This closing video is an experiment in ethnography. It is made using footage I shot of Mami, twelve years old at the time, as we walked home from her elementary school on a Wednesday afternoon. She wanted to visit a nearby shrine, though as we climbed the steps to the sacred neighborhood site, she hardly seemed interested in the place itself, so enrapt was she in telling me about a kid in her class who made fun of her for not being to read Japanese fluently like her classmates. At the ablution basin or chōzuya we each sipped some water. It was a hot day and the climb up the steep, stone steps had made us sweat. The courtyard in front of the shrine was empty and quiet, a reminder of the shifting scales and relations of movement and stillness that inscribed Tokyo. Looking around, Mami said abruptly: “What is this place called?”

I was briefly confused. This shrine was on the route she walked every day. Shouldn’t the name of the shrine, at the very least, be familiar to her? It was a known landmark to her and was a notable, if not significant feature in her neighborhood geography.

Before I could say anything though, Mami suddenly pointed up at the sen ja fuda or paper strips emblazoned with the names of past worshipers stuck haphazardly to the posts and lintel of the shelter over the stone basin. “Can you read that?” Together we struggled to decipher the stylized kanji characters of family names with little success. Our collaborative attempts at reading failed. The story Mami had just been telling me about her classmate’s ridicule of her literacy lingered and resituated itself.

“What is this place called?” lingered as a question both peculiarly revealing and prescient. The question shaded Mami’s experience with Tokyo, and Japan more broadly, a location she found difficult to calibrate herself to, in antagonism with her own sense of Otherness—either perceived, fantasized, or felt. But asking after the name of the place also seemed to imply something had changed in the place itself. The confusion I felt at Mami’s question might better be transferred to the entirety of the scene: she and I, unlikely duo, at this lonely shrine on a stultifying afternoon.

In such a mundane event there is a sudden gust of movements. There is the camera I am using as technological membrane and memory/memorializing device. There is this revered component of the Tokyo landscape. Then there are our bodies—young and not so young, biologically, students, studied and studier. Japanese and American, but mixed-up and in-between, speaking to one another in an argot we’ve created over the two years of our friendship. A fractal language of anthropologist and subject, a becoming-speech in which we ask questions about the place we are at. What is this place called?

It is changing, and us with it, and because of it, and becoming so that our relations to the place and one another are morphing. Indeed, they always have been. The question is not a symptom of the change. It is like the Cuna shaman for whom “chanting creates and occupies a strange position, inside and outside, part of, yet also observer of the scenes being sung into being” (Taussig 1003, 111). It is an event folding over such “that the self is no longer as clearly separable from its Alter” (Ibid., 252). It is not just about seeing where we are, and the boundaries between us, and the limits of our possibility to be in a space, to claim it and simultaneously be claimed by it. It is about contact—through the internet, through bodies speeding and wrecking themselves on the city’s surfaces, in Naoko rubbing Emi’s back as she sobbed after being in violent contact with her male assailant. Affective contacts, cognitive contacts, bodies touching and being touched, language shared in close spaces, Tetsuya’s uncanny presence at the DIY spot in Haneda, the unexpected contact with Saori on the train. Cultural contacts and relays; assemblages; rhizomes of relation, memory, feeling. And broken, failed contacts too, doing strange work. Hiroyuji’s withdrawal, the girl in Emi and Naoko’s juku, Yumi’s pencil stabbing down, breaking the transmission relay connection with a force no longer repressed.

Looped, the question echoes. Asking what this place is called is also asking about what Mami is to call herself.

I’ve attempted to show throughout this project in its erratic geometries how youth is a diverse and unstable figure. It slips over borders and comes home again altered while still beguiling with its sameness. Youth continues to change across cultural practices and thresholds of being. Its very instability enlivens our awareness of larger cultural shifts coupled with transformations in environments and durations. In the cultural drift I describe in my history with Tetsuya there is a longitudinal perception of youth as changing within even as the term still defines Tetsuya in contrast to his co-workers and to generations of male labor that preceded him.

