B (3:27)

Thank you for the wonderful opening question, Yadong. I think I'll talk just a little bit about my background and then we'll get into the question question of social change from there. I didn't start off to write about social change, at least not sort of what I think people are calling grassroots or bottom up social change. My first big project was on maybe top down. Although neoliberal change never frames itself as something that's obvious and that someone is doing to somebody else. It sort of emerges, or as I guess Margaret Thatcher once said, there's no alternative, that kind of thing. So it emerg emerges in moments of crisis. But I didn't actually start my I didn't actually begin my academic journey with the study of Japan, which is interesting. I started with French lit in sociology and the sociology of prisons, which I can talk more about. I ended up writing about a colonial prison, which I'll get to later on in the interview that became a history hall in Korea when we get to one of the other edited volumes that I'd done and that I didn't expect either. But prisons show up all over the world in colonial settings, et cetera. Then I went on to study sociolinguistics and translation and I came to the study of anthropology actually a little bit later in life and through a class that I have now taught for the last 20 years. But I took it with the person that became my PhD advisor. And I think what was the most compelling to me in that class was unlike other classes on the anthropology of Japan that don't insert the word modern, the focus of this was as much about modern as anything else. The question of the modern in relationship to Japan. And when I began studying this, it was still what we now retrospectively know as the bubble period. Nobody called it a bubble before. There was no such thing as that. Japan is the first sort of, I guess, bubble that emerged from wherever people don't seem to know because capitalism at that time was theorized in East Asia to Go on forever. It's a miracle. And they do it differently. And so the question labor was sort of obscured. It's actually not all night labor. The Japanese are special. And then the Japanese government repeated with yes, we are. And all of this very complex sort of trajectory. So when I walked into a class and they were talking about Orientalism, which I had some familiarity with because of other. Of thinking about colonialism in Europe and in other parts of the world. And then she began to talk about modernity and these sort of massive transformations or what Stefan Tanaka calls the synchronization of Japan with the West. So we were introduced to the notion of temporality and of value with regard to a place that those words were not even used with. And then came into contact with ideas from people like Leo Ching, who's written the book Becoming Japanese, who talked about how did a multi ethnic empire become a homogeneous nation state. These really interesting questions about a place that seemed to sort of have seamlessly. And of course it wasn't because it was occupied finally and had this enormous empire. But we know that the west sort of didn't recognize empires beyond its own. So much complicated history in the middle of this that when I got a chance to work with Marilyn Ivey and with Harry Haroutunian in New York, that's when I decided that this was really sort of my thing. And that had a lot to do with the direction and of course, all of this Frankfurt School background and Foucault and Derridia and all of these things that I probably in the study of Japan wouldn't have encountered otherwise. But my first main project, what became called the Strange Child, I wrote a first piece called the wild child of 1990s. Japan was really about something that people at the time weren't theorizing. They didn't know what had really happened. In 1989, the Japanese stock market and properties plummet by 50%. Although Japan still had these enormous reserves of capital, it owned all the US debt and things like that. But it was a huge sort of moment of shock to the Japanese population that over a course of a generation and a half we're used to things doubling. I was living in Japan at the time of that plummet. Nobody knew what it was. I still remember the conversations with our neighbors and things. And it was only when we came to the United States and the effects of it began to be felt, which I track in the book as something between 95 and 97 and especially this very unfortunate incident of a child murder and how that became in the middle of this financial. Unfolding financial crisis. It became the symbol of something wrong with the youth of Japan. When really what was wrong was the system of capital. And it gets overlaid on the figure of the child. Like a figure of the child that circulates as something actually strange with time and value. And that's never named. Anyway, I ended up writing about this child figure. And then. And then its effects, the figure of this discursive figure. Its effects on especially education at the time. And how education is being restructured. How that moves to labor. What that has to do with some kind of new idea of patriotism. Not the old and not the new. But really some new kind of idea. And the language of this stuff that was really, really new in Japan. Independent individual frontiers, latent frontiers of within Psychologists who get involved in this just incredibly complex. I mean, for an anthropologist, sort of an inexplicable ethnographic landscape. But really a very, very complex landscape that I just happened to fall in the middle of. And so I think what's interesting about that is the first chapters really sort of try to describe how. How the child becomes this figure. A figure of the recession, which is not children and what's going. Happening to them and families, but this other sort of discursive figure that sort of sidelines what's really going on. And puts all of the focus on something wrong with what was really wrong was a system of social reproduction. Which. That's, of course, the whole issue here. That these miracles are not, you know, sort of automatic. They have to be reproduced. And the awareness that this is not going to. These will not be a generation that can reproduce this thing. So I might, you know, move from cram schools to teachers meetings to classrooms, psychologists and education ministries and all of these things. But the last chapter, I think, is the most pertinent to what we're talking about now. It's called the recessionary generation. Times and spaces. And because of my familial also relationship to Japan. I was able to continually go back and sort of continually trace what was going on and where it was moving. And I think nobody really knew.

A (11:08)

At.

B (11:08)

