Asia Leadership Fellow Program
1998 Program Report

Asia in Transition:
Localizing Strategies, Globalizing Processes

International House of Japan
Japan Foundation Asia CenterContents
Foreword ……………………………………………………………….

4

Profiles of the Fellows ………………………………………………… 6
Program Schedule …………………………………………………….

9

Introduction

Toward a Postmodern Asian Perspective…………………………………………………………………….. 12
Program Reports and Papers of the Fellows
Japan and the Anthropology of Modern Life
Liu Xin ………………………………………………………… 27
Local, National, Global: The Culturo-Political DilemmaEndo Suanda ………………………………………………… .. 39
The Asia Leadership Fellow Program 1998 – A Report
Diana Wong …………………………………………………... 44
The Future/s of Globalization: A view from Southeast
Asia
Diana Wong …………………………………………………... 51
Touching Bedrock
Sylvia Mayuga ……………………………………………..… 59
Report on ALFP, 1998
Janadas Devan ……………………………………………..… 74
Limits of Multiculturalism
Janadas Devan ……………………………………………..… 80
ALFP Report
Suwanna Satha-anand ……………………………………..
97
Crisis in Transition, Transition in Crisis: Roles ofThai Public Intellectuals in Economic Hardship
Suwanna Satha-anand …………………………………….. 101
Program Staff and Resource Persons ………………………………

105

Foreword

This publication marks the third year of the Asia Leadership Fellow
Program implemented by The International House of Japan and the JapanFoundation Asia Center. The program was jointly created in 1996 for the
purpose of both bringing together Asian intellectual leaders from the AsiaPacific region and providing opportunities for individual research andcollaborative group work. Not only have the program activities brought
together Asian intellectuals, but they have also promoted better
understanding between Japanese scholars and the Fellows and deepened
the discussions among the Fellows.
As in the previous two publications, this volume consists of the 1998
ALFP Fellows’ reports and papers. This year’s Fellows are from China (LiuXin), Indonesia (Endo Suanda); Malaysia (Diana Wong), the Philippines(Sylvia Mayuga), Singapore (Janadas Devan) and Thailand (Suwanna Sathaanand). During the course of the Fellows’ two to six month’s collaborative
work in Japan, a broad theme of “Development and Culture” has been set
for them to work on together. The Fellows had also proposed specifictopics of research, namely: 1). “Modernization and Its Discontents” (LiuXin); 2). “Local, National, Global: Culturo-Political Dilemma” (EndoSuanda), 3). “The Concept of Asia” (Diana Wong), 4). “Religious Faith andDevelopment” (Sylvia Mayuga), 5). “Asian Modernity” (Janadas Devan),and 6). “Religion and Social Change: Women and Buddhism” (Suwanna
Satha-anand).
Through sharing of insights and dialogue with other public
intellectuals in Japan and in light of the beginning of the Asian Economiccrisis, the Fellows’ research interests have deepened. They were somewhat‘inspired’ by their collaborative work and networking with the otherintellectuals. This is reflected in the Fellows’ writings and their joint
decision to entitle the public symposium, held at the end of the program, as“Asia in Transition: Localizing Strategies, Globalizing Processes”. We felt
assured that this title would summarize the main objective of the 1998
program and thus we decided to use it for this publication.
The International House of Japan and the Japan Foundation Asian
Center also deeply appreciate the kind assistance and active participationfrom those who helped make the program successful in its third year. We
cannot thank enough the resource persons who gave their time and shared
their thoughts and insights with the Fellows in the seminars, symposium
and retreat, and those who acted kindly to help the Fellows get around
Japan during their field trips.
Special thanks also go to Ms. Taeko Kurokawa, who served as
rapporteur and assistant for the program, for her tireless work andhospitable assistance, and Ms. Chola Chek for wonderfully editing thisentire report.
The International House of Japan and the Japan Foundation Asia
Center are confident that hard work and dedication to the program by the
Fellows, the resource persons and many others who have provided
assistance, would surely help the program enter the new millenium withmany more accomplishments.

The International House of JapanThe Japan Foundation Asia CenterTokyo, March 2000

Profiles of the 1998 Fellows
Liu Xin (China)
Assistant Professor, Dept. of Anthropology,
University of California, Berkeley
Prof. Liu Xin started his career as a statistician in China
and later went into social anthropology. He has carried out intensive
anthropological fieldwork in isolated villages in rural China and his
publications include "Space, Mobility and Flexibility: Chinese Villagers andScholars Negotiate Power at Home and Abroad" (1997); and "Yao: thePractice of Everyday Space in Northern Rural Shanxi" (1998). For the ALF
program, Prof. Liu proposed a research topic entitled: "Modernization and
Its Discontents". Prof. Liu received his BA (economics), Shanxi School of
Economics and Finance, China, 1982; MSc (applied statistics), Renmin
University, China, 1985, MA (1990) and Ph.D. (1995) in social anthropology,
School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. He has alsotaught at Renmin University in Beijing, Greenwich University andWestminster University in London.
Endo Suanda (Indonesia)
Chairman, Society for Indonesian Performing Arts;
Lecturer, Indonesian College of the Arts (STSI), Bandung
Mr. Suanda is an ethnomusicologist, scholar of Indonesian performing arts,
as well as a distinguished performer. He has performed as a dancer,
musician, choreographer, and puppeteer in Indonesia and abroad. He has
also taught and organized performances at various universities in Indonesia
and abroad. His published articles focus particularly on the performing arts
in socio-political context. He is currently preparing a dissertation at the
University of Washington, based on his research on the shadow puppet
theater of Cirebon. Mr. Suanda received his B.A. from the National Dance
Academy, Bandung, 1973 and his M.A. from Wesleyan University, 1983.
For the ALFP his proposed topic is: "Local, National, Global: CulturoPolitical Dilemma".

Diana Wong (Malaysia)
Visiting Fellow, Institute of Malaysian &International Studies (IKMAS),
Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia
Dr. Wong is a sociologist who graduated from the University of Singapore
and received her Diplom Soziologie (1977) and Doc. Rev. Soc. (1984) from
Universitaet Bielefeld, Germany. She has written extensively and her
publications include "Foreign Domestic Workers in Singapore" (1996),"Labour Migration and the Emergence of Plural Societies in Southeast Asia"(1996), and "Post- and Pre-Modern Ambiguities" (1995). Her proposed
research topic for the ALFP is: "The Concept of Asia".
Dr. Wong also held past positions as Lecturer, Faculty of Sociology,
Universitaet Bielefeld (1980-85); Research Fellow, Centre for Social Science
Research, Universitaet Erlangen-Nuernberg (1985-87, 1989-92); and Deputy
Director, Institute of Southeast Asian Studies (ISEAS), 1995-1998.

Sylvia L. Mayuga (Philippines)
Writer & Columnist; Chairperson,
Green Alliance for Mt. Banahaw
Ms. Mayuga is a leading environmentalist in the Philippines and has been
extensively involved in organizing communities for sustainable
development. Her work with the local people of Mt. Banahaw also led her
and fellow eco-activities to found an NGO group ‘Green Alliance’. This
group is dedicated exclusively to a reasoned dedicated advocacy for theculture and the physical environment of the mystical Mount Banahaw. Ms
Mayuga is also a prolific writer who received various awards including the
National Book Award (1982, 1983) and the Focus Award for Best Essay of
the Year (1973). Her other books include Journey to the Center (a monographon Philippine art and ritual), Earth, Fire and Water (a compilation of essays
on art, culture and the environment), and Paraiso (a poetic history of Mt.
Banahaw). For the 1998 ALFP, her proposed research topic is: "Religious
Faith and Development". Ms Mayuga received her B.A. from St. Theresa'sCollege, Manila, 1963 and MSc. (comparative journalism) from Columbia
University, 1966.

Janadas Devan (Singapore)
Special Correspondent & Leader Writer,
Straits Times, Singapore
Mr. Devan is a prolific writer where his publications include various papers
published in academic journals as well as articles in newspapers andmagazines. He is presently working on a book, Model Nation: An Anatomy ofa Rational State, a study of how the 'founding' narratives of history in the
postcolonial state enable specific social and political formations within thestate. He has also written a series of essays on key moments in the historyof modern Asia. His proposed research topic for the ALFP is: "AsianModernity". Mr. Devan reads Economics, Statistics and English at the
National University of Singapore, and did his postgraduate work in English
Literature and Literary Theory at Cornell University (U.S.A.). He has alsotaught at various universities in Singapore, the United States and mostrecently at Brown University.

Suwanna Satha-anand (Thailand)
Associate Professor and Head of Philosophy Dept.,
Faculty of Arts, Chulalongkorn University

Dr. Satha-anand’s main academic field of interest is philosophy of
Buddhism, religion and of women. She has written numerous books andpapers on philosophy and religion in contemporary society, including
Currents in Chinese Philosophy (1996), "Healing the Earth with Women andBuddhism" (1994) and "Prostitution, Buddhism and 'New Rights' inSoutheast Asia" (forthcoming). Her proposed research topic for the ALFP is:"Religion and Social Change: Women & Buddhism". Dr. Satha-anandreceived her B.A. (first class honors and gold medallist for highest academic
performance) in philosophy from Chulalongkorn University, 1977 and her
M.A. (1978) and Ph.D. (1983) from the University of Hawaii.

Asia Leadership Fellow Program 1998
Schedule of Activities
Sept. 2Introduction session

Sept. 3

Workshop I
Presentation by Mr. Liu Xin(Discussion followed each presentation)Workshop II
Presentation by Ms. Sylvia Mayuga

Sept. 4Workshop III
Presentation by Mr. Janadas Devan
Workshop IV
Presentation by Mr. Endo Suanda

Sept. 7Workshop V
Presentation by Ms. Diana Wong
Workshop VI
Presentation by Ms. Suwanna Satha-anandSept. 8Workshop VII
Discussion on the Collaborative Research

Sept. 9Seminar on "Japan and the Asia-Pacific Region—
Development & Culture"
By Prof. Isami Takeda, Dokkyo University

Sept. 11

Seminar on "People's Asia"
By Prof. Hisashi Nakamura, Ryukoku University
Visit to the Institute of Oriental Culture, University ofTokyo
Seminar on “Japan and Asia from the Maritime Viewpoint”
By Prof. Takeshi Hamashita, University of Tokyo

Sept. 14

Seminar on "Japanese in Bali"
By Prof. Shinji Yamashita, University of Tokyo

Sept. 16

Seminar on "The Social and Cultural Significance ofReligion in Japan"
By Prof. Yoshiya Abe, Kokugakuin University

Sept. 17-19

Symposium on "Population Movement in Southeast Asia:
Survival Strategies and Changing Identities",
at the National Museum of Ethnology, Osaka

Sept. 21

Seminars on: (1). "Development of the Concept of'Development' in Indonesian Language"
By Prof. Tsuyoshi Kato, Graduate School of ASAFAS, andProf. Motoko Shimagami, Graduate School of Human &Environmental Studies, Kyoto University(2). "Politics versus Literature?: With Illustrations fromIndonesia", by Prof. Umar Kayam, Gadjah Mada University

Sept. 22

Seminar on "History of Japanese Nationalism"
By Mr. Shunsuke Tsurumi

Sept. 25

Seminar on "Intellectual History and Sociology of Knowledge
in Japan” by Emeritus Prof. Takeshi Ishida,
University of Tokyo

Sept. 28

Seminar on the current situation in Cambodia by Mr. Sichan
Siv, Former U.S. Deputy Assistant Secretary of State forSouth Asian Affairs

Sept. 30

Seminar on "Individual and Culture in International Society"by Prof. Kenichiro Hirano, Waseda University

Oct. 1

Seminar on "Nationalism in Modern Japan—National
Identity and International Relations"
By: Dr. Eiji Oguma, Keio University

Oct. 2Workshop VIII (Free discussion among the Fellows)

Oct. 5

Seminar on "The Role of Music in Development and Culture"
By Prof. Yoshihiko Tokumaru, Ochanomizu University, &Prof. Max-Peter Baumann, University of Bamburg, Germany

Oct. 6

Seminar on Japanese Media and Asia
By Mr. Noriyuki Wakisaka, Editorial Writer, Asahi Shimbun

Oct. 7

Seminar on the Economic Crisis and Japan
By Mr. Tadashi Nakamae, Nakamae Institute ofInternational Economy

Oct. 8Introductory Seminars on Okinawa(1). "Contemporary Okinawa in the International Context"
by Prof. Masaaki Gabe, University of the Ryukyus(2). "The Cocktail Party and Okinawan Identity" by
Prof. Katsunori Yamazato, University of the Ryukyus

Oct. 9Seminars at the University of the Ryukyus(1). "Okinawa and the Japanese Constitution"
By Prof. Tetsumi Takara(2). "Development of the Okinawan House and Its
Succession of the Traditional Design"
By Prof. Nobuyuki Ogura

Oct. 13

Seminar on "Bali and the Japanese"
By: Prof. Yoshinori Murai, Sophia University

Oct. 14

Workshop IX
Free discussion with Prof. Hisashi Nakamura

Oct. 16

Seminar on "Nationalism and Gender: Revising the Public
Memory”
By Prof. Chizuko Ueno, University of Tokyo

Oct. 19

Seminar on "Civil Society and Democratic World Order”
By Emeritus Prof. Yoshikazu Sakamoto, University of Tokyo

Oct. 21

Seminar on Human Rights
By Prof. Kinhide Mushakoji and Prof.Hideaki Uemura (atMeiji Gakuin University Totsuka Campus)

Oct. 23

Weekend Retreat in ItoOct. 28

Public Symposium on "Asia in Transition: Localizing
Strategies; Globalizing Processes”

Toward a Postmodern Asian Perspective
In recent years, particularly following the economic and financial crises inNortheast and Southeast Asia that began in mid-1997, scholars of Asianorigin have grown interested in assessing the impact of globalization on
national development. This intellectual shift has opened a window ofopportunity for Asians themselves to seek alternative paradigms, to betterreflect on the events in their region. The intellectual atmosphere seems
increasingly in favor of postmodernism.
Postmodernism, in a nutshell, rejects modernism, which isunderstood in the context of universalism, grand theory, scientificrationality, and scientific models of progress. Postmodernism promotes
particularism rather than universalism. It questions the principal tenets ofmodern architecture, attacks general scientific paradigms, and recognizes
the importance of multiple instances of traditional wisdom and cultural
knowledge -- in other words, a relativism of cultural knowledge.
This intellectual trend seems compatible with scholarly thinking in
East Asia, as academic traditions in the region have been heavily based on
cultural values and historical realities. Although Western scholarship has
influenced Asian societies and Asians have gone to study in the West,
Western scientific approaches have not always been taken seriously. The
failure of liberal democracy, the emergence of the developmental state, andthe so-called “Asian values” debate in East Asia have posed serious
challenges to the Western idea of scientific progress.
In the 1998 Asia Leadership Fellow Program, Fellows from various
countries outside Japan (mostly from Southeast Asia), resource individuals
from Japan, and other participants sought, in their own distinct ways, toshed light on issues related to national development in the context of global
vs. local cultural values. Although the discussions focused on several
practical issues, the theme of this program raises the question of whether
postmodernism has finally emerged as the appropriate perspective to
explain Asia’s recent dramatic changes.

I. The Fellows’ Preliminary Thoughts
The 1998 Fellows of the Asia Leadership Fellow Program, initiated in 1996,
include Liu Xin (China), Endo Suanda (Indonesia), Diana Wong (Malaysia),
Sylvia Mayuga (Philippines), Janadas Devan (Singapore), and Suwanna
Satha-anand (Thailand). Each of them offers some preliminary thoughts on
their projects.

Liu Xin, a social anthropologist from China, reflected on the cultural
logic of nationalism by focusing his attention on the socioeconomic
conditions in rural China. His main contention is that the radical transitionin the last twenty years has coincided with a lack of “moral order” in ruralcommunities. Each moment in the recent past can be characterized as aunique combination of different elements derived from three macro-sociohistorical sources: traditional, revolutionary, and modern. The historicalshift from traditional meanings and symbols to revolutionary ideas andnow to discourses of modernity has left people in rural communities
confused. The new form of capitalism is without any form of governanceand regulations. His main interest in anthropological research is in the areaof corruption and business in Beihai city, Guangxi province, because it
illustrates the total change or re-emergence of statistical and quantitative
reasoning in the last two decades.
From Indonesia, Endo Suanda presented his preliminary thoughts
based on his concern about different social dynamics in today’s world:
localism vs. globalism and nationalism vs. regionalism. He paid particularattention to the significance of cultural values in Indonesian villages, whichhave been damaged by what he calls the “national perspective” ondevelopment. In an attempt to create a national identity in the last 30 years,
the state has intruded into local cultural traditions. He sees this form ofstate intervention as posing a “danger” to the survival of the village ways oflife. Because of this unhealthy socio-cultural development, he views himself
as a man in a mission to promote cultural pluralism, as opposed to “ethnocentralism”.
Diana Wong of Malaysia expressed keen interest in social identities
with regard to Asia in the context of global capitalism. Singapore, sheargues, sought to champion Asian values not only because it was
opportunistic and instrumentalist, but also because it had to present itself as“Asian” in order to be accepted as “global”. Despite the economic crisis in
the region, she proposes that we not abandon the concept of Asia, because it
can help establish a learning community. She believes it would be more
fruitful to consider Asia in the context of pluralism, however. Maritime Asia,
not continental Asia, serves as a point for different civilizations to meet, as
Islamic, Chinese and European civilizations did here. In her view, this kindof discourse would provide an opportunity for the reconstructing of a morepluralistic conception of Asia. Pluralism should be seen as a conceptual
alternative to globalism or universalism.
Based on insights derived from her country, the Philippines, Sylvia
Mayuga sees herself as a scholar/activist, who is interested in the concept of“sustainable development”. Based on her philosophy, which emphasizes
the spiritual dimension of culture and individuality, she has engaged inactivities related to environmental protection and advocacy. She calls for a
return to the past, to learn from traditional wisdom –- in order to tap“mystical” traditional values -- and to organize communities for sustainable
development. In her opinion, the East Asian economic crisis under the aegis
of globalization should compel us to investigate its root-causes and to look
for solutions based on deep insights found in religions and cultures from
East to West.
Suwanna Satha-anand of Thailand has also taken a criticaltheoretical perspective by examining the ways in which the state ideology of
economic development has denigrated the role of women in Thai society.
Her interest in feminist interpretation of Buddhism led her to investigate theintersection of the state and Buddhism, one of the country’s oldest
institutions. But she found inconsistencies in this relationship. On the one
hand, the state and the traditional institution worked together to promoteeconomic development by not preaching the virtue of contentment. On theother hand, the state has taken the role of education away from theinstitution. In her work on Buddhism and women, she attempts to provide
an alternative discourse that would "liberate” Buddhism from thehegemonic ideology found in the mainstream Buddhist church. She seeks
to deconstruct the state-tainted ideology by putting her perspective within
the context of Buddhist teachings, with the aim of revealing the neglected
messages of Buddha. In her belief, such form of deconstructionism would
help liberate Buddhism from traditional Thai culture and would ultimately
provide a more useful base from which to pursue creative social action topromote change in Thailand.
Janadas Devan appeared to be the only Fellow who took the viewthat history and culture are not of significant relevance to ourunderstanding of nations or communities. By making a provocative
statement that Singapore is the only real country in Asia, he contends that
this conception of a nation-state is based on the idea of instrumental
rationality. He acknowledges the fact that Singapore is a by-product ofBritish colonialism, but stresses that Singaporean nationalism did not exist
until after independence. His concept of legitimacy is based on the idea of avision of the future rather than a reliance on local history and traditions.
For this ahistorical reason, Singapore, as a totally coherent and rationalsociety, is, in his view, a perfect instrument and a perfect location for global
capitalism. The multi-national corporations and the state, not local
entrepreneurs, have built the national economy. The state has thus
accommodated local differences only if they would not threaten the
integrity of nation-building projects, such as the language policy.
In short, with the exception of Janadas Devan of Singapore, theFellows who presented their initial reflections on their projects were inagreement on the need to curb the tide of universalism. They believed inundertaking projects that would draw our attention to the virtue of local
values and traditions untainted by state ideology or scientific models of
cumulative progress. These projects can thus be categorized as a combined
vision for a world based on respect for diversity. As a unifying theme of the
proposed projects, diversity is to be expressed in the context of cultural
pluralism at the regional level (Diana Wong) and at the national level (EndoSuanda). Diversity is also based on a vision for an inclusive community:
moral economic order (Liu Xin), culture-based sustainable development(Sylvia Mayuga), and reinterpretation of a hegemonic ideology to
emancipate women from patriarchism (Suwanna Satha-anand).

II. Reflections by Resource Individuals
During the 1998 Asia Leadership Fellow Program, a number of resource
individuals were invited to give seminars, from 9 September to 21 October,on various topics. These topics were related to Japan’s international
relations, Japanese history and culture, Japanese nationalism and gender,
Japanese media, the recent economic crisis and the future of Japan, civilsociety, and democratization and human rights. These seminars wereintended to promote better understanding between Japanese and other
Asian scholars, especially the Fellows and broaden the scope of discussions
among the Fellows.
On Japan’s international relations, Professor Takeshi Hamashita of
the University of Tokyo and Professor Isami Takeda of Dokkyo University
reflected on the role of Japan in the Asia-Pacific region. In his presentation
on “Japan and the Asia-Pacific Region”, Prof. Takeda examined relations
between Japan and other powers inside and outside the region -- the UnitedStates, Russia and those in Southeast Asia. From a strategic point of view,
the Japan-US security alliance remains at the center of Japan’s foreign policy.
Although Japan has had a close relationship with the United States,
however, it has also developed an autonomous policy towards countries in
the region, especially in the fields of economic, social, and diplomaticcooperation. According to Prof. Takeda, Japan’s aid policy (Oversees
Development Aid or ODA) toward Southeast Asia should be viewed in thecontext of strategic Sino-Japanese relations. For Japan, Southeast Asia
provides a counterweight to China. The aid policy is thus designed both tohelp stabilize the incumbent governments in Southeast Asia and to provide
a public insurance to the Japanese business community in the sub-region.
Prof. Hamashita sought to place Japan in the context of maritime
Asia. He made the initial remark that Japan chose to enter the modern
world mainly because of the political dynamics of Sino-Japanese relations inthe traditional tributary system, not because of the advent of European
powers. In his opinion, the argument that Japan adopted a seclusion policy
from the 17th to 19th century because of its “closed nature” and was forced toopen up after Western powers came to the region needs to be reexamined.
Japan’s decision to leave Asia and enter the Western world was mainly
driven by the need to counter the China-centered system, not by an attempt
to westernize. Japan’s absorption of Western technology and its drive fordevelopment, although it varied from region to region, rested heavily on thecommon agenda to cope with China. A careful reading of what Japaneseleaders have done reveals that they were deeply concerned about reentering the Chinese-dominated tributary system. Contemporary historians
have confirmed that the seclusion policy during the Edo period and theprocess of “westernization” were not the primary objectives of Japaneseleaders, but rather enabled them to reject the Sino-centric system byproviding an alternative.
Moreover, Japanese nationalism is not the by-product of Westernideas, such as state sovereignty, but rather stems from the country’s regional
dynamics, evident in the 17th century. Japan was a society divided into
different regions with their own cultural characteristics and connections
with the outside world. In the 19th century, Japan was moving in the
direction of a multi-racial and multi-cultural society.
Dr Eiji Oguma of Keio University examined the question ofnationalism in modern Japan. He identified models of post-war nationalism
to help clarify the Japanese position in relation to other countries. Similar to
one of Prof. Takeda’s points, he contends that Japan’s economic aid to Asian
countries must be put in the context of Japan-US relations and that it has
benefited the Japanese companies involved. As far as the mythology of theemperor is concerned, he argues that the myth was established alongside
the eradication of local beliefs during the modernization process in the Meiji
period. The state monopolized the authority to read and interpret the myths
and sought to suppress all elements in rebellion against its modernization
policy. The process of modernization has reached the point where theJapanese no longer identify themselves in regional terms. Populist
nationalism has taken root; it is no longer possible for anyone to talk about
sub-national differences among ordinary people. Modernization has
homogenized everything.
In his discussion on the individual and culture, Professor Kenichiro
Hirano of Waseda University, echoed the preliminary thoughts of several
Fellows (as noted earlier) by emphasizing the shift from the age ofnationality to that of ethnicity, and somewhat challenged Dr Eiji Oguma’sview on nationalism (as noted above). According to Prof. Hirano, there isan oscillation between particularism and universalism, as well as between

nationalism and globalism. In the post-nation-state era, ethnicity has
emerged as a unit within international relations. This is the by-product of
globalization, which worked to dilute a sense of separation between nations
and allowed sub-national identities to emerge. He thus sees the possibilityof cultural conflicts at the local level, rather than the clash of great
civilizations as envisioned by Samuel Huntington of Harvard.
In his seminar on “The Cocktail Party and Okinawan Identity”,
Professor Katsunori Yamazato of the University of Ryukyus discussed theway the people in Okinawa (the Ryukyus) feel about their own identity
within the Japanese society. They “have always occupied a marginalized
position in Japan”. Annexed by Japan in 1879, Okinawa was subsequently
subject to the Japanese government’s language- standardization policy.
According to Prof. Yamazato, contemporary Okinawans do not think that
their culture is inferior and many of them now believe that they do notalways have to follow what goes on in the northern islands of Japan. Many
Okinawan writers now believe that they can make literary contributions to
the rest of Japan by using their own culture and language. But they remain
ambivalent about their identity, as Japanese and as Okinawans. In Prof.
Yamazato’s own words: “Such vacillation will certainly persist well into thetwenty-first century”.
On his presentation on intellectual history and the sociology ofknowledge in Japan, Emeritus Professor Takeshi Ishida of the University ofTokyo, discussed four topics: nationalism (1945-1960), modernization (mid1960s-mid-1970s), culture (1970s-1980s), and globalization (1990s-present).
Prior to the end of World War II, two forms of nationalism had emerged:
nascent nationalism and a type of nationalism bordering on Westernimperialism. After that, Japanese intellectuals formed what is called “acommunity of remorse or regret”, because they failed to stop the war andconsidered “imperialist nationalism” wrong. Although they idealized
Asian nationalism at first, they became disappointed when the promisingpeaceful co-existence between China and India ended in 1959. The next
generation of scholars sought to evaluate Japan as a nation more modern
than the rest of Asia. During the Cold War, with the US assistance, theJapanese economy recovered rapidly. A new Japanese attitude emerged, atleast in business circles: Japanese economic superiority, justified on the
grounds that Japan provided other Asian countries with aid to help themraise their productivity. Although Japanese intellectuals were still boundtogether within the “community of remorse”, they were now divided into
two groups: one against the Vietnam War; the other pro-government andpromoting modernization.
Out of this modernization emerged a sense of cultural pride. In the
midst of the Oil Crisis in 1973, the Japanese economy proved resilient.

