The Future of Japanese Studies - Transcript

Transcript

00:00:02

Opening Jingle

This is the Nordic Asia podcast

Duncan McCargo

Thank you for joining the North Asia podcast, a collaboration sharing expertise on Asia across the Nordic region. I'm Duncan McCargo, director of the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies and a professor of political science at the University of Copenhagen. With me today is Aike Rots, associate professor in Japan Studies at the Department of Culture Studies and Oriental Languages at the University of Oslo. Aike has a wide range of interests in areas from religion to biodiversity and the environment, and he currently holds a much coveted ERC starter grant which is boldly entitled Whales of Power, Aquatic Animals, Devotional Practices and Environmental Change in Maritime East Asia. Aike, Welcome to the North Asia Podcast.

00:00:52

Aike Rots

Thank you very much for inviting me.

00:00:54

Duncan McCargo

So a bit of background to this podcast; Aike and I met most recently here in Denmark where he gave a keynote address to a conference at the Copenhagen Business School last month on the theme of Japan and Japanese Studies in the 21st Century. And that was a very lively conference that brought together a number of early career academics in Japanese studies from across the Nordic region. Their positions in nine cases have been generously funded by the Nippon Foundation. And it was really the first in-person gathering of the clans of Nordic Japanese Studies for a couple of years. So Aike’s keynote really did a great job of setting the agenda for that conference, and people kept on referring to it during the sessions and even at my table during the closing dinner. So we thought we'd revisit the keynote and talk about some of the key themes that emerged from it. So Aike, you argued in the keynote that Japanese studies has experienced some ups and downs over the past couple of decades. Can you elaborate on what you meant by that?

00:01:49

Aike Rots

Yes. So I think for the last two decades or so, there's been quite many debates within within areas, studies in general, Asian area studies, especially within Japanese studies about the scope, the reason d’etre and the legitimacy of Japanese studies as a discipline and whether this discipline should continue or and if so, in what shape it should have, and what is sort of the responsibility or the purpose of having Japanese studies. So there's been, as I said, quite many debates starting 20 or 22 years ago with the work of Henry Harrison in Oshima. So challenging area studies challenging some of the ideological agendas of area studies, but also what they considered the methodological shortcomings. And ever since we've had sort of the ups and downs, one of the good things in terms of institutional continuity has been that student enrollment, both in Europe and the United States, has been consistently high, which probably has a lot to do with the popularity of Japan also internationally. But recently we've seen sort of new roundtable discussions, conference papers, special issues addressing some of the same questions. What does Japan studies still matter? Do we need it as a separate discipline? Some scholars debating the death of Japanese studies and then also seeing others claiming for the rebirth of Japanese studies. So many of these debates are ongoing, and I discussed during my talk, I discussed some of the what I see, some of the challenges, but also some of the opportunities for Japanese studies and also Asian studies in general.

00:03:25

Duncan McCargo

Right. I guess a lot of what you're saying could apply to other areas of Asian studies, including my own in discipline of Southeast Asian studies, where we feel even more marginal perhaps than than people in Japanese studies. I mean, as you've just said, a lot of our students are interested in Japan because they were attracted by popular culture, by notions of Cool Japan, by manga, by comic strips, by games online and so forth. Is there anything wrong with that? I mean, I heard some people saying, well, we can't just have students who are coming to us because of this popular culture interest that we've got to lead them in different sorts of directions. What do you feel about that?