The end of the 90s and in the first decade of the 20th century. First of all, no one knew about what was gonna happen to the nuclear reactors and the coastline of northeast Japan. But nobody really knew where this was going. What it was doing was producing unlivable for young Japanese conditions. In the sense that they weren't able to reproduce those stable salaryman positions of their parents. Which meant that you couldn't have the stay at home housewife who's reproducing all of the next sort of generation of labor. And I think there was a rise in the suicide rate and rise in depression and rise of the part time labor force and all of this insecurity. But I think what I didn't expect and nobody else expected and we should always, as one of my mentors said, expect the unexpected. Yeah, that's what he says about the ethnography he teaches. John Pemberton teaches this wonderful class at Columbia. As I was going to the field, he said expect the unexpected. And I never forgot that. So in 2013 and 14, when I started to see these magazines about young people's heading out of the, out of urban places and trying to find another place where they could make lives. Because if they couldn't pay the rent in the city, were there other alternatives? And if they were being told they should do it on their own, was that the only way to do things? And did 8 million emptied abandoned houses and young people who couldn't have children and is this the only lifestyle that could happen? And of course in the case of Japan, people started to be very, very critical of the energy system and environment because they realized that all of this depended on two things. The production of this energy through these nuclear reactors all over. And what one really interesting friend of ours has called the war of a peaceful nation against itself on the one hand and then the reliance on women's labor on the other. So that's when I started to think about the center periphery divide in a new way than I had before and Marilyn Ivey and a number of other people. There's a really good book, Mirror of Modernity and there's some wonderful pieces in that about how the outlying areas of Tokyo become the feeder, you know, sort of the feeder areas of this white collar workforce. Maybe same thing with Beijing for the people who can. But Seoul for sure, this is the place from like the 70s on that young people are really educated to move, to be successful, get these white collar jobs and things like that. And it's all in these high centers. That would be Taipei also. So that first depopulation of the countryside is what really changes the landscapes of these places. Because the rural areas as we call them now used to be and still and now are again these incredible places to live within if you want to talk about culture, enormous culture and heritage and things like that. So that's when I started to see these sort of advertisements in these lifestyle magazines about young people moving someplace else. And they Called it you. And I turn. And I thought, okay, I've never seen anything like this before. Who are these young people and what are they doing? And I still remember a good Japanese friend of mine saying, no, it's just a magazine. It's not happening. And I thought, you know, you're probably right, but I'm an anthropo. I'm just going to go see. So that's when I actually started traveling around Japan, looking at these places that these magazines were writing about, and I found much more than they were writing about. Like, the stories are much more complex and the things they missed is fine, you know, but that's when I realized. And I remember first talking about this at a conference, and somebody in the audience said, oh, you're just looking at a marginal sort of, you know, some kind of marginal phenomenon. I said, no problem, because I've been writing about the center for a long time. I'm very happy to write about, you know, sort of marginal. And of course, now it's not marginal at all. After Fukushima and after Covid, this has changed the landscape a lot. But we're gonna talk more about that. The kind of things the first group that I write about in the new volume, I really met in a very different place and a very different way. Ethnography is sort of wonderful that. Full of surprises and full of, I think, what documentary filmmakers call the unfolding present. And so you need to be sort of there to see that happen. So what else do I want to say about this? We're going to talk more about collaborative things. It was before I actually wrote my first book. I got involved in Global Futures of East Asia and also with Spaces of Possibility, another one that we'll talk about. And both of those led me to. To finishing my own book. It was very hard to finish this first book. There was so much material. But finally one of my good friends said, we all are waiting for your book. So that's when I finished that. And then I kept doing these collaborations. And at the end, I'll stop there, because at the end we're going to talk about the new things that I'm doing alongside this.

A (16:34)

Thank you very much. Thank you for sharing this very exciting intellectual journey with us. And thank you. It's also very fascinating to know it all begins with a study of prison turning to cultural figure of strange child in Japan. And we can still see this continuity of study in the sense of something gets wrong and how people react to this feeling in your chapter in this volume. So now let's turn to the origin story of this particular volume. So how did this volume come into being? What motivated you to bring these contributors and cases together? And how did your own teaching and research experiences you just mentioned shape the project's development over time?

B (17:11)

So this is the third volume, collaborative volume in the series. And afterwards I'll talk about the other two because I would really like to give credit to the other. I don't think I would have been able to do this one without the other two behind it, but I'll just talk about this one. So for this second project that I started that I talked a little bit about, that I discovered at the end of my first book, and the sixth chapter is about these new spaces and the peripheries and what peripheralization is and those kind of things. Because of that, I came into contact with something called the akiya mondai. Akiya means abandoned home, and mondai in Japanese always, which is a translation of problem, but it means issue. So everything is the woman problem or the kid problem or the abandoned space problem. But what I realized also is that alongside this, and there's all these words of hollowing out and stuff, it's sort of like the detouritization of Japan, which is a very, you know, sort of. Japan is not supposed to look like Detroit. What does a place look like when it's declining is what is, you know, sort of all these empty spaces. So it was really. It was, you know, a big embarrassment to the Japanese government, although they had overbuilt, like most places. I guess China is quite overbuilt too. All these places overbuild and overbuild. And then when there's no one in them, you know, then. Then it's a big problem, especially if they deteriorate, which they do. So because one of my new interests in this sort of second, big individual project of mine, which I'm now finishing and I'll talk about at the end, because it was about these abandoned. And their homes too. Abandoned homes. And that was paralleling the beginning of something else which I'm now working on, too. Declining population and young women who are not having children. But because of these physical spaces that were kind of at the center of this. A friend of mine in architecture at the University of Washington who works on Japan, said, I'm going to introduce you to a friend of mine, Jeffrey Ho, who was at the University of Washington then and was one of the chairs of Built Environments. He's now moved to Singapore. But what my friend Ken Oshima said is, Jeff doesn't, you know, like many architects do, look at the history of architecture, or they think about big buildings in large places. But Jeff doesn't do that. He thinks about public spaces and he thinks about community projects. And I think he's perfect for. And this would bring Taiwan and China. He also does China studies together with Japan. So that's how that happened. And Ken introduced me to Jeff. And Jeff had done a number of projects before this. He had several volumes out and. And I had two. So we got together and we wrote this project and we applied for money and we got it from the University of Washington. And what we did was we compiled a list and we invited people from all over, situated in East Asia to join us. So it was going to be this incredibly wonderful sort of. Instead of just people situated in America, in the United States, who study other places, we were bringing all these people from East Asia. Then the COVID crisis hit. So we only could bring them virtually. But it was really a wonderful group. Many of them are still in the volume. Some of them weren't able to finish, especially because Covid weren't able to finish their project. So I'll talk about that later. I ended up inviting a number of graduate students of mine who were reading this volume and producing papers which were wonderful to join. But it really started from the meeting with Jeff. And I guess he was interested in how an anthropologist looks at built environment. I was interested in how a built environment looks at the things that are going on. So we sort of put our minds together, invited all these people from across Korea, Japan, China and Taiwan, Hong Kong also to meet together and talk about. At first we called it something a little bit different, but we were always focused on these spaces of action. What does it mean? Because neoliberalism, one of the things that it does, this new liberalism, is it focuses on the subject as a subject of this new kind of freedom, which is really freedom of self, responsibility and risk. Divides is such an overused word in the United States now. But it really individuates, I think, is the word anthropologists use and puts people on their own in these very new competitive environments. So we realized that the people we were talking about were young people who understood that that separation was a very bad idea. And they were gathering together in small groups and collectives and creating new things that they were creating because they were coming together. They needed a physical space, or they were making these physical spaces. Or in the case of some of the things I look at, they were just taking these abandoned things and. And Repurposing them in this very environmental way. And I'll talk more about that, what that was. So that's really how we started. And what was wonderful about the conference itself is that in the process of it, people in Japan who didn't know what was happening in different places learned about each other. And people from Taiwan learned about what was happening in Japan, and the people from China learned about what's happening in Korea. So there was all of this sort of inter conversation. And since they've all visited or many. So in Taiwan, they started writing about Japan, and in China they started writing about. Anyway, for those reasons, I think it was really exciting. And then just two more things to say. Jeff got very busy and also was offered because of the pandemic. He was visiting his family a lot in Taiwan. And I think he decided that he really needed to live quite more closely. So he took the position in Singapore. And this project was supported by our East Asia Title six Center. Now, unfortunately, the Title six centers have lost funding, but at the University of Washington, this was a really vibrant space. And the reason that it got refunded is because of these projects that we do. We had gotten their money, we got other money. We had all this money to invite all these people. So since I had been part of these other two projects that produced written sort of material outcomes and Jeff had to leave, I decided that I would try to do this on my own. So I put together a teaching volume. I've put the papers together, the ones that I had, and wrote an introduction myself. And then I taught it. I taught it in several classes. And that I think was really interesting because a lot of these are young people that we're talking about. So the people in the classes just had these incredible, you know, responses to it, their questions. And that's when I knew that I needed the teaching appendix in the end, which we're going to talk about. But there were several, and if we have a minute, I'll just talk about one of them. In one of the classes, there was actually a conflict that arose over something called political indifference in China. And I had some graduate students who were saying that there are things you can do and you can't do. All sorts, things of things that came up. And there was actually sort of a little fight between the students. And this caused two of them, sue and Wu, to actually write their piece. Another piece was written by Summer dye on the 706 bookstores. And she was another student of mine who came to the class and said everybody had told her she Needed to take my class on changing generations and she wrote it there. So this is really the story of, you know, student interest as much as other things.

