Emiko Ohnuki-Tierney interviewed by Kalman Applbaum and Ingrid Jordt 30th April 2011

0:04:12 I don't come from an academic family and had never heard of anthropology until I came to the United States; I was making so many cultural mistakes that I was advised to take a course in social anthropology; as I was raised not to think of a profession I don't think I ever thought of becoming a professional anthropologist even after my PhD; I always liked to read, and to this day writing is the best way for me to learn; I was rather an odd girl in Japan as I always wanted to read rather than doing the things that young women were supposed to do; however I did have a helpful background as my father spoke several languages, so early on I was exposed to foreigners; I remember we were invited to spend Easter with a Russian family, and the children were enchanted by coloured eggs, while my father disappeared; my parents had been good about taking care of prisoners of war and other foreigners, so I think my father was being traced by the police at that time; he was taken away to the police station for questioning; women were not supposed to work, but my parents prepared their daughters for a possible future as a diplomat’s wife; so, if I wanted to learn English they would find an Oxford graduate to tutor me, or French, then somebody who had lived in France; in this way I had more exposure to foreigners and foreign cultures; as far as being an anthropologist I really was lucky, as I never had to agonise over what to be, or to achieve; my hobby led to my profession.

3:14:01 I must have been interested in culture as historical process way back, so my master's thesis was actually on Detroit Chinatown; at that time nobody was interested in Chinatown and it was demolished because of urban renewal so my MA thesis became its only recorded history and is now in several libraries as a book; I traced the Chinese community in Detroit from the time they came to the United States; my field research was using newspapers in the public library; I then became a waitress at a Chinese restaurant to be able to talk with local Chinese and also spent a lot of time in the Detroit Public Cemetery; the Chinese could not bear the thought of just being buried in the United States and wanted their bones to be buried in their natal village; since the Americans don't read characters, they left precious information on their tombstones, so I was able to identify where they were from and birth and death dates; in the case of women they retain their clan affiliation of their family of orientation and add the clan name of their husbands; so I was able to trace their clan affiliations(all belonged to four clans) and marriage patterns; I was able to think of culture in a historical perspective; for my PhD I chose the Sakhalin Ainu who were hunter-gatherers with a highly developed oral tradition; however by the time I was able to work there it was all memory culture, for example, the bear ceremony was no longer performed; I did publish a couple of books on the Ainu but by that time I was teaching; I could not just tell my students to look for hunter-gatherers and there were a lot of limitations on doing memory culture; in the early 1980s I switched to my own Japanese culture; my first work was published, as Illness and Culture in Contemporary Japan (CUP). I tried to show that with all the development of biomedicine still there are cultural underpinnings; I coined terms such as "cultural germs", which is how the notion of germs is really related to the notion of impurity in Japanese culture, and how the biomedical delivery in Japan is so different; doctors don't use medical terms while talking to their patients, they don't close the door when the patients enter their examination room; at that time biomedicine was encountering side-effects like those caused by thalidomide, so Chinese medicine was coming back; they were advocating the removal of problems without surgery; however, medical anthropology as a field was very competitive, so I switched to historical processes which also interested me; I turned to The Monkey as Mirror (Princeton U Press); as the monkey was always pressing the boundary between animals and humans, I thought that I would be able to understand the Japanese conception of humans by studying the symbolism of the monkey; but at that time I had a wonderful experience with linguistics, which was my minor at the Indiana Summer Linguistics Institute; Tom Sebeok taught a marvelous course and I became very interested; at that time structuralism was still "in", so I learned the basics of structural linguistics; when I was doing the monkey work Tom came to Japan and asked me to go to view the monkey trainers in the western part of Japan; I had never seen a monkey performance so I agreed to go; I told my mother what I was going to see, and she, from an older generation, said that was a Hisabetsu-Burakumin's occupation; I was fortunate because I had only thought of the metaphysical aspect of monkey symbolism, but I realized I could not understand it without understanding the social history of the former outcastes; I delved into the social history of the Hisabetsu-Burakumin and found that although they themselves assume a unilineal historical development and that they were always isolated, when I went through the historical material it was not so; for example, most types of street performers were the occupations of the “untouchables” during the Edo period but one of them was not; cormorant fishermen became one, then got out of this social category, and Kabuki actors similarly; at that time a very famous mediaeval historian called Amino started to ask basic questions about Japanese history; he proposed the idea that the agrarian Japanese and their cosmology became hegemonic; then from the latter part of the eleventh century onward impurity became radical negativity, and the non-agrarian people engaged in non-agrarian activities became more and more marginalized; so it was a much more fluid history as far as symbolism and meaning; when I analyzed kyōgen (a comic interlude between the noh plays), it was a wonderful way to look at that, even in mediaeval Japan the monkey and “outcaste” usurp the social hierarchy; in the morning a feudal lord starts off with a servant and encounters a monkey trainer; at that time the monkey skin had a magical power which prevented arrows penetrating it, so warriors wanted monkey skin to cover their quivers; the lord told the trainer to kill the monkey and give him the skin; the trainer tried to stall the lord by saying that the monkey