00:04:03

Aike Rots

Well, first of all, the fact that students become interested in Japan because they learn about it, for example, by watching anime, cartoon movies or video games doesn't mean that once they start studying and learning the language then that's the only thing they're interested in. And this is a misunderstanding I often come across also among colleagues who say like, okay, our students, they're only interested in popular culture, so that's the thing we should focus on, and that's the way to recruit students, right? I personally experience that, Yes. Okay. When they're 16, 17, 18, this is for many, but not all, but for many, this is the way to get interested in Japan. But then when they actually study about society, for example, very popular topics that now students want to write about have to do with gender inequality, they have to do with food security, they have to do with environmental topics as well, so it's actually quite diverse. There's a great diversity among students. So it's definitely not only the Cool Japan thing that attracts them. Of course, political economy of popular culture is a very important research topic, and it's certainly something also that we need to include in our courses. But one question is: if Cool Japan is the main reason that we attract students, what happens when Japan is no longer cool? And of course, this idea somewhat provocatively during my keynote talk also address this that cool Japan has become a government, a strategy for attracting the students and tourists and so on. But the moment when a minister of foreign affairs starts appointing Doraemon, an amine and robot cat as culture ambassador, or that Prime Minister Abe showing up at the closing ceremony of the 2016 Olympic Games dressed up as Super Mario, then you could argue that perhaps Japan is no longer as cool as it once was, and that perhaps that is not the only way to guarantee institutional continuity. So I'm all fine with the whole Cool Japan thing, but that certainly shouldn't be the only reason d’etre of Japanese studies. And that's something to be aware of, I think. Student numbers might drop and we still want to keep doing research on Japan - also when we don't have that same popularity and perhaps not the institutional backing that we have right now.

00:06:12

Duncan McCargo

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, there are clearly dangers that this cool Japan stuff can descend into a bit of a parody of itself, as you were suggesting there. You've already alluded to this slightly notorious panel, which I think was at the 2019 Denver Association for Asian Studies Conference, actually entitled The Death of Japan Studies, when people who were all in Japan studies start gathering at academic conferences to pontificate about the death of their own subdiscipline. It's an interesting development. Do you think Japan studies is in fact dying? Is it facing a crisis or is it facing this rebirth of some sort that you talking of? Yeah, well, you.

00:06:49

Aike Rots

Could only have a rebirth of your sort of, you know, pretty much dead.I don't think I don't think Japan studies is dying, and therefore, it probably doesn't really need a rebirth either. I understand that these are sort of there's a certain rhetoric going on there. And I do think it's important. And it's good that people who are within Japanese studies every now and then raise the question, what is it that we're doing and what is this sort of the, the added value of Japanese studies as a sort of institutional presence in addition to disciplines like anthropology and literature studies and so on. And so I think many of the debates that have happened there are actually quite relevant and important. But also it's worth noticing that often people who proclaim the crises or the death of Japanese studies or area studies are often people who are in positions permanent tenured, where, you know, they're not personally directly threatened by this, whereas others younger early career researchers doing excellent research on things Japanese - they're the ones who are struggling to get permanent positions. And so for them, senior colleagues proclaiming the death of Japanese studies might actually negatively affect their career opportunities. So I don't think it's particularly productive to think of it that way. I do think it's important that we raise the question of what is the added value of this discipline and what are the methodological limitations that we have. And one of the problems that I see within Japanese studies still lingering is problem of methodological nationalism. The taken for granted the tested assumption that there is something uniquely Japanese or something at least that sets Japan apart from other national cultures, from other countries when it comes to Japanese art, religion, literature, philosophy and so on. The non-reflexive use of the adjective ‘Japanese’ in discussions, and thus the reification of certain bodies of thought or bodies of literature and so on of those things as Japanese, which also denies diversity within Japan, right? So I think we need to move away from this type of methodological nationalism towards much more transnational and comparative research, not least within Asia. And fortunately, this is happening. So so these kind of debates are very important, but we can do those debates without necessarily declaring Japanese studies dead or saying we need its rebirth. I think we we need institutional continuity as well.

