Organizer: Eric Cazdyn, University of Oregon
Chair: Masao Miyoshi, University of California, San Diego
Discussant: Marilyn B. Young, New York University
Everyone has heard about Japan’s economic crisis by now; few also fail to notice its political stagnation. Underlying these conditions is the inextricable tangle of interests among financiers, politicians, and bureaucrats. Alongside this paralysis, cultural commentators including scholars, writers, and journalists are peculiarly silent. It has been ages, actually, since we heard full and coherent explanations of Japan’s social and cultural situation, not to mention the situation outside the country, from any Japanese writer. Some scholars a while ago were explaining this malaise as a by-product of the economic "miracle," a general acquiescence to the post-War capitalist development. This miracle discourse, more than anything else, functioned to snuff out substantial criticism. This panel will discuss the possibilities and limitations of a break-through from this paralysis.
Behind such speculations stands a crucial theoretical problem: The relation between capitalism and criticism. In what way does the "success" or "failure" of capitalist development relate to degrees of critical and political consciousness? Does this relation take a unique form in Japan or can it be gleaned in other late capitalist situations? And, finally, what does all this mean for Japanese Studies? Starting with historical, philosophical, socio-economic, and cultural concerns, the panelists hope to see the political and intellectual significance of the current paralysis of Japan.
Persisting Memory/Forgetting History: The Postwar in Japanese Culture
Harry D. Harootunian, New York University
I would like to explore how the "postwar" has been used as a cultural trope since the end of the war. As a mnemonic device for recalling the "experience" of the nation in defeat instead of the vast and complex history surrounding the war, it has become fused with the idea of culture as an endless present that has removed itself from history—much like the commodity form. Japan has effectively repressed the wartime experience, and has kept the experience of a time when others, notably the Americans, prevented Japan from actually forgetting the war and its continuing status of a defeated nation. Japan was to live in this particular temporality, which has led to reinforce the fetishization of an "experience" rather than merely the lived experience of everyday life—at the price of forgetting history and politics. Paradoxically, it has reaffirmed precisely the role of Japan as dependent client of the United States it was trying to exorcise and which the forgotten history before the war had already put into question and made into an object of intellectual contestation. I would like to juxtapose Imamura Shohei’s brilliant documentary, "A History of Postwar Japan As Told by a Bar Maid" (1970), which actually problematizes the history of everyday existence, to the dominant cultural discourse centered on transforming the postwar into an auratic experience free from history.
The 30s in the 90s?
Kojin Karatani, Kinki University
Concerning the advent of the Japanese and worldwide economic crises in combination with concomitant crises in political representation, many have spoken of the prospect that the 1990s will follow a course similar to that of the 1930s. This may seem like the same old leftist craving for signs of crises, but be that as it may, we have to examine this sense of repetition with extreme care, especially now that the conventional left has actually been defeated. In the 1930s, there was a shift from modern capitalism to "late capitalism." Sixty years before, in the 1870s, was the transformation of liberalism into imperialism. In the same measure, the 1990s has witnessed the full integration of a global market economy. The concern of my presentation is not in elaborating upon the periodization between these phases, but in shedding light on the repetition compulsion. This is to say I want to focus on the formal identities that persist in these events beyond their periodical differences. It is from these economic and philosophical concerns that I will speculate on the current paralysis of Japan and its national as well as transnational effects.
Crisis Acting: Political Actors and Film Actors After the Miracle
Eric Cazdyn, University of Oregon
One of the more utopian gestures to come out of Japan occurred in mid-July when Prime Minister Hashimoto ascribed the present economic crisis to his own incompetence. Does a single person possess such power? As with most utopian gestures, the country collectively rolled its eyes as if to say, "don’t overestimate yourself, the problems are more systemic." But the problem of agency (be it a Prime Minister’s or a factory worker’s) cannot simply be thrown at the door of the Japanese social machine. Rather, I want to think through the current paralysis of Japan as one tied to the present contradiction between the national and the transnational. How does one identify with the nation and obey all of its codes when the process of globalization seems to call many of these codes into question? At the present moment there are no answers to this question and this, I think, partly explains the paralysis. This, then, leads to another set of questions: What type of actor is required to produce significant social change? Is the language of agency and actors still operative in the postmodern? In order to get at these questions, I will first return to earlier "crisis moments" in the Japanese economy in order to survey how the concept of the new actor has been invoked—both politically and cinematically. I will then conclude by speculating on what, if any, transformations in acting theory and practice might be occurring today?
What’s Happening to Japan?
Masao Miyoshi, University of California, San Diego
The current economic crisis is different from earlier versions, not only in intensity and scale, but in its being the culmination of all contradictions which Japan has avoided facing since the end of World War II, or even earlier. The contradictions in modernity and capitalism are of course endemic in any modern nation-state. Most industrialized nations, however, struggled with the issues of cultural and ethnic diversity, which resulted in the emergence of contesting historical narratives. The plurality of histories paradoxically works to keep the sense of history indispensable and alert, allowing them to respond to changing situations. The case of Japan is different. It has succeeded in ideologically erasing heterogeneity and thus history. The result is an ever-present signifier without the signified: "The Japanese" are to be of one family/village/nation; Japan is always to be "Japanese." Myth and belief have replaced history and reference.
Economically, the concern with efficiency and profit has never been allowed to surrender to the idea of tribe and nation. This scheme worked in politics, culture, and economy when the globe was conceived in terms of nations. In the globalized world, where nations are being reorganized into disparate parts and fragments, this nation-based mapping of the world is irrelevant and useless. Degraded myth and belief merely breed corruption and paralysis in which today’s Japan is hopelessly trapped.
I would like to trace this historical development with an eye on the literary and cultural aspects.