Diversifying Culture Beyond the Human in Osaka, Japan
What can strolling along a dammed and dyked river system on the post-industrial outskirts of Osaka, Japan teach us about cultural diversity? This past spring, eleven graduate students from the University of Toronto were led by Osaka University professors Atsuro Morita and Gergely Mohácsi on a walking tour in the suburb of Ibaraki, where formerly twisting tributaries have been forcefully diverted into uncannily straight rivers with concrete embankments to control flooding. In the shadow of these infrastructures, waterless and so-called “dead” rivers have been turned into parks. No longer a natural breeding ground for fireflies, the city now imports the insects to these parks from afar for the annual springtime festivals held in their honour. The students were learning that the transformation of human and animal relationships with this river landscape through remarkable but crumbling infrastructures had something to do with cultural diversity in Japan. But what exactly?
The tour was part of a week-long program and six-year partnership between the University of Toronto and Osaka University during which students have exchanged and compared their notions of cultural diversity. The partnership is supported by the RESPECT (Revitalizing and Enriching Society through Pluralism, Equity, and Cultural Transformation) Program at Osaka University, U. of T.’s Asian Institute and Department of Anthropology, and jointly coordinated by Toronto professor Shiho Satsuka and Osaka professors Morita and Mohácsi. For the past five years, students from Osaka University have visited Toronto to learn about Canadian notions of diversity, specifically multiculturalism. Osaka students experienced everyday multiculturalism in Toronto through lectures and fieldtrips given by U. of T. professors Bonnie McElhinny, Girish Daswani, and Joshua Barker. The students came to realize that Canadian multiculturalism is more than a national policy and international model. It is complex, negotiated, and requires collaboration between all citizens—including immigrants, refugees, and indigenous communities that the state has historically marginalized. But the visiting students astutely noticed that Canadian multiculturalism was solely focused on human life and culture. It does not account for the diverse lives and worlds of nonhuman life, because Western thinking often reduces non-humans to the category “nature”. They suggested that this narrow focus might miss other aspects of the worlds we live in. The Japanese students began to teach the U. of T. participants about their own experiences and notions of diversity by comparing Canadian multiculturalism to kyosei, a Japanese concept translated as “co-living,” “co-existence,” or “living together”. The Canadian students were intrigued by the idea of kyosei, but could not fully grasp the concept outside of its Japanese historical and social context.
This sixth and final year, from April 29 to May 6, a group of eleven U. of T. graduate students travelled to Osaka University for the program. The focus was on grassroots environmental and social justice activism in Japan. Centred in Osaka, this activism has used kyosei to emphasize how human life is connected to and “co-exists” with more than just other humans, but also other animal and plant beings, nature, and the surrounding landscape. However, the program was more than an introduction to a local, culturally-specific notion of diversity. The program also spoke to broader human impacts on the world today: how biodiversity has declined, temperatures have increased, air composition has altered, and landscapes have been remade—all by humans, especially in the most recent centuries of heavy industrial and economic development. This entanglement of humans in the earth’s processes has been recently noted by the scientific community. Some scientists now term this new geological era the ‘Anthropocene’. The Anthropocene is also taken as a marker that humans now face ecological crisis at a planetary scale. Therefore, this year’s program was aptly titled “Landscapes of Cohabitation: Diversity and Divergence in More-than-Human Entanglements of the Anthropocene”. It addressed the question of what kyosei, diversity, and “co-existence” might mean in this post-industrial moment of global change. Students were asked to consider how to live together not only with humans of different cultures, but also with diverse natures and other non-human beings.
During our week in Japan, the U. of T. graduate students went on several fieldtrips and learnt about the history of the grassroots emergence of kyosei, slowly grasping that this “co-existence” was different from the Canadian multicultural model. As Nate Renner, a graduate student in ethnomusicology who studies the indigenous Ainu people of Japan, explained, “Problems have arisen in versions of multicultural policy in North America where the concept of human culture is essentialized and difference is emphasized.” Qieyi Liu, a graduate student at the East Asian Studies, added that kyosei challenges the emphasis on static representations of cultural and human difference. For Renner, the fieldtrips were “useful for thinking beyond standard definitions of culture.” Instead, he noticed “an approach to living together based on engagement with locality, non-human environment, and local aesthetics.” For example, on a tour of NGO activities in Kamagasaki—one of Japan’s lowest-income neighbourhoods with a vibrant history of labour and community activism—Renner felt that the NGO groups “were committed not only to the humans there, but also to non-human parts of the area such as parks, buildings, and even the ways shadows cast on streets at certain times of day.” Even in the urban context of Kamagasaki, kyosei includes parts of the world the West calls “nature”.
