“Make Japan Great Again” #2_Introduction

A Philanthropic Scholarship Program and Transnational Youths’ Yaritaikoto for “Social Good”

This is an excerpt from my 81-page anthropology thesis titled “‘Make Japan Great Again’: An Emerging Class of Transnational Youths and Their Yaritaikoto for ‘Social Good’.”

<Table of Contents>

1. Abstract
2. “What Do You Want to Do for ‘Social Good’?” (Introduction)
3. Collaborative Methodology (Research Methods)
4. Brief History of Japanese Political Economy (Historical Background)
5. The Extremely Vague Approach to “Social Good” (Data Analysis #1)
6. The Disparity between the Foundation and Scholars (Data Analysis #2)
7. “What is Your Version of ‘Social Good’?” (Conclusion)
8. Recommendations to the Yanai Community (Appendix)
9. Bibliography

1. “What Do You Want to Do for ‘Social Good’?”

“Do you know what you want to do after college?” During our catch-up call over Zoom, I asked my Japanese friend, who studies abroad at a prestigious university in the U.S., just like me. Not having interacted with her for a few months, I only knew fragments of her life as portrayed on her infrequent social media posts. She shrugged her shoulders with a casual response: “I’m not sure what I want to do. I’m still figuring out for whom I want to improve society.” After a little pause, she continued: “But I guess, at least I know that I definitely want to avoid following the common career paths, like consulting or investment banking.”

This is not our first time discussing our career aspirations after college, especially given our consistent interest in “paying it forward.” Yet this time in particular, we went on to discuss why many Japanese international students end up working for high-profile corporations in prosperous industries. Hypothetically speaking, we pondered, if students gained complete economic freedom to pursue their genuine calling without having to secure immediate financial stability, would they still seek stereotypical careers? Besides seemingly lucrative salaries, what alternative logic can explain the popularity of such jobs? These questions would have remained as mere philosophical thought experiments — rather than ethnographic case studies — had it not been for the Yanai Scholarship.

In 2016, Tadashi Yanai, the CEO of Uniqlo and Japan’s wealthiest billionaire, launched a merit-based scholarship for roughly 40 students every year. In the midst of Japan’s three decades of economic stagnation, the Yanai Scholarship was born from the need to support “aspiring and passionate students to acquire advanced knowledge on a global level” (The Tadashi Yanai Foundation n.d.). In order to find such “passionate and aspiring” individuals from the pool of hundreds of applicants, the Foundation’s admission process emphasizes one quality: “the ability to lead their respective fields with global knowledge and contribute to the development of Japanese society” (The Tadashi Yanai Foundation n.d.). In other words, the Foundation does not admit students based on their objective achievements, such as academic accomplishments in high school or prestigious awards from extracurriculars, but it evaluates their commitment to “social good,” without defining what activities that entails.

Under its mission to create a society of independent and mutually respectful individuals (The Tadashi Yanai Foundation n.d.), the Yanai Tadashi Foundation grants all scholars an equal amount of money regardless of their financial needs. The scholarship covers all expenses directly charged by their school up to $80,000 per year as well as the $15,000 annual stipend for unrestricted use, such as research, travel, and living expenses. To be eligible for the $380,000 scholarship, applicants must attend “one of top 50 universities in the U.S. or comparable universities in the U.K.” and come from a family whose annual household income does not exceed 24 million yen, or approximately $210,000 (The Tadashi Yanai Foundation n.d.). According to an official report by the Ministry of Health, Labor, and Welfare (2019), only 1.2% of the Japanese population earn more than 20 million yen a year in 2018.

During the interview for this research, one of the administrators mentioned that some Yanai scholars, applicants, parents, and high school teachers question the Foundation’s approach for not attempting to maximize the number of recipients by reducing the amount of individual financial coverage. The current structure of the scholarship seems paradoxical to Yanai Tadashi Foundation’s primary objective: “[providing] financial support and opportunities for higher education … to people and their family who are unable to lead their own future, despite their best efforts due to the harsh social circumstances” (Yanai Tadashi Foundation n.d., emphasis added). However, the program administrators explain that the Yanai Foundation prioritizes supporting individuals who can contribute to bettering society over helping the poor receive quality higher education.

Other criteria for the scholarship’s application include Japanese citizenship throughout undergraduate education and Japanese language skills. Counterintuitively, applicants do not have to be Japanese residents, despite the Foundation’s emphasis on Japanese identity. Thus, those who have never lived in Japan can still apply. In fact, about 36% of scholars in the first four cohorts graduated from high school outside of Japan (The Tadashi Yanai Foundation n.d.). The Foundation recruits students based on their future potential to improve society with “global knowledge” and their Japanese identity illustrated by Japanese passports and language proficiency.

