Place-making and the cultural politics of belonging in a mixed Korean/Japanese locale of Osaka, Japan

This dissertation investigates the cultural construction of belonging to place, and contestations over such belonging, in an area of Osaka, Japan, where ethnic Koreans and Japanese share geographic and social space. Based on twenty months of field work in this mixed residential/small-scale industrial zone, the dissertation explores the processes by which place is invested with meaning and made an anchor of social identity through its mediation of everyday experience and narratives of affiliation. The dissertation focuses on how cultural difference is conceptualized and constructed in social practice, particularly through the idiom of place, and as refracted through the discourse of the nation.;The contentions that local place-making is shaped by contest over representations, and that this contest is informed by reified notions of "culture" and "heritage" shaped within the discourse of the nation, are explored in various dimensions. These include (1) marking of "heritage" upon the landscape in making claims to place for particular groups; (2) the "performance of belonging" through periodic local festivals (Korean and Japanese) thematizing the relationship between "heritage" and its "owners," and involving embodied experience and display of "heritage"; (3) constructions of "national culture" in efforts to cultivate Korean identities among primary school children of Korean heritage in an "ethnic class.";Differential control of symbolic and institutional resources shape the place-making strategies available to different groups. Elite local Japanese enjoy access to the machinery of the state as well as to historical representations that, partaking of a larger national narrative, align heritage and place in claims of ancestral precedence, while Korean claims to local belonging are complicated by moves to recover Korean subjectivities, through assertions of difference involving reference to a Korean national symbolic space. A discourse of "living together" (kyosei) offers an alternative to erasure or exclusion of cultural difference in Japanese society, while validating reified constructions of culture and principles of national affiliation.