セクションⅡ:アイデンティティ “Am I My Brother's Keeper?” ─Discriminatory Practices in the Name of Security

Miguelángel VERDE(1)(Kyoto University)

Seven years after the Japanese government abolished fingerprinting of foreign nationals due to an unusual display of discontent in civil society, it has decided to amend its immigration laws (改正入管法) to allow, once more, for fingerprinting and photographing of foreign nationals, no matter their visa or residence status. In blatant contradiction with Japanese law, which makes it illegal to fingerprint anyone that has not been charged with a crime, this controversial measure is weakly justified by stating it will help to “prevent the occurrence of acts of terrorism against Japan.” However, with the exception of the Japanese Embassy hostage crisis in Lima, Peru, Japan has never suffered a terrorist act that didn't involve Japanese nationals solely. The arrests that followed the Aum Shinrikyou's (オウム真理経) fiendish Tokyo sarin gas incident lead approximately twenty Japanese nationals to be tried and convicted by the justice system, but none of the cult's internationals members were ever found to be involved in the attacks. Similarly, the infamous Japanese Red Army (日本赤軍), which hijacked airplanes, bombed and stormed company facilities and embassies, and murdered civilian bystanders indiscriminately, perpetrated thirteen terrorist acts between the 1970s and the 1980s. And yet, only two on them were committed on Japanese soil, while the other eleven were committed abroad; in every case, nonetheless, the participants involved in the attacks were solely Japanese nationals.
The Japanese word for a stranger (他人) is an “other person.” Foreigners (外国人, “outside country people”), likewise, are usually called gaijin (外人), “outside people” or “outsider,” in informal circumstances. The Japanese scholar Ohsawa Masachi has forwarded that the Aum sect “can be seen as an extreme reflection of Japanese society in general,” since it “mirrors the same type of fear toward the ambivalent 'other' common within the Japanese population.” For Ohsawa, that fear of the ambivalent 'other' is “a symptom of the social disintegration brought forth by advanced capitalism,” and in that manner “not particular to the Japanese, but rather reflected in many ethnic nationalisms and religious fundamentalisms of contemporary global society.” Nowadays, when globalization leads us inevitably to attempt to constructively deal with the intricacies of multicultural contexts, the return of undeniable racisms and state-sponsored discriminatory policies must be carefully analyzed and protested.
Within this article, we will briefly review Carl Gustav Jung's psychoanalytic shadow archetype, which attributes to others “all the evil and inferior qualities that we do not like to recognize in ourselves.” In order to better understand how the notion of the 'Other' is framed in terms that allow to detach ourselves from what we revile in ourselves, and project these dissatisfactions and uncertainties unto those that are beyond the limits of our communities, we will focus on the collective shadow. Likewise, an examination of Frankfurt School thinkers Theodor W. Adorno's and Max Horkheimer's concept of mimesis may allow us to understand the nature of the ambivalent horror/desire relation that every culture experiences towards other 'alien' cultures, and how the same emotional core that contains the seeds of hate also contains a potential for reconciliation. We intend, in this manner, to pose Japan's amended immigration policy as a case study that can forward explanations on how nations that defend universal human rights and humanitarian aid can also advocate nationalism and discrimination; the threat that the latter represent to attempts at multiculturalism and social justice; and, the possibilities we have in order to overcome such a dilemma, if we have the sufficient bravery to attempt the moral effort required to recognize “the dark aspects of [our collective] personality as present and real.”

“Governments perceived September 11th as an opportunity to push forward programs, often harsh and regressive programs, that they knew the population would either oppose or certainly not be very satisfied with, but that they could push – carry through – under the … using the moment of fear and tension and also with the appeal to a kind of … a false kind of patriotism which translates into loyalty and subordination. I mean that is the kind of things power systems tend to do. If they have an opportunity they are going to use it.”
Noam Chomsky in an interview with John Junkerman for the documentary Terror and power: Noam Chomsky in our times

