Organizer and Chair: Karen Kelsky, University of Oregon
Discussant: William Haver, State University of New York, Binghamton
The encounter between Japan and the West (and Japan and Asia) has been an eroticized one. From Pierre Loti onward, Westerners have projected their sexual fantasies onto Japan, and have made Japan itself a feminized object of desire. However, such desires have never been simply unidirectional; Japanese also have produced, in popular media such as pornography, comics, novels, and film, narratives of desire for and about their own Others—Western, Asian or otherwise. Indeed, throughout the twentieth century, beginning with expanding emigration, militarism and trade, and continuing with recent transnational marketing, tourism, and the internet, Japanese and Western eroticized images of one another have become mobile to an unprecedented extent, gradually released from domestic systems of meaning, and cast out as commodities on the international marketplace. This interdisciplinary panel, which ranges across literature, history, and anthropology, will explore co-productions and co-receptions of erotic images between Japan and the West over the past one hundred years. Papers will address the erotic writings in English of the early twentieth-century bisexual Japanese poet Noguchi Yone, the "erotic-grotesque nonsense" modernist discourses in the context of 1920s and 30s imperialism, constructions of sex and sexuality in scholarship on Japanese "public" sex practices, eroticized responses to Japanese animated films in the United States, and the popularity of the recent U.S. bestseller Memoirs of a Geisha, written by a white American man. The goal of the panel is to provoke lively discussion about the "marketing" of Japan/Japanese in the West, and the West/Westerners in Japan, as objects of desire, sources of fantasy, and sites of erotic possibilities as yet unimagined.
Seen and Unseen: The American Diary of Noguchi Yone
Karen Kelsky, University of Oregon
Noguchi Yone (1875–1947), the father of famed sculptor Noguchi Osamu, although all but forgotten today, was a significant figure in the early twentieth-century American literary world as the first Japanese poet to publish in English, member of the Imagist circle of poets, and acquaintance of Joaquin Miller, W. B. Yeats, Ezra Pound, and Rabindranath Tagore. Despite his prolific poetic output (which includes, among other collections, Seen and Unseen, Monologues of a Homeless Snail [1920]), Noguchi was best known for his serialized novel, The American Diary of a Japanese Girl (1912), the fictionalized diary, written in intentionally infantile broken English, of a young Japanese woman’s attempts to find a job and a man in the United States. The American Diary is a disturbing work in its apparent pandering to racist American stereotypes of infantilized, feminized, and hyper-sexualized Japanese. All the more so because it is perhaps semi-autobiographical: Noguchi, who came to the United States alone and penniless in 1893 at the age of nineteen, was at different times the lover of Charles Stoddard (professor of English and peripheral member of the Imagist group), the lover of Ethel Armes, a newspaper reporter, the husband of Leonie Gilmour, mother of Osamu, and, upon return to Japan in 1904, husband of Takeda Matsu, his one-time housekeeper. This paper will analyze The American Diary, Noguchi’s personal correspondence, contemporary reviews of Noguchi’s work, and other writing of the time, to explore the conflicted erotic subjectivity of this bisexual Japanese nationalist poet as it was both created and circumscribed by the Orientalist literary and sexual context within which he lived and worked.
Erotic Transnationalism/Grotesque Imperialism
Mark Driscoll, University of Michigan
The historiographic protocols of modernization theory have hegemonized the readings of Japan’s imperialism, insisting on a one-way movement of modern power and civilization that initiated in the "West," arrived "late" to Japan, and later still, to Japan’s colonies and imperial periphery. Post-colonial theory’s insistence on reading the effectivity of the periphery on the metropolitan center, and Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of "mutant, decoded flux" of desire flowing back and forth between center and periphery, critically interrogate the uni-directional historicism grounding modernization theory. My paper will examine three of the central figures associated with the so-called "erotic-grotesque-nonsense," arguably the most popular modernist form in Japan from 1925–1935. I argue that the erotic-grotesque-nonsense can be fully genealogized only through the Japanese imperial periphery. Looking first at the case of Tanaka Kogai, one of the most influential sexologists in Japan in the 1920s and the representative erotic-grotesque-nonsense sexologist and metapsychologist, I argue that his tenure from 1896–1904 as the governor-general’s chief psychiatrist in Taipei, Taiwan significantly influenced his popular sexology and erotic-grotesque-nonsense texts written later in metropolitan Tokyo and Osaka. Therefore, while reading some of his writings as a colonial psychiatrist, I will look briefly at his metropolitan best-seller called Sex Maniacs (1925). Similarly, I will consider the ero-guro writers, translators (Arabian Nights, Decameron, Sade’s Juliette) and editors Umehara Kokumei and Sakai Kiyoshi, who published the influential erotic-grotesque-nonsense monthly Grotesque (1928–1930), as well as its precursor Kamashastra (1927–1928). I will analyze the implications of the fact that Umehara and Sakai published the first erotic-grotesque-nonsense monthly in Shanghai where they moved in 1926, vowing to "bring the ero-guro revolution to China."
