Cambridge Companion to Modern Japanese Culture

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34 Harumi Befu

Conclusion

Whether the issue is ‘Japan’, ‘Japanese culture’, or ‘the Japanese’, one is

always confronted with the problem of essentialism, standardisation, homo-

geneity, on the one hand, and stratiﬁcation, variation, relativism and de-

territorialisation/re-territorialisation, on the other.

As we have seen, essentialism is the core of the conventional deﬁni-

tion of these concepts, which are presented as if they are true and apriori

representations. They deﬁne ‘Japan’, ‘Japanese culture’, and ‘the Japanese

people’ in a simpliﬁed and standardised way, doing injustice to the reality

of variation, and set up standards by which ‘variants’ are judged as inferior

and made to conform to the established standard. Thus we have a deﬁnition

of Japan which is based on events as known in central Japan (the Kansai–

Kanto belt). ‘Japanese culture’ is deﬁned in terms of a series of cultural

traits said to be found in Japanese tradition from time immemorial, and

ignoring the signiﬁcant inﬂuences absorbed and indigenised into Japanese

culture from China and the West. The complexity of who ‘the Japanese’ are

is simpliﬁed in the essentialised conception of citizenship, parentage, and

cultural/linguistic competence.

Essentialised conceptions privilege certain regions of Japan, certain lin-

guistic patterns, and individuals with certain character traits, creating a

stratiﬁed structure in which those who are not so privileged – those who

metaphorically live in the ‘peripheries’ of Japan, those who speak dialects

and languages different from the ‘standard’ Japanese, and those who do not

fulﬁl all of the criteria of essentialised Japanese – are relegated to lower

rungs on the social ladder.

Moreover, such conceptions assume that the essentialised qualities are

an unchanging concrete reality. The position taken in this chapter is, rather,

that ‘Japan’, ‘Japanese culture’, and ‘the Japanese’ are relativistic, ﬂuid,

mutable and multifaceted concepts. These concepts are in part born out

of comparison of Japan, Japanese culture, and the Japanese people with

those of other countries.

This means that how these concepts are to be

deﬁned is a function of who/what ‘the other’ is. Japan is many things to

many peoples. The ﬂuidity and mutability of these concepts are seen in

historical vicissitudes, government policy, cultural competency and other

factors.

To explore the social and political ramiﬁcations of these alternative

conceptions, we might envision, in extreme forms, two sets of deﬁ-

nitions: conservative-traditional versus liberal-progressive. Conservative

Concepts of Japan 35

deﬁnitions are restrictive and essentialist. They espouse the isomorphism

of land = people = culture = polity, and tend to uphold a nationalistic and

patriotic political stance.

This view of isomorphism continues to be embraced by a number of

inﬂuential politicians and intellectuals, and forms the ideological basis of

their political stance. It clings to the idea that there are ‘pure’ Japanese and

non-pure Japanese, who are ranked accordingly. These deﬁnitions empha-

sise the homogeneity of the Japanese in a genetic and cultural sense, ignor-

ing the reality of heterogeneity, and end up being xenophobic, patronising

and discriminating against those who are not ‘pure’. At the same time they

assert a claim that Japan belongs properly only to ‘pure Japanese’, excluding

those who do not ﬁt its narrowest deﬁnition. These xenophobic deﬁnitions

foster a narrow, ethnocentric nationalism that creates uneasy relationships

not only with those reduced to second class status, but also with neighbour-

ing countries. They foster, for instance, an environment in which mixed-

blood Japanese are looked down on, and the unfortunate Japanese who

could not repatriate from China immediately after Japan’s defeat, through

no fault of their own, are regarded as unwelcome foreigners.

Conversely, liberal-progressive deﬁnitions takes an inclusive position

admitting the heterogeneity and multifacetedness of ‘Japan’, ‘Japanese cul-

ture’, and ‘the Japanese’, where all variants of these concepts have equal

value, rather than privileging ‘the pure’ over ‘the impure’. This cosmopoli-

tan position admits Japan as a home to ‘the Japanese’ of all shades and

colours, whatever their state afﬁliation, language and cultural competence,

colour of skin or biological descent.

