Deaf in Japan: Signing and the Politics of Identity (review)

As a Japan studies specialist currently studying Makaton (a simplified version of Auslan for people with intellectual disabilities), I was eager to read Karen Nakamura's book Deaf in Japan: Signing and the Politics of Identity. Nakamura's methodology combines the field techniques of anthropology, archival research, and the political analysis of social movements to gather information on deaf movements in Japan in the postwar era, with the goal of understanding what it means to subscribe to "deaf identity" in Japan. She frequently includes cross-cultural perspectives from international deaf movements and language systems to contextualize the Japanese case, as well as poses thoughtful and provocative questions about personal and communal identities by comparing the Japanese deaf community to other minority groups in Japan. Disability studies is well established in the fields of medical anthropology, early childhood education, and other more clinical areas of research, but little research has been conducted in the Japanese context. My book On the Margins of Japanese Society: Volunteers and the Welfare of the Urban Underclass (Routledge, 1997) and Emiko Ohnuki-Tierney's Illness and Culture in Contemporary Japan: An Anthropological View (Cambridge University Press, 1984) deal with disability in specific contexts (the former with reference to poverty and welfare, the latter with reference to Asian medical models), so Nakamura's monograph is extremely important because it explores disability in a wider context—as deafness cuts across all class, ethnic, and gender lines—and explores disability as a social construct for identity formation.

Nakamura explores deaf identity in Japan in two ways: communally (through the analysis of deaf activism) and individually (through life histories). She first describes the ideological differences between two prominent deaf movements in Japan: the Japanese Federation of the Deaf (JFD, established in 1947) and D-Pro (established in 1993). JFD has taken a leading role in the deaf movement in Japan, working for the most part in collaboration with the government to facilitate the community's access to benefits. Nakamura describes this group as embracing a position of "inclusive and assimilationist politics" (pp. 5–6). JFD is also more inclusive in its definition of deafness (partial versus total) as a basis for identity construction (p. 66). On the other hand, D-Pro espouses a more separatist philosophy: its "Declaration of Deaf Culture" states that "deaf people are a linguistic minority who converse using Japanese Sign Language, a language that is distinct from the Japanese language" (pp. 8–9). Influenced by the American deaf movement, D-Pro's stand is that deafness is not a medical condition but a cultural attribute. "Speakers" of Japanese Sign Language (JSL) constitute a minority group in Japan, with equivalent status to any other ethnic group, such as the resident Koreans, the burakumin, and the Ainu. Even though deafness is always defined as a disability, this book's argument is juxtaposed against studies of ethnic minorities in Japan: Sonia Ryang's work on resident Koreans, Takeyuki Tsuda's work on Japanese Brazilian migrants, Richard Siddle's work on the Ainu, and a variety of works on the burakumin, for example.

The "deafness as ethnic minority" debate informs much of the ethnographic data presented in the book. The middle chapters are devoted to description and analysis of experiences of deaf people in contemporary Japan. Nakamura identifies three stages of deaf cultural identity in postwar Japan, as indicated by historical, socioeconomic, and political developments in each period, and charts how the politics of deafness has transformed over this time frame. The future of this community, though, is under threat: falling birth rates, improved public health, advances in hearing technology, and a tendency to mainstream in education all mean the Japanese deaf community is gradually splintering and assimilating into wider Japanese society (p. 115). This helps us, perhaps, to understand the radical stance of other movements; if the deaf community is entirely normalized, those who become deaf much later...