On May 2006 the Immigration Control And Refugee Recognition Act was revised: foreigners entering Japan would be required to have their fingerprints and photographs taken, as well as other personal identification information, to later cross-reference the collected biometric data with lists of convicted criminals, potential terrorists and past deportees. Since then, the Japanese state has repeatedly expressed its concern that its support to the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, embodied by the deployment of Japan's Self-Defense Forces to these countries, could prompt terrorist attacks within the nation. Japanese Minister of Justice Hatoyama Kunio, in late 2007, ludicrously attempted to justify the revision when he stated that “an acquaintance of a friend” was an Al-Qaeda operative who had entered Japan a number of times with fake passports. The media was also quick to note that Japan would be the second nation to compile biometric data of its foreign visitors, since the United States had started to do so already by 2004.
The truth is that Japan is not the second nation to do so, but the United States, because Japan had already required compulsory fingerprinting in the past. Likewise, the Japanese government has decided not to compile the biometric data only of its foreign visitors, but of the entirety of its foreign population, since foreign residents, even those that have been granted permanent residence, are also required to provide fingerprints and photographs every time they decide upon re-entry. The only exceptions are children under the age of 16, and the country's ethnic Chinese and Korean permanent residents, who continue to be denied Japanese citizenship upon birth, despite the fact that the majority come from the first and second generations that were born and raised in Japan, their forefathers mostly immigrants (or, forced laborers) that came to reside in the fascist colonial Empire of Japan in the years before, and of, the Second World War.
From 1955 onwards, the Japanese Alien Registration Law burdened foreigners with the requirement to always have their Alien Registration Certificates on their persons, a ten-page identification that featured the person's fingerprints and personal information. In 1987 revisions ended the requirement that demanded that a new set of fingerprints be taken every five years. In 1992 compulsory fingerprinting was abolished for permanent foreign residents, but they were still required to have their Alien Registration Certificates at all times or be subject to criminal penalties; other foreign residents, however, were still required to provide their fingerprints. Slowly, a trickle of foreign residents that refused to submit their fingerprints (the first, Tokyoite Han Jong Sok in 1980) became a massive stream of more than 11000 people that were actively involved civil disobedience. The refusal, for some, meant imprisonment; for others, heavy fines. When the international media's attention turned to these facts, the Japanese government relented in its continued attempts to fingerprint its foreign residents, confronted as it was with its most important cases of civil disobedience since the student protest of the 1960s. The year 1999 saw a further revision of the Alien Registration Law that replaced fingerprints with a signature, and lessened the punishment for not carrying the new official identification, the Alien Registration Card, from a criminal penalty to an administrative one.
The most recent revisions return foreign residents to a status prior that existent in the 1980s. Upon entry to Japan, or re-entry in the case of residents, fingerprinting can also be denied: the penalty, now, is simply the impossibility to either enter, or even re-enter, the country. Beyond the much-needed discussion on whether such policies in themselves violate basic human rights, other consequences remain to be explored. Due to the fact that fingerprinting is reserved only for people arrested for crimes in Japan, and that the compiled data (to be kept not only for the duration of the person's stay in Japan, but for 70 years after its compilation) can be shared with the police and other state authorities upon request, it is clear that the motive for this policy is mainly intended to facilitate surveillance and control over anyone that is not considered to be part of Japanese society. To clarify why I use the words surveillance and control, I refer to the fact that the year after fingerprinting was abolished, Japan's National Police Agency started to release statistics on crimes committed by foreigners every six months. To be sure, these statistics were not accompanied by statistics on crime committed by Japanese citizens, in order to allow some contextualization, let alone statistical interpretation. Laxity in measures that previously allowed a dramatic difference in the availability of personal data to the authorities between Japanese and foreign citizens was immediately met with measures that attempted to rouse worry and concern in the ethnic Japanese citizenry about its foreign minorities.
The Japanese media, in particular newspaper publications, also contributed to a slanted view on crime within Japan. Arudou Debito, prominent naturalized social activist, in collaboration with The Japan Times, explains that The Asahi Shinbun, for example, had very few articles on murder in 1985; however, in 2005, despite the fact that murder rates were lower, articles on murder exceeded a thousand. On February 8th 2007, The Mainichi Shinbun featured an English headline that read as follows: “Number of crimes committed by nonpermanent foreigners declines in Tokyo;” however, the same article's headline read in Japanese: “Foreign crime rises in the provinces: Chubu Region up 35-fold in 15 years.” (2) Is it no surprise that with such a bias towards the perceived role of minorities in what concerns crime the Japanese Immigration Bureau announced, in October 2007, that their telephone hotline now also allows for calls on weekends and holidays to report illegal immigrants to the authorities. The Bureau's stated intention is to reduce the number of “illegal stay foreigner [sic]” (to half the number existent in 2004 by the end of 2008) in order to “revive the title […] 'the safest country in the world,'” (3) and thereby ensure a reduction in crime within the nation. Japanese citizens are thus called upon to collaborate with the authorities in order to better achieve such an end. Illegal immigration, inasmuch as it is a crime in itself, can be considered a major factor that contributes to increased crime within any country. Since people that cannot legally work must resort to informal activities, legal activities procured either by fake paperwork and/or employers that close their eyes to the law, or to illegal activities. And yet, when the Japanese government decided to return to its compulsory fingerprinting policy of foreigners, it contended that this was necessary to ensure protection from potential terrorist threats. Obviously, what this rationale allows is to subsume a discriminatory practice within the wider scope of the international's community's most recent efforts at security.