A (25:14)

Exactly. It's really exciting to see this journey. This volume is full of ongoing and vibrant dialogues. And also you bring it to your classroom and also to make classroom also full of dialogues. It's really exciting and I'm really looking forward to learning from you about how to use it and based on your appendix, education appendix. So we'll talk about it later, I think. But for listeners who haven't yet had the chance to read the book, what would you say about the central questions and the themes that the volume sets out to address? So what does this perspective on everyday form of resistance allow us to see? What might be obscured if we focus too much on the formal politics or spectacular collective movements? Right.

B (26:04)

So I mean, the question, the title of the book was always, you know, I think it was always a little bit up for grabs. Were we looking at responses in the introduction? I call them second order effects, things that nobody expected to come out of, as we never expect. Nobody expects social change. Actually, it's a very non linear kind of thing, or I'm going to say something about that at the end. These wonderful, wonderful quotes by Susan Buck Morrison, A book of hers, Revolution Today. So I had to start, as I said in the beginning when I came across these young people trying to do something, trying to do something else with their lives, actually relocate in this kind of reverse direction. They had to change their consciousness to do that. They had been raised to think that Tokyo was the place of success. And it was actually a forward or progressive move to go there. And going out or back to the peripheries was sort of encoded as a sign of failure that you couldn't make it someplace. So they had to actually do this thing in Japanese that's called ishi kaikaku. They had to actually ishikaikaku. They had to actually change their way of thinking spatially and temporally, because forward and backward are also temporal notions as much as spatially imploded ideas. So I think we decided on resistance in the title because I think people don't know what the word response actually means, but it's someplace between response and resistance. And we were thinking about. We began thinking about how national cultural spaces, political entities, societies move forward in time or how they emerge from generation to generation. And of course, as anthropologists, we've been arguing for a long time that this is not genetic, it's actually, it's not biologically. Determined. Right. This is actually. Right. Recreated every time. So how does it get recreated? Who are its subjects? And I think this is, of course, this is not the message that we teach people. But if we taught people that, then we would be in a very different landscape. Right. That you always have the possibility of doing otherwise. Maybe it's not easy to do on your own, but what does it mean to really deeply think about the structures, the power structures that animate your world and what and are. And what direction they're taking things? We also have to. It's really important for people of my generation to realize, and especially I think for the young people in Japan, if we think about East Asia, that climate change and energy production are a key node now that really animates so much of the conversation. So we were thinking about all of those things when we started to see Jeff in Taiwan and China and me in Japan, people doing otherwise, making different decisions about their lives themselves and with. With full consciousness that in doing that they were making some kind of a change because they are the system. And by not participating in that system in that particular way, and especially with these systems rely on human resources or human capital completely. So when human capital takes it back and says we are the capital. And I had to. I actually didn't realize this, even though my Marxian friends have always realized this to the extent until I saw these young people doing it and then I didn't expect them to be so aware that they would actually say it and teach it. We can build the societies we want to live in. We are. It's we, we are that which gives it strength. And we can take back that strength. We can take back with our own hands. We can take back our labor. This is the kind of things they start these. Some of these people started to say and it was, you know, I. These are not normal conversations. Right. These are very different kind of conversations that I. That I walked into. It's, you know, what does. In the Heideggerian essay, building, dwelling, thinking. It was really like that, like putting white collar typical white collar ideas or kind of that kind of moment of thinking which should be shared with everybody together with hands on creating what happens when you do that. So that's really what some of these people were doing. So I think those are the things that really drew Jeff to what I was doing and me to Jeff. And so we tried to sort of theorize, if you can call it that, a kind of resistance that is sort of a small P politics rather than a large P. If you think of the large P as electoral politics. But we always know that the big P politics depends on the everyday. That's where change happens and that's where it always. That's where it always has been. And again, these are things that we don't teach and we don't repeat often enough. So people, I think maybe particularly in the United States, this is where I have a new friend from Chile who reminds me of this. You know, you guys haven't talked about this. How do you think you're gonna keep that democracy? It's a very good question. But anyway, those are some of the things that we're animating. Then if I just move on to the question of resistance per se. I think in the case of Japan, where I do most of my work, although I do have, I did do a large project in Korea, which I'll talk about in a minute. I think that 311 was really a turning point, just an enormous turning point. And I think many people outside of Japan didn't realize they knew the Japanologist and other people interested knew the cataclysmic nature of this, but they didn't know or nobody could realize yet what the reverberations, that's what this wonderful book called Revelation and Revolution by Sabu Kozo, he's a translator in New York City. He calls it the revelations of Fukushima, the reverberations, he calls it how it would really reverberate through echo, through society. Like what this would mean for young people. Because Ngao To Kan, the then prime minister, the first prime minister who was not an LDP member, you know, like 50 years, he was sitting there at this moment and afterwards. He's now written a memoir that I haven't yet read. But I remember him saying that if the winds were wrong, the radiation would have come to Tokyo. And then he had 30 million people to evacuate. You know, this is a very different thing than the northeast coast. The northeast coast has had this kind of seismic event happen before and they have rebuilt and it's terrible because the tsunamis are incredible and they wipe out. But people are amazingly resilient, have been amazing resilient in the north. But nobody's ever seen somebody put these vulnerable cool water reactors with batteries underground and rely on a seawall that then plummets a meter with this level. And so the civil engineers, as good as they are, my husband is a civil engineer. But they were really something they couldn't predict either. With the explosions of these. Then a sort of Chernobyl like thing was created. Only you have a. You know, in this case of Russia and what they've covered up about Chernobyl. This is not an easy situation to explain to the population. Nobody knows what low level radiation does. I'm going to talk. When I talk about my chapter, I'll talk about this wonderful documentary filmmaker who's dedicated her life to. To anti nuclear energy activism. But she knew something about it because she had gone to Chernobyl and talked to the doctors there. So 311 was really a turning point. And I think Jeff was aware of that and I was aware of that. And we knew that these young people, these reverberations happened in this very particular way, that they began to question the capitalist system through this. Because without these resources, without being able to use the environment in a certain way and use the peripheries in a certain way, part of the capitalist system is just shut down. It absolutely relies on these resources and energy production. And Japan's energy production is 40% nuclear. So I think this was really a turning point. And when I realized that many of my friends were writing about this earlier, but when I heard young people say after 3:11, nothing is the same when they were old enough to realize what that meant. And to them it meant they needed to be environmental enough new way, they needed different practices of life. So I guess those are some of the things that we were thinking about. And then I began to think about how does that meet up with reproductive labor in the home? And then we had sort of our two arenas, plus these formal spaces that people are building. What does it look like spatially across this landscape of East Asia? And then I guess one more thing we started to realize. And my friend at Duke, Leo Ching, has also written another book that I'll cite from. He has this really interesting book called Anti Japan. And he's talking about the anti Japan sort of reaction, especially the older generation. But he ends with an epilogue about youth protest across East Asia. And he talks about how the young people, and Yadang, I think that's your generation across East Asia have different things in common than their parents did. The common grammar, what he calls it, of popular culture and the experience of precarity. And he puts those together to see how young people have begun to. And of course, with online sort of access, have begun to talk to each other about shared realities, even though there are serious specificities and local forms. But I think this also was something animating to us that this generation is in touch with each other about the past, but also about the present. Something like that Excellent.

