Organizer and Chair: Jonathan M. Hall, University of California, Santa Cruz
Discussant: Komori Yoichi, University of Tokyo
Sexual GNPism? Taking cue from Oshima Nagisa’s ironic, 1971 linking of the sexual and economic, this panel reads across Showa and Taisho Japan the imbrication of sexual origins in modernizing teleologies of progress and development. How have Japanese discourses of modernity figured the sexual as history, foundation, or origin? As supplement, corollary, or critique? How are sexual narratives of origin linked to, produced by, or necessary for the logics of growth, development and improvement that mark much of Taisho and Showa modernization? How are sex and sexuality modernized from the start by their fixing as quantities, substances, or elements that warrant expansion, limitation, or preservation?
Texts examined in this interdisciplinary panel cover a broad terrain including film, narrative, and critical and industrial literatures and range from early Taisho to late Showa. Each panelist locates the sexual in relation to a modernizing teleology. For Faison, it is a purportedly originary space of purity that modernization threatens, while for Hall it allows the fantastic construction of a modern, national subject. Similarly, Kinoshita raises the sexual in relation to "‘feudalism’ as phantasmagorical origin," while McKnight suggests it as a byproduct of "not yet modernized modernity." Configured between the imperatives of modernization and liberation, with the specter of the West never far from view, sexuality for Oshima had been hoisted upon modernity’s own petard. Likewise, we ask what are the sexual GNPs of Japanese modernities, their figures of sex?
Discussant Komori Yôichi’s work on discursive formations of the subject and the state under modernity has been vital for this panel.
City and Country in the Mythology of Female Sexuality: Control and Concession in Japan’s Modern Textile Factories
Elyssa M. Faison, University of California, Los Angeles
This paper will focus on the journal Jokô kenkyû (Research on Female Factory Workers) from the mid-1920s to the mid-1930s, and how one particular group of female wage laborers became the subject of a larger discourse that defined the modern Japanese woman as always in danger of becoming unchaste. In Jokô kenkyû, a monthly publication by and for factory owners, operators and supervisors that has received virtually no scholarly attention to date, the romanticized countryside of the folklorists sits uneasily as supposed originary space of a pure femininity alongside the decadent excesses of the modern city and the contested space of the factory, where a newly emerging definition of Japanese womanhood appeared to be under siege.
By focusing on a number of articles and symposia in Jokô kenkyû that sought to investigate the problems of "sex" and "public morals" among these workers, this paper will argue that by the 1920s popular consciousness had coded the countryside as feminine, the new urban areas as masculine, and female mill workers as located in the liminal space of the industrial factory: an ambiguously defined but highly surveilled and surveyed territory in which the interests of the state and private capital fought to contain the clash between an agricultural past and a modern industrial future.
A Certain Austrian Theorist of Ninjô: National Origins and Psychoanalytic Ends in Taisho and Showa Criticism
Jonathan M. Hall, University of California, Santa Cruz
Psychoanalysis in Japan staged its first subjects not in patients populating the newly established Meiji clinics, but rather through Taisho and early-Showa literary and medical journals where the texts at hand were canonical works as conceived within newly formulated literary and historical traditions. My paper traces early Japanese Freudian discourse, asking how concepts of origin, modernization and nation authorized articulations of a specifically sexual subject. Via two very different understandings of the psychoanalytic project—first, Morooka Son’s 1913 rift on The Tale of Genji, Murasaki Shikibu, and Freud, "a certain Austrian theorist of ninjô," then Kosawa Heisaku’s 1932 treatise on the Ajase myth as alternative to Freud’s ‘universal’ Oedipal complex, I ask about the relation between Japanese psychoanalytic thought and emergent concepts of origin, tradition, and "the folk."
On one hand, my presentation marks a shifting tenor in "Japanese psychoanalysis" from Morooka’s early texts where one Japanese classic is marshaled to authorize a regional cosmopolitanism to Kosawa’s later text where a different set of classics is summoned for a rejection of Freudian universalism and a delineation of a Japanese difference from European models. Yet, in tracing this certain intellectual and literary history, I look at psychoanalysis as both tool and symptom in the production of modern sexuality. How do these texts suture both a unity and a fissure between nation and sexuality, whereby the sexual subject is ab origine a national subject and a subject in the long march of modernization? Or where sexuality itself is retroactively constructed as national origin?
