The Japanese Self in Cultural Logic

Prologue

My Own Self I left Japan when I was twenty-eight, an age at which I had become irreversibly Japanese. And yet, a typical expatriate, I was thoroughly alienated from my home country—perhaps, I now realize, in overreaction to a still-lingering ambivalence. It was years before I regained a reasonable balance. Furthermore, as I began to grapple with the American way of life I was entrenched in my doctoral training in sociology, which emphasized a universalistic theory centering on the ideas of Talcott Parsons. What turned me back to Japan was the job market and the realization that my Japanese background was the sole resource I could offer to American academia. Accepting a position teaching cultural anthropology at the University of Hawai‘i, I entered a fascinating world in which the particularities of lived human experience are held up against a universal mirror. Thus I reconnected with my country of origin, to which I have returned every year as a researcher. This brief tale reveals the multiple marginality of my identity. I am marginal to both Japan and the United States. Perhaps more important, I am marginal to anthropology, not only because my degree was in sociology but also because anthropology has traditionally insisted on studying a society other than one’s own. I am a native anthropologist, even though my “nativity” is not fully legitimate. As a native, I was unable to replicate a non-native’s “awakening” experience in my fieldwork. Instead, I have endured tough self-training, perhaps as tough as a non-native’s fieldwork itself, by teaching American students and writing for English-language readers. The American classroom has been my field site. This multiple marginality has led to an ongoing conversation between the different parts of myself. The “Japanese” part reacts emoPrologue tionally and naively as Japan rises and falls in the international hierarchy of power and reputation. When G-Seven (later Eight) world leaders stood in line for a photo session, I was just as anxious as most Japanese to see where “our” prime minister would stand: would he be at the end, isolated from the group, or chat comfortably with the other leaders near the center? My ego is boosted each time a Japanese citizen wins a Nobel Prize, and I am gladdened by the success of Japanese baseball players playing in American stadiums. Conversely, whenever Japan exposes its ineptitude, misjudgment, or large-scale corruption in global headlines, I shrink with shame and anger. Nonetheless, I am “nationalistic” in a very inconsistent way. When Japanese criticize Americans for weak reasons, I feel upset. In the Japanese national sport of sumo, the only athlete I care about is a local wrestler from Hawai‘i. Like many first-generation immigrants to the United States, I gratefully acknowledge my host country as a land of generosity and opportunity for newcomers. More generally, I appreciate American pluralism, even as I am aware of the huge price it extracts. This consciousness of my marginal identity accounts for my enduring interest in self—an interest that, however, goes beyond personal involvement, as the present volume, with its broadly sociocultural implications, will make clear. Why Self Now? Lately there has been a resurgence of interest in the notion of self, for a number of reasons, from academic to popular, from culture-free to culture-bound. On the academic side, interest in the self reflects the current trend of challenging the alleged misrepresentation of the nonWestern “Other” by the Western “Self.” The former “native Other,” thus, is being refigured into Self, while the Western “observer Self” is being recast as Other. This is a major issue for contemporary Western anthropologists, who have been studying “native Others” as a matter of disciplinary mandate. This crisis has led not only to deep selfre flection on the part of Western academics, but also—and as a consequence —to a new focus on the “non-Western native self” in Western academic work (as evidenced by this book). This controversial Western Self is further complicated by the political, ethical, and methodological self-consciousness of ethnographers , who inflict an inevitable “intrusion of their own selves” on the lives of the people they study (Cohen 1994, 5). Reflexive anthropology now advises ethnographers to be aware not only of how they project x PROLOGUE themselves onto the native other, but also of how they are themselves monitored by the native...