[ 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’ arguments about myth and bourgeois culture to a consideration of nationalism, I show how mythic representations are used to subtly build nationalistic sentiment. As Barthes argues, bourgeois culture is myth which appears to be innocent, natural, and eternal, but in reality is ideology which "interpellates" people into the roles of bourgeois society. Likewise, I find that nationalist culture employs the seeming "innocent," "natural," and "eternal" to interpellate people into the roles of nationalist society. The Opening Ceremony marries everyday gender roles with militaristic readings of core, but vaguely remembered, Japanese mythology. Both the gender roles and the mythology seem innocent and natural, but both are used to reprise wartime cultural symbols and rhetoric. In so doing, the Nagano Olympics Opening Ceremony inspires uncritical pride in a new historical memory of Japan which creates space for the revival of Japan’s wartime ideology.
Historicizing Japanese Animation: From Gundam to Evangelion
Satomi Saito, University of Iowa
With the success of TV cartoons such as Pokemon and Sailor Moon, Japanese animation has recently acquired popularity in the American consumer market. Now so-called anime (Japanese animation) is even considered to be a major cultural product that can be exported outside of Japan. One-sided traffic of images from U.S. to Japan that lasted from the late 19th century is partly transgressed, and the American audience is now exposed to an abundance of foreign images in its everyday life. In this situation, we are faced with several fundamental questions. What is the value of anime outside and inside this "cultural heritage"? What role is anime’s cultural specificity playing on our conceptualization of it?
In order to answer these questions, I will place anime in the Japanese context and examine its characteristics as a genre in its historical development. In my presentation, I will divide the history of anime roughly into two periods: the first wave (up to early 1980s) and the second wave (early 1980s to late 1990s), and examine a representative work of the second wave: Shin seiki evangelion (1995) in order to focus on its postmodern aspect. By doing so, I will not only discuss the process in which anime has differentiated itself from foreign (mainly Disney) animation in the first wave but also the way it historically developed, differentiating itself from the previous generation in the second wave. Historicizing anime will avoid the cultural essentialism we tend to place on Japanese animation and seek a possibility of reading it as a new visual experiment.
Single Women and Delayed Marriage in Japan and Hong Kong
Lynne Nakano, Chinese University of Hong Kong
The average age of first marriage in Japan and Hong Kong are among the highest in the world. This paper considers views of marriage and women’s reasons for delaying or indefinitely postponing marriage in the two societies. The trend toward delayed marriage in Japan is generally blamed on women. The media represents unmarried women as selfish "parasite singles" who continue to live with their parents while spending their money on personal luxury items. Conservative journalists and politicians blame unmarried women for the decline of the Japanese birth rate and family values. Social commentators warn that Japan’s future rests on women’s decision to marry and produce children to support the aging population. Other social observers commend women for rejecting marriage, seeing their choice as an expression of freedom from the nuclear family ideology propagated by the postwar corporate system. In Hong Kong, single women who live with their families are more likely to be praised for their filial piety than blamed for their selfishness. This paper considers why unmarried women are seen as agents of change in Japanese society but are more likely to be seen as objects of pity in Hong Kong. It also reflects on women’s views toward marriage and the role of employment opportunities, financial resources, educational level, and natal family relationships in shaping women’s life decisions in the two societies.
Organizer and Chair: Cheryl Crowley, Emory University
Discussant: Eri F. Yasuhara, California State University, San Bernardino
Keywords: Japanese literature, haikai, early modern period, Japanese poetry, Japanese picture scrolls, Bashô, Chômu, Buson, Issa.
Although haikai was constantly renewed and transformed over the centuries since its inception, it always retained the collaborative, dialogic aspect that it had acquired through its parent genres waka and renga. Haikai poets composed verse in the presence of companions, they exchanged advice and criticism at meetings and through letters, they read each others’ anthologies and treatises, and constantly made allusions to their colleagues’ works in their own. Haikai poets also collaborated with artists to produce works in which the visual and the verbal combined in a dynamic balance. The haikai poet was never alone: he or she always worked with a deep awareness of predecessors and living companions.
In this panel, four specialists in Edo literature consider the effects of collaboration of haikai in a variety of contexts. Scott Lineberger studies the collaborative work of haikai poet Chômu and painter Kano Shôei to produce the extremely influential Bashô-ô ekotobaden, a work that had enormous impact on the canonization of Bashô. Cheryl Crowley examines linked verse sequences of the Yahantei school to reveal the significant role that cooperative efforts between poets of differing schools played in the Back to Bashô movement. Toshiko Yokota considers the collaborations of Buson and his chief disciple Kitô to show how these poets competed and cooperated in enhancing their symbolic and cultural capital. Scot Hislop analyzes the seldom-studied linked verse of Kobayashi Issa to show how Issa created an innovative poetic space quite distinct from that of his predecessors in the An’ei-Tenmei era.
Collaboration in the Back to Bashô Movement: Two Linked Verse Sequences of Buson’s Yahantei School
Cheryl Crowley, Emory University
Renewed interest in the collaborative verse form haikai no renga (haikai linked verse) was an integral part of the mid-eighteenth-century’s Back to Bashô movement, in which haikai poets, most notably Yosa Buson and his Yahantei school, argued for a rejection of the commercialized practices which characterized contemporary haikai and a return to the ideals of Bashô. After the death of Bashô, who had made elegance (ga) central to his poetry, game-like forms, such as tentori (point-garnering) haikai—where poets competed with one another for points—came to compete with linked verse and hokku (starting verse) composition. Buson and his colleagues in the Back to Bashô movement opposed this trend. In their efforts to imitate Bashô, they made linked verse a cornerstone of their practice. For them linked verse composition was an act of resistance to the more popular trends of the day, a marker of solidarity among poets of different schools who shared the same goals, and was central to their efforts to reclaim haikai from the status of a game and return it to the standards set for it by Bashô.
