Straightjacket Society: An Insider's Irreverent View of Bureaucratic Japan by Masao Miyamoto (1994)11/25/2019  Masao Miyamoto is a psychiatrist who grew up in Japan and was trained in the US. He returned to Japan after 11 years of living, teaching, and working in America to enter the Japanese bureaucracy, and this book contains critical articles of analysis that he submitted to major Japanese newspapers.
As the introduction by Juzo Itami explains, the bureaucracy in Japan is the inheritor of the governmental structure of the Meiji Restoration, where a group of Japanese elites thought of it as their duty to lead national development to protect themselves from the threat of Western imperial powers. It thus had a historically important function, and the bureaucracy still has unparalleled power, holding effectively both legislative and executive functions within the government. Dr. Miyamoto, with his unique, insider-outsider position in Japanese society and the Japanese bureaucracy (it is people who are positioned in this way that make the best informant for the anthropologist) presents an incisive account of the Japanese bureaucracy, which is backed up by his training in psychoanalysis. The Japanese bureaucracy, for him, is like a village of insiders that suffer from a surfeit of groupism, composed of un-formed, adolescent non-individuals. I thought while reading that he was perhaps too harsh in his criticism, and wrote as a smug, intellectual trained in the West who, after adopting the mores of the "developed" Westerner, views his native home with a paternalistic eye. However, he is also able to understand Japanese culture as well, the penultimate chapter features a conversation between him and an American expat to Japan, where he defends Japanese society. He reveals that he returned with the hopes of helping his country and his countrymen--what are some of his recommendations, you may ask?--he wants to liberalize the bureaucracy, who operates as the biggest trade barrier: by opening the markets for trade, it would shift the interests of producers to those of the consumers, leading to a win-win situation for all the consumers in the world--I guess the values of the market were just starting penetrate Japan.
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 Started this a year ago while in Mexico, was reading it alongside Spinoza's Ethics; finished neither back then, but picked this back up to tackle Ethics.
Great introduction to Spinoza. It contextualizes his philosophy through the historical context, Spinoza's personal biography, and the intellectual context (Spinoza's intellectual influences, intellectual trends of the day, etc.). Does a great job of explaining Spinoza's abstruse terminology (substance, attribute) and how Spinoza usage of these terms diverge from his predecessors (Aristotle). Spinoza used language in a particular way; he wanted to write in a pure, philosophical language divorced from the language of man, and without Scruton, I would miscomprehend Spinoza. Roger Scruton is a British conservative: I saw a Youtube video of him in a debate with Terry Eagleton. I think that Scruton's study of the classics, of Spinoza and some of the other medieval philosophers, lends to his conservative ideology. In Spinoza's philosophy, human beings move from a passive state to an active state of freedom by way of reason (adequate ideas of the world). State institutions and laws exist to allow human beings to exercise reason, which is their freedom. Liberal constitution provides a framework for rational thought and discussion, and by "obeying the laws of a liberal constitution, we obey the dictates of reason, and to be compelled by reason is to be free." This means that "civil disobedience, which threatens the condition upon which his freedom depends, involves only a partial understanding... Such disobedience is an expression, not of freedom, but of inner bondage." No wonder conservatives are enamored with the discourse of reason, freedom of speech, freedom, although I think that their own positionality prevents them from seeing the uneven distribution of access to rational discussion within a polity.  Read this several years ago; something about the novel stuck with me and provoked a rereading.
Pierre and Jean are brothers. Pierre the older is training to be a doctor; he is intelligent and "full of utopian and philosophical ideas." Jean, his younger brother, is getting ready to practice law; he is "as blond as his brother's was black... as calm as his brother was ardent... as well-mannered as his brother was sullen..."--at first sight, these two brothers are as different as can be. They both love their mother (later on, Maupassant makes evident the Oedipal dimensions of their love, and the brothers' competitive jealousy); the mother is, as is common in many a Maupassant story, a Bovarian character, described as "frugal, middle-class, a little sentimental, and endowed with the tender soul of a cashier." ("...douée d'une âme tendre de cassière"--what a description!) She has suffered silently in her marriage to Roland, a vulgar man whose imagination fails to extend past the family boutique store. Now retired, they live in Havre where Roland can exercise his passion for fishing; Pierre and Jean are visiting them for their summer vacation. One day, after fishing with their young, widowed neighbour, Mme Rosemilly, they receive news that lights these latent tensions into motion: a family friend--the rich, childless, bourgeois Marechal--passes away and makes Jean his sole inheritor. Maupassant takes this opportunity and performs a psychological examination of Pierre's mind; Pierre the Doctor makes precise incisions on his own psychological state, and "demasks the other that was in [him]" (p. 87). Just as the other is unearthed in Pierre, Pierre starts to occupy the place of the other, the excluded, the bastard child in his family (a very common theme in Maupassant). As this happens, Pierre the doctor becomes Pierre the persecutor, and a minor suspicion of his mother's fidelity turns into a conviction, and once convicted, Pierre becomes her torturer. His mother turns to Jean, and Jean, the bastard child, takes Pierre's place as the legitimate l'enfant d'amour. Pierre the bastard is eliminated, his familial ties cut, as he is cast away as the doctor on a transport ship--his is a social death, his "small marine bed, narrow and long like a coffin" (p. 210). Really appreciate the French and their respect for literature. In this book, beyond Maupassant's masterpiece Pierre et Jean, there is Maupassant's famous essay, "The Novel," Bernard Pingaud's excellent critical essay, critical notes by Pingaud, and a dossier full of reviews by Henry James, Paul Bourget, and Anatole France.  Another ethnography of online spaces; read this a couple of months ago.
