venue:
Nanzan University
Saturday 8 December
Panels and individual paper sessions will be held at Nanzan University, Q Building
PANEL 1: DISABILITY IN CONTEMPORARY JAPANESE SOCIETY: COMMUNITY BUILDING AND BELONGING
Organizer & Chair: Robert Croker (Nanzan University)
Time: 11:00—12:30
Location: Room 605
Panel Abstract
As Tokyo prepares to host the 2020 Paralympics, with the city aiming to have all subway stations equipped with multipurpose elevators by March 2019, Japan still faces significant issues regarding the understanding and treatment of people with disabilities and organizations who deal with them. While the shocking stabbing deaths in 2016 of 19 disabled people at a facility in Sagamihara briefly highlighted some issues concerning social stigmas, anonymity, and press treatment, there remain multiple questions concerning changing understandings in a society where disability is widely associated with shame. Whilst the disability rights movement since the 1970s has helped bring about major improvements in the legal status of persons with disabilities in Japan, there remain barriers to integration, education, and social acceptance.
This panel explores the characteristics, determinants, and limits of disabled people’s social integration in contemporary Japan. Disability in contemporary Japanese society can be viewed through multiple lenses and this panel integrates multidisciplinary perspectives to focus on the variety of experiences of people with disabilities. In examining issues including identity and belonging, sexuality and gender, networks and community development, and education, the panel includes personal approaches to disability—through autoethnography and tōjisha kenkyū (self-directed studies)—and those that highlight communities of disabled persons in employment and educational settings.
Presenter 1: Jennifer M. McGuire (Doshisha University)
Negotiating participation in “hearing” schools: Deaf and hard-of-hearing students’ strategies for mitigating and concealing difference
This paper draws upon long-term ethnographic research to explore how deaf and hard-of-hearing (DHH) students negotiate participation in mainstream schools. Colloquially known as inte (a shortened form of the loanword for “integration”), these mainstreamed youth are often positioned as “the other.” In hearing families, they are an anomaly as the sole DHH family member. Integration into the family and into mainstream society can be problematic for all DHH youth, regardless of their educational background. However, social segregation in school is a particularly salient feature in inte narratives because they are typically educated in environments in which they are a minority of one in the classroom and often in the school. In these contexts, significant communicative and social barriers tend to hinder the formation of meaningful relationships with hearing peers, which can lead to social exclusion and marginalization. These obstacles are raised as students move through the educational system due to institutional and social factors. However, inte, like other marginalized youth in Japan, are not passive actors. They demonstrate agency in their efforts to transform their circumstances. In this paper, I analyze the strategies inte employ to mitigate and conceal difference and the effects of these tactics on peer relationships and educational experiences.
Presenter 2: Minae Inahara (Kobe University)
The Ghost of Eugenics in Japan: Exploring the Intersections of Disability, Asexuality, and Anonymity
In this paper, I investigate issues surrounding asexuality and anonymity of people with disabilities in Japan. Prejudice against the disabled is twofold: (1) it forces the disabled to be both asexual and anonymous; and (2) it acts as a protection to reinforce the traditional structure of the “good Japanese family,” a social group of which the disabled person can rarely be a member.
In Japan, the Eugenic Protection Law enforced the involuntary sterilization of people with disabilities from 1948 to 1996, which allowed 16,400 people to be sterilized against their will. On January 30, 2018, a woman in Miyagi Prefecture filed a lawsuit against the state, seeking damages over her forced sterilization when she was a teenager.
As a disabled person, from puberty I grew up in an environment that made it unthinkable to consider myself as sexual. All cultural representations insisted that I would never have a sexual partner. Treating people with disabilities as “asexual” and “anonymous” is considered frustrating and offensive. In order to explore asexuality and anonymity I use the work of Emmanuel Levinas, and his notion of the “il-y-a,” which is a space devoid of meaning. Within Japanese society, “il-y-a” is conformity to a community. I suggest that the “il-y-a” of the disabled person may be overcome through self-directed studies (tōjisha kenkyū) and peer-driven counselling can re-constitute their identity in a positive light, in order to escape the ghost of eugenics.
Presenter 3: Benjamin Dorman (Nanzan University)
Community Building in Japan: Social Networks, Volunteering, and Disability
This paper is based on autoethnographic work concerning my role as a parent and caregiver for my son, Lenny, who is on the autism spectrum. I follow Elizabeth Barrett’s (2017) suggestion that parents of autistic children acquire skills as caregivers that enable them to act ethnographic researchers, and that they have privileged access to “hard-to-reach” research participants. It focuses on first-hand experiences of educational and socialization practices in Japan and the US. I consider different strategies employed by various actors in these countries—including educational and medical authorities, parents, volunteer groups, and NPOs—to deal with individuals on the autism spectrum. Cultural and social practices, including those in the medical, biomedical, and educational fields, also vary between these countries, and these practices in turn influence community standards. A crucial element surrounding this issue is the widespread use of social media in creating and sustaining support networks that lead parents and others to seek methods of treatment and ways of understanding that are not presented by local authorities or represented through prevailing community attitudes.