00:09:14

Duncan McCargo

Absolutely. Yeah. The talk of the death of Japan studies as clearly dangerous talk and not not to be encouraged. But another theme that did keep coming up, you know, on the fringes of the conference and it's something I hear quite a bit about in my capacity as director of NIAS, is the sort of ‘China rise has displaced Japan’-conversation. It's almost as though the rest of the world can only cope with one significant Asian country at a time. And I was actually point at the University of Leeds in the early nineties with a specific brief to teach a course on Japanese politics, and I replaced a colleague who'd retired who used to teach on China. And when I stopped teaching my course on Japanese politics, a new course was started on Chinese politics and there's currently not one offered on Japanese politics anymore. So I saw a kind of Japan boom of, say, the nineties and the first decade or so of this century. So what do you say to that particular problem? Is China versus Japan in terms of Asian studies, a zero sum game?

Aike Rots

Well, I can understand that for some university or faculty managers, having the one sort of might be an excuse of doing less of the other. So I understand where this sort of feeling, not just within Japanese studies, but also within Japan, like Japanese government and so on, this fear that China becoming more important would somehow lead to Japan becoming less important. I kind of understand where it comes from, but I don't think it needs to be and I don't think it should be that way. If anything, the rise of China, both politically and economically and perhaps culturally, as well, as a sort of internationally, as a major player, it only makes Japan more important, right, as it's the main neighboring country and trade partner and military power also in East Asia. So the fact that China becomes more and more important to European international politics, for example, doesn't make Japan less important. Quite the opposite. It makes Japan also more important. So I think and now actually recently, it's not so much when it comes to more sort of cultural studies and the study of language and so on. It's not so much China that's perceived as the problem. It's actually Korea, because as we all know, Korea is cool right now. I mean, Japan sort of that's the only thing that I've been told. I don't know anything about coolness, but I've been told the only thing that's still cool about Japan are the video games. But when it comes to music, when it comes to film, when it comes to these other expressions of popular culture, we've all watched squid games and then listen to K-Pop and so on. Apparently Korean culture is much more popular than Japan right now. But also there, I hear the same sounds of people saying, oh, Korea is becoming too popular now. Now in Japanese studies, we're going to lose students because our students would rather study Korean instead. And there's the same notion of, you know, it's either or - that you can't have one, that students are only interested in one country at the time, or institutions can only focus on one Asian country at a time, as you're saying. Whereas I would argue what we need to and actually is what a similar students last year colleague of mine and I, we did a small questionnaire survey among our students with about 150 respondents, and we asked them would they be interested in learning more or less about other Asian countries like Korea and Vietnam? So this was asked the students who were majoring in Chinese or Japanese studies, and the vast majority, about 90% of them, said they want to learn more about other East Asian countries. They're interested in having more of these transnational Asian perspectives as part of their training, either at the B.A. or at the M.A. level. So I think rather what we need is a sort of a strong transnational Asian studies where obviously some of the people have different language skills and so on. So people focus on different countries and different cultures within that. But to strengthen that regional and transnational Asian studies both in study programs and in research. So it's not either or, I don't think it is.

00:13:15

Duncan McCargo

Obviously, another problem that looms very large when we start talking about the study of Asia in general, East Asia in particular, and perhaps Japan even more than other countries, is the difficulty and complexity of the language and the challenges that are faced by trying to to acquire sufficient command of Japanese to be able to function there, let alone to do any sort of academic work in that language. How important is language study these days? Now we're going to come across people who say to us, Well, I can go to Tokyo and use this app on my phone to talk to the person in the department store at the railway station or Google Translate is getting really good now. So I can just run all this Japanese stuff through a program and I can figure out more or less what they say.

