Giri & Ninjou at the Japanese University

People often ask me what it's like being the only foreign prof at a J university. Normally, it is like anywhere else.

It's when the chips are down you see the differences.

Recently my uni went back to face to face but I refused due to my wife's health issues and my son's developmental issues. Basically, I haven't the energy to be a double careworker at home and ride the plague trains.

The response has been split along giri (obligation to work) and ninjou (intense humanity and empathy) lines.

When I made the announcement, my usually sunny supervisor called me irresponsible and terrible, and threateningly hinted at problems because the other profs didn't know what was happening. The dean noted I had gotten fat and told me to work more, then relented and told me to take care.

In response, I sent a mass email to everyone explaining exactly the pressures I was under, and got some sympathetic emails telling me they understood and to take care of myself.

Just now, an older prof I ran into shook my hand, hugged me, and wept openly.

So, these are the extremes you get here.

Life in Japan in the Time of Corona (Or why rona will be big in Japan for a while yet)

I just went to a new little soba (buckwheat noodle) shop in my neighborhood here outside of Kyoto and had a tasty and cheap bowl of nishin (Pacific herring) noodles with a green apple sour cocktail to wash it down. Only after ordering did I notice that the master (chef & owner) had his mask hanging off his chin as he cooked, bustled about the open kitchen, and breathed all over my food.

I would not have gone in had I noticed him first.

Which got to me thinking, why would a small business owner struggling under safety restrictions engage in such self-destructive behaviour? To step back further, why is a supposedly law-abiding society like Japan having such a hard time shaking off Corona?

(Warning - This article contains a lot of anecdotal evidence, but that doesn't mean it is totally invalid, just needing clarification & confirmation.)

1 It's a class (and hierarchy) thing

Who do I mostly see drooping masks over their chin here? A LOT of construction and service workers. In other words, blue collar workers at the low end of the socio-economic spectrum. People who have little to lose. I remember Bourdieu commenting on how lower class people engage in self-destructive behaviour more on average because they have little to lose. Japanese laborers seem to be embodying this trend.

On the other hand, I also see bosses and managers mask drooping as they command about bowing and masked underlings. It could be the rules don't apply to them when in a position of power at the top of the hierarchy.

Not that a virus cares about these things...

2 It's a social thing

Japanese are inherently social, but their sociablity is often outsourced to a paying contact - the girl at the snack bar, the master at the noodle shop. As I ate my soba, a local woman at the counter talked up a storm with the waitress. Many Japanese talk less with their family than coworkers or shop staff, so shutting down eating and drinking establishments is anathema to their social identity.

So stay at home orders feel like social suicide to many Japanese. No wonder they went on with the Olympics, and hordes of maskless young people throng in McDs and parks, and push up the daily Corona stats...

3 It's a macho manchild thing

Predominantly, the maskless faces I see in the streets are male. Ian Buruma's A Japanese Mirror adroitly dissects the Japanese male psyche, which is split between the swaggering machismo of the samurai (a la Yukio Mishima) and the co-dependence of a spoiled son from a hahmono, or suffering mother tragedy story, which were big in the 1950's. That was when Japan needed armies of manchildren to do what they were told and staff its companies and rebuild the nation.

Now, no one is telling them what to do, so their masks hang low...

4 It's a technocratic thing

Now that Japan is estimated to be 50% vaccinated, I am seeing older people loosening their masks. I live on the Tokaido, the old road between Kyoto and Yedo, and many of the largely senior citizen hikers that trudge past my house reliving the old glory days of the samurai have dropped masks altogether as they chat amiably as they walk.

This implies that we may see a rise in vaccinated people being infected. Time to watch those numbers...

I went out for beers under the ancient Sanjo Bridge in Kyoto the other day, and talking with a fellow professor who teaches at Kyoto University, we concluded Japan is only half way through the Corona epidemic. In short, we expected the epidemic to last 2 more years, even though we were sure we'd be sent back to classrooms long before that.