INDIVIDUAL PAPERS SESSION 1
Time: 11:00—12:30
Location: Room 606
Edmund W. Hoff (Aoyama Gakuin University)
Digital Layers: Temporal Development of Japanese Online Cosplay Communities
Youth culture in Japan and around the world is quick to adopt new tools of self-expression and methods of differentiation from hegemonic society. This is reflected in cosplay communities with a move in the 1990s to online interpretations of community activity. From a hobby that started as an analog interaction including physical photo sharing, practitioners in Japan developed digital methods of exchange through the nascent online communities of Cosplayers Cure and Archive. Suddenly, what started as insular activities were being conducting online; a degree of which were being viewed in real time around the world and inspiring similar physical and digital communities. This presentation will examine the development and growth of online cosplay communities in Japan, how they mirrored Japanese social values and developed beyond these original digital constructs.
The influence of other social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter had a fundamental effect on what were initially reflections of analog community activities in Japan. With the swift change in format of online structures, these older formats were left behind for more open iterations as Cure shifted to WorldCosplay and Archive added Cosplayers Global. In this headlong drive to the future, earlier versions of the sites were shed as relics. The permanency of material posted to the Internet is a social concern, however, iterations of digital realities are left behind with surprising speed. This is bound to continue as sleeker more universally friendly formats are adopted, displacing awkward versions of community to the past.
Patrick McCartney (GSGES, Kyoto University)
Global Yoga in Japan: Hip Diplacements within Social Structures
Through ethnographic observation and broader multimodal research in Kansai, this presentation articulates the perceived role that yoga has in Japanese society, today. Global yoga, as it is found in Japan, presents in similar ways to what we find in other countries of the global north; and, increasingly, within the global south. The public imagination of yoga’s potential is found in advertising, like: on subway platforms for specific yoga studios, or in indirect ways as a floating signifier for a general sense of global wellness. The more visible and popular forms of global yoga are imaginatively consumed in Japan as a liminal portal through which one can possibly find existential relief, and community.
However, this cosmopolitan aspiration of embodying and performing a global yogic identity is embedded within structures that are overwhelmingly asymmetrical, socially speaking.
Acquisition of a yogic identity is found beyond the reach of many. Yoga becomes an instrument instead to create distinction; which necessitates displacement and othering. Yoga is overwhelmingly patronized by middle class women who use it as a method to fulfill a subtle desire to achieve a global whiteness. This is linked to the underlaying romantic ethic that appeals to a disenchanted, hyper-routinized, yet hip, modern, urbane, atomized individual, who tacitly enters into a Faustian-like pact with the logic of neoliberalism’s governmentality; which includes the pressure to perpetually improve oneself, as long as one can afford to buy into the program.
Thomas S. Hardy (Meiji University)
Place, displace, and replace: Rent-a-family in Japan
The Japanese family, or ie, having been put in place in modern Japan and partially displaced by economic and demographic changes buffeting the society, is currently being replaced in part with substitute members through family rental services. These services allow a person to rent one or more family members (father, mother, husband, wife, or child) and girlfriend or boyfriend for rite-of- passage events (such as school events, weddings and funerals), bosses and clients for business situations, and friends and well-wishers for social functions (such as parties, performances, and concerts). For example, a single mother can rent a father/husband for a meeting with her child’s teacher. She thereby fulfills social expectations and avoids embarrassment, gossip, and the possibility of her child being bullied. The emergence and performance of this service leads me to consider (a) specifically Japanese cultural reasons for the development of the rent-a-family industry; (b) critiques of expectations that family in some way equals love rather than an unpaid unit of production; (c) the implications of out-sourcing family work; and (c) the notion that out-sourcing family services can lead to stronger, less transactional family relations.
INDIVIDUAL PAPERS SESSION 2
Time: 13:45—15:15
Location: Room 605
Roy G.Hedrick III (Doshisha University)
The International Student “Bubble”: A Support System or Hindrance?
Much of the work on study abroad focuses on the value of the immersive experience. According to the discourse, immersion into the host culture is the key to a worthwhile study abroad experience. Immersion forces these students outside of their comfort zones which is said to foster personal growth, international awareness, and better career prospects. I will examine the understanding of study abroad differently by exploring the disconnect between the promises made by the discourse of study abroad and what students say they experience while undergoing study abroad. Many students find themselves in a “bubble” of other foreigners, the opposite of the coveted immersive experience and not immersed like they should be according to the discourse of study abroad. But instead of this bubble devolving into a miniature copy of their home culture and isolating them from the host culture, it is instead used as a tool to make their lives in the host culture easier.
