Organizer and Chair: Nina Cornyetz, Rutgers University
Discussant: Naoki Sakai, Cornell University
In postwar Japan, as in other nations, there are ongoing reformulations of the ideological categories of "national self" and "others." The modern myth of a homogeneous Japanese aesthetic is being contested by voices from various peripheral positions within mainstream Japanese society. Literature functions as one discursive site reproducing, and producing ideations of identity. The proposed panel will explore how notions of cultural, racial, sexual and gender diversity affect the construction of a "Japanese self" and "others" in postwar literature. How are categories of community and difference reforming in the works of today's writers, in response to changing perceptions of "Japaneseness"? The panel will discuss contemporary literary constructions of self, and the production of "others" from multiple perspectives.
Two of the four papers focus on racial identity. Michael Molasky's "Poetry of Protest from Occupied Okinawa: Arakawa Akira's 'The Colored Race"' explores the complexities and ambiguities of racial discourses in Japan, as expressed in Arakawa's "political" poetry, which advocated a black American/Okinawan alliance against white racism. John Russell's "Consuming Passions: Spectacle, Liminality, and the Commoditization of Blackness in Japan" addresses the construction and commodification of black youth culture in Japanese popular fiction, arguing that "blackness" operates as a signifier for a stereotyped "otherness," equated with physical and sexual prowess, style, and antisocial commentary.
The other two papers are concerned with Japanese representations of "Japaneseness" that are antithetical to antecedent axioms on Japanese cultural homogeneity, and question dominant doctrines on "normative" sex/gender ideology and practices. In "Dismantling Japanism: The Ciphered National Self in the Works of Shimada Masahiko," Nina Cornyetz argues that the bilingual, bicultural and bisexual characters of Shimada's satirical works unsettle conventions of Japanese identity, by inhabiting the interstices of racial, linguistic, cultural, ethical and sexual identificatory categories. Katsuyo Motoyoshi discusses the hermaphroditic gender identity in the pioneering works of the critically acclaimed, self proclaimed lesbian writer, Matsuura Rieko, in "Emphatic Phallacy: Gender Identity in Matsuura Rieko's Sexual bildungsroman."
Each literary work represented in this panel struggles with the boundaries of national, racial, sexual, and gender norm, indicative of contemporary, coexisting and often contradictory discourses on Japanese community and difference.
Michael S. Molasky, Connecticut College
Arakawa Akira is known in Okinawa less for his poetry than for his iconoclastic social criticism and for his role as President of The Okinawa Times. Yet he began his career in 1953 by establishing Ryudai bungaku, a small but influential student literary magazine where he wrote poetry protesting both the American occupation and Japanese indifference to Okinawa's plight. One such poem, "Thoughts on 'The Colored Race' Part One" (" 'Yushoku jinshu'sho-sono ichi," 1956, hereafter "The Colored Race") shocked the occupation censors with its clarion call for black GIs to unite with Okinawans and to resist white racism.
Although censorship of "The Colored Race" is mentioned in Okinawa's postwar literary histories, the poem itself has received scant attention from Okinawan critics, presumably because they are unimpressed by its strident tone, technical inadequacies, and its facile cry for unity among the racially oppressed. Despite these shortcomings, the poem provides valuable material for exploring the ambiguity of race as a conceptual category in Japan. And while pointing to the difficulties posed by color-centered models of race, this poem addresses the specific complexities of Okinawan racial identity during the American occupation. It also points to the ambiguous position of black GIs, who serve as members of the occupation forces while suffering discrimination from their fellow soldiers. Yet the poem itself is also marked by ambiguity: it employs "race" as part of a political strategy while discrediting it as a conceptual category, and it calls for unity among "the colored races" while ultimately insisting on racial purity. After effectively dismantling the concept of race throughout the poem, the final section seems to reverse itself, suddenly advocating "purity" and conceiving of race as "blood." This reversal and the ambivalence to which it attests underscores the complexity of color centered models of race.
In addition to the questions it raises about conceptions of race in Japan, Arakawa's "The Colored Race" represents a key turning point in postwar Okinawan intellectual history: this poem is among the first attempts to discuss the occupation in terms of racism, it links racial discrimination within American society to that directed at Okinawa's occupied populace, and it calls for a coalition based on skin color that overrides national affiliations.
