The Moderate Party - the missing link

Having watched the news about yesterday's general election (the results can be seen here), it's clear that a blame-game is already starting, firstly, concerning the bad result for the Social Democrats (the lowest in 96 years) and, secondly, concerning the rise of the Sweden Democrats, a rightist populist party with neo-nazi roots which managed to enter parliament for the first time ever.

To the first question, two often repeated replies are: 1) the Social Democrats suffered from the party's "red-green" alliance with the (formerly Communist) Left Party and the Green Party which alienated traditional Social Democratic voters, and 2) the personal lack of popularity for the Social Democratic party leader Mona Sahlin, especially compared to the prime minister Fredrik Reinfeldt, party leader of the Moderate (conservative) Party.

However, consider a few facts. Firstly, even without the "red-green" alliance the Social Democrats would have had to cooperate with the Left party and the Greens if they had been given the mandate to govern. Just a year ago the Social Democrats seems to have a large and secure lead over the rightwing coalition, at a time when Sahlin led the party and the "red-green" alliance was in place. Clearly, the question about the Social Democrat failure is more complex than the most popular answers suggest.

Answers to the second question - about the success of the Sweden Democrats - range from simply acknowledging the failure of the "integration policy" to blaming the market oriented economic policy of the government for having generated anxiety and discontent that is discharged on scapegoats like the immigrants.

There may be some truth in these answers, but there is one additional, obvious answer which is not heard so often, namely the Moderate Party's ideological march into the political center, which has opened up a vacuum on the right which the Sweden Democrats have been able to exploit.

That this ideological move is the key to the strenght of Fredrik Reinfeldt's "new moderates" is something we have grown used to hearing ever since their first electoral success in 2006, when they toppled the Social Democratic government of Göran Persson. Abandoning many of the overt signs of conservatism, profiling itself as close to the concerns of common wage-earners and even going so far as to call itself Sweden's "only Labour Party", the Moderate Party has had considerable success in outcompeting the Social Democrats on the own turf. Disguising neo-liberal tax cuts a a reform for making it "profitable to work" and redefining the shrinking of the social safety net into a responsible policy for "guarding the core of the welfare" has helped the them gain support of many voters in the political middle regions, especially those who benefit from the tax cuts and have been lucky enough to keep their jobs.

It turns out, therefore, that the two big questions concerning the difficulties of the Social Democrats and the growth of the Sweden Democrats are linked. And the name of that link is the "new moderates".

But if that's true, what explains the weak support in public opinion polls for the Moderate-led coalition just a year ago? Well, my guess is that continent factors have played a large roll. The main effect of the Moderate march into the political centre has been to create a more advantageous terrain for them in challenging the Social Democrats, but it hasn't automatically guaranteed that the challenge would succeed. As far as I can see, the fall in public support had much to do with self-inflicted wounds such as the truly catastrophic reform of the unemployemnt insurance, which triggered a flight from the insurance system just before the onset of the worldwide economic crisis, the heated debate about the FRA law (the impopularity of which helped catapult the Pirate Party to the EU parliament) and the many glaring mistakes that were made when the Health Insurance system was reformed. The best explanation of why public opinion turned since last year is the strong economic recovery after the crisis that started with the Lehman shock in 2008 which has contributed to the high levels of trust and confidence people feel for Reinfeldt and his finance minister, Borg. All the previous fiaskos are forgotten.

Yes, contingent factors - which means that the importance of factors like Sahlin's personal popularity or the "red-green" alliance are probably a bit exaggerated.

A third question much discussed in news programs is how Reinfeldt will be able to govern without making himself dependent on the support of the Sweden Democrats. A solution favored by many political commentators is for Reinfeldt to reach out "across the bloc border", preferably towards the Greens but perhaps also to the Social Democrats, in order to secure a majority. So far, however, the Greens seem intent on declining such overtures. Since cooperating with the Sweden Democrats has been ruled out, the most likely alternative seems to be for the government to reply on "jumping majorities", i.e. provisional arrangements from issue to issue.

The Greens should not be faulted for declining Reinfeldt's invitations. To do so is not at all irresponsible, as some commentators seem to be suggesting. To actually cooperate with Reinfeldt would mean granting him and his Moderates a comfortable seat near the political center, which would make it very difficult for a Social Democratic or Leftist government to challenge him. The only one benefitting from such an arrangement, apart from the Moderates, would be the Sweden Democrats, who would be free to thrive and expand in the vacuum created on the right.

Predictions are risky, but let me venture one nevertheless. I predict that the results of the election - in combination with the Green refusal to cooperate with Reinfeldt - will prod the Moderates to move back towards the right-hand end of the political spectrum. That will give the opportunity to the Social Democrats to recover some ground in the center.


PS (added 22/9): It seems we're headed for instability and jumping majorities. That's fine. For each party to demonstrate its separate identity and to emphasize the conflicts and differences that separates it from other parties is surely preferable to a situation in which established parties huddle together in an indifferent mass in the center. Such cooperation would kill polititcs in all areas except one, that of "integration", which would be elevated into the axis mundi of politics - which is exactly what the Sweden Democrats want.

Van Gennep's The Rites of Passage

I must confess that before reading this classical work I only knew of van Gennep through Victor Turner, which perhaps explains why I was surprised by quite a lot in it. And I don't just mean the differences in the way Turner and van Gennep use the term liminality (which is much broader in Turner who sees it as a component of practically all rites and much else besides). I'm also pleasantly surprised by van Gennep's extraordinary sensitivity to the “feel” of places, in particular in relation to situations involving crossing frontiers or thresholds, doors etc.

I'm stunned by how much here that might have been a direct inspiration to Amino Yoshihiko (and perhaps also Orikuchi Shinobu). Take Amino's fascination with the dôsojin, the stone objects placed outside villages in medieval Japan. In similar fashion, van Gennep writes about natural objects like rocks, stones or trees which could mark “magico-religious” borders or frontiers around premodern communities and which almost universally were associated with the phallus (van Gennep 1960:15f). The discussion about the “mana inherent in all strangers” (ibid 34f) is also echoed in Amino. The idea of muen seems to bear directly on the juridical license given to young people in transitional or liminal periods.

During the entire novitiate, the usual economic and legal ties are modified, sometimes broken altogether. The novices are outside society, and society has no power over them, especially since they are actually sacred and holy, and therefore untouchable and dangerous, just as gods would be. (ibid 114)

Hence the young could steal and pillage at will at the expense of the community (something van Gennep illustrates with examples from Liberia and the Bismarck Archipelago). Another similarity: take Amino's hypothesis that medieval Japanese covered their face with veils, straw hats or fans whenever they felt that they were in the presence of the sacred. He could well have taken his cue from Van Gennep, who writes that people in the ancient world veiled their head “to separate themselves from the profane and to live only in the sacred world” (ibid 168).

Another idea which seems directly translatable to Amino's discussion of muen is van Gennep's description of the zones between polities or communities, such as deserts, marshes or forests, which he describes as liminal zones with a sacred quality which were “sacred for the inhabitants of the adjacent territories. Whoever passes from one to the other finds himself physically and magico-religiously in a special situation for a certain length of time: he wavers between two worlds” (ibid 18). In Greece, such zones were used for market places or battlefields. Generally, such zone were free and open for anybody, a commons where everyone had full rights to travel and hunt.

There were also temporary magical zones. Such zones, which functioned as asylums, could be established between strangers by greetings, for instance by “pronouncing a word or a formula like the Moslem salaam” (ibid 32). Sometimes mere sight constituted sufficient contact for such a right of asylum to arise: “The Shammars never plunder a caravan within sight of their encampment, for as long as a stranger can see their tents they consider him their Dakheel”, e.g. he becomes protected (Layard, quoted in van Gennep 1960:32).

Why am I interested in this? Because I'm interested in exploring how a phenomenology of the sacred could be put to use in today, in our society. I strongly suspect that we can't do without such a phenomenology if we want to articulate a convincing idea of how we experience freedom. Freedom is not a principle or a political system, but neither is it a mere feeling. Freedom as an experienced reality is perhaps best described as a world, or realm of existence, lying beyond mundane considerations of utility and power and hence antithetical to capitalism and the state. The borderlines of that world are not sharp, to be sure, but as van Gennep shows, they were hardly sharp in premodern societies either. We can't see them clearly, but we can feel them - somewhat in the manner we feel changes in the air, or in temperature. Dérive is one way to track them down.


van Gennep, Arnold (1960) The Rites of Passage, London: Routledge and Kegal Paul.

Taussig and Turner

I felt a bit bothered by Taussig’s criticism of Victor Turner in Shamanism, Colonialism and the Wild Man, so I had a look at a few of the books by Turner I happened to have at hand, The Ritual Process (Aldine Transaction, 2007) and From Ritual to Theatre (PAJ Publications, 1982), to see how fair the criticism is.