These differing interpretations obviously have far-ranging political and

social implications. Conservative deﬁnitions of Japaneseness are supported

by conservative politics, which is still very much alive, and in fact dominates

Japan. Witness the unwillingness of the government to allow refugees to

remain in Japan, and its reluctance to accept foreign workers in spite of the

massive labour shortage.

But the empirical reality ﬂies in the face of the

conservative image of what Japan should be, and foretells an eventual shift

to the liberal-progressive deﬁnitions.

Notes

1. Sugimoto (1999).

2. Yano (2002).

3. Ivy (1995).

36 Harumi Befu

4. Tai (2005).

5. Befu (1992).

6. Society for the Study of Japonisme (1980).

7. Mouer (1983).

8. Dower (1986).

9. Kabanov (1992).

10. Befu (2001).

11. Hanihara (1995).

12. Ueyama, Sasaki and Nakao (1976).

13.

Ono (1974).

14. Kuki (1930).

15. Hamaguchi (1985).

16. Nakane (1970).

17. Watsuji (1935).

18. Takeo Doi (1973).

19. Watsuji (1935).

20. See, for example, Dale (1981); Miller (1982); Mouer and Sugimoto (1986); Oguma

(2002) and Weiner (1997).

21. Benedict Anderson (1983); Sugimoto (1996).

22. Befu (2000).

23. Ministry of Foreign Affairs (2007: 9).

24. Sakai (2003).

25. Paul White (

2003).

26. Machimura

(2003).

27. Yatabe (2001).

28. Ben-Ari (2003).

29. Ministry of Foreign Affairs (2007: 16).

30. Schodt (1996).

31. Shirahata (1996).

32. Cwiertka (2005).

33. Clarke (2000).

34. A word needs to be said on the terminology of the legal status of the Japanese and non-

Japanese. The Japanese term is kokuseki, which is often translated as ‘nationality’ or

‘citizenship’, neither of which is accurate. The former is often used to reﬂect national

or ethnic origins, as when an American might ask another, ‘What is your nationality?’,

expecting an answer such as ‘German’ or ‘French’, meaning ‘I am of German (or

French) descent’, which has nothing to do with citizenship. Thus using ‘nationality’ to

refer to the legal afﬁliation can be misleading. ‘Citizenship’ has the strong connotation

of individual rights and duties in a democratic political system. Japan, especially before

1945, did not have such a political institution. Use of ‘citizenship’ in such a context

is misleading. Thus kokuseki will be translated as ‘state afﬁliation’ or ‘legal status’ in

most contexts, and ‘citizenship’ will be used only in unambiguous contexts. When

the term ‘citizenship’ is used, it is used only to convey the technical status of state

afﬁliation.

35. Fukuoka (1993: xxxi; 2000: 11–12).

36. Chung (2001).

37. Tsuneko Ogawa (1995); Saij

o(1978; 1980); Wu (2004); Yamamura (1981).

38. In Tsuneko Ogawa (1995: 219).

Concepts of Japan 37

39. Shigematsu-Murphy (2002).

40. All these terms are pejorative in certain contexts. ‘Mixed blood’ implies impurity.

‘Foreigner’ and ‘Amerikajin’ imply ‘you are not Japanese’ to those whose self-identity

is Japanese.

41. Befu (1992).

42. Kant

o Bengoshi-kai Reng

okai (Federation of Bar Associations in the Kant

o Area)

(1990).

Further reading

Mouer, Ross and Yoshio Sugimoto (1986), Images of Japanese Society, London: Kegan

Paul International.

Oguma, Eiji (2002), A Genealogy of ‘Japanese’ Self-images, Melbourne: Trans Paciﬁc Press.

Weiner, Michael (ed.) (1997), Japan’s Minorities: The Illusion of Homogeneity, London:

Routledge.

takami kuwayama

Japan’s emic conceptions

Emic and etic

The distinction between emic and etic was ﬁrst proposed in the mid-1950s

by the linguist Kenneth Pike. The term ‘emic’ derives from phonemics,

which studies the sound system of a particular language that is meaning-

ful for native speakers. The term ‘etic’, conversely, derives from phonetics,

which studies the physical properties of speech sounds independently of

the speaker’s perception. The following examples illustrate this distinction.

