Organizer: Mark Anderson, Cornell University
Chair: J. Victor Koschmann, Cornell University
Discussant: Chungmoo Choi, University of California, Irvine
In the 1920s and 30s, Japanese intellectuals began to reexamine a number of questions, among them the place of minorities in national communities, the relation of metropolitan Japan to colonial Asia, and the nature of Japan's historical origins. A new relation between knowledge and national communities was articulated that retains currency today. Our panel explores this reevaluation in several disciplinary settings.
Mark Anderson investigates wartime and post-war evaluations of Fukuzawa Yukichi and Okakura Tenshin in terms of how their projects resituated Japan and Asia in relation to the English-speaking world's historically shifting regimes of power and knowledge, and to competing conceptions of technology, art, race and culture.
Michael Bourdaghs examines how Shimazaki Tôson's early Shôwa writings participated in a rewriting of Japan's modern history. In this revision, an ethic of remembering masked a politics of forgetting, both with respect to the national community and to the image of Tôson as a pivotal figure in modern Japanese literature.
Osamu Murai traces the roots of present-day appropriations of Okinawa by intellectuals back to pre-war folklore studies. He discusses the ambivalence of nation and empire in constructions of Japanese history, focusing on historical linguist Iha Fuyu's role in rewriting the colonization of Okinawa as a return to Japanese origins.
We are pleased to have as our discussant Chungmoo Choi, whose extensive work on questions of nationalism and colonialism in Korea and Japan provides a distinctive perspective for productively engaging the issues raised by the panel.
Resiting Modern Japan: Fukuzawa, Okakura, and Remembrance
Mark Anderson, Cornell University
Fukuzawa Yukichi built his career on translation, education, and journalism which took English language texts as a point of departure. Much of Okakura Tenshin's most influential and widely publicized work was both written and published in English. Both participated in, and were later subjected to, a process of translation which staked out the coordinates for subsequent attempts to map Japaneseness in connection with the nation-state. While Fukuzawa has come to stand as a symbol of universalist Western enlightenment and Okakura of Pan-Asian particularism, my presentation will seek to trace out a more finely grained account of which specific technologies of nationalism they participated in instituting and the variety of bodies politic their projects were implicitly designed to produce. I situate Fukuzawa and Okakura's work as competing attempts to variously position Japan and Asia vis-à-vis the English-speaking world's historically shifting regimes of power and knowledge. These attempts, in turn, involve instituting personal, regional, and national origins and destinies which it will be the task of the presentation to enumerate. In other words, I map out the conceptions of national unity and memory their projects envision for the purposes of reexamining the place of pre- and post-war constructions of Japanese/Asian "traditions" in the present.
Shimazaki Tôson and National History: Awkward Memories
Michael Bourdaghs, Cornell University
In 1929, Shimazaki Tôson withdrew his celebrated work Hakai (Broken Commandment, 1906) from publication in response to charges that it included prejudiced language and attitudes toward hisabetsu burakumin characters. Ten years later however, he included the novel in a new edition of his collected works. In a new preface Tôson explained that he was re-issuing the work because of its historical importance. He argued that Japan needed to confront even the most shameful aspects of its past, including discrimination against burakumin, if it hoped to overcome them. Yet Tôson's act of remembering was equally an act of forgetting: the 1939 edition of Hakai was heavily revised. Apparently, much of the 1906 text was indigestible to 1939 historical memory.
My paper will explore ways in which selective historical memory helps construct imaginary national identities. In addition to examining the revision of Hakai, I will explore Tôson's other early Shôwa writings, including Yoake mae (Before the Dawn, 1929-35), his massive historical novel of the Meiji Restoration. I will also examine how Tôson's works were read during this period, as well as how the writings of this period were in turn remembered (and forgotten) in post-war Japan. As I reconstruct what was forgotten by Tôson and his readers, I will also question the status of my own historical memory-what is at stake when I forget one Tôson in order to remember another one.
The Narration of Empire, The Narration of Japan
Osamu Murai, Fuji Women's College, Sapporo
Since the 1960s, the discourse of Japan's "Southern Islands" has regularly resurfaced at roughly ten year intervals, advocated by such figures as novelist Shimao Toshio, poet Yoshimoto Takaaki, and folklorist Tanikawa Ken'ichi. This discourse situates the Ryûkyûs/Okinawa, which were "disposed" of (claimed as possessions) by Japan during the Meiji period, as the site of Japan's "origins," a place where Japan's "antiquity" was preserved. In treating this discourse as a form of Japanese nationalism, I have termed it the "Southern Islands Ideology" (see my Nantô ideorogii no hassei, Tokyo: Fukutake shoten [1992]; revised edition, Tokyo: Ôta Shuppan [1995]).
This discourse arose out of Japanese folklore studies (minzokugaku) as expounded in the Taishô period (1920s) by Yanagita Kunio and further developed in the 1930s by Origuchi Shinobu, and Japanese colonialism is clearly reflected in it. Surprisingly, however, the discourse initially arose in the 1910s within "colonial" Okinawa, where it was formulated as a narration of "liberation" by the Enlightenment reformer Iha Fuyu. Iha emigrated to Japan from Okinawa in 1925, then traveled in America (including Hawai'i) during 1928-9, after which he devoted himself to linguistic studies (research on the Omorosôshi anthology of classical Okinawan poetry). This paper will take Iha as the focal point of a critical engagement with the 1930s and 1940s narratives of Yanagita, Origuchi, and others as contextualized by other contemporary discourses on modernity