PANA Institute for Leadership Development

Masato Kato (加藤 匡人, katoppe820@yahoo.co.jp), a student working toward a Master of Arts in Religion and Society at Pacific School of Religion, wrote this paper for the PANA-sponsored PSR course "Asian-Pacific Islander Diasporic Political Theology in the Context of Empire Building", taught by Dr. Eleazar Fernandez in the Spring of 2008.

Please note that the views expressed in this paper are his own personal reflections, and are not made on behalf of the Tenrikyo organization of which he is a member.

One of my friends, originally from Philippines, once shocked me, saying, “Japan should accept more immigrants so that you can gain young laborers.” Upon hearing this comment, a sense of rejection came to my heart, while I gave him the nod to carry on the conversation. It was not long before I found out what was causing me the emotional turmoil. Lying deep in my mind was the belief that Japan is a homogeneous nation, and blending any non-Japanese people would undermine its cultural purity. This set of reflections led me to critically go over my belief in the homogeneity of Japan: Is Japan really a homogenous nation? If so, what am I supposed to make of the Ainu and the Okinawans, who had been either assimilated into mainstream Japanese culture or segregated in certain areas of society? What about the Koreans or immigrant workers in Japan, a majority of who have been living in the country much longer than I have?

These lingering questions proved that I have always believed in homogeneity while I knew Japan was a heterogeneous society. After having become familiar with postcolonial discourse, I came to realize that the ideology of the dominant class of the society, to which I belong, had shaped my view. Frantz Fanon echoes this mentality: “Colonialism is not satisfied merely with holding a people in its grip and emptying the native’s brain of all form and content. By a kind of a perverted logic, it turns to the past of the oppressed people, and distorts, disfigures, and destroys it.”[1] In relation to the issue of minorities in Japan, I seek to discuss what I call the “homogenous mentality” that pervades the minds of many mainstream Japanese (including myself), by drawing from literature that sheds light on the mechanism and root of this mentality. I will tackle the issues surrounding the homogeneous mentality, by drawing upon insights from the experiences of Japanese Americans during WWII, and the religious teachings of Tenrikyo.

Living in Japan for more than twenty years, I have been involved in many discourses in which Japan has been described as a homogenous nation. It has been quite normal to hear someone say, “We, Japanese, living in a homogeneous nation…” in ordinary conversations without having any sense of guilty for ignoring minorities. Yet, in fact, most of the Japanese people have learned about these minorities in junior high or high school. Scholars have pointed out this mentality, naming it in different terms, as a defining quality in Japanese cultural identity discourse that impinges upon ordinary people’s self-understanding of their identity.

Harumi Befu, a renowned anthropologist of Japanese cultural study, dissects the mechanism of the homogeneous mentality in relation to Nihonjinron.[2] According to Befu, Nihonjinron is a set of beliefs or ideologies about the uniqueness of Japanese culture that intellectuals are trying to advance in their public discourse. He introduces two underlying assumption on which Nihonjinron rests; the assumption of cultural homogeneity, and the coterminousness of geography, race, language, and culture. By drawing from the result of a survey that demonstrates the high rate of ordinary Japanese people’s understanding of internal variations of Japanese culture and society, Befu states that the homogeneous mentality is based not on people’s lived out experiences but on conscious decisions of major advocates of Nihonjinron. These advocates push forward the homogeneous belief virtually in every facet of Japanese culture including language, religion, race, and lifestyle.

In addition, Befu points to another assumption upon which Nihonjinron relies. He contends:

"In short, a claim is made for equivalency and mutual implications among land, people (that is, race), culture, and language, such that those and only those who practice the culture also speak the language and have inherited Japanese ‘blood’ from their forebears, who have always lived on the Japanese archipelago, and that no other person speaks the language natively and practices the culture."[3]

This implies a kind of genetic determinism that binds elements of cultural identity into one precisely defined identity. This assumption clearly explains what has long caused me to question as to why Japanese-Americans who, while having an appearance of Japanese natives and Japanese surnames, cannot speak Japanese. Together with the assumption of cultural homogeneity, this notion comes to the center of cultural identity discourse of Japanese people.[4]

Befu further states that Nihonjinron, although seemingly being descriptive statements of observed facts, however faulty they might be, serves as a prescriptive model or ideology that characterize an idealized state of what Japanese should be like. This model, while serving as moral imperatives rather than declarative propositions, sets the line in normative standards of society. In other words, whoever goes against or fails to meet this standard can be considered as “un-Japanese.”

