[ Panels by World Area Main Menu ]
Organizer: William M. Fletcher III, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
Chair: Gary D. Allinson, University of Virginia
Discussants: Gary D. Allinson, University of Virginia; Laura Hein, Northwestern University
Keywords: Japan, Interwar period, state-business relations, business/economic history, political economy.
The papers in this panel present a new approach to government-business relations in Interwar Japan. Most studies have analyzed such ties in terms of bureaucratic dominance, the use of governmental policies to benefit the zaibatsu or particular industries, situations of conditional asymmetry in which one side has a temporary advantage, or as a roughly equal relationship of "reciprocity." Avoiding the conceptual straitjackets of these models, each of these three papers depicts a continuous and dynamic contestation for influence between the state and business organizations in highly unstable economic circumstances, what one might call a pattern of "competitive negotiation."
Von Staden’s paper finds that even in the iron and steel industry, which received heavy government support from the start, both sides negotiated as independent actors about major policy decisions. Deliberative councils (shingikai) became important channels for planning the amalgamation of nearly all of the industry into one firm. Fletcher’s study of the cotton spinning sector argues that the trauma of the Great Depression, far from hastening progress toward a state-managed economy in the early 1930s, instead confirmed that industry’s tradition of self-governance. Neither side influenced the other very much. Kimura’s analysis of Japanese business diplomacy traces the complex impact of two major business missions to the United States and England. If they did little to blunt the forces of nationalism that eventually led to war in 1937 and 1941, they had significant economic effects in expanding Japanese trade in the short term and laying a basis for the post-1945 integration of Japan into the world business community.
Toward a "Managed Economy"? A Case Study of the Japan Spinners Association, 1927–1936
William M. Fletcher III, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
This paper challenges the common interpretation that the early 1930s marked a major change in the relationship between the Japanese government and the private sector in the direction of a "managed economy" directed by the government. Often, scholars cite the Important Industries Control Law (IICL) of 1931, a measure designed to deal with the impact of the Great Depression, as extending state control through the encouragement and regulation of cartels. This case study of the cotton spinning sector shows, however, that in the early 1930s executives not only maintained their self-governance through the Japan Spinners Association (DaiNihon Boseki Rengokai/Boren) but also sought to extend their control of the entire cotton textile sector, then the nation’s largest and most competitive industry.
In fact, the Spinners Association did not seek government approval as a cartel recognized by the IICL. Furthermore, the spinners resorted even more to what had become a traditional practice of production cutbacks, despite increasing criticism from other business sectors, labor leaders, and officials. Firms themselves also took responsibility for overcoming the effects of the Great Depression through increasing efficiency and diversifying production. Irked by challenges to their independence by export associations and industrial associations of weaving firms, Boren in 1935 began to expand its formal authority over all of the groups. In brief, autonomous control in this prominent sector remained vibrant up to the start of the China War in July 1937.
Government and Business Relations: Independent Actors in Negotiating the Amalgamation of the Japanese Iron and Steel Industry (1916–1934)
Peter von Staden, London School of Economics
The presentation will challenge two perceptions: that 1) inherent to the Japanese way of political decision making, a kuromaku (black curtain) exists between those who partake in the "real" process and those on the outside; and 2) the government dominated the Deliberative Councils (shingikai) through which negotiations with the iron and steel industry occurred during the Taisho and early Showa period. This era merits special attention because it witnessed a dramatic development in the merging of almost all firms into one company.
Some observers have argued that, since the bureaucracy selected the shingikai participants, it orchestrated the outcome. In fact, shingikai records of business/government negotiations on the iron and steel industry’s amalgamation suggest that, whatever back-room dealing may have occurred, business considered them as important channels for meaningful discussions and decisions on major policy issues.
The records also suggest that both sides saw themselves as independent actors. Scholars have often contended that business was dependent on government, or vice versa, because of zaibatsu funding for political parties, the close ties between officials and certain companies since the Meiji era, and the economic gains for some industries from government policies. However, the findings here suggest that the economic and political fluidity of this period inhibited the development of a sense of reciprocity or a quid pro quo mode of interaction. In such circumstances, important negotiations between government and business may be overt and take place in open fora such as the shingikai.
Japanese Business Diplomacy in the Interwar Period
Masato Kimura, Harvard University
This paper argues that Japanese business diplomacy during the Interwar era, despite some clear failures, had important short-term and long-term impacts on Japan’s international economic relations. Although the topic of the influence of the business community on foreign policy has engendered much controversy, few specific case studies exist. This analysis focuses on two major Japanese business missions to the United States and England, one in 1921–22 and one in 1937.
In both instances, the privately organized missions strived to promote peaceful trade and commercial relations. The first mission reflected a desire by Japanese business leaders to participate fully in the world business community, just as Japan’s participation in the Washington Conference of 1921–22 symbolized Japan’s recognition as a major world power. The second mission in 1937 aimed at encouraging peaceful relations between the United States, England, and Germany and reinforcing the importance of free trade as opposed to autarky and economic nationalism as threats to trade and peace.
Each mission succeeded in expanding Japan’s international economic and commercial connections. The emissaries had more difficulty in assuring foreign business leaders about Japan’s goals in China and ultimately proved unable to stem the forces of nationalism, either in or outside of Japan, that led to the start of the Sino-Japanese War in 1937 or the Pacific War in 1941. In the long term, however, the commercial networks that these missions helped establish in the 1920s and 1930s became crucial in Japan’s re-entry into the world business community in the 1950s.
Organizer: Rei Okamoto, Northeastern University
Chair and Discussant: Charles Shiro Inouye, Tufts University
Keywords: popular culture, national identity, Japanese modernity
This panel explores how different popular cultural forms—such as clothing, film, animation, and pop music—contributed to the construction of modern Japanese identity. In particular, we want to understand the relationship between the modern and the popular, and between both of these and the emergence of national consciousness. Our panelists will analyze the emergence of modern imagination from the perspectives of history, cinema studies, and media studies.
David Wittner examines technological artifacts and the popular discourse on these artifacts during the Meiji period, identifying the attempt to create a new national identity that was infused with elements of "traditional" Japan and icons of a "modern" Western-style nation. Mitsuyo Wada-Marciano argues that critical discourses on Japanese cinema had internalized the "Western gaze," and demonstrates how postcolonial discourse shaped Japanese cinema. Rei Okamoto examines how prewar animated cartoons came to collectively imagine Japan’s national-cultural identity by bringing together contrasting elements, such as fantasy and realism, the traditional and the modern. Michael Raine focuses on "Americanization" in the "three girls" film musical series in the 1950s, and suggests that gender is a crucial factor in the mediation of foreign popular culture in Japan.
We will limit the time for paper presentations and comments to seventy-five minutes in order to create ample opportunity for group discussion and audience participation. Using models of visual and discourse analysis, our panel seeks to open new possibilities of inquiry regarding the relationship between popular culture and modern Japanese identity as an ideological formation.
Bunmei Kaika to Gijutsu: Technology Transfer and the Defining of a Meiji National Identity
David Wittner, Utica College
This paper examines the transformation of Japan’s national identity in terms of technological artifacts and popular discourse related to these same artifacts during the first half of the Meiji era. Throughout the 1870s, commoner and government official alike absorbed icons and artifacts from the West, items ranging from Western-style clothing to machinery, with the intention of creating "civilization and enlightenment" in Japan. By the end of the decade, however, critics of Japan’s Western-style modernization developed a bifurcated argument that promoted a new national identity infused both with elements of "traditional" Japan and the icons and technological artifacts of a "modern" Western-style nation. The new identity urged, for example, that government officials abandon Western dress, the ubiquitous swallowtail coat, and return to wearing hakama. They had similar recommendations for military dress and footwear. These same critics reformulated their arguments in favor of the continued absorption of "modern" Western-style machinery. Iron machines were no longer icons of "civilization and enlightenment," however; they were necessary for national security and military preparedness, and were a gauge by which Japan could claim equality with the West.
Critical Discourses on "Japanese Cinema"
Mitsuyo Wada-Marciano, Tufts University
While much has been made of Kurosawa’s "Rashomon" (1950) as opening the internationalization of Japanese cinema, in actuality, the relationship between Japanese cinema and the "Western gaze" began from the cinema’s inception as a driving preoccupation among filmmakers, critics, and audiences. As evinced in the apparent transformation in Japanese film criticism—from the emulation of Western cinema such as in the 1910s pure film movement to the 1930s discourses of cultural exceptionalism—criticism had thoroughly internalized a "Western gaze," an imagined set of critical values, which critics both depended upon and yet needed to escape. For Japanese film writing of the 1930s, the question of how to construct a modern Japanese cinema overlapped with social discourses on constructing a modern Japanese subject, a difficult task since the terms of modernity as demonstrated by the West would always be out of reach. As Harry Harootunian has written on Japanese intellectual discourse in the interwar period that "contemporary postcolonial discourse is simply a repetition of the Japanese experience in a different historical register," this paper will reveal how postcolonial discourse shaped Japanese cinema. Three main issues are: how critics valued "Japanese cinema" in the pre-1930s acceptance of the "Western gaze"; how nationalism and reimagined cultural traditions asserted the uniqueness of Japanese cinema in the 1930s and 40s; and the postwar rehabilitation of Tsumura Hideo, a wartime nationalist critic and participant in the notoriously anti-Western symposium "Overcoming Modernity" in 1942.
Modernity, National-Cultural Identity, and Prewar Japanese Animated Cartoons
Rei Okamoto, Northeastern University
1917 saw the birth of Japanese animated cartoons (manga eiga). The creators of this cultural form began their careers by imitating and experimenting with the techniques they observed in animated shorts from the United States and Europe. This paper examines how prewar manga eiga, a then minor subspecies of cinema, came to collectively imagine Japan’s national-cultural identity vis-à-vis Western and Asian Others, while being constantly influenced and threatened by the aesthetic impact and domestic popularity of Western animation.
A complex interplay of modernism and fascism strongly affected this popular form of modern creation. The winding road of progress for manga eiga coincided with a historical period of growing nationalism and imperialism that eventually led the country to the Asia Pacific War. During the final years of the war, manga eiga managed to establish its own style by bringing together contrasting elements, such as fantasy versus realism, and the traditional versus the modern. The most distinguished example of this mixing was the feature-length "Momotaro—Divine Troops of the Ocean" (1945), which depicts a mythical hero Momotaro (Peach Boy) as the commander-in-chief of realistically portrayed modern troops.
Discourses of Japanese cultural critics also highlighted in various ways the hybrid nature of manga eiga. For instance, Imamura Taihei wrote in 1942 that, in order to improve the quality of Japanese manga eiga for the New Order, they needed to absorb not only modern techniques of the Disney Studio but also traditional art forms such as emaki and minyo to attain unique Japaneseness.
Kawaii Babies: "Americanization" in the 1950s Made-in-Japan Film Musical
Michael Raine, Yale University
Rick Altman has argued that the American film musical is structured by a "dual focus" that replaces classical narrative’s psychologically motivated goals with parallel male and female leads. In this genre, marriage becomes the privileged trope that "resolves" the sexual and thematic tension between the oscillating poles of the narrative. Although film musicals were some of the most popular American imports in 1950s Japan, the "three girls" series featuring young singing stars Misora Hibari, Eri Chiemi, and Yukimura Izumi avoids that heterosexual imperative. If Hollywood cinema taught the world heterosociality in the 1920s and 1930s, these films remind us that even in the 1950s many cultures remained to be convinced.