This paper is a discussion of two Yahantei school linked verse compositions, Susuki mitsu (Seeing Miscanthus) from Kono hotori (Around Here, 1773) and Na no hana ya (Rape-Flowers—!). Both are highly representative of the new style of linked verse that emerged during this period, and show how the practice of linked verse composition became a way to reify the ideals of the Back to Bashô movement.
Collaboration of Buson and Kitô in Their Cultural Production
Toshiko Yokota, University of California, Irvine
As the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu notes, those who are engaged in cultural production attempt to advance their positions in the cultural field, competing for cultural legitimacy. No author produces his works alone. In the case of the poet-painter, Yosa Buson, friends and students in his haikai group also participated in his literary and artistic production, competing and collaborating for advancement of their position within the field.
Buson and the members of his haikai group collaborated in their process of producing haikai linked verse. Since 112 sequences of haikai linked verse in which Buson participated have survived, it was still an important poetic genre that required collaboration of the participants. Buson’s haikai students also contributed to Buson’s artistic production by promoting the sales of his paintings. The analysis of Buson’s two-fold practice as a poet-painter will show that his haikai network overlapped with that of his painting and that he collaborated with his student-patrons in both fields.
In this study, I will focus on Buson’s relationship with his leading student, Takai Kitô, and examine various aspects of their collaboration. I will also demonstrate the significance of the following points: (a) Buson’s giving Kitô opportunities to edit the group’s anthologies, (b) Buson’s writing prefaces for Kitô’s works, (c) Buson’s composing haikai linked verse with Kitô and (d) Kitô’s role as a middleman to support Buson’s practice as a painter, and show that the two reciprocated and enhanced economic, cultural, and symbolic capital through their collaboration.
The Light Banter of Tanuki: The Tobi Hiyoro Sequence by Issa and Ippyô
Scot Hislop, Cornell University
The haikai no renga (haikai style linked verse) sequences of Kobayashi Issa (1763–1827) have not received much scholarly attention even though they formed an important part of Issa’s poetic practice. There are some 250 sequences extant which he participated in. Many of the best of these were composed in a comparatively elegant style with poets like Natsume Seibi (1749–1816). In this paper, though, I will examine the Tobi hiyoro sequence composed in 1815 by Issa and Kawahara Ippyô (1771–1840), the poet who most resembled Issa in terms of style of composition and choice of topics. In this sequence, Issa and Ippyô collaborated in seeking new poetic space outside the confines of the increasingly clichéd Shôfû style (the style produced by An’ei and Tenmei [1772–1789] period poets). I will look at some of the techniques they used in this collaboration and will argue that their joint efforts constituted a viable alternative to the stylized sequences of their contemporaries.
The Collaborative Creation of the Illustrated Biography of Bashô the Elder
Scott Alexander Lineberger, Columbia University
The Illustrated Biography of Bashô the Elder (Bashô-ô ekotobaden) was completed in 1792 and presented to Gichûji Temple, where Bashô is buried. It was the first complete biography written about Bashô, tracing his life from his early years in Iga, through his numerous journeys and concluding with a remarkably detailed record of his final days. The creative force behind this scroll was the Kyoto literati monk Goshôan Chômu. The work consists of three scrolls comprised of paintings by Kano Shôei alternated with a text handwritten by Chômu.
The text portrays Bashô as a poet who was inspired by a profound understanding the Buddhist concept of impermanence to conduct a life of poverty and wandering. While this interpretation is only loosely based on fact, it fundamentally influenced the subsequent reception of Bashô’s work and his canonization.
This presentation analyzes the unusual collaborative effort that led to the creation of this scroll. As a picture scroll, this text embodies the synergy produced by the collaboration between writers and painters. Moreover, while Chômu compiled the text, he should not be described as the author, because the text is based almost entirely on Bashô’s journals and the writings of his disciples. A close reading and analysis of the text reveals that Chômu skillfully weaves together the fictional writings of Bashô with the biographical writings of Bashô’s disciples and a few words of his own, thus creating a remarkable collaboration with poets who lived a century before himself.
Organizer and Chair: Elizabeth Lillehoj, DePaul University
Discussant: Samuel C. Morse, Amherst College
Keywords: Japan, art, modern, adaptation.
In the visual arts, how has modern Japan responded to its encounter with the West, and how has the West received the art of Japan? This panel examines exchanges between Japan and the West that have taken place in art and art history, considering ways in which imported forms have been amassed, adopted, and assimilated from the 19th century to the present day. We consider the permeable, yet transformative barriers that separate and define material cultures in Japan and the West.
The discussant, Samuel Morse, opens our panel with a summary and commentary on four papers. Kyoko Kinoshita’s paper looks at the 1876 Philadelphia Exposition display of a popular Meiji export, Arita porcelains, which stood as evidence of the expansion of a fledgling Asian luxury-ware producer into American commodity culture. Jonathan Reynolds’ paper treats Josiah Conder, a European architect invited to Japan by the Meiji government to aid in modernizing architectural training at the Imperial Engineering College. Monika Dix’s paper brings us into the 21st century with her discussion of the limitations of North American academic curricula in Japanese art history and her suggestions for teaching survey courses in the field. Last, Elizabeth Norman’s paper addresses contemporary public art in Japan, which is widely conceived of as a Western artistic form but which has been absorbed into the shared spatial idiom of Japan today. Following replies by the paper writers, we call for responses from several members of the audience who have received the papers and volunteered to prepare comments.
A Study of Arita Export Wares at the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition of 1876
Kyoko Kinoshita, Philadelphia Museum of Art
With the recent publication of several important research reports, the study of Meiji crafts has progressed remarkably in Japan. Nevertheless, because it is difficult to find original documents on art exported around the world, many questions remain. Research on Arita wares exported to the United States based on these new materials offers fruit in our search for information, as my paper reveals.
