Nikkei is a Japanese term used to refer to people who are of Japanese descent but are “not Japanese” because of their lack of Japanese citizenship, language abilities, looks, and racial or cultural purity. So, from a Japanese perspective, nikkei are “non-Japanese Japanese.”

As many of us who go by Nikkei and are living in the “West” know by experience, we are “non-Western Westerners…

What does it mean to be Nikkei?

Please join us for presentations by a diverse group of artists, activists and scholars who challenge our conventional understanding of Nikkei while also bringing to light the violence it presides over. Throwing Lifelines across Borderlines is a Community Symposium on Critical Nikkei Studies. Our intention is to bring together community to resist supremacy and build community power.

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Locations:

● Days 1-2:

In-person: San Francisco State University, HSS 278

Remote access: https://sfsu.zoom.us/j/88289195318?pwd=eUdjUlBvdWh0a3VOVCt6eFh0N3lDdz09

● Shusenjo Screening (Day 2 @ 7pm):

In -person: Marcus Hall 224

Streaming link (valid until 9pm only): https://vimeo.com/532077221 (password: SFSUscreening)

● Day 3: Eastside Arts Alliance, 2277 International Boulevard, Oakland (In-person only; video recording available later)

All times listed in Pacific Time

1:00 – 1:25PM Welcome & Land Acknowledgement:

● Shō Yamagushiku & OWU (Scott Oshiro, Francis Wong, Wesley Ueunten)

● Wesley Ueunten and Mai Nhung Le: Welcome

1:30 – 2:30PM Session 1: Social Movements & Critical Nikkei Studies

● Kozue Uehara: “Kaho‘olawe, Kisenbaru, and Kin Bay: Towards a new transpacific commons against U.S. military capitalism”

● Scott Tsuchitani: “The Hammer and the Pheasant: A Proposition for ‘Critical Nikkei’ Studies”

2:45 – 3:45PM Session 2: Buraku Immigrant Studies

● Tsutomu Tomotsune: “Engineered Community: Japanese American Internment Camps and The Buraku Immigrants”

● Kiyonobu Hirooka: “Basic Research on the Influence of Right to Life and its Philosophy in Social Movements”

3:45 – 5:15PM Session 3: Transpacific Collaborative Activism

● Kinjo Minoru, Manami Kishimoto, Miho Kim, and Souya Akira

5:30 – 6:00PM Closing: Ainu in Diaspora Hip-Hop Ethnography

● Dr. R. Māpuanapaia'a'ala Shizuko Hayashi-Simpliciano a.k.a. Katana

1:00 – 1:25PM Opening Performance: Tanko Bushi

● Francis Wong and Scott Oshiro

1:30 – 2:15PM Session 1: Roundtable on Performing Japanese (American)-ness

● Troy Kondo: “Japanese American Identity Politics”

● Kei Terauchi: “Liberating Service Work through Performance: Intervening in Orientalism at Japanese Restaurants”

2:15 – 3:30PM Session 2: Performing Politics

● Masaho Kumazawa: “Performing culture in Asakusa from the 1920s to the 1930s: subculture transcending nationality, class and the times”

● Yuki Obayashi: “ Remembering to Forget: Sanitizing U.S. Nuclear Violence in the Hiroshima Maidens Project”

● Yuri Takahashi, “Asian American Film production/Screening activities on Artistic Labor”

3:45 – 4:30PM Session 3: Critically Engaging with Nikkei Narratives

● Shō Yamagushiku

● Dr. R. Māpuanapaia'a'ala Shizuko Hayashi-Simpliciano a.k.a. Katana

● Tomoki Birkett

4:45 – 5:30PM Plenary Discussion – Moderated by Tsutomu Tomotsune

5:30 – 6:00PM Closing Remarks

7:00 – 9:00PM Film Screening: Shusenjo

Locations:

● In-person: Marcus Hall 224

● Streaming Link (valid until 9pm only): https://vimeo.com/532077221 (password: SFSUscreening)

