Japan After Japan: Social and Cultural Life from the Recessionary 1990s to the Present 9780822388609

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Japan After Japan

asia-pacific: culture, politics, and society Editors: Rey Chow, Harry Harootunian, and Masao Miyoshi

© 2006 Duke University Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper  Designed by Jennifer Hill Typeset in Scala by Tseng Information Systems, Inc. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data appear on the last printed page of this book.

CONTENTS 1 Introduction Harry Harootunian and Tomiko Yoda 16 A Roadmap to Millennial Japan Tomiko Yoda 54 The University and the ‘‘Global Economy’’: The Cases of the United States and Japan Masao Miyoshi 81 The University, Disciplines, National Identity: Why Is There No Film Studies in Japan? Mitsuhiro Yoshimoto 98 Japan’s Long Postwar: The Trick of Memory and the Ruse of History Harry Harootunian

122 National Subjectivity and the Uses of Atonement in the Age of Recession J. Victor Koschmann

142 ‘‘Give Me Japan and Nothing Else!’’: Postcoloniality, Identity, and the Traces of Colonialism Leo Ching 167 ‘‘You Asians’’: On the Historical Role of the West and Asia Binary Naoki Sakai 195 Revenge and Recapitation in Recessionary Japan Marilyn Ivy 216 The ‘‘Wild Child’’ of 1990s Japan Andrea G. Arai 239 The Rise and Fall of Maternal Society: Gender, Labor, and Capital in Contemporary Japan Tomiko Yoda 275 Representation, Reality Culture, and Global Capitalism in Japan Eric Cazdyn 299 Monsieur le Capital and Madame la Terre Do Their Ghost-Dance: Globalization and the Nation-State Yutaka Nagahara 331 New-Age Fetishes, Monsters, and Friends: Pokémon Capitalism at the Millennium Anne Allison 358 Otaku Movement Thomas LaMarre 395 A Drifting World Fair: Cultural Politics of Environment in the Local/Global Context of Contemporary Japan Yoshimi Shunya 415 Angelus Novus in Millennial Japan Sabu Kohso 439 Contributors 443 Index

Introduction

Harry Harootunian and Tomiko Yoda

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ore than a decade has passed since the bursting of Japan’s bubble economy, and despite some intermittent signs of recovery, the prolonged economic downturn that began in the early 1990s still weighs heavily on the nation. In the course of the decade, an optimistic view that the nation’s economic stagnation is merely a temporary downturn in a business cycle, an adjustment of the excessive growth and the inflation of asset prices in the latter part of the 1980s, was abandoned. While the prognosis of Japan’s economic future remains uncertain, the fact that the recessionary decade has catalyzed a wide-reaching transformation in Japanese society seems indisputable. During the 1990s, the waves of bankruptcy and unemployment reached post-1940s peaks, palpably eroding the vaunted lifetime employment system and cutting deeply into the core of postwar Japanese social compact and the sense of national identity. Many claim that the full revival of the economy would entail a further process of restructuring—a process that will continue to exact serious tolls on the Japanese society in fractious and uneven ways. The economic woes during the decade have greatly tarnished the image of Japan, built up over decades, as a nation of an unending economic expansion. The significance of the 1990s as a major historical conjuncture, however, must also be understood through the ways in which it marked the dissolution of the status quo in another sense. The decade appears to have signaled the long-deferred end of the postwar, which Japan has kept alive as vigorously as the state once tried to prolong the life of the former emperor Hirohito as he lay dying. This narrative of the long postwar began with

the United States conspicuously conspiring with Japanese and the imperial house immediately after the war to absolve the emperor from war responsibility, which would spare him from going to trial in the Tokyo Military Tribune. By preserving the emperor and the dynasty, the United States literally undermined the very reforms it had implemented to eliminate prewar fascism and to put into place the foundations of a genuine social democratic structure. At the same time, the United States also served as the principal alibi for Japan’s failure to achieve its postwar aspirations, however it was defined (even though the retention of the emperor more than amply fulfilled the most primary of these ambitions). The ‘‘compensation’’ allegedly paid was one in unprecedented economic affluence and military protection, if not the promised social democracy. The significant decline of this partnership was exposed in the course of the 1990s, providing us with an opportunity to reexamine the tangled historical relationship between these two countries since the end of the war. Once the Cold War had ended, the United States, with its control over the global market, and without real threats to national security apart from the rhetoric of so-called rogue states and China, recognized that the utility of the postwar it shared with Japan had outrun its productivity. While the United States had been progressively detaching itself from Japan throughout the 1990s, Japanese found themselves persuaded to cling even more tenaciously to a relationship, which for decades had excluded all others for the status of a partnership that was equal in name only. The Japanese desire to retain the dependent relationship it has lived with the United States points to a reluctance to let go of the distorted history that has retained for it both the principle and principal of political authority and thus the whole of its modern history. If the Japanese are always perplexed when foreigners, and especially Asians, constantly demand of them an account of their conduct in the war, it is because they were permitted by the U.S. military occupation to retain their prewar historical experience and make it a fundamental part of the new postwar order, unlike the Germans who were forced to confront and question it as a condition of shedding but not forgetting it. If the recognition of the end of the postwar hit a Japanese society already reeling from the millennial malaise of the 1990s, the events of 9/11 on the other side of the globe would convince them that the new century announced even worse things to come. America’s new imperial turn after 9/11 (return is a better description), war in Afghanistan and the invasion of Iraq, simply confirmed the worst of Japanese fears and anxieties that their status as America’s partner had always been an empty fiction. While the 2

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Japanese press reverberated with news of the shock attending the collapse of the World Trade Center by Muslim, notably Saudi Arabian, suicide bombers (that must have momentarily recalled for some the specter of kamikaze missions in the last days of World War II), writers on the Left (what was left of them) and the Right could share a large reservoir of agreement over what the event might reveal about the future of Japan and its relation to the United States. September 11 and its aftermath presented to them a picture of Japan no longer moored to the so-called partnership with the United States and the long postwar that had both housed it and shielded it from the rest of the world. There emerged a common acknowledgment of a national existence no longer exclusively bonded to an interminable Americanized postwar and a partnership emptied of all meaning but deception and bad faith on both sides. As Japan was recognizing that its world could no longer consist of America alone, the United States had already embarked on a mission that set itself against the world or that portion of it not yet assimilated to its imperial exemplars and expectations. In the new American imperium, Japan was assigned the role it had always played, as simply a pliant client state of long and loyal standing, ready to respond to imperial dictates (read as requests) on a moment’s notice by joining the coalition of the willing. And Japan, in turn, demonstrated the swiftness of its willingness to respond with money and personnel. (In the previous Gulf War, Japan only contributed cash.) Compliance with the American demand has simply affirmed Japan’s true client status in the imperium, occupying a semicolonized position. For both the Japanese Left and Right, the maintenance of the equal partnership was a basic condition for sustaining the relations between two countries. The blatant betrayal of this comforting illusion, therefore, elicited strong responses from both camps. What seems to have seized the attention of left-leaning observers in the wake of the imperial wars unleashed after 9/11 was the manifest desire to emphasize an exceptional universalism of the American state according to the tenets of a political theology. Kan Sanjun put it best when he concluded that American-style universalism means only that the United States is the world; and the world, now reduced to America, merely aspires to realize a ‘‘universal human value.’’ 1 This sentiment, by no means exceptional these days, has easily seen through the claims employed to underwrite yet another ‘‘just war’’ fought by the United States that immediately demands a response from America’s supposed partners like Japan. The effect of 9/11 has been to stir memories of Americanism and its baneful history Japanese have lived since 1945 and, introduction

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according to some, since the coming of Commodore Perry in the midnineteenth century. On their part, the Right (the center is defined by indifference) has appealed to the figure of an American empire to dramatize a long postwar lived under the shadow of a colonial power, an experience that reminds Japanese that they are still living as though in a precinct of permanent parenthesis. For many on the Right—and we are not distinguishing between so called conservatives, neoconservatives, and reactionaries—the U.S. military occupation and its policies dedicated to reforming Japan, called ‘‘regime change’’ today, constituted the first step in the subsequent Americanization of war. This meant for them the denial of both Japan’s recent history and a further proscription against it in the future. While the Left could agree with the Right on the baleful effects of the U.S. occupation of Japan, they were more interested in seeing through the logic of social reforms that initially promised the establishment of a genuine social democracy, which, to their immense disappointment, was soon aborted. Paradoxically, both of these positions lined up as indictments against the postwar occupation and revealed elementary truths that are hard to deny in light of the history Japanese have lived since 1945 and the current situation that demands their active and automatic participation in the American imperium. In recent years, conservative and right-leaning opinion, decidedly antiAmerican in form but not necessarily content, has sought to account for Japan’s long subordination to the United States as a condition for insisting on a relationship based on difference and the recognition of equality between the two countries. According to outspoken extremists like Nishibe Susumu, the realization of this difference has become urgent since the terror of 9/11. Yet it is characteristic of this discourse, as of so much on the Right, that it is difficult to distinguish between the terror of the strike on the World Trade Center and that of the United States as it has recklessly embarked on an imperial war and yet another military occupation. Nishibe has even recommended emulating the Left’s traditional anti-Americanism as a principal condition for envisaging a program capable of distancing Japan from American imperial meddling and interventions in the internal affairs of other sovereign states. This overriding of local sovereignties lies at the heart of what the Right has called ‘‘the terrorization of war’’ and that refers to the policy of the George W. Bush administration to act unilaterally to pursue its own national interest as if it possessed the authority of universal necessity. (Nishibe is on record for having compared Bush with Hitler, a not too-far-afield identity these days given the view of loyalty they seemed 4

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to share.) ‘‘America,’’ Nishibe remarked in a discussion with the patriotic cartoonist Kobayashi Yoshinari, is a ‘‘barbarian civilization’’ that worships the ‘‘holy trinity of Americanism, globalization, and vulgarism.’’ Standing at the center of the world, it casts its long shadow over a ‘‘puny’’ Japan, a ‘‘fumbling country,’’ whose existence has been exiled to its periphery. His solution calls for a new form of ‘‘Japanism’’ (not really different from its 1930s predecessor) that would explain to Japanese why they have been so blinded to the American problem and, thereby, offer them a way to become Japanese again.2 In this respect, no voice has been more vociferous in pushing Japan’s claims for respect from and equality with the United States than the current governor of Tokyo, Ishihara Shintaro. Nor has anyone been more consistently outspoken in his denunciations of the American treatment of partners like Japan after 9/11. Ishihara’s credentials as a critic of American hegemony go back well before the current situation. But there is no question that the aftermath of 9/11 has fueled his desire to emphasize his earlier complaint that Japan must say no to the United States and refuse any longer to bend to its dictates. Convinced that Japan is capable of setting its own political and economic agendas without American approval and guidance, Ishihara’s particular purpose seeks to elicit from the United States a recognition of respect and equality in a partnership consisting of the globe’s economically powerful nations (resembling the G-8) who stand together to fend off the encroachments of what he has called ‘‘third nations’’ like North Korea and even the People’s Republic of China. Lurking behind this program is the ambition to finally shake off Article 9 (the peace clause) of the constitution in order to openly and fully rearm Japan in anticipation of the coming struggle with third nations—something akin to but not exactly a Japanese version of Samuel Huntington’s call for the defense of Western civilization against the barbarians who are already gathering at the gate.3 Not withstanding the univocity of Japanese opinion to delink Japan from the American imperium after 9/11, the Japanese government of Prime Minister Koizumi Junichiro has moved swiftly to fulfill the demands of the Bush II administration to join the coalition in the Iraq war and this time to send military personnel instead of merely cash. This almost automatic response simply risks replicating the circulation of the image of Japan’s historic subaltern status to the United States, despite all of the recent outcries for the recognition of respect. At the same time, it also represents a significant step in a long-standing strategy of the Liberal Democratic Party (ldp) to circumvent and ultimately abrogate Article 9 of the postwar constituintroduction

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tion, which, according to the Right, will finally make Japan free and sovereign again to make its own history. Despite the Right’s vocal attack on the status quo represented by the ldp, the two concur on the agenda of abolishing Article 9 and to reaffirm national sovereignty in manners that would rehabilitate the disavowed memory of the fascist past. To this extent, the Right’s critique of American imperialism and Japan’s subordination to it in the name of partnership remains vacuous. Regardless of the efficacy of specific analyses of American imperialism and Japanese experience of it issued by the Left or the Right, common themes running through these discourses bespeak the mounting pressure on the Japanese to question the nation’s relation to the United States and thus reevaluate its long postwar. While Japan is simply no longer as important to the United States as it once was, it now has the opportunity to become interesting (pace Masao Miyoshi). The events over the past decade and a half have shaken up the numbing tenacity with which the economic nationalism centered on the image of an ever-expanding Japan Inc., on one hand, and the country’s reclusion in the parasitic relation to the U.S. geopolitics, on the other. They have colluded to displace the discussion of Japan’s past and present in genuinely historical terms. The main topics in most essays in the present volume are issues, events, and other materials concerning Japan in the 1990s, and all but four of them were written before 9/11. However, Japan After Japan was conceived as an attempt not so much to assess the cause and effect of the so-called Heisei recession and related matters, but to examine how the recessionary, post– Cold War decade figures in the ongoing production of knowledge on Japan and its relation to the world. Thus the scope of inquiries engaged extend beyond the 1990s, addressing some of the most central and persistent questions concerning Japan’s contemporary history. In this respect, we believe essays here supply the appropriate platform for examining the transformations of Japan in the new century, including the current conjuncture since 9/11. The specter of the dissolution of postwar Japan in multiple senses during the 1990s elicited a complex set of reactions both in the nation and abroad, reshaping the perception not only of the country’s economy but also of its politics, society, and culture. The introductory essay by Tomiko Yoda, ‘‘A Roadmap to Millennial Japan,’’ offers an overview of the 1990s Japan as the perceived site of interlocking politico-economic and sociocultural malfunctions. Yoda analyzes some of the representative perspectives from which 6

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the national malaise has been articulated, examining the politics underlying the manufacturing of ‘‘Japan in crisis.’’ The essay counters the widespread tendency to isolate 1990s Japan both spatially and temporally as an instance of a sudden breakdown of the Japanese system. Instead, it suggests approaching the decade in relation to the broader historical trends of globalization and postmodernization that followed the completion of Japan’s postwar high-speed economic growth. While the Japanese recession of the 1990s has been closely associated with the banking crisis, Japan’s failure to keep abreast of the advances made by U.S. high-tech industries during the decade seriously undermined the confidence of the nation’s policy makers who had envisioned their country’s future prosperity founded on its global technological leadership. Against this background, the need to overhaul Japanese higher education emerged at the center of debates on the plans for the nation’s economic recovery. Both Masao Miyoshi’s and Mitsuhiro Yoshimoto’s essays discuss the impasse of the Japanese intellectual environment today through the analysis of the nation’s universities and the floundering attempts to import AngloAmerican models of alliance between the universities and private business. Miyoshi’s ‘‘The University and the ‘Global’ Economy’’ examines the neoliberal principle at work behind the call to transform the universities to make them respond better to the economic needs of Japanese industry in the global economy. The mounting pressure to revamp higher education in Japan, however, has been met by strong resistance from the established hierarchy of professors who control university administrations, waving the banner of academic freedom as they fight to protect their fiefdom within the insular institutional culture. Miyoshi points out that what is left out in this ongoing struggle over the future of Japanese universities is a serious reflection on the social impact of corporatizing the university—for example, how ‘‘rationalizing’’ the academic disciplines considered redundant, including most areas of the humanities and social sciences, renders more precarious than ever the ability of the university to function as a source of critical knowledge. In Yoshimoto’s ‘‘The University, Disciplines, National Identity,’’ the drastic curtailment of the liberal arts curriculum in Japanese higher education today is examined in relation to the disciplinary formation of the humanities in the nation’s academic institutions. The dearth of substantial criticism of the entrenched disciplinary frameworks in Japanese academia has not only prevented the emergence of interdisciplinary programs such as film studies but also highlights the limitations of the nation’s academic estabintroduction

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lishment that has consistently served as an ideological apparatus of the state. Yoshimoto argues that while the proposals to reform Japanese higher education allegedly aim at making the nation’s universities more open and more accommodating to the intensified global movement of knowledge and information, they continue to construe the institutional identity of the university in terms of national culture. While strong misgivings about Japan’s future have fueled the pandemonium over university reform, the nation’s past has also been a focal point of national debates. The end of the Cold War and the fiftieth anniversary of the end of the Pacific War, set against the economic malaise of the 1990s, have contributed to the rising interest in coming to terms with the nation’s past (whether in acknowledgment or defiance of the nation’s war responsibility). A number of essays in this issue discuss Japan’s prolonged unease with its wartime history, which reached a new level of tension during the decade. In ‘‘Japan’s Long Postwar’’ Harry Harootunian observes that Japan’s uncertainties concerning its present, amplified by its political and economic failures, have encouraged the appeals to memory, experience, and mourning as substitutes for the genuine debate over history. Harootunian finds in Katō Norihiro’s influential essay on Japan’s postwar repression of the Pacific War such a denial of history that has helped defer the completion of the postwar to this day. While claiming to correct the perversion that crept into Japanese history and the national psyche through the postwar disavowal of the painful and incriminating past, Katō reproduces the much rehearsed gesture of evading historicization, reducing the past to a series of neat dualities between authentic and inauthentic, native interiority and foreign exteriority, or the Enlightenment project of abstract linear history and the return to the mythological cyclical time of the folk. Harootunian analyzes how these double structures foreclose history as a site of intractable contradictions, smoothing over the irreversible transformations that have taken place in the course of the nation’s formation as a modern capitalist society. Katō Norihiro’s work and the controversies over the Japanese military’s brutal aggression in Asia are approached from another angle in J. Victor Koschmann’s ‘‘National Subjectivity and the Uses of Atonement in the Age of Recession.’’ The essay focuses on the status of subjectivity and its relation to nationhood implicated in Katō’s work. In Katō’s insistence that Japan cannot properly admit its responsibility for the violence committed against Asian countries and peoples during the war without first restoring the unified national subject through the mourning of its own war dead, Koschmann hears the echo of an earlier discourse that contributed to Japan’s war 8

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amnesia: postwar Japanese liberalism. Like the liberals that posited the attainment of modern subjectivity as the necessary basis for democratic transformation in Japan, Katō reifies subjectivity as a prerequisite for political action and accountability. Such a claim offers an excuse both to evade the consequences of the past indefinitely and also to conveniently displace the victims who suffered Japanese military violence as the other, external to the subject and its community that constitutes the immanent concern for Japanese society. In ‘‘‘Give Me Japan and Nothing Else!’’’ Leo Ching reminds us that postwar Japan’s refusal to address the nation’s war responsibility coalesced over more deeply buried questions concerning Japanese colonialism. The essay studies the complex legacy of Japanese colonialism today through contemporary debates among Japanese and Taiwanese critics over kōminka (imperialization) literature produced in Taiwan under Japanese colonial rule. Through this study, Ching suggests that the relative absence of the term postcolonial in contemporary Japanese intellectual discourse must be understood through the incomplete project of decolonization in Japan, conditioned in part by the postwar U.S. policy toward Japan and Asia and by the broader history of modernity that overdetermines the relation between Japan and its ex-colonies. Naoki Sakai’s ‘‘‘You Asians’’’ illuminates the mutually implicating relations between the United States and Japan that helped efface the latter’s past as a colonizer and the ruler of a multiethnic empire. Paying particular attention to the roles played by U.S. experts on Japanese studies in the process, Sakai considers the postwar consolidation of ethnocultural and racist nationalism in Japan and the continued influence of this national formation to this day. He argues that Japan’s singular and autonomous cultural/ ethnic identity was fabricated in the matrix of postwar Japanese-U.S. relations. He points out, furthermore, that the process illustrates the more general predicament of Asia as an entity constituted through the postcolonial complicity between the West and the Rest. Marilyn Ivy’s ‘‘Revenge and Recapitation in Recessionary Japan’’ explores the contemporary conditions contributing to the surge of interest in Japan’s wartime history. In particular, Ivy analyzes historical revisionism and its destructive yearning to restore transparent national unity and meaning as an effect of the nation’s loss of economic success as its ultimate source of selflegitimation. Against the anomie and instability of contemporary Japan, neonationalists invoke war as violence that is at once organized and organizing, legitimate and legitimating—a nostalgic site where the wholeness introduction

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of the national subject is imagined. Ivy sheds critical light on this rhetoric by identifying its resonance with the discourse of a young serial murderer, Youth A, on his killing and decapitation of a boy. By linking the images of decapitation and recapitation found in neonationalist literature, the writing by Youth A, and the megahit animation Mononokehime, Ivy notes the repeated narrative of loss and recovery mediated by the ghastly images of death scattered in diverse sociocultural locations of Japan in the 1990s. Andrea Arai treats some of the same material studied by Ivy—the murder by Youth A and the animation film Mononokehime—but her ‘‘ ‘Wild Child’ of 1990s Japan’’ approaches them as testimonies to the tremendous anxiety forming in Japan today around the status of children and their function within its system of social reproduction. Mononokehime exploits the image of a wild child that appropriates childhood as a figure of nature, innocence, and origin ultimately contained and recuperated into the civilizing narrative of modernity. Youth A’s monstrous murder of children, by contrast, refracts such facile domestication of childhood, threatening to expose the complicity between Japanese national identity and the very forces that have eroded childhood in the society. Through the analysis of the best-selling memoir written by Youth A’s parents, Arai discusses the widespread move to reduce the murder to a lone act by Youth A, who is posited as a signifier of pure unknowability, silencing the possibility of understanding his unspeakable act of violence in relation to its historical and social contexts. Tomiko Yoda’s ‘‘The Rise and Fall of Maternal Society’’ treats the troubles plaguing the contemporary Japanese mechanism of social reproduction as well, but with this essay we move from the issue of children and childhood to that of maternal and matricentric domesticity. Yoda examines the popular concept of Japan as a maternal society, locating its historical and ideological bases in the gender division of labor at work and at home that developed in close association with the nation’s rapid economic expansion and industrialization. The essay then follows the transformation of the concept of maternal society in the 1970s and 1980s in relation to the increased influences of large corporations on the Japanese social order. Yoda argues that in this process, the concept of maternal society became entwined with the regime of social management and control of labor that enforces rigorous discipline of mass competition staged within supposedly insular, egalitarian, and protective social space. Yoda analyzes conservatives’ recent attack on maternal Japan and their campaign to revive fatherhood and the paternal principle in the nation as reactionary attempts to restore the status quo,

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disavowing the real source of their panic—the weakening of the maternal regime in the face of the new configuration of global capitalist order. Eric Cazdyn’s ‘‘Representation, Reality Culture, and Global Capitalism in Japan’’ places Japanese sociopolitical debilitation in the 1990s in the context of the broader shift of power and capital away from national economies and national political organizations that have precipitated a profound crisis in the existing forms of political as well as artistic representation. Cazdyn turns to the phenomenon of reality culture, the avid consumption of ‘‘real events’’ in the media (such as cop shows, quiz shows, live Web cameras, and surveillance tapes), as a significant symptom of this representational disorder. Focusing on Japanese film directors who have problematized the conventional dynamics between representer, presented, and spectator, Cazdyn examines how their films suggest both utopian and distopian potentials in the current heightened sense of anxiety over the representability of reality. Like Cazdyn,Yutaka Nagahara finds Japan today grappling with the double bind between the local/national and the global/transnational—where the aspiration to strengthen the global competitiveness of Japan serves as an impetus not only for the proliferation of neoliberal policies but also for the call to resuscitate national symbols. Nagahara’s ‘‘Monsieur le Capital and Madame la Terre Do Their Ghost-Dance’’ provides a theoretical framework for analyzing this schizophrenic condition by tracing its sources to the internal contradiction of capitalism itself. The essay studies the fundamental impossibility of capital to completely sublate the nation-state, on one hand, and capitalism’s perpetual attempts to free itself of this limitation, on the other. Through this discussion Nagahara cautions us against making hasty assumptions about the deterritorialization of global capital today, insisting on the need to understand the current socioeconomic instability in Japan through the ongoing and inevitable negotiation between the forces of the capital and the national. The growing popularity of Japanese anime, comic, and video game products around the world has drawn much attention as one of the few bright spots in the nation’s bleak economic landscape since the 1990s. Beyond hard figures of substantial revenue generated by these industries, the trend has been touted by some as ushering in the nation’s shift from being an exporter of hardware to an exporter of software (cutting-edge media and entertainment products). The pundits and bureaucrats have sought to capitalize on the success of these products not only in devising a strategy for the nation’s economic revival. They have also sought to use the emergent

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image of ‘‘cool’’ Japan abroad in order to boost the sagging national selfconfidence. The irony, however, lies in the fact that these commodities also seem to testify to the nature of mass culture today that resists easy containment in fixed national cultural identities. Essays by Anne Allison and Thomas LaMarre both address these issues, demonstrating from different angles how and why agents and properties associated with the new culture industry in Japan are irreducible to concepts and perspectives of modernist order that have, among other things, supported the nationally based understanding of culture. Allison analyzes Pokémon, a complex of products including electronic games, anime, comic books, and a diverse array of character merchandises that originated in Japan and became popular around the world in the 1990s. Studying how it was created, distributed, and received, Allison points out how Pokémon incarnates significant traits of postindustrial capitalism. In particular, her essay ‘‘New-Age Fetishes, Monsters, and Friends’’ demonstrates how intensely and ingeniously commodity culture now incorporates affect and sociality in the processes of capitalist production and accumulation. Drawing on the classic anthropological theory of gift exchange, she examines the extent to which the distinction between gift and commodity fails to apply to Pokémon, confounding the conventional notion of commodity fetishism. She locates in Pokémon the effect of dissolving the boundary between intimacy and alienation, capitalist modernity and a premodern past, qualitative forces of affect and quantitative, instrumental thinking. This ambivalence is also evident in ways that products such as Pokémon have been invoked to reinforce a new national myth in Japan, transposing traditional social forms and practices into new media culture. Pokémon nationalism repeats a familiar insistence on Japanese cultural uniqueness. Yet it also suggests that the intimate social relationality once advertised as the hallmark of the Japanese process of making goods is itself commodified via games and other entertainment products. Allison’s essay suggests that Pokémon, which allegedly helps sooth the stress of childhood in late modernity, itself incarnates the logic of postindustrial society. LaMarre’s essay ‘‘Otaku Movement’’ treats otaku, the cult fans of anime, and discourses that have arisen around this figure, paying attention to their roles in generating and transforming anime. He explores the possibility that otaku activities can be understood not simply through the received notions of reception and consumption but as a form of labor that maintains some measure of autonomy from the regulatory control and standardizing forces of corporations. Correlatively, he asks whether anime invokes a visual field 12

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of radical immanence eluding a fixed center or a hierarchical organization and containment while constantly proliferating and mutating across multiple mediums. LaMarre examines these questions by studying discourses on otaku and anime in Japan led by figures such as Azuma Hiroki, Okada Toshio, and Murakami Takashi. He finds in works by these writers and artists provocative hints for theorizing not only a new global media formation but also the possibility of resisting the communicationally and informationally hyperconnected world from within. At the same time, he sees Japanese otakuologists’ inability to realize the full possibilities of their own insights. He locates the limitations of their discussions when they seem to associate anime with a cultural identity (Japaneseness) and the otaku with masculinity, even as they deny any localized understanding of media and the existing schema of sociosexual development as the means for understanding otaku fantasy. While the 1990s brought about considerable changes among institutions such as large corporations and the state bureaucracy, oppositional politics have also undergone transformations as they have sought to respond to a shifting social order. The final two essays of the volume both insist that new types of social and political movements, while often operating below the radar of mainstream media and pubic attention, are crucial factors for understanding contemporary society and its future possibilities. Examining the planning of Aichi Expo 2005 and the opposition it catalyzed, Yoshimi Shunya considers the changes in citizens’ movements and the context of their operation in Japan today. The essay, ‘‘A Drifting World Fair,’’ traces the manner in which movements by local citizens exerted powerful pressure on the government to change the planning of Aichi Expo 2005 from being an avatar of obsolete development ideology to a more environmentally conscious project. The political landscape that Yoshimi’s case study reveals is highly complex, with multiple potentials of collaboration as well as tensions among parties involved. Two lines of conflict, in particular, emerged at the center of controversy: that between local and national governments on one hand, and between grassroots community activism demanding changes to the top-down chain of command in the planning versus state and local governments reluctant to allow such participatory process, on the other. While major shifts in the expo planning occurred under pressure from international ngos, Yoshimi’s study illustrates how these developments were enabled by sustained efforts made by local groups. The final essay of the volume by Sabu Kohso, ‘‘Angelus Novus in Millennial Japan,’’ is both a survey of emerging forms of political movements in introduction

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Japan today and a passionate manifesto that identifies new possibilities for radical politics in the present. Kohso’s essay helps us understand these new activisms in historical terms—how they take after and depart from earlier models of radicalism, particularly those associated with the New Left of the 1960s and 1970s. Furthermore, his discussions bring our attention to the fact that some of the groundwork for these new movements was laid during the 1980s, the period conventionally identified with the bubble economy and the overwhelming retreat of oppositional politics. The ascent of neoliberalism and the changes in the economic structure during the bubble economy provided one part of this context, creating a need for activism that attended to new modalities and loci of oppression and exploitation. Meanwhile, the activism in Sanya, support groups for jailed militants, and opposition against the emperor system that emerged in the wake of New Left politics during the 1980s stand as examples of the kind of activism included in Kohso’s genealogy of radical politics. They portend the movements today in their nonsectarian nature, transversal openness (broadening the definition of politics to encompass larger domains of social experience), and the use of performative practices that incorporate elements of mass culture in their activism. The historical perspective that the essay advocates is one that is both emphatically critical of the existing conditions of the world and full of sustaining hope for possible changes. Earlier versions of most of the essays included here were originally presented at a workshop held at Duke University in November 1999. The event was made possible by generous funding from the Asian/Pacific Studies Institute, the Office of Vice-Provost for International Affairs, the Josiah Charles Trent Memorial Foundation, the Program in Interdisciplinary Studies, and the Center for International Studies, all at Duke University, and from the University of California, San Diego. They were collected in a special volume of South Atlantic Quarterly published in 2001. The essays by Allison, LaMarre, Yoshimi, and Kohso were added for this book in order to expand the scope of our discussion. Allison and LaMarre address developments in Japanese mass culture in the 1990s, while Yoshimi and Kohso shed light on changing tactics and organizations of oppositional movements in Japan. Masao Miyoshi’s input in this project has extended far beyond that of a contributing author, and we are deeply grateful for his help and advice. We owe special thanks to Fredric Jameson not only for participating in the workshop but also for suggesting the idea for the project in the first place. Thanks to George Tomlinson and Maggie Clinton for as14

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sembling the index while continuing as graduate students at NYU under extraordinary circumstances. Finally, we want to thank Reynolds Smith of Duke University Press for his invaluable assistance and support. Notes Throughout this volume, Japanese names, except those of Japanese who are based abroad or non-Japanese nationals of Japanese descent, are cited in Japanese order with the surname placed before the given name. 1 Kan Sanjun, ‘‘Datsu reisen to higashi Ajia’’ [Post–Cold War and East Asia], in Gen-

dai shisō [Contemporary Thought] 28, no.7 (2000): 60–67. 2 Nishibe Susumu and Kobayashi Yoshinori, Hanbei to iu sahō [An etiquette called

anti-Americanism] (Tokyo, 2002), 40–45, 123–135. 3 Samuel Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order

(London, 1998).

introduction

15

A Roadmap to Millennial Japan

Tomiko Yoda

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his introductory essay aims to provide an overview of the context that brings together the chapters in this book: the ongoing discursive construction of Japan during the long economic downturn of the 1990s. A huge volume of commentaries on the malaise afflicting Japan, unleashed particularly from the neoliberal and neonationalist camps, has fed into and shaped the impression of overall national doom. Against this backdrop, the present essay points out a significant degree of complicity between the Japanese neoliberals and neonationalists, despite their apparent disagreements on their attitudes toward economic globalization and the role of nationstates today. I examine some of the representative claims made by the two sides, analyzing the politics involved in their discursive manufacturing of the ‘‘crisis.’’ In the latter half of the essay I explore some theoretical frameworks through which to make sense of 1990s Japan that counter the widespread tendency to isolate it both spatially and temporally. Instead of defining the 1990s through the recession and its effects, I suggest examining the decade in relation to the broader historical trends of globalization and postmodernization that followed the completion of Japan’s postwar economic modernization. I argue, furthermore, that this perspective helps us understand the profound sense of not only economic but also sociocultural disturbances in Japan with which the decade has become identified. The economic turmoil of the 1990s has often been cast as both the cause and the effect of the sudden malfunction of the ‘‘Japanese system,’’ which allegedly encompasses not only politics and economics but also the nation’s

social and cultural organizations that took shape in the process of its modernization. This essay approaches sociocultural trends in the 1990s not as the effects of such an abrupt breakdown but as a culmination of the historical process by which the apparatus for producing and reproducing the national community has undergone a complex course of decline. In the last section of the essay I discuss how we may analyze the 1990s as a paradoxical nexus of the retreating national order, on one hand, and the widespread eruption of nationalistic sentiment, on the other. The section also examines the dominant currents of the intellectual landscape in 1990s Japan and the nature of the crisis that it articulates. It is the built-in constraint of the introduction that the discussion here barely scratches the surface of an extremely broad range of issues. Furthermore, an attempt to make sense of events so close to the time of writing and still in the process of unfolding cannot help but be tentative and speculative. While recognizing these limitations, however, I believe that taking a stab at mapping this complex terrain into some manner of coherence may contribute to the discussion of what really is at stake in trying to understand the nation’s turbulent decade. The recession of Japan in the 1990s acquired an epochal status as it became increasingly identified with the breakdown of the nation’s unique economic system: the growth machine supported by the iron triangle (industry, bureaucracy, and single-party politics) as well as by the ethos of harmony and formidable work ethics of a homogeneous and highly disciplined population. It is said that while this formation underwrote the nation’s ‘‘miraculous’’ high-speed industrialization and growth that made it a poster child of modernization theory and enabled its subsequent rise to the ranks of global economic superpower, it is now strangling the nation with a stagnant economy. Commonly thought to be at the heart of the so-called Japanese disease is the impasse stemming from the giant export-dependent economy that has left its domestic economy relatively underdeveloped. Conditions such as an extremely high cost of living rigged by an overregulated and inefficient import, distribution, and retail structure; the inadequacies of social security; and a tax system that punishes consumption have consistently squeezed the funding from Japanese households into industries as a cheap source of money, mediated largely by commercial banks. Under heavy protection and regulation by the government, this funding mechanism encouraged the banks to overloan and large corporations to overborrow, helping build the capital-intensive heavy and chemical industries that drove postwar a roadmap to millennial japan

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industrialization and growth. The bank-corporation nexus, furthermore, was one of the primary means by which the Japanese bureaucracy, particularly the powerful Ministry of Finance and the Ministry of International Trade and Industry, steered the course of the national economy while avoiding more blunt forms of state intervention. The system, however, allegedly outlived its efficacy in the 1980s and instead encouraged the formation of the speculative bubble and its subsequent collapse. By then Japan was drawing envy from other industrialized nations by its resilient responses to repeated global economic upheavals since the early 1970s. Japan appeared to have pulled off rapid organizational and technological restructuring in the manufacturing sector (becoming an international model for improved methods and quality of production as well as rigorous cost-cutting), and the broad reorientation of its economy away from resource- and labor-intensive heavy industries to high value-added high/mixed technology lines; and it quickly expanded the nation’s international market share in these areas. This resulted in Japan’s huge trade surplus, especially against the United States, which, in turn, raised the value of the yen against the dollar—the trend that the Japanese government, under international pressure, formally censured in the Plaza Accord of 1985. In the face of the skyrocketing yen that severely cut into the profitability of the Japanese export industry, however, the government attempted to curb the appreciation of the currency by easing its monetary policy. This left Japanese banks overflowing with liquidity, while at the same time the nation’s banking industry was losing some of the traditional clientele, due to the changes in corporate fund-raising methods. Gradual deregulation of the capital market by the Japanese government that began in the 1970s opened broader options for profitable and mature large corporations to acquire funds without the help of banks, through the issuance of stocks and bonds, leading the way in the trend of ‘‘financial engineering’’ (zaiteku). Many banks, as a result, began lending to higher-risk borrowers, including stock speculators and real estate developers eager to borrow and invest in the burgeoning speculative boom. It has also been pointed out that banks were left with an oversupply of funds because the Japanese government, characteristically, did not deregulate the capital market for individual investors, so that most Japanese households had little choice but to put their money into bank accounts.1 The lax evaluation standards for lending practiced by the Japanese banking industry fostered through years of its cozy relations with the government and corporate borrowers, together with increased volume of lending on the basis of highly overvalued real estate as 18

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collateral, helped pump more speculative investment into stocks and the real estate market. It is likely that the speculative bubble was tolerated or perhaps even encouraged by the Japanese government in order to facilitate corporate investments necessary to sustain Japanese companies’ competitiveness in the global trade war (made fierce by the volatility of currency exchange rates, the emergence of new competitors in Asia, and the general trend of overcapacity and overproduction in the world economy). By the end of the 1980s, however, the overvaluation of asset prices reached an alarming level, and when the government finally stepped in to cool the economy down by tightening its monetary policy and imposing restrictions on real estate sales, the boom quickly turned into a bust. The banks were left with mountains of nonperforming loans, the volume of which grew rapidly as the industry and the government obstinately refused to admit and confront its magnitude during the early 1990s. The deterioration of the Japanese banking industry mired in nonperforming loans resulted in a bad credit crunch, but more seriously, the bursting of the bubble economy caused the overall decline of demands and market confidence. Furthermore, many of the standard macroeconomic measures deployed by the Japanese government in the past to stimulate the economy proved ultimately ineffective in the increasingly globalized economic environment. For instance, despite the slowdown of the Japanese economy, a large U.S. deficit kept the value of the yen up during the first part of the 1990s, depressing the profit of Japanese exports. The lowering of interest rates by the Bank of Japan did help depreciate the yen, but it fell short of achieving the intended results: stimulating domestic demands, reviving the asset price, and thus shrinking bad loans. In the globalized financial market, low interest rates in Japan, rather than increasing domestic investment, led to the flow of money offshore in search of higher returns. The availability of Japanese funds and the artificially low interest rate encouraged an investment boom in East and Southeast Asia, contributing to the bubble there, which would later haunt the Japanese economy. The meltdown of Asian financial markets, beginning with the Thai currency crisis in July 1997 and the severe recession that followed in many countries in the region, dealt a further blow to the teetering Japanese banks with large investments there, as well as to Japanese exporters that had increasingly become dependent on the demands of Asian markets. Meanwhile, after the collapse of a group of housing loan banks ( jūsen) in 1996, a string of bankruptcies of major Japanese banks and brokerages followed in a roadmap to millennial japan

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1997 and 1998. In the fall of 1998 the crisis in the Russian and Latin American economies aroused an alarm for a genuine worldwide depression, and fingers were pointed at Japan as the trigger of this doomsday scenario. At present, despite monetary and fiscal policies by the state (an extremely low interest rate since 1995 that was lowered to zero in February 1999 and massive stimulus packages sponsored by the government), the Japanese economy has yet to establish a clear prospect for a sustained economic recovery. The broad outline provided above is a composite of widespread accounts on how and why Japan suffered a serious economic downturn in the 1990s. What concerns us here more than the accuracy of this narrative is the structural nature of the economic troubles that it constructs. The impact of negative psychology and a pessimistic outlook on the nation’s economic future, furthermore, has been compounded by the association between the recession and a diverse set of ominous events and phenomena observed in the nation during the decade. Though they were not directly related to the recession, these occurrences have become closely interwoven with the economic crisis in the popular imagination, underscoring the perception of national peril that encompasses virtually all aspects of Japanese contemporary society. Before the extent of the banking debacle and its possible effects on the economy were widely registered by the public, there occurred two events that literally shook the nation: the Hanshin earthquake and the Aum Shinrikyō’s sarin gas attack in the Tokyo subway, both in 1995. The earthquake that devastated one of the largest metropolitan areas in the country not only exposed the precariousness of life in this highly urbanized nation but also became a striking symbol of the government’s bureaucratic rigidity and ineptitude in crisis management. The disproportionate level of hardship that the earthquake brought to the economically, socially, and politically vulnerable segment of the population drew attention to the social fault lines running beneath the surface of the supposedly homogeneous ‘‘mass middle stratum society’’ (chūkan taishū shakai ). In the case of Aum Shinrikyō, the degree of threat that a single cult organization managed to pose to the public safety, and the failure of the Japanese police to prevent the elaborate planning and execution of sarinization as well as other violent crimes perpetrated by the group, shocked a population accustomed to a relatively low crime rate. Many of the core members of the cult were young, well-educated men and women from a seemingly

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unremarkable middle-class background, including engineers and lawyers trained at some of the top universities. The incident raised a number of lasting questions: How did society fail to instill basic ethical and social consciousness in these seemingly intelligent, serious, and ordinary young adults? And why could it not offer them a more compelling and meaningful vision of their lives and their future than to follow the millennialist delirium of a charismatic cult leader? The moral panic over the status of the younger Japanese in the latter part of the decade was further reinforced by incidents that were publicized as signs of serious troubles afflicting teenage boys. The discovery of the monstrous murder of children committed by a fourteen-year-old boy who became known as ‘‘Youth A’’ (Shōnen A) in 1997 as well as a string of violent crimes by male teenagers in a fit of loss of control referred to as a state of being ‘‘sundered’’ (kireru) were cast as extreme cases of more pervasive problems with Japanese teens. This was only one side of the coin; what was violence in the case of boys was sex in the case of girls. The promiscuity of young Japanese girls and their cashing in on their sexual marketability— young girls selling their companionship and sexual favors to older men in return for money to pay for karaoke bars, luxury designer goods, and mobile phone bills—became widely publicized both inside and outside Japan. Public outrage and puzzlement over prostitution by these young middle-class girls were complicated by the culpability of the adult males who constituted their clientele, as well as by the stark way in which the girls’ actions seem to mirror the commodity fetishism of contemporary Japan and the ‘‘anything goes’’ zeitgeist (some called it the ‘‘moral meltdown’’) of the decade. While the nation appeared to need strong and skillful leadership more than ever, the media was in fact saturated with reports of a diverse assortment of ‘‘misconducts’’ ( fushōji ) of elites affiliated with leading institutions in business, politics, and bureaucracy. The exposure of rampant corruption, greed, and ineptitude among political leaders is, of course, old news in Japan. But the barrage of scandals involving elite bureaucrats was characteristic of the decade. The corrupt ties between bureaucracy and business emerged not only from obvious suspects such as the Ministry of Finance but from a wide array of agencies, including the Health Ministry’s cover-up of its role in approving the importation of hiv-contaminated blood products that resulted in 1,400 hemophiliacs contracting the virus. More recently the Japanese police force was rocked by scandals involving incompetence, criminal neglect, and criminal acts committed by officers. There

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were also reports revealing the ties between Japanese blue-chip corporations and sōkaiya (racketeers who threaten to cause trouble at the annual shareholders’ meetings). The relations between large Japanese corporations and organized crime in general are said to have deepened through the real estate bubble in the 1980s when gangsters were often deployed (presumably through subcontractors) to facilitate large-scale developments in congested cities, providing services such as intimidating reluctant property owners into selling their lands or forcing stubborn renters to evacuate property already sold to developers. In summary, Japan in the 1990s has come to be widely perceived as the site of an imploding national economic system, a disintegrating social order, and the virtual absence of ethical and competent leadership. Against this background a huge volume of commentaries, finger pointing, and solutions for the national malaise has been churned out by the media. Most notably, a steady stream of critiques from neonational and neoliberal perspectives has substantially informed the public perception of the national crisis. The Japanese government’s massive bailout of failing banks in the 1990s galvanized a surge of neoliberal criticism of government intervention in the banking debacle in particular and the market economy in general. Reformers argued for the need to foreclose on bad loans and to let insolvent banks and businesses fail, even at the cost of large-scale bankruptcies and unemployment. They insisted that in the end tough measures would hasten the process of recovery and be the right step toward building a competitive free-market economy in Japan. As the decade wore on and the bursting of the speculative bubble catalyzed a much broader and deeper economic downturn, the central target of the neoliberal attack shifted somewhat from the Japanese state and bureaucracy to Japanese corporate governance. Large Japanese corporations themselves were denounced as being steeped in the bureaucratic structure that breeds risk-averse, complacent, and insular culture. They were blamed for weakening the Japanese economy by ignoring the shareholders’ rights to high return on equity and focusing instead on institutional growth and stability, acting as the caretakers of the organizations that give out rewards to loyal corporate stewards. According to the critics, therefore, corporate management too had to undergo rationalization—for example, by swiftly abandoning the lifetime employment system, interlocking shareholding among companies, or adherence to the ‘‘convoy system,’’ in which strong companies aid and protect weaker companies among their affiliates, typically under bureaucratic guidance. 22

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Since the escalation of the trade war in the 1980s the Japanese government had been under fire from Washington to open its market and remove laws and regulations that protected the domestic industries. Though economic liberalism did have strong advocates among elite policy makers in Japan prior to the decade, in the 1990s the U.S. call for market-driven reform in Japan was joined by a broad neoliberal chorus from within the nation. For the neoliberals of the decade, the United States became the exemplar of all that is right and what Japan is not—a society that fosters healthy and dynamic competition, transparency, accountability, entrepreneurial spirit, fairness, and the ability to take bold but calculated risks. In the wake of the Japanese government’s announcement of plans for the major deregulation of the Japanese financial market (so-called Japanese Big Ban), the neoliberal pundits brandished the term global standard—de facto shorthand for U.S. or Wall Street standards and practices—to chastise local deviations from it. The neoliberal paean to the transparent borderless capital and the United States as its embodiment appeared unconcerned with the politics of freemarket ideology, such as the blatantly political motives behind the U.S. government’s demands for the restructuring of the Japanese economic system. The rationalization of the Japanese banking industry reeling from the debt crisis would have provided an ideal feeding ground for Wall Street vultures, helping the United States promote its corporations and reinforcing the increasingly critical function that the alliance between government and high finance has played in U.S. geopolitics since the 1970s.2 As the malady of the Japanese economy began to spread outside the banking industry, however, the U.S. government itself softened its free-market rhetoric and even supported the Japanese government’s massive Keynesian stimulus package. This about-face in the U.S. policy toward Japan is said to reflect Washington’s concern that further weakening of the Japanese economy could in turn catalyze the drying up of ‘‘Japan money’’ from the U.S. market.3 There is, of course, the complex domestic politics of neoliberalism as well—the ideology of economic globalization has given further clout to the Japanese state’s conventional tactics of using foreign pressure (gaiatsu) as a shield to push reform measures that benefit select economic sectors and businesses while muffling the complaints of interest groups that oppose them. Neoliberals’ celebration of globalization (and the vilification of the supposedly insular, irrational, and backward characteristics of the Japanese economic system), furthermore, is usually framed by the rhetoric of national interest. Their prescription for the Japanese economy and people to swala roadmap to millennial japan

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low the bitter pill of liberalization and rationalization is typically packaged under the familiar call to endure hardship for the sake of building national strength. As Yutaka Nagahara points out in his essay in this volume, globalization and the adoption of a global standard are typically promoted as the means for increasing the national economic competitiveness of Japan. Of course, the legitimization of the market through its alignment with national prosperity is an old argument that goes all the way back to Adam Smith. There are, furthermore, more contemporary reasons for pandering to the nationalistic and conservative impetus of the anxious population. Neoliberals need to rally public opinion because the so-called free market requires massive political initiatives, a huge array of reform measures, and new infrastructure in order to operate. It is worth noting that the contradictory linkage between the national and the global in economic liberalism bears some resonance with the relation between the universal (project of modernity) and particular (nation building) found in the political liberalism that promoted postwar modernization and democratization in Japan. Through their very call to exorcise the particular and parochial in Japan, neoliberals, like earlier political liberals, occlude the global political and economic forces within which Japan is already situated. With modernization now replaced by globalization as yet another elusive goal projected elsewhere, neoliberal marketism once again simultaneously reifies and marginalizes Japan, reproducing national unity and insularity through this dual gesture. Correlatively, their critique of the ‘‘Japanese system’’ tends to slip and slide from supposedly acultural and apolitical marketism to quasimoralistic exhortation for Japan to repent and reform its inner character, upholding the same old liberal doctrines of individualism, self-help, and entrepreneurial spirit as those that ultimately lead to the national good. By defining Japan through the lack of properties that characterize the modern individual/national subject, neoliberals reproduce the modernist mapping of the world divided between subject and object, center and margin, and so on. Constituting the Other (the United States) as the embodiment of the global, they faithfully replay what Sakai Naoki refers to as the ‘‘postcolonial complicity between the West and the Rest.’’ Thus, though neoliberals speak of globalization as a radical new chapter in human history precipitated by the worldwide expansion of a borderless market and a technological revolution that links the globe under a vast informational network, their rhetoric also relies heavily on the conceptualization of the world

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and of a subject that hearkens back to the regime of the nation-state, imperialism, and colonialism. Neonationalists in Japan also gained influence in the 1990s, charading as a new, provocative challenge to the nation’s faltering status quo. The neonationalists infiltrated the mainstream media with their boisterous rhetoric and most notably appealed to the young Japanese with their transgressive gestures, defying the postwar state’s official tenets of democracy, human rights, and peace. In the 1990s neonationalism gained momentum through its campaign against history education in postwar Japan. Groups such as the Japanese Society for History Textbook Reform have claimed that the history textbooks used in Japanese schools (carefully censored by the Ministry of Education) have disseminated the distorted image of wartime Japan as a cruel aggressor toward Asian countries and peoples. Neonationalists argued, furthermore, that dispelling self-punishing and masochistic representations of the nation’s history would be an important step toward fostering a healthy nationalism and national pride, banishing the curse that befell Japan through its defeat in World War II, postwar occupation by the United States, and demilitarization. The rise of neonationalist historical revisionism was closely associated not so much with the recession but with the end of the Cold War. The dissolution of Cold War polarization, the increased confidence of Asian nations undergoing rapid economic development since the 1970s, and Japan’s greater need to strengthen its relations with Asian neighbors in the post– Cold War economic and political environments all drew attention to the unfinished business of the Japanese state’s long-deferred official acknowledgment of and apologies for wartime guilt. The retreat of military dictatorship and other forms of explicitly authoritarian regimes in a number of Asian nations also energized local grassroots movements, condemning the Japanese military’s war crimes and demanding compensation. Neonationalism grew, in part, as a reactionary and defensive response to these growing pressures on the Japanese state and people to face up to the past from which they were shielded during the Cold War era. The Gulf War, the first large-scale international armed conflict after the fall of the Berlin Wall, revealed another dimension of the post–Cold War conditions contributing to the neonationalists’ campaign to rehabilitate the Japanese military past. The Japanese government’s muddled response to the war in the Persian Gulf exposed its deep confusion and internal split over

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its place in post–Cold War geopolitics and the status of the nation’s postwar constitution that renounced the deployment of offensive forces and prohibited the stationing of its Self-Defense Forces (sdf) overseas. The awkward spot that the Japanese government found itself in as a multinational military force was mobilized under U.S. orchestration stimulated a national debate over the function of the Japanese Self-Defense Force. While the campaign to overcome postwar Japan’s disavowal of its wartime past and restore a ‘‘real’’ military to the nation once again was central to the agenda of the Japanese right throughout the postwar era (including the effort by Prime Minister Nakasone Yasuhiro in the 1980s), the neonationalist movement of the 1990s led by academics, pundits, and media celebrities popularized it, helped by post–Cold War geopolitical transformations. In the latter part of the 1990s, furthermore, the perceived menace of recession and the tidal wave of economic globalization developed into a major component of neonationalist rhetoric. As Marilyn Ivy points out, the prolonged recession in a nation so closely identified with its economic success added force to the neonationalists’ call to recapture the national identity and national unity through the affirmation of the state as an agent of war and citizens as those who would lay down their lives for their nation. War and death in combat were upheld as the ultimate enactment of public duty, politics at its purest and most heroic—that which stands in direct opposition to the hypocrisy, cowardice, decadence, selfishness, and petty greed that have allegedly infected Japanese society and contributed to its present predicament. It should also be noted that some of the leading neonationalist ideologues of the 1990s, especially Marxist-turned-nationalist Nishibe Susumu and the critics affiliated with his journal Hatsugensha, have sharply criticized the mainstream conservatism (hoshu honryū) of postwar Japan. They have denounced the pro-American and probusiness stances that have dominated the ruling conservative Liberal Democratic Party (ldp) for giving control of the state to the technocrats and bankrupting nationalism by accepting perpetual political subordination to the United States under the convenient cover of pacifism. Postwar Japan, they say, has been poisoned not only by the Occupation and the subsequent neocolonial control exercised by the United States but also by the unprincipled capitalism and bureaucratic rationality of its own leaders. Now that Japan’s path to international political influence through its economic prowess has been derailed by the bursting of the bubble economy and made more elusive by the assault of U.S.-led global capitalism, neonationalists claim that Japan must restore its nationhood 26

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through cultural, ethical, and racial as well as territorial integrity, to be asserted by military means if necessary. Yet the neonationalists themselves are ambiguous when it comes to defining their agendas in positive terms. Just what is authentic ‘‘Japan’’ and its ethicopolitical community, and where would we find a basis for it in Japan today? These are among the questions to which the neonationalist rhetoric does not supply clear answers. Primordial Japan seems to hover in midair as an ill-defined counterpart to the economic nationalism of Japan Inc. (an entity that is in itself apparitional). In other words, the neonationalist campaign to restore nationalism and Japan’s political integrity is emphatically a reactive discourse. It takes for granted the mainstream view that Japanese nationhood is in decline today more than ever in a world increasingly organized under the force of global capital; as such, the neonationalists’ agenda is focused on compensating for this eclipsed nationhood. We may note, furthermore, that the current debate over Japan’s rearmament as a whole is driven not so much by nostalgia for wartime militarism but by post–Cold War geopolitics. While neonationalists may speak in the Hegelian language of national subjectivity posited through its war-making agency, the amendment of the peace constitution actually conforms to the demands of the new world order largely dictated by U.S. policies. In the post–Gulf War era of internationally sanctioned ‘‘humanitarian war’’ supposedly against military invasions by ruthless dictators and ethnic cleansings by fanatic nationalists, Japan’s inability to send its military force abroad to participate in the global police force has lost the aura of pacifism.4 It has, rather, degenerated into a source of national embarrassment, a liability to the country’s status among the community of wealthiest nations (as well as Japan’s ambition to become a permanent member of the United Nations Security Council). This is why one of the most vocal proponents of rearmament and the revision of the constitution in mainstream politics has been pragmatic, pro-American, neoliberal politician Ozawa Ichiro. Rather than being a move against the currents of globalization, then, turning the sdf into ‘‘normal’’ military forces would in fact align/subordinate Japan to the international consensus among dominant capitalist states led by the United States designed to protect and promote an environment hospitable to their global business operations and investments.5 The exclusionary rhetoric and anti-U.S. (and anticapitalist) stances of some neonationalists influence public opinion to support the constitutional amendment that would in turn help the state implement policies that reinforce and expand the security alliance between Japan and the United States. a roadmap to millennial japan

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Thus there is more compatibility than might first appear between neoliberals, who affirm the globalizing forces of the free market and exhort Japan to be open to it, and neonationalists, who argue that we must defend the autonomous sphere of the political in the form of the nation-state as the irreducible horizon of identity. For one, underlying their claims is the common assumption of a neat separation (and simple tension) between economic and political, or nation-state and global capital. This shared premise underwrites the symmetry with which neonationalists and neoliberals define and criticize postwar Japan from opposite ends. For neonationalists, Japan Inc. is perverse because it is completely dictated by economic interests, while for the neoliberals it has failed as an economic system to the extent that it is governed by parochial politics and entrenched culture. The former’s hypostatization of an ethicocultural and political nation primordial to modern capitalism and imperialism and the latter’s hypostatization of the autonomous flow and logic of capital independent of sociopolitical locations complement rather than oppose each other. That is to say, the contradiction posited between the nation-state and capital, as well as that between Japan and the world, serves the common purpose of displacing the contradiction within each pair of terms constituting the binaries. By the late 1990s the popularity of neoliberal and neonationalist rhetoric in the media inflamed the anxiety that Japanese people must either flee the sinking nation-state by jumping into the sea of borderless market outside it or retrench within the national boundary in defiance of globalization, reasserting their national identity by their own blood. Yet the inconsistencies within neoliberal and neonationalist discourses themselves suggest such choices—between national, political, and communal, on one hand, and global, economic, and market exchange on the other—are untenable even for those who appear to claim them. Moreover, the spectacle of national crisis projected through such binarism helps foreclose the domestic resistance against new economic and political configurations that are taking shape—for example, Japan’s integration into the new global military alliance that will further remove security policies from the democratic political processes, or economic deregulation and privatization of public services driven by the state and businesses. The duality of Japan versus the world, or the nation-state versus the global market, that underlies much of the rhetoric of ‘‘Japan in crisis’’ occludes the mutually parasitic relations between economic and political forces at play. The expanse of the borderless market is, of course, not ‘‘out there’’ somewhere outside Japan but is spreading within it, through the very forces that 28

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are transforming the corporate governance and employment practices in Japanese companies or in neoliberal measures that are eroding the public sector and services in the name of reform. Meanwhile, Japanese political order as we know it is imploding from within, as attested to by the chaotic state of party politics since the early 1990s when the uninterrupted control of the ldp over the government ended after thirty-eight years. Since then, we have seen repeated prospects of the breakup of the ldp; the Socialist Party (now called the Social Democratic Party, sdp), the leading opposition during postwar ldp hegemony, has also been in a state of disarray; and a host of new opposition parties have appeared and disappeared at a dizzying pace. The ruling elites among the Japanese bureaucracy and politics are divided themselves. On one hand, some are fighting to hold on to the older power base (secured by pork-barrel politics and the dispensation of subsidies). On the other hand, some are seeking to establish a new ground of legitimacy and rationale for the state in its regulatory function vis-à-vis the global economy, its role in the alliance controlled by dominant capitalist countries led by the United States, and its maintenance of the infrastructure, low social spending, and other conditions that promote the growth of its leading corporations. All in all, a critical factor driving the fracture within the Japanese political structure is the totality of forces aimed at reconfiguring the state and its function so that its military, legal, and political apparatuses respond better to the needs of the most powerful and competitive multinational corporations currently based in Japan. One of the most urgent problems facing Japanese society, then, is not the dilemma between the nation-state and global capital, but the changing relations between the ‘‘nation’’ and the ‘‘state’’ under the new demands of capitalism in its global configuration. One way to shed light on these forces at work in Japan that neoliberal and neonationalist alarmist discourses obscure rather than reveal may be to consider 1990s Japan not in terms of the recent catastrophic rupture (supposedly from its previous prosperity and airtight social organization) but in the context of the ongoing transformations of Japan and the world in a larger time frame, with a focus on the last three decades. Both neoliberals and neonationalists take as their object of criticism an entity referred to by terms such as Japan Inc., wherein economy, politics, culture, and society appear so closely enmeshed that it looks entirely governed by economic or politicocultural forces, depending on the angle from which one sees it. Neoliberals generally perceive Japan Inc. as an endogea roadmap to millennial japan

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nous product of modernization in Japan, combining native sociocultural characteristics and systems developed under the demands of the ‘‘catch-up’’ economy during the postwar recovery and expansion. Conversely, for the neonationalists the overwhelming external forces that led to Japan’s defeat in World War II and the Cold War military-Keynesian regime of the United States turned Japan into a nation without a proper political backbone despite its phenomenal economic growth. What has often been overlooked, however, is the fact that the image of Japan that is currently denounced as being too national (parochial and particular) by neoliberals, on one hand, and not national enough (politically subordinated to external forces) by neonationalists, on the other, obtained its veneer of self-evidence not so much during Japan’s postwar modernization and the Cold War era but after the nation’s modernization was said to be over, when the Cold War geopolitical and economic configurations of the world began showing signs of retreat. Even a cursory look at postwar Japanese history reminds us that the stability and cohesion of Japanese capitalist order was repeatedly challenged during the nation’s rapid economic expansion from the 1950s to early 1970s —for example, through the surge of union activism, the public protest against the Japan-U.S. security treaty, and radical student movements. The framework of modernization has been instrumental in smoothing these ruptures and instabilities into a linear narrative of national progress, charting time by the growth of the gross national product (gnp). It was, however after postwar modernization and industrialization were said to be completed in Japan that this faux temporality of modernization crystallized into the seamless space of Japan Inc., foreclosing history as a contested and overdetermined field of multiple possibilities. Many of the critical ingredients of social order in contemporary Japan centered on its system of capitalist production germinated during the economic high growth period usually dated between the mid-1950s and late 1960s. Yet it was in the process of the nation’s economic recovery from the worldwide recession (that began with the breakdown of Bretton Woods international monetary regime and the energy crisis) that Japan’s capitalist regime consolidated its appearance of being at once timeless and all encompassing. The heightened international competition and volatility of the global economy of the early 1970s hit Japan hard, coming at a time when it had depleted the resource of cheap labor extracted from rural areas and agricultural sectors through the process of industrialization. The Japanese economy, then, launched a ferocious struggle for survival through the re30

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orientation of its focus from heavy industries to high-tech lines, the gradual expansion of offshore production, and the implementation of technological and organizational innovations in order to raise efficiency and quality and contain the cost of domestic operations. Labor union and other major forces contesting the capitalist order, meanwhile, kept weakening as the alarm over the nation’s economic crisis and intense international competition helped corporations push through unprecedented levels of rationalization of the labor process. These developments culminated by the late 1970s in what some critics describe as the establishment of Japan as an enterprise society (kigyō shakai ) organized around the vast corporate network headed by big companies (especially the large export-oriented corporations), which exert a powerful influence over the pyramid of increasingly smaller companies (suppliers and subcontractors) beneath them. Big business in Japan was, of course, the central institution of postwar modernization, carefully nurtured by a state. Yet the concept of an enterprise society points to the ascendance and increased independence of forces wielded by large corporations in Japan as the era centered on national economic development mediated by the state came to an end, replaced by increased global economic interactions and competition. Meanwhile the political system in Japan took on a supporting role as guardian of social and political stability by redistributing resources not so much through the welfare system but through subsidies and protection of economic sectors at the margin of the enterprise society, such as agriculture, construction, and small-scale retail concerns. Since the late 1970s, furthermore, more aggressive and explicit advocates of corporate hegemony have appeared among policy makers, calling for the privatization of stateowned companies, economic deregulation, and cutbacks in the state budget (smaller government), especially in social services. The concept of an enterprise society also suggests the changing function of large corporations in Japanese civil society. Many of the organizational structures and managerial systems that developed in large manufacturing companies during the economic high-growth period appear to have become both intensified and generalized throughout the Japanese workplace in the 1970s and 1980s. Furthermore, as Watanabe Osamu and others have argued, the methods and principles of labor management deployed in corporate Japan, such as ability-based competition, permeated the society, strengthening the image of Japan as a singular corporate entity. The discursive construction of Japan Inc., furthermore, was closely linked to the roles assigned to Japan in the broader narrative on the global economy. a roadmap to millennial japan

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Against the background of mounting trade friction, the relative strength of the Japanese economy in the 1970s and 1980s caught international attention, contrasting the stagnant conditions weighing down much of North American and European economies saddled with large numbers of business failures, high unemployment rates, and labor disputes. Japan was touted as a nation that made highly focused investments of its social resources toward building the international competitiveness of its economy (instead of spending a large amount on social welfare); was guided by highly trained career bureaucrats who looked out for the long-term interest of corporate Japan; and was equipped with extraordinarily cooperative unions and workers that rally behind management. This image of Japan as Number One—a lean and mean organic capitalist machine threatening to overtake ‘‘white capitalism’’—served as a propaganda tool in the United States and elsewhere as states and businesses sought to dislodge the burden of the welfare state and the systems of wage and labor management established under the Fordist-Taylorist regime of production. In the 1980s and into the early 1990s, moreover, the Japanese economy played a significant role in transforming East Asia into a new center of capital accumulation. The rise of the East Asian economy with Japan leading the way, disrupting the privileged association between capitalism and Western civilization, further stimulated culturalist and exceptionalist (that is, difference vis-à-vis the West) views on the Japanese economy. The denigration of Japanese capitalism or an Asian model of development widely heard in the late 1990s merely inverted earlier hyped-up claims for new political purposes while continuing to displace the ongoing and interrelated transformation of global capitalism by ahistoric schema of cultural difference. As Peter Gowan argues, the demise of Asian/Japanese capitalism has been exploited by the neoliberal propaganda that casts the national economy organized under the state’s macroeconomic regulation (in particular, exercising control over the capital market) as a local and cultural deviance from the fundamental principles of capitalism, displacing the history of Keynesian economics that shaped much of the post–World War II capitalism.6 Thus Japan Inc., as the timeless and seamless enterprise-centered society shrouded in the aura of miraculous growth and cultural uniqueness, was installed retroactively as the subject of postwar Japanese modernization from the perspectives that coalesced around the late 1970s. Japan Inc. was a construct that emerged in tandem with the increased breadth and depth of corporate control over the society under the first phase of the nation’s postmodernization and domestic as well international responses to the 32

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transformation of the capitalist economy since the mid-1970s that we now increasingly refer to by the term globalization. The legacies of postwar modernization and industrialization of the Cold War era undoubtedly remained in post-1970s Japan, but they were often selectively retained, filtered, and modified by the new configuration of power organized around corporate networks and the global competition they engaged in. What came under severe criticism and scrutiny in the 1990s, then, may be better understood not so much as postwar Japan or Japanese modernity as a whole (as neoliberals or neonationalists suggest) but as dominant currents in Japanese political and economic strategies since the 1970s together with the often exaggerated and distorted claims built around them. Approaching Japan in the 1990s in relation to the postmodernization and globalization since the 1970s means assessing it in both its continuity as well as its break from the past, while also eschewing the exceptionalist schema of the Japanese system versus a global standard, commonly found in the discussion of Japan in crisis. The need to avoid approaching 1990s Japan as a discrete national subject that stands in opposition to the global order applies to the examination of not only its political economy but also its culture and society. As I have suggested earlier, the sense that the economic downturn is somehow responsible for the perceived unraveling of the nation’s social and cultural structure has amplified the national anxiety over the recession. The notion that the dysfunction of the Japanese system has had repercussions in all aspects of contemporary Japanese life, in turn, has reinforced the culturalist construction of the Japanese economy. In the following discussion I will once again pay attention to the historical developments since the 1970s in order to analyze the millennial doom over the sociocultural conditions of Japan in the 1990s. The alleged signs of social and cultural decay in Japan today need to be understood, at least in part, as local expressions of postmodern and global transformations of late capitalist society that have developed over decades. This perspective will also help us better understand the complicated nature of relations between the 1980s and 1990s beyond the standard juxtaposition between bubble and recession as the contrasting themes of the two decades. The image of Japan as Number One, emerging out of major economic gyrations since the early 1970s, helped affirm the ongoing permutation of the capitalist regime in the country, realigning the national identity accordingly. For one, it was widely seen as a sign of the dramatic metamorphosis a roadmap to millennial japan

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of the nation’s world-historical status and thus the narrative of world history itself. For over a century the ruling elites of Japan, the nation reputed to be the most successful latecomer to modernity, had been intensely selfconscious about their relation to the West, measuring themselves against the time lag to the dominant Other. Japan’s establishment as an economic superpower, superseding the majority of Western nations in the contest of capital accumulation, therefore, unleashed a powerful sense that Japan had finally reached its ultimate national aspiration by not only completing but also going beyond modernization, becoming freed from the historical scenario of modernity that had consistently precluded it from a full-fledged subject position and historical agency. The challenge that Japanese economic advances posed to Eurocentric history and the mapping of the world, in other words, was perceived as the nation’s triumph over modernity and over history itself. Many imagined that Japan, liberated from the telos of modernization that for long functioned as its structural and structuring lack, had become a posthistorical nation. In the 1980s, bureaucrats and pundits busily refashioned the national image as a phantasmic collage of the past and the future under pat labels such as the Age of Culture (bunk no jidai ) and Information Society ( jōhōka shakai ).7 Cultural critics armed with French poststructuralism and its critique of Western modernity dreamed up their own version of posthistoric Japan: the never fully modern vanguard of postmodernity, unfettered by the dead weight of Western metaphysics or the Enlightenment project of modernity. In the works of these critics hailed by the media as ‘‘new academics,’’ postmodernity was linked to the intensification and coming into its own of a peculiar brand of modernity that developed in Japan. They mused that Japan as a centerless and depthless space had emerged as the cutting edge of postmodern capitalist production and consumer culture. Postmodernism was made into an industry by the media that swallowed up and spouted out the metacritique of postmodern consumer society itself as a commodity, promoting its stable of cultural celebrities composed of new academics and other trendsetters in media and marketing.8 Empty Japan was celebrated against the background of a speculative bubble in the late 1980s as the space of the intoxicating lightness of endless present replete with infinitely varied commodities circulating as increasingly immaterial signifiers (of lifestyle, ambience, status, and so forth). The self-congratulatory exuberance that accompanied the bubble economy and the boom of postmodernism in Japan had fizzled by the mid-

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1990s, replaced by the debilitating air of anxiety ( fuan). The structure of the feeling of posthistory has remained, but in the 1990s it became associated with unbearable fragmentation, opacity, and paralysis. Japan in the recessionary decade seemed arrested in the seemingly paradoxical state of an unending and entrenched present coexisting with momentous instability. What accounts for the difference between the two decades, of course, is the recession that undermined the economic stability of Japanese society and had profound impacts on the national psyche. We also need to note, however, that the crisis of the national economy has brought to light the ongoing crisis of the national itself. What I mean by national is not so much the sociocultural formation that defines a given national community but a historically specific form of social order in the capitalist modernity that has been imagined above all in reference to the nationstate system. The national has operated through a broad configuration of disciplinary institutions, hegemonic rule through the creation of social consensus and normativity, and the forging of individual and collective identities in complex relation to one another.9 While much has been said about the near-annihilation of distinct national culture and social organizations in the current phase of globalization, we also need to pay attention to the ongoing structural breakdown of national mechanisms in late modern societies. That is to say, the very apparatuses by which the appearance of sociocultural integrity had been maintained in modernity—the discursive and symbolic mediation through which the ‘‘imagined community’’ has produced and reproduced itself—now appears to be in the process of decline. During the initial stage of postmodernization in Japan, the conflation of the postmodern with Japan’s self-realization and the fulfillment of its destiny helped obscure the disintegration of the national that was under way. The imaginary national topos of Postmodern Japan, in turn, provided a pseudonational and spatial contour to the empty, endless present. In the 1990s, however, under the rapid erosion of the mythos of perpetual economic growth that had displaced history (the belief that Japanese society developed a magical formula that sustains the dynamism of capitalism forever) the effects of postmodernization on the society began spilling out of the national frame, contributing to the sense of opacity and the disintegration of existing social institutions and practices. Although some Japanese critics in the 1990s pronounced the death of postmodernism as a consumerist intellectual fad of the effervescent era, what really came under question during the decade was the contradictory link between the status of

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the national and the process of postmodernization that was at times passed off as the theory of the postmodern in Japan. Despite the widespread dismissal of postmodernism, the dissolution of modern Japanese sociocultural order (allegedly composed of its premodern tradition mixed with the mass culture of modernity) has been a hot topic among Japanese cultural critics. In the 1970s some had already predicted that the end of the era of mass production, mass consumption, and a nation tightly united under the hunger for economic advances would lead to the decline of this sociocultural structure that underwrote the nation’s rapid economic development.10 Indeed, Japan’s transformation into one of the most affluent societies in the world was accompanied by the palpable weakening of its postwar values and norms, particularly on matters such as work ethics, respect for hierarchy and authority, sexual mores expected of women and youths, and the strong sense of collective identification, while the pursuit of individual identity and individuated lifestyles has become a powerful trend. Many of the social calamities of the 1990s (including Aum Shinrikyō, teenage prostitution, and teenage violence) have been linked to this transformation going out of control, especially among the young Japanese. Miyadai Shinji and Ōtsuka Eiji, two of the most representative cultural critics of the 1990s, have helped shape the debates on these issues in the media. Their primary field of interest lies in what some refer to as the development of subculture (or neosubculture) in Japan after the postwar economic high-growth period. It should be clarified from the start that the term subculture as used by these critics does not necessarily have countercultural or underground connotations. Furthermore, while the term seems to overlap with popular (consumer/media) culture in general, it is usually more narrowly associated with advanced consumer society (kōdo shōhi shakai ), defined by the shift from mass consumption to individuated consumption, or advanced information society, defined by the shift from the centralized mass media to various forms of less centralized communicational networks that began taking shape in the 1970s. In a printed interview, Ōtsuka characterizes the concept of subculture and its distinction from more established terms such as mass culture (taishū bunka) and folklore (minzoku) through its fragmentary and acontextual characteristics. Subculture, he says, is a collection of disjointed ideas, phenomena, and artifacts that have become disembedded from their historical origins.11 Subculture or subculturalization, therefore, is not defined via the binary between high versus low, center versus periphery, or mainstream 36

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versus counterculture. The prefix sub- suggests that these subcultural forms no longer participate in the hegemonic contest that both presupposes and feeds into the shared symbolic horizon of a society, not even as an antonym or an alternative to the mainstream and dominant culture. As Ueno Toshiya points out, subculture as defined by Ōtsuka appears to be what others, especially outside Japan, refer to as postmodern culture.12 It has been frequently commented, moreover, that the theoretical framework used by the 1990s critics of subculture echoes that of 1980s postmodernist new academics. Miyadai and Ōtsuka, however, rarely refer to the standard canon of postmodern theory, and they distinguish themselves from the new academics of the prior decade. Miyadai argues that the codes of ‘‘difference’’ and ‘‘individuation’’ that dominated the 1980s marketing strategy have themselves become banal in the 1990s.13 The desire to stay one step ahead of the crowd that drove faddish consumer culture of the 1980s is no longer viable in the much more fractional cultural scene of the 1990s. Even the sophisticated ‘‘play of difference’’ that energized the elite strata of postmodern culture—that is, the continual escape from the banality and rigidity of established cultural forms by the unending gesture of undermining, destabilizing, and parodying their underlying rules and suppositions—retained residual ties to the common assumptions, strict binaries, and cultural norms that were being deconstructed or spoofed. It should be noted, however, that some, like Azuma Hiroki, insist that the withering of 1980s postmodernism in fact indicates the saturation of the postmodern in 1990s Japan.14 In other words, in the 1990s even the pronouncement of the impossibility of a transcendent point of view has lost its critical edge in the face of a world where the absence of a master narrative appears to have become a banal fact of life. No particular point of view, no matter how antiessentialist, can claim for itself a privileged position from which to speak about the present. The cultural landscape of the 1990s, according to Miyadai, is no longer divided between leaders and followers of trends but consists of coexisting microcosmic groups that do not communicate with one another. It has been widely commented that the agents of subculture in the 1990s were characteristically numb to the gaze of others outside their specific ‘‘tribes,’’ indifferent to the collective imagination beyond highly segmented and immediate social relations in which they resided. Otaku is a name given to one type of subcultural subject, typically young males who are obsessed with particular elements of popular culture but indifferent to their broader social and historical contexts. Miyadai observes that the primary criterion of thoughts a roadmap to millennial japan

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and actions in Japanese youth culture has moved from the distinction between trendy versus passé to a more visceral, gut-level divide between pleasant and unpleasant (kai fukai ).15 He reads this shift as a symptom of the ‘‘de-socialization’’ of youths that can at times lead to explosive violence and an icy inability to empathize with others. Miyadai claims that although the weakening of shared values and moral codes is a phenomenon common to all mature modern societies, this trend has been particularly salient and problematic in Japan, because unlike in the West, Japan does not have a transcendent system of values (and subjectivity based on it) underwritten by the Judeo-Christian religious tradition. What glued Japanese society together instead has been the codes of collective moral beliefs and customs rooted in premodern Japanese communalism that have survived all the way through the postwar economic high-growth period. By then the role of traditional collectivity had been substituted by the national community (united under the singular goal of economic development), and collective morality became aligned with many of the key institutions and values that propelled the nation’s modernization. Japan’s success in overcoming its material needs and the concurrent maturation of consumer culture, however, have finally broken down the unity of national community and thus the residual structure of collective morality, leaving behind nothing to counterbalance the fragmenting energies of capitalist modernity.16 Miyadai views social anomie in Japan today as an irreversible historical development. What is needed, then, is not the revival of the lost community or collective morality but a system that complements the society in its very complexity and diversity. He advocates the development of rational, pragmatic, and morally neutral means for ensuring mutual respect for individual dignity, freedom, and accountability.17 It is the ‘‘invisible hand’’ of such a system that he envisions working behind the scene to regulate and hold together the society of narcissistic, present-oriented, and atomized subjects. Meanwhile he lashes out at the Japanese adult establishment for holding on to the dogmas and useless institutions of modernization that have exhausted their historical roles, attempting to impose their obsolete values on youths who are already living postnational and postmodern realities. He exhorts the Japanese to develop the ability to make autonomous judgments and decisions, honing their communication skills to navigate the world without a haven of stable collectivity. The writer Murakami Ryū (considered one of the leading Japanese novelists today) has also made a similar appeal. He claims that Japan can no 38

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longer postpone the final departure from the collectivism underwritten by the national community and must turn into a truly modern, liberal, and individualistic society. In an essay published in 1997 he argues that Japanese society has not fully confronted the fact that its modernization, and thus the era of national unity and purpose, has ended.18 Thus Japanese youths are still being force-fed the anachronistic ideologies of modernization—taught to compete for the monolithic postwar Japanese middle-class goals of good diploma, good job at a big company, and good marriages (for girls)—centered on institutions such as homes, schools, and corporations that used to socialize individuals into national subjects. Yet the validity of this message is constantly undermined by images in the media and everyday experiences surrounding the youths. They cannot help but notice the deterioration of these once-unquestioned institutions and their creeds, and they see the unhappiness and self-destructive conducts of adults still tethered to them. The violence and moral paralysis of youths today, according to Murakami, is symptomatic of the profound and widespread confusion they suffer as the result of this contradiction. The adult Japanese, on the other hand, are wallowing in an acute sense of desolation; middle-aged Japanese men, for example, continue to cling to the corporate collective even though it no longer offers them a sense of larger purpose and meaning, as it did during the era of national modernization. Both Miyadai and Murakami are prescribing the means to resolve the paradox that seems to have complicated the narrative of Japan’s transformation into ‘‘mature’’ modernity. Namely, despite the development of a full-blown consumer culture that rivals any late capitalist societies and the progressive relaxation of traditional moral codes and social values, some of the central institutions of the national order appear to have survived if not strengthened since the 1970s, including the heterosexual nuclear family, a highly standardized and competitive education system, and extreme discipline at the workplace for the core workers in Japanese companies. Miyadai and Murakami blame this inconsistency on the reactionary segment of the population (such as middle-aged, salaried men or education-crazed suburban mothers) that is incapable of living and thinking outside the shelter of collective identity and clings to the sociocultural structure of the past. This perspective, centered on the dichotomy between the collective national order of modernization versus the decentered, diverse, and individuated society after modernization, however, underplays the function of capitalism that has persisted even as it transformed in the wake of Japan’s a roadmap to millennial japan

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postwar economic expansion. The two trends in Japanese society since the 1970s cease to appear contradictory if we see them as interconnected dimensions of an enterprise society mentioned earlier: the subordination of the society under the large corporation and its specific form of labor management centered on the principle of individual competition. Not only the shift from homogeneity to diversity in the personal life revolving around consumer culture but also an increasingly more systematic and intensive extraction of labor power at the workplace (and at school) and the maintenance of heterosexist domesticity and gender roles, it should be noted, conformed to the logic of capital as articulated in the enterprise society. These matters are discussed in more detail in my essay on maternal society, in this volume. Here it will suffice to note that what appears as a throwback to the traditional social structure or disciplinary regime of modernization has in fact acquired a new rationale and apparatuses under the hegemony of large corporations. For instance, labor management in the enterprise society speaks not only the traditional language of loyalty, harmony, and obligation but also of self-initiative, continued self-improvement, and workers’ autonomy in order to promote individual competition and underplay a static and centralized hierarchy of command and authority. Thus by the time Japanese society appeared to have overcome the lack that drove its population into the project of national economic development, the apparatuses of economic growth had become a self-sustaining mechanism deeply ingrained in diverse areas of the society, encompassing increasingly longer segments of the human life cycle so that even young children toiled under the regime of ‘‘examination hell.’’ What was promoted as the means for building a stable, egalitarian, and prosperous society became an end in itself, as a large segment of the society sought the means to survive in the age of mega-competition in the power of large corporations and their global market share. After the completion of modernization, the principle of capitalist production and the control over labor deployed in big companies went on to exert greater influence on the society than ever, but increasingly without the mediation of centralized state programs or national sociocultural order. Instead the corporate subordination of workers and their families through a highly rationalized system of labor management began serving as the model through which national and social unity was imagined. This was the social integrity, above all, of mass competition, allegedly an inclusive and homogeneous space that sustains a high level of competitive pressure, 40

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constituted of differentiating as well as equalizing forces. This paradoxical space of enterprise society supported the illusory national frame of Postmodern Japan mentioned earlier, simultaneously appropriating and eroding the institutional and ideological bases of national sociocultural order. By reducing the complexity of this hybrid formation to the anachronistic remnants of the national imaginary and collectivism, Miyadai and Murakami misrepresented the late capitalist logic governing it. Implicit in their views is the core tenet of liberalism that regards capitalist modernization as a natural, inevitable, and noncontradictory evolutionary process that effects a coherent form of social organization (rational, individualistic, nonauthoritarian, and so on). Moreover, it is through a simplistic binary of Japan versus the West (collectivism versus individualism) that they posit the allegedly atavistic traces in Japanese modernity as the lack that legitimates the further rationalization of Japanese society. In the end Miyadai’s and Murakami’s arguments turn out to be very similar to the rhetoric embraced by economic liberalism and its critique of the ‘‘irrational’’ Japanese economy. It is hardly a coincidence, therefore, that the debate over the decline of national community and the disciplinary regime of modernization began to proliferate in 1990s Japan as the nation’s capitalist system entered a new phase of transformation. The economic slump provided the pressure (for some, the opportunity) for Japanese corporations to renounce the tightly interrelated organization of home, schools, and work in the enterprise society. Wages, benefits, and job security for regular male workers started to break down under economic stagnation, while corporate restructuring, depressed demands in the labor market, and changing strategies of corporate recruitment kept diminishing the prospects for youths entering the job market (even those with hard-earned diplomas from decent colleges) to find secure employment at large companies. In the meantime women faced further intensified pressure to work and contribute to the household income while gender discrimination at the workplace remained firmly entrenched, and the demands on unpaid female labor to bear the brunt of inadequate social services have become greater than ever. The rising number of homeless (many of whom are recently unemployed men and women) in urban areas and the surge of suicides linked to economic woes are salient symptoms of the economic shake-up presently unfolding. More long-term and systemic problems may also be suggested by the conditions of Japanese youths. Many worry that the increase in the unemployment rate among Japanese in their twenties (around 10 percent as of a roadmap to millennial japan

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spring 1999) and the increase of ‘‘freeters’’ ( furiitā) among them—youths who are reputed to be indifferent to solid career aspirations or good work opportunities and drift from one contingent job to another—are signs of a new economic underclass in the making. (According to the Ministry of Labor, the number of freeters rose from 1 million in 1992 to 1.5 million in 1997.) It is said that a considerable portion of young Japanese today, especially those without a college education, will never enjoy the security and benefits that the past generations had through regular employment (or through a marriage to a regular worker); instead, they will constitute a social strata of surplus labor to be hired and fired according to the fluctuating demands in the labor market. Staggering public debt (now amounting to $6 trillion, 130 percent of the nation’s gdp) accumulated by a government that tried to spend itself out of recession is a dark legacy bequeathed to today’s youths. Meanwhile, the media is circulating unsympathetic references to the young working Japanese who continue to live in their parental homes as ‘‘parasite singles,’’ charging them with being opportunistic, irresponsible, and hedonistic, blowing off their disposable income on luxury consumption while freeloading off the older generation.19 The conflict of interest creeping in between younger and older populations in the rapidly aging society is one of the significant social fault lines surfacing in Japan today. Miyadai made a name for himself by speaking out on behalf of the young Japanese known as the baby-boomer juniors (dankai junia), contesting the conservative claims that morally degenerate, antisocial, and underachieving youths today epitomize the nation’s social crisis. He has argued for the rights of teenagers to make choices on matters concerning their bodies and sexuality and for the dismantling of monolithic standards of evaluation in Japanese schools; he has also defended the youths’ lack of ambition and moral inhibitions not as their failings but as their adaptation to the ‘‘endless everyday’’ (owari naki nichijō) of the postmodern world. While the pressure-cooking Japanese education system and other oppressive disciplines of enterprise society that Miyadai attacks do continue to operate and bear down on the youths, we need to be aware of the new forms of terror surfacing through ongoing social, economic, and political reorganizations. Many leaders of Japanese business, bureaucracy, and politics today fully endorse the dismantling of the costly and beleaguered education system designed to produce an evenly disciplined population. For instance, educational reform plans proposed in the 1990s under the banner of diversity, tolerance, and liberalization aim at depressurizing the force field of mass competition, creating a system that can openly round up and 42

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expel its lowest performers while creating a separate accelerated track for the high performers. The youths, especially those without a privileged social and financial background, are one of the first groups of the population to be directly and adversely affected by these transformations. We also need to consider the complex ways in which not only reactionary moral indignation but also the changing demands of capitalism inform the recent youth-bashing. The denigration of wayward youths by conservatives has translated less into a campaign to reform them into upstanding and productive Japanese citizens than into an encouragement of public opinion that holds them responsible for their economic and social displacement. What is really at stake is not the threat the youths pose to the Japanese postwar ethos but how to master the disruptive effects of the Japanese capitalist regime’s withdrawal from the system of social management that had until recently sustained a relatively even income distribution and the phantasm of a homogeneous mass middle-stratum nation. The conservative condemnation of youths’ moral deficiency invites hardened tolerance toward increasingly more visible socioeconomic unevenness while diverting attention away from its causes. From this perspective we can see how conservative assertion of traditional values and liberal reform complement each other. A similar logic is at work in the demonization of foreigners and immigrants as criminals and threats to public safety by Ishihara Shintarō, the popular nationalist governor of Tokyo. Speaking to the Japanese sdf, Ishihara urged them to prepare for the rioting and looting by sangokujin (a derogatory reference used primarily for Chinese and Korean immigrants) and other foreigners in the event of a major earthquake in Tokyo. Ishihara’s xenophobic rhetoric could be understood as laying the groundwork not so much for the removal of foreigners and immigrants but for ideological and institutional responses to their expected increase (due to changing Japanese demographics and the acute need for cheap labor by its industries and businesses), setting them up as convenient political scapegoats while justifying aggressive measures to rein them in.20 Ishihara’s demagoguery reminds us of the fact that some of the most popular elements of conservative and nationalist discourses in Japan today are premised on social heterogeneity. They propose to redraw national identity on a basis other than the passive assumption of homogeneity coupled with the silent repression of difference that underwrote postwar nationalism in Japan. Thus Ishihara comfortably mixes overtly racist and nationalist rhetoric with the neoliberal language of national strength built on individual responsibility and accountability, capitalizing on the popular disa roadmap to millennial japan

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content with the status quo. Although he flaunts his anti-American stance, his political persona—hawkish, patriotic, socioculturally conservative, and often neoliberal in his stance toward the economy and the role of government—appears to have more in common with the U.S. Republican Party since the Reagan presidency than the conservatism of the ldp in Japan (where he began his political career). As such, the critique of national community offered by liberal critics such as Miyadai and Murakami cannot offer a rigorous challenge to the new brand of nontraditional nationalism that feeds off the decline of enterprise society and the imaginary coherence of its enclosed (pseudo-)national order. Asada Akira, who is considered the leading postmodern critic of the 1980s, provoked much discussion recently by drawing attention to the broader manifestation of such a nontraditional nationalism in the cultural and intellectual landscape of 1990s Japan.21 In Asada’s words, the 1990s were the decade of ‘‘return to J’’ ( J kaiki ). The letter J, however, stands not so much for Japan but for J in terms such as J-Pop, an enormously successful brand of Japanese popular music, which features teenage vocal groups with English names such as Speed or Dragon Ash or megastar Utada Hikaru, who sings rhythm and blues songs with Japanese-English mixed lyrics. There is also a J-league, a Japanese professional soccer league that was self-consciously created and marketed as a more pop, hip, and contemporary alternative to professional baseball, the traditional national sport of Japan. The return to J, therefore, is not a simple repetition of the numerous surges of cultural nationalism that have erupted periodically in the country’s modern history. Alphabetized and contracted, J is Japan as a site of the trashy pop culture of otaku, video games and animations. It is wholly divorced from the hoary tradition and rarefied premodern aesthetics that once anchored Japanese cultural identity in contrast to and resistance against the dominance of modern Western culture. Asada scoffs at the return to J as a backlash against the multiculturalism of borderless global capital, self-withdrawal at the level of culture in a country where the tide of globalization overwhelmed its ailing national economy. Contrasting it with the ideological and philosophical tension that modern Japanese intellectuals struggled against—caught between Japan and the universalizing dogmas that entered from abroad, whether Christianity or Marxism—Asada dismisses the return to J as a superficial reaction to the raw reality of the global economy. Negative characteristics that Asada identifies in J-culture—populist, in44

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fantile, shallow, and parochial—are attributed to the Japanese intellectual scene of the 1990s as well. As already mentioned, this was the decade in which postmodern theorization associated with Asada was increasingly dismissed as an incarnation of the 1980s consumer culture, snobbish cosmopolitanism based on imported theories that remained disengaged from the Japanese context. Asada views the heightened interest in local subculture by a new generation of Japanese critics as well as the prominence of neonational and neoconservative pundits as the manifestation of the intellectual return to J during the 1990s. Regardless of the validity of Asada’s general assessment of the Japanese intellectual or cultural climate, his simple conflation of critical discourses and popular cultural trends may need some qualification. Consider, for example, the nationalism of Fukuda Kazuya, a scholar of French literature turned neoconservative who calls himself a ‘‘punk conservative.’’ According to Asada, Fukuda typifies the return to J to the extent that his conversion to nationalism was mediated by his very acknowledgment of Japan as a deessentialized simulacrum. Indeed Fukuda, who draws on a broad range of contemporary critical theory, concedes that a nation is a historically contingent, imaginary formation, but he insists on its significance as a necessary fiction for protecting some measure of social order and integrity in a world increasingly dominated by the pure forces of market economy and the new version of U.S. imperialism. Fukuda also suggests that neonationalism today cannot be reduced to naive and regressive communalism insofar as it is an effort to secure the space for publicity (kōkyōsei ) in a society increasingly infested by disjointed psuedocommunities.22 At the core of Fukuda’s concern, therefore, is the preservation not of a particular content of the national but its structure, not a national essence but a national form. Fukuda’s ‘‘formalism’’ suggests the structural cause for the ghostliness of ‘‘Japan’’ invoked in the nationalist discourses today. He is conservative to the extent that he is attempting to restore the ideological coherence of modern order and the nation’s axiomatic status within it. Fukuda’s neoconservatism seeks to counter the subculturalization of Japan by the fictitious national validated by the values and principles of modernity. This means, moreover, that he is returning not so much to J but to M—that is, the reaffirmation of the telos of modernity not as a goal to strive for but as the ground for defending the consistency of the world as we know it. Here we may note that the formal Japan of neoconservatives is empty but not entirely ahistorical. Even though ‘‘Japan’’ itself may be acknowledged to be a simulacrum devoid of essence, it is still anchored in the context a roadmap to millennial japan

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of modernity; a nation recognized as an imagined community is a historicized nation. As Ōtsuka’s definition of subculture suggests, however, the cultural practices in contemporary Japan that have captured much attention in recent years are characterized by their radical lack of will to history. They are not only severed from tradition but also indifferent to the imperatives of modernity. It is therefore important to consider this difference between subcultural J and neoconservative ‘‘Japan.’’ Rather than assuming that the Japanese popular culture today ultimately refers to some form of a larger national frame, we may understand the prefix J- as inscribing the subculturation of the national. Put another way, the more appropriate category for discussing the J-culture may be the local rather than the national. As Stuart Hall and others have pointed out, globalization does not translate into a seamless homogeneity of global culture. Local cultural variance, far from being expunged, is actively produced and consumed—as ethnic food, world music, and constantly changing themes in fashion, for example—but the meaning and function of cultural difference is being fundamentally transformed. The local is increasingly disassociated from specific social spaces and relations we inhabit as it is constituted through the process of commodification. Rather than inscribing a sociocultural boundary between the inside and the outside (that takes the national interiority as the ultimate horizon), the local in the global postmodern operates on a more fluid, affective distinction of familiar and exotic or a visceral sense of proximity and distance that need not presuppose a fixed historical or social point of reference. This fluidity is what enables the infinite reproduction of J that crowns everything from pop music to novels on street life in urban Japan (so-called J-literature). No matter how seemingly insular and local J-culture may appear to be, therefore, it is not parochial in the conventional sense of the term. If Fukuda’s nationalism is national in form rather than in content, J is national in content rather than in form. We can find an illustration of this aspect of J-culture in the animation series Evangelion, which was a phenomenal hit in mid-1990s Japan. Many have commented that Evangelion is a massive patchwork of citations, drawing from a vast array of foreign and domestic science fiction, comics, and animations as well as religious, pop psychological, and scientific literature to a degree unprecedented in the medium. Yet, unlike earlier generations of anime that often looked inadvertently Japanese even when they were supposed to be taking place in some distant galaxy, Evangelion self-consciously inserts visual/narrative details unmistakably drawn from the most mun46

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dane everyday life in Japan in the late twentieth century. Highly local markings, blended into the animation’s sophisticated collage of nonlocalizable elements extracted from disparate contexts, perform a specialized function as signifiers of proximity, a prop that induces in the targeted audience a sense of familiarity with and connection to the story world. A similar logic appeared to be at work in reverse when Pokémon: The First Movie was prepared for distribution in the United States. Overt signs of Japaneseness were airbrushed out and replaced with signifiers that appear local to the American audience.23 Of course, there is nothing new about the procedure for passing cultural products from marginal locations into the larger mainstream market. Increasingly, however, such an operation is becoming the norm rather than the exception, as references even to cultural idioms local to the site of production take on the affectation and artificiality of cultural masquerade. National culture itself was always an abstraction, forging unity out of heterogeneous customs and narratives, thus patching up radical historical transformations and ruptures into a seamless continuity. While insisting upon its autonomous meaning and identity, it actually relies on the international framework of the modern nation-state system to mark its interiority. J-culture may represent, however, a new level of abstraction from the concrete social context in that the signifier of locality can be immediately —that is, nondialectically—subsumed into the general economy of value underwritten by global capital. The production and marketing of J-culture, therefore, is as native to the postmodern consumer society as the commercialization of multiculturalism. The proliferation of J-markings in 1990s Japan signals not the resurfacing of the national (regressing into it) against the tide of global postmodernity but its continual waning. The poverty of J-culture that Asada blames on Japan’s self-withdrawal, therefore, has to be understood in relation to the regime of cultural production under global capital. Asada’s insistence on the conventional opposition between Japanese parochialism and the cosmopolitanism of global postmodernity, together with his nod to the past era (when the binary between Japan and the world stimulated intellectually and artistically productive tension), indicates that he too is not immune to the return to modern I suggested of the neoconservative Fukuda.24 In fact, the return to modern in various inflections has been one of the most dominant trends of intellectual discourse in Japan during the 1990s across the ideological spectrum. Not only Asada but many leading figures of the postmodern culture ina roadmap to millennial japan

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dustry of the 1980s appear to have treaded this course.25 For instance, in the 1990s Karatani Kōjin, a leading intellectual figure of the 1980s and a close associate of Asada, began arguing for ethical intervention against global capital and the nation-state system, through a theoretical program of ‘‘(non-historicist) Marxism via Kant.’’ Karatani invokes Kantian ethics as an imperative to accept the freedom of oneself and others while at the same time recognizing the historical and social contingency of the subject.26 The ethics, in other words, rest on the transcendental act of choosing to be free, shouldering the consequences of recognizing others as well as oneself as free, individual subjects (thereby rejecting the utilitarian ideology of capitalism that reduces others to means, as well as the parochialism of the state that separates ‘‘us’’ from ‘‘them’’), even though we can never obtain the objective certainty of our freedom. Karatani’s argument strongly echoes Slavoj Žižek’s reading of Kantian ethics in which freedom is equated with the Lacanian Real, a nonhistorical, nonreal entity around which a symbolic network (the sphere of history, language, social relations, etc.) is articulated, an origin that is retroactively presupposed but remains resistant to symbolization. At the most fundamental level, ethical choice, according to Žižek, is not between good and evil but whether or not one establishes one’s agency through the reaffirmation of the symbolic order organized around the Real as its empty kernel. To reject this paradoxical predicament of subject, refusing to choose ‘‘something’’ (for example, freedom without an absolute guarantee) is not so much evil but mad, a psychotic withdrawal from the symbolic order. Žižek recasts ethics at this theoretical register in order to challenge what he perceives as the reigning ideology of global capital that strives to dissolve all impediments to the unbridled commodification of everyday life—in other words, postmodern attitudes that ‘‘pathologize’’ the rigidity of a modern autonomous subject while endorsing the psychotic choice of distancing oneself from fixed identity, closed social boundary, or a big Other.27 Žižek’s formulation helps us detect a common current underlying the return to modern in the intellectual discourses of 1990s Japan: the fear for the degeneration of the symbolic order precipitated by the withering of modern teleology under the logic of global capital. Critics appear to be wary that in contrast to the cliché about postmodern consumer society as a sphere of self-interest and unfettered pursuit of pleasure, the society may be blindly drawn to the death drive—beyond the pleasure principle, self-preservation, and phantasmic coherence of socius. Rather than an ineluctable maturing

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of modern society, they perceive a profound and unpredictable crisis erupting out of the retreat of the modern national order. This is the background against which Fukuda Kazuya himself identifies a parallel between neoconservatives’ invocation of a fictitious nation and the cosmopolitan project of Karatani Kōjin based on universal ethics.28 The most vital tension among diverse strains of cultural criticism in the 1990s surfaced in their relations not against supposed ideological opponents but against the present historical moment and its pervasive indifference to the metalevel theorization. Whether in upholding the national community or universal ethics, then, critics are reaching back to the ideals of modernity to re-create the state of tending toward an unrealized goal. The return to modern, in other words, struggles against the inertia generated by the fait accompli telos of global capitalism—the market and its self-regulating mechanism as the solution to all problems, the ultimate horizon foreclosure of history. It is the terrifying prospect of disappearance, not so much of the master narrative but of the desire (and agency) that used to generate it, that calls for the apparition of the modern today. The profound sense of rupture and uncertainty in the present tends to stimulate the return to the languages and ideas of the past. A critical question that arises in such a context is whether the existing frames of knowledge are adequate to the task of developing an understanding of, not to speak of a cogent strategy against, the problems arising before us. It may be worth remembering the old lesson of complicity between antimodernist calls to ‘‘return to Japan’’ and the history of modernization. Now we may need to caution against the return to modern (e.g., the host of refurbished modern paradigms wrapped in the garb of neo) and their ironic complicity with the new. While they largely miss the genuine source of novelty in the present, in their very blindness they serve as handmaidens to the ongoing transformations that are taking us beyond the familiar terrain of the modern order. In this essay I have argued against the mainstream neoliberal and neoconservative constructions of 1990s Japan that reaffirm one of the most dominant frameworks through which Japanese modernity has been construed: the duality between Japan and the world (now cast as global capital or the United States as its embodiment). The reference to this schema, whether in urging Japan to adopt the global standard or in exhorting Japan

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to assert its political autonomy, obscures much more fundamental problems that Japan and the world are facing today. The issue is not the changing relation of Japan versus global capitalism but the permutation of the global order of capital into an increasingly direct and pervasive force organizing our world, shaping, for instance, political as well as economic forces in ways that blur the boundary between them. By placing 1990s Japan in the context of postmodernization and globalization since the 1970s, I have tried to suggest the extent to which Japan has been already fully implicated in this development, well before the 1990s economic downturn. The exceptionalist image of ‘‘Japan’’ that is invoked against the global capital today is itself largely an outgrowth of this process. To speak of the impasse of the Japanese system (its tension with the global standard), therefore, is no less ahistorical than the once-popular belief that Japan, through its repression/preservation of precapitalist psychosocial organization, developed a system that yokes the eternal flame of capitalist expansion. So how may we approach 1990s Japan in its proper historical dimension? One of the responses to this question that we have examined is the return to modern not in the sense of grafting old frameworks onto the new conditions but as a means for understanding the present by reimagining the alterity to the dominant ideological horizon of our time. The approach, however, runs a serious risk of turning nostalgic rather than critical unless it remains well calibrated to the contemporary target of criticism. Many of the most compelling critical thoughts on modern Japan are those that have struggled to maintain a genuine tension with both modernity and tradition, problematizing the reification of Japan as well as of the West. Japan in the 1990s, however, signaled the need to rethink fundamentally the efficacy of this strategy by pointing to the shifting center of contradiction as well as coherence of our world. Earlier I objected to Asada’s analysis of J-culture because of his focus on its parochial content, stopping short of addressing the global relation of cultural production as its structural basis. Asada’s own criticism of J-culture as a reaction-formation to the raw reality of the global economy suggests that his hostility is directed not so much against its parochialism but against its realism, that is, the dismissal of the exteriority not of Japan but of global capital. Asada’s (anticapitalist) cosmopolitanism, however, blunts its critical force by holding on to the old adversary, parochialism (nationalism), rather than directing its aim against the globality of capitalism today that

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dissolves the dialectical tension between universal and particular, threatening to cast cosmopolitanism as well as nationalism redundant. The nostalgia most likely to thwart the critical efficacy of the return to modern may be the yearning for the ‘‘space of modern’’ as a familiar site from which to disclaim oppressive and abject Japan. The 1990s have presented us with the prospect that the Japanese cultural and social terrain, without ever overcoming the parochialism, may appear before us in its utter globality. Notes 1 Takeo Hoshi and Anil Kashyap, ‘‘The Japanese Banking Crisis: Where Did It

2 3 4

5 6 7

8

9

10 11

12 13

Come From and How Will It End?’’ (working paper 7250, National Bureau of Economic Research, July 1999), 4. Giovanni Arrighi, The Long Twentieth Century (London, 1994), 323–24. R. Taggart Murphy, ‘‘Japan’s Economic Crisis,’’ New Left Review, no. 1 (2000): 46– 52. On the significance of the Gulf War as the pivotal event in the emergence of a new world order protected by the U.S.-led world police, see Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, MA, 2000), 180–82. Watanabe Osamu, Gendai nihon no teikokushugika, keisei to kōzō [Imperialism of contemporary Japan: Its development and structure] (Tokyo, 1996), 237–41. Peter Gowan, The Global Gamble: Washington’s Faustian Bid for World Dominance (London, 1999), 14. Also see Arrighi, The Long Twentieth Century, 328–30. On the discussion of postmodernism in relation to Japan in the 1980s, see Masao Miyoshi and H. D. Harootunian, eds., Postmodernism and Japan (Durham, NC, 1989). On the Age of Culture, see Harootunian’s essay, ‘‘Visible Discourses/Invisible Ideologies,’’ in Miyoshi and Harootunian, Postmodernism and Japan, 78– 90. On the commodification of postmodern discourse and new academics in the 1980s, see Marilyn Ivy, ‘‘Critical Tests, Mass Artifacts: The Consumption of Knowledge in Postmodern Japan,’’ in Miyoshi and Harootunian, Postmodernism and Japan. Although the scope of the word national, as I use it here, is broad enough to virtually overlap with that of social, its explicit historical and institutional associations (to the nation-state system) also helps us consider its decline in concrete and material terms. Murakami Yasusuke, Kumon Shunpei, and Satō Seizaburō, Bunmei to shite no ie shakai [The household society as a civilization] (Tokyo, 1979), 467. Ōtsuka Eiji and Ueno Toshiya, ‘‘Sabukaru otaku wa naze hoshu to musubitsuitaka’’ [Why did subcultural otaku become allied with conservatives?], Impaction 106 (1998): 10. Ibid. Miyadai Shinji, Ishihara Hideki, and Ōtsuka Akiko, Sabukaruchā shinwa kaitai:

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14 15 16 17 18 19

20

21 22

23 24

25

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Shōjo, ongaku, manga, sei no sanjūnen to komyunikēshon no genzai [Disassembling the myth of subculture: Thirty years of girls, music, comics, and sexuality, and the current conditions of communication] (Tokyo, 1997), 9–25. Azuma Hiroki, Yūbinteki fuantachi [The postal anxiety] (Tokyo, 1999), 254. Miyadai Shinji, Seifuku shōjotachi no sentaku [The choices of the girls in uniform] (Tokyo, 1998), 242–43. Miyadai Shinji, ‘‘Baka oyaji wa inkyoseyo’’ [Stupid geezers should retire], Sansara 8.4 (1997): 85–86. Miyadai Shinji, ‘‘Jiyū to chitsujo,’’ [Freedom and order] Shōsetsu Tripper (Fall 1998): 216–24. Murakami Ryū, ‘‘Samishii kuni no satsujin’’ [A murder in a forlorn nation], Bungei shunjū (September 1997): 116. The notion of parasite single is based on a work by sociologist Yamada Masahiro; see Yamada Masahiro, Parasaito shinguru no jidai [The age of parasite singles] (Tokyo, 2000). With the waning of the disciplinary regime of enterprise society, we may expect to see on one hand the reinforcement of the overtly coercive apparatus for maintaining the social order, and on the other the expansion of informational control of the population, as suggested by the recent passage of the wiretapping law, which gave police the power to use wiretap in their criminal investigations. Asada Akira, ‘‘J-kaiki no yukue’’ [The future of the return to J], Voices 267 (2000): 58–59. Nishibe Susumu et al., ‘‘Dentō, kokka, shihonshugi: hoshushugi no riron o tou’’ [Tradition, state, and capitalism: An inquiry into the logic of conservatism], Hihyō kūkan 16 (1998): 18. Kubo Masakazu, ‘‘Why Pokemon Was Successful in America,’’ Japan Echo (April 2000): 59–62. In a New Year symposium printed in a popular business magazine, Asada commented, ‘‘Given that Japanese-style groupism is no longer functioning properly, we are now at the point where we need to reaffirm some of the fundamental principles of modern individualism’’ (‘‘Futatabi maruyama masao o omoshirogaru’’ [Let’s have fun with Maruyama Masao again], Daiamondo [Diamond] 85.1 [1997]: 163). It is often said that one of the pivotal moments in this transition came during the Gulf War when some of the leading writers and critics linked to 1980s postmodernism issued a joint statement protesting the Japanese government’s support of the war, casting off the prior image of political aloofness that had distinguished this generation from the New Left intellectuals and cultural figures of the 1960s and early 1970s. Among the signers of the statement, some, like Asada or Karatani Kōjin, have moved away from the analysis of postmodern consumer culture to take up more explicitly leftist political issues, expressing a renewed focus on Marxism in the 1990s. Others, such as Tanaka Yasuo, who made his media debut in the early 1980s with a best-selling novel, Nantonaku Kurisutaru [Somehow crystal] (the work famous for dense footnotes on brand-name luxury goods and references to trendy urban spots throughout the narrative that made

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it a manual of 1980s consumer culture), have fashioned themselves into celebrity liberal-democrats. Tanaka became involved in a number of citizens’ movements (including disaster relief in the aftermath of the Hanshin earthquake) in the 1990s and was elected governor of Nagano prefecture in 2000. 26 Karatani Kōjin, Rinri 21 [Ethics 21] (Tokyo 2000), 9–10. 27 Slavoj Žižek, Tarrying with the Negative (Durham, NC, 1994), 216. 28 Fukuda Kazuya, ‘‘Owarinaki nichijyō to yakkai na bokutachi’’ [The endless everyday and our intractability], Takarajima 30 (1995): 53–54. Fukuda’s reflexive comment is notable for the matter-of-fact tone with which he signals the erosion of the conditions that had constituted nationalism as a form of particularism, defined by its opposition to the universalism in postwar Japan. On the historical and political sources of this binarism, see Sakai Naoki, ‘‘Modernity and Its Critique,’’ in Miyoshi and Harootunian, Postmodernism and Japan.

