Philosophy & cultural embodimentVol. 3, No. 1, 21-25©2023. March. 31

Can Japanese Literature Contribute to theContemporary Debate on Race ?
Shojiro Kotegawa
Introduction
There are very few works in Japanese literature which focus on race. One of the main reasonsis the illusion shared by many Japanese that Japan is a “mono-racial nation” and therefore
free from racism. This illusion has prevented race from being regarded as a suitable theme forJapanese literature. In order to counter this illusion, this paper will focus on some exceptional
works in Japanese literature that have addressed race head-on, and examine how Japanese
literature can contribute to the contemporary debate on race.
This contemporary debate has revolved around the idea that race is socially constructed, thatrace has no genetic or biological basis. Philosophy of race has focused on racism as embedded insocial and institutional structures and the subconscious or unconscious levels of consciousness
rather than on intentional, individual racism. However, it has been difficult to clarify why race is“seen” or “heard” by discriminators, and why the discriminated are bound or forced to adapt invarious situations to the racializing perception of the discriminator. Relying on Merleau-Ponty’s
theory of embodiment, the phenomenology of race has attempted to overcome these difficulties
and approach the depths of racism by elucidating racist attitudes and behaviors in terms of“embodied habits” (Alcoff 2006; Al-Saji 2014; Ngo 2017).
In what ways, then, can literary works contribute to the philosophical clarification of racism?
Literary works do more than provide examples for philosophical theories (nothing would be
more tedious or even blasphemous than to read a literary work only as an example of the validityof a philosophical theory). In my view, a good literary work, through its vivid descriptions,shows us how racism is embodied in our bodies. And through that it makes visible the various
aspects of racism that philosophical theory has not been able to show. In what follows, I will
discuss the ways in which racism is portrayed by three Japanese writers and examine what canbe seen in their works.
Internalized white gaze: Shusaku Endo (1923-1996)
Belonging to the first generation of Japanese intellectuals who studied in Europe after WorldWar II, Shusaku Endo is a rare Japanese writer who dealt with the racial discrimination that heexperienced during his stay in France (1950-1953) and wrote several novels on race (White Man(1955), Yellow Man (1955), Foreign Studies (1965), etc.).
Not only did he describe in detail the discriminatory attitudes and behavior of whites toward
Asians: for example, calling them “Chinois!” (Chinese) or “Sale jaune!” (dirty yellow man),avoiding them in trams and restaurants, and staring them in the face, etc. At the same time, healso sharply analyzed the racial consciousness peculiar to members of the so-called “yellow

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race” who belong to the racial majority in their own countries but are a racial minority in theWest. According to him, the racial consciousness of the yellow race is characterized by “amnesia,”
an “internalized white gaze,” and “internal discrimination among people of color and Asians.”
First, those who have suffered from Western discrimination against Asians, while outraged
by it, tend not to make an issue of it, but rather to try to forget about it.
[…] I didn't think about my skin color while I was in Japan, and even though I was angry
in Lyon at the time, I could have left the city and gone back to Japan eventually. In otherwords, I had a real place and a future to escape to.1
Even after returning to Japan, however, students like Endo who have suffered fromdiscrimination in the West are often not willing to talk about their experiences. There are twomain reasons for this: it reminds them of a sense of humiliation and shame and makes themloose status in their Japanese communities, where those who are highly regarded in the “whiteworld” are often taken to be superior to others. This “internalized white gaze” tempts them either
to behave according to racial stereotypes or to imitate the whites. For instance, contemporary
Japanese researchers tend either to try to meet stereotypical expectations by presenting papers on
topics such as “Derrida and Zen” in international conferences or to go into the minutest detailsof historical or philological discussions so as to justify their status as researchers.
While portraying racial discrimination against Japanese people, Endo does not forget tomention Japanese discrimination against other Asians and black people: Japanese people feeling“racially superior” to black people or detesting being confused with Chinese people (who had
been the target of racism in the U.S. from the 19th century). Endo discloses that Japanese whohave internalized the white gaze not only see themselves as inferior to whites, but also as themost westernized yellow race, and therefore try to portray themselves as superior to other
Asians and black people. Endo's descriptions make visible not only that people of color who are
discriminated against can easily flip to the racist side, but also that they seek to elevate their own
racial status by racially discriminating against others. In this way, he challenges the dichotomy
between racializing perpetrator and racialized victim, and reveals the multilayered structure of
racial discrimination.
Race and gender: Minae Mizumura (1951-)
The internalized white gaze that Endo perceived was also portrayed in Minae Mizumura’s An
I-Novel from Left to Right (1995).
The gradual discovery that I was Asian wasn’t shocking in and of itself. The shock I felt
came from being lumped together with people whom Westerners regarded as Others—as
did I, a Japanese. To be lumped together with those whom in some hidden corner of mymind I had always blithely congratulated myself on being distinct from was worse thanshocking. It was humiliating. (p. 169)
This kind of shock or even humiliation is not necessarily unique to Mizumura, who has
lived in the U.S. from age of 12. It can apply to many Japanese and “people of color” who haveinternalized a variety of Western-derived values and feel happy to be treated like whites in theWest.
Mizumura also describes various discriminatory behaviors against Asians in the U.S., butfrom a perspective that Endo lacks: intersectionality between race and gender.
1 Cf. Shusaku Endo, “Colored Race and White Race” (1956), p. 213.

