"How Do We Engage with Diversity? Thinking Through Discomfort" By Koichi Iwabuchi
Living with Differences and Coexisting Together
The word “diversity” is now heard everywhere, yet opportunities to carefully reconsider what it truly means remain surprisingly rare. This book, written by a leading scholar in media and cultural studies, begins with various forms of “discomfort” surrounding diversity and unravels the contradictions and possibilities embedded within the concept.
The author first reveals the pitfalls of narratives that simply celebrate diversity. In positive narratives that claim immigrant cultures enrich society, “only those positioned at the center of society are able to evaluate, select, and accept the cultures of marginalized groups, such as immigrants and ethnic minorities.” In other words, promoting diversity can also become a mechanism that preserves the dominance of the majority. The reality that in Japan, while the Tokyo Olympics promoted the slogan “Unity in Diversity,” inhumane treatment at immigration detention facilities and the continued denial of same-sex marriage were left unaddressed demonstrates how empty a merely symbolic form of diversity can be.
At the heart of this book is a path of thought that enables us to recognize the struggles of others as matters that concern ourselves. Drawing on historian M. S. Morris-Suzuki’s concept of “implication” (renrui), the author argues that those of us living in societies that have benefited from past human rights violations have a responsibility to address existing injustices. Furthermore, through the perspective of intersectionality—which seeks not sameness but “affinity” among different experiences of discrimination arising from intersecting social identities—the author proposes the new concept of “kyōkei” (協繋). It describes a flexible form of solidarity in which people with different values stand together as equals in resisting injustice.
The author argues that it is also important to become accustomed to one another’s differences, without turning away from the complex reality of coexistence, which is not always harmonious. This perspective carries urgent significance at a time when anti-diversity movements are gaining momentum around the world.
In Japan, where ideas of nationality based on bloodline remain deeply rooted and where even comprehensive anti-discrimination legislation does not exist, the institutions and cultures necessary for cultivating imagination toward the struggles of different others remain fragile. As a foreign resident living in Japan, the reviewer strongly hopes that this book—which offers guidance for “continuing to question without simply accepting discomfort as inevitable”—will be widely read. (Price: 990 yen)
