This paper explores the contradictory discourses on manners, safety and emotion that arose with mass motorization in Japan in the 1960s and which continue through the present. It documents the way in which multiple government entities end up working at cross-purposes in their attempts to cultivate safer drivers and slow the epidemic of traffic accidents. On the one hand, the discourse on driving manners suggests a widespread embrace of the Traffic Bureau's and other government agencies' concern with safety. On the other hand, the emphasis on manners may lead to angrier driving, which promotes accidents according to psychological studies of driving. The picture that emerges is one in which attempts at social control are complicated by the often unpredictable emotional reactions of subjects caught in a web of institutional and ideological processes. By exploring the relationship of emotion to driving school curricula and the discourse on manners, this article extends previous studies of self, social control, and social management in Japan.
In the city of São Paulo, Brazil, one middle class ethnic minority, Japanese Brazilians, is surprisingly visible in the citys unsecured public spaces. Their presence in these spaces is particularly surprising in light of the extensive scholarly discussion of the death of public space in urban centers throughout the world, and So Paulo specifically. Scholars have highlighted the retreat of middle- and upper classes into gated communities and fortified condominiums that keep them insulated from the poor living in urban slums and squatter settlements. This article focuses on one particular activitythe game of gateballand the cultural dynamics that make playing this game in public especially meaningful to elderly Japanese Brazilians. This case suggests some of the motivations for middle class residents to remain in public spaces despite prevalent discourses on crime and security. More broadly, it suggests that anthropologists account for spaces that are open or closed to varying degrees, and for the possibility that people often move between various types of spaces on a daily basis despite new forms of residential segregation.
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