was his livelihood; the lord threatened to shoot him and the monkey with one arrow; the trainer said that would ruin the monkey skin, however he knew how to kill the monkey with one stroke; the lord agreed; the trainer hit the monkey, and it mistook the signal to start dancing; the monkey danced so well and enchanted the lord to join in; his servant begged the trainer to stop the monkey’s dancing so that the lord would quit dancing and they could continue their journey; this is an interesting subversive play; I became interested in the historical political-social context that would have an impact on the meaning of symbolism; somehow anthropologists were very interested in symbolism and rituals at that time but did not think about the geopolitics or the socio-political context, despite the fact that they were studying Africans when colonialism was still rampant; they studied ritual as if it had been there forever, and were very synchronic in approach; Since I had studied the Ainu, a marginalized people, also the former “outcaste,” I felt I needed to look at the centre of Japanese society so wrote a book called Rice as Self (Princeton U Press); this was also historical; starting in the eighth century, I tried to show how the symbolism of rice underwent historical changes because of geopolitics. The next project was on the cherry blossom – perhaps the most cherished symbol for the Japanese and a polyvocal symbol par excellence; I thought I would look at cherry blossom viewing because I had been focusing on symbols, and why not look at group rituals; what I did not realize was that the cherry blossom was turned into the symbol of soldiers forced to sacrifice their lives for the Emperor, and nobody really understood this transformation including the Kamikaze pilots who were intellectually the cream of the crop, reading intellectual philosophy, literature, history - Greek, Roman, English, Chinese, Italian, French, German; they could argue about Marxism in a sophisticated way, yet they did not realize the significance of one pink cherry blossom on the side of the plane that did not have the mechanism to return; also each corps took the name of types of cherry blossom; Nitobe Inazō, a cosmopolitan scholar, became very nationalistic and wrote 'Warrior's Way' in English; on the first page he wrote that the cherry blossom and the way of the warrior were indigenous to Japan; thus the cherry blossom became the symbol of the unique soul of the Japanese who do not hesitate to die for the Emperor; however, the Emperor was non-existent until the latter part of the nineteenth century when German scholars urged the Japanese oligarchs to promote the Emperor to unite Japan; here were people who had not given much thought about the Emperor but were all taught that they were supposed to die for him; I realized you really had to understand geopolitics to understand the so-called symbolism; this project took me a long time and resulted in Kamikaze Cherry Blossoms and Nationalisms: The Militarization of Japanese History (University of Chicago Press); I had a chapter introducing the Kamikaze pilots' diaries and the University of Chicago marketing department suggested I write a book on these; their vision was to collect hundreds of diaries, but I chose only a few to show contradictions and ambivalences; this is not unique to the Japanese pilots; in World War I the German student soldiers wrote letters and diaries are also very touching in their desire to die for Germany; All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque starts with just such a sentiment, which is then questioned during the period of trench warfare; Bernard Edelman’s book, Dear America, on the Vietnam War shows the same; the way that patriotism gets implicated in orchestrated political nationalism, so that cultural nationalism, such as enjoying the cherry blossoms, becomes transformed and used as a weapon; another thing that I started to think about was why these brilliant people did not perceive this; why they did not refuse to follow the twisted symbolism of the cherry blossom; I am now writing a whole book called Flowers That Kill: Communicative Opacity in Political Spaces, this started with Baudelaire who was the first to coin the term 'modern', with the idea that there is a stable structure along with a contingent, ephemeral paradigm that is emerging; he also suggested that the world would be in trouble if we understood each other, and it was better for us that we did not; this was, not directly, but much more systematically developed by Bourdieu; before that, Edmund Leach, who was marvelously adept at thinking about new ways to do anthropology, in Highland Burma he said that two people who participated in a ritual may have two different readings of it; this idea was not taken up in anthropology, but Bourdieu argued that méconnaissance was the locus of power inequality because the underclass individuals do not perceive what they are really doing when the upper-class doxa is filtering down, and the symbolic violence is taken as natural; I am interested in trying to understand when symbolic meaning is understood and when not; I compare the symbolism in the propaganda of the modern dictators, including Lenin, Stalin and Hitler, with the Japanese Meiji Emperor who remained invisible and inaudible; even scholars mistook one portrait as his photo but in fact an Italian artist, Edoardo Chiossone, was invited to look at the Emperor from the next room during a banquet; he produced a photo of himself wearing the Emperor's uniform and just changed the face; people were surprised to see how Western the Emperor looked; we were supposed to bow to the photos of the Emperor and the Empress in a little wooden shrine at the very end of the school yard that was only opened on a few ritual occasions; we never saw the Emperor's photo; I am trying to see how the Almighty in Judaism, Christianity and Islam, cannot be seen or heard, and how the politically powerful maintain their power by aggressively projecting their images and through oratories; the Japanese Emperor's position is very complicated because he was never a warrior king traditionally as it was the Shogun who held that role; the Emperor was always just the guardian of rice; suddenly the Emperor became Commander in Chief but never was in reality; there is a Japanese taboo against objectification of the soul, as even a word has a soul, so uttering a word was a very dangerous act; portraits were important in China but when the idea was brought to Japan it was rejected; thus there are a lot of complicated factors to address.

