Disrupting the Clichéd Images of Migrant Youth in Japan: A Deleuzian Account of Cinema Time and Education

The Japanese government’s survey results on young migrants’ fushūgaku, as sensationalized by Japanese mass media outlets’ coverage, barely scratches the surface of sanctioned realities confronting them who have been neglected, excluded, and assimilated in public school education and society. Instead, what the sensationalized results implant in the general public, especially the Japanese majority, is the common image plugged into the word fushūgaku. This chapter problematizes precisely the common image of young migrants that is always already conjured up in the memory of the Japanese majority in parallel with fushūgaku, which is fabricated as a problem of the youth’s own making. The purpose of this chapter is twofold: (i) to explicate the ontology of Japanese-ness known as nihonjinron (日本人論) (Kowner & Befu, Race and racism in modern East Asia: Vol. II—interactions, nationalism, gender and lineage, 2015) that ethnocentrically differentiates Japanese people from non-Japanese (i.e., young migrants), and (ii) to bring forth minority counter-memories buried under but contending with majority Japanese memories. The chapter begins by conceptually explicating the ontology and connecting the ‘a-signifying’ (Iwase & Bradley, Video J Educ Pedag 6:1–27, 2021; Lazzarato, Signs and machines: Capitalism and the production of subjectivity, 2014) mechanism of this ethnocentrism with Gilles Deleuze’s, The logic of sense, Columbia University Press, 1990; Deleuze, Difference and repetition, 1994) concepts of ‘good sense’ and ‘common sense’ that, together, engender ‘cliché’ as a sensory-motor image. Drawing on some key findings from my post-qualitative film-philosophical research on ‘minor video-making’ with`ants in Japan, the chapter explores the possibility of disrupting the ‘clichéd’ image of young migrants equated with fushūgaku by ‘affectively’ (Deleuze, Spinoza, practical philosophy, City Lights Books, 1988; Deleuze & Guattari, A thousand plateaus: Capitalism and schizophrenia, University of Minnesota Press, 1987; also see Cole et al., Deleuze and education, Edinburgh University Press, 2013) reading the on-screen ‘time-images’ of a short docufiction collaboratively filmed and edited by the young migrants and me. Through the affective reading of the time-images, I engage in the question of time.