Organizer: Kimberly Kono, University of California, Berkeley
Chair and Discussant: James A. Fujii, University of California, Irvine
Keywords: Japan, literature, colonialism, modern.
This panel will focus on cultural production emerging from various sites of Japanese colonialism. Examining Japanese-language poetry and fiction produced in Korea, Manchukuo, and Japan, the presenters will discuss the ways in which these textual manifestations of the colonial enterprise reflect, reproduce, and reconfigure colonial discourse. Rather than advocating a unified version of shokuminchi bungaku, colonial literature, we present a more nuanced vision of this category as well as a complex examination of colonial relations. The diverse array of colonial subjectivities addressed in our papers not only proposes questions regarding aspects of identity such as race, class, gender, and ethnicity, but also broadens discussions of colonial relations based solely on race, and expands notions of what it means to be a colonial subject.
Helen Lee traces the discursive construction of race in senryu, a popular poetic genre, appearing in Chosen Senryu. Kimberly Kono examines the interplay of race, class and gender in Yokota Fumiko’s alternative representation of interethnic romance. Robert Tierney’s paper proposes the possibility of an anti-imperialist novel through an examination of a text by Nakajima Atsushi. Shifting to the postwar period, Christopher Scott focuses on the legacy of colonialism by exploring the postcolonial subjectivities articulated in the works of Resident Korean writer Kim Tal-Su.
Representations of Colonial Experiences in Chosen Senryu: Working Class Japanese in Colonized Korea
Helen J. S. Lee, University of California, Irvine
Interrogation of the idea of race in the context of Japanese colonization of Korea not only underscores the works of Western critics such as Albert Memmi and Frantz Fanon, but also forces us to explore the discursive formation of race between two groups of people who supposedly belong to the same race. My paper employs the popular poetic genre, the senryu, as a source of exploring Japan’s popular racialization of Koreans in the colony. To be specific, the "populace" in question here consists of those who had direct contact with Korea, not as administrators, soldiers, or government officials, but as the occasional traveler, the small-time entrepreneur, the poor emigrant. The fecundity of satiric, light, vulgar, uninhibited expressions of thoughts and sentiments in senryu makes this genre a valuable source to investigate the voices of the common folk that are not articulated in other texts. What emerges from the senryu poems (Chosen Senryu, Korea: 1922) written by Japanese in the colonized Korea is the dimension of colonial experience—those of the working class Japanese—that supplements and more importantly counter-narrates the dominant paradigm by which we view colonial reality. Contrasting with the officially recognized colonial relations of inequality, the images in senryu poems depict the specific and complex manner in which racial relations were played out in everyday life of the common folk.
Performing "Race," Gender, and Romance in Colonial Manchuria
Kimberly Kono, University of California, Berkeley
The depiction of romantic relations between Japanese and colonized subjects proliferated throughout literary and cinematic texts in the late 1930s and early 1940s. Many of these representations, produced both in Japan and its colonial territories, positively depicted romantic relationships between Japanese and colonized peoples. Through such representations, these texts also reflect the colonial governments’ promotion of tsukon, interethnic marriage, as a step toward cultural assimilation and, in the case of Manchukuo, gozoku kyowa, loosely translated as "ethnic harmony."
In contrast to such harmonious endings, Yokota Fumiko’s short story "Love Letter" (Koibumi, 1938) portrays social interactions in the colonial context as fraught with alienation and miscommunication. In her depiction of a Chinese man’s unrequited love for a married Japanese woman, Yokota transforms the conventional paradigm of interethnic romance through the contrasting narration by the enamored Chinese man, Wang, and the Japanese female narrator, watashi. Her juxtaposition of these two narrators and her use of performance reveal the inherent contradictions in constructions of "race" used in colonial discourses of cultural assimilation.
Despite the fact that colonized subjects, like Wang, were urged to become "good imperial subjects" by assuming various Japanese cultural practices such as learning the Japanese language, or wearing Japanese clothing, they could never completely transcend their ethnic identities. Even the most perfect "performer" would, ultimately, never achieve equal status with Japanese colonizers. By revealing this contradiction, Yokota critiques discourses of cultural assimilation and ethnic harmony, and articulates diverse colonial voices, providing alternative perspectives on the Japanese colonial project.
Anti-Colonialism and the Colonial Novel: Nakajima Atsushi’s Light, Wind and Dreams
Robert Tierney, Stanford University
In line with changing times, Japanese colonialism began to assume an anti-colonial and anti-Western cast during the interwar period and ultimately came to present itself as a means of liberating colonial populations from their subjection to Western domination. What role did literature play in refashioning this ideologically usable image of colonialism and in differentiating the Japanese empire from the pernicious Western variety?
In this paper, I will explore this issue by examining Nakajima Atsushi’s novel entitled Light, Wind and Dreams, written in 1941 and nominated as finalist for the Akutagawa literary prize the following year. Based partly on R. L Stevenson’s Vailima Letters, the novel is a fictionalized autobiography which gives an account of the four-year period (1890–94) when the Scottish writer takes up residence in Samoa in hopes of recovering his health. Appalled by the blatant interference of the Western powers in Samoan affairs, Stevenson begins his political battle by denouncing the injustices and rapacity of the colonizers in a series of public letters to the London Times. Later he befriends and backs a popular opposition group and seeks to mediate between it and the puppet government subservient to the Western powers. In the end, civil war breaks out, the opposition is crushed and Stevenson falls into despair.
Set in a period immediately preceding the birth of Japan’s empire and in a region that fell outside its formal sphere of influence, Light, Wind and Dreams seems at first glance to be far removed from the pressing concerns of a nation on the eve of the Pacific War. On closer inspection, however, this anti-colonial novel structured around a dichotomy between an evil Western colonialism and an enlightened version championed by Stevenson also participates in the ideological remodeling of late Japanese imperialist discourse. At once historical figure and Nakajima’s alter ego and spokesman, Stevenson becomes the unlikely and unwitting agent in this reconfiguration of an anti-colonial colonialism.
Kim Tal-su and Resident Korean Literature in Postwar Japan
Christopher D. Scott, Stanford University
In recent years, Resident Korean literature (zainichi Chôsenjin/Kankokujin bungaku) has come to occupy a high-profile position in Japanese literature. Yû Miri and Gen Getsu have won the prestigious Akutagawa Prize for works which depict Resident Koreans in unconventional ways, while Yan Sogiru and Kaneshiro Kazuki have dealt with Resident Korean issues in popular fiction. Such reinvention and commodification, however, threaten to obscure the genre’s more complicated history.
Although the term "Resident Korean" did not come about until after World War II, when many Koreans were stranded in Japan as resident aliens and cut off from their homeland, Koreans had been living in Japan throughout the colonial period (1910–45). Resident Korean literature suffered from a similar paradox: it was a product of colonialism forced to survive in a postcolonial context. Thus, Resident Korean literature often says as much about Japan as it does about Korea.
My paper will explore the dilemmas facing Resident Korean literature in the immediate postwar period by examining the career of Kim Tal-su (1919–97), one of its "founding fathers." I will focus on his 1948 debut novel Kôei no machi (Streets of my successors), the story of a Korean youth who returns to Korea from Japan during the colonial period and finds himself questioning his own identity. As I will show, this text re-presents the colonial past in ways which both expose the contradictions of colonial rule in Korea and reflect the crisis of subjectivity in postwar Japanese society and literature.
Organizer: Ken Ruoff, Portland State University
Chair and Discussant: Andrew Gordon, Harvard University
Do we know enough about the political Right in Postwar Japan? Doubts arise because historians writing in English have tended either to neglect this central topic or to ignore the fact that during the past half century the Japanese Right has been neither monolithic nor static. There is great need for a deeper understanding both of the organizational dynamics of the Right and the sources of its intellectual coherence and internal divisions. This endeavor begins with a single question: Where does one draw the line between the Left and the Right in Postwar Japan? While analyzing individuals and organizations generally categorized as belonging to the Right and exploring various definitions of the Left-Right divide, this panel examines the validity of the Left-Right division itself as an explanatory device for understanding postwar Japanese political history.
David Williams suggests that the framework of center vs. periphery allows for a better understanding of political reality in Japan than does the traditional Left-Right division; his paper focuses on the Kyoto School, in particular on the writings of Tanabe Hajime. Rikki Kersten analyzes Japanese interpretations of the tenko (political apostasy) of leading postwar intellectuals including Shimizu Ikutaro and Yoshimoto Takaaki to understand how these intellectuals’ view of democracy evolved as they struggled with the concepts of nation and state. Ken Ruoff traces the evolution of lobbying techniques employed by the emperorist Association of Shinto Shrines in order to remind us that far from being comprised only of groups on the Left, Postwar Japan’s civil society included many right-wing groups which learned how to play by the rules of postwar democracy even if they entirely or partially rejected the postwar system itself. This panel suggests not only that the complex and dynamic political Right requires more attention, but that the Left-Right paradigm itself needs to be reviewed.
Postwar Tenko—Transcending the Left-Right Paradigm
Rikki Kersten, Sydney University
Historians of postwar Japan have resorted to the Left-Right paradigm as an analytical framework far political thought almost as a reflex action. While ‘Left’ and ‘Right’ may represent identifiable categories in post-1945 Japan, these neat categories blur when we encounter those individuals who have dared to travel between these poles of ideological affinity.
Postwar tenko presents historians of political thought with a valuable opportunity to understand what it means to freely reject one identifiable intellectual orientation for another that appears to be its opposite. It is astonishing that while Japanese scholars have published over 124 commentaries on the phenomenon of postwar tenko, historians of Japanese political thought outside of Japan have barely considered this subject at all.
This paper examines Japanese writing on tenko (political apostasy) in the postwar era, from the perspective of observers and of tenko-sha themselves. In responding to the tenko of leading thinkers such as Shimizu lkutaro and Yashimota Takaaki, Japanese intellectuals reveal that it is the search for a philosophy of history that navigates between the nation and the state that appears as a major concern for those thinkers who first shaped, then rejected, Japan’s postwar democracy. Postwar tenka casts doubt on the Left-Right paradigm as an adequate analytical tool for understanding political thinking in postwar Japan, and indicates other avenues for insightful reappraisals of what has hitherto been fuzzily described as ‘a shift to the Right.’
When Right Is Wrong: Does the French Revolutionary Idea of "Right vs. Left" Distort Our Understanding of Japanese Politics? The Example of the Postwar Kyoto School
David Williams, University of Sheffield
Since the idea of "left vs. right" originated in the bloody struggles of the first three years of the French Revolution, it has become part of the fundamental vocabulary of political journalism and social science around the world. This includes even countries, such as China and Japan, that have never been ruled by Europe and have developed a sophisticated language of political analysis independent of Western experience.
Nevertheless, there are ample grounds to argue that the idea of "right vs. left" distorts our understanding of modern Japanese politics. At many points, the rubric of "center vs. periphery" offers a sounder explanation of Japanese political reality. This alternative view holds that the key dynamic of Japanese politics sets a practical, amoral, materialistic, bureaucratic, efficient, effective and realistic center against an impractical, moral-minded, idealistic, spontaneous, spiritual and often violent periphery. Drawing on some tentative notions once proposed by Tetsuo Najita, this revisionary thesis challenges the intellectual coherence of any simplistic concept of Japanese "fascism," in the Italian mode, as well as the conventional assumption that postwar Japanese politics has been a struggle between a progressive left and a reactionary right. A close mapping of the ideological outlook of the Kyoto School of philosophy, particularly the postwar writings of Tanabe Hajime (1885–1962), illustrates the power of this critique.