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The University and the ‘‘Global Economy’’: The Cases of the United States and Japan

Masao Miyoshi Iwao Nakatani, deputy chairman of the government’s Economic Strategy Council, joined Sony Corp.’s board on June 29 after resigning from his full professorship at Tokyo’s state-run Hitotsubashi University. Nakatani had applied earlier this year to the National Personnel Authority for permission to take up Sony’s offer. This was a perfect opportunity for the mandarins to show a change of heart. But they rejected his request, citing regulations that bar public servants from running their own companies or serving on the boards of profit-making firms. Prime Minister Obuchi and the Education Minister spoke up in Nakatani’s defense, but to no avail. So Nakatani will teach part-time at Hitotsubashi and consult at several startups. Irene M. Kuni, ‘‘Memo to Japan: Set Your Academics Free,’’ Business Week, July 10, 1999

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y now we are sufficiently alerted that the touted ‘‘global’’ economy means capital’s maximal pursuit of profit and productivity and excision of the unprofitable and unproductive throughout the world. Both the cause and the effect of the vast advances in electronic and biogenetic technology, the productivity and efficiency in communication, transportation, manufacture, and medicine, have been immensely enhanced during the last decade. Capital can reach anywhere in the world practically without cost. ‘‘Globalization’’ aims at the concentration of wealth by taking full advantage of uneven development. The few rich are immensely rich, while the poor are unprecedently deprived and multitudinous, and the gap between them is deep and wide. The distribution of wealth is uneven not only between the developed and developing nations but also within each of these

nations and regions, both industrial and unindustrialized. What is most striking in this development, however, is the pervasiveness of this ‘‘neoliberal’’ principle and practice. It is evident in the nearly worldwide project to privatize public resources and to convert all political concerns into economic ones. In public policy discourse, ‘‘rational’’ choice is assumed to be gainful and acquisitive above all other interests. In personal consideration, too, self-interest is taken to be normative and legitimized. This is the moment of triumph for neoliberalism, and critical ideas such as opposition, resistance, and liberation are all but forgotten and discarded as useless and irrelevant in a supposedly seamless globe of capitalism. This article examines the impact in the United States and Japan of globalization on the university, a site that might be expected to document, interpret, criticize, and intervene in the face of such an event. Several prefatory remarks need to be made here as regards the foci and limits of the article. First, the corporatization of the university is by now in progress nearly everywhere in industrial nations. My choice of these two countries is not meant to be contrastive or typical; it is primarily randomly exemplary. Second, the history of the university is widely discrepant and variant everywhere, even between France and Germany, not to say the United States and Japan. Here, however, I will have to restrict myself to today’s state of affairs, leaving the forces of history to chance comments and suggestions. Third, I have elsewhere written about the corporatized university in the United States, especially around the issue of technology transfer and the withering of the humanities.1 I am fairly certain that my documentation is accurate and up to date. On the other hand, there are developments in Japan about which I am not quite clear, nor, it seems, are most native scholars because of the particular nature of the political discourse in today’s Japan. I will discuss that subject more fully later. Finally, my purpose is not just to present the current stages of academia’s surrender to business in the two countries but, by comparison, to suggest divergent ways globalization is unfolding in the world. The alliance between the university and industry in the United States is not a recent event. Aside from the land-grant colleges and universities that are by law required to represent the public interests, even private universities have had far more intimate relationships to society at large, including the business world, than have their European counterparts.2 Social needs and interests often interfered with ‘‘free’’ learning. Agriculture, engineering, home economics, and defense have never been far from the core of U.S. the university and the ‘‘global economy’’

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higher education. Of course, colleges and universities have also aspired to study and teach the unbridled truth in the name of liberal education, and yet since World War II, defense-related research increasingly occupied the center stage at universities. Such an emphasis on national security, moreover, was not restricted to physical science and engineering but extended to social sciences and the humanities. This balance between utility and free inquiry was maintained without too much ado, however, as long as the idea of nation-state lasted, defining and shaping the structure of culture, ideology, and pedagogy. It is no surprise that the end of the Cold War overlaps the ascendance of the so-called global economy. In retrospect, the Cold War was no confrontation of two equally powerful empires, as was argued by Western ideologues, but the late stage of capitalism where the hegemony finally vanquished the last bastion of the non/anticapitalist insurgency in the centuries-long history, thus opening the era of the global economy. Once the last military threat is removed, financial and industrial capital no longer needs the confinement of the nation-state for its operation. Now, released from the obligation to keep the nation as a potentially mobilizable whole, capital moves freely nearly everywhere in the world, selecting sites for production and consumption and discarding unprofitable populations and regions. This principle for reorganizing the world on behalf of productivity and profitability, and not tribal and national coherence, equally applies to the governance of corporations, universities, and other social and cultural institutions. National culture, national art, and national literature, together with the national economy, are increasingly irrelevant; instead, efficiency in production is the comprehensive rule, and consumption is the mandate for every citizen. Accountability is foremost in every segment, and excellence —without a specific direction or content—is the manifest objective.3 Thatcherism and Reaganomics of the 1980s had been the first step in international capital’s accelerated attempt to privatize the public. Funds supporting public programs were radically reduced and rechanneled into the coffer of large corporations. The most successful social revolution of the twentieth century, their program effectively began to transfer wealth from the poor to the rich.4 The university was to be integrated into this general reorganization of society. Thus the alliance between business and academia has been aggressively promoted since around 1990. On the campus scene many new developments began to attract the attention of the public. General restructuring of both institutional and disciplinary organization is the most conspicuous. The disciplines formed 56

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around the concept of the nation-state were freshly reexamined. The decline of national literature—English as well as Russian or German, for instance— was obvious, but other nonutilitarian studies such as linguistics, philosophy, or even physics and mathematics were considered ripe for downsizing. The crisis in placement of Ph.D.’s in such disciplines was no longer a result of demography nor a consequence of a downturn in the economy. The change reflected the fundamental reformulation of higher education. More ubiquitous than those specific permutations is the general policy and outlook toward cost and output. In teaching, course enrollment, degree production, and Ph.D. placement are the bases for planning. For the evaluation of research and scholarship, the quantity of publication and frequency of citation are now indispensable. Thus grants and endowments are valued not only for financial enhancement but also as a demonstration of excellence. Budgetary autonomy is increasingly expected for institutional units, including, for instance, the university press. The university press that was originally intended for the publication of scholarly monographs is now rapidly trying to become a trade publisher, and its list often excludes first books, specialists’ monographs, and unpopular topics. The consequences of such a turn toward commercial profits are profound in altering the character of research and scholarship as well as affecting the procedures for academic evaluation. Although the tenure system has not been outright abolished as yet, it is being undermined by the large-scale hiring of temporary lecturers and graduate students. Over 60 percent of undergraduate humanities courses are being taught in the United States by non-ladder-rank faculty.5 Distance teaching, also known as the virtual university, is another device for downsizing costly classroom instructors. Electronic teaching has not yet attracted as many students as its administrators had hoped, and yet the methods of mass-producing degrees are continually sought and tried, successfully at times, as can be seen in the for-profit operation of the University of Phoenix.6 Even staid universities in the United Kingdom such as Oxford and Cambridge are forming a consortium to fight back against the global virtual university being constructed by the University of Michigan, Columbia University, and the University of California, Berkeley, in cooperation with Time-Warner and Walt Disney Company. Vice-chancellors from Britain’s leading universities have established the Vice-Chancellors’ and Presidents’ Forum to tackle the issue. At a recent meeting in Hong Kong, hosted by the Association of University Presidents of China, the British vice-chancellors agreed to plan ‘‘global degrees.’’ 7 the university and the ‘‘global economy’’

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The role of the administrators in the university thus has to be elevated to a new height. No longer expected to be a mere intellectual or even an educational leader, an administrator is a manager par excellence. Most administrative recruits have at least some managerial experience, and presidents and provosts are no longer embarrassed to be called the ceos of universities. They are there to organize and manage research and education efficiently in accordance with the required norm. Reflecting this organizational situation, administrators’ salaries are approaching the scale of corporate managers. In 1998 a corporate ceo received a salary 326 times that of an assembly-line worker (as against 35 times in 1974 and 187 times in 1994).8 Though not quite in the same proportion, university presidents being paid in hundreds of thousands and even over a half-million dollars (plus benefits) are no longer rarities. One ought to remember that the compensation for contingency workers in academia hovers around $25,000, rarely rising above $30,000, with heavy teaching loads and no benefits. These are significant episodes in the history of the transformation of the university. The crucial event in the process that exceeds them in importance, however, is the phenomenon of ‘‘technology transfer,’’ which has received little notice outside the ranks of active managers of the corporate university. In response to the gradually rising demand for a fuller utilization of public funds, the U.S. Congress passed a bipartisan bill in 1980 under the sponsorship of Senators Birch Bayh and Bob Dole called the Bayh-Dole Act of Patent and Trademark. It authorized research universities to patent and license the results of federally funded research projects. As everyone knows, the Cold War had made available billions of dollars to research universities for decades. These research results were published and open to the public use, and most remained unpatented. The Bayh-Dole Act at first permitted only small start-ups and domestic companies to obtain exclusive licenses for the patents owned by the university. In time the law was loosened so much that any corporation, domestic or foreign, of any size could obtain exclusive rights to the discoveries made in the university laboratories. The patenting activities had been slow until about 1990, after which they have been leapfrogging every year. Up to 1979 the federal government spent more than industry on research and development (r&d), but this ratio was reversed after 1980, until in 1997 the expenditures by the federal government and industry on r&d reached a proportion of 1 to more than 2.9 The cut may very well have been a part of the Reagan policy to downsize public expenditures. But then the slack was taken up by universities, which increasingly exploited federally funded r&d for the benefit of the corporations. 58

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It should be noted, however, that nationally, r&d is overwhelmingly funded by industry, with universities contributing a mere few percentage points of corporate expenditures. Within the university research expenditures, moreover, by far the largest source of funding is the federal government, with corporations contributing only one-tenth of the federal allocations.10 As for the basic research versus r&d expenditures, the total national expenditures from all sectors have decisively been in favor of utility at about 1 to 6 or 8, depending on the year between 1960 and 1997. The federal obligations for national research, on the other hand, have been more or less evenly divided since around 1990 (earlier, more had been expended on r&d). Inside the universities, however, federally funded basic research still commands far more weight than r&d at the ratio of roughly 2 to 1. Despite these complicated indices, post–Cold War university technological research has increasingly prioritized marketable and entrepreneurial r&d over basic research, which is not immediately profitable. A February 1999 report by the Committee of Vice-Chancellors and Principals of the Universities of the United Kingdom, called Technology Transfer: The U.S. Experience, makes it clear that the British universities are trying to learn from the U.S. practice. Although it warns about the variance between the United States and the United Kingdom, the report proper hardly touches on any difference in the makeups of the universities in the two countries. It supports technology transfer as a ‘‘public duty, [with] income generation, wider benefits for the university, [and] contribution to economic growth.’’ The report in fact ends with glowing praise for the University of California, San Diego, Connect program, an outreach project for neighboring business, as it emerged in the 1980s when the San Diego area was hit hard by the prospect of a reduction in defense spending. Its objective was to create ‘‘a local Silicon Valley’’ by working ‘‘with all companies, whether old or new, but in practice 80–90% [had] been small and fast growing.’’ 11 Of course, the use of university r&d facilities for the benefit of industry could be justified if service so rendered was adequately acknowledged and repaid by its corporate beneficiaries to the source of its funding, the taxpayers. Such, however, is not the case. Corporations, both domestic and foreign, are taking advantage of federally funded research results as a means for downsizing their own laboratory costs. The universities, on the other hand, try to ally themselves with corporations so that they can get not only patent royalties but also direct funding from them. To take just one instance, the College of Natural Resources at the University of California, Berkeley, made an agreement with Novartis, the world’s the university and the ‘‘global economy’’

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largest genetic engineering transnational corporation, which is headquartered in Switzerland. In exchange for $25 million over five years, the university will grant Novartis exclusive license review rights for a portion of research results conducted by the college, as determined by the ratio of its contributions to the entire budget of the college. The direction of research and which projects to fund will be decided by a joint committee made up of members of the faculty and Novartis. Still in negotiation as of spring 1999 was whether Novartis would contribute $25 million more for the construction of a laboratory. The corporation is likely to make a huge profit, none of which will be returned to the federal government, taxpayers, or consumers. Yet the arrangement was enthusiastically welcomed by the university and the Berkeley campus. The reasons given for the support were benefits for the graduate students, access to the real world for the faculty, and contributions to the public. (In what sense is Novartis ‘‘public’’?) The British Technology Transfer report lists the benefits of the research alliance for the university as follows: (1) ‘‘political support on sensitive issues such as the use of animals in research, toxic usage, new buildings’’; (2) ‘‘a bridge into high tech industry for . . . students’’; (3) ‘‘an added attraction to sponsors of research, who are keen to see that there is an effective outreach program which will bring research findings into beneficial use’’; and (4) ‘‘good relationships with successful new wealth (e.g., 12 endowed chairs).’’ 12 The British administrators are perhaps less fearful of being candid than are their U.S. counterparts. The profound effects of technology transfer, as I see them, are quite otherwise. First, it converts learning into intellectual property, and by privatizing public knowledge it obstructs the free flow of information, which constitutes the basis of academic freedom. Second, the commercialization of knowledge and learning also compromises the principles of conflict of interest and commitment. It would seem natural for the inventor/researchers to protect their material self-interest. Business opportunities abound outside their classrooms and labs, and academic independence is liable to be jeopardized by corporate interest. Examples of conflict of interest and commitment are both obvious and abundant. Those who aid start-ups to develop their inventions into commercial drugs and medicines write articles evaluating their efficacy. Those who publish a paper assessing the effects of gene alteration own genome patents that have been licensed for tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of dollars in fees. Furthermore, technology transfer encourages the entrepreneurial spirit among the faculty, which tends all too easily toward competitiveness, self-promotion, and opportunism. 60

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These are serious dangers, and they are now fully manifest at many research universities. Even more threatening, however, is what is happening in the areas outside directly affected applied science. Administrators preoccupied with the alliance between the university and global capital are nearly indifferent to the disciplines in the humanities and social sciences. Now that capitalism has reached beyond the stage of nation-statism, its dependence on the nation-based academic disciplines is perceived, as has already been mentioned, to be less strategic by the university administrators as well as students, academic managers, and consumers. Those who are in the humanities, on the other hand, are preoccupied with cultural studies, identity politics, and postcolonial studies, as if oblivious to the real crisis of the humanities in the university, their erasure. They determinedly avoid facing the crucial issues of the ongoing exploitation of the poor and the powerless of the world. The question to be asked now is, Can civilization afford to discard the practice of self-criticism, if that is what the humanities are largely to be concerned with? The global economy exerts similar pressures on Japanese higher education. The ways the Japanese universities have been responding to the corporate economy, however, are considerably different because of the different roles played by the university in Japan both historically and socially. For instance, it is undeniable that the social role of the humanities in the Western university, as in Japan, has nearly always been legitimation and participation in, and not criticism of and opposition to, power. Still, in the West there has been a practice of liberal arts that is presumably based on secular free inquiry. In a country such as Japan, where state control of knowledge and information was nearly complete until a half-century ago, the idea of liberal education has remained precarious to this day. In the prewar days, individuals persecuted as subversives were only briefly and sporadically able to resist the state authorities, as were the progressives in the early postwar years and the 1960s. The critical will and intelligence that were revealed at these intermittent moments have markedly waned since around 1970, when Japan’s booming economy guaranteed a comfortable life more or less for everyone, including academics. In literature, arts, and intellectual discourse, politics has now been carefully avoided in defense of the status quo, and hard subjects have been eagerly replaced with ‘‘soft’’ consumer topics. Intellectual rigor is visibly being compromised. Extreme colloquialism, nonparagraphic and nonsyntactic structure, and neologism, especially foreign words, have affected even the university and the ‘‘global economy’’

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academic writing style. References have been reduced to a casual minimum, removing the possibility of constructing a discursive system. Instead of substantive and coherent writing, conversations conducted by a group of ‘‘writers’’ are transcribed, edited, and printed, and this form, called zadankai, has been the dominant mode of discourse in Japan for several decades.13 Although political discourse has not entirely vanished, it is usually conducted in abstruse abstractions. Thus there is seldom a serious argument, and only rarely do we find well-documented and closely reasoned assertions or refutations. The development of bibliography and book review, too, is minimal. Most journals of opinion have vanished, and those remaining are packed with disjointed gossip and random judgments. Of course, the general disarray of intellectual discourse is perhaps worldwide as a function of intensified consumerism and neoliberalism. Yet in most societies, even in the United States, educated and mature exchanges do survive. In today’s Japan even this much vitality is not easy to detect. How, then, is the university being appropriated into the corporate structure? Talks about university reform began the minute the U.S. Occupation authorities radically changed the institutions of higher education. In conformity with the U.S. system of institutional articulation, the elitist gymnasium (kyūsei kōto gakkō) was abolished,14 and many new colleges and universities were created in the name of democratic education. The change was both inconsequential and profound. If General Douglas MacArthur’s policy planners dreamed about truly democratic education even their own country did not possess, such a fantasy was of course disabused at once. Deeprooted nation-statism and hierarchism were preserved with emperorism, as we will see below. The proliferation of new colleges and universities, on the other hand, provided a great many people with easy access to higher learning. The result, eventually, was a disastrously lowered academic standard among both students and faculty, accompanied by a huge expansion of the college-educated population. The former contributed to the elimination of criticism as has already been mentioned, while the latter encouraged consumerism and leisure activities. Undeniably, inflated higher learning led to the deterrence of prewar exclusivism, but such popularization was not invigorated with information and judgment. The dissatisfaction with the postwar educational format has been quite pervasive ever since its inauguration, although there has been little argument as to the specifics. After the decade-long protests against the U.S.-Japan Mutual Security Pact that died down around 1970, there was a surface calm. Underneath, however, a tension persisted between the Ministry of Education, which would restore the 62

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prewar paradigm of power and control if it could, and the leftist teachers’ unions, which would hold on to their socialist/communist ideologies of the immediate postwar years. The tension gradually yielded to a stalemate and then stagnancy, where little was said and argued. We may recall that in the United States, too, enrollment in higher education dramatically expanded after World War II. The total number of B.A.’s, M.A.’s, and Ph.D.’s conferred in 1950 more than doubled the corresponding figures in 1942.15 In the United States, however, higher education did not suffer from immediate deterioration in quality as a result of this sudden expansion. The reasons for this avoidance of vitiation are not easy to identify precisely. The infusion of European refugees and ideas during World War II is certainly one factor. The emergence of the United States as the hegemon may have provided resources for sophisticated scholarship and experimentation. The entry of working-class students into the academic scene as a consequence of the GI Bill was no doubt another factor in reshaping the bythen petrified elitist tradition in higher education. The Jews, the Irish, and other white male ethnic minorities, followed by their female counterparts, invigorated the university, although the admission of African Americans and other darker-skinned minorities was delayed by a few more decades. The effects of the Cold War, on the other hand, visibly affected the general direction of academic discourse toward conservatism, nation-statism, and capitalism, as we have already seen. During the 1980s Japan nearly dreamed about unseating the United States as the world’s economic hegemon. Prime Minister Nakasone Yasuhiro, imagining himself to be the Ronald Reagan of Japan, tried to adopt a general policy of privatization. In 1984 he established the Special Council on Education (Rinji Kyōiku Shingikai) to look into the possible courses of reform and to report directly to his office. Business leaders played an important role in the formation of the council, and its recommendation was for liberalization and diversification ( jiyū-ka and kosei-ka) of universities. The liberalization of education did not mean an emphasis on academic freedom and experimentation, but on the contrary, it was an ideology of choice— the choice to educate only a few or the choice not to educate—the principle of neoliberalism. It fought against educational equality. In this sense, ‘‘the neo-liberalism at the bottom of the ideology of choice does not at all contradict the principle of state control.’’ 16 In the 1990s the Nakasone reform principle came to serve as a guideline, as the global economy forced Japan—moribund increasingly in so many civilizational aspects—to face its long-unremedied structural failures. the university and the ‘‘global economy’’

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Here we need to examine briefly the stagnancy of the Japanese university, which is ultimately traceable to the issue of academic freedom in Japan. First, in reaction to the wartime state control of higher education, academic freedom and university autonomy were legally guaranteed in the immediate postwar years. Thus the Ministry of Education was discouraged from interfering with universities and colleges, which presumably enjoyed unprecedented intellectual freedom and administrative autonomy.17 The Ministry of Education, however, is the sole state funding agency for the national universities and colleges, and it also provides assistance to municipal, prefectural, and even private institutions. The officials of the ministry make decisions on the merits and demerits of even the most minuscule proposals and applications made by academic institutions, and their ‘‘advice’’ (that is never specified by law or regulation) has final power and authority. Thus, while the universities and colleges are presumably free of governmental control and interference, they are in fact totally in thrall of the ministry. It must also be mentioned that the Ministry of Education has a powerful bureaucracy that shares its conservative ideology with the Liberal Democratic Party (ldp), which has ruled Japan during most of the postwar years. In recent years, however, impatience with this fossilized education bureaucracy has been rising within the ldp itself. And under pressure from industrial leaders, the Ministry of Finance and the Ministry of International Trade and Industry are making demands on the Ministry of Education, as Japan’s economic slump becomes increasingly serious. Thus authorities and policies are far from precisely articulated. Second, a semblance of academic freedom and university autonomy, on the other hand, is manifest in a manner hardly anticipated by the postwar reformers. Practical administration is largely left to the decision of every university and college without governmental interference. That means that every institution is managed by its academic senate or senates (that is, professorial assembly, kyōjukai, either campuswide or departmentwide). Some colleges and universities make decisions by a unified senate, but not others. When there is a disagreement, as there often is, among its many units and ranks, an institution as a whole cannot reach any decision at all, thus choosing the status quo as the only viable solution. With a few exceptions, such as Tsukuba University, which directly belongs to the Ministry of Education and where the president traditionally dictates, the head of an institution often has no power of arbitration or decision making, nor is there a board of trustees and regents empowered to adjudicate. A firmly established hierarchy of professors who jealously guard their prerogatives often controls 64

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the senate, and it is nearly impossible even for the Ministry of Education needless to say their president, to overrule them. University autonomy thus means the faculty’s fierce will to be left alone, rejecting any criticism, suggestion, and guideline from outside as illegitimate interference. The evaluation of teaching by the students constitutes in the eyes of some faculty a violation of academic freedom. Even the distribution of a syllabus among the students constitutes an infringement of academic freedom for some faculty.18 Academic freedom and autonomy in Japan, then, signify in fact unlimited territorial independence and isolation having little to do with the principle of free inquiry and learning. There is no doubt that Japan’s reform plan today is part of a project to integrate the university into the economic scheme of corporate Japan, as we shall see later. On the other hand, the university faculty’s determined isolation not only from the conservative national bureaucracy and business but also from the public, their own students, and finally even from intellectual life itself should not be overlooked in our consideration of academic corporatization. The relationship of the Japanese academics to the intellectuals of the world is thus often merely social and diplomatic and is seldom maintained through a vigorous critical and learned exchange. A fundamental reform is indisputably in order. Before proceeding to a discussion of the current university reform issues in Japan, I must mention the extraordinary reluctance to clarify, define, and articulate any policy matters on the part not only of the Ministry of Education and other political and bureaucratic organizations but also of the academic administration and faculty. This acceptance of indeterminable expression is so pervasive and matter-of-fact in today’s Japan that the only way for an outsider to understand it is to view it as a deliberate political strategy to turn all issues into ad hoc negotiations among the insiders. Incomprehensible terms are chosen, and decisions are made on the basis of undecipherable ambiguities. The negotiating parties obviously know that they are not communicating with one another, but they proceed regardless. Scholars who write on these matters recognize that the crucial terms are left undefined, and yet they have learned to float in the quandary.19 Perhaps they have no other choice; even if they should request clarification from the Ministry of Education, they would be not likely to get it. Besides, even the officials in the Prime Minister’s Office or within the ldp probably have no answer. No one seems willing or able to make a commitment. And in this consensual uncertainty, consensus seems to be forming. For this article I have culled through books, articles, and newspapers as well as the official 1998 report to the Ministry of Education by the Council on the Univerthe university and the ‘‘global economy’’

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sity, On a Vision of the Twenty-First Century University and the Future Reform Policy: The University That Is Radiant with Diversity in the Competitive Environment [21-Seiki no Daigakuzō to Kongo no Kaikaku Hōsaku ni tsuite: Kyōsō-teki Kankyō no nakade Kosei ga Kagayaku Daigaku], which many regard as one of the crucial educational documents in twentieth-century Japan.20 I must confess, however, that there are many undeterminable core issues that can only be surmised rather than clearly interpreted and assessed.21 The Nakasone principle is by now thoroughly incorporated into the higher education policy of the long-dominant ldp. (Perhaps the best proof of this supposition is to be found in the October 1999 appointment of Nobuhiro Nakasone, the son of the former prime minister, as minister of education. Nobuhiro had had no prior experience in education whatsoever, though such an appointment has not been a rare incident in postwar Japan.) How is this neoliberal principle being formulated into specific plans? The 1998 report is so full of abstractions and generalizations as well as subterfuges that a précis is both difficult and irksome to devise. With the assistance of a number of articles and books on the subject, however, extractions can be attempted, and some comments can be made. While it emphasizes diversity, flexibility, and specialization among universities, the overall objective is the adaptation of the university to the economic needs of Japanese industry in the global economy. Reform planners must first identify the industry’s long-term requirements and then implement them by first consolidating the ldp bureaucrats who are not necessarily in agreement, by mobilizing the hesitant university administrators, and by persuading—and if necessary by coercing—the faculty who feel threatened with the likelihood of downsizing or the loss of jobs, security, authority, and finally, ‘‘freedom.’’ The main proposals being considered by the governmental agencies are the elimination of general education; the diversification of institutional types; the expansion of graduate school; the establishment of a review system for accreditation, tenure, and appointment; the expansion of continuing education; and finally, the formation of a business-academia-government alliance on behalf of technology transfer. The Japanese project of making higher education productive and efficient begins with the reduction of general education. In the postwar college and university system, the idea of general education (kyōyō gakka)—or liberal education—was imposed on all students as a required curriculum for the lower division. This was a mixture of Japan’s own elitist model of the gymnasium concept and American-style liberal education. With the hugely expanded college population, now standing at some 40 percent of the age 66

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group, the humanities courses were largely a failure. There was no competent faculty, nor was there a serious interest among students. Besides, there was a rising need for expanded professional, or even occupational, training for the increasingly competitive world economy. Thus the first step in rationalization took the form of the abandonment of general education, which was not only not immediately useful but also could lead to the inculcation of criticism and subversion. The elimination of liberal arts education was carried out in the 1990s in most national universities, except for a few, such as the University of Tokyo, where it has remained as a four-year program for universal education.22 The humanities, which are being questioned and deemphasized also in U.S. universities now, have been abandoned once and for all in Japan, and the faculty in the division have been absorbed by professional departments and schools. The exception of the University of Tokyo is an example of institutional ‘‘diversification,’’ which the reform plan promoted. There is no longer a uniform idea of the university guaranteeing equal education for all. Educational institutions are now hierarchically classified into community college, four-year college, research university, key research university, graduate school, and so forth. State funds and resources are allocated accordingly, with a focus on leading research universities. Thus the plan would dispense with the costly obligations for all citizens—somewhat like Margaret Thatcher’s educational reform in the United Kingdom. The policy of diversity thus aims at reducing general costs while raising efficiency and productivity. The principle of the elder Nakasone tries to recuperate economic elitism. Likewise, expansion of graduate schools is on the agenda. Industry requires highly trained engineers and scientists who are not being produced in sufficient numbers at present. While the number of graduate students rapidly increased in the 1990s (a tenfold increase since 1960), the graduate program in Japan is still markedly underdeveloped compared with that in the United States and European countries. The number of graduate students per 1,000 people in the United States, the United Kingdom, France, and Japan was, respectively, 7.74, 4.86, 3.54, and 1.31 in 1996.23 The need for expanding both graduate school facilities and faculty is obviously acute as the demand for professional training rises in these days of the knowledge industry, and plans are being made for rapid implementation. In view of the tight budget situation ridden with a huge deficit every year, however, the realization of such plans is far from assured. The diversity in the categories of university and college from community college to graduate school requires a system of evaluation and accreditation. the university and the ‘‘global economy’’

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As I have already mentioned, most faculty members are quite reluctant to accept a reviewing practice of any kind, either institutional or personal, that might lead to their humiliation and reassignment, in addition to greater pressure and tension. The classification of institutions in accordance with their qualities and performances as well as reputation looks downright undemocratic and hierarchic to them. Aside from the difficulties of evaluation, there are significant legal problems regarding any change in the terms of employment. First, the faculties of the national universities are civil servants generally assumed to be the state’s lifetime employees. Thus a university faculty member can be neither hired for a limited term nor fired after a limited term. In other words, unless a new civil service code is established, termination of employment is impossible for a professor. And the civil service code is—because of the power of teachers’ unions and institutional inertia—nearly impossible to change. Thus although a real tenure review is widely perceived as critical, there is as of now no legal ground and likelihood for instituting it. In the spring of 1997 the Diet did pass a very limited alteration enabling a term contract for a few categories of academic employees (kyōiku ninki hō, or the Law Regarding Educational Appointment).What these categories are, however, is unclear, very much like most Ministry of Education rules and regulations. Despite the wording of the bill that was passed in the Diet, for example, the ministry explains that if a university wants to appoint a professor for a definite duration, such an arrangement can be made in any category. As usual, however, no one knows for sure what this situation means, and time alone will decide how the law is to be implemented.24 On the whole, supporters of the tenure system argue that the system of review and evaluation—‘‘as in the United States’’—will vitalize research and education and that academic freedom is already secure in postwar Japan. They assume that competition improves productivity as in the market economy.25 Those who oppose the review system maintain that time limitation discourages serious long-term projects and that the private university is likely to abuse it to control the faculty politically. They further fear that the faculty will be distracted by the quantity of publication at the expense of serious teaching and research. Neither side addresses the lethargy and deterioration of critical will and intellectual vigor in today’s Japan. Supporters are solely concerned with industrial utility, while the oppositionists care only for the security of their employment. The atmosphere is gradually changing, however, and the faculty, slowly surrendering to the rhetoric of market in society at large, seems much less confident now in fighting for their status quo. The 68

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advisory committee to the president of the University of Tokyo, for instance, intimated in the summer of 1999 the eventuality of accepting the reform proposal. As a result of a radical decline in the birthrate, the Japanese population is rapidly aging, and the productive age group is losing in proportion. This demographic development satisfies in some measure the industrial need for downsizing,26 but it also works against the demand for a highly skilled workforce. The shortage of trained workers will have to be somehow remedied by locating a new source of labor. Adult education and advanced refreshment courses are the answer. Continuing education, however, needs the relaxation of the long-established idea that education is for the young only. Such a reorganization of life cycle, moreover, further requires a change in social structure as well as the general attitude toward work and study. People must be made to understand that lifelong education is a psychologically and professionally disturbing pursuit. In order for Japan to achieve acceptance of professional retraining, even family life will have to be reorganized. Are people ready to make adjustments to their personal life? A husband for his wife’s return to college? To the workplace? There are other difficulties, such as faculty resources, tuition burden, and campus facilities. The government of Japan, already suffering from a heavy deficit every year, cannot be expected to finance all these extra demands. Higher education is an expensive venture, and despite the reputation of Japan as a Confucian nation that reveres learning, Japan’s spending on colleges and universities, as compared with other industrial nations, is extremely low. The ratio of the expenditures on higher education to gross domestic product is as follows: Canada, 1.6 percent; Sweden, 1.5; Denmark, 1.4; Australia and Holland, 1.2; United States and Switzerland, 1.1; France, Germany, and Austria, 0.9; Spain, 0.8; United Kingdom and Italy, 0.7; and below all of these nations, Japan stands at 0.5 percent.27 For an economic superpower, Japan is amazingly indifferent to the physical conditions of its universities. Their campus facilities—labs, classrooms, libraries, and offices —are all in dire disrepair as well as overcrowded. Yet the ldp’s answer is not an increase in the educational budget but privatization and downsizing, which are now called ‘‘the plasticity and flexibility of the educational and research system: the autonomy of the university.’’ The 1984 report of the Special Council on Education to Prime Minister Nakasone was highly critical of the uniformity of the college and university that resulted from the tension and stalemate between the Ministry of Education and the teachers’ unions. It recommended the liberalization, diversification, and conversion of the the university and the ‘‘global economy’’

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national university into tokushu hōjin (special corporations).28 This idea has been redefined and renamed in the current university reform debate as an ‘‘independent administrative corporation’’ (sometimes translated as ‘‘independent administrative agency’’), or dokuritsu gyōsei hōjin (dgh, hereafter). The meaning of the phrase, once again, is not clear. But its model is said to include both the British administrative concepts of agency and the U.S. public university.29 Since the former reference is not specific enough, let me focus on the latter model in trying to understand what the term is intended to mean in the Japanese context. While a national university as it exists now in Japan is owned, administered, and managed as a part of civil service, the state university in the United States belongs to the state but is administered and managed by a private independent corporation. It is placed under the oversight of the board of regents or trustees that confers autonomy in micromanagement to the university administration. The regents and trustees are usually appointed from the business circle of the state. The administration, headed by the president, is then responsible for the faculty, students, and staff. The faculty is represented by the academic senate that claims the right to cogovernance with the administration of the university in matters of education, research, and public service. The state university is legally financed by the state but accepts tuition and/or fees from the students, which amount to a considerable portion of the operating costs. It also receives grants and contracts from multiple funding sources, such as the federal government, foundations, and private corporations. In the case of some universities, such as the University of California system (whose annual budget amounted to $13 billion in 2000), these outside funds exceed the state input severalfold. Of course, the details vary widely. Some universities are well established and powerful on the U.S. higher education scene, while others languish as mediocre institutions devoted largely to vocational training. The ranking is conducted not by the state or federal authorities but by private educational agencies. The precise role of the president vis-à-vis the faculty, on one hand, and the board, on the other, for example, is not easy to define. The same is true of the governor of the state, who can be sympathetic or hostile to the university. The academic freedom and university autonomy of the faculty senate also vary in their range, from nearly complete at some universities to under constant pressure from legislators or the governor at others. The state university is, however, far more autonomous than the Japanese national university, by and large. There are far fewer laws and regulations that bind the faculty as public employees as would be the case at the Japa70

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nese national universities. The autonomy of a private university, such as the Harvard Corporation, is nearly complete in this respect (although, of course, inextricably incorporated into the capitalist system, generally), but even that of a state university is quite pliant and adjustable to the changing conditions of the global political economy. And that flexibility is supposedly what the dgh is being designed to achieve. The ldp’s objective of converting the national university into a dgh is hardly the enhancement of free inquiry or critical intelligence, but the incorporation of university technology into Japan’s industrial network, thereby saving the capital outlay for the government and broadening the profit base for corporations. Japan’s phenomenal success in manufacturing up to the 1980s has not been matched by its performance in the 1990s ‘‘global’’ development in information and gene technology. On the other hand, the university that has been costing the taxpayers an increasingly heavy burden is not producing intellectually or technologically. What is needed, as industry and government leaders—and, increasingly, university administrators—see it, is a closer alliance of industry, university, and government, or a san, gaku, kan partnership. The ldp dream seems to run like this: Industry will provide the dgh, once it becomes a reality, with lists of its urgent needs as well as its practical know-how, while the dgh presumably will give industry its knowledge and technology. With fewer restrictive laws and regulations governing it, the dgh will facilitate the cooperation by freer exchange of personnel, resources, and programs. Engineers from business and academia can work together at joint r&d centers; industry can rely on the university for a greater share of employee training, while the newly expanded class of graduate students will be assured of employment. By utilizing the discoveries and inventions generated at the university, industry can save lab expenses for costly r&d. The greater pliancy of the dgh, as it is being planned, will enable quick ‘‘rational’’ responses to the everchanging market demands and profit strategy. Now diversified dghs can interact and make maximum contributions to the economy, which particularly needs a jump-start in this decade-long stagnation. More importantly, by the conversion of the national university to the dgh, the state can eventually turn many national universities into full-fledged private institutions independent of national subsidies, in time. Even at an early stage, the Japanese government calculates that it will be able to save one third of its annual allocations.30 In short, it is a call for a Japanese version of corporatization of the university, especially technology transfer. The talk on technology transfer began to circulate in Japan in the 1980s the university and the ‘‘global economy’’

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after the Bayh-Dole Act passed in the United States Congress. There had been a prewar case of the Riken Research Institute.31 After World War II there was a development at the Tsukuba Research Center that was established by the Ministry of Education by forcibly transplanting the Tokyo University of Education in Tsukuba some forty miles from Tokyo. Intellectuals on the left fiercely fought against the move, but in time Tsukuba became the ldp’s proud model city for an industry-university-government research park. Still, its success in science consortiums was not sufficient to expand the tripartite alliance. In this aspect, Japanese scholars were, and still are, Confucian in their traditional posture of contempt for entrepreneurial ‘‘greed.’’ 32 Of course, if academics are skeptical about industrial scientists, industry, too, mistrusts Japan’s academic scientists as impractical, outdated, and useless. In fact, industry openly admits that it prefers importing technology from U.S. universities to turning to Japanese academics.33 Only in the 1990s—by then Japan’s economic boom had long vanished—did the profit-driven partnership become a respectable topic among Japanese academics. In a series of symposia on industry, the university, and government cooperation, business leaders, university administrators, and government bureaucrats regularly met between 1984 and 1992 specifically to talk about technology transfer.34 The participants’ sense of urgency for an increased flow of knowledge was palpable, yet they largely thought of it as a new management style, still groping for a full significance of the undertaking. In October 1994 a large-scale conference of U.S.-Japan university presidents on the future of science and the university was held. The seriousness of the Japanese chief administrators was demonstrated by the list of participants: the presidents of the very best national universities such as Tokyo, Kyoto, Tsukuba, Osaka, and Tōhoku were there, as were officials of the Ministry of Education and industrial leaders. In contrast, the U.S. side was represented by the presidents of the University of Hawaii, Michigan State University, Michigan Technological University, Western Michigan, Erlham College, and California State University at Pomona, all reputable institutions but certainly no equivalents in prestige compared with the Japanese side. If the participants already suggest an imbalance in the expectations of the two sides, the transcripts of the speeches confirm it. Of the three topics of the conference, environmental technology and the exchange student program do not reveal a yawning gap between the two factions. However, in the first session of the conference, which discussed technology transfer (which seems to be the real focus of the gathering), there was hardly any commu72

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nication. The Japanese participants without exception spoke in generalizations, indicating the lack of familiarity with the subject as a step in the process of corporatizing the university. The Japanese side assumed that science still essentially means basic science, while the U.S. contingent took it for granted that they were there to talk about applied science, not ‘‘curiositydriven science.’’ The American representatives were actively converting university research projects into a profitable business, presumably benefiting corporations and inventors (i.e., professors) alike.35 Thus they discussed venture capital, incubators, competition, start-ups, and intellectual property as crucial foci in the ongoing economic-academic development, while the Japanese participants admitted they were unversed. What is most striking about the Japanese participants is that they usually did not see any change in the future. For example, they pointed out that academic employment in Japan is on a twelve-month basis, which prohibits a national university professor from working as a consultant for a private corporation. That arrangement appeared settled, although the restriction is merely a matter of governmental classification, which could be altered if the public so desired. Half a decade later, one of the participants in the 1994 conference, the then-president of the University of Tokyo, was the minister of education. Several other participants are now in the forefront for the corporatization of the Japanese university via gradual privatization. There is a definite change in the climate now, although the process is far from complete, as we have seen. Several features in the Japanese development of privatization and technology transfer need to be mentioned. First, one element that has no counterpart in the United States is the dominant leadership role assumed by the Ministry of Education and other government agencies. They initiate, drive, and macro- and micromanage the movement toward privatization in its direction, pace, and scale, and the university is pronouncedly passive in its deliberation on its future. One needs to remember that in the United States, too, the main source of funding for university r&d remains the federal government. As can be seen from the passage of the Bayh-Dole Act, the government is not at all absent in the process of university corporatization. Yet the U.S. university is far more aggressive and entrepreneurial in its decision and implementation. In Japan, on the other hand, although the monopoly of higher education by the Ministry of Education seems waning before the increasing influence of the Ministries of Finance, International Trade and Industry, and Foreign Affairs, among others, industry still seems to work its will through the mediation of the ldp and the Ministry of Education. And the university simply trudges along. the university and the ‘‘global economy’’

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In a symposium called ‘‘Academia-Government-Industry Partnerships Towards the 21st Century: Science and Industry in the Network Society,’’ held in November 1996, the participants from both the United States and Japan talked about the same subjects. But the tone was distinctly different. Here technology transfer was a given. The participants were confident about the future of the business-government-academia alliance. There was no selfconscious hesitation, needless to say criticism, only the conviction that the triad will carry the twenty-first century into their corporatized utopia.36 Second, the reluctance of the Japanese faculty to capitalize their research is striking in contrast to the venturesomeness of the U.S. professors in technology. The Japanese are as of now indifferent to the ownership of their inventions that result from university research. Patent applications are prominently few.37 It may well be due to the lack of experience in entrepreneurship, as is certainly the case with the general failure to open start-ups and spin-offs. It is also undeniable, however, that a sense of the public still survives among university researchers in Japan, who assume that their university inventions are naturally public property, as U.S. scholars once did. When Jonas Salk developed a polio vaccine in the 1950s, it never occurred to him to patent his discovery. His question then—‘‘Could you patent the sun?’’ 38—is becoming incomprehensible to today’s business-minded American scientists. Can venture capitalism be kept out of the Japanese university? Third, the reluctance to commercialize their university research is inextricably tied, in this case, to their general intellectual lethargy, their inactivist doctrine, which isolates today’s Japanese university faculty from many segments of the intellectual, cultural, and industrial world. Their refusal to participate in the program of university conversion into the dgh, or an agency for the global economical paradigm, is unquestionably attractive in itself. At the same time, their program of inaction may well be due less to a reasoned-through objection to global capitalism than to the defense of their inexcusable status quo, a sanctified space of self-indulgence. In the analysis of this situation, one needs to distinguish sharply between the businessgovernmental agenda of appropriating higher education, on one hand, and the academic professionals’ self-interest in the status quo, on the other, an astounding program of inactivism, doing nothing. Fourth, the Japanese faculty’s jealous protection of their tenure system that means virtually review-free and lifetime employment will not last much longer regardless of the outcome of the dgh proposal. They insist that the introduction of an outside review system will inevitably destroy the 74

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possibilities of serious research projects that may well take several years to yield results, but such an argument is finally unconvincing. They will have to first demonstrate how productive research projects are in fact being conducted now thanks to the freedom from time restrictions. Such evidence is sadly absent at the moment. Finally, the Japanese academics’ assumption that they have an important role to play in the national economy and culture is astonishingly naive and uninformed. In this globalized economy, capital does not require Japanese academics for basic research and r&d. Japanese corporations can always invest in the U.S., European, and other university labs that hanker for overseas investments. If the Japanese university blindly resists, corporations can always go abroad and purchase service at a lower cost at mit, Cambridge, Johns Hopkins, or the University of California at Irvine. Research is being conducted with funds provided by the U.S. taxpayers, and corporations—Japanese, American, Swiss, or whatever—can take full advantage of these research results by acquiring them with very little outlay. They are free to move globally. Japanese academics—as, for example, represented by Hasumi Sanehiko, president of the University of Tokyo and of the Japan Association of National Universities in the summer of 1999 39—do not seem to be fully aware of their very much weakened position. Nor does a conversation between Hasumi and Arima Akito, his predecessor as president of his university and the minister of education until September 1999, betray signs of understanding.40 They seem to believe that the dgh was a mere policy matter rather than a symptom of the radical transformation of the global economy, of which Japan and its universities were no more than parts. If they are at all serious about preserving their university, they need to devise a fundamental alternative strategy to survive economically and maintain their critical position. In the 1994 conference on the future of science and universities, Arima remarked that the U.S. universities have problems similar to those of the Japanese. But, he continued, ‘‘my conclusion is that after all, the American universities are twenty years ahead of us Japanese.’’ 41 Does this mean the Japanese are still playing the game of time and progress: ‘‘They were there a long time ago, we must catch up’’? If this is what is in the minds of Japanese leaders, it augers ill indeed. This lack of comprehension is highlighted in the example of Japan, but it is evident among U.S. critics of the corporate university as well. The corporatization of the university is destructive anywhere, as I have argued throughout this article. It degrades learning into intellectual property, obthe university and the ‘‘global economy’’

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structing the free flow of information and knowledge. This transformation of judgment and criticism into ownership will not be contained within a narrow space of applied science. Social science and the humanities are certainly vulnerable, although as nonindustrial subjects they are by nature unprofitable. Those in the fields of ‘‘curiosity-driven science,’’ as U.S. university administrators contemptuously call it, are beginning to feel that they, too, should have a share in the circulation of intellectual property. Massmarketing of humanities lectures via telecommunication in a virtual university, for instance, is an increasingly prominent possibility. If this conversion of learning into intellectual property is the direction the U.S. academy is now taking, does it also have to be the destination of the Japanese university? Should the Japanese scholars not recognize and reaffirm whatever they still seem to retain? The fast lane to catch up with U.S. scholars is not what they need. By facing up to their social isolation and intellectual lethargy, they can recover something they have not quite lost yet. The Japanese scholars’ refusal to marketize their knowledge and information, if that is what keeps them from the dgh project, is admirable in itself. Fully articulated as a program of social service, that could serve as a model for emulation by scholars in the rest of the world. To document, criticize, and intervene as well as provide inventions and discoveries for social utility, such a program of public service both as critics and servants is immensely valuable in this globalized world. Is it possible to merge the anti-dgh movement into a program to rebuild the public idea of the university? Notes 1 Masao Miyoshi, ‘‘Ivory Tower in Escrow,’’ boundary 2 27.1 (2000): 7–50. Its Ger-

2 3

4

5

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man translation was published in Lettre International (Berlin) in the spring of 2000. Its Chinese and Italian translations are also being planned. The Morrill Act of 1862 stipulates that the land-grant colleges and universities teach such socially useful subjects. See Bill Readings, The University in Ruins (Cambridge, MA, 1996), for a full exposition about the notion of excellence in academia. The contentless excellence is identical to the idea of success, and the word is unselfconsciously brandished, for instance, in advertisements for Hofstra University: ‘‘We Teach Success,’’ as printed regularly in the New York Times since about 1997. Their does not mean Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan personally. Obviously they were acting under the guidance, instructions, or orders of their industrial and financial leaders. MLA, Final Report: mla Committee on Professional Employment (New York, 1997), 8.

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6 Lawrence Solely, ‘‘Higher Education . . . or Higher Profits? For-Profit Universi-

ties Sell Free Enterprise Education,’’ In These Times, September 20, 1998, 14–17. 7 Simon Targett, ‘‘Universities Aim at Media Giants,’’ Financial Times, May 27,

1999. 8 See the special report on executive pay, ‘‘The Good, the Bad, the Ugly of ceo

9 10 11 12 13

14

15 16 17

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Salaries Scoreboard: Executive Compensation,’’ Business Week, April 20, 1998, 64–110, with contributions by Jennifer Reingold, Richard A. Melcher, Gary McWilliams, and other bureau reports. The figures for 1974 and 1994 are from the Web site of the House Democratic Committee, available at www.house.gov/demo crats/research/6ceopay.html. ‘‘No. 988, r&d Expenditures: 1960 to 1997,’’ in Bureau of the Census, Statistical Abstract of the United States, 1998, 116th ed. (Washington, DC, 1998), 609. ‘‘No. 990, Performance Sector of r&d Expenditures: 1992 to 1997,’’ Bureau of the Census, Statistical Abstract, 610. Committee of Vice-Chancellors and Principals of the Universities of the United Kingdom, Technology Transfer: The U.S. Experience (London, 1999), 8, 30. Ibid., 31. See chap. 9, ‘‘Conversation and Conference: Forms of Discourse,’’ in my Off Center: Power and Culture Relations between Japan and the United States (Cambridge, MA, 1991), 217–31. Uzawa Hirofumi, an internationally respected economist, is nearly nostalgic about his days in the First Higher School, the most coveted institution of the prewar Japan, in his Nihon no Kyōiku o Kangaeru [Concerning Japanese education] (Tokyo, 1998). Bureau of the Census, Historical Statistics of the United States, Colonial Times to 1970 (White Plains, NY, 1989), 1:385. Ōuchi Hirokazu, ‘‘‘Takuetsu-sei’ no shihai’’ [Control by excellence] Gendai Shisō: Daigaku Kaikaku [Contemporary ideas: University reform] 27.7 (1999): 146. Katō Hirokazu, ‘‘Monbushō to Kobetsu Daigaku to no Kankei’’ [The relationship of the ministry of education to individual universities], in Daigaku, Kyōyōbu no Kaitai-teki Shūen [The disintegration of general education in the university] (Fukuoka, 1997), 127. Thus the 1998 Report of the Council on the University lists the word syllabus as the first of eight terms that need explication. Others include the semester system, teaching assistant, Faculty development, research assistant, refresh education, and GPA system, presumably unfamiliar terms requiring glosses for the university instructors. Yamagishi Shunsuke, a journalist who specializes in educational matters, writes how secretive the Ministry of Education is. He also points out that the ministry’s explanations are both incomprehensible and unforthcoming. See ‘‘Monbushōyo! Jōhō o Kōkai-seyo: Kokuritsu Daigaku wa Burakku Bokkusu’’ [Ministry of Education! Release public information: The national university is a black box], special issue, ‘‘Kokuritsu Daigaku Biggu Ban’’ [Big bang, national university], Ronza (April 1997): 28–33. Obscurantism is not a bureaucratic monopoly. The white paper on the University of Tokyo, Tokyo Daigaku: Genjō to Kadai 2 (Tokyo,

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1997), supposedly describes every departmental and disciplinary program at the university. One chapter on the School of Literature (Bungakubu) has a seven-page summary of the school’s program. This section, written by Takahashi Kazuhisa, an assistant to the president, has eleven finely printed long paragraphs and they contain exactly thirteen sentences altogether. None of the paragraphs is decodable, even if a reader spends hours. The writer cannot have written the section for a single possible reader. This text, like so many in today’s Japan, is published to prohibit reading and communication. 20 The council members were appointed by the Ministry of Education, and they consist of twenty regular members, many of whom are university administrators and faculty, with a half-dozen chosen from business and industry. There are other subcommittee members also appointed by the ministry. The council was first formed by Prime Minister Nakasone in 1987, and it had made eighteen reports before the 226-page 1998 report, published on October 26, 1998 (hereafter cited as The 1998 Report of the Council on the University). 21 In the special issue of Gendai Shisō mentioned in note 16, Abe Kinya, president of Hitotsubashi University, remarks that the Japanese national university is being converted into an institutional form called dokuritsu gyōsei hōjin (roughly, independent administrative corporation). He then observes that in a committee he organized for the Association of the National Universities to discuss the term, no one, including himself, economists, and education scholars, knew what the term meant. He explains that the Japanese term is a translation of the English word agency, as it was used by Prime Minister Thatcher’s cabinet. He reports that the government official in charge was invited but declined to attend because the plan had not been decided on. Apparently in ‘‘three to five years’’ a next stage in the conversion process will be reached, but no one knows whether that means the conversion itself will take place in that time frame, or merely the decision on whether or not to go ahead with conversion. In another article in the same issue, Iwasaki Minoru, a sociologist at the Tokyo Foreign Language University, describes the same situation. The Ministry of Education and the Prime Minister’s Office have already made the agreement about the conversion timetable without knowing for sure what the concept of dokuritsu gyōsei hōjin means. The habit of using a term without knowing what it means is not limited to the bureaucrats. Motohashi Tetsuya, a noted translator of Anglo-American critical theorists, writes a whole article in the same university reform issue on the meaning of the word agency without once considering it in the context of administrative organization. Instead, he rambles on in this obviously recycled article about subjectivity, subalternity, Judith Butler, Homi Bhabha, Gayatri Spivak, gender studies, etc., etc. The fact that the editors did not reject this irresponsible article says a great deal about the malaise of today’s Japanese intellectual life. 22 There are many books on the process of the elimination of kyōyō gakka. One of the best is Amano Ikuo, Daigaku: Chōsen no Jidai [The university: The age of challenge] (Tokyo, 1999), esp. chap. 13. See also Katō Hirokazu, Daigaku, Kyōyōbu no Kaitai-teki Shūen.

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23 The 1998 Report of the Council on the University, 158, 164. 24 For the arguments pro and con limited-term appointment, see a special issue

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27 28 29

30

31 32

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devoted to the topic, Ronza [Forum] (November 1997). Of the three supportive writers, two are university administrators and one is an industrial engineer who is visiting the University of Tokyo. Of those against, two are faculty members and one is president of a private college. There is one neutral paper by a professor that describes the tenure system in the United States in glowing terms. See, for instance, Nakajima Mineo, ‘‘Daigaku nimo Shijō Genri to Min’i o’’ [Market principle and public opinion for the university], Ronza (November 1997): 12– 17. Nakajima is president of the Tokyo Foreign Language University. ‘‘By absorbing the unemployed and homeless,’’ as a cynic would call it. See ‘‘Rinkyōshin Ikō no ‘Daigaku Saihen’ Katei ga Sashi-shimesu mono’’ [What is meant by the process of ‘‘university reform’’ since the Special Council on Education], Gendai Shisō 27.7 (1999): 236–52. The 1998 Report of the Council on the University, 173. Yamagishi Shunsuke, ‘‘Monbushō-yo!’’ 28–29; Ōuchi Hirokazu, ‘‘‘Takuetsu-sei’ no shihai,’’ 134–53. Hosoi Katsuhiko refers to the corporate structure of the U.S. state university in chap. 1, ‘‘Daigaku Jiko Hyōka to Daigaku no Arikata’’ [The self-criticism of the university and the modes of the university], in Daigaku Hyōka to Daigaku Sōzō: Daigaku Jichi Ron no Saikōchiku ni Mukete [The evaluation and creation of the university: Toward the reconstruction of the idea of university autonomy], ed. Hosoi Katsuhiko et al. (Tokyo, 1999), 32. The current allocation for the national universities runs around ¥1,569,800,000,000, which can be reduced to around ¥1 trillion by the conversion. The national universities enroll about 30 percent of the students, while the private universities that enroll 70 percent of the students receive from the state only ¥300,000,000,000. See Yamagishi Shunsuke, ‘‘Monbushō-yo!’’ 30. See also Atōda Naosumi, ‘‘Min’ei-ka wa Gyōkaku no Shinboru da’’ [Privatization is the symbol of a policy change] Ronza (April 1997): 10–16, and The 1998 Report of the Council on the University, 175. See the conversation between Arima Akito and Hasumi Shigehiko, ‘‘Dokuritsu gyōsei hōjin-ka wa sakerarenai’’ [dgh is inevitable], Ronza (February 2000): 28. ‘‘America has something Japan sorely needs: Greedy professors’’ (Irene M. Kunii, ‘‘Memo to Japan: Set Your Academics Free,’’ Business Week, July 19, 1999). For a view from a different perspective, see Manuel Castells, End of Millennium, vol. 3 of The Information Age: Economy, Society, and Culture (Oxford, 1999), esp. 245. The special issue of the Tsūsan Jānaru [miti journal], May 1998, has several articles relevant to this mutual aloofness between industry and university. See also Nishizawa Jun’ichi, ‘‘Dokusō-teki Kenkyū no Ikusei’’ [Nurturing original research], in Zunō Rettō ‘‘Nihon’’ no Sosei: San Gaku Kan Kyōryoku no Shin Tenkai [The creation of knowledge archipelago Japan: The new development of the cooperation of the industry, university, and government], ed. Nishizawa Jun’ichi (Tokyo, 1993), 35–61.

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34 A group of scholars, industrial leaders, and government officials met over eight

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36

37 38 39 40 41

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years in Fukuoka, Kyūshū, to discuss the tripartite alliance. Papers from these meetings were collected and published as Zunō Rettō ‘‘Nihon’’ no Sosei. See, for example, Imura Hiro’o’s summary statement about the first session of the conference, Kagaku to Daigaku no Shōrai: Nichi-Bei Daigakuchō wa Kataru [The future of science and the university: Japanese and American university presidents speak], ed. Ezaki Naoto and Onoe Hisao (Kyoto, 1995), 212–17. Nara Sentan Kagaku Gijutsu Daigakuin Daigaku Kenkyūkai, 21-Seiki ni Muketeno San-Kan-Gaku Renkei Senryaku: Netto wāku Shakai ni okeru Kagaku to Sangyō (Tokyo, 1998). ‘‘Gakusha to Tokkyo: Nihon no Daigaku Shutsugan Fushi’’ [Scholars and patents: Few applications of the Japanese university], Yomiuri shinbun, July 5, 1998. Seth Shulman, Owning the Future (Boston, 1999), 54. Japan Times, September 13, 1999; editorial, Asahi Newspaper, Evening News, September 20, 1999. Arima Akito and Hasumi Shigehiko, ‘‘Dokuritsu gyōsei hōjin-ka wa sakerarenai,’’ 15–31. Ezaki Naoto and Onoe Hisao, Kagaku to Daigaku no Shōrai, 38.

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The University, Disciplines, National Identity: Why Is There No Film Studies in Japan?

Mitsuhiro Yoshimoto

T

he situation surrounding the university has been radically changing for some time. It is said that the university is in crisis, even in ruins. It is losing the clear sense of identity, mission, and reason for its existence. What the university does or stands for is not at all self-evident. In the United States this crisis is manifested in many forms at various sites of institutional conflict and struggle: the ‘‘cultural wars’’ between right and left, the debate on canons, cultural studies and its impact on established disciplines, increasing bureaucratization, and wholesale adoption of the principle of a market economy. In Japan drastic changes have been introduced in the university system since the early 1990s, and their true impact is yet to be fully experienced by faculty, students, and society. They are part of a general trend of liberalization, administrative reform, and relaxation of government regulations, which are in turn a response to globalization of economy and cultural interaction. The pressure to reform the university is further intensified by the economic recession of the 1990s and the decreasing number of children. The university is supposedly becoming more globally oriented and competitive; its new mission is to make students understand and open to other cultures and societies; students also must be trained to develop into active agents in ever-more-complex networks of information. Rhetorics of globalism, information society, and cross-cultural understanding abound, yet exactly what do these words and phrases mean? How are they specifically related to socioeconomic development since the 1980s, the period of ‘‘post-

modernism’’ followed by the so-called Heisei recession? What actually has been changing in the Japanese university since the economic bubble burst in the late 1980s? Numerous books, articles, and essays have been published on the university reform of the 1990s. Most of them concentrate on structural reorganization of faculties, departments, and curricula, yet they rarely discuss the more fundamental questions of what should be studied and taught, how research and teaching can be refocused, and how and for what purpose disciplines should be reinvented. As a way of entering the debate on the Japanese university, I have decided to focus on a discipline that does not exist in Japan: film studies. It is quite surprising that film does not receive any systematic attention when global circulation of information, image, and cultural commodity is one of the central themes of university reform. Film studies could give us insight into the transformation of the university in the age of recession because outside Japan, particularly in the United States, it is one of the new academic disciplines that emerged in the wake of political protest and a massive influx of students to universities in the 1960s. Why did nothing comparable happen in the Japanese university in the 1960s when students were at least as active as their U.S. counterparts in political protest and contestation against the faculty and university administrators, the out-of-date curriculum and ineffective teaching, and the complicity of the academy, industry, and government in their support for the U.S. bombing of Vietnam? Why is the study of film so conspicuously absent in new faculties and reconfigured departments at universities in the 1990s? Why has the Japanese university not allowed film studies to establish itself as an academic discipline? Is it because of Japanese indifference to film and popular culture? Or academic conservatism in general? While these are important factors, they do not fully account for the absence of film studies in Japan. Film is not necessarily ‘‘popular culture’’ anymore. It already has a history of more than a hundred years, and many films have achieved the status of classical works because of cultural capital accruing to them and, ironically enough, because of the technological obsolescence of film in the age of electronic and digital images. Thus, if film is still not a legitimate object of scholarship in the Japanese university, it is not mainly because of film’s newness or popular status. Then how can we explain the absence of film studies in the Japanese academy? Our attempt to answer this question will reveal the implications of the current university reform, the structure and function of the university, and how and for what

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purpose knowledge is produced and consumed in contemporary Japanese society. The existence of film as such is not a sufficient reason for the establishment of film studies. Nor is a general interest in film’s aesthetic value or social significance. For film studies to emerge as an academic discipline, film must be invented as an object of scholarship. This invention cannot be done by simply arguing that film deserves serious scholarly attention. As Richard Dyer points out, there are many important things that are not studied in the university, and only certain aspects of the object and certain ways of studying them become central to the identity of the discipline.1 In the United States, film became a new object of academic study in the 1960s. The precise reason why the formation of film studies occurred around that time is too complex to be explained fully here, but we can point out several factors that played a significant role in the incorporation of film in academia. Auteurism and art cinema made film as respectable as other types of art such as literature, painting, and music from an institutional perspective. The influx of students to universities in the 1960s created the demand for more courses and new subjects to satisfy their diverse interests, and film was a convenient object to meet this demand. The contestation against the traditional curriculum and literary canon and the introduction of theory in the humanities made film an ideal object to expand the notion of text and the parameter of interpretation as a mode of literary scholarship. Although film was taught in a variety of disciplines, as David Bordwell has argued, it was interpretation that dominated the emerging field of film studies.2 To this extent, it is no surprise that film studies maintained close institutional connections with literature departments, particularly English and comparative literature. Curiously, nothing remotely similar happened in the Japanese university. Literature departments in Japan never embraced film or study of film as part of their intellectual endeavors. Particularly puzzling is the reaction of English departments, given the fact that film studies in the United States has often been housed in or formally associated with English. In American universities it is simply taken for granted that film is part of English and foreign language and literature departments (a notable exception is East Asian languages and literatures).3 Some critics even complain about the unwillingness of many English departments to hire faculty who specialize in something other than literature or film.4 Another strange phenome-

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non is the absence of any institutionally sustained engagement with film in American studies in Japan. It is difficult to comprehend how it is possible to maintain a discipline of American studies in which Hollywood is not a major focus of scholarship. Why have English departments in Japanese universities been absolutely indifferent to film? Why has the transformation of English departments in U.S. universities not had any fundamental impact on the discipline of English in the Japanese university? In the American university, English has two aspects or genealogically separate components: English literature and rhetoric. The rise of English in the late nineteenth century in the American university was linked to the decline of rhetoric. Having entered the academy first as a study of language and then of literature, by the early twentieth century English had replaced not only rhetoric but also Greek and Latin as the foundation of the university.5 This rapid rise of English as a central focus of humanistic education was closely interlinked with the formation of the modern nation-state. The classic canon was vernacularized, and literature was equated with national culture as organic totality. The hierarchy of English and rhetoric, however, has been reversed in recent years. Whereas there is a great demand for rhetoric and composition courses, traditional education in English literature is declining. What was once regarded as the transcendental value of English literature turns out to be an ideological construct after all. The organic wholeness of national culture that English literature supposedly embodied excluded a vast majority of people who were not white, Protestant, middleclass males. Moreover, the declining significance of the nation-state makes traditional literary education obsolete or simply irrelevant.6 The linguistic competency that students are required to attain by taking English composition and rhetoric courses may serve the interests of transnational capital and corporations but not necessarily those of the nation-state, which is barely able to maintain its identity.7 The enlarged notion of text, which not only includes canonical literary texts but also other types of writing, film and audiovisual materials, city and urban environment, and so forth, is one of the strategies that English has adopted to survive as a discipline. It is, however, far from clear where this strategy is finally leading. Just like its counterpart in the United States, the Japanese university was from the beginning an essential state ideological apparatus interpellating national subjects. The Imperial University, as its name clearly indicates, maintained a close connection to the emperor, who regularly appeared at graduation ceremonies to hand out commemorative silver watches directly 84

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to the honor graduates. The Ministry of Imperial Household also gave a substantial amount of financial assistance or smaller gifts to national and private universities in the name of the emperor.8 The establishment of kokubungaku, or national literature, as an academic discipline was an explicit attempt to invent the continuity of national history manifested in literature as a national spirit. As Stefan Tanaka has shown, the discipline of toyoshi, or the history of the East, was invented in the 1890s to resolve a seemingly impossible question of ‘‘how to become modern while simultaneously shedding the objectivistic category of Oriental and yet not lose an identity.’’ 9 Yanagita Kunio’s nativist ethnology (minzokugaku) is, according to H. D. Harootunian, another powerful example of discourse that ‘‘ultimately authorized the formation of a discipline called Japanology, which made folk, community, and culture (a synonym for race) interchangeable subjects of knowledge representing a completed history and an immutable essence.’’ 10 What was the function of English in the construction of national subjects in the Japanese university? English fulfilled the ideological function of reproducing national subjects, but needless to say this goal was not achieved by English composition and practice in rhetoric. Whereas kokubungaku, nativist ethnology, and Oriental history attempted to reinvent Japan as an organicist totality, English contributed to the construction of national subjects through a representational apparatus of translation. Students were required to parse the canonical work of English literature sentence by sentence, examining the meaning of each word by using the Oxford English Dictionary. The ability to explain the etymology of a word and cite a specific definition number in the OED entry became the mark of great scholarly accomplishment. The ultimate objective of this painstaking process of learning was to produce an ‘‘accurate’’ translation of a canonical work. The original work was literally treated as a sacred text, and students were asked to face it sincerely not through arbitrary interpretation but through appreciation on a personal level. Thus through the positioning of translation as the central focus of scholarship, English in the Japanese university was to establish the equivalency between Japanese and English, and more importantly, between Japan and England. The utmost importance of translation in the discipline of English can be explained as a need for reproducing a particular kind of national identity based on the dichotomy of Japan and the West. As Masao Miyoshi argues, ‘‘The Japanese felt that it was strategically vital and politically crucial to insist on equivalence and symmetry. . . . The fact that an English text could be translated into Japanese, and vice versa, was seen at least parthe university, disciplines, national identity

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tially as an act of demonstrating Japan’s cultural compatibility with Britain at a time when the British Empire ruled the world.’’ 11 The centrality of the ideas of accuracy and equivalency is problematic not necessarily because the representation of translation based on these ideas erased fundamental differences between English and Japanese. Instead, the institutionalized practice of translation in the Japanese university created an illusion that English and Japanese existed as two autonomous linguistic unities in the first place. What was erased was not the differences between the two languages but the fictitiousness of English and Japanese as self-sufficient language systems. The differences between English and Japanese as languages and cultures became representable as a result of the putative equivalency of the two.12 English is therefore an accomplice of kokubungaku in the construction of national subjects. On one hand, the discipline of national literature projects the putative identity of a modern nation-state onto history and then tautologically explains Japanese literature as a natural outcome of the continuous national history. The discipline of English, on the other hand, divides the world into self-enclosed nation-states, and the communicative model of translation that underlies the discipline constructs the relationship of equivalency and compatibility between Japan and the West. It is surprising that many scholarly books by North American and British film scholars have been translated into Japanese.13 Who reads those books? For what purpose? Why are they published in the first place? We naturally want to ask these questions, given the absence of film studies as a discipline in the Japanese university. Yet there is in the end nothing particularly surprising about the publication of these translated works on film. In the academy, where the production of national subjects remains imperative, the important thing is not necessarily, for example, what Fredric Jameson has said about postmodernism but how many of his books are translated into Japanese and who has translated them. Scholars of English seem to feel a compulsion to keep up with the latest trend in the U.S. academy, and if film happens to be one of the fashionable topics, new books on film are introduced in Japan without necessarily reconfiguring the discipline of English. Western scholarship is reproduced only as a simulacrum through translation, and once the work of translation is done, there is nothing else to do. When literary studies is equated with the accurate translation of a foreign text whereby cultural capital is accumulated within the self-enclosed boundaries of the nation-state, it is not surprising that English remains utterly indifferent to film itself. Books on film may be useful for maintaining the illusion of a shared discursive space where Japanese participate in 86

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scholarly debates as the equal partners of North American academics. However, to the extent that it cannot be ‘‘translated,’’ film itself does not have much value for the discipline of English, the ideological objective of which is still the construction of national subjects. Whereas a communicative mode of translation remains a central focus of the disciplinary formation of English, the study of English is legitimated by the ideas of kyōyō (culture) and koten (classics). English literature is important for university education because it is believed that it makes a significant contribution to students’ self-cultivation and acquisition of cultural competency expected of well-educated university graduates. But the value of kyōyō has been heavily criticized in recent years, and English and other traditional programs are forced to reevaluate their disciplinary identity and legitimacy. The idea of kyōyō became a dominant creed of the cultural elites in the early twentieth century.14 Kyōyō was not some abstract notion but a set of concrete literary and philosophical works from ancient Greece to contemporary Japan. To acquire kyōyō, students read a wide range of classics, including the works of Plato, Aristotle, Immanuel Kant, Georg Hegel, Arthur Schopenhauer, Friedrich Nietzsche, Goethe, Jacob Burckhardt, Dante, Shakespeare, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Charles Baudelaire, Romain Rolland, Walt Whitman, Leo Tolstoy, Natsume Soseki, Abe Jiro, and Nishida Kitaro, among others. This mishmash of literary and philosophical works from a variety of traditions and historical periods embodied culture and at the same time functioned as a canon to be mastered for the purpose of selfcultivation. The emergence of kyōyō was closely related to the impasse of the risshin shusse (advancement and success in life) ideology, which urged young men to study hard to achieve worldly success, on one hand, and, on the other hand, not to become a failure in life. This ideology of risshin shusse—a combination of the optimism of Horatio Alger and the paranoia of Social Darwinism—began to lose its hold over people’s consciousness when the modern nation-state, its institutions, and its apparatuses were firmly established, so that there was little possibility of climbing up the socioeconomic ladder rapidly. As the unemployment rate of university graduates increased in the 1900s, the connections between university education and worldly success were becoming less obvious. The appearance of terms such as chishikijin and interi, which both mean intellectuals, in the 1910s coincided with the formation of a new class of white-collar workers with university degrees.15 Instead of pursuing worldly success, students increasingly turned the university, disciplines, national identity

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inward, choosing the cultivation of an individual self and the acquisition of universal culture as an ultimate goal in life. Cosmopolitanism and individualism were two major features of the kyōyō ideology. The direct connection was established between timeless ideals and an individual self; politics, history, and society were conspicuously absent. It was therefore very natural that the idea of kyōyō became unfashionable with the rising popularity of Marxism in the 1920s. Moreover, the rise of mass culture, consumerism, and Americanism in the 1920s produced a new type of university student who was more interested in sports, movies, jazz, and cafés than in Goethe or Nietzsche. For these urbane and consumption-oriented students, the idea of kyōyō seemed too provincial.16 The decline of kyōyō was, however, only temporary; in the 1930s and the first half of the 1940s kyōyō continued to influence students as a dominant ideology of higher education.17 After World War II, kyōyō culture as such disappeared when imperial universities and higher schools were abolished. The Occupation’s radical reform of the educational system gave birth to new universities (shinsei daigaku) to replace the overtly nationalistic prewar educational system. To renew the legitimacy of the university as a democratic institution in a new Japan, which the government attempted to refashion into a bunka kokka or ‘‘cultural nation,’’ the idea of kyōyō was explicitly institutionalized as part of the postwar university system. Kyōyō, which had existed as a dominant strain of student culture at elite universities and higher schools, became available to any students who went through the general education curriculum in their first two years at universities. This institutionalized form of kyōyō did not function particularly well from the beginning. Many universities had two separate faculties and even campuses, one for general education and the other for advanced education in majors and specializations. A radical educational reform led to the creation of a new hierarchy, and the faculty in the general education program were often treated as second-class citizens. The rigid separation of general education and major curricula created the general perception that the acquisition of kyōyō, which no longer had any value in itself, was nothing more than a bureaucratic formality. The micromanagement of the entire university system by the Ministry of Education further ensured that no innovation in general education would be implemented by any individual university. The idea of kyōyō became the symbol of the bureaucratization of the university rather than of critical thinking and an emerging democratic subject, which the postwar educational system was supposedly fostering. 88

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In the mid-1990s the idea of kyōyō as an ideological core of the postwar university system was finally smashed in the midst of the drastic administrative and curriculum reform that the Ministry of Education imposed on national, municipal, and private universities. The failure of general education, a need for expanding graduate programs and research activities, a decrease in the number of young people attending college, and global competition are some of the apparent reasons and motivations behind the reorganization of the university system. The most conspicuous outcome of the reform was the abolition of faculties of liberal arts at all major national universities except the University of Tokyo. Both public and private universities have been trying to outdo one another in their quest for new names and imaginative concepts for their new academic units, some of which are former faculties of liberal arts. Faculty of Integrated Human Studies, Faculty of Cross-Cultural Studies, Graduate School of Social and Cultural Studies, and Faculty of Environmental Information are fairly typical examples showing this recent trend. These large academic units consist of departments such as intercultural communication, cultural norms, Asia-Pacific cultures, Japanese culture, human studies, international human studies, human environment, media environment, and so forth.18 The proliferation of all these new departments and schools, which is a result of the Ministry of Education’s directives and ‘‘recommendations’’ since the late 1980s (that is, since the collapse of the bubble economy), makes us wonder how they are related to the existing academic disciplines and institutions. It turns out that their newness is often in appearance only, because the same old academic subjects are repackaged in new administrative units and are still taught by the same faculty, who are not necessarily trained in the trendy subjects or interdisciplinary methods they now purportedly claim to know. While the old disciplines remain without any fundamental change, the new departments and faculties, whose names should be understood as brand names or registered trademarks, neither expose the roots of the current crisis of the university more clearly nor articulate what was wrong with the old kyōyō curriculum more convincingly. The problem with the current university reform is that it has little to do with the existing disciplines’ immanent critique of their own disciplinarity and institutional history. For example, how has the discipline of English responded to the onslaught of anti-kyōyō sentiment and the radical reorganization of the university so far? It does not seem that any genuine reflection on the state of the field and the problematic history of the discipline has the university, disciplines, national identity

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been consistently pursued as a collective endeavor. The notions of international, culture, information, and communication are ridiculed or dismissed as empty words. They are mostly regarded as a marketing gimmick for keeping the enrollment figure high and as a gesture of appeasing the Ministry of Education for more government grants-in-aid. The collapse of the kyōyō curriculum is regarded as a calamity created by the Ministry of Education or by the massive influx of new types of students or the masses, who are not particularly interested in classics and high culture. These critical views on the current university reform are not completely off the point. However, what is missing in the defensive posture of English’s cynicism is its own role in the demise of kyōyō. The lack of self-reflection is evident, for example, in a collection of short essays by English literature scholars, ‘‘The Future of the English Department,’’ published in the discipline’s principal journal, Eigo seinen.19 English and other foreign literatures are increasingly losing popularity among college students, and it is not clear if their disciplinary autonomy and existence can be maintained as universities continue to undergo the restructuring process modeled after corporate mergers and downsizing. What kinds of solutions are being proposed by leading professors of English in the face of a crisis in their discipline? Kishi Tetsuo, a professor at the University of Kyoto, argues that any discussion of the future of the English department must start with the fact that the majority of students who choose to major in English are not interested in English literature.20 Their choice is influenced more by factors such as the difficulty of entrance exams and the ranking of universities. Many students are in fact willing to study anything as long as they can enter the university of their choice. Kishi claims that this desperate situation makes it all the more necessary to teach students what real English literature is like; that is, even though the idea of canon is unpopular, students should be taught the classic works of Shakespeare and John Milton rather than the contemporary works of forgettable authors. He defends the canon further by saying that even though they are a small minority, there are still some students who are genuinely interested in English literature and will become firstrate scholars. Students can become professors of English in Japanese universities without ever reading one line of Shakespeare’s or Milton’s works. However, these professors would never be able to participate in an international competition. Therefore, concludes Kishi, the classics, not contemporary works, should be taught in the English department if Japanese scholars want to compete with foreign scholars internationally. I could go on to discuss other essays in the journal’s featured section, ‘‘The 90

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Future of the English Department,’’ but their diagnoses are not radically different from Professor Kishi’s. Tamai Akira at the University of Osaka, for example, argues that the English department is now freed from the need of teaching ‘‘practical English’’ to students because there are a wealth of resources available outside the university, such as English conversation schools, audiovisual aids, satellite television, and study abroad programs. As a result, the English department can now do what it is supposed to do: teach and study English literature.21 These essays, however, are so far removed from the reality of the current crisis of the university in the midst of recession and the role and responsibility of English in that crisis. What exactly is the ‘‘international competition’’ Japanese scholars of English literature are supposed to participate in? Why cannot Japanese scholars participate in—let alone ‘‘win’’—this competition if they have not read Shakespeare or Milton? Is there no need to question the politics and institutional history of the canon, to examine why certain works are either included in or excluded from it? Why does Professor Kishi seem so proud of his inability to teach students how to communicate and articulate their opinions in English? Is the purpose of literary studies merely to keep a cultural heritage alive? 22 If a more expanded field of Western cultural studies replaces English in the academy, why should that new field be organized around the study of (English) literature as its core? 23 Most important of all, for what purpose do Japanese scholars of English study English literature? What is remarkably absent in these essays is any trace of self-reflection on the positionality of Japanese scholarship on English literature. In his trenchant critique of the discipline of English in the Japanese academy, Naoki Sakai asks, ‘‘Why do Japanese scholars of English have to spend months and years to produce scholarly books about nineteenth-century English writers which no experts from Britain will ever read because they are written in Japanese?’’ Why are Japanese scholars of English so eager to introduce the new scholarly trends and theories from North America and Britain but only after carefully removing the critical edge and political force from them? ‘‘Although there are clearly ways for scholars of English in Japan to positively relate themselves to the objects of their field, English literature as a discipline tends to discourage people in the field from seeking new ways of attachment which will inevitably be political.’’ 24 Why does the discipline of English discourage such a metadisciplinary reflection? How is such a form of discouragement institutionalized in the discipline to such an extent that many Japanese scholars do not feel any sense of disjunction between themselves and the object of their study? As I discussed earlier, this false sense of relatthe university, disciplines, national identity

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edness comes from the illusion of equivalency between English and Japanese cultures established by the communicative mode of translation and the kyōyō ideology, and paradoxical as it may sound, it is through this imaginary equivalency that the Japanese national culture is affirmed and authenticated. Such is the coloniality of English in the Japanese academy, yet a serious postcolonial critique of English’s unstated assumptions as a discipline has not been carried out systematically by Japanese scholars of English, not even by those who are supposedly specialists of postcolonial criticism. What underlies various reform measures adopted by the Ministry of Education is a logic of performativity and market economy. With the introduction of a limited-term appointment, for instance, the performance of a faculty member is evaluated at the end of a five-year contract, and the university may or may not decide to renew a contract based on that evaluation. What is looked at is the input-output ratio or efficiency of faculty teaching and research; that is, the object of evaluation is the profitability of faculty activities. Efficiency and profitability are also pursued on a larger institutional level. The government is now seriously trying to semiprivatize national universities as independent administrative agencies (dokuritsu gyōsei hōjin). If the plan is actually implemented, on one hand it could lead to the closing of regional national universities, many of which are not profitable without government subsidies, and on the other hand, financial, technological, and human resources will be further concentrated in a limited number of universities designated as ‘‘centers of excellence.’’ In this corporate vision of the university, kyōyō is replaced by technology and information, which are ‘‘a major stake . . . in the worldwide competition for power.’’ 25 The Japanese university is, in other words, increasingly being ‘‘Americanized.’’ 26 This does not mean, however, that Japanese universities are simply becoming transnational corporate entities. What underlies the ministry’s coercive methods is a profound crisis of Japanese national identity. Recurrent key words in the university reform such as international, culture, comparative, information, and communication all reveal that the government is desperately attempting to maintain the university as a state ideological apparatus by adjusting the way the identity of national culture is manufactured. The ideology of kyōyō constructed the national culture through a cosmopolitan fusion of the West and Japan, which was opposed to the rest of the world. In contrast, the notion of international culture or comparative culture posits Japan more explicitly as a distinct national culture, the uniqueness of which is then illuminated through comparison with other national 92

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cultures. This shift from one meaning of culture (kyōyō) to another (bunka) is evident in the shift of focus in English language education. Whereas the illusion of equivalency and compatibility between the West and Japan was created by the communicative mode of translation in the age of kyōyō, in the increasingly globalizing world, the putative uniqueness of Japanese national culture cannot be maintained within the hermetically sealed space of the nation-state. The emphasis on practical English in the new programs of international culture, communication, and information is a self-conscious attempt to represent the national culture of Japan in English, a de facto lingua franca of the global market of information commodity.27 It is this continuing presence of the national culture as a kernel of identity that makes the current university reform look anachronistic, empty, and dangerous. The techno-informational nationalism pursued by the Japanese government does not necessarily promote the expansion of media studies, cultural studies, or communication studies, the situation of which is, in Yoshimi Shun’ya’s words, ‘‘miserable.’’ 28 These disciplines or fields critically examine technology as a social construct in the network of discursive practices, and to this extent they are not particularly relevant to the government’s technoutopian vision of a postrecession Japan where computers, information networks, and digital media are only instruments for improving efficiency, productivity, and profitability to survive global competition in the twenty-first century. To combat this instrumental approach to technology in the new university curricula, it is imperative to explore collectively the possibility of establishing various institutional sites where audiovisual media and technologies and their sociocultural meanings and significance are critically studied. And I would argue that one of the prerequisites for the success of such an intervention is the establishment of film studies as an academic discipline. Given the central role film played in the transformation of human perception, subjectivity, and social relationship in the twentieth century, it is unthinkable how we can seriously study media technologies and audiovisual images without considering film. The ‘‘miserable’’ situation of media and communication studies in Japan now has something to do with the fact that Japanese academics, unlike their counterparts in the United States, were unable to seize a moment in the late 1960s and failed to invent film as an object worthy of scholarly attention. Film studies can introduce in the Japanese university a radicalized form of interdisciplinary practice, which problematizes the unstated assumptions of existing disciplines and the notion of disciplinary expertise. As Stuart Hall argues, ‘‘Serious interdisciplinary the university, disciplines, national identity

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work does not mean that one puts up the interdisciplinary flag and then has a kind of coalition of colleagues from different departments, each of whom brings his or her own specialization to a kind of academic smorgasbord from which students can sample each of these riches in turn. Serious interdisciplinary work involves the intellectual risk of saying to professional sociologists that what they say sociology is, is not what it is.’’ 29 Despite the ever-increasing number of interdisciplinary programs, departments, and schools, what is absent from the Japanese academy is precisely a desire for questioning disciplinary boundaries and presuppositions on a fundamental level. Film studies should be an institutional site for serious interdisciplinary work, and only by being such a site can its formation and existence be justified. Notes 1 See Richard Dyer, ‘‘Introduction to Film Studies,’’ in The Oxford Guide to Film

Studies, ed. John Hill and Pamela Church Gibson (Oxford, 1998), 3: Anything that exists can be studied, and in these last years of the twentieth century it may well seem that virtually everything is. Yet only some things become organized into disciplines and institutionalized into departments and conferences; if everything has its web site, only some things have their boards of examiners, refereed journals, and employed enthusiasts, or possess the (often insecure) cultural capital of being understood to be ‘‘studies.’’ Nor is the form that studies take wholly determined by the object of study—the history of film studies, as of any other discipline, makes clear that there are many different ways of deciding what it is you attend to, and how you attend to it, when you ‘‘study’’ something. All manners of factors, including chance, determine why something gets taken up as worthy of ‘‘study’’ and what form that takes, but cutting across them all is the conviction, one that must be or be made widespread, that the object of study is important, that it matters. It is the terms of such mattering that then characterize the changing forms of study. 2 David Bordwell, Making Meaning: Inference and Rhetoric in the Interpretation of

Cinema (Cambridge, MA, 1989). 3 Ginette Vincendeau, ‘‘Issues in European Cinema,’’ in Hill and Gibson, Oxford

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Guide to Film Studies, 441; Mitsuhiro Yoshimoto, Kurosawa: Film Studies and Japanese Cinema (Durham, NC, 2000). Cary Nelson, Manifesto of a Tenured Radical (New York, 1997), 56. Robert Scholes, The Rise and Fall of English: Reconstructing English As a Discipline (New Haven, CT, 1998). Bill Readings, The University in Ruins (Cambridge, MA, 1996). In most Japanese universities there are no Japanese composition or rhetoric courses that fulfill the same ideological function as English in U.S. universities.

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Japanese is usually not a required subject, and the ‘‘national literature’’ department does not offer courses that correspond to English composition courses required of U.S. college students. According to an Asahi shinbun article (September 18, 1996), Kōchi University, a national university in Kōchi prefecture, instituted a new required course called ‘‘Technique of Japanese’’ (Nihongo gihō), the objective of which is to teach students how to speak and write articulately. Yet this type of course is very unusual in Japanese universities, or in the words of the Ministry of Education, a ‘‘unique attempt.’’ Carol Gluck, Japan’s Modern Myths (Princeton, 1985), 84–85. Stefan Tanaka, Japan’s Orient: Rendering Pasts into History (Berkeley, 1993), 3. H. D. Harootunian, ‘‘Figuring the Folk: History, Poetics, and Representation,’’ in Mirror of Modernity: Invented Traditions of Modern Japan, ed. Stephen Vlastos (Berkeley, 1998), 159. Masao Miyoshi, ‘‘The Invention of English Literature in Japan,’’ in Japan in the World, ed. Masao Miyoshi and H. D. Harootunian (Durham, NC, 1993), 277–78. Naoki Sakai, Translation and Subjectivity: On ‘‘Japan’’ and Cultural Nationalism (Minneapolis, 1997), 1–17. For example, the following books have been translated into Japanese: David Bordwell, Ozu and the Poetics of Cinema (Princeton, 1988; Japanese translation, Seidosha, 1992); Rey Chow, Primitive Passions: Visuality, Sexuality, Ethnography, and Contemporary Chinese Cinema (New York, 1995; Seidosha, 1999); Mary Ann Doane, The Desire to Desire: The Woman’s Film of the 1940s (Bloomington, IN, 1987; Keisō Shobō, 1994); Caryl Flinn, Strains of Utopia: Gender, Nostalgia, and Hollywood Film Music (Princeton, 1992; Heibonsha, 1994); E. Ann Kaplan, ed., Women in Film Noire (Bloomington, IN, 1978; Tabata Shobō, 1988); E. Ann Kaplan, Women and Film: Both Sides of the Camera (New York, 1983; Tabata Shobō, 1985); Tania Modleski, The Women Who Knew Too Much (New York, 1988; Seidosha, 1992); Constance Penley, Nasa/ Trek: Popular Science and Sex in America (London, 1997; Kosakusha, 1998); Peter Wollen, Signs and Meaning in the Cinema (Bloomington, IN, 1969; Firumu Ātosha, 1975). Tsutsui Kiyotada, Nihon gata ‘‘kyōyō’’ no unmei [Destiny of the Japanese style ‘‘kyōyō’’] (Tokyo, 1995). Takeuchi Yō, Risshin shusse shugi: Kindai Nihon no roman to yokubō [Careerism: Romance and desire in modern Japan] (Tokyo, 1997), 117–38. Ibid., 232–39. Tsutsui, Nihon gata ‘‘kyōyō’’ no unmei, 100–6. The following is a complete list of departments and programs in each of the four faculties: (1) Faculty of Integrated Human Studies at Kyoto University— Department of Human Studies (Fundamental Human Studies, Social and Human Environmental Studies); Department of International Cultural Studies (Cultural Structures, Civilizations, Language and Culture, Japanese and Chinese Culture and Society, European and American Culture and Society); Department of Fundamental Sciences (Mathematical Science, Information Sciences, Physics); Department of Environmental Sciences (Material and Environmental Sciences, Earth and Biological Sciences, Life Science); (2) Faculty of Cross-

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19 20 21 22 23 24

25 26

27

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Cultural Studies at Kobe University—Department of Communication Studies (Information Lab, Linguistics, Communication, Intercultural Communication, Cultural Norms); Department of Area Studies (Asia-Pacific Cultures, Cultural Interaction, Japanese Culture, European Cultures, American Cultures, Cultural Systems); (3) Graduate School of Social and Cultural Studies at Kyushu University—Department of Japanese Society and Culture (Society, Culture, Regional Science, Structure of Social Economy, Basic Structure of Human Sciences, Comparative Studies of Ancient Civilization, Regional Material Information, Study of Industrial Documents and Information, Japanese Language Teaching); Department of International Society and Culture (Asian Studies, European-American Studies, History of Ideas, Comparative Politics, Intercultural Communication, Language and Culture, Environmental System, Global Environmental Conservation, Evolution of Earth Environments); (4) Faculty of Environmental Information—Knowledge Information Program, Human Environment Program, Media Environment Program. All information is from each institution’s Web site: (1) http://www.h.Kyoto-u.ac.jp/english; (2) http://ccs.cla .kobe-u.ac.jp/index-e.html; (3) http://www.scs.Kyushu-u.ac.jp/F2/scsinfo.html; (4) http://www.sfc.keio.ac.jp/SFCInformation/curriculum/curriculum course .html.en. Eigo seinen 142.6 (1996): 6–15. Kishi Tetsuo, ‘‘Eibunka to eibungaku’’ [The department of English and English literature], Eigo seinen 142.6 (1996): 11. Tamai Akira, ‘‘Eibungaku ni okeru kenkyū no omoshirosa o mezashite’’ [Aiming at the pleasure of research in English literature], Eigo seinen 142.6 (1996): 12. Nagao Teruhiko, ‘‘Eibunka no genjō to shōrai’’ [The present condition and future of the English department] Eigo seinen 142.6 (1996): 6. Ozawa Hiroshi, ‘‘Sound and Fury,’’ Eigo seinen 142.6 (1996): 7. Stuart Hall and Naoki Sakai, ‘‘A Tokyo Dialogue on Marxism, Identity Formation, and Cultural Studies,’’ in Trajectories: Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, ed. Kuan-Hsing Chen (London, 1998), 370. Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Conditions: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis, 1984), 5. Bill Readings writes, ‘‘‘Americanization’ today names less a process of national imperialism than the generalized imposition of the rule of the cash-nexus in place of the notion of national identity as determinant of all aspects of investment in social life. ‘Americanization,’ that is, implies the end of national culture’’ (University in Ruins, 3). See the featured section titled ‘‘Communicating Japan to the World’’ in Japan Echo 26.5 (1999), which includes an introduction by Takashina Shūji; ‘‘Japan’s Failing Grade in English,’’ by Inoguchi Takashi; ‘‘Giving English Education a Firmer Focus,’’ by Suzuki Takao; and ‘‘Toward a New Era of Intellectual Correspondence,’’ by Daniel Bell, Funabashi Yōichi, Wolf Lepenies, Shimada Haruo, Yamazaki Masakzu, Yonehara Mari, and Takashima Hatsuhisa. Suzuki Takao, for example, writes, ‘‘We need to shift the aim of English education to fostering stu-

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dents who can convincingly describe Japan’s distinctive circumstances to people unfamiliar with our country’’ (12). 28 Yoshimi Shun’ya, ‘‘Media kenkyū, paburikku na chi o meguru oboegaki’’ [Media studies, a note on public knowledge], Gendai shisō (June 1999): 228. 29 Stuart Hall, ‘‘The Emergence of Cultural Studies and the Crisis of the Humanities,’’ October, no. 53 (1990): 16.

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Japan’s Long Postwar: The Trick of Memory and the Ruse of History

Harry Harootunian

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he last days of the twentieth century witnessed an explosion of memoration and an unprecedented proliferation of mnemonic devices that have not just reinforced the earlier separation between memory and history but confused their respective functions in such a way as to invite the substitution of one for the other, as if the order of knowledge and experience each represented no longer mattered. This misrecognition was undoubtedly prompted by the effort to retain from the history of World War II the memory of a record of barbarism so unparalleled that it became a moral imperative of each generation to recall the painful moment when millions were systematically murdered. In the lengthening shadow of that historical trauma, we have seen an obsessive enlistment of memory and experience in the court of history to judge those acts of unpardonable and almost unrepresentable terror nations and peoples have inflicted upon each other to enlarge the vast tapestry of horror that even now, a halfcentury after the event, we still bear witness. Every contemporary instance of mass, genocidal destruction—Rwanda, Cambodia, Bosnia—jars the great memory-desiring machine to recall the violence of the past in order to act in the present, even though the act of memoration is often made to serve as a substitute for acting. In France, Vichy and its complicity in the Final Solution has become a virtual industry, producing histories, memorial accounts, movies, and novels; in Germany, until reunification, generations were constantly reminded of the depredations of the Nazi past and the fear of historical reprisals. Since the early 1990s especially, there has been a virtual cascading of books, discussions, and articles occasioned by the fiftieth anni-

versary of the end of Japan’s war with the United States and Asia that have sought to make sense of the consequences of that momentous event in the intervening half-century. Like others, the Japanese have appealed to memory, as such, and the retrieval of ‘‘experience’’ but less, perhaps, to grasp the meaning of the events that led to genocide in Asia, destruction, and defeat than to refigure the relationship between victimizer and victim. While the Japanese example seems more overdetermined than, say, the French or German efforts to restore a collective memory of war and its aftermath, we must also recognize in this appeal to memory and forms of memoration a structure of repetition driven by a fetishized object, an absent but ghostly apparition that reappears to remind Japanese they are not really modern but Japanese. It would be hard, in any case, to find a national experience that has dwelled so long and longingly on the postwar. It is a post that refuses postponement—so much so that contemporary photographer Tomotsu Shōmei misrecognized what he called ‘‘Americanization’’ as dominating the scene of the 1960s to conclude that it ‘‘had originated from the American military bases’’ and thus from the time of the Occupation. ‘‘I have the impression,’’ he wrote as late 1981, ‘‘that America gradually seeped out of the meshes of the wire fences that surrounded the bases and before long penetrated the whole of Japan.’’ Yet this misrecognition, driven by cultural amnesia, revealed only the excess of expenditure caused by the overdetermined importation of American-style commodity culture and prompted a willful forgetfulness that the process had originated well before World War II and the hated army of occupation from a country he had never seen. This sense of forgetfulness articulated by Tomotsu was already a negative image that aimed to replace quality with quantity, value with desire, and the enduring old with the ever new in the ever same. Above all else Americanism, as it was called, destroyed memory and encouraged social forgetfulness, as Katō Norihiro would point out, to make possible Japan’s long and interminable postwar. It was for this reason that Tomotsu asserted that the Occupation had obliterated Japan’s prewar ‘‘traditional’’ past to establish a ‘‘postwar without end.’’ 1 As a category for classifying and organizing the memory of the nation, the postwar has become an empowering trope that condenses the temporality of a duration into an endless spatial scape and present. In fact, I think it is precisely this spatialization of the postwar and its refusal of temporality that reveals its wider complicity with the forces of global capital, even though such considerations seem remote and even unacknowledged among its proponents. If this constant return to the site of sengo recalls Eric Conan and japan’s long postwar

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Henri Rousso’s Vichy, un passe qui ne passe pas, a recent work that explains why the Vichy phenomenon refuses to disappear,2 the resemblance is only momentary and dwarfed by the sheer longevity and scale of Japan’s desire to retain its postwar. In Japan, despite the stimulus of orchestrated memory in 1995 marking the event’s fiftieth anniversary, discourse on the meaning of the postwar has continued uninterrupted as if the nation were still approaching its moment of remembrance, with writers, thinkers, and scholars persistently engaging the ‘‘experience’’ (taiken) Japanese lived through during the U.S. Occupation. Yet the continuation of this discourse in the repetition of its structure has been enabled by transmuting a physical-military occupation into a mental occupation and subsequently into a cultural unconscious as constraining as the real thing. Moreover, this operation inflects an earlier move, made in the 1930s, when thinkers and writers transformed the importation of commodity culture and new knowledge into a form of mental and cultural colonialism.3 In that time, Japanese lived and wrote about their modernity as if they were oppressed by a colonization of the mind. This is precisely the experience critic Katō Norihiro has recently named as nejire-twisted, and that has led to ‘‘50 years of self disavowal’’ and historical revisionists have marked as a ‘‘mistake.’’ 4 It is important to recognize that Katō’s book Haisengoron has imbricated a vigorous, but not rigorous, discussion demanding the revision of textbooks on modern and contemporary history with the purpose of minimizing the nation’s destruction of Asian populations and diminishing Japan’s responsibility in order to eliminate what Katō has called the ‘‘stain of the starting point’’ and removing the charge that Japan had fought an ‘‘unjust war.’’ In this regard, a putative ‘‘liberalistic historical view’’ has been forcefully insinuated into the discussions to insist upon revising textbooks that might, in fact, call into question interpretations that have blamed Japan as ‘‘unjust.’’ 5 Instead, the new historiography has promoted the idea that Japan’s war actually encouraged the development of independent folk movements throughout Asia, an idea as persuasive as Samuel Huntington’s now-forgotten interpretation of how the U.S. bombing of Vietnam accelerated the modernization of its society. Liberalistic historiography has easily converged with the theories of cartoonist Kobayashi Yoshinori and his proclamation of gōmanism—a declaration of a new arrogance and haughtiness— that aims to provoke Japanese to take pride in their wartime achievements. Even the most cursory look at his fat comic book Sensōron [On war] would reveal how the illustrator has simply inverted the usual violence associated with manga into an affirmation of national amour propre.6 It should be 100

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pointed out that Kobayashi has been active in promoting a ‘‘society for the creation of new historical text books.’’ But this recent activity to remember a just history and shake loose from a deadening cycle of ‘‘self-loathing’’ and ‘‘self-deception’’ was prefigured and undoubtedly authorized by the countrywide movement to induce the government to once more assume responsibility for the financial and administrative maintenance of Yasukuni Shrine, the central site for bereaving Japan’s war dead, even though such an arrangement was prohibited by the constitution. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s this move encouraged cabinet ministers to attend public ceremonies at the shrine and effectively fused memory and mourning into a national morality and bereavement into a countrywide movement. If the visitations of prime ministers resemble Helmut Kohl and Ronald Reagan at Bitburg, the move to condense memory and mourning into moral purpose and refigure a collective ethic retrieved from the vast archive of nationalistic sentiment, resentment, and victimization has proved to be a powerful instrument in the struggle between memory, experience, and history and the reformulation of national morality.7 What needs to be explained is how and why the postwar has been used as a cultural trope from the moment war ended. As a mnemonic device for recall, the memory of living through the postwar, the nation in defeat, instead of the war itself, or indeed the vast complex history before the war, was coupled with the idea of culture to construct an endless present, more spatial than temporal, much like the commodity form that colonized Japanese life before the war as thoroughly as the U.S. Occupation. What I mean is that remembering the postwar in the 1990s worked to recall not the experience of wartime Japan, which the various discourses inspired by the Occupation and the enshrinement of Hiroshima effectively displaced, but rather the experience of a time when others, notably the Americans, prevented Japanese from actually forgetting their continuing status as a defeated nation. Hence Japan was destined to live in the space rather than the time of a defeated nation, oppressed by an alien force, groaning in the shadows of an imposed colonialism that had thrown the country and its people outside history. The consequence of this cultural strategy has been to reinforce the fetishization of an experience, and the forms of representing it, that was always posited on the inauthenticity of the outer and the authority of inner. Far from being an experience rooted in everyday life, the now, where the present writes its own history, this cultural experience claimed an indeterminate precinct, close to what Louis Althusser once described as a ‘‘space without places, a time without duration,’’ what has often been called the japan’s long postwar

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nonplace of colonial space and lag all histories must encounter to make a beginning.8 In this way, the various forms of historical revision—left, centrist, and simple reactionary—share a common ground: history has to start anew, and the archive needs to be restocked. It is for this reason that the trope refuses to go away and has, paradoxically, affirmed the role Japan has chosen to play as a client of the United States, living a new colonial oppression, another’s history that so much of the forgotten history of the prewar period had put into question and had made as an object of intellectual contestation. The earlier call to overcome the modern signaled this desire to escape an Other’s history that had alienated Japanese from themselves, but it managed only to affirm modernity’s hold on national consciousness. If the twilight of memory, according to Andreas Huyssens, is the moment that foreshadows the ‘‘night of forgetting,’’ given in the very structures of representation itself, it works also to show how temporality itself becomes, as Theodor Adorno once observed of the commodity form, a frozen emanation inaugurating the impending regime of historical amnesia.9 Yet we must recognize in this long postwar Japan’s own complicity. The experience of the postwar as colonial history could not have been accomplished without a prior history and memory of having been a colonizer, without, in fact, the persistent base of Japan’s identity as a colonizer. In this sense Japan’s capacity to play this role matched its desire to overcome modernity, whose conceptualization would not have been possible without a memory of a prior experience of having become modern. What lasted a few years as military occupation became the trope of lasting experience Japanese have lived for a half-century. In this way the postwar was assimilated into the discourse on modernity and its identification of crisis. To be sure, many interpreters have tried to situate this incessant preoccupation with the postwar in a historical conjuncture marked not simply by the fiftieth anniversary but, rather, a cluster of events linking, in a temporal chain, the Hanshin earthquake, Aum Shinrikyō’s days of rage leading to the sarinization of Tokyo subways, and the proliferation of partyless factions attended by the sharp decrease of voter participation and the beginning of financial collapse. According to Kurihara Yukio, these are not contingent events but occurrences that clearly prefigure the collapse of the legitimacy of the postwar state. Added to these portents is, of course, the end of the Cold War. But the old order in Japan has still not vanished and a new one has not yet disclosed itself.10 Another writer, Ōsawa Masachi, has proposed the operation of replay between Aum’s sarinization and the state’s effort to suppress Ōmotokyō in 1935, which he has also linked to the mutiny of 102

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Feburary 26, 1936. The point of this repetition is to show not so much the similarity of events but the existence of a single duration, the sharing of the same ‘‘contemporaneity.’’ 11 It is for this reason that sengo has not ended because the past that gave it birth has not ended. But it is hard to imagine a single duration linking the past to the contemporary present, since the state that relentlessly pursued Ōmotokyō to quiet its millennial vision was different, at least in form, from the one that has presided over the country during Aum Shinrikyō’s effort to hasten the world’s end. It is infrequently recognized that the effort in the 1990s to unwind recollection to reach a truer memory of cultural identity, what I have called the trick of memory, and the insistence to revise recent history in order to provide the nation with an accurate record of the war—the ruse of history—occurred precisely in an environment beset by a deep recession that aimed to reconstitute a national subjectivity anew. Both, also facing a present seemingly sliding beyond control, looked to the past for an explanation of the cause of the contemporary malaise and its solution for an unenvisaged future that must be different from the present. What links these activities in a common effort is the temporality of a present that must, in some way, be overcome—an idea and a plan for the new twenty-first century first proposed in the early 1970s with the issuing of a white paper composed by a brain trust of Prime Minister Ōhira Masayoshi—since it had contributed to the overdetermination of memory and history.12 Since the beginning of the 1990s Japan had experienced a progressive recessionary cycle undoubtedly signifying a crisis of accumulation that has contingently converged with unanticipated momentous global events such as the ending of the Cold War, the fundamental alteration of the global economy and its consequences for the historically privileged economic relationship between Japan and the United States, overproduction, diminished demand, overextensions of credit abroad, and the implementation of a globalizing process under the sign of transnationality. Combined with economic instability were events such as the Hanshin earthquake, which revealed both the government’s lack of planning and its incompetence in devising a plan for speedy recovery; the assault of Aum Shinrikyō and the hitherto unanticipated specter of urban civil disorder; the acceleration of suicides among the cohort of middle-aged males; violence in the schools, especially among children; and ceaseless corruption at all levels, which were all read as social signs of a troubled present and a darkly uncertain future that could only be avoided by rectifying the past through true memory and history. It is little wonder that the singular hero of the 1990s has been filmaker and actor japan’s long postwar

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Beato (Kitano) Takeshi, whose films monotonously show that in Japan the life of a member of the yakuza, or a corrupt cop, is more fun, if not meaningful, than any other occupation that no longer seems worth pursuing. The so-called bubble of growth burst in 1990 after decades of fast growth that made Japan the second most powerful economy in the world, marked by rising prices that the population had docilely subsidized and staggering indebtedness at home and abroad. In that year the Ministry of Finance advised banks to exercise stricter discipline on their lending practices, especially loans for real estate. What, in fact, was at stake was the abandonment of a decades-long policy that promoted a pattern of debt-financing of largescale, infrastructural projects. In this scheme, national and local governments were locked in a cycle of buying, improving, and developing land and selling it, which demanded the sustaining of inflationary prices for real estate. This program resulted in massive public debt, cozy relationships between governments and mammoth construction conglomerates and the production of unrelieved corruption, the accumulation of huge private fortunes, and a social infrastucture, as the Hanshin earthquake showed, that proved to be completely unsafe. Ironically, this scenario was already proposed by writer Abe Kōbō in his prescient novel of the 1950s, Suna no onna [Woman in the dunes]. Land prices had risen first in Tokyo in the preceding decades, making the city the most expensive place in the world to live, and then spread gradually to other cities. Hence once prices began to fall in the capital, the same trickle-down effect was observed elsewhere but at a much slower pace than the rate of growth. As a result the process of devaluation also moved slowly and was accompanied by significant decreases in stock market prices. Thus the recession combined a decline of the value of assets and a mountain of bad loans that seemed to have been made on the basis of a whistle and a handshake and often involved the most disreputable elements in Japanese society. With the bursting of the economic bubble came the inevitable revelations of innumerable scandals of corrupt practices and improper arrangements that had fueled Japan’s breakneck economy. During the decades of growth and unprecedented affluence it was shown that banks that had loaned money too easily were now confronted by what economists call ‘‘latent’’ losses and the prospect of certain bankruptcy. Throughout the 1990s there was a steady and unabated narrative of failed banks, financial institutions, and securities firms. Once the story line of growth deconstructed, it was further shown that securities companies had, as normal practice, illegally guaranteed customers protection against losses; together with other financial institutions they were forced to write 104

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off enormous losses. Although Japan experienced a momentary recovery in 1994, that soon dissipated since it was openly acknowledged that Japan could not lift itself out of this recession as it had in the past by resorting to the combination of expanding foreign exports and stimulating domestic demand with large-scale public works. Exports, it seemed, had exceeded demand in the mid-1990s, and recent government investigations into corrupt practices in the construction industry (leading to a few arrests) dampened any enthusiasm for this technique, even though it was eventually promoted by the very same bureaucracy that since the 1950s had come up with what Gavan McCormack has described as ‘‘one after another hare brained notion.’’ 13 The yen began to rise precipitously, exports yielded less of a margin of profit, and businesses and factories were thus forced to scale down their operations. This meant pulling back on new initiatives for new products and reducing employment through early retirements and layoffs. The official lending rate dropped to historically low levels, and corporations, despite recognizing the necessity of economic stimulation, were increasingly reluctant to commit their resources to new forms of expansion. This has been especially true of capital industries producing automobiles, electronic machinery, and precision tools. According to economist Nakamura Takafusa, Japanese lifestyles and living standards have been altered by the recession, even though he recognizes that Japan is still an enormously wealthy country that is on its way out of the crisis.14 Since the late 1970s there has been a growth of services as a significant element in the structure of consumption habits, and this has meant a shift from an emphasis on commodity goods to travel, education, and recreation. At the same time, expenditures on food and other necessities have decreased. While both the construction of new homes and the average house size have increased since the late 1970s (seven to ten mats, fourteen to twenty square meters per person), rising real estate prices curbed home buying to diminish the dream of home ownership and keep it at 1960s levels. Even the collapse of the real estate market in the late 1980s and early 1990s and lowering interest rates on mortgage loans that ordinarily would have signaled a spurt in housing starts have failed to meet expectations of renewed growth. But the most important result of this recession and the most dramatic revelation, at least for our purposes, is perhaps less the actual economic and social consequences than the recognition that it represented the failure of precisely those values long touted as an explanation of Japan’s economic and political successes and a testimony to the nation’s uniqueness. japan’s long postwar

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What the recession and events like the Hanshin earthquake showed was not the operation of an efficient and smoothly operating political society social scientists everywhere hailed as a model for advanced industrial states but an incompetent and corrupt single-party system allied with an entrenched bureaucracy and businesses whose capacity for remembering and learning from the past has been even less than that of the fabled Bourbon monarchs. Recession was the sign of repudiation of a particular image of a social and political order in Japan that had been made to characterize the sense of well-being the Japanese had experienced in the preceding decades. What has thus accompanied this downturn materially has been the shock of growing unemployment and the collapse of the so-called social contract that had once assured workers in major industries of lifetime job security —the envy of the advanced industrial world—and demonstrated painfully the betrayal of precisely those institutions that had confidently promised and convinced the population that they were serving community-centered values. With layoffs, fewer jobs for both younger people and women even though the general population is aging, and a failing educational system from top to bottom, Japanese society has come to resemble the frightening example of those industrial societies whose social and economic failures Japan’s own success was once promoted to justify as a model to be mirrored and emulated. If economists are at a loss to explain where new industries and products are to come from, it is even more difficult to resolve both social problems stemming from the recession and the loss of confidence in those institutions, businesses, and firms Japanese for generations had been so carefully socialized never to question. The social problems clearly signify anomie and political indifference, if not distrust; older workers who have been layed off or retired early have in recent years resorted to suicide, while the young, decompressing from an oxygen-deprived environment obsessively concerned with educational achievement, which is not the same as achieving excellence through education, have resorted to forms of violence, bullying, and mutilation that have become cause for national anxiety. New educational reforms aiming to improve the quality of training are really bureaucratic devices designed to centralize and cut back on funding and instruction for an emphasis on technical education. It is difficult, in any case, to dissociate this contemporary context dominating much of the 1990s from the appeals to memory and historical revision. I do not mean to suggest that the present economic slump and political failure have caused this interest in memory and history or that such activity is reducible to it, since they constitute different sets whose sur106

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facing conceals the fact they have developed from different causes and pasts. Yet the present has provided the space for a convergence of political and economic insolvency and a greater consciousness of memory and history, however contingent, and thus the figure of a consequential conjuncture in which the political and economic failures of the 1990s have overdetermined the need to explain the present by resorting to memory and history as a way of alerting Japanese to repressed possibilities that must now be resuscitated if the future is to look different from the present. By the same measure the powerful impulse to recall and revise the historical record unveils the fragility of a present bereft of national purpose, will, and the bonds of solidarity that must now, somehow, be reconstituted to avoid the certainty of an uncertain future. With thinkers like Katō Norihiro continuing the work of earlier critics such as Etō Jun, recollecting the long duration is made to stand in for history, whereas the historical revisionists resort to the act of revising to get back to real and true history, which will stand in for memory. But in both cases, history and memory are once more united. What marks the endless duration of the postwar, then, is not its kinship with the 1930s and the repetition of events and an experience that relies on memory to reassert a structure of repetition claiming disavowal but its deep involvement with the 1990s and the desire to overcome it. While the contemporary desire to recollect a true past and rewrite it superficially resembles the effort to overcome modernity in the late 1930s, the former is fueled by nostalgia for a loss that never existed while the latter tried desperately to envisage another kind of modernity that depended less on imitating imported examples. In the current conjuncture, Katō Norihiro, surely the most persuasive among conservative cultural critics, has noted how most writers, excepting Dazai Osamu, failed to record the wartime experience— how in fact such an experience was seen as impossible.15 Much of the intellectual and literary activity immediately after the war seemed bent on not only effacing the experience of the war, as such, and that of the preceding decades but figuring one that emerged whole in the postwar. The fashioning of a postwar experience, manifest in the tortuous and often pointless preoccupation with subjectivity and war responsibility, had more to do with decoupling the present from a forgettable past. The war was seen as a hardship for survivors, especially those who, like writers, were charged with the task of representing the substance of personal experience, which meant representing thought (shisō). Hence, war’s end was experienced as a removal (haijo) because of the impossibility of thinking and speaking about the war.16 In this way, the war was made to appear as an ‘‘impossible experijapan’s long postwar

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ence to represent’’ that needed to be pushed aside through forms of forgetting. Even Takeuchi Yoshimi inadvertently contributed to this process of forgetting when he acknowledged, in his classic essay on overcoming, that the symposium of 1942 never reached the status of thought because of oppressive conditions. What has bothered Katō most in this meditation was how war and defeat made it impossible for recovering those conditions of the past that had structured the identity of the collectivity. Denying the history that had marked the group’s identity meant accepting its determination in the postwar present itself. This, for Katō, constituted the real meaning of haisen, war’s defeat, its capacity to make the space for a ‘‘structure of selfdenial’’ and ‘‘self-deception’’ and the construction of an identity cut off from the past but rooted in a present that Japanese were forced to live as nejire, a ‘‘twisted’’ and ‘‘perverse’’ narrative.17 It is important to note that Katō begins his principal essay, ‘‘A Defeated Postwar,’’ from a personal experience that comes well after war’s end and recalls for him an episode of bad faith in which he participated as a schoolboy and that represents for him the oppressive nature of the postwar that exceeds the wartime past. Katō’s argument emphasized how postwar Japan has constituted a ‘‘heterogenous temporality’’ Japanese were forced to live because the defeat imposed upon them the inescapable judgment they had fought an unjust and unprincipled war. They are destined to live this timeless duration because they have not yet ‘‘apologized’’ to those countries upon which they had inflicted destruction and death. It is interesting to note that Katō’s book was a best-seller in 1997 that shared the center stage with the hit anime Mononokehime. The obvious reason for this success is that both seemed to offer Japanese timely relief and rescue from the depredations of ‘‘wounded selfrespect.’’ But his work is strangely silent on any consideration of reconciliation with the victims who expressed anger toward the offense of colonizing Asians and waging war. In Katō’s work, nothing is said about the aggressive war as the reality prior to defeat. Instead he resorts to a brutal equation that differentiates between the dead who carried on the war and those who were subsequently branded as murderers from the perspective of the postwar. Instead of acknowledging the violence committed by Japanese armies of occupation, he dwells on how Japan was forced to accept a constitution under the menace of a U.S. army of occupation and how, as a result, Japanese have lived in a state of perversity, pollution, and stain (kegare). His revised narrative circulates amuletic terms such as nejire, kegare, yogore, and ayamari, whose associations remain sufficiently opaque, ambiguous, but suggestively evocative. Deploying these terms as if they were sacred incan108

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tations, recalling the figures of Yanagita Kunio and Orikuchi Shinobu, who summoned them in their defense of the irreducibly Japanese against the onslaught of capitalist modernization, Katō’s renarrativization of the postwar might very well have renewed its life. Convinced that the pollution Japan suffered inflected a worldwide contagion, he believed it was necessary to ‘‘create good from the bad.’’ 18 But it is also evident that his appeal to the corrosion of global pollution instantiates the twisted history lived by postwar Japanese because of the religious associations resonating in the specific Japanese context. To rid Japan of this pollution guaranteed the realization of social solidarity in an anomic world, since the act was rooted in forms of commemoration and communal abhorrence of pollution.19 It also meant that the removal of ‘‘error’’ and ‘‘mistake’’ would open the way to resecuring a ‘‘subjectivity answerable to history’’ and reinstating a nationality founded on a ‘‘unified personality.’’ But the price of this commemorative process meant mourning for Asia’s 20 million dead only after expressing regret for the 3 million heroic dead of the home country. Mourning meant conversing first with the heroic spirits of Japan as a necessary condition for communicating with Asia’s dead. Even in commemoration, Katō has managed to recuperate the structure of colonialism among the dead.20 It is interesting to observe how Katō’s flush of success has encouraged him to expand his argument from the literary circumstances of the immediate postwar period and the Occupation’s policy of censorship to the whole of Japanese society and its modern history. This seems to be the task of the recently published book Nihon no mushisō [Thoughtless Japan], which asks the eye-catching question of why thought in Japan had died and answers by pointing the accusing finger at the persisting postwar. It was the postwar settlement, according to Katō, that drove Japanese politicians into the odd behavioral pattern of making public slips of speech that became immediate international problems. The archetypal example was former justice minister Nagano Shigeto’s willingness to share a ‘‘private’’ opinion with a reporter of the Mainichi shinbun (May 6, 1993) that the ‘‘Nanjing incident was cooked up.’’ 21 (It should be pointed out that as late as January 2000, ‘‘liberalistic’’ historians at a conference held in Osaka were still proclaiming that the figure of 300,000 Chinese dead at Nanjing was a ‘‘fiction.’’) Almost immediately upon blurting out this opinion, he retracted the statement and submitted his resignation. Yet Nagano, like others, never showed contrition for uttering the statement or expressed shame during the retraction because, in Katō’s thinking, he was voicing a real intention (honne) even though the framework (tate mae) of acceptable verbal behavior demanded japan’s long postwar

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either another opinion or immediate cancellation. Katō proposes that this doubling between real intent and expected behavior itself was produced by the postwar experience that was constrained within an enforced and alien constitution and its interpretation of war and peace long after the army of occupation left. What the slip represented was the murmur of honne-real and honest intentionality, the buried, true motive that an alien army of occupation and its institutions had violently repressed, a ‘‘recollection’’ hidden within the ‘‘unconscious.’’ 22 Self-deception of postwar Japanese was in fact inscribed in this interaction between an established framework mandating proper expression and the irruption of a true intention. With this move, Katō has merely reproduced every effort to resuscitate a hidden authenticity, the irreducible trace of an originary presence modern Japan has ceaselessly sought to restore to anchor contemporary identity, whether it was Watsuji Tetsurō’s ‘‘double life,’’ Orikuchi Shinobu’s repetition of archaic exemplars, or Maruyama Masao’s kosō, a deep stratum that runs through history like an underground river. Yet all of these appeals to a trace of the authentic were based on the presumption of the existence of a double structure in Japan, not too different from W. E. B. Du Bois’s twin souls of black folk. Unexceptionably, Katō employs this conception of doubling as a means of recalling a form of resistance that derives from Japan’s earliest encounter with alien civilizations and the processes by which the country was almost, but not quite, assimilated into them. In a certain sense he was suggesting that history was simply a record of how the Japanese were made to submit to the countless waves of cultural imperialism and that the weapons of the weak devised to resist domination—the gestures of the body —constituted a form of an ahistorical or anahistorical existence. There are, of course, echoes of the folklorist rejection of history, especially Orikuchi, but also of a scandalous conception of history as terror that could be overcome by appealing to the recurring myths and rituals associated with the communitarian body once popularized by the cryptofascist historian of religions at the University of Chicago, Mircea Eliade, who, it seems, had earlier corresponded with rural fascist Tachibana Kosaburō and more recently has been embraced by writer Ōe Kenzaburo. It is, in any case, Katō’s purpose to explain both the self-loathing of Japanese produced by the postwar experience and the possibilities for redemption from this awful, unending fate by reminding Japanese of the hidden resources for resistance the nation’s history offers. Reference to a double structure clearly requires an act of mourning and memoration, the virtual mobilization of cultural memory that will explain to Japanese why they 110

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have been most recently interred by an interminable postwar and how they might bring this unhappy state to an end. It hardly needs reminding that this argument, like his earlier observations concerning nejire, resonates with religious associations derived from the folkloric idiom. In this case, he leans heavily on Orikuchi Shinobu as read by Tsurumi Shunsuke.23 The double structure he appropriates from them refers to the layering of Japanese cultural formation into a fundamental native stratum developed prior to the importation and thus violent imposition of continental civilization, which itself constitutes yet an overlaying stratum. Despite waves of foreign importation, down to the most recent embracing of modern European civilization, these later arrivals succeed and are even superscripted over the older layer to repress them as a cultural unconscious that inexplicably remains intact, waiting to be summoned either as a revenant anxious to take reprisals on a present that has forgotten it or as a neglected form of resistance. In Orikuchi’s formulations, civilization was brought by the ‘‘gods who come rarely’’ (marebito) from beyond the sea to provide the village community with timely good fortune and bounty. These marebito were men-gods, guests, even ‘‘strangers,’’ whose visitation coincided with the yearly cycle of village production and whose prayers and recitations invoked abundant harvests and good fortune. Tsurumi took this notion and transmuted it into the first occasion when Japanese confronted representatives of an advanced, enlightened civilization, which has been successively repeated down to modern times. The encounter provoked the development of a strategy that would preserve the native culture from being entirely assimilated into the exemplars of the alien civilization and disappearing altogether. Orikuchi’s reckoning envisages such devices as constituting acts of resistance that can be accessed through the exercise of recall and folk memory. We can see that in Katō’s appeal to the authority of the double structure, as in Watsuji and Maruyama before him, there is thus an explicit rejection of history, as such, for the existence of a fixed and unchanging endowment that is available to recollection. History through the act of memoration is recalled to the present, and the repressed strategy of resistance is repeated. Armed with this logic of repetition, Katō saw the postwar simply as an occasion for animating the memory of this archaic and, I should add, nativist restoration of the true tradition, what honne revealed as a ‘‘true intention’’ that Japanese have understood since antiquity. According to this narrative the massive importation and imposition of Americanism after 1945 and the subsequent freezing of the postwar into a permanent and endless everyday japan’s long postwar

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was simply the most recent instance of Japan’s experience of the violent encounter with other civilizations, China, Indo-Buddhism, and Europe. These episodes were so transforming that they created and thus reinforced the installation of a double structure in which the new and often more technologically advanced import pushed received native practices into a lower depth of the Japanese cultural unconscious. In Katō’s thinking this meant that the double structure organized life between those who possessed words, as he put it, and those who did not—between a rulership and the ruled, superior and inferior. Early Japanese history, he explained, was marked by this division of intellectual labor in the separation between the political center and the periphery, between those deities associated with the ruling elite and those who were identified with village life. Under these circumstances the powerless developed strategies of the weak that, for Katō, would constitute forms of resistance and opposition. Archaic history taught that disempowerment always meant inaccessibility to language and the necessity to devise a strategy of the weak. Forced to submit to the center, from which culture invariably emanated, especially the newly acquired technologies of culture, the provincial had no other choice but to submit. In Katō’s appropriation of this exemplar, the weak submit but not entirely so and ultimately rely on a number of devices, such as the mask (beshimi), the pattern of speaking through the side of the mouth that would produce different levels of bilabiality and emphases, and frowning. What is important to this argument is the recognition that the weak are not able to speak and must thus appeal to other devices that will relay resistance and opposition. Almost as if he had taken a chapter out of the text of Homi Bhabha, Katō calls attention to the dynamic of imitation, Orikuchi’s conception of motogi, which like the mask, provides the occasion of acting contrary to while imitating the words of the superior. With Orikuchi, Katō explains, this practice of imitation brought associations of opposition, contrariness, and criticism, a little like, I suppose, the weight Bhabha gives to ‘‘mimicry’’ and ‘‘sly civility.’’ In the absence of possessing words and ‘‘talking back,’’ then, imitation relies on bodily gestures that impose a distance from the original, violating but not ‘‘injuring’’ it, to express a form of resistance that does not appear on the surface.24 Katō saw this strategy as a form of resistance that concealed the ‘‘intention of opposition’’ in the gesture of imitation that appeared as an evasion. In this sense he considered the idea of motogi as a ‘‘wound’’ on the body, inasmuch as its sign is a ‘‘shut mouth’’ and a ‘‘covering of the eyes,’’ even though there is the impulse to resist. Yet it is still an expression of ‘‘bravery’’ because it

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is all the weak have available to them as a result of their submission, since they have no words through which to express their intention. Words belong to the ruler, and in postwar Japan this referred not only to the literary censorship of the U.S. Occupation but to the constitution written by foreigners. Hence the only way to register genuine resistance was through the body. Katō, then, envisioned the postwar as simply another instance of a long history in which Japanese were suppressed through the agency of cultural colonization, where voice and word were expropriated from the people who would have no recourse but to express their opposition in silent, bodily gestures. In this way the postwar was an instantiation of the double structure that had held Japan in an iron cage since antiquity. By the same measure the defeat and postwar had already begun to show signs of how Japanese were able to vent their subjugated state and their opposition to it. But the device of the double structure was actually created to grasp Japan’s modernizing experience by demonstrating the existence of a native interiority that, miraculously, had remained immune from the vast transformations of capitalism. In this regard Katō’s theorization resembles Partha Chatterjee’s more recent efforts to show that South Asia was able to articulate an anticolonial nationalism that drew its force from native resources rather than the colonizer, the same place of interiority Katō reserves for Japanese forms of opposition that erupt to overcome the present, whether it is modern society as in 1942 or the current postwar grip on Japanese sensibilities. Yet this tactic is an alibi, since the very claim that Japanese have been dispossessed of words has been belied by Katō’s own text, not to mention a constitution that in every decisive respect has become the expression of contemporary, national sentiment and desire. Through the so-called symbolic emperor and the designation of the subject of the nation as kokumin, the constitution has become a document every bit as Japanese as the Meiji Constitution, whose language may have been originally Japanese but whose form and even content were not. What this alibi allows Katō and others who have followed its logic to affirm is the present, much like those participants in the earlier conference on modernity who discovered the impossibility of overcoming the modern. With Katō the postwar sustains the structure of doubling that itself is simply how Japanese have come to affirm their present. What Katō’s renarrativization has managed to reinforce is, in fact, a postwar settlement designed by the U.S. military occupation to protect the emperor and his institution from war responsibility that would guarantee the existence of both indefinitely. More important, preservation of the imperial institution

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would spare the Japanese from remembering the war and a colonial past completely to open the way for the momentous shift from victimizer to victim that Katō has so ably articulated. If Katō supplied an account that evaded history by appealing to the repetition of a double structure, others in recent years have, in fact, tried to make the same argument by rethinking the history that the postwar has made Japanese forget. While interpreters seek to differentiate Katō from the historical revisionists and the proponents of the new arrogance, arguing that he starts from different premises, what they all share is the conviction that postwar Japan has been a painful record of self-denial and self-deception driven by a ‘‘historical conception of self-oppression’’ ( jigyaku) produced by a mistake that must now be rectified.25 Although he explained that the duration of the postwar continues because Japan has not yet grasped the responsibility for its aggression and ‘‘apologized for this fact,’’ we must recognize that the appeal to a ‘‘twisted’’ and ‘‘mistaken’’ existence requiring resolution through an act of memoration is never far from a strategy that seeks to eliminate the curse of nejire and the stain of pollution at the level of textbook production and teaching history. Where Katō dismisses the war, as such, and starts from the experience of a defeated postwar, revisionists such as the tireless proponent Fujioka Nobukatsu have resorted to slashand-burn tactics to diminish the importance of certain wartime events in the effort to airbrush history and create a ‘‘correct’’ narrative. Behind this strategy is the figure of gomanism, so persistently portrayed by cartoonist Kobayashi Yoshinori and the imperative of haughtiness and arrogance. The almost overnight proliferation of organizations and the avalanche of barely readable publications purportedly demonstrating the enormity of the textbook problem, linked to both Liberal Democratic Party politics and publishers such as Sankei Shinbun and php (Peace, Happiness, Prosperity), disclose the pattern of attack on received accounts of the past and the urgency of finding a more usable version capable of serving the interests of the Japanese nation at this moment of a troubled history. Books about textbooks abound, and the combustible clash over claims of conceptuality matches the outpouring of publications on the meaning of what it meant to be Japanese a generation ago. At the center of this new venture capitalism are people like Kobayashi, Nishio Kanji, Fujioka, and Takahashi Shirō; space permits only the barest sketch of the guiding principles of this campaign, or as it is called in Japan, the Liberalistic Historical View and the vision of one of its formulators, Fujioka Nobukatsu.26 Masquerading behind liberalism, this conception has declared war on 114

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both a historical narrative determined by the Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal and one circulated by the Comintern. The key to this uncommon bonding is the simple assumption that both promote a foreign interest; the war tribunal narrative encouraged a plan of ‘‘brainwashing the Japanese by the US Army of Occupation that held the state responsible for the war,’’ while the Comintern view aimed to discredit Japan’s successful modernization under the emperor. Both, according to Fujioka, converged to overdetermine the production of a historiography that has ‘‘darkened Japan’s history,’’ inviting ‘‘self-oppression’’ and ‘‘poisoning historical education in the postwar and the writing of textbooks.’’ Hence Japanese, as Katō’s complaint reminds us, continued to live the postwar as a deception. The task of a genuine historical education is to bring Japanese back to the experience buried by postwar oppression and self-loathing. Fujioka named this history ‘‘energetic’’ and enumerated the special characteristics of this upbeat version: (1) healthy nationalism, (2) realism, (3) ending ideology, and (4) critiquing bureaucratism (especially those bureaus that had presided over textbook selection). In mapping this new narrative Fujioka and his colleagues have targeted the question of ‘‘comfort women’’ and the rape of Nanjing as episodes that have portrayed Japanese aggression and violence darkly, when in fact the former simply constituted a voluntarily reached contractual arrangement and the latter manifested a policy of self-defense. As pointed out earlier, the issue of Nanjing was recently the subject of a conference in Osaka that declared its numbers exaggerated, an episode that brought little or no commentary in the Japanese press. Virulently antiforeign, Fujioka has also often publicly condemned the aspirations of Koreans living in Japan without citizenship.27 I think we need to explain why so much activity has been poured into revisionist conceptions of history that promise to undo the past and deliver Japanese from an alienated but seemingly endless present, how memory, mourning, and history have conspired to make sure that the postwar will not go away, even though their purpose is to end it. We need not belabor the obvious nationalism energized by historical revision or its undisguised racism, despite the claims of a ‘‘healthy’’ and ‘‘energetic’’ concern for national identity. It is important to recognize that Katō Norihiro and the revisionists invariably attribute Japan’s twisted ‘‘experience’’ and self-loathing narrative to the coercive powers of an army of occupation while they are disavowing either the existence of such a colonizing force in Asia or its power to coerce and bend subject peoples to live another version of a ‘‘twisted’’ and ‘‘self-deceiving’’ history. Yet if we manage to look beyond these most recent disavowals, we will see one of the more recurring anxieties of the prewar japan’s long postwar

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period, when thinkers generally agreed with sociologist and fascist theorist Takada Yasuma on the necessity of the folk to finally free itself from the abstractions of enlightenment thought that estranged the Japanese from their own history, from what he called the ‘‘historical whole.’’ This was, it should be recalled, the principal preoccupation of the Kindai no Chōkoku symposium and explains why so much effort was exercised in resuscitating the enlightenment project in the immediate postwar years. It is precisely this narrative of enlightenment, which Shimizu Ikutarō advised ‘‘forgetting’’ in the 1960s, that manifests Japan’s colonial bondage and twisted history, and which has now invited a new ‘‘haughtiness’’ serving the national interest to return Japanese to their true, unchanging history. Yet we must observe in this move a desire that produces a structure of repetition that admonishes the folk to return to its essence while working to maintain the very colonialism Japanese are being asked to cast off. What other effect could people such as Katō or Fujioka hope to achieve with fantasy narratives whose enunciation calls not for what once was but a history that could have been, now driven by memory of what never was? But a memory propelled by a longing for an absent object merely attests to a fetishization that produces repetition and the subsequent confusion of history with memory and experience. History is not memory, the conservation of the archive; the tendency to identify history and memory is well the sign that our conservative epoch dreams only of the status quo, that it desires no more than what has come and has no interest in the possibility of another history that has been lived and experienced. This possible history is no fantasy of what should have been but, rather, one we might envisage and even aspire to in the future. History, if this term has any sense, is the history of the present and is thus necessarily politicized. It is, I believe, only history if the interventions force moments of critique and make possible the realization of promises transmitted and recovered by tradition. Something of this possibility was disclosed by Imamura Shōhei in his extraordinary History of Postwar Japan As Told by a Barmaid [Nippon sengoshi: Madamu Onboro no seikatsu] (1971). In this brilliant documentary, now a missed moment, Imamura lays hold of a history of the present, the immediate postwar years as lived and experienced by his interlocutor, Onboro, who gradually shows that her everyday life reveals a history vastly different from the publicly evolving narrative of political events marking Japan’s recovery in the 1950s and 1960s. The history of Imamura’s Madam Junky within the postwar era is entirely different from the postwar history of Katō and the revisionist historians. Her life is 116

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one of neither disavowal nor denial but is governed simply by the problem of getting on as best she can, given her circumstances. Onboro is shadowed by her pariah class status, which the director establishes early with shots of an abattoir. But her gender overdetermines the limitations that structure the possibilities that are open to her. Her life and work revolve around the bars and prostitutes serving U.S. military personnel at the Yokosuka naval base. Early in the film Imamura juxtaposes her view concerning the war, defeat, and the immediate postwar against a stunning public scene in which people are shown praying at a shrine, undoubtedly imploring the gods for good fortune in this dark moment of Japan’s history. He asks her how she feels about the war and its ending, whether she is saddened and suffers grief and remorse, against a backdrop of people expressing regret and pleading for godly intercession. Onboro responds cheerfully, saying how glad she is that the war has ended and what a nuisance it had been and expressing the necessity of now getting on with her life. As much as Tomotsu was obsessed with a never-ending postwar and the Occupation’s destruction of the past, Onboro is indifferent to that same experience and the past that led to war and destruction; she sees the postwar and the Occupation as an opportunity for a new start. Much of the film is concerned with how she makes her way into the bar world of Yokosuka, the people, usually American men, she has become involved with, and her aspirations for financial independence and a comfortable life. Imamura emphasizes both her optimism and her energy, expressed continuously by behavior that is both autonomous and independent, despite the obvious fact that she is deriving her livelihood from the Americans. By contrast, Imamura’s portrayal of a kind of ‘‘sanctioned’’ and ‘‘public’’ history centered on the Occupation and Japan’s subsequent recovery under obvious U.S. direction suggests simply a narrative of dependence that will lead to the nightmare of the long postwar that people like Tomotsu would regret and Katō would describe as a ‘‘falsehood’’ (uso), even though it is necessary for maintaining the status quo. Onboro is living off the page, as it were, outside the official narrative of postwar Japan and postwar as Japan, recounting her experiences to the director’s questions, so that her everyday life cumulatively writes a different history. This should not be confused with the ‘‘personal history’’ fad of a few years ago, where people were encouraged to write histories about themselves, like students in composition classes asked to compose a history of their family. Onboro is not writing her history, as such, but recounting her experience of the everyday. This conversation is always punctuated by and punctuating film clips that tell another story about Japanese political society in the japan’s long postwar

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postwar years. There can be no presumption about the relationship between Onboro’s everyday and the general narrative about Japan’s recovery under U.S. military tutelage. The history of her everyday does not constitute a metonymic stand-in for a larger history being written by the new U.S.-Japanese partnership in the Cold War era. Nor is it possible to assume that such experiential histories add up to the larger, sanctioned version. Hence there is no obsessional fear of a postwar that will never end because she does not presume that it is a problem affecting memory and history and that it is anything more than a means of getting people, like herself, back to work and routinized living. This impulse reveals no regret for the destruction of a past, now forgotten, that was made to appear authentic and even traditional. In many ways Onburo continues an existence that class and gender had already assigned to people like her, to whom the postwar now offered newer opportunities for both financial advancement and material comfort that undoubtedly would not have been available before the war. This is not to suggest, by any means, that class and gender no longer stood as roadblocks but only that she was now in a position to exploit a few more opportunities even though she was consigned to a life that war, defeat, and peace would not alter. What she succeeds in disclosing throughout is a sense of great relief and a recognition of the opportunity that the present now offers, as against the deprivations of wartime. Moreover, there is no hint in her discussion that she and her countrymen and -women are living a great deception marked by self-loathing, a distorted, false, and twisted history against which the mimicry of bodily gesture will register resistance, what Katō melodramatically described as an overturning, ‘‘shutting down of society’’ resembling the ‘‘capsizing of a large, transparent bowl.’’ ‘‘The bowl is covered,’’ he explained, ‘‘but the people inside don’t think so.’’ It is merely a case of the ‘‘emperor’s new clothes.’’ And because it is a lie, Japanese do not see it honestly as one.28 With Onboro there is no sense of a deception, of living a lie and not seeing it as such, or of the recognition of a truer reality that somehow has been buried by the military occupation. There is no need to insist that this unhappy state can be terminated if only the distortion and deception are acknowledged. The appearance of honne is a signification that announces this necessity. For her, however, and presumably for Imamura, continuing the postwar has a reality for the rich and the powerful, both Japanese and Americans, while she has seen its beginning as something of a blessing whose end comes when she leaves Japan for San Diego, married to an American sailor. Yet we cannot help thinking that this decision finally frees her from an environment that had held her hostage to both 118

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class and gender, even if it was somewhat ameliorated by the presence of U.S. lifestyles and material culture. Leaving Japan meant ending the postwar for Imamura and, for Onburo, a liberation from the social constraints she had so resourcefully exploited but that finally determined for her the necessity of migrating to the other place—the United States—echoing, unintentionally I suspect, the hero of Shimazaki Tōson’s 1906 novel Hakai [Broken commandment], who is also from the pariah class and decides to leave Meiji Japan for Texas as a solution to his knotted existence. The scene of the postwar, then, opens on a vast site of unevenness in which different histories are being lived. What the director manages to orchestrate is the coexistence of different narratives and temporalities—and especially the experience of everyday life writing its own history that marks a radical difference. Imamura’s barmaid is mercifully free from the fetishized structure of repetitive disavowal that represents Japan as successfully modern while it seeks to portray Japanese as essentially unchanged, as if the latter were incommensurate with the former. Moreover, Imamura, in his decision to use film and the form of the documentary, contrasts sharply with Katō, who ultimately appeals to the novels of established writers as if they were unproblematic and revisionist historians who merely reaffirm the plotline of a familiar historical narrative. With Imamura, the film documentary becomes the proper mode to immerse itself in everyday life, standing in immediate contrast to the ongoing public narrative that punctuates the barmaid’s experience, which will become the official version writers like Katō and Fujioka will later see as mistaken. For Imamura’s barmaid, her everyday life is where the ideological struggles over value are fought and where an open-ended and incomplete present, contradictory, yet multiaccented situation writes its history of difference. As Imamura shows, this history of the present and its difference has nothing to do with the commodified object of revenance Japan’s modernity has incessantly called forth to signify difference. Beyond these pathologic repetitions, we must begin to recognize that the crisis unveiled by a persisting postwar reveals a context that is propitious for such recycling of the past. Above all, it is a crisis of the future that modern capitalist societies such as Japan know incites a constant recycling in a memorial object. If the regime of instantaneity sustaining modern technological media has for effect a sentiment of inexorable loss that restores to the present what seems to escape it, this valorization blocks a real apprehension of the past, of duration, of time that has passed, to weigh heavily on our capacity to envisage the future. japan’s long postwar

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Notes 1 Sandra S. Phillips, Alexandra Monroe, and Daido Moriyama, Daido Moriyama:

Stray Dogs (San Francisco, 1999), 16. 2 Eric Conan and Henri Rousso, Vichy, un passe qui ne passe pas (Paris, 1994). 3 This is one of the arguments of my Overcome by Modernity: History, Culture, and

Community in Interwar Japan (Princeton, 2000). 4 Katō Norihiro, Haisengoron [Since defeat] (Tokyo, 1997), 16–17; Buto Ichiyo, ‘‘‘Ne-

5 6 7

8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19

20 21 22 23 24 25

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jire’ o toku’’ [Explaining the twisted], in Sengoron songi, ed. Kurihara Yukio (Tokyo, 1998), 13–16. Katō, Haisengoron, 18; Buto, ‘‘ ‘Nejire’ o toku,’’ 25–26. Kobayashi Yoshinori, Sensōron (Tokyo, 1998). See H. D. Harootunian, ‘‘Memory, Mourning, and National Morality: Yasukuni Shrine and the Reunion of State and Religion in Postwar Japan,’’ in Nation and Religion, ed. Peter van der Veer and Hartman Lehmann (Princeton, 1999), 144– 60. Louis Althusser, Montesquieu, Rousseau, Mary (London, 1972), 78; see also Homi Bhabha, ed., Nation and Narration (London, 1990), 294, 300, 309–10. Andreas Huyssens, Twilight Memories (New York and London, 1995), 3. Kurihara, Sengoron songi, 9. Ōsawa Masachi, Sengo no shisō kūkan [The space of postwar thought] (Tokyo, 1998), 8–12. Nagatomi Yūichiro, Kindai o koete [Surpassing the modern] (Tokyo, 1984), 2 vols. Gavan McCormick, The Emptiness of Japanese Affluence (Armonk, NY, 1996), 69. Takafusa Nakamura, Lectures on the Modern Japanese Economy (Tokyo, 1994), 308–12. Katō, Haisengoron, 113–221. Ōsawa, Sengo no shisō kūkan, 35–36; Katō, Haisengoron, 156–58. Katō, Haisengoron, 77; see also 17, 18–24; Ōsawa, Sengo no shisō kūkan, 38–39. Katō, Haisengoron, 76–77; also 214. Ibid., and 55; see also Ōgoshi Aiko, ‘‘Zange no neuchi mo nai’’ [Worthless repentence], in Nashonaru histeri-o koete [Surpassing national history], ed. Komori Yōichi and Takahashi Tetsuya (Tokyo, 1998), 125–30. Katō, Haisengoron, 76. Katō Norihiro, Nihon no mushisō (Tokyo, 1999), 16–17. Ibid., 84. Ibid., 261. Ibid., 279–80. I have relied on the following: Takahashi Tetsuya, Sengo sekininron [On postwar responsibility] (Tokyo, 1999), for a more sobering account, esp. 110–30. The literature by members of the ‘‘liberalistis’’ school of historical revision, centered on the tsukurukai, referring to the Society for Creating New History Textbooks, is mountainous and monotonously repetitive. I have consulted Kobayashi Yoshinori, ed., ‘‘Tsukurukai’’ to iu undō ga aru [There is a movement called the ‘‘Creating

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Society’’] (Tokyo, 1998); Nishioka Kanji and Fujioka Nobukatsu, Kokumin no yudan [The negligence of the Japanese people] (Tokyo, 1997); Iwate Kokkai Gi’in ni yoru Rekishi Kyōkasho Mondai no Sokatsu, Rekishi kyōkasho e no gimon [Doubts about history textbooks] (Tokyo, 1997). 26 Tawara Yoshifumi, Kyōkasho kōgeki no shinsō [The truth about textbooks] (Tokyo, 1997), 1–8. In English see, by all means, the pamphlet issued by the Japanese Society for Textbook Reform, The Restoration of a National History (Tokyo, 1998). 27 In Tawara, Kyōkasho kōgeki no shinsō, 38–41. 28 Katō, Nihon no mushisō, 3, 41, 5.