First, here’s what Taussig writes. Describing the “sensory pandemonium” of the yagé nights among Colombian shamans and healers as akin to the production of dialectical images or montages in Benjamin’s sense, he adds that “the movements and connections involved here between self and group are not susceptible to the communitas model that Victor Turner postulated as a universal or quasi-universal feature of ritual” (Taussig 1987:441f). He then quotes the following passage from Turner:

In flow and communities what is sought is unity, not the unity which represents a sum of fractions and is susceptible of division and subtraction, but an indivisible unity, ‘white’, ‘pure’. ‘primary’, ‘seamless’. This unity is expressed in such symbols as the basic generative and nurturant fluids semen and milk; and as running water, dawn, light, and whiteness. Homogeneity is sought, instead of heterogeneity [and the participants] are impregnated with unity, as it were, and purified of divisiveness and plurality. The impure and sinful is the sundered, the divided. The pure is the integer, the indivisible. (Turner, from Image and Pilgrimage in Christian Culture, co-authored with Edith Turner, Columbia University Press 1978)

Taussig adds:

Impregnating people with unity may fit well with certain fantasies of maleness and fascism. Certainly the communitas features of the yagé nights are the antithesis of this whiteness, this homogeneity, this soppy primitivism of semen and milk and the unified and the pure. Against that the yagé nights pose awkwardness of fit, breaking-up and scrambling, the allegorical rather than the symbolist mode, the predominance of the left hand and of anarchy. (Taussig 1987:442)

So, is Taussig’s criticism fair? In fact, Turner is far from clear about to what degree he sees unity as a necessary feature of liminal experiences, the experience of “anti-structure” or communitas. Although the quoted passage strikes me as extreme, it’s not hard to find other passages describing communitas in terms of unity. For instance, describing what he calls “spontaneous communitas” (as opposed to “ideological” and “normative communitas”) he writes that “[i]ndividuals who interact with one another in the mode of spontaneous communitas become totally absorbed into a single synchronized event” (Turner 1982:48). Elsewhere he describes communitas as “homogeneous”, “relatively undifferentiated”, and “unstructured” (ibid 47, 2007:96, 132).

At the same time, Turner, somewhat inconsistently, also writes: “For me communitas preserves individual distinctiveness – it is neither regression to infancy, nor is it emotional, nor is it ‘merging’ in fantasy” (ibid 1982:46f). And recall how he describes liminality, a quality he closely associates with communitas and anti-structure: “Characteristic of this liminal period is the appearance of marked ambiguity and inconsistency of meaning, and the emergence of luminal demonic and monstrous figures who represent within themselves ambiguities and inconsistencies” (ibid 113). Here we hear nothing of oneness or unity. Liminality seems must more closely associated and communitas to ambiguity, play, and insecurity. 

What Taussig’s criticism reveals is the rift that seems to run through Turner’s thinking about communitas – the fact, in other words, that the way he describes liminality doesn’t always accord with the way he describes communitas.

The problem seems to be this: Turner describes communitas both as a unity in which distinctions are dissolved, and as a unity in which the distinctions are preserved. Several passages suggest that his model of communitas is that of religious grace. Grace itself, however, is closely modeled on love, and one of the most striking qualities of love is surely the presence of an overflowing sense of oneness which paradoxically coexists with a sharpened eye for the uniqueness of the other person. As Adorno states in his aphorism about "Sabbath eyes", love seeks oneness, and yet wants the other person just the way he or she is: "The eyes that lose themselves to the one and only beauty are sabbath eyes. They save in their object something of the calm of its day of creation" (Adorno, Minima Moralia, Verso 1987, p 76).

What should be criticized in Turner, then, is not really that he equates ritual with the experience of unity – for as we have seen he is very ambiguous on this point. What should be criticized is rather that he models the experience of communitas on that of love without clarifying the riddle of how the seeming opposites of unity and individuality can coexist in it. 


P.S. Having read Image and Pilgrimage, I must admit that Taussig's criticism is not unreasonable. Their views on pilgrimage are completely at odds, one stressing homogeneity and the other heterogeneity.

Michael Taussig's Shamanism, Colonialism, and the Wild Man (1987)

Putting down this book I ask myself how much I remember of it. As much as the scattered memories of a long voyage after having returned home. Or as much, perhaps, as what one remembers of a dream when awake. 

How much do I know of what this book seemed to be about while I read it - the Putomayo Indians, the Colombian rubber trade, colonialism, torture and healing, and shamanism? I remember the “space of death”, the space of terror that cannot be reduced to rational economic motives, the image of a predatory capitalism that has derailed and reassembled itself as the monster it imagined the natives to be. I remember the crossings of Joseph Conrad – who suddenly appears so petty bourgeois and narrow-minded – and poor Roger Casement. I remember the long, horrible discussions about whether the slavery along the Putomayo was really slavery or merely “debt peonage”, as claimed by the rubber barons, repugnant success stories like Julio César Arana, head of the Peruvian Rubber Company. And I remember thinking: how fuzzy and even non-existent the borders are between slaves, traders, wage laborers and family members. Just remember all the countless daughters who have been sold by their parents, in countries where slavery was nominally abolished centuries ago. And how fluid these categories are in our society today as well! I remember the sadness I felt when I read about people like Rosario, Marlene and her father, or Santiago. 

I also remember another point of interest: Taussig’s insistence that the dreamlike mist surrounding these historical memories, reports and colonial fantasies should be retained and not reduced away. Like Conrad, we - the searching critics - should “penetrate the veil while retaining its hallucinatory quality”, and like Benjamin, we should approach interpretation in a combined act of “reduction and revelation” (p 10). Myth is subverted by myth. Unlike the immanent criticism of Adorno, this is not a rational endeavor, taking aim at the intellectual closure of identity-thinking. It’s an emotional voyage in the style of Benjamin, relying on a visual or perhaps a tactile groping one’s way through fog or through dream, hoping for a dialectics to be set in motion which will guide us towards awakening. 

What would get lost if we tried to reduce away the mist would be the “sense of reality crucial to the moral character of social relations”, which is diffused through society, providing it with its emotional props and supports. Society, Taussig suggests, is not only served by explicit ideologies, but also by a “poetics of control”, an “implicit social knowledge”, or by what Raymond Williams called a “structure of feeling” – a “communal possession with all the firmness that structure suggests, yet operating in the most delicate and least tangible aspects of our activity” (p 288, 366). The task of the critic is to engage this reality, making it crack open through the skilful applicaton of dialectical image and montage, and thus tapping into and releasing the “creative power of chaos” underlying it. 

I think here of Helena Flam, who writes about how social structures are upheld by “cementing emotions” like gratitude or loyalty, but also by feelings of shame or fear. Social movements must operate with “subversive counter-emotions” to shock, disrupt and undermine the emotional structure of the status quo and release "subversive counter-emotions" like anger, pride, hope and wonder (see the volume Social Movements and Emotions, edited by her and Debra King and published at Routledge 2005). 

Criticism, Taussig suggests, is "sorcery". It proceeds through the medium of the dream. And why? Because it’s the only way out. The dream is reality, or at least it structures reality.

And I remember the descriptions of the Colombian shamans' yagé nights (the quip, which I read somewhere, that Taussig is a high theorist who writes like a beatnik is true). I also remember, but more vaguely, the attempts to theorize these nights. They belong with the sacred, taking place as a communal ritual, but lack the “unity” which Turner sees as characteristic of the communitas of ritual: “the movements and connections involved here between self and group are not susceptible to the communitas model that Victor Turner postulated as a universal or quasi-universal feature of ritual”. Against the fantasies of unity, “the yagé nights pose awkwardness of fit, breaking-up and scrambling, the allegorical rather than the symbolist mode, the predominance of the left hand and of anarchy” (p 442). Instead of unity, there is disunity, as in the montage as theorized by Benjamin. The yagé night is marked by radical heterogeneity. It is a “sensory pandemonium”, a dance of leaping shadows, a “chaotic mingling of danger and humor”. You don’t know how they will turn out. You will laugh, but you will also vomit and feel sick. Everything is hallucinatory and intense, but also full of unexpected, dreamlike reversals, connections and juxtapositions. So much laughter. “It belongs to the family of the pun”, Taussig quotes Barthes. “It is on the side of carnival”.

The book too is like a dream. It cannot be pinned down to any of its constituent parts. It’s a montage. It points beyond itself.

Sarkozy and "the least of these"

One of the most important news in recent days is surely the mass-deportations of "illegal" Roma from France (see New York Times, Der Spiegel, or Dagens nyheter).

This is a grotesque spectacle. It's almost impossible to imagine the entire population of French citizens being deported from a non-European country after an incident involving fifty or so French hooligans. To deport the Roma, by contrast, is another matter.

Part of the explanation is of course the deep-rooted, ingrained racism and discrimination against the Roma, found throughout Europe. But there is also a hatred of mobility as such which I am sure has helped motivate the deportations.

As Hortefeux, the French minister of interior, carefully explains, the French government is not targeting any specific ethnic group or stigmatizing the Roma. In a certain sense, he is right. What the government is battling is not the Roma per se, but a far worse hydra - namely the ability of people to take even a few steps in directions not authorized by the system.

Few things are as threatening to an unequal social order as the ability of people to break out of their confinements and gain access to what, according to the rulebook, should be reserved for the winners.

To prevent this, capitalism has always needed borders, despite its talk about the freedom of movement. It goes without saying that the relativization of national borders hasn't meant any increase of peoples' freedom to move. The freedom of people to move within the EU is comparable to the freedom of movement enjoyed by the Japanese during the Edo period - everywhere there is the same need of permits, the same sorting of people according to what papers they possess or in what direction they are travelling, the existence of gates and barriers not for exacting tolls but for "public safety", and thus also the same ability of the police to selectively restrict this "freedom" whenever it needs to. What happens is much better described as an increasing freedom for authorities to regulate the processes of exclusion. This is why some EU members - such as Romanians or Bulgarians - need work permits to stay in France longer than three months and why the deported will be prevented from returning to France by digital fingerprinting. Meanwhile, Sarkozy is reassuring his colleagues in Bucharest and Budapest that he has no intention of limiting the freedom of movement of their security apparatus:

Mr. Sarkozy also proposed that France bring in Romanian and Bulgarian police officers to work in the Paris region and send the French police to Romania and Bulgaria to help fight trafficking and other crime by Roma (New York Times, 29 July 2010).