Porcelains made in the Arita area were Japan’s chief export to European countries in the mid-17th century, when Japan was largely closed to the outside world. However, popularity of Arita wares gradually diminished in the 18th century. In the 19th century, once Seto and Mino began producing porcelains and after a destructive fire hit Arita in 1828, the manufacture of Arita porcelains declined dramatically. In the modern period, Japanese potters turned to Western methods and markets. For example, Fukagawa Yeizaemon (1833–1889) introduced new techniques, contributed to the establishment of a modern system of manufacturing porcelains at Saga, and then launched the Koransha firm at Arita in 1875 for the purpose of participating in the 1876 Philadelphia Centennial International Exposition. Another manufacturer, Kiriukosho Guaisha, began business in Tokyo in 1873, and also participated in the Philadelphia Exposition, which offered a perfect opportunity for Japanese exporters to extend their business to the United States. In this paper, I analyze art works exhibited at the exposition that are now in the Philadelphia Museum of Art, basing my research on an official catalogue published by the Japanese Commission in 1876.
The Cultural Contradictions of an English Architect in Meiji Japan
Jonathan M. Reynolds, University of Southern California
During the Meiji period, the English architect, Josiah Conder (1852–1920), was exceptionally successful at facilitating cultural exchange between Japan and Europe, acting as a kind of purveyor in the import/export business of aesthetics and technology. The Japanese government in 1876 hired Condor to train Japanese students in European architectural practices. The academic program in architecture at the Imperial Engineering College (later incorporated into the Imperial University) that Conder helped to establish was an essential institution for the formation of a modern architectural profession.
Conder arrived in Japan at a time when the Japanese government promoted Western architecture as a key component in its far-reaching modernization program. Yet Conder, who was invited to Japan to forward the government’s Westernization policies, became deeply engaged with Japanese culture. He studied and wrote extensively on pre-modern Japanese architecture, gardens, clothing, flower arranging, and painting. These writings are imbued with a sense of urgency because Conder feared that the traditions he was documenting might disappear as a result of the modernization to which he, himself, was contributing. His writings were among the most sophisticated treatments of these subjects available in English at the time and they were well received by an eager audience. This paper will explore the complexity of Conder’s position as an official promoter of Western culture in Japan and as an advocate for Japanese culture in Japan and in the West.
Meeting and Divergence: Japanese Art History Curricula in North American Universities
Monika Dix, University of British Columbia
The importation of Japanese art history into North American university curricula has greatly enriched our knowledge of "world art history." However, the scholarly and instructional methods of Japanese art history in Japan differ from those in the West, as well as from Western art history as taught at North American universities. As a result, Japanese art history is under attack, mainly from Western art historians, who contend that the field is not current or compatible with Western art history. Recent discussions among Japanese art historians regarding the state-of-the-field indicate a strong incentive for new methodological approaches. Although these changes are already evident in current publications and well received in academic circles, their presence is less strongly felt within Japanese art history classrooms at American universities.
I will report on interviews I am conducting with students and professors of Japanese art history concerning the pros and cons of the present teaching curriculum of Japanese art history at universities in the U.S. and Canada, and I will explore alternative ways of teaching Japanese art history on undergraduate and graduate levels. A comparison of methodological approaches common to Western and Japanese art analysis sheds light on the effectiveness and limitations of certain theories, particularly in a cross-cultural context. Furthermore, this study suggests that the incorporation of alternative methodologies will not only change and enrich the way we look at Japanese art, but it also will open new avenues for future research.
Revealing Practice: Public Art in Contemporary Japan
Elizabeth Norman, Sheffield Hallam University
Public art, a contemporary practice and fashionable art form in the West, appears to have been exported to Japan: the English term is not translated into Japanese and Western artists tend to be favored over Asian. However, this is a mistaken reading of Japanese public art, which is culturally specific and ambitious. It may have the superficial look of Western art; the staples of public art practice such as urban regeneration schemes and corporate promotional displays of work are seen everywhere. But the context for public art is different. Japan is a largely paternalistic and conforming society. It does not have a finely tuned sense of public or publics, so social commitment is not an imperative. Social restraint keeps vandalism from being a problem and a critical press is almost non-existent. Art directors and other authoritarian figures insist on single project management. While this may seem like a list of generalizations, public art with its social, political, and aesthetic agendas cannot fail to draw attention to cultural differences.
Specific examples I examine are the Tokyo-based Shinjuku I-LAND and Faret Tachikawa projects, which initiated the practice of contemporary public art according to Western models, and the recent ambitious project to tackle a specific Japanese problem, the declining rural populations in northern Honshu. To study Japanese public art is to study contemporary Japan, for it speaks of the country and its current interests, concerns and ambitions, one of which is to claim a public art that is more than an export.
Organizer and Chair: Joyce Gelb, City University of New York
Discussants: Patricia Boling, Purdue University; Heidi Gottfried, Wayne State University; Shana L. Fruehan, University of Chicago; Kyoko Murakami, University of Kansas; Joyce Gelb, City University of New York
This roundtable will cover emerging policies related to women and gender in Japan and their impact on women’s changing role in Japanese society. Topics will include equal employment, sexual harassment, reproductive rights, and domestic violence policy, as well as changes in educational policy related to women. Several papers will compare gender-related social and labor policy in Japan with European and American counterparts.
Organizer and Chair: Brian Platt, George Mason University
Discussant: Neil L. Waters, Middlebury College
This panel examines the local and national implications of the formation of a self-conscious stratum of commoner elites in Japan during the late Tokugawa period. It approaches commoner elites in an integrated fashion, exploring their roles as local officials, teachers, ideologues, and public activists. We originally hoped to hold this panel back-to-back with Takeshi Moriyama’s panel on Suzuki Bokushi, with the intention of broadening our portrait of local elites to include a discussion of their literary activities (because the back-to-back panel category has been eliminated, the two panel proposals were submitted separately).