Against Proper (Feminist) Subjects: Or Questions of Pleasure and Feminist Reading Practices
Yukiko Hanawa, Cornell University
In recent years the "national" and the "masculine" in discourses on Japan have come to ground reading practices of both prewar and postwar Japanese history and society. Questions of sex and sexuality are invoked when these two areas are assumed to converge in forms of colonialism, imperialism, international sex trade—the trafficking of women "into" Japan, the now famous sex tours, and the trafficking of putatively Japanese pornography "out of" Japan—without critical consideration of what is identified as gender, sex, and sexuality. Scholarship on these topics assumes a readily identifiable universal knowledge of sex, sexuality, and perhaps as importantly, women. This paper will examine the implications of such trends within Japan studies and/or area studies, and consider ways to develop questions which disrupt such institutionalized knowledges. It will focus on an area of contemporary importance within feminist theory and practice: the question of what constitutes putatively proper feminist subjects and subjectivity. It will approach this question through analysis of texts on various modes of public sex—pornography and those activities that are often categorized under prostitution, such as lap dancing, escort services, etc. The essay will analyze texts by feminist scholars who have mobilized feminists theories, particularly of sexual and gender representation, to analyze contemporary public sector sexual practices in Japan. While the texts I will examine assume and indeed reify a distinction between "public" and "private" sex acts, I will take that as a point of critique in my paper. I will read the texts to discover their implicit assumptions about who or what constitutes proper readers of such feminist scholarship and proper subjects of feminist inquiry and feminism.
"The Fifth Look": Western Audiences and Japanese Animation
Susan J. Napier, The University of Texas
With the recent announcement that Disney Studios were set to release Mononokehime, Japan’s highest grossing animated film, Japanese animation seems poised to become part of mainstream American culture. Such a development is not inevitable, however. In fact, the history of audience reception of Japanese animation (anime) in the West has been a complex and sometimes problematic one. Long regarded as children’s entertainment, animation has only recently moved into adult consciousness. Over the last decade, anime’s audiences have metamorphosed from teenagers watching Speed Racer on afternoon television, through film lovers who made the feature film Akira an art house hit in 1989, to today’s current explosion of anime clubs on college campuses throughout America and Europe. While anime insiders appreciate the medium’s originality and often adult-oriented narratives, other observers have found it disturbing or threatening. Even the New York Times in a recent article, (February, 1989) emphasized anime’s graphic sex and violence, barely mentioning its intellectual or aesthetic appeal.
This paper looks at anime’s reception in the West, which is often constructed within a highly eroticized framework, both in terms of the aesthetics of reception, (anime as threatening/exotically appealing Other), and in the content of the most popular anime, (often strongly pornographic). By using surveys, interviews, and analyses of mass media responses over the last decade, I hope to draw on contemporary film theory’s erotics of the "gaze," to develop a critique of what I call "the fifth look," the way Western audiences "look" at a non-Western popular culture phenomenon.
Neo-Orientalism: Writing a Geisha’s Memoirs as a White, Western Man
Anne Allison, Duke University
In 1997, Knopf published Memoirs of a Geisha by first-time author Arthur Golden. Written as the memoir of a retired geisha now settled in New York, the book has been an enormous popular success—22 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list, widely-read in book clubs around the country, and picked up by Steven Spielberg for production into a blockbuster film. Fans (young and old, female and male) appear drawn to both the story itself and the fact that its author is a Western man. On both counts, the appeal is grounded in Otherness—a geisha’s tale of a world utterly "different," as readers have told me, and an author who is other himself to this world he so "authentically" and "artistically" crafts.
In this paper, I address whether or how Arthur Golden’s Memoirs of a Geisha is an Orientalist text and contemplate why—in this moment of transnational capitalism when Japan is known best to Euroamerica for its productivity, technology, and economic stature (now in temporary trouble)—it is generating so much interest and fascination. What desires and fears is this book capturing in its readership, and why is this the best selling book on Japan in the United States, more so than any written by Japanese?