In the face of hilarious absurdities like these (which, like many other absurdities, may well come true), perhaps I may be excused if I allow myself just a moment's daydreaming.

I wonder if Sarkozy is a Christian. I am not, but in my daydream I fancy Sarkozy at the Day of Judgment, looking up at the clouds and beholding the throne of God. Recoiling in fear and horror as he sees His angry face, which is the face of gypsy woman, he recalls the words of the Lord:

On the last day, Jesus will say to those on His right hand, "Come, enter the Kingdom. For I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, I was sick and you visited me." Then Jesus will turn to those on His left hand and say, "Depart from me because I was hungry and you did not feed me, I was thirsty and you did not give me to drink, I was sick and you did not visit me." These will ask Him, "When did we see You hungry, or thirsty or sick and did not come to Your help?" And Jesus will answer them, "Whatever you neglected to do unto one of these least of these, you neglected to do unto Me!"

The atelier and the park

Just some thoughts on Miyashita Park in Shibuya. For those who need a re-cap, Nike has bought the naming rights to the park, which will be renamed Miyashita Nike Park. Equipped with new sports facilities, the new park will charge an entrance fee from visitors and evict the homeless who live there. The firm hired for this outrageous reconstruction is the famous Atelier Bow-Wow (Atorie Wan).

There's a glaring irony here which I think deserves to be more widely known.

Atelier Bow Wow was founded in 1992 by the architects Yoshiharu Tsukamoto and Momoyo Kaijima. This is how they are introduced in the advertisement for their new book, Behaviorology, which was released earlier this year: "Achieving near cult status among architectural students around the world, Yoshiharu Tsukamoto and Momoyo Kaijima of Atelier Bow-Wow have built a career confronting the challenges posed by dense urban environments. Their city houses—enclosed in vibrant, idiosyncratic forms—are distinguished by their capacity to accommodate the changing needs of the occupants" (Amazon). In various sites on the web (here for instance), they are also said to be inspired by Lefebvre and striving for a more "responsive urbanism through the adaptability and mutative qualities of architecture".


Their 1998 Made in Tokyo is a good illustration of their approach to architecture. It is a collection of anonymous Tokyo buildings which "give priority to efficiency and utility" but which are "quite strange when viewed closely". They are "sometimes funny, sometimes sad, sometimes too serious". They are mostly the result of honest attempt to fulfil the needs of their users without being bothered by thoughts of beauty, cultural worth or history. Among them one finds narrow department stores meandering like snakes under a strech of railroad, apartments combined with horse stables, big shrine precincts on the rooftop of shopping areas, car schools on top of super markets, factories built on top of abandoned railways, and so on. Listed among their objects is also Miyashita Park, since it is built on top of a parking house.

They appear out of greedy utilitarianism; 'there's some space left over here, so let's use it for something else'; 'wouldn't it be useful to put this here, and put that over there'. So these samples mix together the building and the surrounding elements, and make up an unexpected significant whole. For example, they might merge together railway, roadway, retaining walls and other civil works to become something where the limit of the building is ill defined. Or they might mix functions which are just a bit unbelievable, simply because of similarity in length or expanse required for two particular functions, or because that thin crack of space seems wasted. As a result, people and vehicles, people and objects co-exist without hierarchy in the same space and form, and strange organisms of urbanism are packaged together. 

Usually, these strange buildings are regarded as lacking in artistic worth or even as grotesque failures. What attracts the authors to them is that they represent an architecture from below, an architecture which adapts itself to the needs of users. It creates what a "lively space" which willingly lets itself be infected with the accidents of the site instead of trying to control or neutralize them. In an interview, Tsukamoto talks of the need use the "fragmented energy" of the city for what he, following Lefebvre, calls a "meaningful production of urban space".

Another example of the firm's fondness for unplanned or unexpected uses of urban space is their 2002 book Pet Architecture. "Pet architecture is a term for the buildings that have been squeezed into left over urban spaces. Curious shapes and inventive solutions for drainage, windows and air conditioning abound. Most of all, it is the extraordinary miniature size of these shacks, store rooms, sushi bars and bike shops which makes this project so fresh" (from the Amazon ad). Some funny examples can be seen here. Common to them all is that they are the result, not of large scale planning, but of people making use of left-over space in a seemingly improvised or ad hoc fashion according to their needs.

To me this sounds very much like Aoki Jun, another Tokyo architect who advocates spaces without pre-given functions which users can change according to their needs and wishes. Last year I read his 2004 book Harappa to yûenchi. Here he distinguishes between two kinds of environment. On the one hand there are "wildernesses" (harappa, literally wild field), in which you don't know in advance what will happen and where it is up to users how they want to use it. An “amusement park” (yûenchi) by contrast is a space designed for a specific purpose in which proper use is already decided in advance. The task of the architect, he thinks, is to encourage the feeling of ”wilderness”.

What's interesting is how clearly Aoki links his distinction to the problem of human empowerment. When spaces are used in unplanned ways - for instance when a closed down school is used for an exhibition -then something resembling ”nature” occurs. He writes that it’s like when a seed is blown haphazardly by the wind on a field (Aoki 2004:10). Such "natural" environments are not designed to make us feel in any particular way. It is all up to us how we want to use it. They call forth the feeling that we can change our environment with our own power. What Aoki writes here resembles what I've been writing about ruins and wastelands and he seems to have made the same associations. "The wilderness is in other words a wasteland", he writes (ibid 11). He compares it to the empty lot of land in the anime Doraemon, where the children gather to play. In gathering there, the children have no pre-ordained purpose. They just gather there and then decide together what to do. ”The wilderness is not fun in itself. Almost daily, one has to invent new ways of playing” (ibid 12).

Here I think of the artists, activists and homeless who since March this year have been staging a sit-in in Miyashita Park to protest against and prevent its reconstruction. Under the name AIR (Artists In Residence) they use it for a variety of imaginative artistic activities. The park today is filled with funny dolls, placards, sculptures and objects made up of shoes, umbrellas, pieces of cloth, garbage and other things available. They cook food together and arrange rock concerts, film screenings, rave parties, outdoor karaoke, poetry readings, workshops and play soccer. There's a park library and a community garden where they plant herbs and vegetables.

What's happening in the park is that they're inventing new ways of playing, just as in a "wilderness". They're acting together to invent ways of having fun, doing the opposite of what you do in an "amusement park" where it’s already decided in advance how you are supposed to enjoy yourself. One of the artists, Ogawa Tetsuo, writes in an essay that he likes Miyashita Park “since it is more like a wasteland than a park”. It is because it's a wasteland that the homeless have been able to live there, and “culture and art are born out of wastelands” (Ogawa 2009). What's so good with a wasteland is precisely that they're unregulated and neglected by the authorities, thus creating a breathing space where users themselves can reshape space according to their needs, desires and whims.

Using Aoki's terminology, we can say that the planned Nike-fication of Miyashita Park is a clear example of a wilderness being turned into an amusement park. The construction will turn it into a space for consumers, part and parcel of the already thoroughly commercialized surroundings of Shibuya.

In view of this, it is ironic to read what Atelier Bow-Wow's Tsukamoto himself states in an interview ("Atelier Bow-Wow: Tokyo Anatomy", Archinect, 22 May 2007). Asked what he thinks makes a good public space, he answers:

The quality of public space is up to the peoples' participation. If all the participants are just a customer it is not a real public space. For example, in a shopping mall there are many people gathering and talking. It looks like public space, but they are just customers. They are all guests. They don't have any responsibilities to maintain the space. I think that just being in a gathering space is different from participating in the shared space with someone.

Sadly, the atelier appears to be turning a blind eye to its participation in the destruction of public space - whether out of cynicism, ignorance or lack of courage. This irony has not been lost on the artists defending the park, who in October last year issued an open letter to the atelier. Stating their agreement with the atelier's appreciation of grassroot users being able to participate in the production of urban space, they end the letter by asking it a series of questions, such as: What was its stance regarding the huts and tents built by the homeless in the park? Why did it accept the task of reconstructing the park? As far as I can tell, the atelier never replied.

Siegfried Kracauer once wrote that "the value of cities is determined according to the number of places in which improvisation is permitted". The Nike-fication of Miyashita Park will diminsh that number if it is carried out. There is indeed much one would like to ask the atelier. What's wrong with the "pet architecture" of the blue-sheet tents of the homeless? Why contribute to crushing the improvised and empowering use of urban space you claim to be championing? Don't you realize how silly your books will read if you go through with it?

The atelier now faces three options. To lose its reputation, to pull out of the project, or to accomplish the seemingly impossible task of a constructing an amusement park which is simulteneously a wilderness. Meanwhile, AIR is offering its own version of an architecture from below, of a "lively space" in which users decide on what to do in an improvised fashion, reclaiming and détourning urban space and using it in unplanned ways.


References

Aoki, Jun (2004) Harappa to yûenchi, Matsudo: Ôkokusha.

Ogawa, Tetsuo (2009) “Motto akichi o! Miyashita kôen ga naiki kôen ni” (More empty land! Miyashita Park will become Niki Park), Impaction 170 (August).