A (36:58)

Thank you very much. And I totally agree with you. I think generational gaps always exist, but in today's East Asia young scholar and also the ordinary young generation are facing a kind of some kinds of very specific challenges. And I think this is the point where we can turn to resistance, particularly in the context of East Asia. So it's fair to say resistance is a key word not only for this volume, but also for socio cultural anthropology, but for this volume in particular. Can you elaborate a little bit? Resistance against what? For example, we are witnessing a variety of challenges you just mentioned emerging in East Asia today, such as social exclusion of particular groups, such as neoliberal development project and equality intensify, such as authoritarian governance, educational and work pressures. So how do all these overlapping challenges shape the forms of resistance that appears in today's different chapters also across East Asia?

B (38:00)

So you know what Yedong? I didn't think that. Again, I didn't expect to be in this situation which I've now been in for a number of years, but I began to realize that and I'm born and raised in the United States, Portland, Oregon. So you know, sort of not an East Asian citizen. But I think what's interesting here to me, I guess besides the present and what kind of, what kind of action or what kind of counter move this is that I think these young people, and I quote this at the beginning of my sixth chapter in my book, are very savvy about the past too. They're beginning to ask questions about empire and questions about the developmental state of the post war period. So this is not just resistance to a regime that needs, needs their buy in to be those individualized, individuated, competitive and I guess in Korea they call it the spec generation. People who amass these specs and are in competition constantly with their friends. But I think this has given young people the ability to really think about the kind of work regimes that their parents went through and the externalizing of the environment during that time to build this material wealth. And they're living and this my students here at the University of Washington are so much in this situation. In fact, in a new class called Art and Activism that I created in the first row, the kids that sit in the first crow, they just looked at me and they said what did you leave us with? How did we get to this point? And I think they're really inspired by reading about a part of the world that they don't know very much about. They have a lot of stereotypes about, but they don't know they either think about these big collectives or communities. And the whole idea of change doesn't get associated with East Asia. These cultures that go on forever or whatever that means, you know, really unexamined, lived experience. So I think one of the things that was so interesting to me was to be part of a project that really teaches us about the importance of specificity and ideas that travel from place to place and set down and take local form and what that looks like and how that enables us to think about the past and the present, these histories of the present and things. And that's where I think the resistance or these different choices that people are making are so powerful. But one other thing, and this has to do with my second book that I'm working on right now. I pretty much figured just being able to do fieldwork means to be there with people in the midst of these things of what they're doing or what they're thinking or what the complications that they're encountering is. Well, I guess, really to see how they take on these challenges and how they. I guess the way that we put it in the volume is how they produce presents and then imagine futures. And that, to me, was a really different. And my students are really inspired by this. The question they ask is, how do we do that here? In one of the talks I've given on this volume, the people in the audience said, can we go visit these places? And the answer is, yes, you can. I think people don't know these things about East Asia. They don't know about lived experience. They don't know that people who are in protests don't just leave the protests and forget about it. They go on and do something else. That's the story of the chapter on Taiwan. These people were in the umbrella movement or. Or any of these things we're talking about. So I guess to us, we were describing a form of social change. And I think it's really the form that's so interesting. And how do the forms change, and how do they inspire each other? And how do people learn as they're going on? Susan Buck Morris calls this. She says that we should think of change as not instrumental. In other words, one cause is one thing, but mimetic in the sense that people learn from each other. They borrow one of the groups that I'm working with. One of the first things they said to me is, we're going to build for the 99%. And they didn't have to say Occupy Wall street to me. They didn't have to say David Graeber. These are things that they said. Our professor in architecture told us not to go to Tokyo and build a building. Big building after 3, 11, you know, go build for the 99% think of these spaces and reusing materials and doing something different and being part of these past and presents rather than wiping them out and demolishing and starting over. So all of these things were just, you know, they're very different stories from East Asia, I think.

