At the same time, the establishment of a “modern standard language” was an essential component of Japan’s process of modernization and construction of its nation-empire. Critics have also noted that Japan’s expansionist vision and accompanying colonialist dreams of the early 20th century—which included the teaching of Japanese throughout its colonies—necessitated the creation of a standard language both at home and abroad.

This panel brings together these discourses on race and standard language to suggest that written language in particular has served as a key mode of visualizing difference in Japan, where ethnic difference usually functions invisibly. Panelists examine moments of deviance from a set of racialized norms: (imperial) Japaneseness, standard Japanese language, gender, and heterosexuality. We argue that what makes these moments particularly anxiety-inducing to the normative order is that differences in question toggle between visibility and invisibility, mirroring the normative privilege of being sometimes visible, sometimes not.

We begin with Andre Haag’s paper, which exhumes a body of Japanophone literary fiction from the late 1930s that struggled to expose the hidden world of colonized Korean subjects and render them legible to mainland Japanese readers. As wartime assimilation policies were reaching their apotheosis in the slogan of naisen ittai (‘mainland Japan and Korea consolidated in one body’) and other frequently invoked conjugal metaphors, narratives featuring Korean subjects contended with a smoldering complex of anxiety and desire fixated on invisible colonial others, which circulated in sensational press reports about Korean subversion and licentious sexuality. Evocative of this moment is Ishikawa Tatsuzō’s overlooked story “Bong Chŏng-hwa” (1938), a prose portrait of the eponymous Korean actress who passes as Japanese while eluding pursuit by a conflicted Japanese narrator outwardly committed to combating imperial discrimination. Reworking familiar tropes of colonial interracial romance, Ishikawa’s story engages in an extended act of surveillance that racializes the elusive and “incomprehensible” Korean woman textually, even as it allows her to resist him through disruptive, dissembling acts of storytelling and writing that call into question both his political commitments and masculinity.

Chris Lowy’s paper moves the discussion into post-imperial Japan, considering how written language, specifically the visual representation of language, can, in the face of standardization, itself become a space for visualizing resistance against the imposition of standardized Japanese on peripheral subjects. Looking at the Japan-born Korean writer Yi Yangji’s Yuhi (1989), Lowy demonstrates that authors writing on the linguistic periphery have used various components of the Japanese writing system to visualize their resistance to the hegemony of modern standard Japanese. This practice can be understood as an inherently queer form of resistance: it was during the same time that the push for linguistic standardization was occurring in the context of modern nation and empire building that heterosexuality was being constructed as the “standard” form of sexuality. Through this frame, it is clear that if non-heterosexuality is a form of queerness, then non-standardized linguistic practices, too, are a form of queerness. This is powerfully evidenced in the legacy Yuhi represents.

Finally, Cindi Textor places issues of passing and linguistic difference in Japan into conversation with global contestations of normative whiteness. Indeed, as Japan’s immigrant population from South Asia, Latin America, and even North America increases, color-based racism and its local transculturations in Japan are becoming more relevant. Textor’s paper explores visible and invisible modes of racialization in Japan through the work of Levy Hideo, an American-born Japanese-language writer. Whiteness and white privilege are a constant and conspicuous, if unstable, presence in Levy's work, though rarely remarked on explicitly in terms of whiteness or race more broadly. The slippage of whiteness in Japan between visibility and invisibility, as is legible in Levy's fiction, can offer clearer insights into the ways that ideologies of race can function smoothly despite—in fact because of—the instability of their categories.

Together, the presenters point to written language, specifically literary texts, as a key site for rendering visible a complex of intersecting norms as well as the queer difference that accompanies and, perhaps, resists them.