Amino Yoshihiko (12): Capitalism and muen

The problem of how muen relates to capitalism in Amino's thinking is almost as controversial as how it relates to the emperor. To put it simply, muen is, on the one hand, linked to an ancient freedom which Amino associates with "primitive communism". This freedom is said to derive from a feeling of the sacred which creates a realm in which secular hierarchies and laws melt away and property relations no longer hold. This is the concept of muen used when Amino claims that the “primitive” (muen) yields to the “civilized” in the course of the late middle ages, the latter being represented by the establishment of a burgeoning monetary economy and the hegemony of the worldview of an “agricultural” settled population. But on the other hand, the realm of muen is also described as the birth-place of capitalism and the market. Amino even goes so far as to claim that goods can only turn into commodities by passing through a realm of muen where they are liberated from their ties to their producers and previous owners - a claim which suggests that the principle of muen cannot possibly have decayed or weakened in the late middle ages.

The problem is how these two aspects of muen hang together. How can muen be a stand-in for communism if  it is also conductive of capitalism? Was Amino's prime concern to explain the emergence of capitalism in medieval Japan or to excavate ancient layers of consciousness in order to find a radical idea of freedom that could serve as a counter-weight to or relativize the capitalist society of today?


The two ideas of muen

Amino's thinking wasn't static. Many claim that a shift occurred in the course of the 80s and 90s and that "muen as freedom" became downplayed in favor of "muen as capitalism" (e.g. Sakurai 2001:452ff). This may be so. However, as a look in almost any of his books befinning with the 1978 Muen Kugai Raku will show, he never really relinquished any of these ideas of muen. The concern with the capitalist market is evident already in Muen Kugai Raku and the idea of muen as a "no-property" is prominent even in the late books.

A good place to assess the extent of Amino's shift is Nihon chûsei toshi no sekai (2001) in which a series of texts dealing with muen from the late 70s to the mid-90s are collected. In one of the newer texts (”Chûsei toshi kenkyû no mondaiten to tenbô” from 1996) Amino looks back on the earlier texts, stating that he still maintains that places in nature such as mountains and riverbanks had a sacred quality in medieval times which made them function as asylums. However, he now believes that it is too simplistic to draw a direct line from that to ”freedom”, ”peace” and ”equality” as he did in Muen Kugai Raku (Amino 2001:411). The reason is the link to capitalism.

The realm of muen contributed to the emergence of capitalism in many ways. In a basic sense, it was only by passing through "the world of gods and buddhas" that things could be severed from their links to the concrete human beings who had produced, owned or used them, and become commodities. This was why the early markets tended to spring up in places like riverbanks, in front of temples or in marginal spaces on the outskirts of the settled communities. Only there could people engage each others as strangers, without consideration for each other's private circumstances. In addition, the goods offered up to the kami or emperor was an important source of trade and commerce. Thus the imperial, religious and later also private storehouses served as an early form of banks, offering to lend rice in return for rent (suiko). During the middle ages, the temples in particular played an important role in finance. Religious networks for collecting charity (kanjin) were an important source of trade networks, monks often played a central role in trade and money-lending, and ideologies legitimating commercialism were fashioned by the Ikkôshû and Nichiren. The system of making offerings of salt or fish to the kami, emperor or local leaders was also, as I've mentioned in earlier posts, the origin of the kugonin system.

What happens in the late middle ages - Amino talks about a crucial transition period in the 14th century - is that commercialism liberates itself from its religious underpinnings. The irony of history was that the monetary economy which had been born out of the realm of muen started to undermine the prestige of Gods and Buddhas. The increase in literacy contributed to this erosion of the prestige of religion. The resulting picture is somewhat reminiscent of Weber's thesis of the birth of capitalism from a protestant "ethic" from which it then becomes independent, forming an autonomous system without any need of religious anchorings. I am also reminded of Marcel Mauss' idea of the religious origin of economic value, described in The Gift.

Muen, then, was the birthplace of capitalism in Japan. The freedom of capitalism grew out of the freedom of the asylum. In his often stated approval of Nakazawa Shin'ichi's drastic remark that "muen, that's capitalism, isn't it" (e.g. Amino 2007:415), Amino even goes a step further, identifying muen with capitalism. Rather than seeing muen as itself capitalistic, however, it seems more useful to view it as a precondition for capitalism. That muen is hardly in itself capitalistic is clear from Amino's examples. Thus he usually describes it as a kind of commons, a sphere of life with no masters and no owners (mu-shu), free from the logic of property and secular hierarchy.

This can be seen even in very late texts, for instance when he - following Katsumata Shizuo - describes the logic behind the robber expression otosu, literally meaning "letting something fall or drop (to the ground)" but used by robbers in the sense of liberating objects from their owners. Things that were found lying on the ground were regarded as without owner, as gifts from the gods which were free to pick up for anyone who happened to find them. The expression otosu thus signified that the "dropped" goods had entered the commons, the world of muen where they no longer belonged to anybody. Similarly, the expression otoshiya was used for mountain huts in which such goods would be stored (Amino 2003:40ff). Many similar examples could be added to illustrate the idea of goods leaving the sphere of private possession and entering a world of free "communist" circulation. The one that comes first to mind to many is probably that of uchi-kowashi, an established form of protest by the common people whereby they would march to the house of, say a rice merchant hoarding rice to drive up prices, and destroy or distribute the goods in the store. A similar logic was at work in the eejanaika riots of the late bakumatsu era, when singing and chanting town people would dance into the houses of the wealthy and powerful, demanding food and drink, or clothes and other goods, only to consume it or give it away immediately, letting it circulate.

As for the future, Amino believes in continuing research in order to show how muen can also be a way of overcoming capitalism, ”to think further about the problem which I have indicated by such terms as muen, kugai, and raku, in order to reach a vantage point superceding capitalism” (Amino 2001:413).

Muen, then, is not identical to capitalism. It rather functions as a kind of "reset", cancelling out the existing secular ties of goods and thus freeing them up for new configurations in which they are inserted into new ties. Those ties can be those of the capitalist market but they can also be those of a variety of other logics, such as the redistributive logic of robbers or the popular justice of townspeople.


An aporia?

Still, the ambiguity in Amino's works as to whether muen is seen primarily as a sacred realm of freedom or as the seedbed of capitalism remains. This ambiguity entangles him in difficulties which almost seem aporetic (for criticism of Amino regarding this, see Oguma's interview in Amino 2002, esp. p.190). It also invites a variety of interpretations, depending on which conception of muen the interpreter favors. If one saves consistency by stressing the link to capitalism, then the role of freedom in Amino's thought is left unexplained. It is easy to find interpreters who downplay the aspect of muen as freedom, focusing instead almost entirely on the relation of muen to capitalism (e.g. Ozeki 2003). If on the other hand the question of freedom is focused, then the link to capitalism must be downplayed.


Muen as relation

One way to resolve the dilemma is to view muen as a relational concept. This is a perspective offered by the historian Sakurai Eiji. Although he himself is primarily interested in the link between muen and capitalism, his idea of muen is in my view supple enough to point towards a way of reconciling the two conceptions of muen. That he is far from ignoring the link between muen and "communism" is evident in the way he starts his commentary on one of Amino's book, namely by quoting a passage from Muen Kugai Raku in which Amino writes about the "ghostlike" shape of muen and mushoyû ("no-property") which follows private property like a shadow, ”constantly, quietly, or perhaps rising with a look of anger or resentment” (quoted in Sakurai 2001:449). Sakurai compares this to the ghost of communism in the Communist Manifesto. He then goes on to the problem that if muen is linked to capitalism it obviously makes no sense to assert, as Amino does, that muen is weakened or decays in the period from the late middle ages and onwards into the Edo period. Now my own solution to this dilemma, as mentioned, is to say that capitalism quickly developed into a system of its own no longer in need of sacred trappings. That way it obviously becomes possible to say that capitalism flourished in the Edo period while muen withered away. However, Sakurai shows that there is another solution. While Amino tends to think of muen as originating in an inherent sacred quality in certain places or people, he himself thinks of muen as a relational concept. In some cases muen arises because certain places are regarded as sacred, but that is by no means necessary. That refugees, for instance, can obtain asylum in a country is not because that country is ”sacred”. The country is not in itself a "place of no-relation" (muen no ba), but simply "unrelated" (muen) to the country of origin. In the same way, capitalism and market relations arise in places outside the village community, not necessarily because such places are considered sacred in themselves but because they are outside and thus "unrelated" to the community (ibid 455f).

In Sakurai's version, this relational concept of muen amounts to a desacralization. Sacrality is no longer central to the idea of muen, as it is in Amino, since muen simply means that things are unrelated. With this redefinition, Sakurai has changed it into a concept very much suited to describing capitalist societies. He thus drops the assertion, so often heard in Amino, that the principle of muen decayed in the late middle ages. Even in the Edo-period, with its flourishing capitalism, muen was alive and well.

Let me now state my own interpretation. It differs slightly from Sakurai since I am less interested in capitalism and more interested in how muen functioned as an idea of freedom. I reject those passages in which Amino directly identifies muen with capitalism. Capitalism may very well have developed out of muen, but that does not mean that it is identical to it or that such a development is necessary. The freedom of capital is at most a  "fallen" version of the freedom offered by muen. It is "fallen" since it introduces new secular ties, generating its own losers and dependencies. A genuine muen would have to function as a shelter for all losers. Even losers in market exchange would be able to escape there and find a haven where the stigma of their defeat is erased.The muen of temples and other religious organizations should similarly be viewed as "fallen" since they create new hierarchies.