Contrary to the Foundation’s emphasis on “social good,” both towards the general public and the internal community, the program administrators give admitted scholars little to no guidance regarding their education and career choices. Indeed, the scholars engage in a wide range of academic and extracurricular activities. Their majors vary from creative writing and East Asian studies to molecular biology and urban studies. Some play competitive sports or musical instruments in orchestra, while others launch their own startups or work for graduate-level research labs. In spite of their diverse interests, a significant portion of Yanai scholars choose career paths in management consulting or investment banking. Over the past four years, I have repeatedly heard from students and mentors in the Japanese study-abroad community that the majority of elite international students — regardless of their tie to the Yanai Scholarship — work in consulting or finance after college.

Although most Yanai scholars are aware of the fact that many students end up in a similar career path despite their diverse aspirations, no one knows why and how fellow scholars make such choices. This uncertainty around fellow scholars’ everyday experiences particularly stems from the limited information available in the diasporic community. Once admitted, students have few opportunities to interact with their fellow scholars, which has become even less due to the COVID-19 pandemic. After the intensive orientation during their pre-college summer, scholars are no longer required to interact with others at all. Although many scholars interact with one another through virtual events like bi-weekly check-ins, it is impossible to fully understand each scholar’s circumstances due to incomplete information available on social media and occasional calls. It is in fact this lack of transparency within the Yanai diaspora that has made me wonder how Yanai scholars spend the scholarship resources to find and practice their yaritaikoto.

The term yaritaikoto (“what I want to do”) is often interpreted as curiosity (i.e. what one desires to know/experience), aspiration (i.e. what one desires to achieve), and/or passion (i.e. what one is dedicated to). It is an indexical word; its exact meaning changes depending on relevant contexts in a given discourse (Peirce, 1932; Silverstein, 1976). For example, the scholarship administrators might ask an applicant following questions, all using the word yaritaikoto: “what do you want to learn in college?”, “what do you hope to accomplish in 4 years?”, or “what are you currently most passionate about?”. In order to study yaritaikoto as an anthropological object, I draw on Arjun Shankar’s (2020b) cutting-edge theory of curiosity. In his ethnography on the mental health crises at Hamilton College — where two Yanai scholars have attended as of 2022 — Shankar suggests that anthropologists study curiosity as “emotional values” associated with certain activities by investigating dominant value systems that shape the relative desirability of what one does and does not. Rather than viewing curiosity as “a static trait that one has or does not have,” Shankar examines ways in which curiosity gets “facilitated or constrained, based on one’s position within a complex web of historical, political, economic, and cultural power relations.” Likewise, I investigate Yanai scholars’ yaritaikoto by asking: “Who can be curious [or find and pursue yaritaikoto], within what contexts, why, and how?” (Zurn & Shankar 2020b).

A few Japanese social scientists have studied discourses around yaritaikoto among college students, particularly in relation to post-college job hunting. Ukai (2007), for instance, proposes that Japan’s economic crash in 1990 made recruiting companies significantly more powerful than job-seekers, as the former offered drastically fewer positions than the number of college graduates looking for jobs. This shift in the human-resources market turned the practice of self-analysis (jiko-bunseki) on personal strengths and career interests into an indispensable part of the strategic job hunting in Japan. Moreover, it is highly probable that the intensified emphasis on the quality of jiko-bunseki during the recruitment process has fostered students’ anxiety and shame for not having clear yaritaikoto.

Matsuura (2019) further explored the emotionality of the yaritaiokto discourse, examining how Japanese college students emotionally respond to the dilemma during job interviews. On one hand, companies expect job-seekers to present their unfiltered true self, yet on the other hand, they evaluate applicants’ desirability as a potential employee based on particular presentations of the self that is beneficial for their businesses. Drawing on Arlie Russell Hochschild’s (1983) theory of emotional labor, Matsuura found that the frequent discrepancy between the externally-imposed emotional rules and the internally-occurring emotions caused job-seekers to experience stress and other negative feelings during interviews. Furthermore, students in her study attempted to justify their negative experiences by submissively changing the interpretation of the unfair emotional rules, rather than challenging them. She argues that their desperate effort to navigate such conflicting situations by sacrificing their personal needs results in undermining their agency.

Contrary to Ukai and Matsuura, Hashiguchi (2006) explicitly examines an emerging social hierarchy based on one’s ability to articulate and realize yaritaikoto. On one hand, he observes a respected class of people who are capable of flexibly and constantly adapting their lives to what institutions require. On the other hand, there is an “underclass excluded in poverty and deemed to have no use in society” (Hamaguchi 2016: 166). In the case of the Yanai Foundation, particular kinds of engagement privilege some students over others throughout the admission process, which closely evaluates the clarity of their yaritaikoto and likelihood of putting that yaritaikoto into action. Those who successfully articulated their yaritaikoto that contributes to “development of Japanese society” receive an access to the transnational elite world, while those who failed to do so often give up on attending their dream school due to an insufficient amount of financial aid — or studying abroad altogether.

