Japan's minorities: the illusion of homogeneity

This book is a new edition of the edited volume published under the same title in 1997. Perhaps to the reader’s surprise, though, only part of the book is rewritten by the same authors (Chapters 1, 2 and 4, and Chapter 8 which is now co-authored with a new contributor), giving, needless to say, important updates on recent developments. Other chapters may discuss the same minority groups in Japan but are written by different authors with different emphases (Chapters 6, 9 and 10): chapter 6 on the Chinese residents, for example, focuses on newcomers and their transnational practices. Furthermore, there are chapters looking at other minorities in and heterogeneous aspects of Japanese society which were not given special attention to in the first edition (Chapters 3, 5 and 7). As a collection of chapters each generally dealing with one principal minority group in Japan, the book as a whole provides a good overview of Japan’s minorities. As its subtitle suggests, however, the book also aims to dispel ‘the illusion of homogeneity’. Not only do the chapters contest the illusion of Japanese homogeneity by narrating the suppressed stories of minorities in Japan, many of them also bring up the theoretical issue of the self/other relation between the mainstream Japanese and the minorities. The book opens with a chapter by Michael Weiner, the editor, which analyses the modern production of a ‘homogeneous’ Japanese identity through division between it-self and the ‘others’ both at home (minorities such as lepers) as well as abroad (the colonial ‘other’) in the period between 1868 and 1945. But the illusion of homogeneity is produced on the side of minorities too. In chapter 2 on the Ainu, for example, Richard Siddle describes how, in an attempt to resist the state policy of assimilation and the master narrative of national homogeneity where the Ainu problem had been addressed only in the realm of welfare, even the radical Ainu have reaffirmed their ‘indigenous’ identity, whereby ‘denying them[selves] a contemporary modern identity’ (p. 37). Siddle thus indicates the double-edged nature of tourism. Similarly, in Chapter 9 Matthew Allen discusses how ‘fragmented identities [which] have long been part of the Ry uky uan/Okinawan experience’ (p. 199) are articulated, both culturally and politically, into some imagined coherent whole in opposition to Japan and also to the United States. Chapters 4 and 6 are perhaps more empirically oriented, but nevertheless reveal the difficult problem of identity and heterogeneity in their respective cases. In the latter, Gracia Liu-Farrer shows not only the diversity of the Chinese Asian Ethnicity Vol. 11, No. 3, October 2010, 371–373