Contested Identities and Models of Action in Japanese Discourses of Place-Making Author(s): Eyal Ben-Ari Source: Anthropological Quarterly, Vol.

68, No. 4 (Oct., 1995), pp. 203-218 Published by: The George Washington University Institute for Ethnographic Research Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3317283 . Accessed: 11/07/2011 00:57
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CONTESTEDIDENTITIES AND MODELS OF ACTIONIN JAPANESE DISCOURSESOF PLACE-MAKING

EYAL BEN-ARI The Hebrew University of Jerusalem This article examines discourses related to newly built neighborhoods in contemporary Japan. The focus on recently constructed housing estates is a corrective to many recent studies which have been overwhelmingly examinations of "old" or "traditional" neighborhoods. On one level, such discourse is related to the reputational content of a locality, that is to the series of typifications and images that capture the character and "spirit" of a place. On another level, people often use the residential community as a medium for discussing or for evoking wider issues. Through addressing specific places and their attendant qualities, people constantly promote or denigrate certain visions of what Japan was, is, or should be. This study suggests that a fruitful way to explore the complexity of these discourses is to uncover the 'folk" models of locality which are held by different local groups. People use these models to describe, analyze, and evaluate what goes on in their communities and to prescribe ways to change them. [urban imagery, urban anthropology discourse, Japan, communities] Introduction Towards the end of my first fieldwork in Japan I interviewed an 80-year old villager about the history of the area in which I was working. Towards the end of our conversation he asked where I lived. I answered that I lived in, and was studying, Hieidaira, the new suburban housing estate neighboring his village. He thought for a while and then declared:
you have peoplefrom all over the country.They'reall so occupiedwith theirjobs or businessesthat there is almost

is actually a littleTokyo. Hieidaira It'slikeTokyo in that

to invest his timein the neighborhood asnobody willing

sociation.Well, what do you want? They'reall first generation in the estate; There's no feeling of furusato people.

or homeplace], and little contactbetween [hometown

At that time I sensed that calling a residential area, located hundreds of kilometers away from the capital, "Little Tokyo," evoked a rich variety of connotations and associations, but like many insights garnered during fieldwork I did not pursue the matter. It was only years later, when I began to think about the manner by which people talk about-that is, describe, analyze, and evaluate-their residential community, that I began to discern the metaphor's meaning. At first I thought that the image simply exemplified the "reputational content" (Suttles 1984) of the housing estate: the series of typifications and images that capture the character and "spirit" of a 203

place. But then I realized that the strength of the "Tokyo" metaphor used by the elderly villager lay in the "missions" (Fernandez 1986: ch. 2) it seemed to be carrying out. First, it illuminated many of the qualities commonly associated with "modern" Japanese communities: urban impersonality and heterogeneity, self-interest bordering on selfishness, and a lack of communal commitment and involvement. Second, this image underscored an attitude towards such localities. The villager's declaration seemed to have an appeal as much for its critique of contemporary Japanese society as for its expressing a quest for the warmth and intimacy of the "traditional" community. And third, the metaphor predicated a "folk" model (Quinn and Holland 1987; Keesing 1987) of community dynamics: that is, as set of assumptions and interpretive schemes that lie at base of mundane or common sense knowledge about communities. These models are of great importance because they are the basic points of reference for "what we are" and "what we are trying to do" through which people's reality is constructed. Here the man I interviewed seemed to be assuming-much like many older sociological theories of community-that a particular locality could be taken as a microcosm of wider social processes. More specifically, this man proposed that the case of Hieidaira exemplified a causal chain linking the effects of industrialization and urbanization to involvement in, and a sense of belonging to, a community. But how is this image--or, more correctly, the

204

ANTHROPOLOGICAL QUARTERLY to address these issues through examining what Mullins (1987) has identified as a primary task of urban anthropology: namely, the links between discourses about local communities and the larger society. In this article I extend the discussion in these works into four unexplored directions. Two issues relate directly to Japan and two bear wider import for urban anthropology and the study of complex societies. My first point involves the type of community I have chosen to examine. The overwhelming majority of previous studies of Japanese localities have been examinations of "traditional" or "historic" communities or neighborhoods (Ben-Ari 1992). Against the background of these works the lack of systematic treatments of how newly built residential communities figure in the public discourse about the plight of contemporary Japan is readily evident. I propose that the importance of studying such localities lies not only in their quantitative significance: by some estimates more than a third of Japan's population now resides in such recently established suburbs (Allinson 1979: 5). It is also important because these communities are among the primary means through which the ideology-the central symbols and goals-of Japan's new middleclass is discussed and debated. In other words, new residential areas often provide concrete instances through which different groups debate the social typifications and lifeways which have been shaped by this ideology. As Kelly (1990, 1986) puts it, both career haveidealized official policyand publicopinion
employmentin large organizations,meritocraticeducamotherwho gives care (1990: 69).

properties, viewpoints, and causal chains it predicates-related to wider discussions about presentday residential localities and their place in contemporary Japanese society? The last decade has seen the publication of a number of excellent studies dealing with this question. These analyses center on the ways in which "old" places-whether real or imagined-are discussed as part of a nostalgic search for identity in the postwar era. Martinez (1990), for instance, shows how people have begun to look for the good in Japan, and to spend their holidays in places that represent the real but lost Japan. Bestor (1989) illuminates how the old urban label of shitamachi is now being reapplied to make sense of, and legitimate, contemporary community life and lifestyles in Tokyo. Finally, Robertson's (1992) work, which focuses on a newly urbanized suburb of Japan's capital, emphasizes the (problematical) traditionalizing practices of "place-making" in today's Japan (Noguchi 1993). Such studies have done much to further our understanding of what is entailed by "talk" about a locality. These studies show how "traditional" communities-whether real or imagined-are represented in contemporary public culture as idealized versions of the "good" Japan, and how the purported qualities of such places are part of the nostalgic quest for identity in postwar period. Furthermore, they show how, through addressing specific places and their attendant qualities, people constantly promote or denigrate another level of imagery: certain visions of what Japan was, is, or should be like. In this article, however, my aim is not to add yet another explication of the concepts of "tradition," "old," "urban," or "rural" as they are used in contemporary Japan. Rather, using the case of the neighborhood that I studied, I will examine a set of wider theoretical issues involved in contemporary discourse about local communities. Recent studies in anthropology and related the conhave underscored disciplines tested-essentially labile and political-nature of community identity (Cohen 1986; McDonogh 1991; Bendix 1992). According these approaches, local identity is no longer conceptualized as a given but rather as an assortment of typifications and images that are constantly negotiated. But maintaining that such typifications and images are contested is not enough. We need to theorize the cultural contours within which these contestations take place: to delineate the underlying grounds and the limits on such public debates. This article seeks

of laborbedivision anda nuclear tionalcredentialing, who takescare and domestic husband tweenworking

