‘Asian Approaches’

In 2017, we are seeing a growth of so-called emerging donors, including the powerful Asian development cooperation partners such as China and Korea (Satō and Shimomura Reference Satō and Yasutami2013). A number of discussions are taking place among development practitioners, scholars and state officials to understand better how these new partners are reshaping the development cooperation landscape. For example, in May of 2015, development experts, policy specialists and government officials from a dozen Asian countries, as well as Australia and the United States, gathered in Cambodia for the twelfth meeting of the Asian Approaches to Development Cooperation (AADC) dialogue series (Mulakala and Ankel Reference Mulakala and Eleana2015).Footnote ¹ While their discussions raised important points about approaches and issues in the field of development cooperation that move ‘beyond aid’ (see Kharas et al. Reference Kharas, Koji and Woojin2011; Janus et al. Reference Janus, Stephan and Sebastian2014; Mawdsley Reference Mawdsley2015), I interrogate the implications behind phrases such as ‘Asian approaches’ that offhandedly and purportedly explain these phenomena (Stallings and Kim Reference Stallings, Kim, Stallings and Kim2017; Watson Reference Watson2014). In short, I caution against the adoption of culturalist explanations as analytical frameworks (see Breidenbach and Nyiri Reference Breidenbach and Pál2009; Kim and Kang Reference Kim and Kang2015), but propose to take development actors’ own culturalist arguments as ways to understand how certain notions of culture emerge in transnational encounters. The task is to see the usefulness of culturalism as an ethnographic artefact and not as an analytical framework.

Scholars, policy makers and aid practitioners alike have produced analyses of emerging Asian donors, pointing to particular characteristics of their approaches to development cooperation (Asia Foundation et al. 2010: 2; Binder and Meier Reference Binder and Claudia2011; Brautigam Reference Bräutigam2009, Reference Bräutigam2011; DeHart Reference DeHart2012; Six Reference Six2009). For example, one common reference is to ‘the China model’, often conflated with the perception of ‘a China threat,’ which is notable for the central role of state-owned enterprises, private commercial actors, authoritarian politics and an adherence to a non-interventionist principle in respect of sovereignty (DeHart Reference DeHart2012; see also Bräutigam Reference Bräutigam2009, Reference Bräutigam2011; Shimomura and Ping Reference Shimomura, Wang, Satō and Shimomura2013). Scholars also talk of Korean approaches to development assistance that have been shaped by the longstanding conflict between North and South Korea, the Korean War and Japanese aid, factors that differentiate them from (so-called) ‘traditional’ perspectives on development cooperation (Kim Reference Kim2011; Kondoh Reference Kondoh, Satō and Shimomura2013). Studies also attend to the alternative philosophies and ethics among emerging donors, including ideas of mutuality and reciprocity, the primacy of infrastructural projects and the fact that many of them were once aid recipients or colonies of Euro-American empires themselves (Kim Reference Kim2011; Mawdsley Reference Mawdsley2011; Six Reference Six2009).

Within this discussion of emerging donors, Japan has tended to be excluded because of its status as a so-called traditional donor and former colonial power. Nevertheless, it exhibits aforementioned characteristics—such as a focus on infrastructural projects and partnership with private actors—that do not fully fit into traditional paradigms of aid (Arase Reference Arase1994, Reference Arase1995; Kato et al. Reference Kato, Page and Shimomura2016). As such, scholars of Japanese foreign aid have also recently revisited the history of Japan's development cooperation system to argue its significance on the initial formation of Asian approaches as well as its potential influence on emerging donors (Kato et al. Reference Kato, Page and Shimomura2016; Satō and Shimomura Reference Satō and Yasutami2013). In talking about Asian approaches, then, I refer to texts that discuss Japanese actors as well as those that focus on other so-called emerging Asian actors in the field of development cooperation.

