Modernity's children : generational change, identity and global citizenship in Japan

Abstract

This thesis attempts to identify and document a generational movement in the conception and creation of Japanese collective identity - to understand its precedents and consequences. From an examination of how Japan's early 20th century agricultural majority saw themselves in the world around them throughout Japan's period of industrialisation, to understanding the social landscape and identities of some of Japan's contemporary youth, the thesis charts a generational movement away from the influence of the State and nation-builders, and towards a more self-determined collective imagination which puts the individual in charge of the creation of Japaneseness. In contrast to their elders, young people create a multi-cultural and inclusive Japanese identity which incorporates local and global diversity and establishes them as equal stakeaolders in a world of many like-others. Through life stories, interviews, case studies and community ethnography, the thesis attempts to understand how this generational movement has occurred because of the chtnges that modernity has wrought on the local arenas of Japanese life-reorganising Emily and community systems and memberships, and altering the perception and cefinition of what it means to be socially and imaginatively "mobile". It is these local- , evel changes-rather than any `top-down' `globalising' or `westernising' forces-that have most changed the' concurrent creation of Japanese collective identity. For the younger generations of Japan and of other industrialised societies too, the previous genefations' attempts to come- to terms with these changes have left them with a comparative freedom to re-conceive the borders and boundaries of collective identity, and to incorporate their experience of local diversity into a template of diversity acknowledging cultural and national identity. The thesis concludes; however, that these new identities are not so much original as they are displays of a more well-adjusted adaptation to a modernity which continues to affect us all, ordering our most intimate experiences and perceptions and setting them into expressions of collective memberships and solidarities