Organizer and Chair: Yoshikuni Igarashi, Vanderbilt University
Discussant: J. Victor Koschmann, Cornell University
The four papers in this panel explore the intersections between politics and culture in postwar Japan. As Japan experienced a "miraculous" recovery and transformation after the defeat of the war, the meaning of politics did not remain stable. This panel covers the first twenty-five years of postwar Japanese history and presents four cases of political redefinition within the realm of culture, a realm which acquired further political significance through the process of media development and mass-socialization in Japan.
The 1964 Tokyo Olympics provides cases for Noriko Aso's and Yoshikuni Igarashi's inquiries into the politicization of history through its public display. Aso pays attention to the art exhibit concurrently organized in Tokyo in honoring the spirit of the Olympics and examines the use of the past in the Olympic exhibit's aesthetic representation of Japan. Igarashi's paper discusses the memories of the war that haunt the Olympics and explores the popular desire to reconfigure the past through the monumentous events of the Games. Leslie Pincus focuses on the Hiroshima culture movement's struggle to redefine political activism in the immediate postwar years. The study of the movement offers insights into the social and cultural activism within the process of postwar democratization. Finally, Kentaro Tomio offers a theoretical inquiry into the politically charged period of the late 1960s in Japan. Although the actual political movements in the late '60s may not have had lasting liberating effects on contemporary Japanese society, the movements offered a fertile theoretical ground by which to contemplate the possibilities of politics in modern society.
Sumptuous Re-past: The 1964 Tokyo Olympic Arts Festival
Noriko Aso, Portland State University
The 1964 Tokyo Olympics served as official notice to the world that Japan had put to rest its wartime ghosts. The promise of the future was on display for both the Japanese populace and the international visitors; even the shadow of postwar penury was soon to vanish under the bright lights of Japan's economic miracle. However, as I will argue in this paper, a carefully composed Japanese "tradition" also constituted an integral part of this sanitized postwar identity.
Baron de Coubertin, the man who revived the Olympic games for modern times, stipulated that Olympic festivals were to feature both athletic meets and art exhibitions. Moreover, the International Olympic Committee decided that, beginning with the 1964 Olympics, the arts festival would showcase the sponsoring country's artistic tradition and no longer be restricted to "sports" as a theme. The Japanese government took this mandate seriously. An elaborate series of exhibitions were organized, ranging from archaeological artifacts to Olympic stamps. The centerpiece, however, was an exhibit of "ancient Japanese arts" staged in the Tokyo National Museum.
In addition to the national museum's holdings and works begged and borrowed from private Japanese owners, other pieces were temporarily repatriated from the world over. Buddhist sculpture, Yamato-e, samurai armor and tea implements were put in the spotlight, literally, as department store presentation techniques were implemented for this extravaganza. Yet the choice to restrict center stage to works dating no later than the Tokugawa period seems counterintuitive, given that the primary goal in the Tokyo Olympics was to present the New Japan. Why not marshal the best in Japanese modern and avant-garde art instead?
In my presentation, I will explore the logic behind this yoking of an ancient aesthetic "tradition" to a high-rise future. Despite fissures in the relationship, this was not an arbitrary partnership: visions of the future call on particular conceptions of the past. The identity of the "pacifist," "craftsmanlike" and "culturally unique" Japanese citizen of the future rested on a foundation of a meticulously sculpted past.
The 1964 Tokyo Olympics and Historical Redemption
Yoshikuni Igarashi, Vanderbilt University
As Japan entered into a phase of high-growth economy in the 1960s, the 1964 Tokyo Olympics provided an impetus for further economic development with huge investments into the infrastructure of the city, including the construction of a bullet train system between Tokyo and Osaka. The events symbolized the full acceptance of Japan into the international community and marked the path for Japan to take in the future.