While these idealizations may contradict the realities of life for many Japanese, this middle-class ideology nevertheless defines "standards of achievement, images of the desirable, and limits of the feasible" (p. 69).1 Along these lines, an examination of the discourse about localities said to be populated by representatives of the new middle class may prove fruitful in furthering our understanding of both their "reputational content" and their use in broader debates about contemporary Japanese society. My second point stands in direct contradiction to much of the stress found in recent analyses. To take two examples, while Martinez (1990) shows

CONTESTED IDENTITIES

205

how peoplenow look for the "good"in the lost Japan, Bestor (1989) illuminateshow the old urban label of shitamachi is now beingreapplied to legitimate contemporary communitylife in Tokyo (see also Dore 1978 and Smith 1988). In such works the accent is on a specificversionof the past: the and cooperative"historibenevolent,harmonious, cal" community.These workscharge that in conthe "negative"or adtemporaryrepresentations verse features of past communities have been glossed over. According to these studies, this favorableversionof rural and urbanlocalitieshas older views. But essentiallyreplacedor supplanted what of other images--of anti-democratic practices, of conservativeattitudes toward authority, and of socialcontrol-which have also guidedpostwar understandings of variouslocalities?I will argue that these images still figurein the contemporary discourseabout localities,and that the newer images have been grafted on, rather than having in my examinareplaced,older ones. Accordingly, tion I uncover and contestation both the complexity that markthe discourseabout such places. The third point is theoretical. I argue that "talk" about local communities(any such places) includes assumptionsabout causality which are used to appraisereality. Here my study suggests the use of a certain concept, that of "folk" model-or alternatively "key scenario" (Ortner 1973) or "schema"(D'Andrade1992)-that may allow us to ascertainthe main elements of such talk. Robertson's (1992) insightfulworkon a new suburbof Tokyo,to put this generalpoint by way of a Japaneseexample,examinesthe practicesof aimed at transforming "place-making" contempoof "hisrary communitiesaccordingto properties toric" villages. Yet she is unclearabout how the people she studiedthink these practiceswill effect concretechangesin their communities. I wouldarin that order to understand such gue reasoning there is a need to make explicit the assumptions abouthow "tradition" is linkedto socialactionand to personalcharacteristics.It is these purported causal chainswhichundergird assertions aboutthe returnto "tradition" and to "past"placesas bases for identityand as remediesfor currentsocialills. I suggest that we use the concept of folk model in order to delineatethe differentlevels and internal of metaphorical organization usage that come into play in talk about residentialcommunities. Fourth,I argue that the use of the folk model conceptallowsus to link thoughtto action.In other

words,my analysisshouldnot be seen as Oust)anotherexercisein delineating the ideational formsof discourseaboutcommunity. Its focus is also on social action and practice.This is a behavioralor practicalfocus (Agnew,Mercer,and Sopher1984: and folk modelsof commu2) becausemetaphors nity providebasic pointsof referencefor what social scientistscall cognitivetasks:describing, charand such acterizing,analyzing, evaluating places, and advising and prescribinghow to change or maintainthem. Hence my finalaim is to showhow talk about the neighborhoodby various local (in the sense of the practical groupsis constitutive actualizationof ideas and images) of this very locality.
The Community

Hieidaira, the housing estate I studied (Ben-Ari of 1991a),offersa usefulentryinto a consideration these issues. Hieidaira, which means "plain of Hiei," was developedin the late 1960s. It is set against the rather picturesqueHieizan mountain chain to the east of Kyoto'snorthern suburbs.Together with a small neighboring village, Hieidaira is part of an independent administrative district within the city of Otsu in Shiga prefecture.Initially developedas an area for second (summer) for homes,the estate'slocationmade it economical standardresidential as the urbancendevelopment ters of Kyoto and Osaka expandedin the 1970s. Hieidaira now resemblesmany other newly constructed housingestates in the country.Its three wards are dividedinto neat rectangular blocks of detacheddwellingsgiving the area an appearance of being thrust upon the mountains.As in many Japaneseresidentialareas (Smith 1979: 95), residencestend to be owner-built and thus appearless monotonous than their European or American counterparts. The estate has a populationof nearly 3,000 people, of which sarariiman(salariedemployees) are the largestminority.While we shall returnto this pointshortly,sufficeit to note here that other sizeable occupationalgroups include merchants, teachers,and artisans.Again,in wayssimilarother Japanesesuburbs(Plath 1980: 21), the tempo of aroundthe flowof peoplefrom daily livingrevolves the community in the morningand their returnat night. Only on weekends,or occasionalholidays, are there many men aroundduring the daytime. Hieidairapartakesof a dualismthat characterizes

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ANTHROPOLOGICAL QUARTERLY northern neighborhoods. In the past these areas have been perceived by people living in the ancient capital as being far away from the city's center. The image of Hieidaira as an "other place" is also related to its spatial surroundings. Reactions to the mountains and greenery surrounding the neighborhood are epitomized by those of a doctor who runs a small clinic in the estate who told me that "Hieidaira is a little like America." Other people talked of Hieidaira as being like "Europe," "France," "Germany," and, in a Japanese twist to "other" places, like "Hokkaido." Hokkaido is Japan's northern and most spacious major island and in the popular mind is often associated with the ambience of foreign countries. Stating the resemblance between the estate and foreign places served at one and the same time to play up the "natural" advantages of the area-the good air, expansiveness, and greenery purportedly found outside of Japan or in the northern island-and to contrast them to the usual plight of urban life in Japan. It is around this contrast that people's comments tended to conflate the "physical" side of the area with its social ambience. Much of this imagery has to do with the countrified atmosphere of the locality. My fieldnotes are replete with testimonies about the "calm" or "leisurely" (hissori, yuttari) feelings elicited by the area. Frequently, such qualities were compared with the characteristics of people's previous places of residence. One woman, in a rather humorous tone, told me of growing up in the center of Kyoto and of having to get used to the country (inaka) with all of its creepy, crawly insects when she came to the neighborhood. Another man used the label "country" when telling fellow workers in Kyoto that he "commutes from the country, a place of good air." A Governing Identity: Urban Ambience and Education Yet despite its location in the mountains, surrounded by forests and streams, the neighborhood has-as I was told time and again by people both within and outside the area, and during both periods of fieldwork-a distinctly urban mark. One prime expression if its urban character is the constant mention of the variety of its residents. Such commentary about local diversity obviously served to differentiate the estate from older, purportedly more homogeneous villages. But on another of "folk" understandings of citlevel-that