More than a critique of poorly construed state policies, however, what this article wishes to explore are the psychological and socio-cultural mechanisms that allow discriminatory practices to be matter-of-factly accepted by the majority population as a necessity, and additionally, accepted, believed and upheld to be a practice that is not discriminatory in nature. Before we continue, nonetheless, it is important to explain why we believe that the policy revision's intention is not mostly to “prevent the occurrence of acts of terrorism against Japan,” and why, even if it were, this blatant contradiction with Japanese law, which makes it illegal to fingerprint anyone that has not been indicted with a crime, fails to truly increase security with Japan in what concerns the threat of terrorism.
Truth be told, with the exception of the Japanese embassy hostage crisis in Lima, Peru, which lasted December 1996 through April 1997, Japan has never suffered a terrorist act that didn't solely involve Japanese nationals. The hostage crisis, which occurred when forces of the T?pac Amaru Revolutionary Movement stormed the official residence in the midst of a party that was held in celebration of Emperor Akihito's birthday, can be considered a terrorist act that victimized Japan only due to the diplomatic convention that a embassy is considered to stand upon its own nation's soil. However, if we are to analyze acts of terrorism that have occurred within Japan proper, we must refer exclusively to either that perpetrated by Aum Shinrikyou (オウム真理経) in their 1995 sarin gas attack on the Tokyo subway system (地下鉄サリン事件) or to those perpetrated by the Japanese Red Army (日本赤軍) in 1970 and 1974(4). The irony that arises from this revision, as we have stated above, is the fact that the arrests that followed the Aum Shinrikyou sect's fiendish attack to Tokyo lead some twenty Japanese nationals to be tried and convicted by the justice system, but none of the cult's internationals members were ever found to be involved in the attacks. Similarly, in every terrorist act committed by the infamous Japanese Red Army the participants involved in the attacks were solely Japanese nationals. The most likely participants, therefore, in any terrorist threat toward Japan would either be ethnic Japanese terrorist cells – such as Aum Shinrikyou – or ethnic Japanese terrorist cells with sympathies for other international terrorist fronts – such was the case of the Japanese Red Army, which had close ties to the Popular Front For The Liberation of Palestine. And yet, Japanese ethnic citizens remain to be scrutinized by security authorities with the same zeal as ethnically foreign citizens.
Nowadays, when globalization leads us inevitably to attempt to constructively deal with the intricacies of multicultural contexts, the return of undeniable racisms and state-sponsored discriminatory policies must be carefully analyzed and protested. The socio-cultural studies of Japanese scholar Ohsawa Masachi forward that the Aum Shinrikyou sect “can be seen as an extreme reflection of Japanese society in general,” since it “mirrors the same type of fear toward the ambivalent 'other' common within the Japanese population.” (5) The usual Japanese word for stranger is 他人 (literally, “other person”). While foreigners are usually called 外国人 (lit. “outside country person”), in circumstances when a certain snide undertone wishes to be added they are called 外人 (lit. “outside person” or “outsider”). The fear of the ambivalent “other” is “a symptom of the social disintegration brought forth by advanced capitalism,” and in that manner it is “not particular to the Japanese, but rather reflected in many ethnic nationalisms and religious fundamentalisms of contemporary global society.” (6) As Ohsawa points out, what needs to be addressed is the very mechanism that causes people to posit these “others” as plausible and real(7). Ohsawa explains that our conception of reality is mostly determined “by its relation to that which is not real or anti-reality […] in other words, we construct our meaningful reality by (unconsciously) posing it against that which we have accepted as not real.” (8) To understand the socio-cultural implications that that political discrimination entails, we will first provide a psychological exploration of why the phenomenon occurs. This is what leads us to examine the role that the shadow archetype plays in the psychoanalytic theory proposed by the Swiss psychologist Carl Gustav Jung.
From the standpoint of the psychology of the personality, Jung clarifies, a twofold division ensures: “an 'extra-conscious' psyche whose contents are personal, and an 'extra-conscious' psyche whose contents are impersonal and collective […] the second group forms are, as it were, an omnipresent, unchanging and everywhere identical quality or substrate of the psyche per se.” (9) These are what have come to be understood as the psyche's archetypes. The shadow is a fundamental archetype in the development of the individual's and the collective's psyche. To become conscious of the shadow archetype, explains Jung, is to recognize “the dark aspects of the personality as present and real.” (10) An examination of these dark characteristics – that is, the inferiorities that constitute the shadow – reveals an emotional nature, a kind of autonomy and an obsessive or, better, possessive quality. A weakness, a certain inferiority and lower level of personality is contained within the shadow(11). That is why the pursuit of self-knowledge is a moral problem that always is met with considerable emotional resistance(12), and why it is bound up with projections that are not recognized as such, since their recognition represents a moral achievement beyond the ordinary(13). Surely, “some traits peculiar to the shadow can be recognized without much difficulty as one's own,” but the cause of emotional resistance “appears to lie, beyond all possibility of doubt, in the other person.” (14) Since it is not the conscious subject but the unconscious which projects – “one meets with projections, one does not make them,” – no matter how obvious it may be to a neutral observer that the resistance is a matter of projections, there is little hope that the subject will perceive this, and will be able to withdraw his emotionally-toned projections from their object(15).
The peril that results from projection is that the subject is isolated from its environment, since instead of a real relation there is now only an illusory one. Jung describes that “projections change the world into the replica of one's own unknown face(16).” Similarly, Ohsawa has observed that Aum Shinrikyou was characterized by an intense delusional paranoia. However, both the sect and the mainstream Japanese population fulfilled conspiracy fantasies for each other:

