Abstract
The Mixed Race people known as the “hāfu” are attracting more attention in contemporary Japan,
as it shifts towards becoming a multicultural society. Recent studies focus on the various roots
and routes of the problems the “hāfu” face, and on the changes in how dominant media represent
them. However, these efforts are still in their early stages, and there is a need for research focused on
the problems the “hāfu” face at a more experiential level, and on the practices of everyday life that
form their relationships with representation in the media. Drawing from these, this study focuses on
the place of “encounter” of the “hāfu” through social networking service, a unique contemporary phenomenon,
and aims to engage with the aforementioned challenges by examining the forms of interactive
order that the “hāfu”, with their diverse roots and routes, build. More concretely, the study focuses
the practice of “laughing away” difficulties in life, which is often observed in the place of encounter
through social media and in the phenomena of forming hierarchies and excluding members that stem
from the practice; it then discusses this using de Certeau’s “Art de Faire” as an interpretive framework.
The study shows that what appears to be “ordinary” behavior universal phenomena related to norms
of interactive order and can be interpreted as behavior with characteristics that are peculiar to contemporary
youth culture is in fact a form of art filled with tension that is closely related to minority
social bodies. This study suggests that, in order to critically investigate the reality of conviviality in the
multicultural conditions of contemporary Japanese society, there needs to be more in-depth empirical
research on the art of minorities and their mechanisms of ordering and exclusion.
