Organizer: Douglas Slaymaker, University of Kentucky
Chair: James Dorsey, Dartmouth College
Discussant: Anne Allison, Duke University
We will examine some of the most exciting, and volatile, issues in contemporary scholarship: the individual and society, and the relationships between the two. This panel is an exploration of those issues in the Japanese context by focussing on the writing of Sakaguchi Ango (1906–1955). We will explore the ways in which Ango manipulates key icons and terms to call for re-evaluation of relationships between the citizens of Japan and their culture. Ango’s writing exploded in postwar Japanese society and the reverberations continue. Most famous is his admonition to daraku, a call to decadence variously defined (various, and sometimes competing definitions, will be suggested by members of this panel.) He is also well remembered for extreme assertions; for example, he suggested that we should tear down the old temples of Kyoto and replace them with train stations for no one would miss the temples, but if the trains stopped life as we know it would come to an end. What then, is culture, the individual, asks Ango. The power of his prose, the forthrightness with which he confronted issues, and the emotional investment in his subjects has had a profound impact through the last half century and over generations of writers.
We propose to explore the historical context of Ango’s pronouncements on culture and the individual while weaving these issues into contemporary discussions. These papers will present differing understandings of Ango’s ideas prompting lively discussions that are anticipated to extend beyond the panel itself.
Trapped in the Discourse on National Identity: Sakaguchi Ango and the Essentializing of Japanese Culture
James Dorsey, Dartmouth College
The suicide of Akutagawa Ryunosuke in 1927 inspired in many a deep suspicion of the highly intellectual approach which his work embodied. This paper will situate Sakaguchi Ango (1906–1955) within this modern anti-intellectual current and explore how this stance blinded him to the overall artifice of the discourse on national identity in the 1930s and early 1940s.
Ango’s favored trope is best represented in "The Birthplace of Literature" ("Bungaku no furusato," 1941). Here he rejoices in an anecdote portraying Akutagawa, that quintessential intellectual, as dumbstruck by a simple farmer’s autobiographical tale of infanticide. Here and elsewhere intellectual analysis (i.e. Akutagawa’s attempt to "understand") is dismissed as powerless in the face of simpler, almost instinctual urges.
In "A Personal View of Japanese Culture" ("Nihon bunka shikan", 1942) Ango writes "I wouldn’t mind if the temples of Kyoto and the Buddhist sculptures of Nara were destroyed just as long as the trains keep running." In the context of the cultural nationalism of the time, such iconoclastic rejections of high-brow articulations of "Japanese-ness" seem to represent an oppositional, progressive voice. In the end, however, Ango reinscribes national identity at an even deeper level, linking it to a direct attendance to "the necessities of everyday life" (seikatsu nohitsuyo). It is his anti-intellectualism that prevents Ango from recognizing the constructed nature of the discourse itself, and thereby unwittingly implicating every resident of the archipelago in the most dangerous intellectual construct of them all: the web of cultural nationalism.
Sakaguchi Ango’s Individual Cult(ure)
Douglas Slaymaker, University of Kentucky
This paper is an exploration of Sakaguchi Ango’s conceptualization of culture and the role of the individual within a national culture. Ango asserts that for Japanese culture to be healthy it cannot be stultified in arcane forms but must be vibrant, responsive to contemporary need, and allowed to "progress." Further, it is important to Ango that individuals be able to follow their own desires and needs without the constrictions of societal taboos and strictures. Ango seems to understand culture as performative which also yields an activist political edge which he does not fully explore (I am borrowing from Homi Bhabha’s understanding of culture). At the same time, while noting the degree to which many people cull an individual identity from their national identity (as Japanese), Ango calls vociferously and poignantly for a self-identity created by casting off the robes of morality and society—Ango’s image of "daraku" or decadence—in order that the individual may find, return to, an authentic identity. The concept of an authentic identity is of course problematic, and the force of his prose often obscures the subtlety of his argument. Ango is tempted by an essentialist and anti-intellectual understanding of these issues, prompted, I will argue, by his disgust with the wartime society’s incursion into all arenas of life. This paper is an exploration of Ango’s attempt to navigate the waters that flow around the individual and culture as he tries to offer an ideal of the individual active within a national culture that is not repressive.
Sakaguchi Ango’s Daraku and the Anxiety of Culture
Robert Steen, Wellesley College
This paper will place Sakaguchi Ango’s critique of cultural identity in the context of his use of the term daraku, made famous by the success of his 1946 essay "Darakuron." I have chosen to focus on daraku not in order to provide a definition which promises to elucidate his views on culture, but because I hope to suggest that the way in which the term acts upon readers and performs a radical understanding of culture which is present in many of Ango’s works.
The difficulty the term has posed for Ango’s translators suggests that the term’s meaning may be embedded in aspects of Japanese culture which can only be approximated in foreign languages. But the problem of meaning is not so easily reduced to cultural difference, since Japanese readers have also repeatedly commented upon the term’s abstrusity. It is possible to read Ango’s extravagant use of so opaque a word in his essay as an attempt to produce, by foregrounding the non-transparency of language, a moment of cultural dislocation.
Support for such a reading exists in parallels between daraku’s performative charge and Ango’s comments on cultural identity. In "Bungaku no furusato," for instance, Ango describes furusato, one’s native soil or homeland, by providing examples not of belonging but of radical dislocation. Imagery of cultural rootedness, community and presence becomes in Ango’s texts the sign of radical alterity. Daraku is the symptom of an anxiety about culture felt when distinctions between inside and outside, us and them, and native and foreigner collapse.
Sakaguchi Ango and the Cult(ure) of Identity
Ian Smith, University of Oregon
To what extent did the Emperor System and Bushido, as the most prominent icons of national morality in wartime Japan, function to construct a national identity? And where did the Japanese people situate themselves within the complex network of power relations these wartime discourses represented? Sakaguchi Ango attacks these questions in his 1946 essay "On Decadence" ("Darakuron") by subverting the two icons dialectically. His essay desacrilizes the Emperor System and Bushido as ideological constructs designed to efface individual identity in favor of a unified moral character to be shared by everyone. Ango viewed the end of the war as an opportunity for the Japanese people to discover their own subjective identities. But the only way they could begin to accomplish this, he insisted, was by falling to the very depths of decadence to cleanse themselves of the moral coding to which they not only submitted but actively embraced. This paper investigates the methodology of Ango’s attack on the institutional and cultural systems he views as not only bastions of State power but as barriers to the realization of subjective identity. Though he is known primarily as an iconoclast par excellance, I argue that the ultimate target of Ango’s criticisms is not the systems he assaults, but the narcissism of the Japanese themselves. It is the people’s need to define their identities through participation in such systems that Ango attempts to expose with his notion of decadence, using it as a stimulant to force them to acknowledge the discursive construction of their own moral and cultural values.