A (43:30)

Fascinating. Thank you for pointing out that resistance is not only about, you know, like you mentioned, instrumental thing, but also an issue about time, about dealing with and negotiating the relationship between the past, future and the present. And also another very striking feature of the volume is its emphasis on space. Built space, natural environment, housing, cultural and symbolic spaces, and even speculative or imagined spaces. So why do you see space as such an important analytic lens for thinking about resistance and social transformation in today's East Asia?

B (44:06)

Yeah, thank you for this really great question. Each of these are really so interesting. So I'm going to quote again from Susan Buck Morris. This is coming from an interview that she did in a volume, an SAQ volume. And we can list all of these different things that I'm referring to called 1968 decentered. Susan Buck Morse is known for her book on Walter Benjamin and also her work on Russia and a number of other things. Haiti she's written on. She was in Eastern. Eastern European scholar to start with, but also works in philosophy. But she has this newer book out called Revolution Today. And really what her interest is, looking across from Tahrir Square to Occupy Wall street, she's really interested in these Occupy movements. Another person to think about is Kristin Ross, who looks at this in the commune form in France. So, you know, we were very interested in how these, how these impetuses to do something different, how they learn from and see each other, and why people are occupying space. Why is space so positive? But of course, protests move through space. Everything moves through space. We live in space and spaces, you know, whether these are homes or schools. So. So we were just very interested in how social change, as some kind of theorists have said, in order for social change to happen, it takes spaces or the reforming of spaces. This could be change from, if you want to say, from a powerful political authority that when the Japanese moved into Seoul, they rebuilt it just like the French rebuilt Paris, Haussmann Boulevards, or they rebuilt other places. Everybody's known that humans live in these spaces and they live from these spaces, and they learn from these spaces. Actually, there's a really Fascinating article. I teach in my class called Inventing, Forgetting, Remembering by Takashi Fujitani, who talks about how the Meiji project was really to redo spaces to put statues every place to teach people about the emperor. How do you make change? Is to make change through these physical landscapes that people live in. But Susan Buck Morse was very interested in how. How people see each other in these places. So the Occupy movements actually take over space. And that interrupts the whole relationship between public and private too. So that's so interesting about it. So she has this really interesting and helpful phrase. She says these spaces render visible the horizons of the possible. And that's something that I kept thinking about. That's why all of these people, first of all, they're changing the spaces of their life, but they're also creating new community spaces, places for people to come together. And when we go through the chapters, we'll talk about some of them. You know, whether they're libraries or bookstores or cinemas or, you know, a place that rebuilds other spaces or a vegetable container or all of these things. It's so interesting to see what happens when this physical landscape actually changes. So what happens within these or when people see these and the possibilities that they see when they notice this kind of labor that's gone into these things or just the focus of time and the inhabiting of these places. And also, remember I was working with a built environment person, so they're all about space. That's what they do. But I was thinking about these abandoned spaces, what happens when something is abandoned in the landscape. And I was looking at the effects of it, of these places that were abandoned in these physical landscapes. So I started to think about and read about people thinking spatially. And of course, I had been trained to think temporally, and that's the whole notion of my first book. So we were putting space and time together, and then that helped us to think about the difference of center and periphery too, in terms of those landscapes. So maybe that's a little bit of what we were thinking of here with spaces.

A (48:33)

Perfect. I think the fascinating idea to in this way, bring time and space together to talk about future making East Asia. And now could you please walk us through the organization of the whole volume? How are the chapters grouped? And what distinct questions or perspectives does each section bring to the table?

B (48:53)

I think, to be honest, everybody would like to hear that there were obvious reasons to separate these into these sections. What I was trying to do in the sections, first of all, was make every section as much as possible. There's A few more pieces on Japan than the other pieces. But to make every section cross regional. So. So the first section starts with a piece with my introduction and then my opening chapter and then a piece on Korea and then Hong Kong and then China. So the first question was how do we put these together and think of. In this first section we're really trying to talk about, I guess we said acts of resistance, but I think that really the acts of resistance are not completely separate from the second section that we called Community Places, because everybody's doing that too. Maybe there's a few more individual actors in the first section. And then in the second section, from Ishibashi to Sugano and Summer Dai and then Matsubara, they're talking more about community spaces perhaps. And I'll talk more about that. And then in the last one, the last one really is a really interesting. There are two pieces on Taiwan and I think these really speak together about. We called it environments. We could have called it peripheries. Quang and Wu are working in urban spaces too, but. But there could have been different ways that these were organized because there are a lot of overlaps thematically between the chapters. But I think to be honest, the real purpose of separating these in this way was to the ones that read the best together. Hae in Chae's piece reads really well with mine and I think Chan does too because of the individual acts here. And also Tsu and Wu. And then in the second part, I think Ishibashi reads really well with Sugano and Summer. So it was really reading them together and thinking about them. But they all really have a lot in common with each other. And I think that's what my students when they were reading it and also my colleagues when they were reading and commenting on this, there were some really interesting. There was some really interesting feedback about. About why not put these together with chapters that read really well together? So I think that was also something we were thinking about.

A (51:39)

Interesting and following your statement that in your editing of this volume, you really want to make every chapter, every section trans regional. So from Japan to China to South Korea, what shared history shaped the cases in this book? And how does this volume handle comparison between different East Asian countries, regions, communities or mode of resistance? Were there patterns of culture that especially surprise you as you work on this collection?

