Maari Sugawara

“COLONIZED”

JAPANESE IDENTITIES LIVE FOREVER: THE JAPANESE STATE’S DATA COLONIZATION

Artist’s Statement

By Maari Sugawara

Documentation of Dreams Come True Very Much, Single-channel video installation, June 2021

GROWING up as a racialized, queer woman with Autism Spectrum Disorder in England from the age of ten, issues of gender, racialized, and marginalized identity have been central to my art-based research. This displacement prompts me to review the nuances of selves and identities. In particular, my research focuses on acts of selfcolonizing in Japanese cultural and national identity.

My interest lies in the critique of both whiteness and male domination. All of this informs post-war Japanese identity as well as the agendas of digital technologies. Incorporating XR (VR, AR, MR), animation, 3D art, photography, videography, texts and sound that are narratively linked, my art projects invite the audience to inhabit an imaginative future space that explores issues of identity, memory, and global and personal herstory.

My in-progress series of art projects, “Algorithms of Innocence,” illustrate how identities are constructed based on Eurocentric and patriarchal norms to explore alternative futures for Japan. The backstory of this project is informed by the “Moonshot Research & Development Program” proposed by the Cabinet Office of Japan, in which the government asserts a near future where the Japanese people will multiply themselves into both physical and virtual avatars.1 Using alternative realities to emphasize the political and social possibilities of AI in the post-“Moonshot” world, I aim to unpack how the Japanese state plans to use digital technologies as renewed forms of oppression.

The Japanese state plans on using digital technologies as renewed forms of oppression in the post- “Moonshot” an AI-driven future. Aptly named after a project undertaken by the U.S, the program is modeled on large-scale projects such as the European Commission’s program Horizon Europe and the US National Science Foundation (NSF) program. It seeks to deepen Japan’s partnership with Euro-American countries in order to boost its faltering global research profile and keep ahead of China—Japan’s new Asian economic-political rival—while tackling domestic issues such as Japan’s shrinking and rapidly aging population. The Japanese government proposes to create “Society 5.0” by 2050, wherein a single person controls up to ten avatars at once to “maximize their productivity,” to „be more resistant to stress,” and to „improve individuals’ QoL.”2 The proposal states that it will be possible to “extract human thoughts,” and that by “analyzing the

NOTES:

1 https://www8.cao.go.jp/cstp/english/moonshot/sub1_en.html?fbclid=IwAR2S3_ h59A96jF0ZOIRXNOt1j8dmA3XRiIip_trUelBOvBTRgOKFcfTGQG8 2 Cabinet Office, “Moonshot International Symposium Initiative Report,” https://www8. cao.go.jp/cstp/stmain/mspaper3.pdf, 13. 3 Ibid., 13. 4 James Schoff, “Setting ‘Moonshots’ on Target: U.S.-Japan Strategies for National

VR capture of SUCK MY HOUSE, 2021

brain information” they will “model the thinking [of individuals]”— such as “human brain recognition and decision-making”—and “reproduce it on a computer to artificially improve the model.”3 The nationalistic nature of Japan’s “Moonshot” program was also straightforwardly highlighted at the “Setting ‘Moonshots’ on Target: U.S.-Japan Strategies for National Technology Investment,” a panel organized by key thought leaders behind this program. It was stated that through the program, “likeminded allies like Japan and the US can build ties,” so when they are “in crisis, they can bring the shared strength of their system of science and technology to national needs.”4

The government is attempting to multiply Japanese national identity: with a life’s worth of data from every citizen, the Japanese state can practically eliminate the death of the Japanese people, as information lives forever. Identity is information with selfawareness. The government uploads the individual’s data up to the point of their physical death to a machine that thinks it is the individual. Thus, Japanese national identity lives on. It can be kept fully intact—in the sense that identities that are saved as “Japanese” data will therefore always be “Japanese”—solving the issue of the nation’s population decline without taking immigrants. In this scenario, a Japanese person, or at least a Japanese person’s identity, can work forever for the nation. The sets of data (people’s identities) will be used by the State to perform tasks. Japan is a self-proclaimed homogenous nation; this program would solidify that claim even further. The colonization of life (removing death from life), is perhaps, the ultimate form of violence.

“Data colonialism,”5 is the „commodification of human life as data.”6 The desire to create and control technology is fundamentally a realm dominated by whiteness and maleness, making technology itself inherently patriarchal.7 “Data colonialism” materializes especially in “multiethnic countries with high levels of social inequality outside of Western context”8 — which Japan fits into. These countries are at greater risk of double or triple marginalization through digital technologies due to the process of colonization that reproduces injustice within countries and enacts violence on gendered and racialized bodies, which erases “alternate visions of the world”.9 This leads to technology continuing to operate as a renewed form of oppression.

Technology Investment,” Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, May 28 2020. 5 Paola Ricaurte, “Data Epistemologies, the Coloniality of Power, and Resistance,” Television & New Media, vol. 20, no. 4 (2019): 350-365. 6 Idem. 7 Judy Waijcman,“Feminist theories of technology,” Cambridge Journal of Economics, 34 (2010): 143–152. 8 Idem, 353. 9 Idem, 353. 10 Idem, 353. 11 Idem, 357.

Governments and public institutions act as central forces in the process of internal and international data colonization at the systemic level by:

“1) developing legal frameworks, 2) designing public policy, 3) using artificial intelligence systems for public administration, 4) hiring technological services, 5) acquiring products for public administration and surveillance purposes, 6) implementing public policies and digital agendas, and 7) facilitating education and the development of labor forces.”

In “Algorithms of Innocence,” I critique Japan’s datacolonizing, post-“Moonshot” society. The narratives of this project dissect the constructed narratives of nihonjinron, which are theories of the Japanese that seek to account for particular “Japanese” characteristics, grounded in the discourse of tan’itsu-Minzoku–the myth of Japan’s ethnic and cultural homogeneity. These narratives not only produce hegemony, but also haunt the data of the AI-driven “Moonshot” future. My project insists on moving away from Japan’s futures built on nationalism and self-Orientalism; a mentality firmly rooted within the post-war Japanese psyche.

References: n Cabinet Office. 2019. “Moonshot International Symposium Initiative Report.” https://www8.cao. go.jp/cstp/stmain/mspaper3.pdf n Caughie, John. 1990. “Playing at being American: Games and tactics In Logics of television,” edited by P. Mellencamp. London: British Film Institute. n Frankenberg, Ruth. 1993. White Women, Race Matters: The Social Construction of Whiteness. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. n Ricaurte, Paola. 2019. “Data Epistemologies, The Coloniality of Power, and Resistance.” Television & New Media, vol. 20, no. 4: 350–365. n Schoff, James. “U.S.-Japan Technology Policy Coordination: Balancing Technonationalism with a Globalized World,” Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, https:// carnegieendowment.org/2020/06/29/u.s.-japantechnology-policy-coordination-balancingtechnonationalism-with-globalized-worldpub-82176. Accessed March 9.