National confidence was strengthened to the point where Japanese culture
was seen “unique” or “superior” to other cultures. The resilient culture was
the reason for Japan’s economic successes. This cultural pride became a partof what came to be known as “Asian values”, the secret of economic growthin Asia and an alternative to the Western models.
But then came the final stage: globalization. Rather than stressing
Japanese “uniqueness”, a new language has emerged with more and moreemphasis on global standards and free-market economics as the key terms.
Prof. Ishida views the new Darwinistic developmentalism as potentially
dangerous, because it can easily destroy the traditional welfare state andvarious social movements.
Professor Chizuko Ueno of the University of Tokyo focused her
seminar on issues related to nationalism and gender. She raised the issue of
whether women’s equal participation in the military would be accepted as agoal to promote gender equality. According to her, American feminists who
demand an equal opportunity for participation in combat are morenationalists than feminists. She criticizes the post-war peace movement
because of the fact that certain motherhood was mobilized and utilized. She
views nationalism as a collective identity of an oppressive nature. On thesubject of Japanese aggression, she and other activists are growing confident
about the success of the attempt to reconstruct the self-consciousness as“perpetrator” in Japan. Because history became a site of political conflict,the aim of women or gender history is to rewrite man-made history;
feminist history should refute the “standard” history.
According to Noriyuki Wakisaka, editorial writer for Asahi Shimbun,
Japanese media and intellectuals are also said to have a more active role in
the process of development. There is a close relationship between journalists
and intellectuals. A few journalists have become politicians -- even Prime
Ministers; intellectuals have also left their profession to work as journalists.
That said, interaction between journalists and intellectuals has been on the
decline, in part because many of the latter have made no contribution to thepolicy-making process. Japan has also made an intellectual contribution toeconomic development. During the recent economic crisis, for instance,
Japanese economists at the World Bank published a report entitled “EastAsia, the Road to Recovery”. For new insights and recommendations, theObuchi administration has learned to depend less on the government
bureaucracy, long considered the biggest think tank in the country, andmore on business leaders and economists.
On Japanese cultural traditions, several resource scholars focused ona number of specific areas, ranging from religion, to the conception ofindividuality, to music. In his discussion on the social and cultural
significance of religion in Japan, Professor Yoshiya Abe of Kokugakuin

University focused on the syncretism of Shintoism and Buddhism.
Buddhism came to Japan in the sixth century and provided a politicalservice, as it influenced the making of the rule of law and helped tosystematize an advanced culture. The Buddhism that came to Japan was
not original in form and became transformed by Shintoism, which had beenrecognized only as a national state cult before 1945. Buddhism emerged as astate religion intended to prohibit Christian practices. Missionaries brought
Christianity to Japan by in the 16th century and introduced firearms,
democratic ideas, and the ideology of markets around the castle.
Confucianism has been treated by the Japanese as a political philosophy, not
as a religion, and had a lot of influence on society. In contemporary Japan,
religion has lost the majority of its functions, but still serves as a basis for thevalue system.
On the role of music in development, Professor Yoshihiko
Tokumaru of Ochanomizu University expressed concern about thedomination of Western international marketing, which reduces the level ofappreciation for local music. Unlike in the 19th century, when people
considered a certain type of music to be “the best” and others “primitive”,
people are now becoming more aware that traditional or tribal music is very
complex.
According to other resource scholars, traditionalism continues tomaintain its cultural relevance in the midst of globalization. Emeritus
Professor Yoshikazu Sakamoto of the University of Tokyo discussed theconcept of the “civic state” and “transnational civil society”, seeing
contradictions between capitalism, global market economy, and civil society.
He also questions the conventional wisdom that posits that the middle classis the agent of democratic change. For him, political authoritarianism andcapitalist development associated with the emergence of the middle class
could go hand in hand. Civil society serves as the basis for democratizationand is possible in traditional societies, not simply because of the rationalorganization of social life experienced in the West. Civil society is ahistorical concept and an open-ended process, based on the idea of equal
rights of human beings (representing rationality) and mutual recognition of
dignity (derived from the sense of awe to them). We propose a change to
traditional culture and a critical reconstruction of traditional values.
On human rights issues, Professors Kinhide Mushakoji and
Hideaki Uemura of Meiji Gakuin University shared their thoughts on how
Japan learned to adopt liberal values, with external factors playing a keyrole in the process. When the Meiji government sent a mission to the US andEurope to negotiate unequal treaties with their leaders, the mission sent
home a message saying it had been told that the country was not civilized
because it still treated Christians in an uncivilized manner. The mission

asked the government to recognize freedom of religion. Japan has madenumerous other efforts to westernize itself with the aim of proving itself acivilized nation. At a Stockholm conference on child abuse and prostitution,for example, Japan was told that it would not be accepted as a civilized
nation unless it took up the issue of child prostitution and trafficking. This
does not mean that human-rights issues are totally alien to Asian traditions,however. Grassroots social movements in East Asia have worked to fight all
forms of discrimination and racism. Thus, one cannot say that Asia has no
tradition of human rights. As far as human-rights education is concerned,
the legalistic approach is not enough.
Traditional values have acontribution to make. An Asian approach is needed that includes a broad
range of rights: socioeconomic and political rights and civil liberties. Prof.
Mushakoji disagrees with those who argue that human rights are universal
and should be applied to all societies. What is important is to transform
socioeconomic and political conditions so as to make it easier for humanrights to be implemented.
In sum, these seminars provide another unifying theme regarding
the ongoing trend toward postmodern thinking, which rejects universal
ideas and scientific models of cumulative progress and acknowledges thevirtue of cultural diversity and assimilation. The trend sheds light on new
dilemmas (potential clashes between cultural values and between
universalism and localism) and presents new opportunities for a greaterappreciation of cultural diversity and relativism.

III. The Ito Conference
At the Conference in Ito, the Fellows presented their final findings.
Presenters included Liu Xin, Endo Suanda, Diana Wong, Sylvia Mayuga,
Janadas Devan, and Suwanna Satha-anand. Although the subjects fordiscussion were diverse, they made efforts to present what they had learned
or discovered in the last several weeks.
Fellows such as Sylvia Mayuga continued to focus on issues related
to the need for maintaining local traditions. She asked whether we need toreturn to a lost wisdom of interdependence destined to begin in Asia andthe world. In other discussions, she defended this endeavor by referring tosuccess in international solidarity among NGOs after “eliciting the genius ofIndonesian people”.
Endo Suanda also stayed the course by presenting his critique ofwhat he considered the “problem of standardization” and the state’s role inpromoting certain “local arts” as superior to others according to criteria
based on the national interests.

Suwanna Satha-anand returned to the question of values andhuman judgment in our subjective understanding of history and society.
She mentioned that mutual recognition of human dignity, for instance, is in
itself an expression of value. It also helps reintroduce the discourse of value
and commitment of the human agency into the social sciences, privileges
human evaluative judgment as the basis for civil society, and highlights thepossibility of an inter-subjective collective set of value judgments.
Diana Wong also returned to her earlier theme of Asia as a morethan geographical category and asked if an emancipatory project of Asia ispossible. Based on the argument that Europe is not of the universalist cast,under which other particularities are subsumed, but rather an expression ofregional particularities in a global order, she offered a vision for Asia. A
sense of community could be built on shared experiences in the following
areas: Asia as an invention of the West, cultural pluralism, modernization,
and a history of early trade relations within the Chinese tributary system.
Liu Xin reflected on the question of the “we” often raised
throughout the two-month period. The word “we” was frequently usedand emphasized as a notion for suggesting that certain political positions
are theoretically unquestionable. But, in his view, it is no longer easy todefine the term in a systematic way; whenever we use it, we should explain
its specificity. He then proposed that the word “we” be pluralized andargued that overemphasis on “identity” might result in a sharpening ofdifferences between “we” and “they”. The main difficulty is how toconceptualize the plural of the plural. He further argued that theemphasized “we” invoked the notion of subjectivity, as consciousness of
consciousness, which was in turn deeply rooted in a humanist conception ofhistory and reality. Without realizing this, one might not be able to see
clearly the globalizing process as a historical force, through which humansubjectivity is made and situated. In short, the notion “we” should be used
more appropriately for the struggles of our time by modifying it in three
dimensions: articulation of its specificity, pluralization of the plural, andobjectification of subjectivity.
The discussions on the Fellows’ topics were elaborated, as otherparticipants; some of who did their own presentations, raised morequestions and answers. A dominant theme seemed to be the question ofwhat needed to be done to further a sense of community in Asia, based onshared values and a collective identity.
Some concerns were raised to confront the fact that what we see now
is the strengthening of nationalism, not regionalism. The issue of how to get
rid of nationalism was then discussed. Professor Kiichi Fujiwara of the
University of Tokyo presented three possible approaches: elitist exposure todifferent societies, global identity building based on global concerns, anddetachment from the nation itself. He still believes that these are not theanswers to the problem, however. What we should do is to live with it, by
taking heart from the fact that extreme nationalism is on the retreat. Basedon his fieldwork with the Ayta people in the Philippines, Professor Hiromu
Shimizu of Kyushu University asserted that another strategy for dealing
with the problem of nationalism is to go beyond the national border bypromoting international citizenship. Prior to the eruption of Mt. Pinatubo,these people were unaware of their distinct identity. Afterwards, they
became conscious of their distinct cultural heritage, but have since been
willing to go in the direction of bilingualism and biculturalism.
More criticism was leveled against the objectifying certain sources ofculture and the legitimization of national rule seen as part of dangerous“cultural logic”. Professor Yasuyuki Nagafuchi of the Nagoya Institute ofTechnology emphasized the need and possible approaches to create a public
space, which would not have to depend on “cultural logic”.
The stress on the need to promote some form of an “Asian identity”
based on the notion of cultural diversity was discussed in Professor Masako
Okamoto’s, of Osaka University, presentation. Drawing on the problematic
dichotomy in Turkey between “Western and traditional” or “secular andIslamic”, she commented that we need to get away from this inflexible
binary framework or rigid worldview. Instead, she argues, a more fruitful
way to promote some Asian identity would be to concentrate on what
Asians share in common, or on what does not alienate certain groups.
Toward the end of the conference, the discussion centered on policyrelevant issues associated with the Asian economic crisis. What needed to
be done? Who should get involved in the decision-making process? Is therea need for a super-national agency to take charge? Should a global orregion-based institution be built? Some argued that the state should be leftto do this job; NGOs would not be able to do much, but should provide a
useful social safety net. Diana Wong sees the crisis as an opportunity for
non-economists to question conventional economic assumptions. Suwanna
shared the Thai experience in which intellectuals and activists battled
economists, played a mediating role in solving problems and conflicts
brought about by rapid economic development, and contributed to thedrafting of the new constitution. Professor Fujiwara sees the end ofsocialism and capitalism and the emergence of a social engineering of
capital market, and has placed his bet on democratization. But the questionof how to handle the free flow of information was left unanswered because,
as Janadas put it, nobody could control or structure it.
The Ito conference continued to tackle serious issues largely driven
by the postmodern agenda; the presentations and discussions remained
centered on how to create visions for more inclusive communities based onthe idea of unity through diversity and mutual respect. The participants did
some serious soul-searching for practical local solutions to the larger
problem of nationalism and the negative impact of globalization on national
and local development.

IV. The Public Symposium
After two months of intellectual interactions among the Fellows and otherJapanese resource scholars and journalists, a public symposium was held on
28 October. The theme was “Asia in Transition: Localizing Strategies,
Globalizing Processes”. The theme again reflected the Fellows’ interests inpushing their postmodern intellectual agenda in the midst of the Asian
economic crisis. The questions and answers were centered on identity issues,
the way in which the crisis should be understood, and how the problem ofresurgent nationalism in Asia should be dealt with.
On the question of fragmented identity, Suwanna responded with anote in support of the need to reconstruct the images of women and topromote gender equality by following two steps. First, there is a need todeconstruct the traditional images of women as having a subordinate
identity in the context of Thailand’s Theravada Buddhism. There is also aneed to locate or unearth hidden passages in the traditional scriptures thathave been overlooked by the mainstream, male-dominated Sangha.
Second, there is a need to search for traditional or religious values to form abasis for civil society. Sylvia is encouraged that there are many ethnologicalstudies, which are subject to interpretation and which serve as a key to the
new understanding of humanity’s relationship with nature and with one
another in small polities. But Endo Suanda sees Indonesia’s value system
as being in a very confused stage.
Amidst this call for a greaterappreciation of local values emerged a lingering doubt about the danger ofnational disintegration, which concerns state leaders. But Endo Suanda
insisted that people be allowed to make their voices heard.
On the question of how the Asian economic crisis should beunderstood, the responses varied. Janadas argues that, while foreigners
should be blamed for the problems, the rapid process of economic
liberalization should be seen as the main cause. A more effective means togovern capital movements would be valuable. In Thailand, as Suwanna
pointed out, two perspectives emerged: one put the blame on the Americans
and so on; the other directed the blame at globalization itself. On thequestion of how to get out of the crisis, the response from Janadas was that,
if the crisis did not last long, it could be a good thing in that it would help
people do what they were supposed to have done a long time ago. It would
also help bring a greater realism to all states in Southeast Asia. Diana

Wong echoed Janadas’s notion of “realism” by emphasizing tremendous
structural weaknesses in the Asian economies. It took the West hundreds ofyears to achieve what Asia did in twenty. Fundamental economic structureneeds to be put in place to help generate sustainable growth, and the task
will be time-consuming. Society should be given more space between thestate and market forces.
The Fellows touched on the future of nationalism in different ways.
Indonesia’s new nationalism poses a threat. Liu Xin identified three formsof nationalism in China: popular nationalism, national nationalism, andofficial nationalism. While official nationalism is on the decline, popularnationalism is on the rise, to which we should pay attention. Not everyone
saw nationalism as being out of control, however. Suwanna argued that, if
there is a new form of Thai nationalism on the rise, it is one based on
popular democracy, which might be healthier than the one the Thais haveexperienced for the last 50 years. In the Philippines, nationalism is being
redefined; populism is beginning to articulate the folk wisdom of theFilipinos. As Sylvia put it: “We are becoming one community”.
The public symposium was brought to a conclusion with the final
remarks from Professor Mitsuo Nakamura of Chiba University, with hisreflection on the late Soejatomoko, who viewed Asian modernization as akind of art tied to the moral fabric of society threatened by rapid economic
development. Behind the moral fabric, there is a system of traditional
values. Modernization cries out for more attention to values and the moral
foundation of society, which provide a sense of continuity on the Asianscene.

V. Toward an Asian Postmodern View on Development?
The 1998 Asia Leadership Fellow Program was by and large unique in that
the Fellows from different Asian countries shared their personal thoughts
on what went on in their societies one year after the economic crisis hit theirregion. The exchange of ideas among the Fellows and between the Fellows
and other Japanese participants appeared to bring a higher level ofawareness regarding the need to re-examine the impact of globalization onsocioeconomic development from a postmodern perspective. If there was acommon thread to the Fellows’ projects, it was their joint call for a return tolocal wisdom in the midst of globalization and socioeconomic woes.

Program Reports and Papers by the Fellows

Japan and The Anthropology of Modern Life
The Asia Leadership Fellow Program 1998
By Liu Xin
Acknowledgments: I wish to take this opportunity to thank sincerely theJapan Foundation (Asia Center) and the International House of Japan for
their official support for this fellowship program. Mariko Oka-Fukuroi ofJapan Foundation (Asia Center) and Tatsuya Tanami of the International
House as the actual organizers of this program deserve a medal for theirbrilliance in the management of the fellowship. I particularly appreciate theway in which the fellows were selected, and my deep gratitude is due tothose who recommended me to this program. I would also like to thank thefollowing persons for their kindness and help while I was in Japan: Isamu
Maruyama, Naoko Shimamura, Taeko Kurokawa, Maho Sato, Lili Nie,
Ryosei Kokubun, Hiromi Shimizu, Shinji Yamashita, Takami Kuwayama.
This report consists of two parts. The first part is an account of theactual activities I participated in and of the various kinds of research I
carried out, both during and after the period of collaborative research (i.e.,from the 1st of September to the 30th of October, 1998). The second partdeals with a particular question central to my own experience in Japan as ananthropologist, i.e., the question of how ethnographers may carry out fieldresearch in a modern society such as Japan, where traditional forms ofcollective or social organization used to provide an experiential basis for
ethnographic fieldwork, have largely disappeared. In other words, thesecond part of this report is an attempt to rethink the place of anthropology
in the study of modern life, which is not only my own concern but also asignificant question for the contemporary debates in anthropology andbeyond. Of course, my attempt here is preliminary in the true sense of theterm.

Part IMy activities and research during these past four months can be divided
into three main categories: 1) the collaborative research with other fellows,which included the interactions and exchanges with a large number ofJapanese scholars; 2) field research in Japan; and 3) others, such as lecturing
in Japanese universities or personal meetings with Japanese scholars. Let
me have a brief discussion of each of these categories.

1) Collaborative Research
A list of the program activities during the period of collaborative researchhas been compiled by the International House of Japan, which can be used
to show the discussion topics and research interests among the fellows.
What I would like to do here is to comment on these activities, from my
own personal point of view as a partial reflection on the degree of success of
this program. The intention of this program was to create an arena for Asianscholars (or, more precisely, Southeast Asian scholars) to interact with eachother as well as with Japanese scholars. As I understand it, this program
was meant to bring influential (potentially in some cases) local scholars
together, i.e., to provide an opportunity for these scholars to work
collaboratively in order to see what kinds of intellectual questions may beraised as a result of interactions among them. If such was the purpose of thisprogram, in my view, it achieved a great success, because a number ofsignificant questions concerning Asia or Southeast Asia were only possible
to be raised by the fellows working together as a group. In other words,
questions raised or problems identified were the result of interactions andexchanges among the fellows, as well as between the fellows and Japanesescholars.
However, from another perspective, this successful aspect may beseen as being inefficient in the organization of this program, because
particularly in the beginning of the collaborative research, there were times
when interactions and discussions among the fellows seemed to lack any
specific direction. But my feeling is that even those moments of hesitationand sometimes misunderstanding later turned out to be meaningful for theidentification of any problems. Also, since the fellows were chosen fromdifferent regions and had different backgrounds, a certain period of time
was needed for them to understand each other's concerns. But the questionis how could the organizers help the fellows interact on a truly collective
basis as soon as they arrived? One suggestion for speeding up this initialstage, may be that, instead of asking individual fellows to recommend
Japanese resource persons, the organizers could introduce a selected
number of Japanese scholars, to provide an initial and tentative framework
for interactions and discussions with the fellows. As in our case, individual
fellows recommended many Japanese resource persons, who came to join
the discussion in the first few weeks of the program. In so doing, a diverse
range of Japanese scholars were introduced to us, but a picture of how thesescholars were related to each other and how they represented the Japanese
intellectual scene was not made clear until later in the program. This is not
to suggest that the focus of this program should shift from interactions
among the fellows to exchanges between the fellows and Japanese scholars.

Rather, it should suggest that, in order to provide for the fellows an initialcommon ground for communication; individual Japanese scholars and theJapanese intellectual life could be placed in the larger picture of global
production of knowledge, of which this program is a part. This would not
be an easy task, but I believe that if some considerations could be made inthis direction, it would benefit not only the fellows but also the twoorganizing institutions, i.e., the Japan Foundation (Asia Center) and theInternational House of Japan.
My own dilemma in the beginning of this program was that I foundit difficult to relate my question about the condition of contemporary China
to the inquiries of other fellows, whose concerns were more closely linked tothe current economic and political crisis of Southeast Asia. The discussion
and exchange among the fellows however, allowed me an opportunity tounderstand, from a very different perspective, the situation of Southeast
Asia in specific and the nature of sociocultural struggles of our time ingeneral.

2) Field Research in Japan
During the collaborative period of research, the fellows visited Kyoto,
Osaka, Ito, and Okinawa. Afterwards, I made special trips to see a numberof Japanese cities and local areas for the purpose of fieldwork of some sort.
These trips were preliminary in two senses. First, none of these trips,
although with a full anthropological intent, was long enough to beconsidered as fieldwork in its proper sense. I spent no more than a few daysin each of these places I visited. Second, they were preliminary in the sense
that, by visiting a variety of places in Japan, I hope to search for possible
locations for future intensive fieldwork, which is part of my long-term
research plan to write comparative ethnographies on East Asian societies.
Below is a list of places that I visited.
1). November, 1998: Hokkaido, several cities including Sapporo, anotherface of urban Japan;2). November, 1998: Nagaoka area, including Niigata but mainly Nagaoka
rural areas;
3). December 1998: Shigoku, mountainous villages as well as local towns
and townships;
4). December 1998: Kyushu, a wide range of places including both urban
and rural settings.
If to use a recently invented anthropological term, my travel in Japan
may be called "a multi-sited field research," because I was moving from one

place to another while observing the characteristics of modern life in Japan.
A central question coming out from these trips, which I shall deal with in
the second part of this report, is what the phrase "anthropology of modern
life" entails?

3) Others
Some other activities of mine may also be mentioned. First, I gave threelectures in two Tokyo universities. The topics of these lectures were about
the paradigmatic shifts in Western anthropology. These lectures allowed me
the opportunity to meet with Japanese College students, i.e., to understandtheir concerns and interests, and these lectures also helped me to better
understand the system of Japanese universities in terms of their function insociety. Second, I participated in a number of cultural activities typical ofJapanese society, as part of my anthropological experience. For example, Iattended a Shinto wedding in rural Nagaoka; observed the ritual of kendo
competition/performance between Waseda and Keio universities. This kindof experience has provided me an opportunity to understand the connection
between cultural forms and social organizations in modern Japan. Third, I
met a large number of Japanese anthropologists and China specialists inJapan. By meeting with these scholars from Tokyo University, Keio
University, Sophia University, Kyushu University, and so on, I tried toinitiate some kind of relationship with them for the purpose of building ties
between Japanese, American and Chinese scholars. In particular, I am
looking forward to meeting some of these Japanese scholars in Berkeley inthe near future. Fourth, I attended a number of conferences or workshops.
For example, I attended the workshop organized by the Future Generation
Foundation, held in Kyoto on 4-7 December, which discussed the notion ofgenerativity as their sixth topic of a series of discussions in search for a new
public philosophy. Fifth, with the help from friends and relatives, I had
some precious opportunities to spend a few nights in rural households, bothin Nagaoka and Shigoku areas. This experience, although short, was very
important for me to raise questions about the nature of change in Japanesesociety, which will be briefly discussed in the following part.
Through this diverse range of experiences, two objectives wereachieved. The first one is that I have obtained a relatively comprehensive
picture of contacts and contexts of scholarly interests in Japan, with which I
will try to push for future collaborative research between Japan, China andUnited States. Second, these experiences strongly reaffirm my view that
China scholars from the west should pay serious attention to the Japanese
literature.

Part II
An underlying question brought about by all these diverse experiences inJapan, as far as myself is concerned, is the question of how anthropologists
may carry out field research in a society where traditional forms of social
ties seem to have disappeared. They were also the very basis upon which
the classic mode of anthropological knowledge was founded. In this part of
the report, I would like to begin with a reflection on the question ofanthropology of modern life, which is by no means a new question, as a clue
for showing the progress of my thought during these four and half months
spent in Japan. In so doing, an anthropological tone is inevitable in thesecond part of the report, which is indeed my intention to introduce into thereport a substantial content. Later, I shall point out how such a specificquestion derived from anthropology is linked to a wide range of questions
raised by the fellows of this program.