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National Subjectivity and the Uses of Atonement in the Age of Recession

J. Victor Koschmann

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eeply rooted in the culture of Japan’s recession of the 1990s are insistent issues of Japanese war responsibility and compensation, some of which stem from atrocities such as the Nanjing massacre of 1937 and sexual slavery connected with the so-called comfort stations operated by the Japanese military during the Asia Pacific War. Centrally at issue in most of these cases are demands for Japanese apology and compensation. In the course of the decade, significant connections have emerged between issues of war guilt and the question of Japanese nationalism. These are manifest especially in what has come to be called the debate on the historical subject (rekishi shutai ronsō), which was touched off by literary critic Katō Norihiro’s publication in January 1995 of an essay titled ‘‘Haisengoron’’ [Since defeat], and whose various manifestations continue to the present.1 Others have already written in English about this essay and the ensuing controversy.2 My focus will be on Katō’s argument that in order to offer an authentic apology for the 20 million (non-Japanese) Asian victims of the Pacific War, it is first necessary to form a national subject (kokumin shutai ) via the process of mourning the 3 million Japanese war dead. This formulation raises important questions regarding the elements and dynamics of apology.3 It calls to mind a genealogy of similar arguments in the past, as social reformers and political leaders have repeatedly announced the need to construct a subject, often via something like what Sheldon Garon has called campaigns of ‘‘moral suasion’’ (kyōka), and also raises issues related to the logic of politics and the dialectics of otherness.4 Most important, Katō’s argument suggests that in the recession era in Japan even the perceived need to apologize to

other Asians for Japanese aggression and atrocities can be appropriated as the pretext for national mobilization. Arguments like Katō’s appear to reveal deepset concern among intellectuals and other elites regarding a perceived decline in national power and prestige as a result of the 1990s recession and, in a longer-range and more pragmatic vein, can be understood as efforts to ‘‘settle accounts’’ with Asia on the issue of war guilt as a necessary step toward cultivating a more ‘‘ordinary’’ military, as well as political and economic, role for Japan in international affairs. To guage the full impact on the Japanese public of the decade’s repeated revelations and demands for apology, they need to be framed against the background of a plethora of other disasters, incidents, and embarrassments that have occurred since the death of the Shōwa emperor. In regard to the sexual slavery issue, for example, activism among Korean and Japanese women against commercial sex tours to Korea (the so-called kisaeng kankō) in the 1970s and 1980s was gradually expanded to include the issue of the wartime ‘‘comfort stations,’’ so that when the Japanese emperor died in 1989, demonstrations were held in Korea against the sending of an official Korean delegation to the funeral. During South Korean president Roh Tae Wu’s visit to Japan in May 1990, the new Japanese emperor, Akihito, expressed ‘‘intense sorrow’’ for wrongs inflicted on Korea, and Prime Minister Kaifu Toshiki added his version of an apology on that occasion as well. Then, in June 1990, the Korean Comfort Women Problem Resolution Council —also known as the Korean Council for the Women Drafted for Military Sexual Slavery by Japan (Teitaikyō)—issued six demands to the Japanese government, the centerpiece of which was public apology, supported by acknowledgment of all the facts, full disclosure, a memorial for the victims, compensation, and incorporation into historical education.5 Meanwhile, Japanese stock prices fell in February 1990, soon after the general election, and then a major plunge began. Newspapers filled with reports of securities scams perpetrated by major brokerage houses, and suspicion was soon directed at not only private firms but the Ministry of Finance itself. By the fall it had become clear that Japan’s stock market ‘‘bubble’’ was bursting, and by early 1991 land prices were falling as well. Among the factors in the stock market decline had been interest rate hikes, spurred in part by rising oil prices as a result of the August 1990 crisis in the Persian Gulf. As explained below, the Gulf War brought a further series of embarrassments for the Japanese government as politicians and bureaucrats struggled to resolve the apparent contradiction between Japan’s constitunational subjectivity and atonement

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tional commitment to pacifism and demands from the U.S.-led coalition. It is especially significant that the Gulf War crisis came in the wake of renewed interest in and reflection upon Japan’s militarist past that had been stimulated by the numerous television and other retrospectives on the Shōwa period (1926–89) that had accompanied the death of the Shōwa emperor. Under the pressure of new revelations in the early 1990s regarding official involvement in wartime sexual slavery, Japanese representatives were repeatedly moved to issue apologies, which former victims and their supporters considered inadequate or otherwise objectionable. A general apology to all involved countries accompanied the Japanese report on the ‘‘military comfort-woman’’ system that was issued on July 6, 1992, and on August 4, 1993, on the occasion of a supplementary government report that for the first time admitted coercion and deception in the recruitment of comfort women, Chief Cabinet Secretary Kōno Yōhei offered the Japanese government’s ‘‘deepest apology and sense of self-reproach to all the women for their irreparable mental and physical suffering and injuries.’’ 6 Nevertheless, the issue has remained pending because of the absence of what plaintiffs consider to be frank acceptance by the government of the historical facts, a sincere and comprehensive apology, compensation, and other signs of good faith. By mid-decade the combination of Japan’s worst postwar recession with a yen that was soaring to new heights appeared to be causing the political system to crumble as well. Liberal Democratic Party (ldp) rule had been brought to an end in 1993, but by early 1994, reformist prime minister Hosokawa Morihiro had resigned under suspicion of irregular financial dealings after only eight months in office; the next prime minister, Hata Tsutomu, resigned in June after only two months. Public confidence in government as well as the economy seemed to be declining steadily. At the end of the year, a New York Times/ Tokyo Broadcasting System poll showed that only 25 percent of Japanese believed that Japan would ‘‘dominate the world economy in the next century,’’ compared with 53 percent three years earlier.7 If that were not enough, in mid-January 1995, a massive earthquake decimated the city of Kōbe, eventually subjecting the Japanese government, construction companies, and Japanese engineers to criticism for corruption and corner cutting. Then, in March, the religious cult Aum Shinrikyō carried out the first of several suspected poison gas attacks on the Tokyo subway system, and the subsequent investigation dominated news media for the remainder of the year. In midyear, observances honoring the fiftieth anniversary of Japan’s defeat in World War II provided an appropriate 124

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and irresistible occasion for raising issues of war responsibility. The Japanese prime minister—now Socialist leader Murayama Tomoichi—in coalition with the conservative ldp, declared that Japan had brought about great suffering through its ‘‘colonial rule and aggression’’ and offered his ‘‘heartfelt apology.’’ However, after intense political infighting among factions, parties, and extraparliamentary pressure groups such as the Bereaved Families Association, on June 9, 1995, the Japanese National Diet was able to pass only an ambiguous resolution that declared the need to ‘‘humbly learn from past mistakes’’ but avoided any mention of ‘‘aggressive war’’ and offered no clear apology to Japan’s war victims.8 September 1995 brought the shocking news that three U.S. servicemen in Okinawa had been charged with raping a twelve-year-old girl, leading to widespread protests against the U.S. military bases that dominate Okinawa prefecture. Popular anti-Americanism heightened by the Okinawa rape case merged in some cases with growing conservative outrage over ‘‘masochistic’’ school textbooks that were supposedly too critical in their treatment of Japanese history. In July 1995, for example, University of Tokyo education professor Fujioka Nobukatsu, German literature specialist Nishio Kanji, and others had formed the Study Group for a Liberal View of History (Jiyūshugi Shikan Kenkyūkai), and in January 1996 more or less the same group formed the Japanese Society for History Textbook Reform (Atarashii Rekishi Kyōkasho o Tsukuru Kai). Both organizations seek to promote a new, more self-congratulatory national historical narrative. The latter, especially, seeks ‘‘a complete overhaul of history education in Japan, to be brought about by history textbook reform.’’ The organization attacks textbooks, especially middle-school texts, that ‘‘depict the nationstate formed during the Meiji Restoration as . . . evil . . . and condemn all of Japan’s modern history, for that matter, as a succession of criminal acts.’’ As an example, they charge that the textbooks’ ‘‘widespread adoption of the irresponsible, unsubstantiated argument that the ‘military comfort women’ were forcibly transported to war zones can be traced to this same perverse, masochistic historical view.’’ 9 Publication in 1997 of Iris Chang’s The Rape of Nanking and other revelations provided further grist for the textbook reform society’s reactionary mill and kept war-related issues in the Japanese media for the rest of the decade, alongside reports of economic woes and political embarrassments. As noted above, Katō published ‘‘Haisengoron’’ near the midpoint of the decade, in January 1995, so consideration of his proposals paralleled the national subjectivity and atonement

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events of 1995 and later. However, in assessing his essay’s impact we must realize that at least among intellectuals the logic and structure of Katō’s argument were hardly new. As early as 1875, Meiji enlightenment thinker Fukuzawa Yukichi had argued, in a manner broadly analogous to Katō’s, that Japan’s advancement in the modern world was contingent upon formation of a (national) subject. According to Fukuzawa, the ‘‘spirit of civilization’’ that Japan sought was ultimately national rather than individual: ‘‘Civilization should not be discussed in terms of an individual but only in terms of an entire nation.’’ The problem was that ‘‘in Japan there is a government but no nation.’’ 10 Thus an independent nation—a national subject— had to be constructed before the full spirit of civilization could be acquired. At the same time, since a nation had to be built from below, the construction process had to begin with individuals: ‘‘We shall achieve national independence only after we achieve personal independence.’’ 11 In effect, pursuit of civilization had to be premised upon the simultaneous formation of a national subject and individual subjects through mobilization and enlightenment of the populace. Toward the end of the Asia Pacific War, political scientist Maruyama Masao retrieved Fukuzawa’s problematic of subject-formation, recalling that Fukuzawa ‘‘could never conceive of national independence in the absence of individual autonomy’’ because national independence had to be ‘‘mediated through the inner independence of personalities.’’ Soon after the war, in 1946, Maruyama himself posited the need for subject formation as the criterion of meaningful social change. He argued that the ‘‘establishment of a modern personality’’ ought to be top priority in the postwar era, because only such a personality/subject could lead Japan to democracy.12 Maruyama was not alone; a wide range of ideologues argued in the 1940s that in order to complete the democratic revolution, it was necessary to construct a modern, democratic subject through mobilization and education, and until that subject was dominant in the Japanese population, democracy would remain an incomplete project. He and other enlightenment ideologues and their epigones returned repeatedly in the postwar period to Fukuzawa’s notions of national/individual subject formation in the context of their concern about citizenship and political participation.13 In between Fukuzawa and Maruyama, not only liberal nationalists but thinkers and activists further to the left repeatedly expressed concern about the apparent absence in Japan of the modern subjects (individual, communal, national, political, bourgeois, and proletarian) that would be capable of carrying—indeed, embodying—progressive social forces and bringing 126

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them to culmination. Often they tended virtually to fetishize the subject as an end rather than a means to other ends such as civilization, socialist revolution, or modernity. A case in point is the position adopted by Fukumoto Kazuo, a leader in the prewar communist movement. In opposition to the broad, united front strategy of Yamakawa Hitoshi, who argued, in effect, that the ‘‘proletarian subject’’ would eventually emerge piecemeal in the course of joint action among elements of the front, Fukumoto propounded that the party ought to give top priority to forging a theoretically correct revolutionary vanguard (subject) that would take charge of the revolution. That is, in his tendency to prioritize subject formation over immediate revolutionary action, Fukumoto shared the outlook on social change common to Fukuzawa, Maruyama, and a variety of others in modern Japan. Yet fetishization of the subject is not a disease only of the left. In a speech in Karuizawa in 1985, conservative prime minister Nakasone Yasuhiro reacted to widespread calls for economic and cultural ‘‘internationalization’’ by shifting attention to the Japanese themselves: until the Japanese consolidated their own identity, they would be unable to interact productively with others. He repeated these sentiments often. In 1986, in the same speech in which he caused an international incident by attributing the supposedly lower average ‘‘intelligence’’ of Americans to the high percentage of ‘‘Blacks, Puerto Ricans, and Mexicans’’ in the United States, he observed, ‘‘In order to advance as an international state, it is very important for us to know something about Japan itself. In other words, it is often called identity, the discourse on identity. If we do not know ourselves, it will be impossible to make comparisons with other countries.’’ 14 Indeed, Nakasone was so enthusiastic about consolidating a self-aware Japanese subject that he saw to the establishment in May 1987 of the International Research Center for Japanese Studies (Nichibunken) in Kyoto and encouraged the mobilization of intellectuals toward the project of ‘‘studying Japan.’’ Similarly, as Garon has shown, conservative government officials and concerned leaders of private organizations in modern Japan have repeatedly fostered campaigns of ‘‘moral suasion’’ designed to ‘‘mold the minds’’ of the people. Implicit in many of these campaigns is the formation of a unified national will, or subject, which, it is hoped, will motivate behavior in support of national or institutional goals. Katō Norihiro’s contribution to the Japanese discourse on the historical subject, set forth as ‘‘Haisengoron,’’ is anything but a ringing manifesto on the apology question; it is vague, elusive, and long-winded. But eventually he national subjectivity and atonement

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gets around to his tentative call for action: ‘‘What I am getting at here, in a nutshell, is whether it might be possible to put mourning for Japan’s 3 million war dead first, and find in that mourning process a way to mourn, and apologize to, the 20 million Asian war dead.’’ 15 He clarified this somewhat in August 1996: ‘‘What is necessary, first, is for Japan to become a society capable of apologizing, to construct a subject of apology. The method of doing that is none other than to overcome our split personality.’’ 16 Katō’s reference to Japan’s split personality requires some explanation. In ‘‘Haisengoron’’ he argues that Japan’s political identity since the Pacific War has been deeply split between those who have defended the constitution as the ‘‘most universalistic and radical’’ document of its kind and those who have persistently sought to revise article 9 and other aspects of the constitution so as to allow Japan to be an ‘‘ordinary nation’’ capable of employing force if necessary.17 Referring to these contending forces as Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Katō argues that together they constitute a kind of split national personality, which makes straightforward apologies for the Pacific War impossible. In effect, Dr. Jekyll apologizes, but then Mr. Hyde comes forward and calls the Nanjing massacre a frame-up or otherwise contradicts Jekyll’s sentiments. The result is perpetual failure to apologize in a manner that inspires confidence. For example, Prime Minister Hosokawa’s 1993 apology was followed by a statement by the director of the Defense Agency to the effect that the 1946 ‘‘peace Constitution’’ should be reconsidered, and then in August 1994 Prime Minister Hata Tsutomu’s minister of justice expressed his view that the so-called Nanjing massacre was nothing but a ‘‘frame-up.’’ Katō believes that only through a process of mourning Japan’s own war dead can such representatives of Mr. Hyde be pacified, thereby healing the national schizophrenia and making international apologies seem plausible and trustworthy.18 What, more precisely, does Katō mean when he says that the nation should mourn (tomurau, itamu) Japan’s own war dead? In a clarification published early in 1999, he claims not to mean any sort of action that ‘‘smacks of ritual.’’ Rather, he seems to be after a certain attitude of respectful regard: ‘‘I am referring . . . to how each postwar Japanese is able to confront (mukiau) these war dead, how they are capable of thinking about the dead. In French, what I mean is considérer (or envisager) des morts de la guerre, in that these words have the sense of to think about (kangaeru), respect (omonjiru), or confront (mukiau).’’ He explains that according to conventional postwar values (sengo kachi ), promoted especially by the progressives, the Pacific War must be rejected as a ‘‘bad’’ war, and as a result the Japanese who died in that war 128

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are ignored. In the meantime, those who for family or other reasons are inclined to mourn them have in reaction turned toward the extremism of what Katō calls the ‘‘Yasukuni logic,’’ that is, communalistic jingoism on the prewar model, as typified in the mentality associated with Yasukuni Shrine. Thus, in Katō’s view, postwar progressives are to blame for the prevalence of Yasukuni-type extremism. Therefore Katō claims that it is partly to sever the roots of such extremism that he calls for progressives to join in honoring the Japanese war dead. This would supposedly undercut Yasukuni logic and allow an apology to be made to Asian countries without being immediately voided by a conservative rejoinder.19 In other words, in Katō’s scheme, national subject formation amounts essentially to an effort to induce, especially among progressives, a certain regard, or respectful attitude, toward Japan’s own war dead (principally soldiers of the empire, but civilian victims as well). As such, if carried out, it could be viewed as one of a series of ‘‘campaigns’’ that since the early twentieth century have sought through ‘‘moral suasion’’ (Garon’s term) to instill attitudes favorable to state policy or national well-being as interpreted by government officials and/or private ideologues. One is reminded of the early postwar enlightenment in which Maruyama Masao, Ōtsuka Hisao, and others called for a ‘‘national subject’’ on the model of the ‘‘modern personality’’ called for by Maruyama or the ‘‘modern human type’’ (kindaiteki ningen ruikei ) expounded by Ōtsuka. Ōtsuka was preoccupied with how to transform popular mentality so as to constitute a ‘‘democratic’’ political subject. In 1946 he wrote, ‘‘My principal concern . . . is the cultivation of the kind of political leadership (i.e., subject) that our future in this country demands. I am convinced that a most essential precondition for its growth is in the human factor. . . . As long as the people hold to forms of thought and behavior that are traditional, feudal or what Marx called ‘Asiatic,’ our democracy will be no more than a shell of structure with no soul.’’ 20 Even as late as 1963 he insisted that ‘‘only through discovering the ways in which the people’s ideal interests and their value orientation can be remolded will it be possible to modernize and democratize our society, to give life to those formal structures of modern democracy.’’ 21 Although at one level Katō seems to want to change ‘‘postwar values,’’ which presumably have pervaded a large portion of the population, he is also specifically targeting the views of the ‘‘progressives’’ (kakushin jin’ei, kakushin seiryoku, goken-ha). Obviously the kind of campaign he contemplates would vary considerably in scale depending on which group is deemed more crucial. But even a campaign aimed at ‘‘progressive intellecnational subjectivity and atonement

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tuals’’ would have to be national in scope and, regardless of its ostensive purpose, would have clear implications regarding the consolidation of Japanese nationalism. Philosopher Takahashi Tetsuya responded to Katō in March 1995 that rather than trying to wipe out Japan’s national shame, it might be more productive for Japanese to remain vulnerable to the war memories embraced by former Japanese army sex slaves and other Asian victims and to continue to be shamed by their gaze. Such a course would ‘‘open up decisively more important ethical and also political possibilities for this country and for us, its citizens.’’ Evoking Emmanuel Levinas, Takahashi observed that the philosopher ‘‘finds the fragile possibility of ‘ethics’ in the era of the holocaust in the ‘shame’ engendered by the gaze encountered when looking into the face of the ‘other,’ of the ‘stranger, the widow and the orphan’—the face that cries out for justice in the midst of the misery of history.’’ For Takahashi, ‘‘That consciousness of shame is the first step toward an awakening to one’s ethical responsibility.’’ 22 In reply Katō pointed out what appears to be a paradox in Takahashi’s reasoning in that while Takahashi, like Katō, seems to want to overcome communalistic nationalism, he unwittingly reinforces the ‘‘communal’’ (kyōdōteki ) composition of postwar society in his ‘‘moralistic’’ call for Japanese nationals to feel perpetually guilty for the war crimes of an earlier generation. In Katō’s view, by appealing in this manner to an unexamined, naturalistic sense of communal morality, Takahashi obscures the capacity of each individual to make independent judgments. Instead, therefore, Katō argues for the values of what he calls a nonmoral form of sociality, which is related to modern publicity (kōkyōsei ), by which he seems to mean public association mediated by modern individualism and autonomous choice. To illustrate such values, Katō refers to Hannah Arendt’s stance in her debate with Gershom Scholem over her essay ‘‘Eichmann in Jerusalem,’’ published in the New Yorker in 1963. Whereas Scholem had wanted Arendt to feel sympathy for other Jews based on her membership in their community, Arendt had employed a light, somewhat detached tone that according to Katō exemplifies the personal autonomy and objectivity of modern sociality.23 In the spirit of Levinas’s emphasis on preserving difference, Takahashi also questioned repeatedly Katō’s insistence that Japan’s own war dead must be mourned first: The biggest problem . . . is his notion that we should consolidate our identity as ‘‘Japanese’’ prior to relations with the ‘‘other.’’ He says that in order to meet

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the ‘‘other’’ there must first be a ‘‘self ’’; in order to apologize we must first construct ‘‘we Japanese’’; in order to confront the ‘‘20 million Asian dead,’’ we must first confront ‘‘our own 3 million dead.’’ . . . But how can a nation that in a war of aggression has caused the deaths of 20 million (indeed, some recently contend that 30 million were killed in China alone) get away with forming its own identity prior to encountering, confronting, and being ‘‘interrogated, judged, and denounced’’ by them? . . . One should rather say that if we do not first confront the Asian dead, we will never be able to construct [the subject called] ‘‘we Japanese.’’ 24

Despite the cogency of Takahashi’s argument, it is nevertheless significant that his alternative approach also idealizes a certain kind of national subject (‘‘we Japanese’’), one of whose attributes would probably be heightened (albeit ‘‘enlightened’’) nationalism. One of Katō’s sharpest critics, Ōgoshi Aiko, also focuses on his reluctance to confront directly the victims of Japan’s war in Asia, but attributes that reluctance to a nineteenth-century view of history and the state. In commenting on the Katō-Takahashi exchange, Ōgoshi remarks, In contrast to Takahashi, Katō avoids becoming directly involved with the living witnesses who embody the reality of history. That is because he does not expect history to appear in the form of an accusation that implicates his own particularistic existence. In his view, history should rather manifest itself in the memory of communities such as the state and ethnic nation (minzoku), and thus he assumes that he can be involved in history only as a citizen of the state or as a member of the nation. . . . It is clear that Katō’s argument is based on the modern, Hegelian view of history that finds the meaning of subjectivity in self-consciousness of one’s historical existence.25

Ōgoshi implies that for Katō a Hegelian framework is necessary as a means of rehistoricizing postwar consciousness, whose own historicity was usurped by the U.S. imposition of an alien constitution. In doing so she also implicitly highlights his similarity to older Japanese conservatives such as Etō Jun, whom Katō criticized earlier in his literary career: According to [Katō], Japan’s postwar era is merely a continuum of abstract time that lacks historical consciousness. That is because postwar Japan took the Occupation-imposed Constitution as its starting point, and therefore failed to develop the body, or essence (karada), of a nation-state. Not to be formed as a nation-state is, to Katō, the same as not having any history. . . .

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Katō insists that because of its ‘‘split subject’’ Japan ‘‘cannot as a nation ever become a subject that makes history.’’ Therefore, the Japanese, who have no history themselves, are also incapable of confronting the living witnesses of history.26

She argues that the Cold War structure allowed postwar Japanese to continue to embrace their victim complex that they acquired toward the end of the Asia Pacific War; therefore, conversely, it was only when that structure had largely collapsed that, in a still ‘‘disheveled’’ state, they were driven out into the real world. At more or less the same time, they were forced to confront their own responsibility by being faced with living witnesses and victims of a modern sex crime. In such a situation no narrative of victimization could protect the Japanese people from indictment. Referring to Japan’s entire modern period, Ōgoshi asserts that the Hegelian project of constructing ‘‘the historical subject of the nation-state’’ had never really succeeded in modern Japan precisely because the national subject it fostered was the by-product of European and U.S. colonialism and was therefore based on the victimization of others. Indeed, in her view, it was the Kyoto school of philosophers that undertook the task of criticizing the Meiji philosophy of history and replacing it with the ‘‘distorted’’ construction of an aggressive state premised on victim consciousness.27 Again implicitly invoking Levinas, Ōgoshi argues forcefully that Japanese womens’ approach to the former sex slaves has been unencumbered by Katō’s ‘‘a priori concepts of ‘the Korean former comfort women’’’ and unmediated by the ‘‘illusion of the nation-state’’—the same nation-state that, while demanding so much of women, has consistently failed to protect them. We are provided with the historical lesson that it was competition among nineteenth-century nation-states that led to the emergence of the twentieth as the ‘‘century of war and violence.’’ Awareness of this fact is especially keen among the women who were the victims of such war and violence, including sexual violence. We women of the aggressor country cannot avoid war responsibility, but when it comes to prosecuting crimes of state and sexual violence we are entirely capable of pursuing collective struggle that transcends the state.28

Such women, Ōgoshi adds, are not taken in by Katō’s yearning for national subject formation. It appears that the effect of Katō’s proposal might be to help consolidate 132

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the Japanese nation as a single, unitary subject that, in the first place, would exclude any who do not share a certain mystical relationship to ‘‘Japan’s’’ war dead (Okinawans, resident Koreans, Chinese, etc.) and thus cannot identify with the nation through that medium, and second, would situate and ultimately utilize for national purposes that subject’s ‘‘Others,’’ such as the former sex slaves and other Asians. Héléne Cixous is eloquent on this process of dialectical domestication and incorporation: What is the ‘‘Other’’? If it is truly the ‘‘other,’’ there is nothing to say; it cannot be theorized. The ‘‘other’’ escapes me. It is elsewhere, outside: absolutely other. It doesn’t settle down. But in History, of course, what is called ‘‘other’’ is an alterity that does settle down, that falls into the dialectical circle. It is the other in a hierarchically organized relationship in which the same is what rules, names, defines, and assigns ‘‘its’’ other. With the dreadful simplicity that orders the movement Hegel erected as a system, society trots along before my eyes reproducing to perfection the mechanism of the death struggle: the reduction of a ‘‘person’’ to a ‘‘nobody’’ to the position of ‘‘other’’—the inexorable plot of racism.29

Katō’s sutured national subject is apparently intended to strengthen national identity and encourage political unity, if not unanimity, in regard to the Asia Pacific War, facilitating a genuine apology to the 20 million Asian war victims and eventually bringing about true reconciliation. But is that how politics—even ‘‘politics’’ in the impressionistic sense evoked by Katō— works? Identity can only be formed differentially: ‘‘Every identity is relational and [thus] . . . the condition of existence of every identity is the affirmation of a difference, the determination of an ‘other’ that is going to play the role of a ‘constitutive outside.’’’ Formation of a ‘‘we’’ requires a ‘‘them,’’ often leading to the antagonism between ‘‘friend’’ and ‘‘enemy’’ that is the fundamental condition of politics.30 If that is so, the domestic unity that Katō seeks would most likely entail the relocation of the frontier between friend and foe, such that rather than dividing progressives from conservatives within Japan it would now divide the newly unified Japanese from their Asian Others. In accord with the age-old pattern, domestic political opposition would have been projected onto a foreign Other, creating a new binary between insiders and outsiders. Would this not make a sincere apology less rather than more likely? The actual consolidation of a Japanese national subject not only would lead to a narrower and more insular conception of Japanese nationality but national subjectivity and atonement

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would also vastly reduce the critical leverage of former sex slaves and other outsiders who call for justice. Indeed, to the extent that pressure from such outsiders would reinforce further the unity and self-assuredness of the nascent Japanese national subject, it would be functional in preserving unity. In effect, the former victims of Japan’s war machine would be domesticated and made part of the system by which the Japanese national subject continually reproduces and enhances itself. They would no longer be strangers with the capacity to generate profound unease and political dissension but would be forced into the position of Japan’s others, defined and delimited by their dialectical role in a solipsistic national history. In the absence of that unease and dissension, it would become more difficult to catalyze unpleasant memories among Japanese and destabilize their ‘‘victim complexes’’ regarding the war. Of course, the above scenario presumes that the task of national subject formation could actually be accomplished via the sort of mourning Katō advocates, but that is unlikely. What then? Is it true, as Katō implies, that the Japanese nation must be the agent—the subject—of apology? In fact, it appears to be generally accepted internationally that the government represents the nation, and only a government leader is formally qualified to make a binding apology. Of course, as Takahashi points out, the idea that the government represents all the people is not unproblematical,31 but in order to get an apology on the record, thereby rendering it ‘‘official, binding, and collective,’’ there is no substitute for the head of state or prime minister.32 The same applies in the case of compensation. That would be true whether or not the apology is preceded by a sea change in Japanese attitudes toward Japan’s own war dead. In short, it would appear that national subject formation, as conceived by Katō, is not necessarily related to the issuance of a clear and unambiguous, binding apology. Moreover, organizations representing the former sex slaves are unlikely to accept anything less than a formal, government apology. As noted above, the Korean council has consistently demanded that the Japanese government reveal all relevant documentation, ‘‘recognize its war crimes, apologize to its victims, provide compensation, and punish those responsible for military sex slavery.’’ In other words, ‘‘The Korean Council has focused its attentions directly on the Japanese government’’ as the subject of apology.33 It is surely true that so long as the Japanese political situation is unstable and Japan lacks a strong government able to carry out clear policy initiatives, it will remain difficult for the government to issue such an apology. But that 134

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is a strictly political problem and needs to be dealt with politically. At the same time, some elements in the government and major political parties are eager to sidestep the issue by depoliticizing it and handing it over to private citizens of ‘‘the nation.’’ For example, in August 1994 Japanese prime minister Murayama Tomoichi announced his Plan of Exchange for Peace and Friendship, and the same year a government subcommittee stated, The Japanese government has responded sincerely from the perspectives of international law and foreign relations through the San Francisco Treaty, peace treaties between the countries involved, and other treaties to the problems of compensation for foreign labor, the draft, and the problem of military sexual slavery. However, from a humanistic point of view, we will encourage the broader participation of the people to raise funds and distribute them to victims. The government will cooperate with this activity.34

Then, in mid-1995, University of Tokyo law professor Ōnuma Yasuaki, some conservative party politicians, and others fostered the formation of the Asian Women’s Friendship and Peace Foundation, or Asia Women’s Fund, whose purpose has been to accept contributions from private Japanese citizens and organizations to be paid out as reparations to those former comfort women who agree to accept them. However, these moves have been widely interpreted as an attempt to shift responsibility for compensation away from the government. Private contributions to this fund have been far below expectations, in part because many Japanese who would otherwise be willing to contribute refuse to do so because they believe the government is shirking its own responsibility to pay compensation. No doubt some potential contributors also have been influenced by victims in Korea, the Philippines, Taiwan, and other countries who refuse to accept such ‘‘sympathy’’ money. In any case it is obvious that the movement to institute a private fund at the level of the nation rather than the state is the practical counterpart to Katō’s position that the subject of apology must be a unified national subject. Both Katō and the proponents of the private fund are attempting to mobilize the people of the nation in response to the demand for an apology. But if the government can issue a binding apology in the absence of a campaign, what is the private fund campaign’s true purpose? One can only speculate that if the campaign should succeed, it would enhance national identity and unity in addition to providing satisfaction to at least some of the former sex slaves; if it should fail, as seems to be the case, it would at least have helped deflect criticism from the government. national subjectivity and atonement

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If the misfired Asia Women’s Fund represents one element of the government’s alibi for not squarely confronting the need for an official apology, then Katō’s unrealistic call for formation of a national subject of apology might provide a different sort of alibi for the nation. That is, if Katō were to succeed in convincing a substantial segment of the Japanese people that a sincere, authentic apology can be issued only after formation of a national subject via ‘‘mourning,’’ the people’s failure adequately to mourn and, thereby, to form such a subject would provide a ready explanation for why an effective apology is not forthcoming. Indeed, Katō’s conception of mourning as the instilling of a certain attitude of respect or consideration is sufficiently vague to preclude any objective determination on whether or not a national subject has been formed, and if so, to what extent. In the absence of such a determination, Katō’s campaign would never be completed, and an apology would be deferred indefinitely. In considering the implications of that indefinite deferral, one is again reminded of a direct parallel in the early postwar period, when Maruyama and Ōtsuka were espousing a new national/individual subject in the form of a ‘‘modern human type,’’ or a ‘‘modern personality’’ that was autonomous, responsible, and self-reflective. So long as such a personality type was considered prerequisite to progressive social change, which included democratic revolution and confrontation with war guilt, the failure of that type to become predominant in society provided, conversely, a ready explanation for Japanese failure to confront war guilt. Honda Shūgo, a postwar literary critic, put it clearly: ‘‘The lack of [Japanese] consciousness regarding war responsibility is the result of our failure to establish a modern ego.’’ 35 By positing the need for national subject formation (a modern ego) as a prerequisite for apology, Katō has, to borrow imagery from Cheshire Calhoun, drawn attention to the ‘‘social determinants of moral ignorance’’ and thus released people from responsibility. That is, he has ‘‘made publicly available for self-conscious wearing’’ the identity of a people incapable of forming themselves into a coherent national subject and, thus, also incapable of making a sincere and binding apology.36 Their inability to become a national subject releases them from the need to apologize. If so, it is no wonder that Katō’s arguments have attracted considerable attention and admiration. Provocatively, Ōgoshi ascribes Katō’s motivation to his membership in an elite group of student protesters of the late-1960s, specifically those who led the massive strikes and demonstrations carried out under the jointstruggle committees, or Zenkyōtō:

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Most likely, [Katō] secretly wants modern Japan . . . to settle accounts in its distorted relations with Asia—which would amount to ‘‘abandoning Asia’’ (datsu-A)—and reconstruct the nation-state anew on the foundation of a historical subject. No doubt, despite the protests of a younger cohort, that is also the aspiration of most members of the Zenkyōtō generation who have now wormed their way into the power centers of Japan as a great economic power. That might explain the return of the ghost of Hegel.37

More important, perhaps, than Katō’s own motivations are the implications for a wider public of the goals she ascribes to him. What would it mean for Japan to ‘‘reconstruct the nation-state on the basis of a new historical subject’’? As suggested above, when Katō was writing the essays that touched off the debate in 1994–95, there were plenty of economic, political, and social reasons to favor ‘‘reconstruction.’’ Throughout the 1990s, influential opinion journals were filled with proposals for reform of virtually all the institutional pillars of Japan’s postwar system. The main reason, of course, was the bursting of the bubble of economic speculation that characterized the late 1980s and the subsequent recession during which failures—institutional, political, legal, and moral—proliferated and the need for fundamental change began to seem obvious. Yet Ōgoshi’s reference to reconstruction—especially of the nation-state— seems potentially to point beyond the recession in the narrow sense to the debate in the 1990s over Japan’s role in the Persian Gulf War. In the early period after the invasion of Kuwait on August 2, 1990, the Japanese supported United Nations Security Council resolutions against Iraq but clearly hoped that a peaceful settlement could be reached. The emergence of a clear crisis set off urgent discussions in Japan, which initially resulted in a government decision to contribute $4 billion, divided between the U.S.led coalition and the other countries in the region. The United States, however, was displeased with that level of support and pressured Japan to do more. The response of the Kaifu administration was to propose the United Nations Peace Cooperation Bill, which attempted to avoid constitutional issues while satisfying the United States and its allies. Basically it called for the establishment of a peacekeeping force that would be separate from the Self-Defense Forces and restricted to noncombat duties. In fact this satisfied neither the pacifists nor the conservatives in the Japanese political arena, and the bill was rejected by the Diet. After war broke out in January 1991, the government caused more dissension by announcing its intent to

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contribute an additional $9 billion to the multinational force, but despite political conflict, this measure was passed in February. In sum the war presented Japan with challenges and embarrassments that in some ways equaled those caused by financial scandal and the onset of recession. Politics in Japan was thrown into turmoil by the first major international crisis of the post–cold war era. Debate over Japanese participation in the gulf coalition quickly turned into the theater of the absurd and created a classic case of immobilism in the Japanese political system. Foreign policy issues that had been pointedly and purposefully evaded for decades as a means of maintaining domestic political consensus now had to be confronted and new policies devised if Japan was to respond in a way befitting its new self-confidence. Most fundamental was the issue of collective security.38

It might be significant, along with other factors, that Katō seems to have written ‘‘Haisengoron’’ with the aim of responding somewhat belatedly to an internationally publicized statement composed by a group of Japanese intellectuals to protest Japan’s contribution to the Gulf War. The letter was based on discussions among about fifty writers who attended a symposium in Tokyo on February 9, 1991, and a version of their statement was subsequently published in the New York Times. Forty-two participants signed the first part, which read, ‘‘I oppose any contribution by the Japanese state to the Gulf War.’’ Sixteen signed the second part, which was more controversial: The postwar Japanese Constitution states that the Japanese people ‘‘renounce war.’’ This provision has been maintained by the spontaneous choice of the Japanese people, and not as a result of coercion by any other country. It is premised on the Japanese peoples’ feelings of regret for fighting World War II as if it were the ‘‘last war,’’ and especially for causing harm to other nations of Asia. In addition, we believe that this provision expresses the hopes and prayers of the Western peoples, who themselves have been through two world wars. As we face a major turning point in world history, we believe that the ideals embodied in the present Japanese Constitution are the most universal and radical. We do not wish Japan to contribute to war in any fashion, directly or indirectly. We think that Japan’s international contributions should all be premised upon the intent to ‘‘renounce war.’’ We oppose any contribution by Japan to the Persian Gulf War or to any fu-

ture war.39

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The provision in question, of course, is article 9, which states that ‘‘the Japanese people forever renounce war as a sovereign right of the nation and the threat or use of force as means of settling international disputes.’’ Although Katō had responded briefly and rather anticlimactically to the antiwar letter in May 1991,40 in early 1995—most likely stimulated by debate over what kind of apology should be issued by Prime Minister Hosokawa—he returned to it in ‘‘Haisengoron.’’ Katō was incensed by the protesters’ claim that article 9 ‘‘has been maintained by the spontaneous choice of the Japanese people, not as the result of coercion by any other country’’ because it obscures the fact that the constitution was originally imposed by the U.S. Occupation forces. He also contends that widespread support for the constitution is not the result of ‘‘regret for . . . causing harm to other nations of Asia’’ but the result, rather, of its usefulness as a means of maintaining a peaceful and prosperous Japan. Finally, he contends that the statement caters to Western sentiments, and in relation to the clause that ‘‘this provision expresses the hopes and prayers of the Western peoples, who themselves have been through two world wars,’’ he points out that, nevertheless, article 9 has served the strategic interests of the United States overall, and he sees the letter as hypocritical and in bad faith.41 His intent appears to have been primarily to expose what he saw as the statement’s disingenuousness, and he does not explicitly make an argument for constitutional revision. The clear connection between the genesis of ‘‘Haisengoron’’ and the controversy in Japan over the Gulf War suggests that an important context of Katō’s argument for the strengthening of national subjectivity through mourning is the widespread desire not only to make a clean breast of the war apology issue but also, on that basis, to turn Japan increasingly toward the stance of an ordinary nation that not only maintains but is capable of using military force. I am not suggesting that Katō himself would want to make such an argument explicitly, but it is possible that popular support for some variant of the ‘‘ordinary nation’’ ideal, which was first popularized by Prime Minister Nakasone Yasuhiro in the 1980s, underlies the notoriety of Katō’s writings. Despite Katō’s apparent reluctance to support the conservatives on constitutional revision, the effect of Katō’s argument is less to rid Japan of the split between Jekyll and Hyde than to strengthen Hyde’s side in the continuing contest regarding article 9 and Japan’s future stance militarily and politically in crises such as the Gulf War.

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Notes 1 Iwasaki Minoru, ‘‘ ‘Kokumin no monogatari’ e no yokubō wo hihan suru konkyo

2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13

14

15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23

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to wa?’’ [On what basis should one criticize the desire for a ‘‘national narrative’’?], Sekai (October 1997): 90. Tessa Morris-Suzuki, ‘‘Unquiet Graves: Katō Norihiro and the Politics of Mourning,’’ Japanese Studies 18.1 (1998): 21–30. See Norma Field, ‘‘War and Apology: Japan, Asia, the Fiftieth, and After,’’ positions 5.1 (1997): 1–49. Sheldon Garon, Molding Japanese Minds: The State in Everyday Life (Princeton, 1997), 7. George L. Hicks, The Comfort Women: Japan’s Brutal Regime of Enforced Prostitution in the Second World War (New York, 1995), 140, 145, 160. Ibid., 179, 223–24. David E. Sanger, ‘‘Japanese Less Confident of Economic Future, Poll Finds,’’ New York Times, December 30, 1994. Daizaburo Yui, ‘‘Between Pearl Harbor and Hiroshima/Nagasaki: A Psychological Vicious Circle,’’ Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars 27.2 (1995): 38–51. Fujioka Nobukatsu et al., The Restoration of a National History (Tokyo, 1998), 3–4. David A. Dilworth and G. Cameron Hurst, trans., Fukuzawa Yukichi’s ‘‘An Outline of a Theory of Civilization’’ (Tokyo, 1973), 48, 144. David A. Dilworth and Umeyo Hirano, trans., Fukuzawa Yukichi: An Encouragement of Learning (Tokyo, 1969), 16. J. Victor Koschmann, Revolution and Subjectivity in Postwar Japan (Chicago, 1996), 179, 181. See Matsumoto Sannosuke, ‘‘The Roots of Political Disillusionment: ‘Public’ and ‘Private’ in Japan,’’ in Authority and the Individual in Japan: Citizen Protest in Historical Perspective, ed. J. Victor Koschmann (Tokyo, 1978), 31–51. ‘‘Zensairoku: Nakasone Yasuhiro shushō ‘chiteki suijun’ kōen’’ [Complete text: Prime Minister Nakasone’s ‘‘intellectual level’’ speech] Chūō Kōron (November 1986): 159. Katō Norihiro, Haisengoron [After defeat] (Tokyo, 1997), 76. Katō, ‘‘Sengogoron’’ [After postwar], in Katō, Haisengoron, 102–3; my emphasis. Ibid., 49–50. Katō Norihiro, ‘‘‘Haisengoron’ o meguru ‘Q & A’’’ [Questions and answers on ‘‘Haisengoron’’] Ronza (January 1999): 73. Ibid., 80–81. Ōtsuka Hisao, ‘‘The Formation of Modern Man: The Popular Base for Democratization,’’ Japan Interpreter 6.1 (1970): 1. Ōtsuka Hisao, ‘‘My Thinking in Retrospect,’’ Japan Interpreter 6.1 (1970): 7. Takahashi Tetsuya, ‘‘Ojoku no kioku o megutte’’ [On the memory of insult], Gunzō (March 1995): 177. Katō Norihiro, ‘‘Katarikuchi no mondai’’ [The problem of how it is said], in Katō, Haisengoron, 244.

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24 Takahashi Tetsuya, ‘‘‘Aitō’ o meguru kaiwa: ‘Haisengoron’ hihan saisetsu’’ [A con-

25

26 27 28 29

30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39

40 41

versation on ‘‘mourning’’: Revisiting the critique of ‘‘Haisengoron’’], Gendai shisō (November 1995): 249. Ōgoshi Aiko, ‘‘Mō hitotsu no ‘katarikuchi no mondai’: Dono yō ni rekishiteki jijitsu to deau ka?’’ [Another ‘‘problem of how it is said’’: On coming to grips with historical fact], Sōbun (April 1997): 22. Ibid., 22–23. Ibid., 24. Ibid., 25. Héléne Cixous and Catherine Clément, The Newly Born Woman, trans. Betsy Wing (Manchester, 1986), 70; quoted in Robert Young, White Mythologies: Writing History and the West (London, 1990), 2. Chantal Mouffe, The Return of the Political (London, 1993), 2–3. Takahashi, ‘‘ ‘Aitō’ o meguru kaiwa,’’ 249. Nicholas Tavuchis, Mea Culpa: A Sociology of Apology and Reconciliation (Stanford, 1991), 101. Chin Sung Chung, ‘‘The Origin and Development of the Military Sexual Slavery Problem in Imperial Japan,’’ positions 5.1 (1997): 237. Ibid., 242. Koschmann, Revolution and Subjectivity, 66. Quoted portions are from Cheshire Calhoun, ‘‘Responsibility and Reproach,’’ in Feminism and Political Theory, ed. Cass R. Sunstein (Chicago, 1982), 258. Ōgoshi, ‘‘Mō hitotsu no ‘katarikuchi no mondai,’ ’’ 24. Kenneth B. Pyle, The Japanese Question: Power and Purpose in a New Era (Washington, DC, 1992), 1. Translated by the author from the text included in Kawamura Minato, ‘‘Wangan sengo no hihyō kūkan’’ [Critical space in the wake of the Gulf War], Gunzō (June 1996): 300. Katō Norihiro, ‘‘Kore wa hihyō de wa nai’’ [This is not literary criticism], Gunzō (May 1991): 198–226. Katō, Haisengoron, 14–18.

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‘‘Give Me Japan and Nothing Else!’’: Postcoloniality, Identity, and the Traces of Colonialism

Leo Ching

A

t a postgraduation reception, I was chatting with a student from Taiwan who had just received her degrees in mathematics and Japanese. Her younger sister, who is studying in a university on the West Coast, was standing nearby. My student asked me about my book manuscript, so I casually explained to her how I was writing on Japanese assimilationism in Taiwan during the colonial period.1 Only halfheartedly interested in our conversation to begin with, the younger sister, with her bleached hair and pearly pink lipstick that exuded a distinctively contemporary Japanese look, suddenly interrupted us. ‘‘You mean, how we are becoming Japanese?’’ she asked earnestly. In 1995, on the one-hundredth anniversary of the Treaty of Shimonoseki that ceded Taiwan to Japan, a number of commemorations took place in Taiwan. On June 1, Shih-lin elementary school celebrated its centennial. Shih-lin elementary is what used to be known as Shizangangakudō, the birthplace of Japanese colonial education founded by Izawa Shūji, the first director of the Colonial Education Bureau. For the celebration, the children sang in Japanese the school song from the colonial period, just prior to their singing of the national anthem. A month later Lu Xiu-lian, the newly elected vice president and then a legislator of the Democratic Progressive Party, led a one-hundred-member pilgrimage to Shimonoseki, where the treaty was signed, and gave thanks to the Japanese for leading the Taiwanese out of China.

The two episodes succinctly capture two interrelated and yet distinct desires for ‘‘Japan’’ in the so-called postcolonial Taiwan.2 On one hand, there is a desire for Japanese commodity-image-sound in the circulation of mass culture. (In early April 1999, for instance, six of the top ten music singles in Taiwan were by Japanese artists. Over 80 percent of comics sold in Taiwan today are Japanese.) Much like the United States in the 1980s, the current economic downturn of Japan does not signal the decline but rather the increasing dominance of its mass cultural representations and commodities, especially in East and Southeast Asia. On the other hand, there is the desire for Japanese colonialism in the formation of an oppositional political identity. (Japanese colonialism has induced, the argument goes, a historical rupture that enabled the dis-identification from Mainland China and the construction of a uniquely Taiwanese subjectivity.) We should not collapse or subsume too hastily these two modes of desire for Japan into a singular psychology of colonial dependency or nostalgia. The growing presence of Japanese-produced mass culture in Taiwan and in other parts of Asia, as I have argued elsewhere, has more to do with the differentiating logic of latecapitalist modernity than with the workings of the same Japanese colonialism.3 It is also important not to reduce and confuse the desires for Japan for an unmediated process of identification with the (ex)colonizer. The desires manifested in these situations are not goals in themselves—to actually become Japanese or to relive Japanese colonialism. Rather, they constitute the domain of the subject’s impossible relation to the object-cause of its desire; they point to the dimension of fantasy that gives and coordinates the subject’s desire, to specify its object and to locate the position the subject assumes in it. In this case, these are the fantasy to participate in the globalization of consumerist culture and the fantasy to create an independent Taiwanese nation. It is not surprising that ‘‘Japan’’ has constituted the object of desire in the cultural politics of contemporary Taiwan, given its half-century of colonial rule and postwar economic dominance. Although today few Japanese are aware of the dissemination and pervasiveness of its mass cultural forms in Asia and elsewhere, even fewer can imagine Japan’s colonial history as embroiled in the internal political struggle of its ex-colony. Nonetheless it would be simplistic and inaccurate to characterize the desires for Japan in postcolonial Taiwan as merely a continuation of Japanese colonial practices. Official Japanese colonialism, as well as military and territorial enterprises, ended with Japan’s defeat in 1945. Not only has Japan relinquished its formal control, but the island was soon subsumed under the dictatorship of the ‘‘give me japan and nothing else!’’

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renegade kmt (Kuomintang) Party and inserted, like most third world authoritarian regimes, into the American-led anti-Communist bloc. To insist on the persisting colonial influence on the formerly colonized is to ignore the specific conditions of wider and multiple development and transformation of Taiwanese society under the exigency of the postwar Cold War order and the concomitant rehabilitation of Japan as a ‘‘sub-imperialism’’ under U.S. hegemony.4 However, it would be equally ahistorical and disabling to bracket the desires for Japan as a sui generis postwar postcolonial phenomenon. One can argue that the post-1945 authoritarian kmt regime and the infamous 1947 February 28th Incident have occasioned a historical and ideological rupture that disillusioned the Taiwanese of their (naturally endowed) Chinese origin and propelled a (misguided) wistful identification with Japan. But this line of argument fails to acknowledge the turmoil of the colonial psyche, that complex process of identification and disidentification that has deep historical and discursive roots stemming from the colonial era. It also ignores the structural similarity between the postcolonial desire for Japan and the colonial articulation of identity and difference. The claim that ‘‘the Taiwanese are not Chinese’’ was a historically inscribed enunciation deeply embedded within Japanese colonial practice of assimilation (dōka) and imperialization (kōminka). Furthermore, it was the hierarchical and discriminatory colonial economic structure that enabled the wholesale replacement of the Japanese by the Mainland Chinese after ‘‘liberation’’ and laid the groundwork for, as some have argued, the island’s subsequent economic ‘‘miracle.’’ 5 It is from the irreducible tension and contradiction between the past and the present that we can make preliminary characterizations of the desires for Japan as a distinctively postcolonial phenomenon—postcolonial not in the sense of coming after or overcoming colonialism, but in the sense that the present condition is infused with colonialism but cannot be reduced to it. Stuart Hall puts it this way: It does not mean . . . that what we have called the ‘‘after-effects’’ of colonial rule have somehow been suspended. It certainly does not mean that we have passed from a regime of power-knowledge into some powerless and conflict-free time zone. Nevertheless, it does also stake its claim in terms of the fact that some other, related but as yet ‘‘emergent’’ new configurations of power-knowledge relations are beginning to exert their distinctive and specific effects. This way of conceptualising the shift between these paradigms—not as an epistemological ‘‘break’’ in the Althusserian/structural-

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ist sense but more on the analogy of what Gramsci called a movement of deconstruction-reconstruction or what Derrida, in a more deconstructive sense, calls a ‘‘double inscription’’—is characteristic of all the ‘‘posts.’’ 6

The main purpose of this article is to consider the continuities and discontinuities, the ruptures and permutations of colonial power, and the many ways colonization have become indelibly and inescapably inscribed in the cultures of both the (ex)colonizer and the (ex)colonized, although to vastly different extents and with different effects. I will begin by briefly noting the relative lack of circulation of the term postcolonial in Japan and suggest we see that absence as a symptom of an incomplete project of decolonization. It is the lack of decolonization that enabled postwar Japan to construct and constitute itself as singular, homogenous, and exclusive and thereby subsequently disavow and efface the traces of the empire. I will then take up the recent debate over kōmin literature (literature by the imperial subjects) as an attempt to reinscribe those who ‘‘once were Japanese’’ into the problematic of Japanese colonialism studies. I will end by suggesting that the predicament of colonial modernity offers a better analytical strategy than identity struggles in understanding the desires of the former imperial subjects in becoming ‘‘Japanese.’’ Despite the popular use (or abuse) of postcolonial as both a descriptive and analytical category in Euro-American academe, the term has gained little currency in contemporary Japan. At first this indifference might seem odd, given Japan’s propensity for instantaneous commodification and consumption of knowledge, especially with theories and paradigms stemming from the West. The recent conferences and publications on poststructuralism and postmodernism are only the more prominent examples. This lack of circulation and sensitivity to postcolonialism is not necessarily a bad thing, given the growing criticism of the term’s theoretical diffusiveness and political conservatism by intellectuals in the Euro-American context.7 Postcolonialism’s lack of currency, however, is not restricted only to the discursive fields of Japan. South Korean intellectuals express strong reservations about and discomfort with the word as well. As Chungmoo Choi has argued, postcolonial South Korea is a space lying between the empty signifier, postcolonial, and the reality that it (mis)represents. Even French intellectuals generally shun the usage of postcolonial and opt for terms such as créolité or francophonie.8 What is evident from the examples cited above and remains unacknowledged by theorists such as Stuart Hall is that postcolonial is an ‘‘give me japan and nothing else!’’

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exclusively Anglo-American construction and phenomenon. Nonetheless, the inability to establish postcolonialism as a discourse and problematic on both general and intellectual levels in Japan represents less a critical distance from a contentious theoretical debate than the continuing ambivalence toward historical memories of war and colonization. If South Koreans have found little use for the term postcolonial because it does not accurately represent Korea’s neocolonial reality, and if the French find indigenous vocabulary more appropriate than a foreign invention, how do we account for the relative absence of postcolonialism in Japan? Ukai Satoshi has pointed out that one of the reasons why postcolonialism and the question of colonialism in general have eluded the Japanese is because in Japan ‘‘the memories of colonial rule are deeply intersected by the memories of the Second World War.’’ In 1980s Europe, Ukai observes, there was a strong tendency to uncouple the memories of World War II as exemplified by the atrocity of Nazi Germany and the problems of colonialism associated with France and England. In Japan, however, ‘‘the memories of war and the memories of colonial rule are overlapped in a temporal and spatial continuum. It is a structure that suppresses memories of the war and concomitantly suppresses the memories of colonial rule.’’ 9 Moreover, the strong anti-Communist policies associated with Cold War geopolitics in Asia and the postwar construction of Hiroshima as solely the site of victimization further prevented Japan from genuinely interrogating its colonial past and pursuing its war responsibility in postwar Asia. Ukai’s differentiation between Europe’s separation and Japan’s conflation of memories of war and memories of colonial rule is only partially correct. There is little doubt that Germany has done far more in addressing and compensating for its crimes against the Jews during the Nazi era (but less for World War II or for its short-lived colonial past) than, say, what Japan has done for the victims of the Nanjing massacre. What remains less noted in the kind of comparison between the Germans and the Japanese based on an unexamined moral conviction (and disguised Eurocentrism?) is how Holocaust memory was instrumental in the making of postwar German national identity.10 An identity that is constructed on the grounds of moral decency (and superiority?) remembers one’s own country’s role as perpetrator. The processes of remembering and the procedures of reparation displayed the kind of civility and sensitivity that meshed well with other prominent sources of German identity, such as the cultural geniuses Goethe and Mozart. They worked to minimize the stark contrast between Goethe and Hitler that had profoundly confused the Germans in the immediate post146

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war years. In other words, Germany’s response to its war crimes is not the product of a primordial national character, but exactly the other way around. Only through compulsive mourning and collective remembering of the Holocaust could a German identity, devoid of Nazi aberration, be reconstituted in the postwar era. Consequently, the Germans’ focus on the Holocaust as ‘‘the central and unavoidable fact of German history may also have occluded [their] view of European colonialism and their own complicity as Europeans in it.’’ 11 In the Japanese case, a new postwar national identity based on singularity and exclusivity that has dominated the discussion on Japanese identity was constructed by the effacement of the memories of war and empire. Instead of an outstretched and vast imperial landscape, Japan, as both a geographical and cultural signifier, is now enclosed and delimited within the borders of an ‘‘island country.’’ The multiethnic constitution of the ‘‘Japanese,’’ as necessitated by the incorporating logic of the empire, was readily discarded and disavowed in the immediate postwar years. Instead, a singular national/racial identity, or what Oguma Eiji has called ‘‘the myth of the homogeneous nation,’’ was inaugurated and consolidated in conjunction with Japan’s refusal to confront its war crimes and colonial past.12 The new understanding is that Japan has been a natural community integral to the Japanese archipelago since antiquity. In the postwar construction of Japanese national history, Japan’s modern past was never properly grasped as a history of empire building where former subjects of the Japanese Empire have been totally obliterated from its discourse. It is by effacing and denying the traces of those who ‘‘once were Japanese’’ that the postwar cultural identity of the Japanese as a homogeneous people was able to establish itself as Japan’s self-image. Let me underscore that it is not my intention here to minimize the different reactions and attitudes between the Germans and the Japanese to their legacies of the war. Instead the point is to abstain from seeing those differences as reflections of their respective national or cultural characteristics. It is to apprehend their differences through a similar structure of ideological interpellation in the redefinition and reconstruction of national identities for the reconstituted postwar world system. From the perspective of Japan’s continuous disavowal of its imperial past and obsession with its national identity (which I see as concomitant processes), to discuss the absence or presence of the postcolonial in contemporary Japan seems rather pointless. The crux of the problem is not so much the conflation between memories of war and memories of empire. In fact, the interrogation of and response to the issues of war responsibility have ‘‘give me japan and nothing else!’’

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more often than not deflected and bypassed the questions of Japanese colonialism.13 Rather, the problem lies in the peculiar ways in which the Japanese Empire has liquidated itself without going through the process of decolonization. The Potsdam Declaration stripped Japan of its colonial and occupying territories, with Japanese sovereignty limited to Honshū, Hokkaido, Kyūshū, and Shikoku.14 Unlike the British and the French, the Japanese did not have to concern themselves with the procedures of decolonization. There was no debate within Japan regarding the fate of its possessions; it was as obvious as the defeat itself. The Japanese Empire has simply vanished. As a result decolonization was never of domestic concern; it was the problem of other nations. What has been precluded from intellectual and popular discourses alike in postwar Japan is the question, What exactly constituted the decolonization of the Japanese Empire? In this way Japan was deprived of (or rather conveniently relinquished) any sustainable discussion and debate over its responsibilities not only of the war but also of its overall colonial legacy. The vacancy created by the abrupt withdrawal of the Japanese colonizer has, however, produced dire consequences for the many who found themselves thrust into an era of postcoloniality only to be mired in another neocolonial struggle. Decolonization, as Frantz Fanon reminds us, is a historical process that ‘‘cannot become intelligible nor clear to itself except in the exact measure that we can discern the movements which give it historical form and content.’’ 15 In this regard decolonization remains unintelligible to both the Japanese and the former subjects of the Japanese Empire. Because of the need to foreground Japan’s decolonization (or lack thereof ), Tomiyama Ichirō, in a forum called ‘‘What Is Postcolonial Thinking?’’ insists that before discussing postcoloniality in Japan, we must problematize the absence and abandonment of any basic discussion about decolonization and its responsibilities in postwar Japan.16 An important way to think about the incomplete project of decolonization in Japan is through the critical interrogation of Japan and Japanese as different axes of identity politics and analytical sites that are neither a convergent reproduction of nor a unique divergence from the West. It is aimed at a historical apprehension of the emergence of a particular Japan and its denial of otherness and difference within the cultural condition of modernity.17 The power of these critical interventions notwithstanding, one cannot but ask what happened to the former subjects of the Japanese Empire, those who were once ‘‘Japanese’’? What about their practice of ‘‘an uneven, incomplete production of meaning and value, often composed of incommensurable demands and practices,’’ or what Homi Bhabha 148

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has called the ‘‘cultures of survival’’? 18 If colonialism is constituted by the interrelation of the colonizer and the colonized within a structure of asymmetrical power relations, should the decolonization process not be equally constitutive? It is only recently that kōmin (huan-min) literature, especially that written by the Taiwanese ‘‘collaborators’’ in the 1940s, began to receive public and academic attention.19 Kōminka, or ‘‘the imperialization of subject peoples,’’ is usually understood as the final and most intensified stage of the overall Japanese assimilation (dōka) policy implemented from 1937 to Japan’s defeat. It is a movement that ‘‘aimed at the complete regimentation and Japanization of Japan’s colonial races, and justified these goals through endless moral platitudes couched in Confucian phraseology and centered on inculcation of a sense of obligation to the Japanese emperor.’’ 20 Kōmin literature, then, represents the various responses to and negotiations with the processes of Japanization where questions of identity invariably take center stage. I will first consider the recent reevaluations of kōmin literature by both Japanese and Taiwanese critics to map out the different ideological positions regarding these controversial texts. The attempts by the postcolonial critics, I then argue, constitute not so much an explanation but a symptom of kōminka itself. In other words, what concerns me here is how identity emerges as the primary concern and desire for these texts and critics alike. It is the conflation of identity as both a descriptive and an analytical category that, in my opinion, conceals the historical uniqueness of kōminka as a colonial ideology that, despite its obvious affiliation with the colonial process of assimilation, requires a theorization in its own right. Only by deflecting the questions of identity to the larger problem of colonial modernity as an indelible predicament of the traces of Japanese colonialism can we begin the project of decolonization. The emerging interest in kōmin literature and colonial studies in general must be placed in the specific context of the recent democratization process in Taiwan and the changing geopolitical configuration of the post–Cold War era. With the demise of the dyadic Cold War order and the collapse of military-authoritarian regimes in Taiwan and South Korea, voices of the formerly colonized peoples, from the so-called comfort women to the imperial soldiers, are demanding proper recognition and compensation from the Japanese government. While the bureaucrats continue to circumvent the questions of accountability, the numerous albeit segregated movements and activities have irretrievably placed the issues of war crimes and colonial‘‘give me japan and nothing else!’’

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ism in the public arena. It is within this historical juncture that colonialism studies have emerged on the Japanese intellectual horizon. Similarly in Taiwan, with the end of martial rule and the emergence of Taiwanese cultural nationalism since the 1980s, renewed interest in Taiwanese history and culture (and hence its colonial past) began to consolidate and assert itself in both intellectual and popular discourses. Long considered an intellectual taboo and social pariah under the draconian watch of the kmt, kōmin literature has in the past few years ‘‘spread like a little boom.’’ 21 It is against this backdrop of prolonged repression and neglect that Japanese critic Tarumi Chie embarks on a reevaluation of the corpus of literary texts that she terms Taiwan’s Japanese language literature (taiwan no nihongo bungaku).22 In ‘‘The Identity of the Taiwanese Writer and Japan’’ (Taiwanjin sakka no aidentiti to nihon), a chapter devoted to one of the most notorious kōmin writers, Shū Kin-ha (Chou Chin-po), Tarumi calls for an alternative interpretation of this quintessential ‘‘traitor’’ text. Shū is perhaps the most representative of all kōmin writers, and his meteoric rise to fame (as recipient of the first Bungei taiwan [Literary Taiwan] award in 1941 and a participant in the second Greater East Asian Writers Assembly in 1943) is only matched by his swift fall into postwar apostate notoriety. In all the recently published anthologies of Taiwanese literature under Japanese colonialism, Shū’s name (and the names of other kōmin writers as well) is conspicuously absent. In one of the few postwar texts that mentions Shū, he is simply dismissed as a ‘‘true kōmin writer.’’ Against the overwhelming nationalist condemnation of collaborative writings, Tarumi writes, Even if kōminka was a part of historical movement, for a writer to use it as a theme and to produce a work of art, there must be some inner necessity (naiteki hitsuzen) within him. Shū has certainly deviated from the circumstances of Taiwanese intellectuals of the time. But to condemn that deviation solely from the perspective of nationalism, nothing can come out of it. There is a definite motivation to his ‘‘pro-Japaneseness,’’ and I believe that motivation can be a clue to solving the problem. To put it simply, it is how people come to terms with their national identity within the process of modernity.23

For Tarumi, however, the reassessment of Shū has significance beyond the localized colonial society. Since the problematic of identity formation ‘‘within modern Japanese literature has been usually thematized in opposition with the so-called Western civilization (seiyō bunmei ),’’ by inserting Shū into that context, Tarumi hopes ‘‘to free us from that barren binarism onto a possible world of multiplicity.’’ 24 Tarumi should be commended for 150

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attempting to release kōmin literature and its writers from nationalism’s silencing and moral condemnation. However, it is not clear the insertion of a ‘‘collaborating’’ (now rendered ‘‘conflicting’’) colonial identity will necessarily offset the binary relationship between the West and Japan. As a late imperialist and the only non-Western colonial nation, ‘‘Japanese’’ identity (whatever that may mean) has always been inscribed within a larger interrelational structure that ambiguously situates Japan with the West and within Asia, a relationality that arguably has remained the same since the late nineteenth century.25 Furthermore, does a world of multiplicity (tagenteki sekai ) necessarily guarantee relief from the constraints of binarism? And what exactly is the enunciative position of the postcolonial critic who insists on the complexity and multiplicity of a quintessential collaborative text? Never really elaborating on the various theoretical issues that she poses, Tarumi then turns to the discussion of Shū’s most representative work, ‘‘The Volunteer’’ (‘‘Shiganhei’’).26 ‘‘The Volunteer,’’ as if in support of the official implementation of the volunteer system on June 20, 1941, was published the following September. The short story narrates the philosophical difference regarding kōminka between Chō Mei-ki (Chang Ming-kuei), a returning student from Japan, and Kō Shin-roku (Kao Ching-lu), a friend since public school (kōgakkō) who has remained in Taiwan. ‘‘The Volunteer’’ begins with the narrator, ‘‘I,’’ Mei-ki’s brother-in-law, meeting Shin-roku, as they are both to greet Mei-ki, who is returning after three years studying abroad in Tokyo. It soon becomes apparent that Mei-ki, after the initial excitement of returning ‘‘home,’’ has become disenchanted and disappointed with what he perceives as stagnant and prosaic in Taiwan’s overall development. Mei-ki’s gloom and criticism are contrasted with Shin-roku’s passion and enthusiasm. The narrator soon learns from Mei-ki that Shin-roku, who has neither attended secondary school nor studied abroad, has learned to speak flawless Japanese by working in a large food store where he functioned equally among the Japanese employees. As living proof of Mei-ki’s ‘‘environmental determinism’’ (kankyō ron)—the making of an imperial subject must begin with the creation of an appropriate environment—Shin-roku has already adopted a Japanese surname and belongs to the Patriotic Youth Association. The story soon evolves into a discussion on kōminka between Mei-ki and Shin-roku, with the narrator initially serving as an impartial observer. Despite their common goals to become Japanese, the difference between Mei-ki and Shin-roku is postulated as the difference between theory and practice, logic and passion, intellectualism and activism. To Mei-ki’s mock‘‘give me japan and nothing else!’’

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ing inquiry regarding the Patriotic Youth members’ belief in clapping their hands and becoming imperial subjects, Shin-roku replies in earnest: ‘‘By clapping our hands we are being guided in becoming closer to the gods. It is through the praying to the benevolence of the gods in all sincerity that one can for the first time become one with the gods (shinjin icchi ). . . . When we clap our hands, we are striving to feel and experience the Yamato spirit. For the youth of this island, we couldn’t ask for a better and nobler experience.’’ 27 For Shin-roku, kōminka is not a question of method or theory but simply ‘‘a path to be trod’’ (ayumubeki michi ). Accusing Shin-roku of ‘‘fanaticism’’ (kamigakari ), Mei-ki insists that kōminka is fundamentally a question of culture, of elevating Taiwanese culture to that of metropolitan Japan through education and training. For Mei-ki, to be Japanese is also an existential question that requires reckoning. He confides to the narrator, ‘‘Of course we have to become Japanese. However, I don’t want to be as unruly as him. Why must I become Japanese? That is what I think before anything. I was born in the empire. I grew up with Japanese education. I cannot speak other than Japanese. I cannot write a letter without using the kana script. That’s why if I don’t become Japanese, there is no reason for me to be alive.’’ 28 At this point the impartial narrator turns into a condemning commentator, grimacing at Mei-ki’s ‘‘detailed calculation’’: ‘‘I looked hard at him and saw a weak human being. His inability to charge toward his goal and reluctantly wasting his time are likely due to this caution. However, there is something in the matter that cannot be reasoned out even with that kind of calculation. That is because, as he puts it himself, he was raised as Japanese since birth. No, it is a fate even before he was born. Unfortunately he began to calculate that fate with the intellectual abacus he learned in Tokyo.’’ 29 The story comes to an abrupt end when both Mei-ki and the narrator learn that Shin-roku has volunteered with a petition written in blood. Mei-ki then announces his defeat: ‘‘I went to apologize to Shin-roku. I have lost. Shin-roku is just the person who will change Taiwan for the sake of Taiwan. After all, I am a powerless individual who cannot do anything for Taiwan.’’ 30 It is not difficult to discern the political and ideological implications of ‘‘The Volunteer’’ at the most rudimentary level. If assimilation (dōka) has historically been the political project of the intellectual class, the newly implemented kōminka, in conjunction with the total mobilization of the colony, aims at a populist affirmation. There is to be no calculation, no contemplation or investigation into ‘‘becoming Japanese’’ (or, more precisely, becoming an imperial subject). It is not a question of identity but a matter of fate. It is not a process of becoming but a state of being. 152

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Instead of focusing on kōminka’s anti-intellectualism, and thus its ideological efficacy, Tarumi’s analysis, by juxtaposing Shū himself with the colonial elite (like Mei-ki and the narrator), attempts to emphasize the struggle over their ‘‘sundered identity’’ (hikisakareta aidentiti ). For Tarumi, Shū’s ‘‘crime’’ as a kōminka collaborator could be deflected, if not entirely absolved, by ‘‘disregarding [the story’s] sudden conclusion and attending only to the part depicting Mei-ki’s agony.’’ 31 Reading ‘‘The Volunteer’’ in conjunction with Shū’s other works, Tarumi is able to construct a genealogy of characters (all members of the intellectual elite) who writhe in agony regarding the question of identity rather than merely espousing the virtue of kōminka. Tarumi intimates but does not elaborate that, for the elite class growing up in a historical juncture when Japanese colonialism has anchored itself for almost a half-century, their sundered identity has to be different in kind from that of the earlier colonial moments. The struggle over identity for these members of the colonial elite is not figured by the eclipsing of an indigenous identity by another foreign ontology; rather, it is configured by a sense of fait accompli, of ‘‘cannot not be Japanese.’’ In other words, the workings of late colonialism have liquidated any possibility of a relationality where one form of identity can be juxtaposed or counterpoised with another, where the conflict over identity could be symbolically resolved either through colonial sublation or nativist restoration. I have discussed at length Tarumi’s reading of kōmin literature because she has actively engaged in the debates of colonial literature in both Japan and Taiwan. She is seen as the representative of a new generation—postwar and postcolonial—of Japanese critics who has been espousing through her studies of Japanese language literature in the former colonies the possibility of a multiculturalism that will enable the ‘‘coexistence with difference’’ (tasha to no kyōsei ).32 Another critic, Hoshina Hironobu, for example, has also tried to complicate the one-dimensional characterization of Shū Kin-ha as a kōminka collaborator by redirecting our attention to Shū’s view on Taiwanese culture through the discussion of Shū’s lesser-known novella, Climate, Faith, and Chronic Disease. Hoshina argues that one must concede that even in Shū’s most representative kōmin literature, such as ‘‘Mouth Cancer’’ [‘‘Suigan’’] and ‘‘The Volunteer,’’ there is an underlying ‘‘strong concern for Taiwan’’ (taiwan ni taisuru kyōretsu na kanshin). And without a deep commitment to Taiwan, ‘‘there would be no such a powerful kōmin literature.’’ 33 Hoshina, therefore, argues that when we reread Shū’s work from the perspective of his fondness for Taiwanese culture, an image of Shū Kinha as other than a representative kōmin writer might emerge. ‘‘give me japan and nothing else!’’

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Another reconsideration of kōminka literature, but from a more judicious perspective, is Lin Jui-ming’s ‘‘Wartime Taiwanese Writers and Kōmin Literature’’ [‘‘Kessenki taiwan no sakka to kōmin bungaku’’].34 Lin begins his essay by juxtaposing the 1942 plea by Chang Wen-huan (Chō Bun-kan) that ‘‘there is no non-kōmin literature in Taiwan’’ and the 1990 comment by Yeh Shih-t’ao (Yō Seki-tō) that ‘‘there is no kōmin literature, there’s only resistance literature.’’ Lin then inquires into the complex and twisted relationship between submission and resistance by comparing two kōmin texts: The Road [Michi], by Chin Ka-sen (Ch’en Huo-ch’un), and A Torrent [Honryū], by Oh Shō-yū (Wang Ch’ang-hsiung). Lin first concurs that both texts depict the inner conflict of Japanese-educated Taiwanese intellectuals under the kōminka movement. He then situates both texts according to the literary journals in which they were first published and their respective ideological positions. Both texts dramatize the conflicting and complicating emotions of the ‘‘Taiwanese as Japanese subjects’’ (nihon kokumin toshite no taiwanjin). However, their respective resolutions to that struggle mark a significant difference in their political intention and thus, by extension, depict the different political missions of the two journals, Bungei taiwan and Taiwan bungaku [Taiwan literature]. Lin argues that the protagonist in The Road, after a long process of bitter struggle and anguish and even coming to perceive the falsehood of ‘‘equality under His Majesty’s gaze,’’ ends up in a more fierce refutation of his Taiwanese identity. He comes to reject his native tongue and devotes himself to kōminka by volunteering for the military. By contrast A Torrent ends with a more open perspective for identity formation by having one of the characters proclaim, ‘‘The more I am a good Japanese, I must also be a good Taiwanese.’’ For Lin this effort to preserve any sense of Taiwaneseness constitutes the last thread in ‘‘preserving the dignity of the Taiwanese people.’’ 35 The most salient part of Lin’s article is his discussion of the postwar evaluation of these texts. Although Chin’s The Road is excluded from the 1986 twelve-volume anthology Taiwanese Literature before Liberation [Kuangfu ch’ien Tai-wan wen-hsueh chi] due to the editors’ ‘‘silent but tolerant protest,’’ it was translated into Chinese by Chin himself in 1979 and published in the People’s Daily Newspaper. In a supplement to the translation and on several other occasions, Lin observes, Chin has continued to emphasize that ‘‘the speech and action in the story are completely driven by the circumstances of the time.’’ 36 Oh also translated A Torrent into Chinese in the postwar years, and it is collected in the aforementioned anthology. While Chin was faithful in his translation, Oh diverged considerably from the original 154

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Japanese version. In his recollection Oh explained that the modification was necessary because A Torrent was published only after strict censorship by the colonial government, and the authority revised several parts. Lin concurs with Oh’s qualification. In the 1980s a number of scholars began to argue for a more open-minded reading of The Road, and some even went so far as to suggest that rather than ‘‘kōmin literature,’’ it is actually ‘‘resistance literature.’’ 37 Taking issue with this revisionist interpretation and its equivocalness, Lin urges a ‘‘moral’’ reading of the text. For Lin the distinction between kōmin literature and resistance literature is not simply a question of categorization. Rather, the differentiation itself concerns ‘‘the dignity of a people,’’ and ‘‘morality.’’ For ‘‘the descendants of an oppressed people’’ like Lin, the centrality of the problem cannot be blurred or concealed by the ‘‘empty choice between kōmin literature and resistance literature.’’ Beyond the evaluation of either compliance or resistance, what is important for a text like A Torrent—what Lin now reclassifies as non-kōmin literature ( fei huan-min wen-hsueh)—is its refusal to relinquish the notion of a Taiwanese identity. Lin passionately proclaims that ‘‘with that kind of dignity, there is hope for the people.’’ Such effort is, in Lin’s opinion, sorely missing from Chin’s The Road.38 Lin’s intervention in the debate over kōmin literature lies in his resistance to the seduction of the kind of postcolonial ambivalence that in the guise of subverting the binarism between submission and subversion remains noncommittal politically and naive theoretically. For the simple inversion between the two presupposed categories corresponds only to a shift in the evaluative procedure and does not question the fundamental structuration that undergirds the opposition in the first place. By designating non-kōmin literature as a third category, Lin tacitly avoids the postcolonial desire to seek resistance anywhere and rejects the nationalist fervor to condemn betrayal everywhere. The choice between kōmin literature and resistance literature is indeed empty, given the particular historical circumstance in which all cultural productions and meanings are imagined, constrained, and contested. The dialectic between the personal and the historical, between intended meanings and unintentional effects, produces the kind of contradictory practices that are not reducible to insipid and nonshifting classifications. Non-kōmin literature not only rebuffs the overcompensation of resistance literature, but it also restores some degrees of agency to the otherwise censurable kōmin literature. The contrast between the interpretations of kōmin literature by Lin and Japanese critics such as Tarumi and Hoshina is most likely determined by ‘‘give me japan and nothing else!’’

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their respective positions of enunciation. On one hand, Lin writes against the Chinese nationalist and communist prolonged and outright condemnation of kōmin literature as merely and simply enslaving literature (nu-li hua te wen-hsueh). In this regard Lin’s position is not all that different from the Japanese scholars’ attempts to reconsider colonial literature in its multifariousness. On the other hand, Lin cannot accept the aleatory overturning of compliance into resistance, of collaboration into denunciation in which no position on the colonial/anticolonial scale is ever irrevocably fixed. The reevaluation of colonial texts is not only a textual exercise and an intellectual endeavor; it is also a political act that has moral consequences, especially for those descendants of an oppressed people. Lin concludes his discussion with the following remark: ‘‘There are aspects of ‘kōmin literature’ that deserve sympathy. However, there are also responsibilities that writers of colonial Taiwan cannot avoid. Japanese colonial rule must be charged with its national responsibility as perpetrator and exposed to severe criticism. However, as far as Taiwan is concerned, the reversing of the meaning of ‘non-kōmin literature’ is also a returning of some dignity to Taiwan. The existence of ‘kōmin literature’ serves as a good admonition for us.’’ 39 Lin’s political commitment and theoretical insights notwithstanding, there is something unsettling about his nativism and moralism. There is not a necessary relationship between ethnic identity and anticolonialism. The call for a Taiwanese identity does not necessitate a rejection of a colonial Japanese identity. This interdependency is not surprising given the fact that an imaginable notion of Taiwaneseness is itself a product of colonial modernity. One need only recall the famous 1921 dictum of Ts’ai Pei-huo (Sai Bai-ka) that ‘‘Taiwan is at the same time the Taiwan of the empire and the Taiwan of us Taiwanese.’’ 40 By resorting to a simple moral conviction as the final arbitrator of good and evil, Lin elides the very tension of colonial identity formation that sustains the irreducible contradiction in the absence of an anticolonial practice. In other words, Lin’s ethical doctrine presupposes a certain social/ national homogeneity that in the final instance mystifies the complex and dialectical process of kōminka itself. What is needed, then, is not an ethical evaluation but an ideological investigation into how cultural productions provide a field of creative and destructive tension with notions of identity and social transformation within the constraints of the kōminka movement. Despite differences in their reconsideration of kōmin literature, Tarumi, Hoshina, and Lin share a certain reflexive, and thus reductive, understanding of cultural productions in relation to kōminka: the literary works as expressing the reality of kōminka in an unmediated if not unproblematic 156

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manner. This perceived reality is then turned inward in the form of the protagonists’ struggle over identity, and their respective political and moral value (compliance or resistance) is judged according to the manner in which certain identities are either confirmed or refuted. But as Tomiyama Ichirō has suggested in the context of imperialization in Okinawa, the notion of kōminka signifies not a process of shifting from one ‘‘homogenized identity’’ (kinshitsuna aidentiti) to another (or the clashing of two already constituted identities). It does not presuppose a ‘‘differentiated space’’ (bunkatsu sareta kūkan) between the self and the Other. It is a condition of an ‘‘ambivalent identity’’ when the self ’s interior is encroached upon by a sense of ‘‘otherness’’ at the moment of ‘‘becoming Japanese.’’ 41 Thus what has come to be regarded as a ‘‘Japanese’’ or ‘‘Taiwanese’’ identity, rather than prefiguring and preceding kōminka, is actually enabled and defined by it. What is taken for granted and left unexamined, ironically, is the category of kōminka itself, which enabled the construction and dramatization of identity struggle in the first place. For if kōminka is predominantly a cultural rather than a political or economic mode of colonial power (as was the case with dōka), cultural productions themselves do not simply reflect the underlying colonial rule but constitute colonial policies and a field of contestation in their own right. In this regard the struggle over identities is not merely a reflection of or even a response to the process of imperialization; rather, it is part and parcel of the very logic of kōminka itself. The inquiry into the objective status of kōminka cannot be accomplished in isolation but foremost necessitates an analysis in contradistinction to an elusive other: assimilation, or dōka. Dōka embodies a generalized field of colonial project. Precisely because of its inner contradiction as manifested by the gap between the political and the cultural, ‘‘Japanization’’ was predominantly articulated as a problematic of the colonizer as a failed, or yet to be materialized, colonial policy. The newness of kōminka as a colonial ideology lies in its inauguration and internalization of Japanization as exclusively a problematic of the colonized as an incomplete imperial subject. In this regard kōminka discourse has persistently emphasized a lack of appreciation (kansha no kimochi ) and deep emotion (kangeki ) toward the benevolence of the emperor and the imperial nation by the colonized Taiwanese.42 Only at this particular historical juncture does struggle over colonial identity emerge as the dominant discourse in colonial Taiwan where ‘‘cannot not be Japanese’’ becomes an overwhelming existential anxiety and a political desire. Kōminka, therefore, is neither a logical extension nor an abrupt aggravation of dōka in the general tendency of Japanese colonialism. Rather, it is a ‘‘give me japan and nothing else!’’

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colonial ideology that by concealing and erasing the inherent contradiction of dōka radically transforms and circumscribes the manner in which colonial subjectivity and identity are allowed to be articulated and represented. What I am positing here is that the very notion of an identity struggle is a historical condition that emerged as a fundamental problem and a predominant concern for the colonized only within the specific colonialist ideology of kōminka. The postcolonial critics of kōmin texts, in their haste to salvage and illuminate the dignity and recalcitrance inherent in these texts of collaboration through the trope of identity struggles, fail to grasp the logic and affectivity of kōminka. In short, contrary to the postcolonial critics’ assertion, identity struggle is not the effect but the very cause of kōminka. Prior to the demise of the political movements in the 1930s, and during the socalled rule by dōka or assimilation, culture was an important form of political expression and social commentary. At that point the Manichean division between the colonizer and the colonized was the common motif in literary representations. Literature, mainly short stories, dramatized the conflict between the clearly defined boundaries between colonizers and colonized, Japanese and Taiwanese, capitalists and proletariats. Works by Lai Ho and Yō Ki (Yang Kuei) are exemplary here. Assimilation remained an incomplete project directed mainly at the gradualist policy of social amelioration in the education system and the general welfare. Publication in the Chinese language, for example, both classical and vernacular, while detested by the colonial authority was at least possible and mildly tolerated. With Japan’s intensifying involvement in China and the growing concern over an all-out confrontation with other imperialist nations, kōminka was implemented in conjunction with mass mobilization in 1937. Unlike dōka, which remained an unrealizable ideal of colonial integration, kōminka necessitated an objectification of Japanization by demanding the colonized to act, live, and die for the emperor in defending the Japanese Empire. What kōminka entailed for the colonized, then, as exemplified in the subject construction of a good and loyal Japanese and the so-called kōmin literature, is the interiorization of an objective colonial antagonism into a subjective struggle within, not between, colonial identities. In other words, cultural representations under kōminka displaced the concrete problematic of the social and replaced it with the ontology of the personal. This kind of interiorization of identity struggles and the identification with the colonizer is not particular to the Taiwanese-Japanese colonial relationship. It is a general category of colonized existence vividly depicted by Albert Memmi: ‘‘The first attempt of the colonized is to change his condi158

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tion by changing his skin. There is a tempting model very close at hand— the colonizer. The latter suffers from none of his deficiencies, has all rights, enjoys every possession and benefits from every prestige. He is, moreover, the other part of the comparison, the one that crushes the colonized and keeps him in servitude. The first ambition of the colonized is to become equal to that splendid model and to resemble him to the point of disappearing in him.’’ 43 However, this desire for the colonizer, as I suggested at the beginning of this essay, is always mediated by something else, something other than being just like the colonizer. We might reverse the order of Memmi’s observation and place the emphasis less on ‘‘to resemble him to the point of disappearing in him’’ and more on ‘‘to become equal to that splendid model.’’ To become Japanese represented a temporary transcendence from the irrepressible discriminatory colonial structure. Even Shū Kin-ha, the notorious kōmin writer discussed earlier, had this to say when he learned of the volunteer system: ‘‘There is this thought that the reason why we [the Taiwanese] are being discriminated against is because we have not shed any blood. When we bleed then we can be boastful. We’ll first accomplish our duties then we shall make our demands. In our minds, we had all understood this.’’ 44 It is therefore not surprising that the Taiwanese aborigines, positioned in the abyss of the colonial hierarchy and deprived of most political and economic possibilities, were most receptive to the volunteer system and displayed ardent loyalty to the Japanese.45 When we shift our attention from an interiorized struggle for identity to a process of identification in the kōmin texts another aspect pertinent to the colonial psyche as produced by kōminka emerges, that is, the question of modernity manifested in the relationship between the colonial intellectual and metropolitan Japan. In a majority of the kōmin texts there is an almost formulaic description of Taiwanese intellectuals’ fondness for metropolitan Japan and equally strong disenchantment with colonial Taiwan. In his reading of Oh Shō-yū’s A Torrent Taiwanese critic Lü Tsen-hui argues that Taiwanese intellectuals during the period of kōminka conflated the colonial procedure of ‘‘imperialization’’ (huang-min-hua) with the desire for ‘‘modernity’’ (hsein-tai-hua). It was precisely their inability to disentangle the two formidable forces of colonialism, Lü suggests, that prevented the Taiwanese intellectuals from ‘‘intelligently’’ confronting the question of imperialization.46 Lü points to the asymmetrical colonial relationship that foregrounds the anxiety of the colonial intellectuals only in the binary opposition between an advanced Japan and an underdeveloped Taiwan. This mode of colonial pathology is presented in several literary texts that depict the Tai‘‘give me japan and nothing else!’’

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wanese intellectuals’ yearning for metropolitan Japan and their impatience with colonial Taiwan—and subsequently, as Lü underscores, their disdain for Mainland China—after returning from their studying abroad. What the Taiwanese intellectuals desired in these texts was the constellation of modernity mediated through the bustling streets of Tokyo, or what Wu Cho-liu (Go Taku-ryū) in The Orphan of Asia calls ‘‘the scent of culture.’’ 47 In contrast, the villages in Taiwan can only represent ‘‘an inescapable boredom’’ and ‘‘an incredible monotonous life.’’ The gap between metropolitan Japan and colonial Taiwan thus became the starting point for the colonial intellectuals to contemplate the question of imperialization. The desire for modernity is consequently reduced to the problem of ‘‘Japanization’’ ( ji-pēn hua). Lü writes, From the standpoint of colonial rule, it is very natural that Japan, especially Tokyo, has become the most important place to go ‘‘study abroad’’ for the Taiwanese intellectuals. Under the kind of colonial structure, it is rare for these intellectuals to travel to more advanced countries like England, United States, Germany or France. The only other choice, Mainland China, surely lags behind Japan in its degree of modernity. As a result, Japan ‘‘monopolized’’ (lung tuan) the horizon of ‘‘modernity’’ for the Taiwanese intellectuals. Without a standpoint for comparison, they unknowingly assumed Japan to be the most modernized nation in the world, and conflated ‘‘modernization’’ with ‘‘Japanization.’’ 48

Despite colonial propagation of an alleged racial and cultural affinity between the Japanese and the Taiwanese, the structural relationship that posits the opposition between modern and underdeveloped, between the colonizer and the colonized, is not dissimilar from, say, the Indian intellectuals’ relation to London, or the West African intellectuals’ to Paris. Regardless of Japan’s ambivalent relationship to the West, for the Taiwanese intellectuals, Japan irrefutably represented the modern, as equivalent to the colonizing West. Despite the common assertion of Japan’s historical specificity as a late-developing colonial power, which endowed Japan with a developmental fervor different from Western imperialism, from the vantage point of the colonized Taiwanese, Japan was the locus of modernity, Japan was the West. There is no doubt that Japanese imperialism and its subsequent colonizing have their own characteristics that reflect the specific historical conditions of their emergence and the particular socioeconomic and political systems of Japan’s colonies. Furthermore, there was certainly a time lag between Japanese empire building as compared with its Western counterparts 160

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(with the exception of Germany). Japanese imperialism intensified at the very moment when the rationalization for imperialist expansion and the maintaining of colonies by the Western powers were under severe criticism. The belatedness of Japanese imperialism and its nonwhite racial constitution have certainly required Japan to create different sets of what Edward Said has called the ‘‘strategy of positional superiority’’ in relation to its colonized.49 Naoki Sakai has succinctly defined this strategy as ‘‘the strange coexistence of an uncritical identification with the West and an equally uncritical rejection of the West.’’ 50 In his reading of Japanese philosopher Watsuji Tetsurō’s travel writings, Sakai points out, first, that Watsuji identifies with the West as he ascribes the Indian submission under colonial rule to the Indian’s national character rather than the forces of British expansionism. However, when Watsuji is in Shanghai, the semicolonial city where Japanese imperialism was fully present, a colonialist situation where the word Anglo-Saxon could easily be substituted for Japanese,Watsuji intentionally disavows the mimetic relationship between the Anglo-Saxons and the Japanese. Watsuji, despite occupying the position of the Japanese imperialist in China, refuses to see the structural similarity between Japanese and Western imperialism. Instead Watsuji launches a strong condemnation of Anglo-American imperialism and Eurocentrism. What is exercised here is ‘‘a displacement of a certain colonial guilt about the imperialism of his own country that finds its outlet in the description of the brutality of Anglo-American imperialism.’’ 51 What is being disavowed here is both the mimetic relationship with the Anglo-Saxons and the antagonistic relationship Japan has with the Chinese and other Asians. The displacement of the antagonistic relationship between the Japanese and the Asian colonized is instead replaced by the paternalistic and racist call to liberate the peoples of the East from colonial domination by Europe and America. Watsuji’s articulatory practice of identification and dis-identification is symptomatic of Japanese colonial discourse in general. What is in question here is not whether Japanese colonial discourse is the same as or different from Western colonial discourse but, rather, how the enunciative position of that identity or difference is articulated and configured in reference to the instituted differences between Japan and its others. What we need to be mindful of is how the insistence on the differences of Japanese colonialism conceals the structural sameness of Japan’s colonialist/imperialist practice with all other workings of imperialism and colonization. For it is often in the name of cultural and colonial differences that Japanese nationalists have contrasted Japanese with Western imperialism as more humane ‘‘give me japan and nothing else!’’

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and beneficial to the colonized. In short, the inscription of Japanese differences always already presupposes a systemic economy of colonization and imperialism that makes the comparison possible in the first place. With the end of the Cold War and the transnationalization of capitalism on a global scale, the question of colonialism has become a legitimate object of analysis in the West and in Japan as well. This is inevitable as the colonial others—for example, Korean-Japanese writers and the growing number of migrant laborers from the ex-colonies—gradually make their irreducible difference and irrefutable presence felt in the cultural and economic fabric of Japanese society. Since, however, it has become more and more difficult to identify points of intervention in an increasingly complex social and economic structure, and to identify the agents and bearers of social transformation, the function of colonial studies is in danger of becoming one of compensation, not of critique. The contemporary Japan/West that will not negotiate with the moral authority of their erstwhile others, is a Japan/West that will not pay a price or atone for past colonization. However, any dominant subject position that is in the process of deconstructing or calling itself into question cannot do so either in solipsistic isolation or in a facile ‘‘dialogue’’ with the subaltern positions. The task at hand is not to fetishize their differences or to posit their otherness in an enclosed historical past, but to trace simultaneously the structural continuity and discontinuity, identity and difference, between formal colonialism and its legacy and to map out the very contradiction produced by these historical movements. I will end with a passage written almost forty years ago by Ozaki Hotsuki, a pioneer in Japanese colonial literature studies, that has become more relevant today regarding the project of decolonization for the Japanese: Only three days after Japan’s defeat, I was speaking to a fellow soldier from Taiwan on the future of the island. He said, ‘‘Japan lost. Taiwan is liberated. Chiang Kai-shek’s army will be here soon. But Taiwan’s culture and living standard is much higher. This is the result of the fifty-year Japanese rule. It would be impossible for us to get along. What should we do? The third way, that is, to be independent and to associate with Japan and China as equals.’’ At the time I was overwhelmed by the surrounding changes and could not appreciate the true meaning of his words. However, sixteen years later now, I am beginning to see the importance of those words that he uttered rather calmly and, moreover, their double meaning. First of all, the ‘‘Japanese rule’’ that has compelled him to believe that ‘‘Taiwan has a higher cultural and living

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standard’’ than the Chinese, and second, as the result of the first, his dream for independence in order for Taiwan to ‘‘associate with Japan and China as equals.’’ Both of these are questions that we Japanese cannot simply avoid.52

Notes 1 The title of this article, ‘‘Give Me Japan and Nothing Else!’’ is a translation from

Chinese of a cover story on Japanese youth culture and its influence in Asia (K’ewo-jih-pēn chi-yü-mien-tan). See Time Express, June 1999, 44–83. 2 The definition and periodization of postcolonialism in Taiwan is contentious. The ruling Kuomintang (kmt) government considers 1945, the year of Japan’s defeat, as the beginning of Taiwan’s decolonization and hence of its postcoloniality. But the so-called Taiwanese—those of Minnan and Hakka ethnicity—refer to 1987, the year martial law was lifted, as the beginning of postcoloniality in Taiwan. See Liao Ping-hui, ‘‘Postcolonial Studies in Taiwan: Issues in Critical Debate,’’ Postcolonial Studies 2.2 (1999): 199–212. 3 Leo Ching, ‘‘Regionalizing the Global, Globalizing the Regional: Mass Culture and the Discourse of Asianism in the Age of Late Capital,’’ Public Culture 12.1: 235–59. The consumerist nature of Japanese mass culture is evident in the complete monopoly of its consumption by young Taiwanese with large disposable incomes who neither are fluent in Japanese nor have experienced colonialism directly. Take Japanese tv programs, for example. Despite colonial history and the presence of elderly persons fluent in Japanese, Japanese tv programs (subtitled or dubbed) are watched almost exclusively by the younger Taiwanese. See Ishii Kenichi, Su Herng, and Watanabe Satoshi, ‘‘Japanese and U.S. Programs in Taiwanese Television: New Patterns in Taiwanese Television,’’ Journal of Broadcasting and Electronic Media 43.3 (1999): 416–31. 4 In the mid-1950s under John Foster Dulles, the United States initiated a triangular program to boost Japanese exports and to make the Japanese economy self-sufficient. The Americans put up funds for Southeast Asian countries to purchase Japanese exports, in return giving these same countries privileges in the U.S. market. The United States also ensured that the World Bank and other ‘‘international’’ organizations lavish loans on Japan. The plan was to facilitate capitalist development in the region to counteract the ‘‘perceivable’’ Communist threat. The war in Korea has, of course, through the promoting of militarization of Japanese industries, accelerated the process. The Korean conflict was extremely profitable to Japanese business, which benefited greatly from the increased U.S. expenditure and thus also consolidated the role of Japan as the U.S. counterrevolutionary ally in East Asia. And Japan’s relation to its Asian neighbors began to assume a different configuration of economic domination. The reparation programs in connection with war responsibility were to be designed and instigated by business to assist the revival of the Japanese economy. In other words, together with financial ‘‘aid,’’ they were nothing but disguised investment or export credits aimed at market developments in Japan’s ex-colonies for the exportation of Japanese and U.S. goods. It is therefore both symbolic and significant

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5

6

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8

9 10 11 12 13 14

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that Gavan McCormack concludes his critical examination of what he calls ‘‘the emptiness of Japanese affluence’’ in the postwar era by returning to the questions of war and, by extension, Japanese colonialism itself. See Gavan McCormack, The Emptiness of Japanese Affluence (New York, 1996). See for example, Lin Chi-wen, Jih-pēn chü-t’ai-mo-ch’i chan-ch’un-tung-yüan-ti-hsi chi yen-ch’iu (1930–1945) [The study of the war mobilization system in late Japanese occupation of Taiwan] (Taipei, 1996). Stuart Hall, ‘‘When Was ‘the Post-Colonial’? Thinking at the Limit,’’ in The PostColonial Question: Common Skies, Divided Horizons, ed. Iain Chambers and Lidia Curti (London, 1996), 254. See, for example, Arif Dirlik, The Postcolonial Aura: Third World Criticism in the Age of Global Capitalism (Boulder, CO, 1997); Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present (Cambridge, MA, 1999); E. San Juan Jr., Beyond Postcolonial Theory (New York, 2000). Chungmoo Choi, ‘‘The Discourse of Decolonization and Popular Memory: South Korea,’’ in Formations of Colonial Modernity in East Asia, ed. Tani Barlow (Durham, NC, 1997), 349; Ukai Satoshi, ‘‘Posutokoroniarizumu: Mittsu no toi’’ [Postcolonialism: Three inquiries], in ‘‘Fukusū bunka’’ no tameni [Toward ‘‘multiple cultures’’], ed. Fukusūbunka kenkyukai (Tokyo, 1998), 43. Ukai Satoshi, ‘‘Posutokoroniarizumu,’’ 45. I owe this insight to Franziska Seraphim’s ‘‘War Memory, Special Interests, Changing Publics’’ (unpublished paper). Sara Lennox, Susanne Zantop, and Sara Friedrichsmeyer, eds., The Imperialist Imagination: German Colonialism and Its Legacy (Ann Arbor, 1998), 6. Oguma Eiji, Tan’itsu minzoku shinwa no kigen [The myth of the homogeneous nation] (Tokyo, 1995). McCormack, Emptiness of Japanese Affluence, 238. By the definition expounded in the Potsdam Declaration, the ‘‘unjust’’ acquisition of the Japanese empire could have been equally applied to both the United States and the United Kingdom. Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (New York, 1963), 36. ‘‘Posutokoroniaru shisō to wa nanika’’ [What is postcolonial thinking?], Hihyō kūkan 2.11 (1996): 6–36. See, for example, Naoki Sakai, Voices of the Past: The Status of Language in Eighteenth-Century Japanese Discourse (Ithaca, 1991); Marilyn Ivy, Discourse of the Vanishing: Modernity, Phantasm, Japan (Chicago, 1995); Oguma Eiji, ‘‘Nihonjin’’ no kyōkai [The boundaries of the Japanese] (Tokyo, 1998). Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (New York, 1994), 172. For an excellent but slightly different analysis of the recent debate, see Sungsheng Yvonne Chang, ‘‘Beyond Cultural and National Identities: Current Reevaluation of the Kominka Literature from Taiwan’s Japanese Period,’’ Journal of Modern Literature in Chinese 1.1 (1997): 75–107. Mark R. Peattie, ‘‘Japanese Attitudes toward Colonialism,’’ in The Japanese Colonial Empire, 1895–1945, ed. Ramon H. Myers and Mark R. Peattie (Princeton, 1984), 121.

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21 Hoshina Hironobu, ‘‘Kikō to shinkō to jibyō ron’’ [On ‘‘Climate, faith, and chronic

22 23 24 25

26 27 28 29 30 31 32

33 34

35 36 37

38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45

disease’’], in Yomigaeru taiwan bungaku: Nihon tōjiki no sakka to sakuhin [Reviving Taiwanese literature: Writers and works during Japanese occupation], ed. Shimomura Sakutarō et al. (Tokyo, 1995), 433. Hoshina gives an example of this dramatic turnabout: in October 1993 Wenshue Taiwan organized an epoch-making special issue on Shū Kin-ha, only a year and half after his first name was rendered in asterisk in the Independent Evening Newspaper of May 31, 1992. Tarumi Chie, Taiwan no nihongo bungaku [Taiwan’s Japanese language literature] (Tokyo, 1995). Ibid., 57–58; italics mine. Ibid., 58. See, for instance, Karatani Kōjin, Shūen o megutte [Regarding the end] (Tokyo, 1990), esp. ‘‘1970=shōwa 45—kindai nihon no enzetsu kūkan’’ [1970=shōwa 45 —the discursive space of modern Japan], 9–44. Shū Kin-ha, ‘‘Shiganhei,’’ Bungei taiwan 2.6 (1941): 8–21. Ibid., 16–17. Ibid., 20. Ibid. Ibid., 21. Tarumi, Taiwan no nihongo bungaku, 61. Masayoshi Matsunaga, ‘‘Taiwan no bungaku katsudo’’ [Literary activities in Taiwan], in Kindai nihon to shokuminchi [Modern Japan and colonies] (Tokyo, 1993), 332. Hoshina, ‘‘Kikō to shinkō to jibyō ron,’’ 442. Lin Jui-ming, ‘‘Kessenki taiwan no sakka to kōmin bungaku,’’ trans. Matusnaga Masayoshi, in Kindai nihon to shokuminchi, vol. 6, Teikō to kutsujū [Modern Japan and colony, vol. 6, Resistance and submission] (Tokyo, 1993), 235–61. Ibid., 249. Ibid., 251. See, for example, Tsukamoto Terukazu, ‘‘Shōkai—Chin Ka-sen no Michi’’ [Introducing Chin Ka-sen’s ‘‘The road’’], Taiwan bungaku kenkyūkai kaihō (December 1982). Lin also notes that Hoshina Hironobu makes the same argument by suggesting that The Road be read in its ‘‘double meaning’’ of both kōmin literature and resistance literature. See Lin, ‘‘Kessenki taiwan no sakka to kōmin bungaku,’’ 255. Lin, ‘‘Kessenki taiwan no sakka to kōmin bungaku,’’ 258. Ibid., 258. Tsai Pei-huo. ‘‘Gotō to gotō’’ [Our island and us], Taiwan seinen 2.2 (1921): 58. Tomiyama Ichirō, Senjō no kioku [Memories of the battlefield] (Tokyo, 1995), 10. See Washinosu Atsuya, Taiwan hōkō kōminka tokuhon [A Primer for Taiwan’s Baojia system and imperialization] (Taipei, 1941), 180–241. Albert Memmi, The Colonizer and the Colonized (Boston, 1965), 120; emphasis mine. Quoted in Hoshina, ‘‘Kikō to shinkō to jibyō ron,’’ 445. See, for example, Suzuki Akira, Takasagozoku ni sasageru [For the Takasagozoku] (Tokyo, 1976).

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46 Lü Tsen-hui, ‘‘Huang-min-hua yü hsien-tai-hua ti chiu-k’o: Wang Ch’ang-hsiung

47 48 49 50 51 52

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‘Pēng-liu’ ti lin-i-ts’ung tu-fa’’ [The conflict between imperialization and modernity: A different reading of Wang Ch’ang-hsiung’s ‘‘A Torrent’’] (paper presented at the T’ai-wan-wen-hsüeh yen-t’ao-hui [The study of Taiwan literature], Taipei, 1996). Wu Cho-lin, Ajia no koji [The orphan of Asia] (Tokyo, 1956), 23. Lü, ‘‘Huang-min-hua yü hsien-tai-hua ti chiu-k’o,’’ 4. Edward Said, Orientalism (New York, 1978), 7. Naoki Sakai, Translation and Subjectivity: On ‘‘Japan’’ and Cultural Nationalism (Minneapolis, 1997), 135. Ibid., 134. Ozaki Hotsuki, Kindai bungaku no shōkōn [The Scar of modern literature] (Tokyo, 1991), 64.

