Organizer and Chair: Sally A. Hastings, Purdue University
W. Donald Smith, University of Washington
Government and corporate officials in prewar Japan took a schizophrenic attitude toward Korean miners, publicly calling them compliant and politically naive while privately keeping them under close surveillance. Officials sometimes seemed to believe their own rhetoric; a major 1932 strike at a neighboring colliery, for example, shocked the Mitsubishi mines in northern Kyushu into suspending the employment of Koreans. No one should have been shocked, however. Korean men and women displayed a capacity for militant action within months of their arrival in the Japanese mines in 1917. A series of incidents in 1917–1920 dismissed in the press as "riots" in fact included protests over unsafe working conditions and discrimination. During World War II as well, Korean miners staged hundreds of labor disputes. The prewar official dismissal of Korean militancy has been echoed, ironically, by postwar Japanese Marxist scholars, many of whom see Korean workers as having been unable to act without guidance from intellectuals. In fact, however, their lack of theoretical training did not prevent the Koreans from developing a strong consciousness of both class and ethnicity. Ethnic identity could have facilitated the formation of a strong Korean bloc within the Japanese labor movement but Japanese workers’ prejudice, combined with thorough company and police surveillance and a lack of experienced Korean organizers, meant that Korean militancy remained largely untapped until August 1945, when Korean miners in Hokkaido launched postwar Japan’s first strikes.
James Raeside, Keio University, France
The last of Mishima’s plays to be staged, Raio no terasu (The Terrace of the Leper King) concerns the Cambodian ruler Jayavarman III who devoted his life to building the Bayon temple at Angkor Wat, but was struck with leprosy shortly after the project had begun. In Mishima’s play the progress of the temple’s construction parallels the decay of the king’s body. Jayavarman believes that the accomplishment of his project will represent a triumph of the spirit over the body, but the play’s ending reverses this expectation. In a final dialogue between the spirit of the dying King and his body when he was young, the body boasts of its eternity while the spirit, afflicted by age and disease, fades away to silence. This unexpected celebration of the form over essence, the assertion that physical beauty is eternal while the spirit fades, is echoed in many of Mishima’s later works.
Leprosy is a disease of death-in-life: living upon the body but consuming and disfiguring it. Lepers have a special symbolic significance in religions other than Christianity and leprosy often becomes a metaphor for moral degeneration. Having traced instances of Mishima’s use of images of leprosy in other major works—notably The Sea of Fertility (Hojo no umi) and Forbidden Colors (Kinjiki)—I propose to relate it to broader concepts of transgression and pollution, and to Mishima’s lifelong concern to define the relationship between life and art, form and spirit.
Guohe Zheng, Ball State University
In 1938 Hagiwara Sakutaro (1886–1942) published an essay entitled Nihon e no kaiki (The Return to Japan) in which he called for an end to Japan’s madly copying the West since the Meiji Restoration and a return to things Japanese. While the essay serves as a well-presented recent example of the so-called pendulum motion that recurs so often in Japan’s history, we cannot but feel a sense of irony since Hagiwara is generally considered to have established modern colloquial poetry in Japan, a genre which originated under direct Western influence in the Meiji period and has since developed as a conscious break from the Japanese poetic tradition. Moreover, Hagiwara never wrote, before or after Nihon e no kaiki, a single waka or haiku, the prototypical form of the Japanese poetic tradition. Finally, it was published right in the middle of Japan’s "fifteen-year war period" when ultra-nationalists also preached returning to things Japanese to promote Japanese military expansion. All these leave us wondering about Hagiwara’s true feelings towards the West and towards Japanese tradition, and call into question Hagiwara’s motivation in writing the essay, namely whether it represents Hagiwara’s collaboration with the ultra-nationalists. By exploring Hagiwara’s own works and citing various critics, this study argues that Hagiwara never turned away from the West, nor showed signs of returning to things Japanese. The publication of Nihon e no kaiki demonstrates that at deeply troubled times when it was more and more difficult for artists to maintain their integrity, Hagiwara Sakutaro, too, found himself tending increasingly to jingoism.
Brian Platt, University of Illinois
In 1872, the Meiji leaders prefaced their plan for a national, centralized educational system with the proclamation, "In the future there shall be no community with an illiterate family, and no family with an illiterate person." However, in spite of their platitudes about ending illiteracy and ignorance through modern education, the leaders were in reality speaking to a populace which was not only highly literate, but one which had its own entrenched schooling practices and its own conceptions about the nature and purpose of education. Many of these ideas and practices were radically different from those advocated by the Meiji state. As a result, Meiji educational policies met with dissent from people at all levels of rural society. This was not the dissent of an unschooled peasantry resisting formal schooling, but a confrontation resulting from the imposition of one educational vision upon a society which already possessed its own well-developed patterns of schooling.
This dissent took many forms. The frequent school-burnings and anti-school protests during the first Meiji decade were its most volatile manifestation, but more often we find communities either ignoring state directives or negotiating (through the mediation of village elites) with the state to reach mutually agreeable compromises. These various forms of local resistance, rather than simply obstructing or delaying Meiji reforms, actually helped shape the direction of central policymaking during the first two Meiji decades. Consequently, by examining the resistance to and local implementation of educational reform, we can begin to unravel the dynamics of Meiji state formation.
Ming-cheng Lo, University of California, Davis
This case study analyzes some aspects of the identity politics among successfully assimilated colonial subjects under Japan’s intensive assimilation campaigns, known as the kominka movement, during WWII. Drawing on oral interviews and published and unpublished memoirs, I examine the experiences of a particular group, the medical students and doctors in Taiwan, who were considered one of the most successfully assimilated groups under the kominka movement. My paper identifies two major mechanisms through which Taiwanese medical students and doctors were assimilated, including inter-ethnic professional ties and channels of upward mobility in the colony. Furthermore, my study reconstructs the dominant identity narrative of this group by tracing how they developed an identity that was anchored in their modernist professional culture. My analysis shows that this identity narrative contained rather than dissolved internal ethnic tensions between the Taiwanese and the Japanese, and the students and doctors in this study appeared to manifest a double consciousness. In local encounters, they admired and internalized fragmentary "Japaneseness," but at a structural level, they resented and opposed Japan’s colonialism and militarism. This paper concludes with a theoretical discussion of East Asian "hybridity" in the historical context of Japanese colonialism.