Many of the students I spoke to have found themselves feeling “isolated” from Japanese students. They found their bubble of friends to be mostly exchange students rather than students from Japan. To further explore their experiences, this presentation discusses interview results of students in a college level degree-seeking program taught in English as well students in a credit-seeking intensive Japanese language program. This presentation investigates the role this “bubble” plays in their daily lives, as well as how they fit into both the community of their school and the larger community of Japan.
Paul J. Capobianco (University of Iowa, Kyushu Sangyo University)
Micro-internationalization and Japanese-foreign trajectories
This presentation explores the effects of “micro-internationalization” on Japanese-foreigner relationships in contemporary Japan. Specifically, it explores the multifaceted implications of the direct interpersonal encounters that are playing out between Japanese and foreigners within the context of a rapidly diversifying Japanese society, one in which foreigners are expected to play an increasingly important role in the immediate future. The concept of micro-internationalization considers how internationalization unfolds at the personal level and through the everyday experiences of intercultural actors. Micro-internationalization suggests that the everyday encounters that occur between these intercultural actors provide important, and often overlooked, insights into how internationalizing forces impact human relationships and identity constructions in highly idiosyncratic but potentially powerful ways. This presentation explores some of the positive and negative ramifications of these micro-internationalizations in ways that are often looked by scholars. Drawing on qualitative data collected in Japan between 2014-2018, this presentation suggests that scholars should consider more seriously a wider range of foreigner-Japanese outcomes when analyzing the development of Japanese-foreigner relations in the current context. Only in doing so can we obtain a more nuanced understanding of the was Japanese and foreigners relate to one another in this increasingly volatile context. In relation to the theme of the conference, this presentation also explores the “displacements and potentials” that emerge as micro-internationalization takes place.
Sawano Michiko (Ritsumeikan University)
Conveying sensuosity: The cases of forklift operating education
This presentation will discuss the conveyance of sensuosity through the cases of forklift operating education at a shipping company and a training school. The operation of a forklift is not only a matter of understanding as a textual knowledge, but also physical techniques which are acquired sensually. To learn it, people have to practice repeatedly. Seniors who are educating new members of a shipping company, and instructors who teach technical skills at a training school, try to teach the points to learn operating a forklift sensibly. However, “what I feel” and “what you feel” would be different, and it is not always clearly understood by others. How is it realized to teach sensuosity? Also, how is it done if the approach from materials (e.g. a forklift and a luggage) is also helping its transmission? It is important to clarify how uncertain sensuosity can be conveyed in order to think about communication in modern society where social media grows and communicates without physical contact / space sharing due to increase.
INDIVIDUAL PAPERS SESSION 3
Time: 13:45—15:15
Location: Room 606
Timo Thelen (Kanazawa University)
Where Once the Mermaids Used to Live: Depopulation and Over-Aging on the Ama Divers’ Island Hegura
In the early 1950s, the Italian photographer Fosco Maraini visited the small island of Hegura (Ishikawa Prefecture), where at that time hundreds of young women only wearing loincloths were diving for sea fruits like abalone. Maraini’s orientalist depiction of these female.ama divers as “mythological sea goddesses” (1962, p.19) displaced by the Japanese mainland’s society became internationally known as the inspiration for a James Bond novel and its popular movie adaption (1967). Until today, however, the situation of the islanders has drastically changed. Those ama, who are still diving, are in the average age of 65, wearing full-body wetsuits and using modern equipment.
Hegura Island is recently inhabited by only ca. 30 permanent residents; the youngest is in her fifties. The community leaders expect that the island will become unoccupied in the next decades. Based on qualitative fieldwork, this paper will illustrate the process of over-aging and depopulation and its sociocultural consequences by the example of an island’s microcosm, which can serve as a pars pro toto for Japan’s peripheries. I will discuss the reasons for rural decline such as the decreasing primary sector, youths’ outmigration, and the neglect by the national and local government. Moreover, I will draw on case studies of islanders to discuss the individual reasons for staying on Hegura. In contrast to common cliches, these decisions were often not made for nostalgia or romanticism but for pure pragmatism: many elderly ama divers do not possess the financial freedom and social bonds to live on the mainland.
Yoann Paul Moreau (Mines Paristech – France / Rihn – Kyoto)
Rural Exodus as a Long Term and Global Disastering Phenomenon
I may present an anthropological perspective on Kaso (過疎 “depopulation”), considering it as part of a global process that disrupts many of the constitutive equilibriums of human-human, human-nature and nature-nature relations. To put it in simple words, Kaso is a global and long term phenomenon that deeply endanger the “milieu” (Berque 2000) that is the eco-techno-symbolical pattern that structures human and nature as a living whole. Through two case studies, in Yagisawa (Izu-shi, Shizuoka-ken, Japan) and Salvacao (Amazonia, est. Para, Brazil), I wish to provide a new perspective on rural exodus as a long term and global disastering phenomenon.
