差別ではなく区別：「ガイジン」の成り立ちNo Discrimination but Distinction: The Formation of “Gaijin”

The problem of sabetsu (差別) in Japan is not as clearly recognized as discrimination is in the West. One could say it has remained highly ambiguous and been left alone throughout modern history. Yet for anyone actually living in Japan, sabetsu plainly exists, and it is also a fact that many people have suffered because of it.

The question I want to ask here is why sabetsu in Japan is so hard to see on the surface. One reason, I think, is that Japan has no concept that corresponds to the Western concept of discrimination.

The Japanese word sabetsu originally derives from a Buddhist concept and is not equal to discrimination. So when discrimination, a Western concept, flowed in during the modern age as a translated word, and at some point sabetsu was applied as its translation, a problem of sabetsu that cannot be pinned down was already born in modern and contemporary Japan.

If so, what is the nature of sabetsu in Japan? I think it becomes relatively clear if I think of it as kubetsu (区別), distinction. Take Osaka, where I was born and raised. There is a district called Ikuno Ward, laid out on the premise of distinction. As anyone who lives in Osaka understands, it is a neighborhood where Zainichi Koreans have built their lives over a long history.

Throughout that history, in a small island country where one mountain over lies a completely different cultural sphere, each village community has heightened its own sense of shared identity by distinguishing itself from other village communities. This is where the diversity of festivals and customs comes in.

The problem of subject and object, built on the Western "self and other," does not exist in Japan, because the Japanese language has no subject to begin with. So one could say that the idea of coexisting by distinguishing self from other does not exist in Japan. It is not a matter of one individual's view toward another; the individual's existence in Japan is secured by thoroughly distinguishing one's own community from other communities.

For this reason, Zainichi Koreans in Osaka were long thoroughly distinguished by the boundaries of the community and kept in a state where the areas they lived in were set apart. It was a mechanism that brought them great suffering, and it is only natural that it is received as discrimination. That it appears at a glance as if there is no discrimination in Japan is because, while the boundaries of the community hold, it is hard for discrimination to surface in the form the word "discrimination" suggests. This is the crux.

Such divisions are found all over Japan: the Homi housing complex in Aichi, the areas in southern Saitama where communities live together, the neighborhoods around U.S. military bases in Japan, the bay districts of Tokyo. All of them share a structure in which the place is divided first, before the people ever meet.

The state said to be calm in Japan has been supported by the boundaries between communities holding and by little contact in everyday life. When those boundaries waver and people who had not met begin to live in the same place, tension arises on the side of the community. This tension comes from the mechanism built on boundaries, not from anyone's nature.

Looking at Japanese society today, I feel that this tension around boundaries has been rising. Travelers will not notice it, but an important factor is that society as a whole has become considerably poorer. In a totalitarianism like Japan's, individuals do not become poor one by one; the whole society becomes poor at once, and to an extreme. That is exactly now.

In such a time, once a channel opens through which anxiety turns into an attack on someone, the image of a "quiet Japan" that the world has long held collapses in an instant. What matters is not to direct anxiety at anyone, but to look at the structure that produces it.

In Osaka too, the number of people living as immigrants is growing, and there are more occasions for people to meet in daily life. More places to meet is also a chance to put the mechanism of distinction back into the relation of sohan kyozon (相反共存), in which differences are kept and people are together all the same.

So now that distinctions at the level of the community have begun to waver, the question is whether the mechanism of distinction can be moved into sohan kyozon.

A mechanism that sees the community before it sees the individual: the concept of "gaijin," which has become known in the West too, has been formed not by discrimination but by distinction. If we misread this, only a barren argument will go on.

*1 Sabetsu (差別): a Japanese concept that historically derives from Buddhist thought. It is often translated as "discrimination," but as explained in the text, it carries the sense of "distinction" and "separation" at the communal level.