Unlike Western scholars of China, who have long been engaged in an effort to define "local elites" (or "gentry") and to examine their identity and their roles in early modern Chinese society, Western scholars of early modern Japan have only begun to study commoner elites as a distinct group. As this panel shows, commoner elites became increasingly aware of their unique position in the socio-political order during the early nineteenth century. They faced the common challenge of defining their status within their communities amidst social and economic changes. They were tied together through expanding networks of commercial and cultural exchange. They created new ideological movements that were tailored to their specific set of concerns and interests. Finally, in response to the pervasive sense of crisis in late-Tokugawa society, commoner elites engaged in new forms of public activism—schools, militias, anti-infanticide campaigns, and so on. At the end of the Tokugawa period, this local activism was transferred to a national scale, allowing the collective efforts and concerns of local elites to shape both the Restoration movement and the formation of the Meiji state.
Defining Community in Nineteenth-Century Osaka
Sakurako Handa, Princeton University
While discrete rural communities of early modern Japan have been studied intensively, the study of urban communities has had few practitioners. The artificial (in the sense of man-made) nature of cities certainly demanded a different, and possibly more intensive, effort to create a sense of boundedness. My objective in investigating neighborhoods in nineteenth-century Osaka has been to sketch out the nature of this artifice: how was the community, and local influence, defined by the administrative structure? Were there alternative modes of community and local influence beyond the structure itself?
Regulations and codes generated by neighborhoods reveals the administrative structure of the community, as well as its tensions. Outlining the responsibilities of the neighborhood property owners (chonin, in the narrow sense), it establishes the distinction between "us" (property owners) and "them" (their tenants and outsiders) and reveals the demands placed upon the neighborhood for the purpose of urban population management. Occasionally revised, these codes also reveal the changing nature of the neighborhood community over time.
My paper will examine two sets of neighborhood codes from Kobiki-machi Minami-no-cho. Taking some hints from its population registers, I will contrast its administrative structure and residential practice. I argue that the protocol that had defined relationships in the neighborhood had been undermined by the early nineteenth century with the erosion of the premise of community (property ownership by residents) as well as by rampant and creative "poaching" on the structure by neighborhood residents for entirely different ends.
Teachers and Ideological Movements in Late Tokugawa Japan
Brian Platt, George Mason University
This paper explores the relationship between the proliferation of schools and teachers during the second half of the Tokugawa period and the emergence of a self-conscious stratum of commoner elites. One point of intersection between these two phenomena can be found in the various ideological movements that spread among commoner elites in late Tokugawa Japan. During the early nineteenth century, Confucianism, Shingaku, and Nativism were refashioned by local elites to provide an ideological foundation for social, moral, and economic reform at the communal level. Each of these ideological movements encouraged local elites to open schools as one strategy in the larger effort to rejuvenate local society. Teaching, they argued, offered an opportunity for elites to transmit moral principles and practical skills within their communities, thus contributing to both parts of a dual program of moral and economic rehabilitation.
My paper examines how each of these ideological movements articulated the importance of education, and also traces the teaching activities among adherents to each of these movements. These movements, I argue, also highlight the intra-communal and trans-communal dimensions to the formation of this stratum of local elites. On one hand, these movements promoted teaching as a means of rebuilding the bonds between elites and their communities. On the other hand, these movements—which were usually transmitted through teacher-pupil relationships—strengthened those ties among elites that transcended the community, linking elites together into regional and national networks inaccessible to most commoners.
Peasant Elites, Infanticide, and Social Order in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Japan: A Case from Chiba Prefecture
David L. Howell, Princeton University
This paper is part of an ongoing project concerning social disorder and intellectual ferment in nineteenth century Japan. It examines an instance of collaboration between rural elites and government authorities in the years surrounding the Meiji Restoration. In the 1860s, Otaka Zenbei, a wealthy peasant in Kazusa province, became concerned about what he saw as an epidemic of abortion and infanticide in the villages of the Boso peninsula. He submitted a series of proposals to remedy the problem to the Tokugawa authorities, but although they were received sympathetically no action was taken on them. Immediately after the Meiji Restoration, however, Shibahara Yawara, the governor of Kisarazu and Chiba prefectures, implemented a welfare policy for pregnant women and young children that owed much to Otaka’s earlier proposals. Shibahara enlisted local elites to support the policy through monetary donations and to oversee its implementation, which entailed both the distribution of funds and the creation of rudimentary bureaucracy to monitor the reproductive activities of local women.
In examining this and other cases of cooperation between rural elites and the authorities in the Tokugawa-Meiji transition period, I hope better to understand rural elites’ perceptions of the connection between local problems and national affairs. Otaka and Shibahara understood abortion and infanticide to be both general problems of morality and economy (killing infants is an absolute wrong, and infants grow up to be productive farmhands) and practices particularly connected to the Boso peninsula, which they supposed to be a major center of these practices.
Ishizaka Shoko, a Village Headman in Restoration Period Japan
M. William Steele, International Christian University
This paper examines the activities, ambitions, and ideological orientation of Japanese local elites in the years immediately before and after the Meiji Restoration. Previous research has concentrated on the dramatic outbursts of rioting or bouts of religious frenzy that destabilized rural society from the 1860s through the 1870s. In contrast, this paper highlights the role of village headmen in securing stability and guiding their communities through the transition period. In the absence of effective central controls over law and order, some village leaders established local peacekeeping forces in the 1860s, including the formation of farmer militias (nohei). Moreover, amid the confusion of the times, local leaders were quick to seize new opportunities for advancing local and regional interests and, at the same time, reinforcing their own positions as local and regional notables. One such person was Ishizaka Shoko (1841–1906) who became the head of Notsuda Village (in present-day Kanagawa Prefecture) in 1857. A young and vigorous leader, Ishizaka guided Notsuda through the crisis years of the Restoration. In 1866 he helped train a village militia; in the early 1870s he promoted village "civilization and enlightenment," set up new village schools and preached a new political morality based on action "for the sake of the village" (mura no tame). Ishizaka went on to become a major figure in Kanagawa politics; he joined the People’s Rights Movement and argued on behalf of local autonomy (jichi). He was elected to the Kanagawa Prefectural Assembly in 1879 and in 1890 won election to the Lower House of the first Diet. An examination of Ishizaka’s activities clarifies the crucial role that local and regional leaders played in the shaping of modern Japan.