Instead, the representation of femininity in the films, and in the popular music they featured, leads us to an understanding of gender as crucial to the mediation of foreign popular culture in Japan. For a film culture in which series and star were more salient than text and director, these films became both symptoms and agents of larger cultural processes still at work today. Rather than opening a utopian semiotic ground for a representation of non-heteronormal sexuality, the "three girls" films paradoxically worked to secure the identity of their viewers as consuming subjects through a delirious reflexivity that doubles the image of the performer as celebrity and of the roles those performers play as spectators within the film.
Organizer: Bettina Gramlich-Oka, University of Tuebingen
Chair: Herman Ooms, University of California, Los Angeles
Discussant: Lawrence E. Marceau, University of Delaware
Keywords: Japan, Tokugawa period, history, culture.
In the wake of the interdisciplinary boom of the 1990s, scholars now acknowledge that disciplines are neither timeless nor unchanging. Still, our histories tend to dismiss the time before the disciplines as one of "undisciplined knowledge," an era of amateur or imperfect understanding.
This panel looks to the late Tokugawa period to explore the period’s new understandings of Japan’s history and culture. We contend that new forms and uses for knowledge were made possible by the "undisciplined" character of inquiry at the time.
To cite the instances examined in our papers—history, hitherto conceived of as a mirror for princes, as redeveloped by a figure like Rai San’yô took on an affective dimension that transformed it into the history of a people. Geography, as presented in Kudô Heisuke’s and his daughter Tadano Makuzu’s studies of Russia, offered both instrumental knowledge of Japan’s Northern frontier and a broader engagement with cultural difference that worked on an entirely different register. Ideas of Japanese identities in the record of Nakagawa Tadahide’s pioneering ethnography marked a distinct departure from the traditional writing about China in its desire to depict the customs of ordinary Chinese. And as a mirror of the foreign, Ueda Akinari’s pamphlet on tea offered a moral guide to Edo-period city culture in its antiquarian exploration of Chinese materials.
The unparalleled mixing—social and intellectual—that distinguished Tokugawa literati life transformed knowledge in ways we are only now beginning to recognize, in large part because these works, by poets, scholars, officials, dilettantes, and antiquarians do not readily fall within our disciplinary sightlines. With this panel, we begin a reevaluation.
Unofficial History: San’yo, Bakin, and the Reanimation of the Past
Thomas E. Keirstead, Indiana University
The release in 1827 of Rai San’yo’s Nihon gaishi (Unofficial History of Japan) marks something of a milestone. The first truly popular history of Japan, it became required reading for the generations who straddled the Meiji Restoration.
How are we to account for the Nihon gaishi’s enormous appeal? Historians typically cite the work’s sympathy for the imperial cause. It is credited, for instance, with rallying activists and reformers to the Emperor’s side. Yet in this respect, the work is not in fact remarkable—little different from other histories available at the time. Testimonials to the work’s effect (mostly post-Restoration) suggest that San’yo’s particular achievement was to move people, to make them feel an intimate connection to the nation’s history.
To understand the work’s appeal, I’ll argue, one needs to turn to San’yo’s milieu, to the ventures in historical fiction essayed by Bakin, Kyoden, and others, to the antiquarians who were compiling and collecting marvelous miscellany from Japan’s past. In such works and collections, one finds an avid curiosity about the texture of life in the past that signals a new departure. In effect, I’ll argue, such texts (San’yo’s included) are pioneering efforts in a new sort of history, a new relationship to the past. Interested in the experience of the past, fascinated by the fact that that experience cannot be recaptured yet at the same time convinced that the past matters to the present, they turn to history, not merely to instruct or enlighten, but to entertain and capture the imagination.
Chinese Tea and the Perfect Japanese Gentleman: Ueda Akinari’s Seifusagen Dissected
Anna Beerens, University of Leiden
Seifusagen (A Little Word on the Fresh Breeze) is a pamphlet on sencha (steeped tea) written by Ueda Akinari (1734–1809), poet, physician, author of fiction, kokugakusha, tea connoisseur and potter. It was published in 1794. The work not only provides information on practical matters, but also a moral guideline for those in search of means to give shape to his or her identity in the context of Edo-period city culture. Largely derived from Chinese sources on the drinking of tea, and its accompanying scholar/recluse ideology, Seifusagen shows us different aspects of Akinari’s broad knowledge. Akinari addresses his readers as "gentlemen of the mountain forests" and wishes to draw them into a world of reclusive non-conformism, refined taste without ostentation, and civilized conversation. Seifusagen connects to elements of escapism in what is often called "the Literati Movement" in which the Chinese hermitic ideals are reworked to fit contemporary discourse on self-compromise, self-expression and self-cultivation.
A Japanese Representation of Life in China during Qing Rule
Margarita Winkel, University of Leiden
Over the last decades, several studies have shown that the impact of Chinese culture on Tokugawa Japan was considerable and diverse. Historians have described how the Japanese kept up with recent developments in China through the import of new books and sometimes even through the visits of experts. They show that, in spite of the official policy of restricted international contacts, for various schools of thought and science, as well as for artistic and literary pursuits, China’s role as a cultural and intellectual guide continued to be at least as important as in earlier times.
Little, however, has been written about the Japanese interest in contemporary China. In my paper, I will consider this interest in the customs and lifestyle of their Chinese contemporaries by examining Nakagawa Tadahide’s (1753–1830) account Shinzoku kibun (An Account of Ordinary Life in Qing China, 1799). In this book, he constructs an image of daily life and culture in contemporary China under Qing rule on the basis of interviews with residents of the Chinese quarter of Nagasaki.
I intend to discuss the way in which "modern China" is represented in this work, and how this focus on contemporary popular life relates to a general growth of interest among late Tokugawa Japan intellectuals in contemporary societies, foreign life-styles, and "people’s" histories.
"Russia" in the Writings of Kudo Heisuke (1734–1800) and Tadano Makuzu (1763–1825)
Bettina Gramlich-Oka, University of Tuebingen
This paper explores the metaphoric roles of "Russia" in late Tokugawa. Both Kudo Heisuke and his daughter Ayako (better known as Tadano Makuzu) have recently been receiving renewed attention in Japanese scholarship. By analyzing the works of father and daughter together, we can distinguish in their writings two discursive dimensions, a spatial and temporal one. While Makuzu and her father both share certain knowledge about "Russia," their descriptions and uses of "Russia" diverge from one another. On close reading, however, both share the goal, expressed in different "disciplinary" spheres, of benefiting society.
Kudo Heisuke’s account, Akaezo fûsetsu ko (Report on the Land of the Red Ainu [i.e. Russia], 1781–83), and its presentation to bakufu politician Tanuma Okitsugu around 1783, supplied important instrumental and influential knowledge for the increasing interest among his contemporaries in geographical boundaries.
Makuzu’s discussion of Russia in her works Mukashibanashi [1811–12] and Hitori kangae [1819] had a different objective. Makuzu’s knowledge of "Russia" derived mostly from her father and his acquaintances, but her selective accounts of "Russia" function to display her concern with society rather than with geo-political boundaries. Makuzu uses the socio-political order of "Russia" to demonstrate by comparison the disorder of her time and the need for reforms.
By comparing both their writings, the shift in the discourse on "Russia" from an informative to a more metaphorical level is evident; more striking, however, is how a woman without constraints made use of her "undisciplined" knowledge.
Organizer: Jae Won Sun, Harvard University
Chair: Andrew Gordon, Harvard University
Discussant: Louise Young, New York University
Japanese settlers in Korea formed the largest overseas Japanese community within the empire, and certainly one of the largest colonial communities in the twentieth-century world. However, existing scholarship has focused almost entirely on the colonial policies and prominent officials, while largely neglecting the lives of ordinary settlers. Our panel aims to emphasize the importance of studying ordinary settlers for understanding not only the process of Japanese expansion into Korea, but Japan’s modernity itself. We will attempt to explain the overall trajectory of Japanese settler experience in Korea based on an examination of previously unused sources in Japan, Korea, and the United States. The first presenter Kenji Kimura, who has published a pioneering study on the Japanese migration to Korea, will open up the panel by showing how and why those Japanese on the peripheries of a newly modernizing state migrated to Korea and succeeded as colonial entrepreneurs around the time of annexation. Jun Uchida will then look at the activities of middle- and upper-class Japanese merchants and their interactions with Koreans, focusing on their semi-official role as grassroots agents of Saito Makoto’s so-called "cultural rule" in the 1920s. Lastly, Jae Won Sun will clarify the reverse impact of colonialism on the settlers by analyzing the process of their repatriation and resettlement in Japan immediately after the Second World War. Overall we seek to introduce a novel problematic of settler colonialism into the study of Japanese empire and encourage a kind of cross-cultural collaboration that our panel represents.
Settling into Korea: The Japanese Expansion into Korea from the Russo-Japanese War to the Early Period of Annexation
Kenji Kimura, Shimonoseki City University
Gennosuke Yokoyama, a famous journalist best known for his work "Japan’s Lower-Class Society," exhorted Japanese workers to migrate to Korea and seize new opportunities for better employment before the Russo-Japanese War. Other pamphlets, such as "A Successful Way of Advancing into Korea with a Small Capital of 100 Yen" and "Let’s Become Large Landowners in Korea," similarly called to ordinary Japanese to migrate to the peninsula, singing the prospect of quick success and a better life. By the time of annexation in 1910, the Japanese in Korea totaled over 170,000 and formed the largest overseas Japanese community.
Most of these early migrants were those Japanese who failed to ride the crest of modernization in Japan, and sought to recover their losses in the new territory of Korea. In this paper, I will examine the ways in which these Japanese, who were left out of the process of industrial revolution and the modern urban work force, coped with their failures by seizing new opportunities for social advancement in Korea. First, I will look at the occupational breakdown of Japanese settlers and show how the categories of company employees, miscellaneous workers, and government officials gradually increased over time. I will then show how they migrated to Korea and succeeded by accumulating wealth and skills, obtaining additional salaries on the colonial payroll, and/or becoming independent entrepreneurs. Overall I intend to examine the Japanese migrants as a window through which to rethink about the Japanese colonization of Korea and its relationship to Japan’s modernity.
