Global Futures in East Asia: Youth, Nation, and the New Economy in Uncertain Times (Contemporary Issues in Asia and Pacific) (35 page)

Notes

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

In the preparation of this chapter, I have benefited from the helpful comments of colleagues at the University of Washington, Stanford University, University of California at San Diego, and Whitman College. In particular, I would like to thank Miyako Inoue for help in thinking through the problem of patriotism in a neoliberal age and to Ann Anagnost for ongoing discussions, feedback, and careful attention to all stages of the writing of this chapter.

1
. “By other means” is a notion borrowed from Gordon Lafer’s discussion of the “war on terror” as a “strategy for advancing a neoliberal agenda” (2007).

2
. Jennifer Robertson, in writing about a pre–nation-state form of education for women, called
Shingaku
(heart learning), describes the idea of
kokoro
(heart) in Japanese as “one of the most compelling and ubiquitous terms in the Japanese language” (1991: 88). Including both the heart and mind, it can refer to a locus of feelings, consciousness, and authority.

3
. The Japanese economy expanded at a historically unprecedented rate with double-digit growth from 1955 through 1973 as a result of a national campaign led by the Ikeda government. For more about the income-doubling campaign of the Ikeda government and the sustained growth period of 1974–1990, see Hein 1993.

4
. Igarashi (2002) uncovers how neonationalist sentiment is linked to a set of concerns about national incompleteness that have been one of the troubling mainstays of the modernity project in Japan. He uncovers the resonances between Maruyama Masao’s use of the notion of “incomplete modernity” in partial explanation for the totalitarian programs and ideologies of the 1920s through the 1940s and present-day cultural critic Kato Norihiro’s argument about the necessity of
war
as a means to complete the modernity project in Japan. According to Kato, only with the (re)addition of the right to war will Japan emerge as a whole or “normal” nation that can mourn those who were once the victims of Japanese imperial aggression.

5
. Modernization theory, as Takashi Fujitani (1993) discussed, was along with many other things an effort to posit, but then also to translate, the violence of the 1930 and 1940s into a postwar campaign of economic growth.

6
. As Ann Anagnost explains in the Introduction to this volume, the power of ethnographic investigations is in their ability to engage with transformations at the everyday level, while attending to historicity and complex crossings among national contexts. In the case of the present chapter, the ethnographic work takes the form of tracking the Japanese context and its effects.

7
. In the aftermath of the revisions to the Fundamental Law of Education at the end of 2006, a number of interesting discussions of their content have been published; see, for instance, Leibowitz and McNeil 2007. I am indebted to their discussions. The revisions have also been carefully documented on the website of the Japanese Ministry of Education and Technology in Japan (MEXT); see
www.mext.go.jp
.

8
. For the English-language versions of the Imperial Rescript on Education and the 1947 Fundamental Law of Education, see Horio 1988: 399 and 400–401, respectively.

9
. See Horio 1988: 153–158 for a discussion of an important document on “The Image of the Desired Japanese” (
Kitai Sareru Ningenzo
).

10
. For a thorough discussion of the Nakasone period education reform agenda, see Hood 2001.

11
. “Learn from Japan” references a period in the late 1970s and 1980s when the Japanese government under prime ministers Masayoshi Ohira and Yasuhiro Nakasone began to refer to their nation as having achieved their long-term goal of catching up with the West (in particular the United States, following the Occupation of Japan). The notion of catch-up had been a complicated one in that it referred variously to a combination of economic and cultural might and the ability to influence world events as a result. As the Japanese began to talk about their new plan to go beyond Western paradigms of modernity with plans for an information and knowledge society, Western writers began to describe the differences of Japan in terms of what they were doing better than Western nations, or how we could learn from the particular forms of discipline, social organization, and strong educational system that resulted in an envious combination of high math and science scores, historically high GDP, and low crime and divorce rates. The claim was often made that Japan now had things to teach the West.

12
. For more on the financial collapse in Japan of the early 1990s, see Katz 1998 and Saxonhouse and Stern 2004.