Organizer: Alisa Freedman, University of Chicago
Chair: Henry D. Smith II, Columbia University
Discussant: Jordan Sand, Georgetown University
Keywords: Japan, city, design, literature, film.
In the 1920s and 1930s, Tokyo emerged as a metropolis, filled with mass transportation, concrete architecture, and crowds at work and play in bustling business and entertainment districts. The suburbs grew rapidly, as residential neighborhoods were built to accommodate the influx of white- and blue-collar workers and their families. Although the expansion of Tokyo had begun earlier, a conjuncture of historical forces, including the growth of consumer capitalism, rise of the middle classes, and necessity of rebuilding the city after the 1923 earthquake, made the speed and extent of change more dramatic than perhaps ever before. Images of the new Tokyo proliferated in written and visual media.
Through presentations focusing on design, architecture, literature, and film, our panel will investigate the development of modern Tokyo and how transformations in urban space affected the lives of its residents. Sarah Teasley will analyze furniture-maker Moriya Nobuo’s designs, demonstrating how they reflected and shaped middle-class desires and the realities of domestic space. Ken Tadashi Oshima will explain the design and construction of Hijiribashi Bridge as an urban nexus and expression of changing visions of Tokyo. Alisa Freedman will discuss how writers perceived something particularly modern about the commuters and couples they saw in Shinjuku Station, Tokyo’s most used terminal. Kota Inoue will examine filmmaker Ozu Yasujirô’s depictions of daily life in the 1930s suburbs. This multidisciplinary panel will contribute to the growing field of research on interwar urban culture by bringing new perspectives based on intensive analysis of specific sites, spaces, and architectural forms.
Furnishing the Modern Metropolitan: Moriya Nobuo’s Designs for Domestic Interiors, 1922–1927
Sarah Teasley, University of Tokyo
When Tokyo-based furniture-maker and interior designer Moriya Nobuo died in 1927, he left behind a small but massively influential body of work. Characterized by the coincidence of romanticist poeticism with a modernist concern for utility of use and production, Moriya’s theoretical propositions and built designs reflect a drive to implement a shift from tatami- to chair-based domestic interiors through the creation of accessible "western-style" furniture and the popularization of desire for it. In a period when architects, social reformers, and interior designers saw this shift as integral to urban Japanese modernity, Moriya’s designs for city interiors and their residents reflect and practice a belief in shaping national culture through the built environment.
This paper examines Moriya’s designs for domestic interiors from 1922, when he returned from studies abroad, to his death in 1927. On the one hand, Moriya designed a series of expressionist-inspired model rooms intended for the suburban single-family homes of the new middle class; on the other hand, as the founder of design firm Kinome-sha, he launched a line of simple, inexpensive, mass-produced furniture designed to make chair-style living attractive and possible even in pre-existing domestic spaces. Moriya also influenced future generations of designers in classes at the newly-formed Tokyo Higher School of Industrial Art and in articles in Mokuzai kogei. These activities embody Moriya’s visions for the domestic interiors—and, by extension, the identities—of 1920s Tokyo’s new modern metropolitan middle class, and also describe the differences between spaces (and identities) desired and those actually lived.
Hijiribashi: Spanning Time and Crossing Place
Ken Tadashi Oshima, Columbia University
Spanning the steep verdant embankments of Tokyo’s Kanda River, the soaring concrete arch bridge, Hijiribashi, stands today as a key project of the Imperial City reconstruction project after the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923. Built on the constructed Edo landscape of the former feudal capital’s Outer Moat, Hijiribashi both connects the premodern and modern city and serves as a vital transportation link as an urban nexus of automobile, pedestrian, water, and subway routes. This presentation examines this bridge’s planning, construction, and evolution as a microcosm of Edo/Tokyo’s urban structure.
In particular, this presentation discusses Hijiribashi (Saints’ Bridge) as a successful union of the planner and architect’s visions to realize a functional modern meisho (notable vista). Following Gotô Shimpei’s guidelines calling for efficient flow of vehicular traffic through a straight four-lane crossing, architect Yamada Mamoru (1894–1966) simultaneously realized abstract artistic ideals of the Bunriha Architectural Society (1920–1928), the first modern architectural movement in Japan. While the bridge achieves the modern ideal of a non-ornamental, fire and earthquake proof structure, its abstract design simultaneously recalls the ideals of German Expressionism and images of Edo bridge landscapes as depicted in numerous woodblock prints and photographs. Hijiribashi, as one of the few extant structures from the 1920s, thereby becomes a physical, spatial, and temporal link to understand the complexities of Japanese urban change and continuity.
A Literary Look at Shinjuku Station: Hub of the Daily Commute, Heart of the Dating Scene
Alisa Freedman, University of Chicago
In literature, journalism, popular song, and in practice, Shinjuku Station was the hub of the daily commute and heart of the Tokyo dating scene from the late 1920s. Connecting the expanding suburbs to the burgeoning financial center, Shinjuku Station became Tokyo’s most used terminal after 1925. In literary stories, newspapers, and guidebooks, its crowds were described as more socially diverse and youthful than those at Tokyo and Ueno stations, the other major entryways to the metropolis. The area surrounding Shinjuku Station rapidly developed into a bustling commercial and entertainment center and became a desirable dating place, especially for young businessmen and various kinds of female workers who started their romantic evenings in the terminal.
