Global Futures in East Asia: Youth, Nation, and the New Economy in Uncertain Times (Contemporary Issues in Asia and Pacific) (31 page)

Notes

1
. For example, the story appeared in
The Straight Times
(Singapore) and
Reuters
. An Internet search produces three pages of reports on the school.

2
. See Yan (2003) for an analysis of the operation of neoliberalism in the process of migrant labor recruitment. A prominent character of neoliberalism in China is a strong state involvement in marketization and privatization. Those who are troubled by the seeming incongruence between the strong party-state and neoliberal reform in China might find a useful comparison in Graham Harrison’s analysis of the neoliberal project in Africa, which demonstrates that “those states that have (relatively) succeeded in implementing neo-liberal foundations have relied on distinctly non-liberal forms of politics to do so” (Harrison 2007: 98). David Harvey (2005, 2006) shows that the illiberal politics of neoliberal reforms are not so exceptional after all.

3
. According to
www.nhkint.or.jp/us/history_e.html
(accessed on May 15, 2007), the drama series was shown in more than fifty countries and regions. In April 2007, the drama was rebroadcast by the Hunan Satellite TV with a high reception rate.

4
. Hayek’s ideas about the power of the market as a rational ordering force were considered eccentric until Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan brought them into mainstream respectability.

5
. Not coincidentally, battleground and survival games have become a common trope in Japan that figures ominously in Japan’s anxiety about its future global competitiveness (Arai 2003).

6
. Note here the echoes of how the South Korean state marks out categories of the deserving and undeserving poor, as discussed by Jesook Song in Chapter Ten of this volume.

7
. See Perry and Welkos 2007 on audience reception of the Hollywood film
300
, which celebrates an ideal militarism embodied by ancient Spartans.

8
. A search using “West Point” as the keyword in the China Academic Journals Full-Text Database turns out 419 articles from 1979 to 2006. Of those articles, 398, or 95 percent, were published between 1994 and 2006 (retrieved on June 25, 2007 from the China Academic Journals Full-Text Database).

9
. Derrida’s critique on reason and rhetoric through the hyphenated concept-metaphor might be very useful here. In “White Mythology” (1974), Derrida critiqued the classical opposition between concept and metaphor, in which the concept seeks an essential or truthful relationship between the Mind and the World, while metaphor is a linguistic relationship within language that sets up an analogy between two entities. The concept is at the center of metaphysics while the metaphor is at the margin and is “admissible in philosophy, but only to the extent that it promises a return, with augmented resources, to the literality of the concept”
(Harrison
1999: 513). Derrida’s project is to show that “metaphysical discourse is derivative from (
reléve de
) metaphor, not what is left over when—impossibly—language has been purged of all trace of metaphor, periphrasis, and ellipsis” (Harrison 1999: 516). In the context of our discussion, Derrida’s critique is ironically paralleled by military-corporate executives who endeavor to show that the two are not metaphors for each other but are spheres that increasingly interpenetrate each other.

10
. CCTV, “The Story behind Luo Zhongli’s ‘Father’
” (
Luo Zhongli ‘Fuqin’ bei-hou de gushi
), October 16–17, 2007; retrieved on November 20, 2010, from
http://longquanzs.org/articledetail.php?id=12998
. The painting is now in the collection of the National Art Museum of China and can be viewed at
www.namoc.org/en/Collection/200902/t20090205_66388.html
(retrieved on June 13, 2012).

11
. CCTV International, “Luo Zhongli—Days in the Daba Mountains” (
Luo Zhongli: dabashan de rizi
), September 27, 2003; retrieved on November 20, 2010, from
www.cctv.com/west/20030927/100316.shtml
.

12
. See Su Ning, “Retell the Story of Father” (
Chongsu fuqin de gushi
), October 31, 2002; retrieved on July 4, 2007, from
www.filmsea.com.cn/newsreel/commentator/200210310034.htm
.

13
. For the constitution of the intellectual identity, see Barlow 1991; for intellectuals in the 1980s Enlightenment, see Wang 1996; for the relationship between intellectuals and workers, see Rofel 1994.

