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Crossing the border: Japan may serve as example because it knows a lot about borders and because it has so many uses for them. And because, unlike those of many other countries, Japan’s borders are natural, not agreed-upon terrains but leagues of formerly uncharted sea. An archipelago, like the United Kingdom, it has long distanced itself from its neighbors, something its watery borders have encouraged.

In consequence these borders have seldom been breached. Japan is among the very few Asian nations that did not suffer through the intrusions of Western imperialism—Europe and the United States crossing borders irrespectively.

Japan’s borders were breached only twice. In the thirteenth century the Mongols set out to invade Japan but their fleet was stopped by a typhoon and an occupation was averted. This phenomenon was seen as evidence of divine favor and the typhoon was thereafter referred to as kamikaze, the “divine wind,” a term that was to prove useful on numerous occasions—most recently, describing the activities of suicide bombers during the latter days of World War II.

It was during this war that Japan’s borders were again breached.

The Allied Powers set out to invade Japan, devastated it, and an occupation resulted. This was the first and so far only time that Japan’s boundaries were ignored and its borders broken.

The effect of such an invasion is often decisive. Not only are people killed and dwellings destroyed, but whole cities are ruined, communications systems are broken, and famine and pestilence stalk. The destruction of recognized borders in all fields leads to social and personal chaos. After all, the borders were there to preserve the very identity that is now threatened.

For Japan, this was the first time it had been invaded. Though the country had had internal border problems, a massive breach of this nature had never before occurred. And in addition to the physical damage there was the mental harm that occurs when an idea of self predicated upon the notion of a state is destroyed. Borders are there not only to protect but also to define.

Due both to these experiences and the fact that they have remained very much an island people, the Japanese have traditionally viewed border crossings as something of which to be wary. They have long regarded their own borders as boundaries—not merely lying adjacent but forming a limiting line.

Indeed, during much of its history Japan remained nominally closed to outsiders. The government deemed leaving the country an unlawful act and returning after having somehow successfully left a criminal one—a national seclusion that is known as sakoku. Inside the country various borders were observed and travelers from one province to another had to pass through guarded barriers, forts that contained much the equivalent of immigration and customs services today.

Borders were also put to work and afflicted not only on peasants and craftsmen. There was a boundary-based system known as sankin kotai where the daimyo, the lords of the capital, were forced to make expensive trips back to their own provinces. Since their processions were seen as ceremonial, they contained large numbers of people (though members of the immediate family were to be left behind as government hostages in all but name) and were very expensive. This had the double advantage of providing work, making money, filling state coffers, and curbing any thought of political uprising since such attempts are always expensive. The grand daimyo processions, spilling money, were stopped at each of the many district border forts. Borders were barriers.

And indeed they still are. The 1945 Allied Occupation of Japan had substituted one military government for another and crossing borders, in and out of Japan, became again difficult for the Japanese. This is no longer true but it should be noted that even now the doors into Japan swing only one way. It is easy for the visitor to get out but not to get in. This is something that countries learn. This is why at most immigration barriers everywhere there are separate entry lines for the confident native and for the merely hopeful foreigner.

This is also why there is also so much fuss made about nationality within the country. In Japan there remains a rigid definition. The Japanese are inside the boundary, everyone else is out. Though there are accommodations for Japanese citizenship, these are—like those of all other countries—rigid. There is no accommodation for those who would live and work there without undergoing proper procedures. Even third-generation people whose ancestors came from, say, Korea are routinely denied some of the advantages of citizenship—running for public office, for example.

I myself have spent my entire adult life in Japan, living as a foreign body in the native mixture. Officially I enjoy eijuken, permanent residence, a fairly exotic and somewhat in-between category. Before I applied for this I was told that I ought to opt for citizenship because it was so much easier for the bureaucrats to arrange. I could be nominally Japanese in that fashion. With permanent residence I was neither one thing nor another—so I pay taxes but I cannot vote; my borders remain vague.

It is not that Japan is with its history of closed borders more xenophobic than other nations, merely that it is more open about being xenophobic. There is little concern about being observed and found xenophobic—or indeed misogynist, or racist.

Take, for example, the terminology used in referring to foreigners. The standard Japanese term gaijin translates, innocently enough, as “person from the outside.” Foreigners in Japan, to be sure, find the term loaded with prejudice, but that is their privilege. There are many worse that could be used yet rarely are—keto (“red-haired barbarian”) for example. And when it comes to bad-mouthing foreigners Americans have little ground to stand on. I remember from Occupation days Eighth Army notices forbidding “fraternization with the indigenous personnel,” and few languages can have had terms so unlovely as the standard G.I. for a Japanese person, gook, as in: “Hey, that’s a good-looking gook girl.”