Barbara Geilhorn (German Institute for Japanese Studies Tokyo)
A Theater of Displacement? Strategies of Documentary Theatre Responding to Disaster
It is often stated that theatre is capable of telling people’s stories and creating a public sphere that evokes temporary communities. In so doing, performing arts are highly effective in helping people to come to terms with individual and collective trauma, and at the same time participate in the shaping of collective memory. In the immediate aftermath of disaster, the documentary approach, in which the negotiation between fiction and real-life events is a central issue, is often perceived as being particularly useful. Focusing on Ōnobu Pelican’s Kiruannya to U-ko-san (2011), my paper will analyze documentary theater from the area afflicted by the triple disaster of March 11, 2011. Weaving a dense fabric of fictitious material, newspaper clippings, and reality, Kiruannya and U-ko provides a rich tapestry of the multiple and often contradictory features of Fukushima Prefecture in the aftermath of the Fukushima calamity. I will show that Ōnobu’s play opposes national discourses of a spatially limited disaster and offers keen insights into the highly ambivalent emotional landscape of those residents of Northern Japan whose homeland was turned into a disaster zone and/or radioactive wasteland after March 11
INDIVIDUAL PAPERS SESSION 4
Time: 15:45—17:15
Location: Room 606
Carmen Tamas (University of Hyogo)
Laughter as a Fertility Ritual and Practice in Contemporary Japanese Society
Every year on the Sunday before Sports’ Day, a small community from a village in Wakayama celebrates Warai Matsuri, the Laughter Festival, a ritual related to the European festa stultorum or risus paschalis discussed by Bakhtin. A Fool in colorful clothes with a vividly painted face urges people to laugh, while his companions offer the year’s fruit and vegetables to the gods. The locals identify the Fool with the goddess Ame-no-Uzume, whose obscene dance created laughter and brought back the hidden sun, and they are not the only ones to do so. In Aomori there is a much younger practice, that of celebrating spring through a tug-of-war contest where the participants use suction cups attached to their bald heads. They are members of the Tsuruta Hagemasu Kai, and their stated mission is to bring peace and fertility to the earth by making people laugh.
My paper is an attempt to discuss perspectives on laughter in contemporary society, the way it is used in sacred rituals and social practices, as well as the potential transformations this gesture may have suffered. Just like crying, laughter is a non-verbal gesture often associated with a kind of sacred language, a form of communication with the gods, but what happens when it turns into a mechanism of coping with baldness?
Andreas Riessland (Nanzan University)
Japan’s Unique Beauty: Deliberations on the Resilience of Ideology
Picking up on ideas about the “Beautiful Japan” ideology that I raised at the 2017 AJJ conference in Kyoto, I want to use this presentation to introduce a case study of this ideology at work, in Mercedes-Benz’ advertising for the Japanese market from the mid to late 1990s.
Essentially, the canon of a distinctive “national beauty” inherent in Japan’s landscape, and of a particular sensitivity towards this beauty by the country’s inhabitants, is a brainchild of the mid Meiji period, developed at that time as a response to the popular narrative of the supremacy of Western civilization. With the ultranationalism of the 1930s and 1940s, this idea of aesthetic particularism became a mainstay of the propaganda effort to bolster Japan’s claims to a cultural leadership role in Asia. But in contrast to other core elements of Japanese supremacist doctrine, the idea of Japan’s intrinsic beauty and of its people’s innate sensitivity towards this beauty was hardly affected by the country’s post-war ideological realignment.
Ksenia Golovina (The University of Tokyo)
Cups, Chairs, and Graves: Displacement and Materiality in the Lives of Russian-speaking Migrants in Japan
Migration has been traditionally discussed in the framework of displacement with the focus on such notions as nostalgia, reconstruction of identity, and searches for belonging and meaning. This study, inspired by the material turn in the social sciences and humanities, aims to investigate displacement and its outcomes by looking at material objects in the homes of Russian-speaking migrants in Japan as well as individual and communal material practices by the members of this population. While migrants themselves relocate to a new country, the vast material world—with the exception of things that can be included in one’s baggage—is left behind. As one’s material culture is an ontological marker of one’s existence, deciphering the processes in which migrants reassemble materiality in their new location is crucial to understanding a migrant experience. Furthermore, when certain objects surface in communal practices, they hint at the meanings along which a migrant community is enacted. From photographs to furniture and ultimately to the graves of the 20th century Russian emigres in Tokyo that are taken care of by the present-day migrant community, this study aims to show how displacement yields a new vocabulary of meaning developing hand in hand with both newly encountered and (re)constructed materiality in the country of destination.