In order to study the particular class-formation processes through yaritaikoto, I explore neoliberalism as a fundamental theme in this project. David Harvey (2005: 2) famously defines neoliberalism as “a theory of political economic practices that proposes that human well-being can be best advanced by liberating individual entrepreneurial freedoms and skills within an institutional framework characterized by strong private property rights, free markets, and free trade.” Simply put, neoliberalism promotes a “small government” in order to implement privatization and deregulation within a globalized free economy. To many, the “free-market revolution” seems “inevitable, natural, all-encompassing,” and above all, strongly tied to “the alleged ‘logic’ of globalization” (Peck 2010: 5). Today, neoliberalism appears everywhere and in everything to the point where it profoundly influences social spheres which seem unrelated to the traditional notion of political economy, such as education and development of personal identity.

In this particular study on Yanai scholars’ yaritaikoto, I approach neoliberalism as “governmentality,” a profoundly flexible structure of management that cultivates an elite class to solve social problems through individual responsibility, privatization, and international free trade (Hilgers 2011: 358–60). This governmentality framework is particularly useful for understanding the Yanai scholarship for four reasons. First, the flexible management structure relates to the lack of regulation for Yanai scholars’ academic and career choices. Second, the Foundation is viewing transnational elite education as an effective means to solve societal problems within Japan and abroad. Third, the Foundation’s emphasis on following one’s yaritaikoto to change society demonstrates a sign of individual responsibility. And finally, the Foundation’s board of directors, most of whom are corporate elites, represents privatization characterized by neoliberal governmentality. By applying this framework, I aim to specify ways in which the particular version of neoliberalism in contemporary Japan shapes and reflects policies of the Yanai Scholarship program and its scholars’ lived experiences.

This research project unpacks the neoliberal logics of “social good” as expressed by a transnational elite higher education program that claims to make economically stagnated Japan “great” again. I compare and contrast how the Foundation narrates ambiguous descriptions of “social good” and how scholarship recipients interpret such a concept within the neoliberal value systems they encounter through the scholarship program and their academic institutions. In addition to these ideological discussions on “social good,” I ask: How do Yanai scholars discover and pursue their yaritaikoto during and after higher education? How does neoliberal governmentality in Japan — first implemented by the Nakasone cabinet in the mid-80s (Arai 2013: 10) — shape emerging notions of social change and subjectivity among transnational college students?

Throughout this thesis, I argue that the Yanai Foundation’s deliberately ambiguous model of “social good” serves to maintain, and sometimes exacerbate, societal obstacles for elite youths to identify and practice their yaritaikoto. Regarding transnational higher education as a strategy to revitalize Japan’s global reputation, the Foundation sees no need to implement institutional interventions to achieve its mission. Rather than organizational solutions, the program administrators focus on individual efforts as a key component for “social good”; such an approach fails to recognize structural problems many Yanai scholars cannot overcome. Despite the reported disparity between the Foundation’s public mission and its scholars’ disengagement with “social good,” the Foundation deflects any constructive criticism merely as irrelevant. As it places no temporal bound for “social good” and groups the scholars as a portfolio for long-term investment, the Yanai Foundation as a whole can never fail to achieve its mission.

Throughout my undergraduate years, I frequently felt frustrated with how most anthropologists remain descriptive about the world’s structural injustices — which made me cry multiple times in class — without the slightest attempt to prescribe any solutions. Admittedly, I was eager to make a difference and believed that I was ready to do so. Meanwhile, however, I paradoxically found myself unable to speak up a single word to mitigate a silly dispute among a few residents in my dorm. Juxtaposed with my inability to solve such a minor issue in a 20-person house, I had to question the validity of my bold vision to tackle major global problems. When my friend told me over Zoom that she was still searching for whom she wanted to improve society for, I wondered how I am supposed to use my higher education to change the world. I also questioned who exactly constitutes the world. Who are we to believe that we can make a difference in the lives of others? After all, what precisely does it take to make the world a better place?

My interpersonal contemplation has led to this year-long anthropology thesis. In Chapter 2, I will discuss my methodology, not as mere techniques of knowledge-production, rather as my theoretical stance as a public anthropologist. Chapter 3 will explore post-war Japan’s economic and educational history in order to understand the current study-abroad boom, of which the Yanai Foundation plays a significant role. In Chapter 4, I will demonstrate ways in which members of the Yanai community maintain vague approaches to “social good.” Chapter 5 will highlight the disparity between the Foundation’s alleged mission of “social good” and students’ societal struggles to find and pursue their yaritaikoto. As with many corporate philanthropies, higher education programs sponsored by private businesses often covertly reproduce the logics of neoliberal capitalism while presenting themselves as moral and humanitarian. Ultimately, the Yanai Scholarship’s extremely loose governing structure both shapes and reflects Japan’s emerging class of “ethical elites” who successfully combine their yaritaikoto with “social good.”

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