Seyla Benhabib 'The Claims of Culture: Equality and Diversity in the Global Era' Comments from the viewpoint of Japanese Studies
by Dr. Susanne Klien
As regards Benhabib’s elaborations on equality and diversity in the global era, her argument against the "purity of cultures, or even (in) the possibility of identifying them as meaningful discrete wholes" and her plea for the recognition of the "radical hybridity and polyvocality of all cultures" seems convincing, if inconvenient. After all, we have all come across dubious constructions of ethnic homogeneity in our individual fields of study.
Apart from the fact that I find the jargon hard to read and unnecessarily abstract and complex Benhabib’s paper holds some minor logical incoherence: The author uses the term of "universalism" in the title of Chapter 2 (p. 24), but explains the term only two pages later. I find it difficult to cope with this rather unusual structure of introducing a term without immediately defining it. But on the whole, Benhabib’s introduction into the etymological derivation of "culture" is useful as well as her explanations of the relation between "culture" and "civilization" and her comments about differing understandings of culture. With regard to Benhabib’s view of culture as "complex human practices of signification and representation, of organization and attribution, which are internally riven by conflicting narratives", I can only agree. After all, in the case of Japan, the homogeneity of its culture has been claimed over and over again. In many ways one could say that Japan constitutes an antipode to the anthropological view of the democratic equality of all cultural forms of expression since there is so much emphasis on uniqueness in the national discourse. There is a phenomenon called "nihonjinron" (theories of the Japanese), or discourse of Japanese uniqueness, which
"refers to the sort of publications, visual presentation and oral lecturing that are produced or performed in journalism, academia, schools and so forth, and has an obsessive focus on the unique and exceptional features of the ethnic Japanese. It purports to explain to the Japanese as well to the non-Japanese audience in terms of cultural traits how unique and distinctive the Japanese are as an ethnicity" (Encyclopaedia of Contemporary Japanese Culture, Sandra Buckley (ed.), Routledge 2002, p. 365-6).The authors of Nihonjinron are mostly Japanese, but it has also been written and lectured about by non-Japanese authors such as the US anthropologist Ruth Benedict, who wrote The Chrysanthemum and the Sword in 1946, a study of characteristic Japanese traits such as group consciousness and the power of giri or obligation and haji or shame as sources of social discipline. Another well-known Western representative is Peter N. Dale, who has been known for his The Myth of Japanese Uniqueness. Nihonjinron draws upon various disciplines such as sociology, anthropology, national literature studies, linguistics and philosophy, but commonly this genre is not necessarily consistent with regard to logical structure. Due to the lack of critical precision in this discourse, there are a number of unexamined assumptions which form the basis for "Japanese uniqueness." First, the homogeneity of the Japanese as a group must be beyond doubt in order to construct a credible ethnic-national identity. Second, the assumption is generally that the ethnic Japanese share a national culture. Being Japanese implies internalising such a national culture. Third, the unity of Japanese national culture is supposed to correspond to the unity of Japanese language. Thus, the structure of the Japanese language is assumed to reflect the structure of the Japanese culture and vice versa.
The Japanese are unique mostly in contrast to the West; Japanese culture is predominantly identified in comparison with assumed traits of the West. In other words, this discourse is a classical case of identity construction, being an example of Benhabib’s claim that cultures are formed through complex dialogues with other cultures and of the fact that self is only self because it distinguishes itself from the "other(s)". What is more, the national Japanese discourse often reproduces stereotypical images conceived of Japan by the West, a phenomenon referred to as "auto-Orientalism", examples being theories stated by Japanese authors about assumedly unique Japanese ways of communication by way of empathy and intuition which are claimed to be inaccessible to Westerners.
To come back to the construction of ethnic homogeneity, in 1986 then Prime Minister Nakasone Yasuhiro controversially argued that the absence of ethnic minorities in Japan for the past 2000 years made it easier for Japan to evolve into an ’intelligent society’. Needless to say, that Nakasone’s claim led to protests by representatives of Ainu, an indigenous people whose traditional territory includes the northern island of Hokkaido, and resident Korean groups. It is true that since the early 1980s, there has been growing immigration of foreign migrants to Japan, and due to this, there has been an increasing consciousness of cultural diversity. It was also in the 1980s that the term "kokusaika" or internationalization became a popular slogan in Japan. This word has a wide variety of meanings in all areas one could possibly think of, ranging from "the expansion of the movement across national boundaries of goods, capital, information, people, and culture as the totality of these" (Japanese Economic Planning Agency) to "a process of opening Japan’s heart to the outside world" (Ryuhei Hatsuse of Kobe University). Kokusaika can be interpreted as change in the domestic system in a great variety of meanings. "Globalization" has displaced "internationalization" in the mean time. Despite the continuing popularity of this notion in commercials and everyday life, Japan is evidently far from a multicultural society, and the "us"-"them" awareness vis-à-vis foreigners is still quite strong among large parts of the Japanese population. This tendency to see the world in binary terms has also been described as the "sakoku mentality", sakoku meaning secluded nation, a reference to Japan’s geographic isolation as an island nation and to the national seclusion policy of the Tokugawa Shogunate between 1639 and 1868. The geographic position is indisputable but with regard to the national seclusion, there is increasing debate about its true scope, with more material being discovered that demonstrates economic and political exchange during that period.
An interesting example of Japanese globalization may be the case of the contemporary Japanese photographer Hiroshi Sugimoto. Born after World War II, Sugimoto was educated both in Japan and the United States. He has travelled around the world creating portraits not of people of buildings or even landscapes but of seascapes, portraits of the world’s water. These works are entirely without national identification, but he makes ironical allusions by calling them "Ionic Sea" or "North Japanese Sea" and the like. On the other hand, however, Sugimoto also likes to draw on overtly Japanese motives in his art. He made a video from stills of the innumerable Buddhist figures filling the main temple hall of Kyoto’s Sanjusangendo. It is interesting to note, however, that by the end of the video, the images of these calm faces follow one another more and more quickly, accelerating until the distinctions among the faces dissolve. Sugimoto’s works can thus be seen as moving between the national and the global. It seems that, as Julia Adeney Thomas points out in her paper "Global culture in question: Contemporary Japanese photography in America", contrary to Arjun Appadurai’s argument (among others) that "we are entering a postnational world" the insistence on "Japaneseness" prevails, something which may be due both to the artists themselves as well as marketing needs.
To come back to Benhabib’s understanding of the local/global dynamics, I fully agree that we should view human cultures as "constant creations, recreations and negotiations of imaginary boundaries between "we" and the "other(s)". The problem is only what scholarly approach to take in trying to grasp it! To sum up my comments, her observations relate to highly interesting issues but sound somewhat trite. Besides, there are no evident conclusions from her elaborations. Even if cultures are hybrid, she does not follow up on this, which is rather unsatisfactory for the reader.