John G. Russell, Kokuritsu Gifu Daigaku
In recent years, the Japanese media has made much of what it has labeled the "kokujin bumu (black boom)." In particular, the commercialization of black popular culture has created an interest in certain highly stereotyped aspects of African American material culture in Japan. The most vivid expressions of this fascination can be found in the emergence of so called kokujin ni naritai wakamono, young Japanese "black wannabes" who appropriate the dress, style and manner of marketable black popular culture, and in books and magazine articles which discuss the phenomenon primarily in the context of black-Japanese sexual relations. These consuming passions-the conspicuous consumption and mimicry of commoditized black cultural styles and the fabrication of fraudulent conspicuous personae-draw their rhetorical power from the fact that "blackness" as a signifier of an ineffable and heavily romanticized Otherness, is equated with sexual and athletic performance, fashionableness, and anti social behaviors.
This paper critically examines the discourse on "blackness" in Japan, focusing on its construction and commoditization in popular narratives, including the works of Yamada Eimi, Ieda Shoko, and Murakami Ryu, that define blackness in racially stereotypical terms which reproduce, indigenize, and reinscribe traditional Western obsessions. Such reproductions reduce blackness to a spectacle of physicality, and carnal and material pleasures, whose consumption in Japan serves as a subversive critique of Japanese institutionalized social and gender roles, allowing Japanese to reconfigure these gender roles and "Japaneseness." At the same time "blackness" may be used to reinforce the myths of Japanese homogeneity, fears of foreign contamination, and the values of the status quo. The paper argues that the current Japanese fascination with, and exploitation of "blackness" also functions as a means through which Japanese attempt to resolve the problem of their own liminal identity in a postcolonial world which continues to perceive issues of race largely in terms of "black" and "white." Moreover, these issues must be addressed in a Japanese society which is increasingly faced with the influx of non white peoples whose presence defies traditional definitions of gaijin as white foreigners, and whose influence upon Japan is ambiguously viewed as both culturally invigorating and threatening, attractive and repulsive.
Nina Cornyetz, Rutgers University
The proposed paper will read the satires of Shimada Masahiko (b. 1961), as a corpus of concerted assaults upon socially dominant Japanese conventions of self identity. As Shimada's stories unfold, the variant categories by which individuals identify themselves as members of the modern nation state Japan (such as language, culture and relation to the emperor) are relentlessly fragmented. In Tengoku ga futte kuru (When Heaven Comes Tumbling Down, 1985) Shimada presents us with Ririka, Japanese of birth but raised in the Soviet Union. Returning as a young adult to Japan, she cannot speak Japanese, and her gestures and mannerisms mark her as culturally and linguistically foreign. Her brother Mario, similarly bi national, experiences a trauma which sets in motion his subsequent obsessive attempt to "transcend his history and reinvent himself." The hero of Yumetsukai (Dream Messenger, 1989) is known variously as Masao or Matthew, and is bilingual, bicultural, and bisexual. Shimada's characters persistently inhabit the interstices of racial, linguistic, cultural, and sexual identificatory categories. Against dominant modern Japanese notions of national unity, Shimada posits Japanese who cannot be placed within the quotation marks surrounding the cliché "we Japanese" (wareware Nihonjin).
In Shimada's work, the unraveling of the national self begins a process of querying those putatively "universal" categories by which sexual, ethical, psychological, and other social norms are constructed. "Little Philosopher" of Yudayakei aonisai (A Callow Youth of Jewish Descent, 1987) travels to France to cure his schizophrenia. His condition is attributed to too much introspection, requiring his separation from Japan. Little Philosopher's return to mental health is in part due to a Jewish mentor who turns out to have invented his Jewish heritage. Both the mentor and Little Philosopher are in the end fully ciphered, or to paraphrase the hero, turned into question marks behind words. The mentor declares himself Little Philosopher's disciple because, "you are wonderfully zero....your identity cannot be ascertained."
Shimada attempts to release Japanese narrative of its "schizophrenic" (obsessive/introspective) concern with identifying, and reproducing, a homogeneous "Japaneseness." The protagonist of Boku wa mozoningen (I am a Cyborg, 1986) proclaims proudly, "I am my own Tower of Babel." Little Philosopher says, "I want to be freed of this concept of being Japanese," a statement that serves as a metaphor for Shimada's project to liberate Japanese literature, and the construction of the Japanese literary subject, from their present "Japanist" tautological configurations.
Would you like to return to the Japan Table of Contents? Choose another area?