B (52:11)

I talked a little bit about this in the earlier question, I think. But I guess what's interesting about the East Asian context and the cross regional connections that we're thinking about, and I'm Thinking even more about now in a new project on reproductive labor is we're trying to really think about both a short period of time and a longer period of time. In other words, and I think I said this when I was talking to you in the opening when I was in grad, even when I was in graduate school and the generation before this, most people were working on one place. The idea in anthropology, and I think it's a very good idea, is to have deep language knowledge. Especially if you're a native anthropologist, a Chinese person working in China, then you have language. But if you're not and you're an anthropologist doing this fieldwork in another place to take the to you're required to take the time to have deep, deep area knowledge. Of course. And to have area knowledge of East Asia means to have area knowledge of the world because these have been colonized in occupied spaces. And what that means. But it also means you need enough linguistic background so that you walk into places. And I found this over and over again. And people don't have to wonder if you can understand what they're saying. You have to be part of the conversation. You have to know these things as well as they do if you that's possible. And know all the language associated with it. So you just need this really, really deep background. I think that's one of the reasons that people did work in one place rather than look at the connections between places. So again, the Japanese Empire and the ways that it's spread out and the kinds of power structures that it colonized by which quite different from the Europeans, but nonetheless brutal. But the kind of animating ideologies of co prosperity sphere and things and the long durer of this empire in Taiwan from 1895 and then Korea from 1910, et cetera, really brought these countries together in a completely new way. I mean, there were 6 million Japanese living or more civilian and soldiers living outside of Japan. And there were equal numbers of colonial subjects who were then thought of subjects of the Japanese Empire living inside of Japan. So you had this really shared space, uneven of course, but under this different notion again than European colonialism that always colonized across race. And Japan have that possibility. And so they're building this whole whole and they think enduring empire that will go on for a really long time. And you know, when I meet Koreans, older Koreans, they speak to me in Japanese. Of course they do. Yeah. So that was everybody's language. The Japanese in China are a shorter amount of time in Manchuria, but not happily so. Right. But so from there to the post war period. Even though this gets pulled apart with the American occupation and them repatriating and depatriating these places so quickly, there's so much shared background. This is just a couple of generations ago. So to think of this place separately, and this is what I found. In a minute I'll talk about this colonial prison in Seoul. To think of it separately was always a very sort of strange idea. But. But as a result of these neoliberal logics finally coming to East Asia, they were kept out by the Korean government and kept out by the Japanese government. We knew what was happening. They knew what was happening in Europe and in the United States. And when Ronald Reagan and Thatcher came to Nakasone San and said, you need to do this too, because this is the way of the future, he goes, he said, no, thank you. We're doing just fine without this. But when they finally, after the 90s and China's market socialism is a little bit different, but Korea is taken over by the IMF and forced into this full country liberalization of their economy. Japan takes on some of this, keeps some of its labor protected, but really changes the nature of that 99% middle class in China, Korea, they talked about 70% middle class really divides. The social division happens. Then you have another moment. Maybe people just weren't thinking enough about it. When there's so much shared experience across these places. Pun Nye is writing about it in her fantastic ethnography Made in China, and Cho Haejong is writing about it in Korea with respect Generation Jesuk Song Korea and the Debt Crisis. I guess my book, in the Case of Japan, Anne Allison, has also written about precarious Japan. Maybe mine is sort of that main ethnography of that period. But there's so much in common. And then when we begin to see these responses and we don't really know where they start. Does Korea learn from Japan? Does Japan learn from Korea? The Japanese, some of the young people are learning from other places in the world. They're looking at Europe, they're looking at the Middle east, they're looking at the United States and seeing what these social gaps and this alienation looks like. And now we have another moment to think across East Asia, but in a way that's actually a little bit different than the US Maybe a little bit more, I don't know, more creative, especially more than Trump's US So I think it's just a very interesting moment to think about these. And we found that by bringing these people together to Talk about this at the conference. We really heard, I think in anthropology we call it these intertwined presence in histories. We really heard the echoes of it, and that's why it made sense. And. And I think East Asia has, you know, these young people in East Asia have a lot to show the rest of the world, and they open up these spaces. They're so willing to have them to be in conversation with other people. Oh, I should mention, and I sometimes forget, all of these people use social media to such a fabulous extent. So all of these things are online, some of it, of course, in Japanese, Korean or Chinese or Taiwanese, but all of it is available. And my students who speak these languages, they do projects on these. They just want to know what's happening now. Great.

A (59:32)

Unfortunately, we cannot have all the artists together to talk about their own project, but we are very lucky to have you here to talk about your own chapter in this volume, which focuses on post 3.11 Japan and the activities of women who leave cities like Tokyo to establish alternative DIY and community projects in Malaysia.

B (59:52)

More.

A (59:53)

I would say more periphery regions. I think you've talked a bit about this project, but what drew you to this women's activities? And how do their everyday practices of making, inhabiting and caring for place open up new forms of resistance and possibilities, not only for their own lives, but also for how we might think about East Asian future more broadly.

B (60:15)

