Behind the Paper Screen / Teaching models of 'Japan'
Sawa Kurotani Special to The Daily Yomiuri
A few weeks ago, I received an e-mail from one of my former students, who recently had a vacation in Japan. She had a very nice time in Japan and enjoyed experiencing a different culture. Of course, there were some surprises and confusion, typical of a trip to an unfamiliar country with different customs than one's own. However, she wrote: "I anticipated many of these [differences], thanks to your class. Japan was exactly like you taught us!"
Every once in a while I get similar comments about my course, "Japanese Society and Culture," from my former students, who have visited Japan, had business dealings with a Japanese company, or met someone from Japan. Fostering cross-cultural understanding is one of the import!ant missions of cultural anthropology, and I am flattered to know that I have had a small part in it.
But I also can't help getting a knee-jerk reaction to these comments: a feeling that all I did was to present a "Cliffs Notes" version of Japan, a handy reference guide to all things Japanese that misled our students into thinking that they really understand "Japan."
The founder of anthropology in the United States, Franz Boas, was the strong and vocal advocate of an approach to cross-cultural understanding that is often referred to as "cultural relativism," the idea that cultural beliefs and behavior! can be understood and judged only in their own cultural context, and not by imposing outside standards. Behind this concept is Boas' belief that every culture has its own internal logic, and customs and beliefs that may seem outlandish or nonsensical from an outsider's point of view all "make sense" once you understand this internal logic.
For an outsider to come to understand this internal logic of a culture, long-term cultural immersion and careful study are essential. This is why, in the discipline of cultural anthropology, fieldwork of over one year has been the established norm. Even then, anthropologists have struggled with the self-doubt that, no matter how hard they try, they can never really "get it." Some have concluded that the best anthropologists can hope for is a reasonable outsider's interpretation of it.
I also keep wondering what "Japan" really is. Is it about age-old traditions or about contemporary social realities? Is it about a coherent "cultural whole" or the lived experience of individuals who consider themselves Japanese? Is it about official rules and normative values or their infinite variations as practiced in everyday life? And how do we convey all of these things in 30 class sessions or less?
I always struggle in my classroom to strike a balance between the generalizations and the particulars. There are certainly general patterns or tendencies that we may label typically "Japanese."
For example, many anthropologists of Japan have analyzed that the Japanese sense of self is more "relational" and less "individualistic," and argued that the distinction between uchi (inside/home) and soto (outside/strange place) is a key concept in the Japanese worldview. While these generalizations have explanatory values, they gloss over the particulars that makes the actual experience of being Japanese or living in Japan more complex.
My own lived experience of Japan is limited by the fact that I grew up in the Yokohama area, a very large city only about 50 kilometers from Tokyo's city center, in the family of a "salaryman." I have no idea what it is like to grow up on a rice farm, or be the daughter of a small business owner, or live in a small town in Hokkaido. When I travel within Japan, or meet someone who grew up in a different social environment in Japan, I am struck by how different it means to "be Japanese." All these internal differences are key to understanding how actual "natives" live their lives and how the rest of the world appears from their points of view; yet they get erased by theoretical generalizations.
At the small liberal arts college where I teach, the majority of students are Caucasian and many have had surprisingly little cross-cultural experience that is meaningful to them. Very few have lived or traveled abroad prior to college, and some have never been outside California. Although California itself is a culturally diverse state, I am often struck by how their social networks are defined by social distinctions such as race and class, even if they live in multicultural communities and went to a high school where Caucasian students were in the minority. Whenever they interact with people from different cultural backgrounds, they do so, for the most part, through their common denominator as "Americans" and "American teenagers."
Combined with a general lack of life experience, typical of young adults, their interpretation of others' actions and motives also tends to be more simplistic. I find it tricky to introduce generalizations about Japan to this audience, because whatever I tell them often becomes the only lens through which these young Americans look at anything and everything Japanese from then on. Whenever something or someone Japanese confuses, surprises, or frustrates them, they tend to quickly (and uncritically) resort to seemingly clean-cut explanations.
For example, "Japanese are overly polite to foreign visitors because they are soto," or "they have no individuality, because they are so group-oriented." Along the way, they forget that Japanese are also individuals with their own needs and desires, and their actions are not singularly dictated by their "culture."
Recent social and cultural changes in Japan also make it a challenge to keep our teaching about "Japan" up-to-date and relevant. Many aspects of Japanese society and culture that used to be considered "unique" by outside observers are no longer.
Lifetime employment, for instance, was a key to Japan's postwar economic success and had a broad and profound social impact. But corporate restructuring changed all this throughout the 1990s and into the 2000s, and is effecting radical change in the culture of work in today's Japan. So, I am finding a lot of earlier anthropological studies on Japan already outdated. Yet, scholarly research on recent social-cultural changes (in English-speaking academia) is still underdeveloped, and it will be a while before comprehensive analyses of Japan's transformation during the Heisei era (starting in 1989) become available. In the meantime, my anecdotes and preliminary observations have to suffice as the primary source of information for my students.
With all this ambivalence, why do I--and many anthropologists of Japan--continue to teach "Japan"? That discussion will have to wait till next month.
Kurotani is an associate professor of anthropology and director of Asian studies at the University of Redlands in California.