27:25:03 Fieldwork is something that is very difficult to do in these symbolic studies; Victor Turner proposed the meaning of exegetical symbols - you ask the informants and the informants would tell you what the meaning of the symbol is; it never worked for me with the Ainu; I would ask why they used this herb for a shamanistic ritual and they would tell me they had been doing so forever; somehow I have been able to publish a Japanese version of my books, and they tell me that since I have a distance from Japanese culture I see points that the Japanese don't see; this includes the military manipulation of cherry blossoms; many people have said they were not aware of this; fieldwork in itself does not always tell me, but one has to think in terms of the historical context; I like doing fieldwork, and look a little different from other Japanese women of my age, so they are curious but very frank in answering my questions; However I need to look beyond just the Japanese context, and am getting into the much more difficult task of doing comparative work; I think it is dangerous; I am sure this current book will cause people to question my knowledge on Hitler's Germany, for example, but it gives a very interesting comparative point as Japan's modernity did not follow the pattern of Europe; we never had Western science or the Enlightenment until the end of the nineteenth century; that was why Japanese propaganda emphasized both modernity and the resurrected emperor system; contrary to Anderson's claim that modernity replaced myth with history, with modernity Japan replaced history with myth by claiming that the emperor system started 2,600 years ago; from the end of the nineteenth century the State had to emphasize this with the symbols of the emperor system, but not the emperor, on stamps, coins, etc., but also images of modernity, such as planes; Lenin, Stalin and Hitler really expounded that they had brought modernization to the people; in Germany this was reflected in the Autobahn and VW cars, and Hitler's speeches were listened to on the "peoples' receiver"; the link between lung cancer and cigarettes was first found in Germany, and Hitler asked people to think how many VWs they could have by giving up smoking, and also suggested it was a degenerate habit indulged in by gypsies and Africans etc.; the German State was also stressing the primordial German identity through Wagner's Ring cycle, the Alpine mountains, etc., but this alongside their modern triumphs; in the case of Japan it was very difficult because all the technological inventions that went along with modernization came from the West; they had invented the myth of the emperor system; all of this would never have occurred to me if I had not understood what had happened in Germany or elsewhere; thus I find the comparative aspect helpful, even if I fall short of satisfying specialists in my explanations.