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When Mizumura’s American-educated sister Nanae entered a fashionable bar in New York
City with her Polish boyfriend Henryk, she was “dressed carefully”, sat up straight and “usedproper English” when placing her order so as not to be looked down on. Yet seeing her drunken
boyfriend kissing her despite her refusal, a white bartender said ‘Will you two behave yourselves
or will I have to ask you to leave?’ ‘I just don’t think you two belong in a place like this.’
After the incident, Nanae complains to Minae as follows.
If I’d been a white woman, that bartender wouldn’t have been so rude. At least not to myface. If I were white, he would have seen I wasn’t enjoying it. […] he never even looked
at me properly in the face. When I came in, all he saw was an Oriental woman with long
hair. Then when things started to get out of hand, he assumed that both of us were toblame. And you know what’s worse? I realized that it wasn’t just Henryk who made me
look cheap. I made him look cheap too, because I was Oriental. To some Americans—I
wouldn’t say all, but to some Americans, a guy who hangs around with an Oriental girl isalready a cheap guy. (pp. 195-196)
Nanae’s complaint illustrates how the bartender’s racializing perception affects what he seesand does not see in her, that is, what aspects of her appearance and behavior are salient to him.
By seeing her as fitting the framework of the stereotypical “Oriental,” he perceives her “longhair,” indecisiveness, and even ‘sluttiness’ as salient, rather than her proper dress, proper English
and expression of displeasure at being kissed. This is one of the features of racializing perceptionthat the phenomenology of race calls “the limitation of the receptivity of vision” (Al-Saji 2014).
Furthermore, she is racialized not simply as an Asian, but as an Asian woman. Under the
racializing and gendering gaze, being with a (drunken) white man presents her as an indecent
Asian woman, and at the same time, being with such a woman presents Henryk as a ‘slutty’white man. In the bartender’s perception, both race and gender are already at play and Nanae’s“racialized body” is elided into her “gendered body (female body).” This perspective ofintersectionality between race and gender suggests that discriminatory behavior toward peopleof color, including Asians, always involves some kind of gendering. It will thus enable us toreconsider Endo’s depiction of discrimination against Asians in terms of discrimination against
Asian men.
Seeing with Others: Sawako Ariyoshi (1931-1984)
Endo and Mizumura have in common the fact that they received Western-style higher
education (both specializing in French literature), which made them internalize the white gazemore than ordinary Japanese, and depict the gap between this gaze and their own racialized
bodies. From a different perspective than Endo and Mizumura, and on a more expansive scale,
Sawako Ariyoshi deals with diverse aspects of racism in her novel Not Because of Color (1964).
After achieving some success as a writer in Japan, Ariyoshi won a Rockefeller Foundation
grant to spend the 1959-1960 school year at Sarah Lawrence College. Written based on her
experiences and many trips to Harlem during this stay, Not Because of Color vividly depicts
both racism in Tokyo and New York from the perspective of a Japanese “war bride,” Emiko
Jackson, who married and had children with a black American soldier during the occupation ofJapan in the late 1940s.
Among the various elements of this work, I will focus on only three points: 1) language,race, and class, 2) the multilayered structure of racial discrimination, and 3) seeing with Others.