(May. 31, 2007)
Sawa Kurotani Special to The Daily Yomiuri
A few weeks ago, I received an e-mail from one of my former students, who recently had a vacation in Japan. She had a very nice time in Japan and enjoyed experiencing a different culture. Of course, there were some surprises and confusion, typical of a trip to an unfamiliar country with different customs than one's own. However, she wrote: "I anticipated many of these [differences], thanks to your class. Japan was exactly like you taught us!"
Every once in a while I get similar comments about my course, "Japanese Society and Culture," from my former students, who have visited Japan, had business dealings with a Japanese company, or met someone from Japan. Fostering cross-cultural understanding is one of the import!ant missions of cultural anthropology, and I am flattered to know that I have had a small part in it.
But I also can't help getting a knee-jerk reaction to these comments: a feeling that all I did was to present a "Cliffs Notes" version of Japan, a handy reference guide to all things Japanese that misled our students into thinking that they really understand "Japan."
The founder of anthropology in the United States, Franz Boas, was the strong and vocal advocate of an approach to cross-cultural understanding that is often referred to as "cultural relativism," the idea that cultural beliefs and behavior! can be understood and judged only in their own cultural context, and not by imposing outside standards. Behind this concept is Boas' belief that every culture has its own internal logic, and customs and beliefs that may seem outlandish or nonsensical from an outsider's point of view all "make sense" once you understand this internal logic.
For an outsider to come to understand this internal logic of a culture, long-term cultural immersion and careful study are essential. This is why, in the discipline of cultural anthropology, fieldwork of over one year has been the established norm. Even then, anthropologists have struggled with the self-doubt that, no matter how hard they try, they can never really "get it." Some have concluded that the best anthropologists can hope for is a reasonable outsider's interpretation of it.
I also keep wondering what "Japan" really is. Is it about age-old traditions or about contemporary social realities? Is it about a coherent "cultural whole" or the lived experience of individuals who consider themselves Japanese? Is it about official rules and normative values or their infinite variations as practiced in everyday life? And how do we convey all of these things in 30 class sessions or less?
I always struggle in my classroom to strike a balance between the generalizations and the particulars. There are certainly general patterns or tendencies that we may label typically "Japanese."
For example, many anthropologists of Japan have analyzed that the Japanese sense of self is more "relational" and less "individualistic," and argued that the distinction between uchi (inside/home) and soto (outside/strange place) is a key concept in the Japanese worldview. While these generalizations have explanatory values, they gloss over the particulars that makes the actual experience of being Japanese or living in Japan more complex.
My own lived experience of Japan is limited by the fact that I grew up in the Yokohama area, a very large city only about 50 kilometers from Tokyo's city center, in the family of a "salaryman." I have no idea what it is like to grow up on a rice farm, or be the daughter of a small business owner, or live in a small town in Hokkaido. When I travel within Japan, or meet someone who grew up in a different social environment in Japan, I am struck by how different it means to "be Japanese." All these internal differences are key to understanding how actual "natives" live their lives and how the rest of the world appears from their points of view; yet they get erased by theoretical generalizations.
At the small liberal arts college where I teach, the majority of students are Caucasian and many have had surprisingly little cross-cultural experience that is meaningful to them. Very few have lived or traveled abroad prior to college, and some have never been outside California. Although California itself is a culturally diverse state, I am often struck by how their social networks are defined by social distinctions such as race and class, even if they live in multicultural communities and went to a high school where Caucasian students were in the minority. Whenever they interact with people from different cultural backgrounds, they do so, for the most part, through their common denominator as "Americans" and "American teenagers."
Combined with a general lack of life experience, typical of young adults, their interpretation of others' actions and motives also tends to be more simplistic. I find it tricky to introduce generalizations about Japan to this audience, because whatever I tell them often becomes the only lens through which these young Americans look at anything and everything Japanese from then on. Whenever something or someone Japanese confuses, surprises, or frustrates them, they tend to quickly (and uncritically) resort to seemingly clean-cut explanations.
For example, "Japanese are overly polite to foreign visitors because they are soto," or "they have no individuality, because they are so group-oriented." Along the way, they forget that Japanese are also individuals with their own needs and desires, and their actions are not singularly dictated by their "culture."
Recent social and cultural changes in Japan also make it a challenge to keep our teaching about "Japan" up-to-date and relevant. Many aspects of Japanese society and culture that used to be considered "unique" by outside observers are no longer.
Lifetime employment, for instance, was a key to Japan's postwar economic success and had a broad and profound social impact. But corporate restructuring changed all this throughout the 1990s and into the 2000s, and is effecting radical change in the culture of work in today's Japan. So, I am finding a lot of earlier anthropological studies on Japan already outdated. Yet, scholarly research on recent social-cultural changes (in English-speaking academia) is still underdeveloped, and it will be a while before comprehensive analyses of Japan's transformation during the Heisei era (starting in 1989) become available. In the meantime, my anecdotes and preliminary observations have to suffice as the primary source of information for my students.
With all this ambivalence, why do I--and many anthropologists of Japan--continue to teach "Japan"? That discussion will have to wait till next month.
Kurotani is an associate professor of anthropology and director of Asian studies at the University of Redlands in California.
(May. 31, 2007)