00:13:59

Aike Rots

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, I mean, now I'm going to sound like somewhat old fashioned humanities person. No, I do. I absolutely think that in order to really get to understand a society, and cultural aspects of a given society, that it's essential to be able to both read texts in that language, but also to communicate and to speak with people and to listen to them. In my research, I've always combined ethnographic research interviews, participant observation with text based research, and find this sort of this combination of and very fruitful. And certainly the research that I've done in first well in Japan, but now more recently also been doing research in Vietnam. I wouldn't have been able to do that research without language skills. And it doesn't mean that, you know, everybody has to be absolutely fluent or but a basic understanding of languages is in my perception, it's a prerequisite for really getting to understand the, yeah, understanding a place. And for me, that's an important argument for preserving Japanese studies or Chinese studies or Middle Eastern studies with Arabic, for example, for preserving these area studies programs with language training is an important component of that. And I recognize in the other people who say, you know, it's the added value of various studies, we might as well just merge it with cultural studies or with anthropology or with political science or with different disciplines and let people study those places from from within those disciplines. But I do think there's a lot of what we might call ‘place specific linguistic’ and ‘cultural and historical expertise’ that would get lost if we were to do that. And also transmitting that knowledge would become more difficult. So I do think there is absolutely added value to that type of language training. But for me, the language training is always sort of a means towards a goal. And some of us students, they might think of studying Japanese primarily as a way to get good at Japanese and may not be so interested in other parts of society and culture. But for most of them they have that interest and then the language is a way to get there. But it means it takes up a lot of time during the study programs. It doesn't mean we have less time for, for example, methodological training. And that's always a question then, right? What kind of theoretical and methodological courses can you include in areas, studies programs, and that people have quite different ideas about what should be or what shouldn't be part of area studies. So I think this is an ongoing debate and perhaps it's also important to accept that now focusing on, for example, in the Nordic countries that not everybody can do everything, right? This traditional idea that a Japanese studies department should have one person doing history, one person doing linguistics, one person doing literature, one person doing anthropology, and one person doing politics, and each should have covered their own field and not really necessarily doing much work together and that sort of everything covered. And I don't think that's realistic. I think it's better to say, okay, different programs have different areas of expertise, and especially at the M.A. level saying, okay, our university has a strong historical tax base focus. Your university has several people working with linguistics and translation and a third university, they do a lot with politics, international relations, so students can choose the M.A. that sort of they're the most interested in and then get relevant methodological training. You can't give them everything.

00:17:29

Duncan McCargo

Right. I mean, you're sort of getting towards the next topic I was going to ask you, which is given that we know Japan studies can't remain static, there are all these challenges. What kind of adaptations will be most desirable to secure a stronger future for the study of Japan and in the Nordic region and in Europe and even beyond?

