Just as we attempt to create who we individually are by various assumptions and appropriations, so too do nations presume an identity that is based upon a number of premises and importations. All of these resemble each other more than they differ, but some nations, and some people, require different models.
The processes of ethnogenesis -- the formation of ethnic groups -- in the Japanese archipelago have been distinguished by a degree of consensus that is unusual only in that it is so long-lived. The idea that culture and "ethnos" are closed, bounded units, that there is an essential Japanese psychic unity that permeates these various cultural building blocks -- these are perhaps anachronistic ideas, but they persist.
Their acceptance leads to a number of assumptions. Mark Hudson, author of this very interesting new anthropological study, suggests some of them. It is "accepted by many people in contemporary Japan that only ethnic Japanese can speak Japanese fluently; foreigners who become highly proficient in the language are usually seen as somehow threatening exceptions to the rule. . . . There is a similar widespread assumption that people who do not look Japanese cannot be Japanese citizens."
As anthropologist Peter Oblas has put it, "If the Japanese myth of racial origins was an automobile, one might hear the consumer refrain that it outperforms the Western model in terms of long-term reliability, flexible handling ability and attractive features."
Such notions as these are often put to political ends. Indeed, scholarly discourse on ethnogenesis in the Japanese islands has been strongly influenced by nationalistic discourses in Japanese society. In fact, nationalism has always provided a context for such debates.
Particularly, "a primordialist view of ethnicity, the view that the Japanese Volk was created at a single time in antiquity and has continued to be a bounded and essentially unchanging essence ever since . . . has very deep roots in the Japanese tradition and has played an important role in debates on ethnogenesis."
In this work, Hudson offers an approach to ethnicity that differs from that found in both Japanese popular discourse and Japanese scholarship. Availing himself of much recent archaeological and anthropological material, he presents a new model of a core "original" Japanese population.
The ingredients for Hudson's argument have been around for a while, but his highly original ordering of them creates the approach.
To begin with, the Jomon people who were present in Japan early on were succeeded by agriculturists from the Korean Peninsula during the Yayoi Period.
Evidence of hitherto unnoticed migrations and agricultural colonization reveals that the culture that ethnicity yields does not emerge pristine, but is the result of "cumulative negotiations." Ethnic identity is thus always being re-created both in and outside the society in question.
Hudson must therefore also look at the interactions within the larger system that is East Asia. He examines different ethnic identities, such as that of the Ainu, and finds unexpected correlations. For example, the idea of the Ainu ethnic can be linked directly to the expansion in Japanese trade flowing north as Hokkaido became increasingly exploited by the Honshu peoples.
Since this important study is aimed at fellow scholars, the layman should not expect an easy read. At the same time, however, it is free of professional jargon, and Hudson makes certain in both foreword and afterword that the nonanthropologist can follow his argument. There is a 60-page bibliography for those interested, but the author is equally concerned that the ordinary reader comes away with the understanding that "once exposed, the ruins of identity may then be rebuilt in a different way."
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