Sunday 9 December
Panels and individual paper sessions will be held at Nanzan University, Q Building
PANEL 2: SOCIAL WELFARE INSTITUTIONS AS SITES OF EXCLUSION IN CONTEMPORARY JAPAN
Organizer: Jolyon B. Thomas (University of Pennsylvania)
Chair & Discussant: Yumi Murayama
Time: 11:00—12:30
Location: Room 605
Panel Abstract
The Japanese state takes care of its own. State agencies ensure the health and wellbeing of the populace through social welfare programs such as reduced price physical exams, mandatory leave policies for new parents, and extensive safety measures that mitigate daily dangers while ensuring readiness for extraordinary events such as natural calamities. Japanese schools endeavor to mainstream children with special needs, while various “barrier-free” initiatives enhance access for persons with disabilities (PWDs). But behind all of these official efforts at inclusion and support lie biopolitical anxieties about social reproduction, which in turn reflect and reinforce prevailing notions of what it means to be Japanese. The Japanese state may take care of its own, but the question of who counts as a person deserving of care is decided in quotidian, localized situations where individuals receive or do not receive the care and support they need. Through three cases on social welfare institutions like public schools and assisted living facilities, this panel explores how well-intentioned efforts at inclusion can sometimes have exclusionary effects for PWDs, linguistic and religious minorities, and people who do not fit the stereotypical Japanese phenotype. The panel’s composition reflects our shared intellectual concern with diversity and inclusion: We include a non-Japanese resident working as a full-time lecturer in Japan, an American graduate student who uses a powered wheelchair, and a black American junior professor. Our discussant is a Japanese female researcher who works on the topic of women and religious minorities in modern Japan.
Presenter 1: Mark Bookman (University of Pennsylvania)
For the Sake of Japan and World Peace: Disability Justice at a Turning Point
Over the past two decades, policymakers and public intellectuals in Japan have attempted to integrate persons with disabilities (PWD’s) into mainstream society by removing physical, cultural, educational, and bureaucratic barriers. Their actions have facilitated the rise of barrier-free brothels, amputee cafes, robot-assisted elderly care, and other initiatives that stretch the boundaries of accommodation in previously unfathomable ways. But increased longevity and access to the community for PWD’s has meant increased strain on caregivers and those responsible for carrying out barrier-removal projects. Violence toward PWD’s has become a common refrain in the media, with routine reports of neglect, abuse, and even murder. Perhaps the most (in)famous incident in recent memory is the Sagamihara Stabbings of 2016, in which a former employee of the Tsukui Yamayuri-en Care Facility returned to exterminate nineteen residents and wound twenty-six others. The assailant claimed that his actions were “for the sake of Japan and World Peace,” as killing PWD’s would release Japan from the economic burden of caring for them. His actions have driven activists and politicians like Teruhisa Yokoyama and Nobuto Hosaka to call for top-down legal reforms which, if adopted, will drastically reshape the definition of (dis)ability in Japan. By analyzing those reforms alongside responses from Japan’s disability rights communities in this presentation, I reveal whom they will privilege with access, how they will interact with conservative anxieties about sex and reproduction, and what they will mean for the future of the nation.
Presenter 2: Alec LeMay (Bunkyo University)
Mushukyo Discourse, Minority Making and the Othering of Catholic Children
Christians in the west have debated for centuries what is more important, faith or works; but Christians in Japan viscerally understand that without the latter, the former is doomed. Christianity in Japan is an extreme minority at 1% of the population. This has changed in recent years with the influx of foreign Catholics, but due to mechanisms of cultural assimilation, few children remain into adulthood. A factor in children’s flight from the Roman Catholic Church of Japan (RCCJ) is related to how they are “othered” by Japanese who consider non-religion to be the norm. A view that being non-religious (mushukyo) is indicative of Japanese identity has become a new discourse in Japan. This has been promulgated by pressure to conform to classroom and club culture.
This paper addresses the mechanisms at play in Catholic children’s marginalization and church flight. Through over a decade of ethnographic research, the following exposes how mushukyo discourse is constructed and disseminated. This begins in junior high school with classroom and club activities that assumes “public” extracurricular and weekend activities should take precedence over “private” activities such as church. Catholic children internalize this judgement by taking it for granted that even on Sundays church is expendable. Mushukyo discourse has left its mark on ethnic and ideological minority groups by pressuring young children to comply with a notion that all Japanese are non-religious. The result has been a construction of homogeneity at the expense of parental wishes.
