Organizer: James E. Roberson, Sugiyama Jogakuen University
Chair: Gordon Mathews, Chinese University of Hong Kong
Discussant: Takie S. Lebra, University of Hawai'i, Manoa
The purpose of this panel is to consider the implications of lifecourse for conceptions of self in Japanese culture. Many recent anthropological analyses of the Japanese self have maintained that it is contextual, multiple, and fragmented. Some analysts argue that the Japanese self is inherently interrelated with others, as opposed to the separate, independent Western self; some fault earlier scholars of Japan for the "ideology of the individual," ethnocentrically coloring their understanding of Japanese culture and selves; some discuss the Japanese self from a postmodern perspective, suggesting that the coherent self is everywhere a fiction.
Much of this recent academic discourse has disregarded the Japanese lifecourse, and Japanese selves' senses of their lives over the lifecourse. While we on this panel accept the proposition that the Japanese self is multi-dimensional, we question the utility of seeing the self as "multiple" or "fragmented" insofar as these conceptions deny the continuity and integrity of the individual's sense of self across the lifecourse. In that 'the Japanese sense of self' is interwoven with individuals' sense of personal identity, examining the relationship between identity and lifecourse should provide insight into Japanese conceptions of self, in all their complexity and variety.
Through ethnographically based discussions, this panel will explore the relationships that exist between lifecourse and self-identity in Japan. In doing this, we hope to begin to integrate discussions of lifecourse with those of self in Japanese culture.
Gordon Mathews, Chinese University of Hong Kong
Ikigai is a Japanese term roughly defined as "that which most makes one's life seem worth living." My interviewing of Japanese of all ages and walks of life shows how ikigai shifts over the lifecourse. Many Japanese in their late teens and twenties seem to find their ikigai in their dreams of the future: becoming a novelist, say, or marrying a beautiful spouse and having a perfect family. In their thirties, forties, and fifties, most forgo their dreams for their present ikigai of working for a company, or nurturing less-than-perfect family and children. Most seem to immerse themselves in these enveloping social realities, but some continue to adhere to their receding individual dreams. The sixties, for many I interviewed, are a time of ikigai uncertainty-with retirement from work and with children departed, they must find a new ikigai by which to live-a "second life." Some are able to find a new ikigai in vocation, avocation, or religious belief, but others cannot, dwelling instead on a past ikigai to which they cannot return.
What can the concept of ikigai contribute to understanding of 'the Japanese self'? Ikigai is defined by Japanese commentators as being inherently individual and volitional: it is the individual's sense of deepest social commitment, a commitment that the individual may affirm, but may also withhold. In this sense, the 'interrelated, contextual Japanese self' written of by anthropologists seems to be underlain by the separate self's commitment or lack of commitment to the various layers of its social world as it passes through life and sees its dreams flare and fade. The Japanese I interviewed used ikigai as a means of prioritizing their interweaving social commitments; ikigai served for them as a means of comprehending themselves as both a part of and apart from the thickets of social relations within which they have lived their lives. In this sense, the contextual Japanese self may be seen as based in a core of individual self-identity, a core formed of the self's choices of commitments over its life, and of its ongoing passage of dreams and accretions of memory.
James E. Roberson, Sugiyama Jogakuen University
This paper will examine the relationships that exist among discourses of self-identity, leisure and lifecourse among the employees of a small manufacturing company located in Tokyo, Japan. I argue that these working-class Japanese people find important complementary or alternative sources of self-identity in the private, non-work activities and inter-relationships of their lives. In particular, I discuss the private pursuit of self among a number of the men and women for whom art, religion and other personal interests were particularly important. These alternative or complementary sources of identity, though not overtly manifest or openly expressed in the company context, may underlie or inform the relationship between the individual and his or her working at the company in ways which, when seen from the perspective of the lifecourses of these individuals, provide significant sources of integrity and meaning to their actions, lives, and selves.
Drawing upon this ethnographic material, I argue that if we are to take these people's reflections upon themselves seriously, then we must also recognize a cross-contextually contiguous integrity both to their own personal senses of who they are and to the "self" in Japanese culture more abstractly conceived. A consideration of or focus on lifecourse compels, I argue, a recognition of an "inner self that provides a fixed core for self-identity and subjectivity" among Japanese people. In looking at the inter-relationships that exist among leisure, lifecourse and self-identity among the people working at a small Japanese company, we are also forced to recognize that the complexity of the person and self in Japanese culture exists in relation to both continuities and changes in lives lived across the course of time.
Susan O. Long, John Carroll University
The Japanese phrase, "shikata ga nai," (literally, "there is no way to do [it]," or "it can't be helped") is frequently taken to indicate the speaker's sense of resignation, and the phrase has often been quoted by foreign scholars to indicate a vast cultural gap between Japan and "the West," for example, in attitudes toward nature and in definitions of selfhood.
This paper argues rather, that the very commonness of the phrase "shikata ga nai " suggests that the issue of control is a very salient one in Japanese culture. Scholars such as Bachnik and Rosenberger have recently placed the issue in the movement between uchi and soto, with control characteristic of soto contrasting with the engagement of uchi. While I agree with their arguments about the relational nature of "self" in Japan, ethnographically I find a great deal of evidence for conceptions of selfhood in which control is seen as desirable not only in relations with outsiders but throughout one's social world. These writers do not give enough recognition to the conscious manipulation of inner and outer movement.
In this paper, I present several examples from fieldwork on illness and medical care in Japan over the past fifteen years that illustrate such a desire for control. The "shikata ga nai" decisions to abdicate control in these stories appear to be pragmatic decisions to exchange what is hopefully a temporary dependency for greater control in the long run. Continuous movement between dependency and control occurs not with different people each time, but most often with convoys of associates (Plath) over the lifecourse. Control is thus neither abdicated by "shikata ga nai" attitudes nor antithetical to relational notions of self, but an integral part of self-definition in Japan.
David W. Plath, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
Japan may not be Number One in per capita production of home media images (snapshots, family albums, consumer videos, and so on) but the rest of the world identifies people as Japanese less for wearing kimono than for wearing cameras.
This passion for self-imaging is not easy to reconcile with two often-voiced claims of high church postmodernism. If the Japanese Self is, as the latest fad asserts, a mere feather on the breath of Foucault, then there should be little reason to make, much less preserve, likenesses of self. (Buddhist theologies of non-self similarly run counter to the near-universal practice of making and preserving photographs of dead relatives). And if the camera is only a hegemonic tool, instrument of the colonialist Gaze, then one wonders why the never-colonized Japanese have so cheerfully turned that instrument on themselves for more than a century and a half.
Drawing from field materials as well as published sources, I explore contradictions between self-imaging as Japanese popular practice, on the one hand, and the imaginary Self projected upon Japanese by Western cafe intellectuals, on the other.
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