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Liberal Thoughts |
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Volume 1, Number 6
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â´Â Dr.Patrick Jory (´Ã.¾ÅÒʵԡ ¨ØÃÕ)
It is often said that Japan is the only country in the world to have achieved modernity on its own terms, without the associated Westernization of its society and culture. Japan’s former Vice-Minister for International Finance, Sakakibara Eisuke, once famously claimed (in more optimistic economic times) that Japan had succeeded in developing its own form of capitalism, distinct from and superior to, Western capitalism. Such claims have raised the fundamental theoretical issue of Japan as “different”: that is, the distinctive nature of Japanese modernity is a challenge to the Western master narratives of modernization and capitalist development, which plot the nations of the world into the same stages of “becoming” - modern, developed, capitalist. Japan’s difference thus offers the possibility of multiple modernities. The exploration of the notion of difference is the subject of John Clammer’s new book, Japan and Its Others: Globalization, Difference and the Critique of Modernity.
For those who have no background in Japanese studies this book is still of intellectual value - especially for those interested in contemporary Asian cultural studies. For scholars of Thai studies the book can be read with Thailand in mind, since superficially at least, Thailand and Japan, despite the vast gulf between the two countries in terms of economic and social development, share a great many similarities. Both societies have been deeply influenced by Buddhism. The premodern economies of both Japan and Thailand were substantially based upon wet rice cultivation. Each society has a long tradition of animistic religious practice deriving from a dependence on the natural environment and particularly wet rice cultivation (in the case of Japan, the animistic tradition has been formalized as “Shinto”). Both societies escaped direct colonial rule which, arguably, has ensured a greater continuity of social and cultural patterns. And both countries are constitutional monarchies whose monarchs have played significant political and cultural roles in the modern era (although the premodern role of the Japanese monarchy is considerably different to that of Thailand). Moreover, both societies have taken the path of capitalist economic development. Thailand is today an avid consumer of contemporary Japanese popular culture - from manga and anime to J-Pop music, clothing and body fashion, and video games. And as in Japan, discourses of difference are not only a central preoccupation of Thai social scientists but also a popular theme of public debate. They are, moreover, fundamental to Thai notions of cultural identity in an age of Western global economic and intellectual hegemony.
The book is a compilation of ten articles written by Clammer in recent years. There are chapters on the concept of difference and the place of the “Other” in Japanese society, in particular the West (the book-cover depicts a Western mannequin used as a scarecrow in a Japanese rice paddy). One chapter analyses debates about modernity and postmodernity, and the claim that Japan is the only true “postmodern” society in the world today. There is an interesting reassessment of the on-going Nihonjinron or “Japanese uniqueness” debate in Japan (which bears strong similarities to discourses of àÍ¡Åѡɳìä·Â/¤ÇÒÁà»ç¹ä·Â in Thailand), which suggests that some of the less politicized versions of Nihonjinron may act as “a healthy corrective to Eurocentric hegemony in social theory” (p.68). Another chapter examines the neglected subject of the “political economy of the emotions” in Japanese capitalism, and in particular the influence on the emotions of popular culture and consumerism. Three chapters focus on the “Others” within Japan: migrant workers, and how their the ambiguous position in Japan challenges Japanese notions of self; the Christian community and how its culturally alien cosmology marginalizes it from mainstream Japanese society; and the Jews, another historic “Other”, and the curious interest they attract in Japan. “Development from the East” looks at the distinctive nature of Japanese development anthropology and its search for a non-Western discourse of development. In this chapter Clammer delivers a well-deserved rebuke to orthodox development anthropogy and its role in the service of development economics. The final chapter explores Japan’s “native cosmology” in the form of the animistic Shinto tradition. Clammer suggests that a reconsideration of Japanese animist epistemology may have much to offer to contemporary thinking about human relations with nature, particularly in light of current debates regarding the spiritual aspects of the environment.
Despite this eclectic selection of articles there are enough common themes running through the book to give it coherence. One of the most interesting is Clammer’s identification of alternative notions of the self in Japan, a major area for the exploration of difference from the West. The influence in Japan of the Buddhist theory of “non-self” (͹ѵµÒ) (and, to a lesser extent, ideas of self and nature in Shinto) challenges one of the fundamental principles of Western epistemology, which has links to the modern concept of the “individual”. Clammer goes on to question,
Western philosophical assumptions […] which link individuality, autonomy […] and the possession of an essence (a permanent core of being) into a seamless whole in a way very distinct from the images of personhood found in many Asian societies, especially in India, China and Japan […] It is from this conception of the person that much of the modern Western political project (its universalism, concern with liberty and with rights) stems. A particular image of the world - globalist, inclusive and democratic has emerged according to this hypothesis directly from Christianity
Other central ideas in Buddhist discourse, including the alternative theory of causation known as “dependent arising” (»¯Ô¨¨ÊÑÁÁØ»ºÒ·), “nothingness” (ÊصÒ), the rejection of monotheism, the theory of impermanence (͹Ԩ¨Ñ§), reincarnation (ÇѯʧÊÒÃ) and the absence of a linear progress of historical development, are all deeply alien to the Judaeo-Christian tradition. For Clammer the existence of such fundamental epistemological differences offers considerable potential for the development of alternative, “indigenous” social sciences which would overcome their current Eurocentric bias, an issue which has long been a concern of the Japanese academic community. This potential is not restricted solely to the Japanese social science enterprise. Clammer cites the work of the Thai public intellectual Sulak Sivaraksa as one example of an alternative social critique from a Buddhist perspective. Another is the emergence of “post-Confucian” social theory in Chinese speaking societies (pp. 73-4), which, one would assume, is likely to attract more attention with the increased discursive presence of mainland Chinese social scientists in such debates.