34:35:16 It is somewhat difficult for Japanese anthropologists to accept what I do; anthropology in Japan is so much more focused on the non-self, so not the Japanese; the scholarship of Japanese history and culture is done by historians and folklorists; their interests are not the same as theoretical interests that are devolved in anthropology in the UK, France or the US; so I am really in no-man’s land as I am not doing work that is central to anthropological concerns in Japan and even in the United States; who else is doing work from the eighth century on? Some, but not all, historians get very nervous because they don't want to leave the exhaustive archival work as their key; I am being very bold, and thank goodness I am not looking for a job or tenure, and I do what I feel will help me learn rather than satisfy others.

36:31:20 On writing to learn, just lately I was going through my chapter on symbolism and I disagreed with Clifford Geertz about "culture is public because meaning is"; I say that it is not the particular meaning in a particular social context, but it is polyvocality with enormous numbers of meanings assigned to a particular symbol that is shared, so people can be reading different meanings in a particular social context; but for the first time I really understood Negara, and realized that Geertz was trying to get out of functionalism; he was saying that this important Balinese ritual was not necessarily like propaganda in a modern dictatorship to promote political power, but was an end in itself; Victor Turner said the healing of the Ndembu ritual was to heal the individual as well as for the illness of the social group; in one chapter I discuss the symbolic expressions of collective identity, and there are many rituals for this but not directly related to promoting political power; I was at the newly created L’Institut d’Études Avançées-Paris for three months last summer; on July 14th, what Americans call Bastille Day (the French don't call it that as it signified for them a failure to find the thousands of political prisoners they had hoped to find in that prison); it was fascinating to observe the parade; every single unit of the French military were represented, including the air force; France is an interesting country; I went there for literature, philosophy and art, but it is full of militarism - Napoleon's tomb, military museums, etc. - so this magnificent display is a collective presentation of self, and not necessarily to strengthen the military; I think there are rituals that do not necessarily have a direct function; I still have to think about all of this, but I would not have thought through Negara if I had not started writing

41:47:22 As I did not go to a major department for my specialization, I only met persons like Geertz when they came out of their way to talk with me and invited me to The Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton; Victor Turner spoke with me during one of the AAA meetings, we lunched together, and started to correspond; what I am starting to do with polyvocality is very much what Victor Turner did with multi-vocality; in the case of Edmund Leach, as a discussant he was extremely generous in response to the paper I gave at one of the American Ethnological Society meetings, and then I started to correspond with him; I admire how flexible he has been, starting with 'Highland Burma', but never promoted the Leach School, and he was very good about being open, so I learnt a lot from him; I learnt also from Eric Wolf; although I didn't have much direct contact he was very good in writing to me, and in his dissatisfaction that symbolic anthropologists never try to relate their findings to power; that was very important for me and that is why I am trying to get into political spaces, to show symbols and rituals are not just isolated in an arena of culture; also I became acquainted with Pierre Bourdieu fairly late in his life, but I could not believe how he spent a whole hour listening to me when I was writing the cherry blossom and Kamikaze book; he wanted to publish my article on the monkey in his journal, he was very generous; at that time I really did not relate my question to his méconnaissance; I think rather than dialogue on a specific topic sometimes I am impressed by some scholars whom I meet, and when I reread their work and do my own work, then I start to learn what they were really trying to say; I think there are other people who are very influential; Lévi-Strauss was stimulating, again I was very late in getting to know him; the first time I met him he said with a sad expression that he would have liked to have discovered“your [Japanese] culture” when he was young, but now he was too old to learn the language; he was very humble; when I asked about something he just said he didn't have enough knowledge to speak about Japanese culture; however, he gave a very insightful speech at the opening ceremony of the International Centre for Japanese Studies in Kyoto; it showed a genuine interest in Japanese culture; I was a little ashamed that when I first met him I was trying to move away from straight structuralism, which had been very useful when working on memory culture and myths, but not so good for fieldwork data; all these important scholars not only publish but read everything, so when I went to see him I didn't think he would have recognized my name; he wrote to me a few days before his death though he said he had to dictate the letter to his wife; however, he signed it in his characteristic manner; these meetings with scholars had influenced me, but also inspired me to emulate their generosity.