To most English-speaking people, the p sounds of pike and spike proba-

bly sound the same, but phonetically speaking, they are actually different

because the former is ‘aspirated’ whereas the latter is ‘unaspirated’. Such dif-

ferences are, however, irrelevant in terms of meaning production, and are

therefore ordinarily ignored by native speakers. By contrast, the p sound

of pike is immediately understood as different from the b sound of bike

because, even though they are articulated in almost the same way, the subtle

distinction between ‘voiceless’ and ‘voiced’ that separates the two sounds

produces decisive differences in meaning. Technically symbolised as /p/ and

/b/, they form parts of the phonemic system of the English language. Simply

put, phonetic differences are revealed when measured precisely by some sort

of objective methods and standards, but seldom come to the attention of

speakers themselves, whereas phonemic differences are not only perceived

to be real, but also essential in their speech behaviour.

The anthropological debate

Drawing on the linguistic insight above, anthropologists have applied the

emic/etic distinction in cultural analysis. Historically speaking, however,

the anthropological discussion developed in ways that often departed from

Emic conceptions 39

the original linguistic formulation, which eventually resulted in the identiﬁ-

cation of emic with inside, subjective, mental, culture-speciﬁc, relative, etc.,

and of etic with outside, objective, behavioural, cross-cultural, absolute, etc.

The emic approach is represented by Ward Goodenough,

who devised

a method called ‘componential analysis’. This method, like the phonemic

distinction between /p/ and /b/ explained above, contrasts pairs of related

words, especially culturally signiﬁcant ones, according to the ‘components’

that distinguish one from the other, in an attempt to show the cognitive

map (i.e. classiﬁcation system) of a people under study. Among English-

speaking people, for example, a male family member who is lineal and of

the same generation as the ego is brother, whereas a female family member

with the same attributes is sister. In Japanese, another criterion – the relative

age – is used in identifying whether the brother is ani (elder brother) or

oto (younger brother), and whether the sister is ane (elder sister) or im

oto

(younger sister). Goodenough and his associates

claimed that such analyses

would help reveal the logic behind speech and, ultimately, the native mind.

The etic approach is well represented by Marvin Harris,

the con-

tentious founder of cultural materialism. Major objections raised by Harris

and by other critics of the emic approach may be summed up as follows.

(1) The study of emics results in purely relativistic descriptions of particu-

lar cases, thus making cross-cultural comparisons difﬁcult, to say nothing

of generalisations that are expected to arise from such comparisons. The

emic approach is anti-science. (2) Actual life is far more ambiguous and

diverse than the linguistic analyses have made it out to be. By and large,

linguistic models of cultural analysis, including the structuralism of Claude

evi-Strauss, are too formal to explain the complexity of human behaviour.

They are also a-historical because time as a factor is effectively eliminated.

(3) Language analysis is ordinarily based on the data obtained from a small

number of knowledgeable informants. It is unclear to what extent the results

actually apply to the whole of the people described. (4) Componential anal-

ysis is only effective in the study of a limited number of subjects, such as

kinship terminology and folk taxonomy of plants and animals, which are

considered by the critics to be rather trivial.

The relevance for Japanese studies

The etic approach has its own shortcomings,

but the above criticisms of the

emic approach are relevant to the study of Japan. The ﬁrst point, namely,

that the emic approach results in relativistic descriptions that are difﬁcult to

validate cross-culturally is parallel to the long-lasting criticism that Japanese

40 Takami Kuwayama

studies are so self-contained that they have produced few, if any, insights

into the study of other countries. In the end, this criticism is directed

toward the prevailing belief in the uniqueness of Japan, which has given

rise to ‘Japanese exceptionalism’. The second and third points, namely,

the failure to accommodate ambiguity and diversity and the problem of

representativeness, together challenge one of the most dominant views of

Japan – the idea that Japan is homogeneous, or, as Harumi Befu argued,

that homogeneity is hegemonic in Japan.

Whether emic or etic, most concepts used in anthropology have been

made by anthropologists themselves. Certainly, emic concepts are fre-

quently derived from native words or ideas, but it is, after all, anthropolo-

gists who determine their values and take them up for scholarly discussion.