14
. See Zhu 1998 and Gu 2001. Zhu (1998, especially chapter 2) details the discursive formation of humanism and the defensive position of Marxist class theory in the 1980s.

15
. See Barlow’s critique of market feminism (2004: 253–301).

16
. “Volunteerism” in the Mao era refers to collective willpower that can overcome daunting material constraints. This thesis came to the ultimate test during the Great Leap Forward, in which millions of peasants were mobilized for massive projects to build the rural infrastructure. This mass mobilization was caught up short by three years of famine (1959–1962), exacerbated in part by the redirection of rural labor from grain production to dam building. A significant number of people died of hunger. This history is important for understanding the irony that I note here. If Maoism is dismissed as voluntarist, market humanism is no less so, but in ways that have become “decollectivized”!

17
. Pazderic, in
Chapter 5
of this volume, shows how the smile figures in the creation of embodied capital in Taiwan as well.

18
. See
http://blog.wespoke.com/archives/000655.php
(last retrieved on June 27, 2007; the URL is no longer active).

Chapter
Seven

Notes to the Heart

New Lessons in National Sentiment and Sacrifice from Recessionary Japan

ANDREA G. ARAI

In 1882 the French theologian Ernest Renan wrote “What Is a Nation?” in which he set out “to analyze an idea which, though seemingly clear, lends itself to the most dangerous misunderstandings” (Renan 1996: 42). In this seminal essay, Renan argues that, in the association of the nation and nationality with the natural and inevitable outgrowth of former dynastic realms, the historical novelty and the affective power of national identifications had been mostly overlooked. His poignant intervention was to redirect attention to the nation as a new relationship of sentiment—or what he called a “soul, a spiritual principle” (1996: 52). Born of the obligatory processes of “forgetting” and “remembering,” the nation is the result of the singular stitching together of a rich legacy of memories, or rather, remembering only the things that bond and the present-day consent that is born of forgetting to remember the differences and inequalities that are inevitable in the formation of nations. As the culmination of sentiment and sacrifice, the “large-scale solidarity” we know as the nation is regenerated through a “daily plebiscite,” or habit of “remembering to forget and forgetting to remember” the endeavors, sacrifices, and acts of devotion made in the past and those that one is prepared to make in the future (Renan 1996: 53).

Nearly a century later, Benedict Anderson returned to Renan’s discussion of the deep attachments and colossal sacrifices generated by the nation in an effort to locate the birth of this new sentiment and sacrifice within the larger
context
of capitalist modernity. Through his notion of “imagined communities,” Anderson uncovered the particular technologies of remembering to forget and forgetting to remember—technologies such as print capitalism and other forms of mechanical reproduction that made it possible to imagine commonality and camaraderie with fellow citizens that one is not likely to ever meet (Anderson 2006). For Anderson, these contradictory and necessarily repetitive habits of the nation that result in sentiment and sacrifice in common are historically contingent and modular; that is, within changing historical conditions, across national contexts, and as a result of the pressures that these differing national contexts place on each other, the means of regenerating this affective tie for a national citizenry may shift.

This has never been more evident than in a statement written by Takahashi Tetsuya, a well-known scholar of war memory, in reference to Japan in one of his lesser-known works,
Hearts and War
(
Kokoro to Senso
): “These days, even if you wanted to reproduce the spirit of the prewar period, it would not be possible. And, by the way, this is not what is needed today” (2003: 12). What is at stake is precisely this shifting basis for an affective relationship between citizen and nation.

The context in which Takahashi is writing is a nation in crisis—Japan in the early twenty-first century—and it is this sense of crisis that would seem to compel a shift in the forms and requisites of the rituals of forgetting and remembering. Following a decade of severe economic downturns, beginning with the bursting of the first of the real estate and stock market bubbles of the early 1990s, the Japanese economy contracted to almost half its former size, resulting in what Carl Cassegard (2008: 10) has called the “collapse of the self-complacent space of Japan.” Along with major reforms and restructurings of the economy that radically changed the structure of labor and education, the new recessionary context brought with it a profound anxiety about the naturalness of the imagined community of the Japanese nation and the ability of its youngest members to participate in the habits of forgetting and remembering that had naturalized national sacrifice and devotion and that had defined the will of their parents’ generation to labor almost without limits.

