Organizer and Chair: J. Philip Gabriel, University of Arizona
Discussant: Brett deBary, Cornell University
This panel examines three postwar Japanese writers who focused on marginalized places and peoples as their key concern-Shimao Toshio, Morisaki Kazue and Tanigawa Gan. These writers did not simply attempt to bring the marginalized into the mainstream or to affirm their contributions to the system. Their concern with marginality was, instead, a strategy for opposing and transforming central institutions and the suppression of cultural and political difference. Each of these authors also wrote "in the margins" by living outside of metropolitan centers like Tokyo, and eschewing mainstream cultural arbiters of taste like the bundan. They critiqued Japan's state-guided modernization (in the midst of Ikeda's "income doubling" drive) and promoted the local, the displaced, and the "non-modern" as alternative visions for Japan. By remapping operative constructions of ethnicity, gender and class, they also anticipated arguments against the hegemonic cultural discourses (nihonjinron) that spread in the 1970s and 1980s.
These papers, then, suggest ways in which minorities, women, and the underclass expose contradictions in the mainstream's selective construction of identity. Phil Gabriel examines novelist Shimao Toshio and his theory of Yaponesia with which he sought to recover a distinct culture centered on Okinawa predating that of mainland "Yamato." Rebecca Jennison looks at the writer Morisaki Kazue and her attempt to reformulate gender through works such as Pitch Black (Makkura), an oral history of women coal miners in Kyushu. Wesley Sasaki-Uemura discusses the significance of Tanigawa Gan's experiments with local working-class culture circles in Kyushu and Nagano.
Gender, Class and Nation in Morisaki Kazue's Makkura (Pitch Black)
Rebecca Jennison, Kyoto Seika University
This paper focuses on Morisaki Kazue's semi-documentary work, Makkura (1961) which is based on oral histories of women who worked in the coal mines in Kyushu. Through a reading of the interwoven narratives which constitute the main body of the text, the author's strategy of highlighting the voices of "marginalized" women becomes apparent. Here, the text is discussed first in the context of her involvement in both the Village Circle and "Bulletin of the Anonymous" movements. An attempt is also made to situate it in relation to works by her contemporaries who were also exploring strategies of resistance against the newly emerging social and economic hierarchies of the period.
A present-day rereading of Makkura also suggests that the text might be considered in relation to recent developments in feminist ethnography; that is, the question of Morisaki's stance in relation to the women whose lives she is attempting to depict can be raised. In connection with this and in light of Morisaki's own complex personal relationship to Japan's colonization of Korea, we may ask whether a reading of Makkura as a "post-colonial"/"feminist" text is possible. Finally, we might ask what implications this early attempt by Morisaki to reformulate gender as a complex category that resists hegemonic cultural representations has in the context of contemporary feminist discourse in Japan.
Organizing the Margins: Tanigawa Gan in Kyushu and Nagano
Wesley Sasaki-Uemura, University of Utah
This paper focuses on the essays and activities of Tanigawa Gan during the early 1960s in Kyushu and the 1980s in Nagano. Tanigawa is probably best known for his local culture movement, Circle Village, and his work with laid-off coal miners in the Chikuho region of Kyushu. Through the miners' anti-rationalization struggle, Tanigawa developed a complex analysis of the marginalized and his relationship with them as an organizer or facilitator (kôsakusha), making local autonomy his theoretical and organizational cornerstone. Because he opposed state and corporate attempts to break union militancy and Japan Communist Party attempts to control the strikers, Tanigawa was severely pressured by both police and Party. He finally gave up the miners' struggle in 1965, moved to Tokyo and basically "went silent."
At the end of the 1970s, however, Tanigawa moved to rural Nagano and started a children's education movement. His Jûdai no Kai (Teen Club) was centered on stories by Miyazawa Kenji, echoing Miyazawa's own attempts to create a rural utopian community some sixty years earlier. Choosing an author eschewed by the established left did not indicate a swing to the right so much as Tanigawa's attempt to recover elements in Miyazawa's stories that could lift orthodox left-wing ideology out of its stagnation. Although his work in Nagano is often seen as somewhat frivolous after his experience in Chikuho, I argue that it was a new response to the rise of a centralized, homogenized "managed society" (kanri shakai) in the 1980s.
*Tanigawa Gan died of lung cancer on February 2, 1995, at the age of 71
Rethinking the Marginal: Shimao Toshio and Yaponesia
J. Philip Gabriel, University of Arizona
Yaponesia is a term signifying Shimao Toshio's attempt to define and recover a cultural substratum prior to and separate from the dominant "Yamato" culture. In the late 1960s and early 1970s his Yaponesia writings became important texts to many Okinawan intellectuals concerned with the cultural repercussions of Okinawa's reversion to the mainland. In essence, Yaponesia became a critical term by which these intellectuals attempted to reassess their own position vis-à-vis the dominant culture. The present paper attempts to reassess the importance and continued relevance of these writings some quarter century after the reversion, as well as show how Shimao's fiction and Yaponesia-ron-usually viewed as separate projects-form an internally coherent body of work which calls into question both the notion of cultural homogeneity in modern Japan and the conventions of modern Japanese literary narrative. His essays are read here as reinforcing expressions of personal and collective incongruity toward the central culture, and his fiction as a parallel attempt to question certain conventional power relations (notably male dominance) and uncover a marginalized narrative logic, namely that of the unconscious. Shimao's notion of Yaponesia as Japan's cultural unconscious finds intriguing parallels with his dream fiction, not only in the obvious area of a rediscovered, in some ways collective, unconscious, but in suggestions that Shimao was deliberately disrupting certain monologic and linear tendencies in national as well as literary narrative by rejecting conventional narrative structure and "plot" (monogatari, in his words) and embracing dream "logic."