Tsutsui W.M. A Companion to japanese histоry

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has now lost its relevance. Women more than men are delaying marriage in part

because many more are continuing their education and they have fewer socioeco-

nomic incentives to get married. Also, fewer couples get together via arranged

marriages (miai kekkon).

The rise in age at first marriage is a key factor in Japan’s declining fertility. The

average number of childbearing years has become much more constricted since 1950,

with the greatest concentration of births by far being between the ages of 25 and 35.

A couple’s first child is generally born within a few years of marriage and child bearing

usually ends another few years hence. The campaigns to reduce fertility and the

precipitous drop in infant mortality, together with rising economic prosperity,

resulted in families controlling their fertility and investing more of the household

income in their children. Initially, control of fertility was achieved primarily through

use of induced abortion and abortion prevalence rates shot up from below 15 percent

in 1950 to nearly 50 percent by 1955. However, abortions fell back quickly to about

half that figure over the next decade, gradually declining to about 10 percent by

1995. On the other hand, contraception practices have risen from below 20 percent

in 1950 to over 50 percent by 1965, fluctuating between 50 to 60 percent up to the

present.

In the case of Japan, the condom has been the primary method of

contraception, with 78 percent of those who practice contraceptio n continuing to

use this method even in 1998. A combined total of 4 percent used the pill or IUD.

The Japanese government in fact approved the sale of the pill only in June 1999.

Notions of family gender roles and male dominance of the me dical profession have

prevented women from controlling their own fertility.

In theory, gender roles are thought of in terms of ‘‘co mplementary incompeten-

cies,’’

although in practice they are not symmetric and equal. Productive labor is

seen as a social, public sphere activity while reproductive work is considered internal,

domestic, and private. Men are thought to be competent in the former sphere but

incompetent in the latter and vice versa for women. As a consequence, women are

expected to manage the home, handle day-to-day finances, and oversee the raising of

children and their education. With heavier and heavier investments in children’s

education in the 1970s and 1980s, the stereotype of the ‘‘education mama’’ (kyo

iku

mama) arose, who devoted herself to providing optimal conditions for their child’s

educational success. Mothers often had to find part-time work to get the mon ey for

supplies, tutors, and cram schools.

On the other hand, businesses cont inue to follow a gendered structure of employ-

ment in which women’s labor is considered supplemental to the household income.

Companies rarely hire women for full-time permanent positions, despite the passage

of the Equal Employment Opportunities Act of 1985. Women are typically hired as

‘‘office ladies’’ whose jobs do not grow or expand over time, or as part-time workers

without the various benefits of full-time workers. During the high growth era in

particular, companies expected men to give first priority to their jobs rather than their

families, assuming that their wives would handle domestic matters. By the late 1970s,

salarymen were almost obliged to socialize with co-workers every night, creating the

image of the absentee father who returns home after the children have gone to bed

and leaves for his morning commute before they wake up, seeing them only on

Sunday. Salarymen could also be reassigned to another city for an extended period

with the resulting commuter marriage reinforcing the gender separation between

POSTWAR SOCIETY AND CULTURE 319

residence and work. Since middle-class life often requires more income than the

husband alone can provide, his wife is compelled to work, usually re-entering the

workforce once the children are older and going to school and juku (cram schools).

The double burden of taking care of the home and working outside it means that

most women look for jobs with flexible hours, often choosing part-time work.

Eventually, caring for one’s in-laws may force them to exit the labor force once again

since over half of the elderly live with their children.

The divorce rate is comparatively low in Japan but it has doubled since 1975 from

1.07 percent to 2.1 percent. Economic factors militate against youthful divorce given

the gendered structure of employment. The social stigma one suffers from a court

case and the absence of mechanisms to ensure alimony payments also prevent women

from divorcing their husbands. Divorced women have difficulty getting mortgages or

even credit cards. Despite these problems, in the past few years middle-aged divorce

has taken off, when responsibilities for the children have lessened and the economic

impact of divorce has been reduced. In the 199 0s, retired husbands were likened to

sodai gomi, the oversized garbage that requires special pick-up, for always sitting

around the home without helping out.