many suburban communities: while it is linked politically and administratively to the city of Otsu (pop. 250,000), it is to the neighboring giant of Kyoto (pop. 1.5 million) that most of the local residents are oriented. It is to Otsu that they turn for public services (schools, libraries, welfare aid) and major utilities, but it is predominantly to Kyoto that they turn for jobs, higher education, and the provision of daily needs such as medical care, shopping, and entertainment. The Physical Setting: A Distant "Country" Let me begin with the physical imagery of the estate not only because it is the most tangible, but because it is also one of the most remarked upon aspects of the place. Among the hundred or so comments I have recorded about the place in my fieldnotes, two types were most common: remarks about the locality's distance from urban centers and statements about its spaciousness. For example, local residents reported that when told about the estate, outsiders' reactions were often sympathetic comments such as "it must be very difficult to live in Hieidaira because it is such a distant place." Many non-natives referred to the area as an hekichi, a remote area inconvenient in terms of access. Interestingly, the impression of distance appears to be related to a perception of Hieidaira as an "other" place, remote in an historical sense or removed spatially from the confines of Japan's national borders. Thus, outsiders often associated the estate with the Buddhist temples which lie atop of Mt. Hiei a few kilometers north of the estate. In this view Hieidaira is isolated just like this religious complex (belonging to the Tendai sect) which has figured as a pilgrimage site for hundreds of years. One day a local resident, a professor of Chinese studies at a private university in Kyoto, explained:
Historicallyspeakingthis area has an image of being far away. I think its has to do with the image of Mt Hiei whichis a deep and far away place;that'swhy the image is fused with this religious image. of the neighborhood The name Hieidaira is written with the same Chinese ideogram [as Mt. Hiei] and that's why people tend to and thinkof this as being in the middleof the mountains to being a place "far away." People are really surprised
learn that it takes me only twenty minutes to reach my university.

Similar explanations that I received for the image of distant place associated the estate with Kyoto's

CONTESTEDIDENTITIES
ies-these comments underscored what Fischer (1976: 37) has so aptly illuminated as the social mark of cities: the existence of a variety of separate social worlds. Along these lines, depicting Hieidaira as diverse is a way of characterizing the way many of its residents maintain intense networks of ties external to the neighborhood through which flow assorted people and meanings. The following excerpt, from a conversation I had with the head teacher of the local school, expresses this point graphically and links it to another purportedly urban trait:

207

"have a high level of knowledge" (chishiki ga takai). In its most overstated form the assertion-put to me by numerous people-was that the estate is inhabited by many Kyoto University teachers. Kyoto University is the second-ranked institution of higher education in Japan, and certainly the first-ranked in this area of the country.

This governing identity is encapsulated by the most common label used for people living in the estate: interi. The dictionary translation of interi is intellectuals or the intelligentsia, but in more common parlance it means highly educated people. As one astute local observer put it, the academic backit's as though Listen, theytooka multi-story apartment turned it over: sort of and building just "spilled ground of a graduate of an elite university is often people out." The peoplehere live in private,detachedhousesbut perceived as a measure of that person's success, the contact themis like that in an apartment hard work, and intelligence. More generally in Jabetween of the areaas a building. Theyare not reallyconscious pan, such people are usually accorded respect, presthatthey andyousometimes community, get the feeling tige, and above average salaries. The image of ina sortof selfishness. thinkonlyof themselves, teri, however, includes not only an emphasis on educational achievement, but also elements of poAnother man, a real estate agent, commented that litical progressivism (a confrontational posture to Hieidaira was very Tokyo-like (Tookyoteki): living authority, and "sticking" to one's rights). in the area are people from a variety of places, The labelling of the neighborhood as interi has with a distinct feeling among them that they can do what they feel like doing without others' roots in the 1970s when residents (led by a number of university lecturers) organized a series of camintervention. But more is said to mark the neighborhood paigns to force local government and the private than urban heterogeneity and self-centeredness. developer of the estate to provide such amenities as The educational achievements of Hieidaira's resia new sewerage system, kindergartens, school, and dents repeatedly came up in interviews and converplaygrounds (Ben-Ari 1991a: 113-114). So successsations. This point may be clarified through the ful were the residents that one head of the neighlists residents and outsiders provided when I asked borhood association was labelled by a former emabout the kind of people living in the estate. No ployee of the developing company as "an expert in doubt reflecting the importance of employment as human engineering, a specialist in putting demands the core of social identity in all industrialized societo local government officials and getting their coties, these inventories were almost always lists of operation." What is of significance from the point of view of the present analysis, however, is that the occupations. While lists varied somewhat between label "interi," originally attached only to the local individuals, all included the following core of vocations: sarariiman, doctors, merchants, lawyers (I leadership, was generalized into a designation for never encountered any), and school teachers. In adthe whole area. Two points merit mention in this dition, a number of other, rather special, categories regard. First, the estate's identity was not solely of people were said to inhabit the neighborhood: the result of processes by which only highly edumusicians ("enough to set up a whole orchestra," cated people moved into the area, for in reality inas one man exaggeratedly put it), artisans (using migration was very diverse. Rather, it crystallized traditional forms found in Kyoto), artists, but out of the management of the community's "exterabove all university lecturers. nal relations": out of the success of the original Thus Hieidaira has a rather strong "governing leaders in forging a sense of local identity, and the identity" (Suttles 1972: 248-250): it is said to be labelling of the neighborhood by outsiders such as marked by people with high educational achieveofficials at the city office. Second, the general label ment. A teacher at the local school (she lives of interi was the outcome of amplifying small differences between the Hieidaira and other essenoutside the area) told me that this was "a hai reberu (high-level) area, one of university teachtially similar neighborhoods. Hieidaira's minority ers," and a number of people told me the residents of university teachers began to be taken as repre-

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ANTHROPOLOGICAL QUARTERLY
parents in the area had an interest in education and therefore came forward with many demands; or, that the heavy stress on achievement at home led to constant claims put to educational authorities. Almost all of the educators thus underscored what they perceived to be a widespread sentiment-again, Hieidaira being both a typical and an extreme example of such expectations-that educational authorities be responsive to the demands of parents. The political imagery of the estate combines depictions of local people's attitude to authority and their ability to mobilize towards collective action. The image of Hieidaira's aggressive progressivism came up time and again in conversations with people who have (or have had) dealings in city-level politics: leaders and activists in neighborhood organizations, politicians and city bureaucrats, and school teachers and principals. A local resident, herself a kindergarten teacher working outside the neighborhood, directly linked collective participation and "outspoken" dealings with authority to education:
Because you have many people who have a high educational level here, they tend to be independent; and they go directly to heads of departmentsin the city government, to the mayoror to peoplein charge.Thereis much less fear of going to managersamong them than among other peopleliving in Otsu.