"Anthropology of Modern Life"The conventional image of the anthropologist is that of a fieldworker whose
method of research is known as "participant observation," i.e., to be part of agroup of people in order to understand what is going on in a specificcommunity. The doctrine of participant observation marked theestablishment of anthropology as a scientific discipline, and in some sensesuch a doctrine continues to govern the rules of training students inanthropology. However, this doctrine has been criticized and challenged in
the past few decades, from a number of different positions, in such a way as
to make many anthropologists feel uncomfortable about the theoretical
implications of its methodology.
Although every anthropologist issomehow conscious of the problems inherent to the discipline's
methodological claims, the problem of methodology itself is far from being
solved.
Although many anthropologists have argued for an anthropology ofmodern life, very few have succeeded in providing any systematic vision for
how such an anthropology can be formulated. This is why I believe that it isnecessary for me to comment on this question based upon my experience ofmodern life in Japan. It is also necessary to point out that this kind ofcriticism and challenge to the classic mode of anthropological knowledge
not only concerns the conceptual enterprises of Western academic order, butalso indicates the changing realities of social and cultural life of our world at
the present time. It is in this context of change that the question ofanthropology of modern life should be situated. And, therefore, a possible

answer to this question may illuminate us on the condition of our present
society.
There are two fundamental presuppositions in classic anthropology.
The first one is that anthropological knowledge comes from the experiencethat the ethnographer is supposed to have in the encounter with his subjectsof study. In other words, anthropological knowledge is a form ofknowledge that is directly derived from experience, i.e., personal experienceof the ethnographer. The second one is that anthropology studies otherpeople or cultures as and in their wholeness. This is an assumption closely
linked with the functionalist proposition that the whole is larger than theparts putting together. In other words, there are certain qualities belonging
to the whole itself, rather than in the individual parts that makes the whole.
Because of these two presuppositions, the classic anthropologist finds aconvenient site for fieldwork, i.e., the community, either a tribe or a village
or a neighborhood. For it is only in the community that the wholeness ofsocial life can be studied by experience.
The question that needs to be raised is this: when the anthropologist
moves to study modern society, where the traditional mode of communal
life is no longer dominant, could he still be able to carry out ethnographic
fieldwork defined in classic anthropology? The question of methodology is
crucial for anthropology, not only because anthropology is a discipline that
depends upon one single method but also because the very single method,i.e., participate observation, is intrinsic to the justification of anthropology
as a scientific discipline.
A major significance that an anthropologist will find, for example,
when he travels in today's Japan, is that what constitutes experience inmodern society is different from that in traditional society. What is
experience? Assumptions about experience are central elements in themaking of anthropological inquiry. Ethnographic experience is personal
experience, which is the experience by which the ethnographer is to reachhis knowledge on the one hand and, on the other hand, the experience inwhich the people as the object of ethnographic knowledge are made to bethemselves. The sameness of the ethnographer's experience and theexperience of the people under study is presupposed in the very heart ofanthropology. What underlies this is a further assumption that people are
made of by their real experiences. Therefore, it is only when the
ethnographer experiences the experience of the subjects of his study that hewill be able to understand the meaning of their life.
Thus, one must raise another question: what do we mean when we
say that an experience is real? For the anthropologist who is ready to leave
for fieldwork, there are often two senses of the real in his mind. The first
sense is that the real means something that actually happened. That is, what

actually happened is real. In this sense, events, i.e., happenings, are given
priority in the conceptualization of the real. In other words, this sense of thereal means to suggest that the nature of these happenings is objective rather
than subjective. What actually happened has to happen in a specific place.
The specificity of a place in which events take place is therefore
presupposed in this sense of the real. That is to say, if following this logic,
an ethnographer cannot know what happened unless he goes to that specificplace to witness by his own experience.
The second sense of the real is that of truthfulness, which concerns
the way in which the agents render experiences into meanings. Whatactually happened is experienced by a certain group of people in a specificplace. And those who have experienced them will process these experiences
into meanings. This second sense of the real implies that there is a truthful
rendering of these experiences into meanings. This is not an objective
process because it is concerned with how people make sense of their own
lives, but this sense of the real assumes that there is a-or perhaps the onlytruthful rendering of these experiences. And the ethnographer further
assumes that his task is to reach that very truthful process. This is to say
that, in terms of how what actually happened makes sense for the agents,
what is truthful is real. This not only means that the production of meaningneeds to be truthful for the agents, but also means that it is the truthfulexperience of the ethnographer that sets up the foundation foranthropological knowledge.
As we have seen, there is a whole set of assumptions andpresuppositions behind the belief in real experience. These assumptions
and presuppositions have brought serious consequences on those who
believe in it. In particular, I would like to point out one of such serious
consequences, i.e., the one that concerns our conception of events in time. It
is because what is real is considered to be what actually happened, andwhat actually happened could only happen in the past. For those who holdsuch a sense of the real tend to view the chain of events in terms of a single
direction from the past to the present and then to the future. It is also
because the truthfulness of an experience can only be the experience of what
has been experienced, an order of things tends to be arranged in a way thatgives what has been experienced a priority over what will be experienced.
That is, in the authority of real experience, the happened determines thehappening. In other words, in such a way of making senses, there is atendency in associating cause with past experience. My argument is that
this whole set of assumptions and presuppositions behind the belief in realexperience is both an underlying principle of social organization in
traditional societies and a methodological epistemology in classic
anthropology.

Now let us turn to the other side of the problem, to see how suchassumptions about real experience are no longer adequate to the study ofcontemporary societies such as Japan. Of course, Japan is a very uniquesociety, which cannot be easily labeled either as modern or as postmodern.
However, this difficulty in categorizing contemporary societies should not
be an obstacle for us to discuss the differences between two types ofsocieties in terms of the function of personal experience.
Let me begin with an ethnographic observation. Perhaps, no othersociety could be compared with Japan in terms of its fascination withvarious kinds of electronic games. In a gameland, so popular in Japan that a
traveler cannot avoid noticing them, there are usually many machines fordifferent kinds of games. What needs to be pointed out is that, although allthese games are based upon a limited number of technological inventions,cultural or symbolic contents that these games try to imitate are very diverse,
ranging from boxing to football games, from car racing to majiang, so on
and so forth.
These gamelands may have a long history. Electronic machines havebeen improved from time to time. But it seems to me that there was a critical
moment when the improvement of these machines made it possible forplayers to generate what is now known as "virtual reality," a term popularamong journalists as well as among a number of particular academics. One
who has never been to such a place will not be able to tell what this word"virtual reality" actually means. It is sometimes misunderstood as anequivalent to a certain kind of imagination, i.e., the kind of imagination that
feeds back to reality. This is perhaps not quite right, because "virtual
reality" is not a form of imagination but a form of reality. A decisive
moment in the improvement of game machines must be the moment at
which an "actual" event or a "real" person can be generated on the machine.
This is precisely what makes "virtual reality," which is a reality without any"real" contents. This term "real" used in the previous sentence is the one thatembeds both the actual and the truthful. "Virtual reality" creates a new senseof the real, which does not embed both senses of the actual and the truthful.
Here, we confront a difficulty of language. That is, within one word,
we must distinguish two concepts. Or if we put it in a structuralist language,
we may say that there is only one signifier but two signifieds. Perhaps, we
may distinguish them by attributing one as "what happened" and the otheras "what happens," i.e., the former as "actuality in the actual" and the latter"the actual in actuality." The former is easier to be understood, as we
showed earlier. What actually happened is something that has completed
the act of an event. And therefore, its actuality lies in the actualization ofthis event. However, for the latter, it is quite difficult for us to explain,because the language that we use is designed for expressing "real"experience in its conventional sense. But let us try. "What happens," as wetry to distinguish it from "what happened," is something that is actually
happening but not actually happened. In other words, there is nocompletion in "what happens." Therefore, its actuality is not in theactualization of the event; rather, the actualization is a constant actuality.
This sense of "what happens" is different from forecasting, because
forecasting, particularly those based upon statistical knowledge, relies
entirely upon what actually happened. This is to say that, although
forecasting involves calculation of the future, in the temporary scale ofmeasurement, the future remains to be seen as being dependent upon thepast events. In contrast, virtual reality has nothing to do with the past.
This is precisely the nature of the gameland, where the conventional
logic of time has been abandoned. "What happened" does not have thepower in controlling what will happen. The person who plays the game
may not know, or care for, what happened. I talked to a game player of acollege, who was playing a football match, in a noisy lane near Osaka JRstation. He was a friendly young man and not so reluctant in speaking
English. The urge to talk to him was because, when I was in California, once
I read in a local newspaper saying that the result of the 1998 World Cup
Final, which was between Brazil and France, had been virtually played out
in Japan by a game expert. The result was that France lost to Brazil by one
to two. I was in Osaka in early October of 1998. The World Cup had finishedby that time and ended in that France beat Brazil three to zero.
I could not understand what it meant in the Californian newspaperthat said the game was virtually played out until I had the experience ofwatching Japanese boys playing football games on the machine. It is
designed in this way that the game player controls one team and plays
against the team controlled by the machine. One can choose to play a teamlisted on the machine against one's choice of another team. I talked to thiscollege student how he might use the result of the real matches in playingout his game, when he was playing England against Argentina. He told methat he did not know the history of matches between these two teams, andwhat he was doing was simply to play.
This means that neither real qualities of each team nor actual results
between these two teams mattered to him. In fact, he later admitted that hehad no interest in sports. Rather, his interest was in games, and the footballgame was very popular during this past summer. When I asked why hechose these two teams, his reply was because he liked these two countries.
The result of his match was not so important to him, but his skills ofcontrolling the match were indeed impressive.
This example is perhaps not typical. It is probably true that the
majority of people who go to play football games know more about thebackground of each team, which one chooses to play. However, the pointthat needs to be made is clear: this is not a game that relies upon one's
knowledge of previous matches between these teams. It is a game in itself.
In relation to the question of experience raised earlier, what we needto make clear is the extent to which game playing is representative of themode of experience in today's Japan. In other words, to what extent can one
say that this kind of game playing represents another mode of experience
typical of Japanese society at the present time? Or can we say this at all? In
this short report, I will not be able to provide a complete answer to thisquestion. But I would like to point out that this example seems to suggest
that, in terms of the constitution of experience, there seems to have emerged
another mode of it in contrast to the traditional definition of "real"experience.
Let me try to explain what I mean by this. In contrast to the kind ofreal experience we discussed earlier, this mode of experience, shown by theexample of game playing, have also two characteristics. First, this mode ofexperience, shown in the gamelands of Japan, is not dependent upon what
happened. It is no longer natural to assume the existence of a natural link
between what actually happened and what will probably happen, i.e.,
between the past and the future.
To say that the past determines the future means nothing to those
who play the game of football between Brazil and France, because thestarting point in their games is not "what happened" but "what happens"right in front of them. This can be more clearly shown by looking at how
young people playing other games, such as surfing. They may never be able
to become a surfer but they can, with a little cost, play out the experience ofsurfing on the machine. This experience is real but it is not "actual" in theconventional sense of the term. For those who play the detective, they cankill as many spies as they like, depending upon their shooting skills. Theseskills are obtained from practicing on the machine rather than in realsituations. In the act of game killing, the real does not invoke any sense of
the truthful. Therefore, we must say that to play the game is very real, butwhat underlies the sense of the real in its conventional sense, i.e., the actualand the truthful, disappears. Or we may put it in this way: this kind ofgame experience is real but it is no longer actual and truthful.
A point needs to be reiterated here. When we say that the real in
traditional societies implies the actual and the truthful, we mean that as thelogic of experience there is a whole set of assumptions and presuppositions
about what is real and what is fictitious. In a similar way, I pose thequestion of the extent to which the kind of game playing could be seen as arepresentative instance of another mode of experience. By doing this, I haveby no means meant to suggest that every Japanese visits gamelands or every

individual has the same kind of experience. Rather, what I mean is that wemust be able to talk about this issue in terms of the mode of experience, i.e.,the dominant form of a general tendency.
If one takes the view that the kind of game playing is representativeof contemporary Japanese society in terms of its organization of everyday
experience, the anthropologist will find that it is very difficult to carry out
field research without reconsidering what is supposed to mean by "realexperience". If the anthropologist claims that his knowledge is based upon
his experience of the experience of another people, he must be able toidentify a truthful rendering of what actually happened made by thesepeople. But this truthful rendering of what actually happened by the people
under study is now-if our example of the game playing is indeed
representative of the general mode of everyday experience in today's Japanimpossible.
This is not only a dilemma for anthropology as an academic
discipline but also indicates a crucial shift in contemporary society, in which
there is no longer a natural association between-to put it in a crude waytruth and actuality. That is, what is real is shattered. The anthropologist
used to rely upon the conventional sense of the real, which presupposes theunity of the truthful and the actual. If this conventional sense of the real is
no longer representative of the general mode of everyday experience of thepeople under study, one who tries to be a Conrad of anthropology will
inevitably get lost in "the heart of darkness." My argument is that, in orderto think about anthropology of modern life, one must realize that there is afundamental shift in the way in which our experience is shaped in today's
world or, more precisely, in some parts of today's world.
It is clear that the implication of this discussion is far beyond themethodological issue of anthropology. It is important to note that, although
I have taken anthropology, its methodology in particular, as my focus of
discussion, the true question raised here concerns the shift taking place inour world at the very present time. Various kinds of postmodernists havebrought the question of today's change to the forefront of our consciousness
by introducing a large number of unconventional social and historicalexperiences. But, so far, little has been done on the very nature ofexperience itself, which seems to me holds the key to the questions of ourtime, the time of information technology and transnational capitalism.
If I may continue to take the anthropologist's dilemma as an example,
I will further point out that the idea of studying from within a community, avillage or a neighborhood for example is quite problematic. For those whose
experience of reality is modeled on game playing do not contextualize theirexperiences in real space. By saying this, I do not mean that there is nolonger any form of community existing in Japan. Nor do I mean that theexisting communities, no matter what form they take, do not provide asocial context for those who live in it to act. What I mean is that the generalmode of everyday experience in Japanese society is not typically
represented by that of communal life. Rather, it is the gameland that seems
to be more appropriate for the image of everyday experience in Japan. Thatis, real experience is no longer rooted in a community defined in terms ofgeographic locations. So the question left for the anthropologist is this: how
can we understand those whose experiences exist in a virtual community?

Local, National, Global: The CulturoPolitical Dilemma
Presentation by Endo Suanda
The issues I have been working on concern the local traditions,values and performing art cultures, that have often been forced to change by
the state authority and state hegemony. I would like to discuss somedistinct cases in my research from different angles. I will deal with theseissues from three angles: standardization, clarification, and professionalism
in the cultural sector of Indonesia.

1). Standardization of Art
What I mean by “standardization” or “standardizing” is to create akind of criteria, which is to be penetrated and applied to art. These include
criteria of good and bad, foreign and original, and so on. There are ofcourse a number of channels related to this issue, but I am going to discuss
about some of them.
I would first discuss about Indonesian art schools, cultural offices,
tourist offices, etc. The first traditional art school in Indonesia was founded
only four years after independence, in 1951 in Surakarta of central Java.
One of the main areas besides conservative purposes to keep the traditionalarts alive was to create a kind of “national art” under the ideology at thetime, or the “national culture”. As a result, this school in central Java not
only teaches Javanese art, but also Balinese art, Sundanese art, and othertypes of genres. The organizers were hoping that the students and faculty
members would create another form of art; not traditional but a newly
created traditional-based art, in order to identify that the national art isdifferent from traditional and from other kinds of modern art. This school
waited for a decade to be followed by schools in other parts of the country,
such as in Bali, Bandung, then in Sumatra, Padangpanjang, and Sulawesi.
More arts colleges were later founded in several places in Indonesia.
By now there are perhaps more than 10,000 graduates of theseschools. They are spread all over the nation employed as government civil
servants, meaning that those students who were trained in central Java withcentral Javanese art, have opportunities to teach in Irian Jaya, Kalimantan,
and Sumatra. They are penetrating, so to speak, and re-teaching the artistic
values that they had learned in central Java. This would create some kind of
standardization where a civil servant needs to follow the state guidelines.

This is nationalism of art, but it can also be regarded as regionalism,
meaning that Sundanese and Balinese arts are being relocated or penetrated
in the different regions. But this is not regionalism, in another sense. It canmean a penetration of some regional values (“major” values, so to speak) toother “minor” regions.
Another kind of cultural and artistic activity, which is very common,is the government promoting or creating annual artistic competitions. This
involves all levels of government administration from central, to provincial,and district levels. These competitions also give opportunities for different
cultural traditions to compete with one another. On the national level, forexample, you will have a competition between Aceh and Irian Jaya, whichhave totally different traditions and systems. The competitors have to win,
one over the other, and these competitions can be viewed as a process oflegitimizing or establishing artistic and cultural values by the government.
This is not to mention that in some competitions, many of the jury does nothave anything to do with art. Also, some invited art groups tend to begenerous or to show favor toward government officers. This also generates
interest from the lower classes of the villagers to be just like them. Whodoes not want to be popular, who does not want to be toured about? So thiscreates, slowly or quickly, a kind of standard.
A basic problem with standardization is that it would also mean
discrimination. It regards one particular cultural value superior to others,
and diminishes certain values. This is precisely the opposite practiceagainst the philosophy of “plural society” that is continually addressed by
the government. This policy however, lacks reality and is related to theissue of identity. The government not just wants to define a national
identity, but they also want to define the local identities. Both are definedby the State. Therefore, almost everything has to be defined, including its
identity and purpose, because the government does not like unclearness.
One of the most hilarious things appears to me is that the country,
towns and provinces, have to have their own “official” identities. First,
every single town or province in Indonesia has to have the date of its
foundation. This is regardless of whether or not a historical research was
carried out, and therefore, many of the leaders had to randomly decide on
the date of foundation. Besides, each town has to have a motto as an
identity.

2). Clarification of Art
The second point is an overemphasis on clarity and disbelief in
unclearness. In my observation, unclearness, blurriness and flexibility ofthings are not only just the nature of art or culture but also its power. Ifeverything is already clarified, it is not interesting in making art. There has
to be some flexibility. There has to be something of unclearness,
unpredictability, spontaneity, and inspiration where you do not know what
will come and when it will come. This is the power of artistic life, andgovernment, and sometimes academics, do not like that. The government
wants to clarify everything. They do not believe that unclearness canmanage, can organize or can govern something.
Let me tell you about the festival in Cirebon. In Cirebon, there is afestival followed by about 30,000 people, and about 3,000 or more are
involved in a huge parade. About 200 to 250 different art groups marched
in a 5-hour-long parade – a masquerade, which had no leader. There wasalso no organizer who decides the order of the parade, for example, but
2,000 people just come and participate. And it worked. There was no
explicit guidance, but the participants governed themselves and many folks
enjoyed that parade. There were a lot of images. People made all kinds ofcreations, such as a picture of Saddam Hussein, naval army warships, astatue of an Islam teacher teaching people. All these are carried on trucks
decorated with a stage, and people speaking with a huge microphone or thesound coming from a tape recorder.
If this festival is carried out by, say, the non-Islamic community, it
would be viewed with very severe criticisms, but the community in Cirebon
is basically Muslim. It is a fluid and natural kind of dynamics, which does
not create any problems or offences. Hundreds of images including
Saddam Hussein, missiles and robots are exhibited. Many people do notknow what they are, but they still want to participate and do whatever theycan, the best they can do there. That is what I mean by unclearness, andthere is a kind of cultural and spiritual dialogues which do not create chaosor tension. The participants do not care whether things shown there –electric guitars, Chinese dragons, for example -- are foreign-originated ornot.
In 1994, the government started to involve itself with the festival.
They wanted to involve the tourist offices so that they could give awards tothe best groups in the parade. This means that there would be a team ofjudges to evaluate the festival. By doing this, the people come toconsciously think as “Oh, this is foreign,” “This is Chinese,” “This ismodern,” or “this is not so good,” and so forth. And two years later in 1996,
they banned the Chinese art elements involved there -- not just banning, but
the police burned the masks. This is what I mean by “control”. One of myperfect examples of “Unclearness is the power of art” is calligraphy. In
calligraphy -- Islamic calligraphy especially -- it is usually done on a veryclear sacred text of Quran. But the text, after it is drawn, becomes very
difficult to read because the composition of letters can be anywhere, and thescript can be stretched all the way down or up, etc. But this is precisely thenature of art, which is in contradiction with the clearness.

3). Professionalism in the Cultural Sector of Indonesia
Next I would like to discuss the professional approach andconsideration in the cultural sectors. So far, the cultural sectors of Indonesia
are considered least important, and so anyone can be a cultural officer, or
can even be the Minister of Culture, Tourism, etc. There are lots to say
about this, but I just want to mention two issues as to what kind of person
or authority wants to be considered an artist.
First is Soeharto. In 1991, Soeharto wanted to become the first
official calligrapher, by writing the first sentence of the script of Musab
Quran in the festival in Siklau. That was in 1995. This Quran has 42
different styles of script, but Soeharto wanted to make one the national
Quranic Musab. However, he is an unpracticed calligrapher, so therefore
his hands basically had to follow the lines of calligraphy prepared byanother artist. Let me quote Kenneth George:“In this way, Soeharto was [brought] into the material production andsocial legitimatizations of the national Musab. As signator andIndonesian president, he gave the Musab a seal of approval andlegitimacy. As calligrapher, he yielded to artistic and religious
authorities and so let others write through him and for him.”
Another interesting occasion is about Harmoko, when he was Ministerof Information. He opened the festival of puppetry in Solo. He wanted to
do the first opening of the puppet shows by performing a short scene of thepuppet performance, but doing that he was trying to recite the religious
kind of politics, or politicized religions. While he was doing the first show,
he recited the “Al-Fatihah” which is the first Quranic phrase. We in
Indonesia learned “Al-Fatihah” since we were three years old. And “AlFatihah” is recited maybe at least ten times a day, if one is practicing a fivetime prayer schedule, which means that everyone must know the phrase.
Unfortunately, Harmoko recited “Al-Fatihah” incorrectly, and the Islamic
leaders accused him of intentionally insulting the Quranic phrases, because
it is impossible that you cannot recite it well.
There is a culturo-political dilemma in Indonesia on the local,
provincial and national levels, and this dilemma, I believe, is an issue which
can also be witnessed in other parts of the world, and which needs to be
tackled.

(This is an edited version of Endo Suanda’s presentation at the Weekend Retreat in
Ito in October 1998.)

The Asia Leadership Fellow Program 1998 –A Report
Diana WongI.

Introduction

This program has undoubtedly been invaluable to my further intellectualand social development and I would like to take this opportunity to express
again my deep appreciation to the International House of Japan and theJapan Foundation Asia Center for their intellectual and financial
sponsorship of the program and of my participation.
Much has already been said about the strengths of the program, but
it still may bear some repeating in writing. Having had administrative
experience myself, I am aware of the difference that senior management
makes to such enterprises, and the vision, openness and flexibility displayedby the program coordinators from the International House and the JapanFoundation Asia Center was as exemplary as it is rare. At the same time, I
should not fail to mention how impressed I, and my other colleagues, wereby the younger staff of both institutions – by their enthusiasm, theirintelligence, their training, their openness to the world. It would not be too
far from the truth to say that I learnt as much about Japan and Japanesesociety, and about the value of cultural dialogue, from them as from theofficial program.

II.

Reflections on the Fellowship Program

It should be borne in mind that for fellows of the caliber and the standing
envisaged for the program, two months is a long time. There is therefore anunderstandable desire to use this time as productively as possible. For some,
this means the availability of time for individual reading and writing, but
clearly, this is not the main intention of the first two months of the“collaborative research period”. There was however, on the part of myself
and my colleagues, a general sense of uncertainty, as well as anxiety, about
this “collaborative research period”. How can a group of randomly selectedindividuals from diverse fields and sites of research and political activities
engage in “collaborative research” with an expected outcome, as planned
for in the form of a weekend retreat with Japanese colleagues and a public
symposium? In my opinion, this stated objective of the program is clearlyunrealistic and generated a great deal of undue anxiety, tension andultimately, wastage of time.
And yet, equally clearly, the objective of the two-month program
cannot be merely that of an individual sabbatical. It would appear to me
that Kasian Tejapira`s characterization of the potential of this gathering as arare, if not unique, forum for „Great Debates“ among public intellectualsfrom Southeast Asian countries engaged in the great issues of the day intheir own respective countries is most apt:
“The program provided the fellows with a rare and valuable opportunity and forum
to air their domestically developed ideas and arguments before an audience of likeminded international colleagues, to let their views be examined, questioned,
challenged, contested and criticized by the latter and see whether or not they could
withstand the test and still hold water. Only through open, sincere, serious anduninhibited debates could there be a genuine exchange of ideas and mutual learning
among the fellows”.
Opportunities are increasingly available for Southeast Asians tomeet and talk to each other, but these encounters tend to be limited to theconference circuit and thus to brief and casual conversations. This program,with its time-frame of two months, would have allowed for “a genuine
exchange of ideas and mutual learning among the fellows”.
In retrospect, I regret not having made more of this unrivaled
opportunity. There was so much more I could have learnt from Suwanna
about Thailand, Endo about Indonesia, Sylvia about the Philippines, Liu Xin
about China, Janadas about Singapore, and thus about Southeast Asia andEast Asia in general, so many more debates which could have been
conducted. As it is, I have learnt much, most of it anecdotal and incidental.
The two best sessions in this respect were, I believe, the ones in which we
finally sat down together in a formal setting to discuss the crisis.
Drawing on this experience, my suggestions would include thefollowing:
1.
A clear statement of the objective of the program would be helpful,and thereby, perhaps a reformulation of the term “collaborative research
period”. Collaborative research connotes consensus, documentation, andcoherent presentation. What should be prioritized however are contestation,
debate, and free and open-ended exchange of ideas.
2.
The official program should be designed to allow for more time forsuch discussions among fellows. These discussions should be restricted to
the fellows themselves, and at the most, one or two Japanese staff members.
For such discussions to be really fruitful, the atmosphere has to be informal

and intimate, with all present engaged in debate, rather than a debate
engaged in for observers. There is also no need for facilitators for suchdiscussions, as the fellows come to Tokyo, in Kasian`s words, “fully formed
and mature”. As mentioned earlier, the sessions that I found really fruitfulin this regard were the two held on the crisis; unfortunately, there was only
time in the official program for two such sessions.
3.
These collective discussions should of course be related to thesymposium with Japanese colleagues at the weekend retreat, as well as tothe public symposium at the end of the two-month program. What should
be retained is the selection of a specific theme – such as the role ofintellectuals, of culture or of the crisis – in order to provide some degree of
coherence to the discussions and to the public presentations. Within thisborad thematic however, our experience was that individual fellows madepresentations on areas of concern to themselves, sharpened by the mutual
exchanges during the course of the program, rather than the putative resultsof the collaborative research. This, it seemed to me, worked out rather well.
4.
I found the reports written by previous fellows extremely interesting
and thought-provoking and would suggest that all reports be circulated to
all the fellows from the various years. They should be circulated in advanceto incoming fellows, in order to give a sense of what can be expected andwhat can be achieved during the two months. They should also be
circulated to past fellows too in order for a sense of shared and cumulative
experience and institutional memory to emerge for the network.