Settler Colonialism: Japanese Merchants in Korea in the 1920s
Jun Uchida, Harvard University
My case study will examine the activities of middle- and upper-class Japanese merchants and their interactions with Koreans under Saito Makoto’s so-called "cultural rule" of the 1920s. As large firms remained reluctant to invest in the peninsula well after the annexation of 1910, enterprising merchants played a crucial role in facilitating the penetration of Japanese capital into the Korean economy and sustaining the lifeline of empire by purveying daily necessities to Japanese officials and residents alike. I will focus on those who grew into prominent "localized" entrepreneurs and sought to join in the colonial management of Korea through the chambers of commerce—the only self-governing institution left to the settlers after the residents’ associations were abolished in 1914. I will focus on the apex of their role as semi-official agents of empire in the 1920s, whose main task was to negotiate with influential Korean merchants and local elites in the aftermath of the March First Movement of 1919. I will examine how the merchants assisted Governor-General Saito’s policy of assimilation by strategically accommodating Korean merchants in the joint chambers of commerce and co-opting the influential Koreans in pro-Japanese organizations. I will also probe their self-awareness as grassroots imperialists by analyzing their efforts to "civilize" fellow Japanese and Koreans, and critique various aspects of Saito’s policy in the local media. By examining the complex social dynamics of empire from within, my paper aims to provide some clues to understanding the unmatched intensity of Japanese colonial rule in Korea and its relationship to Japan’s modernity.
The Reverse Impact of Colonialism: Repatriation and Resettlement of Japanese Entrepreneurs after the Second World War
Jae Won Sun, Harvard University
Six million Japanese, equivalent to one-tenth of the total domestic population, returned to the homeland from the colonies after the Second World War. About half of them were civilians and a quarter of these civilian repatriates were from Korea. Characteristically, these Japanese had lived in the colony for a long time, but they rushed back to Japan as soon as the war ended, and took a long time in settling down. In this paper, I will examine the reverse impact of Japanese colonialism by looking at the process of repatriation of Japanese entrepreneurs and their resettlement in post-war Japan. Specifically, I will investigate the activities and the logic of the Association for the Repatriate Entrepreneurs, which aimed to recover the lost overseas assets of repatriate businessmen. I will show how the Association initially sought to achieve this goal by demanding war reparations from the government. The Association criticized the government for being unfair and unequal in allocating war reparation payments to repatriate entrepreneurs vis-à-vis domestic entrepreneurs. However, pressed by the policy outlined by the GHQ and the shortage of financial resources, the government could not help but ignore their complaint. I will examine how the repatriate businessmen changed their tactics and asserted their distinct identity from the domestic firms by restarting their business activities based on their unique overseas experience.
Organizer and Chair: Michael Bourdaghs, University of California, Los Angeles
Discussant: Hideo Kamei, University of Hokkaido
Keywords: Meiji literature, literary criticism, literary theory.
In mid-1970s Japan, after the retreat of the New Left and of previously hegemonic models for politically engaged literary criticism, a new generation of scholars sought a way out of their perceived impasse through a radical questioning of existing notions of subjectivity, language, and of "literature" itself. Kamei Hideo has been a leading figure in this new wave. Like many of his peers, he turned his attention to the largely unknown terrain of early Meiji literature, unpacking its many remarkable experiments in new configurations of self, writing, and sociality. This panel examines the work of Kamei and his peers and the transformation they achieved in the sensibility and praxis of literary scholarship in Japan.
The papers all return to Meiji to revisit pathways first traced by Kamei and others, using their work as a springboard to reconceptualize the ethical and political stakes of Meiji literature in the here-and-now. Ueda’s paper takes up issues that Kamei raised in his Shosetsuron (Theory of the Novel, 1999) and explores how Tsubouchi Shoyo’s Shosetsu shinzui (Essence of the Novel, 1885–86) helped produce the very genre it claimed merely to describe. Essertier discusses an issue Kamei explored in Meiji bungaku shi (History of Meiji Literature, 2000) and elsewhere: the politics of Meiji language reform movements. Field revisits the highly original interpretation of narration techniques in Futabatei Shimei’s Ukigumo (Drifting Clouds, 1887–89) that Kamei elaborated in Kansei no henkaku (Transformations of Sensibility, 1983). We look forward to a stimulating dialogue with our discussant, Professor Kamei.
Shosetsu as Knowledge: Its Engagement with "Histories"
Atsuko Ueda, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
Contrary to popular belief, Tsubouchi Shoyo’s Shosetsu shinzui, the alleged beginning of modern Japanese literature, does not describe the pre-existing entity called "shosetsu." Rather, it is a prescriptive work that produced the boundaries of the "modern novel." Of course, "shosetsu" is now a standard translation for "novel," yet the very formula, shosetsu = novel, was yet to be established. In Shosetsuron, Kamei Hideo described Shosetsu shinzui as "a text that wrote about shosetsu when shosetsu was yet to exist." My paper follows his lead and explores the forces that shaped the production of shosetsu = novel by treating shosetsu as a medium that is configured on the textual surface of Shosetsu shinzui.
Within the chaotic space in which Shoyo wrote, various disciplinary boundaries that we now take for granted were non-existent. "History" and "fiction" were no exception; in fact, shosetsu fiction was listed under the rubric of history. In order to legitimate shosetsu as an independent form of knowledge appropriate for the new modern nation-state, Shoyo had to sever the connection between the two. Moreover, there were at least two discontinuous forms of "history" co-existing: the discourse of "history" as established in the English-language texts that found themselves in Japan, and that of seishi (official history) with a long tradition in the Chinese classics. I will examine how Shoyo negotiates with these two forms of discourse and establishes shosetsu = novel as a prose narrative distinct from history, as I explore the ideological implications of his effort to posit shosetsu as an autonomous genre.
Elegance, Propriety, and Power in the "Modernization" of Literary Language in Meiji Japan
Joseph Essertier, University of California, Los Angeles
In the late 19th century, decades before the dominance of the genbun itchi style ("the unity of the written and spoken languages"), Japanese intellectuals and literati experimented with a great variety of writing styles and scripts. Some have viewed the eventual "death" of most of these styles and the rise to dominance of one style, genbun itchi, as a natural and inevitable process that was necessary for successful modernization. Others, including Kamei Hideo and Karatani Kojin, have found the process to be quite political and deeply intertwined with the tremendous social changes, ideologies, and institutional formations that took shape in the period. My paper, taking its cue from the insights of scholars of the latter view, investigates debates and other forms of discourse in which style and script were discussed, and delineates aspects of the process by which new and/or transformed perceptions of beauty, propriety, and power in the written language of Meiji literature evolved.
Novelists and poets who experiment with literary style consider not only the communicability but also the beauty, elegance, vulgarity, or propriety of words. I analyze the arguments and ideas relating to the criticism, hierarchies, and evaluations of written language of the period—including those of Mori Ogai, Yamada Bimyo, Yano Ryukei, and Taguchi Ukichi—in an attempt to fill in some pieces of the “history of expression” project begun by Kamei and others.
Methodological Yearnings and the Interpretive Imperative: Exploring Futabatei Shimei’s Ukigumo
Norma M. Field, University of Chicago
Modes of analysis are necessarily agenda-driven, both explicit and unacknowledged, and understanding the presumptions and stakes of a given form of analysis can be as compelling as the knowledge yielded by the analysis. It is perhaps less tendentious to observe that every form of analysis—historicist, formalist, psycho-analytic, phenomenological, etc.—entails one or more other modes. Yet, to leave it at that would be to miss the passion underlying the investment in a given mode. Since I am referring especially to analyses of what we have come to call literature, it would also be to miss the cherished values having everything and nothing to do with literature that are both expressed and obscured by analytical stances.
In his influential work diagnosing a historic "transformation of sensibility," Kamei Hideo identifies an entity he calls a "no-[grammatical] person narrator" in Ukigumo, often termed Japan’s first modern novel. The narrator is a bridge between author and reader, invested with the task of producing empathy for the characters, and for the nameless, historical beings they resemble. Mitani Kuniaki, in disputing this characterization, focuses on the stabilization of a past tense as marker of fiction. For him what is at stake is the constriction of the freedom enabled by the rich ensemble of premodern verb forms.
Reflecting on these examples, I want to consider Futabatei’s investment in representing speech, including the speech of thought, and thereby challenge dominant notions of gembun itchi and modern interiority.
Organizer: Patricia G. Sippel, Toyo Eiwa University
Chair: Steven J. Ericson, Dartmouth College
Discussant: Conrad Totman, Yale University
Keywords: rivers, environment, politics, Japan, history.
Although complex environmental problems confront the contemporary world, scholars of Asia have been slow to address them. This panel aims to contribute to a discourse on environmental issues by examining the history of water conflicts and water management in Japan. In addressing Japan’s "water politics," the panel asks: What historical continuities can be seen in Japanese responses to environmental problems? How have the competing interests of nation, region, and locality been reflected in water management and uses of the environment? How have changing modes of production been reflected in changing human relations with the natural environment? To what extent has citizen activism helped to create a new ethic of environmental awareness?
Sippel’s paper uses the example of mining-related water pollution to discount the notion of a pristine early modern era and to highlight areas of continuity in approaches to environmental problems. Lewis examines river politics in Toyama Prefecture as a means of negotiating regional and national interests since the late nineteenth century. Wilson explores the environmental and urban problems that produced flooding in the late Meiji period and the controversy over the construction of the Arakawa Drainage Canal. He attempts to locate river engineering within the social and cultural transformation of the Meiji-Taisho era. Finally, Vosse discusses the political context of the massive postwar dam construction projects in postwar Japan, focusing on citizen protest movements against the damming of the Nagara and Yoshino rivers. These presentations highlight water politics as one means of understanding changing human interactions with the physical environment in Japan.
Re-usable Solutions: Copper Mines and Water Pollution in the Early Modern Era
Patricia G. Sippel, Toyo Eiwa University
In 1891 a group of farmers who lived close to the Watarase River in Tochigi Prefecture petitioned the Minister of Agriculture and Commerce to close down the Ashio Copper Mine on the grounds that waste from the mine had contaminated the Watarase and was damaging their fields and their health. After more than a decade of petitions, protests, and national publicity, an unsatisfactory settlement was reached in what is usually identified as Japan’s first major case of industrial water pollution in the modern era.
But early modern Japanese people experienced significant environmental degradation. In particular, water pollution from mining was a familiar, if not welcome, part of rural life, especially in the relatively poor northern provinces. Moreover, there are clear continuities between early modern and modern Japan in community and government responses to water pollution. By examining several cases of mining-related water pollution, this paper will argue that Japan’s early modern era offered a number of re-usable solutions for dealing with natural resources and handling problems of pollution. Some of those models—lost in the modern era and lately rediscovered—offer much to contemporary citizens and policymakers. But there were also less benign "solutions," including the practice of ignoring or simply paying off victims of water pollution. This last approach was unfortunately similar to the one endured by farmers in the Ashio area and by other pollution victims in modern and contemporary Japan.
Central Politics on the Periphery: Negotiating Toyama’s Rivers
Michael Lewis, Michigan State University
An Inuit word for "reality" literally translates as "the thing turned towards you." In Japan from the late 1860s, a very pointed reality for people living outside newly created cores of central political power was the threat of becoming peripheral. Falling off the central political map hurt more than local pride. Losing the new national treasury’s fiscal support could set in motion economic reverses. The result could give flesh to the idea that some regions were expendable and thereby make an attitude held by central government officials into a local certainty.
In many regions, local politicians relied upon river politics, a practice that paradoxically posited the locality’s irreplaceable importance to the state and utter dependence on it. Initially, local leaders took this stand for strategic reasons and not out of unmitigated respect for state authority. But the strategy that at first encouraged national involvement in local affairs often fostered the marginalization it sought to prevent.