Co-sponsored by Broadcast & Electronic Communication Arts

9:00 – 9:45PM Q&A with filmmaker Miki Dezaki (in person)

Chair: Wesley Ueunten

Eastside Arts Alliance, 2277 International Boulevard, Oakland

(In-person only; video recording available later)

5:30 – 8:00PM Work-In-Progress Performance by Marshall Trammell and NAKA Dance Theater

(Debby Kajiyama and José Navarrete) with inspiration from Kazuo and Sachiko Ishikawa, Manami Kishimoto, Scott Tsuchitani, Wesley Ueunten, Kiyonobu Hirooka and others

Kozue Uehara

Kaho‘olawe, Kisenbaru, and Kin Bay: Towards a new transpacific commons against U.S. military capitalism

This paper reexamines the historical significance of contemporary struggles to create a new transpacific commons against U.S. military capitalism. As an international student from Okinawa studying in Hawaii during the mid-2000s, when the realignment of U.S. forces was accelerating in the wake of post-9-11 Iraq War, I came across historical documents about the popular struggle against U.S. military use of Kaho’olawe Island for bombing three decades earlier in the mid-1970s. Its bold acts of civil disobedience to sail to the island during military exercises and expose oneself to their danger captured global attention, while nurturing spiritual values of community which transcended the secular, individualist value of physical safety and personal gain. Such a movement was also emerging during the same period in the mountains of central Okinawa in the form of the Kisenbaru Struggle, which protested the U.S. military practice of firing drill with live ammunition and attempted to stop these military exercises that shot bullets into the surface of Mount Onna and Mount Bhutto. Kisenbaru Struggle succeeded in temporarily halting the military drill, but eventually the protesters were arrested and injured when the U.S. military resumed the exercise. The Kaho’olawe movement was also trying to transform a military site of state-organized mass murder into a sacred site for communal life, whose radical vision of restoring the indigenous commons was shared by the Kin Bay Struggle in central Okinawa against the construction of oil-stockpiling tanks and refineries during the 1970s. These interlinked struggles and their shared values laid the foundation for circulating anti-nuclear movements across the Pacific during the 1980s. In this presentation, I will discuss the historical process in which contemporary U.S. military capitalism fostered an avaricious economy of death which underpinned the transition from Cold War welfare capitalism to neoliberal imperialism, and the multipolar transpacific movements that rejected its very structural foundation and expressed an alternative moral subsistent economy of common life.

Scott Tsuchitani

The Hammer and the Pheasant: A Proposition for “Critical Nikkei” Studies

As we gather to inaugurate the first symposium of its kind, it is important to ask: what is critical about Critical Nikkei Studies? What purpose and what audiences does our work ultimately serve? This paper draws upon the community-based pedagogy of nisei scholar activist Isao Fujimoto and the author’s own art practice-as-research both to analyze the problem of racism in Japanese (American) racial formation and to provoke reflection on effective means of intervention and transformation. If, as Omi and Winant argue, racial formation is produced between the state’s regulation of racial groups and those groups’ contestation and own constructions of race, what happens when a group’s self-construction coincides with, rather than contests, that of the state? How can the normative logic of kotowaza (proverbs) such as 出る釘 は打たれる (“The nail that sticks up gets hammered down”) and 雉も鳴かずば撃たれまい (“Silence keeps one safe,” or more literally, “The pheasant who does not shriek avoids getting shot”) be read against the grain to find political potential in the fear and danger that motivate their threats of violence? Looking back on a quarter century of his own cultural practice, “author-as-pheasant” Tsuchitani (槌谷, “hammer valley”) reflects upon what can happen when one violates the heavily policed boundaries of Nikkeijinron (dominant discourse of Japanese (American)-ness) to “lance the boil of nausea that accompanies the disavowal of history,” to borrow a phrase from late Nigerian curator Okwui Enwezor. If the practice of parrhesia (fearless truth-telling) can “open up a field of unspecified risk,” as Foucault argued, then how can we incorporate this unsettling tactic into a rhetorical strategy that activates participation in a collective process to dismantle not only the dominant discourse of “J(A)ness” but also the system of knowledge that produces it? By doing so, we can potentially enact the radical democracy of cultural/knowledge production and civic participation that J(A)ness works so hard to prevent.

