Global Futures in East Asia: Youth, Nation, and the New Economy in Uncertain Times (Contemporary Issues in Asia and Pacific) by Unknown Read Free Book Online Page A

the debt crisis in the United States, the European Union, and China. China’s real estate bubble threatens an iteration of the Japanese disease in China.
    5 . See Morris-Suzuki 1988 for an account of how government agencies plotted Japan’s future course as the information society. The knowledge economy has now diversified to include materials science and biogenetics as key areas for economic growth. China and India are engaged in a race to develop research parks and “innovation incubators,” while the labor costs for building the physical infrastructure of such facilities are still low. Likewise, we see transnational competition for becoming the new “education hubs” that are very much in service to this model of technological innovation as the driver of the new economy.
    6 . In East Asia, nation-building projects did not always relinquish the past completely. For example, Japan’s modern emperor system employed forms of “creative anachronism” to form the diverse inhabitants of a dispersed island archipelago into the Japanese people through new forms of national pedagogies (Fujitani 1993)—a project that was extended to Taiwan and Korea as part of Japan’s colonial expansion (Ching 2001; Schmid 2002). China’s formation as a modern nation entailed a more deliberate break from the “feudal” structures of the past but no less a molding of the people, in this case “the masses” as new socialist subjects.
    7 . For the case of China, see for example the discussions by Lydia Liu (1995) on the translingual movement of conceptions of “individual” and by Tani Barlow (1991) on the emergence of the position of “intellectual” in relation to Enlightenment projects.
    8 . A 2006 story in the English edition of the Japanese newspaper
Asahi Shimbun
(September 27, 2006) exemplifies a more recent iteration of this mode of comparison. See “China’s Gifted ‘Superchildren’ on a Fast Track to Success.”
    9 . For example, Andre Schmid argues that in early-twentieth-century Korea “shifting understandings of China and Japan were integral to Korean self-knowledge, largely overshadowing the East-West dynamic and giving Koreans several others against which to compare their nation’s particularity” (2002: 10).
    10 . See Koschmann (2003: 229) for an account of the 1960 Hakone conference, where Japan historian Jon Hall set out nine essential characteristics of a modern society.
    11 . Human capital could be considered the essence of neoliberal subjectivity. It marks a significant departure from earlier forms of labor subjectivity in the sense that the worker is understood as an entrepreneur who invests in his or her own self-development. Much of the literature inspired by Michel Foucault’s (2008) late lectures on neoliberalism sees human capital as a mode of governmentality that incites individuals “to adopt conducts deemed valorizing and to follow models for self-valuation that modify their priorities and inflect their strategic choices” (Feher 2009: 28).
    12 . This emphasis on affective labor perhaps accounts for the spread of the concept of EQ (emotional quotient) among human resource managers in East Asia, as well as elsewhere, as a measure of interpersonal skills and leadership potential. A self-help literature has become widespread to teach individuals how to evaluate themselves and develop their emotional intelligence as an aspect of their overall human capital development.
    13 . Quoted phrase from Stacy Wagner, personal communication.
    14 . In Japan, the term
freedom
connotes a more individualized horizon for the development of human creativity that had been constrained by the deadening and highly gendered institutionalization of the salaryman tracked for upward mobility. As noted earlier, the
freeter
youth has been described as a figure of “the great refusal” of this sort of labor bondage. In South Korea,
freedom
signals the moment of democratization in 1987 following a long era of military