The Far Right and Democratic Lobbying: The Case of the Association of Shinto Shrines
Ken Ruoff, Portland State University
Judging from its level of hostility toward the postwar system in the decades after the Occupation, the emperorist Association of Shinto Shrines (Jinja Honcho) was an organization on the far right. Nonetheless, early in the postwar era the nonviolent Association of Shinto Shrines learned to employ democratic lobbying techniques to pressure the Cabinet and Diet to address its causes. Whether pressing for state recognition of Ise Shrine’s special national status, the restoration of the crime of lèse majesté, the reestablishment of national Foundation Day, the reestablishment of state support of Yasukuni Shrine, the legalization of the reign name system, or fighting against the "MacArthur Constitution," official apologies for Japan’s wartime actions, and textbooks that fail to edify the state, the Association of Shinto Shrines has learned the effectiveness of grassroots political action, from signature campaigns to mass demonstrations (techniques often associated only with left-wing groups). Right-wing groups form part of Japan’s diverse "public sphere" or "civil society," and their political influence, especially their skill in playing by the rules of the postwar system, must be taken into account. The simplistic dichotomy of a liberal civil society on the one hand and a conservative state on the other hand should be laid to rest once and for all. Even with regards to "emperor system" issues, it misleads far more than it informs.
Organizer, Chair and Discussant: Ulrike Schaede, University of California, San Diego
Keywords: Japan and Asia; foreign direct investment (FDI); World Trade Organization (WTO); internationalization of the yen.
As Japan faces the challenges of recession, structural change, as well as external policy and market pressures, a fresh look at its economic policies is in order. This interdisciplinary panel brings together research on specific policy areas that have long been subsumed—often without further analysis—in the "developmental state" paradigm, such as FDI, subsidies for small-sized firms, international financial controls, and trade diplomacy.
We find that these policy areas continue to play important roles in Japan’s political economy, but with new emphasis. Each of these issue-areas gives an example of how Japan is responding in ways that few would have predicted. As companies relocate production outside Japan, their bargaining power vis-à-vis the government is increasing visibly. What used to be FDI support for large companies has effectively become a subsidization system for small firms. At the international level, Japan seems to be employing the new trade regime to move away from previous bilateral trade diplomacy. Yet at the same time, it is attempting to make the yen the most widely used currency in Asia, to protect its large firms.
This panel aims to explain and predict Japan’s policy choices. In addition to presenting their work, with its focus on Japan in Asia, panel participants seek to actively involve the audience in a discussion of the various factors now at play in shaping Japan’s strategy choices, domestic and international, and their implications for Japan’s standing in the international political economy.
From Export Platforms to Integrated Manufacturing: Japan’s MNCs in East Asia
Patricia Nelson, University of Edinburgh
Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) by Japanese multinational corporations (MNCs) has played a central role in East Asia’s development. Early FDI went to the region to establish export platforms for labor-intensive manufacturing industries. In recent years, Japanese MNCs have moved toward capital-intensive, medium-tech manufacturing which suits the needs of their highly globalized operations and complements other firms’ trade and investment.
The critical issue is whether the benefits of advanced, integrated manufacturing can offset the threat of new financial crises in East Asia. The sheer magnitude of indirect investments which followed FDI into the region during the 1990s created serious and unsustainable risks, raising concerns for a global contagion effect. Governments now find themselves caught between the desire for local stability and the pressing need for capital inflows from MNCs, the original source of the 1997 crisis.
This paper explores the transition of Japanese FDI from export platform to integrated manufacturing and asks whether the MNCs have gained power relative to local governments. How actively are Japan and local governments encouraging new FDI whilst trying to protect themselves from unforeseen (and perhaps unmanageable) financial crises? Based on case studies analyzed against theoretical explanations of FDI, the globalization of business and the role of the state, the paper finds that the relative power of MNCs appears to be growing vis-à-vis the state.
Budgets and State Finance: The Politics of Public FDI Credit in Japan
Mireya Solis, Brandeis University
The Japanese state is the world’s largest public financier of multinational corporations. No other industrialized nation has committed as many financial resources to the promotion of multinationalism as Japan has, especially towards industries that have lost export competitiveness and/or for small enterprises that cannot afford the costs of foreign relocation on their own. Nevertheless, FDI industrial policy does not fit well with the developmental state thesis. The Japanese state has not been entirely strategic, nor always coherent in its allocation of subsidized FDI loans. Indeed, over time the compensatory character of the public FDI credit program has increased with powerful interest groups (most notably the small firm lobby) capturing a larger share of softer loans. Moreover, Japanese public financial institutions involved in FDI credit have clashed in the past over jurisdictional boundaries, often producing institutional overlap and duplication of functions.
The central conclusion of this research paper is that budgetary structure largely determines the degree to which Japanese public financial institutions engage in soft or hard finance as they seek to promote multinationalism. Institutions that rely solely on budget subsidies have more discretion over concessional lending, whereas agencies that rely on repayment funds from the postal system must attach stricter conditions to their loans.
Sword and Shield: Japan’s Strategic Use of the WTO Dispute Settlement System
Saadia Pekkanen, Middlebury College
From the time that Japan joined the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) in 1955 to the start of the Uruguay Round in 1986, it avoided using the rule-based dispute settlement system at the heart of the multilateral trade regime. But no more. Since the birth of the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 1995, there has been a significant change in Japan’s external trade diplomacy. Japan is now actively choosing the legal rules of the WTO to both shield domestic measures and practices, and even more importantly, to challenge the measures and practices of its trade partners. This is a conscious strategy where a substantive set of international legal rules are being made to serve as both "shield" and "sword" in trade disputes among Japan and its trade partners.
Using the prominent U.S.-Japan Fuji-Kodak dispute as an illustration of the "shield" aspect, and the Japan-Canada Automobile dispute as an example of the "sword" aspect, this paper undertakes a legal analysis which has important policy implications for the ways in which Japan is responding to external policy and trade pressures.
Insulation in an Era of "Open Regionalism": Asianizing the Yen
William Grimes, Boston University
"Internationalization of the yen" has again become a popular catchphrase in Japan, in response to the Asian financial crisis of 1997–99 and European monetary unification. Despite the apparent connotation of embracing a globalized financial system, however, one of the major goals of yen internationalization is actually insulation. In particular, it is seen as a means of insulating Japan’s economy from the effects of wild fluctuations in value among major currencies.
Moreover, "internationalization" of the yen is more of a regional strategy than the term itself suggests. In fact, virtually all plans focus on expanded use of the yen mainly in East and Southeast Asia. Thus, Japanese policy makers are attempting to "Asianize" the yen. This is meant not only to insulate Japan’s economy, but also the economies of its Asian partners, from the volatile global economy.
This paper will examine the tensions between insulation and globalization in the yen internationalization debate in Japan. It will also address the tension between a strategy of regional insulation and Asia’s movement toward "open regionalism"—both for Japan and its Asian partners.
Organizer and Chair: Ethan Segal, Stanford University
Discussant: Robert A. Eskildsen, Smith College
Current scholarship frames the question of nationalism as a phenomenon identified with the modern nation-state, and tends to dismiss broad-based collective identities in other contexts—in which "modernity" and the "nation-state" are not present—as either lesser, or categorically distinct phenomena. Recently, however, scholars have begun to explore broad-based collective identities in premodern settings where the nation-state is either absent or nascent. While acknowledging that nations are not timeless, ever-present entities, encounters with foreign others and the recognition of separate but equal spheres of state authority were factors contributing to the development of "national" identity which predate modernization.
This panel explores issues of broad-based collective identity—what might, in later ages, be called "national identity"—in tenth- to thirteenth-century Japan. Each paper explores the formation and assertion of such identity in a different setting. First, Robert Borgen looks at how Japanese chose to portray themselves to a foreign government. How did Japanese handle problems of sovereignty while operating within the Song Chinese East Asian system? Next, Ethan Segal explores how Japanese saw themselves and managed domestic policy. Extending Borgen’s discussion of sovereignty, Segal searches for the boundaries set by Japanese elites and compares his findings with the writings of modern scholars of nationalism. Finally, Haruko Wakabayashi examines Japanese views of foreign others, focusing on what was seen as exotic and different. How did such designations create a Japanese identity among the audience of medieval tales? All three papers challenge the idea that collective, "national" identity is a purely modern phenomenon.
Crossing the Sea: Japanese Identity in Eleventh-Century China
Robert Borgen, University of California, Davis
My paper will look at a series of events in the 1070s–80s illustrating how Japan related to China at a time when most believe the Japanese had little interest in the outside world. In doing so, I will try to show that the Japanese elites had a strong sense of collective identity and displayed attitudes resembling those of modern nationalism. The events begin with the pilgrimage of the monk Jojin (1011–81) who went to China in 1072 with seven disciples and left a diary describing his travels. Several incidents he describes reveal his self-consciousness as a Japanese: when asked to pray for rain, he notes that failure would be an embarrassment for the Japanese nation; when asked by the Chinese court to provide information about Japan, he dramatically inflates its size and population. Although Jojin remained in China, he sent his diary back with five of his disciples. Accompanying them was an envoy bringing a message and gifts from the Chinese court. A year and a half later, we discover the Japanese beginning to debate the problem of how to respond. Traditional Chinese diplomacy had required that other countries express subordination, an attitude that the Japanese had never accepted gracefully. In this case, the Japanese eventually decided to send back gifts more substantial than what they had received, and respond with a message not from the emperor but from the Council of State. Both on a personal and a government level, Japanese strove to assert their distinctive identity.
Limits to Authority and Kamakura Proto-Nationalism
Ethan Segal, Stanford University
In 1191, two Japanese boat captains along with their crews were expelled from China for involvement in a murder. The Chinese Court sent official notice demanding that the Japanese government take action against the offending captains, and the matter was quickly brought to the attention of Japanese Regent Kujo Kanezane. Kanezane’s intriguing response to the crisis, recorded in his diary Gyokuyo, suggests that early medieval elites had a strong sense of Japanese identity that resembled modern conceptions of nationality and yet differed greatly from the basis for national membership found in Japan today.
This paper explores the precursors of Japanese national identity in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. A wide range of sources, including diaries, government decrees, and building inscriptions, reveal links in the early medieval Japanese mind between land, people, and administration. Kamakura period officials recognized that they had a limited sphere of authority, beyond which existed other autonomous states. Although distinct from modern nationalism, a clear sense of shared Japanese identity that extended beyond the confines of Kyoto warrants comparison with Benedict Anderson’s idea of imagined communities and Eric Hobsbawm’s discussion of "proto-nationalism." While it cannot be proven that proto-nationalism leads to the later emergence of modern nationalism, the distinctive identity asserted by Kamakura period elites was significant for its enduring nature and the major role it played in government policy formation.
