Co-founders’ Remarks (English)

Springboard Japan Translates (Vol. 1): “Kinship and Labor”

Sachi Schmidt-Hori (Dartmouth College)
Wendy Matsumura (UC San Diego)

1. Introduction

“Springboard Japan” was founded in the summer of 2021 as a multi-purpose open-access forum for people interested in Japan, as well as humanistic and social scientific research on Japan. Following this first issue, we plan to incorporate user feedback and provide other services, such as information access and information exchange, as well as discussion networks.

Developed in the 1980s, the internet has seen rapid innovations up to the present. This has brought about a revolution in our ability to access information. Today, search engine algorithms make it possible for us to obtain (often instantly) specific information that we need, culled from massive amounts of digital data. However, the findings provided by a simple keyword search can have many shortcomings, including, first and foremost, the lack of depth and accuracy of the information. Further, the more specialized the information, the lower the possibility that we will be able to access the correct representation thereof. In the fields of humanistic and social scientific studies too, even though many new pieces of specialized knowledge are accumulating each day, language barriers and discrepancies in the availability of research support mean that most of the findings can only reach an extremely limited circle of people who occupy privileged positions institutionally and geographically. As academia’s corporatization makes the workforce increasingly stratified, obstacles to access will surely intensify. This is the very context out of which we conceptualized the “Springboard Japan” project.

“Springboard Japan,” our multi-purpose open-access forum, aims to provide opportunities for interested people to "jump over" the multiple barriers that stand in their way—linguistic, cultural, institutional, societal, and so on—and share knowledge and engage in conversation with each other. Further, “Springboard Japan” takes advantage of the flexibility of the web, which allows us to receive and respond to feedback from users and guest editors as the forum evolves and expands. As such, this platform aims to function as a constantly shape-shifting space that the users and creators co-create based on our collective objectives, needs, and aspirations. Currently, our main focus will be on producing high-quality translation of already published works (research articles and book reviews) from English to Japanese and Japanese to English. In the future, we will offer bilingual access to columns, interviews, roundtables, performance art, and other types of content.

II. Springboard Japan Translates Volume 1: “Kinship and Labor”

The main offering of this forum is Springboard Japan Translates, a section that translates research articles and book reviews along a common theme. The first volume reflects the interests of the two directors of the project: “Kinship and Labor.”

The two research articles translated from English to Japanese are:
1. Kim, Yumi. 2018. “Seeing Cages: Home Confinement in Early Twentieth-Century Japan.”
   
2. Suh, Jiyoung. 2019. “The Gaze on the Threshold: Korean Housemaids of Japanese Families in Colonial Korea.”
   

In her article, Yumi Kim examines the contributions that psychiatrists like Kure Shūzō made, through the power of modern science, in order to save “the mentally ill” and their families from the devastating burdens of home confinement and care. Kim analyzes their contributions within the context of the Meiji government’s reconsideration of the family form, as well as their pursuit of policies through the language of civilization and enlightenment. The article introduces psychiatrists who deployed new representational strategies to emphasize the scientific nature of their field, which Kim calls the “documentary mode.” While she repeatedly points out the colonial roots of this strategy, by pitting these psychiatrists against the Meiji regime’s efforts to maintain home confinement of the “mentally ill” in practice through a discourse of familialism and care, Kim’s piece marks an interesting moment where state interests and the expertise of ‘experts’ failed to converge completely.

Jiyoung Suh’s piece analyzes literary texts in order to highlight the difficulties of bringing the perspectives of Korean housemaids who were employed in Japanese settler households in colonial Korea into the historiography. While echoing Gayatri Spivak’s point that it is colonial conceit to think that a complete recuperation of the voices of the subaltern is possible, or to think that attributing agency to their actions is a straightforward task, Suh argues that paying attention to the presence of Korean housemaids in colonial-era Japanese literary texts (as well as to the figure’s erasure from Korean nationalist historiography) is a meaningful undertaking, as it reveals the importance of forms of gendered, colonial labor that cannot be neatly classified within standard measures of exploitation, to the reproduction of settler households. The intimacies that simultaneously disrupted and reinforced the boundaries between colonizer and colonized, as seen through Japanese representations of the Korean housemaid, highlight the importance of understanding the affective relationships that develop in settler contexts (as well as their necessary repression) within and beyond the Japanese empire.

The research articles published from Japanese to English in this volume are the following two pieces:
1. HATA Eriko. 2004. “Ochikubo no Kimi’s Acquisition of the ‘Families.’”
   
2. NAGASHIMA Yūki. 2015. “Employment and Replacement of Merchants’ Servants in Early Modern Kyoto: A Case Study of the Endō Household.” 