Another recent media topic has been ‘‘parasite singles,’’ a phrase coined by Tokyo

Gakugei University sociologist Yamada Masahiro in 1997. He defined these as men

and women in their 20s and early 30s who live off their parents even if they have a job,

and he blamed them in part for falling birthrat es, the continuing recession, and a

general lack of civic concern. The tendency in the press has been to focus more on

women, in part because young single women with disposable incomes have been the

targets of advertising and consumer products. However, the current recession has

meant that companies make fewer new hires and the unemployment rate for young

men has risen to about 10 percent. Women for their part realize that few of the m will

get hired as regular, permanent employees, and that they will be forced out of the

labor market when they get married or give birth. Should they re-enter the workforce

later on, they will typically make less than they did when they were single.

Shifting Communities

Shifts in the location of Japan’s postwar popul ation show its process of urbanization

and the centralization of economic structures. Mass migration from the countryside

to the cities in the early postwar raised the percentage of Japanese living in urban areas

from one-third of the population in 1950 to two-thirds by 1965 and three-quarters

by 1975. By far the heaviest in-migration took place in three places – metropolitan

Tokyo, the Nagoya region, and the Osaka–Kobe area. Over half of the nation’s

population lived in these three urban areas by the mid-1980s, and while the rate of

in-migration has dropped considerably since 1975, these three areas have more than

compensated for any U-turn or J-turn out-migration back to the countryside or the

suburbs.

While central Tokyo had been heavily destroyed during the war, it was rebuilt along

established patterns because it retained its role as the center of government and

business. Its population grew by more than 3 million to over 10 million by 1960.

The central wards of the city became saturated by the mid-1960s, and when the ring

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of surrounding suburbs became saturated in the 1970s, the population of further

outlying prefectures grew.

The early postwar urban and suburban growth from migration represented the rise

of the middle class in postwar Japan. That is, peop le who migrated to Tokyo were not

primarily factory workers. Postwar heavy industry was built up in more peripheral

areas, especially in coastal towns and along waterways to facilitate transportation and

waste disposal. Factories were often combined with refineries and related fa cilities in

massive integrated complexes known as kombinato. Those with jobs downtown were

more typically office workers, those engaged in commerce, and those in light industry

related to services such as publishing. The residential outlying suburbs and even more

distant bedroom towns were therefore closer to the polluting factories than the

central offices down town. This geographic feature would be important to the com-

position of residents’ movements in the later 1960s and 1970s.

From the mid-1950s, large public housing projects known as danchi sprang up in

the metropolitan areas, although at the time they were sites of future dr eams rathe r

than mature communities, often lacking even grocery stores. They became middle-

class enclaves that represented the beginnings of consumer culture and the ‘‘bright

life’’ (akarui seikatsu) that it was supposed to bring.

On the other hand, the danchi

were also emblematic of the problem of overcrowding in the cities and the difficulty

of forging an identity in mass society. Two decades later, a European Economic

Community report would still refer to urban Japanese living arrangements as ‘‘rabbit

hutches.’’

As urban density increased, real estate became overvalued, making it

more difficult to afford the closer one got to the city center. People had to choose

between longer commutes to work in the city or more expensive housing.

Domestic consumer demand drove Japan’s economic growth in the postwar

period

and the desire for modern labor saving devices for the home and the

trappings of middle-class life was crucial. Advertisers in the late 1950s and early

1960s promoted the ‘‘Three Imperial Treasures’’ – not the imperial regalia of

sword, mirror, and jewel but rather the refrigerator, washing machine, and TV.

Another advertising slogan of the day, the ‘‘three Cs,’’ changed from cash, car, and

camera to cars, color TV, and coolers (air conditioners) by the late 1960s. The speed

with which it became possi ble for the majority of people actually to purchase such

goods rather than just dream about them was breathtaking. The 1960 plan that

Prime Minister Ikeda Hayato announced to double people’s income within a decade

actually succeeded years before its target date (when measured by per capita GDP).

Japan sustained its rapid economic growth by constantly refining and expanding

consumer desire. The diffusion rates for TV, for example, rose rapidly in the early

1960s. Only 5 percent of Japanese households had a television set in 1957, but by

1960, a third of them had one and three years later almost 75 percent had a set. By

the 1970s, the black-and-white TV market had become saturated, so manufacturers

created renewed demand by pushing color television and by 1980 nearly every

household had one. This then was followed by video cassette recorder diffusion and

more recently by high definition and satellite dish TV.

