Conclusion

All development aid projects are historically and regionally specific. More than a reproduction of global inequalities or neoliberal regimes, the aspirations and activities I traced in this book drew from particular political ideologies, movements, and relationships in twentieth-century Japan and resonated with imaginations of a better world rooted in modern Japan’s relationship with Asia. Moreover, development aid work is not only about “develop­mental” outcomes such as poverty reduction or empowerment; it also cultivates particular kinds of people shaped by ideas of professionalism, moral imaginations of the future, and relationships that cut across multiple boundaries. The Japanese concept of hitozukuri, used in OISCA and by other Japanese aid actors, captured this aspect of aid work (although I have used it to refer to the making of persons among aid workers—Japanese, Burmese, and other staffers) as much as it was about aid recipients (train­ees and villagers). Following scholars of “Aidland,” I have examined the social world of “development professionals” as a productive site of inquiry, acknowledging that their knowledge practices and moral labor have an impact on how “development aid” is constituted and made meaningful for its participants (Fechter 2016; Fechter and Hindman 2011; Mosse 2011; Yarrow 2011).

Some anthropologists argue that the focus on Aidland contains the danger of becoming too parochial, too individualist, and unaware of wider political and economic power dynamics that shape “development outcomes” (Harrison 2013). The case of OISCA, however, shows that an attention to the world of aid workers and their personal trajectories does not need to be apolitical or uncritical of development outcomes. First, the methods, pedagogies, and life stories of making persons have political significance. In OISCA, how training activities happened—through collective labor, a communal lifestyle, kinship metaphors, disciplinary practices, and so on—pointed to important ideological and historical processes underlying 187OISCA as well as general approaches to aid among other Japanese aid actors. An attention to the personal and relational world of aid workers can reveal how the values that they hold important and the actions they take (or not) have histories and political implications themselves. These are also outcomes of development efforts that need to be interrogated.

Second, examining the everyday practices and discourses of aid workers’ lives can destabilize standard definitions of the “development professional.” Analyses of Aidland tend to treat development professionals as existing in a managerial and rationalized world, even if they struggle within it. But a close-up of OISCA staffers’ activities indicates that the development professional looks quite different in this situation. Many of OISCA’s senior Japanese staffers and Burmese staff members resisted managerialism, and rationalism was not an unquestioned framework. Understanding the details of aid workers’ aspirations and practices can challenge generalized frameworks that present development professionals as a homogenous group of people.

Lastly, looking at Aidland can be an opportunity for an interdisciplinary analysis that goes beyond the ordinary confines of the anthropology of development or development studies. To understand OISCA, for instance, I had to draw on religious studies and analyses of secularism, Japanese studies, and works by historians and take inspiration from multiple theoretical frameworks. The book is evidence that, at the very least, perspectives of Aidland do not have to be insular.

The historical and political contexts of the moral imaginations of becoming one were in themselves important outcomes of aid in OISCA, but what of the seeming failure to produce leaders of community-based development? The practical goals of the training programs were to teach trainees some skills in sustainable and organic agriculture and to give them the character traits and dispositions to become community leaders of sustainable development. Many of the trainees from the Myanmar training center did go on to implement organic methods in their farms and even to disseminate this knowledge to neighbors, but most did not become leaders of a community-based movement or development project. In general, about a third of the graduates from the Myanmar training center returned to farming, another third became staff members, and another third joined Japanese companies in urban areas such as Yangon. What were the outcomes of aid in these instances, and how did OISCA staff members evaluate these results?

On one level, staffers in Japan and Myanmar valued the fact that some former trainees were implementing OISCA’s agricultural methods, even if 188only on a small scale. Having an impact on one person was meaningful in itself. Yet the follow-up of trainees was an issue that constantly came up in OISCA Magazine as an issue to address, and Japanese staff members discussed it regularly. In the Myanmar training center, Sakurai-san had instituted a system for trainees to create action plans before graduating and a loan system to help recent trainees jumpstart the projects in their plans. During my research, it was still too early to tell the effectiveness of this strategy. But regardless of what trainees did after their year at OISCA, many of them stayed connected to OISCA in one way or another, visiting its offices and training centers, and remaining in touch with other former trainees and staffers on Facebook, and, of course, a number of them became staff members. Despite the “failure” of the supposed aims of the training programs, a strong international network remained.

The OISCA Tokyo headquarters organizes an International Board of Directors meeting every year, inviting the directors of the training centers, a couple of the senior local staff members from some of the training centers, and other OISCA supporters from around the world, including former trainees. In 2015, seventy-seven representatives from the fourteen countries and territories where OISCA has chapters were in attendance, as well as the mayor of Toyota City, where the meeting was held, and the state minister of the Ministry of Women and Children Affairs of Bangladesh (OISCA 2015). After more than fifty years since its establishment, OISCA continues to have a significant network of supporters in Japan and elsewhere. Could this be considered an outcome of OISCA’s activities, even if it does not fit usual definitions of development? Does the growth in the number of people around the world who know about OISCA and support its mission and have learned to one degree or another the supposed values of Japaneseness constitute a measure of success for OISCA? If so, what are the politics of these outcomes?

