Book review: Shinohata
Feb. 15th, 2011 00:19![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ahorbinskiDore, Ronald P. Shinohata: A Portrait of a Japanese Village. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1994. [1978]
Ronald Dore first went to the hamlet of Shinohata, about a hundred miles north of Tokyo, in 1955 to study the effect of the recently enacted land reform there as part of his survey of land reform in Japan--Shinohata fitting his idea of the third sort of village he needed to survey to give a roughly representative picture in his book. But he kept coming back over the years, and in the late 1970s he was asked to write an ethnography of the village as it was then; inevitably, Dore drew on comparisons between the Shinohata of 1975 and of 1955, and of the Shinohata of even earlier that he heard about from people in their stories and recollections, diligently recorded and transcribed by him. The new UC edition incorporates an afterword written in 1993, just after the electoral earthquake of the LDP's temporary eclipse from power.
These years, in other words, encompass Japan's postwar, the Economic Miracle, the Bubble, and gesture towards the Recession, but Dore's focus on the village he comes to know and, it's clear, to love, and its inhabitants keeps the larger concerns of the general story in the background. Primarily Dore is concerned with the effects that increasing economic prosperity have on individuals, their livelihoods, their households, and the community as a whole, and if in the 1978 epilogue he comes down unequivocally in favor of development and the real changes in standards of living that it brings, along with many other material and non-material goods, the 1993 epilogue is, not renunciatory, but mindful of the fact that Japan's growth has real social costs that in some sense, as the recession continues, may not be worth paying.
Dore is a wonderful writer; Shinohata reads like a novel, and he shows a true understanding of and sympathy for the village and the ways it works, and explains them lucidly and with a sense of humor. I recognized aspects of my own experience in Japan in many of his recollections, and the book fleshes out a story that many people, I think, know only in broad outlines from poli sci texts and economic history lectures. I appreciated too that Dore, though by 1993 he has come to question the social costs of growth, does not abandon his conviction that economic prosperity is a real human net positive. This comes up in discussions of modernity sometimes: yes, the 20thC was bloody beyond recompense, and yes, modernity and its atomizing and anonymizing forces can be pernicious, but antibiotics and vaccines are great too, and so is the prosperity that makes our current lifestyles thinkable, and possible. And none of them are easy to decouple from the others, outside of fascist delusions.
1993 is nearly 20 years from 2011; I wonder what Shinohata is like today, and given what I know of Japanese politics and society since then, I would not be surprised to to find anything from stasis-that's-actually-a-backslide to a real retrogression in both economic prosperity and social cohesion. Japan is routinely excoriated for the rural agricultural subsidies--more or less capital transfers--that it pays, and one of the things that doomed the LDP at last in the late 00s was its cutting those payments. But Dore makes the point that those payments, at least during the Miracle and the Bubble, can rightly be seen as payback for the years of Meiji, Taishô, and Shôwa industrialization, in which the government extracted all the capital it could from the land and put it all into industry, without hesitation or apology. Those earlier transfers out made possible the later transfers in, and what I'm dancing around saying here is that, fundamentally, the Japanese and every nation have at least in theory the right to run their economy and society however they please. It's not for anyone else to question their choices, though of course that doesn't stop people from doing so; Dore doesn't do that. He does, however, ask the tough question:
Ronald Dore first went to the hamlet of Shinohata, about a hundred miles north of Tokyo, in 1955 to study the effect of the recently enacted land reform there as part of his survey of land reform in Japan--Shinohata fitting his idea of the third sort of village he needed to survey to give a roughly representative picture in his book. But he kept coming back over the years, and in the late 1970s he was asked to write an ethnography of the village as it was then; inevitably, Dore drew on comparisons between the Shinohata of 1975 and of 1955, and of the Shinohata of even earlier that he heard about from people in their stories and recollections, diligently recorded and transcribed by him. The new UC edition incorporates an afterword written in 1993, just after the electoral earthquake of the LDP's temporary eclipse from power.
These years, in other words, encompass Japan's postwar, the Economic Miracle, the Bubble, and gesture towards the Recession, but Dore's focus on the village he comes to know and, it's clear, to love, and its inhabitants keeps the larger concerns of the general story in the background. Primarily Dore is concerned with the effects that increasing economic prosperity have on individuals, their livelihoods, their households, and the community as a whole, and if in the 1978 epilogue he comes down unequivocally in favor of development and the real changes in standards of living that it brings, along with many other material and non-material goods, the 1993 epilogue is, not renunciatory, but mindful of the fact that Japan's growth has real social costs that in some sense, as the recession continues, may not be worth paying.
Dore is a wonderful writer; Shinohata reads like a novel, and he shows a true understanding of and sympathy for the village and the ways it works, and explains them lucidly and with a sense of humor. I recognized aspects of my own experience in Japan in many of his recollections, and the book fleshes out a story that many people, I think, know only in broad outlines from poli sci texts and economic history lectures. I appreciated too that Dore, though by 1993 he has come to question the social costs of growth, does not abandon his conviction that economic prosperity is a real human net positive. This comes up in discussions of modernity sometimes: yes, the 20thC was bloody beyond recompense, and yes, modernity and its atomizing and anonymizing forces can be pernicious, but antibiotics and vaccines are great too, and so is the prosperity that makes our current lifestyles thinkable, and possible. And none of them are easy to decouple from the others, outside of fascist delusions.
1993 is nearly 20 years from 2011; I wonder what Shinohata is like today, and given what I know of Japanese politics and society since then, I would not be surprised to to find anything from stasis-that's-actually-a-backslide to a real retrogression in both economic prosperity and social cohesion. Japan is routinely excoriated for the rural agricultural subsidies--more or less capital transfers--that it pays, and one of the things that doomed the LDP at last in the late 00s was its cutting those payments. But Dore makes the point that those payments, at least during the Miracle and the Bubble, can rightly be seen as payback for the years of Meiji, Taishô, and Shôwa industrialization, in which the government extracted all the capital it could from the land and put it all into industry, without hesitation or apology. Those earlier transfers out made possible the later transfers in, and what I'm dancing around saying here is that, fundamentally, the Japanese and every nation have at least in theory the right to run their economy and society however they please. It's not for anyone else to question their choices, though of course that doesn't stop people from doing so; Dore doesn't do that. He does, however, ask the tough question:
So come on, Dore, said a friend to whom I was telling some of this. You used to say none of this 'where are the snows of yesteryear' business. None of this green nostalgia for a warmer, unpolluted, nonpolluting, natural human past. All the changes in Shinohata are for the better. That's what you used to say. But what about now? Are you still of the same mind? (327)
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Date: 2011-02-15 15:05 (UTC)---L.
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Date: 2011-02-15 19:25 (UTC)