Like Sakurai, however, I too favor a relational concept of muen. Muen to me is essentially a "resetting" in which the norms and rules that determine our conduct and our status in ordinary everyday life are cancelled. This conception of muen is narrower than Amino's. I see muen as immensely difficult to institutionalize without compromising it. Outside natural settings, it probably always has an emphemeral, liminal quality, since it essentially consist in the operation of resetting through which a thing or a person passes before it once again "falls" and becomes entangled in new ties. Thus the resetting of mind before engaging in a musical performance could be described as a state of muen. Similarly, a game of chess during which players forget about the surrounding society is muen in relation to that society. The separate worlds created by these activities presuppose that the participants pass through a state of muen, but since the activities themselves tend to generate new ties among musicians and players, even they will in the long run be unable to realize muen except in an imperfect or "fallen" state.

The fact that I view muen as a liminal, threshold state (somewhat like Turner's state of "liminality") means that connotations of the sacred continue to color my concept of muen. Here too I differ from Sakurai. This sensation of the sacred, however, is not necessarily linked to any religious institution and is not nececcsarily accompanied by any thought of sacrality. It's an "everyday" sacrality. I believe that Amino himself uses the word "sacred" in this sense when he talks about "rivers and mountains" or the world of nature as sacred or when he claims that the outcasts were regarded with respect and awe because of their closeness to the sacred.


The larger picture

Presumably, one reason that Amino never felt the relation between the aspects of muen as freedom and as capitalism were acutely problematic was his preoccupation with deconstructing the idea of Japan as a unitary "island-country" based on rice agriculture and liberating himself from the productionist bias of Marxist historiography. Muen as an ancient idea of freedom was one way to achieve those ends, but so was paying attention to capitalism and other "non-agriculturalist" ways of life.

There is something of a parallel here to Deleuze & Guattari, who similarly idolize the nomadic in their attempt to break with the sedentary, with the logic of the state. To them, just as to Amino, capitalism is ambivalent, impossible to categorize neatly. Their mode of thinking, just as in Amino's, is primarily dualistic – not to say manichean (or, as Yamaori Tetsuo says about Amino, "antithetical"). It is a thinking in which complexity is generated through the superimposition of a series of dualisms - nomadic/sedentary, striated/smooth, agricultural/non-agricultural, primitive/civilized, and so on - and a fruitful tension arises through the effort to relate them to each other.

The problems occur when phenomena can’t be captured dualistically. This is why the problem of capitalism is so significant to both Amino and Deleuze & Guattari. Is capitalism to be celebrated for its deterritorializing effects or resisted because of its reterritorializations? Has the nomadic been furthered by capitalism or not? Did muen retreat with the defeat of the "primitive" or is it part of the victorious capitalism?

Capitalism may well be a force that contributes to the weakening of the logic of sedentary or agricultural. But surely that doesn't mean that the nomadic impulse won't one day revolt against it, or that the idea of muen won't inspire a longing for a freedom beyond the freedom of capital.


References

Amino, Yoshihiko (1997) Nihon shakai no rekishi (The history of Japanese society), vol. 1, Tokyo: Iwanami shoten.

Amino, Yoshihiko (2001) Nihon chûsei toshi no sekai (The world of medieval Japanese cities), Tokyo: Chikuma shobô.

Amino, Yoshihiko (2002) “Jinruishiteki tenkanki ni okeru rekishigaku to Nihon” (History and Japan in a transformative period of humankind” (interview by Oguma Eiji), pp 143-232, in Amino & al ‘Nihon’ o megutte: Amino Yoshihiko taidan-shû (About ‘Japan’: Collection of conversations with Amino Yoshihiko), Tokyo: Kôdansha.

Amino, Yoshihiko (2003) 'Wasurareta Nihonjin' o yomu (Reading 'Forgotten Japanese'), Tokyo: Iwanami shoten.

Amino, Yoshihiko (2007) “Kyôkai ni ikiru hitobito – seibetsu kara senshi e” (People living in the margins: from sanctification to discrimination), pp 397-422, in Amino Yoshihiko chosakushî, Vol. 12: Muen Kugai Raku, Tokyo: Iwanami shoten.

Ozeki, Motoaki (2003) “Amino shigaku no mondai keiretsu” (The lineage of problems in Amino historiography), pp 29-57, in Kojita, Yasunao (ed) Amino shigaku no koekata – Atarashii rekishizô o motomete, Tokyo: Yumani shobô.

Sakurai, Eiji (2001) “Kaisetsu: ‘Muen’ron – ‘rô-marukishisuto’ no keikoku” (Commentary: About “muen” – the warning of an “old Marxist”), in Amino, Yoshihiko Nihon chûsei toshi no sekai (The world of medieval Japanese cities), Tokyo: Chikuma shobô.

Amino Yoshihiko (11): Karatani's criticism

I've already remarked on the similarities between Amino's and Karatani's take on the emperor system. Let me briefly discuss the differences as they are highlighted in a criticism Karatani makes of Amino in a paper from 1991 ("The Discursive Space of Modern Japan").

This is a paper in which Karatani discusses the closure of Japan's discursive space and is looking for ways to get out of it. The relevant section is one in which he argues that the state is constituted through its relations to other states and that it is therefore wrong to look for the roots of the emperor-system in the people, as the nativist scholars (kokugaku) or Yanagita Kunio tried to do.

People are conscious of the emperor when they are also conscious of international tension, and when the emperor is forgotten, it is because tension with the outside has eased. The same applies to the Edo period. (Karatani 1991:206)

The roots of the emperor-system, then, are not internal but external. He extends this criticism to anthropolocially inspired researchers today who turn to internal "others" such as marginals or minorities to destabilize the emperor-system. "What are called 'exterior' and the 'Other' in cultural anthropology do not in fact maintain any exteriority or otherness. Rather, they are indispensable to the community and are thus part of it" (ibid 208).

This criticism falls on Amino as well.

For example, the historian Amino Yoshihiko attempted to find the basis for overturning the emperor system in outcast groups, yet ended up finding the emperor system there, because outcast groups are not external to the system; the community system is precisely that which includes them. Amino, who had previously written on the Mongol Invasion and had seen in that international crisis the transformation of the ancient system, was subsequently caught in the trap of structural theory. To discover plurality and otherness on the inside does not amount to escaping interiority. [...]

There are other, more "fundamental," strategies that fall under the name of relativizing the emperor system and tracing it back to a previous state of plurality; these result, as with Yanagida, in a move to the Southern Islands. Some, like Yoshimoto Ryumei, have literally turned to the Southern Islands, while others, like Umehara Takeshi, have looked to Jomon or Ainu culture. Whether toward the south or toward the east, and whether to affirm or negate the emperor system, this type of "introspection" has produced no effect. (ibid 208f)

"Introspection" into Japan's history, no matter how seemingly pluralistic or even cosmopolitan it may be portrayed, can only result in self-congratualtory fictions that fail to introduce genuine exteriority. What destabilizes the system is outside forces like the world market or foreign imperialism that produce a real sense of crisis, not any internal ”others” who are in fact part of the system. At least according to Karatani.

Now, Karatani’s criticism seems unfair from many points of view. Let me mention a few obvious points.

1) Amino’s ”discovery” of the emperor among the outcasts wasn't a failure, since he set out precisely to show that such a link existed.

2) They talk about different things: Karatani is looking for exteriority, a true other outside the system. Amino is looking at the idea of freedom in medieval society (muen) and how it animated and guided groups like the non-agriculturalists and other itinerants. These are two completely different things and to accuse Amino of having failed to point out a true other is to miss his point.

3) Amino is not disregarding the question of the outside of the community. Remember that he claims that the emperor comes into being in order to rule that which escapes the community. To Amino too, the state's roots are therefor not internal to the community but external to it. He never presupposes any unitary "national" culture as the basis of this state, which he instead portrays as similar to what Karatani will later label ”empire”, the rule over markets and trade, over what takes place between communities.

4) It also seems unfair to claim that trying to encourage alternative forms of cultural identification is meaningless or that it will merely result in a seeming cosmopolitanism that is the flipside of ultranationalism. Karatani's claim that the ”emperor” ever since the Edo period has been held in latency during periods without foreign threats only to appear again when needed rests on an ahistorical presupposition of an unchangeable system or ideology.

Karatani’s text, however, is still instructive. In pointing to how a system is destabilized by forces outside it, he anticipates Amino’s shift in around 1990 towards a more ”deconstructive” tactic that focuses on the lack of unity in ”Japan”, its myriad differences, and its links to the outside – things like the Emishi, the East Asian trade network, or western Japan’s similarity to Korea. In these later works Amino shows how Japan never forms a unitary system at all, except in ideology, since it is located within a larger field of forces. This is not merely a matter of  tracing the emperor-system "back to a previous state of plurality” (as Yanagida and Yoshimoto), since the lack of unity persists even today. While in his earlier stance he tended to focus on how emperor and outcasts or agriculturalists and non-agriculturalists were dialectically interrelated, he now shifts to a stance in which this interrelationship is subject to strong local variations. With this shift, the dialectical interplay with the emperor is downplayed since it wasn't important outside western Japan. To be sure, Amino doesn’t break completely with his previous approach. He continues to use internal "others", such as itinerants, as a lens to show how multifarious society was. He also continues to be interested in how the ideas of freedom and independence empowered people. This is not a contradiction. Shifting to local variations doesn’t amount to giving up the idea of muen. As I have written elsewhere, the idea of muen is not at all in need of any protecting emperor in a unitary empire, but thrives in a fragmented society with a plurality of power-centra.