Systems of education and labor have attempted to discipline youth while capitalism has sought to commodify its energies, practices and desires. There persists an uncontainable heterogeneity, constantly diverging from the telos of successful transitions into adulthood. The anxiety these heterogeneous divergences inspire is hardly new, nor even remarkable. Recognizing the anxiety is to understand it within a series of its own heterogeneous genealogies of panic and continuity through which the child (as a state of becoming) and youth (the category of social, political, technological, ethical, economic, and media becoming) (re)emerge and co-mingle.

It is useful here to remember the counsel of the Dadaist, Hülsenbeck. The lives of young people, in Japan and across the Pacific Rim and beyond, are beset by modulations of the “social convulsions” of capital and intensified claims of the state in the face of regional drifts. Rather than seeking the hard lines of bright resistance, we can imagine that the Dadaist strategy of “let[ting] onseself be thrown by things” may be also be a youthful mode of becoming. Being thrown is evading the risk of sedimentation and thus a risk to one’s life. Like the spatial tactics of the skaters, being thrown may place the body into new lines of flight and open new instances where wreckage and disorder are manifest as native components in the assemblages of everyday lives. Youth is that way of rising up, like Hirsch’s sleepwalkers, out of their calm beds and walking “through the skin of another life.” Or many lives. Failure is not to be avoided while crisis is a tautological foreclosure of the endless question as a palimpsest of becoming: What is this place called?  

This project has sought to take the various lives and the series of their events and worlds as lines “divergent; not relatively, in the sense that one could retrace one’s path and find a point of convergence, but absolutely divergent in the sense that the point or horizon of convergence lies in a chaos or is constantly displaced within that chaos” (Deleuze 1987, 123). There is no hopeful horizon. Nor is there a truth to be discerned. Young people are living out youth beyond its years. It is a moment of transition fragmented into microtemporalities where differences are always making new things happen.

The video also uses archival footage from a 1941 educational film, entitled “Children of Japan” made for American classroom viewing. How many classrooms it actually screened in is uncertain, since the film had only begun circulating just before the Japanese Navy attacked Pearl Harbor. What had been intended as a Western pedagogical film extolling the modern, middle-class familial values of a neighbor along the Pacific Rim quickly became anachronistic amid the (racist) war fervor following the aftermath of the attack.

The film persists as an ethnographic relic, uncannily adrift as an artifact ideologically undone as the nations slipped over the threshold from peace to war. The orderly classroom instruction depicted in the film, of students practicing the stroke order for kanji in childish unison, would become a sign of a population conditioned to fascism and then, in the post-war, a symbol of cultural resilience and Japan’s native capacity to adapt Western knowledge into a mysterious Eastern ethos of education and social techniques.

In the present moment, these classrooms persist with children in uniforms and time spent practicing calligraphy, albeit with less certainty as to their efficacy and stability as social and national institutions. The film itself is a global text from an earlier period, now cut apart and placed into a different circulation of meaning, value, and possibility; a foundational lesson learned from the Dadaists so long ago.

The archival images are uncanny visual echoes to Mami’s looped questions. They are laced through my own ethnographic footage, reckoning my yearning for cut-up time, spiraling time, time slipping away and stealing back again. They point to historical ruptures. Together with the present ethnographic they throw us, the viewers, from one instant to the next, one place to the other even as somehow we know—this is the same place. But it isn’t. Mami is walking down the steps of the shrine. Mami is calling me to follow her to the back door of her house. “Don’t be shy, Dwayne!” Mami shows me how she has broken into her house before by cutting the metal of the back door and reaching in through the jagged hole to flip the latch. She asks if she should do it again, reach in and flip the latch, pretending to be the girl she was when she broke in like a bad kid who forgot her keys. She goes in but offers that I can go around through the front because it is more proper? I don’t know why she tells me this. I say I want to go in the way she went in.  

The archival children in their mundane pre-war routines, filmed so long ago, are an uncanny, modern shadow of Mami’s own globalized trajectory. Together their images weave together into a film like a skin of another life. Mami goes inside, telling me about the latest mistake in taste her father made when buying her a gift on another business trip. “You can totally tell that’s not my style.”

With close, familial warmth, the pre-war children go to sleep next to one another while Mt. Fuji is bathed in moonlight. In front of Mami her internet browser snaps open and she begins quickly typing in her search terms, keywording her way into the digital skin of another life.

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