sentative of the whole area. These differences were then taken to be fully fledged representations of the community's governing identity. Thus, Hieidaira began to be, and still is, called an interi no chiiki-an area of the highly educated. Closely related to the image of educational achievement is a conception of relatively high economic standing. The same teacher who used the image of an apartment house said, "The level of people here is higher than the average in the country. Both in their income and in their awareness of education they are the elite (joryu, also upper classes)." Referring to the Hieidairaites, a city official told me that "their prosperity is very conspicuous," while a young school teacher said that some houses looked as though they had come out of home fashion magazines. Such labels, however, are not merely abstract designations of the neighborhood's main qualities, but also figure in the way people reason about its social dynamics. Talk about the tone set by the interi of the area revolves around two issues: a highly competitive "passion" for education and an assertive politics. A member of the city's Board of Education stressed that Hieidaira was similar to many of the newly built areas of the city populated by people who put a heavy emphasis on education. In a similar manner the principal of the Middle School to which the children of Hieidaira commute, observed that like residents of other such areas, Hieidaira's parents are very enthusiastic about education and participate avidly in school related activities. The children, he added, usually get high grades. In one meeting with the local people the mayor said that this was an area with many "high level" people and that he had heard from teachers that the estate's children, as well, were on a "high level." Such comments simultaneously asserted the typicality of Hieidaira as an area populated by a new generation of people educated after the Second World War and its distinctiveness as the rather extreme embodiment of interest in education. Images of Political Action Teachers at all levels-kindergartens and elementary and middle schools--often placed the enthusiasm for education in a causal scheme related to politics. In their thinking the label "interi" provided a bridge between education and politics by linking the stress on education to the articulation of local demands. Accordingly, I was often told that

This attribution was echoed (in a disapprovingtone we shall return to presently) by a self-employed man in his fifties:
in Japanin I see this as partof what has been happening the last twentyor thirtyyears. Hieidairais Japanin miniature.It reflectsgeneralthingsthat are going on outside: the strengthening of people'spoweror citizens'power.If

liketheandoesnotwork out,or if theydon't something

swer the city government gives them then they go running off to the newspapers.

Another woman related the stance towards authority to income, occupation, and exposure to America, and through these elements to the future image of Japan: in Hieidaira havean independent income andinPeople
dependentwork and in this respect they are different from other people. This is a general problemin Japan and not only in Otsu:the relationbetweenpeopleand the
administration. It should be like, well, the grass roots

movementin America,or the movementagainst the war in Vietnam.One has, as an individual. . . to indepenand whetherthere dently decide about one's environment
is a need to go against the political or administrative

CONTESTED IDENTITIES
authorities.

209

Her words were echoed time and again by persons who linked the concentration of people who deal in knowledge to a progressive political stance. Thus an ex-principal of the school made a point of contrasting Hieidaira with old neighborhoods or villages in which the dominant force was usually a local oligarchy. "Hieidaira is a good example," he said, "it is exceptionally open and democratic." It is important to understand the wider context within which this kind of talk takes place. Since at least the end of the 1960s public struggles in Japan have been influenced by a variety of groups: citizens' and environmental movements, consumer cooperatives, students' and welfare groups, and some labor unions and political parties. These movements have succeeded not only in placing new issues on the country's political agenda, but in changing some of the premises on the basis of which public struggles are carried out. They have been instrumental in crystallizing the idea that Japan's citizens have something called "rights" which the system owes them, and have taken the lead in pushing for the establishment of democratic procedures for expressing their demands and striving for their acceptance (Mckean 1981: 267-268; Pharr 1990: 11). In this sense the Hieidairaites are taken to be representatives of these new kinds of groups and attitudes. There are yet other implications of the interi label. The owner of a local steak-house bluntly linked interi-related occupations to the resources at the disposal of local people:
Listen, the people who work in the city governmentare weak in terms of intelligence;they're stupid. For them is the most importantthing your educationalbackground becausein orderto get into the municipality they have to That's why it's impass tests like to get into universities. associationtherebe uniportantthat in the neighborhood versity teachers.

These passages underscore how, once the identity of the locality has emerged, it can, in itself, be used as a resource. In other words, "intellectuals" in Hieidaira provided not only advice and leadership, but on another level their very status began to be used as a resource itself. Talk about a locality's identity, to put this another way, involves not only abstract niceties of rights and entitlements, but perhaps no less importantly, entails analyses of the practicalities of politics. Materialism, Individualism, and Evaluation Yet for all of this, the qualities associated with Hieidaira are rarely described only in positive or affirmative tones. They all belong to what may be termed a contested terrain in Japan's public culture. The debate about these qualities centers on the value of (Western) individualism and democracy, the excesses of competition, and the loss of a quintessential Japanese identity. Materialism: If awareness of consumer issues and of the power of consumer groups is the positive side of people's reaction to increased tangible wealth, materialism is its negative side. One element often cited in critical terms in this regard was the "showiness" of the neighborhood's residents. For instance, a number of people mentioned the ostentatiousness of some of the houses and furnishings. Another indicator of residents' pretentious self-advertising was a Japanese version of "keeping up with the Tanakas." One anthropologist living in the area characterized what was happening among a coterie of friends as a sort of "potlatch":
We startedit off by invitinga few friendsaroundhere to a party.Soon we began a roundof going to each other's houses,drinkingbeer, sake and whisky,singingkaraoke, and sometimesdancing.Pretty soon some of the original friendsbeganto invite morepeopleto the partiesand the groupgrew from about 16 to about 32. It was too much, it becamea kind of potlatch:peoplebeganto notice and commentabouteach other'sfurniture, and what they had bought for the kitchen. It's crazy!

The local residents, keenly aware of the power of the interi image take full advantage of it. A retired Kyoto University professor told me how, when meeting local government officials, he would produce his meishi, his name card. It has, he said,
great name value; it makes a strong impression on local administrators and predisposes them to take matters I raise in a more serious way. That's probably one of the reasons why they recruited me into the neighborhood association, so that every once in a while they could "parade" me in front of government officials.

Self-Centeredness: A closely related theme pervading people's comments about the materialism said to characterize the neighborhood, was selfcenteredness. One woman who runs a local art gallery told me how surprised she was when she moved into the neighborhood. She had thought that the neighborhood was populated by cultured people (bunkajin), but then saw these very people carelessly throw out their garbage on days when there

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ANTHROPOLOGICAL QUARTERLY plex discourse about the ills of contemporary Japan. Here I can offer only a small number of examples. A resident of the estate, a carpenter who was born in and still works in Otsu, stated: is probably related of the parents, to the higheducation theirchildren are reteachers: doctors, manyuniversity
ally smartand many of them go to juku [privatesupplementary schools] from a very early age and they are I wouldn'tlike my taught this sense of competitiveness. daughterto go to a juku. I want her to be muchfreer;to I feel that the competitive spirithere is very strong.This

was no collection. "It's as if they're not concerned," she said, "when their garbage bags tear and make the whole street dirty." An elderly man talked of the estate's young mothers as tonde-iru okaasan: "flowery"mothers who are basically interested only in going out and having a good time. One of the local newspaper agents said that there were more educated people here who read a variety of newspapers and journals, but that they were also marked by a sort of individualism. He linked education to snobbery, and to a lack of concern with others. A 60-year old resident specializing in the property market, contended that Theydon'tcare whatothersthink, my (own)house." interownwayandwantto liveit without theyhavetheir who It's sucha Western ference. styleof living: people sawlife thereand or Europe, wentto America, France, to live like that here.Thatuniversity decided professor for his sabbatical and he told me that was in Virginia himof America. Thismanin thearts Hieidaira reminded and wantsto live like a French gallerywas in France
painter. ... nese-like. Hieidaira is so European,not very Japathereare a lot of peoplehere who have a feelingof "only

comehomeanddo all sortsof things.