India, China, and Barbaric Others: Representing the Foreign in Early Medieval Japan
Haruko Wakabayashi, Institute for the International Education of Students
This paper explores early medieval perceptions of foreign, focusing particularly on the distinctions found among images of India, China, Korea, and the other foreign lands. This will be done first through the analysis of individual stories in the Konjaku monogatarishu, known for its wealth of foreign imageries and diverse representations of culturally distinctive people. These tales reveal how other lands and their peoples were perceived and presented in late Heian Japan. Second, the paper will take a close look at Xuan Zhang, a seventh-century Chinese monk who made a pilgrimage to India. Xuan Zhang had been widely known in Japan by the Heian period, and anecdotes from his travel record, Da Tang Xiyuji, are included in the Konjaku monogatarishu. These tales help us understand how Xuan Zhang was received in Heian Japan, and the influence his writings and anecdotes had on Japanese views of China, India, and the barbaric land of the West. Finally, the paper will reexamine the sangoku shiso (the idea that Japan is one of the three countries along with India and China that are central to the world) and attempt to reconstruct the world as imagined by those who wrote and read the Konjaku monogatarishu. Their assertions of foreign identity at a national level helped to shape Japanese notions of self that extended beyond local communities and reached a broad spectrum of society.
Organizer: Andra Alvis, Indiana University
Chair: Joshua Mostow, University of British Columbia
Discussant: Gilbert Chaitin, Indiana University; Joshua Mostow, University of British Columbia
Keywords: Japan, literature, psychoanalysis.
Although issues of subjectivity have become increasingly important for Japanese literary criticism, psychoanalysis—theory’s most sophisticated view of the subject—remains marginal to the study of Japanese literature. Our panel explores the possibilities for, and limitations of, reading between psychoanalytic models of the subject and twentieth-century Japanese literary narratives of subjectivity. What understandings of the subject in Japanese literature can be generated through the lens of psychoanalysis? In what ways do Japanese narratives of subjectivity problematize psychoanalytic models? Using the work of three different psychoanalytic schools, our papers explore the shifting intersections of Japanese literature, psychoanalysis, and narratives of subjectivity. Mary Knighton reads Kanai Mieko’s "Boshizo" via ideas on "translation," hypothesizing a Lacanian, distinctly twisted subjectivity therein. Jonathan Hall studies poet-ethnologist Origuchi Shinobu’s figure of alterity, the marebito, in conjunction with neo-Freudian Jean Laplanche’s concepts of primal fantasy and the other, arguing for mutual inflection between the two theories. Andra Alvis utilizes Kleinian theories of splitting/projection to examine parallels between the subject of the shishsosetsu and the "split subject" of psychoanalysis, as well as to highlight the necessity for cultural modulated psychoanalytic readings.
Our panel will follow a "nonconventional" format, designed to foster dialogue. With the audience encouraged to obtain the full papers in advance from analvis@indiana.edu, each panelist’s presentation will be limited to 10–15 minutes. Joshua Mostow will then break the ice for intensive audience discussion by asking specific questions of each panelist. Gilbert Chaitin, a specialist in psychoanalytic criticism and French literature, will conclude by theorizing the issues raised as psychoanalysis confronts a non-Western literature and its subjects.
Chiasmic Narrative and Twisted Subjectivity in Kanai Mieko’s "Boshizo"
Mary A. Knighton, University of California, Berkeley
Lying in bed, an unnamed female protagonist is awakened by a disembodied voice intimate to her, yet strange. In this way, Kanai Mieko’s "Boshizo" (Portrait of Mother and Child, 1972) narrates a scene of fantasy enclosed and framed by a voice that resembles less a narrator per se than an inscrutable message from the big Other. The demanding task of making sense of this "message" overtakes the goal of finally "getting it"; that is, "Boshizo’s" symbolic fable demonstrates how Lacanian psychoanalysis is fundamentally concerned with the necessary incommensurabilities involved in "translation": between individual subjectivities, between cultures, and between the self divided from itself. I ultimately argue that Kanai’s story stages at several levels a "crossing over" of languages, cultures, and psychic registers. Its primary means of doing so, moreover, is effected by the rhetorical figure of the chiasmus.
The chiasmus functions to structure not only key sentences in "Boshizo" but also the overall narrative scene inscribed as the external narrator’s fantasy. Indeed, it is just where this narrative "twists" that the narratorial subjectivity within the story also twists, ostensibly dramatizing a "perverse" turn to incest, significantly enough, via intertextual and cross-cultural allusion to Lewis Carroll. So while this story is seemingly about a daughter’s incestuous desire for her father, here the story’s "message" becomes twisted and distorted, consequently rendering illegibility as "translation" into a recognizable image or "portrait": not one of father and daughter at all, but rather of "mother and child."
In constructive tension at times with critics Sakai Naoki, Azuma Hiroki, Slavoj Zizek, Kaja Silverman and others on translation and Lacanian theory, I take pains in my reading of "Boshizo" to question how and whether or not psychoanalysis as a tool of literary criticism can adequately account for and "translate" the gendered, socio-political, and cross-cultural matrix out of which subjectivity emerges to find its hybrid shape.
Traces of Another: Origuchi, Laplanche, and the Enigmatic Signifier
Jonathan M. Hall, University of California, Santa Cruz
Current English-language understandings of poet-ethnologist Origuchi Shinobu (1887–1953) emphasize on the one hand Origuchi’s reliance on a particularistic concept of "Japaneseness" ultimately complicit with statist intentions and, on the other, his contestation of a monolithic, nationalized subject for the modern novel. Focusing on Origuchi’s 1927 essay "Kokubungaku no hassei III" (The Production of a National Literature, Part III), his well-known figure for alterity, the "fixed visitor" or marebito, I examine Origuchi’s construction of alterity alongside psychoanalytic theories of primal fantasy and the other. After moving through Frantz Fanon’s conception of racialized alterity and the "colonial" situation of Origuchi’s argument, I go on to appose Origuchi’s methodology of kodai (the "ancient") and Jean Laplanche’s "translation," Origuchi’s marebito and Laplanche’s "enigmatic signifier." Useful to him for its critique of modernity, Origuchi’s "ancient" is far less a linear past than a concurrent, archaeological palimpsest insisting upon its retranslation. Like Laplanche’s metaphor of the "spine in the flesh" that attacks the very subject that is built around it, Origuchi’s alterity emerges as something in the service of a Japanese particularism, but in a fashion that destabilizes from its inception that national subject.
Laplanche’s displacement of the Oedipal symbolic and his cultural relativizing of the Oedipus both point to the specific usefulness of Laplanchian psychoanalytic theory in a Japanese context. In reverse fashion, my own methodology of apposition refuses rendering Origuchi the single object of inquiry, underlining how the early-century Origuchi might significantly inflect our reading of Laplanche’s late-century work.
First Person Plural: Psychoanalysis, Narrative, and the Shishosetsu Subject
Andra Alvis, Indiana University
Owing to its collapse of author, narrator, and protagonist, the subject of the shishosetsu, or I-novel, is often viewed as a unitary ego. By contrast, my paper argues that another characteristic associated with the I-novel, its lack of emplotted narrative, highlights parallels between the subject of the shishosetsu and the "split subject" of psychoanalysis, an "I" fragmented by unconscious processes.
Relying on the ideas of Melanie Klein, I examine the relation between unstructured plot and the splintered subject in shishosetsu by Shiga Naoya, Yasuoka Shotaro, and Tsushima Yuko. In general, shishosetsu by these three authors involve sections of text that interweave the "I’s" present with unsettling reminiscences and anxiety provoking dreams. I argue that such "jumps" to disturbing content are suggestive of Klein’s model whereby unacceptable psychic content is split off from the self and projected into the other of dream or memory. In Shiga’s "Sobo no tame ni" (For Grandmother, 1917), fragmentation evokes anger towards a beloved grandmother; in Yasuoka’s "Aigan" (Prized Possessions, 1952), consuming disappointment over Japan’s unconditional surrender; and in Tsushima Yuko’s "Numa" (The Marsh, 1984), the aggressive desire of female sexuality
At the same time that it advocates a psychoanalytic reading of shishosetsu, my paper highlights the complexities and ambiguities of such an approach. I argue for a framework that can be culturally inflected with reference to Japanese folklore, history, and psychoanalytic theory. I also discuss the tangencies and gaps that exist between the analysand’s clinical narrative of subjectivity and the literary narrative of the shishosetsu.
Organizer and Chair: Lawrence E. Marceau, University of Delaware
Discussant: Jonathan Chaves, George Washington University
Scholars have long recognized the importance of Buddhist eremitism and the literature produced by recluses (inja) in medieval Japan. Recluse writers such as Saigyô, Kamo no Chômei, and Yoshida Kenkô are well represented in Japanese literary studies, especially for their rejection of sociopolitical values and their desire to transcend society through physical separation from it. Writers and thinkers in the early modern period in Japan also recognized the possibilities raised by medieval Buddhist recluses. However, a crucial distinction between medieval inja and the early modern residents of Kyoto, Osaka, and Edo, is that in many cases the later recluses chose to follow their eremitism while physically remaining in the metropolis as "shiin," or "urban recluses." Furthermore, their reclusion seems to have been inspired as much by Confucian and philosophical Daoist examples as it was to their medieval Buddhist precursors.
In this panel, three specialists in early modern Japanese art and literature provide valuable insights into this important, yet little-studied, phenomenon. Using an influential text produced in the 1680s, Lawrence E. Marceau examines early patterns of urban reclusion related to the interests of Ihara Saikaku and his circle. C. A. Crowley explores a different brand of urban reclusion in the circle of Yosa Buson in the 1770s. Finally, Patricia J. Graham analyzes the expansion of the urban recluse ideal into Japan’s provincial cities in the early 1800s. Eminent scholar of Chinese poetic eremitism and Chinese poetry in Japan, Jonathan Chaves, will provide sophisticated feedback as discussant.
On Retreat in Style: Saikaku, Sairoken Kyôsen, and Kindai yasa inja (1686)
Lawrence E. Marceau, University of Delaware
A half century after the sieges of Osaka Castle and the final solidification of the Pax Tokugawa, a poet-priest named Gensei (1623–68), living in seclusion in the Kyoto suburb of Fukakusa, reflected on like-minded eremites over Japanese history and collected their stories in a work, Biographies of Japanese Hermits (Fusô in’itsu den, 1663). A generation later, Sairoken Kyôsen, a disciple of haikai poet and writer Ihara Saikaku (1642–93), submitted a manuscript to his teacher, asking him to make a clean copy for publication. This work, Recent Stylish Recluses (Kindai yasa-inja, 1686) provides a remarkable projection of the traditional Buddhist recluse into late-seventeenth-century urban life. Kyôsen’s text, in conjunction with Saikaku’s own distinctive woodblock illustrations, tells the stories of 37 recluses who, whether through individual choice or through the dissipation of their fortunes, end up making the most of the rustic life—at the same time ensuring that they remain close to the bustling metropolis. Furthermore, several of the hermits introduced in Stylish Recluses, are, in fact, women.
This presentation analyzes the shiin, or urban recluse, phenomenon at an early stage, through examples drawn from Stylish Recluses and other contemporary works. While exploring individual stories, we shall examine such issues as the relationship between philosophical Lao-Zhuang Daoism and haikai poetics, and between urban material culture and Buddhist-inspired reclusion. Saikaku and his collaborators present to us, among other things, a refreshingly upbeat view of eremitism that strikes a chord with other popular fiction of the era.