Presenter 3: Jolyon B. Thomas (University of Pennsylvania)
“Japanese People Don’t See Race”: Exclusionary Practices in Public Education
References to Japaneseness pervade daily life in Japan. The idea of Japaneseness cloaks personal opinion with the mantle of common sense, renders specific practices and dispositions as aspects of a timeless culture, and censures undesirable behavior while establishing social norms. Little of this discussion is about race, but I contend that the language of Japaneseness is nevertheless racist. As the experiences of marginal communities such as Japanese-born Koreans (now fourth-generation, but technically not fully “Japanese,” immigrants; Chung 2010) and traditional outcaste communities (burakumin; Bondy 2014) attest, conceptions of Japaneseness create a social center that tolerates difference but does not fully include it (Brown 2006). In this talk I use the cases of two marginal student populations to highlight how insider/outsider groups may be ethnically “Japanese” but can still be racially coded as “not Japanese enough.” First, a recent Osaka District Court case about a public school forcing a Japanese brunette to dye her hair black shows how deviations from a narrow phenotype (black hair) elicit not only physical coercion but also moral condemnation. Second, the case of Japanese “returnees” (kikokushijo) shows how children of Japanese elites who live overseas for extended periods of time acquire a bodily habitus that marks them as unassimilable when they return to Japan. I conclude by examining how racist thinking in Japanese public school settings reflects recent changes to the Fundamental Law on Education (2006) and the newly revamped curriculum for mandatory morality education.
INDIVIDUAL PAPERS SESSION 5
Time: 11:00—12:30
Location: Room 606
Esben Petersen (Nanzan Institute for Religion and Culture)
Missionary Juvenile Literature, Japan and the Teaching of German Self-Identity
In the late-nineteenth-and early twentieth century, the European journalistic market saw the emergence of a new genre: the juvenile missionary journals. Catholic orders, Anglican mission societies, but also smaller liberal-Protestant movements such as the German Allgemeine evangelisch-Protestantishce Missionsverein founded such journals and periodicals to report on their missionary activities outside of Europe. These journals offered a variety of ethnographic and anthropologic information of people and religions from all over the world which fascinated its readers. However, although used by missionary scholars as sources for historical interpretations for quite some time, the genre of juvenile missionary journals has hardly been considered in itself in relation to the educational purposed they played.
In this paper, I study the German-language Juvenile missionary journal’s ethnographic and anthropologic writings on Japan in an attempt to identify the social truths and moral messages they communicated and the images they painted. Which stories were told and what kind of emotions did they promote in their readers?
The texts―written for the German youth readership―I argue, were much less designed to convey facts about the Japanese people than they were about giving the reader an appreciation of his or her place in a greater social and cultural world order. They made the juvenile reader recognize the taxonomy of categories which established Christianity as the primary religion and had a feel-good factor about them. The literature made up an important medium through which, when read and absorbed, the self-identity of Swiss and German children could become intimately tied to a certain perception of nationality and religiously differing people overseas as the “religious other.”
Roger Vanzila Munsi (Nanzan University)
The Age-Old Ritual Practice of Ohatsuhoage among the Kakure Kirishitan Survivors: Intersection of Identities and Resources
This presentation highlights the singularity of the most salient features of the Ohatsuhoage ritual event that constitutes one of the most persistent and deeply ingrained aspects of Kakure Kirishitan survivors in Nagasaki. By bringing together these significant characteristics from the lived religious experiences of three Kakure Kirishitan communities, I attempt to forge a significant positive correlation between the corporate identities and ritual resources that the material gives evidence to. The synthesis demonstrates that the ritually-prepared communal meal—Ohatsuhoage—constitutes a stable part of Kakure Kirishitan dominant ideology in which its followers critically take up membership in and identity with the divine and human community. Intriguingly, its core elements conspire together to signal, shape, and heighten collective self-definition, psycho-religious imagination, cherished memories and emotions, while also grounding their identity formats and adaptation processes. The analysis reinforces the startling assumption that the Ohatsuhoage ritual event continues to be, for the most part of the actor-participants, an historical and valuable religious activity deemed important enough to maintain their minimal survival in urban settings. In general, therefore, this study provides a refined interpretative tool for further understanding how the Ohatsuhoage ritual activity has increasingly proved to be a definitive component of the various processes that ultimately enables Kakure Kirishitan survivors to be nurtured by the strands of their longstanding spirituality and religion in the flux of social change.
Tómoki Piekenbrock (Heinrich-Heine-Universität (Düsseldorf) and Kanazawa University)
How to be Muslim in Kanazawa: Cultural identity of Muslim families in a recently developed Muslim community
The city of Kanazawa (Ishikawa prefecture) has recently pushed for significant internationalisation in an effort to draw much needed foreign workforce, tourists and prestige. Kanazawa University in particular endeavours to promote enrolment of students from abroad. Many of these young people hail from predominantly Muslim countries. Hijab wearing girls have become a common sight in the neighbourhoods close to the university. Nurseries and schools today feature many children from Muslim students’ and university staff families. Recently, a mosque has been inaugurated after considerable negotiation with the neighbourhood.
