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 400th
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.