2nd Global Conference
Wednesday 3rd September - Saturday 6th September
2008
Mansfield College, Oxford
Conference Programme, Abstracts and Papers
Session 8b: Multicultural Complexities
Chair: Caitlin Nunn
12 Years Diary: Issue of Cultural Essentialism in ‘Multicultural’ Japan
Shota Ogawa
Visual and Cultural Studies, University of Rochester, USA
Japan is currently undergoing a critical shift from a nation built on the narrative of cultural and ethnic homogeneity to a nation that embraces diversity as it braces for a radical increase in migrant workers in the age of steadily declining and aging population. Despite this critical shift, the model of multiculturalism (known more commonly as Tabunka Kyosei) as it is popularized through cultural representation has largely escaped critical interrogation. My paper will look at Junji Hanado’s film, 26 Years Diary (2007), and its representation of the sensational 2001 accident in which, Lee Su-Hyon, a South Korean student was killed as he tried to rescue a drunken man from a Tokyo subway track. Drawing on the media interpretation of the accident as a heroic act that transcended the national border, the film reconstructed Lee’s life into a didactic story that promote the bridging of Korea and Japan at a personal and political level. Just as how Tabunka Kyosei is inseparable from the crisis of population decline, the message of bridging also requires Japan to be represented as ailing while Lee must be its remedy. Through close scene analyses, I will argue the idiosyncratic ways in which the film invokes the presence of Zainichi Koreans (Japanese-born Koreans) in its representation of an ailing Japan. The film’s contrasting representation of Zainichi and mainland Koreans reveals the problematic structure of Tabunka Kyosei that is founded on a binary articulation of foreigners as either the cause of, or the remedy to the ailing Japan.
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National Minorities in Poland after 2001 – A Political Issue or an Element of Multicultural Reality?
Iwona Jakimowicz-Ostrowska
Akademia Marynarki Wojennej w Gdyni, Poland
There are many potential threats to the national security in Europe. The modern political activity of Poland on the international arena becomes at times the source of disagreements and conflicts, which influence the level of security perceptible by the common citizen. It is not only the terrorist attack of September 11th 2001, but also the riots in France in 2004 that revealed the source of the threat for the modern Europe - the lack of understanding between the representatives of different cultures and civilisations. The current political situation, i.e. the increase of international tensions caused by the gradually more frequent terrorist activities, raises concern in European societies and creates an essential problem of the shape of internal politics of European countries towards the minorities. This conflict, the source of which lies in the presence of national and ethnic minorities in European countries, is also present in Poland. The increase of radical actions by the youth, postulating xenophobic slogans by some of the media and the rebirth of nationalistic tendencies in some of the representatives of the opinion-forming communities, is a result of cultural transformations in the Middle and Eastern Europe, including the territory of Poland. The political situation in this part of Europe during the early 1990s was an impulse to a much braver manifestation of national subjectivity by its inhabitants and also revealed the necessity of regulating the legal and institutional conditions of its functioning. The change, naturally, was not immediate and even today one can witness attempts at marginalisation and discrimination of the role the minorities play in the political and social life. Poland is still perceived as a country which is ethnically, nationally and religiously uniform, and the census of 2002 showed that only 3 % of all the citizens admit to having foreign roots. Nevertheless, according to the reports and opinions of the minorities, the actual number of such citizens may be slightly higher.
The article dwells upon the notion of adaptation of selected national minorities in Poland. It presents the problem of accepting cultural differences of the representatives of different nationalities, who are currently inhabitants of this area, as well as obstacles, which the modern reality puts before the increasingly heterogeneous ethnic community in Poland. The author shall attempt to explain the reasons behind the revival of nationalistic tendencies in certain spheres of the Polish society.
Naoko Maehara
School of History and Anthropology, Queen’s University, Belfast, Ireland
Drawing upon ethnographic research among Japanese migrant mothers in Ireland and auto-ethnographic work of my own experience, this paper focuses on the relationship between collective memory and individual memory: how do Japanese migrant mothers reconstruct collective memories of their husbands’ places and their own homelands to establish their sense of self and their relationships with others?, and; how are their individual memories navigated through a heterogeneous set of collective memories in which they often participate? In particular, their memories and imaginations of family life are examined, since I acknowledge that, in the case of Japanese migrant mothers, their sense of selves are largely shaped through their emotional involvement with families in Ireland and in Japan. Applying a dialogical perspective of self, I argue that remembering is an act of internal dialogue and interaction with ‘private audiences’. For Japanese migrant mothers, their private audiences include their husbands, children, in-laws, and friends in Ireland, and their own family and friends in Japan. In the attempt to create interpersonal bonds internally with private audiences, they participate in collective memories that navigate what they remember and how they remember. A different set of collective memories, in which they often participate, evoke multiple, often ambivalent, individual memories and imaginations. A dialogical perspective of remembering suggests how individual memories are organized through the internalization of cultural values, schemas, and narratives. Remembering, like other cognitive processes (e.g., perceiving, feeling, or thinking), is an important dimension of transnational cultural interlacing of contemporary life.