This paper examines river politics as they developed in Toyama prefecture from the 1870s. Negotiations with the central state over allocations for riparian works helped create practices and asymmetrical relationships that became routinized as the way the region must relate to the center. The development of Toyama as a gateway to Asian conquest accelerated dependency. But the practice was not limited to Toyama. River politics and its variants were widespread. In the years since 1945, they have continued to flourish from deep roots in Japan’s political culture. Ironically, these practices today frustrate central attempts at administrative and fiscal reforms.
Factories, Forests, and Floods: Building the Arakawa Drainage Canal to Save Tokyo
Roderick Wilson, Stanford University
In August 1910, massive flooding in Tokyo left 52 people dead and over 200,000 buildings damaged or destroyed. This and other recent floods forced a nationwide debate on the central government’s role in the planning and funding of riparian works. After a year of surveys and bitter haggling between Tokyo and Saitama officials, a decision was reached to launch Tokyo’s hitherto largest civil engineering project ever: the Arakawa Drainage Canal. Essentially replacing the Sumida River as the Ara’s outlet into Tokyo Bay, the 23 kilometer Arakawa Drainage Canal required nineteen years to build, applied the experience and knowledge of Japanese engineers working abroad on projects like the Panama Canal, and employed thousands to dig dirt, lay cement, push trolleys, and operate dredging equipment.
Despite the unprecedented scale of the project and its importance in insuring Tokyo’s growth, the Arakawa Drainage Canal remains a topic almost untouched in the historical scholarship. In this paper, I explore the environmental and urban issues that led to the increasingly devastating floods of the late Meiji period, as well as the political controversy that surrounded the decision to build the canal. I argue that upland deforestation and lowland industrialization severely damaged the water carrying capacity of the Ara River’s watershed. I also highlight the tension between rural and urban communities and between local and national governments over the costs and limited focus of the project on the lower Ara River. As with many large-scale government sponsored civil engineering projects, the decision to build the Arakawa Drainage Canal enjoyed widespread support, but that support was neither unanimous nor were the canal’s benefits universally enjoyed.
Protesting the Construction of River Dams in Postwar Japan
Wilhelm Vosse, International Christian University
Because of its relatively short and steep rivers, Japan is home to a relatively large number of dams. In 1998, there were 2,675 dams in operation (6% of all dams worldwide) while more than 450 dams are still under construction. The most important rationale for the construction of dams in the first two decades after World War II was irrigation control and hydropower generation. In the past two decades, however, the focus has changed towards flood control and fresh water management. All dams are publicly financed and their construction has become one of the main pillars of income for the influential construction industry in Japan. The construction industry, local politicians, and many Diet members have a strong economic and political interest in continuing the high pace of dam construction projects. They frequently continue their support for new dam projects even though the initial rationale for their construction is often no longer compelling. Over the last three decades, many dam opposition movements have organized protest activities, first against the construction of individual dams then also against the Japanese government decision-making process. These opposition movements have focused attention on the negative environmental effects on river wildlife and on riverbank vegetation. This presentation will focus on the activities of these environmental movements, particularly the movements against the construction of the Nagara River estuary dam and the Yoshino River dam. It attempts to assess the extent to which environmental movements have been successful in raising environmental awareness concerning rivers and the extent to which they have led to reform in government-initiated river construction policies.
Organizer: Leila Wice, Columbia University
Chair and Discussant: Gregory M. Pflugfelder, Columbia University
Keywords: Japan, crime, gender.
On the eve of the emergence of a full modern legal system in Japan, gender increasingly displaced other categories as the object of and mechanism for social control. This panel compares formal and informal disciplinary regimes within the theater, in courtrooms, in popular print media, and on the streets to show how the significance of gender changed drastically within many realms of Japanese life during the late Edo through early Meiji periods. We will look at regulations, and at the individuals and the institutions that drafted, violated and enforced them.
Valerie Durham compares historical and fictional accounts of criminals who were famous partly for being women. Her close look at courtroom scenes in early Meiji kabuki plays about Hanai Oume and Takahashi Oden demonstrates that even as theatrical and literary conventions were transforming these true stories, the parameters of female roles both on and off stage themselves were changing over time. Leila Wice traces the creation and execution of prohibitions on transvestism in municipal misdemeanor codes. She compares them to earlier forms of regulations on appearance, analyzing how and why the categories most explicitly regulated and violated shifted from status to gender. Suzanne O’Brien shows that the new corps of policemen created to enforce reforms of daily life were themselves reshaped as their novel subjectivities reconfigured their masculinities.
Women, Crime, and Punishment in Nineteenth-Century Kabuki
Valerie L. Durham, Tokyo Keizai University
This paper examines the topic of women and crime as depicted in kabuki, focusing in particular on the late Edo and early Meiji periods. From the Edo period well into the Meiji, kabuki and the jôruri puppet theater served a double role as entertainment and news media. The popular theater also fulfilled an important didactic function by using its stories to reinforce and propagate the contemporary moral code. Hardly surprising, crime, and its punishment, were a favorite topic for pre-modern drama.
In the first half of the Edo period, moral and theatrical conventions precluded a direct representation of female evil. As a result, Yaoya Oshichi and Shirakoya Okuma, historical figures who were executed for their crimes, came to be portrayed as committing their transgressions under extenuating circumstances, and as being pardoned for their acts. It was not until the early nineteenth century, with the development of the akuba role type in kabuki, that evil heroines finally emerged. Punishment for these women is usually in the form of murder or suicide as prescribed by the contemporary codes of kanzen chôaku (reward virtue, chastise vice) and karmic retribution. The influence of the akuba role type continued into the Meiji period, in kabuki depictions of such women criminals as Takahashi Oden and Hanai Oume. But these Meiji plays differ from earlier works in that they serve as propaganda for the new legal code, and give considerable prominence to realistic courtroom scenes in which their heroines are judged and sentenced.
Cross-Dressing as Crime in Edo and Tokyo
Leila Wice, Columbia University
For just under seven years during the early Meiji period, male-female transvestism was a crime on the streets of Japan’s urban centers. Rules about clothing were not new, but earlier codes had regulated dress primarily in terms of status rather than gender. I will trace the planning, promulgation and reception of an 1873 ban on male/female cross-dressing, to examine how and why the newly national government enacted these regulations, in the context of earlier sumptuary regulations, which rarely specified appropriate appearance in terms of male and female.
The beginning of the Meiji period has often been portrayed as a moment of liberation from the strictures of the feudal regime of the Tokugawa Shogunate, which kept its hierarchy in place by harshly regulating even the smallest details of daily life, such as clothing. But even after the end of the Edo period, the new administrative regime carried out the transition from former semi-centralized systems of stratified stations through the deployment of the same sorts of mechanisms that had maintained that earlier status system, including strict government demands about personal appearance. The older mechanisms of symbolic prestige did not simply disappear; rather, they were subsumed into a new social hierarchy.
Policing Men: Misdemeanors and New Masculinities
Suzanne O’Brien, Loyola Marymount University
An intensification of efforts to "reform" and standardize certain aspects of daily life marked the early years of the Meiji period in Japan. Government authorities, fearing that the "ugly customs" of the common people would be perceived as evidence of Japan’s lack of civilization, drafted misdemeanor codes to wipe out "barbarous" social practices. The enforcement of these codes was entrusted to the new police forces, comprised primarily of former samurai, who were themselves far from models of civilized behavior. Police enforcement of misdemeanor codes, and the management of customs (fozoku) more generally, were not only crucial to creating new subjectivities among the public, but were also essential to the construction of a modern police force manned by a new and highly visible figure in the Meiji landscape: the vigilant, self-disciplined policeman.
Police jurisdiction over customs was a critical element in the formation of both the Keishicho, the new national police agency, and in the recruitment, training, regulation and deployment of policemen. I argue that the policeman represents a new hybrid masculinity, drawing on both samurai esprit de corps as well as new understandings of civilized behavior that required the jettisoning of many attributes of samurai status and identity. Crimes of custom, it turns out, were as constitutive of new subjectivities for the policeman as for the offender who ran afoul of the new misdemeanor codes.
Organizer and Chair: Edward Kamens, Yale University
A Forest for the Nation: The State, Nationalism, and the Construction of the Meiji Shrine Forest
Rosemarie Bernard, Bowdoin College
Along the grounds of the imperial palace, the forests of the Meiji Shrine in downtown Tokyo constitute the only expansive green space of the metropolis. Although often mistaken as the only remaining segment of a formerly forested region, in fact the Meiji Shrine forest was constructed artificially by order of the state in 1913. To construct the forest, youth associations from across the country, including the colonies, provided labor to plant more than 95,000 trees among representative species from each region of the polity. Built as an adjoining part of the Meiji Shrine sanctuary dedicated to the Meiji Emperor, according to the logic of the state the forest was a valuable urban symbol of a modern constructed nation at once imperialist and populist. In this paper I consider the history and ideological context of the construction of the Meiji Shrine forest, as well as its postwar survival among neo-nationalism and its critiques.
Completing Liberalism: "Free Education" in the Thought of the Freedom and Popular Rights Movement
Abigail Schweber, Harvard University
The philosophy of the Freedom and Popular Rights Movement has been characterized as "incomplete liberalism," focusing on political rights to the exclusion of social ones. This characterization overlooks the position taken by the movement in the debate over the new national education system. Specifically, the movement advocated the application of the principals of what they termed "free education," privileging parental rights and individual choice over the government’s preferred model of strong state control. The movement’s adoption of this philosophy represented an attempt to apply the full spectrum of the Western concept of liberalism to Japanese society, an attempt which has been neglected in the literature. While the ideals of "free education" were never fully implemented, and government controls over the education system gradually increased, this attempt represented a direct challenge to the state’s control over the new, public school system. This paper explores the discourse on "free education" within the movement as a struggle to formulate an approach to Western liberal philosophy which could accommodate the cultural and historical circumstances of early Meiji Japan, and repositions the Meiji government’s efforts to utilize the education system for ideological purposes as a response to this challenge rather than as a continuation of traditional practice.
Yasuoka Masahiro and Character Cultivation in Taisho Japan
Roger H. Brown, University of Southern California
Intellectual histories of Taisho Japan regularly emphasize an emerging concern with the improvement of individual character and the formation of an autonomous sense of self-identity. This inward focus on personal cultivation attuned to cultural context (kyoyo) is generally linked to the burgeoning influence of European idealism and contrasted with an outmoded Meiji ethic of character building directed toward service to state and society, a perspective bound up with indigenous ideals of top-down moral suasion (kyoka) and spiritual cultivation (shuyo). Does this way of conceptualizing Taisho era discourse on character cultivation, however, adequately explain the phenomenon’s intellectual character and political significance?
This paper suggests that it does not, and seeks to re-conceptualize this issue by examining the thought of the nationalist intellectual Yasuoka Masahiro (1898–1983). A graduate of the First Higher School and Tokyo Imperial University, Yasuoka’s discourse on the cultivation of personal character reflected neo-Kantian thinking on individual improvement and the creation of cultural value then permeating these elite institutions; however, of at least equal importance was his understanding of Confucian ideals of personal cultivation as the foundation for public morality and Wang Yangming’s views on self-knowledge as the first step toward political action. The resulting perception of individual character cultivation as a communal act of direct cultural and political consequence calls into question portraits of two distinct ethical perspectives, as well as demonstrates how the focus on character building at the core of both shuyo and kyoyo could become an integral component of a nationalist ideology of moral suasion and cultural revival.