Asian approaches, as in the AADC meeting title, can refer to actual differences due to specific political, economic, institutional and conceptual approaches to development cooperation. Nevertheless, at times, the ways that some policy makers, development practitioners and scholars speak of Asian characteristics (or Chinese, Korean, Japanese, and so on) employ a kind of reasoning that I call instrumental culturalism. Culturalism can be defined as “the defence of distinct and essentialized communities in the name of the respect for differences” (Fassin and Rechtman Reference Fassin and Rechtman2005: 348). Although the respect for differences is important, culturalism takes the further step in that it naturalizes otherness as if differences were cultural, natural, essential and immutable. At its most extreme, culturalism can take the form of a theory of the ‘clash of civilizations’ (Huntington Reference Huntington1996), which has been widely criticized for ignoring the interconnectedness between cultures and the internal diversities within any given culture, resulting in a dichotomous us versus them view of the world (e.g. Said Reference Said2001). Instrumentalisation in the way that I use in this paper refers to how culture has been objectified as a means to an end—a tool that can be used to achieve particular ends such as aid effectiveness. Anthropologists of development have elucidated how aid practitioners and policy makers instrumentalise culture, that is, define culture as a bounded management tool that can be deployed to do development better (e.g. Li Reference Li and Mosse2011). However, as I elaborate below, the instrumentalisation of culture can collude with particular political interests, rather than offer a critical analysis.

There are, certainly, historical and regional characteristics of Asian donors that differ from those of traditional Euro-American paradigms. Nevertheless, such differences must not be reduced to cultural essentialisms. Differences are, rather, products of contingent historical and social processes conditioned by both national and international political economies. Similarly, culturalist explanations are also products of history and politics, as they are often mobilised by particular nationalist interests. To take instrumental culturalism at face value—that is, to accept arguments about Japaneseness, for example, as a set of timeless cultural values and an instrument to implement development projects more effectively—is to become a vehicle for specific political interests. Scholarly work cannot be reduced to such a function.

Despite the problems of instrumental culturalism, it is fruitful to understand culturalist claims such as Asianness and Japaneseness as an ethnographic artefact—that is, as a logic that ethnographers find among their interlocutors. While culturalist explanations fall short of critical analysis, culturalism as an ideology and practice in the world brings forth phenomena. In other words, instrumental culturalism is not representational; it is performative (Austin Reference Austin1962) in that it brings into being that which it names. In the pages that follow, I explore how aid workers in one of the oldest Japanese NGOs, the Organization for Industrial, Spiritual and Cultural Advancement (OISCA), and in their agricultural and environmental training programmes in Myanmar, produced particular culturalist explanations of the world through the work of comparisons. Japanese and Burmese actors variously defined and distinguished between Japanese culture, Burmese culture and Western culture, thereby constructing essentialising definitions of culture. It was through the designation of differences as cultural in the work of comparisons that culture itself emerged as a bounded and static category. Instrumental culturalism is performative in this sense: it does not represent the world as it is but creates it in culturalist terms in the moment that it is named as such. More specifically, by looking at the performative effects of instrumental culturalism in development practices, we can gain insight into how culturalist views emerge from transnational encounters. The analyses will appear as common sense to anthropologists and, as such, this article is intended for non-anthropological audiences with the hopes that anthropological perspectives can change the terms of discussion in other fields. In the end, I ask: what kinds of futures are brought into being through particular articulations of instrumental culturalism in the field of development cooperation? The answer might serve as a warning against taking culturalist arguments at face value.