Yosa Buson and the Shiin (Urban Recluse): Using the Mundane to Transcend the Mundane
Cheryl Crowley, Emory University
Poet and painter Yosa Buson (1716–83) also served as a leader of the Haikai Revival movement (1760s–80s) that sought a return to the ideals of Matsuo Bashô (1644–94). Buson called for a rejection of the commercialization of haikai that had occurred during the years after Bashô’s death, arguing that haikai poets should follow the ideal he termed rizoku: using the mundane (zoku) to transcend the mundane. Buson recommended that haikai poets turn away from fame and ambition and instead study kanshi, enjoy wine, good companions, and the beauty of the natural world. Buson’s formulation of the rizoku theory was based in large part on notions he received from Kuroyanagi Shôha (1726–71), a chônin (urban commoner) who retired at forty to live as a shiin, devoting himself to kanshi and haikai. Shôha had studied kanshi with masters Hattori Nankaku (1683–1759) and Ryû Sôro (1714–92), and he was an important source of information for Buson about Chinese poetic theory, as well as a mentor and role model. Buson’s preface to Shundei kushu (1777)—a collection of Shôha’s hokku—is where Buson makes his most comprehensive description of the rizoku theory, and it is written in the form of a dialogue between Shôha and himself
This presentation examines Buson’s relationship with Shôha through a close reading of Buson’s extensive correspondence with Shôha, his haikai prose associated with Shôha, and the hokku of the Sanka-sha haikai circle of which both were members, exploring the role of the shiin figure in Revival-period haikai.
Ôkubo Shibutsu, Vagabond Poet of Edo
Patricia Graham, University of Kansas
The talented late-Edo period kanshi poet Ôkubo Shibutsu (1767–1837) is generally identified by his sobriquet "Poet Buddha," a name he took in homage to the Chinese poet Du Fu. In emulation of his beloved Chinese scholar-poets, he also painted literati plant subjects, and spent years wandering around Japan during the latter part of his life. Much of the inspiration for Shibutsu’s poetry came from encounters with artists, Confucian scholars, and poets during his peripatetic journeys between Kansai, Hokuriku, Tôhoku, and his home in Edo. Deeper understanding of the rarified pastimes enjoyed by the Confucian scholars, kanshi poets, and painters in his circle of acquaintances can be gleaned from published journals of two of his extended trips, the Seiyû shisô (1818) and the Saihokuyû shisô (1825).
These journals describe the activities and convivial atmosphere at the gatherings at which Shibutsu composed his poems, enlivened by the inebriated state of the participants. They also reveal Shibutsu’s indebtedness to his painter-friends for his poetic themes. One younger painter with whom Shibutsu developed a close friendship was Yamamoto Baiitsu (1783–1856), who is mentioned as a frequent companion in his travel diaries. A number of extant datable paintings by Baiitsu contain poetic inscriptions by Shibutsu that were later published in these journals. Focusing on the relationship between these two men, this paper will explore the essential and intimate relationship between painter and poet in late-Edo Japan, especially the notion of painting as a source of inspiration for the artistic creativity of kanshi poets.
Organizer: Fumiko Nazikian, Princeton University
Chair and Discussant: Patricia J. Wetzel, Portland State University
It is clear that learners need to acquire both linguistic and sociocultural knowledge of the target language in order to develop language proficiency. In developing proficiency, students become able to correctly interpret, respond to, and interact with others in a culturally appropriate manner. This raises the issue of just how culture can and should be incorporated into language instruction. This panel examines this question from an interdisciplinary point of view with the aim of making specific suggestions for Japanese language pedagogy. Some key issues which will be addressed are: (1) how the concept of indirect speech and conventions of politeness are acquired by the non-native learner; (2) how an understanding of dynamic aspects of cultural negotiation benefits language learners; (3) how culture-based student performance in the classroom translates into better language proficiency; (4) how sociocultural competence in Japanese is presented in textbooks, as well as how it is perceived by teachers and students.
Cultural Construction, Negotiation, and Language Pedagogy: Making "Culture" More Dynamic in Japanese Language Instruction
Hiroaki Kawamura, University of Findlay
This paper will examine how dynamic aspects of culture can be incorporated into the Japanese language curriculum. Critique on cultural studies since the 1960s under Marxism, post-structuralism, and postmodernism has directed our attention toward the dynamic processes of cultural construction and complex patterns of human involvement therein. Some of the recent Japanese ethnographies clearly reflect the influence of this theoretical development (e.g., Sugimoto 1997). What are the implications of this theoretical development for language pedagogy? Is the concept of "process" in cultural construction useful for learners of Japanese? This paper will argue that the understanding of dynamic aspects of cultural negotiation will be beneficial to language learners especially after the initial stage of language instruction. Understanding dynamic process in cultural construction will help learners develop skills to become independent learners by improving their observation skills and also prepare them to become better analysts of Japanese culture. The incorporation of dynamic aspects of culture is crucial in light of the direction provided by the National Standards (1996) and the draft of the Japanese Standards (1998), both of which propose "understanding of the concept of culture" (Comparisons) as one of the primary objectives. This paper will discuss creative and purposeful choice of distal/direct styles and strategically adopted use of a local/Tokyo dialect by native speakers of Japanese. The data used in this paper were drawn from the author’s observation and interviews through his training, experiences, and research in both cultural anthropology and Japanese language pedagogy.
Analysis of Non-disjunctive Sentence Ending keredo and ga
Satoru Ishikawa, Harvard University
Uchi and soto, sasshi and omoiyari are words which are often used to characterize Japanese culture (Nakane 1967). It goes without saying that these concepts are reflected in language, and cannot be separated from Japanese use of language. Many scholars have pointed out that uchi and soto are closely related to the use of honorific expressions and the avoidance of directness (Makino 1996, and Wetzel 1994). It is essential that Japanese language learners understand such characteristics of Japanese culture and learn the ramifications of communicating (or not) with suitable language forms and in a manner that is culturally appropriate. Indirectness (related to sasshi and omoiyari) plays a crucial role in Japanese culture and language, especially in avoiding conflict. There are several strategies to convey thoughts or judgments indirectly, such as by omission, circumlocution and so forth.
One such strategy is the use of keredo or ga at the end of sentences. Keredo and ga are defined as connective disjunctive particles. However, frequently keredo and ga attach to the ends of sentences even though the sentence does not carry disjunctive meaning. Keredo and ga make the sentence less assertive and enable the speaker to present his/her idea politely (Nazikian and Ishikawa 1997). We instinctively understand that native Japanese people use this type of keredo and ga but we do not know exactly how or how often speakers use this type of expression. Moreover, how Japanese language learners acquire the non-disjunctive sense of keredo and ga is unknown. In this paper OPI interviews are analyzed in terms of non-disjunctive sentences ending in keredo and ga. I will make some pedagogical suggestions for how this non-disjunctive sense might be brought into the language classroom.
Developing a Sociocultural Competence in Japanese
Fumiko Nazikian, Princeton University; Noriko Cakmak, University of Pennsylvania
Language teaching has increasingly placed importance on enabling students to use the target language in a socially and culturally appropriate manner (Hymes 1974). Japanese is no exception (ACTFL guidelines), however there is as yet no consensus on what is required for sociocultural competence in students of Japanese and how such competence can be developed. This study aims to clarify the essential social and cultural factors which need to be incorporated into Japanese language teaching. The present study focuses on honorific/interpersonal expressions representing social status, intimacy, gender, bamen conversational situations, uchi-soto relations, speaker-/listener-oriented. Perceptions of sociocultural competence are analyzed from three perspectives: the teacher’s awareness; the student’s awareness; and textbook guidance. A survey will assess teacher and learner awareness regarding: honorific/interpersonal expressions; Japanese concepts which they consider important; classroom activities they use to develop sociocultural awareness. Japanese textbooks of various levels are also examined to investigate cultural perceptions. We will present an outline of appropriate sociocultural factors to be included in instruction, based on the survey results and reexamination of previous studies on Japanese culture.
Toward Performance-Based Instruction of East Asian Languages
Mari Noda, Ohio State University
This paper suggests ways of using the metaphor of "performance" to help learners develop the experiential memory of being viable participants in another culture. Performance is defined by Walker (2000) in terms of a specified time, place, and roles, along with a conventionalized script or a program of action, and audience. It is another powerful conceptual framework useful for the instruction of East Asian languages, which are culturally distant for American learners. It allows for a systematic analysis and presentation of communicative interaction. It frees learners from the fear of losing self-identity based on their base culture. It provides a mechanism for discussion of learners’ behavior in the target culture from a holistic perspective. It forms the basis for a compilation of experiential memory of the target culture, which in turn will help learners in coping with new experiences in the future. In actual classroom practice, performances are rehearsed. Learners prepare for performance by working with learning materials. Teachers function more as directors of performance than as deliverers of factual information about the target culture and language. Using concrete examples, I will discuss how teachers can prepare for a performance rehearsal, conduct it, assess it, and plan future rehearsals based on the assessment.
Organizer and Chair: Marie Thorsten, Macalester College
Discussants: Mark Nornes Abe, University of Michigan; Ming-Bao Yue, University of Hawaii, Manoa
Remembrances of World War II prominently appeared in the mass media, popular culture and scholarly literature throughout the 1990s, following the timeline of 50-year commemorations from Pearl Harbor to the atomic bombings. Among those that attracted the most global attention have been the observances in Japan and the United States that follow the prevailing nationalist sentiments of each country but that, according to critics, threaten to re-instate war-era patriotisms. An example in the United States was the failure of the Smithsonian to include its original commentary in the exhibit of the Enola Gay, in order to focus on American heroism. There have been many examples from Japan, especially the use of the Yasukuni Shrine to honor deceased veterans, and the re-instatement of the national flag and anthem, all of which remind wary Japanese citizens of the odiousness of World War II.
In this panel, we will present topics of war remembrance that have not received wide media attention. They are lesser known because they often do not follow the sentiments of each nation’s security regimes because they include messy binational collaborations, and because they foreground complexities of war memory that cannot be reduced to binary assumptions of war conflicts or patriotism.
Treading the Tiger’s Tail: American and Japanese World War II Veterans’ Reconciliation Ceremonies
Marie Thorsten, Macalester College
Formal ceremonies of friendship between American and Japanese veterans of the Pacific War have taken place in 1992, 1995, and 2000 in Hawaii, and in 1997 and 1999, in Japan. Reunions of enemies, even former enemies, are always fraught with sensitivities. I propose an analogy of the World War II veterans’ ceremonies as acts of "treading the tiger’s tail." This expression of stepping close to danger is borrowed from a kabuki tale (and Kurosawa film) in which enemy factions wine and dine in an unlikely gesture of mutual respect—unlikely because the line between treason and forgiveness can be perilous, even after several decades have passed.
This paper will map the various cultural and generational sensitivities that have surrounded these particular reconciliation ceremonies. The sensitivities have been strongest, not between the factions of veterans on both national sides who participate in the ceremonies, but within the cultures of the respective nations themselves. Among the most significant intra-cultural concerns are whether the ceremonies, which use full military decorum and regalia, are actually bridging enemies or honoring fallen heroes—or whether they are creating mutual endorsements of each nation’s past patriotic missions. Accordingly, the veterans’ ceremonies provide an instructive window for viewing each nation’s respective practices of patriotism, cultural tolerance of historical shame, definitions of vicitimization and capacities for transnational memorialization.
Revisioning the Pacific War: Japanese and American Critiques of Pearl Harbor Films
Geoffrey White, University of Hawaii
From the time of the Pearl Harbor bombing in 1941 onward, films of that event have played a key role in shaping American and Japanese understandings of the Pacific War, and of relations between the two nations. While media attention has often focused on official statements (and silences) regarding the historical significance of the bombing, popular cultural forms, especially films, have played a dominant role in forming national memories of the war, particularly among postwar generations.