Preserving the Ochiai Deer Dance: Tradition, Modernity, and Globalization in Rural Japan
Christopher S. Thompson, Ohio University
In many Japanese rural hamlets, age-old folk performance traditions are dying, or at least changing. In Ochiai, a small rice-farming hamlet in south-central Iwate Prefecture, there are no longer enough residents to perform Shishi Odori, the Deer Dance that has served as a signature of this small rice-farming collective for over three-hundred years. But instead of succumbing to the demise of their heritage, Ochiai residents are adapting Shishi Odori and its related practices to the changes wrought by modernity and globalization in northeastern Japan.
In this paper, I examine the meaning and significance of the Deer Dance in contemporary Ochiai from the viewpoint of its performers and hamlet residents. In so doing, I show how this local tradition is organized and performed in a way that reflects a new hamlet identity that is a product of the present, not the past. Interestingly, this analysis contrasts sharply with the view of municipal bureaucrats who believe their funding of Ochiai’s efforts to sustain Shishi Odori helps to "preserve the past" and of domestic and international tourists who attend performances to experience an "authentic" taste of Iwate’s rural folk history. Based on annual fieldwork since 1994, I argue that various local level social and economic circumstances have forced Ochiai residents to make significant compromises in the personnel, costuming, choreography, and management of their local tradition, which render present-day Shishi Odori a performance that is thoroughly modern.
Organizer and Chair: Rebecca Copeland, Washington University, St. Louis
Genre fiction attracts a popular audience by providing, among other pleasures, reassuring myths of social reality. Readers are comforted by presentations of moral order, gender codes, and cultural formulations that correspond with the reality that they have been socialized to accept. Of the various categories of genre fiction, the detective story is perhaps the most suited both to reinforcing and disrupting these myths. Emerging as a direct result of the contradictory and alienating forces of modernity, the detective story allows readers to make sense of the chaos erupting around them by providing a coherent narrative navigated by a wise and observant detective. Whereas the detective story has been an important sub-genre in Japanese popular fiction since the early 1900s, it has become especially prevalent over the last decade, with entire shelves in bookstores devoted to "misuterii" fiction. Women writers in particular are garnering many of the prestigious awards in the category. What does it mean for a woman to address "the myths of social reality"?
In answer to this question, Matsugu and Seaman will consider works by the profoundly popular Miyabe Miyuki, Matsugu focusing on the alienation implicit in modern urban society and its effect on youth, and Seaman discussing the ideal of family as set against the erosion of communal values. Mikals-Adachi will continue the survey of youth and family in her study of Nonami Asa’s teenage detective. Copeland’s paper will examine the issues of family and sexuality as presented in Kirino Natsuo’s work. The panel will conclude with a roundtable-type discussion, including audience participation, on using the detective fiction genre to explore popular views of family, female sexuality, and the myths that surround them.
The Attic and the Hero in Miyabe Miyuki’s Crimes of Our Neighbors
Miho Matsugu, University of Chicago
Miyabe’s 1987 debut work, Crimes of Our Neighbors (Warera ga rinjin no hanzai), tells the story of Makoto, a boy living in a townhouse in Tokyo who commits crimes to protect his family from the noisy dog next door. Introduced in the 1970s to promote residential identity and neighborly harmony for the middle-class Japanese family, the townhouse by the late 1980s bubble economy came to symbolize the estrangement of neighbors from one another. Connected by a crawl-space between roof and ceiling, the units offer none of the privacy their separate front doors suggest. Makoto uses this hidden attic—in literature a persistent setting for childhood secrets and games—to fight against the selfishness and unfairness of his neighbors.
In this paper, I will discuss how the structure and ideology of the Japanese townhouse—and its central defect, the shared crawl-space—helps shape Makoto’s actions, and through those, his subjectivity. As Nishikawa Yuko has observed, the Japanese government created models for postwar housing designed to contain the nuclear family as a unit of the nation, and the townhouse was no exception. Do state-designed structures act only to instill national values in the individuals they house? What scope is there for the formation of a subject that outwits state ideology? Tracing Makoto’s development through the architecture of his home, I will examine the novel’s ambivalence towards crime—a challenge to the state definition of right—in the pursuit of such state-sanctioned values as obedience to community rules.
Family Ties: Community and Individuality in Miyabe Miyuki
Amanda Seaman, Randolph-Macon College
Miyabe Miyuki, one of Japan’s best-known and best-selling writers of detective fiction, has used the genre to critique contemporary Japanese society. One of the themes of particular concern to Miyabe is that of community. Miyabe advances the idea that a person’s identity is formed by the community; and community is generated by the place in which a person lives. In Kasha (Fire Cart, 1992), Miyabe critiques modern, consumption-driven notions of autonomy and identity, suggesting that healthy individual existence, for both men and women, depends upon membership in close-knit, familial units. The family that the detective has created in Kasha stands in stark contrast to the rootless, single young victim and her killer, while in Riyu (Reasons, 1998), a family found murdered in a luxury high-rise turns out to comprise four individuals with little connection to one another. At the same time, however, Miyabe’s ideal of family goes beyond simple blood or even marriage ties. What is important here are traditional communitarian values, shared experiences, and mutual assistance. This paper will examine the paradigm that Miyabe has set up and will show how in her later novel she nuances her critique of social problems. Miyabe’s investigation and meditation on kinship, family, and community in these two novels, therefore, serve to map the role of identity in the formation of self and of place in the increasingly isolated and isolating world of contemporary Japan.
Family Mysteries and the Budding Detective Nonami Asa’s The Key and The Window
Eileen Mikals-Adachi, Ochanomizu University
While mystery novels have enticed Japanese audiences for years, inclusion of this genre in the boundaries of "pure" literature is a fairly new phenomenon. Mystery writers are not only capturing many of the prestigious awards, but they are setting trends in the literary world. Most notable of these trends is the pronounced focus on family issues in mystery novels written in the 1990’s. This paper will concentrate on the works of Nonami Asa (b. 1960), recipient of the Japanese Detective Story Excellence Award (1988) for Happy Breakfast (Kofuku na choshoku) and the Naoki Prize for Literature (1996) for Frozen Fang (Kogoeru kiba), and one Japan’s most renowned mystery writers of "family novels."
Most impressive of Nonami’s techniques is her depiction of youth to analyze social issues and the relationship of such problems, especially juvenile crimes, to the collapse of the traditional family structure. The focus of this study will be The Key (Kagi) and The Window (Mado), two novels written in sequence and set one year apart in order to portray the maturation of Nishi Mariko, high school student and budding detective. Recently orphaned and hearing-impaired, Mariko searches for her own place in the modern world as she tries to solve a series of neighborhood crimes. By examining the portrayal of this young female detective, this study will demonstrate how Nonami uses the detective genre to provide perspective on the problems currently facing the new generation of Japanese.
Woman Uncovered: Pornography and Power in the Detective Fiction of Kirino Natsuo
Rebecca Copeland, Washington University
Detective fiction has often been described as a genre "unbecoming" to a woman. Originally this evaluation was levied against mystery-writing women because the genre often required an involvement with the sordid and seamy side of life. Later, feminists have criticized the genre as "unbecoming" to a woman because features endemic to detective fiction seem to reinforce the supremacy of a patriarchal social code. That is, the aberrant are punished and the good are restored to power—often at the expense of female independence. Where does the Japanese woman writer stand in this debate? Is she using the genre to write herself back into a traditional social order that is being lost? Or is she using it as a means to claim originary power and thus devising a new social order in her fictional worlds?
In this paper I will suggest answers to these questions by focusing on Kirino Natsuo’s Tenshi ni misuterareta yoru (The Night the Angels Forgot, 1994). At the story level, Kirino’s detective takes us through the dark and dangerous world of the pornography industry where women are exploited as objects of desire. But at a deeper level, Kirino questions contemporary sexuality in Japan, interrogating the agency and authenticity of female desire. The resulting work is problematic and puzzling, and the implication for independent women in contemporary Japan, who would challenge the social myth of female abjection, is unsettling.
Organizer and Chair: Melissa McCormick, Columbia University
Discussant: Melinda Takeuchi, Stanford University
Although justly famous for their sponsorship of Chinese-style and Zen-related art objects during the 14th through the 16th centuries, the Ashikaga shoguns commissioned painted temple and shrine founding legends (engi-e) with equal vigor. These lavish productions utilized expensive materials and necessitated the collaboration of high-ranking aristocrats, warriors, and monks, as well as the finest painters of the day. Yet painted engi remain relatively neglected in scholarship on the cultural activities of the Ashikaga shoguns and medieval picture scrolls. This panel attempts to redress this neglect by bringing together four case studies of Ashikaga-sponsored engi-e dating from the early to late Muromachi period.
While painted engi were typically created by and for religious sects and institutions, the Ashikaga began to commission them for their own purposes. The four Ashikaga-sponsored examples demonstrate what might be called the "privatization" of the genre, the function of which oscillates between the institutional needs of the shogunate and the private concerns of the shogun himself: to commemorate a death, to serve as offerings to family shrines, or to assert political and cultural supremacy throughout the realm. While each case of sponsorship may appear as a highly public act of political assertion, not to be overlooked are the subtle ways in which the work encodes the agency of the individual shogun. Examination of Ashikaga involvement with painted engi thus puts into sharper focus the personal and institutional identities of shogun and shogunate, situating both within the highly complex cultural, political, religious, and social matrices of medieval Japan.
Memorializing Yoshimitsu: The Yuzu nenbutsu engi emaki in Seiryoji Temple
Akira Takagishi, Japan Society for the Promotion of Science
With calligraphy by Emperor Gokomatsu, the fourth Ashikaga shogun Yoshimochi, and more than twenty other prominent individuals, as well as elaborate paintings by six different painters of the Muromachi period, the Yuzu nenbutsu engi (1414) in Seiryoji temple (Kyoto) represents one of the most important cultural monuments of the fifteenth century. Because all of the individuals involved can be identified, this set of handscrolls provides crucial material for examining the activities of the cultural elite and the poorly understood painting studios of the early fifteenth century.
While scholars in the past have focused on the artistic merits of the work, this paper examines the circumstances surrounding its production, arguing that Seiryoji’s Yuzu nenbutsu engi emaki was in fact made as an offering for the third Ashikaga shogun Yoshimitsu’s memorial service held on the seventh anniversary of his death (5.6.1414). This thesis will be pursued through an examination of dated inscriptions on the scroll, Yoshimitsu’s personal connections to the calligraphers involved in the project, and other documentary evidence. The paper will shed light on the mixing of the public and the personal in the ritual offering of engi, the apotheosis of Yoshimitsu within the Ashikaga clan, and the possible memorializing function of the numerous other versions of Yuzunenbutsu picture scrolls that survive from the premodern period.