By the way, the soba was worth it. I'm fully vaccinated, I just hope I didn't bring home a side order of master's rona breath for my unvaccinated child.

Outsourcing Privacy Invasion: Japan's neoliberal ID check app

Here is an example of Japanese style neoliberalism. Tokyo has introduced an app for scanning the mandated ID cards of foreign residents.

With this move, the state retreats from its former duties (ie checking foreigner status, regulating employment) while foisting the responsibility for these on businesses and individuals with the warning "Business owners who employ illegals can be held liable."

The state also abrogates its duty to protect foreigner rights by making the employers do the checking and thus them commit any invasion of privacy.

Insidious and insipid at the same time.

Capitalism As A Flight To Nowhere

Have you seen the news? Flights to nowhere are selling out in minutes. Shops are selling airplane food. People (with jobs, homes, and money) are breathing sighs of relief that air travel is resuming because of the ‘tough’ year they have had. https://news.sky.com/story/coronavirus-plane-food-sold-in-shops-and-flights-to-nowhere-airlines-try-to-stem-pandemic-losses-12115035

 

More than ever before, we are at home with our family, and connected online 24-7, yet still desiring for escape. But what exactly are we escaping from, and to where?

 

Not since Durkheim’s groundbreaking work on how social disconnection leads to depression and suicide have we seen a clear indicator of how this phenomenon works. We are connected to each other, but disconnected from consumption, from sidewalk cafes, clothes stores, and bars. We can’t travel to exotic locales, or go see the shows. We are cut off from our goal – endless, mindless consumption, and the culture industry that takes our mind off it. And it is killing us. As Durkheim stated, “One does not advance when one walks toward no goal, or - which is the same thing - when his goal is infinity.” 

 

COVID & DEPRESSION

Under Covid, we see what Durkheim would describe as a “general state of extreme depression and exaggerated sadness, causing the patient no longer to realize sanely the bonds which connect him with people and things about him. Pleasures no longer attract.” Indeed, this is the very definition of Durkheim’s ‘Melancholy suicide’, in other words, an ennui towards the daily pleasures of family, work, hobbies, and health, and a craving for the hyped pleasures of consumption, particularly through travel.

 

SOCIAL BELIEFS

Neoliberal capitalism has programmed us to desire the same thing: the status signifying brand, the high paying job, and the package tour to blow off steam from the effort required in acquiring these. This is the ideology of the times, the religion of what Foucault called homo economicus – man defined by his economic relations. According to Durkheim, “It is society which, fashioning us in its image, fills us with religious, political and moral beliefs that control our actions.” We are flailing and failing during the Covid crisis precisely because of how our society is constructed. Look at the utter failure of hyper capitalist US society to deal with the crisis, then the ‘surprising’ success of African and Asian nations, which realize the importance of traditional social bonds for stability and individual happiness.

https://www.france24.com/en/africa/20201008-africa-a-coronavirus-success-story

 

MASS PRODUCED PEOPLE & THEIR PLEASURES

Durkheim also noted, “Social man...is the masterpiece of existence.” But homo economicus is not a series of masterpieces, each unique in his or her own right. Instead, we are mass produced knock offs, infinite variations on the same product, modded and kitted out in ways that simulate individuality, freedom, but which are just different coloured chains of consumption. Make no wonder that we feel unfulfilled and lonely, despite having access to the internet’s Cave of Wonders.

 

In the early days of the Covid-19 crisis, media outlets sagely opined that the crisis would be a time to find a new normal, one that fulfills individuals while allowing a new relation with nature. Looking at the return of the airline industry, with the pump priming action of flights to nowhere, I fear that we are willingly slipping back into chains that bound us, and refusing the lesson on what is important in life that Corona is trying to teach us.

