Once thought of as a 'vanishing people', the Ainu are now reasserting both their culture and their claims to be the 'indigenous' people of Japan. Race, Resistance and the Ainu of Japan is the first major study to trace the outlines of Ainu history. It explores the ways in which competing versions of Ainu identity have been constructed and articulated, shedding light on the way modern relations between the Ainu and the Japanese have been shaped.
This set provides a comprehensive introduction and contains the most important critical literature on the history and historiography of nineteenth-and early twentieth-century Japan.
Japan and Okinawa provides an up-to-date, coherent and theoretically informed examination of Okinawa from the perspective of political economy and society. It combines a focus on structure and subjectivity as a way to analyze Okinawa, Okinawans and their relationship with global, regional and national structures. The book draws on a range of disciplines to provide new insights into both the contemporary and historical place of Okinawa and the Okinawans. The first half of the book examines Okinawa as part of the global, regional and national structures which impose constraints as well as offer opportunities to Okinawa. Leading specialists examine in detail topics such as Okinawa as a frontier region, Okinawa's Free Trade Zones and response to globalization, and Okinawa as part of the Japanese 'construction state', being particularly concerned with how Okinawa can chart its own course. The second half focuses on questions of identity and subjectivity, examining the multitude of vibrant cultural practices that breathe life into the meaning of being Okinawan and inform their social and political responses to structural constraints. The originality of this book can be found in its elucidation of how the structural constraints of Okinawa's precarious position in the world, the region and as part of Japan impact on subjectivity. For many Okinawans, in the past as now, acceptance and rationalization of their dependency has made them collaborators in their own subordination. At the same time, however, they have demonstrated a capacity to give voice to a separate identity, inscribing cultural practices marking them as different from mainland Japanese.
The Affect of Difference is a collection of essays offering a new perspective on the history of race and racial ideologies in modern East Asia. Contributors approach this subject through the exploration of everyday culture from a range of academic disciplines, each working to show how race was made visible and present as a potential means of identification. By analyzing artifacts from diverse media including travelogues, records of speech, photographs, radio broadcasts, surgical techniques, tattoos, anthropometric postcards, fiction, the popular press, film and soundtracks—an archive that chronicles the quotidian experiences of the colonized—their essays shed light on the politics of inclusion and exclusion that underpinned Japanese empire. One way this volume sets itself apart is in its use of affect as a key analytical category. Colonial politics depended heavily on the sentiments and moods aroused by media representations of race, and authorities promoted strategies that included the colonized as imperial subjects while simultaneously excluding them on the basis of "natural" differences. Chapters demonstrate how this dynamic operated by showing the close attention of empire to intimate matters including language, dress, sexuality, family, and hygiene. The focus on affect elucidates the representational logic of both imperialist and racist discourses by providing a way to talk about inequalities that are not clear cut, to show gradations of power or shifts in definitions of normality that are otherwise difficult to discern, and to present a finely grained perspective on everyday life under racist empire. It also alerts us to the subtle, often unseen ways in which imperial or racist affects may operate beyond the reach of our methodologies. Taken together, the essays in this volume bring the case of Japanese empire into comparative proximity with other imperial situations and contribute to a deeper, more sophisticated understanding of the role that race has played in East Asian empire.
Multiethnic Japan challenges the received view of Japanese society as ethnically homogeneous. Employing a wide array of arguments and evidence--historical and comparative, interviews and observations, high literature and popular culture--John Lie recasts modern Japan as a thoroughly multiethnic society. Lie casts light on a wide range of minority groups in modern Japanese society, including the Ainu, Burakumin (descendants of premodern outcasts), Chinese, Koreans, and Okinawans. In so doing, he depicts the trajectory of modern Japanese identity. Surprisingly, Lie argues that the belief in a monoethnic Japan is a post-World War II phenomenon, and he explores the formation of the monoethnic ideology. He also makes a general argument about the nature of national identity, delving into the mechanisms of social classification, signification, and identification.
“In this exhaustively-researched and beautifully-written book, Onishi uncovers a hidden history of Afro-Asian radicalism and internationalism. He presents bold and generative arguments about the ways in which the affiliation of kindred spirits across the Pacific enabled anti-racist intellectuals and activists from Japan and the U.S. to forge a new philosophy of world history and formulate practical programs for liberation.” —George Lipsitz, author of How Racism Takes Place “This fascinating and ground-breaking book offers a new window into the vital history of Afro-Asian solidarity against empire and white supremacy. Meticulously researched, it recovers the epistemological breakthroughs that emerged at the intersection of radical struggle and geographical reorientation. Through his sharp analysis of cross-cultural and transnational collectivity, Onishi provides a guidepost for all those interested in the study of utopian, boundary-crossing projects of the past, as well as the creation of future ones.” — Scott Kurashige, author of The Shifting Grounds of Race and co-author of The Next American Revolution Transpacific Antiracism introduces the dynamic process out of which social movements in Black America, Japan, and Okinawa formed Afro-Asian solidarities against the practice of white supremacy in the twentieth century. Yuichiro Onishi argues that in the context of forging Afro-Asian solidarities, race emerged as a political category of struggle with a distinct moral quality and vitality. This book explores the work of Black intellectual-activists of the first half of the twentieth century, including Hubert Harrison and W. E. B. Du Bois, that took a pro-Japan stance to articulate the connection between local and global dimensions of antiracism. Turning to two places rarely seen as a part of the Black experience, Japan and Okinawa, the book also presents the accounts of a group of Japanese scholars shaping the Black studies movement in post-surrender Japan and multiracial coalition-building in U.S.-occupied Okinawa during the height of the Vietnam War which brought together local activists, peace activists, and antiracist and antiwar GIs. Together these cases of Afro-Asian solidarity make known political discourses and projects that reworked the concept of race to become a wellspring of aspiration for a new society. Yuichiro Onishi is Assistant Professor of African American & African Studies and Asian American Studies at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities.
Transcultural Japan provides a critical examination of being Other in Japan. Portraying the multiple intersections of race, ethnicity, class, and gender, the book suggests ways in which the transcultural borderlands of Japan reflect globalization in this island nation. The authors show the diversity of Japan from the inside, revealing an extraordinarily complex new society in sharp contrast to the persistent stereotypical images held of a regimented, homogeneous Japan. Unsettling as it may be, there are powerful arguments here for looking at the meanings of globalization in Japan through these diverse communities and individuals. These are not harmonious, utopian communities by any means, as they are formed in contexts, both global and local, of unequal power relations. Yet it is also clear that the multiple processes associated with globalization lead to larger hybridizations, a global mélange of socio-cultural, political, and economic forces and the emergence of what could be called trans-local Creolized cultures. Transcultural Japan reports regional, national, and cosmopolitan movements. Characterized by global flows, hybridity, and networks, this book documents Japan’s new lived experiences and rapid metamorphosis. Accessible and engaging, this broad-based volume is an attractive and useful resource for students of Japanese culture and society, as well as being a timely and revealing contribution to research scholars and for those interested in race, ethnicity, cultural identities and transformations.
Examining the ways in which the Japanese have manipulated historical memory, the contributors reveal the presence of an underlying concept of 'Japaneseness' that excludes members of the principal minority groups in Japan.
