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Academic Skills For Life-long Knowledge: Words on Personhood, Culture and Identity Part 3 of 3

2020.03.24
  • Jackie Kim-Wachutka
  • Culture
  • 2020

In the previous post, we highlighted the plights of sexual, gender, racial, and ethnic minorities in Japan. There may be a veil of illusion over Japan’s society to both its own citizens and people abroad that masks what these minorities are facing. Agency is, of course, a powerful act and while the marginalized have limited agency, they should be empowered to tell their own stories from their point of view and define these terms according to their most authentic emotions. Creating discourse within the society is an important tool for social change. Japan’s historical construction of identity as a nation, what this implies in regards to Japanese mainstream and minority identities alike, and what kind of position it has put Japanese society in the context of international relations, entailed fruitful discussions and discourses concerning Japan’s introspection, essentialism of cultures, be it of Japan’s or otherwise, civil societies, diasporic identities, and defining the center and periphery. Regardless of spatial and temporal boundaries, resisting constraints, seeking identities, claiming agency, and initiating movements involved decentering the center to make way for the periphery. The many actors within Japan’s periphery and its center demonstrated that differences will always exist between and amongst individuals. Even more significantly, differences remain even amongst those that, in theory, are supposed to belong to the same peripheral group. In other words, a periphery and a center will always exist in some form or another since without one the other cannot exist. This can be challenging at times, and in many societies, it is precisely these differences that generate segregation, discrimination, and hardship. Yet it is clear that without differences, little space would be left for individuals to learn and grow.

 

Identity cannot be explained by a single word or two. Identity and all of its concepts is an attempt to explain how humans yearn to make sense of this world and ways in which our existence is truly interconnected. In our current world, are many of us not diasporic people in one sense or another regardless of race, ethnicity, gender, religion, and social class, intimidated to a certain extent by the uncertainties of our own being and belonging? The dilemma of questioning one’s uniqueness is not only the case for the Japanese but also the world’s population as a whole. The mixtures of cultures, upbringing and even the traces of locations where the individual has been to, can truly separate them even from their own supposed place of “belonging” in other groups. However, it also signifies the possibility of that individual to connect with a wider range and variety of people from different constructions of identity as well. After all, the line between segregation and inclusion of individuals is extremely thin. The fluidity of the human body, mind, and soul is truly breathtaking to the extent that it enables its possessor to be segregated from yet also integrated into multiple forms of culture, society, and even class, whether it might be based on an empirical reality or even an imagined community.



Photo Credit: (fauxels@pexels.com)

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