Urbanities,
Vol. 3
·
No 1
·
May 2013
© 2013
Urbanities
88
There are two analytical levels on which the citations given above need attention. The
first concerns the stress on the apparent contradiction between a ‘manmade disaster’, in
which human responsibility is clearly called for and the admission that ‘the competency of
any specific individual’ is not at stake. This overt contradiction recalls that, well noted by
scholars of Japan, between individual-centered empathy (
amae
) and the strong importance of
group harmony (
wa
) and collective achievements. In the course of my ethnographic
fieldwork in Mikazuki, a settlement founded in Tohoku in the immediate postwar period
when Japan had to deal with the re-integration of a large number of repatriated families from
the former Asian colonies, I tested the actual importance of collective achievement at ground
level (Torsello 2002, 2009). Settlers were striving because they lacked two important assets:
social networks within the local community (they were mostly repatriated families) and the
shame of not being part of the territorial social texture. The first initial shortcoming was
related to their condition of settlers and newcomers and could not be solved in the short term.
The second was a product of their sense of being different; what anthropological literature on
Japan has, perhaps unfortunately, defined ‘shame versus guilt culture’ (Lebra 1971 and for a
general critique Creighton 1990). Mikazuki villagers sought to balance their lack of these two
assets (respectively a social and a psychological condition) through consolidating what
informants called
danketsu
(group cohesion).
Danketsu
became an easily transmittable and
reproduced philosophy in the settlement, which under the generous provisions set by the
Japanese Inner Colonization Plan (1946-1973) decided to invest in internal social
harmonization mechanisms and collective economic achievements rather than shortening the
gap with local society. These mechanisms included several agricultural cooperatives within
the village (some of them sponsored through state aid programs), a number of village-level
socio-cultural organizations, the institution of a village Shinto shrine and of a religious
festival which, one of the few in the neighboring area, is still held and a shifting-term village
leadership. Over time, the forced search for harmony has proved costly in the community;
from an initial establishment of 45 households, today only 17 families remain and many
(30%) do not own any farming land.
The second level concerns the image created by the ‘regulatory capture’ argument,
describing the situation where a closely knit framework within which everything is allowed is
contrasted with an outside space in which the degree of accountability dramatically collapses
because it can not be controlled. This, again, mirrors some common cultural tropes, such as
the
uchi
/
soto
(internal/external), and the
honne
/
tatemae
(what is genuinely believed vs. what