Inasmuch as the majority of these scholars are outsiders to the commu-

nity under discussion, anthropological emics are actually etics. At least,

little consideration has thus far been given to the possibility that explana-

tions anthropologists claim to be emic may not, ironically, be recognised

as such by the people who have been described. This oversight probably

derives from the fact that until recently many of the communities studied by

anthropologists have been small-scale, illiterate societies without scholars

of their own. In this regard, Japan is almost exceptional: it has been thor-

oughly investigated by Westerners, but at the same time it has the world’s

second largest professional society of anthropologists.

Indeed, many of

the emic concepts proposed by Japanese scholars have stemmed from their

dissatisfaction with Western discourse on Japan.

Critical appraisals of Japan’s emic concepts

In this section, Japan’s emic concepts are critically examined. Particular

attention is paid to four of the best-known works on the Japanese char-

acter: Takeo Doi’s The Anatomy of Dependence,

Esyun Hamaguchi’s ‘A

Contextual Model of the Japanese’,

Chie Nakane’s Japanese Society,

and

Tetsur

o Watsuji’s classic, Climate and Culture.

All of these have been

either translated into English or re-written based on the Japanese originals.

The use of native terms

‘Native’ is used throughout to mean people born and brought up in a partic-

ular place, or things related to such people. No pejorative sense is implied.

Among the four works mentioned above, that of Doi on dependence or

Emic conceptions 41

amae stands out for its heavy reliance on Japanese words as keys to under-

standing the Japanese mind. This is only expected, for Doi is a practitioner

of psychiatry, which is often called a ‘medicine of words’. The following

episode illuminates this point. When Doi treated a patient of mixed parent-

age, he questioned her English mother about her upbringing. The mother

was born in Japan and ﬂuent in Japanese, but spoke in English until she

came to what Doi thought was a critical moment: she suddenly switched to

Japanese and said, ‘Kono ko wa amari amaemasen deshita’ (This child did

not amaeru or depend much). Having been dimly aware of the importance

of amae, Doi asked why she had said that in Japanese. The English woman

thought for a while and replied, ‘There is no way of expressing amae in

English’.

From this and other similar clinical experiences, Doi became

convinced of the critical importance of amae in analysing the psychology

of his patients and, more generally, that of the Japanese.

Doi confessed that, at a relatively early stage of his career, he started

writing patient histories in Japanese, paying close attention to the words

actually used by his patients. This practice was unusual in his time because

Japanese doctors, regardless of their specialty, customarily wrote in either

German or English as some of them still do today. Doi felt that only by

recording symptoms in the patients’ language could physicians provide an

effective cure. From this perspective, he was attracted to the Sapir-Whorf

hypothesis, which holds that language is closely related to thought – a major

assumption on which emic research rests.

Some additional comments are necessary concerning language. First, the

use of native terms does not automatically make cultural analysis emic. Ruth

Benedict, for example, in her book The Chrysanthemum and the Sword,

used the phrase ‘giri to one’s name’ in order to explain the Japanese sense

of honour. There is, however, no such expression in Japanese, although the

word ‘giri’ itself exists and is used in everyday life to refer to ‘obligation’,

‘debt’, ‘duty’, and so on. Benedict in fact stated: ‘The Japanese do not

have a separate term for what I call “giri to one’s name”’.

This statement

demonstrates that etic, rather than emic, concepts are occasionally invented

by using native words.

Second, within the native community, there are different interpretations

for the same word. For Doi, the essence of amae lies in the desire to seek

identity or a sense of oneness (ittaikan) with another person, particularly

that between mother and child. He thus deﬁned amae as the ‘attempt to deny

the fact of separation that is such an inseparable part of human existence and

to obliterate the pain of separation’.

This interpretation was met with an

42 Takami Kuwayama

objection from Bin Kimura, a psychiatrist and the author of Hito to Hito no

Aida (Between Person and Person). In this inﬂuential book, Kimura praised

Doi for having discovered the scholarly signiﬁcance of amae, but rejected

Doi’s deﬁnition, arguing that amae refers to the indulgence observable

in a relationship in which identity has already been established between

benefactor and beneﬁciary, rather than the desire to seek identity as Doi

contended.