III.

Globalization and the Southeast Asian Crisis

For the 1996 program, the Fellows chose to discuss the question of the
public intellectual. For the 1997 Fellows it was the question of culture. In
the year 1998, there was one, clear, all-consuming question - the question of
the Asian crisis, or the crisis of global capitalism.
This question of nomenclature was more than merely academic. Justprior to the chain of events, which led to the collapse of the Southeast Asian
economies, their remarkable record of economic growth and social
infrastructural development of the past two decades had lent credence tothe notion of an alternative development model or an alternative mode ofembedded capital. With the collapse of the Soviet model of enchained
capital in the late eighties, this apparently successful “Asian” model had
seemingly remained as the only competitor to the neo-liberal model of
unfettered capital.

Against this broader ideological backdrop, the sudden onset of thecurrency crisis generated considerable confusion, both regarding the
economic as well as the social import of the crisis.
I recall the events as they unfolded last summer. I was then at a
research institute surrounded by professional economists. When the baht
was under siege, my economist colleagues told me that the Thaigovernment would not devalue - the consequences would be too disruptive.
When the baht was devalued and the ringgit fell in its wake, I was told that
it would only last three weeks to a month, for that has been the normal
length of a currency crisis, and so I hastily converted all my Singapore
dollars to Malaysian ringgit. And when the month passed, I was assured
that the economic crisis would not last longer than three months, for the US
and European economies were still robust, and would sustain the exportoriented economies of Southeast Asia. The confusion continued, of course,with the highly publicized debate between Mahathir and Soros, Jeff Sachs
and the IMF.
Were inherent weaknesses of the much-vaunted “Asian” model
responsible for the “bursting of the bubble”, or were the disruptive forces ofa newly technologically empowered unfettered and irresponsible global
capital wreaking havoc on the solid achievements of a whole generation ofdevelopmental effort. Was it, in other words, an Asian crisis, or the firstcrisis of global capitalism? The stakes for an intellectual and political
position were high. Was the nation-state to be defended against the ravagesof global capitalism, or was global capitalism to be embraced as thecontinued and even more potent harbinger of economic growth andpolitical liberty?
This was at least the issue as seen from the commanding heights of
the national economy in the think-tanks and universities I was familiar within Singapore and Malaysia. The I-House discussions brought out for me theelite and state-centric bias in this particular formulation of the issue. Indeed,
what the discussions foregrounded was that capital in the “Asian” model
had been embedded in the structures of the state, embodied in the politicalcentre, and not in society. And that the moral, social, and ultimately
economic price to be paid for this entrapped capital was intolerably high.
The case of Indonesia, with its oppressive and repressive developmentalist
and modernizing state, was exemplary in this respect.
The prevailing consensus in the past two decades had been that thestrong states of Asia had been able to “deliver”, and that their legitimacy lay
therein. Yet the charges against Suharto - the charges of corruption,
nepotism and crony capitalism – were moral charges. As Endo pointed out,
the construction of the developmentalist state in Indonesia, to harness theforces of the market in order to speed up “development” and economic

growth, resulted in the attainment of high growth rates, but also inundermining the moral fabric of society. The unfettered forces of the market,
in collusion with the autocratic power of the state, engendered indisputablewealth, but also enormous inequity and corruption.
As Liu Xin pointed out in his paper on China, the issue can beformulated as one of modernity and morality. The predicament here wasthat of the late-comer state. Like a faustian pact, socio-economic
dislocations", in the terminology of the technocrats, were accepted by many
intellectuals as necessary for the leap into modernity these countries had to
make. But modernity without morality is unacceptable. The crisis was areminder of this sociological postulate.
In light of the crisis, the nation, it would appear, has to be defended
against the ravages, not merely of global capital, but of the state as well.
Suwanna`s concerns about civil society brought out for me most forcefully
this point: whilst for the nationalists of the founding generations, questionsof modernity and morality were focussed on the state, at this new
conjuncture of globalizing and localizing forces, it is society which has totake centre stage.
The lack of transparency over the cause of the crisis was paralleledby a similar absence of surety over its social impact. In earlier recessions, thecauses were easily identifiable - the hike in the price of oil, the decline in theprice of rubber etc. Similarly, the affected groups were easy to identify - thepeasants who marched to the district capital, the proletariat who picketed at
the factory gates. Who really constituted, and what really moved, the mob
which wreaked havoc in Jakarta and forced the resignation of the President?
A year and a half after the emergence of the crisis, there are still noconvincing analyses available of the social impact of the crisis. In part, this isdue to the fact that the very nature of the crisis has meant that it has
impacted in quite a different way to that of earlier crises. The agricultural
sector has been spared, so has the manufacturing. Badly hit has been theconstruction sector - but this sector has relied heavily on migrant workers,
either foreign or from the provinces. Lay-offs in the financial andcommercial sectors have affected the middle-class in particular, and thedepreciation of the currency has meant an indiscriminate decline inpurchasing power for all social classes.
The inability to go beyond such preliminary statements lies in part in
the paucity of information. Beyond the problem of information, it is the theproblem of having to draw up a new map, given that the affected sectors,
and the distributional impact are so different from those of past recessions.
Beyond the technical problem of cartography however, lies, I think, a more
fundamental problem, to which Endo and Liu Xin drew attention: theseeming dissolution of the old social categories and forms of collectivities onwhich social analyses have hitherto depended - in particular, that of class.
Classical social analysis has been predicated on the relations of production
generated within the confines of the national economy. The penetration of
global capital into the very interstices of the domestic economy - with theattendant role of mobile labour and capital - has blurred the old distinctions.
Which are the classes in terms of which a social analysis can be made,indeed, is class a category that can still be deployed, are, as Liu Xin said,
new forms of collectivities, new forms of collective struggle, of theconstitution of the we, more appropriate for the recent history of capitalism
which the crisis has made visible.
Globalization, Janadas and Liu Xin argued, is an ineluctablehistorical force, a “historical inevitability”, against which nativist appeals toan unreflective local “we” may appear persuasive, but are ultimately
vacuous and deceptive. By the same token, the unreflective global “we” of
neo-liberal provenance obscures the social constitution and the social
location of global capital. The crisis, Suwanna said, marks a criticaltransition in the post-war history of Thailand and the region, namely, theend to the history of prosperity of the last forty years. These two months ofreflection and discussions at I-House underlined for me the vast intellectual
labour which lies ahead to re-think the new agenda of modernity andmorality facing the region.

IV.

Encounters with Japanese Scholars

A valuable outcome of the two-month program was the introduction it
provided to Japanese scholars and thinkers. I found this to be particularly
valuable as, given my lack of command of the Japanese language, and therelative absence of English translations of Japanese academic literature,
there has been no other way to acquire any familiarity with Japanesethought other than through direct encounters of the sort which the program
made possible. It was a deep privilege to have been able to meet with menof the stature of Shunsuke Tsurumi, Takeshi Ishida, Yoshikazu Sakamoto
and Kinhide Mushakoji – public intellectuals who felt and thoughtpassionately about the new agenda their nation had to fashion in theaftermath of the war. Fortunately, the program also introduced us toyounger Japanese colleagues working on issues of common interest, such as
Eiji Oguma and Chizuko Ueno, as well as area specialists such as Takeshi
Hamashita. The participation at the Osaka symposium, the visit to theCenter of Southeast Asian Studies in Kyoto and in particular, the weekend
retreat in Ito was particularly valuable in this respect, as it gave me theopportunity to meet with a range of area specialists with whom I am likely
to remain in professional contact.

V.

Conclusion

Future cohorts will certainly miss the presence of the initiator of the
program, Tatsuya Tanami. Given the team spirit which has supported theprogram so far, and the degree of institution-building which has beenachieved in these first three years, I am confident that the program willcontinue to be of great value to all future and past fellows. I would be very
happy to see its network character strengthened in the future and I lookforward to contributing to any further activities in this direction.

The Future/s of Globalization
A View from Southeast Asia
Diana Wong
It was the Second World War that first accorded full weight to the contribution
from everywhere, to the globe as a whole. The war in the Far East was just as
serious as that in Europe. It was in point of fact the first real world war.
World history as a single history of the totality had begun. From now on theinterim period of previous history appears as a dispersed field of unconnectedventures, as so many beginnings of human possibilities. Now it is the totality,
which have become the problem and the task. It ushers in a complete
transformation of history. The decisive thing is that there is no more “outside”.
The world closes. It is the earth’s unity. New threats and opportunities appear.
All essential problems have become world problems, the situation is thesituation of humanity.
Karl Jaspers, Vom Ziel und Ursprung der Geschichte

I
Current debates on globalization tend to focus on the challenges of
economic globalization deriving from the spectacular growth of transnational trade, investment and finance capital flows in the last two decades.
An influential body of writings on globalization has also drawn attention
however, to the significance of increasing global interdependence forcultural understandings of the world. For Roland Robertson, the Pittsburgh
sociologist to whom the popularization of the term globalization can be
attributed, the process of globalization entails not only the growth of
concrete global interdependence, but also the consciousness of this new
globality (see Robertson 1992). Similarly, Anthony Giddens, whose recent
work has embraced globalization, conceptualizes the process not merely interms of the emergence of large-scale world systems, but highlights theerasure of the boundary between the out there and the in-here that isconstitutive of globality (Giddens 1996).
Central to the notion of contemporary globalization has thus been its
reflexive and relativizing character, the realization of the inter-connectivity
between local, day-to-day activities and events happening on the other sideof the globe, and hence a heightening, as Robertson notes, of civilizational,
societal, ethnic, regional and, indeed individual, self-consciousness (with)constraints on social entities to locate themselves within world history andglobal future (Robertson 1992: 27). With the retreat of the state from thedomain of political economy as a result of economic globalization, it will bein the realm of culture and as a source of cultural identity that the nationstate, it has been suggested, will, in future, position itself (Fukukawa 1998).
In this paper, I shall argue that the forms of social hybridity
spawned by the erasure of in-here/out-there boundaries, and therelativizing forms of consciousness identified as constituting a new
globalization are, and have been, constitutive of the condition of being in
post-colonial societies since their very inception. From that perspective,“global” consciousness is the belated recognition in erstwhile hegemonic
nations of the loss of monopoly control over the making of the world. In
societies in which the fluidity of cultural and social boundaries have been
the norm rather than the exception, and certainly no novelty of recent global
provenance, contemporary cultural politics operate on a differently formed
terrain and with different terms of reference. In the second part of the paper,
I shall attempt to delineate part of this terrain of discourse as found inSoutheast Asia.

II
In his major work on world history, Jaspers, as quoted in the epigraph above,
attributes the epistemological transition to the globe as a whole to the
profound impact of the Second World War, after which there is no more
outside. And yet, in an excellent and profoundly moving anthology of Writers
on World War II published in 1991, the world at war continued to beconstituted almost entirely, apart from a few pieces on Hiroshima, by theEuropean and American imagination (see Richler 1991). Even in this editorial
project committed to seeing the war in its totality, the distinctively local
Western European and American perspective could be taken - without further
self-reflection - to represent the world. Such naiveté derives, I suggest, from acultural climate informed by an intellectual tradition in which, as charted by
Hegel’s Phenomenology of the Mind, world history culminated in, and wasconstituted by, Western history. This conflation of western history with world
history also meant that western historical consciousness remained essentiallyself-referential. There was no need to locate oneself within world history andglobal future as there was no world history and global future outside of one’s
own. It was from this understanding of the world that all other societies bent
on modernity were said to see their future selves mirrored in the Westernpresent.
Needless to say, post-colonial societies did not enjoy the luxury of thisunquestioned self-production and the epistemological self-certainty itengendered. As the Japanese social thinker Takeuchi has noted, modernity is
the self-recognition of Europe, the recognition of Europe’s modern self as
distinct from her feudal self (quoted in Sakai 1988). For all post-colonial
nations, the emergence of free capital and the nation-state has been
experienced as forces not entirely of their own making. For such societies, theproject of modernity has been defined not merely in terms of their own past
but also in terms of the present of others. The collective self could not be
entirely self-referential; the imperative to relativize, to locate in respect to theworld, was given in the very terminology of development and modernization,
which came with the birth of these societies. The awareness of the global
conditions for its own production and reproduction was thus a fundamental
constituent of the self-consciousness of post-colonial societies.
From its very inception as well, plurality and hybridity defined thesocial self. Four aspects of globalization have been identified by the
globalization theorist, Martin Albrow, as determining the distinctive characterof contemporary global socioscapes: values that draw from the world, accessto and influence by events elsewhere, direct interaction with other parts of theworld via telematics, and maintenance of lifestyles and life routines in newplaces by migrants (Albrow 1997). Contemporary global cities are said to
exhibit these new conditions of daily life (see Eade 1997). Stripped of thetechnological innovations, such as telematics, these socioscapes have beenparadigmatic features of the great port cities of the colonial and post-colonial
world since the late nineteenth century. It is only in the context of therelatively homogenous nation-states of Europe that the daily experience ofalterity in the everyday life-world represents a dramatic and profound breakwith the conditions of local existence in the past.
The discovery of the global as a condition for the reproduction of local
life forms reflects, I would thus argue, a specific shift in western subjectivity inthe late twentieth century. In the recognition of the Other as constitutive of its
own being (the erasure of the out-there/in-here boundary), it marks the end of
the identity of Self and World which western thought has been able to take for
granted in the history of modernity. In that respect, it is indicative of the endof the remarkable 400-year era of western hegemony over the world.
It also marks, if one so will, a reversal of the expected approximation of
post-colonial modernity to that of the west. The emergence of postcolonialconditions of being and consciousness in the west itself represents as it were,an unpredicted and unexpected approximation of western modernity to thatof postcolonial societies. Ulrich Beck’s concept of the risk society as
characteristic of Europe’s Second Modernity under conditions of globalization(Beck 1992), or Richard Sennet’s concept of contemporary American postfordist short-term capitalism in which a coherent narrative of the self based on
the subjugation to a coherent fordist production is no longer possible (Sennet,

this volume), are further exemplification of this process of reverse
approximation. Post-colonial societies have always been quintessentially risksocieties in which the individual and the collective self have never been able toconstruct and control stable conditions of regular and predictablereproduction.
Paradoxically, I would thus argue, the discourse on globalization in thewest represents the increasing realization of its own parochiality, in its
recognition of the co-existence of multiple worlds within a new global order.
The seminal status, as well as the widespread reception, accorded to SamuelHuntington’s Clash of Civilizations thesis attest to this new recognition of theexistence of Significant Others. And paradoxically, the parochiality reaffirms
itself in the postulation of this newly emergent subjectivity as a profoundly
novel condition of the global.
These discourses on globalization thus refer to the highly unsettling,
complex and contradictory transformative forces, and the varying stancestaken in respect to them, in the cultural politics of contemporary western
societies. Its most avid and eloquent exponents and advocates have been an
unlikely conjunction of transnational capitalists seeking to penetrate markets
outside of the metropolitan centres, and diasporic intellectuals seeking toarticulate their position in the interstices of the boundaries they have crossed.
The new capital and labour mobility however, threatens the welfare consensus
between state, market and society underlying post-war European prosperity
as well as political identity. The proclamation of the end of the nation-state in
the wake of a relentless and an ineluctable globalization has been increasingly
countered by the reassertion of the future of the nation as the site of cultural
identity, at the same time as Europe is being constructed as a larger regulatory
entity.

III
In East and Southeast Asia, or what was known as the Far East before theonset of global consciousness (as still used in the above translation of Jaspers),
the cultural debate around the issue of globalization has had a different history.
Up to two years ago, the future was being envisioned in terms such as “The
Pacific Century”, “The Asian Renaissance”, “The Rise of East Asia”. These
were projective, not descriptive terms. They projected a future pregnant withthe promise of a final rupture with the history of intercultural relations of thepast four hundred years - the history of western hegemony. Notwithstanding
its projective, and hence, fictional, nature, this discourse bore witness to a new
relationship of proprietorship to modernity in Asian self-consciousness - if not
as that of producer of modernity, than at least as its consumer. As such, itsignaled the end of a self-consciousness in which the Self was defined by anabsence, mirrored in the Western gaze as a site of backwardness and failure
and as its hapless and unwilling victim, the eternal object of a commanding
western subjectivity. This Asianist discourse testified, paradoxically, to theemergence of a new economy of the Self in which the Other was no longer
construed in terms of the West/East dichotomy, but in which theomnipresence of the Other has been replaced by the presence of serialized andmultiple others.
It was in Southeast Asia too that the term “globalization” was perhaps
unmatched in its popularity and acceptance, for Southeast Asia saw itself as abeneficiary of globalization, and globalization as the context in which the
Pacific Century, the Asian Renaissance, would be staged. As has already been
noted above, “globalization” has been no stranger to the region, and indeed, it
may be argued that unhindered flows of capital and labor have been central tothe making of modern Southeast Asian states and society. The region, in its
pre-colonial, colonial and post-colonial pasts, has been exceptionally open toworld trade and cultures, with plurality and diversity woven into its social
fabric as part of the “natural” order of things. “Globalization, that’s us” - thiscelebration of globalization by the New York Times in one of its recent
columns could just as well, although with a different referent, have been
voiced in Southeast Asia.
Today of course, these terms have lost their currency. And
globalization has changed its meaning: from the promise of a fundamental restructuring of the old order, to the threat of an even more massive andpowerful continuation of the old centric order, shorn now of the protective
cover of nation-state structures and institutions. A sense of crisis pervades all
countries in the region. Beyond the stark reality of the economic crisis and its
social and political consequences however, the crisis can also be seen as one of
the imagination - of the ability to imagine alternative futures (Tejapira 1999).
The gravity of the crisis however, has also provided space for the reemergence of utopian critique in recent intellectual and public debate. The
strongest champion of globalization in Southeast Asia had been the state.
Engulfed by a financial and economic collapse widely understood in Asia asconstituting the first crisis of a newly emergent global financial system, bothglobalization and the state - hitherto virtually unquestioned agents ofdevelopment and modernity - are being subject to severe criticism. Under theaegis of the developmentalist state and a favorable globalization, the social
imagination had been leashed to the dictates of instrumental reason. With thecrisis, development and modernity, at least in the purely statist andeconomistic garb with which state and market had endowed them, no longer
exhaust the imaginings of the future.
With globalization imagined as a neo-imperialist threat, the nation
certainly, has assumed a new salience as a site of cultural identity. Similarly,religion as a collective project has strengthened its presence in public discourse.
Here however, I would like to draw attention to three other imagined transnational social spaces which are engaging intellectual discourse on cultural
futures, in which globalizing forces are not seen ipso facto as a threat but asemergent forces subject to collective direction and transformation.
For the critique of the excesses of the authoritarian developmentalist
state which had engineered the export-oriented growth policies of the postcolonial states in Southeast Asia, the shared values and practices of a transnational civil society have been critical. In particular, impulses for the
democratization of political institutions, for an end to relentless environmental
degradation, for the concerns of those at the national periphery, have comefrom global coalitions located in this trans-national space. Local groups inSoutheast Asia have been actively engaged in the construction of these otherforms of globality and as these concerns enter mainstream national discourse,
so will the engagement in this trans-national space and its project ofalternative globalities.
Another trans-national space in the making is that of diaspora. I would
like to make a distinction here between the concept of diaspora and that ofminority. Diasporas designate trans-national social spaces in which “dwellingin difference” (Clifford 1994) is practiced, minorities on the other hand, occupysocial spaces assigned by the practices of the nation-state. Diaspora cultures
were constitutive of a pre-modern, pluralistic, cosmopolitan order, in theIslamic civilizations of Muslim Spain, Mughal India and maritime Southeast
Asia. They were accorded a more subterranean existence in the colonial
empires that replaced these older cosmopolitanisms. With the advent of thenation-state, state-sponsored nationalism imposed an official narrative of
cultural homogeneity designed to erase all traces of diasporic cultures. The
recovery of the diasporic in recent Southeast Asian discourse can also be readas the desire to affirm the pluralistic fabric of local life-worlds and to forge
new forms of cosmoplitanisms more reminiscent of the familiar plurality of its
own historical experience.
The question of plurality is also central to the third discursive project I
wish to draw attention to, the project of region-building. Notwithstanding thevacuity of the state-sponsored “Asian Values” rhetoric, the utopic vision of an
Asia as a distinctive regional formation continues to exercise the imagination.
In contrast to the project of Europe, and in contradistinction to the rhetoric of“Asian Values”, the project of Asia cannot be constructed on a foundation ofshared values and culture. Asia, as has been often observed, is nothing morethan a geographical expression, a derivative concept, an empty category.
There is no equivalent to the commonwealth of shared values and institutions
derived from the legacy of Christianity. Takeuchi, the Japanese thinker
already quoted above, had concluded from this the necessity for a non-

essentializing conceptualization of Asia - the principle of its unity, as he put it,
has to be found outside of itself (quoted in Sakai 1988).
The project of Asia has to be conceived in pluralistic terms, and theterms of its plurality will have to differ from that developed in Europe.
Anchored in a fundament of shared values, plurality in the tradition ofWestern thought and political practice has referred to the possibility, andtoleration, of divergent and contesting opinions derived from the same set ofcore values (Walzer 1997). In Asia, in the absence of a historical monopoly of
one set of truth-claims, plurality has to be grounded on the contiguity ofincommensurably heterogenous traditions. Tolerance has to mean therecognition and acceptance of irreducible alterity.

IV
The globalizing forces emanating from changing scales of production andconsumption in the world today cannot be denied or simply wished away.
Neither should they be conceived as purely abstract forces unfolding theirineluctable consequences all over the globe. As I have tried to show,
discourses on globalization have their own histories, just as there are different
histories of globalization. The future, even the future of globalization, remains
contested terrain.
The article appeared as: “Die Zukuenfte der Globalisierung – Ueberlegungen aus der
Perspektive Suedostasiens”, in Joern Ruesen, Hanna Leitgeb, Norbert Jegelka (eds.),
Zukenftsentwuerfe. Ideen fuer eine Kultur der Veraenderung, Campus Verlag,
Frankfurt/New York, 1999.

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Beck, Ulrich (1992), Risk Society. London: Sage.
Clifford, James (1994), “Diasporas”, in Cultural Anthropology, 9 (3): 302 - 338.
Eade, J (1997), Living the Global City. London: Routledge.

Fukukawa, Shinji (1998), “Gesellschaft und Kultur im 21 Jahrhundert”, inDeutschland und Japan im 21 Jahrhundert. Zwischen Wettbewerb und Allianz,
Gert Kaiser and Andreas Schlieper (ed), Wissenschaftszentrum NordrheinWestfalen: Düsseldorf.
Giddens, Anthony (1996), “Affluence, Poverty and the Idea of a Post-Scarcity
Society”, in Development and Change, 27.
Richler, Mordechai (1991), Writers on World War II. An Anthology. Vintage:
London.
Robertson, Roland (1992), Globalization. London: Sage.
Sakai, Naoki (1998), “Modernity and Its Critique: The Problem of
Universalism and Particularism”, in The South Atlantic Quarterly, 87: 3.
Tejapira, Kasian (1999), Paper presented at Social Science Research Council
Workshop on Futures. Cebu, the Philippines.
Walzer, Michael (1997), On Toleration. Yale University Press.