48:21:23 Of Japanese scholars, Amino Yoshihiko was one; most of the historians of Japan had to be card-carrying members of the Communist Party or Marxists, and you can't get into the field unless you are one of them; however, Amino, once a Marxist, became influenced by cultural and symbolic approaches, he is the one who almost rewrote the whole history by noting that the focus had been so exclusively on agrarian Japan, and by doing so all other types of occupation had been ignored; he was really important to Japanese history, and he was very kind to me; I could call him with a specific question and he would come to the phone; another scholar was Miyata Noboru; he was not theoretical but knew everything about Japanese folk culture; I could call him to ask even the simplest question; I was very lucky in terms of publishing; when I wrote about the Ainu I was so ignorant, and didn't even have an academic position, but thought I could submit my article anywhere; I sent it to 'American Anthropologist' and they took it, and then I wrote to ten publishers including Cambridge University Press where Walter Lippincott was the anthropology editor; he called me and asked for the manuscript; he published Illness and Healing Among the Sakhalin Ainu, then he moved to Cornell and later became Director of Princeton University Press, so he looked after the publication of my books all the way through; I was very lucky to have had somebody to take an interest in me; the same thing happened in Japan; when I wrote Illness and Culture in Contemporary Japan in English, one editor who was trying to change the distinguished Iwanami publisher from a very staunch Marxian approach read my book; he then travelled from Tokyo to my mother's house in Kobe to see me and said he would like to publish it in Japanese; he eventually became the Director of the Iwanami so he looked after my books in Japanese; every book I publish in English I want to do a Japanese version, not a translation, because I don't want to be a Japanese handler; I want my Japanese colleagues and readers to be able to check my own work.

53:27:08 I think so many young anthropologists of Japan are turning to pop culture; I think it is good that they are talking to young people, and about Anime etc., but I think we still have to deal with big questions that relate to geopolitics; if they turn more to history I think they can find interesting subject matter; last spring I was in Venice and had a wonderful time with young students, then I went to Paris for ten days when the tsunami took place; now I am getting all sorts of news from Japan; what is very interesting is that despite the very negative image of Japanese youth, the tsunami is a marvelous example of what is global, because it is those Japanese and other young people who are helping the victims; the Japanese Government with all the money that came from abroad was still debating how to distribute it, so was very slow in responding; it is the young who are volunteering to help, and this includes international students and scholars who are in Japan; I became good friends with Italian students who are learning about Japanese culture and history, and they love to write in Japanese and I became a pen pal; these same Italians, all in their early twenties, had a two day event for fundraising for the tsunami victims; that is a wonderful topic; as you know, your colleague, Josh Breslau, worked on the Kobe earthquake, on post-traumatic syndrome; the 1995 Kobe earthquake started this notion of volunteering; if you go back to the 1923 earthquake in which even ethnic antagonisms came out, and compare it with the Kobe earthquake and this one, in the global setting, you could really do some very interesting work; you could also do interesting work on the Japanese constitutions, every one of which was been written for us by foreigners, but not by us; I think one should pick up big topics that relate to geopolitics as a good direction to go.

58:34:04 It would be much safer if you just took one field site, but your work becomes so much more interesting if you reach out to broader geopolitics; I think one has to choose whether to take a risk or stay on solid ground; I am sure younger people prefer solid ground first, but I think one can do a lot of interesting work starting with broader questions; you [Applbaum] are interested in commodification, and I once thought of studying Japanese department stores, comparing New York and Paris; the Japanese stores instituted rites of passage in order to sell commodities; done comparatively you could get the cultural aspects as well as at the geopolitical ones; I am weak at thinking about the economic dimension, but using that dimension with political as well as cultural dimensions, would be very interesting.