Jamie Coates
I investigate how 'being-in-common' is produced in emergent urban and transnational communities. My research has focused on Sino-Japanese mobilities and their effect on young Chinese identities with particular attention to how migration, media, and play shape young Chinese efforts to re-imagine co-ethnic and regional ideas of commonality in Japan. My work on the production of commonality has also lead me to explore diverse methodologies applicable to anthropological research. From videography and photography to analyses of historical documents, pop culture media-texts and various digital technologies, my research connects an interest in fieldwork methods to several broader fields of sociocultural inquiry. I completed my PhD at the Australian National University (ANU), and have since taught at the University of Sheffield (UK), Waseda University (Japan), Osaka University (Japan), and the ANU. I am currently a visiting fellow at Sophia University (Japan).
Supervisors: Andrew Kipnis (PhD Supervisory Chair), , Tess Morris-Suzuki (Supervisory panel member), Ashley Carruthers (Supervisory panel member), and Gracia Liu-Farrer (JSPS host and advisor)
Supervisors: Andrew Kipnis (PhD Supervisory Chair), , Tess Morris-Suzuki (Supervisory panel member), Ashley Carruthers (Supervisory panel member), and Gracia Liu-Farrer (JSPS host and advisor)
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Papers by Jamie Coates
Yamanote line, exploring its role as a form of mobility that creates temporalities, spaces and boundaries, and the modes of intimacy and estrangement such
dynamics produce. The papers within this special issue were developed out of discussions held at the Chicago AAS conference 2015. That year marked the
130th anniversary of the line’s initial opening and the ninetieth anniversary of the completion of the loop. A focus on the Yamanote line provided us with fruitful reflections on migration and marginalisation, the way space is imagined and represented in the city, and how everyday life is both disciplined and disrupted. These reflections are included throughout the contributions within this special issue as they relate to Japan; however, they also attest to the continued importance of Japan as a site to reflect on broader socio-historical questions. As we show in this special issue, thinking from the Yamanote line not
only allows us to think about Tokyo or Japan, but also affords attention to wider questions relevant to urban life more generally.
Organised into thematic parts, the topics cover:
The historical context to migration in Asia
Modern Asian migration pathways and characteristics
The reconceptualising of migration through Asian experiences
Contemporary challenges and controversies in Asian migration practice and policy
Contributing to the retheorising of the subject area of international migration from non-western experience, the Routledge Handbook of Asian Migrations will be useful to students and scholars of migration, Asian development and Asian Studies in general.
Each example demonstrates well how class and gender are inextricably linked within Post-Mao China. Hanser utilises Pierre Bourdieu's work on cultural economies of distinction in conjunction with Michele Lamont's concept of 'symbolic boundaries' to organise her point.[2] She argues that different 'structures of entitlement' are produced and re-produced in the service context through the maintenance of certain symbolic boundaries (pp. 197–98).
The encounters found within Harbin No. X department store represent a context where egalitarian and socialist ideals play significantly in the symbolic boundaries created by staff. The staff members position themselves as experts, often instructing the customer to buy a particular item despite the customer's differing preference. Hanser shows how this, in conjunction with a familial 'auntie'-like approach, asserts an air of resistance in what is an increasingly deferent service culture. Happy to rely on the store's socialist symbolic capital and working-class ideals, the staff espouses an egalitarian ideals when dealing with management, experience a greater deal of autonomy in the workplace and feel more assured in declaring their authority when dealing with customers. The staff at Harbin No. X is generally older than the women working in the other two contexts and justify their style of service using a nostalgic concept of candid working class warmth (reqing). Distinguishing themselves from both the hyper-sexualised women found within the Underground market and the overly deferent women in the Sunshine department store, the women at Harbin No. X present themselves as bastions of working-class consumption where 'good quality and good value' (p. 175) are more important than profits generated by the store.