Imagined Feudalism and Romantic Love: Power Relations and Female Pleasures in Mizoguchi Kenji’s The Crucified Lovers (Chikamatsu monogatari, 1954)
Chika Kinoshita, University of Chicago
In this paper I focus on a Mizoguchi Kenji (1898–1956) film, The Crucified Lovers (1954). The film is set in the Edo era, based on Chikamatsu Monzaemon’s Daikyoji mukashi goyomi (1715) and Ihara Saikaku’s "Osan Mouemon," the third episode of Koshoku gonin onna (1686). This paper intends, however, not to examine "feudal" society at the level of historical referents, but to construe "feudalism" as a phantasmagoric origin, thrown by a modern projector against the background of modernity. The film was made within the historical context of postwar democracy, in which Japanese modernity resided in a process of self-defining contrast with the "feudal." By situating the film in this context, I will investigate how the concept of modern romantic love, which was endorsed as a trigger to women’s emancipation at the time, is, or is not, embodied in the film.
Sato Tadao once described Mizoguchi as a man of "feudal nature." By "feudal nature," he seems to point to Mizoguchi’s profound obsession with women in hierarchical social relations, and the "exchange of women." In this sense, his films are always about prostitution, even when prostitution, per se is not explicitly addressed. Female pleasures, which are all but absent in his other films, are exceptionally foregrounded in The Crucified Lovers, and yet take shape in the web of power relations. My methodological aim is to closely analyze the film text and thereby to trace how power relations are inscribed in the filmic space by acting, camera positions and movements.
Hosenka: Scattered Speculations on Nakagami Kenji’s Maternal Melodrama
Anne McKnight, University of California, Berkeley
In this paper, I will focus on Hosenka a shosetsu of Nakagami Kenji’s, as a vital part of the growth and combustion of the postage-stamp sized territory known as the roji. The maternal melodrama in question is the decidedly abstracted melodrama of protagonist Fusa (mother of protagonist Takehara Akiyuki of the Kishû saga). I will read the critiques of sabetsu that emerge through the privileged maternal optic of Hosenka as the part of the critique of "not yet modernized modernity" which was begun in Nakagami’s polemic reportage on the conditions of production of sabetsu in the semiotically-loaded region of Kishû.
There is a six-year gap between the publication of the second and third volumes of the Kishû saga: Karekinada (Withered Cape, 1977) and Chi no hate, shijô no toki (The Edge of the Earth, Supreme Time, 1983). In this interlude, Nakagami undergoes a systematic rethinking of the practices of writing he situates around the term of monogatari. Many of these discourses are ones he associates with breaking or diverting a mode of historiography or narration he compares to linear perspective. Long read as a term proper to both pre-modern and modern prose writing, as well as the keyword for many strata of post-structuralist narratology, monogatari is also the umbrella-term Nakagami uses to describe the dynamic way that the past is archived, recorded and retraced; as such, the term monogatari points to the possibility of a non-mimetic poetics of history. A re-fashioning of monogatari transpires in essays on women’s writing (Higuchi Ichiyo, Enchi Fumiko, Tsushima Yuko), free jazz, the periphery of the "south," and re-readings of folklorist-scholars of the emergence and transcription of Japanese literature such as Origuchi Shinobu.
I ask why the optic of the maternal/domestic, its relations to development and power—for example through the book’s depiction of systems of public health, labor, child-raising in a more "realist" fashion than the Kishû saga—were a necessary part of the reformulation of the protagonist Akiyuki between the two volumes. How are the discourses of sexuality, sabetsu, modernity, and maternity related in Fusa’s consistent failures to find common cause with any community in the novel in the period bracketing the war? What shifts in these coordinates do these melodramatic failures—more than revealing Fusa’s interiority—reveal about the coordinates structuring the relative positions and "grativational" pressures of these discourses? Why is it necessary to present the ground of the maternal to re-fashion the figure of Akiyuki, and Nakagami’s re-situation of monogatari in the last volume of the Kishû saga?
According to this poetics of history, in the world of the text, is Fusa the pluralist supplement needed to provide a complete account of the "voice of the people"? Or rather does the contemporary challenge that might be posed by prose writings of joryû sakka seem to evidence a re-thinking of gender as a mode of production? Drawing from Gayatri Spivak’s essays on translation of media and forms of maternal production, part of my inquiry will include situating Hosenka in the burgeoning discourse by and about joryû sakka.