Conspiracy fantasies project the cause of unacceptable disorder onto imaginary and thus unknown “others.” Aum members and Japan's general population seem to fulfill this imaginary role for one another. They project[ed] their own fantasy onto each other, mistaking their own mirror-image for the enemy. It is precisely the reciprocal projection of the structure of this fantasy, rather than the content of various fantasies, that renders the fantasies real(17).

Likewise, Aum Shinrikyou feared spies in their midst:

Because it is difficult to ascertain who is a spy, everyone comes under suspicion […] The neurotic fear of espionage points to the ambivalent and contradictory character of the mysterious other. On the one hand, such disturbing others are, by definition, unknown and as far removed from Aum as possible. On the other hand, the same fear of espionage produces the anxiety that those distant others might indeed be very close. In the extreme case of the latter scenario, the other becomes internal to the social structure and is now amongst “us” […] The fear of such an ambivalent and unstable relation of the other fueled their fantasy of conspiracies and drove them to wage war against civil society(18).

We understood from Ohsawa's conclusions on the dynamics which rooted Aum Shinrikyou's twisted perception of reality, and from what is implied by the fact that the sect represents an extreme instance of what Japanese culture and society experiences towards what it consider an “other,” that more than likely, the discriminatory policies articulated by the Japanese government must resound with some ambivalent sentiments shared, mostly unconsciously, by the majority population of ethnic Japanese. Jung explains that due to the escapist dream of a world whose reality remains unattainable, the resultant sentiment d'incompl?tude and sensation of sterility are explained by projection as the malevolence of the environment, and in turn intensifies the vicious circle of isolation(19). He calls out attention to the peril that the inability to recognize one's own shadow implies:

It is often tragic to see how blatantly a man bungles his own life and the life of others yet remains totally incapable of seeing how much the whole tragedy originates in himself, and how he continually feeds it and keeps it going. Not consciously, of course […] it is an unconscious factor which spins the illusions that veil his world. And what is being spun is a cocoon, which in the end will completely envelop him(20).