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‘‘You Asians’’: On the Historical Role of the West and Asia Binary

Naoki Sakai

P

artly because of the consequences of accelerating globalization and the emergence of what, for the last decade or two, a number of people have referred to as the postmodern conditions discernible almost everywhere on the globe, we are urged to acknowledge that the unity of the West is far from being unitarily determinable. The West is a mythical construct, indeed, yet what we believe we understand by this mytheme is increasingly ambiguous and incongruous; its immoderately overdetermined nature can no longer be shrouded. Until recently the indigenous or local characteristic of a social and cultural construct found in places in Asia, Africa, and sometimes Latin America has routinely been earmarked in contrast to some generalized and euphemistic quality specified as being ‘‘Western.’’ Without this institutionalized gesture whereby to identify what is allegedly unfamiliar, enigmatic, or barbaric for those who fashion themselves to be ‘‘Westerners’’ in terms of the Western/non-Western binary opposition, it would be impossible to understand the initial formation of Asian studies as a set of academic disciplines in North American academia. Things Asiatic were brought to scholarly attention by being recognized as ‘‘different and therefore Asian.’’ Then, tacitly from the putative viewpoint called ‘‘the West,’’ ‘‘being different from us’’ and ‘‘being Asian’’ were taken to be synonymous in its anthropologizing gesture. A regiment was in effect according to which an acknowledgment of allegedly unfamiliar, enigmatic, or barbaric things was immediately a recognition of one’s positionality as a Westerner. A similar operation could well be performed with Africa or Latin America, so as to identify Africa or

Latin America as belonging to the Rest of the World, the rest that is left over when the humanity of the West is strenuously extracted from the world. Let me begin my essay with a brief meditation on the term Asia and the people who call themselves Asians. Instead of speaking from the usual viewpoint of ‘‘we Westerners’’—a customary addresser stance when one writes in English in the United States—let me address myself from the contrasting position of ‘‘we Asians.’’ For those who fashion themselves as Asians, the word Asians is implicitly we Asians and serves as a vocative of a first-person plural pronoun that self-reflectively designates a group of people whose primary commonality is supposed to consist of ‘‘being of Asia.’’ But, who are the people who call themselves Asians? Or, more fundamentally, where is Asia? What is it? I am not sure to what extent one can seriously claim today that Asia is, first of all, a cartographic index. Nonetheless it is widely believed that Asia is a certain proper name that indicates a vast geographic area with its huge resident population. Accordingly, some people might without reflection assume that those who live in the geographic area called Asia are naturally designated as the Asians. The population inhabiting the area called Asia is called the Asians. From this, however, it does not necessarily follow that the people thus called Asians are able to gather themselves together and build some solidarity among themselves through the act of their self-representation or autorepresentation by enunciating not only we but also we Asians. Clearly there is a wide gap between the fact that the population is described as Asians by some observers standing outside the population—we will inquire into the conceptual specificity of this ‘‘outside’’ or externality later—and the selfassertion by the people themselves in terms of the name attributed to them. Some sort of leap is required in order to move from the state of being described as Asians by some outside agents to the self-representation as a subject in terms of we Asians. And let us not be negligent of a historical verity that this leap could not be made until the twentieth century. Until then, generally speaking, there were objects designated as Asians but there were no subjects who represented themselves by calling themselves Asians. Only in the late nineteenth century a few intellectuals began to advocate the plausibility of constituting the transnational and regional subjectivity of Asia. In this respect one can never overlook the particular genealogy of Asia, that the name Asia originated outside Asia, and that its heteronomous origin is indubitably inscribed in the concept of Asia, even if it can by no means be taken as a geographic or cartographic locality. 168

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It is well known that the word Asia was coined by the Europeans in order to distinguish Europe from its eastern others, in the protocol of constituting itself as a sort of territorial unity. It was a term in the service of the constitution of Europe’s self-representation as well as its distinction. Asia was necessary for Europe because, without positing it, Europe could not have been marked as a distinct and distinguishable unity. Yet as the putative unity of Europe is inherently unstable and constantly changing, Asia has been defined and redefined according to contingent historical situations in which relationships between Europe and its others have undergone vicissitudes. Since the nineteenth century there have been an increasing number of occasions when the West was used almost as a synonym for Europe. The mytheme West came to assume a global currency. Clearly the West neither signifies nor refers to the same thing as the word Europe. Yet in its paradigmatic discriminatory function, the West began to behave like Europe. In other words, Asia was placed in a similar opposition to the West as it had been to Europe. Today Asia is not necessarily subjugated to the domination of the West. Most of the Asian countries are, at least in theory, independent of their former colonizers. Yet we are still not justified in overlooking the enduring historical truth that Asia arrived at its self-consciousness thanks to the West’s or Europe’s colonization, as Takeuchi Yoshimi, a sinologist specializing in modern Chinese literature, asserted more than a half-century ago.1 The historical colonization of Asia by the West is not something accidental to the essence of Asia; it is essential to the possibility called Asia. Insofar as the post of postcoloniality is not confused with ‘‘that which comes after’’ in chronological ordering, Asia was a postcolonial entity from the outset. Takeuchi’s insight was particularly penetrating because he had to address the problem of modernity and modern subjectivity from the vantage point of a specific historical question: How could a Japanese intellectual, as an Asian person, still speak about modernity in Asia after Japan’s defeat or after what the Japanese had done to people in Asia during the fifteen-year Asia Pacific War? Negativity, without which the reflectivity necessary for self-consciousness cannot be achieved, never originated in Asia, and the absence of negativity was certainly implied in Takeuchi’s word defeat (haiboku). Following the tenets of the Hegelian dialectic, Maruyama Masao, Takeuchi’s contemporary, attempted to show that the moment of negativity could be discerned in Japanese thought in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, whereas the Chinese never succeeded in giving rise to their own negativity.2 Im‘‘you asians’’

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plicit in Maruyama’s wartime historiography, which justified Japan’s political superiority over China, was the old thesis of ‘‘flight from Asia, entry into Europe,’’ which meant that Japan should be capable of modernizing itself while the rest of Asia must wait for the West’s initiative and that, accordingly, Japan ought not to belong to Asia in that respect. Unambiguously, with respect to the invocation of we Asians in particular, Takeuchi’s historicism was diametrically opposed to Maruyama’s, yet it is necessary for us to acknowledge that both shared the foundational logic of historicism. Asia could never be conscious of itself before it was invaded by the West, according to Takeuchi. Only through the acknowledgment of its lost autonomy, of its dependence on the West, or only in the mirror of the West, so to say, could Asia reflectively acquire its civilizational, cultural, ethnic, or national self-consciousness. The defeat is registered in the genealogy of the name itself. Ostensibly, Asia is a proper name; nevertheless, as a sign it would be too arbitrary unless it is paradigmatically opposed to the West (or Europe). Its seeming reality depends on the very constitutive exclusivity, so that Western and Asian properties/proprieties are not attributable to the same substance. The same person or thing cannot be Western and Asian at the same time. Depending on the choice of paradigmatic axis, Asia could signify a vast set of concepts, and its reference is too rich, too varied, and too full to be specific. Therefore it does not possess any immanent principle with which to identify its internal unity, either. Except for the fact that it points to a certain assemblage of regions and peoples that have been objectified by and subjugated to the West, there is nothing common in many parts of Asia. In other words, it is impossible to talk about Asia positively. Only as the negative of the West can one possibly address oneself as an Asian. Therefore to talk about Asia is invariably to talk about the West. Takeuchi was typical of Asian and European intellectuals who had their formative years in the 1930s, in that he had internalized Hegelian historicism to such an extent that he could not project historical trajectories other than the historicist one in which the actualization and appropriation of modern values must first require the people’s radical negation of the external forces and of their internal heritage of a feudal past. He believed that Asian modernity could be accomplished only by appropriating the essence of Western modernity. But in order to appropriate the essence of Western modernity, there had to be a collective agent ‘‘nation,’’ and an Asian

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nation had to resist the West without and overcome the reactionary heritage within. In other words, Asia was to modernize itself by negating both the West outside and its own past inside. Where there was no resistance to or negation of the West, there was no prospect of modernity for Asia. For Asia as well as for the West, modernity meant a self-transcending project of struggle with the remnants of the past. Takeuchi was undoubtedly a passionate nationalist in his emotive and affective constitution. Unlike Maruyama Masao, another nationalist thinker of postwar Japan, however, he diagnosed Japan’s modern history as a telling case where genuine negativity was absent. This perhaps is the reason for his excessive idealization of China. He seriously hoped that China would actualize a truly authentic modernity by negating the West’s domination as well as the feudal remnants of the past, unlike Japan, which had facilely accepted the West without resisting it, to the extent of reproducing its imperialism. The historical dialectic he anticipated could not have made sense unless there had been posited the externality of what Asia was to resist. Takeuchi was most adamantly opposed to the large-scale attempt to construct the regional and transnational subjectivity, as embodied in the project of the Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere, while decisively approving the Chinese nationalist agenda that arose in the Chinese resistance of the Japanese invasion in East Asia. One would probably misapprehend his commitment to modernity unless one sensed his recondite shame about his own nation’s imperialistic and dehumanizing maneuvers in East and Southeast Asia in the 1930s and early 1940s and his intense rage against U.S. imperialism, which was about to take over the Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere, in the late 1940s. Then, for Asian peoples, modernity was considered a sort of historical movement that spatially consolidated the unity and substantiality of a political grouping called ‘‘the nation’’ by negating external forces while temporally constituting itself as a subject, as an agent of self-determination, by continually overcoming its own past. Operating in the background of Takeuchi’s historical assessment is a vision of the historically specific division of intellectual labor in which the modern idea and institution are associated with that mythical locus ‘‘the West’’ and are transported from there to the rest of the world. It goes without saying that such a vision of the global circulation of modern things is of an imaginary nature, but it is a powerful and effectual social imaginary on a global scale. It prescribes and presages, as a sort of regulative machinery, what the modern world must look like. Against the background of such a

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cartographic imaginary of the globe, the essentially colonialist distinction between the West and the Rest of the World has been established and maintained for some time, albeit with constant vicissitudes. In Takeuchi’s diagnosis of modernity, consequently, the unity of the nation depended on the externality of what had to be resisted, which was, more often than not, mapped onto a cartographic plane as the externality of one national sovereignty against another. What must be resisted must come from outside the presumed integrity of the nation, just like Japanese troops and capital entering the Chinese territory in the Japanese invasion of China. A nation of Asia such as China was located within the reaches of the West, but the West itself was external to it. Or, more precisely, the territorial integrity and the imagined unity of the nation was constituted in the act of representing the West as an external threat. The externality of what had to be resisted had thus to be comprehended in terms of geographic distance between Western Europe/North America and Asia. This distance between the West and Asia was further translated into the distance between political affiliations and, finally, between the friend and the enemy; it thereby ended up mimicking, although perhaps unwittingly, the gesture of discriminatory distancing by means of which the West constitutes itself by distinguishing Asia and the Rest of the World from itself. The feasibility that Asia could be inherent in the West was deliberately exonerated. Takeuchi could not avoid the cartographic imaginary of the globe upon which modernization theory is invariably dependent although he was unequivocally critical of scholars who promoted the modernization theory in Japan as well as North America. A critique of Takeuchi’s historical consciousness, of an inherently historicist consciousness, therefore, should serve as our starting point for a new conception of modernity and subsequently a new conception of the relationship between the West and Asia.3 According to the conventional historical narrative, the large-scale social changes in Western Europe accompanied by the emergence of modern states, industries, and technologies are thought to mark the beginning of modern society. The origins of modern society are ascribed to a number of historical precedents: the development of parliamentary politics against the absolutist regimes; the symptoms of industrialization in England in the eighteenth century; the formation of the bourgeois social milieu and the new ways of organizing everyday life according to the division of the public and the private; a series of political and social events that led to the establishment of a new polity legitimizing itself in the name of the people, race, or nation; the decline of mercantilism; the formation of subject as ‘‘the nation172

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state,’’ which produces itself by self-representation or auto-representation; and so forth. All these precedents and the subsequent realization of modern societies are located in a cartographic area called ‘‘the West.’’ Inversely, it is appropriate to say that the West is postulated as a geographic area where all these modern things originally started. Thereupon it is claimed that these events, which symbolize modernity, all took place within the West. Furthermore, modernity thus depicted is understood to be something that continually spreads; modernity emanates itself. Unlike an epidemic—the most recent case of which no doubt is aids—which is usually imagined to start in a peripheral site and gradually spread to the metropolis, modernity is fantasized as emanating in a reverse manner from the center to the hinterlands of the world. Therefore the consequences, influences, and effects of this unitary process of social transformation that supposedly occurred strictly within the West are said to be detected and observed in remote areas such as Africa, Latin America, Oceania, and of course Asia as a consequence of modernity’s emanation. In due course modernity as a historical movement was represented as an emanative flow in the cartographic imaginary of the globe. Underlying the historicist apprehension of modernization was a certain vision of emanation without which the centeredness of Eurocentricity could never have been retained. Undoubtedly there is no room for the multiplicity of modernity in such a representation. What we have routinely comprehended in terms of modernity and the West must be called into question because the historicist schema of the world subordinates the multiple emergence of modernities to the single overarching process of homogenization. The West is given rise to because modernity has not been released from its imprisonment in the emanation model. The West is a peculiar term; it is not adequately a proper noun capable of designating some referent in its singularity beyond the sum of its descriptions.4 Neither is it an ordinary noun, as it is also an adjective and an adverb. Its unity is somewhat suggested by the capitalization of the w, without which the conventional narrative of modernization could not be sustained, for essentially every point on the surface of the earth is a west. What is overlooked in this narrative, above all, is the undeniable economic, social, cultural, ethnic, and religious heterogeneity that has continued to exist in the geographic areas imagined to constitute the West: Western Europe, mainly bourgeois Britain and France, in the nineteenth century, with North America being added later in the twentieth century. The examples of its ‘‘you asians’’

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heterogeneity are easy to find: the vast population of Eastern Europe, which is most often excluded from the West; the African Americans who have lived generation after generation in the same social formations with the whites who fashion themselves as Westerners in the United States today; and ‘‘the Asians’’ in England who have received a lot more traditional European education than the majority of English working-class people, to mention but a few. But more importantly, also overlooked is the fact that the contour of the West itself is drawn by this historicist narrative of modernization. It is precisely because it effectively disavows its diversity, as if its interior were congenitally homogeneous, that the West as a social imaginary is called for in the first place. Today the West as an analytic concept is bankrupt and generally useless in guiding our observation about certain social formations and people’s behavior in many loci in the world. It obscures our observation and misdirects our comparison particularly in the cases of the social formations and cultural phenomena encountered in places such as Hong Kong, the United States, and Japan. With Japan being customarily located outside the West, can a comparison with the West tell you anything unique about Japanese culture? Does Japanese anime demonstrate some distinctively non-Western property or propriety more significant than the fact that what the individual researcher perceives to be non-Western indicates only that the person happens to be unfamiliar with it? Yet the uses of the West and Asia cannot be abolished overnight. Certain people will persist in relying on these historical constructs because they have to fashion themselves in these terms and by means of their distinction from each other. By positing Asia ‘‘over there’’ away from the West ‘‘this side,’’ this voyeuristic optic somewhat engenders a fleeting sense of a distinction between the West and the Rest, an ephemeral extenuation for not submitting things Western to the same analytical fields of investigation as things Asiatic. Let us note that this voyeuristic optic, therefore, also serves as an alluring fantasy for those who feel most insecure as the Westerners. Consequently, the putative unity of the West is barely sustained because they deliberately avoid submitting Western and Asian things to the same field of analysis. How perspectives are organized according to this distinction thus prescribes and presages where the West is imagined to be located and who is entitled to feel modern. I maintain that the time of modernity is never unitary; it is always in multiplicity. Modernity always appears in multiple histories. Yet the multiplicity of modernity must not be understood to mean that its plural origins exist side by side in a homogeneous geographic space of the globe. Neither 174

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should the multiplicity of histories be understood as a juxtaposition of the plural homogeneous empty temporalities of national and ethnic histories. Although we are aware that the modernization theory is hardly sustainable today, we are not entirely free of the binary structuring schemata that are constantly utilized by the geopolitics of the modernization theory, within contemporary discussions of modernity. Because such schemata reduce modernity to modernization, the representation of the world they prescribe is hierarchically organized into the West and the Rest, the modern and its others, the white and the colored. Worse still, these binaries are supposed to overlap. The emanation model of modernity stems from a fundamental misconception of the basic element of modernity. Modernity is inconceivable unless there are occasions when many regions, many people, many industries, and many polities are in contact with one another despite geographic, cultural, and social distance. Modernity, therefore, cannot be considered unless in reference to translation. It is impossible to conceive of translation as an operation by which to establish equivalence in signification of the same text between two versions in two languages. In other words, translation cannot be conceptualized according to the schema of communication upon which the emanation model of modernity, for instance, is based. Translation facilitates conversation between people in different geographical and social loci who would otherwise never converse with one another, but it also provides them with a space where the appropriateness and validity of translation is constantly discussed and disputed. In this space we misunderstand and mistranslate one another, but we also recognize the urgent need to strive to understand and translate one another so that we can discover how we misunderstand and mistranslate. This also teaches us how modernity takes place in many sites in the world. Modernity is always relational in the sense that it cannot be confined to one race, religion, tradition, or nation as it always happens as translation. The identities of race, tradition, and nation are constituted and discovered retrospectively after the processes of translation. Translation allows you and me to share, but in order to share, we must translate and transform the original and create something new. Sharing, therefore, is necessarily an experience of creative work toward the other, of creative work in the means of communication. For this reason pidginization, a locale experience of creating a pidgin from multiple languages, points to something fundamental about modernity and its multiplicity. The nationalist demand for the archetype of ‘‘you asians’’

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an unmixed and original language occurs equally as a reaction to and a denial of such an ongoing pidginization and multitude. In this respect modernity is first a process in which people transcend distances of many kinds in order to be in contact with one another. Let me note that universality, not generality, is indissociably related to transcendence in this sense. The misunderstanding of the nature of modernity stems from the misconception of the event of ‘‘being in contact with others.’’ This misunderstanding parallels a confusionism concerning translation and its representation. Contact can never be construed as a one-way process of transmitting a doctrine or value from one party to another. Unless contact is a social relation for which, in the final analysis, there can be no overarching transcendent viewpoint, even the transmission of a doctrine or commodity exchange cannot take place. Thus contact is capable of transforming both parties involved in the transaction. If a social process of transforming, distorting, or destroying the way people are is called violence, modernity is indubitably a violent event, to whose violence both parties are equally exposed (but not equally hurt by). Modernity is not a stasis, the state of some societies that can be specified by a set of characteristics. It is, rather, a kind of violent transformative dynamic that arises from social encounters among heterogeneous people. The notion of the subject that autonomously constitutes and transcends itself toward its future plays such an important role in the understanding of modern consciousness and in the history of the nation precisely because modernity’s inescapable heteronomy is overlooked and erased in the essentially linear representation of this dynamics. Only under the erasure of its inevitable engagement with alterity is history usurped by the subject and turned into a development. A defeat or humiliating subjugation of one party by another because of the other’s economic, technological, or military superiority is, without exception, an experience involving both parties, however differently it may be lived through. Unless modernity is mistaken as development in various historicisms, unless it is thought to be a stage of evolution into which the society as a subject grows, it is simply impossible to rank various social formations in the chronological hierarchy of advancement and retardation. What are mapped onto the chronology of maturity are consequences of violent transformative dynamics: military conquests, religio-educational civilizing processes, economic competitions and rivalries, and political struggles. There is no inherent reason why the prosperous should naturally

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be advanced on the evolutionary ladder, or the conquered necessarily primitive. Yet in the emanation model of modernity, an economy prevails by which the West is assumed to be active in affecting social transformation in Asia, while Asia always remains passive. This economy would then postulate two contrasting but mutually supplementing presumptions: on one hand, the West is capable of transforming itself on its own initiative from within while remaining unaffected by the Rest of the World; on the other hand, Asia is incapable of transforming itself from within while being constantly affected by the West. Accordingly, what may be regarded as the content of modernity, such as ideas, institutions, and the ways of life particular to the modern social formation, cannot be circulated other than in the one-way process of indoctrination. This is a vision of the civilizing mission that fantastically satisfies the narcissistic wishes of those still arrested in the missionary positionality, and—as I will discuss later with regard to the transferential complicity based on culturalism between the United States and Japan after World War II—such a vision respects the premises of culturalism and covertly posits the unity of the West as a transhistorical entity like essentialized national culture. The emanation model of modernity thus gives rise to Asian intellectuals’ obsessive concerns with their own version of modernity and their own modernization initiatives. The global emergence of modernities has been accompanied by a drastically increased frequency of social encounters and commodity exchanges all over the world. While social encounter and commodity exchange give rise to demands for transparency in communication and equivalence in value, they inevitably evoke the incommensurable in our sociality and the excessive in equation. Yet the incommensurable and the excessive cannot be apprehended outside the contexts of contact. For this reason we must not lose sight of the fact that the particularistic insistence on the immutable ethnic and national cultures and traditions goes hand in hand with the universalism of historicism. The culturalist insistence on the integrity of an ethnic and national culture in Asia is always matched by a covert obsession with the culturalist unity of the West. The rhetoric of Asian values, for example, is the simple reversal of Eurocentric culturalism. Today it is increasingly difficult to overlook the fact that the emanation model of modernity is both politically dubious and intellectually inadequate. This prevailing view of the West is no longer acceptable, not only because its material conditions are in the process of being undermined, but

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also because we ought to refuse to view the relationships among many locations in the world according to the cartographic imaginary of historicism. Global modernity has accelerated cultural, economic, and political interchange between different regions and brought different forms of powerknowledge into a more intense interaction. What once appeared exclusively European no longer belongs to the Euro-American world, and there is an increasing number of instances in which non-Euro-American loci are more ‘‘Western’’ than some aspects of North American and European life. This diversification of the West allows us to discover something fundamentally ‘‘Asian’’ and ‘‘African’’ in those people who fashion themselves as ‘‘Westerners’’ and to conceive of relations among people in many locations of the world in an order other than the racialized hierarchy of the Eurocentric worldview. After all, is the West one of the most effective and affective culturalist imaginaries today? Racism being the institutionalized form of desire to naturalize and dehistoricize social relations and identities, the mytheme of the West cannot be cleansed of its racist implications as long as culturalism is the most prevalent means of naturalizing and essentializing a person’s social status and a social group’s identity today. Let me ask once more. Can we continue to presume that the West is essentially a cartographic category? Can we continue to overlook the fact that the distinction between the West and the Rest is increasingly independent of geography, race, ethnic culture, or nationality but is a matter of cultural capital shaping the individual’s socioeconomic status? Can we continue to ignore the wide diversity of contexts in which the very distinction between the West and the Rest is opportunistically drawn, and the economic and social conditions that allow some people to afford to be ‘‘Western’’ while not allowing others? By now it is self-evident, I hope, that the insistence on the propriety and native authenticity of us Asians would only reinforce the discriminatory and distinctive uniqueness of the West and prevent us from dismantling the colonial relationship that underlies the identities of both the West and Asia. In this specific context the putative unity of the West, the dominant and universalistic position, is sustained by the insistence on the equally putative unity of Asia, the subordinate and particularistic position. To illustrate this point, I will draw an example from the history of postwar Japan and refer to what many people in East and Southeast Asia called the Japanese War Responsibility Amnesia. Toward the end of the Asia Pacific War, the crucial issue with which Japanese leaders were primarily con178

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cerned in their negotiations with the Allied Powers about the conditions of Japan’s surrender was neither the welfare of the population of the Japanese Empire nor the integrity of its territories but, instead the preservation of ‘‘the national body.’’ In the language of the prewar Japanese state in the 1920s and 1930s, the national body (kokutai ) was defined in terms of a combination of private property rights and the emperor system. To violate the national body, then, meant either socialist and communist activism that denied the unlimited validity of private property rights or the critique or refusal of the emperor as the national sovereign. In the late nineteenth century, when the emperor system was first installed, the national body was often referred to as a translation of nationality from British liberalism.5 During the early years of the Meiji period (1868–1911), some intellectuals argued that the figure of the emperor represented the sense of nationality. Yet as the Japanese Empire expanded territorially, annexing Hokkaido, Okinawa, Taiwan, Korea, the Pacific Islands, and finally large parts of East and Southeast Asia under the umbrella of the Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere, the emperor was increasingly associated with the universalistic principle of the Japanese reign under which people of different ethnic backgrounds, of different languages and cultures, and of different residences were entitled to be integrated into the imperial nation and treated as equal subjects (the equality of which must be thoroughly scrutinized, indeed). Japan being an imperial nation, the prewar emperor was rarely made to represent the unity of a particular ethnicity or national culture. In the years subsequent to Japan’s defeat and the loss of the empire, the legal status of the emperor underwent a drastic change. While the emperor was defined as the sovereign of the Japanese state and the commander-inchief of all the Japanese military forces under the Meiji Constitution, the new constitution the U.S. government drafted and that its Occupation administration implemented in 1947 defined the emperor as ‘‘the symbol of the unity of the Japanese nation.’’ The implementation of the new emperor system was accompanied by the culturalist discussions of Japanese national unity in Japan as well as in the United States. Thus after the loss of the empire, the emperor was made to symbolize the continuity of Japanese tradition and the unity of Japanese national culture. Some conservative intellectuals, such as Watsuji Tetsurō, positively valued the new definition of the Japanese emperor and served as ideologues for the U.S. Occupation administration and produced an argument that justified the new emperor system on the basis of cultural nationalism.6 At the same time in the United States, anthropologists such as Ruth Benedict and Japan experts were involved in ‘‘you asians’’

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the production of a similar culturalist argument about Japanese national character during the war.7 After Japan’s defeat and under the Allied Powers’ occupation administered by the United States, these two trends of culturalism reached a remarkably effective synthesis in the legitimization of the new emperor system. The effects of such a culturalist endorsement of the new emperor system are surprisingly lasting, and I do not think that even today, after more than a half century, the Japanese public and political elite have freed themselves from the burdens of such a culturalist rhetoric. As amply suggested in a recent article by Takashi Fujitani and in Edwin O. Reischauer’s September 1942 ‘‘Memorandum on Policy towards Japan,’’ which Fujitani discovered at the National Archives, the Japanese national tradition and the unity of Japanese culture were clearly conceived of as instruments for a U.S. occupation of Japan.8 As early as ten months after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Reischauer proposed to use the Shōwa emperor as a puppet for the U.S. Occupation administration after Japan’s surrender. I would never claim that the memorandum prepared by Reischauer, who is regarded as one of the founding fathers of area studies in higher education in the United States and who later became ambassador to Japan (1961–66), single-handedly laid the foundation for the postwar U.S. policies toward Japan and East Asia. But his memorandum is extremely informative in depicting the overall design of postwar U.S. policies toward Japan, including the endorsement of ‘‘the national body.’’ In retrospect we realize not only that Reischauer was consistent in his subsequent publications, such as Japan Past and Present (1947) and Wanted: An Asian Policy (1955),9 but also that almost all of his proposals were implemented in U.S. policies toward Japan and East Asia after the war. This fact is most uncannily indicated by the marker ‘‘@ Harvard University’’ at the end of the memorandum, as if he had intimated the historical destiny and political significance of Japanese studies at Harvard University in the U.S. domination of Japan. Thus the memorandum played the eerie role of go-between in international politics in later training and producing a future Japanese empress for the third generation of ‘‘the puppet.’’ 10 From the late 1940s onward there gradually emerged a certain bilateral international complex of academic and journalistic activities and collective fantasies that worked powerfully to justify and legitimate the postwar emperor system along with U.S. policies toward Japan and East Asia. This bilateral international complex can be summarized as pertaining to a discursive formation, and I would like to call it the discourse of the postwar emperor system. This discourse should encompass not merely governmen180

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tal publications and policies about the emperor and his family, academic justification and study of the emperor system, information generated by journalism, and images and fantastic scenarios produced by the cinema, radio and television broadcasting, and mass print cultures, but also the practices of direct and indirect censorship in many different contexts and levels of various media. Within this discourse the U.S. stance in the subjective position of ‘‘the West’’ and the Japanese stance in the subjective position of ‘‘Asia’’ are clearly delineated. Yet while Japan represents Asia in this discourse, the viewpoints of people from other Asian countries—not only former Japanese colonies such as Korea and Taiwan but also China and Southeast Asian countries occupied by the Japanese troops—are entirely excluded. What Harry Harootunian once called ‘‘the bilateral narcissism of the United States and Japan’’ is clearly one of the regularities of this discourse.11 In its unity as a discursive formation, it is neither American nor Japanese, since it is bilateral. Hence one can consider academic articles by Japanese conservative ideologues such as Watsuji Tetsurō and Ishii Ryōsuke; the public policy memoranda and journalistic publications by American ideologues and technocrats such as Edwin O. Reischauer, John W. Hall, and Faubion Bowers; a great number of films allegorically depicting the international relationships between the United States and Japan and other regions of East Asia in gender terms; censorship imposed on the publishing industry, national press, and school textbooks by the Occupation administration and the Japanese Ministry of Education; and self-regulation voluntarily practiced by the Japanese mass media as all pertaining to the same discourse. Within the discourse of the postwar emperor system, which involved as actors and as speakers not only the U.S. Occupation administration and Japanese nationalists and reactionaries but also the U.S. experts on Japanese studies, there are a few important points that the design of the new emperor system clearly delineated. First, Emperor Hirohito must be forgiven all his wartime responsibility, because otherwise he would be useless as a puppet leader of Japan to be manipulated by the U.S. Occupation administration to rule Japan under U.S. hegemony. Reischauer claimed that Hirohito must be just like Pu Yi of Manchukuo under the Japanese colonial rule. But, Hirohito had the potential to be much more effective than Pu Yi as a puppet, since the mystification of the emperor had already been deliberately achieved by the prewar Japanese state.12 In other words, hegemony was much more systematically and coherently constructed for the effective performance of the puppet in Japan proper, in the late 1940s and afterward, than in Manchukuo in the 1930s. ‘‘you asians’’

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Second, the Japanese people should not be deprived of their sense of national tradition and culture. As Watsuji argued consistently, they should achieve their cohesion as a nation in terms of the organic wholeness of their national culture and the continuity of its national history. This is where the two schools of culturalism, the Japanese ethnic nationalists and the U.S. National Character Studies scholars, found common ground despite their diametrically opposed intents. The emperor’s political significance lay in his aesthetic function of making Japanese people feel unified, in giving them a sense of togetherness without any concrete content. There was no need to define the emperor as an embodiment of the national will or to seek the political function of the emperor in his ability to direct state policies.13 Hence he should be deprived of all legislative, administrative, and judicial authority. The underlying axiom of this emperor system was tautological: that the Japanese should feel unified because they were Japanese and that because they were born in Japan and brought up as Japanese, they should feel destined to be Japanese. Third, as Takashi Fujitani has asserted, U.S. policy makers had to take racial problems into account as part of their ‘‘ideological warfare’’ in U.S. domestic as well as international politics during World War II.14 (It is important to note that many U.S. area specialists believed they had to continue to fight their ideological warfare well into the 1960s.)15 As a devoted patriot of the United States, Reischauer was afraid that the historically infamous treatment of U.S. residents of non-European ancestry, anti-Asian immigration legislation, and particularly the internment of residents of Japanese ancestry in concentration camps could well lend support to the Japanese cause in East Asia.16 He thus confirmed the anxiety widely shared by the mainstream population in the United States at the beginning of the Pacific War. As George Lipsitz illustrated, during World War II in the United States ‘‘racial segregation in industry and in the army kept qualified fighters and factory workers from positions where they were sorely needed, while the racialized nature of the war in Asia threatened to open up old wounds on the home front.’’ 17 So Reischauer argued, the ‘‘point I wish to make has to do with the inter-racial aspects of the conflict in Asia. Japan is attempting to make her war against the United Nations into a holy crusade of the yellow and brown peoples for freedom from the white race.’’ 18 The Japanese attack on White-Americanism and white supremacy could well invoke universal sympathy with the Japanese justification of their policies in Asia and the Pacific. Therefore he concluded that the United States must appear universalistic and open to all races in order to win the ideological war against 182

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Japan. Here it is worth keeping in mind that, almost simultaneously, the ideologues of the Japanese Empire put forth exactly the same argument for racial and ethnic equality among the peoples under Japanese colonial rule. Here, too, let me note the truism that imperialism without universalism is a contradiction. To emphasize the empire’s commitment to the universalistic and multiethnic principle, the Japanese government’s condemnation of racist policies, and ‘‘the integration of ethnic groups according to the Imperial Way,’’ 19 the ideologues of the Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere repeatedly issued and recited old statements and idioms, such as ‘‘Emperor’s equal mercy to every subject without the slightest discrimination among different ethnic groups within the Empire’’;20 and ‘‘Every person who wishes to reside on a permanent basis in the territory of this new nation is equal and should be able to enjoy rights to be treated as equal, regardless of whether he be of the Han, Manchu, Mongolian, Japanese, Korean or any other ethnicity.’’ 21 A number of publications, such as Shinmei Masamichi’s Race and Society and Kōsaka Masaaki’s Philosophy of Ethnicity, offered systematic philosophical and social scientific critiques of racism and ethnic nationalism as part of the state’s ‘‘ideological warfare’’ (shisō-sen) against Anglo-American colonialism, Communism, and ethnic particularism.22 (It is significant that Watsuji Tetsurō, who repeatedly made racist statements against the Jews and the Chinese, despite the Japanese state policies against overt racism from the late 1920s until the defeat, produced the most lasting cultural nationalist justification of the U.S. policy concerning the new emperor system.)23 Yet it is obvious that the critique of racism was called for due to a number of political necessities: the Japanese government and military had to compete with the U.S., British, French, and other old colonial powers for popularity among peoples in Asia and therefore had to appeal to the Asian peoples’ hatred of Euro-American racism, and because of the shortage of labor for industry and increasing casualties in the military, a large number of young people had to be recruited and drafted from the colonized population in Korea and Taiwan to serve in the Japanese military and industry. It is important to remember that, just as U.S. Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson was afraid of imagined black rebellions to be instigated by the Japanese and the Communists, Japanese leaders, too, were haunted by an anxiety over possible mutinies by the colonized.24 As Reischauer’s patriotism was genuine in its careful consideration of how U.S. racism would look to Asian eyes, the unequivocally racist aspect of U.S. nationalism was all the more manifest in his overtures about the strategic need to disavow racism in the United States. Of course, it does not ‘‘you asians’’

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mean that either Reischauer or his Japanese counterparts were primarily concerned with the abolition of racial discrimination within their respective empires. What they clearly shared was a recognition that the governmental acceptance of racism and ethnic nationalism was absolutely counterproductive to the management of their empires and ideological warfares. They insisted, therefore, that their policies had to be cloaked with the aura of universalism, regardless of how unreal or contradictory such universalism may have been in concrete historical situations. It must also be noted, however, that the antiracist rhetoric as such could eventually result in the removal of certain racist legislation. Even Reischauer’s antiracist rhetoric cannot be treated merely as a case of false consciousness. Fourth, the installment of the new emperor system actually marked the end of the antiracism argument in Japan. The Occupation administration deliberately censored not racist but antiracist utterances and publications in postwar Japan, since the denunciation of Anglo-American imperialism and Dutch colonialism almost always premised the general critique of white supremacy during the war. It goes without saying that such an oppression of the critique of racism was also a very convenient measure for the Japanese government, which had to discard the population of its former colonies and the minority population inside Japan proper, such as the resident Koreans and Taiwanese.25 The majority of the newly redefined Japanese nation did not object to the censorship of the critique of racism either, because as the atrocities committed by the Japanese during the war were very often racist in nature, the censorship could in fact help them overlook their own colonial guilt and war responsibility. Instead an international division of labor was established between the United States and Japan, according to which the United States continued to be in charge of uniting various ethnic and racial groups under the banner of universalism, while the Japanese gave up an active role in such integration. In other words, the Japanese were supposed to be content with their naturalized status, passively internalizing the description given by the outside observers, whereas the Americans would seek to transcend and transform the racial and ethnic particularities so as to create a new subjectivity within the premises of their nationalism. The Meiji Constitution unambiguously defined the emperor as the supreme commander of the Japanese military forces, and in his name the war in Pacific Asia was fought and many atrocities were committed. To redefine the status of the emperor as the symbol of the unity of the Japanese nation and its culture while overlooking his war responsibility was to relieve the Japanese nation of its war responsibility, as many analysts have al184

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ready noted. Under the Meiji Constitution all soldiers and bureaucrats were supposed to act under the command of their superiors, and their superiors would surely claim they acted under the command of their superiors, and every important policy including the declaration of war was legislated and implemented as an order of their commander-in-chief, the emperor. When the emperor was pardoned, how could one possibly prosecute his subjects, who at least in theory, followed his command even in their brutality and inhumane acts? What the U.S. Occupation administration sought instead was a few scapegoats, such as Tōjō Hideki and a very small number of militarists,26 and no doubt Japanese conservatives and many wartime leaders wholeheartedly welcomed such a decision. From the viewpoint of the Occupation administration, the International Military Tribunal for the Far East (the Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal) was held as a public procedure of legitimization to officially exempt the emperor and the overwhelming majority of the Japanese from further investigation into their war responsibility. The Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal was a complete failure in its historical significance because the prosecutors would not deal with the racist and sexist atrocities committed under colonial and imperialist policies in East Asia. In short, they did not pursue the possibilities inherent in the idea of crimes against humanity for fear that the accusation of the Japanese leadership for their crimes against humanity could easily boomerang to the Allied Powers, particularly to the United States. Fifty years later such a political settlement has produced a situation where, contrary to what Takeuchi Yoshimi felt, an increasing number of the Japanese are shameless about Japanese imperialist maneuvers in Asia in the 1930s and early 1940s,27 while they are somnolently happy with the new U.S. strategic arrangement in East Asia, except when they are occasionally prodded by incidents such as the mention of the comfort women or the English publication about the rape of Nanjing. It is true that a more overt anti-American rhetoric flourishes in Japan today, but those populist nationalists, not to mention those self-claimed realist nationalists who boast of their technocratic rationality,28 can never take issue with the postwar U.S. Occupation policies that dispensed the Japanese from their war responsibility and colonial guilt. The preservation of national history and of the putative unity of national culture was thus an exceedingly effective means of keeping the occupied population, first, under direct American rule and then indirectly complicit with U.S. hegemony. The most ironic and interesting aspect of the postwar relationship between the United States and Japan can perhaps be found in ‘‘you asians’’

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the fact that the United States effectively continued to dominate Japan by endowing the Japanese with the sense of Japanese tradition and the grounds for their nationalism. It is through the apparent sense of national uniqueness and cultural distinctiveness that people in Japan were subordinated to U.S. hegemony in East Asia. Some sentimental reactionaries such as Etō Jun have argued that the Occupation administration deprived the Japanese people of their right to narrate their own national history. But this was an embarrassingly naive and conceited complaint. Such rhetoric only serves as an international sort of coquetry whose sexist aspect I cannot overemphasize, of amae in the attitude of which, with the gesture of self-pity, the weak (Japan) solicits the attention of the strong (the United States). Contrary to Etō’s assessment, the U.S. Occupation administration intentionally allowed the Japanese to maintain their sense of cultural and historical continuity; it helped nurture the desire of the Japanese to narrate their own self-serving story/history. What seems to be a fatal deficiency of Etō and sentimental nationalists like him is an anachronistic assumption that uncritically takes the ideals of the nineteenth-century European nationstate for granted, namely that a nationalism seeking a nation’s autonomy is external to the imperialism dominating the affairs of that nation. According to the cartographic imagination, U.S. imperial nationalism is external to Japanese nationalism. So from the outset Etō put aside the logical possibility that U.S. imperial nationalism and Japanese nationalism could be compossible and internal to one another; he dared not examine the logical possibility that Japanese nationalism itself could accommodate U.S. imperial nationalism, or even be an organ thereof. What must be called into question is the assumption of externality between an imperial nationalism and a nationalism. Already in the 1930s did not some ideologues for the East Asian Community—which was later called the Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere—advocate the Japanese policies of embracing Chinese nationalism as a necessary component of Japan’s transnational hegemony? 29 They desperately sought ways to construct a Japanese transnational hegemony that was also anticolonial. In this respect the ideological maneuvers adopted by the U.S. Occupation administration in Japan should not be particularly innovative or surprising.30 Even today, Japanese nationalists are incapable of confronting the complicity between their nationalism and U.S. hegemony. As long as the Japanese were allowed to secure the sense of national cohesion in their cultural tradition and the organic unity of their culture, they would never be able to 186

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engage in serious negotiation with people in East and Southeast Asia who were directly victimized by or are related to the victims of Japanese imperial nationalism. They may well be generous and forgiving to individual Japanese nationals but would never forget the past deeds of Japanese imperial nationalism. ‘‘They may forgive but never forget.’’ Despite such a complicity between the Japanese nationalism that has insisted on its particularistic exclusionism and the U.S. imperial nationalism that has tried to appear universalistic since Japan’s defeat, however, the distinction between the West and Asia has been rigorously maintained throughout the postwar period in Japanese cultural nationalism as well as the U.S. area studies on Japan. Furthermore, the rhetoric of Japanese culturalism has been obsessed predominantly with the image of Japanese distinctiveness, but such a rhetoric was produced only in contrast to some fantastic image of Western culture against the background of the cartographic imaginary of the globe. The Japanese cultural identity was produced with a view to some imaginary observer who is positioned outside the organic whole of the Japanese nation. And this imaginary observer is habitually referred to as the West, often symbolizing U.S. hegemony. I do not think that the assessment I present here is limited to the case of Japan after its defeat. This is just one instance in which the sense of ethnic and national identity is invoked against the background of the culturalist binary schema of the West and the Rest. It might appear strange that the United States and Japan, the largest and second largest national economies of the world and two prominent imperial nations, still recognize each other in such a colonialist manner. But this instance only shows how powerful the discourse of the West and the Rest still is. Given the aforementioned understanding of the West and its discriminatory constitution, how can we possibly address ourselves as Asians? The final question I would like to ask, then, is, How can we possibly prevent our self-referential address, we Asians, from being caught in this binarism or from reproducing something like Japanese culturalism? I cannot dare to say I am able to offer a solution. My response is a proposal at best, and it is brief, at the risk of oversimplification. First, let me issue a warning disclaimer that neither the West nor Asia is a mere illusion that one can dispel by adjusting one’s mental attitude. They are social realities even if they are of an imaginary kind. However, if the distinction between the West and Asia is increasingly independent of geography, race, ethnic culture, or nationality but is a matter of cultural capital ‘‘you asians’’

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shaping the individual’s socioeconomic status, one can be attentive to the socioeconomic formation of the qualifications in terms of which the West and Asia are distinctively and performatively presented and to how people invest in the acquisition of such qualifications. In this respect, the West is a sort of ‘‘fictive ethnicity,’’ to use the terminology of Étienne Balibar.31 In some social contexts, an increasing number of people fail to qualify either as Westerners or as Asians. We come across more and more instances that may appear to be oxymorons: a Chinese with superb taste in classical European music; a black American with upper-middle-class mannerisms; a poor white American whose faith is utterly incompatible with the secularized sense of ‘‘modern’’ and ‘‘Western’’ religiosity—a typical case of what sociologists call the American anomaly; an Indonesian preoccupied with Christian ethics; a white French male who is superhumanly meticulous and patient with his handwork in the fine details of his craftsmanship but who is absolutely hopeless in mathematical reasoning; and so forth. When examined carefully, none of these instances shows that there is an inherent quality that determines a person either as a Westerner or as an Asian. What makes such an instance appear as a cultural or civilizational oxymoron, and potentially as an excuse for social discrimination, is our prejudice, our predetermined judgment. It is our prescribed investment for a certain distinction, for a justification for exclusion, and for our own identity. It is probably impossible to rid ourselves of those prejudices altogether in one clean sweep. Yet we may be able to invent a number of strategies whereby to avoid reproducing such a discriminatory gesture as that of the exclusionary constitution of the West. For at any cost, we have to avoid shaping Asia in a mirror image of the West at its worst. Instead of naturalizing the category of the Asian, of grounding Asian identity on some presumably immutable properties of a person or a group, we should treat it as a consequence of constantly changing socioeconomic conditions. We should call a person Asian whenever we find some effect of social adversity or a trait of barbarism from the alleged ideal image of a Westerner in that person, regardless of his or her physiognomy, linguistic heritage, claimed ethnicity, or habitual characteristics. We should use the word Asian in such a way as to emphasize the fluidity of the very distinction between the West and Asia rather than its persistence. Even though we would face an outright rejection in the action by those who fail to qualify as, but adamantly insist on natively being, Westerners, we should seek occasions to call those who customarily fashion themselves as Westerners you Asians. Asians must be a vocative for invitation. Asians 188

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are new barbarians. It is in order to break through the putative exclusiveness of our cultural, civilizational, and racial identity that we must address ourselves to others by saying you Asians. As long as you are barbaric in one measure or another, you are fully qualified to be an Asian. Notes 1 Takeuchi Yoshimi, ‘‘Chūgoku no kindai to nihon no kindai’’ [Chinese modernity

2

3 4 5

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and Japanese modernity] (1947), in Nihon to Ajia [Japan and Asia] (Tokyo, 1993), 11–57 (also published with a different title, ‘‘Kindai to wa nanika’’ [What is modernity?] in 1948). For a discussion on universalism and particularism in modernity, see Naoki Sakai, ‘‘Critique of Modernity: The Problem of Universalism and Particularism,’’ South Atlantic Quarterly 87.3 (1988): 475–504, or its Japanese translation in Gendai Shisō 15.15 (1987): 184–220. Maruyama Masao, Nihonseiji shisō-shi kenkyū [Intellectual history of Tokugawa Japan], trans. Mikiso Hane (Princeton, 1974). This book consists of three essays, the first two of which were written earlier during the Asia Pacific War. The last essay, which differs much from the previous two in its orientation, was published in 1944 when it was almost certain that Japan was going to be defeated. Also important as a contemporary work of historiography based on the concept of negativity is Ienaga Saburō’s ‘‘Nihon shisō-shi ni okeru hitei no ronri no hattatsu’’ [The development of the logic of negativity in Japanese intellectual history] (1937– 38), in Ienaga Saburō Shū (Tokyo, 1997), 1:3–78. The concept of negativity played a central role in both Maruyama’s studies of Tokugawa intellectual history and Ienaga’s studies of Japanese Buddhism. Initially it was elaborated on in Tanabe Hajime’s social ontology in the early 1930s. However, unlike Takeuchi’s, neither Maruyama’s nor Ienaga’s negativity implied ‘‘the defeat’’ or ‘‘being colonized.’’ For an elaborate critique of historicism, see Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe (Princeton, 2000). On the Wittgensteinian problematic of naming, see Saul A. Kripke, Naming and Necessity (Cambridge, MA, 1982). See Fukuzawa Yukichi, Bunmeiron no Gairyaku [An outline of the theory of civilization] (1875; Tokyo, 1937), 37. There is an English translation, but the translator does not seem aware of Fukuzawa’s reference to John Stuart Mill there. See Naoki Sakai, Translation and Subjectivity (Minneapolis, 1997), chap. 3, ‘‘Return to the West/Return to the East: Watsuji Tetsurō’s Anthropology and Discussions of Authenticity,’’ and chap. 4, ‘‘Subject and/or Shutai and the Inscription of Cultural Difference.’’ As many have already pointed out, culturalism was also the most prominent feature of the U.S. efforts during the war to characterize the Japanese nation, the most famous of which is Ruth Benedict, The Chrysanthemum and the Sword (1946; Boston, 1989). A monumental critique of The Chrysanthemum and the Sword can be found in C. Douglas Lummis, A New Look at ‘‘The Chrysanthemum and the Sword’’ (Tokyo, 1982), in which Lummis points out the close relationship between the repressed anxiety about the genocidal foundation of the United

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States underlying Benedict’s work and her patriotic devotion to American nationalism. Takashi Fujitani, ‘‘Reischauer no kairai tennō-sei kōsō [Reischauer’s design of a puppet emperor system],’’ in Sekai (March 2000): 137–46; Edwin O. Reischauer, ‘‘Memorandum on policy towards Japan,’’ September 14, 1942, with materials collected by War Department General Staff, Organization and Training Division, G-3, concerning ‘‘Enlistment of loyal American citizens of Japanese descent into the Army and Navy,’’ December 17, 1942, 291.2, Army-AG Classified Decimal File 1940–42, Records of the Adjunct General’s Office, 1917– , Record Group 407, entry 360, box 147, National Archives, College Park, MD. For the entire memorandum, please refer to the March issue of Sekai at the Iwanami web site, http://www.iwanami.co.jp/sekai/. Edwin O. Reischauer, Japan Past and Present (New York, 1947) and Wanted: An Asian Policy (New York, 1955). Princess Masako received her postgraduate education at Harvard prior to her engagement to Crown Prince Naruhito. In total, the area studies program on Japan at Harvard had probably received the largest donation from Japan among all universities in the United States prior to Masako’s marriage into the Japanese imperial family. Since her marriage, Harvard University has continued to receive large donations from the Japanese government and its subsidiary organizations. Such a mutually dependent relationship between the postwar Japanese emperor system and Japanese studies clearly marks those particular political and economic conditions under which the studies of Japan have been developed in Japan and the United States. This insight should imply that a different kind of Japanese studies should be developed in countries such as China, Australia, Malaysia, Canada, Indonesia, India, France, England, Singapore, Hong Kong, Korea, Taiwan, Germany, Russia, Poland, Turkey, New Zealand, Mexico, Italy, and so forth. In adopting the accomplishments of U.S. Japanology and Japanese Nihonshi and Nihon-bungaku, one must be acutely aware of the ideological and political limitations within which Japanese studies have been developed in the United States and Japan. See Takashi Fujitani, Narita Ryūichi, and Naoki Sakai, ‘‘America’s ‘Japan’/Voices of America,’’ Gendai Shisō 23.23 (1995): 8–37; Harry D. Harootunian and Naoki Sakai, ‘‘Nihon kennkyū to bunka kenkyū’’ [Japanese studies and cultural studies], Shisō, no. 877 (1997): 4–53 (English translation: ‘‘Japan Studies and Cultural Studies,’’ in positions 7.2 [1999]: 593–647). In his ‘‘Memorandum,’’ Reischauer argued, In Germany and Italy we can expect to see a natural revulsion against Nazi and Fascist rule, a revulsion so strong that it will carry a large percentage of the population over to a policy of cooperation with the United Nations. In Japan, on the contrary, no such easy road to post-war victory is possible. There we shall have to win our ideological battles by carefully planned strategy. A first step would naturally be to win over to our side a group willing to cooperate. Such a group, if it represented the minority of the Japanese people, would

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be in a sense a puppet regime. Japan has used the strategem of puppet governments extensively but with no great success because of the inadequacy of the puppets. But Japan itself has created the best possible puppet for our purposes, a puppet who not only could be won over to our side but who would carry with him a tremendous weight of authority, which Japan’s puppets in China have always lacked. I mean, of course, the Japanese Emperor. 13 See Watsuji Tetsurō, ‘‘Kokutai henkō-ron ni tsuite, Sasaki Hakushi no oshie wo kou’’

14 15

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[Requesting advice from Dr. Sasaki on his argument that the concept of the national body must be changed] (March 1947), in ‘‘Kokumin tōgō no shōchō’’ [The symbol of national unity], in Watsuji Tetsurō Zenshū (Tokyo, 1962), 14:313–96. Takashi Fujitani, ‘‘Reischauer no kairai tennō-sei kōsō,’’ 143. Reischauer’s Wanted: An Asian Policy is an early example. You may also find a number of typically jingoistic declarations in Robert N. Bellah, ‘‘Values and Social Changes in Modern Japan,’’ Asian Cultural Studies, no. 3 (1962): 13–56. Of course, the war in which they were so patriotically involved was no longer the Pacific War, but it was called the Cold War in the meantime. As to Japan’s ideological goal in Pacific Asia, Reischauer continued, ‘‘China’s courageous stand has prevented Japan from exploiting this type of propaganda too much, but it has apparently met with a certain degree of success in Siam and the colonial lands of southeastern Asia and even in a few circles in China. If China were to be forced out of the war, the Japanese might be able to transform the struggle in Asia in reality into a full-scale racial war’’ (Reischauer, ‘‘Memorandum’’). George Lipsitz, The Possessive Investment in Whiteness (Philadelphia, 1998), 193. ‘‘Most important, asking African American, Asian American, Mexican American, and Native American soldiers to fight for freedoms overseas that they did not themselves enjoy at home presented powerful political, ideological, and logistical problems’’ (ibid.). Reischauer’s reference to ‘‘the inter-racial aspects of the conflict in Asia’’ clearly shows his and most white policy makers’ paranoia about the possibility of what Lipsitz described as ‘‘a transnational alliance among people of color,’’ which could bring ‘‘to the surface the inescapably racist realities behind the seemingly color-blind national narrative of the United States and its aims in the war. . . . Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson attributed black demands for equality during the conflict to agitation by Japanese agents and Communists’’ (Lipsitz, The Possessive Investment in Whiteness, 187, 193). Reischauer continued: ‘‘The best proof of the falsity of Japanese claims is America’s record both in the Philippines and in China. However, on the other side, we have also unwittingly contributed to Japan’s dangerous propaganda campaign. The removal from the West Coast of the American citizen of Japanese ancestry along with the Japanese aliens was no doubt a move made necessary by immediate military considerations, but it provided the Japanese with a powerful argument in their attempt to win the Asiatic peoples to the view that the white race is not prepared to recognize them as equals and even now continues to discriminate against them’’ (Reischauer, ‘‘Memorandum’’).

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19 Murayam Michio, Daitō a kensetsuron [Construction of greater East Asia] (Tokyo,

1943). 20 Rescript to the population of Korea, 1917. 21 The Manchukuo Declaration of Independence, 1932. 22 Shinmei Masamichi, Jinshu to shakai (Tokyo, 1940); Kōsaka Masaaki, Minzoku no

tetsugaku (Tokyo, 1942). 23 During the war Watsuji continued to adhere to the ideal of pure blood and op-

posed the multiethnic principle of the Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere by taking a stance that was similar to that of Nazism. See Sakai, Translation and Subjectivity, chap. 4. Also interesting is the fact that Watsuji was often celebrated as the representative thinker of Japanese thought in Japanese studies in the United States and Western Europe. It is interesting that those in the missionary positionality deliberately overlooked the Japanese thinkers who were engaged in the construction of universalistic ideology during the war, such as Tanabe Hajime, Ienaga Saburō, Miki Kiyoshi, and Kōsaka Masaaki, and celebrated particularistic thinkers like Watsuji as typical of Japanese culture. Compare to Robert Bellah, ‘‘Japan’s Cultural Identity: Some Reflections on the Work of Watsuji Tetsurō,’’ Journal of Asian Studies 24.4 (1965): 573–94; Augustin Berque, Vivre l’espace au Japon (Paris, 1982) and Le Sauvage et L’Artifice: Les Japonais devant la Nature (Paris, 1986). 24 Starting with the Independence Movement of 1919 and the genocide of the Korean residents in Tokyo in the aftermath of the earthquake in 1923, the Japanese leadership was preoccupied with a possible mutiny of the colonized. As indicated by the recent announcement by Ishihara Shintarō, governor of Tokyo, made for the occasion of the seventy-seventh anniversary of the 1923 earthquake, the majority of the Japanese are still anxious about the possible mutiny by the foreign and the former colonial residents in Japan. We must not forget that to integrate the Koreans into the Japanese military for the war in Asia and the Pacific meant giving arms to them. Recall what happened in the U.S. military in Vietnam during the Vietnam War, and one will understand how anxious the Japanese leadership had to be. In due course the Japanese army had to carefully allocate soldiers from Korea, from the level of the division down to that of the company, in such a way that the Korean soldiers would never constitute the majority. See Higuchi Yūichi, Kōgun heishi ni sareta chōsenjin [Koreans who were made emperor’s soldiers] (Tokyo, 1991), 89–93. 25 Edwin Reischauer was also involved in the postwar treatment of Korean residents in Japan. Here, too, his racist attitude not only toward Asians in general but particularly toward the Koreans was manifest. See Reischauer’s foreword to Edward G. Wagner’s The Korean Minority in Japan, 1904–1950 (New York, 1951). 26 According to Reischauer, ‘‘Memorandum,’’ The possible role of the Japanese Emperor in the post-war rehabilitation of the Japanese mentality has definite bearing upon the present situation. To keep the Emperor available as a valuable ally or puppet in the post-war ideological battle we must keep him unsullied by the present war. In other words, we can-

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not allow him to be portrayed to the American people as the counterpart of Hitler and Mussolini in Asia or as the personification of the Japanese brand of totalitarianism. General reviling of the Emperor by our press or radio can easily ruin his utility to us in the post-war world. It would make the American people unprepared to cooperate with him or even to accept him as a tool. And naturally it would make the Emperor himself and the men who surround him less ready to cooperate with our government. During the past several months there has been considerable use of the name Hirohito as a symbol of the evil Japanese system. With the post-war problem in mind, it would be highly advisable for the government to induce the news-disseminating organs of this country to avoid reference to the Emperor as far as possible and to use individuals, such as Tōjō or Yamamoto or even a mythical toothsome Mr. Motto (in uniform!) as personifications of the Japan we are fighting. 27 For the problem of shamelessness and of guilt, see Ukai Satoshi, ‘‘The Future of

an Affect: The Historicity of Shame’’ in Traces, no. 1 (2001): 3–36. 28 It is interesting that the Obuchi cabinet’s effort to produce a new vision of twenty-

first-century Japan is still very much based on the old premises of the Watsujistyle cultural nationalism. See Report: The Prime Minister’s Commission on Japan’s Goals in the Twenty-first Century (Tokyo, 2000). The commission is headed by well-known Nihon Bunka-ronja (Japanese culturalist) Kawai Hayao, who is also director-general of the International Research Center for Japanese Studies, a governmental research institute with strong connections with Watsuji. Also see Harry D. Harootunian’s analysis of the Policy Research Bureaus of the Ohira Cabinet, ‘‘Visible Discourse/Invisible Ideologies,’’ in Postmodernism and Japan, ed. Masao Miyoshi and H. D. Harootunian (Durham, NC, 1989), 63–92. 29 A number of thinkers can be mentioned in this respect. I will, however, limit my scope to two prominent imperial nationalists, Miki Kiyoshi and Tanabe Hajime, both of whom approved of Chinese nationalism and tried to integrate it into a new transnational arrangement. Under the overwhelming influence of Martin Heidegger, with whom both studied in Germany in the 1920s, Tanabe and Miki worked on the theoretical design of subjectivity that is not based on the nineteenth-century model of sovereignty for the nation-state. Tanabe introduced his version of Hegelianism with heavy Christian overtones into the critique of Linnean classificatory logic and tried to establish a new way of classifying social groups and individuals. His philosophical argument was often appealed to by his followers as the philosophical ground for the multiethnic East Asian Community. Compare to Naoki Sakai, ‘‘Ethnicity and Species: On the Philosophy of the Multi-ethnic State in Japanese Imperialism,’’ Radical Philosophy, no. 95 (1999): 33–45. As the leading figure in intellectual journalism who was sympathetic to Marxism in the late 1920s and 1930s, Miki Kiyoshi was also involved in the design of the Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere. He helped organize the governmental research group Shōwa Kenkyū-kai (Shōwa Research Association) and wrote a number of proposals about how to create a system beyond the rigid oppo-

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sition of socialism and capitalism. He saw Japanese expansionism in China in the light of an uncontrollable capitalism and sought to curb its inevitable violence. 30 Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt, Empire (Cambridge, MA, 2000), is suggestive in many respects. Perhaps the authors are so much concerned with the transatlantic difference between the anti-imperialist empire of North America and the old imperialisms of Western Europe that they attribute too much American uniqueness to the empire of the twentieth century. The deployment in the 1930s and 1940s of an imperial nationalism in East Asia must be understood as an important moment in the historical transition from the imperialisms of Western Europe to the empire of North America. The idiom ‘‘unlike European colonialism and imperialism’’ was so frequently repeated in Japanese documents and propaganda whenever the innovative nature of Japanese rule in East Asia was discussed in the 1930s and early 1940s, and their claim of anticolonialism was undoubtedly an integral part of their notion of the East Asian Community (which was later called the Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere). The reality of their rule evidently betrayed their anticolonial claim in many places and on many occasions, but clearly the Japanese leadership, particularly the members who were called Shin Kanryō (new bureaucrats) and the affiliated intellectuals, were seeking a new transregional formation in East Asia that the project of Manchukuo typically exemplified. In this sense Japanese imperial nationalism shared a lot with the American empire. As goes without saying, it is utterly impossible to conclude that Japanese and U.S. imperial nationalisms were less violent or brutal than European imperialisms. Yet, the Japanese and American rhetoric of anticolonialism seems to indicate a different type or configuration of transregional hegemony. 31 See Étienne Balibar, ‘‘The Nation Form,’’ in Étienne Balibar and Emmanuel Wallerstein, Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities, (London and New York, 1991).

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Revenge and Recapitation in Recessionary Japan

Marilyn Ivy

R

ising unemployment rates, crushing debts, voided life insurance policies, bankruptcies, suicides: the stuff of recession arrests our uneasy attention.Yet the recession also stops us by its forceful disclosure of the abnormal status of the Japanese nation-state. With its U.S.-imposed constitution and its forever-symbolic emperor, postwar Japan was reconstituted as an improper nation-state, one not fully empowered to enact the prerogatives of nation-statehood except by other means. Those other means were, of course, economic, and the economic miracle would henceforth function as the stand-in for Japan. The self-identification of Japan with economic prosperity alone (and the identification by national others of Japan with that prosperity) is perhaps unprecedented. The fabled plenty of the United States, for example, has never been severed from its expansionary prospects pursued with the proper machines of diplomacy and war. In some senses residual, a forcibly dismembered empire, a monstrous remake of U.S. liberalism proferred then contained in the Cold War, the figure of Japan has produced and consumed the miracle of the economic as its very life force, and it has done so with a kind of success that has laminated the social so tightly to its conditions of possibility that there often seems virtually no gap between life and ideology. With the pop of the financial bubble in the early 1990s, however, a narrative of recession began to supersede that of success. The postwar dispensation allowing the impropriety of the Japanese nation-state to be hidden by the successful and success-producing routines of everyday life was revealed as unstable. The fantasia of ever-proliferating consumer signifiers could be

accommodated, could be enjoyed, as long as it still signified success. When economic success could no longer stand in the position of the signified of last resort, then proliferation became increasingly unbearable. Moving away from the remarked successes of the postmodern, a latent sense of everyday desperation has found its millennialist limits in attempts, violent and otherwise, to resituate subjects within the volatilities of the market and the recapitalization of corporations. Here we detect the limits of capital, as the recession seems finally to lay bare the Japanese Thing, with its lineup of lifetime employment, promotion by seniority, and consensus management.1 Layoffs and downsizing expose the extent to which corporate familialism is not prepared to go, as defamilialization writ large accompanies the much-mourned fragmentation of the Japanese family writ small. Earthly disasters and cosmic ones, the Kobe earthquake and the rehearsal for meltdown at the conversion reactor in Tokaimura, the Aum Shinrikyō incidents and the serial murders of Youth A (Shōnen A), all bespeak, cryptically but with insistence, the repetitive effects of an unassimilated logic of recession. In this milieu, efforts to reestablish Japan-as-proper have focused most tellingly on what are sometimes termed neonationalisms. Hardly novel, these nationalisms have emerged as intensifications and extensions of varieties of right-wing emperorisms and militarisms of the postwar period. They also emerge as virulent critiques of consumerist hedonism and the decadence of wealth, as they desperately long for a capitalism without excess (the longing of fascism).2 As such, they have found the recessionary moment perversely hopeful, with its renewed possibilities for the restoration of economic, ethical, and national limits. In retrospect, then, I shouldn’t have been surprised when the plain manila envelope addressed to me (at my home) from the Japanese Society for History Textbook Reform (Atarashii rekishi kyōkasho o tsukuru kai) arrived. Enclosed was a well-produced booklet, The Restoration of a National History: Why Was the Japanese Society for History Textbook Reform Established, and What Are Its Goals. Enclosed also was a letter signed by society chairman Nishio Kanji describing the organization’s goal to ‘‘provide a clear spiritual direction for Japan’s path through the 21st century’’ and ending with a ‘‘sincere wish that people overseas will take an interest in our organization through this English brochure, and will respond to us.’’ Thus the selection of me as an addressee. Although I had long known of their activities in Japan, I was nonetheless

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startled to receive this carefully translated document in English, appealing to non-Japanese readers of English to support their mission. By the very logic of their nationalist project, the society’s appeal to non-Japanese would seem to be illegitimate. Who are those non-Japanese others who could support this rescue mission? Clearly, American Japanologists comprise one such group of potential others. The society’s express aim is to straighten the ‘‘masochistic slant’’ of Japan’s textbooks, a deviation stemming both from Japan’s defeat in World War II and the ensuing U.S. Occupation and also from the prewar Comintern line on Japan as an absolutist, evil empire. Caught between the Soviets and the Americans, communism and liberalism, Japan has been sadistically positioned as the sole bearer of war guilt, deprived of its history, and barred from its future.3 The repeated references to masochism, however, point to pleasures taken in this positioning, to a peculiar relishing of the place of the bearer of guilt. In the historical consciousness of these restorationists, the foreign sadists who have stunted Japan’s national polity have found their counterpart in the indigenous masochists who—savoring their abjection—perform their own sadisms in subjecting Japanese schoolchildren to the blackness of Japanese history and the nullity of the nation. How do they perform this masochistic transference of sadism? Most intolerably, by their insistence on including photographs of Japanese war atrocities in history textbooks destined for viewing by children. Although the nationalist calls for textbook revisions circle around much more than the use of atrocity photos, it is around the place of photographs of mutilations (and the mutilations of photography) that the greatest agitation emerges. The restorationists speak of students’ experiences of ‘‘negative emotions’’ in viewing these photos and the necessity of removing them from textbooks. The format of the English-language brochure is set up as a series of questions and answers, and to question 3, ‘‘What sort of account in textbooks causes students to experience these negative emotions?’’ the authors respond by ‘‘presenting an example.’’ 4 That example is a photograph that appears in both primary- and middle-school textbooks. The photograph is of a painting on a farmhouse wall in northern China, a painting of a soldier cutting off the breasts of a victim tied to a pillar. The authors state that this theme ‘‘actually is representative of one of the official forms of punishment meted out by dynasties throughout Chinese history.’’ Furthermore, ‘‘the Chinese themselves have committed similar mass bar-

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baric acts. In other words, such atrocities are a facet of the Chinese culture, one that is peculiar to the Chinese culture, and one with which the Chinese people are all too familiar.’’ 5 The authors of the booklet thus seek to discredit the evidence of Japanese atrocities by saying that the victims commit atrocities, which they then project onto the Japanese. They further insist that the painting is not a valid depiction but is mere propaganda, now illegitimately reproduced as descriptive of actual Japanese atrocities: ‘‘When children are shown photographs like these, they are bound to believe that their ancestors were murderous monsters.’’ They do not address the historical truth of atrocities performed by Japanese soliders, regardless of what the Chinese did or did not do. The telling sentence is this: ‘‘In actuality, there is no evidence proving that Japanese war crimes were any more heinous than those committed by citizens of other nations.’’ 6 Such is the power of the ‘‘no worse than’’—no worse than the Holocaust, than My Lai, than Indonesia 1965, than . . . what? The agreement of the reader can be obtained, but what is the conclusion? We are all monsters (‘‘they are bound to believe that their ancestors were murderous monsters’’). The fact that monstrosity is shared, that it is international, should pay for its erasure: we are not monsters. And what allows the paradise of shared monstrosity to emerge? Nothing but war. In the motif of ‘‘no worse than’’ one sees the justification for war, when we can all legitimately become monsters and thus escape our monstrosity. In this legitimation, atrocities are not really atrocities; they are falsities, tricks, ruses. Thus the necessity to return to Japan’s war in a compulsion of repetition. Only by justifying the war —and by sharing out atrocity under erasure—can Japan revivify its moribund national body. Restore history, which is to restore the nation, but first restore war and embrace legitimate monstrosity. In its own fantasy of mass dissemination and reproduction, the Japanese Society for History Textbook Reform confesses its desire to create a millionseller.Yet it has already been anticipated by the 1998 publication of the thick Sensōron [On war], now in its twenty-second printing. Creator of the gomanisuto senden (proclamations of arrogance) series of manga, in which Sensōron emerges as only the latest and most notorious inflection, the author/artist Kobayashi Yoshinori also serves as the ‘‘honorary director’’ of the Japanese Society for History Textbook Reform. This is no accident, to be sure, for Sensōron already lays out, not without care and not without research, the structure of the restorationist end of masochism and the legitimation of shared monstrosity that the society endorses. 198

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Kobayashi writes himself into the text as the protagonist, the hero of the narrative (‘‘Kobayashi’’).7 The opening words of this essay on war state ‘‘It’s peacetime’’ as they move to describe the greed, the banality, and the confusion of this Japanese ‘‘peace.’’ In Kobayashi’s cartoon consciousness, this confusion emerges from the breakup of the family, the rising divorce rate, housewife and schoolgirl prostitution, and the spectacle of the bodily transformations of youth. When ‘‘Kobayashi’’ finds himself riding on the train after a long hiatus in the wake of Aum’s subway poisonings, the train itself becomes an occasion for voyeurism and paranoia, as he imagines what others are thinking about as they look at him looking at a poster of a seminude cover girl. This moment of fear that he, of all people, would be seen as fixated on a scandalous image becomes the opening occasion for his untimely meditations on war, peace, chaos, and order, in which war escapes this metonymy and becomes the master sign that rescues all tropes from their partiality and mediation. ‘‘Kobayashi’’ concludes that the opposite of peace is not war (sensō), but chaos (konran). In the midst of these pseudodialectical ruminations the reader is interrupted by his reminiscences of the Aum Shinrikyō incidents, which he presents as war memories. We are taken back: Some years ago I had some consultations with the Aum leadership, because I had published some things that put together Aum with the disappearance of the Sakamoto family. They judged that the talks weren’t producing an agreement, and without any declaration of war, they came to kill me while the talks were still going on. From the sarin subway incidents onward, I was also clearly conscious that this was ‘‘war.’’ Maybe Aum planned to force war upon Japan, but as for the country, there was probably the perception that this wasn’t ‘‘war.’’ For the country, it was a state of ‘‘disorder’’ (konran). So what we call peace is nothing but ‘‘order’’ (chitsujo). At the time of Aum, Japan was in chaos, but I was at war!! In the courts, in manga, on tv. . . . When I was walking the streets, I was always in my head, simulating killing those guys who would come with their weapons to attack me. At that time, I survived—luckily—by waging war.8

The relationship of national subjectivity to the Aum incidents is clarified: Aum is what finally allowed the peaceful, emasculated Japanese male to come into his own, to provide the occasion for heroism and remasculation. (One notes the return of the phallus, as Kobayashi brandishes a giant fountain pen like a sword.) Despite Kobayashi’s tirades against the individual (ko), he performs as the privatized surrogate of the state, as an indirevenge and recapitation

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vidual who rediscovers war when the country (kuni ) still recognizes only disorder. War, here fantasized, is not the opposite of peace but what allows peace, in all its recessionary confusion, to subsist. The Aum incidents allowed the postwar generations to have their own experience of war; having had it, they now understand its power and can move energetically to rehabilitate Japan’s war in Asia and to restore history. But isn’t the privatization of war what Aum attempted to achieve as well? Aum pushed the logic of Toyotism and Japanese nationalism to its limit, replicating with a hypermachinic intensity the production of loyal subjects and workers devoted to the corporate endeavors of Asahara Shōkō.9 At the same time, in another strange culmination of late modern logics, Aum concentrated this productionism primarily in the domain of subjectification. That is, members cut themselves off from productive society as a whole, neither engaging in agriculture like many such religious groups do nor manufacturing any products (they did run computer and noodle shops). Their revenue was generated primarily by a kind of donational thievery, in which members would give everything to the group while skimming money from relatives and friends. Moving capital around through real estate ventures, scams, and ripoffs, they epitomized the limits of capital and the principle of liquidity, as they pushed circulation to its maximum through the rhetoric of Armageddon, the prophetic energies of the final world war, religious conversion as the epitome of globalization, and the fluid transfers of light and energy from Asahara to the body of the believer. Aum constructed a shadow state as Asahara fantasized the final war that would destroy Japan and all other states in what constituted an uncanny rehabilitation of World War II. That the sarin incidents occurred in 1995, the fiftieth anniversary of the end of World War II, has not been lost on most Japanese. Aum’s Armageddon found its calendrical point of departure commemorating the end of a final war that had already occurred. World War II was, in many senses, the first final war, a war that first produced a sense of global finality. It was the war that witnessed the apocalyptic use of nuclear weapons on Hiroshima and Nagasaki; it was the first world war, the first war under conditions of globalism now dramatically extended.10 Thus it is no accident that restorationist minds associate Japanese peaceniks and Aum Shinrikyō.11 Both represent the antithesis of the intact Japanese polity; both oppose it and wage war on it. Aum is unthinkable without its place in consolidating dropout nationalists, techies, and students in what has been called otaku no sekigun, the Red Army of the otaku generation (otaku refers to the socially challenged, obsessive young males who im200

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merse themselves in technology, anime, and other mass cultural pleasures). With the Red Army we receive the image of the militarist fringe of peaceful critique, when the drive for peace becomes the drive for war (and where the logic of bourgeois opposition turns frankly Communist). Aum’s dalliance with Russia (the group attempted to buy helicopters and nuclear weapons) merely confirmed the equation of Aum with communism. We do not encounter Aum again in Sensōron until chapter 11, which presents itself as a ‘‘seeing through’’ of the ‘‘false photographs’’ (nise shashin) of the antiwar movement. Once more the seductiveness and danger of the false photographs of the peace promoters becomes a crucial assertion for neonationalism, as Kobayashi compares them to spirit photographs and shots of ufos (occult artifacts produced by special lenses and strange uses of light). The infamous photo of Asahara Shōkō levitating while in the full lotus position secures his point: that the atrocity photographs beloved by the antiwar movement are no different from Aum’s snapshots of miracles, and that the people who use these fake photos (and show them to children, an essential step) are religious cultists. The occult photographs of Aum are merely a prelude for Kobayashi’s lengthy excursus on atrocity photographs. Going through a series of horrific war photos, many of which have been widely exhibited and distributed, Kobayashi seeks to prove their falsity, which in most cases consists of some sort of mistake in attribution. A wrenching photograph of corpses sprawled over a tier of steps is declared spurious. The author has researched its history: the Osaka Peace Museum called it a photograph of people who died in the Japanese bombing of China; the journal Bungei shunjū of December 1956 asserted that it was a photograph from the Nanjing massacre, and it has been famously circulated as such. In August 1985 the journal Asahi jānaru claimed it was a photograph of the bombing of Chungking, yet critic Hatanaka Hideo has claimed that both are lies, Kobayashi continues. In fact, Hatanaka’s research has shown that it was a photograph taken by the American Carl Mydans and published in a special issue of Life on the war. The explanation attached to the photograph in that issue stated that there had been a violent air raid, and when the all-clear bell sounded, people started leaving the underground shelter. At that point the alarm rang again, warning of another attack, and for some reason the authorities suddenly shut the doors to the shelter. In the panic that ensued, people were trampled to death in the crowd. Those are the corpses we see: secondary results of an air raid, products of ‘‘panic’’ ( panikku) rather than of the bombing per se, ‘‘accidental deaths’’ ( jikoshi ). With that explanation, the Japanese military revenge and recapitation

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is relieved of its responsibility and the photograph is declared illegitimate. As Kobayashi writes, ‘‘If these corpses are not the result of the Japanese military’s bombing, then this can’t be considered a photo of the ‘rape of Nanking’!’’ 12 What counts here as a result hinges on a thinly defined notion of cause and effect, of the relationship of victim to victimizer. No mediation is allowed to intervene, least of all the mediations of photography. In another photograph, perhaps the most famous one in Europe and the United States of the Japanese war in China, we see a baby, burned and crying, sitting alone on the edge of a bombed-out train platform. Yet that image has been cropped; the original photo included a man and a boy (father and brother?) next to the baby. To Kobayashi, the circulation of a photo that had erased those next to the baby intensified the image of Japan as evil; suddenly, with the reappearance of the missing two, the pathos of the image is considerably reduced. One can accept the powers of photography and the manipulations of the image while still wondering why the question of Japanese war atrocities has thereby been assuaged. Yet the imaging of mutilations and of dismemberments becomes the true zero point for the critique of spurious photographs. The first photograph in this series, the image that epitomizes the occult photograph, presents a pile of decapitated heads spread out on the ground. It is a photograph that has been widely exhibited in peace museums, and it is baldly spurious, Kobayashi insists as he takes us through its tangled attributions. At a panel for the exhibition at the Osaka Peace Museum, a participant stated that this was a photograph of the Japanese massacre of Korean independence fighters in 1920. Yet in 1984 the photo was published as a depiction of the 1937 Nanjing massacre (and the manga Eikō naki tensaitachi asserted it was a photo of deaths from the Sankō operation in China in 1941). In China, too, it has been published as a photograph of atoricites in Manchuria. To Kobayashi, it is a photograph of heads rolling over and over, transcending space and time, in all times and all places the evidence for injury. If we state its true character . . . this is not a photograph of slaughter committed by the Japanese military or anything like that! Tanaka Shōmei has confirmed the place as one in Manchuria, and has determined that it is a photo of executed horse-riding bandits. According to the former soldier who was its owner, he bought the photograph as one of ten from a stationery and photography shop in a town on the border of Korea and China at the end of 1931. There were a lot of bandits in China at the time, and

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it is natural that they would have been punished. We can say that if this is a photograph of the execution of bandits, then it can’t be an evidentiary photograph of atrocities. Further, it has been confirmed that in 1932 that photograph was sold as [one of ] Koreans who had been killed as bandits. In short, this is an extraordinarily dubious photograph that has been sold as it is without knowing who the victims are and who the victimizers. In connection with this, Professor Takahashi Shirō, who has seen this photograph, has stated that it was usual for the Japanese military to close the mouths of the corpses it had decapitated with sabers.13

The gaping mouths of the severed heads become the mark of non-Japaneseness, the sign of horror that announces its alienation from proper Japanese murder. Under the sign of execution, and under the pretext of banditry, decapitations are presented as natural. A dismembered Japan can only come back together if the dismemberments, mutilations, and decapitations it has performed are shared (‘‘yes, decapitations are monstrous, but our decapitations are no more heinous than yours or anyone else’s’’). The heads that roll—that circulate—through space and time become the severed part objects of the enjoyment of war that postwar peace and democracy have denied, leftovers of the Real that refuse to be contained.14 What Kobayashi finds unacceptable is the very fact of the circulation of photographs (both enabling and repeating the transcendence of space and time that the rolling heads perform). He repeatedly remarks the photograph as illicit commodity, as an object sold for money. Photographs of mutilations are doubly suspect (he uses the notion of ayashii, ‘‘suspect,’’ to describe them) because they use images of repressed part objects to convey a sense of horror, a horror that is then masochistically extended to the mutilated Japanese nation itself, mutilations caused by its very violence. Photography severs the moment as event; it mutilates the continuum of time. Photography is already a kind of decapitation of the Real, a cutting off, as it incites desires to bring the unapproachable closer yet keeps it distanced (thus, the vocation of photography as a promising analogon of reality, one forever haunted by its virtuality). In a veritable doubling of the commodity fetish (and thus the photograph’s enhanced power when commodified), the photograph ‘‘transcends’’ time and space as it feverishly circulates, without origin and without final destination. Kobayashi writes repeatedly of the relationship of money to spurious photographs, to the illicit trade in atrocity photographs, and to the cultic beliefs and fixations that lead revenge and recapitation

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‘‘strange’’ peace enthusiasts to use such photographs to convince children of the monstrosity of the Japanese nation-state. In what approaches the sublimity (and absurdity) of Freud’s kettle logic, the thinking goes as such: (1) Photographs of Japanese atrocities are spurious—we didn’t commit any atrocities. (2) Our atrocities are no worse than anyone else’s. (3) They were performed during the war, so they are not atrocities.15 The young should not be exposed to the power of false photographies, false atrocities. If they are, they will think their ancestors are monsters (again, the society’s logic) and become monstrous themselves. In fact, the lack of attachment of the young to the nation-state and their widespread perversity are already signs of their monstrosity, which can thus be linked to spurious atrocity exhibitions.16 Persuasions of national monstrosity and widespread lack of attachment to the body of the nation-state are thus indications of disorder in the peace, nowhere more evident than in the confusions and perversions of the young.17 Embodying a consumerist and self-absorbed subjectivity (if one can still call it that), the young no longer have the capacity to die for anything; even their suicides are completely self-referential. If they could only be rearticulated as subjects of an intact nation-state in which war atrocities no longer figure as such, then the banality of everyday peace could be refigured. But to do so, they must be willing to die—sacrifice has to be made real—and to kill.18 Would the Japanese Society for History Textbook Reform be surprised to think that this logic of death is not without relation to the horrific serialized murders performed by the anonymous Youth A (Shōnen A) of Kōbe? For these murders would seem to represent, in their horror and senselessness, the absolute antithesis of their restorationist project of proper nationhood and the education it must entail (no atrocities, please, but give us war). Yet the seriality of these murders and the violence they enacted within the everyday are not unconnected to the repetitive return to the violent purity of war that nationalists espouse. Shōnen A, whose name is not known by the general public, attacked two young girls with hammers in 1997, killing one of them (he was fourteen at the time). But it was in his second successful murder in 1997 that he performed the unbearable, strangling a sixth-grade boy (Hase Jun) and decapitating him, leaving the severed head in front of the gate of his middle school. An agitated note was left in the mouth of the victim and was soon followed by letters to the Kōbe Newspaper [Kōbe shinbun] (including a repetition of the note he left on the body; Shōnen A was worried that the rain might have 204

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made the original note illegible). He was apprehended and arrested soon thereafter and has since been housed at a juvenile psychiatric prison. Shōnen A signed his notes ‘‘Sakakibara-seito,’’ using a combination of rococo Chinese characters to sound out this name. Indeed, the opening of his threat letter to the newspaper begins by saying how upset he was when he heard reporters on tv mispronouncing his name, saying ‘‘Onibara’’ instead of ‘‘Sakakibara.’’ Railing at the mistake—‘‘misreading a person’s name is one of the worst acts of mockery imaginable’’—Sakakibara-seito angrily revealed that ‘‘my name is not a code, or a clue, or a way of reading another name—it’s my real name. That name has been attached to me from the moment I existed, and the things I want to do were also completely determined. Until now, no one has ever called me by my name. If I had been [allowed to be] myself from the time I was born, I probably wouldn’t have taken such explicit actions as putting the head in front of the school.’’ 19 He continued: Thinking ‘‘I’ll do it,’’ I was able to enjoy killing someone, alone, without anyone noticing it. The fact that I’ve purposely gathered the attention of the public is that I’d at least like to have my self recognized as a real, living human being, even if only within the fantasies of all of you—I, who until now, and from now on, continue a transparent existence (tōmeina sonzai ). At the same time, I haven’t forgotten, too, the revenge toward ‘‘compulsory education’’ (gimu kyōiku) which made me a person of transparent existence, nor the society which gave birth to ‘‘compulsory education.’’ 20

The theme of revenge ( fukushū) reappears in A’s description of his conversation with a mysterious ‘‘friend,’’ the ‘‘only other person in all the world with a transparent existence,’’ and the advice he offers—that Shōnen A change his ‘‘game’’ (gēmu; A wrote in his letters of the game of murder he was playing with the police) from murder (which had been his ‘‘hobby, his life, and his objective’’) to the game of revenge: ‘‘If you do that, there won’t be anything to gain or lose, anything above or below you, and you alone will be able to go forward and construct a new world.’’ 21 Throughout his writings, then, we see Shōnen A’s repeated encounters with incoherence, his fears of names and bodies peeling apart, and his violent need to validate the attenuated connections between meaning and empirical objects. We see them in the motif of the baroque pen name (he called himself the SCHOOL KILLER, too) and his primal rage at its mispronunciation; in his ‘‘transparent existence’’ and his desire to be recognized as a ‘‘really existing human being’’ in the fantasy space of the Other; in the revenge and recapitation

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double he created to share this transparency and to urge him forward in the vengeful construction of a new world; and not least in lengthy entries to Bamoidooki-shin, the diabolical god he created to oversee his actions. We recognize the hypertypified countenance of the ‘‘serial killer,’’ the subject who plays out the uncertainty of the boundaries between public and private, machines and bodies, in repetitive violence. Such killers are often described through the lexicon of transparency, as they overly literalize the connections between self and the world and thus operate in a desperately redundant, mimetic mode of identification that is only ever undone in murderous acts of differentiation.22 In his essay ‘‘The Face of the God Bamoidooki,’’ Ōsawa Masayuki reflects on the radical doubt that drove A to carry out his ‘‘sacred experiment’’ (seinaru jikken) designed to test the fragility of human beings and to discover the point at which meaning adhered to human existence. Regarding humans as somewhere between ‘‘things’’ (mono) and living beings (Ōsawa deduces this viewpoint from A’s use of the verb kowasu (to break), a verb not typically used to describe the murder of humans), Shōnen A seemed to regard killing as a way to figure out where the ‘‘spirit’’ resides (the noun tamashii is used) and what happens when the bodily container is broken.23 In these actions he theatricalized the problematic of the intimacies of bodies and machines that animate modern serial killings elsewhere. As Yumiko Iida states, Shōnen A seems to have attempted to view the world from a point of view outside the realm of human constructions, a world of sheer material, seen from the eyes of the monster. Or rather, obsessed with the enigma of the human condition, perhaps he was already living in such an otherwise-world, a subject enraptured by an internal void and desperately driven by a monstrous consciousness demanding a solution to an enigma.24

Creating his own monster god, Shōnen A becomes the epitome of the monster himself, the apotheosis of societal fears about ijime (school bullying), youth violence, perversity, and confusion; he embodies the terror surrounding the very figure of the ‘‘child’’ in postwar Japan.25 In the narratives of proper Japanese nationhood, this monstrosity is the deadly result of peace pushed to its limits, without war: a peace purveyed to the young through unbridled consumption, virtualized worlds (tv, video, video games, anime), and an education system that presents a masochistic view of Japanese national history through textbooks and atrocity exhibitions. The motive of revenge animates what is properly senseless, without mo206

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tive: revenge toward society, the school, the police. In his statement to the Kōbe Newspaper, Shōnen A declared, ‘‘I am endowed with the capacity to kill the same human being twice.’’ This declaration has been interpreted as something derived from Confucianism, a belief that if one defaces or mutilates the corpse, then the person has been ‘‘killed’’ a second time; thus the vengeful spirit cannot return to earth to haunt the living.26 In this image of the mutilation of the corpse, a mutilation performed to foreclose revenge and to counter hauntings, we detect an eerie reversal of the denial performed by neorightists in the face of wartime mutilations. Those mutilations are reassigned to the vengeance of Japan’s enemy Others. Yet Ōsawa speculates further on this image of a second killing, saying that what ‘‘converts the ‘Other’ to a transcendental entity is the (symbolic) killing of the Other. The second killing enables one to kill the transcendental Other. To kill someone twice—isn’t that the ‘murder of a god’ (kamigoroshi )?’’ 27 A god, he goes on to say, who dies (the first time) but does not. Godmurder is a calling back of the god, a god that expresses the negation of god, an ‘‘inside-out’’ god that expresses the impossibility of god. He finds one exemplar of this god in Christ, a murdered god who thus negates god. And for Sakakibara-seito this negative, inside-out god is Bamoidooki. In a startling move—obvious in retrospect but often unremarked by readers of Japanese—Ōsawa shows how Bamoidooki is an anagram for baio modoki. That is, baio modoki indicates an entity constituted as a simulacrum (modoki ) of the ‘‘bio,’’ one that reveals the uncertainty of the divide between organic and inorganic, life and machine. Although he seems to be a transcendental spirit, he is not a true one. In a final move, Ōsawa states that ‘‘what the severed head of Hase Jun was endowed with was the gaze of Bamoidooki.’’ 28 Thus Ōsawa’s emphasis on the face and the head in his analysis of killing: the head of young Jun, the face of Bamoidooki, and their coming together in the killer’s attempt to produce and expunge a transcendental Other in a violent surge of hyperidentification. Shōnen A’s god, situated between life and machine, negatively epitomizes the intimate alienations that compulsively animate so many serial killers. Shōnen A writes in his letters about the enjoyment of killing, how ‘‘ease’’ is produced: ‘‘Even now, I don’t know why I like to kill. I can only say that it is something I’ve had, the nature I was born with. Only when I’m killing am I liberated from my usual abhorrence and do I find ease. Only the pain of [another person] eases my pain.’’ 29 In his original note left with the decapitated head, Shōnen A says, ‘‘I enjoy killing so much I can’t stand it; I want to, want to see people die so much.’’ 30 revenge and recapitation

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It is as if killing produces the enjoyment foreclosed by the routines of everyday life; in murder the enjoyment of revenge and the revenge of enjoyment coalesce. It is this lost enjoyment that is condensed in the horror of the decapitated head and the compensation in realizing the gaze of Bamoidooki (thus the situating of the head in such a way that teachers and others entering the school would have to look upon it). Ōsawa further speculates on the face (kao) of the victim, on the head itself as the chalice of ‘‘spirit’’ that Shōnen A tried to isolate. Unlike the heads of the bandits circling through space and time, no postmortem photographs of Hase Jun have circulated (his father’s narrative, titled Jun, has sold 300,000 copies; the book is copiously illustrated with photos of Jun before his death). The photographed face of Shōnen A appeared for a while on the Internet (and before that in the magazine Focus), but I have been told that the site was shut down. In this outpouring of protection of youth—in keeping their photographs out of the public sphere and of keeping them from seeing photographs of atrocities—one senses the contradictions in a country that has the largest Internet child pornography industry in the world. The scopic drive of Shōnen A—‘‘I want to see, I want to see’’—cannot be severed from the desire to prevent the visual exhibition of atrocity in the name of war (‘‘I don’t want you to see, I don’t want you to see’’). It is not surprising to find the image of decapitation working metonymically across a chain of associations, from Mishima Yukio’s ritual suicide and decapitation as the origination of a series of restorationist projects, performed as the definitive rejection of a liberal, Americanized Japan, to the fetishized bandit heads (embraced as false atrocities, denied as Japanesecaused, and surrounded with a chilling protectiveness) of the educational atrocity photograph, to the equally fetishized head of young Jun as a sacrificial stand-in for all the losses sustained by subjects unmoored in the cyborg economimesis of Japanese capitalism. It is as if this head stands as a perverse justification for the beheadings performed in war: look what a price we have paid for the peace and democracy that fell to us as the vanquished and for the unjust disavowal of war we have been forced to embrace. Here the emperor emerges within the relay of decapitations to signal his status as the endpoint (and origin) of this metonymy. Not only is the emperor the referent of last resort in the calls for a return to history. It is literally his head that is at stake. As many argue, Japan never had a proper bourgeois revolution on the order of the French Revolution; the emperor was never decapitated. Even in the aftermath of World War II, the divine emperor was retained in all his symbolic intactness (again, he kept his head). 208

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Thus as literary critic John Treat has disclosed, there is no heresy more absolute than the image of the emperor’s decapitation, which was realized in 1960 through an acutely carnivalesque short story by Fukazawa Shichirō titled ‘‘Furyū mutan’’ [The story of a dream of courtly elegance]. In that story the emperor and his family are executed by decapitation, and the sound of the imperial heads as they roll—the metallic sound of sutten korokoro, as the Japanese onomatopoeia has it—produced deathly resonances in Japanese literature and politics. For publishing the story, Shimanaka Hōji, president of the Chūō Kōron publishing company, was made the target of a right-wing assassination attempt in which his wife was hideously wounded and the family maid was murdered (Shimanaka Hōji was not home that evening). Fukazawa went into hiding for years. It is still remarkably difficult to find a copy of ‘‘Furyū mutan’’ in libraries or elsewhere, as it is not included in Fukazawa’s collected works or in any anthology of modern Japanese fiction.31 In yet another fantasy space in 1997, the same year as the Kōbe killings, an animated fable of monstrous revenge, godly decapitation, and final war became the startling hit of Japanese cinema history, topped in all-time earnings only by the foreign catastrophe melodrama Titanic.32 Miyazaki Hayao’s Mononokehime speaks in its very title the monstrosity of revenge and the revenge of monstrosity that animate the violence of recessionary Japan. Mononoke indicates a living or departed spirit that comes to haunt, to curse; it refers to the deadly transformations of things that occur when revenge animates. No one has vivified these transformations to more stunning effect than Miyazaki, who with this film has become the undisputed master of global animation (as Princess Mononoke, the film is the first Japanese anime to have been released as a first-run feature—edited, dubbed, and rescored— in the United States).33 Set in the remote forest of medieval Japan, Mononokehime follows the trajectory of a boy named Ashitaka, a minority Emishi on the fringes of majority Yamato culture, after his wounding by a demonic beast that suddenly appears to undo the peace of the northlands. Monstrous indeed (and monster animals abound in this tale), the beast is a wounded boar god transformed into a demonic mononoke determined to destroy the humans who have destroyed the forests.34 The theme of monstrosity without limits animates this animation, as the notion of mononoke functions throughout to remark monstrosity as revenge. This monstrosity appears serially as gargantuan, bloated megabeasts, who—when they become mononoke—are covered with blood-red phallic protuberances out of a Kusama Yayoi nightmare.35 Indeed, we can imagine the return of the phallus to be what is at issue here, the revenge and recapitation

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lost part object that had to be repressed to constitute the subject in the symbolic revolts as a too-close return of the Real, of an excessive encounter with enjoyment. The proliferation of these phallic coverings crazily embodies a multiplicity of castrations now totalized in the figure of beastly revenge. The beasts rapidly being killed off by predator humans are ambivalently aided by the hero, who tries to move (as one wounded by a beast and thus marked, literally, for death) between the worlds of nature (magical forest) and culture (epitomized by the minutely realized world of a tataraba, or ironworks). The anime spirals around the appearance of a veritable wild child, a girl raised by wolves and bent on revenge against the ironworks (her name is San and she is the princess of Princess Mononoke), and her relationship with Ashitaka as the mediator between worlds. The primal forest is overseen by the Deer God (shishi gami, a deity celebrated in folkloric perfomances throughout northern Japan and elsewhere) of Christlike magnitude: his gaze is one of utter benevolence, he walks on water, and he brings the dead to life (flowers burst into bloom under his hooves). He displays a magnificent set of transparent, phallic horns. Their number dramatically exceeds that of the average buck, appearing all too clearly as the life-giving principle of phallic proliferation opposed to the beasts’ principle of phallic destruction. The forest is saturated with petite, ghostlike homunculii called kodama (spiritlets), who have become famous as another manifestation of cuteness (kawaisa) for young anime fans (and we should not forget that Mononokehime is meant for the young above all). They can only be seen by certain viewers—by viewers attuned to the primal power of the forest. As such, they operate effectively as anamorphic representations of the Real—that which cannot be captured in symbolization—and part of that effectivity lies in their form, or rather, their formlessness. They are all head, attached to toddlerlike bodies.Yet the head is featureless, distorted, and skull-like.With only gaping holes for mouths and eyes, the kodama signal their presence by making mechanical clicking sounds. Their very invisibility lends terror to those who cannot see them, while lending power to those initiated into the secrets of the forest. Not really alive but not dead, in their very name and their form they embody the objet petit a, repeated in excess and multiplicity. Looking like fetal remnants of a grander vision of arboreal splendor, they saturate the forest with signs of the primordial.36 It is the death of the Deer God that is sought by the female owner of the ironworks (Lady Eboshi) and her scheming mercenaries. With his death the end of the forest will be assured, and the ironworks will no longer be 210

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troubled by the revenge of the beasts. As in the fantasy of Shōnen A and his mononoke, the question revolves around how one kills a god. The mistress of the ironworks, a caricature of the compleat capitalist, has nothing beyond the imperatives of success to compel her. Some of her venal assistants, however, believe that the head of the Deer God will grant them eternal life, and they are determined to decapitate the god (ostensibly at the bidding of the emperor). The Deer God turns into a luminous, transparent, ever-extending ‘‘Nightwalker’’ as darkness approaches; the god must be killed before he attenuates into his dispersed and insubstantial night form. In an ever-intensifying hunt in the forest, they apprehend the Deer God in the midst of his dematerialization. The Deer God turns his face full upon that of his executors; Lady Eboshi returns his gaze with the cold eye of the practiced shot. Firing once, she sends a bullet through his neck in a line of purple light. Again she fires, and this time the bullet severs the god’s head from his body, decapitating him in a shower of sparks. Yet the god’s body continues to grow, turning into a decapitated, gargantuan Nightwalker that now roams the earth in search of his missing head. The god’s head has been boxed up and taken away, to be sold for a fortune or hoarded for eternity: the epitome of the fetish. The god’s movements across the landscape burn the forest, kill the kodama (their white forms fall through the trees as the Nightwalker absorbs their essence and grows to gigantic size), and destroy the ironworks. The search for the missing head ends in a struggle over the iron box, and in a moment of triumph Ashitaka and San gain the head and hold it high. The Nightwalker recovers his treasure and at last sinks below the surface of the lake. The aftermath? A scene of destruction produced by the decapitated god has been mitigated by the recovery of his head, although he is now absent, disappeared. Flowers and trees come back in a landscape that resembles nothing so much as a clearcut a year after its razing. San the wolf girl (Princess Mononoke herself ) and Ashitaka meet once more. Ashitaka says, ‘‘The Deer God hasn’t died. Because he is life itself, he is both life and death.’’ 37 The line between nature and culture is redrawn. Ashitaka goes to live in the ironworks, San returns to the forest, and with that resolution comes the final appeal to reconcilation: ‘‘Let’s live together in peace.’’ 38 What does it mean to kill a god, a god whose very death embodies the negation of divinity? (What is a god who can die? What is a divine emperor who declares his humanity?) In this instance, a god is decapitated who, because he includes ‘‘both life and death,’’ is life itself. Thus his is a life that subsumes the opposition of life and death. What is this life to the second revenge and recapitation

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power that will not die? It is the principle of animation itself, of a calling into question the division between objects and beings, of humans and machines. It is a virtual transcendence that finds its closure in the recapitation of a god who must then absent himself. The scene of kamigoroshi by decapitation; the headless body of the god now moved only by the drive to recapitate; the fetishistic melodrama of the severed head; the return of the head and the disappearance of the god— these steps unfold a restorationist parable in the structuralist dimensions of a split between nature and culture, a rift that continues to subsist but that is now covered over. (Again the ideology of the clearcut prevails: look how great it is that flowers and grass come back so quickly!) Imagined within an ecofable, the resolution insists that the revenge of nature is doomed, that capitalist productionism will always triumph, albeit with losses and in the guise of peace (‘‘Let’s live together in peace’’). Despite its depiction of the murderous excesses of early capitalism, the film’s denouement clings to a capitalism that could recognize its limits and thus coexist with its exterior peacefully. It is a false resolution indeed, because it is clear that the ironworks and its murderous owner cannot subsist without the voracious consumption of the forest for their profitable survival and that a repeated return to ecocidal war is necessary. In the wake of remarkably violent scenes of slaughter, corpse-ridden battlefields, and the decapitation of a god, one cannot help but think of the neonationalists’ compulsion to return to World War II and the exhibitions of atrocity they hope to stop. In Mononokehime’s topos of revenge become monstrous, we sense a reprisal of those other forms of retribution savored by neonationalists, literalized by Aum’s war, and turned inside out by the solitary Shōnen A. That the effects of this revenge would be allegorized in the form of a beheading that resutures itself indicates the power of the fantasy space of animation and the recessionary strength of national-cultural desires to restore what has been lost, here literalized as the severed head of a god. Restored where, then? To its transcendental body-home, the Japanese nation: decapitated, recapitated, and dead certain of its own ghastly return. Notes 1 For an anatomy of the National Thing, see Slavoj Žižek, ‘‘Eastern Europe’s Re-

publics of Gilead,’’ New Left Review, no. 128 (1990): 50–62. Žižek relies on Lacan for his notion of the National Thing, which indicates a particular form of national identification based on ‘‘enjoyment’’ ( jouissance). Lacan’s notion of the Thing arises from an analysis of desire as the desire of the Other (desire is always di-

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2

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4 5 6 7 8 9

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rected toward another in the realm of human signification). But that desire is not a graspable object; rather, it is always displaced and always excessive to its demand. National groups are formed around a shared perspective toward the other’s enjoyment, as ‘‘our thing’’ (the National Thing) is always threatened by ‘‘them’’ and their alien forms of enjoyment. I discuss Žižek’s notion of the National Thing and its relation to Japan in ‘‘Mourning the Japanese Thing,’’ in In Near Ruins: Culture in Question, ed. Nicholas Dirks (Minneapolis, 1998), 93–118. It is important to note that when the core of conditions (hard work, full employment, economic success) constitutive of the Japanese National Thing no longer obtains, then a crisis of enjoyment ensues and the realization of the all-too-real insubstantiality of the national formation follows. Thanks to Tomiko Yoda for reminding me of the fascist horror of a capitalism without limits. Žižek has said that ‘‘the fascist dream is simply to have capitalism without its ‘excess,’ without the antagonism that causes its structural imbalance.’’ The elimination of this excess ‘‘would enable us to obtain again a stable social organism whose parts form a harmonious corporate body, where, in contrast to capitalism’s constant social displacement, everybody would occupy his own place.’’ Slavoj Žižek, Tarrying with the Negative: Kant, Hegel, and the Critique of Ideology (Durham, NC, 1993), 210. Japanese Society for History Textbook Reform, The Restoration of a National History: Why Was the Japanese Society for History Textbook Reform Established, and What Are Its Goals (Tokyo, 1998), 6. Ibid., 4–5. Ibid, 5. Ibid. I use ‘‘Kobayashi’’ to indicate the narrator, rather than the author or the implied author. Kobayashi Yoshinori, Sensōron (Tokyo, 1998), 12–14. All translations from the Japanese are mine unless otherwise noted. Emphasis mine. The notion of Toyotism was developed by Knuth Dohse, Ulrich Jurgens, and Thomas Malsch in their ‘‘From ‘Fordism’ to ‘Toyotism’? The Social Organization of the Labor Process in the Japanese Automobile Industry,’’ Politics and Society 14.2 (1985): 115–46. Ōsawa Masayuki, Kyokō no jidai no hate: Oumu to sekai saishū sensō [The fictional era’s end: Aum and the final world war] (Tokyo, 1996). Nishio Kanji has written a lengthy essay on Aum titled ‘‘Oumu shinrikyō to gendai bunmei’’ [Aum Shinrikyō and contemporary civilization] Shinchō (August 1995): 232–55. Kobayashi, Sensōron, 156. Ibid., 154–55. Takahashi Shirō is on the Board of Directors of the Japanese Society for History Textbook Reform. By part object I refer to the psychoanalytic notion that partial objects (breast, voice, penis) can operate as stand-ins for the object of desire (epitomized by the Mother), as they channel that desire. A theory of part objects is crucial to an understanding of fetishism, in which such metonyms operate as replacements

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for a primal lack. Kobayashi’s photographed heads, in their very partiality, remind viewers of war, yet they also stop the chain of associations leading to an unbounded sense of horror (which a too-close encounter with the Real would induce). Freud’s ‘‘kettle logic’’ goes as such: (1) I never borrowed your kettle; (2) it was in perfect condition when I gave it back to you; (3) it already had those holes in the bottom when I borrowed it. Christopher Norris discusses this logic in relation to Jacques Derrida’s work on writing and logocentrism in Plato’s Phaedrus, a text which asserts that writing is both inferior and exterior to speech while simultaneously claiming that writing can indeed infect and threaten speech. See Christopher Norris, Derrida (Cambridge, MA, 1987), 39. Such is the title of J. G. Ballard’s important work The Atrocity Exhibition (San Francisco, 1990). The evidence of atrocities and their exhibition is crucial to the establishment of war guilt, as Lawrence Douglas discloses in ‘‘The Shrunken Head of Buchenwald: Icons of Atrocity at Nuremberg,’’ Representations 63 (1998): 39–64. Douglas focuses on the question of their evidentiary status in a legal proceeding, as he discloses that such atrocity exhibits (the shrunken head, flayed skin) functioned primarily as spectacles establishing the ‘‘rebirth of the primitive, an explosion of the savagery normally kept in check by institutions of modernity’’ (45). It was necessary to establish the Nazi regime as literally savage (the headshrinkers evidently learned their methods from anthropological studies of Jivaro methods) in order for war criminality to be established within what Douglas has described as the ‘‘law’s need to justify its own beleaguered normativity’’ (58). Anthropologist Ann Anagnost has been working on the place of the ‘‘monster child’’ in China; Andrea Arai in this issue and elsewhere is also concerned about the notion of monstrosity in relation to children in Japan. Historian Gerald Figal has written a revelatory book about monsters in Meiji Japan (although not about the dimensions of monstrosity engaged by Anagnost and Arai) in his Civilization and Monsters: Spirits of Modernity in Meiji Japan (Durham, NC, 1999). The trope of monstrosity is, of course, monstrous in and of itself, as it proliferates as a ubiquitous trope within modernity. See Marie-Hélene Hunt, Monstrous Imagination (Cambridge, MA, 1993), for an unfolding of the logic of proliferating reproduction implicit in the trope of monstrosity. Thus Kobayashi’s obession with kamikaze pilots. ‘‘Sakakibara no chōsenjō,’’ [Sakakibara’s letter of challenge], Shūkan Asahi, June 20, 1997. Ibid. Ibid. Serial killers are often described in the literature surveyed by Mark Seltzer as ‘‘abnormally normal,’’ ‘‘chameleon-like,’’ and—indeed—‘‘transparent.’’ Whether Shōnen A can be described as a serial killer is debatable; he only killed two people, for example, and the classic modal minimum for seriality is at least three, with a ‘‘cooling off ’’ period between each killing. Serial killers are thus to be distinguished from ‘‘mass murderers’’ and ‘‘spree killers.’’ See Mark Seltzer, Serial Killers (London, 1997).

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23 Ōsawa Masayuki, ‘‘Bamoidooki-skin no kao,’’ [The face of the god Bamoidooki]

Gunzō (October 1997): 224–36. 24 Yumiko Iida, ‘‘Between the Technique of Living an Endless Routine and the Mad-

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32 33

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35 36 37 38

ness of Absolute Degree Zero: Japanese Identity and the Crisis of Modernity in the 1990s,’’ positions 8.2 (Fall 2000): 446. I am indebted to this essay for its probing analysis of the crisis of the subject in Heisei Japan. I want to note Andrea Arai’s generosity in alerting me to Japanese commentary concerning the Kōbe killings and Miyazaki Hayao’s Mononokehime; I also thank Takehiro Watanabe and Kazuma Maetakenishi for their thoughts on recession and crime in contemporary Japan. ‘‘Sakakibara no chōsenjō.’’ Ōsawa, ‘‘Bamoidooki-shin no kao,’’ 233. Ibid., 235. ‘‘Sakakibara no chōsenjō,’’ 31. Ibid. See John Treat’s remarkable essay on ‘‘Furyū mutan,’’ its critique of poetry and empire, and the deadly politics of emperorism it provoked: ‘‘Beheaded Emperors and the Absent Figure in Contemporary Japanese Literature,’’ pmla (January 1994): 100–15. See Helen McCarthy, Hayao Miyazaki, Master of Japanese Animation (Berkeley, 1999), 186. Begging the question of the place of anime in a history of cinema, one can still muse on the sources of its undisputed power: its luminosity (light seems to glow from the most remote recesses of the screen); its virtuality; its facilitation of ‘‘ethnic whitening,’’ as one critic has claimed (there is no need to show real racialized Japanese, which can only bring about feelings of resentment and inferiority in the Japanese audience); and the animated vocation of this medium, one that recapitulates the contradictions of baio modoki as both alive and not. On ethnic whitening, see Satō Kenji, ‘‘More Animated Than Life: Ethnic Bleaching in Japanese Anime,’’ Kyoto Journal, no. 41 (1999): 22–27. The Muromachi period extended from 1392 to 1573. Although Miyazaki claims that he is not depicting any real historical period, it is clear that he is portraying the social milieu of what is sometimes referred to as medieval Japan. Muskets play a big part in Mononokehime, and guns did not appear in Japan until the midsixteenth century. So we might surmise that the late Muromachi period is being evoked, although much of the detail points to the earlier part of the era. Kusama Yayoi is the entirely idiosyncratic Japanese artist who at one time was known for upholstering armchairs with a profusion of rubberized phalluses. On the place of anamorphosis in cinema, see Slavoj Žižek, ‘‘Grimaces of the Real, or When the Phallus Appears,’’ October (Fall 1991): 45–68. Princess Mononoke: The Art and Making of Japan’s Most Popular Film of All Time (New York, 1999), 173. Ibid.

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The ‘‘Wild Child’’ of 1990s Japan

Andrea G. Arai

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n the summer of 1997 a powerful set of representations of a ‘‘wild child’’ exploded onto the media scene in Japan.1 Occupying one portion of this image arena, the blood-smeared face of the young heroine of Miyazaki Hayao’s all-time smash hit, Mononokehime, was featured on everything from posters to pencils. Occupying the other, accounts of a ‘‘child’’ revealed to be the perpetrator of a series of heinous acts against younger school-aged children, Shōnen A, were reproduced in lurid detail everywhere but pictured nowhere (the mainstream media refrained from publishing the name or photographed image of the accused, respecting the protection of minors and their families under Japanese juvenile justice law).2 In the 1990s in Japan, ‘‘the child’’ and its development became the site of a newly intensified nexus of social anxiety. Disclosed in what for the most part became household terms during this period, kodomo ga hen da (children are turning strange) and gakkyū hōkai (collapse of classrooms), a larger discourse of social crisis and collapse made ‘‘the child’’ its focus. Taking this anxiety as my focal point, I examine the production of these images of ‘‘the child’’ and the concerted body of associations about nature, culture, and history, particular to this moment in Japan that they evoke. The sociohistorical significance of these images lies in what they reveal about this social anxiety, how the anxiety itself obscures a recognition of the historically specific location of ‘‘the child’’ at the center of national-cultural narratives, and in turn, how this anxiety shields from view the linkages between this specificity and the everyday realities of the Japanese child and family at the turn of the century.