The Ambivalence of Solidarity

I return, in the end, to the politics of solidarity—the most significant implications and consequences of OISCA’s work, especially for the times we are in today. In March 2011 an unprecedented earthquake struck the northern coasts of Japan, leaving tens of thousands of people dead or missing, hundreds of thousands displaced, and vast regions physically, economically, and socially devastated. The destruction of the nuclear reactors in the area and the subsequent leakage of radiation added to the crisis. In the wake of these disasters, a national slogan appeared: kizuna. 189Translated as “human bonds,” the term appeared on banners across cities and in discourses from politicians to volunteers and became the “kanji of the year” in 2011 by popular vote (Noguchi 2012). These events might not seem relevant to the current study of OISCA and Japanese international aid. But placed in a larger trajectory of the rise of political conservatism and the popularity of words such as kizuna, the moral imaginations to become one in OISCA appear as something of urgent importance.

Since 2011 and especially after Abe Shinzō was reelected as prime minister in 2012, right-wing politics have advanced rapidly in Japan. Rejecting public opposition, Abe and his allies pushed through the 2014 State Secrecy Act (Himitsu Hogo Hō), which allows the government to withhold information deemed necessary for state security. They have also pushed for changes in security legislation, which most constitutional scholars argue violate the prohibition of “collective self-defense” and the general renouncement of war laid out in Article 9 of the Constitution of Japan. In short, these moves signal the militarization of Japan. Abe’s legal reforms have happened against the background of his long-standing support of historical revisionism regarding Japan’s actions in World War II and his affiliation with groups such as the ultranationalist Nippon Kaigi (Japan Conference) (Narusawa 2013; Repeta 2015). The militarization of Japan in the context of Abe’s political and historical views, supported by other LDP politicians in his camp, is alarming for many people in Japan, as evinced in the mass citizen protests that have taken place since 2011 (Slater et al. 2015). Yet, despite widespread disagreements over the government’s direction, both Abe and the LDP have continued to be reelected. In his analysis of the LDP’s electoral victories in the wake of the 2011 disasters, Jeff Kingston (2013) suggests that those disasters, combined with events such as the right-wing Tokyo governor’s sudden announcement of plans to buy the Diaoyu/Senkaku Islands, a disputed territory between China and Japan, set the scene for a heightened sense of national anxiety. According to Kingston, these conditions, in conjunction with the ever-present sense of economic decline, helped the right-wing factions of the LDP win the lower house elections in 2012 and the upper house elections in 2013.

Kingston’s analysis, however, is not about a new rise of the political right; it is that this is a continuation of the same trend that has been seen for decades. Scholars have analyzed an earlier spike in right-wing politics after the Great Hanshin Earthquake of 1995 and the sarin gas attacks by the new religious group Aum Shinrikyō in 1996. These events propelled forms of nationalism by individuals and organizations keen to enhance the state regulation of new religions while reviving the public role of Shinto 190as a “civil religion” (Mullins 2012). These pro-Shinto nationalists included politicians largely from the LDP, representatives of state-affiliated Shinto shrines and organizations, leaders of new religions, and old and new right-wing groups such as Nippon Kaigi.

In this light, we can understand the rise of proponents of “Shinto” environmentalism, such as OISCA actors, as part of an emboldening of nationalist and historical revisionist politics in Japan. This framing makes even more sense when we take into account that Yoshiko is one of the core members of Nippon Kaigi (2015), a somewhat unsurprising fact given her claims of Shinto values and OISCA’s affiliations with conservative LDP politicians. I find this decades-long surreptitious and now more visible rise of right-wing politics and politicians deeply disturbing, especially as they reveal connections with OISCA. But I also cannot help but be fascinated by the entanglements of one of the oldest Japanese NGOs—and, by association, one of the earliest aid actors in Japan—in such political programs. This history upends much of my initial assumptions that international aid efforts arise out of “liberal” politics. My ethnographic encounters with OISCA aid workers also showed that, despite my discomfort with the right-wing tendencies of the NGO, the Japanese and Burmese staff members regardless of age found their work with OISCA meaningful.