Yoshinori’s Patronage of Hachiman Cult Paintings
Melanie Trede, Institute of Fine Arts, New York University
The sixth Ashikaga shogun Yoshinori (r. 1428–1441) consecrated a total of four sets of Hachiman handscrolls to three different shrines on the same day in the fourth month of 1433. Yoshinori’s Hachiman project is unrivaled in Ashikaga engi patronage in terms of the use of expensive silk, and the geographical areas covered by the dedicated scrolls ranging from Northern Kyushu to Osaka and Kyoto. The Hachiman scrolls bespeak of Yoshinori’s ardent desire to receive divine protection from the Hachiman deity for a multiplicity of personal, political, and cultural reasons.
Two of the four Hachiman engi sets commissioned by Yoshinori have survived to date at the Konda Hachiman shrine (Osaka prefecture). Previous research discussed mainly the identification of painter and calligrapher of the Konda scrolls, but issues of patronage have largely remained unexplored. Moreover, the discovery of two handscroll fragments offer fresh insights into Yoshinori’s commitment to Hachiman engi patronage. Pertaining to the legends of the imperial tomb of emperor Ojin (Hachiman) at Konda, the fragments can be identified as part of the dismissed model for one of the extant sets mentioned in Yoshinori’s dedication postscript of 1433.
This paper explores three aspects: the visual strategies employed in the extant handscrolls to materialize Yoshinori’s religious devotion, political aspiration, and cultural preeminence; secondly, relationship with the imperial court; and finally, the meaning of the Hachiman cult in the early fourteenth century.
An Engi-e of One’s Own: Yoshiharu’s "Miniature" Hasedera engi emaki
Melissa McCormick, Columbia University
Nearly every influential religious institution in the medieval period sponsored the production of illustrated scrolls of its founding legends, making the painted engi the predominant category of medieval picture scroll. Among the countless extant engi-e, however, only one, the Hasedera engi emaki of 1523, appears in the small-scroll format, a type of picture scroll roughly half the height of the standard handscroll. Often reserved for the illustration of short stories, small scrolls were owned and appreciated by individuals. The Hasedera engi emaki taken up here thus defies the conventional logic of engi-e presentation in its intimate portrayal of the miraculous origins of a famous temple. This paper explores the context behind the production of this anomalous engi-e and articulates the insights it may shed on the changing nature of painted engi in medieval Japan.
Documentary evidence points to the likelihood that the artist Tosa Mitsumochi (act. ca. 1522–1569) painted this Hasedera engi-e set at the request of the thirteen-year-old shogun Ashikaga Yoshiharu (1511–50). The exceptional interest the child shogun expressed in both the temple and the famous Kannon image it housed led to the creation of his own copy of its founding legend for personal study and contemplation. The scale of the work reflects its primarily didactic and personalized function, one which characterizes other small scrolls owned by previous Ashikaga shoguns. The 1523 scrolls thus cap a lengthy historical process by which a predominantly institutional painting genre was transformed into the object of private consumption.
The Shogun in Omi: Reading Origins of Kuwanomi Temple
Karen L. Brock, Independent Scholar
In the first month of 1532, the twelfth Ashikaga Shogun Yoshiharu (1511–50; s. 1521–46) commissioned a picture scroll set recounting the origin tale of Kuwanomidera (Mulberry Seed Temple) in Omi Province. A remarkable collaboration between members of the imperial family, the aristocracy, and court painters brought the project to completion in a mere eight months. Details appear in Sanjonishi Sanetaka’s (1455–1537) diary and in colophons appended to the end of each scroll, which also include Yoshiharu’s monogram.
While the outward circumstances of the scrolls’ production are indisputable, what can be said about Yoshiharu’s motivations in making this lavish donation to Kuwanomidera? From 1527–34 Yoshiharu lived in Omi, southeast of Lake Biwa, under the protection of Rokkaku Sadayori (1495–1552). For part of that time, Yoshiharu actually lived at Kuwanomidera, and it was there, in 1534, that he married the daughter of a prominent aristocrat. Thus Yoshiharu’s personal connections to Kuwanomidera provide the foundation for reading the scrolls.
This paper delves more deeply into the political, religious, and poetic significance of the paintings and texts, especially their representations of Omi. While the origin tale itself tells of a late-seventh-century healing by Yakushi buddha, the paintings provide an up-to-date glimpse of Yoshiharu’s place of exile. Analysis of these scrolls in their regional contexts, both past and present, situates them within court and shogunal recognition of Omi’s developing importance in sacred as well as political arenas.
Organizer and Chair: Mark McLelland, University of Queensland
Discussant: Kam Louie, University of Queensland
Keywords: Japan, masculinity, gender.
Over the past decade there has been increased attention paid towards "Men’s Studies" and the development of theories about "masculinity" across a variety of academic disciplines which has resulted in a growing number of conferences and publications centered around the analysis of gender from a male standpoint. However, most of this work has had a Euro-American bias. Despite the long tradition of theorizing women’s issues in Asian Studies, there are still only a handful of monographs that take masculinity as their focus. The transformations in recent years that have affected Japanese men, in particular, have so far failed to receive much attention.
This panel features four papers that attempt to theorize the changes that are taking place in representations of Japanese masculinity. The theme of representation is central to all the papers which argue that "masculinity" is a reflexive construct, dependent upon a variety of discourses which position Japanese men against a variety of "others." Often, masculinity has been positioned in a binary relationship to femininity but these papers reveal this approach to be lacking since "Japanese masculinity" is produced as much through relations with other men (both native and foreign) as it is through comparisons with "Japanese women." The panelists show that masculinity is always a hybrid construct, a performance that is dependent upon the nature of the audience that "looks back." What appear to be masculine strengths to some audiences seem to be fatal flaws to others. Panelists focus on WWII military men and contemporary corporate warriors, as well as "new" and "gay" Japanese men. In all the representations considered, specifically "Japanese" masculinity seems to be under attack. The panelists consider the implications of these discourses for a supposedly "male dominated" society like Japan.
Professor Kam Louie, author of Theorizing Chinese Masculinity (Cambridge University Press, 2001), through acting as discussant will add an important comparative angle to the panel.
Japanese Views of the Emperor and the Enemy: Competing Masculinities during WWII
Morris F. Low, University of Queensland
This paper examines how encounters with the enemy during World War II provoked Japanese soldiers to question their own masculinity. Japanese masculine ideologies played themselves out through rigid social constructions that linked men irrevocably to the state through a network of disciplinary codes and institutions intent on conformity, discipline and submission. The norms and standards of manliness were disseminated through schools, military training, Shinto beliefs and images propagated by the mass media. The ultimate reinforcement of these norms in Japanese military culture saw Japanese soldiers socialized into merciless aggressors. At the same time, however, soldiers were subjugated to a status as servants of the emperor.
Yet, by closely examining interrogation reports and wartime accounts, we find competing masculinities, both among Japanese fighting men and when we compare them with the enemy. There is considerable variation in how the enemy is depicted. The paper examines the extent to which the behavior of Japanese fighting men depended upon the race and ethnicity of those who fought back. We see the surprise and awe with which Japanese fighting men saw American, British, and Australian soldiers. Part of the reluctance of the Japanese to describe the Pacific War as against white supremacism is that ideas of hybrid selves had been used to argue that the Japanese were in fact white. The Emperor was symbolic of that "whiteness." Japan’s alliance with Germany and Italy meant that description of the war as a conflict between white and non-white was inappropriate. It is also clear that the Japanese could not imagine a multi-racial enemy, and Asians and indigenous men appear to have had an unclear status, neither friend nor quite foe.
Fight! Ippatsu! "Stamina" Health Drinks and the Marketing of Masculine Ideology in Japan
James E. Roberson, Musashino Women’s University
Every day, vitamin/health drinks such as "Regain," "Guronsan," and numerous others are consumed in vast quantities by people, men and women, throughout Japan. These drinks promise to help one overcome the wear and tear of daily life and work, to restore one’s energy, to allow one to carry on the fight, and to help one keep going even after five—if not in fact for a full twenty-four hours. While consumption of such drinks is not limited to men, the majority are marketed to men and, more significantly, using a set of masculine images. What is being marketed is not only bottled energy but particular images and idea(l)s of men and masculinity. This paper focuses on the marketing of such "stamina" health drinks to consider the role of media representations in the everyday construction of ideologies of masculinity in contemporary Japan. The paper will, further, consider the connections between such media representations of masculinity and constructions of modernity and nationality in Japan during the 1980s and 1990s.
What Does It Take to Be a Man? Male Dominance and Its Paradoxes in Contemporary Japan
Akiko Takeyama, University of Oregon
Male dominance in postwar Japan has been well documented across family, work, relationships, and leisure spheres. Amid Japan’s prolonged economic downturn and the effects of globalization, however, media and academic discourses are sensationalizing a "crisis" of Japanese masculinity, pointing to such phenomena as the growing number of deaths caused by over-work (karoshi), suicide, stalking incidents, kekkonnan (marriage difficulties), and the so-called feminization of young men through fashion and male use of cosmetics and cosmetic surgery. Less than a decade ago, Japanese men appeared to have achieved a level of economic hegemony in the world and enjoyed unchallenged power within Japan. Today, however, Japanese masculinity has become a problematic notion.
This paper examines discourses surrounding the so-called "masculinity crisis" in Japan by focusing on the skyrocketing consumption of personal grooming products and services among Japanese young men, including beauty salons and media and internet websites devoted to the makeover of men’s faces and bodies. Placing this phenomenon against the backdrop of changing marriage patterns, particularly women’s resistance to traditional marital roles and the delay or avoidance of marriage, I will argue that men’s consumption of "grooming goods" reflects an important shift in men’s social status and subjectivity: from those who "choose" to those who are "chosen." I will analyze the current discourse of masculinity crisis as a representation of men’s transformation into objects of consumption by women. Ultimately, I aim to problematize the notion of Japanese male dominance, and suggest that Japanese (and other) masculinities are not timelessly fixed, but an ongoing performance, which shifts along with socio-cultural transformations and the world’s geo-political power relations.
"A Mirror for Men?" The Rhetorical Use of Representations of Foreign Men and Japanese Gay Men in Japanese Women’s Media
Mark McLelland, University of Queensland
This paper argues that Japanese women’s media which uphold visions of foreign men and Japanese gay men as objects of interest and fascination for Japanese women function as "rhetorical mirrors" whose real intent is to reflect back the supposed deficiencies of traditional Japanese men. In Japan, a wide variety of media aimed at women, including magazines, manga, movies and novels portray both foreign men and Japanese gay men in a positive light. It is argued that the real intent of these representations is not to praise the foreign or native "other" but, rather, to indulge in an inverse rhetoric of criticism that praises the foreign in order to denigrate the native. Drawing upon Karen Kelsky’s work on Japanese women’s internationalism, which suggests that women’s consumption of the foreign is a means to "challenge hierarchies of the native over the foreign, of male over female," it is argued that a similar process is underway among Japanese women who interest themselves in fantasies about Japanese gay men. Depictions in Japanese women’s media of gay men as women’s "best friends and ideal partners" say little about actual gay men in Japan and rather more about the perceived inadequacies of mainstream Japanese men. The paper concludes that popular culture is being used as a vehicle for anti-male rhetoric, a channel for an indirect discourse of complaint whose main purpose is not to praise foreign or gay men but to criticize the perceived shortcomings of ordinary Japanese men.