In a few words this man not only posits a causal chain linking international influence to selfcenteredness, but drives his point home by stressing the alien quality of such an individualistic orientation. The reasoning here seems to resonate with wider assumptions found in Japan, and to answer certain expectations about what it means to be Japanese. Japanese travel brochures often use such phrases an "my pace" or "my plan" to make tourists realize that they can do as they want once they have escaped the confines of Japanese society (Moeran 1983: 105). Thus, according to the logic of this man's assertion, it is the same kind of escape from "Japanese" norms of behavior which is risky within neighborhoods such as Hieidaira, because it can lead to a too individualistic stress. To reiterate a point made earlier, the comparison with America or with Europe is not limited to the physical side of the estate, but perhaps more significantly it is a means to attribute certain social characteristics to the area. The problem is not only materialism in itself. As Hidaka (1984: 68) asserts, the problem with materialism is its implication for the "public": materialism leads to individualism which leads to lack of involvement in communal matters (cf. Nelson 1992: 92). The Excesses of Education: In the debate about the excesses of educational achievement local matters are even more explicitly linked into a com-

On the one hand, this passage underscores the effects of Japan's "examination hell." The term refers to the grueling preparations for entrance examinations into the country's top universities, which are said to involve over-pressured children, rote learning, and a basic lack of fun (Rohlen 1983: 77; 1987; Goodman 1989). The carpenter's comments well underline the prospects of his daughter's having to enter such an educational "rat-race." On the other hand, this passage underscores how this competition is localized, in an area of interi. The very act of living in such an area, this man feels, forces his daughter to compete. A 40year old mother of two school age children, talked in similar terms about the local primary school: foreducaan enthusiasm for education, strong pressure arenotso goodforthe tion.Thismayleadto sideswhich demands There arestrong notso healthy. children, puton mothers with Moreover, too strong. the kids,sometimes andto branch tendto be veryprideful education higher thetypeof education around factions offintovarious system they wouldlike. Because people here tend to be more educated,there is

Many polemics about the afflictions of the educational system focused on these mothers, regularly labelled kyooiku mama. This term means "education mama," but as one local wit translated it for me, its connotation is more akin to "education-crazy mother." While not entirely a negative designation, it does indicate a radical stress on achievement. One teacher, again invoking the imagery of Hieidaira as social microcosm, said that the neighborhoodwas characteristic of all of Japan in terms of the anxieties suffered by families dominated by such women, but hastened to add in a much more positive light that it was definitely easier to teach the children of such mothers because they tend to be more inquisitive and open to learning. Along with the competitive education and ma-

CONTESTEDIDENTITIES
terialism which are said to characterize such neighborhoods other dangers-perhaps more troubling than anxieties of "examination hell"-emerge. These risks are more troubling because they question a key assumption about social life in Japan. The following passage is from an interview with the woman who ran an afternoon facility catering for children until the time their parents came home:
Parents here have a feeling that they have come to a place that is free, to a place where they can live a life that is relativelyfreerthan in the city; and they give their childrenthis kind of feeling. There are a numberof outcomes to this situation.For instance,the childrenare unskillful in group activities especially when I compare them to the previousplace where I worked [in Kyoto]. You have to struggle with them until you achieve anything, and this is a reflectionof their parents'difficulties in group activities.Anotheraspect is that there is a leisurelyfeeling here and very little stresson physicaleffort. That's why they lack sturdinessand are poor in sports. This is all part of a general feeling here of selfishness, that anyonecan do what they feel like.

211

In this excerpt a critique of Hieidaira is coupled with concrete suggestions about how to rectify the situation. While we shall return to this matter of organized "solutions" to present social ills in a moment, there is one more set of criticisms of Hieidaira to be dealt with. Politics and Commitment: Many administrators and politicians I interviewed-harking back to a past when things were purportedly easier-complained that in place of "warm" relations between governors and governed, the residents of Hieidaira have begun to place demands on them on the basis of rights. A rather outspoken city bureaucrat said, We've in Hieidaira, invested a lotof thecity'smoney but theresidents haveforgotten this.They've today forgotten the basiccooperation withthe citygovernment. All they do is to cometo us withtheirdemands. Another senior official formulated an explanation of the changing attitudes in historical terms: to theCityOffice thewarandafterit. In thepast before the municipality wascalled the Ooyakusho. The [honorto us. Peothedeference thatwasshown ific]Ooshowed to camearound pleusedto makea fussif a cityofficial theirneighborhood. that Today theyjustsayshiyakusho,
as beingon is, just plain City Office.They see themselves pality. Many feel that public services are "owed" to Thereis a big differencebetweenthe attitudesof citizens

The kindergarten's head teacher explicitly linked this critique to materialism. She mentioned that while it was nice to have large houses and wide gardens, in contrast to apartment buildings, there was a risk here that the children will not feel a need to go out to the street to play. Thus the emphasis in the estate, she concluded, is too much on the house and on the individual, and this emphasis leads to children who lack in group contact and activities. Such comments encapsulate a major criticism of the "educated folks" of Hieidaira-as they do of many representatives of Japan's new middle class: one of their greatest weaknesses is in the ability to inculcate a sense of "groupishness." The ability to "group" is seen as so central as almost to define what being Japanese itself is. Thus by purportedly "doing their own thing," the Hieidairaites are questioning the very foundations of "traditional" values. People very often provided corroborating evidence for this folk theory of education, by underscoring another side of the label interi. Many coaches of the neighborhood's youth sports teams, as indeed observers of the annual sports-day, referred to Hieidaira's children as being rather fragile and sometimes naive bookworms (Ben-Ari 1986). The baseball team's head coach said,
Hieidaira'skids are part of a general trend in Japan, they're weak, unskillful in teamwork [chimuwaaku]. They don't know how to work together . . . and that's

an equal withthepeople in themuniciwhowork footing them.

why we set up these sports teams.

