Organizer: Hiromitsu Inokuchi, University of Wisconsin, Madison
Chair: Kimio Ito, Osaka University
Discussant: Joseph J. Tobin, University of Hawai'i
The dominant trend of Japan Studies, that emphasizing the homogeneity and distinctiveness of the Japanese and their culture (typically appearing in the discourse of nihonjinron), has been criticized ever since the 1980s. Nevertheless, even dominant scholarly conversation among U.S. researchers about "Japan" sometimes slips rather easily into this kind of discourse. Especially in recent years, as U.S. policy makers see Japan as a significant model of social reform, considerable social research of a comparative kind has been conducted from the dominant paradigm, to justify or re-direct the reforms (education is one good example). This research tends to reconstruct the myth of a "successful" Japanese society as homogenous and conflictless, by skirting a more critical examination of Japan.
The majority of these "comparative" studies avoid inquiring deeply of the sociocultural meanings of phenomena, and presume that Japanese society is distinctively different from Western society, and that its "culture," as essentialized, may be taken as a given. This means that the issues of subordinated groups are largely neglected in these studies in those studies, and that, in some cases, represented Japanese society as undemocratic. While it hardly needs to be said that there have always been dynamics of race/ethnicity, gender, class, sexual orientation, etc., in Japanese society, few scholars are seriously concerned with these issues.
This panel attempts to demystify Japanese society by examining issues of subordinate groups in Japan, but it does not treat these issues as special to Japanese society. Accepting a comparison is inevitable, after all. This panel attempts to find the general possibility of presenting concrete cases of Japan as having parallels elsewhere; it situates Japanese phenomena in terms of more universal theories, and sees research of Japanese society as potentially precious contributions enriching those theories. Specifically, we will discuss the Buraku issue, the Korean-Japanese issue, and Osaka regional culture from a critical anthropological perspective.
Towards a Multivocal Pedagogy: School Knowledge in the Elementary School
Education of Buraku Children
Hiroshi Ikeda, Osaka University
In classrooms, teachers in general attempt to transmit to their students schemes of interpretation, i.e., ways to understand the world, by teaching a body of "knowledge." While teachers, and how and what they teach, are necessarily caught up in many levels of political, economic, and cultural compromise and negotiation, it seems that when conflicts over pedagogical policies and practices are experienced by teachers in their classrooms, these are often very difficult for them to resolve. Therefore, in order to carry out their work "efficiently," they tend to make efforts to convey as consistently and with as few contradictions as possible the legitimized, "official" school knowledge. Since a certain body of knowledge or discourse has been given preference and authority, oppositional and alternative knowledge(s) and discourses are excluded.
This paper analyzes the above-stated situation of teachers based on on-going research at an elementary school that has a relatively high number of Buraku students, in which the presenter has been participant as well as observer. Results so far indicate that Japanese elementary school teachers' ways of teaching are fairly univocal. Although the socio-cultural backgrounds within the everyday experiences of the students and teachers extend beyond the rigid structure of the classroom, and, therefore, their knowledges are fairly diverse, such knowledges are processed and reshaped into "school knowledge" through the dominant scheme of interpretation which teachers tend to use. Here it is important to note that not only the state guidelines for school curricula and state-censored textbooks but also the dominant meanings of "society," "education," "child," etc. held by teachers are closely related to "school knowledge" as it appears in the curricula, i.e., pedagogical practices, of their classrooms.
Yet the teachers' contradictory struggles against officially established meanings and practices are also in evidence-mainly outside of the classroom. Ideologies that oppose state and local education policy, and contradictory ideas that exist both in theory and common sense, may also inform teachers' interpretations. In fact, the meanings they personally give to words such as "society" and "education" vary. In this sense, the presenter would suggest, the dominant discourse and marginalized ones, conflicting within the daily practices of teaching, present the possibility for teachers to construct a pedagogy that reflects a multivocal view of the world. My research on Japanese elementary education, focusing on Buraku children, will provide a particular case study of how teachers and students experience the everyday politics of school knowledge.
Media Discouses on the Distinctive Nature of Osaka
Joel Stocker University of Wisconsin, Madison
Commodified images characterizing Osaka's "distinctive" nature in terms of its history, dialect, food, comedy, fashion, and styles of interaction have gained wide popularity (at least in the Kansai and Kanto areas) in Japan. Among political leaders, academics, media professionals, popular entertainers, or "average" consumers, images of place are often of primary importance in the (re)creation of cultural time and place. In this paper, I will discuss the prevailing discourses regarding Osaka appearing on TV shows and I will contextualize my topic, within the expanses of Japanese media culture, by discussing my ethnographic research on the young manzai comedians of the Minami area of Osaka City.
