Organizer and Chair: Kyoko Kurita, Pomona College
Discussant: Hideo Kamei, University of Hokkaido
Various Meiji writings describe the rapid changes undergone by the new capital, Tokei (soon to be re-named Tokyo). Streets and railroads began to redefine the city, with new spaces replacing the concentric layers of communities around Edo Castle. Wooden structures yielded to Western-style brick buildings. The physical construction of the new center, and its celebration in a variety of media, was intended to contribute to the process of nation-building; it also created a sense of alienation and division. The arbitrary mixture of old and new, and its incongruous underlying principles, alienated not only those who had lived in Edo, but those who had been to the West, and those who had never lived in a big city. Some felt the need to provide literary representations of the physical or psychological spaces that belonged to themselves, inside or outside the city.
This panel will present three different outsiders' perspectives of Meiji Tokyo, all of which de-center the city, relocating it in notionally distant landscapes. First, we consider an inside-out view, from the slums of Tokyo itself. Second, we view it from a rural perspective. And third, we re-envision it in fictional works about the future of Japan. These views add human dimensions to the grandiose but impersonal urban spaces, and relativize the roles played by the city in national affairs and civil society. We will investigate what kind of impact the rhetoric used in the depiction of those different spaces had on literary developments at the time.
The City Seen Inside Out: On the "Documentary" Narrative of Slum
Exploration in the Meiji 20s
Motoo Kobayashi, University of Washington
Like a reversal of the images of the ladies and gentlemen partying at the Rokumeikan, the urban poor in slums surfaced on the pages of newspapers in the 1890s. If the Tokyo of fashionable Western-style brick buildings in Ginza symbolizes the modernizing/westernizing urban space of the nascent nation-state, the slums kept in the background at Mannencho, Shin'ami, or Samegabuchi suggest the presence, right within the city, of other, shadowy cities. Reporters posing as detectives or even explorers descended into this strange "savage land" of the urban underclass. The distance they traveled from one city to another was minimal in real mileage but vast in terms of the rhetoric and imagination framing their narratives; revealing the "dark" disconcerting "cities" within a city could in turn expose the convoluted structure of the modern urban space.
In this paper. I will examine the mid-Meiji reportage on the urban poor, those by Sakurada Bungo and Matsubara Iwagoro in particular, and consider the relationships between the metaphors of exploration, darkness, etc. transported from the Western colonialist narratives and their significance vis-à-vis the representation of the slums as "cities within a city" in the 1890s. Here, the gaze of the reporter as detective and/or explorer is constitutive of the distance and consequently the topos of the cities seen inside out. The city-scape thus produced seems to give an important historical link for understanding the emergence of both "realistic" representational discourse and the knowledge upon the specifically modern multiple contradictory urban space.
The City Seen from Its Provinces
Richard Torrance, Ohio State University
The observation that Tokyo is a colonized "space" radically different from or not a part of Japan, has been made in a variety of contexts throughout much of modern Japanese history. This paper will view Tokyo from the perspective of the provinces and will argue that the recurrence in modern Japanese literature of martial metaphors of conquest and colonization in relation to the capital both define the nation state as a neutral battleground constantly "up for grabs" and assert the superiority of the regions in relation to it. As often as it has been an object of yearning and aspiration, Tokyo has been dismissed and denigrated as irrelevant, destructive, and out of touch with the rest of the nation.
At least three realistic literary movements in modern times have maintained a provisional identity by attacking the center. First, the anti-urbanism of naturalism will be discussed in the context of Kunikida Doppo's short story "Shuchu nikki" (Diary of a drunken man, 1902). Explicit critiques of urban literature will then be raised in the theoretical writings of Masaoka Shiki and Osuga Otsuji. Finally, the plight of rural migrant workers in Tokyo will be described through Kato Takeo's Tsuchi o hanarete (Leaving the Earth, 1920), a forerunner of social realism.
In conclusion, the paper will speculate on the continuity of resentment toward Tokyo that can be perceived in its description as a "foreign" space.
The City Seen in the Future
Kyoko Kurita, Pomona College
Along with numerous political novels, there were many stories about the future (mirai-ki ) written during the 1870s and '80s in Japan. This paper will consider the future, in Meiji Japan, as a temporal topos that writers created and lived in, and will analyze the elements and structures of their landscapes.
Throughout Japanese history, one finds stories that make predictions about the future; but with the popular translations of Western futuristic novels by such writers as Thomas Moore and Jules Vernes, what was considered a "future story" drastically changed. Japanese writers then began to write their own future forecasts, trying to picture the political, economic, social, and linguistic scene in Tokyo at various times in the future, from just a few years beyond to one thousand years beyond. Even Tsubouchi Shoyo was interested in its potential as a genre, and began to write Mirai no yume (Dream of the Future).
Unlike the satirical or scientifically realistic Western genre, these mirai-ki tend to offer near-sighted, pessimistic scenarios extrapolated from current conditions. In a way, they did not see any future. Or else, like Shoyo, who came to condemn the genre for its untruthfulness, they tried to look only at the present and the past. Paradoxically, however, the untruthful pictures in mirai-ki extended the depth and the breadth of the landscapes the writers actually beheld.