Tessa Morris-Suzuki

The Invention and Reinvention of “Japanese Culture”

A specter is haunting europe and, indeed, the rest of the world: not, of course the specter of Communism, but of that other big C—Culture. At the 1991 Conference of the International Association of Historians of Asia, Prof. Ying-Shih Yu of Princeton University argued in his keynote address that the most important current trend in historical studies was the recognition of “culture as a relatively autonomous force in history” (Yu 1991, 21). For too long, he suggested, historians have looked at the past through a narrow window shaped by the values of the west, and particularly by the all-powerful western notion of history as the pursuit of “scientific truth.” To break through this constricting frame we need to recognize “that the history of every society or people deserves to be studied not only as a part of world history but also on account of its intrinsic values” (Yu 1991, 26); we need, in other words, to accept Watanabe Hiroshis notion that every society or region may be “‘particular’ in its own way like an individual” (quoted in Yu 1991, 23).

Touching the grass: science, uncertainty and everyday life from Chernobyl to Fukushima

The Fukushima nuclear disaster of March 2011 raises profound questions, not only about the use of nuclear energy, but also about the way in which scientific knowledge is constructed and communicated. This article focuses particularly on the divergent ways in which the notion of ‘uncertainty’ is understood by scientists and scientific bodies engaged in studying the effects of the Chernobyl and Fukushima disasters, and by the residents who are the main victims of these disasters. I argue that the approach to uncertainty and risk assessment developed by bodies like UNSCEAR and the Chernobyl Forum has been applied in Fukushima in ways that have widened the gap in understanding between academic scientists and local residents, but I also point to experiments in citizen science that have potential to help bridge this gap.

The Japanese Internet: Visionaries and Virtual Democracy

An examination is made of how the development of the Internet in Japan is likely to affect civic rights and the relationship between citizens and their government. This was undertaken to determine if the trajectory of Internet development in Japan, with its distinct locational and corporate biases, has followed the predictions of two prominent Japanese commentators: the visionary Kumon Shumpei who espoused an expansive international perspective that citizens will be transformed into ‘netizens’ in a virtual community; and the media analyst Kogawa Tetsuo, whose pessimistic views were targeted primarily at a national audience and concerned the adaptability of the Japanese to the ‘permanent autonomous zones’ created by information technology. The observations of these commentators on the relationship between the Internet and civil society are tested in an examination of the degree to which the social and political uses of the Internet have followed their conjectures by means of two case studies: the protest movements over United States bases in Okinawa, and the Nibutani Dam in southern Hokkaido—an area with a predominantly indigenous Ainu population. Although the authors report evidence that the Internet has extended the sphere of grass-roots political activity, they believe its effect is likely to be limited until there is a restructuring of Japanese political organisations and attitudes.

Invisible countries: Japan and the Asian dream

A few hours after leaving Narita Airport, I saw the landscape of Hong Kong ≡ Masses of buildings crowded in on either side of the runway. For some reason, as I saw this landscape, I felt my heart glow and gradually expand within me. ‘This is Asia’, I thought (Kobayashi 1996, 311).

Defining the Boundaries of the Cold War Nation: 1950's Japan and the Other Within

This article examines policies towards zainichi Koreans in Cold War Japan. In particular, it focuses on the redrawing of the legal and conceptual boundaries around the Japanese nation in the wake of Japans defeat in the Asia-Pacific War. The creation of postcolonial and Cold War boundaries, it is argued, involved an active process of exclusion which had profound consequences for the lives of Koreans in Japan. The article traces this process from the failed deportation policy of 1950–1951 to the repatriation plan of 1959 and thereafter.

A dream betrayed: Cold war politics and the repatriation of Koreans from Japan to North Korea

They came in their trainloads, in their thousands. Week after week from December of 1959 onwards, a mass of people from all over Japan converged on the port city of Niigata. Amidst the cheers and weeping of well-wishers, they made their way up the gangplanks and onto the repatriation ships: families with their suitcases and bundles of possessions; children clutching their favourite toys; people with paper streamers and bouquets of flowers. Between the end of 1959 and 1984 – the years of Japan’s “economic miracle” – a total of over 90,000 people departed its shores in search of a new and better life in North Korea. Some 70,000 people left in 1960–61 alone (Kim and Takayanagi, 1995, p. 341). The vast majority of those leaving were Zainichi Koreans [members of the Korean ethnic minority in Japan], although over 6,000 were Japanese nationals (most married to Korean partners), and their numbers also included a few people of Chinese origin. Yet very few of the Korean returnees were actually heading “home” to their birthplaces or families, for of the 600,000 or more Koreans who lived in Japan in the postwar decades, over 97 per cent originated from the southern half of the peninsula (Ryang, 1997, p. 3). These returnees were going back, not to “home villages” but to “the Homeland”. Many of them went fired with the belief that they were going to participate in the great dream of building a peaceful, united, socialist Korea. When they reached the port of Chongjin in North Korea the repatriates were met by delegations of well-wishers and taken to a reception centre, where they were housed for a week before being dispersed to homes and jobs in all parts of the country. A booklet produced by the North Korean government to publicise the success of the scheme Asian Studies Review December 2005, Vol. 29, pp. 357–381