That Amino makes this shift doesn’t mean that Karatani was ”right”. Karatani himself changes stance when he realizes that he cannot just wait for outside market forces. In the 90’s he instead turns to activism animated by the idea of transcritical space. In other words he turns himself into an actor within the system who uses his own idea of an outside or exteriority as a guiding star for his actions. This is not so dissimilar to how muen served as lodepoint for the medieval ikki. That transcritical space comes into being by bracketing social status in society is also similar to muen. To be sure, he thinks asscociations would be completely ”outside” the sytem of the capitalist nation-state, without any link to the emperor of course. But as I have shown, muen too can be dissociated from the idea of the emperor.

The importance of the ”external” as one source of the state and of ”sovereignty” cannot be denied. I recall Ishimoda Shô's statement that already at the time of Himiko the state consisted in control over markets and diplomatic relations. The suggestion that the Mongol confrontation might help explain Go-Daigo’s seemingly strange transformation of the idea and style of sovereignty is also suggestive. Certainly the central role accorded to the prayers at Ise may have helped resucitate imperial prestige. But is the state explained only by its relations to other states, as Karatani seems to suggest? How then did the first states originate? How should we explain the sovereignty of ”world-empires” that lack outside since they see themselves as co-extensive with ”civilization”? Isn't it a more fruitful hypothesis to say that the first states and empires come into being in order to control trade and military vagrancy ("the nomadic war-machine"), regardless of the existence of other states?


References

Karatani, Kôjin (1991) ”The Discursive Space of Modern Japan”, pp 191-219, boundary 2, 18:3 (Autumn).

Amino Yoshihiko (10): The emperor's deep roots

One of the controversial points in Amino concerns his treatment of the emperor. Here I won’t enter into the debate on the role of Go-Daigo’s failed “restoration” in the transformation of Japanese society in the late Middle Ages (which I have treated elsewhere).

Instead I will focus on Amino’s equally controversial thesis of an ancient link between the emperor and the idea of muen on which “non-agriculturalists” depended for their freedom of movement. As he himself tells us in an interview, his writings on this link once led him, to his utter surprise, to be accused of being an “apologist for the emperor system” by a critic (Amino 2002:164, 172).

There are two things that make Amino’s thesis on the link between non-agriculturalists and the emperor controversial. Firstly, by portraying the emperor system as “rooted” in the life of the “common people”, he appears to deny any easy possibility of abolishing it. Secondly, by “contaminating” the idea of muen through a link to the emperor, he makes it appear as part of the emperor system and thus much less appetizing as a principle of resistance. A solution to these problems depends of finding a way of extricating the emperor from the “common people” or from muen.

In what follows I will suggest that the problem is not as intractable as it is sometimes made to appear. A careful reading of what Amino writes will reveal that he never in any single work portrays the “partnership” between emperor and non-agriculturalists as harmonious or “natural”, but rather as the result of an ongoing power struggle or tug of war which in turn suggests that the partnership itself is an instable and contestable edifice. Recognizing this will at least be a helpful first step in solving the above problems.


The emperor and the non-agriculturalists

In his major work on the relation between emperor and “non-agriculturalists” – Nihon chûsei no hinôgyômin to tennô from 1984 – Amino starts off by positioning himself in relation to an early postwar debate between two famous historians, Ishimoda Shô and Tsuda Sôkichi, the former a Marxist and the latter generally regarded as conservative. Against Tsuda’s view of the emperor system as a cultural construct resting not on force but on spiritual authority and the people’s acceptance of it as a “natural” phenomenon, Ishimoda argued that this amounted to a “depoliticization” of the emperor system which stemmed from Tsuda’s “fear of revolution”. While sharing his mentor Ishimoda’s Marxist approach to history, Amino states that “the illusionary nature of the revolutionary movement” of the times (in which both Ishimoda and the young Amino participated) must be recognized as a fact. Although critical of Tsuda’s silence in regard to the sufferings brought by the emperor system on the countries occupied or invaded by Japan peoples, Amino defends Tsuda from Ishimoda's attack, stating that he appreciates the former's willingness to lend an ear to the common people and that he wants to learn from Tsuda’s attitude (Amino 1984:5-9).

Amino’s work on the relation between “non-agriculturalists” and the emperor system is indeed a long probing investigation into the deep roots of the latter in the common people. As he shows in his writings, the “non-agriculturalists” – itinerant traders, artisans, fishermen, outcasts, and entertainers – often strove actively for official appointment as kugonin, imperial servants. Why did they feel that they needed the emperor-system and how crucial was this system for upholding their “freedoms”? That is a question which is central not only to Nihon chûsei no hinôgyômin to tennô but also to Amino’s work as a whole.

Before going on, let’s note that Amino gives his own, very special slant to the question debated by Tsuda and Ishimoda. What Amino discusses is not the emperor system as a whole, but one of its two pillars: its support among non-agriculturalists. One of the most interesting points in the picture of the emperor system provided by Amino and other historians working at the same time is its two-fold structure. Apart from being a structure of rule based on the domination of land and the collection of land-tax from the agricultural population, it also rested on a direct rule over people engaged in non-agricultural occupations such as fishermen, traders, artisans and entertainers. In return for offering up their services or “divine gifts” to the court, these non-agriculturalists would be granted a title (usually that of kugonin) along with privileges such as the exemption from taxes and freedom of movement without being hindered by barriers or toll-gates - a system Amino refers to as the kugonin system.

This twofold structure is reflected in the ambivalence of the image of the emperor, who - as Amino writes - had "two faces". On the one hand there is the old mythical association of emperor with rice and fertility, the agricultural monarch ruling the abundant land of luxurious rice (Mizuho no kuni), but on the other hand there is the very different but no less ancient image of the emperor as the ruler of mountains and seas extending imperial protection to traders, artisans and other non-agriculturalists.

An interesting fact which Amino points out is that while the agriculturalist aspect of imperial power was often expressed in a paternalistic ideology stressing harmony and cooperation, the non-agriculturalist aspect had an affinity with despotism. This, he believes, was because policies designed to further commerce forced the state to assert its control over roads, sea lanes and rivers. Go-Daigo examplifies this despotic aspect of imperial power (Amino & Ishii 2000:173ff).

The great role played by the kugonin system in Japanese society in the Middle Ages means that Amino is uncomfortable with using terms like “feudalism” in a Japanese context.  While the term “feudalism” may be applicable to the warrior-dominated society of eastern Japan, it is much less useful to understand the western parts, where the kugonin-system was more developed and in which the influence of the imperial court remained strong during the Kamakura period. Medieval Japan was thus a mixture between a land-based system of indirect taxation which resembled European feudalism and a direct rule over “non-agriculturalists” which had more in common with empires such as the Inca Empire, which had similar systems of “holy servitude” under the emperor.

What creates the violent tension in Amino’s works is a seeming paradox. His relentless attempt to relativize and “deconstruct” the nationalist imaginary of Japan as a homogeneous nation based on rice-agriculture means that he tends to view commerce, trade and itinerancy as liberating forces that help relativize the legacy of the agricultural ideology. As the kugonin system reveals, however, these forces for freedom were themselves allied to the most despotic aspects of imperial rule.

This is a point many critics have pointed to as a disturbing flaw in Amino’s historiography. The historian Miki Seiichirô, for instance, criticizes Amino for failing to clarify whether the kugonin achieved freedom by their association to the emperor or ended up in another kind of unfreedom (Miki 2009:25).  Commenting on the thesis that the emperor was the lynchpin of the freedom of itinerant people, the religious historian Yamaori Tetsuo notes: “It must be noted, however, that this well known first thesis of Amino’s conflicts and overlaps with a second thesis: that the Japanese State is beleaguered by the autocratic nature of the emperorship. Between this countervailance and tension is hidden a tremendous abyss that cannot be crossed in a single leap. Perhaps it is within the deep fissure between these two theses that the dark and mysterious forces of the State are concealed” (Yamaori 1994:219).

In Amino’s account, then, the kugonin system comes forward as a place where extremes meet, as a vehicle for both liberation and despotism. Is there a way to “solve” this ambiguity?


Karatani and Amino

As a small aside, let me mention that Amino’s account of the dual nature of imperial power has probably been an important influence on Karatani Kôjin’s recent thoughts on the difference between empires and nation-states (e.g. Karatani 2004, 2006). While nation-states model themselves on the idea of a national community, empires are indirect structures of rule that seldom interfere directly with the governing of the various peoples or communities under its jurisdiction. According to Karatani, imperial rule instead consists in regulating the commerce and other forms of exchange that take place between the communities it has subjugated, in the gaps or interstitial spaces where people encounter each other as strangers. Empire, then, is the shared rules that allow strangers to engage in exchange.

With Karatani’s terminology, we could say that in the case of ancient and medieval Japan the “empire” consisted in the rule extended over what Amino calls the itinerant non-agricultural population and the lines of communication they used. Spaces in-between communities are exactly what Amino refers to as muenjo – riverbeds, mountains, the sea, beaches or cross-roads. Such spaces were inhabited and used by the non-agriculturalists – hunters, fishermen, traders, itinerant shamans or artisans. As Amino points out, the fact that in such spaces people encounter each other as strangers was why markets would spring up there. Pure, rule-governed commercial exchange simply couldn’t take place within a community where normally all exchange of things or services would lead to a strengthening of the bonds between the people involved. The similarities don’t end there. Karatani also seems to build implicitly on Amino when he argues that feudalism is born in the backward “peripheries” of the grand world-empires, such as the Roman or Chinese empires, to which they look up and on which they sometimes try to model themselves. This accounts for the feudal character of eastern Japan, while western Japan was an intermediate form, peripheral in relation to China but with strong ambitions to form a Chinese-inspired “mini-empire” of its own. As Karatani points out – again, probably under the influence of Amino – it is wrong to call Japanese premodern society as a whole “feudal” since Western Japan had more in common with “empire”. In Marxist terms, this means that Western Japan was less feudal than characterized by an “Asiatic mode of production” or what Wittfogel called a “hydraulic society”. If we compare Amino and Karatani, we can see that they provide the same picture – the former a historically contextualized close-up, the latter a generalizable theoretical birds-eye view model, but in essence the picture is the same.