Problematising Instrumental Culturalism in Asian Approaches

What are the specific problems with instrumental culturalism employed in allegedly Asian (or Japanese in this case) approaches to development? Here I identify three, which will be familiar to anthropologists: essentialisation, self-orientalisation and instrumentalism. Cultural essentialism can be defined as “a system of belief grounded in a conception of human beings as “cultural” (and under certain conditions territorial and national) subjects, i.e., bearers of a culture, located within a boundaried world, which defines them and differentiates them from others” (Grillo Reference Grillo2003: 158, emphasis in original). It attributes a set of traits to a group of people, understood as timeless and uncontested. From an anthropological perspective, assuming that there is such a thing as a coherent Asian approach (or a Chinese or Japanese or Korean one for that matter) suggests an inaccurately static view of culture. UNESCO in Post-2015 Dialogues on Culture and Development, for instance, defines culture as “the set of distinctive spiritual, material, intellectual and emotional features of a society or a social group” that has a role to play in human development and can act “as a force for bringing stability, resilience and meaning to communities” (2015: 8).Footnote ² Identifying a set of unchanging traditional principles that actors draw on reflects this definition of culture as a bounded resource that can be mobilised for human flourishing. This reductionist tendency reflects a culturalist turn in international development, whereby local heterogeneity, political economic factors and the hybridity or coproduction of the local and global, traditional and modern, are minimised if not ignored (Breidenbach and Nyiri Reference Breidenbach and Pál2009).

The discourse of cultural essentialism relating to Asian actors circulates widely among scholars and policy makers. To state, for example, that “China and South Korea share a common culture based on Confucian values” is to reductively characterise these countries as informed largely by so-called Confucian principles (Watson Reference Watson2012: 84; see also Nishikawa Reference Nishikawa2005). The problem with essentialism is that it assigns pre-defined values to a group of people, as if they “naturally” lived by these immutable rules. Even when divergences from these values are discussed, they are represented as exceptions to the norm. Adopting this particular view of culture is problematic as it would ultimately amount to bolstering a culturalist ideology in which difference is reduced to a naturalized cultural otherness that explains away political and socioeconomic factors. Who defines ideas of Confucian values, what political processes make these appear as ruling principles and when they might seem irrelevant are questions that remain unaddressed in essentialising explanations. It is only a short logical step from here to end up with a Huntington-esque argument of the clash of civilizations—a perspective that requires critical scholarly engagement.

The second problem is how the people we study sometimes adopt essentialising and orientalising definitions of their cultures themselves in order to advance particular political interests. Anthropologists have noted how some people around the world embrace essentialising and exoticising images of their so-called cultural uniqueness in a move that has been described as “counter-orientalism” (Moeran Reference Moeran1996), “self-orientalisation” (Ong Reference Ong1999) and “auto-orientalism” (Mazzarella Reference Mazzarella2003), among others. These moves indicate a strategic use of culturalist ideas to objectify one's own culture and use it to advance certain political and economic ends (Spivak Reference Spivak, Guha and Chakravorty Spivak1988) or even scientific knowledge and acclaim (Fan Reference Fan2017; Ito Reference Ito2017). Self-orientalisation thrives in contexts where there is a global market for consuming particular culturalist representations, such as Japanese politicians and corporations who actively promote the image of the Japanese as hardworking and disciplined, and the reason for the country's postwar economic success (Sugimoto Reference Sugimoto2015; Turner Reference Turner1991).

Self-orientalising discourses also exist in the area of development cooperation in Japan. On the Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA)’s website that explains its training programmes for foreign experts who come to Japan, it states that Japanese people have an innate ability “to select and apply foreign knowledge and skills through trial-and-error, always keeping in mind the existing conditions of Japan” (JICA, n.d.). The ability to meld “the Japanese spirit with Western skills (wakon yōsai)” is presented as an essential Japanese cultural quality, which people from other countries can learn by spending time in Japan. As Koichi Iwabuchi argued, such claims amount to what he called hybridism, an ideology in which “identity is represented as a sponge that is constantly absorbing foreign cultures without changing its essence and wholeness” (Reference Iwabuchi2002: 54). Self-orientalisation in the case of Japan includes assertions that the Japanese have always excelled at mixing other cultures with their own, therefore able to act as good models of modernisation in Asia that balance Euro-American influences with one's own traditions. To echo such claims in our studies would merely reflect particular political interests, rather than offer a critical analysis of the phenomenon at hand.

