Slovakian Authenticity in Japan
In “Producing Authenticity in Global Capitalism: Language, Materiality, and Value”, authors Cavanaugh and Shankar (2014) deconstruct two ethnographic examples of how regional and ethnic “authenticities” are produced in the context of global capitalism. Regardless of how convincing their examples are, they provided a useful framework of theoretical approach that blend the linguistic and the material together as they examine the Italian and the American case studies. In this short essay, I decided to use the tools Cavanaugh and Shankar have given us to look at how Slovakian authenticity is marketed in Japan to the Japanese through tpresentation of embodied whiteness. Like Cavanaugh and Shankar, I argue that my example also demonstrate how authenticity is produced in order to increase economic value; unlike Cavanaugh and Shankar, however, I intend to show that this can be done with not the linguistic but the optic. Just as their examples, mine is also adescription of strategies that claim authenticity, which is up for contestation by various actors. Yet this should not take away from our collective point that pushes against the notion of global capitalism as a force that homogenizes culture and asserts that regionality and ethnicity are instrumentalized into profit-generating tools that may have larger cultural and interdiscursive impact.
Anastasia, who I call Ana, is one of my closest friends during my time living and studying in Japan. Ana is from Bratislava, the urban center of Slovakia, and she was a graduate student in a local university studying architecture with a focus on Japanese minka (traditional dwellings). One of the reasons of how she was first introduced to Japan was through a Japanese company executive who had factories producing electricity wires in Slovakia. During his time there, he purportedly fell in love with Slovakian wine and decided to import it to Japan as a side project. To accomplish this, however, means that he had to introduce the little-known idea that is Slovakia to the people in Japan. He decided that he was going to hire young Slovakian students to attend local wine sales events in conference locations and in the basement of department stores. Ana who studied Japanese language and culture at a university in Bratislava for her first graduate degree was an ideal candidate for this job. Donning on traditional Slovakian clothing for the first time, Ana became the spokesperson for Slovak wine, which includes the sweet white wine from Tokaj that was one of their signature products. Ana, of course, was no sommelier or Slovak wine expert at any capacity before joining the program. To present Slovak wine alongside living and breathing Slovakians like Ana and her friends is a readily apparent effort on the part of the Japanese executive to produce even more notion of authenticity that differentiates Slovak wine from the already saturated Japanese wine market.
At the Slovakian wine events, wine samples are provided while the flag of Slovakia is used as a decorating drape in the background. The traditional dress Ana and her friend had to dress in is also a clear culturally distinct symbol. However, what stands out the most, I argue, is their appearances—their presences as embodied Slovakness, compounding with whiteness. In fact, I believe the traditional dresses and the flag are serving as nationality indexes because without them, Ana and her friend would only be read as white women, and upon interacting, white women who speak Japanese, something that does not quite add to the effect of what the Japanese executive would like to achieve in order to broaden the Japanese wine market to include Slovakia. Whiteness is also important in this context. As Ana had once told me about a Slovakian friend of hers who is of Chinese descent but immigrated to Slovakia at a very young age, that she was perpetually told “your Slovakian is so good” because of her assumed status as an outsider to Slovakian society despite her personal history. Had this friend of Ana’s taken her position as a wine presenter in one of these events in Japan, the intended effect of authenticity would be very different indeed, as most Japanese people are not likely to associate a Chinese immigrant with what is “authentically produced” in Slovakia. It is precisely the optics that consists of Slovakian cultural indexes and whiteness, both visual elements rather than the linguistic ones reported by Cavanaugh and Shankar, that were the tools intended in creating the “authenticity” of Slovak wine. Additionally, the traditional clothing, something that Ana and her friend would never dress in in their day-to-day living, whether in Japan or Slovakia, is another visual sign of an earlier time when wine was produced in traditional ways that include stepping on the grapes and imageries of barrels of wine stored within old, ancient stone cellars. In line with Cavanaugh and Shankar’s analysis, it creates a chronotope that connects
Contributed by H.C. JulianLin on 07/02/2022
One response to “Slovakian Authenticity in Japan”
[continued] contemporary Japan with Slovakia in an imagined past.