Most of the numerous munzai comedians who perform on Japanese TV today began their careers in downtown Osaka and are managed by the powerful entertainment company, Yoshimoto Kogyo. They actively participate in the popular, mass-mediated production of portrayals of Osaka. Every year since the late 1980s, hundreds of young people, taking their lead from comedy superstars DownTown and other manzai media entertainers whose identities are strongly associated with Osakan popular culture, have sought out a life in Osaka-style comedy by pilgrimaging to the Minami area of Osaka to study or, rather, practice comedy at the "New Star Creation," Yoshimoto Kogyo's one-year school for the training of young entertainers.
Yoshimoto Kogyo has achieved powerful national and now international commercial reach while marketing products, services, and entertainers, mainly via TV, discursively situated within "Osakan culture." In this respect, the daily and professional lives of the young comedians associated with the entertainment giant provide an interesting case for understanding the interrelations of the mass media, daily (consumer/producer) practices, and the new textures and spaces of community formations in urban Japan.
In sum, by focusing on the ways in which the young comedians, as consumers of and participants within the media production of Osakan comedy, mediate and are mediated by and within the contexts of the school, the stage, and TV programs of Yoshimoto Kogyo, I will address the widespread, media culture-immersed significance of the discourses on urban locality concerning Osaka and the new forms of consumption emerging in urban settings today.
Reproduction of Domination in the Curriculum: Representation of Korea in Japanese
Middle School Textbooks
Hiromitsu Inokuchi, University of Wisconsin, Madison
Recent cultural Marxist theorists have taken an interest in the analysis of textual meanings which, along with class, gender and race, have become important categories of interpretation. In this study, based on cultural reproduction theory, I examine how current Japanese textbooks implicitly construct a dominant ideology about Korea through their representations.
Japan colonized Korea from 1910 to 1945, and during that time the Japanese demeaned the culture of Korea, producing the impression of Korea as "the inferior." Even after the independence of Korea, the residue of this ideology has not been examined critically enough in the study of education. To date, this ideology is so deeply embedded in Japanese conceptions that it is taken for granted as natural in everyday life. In this study, I analyze Japanese middle school history as contained in (1) a diachronic sequence of four versions of the same textbook (from the same publisher) between 1955 and 1983; (2) a pair of high-school world history and Japanese history textbooks. I examine the changing trends in the representation of Korea.
First, I use the method of content analysis, whereby I examine the frequencies of the appearance of key words related to Korea. However, since content analysis does not explain how language serves to construct a dominant social meaning, I focus secondly on the syntactic rules that structure the discourse. In this regard, I want to note that the causative form in Japanese often omits the subject of causation, suggesting that the object is passive. Thus, I analyze the phrases with the form, "make Korea do -," in which the subject is omitted. Third, I examine how textbooks on different school subjects synchronically reinforce a particular ideology inter-textually, especially, I analyze school textbooks in the humanities (Japanese language, music and fine arts) that contain representations of Korea.
In summary, I argue that the cultural heritage of Korea is ignored even when Korean victimization by Japanese colonialism is stressed. Such a depiction implicitly suggests that Korea is a "less developed, weaker" country, ironically reinforcing the traditional Japanese ideology of colonialism. Further, the comparison of the high school textbooks to the middle school ones reveals that "Korea" is less represented in the former despite the fact that the former textbooks contain more "knowledge."
Ambivalent Meanings of "Being a Mother": Identity Formations of
Japanese "Sengyo-Shufu" Women in their Child-Rearing Practices
Yoko Terami, Kobe Shinwa Women's University
According to some recent works in the field of comparative study of culture, Japanese mothers' child-rearing practices have become more "American," in spite of the differences that are supposed to exist between the two "cultures." A number of studies suggest that the basis of this change is the fact that social conditions of Japanese mothers have come to resemble those of their U.S. counterparts.
The purpose of this presentation is to clarify the situation of contemporary Japanese women who stay at home to be "mothers" with no job except mothering, i.e., those women who have chosen to follow the "Japanese traditional styles." Several key questions arise: Have Japanese mothers' child-rearing styles really changed? What kinds of thoughts and emotions do these "sengyo-shufu" (homemakers) women have while keeping themselves at home in order to raise children? What meanings do these women attach to their being mothers?
The data used in this study came from interviews and the questionnaire responses collected from 37 mothers who attended "hahaoya-gakkyuu" (parenting class for mothers), in which I was the instructor. The data suggests that present-day Japanese women are still not free from the traditional ideologies, and are often caught between the traditional and the more radical ideologies, feeling that they have not lived their lives by choice. Some insights are added from my current research on child-rearing practices and child-mother interactions in Japanese and U.S. families.