In the latter half of the twentieth century, tightly woven linkages that graduated to the level of the commonsensical between economic success and the uniqueness of the ‘‘nation-culture’’ Japan turned the development of the child and the parent-child relationship into a sui generis ground. This is not to say, however, that the general education of the child was not an object of national attention prior to the postwar period, but rather that the nature of this attention and investment has changed.3 All too often overlooked in the intensification of the site of ‘‘the child’’ in the postwar period has been the complex contribution of foreign narratives and otherwise expert explanations of Japan’s postwar national development. Crossing here at the site of ‘‘the child,’’ the modernization theory of early postwar Japan studies and the idea of relative culture(s) in an American cultural anthropology of Japan from Franz Boas and his students contributed to the production of a discursive milieu from which emerged a native psychological anthropology of identity.4 This native psychological anthropology, exemplified in the 1970s by the writings on amae by Takeo Doi, fix on the development of the Japanese child as a means of naturalizing the different development of the Japanese nation-culture. As part of my present work on ‘‘the child’’ in modernity, I am examining the postwar genealogy of this native psychological anthropology of identity. In tracking the emergence and development of these theories of the uniqueness of the Japanese psyche, or personality, by Doi and other notable figures like Kawai Hayao, I am interested in how the discipline of psychology—a discipline of modern subject formation—is employed to argue for the nonindividuation of the Japanese subject, in how ‘‘the child’’ is made to support a sense of a different development in time, at once traditional and modern, of the Japanese nation-state, and in what effects the increasingly inward movement of the national form has had on the historical subjects themselves.5 In analyzing the conjunction of these ‘‘wild child’’ images of the 1990s in Japan, I want to emphasize that neither the discourse of the fear for/of the child nor the shock and disbelief that have accompanied the discoveries that a futsū no ko (a regular kid) from a ‘‘regular family,’’ can commit ‘‘monstrous’’ acts against their intimates are unique to Japan (whether this be Shōnen A or Kip Kingel, the Oregon teenager who in 1997 opened fire on fellow schoolmates and then returned home to kill his mother and father, or the Columbine shootings, or any number of recent incidents). Yet this is also not to say that the specificity of the anxiety on which I focus in this essay can be conflated simply with that of other modern nation-states at the the ‘‘wild child’’ of 1990s japan

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end of the twentieth century. I wish, rather, to refuse both exceptionalizing and conflating gestures as a step toward evoking ‘‘difference’’ that can no longer be sought except through a shared exploration of the intertwined trajectories of modernity. I begin with the Miyazaki Hayao film Mononokehime, focusing on the character of San, whose unknown origins make her the ideal substitute for another origin under siege, the spirit world of the forests of ‘‘ancient Japan.’’ The significance of Miyazaki’s appropriation of this enigmatic figure of Western knowledge about human development, the ‘‘wild child,’’ is viewed here in terms of what it can illuminate about the relationship between ‘‘the child,’’ history, and ‘‘Japanese culture’’ set up in the film. What does this figure of ‘‘the child,’’ positioned at the center of a narrative about the native origins of ‘‘Japan,’’ disclose about the sense of social crisis so widely publicized throughout the 1990s and, moreover, about an idealized notion of the child and childhood in late-twentieth-century Japan? I move next to the Shōnen A jiken, an incident that has been ranked with the mid-1990s Kōbe earthquake and the Aum Shinrikyō gassing of the Tokyo subways in terms of its monumental status and aftereffects. In my reading of the discursive production of this event and its aftermath, I engage several different strategies. I look first to the image that is at once the most prominent and the most startling in the general writing of this event: the futsu no ko and the regular family from which it emerges. I read the panic that gathers around this figure of a ‘‘child’’ of the social interior associated with a ‘‘monstrous’’ event through the effects that this association produces and, alternately, by way of what it attempts to shield from recognition. Focusing on one seminal piece of writing, a memoir by the father and mother ( fubo) of the junior high student now known only as Shōnen A, I analyze the sense of dislocation that the exposure by his parents of Shōnen A’s poignantly ‘‘unchildlike’’ acts sets off, exploring the fascination and horror with which this parental confession is received. At the end of this section I attempt to reconnect the spheres of the private and the politicohistorical that the production of monstrosity in this memoir estranges, in order to engage with the stark social reality of children and their families in late-twentieth-century Japan.6 In July 1997 an animated film written and directed by Miyazaki Hayao opened in Japan and broke all box office records for any Japanese movie to date. Within the first five months after its release, Mononokehime [Princess Mononoke], by far the most expensive Miyazaki film, had been seen by one218

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tenth of the Japanese population.7 Originally conceived of in the late 1970s as the story of a beautiful princess living in the woods with a beast-spirit (a mononoke), the project was abandoned at that time due to lack of interest. In the mid-1990s the story was transformed to reflect the concerns of creator Miyazaki with the social malaise of end-of-the-century Japan. ‘‘We can see the 21st century clearly and wonder how we ourselves can live in this chaos. . . . We can’t make films the same way as in the past.’’ 8 Depicting the trouble as ‘‘the weak sense of life of this age’’ (seimeikan no kihaku na jidai ), Miyazaki set about to fashion a story that would anticipate this future trouble and a character that could embody the source of its redemption.9 Nostalgia for a determinate social reality, and its corresponding lifeways, has often guided Miyazaki in his fantastical depictions of times gone past, or yet to be, as well as in his choice of child figures to signify these moments (one is reminded here of the huge hits Tonari no Totoro, Naussica, or any number of other films). Yet, in Mononokehime, a shift occurs in Miyazaki’s accommodation of the trajectory of Japan’s modern development into the present, and his concern over modernity’s losses. Alarmed at the possibility of social deterioration at what should be the space of renewal and reproduction—the youth—and no longer content with the retrieval of a shared past that his prior fantasies could afford, Miyazaki moves in this film to try to reconnect the spheres of nature and ‘‘culture,’’ through the medium of history. The vehicle that he chooses for this is the ‘‘wild child.’’ The film opens with a pan shot over mist-enshrouded mountains that continues down into the deep recesses of the silent forests, as a voice-over announces, ‘‘In this country long ago . . .’’ (mukashi kono kuni de . . .). Shattering the tranquility of long ago, the frightening image of a massive beast engulfed by enormous worms surges through the forest, destroying everything in its path. Ashitaka (the hero) intercepts and regretfully kills the creature, whereupon he discovers that it was a boar god (inoshishi-gami ) that has been transformed into a demon spirit (tatarigami ).10 Its curse transfers to him in the form of a throbbing, snakelike mark covering his forearm, a symbol of the site of both human innovation and destructive power. On Ashitaka’s journey to discover the origin of the curse, he observes a struggle between the animal world and the human in which a figure, not quite animal and not quite human, is leading the animal attack. As the animals retreat, the camera moves in to bring into full view this figure riding on the back of an enormous white wolf. Sucking the blood of the injured wolf, which we later learn is her ‘‘mother,’’ she creates an image that is both feral and fascinating. This is our introduction to San, who not only emerges the ‘‘wild child’’ of 1990s japan

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from the forest with the animals but belongs to their world. She is a child of the wild. The next time we meet San, she is galloping on wolfback with the agility and abandon of an animal of the wild, heading for the bellows to singlehandedly avenge the injury of her ‘‘mother,’’ the giant white wolf Moro. The potentially repugnant effect that her savagery might produce, however, is attenuated here by stylization at several levels. Clothed in what might be called a chic primitive, that to some extent recalls the puerility of the young female characters of other Miyazaki films, San is situated at the boundary of the desirous pristine. What is this space of desirability that the ‘‘wild child’’ occupies, and what specific effects did Miyazaki anticipate in inserting this figure into the imagined space of ancient Japan? In the beginning of the nineteenth century in Western Europe, the idea of the wild child emerged as one that could provide knowledge about humanity’s primitive history, native endowment, and the relative importance of nature and nurture in the child’s development.11 Questions of human development hotly debated at the time were becoming of interest to modern European states faced with the management of colonialized populations, the problem of the children of the urban poor at home, and what was to become the study (in its own right) of child development.12 At this moment the now infamous ‘‘Victor,’’ or ‘‘l’enfant sauvage de l’Aveyron,’’ who had roamed the countryside in an area of southern France near Turns (not far from the county seat of Aveyron), was discovered by a constable, who unlike the peasants who had fed and sheltered the boy for some time, saw him as a valuable asset for scientific inquiries.13 In mapping this figure of a ‘‘wild child’’ onto the imagined origins of ‘‘ancient Japan,’’ Miyazaki appears to have sought to excise the undesirable aspects of modern development (the social fragmentation of capitalist modernity, for example) while preserving the structure of this development itself. San, emerging from the ‘‘wild,’’ provides him with just this possibility. Her position in ‘‘nature,’’ which also defines her distance from ‘‘culture,’’ imparts to her character the potential of a ‘‘life at its start’’ and ‘‘a privileged locus of the truth of origins’’ that can ‘‘transcend a rotten and decaying culture.’’ 14 At the same time that these idealized possibilities of childhood are imparted to San, Miyazaki carefully circumscribes the primitive trope that her behavior and costuming suggest, so as not to draw on the backwardness and savagery that Victor evoked. In order for San to stand in for the development of a new origin in Japan, the associations that a ‘‘wild child’’ might evoke of the ‘‘difference’’ (in a temporal sense) of the West from its 220

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others must be circumvented.15 Neatly contained within the idealized view of a child that is not too wild, the specificity of San’s individual growth (a specificity of which ‘‘the child’’ is emptied so as to stand in for the timelessness of the nation) is carefully restricted. Just as San epitomizes the trope of the child as ‘‘the energized innocence at the heart of the modern dilemma,’’ the very (un)childlike acts of Shōnen A blatantly announce the oddly repellent side of this radiance and potential of modern childhood.16 Yet it is to this sense of disjunction and its effects that we must look further if we are to understand what lies behind this seeming opposition between radiance and repellence and how this (un)childlike behavior has become an object of immense fascination and desire. For just over a month, from late May 1997 when a note was found in the severed head of an elementary school student, Jun-kun (young Jun), at the gate of Tomogaoka Junior High in Kōbe, to the date of the arrest of a junior high student as the suspect of the crime, it was widely assumed that the crime was committed by a male between thirty and forty years of age.17 Moreover, because of the media reports that associated a ‘‘black sedan’’ with the suspect, all neighborhoods adjacent to Tomogaoka were put on alert by the neighborhood associations ( jichikai ) in concert with the local police. Following the heightened state of tension that was palpable in these areas closest to the scene of the crime, the arrest of a local fourteen-year-old youth came as a sudden relief from what seemed like an intolerable period of waiting and not knowing. Yet, all too quickly thereafter, this sought-after information became a source of a new sense of angst, as it became clear that any amount of knowledge, and literally heaps of it have circulated and continue to, would be unequal to the task of placating the anxiety, born of incomprehensibility, that surrounds the Kōbe jiken. Hirota Teruyuki, a sociologist of education who has worked to dispel the spiraling sense of crisis that emanated from the Kōbe jiken, reports that the outpouring surrounding this event is unprecedented in the annals of youth crime in Japan. Having thoroughly investigated the historical record of past youth crimes as well as the claims that child rearing in the homes has deteriorated (suitai shita) and is responsible for producing this kind of youth, Hirota comes up baffled by the near hysterical response. Hardly the first heinous incident by a minor in Japan, and despite historical evidence to the contrary of claims about the collapse of the home, this event resulted in the production of what Hirota terms ‘‘a serious problem’’ (daimondai ).18 One of the founding members of the professional teachers association ( purokyōshi no kai ), by all accounts a unique group that over the period of the the ‘‘wild child’’ of 1990s japan

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last ten years has become well known for its view on the problem with the child, Kawakami Ryōichi views this current sense of crisis as long overdue. In his best-selling book Gakkō Hōkai (School collapse), Kawakami argues that this series of crimes committed by a fourteen-year-old youth has finally caused parents to wake up to the problems of the child and the school, and the social disintegration that undergirds both the former. One of the foremost contributors to the idea that ‘‘the child is turning strange’’ (kodomo ga hen da), Kawakami argues that following these events by a fourteen-year-old in Kōbe, it is no longer possible to assign blame wholesale to the schools; parents must look to themselves as well.19 ‘‘With this incident, it wouldn’t be at all unusual that parents who have devoted even the smallest amount of thought to it would embrace a strong sense of uneasiness about what their child is thinking, or what he/she might do.’’ 20 The story of Shōnen A, or the Kōbe renzoku jidō sasshō jiken (The Kōbe serial killing and wounding of children incident) as it was referred to by the press, has functioned as a shifting point in the discourse on the child, child rearing, and the locations (the home and the school) charged with the child’s care and social training.21 As the initial uproar surrounding the story of Shōnen A subsided, it became clear that a qualitative change in the discourse on the child had emerged, one that first picked up on phrases in use from the beginning of the decade of the 1990s to describe problems in the schools and in the homes—kodomo ga hen da, atarashii kodomo—and gradually moved to include an acute attention to that which was formerly unseen or unknown, the inner recesses of the child’s mind, the child’s psyche (naimen, kokoro).22 This unknown/unknowable area of the child has echoed back on the problems of its nurture, and from here to that which is naturally supposed to emerge as the end result of this process of development, the adult subject, and from there to a national subjectivity. The various terms and forms of fear that in the aftermath of 1997 have attached themselves to ‘‘the child,’’ and the linkages that go on from there to the discourse of the disintegration of the home, are not containable within the standard pursuit of knowledge, with its disciplinary confines. This unaccountable, the anxiety, continues to circulate in the face of the presentation of ‘‘facts’’ to the contrary, locating itself at the site of the child, making the child an object either to be feared for or afraid of.23 Yet, if we reconsider the site around which the anxiety has gathered—‘‘the child’’—as a location built up in knowledge and acted upon through the intertwinings of modernity, then the possibility emerges that rather than the site of the ‘‘real’’ danger, the child has been positioned as a substitute for the recognition of the truly 222

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fearful—‘‘a site of displaced lack.’’ 24 In other words, the locus of anxiety, ‘‘the child,’’ stands for what I suggest is the more truly frightening possibility of a problem at the interior of a knowledge about culture, a knowledge that relies on the development of ‘‘the child’’ for the resubstantiation of its continuity and vitality, a knowledge that has functioned up to this point to gather into it the intractable difference of Japanese from one another. In April 1999, nearly two years after the arrest of Shōnen A for the killing and wounding of four elementary school students, and one year following the publication by Hase Jun, the father of the most highly publicized of the victims, of his memories of the years leading up to the shocking death of his son, the parents of Shōnen A published their own memoirs, Shōnen A: Kono Ko wo Unde.25 This book presents itself as a plea for forgiveness to parents in Japan, in particular the parents of the chief victims Hase Jun and Yamashita Ayaka. Expressions of remorse and repeated admissions of responsibility, on the part of the mother in particular, for bearing (unde) this child, are paired with repeated announcements of despair phrased in the form of a question to the reader: Where, and in what way, did we as parents, make a mistake? (Watashitachi oya wa, doko de, nani wo, machigaeta ka? )26 In fact, from the title onward, we the readers are beckoned to join these parents in their return to the past, enticed on through the use of the te form (unde) of the Japanese verb umu in the title, to expect an ‘‘afterwards,’’ the ongoing history of events that led up to this heinous series of events.27 A kind of implicit agreement appears to take form in our answering this call of the verb form unde, that in this retracing of the past, we will discover something that has yet to be made public about this family, something that only the parents could know, even as they acknowledge their own desperate lack of knowledge. Amid the often conflicting barrage of explanations about the Kōbe jiken from popular commentary to the old and new venues of local rumor and now the Internet, the attraction of these memoirs lies in their seemingly unmediated connection to the origin of the problem. They seem to promise that the ‘‘something’’ that had been crucially absent from the story all along, the something that has left a gaping hole in our ability to know (our children as well as ourselves) will now be filled in. The introduction of Shōnen A: Kono Ko wo Unde starts with the juxtaposition of a drawing that Shōnen A made of his mother one year prior to the jiken and gave to her on Mother’s Day and the note that was found in the severed head of Jun: ‘‘Sa gēmu no hajimari desu. . . . Boku wo tomete mitamae. Boku wa koroshi ga yukai de tamaranai’’ (Everyone, the game starts now. the ‘‘wild child’’ of 1990s japan

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. . . Just try to stop me. I really love killing).28 The drawing marks the regularity of this family, while the note marks something terribly irregular and unexpected. We are informed that Shōnen A’s mother kept this drawing pinned to their refrigerator until the day they had to leave their home. (Who among us with refrigerators and children can help but identify with that?) The mother in the picture is in Western wedding attire; her eyes and nose are drawn accentuated and large; her dress is full, suggesting the maternal rather than the appeal of a young bride. The father, like the writer of this account, is noticeably absent. This drawing in its position at the beginning of the memoir goes much beyond producing a sense of irony that leads to feelings of shock and ambivalence. Beyond the question that has been posed incessantly since the summer of 1997—How could this ‘‘child’’ (from this family) have committed these acts—the juxtaposition of the drawing with the note marks the displaced time of the child’s development, now replaced with a new time, a new name—Sakakibara Seito. He bemoans the usurping of his existence, swearing revenge.29 The subject that committed these acts is now known only to himself; neither we the readers nor his parents know him any longer.30 All we can know is what the subject tells us in the process of trying to restore his position in the symbolic order, through taking on the position of the author of discourse. He does this in a letter addressed to the Kōbe Newspaper prior to his arrest, in which we learn that the prior time was one of transparent existence (tōmei na sonzai ). Fear of a ‘‘child’’ like Shōnen A, who fails to appreciate the ‘‘value’’ of life to the extent that he experienced pleasure in killing, has been constantly paired in the expressions of anxiety that have ensued from the Kōbe jiken against the seeming countersensibility of fear for a ‘‘child’’ who (as the head defense counsel in the case of the Kōbe jiken emphasized for me) lacks worth, love (aijō), and an ability to actualize his ‘‘self ’’ ( jiko sonzai wa jikkan dekinai ). Though it is certainly not my intention to make light of the seriousness of these crimes or of the feelings of the victims on one hand, nor of the importance of ideas like self-worth, love, or other kinds of explanations of this event that define and reside in the area of the private and interpersonal realm of the self and family on the other, I do wish to argue for the importance of situating the absences, which the Kōbe youth apparently encountered within the larger realm of the national-historical problematic. Here I find myself in resonance with Yumiko Iida for the need to situate the phrase transparent existence (tōmei na sonzai ) along the lines of the troubled and disembodied subjectivity, which she argues the Kōbe 224

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youth faced, ‘‘the unbearable lightness of being’’ that he tragically sought to overcome through recourse to violence.31 Shōnen A is divided into sections along the lines of the recounting voice of the mother and father into the time before and the time after the discovery that Sakakibara Seito is their son. While the expressions of remorse and pleas for forgiveness are a constant in every section, so too is an unending review of the intimate past of this family for signs (zenchō) that the parents could have used to predict and prevent these atrocious (kyōaku na) acts from occurring. These remembrances (with the Proustian implications of time that is lost and cannot be wholly recovered, the time here of the child’s development) culminate in the frightening implications for the knowing subject of something that was so central, so familiar, becoming so unknowable. ‘‘I now feel that my ability to know the child’s true self is completely gone. . . . What goes on in the deep interior of the child?’’ 32 In the constant review of what has been said, the development of the narrative of this life together is held up rather than moved along into the future, in what produces a sense of time that did not progress as it should. But we do not know why, and neither do they. A dislocation has occurred, producing a sense of inadequacy and uncertainty of knowledge that gives off the eerie feeling of something gone wrong that is temporal in nature. Who is the knowing subject here, and what might this have to do with the status of knowing that creates the effect of the ‘‘adult’’ in time? There are strong resonances here with the monstrous and ghostly effects set off in the story of the third night of ‘‘Ten Nights of Dream’’ (‘‘Yume Jūya’’), written by Natsume Sōseki in the first decade of the twentieth century.33 Each night contains a ‘‘dream,’’ which is in effect an allegory of a range of modern concerns as seen by Sōseki standing in this late Meiji moment. In the third night (of dream), a ‘‘father’’ is carrying what we believe to be a ‘‘child’’ on his back in the fashion of onbu that typically marks the dependence of the child on the adult. As they walk, the ‘‘adult’’ discovers that he neither knows what he is doing in this place, where he is going, and most eerily of all, what he is carrying on his back. As they progress along the way unknown to the ‘‘father,’’ ‘‘the child’’ reveals itself to be the knowing subject, not the object of knowledge. This change in the position of knowing throws open the seemingly stable temporal locations of ‘‘adult’’ and ‘‘child’’ to the point at which the father no longer recognizes that which he is carrying on his back, and the figure transforms into a heavy stone. Why is the idea of ‘‘the child’’ and the relative positions of the parent and child (in time) one of the central tropes of concern for Sōseki at this mothe ‘‘wild child’’ of 1990s japan

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ment? From the problems allegorized in the remainder of the nights of dream, Sōseki appears to be grappling with the various locations on which the ‘‘knowing’’ subject relies for its sense of ‘‘present-presence.’’ Beyond Sōseki’s acute grasp of this incipient conundrum of modernity, I believe that the significance of his creation in the ‘‘Ten Nights of Dream’’ lies in its posing of these problems through the lens of the everyday. In the mother’s sections of the memoir of remorse (kaikon no shuki ) the focus is on the horror of the recognition that she somehow gave birth to something she no longer knows and probably never really knew. But the ‘‘A’’ I knew, I was too fond of him I suppose, was demonstrative in his feelings, a delicate child with a kind spot. . . . The ‘‘A’’ that comes out in the memo (to the newspaper) was not the son that we had an image of all along. The memo includes the stories of the slaughter of cats, and of the violence towards his fellow students, of which this child (ano ko ga) never spoke to us. The things that he spoke to us about were completely different. He knew us, we only thought we knew him, but I can’t help thinking that we were deceived by this child. We were watching this child all along, could we have been so fooled? Can a child of that age so completely deceive their parents? 34

This admission of the absence of knowledge on her part is closely accompanied in all of its numerous repetitions by the appeal to others that if she did not know, who could? who does? She was a regular ( futsū no) parent; they were a regular family. She was strict in her rearing of A (shitsuke o shikkari yarimashita); they were no different in this from other regular Japanese parents, yet look what happened. While something appears to be wrong here, it is outside their understanding. The repeated insistence in the memoir of the parents of Shōnen A on the inability to know what went wrong, on the very incomprehensibility of what happened, has the effect of isolating this event within the familial sphere and disjoining this sphere of the family (and the child at its center) from the political and historical spheres within which, as Jacques Donzelot in The Policing of Families has argued, it is the ‘‘milieu’’ acted upon in the emergence of new relationships of power and authority.35 Moreover, the sudden incomprehensibility of their situation, the entrance of what can only be abnormal to this seemingly normal setting, sets off a series of effects that produce a sense of monstrosity, which as James Siegel writing about the reporting of ‘‘the child’’ and crime in Jakarta aptly notes, becomes the source of intense social fascination and horror but ‘‘effaces attention to social conditions.’’ 36 Siegel argues that in the case of the report226

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ing of crimes committed by children, the categories through which these acts are made comprehensible are absent both in the law and in knowledge. Children that commit crimes like adults, who want what adults want, are thus incomprehensible, and this lack in knowledge leads to the production of the monstrous.37 In his discussion of the media reporting of ‘‘criminal children’’ who murder other children for gold earrings, Siegel explores how a destabilizing of the adult-child continuum can effect a destabilization in the ‘‘naturalized’’ boundaries of value, which in turn ‘‘upsets naturalized categories of social life.’’ While I have chosen to emphasize the effects of temporality with regard to the location of ‘‘the child’’ in modernity, there is an integral relation between the vectors of temporality and value at the site of ‘‘the child.’’ In a pivotal section of the parents’ memoir of remorse, titled ‘‘From the Time We Knew Our Son Was Sakakibara Seito,’’ Shōnen A’s mother describes her moment of recognition that it was indeed her son, the one she gave birth to (watashi ga unda ko), that committed these incomprehensible acts. Her complete recognition, however, is barred by the fact that he does not want to see his parents, and when he does, he is mostly silent. The mother longs for him to ask for help so that she can believe that it is her son, so that she can return him to the position of the futsū no ko (regular child), so that they can go back to being the regular family that we are repeatedly entreated to find here. In the emotionless meetings with A and in her conversations with her son’s doctors we accompany the mother on the journey of recognition that brings her to the realization that her son is not ‘‘regular,’’ as she thought he was. The recognition that we are brought to with her is only partial, however.We are not led to question the very basis on which this idea of the ‘‘regular child’’ or family is grounded but, rather, the unsettled (and uncanny) feeling that that which was once familiar is now so unfamiliar, and so fearful. Her longing to regain what she has lost leads her to return to the time she has lost, by splitting the subject of her son: the son she gave birth to, that she knew, a time she knew well and can recount to us in minute detail across four sections, and the son she reads about in the expert opinion section at the end of the book (A no seishinkanteisho wo yomiowatte). The mother walks a tightrope of received sensibilities. While establishing herself as an involved mother, a stay-at-home mom (sengyō shufu), through her recounting of the annual celebration of holidays and birthdays, and a firm disciplinarian, she relies on a common idea of Japanese child rearing and mothering and the home out of which emerges, naturally, the ‘‘regular child.’’ 38 What is truly slippery here is the position of the child in the face of the ‘‘wild child’’ of 1990s japan

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this ideology. What is so blatantly absent from this memoir of remorse and most of the writing about the child that has followed in the wake of Shōnen A is an engagement with the relay that exists between the successful development of the child (the inculcation of a certain body of knowledge, manners, meanings, and a received set of attitudes vis-à-vis these social meanings) and a national subjectivity, as that which underwrites the former. So often encased within the rubric of ‘‘socialization’’ by those writing on issues of the Japanese child and family both in Japan and abroad, this writing overlooks the historicity (with accentuation on the political) of these predilections toward the child and equally significant toward the adult as the completion of the process.39 Due to his family’s association with the amorphous Japanese middle class, Shōnen A’s acts could not rest easily within the bounds established to handle problems of this nature in the youth—delinquency. In fact, the range between aspiration to a middle-class position and the continued anxiety over the inability to maintain or reproduce this social standing better defines the climate of the post-bubble 1990s than the unproblematized category of the regular ( futsū). Despite the reality of ever-sterner socioeconomic realities and their effects at the site of individual families, this category continues to evoke a stability of knowledge tightly linked to the idea of ‘‘Japanese culture.’’ Central to this idea of the futsū is the sense of a sensibilityin-common, which is expected to ‘‘naturally’’ emerge from membership within a regular family, and through the main vehicle for which the family has responsibility, child rearing or ‘‘putting beauty into the body,’’ one of the coveted renderings of the famed shitsuke (disciplining). The culmination of this process is the fully developed set of sensibilities, which by virtue of their essential difference from that of subjects of other modern (which is to say Western) nation-states define the internal sameness of the Japanese to one another. However, keeping this category of the regular intact requires the continual reproduction of the site at which this difference locates itself, both the family and the child within the family. In the prewar period, according to Naoki Sakai, the emperor (Tennō) served as a locus of the difference of the modern nation-state of Japan. The prewar origin for this sense of shared sensibility and the ‘‘relationality,’’ or aidagara, that was its supposed effect underwent a major transposition with the massive changes of the postwar period. It was not entirely coincidental that just at this time knowledge about ‘‘the child’’ and its link to development in both the individual and national senses emerged as a special kind of

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knowledge in Japan. This site of origin then finds itself, amidst the postwarmandated reorganizations, encased within the new discursive lodging of ‘‘culture,’’ which links to the site of the child by the already overdetermined link between culture and personality, with its focus on child rearing and human development as a means of gauging the specific personality of a culture. One of the main effects of this tight linkage has been to veil the ‘‘instrumentality’’ of contemporary Japanese childhood. Elaborating at length on the risks to the psychological and physical health of Japanese children of a system of round-the-clock schooling that repeats so closely in its logic the schedules and responsibilities of the adult working world, Norma Field articulates the complex mesh of cultural(ist) logic that has locked Japanese children in this system of travail. It is, argues Field, by performing the ‘‘socially defined tasks’’ of childhood, which it is ostensibly their ‘‘choice’’ to carry out, that Japanese children, at increasingly younger ages throughout the 1990s, have become the objects of laboring and consuming.40 That is also to say that while ‘‘the child’’ and childhood serve as a site of national investment, and thus a place where anxieties about national futures can gather, they also serve as the site of anxieties about personal futures (securing future social status and financial security).41 One of the central effects of this system of travail and its fetishization of the idea of childhood as the ‘‘repository of stored value’’ is the Japanese after-school schooling industry, or the various forms of Japanese juku.42 It is thus the overlay of the one with the other, or rather the interpenetration of the ‘‘personal’’ by the national, that is so overlooked in both the radiant and repellent representations of ‘‘the child’’ and childhood.43 The circumscribed space of the ‘‘regular child,’’ then, not only functions to keep the realities shielded from view but participates in the enactment of these separations and fetishizations, which continually reproduces this space as one of safety and above all certainty. The representation(s) of the Shōnen A jiken brings all this into sharp relief. The voluminous and repetitive commentary on this event takes a number of different but related forms. In varying degrees each assessment leans on a once-romanticized (like Mononokehime) and twice essentialized view of the ‘‘child,’’ accentuating the limits of this idea and producing a spectacle of ultimate fascination. Since much of this writing is involved in a search for the objective causes (gennin) of what happened, the fact that the historical referent (the young man who became known as Shōnen A) is absent and that only an unlocatable voice ‘‘speaks’’ out in various forms of inscrip-

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tion on which nothing but a mysterious ‘‘pen name’’ appears to identify its origin adds substantially to the fascination with this case and the thrill of finding out something that has yet to be revealed.44 Shōnen A: Kono Ko wo Unde became a best-seller, exceeding the 350,000issue mark soon after its publication. The book’s circulation paralleled the seemingly unstoppable mantra it gave birth to: ‘‘Anna shōnen o sodatetara dō shiyō’’ (What can we do if we raise a child like that?). The representation of the Shōnen A jiken exhibits at first a series of sharp contrasts to the trope of childhood represented by the figure of San in Mononokehime. Whereas San is positioned to replace a loss that has occurred, the Shōnen A incident clamors of the rupture of something irrevocable. While Mononokehime circulates as a sign of idealized childhood through the stunning effects of an animation style that portrays both the nature of long ago and the child that emerges out of it in their seemingly undisturbed forms, the fact that Shōnen A’s image never fully comes into view disrupts these desirable notions at their most endangered and dangerous points.45 Moreover, though San’s unknown origins are what define her (in the best sense) as a ‘‘wild child,’’ Shōnen A’s origins are not unknown, just displaced, and furnish an antithesis to the sense of completion that San’s figure seems to promise. By splitting ‘‘the child’’ into the designated categories of the desirable and the undesirable, the heterogeneity of children exceeds their idealization, and this excess becomes the material for the production of monstrous representations and depoliticizing effects. Moreover, the partial recognition of this split in the object of knowledge, which produces such a sense of the inability to know, creates the need for the contrary to this sense of nurture gone wrong, in the form of nature gone right (Mononokehime). When called to signify a past as it should have been, as it is here, it links to the body of discourse about the origins of the nation-culture—Japan.46 Yet what produces the sense of the disjunction of these two sets of images is also the effect of a more fundamental discursive space of resonance. Viewed at this level, the child figure (in modernity) is made more ‘‘elemental,’’ which is to say it is positioned to take on more of the characteristics ascribed in the earlier part of the twentieth century to the Bushman or the South Sea Islander, as the scientific interest in the child’s development produces finer and finer distinctions in knowledge about the child.47 As ‘‘the child’’ is further objectified in knowledge, its heteronomy—the individuality and uncontainability of its own historical specificity—is repressed and 230

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replaced by the idea of ‘‘development,’’ a containable historical movement. Through the intertwinings of modernity that I have outlined here, ‘‘the child’’ in postwar Japan becomes a substitute for the contingencies of history, as it naturalizes the separation of the spheres of the cultural from the national-political.48 A nexus of anxiety about ‘‘the child’’ and its environment reached a peak in the late 1990s following the Kōbe jiken. The crisis of certainty that ensued culminated in the sense that the home, school, and society in general were on the verge of collapse. At the turn of the century, this discourse of crisis worked its way into older categories of knowledge about the child and family, reworking them from the inside and enabling the ease of new kinds of crossings of knowledge and their use in the emerging forms of the national-cultural. I conclude with several examples of how this anxiety is producing not so much a critical reflection on the historical trajectory of the figure of the child in modernity and postwar Japan, but a new series of regulatory mechanisms for the management of the child and family. In The Policing of Families, Jacques Donzelot articulates an approach that neither leads to a privileging of the past as a point of pure and stable origin nor to the denial of historical change. A critique of political reason is overdue. . . . I would like to contribute to such a critique by showing how sieve-like concepts such as ‘‘crisis’’ or ‘‘contradiction’’ are inadequate. Inadequate because they make it possible to neglect crucial transformations by referring them to the terms of simple but outmoded debate: they blur the positivity of these transformations and obscure their efficacy. And because they lead one in the end to mistake for decisive breaks, for surfaces of confrontation (whether real or logical), what is in fact the emergence of new techniques of regulation.49

The long-awaited year 2000 ushered in a whole range of new services, commodities, and images of ‘‘the child’’ of the twenty-first century in Japan. A momentous stream of books, articles, television specials, dramas, and films highlights the problem at the site of the child, whose brain, body, and psyche have been found to be endangered or lacking. To correct these serious absences, a whole range of plans that include the reforms to the juvenile law, a new child abuse protection law, the establishment of new governmental guidelines for child rearing and home education, new education directives that promise ‘‘less competition’’ and address the need for ‘‘kokoro no kyōiku’’ (literally ‘‘education of the heart’’) have either been completed during the period 2000–2001 or are in the works.50 Connected intricately the ‘‘wild child’’ of 1990s japan

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to these changes is a discourse of inwardness, one that focuses on the individual psyche, and its connection with the larger collective psyche of the nation. At this moment, the complex relationship between the anxiety that surrounds the figure of the child and the power of the trope of childhood is undergoing yet another round of reconfigurations. The challenge at this point becomes one of tracking the movement and transmutations of the discourse as it again reconfigures the location of the child in its wake, without negating the real shifts and points of crisis that have emerged. How will the mass-mediazation of these images interact with the new socioeconomic and historical concerns of the nation in the twenty-first century? How will these once again add to the reconfiguring of this site of the child in Japan, and how will ‘‘the child’’ be positioned to make up for the deficits at the more crucial level of the representative force of the nation? How will this affect the social realities of the historical subjects themselves? Notes I wish to note my gratitude to several of the readers of this essay for their indispensable advice during its preparation and revisions. Tomiko Yoda provided critical comments during the early revisions. Harry Harootunian contributed insightful advice and the encouragement necessary to write it in the first place. I also wish to thank Ann Anagnost, Marilyn Ivy, and Leila Wice for their intellectual input. 1 In placing quotation marks around ‘‘wild child,’’ I wish to mark that in my use of

this linguistic and historical referent here and throughout this article I am not assuming that it operates the same way in Japanese as it does in English. 2 Shōnen A was the appellation legally assigned to the junior high student who was discovered in June 1997 to have committed a series of violent (and fatal) acts against several elementary school students in Kōbe. According to juvenile justice law (shōnenhō) in Japan, the name of the suspect and his family cannot be divulged in public. The public dismay over the fact that a fourteen-year-old youth was the perpetrator of these offenses led to a range of debates over the need to revise, with an emphasis on making more punitive at a younger age, the juvenile justice law, which had not been altered since its inception in the immediate postwar period in Japan. The revisions to this law were passed by the Diet in November 2000. These revisions center on lowering the age at which a juvenile can be tried in criminal court from sixteen to fourteen years of age, and altering the nature of the judicial proceedings of the family court (Katei saibansho). 3 For the specificity of the way the child is made an object of national investment in the late Meiji period, see Stefan Tanaka’s analysis in ‘‘Childhood: Naturalization of Development into a Japanese Space,’’ in Cultures of Scholarship, ed. Sally Humphreys (Ann Arbor, 1997).

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4 H. D. Harootunian analyzes the role of modernization theory in the develop-

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ment of the discourse of essentialism in Japan in H. D. Harootunian, ‘‘America’s Japan/Japan’s Japan,’’ in Japan in the World, ed. Masao Miyoshi and H. D. Harootunian (Durham, NC, 1993). I am indebted here to Denise Riley’s discussion in War in the Nursery: Theories of the Child and Mother (London, 1983), especially the section ‘‘Development Psychology, Biology, and the Social,’’ as well as the presentation of a range of debates within the discipline of psychology in Changing the Subject: Psychology, Social Regulation, and Subjectivity (London, 1998). Norma Field depicts this reality as one of ‘‘laboring and consuming.’’ See her trenchant depiction of the everyday of the ‘‘regular child’’ in late-twentieth-century Japan in ‘‘The Child As Laborer and Consumer: The Disappearance of Childhood in Contemporary Japan,’’ in Children and the Politics of Culture, ed. Sharon Stephens (Princeton, 1995). Helen McCarthy, Hayao Miyazaki, Master of Japanese Animation (Berkeley, 1999), 185. Mononokehime cost an estimated $30 million, one-third of which was marketing costs, and grossed $160 million from ticket sales alone. Domestic video sales in the first three weeks after release reached 2 million copies. Ibid., 184–85. ‘‘ ‘Mononokehime’ wo Yomitoku’’ [Figuring out Mononokehime], Comic Box, August 1, 1997, 163. This cited phrase is one of the subheadings in a section of this issue of Comic Box titled ‘‘Shisō no Monogatari’’ [The story of the idea]. Literally the ‘‘thinness’’ of a sense of life that is spoken of here refers in the fuller explanation to the problem of ‘‘the weakness of that which binds one life to another’’ (seimei to seimei no tsunagari ga kihaku) and to the inability to grasp the real importance of life (seimei no omosa ga jikkan dekinai jidai ) of this period in Japan. These problems are directly linked to the trouble at the most intimate levels of society: continued bullying (ijime) in the schools, youth suicide ( jisatsu), and the qualitatively different and bizarre murder of young children ( yōji ni taisuru henshitsuteki, ryōkiteki satsujin jiken). Tatarigami is apparently a term invented from the verb tataru by Miyazaki to create an obvious verbal link between the curse and its source at the tataraba (bellows). Harlan Lane, Victor: The Wild Boy of Aveyron (Cambridge, MA, 1996); Roger Shattuck, The Forbidden Experiment: The Story of the Wild Boy of Aveyron (New York, 1980). See Hugh Cunningham, The Children of the Poor: Representations of Childhood since the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge, MA, 1991). As was the case with Victor, so too with ‘‘Genie,’’ a young girl found after years of terrible abuse that isolated her almost completely from social contact and blocked her regular linguistic development. The fate of these once-treasured objects of inquiry, once they outlive their usefulness, which is to say that they age, is harsh indeed. Aaron Fox writes penetratingly of the often relentless sessions that defined the diligence of the search for knowledge in the case of Genie and the fate of these children once they outlive their contributions to science. See

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Aaron Fox, ‘‘Language, Freedom, and Confinement: Towards a Critique of the Canonical Subject of Language Science’’ (unpublished manuscript) on the case of Genie, and James Kinkaid, Erotic Innocence: The Culture of Child Molesting (Durham, NC, 1998), for a critique of the ‘‘education’’ of Victor. Jacqueline Rose, The Case of Peter Pan; or, The Impossibility of Children’s Fiction (Philadelphia, 1993), 43, cited in Ann Anagnost, ‘‘Children and National Transcendence in China,’’ in Constructing China: The Interaction of Culture and Economics, ed. Kenneth G. Lieberthal, Shuen-fu Lin, and Ernest P. Young (Ann Arbor, 1997), 219. Exemplified by the ‘‘recapitulation hypothesis,’’ this sense of difference was produced by fixing on the development of the child as a means to depict the varying progress of different ‘‘races’’ along a timeline of civilized development. Denise Riley describes a variation of this hypothesis applied to cultural development: ‘‘Just as embryological development echoes the evolution of a species, the development of the child repeats the development of adult human cultures, proceeding in stages from the primitive to the civilized’’ (War in the Nursery, 44). G. Stanley Hall, one of the initiators of ‘‘child study’’ in the United States, adopting the hypothesis of recapitulation went on to claim that a ‘‘genetic psychology’’ of humans could be studied by applying what was in effect the ‘‘comparative method of Victorian ethnology.’’ See George Stocking, Race, Culture, and Evolution: Essays in the History of Anthropology (Chicago, 1982), 125–26. Kinkaid, Erotic Innocence, 58. Throughout this month Shūkan Asahi and other weeklies carried detailed stories of the search for the suspect, who was believed to have traveled in a kuroi sedan (black sedan) to the school. The suspicion that the perpetrator was a much older person was apparently strengthened by the statement of the crime (hankō seimei ) sent to a newspaper in Kōbe in early June. See ‘‘Chōsa Honbu ga Zenryoku de Ou Kuroi Sedan no ‘Seito’’’ [Shūkan Asahi,], June 20, 1997. Hirota Teruyuki, Shitsuke ga Suitai Shita (Tokyo, 1999), 179. In this book Hirota carries out a bold critique of what he calls the ‘‘nostalgicizing and beautifying of the past’’ that surrounds the contemporary issues of the child and the family in Japan. The phrase ‘‘the child is turning strange’’ became famous as a result of the publication Bessatsu Takarajima 129 in 1991 and 1995, entitled Kodomo ga Hen Da. The cover of the issue features a male junior high student seated at a desk in school uniform as his body changes into a small, green, lizardlike monster, which, still holding its pencil, dashes around to the back cover at which point it completes its transformation. ‘‘Tōzen, konkai no jiken de sukoshi mono wo kangaeteiru oya no nake ni mo, jibun no ko ga nani wo kangaeteiru ka wakaranai, nani wo suru ka wakaranai fuan wo tsuyoku idaku yō ni natta hito ga dekitemo fushigi de wa nai’’ (ibid., 70). Various names have been given to this jiken (incident, affair) since the summer of 1997. The one I mention here appears to be the official name. Others that appear are the Jun-kun satsugai jiken [The killing of little Jun incident] or simply the

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1997 Kōbe jiken (the 1997 Kōbe incident). I will be using this version, the 1997 Kōbe jiken, to refer to this incident from now on. In a special edition of the magazine AERA (November 1997) called ‘‘Kodomo ga Abunai’’ (which can be read both as ‘‘the child is in danger’’ and ‘‘the child is dangerous’’), ‘‘Shōnen A,’’ or Sakakibara Seito (the name this young man adopted for himself, literally ‘‘Sake devil, rose, sacred master’’), is named as a moment of the inauguration of the discourse of monstrosity and the child. These are some of the ways that this is expressed in this issue: ‘‘Sakakibara Seito no tsugi ni kuru mono’’ (What will follow Sakakibara Seito); ‘‘Kokoro no yami to kodomo’’ (The dark heart of the child); ‘‘Kodomo dakara to itte, junsui muku de wa nai’’ (Just because it is a child doesn’t mean it’s so innocent); ‘‘Kodomotachi wa yami wo dō mitsumeteiru no ka?’’ (How can we discover the dark [recesses] in [our] children?); ‘‘Kodomo no koro ga wakaranai, kowai, shikarenai’’ (The Period of childhood is unknown, scary, and we can’t scold them); ‘‘Sakakibara no me’’ (The buds of Sakakibara). The idea that ‘‘the child’’ is not only an object needing protection but also one that others might need protection from comes from Michel Foucault’s formulation of the ‘‘dangerous and endangered’’ sexuality of the child, in The History of Sexuality, vol. 1, (New York, 1990). The ‘‘site of displaced lack’’ is from Emily Apter, cited in Anagnost, ‘‘Children and National Transcendence in China,’’ 197. The full title of the book as it appears on the cover is ‘‘Shōnen A’’: Kono Ko o Unde . . . (Chichi to Haha) Kaikon no Shuki [‘‘Shōnen A’’: I gave birth to this child—a father’s and mother’s memoir of remorse]. Worthy of particular note in the main title is the word Unde (to bear or give birth to).Why the parents of Shōnen A chose unde rather than, for instance, to kurashite (our life together) or sodate (raised) has been addressed by Noda Masaaki in a review of this book, ‘‘ ‘Shōnen A’ Fubo no Shuki wo Yomu’’ [Shōnen A: Reading the parents’ memoirs], published in Sekai in July 1999. Karatani Kōjin has written about an intensification in something that is often called ‘‘parental responsibility’’ (oya no sekinin). He notes that in the wake of the Shōnen A jiken, an accentuation of this responsibility, in the form of public outcries to the parents to apologize, was prevalent. Karatani argues that if, as is all too often assumed, the expression of oya no sekinin in Japan is Confucian in origin, then one would expect to find a similar occurrence in other East Asian countries, such as Korea. Karatani reports, however, that this is not the case. See Karatani Kōjin, ‘‘Oya ni sekinin wa aru ka’’ [Are parents responsible], Chū’ō Kōron, November 1997, 120–25. In his Rinri 21 (Tokyo, 2000) on the issue of sekinin (responsibility) Karatani returns to address the problem of oya no sekinin, tying it to the issue of how responsibility, whether that of war (sensō no sekinin) or parental, is to be ajudicated. On the cover of the book, a very conspicuous series of dots following unde works to amplify the effects of meaning, which are diverse in the first place. Several other possibilities for how the nuances in this title work are unde as a sense of reason; unde as a sense of wondering, a feeling that is lost and won’t settle down;

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and yet another, slightly more abstract than the others is kono ko wo unde as kono ko wo unde shimatta, the sense here being that the consequences of what has happened are accepted on the part of these parents, they do not intend to evade the reality before them, and they are introspective about them. Thank you to my husband, Fuminori Arai, for his help in thinking about this usage of unde in the title. Note also that the verb unde has made its way into the Internet exchanges about the Kōbe jiken, in the form of ‘‘Sakakibara wo unda sengo Nihon’’ (Postwar Japan that gave birth to Sakakibara). One of the aspects of the Shōnen A jiken most focused on is the sense imparted in this note of the ‘‘pleasure’’ of killing. The problem here is that of ‘‘the child,’’ or that which is positioned to represent life, continuation, and/or reproduction of a sensibility, occupied rather by the desire to both experience and cause death. In the continued writing on this event, this incongruity has occupied a central position. In her chapter in this book, Marilyn Ivy follows out the theme of revenge connected with the Kōbe jiken. Jim Siegel discusses how a sense of monstrosity is evoked from that which remains unknowable. See James Siegel, A New Criminal Type in Jakarta (Durham, NC, 1998), 34. Moreover, the monstrous demonstrates that we do not really know what we thought we knew after all. (Thanks to Ann Anagnost for her comments here.) See Iida’s insightful article ‘‘Between the Technique of Living an Endless Routine and the Madness of Absolute Degree Zero: Japanese Identity and the Crisis of Modernity in the 1990s,’’ positions 8.2 (2000): 423–64. For another view of how tōmei na sonzai has been interpreted, see Shoko Yoneyama, The Japanese High School: Silence and Resistance (London, 1999), for the ‘‘empathy’’ that many other junior high students felt toward A’s expressions of transparency or invisibility. ‘‘Ima no watashi ni wa, kodomo no honshin o yomitoru jishin ga mattaku arimasen. . . . Kodomo ga fukai naimen no bubun de, nani o kangaete iru no ka’’? (Shōnen A, 239). Natsume Sōseki, ‘‘Yume Jūya,’’ in Sōseki Zenshū [Ten nights of dream], vol. 12 (Tokyo, 1966). Shōnen A, 33–34. Jacques Donzelot, The Policing of Families (Baltimore, 1997). In The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship (Durham, 1997), Lauren Berlant puts a different spin on this argument by discussing how the family is politicized, but in a way that is relentlessly privatized. (Thanks to Ann Anagnost for pointing this out to me.) Siegel, New Criminal Type in Jakarta, 71–72. Ibid., 72. Ueno Chizuko argues that this image of the family has relied heavily on an essential notion of the Japanese mother as ‘‘self-sacrificing’’—a notion, according to Ueno, that is currently on the verge of collapse. See Ueno Chizuko, ‘‘Collapse of Japanese Mothers,’’ in U.S.-Japan Women’s Journal (English supplement), no. 10 (1996): 3–19. The remove between this image of forbearance and the social reali-

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ties of late-twentieth-century motherhood in Japan, in which the young mother has been made one of the hottest targets of consumption-oriented marketing and conflicted messages of home and child management, suggests an ideal site for the eruption of anxiety. For a concise discussion of how the idea of ‘‘socialization’’ rests on the assumption of a ‘‘pre-social’’ moment, or of development as a moving away of the infant from ‘‘the biological’’ to ‘‘the social,’’ see Riley, War in the Nursery, 26–35. Field, ‘‘Child As Laborer and Consumer.’’ Anagnost, ‘‘Children and National Transcendence in China,’’ 219. I am indebted to Professor Anagnost for her thinking on the figure of the child in modernity, especially for her theorizing of the centrality of the figure of the child within the historical trajectories of the nation-state in East Asia. Though I have referred to this after-school schooling system as juku, there is great diversification among the kinds of extra lessons for children that go by this name. Juku can refer to any number of ‘‘cultural’’ or hobby lessons (also called okeikogoto), such as shūji (calligraphy), music lessons, and even English conversation classes. In the main, however, juku names the academically oriented classes that break down into the categories of hoshūjuku (remedial schools) and shingaku juku (test preparation schools). Unlike the remedial schools, the purpose of the shingaku juku is not to supplement the national curriculum but to train students to take entrance examinations. These include exams for entrance to private elementary and junior high schools as well as renowned public and private high schools and universities. According to a spokesman at one of the largest shingaku juku specializing in entrance exams for the junior high level, attendance has undergone yet another boom since the latter part of the 1990s. This latetwentieth-century increase, he emphasized, however, has been quite unlike the earlier ones of the 1970s and 1980s. It may bear emphasizing here that a focus on the location of the child across the intertwined trajectories of modernity not only suggests ways to reveal what is shielded from view by the investment in this location, but also how children are interpolated into this system and how it affects their own social relations. Hirota Teruyuki writes about this search for ‘‘objective causes’’ in the reporting of the Shōnen A jiken in the rush to assign blame for this event. See Hirota Teruyuki, ‘‘Kyōiku Shakai Gakkai Hōkoku Genkō’’ (Tokyo, 1999). Thank you to Professor Hirota for making this article available to me. Drawn at what are now unesco World Heritage sites off the coasts of northern Honshū and southeastern Kyūshū, the natural setting creates a sense of an ideal site of lush but not untamed abundance. In the epilogue to Things Seen and Unseen (Chicago, 1988), H. D. Harootunian writes, ‘‘Culture posing as nature became the great antagonist of history’’ (434). Bill Brown, The Material Unconscious: American Amusement, Stephan Crane, and the Economies of Play (Cambridge, MA, 1996), 171. I am indebted for this view to Stefan Tanaka’s analysis of the relation between ‘‘childhood’’ and historical time in the Meiji period, in ‘‘Childhood.’’ Donzelot, Policing of Families, 8; emphasis is mine.

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50 ‘‘The end to the age of competition’’ is one of the ways the Ministry of Educa-

tion has billed its upcoming reform plan scheduled to take effect officially in 2002. These reforms will mean a significant reduction in basic curricular requirements, a shortening of school hours, and the introduction of a new course of study called sogō gakushū (integrated study). The question of whether these proposed changes are adequate to address the kind of educational problems that now face the Japanese school system as a whole has been the topic of energized debate by a huge range of teachers, parents, the juku, politicians, and a variety of social commentators, who have expressed their doubts about the program as elaborated by the Ministry of Education. At the same time, the view that the current ‘‘crisis’’ in education and in child behavior warrants more discipline at all levels, from mandatory national service (hōshi katsudo), a plan put forward by past Prime Minister Yoshiro Mori, to more morals education (dōtoku) has also been suggested. Meanwhile, historical sociologists of education have problematized the meaning of the phrase end of competition by pointing out that the much understated part of the plan involves the establishment of an elite course from the end of elementary school. Kokoro no kyōiku is a highly ambiguous phrase born of a report on the Kōbe jiken prepared by a special committee, headed by the renowned psychologist Kawai Hayao. While ‘‘education of the heart’’ can suggest the need for Japanese education (both in the school and the home) to broaden its focus beyond the strictly academic or skill-oriented, its more frequently applied meaning is one that emphasizes the loss of traditional moral moorings, and the need to return to them through an education of the young that instills these ideas in a solid way.

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The Rise and Fall of Maternal Society: Gender, Labor, and Capital in Contemporary Japan

Tomiko Yoda

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he notion that Japan is a maternal society (bosei shakai ) is a powerful cliché that has been haunting the discussion of gender in the Japanese context for quite some time. That it is still an issue that demands some attention appears to be underscored by ongoing condemnation of the maternal excesses in Japan launched by conservative critics today. In the past few years the call to restore respect for fatherhood and the paternal principle (what I will refer to as ‘‘paternalism’’) has been a popular theme in the Japanese mass media. We have seen a plethora of articles, special issues of popular magazines, and books on the subject, including Fusei no Fukken [The restoration of fatherhood] (1996) by Jungian psychologist Hayashi Yoshimichi, and Chichi nakushite kunitatazu [No father no nation] (1997) by the current governor of Tokyo, Ishihara Shintarō. The paternalists denounce postwar Japanese history as a process in which the presence of the father and his authority have diminished in family life. At the same time, they claim that the paternal principle—law, discipline, independence, objectivity, the privileging of public virtues over personal desire and so on— has been greatly eclipsed in society at large. In place of father/paternal they perceive the harmful excess of motherhood and the maternal principle both inside and outside homes, encouraging uncontrolled egoism, narcissistic and hedonistic consumer culture, and the hysteria of entitlement and victimhood. Moreover, they consistently equate paternal with national and accuse maternal society of eroding the nation-state as a community based on the supra-individual (and suprafamilial) concern for the public good. Paternalists blame the interconnected phenomena of paternal deficit and ma-

ternal excess not only for the problems riddling Japanese families, such as violent crimes committed by youths, prostitution by middle-class teenage girls, and the refusal of children to attend school, but also for a broad range of economic, social, and political upheavals that the nation has seen in the past decade. The apparent popularity of paternalism has been explained by the destabilization of Japanese masculine identity in the wake of the nation’s economic downturn since the early 1990s. Fathers who have lost their jobs or who fear getting squeezed out of their ‘‘corporate domicile’’ (to which they have hitched their fortune and self-identity) are desperate to find their way back ‘‘home.’’ Yet the homecoming of workaholic, estranged fathers is often met with indifference and mild contempt by wives and children. Paternalists’ diatribe against maternal excess allegedly appeals to the discontent of middle-aged Japanese men, providing them with reassurances that they do have a unique and indispensable role to play at home and in the society at large, beyond the confines of their workplace. In other words, neoconservative paternalism is said to be gaining an audience by offering a remedy to the wounded male ego, providing an alternative vision of masculine legitimacy in postbubble Japan. The above explanation of the surge of paternalism in Japan, however, takes for granted the basic assumption that Japan is in one way or another a maternal society—a condition reinforced by the crisis in the male-centered corporate world. The status of this notion as a descriptive category needs to be interrogated, and its ideological contours and functions must be explored. In the following I study the history of the concept, which emerged in the late 1960s on the cusp of the nation’s postwar industrialization and economic expansion and developed into a pervasive metaphor of Japanese social order in the 1970s. In the first part of the essay I focus on the early theorization of maternal society, on one hand, and the formation of mothercentered domesticity in rapidly industrializing Japan, on the other. I locate the link between the two developments in the economic and political functions played by the new construction of home/family and the psychosocial dynamics projected onto it. I then examine the popularization and transformation of the concept of maternal society beyond the 1960s in relation to the reconfiguration of Japanese society into what some have called the ‘‘enterprise society’’ (kigyō shakai ) during the 1970s and 1980s, a society under the powerful influence of productivity principles and the institutional structures of large corporations. I argue that the maternal rather than the paternal metaphor of power and order obtained widespread resonance 240

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during this period due to its compatibility with the regime of social management that evolved in the enterprise society. At the end of the essay I return to Japan today and analyze recent historical developments, including the vogue of paternalism, as symptoms not of maternal excesses but as signs that the ideological currency of maternal society is in the process of decline. One of the principal aims of this essay is to examine the notion of maternal society not in ahistorical, cultural, and personal/psychological terms, as has been customarily done, but in relation to the organization of gender identity and gender division of labor under the postwar capitalist regime in Japan. This approach, in turn, will shed new light on the significant ideological functions that the notion of maternal society has played. By drawing the trajectory of the rise and the expected waning of the discourse of maternal society, furthermore, I hope to help clear some ground for a discussion of gender and society in Japan that looks beyond this cliché and anticipates new questions and objects of critique that are in keeping with the profound transformations that the nation is undergoing at the present. Recent research by feminist scholars helps us trace the process by which the concept of motherhood and maternal love developed in Japan in close relation to the establishment of the country as a modern nation-state and the introduction of industrial capitalism.1 What we need to note, however, is the distinction between the ideology of ‘‘motherhood,’’ which had emerged by the beginning of the twentieth century, and that of ‘‘Japan as a maternal society.’’ A theme that has persisted in debates and discussions on the mother and mothering in Japan from the late nineteenth century through the prewar period and much beyond is the relation between women’s reproductive function and their roles at home, on one hand, and the promotion of a national goal of economic/technological modernization (and the reinforcement of its military strength in the prewar context), on the other. While the state and industries attempted to exploit the figure of the mother for their own ends, by the 1920s, Japanese feminists such as Hiratsuka Raichō had begun to appropriate as well as intervene in this ongoing construction of motherhood with their own agendas. The feminists attempted to secure social resources and improve the status of women by calling for the ‘‘protection of motherhood,’’ asserting the critical importance of women for the nation especially through their function as mothers.2 These discussions, therefore, revolved around the definition of motherhood (and the domestic sphere as its primary site) as a part of the broader national collectivity. There was, however, yet to be a widespread notion that the principle of motherthe rise and fall of maternal society

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hood serves as a model by which to describe and understand society as a whole.3 Furthermore, as we will examine shortly, the postwar discourse is not only concerned with the agency of mother (e.g., maternal love or maternal nurturing), but equal or perhaps even greater emphasis is placed on the passive role of the child—its dependency on and yearning for the mother. According to the theory of maternal society, in other words, Japan is a society occupied not so much by mothers but by children who depend on and yearn for maternal love and nurturance. So what were the historical conditions that gave rise to the notion of Japan as a maternal society in the postwar period? In order to respond to this question, let me first consider how the theorists of maternal society themselves describe the historical context of this phenomenon. I will draw on two seminal texts on the subject: Etō Jun’s Maturity and Loss: The Destruction of the Mother [Seijuku to sōshitsu: Haha no hōkai], first published in 1967, and Doi Takeo’s Anatomy of Dependence [Amae no kōzō], first published in 1971. Although neither text uses the phrase maternal society, they were extremely influential in the development of the discourse that articulated Japanese social order in maternal terms. In Maturity and Loss Etō Jun studies a series of Japanese novels written by postwar authors who are often grouped together as the so-called third generation of new writers (daisan no shinjin). The third-generation writers, represented by authors such Yasuoka Shōtarō, Endō Shūsaku, Yoshiyuki Junnosuke, and Kojima Nobuo, are said to have produced work that reversed the trends of earlier, more political and masculine postwar literature. They have been accused of ‘‘regression’’ to the effeminate prewar ‘‘I-novel’’ (shishōsetsu) for their bourgeois sensibility, acceptance of the status quo, reclusion in the world of personal everyday life, and abandonment of formal experimentation and innovation. Through critical studies of novels by these writers, Etō weaves an archetypal narrative of two generations of a Japanese family involving the father, the mother, the son, and his wife, beginning in the prewar era and culminating in the postwar economic high-growth period. Through this narrative Etō diagnoses the identity crisis of contemporary Japan in terms of the son’s double disavowal: the loss of the mother and the lack of the father. The story can be summarized as follows: At the beginning, in premodern Japan, there was a society equipped with both the maternal principle of earth (rooted in a native agrarian community) and the paternal principle of heaven (derived from the nomadic culture of Eurasia that entered Japan through the importation of continental culture, according to Etō).4 242

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The mother-father pair obviously refers to the dualism between nature and culture/society, with each supposedly governing their own spheres. In the process of modernization, however, the native father is destroyed by the foreign paternal principle (i.e., of modernity and enlightenment) arriving from the West. The native mother takes part in this process by succumbing to the authority of the foreign father, instilling in her son the sense of shame for his own father.5 She exhorts the son not to become like his father, egging him on in the path to success and advancement (risshin shusse) in the competitive modern world. This betrayal, however, ultimately results in the mother’s own undoing because the son would eventually come to shun the mother as well, as a part of the old world that must be abandoned. The story of the second generation (which is the focus of Etō’s discussion) represents postwar Japan and the period of massive industrialization and the near-total displacement not only of traditional agrarian communities but also of the land (nature) from which they drew sustenance. Etō’s discussion closely follows the plot of a novel, Embracing Family [Hōyō kazoku] by Kojima Nobuo (first published in 1965). The son is now grown and has his own family. But what he seeks in the wife is the replica of a loving, sensuous, and indulgent mother, the desire for whom is strengthened by the guilt of having brought on her demise. While the mother-nature is all but eradicated in the outside world, the son attempts to forge a ‘‘second nature’’ through a pseudo mother-child communion with his wife at home. This scheme, however, is undermined by the wife, who is seduced by the image of a modern nuclear family centered on the conjugal relation between a husband and a wife, lusting after modern domestic life crowded by gleaming consumer goods. The wife’s dissent culminates in her betrayal of the native son for a foreign son. In the novel the protagonist’s wife has an affair with a young U.S. soldier stationed in Japan. Etō observes that now Japanese women, as wives, determined not to be ‘‘left behind’’ by the tide of the times as the husbands’ mothers did, choose the path of self-destruction, eliminating the mother-nature in themselves. The wife thereby dashes the son’s hope to take refuge in the bosom of the second nature.6 Etō characterizes postwar Japan, therefore, through the quixotic struggle of the son who attempts to re-create, in his modern nuclear family, the plenitude of a native agrarian community organized around the maternal principle. The real mother, however, is already lost, and he must tolerate all kinds of whims, selfish demands, and even the infidelity of his wife in order to coax her into obliging him with occasional maternal gestures. Etō’s proposal for Japanese (men) is to ‘‘grow up’’: mature into a true individual the rise and fall of maternal society

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by giving up the nostalgia for the mother and remember/recognize the lack of the father. Etō suggests that the destruction of the maternal in postwar Japan can be a catalyst for the son’s true maturation if it compels him to take the role of the father upon himself, ruling and protecting his own domain. A similar narrative of the origin and pathology of contemporary maternal society is given in Anatomy of Dependence by Freudian psychoanalyst Doi Takeo, arguably the book that had the greatest influence in inspiring the widespread perception of Japan as a society dominated by the infantile yearning to depend on maternal love and nurturing. Doi’s key concept for decoding Japanese culture and society, amae, is said to be based on an infant’s passive demand for love from its mother and its refusal to accept its separation from her.7 Doi, like Etō, suggests that premodern Japanese society maintained the balance between the paternal-Confucian values and the maternal-native amae, roughly correlating with the public and private orders, respectively.8 The modernization, however, destroyed the traditional paternal principle and its ethical codes (respect for hierarchy, self-sacrifice, sense of duty, etc.) that used to keep the raw forces of amae in check. Doi understands the deluge of amae that resulted from this development particularly in postwar Japan, not as a simple malfunction of Japanese social culture; rather, he sees it as the confirmation of its deepest desire, exposing the fact that what appeared to be the paternal principle in the traditional context was in fact all along rooted in and served the principle of maternal amae. Doi diagnoses contemporary Japan as a society of children suffering not so much from the generation gap but from the loss of true division between children and adults.9 He exhorts Japanese to overcome the insular state of amae and its nonindividuated world through the discovery of one’s own subjectivity and the concomitant discovery of the Other (tasha).10 For both Etō and Doi, then, a loss or damage of the originary maternal function of Japanese society has produced a contemporary Japan driven by the child’s desire for a mother. It is not just a desire but desire powerfully inflected by mourning that defines the postwar maternal society (though there is less a traumatic sense of loss registered in Doi as compared with Etō, and even less so in later theorists of maternal society such as Kawai Hayao). As mentioned earlier, however, contemporary research points out that in Japan (as well as in other industrialized societies) the widespread attention to the mother-child relation bound by powerful intimacy and love is a product of modernity, shaped in the modern bourgeois ethos. The maternal ideal presupposed in the image of a child’s boundless desire and a 244

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sense of entitlement to the mother’s love, then, was brought on by the same processes that both Etō and Doi blame for eradicating the originary mother and maternal principle in Japan. The anachronism in Etō’s and Doi’s arguments draws our attention to the peculiar status of maternal love as that which is always already a supplement of modernity that has displaced traditional kinship structure. This may explain why the maternal ideal is so frequently framed by the sense of loss and nostalgia. These affects are inherent to the phantasm of mother and maternalized family relations that help reify the nostalgic image of the past in the present. I will argue, furthermore, that Etō’s and Doi’s analyses of the psychosocial economy of contemporary Japan—modeled after a child’s yearning for the mother—are informed more specifically by the images of family and familial bonding that developed in Japan during the period of postwar economic expansion. In other words, their discussions of contemporary Japan as a maternal society are subtended not just by the discovery of the maternal, which dates back to the turn of the century in Japan, but more immediately by the new formation of domesticity that took shape under the nation’s rapid industrialization during the mid-1950s to late 1960s and the attendant rise of mass consumer society. According to Etō’s narrative of maternal society, although the paradigmatic son left his originary home (traditional agrarian community) behind, he refuses to leave his new home where his wife substitutes for the ‘‘real’’ mother. Somewhere along the way, therefore, the attachment to the mother has been transferred to the mother-home presided over by the wife. Indeed, we may note that the novel on which Etō based his analysis of contemporary Japanese society is titled Embracing Family, drawing our attention to the embrace of a ‘‘family’’ rather than of a ‘‘mother/wife.’’ In the novel the male protagonist and his wife build their dream home that combines her desire for a modern and bright ‘‘American way of life’’ and his desire for domestic insularity and protection (he fantasizes about surrounding the house with a massive wall). But when the family moves into the new home, the all-important wife falls ill from breast cancer. The husband then tries desperately to fill the maternal void himself, performing domestic chores and fussing over his children as if he were a dutiful housewife. While Etō reads this as the manifestation of the protagonists’ regressive desire for the premodern Mother, is he not acting out the new domestic ideal of his society? In other words, is the hero not, in a parodic and confused manner, emulating the so-called my-homism (mai hōmu shugi ) of his generation, which the rise and fall of maternal society

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construed home as a warm, communal space centered on the mother/wife, offering a safe haven from the outside world? Mai hōmu shugi is a Japanese-English neologism that appeared in the early 1960s and came into wide currency by the middle of the decade. The phrase that can be translated as the ‘‘ideology of home ownership’’ (owning a home, of course, was the ultimate status symbol for postwar urban and suburban families) originated as a derogatory term. At the time it implied a critique of the escapist and apathetic tendencies of Japanese society that followed a more politically conscious and contentious phase of postwar history, most recently the popular protest against the renewal of the Japan-U.S. Security Treaty (anpo) that crested in 1960. In other words, my-homism originated as a signifier of the displacement of progressive social and political ideals and involvement, and withdrawal into the selfish and conformist middle-class domesticity and material comfort of privatized family life. The concept that represented the domestication (growing conservatism) of Japanese mass society through the figure of home ownership, furthermore, marked the new symbolic and practical functions that the domicile of the urban/suburban nuclear family began to play during the nation’s highspeed industrialization and urbanization. The metonymical relation between the family and the physical environment of a domestic dwelling developed under the separation of home from the sites of economic production (or more accurately, of paid labor) as increasing numbers of Japanese joined the ranks of wage workers in the course of the nation’s industrialization. The growth of industrial jobs, furthermore, catalyzed large-scale migrations of population from rural to urban areas and the explosive development of new urban and suburban spaces where public housing projects mushroomed. The movement of populations into new and newly created social environments meant that not only were homes increasingly distanced from work, but they were also typically disembedded from established local communities. The supposed separation of home and work, furthermore, occurred under the ever-increasing importance of domestic life for Japan’s economic expansion.11 Although an active consumer society already existed in key urban areas of prewar Japan, it was through the postwar economic growth that it was generalized throughout the nation. The domestic life of Japanese workers, many of whom were enjoying rising income, became vital mediums for pumping wages back into the market. The household consumption, in turn, was spurred by the idealization of modern U.S.-style middle-class life, defined in large part by the acquisition of prescribed sets 246

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of consumer durables. The home was constituted as the center not only of consumption but also of prudent thrift. A high rate of household savings was a significant source of cheap funds that the banks, under state guidance, channeled to Japanese industries, allowing them to quickly build up their productive capacities.12 Most critically, the image of my-home and the separation of home from work that it presupposed was underwritten by the gender division of labor. Home came under the responsibility of ‘‘professional wives,’’ while wage worker husbands were expected to bring back paychecks. During the economic high-growth period, homemaking wives increased among the families of the ordinary working population due to the popularization of middle-class family ideals and the rising wages of regular (i.e., full-time) male workers. At the same time, the maids and nannies that were standard parts of prewar bourgeois households were no longer easily affordable (due to rising labor costs as a result of industrialization) even to relatively welloff families. Consequently the figure of the mother/wife who cared for the family and ran the household spread both up and down the social hierarchy. Even Crown Princess Michiko was portrayed in the media as an involved and nurturing mother to the imperial offspring (rather than entrusting them to the wet nurse as according to tradition).13 Women, marginalized in the labor market, especially from better-paying skilled professions, were expected to fulfill increasingly demanding and complex duties of modern and rational household management, overseeing family finances, maintaining the family’s physical and psychological health, and supervising children’s education. As the home was established as the site of children’s socialization and training, the education and nurturance of children, in particular, gained importance as female duties. The postwar reforms of the education system that promoted the mass aspiration for social advancement through academic merits strongly wedded childhood to education while driving a decisive wedge between childhood and labor. For the postwar masses, children were no longer immediate economic resources but huge investments that had to be reared with the tender loving care of the mother and carefully educated at school to realize their highest potentials.14 With the home front managed by the wife/mother, the husband/father was expected to devote his energy to work, providing secure and rising income to the family at all cost. The home represented the fruit of his labor, his oasis, and the place from which he could expect to draw a sense of fulfillment (and recognition of his worth). The spirit of my-homism, which has been blamed for drawing people away from social and politithe rise and fall of maternal society

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cal activism, encouraged the ethos of masculine workaholism and loyalty to the employer—‘‘working bee’’ (hataraki bachi ) fathers and ‘‘gung-ho employee’’ (mōretsu shain) fathers. There are, of course, obvious tensions between fathers’ workaholism and the happy unity of a modern nuclear family; indeed, Japanese men’s intense engagement with work and work-related activities gradually undermined the paternal presence and authority in Japanese family life. The eclipse of the traditional patriarchal family as well as patriarchal authority in postwar Japan is often attributed to the new constitution and the reform of the civil code implemented under the U.S. Occupation. The postwar legal system established in theory the ideal of equality between the sexes and helped normalize the structure of the modern nuclear family based on conjugal relations between a husband and a wife. It was, however, the national mobilization for economic growth that fundamentally transformed the Japanese organization of domesticity and gender relations therein, establishing women at the center of the home as a sphere putatively separated from that of capitalist production.15 Large corporations reinforced this gender division of labor through a variety of measures, most importantly through the compensation system based on the principle of a ‘‘family wage’’ (or ‘‘living wages’’ as it was called in Japan) for regular male workers but also through employee benefits (e.g., health care, subsidized mortgages, and benefits for dependents) designed to promote coupling between regular male workers and homemaking wives. The state worked in concert with private corporations to promote this domestic organization, for instance, through tax and welfare programs that favored families with wives who had no jobs or low-paying part-time jobs.16 Sakamoto Kazue, in her study of post-1950s representations of the family in Japanese cinema, traces the development of the new feminized, atomized, and psychologized domesticity through the generic convention of socalled home dramas.17 Compared with earlier cinematic genres that focused on families, home dramas represented families literally at home as a stable, autonomous space mostly removed from neighboring communities or activities in public locations, such as the father’s workplace. More of the action was narrowly confined to the home, particularly to the communal space within homes where family members gathered.18 Home dramas are insular not only in spatial but also in diegetic terms, typically focusing on the ordinary everyday life of a family punctuated by life-cycle events such as graduations and weddings, avoiding excessively dramatic story lines. Although these films mostly depicted urban middle-class families, class con-

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sciousness that was present in prewar films on bourgeois families (e.g., anxiety over maintaining their class status) was replaced by the emphasis on their ‘‘ordinariness,’’ inviting cozy familiarity and identification with the audience.19 The mother emerges as the central figure in this filmic domestic space, not only as the practical caregiver of the whole family but also as the essential facilitator of the new type of family bonding that characterized home dramas. Competent and selfless mother functions as the hub for the rest of the family members, mediating emotional ties and resolving conflicts among them. The father, by contrast, is typically depicted to be stubborn and selfish, a ‘‘man-child’’ who is wholly dependent on the wife’s care. Significantly, unlike earlier film genres that focused on the mother and maternal love or a child’s yearning for his or her mother, despite the centrality of the mother, home dramas avoid representing powerful and melodramatic relations between a mother and a child. In fact, not only mother-child but other forms of dyadic ties—between husband and wife or between siblings —present in earlier films on the family are replaced by the focus on communal bonding grounded at home. The emphasis of the genre is on the generalized, warm, and snuggly emotional unity among family members revolving around and managed by the mother.20 We may consider this a psychological correlate to the sociopolitical and economical insularity and isolation of the home. Although the notion of amae in Anatomy of Dependence is based on a oneto-one dyadic relation between a mother and an infant, Doi’s discussion of the concept ultimately invokes the social dynamics that closely parallel the postwar matricentric domesticity. By identifying the yearning for the maternal as the central logic of ‘‘groupism’’ and the relational self-identity of Japanese, Doi generalizes his concept of amae into a sweeping sociocultural theory. After all, the defining feature of Japanese society, according to Doi, is not that infants depend on the care of their mothers but that the desire and patterns of behavior based on the infantile state of dependency persist into adulthood and shape the society as a whole. Doi uses amae to explain the Japanese tendency to draw a strict division between the insider and the outsider of a group, constituting one’s identity not based on individual attributes but in relation to the collectivity to which one belongs. Such Japanese collectives are characterized as insular, exclusive, and personal, embracing their members and dissolving differences among them. The group is typically headed by a figure whose power is more symbolic than real. Such

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a leader (epitomized by the symbolic authority of the postwar emperor, according to Doi) does not exercise authoritarian control over the group but depends on subordinates to hoist him up.21 Thus even if the leader of a Japanese social organization may be more often than not male, the group order may be characterized as feminine and maternal. The sociality of amae as described by Doi, therefore, is far from being a ‘‘pre-repressive’’ utopia—a regression to the pre-Oedipal state of unrestrained dependency on the maternal indulgence. Rather, it is a complex social structure involving multiple subjects who consent to and uphold rules regulating the distribution of status, privileges, and power among its members. The sense of undifferentiated unity within this group is approximated only if everyone, including the most privileged (and indulged) member, respects and reproduces such regulations and contributes to the maintenance of the collectivity. The theory of amae, therefore, exploits the image of the mother-child dyad, which is perceived to be the most primary, intimate, and unconditional of all human bonding, in order to naturalize the insularity, undifferentiated wholeness, and plenitude of affective ties attributed to Japanese group dynamics. The concept of maternal society thus emerged, invoking the mythic past of both the nation (agrarian communality) and the personal psyche (pre-Oedipal mother-child dyad) while also covertly drawing its fresh resonance from the new construction of family life and social organization in contemporary Japan. It reinforced the domesticating ideology of postwar mass society by casting it in terms of the psychosocial structure rooted supposedly in the timeless past. The matricentric, isolated, affective, and insular image of domesticity that took shape in 1960s Japan is far from unique. Rather, many of its features are typical of those found in a society in the process of full industrialization, such as gender division of labor under industrial capitalism, the construction of home as a ‘‘personal’’ space (of affect and psyche) existing outside the relation of economic production, and the identification of home/family with women. The extent to which it permeated the population in postwar Japan relatively quickly, however, deserves attention. A number of characteristics of the postwar domesticity were already present in the image of the so-called new middle-class family of prewar Japan. As Sakamoto’s study suggests, however, middle-class domesticity in the postwar context was no longer confined to the families of urban white-collar workers and professionals but was conflated with the mass. The generalization of matricentric domesticity, thereby, mediated the national self-image emerg-

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ing in the economic high-growth period: Japan as a country of vast homogeneous middlestratum, defined by the shared pattern of consumption and the aspiration for educational and material betterment of life, united in the endorsement of the ‘‘postwar democracy’’ and its promise of peace, equality, and prosperity. We need to note, furthermore, that the concept of Japan as a maternal society arose as this national formation of the economic highgrowth era faced serious challenges. During the late 1960s and early 1970s the postwar regime of power in Japan came under well-publicized attack by student radicalism and a wide array of citizens’ movements for, among other things, its prioritization of industrial development and the promotion of the interests of big business at all cost. It was getting harder to ignore the spectacular level of industrial pollution and other forms of environmental destruction wrought by economic developments, the widening gap between the corporate wealth and the individual standard of living, and urban overpopulation and rural depopulation resulting in the destruction of long-standing communities in cities as well as in villages. Less tangibly, furthermore, there was mounting discontent with the perceived ill effects of the highly managed society (kanri shakai ) controlled by bureaucratic rationality and instrumentalism. At the same time, the ideal of the middle-class ‘‘home’’ that was to offer a refuge from such impersonal power and control in the public sphere was itself becoming an object of skepticism. Negative images of homemaking mothers began circulating in the media, such as overly controlling ‘‘mommy-monsters’’ (mamagon) micromanaging children, especially to induce their performance in an increasingly competitive academic environment. The absence of ‘‘working-bee’’ fathers from my-home also began to attract criticism, casting a shadow on the supposedly felicitous marriage between domestic happiness and the work ethic. The construction of Japan itself as a middle-class matricentric domesticity, framed by nostalgic ties to the premodern/pre-Oedipal past, constituted a counterpoint to such a critique of Japanese society. By conflating the nation with matricentric domesticity—constructing both as a nurturing, inclusive, and natural communality—the discourse of maternal society displaced the growing sense of loss and lack experienced both inside and outside homes, the irreversible costs of capitalist modernization pressing on the society. Although Doi and Etō called on Japanese to grow out of their infantile mother-dependency and confront the demands of the modern world, their discourses, in effect, served to solidify the image of Japanese society

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as a singular, not yet fully modern community bound by a pseudo motherchild affect. The historical conditions that helped spread the notion of maternal society also gave rise to a wide array of reactionary discourses that installed the presence of premodern organic community in contemporary Japan, that is, the theories on Japanese uniqueness broadly referred to as nihonjinron (the theory of Japaneseness) that emerged in the 1960s and became highly popular by the 1970s. Nihonjinron not only critiqued but also often affirmed the survival of the past in postwar Japan, redefining the tradition to be not only adaptable to but in some cases even helpful for the nation’s development into a prosperous capitalist society.22 One of the principal forms of ‘‘tradition’’ it popularized was the household (ie) as an organizing structure of Japanese society. Before it was recuperated in nihonjinron, the concept was typically used in the postwar critique of traditional social organizations that arose in reaction to the wartime slogan of ‘‘family-nation’’ (kazoku kokka) and a broad range of nationalist propaganda that celebrated the familial unity and integrity of Japanese society as opposed to the individualistic and egocentric West.23 Nakane Chie’s Japanese Society [Tateshakai no ningen kankei] (1967), a nihonjinron classic and one of the most influential discussions of collectivism in Japanese society, did much to legitimate ie as a living tradition of Japan. Nakane argued that in contrast to societies that organize groups along the horizontal relations among individuals sharing common attributes, Japanese groups and the society at large are organized vertically, tied together through the hierarchical axis of connection between a superior and a subordinate. The bond between a parent and a child is the prototype of such powerful ties between hierarchically differentiated agents, and Japanese interpersonal relations of all kinds often take on the parent-child form, constituting a structure similar to a household. When Nakane spoke of parent-child relations or household structure, her point of reference was not maternal but paternal authority and organization. Yet in Anatomy of Dependence Doi himself acknowledges the kinship between his and Nakane’s views, suggesting that the deep yearning for amae explains why Japanese society has placed so much significance on the vertical relations in the first place.24 Amy Borovoy’s research on the formation of an affective and nurturing image of motherhood and domesticity in postwar Japan provides a helpful framework for situating Doi’s maternal social organization of amae in relation to more paternally inflected familism (such as Nakane’s) that recuperated some aspects of prewar ideology 252

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of ‘‘family-nation.’’ Borovoy argues that the enormous popularity of Doi’s ideas in Anatomy of Dependence owes much to the skillful ways in which they negotiated the continuity as well as profound differences between prewar and postwar Japanese social orders. In other words, the concept of amae, by invoking a social organization legitimated through emotional intimacy and mutuality rather than top-down commands, helped translate some elements of prewar synecdochic linkage of family and state into idioms compatible with Japan’s postwar democracy under American patronage, accommodating the critique of ie launched by postwar liberal intellectuals.25 Doi’s emphasis on the nonauthoritarian nature of Japanese social order (depaternalization of familism) may also be understood in relation to the social and intellectual context of the late 1960s—the era of the new radicalism that denounced postwar democracy and the liberalism/modernization theory that served as its theoretical underpinning. Anatomy of Dependence refers to Japanese New Left movements and student radicals as the prime examples of desperate amae pathology and the malfunction of paternal principles in the contemporary society. Doi, in a sense, appropriated the New Left’s interrogation of modernity and modernization (the rejection of all hierarchically organized social institutions, centralized systems of power, rational division of labor, bourgeois individualism, and so on) as a proof of their (and Japanese society’s) regressive, infantile, and nonpaternalistic tendencies. What is displaced in Doi’s reduction of the radicals’ critique of modernity to the purported premodernity of Japanese society is the New Left’s indictment of contemporary Japan as a society dominated by modern apparatuses of oppression and exploitation, dictated by the logic of the (imperialistic) state and monopoly capital. As I suggested earlier, the maternalization of Japan by writers such as Doi and Etō helped absorb and deflect the criticism of the contradictions and antagonisms wrought by the postwar Japanese social, political, and economic transformations under the regime of modernization. In The Pathology of Japan As a Maternal Society [Bosei shakai nihon no byōri], published in the mid-1970s, Kawai Hayao clearly disassociates Nakane’s theory from patriarchal and authoritarian structure by offering an emphatically maternalist redefinition of vertical society. Kawai points out that what is fundamental to the theory of vertical society is not the hierarchical relation but the structural function of a frame (ba), an enclosed social field that constitutes and is constituted by vertical relations.26 He argues that a vertical society is not a system of control from above insofar as its hierarchy is a means to sustain the embracing and protective interiority of the rise and fall of maternal society

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ba. This social frame is ordered by the maternal ethics that prioritizes the equilibrium, likened to the mother’s equally unconditional love and acceptance for all her children.27 By the time Kawai published such a reformulation of vertical society, the modernization regime of postwar Japan itself was entering a process of major modification under pressures arising from both within and outside the nation: on one hand, the worldwide recession of the early 1970s that marked the end of postwar expansion, and on the other, the complex legacies of the turbulent 1960s, ranging from student radicalism to the establishment of full-blown mass consumer culture. During the 1970s, these diverse historical forces, in different ways, contributed to the growing currency of concepts such as amae that discussed Japanese social organization in maternal terms. In an essay published in 1974, sociologist Aoi Kazuo provided a succinct expression of an increasingly prevalent sentiment when he wrote that while the traces of ‘‘vertical society’’ seem to be fast fading from Japanese society in recent years, its ‘‘naturalistic’’ tendencies and behavior based on amae have not changed in essence.28 I hasten to add, however, that the notion of ie as a more hierarchical and patriarchal image of Japanese collectivism did not entirely disappear from nihonjinron discourse. It survived primarily in association not so much with the Japanese society as a whole but with its specific yet highly visible segment: business enterprises (kaisha). By the end of the 1970s, the Japanese economy’s resilient responses to the global economic turbulence of the decade and Japan’s increased stature in the global economy gave a new burst of energy to nihonjinron industry, and Japan’s unique cultural legacy was touted as the secret ingredient of its ‘‘economic miracle.’’ In this context, Household Society As Civilization [Bunmei to shite no ie shakai], by Murakami Yasusuke, Kumon Shunpei, and Satō Seizaburō celebrated the modern Japanese business corporation as the incarnation of traditional household organization, purifying and amplifying the logic inherent in the system.29 The authors argued, furthermore, that in postwar Japan, with the breakdown of national solidarity and the transformation of family structure, the workplace became just about the only genuine site of social identity and agency available.30 Thus those who were unlikely to have such workplace affiliation (youths, women, and the elderly) were left atomized, marginal, and dependent. Murakami suggests that this is why Japanese women have sought relational self-identity in the ‘‘biological’’ mother-child union, predicting that this trend toward insular and exclusive maternal relations, as well as women’s need to control the domestic sphere, will only expand in the future.31 We find here a gendered division between the maternal and pater254

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nal concepts in accounting for the Japanese social order: paternal household located in the masculine public sphere of production and maternal domesticity located in the feminine, private sphere of consumption. Timeless Japanese culture centered on organic social cohesion was thus identified at both home and work with clearly segregated gender associations. As we will see, however, this gender division of labor between feminine home versus masculine households gradually breaks down, and by the end of the 1980s there is a growing perception that the maternal order eclipsed the paternal even in those areas previously considered the province of the masculine-public sphere, enfolding the whole of Japanese society. In this process the concept of maternal society itself undergoes significant transformation. Already in Household Society the authors expressed concern over the future survival of paternal ie. They argue that with the end of the postwar developmental model of economy, Japan entered the decadent and atomized age of affluence, and the Japanese people, liberated from the scarcity and need that united the nation and fueled its economic expansion, have begun drifting away from an identification with public solidarity and its attendant ethics. Echoing Daniel Bell’s theory of postindustrial society, the authors raise an alarm against the internal erosion of Japanese capitalism through the breakdown of the ‘‘householdist’’ ethos and virtues, and predict that even (male) wage workers may increasingly disperse into the pursuit of present-oriented pleasures, differentiated lifestyle choices, and identities based on relationships and activities in the personal life. The privatefeminine order of desire, consumption, and dependency, in other words, is predicted to increasingly encroach upon and corrode the public-masculine order of discipline, production, and participation, disrupting the binary between the maternal and paternal principles and the implicit primacy of the latter over the former. The sociocultural scenes of Japan in the 1980s echoed many of the features of postindustrial society feared by Murakami, Kumon, and Satō. The bubble economy in the latter part of the decade in particular has been associated with the gilded age of conspicuous consumption in Japan, marking the completion of the society’s shift from the culture of mass consumption (and mass-produced goods) to that of individuated consumption. While the youth of the 1970s—after the collapse of the Japanese New Left movements —were characterized by an apathetic (shirake) attitude, the youth of the 1980s were exemplified by more upbeat, unapologetically apolitical, and consumerist young men and women known as the ‘‘new species of man’’ (shinjinrui ). Older Japanese expressed bewilderment toward the new genthe rise and fall of maternal society

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eration, perceived to be self-absorbed, hedonistic, and often clueless about the basic codes and conventions of society. The new species was pragmatic and clever enough to work with the system at school and the workplace, but without internalizing the values purportedly embedded in its structure. Combined with the affluence of contemporary Japan and an education system focused on test scores, matricentric domesticity and excessive mothering at home were often blamed for producing such narcissistic and superficial youths. During the decade, a number of pop psychology books on the ill effects of the maternal smothering of children became best-sellers, and the term mazakon (mother complex or fixation on mother) started circulating widely in reference to the psychology of Japanese men.32 By the end of the 1980s Asada Akira, one of the most influential Japanese critics associated with the vogue of postmodernism in the country, located the maternal principle not in the private realm of consumption but at the very heart of Japanese capitalism itself, enabling its success that appeared, at the time, to overtake U.S. economic leadership.33 Asada claimed that while modernization was identified with the process of maturation in human history, fostering ‘‘adult’’ individual subjects that bear responsibility for their actions, Japan never really matured/modernized according to this model shaped through the evolution of industrial capitalism. Moreover, although Japan appears to have grown progressively infantile rather than mature, its capitalism seems to function all the more smoothly and effectively. For Asada, this success of Japanese ‘‘infantile capitalism’’ proves that capitalism relies not so much on the energy derived from the process of maturation but from the dynamics of competition that need not strive toward a singular or transcendent telos. In Japan, therefore, ‘‘nearly purely relative (or relativistic) competition exhibited by other-oriented children provides the powerful engine for capitalism.’’ 34 Asada, however, warns against idealizing this realm of seemingly carefree and ‘‘childlike games of differentiation’’ in contemporary Japan, unfettered by tradition as well as by the internalized discipline of modernity. He argues that this realm of children is maintained by a specific modality of power, which he calls the principle of ‘‘maternal place.’’ Children can play ‘‘freely’’ only when there is some kind of protection. They always play within a certain protected area. And this protected area is precisely the core of the Japanese ideological mechanism. . . . It is not a ‘‘hard’’ ruling structure which is vertically centralized (whether transcendental or

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internalized), but ‘‘soft’’ subsumption by a seemingly horizontal, centerless ‘‘place.’’ Despite frequent argument about Confucian patriarchy, the Japanese family is an essentially maternal arena of ‘‘amae,’’ indulgence, and both the father and the children are softly wrapped in it (in other words, the mother is forced to provide that kind of care).35

We need to note that Asada’s analysis of Japanese society not only dispenses with the paternal commands (maturation, repression, centralized hierarchy, etc.) but transforms the meaning of the maternal embrace as well. Asada echoes Kawai as he describes the maternal principle in terms of horizontal, inclusive space, asserting its primacy over the patriarchal hierarchy as the ‘‘true’’ organizing structure of Japanese society. Operating through a passive maternal medium, it constitutes a noncoercive force that controls individuals by ‘‘wrapping’’ and ‘‘embracing’’ them in its fold. Unlike earlier theorists of maternal society, however, for Asada this is not so much a residual form of premodern agrarian culture and society but represents the cutting edge in the dynamic permutation of capitalist society. Asada critiques maternal principle in contemporary Japan not because it is regressive but because he regards it as a highly effective apparatus of exploitation in a capitalist society. His vision of maternal society, therefore, completely dispels the nostalgia for the native-maternal past as well as the aspiration for the modern-paternal future that we saw in the earlier theories of maternal society. Asada sees in the ideology of maternal space a complex working of desire facilitating the operation of power. As we have seen, for Etō, Doi, and Kawai the saturation of infantile desire in Japan, particularly in the postwar period, is a disorder to be corrected, caused by the destruction of native paternal authority that kept infantile/primordial amae under control and served as a counterbalance to the native maternal principle. When Asada speaks of Japanese maternal space populated by children who never grow up, however, the infantalization is presented as a condition supported and reproduced by the system that exploits it. Maternal principle is a mechanism of modern social management that manipulates the selfish demands and immaturity of children, making children give up freedom from it in exchange for the freedom in it. The apparent insularity and flatness of the maternal space encourage not the stasis of harmony, balance, and unity (as Kawai supposed) but the ceaseless motion of competition and differentiation within, driven by individuated desire. Asada himself is vague about the historicity of this maternal order in the rise and fall of maternal society

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Japan, positing its continuity as the reigning ideology of Japan throughout the prewar and postwar periods. Locating it in everything from contemporary postmodern theory (or the reception of it in Japan) to the prewar antimodernist thoughts represented by Nishida Kitarō and the ‘‘Overcoming of Modernity’’ symposium, Asada risks reifying the maternal place as a native ideological response to the demands of capitalist modernity. The maternal space as an insular and nonhierarchical world that entraps children, cleverly maneuvering them into frenzied obsession with work and competition, however, is an image that bears a striking resonance with the corporate management of labor in Japan that is said to have germinated in the economic high-growth era and crystallized in the 1970s and 1980s. While Asada himself associates Japanese-style labor management with maternal space, I argue for much more fundamental relations between the reinforcement of the concept of maternal society in post-1970s Japan and the consolidation of corporate-centered social organization (its construction of workplace, home, and school) that occurred in the wake of its postwar industrialization and economic expansion. Japan’s relatively quick recovery from the global recession of the early 1970s is frequently attributed to a unique form of labor management that fostered an adaptable, multiskilled, and hard-working labor force with a cooperative attitude toward the employer, enabling Japanese companies to achieve rapid organizational restructuring and technological innovation. Japanese corporations, in turn, supposedly offered an egalitarian and inclusive environment for their regular workers, removing rigid stratification between white-collar and blue-collar employees, fostering a cooperative workplace culture where senior workers helped and trained younger colleagues, providing job security through lifetime employment, establishing a welldefined system of promotion and wage increase based on seniority as well as merit, and investing in various programs (especially small-group activities) that provided opportunities for workers to develop their abilities and participate in decision making at the workplace.36 This benign picture of Japanese corporations as egalitarian, protective, and nurturing, offering both more humane and efficient alternatives to the Fordist-Taylorist model of labor management, however, has been widely contested.37 Critics have depicted Japanese corporations as wielding an authoritarian control mixed with ingenious mechanisms for extracting from workers voluntaristic compliance with management goals. In particular, the staging of multileveled competition at the workplace has served as a principal apparatus for exercising seemingly noncoercive yet extremely rig258

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orous control over labor.38 During the period of economic growth, large private corporations broke up the solidarity among the workers and weakened (co-opted) labor unions by offering opportunities for wage increases and promotions, encouraging competition among all regular workers.39 The lifetime employment system also tended to lock workers into seeking vertical mobility within one firm. The Japanese state and businesses have opted for company-based benefit systems rather than a comprehensive state-run program to provide social security for wage workers, reinforcing employees’ reliance on employers not only for a paycheck but for a variety of basic social services. Dependence on a single employer mixed with fierce internal competition helped create workers’ tolerance for high pressure at work, displacing fundamental conflicts of interest between labor and management. The recessions of the 1970s, precipitated by the energy crisis as well as heightened global economic volatility and competition, helped intensify such a regime of corporate control over labor in Japan. The economic downturn and greater competition legitimated the corporations’ extensive rationalization of the labor process; replacement of regular workers with cheaper contingent (i.e., part-time, temporary, or daily) employees; introduction of ME (microelectronic) automation systems into factories and offices; relocation of some part of the production offshore; and imposition of the harsh discipline of higher productivity and lower cost on the slimmed-down cohort of core workers. The firms imposed an increasingly demanding system of evaluation for regular workers, constantly measuring their skills and abilities as well as corporate loyalty (how accommodating they were to management decisions).40 Competitive pressures were kept high at all career levels by the staging of segmentalized rivalry among clearly defined peer groups of workers with equivalent seniority. As well as expanding work hours (often in the form of unpaid overtime) and stagnant wages, workers were expected to accommodate irregular work schedules and cooperate with the firm’s plans for the flexible deployment of the labor force by accepting permanent and temporary transfers within or outside a company (to subsidiaries and affiliated firms). The companies responded to the threat of atomization of workers and sagging morale in the face of this unstable and extremely taxing environment by reinforcing team-based work units and group activities. QC (quality control) circles and ZD (zero defect) movements promoted teamwork and competition not among individuals but among groups and allegedly empowered workers through participation in workplace decision making. At the same time, not only did QC and ZD activities routinely demand workers’ ‘‘voluntary participation’’ outside the the rise and fall of maternal society

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regular work hours, but the peer pressure generated through them forced workers into accepting stringent production quotas and cost-cutting goals set by management. In the era of global economic competition, the ‘‘protected’’ space of lifetime employment in large Japanese corporations turned into a crucible for experimenting with methods for extracting labor power at an unprecedented level of intensity and systematicity. It is widely acknowledged that until the mid-1970s, Japanese-style labor management was mostly limited to large corporations, not small to midsized companies, where the majority of Japanese wage workers were employed. By the late 1970s, however, the managerial systems of large corporations were increasingly generalized as large corporations gained greater control over the networks of small to mid-sized suppliers and subcontractors that had formed around them. These small to mid-sized companies, whose dependency on ‘‘parent corporations’’ increased due to the recession, were forced to accept the latter’s demand to provide better goods and services at lower costs. This often translated into incorporating some of the labor control/rationalization measures used in large corporations.41 By the end of the 1970s, the principle of ‘‘lean management’’ had begun spilling over even into the public sectors in the name of administrative reform pushed by the state, resulting most notably in the privatization of large state-run companies, such as the national railway system, breaking up the traditional base of strong and militant labor unions. Watanabe Osamu argues that both direct and indirect influences of large corporations and their system of labor management spread throughout Japanese society in the aftermath of the economic turmoil of the 1970s, forming a comprehensive regime of enterprise society. The vast pyramid of companies, commanded by large corporations at the top with the smallest suppliers and subcontractors constituting its base, helped funnel the influence of corporate order into the lives of the workers and their families at all levels of the social hierarchy. Watanabe writes, ‘‘Corporations’ control over labor and their system of competition swept up the majority of workers and their families, establishing the principle of ‘ability-based competition’ (nōryoku kyōsō shugi ) as the master ideology of Japan.’’ 42 He sees its impact permeating the society, especially in the feverish escalation of academic competition in the Japanese school system. Indeed, a major shift in the Japanese school system and its role in the lives of children and youths occurred right at the time when the enterprise society is thought to have consolidated. Miyadai Shinji, for instance, observes that around the late 1970s, the rigorous organizational and evalua260

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tive structure of the Japanese education system not only intensified but spilled beyond the confines of classrooms and campuses, rendering homes and suburban communities as satellites of schools, completely subsuming the lives of Japanese children and youths.43 Miyadai blames this trend on the education-crazed, middle-class, suburban, homemaking mothers, who sought in children’s academic successes the sole means of validating their social worth and compensation for their hollow domestic lives isolated from society and vacated by workaholic husbands.44 Such a view, however, reduces political and economic forces at work in shaping Japanese education to the problems in the insular world of suburban homes and the personal discontent of homemaking mothers. For one, we need to consider the function of state policies in shaping the postwar Japanese education system.With the beginning of single-party rule by the conservative Liberal Democratic Party in 1955, the state launched a concerted effort to ‘‘depoliticize’’ the schools and school curriculum by suppressing teachers’ political activism and breaking up the power of leftist teachers’ unions, bringing school administrations more closely under the authority and supervision of the national and local governments. Particularly since the 1960s, furthermore, the state explicitly subordinated educational policies under its economic and industrial planning, turning Japanese schools into institutions that discipline and educate the future workers, responding to the demands of Japan’s rapidly growing and industrializing economy. The state implemented national standardized testing in a campaign to raise academic standards, which in turn established the comprehensive ranking of schools. This made test scores the central concern for many school administrations while fueling parental anxiety over the academic standings of their children and of the schools they attended, stimulating the trend of mass academic competition for students’ entry into high-ranking schools. Inui Akio argues, furthermore, that by the late 1970s the corporate system of labor management began to have a strong and immediate impact on the Japanese educational system, without being mediated by the state and its educational policies.45 With the consolidation of the enterprise society, the schools became fully integrated into the economic system through their function as a job placement agency. Recruitment practices of large companies, according to which a majority of new hiring is done once a year, taking graduates straight out of high schools and colleges, spread into larger areas of the job market. Under this system, candidates were evaluated not for their concrete job skills but for more abstract criteria, such as future the rise and fall of maternal society

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potential, general intellectual abilities, and character; and school grades, test scores, and the status of the school one graduated from carried great weight in the placement process. The domination of a ‘‘school-based system of values’’ over children’s lives increased with the heightened sense of competition for good jobs in the economic low-growth period of the 1970s. Parental obsession with children’s academic performance, therefore, cannot be disassociated from how corporate Japan hires and manages its workers. As it was in the Japanese workplace, the principle of ability-based competition at school that germinated during the economic high-growth period became generalized and intensified in the 1970s. By the end of the decade, it had turned into a seemingly airtight system of ‘‘schoolization’’ that trapped students in the endless circuit of a highly standardized system of evaluation, ranking, and competition that appeared to flow seamlessly from school to workplace. The construction of Japan as a society populated by ‘‘children’’ who are both passive/complacent and fiercely competitive, as well as highly dependent on an authority that is protective, nurturing, and egalitarian (but also extremely controlling and demanding), is compelling not simply because today’s Japanese adults were raised under the postwar Japanese school system and mothers obsessed with children’s academic standing. Rather, the contemporary Japanese environment of child raising and education itself has been shaped in relation to the specific modality of the capitalist system of production in Japan wherein children were to function in the future.46 There is thus a powerful correlation between what Asada referred to as the maternal principle and the ideology of Japanese enterprise society that has influenced a broad range of sociocultural ideas, institutions, and practices, particularly since the 1970s. I suggest, furthermore, that it was the compatibility of the post-1970s capitalist regime with the maternal rather than the paternal metaphor that helped preserve and reinforce the notion of Japan as a maternal society. While this perspective alone may not answer all the questions pertaining to the maternalization of contemporary Japan, it will certainly offer correctives to predominantly ahistorical, cultural and personal/psychological terms by which the concept of maternal society has been construed. It also enables us to examine the gender construction in Japan today in relation to the global transformation of capitalist societies in the last several decades. The attention to corporate labor management, furthermore, helps us understand the capitalist logic at work in the collusion between the emphatic 262

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disavowal of hierarchy and alterity associated with the maternal principle and the excessive form of competitive and exclusionary mechanism found throughout Japanese society. Maternal space, which on one hand appears to foreclose free competition by its ‘‘ethics of equilibrium,’’ actually serves as an apparatus for generating a ‘‘mass rivalry,’’ mobilizing the maximum spectrum of the population (not just the most privileged elites competing for high stakes) to participate in the rigorous system of competition.47 Kumazawa Makoto argues that the absence of clear-cut distinctions in lifestyle among different social classes in postwar Japan (i.e., homogenized under the mass consumer culture) has helped sustain the system of individualistic competition in the workplace, obstructing the formation of strong solidarity among workers.48 Kumazawa’s analysis not only points to the mutual reinforcement between consumerism at home and stringent discipline at work but also suggests how both realms were regulated, on one hand, by social conformism and homogenization and, on the other, by heterogenization—the affirmation of individual desire, self-interest, aspirations, and abilities. The concept of maternal society, in turn, draws our attention to the function of gender roles and gender ideology in the production and reproduction of the enterprise society. We have already noted how the construction of insular and consumerist matricentric domesticity was a critical ingredient in Japan’s economic development. We may also consider the interrelated function of gender division in the organization of wage labor. Critics have pointed out that the upward mobility of wage and rank offered to bluecollar as well as white-collar workers in large Japanese corporations—designed to reinforce the morale and corporate loyalty of core workers—was sustained by permanently removing women from such an upward track.49 Ōsawa Mari suggests that this structural exploitation of female workers became more widespread and more critical to the operation of Japanese corporate capitalism after the 1970s.50 For one, against the background of severe labor rationalization, the exclusionary treatment of female workers highlighted the desirability and privileges of regular male workers as the ‘‘in group,’’ a status worth preserving through the tireless demonstration of loyalty and accommodation to the employers. Together with young female workers who had been consistently exploited in low-wage, dead-end jobs throughout the process of Japan’s industrialization, since the mid-1970s, due to the erosion of wages and job stability of male workers under economic slowdown, a record number of women in their late thirties (who had left the labor force upon marriage and childbearing) reentered the job the rise and fall of maternal society

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market. This constituted the second peak of the famous M-shaped age pattern of female labor participation rate in Japan. Most married women who returned to the job market, however, continued to perform the majority of household work (Japanese men’s rate of participation in housework remains notoriously low), choosing part-time work with a relatively short and flexible schedule to permit them to fulfill the dual responsibility. This new pool of relatively cheap, high-quality, and easily disposable female contingent workers provided an indispensable boost to the Japanese manufacturing sector’s recovery from the global recession. The pyramidal structure of the Japanese enterprise society, in which smaller suppliers and contractors help larger companies weather market fluctuations by serving as buffers, is clearly marked by gender stratification: the smaller the scale of business, the larger the proportion of female workers.51 We need to note that it was by rendering female wage labor ‘‘supplementary’’ to the family income that the supply of female part-time labor and the discriminatory treatment of female workers in general could be sustained. Furthermore, the Japanese companies’ demand of total dedication to work from male workers presupposes the presence of a wife at home whose employment, if any, is secondary to her domestic responsibilities. Husbands mediate this corporate control over domestic life by taking for granted their wives’ personalized services at home, and by their own expectations that women accommodate men’s work lives. Under this system Japanese corporate order has controlled female labor both directly as part-time wage workers and indirectly as wives of their regular male workers. Furthermore, the Japanese educational system, critical to the corporate recruitment system as mentioned earlier, could not operate without the massive labor of mothers who supervise their children’s academic performance. The Japanese social infrastructure also relies heavily on women’s unpaid labor at home. By the 1980s, taking cues from welfare reforms executed under Reaganomics and Thatcherism abroad, the Japanese government was openly promoting a Japanese-style welfare state (nihon-gata fukushi kokka), calling to take advantage of the ‘‘hidden asset’’ of Japanese families (i.e., female unpaid domestic labor), further shifting the burden of social welfare—already more heavily dependent on the private resources of families and corporations as compared with other affluent societies—to individual households.52 The strong association of women with the home and the limitation it has imposed on female wage labor has also helped control the growing unevenness in income and asset distribution in the society. In her study of class differential in the pattern of consumption, Ozawa Masako observed 264

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that married women in Japan are more likely to work if their husbands earn less, while women married to men with higher incomes tend to be homemakers, even if they are qualified to hold relatively well-paying jobs.53 Women’s ‘‘supplementary income,’’ therefore, has offset the income and asset differentials that began to widen in the 1970s and 1980s, serving as a bulwark against the dissolution of the vaunted homogeneity of the middleclass nation (which in turn has supported the mechanism of mass rivalry). We may add that the mobilization of relatively low-cost and flexible female workers has also eased the pressure on the Japanese economy to resort to another obvious source of cheap labor, the importation of foreign workers, a solution that threatens to disrupt the ideology of Japanese cultural and ethnic insularity so central to postwar national identity. Manuel Castells marvels at the fortitude of the Japanese patriarchal family as the ‘‘true miracle’’ of the society. According to Castells, it has canceled out class segmentation, reuniting within the family stable male workers and contingent female workers, so that social cleavages are dissolved in the unity of the family.54 Castells is correct to focus on the control and subordination of female labor as a core component of Japanese socioeconomic order and its occlusion of social stratification and antagonism. He mistakes as ‘‘traditional patriarchy,’’ however, a highly complex and contemporary form of gender division of labor that emerged in relation to Japanese postwar economic development, which has been further modified and intensified since the 1970s. In other words, it was not that Japan achieved its continual economic growth without compromising its social stability because there was a cultural tradition in place that compelled women to accept blatant discrimination at the workplace while holding down the fort at home. Rather, it was because the segregation of gender roles was so integral to the principle and operation of enterprise society (i.e., its need to tightly manage the labor process not only through control over the workplace but also over other institutions such as homes and schools) that the massive level of institutional and ideological reinforcements have been deployed to maintain and manipulate that division. Japanese men’s continued fulfillment of financial responsibility to their families, despite their physical and psychological withdrawal from home, also must be understood not as their observation of the traditional patriarchal ethics but as the result of their intense enclosure in the enterprise society that prescribes a financially determined paternal role to them. Absent fathers who nevertheless bring home paychecks have consolidated domesticity as the domain of women that is ‘‘separate but equal’’ in relation to the workplace, and this work-home dichotomy the rise and fall of maternal society

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and clear-cut separation of gender roles, in turn, has enabled Japanese corporations to marginalize and exploit female workers while imposing an extremely competitive and controlling work environment on regular male workers. The alarm over the decline of patriarchal order in 1990s Japan that I mentioned at the beginning of this essay is by no means an isolated phenomenon. In the United States, for instance, diverse movements from disparate ideological and cultural contexts have arisen in reaction to the perceived crisis of masculinity and fatherhood, including the mythopoetic men’s movement of Robert Bly, the conservative Christian Promise Keepers, and the African American Million Man March. In different ways these movements have responded to the degeneration of paternal authority catalyzed in large part by the erosion of male employment and the wage structure. Men’s/father’s movements, furthermore, have addressed not only men’s loss of power and status but also their flight from their traditional responsibilities to women and children. Some men are willingly giving up the roles prescribed to them in the modern patriarchal family as this structure is fast losing its normative status in many societies. There are also more symbolic and abstract senses in which patriarchy and the relations within the patriarchal family organization no longer seem to serve as preeminent metaphors for power and order in the world today. The post-Fordist mode of production and new business organizations that tend to avoid rigidly hierarchical and centralized organizations are described by terms such as soft, horizontal, and flexible, refracting traditional masculine and patriarchal associations. In the United States the end of the Cold War has also contributed to the trend toward demilitarization (and demasculinization) of national identity in popular consciousness. The link between the war/military and masculinity that once seemed inevitable appears significantly transformed in the wake of the Gulf War, characterized as a ‘‘smart war’’ with female soldiers deployed extensively (although not in formal combat) in the U.S. forces.55 The current historical conjuncture stimulating the discussion of the ‘‘post-patriarchy’’ among some Euro-American feminists has also been accompanied by the changing function of mothers and the maternal function in society. With the increased volume of women’s participation in the job market as full-time workers there has been a considerable rise in men’s involvement in housework and child raising. Perhaps more importantly, in the households where women have successfully joined the ranks of well266

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paid professionals, housework is increasingly outsourced to maids, nannies, and myriad other commercial services. The depaternalization of work and other arenas of the ‘‘public sphere,’’ therefore, have been accompanied by the dematernalization of the home (although the dematernalization of the home and housework does not necessarily mean defeminization).56 Among many dominant capitalist societies, therefore, we are witnessing a series of social transformations that suggests increased fluidity of gender roles and gender identities. While some women are earning themselves out of traditional feminine roles and statuses, some men are buying into previously effeminizing pleasures of consumption. Many aspects of these general historic trends have been evident in Japanese society in the last few decades. As we have seen, since the mid-1970s, male workers have been absorbed en masse into the depaternalized ‘‘softcontrol’’ of flexible production systems and institutional organizations. Outside the workplace they have been fully involved in the hyperconsumerism of the 1980s, enthusiastically embracing many of the ideas and practices that had been associated with women. By contrast, what has not transpired in Japan to a comparable degree, of course, is the dematernalization of the home. A vast array of ideological and institutional pressures that engender women through their association with domesticity has not shown much sign of abating. Even women’s return to work after marriage and childbirth has been recuperated into the domestic logic.57 Mother’s paid labor is perceived to be an extension of her maternal function, since it typically supplements the household budget to acquire better housing for the family and better education for children. The persistent maternalization of home and woman has been a major ideological support for society’s preservation of the gender division of labor and the heterosexist family organization. The net result, I would like to suggest, has been the redoubled impression of maternalization/feminization of society since the 1970s. A separate but isomorphic maternal frame operating at home and work as well as at school (and other major social institutions) coalesced into the spectacle of Japan as a maternal society. A strict differentiation of gender roles, in other words, has helped strengthen the maternal image of Japan as a whole. After the global recession of the 1970s, in part through the intense reinforcement of gender division of labor, Japan reorganized its manufacturing system and was hailed as the trailblazer of the new economic formation. The recession of the 1990s, however, severely marred the reputation of Japan Inc. Its decentered yet highly controlled corporate network enthe rise and fall of maternal society

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abled massive mobilization of autonomous and self-regulating parts (i.e., the coordination among companies in varying sizes and functions or the workplace composed of small-group units staffed by multiskilled workers) working together toward shared goals, achieving superb efficiency at the microlevel. Like the fateful Titanic running straight into the iceberg, however, typical Japanese organizations are now criticized for lacking the ability to nimbly rechart and recalibrate their goals and paths, particularly under crisis, when swift and risk-taking decisions can make the difference between life and death. Delayed responses to economic troubles by Japanese corporations and the government during the 1990s have been reproved by many as symptoms of their macrolevel conservatism and rigidity. Furthermore, the prolonged recession of that decade forced Japanese companies to reevaluate much of the basic structure of their labor management, including lifetime employment, the corporate benefit system, and the extensive use of multiskilled generalists. No matter how effectively Japan Inc. has downplayed the relation of power and exploitation, no matter how cleverly it may have staged the mass competition that enables flexibility and a high level of differentiation within, the cost of its closed and turgid coherence is felt by many to outweigh the benefits in the frenetic pace of the changing economic and technological landscape today. Thus, contrary to the claims of paternalists, what came under threat in 1990s Japan is the maternal regime itself, not the paternal authority or patriarchal values whose currency has already been in decline for quite some time. In other words, the paternalist panic was sparked by the perceived impasse of the maternal enterprise society as the dominant order of Japanese society. Paternalists’ disavowal of the cause of their own agitation marks their reactionary and restorative impetus. The retrogressive call for the revival of fatherhood bespeaks the last-ditch attempt to hold on to the status quo, seeking to prop up the exhausted Mother by restoring the Father, the Nation, and the charisma of authority. If the decline of the U.S. economy in the 1970s to 1980s signaled the eclipse of paternal ‘‘adult capitalism,’’ Japanese recession in the 1990s may be read as the impasse of social management and capitalist production under maternal supervision. In the face of the ongoing transformation of the capitalist system, not only the paternal but also the maternal guise of power appears outmoded. The terror of soft control effected by institutions that appear noncoercive, nonauthoritarian (nonpaternal), and noncentripetal, imposing purely relative competition on the basis of performance and efficiency, has been associated with the postmodern modality 268

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of power in general.58 Japanese labor management and the school system suggest that in some respects this postmodern regime developed faster and more thoroughly in Japan than in most other dominant capitalist societies. The maternal space in which social activities seem naturally (voluntarily) to take the shape of capitalist production may well have qualified as a more evolved form of the capitalist system when compared with the externalized social compact between labor and capitalist envisaged in the standard Keynesian-Taylorist model. The rhetoric of U.S. entrepreneurial culture today, however, implicates a more radical blurring of the line between labor and capital, between social activities and capitalist production/accumulation, or between play and work. During the recent high-tech boom, the cutting edge of capitalism was embodied by the image of entrepreneurs in their twenties making and losing millions of dollars through their dot-com ventures, working, eating, and sleeping in cramped Silicon Valley offices littered with pop culture paraphernalia. The business for them was supposedly not about money or status but about having the greatest fun of their lives. Thus the capitalist venture was cast rather graphically as a playground for children but with no mothers in sight. The specter of infantile capitalism that has completely dispensed with the adult presence may have signaled the retreat of the familial and developmental metaphor (traditional forms of sociobiological reproduction) as a figure of capitalist organization of production and accumulation. The capitalist system today is increasingly characterized by its disassociation from enclosed territorial boundaries, disengaged from the socius as the source of labor power. For one, the intensified international division of labor under the global system of production has pushed some of the laborintensive manufacturing process farther from the metropolitan centers where the capital accumulates. Transnational corporations at the center of this global system control the high-value-added operations such as research, design, marketing, and finance while delegating the management of labor to local subsidiaries. In affluent capitalist societies themselves, the state and large corporations are expected to become less and less dependent on the hegemonic process of engineering mass consent mediated by traditional institutions of social reproduction such as families and schools. The rapid development of information technology is providing them with new means of monitoring and manipulating workers, consumers, and citizens through exponentially enlarged and more flexible methods of gathering and disseminating information, enabling finer-tuned, individuated, and direct (though not openly coercive) forms of control.59 The spectacular boom of the rise and fall of maternal society

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the U.S. economy supported by the strength of its finance capital and hightech industry in the 1990s also reinforced the impression of capitalism becoming increasingly divorced from labor, geographic location, and material resources, operating in the realm of abstraction where money and information circulate at a dizzying pace and volume against the virtual expanse of a speculative future. With these new features of global capitalism capturing the imagination of our time, the maternal enterprise society is losing its paradigmatic status not only in legitimating the structure of dominance but also in plotting counterstrategies. Feminist analysis of Japanese society must also look beyond the gender construction of the enterprise society or the current popularity of conservative misogyny and backlash against feminism to fathom where the principal battleground of the future will be drawn. In the 1980s, Asada was a cultural icon among Japanese youths brought up in the nation’s school system, prescribing escape (tōsō) rather than maturation as a means to elude the embrace of the maternal frame.60 Asada’s breezy application of Deleuzian schizoanalysis on contemporary Japan offers little hint on how to plot an escape from a system of control that does not depend on the construction of social interiority. If the phantasmatic enclosure of maternal society dissipates into a more amorphous web of seemingly arbitrary constraints, taken over by a form of power that increasingly bypasses the mediation of social identification, there will be no clearly articulated ‘‘inside’’ that serves as a point of reference of escape. From the present vantage point, one cannot help but suspect that Asada’s proposal (or at least the way it was generally understood in Japan) in the 1980s expected the persistence of the maternal interiority as its Archimedian point. It is often said that Japan has achieved its economic modernization while, for better or for worse, stubbornly resisting some of the cultural and social forms of the West where capitalism originated. Such a claim usually implies that the peculiarities of Japanese social institutions and practices, when compared with those found in North America or Western Europe, registers some degree of its externality to capitalist modernity. The rhetoric of cultural uniqueness including the notion of maternal society has been a powerful national mythos since the 1960s precisely because it has served as an alibi for disavowing Japan’s incorporation into the capitalist regime of production and the deep social costs this process has exacted. What the breakdown of maternal society in Japan is anticipated to usher in, then, is not the long-deferred ‘‘Westernization of Japan,’’ the shift from its collectivism to the ‘‘generic’’ capitalist culture of competitive individualism. Rather, 270

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the society will lose the ideological apparatus that has obscured the extent to which it has already been saturated by the logic of capital and how badly the ability to question the status quo or sustain pockets of alternative imagination and creativity has withered during the period of mass denial. The ‘‘Maternal Japan’’ that neoconservative paternalists decry is already beginning its retreat without giving us much cause for simple celebration. Notes 1 For example, see Koyama Shizuko, Ryōsai kenbo to iu kihan [The ideology of good

2 3

4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11

12 13 14

15 16

wife/wise mother] (Tokyo, 1991); Muta Kazue, Senryaku to shite no kazoku: Kindai nihon no kokumin kokka keisei to josei [Family as a strategy: Women and the formation of the nation-state in Japan] (Tokyo, 1996). Muta, Senryaku to shite no kazoku, 128–29. Koyama argues that the dominant ideology on motherhood in prewar Japan that called for ‘‘good wife, wise mother’’ (ryōsai kenbo) did not evolve in tandem with the notion of ‘‘family-nation’’ (kazoku kokka), which invoked the father-son relationship, ties between main and subsidiary branches of the extended kinship organization, or claims of common ancestry among all Japanese to promote the ties between the emperor and the imperial household, on one hand, and individual citizens and their households, on the other. See Koyama, Ryōsai kenbo to iu kihan, 3. Etō Jun, Seijuku to sōshitsu: Haha no hōkai (Tokyo, 1993), 147–52. Ibid., 12–20. Ibid., 113. Takeo Doi, Anatomy of Dependence, trans. John Bester (Tokyo, 1973), 74. Ibid., 153. Ibid., 163. Ibid., 84. Makoto Ito argues that Japanese high economic growth was not as export-dependent as commonly assumed. See Makoto Ito, The World Economic Crisis and Japanese Capitalism (New York, 1990), 155. Ibid., 158. Yamada Masahiro, Kindai kazoku no yukue: Kazoku to aijō no paradokkusu [The future of the modern family: The paradox of family and love] (Tokyo, 1994), 192. Heidi Hartmann writes, ‘‘When children were productive, men claimed them; as children became unproductive, they were given to women’’ (‘‘The Unhappy Marriage of Marxism and Feminism: Towards a More Progressive Union,’’ in Women and Revolution: A Discussion of the Unhappy Marriage of Marxism and Feminism, ed. Lydia Sargent [Boston, 1981], 23). Kimoto Kimiko, Kazoku, jendā, kigyō shakai [Family, gender, and enterprise society] (Kyoto, 1995), 198. Andrew Gordon’s study of the New Life Movement provides an excellent illustration of the complex interworking among the formation of labor management,

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17 18 19 20 21 22

23

24 25 26 27 28

29 30 31 32

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state policies, the family, and gender relations in postwar Japan. See his ‘‘Managing the Japanese Household: The New Life Movement in Postwar Japan’’ Social Politics (Summer 1997): 245–83. Sakamoto Kazue, Kazoku imēji no tanjō [The birth of family image] (Tokyo, 1997). Ibid., 227. Ibid., 358. Ibid., 174. Doi, Anatomy of Dependence, 57–59. Harry Harootunian has traced the genealogy of this discourse to the modernization theory promoted by U.S. Japanologists. See ‘‘America’s Japan/Japan’s Japan,’’ in Japan in the World, ed. Masao Miyoshi and H. D. Harootunian (Durham, NC, 1993), 196–221. Senda Yuki, ‘‘‘Ie’ no meta shakaigaku: Kazoku shakaigaku ni okeru ‘nihon kindai’ no kōchiku’’ [Meta-sociology of ‘‘ie’’: The construction of Japanese modernity in family sociology], Shisō, no. 898 (1998): 75–103. Doi, Anatomy of Dependence, 28. Amy Borovoy, ‘‘Recovering from Codependence in Japan,’’ American Ethnologist 28.1 (2001): 101. Kawai Hayao, Bosei shakai nihon no byōri (Tokyo, 1997), 28. Ibid., 24. Aoi Kazuo, ‘‘Sengo nihon no kazokukan no hensen’’ [The transformation of family in postwar Japan], in Kōza kazoku [Seminar on family], ed. Aoyama Michio (Tokyo, 1974), 8:163–64. Murakami Yasusuke, Kumon Shunpei, and Satō Seizaburō, Bunmei to shite no ie shakai (Tokyo, 1979), 467. Ibid., 216. Ibid., 561–62. For example, Kyūtoku Shigemori’s study of child psychopathology rooted in mothering, Bogenbyō [The pathology of maternal origin] (Tokyo, 1981). Anne Allison analyzes the reports on mother-initiated incest with a son found in Japanese popular media in the 1980s, in Permitted and Prohibited Desires (Boulder, CO, 1996), 123–45. One of the most well-known academic feminists in Japan, Ueno Chizuko, has written frequently on the topic of mazakon men. See, for example, her Mazakon shōnen no matsuro: Onna to otoko no mirai [The last days of motherfixated boys: The future of women and men] (Tokyo, 1986). Asada Akira, ‘‘Infantile Capitalism and Japan’s Postmodernism: A Fairy Tale,’’ in Postmodernism and Japan, ed. Masao Miyoshi and H. D. Harootunian (Durham, NC, 1989), 273–78. Ibid., 275. Ibid., 276. One of the most influential proponents of this view is Koike Kazuo; see his The Economics of Work in Japan (Tokyo, 1995). On the question of whether Japanese-style labor management presents a viable alternative to Fordism, see the critique of Toyotism by Knuth Dohse, Ulrich Jurgens, and Thomas Malsch, ‘‘From ‘Fordism’ to ‘Toyotism’: The Social Organi-

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38

39

40

41 42 43

44 45 46

47 48 49 50

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zation of the Labor Process in the Japanese Automobile Industry,’’ Politics and Society 14.2 (1985): 115–46. Martin Kenney and Richard Florida responded to the above article with a defense of the Japanese manufacturing system as postFordist, in ‘‘Beyond Mass Production,’’ Politics and Society 16.1 (1988): 121–58. Kumazawa Makoto forcefully argues against the image of Japan’s corporate paternalism (or familyism) as an outgrowth of the traditional family system. Instead he points out that the corporate society and the state were able to extend control over workers to the extent that the latter were separated from their traditional familial and communal support and forced to choose the individualistic culture of free competition. See his Portraits of the Japanese Workplace: Labor Movements, Workers, and Managers, trans. Andrew Gordon and Mikiso Hane (Boulder, CO, 1996), 28. It should be noted, however, that the particular ways in which Japanese labor management developed were the result of often fierce contests between unions and managers during the first two decades of the postwar period. For instance, an equal treatment between blue-collar and white-collar workers, job security, and living wages were all parts of hard-fought agendas of postwar labor unions. For a discussion of the history of postwar Japanese union activism in English, see Andrew Gordon, The Wages of Affluence (Cambridge, MA, 1998). Maruyama Yoshinari, ‘‘Nihonteki seisan shisutemu wa posuto fōdizumu ka’’ [Is the Japanese-style manufacturing system post-Fordist?] Keizai hyōron (April 1993): 134–36. Watanabe Osamu, Kigyō shihai to kokka [Corporate domination and the state] (Tokyo, 1991), 170. Ibid., 171. Miyadai Shinji, Maboroshi no kōgai: Seijuku shakai o ikiru wakamono tachi no yukue [Phantom suburbia: The future of youths who live in mature society] (Tokyo, 1997), 146–48. Ibid., 272–77. Inui Akio, Nihon no kyōiku to kigyō shakai [Japanese education and enterprise society] (Tokyo, 1990), 140–202. On Japanese childhood, education, and the regime of production, see Norma Field, ‘‘The Child As Laborer and Consumer: The Disappearance of Childhood in Contemporary Japan,’’ in Children and the Politics of Culture, ed. Sharon Stephens (Princeton, 1995). Norma Field locates this form of generalized competition in Japanese children’s education. See ibid., 56. Kumazawa, Portraits of the Japanese Workplace, 250. Ibid., 167. Ōsawa Mari, Kigyō chūsin shakai o koete: Gendai nihon o jendā de yomu [Beyond enterprise-centered society: Reading contemporary Japan through gender] (Tokyo, 1993). For a discussion in English on this topic, see Merry C. Brinton, Women and the Economic Miracle: Gender and Work in Postwar Japan (Berkeley, 1993), 130–39. Ōsawa, Kigyō chūsin shakai o koete, 96.

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52 Ibid., 204–32. 53 Ozawa Masako, Shin kaisō shōhi no jidai [The age of new class-stratified consump-

tion] (Tokyo, 1985), 128. 54 Manuel Castells, End of Millennium (Oxford, 1998), 225. 55 We need to heed, however, Cynthia Enloe’s warning against drawing hasty asso-

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ciations between the end of the Cold War and the demilitarization of national identity or the demasculinization of the military. See her The Morning After: Sexual Politics at the End of the Cold War (Berkeley, 1993). The industries that provide these services to homes are largely staffed by women of color. The exploitation of female labor and the link between women and the denigration of housework appears to be outliving the modern patriarchy in new forms, but they are now conspicuously marked not only by gender but also by class and racial divides. For a thoughtful reflection on the current status of housework and paid maid service, see Barbara Ehrenreich, ‘‘Maid to Order,’’ Harper’s Magazine (April 2000): 59–70. Ueno Chizuko, Kachōfusei to shihonsei [Patriarchy and capitalism] (Tokyo, 1990), 219–21. For example, Jean-François Lyotard discusses postmodernity in terms of the social system that legitimates itself in the name of a purely relative performativity principle, controlling not the movement of the players but the rules and basic assumptions on which the game (competition) is based. See his The Postmodern Condition, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis, 1984), 60–67. Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy, commenting in part on Lyotard’s analysis, refer to the new, ‘‘softer’’ form of totalitarianism, which ‘‘proceed[s] from the dissolution of transcendence, and, henceforth, come[s] to penetrate all spheres of life now devoid of any alterity’’ (Retreating the Political, ed. Simon Sparks [London, 1997], 129). Michael Hardt offers a helpful theoretical model for understanding the emergence of the ‘‘society of control’’ and the displacement of civil society in relation to the Marxist notion of capital’s real subsumption of labor. See his ‘‘The Withering of Civil Society,’’ Social Text 45 14.4 (1995): 27–44. Also see Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, MA, 2000), 22–41. Asada Akira, Tōsōron: Sikizo kizzu no bōken [A theory of escape: Adventures of schizo kids] (Tokyo, 1984). For an analysis of this text and Asada’s status as a cultural icon, see Marilyn Ivy, ‘‘Critical Texts, Mass Artifacts: The Consumption of Knowledge in Postmodern Japan’’ in Miyoshi and Harootunian, Postmodernism and Japan, 21–46.