In this research (still in development), I will investigate the Muslims’ perspective to find their place in Kanazawa despite challenges through islamic customs in everyday life contradicting social norm, e.g. lack of halal foods and drinks, wearing of the Hijab, mandatory daytime prayers and religious moral codes. Though, interpretation of these aspects substantially differs according to the region of origin, social status and one’s beliefs. I will portray a number of Muslim residents in Kanazawa by conducting narrative interviews. Based on their experiences I will identify challenges that Muslim residents face in Kanazawa and obstacles that prevent them from taking part freely in society. A focus will be set on raising children in the islamic faith while retaining their integration into surrounding environment. For instance, concerns and anxieties that parents have for their children’s future religious life will be discussed. Through this research I hope to draw a clearer picture of Muslim families’ cultural identity in Kanazawa’s social environment.
INDIVIDUAL PAPERS SESSION 6
Time: 13:45—15:15
Location: Room 605
Atsushi Takeda (Ritsumeikan University)
Inbound Mobility Matters: Linguistic Landscape and Bilingual Education in Niseko, Hokkaido
Inbound tourism is conceived of as a growth strategy for the Japanese Government as the flow of foreign tourists is regarded as a potential driving force for economic growth. For regional areas where depopulation and economic downfall are becoming serious issues, international tourism is indeed a viable strategy for revitalization. Niseko.a popular inbound tourism destination in the regional area of Hokkaido―does benefit from international tourism and succeeds in revitalizing its community. Whereas many other Japanese ski resorts closed down in the 1990s after the end of the ski trend, Niseko Ski Resort chose to attract international skiers along with foreign capital. It has become a well-known ski resort for international visitors. Its impact is evident in the linguistic landscapes of Niseko where one commonly observes English items in ski slopes, hotels, restaurants, and shops. This biculturalism is one way in which inbound tourism could transform the local landscape. Its influence is seen in local education as well. Niseko opened an international school in 2011 in response to the growing number of children of expatriates and bicultural families. In this paper, we will investigate the mobility of inbound tourists in Niseko and explore how such mobility shifts the flow of people, transforms the linguistic landscape, and influences local education.
Michelle Henault Morrone (Nagoya University of Arts and Sciences)
Toward an equitable ESD system: Newcomers in Japan’s schools
In 2014, when the UNESCO-ESD Summit was held in Nagoya, Japan, there was considerable hope it would inspire a significant trickle-down effect. UNESCO-ESD signs were posted for weeks all over the subways to drum up attendance and NHK provided nightly coverage during the event. In the end, UNESCO-Japan funds were established for the creation of ESD curriculum programs. Yet while information about ESD has become more noticeable, for the most part, it remains a quiet movement in Japan. Those loyal to the cause work tirelessly on its behalf and many good programs have come of their efforts, some at the elementary school level, and others in cooperation with NGO’s or business/community activists..The agricultural dimension of many of Japan’s ESD programs naturally tends to focus attention on the environmental pillar of ESD’s three-pillared core (economics, environment, society). To this point, however, the other two pillars have played less of a role in curriculum development, perhaps because the whole notion of sustainability seems to demand an emphasis on the environment. In spite of its obvious importance with regard to education, the society pillar is rarely given anything like equal weight in these matters. Its equity aspect in particular tends to be all but ignored. For example, inclusion, an important equity issue and one that relates to all manner of individual rights, has not been made a focused part of pre-service teacher training in Japan. This contrasts with how ESD is taught in pre-service education schools in other countries, particularly in the nations of Northern Europe…Japan is experiencing demographic changes that make inclusion as a mark of equity a critical issue for investigation. This research examines the degree to which Japanese schools are prepared to address the inclusion of rising numbers of children of foreign origin. Different categories of newcomer students were interviewed about their experiences and expectations in school. Families were also interviewed to learn how conversant they were with the educational options available to their children within the system, particularly as these relate to their chances for meritocratic advancement in Japanese society. These interviews give a picture of the current state of Japan’s efforts to accommodate non-native students while simultaneously highlighting areas in need of further attention, especially in light of the commitments to ESD that Japan has made to UNESCO.
Anya C. Benson (Chuo University)
Education and aspiration in children’s media-themed participatory events
Participatory events have become a staple of Japanese children’s media environments, establishing a new variety of educational spaces that combine play with personal aspiration. By analysing the structure and marketing of three annual events based around the girls’ television series Purikyua, this paper discusses the potential for Japanese transmedia works to guide children’s physical actions and textual learning. A combination of instruction-based marketing (for example, through tutorial videos and quiz games), online interaction, and suggested bodily movement creates an emerging form of textual pedagogy that centers potential but aspirational identities. The events’ how-to framework suggests an attempt to establish a “correct” form of textual participation—playing with a toy in a specific way, engaging in specific activities, learning specific information or professing specific ideological values—and thus functions pedagogically to teach its own consumption.