In contrast to Harbin No. X, The Underground represents the cheaper, riskier alternative to department store shopping and embodies contemporary anxieties about 'primitive' getihu capitalism (p. 136) and the rural–urban class divide. According to Hanser's research, the women working in The Underground were perceived as deceptive or false (xu), with many tricks (shuofa) and generally willing to do anything for a sale (p. 134). This portrayal was again exacerbated by the perception of The Underground as a place run by young rural women, whose fashion, bodies and wares embody the 'unsophisticated, unfeminine, unscrupulous' (p. 135) and sexually promiscuous stereotype of young outsiders (waidiren). Hanser shows however, how these images are destabilised, resisted and performed in the service encounters found in this context. She argues that The Underground also served as a 'theatre for counter performances of distinction' (p. 137). The comical and lively examples provided in Service Encounters show how the salespeople in The Underground blur the boundaries between the getihu market and the larger department stores. Claiming the differences to be mainly cosmetic, the women in The Underground advertised their wares as the same as Sunshine or Harbin No. X, but at cheaper prices. Similarly, other actions such as mimicking the returns policies of Sunshine all served as ways of adding legitimacy to the sphere of their small individually-run stores.
Hanser's final example at the Sunshine Department Store is far less lively than either The Underground or Harbin No. X. It nevertheless, serves as perhaps the strongest example of how service work is distinction work. The managers at Sunshine utilised strict forms of control and habituation in order to maintain a symbolic boundary between the women who worked under them and other women service workers (p. 97). This involved not only the careful monitoring of the workers' appearance but also a vigorous campaign of 'subject-making' where the women actively reshape themselves. The target of this process argues Hanser, is to have workers that not only appear to be the youthful, feminine and deferential, but actually are. This involved both classes for employees on proper behaviour and grooming, self-disciplining action amongst staff themselves, and strict age limits. This section provides the most theoretically interesting and detailed section of service encounters as Hanser explores the way the groomed, deferential bodily practices of the women in Sunshine serve to create a space of distinction. This space is one where the women working in it are almost invisible and where recognition of the customer 'is in fact recognition of class entitlement' (p. 106).
Criticisms are hard to find in reviewing Hanser's Service Encounters. A minor reservation is her emphasis on concepts of class and distinction in neglect of the subjectivities and pleasure that potentially motivate such practice. In particular, some further thought as to why young women working for Sunshine willingly adopt and encourage each other to embody certain ideals, whether these appeal to their own aspirations, and how they contrast with the pleasures associated with the sense of socialist nostalgia for women at Harbin No. X, would have further strengthened her already excellent work.
Hanser provides a vivid account of the everyday implications of Post-Mao era economic reforms and how boundaries of class and gender are both articulated and made permeable. Her concise and careful use of social theory makes it a useful introduction to practices of class and gender distinction. It also provides a clear description of policy changes in the reform era, making this an ideal text for anyone new to cultural research in Post-socialist China. However, this recommendation is not to imply simplicity. The clarity and rigour of Hanser's work makes it a pleasure to read, a vivid ethnographic account and an important contribution to gender studies.
The northern corner of Ikebukuro hosts over 300 Chinese-owned businesses and its municipal district (Toshima ward) is home to more than 13,000 Chinese nationals. More significantly, the station connects to many wider networks of Chinese sociality in the city. The official government response to the Chinatown proposal was that the Chinese community was too new, and too disengaged from local Japanese organizational activities to warrant official recognition. The phrase ‘let’s start from a dialogue’ (mazu kōryu kara) was repeated in various media reports at the time, exemplar of the polite yet distinctly conclusive way Japanese institutions reject these sorts of proposals. Unable to gain official approval, several of the initial proponents of the Chinatown proposal side-stepped Japanese stakeholders by producing a ‘Tokyo Chinatown’ website that links to various social media. In turn, Ikebukuro’s unofficial Chinatown status has been supported by some Japanese scholars and activists, serving as a symbol of new urban diversity in Japan.