Scott Tsuchitani (槌谷スコット) is an artist and PhD candidate in Cultural Studies at University of California, Davis. His provocative socially engaged art has been exhibited at ten museums around the U.S., presented in Europe and Asia, censored by the De Young Museum of San Francisco, and cited in such journals as Amerasia, Asian Diasporic Visual Cultures and the Americas, Early Modern Japan, World Art, Southeast Review of Asian Studies, Impaction, Social Policy, and Kyoto Journal, as well as the academic books Queering Contemporary Asian American Art, Routledge Companion to Museum Ethics, Buddhism in America, Asian America Through the Lens, Countervisions: Asian American Film Criticism, and Japanese Americans: The Formation and Transformations of an Ethnic Group.

Tsutomu Tomotsune

Engineered Community: Japanese American Internment Camps and The Buraku Immigrants

Although WRA desperately refused to be regarded as similar to Nazi-Germany concentration camps, both regimes shared the idea that camps were historical experiments for controlling human resources. Nazi-Germany concentration camps were the experimental sites for necro-politics, which caused social minorities to die efficiently. In contrast, Japanese American internment camps, as sites for the bio-politics experiment, caused Japanese Americans to live efficiently and preempted practices for the US occupation in Japan after the war. In the internment camps, regarding internees’ riot against the inhuman conditions, WRA provided them to encourage to publish newspapers or small printed papers and to organize their committee to manage lives by themselves as a realization of democracy. Moreover, for farmers, WRA guaranteed industrial skills training such as product manufacturing, including shoe repair works mainly run by the Buraku people. By mobilizing anthropologists, sociologists, and education scholars to manage these businesses, WRA and War Department operated internment camps. The project guaranteed successful government of the US occupation after Japan’s defeat in 1945, which wiped racial discourse in the process. The existence of Buraku in internment camps was sometimes represented as an agent of WRA, and other times stigmatized as shunned stains who dealt with polluted business related to the death or carcasses. The Buraku in the camps was a metaphorical scapegoat to maintain the majority internees’ ordered structure of class and rank and their aesthetics, as usual rhetoric which refers to stigmatized minorities as a scapegoat to maintain social order. In addition, the Buraku had a role in neutralizing settler colonialism which Japanese Americans unwittingly engaged in the settler state like the US. This paper tries to demonstrate the experimental part of Japan’s internment camps and occupational policies after the war and locate Buraku’s psycho-political position in the US-Japan interwar history.

Tsutomu Tomotsune is Professor in the Institute of Japan Studies in Tokyo University of Foreign Studies, specializing Intellectual History and Minority issues in Japan, focusing on Buraku issue.

Kiyonobu Hirooka

Discrimination against Japanese/Nikkei Immigrants from Buraku Community in United States and Hawaii: Focusing WWII incarceration

I (Hirooka) have recently written an article titled “Emigration Crossing Borders and

Discriminated Buraku Community;” in the first volume of the series Modern And Contemporary Japan and buraku Issues. In that article, I pointed out that the emigration policy had been advocated as a Buraku problem measures immediately after Meiji Restoration. However the Japanese governmental projects, such as settlers sent to Hokkaido through Buraku Kaizen Jigyo (部落改善事業; Buraku improvement projects) or emigrants sent to Manchurian through Yuwa Jigyo (融和事業; conciliation projects) under the war time, we know some cases but not so many. On the other hand, Emigrants to America including Hawaii have been left as a problem.

So, I traced the accusations against Buraku discrimination among Japanese immigrants in Hawaii. And then, I researched the historical materials related to incarceration in the California Online Archive (COA) which Wesley introduced us. Searching COA has been amazing experience. There are many reports in it, and I found that the U.S. army and WRA showed a strong interest in Buraku discrimination, discrimination case had also occurred among Nisei soldiers. We consider it should be an underflow of Japan occupation policy, for example the GHQ draft for the Constitution of Japan, especially Article 14 nowadays which declare the equal rights under the law.