The third problem of instrumental culturalism is the instrumentalist aspect: the reduction of culture as a tool or means to serve particular ends. This is already evident in the above two characteristics of this line of thought. In an analysis of the conceptualisation of culture in UNESCO, Bjarke Nielsen writes that culture in the agency is “a political tool… [which] promotes culture as a road towards a better world” (2011: 278). In this context, culture is a bounded entity that can be grasped and mobilised to serve UNESCO's universal mission. A similar view can be found in how UN and other aid agencies instrumentalise ideas of community in development. Tania Li (Reference Li and Mosse2011) describes how the World Bank rendered communities technical, that is, objectified and classified local communities and their cultures as resources that could be harnessed through participatory methods to make aid delivery more effective (or make them appear so, see also Mosse Reference Mosse2005). This analysis resonates with Nikolas Rose's diagnosis of communitarian thinking in Europe and America, which seeks to reinvent government “through the political objectification and instrumentalization of […] community and its ‘culture’,” as if it were something that could be “investigated, mapped, classified, documented, interpreted” (Reference Rose1999: 172–3, 175). In short, communities and their cultures become valuable for aid agencies in so far as these can be bureaucratically categorised and used to meet project aims, and ultimately technically evaluated. As we will see, the Japanese and Burmese aid actors whom I encountered did not technically instrumentalise culture in this way, but they did see essentialised ideas of culture as means to an end. That is, they ultimately saw essentialised cultural values—Japaneseness, Burmeseness or Western-ness—as a set of characteristics that could help or hinder in the aim of project delivery, or in the case of OISCA, of managing an agricultural training centre based on a communal lifestyle.

Fundamentally, the problem with essentialisation, self-orientalisation and instrumentalism arises when scholars adopt these perspectives as their own analytical frameworks. Analysis becomes, then, merely a platform for certain interests or a mirror of the objects of study (cf. Riles Reference Riles2006). In the case of Japanese development cooperation, if scholars repeated JICA's claim of Japanese essential abilities to meld “the Japanese spirit with Western skills,” the description would simply echo JICA officials’ statements and definitions of Japanese culture. In other contexts, the replication of instrumental culturalism can collude with even more aggressive political projects. For example, anthropologists of Britain have shown how the reduction of people's identities to culture has tended to obscure factors of class (Evans Reference Evans2012; Grill Reference Grill2012). Relatedly, across Europe we see a rise in what Stolcke (Reference Stolcke1995) has called cultural fundamentalism, which incorporates older forms of racism and reifies cultural boundaries of difference (see also Grillo Reference Grillo2003). How these perspectives contribute to a dangerous clash of civilisations argument can be seen in the rise of Islamophobic movements around the world. These examples should give scholars pause before making the argument that a particular phenomenon, such as Asian approaches, is due to some static understanding of culture that can be channelled for particular political or managerial ends. In my view, treating culture as an object and a tool is a problem when such conceptualisations can be easily used to serve particular political interests.

Anthropologists have long addressed the problem of how popular discourses and anthropologists understand culture differently. In many ways, given how anthropologists and others have critiqued the essentialisation and instrumentalisation of cultures for decades (Stolcke Reference Stolcke1995; Grillo Reference Grillo2003; Kuper Reference Kuper2003; Wright Reference Wright1998), it is curious why this perspective persists in popular discourses. It is beyond the scope of this article to discuss the reasons for this. What interests me is how instrumental culturalism appears as an ethnographic artefact—as something that the people we study imagine and do. In the end, even if anthropologists see the problems with this perspective, it is a view that exists in the world of the people whom anthropologists study. Therefore, instead of rejecting instrumental culturalism all together, I take it as an object of critical ethnographic inquiry. That is, I seek to understand how development practitioners use instrumental culturalist logic and what its consequences are. By doing so, we can grasp the significance of such thinking for development actors and its performative effects in producing essentialist views of culture in transnational encounters. We can examine the ideological and political consequences of calling something culturally Asian or Japanese, even if it is done in a casual way.

