Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grant: Multiculturalism, Okinawan Popular Culture and the Politics of Ethnicity in Osaka, Japan

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Graduate student Sumi Cho, supervised by Dr. Jennifer E. Robertson, will undertake research on emerging concepts of multiculturalism in Japan. Multiculturalism is popularly equated with respect for hitherto underrepresented racial, ethnic, class, gender and other minority groups. However, research suggests multiculturalism policies also can maintain and reinforce hierarchies by dividing and subordinating minority groups in subtler ways. The discourse of multiculturalism only recently emerged since the 1990s in Japan, where the ideology of ethnic and cultural homogeneity is still dominant and perpetuated.Cho will study this emerging phenomenon through research on diasporic Okinawans and Okinawa popular culture in Osaka. Okinawans have been the most successful among ethnic minorities in addressing their ethnic difference through popular culture, with the increased risk of further exoticization and commercialization of their difference. Combining participant observation, ethnographic interviews, media text analysis, and media reception studies, the researcher will explore the ways in which popular cultural practices are related to changing attitudes about ethnic relations in Japan. She will also investigate how the interactions between marginalized and dominant social groups may lead to political change through the mediation of popular culture. In doing so, this research seeks to explicate the ramifications of the emerging politics of multiculturalism in Japan.The research is important because it will be one of the first studies of the emergence of multiculturalism politics in a non-western setting. It will also contribute to the education of a social scientist.