Through that research, I was surprised that the Incarceration process was very systematic and quickly, and that anthropological or sociological investigations started from the early beginning. Today, I would like to introduce the important point of the latter half of that article, the discrimination case in Hawai’I, in California, and in the Intern camps, and then raise some questions for the discussion.

Kiyonobu Hirooka (廣岡浄進) is an associate professor of the Research Center for Human Rights at Osaka City University, and a visiting scholar at San Francisco State University. He studied modern East Asian history and Japan Studies at graduate school of letters, Osaka University, Japan. And his doctoral degree was awarded by Osaka University. His current research interests focus on the historical experience of Buraku issues and cross-cultural histories relating to racism in the modern age. His most recent research article is “Ekkyou-suru Hito no Idou to Hisabetsu-Buraku”[Emigration Crossing Borders and Discriminated Buraku Community (越境する人の移動と被差別部落)] in Takeshi ASAJI (朝治武) et al. eds., Kouza Kingendai Nihon no Buraku Mondai [the Series Modern Japan and Buraku Issue (講座 近現代日本の部落問題)], vol.1, Kaiho Shuppansha, March 2022.

Troy Kondo

Japanese American Identity Politics

In this talk, I plan to address the many different implications of the Japanese Empire and of being a “full blooded” Japanese American Fifth generation (Gosei). I wish to speak about my own experiences as a Japanese American whose family have embodied Imperial Japanese thoughts and feelings of Japanese racial superiority over other Asian ethnicities (i.e., Koreans, Chinese, etc.), other Japanese Americans that were not “full blooded”, half or otherwise (hapa identities) and upholding settler colonial legacies. My own experiences with my family and living adjacent to many white identities taught me these feelings of superiority over others while knowing nothing of this legacy myself.

Kei Terauchi

Liberating Service Work through Performance: Intervening in Orientalism at Japanese Restaurants

In this talk I will share my experience working in high end Japanese and non-Japanese restaurants. My argument is that Japanese restaurants in the US are constructed through racial capitalism because the industry participates in stereotypes of Asians as racial-economic tropes while exploiting Asian labor. The orientalized performance and homogenized racialization of Asians in Japanese restaurants in the US are a pattern that comes from a system of knowledge that justifies racial and gendered exploitation. I will make a case that the systemic issue at hand is centered around the US-Japan power relations and cultural productions engineered to show Japan as the feminine and dependent damsel of a nation that needs guidance and support. I will reflect on my years in restaurant service work that took me from hot spots as seen on Sex And The City to some of the most exclusive dining destinations in the world where I gained a sense of ethno-national identity, earned capital, and experienced racism and misogyny. While orientalized performance negatively affects service workers, I also believe that the act of performance itself offers ways to intervene in the system of oppression and possibilities for liberating service work.

Kei Terauchi (寺内けい) is an MA student in the Asian American Studies program at SFSU. Kei was born in Chiba, Japan, and spent her early years in Tokyo, Saitama, and Edina, a suburb of Minneapolis, MN. She grew up playing the piano and attending as many Prince shows as possible and eventually attended Bryn Mawr College where she double majored in French literature and music. Before she went off to her first run at graduate studies in Music Theory/History at SUNY Stony Brook, she worked as a bartender at a local Japanese restaurant in Minneapolis. This experience led Kei to continue working in restaurants as she completed her MA and also made her a PhD dropout. After 17 years of working in restaurant management for a number of Michelin starred restaurants in the US and Japan, she returned to graduate studies to learn and write about Asian American issues in the restaurant industry. Kei is currently the general manager of a start-up philanthropy organization in SF. She is also an open water swimmer and lives in the Outer Sunset with her husband and two cats.