Another dimension to Clammer’s interest in the Japanese self is his exploration of the construction of subjectivities by Japan’s “hyper-consumer culture” (p.72), a subject he has already written on extensively in his earlier works, Difference and Modernity: Social Theory and Contemporary Japanese Society (1995), and Contemporary Urban Japan: A Sociology of Consumption (1997). “Consumer capitalism”, Clammer writes,
creates new subjectivities. It does so by shaping taste, desire and images of things, services, places, and foods; and through its impact on concepts of the perfect body via ideas of diet, health and fitness, body shape, colour and decoration (p.104)… Identities are in other words largely formed through consumption, and things, places, and activities that formerly fell outside the consumption nexus are rapidly assimilated into it once they are discovered by the system as exploitable new fads (p.105)
The hyper-consumerism characteristic of Japanese capitalism today thus has the effect of progressively loosening Japanese subjectivities from the former influence of alternative discourses on the construction of the self, including those discourses deriving from the family, the education system, religious traditions, and the state. Clammer draws attention to the importance of the burgeoning field of popular culture - contemporary print media, TV, film, pop music, dance fads, popular literature (especially comics or manga), science fiction, theatre and drama, advertising, merchandising, sport, street art, body art, fashion, electronic games, etc. - to any examination of the contemporary shaping of Asian subjectivity, especially among the youth.
Another fruitful area for investigation raised by Clammer, not just for Japanese studies but potentially for the cultural and environmental study of Asia generally, are the alternative discourses about humanity’s relations with the natural world. Again, Clammer identifies important epistemological differences between Japan and the West as the source for a potential critique of dominant development discourses. The separation of “the social and the natural” and of mind and body, two key ideas in the Western tradition, have, according to Clammer, no parallel in Japan, at least until quite recently (pp. 60, 170). In traditional Japanese cosmology, writes Clammer, “the boundaries between human/natural/divine are extremely permeable” (p.226). Central to these key differences is the influence not only of Buddhism but also Shinto, the animistic tradition of Japan. Despite being one of the most important cultural well- springs for most of Asia, animism is still poorly understood compared to the much more studied and better known “universal” religious or philosophical systems of Buddhism, Islam, Christianity, and Confucianism. The “depressingly narrow-minded reading of animism” (p.220) characteristic of nineteenth century European anthropology regarded it as a “primitive” stage of religion, of interest only in terms of the evolution of religion, and destined for extinction. Hostility towards animism is a feature common to most of the “universal” religions, particularly the monotheistic traditions.1 Coinciding with the emergence of industrial capitalism and economistic discourses of development in the modern era the state joined the attack. Animism became branded as “superstition”, based on “ignorance” that should be replaced - especially via mass compulsory education - with scientific, rational thought. Only in Japan was Shinto officially retained as an indigenous tradition, although, as Clammer points out, in many respects Shinto was shorn of much of its original meaning by the Japanese state during the Meiji era, particularly its association with local identity and discourses of nature.
Yet reconsidering animism’s status as an indigenous discourse (or more correctly, multiple indigenous discourses) about humanity’s relations with the natural world, as many Japanese intellectuals have recently been doing, may help to address the issue of the contemporary alienation of industrial man from nature. “Animistic beliefs”, claims Clammer, “are […] functional to the preservation of the ecology” (p. 222) - but that is not all. Animism imbues the landscape with meaning. Animism’s contribution to local systems of meaning can also explain why land rights struggles throughout the world appear so intractable, since the conflict is not simply over land or resource use but between indigenous “ontologies” of local communities and the “rationalizing” paradigm of the state (pp.230-1).
Despite over a century of colonization, industrialization, and urbanization, animistic traditions still thrive in Southeast Asia (in Thailand, more so than most places), and not always with official disapproval. In China, with the demise of the historical materialist perspectives of Chinese Marxism, popular religion is making a strong comeback. As Clammer shows, “Animism connects with a whole field of issues that have merged or been discovered in the contemporary cultural scene - concern with selfhood, the body, death, animal liberation, dreams, alternative medicine, organic farming, macrobiotics and meditation...” (p.239). To this one could further add the key issues in contemporary Asia of political decentralization, local control over resource use, the opening up of space for local cultural expression, and even religious tolerance, as a corrective to exclusivist religious fundamentalism and universalism of all kinds.
How different is Japan, or “Asia” for that matter? What is the nature of that difference? And what is the significance of that difference for contemporary social and cultural studies? This is a book rich with ideas, many of which are applicable to other fields in the study of Asia. Many of Clammer’s propositions are certainly open to contestation - the book does not claim to be a systematic exposition of contemporary Japanese culture. But in his exploration of the theme of difference Clammer’s book should at the very least draw attention to and stimulate debate on some of the most important questions in contemporary Asian cultural studies.
1 Certain American missionary organizations working with tribal groups in Thailand, for example, still speak of turning the people away from “demonic worship” towards the “true path” of Jesus Christ. Of Thai religious belief generally the “BGC Missions in Thailand” website advises us that, “The word “Thai” means “free,” and the Thai are very proud of having never been colonized like the nations around them. Spiritually, however, the Thai are not free. For centuries they have followed the teachings of the Buddhist religion and are now in great bondage to its beliefs, as well as to spirit appeasement and occult practices.[my italics]” See http://www.bgcworld.org/cplantin/thland.htm
