Organizer and Chair: Elaine T. Gerbert, University of Kansas
Discussant: Livia Monnet, University of Montreal
The past decade has seen a proliferation of writings on vision and visuality covering a vast spectrum of topics, ranging from the history of seeing, the theorization of spectatorship, the visualization of texts, and discourses on electronic technologies and computerized vision, to the "teletopological space time of visual representations" (Burgin).
The cultural, social impact of modern optical technology was especially conspicuous in Japan from around 1915 onward and was linked to the emergence of a new, modernist sensibility. Amateur photography, stereoscopes, motion pictures, home movies, exhibition halls, and modern showcases and advertising led to quantitative and qualitative shifts in who and what was represented and how the presented was related to looking. New ways of seeing were implicated in new ways of thinking about identity.
The papers on this panel explore the dynamics of ethnic, national, and gender identity from the perspective of "seeing." Shigemi Inaga examines how Yanagi Soetsu unwittingly assumed the "orientalist gaze" of the colonizing Westerner as he made visible Korean culture within the Japanese colonial empire through the retrieval and exhibit of Korean folk art. Dennis Washburn analyzes the ideological basis of Yokomitsu Riichi’s spectacle-oriented aesthetic practice as revealed in his 1939 novel Shanghai, in which Western modernity is fused with an Asian identity. Nina Cornyetz takes up the idea of a "gendered essence" created through the evocation of the visual in Izumi Kyoka’s 1917 novel and Bando Tamasaburo’s 1995 revisualization of Izumi’s essence of "woman." We hope that these papers and the discussion that follows will open up new areas of inquiry in the research on visual-verbal relations and contribute to the mapping of the "scopic fault-lines" of Japanese modernity.
Shigemi Inaga, International Research Center for Japanese Studies, Kyoto
Yanagi Soetsu (1889–1961), founder of the Mingei Undo or Popular Art Movement in Japan, owes his discovery of the "immaculate beauty of everyday ware made by unknown craftsmen" to Korea under Japanese occupation. Yanagi attempted to preserve and promote this Korean Popular Art by organizing exhibitions, collecting remaining wares and founding the Korean Popular Art Museum in Seoul. Through these efforts, Yanagi succeeded in literally "visualizing" the "popular art" which had remained invisible and unrecognized as such until then. Further, Yanagi applied this strategy not only to Korean but also to other Asian cultures, including Japan. His politics of visualization of Popular Art contributed to rehabilitate the repressed Asiatic cultural identity under the overwhelming impact of Western imperialism and Western culture.
Still, the fact remains that such a rehabilitation was not possible without Japan’s colonization of the Korean Peninsula. Just as the Europeans recommended to the Japanese to preserve their traditional art, Yanagi encouraged the Korean people to liberate themselves from Japanese "modern" art education. In this double concentric structure of subordination lies an interiorized "orientalist gaze" unconsciously imbedded in Yanagi’s Mingei ideology.
As a manifestation of East Asian Modernity, the Popular Art Movement, as a discourse, visualized its anti-modernist undercurrent. The invention of tradition, it implies, must be reexamined by analyzing the tactics of "visualization" the Mingei Undo enacted through its development as a private institution under the Japanese colonial Empire.
Dennis Washburn, Dartmouth College
Yokomitsu Riichi’s aesthetics were motivated by a desire to create a modernism that was genuinely Asian, and in that desire he shared the aspirations of many others in his literary generation. What Yokomitsu longed for was a culture that was truly modern by virtue of its being universal—a culture that would overcome the West by subsuming it under a larger synthesis of Western and Asian values.
The principles of Yokomitsu’s aesthetics may be vague by virtue of their extreme universalist tendencies, but the ambitious aims of his project of cultural renewal are unambiguous. The work that lays bare the ideological underpinnings of his aesthetic practice is the novel Shanghai (1929–32). In an essay titled "The China Sea" (1939) Yokomitsu writes that in all the world Shanghai is the place that best "expresses the character of the modern" because he believed that in this city an Asian modernism had emerged under the pressure of Western colonialism. Urged to visit Shanghai by his compatriot, Akutagawa Ryunosuke, Yokomitsu went to the city for a month in 1928; and on the basis of that brief stay he wrote his novel, which depicts the lives of several Japanese expatriates. The visual descriptions of the spectacle of the city itself are vivid examples of the kind of modernist art Yokomitsu was trying to achieve. However, these descriptions also suggest that Shanghai was for Yokomitsu a kind of dreamscape into which he could project the desire of his generation for a culture that would resolve the dilemma of Japanese modernism. Just as his characters recognize that they are at once Asian and outsiders in China, so Japan was situated uncomfortably on the cusp between Western modernity and its Asian identity. The desire to resolve that dilemma in favor of a modernism that went beyond Western modernity was a powerful ideological justification for Japan’s colonial and military policies toward Asia in the 1930s and a central theme in Shanghai. My essay will explore that theme in detail, tracing the connections between colonialism, modernism, and the aims of the Shinkankaku-ha.
Nina Cornyetz, Rutgers University
The talk will analyze the gendered politics of the visual economy informing Izumi Kyoka’s "Tenshu monogatari," (The tale of the castle tower, 1917), alongside the fall 1995 filmic version directed by the onnagata (female impersonator) Bando Tamasaburo, who also starred as the female lead. An aestheticization of metaphoric gender, together with the modern privileging of a visual economy in Kyoka’s narratives, lead to an elevation of what I am calling "theatrical" gender; what one might call a "man in drag" replaces a biological woman as the "most aesthetic" representation of "femaleness." Onnagata are concerned, precisely, with theatrical femaleness.
For Tamasaburo, and for Izumi Kyoka as well, there seems to be a tacit affirmation that "gendered essence" is severed from the "sexed body," and lies not in the subject him or herself, but rather in the discourses, and the culturally dependent visual economy, that produce the subject. Tamasaburo’s version appears to alter not one word of the narrative script, but faithfully supplies the supplement, in the form of the body-in-performance, the visual, the gesture, the music. The overlapped productions of "the female" in language meant to be performed, and as the talk will elaborate, in a refracted, triply mediated visuality, provides him as an onnagata, with the perfect vehicle for enacting femininity; it is through this visual enactment of (materially absent) femaleness that a particular androcentric aesthetic is best achieved.