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1) Language, race, and class
Ariyoshi shows more sensitivity than Endo and Mizumura to the relationship between
language, race and class. Emiko learns English from her future husband Tom, but her Black
English prevents her from getting a good job with the occupying forces. Also, on a ship boundfor the U.S., she and other war brides are looked down upon by Japanese female students goingto the U.S. to study. “There were many American sailors on the ship, and some of the men talked
to us, but the students despised their English, saying it was vulgar and unintelligent” (p. 123). It
is not difficult to find here the internalized white gaze that Endo and Mizumura observed, but bylinking this internalization to class and race, Ariyoshi discloses the various hierarchies that lie
behind it.
In Puerto Rico Diary (1964), a sister volume to Not Because of Color, Ariyoshi frequently
describes how fluent and elegant English, the colonizer’s language, is considered a sign ofintelligence and culture, and as a result, Japanese and Puerto Rican locals whose English is notfluent are often regarded as “inscrutable” or “vulgar.” She recognizes that criticizing racism isinseparable from questioning the ways in which language is linked to class and colonialism.
2) The multilayered structure of racial discrimination
Not Because of Color details the multilayered structure of racial discrimination and shows us
how Japanese “war brides” learn it and become involved in it. In order to escape the racist gazeof the Japanese toward her mixed-race daughter Mary, Emiko went to the “land of equality,”
where she witnessed not only discrimination against black people but also discrimination amongwhite people (Jewish, Irish, Italian), Tom’s discrimination against Puerto Ricans, Mary’s disdain
for Africans as savages, and the contempt with which African elites treat African Americans.
At the Japanese restaurant where she and the other war brides work, Japanese women, who
are often stereotyped as modest and deferential, pry, scorn, and curse at each other over the raceof their partners (when Shimako is ridiculed for her husband’s Italian descent, she shouts at
Takeko, who has a black husband, “Don’t talk big to me, you gave birth to a colored child!”).
In this way, the racial identity of Japanese women is affected by the race of their partner; by
discriminating against each other in an attempt to position themselves as having a higher racial
status, these women become embedded in a multilayered structure of racism, which they thenreproduce.
3) Seeing with others
It should be noted that Ariyoshi tries to figure out how to get out of this multilayered
structure of discrimination. At various points in this novel, we see the transformation that Emikoundergoes as she lives with her daughter and husband and begins to see the world with them.
Living with her dark-skinned daughter in Tokyo, Emiko comes to understand for the first time
the seriousness of the discriminatory gaze of the Japanese toward black people (p. 59). By
living with black people in Harlem, she comes to realize the richness of their expressions (p.
142). Furthermore, by watching Tom, who works night shifts at a hospital in New York City andcomes home exhausted every morning, she comes to realize that the sexual stereotype of black
men that has spread among the Japanese people is nothing more than a “laughable myth” (p.
188).
A. Al-Saji, a leading phenomenologist of race, emphasizes the importance of “seeing withothers,” which is achieved by “living with others.” In contrast with isolated events and punctual
efforts, seemingly minor and incessant contacts with others in everyday life “insinuate their way

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into one’s prereflective life” and enable us to “see with others” (Al-Saji 2014, p. 160). “Seeing
with others” does not mean “putting others in perspective” or “seeing from the standpoint ofothers.” In Emiko’s case, she does not objectify her daughter and husband, whose skin color isdifferent from that of the racial majority in Japan, nor does she imagine how they see the world,but she sees the world “with” them and renews her self-identity by critically questioning her own
discriminatory views. This shift in perspective makes her own embodied habits of perception
unstable, reorienting her perspective through connection with her daughter and husband. In thisway, Ariyoshi’s works provide us with rich material for thinking how to see with others.
Conclusion
In this paper, I have shed new light on such issues as the internalized white gaze, themultilayered structure of racism, the intersectionality of race and gender, and seeing with others.
To be sure, these are not new issues. However, by examining the racial experiences of Japanesepeople as vividly portrayed in literary works, we can see how these issues can be expanded in
new ways. It remains to examine the works discussed here in comparison with works written by
Chinese, Korean, and Asian American writers as well as writers from other Asian countries andcommunities. In this way, taking into account the racial experiences of Asians will provide clues
to counter the hate crimes against Asians resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic and all formsof racism.
Works Cited(1964) Sawako Ariyoshi, Not Because of Color (Hishoku), Kawadeshobosinsha.
(1964) Sawako Ariyoshi, Puerto Rico Diary (Puerto Rico Nikki), Iwanami.
(1965) Shusaku Endo, Foreign Studies, translated by Mark Williams, London: Peter Owen,
1989.
(1995) Mizumura, Minae. An I-Novel from Left to Right. Translated by Juliet Winters Carpenter,
Columbia Univ Press 2021.
(2006) Alcoff, Linda Martín. Visible Identities: Race, Gender, and the Self, Oxford/New York:
Oxford University Press.
(2014) Al-Saji, Alia. A Phenomenology of Hesitation: Interrupting Racializing Habits of Seeing,
in: Emily S. Lee (ed.), Living Alterities: Phenomenology, Embodiment, and Race, New York:SUNY.
(2017) Ngo, Helen. Habits of Racism: A Phenomenology of Racism and Racialized Embodiment,
Lanham/Boulder/New York/London: Lexington Books.

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