Being and Landscape: An Ontological Inquiry into a Japanese Rural Community

This essay aims to reflect on the idea of landscape and our relationship with it by taking the Japanese notion of furusato (native place) in its ontological dimension. Grounded in Heidegger’s ‘phenomenology of Being’ and ‘ontology’, a phenomenological understanding of fieldwork experience in a Japanese rural community will be developed in order to rethink both the furusato and the ‘Being-landscape’ relation. As a consequence, we will be concerned not with how people speak about landscape, but with how the landscape speaks through people. What will be brought to light are the landscape’s moral and relational dimensions: namely, (i) the responsibility towards both our communities and future generations and (ii) a more-than-physical understanding of landscape that alerts us to our belonging to a common world comprised of relationships and tasks.     

Facing Nuclear Risks: Lessons from the Fukushima Nuclear Disaster

This paper discusses the sociological lessons learnt from the Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant accident that occurred on 11 March 2011. This disaster is the second largest nuclear accident after the Chernobyl accident. Meltdown and explosions occurred because of the hydrogen released from the damaged core. A large amount of radioactive materials has been released. Many people, around 150 000, are still in evacuation by government order or by their own choice. The incident has several characteristics. First, it is the first severe accident of a nuclear power station, the complex disaster being triggered by a large earthquake and tsunami. Second, the four reactors were simultaneously endangered. Third, the uncontrolled situation of the melted‐down reactors has continued for more than 9 months. Fourth, it is the first severe accident of a nuclear power plant on the coast. Scientists are worried about serious contamination of seawater and damages to the ecosystem. This accident is a human disaster which an electric company and the national government are very much responsible for due to a series of “underestimates,” such as that of the height of a possible tsunami, the possibility of a “station blackout” and lengthy periods of no AC power. A lot of confusing and misleading information, along with the deliberate concealment of information and delay in information disclosure occurred. Located in the background of all of this is the “Atomic Circle,” a very closed relationship between politicians, government, academics, industry and the media. We should try and learn from all of this in building a post‐nuclear East Asia. This would be the greatest lesson from the tragic Fukushima disaster and the greatest message to East Asia, the world and future generations.     

Genealogy of tabunka kyōsei: A Critical Analysis of the Reformation of the Multicultural Co-living Discourse in Japan

The Japanese government started to accept semi-skilled foreign workers officially under the newly established tokutei ginō status in 2019, and national policies for supporting foreign residents are gradually being developed. However, it is unclear how the principles of tabunka kyōsei (multicultural coexistence or co-living), the official slogan for supporting foreign residents since the mid-2000s, have changed as a result of recent policy trends. In this article, I examine the transformation of logics for legitimizing policies for foreign residents using discourse analysis of the official government documents on tabunka kyōsei. Previous critical studies have revealed that tabunka kyōsei is based on the logic of a binary opposition between “Japanese” and “foreigners”. This was combined with the neoliberal logic of “supports for self-reliance”, a paternalism that sees foreigners as being in need of support if they can live "just as" Japanese. This paternalism has prevented the development of recognizing the human rights and cultural differences of foreign residents as de facto immigrants. In addition, a logic has explicitly emerged in the tabunka kyōsei discourse at the end of the 2010s that sees foreigners as a threat to national security and that their acceptance should be strictly governed by the border control policy and socially controlled from the viewpoint of national interests. To deal with this situation, tabunka kyōsei must be recreated as a principle for recognizing foreign residents as immigrants and guaranteeing their human rights and cultural differences.     

The Eroticism of the Maternal: So What If Everything Is About the Mother?

The “erotic” bond between the mother and the infant is often idealized as the epitome of the preoedipal, prerepressive utopia in the blissful image of the naked and sacred mother-infant dyad. This article problematizes such a utopian image by identifying the core fantasy underlying that which is maternal. My discussion looks at the mother both as the object of erotic fantasy and the subject who is doing the fantasizing. This study brings together two seemingly disparate theoretical notions, Lacanian feminist psychoanalyst Luce Irigaray's argument about our culture's relationship with the mother and Japanese psychoanalyst Takeo Doi's study of amae. I argue that what Irigaray calls “desire of/for the mother” and what Doi attempted to explain using the everyday Japanese word, amae, a wish to “depend and presume upon another's love or bask in another's indulgence,” are both what is understood in the clinical psychoanalytic language as maternal erotic transference.     