The diffusion of television in society also shows the transition in key postwar mass

media. In the decade after the war, newspapers, radio, and movies were the key

media for inf ormation, advertising, and mass culture. Newspapers continued to be

important, but TV came to su pplant radio. In the early 1960s, weekly magazines

POSTWAR SOCIETY AND CULTURE 321

(shu

kanshi) appeared, many of them begun by newspaper companies. Their format

covered news items but also presented columns, serialized novels, photo essays, and

cultural features to generate broad appeal. Such weeklies continue to the present, but

the medium has survived and grown by specializing its content for particular niche

markets. In the mid-1970s, FM radio became an important alternative platform for

music and tied in with audio cassette players like Sony’s Walkman. With the mini-

aturization of electronic technology and the privatization of the state-run telephone

company, cell phones may be the key medium today in Japan, being much more

ubiquitous than comput ers and used far more frequently for text messaging, e-mail,

and web access than in the West.

In contrast to these mass forms of communications, citizens’ and residents’ move-

ments developed their own mini-communications (mini-komi) to allow for greater

individual expression and debate. Their small-scale publications reflected the move-

ments’ emphasis on local autonomy, democratic decision-making, and loose organ-

izational structures in contrast to the 1950s paradigm of Marxist ideology-driven,

class-based proletarian movements. As social movements formed in the 1960s and

1970s, especially around issues such as environmental pollution, they used their mini-

komi to question the direction of Japan’s modernization and forge connections with

like-minded groups. These movements had specific goals related to their place of

residence, whether blocking polluting kombinato, seeking redress for the effects of

pollution, or protecting and preserving the local environment. Since the movements

centered on residential areas, women were more likely to join them due to their

association with the domestic sphere. Thus, mini-komi often reflected women’s

concerns and style of writing. At their peak in the 1970s and 1980s, mini-komi

exchanges linked an extremely diverse network of groups including those concerned

with organic food production, alternative lifestyles and communes, arts, women’s

issues, disabled persons, minority rights, problems in education, peace, and nuclear

power generation.

These social movements often gained impetus from the student activism of the late

1960s. The educational system expanded rapidly in the 1950s and university gradu-

ates, especially from Japan’s top schools, were highly sought by the government

bureaucracy and big business. However, students began to question the form of

education they were getting and the social costs of Japan’s increasing affluence.

They were a key element in the Anpo and Miike protests, and students again took

the lead when protests broke out in the mid-1960s over Japan’s involvement in the

Vietnam War. By the late 1960s, campus revolts were ubiquitous, breaking down into

two main types. At places like Nihon Universi ty, the unrest was sparked by the mass

production, assembly line education that students received, while the protests at more

elite institutions like Tokyo University were more self-critical about students’ possible

complicity in the severely flawed social system. Many student activists carried their

concerns ove r to social movements after they graduated.

As society became more affluent in the 1970s, parents invested more income in their

children’s education and more students advanced to university. Primary and secondary

education was organized around the entrance exams to universities and the curriculum

tended to standardize knowledge and emphasize rote memorization based on the

notion that questions admitted of only one answer. Students who did not display

enough potential were guided toward alternate tracks such as vocationa l-technical

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schools or junior colleges. In 1975, over 90 percent of Japanese children were gradu-

ating from high school; 40 percent of men went on to universities, while 20 percent of

women went to junior college and 12.5 percent to universities. Increased competition

to gain entrance to good schools and ultimately good universities gave rise to cram

schools (juku for high school entrance exams, yobiko for the universities). By the 1980s,

the top-down structure, hierarchic mode of relations, and in-group dynamics of

competition led on the one hand to the problem of bullying (ijime) in schools, and

on the other to children who refused to go to school. The 1983 movie Family Game

(Kazoku ge

mu) brilliantly satirized the educational situation by showing the exploits of

a private tutor for the child of a middle-class family.

Now, 97 percent of Japanese children graduate from high school. Nearly half of the

men go on to universities and a comparable percentage of women go to either junior

college (15 percent) or universities (33.8 percent). However, negative population

growth has meant that universities have had to restructure themselves to attract

dwindling numbers of students. While the top public and private universities still

get more applications than their available slots, smaller colleges have had a much

more difficult time competing for students to maintain their enrollments and have

had to specialize in projected areas of interest and become increasingly production

oriented. Universities prom ote popular courses and teachers and tend toward niche

marketing to draw students, including housewife and international tracks.