Masaho Kumazawa

Performing culture in Asakusa from the 1920s to the 1930s: subculture transcending nationality, class and the times

In this presentation I trace the history of popular performing culture in Asakusa (the eastern part of Tokyo). Being one of famed tourist spots in Tokyo, Asakusa nurtured the popular performing arts that flourished from the 1920s to the 1930s, and are still important today. Asakusa’s culture at that time with its gorgeous history, is the origin of today’s Japanese subculture of Aidol (singing and dancing performers idolized by young people), cross-dressers (those who dress as opposite sex) and Kosupure (people dressing up as their favorite anime character).

Asakusa town developed near the gate of Sensoji Temple in the 18th century (in the middle of the Edo period). Back in the Edo period people enjoyed circus performances, freak shows and street performances. In the 19th and 20th centuries, Asakusa had become the center of entertainment for the masses. Asakusa had kept its status of entertainment district even after the political change from the Tokugawa shogunate (in the early-modern times) to The Government of Meiji (in the modern times). In the mid-Meiji period the streets of Asakusa, the progenitor of today's amusement center, were lined with show tents and Playhouses.

Tokyo lost the most part of the scenery reminding us of the Edo period in the Great Kanto Earthquake of September 1923. As the city rapidly revived itself, Asakusa was transformed into a modern urban space. It had become the foundation of new consumption and culture, including architecture, movies, theater, music, dance, photography, gourmet food, and fashion. In particular, Asakusa Rokku (the Asakusa Koen District No. 6) with its Western-style movie theaters and playhouses was crowded with people. Concluding this presentation I will introduce some texts and movies created by novelists and poets who were attracted by Asakusa. These records show the prosperity of Asakusa from the 1920s to the 1930s.

Yuki Obayashi

Remembering to Forget: Sanitizing U.S. Nuclear Violence in the Hiroshima Maidens Project

In April 1955, twenty-five female victims of the U.S. atomic bombing—hibakusha (explosion-affected people)—of Hiroshima were flown to the United States and received extensive plastic surgery to correct severe deformity from keloids. Initiated by the American journalist Norman Cousins and the Japanese Methodist minister Tanimoto Kiyoshi, this one-and half-year project was supported on multiple civilian fronts in the United States, including successful fundraising through the popular TV program This is Your Life. The Hiroshima Maidens Project served as a critical early Cold War turning point, demonstrating how Americans succeeded in collectively transforming their anti-Japanese sentiments into a form of humanitarian rescue and aimed at their former enemy. By emphasizing American “generosity” during a sensitive Cold War juncture, U.S. media and contributors to the project enforced the racialized body images of the Hiroshima Maidens.

I interpret Hiroshima Maidens as a transnational juncture of Japanese Studies and Japanese American Studies. In my presentation, I focus on the TV program, This Is Your Life, aired on May 11, 1955, examining the unsettled visual images of the hibakusha women. While featuring Tanimoto, This Is Your Life strategically concealed its two hibakusha women guests from the viewers by presenting solely their silhouettes. This Is Your Life frames the wounds and scars of U.S. atomic warfare as requiring cover. By not showing the faces, much less the bodies, of these two Japanese women outright, This Is Your Life contributed, I argue, to their racialization in a way that drew on the logic of the Hiroshima Maidens Project itself. Presenting these two hibakusha as silhouettes on an otherwise blank screen, the show invited its American audience to project gendered fantasies of rescue and rehabilitation onto them.

Yuki Obayashi (大林由季) is a lecturer in Asian American Studies at San Francisco State University and a Ph.D. candidate in Literature at the University of California, Santa Cruz, with a designated emphasis in Critical Race and Ethnic Studies. In her dissertation, Yuki examines 20th/21st-century literature and film of the Japanese and U.S. empires in the Pacific, focusing on nuclear militarism. In her recent project, Yuki co-authored an introduction for the Penguin Publisher’s edition of Etsu Sugimoto’s memoir, A Daughter of the Samurai (2021), with Karen Tei Yamashita. Her article on the Hiroshima Maidens Project is forthcoming in the collected volume, Medical Culture in East Asia and Cinema, from Hong Kong University Press.