Touching Bedrock
Sylvia L.Mayuga"all shall be well andall manner of things shall be wellby the purification of the motivein the ground of our beseeching."- T.S.Eliot, 'Little Gidding,' The Four Quartets

The Asian financial crisis going global in the autumn of '98 infused a senseof urgency into the Asia Leadership Fellow Program, seeding the theme ofits concluding symposium, 'Asia in Transition: Localizing Strategies;
Globalizing Processes.' With daily news on the fault lines, casualties andemergencies of a fading “Asian Miracle,” the year's Fellows werecompelled to a widening context for the crisis in their own countries.
Large questions came up. What is this crisis saying about thestructure and ideology of the world economic order? Are we looking at thedeath of global capitalism or only a traumatic readjustment to the'borderless' world economy touted by its drumbeaters? Is there a way outof this currency trap? If culture is part of the problem, might it also be partof the solution? Why is Japan standing still?
I left the Philippines in August with initial figures of the crisis onhome ground: a conservative estimate of 5,000 jobs lost everyday, alreadytotaling 100,000 in the first quarter of 1998 alone, swelling daily with theclosure of more factories and small and medium business enterprises.
Philippine Air Lines, Asia's first flag carrier, was itself threatened withclosure or sale to foreign investors in the unfortunate convergence of labor
unrest and ballooning dollar-denominated debt payments - a national
humiliation deepened by the centennial celebration of the First Philippine
Republic.
Our first Fellows' exchanges marked tectonic movements.
Philosophy professor Suwanna Satha-anand informed us that Thai
professionals like herself were already suffering a 20% cut in salaries.
Ethnomusicologist Endo Suanda, who crisscrosses Indonesia with amessage of inter-tribal unity through the arts, brought firsthand accounts ofchaos, soon underlined by news of the beheading of Madurese migrants by

Dayak tribesmen to whose ancestral lands they had been transplanted
without consultation.
On our first week together, Mahathir Muhamad plunged Malaysia,
sociologist Diana Wong's country, into panic with a sudden reimposition offoreign exchange controls and the imprisonment of his own chosen
successor, Anwar Ibrahim, for opposing the move. Immediate impact
seeped into Malaysia's former state, Singapore, where its capital made up
40% of global investments. Mahathir's autocratic spasms recalled recent
ASEAN history - Ninoy Aquino's solitary confinement and assassination
under the Marcos regime in the 80s and the imprisonment of ourSingaporean colleague Janadas Devan's father, Devan Nair, for organizing
transport workers in prosperous Singapore's own fitful 60s.
Our Beijing-born colleague Liu Xin's biography telescoped more
historical turbulence. Like the dilemma that once faced a young Vaclav
Havel, the label "counter-revolutionary" on his father during the Chinese
Cultural Revolution left Xin no choice in a college education. Statistics
became this humanist's passport to a local college and a scholarship,
facilitated by missionaries, for graduate studies in London. The massacre on
Tienanmen Square in 1989 finally saw him leaving for the course of his
choice at the University of California. Now an anthropologist, Xin's
struggle "to make general statements about Chinese society" was aformidable task in the progressive breakdown of a moral universe undergrowing economic and ecological pressures.
Substance, constriction and escalating historical challenge in the
lives of Asian intellectuals framed our unfolding discovery of Japan,
recalling the title of a lecture by the Filipino sociologist Walden Bello on the1996 APEC Summit: 'Six Adjectives in Search of a Verb.’ This became “sixtroubled economies watching Asia's most powerful economy” as Japanese
realpolitik emerged in the ALFP lecture workshops.
International relations Professor Isami Takeda drew a very small
triangle illustrating the boundaries of Japan's traditional foreign policy map- itself at the left, America to the right, China on top. Southeast Asia, withmajor Japanese investments held hostage by crisis, remained a vague bloc
towards the equator. Economic historian Takeshi Hamashita who lectured
on trade relations in ancient maritime Asia confirmed the impression in awistful admission of limitations to traditional scholarship on South-east
Asia at the imperial university's Institute of Oriental Studies.
A picture was emerging postwar Japan, much like a colonizedPhilippines, has identified more closely with America than with its relations
to the south. There were in fact, conflicting schools of thought on whether
Japan was Asian at all. In the succeeding weeks, I began to catch the drift ofa residue of guilt struggling with denial of the World War II experience. Itcame with an apparent blend of shyness and sense of superiority that defineJapan and the Japanese apart from the rest of Asia.
A complex reality was beginning to combine in word and flesh in a
way that particularly delights writers, prodding an exploration of living
context - on strolls and subway adventures, in restaurants, shrines, shops,
casual conversations, the I-House library, even while feeding the carp in its
classical Japanese garden.
A book title hastily scribbled by Program
Director Tatsuya Tanami became a vital thread to discovery - 'The Book ofTea' by Okakura Kakuzo, best known in Japan by the pseudonym Tenshin,
the 'heart of heaven.'
Painter, art historian, the finest of writers, Tenshin turned out to be aworthy global interpreter of the Japanese soul and its landscapes - now
enduring, now shifting in the alternating shock and illumination of
encounter with the world outside its introspective island borders. Written
and published in English nearly a century ago in Boston and New York, the'Book of Tea' is a classic of Japanese history told through the metaphor of"teaism.""Wa-kei-sei-jaku" - harmony, respect, purity, tranquillity -, theessential ideals of chanoyu, the Way of Tea, not only summarize centuries ofspiritual evolution in becoming simplicity and intimacy with nature. They
remain an urgent prescription for social and personal equilibrium at theuncertain eve of a new millennium. The book's recent revival in Japanhinted at an uneasy sense of standing at the edge of great changes, agroping for surer footing on bedrock older than 20th century dominance of
the world market.
Through chanoyu, Okakura unfolded a web of Asian influences
rooted in Taoism, Confu-cianism and Buddhism that animist tribal Japanbrought to exquisite peaks of ritual, art and craft, today surrounded byprotective circles of global cognoscenti. A political dimension in his second
book 'The Ideals of the East' swept from micro to macro in the accretion ofcontinental influences that gradually made Japan a "museum of Asiaticcivilizations." A spiritual insider to a society whose basic reflexes havechanged little since his time, Tenshin became my Virgil to patterns still
moving like a silent undertow in a modern Japanese psyche linked it, like itor not, to Asia's larger story.
The centuries shed light on the ALFP '98's own weaving of trends ofcontemporary Japanese thought "at the cutting edge." Singularly vivid was
a lecture by the 37 year-old professor Eiji Oguma whose protean
transformation from agricultural biologist to cultural historian andphilosopher had already delivered two books with a bold challenge to his
society - to reexamine itself and its one-dimensional ruling mythology.

As long-suffering Japanese sensitive to global winds look longingly
outside its tight ceremonial confines, Oguma documented and analyzed aclosed system's great resistance to diversity. Its costs, shared by its citizens
and foreign relations, are highest among Japan's ethnic and economic
minorities - Ainus, Koreans and Okinawans still deprived of a just share in
Japan's postwar democracy, prosperity and global standing. It was astartling backdrop to the courteous culture that meets the casual eye - early
tribal mythologies co-opted from their deepest sources in the folk soul andflattened to the "emperor mythology" of an elite ruling from the center,turning sources of new life and energy into periphery with great system andscant sympathy.
Oguma's thesis shared passion and vantage point with a lecture by
Shunsuke Tsurumi, author of a history of Japanese nationalism, fittingly
delivered after a chanoyu in the old capital of Kyoto. His metaphysicalleaning focused on a sense of time as a tracer to Japanese history. Fact andtheory blended into insight on a reality poignantly familiar to the rest of
Asia: how the "communal time" of agricultural centuries marked by seasons,planting cycles and tolling temple bells gradually vanished with theindustrialization that began in the Meiji Restoration of 1868.
Over a century hence, a scholar mourned the discovery of a survey
in Tokyo that "Hayaku! Hayaku!" (Hurry! Hurry!) are the words mostfrequently dinned in the ears of schoolchildren running a competitive race
to a ticking industrial clock. It runs trains with pinpoint precision in theworld's second largest economy, yes, but going or gone are strands of lifegiving custom. Japanese children playing Mozart at great speed with many
mistakes is a comic detail of a pervasive sense of scarce time but gone aswell is the helping hand older children traditionally extended to younger
ones. ayaku! Hayaku! has already delivered tragedy - a shocking statistic ofJapan's suicide rate, today the highest in the world, with teen-agers 14 to 16
as the most numerous.
Having "erased 5,000 years of history, the Meiji machinery is stillgoing on intact today," said Tsurumi. Was this the root of paralysis
obstructing farsighted solution of deep trouble in Japan's banking system?
Estimates of bad loans facilitated by an entrenched Confucian Old Boy
network spread-eagled across business and government bureaucracy has
spiraled from an initial 13 trillion yen to the 150 trillion of this writing,equivalent to 30% of Japan's economy. Following a previous increase insales taxes and lowered interest rates on savings, a new scheme to bail out
erring banks with more taxes proposed to continue penalizing an obedientcitizenry for the follies of giants.
Japan's internal drama deepened with the autumn, as the "Asian flu"
crept to Russia and Brazil - marked by wildly fluctuating dollar to yen rates

in a counterpoint of mass panic and world-class profiteering by currency
speculators led by the 10% who already control the whole world's wealth.
The global economic "order" was turning into a field for poets and sages,
recorded in bold media strokes bordering on prophecy.
"We are losing the rationality of the order of things. This calls for aredefinition of East and West," Prof. Hamashita had observed. "The Big
Postwar Institutions are Becoming Obsolete," echoed the columnist Jim
Hoagland. "Global Capitalism, Once Triumphant, is in Full Retreat. It will
not soon regain its aura of infallibility," announced the economic analyst
Robert J. Samuelson, urging "a gentler way" to prevent global recession withthe formerly unthinkable measure of debt relief to developing countries.
Like Mikhail Gorbachev in the late '80s and the new Prime Minister
Keizo Obuchi at the U.N. that fall, Henry Kissinger joined the call for debt
relief, castigating the IMF for "lack of knowledge and responsiveness to
Asian realities." Columnist William Pfaff called for "a new Bretton Woods
Agreement," scanning the horizon for "a new John Maynard Keynes" tocreate a new framework for a world economy coming unmoored.
Skewed power sharing between Japanese center and peripherydescribed by the political scientist Takeshi Ishida in his lecture workshop
had become globally translatable. Local protest against the construction of a
nuclear power station in Maki, continued anti-U.S. bases rumbling in
Okinawa, local and foreign NGO protest against ODA misuse by ruling
elites in recipient countries all fell into a pattern linking the bursting ofJapan's "bubble economy" with the vaporization of the "Asian Miracle."
Overflowing liquidity with the doubling of the yen's value by thePlaza Accord of 1985 - an attempt to close the ever conflict ridden U.S.Japan trade gap triggered the dizzy over speculation in real estate andconstruction in Japan, Asia and the U.S. that climaxed in Mitsubishi'spurchase of controlling stocks in New York's Rockefeller Center in 1989.
This, in its heyday, was what Mahathir called "the flying geese model" Japan flying to a risen Asian sun, followed by ASEAN and South Korean
economies flapping growing industrial wings in ascending covey.
But defying gravity too fast in speculative ventures tenuously linked
to mass consumer markets could not be kept up indefinitely. Dramatic
collapse of the Tokyo Stock Market in 1989 burst the bubble and led to
discovery of over-exposure to speculators by major Japanese banks quietly
disguising large defaults with "creative accounting."
Here began theunraveling of the banking sector replicated four years later in Thailand, its
aftershocks in Asia now circling the globe with new lessons on old laws liketime, growth and gravity.
The ALFP offered glimpses of alternatives. The first came with Prof.
Hisashi Nakamura, laughingly describing himself as a man "with nodiscipline" as he traced his shifts from European history to development
economics to agricultural engineering and finally to a teaching job in a small
private college and NGO work with the Buraku, Japan's impoverishedminorities. Economic crises have historically led to shooting wars but in a
nuclear zero-sum game, "the most important part of the solution is thetransformation of American globalization," he said. In his book 'A People'sAsia,' he pressed a "people-to-people politics" in "a war with themonopolistic power of the U.S."
Suwanna and I, both NGO familiars, warmed to Nakamura's
confirmation of a track that had also taken us beyond professionalboundaries into more open-ended, less-trodden paths. She challenging
Thailand's Theravada Buddhist establishment with feminist scholarship andNGO action, and I helping to lay stakes for grassroots-based sustainable
development with the Filipino NGO community. Hopes for a new global
paradigm were fanned higher by Professors Yoshikazu Sakamoto, Chizuko
Ueno and Yoshinori Murai.
A powerful theoretician, Sakamoto offered sensitive historicalanalysis of civil society's leading role in the evolution of the democratic
ideal. “Regressive tragedies" of war, human rights violations and ecologicalcrisis in tandem with "the dynamics of competitive capitalism" were
hastening the growth of a trans-border consciousness of interdependence
and collective responsibility. This statesman-like sensei's faith in thetransforming power of civil society came to a willingness "to die for it" moving us all, bringing Liu Xin to promptly declare his own willingness todie for a vision.
From one of its frontiers came the ALFP's lone woman lecturer
Chizuko Ueno. This brilliant feminist scholar cut closer to the bone on theissue of Asia's "comfort women" than even the question of directcompensation. Briskly lifting a curtain on internal debate, she pointed out
an unresolved historical double bind in Japan's "sacred war againstcolonialism". Japan’s wartime feminists protected new suffragette space by
supporting, even promoting, a war that shamed thousands of Asian womento invisibility by their use as the "public toilets" of Japan's Imperial Army.
Ueno Sensei called for breaking more silences on official war history
beyond Japan while sharing experience that counseled greater sensitivity tounspoken and unacknowledged memories still injuring and dividing bothconqueror and conquered. This, too, was Diana Wong's point in her
thoughtful paper, ‘Memory Suppression in Singapore’ that traced selfjustifying myths of wartime nobility claimed by the British colonial
government, the communists, the nationalists and the Japanese Army
preceding Singapore's own founding myth of “history’s beginning” in 1965.

'Her'-story versus 'his'-tory and Japan's uneasy relatedness to theAsia-Pacific were thoughts of an autumn festival weekend in Okinawa in
mid-October. Tension between the warm wisdom of an ancient matriarchal
culture centered in the sacred groves of old Ryukyu and its fate asgeopolitical football presently bristling with 38 U.S. bases preceded our
encounter with Yoshinori Murai.
This youthful sensei drew more details into a big picture of
imbalance between Japanese center and Asian periphery in the collusion ofJapanese construction firms and government for ODA projects contrary topeople's needs and wishes in Indonesia and the Philippines. Rich withpeople-to-people experience in NGO formation, federation and networking
southwards from Japan, Murai's work promised growth for Asian civilsociety.
But something else was becoming clear as the lecture series ended.
The rarity of Uenos, Sakamotos, Nakamuras, Murais and other globallyminded activists bodes slow growth for Japan's own civil society. The viceof Japan's consensual virtue - individual initiative discouraged by hierarchy
and isolationism afloat in First World comfort - will require much time anddoing to strike fire sufficient for the kind of "people power" already winning
democratic space and a larger share of state power in far less secure parts ofAsia.
We had luxuriated in exceptions to the rule in the ALFP, even as
shared crisis challenged the emergence of a new paradigm in a region still
discovering its common identity after centuries of colonialism. After sharing
initial insights in the public symposium came time to look deeper into
intriguing traces of living spirit glimpsed Hayaku! Hayaku! with the Fellows
in Osaka, Kyoto, Okinawa, ocean-sprayed Ito and time-warped crannies
bypassed by the crowds of frenetic Tokyo.
On the Kumano Kodo
It began with a weekend at the Kii Peninsula in Wakayama Prefecturesoutheast of Tokyo, with a young official of the Japan Foundation who"abducted" me on the last program day. Maho Sato is also a member of afascinating NGO called Albatross. It was led by the 32-year old visionary
Hiroshi Etani who was motoring from Osaka with a complement of
Shugendo practitioners eager to cross-pollinate with a student of animismand mythology from Nanpo, "the islands of the south" in Japan's ancientchronicles.
Two days on the road edged the timeless - beginning in hillside
graveyards with rows of gray stone Shinto markers and moon-faced Jizos
wearing red bibs, vegetable plots, rice fields and farmhouses alongsidesilver threads of river that welcomed us to Wakayama. Gone were all tracesof city gloss as our night bus came to a stop in coastal Shingu-Shi.
About-face from fishing boats and dried fish at the harbor, we
ascended to an undulating blue panorama of low mountain ranges withcypress, pine, cedar, oak and cherry trees in a play of shadow and light such
as Lafcadio Hearn once described to be "gentle as the light of dreams." The
name of this ancient pilgrimage site is fitting - “Kumano,” variously said tobe a corruption of kumo, hidden, and kami, gods or spirits. Their home intribal worship was given the name “Shinto,” the way of the gods, as late as
the 19th century, and only to distinguish a thriving native animism from the
Buddhism which arrived in Japan in 6 A.D.
"This is where the mountain gods married the ocean gods," said
Hiroshi Etani as we viewed elevations lapped by a shimmering Pacific at
sea level. Before us roared Nachi taki, the waterfall at the core of Seigantoji's
spiritual tradition, arguably Japan's oldest. Its lore says the Indian sadhu
Ragyo sailed into Kumano Bay with six companions in 4 A.D., wandered tothese mountains and received a vision of Kannon Bosatsu while meditating
behind that taki. This encounter with the boddhisatva of healing became thefounding event of a community of mountain ascetics and healers, monk andlay, practicing Shugendo all over Japan today.
Also known in China as Kwan Yin, the much-loved Goddess ofMercy, and to India, Nepal and Tibet as Tara and Avalokitesvara, Kannon's
central place in Kumano 1,600 years since Ragyo Shonin, St. Ragyo, indicatestribal Japan's welcoming syncretism. Nachi Seigantoji is a statement of its
creative longevity. Through the centuries, Ragyo Shonin’s hut beside theNachi Falls was succeeded by a small temple, then a monastery melding
three religious traditions in ascetic training centered around 48 waterfalls.
Long famous for healing body and soul, Nachi Seigantoji's present-day
complex of Shinto shrines, Taoist and Buddhist temples, monastery,guesthouse and museum compresses centuries of spiritual and artistic
history in great beauty.
Its ecumenical charisma has survived major fires, persecution by the
shogun Oda Nobunaga in the 16th century and interference by the Meiji
government in the 19th.
In earlier and intervening centuries, perilous
mountain passes, wide rivers, forests with beasts and bandits could not
deter a growing number of pilgrims on the Kumano Kodo - the Road to
Kumano. Among them was a long line of emperors and nobles from Naraand Kyoto, seeking blessings and memorializing a difficult journey to the"home of the kami" in poetry, wayside markers and shrines, as well as thegradual laying of a path of cut volcanic stones. Today extant remnants ofthat original Kumano Kodo are hidden in cedar, pine and bamboo groves

inviting long meditative walks bypassed by narrow mountain roads linked
to a modern highway network.
Among edifices of architectural refinement, endowed by nobles from
Seigantoji's beginnings down to the Meiji Era, is its oldest Shinto shrine - thehollowed-out trunk of a centuried oak. Entering it summoned a feeling of
numinous unspoken presence, the same one palpable in another center ofindigenous spirituality - my home ground on the higher elevations of the
Banahaw mountain range towering over southern Luzon.
As Albatross led on through the gentler elevations of the Omine
Mountain Range extending from Kumano in the south to Yoshino in thenorth, its kinship with animist Banahaw became a fascinating line ofcontinuity. Antedating the imperial version that led to war, tribal Shinto's
sacred spaces - cordoned by woven ropes of rice straw, the shimenawa, andstrands of triangular prayers in paper, the gohei, recalled Banahaw’s own
pilgrimage route of rock, cave, waterfall and river puestos with candles,
incense and incantations etched in stone. Different climate and vegetation
were like the different flags and symbols expressing the same reverence forcommon bedrock of spirit and geology.
Waking at the edges of the forested Wakayama Protected Area withmushrooms in all colors and sizes, drifting mist, hawks and crows sailing in
the blue air of a fragrant dawn brought a resolve to return before we evenleft. Albatross and I had many shared mysteries to decode between
archipelagos linked in a Pacific Ring of Fire. No sooner had the thought
occurred than it was put to a test - my companions would not hear of letting
me sleep some more while they bathed in a famous onsen, a hot spring, on
the Kodo. I was not sorry. Soaking in scalding waters in birthday suit withperfect strangers, crimson momiji (maple) branches peeking from a cliff incold autumn glory, was a return to innocence perhaps as conducive toholiness as Shugendo's freezing waterfall meditations.
The end of our brief time together was followed by more compellingsights on the descent back to Shingu. Burned slopes planted to saplings instraight rows nature never intended, milky silted stretches of the Totsugawa
River where it had been transparent upriver, quarries gouging cliff-sides inthe beginnings of heavy flooding and dead rivers such as we know too wellin the Philippines. Blind to ancient beauty and wholeness, "progress" wascrunching into the home of the kami! As rising alarm struggled with lack ofsleep, I saw a giant Kannon Bosatsu emerging from a sheer limestone cliff arms outstretched, summoning a civil society army….
I was back 18 days later with research, camera and Japanese phrase
book, to be met by a larger Albatross circle. This welcoming cradle, more
proof of Etani's charisma and organizational ability, had been woven by email. It would now swing me in southeastward arc from Wakayama City atthe prefecture's northwest end, completing my traverse of the Kumano Kodoon the Pacific coastline.
So much treasure is hidden in the world's countryside. Upon arrival
in Wakayama City, Albatross member Junya Hanai, aspirant YoshihikoMiyamoto and I were instantly swept by a hurricane named Chie
Matsushita. Calculating backwards from the train schedule to our next stop,
she pointed to the bridge where the Kumano Kodo begins near a Tokugawa
castle, plied us with simultaneous tea, cakes and folklore in the children'sbooks she both writes and illustrates. She led us through a Shinto shrinewith a startling sea of dolls and animal figurines to be set adrift in petition
and thanksgiving, pointed to the island where the shamanic empress Jingu
floated to safety after being cast to sea by a disbelieving consort. She also
fed us lunch, drove us to the train station with packed doughnuts and timeto spare. En route we also learned that bears still roam the lower reaches of
Wakayama’s mountains and that Chie-san, too, practices Shugendo, possibly
explaining her stellar energy.
Tanabe, Taiji and Shingu hugged a coastline of more incredible
beauty, with off-shore islands and rock formations whose sharp edges
indicated relative geological youth as yet unsculpted to roundness by windand rain. Blessed by such a variety of natural forms, the Japanese tribal
mind has a story for each shima, island and atoll, no less than every onsen,
river, old tree, rock and taki - linking romance with faith, nature and thekami down an ascending and descending Kumano Kodo. Such a landscape is
as much a paradise for artists and storytellers as for scientists and saints
who have roamed it in their respective realities down the centuries.
In Tanabe, rolling hills touched by pink clouds of dawn softened avista of creeping industrialization and real estate development in the shockof recession. Here the Albatross network included environmentalists,
journalists, scientists and more Shugendo practitioners, one of them also amodern artist. Preparing and serving a welcome dinner of fresh seafood
himself, our host Deguchi-san caused table talk on animism to explode inlaughter by declaring that he, too, was kami. The "joke" was sound Shinto
however. Kami are not only emanations of nature, founding divinities andancestral spirits but also living persons bringing a breath of spiritual power
no less to faith and scholarship than to the dinner table and the gallery
displaying Deguchi-san’s fine potter’s art in the next room.
This hospitable theology met us in action down the length of theKodo. In Tanabe, it is preserving the unique coastal eco-system of Tenjinzaki,
700 ha. -watershed enclosing a bay teeming with marine life in untypicallywarm waters credited to the yearly Black Current. It is also disseminating
the vision of one Minakata Kumagusu from a hilltop museum in his name,with a roof deck view sweeping from Tanabe Bay to the layered blue velvet

silhouettes of the Kumano mountains and to the east, a perfect metaphor forthe life of a pioneering naturalist born at the eve of the Meiji Restoration.
Besides folklore, astronomy, archaeology and anthropology, theholistic Kumagusu's main field, botany, took him to study at the Tokyo
University and Ann Arbor in Michigan in his early twenties, on to extended
research in London’s British Museum. Back in Wakayama at 34, he plunged
into "the treasure chest of wildlife in the Kumano mountains," studying
fungi, lichen and other flower-less plants. This earned him a global
reputation but plunged him into historical controversy.
When the Meiji government's sword of imperial mythology cleaved
Shinto shrines and Buddhist temples organically bonded for centuries, italso combined Shinto shrines to administer a now official state religion from
Tokyo. This struck at the heart of tribal centers of worship inside dense
forests, alarming Kumagusu with prospects of deforestation. Leading anationwide protest campaign threw him briefly into prison (there hediscovered a new fungus on the walls) and saved a few forest shrines. But
despite a succeeding invitation to lecture on fungi to a curious Emperor
Hirohito, nothing could stop a historical tide that marginalized a Japanese
Goethe’s vision until its late 20th century revival by ecologists andfolklorists.
Links of folklore, faith and nature revealed more ancient traffic
between the Kodo, Asia and the Pacific as we traveled on. One of these was
the legendary Jofuku mentioned in Han Dynasty records as an emissary of
the Qin emperor, sent to search for the "elixir of life" in Kumano's forests in
200 B.C.. Archaeological evidence of pottery-making coastal tribes inJapan's Yayoi Era supports oral tradition that Jofuku did not return to atyrannical emperor’s court, instead settling in Kumano where he taught
medicine, agriculture and paper-making.
On a coastline to which the Black Current brought not only foreignboats but also whales come to winter and spawn. Other archaeologicalfindings dating Japan's whaling tradition to 200 BC give credence to more
lore that it was also Jofuku who introduced whaling to the tribes of the Kii
Peninsula. It is still practiced in the old whaling center of Taiji south of
Tanabe, if on a much smaller scale since a world moratorium on capturing
mink and sperm whales in 1988, much priced by the Japanese piscovegetarian diet that owes much to centuries of Buddhist influence.
Albatross’ vision of Japan’s Austronesian roots shared with Nanpo
and the rest of the Pacific also receives confirmation in Kumano - in
Polynesian words and melodies found in the Kii Peninsula’s festival songs
and distinct Pacific influence on the shapes and decorations of boats
celebrated in the oldest extant paintings of the whale hunt in Japan. Thiscross-pollination cut a wider swathe of time and geography.

