We started our Tuesday morning in Classroom 415, where we shared reflections about our explorations of the city from the day before. Some of us, like me, had gone to Yoyogi Park. Others had wandered the streets around Shinjuku Station or the neighborhood by the NYC. Davinder then taught us about the subway lines in Tokyo to provide context for one of our readings, Tokyo Ueno Station. The novel is written by Yû Miri, an author of Korean descent who lives in Japan. We discussed and learned about the experiences of Koreans in Japan, experiences that have been historically and are still ones of xenophobia, consumerism, violence, and invisibility.
After a hurried lunch and brisk walk to Yoyogi-koen Station, we visited the Tokyo Imperial Palace. Encircled by a moat, white walls, and wooden gates, the Imperial Palace, with its vast but beautiful gardens, could only be accessed by walking bridges. In the gardens, we saw hydrangeas, carp, a bamboo grove, a black snake, open fields of grass, and the Fujimi-Yagura Watchtower.
After another subway ride, we arrived at Meiji Shrine. We passed through giant wooden tori gates of the Shinto shrine, took photos in front of a wall of sake barrels, wrote prayers and wishes at the main shrine building, and received waka, a type of Japanese poetry. As the day drew to a close, a group of us walked to the nearby streets of Harajuku for a rewarding dinner of ramen.
Although the Imperial Palace and the Diet were impressive centers of power, both felt somewhat removed from the rest of Tokyo. Located at the heart of the city (as Davinder showed us with a drawing of the Yamanote subway line), the palace and the Diet were the ultimate representations of Japanese authority, politics, and national identity. Yet, they were kept inaccessible behind guarded moats, walls, and gates, unlike the Meiji Shrine, where the tori gates invited, rather than excluded, the public. Although the shrine also maintained a state-centric narrative as it was built in honor of Emperor Meiji and Empress Shoken, it had a sense of openness, providing opportunities for visitors to participate in their own process of meaning-making. Back at the Imperial Palace and the Diet, political decision-makers and leaders of Japan were the ones who determined what it means to be Japanese through policies, architecture, culture, and even the types of plants in their gardens.
However, these narratives of national identity do not always fully represent everyone, for defining who or what is “Japanese” inherently defines who or what is not “Japanese”. Our visit prompted these questions for me: What narratives are made visible at the Imperial Palace and the Diet, and which, in turn, are obscured? Who represents Japan—the imperial family? Politicians? Japanese citizens? Koreans, ethnically mixed communities, and/or migrant workers, upon whose labor Japan was built, yet who the country still does not always accept? These questions challenged me to consider how I would create spaces for sharing hidden or invisible stories from these communities at these centers of state power. I was reminded of one of our readings, “Observation As An Act of Creation”, in which writer Artur Deus Dionisio demonstrates how art can serve as an “Interruption” of our assumptions about what we perceive or know. Perhaps, through their work, artists, filmmakers, and authors (such as Yû Miri) “interrupt” narratives of invisibility imposed on them and their communities, thus challenging and expanding the idea of what it means to be Japanese.
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