So sometimes my students write things about the things that I do in ways that are so prescient that I think I'm going to read you something that one of them wrote, and she was writing about my chapter. So she says, however, for individuals like Kamanaka, and the first person that I write about is Kamanaka Hitomi, this documentary filmmaker, who I'll talk a little bit more about in the middle. Turning to the peripheries as the location of one's life is more accurately understood as a turn away from labor precarities and the increased spatial temporal unevenness of post 1990s neoliberalization. She's quoting from me on page 14. As stated above, women and younger generations are rejecting the neoliberal ideals of life in these rural areas of Japan. People are using their skills, this is her word, as well as community support, to rebuild a life that is on their own terms. This is also her words. There is a clear. It's really wonderful when the students take this and create their own language of it on their own terms, I think is a very interesting way for young people to put it. There is clear reform from the idea of competition of peers, the neoliberal way in parentheses and freedom is given to all with a helping hand in the mix. This directly correlates with the idea that they read another piece by Yoshitaka Mori, who's an art historian who's written this book about DIY spirit. It's a great book and they had read that. This correlates with Mori's idea as a way to reclaim agency. This young generation is making. This generation is making the U turn from neoliberal societal standards of making a political actor statement. Additionally, these towns are full of creativity and expression. The way Maury describes culture equals politics. Every building that is built to be open and bring together communities is a direct impact on the culture as well as a direct statement of the political stance against an urban neoliberal. I mean, if I had a student who had written that before, I would have made it the blurb on the back of the book. It's great, right? So just very quickly, I mean, I think that's a wonderful overview of sort of what's going on. I chose these four because of the fact that Kamanaka Hitomi is this really incredible filmmaker. And I was working with her on a film. Anyone can look her up and see this. Her final film that she does after the Fukushima disasters is really a very sad look at these evacuees and things. But it's also out of that sad moment emerges this mother's movement that goes to Tokyo to protest against nuclear energy and things. But in the midst of this, Kamanaka decided. And that's where I start the chapter. A quote from her on one of our travels together. She says, how do you put farming and filmmaking together? I'm going to try it. And that's when she decides to move to one of the places we went to sea together. So I started with her and how, as she said, this requires somebody to change their way of thinking. About center, periphery, about time and space, about social relations, about capitalist production. All of these things in the individual decision to try and to make the simple decision to do this someplace else where people can't reach you as easily. They think if you're in the peripheries, maybe you're not as important. She said, doesn't matter. We're gonna farm and filmmake together. But the other group that I really center around in their chapter in my new book, I wanna tell their story for a second. Cause it's such an interesting story. So I met up with these young people not in Nagano, Japan. I met up with them in Portland, Oregon. And the reason that what I. So NPR just came out with in June, came out with this really interesting piece called about deconstruction. This is not deridian deconstruction. They spell it D E Construction. It's a new movement in building that asks people building. Of course it's not happening in Seattle, but is really a whole new movement in building to never demolish a place but to take it apart piece by piece and repurpose all the materials. Not to put it in landfills, as the young people in Japan say. It's not only landfills in our country. We don't have place for that. It's that we have to import more lumber. We don't have even the lumber. So in Seattle you might put it in a landfill and then just go chop down, just sort of wipe out a landscape of trees, right? This cross cutting of trees. But in Japan they don't have the lumber, so they would have to do that too. NPR did a whole piece on this that these young people in Japan did way before NPR was thinking about it. So I walked into in Portland, Oregon, in the northern part of Portland, which was a former redlined area that African Americans had to live in North Portland. In the racial politics of a earlier Portland in the 1980s, a group came in and they built a big recycling center to help people take care of their houses and things. And they called it the rebuilding center of Portland. These young people came to that place and they interned. And then they wrote this book called Rebuild New Culture. They went back to Japan, they moved to Nagano to this. Found this big abandoned warehouse. And they said, this is our place. This is where we create our own rebuilding center of Japan. And we take what we learned in Portland. But with this new idea that at that point was not called deconstruction, they just created a name for it. They call it rescue. And to see the pictures, you can see the pictures in my chapter of what it looks to really take apart these old abandoned houses. Some of them are very old. And save this lumber and save the tiles and save all this stuff, resell it, and then make, instead of destroying these neighborhoods, make something new that's also old and represents the past and the present in these spaces. It's painstaking work. But. But when I saw this, and it's all in Japanese actually, the woman at this recycling place in Portland heard that I teach about Japan. And she went in the back and she pulled out this book that she couldn't read. And she Said, can you read this? And she gave it to me. And that's how the second example started. Because I went to Nagano afterwards and I brought the book and they were so thrilled to see the. And this person, this crazy anthropologist who had gotten this book and showed up at their doorstep. So I met this couple who had started it and I write their story. And I think what's the most incredible thing about Ruby Sen from the beginning, and now they've been there for 10 years, is that they had these very big messages. And that's sort of. I quote them at the very beginning. She says, we want to rebuild buildings and culture. We can create a new society from here. This is a strange landscape of abandoned houses and radioactivity and social disconnection. We don't need to live that way. So as soon as I walked in and these are the kind of things they were saying, I knew this was already a political project. This was. Some of these are very everyday. Like Chicaco is doing this thing in the everyday, just converting this vegetable container into this cafe and inviting in her neighbors. But each one of these young people who does this has these big messages to say, like Chicako talks about making equal in the space of a cafe. How do you do that? So I think I wanted to focus on women here because right now, across East Asia and Japan in particular, there's this big focus on women and what they're doing or what they're not doing and what they should be doing. I'm going to talk about that later. And so I wanted to really think about how these women. And Ayumi is another one who thought as a single woman, she couldn't exist on her own. So she found this community in Nagano and they invited her and they said, don't worry, you won't be on your own, we'll take care of you. And that's how she started this whole new new business and invites in. Each one of these is kind of transformative in itself because people have realized what's at stake here and what they can do. The messages, the actions. Oh, also Ruby Sin teaches. They teach DIY classes, they make movies, they write books. They're just incredibly productive young people. But they also. It's a very heterogeneous community in the sense that people with a lot of education, people with less education, typically in that developmental state sort of climate, there would be. That would be a big separation. The people that get these big jobs and the people who don't. Here, it's a very different landscape. The other thing I should just mention is this has become such a pull for young people. So Ruby San has created. They understand that they need more people and they want to teach this across the country. So they opened up a big thing. They call supporters and volunteers, hundreds of people. We were there one day when this architecture student, who should have been doing a paid internship in Tokyo, is coming out for free just to sit day after day and clean tiles. And you ask him, why is he doing this unpaid work? He's not getting credit for it because he wants to be part of something different. So they have this really big. And that's I guess, where I just decided, instead of writing one sort of thorough chapter that I would write, take these four different examples and try to think about them and the sort of different ways that they're coming together and the kind of things that they're not only doing because the doing is very big here, but the kind of things they're thinking and expressing at the same time.

A (70:44)

Exactly. And as you just quoted one of your students, excellent writing here. I think it's a proper time for us to talk about the possible roles that this book may play in the classroom. So one distinctive feature of the volume is the teaching appendix that follows the case studies which offers concrete suggestions for bringing these materials into the classroom. So what were your goals in including this section and who did you have in mind as the primary audience for the book? For example, undergraduate and graduate students, activists, practitioners, or broader public? And how do you, as the editor, hope they will use or engage with the volume?