The new attitudes signal a significant change from the prewar conception of the hierarchy which led from the Home Ministry down to the community (and to the household): "the purpose of this pyramidical structure was ... the transmission of the will of those above to those below, and the feelings of those below to those above" (Dore 1959: 104, emphasis in original). That the Hieidairaites, as indeed the residents of many newly built areas, are questioning this cultural conception, was made even clearer for me in the words of a member of the municipality's social welfare department. He explained that many newly built areas like Hieidaira were populated by young couples with no restraint (enryoo) in demanding things of government authorities. Here again, the use of the word "enryoo" resounds not only with a questioning of authority, but also with a threat to some deepseated Japanese views of appropriate behavior and communication between status levels (Kondo 1990: 150).

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ANTHROPOLOGICAL QUARTERLY Organized Solutions: The Intentional Creation of Furusato When I mentioned the rather weak participation of Hieidairaites in the voluntary fire brigade, an official from the city's fire fighting unit said:
In Hieidairayou have a hodgepodge of people from all sortsof places like Osakaand Kyotoand they have little

Similar critiques were directed towards the political organization in the locality. The head of the neighborhood association (an executive in a Kyoto department store) talked about the locality's occupational make-up:
A lot of university teachers,self-employed, artists,and so on live here. On the one hand, this makesfor peoplewho are willing to be mobilized for the gains of the whole On the other hand, this makes things disneighborhood. jointed:it is very difficultto get some kind of uniformity of opinionbeforeputtingdemandsto the administration.

awareness andcommitment to the area.That's whyits where mostpeople livein an apartments, bigapartments, areaonlyfor a shorttimeandhaveno attachment and
little solidarity. betweensuch peopleand Any cooperation the [local] area is difficult. difficult to get volunteers for fire fighting.... Hieidaira'sthe same as areas where there are mostly

This view of the difficulties in reaching a consensus is shared by city officials. Here are the words of an official from the department liaising with the neighborhood associations:
In Hieidairayou have people with all sorts of opinions, from all sorts of places, and with all sorts of ways of thinking. Under these circumstancesthere is very little local solidarity.Maybe this will come about in the next generation,but now it's difficult to get them to work together.

As yet other government officials put it, the residents' individualism hindered local communication and led to an inability to reach decisions. Similarly, some persons linked the occupational make-up and the educational level of the Hieidairaites to lack of involvement in communal affairs. The head of the local neighborhood association talked of the snobbery of many university teachers and doctors, who thought they were somehow "superior" and thus unwilling to participate in community functions (such as sports days) or in community action (such as signing petitions). Interestingly, this view is shared by many of the politically progressive residents of Hieidaira. One woman (a participant in the students' movements of the late 1960s) observed:
There is a bad side to middle-classness. Peoplewith education and money have a lot of pride. Sometimesthey becomeindifferent; they thinkonly of their lives and their That business.This is the negativeside of individualism. why it's sometimesdifficultto set up a citizens' movement in such a place [as Hieidaira].

The stress on the negative consequences of Hieidaira's social characteristics is related, in turn, to a set of "solutions" which are aimed at rectifying such social ills and which have been at the heart of much public debate in the past few decades.

This comment includes more than a portrayal of the qualities attendant on urban residences. It posits two elements which many people see as a "resolution" to the social maladies of newly built areas like Hieidaira. The first is a causal model linking time of residence in the area--or more generally local historical depth-to the emergence of solidarity and attachment. The second is a postulate that local solidarity and attachment are preconditions for the emergence of communal involvement action. Implicit in these contentions-as in the assertions underlying the excerpt placed at the article's beginning-is a solution based on the creation of a furusato, a "home-place" or "home-town" in Hieidaira. At base this solution involves the establishment-within new residential communities-of the sentiments of belonging and involvement which are said to have characterized "old" villages. A nostalgia for, and a desire to be associated with, the past is universal to all rapidly changing societies (Davis 1979). But the contents, the meanings, and the means by which this quest is undertaken shift with the context (Stewart 1988: 227). Thus the question becomes one of delineating the peculiarly Japanese version of the past which is involved here (Ben-Ari 1991b). It is useful to follow the lines of Robertson's (1992) argument, as she has done much to clarify the notion of furusato-zukuri (the making of a home-place). The dominant representation of furusato is infused with nostalgia, a dissatisfaction with the present on the grounds of a remembered or imagined past plenitude (p. 14). As Allinson (1978: 458) notes, Japanese scholars, critics, novelists, and poets have all engaged in a orgy of public display over the loss of community, the sense of anonymity, and the widespread isolation that are said

CONTESTED IDENTITIES to afflict urban Japan. Since the early 1970s, however, academics and intellectuals, government officials and party activists, as well as ordinary citizens have begun to call for a resolution to these circumstances. They have discussed such concepts as komyuniti (community) (Ben-Ari 1991a), mai taun (my town) (Tokyo Metropolitan Government 1982), machi-zukuri (creating a hometown) (Nussbaum 1985; Bestor 1992), or chihoo no jidai (the age of the local) (Smith 1988: 381). But as Robertson (1987) astutely observes, all of these terms revolve around the notion of "native-place building." The notion of furusato-zukuri is a practical project. Essentially, it involves remaking the past as the condition for bringing about a social transformation in the present: the idealized characteristics and practices of the "village of the past" are used as prescriptions for creating a similar set of traits and conventions in contemporary residential communities (Robertson 1992: 9). The modes of sociability of the "good old days" which were based on harmony and camaraderie, while long since abandoned or dismantled, are taken to be capable of revivification and reconstruction. Smith (1988) observes that behind this term lie some rather strong assumptions about