This paper considers two of the most watched films of Pearl Harbor: the binational 1970 production Tora! Tora! Tora! and the 1960 Japanese film Taiheiyo no Arashi (Storm on the Pacific), released in the U.S. as I Bombed Pearl Harbor. It examines aspects of scripting and production, as well as critical commentaries and debates about the status of these films as national history in both Japan and the U.S. In both countries, these films have evoked discussions of national war memory and, more generally, of issues of genre and accuracy in cinematic representations of the war. Whereas Pearl Harbor films have been a site of vigilant wariness in Japan, they more often evoke patriotic nostalgia and exhibit affinities for big-screen entertainment in the United States. The paper argues that the critical failure of both films reflects the difficulties of narrativizing national histories that continue to be subjects of contested, ambivalent memory, especially as they circulate across national borders.
Americanizing Japanese War Crimes
Lisa Yoneyama, University of California, San Diego
During the past two decades numerous groups and individuals who were once coerced into sexual slavery or other forced labor by the Japanese government and corporations during the Asia Pacific War have filed international lawsuits to demand reparations. While much activism thus far has taken place in Japan and other parts of Asia, the litigation struggles have recently begun to involve the U.S. legal system. This paper explores the implications of the Americanization of the discourse on Japanese war crimes.
The U.S., Japanese and other governments maintain that the issue of Japanese war crimes reparations was settled by the 1952 San Francisco Peace Treaty. Yet, the Treaty does not preclude the rights of individuals to seek further compensation. A recently passed California state law allows its residents to sue local companies that benefited from wartime slave labor. Several former American POWs have filed lawsuits to obtain additional compensation. In Los Angeles, the survivors of Japanese military sexual enslavement are preparing to do the same.
The process of Americanization needs to be understood in the context of the diasporic movements of war memories. Americanization is a dual process: (1) the legal claims made in the U.S. against injustices of the formerly defeated enemy can obscure equally serious past and present incidents of American military violence, and thus reestablish the U.S. as the custodian of world peace and humanity; (2) the various legal processes may inadvertently reveal how profoundly the U.S. has been implicated in suppressing attempts to condemn Japanese wartime injustices.
Organizer: Naomi Fukumori, Ohio State University
Chair: Esperanza Ramirez-Christensen, University of Michigan
Discussant: Edith Sarra, Indiana University
This panel aims to explore the implications for the hermeneutics of classical Heian monogatari that its authors and readers were mainly women, a fact that while long taken for granted has not been distinctively foregrounded in orthodox scholarship. In particular, until recent years there has not been adequate attention to the ways in which these ancient female-authored texts might contribute to the elucidation of contemporary feminist concerns, among them the major issue of female representation in a patriarchal society.
It is the assumption in film and women’s studies in the West that narrative texts generally situate the spectator (viewer/reader) in the position of sharing the viewpoint or "gaze" of the text’s active figure, almost invariably male. As a corollary, female characters are objectified and put on display for the male protagonist’s, and hence the spectator’s, gratification. Clearly, these conclusions need to be modified in the case of texts authored by women or intended for female readership. How is the male gaze represented when the discursive agency lies with a woman narrator? Does the reader identify with, say, Genji’s assessment of women or with the women’s response to him? In short, how does the woman’s inscription as author, narrator, character, and reader complicate the otherwise culturally dominant male gaze in a patriarchal society?
The panel seeks first of all to find and articulate the female gaze in four Heian and Kamakura narratives: Ochikubo monogatari, Genji monogatari, Makura no sôshi, and Eiga monogatari. Ms. Fukumori will examine how the female-authored narrative consciously thematizes the psychological factors of love and desire in its portrayal of rear court power politics, and in the process constructs an alternative ethics and aesthetics of kingship. Ms. Ryu will dramatize the impact of a critical female reception through a deconstructive reading of Ochikubo monogatari; it reveals what the text’s historical reception as a didactic tale of the evil, abusive stepmother has obscured: namely, the emerging patriarchy’s repression of ancient matriarchal forces in the person of the "abused" step/mother. Finally, Ms. Selden will examine the critical implications of Ukifune’s progress from eroticized object of the male gaze to introspective, clear-eyed nun. The discussant will comment on theoretical issues raised by the papers and evaluate their contribution to contemporary feminist scholarship.
Deconstructing the Figure of Step/mother: The Web of the Maternal and the Erotic in Ochikubo monogatari
Catherine Youngkyung Ryu, University of California, Los Angeles
This paper aims to unravel the mythic, psychological, and ideological aspects interwoven in a tenth-century tale, Ochikubo monogatari. Conventional scholarship views this rich, ancient tale as a quintessential expression of mamako ijimetan (tales of stepdaughter abuse). The designation mamako ijimetan itself immediately identifies the stepmother as aggressor and the stepdaughter, Lady Ochikubo, as her victim. When the didactic theme of kanzen chôaku (praise virtue, chastise evil) is added to this hermeneutic, the stepmother becomes readily equated with the aku that is punished and the stepdaughter with the zen that is rewarded.
Rather than confirming aku and zen as antithetical moral concepts polarizing the positions of the stepmother and Lady Ochikubo, I will interpret them as dual aspects of the mother archetype, and explain the stepmother’s entangled relationship with Lady Ochikubo through the Jungian notion of the "mother-complex." By navigating through the web of psychological forces that interminably draw (step)mother and daughter toward one another, I will delineate the significance of the stepmother’s gaze, which is simultaneously maternal and erotic, vis-à-vis her own daughters, Lady Ochikubo, and Michiyori, who becomes Lady Ochikubo’s husband and avenges his wife’s alleged abuse. I will in the process demonstrate the ideological implications of a demystified feminist reading in which the tale reveals itself as an instance of mamahaha ijimetan (tale of stepmother abuse). In this deconstructive reversal, the sexual politics in Ochikubo monogatari emerges as a conflict between patriarchal and matriarchal forces, with patriarchy finally emerging as the new order with Michiyori’s victory over the matriarch.
From Erotic Object to Nunhood: The Potency of Ukifune’s Silent Gaze in Genji monogatari
Lili Selden, University of Notre Dame
One manifestation of the apparent privileging of the male gaze in Genji monogatari is through the depiction of Genji and other "connoisseurs" of women as figures whose artistic sensibilities and public demeanor are highly regarded by other characters. Another is the tale’s portrayal of "desirable" female characters as sweet, captivating, and responsive women of good breeding and discriminating taste, such as the heroine Murasaki who is brought up by Genji himself and whose portrayal therefore suggests the narrator’s internalization of its male protagonists’ perspective.
It is well to keep in mind, however, that the aesthetic of this gaze is in fact articulated by a highly literate member of the female gender and represents her view of the cultural order of her day. Moreover, the female narrator is not beyond undermining the moral worth of the male gaze by highlighting the self-serving motivations behind it, or by juxtaposing it with the internal speech or thoughts of its female objects and so relativizing it.
This paper will examine the complex ambiguities of the Genji’s narratorial stance as illustrated in the orchestration of the male and female gazes in the story of Ukifune. It will trace the heroine’s evolution from uncomprehending erotic object, to suicidal fugitive, to introspective, clear-eyed nun. Here it is instructive that the development of Ukifune’s own evaluative powers, her insight into her own precarious existence, is a response to her interaction with three suitors and constitutes, as it were, the female "countergaze" that finally resists and rejects the appropriative powers of the male. Significantly, Ukifune is surrounded by characters who speak intimately of, to, and for her, and who incessantly evaluate each other’s personal attributes as well as Ukifune’s. I argue that the apposition of this babble with Ukifune’s quiet yet steadfast gaze serves, in the closing chapters of the tale, to disable and silence the masculine prerogative of evaluating women that was thematized at the (all male) "rainy night discussion of women" (amayo no shina sadame) at the tale’s beginning.
Romancing the Political: The Construction of "Kingship" in Makura no sôshi and Eiga monogatari
Naomi Fukumori, Ohio State University
The Northern Fujiwara’s political stranglehold in the mid-Heian period not only altered the nature of imperial authority, but also terminated, in effect, some long-held, Chinese-influenced cultural practices which had symbolized the emperor’s power. One such practice was the compilation of imperially commissioned, kambun national histories, of which six were completed (now known collectively as Rikkokushi [The Six National Histories]). Additional national histories, commissioned in the first part of the tenth century, however, were never finished. By this time, the locus of political and cultural power had shifted from the emperor’s court to the Fujiwara-controlled empresses’ rear courts, where ladies-in-waiting to Fujiwara empresses were privy to the politics of Fujiwara hegemony. These women composed vernacular works which were centered around the lives of the political figures they served and which, most significantly, provide an alternate narrative of kingship.
This paper analyzes two such works, Makura no sôshi by Sei Shônagon and Eiga monogatari, traditionally attributed to Akazome Emon. The focus of investigation is the female narrators’ framing of the relationship between an imperial couple, Emperor Ichijô and Empress Teishi. Although Teishi lost political stature with the death of her father, the Fujiwara Regent Michitaka, both narrators portray a romantic love which binds the couple together until Teishi’s death.
This romancing of the political is the crucial element of kingship in women-authored texts of the rear court. Furthermore, it is this ethical and aesthetic valuation of romantic love, I argue, which distinguishes these texts from the previously male-centered records of the imperial court.
Organizer and Chair: Ellis Krauss, University of California, San Diego
Discussant: David Arase, Pomona College
This panel focuses on U.S.-Japan relations in the context of the new forms of institutionalized "governance" emerging in Asia. It is related to the panel proposed by Pempel on the private sector economic linkages in Asian multilateralism.
During the 1980s, scholars and journalists focused on the crucial bilateral relationship, especially U.S.-Japan trade friction. During the 1990s, however, new and unprecedented forms of multilateral institutions began appearing in Asia, for example, the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) forum for economic matters and the ASEAN Regional Forum (ARF) for security. The U.S. and Japan also attempted coordination in fiscal matters in response to the multilateral Asian economic crisis of 1997–98.
Despite these new and significant developments and a lot of separate research on either the U.S.-Japan relationship or Asian multilateralism there has been virtually no scholarship analyzing the linkage between the relationship and this new multilateral context. How has the new Asian multilateralism affected the styles and strategies of cooperation and competition between the U.S. and Japan? What roles have the two leading "players" in Asia performed in this new multilateral "governance"? What does the U.S.’s and Japan’s similar or competing goals and interests in the region bode for the future of forms of institutional coordination? Has regional identity been a consequence or a cause of the new structures?
To explore these questions this panel brings together one senior scholar (Krauss) and three junior scholars now doing research on related subjects. The panel focuses on the four most important dimensions of emerging "regional governance" in Asia: fiscal coordination (Katada); trade (Krauss); security (Ashizawa); and (national and regional) identity (Oros).
Cooperative Competition or Competitive Cooperation? U.S.-Japanese Interaction in Asian Financial Crisis Management, 1997–2000
Saori N. Katada, University of Southern California
The paper examines the nature of cooperation and competition between the two major creditor governments, the United States and Japan, in managing the Asian financial crisis. As the crisis hit the prospering East Asia in the early summer of 1997, the Japanese government took an active initiative in mitigating the crisis in Thailand. But later on, the leadership role shifted to the U.S. government and the IMF as the crisis spread to Indonesia and South Korea. While the Japanese government kept revisiting the possibility of alternative solutions to the crisis, the government has been slow in implementing its ideas.
The study focuses on the factors that have influenced the U.S.-Japanese dynamics in forming collective management of the financial crisis as well as Japan’s struggle to promote alternative solutions. There lies a tension between economic regionalization in Asia and the predominantly international financial crisis management structure dominated by the United States and the International Financial Institutions (IFIs). The study also extends its scope to the debates arising from the regional hegemonic competition at the multilateral level such as during G-7/G-8 summits and in the IFIs.