The View Through the Skylight: Nishio Kanji, Textbook Reform and the History of the World

In the closing pages of Kokumin no rekishi [`National History’ , or, more precisely, `The History of the Nation’ s People’ ], Nishio Kanji discusses a story by award-winning novelist Hino KeizoÅ entitled `A Garage with a Skylight’ [Tenmado no aru gareÅ ji]. The teenage main character of Hino’ s story ® nds that the view of trees and gardens which he can see from the window of his comfortable study oppresses his spirit. Gradually, he withdraws from the family home and immures himself in an empty garage whose thick concrete walls protect him from the intrusions of parents, friends and the outside world. The garage has a skylight in the ceiling, and here, within his chosen fortress, the teenager day after day turns on the radio full blast and stares out of the skylight at the blue sky. He imagines that he is an astronaut watching the universe through the porthole of his space capsule. The cobwebs that festoon the skylight become antennae beaming messages to him from distant worlds, and when a shaft of moonlight shines in through the skylight he feels himself responding and senses that the spirit of the universe has entered his soul. (pp. 753± 754) Nishio Kanji uses Hino’ s story as a metaphor for the contemporary malaise of Japanese society, and particularly of the Japanese young. But, arriving at the narrative in the ® nal chapter of Kokumin no rekishi, I could not help thinking what an apt metaphor it provided for this book itself. Like the teenager in `A Garage with a Skylight’ , the author and his collaborators clearly feel themselves to be surrounded by an obscurely disturbing and threatening world: globalization imperils the certainties of national and ethnic boundaries; arrogant westerners impose their standards and values on Japan; a powerful and menacing China looms large on the horizon; ungrateful Koreans brood over memories of Japanese colonial rule. In response to this hostile environment, Nishio and his fellow scholars have retreated into a fortress surrounded by the thick walls of a single shared certainty: an unswerving commitm ent to proclaiming the moral and cultural superiority of Japan to everywhere else. From within their retreat they gaze out through the skylight at the history of the world, and discover, with relief, that the view now looks quite different. Kokumin no rekishi is a 774-page description of that view.

An act prejudicial to the occupation forces: migration controls and Korean residents in post‐surrender Japan

This article uses previously neglected archival material to shed new light on issues of frontiers, migration and the status of Koreans in occupation‐period Japan. When Japan surrendered on 15 August 1945, there were some two million Koreans in Japan. The occupation authorities had little understanding of the Korean community in Japan, and the policies they introduced towards them were often harsh and contradictory. In particular, the imposition of stringent migration controls to prevent Koreans from moving back and forth across the border between Korea and Japan had severe consequences for Japans largest ethnic minority. Occupation‐period border controls were largely enforced by members of the British Commonwealth Occupation Force (BCOF), including British, Australian, New Zealand and Australian troops. Using BCOF archives, the article shows how the occupation forces cooperated with the Japanese police, sometimes in the process reviving wartime social control measures, in order to control the mobility of Korean in Japan. This collaboration had a lasting impact on the status of the resident Korean community and of other foreign communities in Japan. BCOF also appears to have provided the initiative for the introduction of Japans controversial post‐war alien registration system.1

Ethnic Engineering: Scientific Racism and Public Opinion Surveys in Midcentury Japan

The science of race and the scientific study of public opinion are not normally bracketed together. Academic efforts to measure and define the physical characteristics of races reached a zenith in the first four decades of the twentieth century and then fell into decline, as the events of World War II revealed the inhuman ends to which this branch of human science could be turned.The science of public opinion research, on the other hand,was still in the relatively early stages of development at the outbreak of the war andwas to come into its own in the postwardecades,when sociologists, psephologists, statisticians, and advertising agencies developed increasingly powerful tools to grasp and quantify the shifting moods of mass society. Although many of the key techniques of opinion research were pioneered in the United States, it was perhaps in postwar Japan that the art of measuring every imaginable aspect of popular opinion was most highly refined.

Japanese capitalism since 1945 : critical perspectives

This book introduces students of the Japanese economy to a broad range of critical contemporary Marxian analyses by Japanese economists. Each of the five essays - on economic policy, agriculture, big business, labour relations, and foreign trade and investment - is written by a specialist in the field. The introduction places the essays in the wider context of contrasting theories of Japanese economic development. While such writings constitute an important part of the economic literature in Japan, virtually none of the great body of Marxian writing on Japanese capitalism has heretofore been available in English.