Using Karatani’s terms we can say that the ambiguity of the Japanese emperor system is that it combines the cosmopolitanism of a non-agricultural “empire” with the parochial nationalism of a settled agricultural “community”.

We can recall that during much of his career, Karatani has been battling the “closure” of discursive space in Japan, which he feels is the flip-side of nationalism. In the 80’s he tended to celebrate the logic of capitalist markets, with their link to exteriority and spaces in-between, as a tool for deconstructing the closure of national space (e.g. Karatani 1995a:182, 1995b:143ff). In this tendency, we recognize another interesting parallel to Amino, who similarly musters the non-agricultural multitudes engaging in trade against the stubborn Japanese self-image as a homogeneous, agricultural nation. However, since the early 90’s, probably under the impact of the victory of global capitalism, Karatani has been far more critical of capitalism and instead puts his hope in “associations” – open and non-hierarchical networks of the type long favored in anarchism – which he believes provide an alternative both to the nation-state and to capitalism (along with the latter’s tendency to favor the establishment of empires).

Karatani’s expositions of associationism is lacking in historical detail. The interesting question then becomes: can Amino help us make up this deficiency? Or will the close contact with historical detail which his works offers us instead pull us in some other, but perhaps equally interesting direction? Or is history with its love of detail fundamentally so complex that it must resist political theorizing?


The tug of war

Amino was not the first historian to be interested in the link between kugonin and the emperor. For instance, Nakamura Naokatsu had studied the practice of falsifying kugonin diplomas (nise-monjo sakusei) in the late Middle Ages which he saw as expressing the desire of commoners to idealize the emperor, to whom they looked up since they were tyrannized by the oppression of warriors (Amino 1984:36ff). The emperor had become the focal point of devotion and Utopian expectations precisely because he is one step removed from and unsullied by the repressive order which he has nevertheless sanctioned – just as during the late Edo period. Nakamura, however, saw the kugonin system primarily as a late medieval phenomenon and refused to recognize its existence in the early middle ages. Thereby, in Amino’s view, he missed the chance of explaining the origin of this system and roots of the attachment to the emperor.

To clarify the problem of the entanglement of liberation and despotism, we need to follow Amino’s explanation for why the non-agriculturalists turned to the emperor in the first place. This explanation requires Amino to go back in history to ancient Japan, to the time when the nascent imperial state made its first attempt to control the muenjo (ibid 44). In this, he follows Akamatsu Toshihide, who – against Nakamura – showed that the origin of kugonin system can be traces at least to the early 10th century, to the mikuriya, an office responsible for the fish and other food prepared for religious rites in ancient Japan, and niebito, people providing the fish or birds used in rites. In return for these goods, the niebito would be granted protection and privileges which they could use to strengthen their local power and prestige. By the 11th century, these people would be recognized as kugonin (ibid 1998b:26-29). Going back that far in time is important, because by doing so Amino can show that the formation of the kugonin-system is the result of a long power-struggle between commoners and the state.

Let us first look at the answer to the question of why traders and other itinerants actively strove for kugonin status. This was because the emperor was the guarantor of freedom of travel. In ancient times, fields and mountains, rivers and the sea were free areas where anyone could enter, but by the Kamakura period taxes and tolls were levied heavily at barriers, passes, and ports. The official recognition of the emperor was thus what enabled the itinerants to travel freely, something which was necessary for them in order to make a living. “That was the basic reason that traveling artisans demanded the title of kugonin and the guarantee of privilege” (ibid 2001a:373f). Conversely, the imperial court and officials would gain economic advantage by organizing the kugonin since that helped them secure control over the important trade lanes, waterways and harbors. Often there was fierce competition between court, shrines and temples about who would be able to organize them first (ibid 1998b:b30f, 2001a:372ff).

But how did this system arise? In Nihon chûsei no hinôgyômin to tennô Amino looks at the ancient imperial right to rule ”mountains and fields, rivers and sea”, which probably originated as “the natural and original rights of the community” itself, which was impersonated in the person of the ruler. As the first centralized state emerges in Japan with the ritsuryô system as its legal backbone this right was used by the emperor to prohib commoners from hunting on imperial hunting grounds, but on the whole, mountains and rivers are left to the commoners to use freely in accordance with their age-old rights (ibid 1984:97f). While the ritsuryô laws codified the emperor’s right to all land, they also established that mountains, fields, rivers and the sea were places where anyone was free to enter, and that they would be administered by centrally appointed local governing organs and not handed out as fiefs (shôen) to the aristocracy (ibid 2001a:121). However, with the increasing partitioning of land into fiefs starting in the 8th century, regulations were gradually tightened. In tandem with that the ”original rights” start to be awarded as privileges to specific groups such as the niebito. Finally, they take the form of the freedom of travel granted to limited groups such as the kugonin (ibid 1984:97f).

But in the course of this process, there was struggle. Communities resist the increasing privatization of mountains and fields in the hands of the aristocracy with “a tenacious vitality which power-holders are forced to recognize”. That such resistance was raised in the name of the anger of "the god of the land” (jinushi no kami) shows that it was motivated not by a violated sense of collective village ownership (iriaichi) but by something more basic, ”the people’s fundamental right to ’lands and oceans’”. As examples of the assertiveness of non-agriculturalists in the late Heian period, Amino mentions the jinin of Ise Shrine storming into the residence of the minister Fujiwara Kanetada, and mountain priests and yamabushi threatening the court. In late 11th century the court responds to this both by tighter regulations and by trying to co-opts the non-agriculturalists, “organizing them within the system” by according them privileges as kugonin. In that way, the kugonin system is stabilized in the 12th century. Although increasingly regulated, these rights are also given official recognition and live on because of (ibid 1984:100, 2007b 407).

In this account, there is very little or no harmony between emperor and non-agriculturalists. What comes forward is instead the image of a fierce tug of war between those groups in society who want to make use of the freedom of movement and the state power that tries to subjugate them. The really important point is that Amino clearly shows that it was popular resistance, rather than benevolent imperial protection, that helped preserve at least a measure of freedom for the “mountains and fields, rivers and the sea”.


Clarifying the relation between emperor and muen

Even in our modern times, Amino writes provocatively in Nihon chûsei no hinôgyômin to tennô, many of us have had opportunity to grow attached to the familiar sight and characteristic calls of travelling salesmen. But we should be wary of nostalgia: ”In practically all of these people, we have now distinctly discerned the shadow of the emperor. That the shadow of the emperor and the gaze of discrimination are both present at the very heart of the life of the common people is an abysmal fact which we need to confront with steady eyes and ascertain with own hands” (Amino 1984:101f).

No doubt statements like this have contributed to the impressions that Amino presents us with a thesis of an indissoluble entwinement between emperor and non-agriculturalists. However, as I have shown, in reality his account shows that this entwinement is a contingent relation. The emperor is a secondary phenomenon, an external force that tries to control and regulate the movements, the trade flows and the markets of the non-agriculturalists and marginal spaces where they take place.

This is stated with all necessary clarity by Amino himself. In one text, he approvingly quotes an important statement by Ishimoda Shô to the effect that in Japan the state made its first appearance – starting with Himiko, the shaman-queen mentioned in Chinese sources – in the form of control over markets and foreign diplomacy. “The monarchial rule over the market was a secondary [kôhatsuteki] element, and the market is by origin [honrai] something rivaling and checking such rule”, Amino concludes (ibid 1998a:331f).

This statement is an important clarification in several respects. To begin with, it bears directly on the problem of the origin of the state – a problem which has been much debated (in Japan perhaps most famously by Yoshimoto Takaaki in Kyôdô gensôron) without any conclusive results. Amino uses his division of the population into agriculturalists and non-agriculturalists to suggest a theory that explains this origin. The state comes into being in order to control that which escapes the community – which is to say: the itinerants, the non-agriculturalists who make their living in the marginal spaces outside the settled community. In other words, the state in its very origin comes into being as what Karatani calls an “empire” that aspires to rule over the “traffic” or trade between or outside communities.

However, if the state comes into being precisely as rule over muen, is muen then really capable of offering any resistance or refuge from the state? That itinerancy and the wandering in marginal space can offer freedom from the closure of settled community and agricultural life goes without saying, but can it offer any freedom from “empire”, which by contrast thrives on openness, trade and cosmopolitanism? Is Amino after all, in his affirmative stance towards the non-agriculturalists, taking the side of empire?

No, because in his account of the origins of the kugonin system he shows that muen and the freedom of marginal space can do without the emperor. Imperial rule was secondary. All he is saying is that imperial power was formed in the process of establishing rule over marginal spaces outside or between communities. The special link established between these spaces and the emperor was formed because they were beyond the reach of the community or the power of the local lords and that therefore only the emperor could control them. Empire is the last card played by the forces of order to rein in and impose rule on the areas of anarchy.


