No Place Like Home

Over time any cultural difference can be assimilated if there is a material advantage in doing so.

Shame of the memory of this material gain requires the development and application of a suitable spiritual, cultural or mythical narrative.

The structure of this intervention can be determined either through the steady repetition and adaptation of certain behaviour, or through the manipulation of cultural signifiers by groups with vested interests.

Signs at their most basic are transmitters of functional information; they tell us where to go, what we are allowed to do, what delights can be had further down the road, how to avoid getting killed. However, they also give character to an area through their design, language, and by the invisible lattice of values they create around us. This is done quite discretely; signs are quickly edited out of our perception if they are not relevant to what we are doing. Their value, or power, is only dependent on the meaning we assign to them. Without recognition they are absurd, mute, like money or personalities. This series of images was produced as part of the 150th anniversary of the Anglo-Japanese Treaty of Amity and Commerce. This is an odd event to commemorate, as this ‘agreement’ was effectively forced on Japan, one of a series of ‘unequal treaties’ that western industrial powers imposed on China, Korea and Japan in the age of empire. A series of cultural events was coordinated by the British Council and the British Embassy to emphasise common ground between the UK and Japan, focusing on creativity in art and design, scientific research and innovation. The rhetoric of the event described a long, seemingly unbroken, history of friendly cultural exchange and cooperation between the two countries. In the inaugural and closing speeches by the Foreign Secretary and British ambassador to Japan, the unpleasantness of the colonial sub-text of the treaty of 1858 and the Second World War were simply not mentioned. To expect anything else would be naïve of course; and it cannot be denied that the UK and Japan have enjoyed a special relationship. From pottery to battleships, curry to car design there has been a near constant to and fro between the two countries over 150 years. The impetus for this project, however, was that despite various forms of cultural exchange and a desire to affirm a positive relationship, the majority of people I meet in Japan and the UK have impressions of each other that are so heavily determined by media representations (media in the widest possible sense) that personal contact can barely compete with an image constructed over years of exposure to films, literature, art, gossip, news stories and TV programmes. Ever since I can remember, most weekends on British television there is a war film. They alternate between being set in Europe and the Pacific, though occasionally there may be forays into Africa or mainland Asia. In other words, the defining paradigm for the British view of Japanese men, on the most widespread and influential media, is one of opposition. The opposition may be portrayed empathetically, as in films such as Hell in the Pacific, or None but the Brave, but more often than not Japanese male characters are ciphers; shadowy figures that run screaming out the jungle in fanatical disregard of their own lives. From the mid-nineteenth century to the present-day the representation of Japanese women abroad has revolved around sexual fascination. Pierre Loti’s 1887 novella Madame Chrysanthème, which starts with him penetrating the land of Japan through an ‘enchanted fissure’ and ends up with him deserting his Japanese sexual companion, it is a narrative of exploitation that has seen innumerable permutations, from Madame Butterfly to the Brando film Sayonara. The gaze of early European and North American photographers in Japan, sought out ‘types’ rather than personalities when it was turned on the native population, and the female type most commonly found in these 19th century photographs is the geisha. This is not to say that this scopophilia was imported from the west; Japan had its own tradition of the gendered gaze in bijinga - woodblock prints and paintings of beautiful women - but what is notable, from the point of view of national identity, is how little the representation of Japanese women in contemporary Euroamerican media deviates from the sexual reductionism of the 19th century. We can see the trope of the available and exploited woman in, for example Kōyuki’s character in the 2003 film The Last Samurai, and the main protagonist Sayuri in Arthur Golden’s Memoirs of a Geisha. It is difficult not to see the popularity of Araki’s erotic photography in Europe and America as being in some part due to this well-established history of subaltern representation. Like it or not, whenever two countries celebrate diplomatic relations with an exchange of culture it is, in some part, an expression of fascination with perceived otherness. This is not necessarily a bad thing in itself, but the problem is, of course, that perceived difference can so easily be simply projection. British TV and newspapers love to dwell mockingly on the bizarre and perverse in Japanese culture, love hotels, panty vending machines, robot office ladies and the like, while eccentricity and idiosyncrasy are supposedly hallmarks of being British. NHK, the Japanese national TV broadcaster, loves the Cotswolds, Peter Rabbit and high tea (made with leaf tea properly brewed – never with a cheap tea bag squashed against the side of a cup for 5 seconds). What can be counted on not to appear in these national narratives is banality. Banality does not encourage desire, or make for an engaging identity. It also draws attention to the uniformity of modern life, and, by extension, the extent to which much of what we suppose to be our ‘unique’ identities is a by-product of the global market place; an economy which tantalises us with the promise of individuality at the same time that it extinguishes it.

Where I'm Coming From

David Cameron announced in February 2011 that multiculturalism in Britain had failed. As the son of immigrants, born in the UK I reacted to this with trepidation and the mildest tinge of relief; the relief being that if there is a wasp in the room, as the saying goes, you at least want to know where it is. I still believe London is one of the most racially tolerant places to live, and it is always a pleasure to mix with Indians, Poles, Jamaicans, Chinese, Cockneys, Kurdish, and share the feeling that wherever we may be from originally, if you have never gone on the London Eye and know how to get home at three in the morning then you have to the right to call yourself a Londoner.

However, London is not where I grew up; when my father got a job with the BBC in the fifties, there were only few hundred Vietnamese families in the UK, and only us in St Albans, the site of Britain’s first Christian martyrdom. While Vietnam plunged ever deeper into conflict, and my parents’ families were obliged to choose sides (my father’s to the right, my mother’s to the left) I was very much entranced by the gentle countryside of the home counties, but as far as the reaction of others to my not being white, not completely permitted to identify with it.

This unease has not caused me to turn to my ‘roots’ or defend / promote my Vietnamese heritage though. Partly because it seems highly presumptuous that the hardships and achievements of relatives and ancestors can be something I can claim as in any way mine, partly because having the benefit of drawing on more than one culture - being hybrid - greatly outweighs the attractions of a static identity, or indeed the indulgence of spending time wondering who I am. Many artists from ethnic minorities in the UK have made careers exorcising the conscience of the white middle-class by dwelling on the conundrum of their identity, and while I can see that these exorcisms have their value, fighting dominant narratives with subaltern ones still preserves the value of narratives per se. Another unfortunate result of the formation of this discourse is the back lash from the extreme, and now centre right that perceives the admittance of other (Other) narratives, sometimes accusatory, into the cultural life of the UK is an encroachment on British national identity.

Concern in Japan with defining and protecting a national identity is a relatively overt and common preoccupation. At best, this results in a civil society which functions very smoothly, but there is a price to this, which entails turning a blind eye to whatever may disrupt a narrative that provides the comfort of coherence and exclusivity. In this context, the photographic series No Place Like Home was created as part of the series of events commemorating the 150th anniversary of diplomatic relations between the UK and Japan; possibly a difficult anniversary to celebrate, since the original Anglo-Japanese Treaty of Amity and Commerce of 1858 was essentially aimed at extending British influence and exploitation in east Asia at the expense of Japan’s sovereignty. The main purpose of the series was to ask, after a century and a half, how much do the British and Japanese really know about each other, and how much this international relationship has been an exchange of constructed narratives, faultily assigned signifiers, and symbols.

As I dislike artists´or curators´statements that say a work asks questions about something or other, but then coyly avoid giving any conclusions, I will come clean and say that the answers to the two questions above are respectively ‘not much’ and ‘a lot’. It is at least a relief that, despite difficulties in mutual misunderstanding, Japan and Britain choose to celebrate their relationship and perceive cooperation to be more productive than conflict.