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Representation, Reality Culture, and Global Capitalism in Japan

Eric Cazdyn

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o examine the cultural meanings and effects of the Japanese economic recession is the task at hand. Yet between the moment our workshop was conceived (fall 1997) and the moment it was held (fall 1999) a recovery was invoked.1 Moreover, given the manic quality of global capitalism the chance of a subsequent downturn by the time this volume is published is not entirely unlikely. This seeming unpredictability of the global economic system might suggest that any attempt to theorize the relation between aesthetics and political economy (between culture and capital) is destined to fail, destined to return to the drawing board after every economic update. For some this marks the final come-from-behind victory of an autonomous cultural analysis, those close textual readings that refuse to consider the way the sociohistorical context might upset the machinery of the critic’s elaborate mousetrap. But if there has ever been a moment to push aesthetics and political economy into the same idea—to put back on the table the relation between forms of cultural production and forms of capitalist production—it is now. For both realms have recently come together over one of the most significant problems of our contemporary moment: the problem of representation. Representation is considered here in both its political-economic and aesthetic-semiotic dimensions. There is the political-economic category in which local and national representatives mediate the relations between the individual and the state (in which elected representatives effectively stand in for other citizens) or when money mediates the relation between labor

and commodities. Then there is the aesthetic category in which textual elements mediate the relations between the artwork and the world (in which things stand in for other things). At the present moment both categories are facing radical challenges. First there is the breakdown in national representation (such as parliamentary democracies and national economies) as the world system reconfigures and globalizing processes strengthen. On this score the summer of 1997 was most telling. At that time, at the height of the Japanese recession, Prime Minister Hashimoto Ryutaro, contrite and bowing deeply, faced the nation and took responsibility for the current economic crisis. It was due to his own incompetence, he explained, and to a certain identity crisis he felt as a politician and as Japanese at the close of the millennium. As with most utopian gestures the country seemed to roll its eyes collectively as if to say, ‘‘Prime Minister Hashimoto, don’t overestimate yourself.’’ Despite the fact that the prime minister heroically blamed himself, most observers recognized that Hashimoto’s failures were less about his competence and more about the ever-decreasing power of national and local representatives. The power of the national representative now seems to pale in comparison with the transnational representative; thus no matter what policy Hashimoto would have chosen, no matter how much harder he might have worked, there are new formal limitations to his power in shaping both the Japanese and global financial systems.2 What are the North American Free Trade Agreement, Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation, International Monetary Fund (imf), World Bank, and World Trade Organization if not responses to the new demands of capitalism, demands that cannot be managed by national politicians who must tolerate, however begrudgingly, the needs of local constituencies, not to mention the welfare state? This de facto world government is simply more effective at managing the world economy. When the imf grants loans to Mexico, Indonesia, or Russia, the economists of the funds come off as heroes. How far away is Japan or even the United States from the moment when local citizens will entrust, indeed eagerly hope for and solicit, a representative from a transnational institution to work for their particular interests? I view this political and economic crisis in national representation as one of the great social issues of the new millennium. As for the aesthetic realm, this breakdown in representation is best expressed in the recent rise in what I will call ‘‘reality culture’’—real-time reportage, quiz shows, cop shows, certain types of pornography, amateur videos, snuff films, surveillance, docudramas, live web-cams, and so forth. 276

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Reality culture is a form in which an event is not just being recorded but simultaneously produced in order to service (and construct) a growing market of viewers who desire to experience these so-called real events. Reality culture elevates to a new dimension a very old logic, that an event exists not as something discrete but as something that exceeds itself, something that is produced by the very dynamic between representer, represented, and spectator. Reality culture marks a heightened challenge to truth claims, a rise in fakery, a suspicion of ever properly catching and representing reality, a new relationship to (and conception of ) the real, and most specifically, a prodigious leap in representational technologies. Like the Happenings of the 1960s, the allure of reality culture is that events occur unpredictably. But unlike the Happenings, reality culture attempts to commodify and reproduce these seemingly unreproducible events. The danger here, of course, is that once a proven market for such ‘‘real’’ events emerges, the events must then be produced at all costs. It is not too difficult to imagine the dystopian dimension to all of this, such as the production (however indirectly) of crime and murder. At the same time reality culture offers a utopian dimension, it marks a desire for openness, for a spontaneous eruption of the unexpected, the accident, the unpredictable, the messianic, the apocalyptic, and the Houdini act that performs the impossible escape no matter how utopian or dystopian this might be. I view the current boom in reality culture (in both production and consumption) as expressing both the social dreams and nightmares of the current post-Miracle moment in Japan and the world. Or to put this in the form of a question: Might the desire to watch two hours of a bank surveillance tape with the hope of possibly catching the split-second moment of the bank robbery be symptomatic of political fantasies and fears? Immediately following the premier of his film [Focus] at the 1996 Tokyo International Film Festival, director Isaka Satoshi was asked questions that shoot straight to the heart of this emerging phenomenon. [Focus] is about the eagerness and bad faith of a television director who is making a documentary about a twenty-something otaku obsessed with audio surveillance technologies. Although the sweet and bumbling otaku (played brilliantly by rising star Asano Tadanobu) only likes to eavesdrop on cell phone conversations and the girl across the way, the television director wants to incorporate the overheard information into his piece, especially after overhearing two yakuza exchanging information about a gun transfer. The finished television documentary will doubtless appear to have unpredictably encountered the spellbinding and violent events that follow (murder, high-speed representation, reality culture, global capitalism

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chase, rape, and death of the young eavesdropper), while all along it has been the director (together with an all-too-agreeable cameraman and mildly suspicious production assistant) who has directly provoked the events. Isaka’s film comes on the heels of the Tokyo Broadcasting Systems (tbs) scandal in which television executives allowed Aum Shinrikyō higher-ups to view footage of an interview with anti-Aum lawyer Sakamoto Tsutsumi.3 tbs received greater access to Aum (including an interview with leader Asahara Shoko in Germany), Aum received assurances that the interview would not be aired, and Sakamoto (and his wife and the couple’s one-year-old son) received an early death at the hands of the Aum murderers. Questions about news gathering and journalistic ethics circulated wildly, in particular the complicit nature of journalists with the very events they are representing. The tbs debacle combined with the not-so-faded memory of the 1992 faked nhk documentary about a near-death experience in the Himalayas was at the center of the post-screening discussion.4 Isaka was asked how he can pretend that his own film is morally superior to such television programs. In other words, in order to attract us to his film, is Isaka not employing the same strategies as the very television programs he is condemning? Similar questions followed: Can Isaka’s critique of the television industry be lodged against his own film, and if so, does this delegitimate the critique? Is [Focus] a matter of an obsessed tv director on a campaign to make it in the industry at all costs, or a matter of an obsessed industry that leaves no room for individual agency and rigor? How do we criticize anything when the elements of criticism (namely, representation) have been called into such radical question? Isaka ducked and parried; he doubtless expected more sympathy. Hesitant silences prevailed. This event demonstrates that the questions about cultural representation are not simply about reckless television programs (and a ‘‘bad’’ genre called reality culture) but about all cultural production. I want, therefore, to engage reality culture here symptomatically, as a category to help us think through the current crisis of representation in Japan. What is the relation between Hashimoto’s apology and Isaka’s silence? What is the relation between the emergence of reality culture and the Japanese recession? How does reality culture relate to the processes of globalization? Are impotent political leaders and scheming journalists anything new; is not history fraught with such figures? In other words, is the current ‘‘breakdown’’ or ‘‘crisis’’ in representation truly unique to the contemporary moment or part of a more general logic of capitalist and aesthetic production that can be located at earlier moments in Japanese modernity? 278

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To preview the answers to these last two questions, I want to reply yes and no. No, the political-economic and cultural crises in representation are not new. To recognize this continuity we only have to look as far back as the 1960s in Japan at the large social movements and their struggles that turned precisely on the problem of representation, such as the Sanrizuka farmer’s movement that opposed the building of the new runway at Narita Airport. At the heart of that struggle was an attack on the dominant forms of political representation that the farmers viewed as failed. Culturally, we might be reminded of Ogawa Shinsuke and the seven films he made over nine years of the airport battle, himself struggling to find a mode of representation other than the dominant (and to Ogawa’s mind severely limited) methods employed by television and documentary. He was faced with the great aesthetic problem of how to represent people who are literally dying to represent themselves.5 No, a breakdown in representation as we are witnessing at the present moment is nothing new. But at the same time, yes, there are crucial differences that configure the current crises quite differently and warrant a historicized examination of the contemporary moment. In particular, the recent transformations from a nation-state-based capitalist system to one much more globalized, together with the emergence of all new representational technologies marks a discontinuity that must be respected when reading the cultural and political effects of Japan’s recession. To highlight these continuities and discontinuities I wish to build a brief context, focusing on major transformations in the Japanese political economy. Following World War II and the decolonization of Asian countries from Manchuria to Indonesia, the U.S. Occupation, the ‘‘Korean War boom’’ (that generated a program of war-related procurements indispensable to economic growth), the Vietnam War, and the student and labor movements of the 1960s and early 1970s, the postwar Japanese economy hit its peak of corporate/state rigidity by the mid-1970s. At this moment Tokyo became one of the leading industrial capitals of the world. The oil crises of the 1970s severely influenced the importation of raw materials used to make the heavy producer goods, hence creating a redoubled effort back into consumer goods, such as automobiles and electronics. This was the moment of the so-called Japanese Miracle. Here the circle of high production and low wages was squared (for the time being) by reliance on healthy export markets, managed labor unions, and a large pool of rural farmers who (unable to cover their own farming costs) were forced to moonlight by selling their labor on a temporary basis to firms that did not need to worry representation, reality culture, global capitalism

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about proper worker compensation or welfare. Of course, indispensable to this rapid growth was a global environment wrapped in a Cold War logic, a logic that emphasized military-industrial national policies, such as those produced by the Pentagon and the Kremlin, as opposed to (or that produced the possibility for) commercial-industrial national policies, such as the one generated by the Ministry of International Trade and Industry in Japan. The severe revaluing of the yen (which rose from 240 to 155 yen against the dollar within a year) at the Plaza Accord in 1985, however, cut into Japan’s export markets and then expressed the perennially feared crisis at home. This finally put an end to the era of unprecedented high rates of growth in which the average level of real Gross National Product rose just over 10 percent every year from 1955 to 1970. The oil crisis recession also abruptly ended the upward trend in real wages marked by the defeat of organized labor’s 1975 ‘‘spring offensive’’ that called for modest wage increases. Trade disputes and the heating up of U.S.-Japanese relations severely strained both the existing export markets and the immature domestic market, which was then further aggravated by foreign companies crying foul at their exclusion. Out of this national and global situation the Japanese economy angled into the next stage of capitalist development. This transnational stage is symbolized by (1) the flexible accumulation of capital (for example, the keiretsu system is exported abroad so that now non-Japanese companies are gradually being integrated into the networks); (2) cybernetic technologies (space practically disappears as a barrier as communications advance and electronic currency markets and speculation thrive); (3) a global division of labor (production is shifted in greater degrees to the third world); (4) direct foreign investment by Japanese corporations (with the intention of side-stepping national protectionist policies, which are becoming less and less meaningful and enforceable); and (5) the weakening of the nation-state’s decision-making power (as corporations begin to divorce themselves from the imperatives of the nation [infrastructure, environmental concerns, and quality of life] and wed themselves more tightly to transnational objectives).6 This brings us to the most recent economic crisis that first appeared in Thailand (1997), then Indonesia and Malaysia until ripping through South Korea and shaking Japan. Whether or not this is an Asian flu, a product of ‘‘crony capitalism,’’ or a symptom of the structural needs of the global economy seems less important than how the various bailouts and austerity plans, not to mention steady diets of national deregulation and transnational regulation (in South Korea and Indonesia, for example) serve to fur280

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ther consolidate the world system, thus reconfiguring the meanings and effects—the autonomy and decision-making power—of the nation-state. Of course, these characteristics of transnational capitalism, or globalization, as observers in the mass media, politics, and academia have recently agreed to call it, are quite complex, with each deserving focused attention. Here, I will limit my focus to transformations in speculation and the currency markets. Since 1987 the amount of money that crosses the wire connecting the world’s major banks has doubled, reaching a total of $1.25 trillion a day (168 trillion yen).7 Foreign exchange transactions have ballooned over seventy times since 1977.8 The currency markets, moreover, turned over almost $1.5 trillion as of January 2001, an amount exceeding world product in about a month and more than the total amount of foreign currency reserves around the world.9 What all this money does is speculate on exchange rates so as to increase its initial investment. Speculation is basically the process by which someone buys a financial asset in the hope of selling it at a dearer price in the future. This speculation is a symptom of the new requirements of the global economy. The older forms of value production, investing in domestic production or in production facilities abroad, are no longer the dominant forms for attending to the capitalist logic of expansion and profit. Speculation, goaded by ever-increasing financial innovations (such as high-yield bonds, foreign currency futures and options, currency swaps, momentum trading, derivatives, and dozens more invented every month), is the emerging form of choice for managing this new situation. High-risk investments that enable large transactions with a smaller amount of capital not only threaten to bust corporations and banks but now whole nations and governments. One glaring example of this occurred in July 1997 when the Thai government abandoned its efforts to retain a fixed exchange rate for the baht. The Thai currency immediately lost 20 percent of its value, and the currency crisis quickly spread to Malaysia, Indonesia, the Philippines, and Japan. Paul Krugman writes, ‘‘What forced Thailand to devalue its currency was massive speculation against the baht, speculation that over a few months had consumed most of what initially seemed an awesomely large warchest of foreign exchange. And why were speculators betting against Thailand? Because they expected the baht to be devalued, of course.’’ 10 This self-fulfilling logic, in which speculator concerns as to whether or not the Thai government would deflate its currency in order to reinflate its economy, fed on itself to the extent that it produced the crisis that was the very matter of concern in the first place. Of course, this psychological dimension has always representation, reality culture, global capitalism

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been a part of economics, and the likelihood of runs and the significance of investor confidence is nothing new. But the recent skyrocketing of speculation in the global economy does seem to have pushed the meanings and effects of money to a qualitatively different level. Moreover, with the growth of cybernetic technologies that allow real-time economics and the instantaneous movement of capital all over the globe (which of course includes the all new cyberspaces), temporal and spatial boundaries have been reconfigured so that the meaning of the ‘‘short term’’ and ‘‘neighboring countries,’’ not to mention the ‘‘nation-state’’ and ‘‘the region’’ are radically transformed. This new configuration of the world system in which the balance of power is shifting away from the nation-state dramatically affects the operations of representational democracy. Transnational institutions (such as corporations, regulating boards, and banks) as well as the emerging transnational capitalist class (composed of high-level bureaucrats, executives, politicians, and academics) appropriate the role of the nation-state while preserving the latter’s ideological usefulness.11 In other words, at the precise moment when the decision-making power of the nation-state is declining, nationalist ideologies and identities are as strong as ever. In Japan, we only have to look as far as the reenergized flag and anthem movements. There are two immediate explanations for this. First, there has yet to emerge a proper global ideology to work alongside the global political economic realities.12 Second, transnational corporatism can more successfully and secretly consolidate its power by hiding behind the face of the nation-state. In short, national narratives and identities are some of the most profitable commodities transnational corporations sell. This contradiction between the national and the transnational (Japan and the World) has produced a post-Miracle malaise in Japan that, despite some important inroads that have been made toward social change by various local groups, seems to be at an all-time high.13 In the face of huge government scandals as well as the unraveling of the Japanese financial system, political pronouncements of reform and other tinkerings around the institutional edges are shrugged off by most of the populace as just so many expedient defenses of a thoroughly flawed system. At the same time, pointing to the Economic Miracle as a way to delegitimate criticism (the surefire strategy from the postwar period until the bursting of the bubble in the early 1990s) no longer seems to work for those who seem as weary of a U.S.-style global capitalism as they are of their own neonational blowhards. Along with this skepticism and relative stasis come some very difficult questions. 282

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How does one identify with the nation and obey all of its codes when the process of globalization seems to call many of these codes into question? How does one live in a world in which national tropes are being appealed to every day on the level of ideology, while on the levels of production, consumption, and distribution the decision-making power of the nation-state is quickly declining? How are national ideologies and identities refigured within the emerging space of transnationalism? How does one resist certain globalizing trends without inadvertently embracing a Japanese exceptionalism? At the present moment there seem to be no available answers to these questions, and this, I think, offers one frame through which to examine reality culture. Here we might ask in what way reality culture figures a desire to answer these impossible questions, to break through this stasis? In what way might reality culture offer an imaginary way out of this double bind between the national and the transnational? In what way might reality culture allegorize political and social fantasies that might be blocked at the present moment as the world system reconfigures? Of course, reality culture is a difficult category to define and make sense of, especially since it is currently booming in various countries throughout the world. In Europe there are television shows with names such as Big Brother (twenty-four hour surveillance of ordinary people), Desert Island (contestants spend fifty days on an island with the last remaining person receiving a $1 million prize), and 1900 House (contestants must live with nineteenthcentury technologies). In the United States, daytime talk shows delving into ‘‘real-life’’ situations abound as do million-dollar quiz shows starring the guy next door answering unpredictable questions for which preparation is almost impossible. Of course ‘‘home-video’’ programs are red-hot, such as Worlds Dumbest Criminals, which reveals the embarrassed ‘‘I-give-up’’ expressions of criminals after they botch crimes. In Japan these types of shows are no less popular. One, Ikebukuro: Nijū yojikan [Ikebukuro: 24 hours], follows the Tokyo police around as they patrol their local beat, tracking down a stolen vehicle or questioning students for being truant. At the heart of reality culture is the possibility that the unexpected can occur and hijack the show from its usual course (which, of course, is about anticipating the hijack in the first place.) For example, in Ikebukuro cops will be walking down the street and suddenly spot adolescents buying amphetamines. Then the chase begins. The cameraman and commentator follow close behind. Of course, the viewer is there as well. No doubt the viewer realizes that the show is not live, but being live is not the point; rather, the representation, reality culture, global capitalism

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point is to open up the possibility to catch something real and accidental. Although similar to a traditional news broadcast, the difference lies in this supposed catching of a spontaneous act. For the regular news, first there is the spectacle and then the network sends out a crew to conduct the banal job of recording it. For this type of reality culture, first the crew is out recording the banality of everyday life and then the spectacle interrupts it. Or, at least, this is the way both forms sell themselves. Another example of this can be seen in some recent quiz programs. In the Kansai region one show turns on the classic theme of performing a certain task in a limited time frame. In one episode a four-year-old child stands on a stage in front of a crowded studio audience. Behind the child is a large clock that ticks down thirty seconds. The mother of the child is spotted in the audience. A person dressed as a ninja then appears and pretends to attack the child’s mother. The challenge is to see whether the child will begin to cry before the thirty-second time limit expires. In fact, the network found itself overwhelmed with complaints and soon cut this particular segment from the program. For many, this ‘‘game’’ went over the top and thus spawned a brief debate on child psychology and trauma. The power of the show is that the viewer is enthralled by what might happen. We hold our breath waiting to see whether the child turns to hysterics. It is spellbinding, and the moment of truth is also the moment of a certain utopia, however cruel. This is because it comes off as truly unpredictable; it is an event that presents to the viewer a temporary interruption of everyday life’s seeming progression: from present which becomes future, from past which was present. The instant of unpredictability is a mix of past-present-future; it contains all three moments in a single instant. The fact that reality culture has emerged in various countries and is one of the hottest attractions of the global satellite networks says something about the similarities among national situations and the power of the global culture industry at the present moment. At the same time, each national situation has a different cultural history from which reality culture has emerged. To begin to contextualize reality culture in Japan, therefore, I will turn to Hara Kazuo’s 1987 film The Emperor’s Naked Army Marches On [Yukiyukite Shingun], an important marker of this emerging phenomenon. For a radical filmmaker such as Hara, reality culture’s moment of chance, of open possibility, of a breaking point, is precisely what he has exploited in his experimental documentaries. Naked Army narrates Okuzaki Kenzō’s relentless and violent search to find and publicize the truth about a murder that occurred in New Guinea on August 23, 1945. Okuzaki, an enlisted man in 284

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the Japanese imperial army’s Thirty-Sixth Regiment, was one of the few survivors of the troop to return home. At stake for Okuzaki, so many years after the war, is the cannibalization of two enlisted men who were officially labeled deserters. Although it is widely known that acts of cannibalism occurred during World War II, Okuzaki wants to publicize the fact that Japanese troops ate not only enemy soldiers but Japanese soldiers as well. After returning from the war, Okuzaki was involved with organized crime and then spent a total of thirteen years and nine months in prison for murdering a real estate broker (1956), for distributing pornographic leaflets emblazoned with pictures of emperor Hirohito (1976), and for the notorious incident that made Okuzaki a household name in Japan: with a homemade slingshot he fired four pachinko pellets at the emperor (1969). In prison Okuzaki experienced a type of spiritual revelation and became fiercely determined to expose the corruption that occurred and still occurs in Japan. ‘‘I repented for my crimes, I took responsibility, why doesn’t the emperor repent for his?’’ Okuzaki chants with the faith and frequency of a mantra. Hara follows Okuzaki around as he attempts to locate who gave the orders to cannibalize the two soldiers. There are visits to officers’ homes, to a hospital where a former officer is recovering from surgery, to the restaurant of a former medic, to the grave of one of the cannibalized soldiers, to the prison where Okuzaki served time, and to the relatives of the victims. Okuzaki wants confessions, apologies, and remorse from those he interrogates, and if he does not get them, then there will be violence. It does not matter if the other person is sick or if his wife and grandchildren are in the room; Okuzaki will leap up and begin to wrestle with those with whom he finds fault. As the narrative progresses, Okuzaki and Hara’s team go to New Guinea to continue the search for details. We learn, however, that Indonesian government officials confiscated over forty-nine rolls of footage shot in New Guinea. Returning to Japan, Okuzaki concentrates his mission. After the sound of a sudden gunshot and then a black frame, we learn that he has attempted to murder the son of one of the former officers with whom he (we) met earlier in the film. We do not see the murder attempt itself but only read about it in various newspaper clippings that fill the screen. ‘‘Criminal at Large for Wounding His Superior Officer’s Son,’’ reads one of the headlines. Another quotes Okuzaki as stating, ‘‘His son will do.’’ Next, we are outside Hiroshima prison as Okuzaki’s wife approaches the camera. Shizumi explains that her husband is fine and ‘‘that he eats better now than when he was living at home.’’ ‘‘He’s satisfied,’’ she adds. The film ends by noting the death of representation, reality culture, global capitalism

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Shizumi and that Okuzaki Kenzō will be serving twelve years of hard labor in the Hiroshima prison.14 One of the most striking scenes in the film is when Okuzaki attacks former Sergeant Yamada for refusing to apologize for his actions during and following the war. Okuzaki blames Yamada’s illness and his recent need for bone marrow surgery on his refusal to repent for the crimes he committed during the war: ‘‘It is divine provenance (tenbatsu) that you should be ill,’’ Okuzaki rebukes Yamada with a certain amount of satisfaction. Pathetically weak, with drops of mucous running down his nose and with blankets covering his frail body, Yamada refuses to say the right things. Suddenly Okuzaki jumps him, pins him to the ground, and beats him with his bare fist. This is the scene for which Hara has received the most criticism of his own role as provocateur, and by questioning it, I intend to focus the discussion of reality culture and its relation to the transformations in the nationstate. In the collection of essays Gunron Yukiyukite Shingun [The emperor’s naked army marches on: Opinions], several contributors comment on the implications of this scene.15 For example, literary critic Kuroko Kazuo is so taken by Okuzaki’s power and ability to guide the film that he asks, ‘‘I am thoroughly confused as to who is making this film, is it Okuzaki Kenzō or is it Hara Kazuo?’’ 16 Naked Army’s ambiguous method of drawing attention to who is speaking and in control confounds Kuroko to the point that he begins (however naively) to wonder if the film is a documentary or, in his words, a ‘‘drama.’’ Later in the same piece, after commenting on Okuzaki’s constant awareness of his position as the main character, Kuroko wonders if Okuzaki, even during the fight scene with Yamada, is not always in complete control of the film’s aesthetic choices. He writes, ‘‘I am not able to satisfactorily sense the director’s subjectivity; instead, from beginning to end I am overwhelmed by Okuzaki’s performance and control.’’ 17 In Hara’s own article in the collection he also focuses on this controversial scene. Hara begins by explaining that immediately following a private screening of Naked Army, a friend of his inquired into the technique of performing the roles of both camera operator and director: ‘‘Didn’t this method limit the way you could deal with the fight scene [between Okuzaki and Yamada], since on the one hand you wanted to let the camera continue rolling, while on the other hand you wanted to stop the violence?’’ 18 Thinking about this question, Hara returns to one of his earlier films, Goku Shiteki Erosurenka 1974 [Very private eros: Lovesong 1974]. This is a film in which Hara—behind his camera—follows his former lover to Okinawa in 286

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order to come to terms with his own jealousy regarding her desire to be separated from him. After returning to Tokyo, Hara films her in a cramped Tokyo apartment giving birth—by herself—to a baby she intentionally conceived with a U.S. military serviceman. Hara explains that the nature of this film forced him to draw attention to the apparatus of the camera and structured his position vis-à-vis his former lover. The act of filming and the act of being filmed (toru watakushi to, torareru watakushi to) cannot be separated for Hara. ‘‘The camera is like a ‘double edged sword’ (moroha no tsurugi) and when holding it I am simultaneously shooting (or cutting) the person in front of it as well as myself,’’ Hara writes.19 He goes on to explain that there was no other choice but to take on the roles of both camera operator and director. Given the nature of his films, in which he is quite aware of his own role as a character, such as former lover in Eros or as provocateur in Naked Army, to take the risk of being on the other side of the camera is the only way to take responsibility for what changes narration might cause. Hara is aware that the process of making a film changes the film itself. He is also acutely aware of how the spectatorial desire to see what he is filming (a murder in Naked Army, a live self-birthing in Eros, a man with cerebral palsy interrogating onlookers on a crowded Tokyo street in Sayonara CP, a man’s death in Zenshin Shōsetsuka) inspires the filmmaking process, which then transforms the very event itself. Thus Naked Army foregrounds the role of film as being not only interpretive but also transformative, a function I call ‘‘transformative narration.’’ We could say that Naked Army reveals how spectacle is produced during a transnational moment. ‘‘The spectacle is the moment when the commodity has attained the total occupation of social life. Not only is the relation to the commodity visible but it is all one sees: the world one sees is its world,’’ writes Guy Debord. Like money, the spectacle in late capitalism becomes the general equivalent ‘‘for what the entire society can be and can do.’’ 20 Hara confronts head-on the problem of how to produce anything within this new situation: how to represent the spectacle of Okuzaki vis-à-vis the spectacle of filmmaking; how to escape the spectacle by means of the spectacle. Like all commodities, in order to persist, film and television must not only be continually finding and recording new markets (or spectacles), but they must actively produce these markets, these spectacles. This is not to say that film and video producers create wars in order to film them, but this should not prevent us from recognizing that there is more than a mere one-dimensional movement from the event to the representation. Just as a commodity not only meets needs but participates in the creation representation, reality culture, global capitalism

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of such needs, so too do film and television participate in the creation of their object of study. This nonlinear temporality of the event and the representation in which the two moments dynamically relate so that one does not necessarily come before the other is always at work. But I do want to historicize this category of transformative narration and suggest that there exists a qualitative difference in the way it operates and functions in the age of transnational capitalism. Hara’s nonfiction film form and overt gestures to transformative narration is exactly where many earlier films of the 1960s and 1970s, such as Imamura Shohei’s The Pornographers (which I will discuss below) were heading. But only after the socioeconomic situation shifts; only after the onset of information and telecommunication technologies (so that the country—and world—could be wired with real-time video in schools, banks, and city streets, with live feeds from the nose of missiles and the sleeves of soldiers, not to mention the countless camcorders locked on record mode and other surveillance technologies); only after the possibility exists for a type of global accident (as Paul Virilio calls it) in which an event occurs simultaneously in different places (a cybervirus,Y2K); only after this becomes thinkable as dystopia for some (or utopia for others) could a form such as reality culture thrive.21 For Hara Kazuo this moment of chance is precisely what he wants to exploit in his experimental documentaries. It is a move from suspense to surprise.22 His film is double-sided, real and virtual at the same time.23 What it might become and what it is are not cordoned off from each other but entangled at the same instant so that cause-and-effect explanations are shattered. It is not simply that Okuzaki’s desire to murder causes our fascination, nor is it simply that our fascination causes Okuzaki’s desire to kill. Rather, there is an interrelation between the real and the virtual; the past, present, and future; the image and the thing; the star and the spectator; the event and the representation. To catch this moment of possibility, for Hara, is a thoroughly political act; he wants to enter this moment so as to flash the openness of the Japanese social totality, to break through the limitations of contemporary Japanese society. But just as Hara recognizes that this moment of unpredictability is politically ripe, so too does he seem to recognize its dystopian dimension. Such an aesthetic as reality culture is mesmerizing and an attempt to keep people glued to their television sets and reproduce the structure that Hara wants to dismantle. The narrative conventions of television, broadcast news, variety shows, and quiz shows are in crisis; their appeal has weakened. There is simply no return from the indelible experience of watching the Gulf War 288

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from the perspective of a missile. It is true that Hara’s film and most of the television programs mentioned above do not use cutting-edge representational technologies, yet they nevertheless exist within a situation in which these new technologies thrive. In other words, they exist within a situation in which our expectations of experiencing the real have changed. At transformational moments like this there is always a qualitative leap in formal strategies. The move from black-and-white to color or from the sedate and serious reporting of the news to a more stimulated and irreverent style are examples of this attempt at recuperation. On one level, reality culture is just such an attempt to recuperate the current cultural crisis. As already stated, these challenges facing representation are not new; indeed, effective political representation has always been limited, and cultural representation always undermined. Yet the current challenges are distinct, and one way to highlight this is by returning to Imamura Shohei’s 1966 The Pornographers, a film that anticipates the way new real-time technologies and a heightened state of commodification bring to the surface different problems of representation. The Pornographers is about Ogata who lives in Osaka with Haru and her two children, Kōichi and Keiko, from a former marriage. Haru’s husband died awhile ago, and she believes that his spirit is upset due to her infidelity. Ogata and two partners make and distribute lowbudget porno movies for a growing and profitable market, notwithstanding their constant worries about police interference as well as the encroaching yakuza. Ogata wants to take care of the family and believes that by selling pornography he can pay the exorbitant and corrupt education fees for both children as well as provide an antidote to a society that has become hypercompetitive. (Haru, in fact, explains to her friends that Ogata sells medical instruments.) After Haru becomes ill and dies, Ogata becomes more disturbed by the societal destruction wrought by industrialization and the disturbing sexual symptoms that it brings. But then, as if jolted by the dialectic itself, he sees the utopian possibilities of machines (‘‘they don’t talk back’’) and decides to build a sex doll that will eliminate the need for pornography and prostitution by properly managing human desire. Living alone in a houseboat below the beauty shop that Keiko inherited from her mother, Ogata becomes more and more obsessed with his project until finally the film ends as the houseboat’s mooring line breaks from the peer, and Ogata, the boat, and the doll float into the open sea. The film begins at a train station where Ogata and his partners meet two amateur actors before going to a secluded outdoor location to shoot an 8 mm porno movie. The hand-held cameras begin rolling, and then there is representation, reality culture, global capitalism

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a jump cut to a small screening room where the three partners are presumably watching the film that we just saw them shoot. This film is titled The Pornographers—the film that we have already been watching for a few minutes. With the sound of the projector in back, the credits for the film roll as we see reflected on the screen the three men watching the film. In this film inside a film scene we (the viewers) are watching them (the actors) watch the film that they just shot. But soon a strange carp appears on the screen (their screen), then a bridge behind Ogata’s home, and then the film inside the film expands to take over the entire shot as the sound of the projector desists. During the last scene, when Ogata’s small houseboat is floating into the sea, the sound of the projector returns, and the screen becomes smaller as we find ourselves back in the screening room. ‘‘You understand this man, don’t you Ogata?’’ asks Banteki. ‘‘No I don’t,’’ Ogata responds. ‘‘I wonder if he will die,’’ muses Kabo. ‘‘Who cares, let’s get on to the next one,’’ is the response. On its edges, then, The Pornographers is portrayed as a feature film, while its body is portrayed as just another porno flick. First we are watching Imamura’s feature film, then we are watching the porno film, and then we finish by watching the feature film again. Or to put this another way and to preview why I think this film is so profound, we are watching both at the same time. Imamura draws attention to how the pornographic element is contained not only within the content of the blue films that Ogata makes but in Ogata and Haru’s everyday life and in the feature film called The Pornographers. When Imamura made his film in the mid-1960s, the spectacle of pornography (and reality culture), in which its commodification reaches the point of total occupation of social life, was not yet possible because the technology and means of mass producing it were not yet developed. Demand for Ogata’s films far exceeds supply, and he and his partners can only make a few copies at a time. Although they have dreams of building their own laboratory in which an unlimited number of duplications can be produced, the capital needed for such a start-up is so enormous that only the yakuza and big business can succeed. At the end of The Pornographers, when Ogata has been living and building the doll in the houseboat for more than five years, a man named Furukawa comes from Kyoei Industries to offer Ogata a proposition to join his firm.24 Furukawa wants to export the doll to the South Pole and then perhaps later to the moon and Mars. Furukawa explains that his company’s engineers have been trying to build a doll for a while, but unlike Ogata, they just do not have the touch. As we hear the sound of jet planes flying overhead, Ogata looks into the sky as he expresses his disgust 290

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at Furukawa and then mumbles, ‘‘Idiots like you could never understand.’’ Furukawa wants to open markets and envisions the doll as the ideal commodity. Ogata, by the end of the film, wants to move beyond the commodification of sex and desire, by way of the commodity. Imamura seems to turn this narrative trick in order to suggest that feature films and pornographic films might soon be indistinguishable. This prediction is then echoed throughout the film’s compositional level in the way he organizes the mise-en-scène. Using Cinemascope for the first time, almost every shot is taken through windows, shōji, fish tanks, metal bars, or slightly opened doors. In this way much of each frame is occupied by these ‘‘obstructions,’’ leaving only a marginal portion to what might be called ‘‘active content.’’ But just as the complexity of Imamura’s narrative can at the same time suggest what might be considered its Other (a porno narrative, reality culture), so too can the complexity of his compositions suggest a pornographic composition—a composition that will also be the dominant aesthetic of reality culture. If we recall the shot in the screening room when the frame inside the frame expands to take over the entire shot (when the porno film takes over the feature film), what is happening is that the frame is pushing out, crowding out, snuffing out significant relational elements of the shot (for example, the doubleness of the actors looking at themselves). It is precisely this transformation (when the active content monopolizes the absolute centrality of the frame to the marginalization of everything else) that places us dead center in what might be called the pornographic composition, a composition that is less about the nakedness or intercourse of actors and more about the central position of the body or event in the frame. For Imamura, when the body, mug shot, consumer good, car chase, or whatever the active content may be occupies the center of the frame, it crowds out its relations, including relations among elements in the mise-en-scène, relations to history, and social relations of power. In 1966 The Pornographers anticipated this pornographic aesthetic as one that would dominate in the decades to come. Imamura suggests, however, that it will no longer only be contained within blue films but will ooze into mainstream cultural artifacts as well, to the domain commonly called mass culture: commercial film, television, urban signage, and advertising. Indeed, Imamura anticipates reality culture itself. If we move to Isaka Satoshi’s 1996 [Focus], the similarities to and differences from Imamura’s film are quite stunning. [Focus] also employs a film within a film narrative, but instead of stressing the relation between 35 mm representation, reality culture, global capitalism

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and 8 mm (feature film and blue film), Isaka stresses the relation between 35 mm and video (feature film and television). [Focus] begins with a carefully composed scene of a video camera. The shots linger and eroticize the camera not unlike the way a film might enticingly introduce its main actor. After delicately moving around the video camera, the film camera then zooms in on the video’s viewfinder until we see through it and focus on the dubious tv director (Iwai) interacting with Kanemura (the young eavesdropper). The video frame is then inside the feature film frame, and we see both at the same time. Soon the main title for the film appears and, not unlike The Pornographers, the title is for both the video inside the film and the film itself. The rest of the film is then represented as shot through the video camera, complete with the harder video image and all of the requisite lights indicating low battery, record mode, and so forth on the sides of the frame. After Kanemura is shot dead at the end of the film, the battery apparently goes dead and there is an abrupt cut to black, signaling the film/video’s end. The decision to remain in video for the whole film and not to return to the feature film frame is significant, for it marks the coming into being of the precise situation Imamura predicted. The critical distance that is at the center of Imamura’s 1966 film, which allows him to wink at us as he calls his high modernist film pornographic, is now collapsed under this transformed situation thirty years later. Isaka’s film is not a clever film about reality culture, but (as his critics noted after the film’s premier) it is now reality culture itself. Finally, the relation between reality culture and pornography needs development. Halfway through [Focus], the young eavesdropper (Kanemura), the director, the cameraman, and the production assistant park on a dark side street to look at the gun they just found. The director wants to film Kanemura as he views the gun for the first time. Disappointed with Kanemura’s rather undramatic reaction, the director shoots the scene two more times until Kanemura can properly act excited. But at some point two curious skateboarders approach the car and are madly impressed that an actual television show is being produced. They are agog and disruptive, and the director orders them to get lost. A fight ensues, and Kanemura ends up shooting the two boys with the gun. Flustered and no longer content with taking direction from the director, Kanemura turns the tables and takes the three hostage. Once they return to his apartment, Kanemura gives the directions (both on how they will deal with the murders and on what and how everything will be filmed). Kanemura forces the director and the female production assistant to have sex in front of the camera so that the pornographic 292

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footage can guarantee the film crew’s silence. After the scene, Kanemura, rather disgusted at the reality of porn, turns to the cameraman and asks why adult video is so popular. ‘‘Because people want to see,’’ quickly responds the cameraman as if answering the question about the reality culture documentary that they have been making all along.25 In The Pornographers Imamura anticipated the corporatization of the pornography industry (and by extension reality culture) and exposed the vulnerability to this trend in his own film practice. In Naked Army Hara anticipated this new type of reality culture in which the viewer watches an event unfold in a presumably spontaneous and unpremeditated way. But what Imamura, Hara, and Isaka were flashing for us is how this new type of reality culture is not limited to experimental film, shoddy news and quiz shows, or adult video. Rather they argue, by way of the very form of their films, how this pornographic impulse of reality culture is shaping all culture. All three directors highlight the desire for openness, for a spontaneous eruption of the unexpected, but they do so by stressing its simultaneous utopian and dystopian dimensions. It is precisely this desire for the unpredictable that I want to suggest relates to the current breakdown in political-economic representation. Upon the recent Japanese republication and new translation of Karl Marx’s The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, Karatani Kojin makes a provocative argument about representational breakdown.26 Karatani detects a formal repetition of fascism (something that the current moment shares with the 1930s), which is linked to a breakdown in representation (both politically and economically). For Karatani, fascisms do not betray similar content (the events will indeed be different), but formal ones—‘‘a structural isomorphism’’ in the form of what Karatani calls Bonapartism.27 Bonapartism refers to a regime in capitalist society in which the rule of a single individual emerges to represent all groups and classes. Of course this type of representation is functionally impossible within the capitalist system, in which the different classes necessarily require representatives who will work for their particular interests—interests that are necessarily at odds with those of other classes. But even this type of parliamentary representation cannot ideally work, for if the working class is properly represented, then the system itself, one that must offer a structural privilege to those who own the means of production—would become undone and thus unable to reproduce itself. When an undoing of this sort threatens the system, and yet the ruling class can no longer maintain its rule by parliamenrepresentation, reality culture, global capitalism

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tary and constitutional means and the working class is not able to affirm its own hegemony, a crisis erupts, and parliamentary representation gives itself away as fraudulent. It is precisely at such crisis moments that Bonapartism surfaces, and it does so as a solution to this breakdown of representation. In both Europe (1848) and Japan (1927) it was the onset of universal suffrage that drove the collapse. Under universal suffrage the relation between the representative and the represented is arbitrary. Representation is estranged, it does not contain an essential connection, but the represented and the representative ‘‘may be as far apart as heaven from earth.’’ 28 This can also be said for the capitalist economy. The relation between money and the commodity is arbitrary, meaning that there is no essential relation between five hundred yen and a bowl of soba. But that fact must be in a constant state of repression. When crisis hits, however, the repressed returns, and the relation between money and commodity is revealed as arbitrary; money is then hoarded so as to manage the new unstable system of value. And it is precisely at moments of crisis when this arbitrariness of the representational system is revealed and the situation is primed for Bonapartism. Karatani presents the example of how the Japanese peasants of the 1930s revered the emperor as their master and declares, ‘‘This perverted representation occurs not by a mythos descended from ancient times, as advocated by some cultural anthropologists, but by a lack immanent in the modern system of representation.’’ He concludes by adding, ‘‘We should not forget that the advent of the system of representation elected by universal suffrage preceded the occasion of Emperor fascism, and not vice versa.’’ 29 In other words, the emperor emerges as a very modern solution to an equally modern crisis in the representational system. As for the capitalist system, the crisis of representation appears as financial panic; for example, the French bourgeoisie embraced Bonaparte after the panic of 1851. There was a crisis in the economy, due to the falling rate of profit, which then had to be managed by colonial policies. At this crisis point (in the middle of the nineteenth century) Louis Bonaparte emerged to square the circle (to be a protectionist and free-trader, a nationalist and internationalist). Hitler and Hirohito emerged at similar points in the 1930s. After setting up this structural repetition, Karatani then delivers the terrifying force of his argument: the current crises in both the nationstate (the parliamentary system of representation) and the capitalist system (which can no longer be managed by national economies) augurs a Bonapartism in the years to come. 294

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As the decision-making power of national representatives declines further in the face of the rising power of transnational executives, the possibility will emerge for a transnational representative—a transnational Bonaparte. This figure will be able to appeal to the working classes of various nations as well as to the transnational managerial class. Due to a heightened state of (celebratory) globalization discourse and refunctionalized national ideologies, a transnational representative of this sort might not present the same threat as an older national politician crossing borders to ‘‘save’’ a suffering people (the imperial paradigm). Rather, the new representative might very well appear to short-circuit the usual pork-barrel politics of a national situation. Perhaps the current crisis in Japan in which everyone laments a lack of leadership, or at least leaders who are bought and sold to such a degree that it seems systemically impossible to promote policies of any significance, is a sign of things to come. Malaysia’s Mohammed Mahatir notwithstanding, are not the leaders and constituencies of many countries ready and willing to have global business executives come and save the day? What I want to add to this argument is that with the dystopian dimension of Bonapartism comes a utopian one; indeed, it is impossible to have one without the other. Moreover, this genuinely utopian dimension is formally repeated throughout modern history. What must be stressed, however, is that this is no mere coexistence of the fascist and utopian dimensions of social life, so that the optimist chooses the utopian perspective and the pessimist the fascist one. Rather, both dimensions work simultaneously, in dynamic relation so that each supplements the force and possibility of the other. In short, every moment of fascism necessarily presupposes a simultaneous moment of utopian transcendence. Does the current breakdown in political-economic representation produce not only the possibility for an undemocratic transnational Bonaparte but a form of democratic representation that exceeds the nation-state? And if so, then what might such a form look or feel like? I find it much more difficult to speculate on this than on a transnational Bonaparte, but as usual, cultural products and the aesthetic in general are good places to search for hints or flashes as to what the future might hold. I will conclude by offering a brief example. In the late 1980s an odd event occurred on late-night, early-morning Japanese television. At about three or four in the morning, signals would be recircuited and images and audio would appear, flickering like television broadcasts of a bygone era before satellites—indeed before television itself.Visible yet invisible, invisible yet visible; paintings could be discerned. A person read a poem. There representation, reality culture, global capitalism

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were family photographs, old documentary footage of World War II war criminals, and Zengakuren demonstrations. A subculture emerged. People would stay up and wait for the ghostly images. It was hard to predict when they would appear or what they would be. Of course, the television corporations were concerned, and so too was the government. Was it an inside job? Some beleaguered overworked salaryman settling scores? An international plot? A cult? No one seemed to know, and many in the subculture did not want to know. But then, before the event could become something bigger, before it could become History, the images—like the flat flush end of a dream or the last instant of life—stopped. I wonder if this type of reality culture, in which the attraction is in experiencing something impossible, something that threads the needle and breaks open a whole new space of representation, does not suggest a new form of political representation. Perhaps it is a form that is impossible to realize at the present time, a trembling of a new form of democratic representation. Perhaps it is a representation that must produce itself, that must appropriate technology, that must exceed the nation, that must break through structures, that must build new networks. Do the new forms of representation intimated by reality culture and the ghostly televisual flashes suggest things to come? Notes 1 From 1990 to the end of 1997 Japan’s falling markets erased more than $5 tril-

lion in the value of Japan’s stocks and real estate. In the first quarter of 1998, moreover, Japan’s economy sank by a stunning annual rate of 5.3 percent, marking a full-year decline for the first time since the oil crises in the 1970s and the worst annual economic output since World War II. About the same time, April 7, 1998, the Dow Jones Industrial Average closed above 9,000 for the first time and was well on its way to more record highs. Many recognized Japan as emerging from recession, however, after the first-quarter results of 1999 indicated that real gross domestic production had grown by 2 percent after five consecutive quarters of decline. Still, Pax Japonica, The Japanese Century, Zen Capitalism, and all of the other phrases employed to celebrate the Japanese model are now dead and buried. Economic statistics taken from World Economic Outlook: International Financial Contagion, A Survey by the Staff of the International Monetary Fund (Washington, DC, 1999). 2 Even those in the mainstream media (both the Japanese and foreign press) seemed to sense this when they followed Hashimoto’s public self-admonition by trumpeting a crisis in effective political leadership or, to put this into the language being used here, a crisis of representation. 3 Aum was the cult that practiced a scaled-down form of Indian Buddhism in

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4 5

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7 8 9

10 11 12

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Japan. Led by Asahara Shōkō, Aum came under suspicion for criminal activities even before the infamous 1995 sarin attack in the Tokyo subway system. nhk supesharu: Oku Himaraya kindan no ōkoku—Musutan [nhk special—Mustang: The forbidden kingdom deep in the Himalayas] (Tokyo, 1992). On Ogawa Shinsuke, see Ogawa Shinsuke, Ogawa Shinsuke: Eiga o Toru, ed. Yamane Tadashi (Tokyo, 1994), and Erikawa Tadashi, Ogawa Shinsuke o Kataru (Tokyo, 1992). Political economist Ito Makoto has written extensively about Japan’s transition to this new stage of transnational capitalism. See Ito Makoto, Keizai Riron to Gendai Shihon (Tokyo, 1987); Sekai Keizai no Naka no Nihon (Tokyo, 1988); Sekai Keizai no Tenkan o Kangaeru (Tokyo, 1993); and Nihon Shihon-shugi no Kiro (Tokyo, 1995). Doug Henwood, Wall Street: How It Works and for Whom (London, 1997), 10. Yamada Atsushi, ‘‘Advances in Technology Call for New Measures to Stabilize Markets,’’ Asahi Shinbun, August 20, 1998. Henwood, Wall Street, 45. In 1977 foreign currency reserves amounted to more than fourteen days of the amount spent on foreign currency transactions; by 1998 the transactions themselves ($1.3 trillion) were greater than the reserves ($1.25 trillion). See Yamada, ‘‘Advances in Technology Call for New Measures to Stabilize Markets.’’ Paul Krugman, ‘‘Are Currency Crises Self-fulfilling?’’ NBER Macroeconomics Annual, 1996. On the transnational capitalist class, see Leslie Sklair, The Sociology of the Global System (Baltimore, 1991), 117. Sklair seems to overstate the case by arguing that the cultural-ideological sphere (in this case the global ideology of consumerism as replacing national ideologies) will be moving at the same speed as the political-economic sphere. The emerging influence of citizens’ groups led to the enactment of the Nonprofit Organization Law (npo) in December 1998. Nearly one thousand groups received official npo status over the following year. They focus on a range of activities, but their common thread is to protect and enhance public interest. For example, leading up to the winter 1999 World Trade Organization conference in Seattle, a few groups (calling for a rethinking of free trade) had been causing problems for government officials. Or there is the citizens’ group in Sendai that protested the 15 million yen lecture fee given to Margaret Thatcher in 1999. We can also add to this list the ecology, homeless, comfort women, and antinuclear movements and the aids scandal over tainted blood, as well as the call for compensation by Korean laborers whom Mitsubishi forcibly brought to Hiroshima during World War II. All quotes translated from the scenario printed in Hara Kazuo, Dokyumento: Yuki yukite Shingun (Tokyo, 1994), 139–221. Matsuda Masao and Takahashi Taketomo, eds., Gunron Yukiyukite Shingun (Tokyo, 1988). Kuroko Kazuo, ‘‘Nichijo o Utsu Shingun, Soshite Hitotsu no Wadakamari,’’ in Matsuda and Takahashi, Gunron Yukiyukite Shingun, 29.

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17 Ibid., 30. 18 Hara Kazuo, ‘‘Sakusha no Hatsugen,’’ in Matsuda and Takahashi, Gunron Yuki-

yukite Shingun, 343. 19 Ibid., 347. 20 Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle (Detroit, 1983), 38, 41. 21 On Virilio’s notion of the general accident, see Paul Virilio, Open Sky, trans. Julie

Rose (London, 1997), 69–86. 22 Virilio writes about this shift by referring to a quote by Alfred Hitchcock: ‘‘Un-

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like cinema with television there is no time for suspense, you can only have surprise.’’ Virilio then explains that ‘‘this is the very definition of the paradoxical logic of the videoframe which privileges the accident, the surprise, over the durable substance of the message’’ (Paul Virilio, The Vision Machine [Bloomington, 1994], 65). In the very last chapter of Cinema 2: The Time Image, Gilles Deleuze calls this type of image a crystal. He writes, ‘‘We are no longer in the situation of a relationship between the actual image and other virtual images, recollections, or dreams, which thus become actual in turn: this is still a mode of linkage. We are in the situation of an actual image and its own virtual image, to the extent that there is no longer any linkage of the real with the imaginary, but indiscernibility of the two, a perpetual exchange’’ (Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta [Minneapolis, 1994], 273). Although we never see the Chinese characters for kyoei, it might not be too much of a stretch to read kyo as representing the character for education and ei for that of film. This reading goes hand in hand with the argument that Imamura is implicating both the education and the film industries in the ruin wrought by late capitalism. In fact, one of the most profound expressions of reality culture can be seen in the recent mutation in the adult video (av) industry in Japan: in av documentary, what I call DocuPornography. Seventy-five percent of current av film is documentary, which is to say that these films’ narratives are not couched in fiction (if we are still to invest these terms with their traditional meanings). These are films in which a man, presumably the filmmaker, walks the streets searching for women to sleep with. Unlike the earlier modes of av, in which there is, however flimsy, a narrative fiction to hang the sex on, this new genre of Japanese av is the nonfictional account of a man asking for sex. I will be quoting from Kōsaburō Kohso’s English translation titled ‘‘Representation and Repetition: The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte Revisited,’’ in Karatani Forum, http://www.karataniforum.org/represent.html. Karatani writes, ‘‘When we say that the 1990s will be similar to the 1930s, it does not quite mean that the same event will repeat itself. Repetition occurs not in events themselves, but in the form immanent in them’’ (ibid., 1). Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (New York, 1987), 51. Karatani, ‘‘Representation and Repetition,’’ 5–6.

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Monsieur le Capital and Madame la Terre Do Their Ghost-Dance: Globalization and the Nation-State

Yutaka Nagahara

T

he Liberal Democratic Party finally began talking of elevating the Defense Agency to the status of Ministry a few years ago, and now the governor of Tokyo, Shintarō Ishihara, is showing no hesitation to provide the so-called genuine Japanese with a social ‘‘quarantine’’ camp for—against —the so-called illegally residing non-Japanese workers. This is inextricable from the ongoing and deepening Heisei recession. More alarming, however, is that the populist position of Ishihara is now being further put into action by the recently elected populist Prime Minister Junichirō Koizumi, his cabinet, and their ‘‘New Economic Policies.’’ The Japan of the 1990s was the decade of recession and stands in sharp contrast to the hyperbubble period of the 1980s. However, it is incorrect to see the 1990s simply as an interruption or ‘‘recess’’ of the business cycle, whose capitalist dream is an eternal boom with ‘‘manageable,’’ blinklike interruptions. The Heisei recession, instead, brought with it an irreversible structural change in Japanese society, requiring not only people living in Japan but also Japanese policy makers to readjust the Keynesian connective between the economy and the state. This readjustment, however, has revolved not simply around the notion of globalization, but rather, more precisely, around that of the national. This is in no way meant to suggest that we can neglect the accelerating process of globalization, which Japanese capital-ism is now desperately trying to cope with. On the contrary, we must start our argumentation from the national, since the Japanese negotiation with globalization results in a schizophrenic split such as the national

contraction under/due to its desire of global expansion, where the excess of capital and the so-called redundant—for example, the contrast between the skyrocketing information technology stock market and the homeless in Shinjuku station—juxtapose, and which has appeared in the form of uncanny political ruses such as the legalization of the national flag (Hinomaru) and the national anthem (Kimigayo) and the proliferation of many neoliberal policies in the last phase of the 1990s. These were all proposed in the name of ‘‘a globally competitive Japan.’’ In order to analyze this schizophrenic situation, however, we have to consider theoretically both the unsublatable relationship between the allegedly international capitalism and the nation-state and the capitalist means to deal with this unsublatability, from which the politicosocial signification of the Heisei recession emerges. The ultimate conclusion, therefore, of this essay is that globalization, the most conspicuous feature of which is financialization, takes place mainly on the surface, where commodified money and capital—the ‘‘fictitious capital’’ in marxian terminology—circulate. I will try to reach this conclusion by means of theoretically connecting and integrating key concepts of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari and of Karl Marx and Kōzō Uno, an independent Japanese marxian economist.1 As many have argued, I, too, argue that globalization, by and as its reaction, increasingly requires nation-states (and national economies) to renationalize themselves against one another, during the process of which almost all the nation-states transform themselves. But what should be emphasized here is that this renationalization under globalization is not simply conditional upon politicohistorical contingencies; quite the contrary, it must and can be theoretically explained with reference to a capitalist relationship between the surface (circulation/form) and its depth (the productionprocess/content). The body of this text will be divided into two theoretically interconnected parts. Both parts will deal with the same theoretical agenda in essence, a specific double bind: that is, not only the theoretical relationship between the innate desire of capital to be international and its unavoidable national closure, but also the incessantly devised capitalist means to get out of this innate arrest inherent in capitalism. The first part, however, will deal mainly with Deleuze and Guattari, specifically their Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia.2 Carrying over the arguments in the first part, the second part will address and take up Marx and Uno.

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In short, the target here is threefold. First, I will condense Deleuze and Guattari’s many innovative and useful concepts put forth in Anti-Oedipus into a number of theoretical devices. Second, this somewhat violent reduction will be done in order to establish a common ground on which the marxian theoretical concepts at hand and Deleuze and Guattari’s concepts can intermingle. However, the marxian theoretical concepts introduced here are not those that Marx himself deploys in his unfinished theoretical system, but those which Uno elaborates on through his own and independent rereading of Marx. Third, this twofold procedure as a whole is designed as preparation for the theoretical foundation for empirical analyses of globalization. In this sense, although this essay appears speculative at first glance, it is a first step toward empirical, politicoeconomic and sociohistorical analyses to come. It is in this regard that I may have to make a certain detour to take an actual shortcut in order to get closer to the current politicoeconomic situations. The focal point is the subtending tautness between, on one hand, globalization as an innately impossible dream of capital to liberate and release itself totally from territorial closure and, on the other, the nation-state (or national economy) as the result of capital’s incessant and reiterative negotiation with the actuality that capital must discover (vorfinden, find before itself ) or inherit from the past (historical preconditions) (K3:630). This detour, however, is not simply a way to historicize these politicoeconomic situations in a direct manner. It is exactly in this sense that I have to make a detour. At any rate, the two notions put forth at the beginning, surface and depth, from which this essay starts and around which this essay primarily ‘‘re-volutes,’’ must be clarified among other things, in order for the conclusion proposed above to be theoretically persuasive. Let me begin by appropriating a couple of triplets of interconnected yet ambiguously entangled concepts in Deleuze and Guattari’s discourses from the marxian viewpoint. These two triplets are surface-flow-form, on one hand, and depth-stock-content, on the other. The latter triplet is, first, enveloped (ein-hüllen) by the former and, second, subsumed in a formal and then substantive/real manner. The former triplet, on one hand, coincides with the ‘‘Oberfläche-Hülle’’ and/or the ‘‘inhaltslos und einfach circulation [sic],’’ the so-called Waarenwelt (commodity-world), in the marxian discourses, which is therefore indifferent to the ways in which possible commodities are actually produced. It is exactly here, for Marx(ians), where the so-called world

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market emerged and where rapid globalization now takes place as financialization, as and under the disguise of the circulation of commodified capital. On the other hand, the latter triplet corresponds to the ‘‘Tiefe-production,’’ which is still nationally—in other words, territorially—yet increasingly porously demarcated in comparison with the former. Marx describes the relationship between those two triplets as the itinerant passage of ‘‘herab-Steigen’’ (literally, climbing-down) from the ‘‘Oberfläche’’ to the ‘‘Tiefe’’ like a trompe-l’oeil of Maurits Cornelis Escher, whereas Deleuze and Guattari talk about the former as an ‘‘empty form’’ confronting the full body, the depth or the socius (D/G, 186). This itinerant passage, a climbing (down) from the surface to the depth, as it were, must be seen as being closely related to Marx’s concepts found in the abovementioned process, that is, the process of the formal and substantive subsumption of labor power under capital by first of all enveloping society with ‘‘the contentless and simple circulation.’’ We call this the formation of the commodity-economy, which comes from the outside and then invaginates into the socius (K1:791, 12; MEGA 2.2:61). Uno reformulates this invaginating process as ‘‘the osmosis of circulation’’ (form) into production (content). It is simultaneously identical to the process of capturing and captivating production under circulation, the only process through which capital can socially, yet incompletely, establish itself as an auto-valorizing movement, according to Uno. By calling this a process of ‘‘osmosis,’’ as I will argue shortly, Uno implicitly connotes the primarily porous boundaries of reterritorialization as national closure. As is well known, Marx refers to this as a coming ex nihilo, ‘‘the gods of Epicurus in the intermundia, or Jews in the pores of Polish society’’ (K1:93); Deleuze and Guattari refer to it, apparently having recourse to this Marx, as ‘‘‘the very pores’ of the old full body of the social machine’’ (D/G, 223). Uno describes this process in toto, as follows: The commodity-economy, the forms of which are required to disclose the general economic norms, does not emanate from within the production-process of a society, i.e., from the root of its economic life. It arises . . . from the exchange-relation between one production-process and another. The forms of human relations peculiar to commodity exchanges then influence the production-processes by reaction, sink slowly into them, and finally capture and captivate them; the commodity-economy thus secures the substantive base of its operation in a production-process by gradually encroaching upon [invaginating into] it from the outside. . . . The doctrine of production can then

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treat the production-process that is captured by the circulation-form. (U, xxiv, translation modified, my emphasis)

It is apparent that Uno paraphrases Marx’s description of ‘‘The Process of Exchange’’ (K1:99; MEGA 2.2:614), but theoretically it is more than that. This statement is Uno’s crucial critique of the definition of value as a substance, found at the very outset of Das Kapital. Criticizing one aspect of Marx’s theorization of value—value as substance—Uno emphasizes the Marx who wrote, ‘‘The exchange of commodities begins where communities have their boundaries, at their points of contact with other communities, or with members of the latter’’ (K1:102). Schematically put (in order to economize my arguments here), Uno grasps this as a process shifting from one Dominant Form of Capital (dfc) to another: that is, from merchant capital (M1 − C1 /C1 − M2 [M2 − M1 = m > 0]) to industrial capital (M1 − C1 {L + Pm} . . . P . . . C2 − M2 [M2 − M1 = m > 0]). Needless to say, this shift of dfc historically amounts to the socalled primitive (ursprüngliche) accumulation of capital. Here Uno pries out a general and immutably consistent essence of capital’s movement common to both merchant capital and industrial capital (as dfcs), or ‘‘the original starting-point of capital’’ (K3:404), which can be fully formalized with the final domination of financial capital (M1 . . . M2 [M2 − M1 = m > 0]). Financial capital, as the ‘‘finished form’’ of capital (K3:405), reveals that the auto-valorization of capital can and should be described, and is actually realized, as a contentless circulation on the surface, whose ultimate and frantic form is the commodification of capital as such ( fictitious capital). Fictitious capital can be phenomenologically defined here as the specific capital that is invertedly established as the result of the ‘‘capitalization’’ of revenue derived from the mere possession of bonds, debentures, joint stocks, or landed property. It is therefore historically realized through the social establishment of the interest rate. What must be emphasized here is that this characteristic has the same pattern as merchant capital (and usurer capital). Uno and Marx, therefore, define capital as a simple (‘‘en style lapidaire’’) yet seemingly mystical process, by and through which ‘‘money begets money’’ (M1 . . . M2 [M2 − M1 = m > 0]) (K1:170). Hence Marx writes as follows: In simple circulation, the value of commodities attained at the most a form independent of their use-values, i.e. the form of money. But now, in the circulation M − C − M, value suddenly presents itself as a self-moving substance which passes through a process of its own, and for which commodities and

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money are both mere forms. But there is more to come: instead of simply representing the relations of commodities, it now enters into a private relationship with itself, as it were. It differentiates itself as original value (ursprünglicher Wert) from itself as surplus-value, just as God the Father differentiates himself from himself as God the Son, although both are of the same age and form, in fact one single person. (K1:170; my emphasis)

This inversion between or doubling into ‘‘God the Father’’ and ‘‘God the Son’’ is socially postulated on the surface at its zenith as the so-called ‘‘Trinity Formula,’’ which can be summarized, in political economy, as the so-called Smithian (de)composition of value into profit (or better still, interest), wage, and ground-rent. In other words, capital on the surface (be)comes (to be able) to be indifferent to the production process by its very nature. Marx describes the basic nature of this process as follows: The transformation of money into capital has to be developed on the basis of the immanent laws of the exchange of commodities, in such a way that the startingpoint is the exchange of equivalents. The money-owner, who is as yet only a capitalist in larval form, must buy his commodities at their value, sell them at their value, and yet at the end of the process withdraw more value from circulation than he threw into it at the beginning. His emergence as a butterfly must, and yet must not, take place in the sphere of circulation. There are the conditions of the problem. Hic Rhodus, hic salta! (K1:180–81; my emphases)

However, we must not dance here following G.W. F. Hegel, who says, ‘‘Here is the rose, dance thou here’’; on the contrary, we must leap here following Marx in order to understand the cryptic scheme of capital, as Walter Benjamin did. I will let Monsieur le Capital, which cannot be pregnant without Madame la Terre, talk about his mysterious pregnancy: M1 .............................................................. M2 [M2 = (1 + i ) M1] ¯

−

M1 − C1 {L + Pm} ......... P .............. C2 − M2 [M1 + m], subject to L = Labor power; Pm = Production materials; i = interest rate.

The point here is Marx insists that capital at once ‘‘must, and yet must not, take place (vorgehn) (walk forwards) in the sphere of circulation.’’ It is antinomic yet crucial, but in order for this crucial antinomy (a-nomos/ a-nomisma) to make sense, in this scheme, labor power (and therefore land as well, as I will argue shortly) must already be commodified. In other 304

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words, not only labor power but also land/soil as commodity must be already defined as an indispensable part of circulation on the surface. Clearly having recourse to Marx, Deleuze and Guattari start their arguments by defining, first of all, the so-called socius as being ‘‘not the product of labor.’’ For them, the socius ‘‘appears’’ as labor’s ‘‘natural or divine precondition,’’ from which the three social machines are hypothesized to emerge. They are the savage, the barbarian, and the civilized societies. However, at the same time, it must be understood that they are not simply three types of discrete social machines. Rather, Deleuze and Guattari seems to require us to regard them as a theoreticohistorical, although not merely unilinearly consecutive and continuous, process automatically developing toward the capitalist system condemned to finally come/take place (D/G, 10, 261). We also have to see, however, that for Deleuze and Guattari the distinctions between these three social machines are made in order to corroborate ‘‘the possibility of a retrospective reading of all history in terms of capitalism.’’ Having now confirmed this possibility, it must be understood only as a process belatedly and cruelly memorized. Here the historical process of capitalism is theoretically being narrativized from the height of its historically ultimate accomplishment (the present state, Genjō in Japanese). Marx and Uno repeatedly emphasize this methodological voraussetzung to be theoretical and historical at once. Only in this very sense can capitalism be posited as ‘‘the universal truth . . . in the sense that makes capitalism le negatif of all [previous] social formations’’ (D/G, 153; my emphasis). Capitalism finally comes/takes place as a system of ‘‘a memory of signs . . . a system of cruelty, a terrible alphabet’’ despite and/or precisely because ‘‘capitalism is profoundly illiterate,’’ except for one system: the so-called axiomatics (D/G, 240). However, this methodological inversion can only make sense to the extent that capitalism simultaneously mimics this methodological inversion. In this regard, Marx’s statement, ‘‘We suffer not only from the living, but from the dead. Le mort saisit le vif!’’ should not be, therefore, interpreted simply as a linear understanding of the development of capitalism, as it is often misunderstood in criticizing his alleged historicism. It must be understood, rather, in Deleuze and Guattari’s sense: ‘‘Primitive societies are not outside history; rather, it is capitalism that is at the end of history, it is capitalism that results from a long history of contingencies and accidents, and that brings on this end’’ (K1:15; D/G, 153; my emphasis). Deleuze and Guattari insist here that capitalism must be seen as the culmination of ‘‘a monsieur le capital and madame la terre

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long history of contingencies and accidents,’’ in which primitive societies are always already wriggling and functioning in various recollected manners, and the authors will take up the question of how capitalism is obliged to negotiate with these (primitive) societies in order to remake them into modern empires. In other words, a long history of contingencies and accidents, or I would say in a word, of aléa, can be recalled and reinvented in a belated manner by capitalism, during and through the process of which these contingencies and accidents are eventually ordained and/or translated as historical necessities. To get closer to this point, let us see how Deleuze and Guattari go on to postulate the first two social machines in order to address the last social machine, starting with the definition of the socius as being ‘‘not the product of labor.’’ The first social machine, in their tripartite hypothesis, Deleuze and Guattari name the ‘‘territorial machine,’’ the function of which is to code ‘‘the flows on the full body of the earth.’’ The second is ‘‘the transcendent imperial machine,’’ which overcodes ‘‘the flows on the full body of the despot or his apparatus, the Urstaat.’’ They call the emergence of this second machine the ‘‘first great movement,’’ which is assumed to deterritorialize the first territorial (primitive) social machine. The third is ‘‘the modern immanent machine,’’ in other words, the capitalist machine, which decodes ‘‘the flows on the full body of capital-money.’’ Deleuze and Guattari talk here about the relationships between the surface and the depth using two crucial words, the flows (surface/form) and the full body (depth/content). I emphasized ‘‘on’’ because these ‘‘on’s’’ are closely connected to the key-concept ‘‘surface,’’ from which capital starts its long, itinerant, and various life to (trans)form and complete and circulate itself, only to return to the surface as the para-originary (D/G, 261). Capital can be originary only as the para-originary on the surface. ‘‘God the Father’’ becomes originary only by presupposing/anticipating ‘‘God the Son’’ at the outset. Only the Son (increment or, rather, excrement/surplus) can scaffold the Father (advance payment/capital). Inversion takes place as if the Freudian ‘‘Nachträglichkeit/après coup’’ operates here. After the gradual process of the formal and then substantive subsumption of labor power under capital, after the long itinerary to the depth, capital returns to the surface so that it is filiatively mapped and axiomatically translated on the surface, only by which can capital be represented in a formal manner by usurping the content (organs). It signifies that capital needs a specific detour to axiomatically represent itself. I would call the whole process an envelopment of the 306

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depth ( production-stock-content) by the surface (circulation-flow-form), whose crucial point is the commodification of labor power and that of land/soil inseparably associated with it. Without the commodification of these two elements, capital cannot be fully assured to be(come) immanent as a dominant organizing force of the society into which capital invaginates from the outside. It can be said here, following Deleuze and Guattari, that the capitalist machine replaces ‘‘the territorial codes and the despotic overcoding’’ with a system of noncontradiction or a circularity on the surface, where production is being invertedly secured or reversedly inscribed. This is done in order to establish an unverifiable ‘‘axiomatic of decoded flows’’ with no necessity to be verified, from which, by the very nature of axiomatics, all the other propositions of the capitalist machine can be automatically deduced and explained away, albeit retrospectively. In this regard the capitalist axiomatics can be seen as already having arrived, at and from the beginning, as the para-originary. It is a self-realizing trick of the ‘‘Nachträglichkeit.’’ The ‘‘possibility of a retrospective reading of all history in terms of capitalism’’ is given its ( para-)foundation by this specifically logical structure of voraussetzungs. Deleuze and Guattari call that moment the ‘‘second great movement,’’ which incessantly desires to deterritorialize and thereby to regulate the two previous flows altogether. But at the same time they think that this deterritorialization cannot permit ‘‘any part of the codes and overcodes to subsist’’ (D/G, 261; my emphasis). It is in this sense that Deleuze and Guattari can postulate the most striking tendency of the capitalist machine: the tendency as at once ‘‘the decoding of flows’’ on the socius and ‘‘the deterritorialization of th[at] socius’’ on which the decoded flows perform (i.e., exhaustively formalize), the crucial function of the osmosis/invagination of circulation into production (D/G, 34; my emphasis). Deleuze and Guattari analytically decomposes this movement further into ‘‘two sorts of flows’’ whose mutual (and contingent and, therefore, timetaking) encounter is the very moment of the advent of the capitalist machine. They are ‘‘the decoded flows of production in the form of moneycapital’’ and that of ‘‘labor in the form of ‘free worker.’’’ As I mentioned before, however, I should be quick to add one more flow ineluctably indissociable from the latter, to which, however, Deleuze and Guattari do not explicitly refer: the decoded (yet incomplete) flow of the earth/soil based on modern property law enacted by the modern (nation-)state. As Marx put it, this is ‘‘the clearing of estates’’ (K1:756), to which future ‘‘free workers,’’ that monsieur le capital and madame la terre

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is, the serfs in the Middle Ages and the contemporary peasants and ‘‘housewives’’ in the so-called third world, are integrated as ‘‘independent owners’’ of their bodies—the possessive individualism—liberated them from the various types of (so-called traditional) communal ties. These three decoded flows—money-capital as the property of capitalists, free workers as the ‘‘independent’’ owners of their bodies (perhaps disciplinized), and landed property as the legal(ized) title—inaugurate the capitalist machine as an axiomatic system by translating the depth frothing beneath the surface on the surface. Thus, in the capitalist machine, everything seems to take place on the surface, but in order for this self-closedness to be complete, something other than capital must be grafted onto the surface like a prosthesis. This prosthesis is the Urstaat, re-called as the nation-state. Without this seemingly legal/territorial device, these three decoded flows cannot be legally recoded as the titles of appropriation of profit/interest, wage, and especially ground-rent. Only after this legal/territorial recoding can profit/interest, wage, and ground-rent be personified as capitalist, freeworker, and landowner in a reified manner. Thus this prosthesis is specifically bequeathed to the capitalist machine from its previous social machines. The axiomatic capitalist machine needs this arché-state ‘‘from its beginning,’’ and this state remains as ‘‘the permanent foundation.’’ We will come across this permanent foundation later in this essay, when we discuss landed property as capital’s economically modified representation of the Urstaat. Capital has no option but to disavow this permanent foundation as a ‘‘useless superfetation’’ for itself, as if capital forgets the fact that capital required this useless superfetation, because this useless superfetation is one of the modern representations of the socius whose (the) other one lies in the commodification of labor power (K3:630; MEW 26.2:38–39). Thus the capitalist machine cannot arrogate its originary to itself because, as Deleuze and Guattari point out, ‘‘the capitalist machine is incapable of providing a code that will apply to the whole of the social field.’’ Therefore the capitalist machine is cornered to devise something that can make up its incapability/partiality to fully axiomatize the socius. We have, therefore, to decipher this capitalist palimpsestlike erasure not simply in terms of its historical process but in terms of its own theoretical rationalization as well. Thus this outsidedness of the capitalist machine in relation to the socius is crucial for us here. Étienne Balibar rephrases this capitalist device for its incapability/partiality as the long-standing problematic of ‘‘the question of why capitalist social formation took the form of nations.’’ He goes on to say, ‘‘One of the 308

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most important pertinent questions . . . is that of why the world-economy was unable to transform itself . . . into a politically unified world-empire, why, in the world-economy, the political institution has taken the form of an ‘interstate system.’’’ 3 His way of problematizing the relationship between the impossible ‘‘world-empire’’ and its historical appearance as the national can be rephrased as an important and archaic ‘‘conundrum’’ of the capitalist machine. The State does not evolve, nor even has an origin. It arrives, like fate, in a single stroke and fully formed, from a place that cannot be located. . . . For ‘‘unity’’ is by nature unactualizable. The Emperor’s conundrum: if the Great Unifier unifies the empire, is he a part of his own whole? If he is, then the empire is not unified: it is divisible into a subject and an object of unification. If he isn’t, then the unity is necessarily a drive to dominion, and necessarily fails. There is always a remainder and an excess of power.4

One crucial and impossible synecdoche works here, where there stays a ‘‘remainder,’’ or ‘‘restance,’’ if I borrow Jacques Derrida’s neology. This remainder ceaselessly cathects the capitalist machine to expand itself on the ‘‘globe’’ until the point where the capitalist machine be(comes) ‘‘One’’ and ‘‘unity.’’ Deleuze and Guattari theoretically anticipate the capitalist (dis)solution of this ‘‘conundrum’’ through the substitution of ‘‘money [for] the very notion of a code,’’ only through which can the capitalist machine create ‘‘an axiomatic of abstract quantities’’ and without which the capitalist machine could not, still cannot, and will never be able to ‘‘keep moving further and further in the direction of the deterritorialization of the socius’’ by way of overcoming the reterritorialization of the socius (as the nation-state) (D/G, 33). Restating this schizophrenic process, Deleuze and Guattari write, ‘‘What they deterritorialize with one hand, they reterritorialize with the other’’ (D/G, 257). This schizophrenic Trieb to unity is impossibly and therefore incessantly invested in completing the capitalist machine as a unified One, which, however, by no means comes. Even if it does come, it barely comes only on the surface, where the organs of the full body must be usurped and then axiomatically translated. But this ‘‘coming,’’ nonetheless, has to undergo a specific process: the (eternal) ‘‘osmosis.’’ This series of processes, however, can be accomplished only by the axiomatization of the socius, which in turn formalizes (transmogrifies) the full body as a body without organs. Therefore, Deleuze and Guattari clearly point out that ‘‘the body without organs is the ultimate residuum of a deterritorialized socius’’ (D/G, 33; my emphamonsieur le capital and madame la terre

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sis), which we have to interpret in relation to the incapability/partiality of the capitalist axiomatic machine. In this sense, the dream of capital to be(come) totally international is, therefore, always already slashed by the territorial (national) closures. The capitalist machine is only inter/national, which drives the capitalist machine to remake its ‘‘superfetatious’’ yet inevitable companion (the nationstate) as the empire or the process toward One. Nonetheless, it is still doubly bound with the conundrum. And this eternal incompleteness in the process of impossible completion, this incapability, this partiality of capital as such, by its reaction, drives capital (crazy) without limit as long as capital (desires to) remain(s) capital. This non/anti-Hegelese logic of the ‘‘Emperor’s conundrum’’ is, therefore, at the same time a conundrum unexorcisably inherent in capital, unavoidably under the reterritorializing arrest of the (nation-)state. In other words, the nation-state is the historical state-form of the Urstaat that falls back on/compromises with the empire arrested under the capitalist seizure —so much so that the (nation-)state is always already recalled as well as reinvented by capital itself (against itself ) as the (impossible quid pro quo of ) empire. Only in this ‘‘abstract process’’ or pulsion toward an unactualizable unity, in other words, only in this unsublatable process of the axiomatic deterritorialization and its obsessively associated reterritorialization can we locate the actuality of the history of capitalist development, the quintessential pulsion that must be regarded as the impossibility of actualizing capital’s dream of completion of/as globalization. Only by positing capital’s movement in this way can we correctly position our own theoretical track in relation to Balibar’s insistence that ‘‘the world-economy is not a self-regulating, globally invariant system, whose social formations can be regarded as mere local [partial] effects; it is a system of constraints, subject to the unforeseeable dialectic of its internal contradictions. . . . The dominant bourgeoisie and the bourgeois social formations formed one another reciprocally in a ‘process without a subject’, by restructuring the state in the national form and by modifying the status of all the other classes.’’ 5 But at this point, and in relation to the above problematic, serious attention needs to be paid again to the question of the incapability/partiality of ‘‘providing a code that will apply to the whole of the social field,’’ and the insistence that deterritorialization never permits ‘‘any part of the codes and overcodes to subsist.’’ This is closely connected to what we have already touched on with regard to the socalled second great movement, the ‘‘modern immanent machine.’’ However, again Deleuze and Guattari have theoretically prepared a definite response 310

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to this inherent incapability/partiality of the capitalist machine: the modern immanent machine as such ‘‘rediscovers’’ the new, yet archaic device, in the place of that which it never allows to subsist (D/G, 261; my emphasis). They describe this as a ‘‘paradox’’ of the capitalist machine. ‘‘The paradox is that capitalism makes use of the Urstaat for effecting its reterritorializations. But the imperturbable modern axiomatic, from the depths of its immanence, reproduces the transcendence of the Urstaat as its internalized limit’’ (D/G, 261– 62; my emphases). To (dis)solve impossibly or incompletely this paradox/ conundrum, the capitalist machine ‘‘institutes or restores all sorts of residual and artificial, imaginary, or symbolic territorialities.’’ The point here is that this ‘‘residual’’ territoriality is nothing but ‘‘the residuum (résidu) of a deterritorialized socius’’ and, therefore, is understood at the same time as ‘‘artificial’’ where the capitalist machine has and re-stores its actual ground. And it is only secured by capital’s attempt ‘‘to recode, to rechannel persons who have been defined in terms of abstract quantities,’’ where the state, nations, and families ‘‘return or recur’’ in order to supplement capital’s incapability/partiality in a manner ultimately depersonified (by the Hegelian abstrakte Recht). Only after this depersonification can capital become personified as a capitalist, ground-rent as landowner, and wage as worker (D/G, 3; K1:247). Capital has no option but to accept this slashing-momentum as a quid pro quo of the empire retrospectively re-called as the nation-state. This quid pro quo is nothing more than another expression for Deleuze and Guattari ’s specific usage of the French se rabattre sur/rebattrement (see the translator’s note at D/G, 10). Specifying the role of this modern re-apparition of the Urstaat as the apparatus of recoding and regulating ‘‘the decoded flows,’’ Deleuze and Guattari continue to say that ‘‘one of the principal aspects of this function consists in the reterritorializing process, so as to prevent the decoded flows from breaking loose at all the edges of the social axiomatics’’ (D/G, 223, 258; my emphasis). This means that the decoded flows are on the verge of incessant spillover from the social axiomatics, to which the Urstaat is re-called as a rescue under the guise of the nation-state. In this regard the state is an arrogating ‘‘rational entity’’ unto itself, through which the capitalist machine can barely soothe its schizophrenia, even at the cost of experiencing cyclical crises as the destruction of itself. Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of schizophrenia is, therefore, inextricably connected with the movement of the capitalist machine: ‘‘Capitalism, through its process of production, produces an awesome schizophrenic accumulation of energy or charge, against which it brings all its vast powers of repression to bear, monsieur le capital and madame la terre

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but which nonetheless continues to act as capitalism’s limits. For capitalism constantly counteracts, constantly inhibits this tendency while at the same time allowing it free rein; it continually seeks to avoid reaching its limit while simultaneously tending toward that limit’’ (D/G, 34; my emphasis). It is no doubt that here Deleuze and Guattari have in mind Marx’s ‘‘The Law of the Tendential Fall in the Rate of Profit’’ and its ‘‘Internal Contradiction.’’ With this kind of movement we could develop an argument on the crisis theory of Marx based on the notions of the plethora of capital and its parallel, the redundant. Deleuze and Guattari write, [Capitalism] is the relative limit of every society; it effects relative breaks [crises], because it substitutes for the codes an extremely rigorous axiomatic that maintains the energy of the flows in a bound state on the body of capital as a socius that is deterritorialized. . . . Schizophrenia [Trieb to impossible ‘‘One’’], on the contrary, is indeed the absolute limit that causes the flows to travel in a free state on a desocialized body without organs. Hence . . . schizophrenia is the exterior limit of capitalism itself or the conclusion of its deepest tendency, but . . . capitalism only functions on condition that it inhibit this tendency, or . . . it push back or displace the limit, by substituting for its own immanent relative limits, which it continually reproduces on a widened scale. (D/G, 245–46; my emphasis)

This is a remarkably brilliant intervention on crisis theory even seen from the Marx-Uno perspective on crisis theory. But what is at stake here is somewhat different because this statement is another expression of the Emperor’s conundrum, as well as of the incapability/partiality of the capitalist machine to fulfil its dream of a total axiomatic recoding of the socius. In this specific sense, Deleuze and Guattari declare, ‘‘There has never been a liberal capitalism’’; in other words, there has never been capitalism without the state. This is because although a liberal capitalism incessantly desires to be(come) One across the globe only based on its own logic (axiomatics), it is actually destined to carry a national form (D/G, 253). Hence, a liberal capitalism can be realized only and merely as a policy of the so-called noninterventionist capitalist state at a particular time. But this policy is not, as it has been mistakenly understood, the so-called total-capital as a pregiven ‘‘rational entity’’ or ‘‘rational subject’’ of policy making (as particularly in the Sozialpolitik). Mutually competing individual capitals must be mediated each time by the (nation-)state without removing cutthroat competition among them, and therefore the hegemonic center is contested among

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them, by which, furthermore, ‘‘international’’ capitalists become a national bourgeoisie, or inter-slashed-national capitalists. As we saw at the beginning of this essay, Deleuze and Guattari define the socius as being not the product of labor but, rather, as a natural or divine presupposition (of production), on which capital affixes a label, ‘‘useless superfetation,’’ to which we will return later. This socius ‘‘falls back on/compromises with (il se rabat sur) all production,’’ Deleuze and Guattari say. And this is exactly what is constituting the surface, ‘‘over which,’’ they insist, ‘‘the forces and agents of production are distributed’’ (through the axiomatic revealing itself as the market-mechanism). Also, it is exactly on this surface that the capitalist machine can ‘‘appropriate for itself all surplus production.’’ The capitalist machine is absolutely indifferent to the ways in which this ‘‘surplus’’ product is produced insofar as this surplus product is axiomatized and can be bought and sold through the axiomatic market-mechanism (surface) and according to its sign (price), and in so doing the capitalist machine can synecdochically ‘‘arrogate to itself both the whole and the parts of the process.’’ To be more exact, however, as to the relationship between ‘‘the whole and the parts of the process’’ we need to follow Deleuze and Guattari further, first, because we know that the capitalist machine is incapable of totally recoding the socius axiomatically and, second, closely connected with the first, because Deleuze and Guattari insists that this surface is the very field where ‘‘all production is recorded, whereupon the entire process appears to emanate from this recording surface.’’ This results in their conclusive remark, ‘‘Society constructs its own delirium by recording the process of production’’ (D/G, 10; my emphases). It is clear that Deleuze and Guattari are consciously replacing the marxian notion of fetishism with that of ‘‘a perverted, bewitched world.’’ More specifically, they are talking about the viewpoint of Marx’s chapters ‘‘The Revenues and Their Sources’’ and especially ‘‘The Trinity Formula’’ in the third volume of Das Kapital. Both chapters logically correspond to ‘‘The Fetishism of the Commodity and Its Secret’’ in the first volume, in Marx’s argument on the Value-Form. What is unfolding here is an important agenda that demands further attention: ‘‘While it is true that capitalism is industrial in its essence or mode of production, it functions only as merchant capitalism. While it is true that it is filiative industrial capital in its essence, it functions only through its alliance with commercial and financial capital’’

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(D/G, 229; my emphases). I am not going to criticize Deleuze and Guattari for their conflation of merchant capital,6 commercial capital,7 and financial capital (M1 . . . M2 ).8 It seems to me to be more productive, on the contrary, to reinterpret this misleading conflation and rescue a positive aspect from it. The crucial point is that they recognize the common characteristic among the three dfcs of capital, that is, ‘‘M1 . . . M2 ,’’ as that which puts the depth under erasure and can only be realized/valorized on the surface.What is more important is that while articulating this common point, they correctly invite us not to forget that modern industrial filiative capital cannot release itself from an archaic specter that is in alliance with merchant capital (plus usurer capital), and without which capital could not continue accumulating, since it would lose its means of auto-valorization. In other words, even though capital is ‘‘indeed the body without organs of the capitalist, or rather the capitalist being,’’ capital is ‘‘not simply the petrified substance of money by taking a form of fluidity.’’ This is because capital emerges from and simultaneously fosters a contentless and simple, and therefore formalizable, circulation as and on the surface, all the while invaginating from the surface of the socius into the depth. Only by this specific form ‘‘money begets [more] money,’’ the persistent arché-form of capital. Furthermore, even though capital re-‘‘produces surplus value, just as the body without organs reproduces itself . . . and branches out to the farthest corners of the universe,’’ this is possible only to the extent that capital can ‘‘embody itself in the machine as fixed capital’’ (D/G, 10; my emphases). The point to which we have to pay productive attention is Deleuze and Guattari’s insightful reference to the marxian concept of ‘‘fixed capital,’’ where the Oberfläche and the Tiefe are theoretically connected. As to this problem, Marx says, ‘‘Precisely in this aspect as fixed capital [or ‘‘tied-down (engagirtes) capital] . . . does developed capital . . . most strikingly manifest itself. . . . [I]t is precisely in this seemingly inadequate form . . . that the development of capital as capital is measured’’ (MEGA 2.2:560). Marx also defines fixed/fixated capital in a crucial manner: ‘‘Fixed capital, in so far as capital’s relations with itself are concerned, appears as the most adequate form of capital in general. . . . [A]s regards capital’s external relations, it is circulating capital which appears as the adequate form of capital, and not fixed capital’’ (MEGA 2.2:573; my emphases, translation modified). Although Marx defines fixed capital (appearing) as ‘‘the most adequate form’’ of capital in general (Capitals überhaupt, literally, capitals on the top), he immediately limits this definition by insisting that it is so only ‘‘in so far as capital’s relations with itself ’’ and points out that circulating capital should 314

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be dispatched in order to establish capital’s ‘‘external relations.’’ Marx’s point is that there must exist a specific form of capital that can simultaneously integrate capital’s adequateness in relation to itself as well as in relation to its outside. And it is exactly here where interest(-bearing capital), or the pure axiomatics, and landed property/ground-rent, or the capitalist representation of the Urstaat, specifically conjoin or collude and approach one another, so as to allow the Tiefe to circulate/be inscribed on the surface, the Oberfläche. The commodification of capital itself and the formation of ‘‘fictitious capital’’ as its result are the focal point of this process. And it is exactly here where we have to elucidate the meaning of the ‘‘capitalization’’ of ground-rent (as an economic expression of landed property)—not the immediate ‘‘capitalization of land,’’ which is impossible before commodification of land/soil through ground-rent.9 The capitalist, the capitalist bewitched, the capitalist ‘‘becom[-ing] anus[hole] and vampire,’’ emerges only through fictitious capital as a ‘‘modern despotic social machine’’ and is captivated in a synecdochical world where the parts can stand for the (w)hole through axiomatization. Is this ‘‘modern despotic social machine’’ the capitalist machine? As a capitalist, he is only capital personified. His soul is the soul of capital. But capital has one sole driving force, the drive to valorize itself, to create surplusvalue, to make its constant part, the means of production, absorb the greatest possible amount of surplus labour. Capital is dead labour [fixed capital] which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks. The time during which the worker works is the time during which the capitalist consumes the labour-power he has bought from him. If the worker consumes his disposable (disponible) time for himself, he robs the capitalist. (K1:247; my emphases)

Das Kapital’s Waarenwelt finally unfolds itself before us, in which I would unravel the ghost-dance performed by Monsieur le Capital with La Terre/the earth, this Terre which is coerced to collude with Monsieur le Capital in the form of Madame la Terre (landed property as fixed capital). The secret of this dance lies in the coercively collusive relationship between landed property and capital through fixed capital, which revolves around fictitious capital. Now we have to go deeper into this theoretically complicated and even confused field by rigorously having recourse to Marx and Uno. The specific goal of this part is located in the attempt not only to bring into focus the unsublatable and therefore dynamic relationship between the monsieur le capital and madame la terre

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nation-state as the reterritorialization and the capitalist desire to remain unconditionally international as the deterritorialization, but also both the concession made to the nation-state by the capitalist machine that incessantly tries to ‘‘transcend’’ this national closure and its theoretically two consecutive economic/axiomatic forms. The focal point is landed property and ground-rent, and the capitalist form(alization) of them. Marx generally defines landed property as that which historically ‘‘presupposes’’ that ‘‘certain persons [had already] enjoy[ed] the monopoly of disposing of particular portions of the globe as exclusive spheres of their private will to the exclusion of all others’’ (K3:628–29; my emphases). Based on this, ground-rent is defined as ‘‘the form in which landed property is economically realised, valorised’’ (K3:632; my emphases). Indeed, Marx deals with landed property in terms of the form and then its specific historicity invertedly looked/narrativized back from this form. The landed property that Marx introduces into his theoretical system is, therefore, landed property that is already ‘‘transformed by the intervention of capital and the capitalist mode of production.’’ In other words, he tries to define landed property not as an ‘‘eternal’’ but a ‘‘historical’’ category (K3:628; my emphasis), where the capitalist mode of production is understood to have already gotten under way. He therefore states, ‘‘To try to give a definition of property as an independent relation . . . can be nothing but an illusion of metaphysics or jurisprudence’’ (MEW 4:166). Theoretically redundant as it may seem, careful attention shows that Marx discloses an interesting but complicated methodological voraussetzung in his analyses of the relationship between capital and landed property, or theory and history. Marx insists that the monopoly of landed property, for the capitalist mode of production, is not only a ‘‘historical precondition’’; it also must ‘‘remain its permanent foundation’’ (K3:630; my emphases). Capital does not simply and easily take over landed property from the previous social formations as a requisite for its (be)coming into being; capital must hold landed property within itself as something that must function solely according to the logic/form of capital (i.e., axiomatics) in order to travel across the world independently of what capital historically finds before itself and takes over in practice. Capital, in this sense, cannot easily escape (from) and, therefore, must and can absorb and then rule landed property, the appropriate rule of which, in turn, obliges capital to provide itself with a specific form to do so. As emphasized before, the capitalist form of captivating landed property is inextricably bound up with the process of the commodification of labor

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power, despite the fact that land/soil and labor, both of which were firmly tied together as earth/Nature under premodern communities, are foreign to capital insofar as they are not products of capital. Marx paraphrases this process. First, he indicates that ‘‘the form in which the capitalist mode of production finds (vorfinden) landed property at its beginnings does not correspond (ent-sprechen) to this mode.’’ Marx then jumps, somewhat abruptly, to the conclusion that ‘‘the form that does correspond to it is only created by itself ’’ (K3:630; my emphasis). In other words, he stresses that the capitalist machine cannot linguistically communicate with landed property, since capital and landed property are not based on a common linguistic and idiomatic system at their very beginnings. This discrepancy requires the capitalist machine to invent a common Sprache bridging the two, which, however, must be something that capital can control on its own. In brief, landed property must be translated into something that fits the capitalist machine in one way or another. And the first form of this capitalist axiomatic Sprache is ground-rent. As ground-rent is the first economic/axiomatic form(alization) of landed property, Marx’s statement above may seem contradictory, and it deserves further elucidation. In that statement he seems to insist on two propositions that are seemingly at odds with each other. It is not enough, however, simply to show that there are two contradictory propositions; it is necessary for us to disentangle Marx’s complicated use of these two propositions. This is because only by this juxtaposition of these two propositions can Marx theoretically and methodologically introduce a process of formalization (on the surface) of that which cannot be properly formalized (the depth). In other words, only by this strategy can Marx talk about the historical formation of capital together with his own formation of the theoretical discourse on capital, which must be identical not only to the capitalist axiomatic system but also to the unactualizable capitalist desire for the completion of that system. Let me first strip down this process. First, on one hand, Marx asserts that landed property is a historical precondition for the capitalist machine to launch and attain its axiomatic system. On the other hand, he also thinks that landed property ‘‘remains’’ the permanent foundation for the capitalist machine to retain this axiomatic system. Interpreting his two propositions together, it seems natural to understand landed property as that which persistently stays with the capitalist machine from its beginning and as long as it survives. If that were the case, however, we would conclude that it is not necessary for Marx to

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have distinguished a ‘‘historical precondition’’ from the ‘‘permanent foundation.’’ However, Marx does just this. Second, Marx stresses, together with and based on the first assertion, that there exists a discrepancy between the form of landed property corresponding to the capitalist machine, on one hand, and the form of landed property that the capitalist machine has historically and actually to ‘‘find before itself,’’ on the other. At the same time, Marx claims that the form corresponding to the capitalist machine is created only by the capitalist machine itself. Why does Marx asseverate that only the capitalist machine can create landed property that fits to itself ? Should we agree with Marx simply according to his asseveration that ‘‘the form of landed property with which we are dealing is a specific historical form, a form transformed by the intervention of capital and the capitalist mode of production’’ at the very outset of his argumentation? This problem found here, however, clearly shows that Marx is by no means contaminated by historicism. I propose that Marx is repostulating the historical event(uation), continual or not, of so-called primitive accumulation of capital into a theoretical moment and, in so doing, is also articulating how the capitalist machine itself reconstitutes the historically primitive (ursprüngliche) accumulation of capital into the theoretical originary (Ursprung) of the accumulation of capital. In other words, Marx mimics capital’s own desire to integrate and translate the historical arché of the capitalist machine into a theoretical arché, which can equip the capitalist machine with a duplicate (historicotheoretical) arché. The capitalist means of this integration/translation is the formalization or axiomatization of landed property (whose other side is that of labor power). This is exactly the content of what I call the first economic form(alization) of landed property, in other words, ground-rent. Uno recapitulates this relationship en bloc: While capitalism presupposes landed property, on the one hand, it cannot assume landed property [to fit to itself ] at the outset of its development, on the other. . . . [In this sense], capitalism is internally coupled with landed property. . . . Landed property is not so much external to capitalism as it is denounced as a ‘‘useless superfetation,’’ on the one hand; but it is not internal to the capitalist system [either]. . . . Landed property is undoubtedly nothing more than ‘‘useless superfetation,’’ but it is by no means easy to excise it from the capitalist system. . . . Landed property constitutes not only the substantial premise for capitalist society as the very foundation of the commodification of labour-power; it is also the formal premise for the institutions of private owner-

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ship under the capitalist system. Capitalism establishes the institution of private ownership by coming to terms with the private ownership of that which is not produced by labour, i.e., land. . . . Capitalism and landed property capture and are captivated by each other.10

Here Uno does not simply talk about the ‘‘substantial premise’’; rather, he introduces into his discourse the politicoeconomic element of ‘‘the institution of private ownership,’’ which simultaneously signifies that while he deeply recognizes Marx’s critique of Hegel, Uno implicitly takes into consideration the (nation-)state and its basic foundation, that is, property law, to which capital and therefore the capitalist machine are inextricably tied down/fixated. Although landed property is given the capitalist form here, this form(alization) does not necessarily mean that capital can fully free itself from state closure, because in order for landed property to be formalized/axiomatized as ground-rent, landed property must already be theoreticohistorically legalized by the state. Ground-rent is possible only under the legal system, which encloses capital in spite of its formalization of landed property, and it is this legal system as das innere Staatsrecht that inevitably reveals itself as das aüßere Staatsrecht against the other sovereignties. In this regard, Deleuze and Guattari are correct in dealing with this archaic and foreign requisite for the capitalist machine—landed property—as the very problem emanating from the Urstaat, even though the Urstaat historically undergoes various metamorphoses according to the actual and historical situations into which the Urstaat reappears or is recalled. This is because landed property is and must be controlled under the power/legal system in some way even for the capitalist formalization/axiomatization. And its ‘‘modern’’ form is bourgeois property law, which is only enacted and backed by the nation-state. In this sense ground-rent, even though it is the capitalist (first) form of landed property, is not permitted to be appropriated by a landowner without at least the nation-state as a legal system. Deleuze and Guattari discuss this unavoidable and indispensable reapparition of the Urstaat in terms of reterritorialization; in contradistinction, Marx focuses on how the capitalist machine tries to transform this archaic reapparition by virtue of ground-rent (or the money-form of landed property). This specific relationship between the capitalist machine and the reapparition of the Urstaat determines not only how the capitalist machine is incapable/partial but also how the capitalist machine must come to terms with that incapability/partiality. What must not be ignored here is the capimonsieur le capital and madame la terre

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talist ceaseless negotiation with this incapability/partiality as such, which ineluctably results in conjuring (up) the Urstaat even if it is modified as the nation-state. Thus without the form of the nation-state, its legal system, and sovereignty against other sovereignties—in other words, reterritorialization— the capitalist machine is not able to compromise with landed property. ‘‘The transformation of the latter [landed property] into mere exchangeable value —its mobilization—is the product of capital and of the complete subordination of the state organism to it. Land and soil, even where they have become private property, are therefore exchange value only in a restricted sense’’ (MEGA 2.2:614; my emphases). Here Marx juxtaposes the two opposed situations: ‘‘the product of capital,’’ which signifies the completion of axiomatics/deterritorialization, on one hand, and ‘‘the complete subordination of the state organism,’’ which signifies the limit of axiomatics/reterritorialization, on the other. But he clearly emphasizes that landed property cannot be fully formalized/axiomatized as exchange value even through ground-rent. Thus ground-rent as a form is still obsessed with the state. Therefore Marx adopts a seemingly contradictory representation of landed property, not simply to emphasize the historical discrepancy between the modern capitalist machine and the ‘‘archaic’’ landed property, but, rather, to highlight emphatically the capitalist (provisional) form in which capital tries to capture this discrepant landed property as the modern politicoeconomic representation of the Urstaat. As we have seen, Deleuze and Guattari describe the process of this axiomatic representation of the haunting Urstaat as that which ‘‘does not cease being artificial, but it becomes concrete, it ‘tends to concretization’ while subordinating itself to the dominant forces’’ (D/G, 221; my emphasis). The Urstaat tends to concretize itself as the nation-state in relation to the capitalist machine. However, we can question here whether they are correct simply to claim that the Urstaat concretizes itself by merely ‘‘subordinating itself to the dominant forces [capital].’’ It must be understood, rather, as the unsublatable contradiction, where capital incessantly tries to transcend the state boundary while simultaneously subordinating itself to the nationstate, which also incessantly tries to contract itself against other ‘‘sovereignties.’’ The movement of the capitalist machine should be posited as an inevitable and continuous oscillation between the capitalist expansion and the national contraction. Therefore, the first economic form(alization) of landed property, ground-rent, has not yet thoroughly surfaced, which in turn requires capital to fabricate the second form(alization) of landed property. 320

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In order for the capitalist machine to be able to escape (from) this innate fetter, two possible exits exist. The first would be for the capitalist machine to make One Nation-State across the globe; but this would signal the death of the capitalist machine, for the capitalist machine needs something other than itself to swallow up. It must be inhibited all the while it incessantly desires this outside. The second means of escape is to ‘‘fluidify’’ landed property exhaustively by means of fictitious capital. However, in order for the capitalist machine to invent this second form, the capitalist machine must, paradoxically enough, re-form(alize) landed property (here ground-rent) as fixed capital. In other words, in order for the capitalist machine to fluidify landed property, the capitalist machine must fixate it as property in general that accrues. This second form is tantamount to a process of ‘‘capitalization’’ of ground-rent. For instance, Marx, focusing on landed property, says the following: ‘‘Capital may be fixed in the earth, incorporated into it, both in a more transient way. . . . I have elsewhere used the expression ‘la terrecapital’ to denote capital incorporated into the earth in this way. This is one of the categories of fixed capital’’ (K3:632; my emphases). Here Marx talks about the capitalist second form(alization), by which the soil/earth is retransformed from a mere raw material (terre-matière) into earth-capital (la terrecapital) (K3:633). However, in order for the terre-matière to be axiomatically retransformed into la terre-capital as fixed capital, it is necessary to capitalize ground-rent, the capitalist procedure of which is the kernel point of the second form(alization) of landed property. This leads us to the problem of fictitious capital. Before I argue this point, however, I want to take another quick look at how capital tends to regard landed property as ‘‘inferior’’ to itself, but only in order to arrogate a ( para-)originary position to itself. The point is still how capital re(pre)sents landed property in order to get out of the national closure. However, this point will simultaneously demonstrate how difficult it is for the capitalist machine to liberate itself from the state closure. As to this problem, Marx gives an interesting note in part 2 of Theories of Surplus-Value. He describes capital’s reaction and hate toward landed property as if it is a kind of capitalist ‘‘resentment’’ toward something that capital cannot properly create and fully subsume. The landowner . . . is quite superfluous (überflüssig) in this [capitalist] mode of production. . . . The landowner . . . is a useless superfetation [Marx’s own English wording in German is ein nutzloser Auswuchs or Superfötation (N.Y.)] in the industrial world. The radical bourgeois . . . therefore goes forward theoreti-

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cally to a refutation of the private ownership of the land, which, in the form of state property, he would like to turn into the common property of the bourgeois class, of capital. But in practice he lacks the courage, since an attack on one form of property—a form of the private ownership of a condition of labour—might cast considerable dangers on the other form. (MEW 26.2:38–39; my emphases)

However, in facing this predicament, capital neither necessarily desires nor absolutely needs to axiomatize exhaustively the socius as the whole; what capital in practice desires and needs is only the minimum ‘‘precondition’’ and ‘‘foundation’’ for capital’s being into being. This is because capital requires its others to remain permanently outside it in order to swallow up, without which capital would be totally decathected and became static and dormant, which reminds us of the Freudian death drive. Only in this sense can capital’s suffering of the incapability/partiality be tolerated or forgotten by capital itself. But this toleration requires something supplementary that capital itself cannot produce and must therefore inherit from the past or the outside. This is related to Marx’s statement that ‘‘in practice [the capitalist] lacks the courage, since an attack on one form of property . . . might cast considerable dangers on the other form.’’ Put another way, the capitalist machine can never denounce landed property because of its own. If it does so, the capitalist machine would have to remove landed property in toto from its own politicoeconomic system as a ‘‘useless superfetation’’; it necessarily follows that the appropriation of profit in general (which generally appears as revenue for advance payment) would have to be totally denied. Thus while the capitalist machine would like to be totally independent of and indifferent to landed property, and in this sense independent of the national closure, and while the capitalist machine fabricates the capitalist notion of ground-rent for the purpose of axiomatically captivating landed property within itself, despite all this, the capitalist machine still cannot escape (from) the (nation-)state. To be more exact, the capitalist machine has to capture the discrepant landed property in such a way that the capitalist machine can persuade itself that ‘‘capital property (Kapitaleigentum) does in fact appear as the ‘original/ primitive (ursprüngliche)’’’ for the socius. Yet, once capital property arrogates the original position (or arché) of property in general to itself, landed property necessarily ‘‘appears as derivative’’ in relation to capital property. In this very sense, capital needs a device to invert its own historically secondary positionality in order to arrogate a topoi of arché. Thus capital is compelled to insist that landed property is superfluous, and to denounce it as ‘‘feudal 322

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property’’ that ‘‘has become subject to the conditions of bourgeois production’’ (MEW 26.2:149, 4:167). Marx understands landed property as belonging not to the surface but to the depth, from which Marx delves deeper into the form so as to show how landed property ‘‘receives its purely economic form’’ on the surface. This purely economic form can be grasped, according to Marx, by ‘‘stripping away of all its former political and social embellishments and admixtures’’ or ‘‘all those traditional accoutrements that are denounced as uselessly and absurdly superfluous’’ (K3:631; my emphasis). This ‘‘stripping away’’ of the sociopolitical residuum is nothing more than the process by which capital inaugurates but arrogates itself to a ‘‘para-originary position’’ by forgetting the primitive societies between which the capitalist machine actually emerges. Marx offers an interesting antagonism between capital and landed property in his discussion of absolute rent. He says that landed property does not ‘‘exist in the legal sense’’; rather, it ‘‘actually offer[s] resistance and defend[s] the field of action against capital, only making way for it under certain conditions’’ (MEW 26.2:299; my emphases). This ‘‘resistance,’’ or ‘‘restance,’’ simply represents landed property par excellence, which capital has to confront and transform according to itself, however difficult, and so much so that capital must press down this ‘‘resistance’’ at any cost, not only through (legal as well as naked) violence but specifically by ‘‘purely economic’’ axiomatization. This ‘‘purely economic’’ form is the retransformation of landed property into fixed/fixated capital, during the process of which ground-rent (be)comes to be seen as interest as the generalized representation of revenue legitimately guaranteed and acquired by the simple fact of possession fixated, and by which all the forms of revenue such as profit, wage, and ground-rent can be integrated as one form ( pure axiomatic form). Marx writes about this ‘‘purely economic’’ form as follows: M − M'. Here we have the original starting-point of capital, money in the formula M − C − M', reduced to the two extremes M − M', where M' = M +

ΔM, money that creates more money. This is the original and general formula for capital reduced to a meaningless abbreviation. It is capital in its finished form, the unity of the production and circulation processes.’’ (K3:404–5; my emphases)

In the Grundrisse Marx tries to give fixed capital, ‘‘the most adequate form of Capital überhaupt, insofar as capital’s relations with itself are concerned’’ (MEGA 2.2:573), a ‘‘purely economic’’ form in the context of the ‘‘Process monsieur le capital and madame la terre

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of Exchange.’’ His reference to the ‘‘Process of Exchange’’ here, however, is not simply restricted to his desire elegantly to construct his own theory of Value-Form as the specific process of ‘‘osmosis’’; rather, he refers to fixed capital in terms of a capitalist roundabout route, that route along which the ‘‘resistance’’ as such against the capitalist machine is conquered: ‘‘Exchange as such does not begin within the original communes, but on their boundaries, where they cease to be. Of course, to exchange the land, their residence, to pawn it to alien communes, would be treason. Exchange can expand only little by little from its original realm, movable property, to immovable property. Only through expansion of the former does it little by little gain control over the latter. Money is the chief agent in this process’’ (MEGA 2.2:614; my emphases). Marx specifically grasps Uno’s notion of ‘‘osmosis’’ as the gradual process from ‘‘movable property . . . to immovable property,’’ which is tantamount not only to ‘‘the transformation of capital into immovable property’’(MEGA 2.2:614). It is the kernel problem of fixated/fixed capital, but we have to be careful not to neglect the fact that Marx talks about ‘‘property’’—movable or not—and then points out the transformative function of money in this process. In other words, the property that Marx has in mind is something that can be sold and bought through money in the market. While it is taken for granted that the territorial code that ‘‘to exchange land, their residence, to pawn it to alien communes, would be treason,’’ property right in land must be already established in order to exchange land as the exchange of titles in land. Without this process the capitalist machine would not be able to deterritorialize/circulate the land(ded property) that is reterritorialized. As I have already pointed out, landed property historically precedes ground-rent. However, once ground-rent as the capitalist representation of landed property is discovered by and for the capitalist machine to communicate with landed property taken over from previous social formations, landed property, for the first time, can be(come) described and measured as a commodity circulating in the Waarenwelt according to the price mechanism. However, land/soil as such neither contains nor produces any kind of exchange-value in and by itself, since it is a product of neither labor nor capital, as Deleuze and Guattari as well as Marx and Uno emphasize. But as it is (arché-)typically revealed as absolute rent, ground-rent is essentially ‘‘the compensation for the severance of the direct producers from land,’’ which capitalists have to pay, and in this sense, ‘‘the capitalist captivation of the production process is instituted by the exclusion of landed property.’’ 11 However, once ground-rent is established as a phase of the axiomatization

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of landed property, landed property comes to be invertedly seen as the appropriation of ground-rent. The appropriation of ground-rent, therefore, comes to be regarded as periodically incoming revenue, by which, in turn, landed property retrospectively/belatedly becomes fictitious capital. As to this point at issue, Marx proposes a general thesis: Originally, the growth of movable property, its increase as against immovable, indicates the ascendant movement of capital as against landed property. But once the mode of production of capital is presupposed, the level to which it has conquered the conditions of production is indicated in the transformation of capital into immovable property. It thereby establishes its residence on the land itself, and the seemingly solid presuppositions given by nature, themselves [appear], in landed property, as merely posited by industry. (MEGA 2.2:614; my emphases)

Inversion, which is inseparable from the emergence of fictitious capital in general, takes place here, and this inversion cannot take place without the social establishment of the interest rate. However, it is not necessary to go deeper into ground-rent as such; what is at stake here is its representational form. Whereas Uno redescribes landed property as ‘‘the sharp impingement upon capital’s right on profit,’’ he repeats the fact that ‘‘the private ownership of land forms not only the historical condition for the mass conversion of the direct producers into propertyless wage-earners, but also the basis of the institution of private property, the fullest development of which is realised in a capitalist economy’’ (U, 102–3). Most crucially, Uno goes on to say, ‘‘Sometimes land itself, as a title to a series of rental incomes, can also be commodified and be traded, seeming to adapt to the capitalist method of production even more. This conversion, however, must be explained . . . in connection with the theory of the commodification of capital; that theory requires a prior explanation of the form of interest-bearing capital’’ (U, 103; my emphases; translation modified). Uno insists here that the notion of groundrent can be understood only with the commodification of capital as such or ‘‘the form of interest-bearing capital.’’ We are now facing the problem of landed property and its first formalization as ground-rent as a problem that is interchangeable with the problem of fictitious capital. Thus this form of interest-bearing capital whose general conceptualization is fictitious capital should be understood as the capitalist means not only of dealing with fixed capital but also as the capitalist incessant desire to

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transcend the national closure by way of fluidifying capital fixated as fixed capital (such as machinery and landed property). Its conceptually crucial moment is the fluidification of landed property. Here the capitalist machine conjures up the Urstaat introduced by capital itself as a prosthesis to supplement its incapability/partiality, but in a purely economic manner. But note again that capital’s appropriation of profit, as capital property (Kapitaleigentum), must rely precisely on national closure. As for the ‘‘automatically interest-bearing’’ capital in general, Uno wraps up as follows. The prior determination of the general rate of interest in the money market permits capitalism to substantiate the capitalist concept of interest-bearing capital, and opens the way for a ‘‘formal’’ possibility of commodifying even capital itself. In capitalist society a definite series of periodic revenues is identifiable as a series of interest-payments on a definite money-sum of capital; in other words, the periodic revenues are capable of being capitalised by the rate of interest prevailing in the money market, and regarded as interest on the so-called fictitious capital. (U, 116; translation modified)

Uno goes on to point out that ‘‘a privately owned lot of land yielding a series of periodic rent-revenues can be commodified and be traded at a price determined by the capitalisation of these incomes.’’ Thus, due to fictitious capital, landed property becomes represented as one category of ‘‘interestbearing capital.’’ In this way capital must do its ghost-dance with something other than itself in order to be(come) and remain itself (presence). During this ghostdance, by virtue of employing violence on its other, capital experiences ecstasy, an ek-stasis (ecstases), standing outside itself, and entailing the retransformation of capital into fictitious capital, the retransformation of which is the main träger of current globalization/financialization. ‘‘If capital originally appeared on the surface of circulation as the capital fetish, valuecreating value, so it now presents itself once again in the figure of interestbearing capital as its most estranged and peculiar form. This is why the form ‘capital—interest,’ as a third in the series to ‘earth—rent’ and ‘labour— wages,’ is much more consistent than ‘capital—profit,’ since profit still retains a memory of its origin which in interest is not simply obliterated but actually placed in a form diametrically opposed to this origin’’ (K3:837; my emphases). Marx is absolutely correct except for one thing: even if profit is transformed into interest, it must be possessed somewhere on this globe as private prop-

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erty in order to continue accumulation, which in turn requires the legal system somewhere, everywhere. The important point at issue here, therefore, is the form of sovereignty as Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri insist in their Empire.12 Fredric Jameson correctly points out that ‘‘deterritorialization can celebrate its own kinds of ironies. . . . Land speculation is . . . one face of a process whose other one lies in the ultimate deterritorialization of globalization itself.’’ 13 However, in order for the capitalist machine to speculate in land, it has to speculate on how to do that. What I have discussed so far is how the capitalist procedure does just this. But, does its ‘‘other’’ face lie, as Jameson points out, ‘‘in the ultimate deterritorialization of globalization itself ’’? If this is the case, we have to think again about the reterritorialization that persistently haunts the deterritorialization. Or we have to think about whether or not the capitalist machine can ‘‘commodify’’ the nation-state as such, and if it is possible, how or under what form. However, we would be better off thinking about the undeniable fact that speculation in the productive factors, which capital cannot produce but must commodify, is nothing but the re-volute representation of the crisis that the primitive social machines force the capitalist machine to deal with. In other words, we have to consider why the capitalist way of exchanging land/soil and labor/human being is always prone not to a usual speculation of (fictitious) capital but to a specific speculation that is likely to go out of control and destroy society as such. The specific reason has much to do with the particular nature of labor and land, which are commodified not peacefully but violently. As to this problem, Uno says as follows: ‘‘The formula of industrial capital differs from that of either merchant or moneylending capital in that it does not automatically develop from the circulationform of capital. The commodification of labour-power, which gives rise to this form of capital, does not issue from circulation as such. Of course, capital cannot take hold of a production-process, nor realise a capitalist society, without adopting the formula of industrial capital’’ (U, 17; translation modified). Here Uno talks about the violence performed by the state, having in mind Marx’s description of the so-called primitive accumulation of capital, in which Marx says, ‘‘Force is the midwife of every old society which is pregnant with a new one. It is itself an economic power’’ (K1:779; my emphases). Commodification of what capital cannot produce as commodity incessantly conjures up the Urstaat, without which the capitalist machine can neither

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emerge nor remain. Perhaps, then, before we say that ‘‘deterritorialization can celebrate its own kinds of ironies,’’ we should first argue how we should understand the (nation-)state, which still operates as a violent midwife of economic power. To be sure, it is possible for the capitalist machine to ‘‘deterritorialize’’ land(ed property) as a productive factor. It can be bought and sold on the land market, yet only through titles in land, which, ironically, are incessantly reterritorialized as and backed by the state. Without this backing, the capitalist machine cannot give land its specific forms (ground-rent and then fictitious capital). In order for the capitalist machine ultimately to deterritorialize globalization itself, it must formalize the nation-state, or it must give a commodity-form to the nation-state in order to let the nation-state as such circulate on the surface. How is this possible? At the beginning of this essay I briefly touched on the Heisei recession and its political appearances. Now I can simply say, not as a final statement, but as an overture for the next step to come, that Japanese capitalism is about to cope with globalization by means of a rapid restructuring of the banking system in order to financialize the national economy, as such, on the surface, all the while ignoring the piling-up of the ‘‘redundant.’’ This process is giving a new commodity-form to the nation-state and its territoriality, which ‘‘fictionalizes’’ Japanese society as such. This new commodityform of the nation-state is fictitious capital, by which Japanese society—the deterritorialized territoriality in the process of incessantly being reterritorialized—circulates on the surface. However, it is based on the renationalization of the society based on, and grasping, the depth, the national axis of which is not only labor power and land, both of which capital cannot produce, but also national currency, on whose forehead the national sovereignty, now in jeopardy, is affixed. These three are simultaneously the very objects of ‘‘uncontrollable speculation,’’ not only in the market, but also in the memory of the multitudo living in Japan.What will come of this situation is undecidable: the uncanny multitudo obsessed with ‘‘Blood and Soil’’ and the block-economy armed with the violent currency, or the revolutionary multitudo experiencing (ex-periri, transgressing the danger) a joyous clinamen. And this clinamen is clearly stated in the new manifesto by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri: ‘‘The creative forces of the multitude that sustain Empire are also capable of autonomously constructing a counter-Empire, an alternative political organization of global flows and exchanges.’’ 14

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Notes It is my pleasure to acknowledge the assistance of the friends who made this essay possible. I would like to thank Tomiko Yoda, Harry Harootunian, and Masao Miyoshi for the opportunity to read the original version of this essay at the conference ‘‘Millennial Japan: Rethinking the Age of Recession’’ held at Duke University in 1999. I also would like to thank Ken C. Kawashima (nyu). The incentive to continue writing this essay would not have been possible without long and stimulating discussions while driving on the freeway, boozing in many cafés and pubs and everywhere else with him over Uno, Marx, and Deleuze and Guattari. 1 Hereafter I quote Kōzō Uno, Principles of Political Economy (Sussex, 1980), as U

2

3

4 5 6

7 8

9

10

in the text. As to the works of Karl Marx, Das Kapital: Kritik der politischen Ökonomie vols. 1 and 3 (Berlin, 1947, 1949) are abbreviated as K1 and K3, respectively; the so-called Grundrisse (Berlin, 1976, 1981) as MEGA 2.1 and 2.2; and MEW: Karl Marx–Friedrich Engels: Werke (Berlin, various years) as MEW. Hereafter I abbreviate Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. R. Hurley, M. Seem, and H. R. Lane (London, 1983) as D/G in the text. Étienne Balibar, ‘‘The Nation Form: History and Ideology,’’ in Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities, ed. E. Balibar and I. Wallerstein (London, 1991), 3, 5; my emphasis. K. Dean and B. Massumi, First and Last Emperors: The Absolute State and the Body of the Despot (Brooklyn, 1992), 153–54. Balibar, ‘‘Nation Form,’’ 90. As noted before, a historical movement corresponding to mercantilism and the primitive accumulation of capital (M1 − C1 /C1 − M2 [M1 − M2 = ΔM]), where there is no firm ground for ΔM (the ‘‘profit upon alienation’’) insofar as there is no difference (i.e., production) between C1 and C1. Of course there is a difference between C1 and C1 . Otherwise profit does not emerge for merchant capital. However, the difference is only either of a time-lag or a spatial type or both at once. But what is important is that capital is eventually dependent upon this time/spatial difference even at the stage of financial capital. It is definitely one of the branches of industrial capital and is subject to the average rate of profit. Here the alleged ground of ΔM is totally concealed or under erasure and then mystified, and this capitalist erasure becomes a final weapon for the capitalist machine to ‘‘transcend’’ the national closure, as I will discuss shortly. G. C. Spivak confounds ‘‘capitalization of land’’ with ‘‘capitalization of groundrent.’’ See her Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present (Cambridge, MA, 1999). Kōzō Uno, Studies on ‘‘Das Kapital,’’ vol. 5 Interest and Rent (Tokyo, 1968), 424– 25 (in Japanese).

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11 Kōzō Uno, ‘‘Capitalism and Landed Property’’ (1959), in Collected Works of Uno

Kōzō (Tokyo, 1974), 4:402–3 (in Japanese). 12 Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, MA, 2000). 13 Fredric Jameson, The Cultural Turn: Selected Writings on the Postmodern, 1983–

1998 (London, 1998), 153–54. 14 Hardt and Negri, Empire, xv.