Organizer: John A. Tucker, East Carolina University
Chair: Samuel Hideo Yamashita, Pomona College
Discussant: Peter Nosco, University of Southern California
Keywords: Yamaga Soko, Hattori Nakatsune, Motoori Norinaga, Yamaji Aizan, Sakamoto Takao, Nishio Kanji, Society for History Textbook Reform.
This panel explores tensions between xenophilia, xenophobia, and nativism in Japanese historiography via intertextual readings of works from Tokugawa, Meiji, and contemporary times. John Tucker’s "Retreat from Chûchô jijitsu" suggests that Yamaga Sokô’s classic statement of nativist history, the Chûchô jijitsu, was sublated by his metaphysical masterpiece, the Gengen hakki, a work explaining historical change via quasi-universalistic categories from the Yijing. Mark McNally’s "Antiforeignism or Astronomy" examines Hattori Nakatsune’s Sandaikô, a treatise that allegedly explained the Age of the Gods with ideas from Rangaku, or "Dutch Learning." McNally reveals that debate over the Sandaikô—a text admired by Motoori Norinaga, Nakatsune’s teacher, but attacked by many of Norinaga’s followers—was crucial to the formulation of late Tokugawa nativist ideological thought. Barry Steben’s "History as Heroic Narrative" explores the populist historiography of Yamaji Aizan, suggesting that Yamaji was neither a xenophile nor a xenophobe, but an eclectic nationalist who synthesized Western and Japanese approaches to history. Steben critically assesses Yamaji’s ideas in relation to those of Sakamoto Takao, a member of the Society for History Textbook Reform. Bob Tadashi Wakabayashi’s "Karagokoro Redefined" examines the controversy over the Monbukagakusho approved history textbook, of which Nishio Kanji is the principal author. Wakabayashi explores the Tokugawa models Nishio drew upon, especially Motoori Norinaga’s nativist ideas of karagokoro, in relating the controversy to early modern tensions between karagokoro and nativism.
Retreat from Chûchô jijitsu: Yamaga Sokô’s Final Excursion into Metaphysics
John A. Tucker, East Carolina University
Yamaga Sokô’s (1622–1685) Chûchô jijitsu (The True Central Empire, ca. 1670) is well known for its nativistic declaration that Japan, not Qing (1644–1911) China, was the true "Central Empire." Many Sôkô scholars (notably Hori Isao, Morimoto Junichirô, and Tahara Tsuguo) have claimed that Sokô’s final, post-exile excursion into Yijing-like metaphysics, articulated in his Gengen hakki (Exploring the Origin of Things, ca. 1680), provided an ontological foundation for his earlier nativist history. This study suggests that Sokô’s Chûchô jijitsu, although very significant in late-Meiji and early-20th-century nationalist discourse, is anomalous when considered in relation to Sokô’s oeuvre. The latter, which always incorporated indigenous elements, more consistently expressed karagoroko perspectives, as are evident in his final text, Gengen hakki. The study biographically contextualizes the Chûchô jijitsu as part of Sokô’s search for an avenue to intellectual power while remaining in exile in Akô, a tozama domain, and Sokô’s post-exile, Edo return to karagokoro metaphysics in Gengen hakki as a means of accommodating himself to his own tumultuous past, and the renewed prospect of service to the Tokugawa regime. The study claims that the principles of historiography integral to Gengen hakki retreat from the nativism of the Chûchô jijitsu as they endorse a more universalistic perspective on the nature of time, change, and reality.
Antiforeignism or Astronomy? Ideological Development within Late Tokugawa Nativism
Mark McNally, University of Hawaii, Manoa
In 1791, Hattori Nakatsune, a student of Motoori Norinaga, composed a treatise on the kamiyo chapters of the Kojiki called the Sandaikô. He submitted his work to Norinaga who attached it to the first edition of his magnum opus, Kojiki-den. Shortly after Norinaga’s death in 1801, several of his students refuted the Sandaikô, arguing that it was polluted by Rangaku. They were troubled by Nakatsune’s application of European astronomical theory in the composition of a metaphorical interpretation of kamiyo. Nativists, they asserted, should only produce literal interpretations of antiquity. Subsequently, a debate over the merits of Nakatsune’s work ensued, and nearly every influential Norinaga disciple was involved. Modern scholars (Ozawa Masao, Nishikawa Junshi, and Omote Tomoyuki) generally agree that Nakatsune did borrow ideas from Rangaku, a development that signified the victory of scientific inquiry over xenophobia. Hirata Atsutane, one of his most ardent defenders, did not share this tolerant attitude. Instead, he only softened the antiforeign rhetoric that prevailed among Norinaga’s disciples for strategic reasons, as he vigorously attacked Nakatsune’s critics. These critics sought to preserve the literary nature of nativism, as well as its antiforeign tone. During the late Tokugawa period, scholars struggled with one another over the formulation of both an intellectual orthodoxy and a coherent ideology for nativism.
History as Heroic Narrative: Yamaji Aizan and the Foundations of Modern Nationalist Historiography
Barry D. Steben, National University of Singapore
Yamaji Aizan (1865–1917), a journalist-historian affiliated with Tokutomi Sohô’s Minyûsha and the Japanese Methodist Church, popularized the writing of national history by authoring biographies of many of the great national heroes and institutional founders of Japanese history, as well as histories of the Japanese people. He believed that the key trend of history is "the expansion of human rights," an idea derived from the Western "Whig" interpretation, but he synthesized that perspective with Rai San’yô’s concept that by comprehending the "momentum of affairs" even an ordinary individual can alter the course of history. Thus Yamaji was neither a xenophile nor a xenophobe, but an eclectic nationalist who appropriated Western as well as "nativist" ideas in his search for a modern perspective on national history that could inspire young people to bold action for the moral transformation of society. Accordingly, he ridiculed the Rankean historians of the official Bureau of Historiography who were, in his view, deconstructing the heroic narrative of Japanese national history by their positivist insistence that history conform to verifiable facts. This is a major reason why the contemporary nationalist historian Sakamoto Takao, a member of the Society for History Textbook Reform, finds inspiration in Yamaji’s historiographical philosophy. In examining this historiographical philosophy, my paper asks whether Yamaji felt a tension between his socialist-Christian convictions and his reverence for the "Japanese spirit," and further examines whether Sakamoto’s use of Yamaji’s ideas in support of historical revisionism is really true to the spirit of Yamaji’s own writings.
Karagokoro Redefined: Nishio Kanji and the Society for History Textbook Reform
Bob Tadashi Wakabayashi, York University, Ontario
"What explains this cultural perversion in Japan? Perceptive readers will note that a passion to destroy ‘Karagokoro’—the worship of China, Europe, and America—pervades A History of the Japanese People."
So wrote Nishio Kanji, chair of the Society for History Textbook Reform and principal author of another work—the nationalistic history textbook that the Ministry of Education certified for use by middle schools next year. Japanese government approval of this textbook has drawn vehement diplomatic protests, similar to those in 1982, from China and North and South Korea. Consciously emulating Tokugawa nativists such as Motoori Norinaga, Nishio claims that an insidious postwar form of karagokoro—extreme xenophilia based on a SCAP-imposed "Tokyo war crimes trial interpretation of history"—has entrenched itself in all areas of Japanese life. Nishio contends that naive, if not seditious, left-wing intellectuals have duped the entire nation into "masochistically" disowning native values as evil and backward in favor of alien ways that putatively enjoy universal validity—pacifism, democracy, and individual rights and freedoms. It is these deleterious foreign sociopolitical norms and their misguided domestic proponents that Nishio and his Society have "a passion to destroy." They seek to do this through reeducation of Japanese youth and revisionist publications on key topics in modern history such as the Nanking Atrocity, "military comfort women," and the "Greater East Asia War." This paper outlines explicit and implicit similarities between their nativist antiforeignism and that of the Tokugawa traditions which they claim to carry on.
Organizer: Christopher A. Bolton, University of California, Riverside
Chair: Shigemi Nakagawa, Ritsumeikan University
Discussant: Livia Monnet, University of Montreal
Keywords: Japan, literature, 20th century, science, media.
Although science and the arts are often conceived as separate or incompatible, our panel examines the possibility and the nature of an interface between the two. Theories of intertextuality following Bakhtin suggest that literature can incorporate scientific discourses, and so constitute one such interface—in the sense of being a "shared surface" between the two fields. We will test the validity of this intertextual model in 20th-century Japan, particularly in light of the challenges posed by high-tech media from film to electronic texts. These technologies have now given a new sense to the word interface, which has come to mean a way of accessing information, as in "graphic interface" or "computer interface." The individual papers examine three authors whose work negotiates the boundaries of literature and science while also speaking to the challenges raised by these new media.
Joseph Murphy explores Natsume Soseki’s use of cognitive psychology in his Bungakuron in the context of Meiji Japan’s broadening interfaces with the West and our present-day attempts to deal with the role of visuality in contemporary culture. Christopher Bolton sees Abe Kobo as an author who embraced expanding media technologies like radio and film, but found paradoxically that these high-tech media could not contain the voices of science that always sounded in his texts. William Gardner observes how Tsutsui Yasutaka uses the interactive possibilities of new media to explore the interface between the virtual reality of literary fiction and the increasingly hypermediated and virtualized "real world." Additional information about the papers will be available on the Internet at http://faculty.ucr.edu/~bolton/aas2
Other Voices: Abe Kobo on Film
Christopher A. Bolton, University of California, Riverside
Theorists mapping the interface between literature, science, and technology have often explained the disjointed style of the postmodern novel as a reflection of the accelerated pace of language in our electronic society (Jameson), particularly when the author has incorporated science or technology as explicit themes in his or her work (Hayles).
An interesting Japanese test case for these theories is Abe Kobo. Abe is known for novels that include scientific material, and the fragmented, even frustrating style of later novels can indeed be read as a textual simulation of technology’s fragmenting effect on language. At the same time, Abe was also known for his real experiments with new media technologies and new literary interfaces, from radio and film to electronic music and digital texts. But despite the predictions of critics like those cited above, the pace and texture of language in many of these multimedia works is actually less chaotic than in Abe’s prose.
This paper tries to explain why, by looking at film versions of Abe’s novels The Face of Another (Tanin no kao, 1964/1968) and The Woman in the Dunes (Suna no onna, 1962/1964), both directed by Teshigahara Hiroshi and scripted by Abe himself. The films do multiply the number of characters and voices in each story, while the novels remain essentially monologues; but instead of fostering fragmentation, that multiplication actually allows the films to establish a clearer boundary between different voices, and between the worlds of science and poetry.
Interface as Performance Space: Tsutsui Yasutaka’s Encounters with Electronic Media
William O. Gardner, Middlebury College
Recent developments in information technology have compelled us to reimagine the interface between author and reader. In contrast to the relatively stable and unidirectional flow of information offered by print media, electronic interfaces allow for new types of interactivity between cultural producers and receivers, shifting the model of reading from the implied solitude of book reading to what author William Gibson has called the "consensual hallucination" of cyberspace. Few writers have been more attentive to this transformation than Tsutsui Yasutaka, whose prolific works fusing science fiction, satire, and mainstream fiction have explored the relationship between the virtual world of literature and the increasingly hypermediated and virtualized experience of contemporary life.