This prescriptive idea is further strengthened by the universal terms by which Nihonjinron is prescribed so that it serves as an overarching model of Japanese nationality. Claims contradicting Nihonjinron, such as foreigners competent in Japanese language proficiency, are most often silenced in the discourse and are discredited as exception to the rule. Befu claims that the Nihonjinron writings serve as prescriptive, moral textbooks that, without ever being scrutinized like school textbooks, are promoted by the writers as sources for the cultural and national identity of Japanese people.[5] This implies that Nihonjinron as ideology could impact the way people consider themselves without being critically examined. While being a slightly sweeping generalization of Nihonjinron, Befu’s argument is convincing in regard to its detailed analysis of the Japanese mentality as imposed by dominant discourse on national and cultural identity.

In relation to Nihonjinron, John Lie, a professor of sociology in University of California, Berkeley, points to the emergence of what he calls “monoethnic ideology” as a consequence of anti-imperialist sentiment and rapid Westernization of post-war Japan. After the loss of WWII in 1945, Japan entered a new stage of its history. National identity as solidified by imperial ideology lost its grip, and instead, influx of Western cultures (mostly that of the USA) started to reshape the Japanese cultural landscape. This radical social change led most Japanese people to face the question of national identity. “Having lost the dominant pre-war worldview and having experienced rapid Americanization,” Lie states, “most Japanese were confused as to what exactly constitutes Japaneseness.”[6]
This is where the discourse of monoethnic ideology came in. Japan became more ethnically homogenous as people from the previous colonies went back to their homeland after the war. In addition, there was an increasing popular national consciousness as well as highly achieved national integration. Coinciding with the popular demand for distinctive Japanese identity, the discourse of Nihonjinron boomed starting from late 1960s. The discourse of Nihonjinron offered distinctive Japanese cultural characteristics that presumably did not exist anywhere else in the world. Many Japanese people started to accept this set of ideas because there were no convincing alternative answers. Combined with the sense of triumph for rapid economic success of post-war Japan, the monoethnic discourse provided Japanese people with a great deal of confidence in their national identity.[7]

The homogeneous mentality, while offering a firm ground upon which mainstream Japanese can orient themselves in search of their identity, can also blind people to minorities living in the country as well as to how the mainstream has responded to them. In fact the Minority Rights Group, an international research and information unit registered in Britain as an educational trust,[8] estimates that about four to six percent of the Japanese population (about 4,500,000 of 110,000,000 total residents) as of 1974[9] belonged to some kind of minority groups.

Among them are ethnic minorities such as some of the tribes of Okinawans (formerly called Ryukyuan from the name of the kingdom Ryukyu that had existed in Okinawa before the annexation by the Japanese government in 1879), Ainu (indigenous tribes that originally dwelled in the northern part of Japan before being assimilated into or segregated from the majority of Japanese around the late 19th century), Koreans and Chinese (including both of Korean/Chinese nationals living in Japan and kikajin, the ones who naturalized as Japanese citizens). Other groups include Burakumin (former outcastes), Hibakusha (survivors of atomic bombs), and konketsuji (offspring of interracial parentage).[10]

In addition to these groups are many migrant workers, both legal and illegal, mostly coming from such countries as Brazil, the Philippines, Thailand, South Korea, Taiwan, Iran and Bangladesh.[11] All of these minorities are in varying levels discriminated against by the majority of Japanese or sometimes being segregated from the mainstream due to their lack of social and cultural ties. These racial and social separations are also related to class issues: workers lacking proper social service due to their legal status; females working in entertainment or sex industries; and workers engaging in jobs that the mainstream Japanese are not willing to hold.[12] Though small in size, the minorities in Japan are existent as integral fabrics of the society.