Hata’s article focuses on the various dimensions of sewing in the tenth-century “stepchild story,” The Tale of Ochikubo—as commonplace work, a skill requiring expertise, an act that symbolizes sacrality, and so on—in order to analyze the significance that it played in the life of the heroine, Ochikubo no Kimi. Hata demonstrates that the heroine’s ability to establish herself in high society as a member of not just one but two aristocratic families (i.e., her father’s and her husband’s) after enduring many years of torment at the hands of her stepmother was enabled by her very own skill in needlework. Hata’s article brings a new insight into the Ochikubo studies, wherein needlework had tended to be simply interpreted as a means of abuse that had been forced upon the protagonist.

Nagashima Yūki’s article takes the insights of historical demography and engages in a spatial analysis of the employment of servants by a Kyoto merchant house in order to gain a clearer sense of the way that employment patterns of servants unfolded in the early modern city. Through a focused study of servant contracts and family trees of a single merchant house, Nagashima intervenes in existing research on labor mobility in Kyoto by, first, noting that the employment patterns and duration for servants differed greatly based on type (and gender) of servant; and, second, supplementing earlier research that argued for the existence of a two-tiered urban labor market, his focus on the way that the main and branch families were linked through the employment of servants reveals that at least in Kyoto, the labor market was quite integrated and designed in a manner that allowed families to reproduce themselves through kinship ties.

The nine book reviews in this volume address the themes of “kinship,” “labor,” “gender,” “social strata and class.” The reviews translated from English to Japanese are as follows:
1. Tokita, Alison. 2018. “Goze: Women, Musical Performance, and Visual Disability in Traditional Japan by Gerald Groemer.”
2. Suzuki, Yui. 2019. “Women, Rites, and Ritual Objects in Premodern Japan ed. by Karen M. Gerhart.” 
3. Perry, Samuel. 2018. “Intimate Empire: Collaboration and Colonial Modernity in Korea and Japan by Nayoung Aimee Kwon.” 
4. Mclelland, Mark. 2020. “Intimate Japan: Ethnographies of Closeness and Conflict ed. by Allison Alexy and Emma E. Cook.” 
5. Hastings, Sally. 2019. “Beyond the Confines of Motherhood and Home: Recent Studies of Japanese Feminisms.” 

(5) is a review essay of the following three books:
• Bullock, Julia C., Kano Ayako, and James Welker, eds. 2019. Rethinking Japanese Feminisms.
  
• Kano, Ayako. 2018. Japanese Feminist Debates: A Century of Contention on Sex, Love, and Labor.
  
• Zacharias-Walsh, Anne. 2017. Our Unions, Our Selves: The Rise of Feminist Labor Unions in Japan.
  

The four book reviews translated from Japanese to English are:
1. YOSHIKAI Naoto. 2014. “A Study on Female Attendants in Heian Vernacular Tales by FURUTA Masayuki.” 
2. ONODE Setsuko. 2019. “‘Men’s Child-rearing’ Performed by Non-ikumen Men: Fatherhood Masculinity and ‘Child-rearing as a Form of Care’ in Contemporary Japan by TATSUMI Mariko.” 
3. SAWAGUCHI Keiichi. 2018. “The Rise and Fall of Regional Industries and the Sociology of Family Change by MAEDA Naoko.” 
4. HABUCHI Ichiyo. 2018. “An Ethnography of ‘Yancha Kids’: Describing the World of Yankii by CHINEN Ayumu.”

The thirteen Japan Studies works on offer here vary in their time period, discipline, and methodologies. How these are received and understood will vary according to readers’ interests and specializations. That being said, one common thread in these pieces is the existence of women who supplied labor power and devotion in a variety of ways. Heian era nyōbō or live-in female attendants, who existed as both laborers and household members; aristocratic women who managed their households by mobilizing the nyōbō; medieval commoners and aristocratic women, who engaged in various religious rituals; blind itinerant entertainers called goze; mothers and wives who took care of family members confined at home due to mental illnesses; Korean housemaids who supplied Japanese settlers with domestic work and emotional labor in colonial Korea; wives who struggled with the contradictions of the promise of gender equality in postwar Japan and the reality of their double shift as providers of uncompensated labor and wage earners; and the many other women who appear in the pages of our translations fight for themselves, their families, and their communities.

Further, bringing these different pieces together in a single issue illuminates what we risk losing when we are too committed to maintaining our disciplinary boundaries and too interested in making contributions to our small scholarly circles.

While “kinship,” “labor,” “women,” “family,” and all of the other terms that emerge repeatedly in these texts have specific meanings that many of our authors worked so hard to parse out—an ability, to be sure, of years of disciplinary practice—putting scholarship that does not ordinarily get read together may open up interesting areas of inquiry.

To give an example, reading Nagashima’s piece, which argues that the main-branch family relationship determined the way that male and female servants were employed until at least the bakumatsu period, alongside Suh’s piece, which argued that we ultimately know very little about Korean housemaids’ experiences in Japanese settler households, opens up new lines of inquiry in both.

