On Diversity (2)

On Diversity (2)

 

I pledge allegiance to the Flag of the United States of America, and to the Republic for which it stands, one Nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.

 

In July, when the course I teach on transnational culture, required subject for the 2nd year students of my department, was coming to its close, I asked the students to write a short response in two consecutive weeks. I was appalled by the extent to which they had taken the myth of the homogeneous Japanese nation for granted.

 

The first response I asked them to write was about the pledge of allegiance to the flag of the United States. Contrary to my expectations, most of the students reacted positively to the pledge performance. Some even suggested such a ceremony should be introduced to Japan.

 

The pledge, written by Francis Bellamy in 1892, was designed to unify the American nation, the citizenry of which was composed of immigrants of different cultural backgrounds who spoke a variety of languages. Eighteen ninety-two was the year the Americans celebrated the 400^th anniversary of Columbus’ discovery of the new continent. At the Colombian Exposition held in Chicago the following year the U.S. was lavishly displayed as an emerging power. It was also in Chicago in 1893 when Frederick Jackson Turner spoke about the significance of the frontier as the embodiment of individualism and democracy in the creation of the great nation. The census bureau, however, had announced the dissolution of the frontier three years earlier. Industrial cities on the eastern seaboard were swarmed with labourers originated from the poorer regions of central and southern Europe. It was in 1892 when Ellis Island began its operation. There is no doubt that the pledge functioned as a part of the mechanism that assimilated non-WASP immigrants.

 

(BTW, I recently had a chance to visit Stanford for the first time to attend a conference.

The university was founded in 1891 by Leland Stanford who accumulated his fortune by the trans-continental railroad business. Casual visitors to Stanford’s immaculate campus are not necessarily aware of the facts that the Chinese employed in the railroad construction were “excluded” from the U.S. citizenry after the railroad’s completion in 1882, nor the westward movement propelled by the railroad deprived the land and livelihood of the indigenous peoples.)

 

What I would like to emphasize is that the idea of assimilation (or integration or inclusion, euphemistically used) is no other than exclusion of others who are not a part of what is taken for an undiluted culture. The number of foreign residents in Japan (according to the Ministry of Justice, therefore not including sans papiers) has now exceeded two million. And besides, the Japanese nationals include large sectors of non-Yamato extracts, including those whose roots are in Korea, Ryukyu, or Ainu-moshiri. Yamato is self-referentially used to indicate the mainstream Japanese, whose sense of cultural superiority may be compared to that of the WASPs. Along with those ethnic minorities, there are also people who maintain strong bonds outside Japan, such as those who married internationally, or those who have lived abroad over extensive periods of time. I am one of the Japanese passport holders who feel somewhat uncomfortable being included in a sweeping category of the Japanese nation.

 

I would like pose a few questions to the students who wish to introduce the allegiance performance to Japan. Will non-Yamato people be also required to say the pledge? Will the pledge be addressed to the flag of the rising sun? My opposition to such proposal is clear. The flag of the rising sun has long been used as an ensign, but its history as the national symbol is short. It was invented by the Meiji government in the process of establishing a modern state. Think of those who, especially in the years running up to 1945, were deprived of freedom of thought and speech, were raped, were used as forced labourers, were assaulted, and were murdered under the flag. I prefer a community that cherishes plurality of ideas, languages, ethnicities, sexual orientations, etc., to a mono-cultural nation that forges singularity through performative apparatuses such as “the pledge”（E Pluribus Unum）.

 

The following week, I asked my students to comment on the statement made by performance studies scholar Richard Schechner; “Cultural purity is a dangerous fiction because it leads to a kind of policing that results in apparent monoculture and actual racism, jingoism, and xenophobia”.

 

Many of the students did not regard culture as fiction and had difficulties accepting the author’s proposition that cultural purity is dangerous. In their response, they seemed to disregard the parts they didn’t like and went on to paraphrase like; Cultural purity is dangerous because it may lead to racism, jingoism, and xenophobia. Placing their comments in a familiar context, some answered that it is important to maintain Japanese tradition but the over-emphasis of purity can be dangerous. I think the students have taken for granted the idea of singular and homogeneous national culture. The prevalent usage of culture with a name of a country attached (such as French culture, Chinese culture and Japanese culture) probably makes it difficult for the students to think otherwise. I regret that I didn’t spend more time during the course explaining concepts such as “imagined communities” and “invented traditions”.

 

Many of the students also disregarded the part about “a kind of policing that results in apparent monoculture”. They don’t seem to care about ubiquitous CCTV cameras that surround their daily lives. They do not think about the policing and the censoring function of the school, the family, the workplace, and of the neighbourhood association (chō-nai-kai), the association of volunteer fire-fighters (shō-bō-dan), and the association of the lay people affiliated with a Shinto shrine (ujiko), although the last three are not as restrictive as they once were. They don’t seem to be concerned about the new state’s management system of foreign nationals introduced in 2012.

 

Such regimes of surveillance have been depicted in the novels of George Orwell and Aldous Huxley and more recently in the film The Truman Show by the director Peter Weir. The last has a greater resemblance to the contemporary society in that the protagonist is unaware of his being watched. There were students who made a connexion between “cultural purity” the Nazi eugenics policy, but their number was small.

 

The point I would like to reiterate is that cultural purity, implying a culture that is not diverse and undiluted, exists nowhere, and that the maintenance of the myth of monoculture (one nation, one language) requires the violence of ostracism. With the increase in encounters with people of different ethnicities who speak different mother tongues, it is now impossible to contain “our culture” within partition walls, both physically and figuratively. Besides, borders, whatever the form they may take, can only be porous and permeable.