Jung warns us that when we simply declare facts unreal (or, as Ohsawa has explained, when we “accept” them as not real) we do not really dispose of them. A projection has an undeniable reality, and to deny it is to become identical to it, “which is not only dubious in itself but a positive danger to the well-being of the individual.” (21) When certain contents of the unconscious are not interpreted and incorporated into the conscious, they intensify to pathological proportions: they lead to “apparently groundless phobias and obsessions – crazes, idiosyncrasies, hypochondriac ideas, and intellectual perversions suitably camouflaged in social, religious, or political garb.”(22) We can contend, quite easily, that racism (which in the more recent centuries have founded their irrationality in “rational” pseudo-scientific, -philosophical and -cultural explanations with monstrous consequences, as proven by the Holocaust and other contemporary genocides, i.e. in Eastern Europe and in Africa) echoes with these socially and politically veiled intellectual perversions. When society is unable to face its collective shadow, it projects its dissatisfactions and uncertainties upon the others that live beyond its established limits; it projects the characteristics that it reviles the most from within its own community, and condemn others to live under that own shadow, and to embody it for its sake.
Ohsawa explains that while the other, on the one hand, “can be a source of great enjoyment […] The same other, on the other hand, can become the intolerable enemy.” (p.15). Japan's fascination (and obsession) with itself, evidenced in the “scholarly” pursuit of theories of “Japanese-ness” (日本人論, nihonjinron), also coincides with its fascination (and obsession) with the materialistic pursuit of “otherness,” evidenced in a consumer culture and industry that attempts to emulate, and adopt as its own, the lifestyle and commodities that abound in the United States and western European countries. Undoubtedly, since the very first unexpected clashes with Commodore Perry's “black ships” which abruptly ended the national isolation and exclusion of foreigners policy (鎖国) of Edo period, and later on with the socio-cultural discontinuity that resulted from the Allied Forces' occupation after the end of World War II (predominantly, the United States'), Japan has felt, as a nation, a need to re-interpret its history and identity. However, any conscious attempt to make sense of what its defeat meant from a social and cultural standpoint (and, with concern to the latter case, even to make sense of why it was involved in a brutal military attempt to colonize the rest of Asia) is usually met with intense resistance, and on the contrary, substituted by attempts to explain its extraordinary economic and political recovery (also, in the latter case) not in terms that explore the United States' direct supervision of and involvement in Japanese society's concerted effort to overcome its hardships, but in terms that hypostatize carefully selected socio-cultural values as the principal reasons – if not the only reasons.
Xenophobic projections fortify the shared (or politically force-fed) delusion that in every instance Japanese society is orderly and secure and desired, that there are no reasons to expect either the hardships or discontent that foster criminal or anomic behavior from other members of Japanese society, and that without minorities (or with only a very well-selected minority) a quasi-idyllic state of affairs is most likely to upheld effortlessly. Social anthropologist Bruce Caron advances that persistent nihonjinron statements and theses to contemporary Japan should cause as much concern as persistent racist, homophobic and gender-biased statements and theses in the West(23). The above-mentioned concern should also include “Western scholars who continue to reify Japanese uniqueness in a variety of arenas,” because “that a shared history of isolation would create not only cultural differences, but biological ones as well is a central feature of nihonjinron.” (24) Caron explains that this decided-upon “common and unique history” is also employ to stress the differences that allow for outlandish claims, for example, that the isolation imposed on the burakumin(25) has lead them to “now have a divergent biology.”(26) It would seem that to be born and raised in Japan by Japanese parents is insufficient in order to be considered Japanese unless a “full genetic heritage of the 'we Japanese' is shared.”(27) This particular case is an undeniable example in which the racist undertones that commonly underlie discriminatory practices in Japan are evident(28). The case is, however, not so different from that which the several generations of born and raised in Japan Korean and Chinese minorities experience – except for the fact that in these cases the “divergent biology” is a given.
We will conclude our effort to provide what may be sufficient analysis on how Japan continues to enforce its discriminatory practices, what dynamics lead to discrimination are, and some reasons why discriminatory practices occur in Japan, with an attempt to interpret how such practices may be overcome by what the Frankfurt School philosophers Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer understood by mimesis. The German philosopher Jurgen Habermas explains that mimesis recalls the “relation between person in which the one accommodates the other, identifies with the other, empathizes with the other.” It is the surrender of the one to the example of the other not as a loss of self but as enrichment, which counters the domination that derives from the instrumentality that reason endeavors to secure for the subject over the object(29). Adorno and Horkheimer, in relation to the consequences of instrumental reason, explain that individuals' increase in power and domination leads to “alienation from that over which they exercise their power,” (30) be it the world or other individuals. The zeal for self-preservation which lies within modern reason has an unsuspected cost: that which is to be preserved (that is to say, life) is that “which is dominated, suppressed, and dissolved […] Totalitarian capitalism […] makes the satisfaction of needs impossible and tends toward the extermination of mankind.” (31)
Thus, explain Horkheimer and Adorno, rationality supplants mimesis in the contemporary world. Reason is not only its counterpart: it establishes a “mimesis unto death,” (32) a twisted mimesis that enters the service of domination inasmuch as it dries interactions into dead and empty abstract husks that lead to systemic optimization, but severely hinders both the vital experiences and the intimate emotions that occur when individuals enter in contact with an other. The Frankfurt School philosophers, whom dedicated the last sections of their text to the study of anti-Semitism, explain that violent racism is “probably the morbid expression of a repressed mimesis,” (33) for if mimesis wants to become familiar with that which is alien, the projections proper to hatred confuse the inner and outer worlds, and attribute to the object “impulses which the subject will not admit as his own.” (34) Thus, the prospect of intimacy – and perhaps, reconciliation – is condemned to mere hostility. In fascism, “this behavior is made political.” (35) They further explain that “the transference of socially taboo impulses from the subject to the object,” (36) what psychoanalysis terms a morbid projection, explains why “the fantasies of Jewish crimes […] accurately define the anti-Semitic dream.” (37) While discrimination in Japan has not turned violent yet, history teaches us that Imperial Japan was not above the most brutal displays of hatred.
We can collect, from Horkheimer and Adorno's theory on mimesis, that the outline we have drawn on some Japanese political issues, Ohsawa's (and Caron's) reflections on Japanese society and its relation to the other, and Jung's psychoanalysis of the consequences of the shadow archetype's projections upon both on the psyche and the collective psyche, do not stray from a reasonable portrayal of what the facts may be. We will now attempt to describe in which way social behaviors directed by the notion of mimesis can lead to the resemantization of a socialization that is at times obscured by discriminatory practices. When Adorno continued to develop the notion of mimesis, he rested the foundations of his aesthetic theory on it. Mimesis and rationality are irreconcilable(38), as art and rationality are, because while rationality attempts to dominate its object, mimesis, as does art, attempts to assimilate itself to it(39). Mimetic behavior is:

A receptacle for everything that has been violently lopped off from and repressed in man by centuries of civilization […] keeps alive the memory of a kind of objectivity which lies beyond conceptual frameworks [and] sees more in things than they are […] It is aesthetic behaviour alone which is able to experience the world(40).

Adorno contended that the “contemporary loss of any subjective capacity to experience the world objectively is most likely identical with the tenacious suppression of mimesis today.” (41) That is why Horkheimer and Adorno find in the Homer's poem about the confrontation of Odysseus with the sirens a myth that breathes life into what they attempt to say about mimesis. Odysseus, they explain, “however consciously alienated from nature as he may be […] remains subject to it if he heeds its voice.” (42) Both awed and dismayed by the siren's chant, while Odysseus uses ratio to lead his men safely passed the sirens, he also uses it to be enable himself to experience the siren's ecstatic melody. Adorno explains that inasmuch as aesthetic behavior can “be defined as the ability to be horrified,” the shudder that comes from an experience of horror before the object, it is also “a kind of premonition of subjectivity, a sense of being touched by the other […] Without shudder, consciousness is trapped in reification.” (43) If we do not allow ourselves the confusion that comes from interaction with others, we do not allow ourselves the further experience of harmony either. The mimetic attempt to assimilate ourselves to others, instead of subdue them, constitutes a “orientation of the subject towards objectivity which joins eros to knowledge,” (44) and an “endeavor to recover the bliss of a world that is gone.” (45)
Adorno concludes:

Far beyond the Romanticism which felt itself as weltschmerz, as the suffering from alienation, hover Eichendorff's words, 'beautiful stranger [Fremde: alien, stranger]'. The reconciled condition would not annex the alien [Fremde] by means of a philosophical imperialism, but would find its happiness in the fact that the latter remains what is distant and divergent in the given nearness, as far beyond the heterogeneous as what is its own(46).