In survey after survey since the 1970s, the Japane se have overwhelmingly identified

themselves as middle class with consistently upwards of 90 percent of those polled

claiming this identification. While the gap between rich and poor in Japan is consid-

erably smaller than in America, the surveys do not reflect actual income or mean that

relationships at work, school, or home are egalitarian. Rather, they show that inter-

viewees did not want to be perceived publicly as either rich or poor. The claim of

socioeconomic homogeneity in fact masks sharp status compe tition based sometimes

on rather fine distinctions.

Such status competition has helped create consumer demand, and patterns of

consumption have been major elements in defining one’s identity as reflected in

‘‘my car’’ and ‘‘my home’’-isms. While the mass production of consumer items

means that buyers get essentially the same product, minor variations in features

allow consumers to feel that their buying choices exhibit a degree of individuality.

Niche marketing has become a key sales strategy and products from ele ctronics to

clothes to housewares have a wide range of minor variations so that consumers can

find the perfect item to match their lifest yles. The mania for brand-name products

also displays the same psychology, as illustrated in Tanaka Yasuo’s 1981 ‘‘novel’’

Nantonaku, kurisutaru (Somehow, Crystal). Ostensibly a romance, the book became

famous for listing a nearly inexhaustible string of brand-name products and trendy

shopping areas that defined the characters and their actions. Here it is the choice of

particular products that defines one’s indiv iduality. Activities as well as goods began

to define consumption in the 1970s and the travel and tourism industries boomed.

Taking overseas vacations (and buying the appropriate brand-name products) or

domestic trips to a villa, hot springs, or ski lodge became elements of status compe-

tition and of the definition of one’s individual character.

Books and other cultural items are themselves important consumer products. The

authors Murakami Haruki and Yoshimoto Banana have sold tens of millions of books

POSTWAR SOCIETY AND CULTURE 323

and Yoshimoto in fact identifies herself with mass literature and commercial writing

rather than ‘‘serious’’ literature. Each of them sells heavily to particular segments of

the market. Murakami’s works appeal overwhelmingly to men and novels such as

Norwegian Wood evoke nostalgia for the 1970s generation of college students.

Yoshimoto’s market is young women in their teens and twenties and her books

feature such women in atypical social situations. The rapidity with which writers

have to turn out new works, however, means that their novels essentially become

disposable products that quickly find their way to used bookstores. The accelerated

cycle of disposable cultural consumption applies to television, film, comics, music,

fashion, and other artistic ventures.

Production companies and associated businesses are essential to maintaining a

constant flow of cultural commodities and culture industries created a further cen-

tripetal pull into the metropolitan centers. Stores, designer workshops, and venues

for display are concentrated in a few urban spots. Art galleries, the art establishment,

and relevant media are also concentrated in metropolitan areas. Musicians come to

the city because the recording, radio, and TV studios are headquartered there, as well

as print media and production companies.

By the 1980s, a new postwar generation was growing u p in affluence without the

experience of privation or the sense of political and social fragility that the wartime

and early postwar generations felt. Social critics pejoratively applied the term ‘‘new

humans’’ (shinjinrui) to indicate the social value the younger generation placed on

materialism and their spoiled overindulgence that manifested itself in an unwillin g-

ness to work at any job that they considered ‘‘dirty, dangerous, and dull.’’

How-

ever, coming of age at a time when people were acutely aware that the economic

bubble would soon burst has also meant that this generation often envisions a

dystopic future. From the 1970s, the government promoted a utopian vision of an

informat ion society ( jo

shakai) in which the management and control of informa-

tion was the key to actuating a (well-)‘‘managed society.’’ The post-oil-shock transi-

tion of the economy and its high-tech emphasis further emphasized the control of

informat ion. However, popular science fiction comics (manga) and animation

(anime) commonly evoke a near future in which powerful technology and autocratic

control of information combine to create the return of a fascistic society, as seen in the

famous 1980s manga, Akira .

Another effect of the bubble economy was overvalued real estate and speculative

investment and these factors led to the problem of landsharking (jiage). Urban land

prices kept rising to the point that developers for new offices or other projects would

employ gangsters to ‘‘encourage’’ small landowners and longstanding tenants (who

have residence rights against eviction) to accept buy-out offers and leave. When the

housing market fell, those projects were often underutilized and the former urban

dwellers now had high payments on inconveniently distant housing.

The 1995 Kobe earthquake revealed more strains to the social infrastructure as the

government found it difficult to aid survivors and speed reconstruction. The govern-

ment’s slow resp onse spurred the push for revi sions to the law governing NPOs (non-

profit organizations) to ease requirements for registration and enhance tax incentives.