B (71:24)

Yes. So a funny thing happened when we did our first volume, which was Global Futures in East Asia. And we presented it to a group of our colleagues at the University of Washington and all East Asianists. So we thought, no problem here. And the first thing they said to us was, how do you teach this? And so Anne and I were very surprised. These are obvious. I'm not trying to criticize. It's just that I think because we had done this collaboration, we were sort of handing it to them like this is. You don't need to buy those textbooks. Look, we've got situated, contextual, very up to date projects in the everyday, right? And they're all speaking to each other. They didn't know how to teach it. And this happened with Spaces of Possibility too. So this time I thought that not only did I want this to appeal to a larger public, but that my peers need it just to point out, how do you teach a volume like this? And I think it was just sort of a way for them to look at the back first if they didn't want, you know, read the introduction and then look at the back and think, okay, here's the themes. I can just create a lesson plan and now I'll go and pick up the chapters that I want to teach from. But at the same time, I was also thinking of community college and high school teachers. And I actually did an event with East Asia Studies high school teachers. I wanted to create materials for them that are very up to date and very specific. They get good materials, but not as specific as this is. And I think it's all about the specificity. But also I gave a talk, I was invited to give a talk at the Seattle Asian Art Museum. And I was surprised by how many people there were there and all their questions. And there are people just in the public who want to read this and they want to use it in book groups and things. So I think, think the Teaching Appendix is helpful for all of those things. Also, when you write an edited volume, the presses really need to have something like this because the first thing people are going to say is, this is nice, but we don't really know how they go together. So we did sort of that, you know, we did. Since we've been part of this project, it's easiest for us to articulate it. Not everybody is going to need that Teaching Appendix Appendix. But for the people who want to use it and want to have some idea of the themes we were working in beginning, and for them, for people who. The introduction is actually aimed a little bit at my peers. It's a little bit more theoretical. And some people love that. And some people, you know, if they're not as sort of in touch with that. But the Teaching Appendix sort of looks. Works together with that introduction, I think, think to sort of take that theoretical language and translate it into questions and answers. I actually worked with it on a student of mine who had taken like five classes with me. And I said, you probably know my things as well as I do, so why don't we work together? So, yeah, perfect.

A (74:32)

I think this volume is definitely a timely contribution to all this, whether undergraduate students who are interested in East Asia or like you mentioned, high school teachers who are teaching about East Asia. It will be very helpful for them to use it and to read the Teaching Appendix section. Thank you very much for this contribution. And before we close, could you please share a bit about your current and future projects? Have particular chapters or collaborations in this volume open up new research directions for you, whether in Japan, elsewhere in East Asia, or in, you know, collaborative work. And more generally, what kinds of questions are you most excited to pursue next?

B (75:12)

Thank you very much. I'm sorry that we had to miss the other part because I think I talked a little bit too much about some of these. But I'm just going to quickly note that some of the other chapters that I would just like to mention are the Ishibashi chapter on a cinema that was redone, and he calls it I Refuse to live in a Place Without a Cinema. Or Jeff Ho's chapter Summers on the 706 workspace HAE in Chae's on the this southwest town of Mokpo. There's so many good chapters here. I hope, even though we've had to go kind of quickly through those. I hope everybody will take a look. So, yes, as I was saying before, I'm not a gender scholar, at least trained as a deep gender scholar, but the declining population across East Asia, I became aware of another way that this is linking the East Asian region in a new way. And so I put together a group of actually, most of them are East Asian women who are thinking about crisis discourses and collaborative responses. We did a conference in April, and we're gonna put this new volume together, Feminism. Some of the really interesting things happening are Chinese feminist inviting Japanese feminists, environmental activists inviting Korean feminists. All of these people are sort of trading ideas of how they can think about their labor in homes and what it means to reproduce a workforce, what it means to be the one responsible for reproducing social relations without getting paid for it or being underpaid for it. And in a time of insecurity. So we're trying to think about that. And artists, activists, all sorts of people were involved in that. So that's going to be a next volume that I'm working on. And then I'm working on my own second and third books right now. And my second book will think about places like Ribi San, but also some new social movements called no Youth, no Japan, a couple of different artist activists and a number of different people doing really ecosocialists and their relationship to ecofeminists. We're thinking about the notion of change, but we're thinking about it coming from Japan in a new way. How does the message of ecosocialism, degrowth, communism from Japan, that was sort of the capitalist aura of the world after the United States. How does somebody like that become so popular? And how does their message resonate with the younger generation? How is this kind of message coming from Japan rather than the United States. And it's a different conversation about the environment, about democracy, about capitalism for sure. So and it also I'm very interested in the meetup between ecofeminism and ecosocialism. So my oh, and also it involves a political party, so there's sort of these people and their relationships between each other and the kind of change that they're creating. And then I have a third book that I'm planning on solidarity movements around the world, and that is probably a story for another time, but I'm really excited about how we change war to peace in different parts of the world.

A (78:51)

World Excellent. Thank you very much. We are approaching the end of today's podcast and it's very sad that we do not have enough time to dive into these fascinating case studies in this volume, and I'd recommend it to our audience if you have a chance to learn more about these cases. They are really readable and they are really meaningful for us to know more about how East Asian youth scholars are doing today and also how ordinary youngsters in East Asia are pursuing their alternative future. And I also want to say I'm really looking forward to your forthcoming next volume and your second asset monograph. I think I will definitely learn a lot from them. So, Professor EL Rice, thank you so much for joining us today and for sharing all these insights on spaces of resistance and emerging possibilities in contemporary East Asia and also sharing all this fascinating story about your intellectual trajectory. It has been a real pleasure for me chatting with you. Thank you very much.

B (79:46)

Much thank you very much. Adong, thank you for your questions.

A (79:49)

Thank you. So in today's episode, I've been speaking with Professor Arai about her additive volume, Spaces of Creative Social change projects in 21st century East Asia, published by Rutgers University Press this year. For listeners interested in contemporary East Asia youth studies and social movements or educators teaching about everyday forms of resistance, this book offers a rich and timely collection of case studies. I'm Yadong Li, and you've been listening to the New Books Network. We hope to see you next time.