Railways as Japanese identity: Riding between confidence and inexperience
Does railway technology represent Japanese national identity? This paper focuses on the narratives indicating railway technology as a form of Japanese national identity representation. Using Japanese government pronouncements and interviews given by people involved in the Japanese railway supply industry appearing in Japanese vernaculars, I show that railway technology constitutes an integral component of the contemporary Japanese identity narrative, which has been built up through a particular technopolitical regime. These narratives consistently refer to the purported safety, reliability, and punctuality of Japanese railways as one manifestation of the high-quality technological skills underpinning Japanese identity construction. However, the narratives also reveal an inherent irony, whereby the confident Japanese Self at once reveals a countervailing, inexperienced Japanese Self, in which the Japanese railway technopolitical regime realizes that its own domestic strength has resulted in a lack of international experience compared to its European, and increasingly Chinese, rivals. I conclude by suggesting that the Japanese railway identity follows a complex construct involving a confident Self in contradistinction to an inexperienced Self both reproduced in opposition to the European and Chinese Other.
History
School
- Social Sciences and Humanities
Department
- International Relations, Politics and History
Published in
Contemporary JapanVolume
37Issue
1Pages
68-87Publisher
Taylor and FrancisVersion
- VoR (Version of Record)
Rights holder
© The Author(s)Publisher statement
This is an Open Access Article. It is published by Taylor & Francis under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International Licence (CC BY-NC-ND). Full details of this licence are available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/Acceptance date
2023-05-22Publication date
2023-05-29Copyright date
2023ISSN
1869-2729eISSN
1869-2737Publisher version
Language
- en