Conclusiones del tercer capítulo.

The idea of dangerousness meant that the individual must be considered by society at the level of his potentialities, and not

at the level of his actions; not at the level of the actual violations of an actual law, but at the level of the behavioral

potentialities they represented. – Michel Foucault (2001: 57)

A question to be raised … is whether and how the increasing fear of crime – this ideologically produced fear of crime – serves to render racism simultaneously more

invisible and more virulent. – Angela Y. Davis (1997: 269)

We maintain the following: The word ‘criminal’, applied to blacks by whites, has no meaning. For whites, all blacks are criminals because they’re black. This amounts to

saying that in a white city, no black can be criminal.

– A statement by the Groupe d’Information sur les Prisons (GIP) in 197160

Introduction

In Chapter Three I expounded the colonial model of racial government during Imperial Japan in which biometrics – in particular, fingerprinting – played a constitutive role in control-subjectification of race in East Asia. Instead of challenging

60 _{The statement originally appeared in a booklet by the GIP, written by French writer Jean} Genet (Heiner 2007: 340).

the Eurocentric idea of race and racism, race thinking was thoroughly appropriated and localised in Japan as a crucial measure to defend itself in the age of Western imperialism. In the light of this, I suggested that the emergence of Japanese modern racism is better understood in biopolitical terms not simply because the European taxonomy of race was inapplicable in this context but more profoundly because racism was manifested as a security measure that coincided with the introduction of an apparatus of population thinking. Upon the end of Japan’s imperial age, however, the racialised mechanism of biopolitics was dissolved and the biological discourse of civilisation eventually disappeared. Biometric knowledge in the tradition of nineteenth-century European racial sciences became illegitimate: fingerprinting as the inscription of barbarism was gradually replaced by fingerprinting as a means of individual identification.

In one sense, the end of the imperial age and the denouncement of its racist dogma may seem to mark the end of the racial codification of biopolitics and the racist mechanism of biometric knowledge. However, as I explicated in Chapter Two, the present study rejects linear and progressive accounts of the idea of race and the scientificity of biometrics. For a more historically nuanced exposition of racism and biometrics it is necessary to engage in a concrete historicisation of the idea of race and practices of biometric identification in a given context. In view of the thesis’s methodology, this chapter scrutinises the post-WWII political structure of Japan that on the surface appeared to be ‘race-free’ with respect to its political and scientific decolonisation.

The discussion consists of three sections that proceed in parallel with the previous chapter. The aim of the first section is to set up the broad historical context following World War II. I will illustrate the emergence of anti-racism through a brief analysis of

the 1950 UNESCO statement on the Race Question. The UNESCO statement had officially denounced the biological concept of race in terms of racial superiority and inferiority and its consequential political uses. Accordingly, scientific methods of racial classification such as fingerprinting in the tradition of colonial anthropology were said to be de-politicised or de-racialised. The scientific norms, or scientificity, of biometrics had shifted: fingerprinting became no longer a ‘pseudo-science’ of racial and ‘diagnostic’ identification but a ‘true’ science of individualisation (see Chapter One). Fingerprinting was no longer a technology of inscribing civility and barbarism as articulated in Chapter Three.

This post-WWII ‘de-racialising move’ in the history of racism, and concurrently that of biometrics, is where the second and third sections of this chapter are set to critically intervene. In the second section, I will interrogate the transformation of the idea of race in the context of post-WWII Japan. While the biologistic discourses on race gradually disappeared in the field of politics and science in the aftermath of the dissolution of the empire, the idea of race was persistent in cultural and behavioural terms whereby former colonial subjects were criminalised. To this day, racism in the post-WWII context has been recognised as various legal forms of prejudice and discrimination against former colonial subjects residing in the mainland who are often called the Zainichi population, especially as forms of depriving their citizenship (see for example, Chung 2010; Morris-Suzuki 2010; Tanaka 1995). My focus, however, concerns the discursive construction of race – or better raciality (see Chapter Two) because the emergent racialised category was often characterised without referring to the term ‘race’ (jinshu) – in biopolitical terms. The section attempts to articulate the inextricable relations between the postwar politics of security and postwar racialisation, and to show the ways in which the idea of criminality and fear played a

constitutive role in the post-WWII knowledge of race. For this end, I will focus on parliamentary debates concerning postwar security and the 1945 electoral reform where the Zainichi population, particularly the Zainichi Koreans, was criminalised.61

While the focus of the second section is the discourses on race and security, the third section examines security practices of identification in post-WWII Japan where I will critically interrogate the notion of ‘race-free’ biometrics as individualisation. It begins with discussion on the development of fingerprinting as a forensic technique of managing security and crimes in prewar Japan, which can be characterised as surveillant fingerprinting (cf. Foucault 1979) that is distinct from the colonial model of biological and inscriptive fingerprinting (see Chapter Three). In the postwar context, surveillant fingerprinting began to be used beyond penal governance (i.e., the management of recidivism): it began to be used also for civil governance, particularly for monitoring suspect populations including a newly criminalised, and racialised, population of the Zainichi Koreans. Against the ‘de-racialising move’ in the history of biometrics, the last part of the section analyses the political deployment of biometrics for monitoring the Zainichi Koreans under the 1952 Gaikokujin tōroku hō (Alien Registration Act), which can shed light on a new modality of racial government.

Overall, the chapter aims to articulate not just an historical continuity of biopolitical racism in post-WWII Japan. Also, and more importantly in view of the thesis’s objectives, it aims to articulate the emergent dynamics of racial government that involves new ways of subjectifying and controlling race and security through biometrics, which, despite the postwar denouncement of scientific racism, rendered biopolitical racism possible.

61 _{Most of parliamentary documents are digitally accessible from the following two sites:}

Teikoku gikai kaigiroku kensaku shisutemu (available at http://teikokugikai-i.ndl.go.jp) for texts until March 1947; and Kokkai kaigiroku kensaku shisutemu (available at http://kokkai.ndl.go.jp) for the subsequent years.

Anti-racism II: A paradigm shift in the knowledge of race and