One of the ways that I understand this professional commitment among OISCA staffers is that the organization offered them a meaningful vocation and a place of belonging in times when they felt marginalized or lost. In reference to the contemporary era, Anne Allison (2003) has described in heartbreaking detail how increasing numbers of people in twenty-first-century Japan struggle to get by without secure jobs and, most significantly, without meaningful social relationships. Some of the people she spoke with referenced a sense of security lost and social relations dismembered as they expressed their sense of precarity and possibilities of hope. This sense of loss and nostalgic appeal to the past resonates with how OISCA’s Japanese staffers and supporters articulated their visions of the future. What Allison describes is not just a twenty-first-century phenomenon—although it is exacerbated by the current precariousness of jobs and social security—but a sentiment that many people who could not keep up with Japan’s rapid urbanization and industrialization also felt in the postwar decades. In the congruence of nostalgic aspirations, we saw OISCA’s senior staffers, who were mainly of rural and poor backgrounds, join hands with LDP politicians and right-wing public figures. The aid workers I met had found an answer to their sense of marginalization and loss through the activities that these alliances enabled. If twenty-first-century Japan is 191increasingly precarious for a large proportion of its inhabitants, as Allison describes, could this situation push more people to join organizations and movements that espouse ideas of “becoming one” and “Japaneseness” such as OISCA? Could the intersection that we see in OISCA of global visions, nationalist-imperialist ambitions, and ethical values of laboring intimately with others help us understand the rising appeal of right-wing politics in Japan and elsewhere in an increasingly precarious world?

A prevailing sense of everyday crisis in Japan, whether in 2011, 1995, or 1945, has fueled many people’s sense of loss and search for new ways to be together with others. There is a widespread concern over precarious lives that are socially alienated and unmoored from communities of belong­ing. This prevalent sense of atomization might be one of the conditions that frame contemporary humanitarian motivations to help people in other countries as well—that is, “doing good” as a way for those who feel alone to connect with others, as Liisa Malkki (2015) has shown in the case of humanitarians in Finland. And under imaginations of becoming one, the distinctions between the political Left and the political Right no longer matter.

The quest to make connections and find community can take many forms, but one of them that we cannot ignore has been the nationalist and nostalgic visions of people like Abe and members of Nippon Kaigi. Yet, in the hands of Yonosuke, Yoshiko, and OISCA staffers, becoming one is not just an inward-looking ideology. Throughout this book, I have described how OISCA’s Japanese staff members used claims about Japaneseness and so-called Shinto values to reach for universals. The key in this conceptual movement has been the claim that Shinto is nonreligious, neither religious nor secular, and is instead a globally relevant environmental vision. Through the lens of OISCA, then, the arguments by right-wing political actors today who promote the revival of Shinto in the public sphere ap­pear significant not only because of the nationalism behind them but also because this kind of ideology has been central to Japanese actors’ mode of engagement with global others, especially Asian others. Cultural nationalism and internationalism are two sides of the same coin.

Becoming one as a vision in relation to Myanmar is also a fraught issue. The dangers of solidarity and its links with a violent form of cultural nationalism are visible today, when news of atrocities against Rohingya people are showing the world how “being Burmese” is a highly contested question. The country may have come together at one point around the figure of Aung San Suu Kyi, but this sense of temporary unity has given way to a long-standing exclusionary politics. The issue of ethnic minorities’ 192and racial others’ status in Myanmar has been a challenge throughout the twentieth century, as highlighted in the 1947 Panglong Agreement. Many ethnic groups believe that the agreement’s promise of autonomy for ethnic minority regions has been unfulfilled (Ganesan and Kyaw Yin Hlaing 2007; Seng Raw 2001; Smith 1991; South 2008). Rohingya have never had a say in such negotiations, unlike the “recognized” ethnic groups such as the Kachin and the Shan, and have been treated as foreigners and, worse yet, as interlopers to be killed en masse (Selth 2003). As mentioned in chapter 4, the Japanese colonial aspiration of Pan-Asianism in Burma referred to a unity mainly with the ethnically Burman Buddhist majority. Thus, the historical inferences of becoming one in OISCA’s work in Myanmar today coincide with a Burman and state-centric view that has prevailed since World War II.

Readers who know the history of Japan’s Pan-Asianism or the ambitions of leaders of new religions such as Onisaburō already understand that nationalism and universalism have coexisted in Japan for a long time. It is important to highlight that what this history and OISCA show us is not the unfortunate transition from a fraternal and egalitarian worldview to an oppressive one but a perpetual simultaneous presence of the two orientations without paradox. In the work of OISCA actors, it was not that the visions of becoming one as an egalitarian community devolved into hierarchical and imperialistic ambitions but that they coexisted. And so we cannot rescue a “true” and egalitarian form of becoming one from the clutches of inequality and imperialist visions, because they have always been entangled. The work of actualizing solidarity in this sense, in the moral imaginations to become one, will always be ambivalent. The challenge is to determine if solidarity of a different kind can be possible, or if the current times demand a different politics altogether.