Two young women streaming from an Ikebukuro bar. Jamie Coates
From these accounts one might assume that the Chinatown proposal reflects a newly forming Chinese community in Ikebukuro, as well as its tense relationship with local Japanese officials. However, the growth in digital forms of sociality and their intersection with new mobilities has ensured that many Chinese community-forming practices in Tokyo have taken on less territory oriented dynamics. Based on fieldwork in Ikebukuro, the Chinatown proposal by no means reflected the patterns of sociality and identification among the majority of ethnic Chinese in Tokyo, nor Ikebukuro. In fact, the Chinatown’s rejection was met with sighs of relief among many of Ikebukuro’s circles, with people stating that Chinatowns are an older form of sociality no longer fitting the way Tokyo’s relatively new Chinese population want to live their lives.
One young woman from Shijiazhuang told me that Chinatowns do not reflect how her peers imagine places such as Ikebukuro. She continued, stating the Chinatown and its accompanying website and ideals, for instance, were ‘dead’ (si). In contrast, the intersection of smartphones and social media has ensured that Chinese sociality intersects with wider patterns of otherness in Tokyo. One young man from Nanjing, for instance, even jokingly said to me ‘Tokyo’s Chinatown is online (wangshang).’ While Tokyo’s Chinatown may be ‘online,’ it does not follow patterns of strict co-ethnic identification, nor was it disconnected from analogue spaces in the city. Rather than connecting to a single ethnic enclave, digital Chinese sociality in Tokyo connects multiple Sinophone social media platforms to a heterotopic spread of bars, restaurants, social clubs, churches, schools, and various other spaces tucked away within the urban spread of the city. Some of these spaces were clustered around major stations such as Ikebukuro, Shinjuku and Ueno, but this was not always the case. Moreover, this kind of spatial arrangement suggested less about Chinese social life in the city than it did the ways the relationship between digital and analogue life intersects with Tokyo’s already heterotopic qualities.
A woman selling steamed buns in Yokohama. Jamie Coates
The choice of platform in negotiating these many connections and places reflects the differing scaling effects of digital sociality. These scales cut across extant associations between ethnicity and place in Tokyo, following logics of conviviality and practice more so than ethnic identification. At the same time, the conviviality of shared meanings, particularly in terms of joking, ensured that certain social media platforms had aggregating effects. WeChat, for example, was decidedly Sinophone, whereas platforms such as Facebook and Twitter (which are technically banned in mainland China), were used to navigate multi-lingual networks of practice in Tokyo, such as fan groups, artist collectives and nightlife based friendships. Private WeChat groups such as one titled ‘the mental asylum,’ which I followed during fieldwork from 2014–2016 were born out of chance encounters in bars across Tokyo, and became a site for the circulation of private images that parody Chinese pop culture, as well as complex Sinophone language games. Others, such as a group of Chinese-speaking artists, musicians and documentarians formed out of shared interests and eventually became an inclusive space for Chinese-speaking people from around the world, including me. These groups were spaces of constant chatter, and frequently turned into face-to-face meetings throughout the city to sing karaoke and eat Chinese food.
Chinatowns in Japan, much like in other parts of the world, have stood as a curious means of territorializing ethnic groups in the city. Yokohama’s Chinatown emerged out of legal restrictions on the occupations and spaces Chinese workers could enter in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. From the 1980s it was refurbished and reinvented to become a place where ethnic Others were celebrated as consumable and desirable. However, the new Chinatowns of Tokyo appear to differ. From the legal, to the cultural and political, the spatial dynamics of Chineseness and otherness in Japanese cities has taken on new patterns in recent years. Enabled by digitalized sociality, the young Chinese population in Tokyo reflects a diversity that is nowhere but everywhere, aggregated in terms of practice and shared interest, and resistant to the demarcation of ethnic enclaves, such as those embodied in the term ‘Chinatown.’
Jamie Coates works on Sino-Japanese mobilities and their effect on young Chinese identities. In particular, he is interested in how migration, media, and play shape young Chinese efforts to re-imagine co-ethnic and regional ideas of commonality. He is currently a visiting fellow at Sophia University.