13
. In this quotation, Ivy is also referring to a series of neonationalist debates of the recessionary period over the postwar peace constitution with its antiwar clause. In the aftermath of the financial collapse, falling international credit status, and other signs of the loss of international status and power, questions about the “abnormality” or impropriety of a nation that cannot wage war were raised with a new fervor.

14
. The emphasis on emotion was first included in 2002 in the national course of study and has been unofficially included as a category for evaluation on many elementary and junior high report cards.

15
. One of my first direct experiences with the lack of public awareness of the contemporary issues surrounding the Fundamental Law of Education took place in April 2002. My husband, two daughters, and I had returned to the area outside Tokyo in which we had lived during my fieldwork (1999–2001) so that my older daughter could participate in her Japanese elementary school graduation. At the conclusion of the graduation ceremony, the principal, who was retiring the following year, and with whom I had had many conversations, handed a small laminated card to each of the graduating sixth graders. On the card was the text of the 1947 Education Law. None of the parents or students I talked to seemed to understand why they were being given this text. Born in the immediate postwar period, Principal Majima was keenly aware of the changes this law had made in postwar education, and he wanted these students and their parents to know what they were in danger of losing.

Chapter
Eight

Neoliberal Speech Acts

The Equal Opportunity Law and Projects of the Self in a Japanese Corporate Office

MIYAKO INOUE

Long before there were
freeters
, NEETs, and
purekariāto
(
precariato
), there were “women.”
1
They were perhaps the first category of workers whose labor was to be made flexible and to become fragmented and whose subjectivity was to be reshaped by a new governmental universe of economic and political programs for “liberating” people from regulations and enterprising their lives and selves. Even before the dawn of what turned out to be a decades-long recession in the early 1990s marked by rapid disappearance of regular employment and a living wage, some feminist scholars had seen it coming. As feminist economist Adachi Mariko (2007: 141) somberly notes, “The fact of the disintegration of the wage labor category and the liquidation of employment was something that had already been ‘perfectly foreseeable’ in feminist/gender analysis by the late 1980s.”

Economic euphoria in the late 1980s contributed to one of those fleeting historical moments in Japan when the alignment of the stars made it possible to think the idea of gender equity. The unprecedented economic boom seemed to open a widely celebrated door, but, with the burst of the “bubble,” the door of historical possibility slammed shut for Japanese women.
2
During the economic expansion, labor shortages led to the mobilization of women into the workforce, mostly as contingent workers. The ever-expanding world of consumer goods and services further empowered them as discerning and
informed
consumers, all of which
rendered women publicly visible
as the sign of the times. Proclaiming it a national goal “to promote equal opportunity and treatment between men and women in employment in accordance with the principle contained in the Constitution of Japan ensuring equality under the law,”
3
Japan’s original Equal Employment Opportunity Law (EEOL), which went into effect in 1986, symbolized a moment of the seemingly harmonious reconciliation between political liberalism and that of economic empowerment “for all.”

However “toothless” it might have been, the original EEOL prescribed a Fordist dream, which was, after all, about to be eclipsed as the Japanese political economy embarked on a post-Fordist, neoliberal regime of restructuring in the 1990s. The original EEOL was based on a model of collective welfare (finally) extended to women as a politico-legal remedy for Fordism’s own obdurate institutional mandate of the gendered division of labor and “family wage.” By the time it arrived in the late 1980s, however, “gender equity” as was understood and envisioned within the Fordist paradigm had fundamentally been displaced, and the EEOL had been co-opted as yet another limb of neoliberal projects, producing female workers as the subjects of self-government whose aspirations and hopes would be well adjusted to free market governance.