Yuri Takahashi

Asian American Film production/Screening activities on Artistic Labor

Since the 1960s, Asian-American artistic activities have been recognized as social movements against the capitalist state and racial discrimination and have been understood as grassroots activism that based on a proactive community of people in search of an identity. This aspect is still present today. However, due to the gradual development of neoliberalism surrounding cultural production, their activism are no longer sufficient to fund the operation of film production/screening activities. Most of the operating funds have to be provided by non-profit organizations and sponsor companies. Grassroots activism have paved the way for their survival by forcibly or strategically transforming themselves into non-profit organizations. In addition, with the exception of a few artists who are considered geniuses, the economic situation of post-fordism has placed artists in a precariat situation. In other words, it is the gradual inclusion and commodification of their artistic and cultural activities by capital, and as a result, they are placed in a situation where resistance movements and labor processes must be understood as inseparable. Therefore, considering the post-Fordist social situation and the qualitative transformation of labor, the conventional research perspective of the artistic resistance movement is not sufficient. The discussion to be derived from this is to examine the dynamism of the post-fordist mode of production, which considers such artistic activities not only from the aspect of a social movement but also as artistic labor, questions the conventional wage system-based labor form, and at the same time asks whether labor is liberated or further marginalized.

In relation to the debate on post-fordist modes of production, this study explores at artistic labor on film production activities from the perspective of interpretive labor. Labor of Interpretation is a form of work in which the dominated are forced to imagine and care about the rulers in a structurally unequal society based on violence. In such workplaces, polarized structures of imagination are constantly reproduced. Hence, labor in such an environment is alienating as a subjective experience. As a typical example, much of the work performed by women, mainly in the area of care, requires a great deal of imagination, but it is not always recognized as labor, and they are often forced to work without pay. Therefore, in this study, I consider filmmaking/artistic labor as interpretive labor that involves imagination and creativity, as a way to redraw self-images that have been commodified and stereotyped by mainstream society, and to reinterpret history. Normally, the dominant Asian people are always put in the position of being forced to interpret the dominant people, but in the film production and screening activities, the dominant people reinterpret their self-image and historical experiences that have been oppressed, marginalized and imposed on them. In addition, the act of reinterpretation is accompanied by the possibility of revaluing their ethnicity. In other words, the act of reinterpretation has the potential to revalue their ethnicity, which is a different alternative to contemporary art that is based on aesthetic values stratified by the logic of capital.

Yuri Takahashi

EDUCATION

2022 March Ph.D. in Global Studies - Doshisha University

2020 MSc in Social Anthropology - London School of Economics and Political Science

She has made publication and presentations with Japanese and English, in Japan, USA, Taiwan and South Korea.

Publications

2020 "What David Graeber Means for Hong Kong and Taiwan", Yuri Takahashi, The News Lends 関鍵評論網.

Presentations:

“Asian American Film Media Activism; Film Festival as crossed community place,” 11th DMZ International Doc Film Festival Conference “Cinema, North Korea, and Division of Nation,” September 22, 2019. Lotte Chinema Paju, South Korea.

“The Politics of Asian American Society on the Pros and Cons of Building Comfort Women Statues (Ianfuzo kensetsu no zehiwomeguru ajiakei amerikajin shakaino porithikusu)”, Hokubei Ethnicity Kenkyukai, February 20, 2022, zoom.

NAKA Dance Theater

Founded in 2001, NAKA Dance Theater (José Ome Navarrete Mazatl and Debby Kajiyama) creates experimental performance works using dance, storytelling, multimedia installations and site-specific environments. NAKA builds partnerships with communities, engages people's histories and folklore and expresses experiences through accessible performances that challenge the viewer to think critically about social justice issues. Recent themes include: racial profiling and state brutality, genetic modification of native crops, the commodification of water, cultural colonization, and the human response to overwhelming disaster. NAKA brings together and creates rapport among diverse populations, encouraging dialogue and civic participation.

Marshall Trammell

Marshall Trammell is an experimental archivist, percussionist, conductor, and composer. His aesthetics and activism are centered in social change interventions and generate new local and global ecologies that embrace improvisation as a collective, movement-building tool in the creation of post-capitalist imaginaries.