SHUKKOU – The first step in Japanese socialization

 

I had to walk my son to school this morning as he's still getting used to the new direction. It was eye-opening. You can see that the walk to school en masse in uniforms in the morning is really the start of Japanese socialization. Meet up at the appointed time, wearing the appointed clothes (unless you have special permission, like the kid in jeans because of a field trip), and with the same people every day Monday to Friday. There is a huge sense of belonging, of solidarity there.

 

As a foreigner, I have a knee jerk reaction against group proceedings. The hundred kids who flood the road in similar white shirt, blue vest, blue skirt or shorts depending on gender, and bright yellow hat and rucksack remind me of an invading army winding its way through the street on its way to a massacre or bivouac.

 

The foreign is tempted to see the masse movement as a loss of identity and individuality. Nothing could be further from the case. Every one goes together in the same direction in their own way. There are the gangly older kids leading the pack, each with some sort of individualized marker (glasses, a hanging strap, jutting hair). The fidgety younger kids can easily pick each other out of the crowd based on movement, sound, tidiness of attire, etc, despite the added barrier of facemasks. The proceeding is in fact a sensitization to individual differences, of all the little conscious and unconscious movements and signals that mark who we are.

 

I thoroughly enjoyed my walk amidst the throng today, and they seemed to enjoy my funny dances, matching mask and shirt, and the weird English (Gimme a break!) I taught them. More than that, I got to see my introverted son chatting easily to kids he knew and who knew him.

 

I think my wife saw today's walk as an imposition, a duty she had to invoke, and was ready to fight to make me go. Instead, it was a great joy for me to peer into the workings of Japanese socialization, as well as the increasing socialization of my boy.

Reimagining Mobit - The Legitimization of Japanese Payday Loans

A few years back I wrote about Japanese payday loans HERE. At the time, I noted how discourses of gender were marshalled to appeal to men and women in need of high-interest low-oversight finances to support their bourgeoise dreams.

Since then, there has been a huge development in the payday loan landscape. The company Mobit, whose ads I analyzed before, has merged with Sumitomo Bank (SMBC), Japan's third largest bank and where I put my savings. This change that has resulted in a rethinking of their ad campaign, which is all the more evident due to using the same actors in different ways. Gone is the overt sexuality of actress Natsuna's clothing, as is the chic fashion of Naoto Takenaka, and the implied narratives of May-December romance / sugardaddying these ads contained.

Instead, we see both actors clad in the green blazer of SMBC, the uniformity of their clothing effectuating a democratization of roles and relations, as well as a reduction of sexualized narratives. In fact, the only nod to gender is Takenaka's neck tie and Natsuna's open neck shirt, which still implies the common Japanese office relation of older male superior and younger female OL (office lady, or menial worker there half for labour, half to get married to young male employees).

This use of uniforms also repositions both figures from mysterious characters in their own stories to employees in the service of SMBC customers. The flowers floating around both actors represent the bouquets traditionally placed in front of Japanese shops or businesses to celebrate their opening, and thus signal that SMBC Mobit loans are open for business in helping clients realize their modest financial dreams.

Finally, whereas previous Mobit ads focused on the characters and images of their implied narrative, the SMBC Mobit ad also features an offer of 3900 bonus T-point card points for customers who clear the conditions for taking out a loan. This signals a change in target market as well, from the desperately dreaming borrowers of previous ads to more responsible bank clients, who count up bonus points whenever they buy everyday goods and groceries.

All this serves to legitimize payday loans, once shady organizations called 'sarakin' (or 'salaryman money', mostly indicating personal loans at high interest taken out by working men or housewives). The excessive repayment demands of sarakin companies incited the Japanese government in 2002 to empower paralegals to start legal actions against excessive loan payments, and for years Japanese TV and public transit were blanketed with ads for legal help clawing back money from excessive loan repayments. This was reflected in popular culture in manga about high interest loan companies, such as Naniwa Monogatari, Manami no Teiou, and the most recent and ruthless depiction of unscrupulous loan agencies, Yamikin no Ushijimakun.