The Work of Comparisons

Japanese politicians and aid agencies often say that Japan and Myanmar have had a “special relationship” (Nemoto Reference Nemoto1995). This claim derives from the historical links in which Burmese independence fighters, namely Aung San and his comrades, trained in Japan to prepare for the overthrow of British colonialism (and overlooking subsequent Japanese colonial rule of Myanmar). But another common reason given is the idea that Japanese and Burmese people share similar cultural values such as a respect for elders, indirectly distancing themselves from the West which, supposedly, does not value a similar reverence for one's elders (overlooking the fact that this is probably a value shared by many other cultures) (Yamaguchi Reference Yamaguchi1999). This is an example of cultural essentialism and self-orientalisation that simultaneously shows the uniqueness of Japanese culture and shared cultural values between Japanese and Burmese people. These assertions are present in the context of other Asian donors in Asia as well. Scholars have argued that “Asian donors feel very comfortable in their own home region largely because of cultural similarities,” quoting academics and aid actors who make such claims (Stallings and Kim Reference Stallings, Kim, Kato, Page and Shimomura2016: 127). These views exist as instances of instrumental culturalism that development practitioners use.

Yet, the pages that follow illustrate that assertions of cultural difference and similarity, and subsequent essentialisms, might not necessarily be givens for development workers on the ground. They are, in fact, consequences of the work of comparisons that preoccupies many people's experiences in the transnational spaces of development practice. Thus, looking at the discourses and practices through which development workers produce instrumental culturalist thinking shows that ideas of Japaneseness (or Asianness) are not inherent to people's worldviews nor do they serve as explanatory frameworks. Culturalist ideas are made and reshaped in everyday processes of comparison that ascribe differences and similarities to culture. Ultimately, the ethnographic analyses below illustrate how the work of comparisons that development actors are constantly engaged in can produce culturalist views that curtail the possibility of debate.

Japaneseness versus Western-ness

Between 2009 and 2011, I conducted ethnographic research with OISCA, one of the oldest NGOs in Japan, established in 1961. I undertook participant observation at their year-long training programmes in sustainable agriculture and environmental education. I moved between the Tokyo headquarters, the four training centres in Japan and the training centre in Myanmar over the course of 20 months. I also conducted field research at similar institutions as points of comparison and to trace the extent and limitations of OISCA's mode of development assistance.

OISCA's training centres in Japan target rural youth from around the world and the centres in other countries focus on local trainees. OISCA had sixteen training centres across the Asia-Pacific region at the time of my fieldwork. All of the programmes require trainees as well as Japanese and non-Japanese staff members to live together in a communal setting and contribute to shared tasks around the training centres such as cleaning and cooking duties, and engage in hard physical labour in the agricultural fields. The founder, Nakano Yonosuke, was also the founder of a Shinto-derived new religion called Ananaikyō, established in 1949. The NGO's mission echoes Yonosuke's spiritual teachings, such as the interconnectedness of all life forms through what he called the Great Spirit of the Universe. Yet, the NGO's staff members stressed that the organisation was not religious. But neither did they claim a secular position. As I discuss elsewhere, I take these assertions of being “not religious” (shūkyō ja nai) seriously and argue for a conceptual space of the nonreligious, neither religious nor secular (C. Watanabe Reference Watanabe, Bush, Feener and Fountain2015). That is, although OISCA's staff members distanced themselves from the category of religion, this did not mean that they embraced a rational, disenchanted and scientific paradigm, as secularism might suggest (Taylor Reference Taylor2007). Instead, Yonosuke and his successor and adoptive daughter, Nakano Yoshiko, promoted what I call a Shinto ecology. They and the other OISCA staffers often explained that the influences of Ananaikyō on OISCA were fundamentally about Shinto values, and that Shinto was ultimately about Japanese cultural values. One of these values was to live in harmony with nature, an ability that Yoshiko and other OISCA staff members claimed the Japanese have developed organically in the rich environment of the Japanese archipelago.

These conceptions resonate with nationalist-culturalist discourses that have existed in Japan since the 18^th century and in the popular theories of Japanese uniqueness (nihonjinron) (Befu Reference Befu1997; Dale Reference Dale1986). It is no surprise, then, that Yonosuke, Yoshiko and other Japanese staff members in OISCA have had strong connections to nationalist and even rightwing, historical revisionist political actors throughout postwar Japan and in the current era (C. Watanabe, Reference Watanabeforthcoming). Although I do not go into detail here, this context is important in understanding the political implications of instrumental culturalism—that is, the collusion with rightwing nationalist interests—among OISCA's Japanese actors.