Inside a wooden shed on the grounds of Shingu’s Fudara-ku shrine, amain way station of the ascent to Nachi Seigantoji, is a replica of the ancient
funeral boat on which aged Shugendo monks were once sent out to sea totheir reward in the Buddha’s Pure Land. Kannon Bosatsu is also believed tohave come to Kumano by sea from her home in “Fudara-ku,” the Japanesename for Potala, the Dalai Lama’s palace in Tibet, transformed by time anddistance to a literal heaven.
That the way to the heavenly mountain is through the ocean is avariation on a very old Austronesian theme - death as a return to the originof life in the waters. Also evidenced in the funereal practices of Hinduismon the Indian subcontinent, the spread of this belief invites further
discovery. Funeral artifacts found in the Philippines from that time called“prehistory,” for instance, indicate that our ancestors either set the deadadrift on coastlines and riverbanks like the Hindus, or else buried them ingraves facing the open sea. The latter is still practiced in the archipelago’s
farthest pre-Christian reaches in Sulu.
There is much to learn from the Kumano Kodo and the ancient reality
to which it linked the wide world to Japan’s oldest pilgrimage route leading
inwards to Yoshino, Ise, Nara, Kyoto, Osaka, Chichibu and beyond. If Jizo
deities in red bibs down its length are tender protectors of children into thenext life and the ubiquitous shime-nawa a symbol of the unity of earth, fire,
earth and water, a sense of life inter-linked approaches the awesome ingiant statues of the whale in Taiji and "the spirit of the ayu fish," a chubby
human mother, on the road to Yoshino. Yearly rituals of thanksgiving andapology for taking their life to feed the human community open deep layersof a psyche still drawing life from ancient memory of a sacred unity ofexistence transcending time, space and species.
Lifelong rites of passage celebrated to this day by Shinto families
home to this memory, polished to a high sheen with the passing of time andthe gradual birthing of the variant called “shrine Shinto” from the matrix oftribal Shinto. Among its shrines, some have been selected taisha, shrines fora special purpose. In Kumano, three of these taisha, collectively named
Kumano Sanzan, have been the main objects of pilgrimage by rich and poor
since the Heian Period in the 8th to the 10th century. Who is to say the kami
no longer respond to human need on the late 20th century Kumano Kodo?
Because the Albatross network did not have enough time to workout all travel arrangements in detail before our journey began, Miyamotosan and I arrived in Shingu with only the name of a ryokan, an inn, for thenight. Without the names of contact persons, we became the objects of aseries of happy coincidences. The first came with Katsuya Maeoka, anofficial of the City Tourist Bureau who, out of curiosity, joined the official
guide assigned to meet us at the last-minute. Listening to our tales ofanimism on the road traversed, he smiled and said with quiet pride that he
was a Shinto votary himself. Quickly he dropped a plan to show us thedelights of natural landscape, walking us to over the Hayatama Taisha
instead.
Guiding us on the inner state in which one must cross its welcoming
bridge and entrance arch called torii, approving my familiarity with thewater cleansing ritual common to Shinto and Filipino animism, Maeokasan’s next impulse was to request a purification ceremony for two strangers.
Finally I would receive the deep reverberation of the taeko drum that had
beckoned mutely at the Osaka Museum of Ethnology, the shrines andtemples of Kyoto, a wayside shrine in Okinawa. Offering a sprig of thesacred bush called sakaki and a strand of gohei at the altar then sipping sweet
shrine sake from the hand of a lovely shrine maiden, a miko, ritual learningthat had begun in Nachi Seigantoji, the taisha for healing, was completed in
Hayatama, the taisha for the forgiveness of past transgressions.
At the time still innocent of these theological underpinnings, myown received Christianity suggested the meaning of a moving moment as it
flowed into another happy coincidence. That bright Sunday morning in lateNovember also happened to be a late celebration of Children’s Day at the
Hayatama Taisha. We were next receiving a blessing out of time with rowsof beautiful Japanese children. “Unless ye become like little children, ye
shall not enter the kingdom of heaven,” Biblical words became the bass
notes of an ecumenical thought - perhaps Kannon Bosatsu herself was reallylooking kindly on a visit to Kumano by a stranger now feeling like a childwelcomed home.
Gaps between reason and intuition, faith and logic dissolve inexperience. How does it happen, I wondered as we traveled on, that saka
which is ‘slope’ in Japanese, means both ‘to climb to a higher elevation’ and‘farming’ in Tagalog? Is their kumo, meaning ‘hidden,’ related to our own
kumot meaning blanket? Does inaka, their word for ‘countryside’ share aphilosophical root with ina, Tagalog for ‘mother’? Why does saya, Japanesefor scabbard, mean ‘skirt’ in Tagalog? And how did the all-important
Japanese kami for ‘god’ or ‘spirit’ become the pronoun ‘we’ in thePhilippines?
The sense of homecoming deepened as the Shugendo monk Tateishi
Kousho stood on a precarious ledge high on the Kumano Kodo, blowing akunchi trumpet, a giant conch shell once under the Philippine Sea, to notify
the kami of our arrival in tambuli fashion. This was followed by chanting"AUMMM" as long as breaths could hold. Lungs ventilated and limbering
exercises done, we chanted our way to a daylong taste of Shugendo training
in trans-border and trans-specie consciousness. It led to clear pools,
slippery silica-coated flats, deer tracks in river sand, an impressive variety

of ferns and lichens, basalt cliffs and volcanic rocks of all shapes and sizes.
With or without a path, we tiptoed and jumped, slid down, heaved up totaki upon taki, nine in all, through gorges and gullies brimming with flaming
maples, golden oaks, fragrant pines and cedars under a radiant sky.
Treks like this are their own reason for being, exhilarating beyond
words - if sobered by stories of worsening floods and 40 tons of old cars
disposed by modern ignorance down Kumano’s cliff sides, picked up andairlifted by Albatross and Shugendo volunteers from this patch of forest attheir own expense last summer. Years of spiritual search that have taken
Kousho-san to India and Bali have taken him back to Japan's own sacred
mountains with an exuberant pioneering will.
Around a village shrine flying Seigantoji’s rainbow pennant in
Higashi Muro-Gun, this modern monk plants food crops with a new
spiritual community “beyond monks.” Together they break the silence ofdawn chanting “Nami yama no kami sama” to bronze bells jingling and taeko
thumping loud enough to wake the dead. In the evening, they gather
around a hearth fire dug into earth in the way of the ancients, cooking food
while warming a new global vision. Kousho-san has already taken an
American Indian shaman to this hearth and is eager to revive the traditionalfire-walking ceremony such as tribal Shinto once practiced with Asia andthe Pacific.
In the continuity of life that is the Kumano Kodo’s greatest gift, thekarasu, the crow, still hovers over its forests in the dignity of ancient
memory. Legend goes that it was a magical three-legged crow that led
Jimmu Tenno, the first emperor, from Kumano to the fertile plains of
Yamato, the future heartland of the Japanese Empire in Nara. What would
the original tenno say, I wondered, about times that reduce the karasu to ascavenger in deforested cities led by the new imperial capital of Tokyo?
What lamentations would his court unleash at the present state of themighty Totsugawa linking Nara to its mythic origins all the way to the
Pacific? The drying of its riverbed by entire kilometers began withdamming for electrification at the price of fallen forests in the 50s,
exacerbated now by commercial tree-felling progressively drying alegendary watershed year after year.
How fitting that imperial Japan’s mythic point of origin is today a
hidden source of renewal. A mountain-fold away from Kousho-san’s shrine
is the Forest Conservation Society in Kumanogawa-cho. Here Prof. Toyota
Sakamoto and Keiko Matsumoto campaign for the preservation of
Kumano’s forests as they train Asian students for reforestation beyond
national borders. Pine saplings from civic supporters are growing at thiswriting, to be planted on Nepal’s denuded slopes in the spring. The kami

willing, it may next be bamboo groves to prevent yearly flooding around
Banahaw.
Up the steep ascent to the Kumano Sanzan’s third taisha, the Hongu
Grand Shrine, down to its original site beside a shrunken Totsugawa,
Sakamoto Sensei reflected on the syllable “do” in Kodo. It is the Chinese“tao,” “the way without a way,” he said, as we approached the eloquence ofempty space where the original taisha dedicated to wishes for the future
once stood. “Teaism is Taoism in disguise,” came an echo from Okakura
Tenshin as a new page flipped open in a living ‘Book of Tea.’
Memories of the vanished trees and wildlife of a youth spentroaming thickly forested slopes accompanied our slow drive through thebreathtaking loveliness of yellow carpets, lilac patches, orange and crimson
slopes in the full glory of autumn at the border of Kumano and Yoshino.
This, said Sakamoto Sensei, is where 60% of Omine’s original forests still
stand. The rest have succumbed to “progress” and the massive tree-fellingfor nationwide rebuilding after Japan’s imperial war. In their place now aremono-cultured pines and cypresses that, while lovely, have meant
extinction for indigenous wildlife in an ecosystem with intricate laws thatwait to be learned and relearned even as the new threat of acid rain begins
to creep into Omine.
Much must be remembered. But from Omine’s highest point Kimpusen, the golden peak, on Mt. Tamaki - a wide vista had revealed asmuch danger as hope. In kami human and divine met down the Kumano
Kodo - patiently protecting the waters of Tanabe, honoring tradition in Taiji
and Shingu, keeping rich faith in Nachi, rekindling primal fire in Higashi
Muro-Gun, planting saplings from Kumanogawa-cho, chanting under the
thousand year-old native trees serving as columns for Kimpusen-ji,
Shugendo’s high temple in Yoshino - is an enduring strength that can move
mountains. Arms outstretched to a wider world, it can preserve the homeof spirit in nature and the forgetful cities of urban man on a global kodo ofrenewal from sacred bedrock but only if enough people remember.

REPORT ON ALFP, 1998
Janadas Devan
ALFP 1998 was highly successful. Intellectually, it was stimulating; socially,
it was instructive; personally, it was one of the happiest experiences in mylife.
The credit for all this is due, chiefly, to the courtesy, care andkindness of all those involved on the Japanese side of the programme. I
might mention, in particular, Mr. Tatsuya Tanami, Mr. Isamu Maruyama
and Ms Naoko Shimamura from the International House of Japan; and Ms
Mariko Oka-Fukuroi and Ms Maho Sato from Japan Foundation. Ms Taeko
Kurokawa, the Rapporteur in the programme, was a tremendous pillar of
support. She, like the others, became a friend. The fellows gelled as a groupin no small part because the Japanese participants in the programme wereexcellent facilitators.
The other reason why the programme was successful was thefellows involved. Our year saw an interesting collection of specialties andpersonalities. For the most part, we got along. More importantly, we
stimulated each other. Our difference, when they surfaced, were productive;
and our agreements, when they occurred, were not merely confirmatory of
our respective prejudices. In this way, we learned from each other. I
personally learnt a great deal from each of my fellow fellows. Professors
Diana Wong and Lui Xin, both anthropologists, brought an informed rigor
to our discussions. Mr. Endo Suanda and Ms Sylvia Mayuga, the first an
artist of exceptional talent and the other an environmental activist of aninteresting variety, reminded us of recognition not always available in theacademy. And Professor Suwanna Satha-anand, a philosopher, infused our
discussions with a sense of values, all the more profound because she did so
not merely by articulating them but by her very being. I regard it as a strokeof extraordinary good fortune that I had the opportunity to meet thesepeople.
The final reason for the programme’s success was the distinguishedacademics we met. We had fruitful discussions with so many, I cannot
possibly name them all. I’m grateful in particular to Dr. Isami Takeda ofDokkyo University for his personal kindness; to Professor Ryosei Kokubunof Keio University for speaking to me at such length; to Professor Hisashi
Nakamura of Ryukoku University and Professor Mitsuo Nakamura of
Chiba University and Professor Hisako Nakamura of Bunkyo University,
who opened their hearts and their homes to us; and to Professor Kiichi
Fujiwara of Tokyo University, from whom I learnt so much about Japan, theworld and my own region. I’m grateful to all these and others for theircourtesy and generosity.

Seminars
The seminars I-House organised were useful. In addition to theseminars, which were scheduled prior to our arrival, Mr. Tanami
arranged additional seminars for the fellows to satisfy ourparticular interests. Beside these formal seminars, the fellows also
met in private sessions among themselves -- in the seminar room;
over breakfast, lunch and dinner; in trains, busses and taxis; andon one memorable occasion, in the garden, swatting bugs as wellas ideas).
The formal seminars introduced us to the concerns and researchinterests of Japanese scholars and activists; and the private seminars
introduced us to each other, and were useful in clarifying and refining ourown concerns and interests. In these private sessions, we also decided thetheme of our public seminar, where we presented papers.
It is difficult to specify which was more useful – the formal seminars
or our private sessions – but in a way they had contradictory purposes. I
don’t intend the following remarks as a criticism of the programme, butthese contradiction purposes reflect a contradiction in the programme itself.
Let me explain.
On the one hand, the programme aims to bring together “third
track” fellows from Asia so they might exchange views and establish
networks among themselves. On the other hand, the programme also aims
to bring these Asian fellows in contact with Japanese intellectuals so they
can learn something about Japanese culture and society. These aims arelaudatory – it would be a pity if the programme sacrificed one for the other - but sometimes they clashed.
The first aim, in essence, was formulated to promote the researchinterests and concerns of the fellows themselves. The second aim, in practice
if not in intent, tended to promote the dissemination of information in aone-way process – from Japan to the rest of Asia.
As a result, sometimes but not always, I found myself oscillating
between the concerns of the fellows and the concerns of Japanese academics.
Sometimes we were engaged in a collaborative process of inquiry andexchange; and sometimes we were information gatherers, intellectual
tourists.
On one memorable occasion, the two aims of the programme came
together. This occurred during the retreat I-House organised in Itopeninsular, where the fellows spent two delightful days and nights with adistinguished group of Japanese scholars. It seems to me the programme
will benefit enormously if the rubric of that retreat was applied to theprogramme as a whole.
The retreat was highly beneficial primarily because all of us – theJapanese scholars as well as the fellows – came together on a common theme.
Information was exchanged, but it wasn’t a one-way street; views wereshared, but we didn’t do so as intellectual tourists, acting as though wewere each other’s native informants.
I recommend that in future the programme organises its seminars
around themes instead of individuals. Most of the seminars I attended in1998 involved the fellows listening to individual scholars, and then asking
them questions, all in the space of an hour or two. Often, these seminars
were little different from lectures.
If, instead, the seminars were organised around themes, and if a dayor so were devoted to each theme, then we might envisage the following
organisation. First, a group of Japanese scholars (say, three or four) will
distribute their papers in advance. Fellows will read these papers prior to
the seminar. Second, at the seminar itself, the Japanese scholars will present
summaries of their papers, followed by specifically designated fellows (say,one or two) responding formally to the papers. And three, the seminar will
open itself to general discussion.
To be useful, the themes chosen for these daylong or half-day
seminars should dovetail with the general interests of the fellows. In thisway, the formal seminars the programme organises, and the private
seminars the fellows hold among themselves, will feed into each other.
I understand that ALFP 1999 included a Japanese fellow among thegroup. This, I think, is an excellent idea. Notwithstanding the fact that the
fellows in my year learnt a great deal about Japan from the presentations ofJapanese scholars in formal seminars, I think we learnt as much, if not more,from our daily interactions with the staff of I-House and Japan Foundation,and Ms Kurokawa. Friendship, not the parceling out of information, is often
the best bridge between cultures.

Personal Project during the Two-month Seminar Period
Throughout my six months in Japan, and in particular during thetwo-month seminar period, I spent some time on my book project.
This project examines the articulation of race, gender and national
identity in the postcolonial state, focussing (but not exclusively)on the case of Singapore. I study the 'founding' narratives ofhistory in the postcolonial state: how these inscribe a variety ofauthorised identities; what interests of power they serve; how they
enable specific social and political formations within the state.
The project locates itself at the intersection of different registers. First,
it deploys certain contemporary theoretical insights in the fields ofphilosophical and literary studies to study non-literary texts in the
postcolonial state. Second, in investigating the present causes productive ofspecifically configured pasts, it describes a conjunction between narrativesof history and the 'context' of their constructions. Third, it analyses
particular state policies -- concerning, for instance, language policy or the
status of women -- with reference to the meta-narratives of the state or its
ideological self-image.
A key term in the study is "management". One of its central
concerns is the elaboration of the paradigms of economic or corporate
management and its protocols of rationality, to serve at once as the modeland chief beneficiary of what Michel Foucault has called the "pastoral"
function of the state: shaping individuality in a form, and submitting it to apattern, that produces, and validates, a certain form of power. Involved insuch an examination is an exploration of the relationship between the
structures of desire that impel political discourse and theories of governance,
and the structures that actuate the production (in general) of historical,
literary and philosophical texts. These structures inscribe an economy ofpower relations even as they invoke reason and aesthetic coherence as theirjustification.
I argue, in this context, that the 'aesthetic state' refers not just to astate of mind but is a principle of political value and authority informing thetechnologies of management which shape the material practices of thepolitical state to accomplish its pastoral function. Political discourse, in
producing and applying knowledge, appeals repeatedly to aesthetic
principles to mediate between knowledge and action. My working
hypothesis is that a certain conception of the 'aesthetic' informs the'founding' narratives of history in the postcolonial state. An aestheticallyconceived history, that is, serves to define the idealities of racial andnational 'identities' and to prescribe the modalities of political legitimacy.
The aesthetically invoked counters of race and nation -- properly speaking,catachrestical counters, metaphors that produce what they invoke -circulate in general political discourse to generate the legal norms deemed
essential in the establishment of a 'new' state, and to subject its citizens toprecisely that pattern of relations and values which best serve those norms.
During my months in Japan, I managed to revise one chapter in thisproject, and made a preliminary draft of another.

Project During Four Month Personal Research Programme
I spent much of my time in the additional four months I spent in Japan after
the conclusion of the collaborative period, talking to a great variety ofJapanese, in academia, business and government, on current affairs. These
discussions had more to do with my journalistic interests, as a leader writerof the Singapore Straits Times, than they did with my academic interests,
but it is impossible to draw a firm line between the two.
While I was in Japan, the global financial crisis of 1997/98 was its
height. It seemed to me that the crisis was such that the assumptions
governing research on Asian societies would have to change. Before July
1997, almost everyone had assumed that the “Asian 'Tigers” will continue toenjoy for the foreseeable future the growth rates they had enjoyed for morethan two decades. When I began my current book project three years ago, I
too had assumed this. The critical reading I had undertaken of the conceptof 'Asian Values', for example, was governed by the assumption that theideology of 'Asian Values' was supported and validated by the apparent
success of Asian economies. This assumption -- on the part of both thepromoters of 'Asian Values' as well as those, like myself, who criticised theconcept – was exploded by the crisis.
While in Japan, my main focus was to investigate the current
understanding among Japanese intellectual of post-War Asian history. For
better or worse, Japan -- by virtue of its economic power -- has exerted astrong influence on Asia's conception of itself. In the pre-Crisis period,
roughly from the late 70's to the early 90's, Japan's 'example' served as themodel of Asian economic development. My main interest was to ascertain
what impact Japan's 'example' would have in the immediate future.
Some of the issues I explored with the numerous people I met were:a). Did the economic crisis occasion a critical re-examination of the direction
Asian economies and societies took from the 1960's to the 1997? What was
the view among historians, political scientists and economists of that period-- a period that witnessed the doubling of Asia's share of the world economy.
b). What effects did the crisis have on Japan's conception of itself as an"Asian" nation? Did the crisis bring into doubt the concept of an "Asianmodel of development" -- in vogue barely a few years ago -- or did it
occasion a redefinition of that concept?
c). What effects did the crisis have on Japan's view of globalisation? That a
global economy exists is not in doubt; the proof of its existence wasnegatively available in the way the crisis ricocheted from country to country,
continent to continent. What was in doubt, however, was the existence of a
global society -- an affective moral community, stretching across nationalboundaries, and able to arrive at certain common recognition. Japan, as theworld's second largest economy, will inevitably wield a tremendous
influence in the creation of such a society. What was the current state ofthinking on such matters in Japan?

I spoke to an enormous number of people – my notes of
conversations indicate I spoke to about 67. Among them wereindividuals I had met in seminars and workshops held during thecollaborative period. In addition, I saw people in journalism,
think tanks, NGOs and universities; in political parties andgovernment; and in the private sector, including banks.
I should place on record here a fact that belies the popular
image of Japan in many foreign countries: As a practicing
journalist, I had a far easier time meeting people in Japan,
including in its government, than I have had in any other country.
Not a single person I asked to see declined to see me; not a single
person I called did return my call; not a single person I saw wasother than frank and open. To my amazement and delight, I foundJapan a journalist’s delight.
Conclusion
My memories of my stay in Japan will always be among my most treasured
memories. Among the many, two in particular have recurred to me often
since I left in March 1998. It is strange why these, and not the others, should
recur, but there is no accounting for such mysteries.
The first is of the last dinner the fellows had among themselves atthe end of the collaborative period, together with Naoko and Taeko, in thelatter’s home. It was a sad occasion. We knew that it would be the lastoccasion we would all be together.
The second is of the stone garden in Ryoan-ji in Kyoto. I visited it
first with my colleagues in the programme and latter with my wife andchild when they visited briefly. The garden held in repose a fascinating but
indifferent beauty. The abstract arrangement of rocks and pebbles seemed toscratch a gleam of light from the dark, cold, fathomless vastness of empty
space – but that light had nothing to do with our all too-human concerns.
This memory still amazes a troubled midnight.

Limits of Multiculturalism
Janadas Devan
There are three parts in this essay. In the first, I merely assert a thesis about
culture in general: namely, that every culture describes not an essence but acollection of potentials. In the second, I attempt to place the question ofmulticulturalism in Singapore in a larger global context. I do this byexamining in some depth a formulation that will, I think, have a great dealof influence in the coming decades: namely, Samuel Huntington's Clash of
Civilisations. In the third, I turn to a consideration of multiculturalism as
such, especially as it relates to Singapore. This part constitutes the heart ofwhat I'm trying to get at, namely, my doubt as to whether multiculturalism,
as an ideology, is an adequate response to multiculturalism, as a social fact.
I hasten to add that I do not mean to suggest at all that multiculturalism is afalse value.
Not in the least. What I'm trying to get at is thatmulticulturalism as an ideology may well be as bad as the disease it
attempts to cure, cultural chauvinism or exclusivity, unless multiculturalism
contains within itself recognition of something beyond culture. I will callthat something beyond culture, a radical secularism. If I were braver, I
would have called it truth.

I
Anyway, the first part of my presentation: The thesis that any culture, at any
one time, is but a collection of a variety of attributes; which means to say, no
one culture is ever true to itself, its so-called singular genius or essence.
Raymond Williams, the late British Marxist cultural historian and literary
critic, put it thus: every culture, he said, was a conglomeration of theresidual, the dominant, and the emergent. I think this is basically true, only I
think Williams' tripartite, Hegelian structure, though more adequate thanmost models of culture, is itself a simplification of a reality that is altogether
more confusing and in excess of any dialectic.

It is difficult to illustrate this, except empirically. I can do no better
here than refer to my own field, the European Renaissance. Consider justone aspect of this period, religious expression. If you look at Baroque art or
sculpture, you will conclude that people in this period were all in a state ofchronic emotional excitement about God: the figures wave their arms, roll
their eyes, swoon, their hands clutch palpitating hearts, they are
unconscious. Bernini's St. Teresa, for instance, is a recumbent figure, hereyes closed, her lips parted; a smiling angel hovers over her, about to pierce
her with a huge arrow; to all intents and purposes, religious ecstasy is
indistinguishable from sexual ecstasy. When we turn from art to music,
however, we get a completely different feel of Baroque sensibility. A figure
like Johann Sebastian Bach, for instance, is the opposite of a religious
sensibility run riot. One cannot listen to his St Matthew's Passion, forinstance, or his religious cantatas, and hear in them what we see in Bernini's
St. Teresa. Textbooks on the Baroque sensibility, of course, will point to theircommon concern with intricate detail. But in art, that concern with detail fed
excess; in a Bach fugue, on the other hand, or in polyphonic music ingeneral, intricacy was the servant of order. You never forget, when listening
to a Bach fugue, that every thread, every figure, in the music, no matter how
far it strays, or threatens to stray, always comes back home. There is nosuch thing as a cadenza in Bach, which breaks the bounds of what is always
a well-tempered scale of emotions.
The question is which art form best defines 16th and 17th century
religious sensibility? What relation does either art form have with the actual
religious experience of those who lived through it? Can one, in fact,
construct a common genealogy for the art and music of the period, andrelate both to the religious experience of, at one extreme, the contemplativeof the period, like the profoundly ascetic St John of the Cross, and at theother, the common folks? And to press the matter a little further: can one
relate, structurally or analogically, the religious sensibility with the socialand economic facts, the murderous religious wars, or the beginnings ofmodern science in the founding of institutions like the Royal Society, or the
explorations of the New World?
It seems to me that the answer to each of these questions has to be aqualified no. Every period exhibits, not a synthesis, but a collection ofdramatic opposites and incompatibles. Our own period is at once the age ofthe silicon chip, space exploration, the genome project, as well as theubiquitous hamburger, astrology and Diana, the Princess of Wales. All thecharacteristics of human nature exist at all times in every culture.
Undoubtedly, for a number of reasons -- ideological, economic, political, or
purely technical -- some of these characteristics find themselves actualised

or emphasised at some periods, while others remain in abeyance or
unemphasised. I am by no means claiming that all historical generalisationsof a period, like those one finds in the text books on the Renaissance, or the
deeper structures that someone like Cangulheim or Foucault detail, areintrinsically false. Obviously, they aren't. What I would claim is that (a)these generalisations are abstractions, sometimes helpful, sometimes not;and (b) that these generalisations are the product of present causes: thehistory of any period or of any culture, is almost invariably the product ofpresent concerns which are themselves abstractions from an altogether
confusing present reality.
To illustrate the second, let's turn to something closer in time andspace, and of relevance to us -- explanations for the East Asian “economic
miracle”. It is astonishing to remark that what is now taken to be a truism -namely, that this miracle can be traced to certain cultural traits that werealways present -- would have struck almost everyone, no more than a few
decades ago, as an absurdity. Max Weber, at the turn of the century, thoughtthat Confucianism lacked the dynamism of Protestantism. His successors in
mid-century held that a certain number of culturally-specific social andpsychological qualities had to obtain in societies before modernisation was
possible. If one had taken a look at some of those qualities in the 1960s -radical individualism, for one, the personal achievement motive, for another-- one might well have concluded that East Asian societies had no businesssucceeding. But succeed, they did.
The point here is not that Weber was wrong and Kishor Mahbubani
is right. The point is to situate a doubt about cultural explanations, ingeneral; and to suggest, in particular, that cultural explanations of complex
historical processes may be defined as an interested selection from anotherwise unmanageable multiplicity of factors, thus reducing thatmultiplicity to a semblance of unity. If so, cultural explanations of history
have at best an uncertain relation to reality, and at worst, a thoroughly
falsifying one. Asian values, as much as the Protestant work ethic, may well
be formulations that announce, at a particular time and place, not peculiarly
revealing readings of history, but rather the self-valuation of particularelites.