And third, when native words are strictly deﬁned for technical purposes,

as has been the case with Doi’s amae,theytendtodepartfromeveryday

usage, thus causing confusion. Doi pointed out that many concepts used

in Western scholarship were originally ordinary words, and contended that

common Japanese words, such as amae, could similarly be used as technical

terms if deﬁned precisely.

Although this is a legitimate claim, the problem

is that in ordinary speech we cannot say that the mother feels or offers amae

toward her son or daughter, except when the parent-child relationship is

reversed in old age or under similar circumstances. Doi’s deﬁnition contra-

dicts this common usage, for it highlights emotional identiﬁcation between

parent and child, which can occur on both sides.

In a recent book, Elisabeth Young-Bruehl and Faith Bethelard

ren-

dered amae as ‘cherishment’ and gave a detailed account of it. Because Doi

had occasionally compared amae to nonsexual love, which in turn was com-

pared to cherishment,

the authors’ rendition is, in my view, appropriate.

Nevertheless, the use of native terms almost always entails the problem of

translation. Translation is not simply a matter of changing languages, but

rather requires the understanding of the cultural logic working ‘backstage’.

In order to translate meaningfully, one must be familiar with the ‘world

views’ concealed in both languages. In the United States, where Doi’s theory

has been widely accepted, the term ‘dependence’ carries negative nuances

because independence is highly valued there. We may say, however, that

his writing has impacted the American readership precisely because it has

shown that in the faraway land of Japan, dependence is appreciated differ-

ently.

Anecdotes for evidence

From the perspective of anthropology, which is based on intensive ﬁeldwork

over a prolonged period of time, a major weakness of Japan’s emic research

is the paucity of the ethnographic data that supports the arguments being

made. Furthermore, what little evidence is provided is generally no more

than a collection of personal anecdotes of superﬁcial nature.

Emic conceptions 43

This weakness is best exempliﬁed by Hamaguchi’s theory of kanjin (lit-

erally, ‘between-person’) as found in his book ‘Nihonrashisa’ no Saihakken

(Rediscovering ‘Japaneseness’), which was ﬁrst published in 1977. This book

spawned the aforementioned English article, ‘A Contextual Model of the

Japanese’, in which kanjin is rendered as ‘the contextual’. The book begins

with a brief comparison of Japanese and American public behaviours. In

Wakayama, located south of Osaka, Japanese passengers on a packed bus

ignored the notice ‘Do not use auxiliary seats when the bus is full’, and

seated themselves as they liked, despite the driver’s repeated warnings. For

reasons not perfectly clear, Hamaguchi interpreted this behaviour as ﬂexi-

ble and adaptive to the situation, and argued that it revealed the ‘situational

relativism’ of the Japanese. In Honolulu, by contrast, where he spent a short

time as a visiting researcher, American passengers got on a bus in an orderly

manner, with men allowing women and children to go ﬁrst, and, after get-

ting on board, they seated themselves by always occupying the window

side ﬁrst. From these rather superﬁcial observations, Hamaguchi jumped

to the conclusion that Americans obey rules, regardless of the situation

they are placed in, and that they respect behavioural consistency across

situations. He even went one step further when he generalised ‘Japanese’

and ‘Americans’ into ‘East Asians’ and ‘Westerners’, respectively.

Putting

aside the question of whether or not Hamaguchi’s contention makes sense,

it is surprising, to say the least, that the above episodes are among the few

ethnographic cases given in his entire book, which exceeds 300 pages of

bunko (small paperback) size.

The problem of insufﬁcient evidence is also found in Chie Nakane’s

famous book Tate Shakai no Ningen Kankei (Human Relationships in

a Vertical Society), on which her major English work Japanese Society

is based. For example, she illustrated the ‘peculiarity’ of Japanese joretsu

(hierarchy) using the following anecdote: during the time Nakane was at

the University of London as a visiting scholar, an English professor of social

anthropology came back from the US. Soon after his return, during the tea

break, he said to his colleagues that he had met a Japanese scholar in the

US who knew Nakane. Having heard that the Japanese were status con-

scious, the professor introduced the Japanese scholar’s words and brought

the house down when he said: ‘The guy said Chie was his k

ohai (junior).

How Japanese he is!’

Such anecdotes are certainly effective in some

types of cultural accounts intended for a general reading public, but they

should not be substituted for ethnographic data, at least not in an academic

treatise.