Environmental Degradation,Disproportionality, and the Double Diversion: Reaching Out,Reaching Ahead,and Reaching Beyond

Abstract Rather than seeking ivory‐tower isolation, members of the Rural Sociological Society have always been distinguished by a willingness to work with specialists from a broad range of disciplines, and to work on some of the world's most challenging problems. What is less commonly recognized is that the willingness to reach beyond disciplinary boundaries can contribute not just to the solution of real‐world problems, but also to the advancement of the discipline itself. This point is increasingly being illustrated in studies of environment‐society relationships. Most past discussions of humans' roles in environmental problems have focused on overall or average human impacts, but rural sociologists have played leading roles in identifying what I have come to call “the double diversion.” First, rather than being well‐represented by averages, environmental damages are often characterized by high levels of disproportionality, with much or most of the harm being created by the diversion of environmental rights and resources to a surprisingly small fraction of the relevant social actors. The dispropor‐tionality appears to be made possible in part through the second diversion, namely distraction—the diversion of attention, largely through the taken‐for‐granted but generally erroneous assumption that the environmental harm “must” be for the benefit of us all. There are good reasons why rural sociologists would have been among the first to notice both of these “diversions”— and why they will give even greater attention to both in the future.     

Reliability and validity of a new psychometric inventory of childrearing difficulties for evaluating child abuse risk in Japan

Abstract

Child abuse can occur in any family and requires early preventive measures. Here, a new psychometric inventory was developed for detecting child abuse risk based on parental psychological characteristics reported via a self-administered questionnaire by Japanese parents of children below elementary school age (n?=?370). Reliability and validity were tested using factor analysis and examined for correlations with related criteria and Cronbach’s α coefficients. Inventory factors were “Abandonment anxiety” (9 items; α?=?.899), “Anxiety due to lack of confidence” (13 items; α?=?.868), “Suspicion” (5 items; α?=?.832), and “Perfectionism” (7 items; α?=?.793). This inventory will provide a basis for assessing risk of childrearing difficulties and thus child abuse risk for specialists working with Japanese parents.     

Sociological Perspectives on Japanese Manga in America

Japanese popular culture has, according to journalist Roland Kelts, “invaded” the United States in the 21st century, and in particular Japanese comics, known as manga, have successfully “conquered America,” according to Wired magazine. Within the publishing trade itself, the medium's cultural and commercial success became known as the “manga revolution” or the “manga boom.” Yet despite all of this excitable rhetoric, there has thus far been scant sociological research into the particularities of this emerging phenomenon, and what exists is widely dispersed across multiple humanities and social science disciplines. This essay therefore aims to unite this scattered literature and provide a comprehensive survey of sociological perspectives on Japanese manga in America. I identify and explore three main substantive trends in the scholarly discourse: (i) studies of gender and sexuality and the homoerotic manga genres known as boys' love or yaoi; (ii) intellectual property, copyright, and the global digital piracy of manga colloquially known as “scanlation”; and (iii) studies of cultural production and the political economy of the American manga industry. This essay concludes with a discussion of the limitations these perspectives have in common and suggests a more critical research program drawing upon an expanded theoretical toolkit.     

Fight Club,or the Cultural Contradictions of Late Capitalism

Most critical engagement with the film Fight Club tends to emphasize its relevance for the study of contemporary representations of gender and masculinity. These readings tend to primarily highlight the “reactionary” aspects of the film, which are seen as a response to structural sources of feminization experienced by men as they are embedded in the consumerist machine of the service‐oriented economy. In this paper I argue that these takes on Fight Club, while enlightening and indeed capturing a key aspect, miss what I think is its most essential contribution: its attempt to craft a transcendental “counter‐myth” capable with dealing with the cultural and societal contradictions of post‐industrial capitalism in the context of the transition to a service oriented economy. I draw on the work of Daniel Bell in order to offer a neo‐Weberian reading of Fight Club which makes sense of various aspects of the film which are rendered meaningless by the gender‐focused reading. I argue that Fight Club can be seen as an attempt to deal with the evacuation and exhaustion of the original form of value‐rationality from the realm of production in service work — grounded in the older ethic of ascetic Protestantism — as well as the failure of ideological interpellation in the consumer society — grounded in a domesticated version of the experience‐based counter‐Bourgeois ethic associated with aesthetic modernism — to provide an adequate substitute for it. I conclude that Fight Club can therefore be interpreted as an inchoate attempt to produce some version of a class consciousness and cognitive mapping in the late‐capitalist situation.     