II
Having said this, and revealing to you my own view regarding cultural
explanations, I will move on to the second part of my presentation: areading of Huntington's thesis, and in conjunction with that reading, aplacement of the cultural politics of Singapore in the global context.
This juxtaposition of Huntington and Singapore is not as forced as it
appears. Huntington's book mentions Mr. Lee Kuan Yew, the Senior
Minister, more often than it does almost any other contemporary politicalfigure. The Senior Minister gets 10 entries in the book's index. By contrast,
Mr. Lee Teng Hui appears four times, Pak Suharto three, and Dr. Mahathir
four. Other distinguished Singaporean figures, like diplomats Tommy Koh
and Kishore Mahbubani, also make appearances in the book – Mr.

Mahbubani three times, as many occasions as the next name in the index,
Mao Zedong, the Great Helmsman himself.
All this prominence is of course most pleasing to Singaporeans, but
it is astonishing nevertheless. Why should a country of no more than three
million elicit such avid interest?
Strangely enough, not only does Huntington have Mr. Lee much inhis mind, Mr. Lee too has Huntington much in his. When I wrote a review
of The Clash of Civilisations for a Singaporean newspaper in 1997, I was
scooped by, of all people, the Senior Minister himself. Mr. Lee had actuallycommended Huntington's thesis at an election rally no less; and he didn't
just mention it in passing; he actually discussed the book at some length.
Now, the reason why Lee commended Huntington was that he had
praised Singapore's system of "Shared Values" in his book. "Shared Values",of course, refers to the state-endorsed ideology that declares the basic valuesof Singaporeans to be: (1) Nation before ethnic community and society
above self; (2) Family as the basic unit of society; (3) Community support for
the individual; (4) Consensus instead of contention; and (5) Racial andReligious Harmony. As Huntington notes, these “Shared Values” weremeant to emphasise that Singapore was in crucial respects an Asian society.
As the government document announcing the Shared Values ofSingaporeans explained: "Singaporeans are not Americans or Anglo-Saxons,though we may speak English and wear Western dress. If over the longterm Singaporeans became indistinguishable from Americans, British orAustralians, or worse became a poor imitation of them, we will lose ouredge over these Western societies," an edge "which enables us to hold ourown internationally."
Singapore, that is, has to remain Asian for competitive economic
advantage. The logic is impeccable: Singapore fears becoming like America,
not because it fears losing its Asian soul, but because becoming like America
will weaken its ability to compete successfully in the global market, becomea full-blown developed economy, and thereby become like America.
Singapore, in other words, has to remain Asian in order to become Western.
Obviously baffled by this logic, Huntington, despite his admirationfor Singapore, is driven to cite the tiny island-state as a prime example of
why a clash of civilisations -- between the Sinic and the Western in thisinstance -- is inevitable. Lee figures so prominently in the book, not only
because Huntington admires him, but because Lee, more articulately thanany other Asian political figure, has denied the universality of somethingcalled western values, and insisted forcefully that something else called
Asian values informs the logic of Asian modernity.
Singapore, then, is a strange case -- at once evidence of a threat towestern universalism as well as reassuringly familiar. The peculiar position

Singapore occupies in the imaginary of someone like Huntington -"goodness gracious," you can almost hear him say, "this lot want to become
more like us in order to remain more like themselves" -- this curious but
understandable reaction makes Singapore a good test case for asking: What
precisely is at stake in believing that a clash of civilisation is inevitable?
What is being obfuscated, what possibilities are being denied in asserting
the priority of cultural identities or civilisational affinities over, say, class orpolitical identities? At the similarity between Lee (and the Singaporeanestablishment in general) and Huntington (and the American right ingeneral) is a re-formulation of political choices as cultural choices, and the
fashioning of those cultural choices in ways that best support the local
manifestations of what is, for better or worse, a single global economic
system. Indeed, "Asian values" in Singapore is a construct that achieves thesame ideological effects as Huntington's own insistence on the JudeoChristian tradition as the informing genius of Western civilisation. The
effects of both ideological constructs are so similar that it is difficult to tellwhether we are witnessing a Westernisation of Oriental values or an
Orientalisation of Western values, or what either of these categories -Western or Oriental -- might mean. In both instances we find an attempt tolegitimize strikingly similar political and economic agendas by locating theirsource in what is offered as the essential identity of a culture or civilisation.
The question is this: given the remarkable similarities of political agendas,
why then is there an insistence on cultural difference, differences so
insistent that they may well result in clashes? Why must the same bedistinguished as threateningly different?
I must confess at once that I don't really have a clear answer to thisquestion. In what follows I will try merely to establish why the question
forces itself upon us. If for no other reason than to establish that the very
possibility of asking the question situates a doubt as to the rationality of the
distinctions we are being offered -- east and west, Asian modernity andwestern modernity, and so on. I will first highlight the salient points in
Huntington's argument of especial relevance to Asia, or more specifically
East Asia. I will then discuss briefly the cultural politics of contemporary
Singapore. And I will finally attempt a halting answer to the question: Why
must the same be different?
First, Huntington's thesis: It seems to me that the first thing that
ought to be noted about it is its rhetorical power, its sheer preformative
force. Clash of Civilisations -- what can be more arresting as a commanding
metaphor for a totalising vision of global politics? One gets a sense, reading
the book, of a species of intelligence whose insights unfold with themachine-like inevitability of figures of speech.

We normally associate such minds with the so-called softer
disciplines, like literary or cultural studies, and not with realpolitik -- aprejudice that is a little surprising, given the disastrous role played by
figures like "Deutschland Uber Alles" or "Iron Curtain" or "Falling
Dominoes" or "Great Leap Forward" in the politics of the past half-century.
This is not to imply, of course, that Huntington's formulation is
without intellectual content whatsoever because of its rhetoricity. But it
does mean that its capacity to convince is not wholly dependent on
empirical evidence. It is a formulation that aims to determine, a priori, ourperception of events. Huntington himself claims that his aim in offering thefigure is to produce a shift in perceptions somewhat along the lines of theparadigmatic shifts that occasionally take place in the sciences. As ludicrous
as this boast might seem, we ought to take the boast seriously.
For it is its very freedom from empiricity which explains in part theextraordinary influence the thesis has had. For one thing, when compared
to Francis Fukuyama's altogether cheerful and larky "end of history" -- that
other equally rhetorical, equally figural summation of contemporary history-- Huntington's "clash of civilisation" possesses a certain impressively dark
and despairing realism. In any contest between a cheerful theory of humanreality and a cheerless one, the latter almost invariably will prove to be themore influential. The book's thesis, or figure, also catches the news – theBalkans, ethnic conflicts in the former Soviet Bloc, Hindu-Moslem conflicts
in the Indian subcontinent, the growing paranoia in the US about China -which it then amplifies. Whether the confidence with which Huntington
amplifies the figure is related to all the news or only some of it, remains
uncertain, but it is instructive to trace his own growing confidence in the
figure.
When he first offered the figure in an article in 1993, just a couple ofyears after the collapse of the Soviet Union, it came somewhat humbly
dressed with a question mark -- "The Clash of Civilisations?” It waspossible to argue in 1993 that Huntington was merely warning of thepossibility of a clash and not recommending it. Four years later the question
mark disappears from the book's title. Huntington makes it plain he is nolonger merely advancing a possibility but a description of reality and not
merely sounding a warning but a call to action. He is also not merely
urging the West to be realistic in advancing the universality of its values but
urging that it reaffirms its identity, its uniqueness, and unite "to renew andpreserve it against challenges from non-Western societies".

In four years, the figure has grown great with ambition; like
George Kennan's article of 1947 calling for the containment of theSoviet Union, it now aims at affecting policy. And it is as
proposed policy that I think it ought to be considered -- whichmeans to say we have to take seriously not only its cognitive
status as a description of reality, but also its status as aperformative act, its power to achieve what it states. The question-- what sort of world does Huntington describe? -- is inseparablefrom the question -- what sort of world does he want?
On the face of it, it is a rather reasonable world: one mighteven be tempted to say that there is in Huntington a certain wise
generosity regarding the conditions that would best ensure world
peace. Huntington believes that clashes of civilisations -- inparticular, "the conflicts generated by western universalism,
Muslim militancy and Chinese assertion" -- "are the greatest
threat to world peace." Thus, only "an international order basedon civilisations" and mutual respect among them will protect us
from a world war.
The United States' ability to underwrite a global order, healso argues, will become increasingly untenable as the relative
economic, military and cultural power of the West declines. The
world beyond 2020 will look like the world of the 15th century,
before the rise of colonialism and the hegemony of the West.
Relations among nations sharing the same cultural values will be
more intense than relations between nations from different
civilisations. Also, relations between civilisations will vary fromless to more conflictual patterns, depending on their sharedhistories and values -- less conflictual, in the case of the West and
Latin America, and more conflictual, in the case of, say, Sinic andHindu or Sinic and the West. Peace will depend on managing andameliorating the more intense conflictual patterns among
civilisations.
Huntington's prudent generosity regarding international
relations, however, turns sour when he considers the position of
the West itself. Like Oswald Spengler almost a century ago,
Huntington is haunted by a sense of the West as a declining
civilisation.
It may well be. But not only does Huntington bemoan the"moral decline, cultural suicide and political disunity" of the West-- in terms remarkably similar to Mr. Lee's, I might add -- hebemoans also the racial and cultural diversity of the United States.
A multicultural, "multicivilisational US," he says, "will not be theUS, it will be the UN." Huntington is actually very explicit about
this point: he says clearly, Western civilisation must assert itself
within the US, or its decline will be accelerated.
Here is one typical passage: "The futures of the UnitedStates and of the West," he says "depend upon Americans
reaffirming their commitment to Western civilisation.
Domestically this means rejecting the divisive siren calls ofmulticulturalism. Internationally it means rejecting the elusive
and illusory calls to identify the United States with Asia".
In less polite language, this means that the barbarians
beyond the city walls have to be combated because the barbarians
are already squatting within the walls. Huntington's paradigm of a
global clash of civilisations is in fact motivated and accentuatedby a vision of the US riven by similar conflicts within its borders.
His willingness to jettison the universalist claims of westernculture is not unrelated to the recognition that those universalist
claims, which must of necessity be inclusive, can be at odds withthe desired racial composition of the United States.
It follows too that an unwillingness to work a"multicivilisational" United States must result in an unwillingness
to work a "multicivilisational" foreign policy. Thus, therecommendation for the United States to reassert the primacy ofthe Western alliance -- against, among other things, "the elusive
and illusory calls to identify the US with Asia". Given thesepolicy recommendations -- domestically, a uni-cultural UnitedStates, and internationally, a US-European military and economic
combine -- it is fair to ask: is the policy the logical corollary of aworld divided into nine self-enclosed civilisations impossibly atodds with one another; or does the world have to appear sotreacherously impossible for the sake of the policy? Must theWest place itself in purdah because it has to or because it wants
to?
Let's consider one aspect of this seemingly impossible
world by way of an answer. Huntington's observes that many

countries in Asia are at present re-ethnicising themselves. He is
not wrong in this regard. Modernisation, indeed, has been delinked from westernisation, at least rhetorically. Those who once
spoke of modernising their cultures now speak of signifying
modernity or Hinduising it or Islamising it.
The West, in other words, is no longer seen as the only
model of modernity. Because modernisation does not equal
westernisation, and because non-western countries will become
increasingly influential, definitions of modernity will proliferate.
The insistence on "Asian Values" in countries as various as
Malaysia and Singapore is an indication that the project ofmodernity can in fact be founded on cultures quite distinct fromthe West, contrary to what Weber, Durkheim and their followers
believed.
This development should not in itself be surprising. The
genesis of an idea has never determined, in every respect, thedevelopment of that idea. The end is never the same as the
beginning. Mao Zedong proved that with Marxism; and figures
as various as Deng Xiaoping, Mahathir Mohammad (till he wentbonkers over George Soros) and Mr. Lee has proven the samewith Capitalism.
What is at issue is whether the proliferation of modernity
must necessarily give rise to a clash of civilisations. Huntington
believes it will, inevitably, and thinks therefore that the only
certain basis for world peace is a sullen withdrawal of nations into
their own civilisational boundaries and a careful policing of thefault lines along those boundaries. And to establish this model heeither ignores or slights some not altogether insignificant factorsthat tell another possible tale.
Firstly, popular culture, which he dismisses as anirrelevance. "Somewhere in the Middle East," he says, "a halfdozen young men could well be dressed in jeans, drinking Coke,listening to rap, and, between their bows to Mecca, putting
together a bomb to blow up an American airliner." Other than its
gratuitous viciousness, what this representation reveals is his

ignorance of the extent to which popular culture today is nolonger purely Western in origin.
In Asia at any rate, sushi bars and fast food joints, theJapanese fashion houses Hanae Mori and Issey Miyake, the'Cantonese-pop' of Hong Kong and the Malay serials of Malaysia,
are all instances of a vast and irreversible absorption of Asian
cultures by a devouring global culture. They are, if anything,evidence of the incredible capacity of contemporary capitalism to
reduce to a depthless surface any cultural form. We consume as
little of Japanese culture when we eat sushi as we do Italianculture when we eat pasta. We consume, rather, the commodified
artifacts of a global culture that offers us, indifferently, now thisand now that. If Hanae Mori brings back the kimono, it will be ina form so reduced as to be as popular in Buenos Aires and New
Delhi as in Tokyo or San Francisco. It won't be the Japanesekimono any longer.
And popular culture does not come by itself. What ishappening in the realm of popular culture has already happened
far more intensely in the realms of science, economics andtechnology. Huntington ignores these factors altogether, or
dismisses them as aspects of what he calls an elitist "Davos
culture" -- after the annual gathering of high-level government,
corporate and academic figures in Davos, Switzerland. Is theculture shaped by the global economy and technology reallyrestricted to 1% of the world's population outside the West, as
Huntington claims?
China invented printing in the eighth century and themovable type in the eleventh, but both inventions did not reachthe West till the fifteenth. By contrast, new technology, not only
products but also processes, courses through the world today in amatter of years, if not months. Europe took centuries toindustrialise, but Japan telescoped the same process into half acentury, and the newly industrialised economies of East Asia intoa few decades.
What is extraordinary about late capitalism is not only theremarkable explosion of knowledge and techniques, but also theirremarkable portability, their spread, their capacity to reduce to asimilar set of operations the lives of billions of people who havenever met each other. A Ford motor plant in Beijing makes thesame demands on Chinese workers as a plant in Detroit does on
American workers. Mechanical engineering, cybernetics,
aeronautics or quantum mechanics do not acquire Chinese airs in
China or Indian features in India -- if they did, neither country
would be able to explode H-bombs or make airplanes. The global
economy, as well as science and technology have indeed erased toan astonishing degree the specificity of different cultures, thelocal.
Why, then, against this globalisation of technology and thepractices that go along with it, is there a process of reethnicisation. Huntington is not wrong to assert that this process
has in fact become more pronounced in some Asian states inrecent years. Our test case, Singapore itself, to which I will now
turn, is evidence of that process.
Why would a country that now has a higher per capita
income than Great Britain, where English is spoken extensively, acountry that actually feels more westernised that say Taiwan orSouth Korea, why would such a country insist on the Asianness of
its modernity? And equally to the point, why would someone like
Huntington acquiesce to such a characterisation as altogether
obvious, evidence indeed of a law of modernity: its ability to
proliferate definitions of itself, to break with its own modal origin,and thus situate a challenge to that origin.
Significantly, the ideological and economic challenge
posed by Singapore in particular, and East Asia in general, to thehegemony of the West, has been represented, in both America andAsia, for not entirely incompatible reasons, as a conflict within
capitalism.
Both parties seem to agree that a cultural division between,
and not a political division within, each of its contrasting
manifestations now rive global capitalism across the Pacific
Ocean. Thus, for the “Singapore School” of ideologues, thedivision that matters is between a communitarian East and anindividualist West. Thus, for figures as various as Huntington
and William Safire, the division that matters is between an
Eastern “authoritarian capitalism” and a Western “liberalcapitalism".
The protagonists in this particular transoceanic cultural war,
we ought to note, have only recently discovered their dislike ofeach other, after having cooperated closely in the Cold War. The
distinction between "authoritarian" and “liberal" capitalism is lessan argument over the spoils of victory than an argument as towhat that victory means.
Consider, for instance, the great play that has been made inorgans like the Wall Street Journal of the fact that the economy ofSingapore, and of a good many other East Asian countries, isdominated by their governments. This, coupled with the politicalcontrols at the disposal of various Asian regimes, is supposed torender East Asian capitalist miracles demotic versions of true
capitalism. Leaving aside for a moment why capitalist systems
dominated by big government-linked enterprises should be any
worse (or better) than capitalist systems dominated by big private
conglomerates, the distinction is too pat for more immediate
reasons.
First, contrary to what is commonly believed, the active
participation of governments in market economies is not exactly
an East Asian invention. Bismarck's Germany got there first
before Meiji Japan. Indeed, if there is any one particular
ideological inspiration for the form of capitalism that Singapore
practices, it comes from the West: namely, that model of themixed economy that Fabians of Britain's Labor Party successfully
exported to many former British colonies. (Singapore's rulingparty even produced a manifesto in the 1970s that christened thesystem of managed capitalism they had instituted, "Socialism that
Works" -- in contrast, presumably, to the version in Harold
Wilson's Britain that didn't.)
Second, though the extent of public sector participation in
Singapore's economy might well shock free-market orthodoxies
in the US, what has powered Singapore's transformation is notindigenous but foreign capital -- to be exact, multinational capital,much of it from the US. If authoritarian capitalism isdramatically different from liberal capitalism, admirers of thelatter ought to explain why so many Fortune 500 companies havefound the miracle economies of East Asia such salubrious
destinations. To dismiss the relationship as purely exploitative -greedy American corporations exploiting cheap labor; or ruthless
Eastern despotisms taking advantage of American gullibility -- isto miss the mutualities involved altogether.
This is the discomfiting truth that western critics of regimes
like Singapore's have considerable difficulty recognizing. It iseasy enough to dismiss as irrational a system that you findobjectionable; but if the objectionable system comes tricked out
with all the features of a rationality of which you approve, you arethen faced with the disagreeable task of extricating yourself froma judgment that is not also a self-condemnation. Singapore is an
economic powerhouse precisely because its political, social andlegal institutions have been shaped in ways to ensure its
assimilation into a global economic system that emanates fromthe West. Contract law, for instance, the mother's milk ofinternational commerce, functions in Singapore in the same way it
does in the United States or Britain or the European Union.
Entities like Hewlett-Packard and Microsoft know that; theSingapore government knows they know; and all the cutting
things that liberal capitalists have said about authoritarian
capitalists have not prevented JP Morgan from inviting Mr. Lee tosit on its board of advisors. Also it did not prevent the Nixon
Center for Peace and Pragmatism from awarding Lee the"Architect of the New Century" prize, or the US Pacific fleet fromusing Singapore as a forward logistical base.
It is within this context, I believe -- the convergence of
global economic interests -- that the Singapore government's
enthusiasm for "Asian Values" should be understood. American
liberalism reads "Asian Values" as merely a challenge toliberalism's ideological sway, a threat to liberalism's sovereign
presence at the "end of history". In many respects, "Asian

Values" does constitute such a challenge; East Asian regimes
have indeed invoked it to denigrate civil liberties as western
importation, or in Singapore's case, to limit the growth of
democracy beyond the exercise of a free vote at periodic intervals.
But to read "Asian Values" as merely a cultural challenge to theWest would be to underestimate its power and scope, its
continuation of a logic that remains thoroughly Western.
The very discovery of "Asian Values" was driven by theneed to manage, not to resist, an increasingly successful industrial
state. The invocation of "Asian Values" functions, that is, notmerely to contain the growth of rights beyond those alreadygranted to achieve modernity, but also as a means of processing
indigenous cultures into fit instruments of modernity.
In Singapore, "Asian Values", I believe, is largely a code
word for the Confucianism that supposedly underpins theworldview of the Chinese-majority. Rediscovered locally only
after its presence was detected by Western academics like Ezra
Vogel to explain the startling growth of East Asia, Confucianism
is now offered by East Asian ideologues as their answer to theProtestant work ethic. In the space of a decade, a philosophy that
fifty years ago had been an object of almost universal derision
among Chinese intellectuals as the cause of China's backwardness,has been miraculously transformed into a system of"communitarian" beliefs and values. At once, this factor explains
the genesis of Asian capitalism as well as ensuring its continued
growth.
Recently bundled into a more neutral-sounding but
amorphous set of "Asian Values", Confucianism in Singapore
continues to function as the ground of what Chua Beng Huat,borrowing from Gramsci, has called the "ideological hegemony"of the state. Linked to rationality, providing the justification evenfor radical rearrangements of traditional social structures, thisinvented tradition affords the state a means of subjecting the
population to a structure of values whose chief beneficiaries are
the distinctly modern protocols of capitalism, even as the state
stages that modernity as a continuation of an unchanging past. By

yoking in this fashion the past to the present, the local to theglobal, "Asian Values" provides Asian elites with an efficientmachinery for completing a process that has been going on for
more than a century -- the subjection of indigenous cultures to thedemands of modernity.
"Asian Values" constitutes, in this respect, ideologicalmachinery that is continuous with the Orientalism of imperial
metropolitan powers. Singapore, indeed, may well be the mostperfect modern fulfillment of the Orientalist project -- conceived
and executed, this time, by Orientals themselves. No other Asian
country has created as efficient a mechanism for selecting,defining and controlling an "Asian" identity that is so fully
consonant with the requirements of a modern market, even as it
sets aside as waste what it deems decadent and dangerous in theWest.
It is useful to recall that this didn't occur overnight. "Asian
Values" did not always mean conservatism, even in Singapore.
Mr. Lee used to say in the 1960s that "the English-educated" -namely, Westernized Singaporeans -- "don't riot". By contrast,
the Chinese-educated -- namely, authentically Asian Singaporeans-- did, with great vigor. Contemporary Chinese political culture,
only thirty years ago a threat to modernization, has become therepository of conservative values, a confirmation of capitalist
principles. The extraordinary transformation of cultural identities
this has required suggests that the re-ethnicisation that Huntington
speaks of is not quite a rediscovery of essential cultural identities,
but is rather an ideologically-driven reformulation of those verysame identities to meet particular political exigencies.
The claim of differential cultural identities, for instance,
enables Asian establishments to reject the democratic ethos
already present in modern Asian history -- from the May Fourth
movement in China to the nationalist, anti-colonial struggles inIndia, Indonesia and elsewhere -- as an aberrant foreignimportation. Such erasures of recent Asian history are especially
useful in Singapore because the state here is itself the agent of ademocratizing process -- involving social and economic

enfranchisement as well as the ballot box -- which it also wishes
to contain. The very success of Singapore's modernity has led thestate to formulate a sanitized cultural inheritance to restrain its
citizens from demanding political rights beyond those alreadygranted to achieve modernity. By representing, thus, politicalpossibilities within Asian modernity as a choice between Easternand Western cultural identities, the state can contain the threats to
its power that its own success has generated.
Ironically, Western commentators like Huntington who failto note that the source of such contradictory political possibilities
is Asian modernity itself, and choose instead to regard thecontradictions as evidence of a flawed modernity diametricallydifferent from their own, confirm the very terms of the debate that
Asian establishments seek.
The question is why? Why this extraordinary insistence
among entities within the same party that they are really very
different? As I warned at the outset, I haven't a clue what theanswer to this question might be. It is possible to give someoffhand answers -- assert, for instance, that the proliferation ofcultural differences facilitates political control. But such ananswer though applicable to the assertion of "Asian Values" does
not make sense where Huntington's thesis is concerned. Why urgethat Western civilisation give up the claim of universality at thisvery instance in history when a globalised economy suggests thetriumph of that universality?
I would suggest that that very coincidence -- the assertionof cultural uniqueness coinciding with the material fact of
globalisation -- is itself the explanation. Capitalism, hitherto, hasbeen understood to be continuous with a particular culture, asDavid Landes has described with great depth in his recent book
The Wealth and Poverty of Nations. That continuity has beenbroken by globalisation. The very fact that capital is transnational renders capital in excess not only of nation but also of
culture. The threefold link between the rationality of the
Enlightenment, cultural identity and the interests of capital has
become a twofold link between rationality and capital with apurely instrumental notion of culture mediating. The fact that
"Asian values", for example, can now signify competitive
economic advantage -- culture on par, as it were, with a welltrained work force, an efficient infrastructure and favourable tax
structures -- is evidence that transnational capital is alsotranscultural. Which means to say the structures, habits and belief
systems transnational capital requires for its functioning are to aremarkable extent quite independent of any particular culturalformation or nation state.
Culture has emerged as a question of enormous moment, I
suggest, because it has been forced to join the ranks of thealienated by transnational capital. The production of culturaldifferences, and all the potential ugliness that such differences
involve, is a means of recovering value, including nationalsovereignty, in a context where the universal as such has become
the province of transnational capital.
Globalisation will further exacerbate this alienation, andnot only in East Asia. It is highly significant that our theorist ofcivilisational conflicts, Samuel Huntington, is an American. It issignificant, too, that Great Britain, the other country beside theUS which has profited the most from financial liberalisation, has
refused thus far to join the single currency area, largely forcultural and nationalist, not economic, reasons. There are many
people in the US and Britain who resent globalisation’s
encroachment on their political sovereignty.
As the British authors of a recent book on globalisation,
entitled Global Transformations, put it: “Political space in respectof political power and the accountability of political power is nolonger coterminous with a delimited national territory. The
growth of transboundary problems creates overlapping
communities of fate: that is, a condition in which the fortunes andprospects of individual political communities are increasingly
bound together.”
The phrase they use, “communities of fate”, is significant:
The trouble is “communities of fate” are not only no longercoterminous with delimited territorial states, they are no longer
coterminous with definable “We”s either. A global economy
doubtless exists, but there is no global society, a socious, nothingthat answers to a global “we”. When Huntington rejects
multiculturalism – which he sees as the weak cultural analogue of
economic globalisation – he makes the same gesture as when
Jesse Helms rejects the UN, or when Patrick Buchanan rejects
free trade and NAFTA, or when Margaret Thatcher reject theEuro. What all of these widely divergent figures have in common
is the perception that globalisation reduces the traditional powerof the state, the power of a particular people within a definable
territory, to determine their own fate. In this respect, they are nodifferent from Dr. Mahathir of Malaysia, whose rejection ofcapital account convertibility is based on the argument that theelectronic herds of international capital markets are unaccountable,
and therefore irresponsible.
Before we dismiss all of these people as ignorant andreactionary, it would do us well, I think, to take seriously theparadox that they reflect: On the one hand, socially meaningful
life exists locally, in a particular time and place, or it does notexist at all. On the other hand, the global economy is a factcompletely at variance with the conditions of socially meaningful
life. The global economy doubtless exists -- it implicates eventhose with no access to potable water or electricity -- but it has nolocation. It is a vast transactional system involving people who
are far more unlikely to meet each other than are people who livein the same country, and are far less likely to understand eachother when they do meet. The problem is how do we connect thefirst mode of social existence -- here and now, in particularcommunities, in particular spaces -- with that other, equally realmode, the global, which in essence has no location?
Culture has become of great moment because it is one of the
few avenues left whereby a community’s most cherished notions – ofsovereignty, of self-determination, of autonomy – can be vindicated.
Tom Friedman of the New York Times argues quite persuasively in
The Lexus and the Olive Tree that all nations, which wish toparticipate in the global economy, must assume what he calls the“golden straitjacket”. This is a set of uniform economic and social
policies which the markets, not particular states, demand. When acommunity or polity can no longer assert itself economically or
politically, that community only has reality if it translates as cultural
identity. The category of culture, it seems to me, has acquired theprestige it has in many parts of the world precisely because cultural
identity may be the only means available for a community to assert
the priority of the local over the global.

