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

研究生Sumi Cho将在Jennifer E. Robertson博士的指导下，对日本新兴的多元文化概念进行研究。多元文化主义通常等同于尊重迄今未被充分代表的种族、民族、阶级、性别和其他少数群体。然而，研究表明，多元文化政策也可以通过以更微妙的方式分裂和从属少数群体来维持和加强等级制度。多元文化主义的话语直到20世纪90年代才在日本出现，在那里，种族和文化同质性的意识形态仍然占主导地位，并持续存在。赵将通过对冲绳侨民和大阪冲绳流行文化的研究来研究这一新兴现象。在少数民族中，冲绳人通过流行文化来解决他们的民族差异是最成功的，而这种差异被进一步异国化和商业化的风险也在增加。结合参与观察、民族志访谈、媒体文本分析和媒体接受研究，研究人员将探讨流行文化实践与日本民族关系态度变化之间的关系。她还将研究边缘化和主流社会群体之间的相互作用如何通过大众文化的调解导致政治变革。在此过程中，本研究试图解释日本新兴的多元文化政治的后果。这项研究很重要，因为它将是对非西方背景下多元文化主义政治出现的首批研究之一。它也将有助于社会科学家的教育。

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.