The Dialectic of Pronouns: A Critical Assessment of the Folk-Urban Tradition in Sociology

Abstract

This article challenges the folk-urban evolutionary tradition that is exemplified by Toennies' Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft and supported by Durkheim's concepts of mechanical and organic solidarity. I argue that the relationship between these dichotomous concepts is essentially dialectical. Hence, in modern industrial systems, Gemeinschaft (the thesis, symbolized by the pronoun “I”) and Gesellschaft (the antithesis, symbolized by “we”) ultimately transform into a qualitatively different system (the synthesis, symbolized by “they”). I conclude by briefly reassessing the contributions of Durkheim and Toennies to modern sociology.     

Resiling From “Resilience”

This is a sketch for a critique of “resilience” and “resiliency” as keywords of neoliberal newspeak (officialese, langue de bois) under the innocuous banner of which all manner of business is now being transacted. I register the rapid extension of resilience discourse, note the socioeconomic context of its rise to prominence, and identify its implicit political assumptions and its social and subjective effects and side effects.     

Value of “haafu” as a Category in Education Research

This paper examines the importance of better recognizing and representing haafu students in Japanese education policies by using Fraser's tripartite theory of social justice. In today's transnational Japan, there has been a remarkable increase in the number of haafu, a term used in reference to children with Japanese and non‐Japanese parents. However, the educational experiences of haafu children have not been adequately investigated by researchers and the government for education policies. Central to these arguments are concerns that haafu children occupy a liminal space, and hence are potentially educationally “at risk.” They are generally viewed as Japanese because of their nationality and are expected to perform like the majority of Japanese students with two Japanese parents due to their familiarity with Japanese culture. Yet, in practice there is a paradox that haafu students might be marginalized as a consequence of being viewed as not Japanese enough. In this context, how should public education respond to an increasingly culturally diverse student body? This paper argues why there is a need for public education, its policy and practices to more effectively recognize, represent and redistribute resources ‐ as Fraser frames the three dimensions of social justice ‐ in support of these students.     

Expanding our sociolinguistic horizons? Geographical thinking and the articulatory potential of commodity chain analysis

Conceptual linearity and analytic parochialism (aka focus) can make it more difficult for sociolinguists or discourse analysts to apprehend the far‐reaching, exploitative ways inequality is nowadays produced. A suitably material‐cum‐materialist class critique certainly entails empirical and phenomenological worlds flagged by, for example, multi‐sited ethnographies but otherwise side‐lined as merely “extra‐situational” in much talk/text‐directed scholarship. I propose we think more geographically by properly engaging spatiality à la Harvey (1990) and especially the radical politics of simultaneity (Massey, 2005)—the literal, “right‐now” connectedness of places and people. To this end, and allied with deepening interest in political economy, I combine the principles of articulation theory with the procedures of commodity chain analysis for picking apart an epitomic, contemporary manifestation of extreme privilege: the business‐class meal. The proposed discourse‐centred commodity chain analysis offers an ecumenical but systematic framework for tracking how commodity fetishism is actually and discursively accomplished (or not) across dispersed voices, stories, and social meanings.     

Local Motions: Surfing and the Politics of Wave Sliding

Tapping into the politics and rhythms of surfing, this paper embodies a “set” of waves that seeks to erode the sedimentation of Hawaii's modern political orders. By foregrounding a more fluvial and dynamic sense of the political, this paper treats surfing not only as a heterotopic site of agency, but also as an opening for an “other” kind of politics.     

