Past Loss as Future? The Politics of Temporality and the “Nonreligious” by a Japanese NGO in Burma/Myanmar

Abstract

This article examines ideas of the past in the development aid work of one of the oldest Japanese NGOs, the Organization for Industrial, Spiritual and Cultural Advancement (OISCA), derived from a Shinto‐based new religion, and its training courses on sustainable agriculture in Burma/Myanmar. Whereas Japan's official discourses on aid focus on postwar national success, OISCA highlights a sense of national– cultural loss and proposes aid as a form of national renewal by using ideas about Japan's past to “redo” modernity elsewhere. This emphasis on pastness was an effect of OISCA staff asserting that it is a “nonreligious” organization and simply “Japanese.” This article demonstrates how hope for national renewal through development aid generates “redemptive dreams” and enacts a politics of temporality in which Japanese and Burmese aid actors contest over the past as resource for the future and over “Japaneseness” as a universal value, oscillating between oppressive and aspirational possibilities.

The chronopolitics of exile: Hope, heterotemporality and NGO economics along the Thai–Burma border

“…For example, Ghassan Hage refers to capitalist society as a shrinking society which is “characterized by deep inequality in their distribution of hope, and when such inequality reaches an extreme, certain groups are not offered any hope at all” (Hage, 2003: 17, cited in Miyazaki, 2009: 238). Similarly, Watanabe (2013: 650) illustrates how “collective intimacy” among Japanese and Burmese aid workers contributed to the unmaking of individual subjects through the creation of a collective hope for community and national development. Yet, long-term displacement contributes to fragmented forms of collective intimacy whereby uncertain and unstable relations become the norm.…”

“…In a related vein, Watanabe illustrates how Japanese development actors working for one of Japan’s oldest NGOs in Burma are in part motivated by what he calls a “redemptive dream” whereby hope for post-war national renewal through development aid is enacted. This process of starting “over the process of modernity” in a developing country is experienced among Japanese aid workers as an opportunity to overcome what is perceived as a widespread loss of culture and alienation through a politics of temporality in which the Burmese Other is seen as a vehicle for the future of Japan (Watanabe, 2013: 78). As Fabian has observed in anthropology as well as popular culture, others are often represented as temporally distant and there continues to be a widespread belief that development is on a predetermined linear path (Fabian, 2002).…”

“…At the same time, hope is also a phenomenological temporality that both shapes perspectives on the future as well as frames and mediates (and, in fact, may often produce) the struggles between possibility, probability, and eventuality (Appadurai, 2013;Miyazaki, 2006;Richard and Rudnyckyj, 2009). In northern Thailand, senses of hope and futurity among Burmese exiles are entangled in the political economic future of Burma as well as in the everyday affective encounters with NGO practitioners (Watanabe, 2013(Watanabe, , 2014. We also argue that affective experiences of hope are practiced, represented and (re)produced by both Burmese exiles and NGO practitioners.…”

Muddy Labor: A Japanese Aid Ethic of Collective Intimacy in Myanmar

“…While this philosophy, which OISCA's Japanese staffers called “earth ethics” (chikjii rinri), constituted a universalistic idea, it was also framed in nationalist terms, as staff members understood this ethic of “living in harmony with nature” as a fundamentally Shinto and therefore Japanese value. The organization's first staff members who joined Nakano's movement in the 1950s and 1960s embraced this nationalist‐universalist philosophy, and powerful conservative politicians, such as the former prime minister Eisaku Sato, also supported the NGO based on its vision of Japan s role in international aid (Watanabe ) . As one of the first NGOs in Japan with powerful political backing, established even before JICA, OISCA significantly influenced the definitions of hitozukuri aid, sustainable development, and NGO work among politicians, policy makers, and the public in postwar Japan.…”

Development as pedagogy: On becoming good models in Japan and Myanmar

“…None of the Burmese staffers or trainees spoke about the history of Japanese colonialism in Myanmar. Nevertheless, traces of colonial history and memories of the Second World War remain among Japanese staff members and supporters (Watanabe ). There are also echoes of Japanese imperialist ideologies of cultural intimacy from early 20th century Pan‐Asianist projects (Watanabe ).…”