With the passage of the new 1998 law, the number of NPOs shot up by 10,000.

However, this proliferation does not necessarily sign al the growth of civil society and

democracy. Given the motivation of tax breaks in exchange for official recognition

324 WESLEY SASAKI-UEMURA

and regulation, and the non-political character that NPOs are required to maintain,

the significance of their proliferation is ambiguous.

While urban sprawl grew steadily in the postwar, rural areas continue to be

depopulated and now only 5 percent of the population is engaged in primary

industries of farming, fishing, and forestry compared to 48.5 percent in 1950.

Farm households often have to rely on non-agricultural income to survive. As young

men left the rural areas in the 1950s and 1960s, farmers had to mechanize, increase

their use of pesticides and herbicides, and generally standardiz e their patterns of work

to accommodate more capital-intensive modes of farming. Farm households survived

and prospered through a combination of farm subsidies, cash cropping, and non-

agricultural incom e. The poorest rural a reas such as To

hoku saw many rural males

migrate to urban areas in the off-season to supply the day labor market or to work in

factories, getting caught in a vicious cycle of payments that created the urban

homeless. Those sons who decided to carry on the family farm found it increasingly

difficult to secure wives. Conservative farm life and its hard work have become

increasingly less attractive to young women and in the late 1990s some farmers

have ‘‘imported’’ Filipino wives.

While rural areas suffered depopulation and were often cast as unsophisticated

and backward, a nostalgic ‘‘home village boom’’ (furosato bu

mu) developed in the

1960s and 1970s that idealized the countryside and its traditional values and com-

munal forms.

Longing for the furosato can be seen in the popularity of the movie

series, ‘‘It’s Tough to be a Man’’ (Otoko wa tsurai yo), which ran from 1969 to 1996.

The films feature an itinerant peddler named Tora-san who travels around the

countryside trying to get rich quick. His always unrequited love for local women

and his eventual return to his sister’s home in a traditional urban neighborhood

symbolize what Japan left behind in achieving prosperity. Nostalgia for furosato values

has also been invoked periodically in Nihonjinron terms. During the harvest shortfalls

in the early 1990s, many in Japan reacted to American pressure to buy its cheaper

rice by saying that American rice lacke d the particular local conditions and farm

community’s care that make Japanese rice delicious. The popular comic about cook-

ing Oishimbo ran a special series on the ‘‘U.S.–Japan Rice Wars’’ that illustrated

these points.

Rural economic problems due to the postwar demographic shift led to various

campaigns in the late 1980s and 1990s to revitalize the countryside such as ‘‘village

revival’’ (mura okoshi) and ‘‘hometown creation plans’’ (furusato so

seiron). These

initiatives boiled down to finding ways to market rural tradition and social culture,

even recrea ting old-style hamlets as tourist attractions like Shirakawago in Gifu

prefecture. The village of To

no is another example of the attempt to sell the ‘‘trad-

itional’’ culture that ethnologist Yanagita Kunio set down in 1910 in his popular

no monogatari (Tales of To

no), fearing that the stories and belief systems they

represented would be lost. But in order to market performances of these tales today,

no villagers had to be tutored by outside professionals, belying the oral transmis-

sion of tradition. The hollowing out of the countryside has contributed to the

attenuation of social relations that constituted traditional villages and has led to a

drastic graying of that population. Revitalization campaigns have not proven very

successful in reviving rural economies or in repopulating those areas. The few who do

move from the cities out to the countryside often do not stay there permanently. The

POSTWAR SOCIETY AND CULTURE 325

‘‘traditional’’ countryside is not an alternative lifestyle to modern urban life because

rural Japan has also had to modernize to survive.

Shifting Identities

Changes in Japan’s population and communities have brought significant shifts in

thinking about cultural identity in the postwar period. Prewar textbooks presented

idealized pictures of village life in which family and community relations were

analogies for imperial subjecthood writ small. But with the defeat in World War II,

the Japanese were no longer officially defined by their relationship to the emperor,

although he survived constitutionally as ‘‘the symbol of the State and the unity of the

people.’’

The Japanese increasingly saw themselves as thoroughly urban, modern,

and by implication international.