How Does the Restoration of Tōhoku Society Begin? Center and Periphery in the Great East Japan Earthquake

What can we learn from the Great East Japan Earthquake? In this article, I examine the effects of the overarching physical and social system that has developed in Japanese society for the last half century. I use the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant accident as an example. I will also look to the meaning of kuni (the Japanese word for country, state or nation), and emphasize the urgent need to advance sociological comparative analysis of different forms of nation, state and country in times of emergency.     

The “New Mestiza,” the Old Mestizos: Contrasting Discourses on Mestizaje*

This article analyzes varying, inconsistent, representations of “mestizaje” (generally construed as racial or cultural mixing in the Americas) deriving from different historical settings and ideological frameworks. It particularly focuses on what I here term “old mestizaje,” summarized in the writings of Latin American intellectuals of the first quarter of the twentieth century, such as Mexican philosopher José Vasconcelos (The Cosmic Race); and “new mestizaje,” articulated in the works of such contemporary thinkers as Chicana writer Gloria Anzaldúa (Borderlands/La Frontera: The NewMestiza). The center piece of the article is the contradictions and fractures between old and new discourses in terms of their underlying views of race, identity, and “destiny.” It examines the links of old mestizaje with essentialist, Social Darwinist, concepts, and the foundations of new mestizaje on a critical cultural studies paradigm. I propose that various aspects of old mestizaje infused hegemonic racial ideologies throughout Latin America and engendered a form of “color blindness” that obscured pervasive racial inequalities in the region.     

Speaking with the Colonial Ghosts and Pungsu Rumour in Contemporary South Korea (1990–2006): The Pungsu (Feng Shui) Invasion Story Surrounding the Demolition of the Former Japanese Colonial-General Building and Iron Spikes

This essay explores how the legacy of Japanese colonisation (1910–1945) continues to have a lingering impact on Korean life decades after territorial decolonisation. That is, the idea of demolishing the former Japanese Colonial-General building from the civil government of Kim Young-sam and the mysterious large iron spikes found at “auspicious sites” in mountains across the country caused a huge public debate throughout the 1990s until the demolition of the building in 1996. The building in question, on the doorstep of the Chosun royal palace, was regarded as a case of a pungsu (a form of East Asian geomancy better known as feng shui) “invasion” by the Japanese during the colonial era, allegedly to cut the qi (vital forces) of Korean national sovereignty. The iron spikes were also understood by many in the context of a “pungsu invasion”. Unfortunately, there is a general lack of documentary and scientific evidence to confirm the claims made about them, and so the controversy about whether this is a fact or a trauma-stricken myth continues. Beyond the debate over documentary and scientific evidence, this article aims to articulate how these stories or rumours suggest “a collective problem solving and collective psychosis” of a community reimagining itself at an important juncture of history. These rumours reflect the ways in which the nation and the public deal with the interrupted and incomplete social process, especially with regard to the long-unresolved collective wounds and grievances from the Japanese colonial era and a continuing fear of Japan, the nation’s “other”. This article also aims to explore how this controversy echoes post-authoritarian Korean society’s fever of “spiritual decolonisation” and “rectification of history”, which have become consistent public preoccupations and policy statements of successive Korean governments.     

UP OR DOWN? A MALE ECONOMIST'S MANIFESTO ON THE TOILET SEAT ETIQUETTE

This paper develops an economic analysis of the toilet seat etiquette. I investigate whether there is any efficiency justification for the presumption that men should leave the toilet seat down after use. I find that the “down rule” is inefficient unless there is a large asymmetry in the inconvenience costs of shifting the position of the toilet seat across genders. I show that the “selfish” or the “status quo” rule that leaves the toilet seat in the position used dominates the down rule in a wide range of parameter spaces including the case where the inconvenience costs are the same. (JEL D7, H4)     