Bonnie Nardi uses Dewey's activity theory (never heard of this before the ethnography) to analyze World of Warcraft. Dewey's theory allows us to conceive of online games (if I am to understand correctly) as an active and subjective aesthetic experience within a community; the participant is always contributing to the experience and "aesthetic experience can never be realized purely through the structural or formal qualities of an artefact" (p. 43). So, participants in these spaces are not stuck in "an elaborately designed Skinner box" (p. 39) as some scholars analyze it. World of Warcraft and other video games, for Nardi, are a "new digital medium" that afford "rich stimulation to visual sensibilities while at the same time developing complex spaces of performance with opportunities for mastery and active participation" (p. 52). This is a medium where performative mastery can gradually be developed within a carefully designed space. Nardi has interesting things to say about design: she recognizes the powerful agency possessed by design to structure (but not completely determine) participant actions. This gives an extraordinary power to the software artefact designer. However, this is not necessarily a bad thing, and Nardi recognizes the power of great design: she writes that "I cannot speak too highly of democracy as a political system, but artistic production is, to me, another matter; it is inherently singular, anomalous, moving on the edges of culture" (p. 80). She gives the example of an online game on the other side of the spectrum, Second Life, where participants were given the power to shape their own environments: participants ended up focusing their content towards two activities, "shopping and sex" (p. 77). Nardi alsp goes in depth into certain cultural logics within World of Warcraft: addiction, theorycrafting and mods, gender, and does a conparison of World of Warcraft gaming culture in China and North America. Like Boellstorff in his ethnography on Second Life, she also talks about the separation between the actual world and the virtual world, although her focus is specifically on the complex interactions between play and work.  "'You're right about this being limited to me, it's entirely a personal matter. But with some personal experiences that lead you way into a cave by yourself, you must eventually come to a side tunnel or something that opens on a truth that concerns not just yourself by everyone... But what I'm experiencing personally now is like digging a vertical mine shaft in isolation, it goes straight down to a hopless depth and never opens on anybody else's world"' (p. 155).
Bird dreams of Africa, a continent that he has always wanted to go to; however, the 27-year old Bird is now the head of a family, and a soon-to-be, first time father. Africa the continent is out of reach, but it manifests itself in the everyday of Bird's daily existence through metaphors and similes: "... Bird stared for an instant at the numberless antholes in the ebonite receiver" (p. 10); Africa seems to seep out of Bird's subjective experience. Finally, the baby boy is born, but is born with a brain hernia, a monster with two heads. With this, a crisis forces its way into his life--what is he to do, confronted with this burden, this monster that is his son? Does he forego responsibility and wait for its eventual death? Does he surreptitiously speed it along? Does he fight bravely for the life of his son? During this crisis, Bird finds an old drinking buddy, the widowed Himiko--her husband had taken his own life in their room. She thinks about pluralistic universes, a range of possible pasts, presents, and futures; in her pluralistic universes she is able to find consolation and run away from her present. In her he finds a sympathetic friend, and he waits for the news of the baby's death with her in her bed. Once the baby dies, the two escapees plan to travel together to Africa, cutting away their painful ties to Japan. And then the moment of truth, after the baby, despite all probability, survives, and they send it away to a black market doctor, an infanticide without dirtying their hands: Bird, at a bar with Himiko, stares "dumbly into space" and thinks: "What was he trying to protect from that monster of a baby that he must run so hard and so shamelessly? What was it in himself he was so frantic to defend? The answer was horrifying--nothing! Zero!" (p. 209). Bird, only when confronted with the nothingness of existence then chooses to accept responsibility for the baby. (I feel that this can be expanded, wasn't sure what Oe was thinking here.) Final off-topic note: the first few pages of the novel is amazing. |
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