Logics of the Multicultural and the Consumption of the Vietnamese Exotic in Japan

The idea for this essay came to me while interviewing a Vietnamese journalist and small businessman in Oimachi, just off Tokyo's Yamanote line. He had been telling me, with resignation, that after more than a decade of activism for Vietnamese and other migrant community causes in Japan, he had finally given up in the face of official immovability and indifference. A little like a traditional Vietnamese mandarin in times of trouble, he had retreated into scholarly pursuits. After a pause, he brightened up as he began to describe the recent emergence of a Japanese craze for things Vietnamese, telling me with some pride how not long ago he had had a camera crew from NHK television in his tiny shop. Pulling a magazine out of his desk drawer, he bemusedly translated the text on the cover into Vietnamese. One of the bold headlines read "[Let's go] To ‘cheap' ‘cute' things paradise Vietnam."¹

The use of this language to describe things Vietnamese and, by association, Vietnam itself, struck me at the time, and still strikes me, as a stunning abstraction. Vietnam is, by anyone's measure, an abrasive place. While the tourist there may indeed encounter the Vietnamese kawaii, he or she must also experience grinding poverty, pollution, urban decay, incivility, and perhaps even danger. Even so, the reader might well ask why this magazine shocked me so. After all, the cute-ification and sanitization of Third World tourist destinations is not particularly remarkable in the conventions of Japanese commercial travel literature—or, for that matter, in the conventions of commercial travel literature found anywhere in the West. Neither is there anything particularly surprising about the fact that Tokyo should host a Vietnamese "alterity industry."² Indeed, one runs into various forms of the Vietnamese exotic in cosmopolitan cities around the world. (There is even, it is rumored, a Vietnamese pho stall at the South Pole.)³ This considered, I can explain my "shocked" reaction only by saying that on seeing the "Cute Things" magazine, I experienced a heightened awareness of the contradiction between its idealized images of places and things Vietnamese for Japanese consumption and the difficult conditions of life faced not only by people in Vietnam, but by the Vietnamese refugees, migrants, students, contract laborers, and illegal workers I had just been meeting and finding out about in Tokyo and Yokohama. What, I could not help asking myself, was the cultural logic that allowed the suppression of the "nastiness" anyone who goes to Vietnam must experience? And what of the nastiness that accompanies relations between the host society and Vietnamese settlers and sojourners?

If a certain naïveté attaches itself to these questions, then it is a useful one, for it permits jaded eyes to look afresh at the old contradiction between the largely positive classification of idealized and distant exotics and the largely negative coding of material and proximate others in multicultural societies. Rather than simply throwing up our hands at this hypocrisy, or avoiding it by delinking our analyses of a happy globalist "multicultural consumption" from those of an unhappy "substantive multicultural politics," we do better to inquire into the analytical linkages between the commodification, circulation, and consumption of abstract or disembodied otherness and the politics surrounding the presence of empirical others in our midst. In what follows, I'd like to explore this assertion through an ethnography of the consumption of the Vietnamese exotic in Tokyo.⁴ While acknowledging a degree of relative autonomy at the level of aestheticization and consumption of Vietnamese food and zakka, I will argue that the abstract conception of a cute and consumable Vietnam acts to disguise, euphemize, and delimit the always potentially unsettling multicultural reality constituted by the existence of Vietnamese communities in Japan.

A Subjectless Multiculturalism

As Bruner has succinctly put it, "The Other in our...