The issues surrounding the minorities become at stake when belief in Japan’s uniqueness comes to be tied with racial hierarchy and xenophobia. Japanese people in general tend to feel inferior to Westerners (Caucasians) and superior to people of color such as Asians, (those from East, South and Southeast Asia), Africans, and Middle Easterners, despite the fact that the Japanese themselves are part of the color. Scholars trace the root of this mentality to late nineteenth century. Japan started to borrow massively from Western countries technology, military and economic achievement, thus adoring Westerners as mentors or superiors while looking down upon the undeveloped Asian or African peoples.[13] This is related to the aforementioned assumption of genetic inheritance of culture. The distinguishable traits of Asians, Africans or Middle Easterners oftentimes lead to racial or ethnic discriminations.

On the contrary, Caucasians who live in Japan represent superior race and are not subject to blatant prejudice. Yet, they are not welcomed to full participation in Japanese society because of their foreignness.[14] This anatomy of white supremacy is reflected on the dual meaning of the term gaijin (foreigners) in Japanese. “In the generic sense,” Befu remarks, “it refers to all foreigners; but in a more restricted sense it designates only Caucasians – that is, those foreigners who are worthy of admiration in some respects.”[15] Befu’s explanation not only explicitly points to the thinking behind the language use, but also how the racial profile is informed by the homogeneous mentality of Japanese people. Issues of race, ethnicity, minorities and national identity of Japan thus come to intersect at the discourse of the homogeneous, monoethnic ideology.

What am I supposed to do in light of the issues of racial and ethnic minorities living in Japan? How should I deal with the homogeneous mentality that lies in the minds of many Japanese people including myself? The responses to these questions come to be crucial for me, as a person who is going to live in Japan for at least next few decades after finishing my program here at the GTU. It is also crucial for me to face these issues because, upon graduation from the GTU, I will be working as personnel at the Overseas Department of the Tenrikyo Church Headquarters.

Tenrikyo is the religious tradition that I profess, and has many church communities around the world including the USA. The Overseas Department is a section of the headquarters where personnel engage in various kinds of work concerning the overseas mission of Tenrikyo. They include translation of publication, interpretation for people visiting the headquarters as well as for seminars conducted in Japanese at the headquarters, and teaching foreign languages for those aiming to go abroad to do faith-based activities, both individually and collectively. At the department we encounter followers of the religion working as translators who are originally from countries such as Korea, Taiwan, the USA, Brazil, the Philippines and Indonesia, to name a few. The very context in which I will locate myself indicates that, with no doubt, I will need to be sensitive enough to address the issues when involved in discourses relevant to the homogeneous mentality and minority issues at any level.

One of the difficult things concerning this issue is to encourage people (not exclusive to those working at the Overseas Department) to be aware of the salience of the minority issues and the drawback of the homogeneous mentality. These issues hardly become the top priority of ordinary mainstream people in a society, as it does not immediately affect their lives. Besides, even if people become aware of the issues, it is impossible to change the mentality overnight that has been stuck deep in our subconscious. Yet, just being aware of an issue does not immediately solve a problem. It does need to be addressed so that people will be able to start to think about how to deal with it. Having been a part of the API’s diasporic course, I have gained some insights and knowledge applicable in order to better understand and identify with what it is like to be part of a marginalized group.