All these developments all cast payday loans in a very unflattering light, and thus mergers with respectable financial institutions have become the norm. In this way, high interest loan agencies have acquired a sheen of respectability, and re-legitimized the entrenched cultural practice of acquiring Shakkin (借金 or borrowed money) that features heavily in Japanese classical theatre, popular culture, and daily life.

Sources

'Sarakin'. Definition from Goo.ne.jp.
https://dictionary.goo.ne.jp/jn/89531/meaning/m0u/

Rhythmanalysis of This Neo-Conservative Age

Analyzing Rhythm

I have been reading Rhythanalysis by Henri Lefebvre (2007) for an educational project. It is a thought-provoking look at what stands between and around the objects of traditional social science inquiry - the gaps, the lacunes, in other words the rhythm of production instead of the process of making or the products themselves.

It is an intriguing philosophical and analytical exercise, all the more so as it surrounds us in the everyday and yet has gone largely unnoticed and uncriticized. Lefebvre (2007) himself makes quite a tour of subjects as he articulates his theory and approach - he tackles bodies, then the body politic, capitalism, media and music in short order. Impressed, I am moved now to attempt a rhythm analysis of the present day. I will not have the breadth or depth of Lefebvre, and my analysis may be little more than armchair philosophizing, but as an exercise of thought it should suffice to bring about some insights into how the world is going, or where.

Our Testing Time

We live in an age of media-amplified upheaval, with polarizing lightening-rod figures like US president Donald Trump seemingly causing arrhythmia to our world body and the various political bodies (the US, Europe) that inhabit it. As Lefebvre (2007) himself presciently opined, "Today man, humanity, the human species is going through a testing time, where everything is thrown into question: including the existence of space, including the foundations of knowledge, of practice and of societies" (13).

I myself have made several abortive attempts at analyzing the discourse of Trump's ejections, but gave up due to their number, the paucity of their content (ie low ratio of content to rhetoric), and the excess media and academic attention afforded to Trump, which gives him too much credit as an actor of change. Instead, I will use rhythm analysis to conceive of the rhythm of events, in other words the movement of history at this point, in the hopes of finding something that a fine Discourse Analysis would undoubtedly miss. I agree with Lefebvre's (2007) assertion, "rhythm (linked on one hand to logical categories and mathematical calculations - and on the other to the visceral and vital body) would hold the secrets and the answer to strange questions" (14).

So, we are in an age when, for example, bodies in expansion (such as Germany) are out of synch with bodies in retraction (i.e. the US), in other words both exist in a state of an arrhythmia where once there was a healthy if imperfect eurhythmy. In terms of rhythm, the once outward (ie expansionist yet open to immigrants) America is retracting into nationalism and racism, while the once nationalistic and racist Germany is trying to keep its momentum of postwar expansion (acceptance of refugees, expansion of the EU). For simplicity of analysis, I will not at this time include bodies such as Russia, France, or China into my calculations, but instead focus on these two oppositional political entities.

Into this simplified or isolated horizontal axis (ie between states) I add vertical relations, ie where the leaders and their ideologies (ie the rhythm of their internal beliefs) rest inside their political bodies. Trump is both at the top of the socio-economic rank in the US, and has executive control of America's political structure. Merkel has similar control of Germany but comes from a lower, technocratic-bourgeoisie social demographic. She does not control Europe, but since US states have challenged Trump's legislation such as the controversial 'Muslim Travel Ban', these two arrhythmia cancel each other out for my purpose.

Ideologically, Trump is out of tempo with the liberal half of his society, but not with its elite, and has earned the support of the conservative half of the American populace due to his outsider acts and utterances, giving him an approval rating equal to Obama's at his peak (Sherman 2018). Merkel enjoys broad support (DW.com 2018) but is slipping due to societal differences, fears of Russia, unpopularity of cabinet members, and lack of European partners.

