Organizer: Samuel Hideo Yamashita, Pomona College
Intimate Transnationalisms: Rethinking Gender, Space, and Time in Filipina
Migration to Japan
Nobue Suzuki, University of Hawai'i, Manoa
In the latest discussions on international migration, studies of transnationalism have addressed the bifocal orientation of migrants, who are not "uprooted" from their native countries, but who rather construct social spaces that link together their native and adopted locales through their agency. Migrants simultaneously develop and sustain multiple identities and community memberships by engaging in economic and sociocultural practices in the new locales and by continuing to keep in touch with the people and places left behind.
Based on ongoing research, I explore the ways in which transmigrant Filipino wives of Japanese men in urban Japan develop and maintain their networks between themselves and the Philippines, and between themselves and their Japanese neighbors. Central to my discussion is that the success of their networking and positioning of their presence as spouses of Japanese citizens in Japan is interwoven with their moves between two cultures. Besides their church affiliations, the wives establish connections to the Japanese communities in which they live through various activities: Christmas parties, charitable programs, and prefectural festivals. In such events, the wives express their social and ethnic characteristics by their own choices. Filipinas make use of their legal residency in Japan to move back and forth between the two nations and to strengthen their continuing memberships in Filipino families and Philippine society. Through their actions, urban Filipino wives are inscribing their transnational narratives and practices onto an ethnic landscape in Japan.
Internationalization in the Heisei Era: The JET Program After Eight Years
David McConnell, The College of Wooster
At a time when pluralist nations around the world are struggling to use education as a vehicle for social integration, Japan is under international pressure to solve a problem of precisely the opposite order: to "create" diversity and to acquaint its insulated people with foreigners at the level of face-to-face interaction. In 1987 the Japanese government hit on an innovative, if curious, solution to this problem: Drop four thousand foreign language assistants from eight countries into public secondary schools in every far-flung corner of the nation. With an annual budget now approaching $300 million, the Japan Exchange and Teaching (JET) Program stands as one of the largest initiatives in cultural exchange in the contemporary world.
As part of an ongoing research project on this high-profile attempt to transform the nation's vaunted internationalization campaign from rhetoric to reality, this paper examines the "learning curve" on the Japanese side over the past eight years. I argue that JET's most remarkable "success" has come not in broadening Japanese attitudes or changing English language education, but rather in cultivating a genuine feeling of "closeness" towards Japan in the minds of many foreign participants. Ironically, the enhancement of foreign understanding of Japan and the creation of a pro-Japan cohort among foreign youth was precisely the unstated goal of Foreign Ministry and Home Affairs Ministry bureaucrats who designed the program in the midst of the U.S.-Japan trade conflict in 1986. Internationalization in the JET Program is not concerned with some idealistic movement to bring fellowship to our global village or to chip away at the absoluteness of national sovereignties but rather with getting Japan a better press and acquiring a feel for the outside world so as to avoid unanticipated counteractions and thus raise Japan's status in world affairs.
*The original fieldwork for this project was conducted under a Fulbright grant from 1988-90 and a follow-up visit in 1993. This paper is based in large part on data collected during a second follow-up visit in October, 1995, under a short-term research grant from the Northeast Asia Council of the Association for Asian Studies.
Lifelong Learning in Tôwa-chô: A New Wave in Japanese Education
Christopher S. Thompson, University of Illinois, Urbana
In Japan, local boards of education are responsible for managing both school education and a variety of community-wide educational programs coordinated under the heading of "social education." In this paper, I will introduce the contemporary system for social education as it exists in Tôwa-chô, a small regional town in south-central Iwate prefecture. Furthermore, I will illustrate and analyze the impact of a new educational approach for social education called shôgai gakushû (lifelong learning), being mandated by the Ministry of Education (the Mombushô) for the purpose of upgrading and modernizing social education offerings in communities across Japan.
During the post-war era, social education programs made available through the kôminkan system have served as an important catalyst for community life, even in neighborhoods without schools. In recent years, however, economic and political decentralization at the national level, budget cuts within the Mombushô, changing societal trends, and other factors have made social education administrators at all levels less enthusiastic about funding programs purely on the basis of voluntary participation. This condition has forced local boards of education to develop new and creative ways to manage their domain of educational responsibility. This paper will also identify examples of creative educational programs in Tôwa-chô.
Finally, this paper will connect the state of affairs in Tôwa-chô to broader developments in social education in Japan. The myths and realities behind attempts by the Mombushô to better integrate school education and social education through the principles of shôgai gakushû will be identified.
Rethinking the Practice of Mizuko Kuyo in Contemporary Japan: Interviews with
Practitioners at a Buddhist Temple in Tokyo
Elaine Martin, University of Alabama
This paper reports on and considers the meaning of research conducted at a small, "neighborhood" Buddhist temple in southeastern Tokyo. Given the overwhelmingly negative response of the Japanese media to large "commercialized" temples specializing in mizuko kuyo coupled with numerous scholars' observations that no one has interviewed women who actually practice mizuko kuyo, we were very eager to talk to some of the women regularly participating in mizuko kuyo services at this temple. Our findings challenge not only much of the literature previously written on the subject but also many of our own expectations and presuppositions.
We have found that research by Bardwell Smith, William LaFleur, and Zwi Werblowsky, and others, taken as representative of mizuko kuyo practices in general, in fact does not reflect the whole picture because: (l) their observations are based only on practices at large, "commercialized" temples, and (2) various conclusions they draw, even concerning the psychology of the practitioners, have been generated minus the voices of the women themselves. Our interviews and observations at a small temple clearly demonstrate that the practice of mizuko kuyo is more complex and diverse than previously thought.
To summarize some of our findings, which the paper discusses in greater detail, incorporating information from the interviews:
(1) women practice mizuko kuyo for a variety of reasons, not only because of abortion, and may do so even on behalf of other women in their family or to benefit living children
(2) mizuko kuyo is viewed as a family-oriented practice
(3) many practitioners are in their fifties and sixties, and often a lengthy hiatus has intervened between the experienced loss of the infant or fetus and the initial practice of mizuko kuyo
(4) fear of retribution from the spirit of the fetus or dead infant is not the motivating factor in the practice of mizuko kuyo
(5) the practice of mizuko kuyo is viewed as a lifelong commitment, not as a single event or observance
(6) many women rely on a philosophy of accommodation to reconcile apparent contradictions such as abortion vs. Buddhist belief, public vs. private, and religious belief (abortion = sin) vs. the law (abortion is legal).