This presentation examines how Asahara Roroku, Funahashi Seiichi, and Ryutanji Yu, authors associated with the short-lived Shinko geijutsu ha or New Art School, saw post-earthquake spatial, social, and cultural transformations as converging and enacted in Shinjuku Station. This terminal was not only the setting but also the content of their city sketches, which appeared in intellectual literary journals between 1928 and 1931. These modernists, who depicted and even exoticized the sensations of living in Tokyo, perceived the commuters and couples in this seemingly ordinary site as embodying the routinization and allure of urban life. Crossing the boundaries between fiction and nonfiction, these descriptions of Shinjuku Station should be read together to better understand how transformations in Tokyo space affected the lives of its residents and to see literature’s value in representing and reacting to historical change.
The Expanding Metropolis: Suburban Tokyo in Ozu Yasujirô’s I Was Born, But . . .
Kota Inoue, University of California, Irvine
The emergence of metropolitan Tokyo is punctuated by the major restructuring of the city limits in 1932 that enlarged the city sevenfold, making it the world’s second most populous city. The expansion of the metropolis, however, was not simply a matter of redrawing borders. In the peripheries of Tokyo, it meant an encounter between two spaces of different orientation: one primarily agrarian and the other urban. Suburbanization restructured the social relations of the autonomous agrarian community into a system of production serving the needs of the urban center. This structure of domination inherent in suburban expansion shows striking similarity to the process of colonization that Japan was pursuing at the same time
Ozu Yasujirô’s I Was Born, But . . . is generally regarded as a masterpiece among Ozu's early comedies of the emerging middle class. However, released just before the 1932 Tokyo expansion, this film also deserves close attention for its intriguing setting—a Tokyo suburb. Through the transplanted urban children who subtly but fundamentally transform the local children’s community by introducing new rules of play that are based on the urban economy of abstract exchange, the film brilliantly illustrates the conflict that the expanding metropolis brings into the suburb. This paper examines the film’s representation of the suburb in order to reveal the underlying relation of dominance between the suburb and the metropolis, and it further attempts to resituate the metropolis-suburb relationship in terms of the contemporaneous colonial history of Japan in the wake of the Manchurian Incident of 1931.
Organizer: Kyu Hyun Kim, University of California, Davis
Chair: Harold Bolitho, Harvard University
Discussant: Robert A. Eskildsen, Smith College
Keywords: Japan, Tokugawa, domain (han), shogunate.
Coastal defense was one of the most serious public issues that preoccupied the able Japanese minds in the late Tokugawa period. Throughout the first half of nineteenth century, Japanese of various social standings and political orientations became increasingly aware of the global pressures being put on the policy of "national isolation." The shogunate and domain governments realized that their coastal regions had to be defended against naval incursions of "Western barbarians," in particular British and Russian.
However, late-Tokugawa discourses and policies regarding coastal defense contained within themselves potentials to expose the inherent contradictions of Tokugawa socio-political order, and thereby undermine the stability of the very system they sought to protect. For, talking of "defending Japan" brought a series of difficult yet inevitable questions to the fore: what is this "Japan"? Is it an aggregate of domains ruled over by the benevolent shogunate? Or is it something else entirely? Again, who exactly is defending Japan? How should the responsibility of coastal defense be shared by the shogunate and the domains? Do the non-samurai classes have any say in how coastal defense is organized and carried out? Extensive engagement with the problem of coastal defense, concerned with protecting the territorial borders, in the end, led to the various forms of "border-crossing," eventually even direct challenges to these borders, in terms of regions, political groups and organizations, social classes, and ideas.
By exploring the policies, political dynamics, class conflicts, and intellectual debates concerning the problem of coastal defense, this panel seeks to explore an important stage in Japan’s transition from early modern to modern society and political system, while addressing a lacuna in English language scholarship in the history of early-nineteenth-century Japan.
Return of the Samurai: The Phaeton Incident of 1808 and the Remilitarization of the Samurai in Northern Kyushu
Noell Howell Wilson, Harvard University
Traditionally the samurai class of the Tokugawa period (1600–1868) is depicted as a group of bureaucrats pacified by lack of internal warfare, fighting men gradually transformed into civil servants whose identity became linked to military combat only in the title of their rank. In Fukuoka and Saga domains, however, where the samurai classes had shared responsibility for the defense of Nagasaki harbor since the early Tokugawa period, active service in these shore batteries revived the military character of their station from the early nineteenth century. This paper argues that the pivotal incident in this trend towards this restoration of the samurai as soldier was the infiltration of a British warship, Phaeton, into Nagasaki Bay in 1808.
Using largely ignored samurai diaries and domain records from Kyushu archives, this paper explores how this event sparked broad changes in coastal defense around Nagasaki and ultimately altered the military identity of samurai in Fukuoka and Saga domains. I discuss how the strengthening of the military character of the samurai in a society where political affiliation was based on military allegiance challenged the way the samurai class identified with both local province and nation. Finally, by exploring correspondence among the domain governments, the Nagasaki magistrate, and bakufu officials in Edo, this paper addresses the question of what local defense of a bakufu-owned port suggests about the reach (and incipient decline) of Tokugawa political authority in early nineteenth century.
Farmers as Fighting Men: The Military Function of the Peasant Class in Nineteenth-Century Coastal Defense
Miyazaki Katsunori, Kyushu University
One of the founding principles of the Tokugawa state (1600–1868) was the strict class separation of samurai (bushi) and peasants (hyakusho), under which military service was both a duty and privilege monopolized by the warrior class. However, from the early nineteenth century, as fear of foreign attack heightened with the increasing appearance of Western ships along the Japanese coastline, bands of farmer militia were organized throughout Japan to man coastal lookout posts and to respond to attack if necessary. The emergence of the farmer as fighting man contradicted the established hierarchy of social status but in this period of crisis was not only accepted but also embraced.
Drawing upon concrete case studies and primary records housed in the archives of Northern Kyushu, this paper will examine how and why certain strata of the peasant class contributed more than others to the farmer militia, how the militia were organized, and how they actually contributed to defense. We will also analyze how participation in military service influenced the social identity of peasants as a class and political consciousness as members of a local region and of Japan. For the conclusion we will attempt to develop hypotheses concerning the question of how the participation of the peasant class in the farmer militia during the mid-nineteenth century contributed to the opposition movements against the compulsory conscripttion law of the early Meiji Period (1870s).