The culturalist ideology of Japaneseness in OISCA was something that many nationalist political actors in Japan supported. For instance, in a roundtable discussion among politicians, bureaucrats and Yoshiko that took place in 1986, a Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MOFA) official stated that he was deeply impressed with the approach to human resource development that he saw in OISCA's agricultural training programmes. The official, Fujita Kimio, praised the strong emphasis on the spirit (seishin) of hard work and the value placed on practices in the field (gemba) of aid in OISCA, which he characterised as a “uniquely Japanese way” (OISCA 1986: 21). To illustrate the point, he described how new employees in Japanese railway companies, for example, would always start by clipping tickets regardless of their levels of education or status. He pointed out that even Gotō Noboru, heir of Tokyu Corporation and future president of the Japan Chamber of Commerce, started his career cleaning toilets in his father's company. Others at the roundtable voiced their approval of these points, reinforcing the idea that industriousness and the importance of working in the field, regardless of status, were quintessential Japanese values. Thus, as anthropologists have observed in other spaces of learning and training, the focus on hard work and shared physical labour made OISCA's training programmes seem like a reflection of essential Japanese cultural values (Kondo Reference Kondo1990; Rohlen Reference Rohlen1974; Singleton Reference Singleton1998).

The assertion that Japanese values defined OISCA was something that staff members sought to actively promote not only to highlight its particularity but also as the foundation of their global activities. One of the most senior staffers who had been with Yonosuke's movements and OISCA since the 1950s, Watanabe-san, focused on this message in his role as liaison between OISCA and the international aid community. In a report about attending the fifth meeting of the UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) in Manila in 1979, Watanabe-san wrote that he was struck, not for the first time, by the differences between what he called Western NGOs and OISCA (T. Watanabe Reference Watanabe1979). Western NGOs seemed to simply respond to the demands of developing countries due to their sympathetic and perhaps guilty feelings toward their former colonies. In contrast, he wrote, OISCA advocated that the role of developed countries should be to create a foundation for self-reliance (jiritsu) among developing countries through “making persons” (hitozukuri), that is, human resource development.Footnote ³ Echoing similar views from Japanese state aid agencies that also emphasised self-reliance and hitozukuri, he explained that accepting all requests for aid from developing countries would ultimately hinder their abilities of self-help (jijo doryoku). He lamented that Western NGOs did not seem to understand OISCA's, and therefore Japanese, views (T. Watanabe Reference Watanabe1979: 18). Sixteen years later, when OISCA received the ECOSOC Category I status,Footnote ⁴ Watanabe-san wrote another piece explaining the significance of this international recognition. He saw it as proof that “the kind of steady activity based on the hardworking spirit (kinbensa) and humility (kenkyosa) flowing through the blood of the Japanese [evinced in OISCA's activities], now works (tsūyō suru) in the international community” (T. Watanabe Reference Watanabe1995: 10). He added that this was an opportunity for OISCA to move toward becoming even more of an “earth NGO (chikyū NGO)” through Japanese values. In short, Japanese cultural values could become the basis for a universal movement.

While Watanabe-san promoted culturalist ideas of Japaneseness as well as Western-ness to distinguish OISCA from the Euro-American actors that he met at international meetings, he also at times expressed admiration for the West. When he attended the 13^th General Meeting of NGOs in Consultative Relationship with the UN in Geneva in 1976, he saw how misunderstood Japan was in the eyes of other developed countries, as it tended to be seen as simply an extension of US interests and an “economic animal” (T. Watanabe Reference Watanabe1976: 22). He explained that although Japanese people tend to value the virtue of “action without words (fugen jikkō),” he realised that Japanese people needed to learn to speak clearly for their own interests when interacting with people from other countries (T. Watanabe Reference Watanabe1976: 22). The ability to use words adeptly was a supposedly Western value that he thought Japanese people, including OISCA's development workers, needed to learn. These kinds of comparisons that waver between a pride about Japanese exceptionality and a sense of inferiority vis-à-vis the West are common in the nihonjinron ideologies of Japanese uniqueness, and accordingly, in essentialisations of the West (Kelly Reference Kelly1991; Moeran Reference Moeran1996). Making comparisons between Japaneseness and Western-ness seemed to create opportunities for Watanabe-san and other actors involved in OISCA's activities to assess what constituted Japanese values, how to learn from an essentialised West and, most significantly, how Japanese values combined with some Western wisdom could become the basis for a universal movement.