For Nagashima, we are prompted to push him beyond geographical and kinship ties when thinking about the reasons for the reproduction of these expropriative labor relations. As for Suh, we are invited to ask for elaboration of the geographical and inter-personal networks that may lie beneath the seemingly individuated method of hiring Korean housemaids, and then further ask whether this served a function beyond simply providing settler households with a cheap source of domestic labor.

This is just one example that reveals the rich lines of inquiry that can open up simply by reading two articles in tandem from fields that may not usually enter into meaningful conversation. By continuing to translate a wide variety of pieces, and by growing our online platform, we hope to start up even richer conversations that can break open the oftentimes rigid parameters of our disciplines.

III. On Volume 1 of Springboard Japan Translates

Here, we explain the process of putting together Volume 1 of Springboard Japan Translates. It took several weeks to select and finalize the research articles and book reviews for inclusion in the volume. We first searched the various repositories in Japan and in North America to locate pieces that fit our theme (“kinship and labor”) and the following conditions: articles/book reviews (1) that are available via J-Stage, JSTOR, or Project Muse; (2) that editors (Schmidt-Hori and Matsumura for this volume) determined would garner the interest of many readers; and (3) that are relatively new. Out of these, we listed up works that represented a wide range of time periods, disciplinary approaches, methodologies, and topics. We then contacted the editors of the journals and the authors of the pieces in order to obtain translation permissions. As not all people we contacted responded to our queries, the final list was also partly shaped by conditions beyond our control.

We learned many things during the translation process. It was imperative for us to find people who were capable of producing translations of highly specialized articles and book reviews—and without breaking the bank. This was not an easy process. In the end, we brought in a total of 6 graduate students and early career researchers, compensating them between $200–500 based on manuscript length. In addition, we provided detailed feedback on multiple drafts of translations, as well as mentoring (academic and professional). Most of the translators were likely surprised by the stark difference between “understanding what I am reading” and “translating a piece of scholarly work in a manner that the final product can be (almost) read as a text originally written in that language.” (It is our belief that the prevalence of translations of poor quality—though this includes low-stake products like signage and user’s manuals—has been caused by low expectations for translations, low responsibility for providing a good final product, and/or the lack of a practical system for checking the quality). In any case, since the process of drafting, commenting, and revising over and over again between the translators and the editors requires a tremendous amount of time and effort, we believe it is indispensable for all of us to see this exchange of labor, feedback, and compensation as our collective “long-term, mutually beneficial investment” in a worthy project.

Moreover, in order to accurately translate a piece of scholarly work, quite a bit of research is required on top of adequate linguistic ability. Only after thoroughly understanding the argument of the piece can the translator begin to accurately translate the piece. If the translator’s understanding of the original piece is even a little bit shaky, the final translation can be unreadable—that is, it may be grammatically correct, but unintelligible as a complete work. To conduct our own translations as well as to give feedback to the graduate students and early career researchers, we utilized Google, JSTOR, J-Stage, Wikipedia, Japan Knowledge, the National Diet Library digital collections, Aozora Bunko, and other digital resources. When these digitized resources were not adequate, we procured books through our institutions’ Interlibrary Loan service and combed through our own collections in order to find the original primary sources consulted by the authors. We hope to share this kind of knowledge (i.e., how to locate various primary and secondary sources we need) with graduate students and others that we invite into the project in the future.

It was a great joy to work collaboratively with graduate students on this project. In particular, for those who are in the United States as international students, we were able to impart knowledge about exactly what sorts of obstacles await them when trying to enter into a completely different academic environment. We hope to continue to share the knowledge and experiences that we have amassed to these young scholars.

IV. The Future of the “Springboard Japan” Project

This project came about through a series of informal conversations between two university professors who had previously worked for the same institution. (Our idea must have looked a bit reckless to outsiders). We decided to fund the first volume of Springboard Japan Translates through our individual research funds, and worked through all of the unforeseen challenges that arose. In the near future, we hope to incorporate feedback from our users, and build this platform up into something that can contribute positively to the field of Japan Studies at large. We hope that many graduate students and early career researchers will become our partners and collaborators as we grow. (We are especially eager to bring in researchers who have the ability to translate articles and book reviews from Korean/Chinese to Japanese).

The forthcoming volumes of Springboard Japan Translates on "Okinawa: Beyond Representation" (vol. 2) and on "Body Adjacent" (vol. 3) have been funded through a generous grant from Dartmouth College’s Leslie Center for the Humanities. They will also fund a symposium, which we will use to convene a discussion about the future direction of the project. We are deeply grateful to Dartmouth College and the Leslie Center for their generous support.

Finally, we would like to thank our families (including our pets), colleagues, and friends who support our daily work. Journal editors who granted us support for our translation work, authors who enthusiastically granted us permission to translate their work, and our fellow translators also deserve our appreciation. Finally, we thank Roy Schmidt for creating our website, and Momoka Schmidt for designing our logo and providing us with website illustrations. (One of the co-founders inadvertently embodied the theme of the first volume: Kinship and Labor).