Aike Rots

So this is based on an essay actually, that I wrote in 2019, where I also addressed the problem of methodological nationalism in Japanese studies and how that prevents us from making some of the changes that I think are needed. And in that essay, “The elusive adjective” is the title of the essay and it's available online. But in that essay I make three suggestions. These are things that are already happening, so I'm not making this up, right? So in a way, they're more like important and promising trends that I'm identifying. So these three promising trends that I or that are suggested are things that I what I think Japanese studies should or can do. The first is look at or investigate processes of Japan making rather than be part of it ourselves. So adopt a meta-perspective. And I use the example of the work of Tessa Morris-Suzuki, who's a historian who's done a lot of very, very good work in this respect. Look at how Japan has been and continues to be constructed and negotiated and how certain things come to be defined as Japanese, whereas other practices, traditions, groups of people are excluded from this process of inclusion and exclusion and nation building, not just as something that happened at a moment in time in the 19th century or something, but as an ongoing process. So that be the first suggestion to actually look at practices of Japan making. Japan then becoming more of an emic category rather than that analytical category. And the second, which I think is very important, which fortunately is happening now, is more attention to diversity, historical, but also present day, diversity within the Japanese isle, the territory of what today is known as Japan, and that includes more critical awareness of two main indigenous minorities in Japan: people in the Ryukyu Islands and the Ainu people. And at what point that these indigenous communities, how did they become part of Japan or that the parts of their culture were erased and then inihilated, but also how today, for example, what does it mean when Ainu are recognized indigenous minority by the Japanese government? How does it change their position? What does it tell us about notions of Japaneseness and so on? So that diversity, but also the other islands, Honshu, Kyushu and Shikoku and one one of the ways in which this is done also by historians now is that they have this maritime shift, so they have more focus on the seas between Japan and the Asian continent as areas historically areas of exchange and trade and the differences, for example, in religious practices between coastal areas in Kyushu and in Tohoku in the north. So that kind of diversity within, I think is very important. Instead of reifying certain traditions, certain practices as Japanese. And the third suggestion that I have, which also my own research project, ‘Whales of Power’, is trying to do, is more intra-Asian comparative research. And one example is I'm looking at whale worship. So rituals related to whales, sometimes alive, but often dead. And how whales can be sacred animals or who can become spirits and what sort of rituals that people conduct, for example, to pacify those spirits. And there I'm looking at whale worship traditions in South Central Vietnam, and I'm comparing these two practices in both in southwestern Japan, but also hopefully northeastern parts of Japan. So that's sort of and one one of the examples that you wanted to make a bit more concrete; looking at Vietnamese popular religion and looking at concepts and notions of divinity there teaches me that the concept of Kami, which is the term which basically means God or deity, that is quite central to Shinto. And Shinto, as you may know, is closely related to notions of Japaneseness. And very often in popular literature on Shinto, you come across the claim that the concept Kami is uniquely Japanese and that it cannot be translated, that it's something very different from the Western gods, supposedly. Now, looking at Vietnam, I see there's the very same character or that that in Japanese is read as Kami, which is in Chinese character Xun or Toung, as it's pronounced in Vietnamese. They're very similar types of spiritual, supernatural, powerful, but not omnipotent beings that can either be defied humans or they can be, you know, elements of nature. They can have different shapes. The very similar notions about this exist in Vietnam, only in Vietnam it never became Shinto. It was never sort of turned into a separate tradition on its own. So that's just one example of how an intra-Asian comparative perspective helps me understand that what we might call sort of a truism or a common idea about what are Kami and what is Shinto as this unique Japanese tradition is just simply untrue and that of, if anything, that concept Xun is one of the most translatable concepts in all of East Asia, right? Yeah, I think there's more of that is happening now. People doing that kind of comparative research that doesn't reify nation states and then sort of juxtapose them as this is Japanese and this is Vietnamese or Korean or whatever, but rather looks at practices and traditions on the ground and then can look at them in a sort of wider comparative perspective. So I think there are great opportunities there. And you see much research now takes up important issues in relation to environmental change, migration, food security, all of these big themes that are not easily covered within more classical categories, but also they're not limited to one nation state. You need that kind of transnational perspective in order to understand what's going on.

00:23:31

Duncan McCargo

Right. I guess apart from the the problem in Japan Studies of not enough comparative work and perhaps in the past an excessive fixation on some kind of, the quest for something that's very essentialist in terms of what is really Japanese, how do academic disciplines fit into this? Because this is another kind of silo problem. As somebody who's been working in political science for the past three decades, it's not always easy to convince people within that kind of academic discipline that work on different parts of Asia has the same value or salience as work on, say, countries in Western Europe or the United States.

Aike Rots

It's interesting how state of the art research always sort of moves ahead and how institutional structures sometimes take much longer to to follow, right? So I think some of the most interesting research that's happening today is actually research that doesn't fit very neatly within some of these established disciplinary boxes. It's problem driven. It looks at the particular themes, particular issues that, for example, things that I mentioned with migration flows and so on, and how environmental change is affecting migration, how a decision of Vietnamese trainees, as they're called, but they're really the labor migrants in very precarious positions in Japan, often subject to harassment. How that migration is caused by environmental problems that happen in Vietnam, for example. And so these kind of problems that is that anthropology, yes or no? Is it political science? Well, it's definitely related to politics, but… So that's the really interesting research doesn't always fit easily within one of these established disciplines, but of course they have their institutional realities. And I've heard that before about political science. I don't I mean, I'm not a political scientist, so I don't know so much about it, but I've heard that before it's quite difficult if you have like the these non-Western data and so on, that you have to argue much more like why Japan or why Southeast Asia? Why does this matter? And it's much more difficult to get them published into general disciplinary journals than, for example, if your focus is on, I don't know, Scandinavian countries or whatever. So. And that's a challenge for funding as well. I mean, if you apply for funding for research projects, if the project is only about Japan, it's very difficult, quite unlikely that you get funding for a major research project from the European Research Council, from the National Research Council. But if you have that problem driven, taking up major research themes and that can be historical as well, doesn't have to be present day and that often has this this transnational focus, then in a way you're more likely to get that sort of funding. So I'm afraid we'll still, as Asian studies and people work on Asia, we still have to answer that question why Japan or why Thailand or why Vietnam? I'm afraid that's something that we'll have to sort of learn to deal with that if you work on France or in the UK that you don't have to answer that question the same way.