213

community in Hieidaira the locals should cultivate traditional Japanese dances (odori). Along with municipal officials he continued, like many conservative politicians (Nihon Fujin Dantai Rengokai 1980; Imamura 1987: 9), to propose setting up a variety of "citizens' festivals" such as arts meetings, exhibitions, or a city citizens' sports-day. Such community related activities, he reasoned, may aid in inculcating the spirit of the traditional locality with its emphasis on self-help, self-reliance, and solidarity. Indeed, Robertson (1987: 124) has shown how citizens' festivals are staged in cities throughout Japan as a conscious effort on the part of municipal governments to reclaim from inexorable urbanization, and more recently "internationalization," the indigenous village within the city.3 But all of these kinds of suggestions should not be understood as rather simplistic manipulations of residents by institutional interests. The promulgation of such evocative catch-words as fursatozukuri or machi-zukuri is, to be sure, related to the attempt by various levels of government to do things such as implement social change (Kelly 1986), promote tourism and generate local revenues (Ivy 1988; Graburn 1983: 25), strengthen neighborhood associations (Takayose 1979), and create slogans for political platforms (Seah 1989; But to overstress the political the needto revitalize tradition the revival Nagashima 1981). by promoting and economic interests linked to the promulgation of customary festivals and the like, and to practices, reestablish whatareseenas the idealsthatoncecharac- of such terms is to lose sight of their power and terizedthe localcommunity, the furusato . . . [which depth for modern Japanese. It is to lose sight of the weredestroyed] forces of industrialization, place of by the linked locality-and its festivals and artifacts-in andthe decline of agriculture urbanization, (p. 381). the search for personal and collective meaning in today's world. Yet the creation of a "native-place" in such These dimensions were brought home to me communities as Hieidaira reveals the complexity rather poignantly in other suggestions raised at the and the ironies of recreating "past things" in the with the mayor. Speaking in clear terms meeting framework of larger scale urban or suburban localan elderly pensioner asked the municipality for ities. A number of suggestions raised at a meeting help in finding place for a cemetery in the area. He between the mayor and Hieidaira's community continued that until the age of 60 he didn't think leaders were enlightening in this respect. Such about these things, but after he dies he would like meetings were held in all of Otsu's neighborhoods his children to be able to visit his grave in the area. the throughout early and mid-1980s. The mayor Taking up this point, the head of the estate's oldthis with a comment opened particular gathering folks club explained that a cemetery was necessary that sums up some of the contradictions of Japan's "as it is the foundation of a furusato. It is the way "internationalization" by mentioning that he had in which everyone can take root in the area." been to Europe to learn the subject of machizukuri (city "making").2 In Hieidaira it is the older and middle-aged During the meeting various details of the individuals, raised in prewar villages or urban neighborhood's infrastructure and services were neighborhoods, who call for the construction of a discussed. But about midway through the assembly local Shinto shrine. Pointing to the existence of other issues began to be raised when the mayor such a sanctuary in a neighboring village, these suggested that as part of creating a sentiment of people justify their claims in terms of the impor-

214

ANTHROPOLOGICAL QUARTERLY intentionally organized. This is no mean point, for it underscores how, in the contexts of complex urban societies, it is only organizations that can make arrangements for large-scale localities. In Hieidaira-as in Japan in general-it is through the activities of a host of committees, clubs, associations, and other organized groups that the creation of a sense of locality can be actualized. In Hieidaira the need for organized action, intentionally arranged large-scale endeavors, as a remedy for the lack of local solidarity was accented by the president of the PTA: here.Thekidsmayget to It'shardto strike up contacts knowthosewholiveon theirstreet,but a littlefarther difficult. That's is important awayit becomes whyschool forcreating It takestime,andthat's whywe friendships.
need activitieslike dance parties,bazaars,lecture meet-

tance of shrines in ensuring the estate's intergenerational continuity. A retired civil-servant from Hieidaira talked about the advantages of joining the adjacent village in an administrative union of neighborhood associations: It's imaboutthe union. Therearea lot of goodthings Thevilthatthe village joinin furusato-zukuri. portant and they havea Shintoshrine lage has a longhistory; we have three [Buddhist] temples.Here in Hieidaira don't want a shrine, andsome some of whom interi, many I thinkit's do wanta shrine. of whom ... Personally, to have a shrine,even to join the village's important wecould evenif it costsmoney. shrine; join Alternatively if we will in Otsu;Hieidaira willimprove the big shrine services likethememorial service be ableto holdvarious forthe dead. The head priest of this large Shinto shrine located a few kilometers from the housing estate said to me, in of theestateoftencometo participate Thenewpeople born in relaAllof themwere at ourshrine. theactivities so thattheycomeoutof a hometraditional tively places whata festival town(kokyoo) is, theyknow background; When the drums, the atmosphere. the dances, the songs, in the intoHieidaira theylookforthesethings theymove the area. shrines around Another segment of the local populace, overwhelmingly parents of children at school, not only take an active part in organizing, but are continually defending the Buddhist children's festival which is held during the summer. Their explanation--directed at some critics citing the need to leave religious affairs to individual choice-is that without such religious practices the children will find it difficult to develop a notion of spiritual matters and an attachment to the area. Similarly, it is a small group of intellectuals-authors, social commentators, and journalists-who talk of the need to arrange for a chronicle of the estate. As in other Japanese communities (Brown 1979), writing a local history is seen as a way to create a sense of place. While I was doing fieldwork, the book to be based on my doctoral thesis was envisaged as one such document. The importance local residents attach to festivals is not limited to religious or "spiritual" events. Such occasions as bazaars, shows, hikes, trips, summer camps, or singing competitions organized by neighborhood groups are also considered valuable. But what is evident in regard to these latter kinds of activities is the extent to which Hieidaira's residents recognize that these must be consciously and

ings,andrice-balls parties. making

The example of the annual sports-day (BenAri 1986) held in Hieidaira may further illuminate the importance of organized action for local residents. A member of Hieidaira's sports committee related the significance of the day to the process of community-building: Oneof the mostimportant neighborhoods waysin which become familis theprocess areformed people by which of thesports-day lies Theimportance iarwitheachother. forsuchthings. in the possibilities it provides Time and again, the head of the sports committee stressed that such occasions were especially important in areas like Hieidaira where there are hardly any communal festivals and functions and relatively little komiyunikeishun (communication) between people. But the very scale of such events begins to change the quality of participation and the expectations attendant upon such participation. The observations of the head of the neighborhood association about the sports-day at one and the same time played up the significance of such events and underlined a different set of attitudes towards the locality:
The sports-day is the festival(matsuri)of the wholearea.

of people whowantto takepartin the There areplenty

But wholeaffairwith its lively and enjoyable atmosphere. other people none the less feel that taking part in such on their free time . . . Sunday. events poses a restriction

Thus alongside a harking back to the past-and in a way alongside a harking to the future-"village" is also a stress on the importance of the right "not to neighbor." At one and the

CONTESTED IDENTITIES same time, the same people may argue for setting up a local shrine engendering local solidarity, and argue for building a community where minding one's own business is a prime value. These sentiments can be found not only among younger members of the community, as I found out when I asked an elderly professor of Buddhist studies about his ideas of an ideal neighbor. Before replying, he got up and fetched a book of Chinese proverbs. He painstakingly translated a proverb by Confucius into English: "The communication of gentlemen is like water." Giving a little chuckle, he continued in Japanese, "It isn't like milk or juice, you see. This kind of communication is brief and frank. It involves little interference in each other's affairs and no real commitment." Thus for all of the stress on furusato-zukuri, many people said that it was also important to preserve the atmosphere of non-interference and minimal contact with neighbors. They may hark back to an idealized version of the old village, but the freedom "not to participate" is just as important: they want the freedom to choose whether to take part in the "village of the past" or to withhold their participation. These ambivalences bespeak related doubts about the artificiality of attempting to "traditionalize" modern settings. Following the sports-day in which members of the estate's neighboring village had participated, I interviewed an elderly member of the neighborhood association. The women's association of the village had performed a traditional Japanese dance during the interval between the sports-day's two parts. He began rather condescendingly and then spoke of the incongruity of the setting: areprovincial Thishas They[thevillagers] (hookenteki). in good sidesto it like in theirexcellent participation events andothercommunity activities. Butit also sports Conclusion

215

has funnysides, like whenthey got up at the intermission and dressed up in traditionalclothes and danced that traditional dance. It gave me a funnyfeeling. It didn'tfit

dancein the sports in;a traditional day.