The U.S. and Japan in APEC’s EVSL Negotiations: Agriculture, Bilateralism, and Regional Multilateralism
Ellis Krauss, University of California, San Diego
Early Voluntary Sector Liberalization (EVSL) was an attempt in APEC, led by the U.S. and other major free trade economies, to lower or abolish tariffs in 15 sectors, 9 of them as a priority, in the Asia-Pacific region even before the next round of WTO negotiations. Japan and all the other APEC members initially agreed to EVSL in the 1997 APEC meetings in Vancouver. Japan soon, however, said it was going to opt out of the two agricultural sectors, fish and forestry products, based on its understanding that participation in particular sectors was "voluntary." The U.S. put tremendous pressure on Japan and other reluctant Asian countries to implement all nine sectors as a "package," claiming that this was necessary to gain agreement in APEC. The result was a public and messy conflict over the issue at the 1998 Kuala Lumpur APEC meetings, resulting in USTR Barshefsky even accusing Japan of trying to "buy votes" on this issue with their aid money. For the first time since it helped initiate APEC a decade earlier, Japan was isolated, the U.S. and Japan publicly clashed, and the normally consensual forum sustained one of its first and certainly most dramatic conflicts and failures.
This paper will use EVSL as a case study to look at U.S.-Japan relations in the context of Asia-Pacific regionalism, especially at the divergence in the U.S.’s and Japan’s domestic and international political economic interests and in their regional goals in APEC. It will explore and evaluate the strategies each used in this case to influence each other and the other regional actors, discussing the short and long-term consequences and implications of EVSL for both APEC and U.S.-Japan relations.
Japanese Foreign Policymaking toward the ARF: The Emergence of an Asian-Pacific Multilateral Security Institution and U.S.-Japan Relations
Kuniko Ashizawa, Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy
The study will examine the changing nature of Japanese foreign policy-making in the creation of the Asia Regional Forum (ARF). ARF’s creation as the first multilateral regional institution for security covering large sections of the Asia-Pacific region is one of the most important phenomena in post-Cold War regional politics in the Asia-Pacific in general and for the U.S.-Japanese bilateral relationship in particular. Among the questions to be addressed are: What was Japan’s role in ARF’s creation and development? How did the complex U.S.-Japanese relationship affect Japanese decision-making towards the establishment the ARF? In other words, to what extent did the changes in U.S.-Japanese relations since the end of Cold War influence the nature of their bilateral security relationship, and how did this influence the creation of the ARF? What is the dynamic between the changing nature of Japan’s traditional bilateralism with the U.S. and Japan’s evolving policies toward security multilateralism in the Asia-Pacific region?
The study will draw on my dissertation research in Tokyo, which will include extensive interviews of Japanese policy makers and examinations of government documents, newspapers and academic literatures in the Japanese language. Consequently, in this study, the dynamic U.S.-Japan bilateral relationship will be presented in light of how Japanese decision makers perceived this relationship and its evolution over time. Recognizing the need to incorporate this methodological approach within IR scholarship, the study will also explore the questions of how and to what extent the structural factors (distribution of power and degree of interdependence) and other factors (cost-benefit calculations, principled beliefs of decision makers, and epistemic communities) shaped the perception of Japanese decision makers toward U.S.-Japan relations and ARF.
Multilateral Governance and Japan’s New Regional Grand Vision: Policies towards APEC and ARF
Andrew Oros, Columbia University
This paper combines research on the theoretical question of how national identity—what I term a "Grand Vision of the State"—affects the politics of foreign policy making domestically, specifically in this case with empirical research on Japan’s growing role in Asian regional institutions. Japan carefully has cultivated its relationships with its Asian neighbors throughout the postwar period, but only recently has it done so within the context of regional institutions. International and structural factors provide part of the explanation for this shift, in particular the end of Cold Wax-era bipolar competition and the resultant lessening of pressure on Japan by the United States simply to support U.S. objectives in the region. Also important, however, is a change within Japan domestically: a new regional grand vision of itself as an Asian nation. This shift in Japan’s regional grand vision of itself led to noticeable changes in its support of regional initiatives vis-à-vis Western states, in particular the United States.
Japan’s regional initiatives have tended to focus on economic activities as seen by its efforts to create Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) together with Australia, another state seeking to re-define its place in the region. As Japan’s security role within the Japan-U.S. alliance has increased in the 1990s, however, Japan’s security role within Asia also has increased, as seen by Japan’s active participation in the ASEAN Regional Forum (ARF). This paper argues that a focus on Japan’s changing regional grand vision in Asia itself offers a partial explanation for its new policies in both the economic and security realms.
Organizer: Paul Noguchi, Bucknell University
Chair: L. Keith Brown, University of Pittsburgh
Discussant: David W. Plath, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
Keywords: material culture, consumption, Japan.
Anthropology’s major contribution to the study of material culture lies in its attempts to reveal the complex connections between commodities and consumption. Coupled with this effort has been the task of identifying the relationships between the material and non-material realms of culture. Curiously, there has been scarce attention given to the analysis of material culture in Japan which focuses on objects and the unexpected contradictions which emerge as a result of their consumption. This panel seeks to fill this gap by bringing together papers that target such contradictions. Each panelist contextualizes a familiar commodity which involves mass participation and mass consumption. William Kelly raises the question why the commodification of Japanese baseball fans falls so short of the vast marketing of American sports, a phenomenon that cannot be completely explained by the political economy of franchising and marketing. Merry White demonstrates how the Japanese version of Italian food reveals both the taste for exotic adventure and the evocation of home and nation. Paul Noguchi asks why in high-tech Japan does the low-tech umbrella remain the number one lost article at the Tokyo Station Lost and Found Office. Christine Yano investigates why the Hello Kitty line of goods ostensibly and originally marketed for children has now targeted the young female adult as well. Consumption provides ideal sites for the construction of human values in the often contradictory and inconsistent arena of the mundane world. Even the humblest of objects can mask its actual significance and its imprint locally and globally.
Sporting Goods and Self-Fashioning: Why Don’t the Japanese Want to "Be Like Mike"©?
William Kelly, Yale University
The material culture of modern sports spectatorship is logo-centric. Baseball caps, T-shirts, and mock uniforms proclaim allegiance to one’s favorite athlete and/or team. Indeed, branding athletes and marketing brands drive a multi-billion-dollar global sports industry. However, this paper begins from the observation that this public display of individual and team affiliation is near ubiquitous among American and European sports fans but it is much less common in Japan.
This is counter-intuitive, given the much greater emphasis on relational and contextual bases of selfhood and personal identity in modern Japan. Far more than the American self, should not the Japanese self, as it is drawn into the highly commodified economy of spectator sports, be predisposed to fashion itself through identification with sports hero "others" and to express that through the logos of such fandom?
Yet this is not the case, and the explanation offered here begins with economic and sociological factors, including the several distortions that professional baseball has brought to Japanese sports and the limited time that (uniformed) students and workers have to don and display athletic wear.
Still, the immense emotional and monetary investment in animation characters and other logo-centric commodities like Hello Kitty paraphernalia lead one to suspect that there still might be a lucrative market for displaying sports affiliation. That it has not emerged speaks fundamentally, I argue, to an ontological distinction between fantasy and real "others," which contribute, respectively, to the very different notions of "self-image" and "self-identity."
Ultimately, then, this is an essay on selfhood under conditions of late capitalism and on what it is that people seek to express through branded commodities.
Aoyama Italiano: Itameshi and a Yearning for Home in Globalizing Japan
Merry I. White, Boston University
A simple platter of spaghetti bolognese reveals and illuminates the contradictions of Japanese globalization: the Japanese version of Italian food may be seen as commodified yearning for exotic adventure as well as an evocation of the family, the home, and the nation imagined.
The platter of spaghetti with tomato meat sauce is well known in the cuisine that has been called itameshi in Japan. This "domesticated" foreign cuisine has become the most sought after in Japan. Italy has become the number one destination for middle-aged couples, honeymooners, and young women on their own. While some of this tourism is specialized and sophisticated, catering to well-developed tastes for "authentic" Italy, some is carefully calculated to reinforce Japanese images of Italy created in Japan.
Italian entrepreneurs, together with Japanese expatriates in Italy, have helped to provide for Japanese visitors both the "expected Italy," confirming the images created by media and advertising, and a sense of transport and surprise, confirming the trip as personal transformation. These meanings are subsumed in the consumption of a dish of pasta which evokes both the foreign and simultaneously the deepest images of family (mother), home (furusato), and Japan itself (containing family, mother, the imagined premodern rural).
I will describe the contradiction between the quest for furusato and the safety of home and the extrapolations of this yearning into a marketable trend for the foreign, and explore the possible relationship between this contradiction and those of new evocations of nihonjinron, as paradoxically seen in the marketing of this foreign foodstuff.
"Mi Kasa Su Kasa": Umbrellas and the Tokyo Station Lost and Found Office
Paul Noguchi, Bucknell University
This paper explores lost articles reported to the Tokyo Station Lost and Found Office and questions the conventional wisdom that assumes the portable telephone or some other form of high-tech electronic gadgetry commands top ranking for recovered articles. Rather it is the common, low-tech umbrella that continues to be the number one lost article. Why has this humble accessory lingered in top place for all these years? The paper explores the historical and cultural context of umbrellas in Japan as well as the annual occurrence of a rainy season. The paper also examines the place of umbrellas in popular culture, in particular their portrayal in Japanese art, literature, music, and film. The data include interview responses of office personnel, statistical information, and results from a questionnaire distributed to over two hundred commuters about their lost articles.
Despite the fluctuations in the economic cycle, the advancement of technology, and the ebb and flow of fads and fetishes, the umbrella still reigns as the number one lost article. The number reaches unimaginable proportions in storage facilities. In contrast with strategies for solid waste management, source reduction (minimize the amount of material, extend its useful life, etc.) does not appear to be the solution to the problem of unclaimed, homeless umbrellas. Even educating the public has had limited success. Resale and recycling seem to hold more promise. The paper raises the question of what becomes disposable in a disposable society and the consequences of planned obsolescence and conspicuous consumption in a throwaway society.
Confounding Kitty: Dual-Marketing of Japanese Cute Products
Christine R. Yano, University of Hawaii, Manoa
The concept of kawaii (cute) possesses both a visual and emotional dimension in its invocation of sentimentality and nostalgia. Japan’s highly profitable Sanrio Company, Ltd. has been in the business of marketing kawaii since the inception of its flagship character, Hello Kitty, in 1974. That cat—with its oversized head and mouthless countenance—has adorned numerous pencils, erasers, coin purses, and other goods. Originally targeted as a youth/child market, consumption in Japan has extended to female teens and young adults. Adult goods include surfboards, cars, vacuum cleaners, cosmetics, cellular phones, and condoms. In Japan it is possible to buy oneself a Kitty cocoon of consumption which lasts from birth to marriage, and into a succeeding generation with mother-daughter teams of customers. With net sales of 121 billion yen (approximately $968 million) in 1997, Sanrio stands at the apex of kawaii consumer culture which crosses generational borders.
This paper analyzes the gendered, cross-generational appeal of this overtly infantilized interpretation of a domesticated animal, Hello Kitty. By examining the dual-marketing of Hello Kitty in Japan as published in the quarterly magazine/catalogue Kitty Goods Collection, as well as interviews with adult consumers, this paper theorizes on the concept and consumption of cute, and its implications for gender, class, identity, and culture.