Japaneseness versus Burmeseness

The second ethnographic vignette illustrates how Japanese and Burmese aid workers in OISCA's training centre in Myanmar engaged with the work of comparisons in ways that produced notions of Japaneseness and Burmeseness. Sakurai-san, the thirty-something director of the Myanmar training centre, had taken up the role a couple of years before my arrival in August 2010. He was the only Japanese staff member left, overseeing the approximately 40 Burmese staff members and 20 trainees each year. Together, they ran a training centre that was also a farm, cultivating organic rice and vegetables, and raising chicken and pigs. As in all of OISCA's training centres, everyone lived together in a communal lifestyle, sharing in the cleaning, cooking and agricultural duties. The trainees and staffers were mostly ethnically Burman, and therefore Buddhist, but there were also a few people from ethnic minority regions such as Chin state and Kachin state. They generally came from middle-income rural families who had some kind of connection to local government officials—it was through these government contacts that the trainees’ families usually heard about OISCA's training programme.

Sakurai-san had extensive experience working with trainees and staffers in the multicultural environments of OISCA's training centres in Japan and Myanmar. Yet, he was often confounded or surprised by some of the ways that the Burmese staff members and trainees behaved. He often described these encounters with difference in terms of culture. For instance, during an evening staff meeting in October 2010, one of the senior Burmese staff members raised the issue (in Japanese) that, in that particular week, the staffers and trainees in charge of cooking breakfast had been too loud in the mornings.Footnote ⁵ Apparently some of the trainees had also complained about it. Sakurai-san's response caught me off guard (in Japanese): “But that's the same problem with the fact that the male staff members play loud music, right? That's your responsibility, isn't it?” He continued to say that Burmese people always play their music loudly and do not seem to care if other people want to listen to it or not. “In Japan,” he stated rather heatedly, “it would be a problem if you played music loudly and you would get complaints from everyone.” While this message was still sinking in, someone else asked if the time to show up at the kitchen to help with breakfast duties was still 5 a.m. because, when he got there this week, the work had already been done. Another staff member explained that lately the trainees had been eating all the rice from the previous day so they had to cook new rice every morning. This meant that the people in charge of breakfast had to start their work earlier at 4 a.m. Sakurai-san interrupted the discussion to instruct the staff members that if the rules had been changed, everyone needed to be told about it. He elaborated, once again, with his culturalist theory: “In Myanmar, it is always the case that the rule is to not follow the rule, like with motorcycle helmets. People disobey rules as if that were the rule.”

Sakurai-san judged what he deemed to be Burmese people's problematic habits as problems of culture, especially in contrast to what he defined as Japanese values. He saw management and operational problems as consequences of cultural difference, and vice versa. The Burmese staffers with whom I talked later were incensed by Sakurai-san's accusations. The next day, during the morning walk that I used to take with Ma Khaing, Ma Phyo and Ma Su, three of the female Burmese staffers in their mid-twenties, I asked them what they thought of Sakurai-san's talk the day before. Ma Phyo, the most outspoken of them, stopped in her tracks and told me angrily that she was upset by his characterisation of Burmese culture. Ma Su chimed in (in Burmese): “He belittles Myanmar (hnein d è) and looks down on us (ahtin the: dè).” The three of them were Burman but from different parts of the country—two from the Yangon area in the south and one from a region not far from the training centre—and had been with OISCA for approximately five years. Although I knew that they were committed to their work and the training centre, they also talked about such moments with Sakurai-san as reasons for considering other lines of work elsewhere. But eventually, instead of leaving, I learned a few years later that the Burmese staffers rebelled against Sakurai-san's directorship, leading to his replacement with a different Japanese director.

