ABSTRACT
This book addresses a conception of heritage as made, rather than found or given, which as such is significant in the Japanese context. The questions that it raises about our understanding of heritage in Japan, are also a global issue. The UNESCO ‘Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage’ in 2003 involved close cooperation with Japan and, like several other UNESCO conventions and declarations that came before and have been formulated since, it drew directly on the Japanese experience. The idea of a universally applicable notion of ‘intangible cultural heritage’ that emerged from the processes of formulating these initiatives (Kawada and HayashiDenis 2004) attributes value to the process of creation and to the carriers of heritage. It emphasises the importance of the skill that is embodied in the actions of a designated craftsperson or performer (sometimes referred to in terms of the state-administered system as ningen kokuhô) and as such represents ‘heritage’ as a concept which is in opposition to the ideas of cultural knowledge as a ‘thing’ and of culture as property (Bauer 2005). There is an apparent paradox that these designations of ‘heritage’ status as
something that acquires this value through its making, nevertheless require a framework of objectification to identify who and what is intangible. It is a contradiction worked out pragmatically and expediently in terms of the political utility and enlightenment virtues of a formulation that enables Japan to promote an international cultural policy based ‘in the belief, from Japanese experience, that it is important for each country to preserve its individual culture in the course of development’ (Kawada and Hayashi-Denis 2004: 33). This concern for the identification of discrete individual cultures and their protection can be understood as a response to anxieties about globalisation and the perception of a loss or ‘vanishing’ (Ivy 1995) of what makes them unique and distinctive through the degenerative effects of fusion and hybridisation. There is a question here about how those actively engaged in ‘making heritage’
deal with the contemporary homogenising forces of globalisation, what Michael Herzfeld has described in his ethnographic account of Greek artisan potters facing relentless competition from mass production methods, as ‘the increasingly
homogeneous language of culture and ethics’ which ‘constitutes a global hierarchy of value … everywhere present but nowhere definable’ (Herzfeld 2004: 2-3). One of the aims of this book is to define the meanings of ‘heritage’ as it is made ‘Japanese’ within this global hierarchy of value. This will show, as Herzfeld’s study has done, how the local differences manifested through the practices of agents of reproduction may play into but also subvert these essentialising discourses. In a country such as Japan where artisans who produce objects of heritage
value are acclaimed as ‘national living treasures’, it is important to try and describe both the political dynamics and the expressions of agency by which such attributions are made. Such a description reveals what is particular about ‘making Japanese heritage’ as well as the operation and effects of national and international regimes of heritage value. These regimes are historically constructed and based on a ‘peculiarly modern cultural configuration’ connecting ‘objectification’ and ‘possessive individualism’ through the recognition that commodities are central to personal and collective identities (Handler 1987: 139). In this study we start from a perspective wherein the historical framework of the Japanese experience of modernity is important because the proprietorial debates about the identification and preservation of objects and spaces as Japanese heritage takes place through and by virtue of that framework.
