Organizer and Chair: Lucy Lower, University of Hawai'i
Discussants: Toshikazu Niikura, Meiji Gakuin University; Steve Rabson, Brown
University
Japan in the 1930s saw the development of several trends in the redefinition of cultural values. The impact of competing ideologies in the cultural sphere was sometimes acknowledged, and sometimes implicit. Leftist writing was suppressed, and often repudiated in the tenkô, or recantation, of prominent writers within the movement. Experimentalist modernism was increasingly marginalized. Renewed interest in Japanese "tradition," subsumed under the catch phrase Nihon kaiki (return to Japan), was widespread but in fact highly diverse in motivation and result. War on the Asian mainland and in the Pacific accelerated or curbed these trends in "unnatural" ways, that is, under extreme pressure from narrow, "non-literary" considerations. And the exigencies of post-war re-directions in cultural matters has further clouded our view of the complexity of these developments, leading to an overdetermined interpretation of the poetry of the period as increasingly lending support, tacit or open, to Japan's imperialist adventure.
Through analysis of the writing of individual poets and critics, we hope to regain a sense of the actual cultural flux during the 1930s and evaluate how competing trends and especially the re-reading of the native tradition re-shaped both those individual voices and the poetry of the time and after. We will variously address issues of language, poetics, and cultural redefinition, and illustrate how the literary production of this period has in fact multiple and unstable meanings. We will also examine the problems of the distortion of hindsight and of the politics of culture.
Criticism and Poetry: Kobayashi Hideo as a Poet Manqué
Hosea Hirata, Princeton University
There seems to be a consensus that Kobayashi Hideo (1902-1983) single-handedly instituted in Japan a modern discourse named "criticism" in the late 1920s-a period of great turmoil in which the Proletarian Literature Movement became dominant despite the government's increasing suppression. When Kobayashi's debut essay "Multiple Designs" (1929) appeared, due to its non-allegiance to any ideology, it looked either strangely homeless or to be heralding a new era in which Marxism would be defeated and "Japan" would dominate.
In fact, Kobayashi began his career with a baptism of modernism via Baudelaire and then the shattering poetic language of Rimbaud. He was also deeply involved with the lives of two Rimbaud-esque Japanese poets, Tomioka Tarô and Nakahara Chûya, both of whom were to die young. From this initiation into European modernism to his most decidedly counter-modernist, lyrical essays on Japanese classical aesthetics written during the war, Kobayashi's intellectual journey seems to exemplify the trend of "Nihon kaiki (return to Japan)" conspicuous among many Japanese intellectuals at that time.
I would like to trace Kobayashi's work of this period not from the familiar paradigm of "Nihon kaiki" but rather from his peculiar relation to "poetry." In so doing, I hope to illuminate how the two incompatible yet competing discourses, namely poetry and criticism, copulate and give birth to the new language Kobayashi so ingeniously instituted. His texts are not poems but they speak poetry-a "poetry manqué" that nonetheless and necessarily speaks poetry, as if the very failure to be poetry has given a special prerogative to speak poetry. In his language, I would argue, poetry, event, and the real coincide. We must deepen our relation to the real.
Memory and "Tradition" in Miyoshi Tatsuji's Early Poetry
Lucy Lower, University of Hawai'i, Manoa
Miyoshi Tatsuji (1900-1964) is one of the most highly regarded poets of Japan's modern era. He is most often associated with the first and second Shiki (Four Seasons) group of the mid-1930s, poets who combined a devotion to classical language and poetic sensibility with a European-influenced intellectual approach. He is also remembered as an ardent poetic supporter of the Imperial cause during the second world war. Yet both his personal and poetic sympathies are more complex than they are often represented to be. He began his career in the Europe-oriented, modernist Shi to shiron (Poetry and Poetics) coterie, from which he withdrew, together with several long-time poetic associates, in leftist ideological protest. His literary loyalties remained diverse and are obvious as well in his postwar writing, not only of poetry but in translations of T'ang poetry and Balzac.
The very concept of "traditional" lyricism and its place in modern poetry is problematic. It is especially so in terms of the relation of poetry, and literary culture as a whole, to ideology during a period of political turmoil and cultural redefinition. I propose to investigate Miyoshi's construction of this "tradition," focusing especially on poems in which memory, reverie, and/or nostalgia shape the dominant mood, and on his use of the tropes of landscape and childhood. These tend to be read personally, autobiographically; I will attempt, however, to elucidate an evolving cultural poetic in which Miyoshi seeks to reconcile the disjunctions of modern experience with images embedded in his native language and landscape.
Kitasono Katue in the 1930s
John Solt, Amherst College
Avant-garde poet Kitasono Katue (1902-1978) made his literary debut in 1925 writing neo-Dada poetry and, after 1927, surreal poetry. From the early to mid-1930s he started experimenting with Japanese vocabulary while maintaining a methodology based on the latest Western artistic trends.
How are we to evaluate his change in direction to the native tradition? Does it represent a bold new experiment at the forefront of the avant-garde, a potential breakthrough that might even have influenced those at the head of the European and American vanguards? Or is the shift to recuperate the tradition a retrograde step that parallels the rise of the right-wing on the Japanese political landscape and that swiftly led into the quicksand of writing patriotic poetry in the post-Pearl Harbor era?
I will briefly introduce the mid-1930s avant-gardist and nativist styles of Kitasono Katue and attempt to gauge the significance of the variation and breadth in his poetry and poetics. Was his experimentation with two different vocabularies (both Japanese but one evoking the tradition and the other evoking the West) an exercise in creating mutually exclusive paradigms? If so, why? Or, is it mistaken to interpret the seemingly diverse styles as necessarily contradictory (e.g., either the Japanese or Western product is more "real" and the other is merely a phony pose)? These and other issues will be discussed.