Yet, the signs of the past, particularly the memories of the Asia-Pacific War, also burdened the events. The original Tokyo Olympics, which were planned to be held in 1940 and which were canceled because of the war, haunted the 1964 Games. For instance, some contractors in charge of the construction projects for the 1964 Olympics used the term gyvokusai-literally translated as "shattered jewel" but also used as a metaphor for mass suicide in WWII battles-to describe the enormity of the project. The Tokyo Olympics were also held in the area formerly called Washington Heights, the housing area used for U. S. military members. Furthermore, the last torch carrier who ignited the Olympic fire in the opening ceremony of the 1964 Tokyo Olympics bore the special identification of "atom boy," as he was born in Hiroshima prefecture on August 6, 1945, the day of the atomic attack on the city of Hiroshima.
Against the futuristic structures constructed for the Olympics, the memories of the past echoed and insisted upon their existence, I will examine the Tokyo Olympics as a particular juncture of Japan's postwar history where the memories of the war are reconfigured and sanitized through the physical transformation of Japan.
The Postwar Culture Movement in Hiroshima
Leslie Pincus, University of Michigan
Within days of Japan's surrender, in the town of Onomichi in Hiroshima Prefecture, Nakai Masakazu was asked to take charge of the town library-a labor of love as it turned out. The Mayor felt the designated salary would be an insult to a scholar of Nakai's caliber-this despite the fact that a decade earlier, Nakai had been unceremoniously fired from his position as Lecturer in Philosophy at Kyoto Imperial University and subsequently charged as a "thought criminal" under the Peace Preservation Law. The day after installing himself in Onomichi's rundown library, Nakai put up a poster outside the door announcing a "Kant Symposium." While the size of the audience attested to a hunger for knowledge among a population long-mobilized for total war, Nakai discovered that many, in particular the demobilized soldiers, aspired to nothing less than a revolutionary transformation of consciousness. How to enact that revolution from within became the central issue of a "cultural enlightenment movement" beginning in the Onomichi Library and extending to Hiroshima prefecture at large. The movement focused on three tasks: (1) a critical reflection on the links between local intricacies of everyday life and more global questions of historical responsibility; (2) an endeavor to construct a new and non-patriarchal political culture in the present; (3) an attempt to imagine the shape of an emergent mass-mediated public sphere. By 1947, the movement reached its peak in the form of a "Summer Term Citizen's University" and a newly organized Workers' Culture League.
One of many such movements in a post-defeat Japanese landscape, the Hiroshima culture movement-while condoned and perhaps even encouraged by Occupation policy-operated on its own initiative with a vision of peace and democracy that did not necessarily coincide with an Occupation agenda. Eloquently documented by several of its core participants, the Hiroshima movement offers promising terrain on which to explore a number of larger historical issues-the genealogy of postwar social and cultural activism in interwar intellectual debates and anti-fascist movements; the relationship between war responsibility and postwar democratization; and the ultimate curtailment of broadly participatory and transformative notions of democracy in the course of postwar history.
Japan Before "Post-Modernism": The Avant-garde, the Quotidian, and the
Urban Spectacle in the Late Sixties
Kentaro Tomio, Southern Methodist University
The late sixties was just as momentous as the 1960 Ampo (Anti U.S.-Japan Security Treaty Movement) in postwar Japanese history. Contemporary to the avant-garde movements in other advanced capitalist countries, this was a period of cultural crisis in which the intellectuals and other sympathizers of the avant-garde were prompted to critically examine the pervading conditions of Japanese society. They engaged in a broad spectrum of critical practices ranging from the political to the aesthetic in a cultural movement that had in common the theme of "the critique of the quotidian" (nichijôsei hihan). The goal of such critical practices, which had a strong spatial orientation, was the resituating of everyday life-the common modern denominator world-wide according to Henri Lefebvre-as so many sites of as yet unrecovered authentic experience against commodification and bureaucratization for the (re)totalization of human existence. Implicit in such practices, often taking the form of mass movements, were the theory of alienation and the strategy of liberation of urban space. From the mass demonstrations that fleetingly "liberated" the urban centers of Tokyo to the individual, but shared, attainment of emancipated artistic spaces, the critical practices of the late sixties offered glimpses of possibility, which, however, was doomed to fail in the face of more powerful and systematic strategies of the late modern state and capitalism.