Still, tempered though it is in terminology, the truly politically correct, with all of its triumphs and terrors, has never knocked on Japanese doors. And for good reason. Japan is very suspicious of knocked-on doors. This tendency was much strengthened when, in the mid-nineteenth century, American warships appeared with what seemed to be a trade offer but was widely perceived as a bid for imperialistic takeover. With this threat, however, Japan did not, as given its history might have been expected, close its borders and retreat into an even more hermit-like seclusion.

Rather, it compromised and opened its borders, but it did so ever so slightly for the would-be invaders from the West, just a port here or there. But it opened all the way for those Japanese who now needed to go out and learn all that they could about this country that was so politely menacing theirs.

This ploy is a popular one, this one-direction border-crossing convenience. Many countries have found it of use, particularly in Asia—getting in and out of Burma, for example. It is cost effective and considerably slows down invasions, military or mercantile.

It sometimes malfunctions, however. Several years ago Japan, still deep in what it termed “oil shock,” occasioned by just one more of Nixon’s perfidies, decided to shop elsewhere. Iran was to be the new oil supermarket, and to speed transactions the Japanese government initiated a visa treaty, a tit-for-tat arrangement where I freely enter your country and you freely enter mine. This would, it was thought, allow the Japanese oil people to get in and out of Iran with a minimum of fuss.

Perhaps it did, but the fuss this occasioned in Japan was maximum. While Japan was sending a person or two a month to Tehran, Iran was allowing hundreds to travel weekly to Tokyo. Soon the city was awash with friendly, well-behaved young Iranians, all looking for work.

Naturally they did not find it, though the work was there. After their money had run out these friendly young Iranians found themselves employed mainly by the yakuza, who used a number of them for drug running. Thus the authorities could, eventually, after several years, round up and deport as criminals most of these men who had come to Japan to gain a better life. The one-way boundary was reinstated and Japan experimented no more with porous borders.

There are borders other than the corporeal, however. Those, for example, of economic necessity. Perhaps some readers will recall the so-called trade imbalance, a disequilibrium, which for a time remained unchecked, dividing Japan from the rest of the world. Cheaper (and often better) cars and cameras from Japan were bought by too many people in other lands while the Japanese refused to buy in like number the products of the offended nations.

The United States was particularly outraged, claiming that Japan was unfairly excluding products from its populace through wrongful manipulations of Japanese quotas, qualifications, and distribution procedures. Whether this was true or not, Japan waxed wealthy during this period, and the trade imbalance was among the reasons why. This kind of economic boundary was practical.

It was not, however, the kind of boundary that could last long. Shortly the bubble collapsed because cheap production could not be maintained, and other Asian countries could undercut Japanese-product price. The economic borders (some quite imaginatively named: “Japanese structural impediments,” “Japanese lack of interface,” even “Japanese cultural differences”) fell and gradually the trade imbalance, the result and the cause of many an economic barrier, appeared to right itself.

It is still there; to be sure, it always is; it is one of the qualities of having other nations border yours, but the objects exchanged are now different. Japan, which once purveyed judo, sushi, and Zen to the world, and then turned more palpable with cars and cameras, now began exporting manga, anime, and the more flashy kinds of pop culture. Since this latter does not make nearly as much money as do cars and cameras, there is no mention of trade barriers. And indeed there are none. Mickey Mouse is welcomed so long as Hello Kitty is reciprocally admitted.

During this decline, however, and all of this closing and opening of barriers to the West, Japan had also been busying itself with its borders to the East. This had occurred earlier, to be sure, but never to the extent that Japan’s proximity to the rest of Asia might have suggested.

The reason was that Japan first recognized as its major border fissure that of its border with the West, in particular the United States. It was the country with which Japan thought it had to compete and, even now, it is the country to which Japan most often compares itself, sometimes to its own advantage, sometimes not. The rest of Asia, however, does not have this impediment or this advantage. Cambodia compares itself to Thailand, China compares itself to India, and the borders turn into boundaries, or don’t.

When Japan thought of other Asian countries it all too often considered them backward and worthy only of being taken advantage of. Having itself escaped imperialism, Japan, imitating the admired West, turned imperialist, concluding successful wars with China and Russia, taking over Korea and, as it is called, enlarging its borders.