My criticism of Amino

I am not wholly satisfied with this clarification, since I wonder if Amino is not putting unnecessarily much emphasis on the link between muen and the emperor. Muenjo need a plurality of rivaling power-centers to proliferate, not the protection of an emperor. This is shown by the fact that they thrived in periods when power was fragmented and by the fact that they were found also outside western Japan where imperial rule was strongest.

This also means that I don’t accept any simple equation saying that muen can be only be formed in Karatanian “empires”. Remember that Amino himself compares muen to the “asylum” of feudal Europe. This strongly suggests that sanctuaries don't need the protecting hand of an emperor. What is crucial is a fragmented power structure in society and probably also a widespread sense of the sacred. This of course does not mean that I am going to advance any opposite thesis feudal society being a more favorable environment for muen than empires. But I don’t see any evidence at all that muenjo can only emerge in empires.

The entire emperor-paradox in Amino’s writings seems to stem from a strange unbalance. As I have shown, he clearly states that the muenjo arise and are preserved in ancient Japan because of the strength of popular claims. But as soon as one recognizes the importance of popular claims as the basis of muen, then it no longer makes sense to claim (as Amino does in works like Igyô no ôken or Nihon shakai to tennôsei) that the fall of imperial prestige after Go-Daigo’s failure was a decisive factor in weakening the respect for muen - let me refer to this claim as the "Go-Daigo thesis" as a shorthand. Such an explanation only makes sense if muen needs imperial support for its existence. But is he right? Wasn’t there still a popular, religious basis for muen that didn’t need the emperor? I think Ikkô-ikki shows that there was.

Amino himself seems to be aware of the continuing strength of the popular energies that helped uphold the ideal of muen even as late as in the Sengoku (Warring states) period. Commenting on the fact that many of the formal letters recognizing the rights of muenjo or the rakuza-rakuichi were issued by feudal lords of that period, he stresses that such institutions were neither invented by those lords nor granted willingly. The statutes built on strong local tradition which were only recognized reluctantly by the lords, when they had no other choice. Giving them official recognition was often just a final means to bring them under at least partial control (Amino 2001b:35, 52f, 170f).

Amino’s ”emperor-problem” in fact consists of two separate problems: the problem of Go-Daigo (is it tenable to portray him as the hope of the discriminated?) and the problem of origins (how deep are the roots of the emperor system in the stratum of common people?). If the entwinement between emperor and non-agriculturalists is really indissoluble the "Go-Daigo thesis" seems reasonable, but as Amino himself shows the entwinement is contingent. It is only after the emperor succeeds in imposing imperial rule on the muenjo that it becomes crucial for traders and other non-agriculturalists to receive the privilege of being appointed kugonin. This admission opens up for the possibility of muen existing without the emperor. If that is recognized, then the "Go-Daigo thesis" is no longer a sufficient explanation.

That Amino himself didn’t feel he had reached a satisfying solution to the problem of the emperor is evident in interviews. In one interview, Oguma Eiji asks him about his attempt to resist the authority of the emperor which uneasily coexists with his preference for many of the features of the society of western Japan, the stronghold of imperial power – such as the fact that it was less hierarchical than the east, that women had a stronger role in society, or that muen was upheld by the big temples. Amino can only reply that he is “still squirming and struggling for a solution” (imada ni mogaite, jitabata shite iru) (Amino 2002:200f).

This squirming and struggling seem to arise from the fact that Amino still believes that the emperor’s protection was important for maintaining muen and the other parts of western society he liked.

However, the features of western society Amino likes do not seem to have relied necessarily on closeness to imperial power. That muenjo and the regions of freedom it offered were not in need of imperial protection is demonstrated by the fact that muenjo existed also outside western Japan – for instance on Tsushima, a very marginal domain. The famous enkiridera Tôkeiji was located in eastern Japan and so was Mantokuji. As Amino himself shows, many of these temples were granted their rights not by the emperor but by feudal lords, and the rakuichi rakuza were also implemented by feudal lords. To repeat: what muen needed to thrive was a strong living sense for the sacred and the absence of a strong secular central power, not the emperor.

Surely we can imagine travelling salesmen without the shadow of the emperor.


The future

The “emperor problem” in Amino’s writings does not consist in any thesis of an indissoluble link between the emperor and the non-agriculturalists. As he shows, that link was contingent.

This does not by itself solve the bigger problem of whether the “freedom” of muen is attractive as a guiding star today. Even without the emperor, isn’t there always a risk for mini-emperors to spring up in organizations meant to resist hierarchy and oppression? The risk even of lynchings and other forms of internal repression in the name of the “sacred” struggle against outer enemies? Look at the ikki who adopted the orange dress and the straw hats of the hinin. Were the real hinin welcome to participate? And look at the temples functioning as muenjo – what happened to those who challenged their hierarchies?

As Oguma asks Amino in his interview, didn’t the muenjo have their own internal stratifications and hierarchies? Weren’t they often in fact a prime example of the kind of enclaves run by local bosses that Maruyama Masao criticized as a mainstay of the emperor system? Amino’s answer is vague – such opinions, he thinks, arise because people think of communes as communities. He doesn’t deny the internal hierarchies, only states that what he wanted to bring out was a way of human interconnectedness that didn’t rely on power or state (Amino 2002:192f).

In one of his books, Amino himself addresses the objection that the free cities were ruled by rich elite cliques, that the local powerholders who led the ikki were themselves oppressors of their servants and that the temples serving as sanctuaries for a variety of refugees (kakekomi-dera) were little better than "takobeya" (notorious cramped lodgings of workers), or that the Honganji temple was pervaded by hierarchies with the head priest at the top. Again his answer is vague. He says that he won’t argue against these objections, but adds that these relations of private possession, private subservience or the logic of dominance were counteracted by the principle of muen which was also at work in these organizations (Amino 2001b:34).

These objections touch on a fundamental problem. Can muenjo be organized? How can a sacred place be regulated without itself being profanated, turning into a secular worldly power? Isn’t that what happened to the the Buddhist establishment? Isn’t it also exactly what happened to the capitalist market, which Amino claims developed out of the muenjo? Is it possible to imagine an unregulated public or commons, in which the ”sacred of chaos” can remain untained?

Amino has no solution, but at least he brings up face to face with the problem.

He talks about communes and mirs. Like them, the sacred of muen, of the primitive and of nature, can remain an inspiration for revolts, a reminder of freedom that can spur us to resist and try to go beyond the worldly order of power and money.

He seems to suggest that what muen needs to thrive is not organizations. It needs something very different, a completely other way of life, the outlook of the world of itinerants, gamblers, outcasts and bandits. One could call it the air of muen. The organizations that from time to time spring up to challenge the powers that be – the ikki, revolts and religious reformers – are inspired by this air.


References

Amino, Yoshihiko (1984) Nihon chûsei no hinôgyômin to tennô (The non-agricultural peoples and the emperor in Japan’s middle ages), Tokyo: Iwanami shoten.

Amino, Yoshihiko (1998a [1982]) Higashi to nishi no kataru Nihon no rekishi (Japan’s history as told by east and west), Tokyo: Kôdansha gakujutsu bunko.

Amino, Yoshihiko (1998b) Kaimin to Nihon shakai (The sea people and Japanese society), Tokyo: Shinjinbutsu ôraisha.

Amino, Yoshihiko (2001a) Môko shûrai (The Mongol Invasions), Tokyo: Shôgakukan.

Amino, Yoshihiko (2001b) Nihon chûsei toshi no sekai (The world of medieval Japanese cities), Tokyo: Chikuma shobô.

Amino, Yoshihiko (2002) “Jinruishiteki tenkanki ni okeru rekishigaku to Nihon” (History and Japan in a transformative period of humankind) (interview by Oguma Eiji), pp 143-232, in Amino & al ‘Nihon’ o megutte: Amino Yoshihiko taidan-shû (About ‘Japan’: Collection of conversations with Amino Yoshihiko), Tokyo: Kôdansha.

Amino, Yoshihiko & Ishii, Susumu (2000) Kome hyakushô tennô – Nihonshi no kyozô no yukue (Rice hyakushô emperor: the development of the virtual image of Japanese history), Tokyo: Daiwa shobô.

Miki, Seiichirô (2009) “Amino Araki ronsô o megutte” (On the Amino-Araki debate), in Kanagawa Daigaku Nihon Jômin Bunka Kenkyûkai (ed) Umi to hinôgyômin: Amino Yoshihiko no takumonteki kiseki o tadoru, Tokyo: Iwanami shoten.

Karatani, Kôjin (1995b) Architecture as Metaphor: Language, Number, Money, Cambridge, Mass. & London, England: The MIT Press.

Karatani, Kôjin (1995a) Shûen o megutte (On the end), Tokyo: Kôdansha gakujutsu bunko.

Karatani, Kôjin (2006) Sekaikyôwakoku e – Shihon=nêshon=kokka o koete (Towards a World Republic: Transcending the Capitalist Nation-State), Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten.

Karatani, Kôjin (2004) Nêeshon to bigaku (Nation and Aesthetics, in the series Teihon Karatani Kôjin Shû, vol. 4), Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten.

Nakazawa (2004) Boku no ojisan Amino Yoshihiko (My uncle Amino Yoshihiko), Tokyo: Shûeisha shinsho.

Yamaori, Tetsuo (1994) “Book Review: Amino Yoshihiko Nihonron no shiza: rettô no shakai to kokka (A new standpoint on Nihon-ron: society and state on the archipelago), Shogakukan, 1990”, pp 211-219, Japan Review 5.