Defense of the Realm: Late Tokugawa Discourses on Coastal Defense
Kyu Hyun Kim, University of California, Davis
This paper investigates memorials and opinion letters solicited by and submitted to the shogunate from 1840 (marked by the advent of the Opium War) to 1853, when the policy of national isolation came to an end. In their respective groundbreaking researches on this period of Japanese history, Mitani Hiroshi discussed the impact of controversies on coastal defense on the subsequent development of protonationalist ideas and activities, while Fujita Satoru noted that pursuit of coastal defense strategies ultimately resulted in promotion of "feudal isolationism" among powerful domains and weakening of the shogunal authority.
Using these arguments as a starting point, this paper examines the extent of awareness of the potential contradiction in strengthening local daimyos’ military and political power, the process in which new formulations of existing ideas such as "public discourse" and Japan as a political unit ("the realm") merged with the arguments in favor of fortifying coastal regions, and the degree to which these discourses on coastal defense aided or hindered the shogunate system in rationalizing the status quo.
For this purpose, the multivolume collection Nihon kaibo shiryo sosho, (Compendium of Historical Documents Regarding the Coastal Defense of Japan), the Ii Naosuke family papers, official papers of the shogunate on foreign relations and other primary sources are consulted.
Organizer: Naomi H. McGloin, University of Wisconsin, Madison
Chair: Wesley M. Jacobsen, Harvard University
Discussant: Seiichi Makino, Princeton University
Keywords: Japanese linguistics, person reference, usage.
Person reference in Japanese is strikingly different from English in that: (1) the referent is often not overtly expressed ("zero anaphora"); (2) there are multiple referential choices including so-called pronouns (e.g., watashi, ore, boku for ‘I’), titles (e.g., sensei ‘teacher’ for ‘you’), and kinship terms (e.g., otoosan ‘father’ for ‘I’); and (3) pronouns are often associated with rather special social meanings.
Although there have been some linguistic and ethnographic studies of person reference, the scope of data of these studies has been typically limited to personal observations and introspection based on constructed examples. Following the recent trend of usage-based approaches to linguistics, this panel extends the study of person reference in Japanese based on close examinations of systematically gathered data.
The panel examines three different types of person reference: zero anaphora or "missing" argument (Matsu-moto), first-person pronoun (Ono and Thompson), first- and second-person forms (Jones), and title vs. first name (McGloin).
The papers explore often-neglected aspects of referential expressions and demonstrate that Japanese person reference is best understood in terms of cognitive and interactional factors. It also highlights the importance of examining actual usage in written and oral texts in a systematic way and presents this as a new direction of research in examining reference.
Silent Reference in Japanese Discourse
Yoshiko Matsumoto, Stanford University
The ubiquity of ellipted or unspecified referential expressions in Japanese texts has been well noted among scholars in linguistics and literature. This phenomenon of silent reference, or zero-anaphora, in Japanese has often been identified simply with dropped pronouns in languages such as English, especially in formal linguistics studies that mostly rely on introspective data. In this paper, I examine actual usage against the background of previous studies on discourse functions of referential expressions (e.g., Clancy and Downing 1987) as well as some recent work on argument structure (e.g., Thompson and Ono 1997, Matsumoto 1997), and discuss the cognitive implications of the prevalence in Japanese of silent reference.
The main observation in this study is that, contrary to the common assumption, zero-anaphora in Japanese are not simply dropped pronouns, but are a more cognitively and functionally complex entity. This point is developed by analyzing functions of silent reference found in various kinds of actual written and spoken texts in Japanese. Because referents are not explicitly mentioned, recovery of the identity of the silent referent requires a complex integration of various syntactic, semantic, and interactional information as well as world-knowledge. On the other hand, the reference need not be to a unique individual referent, but allows for a certain flexibility of meaning, a point which is less often emphasized by researchers. With these findings, the paper also illustrates the importance of studies of person reference in Japanese from the cognitive and interactional points of view based on a systematic analysis of actual usage.
Japanese (w)atashi/ore/boku ‘I’: It’s Not Just a Pronoun
Tsuyoshi Ono, University of Arizona; Sandra Thompson
Japanese (w)atashi/ore/boku ‘I’ (1SG) have been assumed to be a unitary category for the first-person pronoun, primarily associated with the referential function of keeping track of who is being talked about. Our examination of 1SG in Japanese conversations yields some surprising results.
In more 70% of its uses, the person is clear without 1SG; these uses include two non-referential uses: 1) in the emotive use, the predicate expresses the speaker’s emotion/feeling, and 1SG strongly tends to occur after the predicate in the same intonation contour (sugoi warukute watashi ‘I (feel) terrible’), behaving similarly to final particles (e.g., ne and yo); 2) in the frame-setting use, 1SG typically co-occurs with conjunctions (e.g., de ‘and’ and dakara ‘so’), particles (e.g., topic marker wa and final particle ne), and discourse markers (e.g., nanka ‘what’) and provides the subjective framework for the coming utterance. 1SG and these elements seem to have become semi-fixed expressions (e.g., atashi nanka ne ‘I um, see’) due to their frequent co-occurrences.
1SG is not a unitary category, involving the two non-referential uses of 1SG, which are associated with different sets of features (intonation, use of particle, word order, predicate type, meaning, discourse function, fixedness). This supports a conception of language in which grammatical features are closely tied with cognitive and interactional features.
Constructed data, typically employed in linguistics, fail to reflect the realities of 1SG. The actual nature of 1SG for Japanese speakers can be seen only through examination of everyday discourse, revealing the importance of including facts of human interaction in approaching the study of grammar.
Cognitive and Interactional Motivations for Overt 1st- and 2nd-Person References in Japanese Conflict Discourse
Kimberly Jones, University of Arizona
In Japanese spoken discourse, person reference forms such as names, nouns, and pronouns are relatively infrequent. In this paper, I investigate the cognitive and interactional factors that play a role in the occurrence of 1st- and 2nd-person singular reference forms, such as watashi, anata, and name + san, as subjects of sentences.
