Anthropology of Japan

Japan in Australia is a work of cultural history that focuses on context and connection between two nations. It examines how Japan has been imagined, represented and experienced in the Australian context through a variety of settings, historical periods and circumstances.

Beginning with the first recorded contacts between Australians and Japanese in the nineteenth century, the chapters focus on ‘people to people’ narratives and the myriad multi-dimensional ways the two countries are interconnected: from sporting diplomacy to woodblock printing, from artistic metaphors to iconic pop imagery, from the tragedy of war to engagement in peace movements, from technology transfer to community arts. Tracing the trajectory of this 150-year relationship provides an example of how history can turn from fear, enmity and misunderstanding through war, foreign encroachment and the legacy of conflict, to close and intimate connections that result in cultural enrichment and diversification.

This book explores notions of Australia and ‘Australianness’ and Japan and ‘Japanessness’, to better reflect on the cultural fusion that is contemporary Australia and build the narrative of the Japan-Australia relationship. It will be of interest to academics in the field of Asian, Japanese and Japanese-Pacific studies.

This article provides an analysis of the relation between tourists' experiences, affect, and bodily perceptions, together with processes of remembering and forgetting, focusing on (dark) touristic practices in haunted places in contemporary Japan. It highlights the social features of oblivion, processes in the creation of memories and discourses of war, and their entanglement in the "meshwork" that constitutes a particular place. I draw on ethnographic data of a guided ghost tour that visits Kiyotaki Tunnel, one of the most renowned haunted places in Kyoto. I describe tourists' experiences, analyze the rumors about the haunting, and show that, among the locals, memories of the death of and discrimination against Korean laborers in the tunnel were strategically forgotten. Yet, these memories were "unearthed," appropriated and spread on the internet by visitors, attracted by the haunting. I point out that haunted places emerge as "affective meshworks" primarily as a result of bodily correspondences with affordances in the environment, rather than from narrative and belief, and that (dark) touristic practices can contribute to the construction of new discourses, thus unsettling power relationships. I argue that a focus on affect in shaping meshworks of bodies, environments, memories, and discourses through (dark) touristic practices, can provide an understanding of the experiences of visitors to places related to war and death, and that visitors contribute to the construction of new memories and discourses.

Soka Gakkai is Japan’s largest and most influential new religious organization: It claims more than 8 million Japanese households and close to 2 million members in 192 countries and territories. The religion is best known for its affiliated political party, Komeito (the Clean Government Party), which comprises part of the ruling coalition in Japan’s National Diet, and it exerts considerable influence in education, media, finance, and other key areas.

Levi McLaughlin’s comprehensive account of Soka Gakkai draws on nearly two decades of archival research and non-member fieldwork to account for its institutional development beyond Buddhism and suggest how we should understand the activities and dispositions of its adherents. McLaughlin explores the group’s Nichiren Buddhist origins and turns to insights from religion, political science, anthropology, and cultural studies to characterize Soka Gakkai as mimetic of the nation-state. Ethnographic vignettes combine with historical evidence to demonstrate ways Soka Gakkai’s twin Buddhist and modern humanist legacies inform the organization’s mimesis of the modern Japan in which the group took shape. To make this argument, McLaughlin analyzes Gakkai sources heretofore untreated in English-language scholarship; provides a close reading of the serial novel The Human Revolution, which serves the Gakkai as both history and de facto scripture; identifies ways episodes from members’ lives form new chapters in its growing canon; and contributes to discussions of religion and gender as he chronicles the lives of members who simultaneously reaffirm generational transmission of Gakkai devotion as they pose challenges for the organization’s future.

Readers looking for analyses of the nation-state and strategies for understanding New Religions and modern Buddhism will find Soka Gakkai’s Human Revolution to be an especially thought-provoking study that offers widely applicable theoretical models.

