Book smart
David Leheny, assistant professor of political science, “The Rules of Play: National Identity and the Shaping of Japan’s Leisure,” Cornell University Press, 2003.
What began as a paper on Japan’s sex tourism in southeast Asia morphed into a book about how Japanese policymakers have persuaded citizens to spend leisure time in the same way Americans do, while redefining the activities as distinctively their own.
“I came across a weird Japanese initiative to send more Japanese tourists overseas,” Leheny says. “This is the exact opposite of what most governments try to do, which is to try to attract foreign tourists. So, I started looking at how the Japanese government tried to affect the leisure lives of its citizens.”
Leheny found that as Japan sought to use leisure to boost its economy, policymakers assumed the best method was to study the leisure industry in other “normal” advanced nations.
Their promotion of leisure activities like those in other countries led to an unusual tension. “If the Japanese spend their leisure time exactly as do Americans and Europeans, it raises the question of how Japanese they really are,” he says.
They sent researchers to the U.S. and Europe to study leisure activities, and returned to tweak the ideas to make them more authentically Japanese.
“Of course, this meant that the very ideas of “normal’ and “Japanese’ were being altered and redefined at different moments,” says Leheny, who is spending this year in Tokyo doing research on Japanese counterterrorism policy.
Leheny’s interest in Japan deepened in 1989, when he went there fresh out of college to teach English. His oddest job was working in the countryside as Santa Claus, delivering toys for a combination toy store and car dealership.
“Some of the very young kids had little understanding of Santa and had never seen a white guy in person before,” he recalls. “The door would open, and I would say, “Merry Christmas!’ in English, and then usually had to switch to Japanese to calm them down, because they would cry in terror.”
The experience, Leheny says, recommitted him to academia, where his youngest students are 18. He will return in 2004-05 to teach about comparative politics, Japanese politics and foreign policy.
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