Abstract
Though European countries did not colonize Japan, Eurocentrism has been imposed through the educational system and has actively worked to negate Indigenous knowledges of Japan and those of racialized minoritized groups. In particular, since the Meiji period (1868–1912), there has been a certain intensification of whiteness within the governing socio-cultural fabric of Japan. This intensification has located Indigenous peoples of Japan tangentially to the cultural fabric, in that many of us are unable to transmit local Indigenous knowledges within our governing communities. Eurocentric ways of knowing within the educational system, language, daily practices, the calendar system, foods, and medicine have gained prominence and perpetuate the dominant notions of cultural superiority and inferiority. In this paper, I will trace the historical conditions of the Meiji period to understand the ways in which the educational system, come to be governed through colonial ideologies of whiteness. I also discuss how Indigenous knowledges such as language and ethnomedicine have been silenced in the educational system, but have played an important part with my understanding of the self.
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Kawano, Y. (2011). Being part of the cultural chain. In: Wane, N., Kempf, A., Simmons, M. (eds) The Politics of Cultural Knowledge. SensePublishers. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-6091-481-2_7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-6091-481-2_7
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