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New-Age Fetishes, Monsters, and Friends: Pokémon Capitalism at the Millennium

Anne Allison

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okémon is a world of both things and relations. In this media-mix complex—of electronic game, televisual cartoon (anime), comic books (manga), trading cards, movies, and character goods—the basic concept is of an imaginary universe inhabited by wild monsters that children first capture and then retain in balls they keep in their pockets. Whether a child is playing the game or following the story through manga, anime, or movie, the structure of an encounter with wild and fantastic creatures is replayed through the ritual of ‘‘pocketing’’ the other. In this play world with its magical topography of towns, forests, and caves live 151 pokémon (over 300 with later Game Boy versions), and the goal of the game is to capture them all. This process, called getto suru (‘‘getting’’ or ‘‘gotta catch ‘em all,’’ in the U.S. ad campaign), constitutes the be-all and end-all of the game. What this entails in practice is staging matches or exchanges between pokémon—between those already possessed and those one desires to obtain. While the aim is continual acquisition, the objects one gets are both thingified (valued economically) and personalized (cute monsters inspiring affection, attachment, and love). The logic of play here involves a currency of shifting and multiple valences—between spirits and profits, companions and capital, inalienable and alienable goods. Capitalism is both mimicked and (re)constructed in the forms of play/ consumption engaged by Pokémon. While conforming to a preexisting market economy, Pokémon also pushes it in new directions—what I call here (only half-facetiously) Pokémon capitalism. This is a millennial dream world of enchanting goods and virtual relations in which monsters double

as both capital and pals. It is also an arena in which one sees a borrowing and the reinvention of a premodern past: a world of spirits, communitarianism, and otherworldly relations. By implanting imaginary kinship into innovative technology, the Japanese entertainment industry is becoming world renown today for its intimate play goods. With successive crazes in a mix-media empire of anime, manga, and video games, it is generating billions in revenues and global trendsetting from Singapore to Brazil. Succeeding brilliantly in one of the toughest corners of the world market long hegemonized by the United States, Japan is emerging as the superpower of superheroes in global kids’ culture at the millennium. A bright light in these gloomy times of recessionary economics, the Japanese play business generates national pride. It also offers something to consumers that, in what is a trope for millennial fantasies, feels soothing and supposedly healing to the psyche—commodified intimacies. In these play goods that both feed consumerism and nurture virtual attachments, Japan has found a millennial product that sells well and sells Japan itself on the global marketplace. Accompanying this is a new national myth— of a postindustrial power that has retained/recaptured relationality—and a mythic new capitalism—a market economy of virtual accumulation and capital companionship.1

Communication: Speaking Monsters and Things Pokémon (or Poketto Monstā in its longer version) was originally designed as a software game for Game Boy, the handheld digital game console launched by Nintendo in 1989. Created by a young game designer, Tajiri Satoshi, and his staff at Game Freak, Pokémon was bought by Nintendo and released in February 1996. Predictions were initially modest given that Game Boy technology was on the wane with an eight-bit technology in an electronic game world dominated now by far more powerful machines (Nintendo 64, Sega Saturn, and Sony PlayStation). Sales were far better than expected, however, in part because the game is simple but fun and the handheld Game Boy technology fits in with today’s portable (keitai ) culture (as seen in the ubiquitous cell phones and Palm Pilots carried by even small kids). Sensing the start of a fad, its marketers sought to expand Pokémon across a mix of media venues. In summer 1996, Pokémon came out as a serialized comic in Korokoro Kommiku, the bible of young boys’ manga magazines, read by half of all Japanese boys in fifth to eighth grades.2 Playing cards, distributed by Media Factory, followed in the fall. The television 332

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anime produced by Terebi Tokyo debuted in April 1997. Toy merchandise by Tomy appeared in spring 1997. And the first movie hit the screens the summer of 1997. Besides these major media, there has been a concatenation of tie-in merchandise—pencils and stationary goods by Enikkusu, curry and furikake (spices for rice) by Nagatanien, chocolate and candy by Meiji Seika —as well as a host of highly visible service campaigns—the launching of the pokémon-painted air carriers by ana (All Nippon Airways) in summer 1998 and a train promotion by the national railways (jr) the same summer. And, starting almost immediately in 1997, Pokémon was exported. Beginning in East Asia with Taiwan, Hong Kong, and China, it entered the United States in 1998, followed by Australia, Canada, Europe, Central and South America, Israel, the Middle East, and eastern Europe. Months after its launching as a Game Boy game in February 1996, Pokémon had gained fame in Japan not only as a commercial sensation but also, and more surprisingly, as what some experts were calling both a new form of play and a social phenomenon. As described by Okada Toshio, an expert on mass culture, Pokémon involves the kind of play that goes beyond the world of the game itself—a description I heard often in the course of doing fieldwork.3 This distinguishes Pokémon from other electronic/video games that have become increasingly complex since the late 1980s, demanding intense concentration and single-minded (often solitary) absorption. By contrast, Pokémon’s software is relatively simple and uniquely designed to foster communication. Its designer, Tajiri Satoshi, purposely crafted the game to feature not only matches (taisen)—the competitive trope standard and compulsive in action games targeted to boys—but also exchanges (kōkan) that build communication, interactions, and, in Tajiri’s word, ‘‘drama’’ continuing beyond the framework of Pokémon itself.4 Its potential for tsūshin (communication) and ningen kankei (human relationships)—that quality of sociality so ideologically central to Japanese culture—has been much cited in the rhetoric surrounding Pokémon in Japan. Indeed, the communicability of this play world has proven mythic, something that the public discourse surrounding Pokémon and the creator’s own accounts have repeatedly stressed. The immediate trigger behind the concept of Pokémon, however, came from something technological: the release of the handheld game machine Game Boy. The portability of the system intrigued Tajiri. So did one of its technological innovations: an attachment that could be purchased to link two Game Boys together. Called the tsūshin kēburu (communication cable), it enabled two players to compete against one another. Given that competinew-age fetishes, monsters, and friends

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tive fighting (trying to kill, knock out, or otherwise defeat an opponent) was the central motif of video games (as it remains today), this competitive form was unsurprising. But Tajiri had a novel idea: to utilize the tsūshin kēburu for actual communication instead of competition, to barter with, rather than eliminate, an opponent. Finding this an innovative concept in the world of gaming, Nintendo signed the project on in 1991.5 Though the company gave Tajiri wide berth in developing the game (and amazing patience in the six years it took for Pokémon to be completed), it insisted that the play not consist of exchanges alone. Arguing that a game without battles would be considered boring by kids and would sell poorly for Nintendo, it demanded that Tajiri include both strategies in the software. Pokémon was subsequently built as a game of ‘‘getting’’ based on exchanges as well as matches. To make the former not merely an option but a requirement of play, Tajiri programmed the game so that 11 of the 151 total pokémon could be obtained only through exchanges (using the communication cable to link up with a friend). In designing Pokémon, Tajiri has claimed to have had two major motivations. One was to create a challenging yet playable game that would pique children’s imaginations. The other was to give kids a means of relieving the stresses of growing up in a postindustrial society.6 Born in 1962, Tajiri shares the opinion of many in his generation that life for children today is hard. In this academic-record society (gakureki shakai), the pressure to study, perform, and compete starts almost at birth. Space and time for play have diminished. And in an environment where everyone moves fast to accomplish more and more every day, the human relationships once so prized in society have begun to unravel. In lifestyles that might include a daily commute of four or five hours, Japanese spend increasingly more time alone. Children are particularly affected by solitarism or what has also been called ‘‘orphanism’’ (kojin shugi ).7 According to a 1997 study by the Hakuhōdō advertising agency, most ten-to-fourteen-year-olds eat dinner alone, 44 percent attend juku (cram school) and they on average return home at night around 8 p.m. For such mobile kids, companionship often comes in the form of ‘‘shadow families’’: attachments made to imaginary characters, prosthetic technologies, and virtual worlds.8 No wonder that more than 80 percent play (video/electronic) games and that 30 percent regard these as ‘‘friends.’’ Today’s generation is comprised of ‘‘amenbo kids,’’ Hakuhōdō concluded in its study: children who, like water spiders, attach easily, but superficially, to multiple things.9 In Tajiri’s mind, millennial Japan comes with a loss of humanity. Nostal334

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gic for a world not yet dominated by industrial capitalism, he strove to recreate something of traditional times in the imaginary play world of Pokémon. To ‘‘tickle’’ memories of the past, Tajiri borrowed on his own childhood experiences in a town where nature had not yet been overtaken by industrialization.10 As a boy, his favorite pastime had been insect collecting. Fascinated by the abundance and diversity of species in his natural environment, Tajiri spent long hours studying, raising, and collecting bugs. This activity, involving interactions both with nature (mastery, discovery, adventure) and culture (trading and sharing with others), is what Tajiri aimed to transmit to the youth of today, themselves bereft of natural playgrounds. Virtuality was the medium he chose for this new-age insect collecting: something children are conversant with and that conforms to their mobile, industrial lifestyles. A game junkie (otaku) himself since the age of twelve when a video arcade with Space Invaders arrived in town, Tajiri became as hooked on these virtual worlds as he had once been on nature. Here, he rediscovered the same type of adventure, exploration, and competition he had experienced earlier with bug collecting, but there was one major difference.11 Whereas the latter opens a child up to horizons beyond the self, games are often myopic, enclosing kids within their virtual constructions. Disturbed by this current tendency in atomism, both in gaming and the society at large, Tajiri designed Pokémon to promote more interactivity. He did this by, first, making the game challenging but doable even by young children. The rules are easily grasped and success achieved as long as a child is persistent in playing and learning the game. Given the surfeit of detail involved in Pokémon, however, kids are also encouraged to gather and share information with others. This makes the game world something like a language that promotes communication. Tsūshin is literalized further in the exchanges that, as mentioned already, constitute a central feature of playing the game. Distinguishing Pokémon from other action games where the staple is fighting, exchanges appear trendily new here (and part of the reason that Pokémon is usually categorized as an rpg, a role playing game, rather than as action per se). As Tajiri intended it, this design envelops players in webs of social relationships given that, by the very rules of the game, one cannot play strictly alone. And, he hoped, exchanges would get perpetuated outside the parameters of the game itself and transformed into currencies of other kinds. One example given by Tajiri was that a child might exchange one of his pokémon for a bowl of ramen or a comic book in what is a mixing of metaphors, economies, and pleasures.12 The ideal here is that a community of friendship is built through communicating with Pokémon. new-age fetishes, monsters, and friends

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Interactivity was crafted into this playscape in yet a third way by giving children a fantastic world of made-up monsters and virtual landscapes through which to commune, so to speak, with their imaginations. As I heard repeatedly in the course of doing fieldwork (by marketers, commentators, and child experts), Pokémon provides youth a ‘‘space of their own’’ (kūkan) that, while make-believe, is emotionally real and cushions them from the daily grind of test-taking, study, and commutes.13 While adults typically referred to the game as a ‘‘fake’’ or ‘‘fictional’’ environment, children appeared more prone to describe it as an intermixture of the real and phantasmatic.14 The world is ‘‘like reality, only fake,’’ with monsters that are ‘‘like animals but mutated and made-up.’’ 15 In creating the pokémon, Tajiri instructed his staff to draw on childhood memories of insects, animals, and the outdoors with the aim of capturing the fascination such things might hold for a child. This is what drove his own designs of, for example, Nyorosu who, modeled after a tadpole, is a roly-poly pokémon with a translucent body, plug legs, and a tummy stamped with big twirl.16 Infusing the Game Boy screen with what Sandy Stone has called ‘‘tokens’’ of embodied existence, Pokéworld seems magically alive.17 But the magic here comes from not a mimesis or a displacement of the real but from its transformation— into a new medium (digitality) and new life-form (cyber bugs/monsters). Acting as new-age bricoleurs, the creative staff designed an imaginary world from hints offered by nature (something Margaret Mead attributed to the role of culture—reweaving the natural environment into a fabric of meanings and symbols).18 Superimposed onto digital grids, Pokémon’s landscape is an array of playful habitats: bountiful forests, chubby trees, cute towns, national parks. Linking all these vistas, opening endlessly into yet more virtualized space, are a series of tunnels, bridges, pathways, and roads. By these routes the player navigates a terrain of cascading frontiers in search of new pokémon: the indigenous natives at each locale. Each monster is a unique blend of parts, assembled with irony (as Donna Haraway characterizes the cyborg)— a seahorse sporting snout and cute flaps, a three-toned giraffe whose tail has its own head.19 Confusing virtuality with nature, the fantasy pokémon are typologized according to their naturalistic habitat, a schema that also structures the powers each one holds. So, for example, the three main pokémon types are water, fire, and grass, and the basic rule of gaming strategy states that water trumps fire and fire trumps grass. In order to acquire more pokémon, children must master the intimate details of monsterology. The complexities of this cannot be overstated for not only do the pokémon have 336

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multiple traits (powers, weaknesses, secrets) but these also change as they win matches (gaining strengths and, in some cases, evolving—a feature of natural life Tajiri found particularly riveting as a boy). A complicated and fluid life-form, pocket monsters need to be known in order to be gotten. This makes playing the game a pursuit of not only pokémon but also of ‘‘pokémonology’’ ( pokemongaku): mastering a wealth of information that requires technical dexterity (inputting data into Pokédexes) and strategies for learning. The playfulness of the Pokéworld begets an activity involving study where the latter is meaningful to children and more in their own control than that of others, marketers of Pokémon told me often. As Kubo Masakazu put it, kids today are beaten down by an educational system that enforces endless memorization of sterile facts to be disgorged on stressful exams.20 Overly regulated by this regime, youth are replenished by the play world of Pokémon that, imaginatively rich, comes with a game course not only doable by anyone but also customizable by preference and desire. Because the monsters are imaginary, the stakes here are different from those in school. Study is involved in both, but the facts are, literally, animated in Pokémon, producing a commitment and bond that are intimate. A player becomes personally invested in her or his monsters in knowing them, cultivating their strengths, and identifying them as a part of (rather than distinct from) the self. But if the school system fetishizes one kind of knowledge production, Pokémon fetishizes another. Fans the world over have been described as compulsive, seeking and mastering what is an encyclopedic storehouse of data that, implanted in ever more Pokémon goods (e.g., endless Game Boy editions, comic books, guidebooks, merchandise), also feeds, as parents have complained, a never-ending desire to consume. The taxonomies here, though grafted from nature, also transplant to commodity fetishism: monsters as things that one knows and catalogues in order to get for oneself. As children communicate through the imaginary rubric of Pokémania then, the situation is also reproducing subjectivity into what Fredric Jameson has recently called the ‘‘addictive capitalism’’ of the millennial era.21 Getting addicted to the rush of acquisition constitutes part of the pleasure in Pokémon. And the fetishistic quality it socializes into kids is not dissimilar to what Ōhira Ken has described as the emergent Japanese subject in contemporary times—people who, ill adept at human relationships, are compulsive consumers and taxonomers of brand-name goods invested with value and intimacy. Based on patients in his psychiatric practice, Ōhira calls these ‘‘people who speak things’’ (mono no katari no hito) and argues that atnew-age fetishes, monsters, and friends

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taching so much to acquisition does not correct the atomism of millennial times as much as extend it to a new (intimately consumerist) dimension.22

Commodities: Mixing in Gifts In Marx’s classical formulation, capitalism is an economy based on the estrangement of labor. Work is sold for a wage and the surplus labor extracted from one class feeds the profits of another. Transforming what Marx believed was the essence of species being—labor—into a thing used to produce and purchase commodities, this is a system that turns everything into a currency of and for exchange. Life, including people and the relationships between them, is thingified in the process. An antithetical economic system is that of gift exchange. In his canonical work on the subject, The Gift (1967), Marcel Mauss describes communities where labor congeals into gifts (versus commodities) that are exchanged between individuals and groups (rather than transacted through money).23 The principle here is not self-interest, the desire to accumulate goods for oneself. Rather, the aim is to reciprocate things (rice, beer, wives) that, through exchange, establish bonds between persons. Whereas in capitalism relations are used to produce things, in gift exchange, things are used to produce relations. Japan is a country fully ensconced in capitalism today. Its national goal, as structured by postwar policies, has been a material prosperity fueling (and fueled by) personal consumption. Yet cultural traditions and the nostalgia for these traditions have been grounded in an orientation toward the collective: groupism, interrelationality, communitarianism. It is the supposed erosion of these values in recent years that is often linked to Japan’s current problems (everything from the economic recession to the social pathologies of schoolroom collapse, the refusal-to-go-to-school syndrome, the sarin gas attacks of Aum Shinrikyō, youth crime, and amateur prostitution). As consumer capitalism escalates, there is nostalgia for what Marilyn Ivy has called the ‘‘vanishing’’ of traditional culture, a time and place where what mattered most was not material things but human relationships.24 Still, traces of what is considered the cultural fabric of Japaneseness are seen in contemporary times. This includes a rabid engagement of gift exchange: everything from the institutionalized gift-giving seasons twice a year to the ritualistic purchasing of omiyage (souvenirs) from even one-day outings to local hot springs. Such gifts are exchanged with an assortment of people with whom one has social and economic relationships. These include landlords, neigh338

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bors, coworkers, and relatives, and I myself have been the beneficiary of endless gifts, including a ten-kilo bag of Japanese rice airmailed to me from a friend in Tokyo as a reminder of our friendship (and the time we spent eating what she was sure I missed in the United States—Japanese food). In gift exchange, the transactions reflect on both the bond they express and the giver of the gift. In some sense, one is giving oneself in the exchange: what gets materialized in the form of a thing that is also (as in gifts given to God) a personal sacrifice. As Mauss pointed out, it is this element of gift exchange that makes what is economistic (building the social relations on which life depends) also moral, even spiritual. Things given in exchange are inalienable in that even though they are parted with, the gifts retain something of the giver (like the person’s name as in the Kula ring).25 This is the meaning of the gift and why its symbolism is so powerful; relations between people are built on exchanges of the self. In transactions dictated by money, by contrast, things are alienable from the self (as in selling one’s labor for a wage and buying goods at a store) and traded according to the value of the market rather than according to social relationships. Commodities take on a life of their own, producing a very different type of cultural logic than in gift exchange. Here it is individualistic desire to own and accumulate that drives the economy, and material things are not merely the means to an end (more spiritual and social), but the end itself. Max Weber called this the ‘‘iron cage,’’ referring to the time when meaning and enchantment drop out of the capitalist machine.26 And Mauss decried the loss of morality in modern economies where the gift has been displaced by the commodity. In Pokémon one sees principles of both gift exchange and the commodity economy. The currency of play here, pocket monsters, is at once traded and accumulated, building capital for the player but also relationships with others. Pokémon are gifts as well as commodities, and the communication Tajiri and Nintendo so self-consciously intended for this playscape evokes a premodern past as well as a postmodern future (of virtual relations, animated commodities, spirited ‘‘getting’’). The monster economy laid out by Pokémon serves simultaneously as a template for, and a corrective to, conditions of millennial capitalism in Japan today. And the latter is what alludes to (but also reinvents) the past: a past of insect collecting, gift exchanges, and a world beyond the materiality of things, humans, and rationality. Of course, gift exchange is not a practice new with Pokémon. Neither is the commodified form to which gift giving has been updated today. (During gift-giving season, for example, the stores are stocked with gift goods on new-age fetishes, monsters, and friends

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shelves coded by price, a differential by which the value of relationships is marked—a five thousand–yen shelf with boxes of soap, tinned fruit, and cookies; a six thousand–yen shelf with coffee, whiskey, and candy.) Rather, Pokémon’s innovation is the mapping of an (almost) infinite network of things/places/monsters/relations that decompose and recompose into an endless array of parts/powers/attributes/weapons. The boundaries between these entities are fluid and flexible, but the agenda driving this game space is to make, out of miniscule parts, an entire world, even empire, that feels as cozy and warm as it does masterful and empowering. Alongside getting, that is, weaving relationships is the name of the game. And in Pokémon, these two become part and parcel of the same thing, for getting both entails and produces relations, albeit with partners as much virtual (monsters) as real (other kids). In the voluminous commentary on Pokémon in Japan (by scholars, reporters, child experts, and those in the toy/game/character business), the playscape has been continually assessed in (seemingly) contradictory terms: as a blend of both competition and exchanges, strategy and nurturance, accumulation and communication, premodernity and postmodernity. Reminiscent of Ruth Benedict’s depiction of Japanese culture as anchored in contradiction, these accounts overwhelmingly praise the multisidedness of Pokémon and see it as key not only to the success of the product on the market but also to the benefits this play world yields for millennial kids.27 In an article in the Asahi Shinbun, for example, the reporter uses the metaphor of financial circles (kinyūkai ) to describe the transactions kids engage in while playing Pokémon. Focusing on the cards, he says that children enjoy gathering more than playing them because they are excited by the ‘‘cash value.’’ The latter is printed in magazines tallying current market values of various cards (based on rarity—a feature Nintendo built into the availability of cards and also imprints as one of the attributes differentiating each monster/card). Most kids do not wind up cashing in on their cards, although there are hobby shops and dealers who will buy them. Far more common, however, is participation in organized trades where supposed cash value is the currency of operation. The Asahi reporter lumps this activity under the category of collecting, wondering why children around the world these days are atavistically collecting video games and monster packs the way they used to collect baseball cards, insects, and stamps. His answer, in part, is that in the accumulation and exchange of monsters/cards, there is an ‘‘arousal of ningen kankei’’ (human relationships)—that foundation of

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traditional culture and also the principle of gift exchange. Social bonds are created, then, by something (also) resembling financial circles.28 A researcher of children’s games and play sees the dynamics of Pokémon somewhat differently. Concerned about the solitarism, bleakness, and alienation of kids in the current times of consumer capitalism and academic competition, she notes the tendency to turn inward: ‘‘People feel a lot of darkness today. As defense, they retreat into solitary capsules. On the trains, everyone is immersed in Walkmans, manga, books they buy at kiosks: defense mechanisms used to keep distance from others. Youth also turn to consumer products that allow them to relate to one another by maintaining the rule of silence.’’ 29 Pokémon offers a corrective to such gloom: a ‘‘route’’ (michisuji ) out of atomistic isolation to a brighter world beyond the self. Key here is that the game is structured in such a way that players continually win. Whether through battles or matches, a child keeps acquiring more pokémon and, in the process, receives (time and time again) what Watanabe takes to be the main message of the game—‘‘you’re great!’’ 30 Getting monsters equates here with confirming the self, something Watanabe also refers to as ‘‘unconditional love’’ and believes is acutely lacking in the lives of Japanese children today. Alienated in their labor at school (and with parents who pressure them to academically perform), kids find a world that is far more meaningful and ‘‘loving’’ in Pokémon. Critical here is less the nature of the world per se than the route by which children navigate it by continually acquiring and winning monsters, what Watanabe calls the ‘‘story line’’ (monogatari ) of Pokémon.These acts of acquisition convert what is alien (wild monsters) and alienated (kids’ lives) into the inalienable terrain of the personal and the self. The latter is reminiscent of gift exchange. The former, however, is the logic not of a barter (noncapitalist) economy but of consumer capitalism: taking commodities (alien/alienable things) from the outside and pocketing them as one’s own. In the mind of Pokémon’s designer as well, getting stands as the organizing principle of this game world. But it combines (rather than conflicts) with exchange, and both serve to open children up to a world beyond the narrow confines of an atomistic lifestyle (of study, nomadicism, and isolation). Easy to get both into and out of, this is a flexible playscape that can accompany kids wherever they go and may be used to foster relations as well. ‘‘In an age when kids have fixed schedules and are busier than ever before, Pokémon provides an opportunity to fit in communication with friends.’’ 31 Yet as Tajiri himself has put it, what inspires such communitarianism is not simply or

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principally the desire to build friendships (as in gift exchange). Rather, it is the self-interest (consistent with a commodity economy) of, for example, seeing another child on a train with a monster one wants and negotiating a transaction to get it. The producer, Kubo Masakazu, has said similarly that the genius of Pokémon is its ‘‘open-endedness’’ by which kids can take their Game Boys anywhere and, motivated by the desire to get a monster from the child standing next to them (on a train, in a line at a supermarket, in the countryside for obon [summer ritual for commemorating ancestors]) start playing/negotiating with new friends.32

Conversion: Mobile Technology and Currency Monsters are the medium of play, exchange, and ‘‘getting’’ in Pokémon. Important to its inventor, therefore, was creating a mechanism by which monsters convert into a currency of equivalence: the monster ball. Monsters start out wild and, once captured, inhabit balls owned and controlled by their masters (hence the name, pocket monsters). Standing as a player’s powers, the ball gets activated at the time of a match, thereby releasing the pocket monster inside. While balls/monsters are like personal genies, they can also be quantified and, in this, resemble money that converts the qualitative differences of commodities (use values) to a quantitative equivalence (exchange value). Most of the children I spoke to about Pokémon took great pride in knowing and comparing their stocks of pokémon, measured according to how many numbers one owned of which kind of pokémon with what kinds of strengths, evolutions, and rarities. Treated like private property, pokémon differ, however, from the property at work in another children’s game, Monopoly. In contrast to houses and hotels erected on fixed properties, pokémon constitute a more fluid and flexible currency. Composed out of multiple parts that break down and recombine in a complex array of (possible) constellations, pokémon are less stable or reducible to a material thing. As Tajiri has said about his monster economy, the critical component is that monsters convert to balls through what he calls a process of ‘‘datafication’’ (dētaka): the reconfiguration of value from a material form (monsters) into data that is storable, portable, and transferable (via communication cables on one’s Game Boy).33 This conversion goes in the other direction as well; children use data to raise the pokémon as if they were alive.34 In Tajiri’s mind, this is what enables Pokémon to be a play that continues beyond the game itself: a mechanism by which what is captured within the game can be (endlessly and polymorphously) communicated/ 342

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gotten/exchanged with kids outside. What is capital becomes communicable: commodities that double as gifts. But there is more. Originally, the ball was to be a capsule, and the concept Tajiri first floated to Nintendo was a game about capsule monsters. Wanting to recreate a motif popular in his youth (capsule toys sold in machines), Tajiri also aimed to produce an alternative world to the prevailing tendency toward social atomism (as in so-called capsule hotels).35 The recent rise in social shut-ins (1 million by some reports) exemplifies the latter: people who live literally in their rooms, unable to communicate or interact with the society around them. Usually withdrawing around the time of high school entrance exams and staying that way, in some cases, for years, hikikomori are often described by the word fūjikomeru (to contain within) to mean persons contained in capsule existences.36 Adopting the very same word in order to invert it, Tajiri describes how he designed Pokémon to ‘‘contain’’ the experiences of his youth as an avid bug collector.37 Eliciting memories of the past and transmitting them to youth today (via new-age capsules inscribed with age-old Japan), Pokémon serves as a corrective to the postindustrial state of atomistic alienation. In this space of their own, kids will not be trapped inside as much as routed to communities, communions, and communications outside. What makes Pokémon at once a container of the past and a medium for millennial relationality are the pocket monsters, creatures that broker the border between the practical, everyday, capitalistic and the fantastic, extraordinary, communitarian. As Gō Takeshi notes, they operate as both utilitarian tools (helping players win the game by acquiring more pokémon) and as something akin to spirits or companions.38 As he sees it, this is a worldview that is rooted in traditional beliefs and gives value and respect to the nonhuman. In Shinto, for example, humans are decentered, constituting merely one part of (a multiparted) universe; in folk legends, stories abound of independent animals (that exist not as mere appendages or possessions of humans). Japanese also have a ‘‘weird affection’’ (kansei ) for mechanized things, and they have traditionally believed that if a tool or natural thing lives long enough, it becomes a spirit or ghost ( yōkai ).39According to Gō, such a ‘‘Japanese sensitivity’’ ( yasashisa) is characteristic of ‘‘our spiritual culture’’: something the creators of Pokémon have self-consciously tried to pass onto kids facing the next century.40 Like the return of the repressed, spirits of the past are embedded in the nomadic technology and dataized currency of millennial capitalism. Haunting what is a postmodern form (well-suited to the needs of today’s kids), pokémon new-age fetishes, monsters, and friends

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are ‘‘non-normal things,’’a category that includes a whole range of otherworldly beings, popular in Japanese folklore, legends, and myths. As such, Pokémon represents a blend of the old and the new in Japan. And, in a view that is widespread in the commentary on Pokémon, Gō believes that this construct of otherworldliness is healing in the contemporary times of hypermateriality and individuated lifestyles.41 Parents I spoke with in Japan often expressed similar sentiments. Unlike American parents (who, almost without exception, found Pokémon to be alien), Japanese adults recognized something familiar here that connected them to their youths. Finding the world gentle and encouraging of good values (relations with others, the nurturance of wild monsters), adults also said Pokémon reminded them of their own childhoods, specifically of playing cards (menko), collecting things (insects, baseball cards), and Urutoraman, a live-action television show populated by monsters. Designed by the special effects creator of Gojira (Godzilla), Urutoraman was a huge hit in the 1960s and, running for many seasons, has been recently reprised in Japan and also launched in the United States. Marked by the Cold War logic of its times, these kaijū (monsters) are unilaterally bad and get wiped out, time and time again, by the hero of the show: a human who morphs into a giant cyborg (Urutoraman would translate into Ultraman). What is consistent with Pokémon, however, are the hordes of monsters that, in their diversity and abundance, evoke the scores of yōkai that proliferated in the Edo period of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (and were similarly catalogued in handbooks). As one father told me, he was enamored of this fantasy world more for the kaijū than for the hero because the monsters constantly changed, offered a wealth of differences, and were what he and his friends tried to master (by collecting cards, typologizing their attributes, and reading about them in magazines). As Claude Lévi-Strauss would say, monsters are ‘‘good to think.’’ 42 Even more important for capitalism, they are also good to sell. Easily commodifiable into collectible models, kaijū make for one of the principal items in Urutoraman specialty stores that do good business in Tokyo today. It is this juncture between fantasy and profits, spirits and goods, gifts and commodities that Nakazawa Shin’ichi sees as the ‘‘paradox’’ of Pokémon as well.43 An anthropologist trained in religion who has written a book on the subject, Nakazawa believes that Pokémon captures what he sees as a ‘‘deep unconscious forest in kids.’’ 44 Echoing Walter Benjamin, he sees modernization as a process of taming and materializing life: of (re)seeing the world in terms of rational, visible, and commodifiable things. For children, too, 344

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growing up entails limits placed on the imagination—a disenchantment of reality when existence gets taken over by test scores, daily schedules, and financial transactions. Pokémon, according to Nakazawa, offers a rich alternative to the concrete and routine. Here children play in a field of infinite possibilities where borders are something to go beyond rather than get contained within. Organizing this space are pocket monsters, entities that hover between the known and the unknown, between the visible and the invisible, between the real and the fantastic. Serving as (what Jacques Lacan calls) petit objet a, such a being exceeds phenomenal existence and fills in, imaginatively, for its lapses and lacks.45 As such, pokémon offer a connection to what has gotten lost in the speed, stress, and materialism of millennial times: a sensitivity to the nonmaterial, otherworldly, interpersonal of Japan’s premodern past. But paradoxically, Pokémon also yields tremendous profits. Nakazawa sees the paradox as ‘‘encapsulating the direction in which capitalism is headed today.’’ 46 Indeed, the play industry is the one place that has managed not only to hold onto Japan’s supposed primitive unconscious but also to market it as one of the country’s leading products and most successful exports. As a newspaper reported in 1999, if Japan could produce Pokémon electricity, Pokémon houses, and Pokémon trains, its financial woes would be eliminated overnight.47 In its commodity form, then, Pokémon works as a stimulus to the very capitalism it also serves to, imaginatively, disassemble. And with its premise of accumulation at once enchanting and communitarian, the monster economy here spells out Japan’s promise for a millennial future.

Cuteness: Expanding the Empire with Imaginary Kinship The success of Pokémon was totally unexpected. Never intended to be global and designed for only one audience in Japan—boys between the ages of eight and fourteen—the immediate success of the Game Boy game prompted marketers to expand their horizons. Developed first into the media of comic books, trading cards, and toy merchandise, it was the crafting of a cartoon series and movie versions that held the most promise. The conventional wisdom in the children’s entertainment business is that for even a successful toy or video game to become a fad, it must be accompanied by a television show or film. And, in the case of Pokémon, it has been the venue of storytelling—the adventures of three kids in their travels to discover, catch, and accumulate ever more pokémon—that has widened and new-age fetishes, monsters, and friends

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altered the scope of what started out as a mere Game Boy game. As the producer of the cartoon, Kubo Masakazu, explained its empire to me,48 Pokémon Incorporated is built on three pillars—the electronic game, the trading cards, and the movies and television cartoon (serialized also as comics). These sport a host of elements with diverse appeal to a variety of audiences; the Game Boy game attracts more boys, for example, and the cartoon more girls and younger children. Overarching this is a ‘‘harmony’’ between the components that Kubo attributed to the characters and a quality he referred to as ‘‘cuteness’’ (kawaisa or yasashisa, gentleness, as others in the business also labeled it). Speaking specifically of Pokémon and its success on the export market— such as becoming the top-ranked children’s show on U.S. television when it launched on Warner Brothers Network in fall 1998—Kubo added that cuteness gave Japan ‘‘cultural power,’’ something Japanese are ‘‘polishing’’ as both capital and prestige overseas. Cuteness, as the Japanese cultural critic Okada Toshio has argued, is one thing that registers for all people. In his mind, Pokémon defines cuteness: a cuteness that may well be Japan’s key to working foreign capital in the twenty-first century.49 Others have suggested that Japan’s future in influencing, even leading, global culture will come through three industries: video games, anime, and manga. The market for these three industries has surpassed that of the car industry in the past decade, leading some economists to hope that it will pull Japan out of the red. As one economist notes, what Japan has instead of the Silicon Valley is the ‘‘anime komikku game industry,’’ which will be the root of the new twenty-first century’s culture and recreation industry.50 What makes Japan newly successful in its marketing of games, comics, and cartoons is not simply technological or business prowess but what has been called the ‘‘expressive strength’’ (hyōgenryoku) of Japanese creators.51 Praised for its portable convenience, dataized flexibility, and fantastic spirituality (the return of the so-called primitive unconscious), this postmodern play aesthetics is thought to borrow on both the old and new in Japan. In an article on DoCoMo (a wireless Internet service), for example, Wired magazine reports that Japan is ‘‘putting its stamp on the times’’ by leading the world in consumer electronics.52 A phone that converts into a handheld computer and a wireless e-mail receiver, this flexible machine is sleekly designed and a fashionable accessory to boot. It can also serve as a stress reliever for users in that games can be downloaded or characters (such as Hello Kitty) added as screensavers. ‘‘Gazing at Hello Kitty on their handsets, they’ll relax for a moment as they coo, ‘Oh, I’m healed.’ ’’ 53 As the article 346

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states, the feat here is designing technology that is not only efficient and convenient but also cozy and fun. ‘‘Healing’’ in these times of rupture and individuation, this is technology that doubles as a toy and a communicator: a prosthesis with infinite/intimate possibilities both personal and social. The word used more than any other in Japan to label this quality (of technology, play, and consumer culture) is cute(ness). Yasashisa, or the gentle aspect of cuteness (what Gō Takeshi also labeled the sensitivity at the heart of Japanese culture),54 is precisely the word Japanese producers used to characterize the marketing of Pokémon in Japan.55 As they pointed out, however, this was not its original sensibility when Pokémon started out as a role-playing/action game targeted to boys. Cuteness came with the story versions, particularly the animated cartoon developed by Kubo and his staff. As he told me in an interview, the overarching objective here was to extend the audience of Pokémon to girls, younger children, and even mothers (vital in the marketing of children’s entertainment in Japan). Giving narrative and characterization to what are only sketch lines on a Game Boy screen, the cartoon also placed in the forefront a central figure that, like Mario or Mickey Mouse, could ground and iconize the entire phenomenon. Instead of a humanoid character with whom audiences could identify, a pocket monster was chosen to engender a different imaginary bond, that of possession, companionship, and intimacy, which is key to the construction of yasashisa. This is the genesis of Pikachu, the yellowy, cute, mouselike pokémon with electric powers and a squiggly tail. Merely one of 151 monsters in the original Game Boy game, Pikachu became the lead pokémon in the television cartoon and, subsequently, a global icon on the order of the Nike swish and McDonald’s golden arches. According to Kubo, there was a checklist in making this selection. Needed was a distinctive but inviting image, something memorable but nonthreatening. Pikachu fit the bill with its sharp silhouette and yellowish hue— a basic color and better than red, which signals competition. Aural cues proved critical as well: having a catchy name and unforgettable refrain (‘‘pika pika chuuuu’’) that, reproducible by even small kids, sounds good and goes anywhere without translation—something that proved useful in Pokémon’s subsequent globalization. Key as well was having a face that could ‘‘pleasantly’’ display a range of emotion, including tears, in order to develop its character in the cartoon. And, finally, the monster had to project cuteness, something that Pikachu epitomizes according to practically everyone I interviewed about Pokémon.56 As Kubo summed up Pikachu’s phenomenal appeal, this character ‘‘grabs’’ peoples’ emotions ( pitatto). Its huggable new-age fetishes, monsters, and friends

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look makes children happy (tanoshii ) and mothers feel safe (anshin).57 But equally important are the fierce powers Pikachu holds within its cute frame, something that holds true as well for Japan these days whose cultural power comes in the disarming form of character and commodity cuteness. When asked to characterize Pikachu or pocket monsters more generally, children invariably coupled cuteness with other utilities, namely, strength; they also spoke less of static traits than of relations they formed with their fantasy beasts. Pokémon are imaginary partners, creatures that can be your loyal pet if you control them. They’re companions until the end, sort of like animals that are real except mutated. ten-year-old boy in Tokyo Pokémon are like creatures that are made up. The creators got ideas from nature, but they turned nature around. People care a lot for their pokémon, but they also use them to fight other pokémon. seven-year-old girl in the United States

A relation of both usefulness and intimacy lies at the heart of the cute fetish promoted by Pokémon. Serving as its icon, Pikachu is also the vehicle by which cuteness gets expanded into a more complex web of affective and utilitarian value through storytelling. In the more narrativized cartoons, movies, and comic books, this yellowy thunderbolt assumes a definite personality that, significantly, is built up mainly in terms of the bond it shares with a human. A ten-year-old boy aiming to be the ‘‘world’s best pokémon master,’’ Satoshi (Ash in the U.S. version) is the lead human character who travels Pokéworld in search of wild pocket monsters. Accompanying him in this mission are two pals—Kasumi (Misty in English), a ten-year-old girl, and Takeshi (Brock), a fifteen-year-old boy—and his best buddy pokémon, Pikachu. The boy and the monster first meet in the initial episode where, mimicking the structure of the game, Satoshi is given his lead-off pokémon by Dr. Oak (signaling his first acquisition and the start of the journey). Seeing a cute monster, the boy is initially disappointed, assuming that it will prove to be a weak tool for realizing his ambitions. But Pikachu surprises him, first with a display of indomitable will. Being ordered into the monster ball by which all pokémon are transported and digitalized for travel, Pikachu refuses. Forcing Satoshi to therefore carry it atop his shoulders (like a pet or young child), the monster acquires the badge of specialness. For, as the only 348

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pokémon to remain outside the ball in the cartoon—and therefore outside the currency of equivalence into which all the other pokémon are convertible—Pikachu never gets pocketed. Always appearing more monster than thing, it is forever visible and cute: the material sign of use value in what is (also) a generalizable medium, monsters that, like money, stand for and generate wealth. As Miranda Joseph has noted, the fact that value is an abstraction is what makes it appear mobile, dynamic, and able to change form. But value can do nothing without embodiment, which, paradoxically, both enables movement and weighs it down.58 Engaged in what Roland Barthes called a ‘‘constantly moving turnstile,’’ pokémon continually oscillate between meaning and form, full on the one side and empty on the other.59 In this, Pikachu serves as an alibi: the fleshy sign of use value in what is simultaneously a system of exchange. It is the boy’s property, possession, and tool, but it also emerges as something much more in the cartoon: a free agent, loyal pet, and personal friend. Such a deep(er) relationship starts in the very first episode of the cartoon. Having refused the monster ball, Pikachu is riding with Satoshi on his bicycle when the two are attacked by killer birds overhead. The boy is soon knocked unconscious and, going into warrior mode, Pikachu battles the birds on its own, thereby saving its master. Awakening seconds later, Satoshi is duly impressed by his pokémon’s bravery and skills. Then, in a trope recurrent in the series, the monster suffers an injury, and Satoshi risks his own life to ride his bicycle through the birds to deliver Pikachu to the Pokémon Center (where it can be healed). In this drama of reciprocity, gifts of kindness have been exchanged to establish a social relationship. This bond is referred to repeatedly as one of friendship in the text of the cartoon. To wit, in one memorable episode in which Satoshi is competing against the whiz kid at a cram school for Pokémon trainers, he refers to his monster as a friend (tomodachi ). Criticized for misrecognizing something as a buddy rather than a tool, Satoshi wins the match with Pikachu. Taking note, his competitor concedes that he has learned something new; treating one’s pokémon with kindness actually strengthens its fighting abilities. This message recurs throughout the cartoon series: humans must act not only as masters but also as trainers, tending kindly to their pokémon for reasons both moral (maintaining an interpersonal relationship) and practical (maximizing monster utility, and hence value). Again, the latter merge as pokémon are both relations and things, gifts and commodities. And within this mergence, there is something both feudalistically old-fashioned and new-age fetishes, monsters, and friends

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futuristically cyborgian. On the one hand, the monster-human bond resembles that between vassal and lord; the pokémon serve and sacrifice for their masters, and, in return, they are fed, tended to, and trained. On the other hand, monsters are commodities that fetishize both the power of personal accumulation and interpersonal intimacy, even kinship, between the human and the nonhuman. Monsters are a flexible, fluctuating, and interchangeable currency, shifting between means and end, capital and companion, property and pal. Oscillating between use and exchange value, value also fluctuates between a principal that is economic (‘‘getting,’’ which leads to mastery and wealth) and one far more communitarian and interpersonal, something we could, following Weber, call the spirit of (pokémon) capitalism. Cuteness thus gets expanded and rearticulated in the process of narrativization. Besides the hordes of cute monsters (all different yet similar) that appear on the screen, the game’s capitalistic logic of getting is also reimagined by an alternative worldview. In one episode, for example, the story starts as usual: the triumvirate arrives in a new place looking to discover and catch new monsters. The scene is a natural wonderland whose eco-balance has been recently disturbed by the invasion by one species of beetle into the habitat of another. Being asked by a worried naturalist to temporarily put aside their desire to get pokémon and help him restore order, the children selflessly set to work. In time, they discover the root of the problem and return the forest to ecological harmony. This task has proven time consuming, however, and the show is almost over. Preparing to leave without a single catch, Satoshi is approached by one of the saved beetles that apparently wants to join him. The boy orders it to return to its own kind, but the beetle persists. Shrugging his shoulders, Satoshi throws his monster ball and, on crawling inside, the beetle becomes, as the narrator announces, the boy’s latest acquisition (nakami, literally, ‘‘contents’’). So, the agenda of getting has not been displaced as much as contained within a loftier worldview. And, as a reward for his kindness, the boy receives another monster, one that will be part of his personal stock but that will represent a new breed of (transspeciated and flexible) kin relations. In this way nature collapses into capital (wildness into acquisitions) and capital into culture (a relation of things into interpersonal relations). Such a ploy occurs often in the cartoon. Touched by the altruism of humans, pokémon leave their ‘‘own kind’’ behind to join the human mission—a worldly journey to discover and pocket more monsters. Needless to say, this is a gentler method of acquisition than attacking wild monsters with balls or 350

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winning them in battle after they have been whiplashed, pummeled, or stung. It also reimagines the bond(age) formed. Having the monsters freely enter into a system that will reduce them to balls mimics the workings of capitalist ideology: people as supposedly free laborers willingly contract work for a wage (in an economic system built on exploitation and reification). Implicitly, the monsters making this choice exchange the wildness of natural habitats for something not only enticing—worldly travel, nomadic adventures—but also moral in the Maussian sense. Exchanging a gift (human kindness) for a gift (the monster itself ) results in a storehouse of goods, but also new-age intimacies and attachments. Speaking of the recent craze in not only Pokémon but also character/ cute goods more generally, an advertising executive describes the relationships formed as both kinlike and (inter)personal. Whether a Kitty-chan key chain, a Doraemon cellphone strap, or a Pikachu backpack, these commodity spirits constitute ‘‘shadow families’’—constant and reliable companions that disseminate ‘‘unconditional love’’ in these postindustrial times of nomadicism, orphanism, and stress. Someone else in the business, Riri Furanki, states this more succinctly: ‘‘Parents die, but characters remain forever.’’ 60

Conclusion As Benjamin noted about modernity and the burgeoning of industrial capitalism, emerging technologies tend to get encased in preexisting mythologies.61 In the case of Pokémon, what is a portable game system suturing commodity fetishism to prosthetic virtuality gets mythologized as the spirit of Japan’s past. Or, more accurately, it is the blending of the two—of postmodern consumer goods and premodern spirituality—that bespeaks a mythic future for Japan as a global trendsetter of ‘‘techno cute’’ in the millennial era. This constitutes a new role for a country that, known best in the postwar years as a producer of hard technology (televisions, vcrs, and automobiles, rather than the soft technology of hit movies, popular literature, and music stars), has had little stature in global culture. Recently, however, and particularly since the early 1990s, so-called cultural exports have vastly increased. And no more so than in the domain of children’s entertainment, with the cartoons, comics, video games, and character goods flowing heavily and visibly into such ranks as the Oscars and Saturday morning television in the United States. Spreading as well is a particular quality coming to be regarded on the global marketplace as quintessentially Japanese these days, new-age fetishes, monsters, and friends

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something maybe best called commodity cuteness or spirited capitalism (after the movie Spirited Away, itself a tale of millennial capitalism encased in the mythology of Japanese spirits).62 In this capacity as the producer of intimate play goods, Japan is navigating a new position for itself in the global arena of the imagination—a position, called ‘‘soft power’’ by Joseph Nye, that constitutes an increasingly important component of the economy in this era of addictive capitalism.63 Having hitherto lacked this power, Japan pins a national(ist) hope to such properties as Pokémon: along with generating much-needed revenues, they are also supposed to yield global stature and prestige for Japan. Indeed, such a fantasy has been enscripted into the play world of Pokémon itself. And, tellingly, the form this takes is that of a myth. Published by the consortium of companies owning Pokémon; the Poketto monstā zukan [Illustrated picture book of pocket monsters] is one of myriad guidebooks filled with gaming strategies, monster data, and general background. Serving to introduce both the volume and the game world is a mythic tale about the scientific pursuit of Pokémon studies. It goes as follows: All evidence shows that pokémon made their earthly appearance about 2 million years ago. They were first studied by a French count in the eighteenth century whose work soon spread to other European countries. Pokemongaku was late in coming to ‘‘our country’’ (waga kuni ), however. But when it did, a Japanese scientist made the important discovery in 1899 that pokémon evolve into other forms. This greatly advanced the science of pocket monsters and since the publication of his thesis entitled ‘‘Reflections on Pikachu’s Evolution’’, Japan has become a ‘‘leading country’’ (senshinkoku) in pokémon research. Today another Japanese scientist is at the forefront of this field: Professor Oak, professor of portable beasts at the Scarab Beetle University. Thanks largely to him, the world now knows of 150 species of pokémon and young pokémon trainers are urged to continue his investigations.64 Introducing what is a children’s directory to a virtual game world is this origin myth in which the real place of Japan figures alongside imaginary pokémon. Linking the two is the fact of evolution; pokémon naturally evolve, as did Japan itself, into an ‘‘advanced country’’ within a science that originated in the West. A parable about national identity, the story reflects Japan’s modernization at the end of the nineteenth century when, entering the global terrain of industrial capitalism, it struggled to compete in a world dominated by Euro-American power, capital, and chauvinism. The status of senshinkoku marks parity with Western countries. But, in the mythical field of pokemongaku, Japan also excels, having taken over the world as special352

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ists of portable beasts in the contemporary era of mobile capital and citizens. Today’s world is one of virtual frontiers in which Japanese experts like Professor Oak are discovering ever more species of an imaginary life-form that can be endlessly (re)produced for the consumption and entertainment of global kids. Fusing capitalism with the imagination, and cultural identity with international stature, the myth bespeaks a national fantasy about Japan’s preeminence in the millennial era as the real producer of imaginary playmates. The Poketto monstā zukan is hardly alone in attributing mythic status to Japan for its commercial success with Pokémon and other children’s properties. This is also the conclusion, for example, of a book examining the Pokémon business put out by Tōyō Keizai Shinchōsha. Here, Japan is similarly proclaimed a seishinkoku that, having lagged behind Disney for half a century in the field of character production, has finally surpassed the U.S. company. This has long been a national dream, the book states. And with the recent waves of video games and television programs that sell well overseas, Japan’s domestic production of characters (kokusan kyarakutā) has finally outmatched that of Europe and the United States, making it ‘‘an advanced character country’’ (kyarakutā senshinkoku).65 Another book goes even further, labeling Japan a ‘‘character empire’’ and noting that no country in the world has become as thoroughly inundated with character fetishism— both economically and culturally—as has Japan today. Intended as primarily praise, this volume on Japan’s character business observes how characters like pocket monsters have become the totems, protectors (omamori ), and utility symbols for citizens of today’s high-growth, consumer, and information society.66 Characters serve as the ‘‘lifeline of human relationships’’ in millennial Japan, the authors conclude. Yet another book (an anthology entitled The Reasons Why 87 Percent of Japanese Like Characters) links the hugeness of the Japanese character market and its sensational sales overseas to the ‘‘unease’’ ( fuan) of contemporary times. Pressured by bullying, academic hurdles, and economic instability, children find relief in characters that offer them a love at once absolute and personal (‘‘they love you alone’’).67 A psychiatrist calls this the ‘‘character therapy age,’’ where characters relieve stress and also reflect the ‘‘inner self.’’ 68 Chronicling the history of character trends in postwar Japan, the present is characterized as an era in which contemporary citizens ‘‘communicate’’ with character commodities. This constitutes the ‘‘route’’ for relating to friends, and communication itself has become the object of character consumption. Speaking of Sony’s robotic dog, aibo, the book connew-age fetishes, monsters, and friends

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cludes that such intimate play goods serve as friends and that these friends assume the roles of pets.69 This, of course, is the myth of Pokémon as its inventor reportedly intended it. In this dataized environment of monsters that players trap inside balls lies the transmission of what has been called a cultural tradition: a spiritual sensitivity fostering communication with nature, humans, and ghosts. And in this mythic play world so healing of postindustrial unease lie the seeds of Japan’s future: the production of virtual pets that, in cultivating foreign markets, push global ‘‘friendship’’ toward Japanese products.70 Where, we might ask, is the border between the virtual and the real in this mythology of the millennium? And what will be the future—for Japan and the global marketplace of commodified intimacies—in the era beyond pokémon capitalism? Notes 1 Unless otherwise noted, all translations are mine. 2 This figure was given me by Kubo Masakazu, the executive producer in the char-

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acter business planning section of Shogakukan, the publishers of Korokoro Kommi’kku. Kubo has been one of the most important figures in the Pokémon business in Japan. Masterminding the original comic book version, he has also been one of the main producers for the cartoon and movie series. Yamato Michikazu, ‘‘Kūzen no shakai genshō ‘Pokémon’ chō hitto no nazo’’ [The riddle of the superhit Pokémon that is the unprecedented social phenomenon], Gendai, January 1998, 247. Nintendo, Nintendo jiseidaiki happyō [Announcement about the next generation machines at Nintendo] (Kyoto, 1999), 12. Hatakeyama Kenji and Kubo Masakazu, Pokémon sutōri [Pokémon story], (Tokyo, 2000), 75–76. Nintendo, Nintendo jisedaiki happyō, 13. Takeda Yoshi, ‘‘Mienai kazoku, part 3: Ko to shūdan o yurageru infura o’’ [The family that can’t be seen, part 3: Shaking up the space between the individual and the group], Nikkei Dezain (February 1998): 38. Shimamoto Tatushi, interview by the author, March 2000. Hakuhōdō Seikatasu Sōgō Kenkyūjo, Seikatsu shinbun: kodomo no seikatsu—shōshika jidai no amenbo kizzu (Newspaper of daily life: childrens’ lives—the ‘‘water spider kind’’ in the era of decreasing youth), (Tokyo, 1997). Nintendo, Nintendo jiseidaiki happyō, 12. Hiratsuka Akihito, ‘‘Shūchū rensai dokyumento Tajiri Satoshi’’ [Serialized concentrated interview with Tajiri Satoshi] Antore, June 1997, 168–70. Nintendo, Nintendo jisedaiki happyō, 12. Nakazawa Shin’ichi, Poketto no naka no yasei [Wildness in the pocket] (Tokyo, 1998), 22.

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14 Nakanishi Shintarō, ‘‘Pokémon būmu to Pokémon shokku’’ [The Pokémon boom

15 16 17 18 19

20 21

22 23 24 25

26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36

and the Pokémon shock],’’ in Kodomo hakusho [Children’s encyclopedia] (Tokyo, 1998), 295. The information here is taken from diverse interviews with Japanese children conducted in November 1999. Kubo and Hatakeyama, Pokémon sutōri, 106–7. Sandy Stone, ‘‘Split Subjects, Not Atoms; or, How I Fell in Love with My Prosthesis,’’ in The Cyborg Handbook, ed. Chris Hables Gray (New York, 1995), 396. Margaret Mead, Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies (New York, 1963). Donna Haraway, ‘‘A Cyborg Manifesto; Science, Technology, and SocialistFeminism in the Late Twentieth Century,’’ in Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: the Reinvention of Nature (New York, 1991). Kubo Masakazu, interview by the author, December 1999. Fredric Jameson, ‘‘Utopia and Actually Existing Being,’’ paper presented at ‘‘The Future of Utopia: Is Innovation Still Possible in Politics, Culture, and Theory?’’ conference, Duke University, Durham, NC, April 24, 2003. Ōhira Ken, Yutakasa no seishinbyōri [The pathology of abundance] (Tokyo, 1998). Marcel Mauss, The Gift: Forms and Functions of Exchange in Archaic Societies, trans. Ian Cunnison (New York, 1967). Marilyn Ivy, Discourses of the Vanishing: Modernity, Phantasm, Japan (Chicago, 1995). Bronislaw Malinowski, in his classical study of the Trobriand Islands, wrote of the local economy as grounded in two chains of goods that circulated in opposite directions (the kula ring). In one of these, the goods were exchanged as a marker of relationality and prestige. Bronislaw Malinowski, Argonauts of the Western Pacific; An Account of Native Enterprise and Adventures in the Archipelagoes of Melanesian New Guinea (Prospect Heights, IL, 1984). Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Talcott Parson (New York, 1958), 181. Ruth Benedict, The Chrysanthemum and the Sword: Patterns of Japanese Culture (Boston, 1946), 1–4. Takanarita Tōru, ‘‘Pokémon kado wa shakai genshō’’ [Pokémon cards are a social phenomenon], Asahi Shinbun, October 29, 1999. Watanbe Naomi, ‘‘Kodomotachi ga Pokémon ni motomerumono’’ [What children seek in Pokémon],’’ Kodomo purasu [Children plus], no. 2 (1999): 74. Ibid., 72. Yamamoto, ‘‘Kūzen no shakai genshō ‘Pokémon,’ ’’ 249. Hatakeyama and Kabo, Pokémon sutōri, 136. Nakazawa, Poketto, 95. Nintendo, Nintendo jisedaiki happyō, 25. Nakazawa, Poketto, 93–94. Shiokura Yutaka, Hikikomoru wakamonotachi [Youth who stay indoors] (Tokyo, 1999).

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37 Hiratsuka, ‘‘Shūchū rensai dokyumento Tajiri Satoshi,’’ 209. 38 Gō Takeshi, Pokémon wa kodomo no tekika mikataka? [Are pokémon an ally or an

enemy of children?] (Tokyo, 1998), 134. 39 Ibid., 137. 40 Ibid., 142. 41 Ibid., 150. 42 Claude Levi-Strauss, The Savage Mind (Chicago, 1962). 43 Nakazawa Shin’ichi, interview by the author, March 2000. 44 Nakazawa, Poketto, 160. 45 Ibid., 90. 46 Nakazawa, interview by the author, March 2000. 47 Nikkei Entertainment, ‘‘Shin hitto no shingenchi Pokekuro sedai’’ [The Pokémon

generation, the source of the new hit], January 1998, 49. 48 Kubo, interview by the author, December 1999. 49 Yamamoto, ‘‘Kūzen no shakai Genshō ‘Pokémon,’ ’’ 244. 50 ‘‘Nihon anime kaigai ni eikyōryoku’’ [The influence of Japanese animation over-

seas], Nihon Keizai Shinbun, December 1, 1999. 51 Ibid. 52 Frank Rose, ‘‘Pocket Monster: How DoCoMo’s Wireless Internet Service Went

53 54 55

56 57 58

59 60

61 62 63 64

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from Fad to Phenomenon and Turned Japan into the First Post-pc Nation,’’ Wired, May 2002, 129. Ibid. Gō, 1998. Interviews conducted in fall 1999 and spring 2000 in Tokyo with: Kubo Masakazu at Shōgakukan Inc., Fujita Akira, and Ogawa Takeshi at ShoPro (Shōgakukan Production), Yamagawa Kunio and Iwata Keisuke at tv Terebi, and Kamio Shunji, Sano Shinji, Kanda Shuichi, and Kima Kaori at Tomy Company, Ltd. Kubo Masakazu, ‘‘Sekai o haikaisuru wasei monsuta ‘Pikachū’ ’’ [Capturing the world with the Japanese manufactured monster ‘Pikachu’], (Tokyo, 1999): 344. Kubo, interview with the author, December 1999. Miranda Joseph, ‘‘Family Affairs: The Discourse of Global/Localization,’’ in Queer Globalizations: Citizenship and the Afterlife of Colonialism, ed. Arnaldo CruzMalave and Martin F. Manalansan IV (New York, 2002), 82. Roland Barthes, Mythologies, trans. Annette Lavers (New York, 1972), 123. Riri Furanki quoted in ‘‘Aoyama dezainkai daikyūkai: ‘Kyarakutā no komyunikēshon pawā’’ [The ninth meeting of the Aoyama Association: ‘Character communication’], Būren [Brain] 40, no. 3 (2000): 15. Susan Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project (Cambridge, MA, 1997), 110. Sen to Chihiro no Kamikakushi (Spirited Away in English) was directed by Miyazaki Hayao and released in 2001. Joseph S. Nye Jr., Soft Power: The Means to Success in World Politics (Cambridge, MA, 2004). Asupekuto, Poketto monstā zukan [Illustrated picture book of pocket monsters] (Tokyo, 1996), 8.

anne allison

65 Tōyō Keizai Shinchōsha, ‘‘Pokémon no seikō hōsoku’’ [Pokémon’s principles of

success] (Tokyo, 2001), 236. 66 Hashino Katsume and Miyashita Makoto, Kyarakutā bijinesu [The character busi-

ness] (Tokyo, 2001), 4. 67 Aoyama Rika and Bandai Kyrakuta Kenkyūjo, 87% no Nihonjin ga Kyarakutā o su-

kina riyū [The reasons why 87% of Japanese like characters] (Tokyo, 2001), 17. 68 Ibid., 12–13. 69 Ibid., 194. 70 Hamano Yasuki, ‘‘Pokémon haken no imi’’ [The meaning of Pokémon’s suprem-

acy], Mainichi Shinbun, November 29, 1999.

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Otaku Movement

Thomas LaMarre To begin with, what is this agent, this force which ensures communication? Gilles Deleuze

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n his discussion of the transnational movement of Pokémon, Joseph Tobin signals that official networks, that is, corporate-planned and corporate-directed processes of glocalization, were only part of its success.1 He mentions the importance of ‘‘unofficial consumption networks— ‘‘just months after the television series was first aired in Japan, pirated versions were being sold and otherwise exchanged hand to hand, by mail, and over the Internet by anime otaku (Japanese animation fans) in various locations outside Japan.’’ 2 In other accounts of the diffusion of Japanese animation, one finds reference to unofficial networks and pirate editions that come prior to the corporate regulation of markets, as well as product distribution and profits. In her discussion of the development of a market for Doraemon in Southeast Asia, Saya Shiraishi writes of corporations’ tolerance vis-à-vis pirate translations and editions of manga and anime, which they feel pave the way for the sale of official versions.3 It is as if the official global markets for Japanese animation had a ‘‘dark precursor.’’ 4 Another movement of manga and anime products, associated with the activity of so-called otaku, seems to precede the corporate regulation, standardization, and homogenization of the market. On the one hand, this otaku movement of anime images seems to spur or facilitate the emergence of official markets. Tobin argues, for instance, that ‘‘these informal and in some instances illegal routes of introducing Pokémon and other

Japanese cultural products abroad did more to facilitate than to interfere with Nintendo’s global marketing mission.’’ 5 Yet, on the other hand, otaku seem to remain somehow autonomous of the official markets and corporate regulation. Tobin also suggests that ‘‘otaku are too loyal and too satisfied to suit the pace of contemporary capitalist corporations that depend on consumer restlessness, boredom, and disappointment.’’ 6 Oddly, otaku activities seem both to expedite and to slow corporate-controlled movement of anime around the world. They provide the (dimensionless) point at which global markets coalesce and disperse, where they accelerate, gaining or losing speed. Otaku movement comes before official networks, yet the official networks do not subsume it. Even if the official networks leave otaku activities behind them, the latter persist in their own particular ways. The relation between otaku movement and corporate markets is not one of mutual reciprocity. While the two seem always to occur in conjunction, the one does not simply reflect the other. In this respect, the relation between otaku and corporations recalls the distinction that Antonio Negri makes between constituent power and constitutive (or constituted) power, first in his book on Spinoza and more recently in Insurgencies.7 Constitutive power entails centralized forces of command that come from above, that are imposed on a community, constituting established forms of social, political, and economic power. Constituent power, on the contrary, is immanent to a community, insofar as it is always present within and exercised by a community. Yet constituent power plays a sort of double role for Negri. Constitutive power cannot operate without constituent power (indeed constituent power maintains the very being of constitutive power), yet it can never entirely harness or exhaust constituent power. To use Timothy Rayner’s turn of phrase, ‘‘Negri presents constituent power as the distributed collective force of desire that drives ontological emergence and social innovation.’’ 8 Not surprisingly, Negri’s politics explore the possibility for a withdrawal or exodus of constituent power, which would thus drain constitutive powers of life.9 Now, otaku activities are much like Negri’s constituent power insofar as they underpin the transnational movement of anime and extend the reach of corporate power, yet their force of innovation resists codification, always escaping the very homogenization and standardization that it enables. While otaku are usually imagined as a community (with an emphasis on geeky young men), it is impossible to define this community strictly; it is ever in motion, its boundaries changeable. Otaku activities are more like a distributed collective force of desire than an established, definable commuotaku movement

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nity. Moreover, as a localized immanent force of constitution that entails a great of deal of work, otaku activities recall Negri’s ideas about a constituent power at the heart of labor. For Negri, prior to capital’s abstract quantification and rationalization of labour, there is living labour with ontological force. ‘‘Labor power is both heteronomous and autonomous, object and subject; it is made (as labor), but it makes (as power).’’ 10 Capital must harness the power of labor to achieve its ends but can never control it entirely. Something of labor’s power always exceeds of the grasp of abstract labour. Negri thus encourages us to think about labor in terms of a constituent power of pure or radical immanence, as an uncontainable power, infinitely protean and continually creative.11 I will argue in this essay that it makes sense to think of otaku activities in terms of labor (rather than a bounded culture, psychology, or identity), and while I do not remain entirely faithful to the terms of Negri (or of Hardt and Negri), the idea of a constituent power at the heart of otaku ‘fan work’ allows for a critical analysis of some of the theories and representations of otaku in Japan. Interestingly enough, discussions of anime and otaku in Japan in the 1990s began to emphasize something like pure immanence, precisely at the time when anime became quite prominent in the global market. Attracted to the commercial ascent of anime, commentators started to write of the powers of anime and otaku, with an emphasis on the ways in which these broke with prior modes of organization, production, reception, and distribution—socially, historically, and aesthetically. Anime and otaku became indicators of something radically new and different, and many commentators gravitated to explanations that evoked something like pure immanence. In many ways, speculations about Super Flat art—especially those of the artist Murakami Takashi and the theorist Azuma Hiroki—provided the definitive statement about radical immanence in the context of the anime image. Super Flat art objects and theories presented the possibility of a visual field devoid of perspective and devoid of hierarchy, in which all exists equally and simultaneously. But Super Flat was not alone. It built on other discussions of anime and otaku—such as those of Okada Toshio, the founder of one of the premier animation studios of the 1990s, Gainax Studios; and on the stylistic approaches to anime and otaku appearing in Gainax’s anime series, especially those of Anno Hideaki. What interests me about Gainax, Super Flat, and the discussions of anime and otaku associated with them is their tendency to look at anime and otaku in terms of something like constituent power. Across these anime series, 360

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art objects, and cultural criticism and aesthetic theories, I see an approach to anime that consistently emphasizes the effects of pure immanence— as if anime and otaku had broken with all prior formations and organization (of vision, knowledge, and community), bringing viewers closer to a pure experience of the postmodern era. Yet for all their theoretical ambition and conceptual insights, these discussions stop short of a theory of immanence or a theory of anime. Rather, they tend toward the formation of a discourse on anime—a discourse on the powers of anime, which evokes them in terms of pure immanence. In this respect, this discourse on anime and otaku is more a symptom of the postmodern or the information age than a critical intervention. Nonetheless, this discourse strikes me as exceedingly important in assessing what truly is new and different about anime and otaku, which opens possibilities for thinking about them critically. It may not offer a critical theory of immanence for anime and otaku, but it points in that direction. Consequently, in this essay, I will on the one hand call attention to the ways in which these discussions of anime and otaku undermine their own bid for immanence (or constituent power). I will show how these discussions tend toward a discourse that establishes anime as an object and otaku as an identity—and these new objects and identities do not so much break with prior discursive formations and identities as displace and reinscribe them. The discourse on constituent power becomes a constitutive power, as it were. On the other hand, I will try to stick as close to this discourse as possible, in an attempt to locate those moments where the bid for pure immanence does open new ways of thinking critically, of theorizing otaku movement. In effect, then, this essays traces two tendencies in what I will call the Gainax discourse—its tendency to reproduce or reinscribe the same old identities (especially those of Man and Japan), and its tendency to refuse or challenge all received identities and objects in its drive toward immanence. The Gainax discourse does not offer any ultimate resolution or reconciliation between these two tendencies. Nor does this essay. Rather, I here strive to open this contradiction from within. My aim is to make possible the imagination of some truly new form of (historical) movement, beyond the dialectical image offered by the Gainax discourse. By introducing the problem of labor power at the outset, I hope to indicate one important direction for thinking beyond the bounds of this tentative exploration. If one follows Hardt and Negri, labor power involves a double movement, offering something to be controlled or made into labor, and promising something that creatively remains autonomous and escapes otaku movement

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constitutive powers. Needless to say, looking at things with an eye to their openings and possibilities for escape is very different ethically and politically from seeing how everything is captured, how it inevitably fails (for material and historical reasons). The Gainax discourse, as I will discuss below, pays scant attention to constitutive powers. When questions about history or power arise, it sets up the West and modernity in a manner so monolithic as to disable such questions. Unfortunately, because it glosses over the problem of constitutive power, the Gainax discourse always risks mistaking capture for liberation by confusing constitutive powers with constituent powers. This is a pronounced risk in the context of both otaku and anime because the work associated with them hovers between communicative labor and what Mario Tronti calls a ‘‘strategy of refusal.’’ 12 On the one hand, with their emphasis on other kinds of networks mediated through new technologies, otaku activities seem to refuse received ways of organizing and quantifying labor power. In fact, otaku activities are exceedingly difficult to discuss sociologically and quantitatively. It is easier to track corporate strategies and markets. Otaku movement is very difficult to define and discuss because its boundaries are fluid and porous. Apparently, it occurs everywhere there is anime, but how does one draw the line between anime viewers and otaku? The difference between an anime viewer and an anime otaku is one of intensity and duration—a level of interest, a degree of engagement, or a quality of passion. Such differences resist quantification. In this respect, the work done by otaku cannot ever be thoroughly mastered, commercially or intellectually. Markets and corporate strategies may capitalize on otaku movement, but, as Tobin’s remarks suggest, they cannot predict or rely on it. It is in this respect that otaku movement recalls Tronti’s strategy of refusal: the nonquantifiable work of otaku poses a challenge to received organizations of labor. When faced with their inability to direct or harness otaku movement, corporations call it theft or piracy. On the other hand, the kinds of work associated with otaku seem already subject to constitutive power in the workplace. Collecting, exchanging, and translating manga and anime, which commonly entails downloading, posting, and converting files—are not these sorts of activities already codified in the workplace as a form of communicative labor? In this respect, otaku movement appears as part of a general postmodernization of society, as part of those transformations in the labor process that have been discussed in such terms as post-Fordism, flexible accumulation, or cultural economy. 362

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‘‘Essentially,’’ to quote John Kraniauskas, such changes in processes of production ‘‘involve the technological harnessing of the superstructure by the economic base, a ‘cultural turn’ in production putting entertainment, the symbols and electronic syntax of the information highways, social knowledges and affect to work.’’ 13 In sum, the so-called unofficial work associated with otaku hovers between strategies of work refusal and the postmodern harnessing of communicative labor. Otaku movement arises with the historical transformation of processes of production and labor, and maybe serves as a site of articulation between economies. Otaku movement, as unofficial work, is at once labor and not labor. This essay does not deal primarily with the exploitation or domination of labor, however. It deals more with the forms of power that Michel Foucault identified some years ago as crucial to modernity—subjection, that is, the formation of subjects.14 Of course, one of the tenets of the Gainax discourse on anime and otaku is that today in postmodern Japan, there is nothing like the modern subject, and maybe there is no subjection at all. I agree that there are very good reasons for trying to think beyond the modern subject. Yet for all its disenchantment with the modern subject, the Gainax discourse commonly evokes it as a point of reference whenever it feels necessary to historicize its position. More important, the Gainax discourse flirts with structures of knowledge and fantasy that seem effectively modernist in their play on the modern subject. If the goal is to think the powers of anime and otaku beyond the modern subject rather than lay claim to a simplistic overcoming of modernity, it is imperative to look at how the bid for pure immanence tends toward a discursive formation, and how it might open beyond.

The Gainax Discourse Certain statements about anime in Japan show a surprising degree of regularity. I have already suggested that the works of Okada Toshio, the founder of Gainax Studios and a promoter of otaku culture, constitute one site of formation of a discourse on anime and otaku, together with the works of Gainax, especially the animated series and films of Anno Hideaki. The success of Gainax began with an animated film Ooritsu ūchūgun Oneamise no tsubasa [Wings of Honneamise, 1987], followed by two series directed by Anno, Toppu wo nerae! [Gunbuster, 1988] and Fushigi na umi no Nadia [Nadia: The secret of blue waters, 1990]. These anime prepared the way for Otaku no video, a two-part Original Video Animation (ova). This mockumentary of otaku movement

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otaku and the foundation of Gainax Studios will be discussed in greater detail subsequently, as will the series often deemed the culmination of Gainax’s success: Anno’s Shin seiki Evangerion [Neon Genesis Evangelion, 1995]. Somewhat idiosyncratically, but for reasons that I hope to make clear, I also include in the Gainax discourse the Super Flat concept of the artist Murakami Takashi and the discussions of the cultural theorist Azuma Hiroki. Azuma’s major publications begin with a rethinking of Jacques Derrida in relation to Japanese popular culture: Sonzaiteki, yubinteki: Jacques Derrida ni tsuite [Ontological, postal: On Jacques Derrida, 1998]. Azuma further established the basis for his thinking about anime and otaku in Fukashina mono no sekai [The world of the overvisualized, 2000] and Dōubutsuka suru posutomodan: Otaku kara mita Nihon shakai [The animalizing postmodern: Japanese society from the perspective of otaku, 2001]. His contribution to the catalog for Murakami’s Super Flat exhibition makes important connections between Murakami’s art and his theories. Despite some obvious differences in emphasis, Murakami and Azuma show a common understanding of what anime is and how it works—much of it consonant with Okada and Gainax, and sometimes clearly derivative from them. Generally, the theoretical emphasis of Azuma’s work draws out many of the implications of what I call the Gainax discourse. The regularity of such statements about anime and otaku is such that one might even speak of a discourse on anime in the Foucauldian sense, insofar as such statements do seem to imply some relation to the institutional regulation of anime entertainment.15 My goal, however, is not to trace the origins of the Gainax discourse on anime and otaku. Nor is a full treatment of the ways in which these discussions connect to other discourses in Japan within the scope of this paper. What interests me about these different discussions of anime is the emergence of a common sense of how the anime image works, particularly in relation to the formation of a specific kind of cult fan, the otaku. Central to this discourse is the identification of a distributive visual function, a sort of constituent power of anime as a visual field. But let me begin by sketching some ideas about anime common to Azuma, Murakami, Okada, and Anno. First, these discussions share a sense of the genealogy of anime. They try to define anime in a narrower sense, locating its origins in the Japanese styles of limited animation first evidenced in Tezuka Osamu’s Tetsuwan atomu [Astro boy, 1962], an adaptation of his manga series to television. It is only in the late 1970s and early 1980s, however, that various transforma364

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tions of the limited animation style establish the distinctive look and feel of anime with such television series as Uchū senkan Yamato [Space battleship Yamato, 1974], Ginga tetsudō 999 [Galaxy Express 999, 1979], Kidō senshi Gandamu [Mobiles Suit Gundan, 1979], and Chōjiku Yōsai Macross [Superdimensional Fortress Macross, 1982], as well as the appearance of fan magazines such as Animage. This is the basic sketch that Murakami gives in the catalog for his Super Flat exhibition in order to define the distinctive anime aesthetic that informs his work.16 Naturally, there are all manner of other fan activities and series that might be associated with anime. Yet this basic historical lineage proves central to the Gainax discourse. It also appears in much the same form in Okada’s books and in Gainax’s Otaku no video, which I will discuss below. Not surprisingly, these different commentators see the great commercial success of Anno’s Neon Genesis Evangelion as the culmination (and guarantee) of this lineage. It should be noted in passing that this genealogy for anime stresses maleoriented series and activities. Although some attention falls on the work of female manga artists, their work figures largely as a source of images of cute and potent girls.17 In addition, this genealogy studiously avoids historical questions. While it establishes a historical lineage for anime, the problem of how one organizes a history receives no attention. Azuma simply opts out of such questions. He aligns anime with the postmodern and the posthistorical. Anime is beyond, outside, or after history. Similarly, these discussions of anime tend to avoid narrative analysis, insisting the fans relate above all to the anime image, not anime stories.18 In other words, along with the end of history, there is a sense of the end of narrative. Indeed, in The Animalizing Postmodern, Azuma introduces a general opposition between narrative and database structures. Apparently, the Gainax discourse feels it necessary to eschew history and narrative because it conflates history with grand teleological narratives of modernity. Ironically, however, when these commentators make historical statements, they refer largely to the progressive emergence of new technologies—from television to vcr to computer. History returns as media history, but in its grandest form: linear evolution. It is for such reasons that I see these discussions more as discourse than theory. Their theoretical paradigms appear less to address fundamental questions than to define a historical moment, promote a set of objects, or establish an identity. Nonetheless, this discourse identifies something of theoretical interest—a distributive function at the heart of anime aesthetics and otaku culture, which functions as a constituent power. This distributive function is defined primarily in visual or aesthetic terms. otaku movement

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This, then, makes for the second commonality: these commentators have a common sense of the operations of the anime image, of anime aesthetics. Crucial here is an alleged transformation in vision that also transforms how viewers interact with or relate to anime objects. In his Otakugaku nyūmon [Introduction to otakuology, 1996], for instance, Okada draws attention to the overly attentive, almost obsessive viewing practices of fans in the early 1980s. As they compulsively replayed videos of such favorite series as Macross, they began to perceive differences in animation styles within and between episodes. The result was a new attention to what might be considered flaws, inconsistencies, or trivial details by other viewers. For the otaku, however, these apparently insignificant details become part of the viewing experience, making the experience of viewing akin to scanning for information, rather than to reading a story (whence perhaps Azuma’s thoughts about of the end of narrative structures and the rise of database structures). In effect, what was peripheral becomes central; or rather, there is a breakdown in the visual ordering of central and peripheral that results in a nonhierarchized visual field of information. Azuma identifies something analogous with his concepts of an overvisualized world or database structure. In their attention to the dense, nonhierarchized visual space, Okada and Azuma discover (and invent) what might be called a distributive function, much like that evoked in theories of emergent properties. Theories of emergence look at the emergence of patterns from a simple, almost minimal network of elements interconnected in a distributive fashion, based on the self-organizing capacities implicit in the system.19 While there is no unified formal theory of emergent properties, observation and experimentation suggest that it is difficult for any densely connected aggregate to escape emergent properties. Internal coherences arise that are not predictable on the basis of the elements. What happens is a function of what all the components are doing; yet the global coherence does not resemble the elements. A pattern emerges. One might also think of this selforganizing capacity in terms of constituent power: it is possible to quantify, organize, or otherwise work with patterns, but there is a heteronomous and autonomous power that eludes, exceeds, or escapes rationalization. This is also a cooperative system insofar as all the elements interact at once locally and globally. The Gainax discourse imagines something analogous in the space of the anime image. The emphasis on the dense, nonhierarchized visual space of the anime image is precisely an attempt to imagine a space of distributive interconnections from which emerges a pattern or patterns. Yet the pattern 366

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is not predictable on the basis of the elements. It is in its discussions of the otaku that the Gainax discourse introduces something like the cooperative system. In other words, the distributive function implicit in the idea of a nonhierarchized visual field does not only allow for emergent visual coherence. It also suggests a cooperative system, which is the third shared concern of this discourse. Third then, related to this breakdown of visual hierarchies, is a sense of a breakdown of the hierarchy of producers. In his superflat lineage of (primarily) Japanese art, for instance, Murakami singles out scenes from Ginga tetsudō 999 (the movies) by animator/designer Kanada Yoshinori.20 He thus calls attention to art production that might seem peripheral or marginal to the import of the series. But there are no peripheral producers in this nonhierarchized visual field. The Gainax discourse insists on the fact that true anime viewers (otaku) devote as much attention to the work of character designers and animators as to directors, producers, or writers. Okada argues, for instance, that anime series are the work of many different creators, so that no single story emerges. This follows from Okada’s discussion of the fan’s attention to inconsistencies as a new aesthetic and new form of reception—what might appear as stylistic inconsistency to non-otaku viewers appears to the otaku as a dense aggregate of the works of a series of artists or producers, from which emerges a cooperative system. In brief, production is as distributive as vision. Fourth, this distributive breakdown in production hierarchies extends to the relation between fans and producers. Producers are, above all, fans; and fans are budding producers. Even if fans do not actually form animation studios, as did the Gainax founders, they are so active in consumption that consumption becomes akin to production, as if fans had become coproducers or cooperators. This cooperative system seems to emerge unpredictably as the result of the internal coherence arising from the dense packing of information elements. Consequently, the otaku cooperator works in an extended field of activity that is more like a theater of operations than a site of production. But what kind of cooperation is this? The discourse on anime tends to characterize the fan’s reception as an ineluctable and obsessive cooperation with the anime world. Is it possible to think about difference, distance, or conflict within this discourse? Or does it merely reinvent the old ideologies of Japan as a harmonious, cooperative society, that is, Japan Inc.? To address such questions, one confronts the problem of the subject, which is a fifth topic on which these different commentators tend to agree. Basically, they all see a radical break with definable subject positions. The otaku movement

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distributive function of the anime visually entails a nonperspectival field that prevents the formation of viewing positions and therefore forecloses a manageable or controlled relation to the visual field. In other words, the distributive visual field involves a breakdown in perceptual distance, which results in a purely affective relation to the image.21 Anime breaks out of its television frame, and the distance between viewer and image collapses into a moment of affect. Characteristically, it breaks its frame into an expanded immersive anime world centered on anime figures—in the form of ‘‘cosplay’’ (costume play, that is, dressing as anime characters) or model kits of anime characters that fans can mould or assemble themselves, with personal touches. Morikawa Kaiichirō suggests that the anime first colonizes personal space. The bedroom or the studio apartment becomes a shrine to certain anime series and characters. Then the private room begins to permeate the city with its tastes or shumi. The result is the ‘‘personapolis,’’ which continues to break down prior spatial and urban hierarchies, making the cityscape into a visual field of unprecedented density.22 In other words, the entire city becomes a distributive field of visual information, and the end of definable subject positions results in a mass subject based on what appears to be ‘‘massist’’ aesthetics. In sum, what I call the Gainax discourse discovers a distributive function at work in the anime image, which it uses to speak of the end of all manner of received hierarchies or organizations such as historical relations, organizations of labor in anime production, and producer-consumer hierarchies. Somewhat predictably, with its passively passionate male fans and potent girl images, it remains perplexed and ambivalent about sexual hierarchies. The Gainax discourse does not announce the end of heterosexuality. Its does, however, insist on its perversion. I will return to this, for it is in perversion that a historical relation appears, in fantastical form. Suffice it to say at this juncture that the Gainax discourse evokes the distributive visual field of anime to make claims for the end of all hierarchies—those of history, of modernity, and of the subject. Its discovery of a nonhierarchized visual field implies a theory of emergence. But in the absence of a theorization of emergence, this discourse sees a cooperative system, which becomes a space without conflict or difference. Thus the Gainax discourse verges on a fascist ideology of massist (non)organization. Insofar as it limits its claims to a subculture (otaku), however, it is more like what Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari call ‘‘microfascism.’’ 23 Consequently, the otaku difference becomes crucial. Are these otaku truly a subculture, or do they constitute the

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mainstream? For it is only insofar as otaku differ from the mainstream or from Japan that one can detect in the Gainax discourse a movement of difference within Japan. Otherwise, the discourse on anime simply becomes a discourse on the nation, and the Gainax discourse might inspire an especially potent brand of nationalism. This is surely why the Gainax discourse not only evokes the subculture status of otaku but also insists on the detachment of the otaku—his distance and thus his difference from the mainstream, as well as from other otaku and even from his objects. The term otaku itself derives from a form of address with connotations of detachment and isolation: ‘‘you,’’ as in ‘‘your residence.’’ To refer to someone as ‘‘your residence’’ implies a distanced, highly formalized relation. To be otaku thus implies formal, potentially empty relations. (While more recently the Gainax discourse acknowledges the possibility of female otaku, there is a general bias toward thinking otaku as boys or men, when my usage.) Thus while the collapse of visual and social hierarchies imparts a sense of the unbearable proximity of the image (pure affect without perceptual distances, relations, and positions), the anime image is also construed, rather paradoxically, as a new kind of distance. Okada Toshio and Ōtsuka Eiji stress the discernment of the otaku, for instance. As a connoisseur of distributive fields without center or periphery, the otaku commands specific, highly refined visual skills. They see parallels between otaku and Buddhist-inflected notions of expenditure associated with the ‘‘floating world’’ of early modern urban life, the world of discerning players.24 Or, with a nod to Alexandre Kojève, Azuma has extended his thoughts on this world in the direction of posthistorical snobbery—a detached discrimination that separates man from his barbaric materialistic relations, the animalizing postmodern. Discernment and snobbery are two ways of sustaining some sense of difference within the discourse on anime and otaku—some sense of the autonomy of otaku from Japanese mass culture in general. I will likewise stress the importance of play in otaku activities, but not in relation to posthistorical snobbery or precapitalist modes of consumption and expenditure. Rather, what interests me is the otaku’s almost feverish activity and productivity in the reception and dissemination of images. It is here that otaku activities become indistinguishable from work, hovering between labor power and communicative labor. It is here that the constituent power evoked in the idea of a nonhierarchized, cooperative system might make a difference: the otaku difference might make for otaku movement, theoretically and practically.

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Otakuology: From Dialectical Tension to Perversion Okada Toshio first comes to mind when definitions of otaku are in question. As a founder of what is now one of the most successful animation studios in Japan, Okada’s remarks carry a great deal of weight, both practically and commercially. The self-proclaimed king of the otaku or ‘‘otaking,’’ Okada has apparently devoted his life to promoting anime as an object worthy of serious attention, from the book Otakugaku nyūmon [Introduction to otakuology, 1996] to such subsequent works as Otaku no mayoi michi [The labyrinth of the otaku, 1999] and Ushinawareta mirai [Lost future, 2002]. Significantly, he aims to make anime and otaku worthy of academic attention. As the self-elected spokesman or mouthpiece for otaku, Okada aims to establish otaku knowledge as a form of knowledge on par with disciplinary forms of knowledge. He founded the International Otaku University on the Web in 1996, and he regularly conducts seminars at universities. Of course, it is difficult to gauge whether Okada’s efforts should be seen as self-promotion or an apologia for otaku—after all, he is the otaking. Should one read his heartfelt defense of the otaku as facetious, as tongue in cheek? With his otakuology, Okada has fashioned a sort of play discipline or disciplinary play that oscillates between a disciplinization of knowledge about anime and otaku and an antidisciplinary conceit. Okada penned the script for the two-part ova series entitled Otaku no video (same title in English), released by Gainax in 1992. One of the first concerted efforts to portray and evaluate the otaku, Otaku no video not only presents Okada’s angle on the otaku but also establishes the lineage of animation to which Gainax Studios becomes the legitimate heir. Otaku no video is, in effect, Okada’s foundation story about Gainax as the brainchild of anime otaku. It alternates between animation and mockumentary. Animated segments tell the story of two friends whose passion for anime leads them to found a studio. The story begins with an average and likeable first-year university student (Kubo Akira) whose chance encounter with a high school friend (Tanaka) transforms his life. Tanaka (reputedly a stand-in for Okada) is a serious otaku, obsessed with animated television series, manga, fan clubs, and amateur publications. Kubo is gradually drawn into Tanaka’s world, abandoning his healthy, normal life (and his girlfriend) in favor of Tanaka’s nerdy, creepy otaku club. Together with Tanaka, Kubo becomes so impassioned about anime that the two of them form a garage model-kit company, distributing kits for assembling personalized models of figures from anime or manga series, typically of sexy women, as with 370

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Kubo and Tanaka’s buxom creation Misty May.25 After hitting rock bottom with the commercial takeover of their first company, the two friends finally succeed with an animation company and begin to fantasize about ‘‘otakunizing’’ the entire world. This is the story of the foundation of Gainax Studios, but told in a fantastical form. While it spins a yarn about the triumph of youthful passion, it is full of references that construct a space of knowledge, one that it apparently demands great efforts to master. A series of mockumentary interviews called ‘‘portraits of an otaku’’ alternate with the animated story. In these portraits, Otaku no video presents a series of different sorts of otaku who became obsessed with anime in different ways and at different times of their lives. A respectably ordinary businessman tells of his passion in college for dōjinshi (fan-authored manga, sometimes translated as ‘‘fanzines,’’ which introduce new stories involving established characters or entirely new characters and stories). The businessman sees his otaku days in retrospect as the best time of his life. Other otaku are obsessed with pornography, weapons, garage kits, games, collecting, or piracy. There is even an American fan obsessed with Japan as the land of anime. In other words, the otaku is not a unitary type that can be defined on the basis of any action or belief other than obsession with anime. All are men, and there exists a general homosocial bias (to which I will return), but theirs is such an unqualified masculinity that it appears pathetic—in both senses of the term in English; they are both passionate and helpless. Their passion makes them helpless, for it subjects them to anime, body and soul; and the emphasis on youthful passion or youthfulness serves to highlight a childlike subjection to the anime image. Crucial is the move to transform discipline into self-cultivation. Otaku no video strives to move away from disciplinary formations and subjection toward cultivation of the self. The animated story is full of insider references, and the mockumentary segments also provide a barrage of statistical information. There is constant evocation of knowledge production. Moreover, the intensity of otaku activities implies that to be an otaku demands not only great effort but also supreme discipline. As it constructs a space of knowledge, this otakuology verges on a disciplinary formation that implies subjection. Yet as the nostalgia of the businessman for his school days as an otaku suggests, otaku work is not like school or the corporation. There is, in other words, a strategy of refusal, a resistance to labor organized in received ways. Is otaku work an alternative space of work and knowledge production that resists modern, disciplinary society? Or is it a desire for a postmodernized society in which otaku skills would reign supreme—a desire to succeed otaku movement

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in what Deleuze calls the ‘‘society of control’’ in which disciplinary boundaries give way to constant learning and endlessly transforming subjects? 26 Otaku no video offers both possibilities at once by stressing the oscillation between discipline and self-cultivation. The statistical information that accompanies each portrait of an otaku, for instance, not only gives the impression that otakudom is far more pervasive than anyone suspects (thus implying that otaku activities are already eroding modern disciplinization everywhere). It also gives the impression that this is not disciplinization. Rather, their work as otaku allows these men to know and cultivate themselves. There is, for instance, the self-conscious tone of the otaku telling their stories. They apparently understand their innermost mechanisms of desire. They may not be able to resist the lure of anime; they cannot prevent their enslavement to its buxom, potent girl figures; but they see this passion lucidly, knowingly, and almost rationally. In other words, in Otaku no video, anime appears, on the one hand, as a subjective technology—literally associated with the most recent technologies of vision—that constructs subject positions. Yet on the other hand, Otaku no video evokes a space of play in which the subjection to new technologies affords what Foucault called techniques of the self, akin to self-cultivation or a care of the self. In the animated story of Otaku no video, techniques of self-cultivation often take the form of an overcoming. Self-cultivation appears as a way of transcending disciplinary formations via play. For instance, the ultimate triumph of Kubo and Tanaka with the foundation of their anime studio reinforces the idea that if one is true to one’s youthful passions, one will finally succeed. Young fans may someday otakunize the world. Naturally, such a story of individual triumph recalls the ideology of the self-made man that persists from Victorian-Meiji ideals of personal progress as commercial progress (as with risshin shusse, or the culture of advancement in the world). Analogously, readers of Foucault may detect the emergence of a self-governing subject adequate to modern states. Still, without discrediting the interpretations whereby Otaku no video presents a neoliberal ideology or a postmodern version of disciplinization, I would like to point out that it does not fall simplistically in either of these possibilities. Its bid for a space of play that is not automatically recoverable as ideology or discipline also suggests a refusal of work and evokes the power of labor. In this respect, the emphasis in the Gainax discourse on image and information over narrative provides a useful lead. After all, the experience of watching Otaku no video is not only that of the narrative of commercial triumph. It is equally an experience of information with the charts, graphs, 372

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and interviews. At the level of information, Otaku no video strives to transform communicative labor into constituent power. While the otaku’s work with various visual and information technologies might mesh well with new modes of rationalization of the workplace, Otaku no video presents this communicative labor as borderless and uncontainable. This labor is communicative, much as a disease is communicable—it spreads incessantly, relentlessly, without regard for hierarchies, like an airborne retrovirus; or also like laughter.27 Thus Otaku no video presents the work of otaku as a constituent power, as labor power. And the question posed earlier returns anew: what is the difference between an otaku and someone who watches anime or reads manga? Many commentators see the obsessive nature of the otaku as a sign of seriousness or earnestness. But what happens when obsession is indistinguishable from play, when it constructs a space of play? Are not the viewers who treat anime as mere entertainment bringing it into a more normal set of relations, thus negating its possibilities for play? One of the hallmarks of Otaku no video is its deftness in scrambling the relation between work and play, between disciplinary boundaries and their outside. It thus poses some of the most basic questions of fan culture analysis in a potentially new way. Is it possible to create zones of autonomy within consumerism? Can you escape capitalism from within by practicing it differently? Or is this sense of autonomy precisely the oldest trick in the book, simply manufacturing more active forms of enslavement to the commodity? How can submission to the anime image, however self-abusively aware, enable the construction of an autonomous self ? Is this not just the illusion of autonomy, the ultimate reification of freedom? These problems are, needless to say, part of the legacy of Theodor Adorno in fan culture analysis. When, as early as 1938, Adorno spoke of the fetishism of music, for instance, its ‘‘counterpart’’ is a regression in listening. And he remarks, ‘‘If indeed individuals today no longer belong to themselves, then that also means that they can no longer be ‘influenced.’ The opposing points of production and consumption are at any given time closely coordinated, but not dependent on each other in isolation. Their mediation itself does not in any case escape theoretical conjecture.’’ 28 Adorno gives us an image of listeners who may well be wise to the close coordination of production and consumption but who do not for all that belong to themselves. Fan knowledge may be copious, even voluminous, yet for Adorno it remains regressive and unenlightened. Famously, Adorno’s perspective on the culture industry comes of his engagement with what otaku movement

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might be dubbed high modernism. Yet even high modernism does not afford a truly autonomous realm of knowledge for him. It is in its way as reified as mass culture. Consequently, the relation between mass culture and high modernism does not afford a simple ethical decision of choosing high culture over mass culture. Ultimately, their relation does not allow for dialectical movement, but only for stultifying contradiction—a world moving at once forward and backward, at once avant-garde and regressive, a world full of activities and cultural movement but effectively at a standstill. Is this what otaku movement does? Fan culture analysis has taken issue with Adorno’s recourse to high modernism (his elitism) and with Adorno’s sense of the passivity of the receiver of mass culture. In contrast, fan culture analysis has proposed to follow fandom closely and seriously, to explore the activity of fans, without what is seen as Adorno’s bias against mass culture. Crucial to this shift are fans like the otaku—so-called cult fans. Matt Hill, for instance, distinguishes between fandom and cult fandom: while fandom and cult fandom appear to overlap, cult fandom does seem to imply an identity that is at least partially distinct from the general fan, which is to say, not all viewers who like a certain tv series become cult fans of it. Hill suggests that this distinction between fans and cult fans ‘‘relates not to the intensity, social organization or semiotic/material productivity of the fandom concerned, but rather to its duration, especially in the absence of ‘new’ or official material in the originating medium.’’ 29 Cult fandom, then, perseveres in the absence of official production. If the cult fan demonstrates a kind of autonomy, it is because the cult fan’s activity continues independently of the industry rather than simply following it actively. Hill’s work is indicative of a turn in fan culture analysis that looks to the ways in which the cult fan becomes akin to a producer of culture and thus somewhat autonomous of official production— of the culture industry, as it were. As a cult fan film about cult fans, Otaku no video poses the question of autonomy within consumerism in a new way. Naturally, because it is a cult fan film about cult fans, it does risk the self-referential reification, even as it claims to transform the consumer into a coproducer of culture. Yet Otaku no video raises the intensity (and duration) of fan activities to a new pitch. While Adorno’s concerns remain relevant, the new pitch or frenetic power of otakudom makes it difficult to speak solely of regression, or even of regressive coproduction. Rather, as Otaku no video tries to show, otaku activity shifts the problem of fandom toward a productivity akin to labor power. The implication is that fans have some relation to constituent power. This is 374

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not to say that one should not read this emphasis on labor power as symptomatic of post-Fordist or postmodern capitalism. But the critic still must consider how what is allegedly superstructural (knowledge production or communication) may not be supplemental or secondary in driving historical transformations. Otaku no video calls attention to the disciplinization of knowledge and the rationalization of communication. Its otakuology, as play discipline, strives to transform disciplinary knowledge into practices of self-cultivation and self-knowledge. As a form of unofficial work or play labor, it tries to challenge the rationalization of labor, especially communicative labor. Such a game demands some relation to constituent power. This is where the otakuology of the Gainax discourse runs into trouble—and maybe the notion of constituent power as well. Otakuology hints at strategies of refusal of labor and of disciplinary society: otaku are not corporate salarymen or intellectuals. Their relation to these figures sometimes verges on a negative one, full of melancholic or nostalgic disavowal. For the otaku might easily slip into either position, dutifully yet unwillingly. After all, otaku are also situated socially, and Otaku no video gives us some troubling, negative images of socially lost or fallen otaku. As if troubled by such negative images and models, otakuology seeks a positive force of self-differentiation, a way to assert their difference. If Kubo and Tanaka succeed, it is because of their youthful passion for anime, which may happen to any man at any age anywhere. Their triumph provides one positive image of difference. Nonetheless, as the stark visual contrast between the mockumentary and its animated segments suggests, these two kinds of self-differentiation remain in dialectical tension—the one cannot overcome the other, nor can the one work without the other. The dialectical tension in Otaku no video becomes condensed into the problems of autoeroticism and fetishism. Its emphasis on play over disciplinary knowledge enables self-cultivation, but this way of knowing one’s self takes the form of playing with one’s self, presented, quite literally in some segments, as masturbation. Otaku no video hovers between the thrill and shame of playing with one’s self—or is it sex with an image? In either case, the act of masturbation condenses the dialectical tension between the negative and positive self-differentiation of the otaku. It is not so surprising that sex should come to the fore. After all, does not sex also fall between work and play, socially, at once the site of social reproduction and of selfproduction? What is troubling about Otaku no video is its relation to women. The thrill and passion it attributes to modeling and collecting girl figurines otaku movement

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derives from a sense of autonomy from real women and thus from social expectations associated with relations with them (work to provide the financial support necessary for marriage and family). Otaku no video insinuates a sense of shame and failure in the inability of the otaku to interact with real women, a sense of shame at social failure. In this dialectical tension between thrill and shame, between self-affirmation and self-negation, real women come to embody a condition of (im)possibility for manhood. Ultimately, otakuology seems only to imagine constituent power (and strategies of refusal) through recourse to male potency as an autonomous force, one autonomous of women. Yet images of women remain essential to the fantasy of masculine autonomy. In sum, in playing with himself, in distancing himself from actual women, the otaku apparently refuses certain forms of disciplinization and rationalization, especially those of the corporate man and the nuclear family. Thus the otaku strives toward a new kind of man. Yet insofar as the otaku’s images of women are palatable to the corporate man (and may historically derive from the corporate culture), the otaku does not necessarily present a radical break from received sociosexual formations (the homosocial workplace, normative heterosexuality, and the sex industry, for instance). Rather, otakuology perversely reinscribes received gender roles. In other words, the dialectical tension implicit in the otaku’s negative and positive self-differentiation does not result in a stultifying contraction. It moves. Its movement is that of perversion. Perversion is an especially difficult form of movement to assess, for it differs from regression and progression and from subversion and inversion. Of course, as movement, it creates zones of autonomy, yet it is not obvious that one can track and bound these zones. Surely, to those who would see this otaku perversion purely as a Japanese phenomenon, due to the allegedly rigid or authoritarian structures of Japanese society that foreclose self-expression, I must add that otakudom is not purely or exclusively Japanese. The popularity of anime, and the current Internet boom in hentai anime (perverse animation) serves as a reminder that this is transnational rather than a national movement whose origins cannot be attributed to an isolated, self-identical Japan. Otaku perversion originates in a transnational Japan, that is, a nation already in relation to the world, internally and externally. To think this otaku movement of perversion, I will now turn to how the Gainax discourse tries to transform fetishism—from a problem of the relation of men to women into a problem of how men relate to media. In effect, the Gainax discourse constructs a new structure of fantasy in its at376

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tempt to keep moving, in the hope of overcoming the dialectical tension implicit in cult fandom. Crucial is the displacement of perversion onto a movement of media proliferation.

Media Fetishism: From Perversion to Proliferation Otaku no video sometimes gives the impression that otaku are like adolescents stuck in transition sexually. The otaku passion for images of sexy girls is seen as an adolescent phase in which boys or young men are interested in women yet do not have the confidence or means to court them. In time, these young men are supposed to move forward, from images of women to real women. Or, if they remain interested in anime images of women, these are not supposed to thwart their sociosexual progress represented by dating, marriage, and family. The otaku, however, is not willing or maybe not able to move forward in his sociosexual development. He remains stuck in transit, obsessed with images of women, but indifferent to actual women. The paradigm of arrested development is not exclusive to the Gainax discourse. It pervades other forms of otakuology too. Particularly important is the presentation of the adolescent phase of male interest in pornography as normal, maybe even healthy. Take Chobits, a series almost diametrically opposed to Otaku no video in its take on otaku-like behavior. A fourwomen team, clamp, produced the extremely popular manga series later adapted into an equally popular anime series. Chobits presents the penchant of its young male protagonist for pornography as quite normal. Despite his signs of embarrassment when he is caught with skin magazines, none of his female acquaintances shows surprise or distaste at his collection of pornography. In fact, when he falls in love with an unbearably cute humanoid computer (female, of course), everyone assumes that he is having sex with her/it—as if this were a perfectly normal guy thing to do. Yet by the terms of the story, he cannot have sex with her without erasing her memory and identity. In the end, he embraces this platonic situation—his respect for her identity wins out over his desire for sex with her. He would forego sex rather than change her. Yet one wonders about that pornography collection. Will pornography continue to provide an outlet for his sexual desires? Is it pornography that frees him to realize his ideal love? Chobits seems to imagine the otaku-like penchant for pornography as a basis for an ideal love, a platonic romance. Ironically, pornography plays a key role in arresting conventional sociosexual development in which women might be subject to abandonment and loss of identity. Pornography does not thwart puppy love. otaku movement

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The Gainax discourse does not resemble that of Chobits. It does not see any romantic resolution to the problem of the otaku stuck in sexual transit with his images of women, his personalized figurines and garage kits. His passion or obsession is at once bliss and curse—whence its double movement in Otaku no video—at once self-confident triumph and self-deprecating humor. Above, I suggested that this is not a static contradiction but a mobile tension, one best described as perversion. As the contrast with Chobits suggests, one of the characteristics of the Gainax discourse is to use perversion as a movement without resolution or reconciliation. Anno Hideaki’s Neon Genesis Evangelion (the Gainax series often seen as the culmination of anime) reinscribes the double movement found in Otaku no video. On the one hand, Evangelion has elements of a classic mecha story—a young man has special psionic abilities and genetic features that enable him to pilot a giant robot, which may be the only hope to save the earth from invaders. Generic conventions create expectations of his ultimate triumph and the salvation of this postapocalyptic world. On the other hand, the series undercuts the conventions of battle and triumph by focusing attention on the protagonist’s relations with those around him—especially with his father and a series of young women, each of whom demands a different kind of commitment from him—creating a sort of portrait of an otaku. In the last episodes, with the final battle imminent, the series offers no triumphant end but lingers on the protagonist’s inability to decide or commit, with a stylistic turn to a sort of degree zero of animation (animated black-and-white sketches). Devoted fans of the series balked at this end in large numbers—unsurprisingly since Anno thought of Evangelion as a critique of otaku fandom. Eventually, in response to the protests of outraged fans, Anno and Gainax produced a more conventional end for Evangelion, which effectively killed the series.30 With Evangelion (as with Anno’s prior series Nadia: The Secret of Blue Waters), the idea is to construct a series without end. Evangelion presents this ‘‘without end’’ as something of a shock. After fans commit to the series, following its intricacies and mysteries intently, the series cuts them off. It is a somewhat cruel, sadistic treatment of fandom. Leaving open for now the question of whether this cruelty can produce a shock of enlightenment in fans, I wish to return to the question of what this tells us about perversion as movement. Evangelion and Otaku no video raise the problem of the otaku’s inability to commit. They provide an image of the cult fan stuck in transit, especially in terms of sociosexual development: the protagonist in Evangelion cannot 378

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come to terms with his father, express his desires directly, or otherwise act maturely. In this respect, Gainax’s otakuology evokes repetition compulsion. There is a melancholic, maniac quality to the otaku’s inability to commit—as if he were acting out, unable to come to terms with an originary trauma. In Evangelion, for instance, the protagonist’s trauma is at once the early death of his mother and the early death of the former world: he cannot decide if he fears his death more than the death of this postapocalyptic world; he feels already dead. Thus he continues to repeat the originary trauma compulsively, displacing it without ever coming to terms with it. Aspects of the narrative and characterization fit nicely with melancholic repetition compulsion, but the series is not just this. How, then, does the Evangelion series see this otaku-like protagonist? Does its compulsively repeat his compulsive repetition? Is this why it refuses to conclude at the end? While its protagonist might be construed in terms of melancholia and repetition compulsion, the Evangelion series separates itself from its hapless hero, which is to say, the negative impulses of the protagonist do not provide the overall tone or stance. Nor do the affirmative impulses of the battle and triumph. I have suggested that perversion is the movement that results from the tension between these negative and affirmative impulses. Yet even as it oscillates between negative and affirmative, perversion strives to sustain the affirmative impulse. It does so not by producing a positive reconciliation in the manner of Chobits. Rather, perversion attempts to find something positive prior to the negative and affirmative impulses. This is how the degree-zero animation at the end of Evangelion works: stylistically, it is a move to a moment before the organization of animation, to before sketches are entirely cleaned up, before colors are carefully applied, and before the figure’s movements are subjected to storyboard actions. A polymorphic field of modulating lines in which action does not yet coalesce sequentially: this is Evangelion’s imaging of perversion as prior to action and reaction, affirmation and negation. Perversion, of course, has a range of interpretations, even within Lacaninspired psychoanalysis.31 Suffice it to say in this context that perversion presents a moment prior to sexual organization in accordance to social conventions. Perversion is frequently glossed as polymorphous perversion because it is a phase in which there is not yet an attachment to a particular object. Attachment continues to wander. There is not yet a full, that is, relatively adequate, substitution that intervenes to stabilize the series of wandering attachments retroactively. Nor is there a repetitive, compulsive fixation on an object that promises yet never delivers a full, relatively stabilizing otaku movement

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substitution. Perversion comes prior to repetition compulsion as well. It is rather like moe. A response often associated with anime fandom, moe signals an appreciation for the posture or stance or mien of a character—the way a character looks or speaks—with cute and erotic implications. To evoke the term moe is to indicate an ineluctable appreciation or fascination for the character.32 Often the character for sprout or bud is used as a gloss, with connotations of growth and proliferation. Sometimes this moe is linked to the moe that means to burn, glow, or flame, as with an intense passion. In effect, moe refers to an affective response to images. It is a sort of affective response easy to associate with pornography, but pornography is moe already subject to organization. Moe might be thought of in terms of the excitement you feel for an image, which leads you on to more images. This onward movement might become organized as repetition compulsion, for instance. You may become obsessed with certain details, and repeat them automatically— as, for instance, with the otaku tendency to repeat images of women with specific kinds of skirts, breasts, hair, weapons, and so forth. What powers such repetition is an élan for the image that allows attention to, and interest in, new images—that is, moe. Moe is the moment of perceptual arrest prior to the organization of sexual repetition. Like perversion, moe conjures up the constituent power of sexuality, which makes for a mode of polymorphic proliferation. Perversion best characterizes the stance that the Gainax discourse takes on the otaku’s inability to commit, his arrested development or endless transition. Gainax’s otaku never arrives at a full, stabilizing substitution, a real woman rather than images of women. Yet even as it shows some of the melancholic and maniac qualities of otaku desire, the Gainax discourse strives to locate their constituent power—in perversion, in a positive force prior to the narrative organization of affirmation (stories of triumphant self-made men) and prior to the psychological organization of negation (portraits of arrested or fixated adolescence). Simply put, Gainax’s interrogation of the heroic or epic anime narrative is an attempt to locate its prediscursive potency, also known as moe. Consequently, even if the Gainax discourse occasionally entertains a critical perspective on otaku fandom, it takes the anime image entirely in its productive dimension. The modulating lines of the anime figure derive from a positive force. As a consequence, the Gainax discourse also sees the anime woman—the fetish—wholly in terms of its productivity. Put another way, the Gainax discourse sees the positive qualities of otaku fandom as the true tendency, and as its own tendency. Its otakuology seizes 380

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a constituent power that otaku themselves may remain unaware of. (It is easy to see how otakuology might even be contemptuous of otaku, or at least cruel to them, as with Evangelion.) Lest this remain too abstract, let me try to clarify how perversion/proliferation differs from repetition/fixation. The difference lies in an impossible or failed relation to the real, versus a creative, generative relation to the real. If one thinks of the otaku as a guy obsessed with anime images of cute girls, one interpretation might be that the image, in all its exaggerated potency, stands in for something that is impossible, that cannot be had. In this case the fan’s passionate devotion to the image appears to border on the compulsive repetition of an unnamed and unnamable absence. Otaku activities seem to entail a movement of displacement, an effort to fill a lack in order to master and thus disavow it; to wit: ‘‘Although I cannot in fact ever dream of having a woman like this, I can in another way have precisely such a woman—and even if what I have is not actually a woman, I can mould and master it entirely, which gives me a greater sense of my power.’’ In such an interpretation, the source of trauma is the inability of the man to interact with women successfully. In Lacanian terms, one might say that this local failure originates in the very incompleteness of humans, an original lack that is first and foremost manifested and compensated for in sexual relations. While the Gainax otakuology flirts with some of the melancholic overtones of the otaku’s relation to anime images, it does not found its own movement on lack or absence. Rather, it would found its movement in potency. But to do so, it must dispense with the relation between anime images of women and actual women. The Gainax discourse does not see the anime image leading out into the world toward real women. It insists: images lead to more images. Of course, one might interpret this as Gainax’s disavowal of the overlap between the anime world and the sex industry wherein real women are exploited. Not only is there significant production of animated sex videos in Japan but there is also an important amateur production of sexually explicit or often sexually violent fanzines. In his account of otaku, for instance, Étienne Barral worries about the prevalence of otaku sexual fantasies that entail violence toward women, in which he detects an unconscious hatred of the mother, this indispensable yet ultimately castrating figure from whom the boy desires to be free.33 Similarly, Saitō Tamaki calls attention to the ways in which anime structures phallic fantasies of male power over women.34 Is there any reason to suppose that the interest in mastering images of women does not encourage violence tootaku movement

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ward real women—or that it does not encourage patronage of a sex industry that truly exploits women? Is there any reason to suppose that the image does not connect at all to actual social practices? The Gainax discourse sidesteps such questions; it swerves. In the Gainax oeuvre and discourse, an awareness of such problems only appears with any clarity in the mockumentary segments of Otaku no video. Even in that context, however, emphasis falls on the autonomy of the anime image and the otaku world from the real—the real world, actual women, and the real itself. Again, it is possible to read this as Gainax’s disavowal of the social effects of anime. Yet even if one construes it as disavowal, it is not a simple disavowal —disavowal is never simple, any more than relations to the real are. It is imperative, then, to explore (rather than simply disavow) the ways in which the Gainax discourse proposes anime’s difference. Here the critique of obsessive fans in Kon Satoshi’s Perfect Blue (1997) provides a useful contrast. In Perfect Blue, a crazed fan stalks an idol singer, angry over her decision to transform her image (from idol singer to television actress). The fan fears the loss of the idol singer in this transformation of the real woman behind the image. The fan thus begins to murder people around the woman and to threaten her in an attempt to force her to maintain the idol as an eternal, immutable image. In other words, in Perfect Blue, the fan has a relation to the real. The fan tries to act on the real woman behind the image, to assure that there is no deviation between image and woman. For the fan, the image takes precedence over reality, and the real woman must be forced into conformity with the image. If Perfect Blue offers a critique of cult fans, it is on the basis of their inability to give reality precedence over the image. Such a critique can easily work out badly. For everything depends on its ability to shock viewers out of the images they are viewing. The shocking twist of Perfect Blue is that the crazed fan turns out to be a woman manager rather than a male otaku—one of the idol singer’s agents. It is a twist full of malevolence and ambivalence. After all its attention to the exploitative and violent nature of male fans’ relation to their woman idols, Perfect Blue offers an abject figure, a scapegoat. An overweight, unattractive workingwoman emerges as the crazed killer. The idol singer, in contrast, successfully achieves her transformation into a television star. Clearly, Perfect Blue does not want to do away with idols and idol worship altogether. It simply tries to contain the violence of fandom by projecting it onto abject figures.35 The Gainax discourse operates in a very different way. It tries to remain within the image, dispensing with its correspondence to actual women. It insists on the potency of the image in constructing realities. In the proto382

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typical scenario, the otaku feels moe toward a certain woman image. If it is in manga, he demands anime series; if it is already in manga and anime, he demands figurines; if it begins as a figurine, he wants an anime series; if precast figurines appear, he demands garage kits to build personalized models; if the manga series stops, he begins to write additional episodes; if the character changes in undesired ways, he pens alternative stories; if the series needs promotion, he promotes it; if the figure does not present as much skin as he would like, he draws and sells amateur pornography versions. In this scenario, the cult fan becomes a coproducer or cooperator in a series that traverses different media. Thus the woman image, with the cooperation of the otaku, generates a world, a reality. The woman image does not lead out into the world so long as the otaku remains otaku, that is, a housebound creature who shuns contact with others except in very controlled and formalistic ways. Ultimately, in this scenario, the fan’s aim is to realize the potency of the image and, conjointly, his own. This may someday lead him from garage kits to the foundation of an anime studio, or the construction of humanoid computers or female robots that resemble some cherished image. Nonetheless, for the Gainax discourse, not even the woman robot would serve as a full or adequate substitution that could stabilize the series of transformations of the image (as in Chobits). The Gainax discourse does not envision that kind of happy end or any other kind of resolution. It aims to follow and further the potential of the image to transform across media, generating multiple media worlds. This is an anime brand of utopian thinking: the inherent modulating power of figures makes everything. In sum, by adopting the perverse rather than melancholic possibilities of otaku activities for itself, the Gainax discourse tries to locate the constituent power of sexuality—a positive moment of pure affect of the anime image, or moe—which transforms polymorphic perversion into a movement of multimedia proliferation. The Gainax discourse does not deal with the relation between the anime image and world at large (that is, actual women) because it cannot. The Gainax discourse must insist on otaku’s withdrawal from social realities; otherwise, otaku are simply operating in this world, and badly so. Without the otaku’s detachment, there is no difference from or within Japanese social realities—nor from or within the culture industry. Consequently, the Gainax discourse must insist on otaku autonomy, but a great deal depends on how the otaku withdraws. When the Gainax discourse seizes otaku tendencies in the affirmative (and as its own tendencies), it depicts the otaku in terms of withdrawal into a space of media transotaku movement

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formations, with an emphasis on his passion for new technologies and new media. It must also insist that moe is directed more toward media than toward women. Indeed, the autonomy of the anime image (and otaku) from actual women forms the linchpin of the Gainax discourse. There are a number of obvious problems with this gesture: its bid for autonomy draws in a predictable fashion on homosocial bonds, on the power of men over women, and on a refusal of female creativity.36Constituent power becomes conflated with male potency. In this respect, the problem is not simply that the Gainax discourse disavows the ways in which anime images of women relate to the exploitation of actual women. More fundamentally, despite its technical expertise in anime matters, the Gainax discourse has a problem thinking materiality. Let us return to the anime image as a distributive field of dense interconnections. This is surely what lends the anime image to multiple media transformations—its layers form a system open to emergent, self-organizing patterns. In theory, any densely layered, nonhierarchized image would do. Why then does Gainax otakuology typically make the woman image into the site of openness to media transformations? Why should the image bear any traces of gender? Is there something about woman images that makes them more naturally open? The answer lies in an old metaphysical bias. As the Gainax discourse tends toward a theory of dynamic matter (selforganizing systems), it construes women as closer to matter. Indeed, the prototypical anime woman—say, Misty May in Otaku no video—is not about the power of women at all. It is about the potency of matter. Although the prototypical female figure gives the impression of female potency with its cuteness and exaggerated feminine traits, it usually has none of the potentiality often deemed specific to the female body. Simply put, it is exceedingly distant from the maternal body. One of the striking features of cyborg and robot anime, for instance, is the displacement of female reproductive functions onto just about everything but the female body. This is a sign that something odd is happening. It is as if images of women only become potent insofar as they no longer imply procreative or reproductive functions. This means that reproduction and procreation can be attributed to men, or appropriated by them (depending on your perspective). The maternal body is so distant that it no longer appears as an origin at all, losing all claims to creativity and generativity. Behind this disabling of women lies an old metaphysical bias: woman = passive matter; man = active form. In its emphasis on the powers of the anime image, the Gainax discourse seems to turn toward a theory of dynamic matter, which should trouble 384

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this metaphysical bias considerably.37 It implies that images of women function as attractors in a self-organizing system. This is why the woman image enables a movement of proliferation and transformation across media. In theory, woman = dynamic attractor complicates the conventional association of the female body with passive matter. At the same time, however, the woman attractor only gains its material dynamism insofar as it distances itself from the materiality of actual women. In this respect, the potency of the anime cutie constitutes an aporia in the Gainax discourse. The semblance of woman at once matters and does not matter. Nonetheless, it is an aporia that makes for movement and changes things. If the woman image is to operate dynamically, conventional organizations of sexuality must somehow change. Sexual development must be arrested and opened to new attachments. Clearly, the anime bid for media perversion is currently a powerful fantasy, one that is open to important variations and reinscriptions beyond the Gainax discourse and other anime. The question of capitalism remains, however. Is this movement of perversion/ proliferation not precisely that of capital? Does not capital locate the radical immanence or constituent power in order to unmake older modes and constitute new ones? To what extent does this allow for an autonomous movement within capital that differs from it? Can one get from the refusal of sexual development to a sexual politics or to politics of labor? The interesting thing about the Gainax discourse is that it directs attention to the question of radical immanence and constituent power in the context of a new global media formation. It opens a way to think about how the modulating figures of animation might play a key role in producing connections across different media, and in relation of new structures of fantasy. As such, the Gainax discourse might allow for the theorization of a politics of immanence in the field of global media. Yet just as it appears unwilling or unable to think the material limits and theoretical consequences of its bid for perversion/proliferation, the Gainax discourse remains particularly loath to address the transnational movement of otaku and anime in any other terms than Japanese identity.

Coda: Transnational Movement By way of conclusion, let me summarize the points that I have made thus far about the Gainax discourse’s imagination of otaku movement. I will lay it out stepwise, with the understanding that all these things happen in concert. otaku movement

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The theoretical stuff of the Gainax discourse lies in the idea of a distributive visual field—a nonhierarchized field layered with dense interconnections. The distributive field is a purely asubjective formation immanent in the anime image, which is associated with new media and new technologies. Murakami calls it Super Flat, and Azuma refers to an overvisualized world and data structures, while Okada describes it in terms of an attention to peripheral details that undermines the hierarchy of center and periphery in the visual field. As a moment (and then an experience) of pure immanence, the distributive field promises to break prior hierarchies, identities, and organizations, and to open new possibilities. At this level, the distributive is but a promise of movement—a material capture of something that opens into the future (an experience without a subject). At the next level, the Gainax discourse deals with the emergence of patterns from the distributive visual field. Here it presents two figures—the otaku (cooperator) and the anime girl image (attractor). It tries to avoid transforming the constituent power of this radical visual immanence into a constitutive power—into a new identity, a new order, or a discourse. At this level, the Gainax discourse continues to evoke the immanence of the distributive field to challenge received norms for sociosexual development. Crucial is the idea that the anime woman does not really refer or correspond to actual women in any way. Nor does the otaku’s obsession with the girl image result in conventional sexual hierarchies dependent on the power of men over women. In effect, the Gainax discourse tries to raise the distributive visual field to another power, presenting prediscursive figures (otaku and cuties) as emergent properties of the field. The anime cutie is an attractor, and the otaku is its cooperator; they are not subject positions in received hierarchized systems. It is easy enough to see how this reworking of male-female relations may merely constitute a displacement of homosocial bonds and masculinist assumptions. Moreover, the attractor recalls nothing so much as a Jungian archetype and a quest for mythic origins. Such is the retrograde movement of the Gainax discourse. In the affirmative, Gainax otakuology pursues visual immanence into a movement of perversion. Sustaining visual immanence leads to an insistence on polymorphous attachment at the level of constituent power in the sociosexual field. Analogously, the Gainax discourse strives to locate itself at a site of constituent power in relation of knowledge production and labor. Otaku activities appear as play discipline and as unofficial work, which stand in contrast to universities and corporations, for instance. The attempt of the Gainax discourse to extend the radical immanence 386

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that it discovers in the anime image into the realms of sociosexual development, knowledge production, and labor strikes me as exceedingly important. In its extension of the logic of the distributive visual field into other domains, it not only shows how transformations in technologies of vision have far-reaching consequences. It also shows how such transformations potentially generate a shock of enlightenment, which might be prolonged into critical awareness and a politics of immanence. It is in such a spirit that this essay has belabored the Gainax discourse. Unfortunately, however, at a third level, that of histories and nations, the Gainax discourse fails to think the consequences of its insights about the overvisualized, nonhierarchized field. It is as if the initial limitations of its thinking about the materiality of the distributive field conspire to ruin its attempt to rethink movement through anime and otaku. What looked to be a theory of emergence turns out to be a theory of historical rupture. In a theory of emergence, one expects that the relation between elements and emergent patterns entails correspondence-without-resemblance: the patterns do not resemble the elements; nor are patterns predictable from elements. While the Gainax discourse tentatively opens such a theory when it thinks visually, as soon as it starts to think historically and geopolitically, it construes correspondence without resemblance as rupture, as a complete lack of correspondence. Dispensing with origins altogether results in a sense of historical transcendence and overcoming. I am thinking especially of Azuma Hiroki’s idea of anime otaku as posthistorical. A theory of emergence should spur thinking about how something new (say, the postmodern) emerges from densely interconnecting prior elements (of the modern) yet does not resemble those elements. The new is an experience and actualization of what was virtual to a set of material conditions. The Gainax discourse, however, dispenses with correspondence and thus cannot think materiality or continuity. For Azuma, for instance, a simple break marks the movement from modernity to postmodernity (or alternatively, the posthistorical). In a predictably modernist fashion, the historical break between modern and postmodern is reinscribed as a geopolitical break: Western modernity versus Japanese postmodernity. Consequently, what began as a raid on hierarchies, subject positions, and identities turns into a defense of precisely these hierarchies, positions, and identities. Let me give a last example that brings this discussion full circle. After attending the Otakon (Otaku convention) in the United States in 1995, Okada Toshio wrote of his encounter with American otaku.38 In his account, Okada otaku movement

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demonstrates his profound fascination with the American otaku looking at Japan. Okada’s fascination with the gaze of the American otaku recalls Slavoj Žižek’s discussion of the Western fascination with events in Eastern Europe in the late 1980s.39 ‘‘What fascinates the West,’’ Žižek speculates, ‘‘is the re-invention of democracy.’’ In Eastern Europe, the West looks for its own origins, for the authentic experience of its democratic invention. Likewise, Okada’s fascination with American otaku appears as an attempt to reinvent anime and otaku, to rediscover their origins and identity. As Žižek suggests, the real object of fascination is the gaze, the supposedly naive gaze by means of which American otaku stare back at Japan, fascinated by its authenticity. Thus Okada stresses how proud American otaku are to be otaku, reinventing what it means to be an otaku. Okada discovers an origin that Japan has lost but may perceive in the foreigner’s enthusiasm for Japan. ‘‘Looking at them,’’ Okada concludes, ‘‘reminded me of how I was once infatuated with the United States of America, land of ‘freedom,’ ‘science,’ ‘democracy.’ ’’ In sum, the enthusiastic gaze of American otaku confirms the identity and authenticity of Japanese otaku. Žižek’s point is to show how a national identity appears to come out of nowhere. An identity emerges from an imagined threat to, or an imagined loss of, something that never was. The threat of loss gives that past an aura of reality. This is precisely what Okada does. He follows a wellestablished pattern of complicity between Western Orientalism and Japanese auto-Orientalism. The Western Orientalist gaze thus becomes a source of self-identity for the non-Western position, which is made subject in its relation to that gaze.40 Yet is this not precisely what the distributive field challenges? The distributive field, devoid of perspective and hierarchy, should not allow for the establishment of positional identity on the basis of the gaze. In fact, in his discussion of the art of Murakami Takashi, Azuma works with Derrida’s critique of the Lacanian gaze. The proliferating, multiplying eyes and surfaces in Murakami’s art objects suggest to Azuma an actualized state of deconstruction. Murakami’s anime-inspired series of figures such as d.o.b. do not use perspective, visual ordering, or visual hierarchization—this distributive visual field undermines any recourse to stable viewing positions. So why should the gaze return at another level? Part of the problem is that Azuma sees in Murakami’s art and in anime the arrival of the postmodern—via a complete rupture with the modern Western gaze. Unfortunately, by establishing such a historical and geo-

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political rupture, Azuma recuperates the very gaze that he wishes to challenge. Thus he speaks comfortably in terms that establish Japanese identity. Similarly, Murakami has recently begun to speak of his art to date as not really Japanese. He claims to have invented this new Super Flat lineage within Japanese art for the purposes of international recognition, which would allow him to return to Japan to pursue his real interests. Not only does he claim to manipulate the Western gaze but he also suggests that it is only possible to do so by recourse to something authentic. Thus the reinvention of anime becomes a reinvention of Japaneseness. Indeed, by the late 1990s, there were signs of a nostalgia movement in the anime industry— remakes of classic series such as Astro Boy, Galaxy Express 999, and others, precisely those that the Gainax discourse sees as central to the definition of anime—in conjunction with the establishment of anime as national culture. A similar movement is afoot in North America, in the academy. The field of Japan studies has become enthralled with its new object, anime, which promises to refresh the study of Japan.41 Anime draws students into the classroom in great numbers, where (ideally) the professor would then teach them about Japan society and history via anime. Moreover, many of the introductory books on anime read it in terms of national identity or national allegory. In the words of one author, ‘‘anime is, after all, Japan talking directly to itself, reinforcing its cultural myths and preferred modes of behavior.’’ 42 Another commentator establishes that ‘‘the ‘culture’ to which anime belongs is at present a ‘popular’ or ‘mass’ culture in Japan, and in America it exists as a ‘sub’ culture.’’ 43 In other words, anime is often evoked to flatten difference. Anime is Japan, and any source of difference within anime is predictable difference within the nation (national allegory). Analogously, university courses on Japanese animation in North America have tended to form a canon around animated films that lend themselves better to cultural hermeneutics, ones—by Miyazaki Hayao, Ōtomo Katsuhiro, Oshii Mamoru, Kon Satoshi, and others—that have been distributed and acknowledged in international film festivals. Yet they largely ignore the other circuits of Japanese animation with its unmanageable wealth of tv and ova series, frequently with a daunting number of episodes. It is in the realm of tv and ova anime—one branch of which the Gainax discourse styles as the true anime—that one must at least confront the differentiation of the mass culture into communities of taste, even if one may ultimately construe those differences as false. Although in the transna-

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tional context the Gainax discourse falls prey to the same tendency to resort to ‘‘anime = Japan,’’ it does grapple with differentiation in the context of Japan. If one takes seriously the Gainax discourse on otaku and anime, the challenge of anime lies in its refusal of the sort of cultural mediation that begins with fixed cultural identities. The distributive visual field, in other words, cannot operate as a text that would allow fixed relations to others. In this field, relations to others would not conform to the received identities and positions. All the evidence points in this direction. For instance, the reception of anime in North America really does wreak havoc with the hierarchy of cultural expertise, with respect to translation, for instance. Fan subbers are remarkably more industrious than university experts in terms of the scope and breadth of their activities in translating, introducing, and promoting anime. In this simple way, the transnational otaku circuit potentially challenges the cultural hermeneutics and the complicit play of gazes that seem to dominate academic discussion of anime. Needless to say, the transnational otaku knowledge of anime does not automatically escape the cultural hermeneutics that tends to govern the way in which Japan experts look at anime. As Okada points out, many nonJapanese otaku wish to learn Japanese precisely because they feel they are missing something available to Japanese viewers, as well as to cultural informants and experts. In other words, the Japanophile otaku confirms a loss in translation, allowing for cultural and linguistic expertise to fill the gap. Yet if one takes seriously the notion of a distributive visual field, one would have to think the transnational movement of translation differently. If the anime image works as a media opening that lends itself to multiple media transformations, then the transformations of anime as it moves transnationally would have to be seen as part of the proliferation of its self-organizing field. The appearance of similar attractors and cooperators outside Japan would come as no surprise. Is that not how the anime image is supposed to work? Anime is lost in translation. It is opened in translation. It is imperative to think about how anime makes difference, as mass culture or subculture or fan cult. A theoretical shift is needed in order to think these new modes of reception and new zones of autonomy without positing fixed categories and social types in advance. The Gainax discourse begins to make such a theoretical shift. Crucial is its discovery, via the radical immanence of the distributive field, of the constituent power of anime—which opens the possibility of unmaking received patterns of sociosexual development, knowledge production, and labor. I have shown, of course, how 390

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the theoretical shift of the Gainax discourse falters and fails. Yet its failure should not be taken as a failure of the politics of immanence itself (even if such a politics does run certain risks).44 The aim here is to push the theoretical and political consequences of the distributive field. Whether in Japan or elsewhere, the otaku is, above all, networked and computerized. And the distributive layering of anime images affords a multiplex interface with other media. Oddly, however, while the otaku is always in touch (with the computer), he or she is always out of touch (with the actual world). What does detachment mean in what looks more and more like a regime of all-connectedness? Paradoxically, the otaku lays bare the nonrelation at the heart of the all-relatedness of information. Potentially, then, being otaku means to assert the right to noncommunication at the very center of the communications revolution, to inscribe refusal in the heart of work—which may involve a different sense of how one’s labor pays off. Is the otaku relation to anime a refusal to work at the heart of new media and technologies? That otaku movement is already underway in global media transformations and in realms of activity that are not thought of when otaku and anime are imagined in terms of fixed social or historical identities. Notes I would like to thank Ken Dean, Brett de Bary, Anne McKnight, Sharon Kinsella, and Livia Monnet for their insightful comments that contributed greatly to this essay. I would also like to acknowledge funding from sshrc, as well as from McGill University. 1 Glocalization is a term that emphasizes localizing products. 2 Joseph Tobin, ‘‘Conclusion: The Rise and Fall of the Pokémon Empire,’’ in Pika-

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chu’s Global Adventure: The Rise and Fall of Pokémon, ed. Joseph Tobin (Durham, NC, 2004), 269. Saya S. Shiraishi, ‘‘Japan’s Soft Power: Doraemon Goes Overseas,’’ in Network Power: Japan and Asia, ed. Peter J. Katzenstein (Ithaca, NY, 1997), 234–71. Deleuze writes, ‘‘To begin with, what is this agent, this force which ensures communication? Thunderbolts explode between different intensities, but they are preceded by an invisible, imperceptible dark precursor, which determines their path in advance but in reverse, as though intagliated.’’ Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (New York, 1994), 119. Tobin, ‘‘Conclusion,’’ 270. Ibid., 280–81. Antonio Negri, The Savage Anomaly: The Power of Spinoza’s Metaphysics and Politics, trans. Michael Hardt (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991) and Insurgencies: Constituent Power and the Modern State, trans. Maurizia Boscaglia (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999).

