Organizer and Chair: Laura Hein, Northwestern University
Commodities and the Single Girl: Consumerism and Its Discontents in Miyabe Miyuki’s Kasha
Amanda Seaman, University of Chicago
In the epilogue to his Offcenter, Masao Miyoshi discusses Baba Keiichi’s novel The Leica of Love, which was written in part to instruct other Japanese on how to consume foreign luxury goods. The author, notes Miyoshi, "finds that the top-ranking brand-name goods that the Japanese love to talk about in daily life are not sufficiently introduced into their fictional world" (237). In fact, however, consumer society and consumer tastes have become ubiquitous in recent Japanese literature, from the novel-cum-catalogue Nantonaku Kuristaru to the oeuvres of Yoshimoto Banana and Murakami Haruki. In 1992, a counterpoint to this phenomenon appeared in the world of popular literature, in the form of Miyabe Miyuki’s bestselling detective novel, Kasha. What was so compelling about this mystery of one woman who seeks to steal the identity of another was that both women were haunted by debt and financial ruin, brought on by Japan’s growing addiction to credit and conspicuous consumption.
Upon closer examination, it becomes clear that Miyabe’s murder mystery is more than a simple critique of consumer capitalism; rather, it is an attempt to explain how and why two young women fell into debt, and what their downfall suggests about their (and the author’s) world. In this paper, therefore, I first locate Miyabe’s popular fiction within the context of contemporary, "pure" literature in Japan, and argue that it provides an essentially conservative "corrective" to many of the notions and expectations found in that literature. I then discuss the nostalgic role of "place" and family in Miyabe’s novel, and show how they are presented as antidotes to what she sees as the rootlessness and flimsy identity-construction characteristic of late consumer capitalism in Japan. Finally, I examine Miyabe’s concept of nostalgia, particularly compared to the definition and elaboration of this theme in Yoshimoto’s Kitchen and Tsugumi.
Gifts and Bribes: Gratitude and Obligation in Tokyo Gift Practices
Katherine Rupp, University of Chicago
Gifts, according to American and European conceptions, exist in a special realm outside the marketplace. This interpretation situates the gift in opposition to the commodity. The commodity circulates in the world of commercial transaction, where value is calculated on the basis of price and objects are not exchanged to create relationships between people but to turn a profit. Recent anthropological interest in drawing a strong contrast between "commodities" and "gifts" both reflects and reinforces this ideology. Japan is a place that, like many others, challenges the division between "gift" and "commodity" as well as the related distinction between "gift" and "bribe." In our society, the ideal gift is an object chosen according to the individual characteristics of the giver, receiver, and the relationship they share. Bribes, on the other hand, are usually made in cash, as cash is anonymous, the prototypical commodity form. But in Japan, many gifts are made in cash. And whereas our ideal notion of the gift is something given without calculation, in Japan, it is through precise monetary calculations that appropriate respect is shown by the giver to the recipient. How do different people articulate distinctions between gifts and bribes, between giving that is voluntary and giving that is not? What kinds of giving do they find acceptable, what kinds do they find disturbing, bothersome, or even amoral? By focusing on three specific examples of gifts to social superiors, this paper explores some of the complex details and variations across the many forms of giving and receiving encountered in my research in metropolitan Tokyo, and suggests a new way of conceptualizing the gift/commodity-gift/bribe distinction.
Interaction of Research and National Policy in Japan: A Case Study of the Electrotechnical Laboratory
Monica Strauss, Boston University
In Japan, funding and affiliation conditions historically have supported a prominent position for government and quasi-government organizations in basic and applications research. The Electrotechnical Laboratory (ETL), the main government laboratory in the information sciences under the Ministry of International Trade and Industry, has filled an important niche in research and research management; its contributions have had a great impact on industry research and development as well as basic research trends. A retrospective case study of the Electrotechnical Laboratory illustrates how scientific research and the individuals who performed this work were affected by cultural, historic, socio-economic, and political factors. The tight coupling of science and technology in the Information Sciences lead to a close relationship between academic, government, and industrial research organizations especially because expertise and technology in this highly uncertain research field have tended rapidly to become obsolescent. The cultural orientation and prevailing funding, labor, and other conditions in the environment historically supported certain strategies over others for handling these risks. Japan, a country with a planned economy and a specific industrial policy, has handled these risks very differently than the U.S. with its market economy lacking a national industrial policy.
Edo Through the Looking Glass: The Critique of Late Edo Visual Culture in Endô Kôkei’s Shahô Shinjutsu (New Method Of Depiction)
Tomoko Onabe, International Research Centre for Japanese Studies
How did the introduction of Western linear perspective and its assimilation affect Japanese discourse on visuality in the late Edo period? The scientist Endô Kôkei’s little-known New Method Of Depiction will be examined in the social context of late Edo modernization and westernization.
This period witnessed the import of a kind of camera obscura, called nozoki-megane or peeping glass, which created a sensation. Writers and woodblock prints testify to its popularity. It was the very first exposure for Japanese viewers to Western linear perspective. Endô Kôkei (1784–1864) was among many who were amazed by this novel exotic visual entertainment.
Endô was a mathematical practitioner in the Kaga district, serving as a scientific bureaucrat who chiefly supervised map-making and surveying to the Lord of Kaga, (present-day Kanazawa). After several decades of research on drawing methodology, Western optics, and map-making, Endô wrote a treatise on vision, Shahô shinjutsu, A New Method of Depiction.
By analyzing Japanese drawing and painting as various combinations of three distinct methods of depiction, he begins his criticism towards traditional Japanese visual discourse. First he critiques painters who mix three ways of depiction without knowing the difference. He then attacks contemporary optical theorists. Finally he denounces Hokusai’s original interpretation of linear perspective, called mituwariho in Hokusai Manga.
Using Kôkei’s critique as a base, I would like to focus on how Japanese "saw" or how they "thought they saw" in this transitional period of pre- and post-perspectiveal visual culture.