Wearing Cultural Styles in Japan: Concepts of Tradition and Modernity in Practice

Part II. Wearing Tradition and Wearing Modernity: Negotiating Paths of Social Change

Part II Wearing Tradition and Wearing Modernity Negotiating Paths of Social Change Changes in the political economy of rural areas within advanced industrialized societies challenge governments, average citizens, and the private sector to develop novel ways of coping with and adjusting to emerging circumstances . As the human actors in these contexts confront the realities of social change in their respective communities, they rarely respond passively , instead, directing and redirecting the course of their lives to actively carve out new roles for and understandings of themselves and the social flows in which they move and that they generate. Nowhere has this process of sociocultural reconfiguration been more dramatic than in the rural areas of To – hoku. In a rare examination of this process in a non-Western context, the authors in this section present a series of intriguing case studies that provide examples of how local people wear different styles of tradition and modernity to negotiate the rural, urban, domestic, and international influences of their contemporary cultural milieu upon their everyday lives. The section begins with Nancy Rosenberger’s portrayal of the lives of five To – hoku women in their 20s and 30s. She develops an argument that explores modernity as a process that, in the case of these women, involves the negotiation of tensions within the knowledge and power structures that shape and are shaped by individuals and communities. Through and in relationship to these tensions, people construct individual and social imaginations as they interpret their own identities in relation to that which is, in part, defined as modern and traditional. In her chapter, Rosenberger reveals the multivocality of modernity among To – hoku women that emerges from relationships beyond the global economy. Following Rosenberger’s examination of cultural styles worn by contemporary To – hoku women, Tomoko Watanabe Traphagan explores a 73 different dimension of modernity at the local level by studying the lives of residents intent on actively participating in one manifestation of mainstream Japanese lifestyles through government sponsored international activities in a former farming community quickly becoming a regional industrial center. Traphagan examines the activities and attitudes of residents in the town of Kitasawa in relation to their use of the term “kokusaika” (internationalization) as a means of investigating how people negotiate the ideology and the reality of internationalization in their community. In her detailed account of local international activities, Traphagan illuminates the ways in which Kitasawa residents use the term “kokusaika” to adapt, negotiate, ignore, and contest the changes in their lives associated with the modernization process. Next, Christopher Thompson examines an agricultural hamlet that is adapting its local folk performance tradition to the social and economic circumstances brought about by domestic and international forces beyond the community’s control. For the first time in hamlet history, women are recruited to the collective’s historically male dance troupe—a cultural organization that no longer entertains only local residents, but now regularly performs abroad. But instead of describing this adjustment process as something new, Thompson argues that the traditional performance of Shishi Odori (the deer dance) in Ochiai has long been part of an ongoing syncretistic social process that integrates tradition, modernity, and rural–urban influences, even at times transcending national boundaries. He suggests that the successful preservation of the Ochiai Deer Dance is not the result of the Ochiai community’s resistance to change, but made possible by local residents’ re-creation of the tradition within and against the forces of change that threaten to pull its members apart. Enka music, a genre that focuses on heterosexual romantic heartbreak, is the topic of chapter 7. Debra Occhi maintains that post-World War II enka contains a particular discourse seen as traditional by its middle-aged fans. This discourse outlines gender-differentiated emotional and physical behaviors attributed to men and women relative to their physical locations. Enka also describes an emotional return to furusato, the heart’s traditional home place—a representation often ascribed to the To – hoku region in both national and local imaginaries. Occhi’s examination of enka reveals the constructed nature of Japan’s agrarian sentimentalism, a sentimentalism that often stands in stark contrast to the multidimensional hardships that have historically been a part of To – hoku life. In the section’s final chapter, Anthony Rausch addresses the multiple dimensions of social meaning that surround the preservation, promotion, 74 Part II. Wearing Tradition and Wearing Modernity production, and consumption of Tsugaru Nuri Lacquerware in...