Organizer and Chair: Millie Creighton, University of British Columbia, Canada

Discussant: Gordon Mathews, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong

This panel presents ethnographic work exploring discourses of race and ethnicity in Japan, where such undercurrents are often denied, partly because of the persisting strength of Japan’s myth of homogeneity, and partly because, categories that parallel "racial" or "ethnic" categories elsewhere seem different from "race" or "ethnicity" as defined outside Japan. These papers suggest there are parallel conceptualizations in Japan to racial groupings into "black," "white," and "yellow" found elsewhere. Exploring distorted Black images in Japan, Russell provides theoretical insights to how racial motifs are transformed into fashions or fads. Cleveland explores the usurpation of Black culture and other ethnic or racialized images in Japanese youth culture and consumerism. Exploring now popular Korean dramas, Creighton shifts the emphasis to other Asians, and from youth culture to middle-aged women, now a more important consumer group with the aging of Japanese society, discussing how popular romanticizations, and sexualizations, of Koreans reflect the use of racial or ethnic motifs by individuals to question their own positioning and roles in Japanese social hierarchies. Bondy’s work on Burakumin, a discriminated against hereditary group, exemplifies how minorities in Japan can exist in a manner analogous to racial or ethnic minorities elsewhere, while not conceived as such because difference is not due to race or ethnicity, per se. Commentary by Mathews places these perspectives on race and ethnicity within the contemporary dynamics of Japanese society. The panel contributes to important discussions of how modalities of race and ethnicity can operate to dehumanize individual social actors as human beings both within Japan and elsewhere.

John G. Russell, Gifu University, Japan

Cultural constructions of race provide a medium through which identities are appropriated, displayed, amassed, consumed, exchanged and -- often literally played with through material artifacts of popular culture and media imagery in which racial identities become commodities that can be purchased and consumed. Racial mimicry has become a part of our everyday experience of the Other. Beginning in the 1980s, the commercialization of black, primarily African American urban culture has seen a proliferation of 'black' simulacra, with Asia serving a particularly prolific site of production for new forms of blackface and black paraphernalia. At the same time that these performances and artifacts transgress racial boundaries they also serve to reinforce them by appealing to the same essentialist racial tropes that they at times purport to transcend. This paper examines the meanings and uses of contemporary racial simulacra in Japan and the United States as they are constructed in individually performed acts of racial mimicry and embodied in artifacts of popular material and commercial culture. As Asians and Blacks begin to reencounter each other through popular culture and the arts, many of these encounters are transacted in a virtual space mediated though cultural production where sources of identity and self-representation serve as a kind of synecdochic short-hand of and for essentialist racial, ethnic and cultural difference involving both the self and the Other. This paper also explores how this phenomenon has generated a counter-discourse through which Blacks attempting to address these manifestations of racial mimicry, at times utilize the same essentialist logic.

Kyle Cleveland, Temple University Japan, Japan

Japanese notions of ethnic identity have evolved under the influence of globalized popular culture and social change. While established ideologies of race and nationalism echo in the corridors of authority, Japanese youth are reconsidering their place in society, and their identification with traditional identities of work, family and ethnicity. The "Freeter" phenomenon of post-bubble Japan represents a generation that is disaffected with requisite roles and societal obligations, and seeking alternate paths of identity. Preoccupied with consumer culture, young people in Japan are increasingly buying into surrogate identities, symbolically expressed through idealized and often stereotypical representations of exotic others. Against the backdrop of a culture in which essentialist assumptions of racial mono-ethnicity are pervasive, the adoption of alternative ethnic identities by Japanese youth is a novel solution to oppressive cultural norms that compel conformity. This paper will consider how youth in Japan are negotiating new identities in the context of contemporary social change, at times utilizing racial or ethnic motifs to do so, that are altering the ways in which they self-identify and conceive of themselves within their society.

Millie Creighton, University of British Columbia, Canada

This paper looks at the"Korea Boom" in Japan, focusing on the drama series, Fuyu no Sonata (Winter Sonata), a Korean production immensely popular in Japan. The series instigated a new erotic wave with Japanese women, notably those considered "middle-age," fantasying love, romance, and sometimes marriage with Korean men. The paper explores this shift in the erotic economy from Japanese women’s interest in white males (argued by some to represent a hierarchical racial positioning) to Japanese women idolizing Korean men. It also compares this current fascination with Korean men, to a previous erotic interest in Black men. It explores consumer products for fantasy romance with Korean stars, now flooding the Japanese market. It looks at how the phenomenon has moved from pure fantasy to attempts to meet Korean stars, and a new boom in arranged marriages directed at Japanese women wishing to marry Korean men. The paper explores this pop culture erotic shift in relationship to work done on Takarazuka, suggesting Japanese women are making parallel statements by positioning both "women as fantasy Japanese men" in the case of Takarazuka and "Korean men" in the case of the "Korea Boom" as more desirable partners than actual Japanese men. It attempts to address a recent shift in attitudes among Japanese towards the two groups of East Asians, Koreans and Chinese, in which Japanese have suddenly gained a sharp positive view of Koreans, in contrast to a previously negative one, while Japanese attitudes towards Chinese have more sharply declined.

Christopher Bondy, University of Hawaii at Manoa

Much of the work on "the Burakumin" has treated them as a monolithic group – ignoring or minimizing the great differences found within Buraku communities. Despite the fact that attention to Buraku issues is welcome and encouraged, treating "the Burakumin" as a fairly homogeneous group potentially endorses the long entrenched and fallacious view of Japan as a homogeneous society. The Buraku are a heterogeneous population, the variations and experiences within which are great. This study explores the Buraku as the complicated and diverse marginalized group they are.

Using ethnographies and interviews performed in two different Buraku communities in western Japan, this paper demonstrates how differing historical and social experiences have shaped the approaches taken by the two locales. The diversity within the communities is apparent from within, but is easy to miss when viewed from the outside. For example, each community prepares its members to interact with majority society differently, from encouraging them to share their background to tacitly promoting passing. Overall, this study shows how understanding the heterogeneity of the Buraku experience enables an even deeper understanding of their lives in Japan, while it also reveals how minority experiences have continually been trivialized and marginalized by the majority society.