My paper examines Tsutsui’s ambitious and disputatious encounters with multimedia in the 1990s, focusing on his experiment in combining newspaper serialization and an Internet salon to create the interactive novel Gaspard of the Morning (Asa no gasupaaru, 1991–1992), and the controversy over the textbook publication of his early short story "Automatic Police" ("Mujin keisatsu," 1965) which prompted the author to cease publishing in print media from 1993 to 1997. If Tsutsui’s texts track the emergence of a new imaginative space enabled by the electronic interface, they also raise the question of how—and by whom—this space will be authorized and regulated. The details of Tsutsui’s own encounters with electronic media suggest that the shift to cyber society will not be an ecstatic opening up of new imaginative and communicative possibilities, nor an agonistic struggle over the control of channels of communication, but a highly performative, and occasionally comic, combination of the two.
Soseki’s Bungakuron (1907): Interdisciplinary Study for the New Century
Joseph Murphy, University of Florida
Object of relatively little serious study in Japanese or English, Natsume Soseki’s Theory of Literature (Bungakuron, 1907), with its mathematical formulae and extensive citation of English literature, seems to be regarded as an eccentric indulgence by a writer who came later to be known through his creative works as Japan’s greatest modern novelist. Yet, opening its pages, one finds a scientifically grounded reader-response theory of remarkable sophistication, drawing on the latest in contemporary cognitive psychology and developed sixty years before the idea gained currency in Western literary theory.
What is striking in retrospect and remains challenging today is Soseki’s methodological move. When Soseki sought a theory in which to ground an understanding of literature called into question by his encounter with English literature, he did not go to literary criticism; he went rather to the latest in empirical psychology and cognitive studies of memory. For Soseki it was unthinkable that one would talk about the effect of literature on the reader without access to the sciences that deal with cognition and consciousness. A similar destabilization of literature is occurring today as literary studies attempts to come to terms with the increasing "visuality" of twentieth-century culture. The incorporation of film and other visual media in articles, course syllabi, conference presentations, and position announcements that has become de rigueur in area studies is literally unthinkable without engaging the disciplines that take vision as their object, like psychology, neuroscience, cognitive science, and AI modeling of vision.
This presentation revisits the interdisciplinary struggle of this major figure in Japanese literature, and suggests that the level of interdisciplinarity pursued by Soseki, and the way the consequences rippled through his subsequent work, provide a precedent for theorizing a shift from a philologically-oriented area studies to one oriented to visual culture that proceeds in an ad hoc fashion today.
Organizer and Chair: Andrew Gerstle, University of London
Discussants: Susan Matisoff, University of California, Berkeley; Lewis Cook, City University of New York
Keywords: literature, performance, orality.
The predominant modes of Western research on literature are fixed on the modern printed text, which students read silently, analyze, and understand using current literary methodologies.
Two fields, classical studies and anthropology/ folklore (Parry, Lord, McLuhan, Havelock, Finnegan, Goody, Ong, Bauman, Foley, Street), have given us insights into how to understand the nature of "orality" and "literacy." Work on Western medieval culture (Clanchy, Zumthor, Carruthers) has added another important element. It is now generally accepted that most pre-seventeenth-century European literature was "performed" in some way or another.
Most of Japan’s traditional literary forms (waka, katarimono, renga, haikai, nô, jôruri, kabuki) have performative elements as integral to composition, reception, and transmission. We will examine the physical texts (manuscripts, woodblock-print, illustrations) of Japanese traditional poetry, storytelling, and drama from the perspective of the field of orality and literacy studies. The presentations will question what was the function of these physical representations of performance. One hypothesis is that these texts were used as memory cues for readers to re-create or re-imagine the event, or as material for a future performance; another is that the texts were used by readers to re-create performance. The role of music will also be addressed. The panel will, therefore, raise fundamental questions about the concept of literary texts and how they were read/performed in pre-twentieth-century Japan.
Haruo Shirane will examine the poetic tradition; David Bialock, medieval storytelling; and Andrew Gerstle, drama. Susan Matisoff and Lewis Cook will be the discussants.
Poetry, Communal Re-production, and Performance
Haruo Shirane, Columbia University
Modern readers tend to read Japanese poetry monologically, in isolation, either in an expressive, lyrical mode or in a descriptive, mimetic mode. This tendency overlooks the crucial fact that much of Japanese poetry and prose functioned dialogically and had a strong performative function, fulfilling significant socio-religious functions such as paying homage to patrons and gods, expressing gratitude, bidding farewell, consoling the spirit of the dead. Japanese poetry usually took place as immediate exchange, in a communal context, perhaps best exemplified by linked verse (renga/haikai). At the same time, the poet was often engaged in a process of "re-presenting" or "re-performing" established topics, addressing poetic predecessors and rewriting earlier texts.
Much of Japanese poetry had two potential functions: 1) as a one-time, social, political, or religious act, the significance of which quickly disappeared with the passage of time; and 2) as a written and visual text, which existed outside the context of the initial performance but which in turn was "performed" in different ways by new viewers/speakers/listeners, who, as active "performers," communally generated multiple texts, commentaries, and visual representations. Indeed, the need to re-create the original performative context of the poem gave rise to a number of literary genres such as the poem-tale and poetic diary. This paper historicizes this process and examines these different types of "performances" and "re-presentations" with particular focus on the written (and then printed) text as both material and visual object and as a "stage" for communal participation and production.
The Tale of the Heike and Medieval Musical Discourse
David T. Bialock, University of Southern California
The distinguishing feature of The Tale of the Heike is its musicality. Whereas earlier monogatari were read out loud in intimate groups or alone in silence, The Heike was not only performed out loud, but was chanted to the accompaniment of the biwa. The scant documentary evidence for the biwa hôshi (blind performers) prior to the Heike suggests that their art was purely musical rather than part of a narrative tradition. The earliest references to the biwa hôshi mention their musical skill, but not their narratives, at least until Shin sarugakki (ca. 1060). This absence of any clear documentary proof tying the early biwa hôshi to a narrative tradition has encouraged a view of the biwa hôshi as passive transmitters rather than as active shapers of the Heike narrative. This reflects a modern tendency to privilege narrative content over the important symbolic function of music and vocality in medieval culture.
One of the striking characteristics of medieval Japanese culture is precisely the prominence of music as a topic in discourse, and as an integral feature of performance and ritual. There is rich flowering of texts that analyze the role of music in Confucian ethics and ritual, and in esoteric Buddhism. I will locate The Heike as a performed text within the broader medieval discourse on music and voice by focusing on the representation of biwa performances inside a number of Heike variants and other medieval texts.
Representing Performance in Woodblock Print: Nô, Jôruri, and Kabuki
Andrew Gerstle, University of London
Research into the oral nature of classical and medieval/Renaissance European culture has altered the traditional view (among specialists, at least) that literature was meant to be read as silent words on a page. Fundamental questions have been raised about what was the perceived function of a manuscript that represented a performance, and how it was "read." One hypothesis is that texts were produced primarily for individuals actively to re-create performance.
The "texts" of Nô drama were written down as private manuscripts for use strictly within the troupe. The musical notation was kept secret among professionals. From the seventeenth century we have printed editions that include musical notation for voice and were aimed at amateurs. Therefore, the physical text was printed as a primer for re-creating the living text. Reading, therefore, was a highly physical experience.
Jôruri playbooks were published in the seventeenth century as well, but initially only contained some of the musical notation. From the late 1670s a fundamental change saw the printing of books with the "secret" notation for voice, called maruhon or shôhon. As in Nô, the physical text was a vehicle to re-create the text, which only exists in performance.
Kabuki, however, did not publish complete playbooks. I shall argue that various texts such as yakusha hyôbanki (actor critiques), e-iri kyôgen-bon, ezukushi-kyôgen-bon, e-iri nehon (illustrated summary editions), yakusha-e (actor prints), tsuji-banzuke, and e-banzuke (playbills) were all produced as memory cues for re-creating or imagining performance.
Organizer and Chair: Christena L. Turner, University of California, San Diego
In the Shadow of A-ko: Women Living with HIV/ AIDS in Japan
Joanne Cullinane, University of Chicago
In 1986, shortly after the discovery and deportation of a Filipina woman with HIV in Matsumoto City, newspapers reported the very first case of HIV involving a Japanese woman, dubbed A-ko by the press. The frenzy that ensued is now known as the second of the Three Big Commotions (Sandai Sodo) to hit the country like a series of typhoons in 1986–87. A-ko, the press reported, had contracted the virus from a former boyfriend who was a Greek sailor with bisexual tendencies. Furthermore, she was, they reported, a "habitual prostitute" who had experienced sex with over 100 men. In order to protect the public from this menace, reporters infiltrated her funeral and published a photograph of the deceased in a popular weekly magazine. Later, Shiokawa Yuichi, head of the AIDS Surveillance Committee, asserted that AIDS was not a threat to those leading an "ordinary lifestyle."
The image of HIV as a disease affecting only prostitutes and "loose" women persists in Japan to this day. This misperception makes it difficult for women with HIV to speak out publicly about their illness. Yet, with the development of anti-retroviral therapy, more PWAs (people with AIDS) than ever are striving to live "normal" lives. In this paper, I will examine the case of five Japanese women living with HIV and show how they make selective use of the support networks offered by NGOs while also creating alternative networks which are more responsive to their own needs.
Dealing with the Unknown: Unemployment in Japan
Müge Kökten, University of Virginia
Financial pressures and shifting demographics have recently forced many advanced industrialized nations to reassess their programs of social protection. Japan is no exception. While Japanese policymakers have recently created a number of new social programs and reformed others, in areas ranging from long-term care to pensions, on one social policy issue they have been caught particularly off-guard: unemployment. The unemployment rate, which remained near 2 percent for most of the postwar period, has recently reached the unprecedented level of 5 percent, a dramatic rise that has revealed the inadequacy of current social policies.
In this paper, I explain why Japanese unemployment policy has become less generous, even in the face of rising demands for social assistance. I start by establishing that recent unemployment policy indeed has been "less generous," drawing on over thirty interviews with elites from Japanese government, bureaucracy, labor, business, and academia, and an examination of policy documents. The government has reduced the duration and value of unemployment benefits, while at the same time making eligibility rules harder to satisfy. To understand why, I examine four theories of comparative social policy: demographic pressures (Wilensky); electoral politics (Calder); trade structure and union strength (Katzenstein and Esping-Andersen); and bureaucratic politics (Heclo). A combination of the latter two of these theories proves to be most promising. I find that unemployment policies are best understood as resulting from the actions and inactions of Rengo, the trade union confederation, its interactions with the Ministry of Labor, and the MoL’s own position vis-à-vis other prominent agencies within the Japanese bureaucracy.
The Creation of a New Historical Memory through the Spectacle of the Nagano Olympics Opening Ceremony
Taeko Teshima, University of Arizona
This paper explains how the use of myth in the 1998 Nagano Olympics Opening Ceremony is used to support militaristic nationalism in Japan. Extending Roland Barthes