Drawing on observations from events held between 2016 and 2018, as well as the surrounding interactive world of Purikyua and other girl-oriented media such as “Aikatsu!” and “Tamagotchi”, this paper details an aspirational mode of girls’ media that seeks to use both new and old media platforms in conjunction to teach behavioural patterns and values to young girls—a mode that may be reinforced by similar styles of instructive display on YouTube or Instagram. As media-themed events for young girls focus on guided participation that advertise the possibility of ‘becoming’ an aspirational figure, they construct further space for both transnational and consumerist influences within children’s lives.
INDIVIDUAL PAPERS SESSION 7
Time: 13:45—15:15
Location: Room 606
Adrian O. Tamas (Kobe University)
Being Bald in Japan: An Anthropological Perspective
American journalist Walter Klenhard wondered: “The ideal image of masculine good looks is seldom a bald one. Look at the male models appearing in advertisements, the movie stars with their hair transplants… Given the choice, would any man go bald?”
My research is based on extensive fieldwork, and I must say that one of the things that surprised me the most in Japan was the complete lack of reticence in pointing out and making fun of physical defects, such as being overweight or bald—all the more astonishing in a culture known for its strict code of behavior and extreme politeness. To use Fumio Sunaga’s perspective, bald and fat people represent minorities who are frequently the object not only of microagressions (which are sometimes unintentional), but of open ridicule.
My paper focuses on what being bald means in contemporary Japanese society, and how this particular physical trait is related to social interaction and social status. I have tried to address this issue from a broader perspective, using both historical data related to the situation in Japan, and a comparison with how hair, baldness, and masculinity are related in Western societies.
Debra Occhi (Miyazaki International College)
Shifting Sands: Displacements and Potentials in Ethnographies of Miyazaki Surf Culture
This paper takes up the conference theme as a framework to interpret my several attempts at solo and collaborative fieldwork in the beach areas of southern Miyazaki City, Kyushu, over several years, both solo and with various collaborators. As such it traces the roles of outside forces of accident and serendipity as much as the internal forces driven by the research findings. It also provides the opportunity to synthesize the previous studies with the aim of producing a coherent though punctuated longitudinal study.
My initial study of surf culture at Kisakihama Beach revealed among other things, gendered difference of practice that has diminished significantly in recent years. That project was vexed by institutional resistance, a series of typhoons, and even the death of a collaborator. More recent fieldwork reflects physical displacement of sand and expansion of the ‘culture’ to an area just to the south. Aoshima Beach has become a place where surf culture glocalizes, displaces, and overlaps with other touristic developments. Other sports, including yoga as well as ocean-based leisure, have also entered the fieldsite, expanding the project in those dimensions as the beachside behaviors diversify. Current research includes linguistic displacements and the potentials, including problems, that emerge, as well as the roles of technology. These ongoing fieldwork projects reflect cultural shifts and the resources of various collaborators, as well as the passing away of other significant persons that has ultimately expanded potential for development.
Yuri Nonami (Otemae University)
The Cultural Meaning of “Suri-ashi” in Japan
This paper examines how “Suri-ashi”, a walking style shuffling over the ground, is inherited and preserved in relation to the practical as well as cultural meaning in Japan. “Suri-ashi” has been commonly utilized as a basic physical expression in martial and traditional performing arts in Japan for centuries. In Japanese martial arts, for example, it is practiced in.Judo, Kyudo, Kendo, Aikido, Sumo, and Karate-do, and in traditional performing arts, Noh and Kabuki. “Suri-ashi” is also practiced in Sado, the Japanese traditional tea ceremony. Why do these arts utilize “Suri-ashi”? Regarding cultural meaning, some artistic and cultural critics, and practitioners of martial arts and performing arts, argue from the viewpoints of Japanese agricultural culture, religion and nature (Takechi 1969, Tada 1978, Uchida 2014). There is also some research from the practices of walking (Kidera 2004, 2010). In the anthropology of sports, martial arts are examined in relation with body manipulation and Eastern thoughts (Samukawa 2014). However, there are only few analyses from cultural anthropological research on “Suri-ashi.” This paper helps to fill this gap. It starts with an examination of the historical background of Japanese martial arts and traditional performing arts. Then, fieldwork data of interviews of practitioners, participant observations and experiential practices conducted in 2017, are explored. Finally, I argue that “suri-ashi” has the common meaning in which all the information in each moment from the sole of foot is perceptible and this phenomena is caused by the thought of Zen.