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8 Timothy Rayner, ‘‘Refiguring the multitude: from exodus to the production of

norms,’’ in Radical Philosophy 131 (May/June 2005). 9 This is stated most clearly in Negri’s recent collaboration with Michael Hardt,

Multitude. 10 John Kraniauskas, ‘‘Empire, or multitude: Transnational Negri,’’ in Radical Phi-

losophy 103 (2000): 29–39. 11 Ernesto Laclau, ‘‘The Immanence of Empire,’’ in Empire’s New Clothes: Reading

Hardt and Negri, ed. Paul A. Passavant & Jodi Dean (Routledge, 2004), 21. 12 Mario Tronti, ‘‘The Strategy of Refusal,’’ in Italy: Autonomia, Post-political Politics

(New York, 1980), 29–30. 13 Kraniauskas, ‘‘Empire,’’ 33. 14 Michel Foucault, ‘‘The Subject and Power,’’ in Michel Foucault: Beyond Structural-

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ism and Hermeneutics, by Hubert L. Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow, 2nd ed. (Chicago, 1983), 212–13. A consideration of the institutional dimension of this discourse would have to begin with the perception of otaku as criminals or outlaws. For instance, after the arrest of the serial infant killer Miyazaki Tsutomu in 1989, camera crews and reports exploring his home discovered collections of girls’ manga and books of analysis of girls’ culture (including those of Ōtsuka Eiji). See Sharon Kinsella, Adult Manga: Culture and Power in Contemporary Japanese Society (Honolulu, 2000), 126–28. This association of anime with criminality led to a widespread discussion of the dangers of manga and anime, and of the perversity of otaku— actually, a media panic. It is in such panic that one senses the formation of a discourse in the modes of scrutiny and regulation that begin to define the boundaries of the otaku world. Of course, the Gainax discourse does not intend to shore up institutionalized forms of scrutiny and regulation; yet, in calling attention to the gray zones of anime cult fandom, it calls attention to sites for observation. Exploration of such a discursive construction would surely have to address the regulations of the Internet in relation to prior attempts to police circulation. Murakami Takashi, Super Flat (Tokyo, 2000). The lineage of dōjinshi, amateur manga artists whose works are most visible at the yearly Comiket (comic market), is crucial to the definition of the anime image. It was the work of women artists writing girls’ manga that caught the attention of many a budding otaku—laying the basis for the Lolita-complex (rorikon) manga for men, whose images intersect with the model kits and anime heroines more generally. The question of movement within the image (internal montage or the multiplanar image) seems to me particularly important, especially in relation to narrative movement. I have discussed this in Thomas LaMarre, ‘‘From Animation to Anime,’’ Japan Forum 14, no. 2 (2002): 329–67. The turn to distributive images in these commentators at once raises and ignores the issue of movement within the image, for they tend to ignore the relation of movement within the image to the movement between images, and thus to narrative. Azuma, for instance, opposes narrative to database. Yet what is needed is a better approach to narrative. In this context, perversion emerges as a quasi-narrative movement by default.

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19 Francisco Varela, Evan Thompson, and Eleanor Rosch, The Embodied Mind: Cog-

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nitive Science and Human Experience (Cambridge, Mass., 1991), 86–96. The discussion in this book is especially appropriate insofar as Varela, Thompson, and Rosch wish to present an alternative way of thinking the self as an emergent property and in relation to Buddhism. In addition to his work on the Galaxy Express 999 movies, Kanada Yoshinori worked as the key animation supervisor for a number of Miyazaki Hayao films: Tenkū shiro no raputa [Castle in the sky, 1986], Majo no takkyūbin [Kiki’s delivery service, 1989], Tonari no totoro [My neighbor Totoro, 1988], and Mononokehime [Princess Mononoke, 1997], as well as the Fushigi yūgi tv series [1975].It is interesting to consider how Kanada, the paradigm of anime aesthetics for Murakami and others, impacts such allegedly nonanime films as Miyazaki’s. As a moment of pure affect, this collapse in distance between viewer and image recalls discussions of the close-up in film theory of the 1910s and 1920s. Indeed, discussions of anime in terms of new media often echo or repeat discussions of cinema in terms of new media. At stake is grappling with the relation between new material conditions and new forms of experience. With the film image, early theorists often stressed how it seemed to exceed its frame and move out of the theaters into streets—sometimes with terrifying results. Morikawa Kaichirō, Moeru toshi Akihabara: Shuto no tanjō [Learning from Akihabara: The birth of a personapolis] (Tokyo, 2003). Deleuze and Guattari write, ‘‘Only microfascism provides an answer to the global question: Why does desire desire its own repression, how can it desire its own repression?’’ in A Thousand Plateaux, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis, 1987), 215. Okada Toshio applies Ōtsuka Eiji’s take on consumption in the Edo period from Monogatari shōhiron: ‘‘Bikkuriman’’ no shinwa [On the consumption of narrative: The myth of ‘‘amazing man’’] (Tokyo, 1989) in his account of otaku in Otakugaku nyūmon [Introduction to otakuology]. See Marc Steinberg, ‘‘Otaku Consumption, Superflat, and the Return to Edo,’’ Japan Forum 16, no. 3 (2004): 449–71. The liner notes to the English video release (available online) do a fine job tracing the references, imparting a good sense of this information-dense field. Gilles Deleuze, ‘‘Postscript on Control Societies,’’ in Negotiations, 1972–1990, trans. Martin Joughin (New York, 1995). The work (or power) of humor should not be readily debunked, denounced as complicity, or otherwise given away, however seriously one wishes to take it. Theodor Adorno, ‘‘On the Fetish Character,’’ in The Culture Industry: Selected Essays on Mass Culture, ed. J. M. Bernstein (London, 1991), 40. Matt Hill, Fan Cultures (New York, 2002), x. Hill rules out intensity and opts for duration as the factor of greatest importance, but his duration, if given a somewhat Bergsonian twist, is not far from my sense of the importance of intensity. Shin seiki Evangelion gekijōban: Air/Magokoro wo kimi ni [The end of Evangelion, a.k.a. neon genesis Evangelion: air/my purest heart for you] (1997). See Molly Anne Rothenberg, Dennis Foster, and Slavoj Žižek, eds., Perversion and the Social Relation (Durham, NC, 2003).

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32 For a nice introduction to moe, see Morikawa, Moeru toshi, 27–32. 33 See Étienne Barral, Otaku: Les enfants du virtuel (Paris, 1999), 156. 34 Saitō Tamaki, Sentō bishōjo no seishin bunseki [Psychoanalysis of beautiful warrior

girls] (Tokyo, 2000). 35 Kon Satoshi’s subsequent two works make this clear. In Sennen joyū [Millennium

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actress, 2001], he explores the love of two fans for an actress; her films and their love transcend historical change. In Tokyo Godfathers (2003), he looks at how maternity floats onto male bodies and throughout social relations, without settling necessarily on a woman. Yet there occurs a certain abjection of the maternal body per se. There is, for instance, a tendency to exclude women as creators. Even when the importance of female writers and artists is acknowledged in this discourse, it is primarily as manga producers, and then it is as if women’s manga work provided materials for anime transformation. In anime, their manga images of cute and potent girls become attractors or media openings—thanks to the work of male fans and anime producers. In brief, attention falls on men redrawing the woman image (whether of or by women) rather than on women redrawing it (or the images of boys and men, which may also be unconventional). While there is a sense that this redrawing entails regendering, the outcome is a new kind of man, rather than new genders. This is a question evoked powerfully in the work of Judith Butler and Elizabeth Groz. See Butler’s Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of ‘‘Sex’’ (New York, 1993); and Elizabeth Groz, ‘‘Feminism and the Crisis of Reason,’’ in Space, Time, and Perversion: Essays on the Politics of Bodies (New York, 1995). Pheng Cheah offers a fine analysis in ‘‘Mattering,’’ Diacritics 26, no.1 (1996): 108–39. Okada Toshio, ‘‘Nihon o aisuru beikoku no otaku’’ [In love with Japan: American otaku] Aera, October 2, 1995, 43–44. Slavoj Žižek, ‘‘Eastern Europe’s Republics of Gilead,’’ New Left Review, no. 183 (1990): 50. As Koichi Iwabuchi points out, this process of Japanese identity formation usually excludes or renders abject Asia, which is in fact one of the most important markets for anime. See Koichi Iwabuchi, Recentering Globalization: Popular Culture and Japanese Transnationalism (Durham, NC, 2002). When I presented an earlier version of this essay, Brett de Bary spoke persuasively of this use of anime to renew Japan area studies, which led me to rethink the fascination of Japan studies for anime. Patrick Drazen, Anime Explosion: The What? Why? and Wow! of Japanese Animation (Berkeley, CA, 2003), viii. Susan J. Napier, Anime: From Akira to Princess Mononoke; Experiencing Contemporary Japanese Animation (New York, 2001), 4. Laclau, in ‘‘The Immanence of Empire,’’ provides an important critique of Hardt and Negri’s politics of immanence, as does Kraniauskas in ‘‘Empire.’’

thomas lamarre

A Drifting World Fair: Cultural Politics of Environment in the Local/Global Context of Contemporary Japan

Yoshimi Shunya

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saka Expo 1970 was a monumental event, putting into motion what I would like to call the ‘‘expo fantasy,’’ a system for mobilizing the desire of the Japanese population for launching expositions, which were linked to large-scale public projects orchestrated by the state. By contrast, Aichi Expo 2005 may one day be remembered as the final vestige of the expo fantasy, the beginning of its end. At the same time, Aichi Expo may also serve as a testament to the fact that such a system in decline could offer a site where currents of new subject formation emerge and gather their forces. The blueprint for Aichi Expo underwent substantial revisions after it was criticized for serving as a Trojan horse for a major land development project. The story of the expo symbolizes ongoing changes in the relationship between governmental organizations and social movements lead by local communities in Japan. In the following, I will describe how the expo was originally conceived in the late 1980s as a development-oriented project under the influence of Osaka Expo and how its anachronistic designs were subsequently altered by officials and advisors working with the national government during the 1990s. In particular, the damaging effects that the expo and its associated ventures may have on its venue, Kaisho Forest (Kaisho no Mori), became a major point of contention for the oppositional movement. This essay will discuss how the significance of Kaisho Forest was not self-evident from the start but was discovered through movements lead by members of the local community. I will also consider why the problems surrounding the expo deepened even after a more environment-oriented theme, ‘‘Beyond Development’’, was adopted. The deadlock over the expo-

sition planning was resolved only by external and accidental interventions such as the discovery of goshawks nesting and the harsh criticism issued by bie (International Exposition Bureau) executives. While analyzing why it took outside pressures to break the impasse, I will also emphasize that these interventions could not have been effective without the groundwork laid by local and national networks of activists. Furthermore, we need to examine the relations among these various forces at play in the context of the information society taking shape today. In other words, the story of Aichi Expo illustrates how conventional modes of administration and politics are being eclipsed in the world in which information crosses borders with increased ease and speed. The revisions that the expo planning underwent reflect the new landscape of the public sphere in Japan in the 1990s wherein the national and local governments, local communities, environmental groups, international organizations, and members of professional groups interact with each other in highly complex manners. Aichi Expo grew out of an extremely obsolete development-oriented ideology of postwar Japan. Its beginning can be traced back to 1981 when Nagoya, the largest city of Aichi prefecture, lost out to Seoul in the competition to host the Olympic Games of 1988. The shock of the defeat riveted the entire prefectural government, which had been making an all-out effort to bring the Olympics to the region. In 1983, the governor, Nakaya Yoshiaki, who had worked on the Olympic project, retired, and then vice-governor Suzuki Reiji was elected to take Nakaya’s place. Meanwhile, Japan was entering into the booming bubble economy of the 1980s, and the Fourth All-Japan Development Plan was announced by the national government. According to the plan, the Chūbu area, in which Aichi is located, was to become a major site for the production of world-class industrial technology, and the eastern plateau region of the city of Nagoya was designated as the Aichi Academic Research Development Zone. This was the period during which the Tsukuba Science Exposition 1985 was held, and the state was engaged in a host of extravagant public projects such as the development of a new transit system, the second Toumei Expressway, and linear motor trains. At the same time, along with advances in information technology and globalization, the Chūbu area, where the ratio of secondary industry is higher than in other regions, faced the danger of structural losses to its industrial base. Machimura Takashi described the background for Aichi prefecture’s bid to hold the exposition in the following manner:

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The regional development plans of Aichi prefecture, launched in various phases, were linked to the national development policies at the time: Sakuma Dam and Specific Region Overall Development Plan of the economic resurrection period; the establishment of steel works in Tōkai Region and the Income Doubling Plan; the designation of Mikawa District as Specialized Industrial Region and the Unified National Development Plan, and so on. Huge industrial production bases were created, supported by high-speed transit systems that were built and improved upon. Especially, the concentration of the auto makers, represented by Toyota Motor Company, greatly strengthened the position of the automobile industry in the regional economy. . . . However, it goes without saying that in the age of globalization, there was an impending danger in the region’s high rate of dependency on the automobile as its core industry. For an example, the domestic production of automobiles by Toyota recorded a major dip after the company established a full-scale production system in the United States and declined further after the economic slowdown began in the 1990s.1

In 1987, the Ministry of International Trade and Industry (miti) sent some feelers out to Fukuoka, Aichi, and Hyōgo prefectures to see whether they were willing to hold the international exposition in a near future. Among the three only Aichi reacted positively, and in October 1988, Governor Suzuki Reiji announced his plan to hold an international exposition at the beginning of the twenty-first century. The event was to serve as a major stimulant for regional industrial activities. On the news of the announcement by the governor, Chūnichi Shinbun commented that the local community of Aichi had expressed a strong and persistent wish to host an international event in Nagoya. During the decade starting in about 1965, then governor Kuwabara Mikine tried to hold an Asian development exposition. After that, Governor Nakaya proposed that the Olympic Games be brought to Nagoya. However, these plans did not materialize due to the deterioration in economic conditions and the failure to compete successfully with rival cities. More recently, as well, Aichi prefecture had been trying to hold international events to complement its stature as the axis of Chūbu region.2 In the latter half of the 1980s there was a boom among different regions of Japan to host expositions. While conscious of this trend, the proposed idea was to go a step beyond these local expos—holding an event on par with the exposition of 1970 in Osaka—suitable for Aichi’s prominence among local governments.

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The initial concept for Aichi Expo sought to simply follow in the footsteps of the economically successful Osaka Expo. Less than a week after the announcement, Governor Suzuki met with the mayor of Nagoya and leaders of the business community and took preliminary steps toward designing the basic theme for the exposition: ‘‘Peace and Civilization in the Twenty-first Century.’’ In 1989, the prefectural government established the (Expo) Preparation Committee and a section devoted to bringing the twenty-first-century expo to Aichi. Also in the spring of 1990, the Committee for the Basic Concept (of the Expo) was organized. The theme discussed at the beginning of the committee deliberation was ‘‘Development and Peace for Mankind.’’ Soon after, the committee decided to consider four major themes: the century of art, the century of the heart, the coexistence between man and nature, and human society in the space age. Finally, it settled on ‘‘Technology, Culture and Exchange: Creation of a New Earth’’ as the main theme. At this early point already, some voiced dissatisfaction with a concept that appeared to prioritize technology. In June 1992, Aichi prefecture established the Committee for Basic Concepts for the Twenty-First-Century Exposition. The committee members included well-known businessmen, academics, and critics such as Sakaiya Taichi, Toyoda Shōichirō, Morita Akio, and so on. In June 1994, the committee came up with the final plan for Aichi prefecture. The total enterprise budget was estimated at 1.5 trillion yen, with an expected 40 million visitors. The plan called for continuing the main themes first developed by the preparation committee focused on technology, culture, and exchange. As for the venue, 250 hectares of woodland on the southeastern hills of Seto were to be divided into three zones: a so-called Mountain Village zone with small-scale pavilions; a ‘‘Pastoral’’ zone with international conference halls and common pavilions; and an ‘‘Urban’’ zone with corporate pavilions. Also, there was a plan for the ‘‘Symbolic Axis of Greenery’’—a strip of land traversing the expo venue on which visitors and citizens would replant trees—representing the rejuvenation of the ecological system. From the beginning, however, this plan was severely criticized for being duplicitous, creating artificial zones out of an untouched natural environment. Many considered it highly unrealistic that an ecological system could be preserved by carving out a symbolic axis of greenery in a natural forest. Also, there was a plan to build a monorail that would encircle the venue and a ropeway to the area close to the top of Mount Monomi. Furthermore, the expo blueprint was linked to the plan to turn the venue into a residential development after the event. This area of 150 hectares was to become the 398

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core of the Aichi Academic Research Development Zone, providing 3,000 residences for 10,000 inhabitants. Also, a 2,000-hectare area surrounding the venue was to be developed as the ‘‘Future Exchange City,’’ which would house 33,000 residents. In 1995, the Aichi prefecture government again announced a plan to develop the expo venue into a subdivision with 2,500 units of housing for 7,500 residents. This plan would destroy half of the existing wooded areas without offering any measure for protecting the ecological system from its impact. As the expo planning proceeded under the guidance of the local government, oppositional movements against it, especially those organized around ecological issues, began spreading. These movements emerged in communities surrounding the planned expo venue, the area referred to by the prefecture government as the ‘‘wooded area with Kaisho-chō at the center.’’ The announcement of the government’s venue choice struck local residents by surprise. Previously, it had been reported by the media that the government would select the Yagusa area near the border between Toyoda City and Seto City as an expo site. Although Kaisho and Yagusa areas are no further than ten kilometers apart, their environmental conditions differ very much. Unlike Yagusa, where some development and the construction of an urban base was already in progress, most of Kaisho remained wooded, on steep slopes, and untouched by human hands. In that regard, Kaisho was atypical among the suburbs of Nagoya, where development has had an extensive reach. Furthermore, it was a site densely laden with historic and natural memories, including ancient kilns built in Heian and Kamakura periods. In other words, the prefectural government chose a location that contrasted sharply against the conventional image of the world fair, which emphasizes development and a vision of the future. Did the prefectural government select Kaisho area as an expo site with the awareness of the potential problems it may encounter? No. In fact, the prefecture maintained until some time later that Kaisho and its surrounding area could be developed completely as a future exchange city that would serve as the core of the Aichi Academic Research Development Zone. The basic attitude of the governor was evident as late as September 1995, when he made the comment at the Diet that the expo will prove useful for facilitating public construction projects. Mainichi Shinbun criticized the government’s attitude, pointing out that there was a total lack of procedure through which citizens could become involved in the planning.3 Under such circumstances, oppositional movements gradually grew a drifting world fair

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among local communities. In 1990, the residents, surprised by the sudden announcement of the expo venue, formed the Group for the Protection of Nature and the History of Kaisho. At about the same time, the Mount Monomi Nature Observation Group, primarily comprised of housewives in Seto City, began nature observation activities at Kaisho Forest, and residents of Seto City established a Citizen’s Group for Thinking about the Aichi Expo. These movements became increasingly active from 1993 onward. When the interim report by the Committee for Basic Concepts came out, a series of activities was launched: members of the Mount Monomi Nature Observation Group clad in flying-squirrel costumes submitted an open-question paper to the governor of Aichi prefecture and held photography exhibitions titled The Poetry of Kaisho Forest. Some intergroup members also submitted an open-question paper to the governor requesting an environmental assessment based on international standards. It is worth noting that the natural assets of Kaisho area had never been self-evident to everybody involved before the area was designated as the exposition site. Rather, they were discovered one after another by citizen groups and specialists once the area drew public attention and when the group members began walking around the area conducting repeated surveys and researches. Initially, the local government referred to the area generically as ‘‘Kaisho district and its surrounding wooded area.’’ At the time, no documents referred to it as Kaisho Forest. Soon after, however, through developing relationships between the forest and citizens, it became common to use the proper noun Kaisho Forest. Its animals, woods, and history came to be talked about through more specific and concrete images. Thus, for example, in December 1992, the Aichi branch of Japan’s Audubon Society confirmed that more than seventy species of wild birds nested in Kaisho Forest. In May 1994, the Mount Monomi Nature Observation Group confirmed that five groups of a variety of magnolia kobus, shidakobushi, grew in the planned expo site. In June 1994, even the prefecture government confirmed the existence of rare species of animals and plants in the area, including thirteen types on the verge of extinction. In this manner, citizen groups, nature protection groups, and the government itself engaged in observations and research based on their own points of view. Local environmental groups edited and published several reports about the natural environment in Kaisho Forest from 1995 to 1997. These reports were of a high standard, including analysis of the impacts that the expo and related ventures would have on trees and plants, insects, wild birds, and small animals in the area. In Japan, only a few other cases exist in which citizens 400

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themselves produced detailed studies on wooded mountain areas close to human residences. In conjunction with these studies, there were attempts to present alternative plans to counter the official concepts of the Twenty-First-Century Expo, ones developed from the standpoint of environmental protection. As early as June 1993, the Mount Monomi Nature Observation Group proposed an idea to establish a natural history museum that would utilize Kaisho Forest as its field. The group’s report mentioned earlier had already suggested a museum that would bring together the natural and cultural resources of Kaisho Forest with the woods that surround it. By October 1995, these ideas had matured into a proposal for the natural history museum adopted by the Eco-Museum and Village Network. Thus, from the middle of the 1990s, citizens knowledgeable about the natural environment of the area continually developed alternatives to the official plan. Throughout the 1990s, movements aimed at protecting Kaisho Forest spread gradually, accumulating information about the natural environment of the area. Meanwhile, Aichi Expo faced a number of obstacles, including a downturn in the economy. Unlike during the period of the economic bubble, the financial condition of Aichi prefecture deteriorated as recession continued. The leaders of the local economy began showing a lack of enthusiasm for the expo. Another ominous cloud rose from a series of cancellations of expos planned elsewhere, suggesting that international expositions had exhausted their historical purposes. For example, in June 1991, the Vienna Expo scheduled for 1995 was canceled by a referendum. The Budapest Expo, expected in the same year, was canceled in 1994. Although residents voted in favor of holding the Hanover Expo, the result of the referendum was determined by a very close margin: 51.4 percent voted for the expo, 48.5 percent against it. In Japan, Tokyo Governor Aoshima Yukio decided to call off the World City Expo, and this dampened the mood for promoters of Aichi Expo. As the official blueprint for Aichi Expo faced difficulties and opposition, not only its critics but even its supporters were forced to accept the need to make some fundamental changes. And it was obvious to everyone that the concept endorsed by the prefecture was insufficient in every respect. It was at this point that national-level planners lead by bureaucrats of miti began a full-scale intervention. In August 1995, the planning for the expo moved from the prefecture to the national government when miti established the Preliminary Examination Committee for International Exposia drifting world fair

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tions. Then, in October of 1995, the committee came out with an interim report, which pointed out the further need for the formation of consensus on environmental issues and on venue designation, paying ample attention to the conservation of natural environments. While Governor Suzuki issued a statement expressing his appreciation for the fact that the report fully inherited basic concepts developed by the prefecture, one of miti’s bureaucrats remarked that if this was the governor’s honest sentiment, his understanding of the situation was completely off the mark.4 These comments demonstrated a serious gap beginning to form between the prefectural government and miti. At about the same time, the Ministry of the Environment issued an objection against the expo plan by Aichi prefecture. In November 1995, it called for a major change to the planned route for the Nagoya-Seto road, which was to cut across Kaisho Forest in a north-south direction. According to the ministry, the route will not be permitted as it goes right through the area where very rare species of plants are growing. The Ministry of the Environment also took issue with the proposal of the symbolic axis of greenery, arguing that it would be a complete mistake to clear woods containing mixed varieties of trees and plant evergreen broadleaf trees in their place. Finally, the cabinet meeting decided to reduce the size of the development from the 120 hectares originally proposed to about 80 hectares and move the Nagoya-Seto road eastward of the initial plan. Although these measures hardly proved sufficient, arguments made by conservation movements were beginning to influence the discussions of the governmental committee. For example, according to an article in Asahi Shinbun, Morishima Akio, a committee member with ties to the Ministry of the Environment, commented that the expo theme should focus on a sustainable society since the twenty-first century would be the century of the environment. Other committee members supported the idea, and the discussion began to revolve around the theme of environment. According to the report, every time a meeting was held, objections concentrated on Aichi prefecture’s plan and the proposed map of the expo venue. Those insisting that the environment sounded too serious a theme for an event that should be festive and fun were becoming a minority.5 The discussion was also influenced by the fact that, at the time, the Canadian city of Calgary had made a bid to host a 2005 expo on the theme of nature. The Japanese government had to move more clearly toward embracing themes such as environment or nature in order to compete with Canada. Thus, in December 1995, the committee organized by miti came out 402

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with its final report that proposed ‘‘Beyond Development’’ as the main expo theme. The estimate of the expected entrants was reduced from 40 million to 25 million, and the revised concept of the expo envisioned it as an opportunity to find solutions to global problems and to experiment with an ecological town that conserves natural environment. Although these changes meant a major shift in the basic theme of the event, Governor Suzuki of Aichi prefecture maintained that the miti proposal was a boiled-down version of the concept developed by the prefecture. The mayor of Seto City also chimed in, claiming that the basic concept of the prefecture has not been altered. However, it was obvious that the fundamental aspects of Aichi prefecture’s proposals had been modified, and the planning for the Aichi Expo had entered a new phase. In response to the committee’s final report, in December of 1995, the cabinet reached the decision to bring the expo to Aichi. The strategy for winning the nomination at bie was solidified. The main theme was now titled ‘‘Beyond Development: Rediscovering Nature’s Wisdom,’’ and the environmental tone was made even stronger than in the final report issued by the miti committee. Proposals were made to organize the expo around three ideas: (1) Knowledge Expo: raising provocative questions and offering an opportunity for the entire world to think about common problems such as the environment, resources, energy, population, food, and so on; (2) Expo as a Laboratory for the Future: this should not be a one-time event but continue throughout the event in coordination with community building efforts; and (3) an Asian Perspective Expo: using Asia as the stage, stimulating multifaceted exchanges of traditions, histories, cultures, and arts. However, there were two major blind spots to the strong intervention made by the national government. First, there remained the question of who would be in charge of the new expo. If the organizers were to realize an expo truly ‘‘beyond development,’’ reversing the existing expo model bound up with local development policies, an entirely different agent should manage the event. Such a role cannot be filled by advertising agencies or major event organizers who typically stage expos as events full of fun and entertainment. The organizational and operational body of the Expo Association that was later established lacked a clear vision and commitment on these issues. For one, the group, at least on an institutional level, did not address the problem of linking the new concept of the expo with the means to facilitate citizens’ participation. If Aichi Expo were to be an environmental expo, they should have solicited the involvement of varied citizens’ organizations, including environmental and nature conservation groups from the a drifting world fair

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early stages. They could not have neglected the task of inventing a mechanism for citizens, local governments, and corporations to work together in forging a new kind of expo. Another major problem was the obvious conflict between the theme ‘‘Beyond Development’’ and the development orientation of the prefecture’s plan for the postexposition utilization of the venue. Initially, the expo project as a whole stood in opposition to the preservation of nature in Kaisho Forest. But with the intervention from the national government, at least at the level of expressed intention, the blueprint of the expo came to accord with proposals made by environmental movements. All the more for that reason, the tension between the concept of the expo and the land development on the venue was inevitable, creating a situation of impasse. This conflict had to be resolved in a drastic manner if the plans were to move ahead. In order to think about the first problem, let us move back in time. Originally, when the Mount Monomi Nature Observation Group submitted an open letter to the governor of Aichi prefecture, the local government reacted in a rigid manner, refusing to respond in writing or attend a closed meeting with this and other organizations. In May 1995, Governor Suzuki quickly refused the request by nature conservation groups for a roundtable meeting in which they could engage in an open discussion with the government. However, as oppositional movements became increasingly active, the vice-governor of the prefectural government exchanged opinions with conservationists while taking a walk in Kaisho Forest. In May 1996, Governor Suzuki finally met with the conservationists for the first time to have direct discussions. Meanwhile, starting in the fall of 1995, the prefectural government began a series of citizens’ symposiums offering open discussions between nature conservationists and expo promoters. In the symposium of January 1996, Morishima Akio, who acted as a coordinator, proposed a roundtable meeting to solicit residents’ responses to expo concepts put forth by the national government. However, Governor Suzuki took a negative stance toward these efforts, expressing his concern that these meetings may be mistaken for a decision-making body, provoking tensions and conflicts among the participants. Eventually, environmental groups also became suspicious that symposiums might give governments the appearance of negotiating with oppositional groups, and so the idea was discontinued after the sixth meeting on August 1996. Also, in the middle of the 1990s, movements to request a referendum on 404

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the expo became active. In February 1996, a member of Aichi’s prefectural assembly proposed to hold a referendum. But the government refused to take it up, maintaining that it already had majority support for the event. The government based its argument on resolutions passed by the local government in favor of the expo, enthusiasm expressed by various organizations, and surveys taken in the prefecture. However, questions were raised about the claims over the popular support for the plan. Mainichi Shinbun pointed out that although seven surveys had been taken in the prefecture to date, these had only asked whether the expo idea was well known, what degree of expectations citizens had for it, and whether people had specific requests on the matter. The question of whether people actually supported the expo remained unaddressed.6 In March 1997, a group was formed to demand a referendum to determine whether residents supported or opposed the expo, collecting more than 130,000 signatures by March 1998. At this point, the desire to make the expo organization more participatory began to emerge even among the promoters of existing plans. In May 1996, the Study Group for the Twenty-First-Century Dream proposed that a new type of expo should revolve around volunteer groups and ngo’s, arguing that Aichi Expo would be meaningless if it replicated the standard fare of pavilion-type exhibitions, public construction projects, and a massive number of visitors. Along the same lines, the Dream Club was created and forums with citizens were held every month after March 1998. In sum, activities by grassroots citizens’ groups not led by the public sector were becoming active. The question is whether the newly established Expo Association accurately recognized the problems they faced and addressed them appropriately as various citizen-initiated movements converged in the mid-1990s. At the general meeting of the bie held in Monaco in June 1997, Japan won the bid to sponsor the expo over Canada by a large margin, fifty-two to twenty-seven. In October 1997, the 2005 International Exposition Association was established by the national government, Aichi prefecture, and large corporations. The association faced two major conflicts. The first was between, on one hand, the national government and advisors in Tokyo, who wanted to fall in line with the international views on expositions and, on the other hand, Aichi prefecture, especially those who prioritized the promotion of local economic development and the utilization of the expo venue. The second conflict occurred between the administrative structure established by the governments and the local residents, who desired to be involved in the planning process. a drifting world fair

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The tension between the national and prefectural governments over the venue plan was already salient in 1996, when on an agreement reached at a cabinet meeting, a committee put together by miti began full-scale planning. As already mentioned, the prefectural government had plans for residential developments in the expo venue, turning the area into the nucleus of the Aichi Academic Research Development Zone. This would involve constructing a new residential area for a population of more than six thousand. With this intention, the prefecture acted ahead of the national government and announced its own expo venue concept in August 1996. The prefecture promoted the idea of building a futuristic, environmentfriendly model city on the expo site. According to the plan, high-rise buildings were clustered on the western side of the road that crosses the expo venue in a north-south direction, while low-rise buildings were scattered around the eastern side of the road. Also, the buildings on the hilly South Zone of the venue were to be supported by columns about fifty meters high. The plan proposed by miti was similar to the prefectural one in its basic concept, but the buildings were further concentrated along the western side of the road, and the construction on the eastern side was to be contained. The distinctions between these plans were subtle, but they reflected important underlying differences of views: whether the venue was designed in ways that prepared for the New Residential Urban Zone Development or preempted such a project. This problem was not resolved even after the establishment of the Expo Association. Instead, the association’s basic approach was to toe the prefectural government’s line by accepting the New Residential Urban Zone Development, avoiding thorny problems by limiting its role to those designated by law. Therefore, soon after, the venue plan shifted from that found in the miti concept of 1996, which clearly contradicted Aichi prefecture’s plan, to a more ambiguous one that accommodated the development. Proposals by miti were themselves not without problems from the ecological point of view. But this shift further weakened the possibility of preempting the residential development and turning the expo more environmentfriendly. The construction and environmental specialists who were members of the Expo Association kept insisting that they be involved in the prefecture’s plans for postexposition development, but their requests went ignored. The situation was similar with the second conflict. In the Expo Association, some of the committee members began making efforts to rebuild the mechanism for citizen participation. Furthermore, from the early stages 406

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onward, some members of the special committee tried to eliminate the justification of the postexposition development by creating a venue out of multiple linked locations, including the area near Nagoya Station already redeveloped. However, a part of the problem here was that information on ongoing discussions and proposals did not flow freely among organizations involved, and questions and frustration rose among individuals and groups cut off from each other. This situation continued until the summer of 1999, when major disagreements suddenly erupted. Since internal communications within the association were not made public, their citizens were left in the dark. There were no mechanisms in place other than official press releases to convey what went on within the Expo Association to local communities and citizens’ groups. Even if similar discussions took place inside and outside of the Expo Association, this was never communicated. Thus, after the mid-1990s, the planning for Achi Expo became increasingly aligned with environmental concerns at the level of visions and ideas. At the same time, there were numerous problems that remained untreated, including the obvious contradiction between the concept of the expo proper and the postexposition land development project, the lack of disclosure and a horizontal flow of information, and the need for ways to facilitate citizen participation. While these issues remained unresolved, conflicts grew deeper. What brought these contradictions to a head was the discovery in April 1999 of a pair of nesting goshawks within the proposed area of the expo venue. In fact, the possibility that goshawks, an endangered species, nested in the area had been pointed out from the earliest stages of expo planning. As early as June 1995, the Aichi branch of the Japan Audubon Society began studies in the Kaisho Forest area to determine whether it was a nesting ground for goshawks. In response, the prefectural government released the result of their own survey, reporting that no nesting goshawks had been confirmed on the site. However, in 1998, the survey of Kaisho Forest by the Japan Audubon Society reported the sighting of goshawks exhibiting mating behavior or the type of flying peculiar to the birds during breeding season, raising the possibility that nesting goshawks were in the area. In January 1999, the Japan Audubon Society again pointed out the possibility of goshawks nesting in the venue. Furthermore, in an exchange kept secret from the public at the time, the Aichi branch of the Japan Audubon Society confirmed the nesting of goshawks with the prefecture government. Two weeks later, the question was brought to a resolution when both the Japan a drifting world fair

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Audubon Society and the prefecture government affirmed the presence of nesting goshawks in Kaisho Forest. This was a major blow to the expo enterprise since it meant that substantial modifications had to be made to the venue plan. Indeed, the Japan Audubon Society requested the change of the proposed expo venue to protect goshawks. The Aichi Expo, claiming the banner of nature’s wisdom as its motto, came under pressure to demonstrate the authenticity of its commitment to the environment. The new governor of Aichi prefecture, Kanda Masaaki, announced possible changes to the expo venue plan only one week after the confirmation of nesting goshawks. By the end of May, he stated that the expo venue size at Kaisho Forest was to be scaled down and that existing facilities at Aichi Youth Park and other locations were to be utilized. In order to protect the woods where the goshawks lived, the expo venue in Kaisho Forest was to be reduced significantly. And in order to accommodate a high volume of visitors, it was necessary to distribute the events and facilities onto multiple sites. It was only natural that the Youth Park, very close to Kaisho Forest, surfaced as a candidate. However, this is only half of the story. In reality, not only the nature conservationists but also the Expo Association members themselves welcomed the fact of nesting goshawks. As a matter of fact, the majority opinion within the Expo Association held that it would be difficult to accommodate 25 million entrants in the Kaisho Forest venue alone. Bureaucrats at the national government, while seemingly advocating environmental protection, may have used goshawks in their strategy for expanding the expo venue; and the newly announced venue plan seemed to confirm this hidden agenda. It would have been expected, given the discovery of nesting goshawks, that there would be a major reduction in the land development at Kaisho Forest. But according to the new plan released in September 1999, the area for land development was not in actuality reduced. Only the design of the facility was changed from two-story to single-story buildings. In spite of the reduction in the projected number of entrants and total square feet of facility floor areas, without a corresponding reduction in the land area to be utilized, the strain on the environment would not be lightened. The reason behind the new venue plan was obvious. The association’s position was expressed in response to a question paper dated September 6, 1999, which had been submitted by a Venue Plan Project Team member. He questioned the reason why the size of the land development was maintained at about the same level as the plan proposed before the discovery of the nesting goshawks, even though the building volume was reduced to 408

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about half in the new plan. The logic behind his question was very simple: if the building volume was reduced by half, then the land development area could be likewise reduced so that the impact on the environment would be mitigated. The Expo Association, in response, claimed that it was not possible to reduce the land development area and that the plan for the New Residential Urban Zone Development could not be reversed. The uncompromising stance taken by the association was due to its support for the new residential development. By then, it was commonly acknowledged that the largest bottleneck in realizing the environmental ideal espoused by Aichi Expo was the postexposition residential development plan. There were some disagreements among Expo Association committee members on this matter. The minority opinion wanted to reverse the new residential development itself, but the majority wanted to merely modify its content. However, very few members were allowed to have input in the postexposition project. As a matter of fact, the original scheme for the new residential development, created in conjunction with the first expo plan of the Aichi prefecture government, was even more development-oriented than the expo itself. The vision of the Aichi prefectural government of hosting another Osaka Expo remained intact at this level. By the fall of 1999, the root cause of the problems was obvious. In spite of the gravity of the problem, the Expo Association could not propose substantial changes to the new residential development; the officials of the association maintained that it was outside the scope of their authority. Although this argument was legally correct, it was politically wrong. In the midst of this tension, Honorary President Ole Philipson and officials of bie came to Japan to inspect the venue. They were very critical of the planned use of the venue after the expo, and they questioned the miti official in charge in harsh words. They charged that it was hypocritical to flatten the hills for development and build group housing on the very site of an environmental expo. They pointed out that the land utilization plan of the prefectural government constituted precisely the large-scale twentieth-century development project that was at odds with the expo’s theme. The fact that bie officials expressed such objection was never reported by the mass media at the time. However, two months later, Chūnichi Shinbun made a scoop by exposing the internal document on the criticisms by bie, running a big headline: ‘‘Venue Utilization Plan Is Destructive to Nature.’’ 7 What happened hereafter was an upheaval that could not be stopped. After the Chūnichi story, major newspapers such as Asahi and Yomiuri one a drifting world fair

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after the other reported the entire minutes of the meeting between bie officials and the government. As if to respond to this turn of events, in March 1999, a meeting took place between the heads of environmental organizations, the governor of Aichi, and the minister of international trade and industry. Environmental organizations made the following three demands: (1) the complete cancellation of the new residential development and road plans; (2) the establishment of a mechanism that enables governments and citizens to engage in discussions concerning the expo on equal terms; and (3) the permanent conservation of Kaisho Forest. On April 4, 1999, the governor of Aichi prefecture and others finally agreed to give up the new residential development and road construction and promised to examine ways to conserve and utilize Kaisho Forest on soliciting opinions from the local community, nature protection organizations, academics, and specialists. Powerful obstacles that had stood in the way of oppositional movements for many years were shattered because of the criticism voiced by bie and media reports on it. This very fact seems to suggest that nothing happens in Japan without the ‘‘Black Ship’’ from foreign countries pressuring for changes. But how could bie make an accurate criticism of the postexposition development project at this very moment? Actually, the direct catalyst for bie’s objections came from letters sent to them by international environmental organizations such as the World Wildlife Fund (wwf). Immediately before bie officials left for Japan, the secretary-general of wwf wrote to the bie president, expressing concerns about the effects that Aichi Expo would inflict on Kaisho Forest. The secretary-general of Bird Life International also wrote a similar letter. bie was nervous about these international organizations turning against international expos. From a global point of view, growing forces of environmental movements had already overpowered bie, and it was necessary for bie to obtain their support if it wanted to survive into the twenty-first century. And this trend also was in the background of the conversion that Aichi Expo went through. Therefore, bie was quick to respond to the letters from international environmental organizations. What motivated the international environmental organizations themselves to intervene in the situation? In order to address this question, we need to move our gaze back to Japan. As suggested earlier, already in the early 1990s, local ngos mobilized to protect Kaisho Forest were forming networks. And these local movements, after 1996, became closely coordinated with the national-level environmental organizations such as the Japan Audubon Society, the Nature Conservation Society of Japan, and wwf Japan.

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The letters sent by wwf to bie were made possible by the national-level organizations appealing to international organizations for support. Furthermore, citizen groups in the local community were the true force behind these series of events. Such networks did not just emerge naturally. At the critical juncture, two dynamics were at work that made collaborations among environmental organizations grow rapidly over a short period of time. One is a tenacious effort made by a mature politician for building links among environmental organizations. Iwatare Sukio, the former minister of the environment and an able organizer of the Japanese labor movement in the late 1950s, promoted a collaboration among different movements in order to make Kaisho Forest a park for environmental education operated by the national government. He coordinated three national-level environmental organizations to form a common front, and he mobilized community-level movements by detailed and refined communication and persuasion. He also negotiated with Liberal Democratic Party politicians and bureaucrats of ministries and agencies at various levels. Through these efforts, he succeeded in what seemed almost impossible to others. His political skill was decisive for galvanizing the movement to protect Kaisho Forest, linking organizations all over Japan with international organizations and exercising influences over the politics on the national level. Another factor at play was the rapid spread of communication over the Internet. In the 1990s, ordinary people engaged in social movements in Japan began using e-mail as their main tool for exchanging information. According to Satoko Matsuura, in the effort to protect the Fujimae Tidal Flat in the Port of Nagoya, e-mails were effectively used by one of the movement’s leading figures, Tsuji Atsuo.8 Similarly, e-mails were used to spread the movements and network that took shape in the struggle over Kaisho Forest and became its central medium from about 1998. As a result, information on events following the confirmation of the goshawk nesting in Kaisho flowed horizontally at speeds unconceivable in earlier days. Within the Expo Association as well, there was a grassroots development of networks for exchanging opinions and information. This served as a forum for committee members, who had sensed the unfolding crisis at hand, to plot countermeasures. As long as information was conveyed along the vertical structure of the organization, many committee members were left uninformed about sharp confrontations that occurred in various meetings unless they were there to witness them in person. But after the summer of

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1999, e-mail messages written in order to exchange information in one meeting were transferred to people who attended other meetings, strengthening ties among people with shared concerns. After the scoop by Chūnichi Shinbun, as the situation took some dramatic turns, these networks began to work together, rising above differences in positions such as those of environmentalists, expo promotors, and Expo Association committee members. For example, from February through March 2000, repeated meetings were convened to hold frank dialogues among the members of the Expo Association and people in the nature conservation movement. In order to stimulate broader discussions, a voluntary forum called ‘‘Environmental Expo with Citizen Participation: First Step Meeting’’ was started in April, drawing in the members of the Expo Association, environmentalists, expo promoters, and local residents. This series of meetings was held quite often until the end of May, when the Aichi Expo Examination Committee was established. Some of the meeting participants became members of the committee, comprised of government officials, concerned citizens, and specialists. What do major twists and turns of events surrounding the planning of Aichi Expo suggest about the future of our society? Here we may consider Ulrich Beck’s notion of ‘‘sub-politics.’’ According to Beck, the shift from industrial society to ‘‘risk society’’ is accompanied by the hollowing out of politics in the conventional form of administration, while at the same time the politics that do not depend on existing political institutions are reinvigorated. In other words, the impasses of national regimes and the growing privatization of social interests do not automatically translate into the ‘‘end of politics.’’ Instead, politics emerges and erupts at points outside the domain of public authority and hierarchies. The concept of subpolitics should be distinguished from the conventional politics in two senses. ‘‘Sub-politics is distinguished from ‘politics’ first, in that, agents outside the political or corporatist system are allowed to appear on the stage of social design (this group includes professional and occupational groups, the technical intelligentsia in plants, research institutions and management, skilled workers, citizens’ initiatives, the public sphere, and so on), and second, in that not only social and collective agents but individuals as well compete with the latter and each other for the emerging shaping power of the political.’’ 9 When seen from above, the spread of subpolitics may appear as the failure of official administrative structures and the retreat of politics. However, what is actually happening is that the agents that did not play a substantial part in the 412

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processes of technological development and industrialization in the past— such as citizens, the public, social movements, specialist groups, and workers in various workplaces—are gaining more opportunities to comment on and participate in the creation of social compacts.10 In a risk society, a conventional system of administration may encounter severe opposition and rejections even if the policies are meant to serve the public good. While the process of modernization worked linearly toward predetermined objectives, the reflexive modernization is a process in which diverse values, objectives, and ways of thinking keep intersecting with and differentiating from each other. Existing structures of administration that tend to stay rigidly committed to a fixed set of goals do not function effectively in such a context. Therefore, there is an urgent need to build a system that mediates among multiple currents of forces at play, accommodating diverse modes of producing knowledge and meaning, and allowing a border-crossing flow of information. According to Beck, the ‘‘roundtable’’ model offers one elementary mode for negotiating a system containing such multileveled differences and conflicts of interests and claims.11 Beck’s argument proves helpful in interpreting a series of events surrounding Aichi Expo. Yet the transformation that the expo plan underwent was not something that occurred automatically as a logical outcome of ‘‘reflexive modernization.’’ As we have seen, Aichi Expo was initially based on the outdated idea of holding another Osaka Expo. Subsequently, through the intervention by the national government, the basic concept changed from the industrial-technological expo to the environmental expo beyond development. This shift, however, created an irresolvable contradiction between the ideal of the expo and the reality of the postexposition venue utilization plan. Finally, this very fact was brought to light by international organizations such as wwf and bie. Yet when we look at the actual processes that took place, the pressure that drove all these changes came from a local-national network of oppositional movements, specialists, and politicians. Facilitated by the Internet and engaged political activists, the local power of ngos became connected more efficiently with the global power of transnational organizations. Also, we have to recognize the power that Kaisho Forest itself exerted as a locus where people have found a sense of their own identities and connection to the memory of nature. Kurihara Akira argues that a new kind of citizens’ political movement is emerging today, one interconnecting and rearranging three domains: the living sphere, the identity sphere, and the life sphere.12 According to Kurihara, the life sphere— associated with body, nature, earth, memory, life, and death—serves as the a drifting world fair

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foundation that makes all other spheres possible. The developments in the course of modern industrialization have nearly extinguished the life sphere of people and nature in Japan. What remain are ruins covered over by pavements, barren fields, and landfills. If the environmentally harmonious future city were to have been completed in the postexposition venue, Kaisho Forest would have also turned into such a ruin. The whole chain of events that took place through the planning of the expo shows that it is precisely the power of the people that may offer a resistance to such a process. Furthermore, Kaisho Forest provided an important support to this force. An area that had initially appeared as an unremarkable piece of land, left untouched by developments despite its proximity to a large city, turned out to be a reservoir of memories of lost fields and mountains, holding out the possibility of their resuscitation. Notes 1 Machimura Takashi, ‘‘Chiiki kaihatsu to shite no hakurankai’’ [Exposition as a re-

2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12

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gional development], in Hakurankai o meguru ‘‘jimoto’’ no shakaigaku [Local sociology of exposition], ed. Hitobashi Daigaku Shakaigakubu Chôson Zeminaru (Tokyo, 1999), 5. Chūnichi Shinbun, October 12, 1988. Mainichi Shinbun, February 8, 1996. Mainichi Shinbun (Nagoya), October 25, 1995. Asahi Shinbun (Nagoya), November 30, 1995. Mainichi Shinbun (Nagoya), February 29, 1996. Chūnichi Shinbun, January 14, 1999. Matsuura Satoko, Soshite higata wa nokotta: npo to intānetto [And the tidal flat remained: npo and the internet] (Tokyo, 1999). Ulrich Beck, Reflexive Modernization: Politics, Tradition, and Aesthetics in the Modern Social Order (Cambridge, 1994), 22. Ibid., 23. Ibid., 28–31. Kurihara Akira, ‘‘Shimin seiji no ajenda’’ [Agendas of citizens’ politics] Shisō, February 2000, 5–14.

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Angelus Novus in Millennial Japan

Sabu Kohso

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he goal of this project is to rediscover the impetus of self-emancipation in present-day Japan. In the postwar period of this Far Eastern country, a New Left movement arose and flourished roughly between 1960 and 1970, the two waves of campaigns against the Japan-U.S. Security Treaty. The decade that followed was a time of militarization and violent internal strife (uchi-geba) that gradually took its toll on the movement. Since then it has been hard to find traces of any solid, massive opposition, but there have been significant experimentations that register new possible paths as undercurrents.1 I would like to show that these appear to be gaining realistic ground now that Japanese society is showing rampant symptoms of diastrophic transformation. The new groups can be considered to be post–New Left, and I would like to call them Angelus Novus (after Walter Benjamin) in present day Japan; those young activists who are caught up by the nation’s historical past and the future of capitalism and struggling in the present.2 They are not direct heirs; they no longer follow the founding principles of forming a party and overturning the state by becoming a state. They have, however, certain atavistic elements, especially vis-à-vis a will to totally change society with their own corporeality. So it is that this project requires tracing the threads that would form a new genealogy, a genealogy of emancipatory radicalism. It has been over two decades since I left Japan to live in New York City. During this period I returned every so often and observed the two widely discussed successive economic states: the boom of the 1980s and the recession of the 1990s. In the shift from the former to the latter, the mood

of the entire social milieu changed. I recall the air of the 1980s vividly, just because it feels so alien now: young people on the street looked extremely neat, wearing mostly black designer clothing with bobbed hair that was reminiscent of well-groomed Japanese children. They ardently enjoyed gourmet food, designer clothing, and high culture while unhesitatingly pursuing their careers. In big cities, there were endless renovations of fancy stores, houses, hip clubs, and the like that offered stages for the urban elite. Today’s young people look just the opposite: they are untidy to the extreme with their loose, hip hop–like fashion; but more crucially, their gazes seem sharper and tenser. They tend to hang out on the streets instead of shopping in fancy stores. More and more they are beginning to look like what they really are: street kids. After graduating from high school and even college, many cannot get formal, stable, permanent jobs, the promise once emblematic of the Japanese social system. The majority of universities are no longer institutions for producing middle-class, white-collar workers, to say nothing of Japan’s future elites, but temporary camps for chronically jobless youth. Chances are that they can only be so-called freeters—those who earn their livelihoods, permanently, by odd jobs. So, for a visitor, there is a sense of abrupt discontinuity between the social atmospheres. The 1980s, especially, appeared strangely void of critical thought and oppositional politics. But in reality, there had to have been some social dynamic piercing through the discontinuous periods in relationship with which the older movements dissipated while the new ones arose. In order to grasp this, it is imperative to refer back to the 1980s from the present, more crisis-ridden standpoint.3

The Bubble Revisited In 2001, a group of young progressive scholars gathered to discuss 1980s Japan and postmodernism; their roundtable entitled ‘‘What Was the Postmodern? An Approach to the 1980s’’ appeared in the intellectual monthly Gendai Shisō [Contemporary thought].4 The aim was to resituate this knotty periodization politically. It suggests the possibility of seeing this historicity from a view immanent to Japan, a view that stresses it as a continuum of the struggle. This was a moment dominated by a new current of conservatism called neoliberalism. As any number of analyses of the post-Fordist transformation of social space in the West have shown, in the simplest analysis—in Japan, too—the social and public domains were decomposed by the bare 416

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principles of the market economy; this undermined the welfare system that used to support the disenfranchised. The result was a harsher bifurcation of class and a transformation of the urban space and culture in general: public institutions were replaced by multipurpose commercial spaces, while mass media, led by tv and advertising agencies, took over discursive hegemony. Japan also exemplified a conclusive phase of the shift from a society of discipline to one of control. But because of the conditions that formed Japan’s peculiar bubble atmosphere, the neoliberalist policy was not immediately ostensible there. In Japan, the ‘‘real’’ subsumption of the entire social milieu occurred under the influence of the integration of enterprises into groups (keiretsu) that absorbed affiliated subcontractors into a kind of cartel. The advent of these monsters accelerated the decomposition of critical labor movements. Unions of state-owned companies were dissolved as the companies were privatized and absorbed into organizations subordinated to keiretsu. All the political and social problems were addressed on the level of the market economy. Meanwhile, the state expanded its focus from economic and industrial domains to the entire lifeworld of the people. According to one participant of the roundtable, Sakai Takashi, in modernity the social was established involving oppositions within it, while the way the neoliberalism destroyed the social was by undermining the oppositionality of the social itself. How was this done? As Ōuchi Hirokazu points out, the subject of the workers was strategically split into conflicting positions: workers/consumers. That is to say, in the struggle between capital and workers, the third term consumer was introduced to confuse the struggle. Then the state and capital took the consumers’ side in order to extend their control to the everyday life of the workers. In Japan, a coalition of the state/capital and consumers began a campaign to weaken the unions: they accused the National Railway Union (Kokurō) of providing substandard service and the Japan Teachers’ Union (Nikkyoso) of the degradation of national education. It spread the notorious stereotype, ‘‘For good services, labor movements are nothing but obstacles.’’ In such a sad context, Kokurō folded in 1987. As Sakai points out, the global simultaneity that had expressed itself in the struggle of the late 1960s (and perhaps continued up to the oil crisis in 1973) was lost in Japan, and this process began from the moment the Strike for Recovering the Right to Strike (Sutoken suto) of 1975 failed to achieve its goal. In postwar Japan, all the public workers—with the exception of policemen, firefighters, and corrections officers—had gained the right to strike in angelus novus in millennial japan

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the Bill of Unions (Rōsōhō) passed in 1946. But this was rescinded by new legislation in 1949, mainly under pressure brought by General MacArthur of the Occupation Army. The 1975 strike, led by Sohyo (the General Council of Trade Unions of Japan), was fought for eight days. In retaliation, the administration of the National Railway sued the participating unions, Kokurō and Dōrō (the Union of Motormen), claiming a business loss of 202 billion yen. This major defeat for the unions was the beginning of the strange lag of temporality that characterized 1980s Japan. It was the beginning of a syndrome provoked by a series of deliberate government policies reflecting the sense of lingering threat that the ruling class felt from the 1960s uprising. In the summer of 1975, Prime Minister Miki Takeo proposed a social policy called Outline for the Nation’s LifePlanning (Shōgai sekkei keikaku kōsō) that consisted of four goals: having a home, receiving lifelong education, eligibility for social security, and guaranteed retirement benefits for life. Miki announced this policy right before the union began the strike with its slogan ‘‘Win back the right to strike!’’ Economically speaking, Japan was the quickest of the industrialized nations to have recovered from the oil shock of 1973, which was perhaps another factor for Japan’s being out of sync with the sense of global reality. This was due to its early and ‘‘brave’’ determination to restructure. And later, what contributed to the 1980s economic boom was the increase of marginal labor—part-time and informal jobs—for students, wives, and increasing ranks of migrant and minority workers. The capital and the state claimed that Japan’s economic success occurred thanks to superior technology and a unique management system, but the restructuring and informal/impermanent labor had always already played their crucial roles. For instance, freeters already existed at that time, but they did not appear as troubled as today; rather, they appealed to a sense of being pioneers of a new lifestyle, especially when they worked for the growing service industries. After the corporate hegemony over the entire social milieu was established, as Ōuchi stresses, leading corporations and elite universities joined hands, and the privatization of education became a major trend. Education began to approach entertainment; some large universities moved out of central Tokyo and reestablished themselves in the suburbs, making the educational environment more and more detached from the urban space, and more and more fictional. This pushed Quartier Latin phenomena into a nostalgic past. At the same time, as Miyake Yoshio points out, the discourses of critical social sciences were replaced en masse with the cultural analyses in418

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fluenced mainly by structuralism and semiotics. In consequence, even the issues around the emperor system came to be dealt with folklorically, which is to say that it was treated as a mysterious and fanciful kingdom that had survived since ancient times. This made the nation forget its modern historicity wherein this system was fully responsible for a number of wars of aggression and continues to assume ambiguous yet substantial power. In the early 1980s, politically active intellectuals began to disappear from the front stage, while conservative, technocratic types overpowered them. In such a context, Prime Minister Ōhira Masayoshi organized a policy research group mobilizing such intellectuals in 1979, and the group published a nine-volume report whose main point was to promote Japan’s uniqueness and superiority.5 It saw the present age as one of culture, no longer merely of economic growth and industrial advancement, meaning that Japan had overcome modernity. Significantly, here the notion of culture was tied to the promotion of consumerism, which marginalized production and workers, rendering them obsolete. It was in this climate that some department stores (such as Seibu) used their excessive profits to become cultural institutions—contemporary museums, cinematheques, or performance spaces. Thus the dominant ideology embraced consumers as individuals with difference and choice. In the meantime, the West not only praised Japanese-style management but was attempting to emulate it as well. It was thought superior because it was based on the uniquely intimate relationality (aidagara) that existed in the household-type (ie) society.6 This heady time entertained the idea that Japan had surpassed the West. Japan was both intoxicated and paralyzed by the spatio-temporal wall it constructed against the rest of the world. The ruling conservatives were proudly expressing Japan’s forwardness and the richness of its culture. But the side of the people, workers, and the movement was troubled by the disappearance of moments for struggle. There was no happy ending. Toward the 1990s, darker features of the boom gradually became exposed. Everything that used to be positive became negative. First and foremost, Japanese enterprises quickly responded to the recession by discarding Japanese-style management: on a discursive level, ie and aidagara were no longer in use, being replaced with selfresponsibility ( jikosekinin). The core part of employment secured by permanent contracts began diminishing to the bare minimum. Companies began to throw workers out on the streets and tell them to be responsible for their own lives. Thus masses of homeless people began to roam the cities to find public spaces where they could spend the night. angelus novus in millennial japan

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The year 1995 was known for its disasters: the Great Hanshin/Awaji earthquake, the sarin gas attack in the Tokyo subway by the Aum cult, and the accident at the nuclear power plant Monjyu. Now even that which used to be Japan’s specialty, technology, had become a source of trouble. Furthermore, there was the rape of an elementary school girl by three U.S. soldiers in Okinawa. This rekindled the anti–U.S. base movement and created one of the most powerful currents of feminist fronts ever seen there.7 The year marked a radical shift in the entire social climate. In 1999, the 145th National Diet announced the government’s new policy of intensifying control over the nation. A number of bills were passed: legislation concerning the national flag and the national anthem (kokki kokkahō), seeking to reestablish a tight national body (kokutai ); legislation concerning situations surrounding Japan (shūhen jitaihō), legalizing the war mobilization of every local government; legislation concerning residents’ registration ( jūmin kihon daichōhō), realizing total control of the populace; and three bills aimed against organized crime, including legislation allowing wiretapping [tōchōhō], threatening civil liberties. Now market fundamentalism and the police state can seamlessly merge in Japan, and, as Sakai warns, the country will become a high-tech police state. Now the military and security sectors have been fully reinforced by the state. This corresponds to a shift of governance from an emphasis on negotiation to violence. It used to be that the redistribution of wealth was conducted within the limits of a welfare state, where the conflict within society was solved by negotiation. But the new mode of governance is that the noises created by market fundamentalism are simply oppressed by the reinforcement of security, as Miyake points out. All in all, the seeds of today’s crises were disseminated during the 1980s, yet, being dressed in the robe of economic euphoria and cultural exceptionalism, at that time they appeared as positive signs. Now, moving from an overview of the whole society to activism in particular, I shall exemplify, in terms of the activism of the 1980s, a few strong currents that bridged the generation of the 1970s and that of the post-1990s.

Guattari’s Tokyo Félix Guattari visited Japan in the late fall of 1985.8 During this trip he was invited to visit the Sanya housing complex in Tokyo, a district called a gathering place ( yoseba) for day workers, but in fact a site where they live in substandard lodging houses and are picked up in the early morning by 420

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minivans to be taken to various construction sites. It goes without saying that the day workers were those who physically supported the postwar flourish of the entire society, but they were always treated like the scum of the earth. Located at the northeastern edge of Tokyo, Sanya has always been marginal, ever since the period when the capital was called Edo; then, after the war, it became an enormous barracks for the industrial reserve army (while it reconstructed the Kantō area that had been firebombed).9 Guattari’s day trip was organized by the activist/theorist Hirai Gen. The plan was to show the visitor a transversal Tokyo, as it were, cutting across the city: from Sanya, passing through the old downtown area and the central district (the politico-economic headquarters and the Imperial Palace), to Shimokitazawa, a satellite town of youth culture where the Free Radio Movement initiated by Kogawa Tetsuo was in action.10 On that day Guattari was accompanied by Hirai and other activists, as well as an intellectual star of the time, Asada Akira. Documentation of the itinerary was published in a book entitled Tokyo Theater.11 That fact alone appears quite telling about the discrepancy between the idea of being progressive and the activism of the time. Interestingly, via Guattari, conflicting tendencies within Japanese culture confronted each other. While both sides were eager to discover a new principle in the post–New Left context, they were playing totally different roles vis-à-vis the growing urban culture of Japan’s postmodernity. On one side was Asada, a progressive thinker in all aspects, but a tough critic of the activists, especially of their humanism and their theory of alienation. He was also playing a central role in organizing a new kind of journalism, which applied poststructuralist thought to analyses of new vanguard culture.12 On the other side was Hirai. Several years older than Asada, he belonged to the last generation of Zenkyōtō (a nationwide network of radical students); he had continued to be politically active ever since his involvement in high school disputes.13 In Sanya, he was active as part of a support group for the day workers and also participated in an important film project (which will be introduced later). In terms of the Guattari connection, while Asada was reading Gille Deleuze and Guattari’s work in the context of the new social and cultural climate in toto, Hirai was seeking to use it for a new activism. Asada and Guattari had already been acquainted, but—however or therefore—Guattari proved more supportive of the activist side, criticizing Asada for attacking their conventionalism from the vantage point of sheer theory. Though he had full respect for Asada’s theoretical orientation, Guattari expressed the need for a much subtler, more sensitive, and more flexible approach toward the discourses of activists and the complex relationship angelus novus in millennial japan

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between activism and theory.14 In this encounter with Japan’s postmodern scene, Guattari chose to cherish the growing minor impetus, yet unnameable, rather than the established discourse that appeared as vanguard theory. This constituted one of the rare occasions that the homogeneous image of 1980s Japan, that of the bubble economy and elitist culture, was subtly broken via the intervention of the other. Speaking of the movements of the 1980s in general, the central forces were no longer present in universities but had moved to citizen- and community-based organizations. The issues at stake were less political than social, such as pollution and consumerism. For instance, the antinuclear movement gained enormous momentum. Meanwhile, around the end of the 1970s to the early 1980s, the focus of militant activism shifted from armed revolt to struggles in the courts in support of those who had been imprisoned in the 1970s—especially members of the East Asia Anti-Japan Armed Front (Higashi Ajia hannichi busō sensen) and various factions of the Sekigun [Red Army]. Then, many in the support group began to gather around the anti-emperor system movement. Also, new yoseba movements appeared, especially in Sanya and Kamagasaki in Osaka. That is to say that the 1980s were a time when, under the visible stratum of the cultural and economic boom, radicals were tackling issues around the suppressed and cursed elements of Japan’s civil society. These three kinds of struggles were aligned mostly through the activists’ personal connections. This was the new line of alliance in 1980s Japan.

The Yoseba Struggle In the mid-1980s, Sanya was caught up in the second construction boom in the postwar era, following the first one right before the Tokyo Olympics in 1964. Sanya and other yoseba in Japan—Kamagasaki, Kotobukichō in Yokohama, and Sasajima in Nagoya—were filled with more workers than ever. But not even during the boom did the conditions of the day workers improve. An abundance of jobs did not mean that they were offered health insurance or other welfare support to which the normal citizenry was entitled. They continued to face harsh working conditions and consequently suffer from mental distress (out of loneliness), as well as from health problems (from hazardous working conditions, drinking too much, and old age). For those who could not work, the state did little to help. They had to live in parks and other outside spaces. In the 1980s, an average of 150 workers died each year from exposure in Sanya alone.15 422

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Worse still, inasmuch as there were many jobs, the business of labor brokers (tehaishi ) increased. That is to say that the intervention of yakuza/ fascist organizations broadened. They not only took a cut from workers’ wages but also scavenged margins from everything workers could get. Meanwhile the police treated the yakuza organizations (i.e., in Sanya it was Kanamachi Ikka) as associates who kept order, especially, by oppressing workers’ protests through violence. The police turned a blind eye to organized crime, as well as to the mistreatment of workers. So the activism in yoseba consisted of two elements: (1) voluntary support for workers’ lives, including daily patrols to look out for the homeless and struggling on the street and help them, and orchestrated support (offering food, clothing, and other survival tools) for the annual Winter Survival Struggle (ettō-tōsō); and (2) unionizing the workers to protect them from and fight against the violence of the yakuza-police coalition. After the militarism of the radicalist sector of the New Left gradually died down in the 1970s, some of those who continued to seek the revolutionary moment went into the big yoseba, mostly as individuals, in order to live there and try to learn about the situation of the day workers. This decision was motivated for some by the realization that their earlier activities had failed to incorporate the oppressed masses. First of all, as we have seen, organized labor movements had lost their ground in Japan. In that climate, yoseba offered the only loci where the moment of radical class struggle remained. From the viewpoint of traditional Marxism, the unorganized day workers are defined as lumpen proletariat and marginal. However, along with the decline of the formal labor movement, the theory based on the vanguard party of the organized workers was thrown into doubt. The activists sought to grasp a new potency in yoseba’s workers—more fluid, omnipresent, and rhizomatic forces, as it were, aside from the fact that they were the victims of social inequality, existing as they were as the hierarchical bottom. This became the starting point or the point of starting over for the activists of the generations that followed. At the time Guattari encountered Sanya in late 1985, the film Yama: Yararetara yarikaese [Yama: Attack to attack] was in the final stages of production.16 This is a handmade documentary by and of a group of people around the militant union movement called Sanya Sōgidan (Sanya-Industrial Action Group). The main narratives center around the life and struggle of the day workers roughly during a two-year period beginning in late 1983: it shows their days and nights, Sanya as a labor market, the neighborhood, some interviews, Sanya’s summer festival, the deaths of workers, and actual angelus novus in millennial japan

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attacks by the rogues of Kanamachi Ikka, as well as confrontations with the police force during the protests. Importantly, with the input of one of the two directors, Yamaoka Kyōichi, the film treats Sanya in a specific spacetime expanse: the globalism of day workers under the rule of Japanese imperialism before and after the war. It grasps the day workers in Sanya in association with the historically abused workers from Taiwan and Korea. It includes footage from the other three big yoseba. Finally, it revisits an area of Northern Kyūshū—from Chikuhō/ Tobata to Yahata/Hakata—which was the center of heavy industries (steel and coal mining) that made Japan a strong militarist state at the expense of innumerable Asian and Japanese workers; this area constituted the very imperialist base for invading Korea. Shockingly, both of the directors of the film were assassinated by the same yakuza organization. The first director, Satō Mitsuo, was stabbed to death in December 1984. In fact, the film begins with the scene of Satō lying on the street after the attack. And even more shockingly, Yamaoka, who succeeded in the project, was shot to death right after he finished the film. On the occasion of his death, Hirai wrote a eulogy: When the two—Satō and Yamaoka—pointed the camera at the yoseba, the core of the lowest strata of Japanese society that throbs in its amplification of the whole nation’s vibes, those parasites who lived on in the workers’ neighborhood and continued to work for the state power as its puppets must have felt as though a gun were pointed at their hearts. In fact the film is neither ‘‘a miserable and sad portrait of day workers’’ nor ‘‘a picture of shabby but humble lives’’ as such. Rather, it is a crude report about the becoming of a violent flow of life that—involving the flow from the Korean Peninsula, meandering around the Japanese archipelago, streaming into Sanya and Kamagasaki—never stops its movement.17

The potency of the day workers had already been pointed out in the early 1970s by one of the most dedicated organizers of the yoseba movement (in both Sanya and Kamagasaki), Funamoto Shūji (1945–75). Conceptualizing the nature of the day workers’ rhizomic organization, as well as their specific globalism, in contradistinction from a conventional union, Funamoto described it as ‘‘amoeba-like cells’’ that flexibly connect and disconnect with each other, or ‘‘the flow-like workers’ organization.’’ 18 Thereafter the belief shared among yoseba activists was that Japan as an imperialist nation-state, no matter how deceptively it appears, continues to exist as a substantial apparatus; and the day workers, as a big flow of life, though they are placed on the lowest rung of this system, comprise the vital 424

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power that creates the system from below and thus has the potency to transform it in the trans-Asiatic context. Japanese imperialism has always been common knowledge in terms of historical fact, but for this recognition to become a full-fledged movement, there had to have been some real encounters with alterity. There is a history of encounters with the other that altered the course of the Japanese radical Left. In the context of the New Left, it came as a thrashing criticism by a group of resident Chinese youth, Kaseitō (Overseas Chinese Youth Struggle Committee) in 1970. This group was organized on the occasion of a new immigration bill (nyūkanhō) discussion at the Diet in March 1969. Zenkyōtō and Kaseitō had planned a joint rally on July 7, 1970 (the thirty-third anniversary of the Marco Polo Bridge Incident) for ‘‘stopping the reinvasion of Japanese imperialism,’’ but on that day, Kaseitō decided to step aside and criticize the sects that had joined Zenkyōtō, for they were dismayed by the way the sects interpreted this bill: they felt Zenkyōtō was not treating the issue as seriously as necessary, and instead was using the occasion mainly to propagandize the group’s own agenda. It is said that on that day, all the leaders of the sects were summoned to the stage and impeached by the coalition of minority activists, including some Japanese who shared the same problematic consciousness.19 This incident marked the historical introduction of minority voices into Japan’s New Left movement.20 Meanwhile, in the early 1970s, there appeared a group that took encounters with the other, the presence of the other, or the issues of minorities in the context of Japanese imperialism most seriously, even too seriously: the East Asia Anti-Japan Armed Front—the name still shakes us. The targets of their attack were carefully chosen among the symbols of Japanese imperialist aggression and the companies active before and after the war, in other words, those responsible for Japan’s invasion of Asia and, simultaneously, for the direct oppression of the day workers in yoseba. The targets showed the whole nexus of the imperialist power stretch from the emperor system to yoseba.

Against the Acephalic Emperor Beginning in the early 1980s, Japan, because of growing economic need, began to mobilize the cheap and informal labor power of various minorities (especially immigrants from Southeast Asia). But the government did not rewrite the immigration law to legalize their residency and work. For that matter, before World War II, this same state had forcibly brought more angelus novus in millennial japan

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than 800,000 Koreans to Japan as slave laborers to satisfy the needs of the wartime economy. And by the 1980s, 1 million of them (including their progeny) were still living there, while other migrant workers were streaming into the country. The Japanese state and capitalism used the immigrant labor power whenever necessary, but they never treated the workers humanely, or extended them the benefits of citizens. This has been consistent since before the war. At the core of this policy exists the emperor system that embodies the exclusionary national body (kokutai ). As Hirai explained to Guattari along their itinerary, the emperor system was not a simple feudal remnant, as many believed, but a very contemporary, realistic apparatus that formed the modern state of Japan. Now it is ‘‘a postmodern system that cunningly involves and conserves hereditary customs, traditional family structure, archaic religion, and the memory of communities, in the present, in order to sustain the national body. . . . It is a supplier of the libido (for producing and reproducing the national body) that can be called the Emperor machine.’’ 21 Thus the role of this system should be reconsidered in every respect, especially in relationship with the everyday life of the people. Amano Yasukazu has been involved in various movements since his Zenkyōtō experience in the 1960s.22 His stance has been consistently that of a nonsectarian radical. This particularly flexible, independent yet intense way of engagement has allowed him to participate in and initiate a number of movements in a transversal manner. Like Hirai, he formed part of the Winter Survival Struggle in Sanya and was involved in the support group for the jailed activists. But he was also one, among others, who took the initiative in the historical upsurge of the anti-emperor system movement (as the death of Emperor Hirohito neared in 1989) with a group he organized called Hantenren (the Liaison Conference of Anti-Emperor System Movements) in 1983.23 Before the war, the examination of the nature of the emperor system was mainly motivated by the Japan Communist Party for its party line debates. But it failed to grasp the way the emperor system functioned and assumed the national body. It defined it as an equivalent of the absolute monarchy, failed in ousting it, and eventually came to be itself absorbed into the body. Then, in the postwar constitution, the emperor was redefined as a symbol of national unity at the same time as being deprived of its ruling power granted in the Meiji constitution. Now people became free to reinterpret it, but there was no drastic improvement. Be they symbolic or substantial, cultural or political, analyses just oscillated between the two poles. As I have mentioned earlier, arguments that treated the system mythologically and 426

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ahistorically proved popular during the 1980s. This stance made the emperor look like a mechanism of a mostly cultural nature, especially in reference to the concepts ‘‘sign degree zero’’ and ‘‘being of nothing.’’ 24 On this point Amano insists: ‘‘Now what is most necessary is a political critique (attack) against the ‘Imperial-state-power’ as an apparatus that disguises the political into apolitical culture.’’ 25 Amano’s point is that the emperor system has always exerted an ambiguous yet substantial power over the people. Its nature covers the whole spectrum of the nation’s lifeworld. In a sense, it is the political decomposing (or disguising) its own autonomy and eating up everything else. As Takeuchi Yoshimi (1910–77), an influential social critic and scholar of Chinese literature, insisted, the materials with which the prewar constitution made up the emperor system still persist today. Notwithstanding the postwar amendments, the principles of the system survive. ‘‘In the postwar era, Japanese gained the freedom of association; but the organizational principles of the associations that spontaneously appeared among people were still those of the Emperor system rather than those of the democracy. This system is like a lizard whose head is chopped off but whose tail is still wriggling.’’ 26 In this sense, any number of miniature emperor systems exist and can be found everywhere, in ‘‘every single blade of grass, in every leaf of a tree.’’ 27 As Harry Harootunian points out, the acephalic emperor and his family, despite having been declared merely human beings, continue to exert ritualistic power; it was just that their ordinary family life itself became part of or was placed in continuity with sacred rituals such as Niinamesai (Shintō Harvest Festival) and Daijōsai (the ascension ceremonies) that organized and reorganized national time.28 This became especially evident when people experienced the way the state sought to make the entire nation’s everyday life a big ritualistic space of mourning (for the death of Hirohito in 1989) and glorification (for the ascension of Akihito in 1990). Furthermore, by the use of the media spectacle, the imperial family and its double permeate Japan—but this not only on exceptional occasions like death and birth but also in ordinary, everyday life. All the members of the family appear regularly in the media, showing the model life. From birth to schooling to marriage to adulthood to old age to death, the imperial family members showcase the ideal national types: the body features, intelligence, health, character, aesthetics, morals, and so on. The spectacle is organized so that they induce sympathy from the people, the same sympathy that they feel toward their own family members. In this manner, ‘‘the symbolic emperor has become virtually indistinguishable from a discourse devoted to angelus novus in millennial japan

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stabilizing the identity of the Japanese and explaining to them why they are Japanese.’’ 29 To fight this network of the Japanese biopolitical system, Amano believes it is necessary to involve three shifts of stance: (1) the anti-emperor system movement as a political struggle; (2) the anti-emperor system movement as a reformation of the revolutionary subject; (3) the anti-emperor system movement as a mass movement. The first involves a full reconsideration of the distinction between the political and other domains. Confronting the postmodern power of the emperor system, it is crucial to redefine the political: ‘‘The spectrum of the political always covers everyday life, therefore, the political should be considered as a conglomeration of everyday life.’’ For this precise reason, it is necessary to criticize (or attack) the ‘‘‘Imperial-statepower’ as an apparatus that disguises the political into apolitical culture.’’ 30 The second involves the reformation of the struggling subjects. The political power of the imperial state lies in that it can organize our everyday life on the micro level using various deceptive rituals and mechanisms. To borrow Antonio Gramsci’s terms, the shift from ‘‘the war of maneuver (frontal attack) to the war of position’’ is a sine qua non.31 Objectifying the struggle with such an omnipresent micro power, we come to question in what way we can realize a politics that refuses co-optation at every molecular phase. The Japan Communist Party’s war of maneuver did not work. The sectarianism of the New Left by no means works for this either. Here Amano’s experience of being a nonsectarian radical is at stake. To him this stance can be defined as the sectarianship of nonsectarians or the partisanship of nonpartisans: ‘‘[This stance] is expressed by a conscious refusal of the will to form a party that would inexorably appear in the course of continuing a movement (with many defeats naturally). . . . Refusing to assume any totality or universality outside the concrete movement, in other words, moving toward the universalities only within individual concreteness—that is the stance of ‘the partisanship of non-partisans.’’’ 32 The third movement involves the formation of a new line of alliance, or transversal connection of movements. Considering all the above elements, the anti-emperor movement could and should be a mass movement. Or it might be that if a self-production of a radical emancipatory movement can occur in Japan at all. The anti-emperor front could function as a template (not a principle) for arranging various molecular struggles. As we have seen, the emperor system as a political system imposes a cartography of everydayness on the people in order to form the national body. Given that, a countermovement can also provide a cartography of resistance in its own way. 428

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When the death of Hirohito was imminent in 1989, the power (the local governments), media, and the local right-wing organizations forced people to sanctify the emperor system and Hirohito himself. The ruling class even interdicted all the music and comedy programs on tv to fabricate a nationwide mood of mourning, calling it a period of jishuku (self-imposed control). Counter to this, various individuals and groups produced handmade media that displaced the imposition of the fanatically homogenous value with jokes and parodies. Rallies in the style of parades and festivals took place everywhere. Here appeared a totally new form of resistance, the vital spirit of performativity and laughter that had been mostly absent in Japan’s modern anti-establishment movements.

Angelus Novus in the Bathhouse The generations that became active after the late 1980s inherited all of these elements. The yoseba movement proved indispensable because it grasped the most radical moment of class struggle. Nevertheless, the situation of yoseba changed drastically: the decline in construction during the recession desolated most of them, while the number of the oppressed increased in the form of growing ranks of young freeters and as an older homeless population. Furthermore, the employment style changed due to communication via cell phones. People now look for jobs via employment papers and communicate with tehaishi wherever they are. The new tendency is the scattered and omnipresent, the virtual yoseba. That is to say, breaking out from the frames not only of the Fordist (or Toyotaist) factories but also of yoseba, the multitudes now scatter all over the place, filling the entire social space with their burning biopower. On the other hand, communications with those who carried out the armed struggles during the 1970s—with the East Asia Anti-Japan Armed Front and the factions of the Red Army—have proven valuable in many senses. Support groups for jailed militants—for example, Shienren (the Support/Liaison Council for Fighting against the Death and Heavy Penalties of the East Asia Anti-Japan Armed Front)—mediated between the activists and the general public. Thanks to their efforts, rich discourses about the experiences of the ultramilitant line have found their way into the public domain: themes have varied from political violence, political morals, criminal law, prisoners’ conditions, revolutionary internationalism, psychology of the isolated vanguard, the relationship between vanguard groups and mass movements, and so on. Many in the progressive camp feel that whether or angelus novus in millennial japan

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not they can approve of militant acts, the groups committed to them have posed crucial questions and continue to do so. They occasioned an opportunity for discourse by first committing acts that went far beyond the moral and psychological borders of civil society, but then, precisely because of these violations, they were able to offer a source of rich reflections about the mechanisms of a so-called civil society now on the verge of exploding. The anti-emperor system movement broke the barrier between radicalism and the affect of the mass. It opened the possibility of realizing an antiestablishment movement on the mass level. As we have seen, it created a totally new language of affect with its performativity and laughter surrounding radical politics. Here I shall exemplify four movements of the new generations, ones mainly based in Tokyo.33 The proviso, however, is that they are just a few; we will miss many important groups, especially in the categories of feminism, minorities, media, ecology, and Okinawa. I chose to focus on those which do not fit into existing categories but pursue a radical change. In the late 1980s, networking among young activists was accelerating across the nation. The nationwide high school students’ organizations played the crucial role of being the matrix.34 In a manner similar to that of the Red Guard during the Cultural Revolution in China, they formed a group and hitchhiked to various places across the country in order to contact and exchange information with other groups. In many locations in Japan, there existed so-called free spaces or liberated zones for young activists to make extended visits and commingle (kōryū suru). (This term became an important catchphrase for the new generation.) For instance, Komaba Dormitory of Tokyo University and Yoshida Dormitory of Kyoto University played such roles, and aside from these public facilities, private spaces were created as well.35 That is to say, contrary to my own impressions of 1980s youth, the activists in the late 1980s were developing a totally different mentality: not an individualistic elitism but a communalism. Aki no arashi (Autumn Storm) was nurtured in such an atmosphere; it was organized in 1987 by a group of nonsectarian radicals at Waseda University and a group of punk rockers playing on the streets as a protest against a bill that allows the state’s right to classify information (Kokka kimitsuhō).36 The group is also known as the Individuals’ Joint Struggle Committee for an Anti-Emperor System. So it also gathered around the anti-emperor front and extended its tentacles to engage various issues. Part of the group derived from a radical antinuclear plant movement in Hokkaido, called Hokke no Kai Sapporo.37 According to two of the organizers, Toyama Kōichi and 430

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Kashima Shuichi, their disposition was totally distinct from that of the New Left in that they avoided the use of big slogans and instead dove into action. Their style of rallying, demonstrating, and performing other actions also differed from that of previous generations. Basically, they were influenced by punk culture and performed the protests. Some of them dressed up to create specific effects for the sake of festivity. As the main site of action they chose the so-called pedestrians paradise (hokōsha tengoku), an area of streets temporarily closed to vehicular traffic that appeared every weekend in various spots around big cities. A particularly famous spot is Harajuku, Tokyo, right by Meiji Jingū, the mausoleum of the Meiji emperor. Every weekend, this zone became a spontaneous gathering place of young Japanese, as well as for foreign workers. For instance, Aki no Arashi offered a microphone to pedestrians and asked them to say whatever they wanted; they showed video images of previous acts in which some of their members were arrested by the police; they organized street symposia inviting radical thinkers; some of them did performances mimicking the emperor and his family. Once they released balloons saying, ‘‘Don’t reproduce Imperial family members any more!’’ Using their imagination and creativity in such a manner, they created events or, as Kashima says, configured a social space with the mass. Their organizational concern was not to construct fronts hierarchically as did the New Left, but simply to communicate with the multitude; for them this mainly meant runaway youth. What kind of language should they use to speak with them? At least it was clear that the leftist jargon did not work. This was what prompted their experimental spirit and performativity. Their central problematic existed in how to dissolve the oppression and control that permeated their lives; the primary task for this was to find a way to enunciate and share their oppressed and controlled sense of existence with others—thus their goal was a kind of cultural revolution. During the imposed mourning period after the death of Hirohito, they did gigs and rallies every week—and were removed and arrested every time by the police without having committed any illegal act. The group decided to sue the state for compensation; it struggled in court for a long time and finally won the case in October 1999. Another group, Damé ren (the Alliance of Good-for-Nothings), was inaugurated in 1992 by several people, including the main organizers Kaminaga Kōichi and Pépé Hasegawa. It was this group that took up the issue of communication most directly. Its slogan is ‘‘Commingle!’’ They mainly gather and talk, the subjects basically centering on their life problems, that angelus novus in millennial japan

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is, on how they are so good for nothing: unable to keep the same job, unpopular with the opposite sex, lacking money, nurturing no talent, having bad features, and so on. They are obsessed with the realism of the freeters’ generation. Though some of the members belong to other more radical organizations, the group itself does nothing that looks like a leftist movement. Still it addresses serious issues vis-à-vis Japan’s post-Fordist, postToyotaist society. In postwar Japan, a set of ideals—graduating from a good university, getting a stable job, marrying at an early age, buying a house in the suburbs, purchasing a car, having two children, becoming an executive, and so on—was imposed on the whole nation. The ideals also functioned as the measure for composing the social hierarchy. But today, in the postrecession climate, these ideals are becoming more and more unrealistic and absurd. Thus by commingling and talking, the good-for-nothings question the value system within which they have been judged and marginalized. The goal of these acts is certainly not self-improvement as it is in so many cults in Japan (and in the United States), but to challenge the value system and look for a way to survive without improvement as such. That is their struggle. Methodologically what is indispensable for them is to communicate in person, not via the Internet or e-mail. Most of the members live more or less in the neighborhood, along the Chuō Train line (near the stations of Nakano, Kōenji, Asagaya, and Kichijōji) in Tokyo. As an extension of commingling, some of them live together and even have a day-care center for those who have kids. In this sense, they are experimenting with a new way of life for the poor, a way good-for-nothings can survive. In Japan, there are no longer any Asian-type slums where people can cohabitate easily, and there is no well-developed welfare system as in Europe. Especially at a time when the larger society can no longer sustain the welfare system or social security, trying the communal life and creating a system of hospitality by themselves is becoming more and more a matter of necessity for many people. As the members stress, the talk, commingling, and sharing of space already represents communism for them. They seek to sustain and expand their stronghold of antisuccess and zero work through this communism. The group has been quite successful in expanding: It has involved some prominent activists and intellectuals; it has an associated group in Korea; it has published several books, carrying discussions about pressing themes as well as interesting personal experiences of the members. And all these endeavors are pursued with a great sense of humor and the great power of laughter that the members of the group achieved thanks to their kōryū. 432

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This movement is significant because it has given the generic name good-fornothings to today’s multitude and offered them a place for their discourse. It has created a new cultural paradigm where the freeters’ generation can express itself and members can communicate with each other. Furthermore, it has actually begun to organize a community with this new culture. There was also a labor movement whose discourses were strategically filled with affirmative laughter: Sentō teki Rōdōsha Kyōkai (the Bathhouse/ Militant Workers’ League). In the first place, the Japanese phonetic sentō conveys both ‘‘coin bath’’ and ‘‘militant.’’ So the movement is both the Militant Workers’ League and the Bathhouse Workers’ League. In 1994 it was organized by Yabu Shirō and Yamanote Midori, collaborative writers who wrote essays with an engaging, idiosyncratic style and who published a book about the growing struggle.38 For the movement, they published a pamphlet called Caracalla, using the name of the Roman emperor known for his obsession with baths. It was both a cultural magazine about the Japanese traditional public bath and a mouthpiece of a labor movement. According to the writers, the slogan of the movement was simply, ‘‘The city should support bathhouses so the fee does not go up!’’ But because there was a cultural mechanism that interdicted the mass from being political in Japan, it was necessary to create a new discursive style for their political action. This was why they wrote their essays in a specific style and published the transcategorical magazine. In the final analysis, their target was to develop the most economical way of grasping the scattered social workers—freeters, day workers, and minority workers—in the post–labor union context. And sentō, the bathhouse, proved a very cunning decoy to gather the multitude and concretize the new subject of the political. In Tokyo there used to be public bathhouses at every corner since most residences did not have private baths. But now they exist only in limited areas, and the area where the Good-for-Nothings live—Nakano, Kōenji, and Asagaya—happens to be one of them. That there are bathhouses at all means that the area includes some of the cheapest apartments available anywhere, with rent less than 20,000 yen (about $236) per month without bath, and there is probably also a cheap and shabby shopping area typical of an old downtown. People who live in these apartments and roam around the area are the very ‘‘multitude.’’ The movement had a particular affinity with this urban space. In an interview, Yabu called it ‘‘a conservatism.’’ 39 It is a specific conservatism both aesthetic and political in nature. It emphasizes the ideological importance of the downtown area that conserves an old way of life, while the expansion of living areas to suburbia has been the trend angelus novus in millennial japan

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since the high economic growth period of the 1960s (the same trend and value system that Damé ren targets). This revolutionary conservatism, as it were, was to fight the disappearance of the social space for the poor and to fight the violent machine of endless development/exploitation at one and the same time. In the same interview, Yabu reflected on the movement and said that for him it constituted a thought experiment; and although the group had tried very hard and succeeded in petitioning Congress and actually negotiating with the local government, they were not able to realize any big successes— neither were they successful in organizing the neighborhood community in the Kōenji area. Notwithstanding the failure in motivating a mass movement, however, the action was valuable in that it showed one step forward in our seemingly paradoxical task of organizing the unorganizable flow. Furthermore, under the common denominator sentō, it spatially visualized the habitat of the multitude and temporally measured the degree of the disappearance of the social space. After the Bathhouse/Militant Workers’ League, Yabu participated in organizing a coalition, the Anti-Capitalist Action (aca) in 2001. As the name says, this is an antiglobalization movement based in Japan. The theme of the group’s struggle is basically the same as the sentō movement: how the scattered social workers could create their own class movement and establish their new base in the vast field of social reproduction. This is an informal coalition ( yagō) of different ‘‘groupuscules,’’ ranging from student activists to a group of young freeters. As a whole, it is a collective of those radical leftists not affiliated with sects and parties. For his future campaign, Yabu is paying attention to two significant developments in Japan. One is the Free Trade Zone. In December 2002, the Special Law for Structural Reform (Kōzōkaikaku tokubetsuku hōan) passed the Diet; it allows local governments to remove or ease existing trade regulations in demarcated zones. So it is likely that these zones will appear all over Japan. These will be places where workers can no longer rely on labor laws for protection. The lawful struggles fought according to labor laws will inexorably reach their exceeding point. A labor movement in the form of transgressing the law will revive, just as it was forced to at the beginning of the twentieth century. The last element concerns universities. As I said in the beginning, the majority of Japan’s universities can no longer guarantee stable jobs for the graduates. Neither the administrators nor the government can do anything about it. Thus it is high time to recategorize students, seeing them no more 434

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as a privileged class but as jobless young workers, and organize them according to this concept. If so, the time when student activists suffer from a proletariat complex might finally be over. In this sense, universities themselves might become stages for the struggle again, but in a totally unprecedented way. In Conclusion The post–New Left radical movements or what I would like to call Japanese Angelus Novus are certainly nurtured by the crises of the neoliberalist reformation of the social whose beginning was veiled under the bubble festival. As we have seen, freeters, day workers, minority workers, and foreign workers are the products of the reformation and the concrete ingredients of what the concept multitude embodies in the Japanese context. They can, on the one hand, be seen as passive victims of the neoliberalist reform, but on the other they can stand as a form of exodus of socialized workers from the factories and the formation of a new subject of struggle. But for the transvaluation from the passive to the active, the negative to the affirmative, to take place, there have to be singular names of activists, and their will to radical self-emancipation. Without the activists and without us affirming them, there is no meaning for the theory of revolution. Like Paul Klee’s Angelus Novus described by Walter Benjamin, our angels are looking at history, split between political reality and messianic ideal, as well as memories of catastrophe and signs of progress. But the history they seek to recollect and amend may not exist strictly in the temporal past. In the form of capital (qua savings), and like the storm from paradise, it drives time and determines the future. It is said that Japan is still surviving thanks to the money it earned during the 1980s bubble economy. Most of the Japanese are, directly or indirectly, more or less, affected by the status of the collective account. But sooner or later, the savings (or the history of the bubble) will disappear, and the situation will be different again. That will be the day when we have nothing but our mass corporeality. On that day there is no other choice for the potency of the multitude but to blossom in full. Then, if the angels are messianic, they are so only for themselves. Notes 1 I agree with Alain Badiou when he says that in ‘‘developing a different figure of

politics from the figure of the revolutionary Party, . . . [t]he experimental dimen-

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2 3

4

5

6 7

8 9 10

11 12 13

14

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sion is inevitable.’’ Alain Badiou, Ethics, trans. Peter Hallward (London 2001), 101. Walter Benjamin, ‘‘Theses on the Philosophy of History,’’ in Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn, ed. Hannah Arendt (New York, 1969), 257. Conversations with the following individuals proved invaluable in helping me shape this essay: Nagahara Yutaka, Ikegazmi Yoshihiko, Hirai Gen, Abe Harumasa, Yabu Shiro, and Sakai Takashi. Being the expatriate that I am, I needed to learn from their struggle in Japan as a sine qua non, and I would like to thank them here. ‘‘What Was the Postmodern? An Approach to the 1980s’’ [Posuto-modan to wa nandatta no ka? Hachijūnendai ron], Gendai-Shisō, November 2001, 11. The participants of the roundtable were Ōuchi Hirokazu, Sakai Takashi, Miyake Yoshio, Yamane Nobuhiro, Kakihara Yasushi, and Fujimoto Kazuisa. See H. D. Harootunian, ‘‘Visible Discourses/Invisible Ideologies,’’ in Postmodernism and Japan, ed. Masao Miyoshi and Harootunian (Durham, NC, 1989), 63– 92. Ibid. For instance, the movement Kichi Guntai o Yurusanai kōdōsuru Onnatachi no Kai [Active Women’s Group against the Bases and Military]. Concerning the situation of Okinawa from the feminist standpoint, see Urashima Etsuko, Yutakana shima ni kichiha wa iranai [The abounding island does not need the bases] (Tokyo, 2002). Guattari’s Japan trip was made at the invitation of the composer Ryuichi Sakamoto for an experimental tv project called ‘‘tv War.’’ For more information on Sanya, see Edward Fowler, San’ya Blues: Laboring Life in Contemporary Tokyo (Ithaca, NY, 1996). For more about Japan’s Free Radio Movement, see Kogawa Tetsuo, ‘‘Free Radio in Japan: The Mini fm Boom,’’ in Radiotext(e), ed. Neil Strauss and David Mandel (New York, 1993). Many agree that Kogawa was one of the pioneers of the media movement, emerging as one of the earliest critics of neoliberalism at the same time. Hirai Gen, Asada Akira, Takeda Kenichi, and Radio Homerun, Tokyo gekijō: Gattari, Tokyo o iku [Tokyo theater: Guattari goes to Tokyo] (Tokyo, 1986). I especially have in mind the magazine called gs. Like Zen gaku ren (the National Federation of Students’ Self-Government Associations), Zenkyōtō was a national coalition of students’ organizations. If the former reached its peak in the 1960s Anti–Japan-U.S. Security Treaty struggle, the latter proved most successful in the 1970s struggle. In principle, both of them were neutral to any ideology, so that individual constituent sects fought each other to gain hegemony of the organizations. Guattari explained: ‘‘Synthetic discourses, being glossed by conceptual splendor and aiming at total theorization, are just absurd as compared to the autonomous intelligence coming out of the site of action. . . . Herein exists the clue for judging various acts and movements, including even those of the sects that appear to be totally exclusionary. Sometimes there are even occasions when seemingly

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15 16 17

18

19

20

21 22 23 24

25 26 27 28

29 30 31 32 33

imbecilic acts could resolve situational aporia. So I do not want to judge social groups all in the same light.’’ Tokyo Theater, 48, 50. All translations are mine unless noted otherwise. See Fowler, San’ya Blues, 150. Yama is Sanya’s nickname. I would rather translate the title as Yama: If You Are Fucked, Fuck Them Back. Hirai Gen, ‘‘Zensen no kōgaku e [Toward the optics of the frontier],’’ in Yama: Yararetara yarikaese, ed. Committee of Screening Yama: Yararetara yarikaese (Tokyo, 1986), 55. Funamoto Shūji, Damatte notarejinunayo [Don’t die in the gutter without a word] (Tokyo, 1986), 73. On July 25, 1975, Funamoto self-immolated in front of Kadena U.S. Air Force Base in Okinawa in protest at the crown prince’s visit to Okinawa. He had been wanted by the police since March 1973 as a suspect in an explosion in Kamagasaki. The Japanese contingent included the activist Tsumura Takashi and his group called Tokyo Nyūkan Sutoraiku Jikkō Iinkai (Tokyo Committee for Anti-Immigration Law Strike). See Suga Hidemi, Kakumeiteki na, amari ni kakumei teki na [Revolutionary, too revolutionary] (Tokyo, 2003), 316–17. This is an ambitious attempt to cover the entire discursive background for Japan’s 1968. Tokyo Theater, 22. See Amano Yasukazu, Mutōha to iu tōhasei [The partisanship of nonpartisans] (Tokyo, 1994). Hantenren publishes a pamphlet called Punch; its Web site is to be found at www02.so-net.ne.jp/ hanten/punch.html. ˜ The former is Roland Barthes’s famous concept and the latter is that of the Japanese philosopher Nishida Kitarō (1870–1945). Nishida himself used the concept in explaining the nature of the emperor system in his lecture in 1940. See Nishida Kitarō, ‘‘Nihon bunka no mondai [The problems of Japanese culture],’’ in Nishida Kitarō zenshu, vol. 12 (Tokyo, 1966), 275–434. Amano Yasukazu, Zenkyōtō keiken no genzai [The present of the Zenkyōtō experience] (Tokyo, n.d.), 272. Takeuchi Yoshimi, ‘‘Kenryoku to geijutsu [The power and arts],’’ in New Japan Ideology, vol. 2 of Hyōronshū [Collection of critique] (Tokyo, 1966), 382. Ibid., 393. See Harry Harootunian, ‘‘An Emperor System in Every Blade of Grass, in Every Tree Leaf ’’ (unpublished). Japanese translation published in Shisō [Thought], November 1990. Ibid., 26. Amano, Zenkyōtō keiken no genzai, 281–82. Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci, ed. and trans. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith (New York, 1971), 238. Amano Yasukazu, Mutōha undo no shisō [The thoughts of the nonpartisan movements] (Tokyo, 1999), 114. I would like to acknowledge that in choosing the following movements I was in-

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34 35 36

37

38 39

438

spired by and learned a great deal from the May 1997 issue of Gendai Shisō entitled ‘‘Street Culture.’’ I think that the particular publication announced a paradigm shift in Japan. Zenkoku Kōkōsei Kaigi (The National Council of High School Students) was established in 1989. Komaba Dormitory was forcibly abolished by the university administration in August 2001 after a long dispute that began in 1984. About this movement, see also a collection of essays by the activist and journalist Mitsu Takashi (1967–95), Shūshifu karano shuppatsu [The departure from a full stop] (Tokyo, 1995). Hokke is the name of a fish common in Hokkaidō. Claiming direct action and direct democracy, this group engaged in protests of various styles against the operation of the nuclear power plant and became influential. Yabu Shirō and Yamanote Midori, Musansha taishū shinzui [The essence of the propertyless masses] (Tokyo, 2001). Yabu Shirō, interview by the author, November 2002.

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CONTRIBUTORS Anne Allison is a professor and chair of the Department of Cultural Anthropology at Duke University. She is the author of Nightwork: Sexuality, Pleasure, and Corporate Masculinity in a Tokyo Hostess Club and Permitted and Prohibited Desires: Mothers, Comics, and Censorship in Japan. Her forthcoming book Millennial Monsters: Japanese Toys and the Global Imagination will be published in 2006. Andrea Gevurtz Arai is an independent scholar writing and teaching in Seattle, Washington. She received her Ph.D. in anthropology from Columbia University in 2004. Her most recent publications are: ‘‘Killing Kids: Recession and Survival in Twenty-First Century Japan,’’ Postcolonial Studies 6:3 (2003) and ‘‘The Neo-liberal Subject of Lack and Potential: Developing the Frontier Within and Creating a Reserve Army of Labor in Japan,’’ in Rhizomes: Cultural Studies in Emerging Knowledge 10 (spring 2005). Eric Cazdyn is an associate professor of East Asian studies, comparative literature, and cinema studies at the University of Toronto. He is the author of The Flash of Capital: Film and Geopolitics in Japan (published by Duke University Press) and is the special issue editor of SAQ’s forthcoming volume entitled Disastrous Consequences. Leo Ching teaches Japanese at Duke University. He is the author of Becoming ‘‘Japanese’’: Colonial Taiwan and the Politics of Identity Formations. Most recently, his work has appeared in positions and Public Culture. Harry Harootunian is a professor of East Asian studies and History at New York University. He is the author of The Empire’s New Clothes: Paradigm Lost and Regained and the coeditor (with Hyun Ok Park) of the boundary 2 special issue Problems of Comparability/Possibilities for Comparative Studies (32:2 [summer 2005]). Marilyn Ivy teaches in the Department of Anthropology at Columbia University. She is the author of Discourses of the Vanishing: Modernity, Phantasm, Japan. She has recently completed two essays, one on modernity as a critical term for Buddhist studies and one on flash photography and dark enlightenment in postwar Japan.

Sabu Kohso is a writer and translator who has been living and working in New York City for the past twenty years. He is currently contributing monthly essays about the struggles of the New York multitude for the Japanese journal Gendai Shisō. J. Victor Koschmann teaches modern Japanese history at Cornell University. He is the author of Revolution and Subjectivity in Postwar Japan and the coeditor Total War and ‘‘Modernization.’’ Thomas LaMarre is an associate professor of East Asian studies at McGill University. He is the author of Uncovering Heian Japan: An Archaeology of Sensation and Inscription (published by Duke University Press) and Shadows on the Screen: Tanizaki Jun’ichirô on Cinema and Oriental Aesthetics, and the coeditor (with Kang Nae-Hui) of Impacts of Modernity. Masao Miyoshi is Hajime Mori Professor of Literature at the University of California, San Diego. He is currently working on a book on the university in the ‘‘global’’ economy. Yutaka Nagahara is a professor of Japanese economic history at Hosei University. He is the author of The Emperor System and Peasants. He is a regular contributor to many leftist journals as well as literature and poetry journals in Japan. Naoki Sakai is a professor in the Department of Asian Studies and the Department of Comparative Literature at Cornell University. He is the founding senior editor of Traces (1996–2003), a multilingual journal of cultural theory and translation, which is published in English, Chinese, Korean, and Japanese. He is the author of Translation and Subjectivity and the coeditor of The Deconstruction of Nationality. Tomiko Yoda is an associate professor in the Departments of Asian and African Languages and Literature, Program in Literature, and Women’s Studies at Duke University. She is the author of Gender and National Literature: Heian Texts in the Construction of Japanese Modernity (published by Duke University Press). Yoshimi Shunya is a professor of interfaculty initiative in information studies at the University of Tokyo. He is the author of Dramaturgy in the City: the So440

contributors

cial History of Popular Entertainments in Modern Tokyo; The Politics of the Exposition: Imperialism, Commercialism and Popular Entertainment; Capitalism and the Voice: The Social Construction of Telephone, Gramophone and Radio in Japan; Cultural Studies; Cultural Turn, For the Politics of Cultures; and Expo Syndrome: Postwar Politics and Cultural Struggle in Contemporary Japan. Mitsuhiro Yoshimoto is an associate professor of East Asian studies at New York University. He is the coauthor (with Masao Miyoshi) of the forthcoming Possibilities of Resistance.

contributors

441

Index Adorno, Theodor, 373–74 Afghanistan, 2 Aichi Academic Research Development Zone, 396, 399, 406 Aichi Expo (2005), 13, 395–413 Alterity, 133, 157 Amae, 244, 249–50, 252, 254 Amano Yasukazu, 426–28 Americanism, 99, 111 Angelus Novus, 415, 435 Anime, 10–12, 46–47, 100, 108, 210, 331, 358, 361, 365, 368, 389–90 Anno Hideaki, 360, 363–64, 378 Anti-Americanism, 125, 185, 420 Apology, 122–25, 127–35; private compensation for war victims and, 135 Area Studies, 166, 180–82 Article 9 (Japanese Constitution), 5, 6, 128, 136, 139 Asada Akira, 44–45, 47–48, 50, 256–58, 262, 270, 421 Asahara Shōkō, 200–201 Asia (as concept), 168–79. See also West (as concept) Asian values, 177 Asia Pacific War, 122, 126, 133, 178, 200; commemoration of, 99, 108–9; war responsibility and, 134–35 Aum Shinrikyō, 20, 36, 102–3, 124, 196, 199, 218, 278, 338, 420 Azuma Hiroki, 360, 364–66, 369, 386–88 Balibar, Étienne, 308–9 Beck, Ulrich, 412–13 Benedict, Ruth, 179, 340 Bhabha, Homi, 112 Bonapartism, 293–95 Bretton Woods, 30 Bush, George W., 4

Capitalism, 301–28, 360, 426; crisis theory and, 312; culture and, 178, 187; the Fordist-Taylorist regime of production and, 32; as infantile, 269; landed property and, 316–28; millennial and, 339; Pokémon and, 331, 350; primitive accumulation and, 318; as schizophrenia, 299–300; as transnational, 280–83, 288; the Trinity Formula and, 304 Chatterjee, Partha, 113 Child (the), 216, 222–27, 229–32, 256; the ‘‘wild child’’ and, 10, 216–20 China, 2, 131, 144, 197–98 Chobits, 377–78, 383 Civilization: Fukuzawa Yukichi and the discourse of, 126 Cold War, 2, 25, 27, 30, 33, 56, 102, 133, 144, 162, 163 n.4, 195, 344 Colonialism, 108–9, 142–62 Comfort women, 115, 123–24, 132, 134, 149, 185 Commodity form, 102; fetish and, 116, 313 Consumerism, 105, 143, 195, 239, 246, 419 Corruption, 21 Cosmopolitanism, 88 Culture, 12; consumerism and, 419; culturalism and, 180, 187; cultural uniqueness and, 32, 33, 105, 186; as discourse, 44–45, 87–93; as industry, 12; kyōyō ideology and, 87–90, 92– 93; subculture and, 36–37; Taiwanese intellectuals and, 160 Deleuze, Gilles, 300–14, 319–20, 324, 421 Development, Asian model of, 32 Doi Takeo, 217, 242–44, 249–50, 252–53 Dōka, 144, 149, 152, 157–58

Economy (Japan): 1973 oil shock and, 418; the Asian financial crisis and, 19, 280–81; banking crisis and, 7, 23; the bubble economy and, 1, 14, 19, 34, 82, 104, 123, 137, 195, 299, 418, 435; corporate power and, 258– 62, 267; the decay of the lifetime employment system and, 42; enterprise society and, 31, 40; keiretsu and, 417; Keynesianism and, 23, 30, 32, 104; monetary policy and, 18, 19; as national economy, 24; neoliberalism and, 11, 14, 22, 23, 28, 30, 416–17, 432; postindustrial, 332, 334; as recession, 6, 16, 17, 103, 122, 195–96, 258–59, 267, 299, 328, 332, 415 Edo period, 344 Education: demographics and, 69; educational reforms and, 42, 88; Japanese Society for History Textbook Reform and, 25, 125, 196–98, 204; Ministry of Education (Japan) and, 64–66, 68, 73, 78 n.20, 88–90, 92, 181; Nakasone principle and, 66; textbook reform and, 25, 100, 114, 120 n. 25, 125. See also Universities Emperor, 208, 310; as acephalic, 425, 427; the Emperor System and, 1, 2, 179–81, 190, 208, 419, 426–28, 430; Hirohito and, 1, 181, 429 Etō Jun, 186, 242–45 Evangelion, 46, 378–79, 381 Exceptionalism: Japanese and, 33 Expo Association, 405, 408–9, 411–12 Expo Fantasy, 395 Family structure (Japan), 39 Fascism, 6 Film Studies, 81–84; English departments in Japanese universities and, 84–87, 90–91 Freeters, 416, 418, 429, 432–35 Fujioka Nobukatsu, 114, 116 Fukuda Kazuya, 45–47, 49 Fukumoto Kazuo, 127

444

Gainax, 360–91 Game Boy, 332–33, 336–37 Gender, 10, 41; corporate power and, 258–63; the division of labor and, 10, 247–48, 250, 255, 267; the family wage and, 248, 264; maternalism and, 9, 10, 40, 239–71; otakuology and, 384; paternalism and, 10, 239– 40, 247–49, 268, 271; patriarchy and, 266–67 Germany, 98–99; Bitburg and, 101; the Holocaust and, 98, 146–47; National Socialism and, 99, 146 Gift Exchange, 12, 338–39 Globalization, 16, 24, 33, 50, 54, 167, 278, 299–300 Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere, 171, 179, 183, 186, 193 n.29 Guattari, Felix, 300–14, 319–20, 324, 420–23, 426 Gulf War (First), 2, 25, 124, 137–39 Hall, Stuart, 46, 144, 145 Hanshin Earthquake, 20, 102–6, 124, 420 Hara Kazuo, 284–89, 293 Hashimoto Ryutaro, 276, 278 Hatsugensha, 26 Hirai Gen, 421, 426 Hiroshima, 101, 146, 200 Historiography: historical revisionism and, 106, 115; liberalism and, 114 History: everyday life and, 101, 116– 17, 119; experience and, 8, 100–101; Hegel and, 131; historical trauma and, 98, 198; memory and, 8, 98, 102, 106, 116, 146–47; the posthistorical and, 34; unevenness and, 119 Huntington, Samuel, 5, 100 Identity: kōminka and, 157–59 Ie, 252, 254 Imamura Shōhei, 116–19, 289–91, 293 Imperialism, 425; as cultural, 110; U.S. hegemony and, 3, 4, 144

index

Iraq, 2 Isaka Satoshi, 277–78, 291–93 Ishihara Shintaro, 5, 43, 192 n.24, 239, 299 J-Pop, 44–47 Jameson, Fredric, 327 Japan Audubon Society, 407–8, 410 Japanese Communist Party (jcp), 426, 428 ‘‘Japanese System,’’ 16, 17 Japan, Inc., 29, 31, 32, 367 Japanism, 5, 389 Japan-U.S. Security Treaty (anpo), 246, 415 Karatani Kojin, 48, 49 Katō Norihiro, 8, 99–100, 107–13, 116– 18, 122–23, 125–39 Kawai Hayao, 217, 253 Kishi Tetsuo, 90–91 Knowledge: production of, 6 Kobayashi Yoshinari, 5, 114, 198–99, 201–3; Sensōron and, 100, 198, 201 Koizumi Junichiro, 5 Kokutai, 179, 426 Kōminka, 144, 149; kōmin literature and, 9, 150–59 Korea, 123, 184 Kuomintang (kmt), 144, 150

Miki Kiyoshi, 193 n.29 Ministry of International Trade and Industry (miti), 18, 397, 401–3, 406, 409 Mishima Yukio, 208 Miyadai Shinji, 36–39, 42, 44 Miyazaki Hayao, 209, 216, 218–20 Modernism, 374 Modernity, 34, 39, 177–78, 362; time and, 174 Modernization, 24, 41, 413 Modernization theory, 172 Moe, 380, 383–84 Mononokehime, 10, 108, 209–12, 216, 218–19, 229–30 Monsters, 339, 350–51; keiretsu and, 417; monsterology and, 336 Monstrosity, 198, 204, 206 Multitude, 328, 429, 431, 433, 435 Murakami Ryū, 38, 39, 44 Murakami Takashi, 360, 386, 388–89

Nakane Chie, 252 Nakasone Yasuhiro, 127, 139 Nakaya Yoshiaki, 396–97 Nanjing massacre, 109, 115, 122, 125, 128, 146, 185, 201–2 National: anime and, 389; contradiction with transnational and, 282–83; definition of, 35, 51 n.9; identity and, 1, 147; as ‘‘posthistorical,’’ 34; relation to Labor relations, 31, 40 the global and, 299–301, 310–11, 321; Left (political, Japan), 4, 251 subjectivity and, 8, 27, 129, 133–34, Liberal Democratic Party (ldp), 5, 6, 26, 145 29, 64–66, 69, 71–73, 114, 124, 261, Nationalism, 25–28, 34–35, 93, 187, 196, 411 200; history textbooks and, 196–98; Lin Jui-Ming, 154–56 immigration and racism and, 43; as masochism, 197–98; U.S., 183–84 Manchukuo, 181 Natsume Soseki, 225–26 Maruyama Masao, 126–27, 129, 136, Negativity, 169 169–71, 189 n.2 New Left, 14, 253, 255, 415, 423, 425, Marx, Karl, 129, 300–27, 338 428, 431 Meiji, 179, 431; the Meiji Constitution Nihonjinron, 252, 254 and, 113, 184–85; the Meiji RestoraNishibe Susumu, 4–5, 26 tion and, 125

index

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Oe Kenzaburo, 110 Ogawa Shinsuke, 279 Ōgoshi Aiko, 131–32, 136–37 Ōhira Masayoshi, 103 Okada Toshio, 360, 363–67, 369–70, 386–88, 390 Okinawa, 125, 157, 420 Orientalism, 388 Orikuchi Shinobu, 110–12 Osaka Expo (1970), 395, 397–98, 413 Ōsawa Masayuki, 206–8 Otaku, 12, 37, 200, 277, 358–91; otakuology and, 370, 375–77, 381, 384 Others (Asian), 133, 157 Otsuka Eiji, 36–37 Ōuchi Hirokazu, 417–18 Perfect Blue, 382 Photography, 202–4 Pikachu, 348–49 Pokémon, 12, 47, 331–37, 339–54, 358 Postcolonial(ism), 144–46, 155, 169 Postmodern(ism), 16, 34–36, 50, 362– 63, 365, 387–88, 416, 428 Postwar, 1–3, 107, 113, 119, 128–29; the ‘‘long postwar’’ as trope and, 1–3, 6, 99–102; reevaluation of, 6, 8 Prostitution, 21, 36 Racism, 9, 43, 127, 182–84 Radicalism, 14, 386, 415, 423 Real, the, 210 Reality Culture, 11, 276–77, 283–84, 296 Recession, 1, 6, 103 Reischauer, Edwin O., 180–81, 183, 190 n.12, 191 n.18 Representation, 11, 275, 294 Right, the (Japan), 4, 6, 28, 30, 49 Sakai, Naoki, 228 Sakai Takashi, 417, 420 Sanya, 14, 422, 424 Self-Defense Forces (sdf), 26, 27, 43, 137

446

September 11th, 2–5 Showa period (1926–1989), 124 Shū Kin-ha, 150–53 Social compact, 1 Social democracy, 2 Social Democratic Party (sdp), 29 Social disintegration (perception of ), 23, 33, 36, 106; as ‘‘anxiety,’’ 33, 35 Sovereignty, 4 Super Flat, 360, 364–65, 386, 389 Taiwan, 9, 142–62, 184 Tajiri Satoshi, 332–35, 339, 341, 343 Takahashi Tetsuya, 130, 134 Takeuchi Yoshimi, 108, 169–72, 185, 427 Tanabe Hajime, 193 n.29 Thailand, 19 Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal, 115, 185 Translation, 85–87, 154, 175 Unemployment, 1; and homelessness, 41 Universalism, 49, 187 Universities: academic disciplines and, 7–8, 55–57, 61, 81–85, 89, 94 n.1; academic freedom and, 64–65; anime and, 389–90; Bayh-Dole Act (1980) and, 58, 72–73; dokuritsu gyōsei hōjin (dgh) and, 70–71, 74–76, 78 n.21, 92; effects of the U.S. Occupation on, 62–63; faculty and, 68; freeters and, 416, 434–44; governance of, 58, 61, 70; graduate students and, 67, 71; industry-funded R&D and, 59, 68, 75; neoliberalism and, 7, 55, 63, 73, 75, 81, 92; structure of, 84–85; technology transfer and, 55, 59–60, 66, 71–72; University of Tokyo, 67, 73 Uno Kozo, 300–14, 319–20, 324–27 U.S. Occupation of Japan, 2, 62–63, 100–101, 108, 113, 115, 139, 148, 179, 181, 186, 197, 248, 279, 418

index

Violence, 21, 39, 176, 212 Watsuji Tetsuro, 110, 161, 179, 181–83 West (as concept): 50, 169–89, 362; corporate management and, 419; heterogeneity of, 174; as shifting cartographic locality, 172, 178. See also Asia (as concept)

index

Yabu Shiro, 433–34 Yakuza, 104, 424 Yoseba, 420, 422–24, 429 Youth A (Shōnen A), 10, 21, 196, 204–8, 211, 217–30 Zenkyōtō, 421, 425–26 Žižek, Slavoj, 48, 388

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Japan after Japan : social and cultural life from the recessionary 1990s to the present / edited by Tomiko Yoda and Harry Harootunian. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn-13: 978-0-8223-3787-4 (cloth : alk. paper) isbn-10: 0-8223-3787-8 (cloth : alk. paper) isbn-13: 978-0-8223-3813-0 (pbk. : alk. paper) isbn-10: 0-8223-3813-0 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Japan—History—Heisei period, 1989- 2. Japan—Economic conditions— 1989- I. Yoda, Tomiko. II. Harootunian, Harry D. ds891.j35 2006 952.04'9—dc22 2006008053