“I” and Self-Consciousness in the Japanese Language and in Sociology

Abstract It is often said that the Japanese lack the firm consciousness of “self” namely, they yield to groups and are absorbed in an anonymous state. Some ascribe this to the Japanese language, in which the first and the second person are expressed by various pronouns (or, in many cases, are even omitted) in accordance with the relationships between persons. By contrast the Westerner's “I,” which is usually the only pronoun for the first-person, is rarely omitted. They conclude from this that the Japanese individual does not possess as clearly defined a conception of “self” as does the Westerner. Underlying this issue are the fundamental, interwoven questions of language and self-consciousness: does “self” really exist, and does the analysis of the I in language pertain to the first question? This paper discusses these questions by considering Wittgenstein's argument that “I” does not refer to self-consciousness: rather, “self” is a metaphysical reification of “I.” These problems concern sociology, in which the “subject” of action has been the focal point of methodological arguments. I will show that Meadian interactionism and critical theory are deeply rooted in the metaphysical, subjectivist understanding of “I,” while ethnomethodology offers a perspective which overcomes both subjectivism and objectivism for studying communication.     

All Things Thrown and Wonderful,All Memories Great and Small

And the Lord God made them all. I went to Sunday school and like lots of other kids (though far from all) came to an age at which I simply stopped going. Nothing conscious about it, I don't think, it's just those sets of spaces stopped becoming; stopped like nothing physical can stop, like a car crashing into a wall and instead of rebounding being merely consumed in whole. I (re)member, in my naive teens (when is this? I do not know. Perhaps the time of the Iraq war, but maybe this was a different car journey) I once came out with the statement (which was not particularly naive especially) “I think God exists, how did we all get here otherwise”. Me, my sister that is two years older than me, my mum and dad, were on the road from Auchmuir Bridge towards Stirling around Loch Leven, the loch in Fife, Scotland, on which Mary Queen of Scots was held on an island. I have an image of a memory of going there as well. It is thus, however, that I (re)member the initiation into a different vision of the universe and everything. Yet it is a state clearly pleated bewilderingly. As an event it exists in what Deleuze and Guattari term a “rhizome, a burrow”, with “flights of escape” which have no beginnings or ends, mere initialities and finalities. 3 3 They talk of this in many places. See Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Felix , Anti‐Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia , ( London and New York : Continuum, 2004 ); Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Felix , Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature , Dana Polan trans., ( Minneapolis and London : University of Minnesota Press, 1986 ). For Deleuze alone also see Deleuze, Gilles , The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque , Tom Conley trans. ( London : The Athlone Press, 1993 ).
This is strange. It is not a polemic, nor does it have an explicit argument, except perhaps to ask the question that always dances on a pinhead – as Bohumil Hrabal once put it, “Pirouettes on a Postage Stamp” 4 4 Hrabal, Bohumil , Pirouettes on a Postage Stamp .
– is there any escape? I think I sang “All Things Bright and Beautiful” at my Gran's funeral, but it might have been something else. We stopped in the house of the priest and watched England lose the Cricket World Cup in 1999; they played in blue. That's how I (re)member the year of my Gran's funeral. The church I used to go to burned down. Arson, I think.     

Crafting the Neoliberal State: Workfare,Prisonfare, and Social Insecurity1

In Punishing the Poor, I show that the ascent of the penal state in the United States and other advanced societies over the past quarter‐century is a response to rising social insecurity, not criminal insecurity; that changes in welfare and justice policies are interlinked, as restrictive “workfare” and expansive “prisonfare” are coupled into a single organizational contraption to discipline the precarious fractions of the postindustrial working class; and that a diligent carceral system is not a deviation from, but a constituent component of, the neoliberal Leviathan. In this article, I draw out the theoretical implications of this diagnosis of the emerging government of social insecurity. I deploy Bourdieu’s concept of “bureaucratic field” to revise Piven and Cloward’s classic thesis on the regulation of poverty via public assistance, and contrast the model of penalization as technique for the management of urban marginality to Michel Foucault’s vision of the “disciplinary society,” David Garland’s account of the “culture of control,” and David Harvey’s characterization of neoliberal politics. Against the thin economic conception of neoliberalism as market rule, I propose a thick sociological specification entailing supervisory workfare, a proactive penal state, and the cultural trope of “individual responsibility.” This suggests that we must theorize the prison not as a technical implement for law enforcement, but as a core political capacity whose selective and aggressive deployment in the lower regions of social space violates the ideals of democratic citizenship.