We quickly learned that kyosei does not equate to an easy or romantic notion of living in harmony with nature. One reason for this is Japan’s specific intellectual history. As guest lecturer Professor Masami Yuki (Kanazawa University) explained, Japan does not have a concept of “lost paradise” or Eden. In contrast, Western approaches to conservation and environmentalism often imagine recovering a “lost paradise” by going “back to nature”. This does not mean that Japanese activists do not imagine better worlds. For example, many of the students were struck by lectures detailing the environmental and social justice activism in Minamata, Japan since the 1950s. This activism began after a chemical company dumped mercury-laced effluent into a bay where many local residents fished and gathered seaweed. The contamination caused local fish, cats, birds, and humans to fall ill with an intergenerational toxicity syndrome that came to be known as “Minamata disease”. The students learnt that fisher people insisted their community was not naïve for having eaten the mercury-poisoned fish and seaweed; the sea was their livelihood. Liu remarked that “Their intimacy with surrounding world, nurtured by affection and embodied experiences” left her impressed. But they still imagined better worlds with their activism. Antony Zelenka, an anthropology graduate student, noted that the politically mobilized community faced a “paradoxical struggle” in continuing “to inhabit and make life in intractably ‘damaged’ or ‘impossible’ contexts”. This example is not isolated: similar incidents of post-industrial damage to communities and landscapes continue to occur worldwide. In Canada, an ongoing mercury poisoning crisis is happening at Asubpeeschoseewagong (Grassy Narrows) First Nation. The “paradoxical struggle” of living with damage but imagining a better world is a difficult but necessary realization for today, because we are beyond the point of erasing the legacy of human industrial harm and “returning” to an idyllic state of nature.
Kyosei’s emphasis on non-humans can also inspire a closer attention to the intricate details of plant and animal lives. For another fieldtrip, the students hiked through a conservation area housing a charming troop of Japanese macaques. The students now understood this landscape was not an unspoilt, picturesque park. They noticed that there are complex relations to pay attention to between the monkeys, their human handlers, and tourists. The lecture for that day’s trip explained that many Japanese macaque communities include congenitally deformed monkeys who manage to live long lives into adulthood through the care of others. In reflecting on that lecture, Hannah Quinn, a graduate student of disability studies in anthropology, was inspired by “the new kinds of relations ... that the macaques engage in across congenital and embodied difference.” The macaque relations even challenged biologists’ understandings of what survival and living together can be, as the monkeys interact in ways surprising to the scientists who expect the neglect of the deformed monkeys rather than their inclusion in the social structure. Quinn explained the trip to the monkey park left her with a lingering question: “how do they stay alive and adapt, and why?” She also thought this question should be applied more broadly.
In Toronto, we have our own examples of drastically modified and damaged rivers like the ones in Ibaraki, including the Don and the Humber. These rivers provoke similar questions of how to live and adapt together as humans and non-humans. The issues raised by this program are important for stimulating thinking about how we might incorporate wider circles of diversity into our social, political, and environmental activism and advocacy. Moving beyond multiculturalism to learning about different “worlds”—including those of monkeys, rivers, and fireflies—is essential to life in the Anthropocene. But Liu wonders “how can we expand the lesson to be more than a temporary exposure to parallel worlds?” Travelling back to Canada and inspired by kyosei, students brought new ideas and lingering questions with them: How could Canadian multiculturalism change if it considered our environment and nature? What lives and relations would emerge as vitally important to a society that encompassed more than just humans? On the tour of Kamagasaki, one of the Japanese guides asked the U. of T. students to simultaneously take a bird’s eye and a bug’s view on the neighbourhood. Perhaps Canadians interested in promoting diversity and environmental justice should take that suggestion seriously.
- Antony Zelenka and Johanna Pokorny