This passages underscores the discomfort many people feel with the synthetic creation of traditional practices in inappropriate contexts. He seemed to be saying that there are appropriate places for the expression of the village's traditionality. To take up a point from Hannerz (1992: 133), if nostalgia is one kind of thought and expression generated under the encounter between present difficulties and a certain perspective towards one's past, then irony is another.

In this article I have examined the talk about newly built residential areas populated by representatives of Japan's new middle-class. I began by situating my argument in relation to a number of recent studies which have examined idealized representations of "communities of the past." These works have furthered our understanding of what is entailed by "talk" about such localities. As they show, such discourse is related both to the "reputational content" of a locality and to the way the locality is used as a medium for discussing wider issues. Yet I would propose that my study bears wider import both for the study of Japanese communities and for the more general analyses of localities in complex industrialized societies. By way of conclusion let me underscore a number of issues. First, I have contended that understanding discourse about local communities involves juxtaposing two levels of analysis: the local and the national. I use the word juxtapose, because it is not only a matter of how localities are represented according to the logics of national debates about a "vanishing" tradition or a new kind neighborhood. It is also a matter of how wider understandings are mobilized by people in their dialogue with a variety of significant others about local identity. The national discourse is actualized in-and fixes the contours of-local dialogue. In this respect, Hieidaira is marked by a plurality of images. While it is country-fled in one sense, it is definitely not the country of the "old" Japan in another sense. Being both urban and an area of the highly educated it is taken to be representative of a new type of community which is characteristic of post-war Japan. In this manner talk about Hieidaira is talk of about the new middle class and what it represents. More generally, talk of such localities is part of wider Japanese discourse about modernity, nostalgia, the politics of civic involvement, and (interestingly) about Japan's internationalization. The second point is related to the causal assumptions underlying the discourse on contemporary localities. This point is clearest in regard to the terms "past" and "tradition." The superiority of the "past" is not simply an abstract idea, but one based on invoking-sometimes implicitly and other times explicitly-a causal scheme. "Tradition" is seen to grant a local community strength in communal participation and action by providing the locality with a sense of solidarity and unity. In

216

ANTHROPOLOGICAL QUARTERLY 1989) have long been dominated by analyses at the level of villages and neighborhoods, of communities and subcultures, or of "ethnic" and "minority" groups. Only more recently have anthropological inquiries focused on a grander scale to ask questions about the wider processes that keep parts of this society together or separate them. But as I have shown here, the move to a more macro focus should be undertaken cautiously. The current stress on openness and the pluralism of perspectives now in fashion in anthropology (Gupta and Ferguson 1992; Cooke 1990; Watts 1992) should not blind us to the "topography," that is, to the broad contours or configurations, of possibilities within which the experiences of place in our societies take place. By focusing on the specific folk models or schemas that are used to make sense of the world, I have tried to map some of the limits of the pluralism entailed by newer approaches. For example, the reality of the residents of Hieidaira comprises a limited field of issues such as leisure and collective commitment, individualism and groupishness, or democratic rights and traditional authority relations. While these issues, of course, change at the same time that self-definitions of Japanese change, they nevertheless encompass the broad possibilities within which localism and "Japaneseness" are defined. We must be wary of an all too neat emphasis on the "invention" of Japanese traditions. To reiterate, a stress on contestation, mutability, and change does not imply that "anything goes." We may miss continuities and limits on invention without a recognition of the elements of more enduring coordinates in the way Japanese conceptualize their communities and through these localities the way they think of themselves, their history, and their tradition.

other words, in the Japanese folk theory of traditionality, community-wide activities are both indicators and products of the power of the community which is (in turn) based on its "past" legacy. Yet for all the stress on the edifying nature of tradition, there is an accompanying discourse about the disadvantages of the "village of the past." This discourse focuses-just like the nostalgia-driven discourse-in part on real and in part on imagined places. But what is evident is that the previous images of "traditional" communities as locations of "old ways of thinking" and feudal attitudes which lead to strong social control have not been completely supplanted. In contemporary Japan assertions about "old" places as repositories of traditional values compete with claims about such places as exemplars of pre-war values. The third point is, as we saw, that the locality is not only a vehicle for addressing wider issues, but is linked to concrete prescriptions for action. The folk models of community predicate (again whether implicitly or explicitly) certain causal schemes dictating how to inculcate certain valued or vilified practices and attitudes. Here Hieidaira provides a good example of the complexities involved. The neighborhood is, on the one hand, a model in itself for imparting certain attitudes towards education, politics, and neighboring. On the other hand, the estate is often seen as a place which should be modelled on the traditional community of yesteryear. Thus Hieidaira figures in the contentions of how to actualize (Suttles 1971: 254) expectations drawn from a larger inventory of fantasies which appeal to contemporary Japanese people.4 This idea brings me to the final point of import for the anthropology of complex societies. Anthropological discussions of such societies (Lofgren

NOTES
I would like to thank the editor and two Acknowledgments anonymousreviewersfor commentson an earlierdraft of this and article,and the trusteesof the "OtsukiPeace Scholarship" the HarryS. TrumanInstitutewho assistedme in carryingout fieldworkduring 1981-1983 and again during the summerof 1988. 'In addition,as Bestor (1992) and Lebra (1992) underscore,this ideologyis often contrastedto the ideologyof the old middleclass, and thus figuresas a focus of contestationabout the main guidelinesfor living in contemporary Japan. 2Thisterm resonatesboth with the notionof "native-place making"and the urbanemphasison opennessand democracy: Machi-zukuri policies stem from the belief-widely held by scholarsand officials-that existingpatternsand instilife . . . are outmodedand inaptutionsof neighborhood society;the municipalgovernpropriatein contemporary ment thereforefeels it must step in and createintsitutions that will foster a sense of community and citizenshipapto a modern,democractic society (Bestor 1992: propriate 29). 3To give three examples,throughoutthe country"traditional" festivitiessuch as Bon Odori (Bestor 1992: 31), matsuri, or song contests (Kurita 1983) are used by governments as a models for a varietyof civic events. "In this respectit may be importantto keep in mind that the trend in the past few yearsof turningthingsJapaneseinto a modelto be emulatedby many Westerners has made us forget the extent to which things Westerncontinueto be a model to be emulatedfor many Japanesepeople.

CONTESTED IDENTITIES

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