In his recent book on acceleration and overheating, Thomas Hylland Eriksen (2016) argues that “the credibility of the anthropological story about globalization depends on its ability to show how global processes interact with local lives.” Japan’s precarity, and its unique geopolitical position, provide an important case study for anthropological thinking about mobility’s role in producing futures, livelihoods and politics. It also challenges us to move beyond theories of mobility that assume the epochal inevitability of increased movement.
In absolute terms, few people—less than 2% of the country population—i/emmigrate to and from Japan; many have argued that Japan is actually a net exporter of people. While the desire to travel overseas is dwindling among Japanese youths, tourism from Japan’s East Asian neighbours is booming. But, as is the case with “foreign-worker” policies, many are skeptical about this tourism boom’s long-lasting benefits.
What might an anthropological approach to these problems tell us? Ethnographic studies of mobility in and out of Japan show the way movement acts as a “qualisign,” connecting personal and national futures (Chu 2010). For Chinese people moving to Japan, whether as tourists or migrants, their mobilities produce comparisons between national discourses of modernity and their own notions of the “good life.” Similarly, shifts within the geopolitical and economic relationship between Japan and the Korean peninsula have ensured that many multi-generational Korean residents of Japan (zainichi) are facing difficult personal choices. Moving to Japan can also serve as a source of precarity for unexpected groups. Men who went to teach English in Japan, for example, can often find themselves in uniquely liminal positions.
Mobility is also “good for thinking” about Japanese people whose concern about Japan’s increasing precarity has inspired them to look elsewhere. Inter-Asian movements have increased and produced new patterns of mobility. As Karen Kelsky has pointed out (2001), the concept of “abroad” holds various aspirational qualities for Japanese women, whether enacted or imagined. Japanese men work for the Chinese offices of their home companies. Lower living costs and nostalgia for a simpler life have drawn Japanese retirees to Southeast Asia.
Over the coming months, we will be showing how recent ethnographic work on movements in and out of Japan can reveal new patterns and connections within East Asia.
The neologism bakugai emerged in the Japanese media as a response to reports of intensive shopping by Chinese tourists. It has since filtered into Chinese as baomai and spurred the employment of native Chinese speakers in all large department and drug stores throughout Japan. Chinese consumers spent roughly 12.2 billion USD, or around 41 % of all international tourism consumption, in Japan in 2015 (JTA). The most desirable items were cosmetics and health products (baby formula, skin whitening products), followed by electronics (washlet toilets, rice cookers), and high-end designer brands. Many of these products are not bought for personal consumption, but as gifts or personal favors.
The popularity of bakugai/baomai has given rise to Japanese media reports about unruly Chinese tourists and their excessive shopping habits, fueling the ongoing global image of the “ugly Chinese tourist.” Representations range from concerns about over-crowding to worries there will be no stock left for domestic customers (e.g., a particular concern in relation to milk formula). Tourist behavior has also caught the attention of the Japanese media, such as in September 2015 when a pair of Chinese honeymooners assaulted a convenience store worker in Hokkaido.
Migrants living in Japan with excellent knowledge of Japanese products and brands have increasingly acted as informal tour guides for bakugai, as well as buying items as “intermediate shoppers” through networks on social media and then shipping them to customers (daigou). Ling, for example, a Chinese student at one of Japan’s prestigious universities, is always running around department stores, comparing prices, taking product photos and uploading them onto her Wechat account. Ling knew that her success depended on the authenticity she derives from studying in Japan—her contacts trust that she has access to original products and is familiar with new Japanese trends.
Despite the presence of strong anti-Japanese sentiments in China, products from Japan are in high demand, and Japan is still seen as a desirable and modern location. Cross-border trade relies heavily on favorable currency and taxation rates, the price politics of international brands, consumer trust in foreign goods, and media images. These everyday mobilities generate new cultural forms, such as bakugai and daigou, and discursive trends, such as media panics, suggesting new levels of connectivity, simultaneity, and volatility in the Sino-Japanese context.