Organizer: Akiko Takenaka O’Brien, Yale University
Chair and Discussant: Michael S. Molasky, Connecticut College
Keywords: Japan, Asia Pacific War, memory.
According to his published oeuvre, the career of world-renowned Japanese architect Tange Kenzo begins with the Hiroshima Peace Memorial of 1954. Nowhere discussed are his winning wartime competition entries for colonial projects in Thailand and Shanghai. Such an inconvenient past has been erased from his visual resume, and his postwar memorial to peace appears as a project that built his career on a clean slate
More often than not, our current views of the Asia Pacific War are based on information that has been filtered at some point by a conscious or unconscious appropriation of memory. This panel addresses those transformations of Japanese memory from both the periphery and the center, looking at collective as well as personal memory.
Greg Guelcher analyzes how ex-colonists of Manchuria have spun their wartime experience in postwar narratives to create an acceptable memory of their lives in Manchukuo to present their fellow countrymen. Yoko Genka investigates the decision to promote battlefield tourism in Okinawa as initiated by both American and Okinawan officials. Akiko Takenaka O’Brien reconstructs prewar popular perceptions of the Yasukuni Shrine by examining its significance in the lives of the lower-middle-class Tokyoites. Greg Johnson focuses on memory on a more personal level: transgenerational memory—wartime experiences as they have been conveyed to the next generation—is analyzed using an ethnographic framework.
The work of this panel demonstrates that the various ways the experience of war is historicized is fundamentally affected by complicated and convenient modes of remembering. Understanding the mechanisms of memory—both collective and personal—is crucial for any critical assessment of Japan’s role in the Asia Pacific War.
Constructing an Acceptable Past: Postwar Narratives of the Japanese Agricultural Colonists
Greg P. Guelcher, Morningside College
"The definition of a presentable postwar past," Carol Gluck suggests, "is socially constituted. As time passes and attitudes change, so does the definition of presentability." The shifting self-perceptions of the ex-agricultural colonists in Manchuria illustrate the transformation well.
Initially, symbolizing as they did Japanese wartime aggression against China, the ex-colonists had to maintain a discrete silence about their lives in Manchukuo. A Japanese society eager to forget the war and proceed with domestic economic reconstruction generally met the ex-colonists’ efforts to elicit sympathy for their postwar losses with feigned indifference or outright hostility. Thus rebuffed, they learned to keep their own counsel. Early accounts of the colonial experience tended to be privately-published affairs intended for the ex-colonists’ own enjoyment. Not until the 1970s, paralleling the official restoration of formal diplomatic relations between Japan and China, did pioneering individuals "go public" with their life stories. By the mid-1980s, and likely encouraged by the media attention and sympathy lavished on visiting "war orphans" from Northeast China, the trickle of personal reminiscences became a veritable torrent of literature.
Quantity, of course, guaranteed neither quality nor comprehensiveness. The colonists instead embraced the newly sympathetic atmosphere and penned cathartic accounts privileging their own travails in Manchuria. This paper, then, supports Gluck’s observation; through a close "textual" reading of written and oral accounts, it will identify prevalent themes in this postwar discourse and demonstrate how the ex-colonists minimized their own role in furthering Japanese empire with a carefully crafted and highly myopic "narrative of suffering."
The Admiral and the Tourist: On Okinawan Battlefield Tourism
Yoko Genka, George Mason University
In the 1960s, both American and Okinawan officials of U.S. occupied Okinawa began developing tourism as the islands’ major industry. Besides providing sites for experiencing the history and culture of the Ryukyu kingdom as well as for maritime leisure activities, battlefield tourism also took shape at that time. To wit, the Japanese Navy bunker complex was excavated and turned into a sightseeing spot in 1969. A late 1960s brochure by the Okinawa Tourism Development Corporation, the organization that developed the war site as a tourist destination, describes this new tourist attraction as follows: "Vice Admiral Minoru Ota, Commanding Officer of the Japanese Navy and his 4,000 men committed suicide in this underground headquarters on June 14, 1945 after having shared in a hard-fought battle during World War II." In addition to restoring the bunker, the corporation built a "Navy Monument" dedicated to the memory of Ota and his men. Why and how did such a development occur during the U.S. occupation? Why was this site selected over what had been the Army Underground Headquarters at Shun? Focusing on this particular site, my paper will examine how battlefield tourism in Okinawa has emerged within the discourse of historic and cultural tourism. Ultimately, how does battlefield tourism articulate with the other forms of tourism?
Lost Memories, Veiled Ideologies: Yasukuni Shrine and State Shintô, 1869–1945
Akiko Takenaka O’Brien, Yale University
Yasukuni Shrine enshrines the spirit of those who died fighting for Imperial Japan from the Boshin War to the Asia Pacific War, and since 1954, the deceased members of the Self Defense Force. From 1869 to 1945, Yasukuni Shrine topped the hierarchy of regional shrines (gokoku Jinja) and war memorials constructed throughout Japan in veneration of State Shinto. The shrine today is imbued with ideological implications, and renewed government interaction with shrine activities quickly raises the question of a resurgent Japanese imperialism.
The political controversy overshadows the important question of the role played by Yasukuni Shrine in the everyday life of the lower-middle-class Tokyoites. The shrine was often depicted in literature and was a popular theme of woodblock prints. Festivals, circuses, and horse races held in the shrine compound have always attracted popular participation. This paper investigates the popular opinion on Yasukuni Shrine and State Shintô from 1869 to 1945 in order to examine what some historians call the "collective amnesia" of postwar Japan. The Shrine will be examined not only for its political significance but also for its ideological implications as an architectural space.
Understanding the prewar popular opinion of Yasukuni Shrine and State Shintô will bring to light the difference between what people were thinking before 1945 and what they later believed they had been thinking. This will not only illustrate the shift in popular opinion of State Shintô (and Shintô in general), but also uncover specific components of those ideologies and sentiments that have been the object of collective amnesia since 1945.
"Mother Said She Grew Up with the War": A Study of Transgenerational Japanese Memories of the Pacific War
Gregory S. Johnson, Indiana University
Japan’s public memory of the Pacific War, as narrated in school textbooks, public rites, official statements, etc., is the subject of world-wide research and commentary. The intergenerational transference of private memories of the Pacific War is equally important, but largely neglected.
This paper examines transgenerational memory, the experiences of wartime childhood conveyed from parents to their children born after the war. It initiates an examination of a space between oral history and oral tradition. What role do private first person narratives have in the construction of public Japanese memory? How does public memory affect private memory? How is private memory of war conveyed? How is it gendered? How have parental narratives influenced views on 21st-century Japan’s role in the world?
The concept of transgenerational or intergenerational memory is used in Holocaust studies, but is not widely applied elsewhere. Family folklorists and historians have suggested gender differences and politicization in transmission, reception, and interpretation of family narratives, and these are explored. This study finds common mechanisms for transference of diverse private memory narratives, suggests relationships between parental memory and second generation attitudes, and asserts that study of private memory transmission is critical to understand the meanings imbedded in public Japanese memory of the Pacific War.
Organizer and Chair: David (Max) Moerman, Columbia University
Keywords: Japan, India, Buddhism.
While the importance of China and Korea in the formation of Japan’s religious culture has long been recognized, the place of India has remained comparatively unexamined. Yet as the ultimate source of Japan’s Buddhist traditions, India has had a profound influence on Japanese cultural history informing not only its religious but also its literary, artistic, and political traditions. As a land richly imagined if rarely visited, India represented a powerful and elusive presence: a sort of vanishing point on the religious horizon. Buddhists in premodern as well as in modern Japan attempted, through a range of cultural strategies, to close the spatial and temporal gap separating them from this distant ideal.
Inspired by the AAS challenge to think collaboratively across the borders of discipline and area, this panel attempts a subtle but fundamental reorientation of scholarly perspective to view the history of Japanese Buddhist culture from a South and Southeast Asian rather than North Asian vantage point. Each of the four papers considers a different chronological period and different type of source material—classical Buddhist statuary, medieval temple landscapes, early modern cartography, and modern travel narratives—to reconsider certain shared scholarly assumptions. The panel as a whole asks how a critical attention to South Asia might suggest possibilities for an alternative history of Japanese Buddhist culture. We have chosen to forgo a discussant so as to allow and encourage a more participatory forum for discussion and debate.
A South Asian Component in the Buddhist Statuary of Classical Japan
Mimi Hall Yiengpruksawan, Yale University
It is well known that, for the formative period of classical Japanese art and culture from the sixth through the eighth century, the impact of Chinese and Korean norms were significant on all levels of political, social, and cultural discourse. The Nara capital that emerged by the late seventh century belonged to a network of regional centers across Eurasia whose primary link was the Silk Road and its itinerant communities of traders and Buddhist monks. Not surprisingly the technologies and styles of Central Asian, Chinese, and Korean art and architecture, along with the producers themselves, made their way to Nara to flourish there as the vanguards of an emergent classical Japanese Buddhist visual culture.
What is less well known is the role of South and Southeast Asian elements in the development of this classical art culture. Sources mention Buddhist monks from India, Cambodia, and other Southeast Asian cultures resident in Nara from the early eighth century. It is probable that with them came South Asian technological and stylistic traditions. This paper explores these components in eighth-century Buddhist statuary in order to critically analyze possible South Asian features of what to date has been discussed only in terms of North Asian parameters. The identification of South Asian elements in Buddhist statuary of the classical era in Japan has important ramifications for understanding later architectural and sculptural developments. It is hoped that, by looking outside and beyond the standard frames of analysis, another picture of classical Japan will begin to emerge.
Myoe’s Mount Lanka: Emptiness, Landscape, and Poetic Imagination
Ryuichi Abe, Columbia University
Among many idiosyncrasies that gave renown to the Kamakura Buddhist figure Myoe is his desire to make a trip to ancient Buddhist sites in India where the Tathagata Sakyamuni was said to have delivered the Dharma. In his youth Myoe made a few attempts to actually depart to India, attempts which he abandoned only by the words the kami Kasuga, who decreed through a shamaness’ mouth that Myoe’s foremost duty was to remain in the nation of Japan and promote the Dharma there. Myoe never gave up his desire to experience Buddhist India, however. By inventing liturgies celebrating Buddha’s birth, praising his attaining enlightenment, and commemorating his death, and establishing these events as annual ceremonies at his monastery Kozanji, Myoe worked to reenact through rituals glorious moments of the Buddha’s life and capture these moments as his own intimate experiences.
Perhaps the most extravagant among such efforts by Myoe to internalize within his imaginative experience Buddhist India was his attempt to poetically transform the entire environs of his mountain hermitage into the island of Lanka, the venue of the Buddha’s preaching of the Lankavatara Sutra. In 1216 Myôe named a mountain just behind and north of Kozanji "Ryogasen, " or Mount Lanka, and built two huts, one at the foot of the mountain, and the other on the summit. Based on the sutra’s story, Myoe named each of these huts Rababo (King Ravana’s Pavilion)—the place on the shore at which the ruler of the island nation welcomed the Buddha, who landed there following his trip to the Naga king’s undersea palace—and Kakuden (Flower Palace)—Ravana’s palace on the top of the Lanka mountains, where the Buddha revealed profound Yogacara theories of consciousness, delusion and enlightenment. In the same year Myoe began composing a series of autobiographical poems in waka, in which he described the landscape of his Mount Lanka as well as his daily meditative and ritual practices at these two huts, the practices that gave grounds for the poetic transformation of his mountain hermitage into the sacred site of the Buddha’s celebrated sermon.