Successful in this, in the first part of the last century it extended its colonial ambitions to, eventually, the rest of Asia. This destruction of other countries’ borders was sloganized as the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere. It expressed the idea of an economically and politically integrated Asia freed from Western domination and under benevolent Japanese leadership.

At the same time the same phrase was used back home to rationalize Japanese expansionist ambitions on the continent. Claiming that it was saving these unfortunate countries from the perils of Western imperialism, Japan—or at least a part of the Japanese government—was seeking for leverage that would allow an invasion of Japanese people and Japanese money. “Asia for the Asians” was the slogan used.

Members of the sphere, the “New Order,” eventually included Japan (along with annexed Korea), China, Manchukuo (the puppet state in Manchuria), French Indochina, and the Dutch East Indies—those countries that had suffered most from the “Old Order,” a system of international relations erected by the Western imperialists.

A problem presented by proponents of the plan was Japan’s own record in East Asia, which was as self-aggrandizing as that of the Western imperialists. Japan’s seizure of Taiwan, Korea, Manchuria—and its more recent efforts to promote an autonomous North China—all constituted a kind of proof that Japan was initiating various economic ties with the peoples it was attempting to subjugate in the name of freedom. In this it was admittedly more civilized than some Western nations, which had used opium to subjugate. It also seemed to offer economic advantage. And some still believe in Japan’s sincerity in its stated intentions. For example, Burmese Ba Maw, then head of that country, said that though he deplored the brutal and arrogant behavior often displayed by Japanese soldiers throughout Asia, still, “nothing can ever obliterate the role Japan has played in bringing liberation to countless colonial peoples.”

If so, Japan was suitably rewarded. After the war ended (from Japan’s view disappointingly) it renounced war entirely. Presumed to be no longer a military threat, it became seen as a place that still, naturally enough, sought economic exchange. Thus what Japan failed to gain through war it has gained through peace. Japan’s economy is larger than all the other Asian economies combined.

With all this wartime scrambling over boundaries and postwar cleaning up of borders there are now myriad economic ties with the nations of Asia, and Japan has been able to make the most of occasional relaxations of these, to give aid where it is needed, to cross borders that might otherwise be closed to it.

Some Asian localities—Singapore, Shanghai, Kuala Lumpur—seem in some sense to be modeling themselves on Tokyo. Japan, however, still models itself on America. Some even say that this is but to be expected, its having been a vassal state for these fifty-some years.

Amid this generally peaceful relaxation of Asian boundaries there are exceptions. Even discounting the miserable state of North Korea and the various Muslim insurgencies in Indonesia, Thailand, and elsewhere, there are still some signs of disagreement. Naval authorities in Japan and South Korea search ancient maps in an attempt to find precedent to bolster either Japan’s claim to calling the body of water between it and the mainland peninsula the Japan Sea, or Korea’s claim that this same body of water ought to be called the Korean Sea, or at least, in Korean, the East Sea.

Having observed so much squabbling over borders—for history is a record of little else—one begins to question just what it is that borders mean. The dictionary offers only limited help: a border is a line or frontier separating political divisions or geographic regions, something that indicates a limit or a boundary.

But borders do more. They not only limit, they also define the area within the borders. Americans who now claim that they are first and foremost Americans are exhibiting that phenomenon. They are defining themselves through their boundaries, having chosen to see self as nationality.

Nonetheless, that nationality, that self, can be defined only through comparison with other nationalities, other selves. Without the rich the poor could not so rightly define their state; without the powers of darkness or the axis of evil the rightness of a particular belief or a particular political strategy could not be made so apparent. There is nothing sinister in this. It is simply that borders define not only “us” but also “them,” something other, something different, hopefully opposite, against which we may define ourselves.

Borders thus aid in our predicating who we are since it is only by comparison with a neighbor that we may learn this. Japan is still comparing itself to the continent across the Pacific and not to those other countries nearer at hand. And they, the rest of Asia, are comparing themselves to each other and, increasingly, to Japan as well. This may all end up as stagnant mass-Americanization but at present it is an interestingly roiling batch of emulation and rivalry, of borders physical, political, and metaphorical, of cross-border interactions, of boundaries erected and struck down, and occasionally of exceptional borders as well. “That long frontier from the Atlantic to the Pacific Oceans, guarded only by neighborly respect and honorable obligations”—Winston Churchill was speaking of the U.S.–Canadian border but indicating a possibility, rare in this world of boundaries though it is.

The example of Japan on which I have predicated this talk does not offer much in the way of possibilities but it does indicate an isolated example of the uses of borders and the employment of boundaries, and some indication as to how we might begin to think of these infuriating, fruitful divisions.

—2004