Postwar modernity did not, however, translate into cultural convergence with the

West despite the influence of the occupation and ties to the Western bloc. Japan’s

economic success instead led to sharp competition with America and Japan-bashi ng

rhetoric that implied Japan’s ‘‘unfair practices’’ derived from premodern rem nants in

social behavior. One response was to assert that Japan’s ethnic homogeneity, essential

cultural uniqueness, and group orientation made it better equipped to succeed as a

modern nati on. The resurgence of this discourse of cultural nationalism, known as

Nihonjinron, was set in binary opposition to ‘‘the West’’ and served a conservative

political agenda that in fact exhibited considerable anxiety over the stabi lity of

Japanese identity under rapidly changing social conditions.

Citizen protests and social movements showed that ordinary people did not always

share the establishment’s idea of what constituted a modern, urban subjectivity. Partici-

pants in these movements generally advocated principles of open debate over mass

conformity, local autonomy over obedience to the authority, and minority rights over

cultural homogeneity. Alternative lifestyle movements questioned the modes of produc-

tionand consumptionthat became prevalent during the period of rapid economic growth

and they sought to refashion the image of Japanese as economic animals. Middle-class

conformity has undoubtedly been overstated as the defining characteristic of Japanese

identity today; dissatisfaction with and alienation from society are also widespread.

The postwar proliferation of new religions is one indication of social displacement

and alienation. Typically adherents joined these new religions to cope with life’s

hardships, economic disadvantage, frustrated ambitions, and social discrimination.

Some of these religions aim at social reintegration or success through their group,

while others try to create alternate economies and self-contained communities. Some

view Japan’s technological progress as vapid and aimless and seek to give it spirituality

and purpose. In the extreme case of the Aum Shinrikyo

cult, it recruited those with

science backgrounds who were disenchanted with tec hnology to provide it with the

means to initiate the apocalypse.

However, the key groups in considering the question of exclusion or alienation

from Japanese society are its minorities, such as Ainu, burakumin, Okinawans, and

Korean and Taiwanese residents. Each come from different historical circumstances

and raise different issues with regard to Japanese identity. The Ainu are an indigenous

group now largely confined to the northern region of Hokkaido

.Theburakumin are

326 WESLEY SASAKI-UEMURA

ethnically Japanese but have a long history of being ostracized from regular society

and ghettoized by the ir associations with ritual ‘‘impurity’’ and irregular occupations.

The history and culture of Okinawans place them between Ch ina and Japan, but in

the Meiji period they were among the first colonials. The Koreans and Taiwanese

were victims of Japan’s imperialist expansion. While minorities comprise a small

percentage of the population in Japan, their status contradicts the equivalences that

the postwar state has made between nation, ethnicity, and culture.

Postwar Japanese law strictly defined citizenship according to ethnicity and until

the 1990s required cultural conformity, such as adopting Japanese names, in order to

naturalize. As Oguma Eiji has pointed out, however, the prewar empire was in

principle multi-ethnic and therefore inclusive, so claims of Japan having always been

a homogenous society are recent inventions.

The vociferousness with which the

postwar state has upheld legal and social discrimination against these minorities is due

in part to the racial indistinguishability and intermingling of ‘‘foreign’’ and ‘‘native.’’

A crucial legal instrument for excluding people from the postwar nation’s closed

circle of blood has been the family register system, which until the early 1990s

determined citizenship according to paternity. After the defeat, those Korean and

Taiwanese who did not repatriate were eventually classified as foreigners by the

Japanese government. For second, third, and fourth generation residents, this has

meant that they will always be ‘‘foreigners’’ and excluded from the rights and welfare

that Japanese citizens receive, while nevertheless being forced to adapt to and adopt

Japanese culture. They have been forced to regularly renew their alien registrations,

complete with fingerprinting, which creates a sense of being criminalized for their

birth, a sense reinforced by the social discrimination they also suffer. The discrimin-

atory treatment of Koreans began to be featured in the media from the mid- to late

1960s as citizens drew analogies to controls they would face in the government’s

‘‘managed society’’ and as they questioned Japan’s participation in the Vietnam

War.

By the mid-1980s, many Korean residents whose alien registration cards

were coming up for renewal decided to protest this discrimination by refusing to

submit to fingerprinting and moun ting court challenges to the system.

At the same time, Korean and other non-Japanese entertainers and sports figures

were being celebrated in Japanese culture. The quintessential Japanese baseball hero,

Sadaharu Oh, was Taiwanese. Enka, supposedly the most ‘‘Japanese’’ form of mod-

ern popular music, borrowed much from Korea and arguably has Korean origins.