What was also at stake in this historical moment was that the original EEOL was implemented during Yasuhiro Nakasone’s term as prime minister (1982–1987) along with a series of comprehensive neoliberal reforms based on market fundamentalism, by which “government itself becomes a form of enterprise whose task is to universalize competition and invent market-shaped systems of action for individuals, groups and institutions” (Lemke 2001, 197). Major publicly owned industries, including Nippon Telephone and Telegraph (NTT), Japan National Railways (JNR), and Japan Tobacco (JT), were privatized between 1985 and 1987. The merger of public employee unions with labor unions in the private sectors (
Rengō
) in 1989 meant the corporatization of organized labor in compliance with the broader neoliberal transformation. Revitalization of the economy was sought through market-friendly deregulation of land use, construction codes, finance, taxation, and foreign trade. These reforms in the 1980s were of a piece with those of other industrial superpowers seeking globalization as a solution to the worldwide crisis of Fordist regimes in the form of flexible accumulation. New pools of cheap labor and new consumer markets were the name of the game.

Characterizing
the postwar universal (and egalitarian) education system as depriving children of individuality (
kosei
), and thus as not only undemocratic but also guilty of leaving citizens ill equipped for the coming age of global competition, Nakasone advocated decentralization and privatization of the national public education system and attempted to introduce competition and a market in education, according to which both schools and students (and their parents) would be granted the “freedom of choice” in selecting schools and curricula (Cave 2001; Hood 2001; Okada 2002; see also Arai 2000, 2003; Ivy 2000). It was understood, of course, that there would be winners and losers in this market, but this would be both good management and socially ethical. Revisions of the Health Insurance Law (
kenkō hokenhō
) in 1984—Japan has had universal social insurance since 1905—for the first time charged individuals a 10 percent copayment for covered medical expenses.

These reforms were accompanied by neonationalist cultural work to obscure the social fragmentation of cultural citizenship brought on by the widening gap between the haves and the have-nots. Nakasone was the first postwar prime minister to make an official visit to the Yasukuni Shrine, where not only the war dead but also Class A war criminals (as convicted by the Allied tribunals in Asia) were enshrined. Combined with the steady increase in Japan’s military budget, the prime minister’s visits to the shrine were a reminder for many Asian countries that Japanese imperialism was not only unrepented but could be resurrected at any time.

The EEOL thus paradoxically coexisted with a series of reforms that would further abandon all minoritized social categories, including gender as well as race, class, and ethnicity. How can one make sense of this? What was the shared condition that enabled a conjunctural—if not conspiratorial—articulation between the rise of neoliberal political economic reforms and the arguably democratic policy in the form of the EEOL? How did it shape the ways in which men and women, as well as management and labor, imagined what gender equality would look like and ought to be?

It probably comes as no surprise then that, as many scholars have rightly noted, the EEOL turned out to be toothless (see Creighton 1996; Edwards 1994; Gelb 2000; Lam 1992; Molony 1995; Parkinson 1989).
4
The impetus for the EEOL was a somewhat reluctant response to the 1979 U.N. Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW), which required signatory nations to enact laws to implement the terms of the convention. After six years of debate following Japan’s signing
of
the convention in 1980, which involved effective organized opposition from the business community, the end product appears to be a total concession to the standpoint of management. Although gender discrimination in training, benefits, dismissal, and retirement is prohibited and subject to civil court penalties (albeit with complaints against employers to be mediated by the government), equality in recruitment, hiring, and promotion is not enforceable but subject only to an employer’s good faith effort.
5
Thus, the law did not assign judicial surveillance to key practices. Men get better and higher-paying jobs than women because of bias in recruitment and hiring, and training and benefits are always linked—formally in a gender-neutral way—to the rank and compensation of the job title. Therefore the law’s ability to prohibit gender discrimination has been severely limited from the start because men and women are offered different jobs at the point of hiring. Accordingly, any violation in the areas of dismissal and retirement would be equally missed because it would be hard to claim that a woman was fired or forced into retirement because of her gender when her job is effectively available only to women. The EEOL marked the triumph of management (Gelb 2000): The law itself shifted the terms in which gender equity was to be achieved from the employer’s
legal
responsibility to its
social
and
moral
responsibility as “duties to endeavor” at equity.
6