III
It is within this context that I want to situate a doubt, very tentatively, very
hesitantly, as to the validity of multiculturalism, as an ideology. As a social
value, there can be no doubt about the virtues of multiculturalism: try to bea little kinder to each other, try to be a little more understanding of culturaldifferences. Such values are always valid, now perhaps more than ever.
But multiculturalism as an ideology is more than just a message oftolerance or even acceptance. It is also, fundamentally, an assertion of thepriority of culture as a category of understanding.
If cultural identity exists today, as I assert above, as a category of
exclusive value primarily because of globalisation -- as a form of selfdefense, almost -- the question naturally arises: can assertions of the priorityof cultural categories, like multiculturalism, be a sufficient solution to a
problem whose structure it shares? Can the category of culture, in otherwords, even if it comes dressed up as inherently multiple and relative,function usefully in an arena where culture as such has become a problem?
Can the fox be asked to look-after the chicken-coop?
This doubt about multiculturalism has become particularly acute in
the United States. It is not only people on the right, like Huntington, who
criticise its assumptions, but also people on the left, like Arif Dirlik andMichael Benn Walters, and more circumspectly, Edward Said. While theright's criticism -- that multiculturalism is an attack on the priority of thewestern narrative -- can quite safely, and correctly, be dismissed as
uncomprehending, I'm not sure if the left's criticism can be similarly
dismissed. Fundamentally, the doubt the left has concerns the validity of
substituting identity politics -- African-American, Hispanic, Asian, or
gender or sexual identities -- for the project of modernity. What happens tothe "We" in "We, the people" in the absence of a radical secularism whoseprotocols of rationality are not coincident with any particular culture orrace?

The same question might be asked, I would suggest, ofSingapore. The dynamics of inter-racial relations in Singapore has
never been purely dependent on internal factors. For better orworse, Singapore's nationalism has always been mediated throughthe cultural nationalism of its various indigenous groups. There
would have been no such thing as a Singapore nationalism -- orfor that matter, Malayan nationalism, which was the only thing
we knew prior to 1965-- if there had been no Chinese revolutions,no Indonesian revolution, no Indian national movement. Whatinspired Chinese Singaporeans in the 1950s, for instance, was thevictory of the Chinese Communists in 1949. When Mao declaredon the steps of Tiananmen that "China has stood up", thatstatement was taken not merely as an expression of national selfassertion applicable only to a particular nation-state, but also of
cultural self-assertion applicable to all ethnic Chinese. The
political consciousness of Malays and Indians in Singapore andMalaya were also formed in strikingly intimate ways by events inIndonesia and India respectively.
The fact is nobody in Singapore would have thought ofasserting his or her national identity if he had not felt himself
authorised to do so by nationalist movements elsewhere in Asia.
The fate of nationalism in Singapore was tied up inextricably with
pan-Asian political and cultural movements. The exogenous
origins of Singapore or Malayan nationalism have from the
beginning defined that nationalism as an ideology divided against
itself. Singapore's nationalism thus has always existed in a tense
relationship with the extra-national sources of that nationalism -the cultural nationalisms of its various component races. How wemediate the extra-national origins of Singapore's nationalism is
not merely a political burden but a historical and philosophicalone as well. The problem of inter-racial relations in Singapore isrooted in the fact that Singapore nationalism -- by definition, an
assertion of unique identity -- has never been coincident with its

various cultural nationalisms -- by definition, assertions of transnational cultural identities.
I would like to suggest that the best hope for multi-culturalism in
Singapore, in this context, is not to be found in something called "Asianvalues" -- which almost invariably will be defined in hegemonic, if not
exclusive, terms -- but rather a form of radical secularism that accepts theseparation of the national, or social and political spheres, from the cultural
sphere.
Such a separation, however, is not without its problems. A radical
separation of the national from the cultural can mean the co-optation of thenational by the so-called cosmopolitan -- in practice, the exclusively Englisheducated. It is precisely such a separation in India, where the secular is
identified with the English-educated, that has prompted the rise of Hindu
chauvinism.
Despite the problems of separating the national from the cultural,though, I don't see what alternative there is to such a separation. In practice,
the separation has already occurred in Singapore, legally and formally; but
the separation has yet to acquire an ideological power. We keep slipping,
ever so often, from the protocols of modernity into the protocols of race andculture. The best hope for multiculturalism in Singapore, it seems to me, isto reject cultural identity as an all-encompassing cognitive category, torecognise race as fundamentally a fiction, and to become, in some as yet unthought manner, a-unicultural, a-uniracial.

ALFP 1998 Report:(Substantive Program Evaluation)
Suwanna Satha-AnandIntroductory Note
The 1998 program took place under the shadow of the Asian economic crisis,
which served as a basis for “common concern” among the fellows.
However, it is obvious that some fellows are more well versed in the
discourse of “global economy,” while others are more connected to “localorganizations” struggling with the impact and influence of that globalizing
process. The common concern and the differences among the fellows set the
dynamics of the program at four different levels. They are:
Personal to Group Dynamics
National to Regional Dynamics
Japan to ASEAN and ASEAN to Japan Dynamics
Asia in Japan and Japan in Asia Dynamics

Personal to Group Dynamics
It seems to me that the composition of the group itself reflects thecomplexities of the “globalizing processes” and the “localizing strategies.”
All six fellows: a Marxist anthropologist working on the fragmentation oflife in China who is searching for a “belief,” a spiritualist NGO persona
from the Philippines in need of a rational discourse, a grass-root artist fromIndonesia who is struggling to “demonopolize” nationalism in aestheticopolitical terms; a globalist journalist from Singapore who questions all easyanswers from local people in the globalizing process, a leading researcher
from Malaysia who grapples with the conceptions of Asia, and a student of
Buddhist Philosophy who attempts intellectual mediations between theThai traditional Sangha establishment and the civil society, defy easylabeling. In spite of all their differences, they are all more or less educatedin the “globalizing” West, and thus form the basis of their communication.
The tensions within the group can be seen as not only indicating thedifferent degrees of willingness to listen and to learn from each other, rather
it reflects the necessity and the limitations of the interfacing of the
globalizing and localizing agents. At times of economic prosperity, certain
elements of the “locals” are easily co-opted into the rapid economic

development process, leaving behind their traditions; whereas during
economic downturns the conflicts of interests come to the foreground, andlocal traditions are called upon to help out.
Against this backdrop, I learn to understand the wider contexts of
my work. How my intellectual challenges to an institution of traditional
culture like the Thai Sangha, can be most meaningful in the sense that, if
this conservative tradition can be better equipped to communicate with the
emerging civil society, perhaps the transitions Thailand is facing, whether
economic, political or cultural, can better serve Thai society as a whole. The
tensions between traditional and modernizing forces are not limited toThailand, all ASEAN countries are facing the same dilemma. My
participation in this program helps me realize the wider implications of mywork, as well as its connection to other socio-political situations in Asia.
The conceptions of Asia, with their complexities become very much alive inthe process of the program.

National to Regional Dynamics
After realizing that my work can be part of a national agenda, I was also
challenged into thinking about the possibility that some other ASEAN
countries are keeping an eye on Thailand’s economic recovery. Thailand
has been an “obedient” follower of the IMF package, and in that sense thiscountry “cannot” fail. (Some local Thai newspapers call the IMF “Our
Father.”) It is surprising for me to realize that Thailand is expected to be acase of “hope” for recovery. My instinct tells me that Thai leaders are great
at staging a facade.
However, I doubt that Thailand could be a case study for the“economic recovery” as the paradigmatic thinking about what constitutes agood or desirable society has not changed. Alternative visions of a “good”
society have not gained adequate public support. If the Thais could workout some kind of a more equitable and viable process of negotiations
between the rural, the urban, the localizing and globalizing elements, andbetween civil society and state; then the mechanics of this process could be
the best gift Thailand can offer to her neighboring countries.
It is also interesting to mote that Thailand has been “fortunate” tohave the years between 1992-1997 as a time of great political optimism. The
Parliament just passed the Peoples’ Constitution and the Chuan Leekpai
government still enjoys relatively high degree of legitimacy. (This is in
sharp contrast to the Indonesian situation where an authoritarian
government immediately loses its legitimacy at the onslaught of theeconomic crisis.) The Thai social fabric is still functioning. Malaysia, on theother hand, is facing great political uncertainty, which does not help thecurrent economic downturns.
What is important is I learned all this through personal interactions
with other fellows. It certainly is very different from reading the news fromthe newspapers.

Japan to ASEAN and ASEAN to Japan Dynamics
It is quite obvious that the major focus of the program is for these six fellows
to “encounter” leading Japanese scholars in various fields. As a result, I
believe that all six fellows learn a lot about Japan in terms of her current
situations, her cultures, and her history. However, it is also desirable that
more time be devoted to inter-ASEAN sessions. Frankly, one of the mostimpressive moments I had during my entire two-month stay was when fiveof us had a session on the roles of the Chines in South-east Asia during therecent crisis. We all felt that more sessions like that would certainly be very
enriching for us.
In light of the above, I also feel that it might be fruitful to inviteinterested Japanese intellectuals to participate in the workshops when the
fellows first discussed about their own works. The Ito experience isessentially for the fellows to present their reactions to the seminars so far,
not about the works of the fellows in their homebase as such. I think that asynthesis of the fellows’ background and the program can be better
achieved in combining these two processes, which are somehow still quite
separate.
In short, more opportunities could be created for communications
among fellow ASEANS as well as from ASEAN fellows to Japanese scholars.

Asia in Japan to Japan in Asia Dynamics
Perhaps a short explanation is needed to articulate the phrase “Asia inJapan.” First, it is interesting to note that in Mr. Nakamae’s three scenariosof economic prospects of Japan, there is no mention of ASEAN. There are ofcourse, the US, Europe and China. The session indicates to me that, perhaps
Japan does not exist in Asia, but that Asia exists in Japan. (There is ofcourse a big difference between geography and economics, although thetwo are crucially related.) Japan is a major but nervous player on world
economic stage, ASEAN is a minute appendage between India and China.
Second, Professor Shiraishi’s brief but important presentation on therelationship between Japan and Asia again tells me that at least in the mindsof some Japanese industrialists, Asia exists in Japan. (Prof. Shiraishi talks
about the fact that it is impossible for Japanese car manufacturers toconceptualize their production plants without Asia.) In this sense, therelationship between Japan and the “rest of” Asia is conceptualized under
the necessity of having Asia within the production process of Japanesemanufacturing.
However, I believe that the organizers of the ALFP see the situation
otherwise. A stronger Asia helps nurture a stronger Japan, and ASEAN ispart of the whole. In this sense, Japan needs to reconcile with the rest of
Asia. Japan needs to “return” to Asia with grace. Grace is achieved throughcommunication, not on economic front, but on intellectual and cultural
grounds. From this perspective, the ALFP helps “re-situate” Japan within
Asia.
My independent trip to Matsuyama to meet Mr. Masanobu Fukuoka
informs me that Japan has a “hidden” treasure. He is a “crazy andstubborn” old farmer who refuses to use chemicals in his farms. Mr.
Fukuoka commands little recognition in Japan, but he has been an
inspiration to many NGOs in Asia, Europe and Africa. The globalizing
processes make him more accessible across national borders, and thusincreasing his influences. His localizing strategies help generate income and,perhaps more importantly, hope, for many poor farmers in the world. The
irony is, a person like this little stubborn man from Japan, can be a key tothe global environmental crisis. Few people take notice of him because
alternative visions of good societies are not readily available as a common
frame of reference.
There are many ways ASEAN peoples can look up to Japan, andthere are many ways Japan can learn from ASEAN peoples. The ALFP canbe a perfect point for mutual learning and communication. Thus perhaps,
the globalizing processes can be embraced with less harms, and the
localizing strategies can achieve more without resort to violence.

Crisis in Transition, Transitions in Crisis: Roles ofThai Public Intellectuals in Economic Hardship
Suwanna Satha-anand
Introductory Note
All societies are in constant transition all the time. But some transitions are
more significant than others. Major transitions in many parts of the world
are being defined by the complex relationships between the local and theglobal. The term "global" here indicates key international powers, which
could mean colonial powers, multi-national corporations or the global
economy. The term "local" here involves geographical lesser-powers withcomplicated relationships with the global. Take for example, for many
people in remote rural areas in Thailand, Bangkok represents the "global"
because Bangkok represents the "world" for them. However, at the sametime, many forms of international powers also dictate Bangkok. In the latter
sense Bangkok is "local" in relation to other world communities.
Apart from being defined by the relationships between the local andthe global, the nature of transition itself can take many forms. First, atransition can be a spontaneous transformation with no radical
discontinuity with its own past; or second, a transition can also mean radical
changes which give rise to qualitatively new mode of existence. In bothways, a transition implies a moment of "being-in-between" two stages ofexistence. It can be a moment of anxiety as well as a moment of hope.

Periods of Transitions
In recent Thai history, we can delineate at least four majortransitions or transitional periods.
1).
2).
3).
4).

Thailand's modernization during the reign of King Rama V in late
19th to early 20th Century.
The 1932 change from Absolute Monarchy to Democracy.
The early 1960's government's decision to "develop" Thailand withloans from the World Bank and other international agencies.
The recent economic crisis, when the symptoms of economic
prosperity are becoming a myth of the past.

All these major transitions need also to be seen within the context ofThai political development.
Since 1932, non-elected Prime Ministers (mostly military generals)
have headed approximately two thirds of all Thai governments. Since the1960's, authoritarian leaderships have justified their rules by delivering
economic growth. After 40 years of privileging economic growth over andabove other aspects of the national life, the income share of the poorest 20%
has actually ゛dropped” from 6% in 1975 to 4% in 1991.
On the intellectual scene, great debates for a serious alternative formof society ended in the late 1970's. Nothing comparable to that "Age of
Ideology" has emerged in Thai society since then. After the 1992 May event,the military has kept a low profile on political issues. Last year, just a few
months after the onslaught of the economic crisis, there were cries for the
military to stage a coup état, but they restrained themselves. In 1997, for the
first time in Thai history a civilian holds the position of the Minister ofDefense. Whether this administrative and symbolic positioning will lead toa "democratic civilizing" of the Thai military remains to be seen.
Transitions in Crisis
In the past five years before the current economic crisis, we have seen a
gradual strengthening of the emerging civil society championed by theurban middle-class. Last year the "People's Constitution" was passed by
Parliament. Again, for the first time in Thai history, there was a popularparticipation implemented in the drafting process of the Constitution itself.
Many public intellectuals were instrumental to the drafting of thisConstitution, which is aimed primarily at creating and strengthening
institutional mechanisms for "cleaning up" Thai politics, guaranteeing moretransparency, accountability and protection of the rights of the Thai citizen.
In many ways, the years before the economic crisis have shown signsof healthy transitions for Thai society, the most important of which are, first,
the fading out of military-led state authoritarianism, and second, the rise of
democratic consciousness among the general population. I believe that this"breathing space” period is instrumental to the absence of total social
disintegration in the face of the current crisis. Another reason seems to bethat there is a general feeling that "we" are all in this together. This is might
not be a fair statement because the poor farmers and villagers had nothing
to do with this crisis as actors. And yet, there seems to be no strong sense ofalienation against each other. Actually, one of the reasons why General
Chavalit had to step down was because he delivered a very divisive speech,
trying to blame the "Chinese" for creating this crisis, calling them "it." He
had to resign soon after that.

From one perspective, we can say that the economic crisis was forced
onto the "democratic" transition. This results in putting the first transition intransition. A favorable solution to the economic crisis might or might notlead to a maturing of the "democratic" transition. That remains to be seen.
Another aspect of the current transition is the changing nature of therelationship between the "local" and the "global." In the past, symbolic
subordination/domination in the forms of taxation and forced or coerced
labor recruitment in times of war or big royal projects could characterize therelationship. In recent decades, especially at the height of the globalizing
process in Thailand, the locals were urged and coerced into selling theirland that was their only means of livelihood and long-term security. Thismeans that, in a matter of months, a buffalo boy roaming in the rice field
who might inherit the land from his family, was turned into a caddy boy inan "international" golf course, with members coming from Japan andTaiwan. Today, the same boy might be forced back to being a buffalo boy,except that now neither the buffalo nor the land belongs to his family. He is
now only a "labor." In this way, it can be said that globalization has totally
subsumed the "locals" within its powerful processes. On the other hand, wecannot deny that globalization itself has also produced a condition whereinmany "locals" could be better equipped to cope with the totalizing effects ofglobalization itself.

Roles of Public Intellectuals
In many cases, Thai public intellectuals are rural or urban locals who
become "globalized" through Western education and training. Many public
intellectuals in Asia are educated in Western universities. Some returnhome to their locality, some stay on while others going back and forth. In
many ways, public intellectuals are “mediators” between the locals and theglobal. They are critical of the limitations of the technocrats and thebureaucrats who essentially perform the role of importer and blind
supporter of the globalizing processes. In Thailand, public intellectuals
have been the mediators between government bureaucrats and the local
villagers; between NGOs and urban public; between civil society andtraditional religious institutions and between civil society and the state. It
seems that their roles are increasingly needed in times of crisis andtransitions.
In practical terms, with the government projection of two million
unemployed by the end of 1998, the Thai government has set up several
types of emergency funds made available to different groups of people,
ranging from farmers' cooperatives, various community organizations,home industry promotion groups and others. Many NGOs with publicintellectuals as their advisors or leaders try to make sure that, first, theinformation from the government gets across to the people, and second thatthey get across to the right groups of people. A case in point, The
Foundation for Children Development, headed by a well-known public
intellectual, prepared and presented a report on the "Situation and Choicesof the Underprivileged in Economic Crisis," for comments and inputs by the
public in August 1998. The report was then submitted to members ofparliament, the media and relevant government agencies and to theinterested public.
At another level, many public intellectuals in Thailand are rereading Buddhist scriptures to bring out many neglected elements in
Buddhism that could be a basis for more social equality as well as for moregender equality. The traditional exploitation of the concept of "karma" asjustifying social and gender inequality also needs to be reformed. Many new
researches are bringing out more progressive elements in Buddhism. MA
theses at the Philosophy Department, Chulalongkorn University deal with
topics such as "Human Rights and Buddhist Ethics," "Karma and Social
Justice in Buddhism," to cite a few examples.

Inconclusive Concluding Note
In conclusion, I would simply say that a crisis is better than “unearned
comfort” in bringing out the best potentials in people. I see the economiccrisis in Thailand as an opportunity to re-examine oneself in one's future
participation in the global economy. I see signs of hope from and for the
public intellectuals in their mediating roles between the local and the global,
and thus strengthening the process of localizing strategies.
I would like to end with the philosophy of Watsuji Tetsuro, who
proposed in The Study of Ethics as the Study of Man (Rinri ｪ gaku), that toproperly understand the human situation, one needs to understand the"betweeness" between man. This "betweeness" also needs to be radically reconceptualized. In other words, the question now is how do we deal withthe multiple "betweeness" between man created by the globalizing
processes? Or how could we make sense of ethics in such complex andmultiple sets of simultaneous relationships? The "betweeness" of the public
intellectuals is certainly helpful and important, but will it be enough?

Asia Leadership Fellow Program 1998
Program Staff and Resource Persons
Resource Persons
Yoshiya Abe
Max Peter Baumann
Masaaki Gabe
Takeshi Hamashita
Kenichiro Hirano
Takeshi Ishida
Tsuyoshi Kato
Umar Kayam
Yoshinori Murai
Kinhide Mushakoji
Tadashi Nakamae
Hisashi Nakamura
Eiji Oguma
Nobuyuki Ogura
Yoshikazu Sakamoto
Motoko Shimagami
Sichan Siv
Tetsumi Takara
Isami Takeda
Yoshihiko Tokumaru
Shunsuke Tsurumi
Hideaki Uemura

Chizuko Ueno
Noriyuki Wakisaka
Shinji Yamashita
Katsunori Yamazato

Professor, Kokugakuin University
Professor, University of Bamberg (Germany)
Professor, University of the Ryukyus
Professor, University of Tokyo
Professor, Waseda University
Professor Emeritus, University of Tokyo
Professor, Kyoto University
Professor, Gadjah Mada Univ. (Indonesia)
Professor, Sophia University
Professor, Meiji Gakuin University
President, Nakamae Institute of International
EconomyProfessor, Ryukoku University
Lecturer, Keio University
Professor, University of the Ryukyus
Professor Emeritus, University of Tokyo
Professor, Kyoto University
Former U.S. Deputy Assistant Secretary ofState for South Asian Affairs
Professor, University of the Ryukyus
Professor, Dokkyo University
Professor, Ochanomizu University
Philosopher
Chief Executive, Shimin Gaikou Centre(Citizens’ Diplomatic Centre for the Rights ofIndigenous Peoples)
Professor, University of Tokyo
Editorial Writer, Asahi Shimbun
Professor, University of Tokyo
Professor, University of the Ryukyus

Ito Retreat Participants
Kiichi Fujiwara
Takeshi Hamashita
Ryosei Kokubun
Ibarra Mateo
Yasuyuki Nagafuchi
Hisako Nakamura
Mitsuo Nakamura
Masako Okamoto
Hiromu Shimizu
Takashi Shiraishi
Yoshiharu Tsuboi
Noriyuki Wakisaka

Professor, University of Tokyo
Professor, University of Tokyo
Professor, Keio University
Journalist; Ph.D. Student, Sophia University
Associate Professor, Nagoya Institute ofTechnology
Professor, Bunkyo University
Professor, Chiba University
Research Associate, Osaka University
Professor, Kyushu University
Professor, Kyoto University
Professor, Waseda University
Editorial Writer, Asahi Shimbun

The Japan Foundation Asia Center
Masahiko Noro
Mariko Oka-Fukuroi
Maho Sato
Alan Feinstein

Managing Director
Director, Intellectual Exchange Division
Intellectual Exchange Division
Coordinator

The International House of Japan
Mikio Kato
Tatsuya Tanami
Isamu Maruyama
Naoko Shimamura

Executive Director
Program Director
Chief Program Officer
Program Officer

Rapporteur/Research AssistantTaeko Kurokawa

Asia Leadership Fellow Program 1998 Program
ReportAsia in Transition: Localizing Strategies, Globalizing
Processes

Published by The International House of Japan and
The Japan Foundation Asia Center
March 2000
Printed and bound by Seibundo Printing Co., Tokyo, Japan

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