This study aims at analyzing the intertextual relationship between the sutra and Myoe’s poems and by doing so strives to understand the power of poetic imagination engendered by the ritual and meditative exercises employed by Myoe, the powers that enabled him not only to transcend the geographic distance between India and Japan but also to traverse the temporal distance and arrive at the land on which the Buddha walked.
Imaginary Cartographies: Jambudvipa and the Japanese World Map
David (Max) Moerman, Columbia University
The Gotenjiku zu, the earliest Japanese world map, drawn by a Buddhist priest in the fourteenth century, represents a geography anachronistic and doubly foreign. Depicting Jambudvipa, the world continent of classical Buddhist cosmography, the map describes a world centered on India and bounded by Central Asia, Sri Lanka, Persia, and Nepal. China is represented only by cartouche at the continent’s eastern edge and Japan a mere suggestion in the ocean beyond. It is based almost entirely on the Da Tang xiyu ji, Xuanzhuang’s seventh-century account of his pilgrimage to India. In Japan the map was preserved in temples as a sacred object and served as a ritual aid for internalized journeys to the distant lands of Buddhist origins. One medieval copyist described "feeling as if I were traveling through India" as he traced out Xuanzhuang’s itinerary.
Yet the map was more than simply another example of the medieval Japanese obsession with India, for it was copied and printed well into the nineteenth century with Europe and the Americas crowded within the borders of later editions. The continued popularity of such a premodern religious geography many centuries after European style world maps were in common use underscores the symbolic value of India for Japanese Buddhists of the modern as well as the medieval period. This paper explores the religious and ideological implications of this cartographic tradition and traces the map’s early modern history to examine the multiple and contested meanings of Japanese cultural and religious identity.
Late-Nineteenth-Century Japanese Buddhist Travel and the Construction of Modern Buddhism
Richard Jaffe, North Carolina State University
With the opening of Japan to foreign travel in the latter half of the nineteenth century Japanese Buddhists began a period of exploration of lands they long had contemplated but for centuries had been unable to visit. Between 1885 and 1905 numerous Japanese Buddhist clerics and scholars traveled to South and Southeast Asia to practice in Theravada monasteries, to study Pali and Sanskrit, and to make pilgrimages to sites associated with the life of Shakyamuni and the history of the tradition. Among those making the journey to Buddhist South and Southeast Asia were some of the most important Buddhist clerics of the day: Oda Tokuno, Shimaji Mokurai, Nanjo Bunyu, Shaku Soen, and Takakusu Junjiro, to name a few.
These travelers returned to Japan bearing a wealth of information about Buddhism in the form of travel diaries, photographs, relics, and art objects. Entering Japan at the critical juncture between the suppression of Buddhism during the Bakumatsu and early Meiji years and the growth of Japanese imperialist and Buddhist missionary aspirations at the turn of the century, these images of other Asian Buddhisms played a central role in the repositioning of Japanese Buddhism in Asia. This paper examines the underlying motivations for these diverse travels to Buddhist Asia and discusses the function of these imported traces of South and Southeast Asian Buddhism in the construction of modern Japanese Buddhism and in the reconceptualization of Buddhism as one of the great "world religions."
Organizer: Nina Cornyetz, New York University
Chair: Paul Anderer, Columbia University
Discussant: Keiko McDonald, University of Pittsburgh
Keywords: film, postwar, eroticism, sexuality.
With the lifting of wartime censorship Japanese movies began depicting naked bodies and (heterosexual) sex with a vengeance. Eventually pornography and mainstream cinema alike overwhelmingly relied on female nudity-as-spectacle, and violence against women as constitutive to cinematic eroticism. Our panel focuses on films that offer modes of sexual or erotic gazing alternative to this "idiom" of erotics.
Christine Marran identifies an equation of the sexual violation of women with revolutionary, "overcoming modernity" politics as a corollary to this misogynist cinematic idiom. Marran discusses how 1960s and 70s films by Tanaka Noboru and Matsumoto Toshio challenged this configuration of gendered power relations. Nina Cornyetz argues that Woman in the Dunes (1964) incorporates, yet de-eroticizes, developing norms of sexual gazing: a nude, bound woman as spectacle; rape. Ultimately, the eroticism of the film, Cornyetz contends, is indebted to a "feminine" decentralization of sexual tensions, and an eroticized male body. In yet another configuration of alternate sexual power politics, the female dominatrixes of A New Love in Tokyo (1994), holds Tamae Prindle, market their sexuality as soul-less signs (kigo) to male consumers seeking liberation from sociocultural pressures. In this depiction of Tokyo as a "Sexual Babylon," only the "signs of bodies" matter.
Overcoming Misogynist Modernism in Contemporary Film
Christine Marran, Princeton University
There are at least two directors, Tanaka Noboru and Matsumoto Toshio, who challenge a dominant idiom for expressing configurations of power relations in 1960s film. In the sixties, the ideological warfare that continued through the post-occupation years was often carried out in film through the sexual violation of women. Put differently, misogynist behavior in film of this time was also a political statement framed often in terms of a seemingly unconscious nationalist "overcoming modernity" ideology. The portrayal of violent heterosexual relations was thus an important way in which post-fifties Japanese filmmakers articulated their politics. My concern in this paper is to show how sex was used in sixties and early seventies pink/new wave film to signify political relations that extend beyond the equation of transgressive sexual behavior with revolutionary politics. If we incorporate the politics of gender and sexuality into our reading of radical sixties film, we find that what has been taken to be a revolutionary modernist cinema is also a nationalist one, framing revolution as overcoming modernity. Tanaka and Matsumoto’s films challenge this false alignment of sexual violation and revolutionary politics.
Gazing Otherwise: Alternate Erotics in Woman in the Dunes
Nina Cornyetz, New York University
From the mid-1960s onward in Japan, not only pornography, "pink films" and "Nikkatsu roman poruno" (Nikkatsu romantic-pornography), but mainstream cinema as well, made male domination of women the virtual idiom of Japanese cinematic eroticism. In 1964 scriptwriter Abe Kôbô and Teshigahara Hiroshi—the first Japanese director nominated for an Academy Award—released Woman in the Dunes. Winner of the Cannes Film Festival jury prize, the film was celebrated for its stunning cinematography and eroticism.
At first glance faithful to the "idiom," Woman in the Dunes incorporates many of the developing technologies of erotic gazing: female nudity as spectacle; a bound and gagged woman; a rape of a woman. However, unlike the contemporaneous erotic (nikutai) Japanese films, which often depended upon the abuse of women for spectator titillation, the scenes of bondage, rape, and so forth in Woman in the Dunes do not titillate. In the (attempted) rape scene, for example, not only are the prurient villagers depicted as gross, bestial voyeurs, there is no female nudity, no close-ups on eroticized body parts, and the attempt is unsuccessful—in short, the rape is not eroticized. Hence, I argue that first, the developing codes of cinematic eroticism dependent on the domination of women are here cited in order to be challenged. Second, I will contend that the film’s eroticism conversely relies on an alternate, decentralized ("feminine") sexual economy that also resolutely eroticizes the male body.
Sexuality as a Sign (kigo): Takahashi Tomoaki’s A New Love in Tokyo
Tamae Prindle, Colby College
If Wendy Brown is right in saying that postmodernity means "fragmentation without corresponding wholes . . . social surfaces without depth," Japanese culture in the 1980s and 90s was more postmodern than ever before. The "essentialist" cultural dualism eroded. Together with the slurred definition of "postmodernism," even the distinction between pornography and nonpornography lost meaning. The takeover of spiritualism by materialism transformed Tokyo into the "World’s Biggest Sex Babylon."
Takahashi Tomoaki’s film, A New Love in Tokyo (1994), takes us to the cultural mazes in Tokyo. It depicts an SM (sadomasochist) Club in Shibuya where the "Queens" whip their male "slaves." Off-duty, they frolic naked in the ocean after burying their blindfolded male friends in the sand. Men still hold the buying power, but women have learned to sell their physical images only as signs (kigô). Their glamorous appearance and the pang of ecstasy they beat into men’s bodies are their merchandise. Bodies serve as signs flagging women’s hidden power and men’s catharsis for their strained pride. It is the body that lubricates the materialist Babylon.
My paper studies, in reference to contemporary Tokyo culture, how A New Love in Tokyo parodies some feminists’ wish for androgyny and suggests that Japanese women are marketing sexuality as signs (as Araaki’s photographs symbolize) divorced from love or romance, which men with deep-seated mother-complexes buy as a ticket to freedom from their sociopolitical pressures. The postmodern society leaves alone the matching and/or mismatching of the intentions.
Organizer: Hugh de Ferranti, University of Michigan
Chair: Shuhei Hosokawa, Tokyo Institute of Technology
Discussant: Junko Oba, Wesleyan College
Keywords: music, Japan, popular, performance.
Accounts of Japanese music are often framed in terms of arguments about the grounds for its modernity, popularity, or traditionality. The papers in this panel address restrictive assumptions inherent in interpretations of diverse genres of twentieth-century music: Tokita contests the idea that only Western-styled, markedly new performing arts could be effective vehicles for the expression of Japanese experiences of modernity early in the century, and demonstrates that naniwa-bushi emerged as a modern style in a traditional medium of musical narrative performance. Driscoll argues that the success of the Pizzicato Five group during the time of the "bubble" economy subverts the customary dichotomous schema whereby Japanese popular music is defined and identified solely in terms of its Euro-American antecedents and influences. The concept of "Japanese music" is also addressed by de Ferranti, not in its relation to "Western pop," but in its exclusivity as a disciplinary construct that has discouraged dialogue with research on twentieth-century popular music. McKnight argues for an understanding of Akita Masami (Merzbow)’s music and ideas as not merely a militantly "unpopular" musical subculture, but a response to the ideology of information culture which is grounded in psychoanalytical practice. It is intended both that the panel problematize discourse on Japanese music and specific genres, and that its juxtaposition of presenters from diverse disciplinary and cultural backgrounds stimulate consideration of complementarity of perspectives in this research area.
"Japanese Music" Can Be Popular
Hugh de Ferranti, University of Michigan
Currently there are signs of a splintering of research on Japanese music along lines of the traditionality or non-traditionality of its subject matter: most musicologists devote their attention to genres that had origin prior to the late nineteenth century—much as they have since Japanese music first became a topic of academic study—while work on popular music of the last 100 years is proliferating among researchers trained in cultural studies disciplines such as history, sociology and anthropology. Yet modern popular music and Japanese so-called traditional music are not intrinsically distinguishable as research topics. The discursive sphere of "Japanese music" has long been moderated by conservative policies of academic organizations within Japan, and delimited elsewhere by a disregard for syncretic music in the work of representative scholars. This paper will first outline the terms in which "Japanese music" has been defined, then suggest grounds for a more inclusive concept, as well as research methods whereby popular music can be better understood in relation to other musical practices in Japan. Even some of the most recent Japanese music has textual and contextual elements of continuity with traditional music, although those elements are for the most part not immediately discernible. Such music is at once intrinsically Japanese and a part of global popular musical practice, yet does not conform to the "World Music" market’s essentializing insistence that modern popular music of a given culture should sound recognizably indigenous.
Dis-communication: Noise Music in Post-80s Japan<