I’ll be speaking on a roundtable early on Saturday morning of the AAS. Here’s the abstract:

This interdisciplinary roundtable focusing on Japan explores how essentialist or culturalist arguments are mobilized in research and teaching contexts by interlocutors, other academics, and students, and how to respond as scholars and instructors.

Calls to elevate local worldviews seem uncontroversial until one encounters the tenacity of nihonjinron arguments about Japaneseness. In this roundtable, participants with diverse research agendas and disciplinary backgrounds (history, religious studies, anthropology, and sociology) will focus on the social work done when essentialist or culturalist arguments about Japaneseness are mobilized, whether this be to support the status quo or argue for radical change. While essentialist stances often mollify urges for social reform, they can also be used as “weapons of the weak” to destabilize hegemonic structures. Either way, essentialist arguments tend to obfuscate the actual social, political, technological, and structural mechanisms at play, with varied consequences that may include naturalizing empire or reinforcing racist hierarchies.

Before diving into the conversation, however, roundtable participants will define—for themselves from their own disciplinary background—these key terms. What is the difference between “culturalism” and “essentialism,” and why might these differences matter for our efforts to respond to nihonjinron discourses? Each participant will then speak briefly about responding to essentialist/ culturalist arguments in research and teaching, followed by a collective conversation with the audience. Topics for discussion include: How and when do essentialist arguments interrupt the remediation of social justice problems in Japan? How does the act of cultural comparison itself invite problematic essentialist arguments, and what does cultural translation look like in this context? How might one navigate the objective to explore cultural specificity without reifying cultural uniqueness? When essentialist logics offer comfortable explanatory frameworks to our interlocutors, colleagues, or students, what tactics might we use to disrupt these explanations, and why does it matter that we do so? How can we parse the “discourse” vs. “reality” relationship between nihonjinron ideologies of Japaneseness within Japan, with the ways these discourses impact people’s behavior, their lived experiences, and public policy? Interdisciplinary perspectives offer an innovative opportunity to debate this longstanding problem in Japanese studies.