US-German Arrhythmia

Seen in this light, Trump's attempt to (re-)establish a lone isorhythmic 'great' America has caused a formerly healthy eurythmia with Europe to morph into a diseased arrhythmia, while hinting at new eurhythmics with Russia and China. While Germany waits for the rhythm to reassert itself, Trump pushes it further into arrhythmia. Although Lefebvre's (2007) language is largely passive regarding change of rhythm, the discursive or confrontational aspect of rhythm - that one body may be deliberately throwing a previous eurhythmia out of synch - also comes under his gaze. He states,

"once one discerns relations of force in social relations and relations of alliance, one perceives their link with rhythm. Alliance supposes harmony between different rhythms; conflict supposes arrhythmia; a divergence in time, in space, in the use of energies. The relationship between forces, which requires the domination of one force and draws on the relations of alliance as means (and not ends), is accompanied by a disassembly of times and spaces; of rhythms." (68) 

In other words, Trump's pushing of arrhythmia with Germany, of disassembling the times and spaces of cooperation, is a means to get want he wants, not the end in and of itself.

As Lefebvre (2007) warns, rhythanalysis is preventative and not curative (68), and so the current turn of events is due to previous actions that have harmed the eurhythmia or harmony between Germany and the USA. He offers no solutions to this problem, just a clearer picture of the distortions and arrhythmia they cause.

However, Lefebvre (2007) gives a possible hint to a response when he notes how politics uses rhythms for its ends. He states,

"Political power knows how to utilise and manipulate time, dates, time-tables. It combines the unfurlings [deploiements] of those that it employs (individuals, groups, entire societies), and rhythms them. This is officially called mobilisation. The authorities have to know the polyrhythmia of the social body that they set in motion. It is the extreme case, revealing simultaneously official and empirical - political and military rhythmanalysis." (68-69)

Indeed, despite the public outcry and federal court order against the separation of illegal immigrants from the children at the US border, there is every sign Trump's office intends to separate more families than before (Stern 2018). This is a masterful stroke of rhythm, of waiting for the uproar to die down before continuing business as usual. It is part of the neo-liberal and neo-conservative shared playbook, with results visible in both Trump's shift on the post-financial crisis regulation Dodd-Frank, as well as his rethinking of the US-EU security alliance.

A Final Thought

What to do? Maybe intentional arrhythmia should be met in kind. Earlier today, I posted the following to Facebook under the heading "News I wish would happen..."

News flash: German ambassadors fly home, all US ambassadors & US troops expelled from Germany. "Have it your way, Don" says Merkel.

Perhaps, instead of waiting for Trump and other conservatives to disassemble times and spaces, to set the rhythms and oppositions that keep socialists and liberals off balance, the progressives need to set the social body in motion themselves instead of trying to keep it in political relations that no longer exist. Causing arrhythmia in the conservative camp could be the proactive step that snaps new relations into places, and at worse would only clarify the direction of a deteriorating eurhythmia fast enough to prepare oneself for adapting to the new realities that the eventual dissolution of an alliance entails. 

Sources

DW.com. (2018). "Merkel, Seehofer and Facebook fall in German public opinion."
https://www.dw.com/en/merkel-seehofer-and-facebook-fall-in-german-public-opinion/a-43272310

Lefebvre, Henri. (2007). Rhythmanalysis: Space, time and everyday life. London: Continuum.

Sherman, Amy. (2018). "Story says poll shows Trump tied to Obama at same point in presidency"
http://www.politifact.com/punditfact/statements/2018/jun/18/gateway-pundit/headline-says-trump-tied-obama-same-point-presiden/

Stern, Joseph. (2018). "Trump’s Office of Refugee Resettlement Is Budgeting for a Surge in Child Separations." Slate.com.
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2018/07/trumps-office-of-refugee-resettlement-is-budgeting-for-a-surge-in-child-separations.html