Many popular singers and movie stars were ethnic Koreans or Taiwanese ‘‘pass ing’’ as

Japanese. The current popularity of auth or Yu

Miri, a second generation Korean

resident in Japan, seems to be due to her in-between state as an internalized ‘‘for-

eign’’ ele ment and her articulation of alienation and ostracism.

This type of intern-

alized foreignness in Japanese cultural identity belies the claims of cultural

homogeneity and uniqueness in Nihonjinron.

As Japanese economic expansion overseas took managers and salarymen’s families

overseas, the obverse case of ‘‘foreign’’ residents was created, that of ‘‘returnees’’

(kikokushijo), or children with extended living experience and education overseas.

Although born and raised partly in Japan, the government still considered returnees

insufficiently Japanese in culture and education and in need of remedial training.

Returnees also suffered some discrimination for being ‘‘strange’’ but were also

sometimes envied for being more international. From the late 1980s several of

POSTWAR SOCIETY AND CULTURE 327

these retur nees became radio and TV media figures, acting as a bridge between their

Japanese audience and foreign experiences.

Japan’s investment in Asia, its dependence on international trade, and the recent

import of foreign labor have forced the Japanese to acknowledge that their economic

survival increasingly depends on understanding their nation as multi-ethnic. This was

not how the government envisioned ‘‘internationalization’’ in the 1980s when it

was more concerned with fostering acceptance of Japanese business and culture over-

seas than with making the Japanese people more cosmopolitan . While kokusaika high-

lighted relations with the West, dealings with Asia and the non-West have arguably had a

more significant impact, although the specter of World War II looms behind Japan’s

attempts to assert hegemony in its relationships with other Asian peoples.

Economic penetration of East and Southeast Asia in the 1970s and 1980s raised

fears that Japan was trying to revive the wartime Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity

Sphere. Japanese businessmen on sex tours to the Philippines, Thailand, and other

countries symbolized renewed aggression, this time in business suits rather than

military uniforms. A subtext to the problem of Japane se sex tours was the issue of

wartime ‘‘comfort women.’’ These women, some 80 percent of whom were Korean,

were held in a system of military slavery that Japan instituted during the China and

Pacific Wars. While women’s groups began raising the issue in the late 1980s, the

Japanese government has consistently refused to admit the existence of this system.

Postwar sex tourism also required complex collaboration between Japanese corpor-

ations, travel companies, airlines, hotels at Asian sites, and local bars and procurers, in

a regularized system. But as Asian protests mounted against sex tourism in the late

1980s, the flow of traffic reversed. Rather than Japanese businessmen traveling to

Asia, Asian wome n dubbed Japa-yuki-san (‘‘bound for Japan’’) were increasingly

brought to Japan on entertainment visas to service the existing sex industries.

This signaled the trend of foreign workers coming to Japan to fill the ‘‘dirty,

dangerous, and dull’’ jobs that young Japanese workers were unwilling to perform.

Brazilian Japanese workers (who received special visa status as retu rning Japanese)and

significant numbers of people from Southeast Asia have replaced the rural day

laborers who migrated to the cities during Japan’s high growth era. Workers from

South Asia, the Middle East, and even Africa have found it worth their while to come

to Japan to earn money. Often these workers have been ‘‘invisible’’ to society because

they work in remote areas or at jobs where they do not directly interface with the

public (such as construction work).

However, the awareness of foreign workers in Japan has resulted in consumer

demand for non-Western cultural products. Since Japan’s consumer economy is

constantly driven by the demand for new products and images to sell, foreignness

itself has become a marketable commodity. The ‘‘Exotic Japan’’ campaign that the

Japan Railways conducted in the 1980s foreshadowed the approach of selling some-

thing foreign, and hence exotic, as something that could be safely domesticated and

consumed. Playing off the popularity of the NHK television documentary series on

the Silk Road, the campaign showed exoti c, seemingly continental, locales that were

actually in Japan and could be reached by train.

This approach foreshadowed the

‘‘ethnic boom’’ of the 1990s typified by the consumption of a smorgasbord of food

and cultures without the discomforts or dangers of actual foreign travel. (Here,

‘‘ethnic’’ denotes something non-Western.)

328 WESLEY SASAKI-UEMURA