Sakurai-san's derogatory views may be extreme and exceptions to the rule, but they do not exist in a vacuum; they are part of an existing milieu of culturalist explanations. To say that Japanese approaches to development cooperation have unique cultural characteristics is not necessarily the same as saying that Burmese behaviours are culturally different and inferior, but they depend on the same framework that rigidifies differences in terms of cultural distinctions. Difference and moments of conflict are not seen as interpersonal frictions or structural effects, but cultural gaps that seem insurmountable and potential fodder for a clash of civilisations.

While Japanese actors such as Sakurai-san depended on specific culturalist and hierarchical views of Japaneseness and Burmeseness, the Burmese staff members also sometimes echoed similar culturalist thinking developed through the work of comparisons. One day, I participated in the agricultural work in the rice paddies with some of the Burmese staffers and trainees. We spent the morning making organic fertiliser, called bokashi, which uses a mixture of chicken manure, rice bran, oil scraps and other natural materials. Half-way through the process we took a break. While some of the staffers went off to buy snacks for everyone, I asked the senior staff member in charge, Ko Thein, about the women working in the rice paddies, who I did not recognise. We spoke in a mixture of Japanese and Burmese. He explained that they were hired labourers from nearby villages, often relatives of staffers and trainees at the training centre. He told me that the OISCA trainees were from farming families but many of them were fairly well-educated, some of them even university graduates, and so they had little experience actually working the fields. As a result, they did not have the stamina to work as much as Ko Thein would have liked and so he hired extra hands to help out. These women had been working in rice paddies since they were children so their expertise and strength were a saving grace for the training centre.

At this point, we heard the women and staff members joking and laughing over a plate of fried snacks. Gesturing to them, Ko Thein told me that the ways that people work in Myanmar and Japan were different. “Here,” he explained, “people work while having fun.” In contrast, in Japan, when people work, they just work, without laughter. “At the training centres in Japan, of course you were not allowed to sing and you were not even allowed to talk,” he told me. You were allowed to say something if it was a question about the task at hand, but anything unrelated to agriculture was prohibited. “But in Myanmar, there are songs for the agricultural tasks; for example, there is a song for rice planting and people sing about the scenery as well.” I nodded, thinking that this was also the case in traditional farming practices in Japan, just not in OISCA. He summarised: “People have fun here and they still get the work done, and it feels good.” He described how this was quite different from what he saw in Japan. During his home-staying experience at a farmer's household near one of OISCA's training centres, he realised how seriously everyone worked. “But,” he added, “when it was time to rest we had a lot of fun.” Work and fun were separated in Japan, whereas he understood these to go hand-in-hand in Burmese culture.

As much as Burmese staffers disliked Sakurai-san's culturalist determinations of Burmeseness, at times, some of them also engaged in similar thinking. Thus, despite the apparent conflict, Burmese and Japanese staffers shared a logic of instrumental culturalism in making sense of their relationships with each other. Recognising the fact that development cooperation is, at its most fundamental level, a space of transnational encounters points to the various works of comparison that make expressions of cultural uniqueness, difference and similarity central to aid actors’ worlds. Culturalism and the idea of culture itself become particularly manifest in the context of transnational encounters. In fact, these encounters are not seen as cultural until after the fact; that is, making the moments seem like cultural encounters is one of the outcomes of the interaction. Hence, the fact that Ko Thein met farmers in Japan who worked without laughter might have been a simple personal quirk of that particular Japanese farmer and not about cultural difference at all. But after comparing this experience with Burmese farmers whom Ko Thein knew, who seemed to combine fun and work, the difference appeared cultural for him. Claims of Burmeseness as well as Japaneseness were products of such interactions and comparisons. As anthropologists have long argued, it may only be in comparison that culture appears as such.