The impossible return of prewar spirit referenced in the preceding paragraphs is concerned with a particular moment of this recessionary context at the conclusion of 2006. In December of that year the Abe government succeeded in revising the Fundamental Law of Education (
kyouiku kihonhou
),
which
was often referred to as “the educational constitution” for its close association with the postwar peace constitution of 1947. Therefore, this “prewar” spirit is a reference to an even earlier law, the nineteenth-century Imperial Rescript on Education (
kyouiku chokugo
), which had been revoked during the American Occupation of Japan because of its emphases on patriotism, the family-state, and the figure of the Japanese emperor as symbols of the antiquity and sacredness of the national community. With the revocation of the Imperial Rescript, education, which had been one of the chief arenas of the inculcation of national spirit and devotion in the period leading to Japan’s role in the Pacific War, was stripped of its imperial symbolism. The 1947 postwar education law replaced a discourse of duty with a discourse of rights. It became the focus of both progressive leadership as well as continued contestation on the part of conservatives from the middle to the late twentieth century, as the Japanese nation continued to wrestle with the conflicts and contradictions of its modern nationhood.

As justification for overturning the 1947 Fundamental Law of Education in 2006, the Japanese government targeted the putative deterioration of the sentiment of sacrifice for the nation among the youth. Similar concerns about the youth of Japan had been made repeatedly over the course of Japan’s modern history. However, following a decade of recession and economic crisis, as Japan saw itself losing its hard-won position as a model modernizer, these claims took on a new and powerful valence. Worldwide representations of Japan during the previous half century had portrayed it as a “modernizing miracle”—miraculous because the Japanese had become modern while “keeping their culture.” In other words, it was said by foreigners and Japanese alike that Japan had been able to modernize while remaining different, and this difference was endowed with the charisma of economic success. This is precisely what lay in ruins as the recessionary economy of the 1990s stubbornly refused to end.

Takahashi entered the education debates when it became clear that the Japanese public and its elected officials could be, for the first time in over half a century, persuaded into undoing a historical legacy by failing to remember what they were about to lose and by being unaware of what forms of control might be instituted in its place. In
Hearts and War
, he focuses on the difference between the prewar period and the present in terms of the form and atmosphere of ideological control and its relation to the larger international
context of each period. He points out how forms of pedagogy can be and have been used to restrict, police, and produce a military mind-set.

While the question of national spirit has again moved to the center of national debate, Takahashi argues that the claims of both Japanese conservatives and progressives are misguided with regard to the articulation of this spirit in the revised education law. The 2006 revisions to the Fundamental Law of Education are neither a simple return to the prewar education law (
kyouiku chokugo
), as progressives bemoan, nor are they a simple reinstating of the spirit of sacrifice and the values that underwrote the postwar social and political order, as conservatives hope for. In writing that “this (spirit) is not what is needed today,” Takahashi draws our attention to how these revisions and the focus on the heart constitute a new affective relationship to the nation that is in the making. This focus brings him to the conclusion that prewar forms of governance are no longer viable in a Japan that can no longer offer its citizens the guarantees, public protections, and the kinds of direct national management that undergirded the postwar economic order.

In this chapter, I argue that these discourses of “love” and “heart” that have (re)emerged so strongly in the recessionary context of Japan are vehicles for subjectification “by other means.”
1
It is this
other means
that concerns me here as I historicize and extend critically the way that individualizing techniques of power meet up with anxieties of national fashioning in the Japanese context past and present. The foregrounding of “love” (for the nation) and “heart” represent long-standing and unresolved issues of the relationship between national reproduction and the pressures of global competition. Together, they have produced a new focus on where new frontiers of value production can be found, where transformation must happen, and where the new responsibility for these changes will lie.