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In my visits to what are known in Japan as karaoke classrooms and kissas (a bar/café hybrid) in 2013 and 2016, I watched (and participated in) how elderly karaoke enthusiasts regularly came to sing with and charm each other, defying popular images of old age as a time of doom and gloom. Their common participation centered on enka and kayōkyoku, popular music genres with heavy romantic elements considered outdated by most Japanese today. As Bennett (2012) and Koizumi (2013) argue, popular music matters as a cultural resource through which older people can negotiate personal and collective identities as they age, via aesthetic understandings and social relationships stemming from musical engagements termed “musicking” by Small (1998). In this paper, I explore how and why regular musicking at karaoke classrooms and kissas enabled these elderly karaoke enthusiasts to experience romantic affection. I analyze such musicking activities through the conceptual lens of “serious leisure” elaborated by Stebbins (2015), to highlight the emotional and time investments characterizing regular karaoke participation, which influence the individual and social aspects everyday elderly lives. Through this investigation into elderly musical engagements and romantic affect, I describe the unique modes of karaoke engagement that encourage these elderly men and women to become romantically attracted to each other, and develop intimate emotional and even physical connections. This research is thus significant in addressing the hitherto under-examined issues of intimacy and romance in later life. By portraying livelier possibilities for elderly life through leisure activities, I contend that aging is not simply a demographic crisis to be solved, but an integral process in life that can be negotiated proactively.

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In my visits to what are known in Japan as karaoke classrooms and kissas (a bar/café hybrid) in 2013 and 2016, I watched (and participated in) how elderly karaoke enthusiasts regularly came to sing, chat and laugh with each other, defying popular images of old age as a time of doom and gloom. Their common participation centered on the genres of enka and kayōkyoku, considered outdated by most Japanese today. As Bennett (2012) and Koizumi (2013) argue, popular music matters as a cultural resource through which older people can negotiate personal and collective identities as they age, via the aesthetic understandings and social relationships stemming from musical engagements termed “musicking” by Small (1998). In this paper, I explore how and why regular musicking at karaoke classrooms and kissas enabled these elderly karaoke enthusiasts to construct a purposeful and fulfilling sense of time (or ikigai in Japanese; Mathews 1996) in old age. I analyze such musicking activities through the conceptual lens of “serious leisure” elaborated by Stebbins (2015), to highlight the emotional and time investments characterizing regular karaoke participation, which influence the individual and social aspects of the elderly participants’ biographies and current everyday lives. Through this investigation into the hitherto under-explored fields of elderly musical engagements and temporalities, I argue that elderly karaoke enthusiasts construct complex musical meanings and senses of time, which go beyond existing understandings focusing solely on nostalgic remembrance or the sensualities of the moment of musical experience. Instead, they fluidly traverse and negotiate ideas of the past, present and future through karaoke, in creating individually and socially fulfilling time in old age. Such an understanding of the temporality of elderly karaoke participation, I suggest, can greatly contribute to studies of long-term musical engagement for other generations, genres and cultures also.

Analysing the role of the Chigo from within the western academy, far removed temporally and spatially from the religious and social discourses that framed their existence, naturally comes with its dangers. One must be careful to not use analytic categories or methodologies that obscure the material reality of the Chigo, or any person who inhabits a specific role that straddles the religious and the political; and one must also avoid falling into Orientalist traps of assuming Japanese exceptionalism. With these ethical quandaries firm in mind, this essay will attempt to explore the multitudinous social, religious and soteriological narratives in which the literary and physical figure of the Chigo exists and the ways in which these narratives are extensions and reiterations of existing themes in Japanese literature and Asian literary movements more generally. This paper will also argue that the conflicting narratives and justifications for the existence of the Chigo, as well as the disparity between literary representation and their material realities suggest the historic need in Japanese monastic institutions to create multiple Bhuddological and ‘intrapersonal’ justifications for what was essentially institutional, physical, emotional rape and non-consensual grooming. This serious avenue will be explored while attending to the precarity inherent within using a western rhetoric of sexual rights and violence to analyse a non-western case-study, and these interrogations will also be flanked by a discussion of the discursive limits of using ‘gender’ and ‘sexuality’, specifically the word ‘homosexuality’, as an analytic category in these conversations. This essay thus contends that the Chigo is a literary figure who reflects several historical soteriological and literary trends, who held real religious value, and represents real young men, whom we know less about, who were central religious figures in many temples and communities, and the victims of non-consensual sexual and emotional violence.