John Lie. Multiethnic Japan.
Richards, John B.
John Lie. Multiethnic Japan. (Cambridge and London: Harvard, 2001)
xiii, 248pp., $43.00 paper.
In preparing Multiethnic Japan, sociologist John Lie set out to
describe the lives of the new Asian workers in Japan, but ended up
demonstrating that Japan has long been and remains very much a
multiethnic country.
Lie's case study is extraordinarily well documented. In it he
describes how the Ainu, Burakumin, Okinawans, Koreans and Chinese came
to be invisible ethnicities in Japan, and how the accelerated arrival of
foreign workers in the 1980s re-opened the contemporary discourse on
Japanese identity. He describes the "racialization" of the
contemporary Asian foreign workers and their confinement to dirty,
difficult and dangerous jobs. He tells of the of once-silent minorities
emerging from discrimination in employment, residence and marital
choice, and the internal angst of being unable to claim essential
equality or admit, let alone embrace, their ethnic identities. But he
does all this almost in passing; this is not their story, but the story
of Japanese nationhood.
He argues the contemporary insistence on Japanese ethnic
homogeneity is both very recent and belied by her history of
modernization (state formation, colonization, and capitalist expansion),
and provides ample evidence to be taken seriously. Lie argues that Japan
was multiethnic to begin with and that today's emerging minorities
were established in the pre-modern period with development of social
outcastes as the proto-Burakumin and the Yamato conquest and
assimilation of the Ainu, were augmented in the modern period with the
colonization of the Ryuu Kyuu islands, Taiwan, Korea and the Chinese
northeast, and continue today as a consequence of the capitalist demand
for low-wage workers. Japanese nationhood could emerge only with her
modernization; only with the Meiji restoration of 1868 can Japan be said
to have begun the process of nation formation.
The ideology of Japanese homogeneity emerged, Lie asserts, as
Japanese of all walks of life for the first time developed the means
(media, affluence and a democratic state) to perceive themselves as a
whole, exactly as they recovered from the ruins of colonialism and
all-out war. It is now to be challenged by a more nuanced reality. Lie
ends by considering processes by which social classification and
signification limit the freedom of individuals to fully participate in
their own realities, noting that the reemergence of regional identities
spearheads environmental activism (p171) and the attempt to conform to an imagined Japanese essence stifles individualism (p165).
Lie compares Japanese experiences of race, ethnicity and
nationality to similar experiences in the United States, Britain and
Europe, concluding the Japanese are not particularly racist. The
comparisons warn us not to set the Japanese too apart from ourselves,
but fall short of a satisfying comparative analysis.
Lie's culminating foray into sociological theory argues for
conceptual acuity while illuminating the Japanese lack of clarity in the
language of ethnicity, but falls short of providing a comprehensive
theory to tie together the elements of identity formation and
signification he has presented us. This he leaves to others.
Reviewed by John B. Richards
Southern Oregon University