Habermas describes Adorno's concept of reconciliation as an intact intersubjectivity that is only established and maintained in the reciprocity of mutual understanding based on free recognition(47). A multicultural society should strive to advance socialization upon these lines: by the promotion of social equity, by political institutions that respect and value the totality of society's members, and by policies that are not founded on biases, but inclusive and pluralistic from a socio-political standpoint. What mimesis may allow us to understand is the nature of the ambivalent horror/desire relation that every culture experiences towards other “alien” cultures, and how the same emotional core that contains the seeds of hatred also contains a potential for reconciliation.
I am indebted to a friend who recently reminded me that only a culture that is dead can be kept intact in a world is alive. Cultures exist and cease to exist, and that constitutes no dilemma inasmuch as the people that embrace them learn to live fully, with or without them, and to allow for new cultures to be born. A people that wish to prosper can only do so if they walk into the future, burdened only by the lessons that their memory provides them, but not if they walk back into the past. From the postwar ashes and rubble, the Japanese people pave a solid road into the future, a future where their state must learn to embrace a new culture, which accepts others into the Japanese people, and embraces them within that “us.” In this new culture, we shall truly all be our brothers' keepers.

Notes
(1) Miguel?ngel Verde is a Master's student in Contemporary Civilization Studies at the Graduate School of Human and Environmental Studies at Kyouto University, Japan. He specializes in the study of political philosophy, especially ultranationalism, democracy and totalitarianism.
For any inquiries, email: verde.m@gmail.com.
(2) Arudou, 2007: sole p.
(3) Japanese Immigration Bureau, 2007: sole p.
(4) Even so, the Japanese Red Army's activities continued until 1988, for a total of thirteen terrorist acts, which included: hijacked airplanes, bombed and stormed company facilities and embassies, and the indiscriminate murder of civilian bystanders. The other eleven cases (excluded the 1970 and 1974 acts committed in Japan) occurred abroad, and victimized also other countries' embassies, companies, airplanes and civilians.
(5) Ohsawa, 2003: 1.
(6) Ohsawa, 2003: 1.
(7) Ohsawa, 2003: 4.
(8) Ohsawa, 2003: 5.
(9) Jung, 1959: 7.
(10) Jung, 1959: 8.
(11) Jung, 1959: 8-9.
(12) Jung, 1959: 8.
(13) Jung, 1959: 9.
(14) Jung, 1959: 9.
(15) Jung, 1959: 9.
(16) Jung, 1959: 9.
(17) Ohsawa, 2003: 4.
(18) Ohsawa, 2003: 4.
(19) Jung, 1959: 9.
(20) Jung, 1959: 10.
(21) Jung, 1959: 24.
(22) Jung, 1959: 169.
(23) Caron, 2003: sole p.
(24) Caron, 2003: sole p.
(25) Despite the fact that Japan considers itself a secular society, burakumin are ethnic Japanese that continue to be discriminated because, historically, their forefathers dedicated themselves to trades that Buddhism considered impure, i.e. butchers, leather-tanners, gravediggers, etc. The Ainu (native inhabitants to Northern Honshuu and Hokkaidou) and the Ryuu-kyuu (琉球) islanders (native inhabitants to Okinawa) are also other Japanese minorities that are discriminated by the ethnic Japanese majority, and conveniently overlooked by nihonjinron studies when they claim Japanese have an unique ancestry.
(26) Caron, 2003: sole p.
(27) Caron, 2003: sole p.
(28) Caron, 2003: sole p.
(29) Habermas, 2002: 390.
(30) Adorno & Horkheimer, 1979: 9.
(31) Adorno & Horkheimer, 1979: 54-55.
(32) Adorno & Horkheimer, 1979: 57.
(33) Adorno & Horkheimer, 1979: 187.
(34) Adorno & Horkheimer, 1979: 187.
(35) Adorno & Horkheimer, 1979: 187.
(36) Adorno & Horkheimer, 1979: 192.
(37) Adorno & Horkheimer, 1979: 186.
(38) Adorno, 1986: 81.
(39) Adorno, 1986: 162.
(40) Adorno, 1986: 455.
(41) Adorno, 1986: 455.
(42) Adorno & Horkheimer, 1979: 59.
(43) Adorno, 1986: 455.
(44) Adorno, 1986: 455.
(45) Adorno, 1986: 465.
(46) Adorno, 2001: 79.
(47) Habermas, 2002: 390.

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