Difference Abroad, Difference at Home: Mimesis and Cultural Drift in K.A.
This acting of mimesis and difference is powerful for Kanya. In an afternoon spent in the office with Kanna, he talked of how alien he feels among normal Japanese, straight Japanese. “Living in the U.S. changed me and now I can’t go back. Something got inside, but it’s not something anyone can see. Of course, I’m gay, so there’s always that, but it’s like I’m ‘different gay’—not even normal gay!” He laughed. Kanna
The sense of our own difference is compounded and with it our shared friendships arcing through our own affective drag as English teachers posing as family without bio-family near of our own. “Family” comes to mean those who both work and play together. The relationship is constant across boundary points of labor and pleasure such that the feelings of intimate connection we generate from moments like these are channeled through to our work in varying degrees. Thomas wrote me about “open futures” incorporated and expressed by the teachers themselves—a surplus, or maybe excess, of mobile, valences of becoming being lived through and experiences exchanged. This surplus is the extra-communication between our students who themselves have intensively developed sensitivity to mimetic power and occasionally skills in endlessly folding themselves to fit between the worlds they represent.
K.A. existed to make money but that is not its only fact. Profit actually serves as a petty abstraction, a misdirection into a global stream of financial imaginaries. The claim Charlie asserted, that the school might be a safe haven, echoes the fictional realms of Harry Potter’s Hogwarts, or the Peter Pan youth of Tokyo Disneyland, or the special schools housing youth who might save Japan’s future from apocalypse like the biker gang in “Akira” or the strange children in “Evangelion.”
The intersection of globalized identities, lines of love, experience, memory, history arc outwards from the school as unsteady center and curve inwards, bringing intense forms of life and livelihood, circulating around the circulation of kikokushijo, magic children. Today I received a Facebook message from Ian, the musician, who now lives back in the UK with his Japanese wife and two kids. “Miss you, miss our chats. Nostalgia is a beautiful thing.” The familial among us as part-time workers exerted a powerful bond, one, I argue, that permeated the practice of the space and altered the feeling of the most conventional of business relations without erasing them. Though he managed the day-to-day affairs of the school, Thomas was aware of the slipperiness of the role he inhabited and how his own position within the hierarchy was folded into the space of the familial: “One of the nice things Emily said to me was ‘I've never thought of you as a boss.’” Power relations can be obscured, intentionally obfuscated, and manipulated to conceal modes of exploitation and energy extraction. The familial asserted other claims and held all of us accountable. Difference worked to undermine the stability of those power relations.
The contingent nature of the work left the teachers only partially folded into the job-space itself, thus it never subsumed them fully. Even Kanna, who worked long hours on a full-time schedule, was able to shape the work and space for herself, thus remaking the specific life she had in Tokyo so that it continued to flow outwards into other worlds, drawing in new relations and continuing old ones as she would travel with her husband back to Chicago or go to clubs in Tokyo where U.S. friends were doing guest DJ spots. Affective energy was always on call. Eventually those reservoirs were depleted. Within a year after completing my research three teachers had quit and moved back to their home countries—a life never quite taking hold in Tokyo, because of weakening emotional ties, because of worry over money, because of the persistent difference upon which employment depended. In the years that followed the turnover quickened, including the departure of Thomas and Kanna, two figures so crucial to the daily culture of the school during the course of my two years of research. The specific iteration of K.A. I studied was part of its becoming—a transition from a small group of dedicated educators into a growing company with an increasingly codified system. In the moment “…the future was not understood in any real sense” says Thomas. The school as an institution was so dependent on the affective labor of the teachers as resource exceeding the structure of the school itself. The school was a conflicted, liminal moment of discipline, orthopedics and preservation. It commodified kikokushijo “in-betweeneness” and situated itself along the unstable fissures of global imaginaries and lived expectations. Off the page and in between was a liminal moment where kids and young teachers produced an environment for themselves through affective practices and exchanges.
The sense of our own difference is compounded and with it our shared friendships arcing through our own affective drag as English teachers posing as family without bio-family near of our own. “Family” comes to mean those who both work and play together. The relationship is constant across boundary points of labor and pleasure such that the feelings of intimate connection we generate from moments like these are channeled through to our work in varying degrees. Thomas wrote me about “open futures” incorporated and expressed by the teachers themselves—a surplus, or maybe excess, of mobile, valences of becoming being lived through and experiences exchanged. This surplus is the extra-communication between our students who themselves have intensively developed sensitivity to mimetic power and occasionally skills in endlessly folding themselves to fit between the worlds they represent.
K.A. existed to make money but that is not its only fact. Profit actually serves as a petty abstraction, a misdirection into a global stream of financial imaginaries. The claim Charlie asserted, that the school might be a safe haven, echoes the fictional realms of Harry Potter’s Hogwarts, or the Peter Pan youth of Tokyo Disneyland, or the special schools housing youth who might save Japan’s future from apocalypse like the biker gang in “Akira” or the strange children in “Evangelion.”
The intersection of globalized identities, lines of love, experience, memory, history arc outwards from the school as unsteady center and curve inwards, bringing intense forms of life and livelihood, circulating around the circulation of kikokushijo, magic children. Today I received a Facebook message from Ian, the musician, who now lives back in the UK with his Japanese wife and two kids. “Miss you, miss our chats. Nostalgia is a beautiful thing.” The familial among us as part-time workers exerted a powerful bond, one, I argue, that permeated the practice of the space and altered the feeling of the most conventional of business relations without erasing them. Though he managed the day-to-day affairs of the school, Thomas was aware of the slipperiness of the role he inhabited and how his own position within the hierarchy was folded into the space of the familial: “One of the nice things Emily said to me was ‘I've never thought of you as a boss.’” Power relations can be obscured, intentionally obfuscated, and manipulated to conceal modes of exploitation and energy extraction. The familial asserted other claims and held all of us accountable. Difference worked to undermine the stability of those power relations.
The contingent nature of the work left the teachers only partially folded into the job-space itself, thus it never subsumed them fully. Even Kanna, who worked long hours on a full-time schedule, was able to shape the work and space for herself, thus remaking the specific life she had in Tokyo so that it continued to flow outwards into other worlds, drawing in new relations and continuing old ones as she would travel with her husband back to Chicago or go to clubs in Tokyo where U.S. friends were doing guest DJ spots. Affective energy was always on call. Eventually those reservoirs were depleted. Within a year after completing my research three teachers had quit and moved back to their home countries—a life never quite taking hold in Tokyo, because of weakening emotional ties, because of worry over money, because of the persistent difference upon which employment depended. In the years that followed the turnover quickened, including the departure of Thomas and Kanna, two figures so crucial to the daily culture of the school during the course of my two years of research. The specific iteration of K.A. I studied was part of its becoming—a transition from a small group of dedicated educators into a growing company with an increasingly codified system. In the moment “…the future was not understood in any real sense” says Thomas. The school as an institution was so dependent on the affective labor of the teachers as resource exceeding the structure of the school itself. The school was a conflicted, liminal moment of discipline, orthopedics and preservation. It commodified kikokushijo “in-betweeneness” and situated itself along the unstable fissures of global imaginaries and lived expectations. Off the page and in between was a liminal moment where kids and young teachers produced an environment for themselves through affective practices and exchanges.
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