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THE MYTH OF JAPANESENESS
John Lie: Multiethnic Japan. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001. Pp. viii, 248. $35.00.)
In Multiethnic Japan, John Lie successfully dispels the paradox of the reality of multiethnicity and cultural heterogeneity in modern Japan and the ever-popular Japanese belief of monoethnicity. In the course of demonstrating the centrality of multiethnic Japan, the author deconstructs the discourse of Japaneseness, arguing that the problem with such ideologies of monoethnicity "is not only their empirical inadequacy but their conceptual shortcomings" (p. 159). The author opens the book with an observation of the late 1980s influx of new Asian migrant workers into Japan, which became one of the controversial social issues. He observes that it "challenged the vision of the social integrity and solidarity of the Japanese body politic, which is widely believed to be ethnically homogeneous"(p. 22). The arrival of new foreign workers in Japan posed a potential and symbolic threat to the Japanese self-concept, leading Japanese further to affirm the belief of Japanese homogeneity. In the process of foreign workers' racialization, they were "relationally constructed as the antipodes of Japanese people; they are the class, cultural, and ethnic others" (p. 28).
Central to the widely held belief on Japaneseness are three critical assumptions: a classless society, cultural superiority, and ethnic homogeneity. These values are voiced in cultural expressions and practices both directly and indirectly. One variant of this discourse is what is known as Nihonjinron, a body of writings on theories of Japaneseness whose objective is to identify the defining and different and "unique" qualities of Japanese people. "The sine qua non of the Nihonjinron is the salience of the category of Japaneseness; the only taboos are to say that Japanese are just like other people or to question the category itself" (p. 151). Yet, when carefully examined beyond the widespread myth of monoethnicity, Japanese culture reveals heterogeneous and exogenous roots and influences.
In the following chapter, Lie elaborates on the constitutive character of multiethnicity in modern Japan by studying various dimensions of Japanese popular culture such as sport, popular music, television, literature, and food. "Popular cultural literacy-born of immersion in a particular space and timeis a crucial constituent of the contemporary structure of feelings and of national identity" (p. 57). This was...