ANT209H5 Chapter 4: Week 4- A Japanese Aid Ethic of Collective Intimacy in Myanmar by Watanabe notes
Week 4- A Japanese Aid Ethic of Collective Intimacy in Myanmar by Watanabe notes
THE SMELL OF MUD- The first Japanese aid worker that I met from the Organization for Industrial,
Spiritual and Cultural Advancement told me that OISCA was an NGO that "Smells like mud".1 Yamada
and I were sitting in a coffee shop in Yangon, the largest city in Myanmar, and she had just given me an
overview of OISCA's training activities teaching rural youth techniques in organic farming.
Living together for a year, sharing work as well as meals, baths, and collective duties did not come easily
to participants, but I later came to understand that both Japanese and Burmese staffers considered
living alongside each other a meaningful aspect of their work.
In the sections that follow I describe how participating in a communal lifestyle and shared physical
labor-what Yamada described as dorokusai, muddy labor-produced what I call a form of collective
intimacy among Japanese and Burmese aid workers and trainees.
2 The term hitozukuri became central to the Japanese government's aid hira gave a speech policies in
1979, when then Prime Minister Masayoshi O at the General Assembly of the United Nations
Conference on Trade and Development.
Subsequently, Japanese aid policies, as well as the Japan International Cooperation Agency and NGOs
such as OISCA, have adopted hitozukuri as one of their core missions.
The 650 MUDDY LABOR collective intimacy produced through shared labor, as I describe below,
constituted an instance of such moral subject-making, as the relations and bodily experiences of
communal labor and belonging defined Burmese and Japanese aid actors' understandings of the ethical
basis of aid work and personhood.
JAPANESE AID IN MYANMAR- Since 1962, a military junta has ruled Myanmar.
With Japan serving as the largest aid donor to the country for many years, a handful of Japanese NGOs
have also been active since the mid-1990s.
Japanese aid workers in the country agree that OISCA, in particular, stands as one of the exemplary
NGOs that reflect Japanese positions of engagement in Myanmar.
Each training center outside Japan has one or two Japanese staff members and dozens of local staff,
overseeing trainees that could number from twenty, as in Myanmar, to hundreds, 651
In 1996, a Japanese official of the United Nations Development Programme invited OISCA to begin
projects in Myanmar, and with the support of the Japanese and Myanmar governments, OISCA
initiated activities in the semi652 MUDDY LABOR arid region of the dry zone in central Myanmar.
Japanese staff members often described life at the training centers as "Eating rice from the same bowl,
sweating together".
Another Japanese staff member wrote in OISCA's monthly magazine that no manual existed for OISCA's
activities.
In many ways, OISCA's activities since the 1960s foreshadowed what I perceive as a wider emphasis on
the importance of the field in current Japanese views of soft aid.
Scholars have criticized earlier official Japanese aid philosophies for focusing too heavily on matters such
as national economic interests, developmentalist policies, and trade.
The rise of soft aid, Japanese NGOs with an international reach, and volunteerism, especially in the
1990s, indicated a shift away from such growth-oriented principles.
At the same time, by appealing to the idea of "Working hard together with the local people," Aso¯
sought to advocate this Japanese ideal as an instantiation of a common humanity, manifesting
simultaneously a commitment to a universal solidarity and to a particular Japanese ethic.
During my fieldwork, I frequently heard such conflations of the idea of solidarity and Japanese
superiority in official Japanese discourses of aid.
In June 2010, I visited one of the training centers of the Japanese Overseas Cooperation Volunteers, the
Japanese version of the Peace Corps, in Nagano Prefecture, where government-sponsored Japanese
volunteers were preparing for their overseas dispatch.
Document Summary
Week 4- a japanese aid ethic of collective intimacy in myanmar by watanabe notes. The smell of mud- the first japanese aid worker that i met from the organization for industrial, In the sections that follow i describe how participating in a communal lifestyle and shared physical labor-what yamada described as dorokusai, muddy labor-produced what i call a form of collective intimacy among japanese and burmese aid workers and trainees. 2 the term hitozukuri became central to the japanese government"s aid hira gave a speech policies in. 1979, when then prime minister masayoshi o at the general assembly of the united nations. Subsequently, japanese aid policies, as well as the japan international cooperation agency and ngos such as oisca, have adopted hitozukuri as one of their core missions. Japanese aid in myanmar- since 1962, a military junta has ruled myanmar.
