Ethnicity and Culture in Contemporary Japan

Abstract

Ethnic and racial discrimination in contemporary Japan is a problem of national identity. Japanese national identity, in turn, is the product of a historical process of state formation and re-formation that occurred over the course of several centuries within the context of East Asian geopolitics. Central to Japanese conceptions of national identity is a myth of ethnic homogeneity and cultural, even physiological, uniqueness. This myth links national identity and ethnic issues in contemporary Japan. It protects Japanese society from overt ethnic conflict because it forces minorities, through the organizations that represent them, to choose between ethnic abnegation and the purgatory of institutionalized 'otherness'. My aim in this article is to provide a brief overview of the current situation of Japanese minority groups, with an emphasis on the ideological denudation of non-Japanese identities by the state and society. I shall not devote much attention to the myth of Japanese homogeneity per se, as manifested in the so-called Nihonjinron ('studies of the Japanese people') literature, as other scholars have already done that quite thoroughly.' Rather, the article will provide a framework in which both the tenacity of the myth of Japanese homogeneity and the persistence of ethnic and racial discrimination can better be understood. Japanese homogeneity has never been static. As the ethnic boundaries of Japan expand and contract, the qualities that constitute 'Japanese homogeneity' change. A recent move to reinterpret the indigenous Ainu culture of Hokkaido as the essence of Japaneseness illustrates this point clearly, as we shall see below. But because the shifting content of Japanese culture is constantly reformulated as timeless ethnic and cultural essence, the myth of Japanese homogeneity has remained impervious to subversion from within.