Organizer: Brett deBary, Cornell University
Chair: Chieko Ariga, University of Utah
Discussant: Sandra Buckley, Griffith University, Australia
The panel will consider Japanese theatrical, filmic, and autobiographical texts produced between 1910 (the year of the Japanese annexation of Korea) and 1971 (the year of the Okinawan reversion). To a well-established feminist concern for the role played by modern technologies of representation, whether theatrical, cinematic, or literary, in the production and regulation of normative gender identities, this panel will conjoin more recent lines of inquiry into the links between gender, culture, and colonialism/imperialism. While emphasizing ways in which representations of sexual difference may be linked to the domination and control of women domestically, our analysis will also propose that, in modern colonial and imperialist cultures, supposedly internal differences of gender, ethnicity, and class, cannot be analyzed while leaving the boundaries of the nation-state intact. Rather, these diverse identities evolve and change not only in relation to each other, but to struggles for power with other nations and cultures. Each paper on this panel, then, analyzes the representation of the modern Japanese female body as a site of contradictions which cannot be confined to the domestic sphere, but spill over national boundaries and become implicated in the international exercise of power. For Kano, shingeki "emancipated" Japanese women for careers as actresses domestically while teaching its spectators to be subjects of a colonial empire. For Shigematsu, the body of the karayuki, once exchanged for foreign currency, continues to be "othered" in the libidinal economy of postwar cinema. For Izbicki, the disrobed female body in Occupation film provides both a conduit for newly hegemonic American notions of freedom and a reassuring sense of masculine control for repatriated Japanese soldiers. De Bary traces Morisaki's thematization of the female self as a textual surface where personal and colonial histories intersect.
Japanese Theater and Colonialism: Romance and Resistance
Ayako Kano, University of Pennsylvania
As part of a larger critical re-examination of the relationship between women and the state in modern Japanese culture, this paper will discuss the phenomenon of the actress (a newly emerging profession for women in the late Meiji to early Taisho periods) at the intersection of feminist and imperialist discourses.
In many of the plays performed by actress Kawakami Sadayakko in the 1910s, a European original is adapted to suit the Japanese context. Most fascinating are Japanese versions of plays which deal with colonial situations. William Shakespeare's Othello, in the Japanese Kawakami troupe version, becomes a tale of military exploits set in Taiwan. A play called New Nation's King, based on Wilhelm Meyer-Förster's Alt Heidelberg, transforms the German original into a romance between a Korean king and a Japanese barmaid. The Bondman, based on a novel by Hall Caine, deals with Japan's presence in the Philippines.
In this paper, I examine these "colonial adaptations," focusing particularly on the representation of heterosexual romance and homosocial bonding. My aim is to examine and elucidate how the language of romance and betrayal intersects with the language of colonial domination and resistance. To what extent can we say that the Colonizer relates to the Colonized as Man relates to Woman? And what are the possibilities for an anti-sexist as well as anti-colonial critique of plays such as those performed by Kawakami Sadayakko? Using archival material from the Theater Museum at Waseda University, I will attempt to answer these questions.
Karayuki-san: Representability, Contradiction, and Limitation
Setsu Shigematsu, Cornell University
During the Meiji period, young Japanese females from impoverished families were sent abroad throughout Asia to work as prostitutes. These women were known as the karayuki-san, meaning "foreign bound," or, more literally, "China bound." It is estimated that by 1910 there were over 22,000 Japanese prostitutes overseas. The karayuki-san were exported as commodities and exchanged for foreign capital, and in this sense they constituted part of the first phase of Japan's imperial expansion into Korea, Manchuria, China and Southeast Asia.
My paper attempts to analyze representations of the karayuki-san in two films: Kumai Kei's Sandakan Hachibanso (1974) and Immamura Shohei's documentary film Karayuki-san: The Making of a Prostitute (1973).
My analysis of these two films focuses on the following three issues. First, I attempt to address the relationship between representation, disclosure and voyeurism in the cinematic context. Representing the karayuki-san as Other involves contradictions such as the incitement of the viewer's desire to see and to know but at the same time the inevitable inability of the viewer fully to come to terms with what he or she discovers. Second, I investigate how an ideology of exchange value, sexuality and the body is internalized and embodied by the karayuki-san: they are simultaneously objects and subjects, encoded signs and agents within capitalist and masculinist systems of exchange. Third, I interrogate the structure of transference in this particular cinematic experience and the political implications of this process.
The Shape of Freedom: The Female Body in Post-Surrender Japanese Cinema
Joanne Izbicki, Wake Forest University
From late 1945 to mid-1952, when Japan was occupied by Allied forces, the Japanese cinema implicated the female body-particularly in various stages of undress-in notions of democracy. As staged display, the female body became the occasion in feature films for direct diegetic commentary on personal rights and responsibilities, social relations, and pleasure. My paper considers whether filmic representation of the female contour, rather than merely objectifying the body, functioned as an instigation and conduit for engaging the political and economic suggestiveness of democracy within the peculiar context of the occupation. Female nudity outlined men's freedoms and restrictions while it blurred the margins and limitations of women's responsibilities.
Any paper will consider sequences from several Japanese movies from the occupation era in which the unclothed female body-filmed and unfilmed-configured the shape of the discourse of democracy in early postwar Japan.
Recasting a Colonial Childhood: Self as History in Morisaki Kazue's
Autobiographical Writings
Brett deBary, Cornell University
Like the experiential women's literature that flourished in Germany after 1968, Morisaki Kazue's self-exploratory narratives have sought to challenge cultural definitions of female identity at the same time that they have explored the self as a textual surface upon which the sociohistorical context has left its traces. As in much of this German women's literature, a thematic of mourning is also prevalent in Morisaki's texts, whether in their descriptions of various "wounds" or "lossses" sustained by the female subject, or in their obsessive search for the intersections of a personal history with a fascist past.
My paper will examine the collection of essays entitled Izoku no genki (Principles of Otherness, 1971), based on reflections and observations made by Morisaki while she was a member of Circle Village (Sakuru Mura), a community of activist artists/intellectuals established on the outskirts of Fukuoka during the period of the Miike and Chikuho coal mine strikes. While at Circle Village, Morisaki discovered the mining industry, not only as a juggernaut of Japanese modernization, but as a site of cultural hybridization where Korean, Chinese, Okinawan, and Yoron Islander miners worked side by side with rural Japanese. Using mining culture as a backdrop, Morisaki's essays explore the ways in which modern ethnic, gender, and national identities have been made visible through processes of social marking, as well as the violent struggles through which such differences have often been negotiated Morisaki's recasting of Japanese modernity in terms of its sites of hybrid cultural practice is interwoven, in Izoku no genki, with a retracing of her personal history as daughter of a Japanese colonial administrator in Korea.