One of the most inspiring insights is the experience of Japanese-Americans. While the Japanese natives have belonged to the dominant group of the society, Japanese-Americans have experienced severe discrimination and exclusion from the mainstream American society as a minority group ever since they immigrated to the USA in the late 19th century. In particular the internment of Japanese-Americans during WWII set the clear and unjust line between mainstream Americans (mostly of European ancestry) and an ethnic and political minority of Japanese-Americans, who occasionally resisted the force of assimilation imposed by the act of internment.[16] Fumitaka Matsuoka remarks, “Japanese Americans were determined to prove to society their own ethnic identity and pride even in the midst of the tide that tried to sweep them into the dominant culture. The internment experience is a reminder that Japanese Americans are viewed as ethnically ‘different’ from the rest of the society.”[17]

This implies that the memory of Japanese-American as an ethnic minority becomes of paramount importance in regard to the collective perception of Japanese-American identity even today. The history of blatant racism that people of Japanese ancestry experienced in the USA, which is unfortunately not a major subject in Japanese history education, can be a great resource in demonstrating to the mainstream Japanese the nature of the unheard voices of the pains and sorrows of minorities. It speaks to their hearts with the very fact that people of the same ancestry across the ocean have suffered from being a minority, which, ironically, is a kind of people that many mainstream Japanese are blind to in Japanese society.

I would like to conclude this paper by proposing my personal conviction in regard to the issues surrounding the homogeneous mentality and minorities in Japan. As Tenrikyo followers, we must seek racial and ethnic justice as addressed by the teaching that human beings are all brothers and sisters created by God the Parent. I would like to seek for opportunities to engage in the cause for minority justice inside and outside Tenrikyo communities as a way to put into practice the teaching. Tenrikyo has networks for minority issues that connect with communities in the wider society that also work toward realization of more equal society. By acquiring information from those organizations as well as from individual study, I can be better equipped to address the issues to those who are yet to be informed. In so doing, I seek to share insights from the experience of Japanese-Americans so that people can better identify with the experiences of minorities.

In addition to gathering information and studying minority issues in Japan on a macro level, investigation on micro level is also important when it comes to understanding the heart of the issues, i.e., the real experiences of minorities. This not only means being in touch with minority communities as an observer but also interacting with members of the communities to the extent that is possible in my position. In close proximity from Tenri, where the Tenrikyo Church Headquarters stands, are cities such as Osaka and Kobe, where a majority of Koreans inhabit. Though I do not have an immediate connection with these people, the chances are high that I will encounter them in public space or through connections that I would be able to establish as I expose myself to minority issues.

Nevertheless, this is an ideal picture of what I will be able to commit myself to, given my fulltime position at the Tenrikyo Overseas Department. Yet, I believe, as I raise my own awareness and gain knowledge about these issues, a new venue will open where I can serve minority issues even within Tenrikyo communities. Taking it as a starting point, I would like to extend my effort to the wider community so that more and more people can become aware of issues surrounding minorities in Japan.

Bibliography

Befu, Harumi. Hegemony of Homogeneity: An Anthropological Analysis of Nihonjinron. Melbourne: Trans Pacific Press, 2001.

Clammer, John. Japan and Its Others: Globalization, Difference, and the Critique of Modernity. Melbourne: Trans Pacific Press, 2001.

Fanon, Frantz. The Wretched of the Earth, trans. C. Farrington. London: Penguin Books, 1990. Quoted in Sugirtharajah, R. S. Postcolonial Criticism and Biblical Interpretation. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002.

Lie, John. Multiethnic Japan. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001.

Nakano, Hideichiro. “The Sociology of Ethnocentrism in Japan.” In Diversity in Japanese Culture and Language, edited by John C. Maher and Gaynor Macdonald. London: Kegan Paul International, 1995, 49-72.

Ng, Wendy. Japanese American Internment During World War II: A History and Reference Guide. Westport: Greenwood Press, 2002.

Matsuoka, Fumitaka. “Creating Communities Amidst the Memories of Historical Injuries.” In Realizing the America of Our Hearts: Theological Voices of Asian Americans, edited by Fumitaka Matsuoka and Eleazar S. Fernandez. St. Louis: Chalice Press, 2003, 29-40.

Minority Rights Group, Japan’s Minorities: Burakumin, Koreans, Ainu, no. 3. London: Minority Rights Group, 1974.

Footnotes