Duncan McCargo

Right, Yes. The case study selection question is one that does pop up again and again. And of course, we're all being told you need to be interdisciplinary. And at that point people like me will put their hands up and say, yes, we've always been interdisciplinary. And then someone will say, ah, well, your area studies, that's the wrong kind of interdisciplinary, right? Those words are never quite use. But that's not what we mean by interdisciplinary, not people who know an awful lot about particular places. They would be in a slightly different category. What would you say the most important takeaways from your reflections on the future of Japanese studies at this point?

00:26:55

Aike Rots

I would say there's that area studies, if anything, in a world where we have we live in a in a time of crisis, I think that's fair to say, and it's that that's an environmental crises, there are health crises, there are global crises, global inequalities and the whole 1990s Fukuyama, “End of history”, we sort of we have a great system and you just need some fine tuning - clearly that's completely no longer relevant. And I think there's a general sense of crises and there's also a general awareness that this is or crises plural, but a general awareness that we're globally connected. Right? But ways in which this plays out sort of locally actually really matters where you are and and different places have their different sort of local challenges and that therefore specific knowledge of other countries, other cultures of the diversity, linguistic diversity, cultural diversity in the world doesn't get less important - if anything becomes more important for understanding how exactly these different crises, how they affect communities in different parts of the world, but also for perhaps learning ways of coping, responding to these kind of challenges. So I think that with what areas studies can contribute is that specific place based historical linguistic knowledge that will help us understand, for example, different responses to environmental disasters or something, and therefore also in a way sort of diversify knowledge. And this is something that's happening within the environmental humanities challenging modern Western episteme about man conquering nature and nature versus culture and so on, that kind of thing. Actually taking seriously different indigenous or non-Western knowledge systems can also be very productive and can maybe generate new insights. And I think there's an important role for the areas studies to play there, and that's why we have to strive to preserve that diversity within the area studies. So it's not only like big Japan and China and the few big countries that attract students, but also smaller languages and cultures that may not attract so many students. But but where it's equally important to preserve that specific knowledge. But we as area study scholars have a responsibility and not just staying on our little islands, but to address those big questions and to try to proactively try to establish those dialogues with colleagues who work on those topics in different contexts. So I think there's some real opportunities there. I think area studies matter, and they especially matter in the light of the crisis that we live in, that we have today. But we as area study scholars, we we can't take this for granted. Right? That others will recognize the importance we have to reach out. And so public dissemination and outreach are actually important parts of our responsibilities as scholars working on Asia.

00:29:45

Duncan McCargo

Absolutely. And that's why we've created the Nordic Asia podcast. So thank you Aike for taking the time to discuss your ideas about the future of Japanese studies with us here on the Nordic Asia Podcast.

00:29:57

Aike Rots

You're welcome. Thank you for inviting me.

00:29:59

Duncan McCargo

I'm Duncan McCargo, Director of NIAS. I've been in conversation with Aike Rots, associate professor in Japan Studies at the University of Oslo about his ideas concerning the future of Japanese studies. Thank you for joining the Nordic Asia Podcast, showcasing Nordic collaboration in studying Asia.

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