The data are audio and video tape recordings of casual conversations and televised debates, totaling approximately 13,000 intonation units. All 1st-person reference forms observed in the data were pronouns. Approximately two-thirds of the 2nd-person reference forms were also pronouns, and the remainder were names.
The use or non-use of person reference forms has been said to be motivated by cognitive factors. For example, their use can help insure understanding when there is limited contextual or pragmatic information to help the hearer interpret the identity of the referent. However, my data show that interpersonal constraints sometimes override what would be predicted based on cognitive factors. 1st-person forms occurred more frequently in talk involving conflict. (No such link was found for 2nd-person forms.) Also, both 1st- and 2nd-person forms were used in conflict talk even when the referent could have been understood easily without them, showing that they are motivated by factors other than cognitive ones. Depending on how they are used, these forms are shown to have the effect of either smoothing over or exacerbating the conflict.
Power vs. Solidarity: Use of Address Terms by Japanese Professionals in the U.S.
Naomi H. McGloin, University of Wisconsin, Madison
It is well known that the way the speaker refers to the hearer differs depending on the relative status, gender, and degree of familiarity/closeness of the addressee. Japanese and American English present a striking contrast in this regard. In referring to an addressee who is socially higher (or even equal) in status, the Japanese use titles or last names, while Americans prefer to address each other by first names regardless of the relative social status of the speaker and the addressee. In other words, "power" is the defining factor in Japan, while "solidarity" is focused in the U.S.
This paper examines how Japanese native speakers who have been living in the U.S. and have been acculturated to varying degrees to the U.S. address system negotiate between the two systems. The paper presents the findings of the survey of 80 professionals teaching Japanese in the U.S. The survey sought to answer questions such as whether they prefer use of first names as opposed to sensei, how they feel about these two systems, and if they find it easier to use first names in e-mail communication as opposed to face-to-face communication, among others.
There is a wide range of opinions expressed in the survey, but preliminary findings indicate that the respondents prefer to be addressed by their first names rather than sensei by a senior colleague whom they know professionally.
Organizer: E. Bruce Reynolds, San Jose State University
Chair: Lela G. Noble, San Jose State University
Discussant: David A. Titus, Wesleyan University
Keywords: fascism, political history, comparative politics, Japan, early Showa era.
In the 1930s political movements generally dubbed "fascist" gained widespread popularity and support as "third path" alternatives to communism and liberal democracy. These "fascist" movements seemed to offer a unifying antidote to both the class animosities promoted by Marxism and the social atomization that characterized liberal-democratic societies. "Fascism" offered a spiritual alternative to materialism and a national alternative to Marxist internationalism. It promised to perpetuate private property, but to balance matters by using state power to curb purely selfish behavior and promote common interests.
Since the 1960s scholars of comparative fascism and modern Japanese history have generally argued that Japan was not fascist, primarily on the grounds that Japan lacked a charismatic dictator and a party-based regime, characteristics often included in definitions of "generic fascism." Consequently, many significant historical and ideological parallels among the founding members of the Axis Alliance—Italy, Germany, and Japan—have been downplayed or ignored. The papers in this panel argue that the parallels are more significant than the commonly cited differences, particularly the striking similarities between the ideologies of Japanese Shinto ultra-nationalism and German National Socialism. Because Japan’s inclusion is essential if comparative studies are to yield a full understanding of the fascist era, “Axis Studies” is suggested as an appropriate new rubric for such research.
The Fascist Era: Imperial Japan and the Axis Alliance in Historical Perspective
Joseph P. Sottile, Independent Scholar
Since the end of World War II, many scholars have tried to define fascism and to formulate a generic model of fascism. While some still disagree, most regard both Fascist Italy and National Socialist Germany as examples of "generic fascism." However, their partner in the Axis Alliance—Imperial Japan—generally has been excluded and, indeed, ignored by scholars and historians of fascism. This stems from the fact that Imperial Japan neither had a dictator comparable to Benito Mussolini or Adolf Hitler, nor a party-based regime like Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany. Yet, Imperial Japan displayed many of the same ideological, political, and historical characteristics exhibited by its Axis Allies, and it certainly shared common geopolitical goals—imperialism and colonization.
This paper argues that, despite some significant differences, the three Axis powers exemplified an era in world history—the Fascist Era. Their convergence into a cooperative partnership arose out of similar attempts quickly to create viable nation-states in an age of static imperialism. This reevaluation of the traditional disassociation of Imperial Japan from generic fascism takes into account the broad historical and geopolitical context of the era (1870–1945), fascism’s methodology of mass mobilization, the fascist rationale for war and imperialism, and fascism’s broad neo-idealist appeal. This "Axis Minimum" is the basis of an expansive model of generic fascism—Axis Studies—that includes Imperial Japan, thus eliminating the historiographical rationale for separating Imperial Japan as a "special case."
Peculiar Characteristics: The Japanese Version of the "Third Path"
E. Bruce Reynolds, San Jose State University
Japan is usually excluded from the "fascist" fold because it lacked a charismatic dictator and a mass-based political party. Further, critics point out that the emperor still stood at the center of the Japanese political system, the Meiji Constitution remained in place, the Diet continued to meet, and elections were held, even in 1942 after Japan had gone to war against Britain and the United States. It is also the case that relatively few Japanese explicitly called themselves "fascists." There are, however, very good historical and practical reasons for these anomalies that have distracted scholars’ attention away from more significant similarities.
While Mussolini found it necessary to revive the imagery of the Roman Empire and Hitler the Teutonic Knights and the spirit of the German Volk to create a basis for spiritual renewal and national revival, the Japanese had a similar tool more readily at hand in the myth-enshrouded imperial house. "Third path" advocates in Japan, whose goals largely paralleled those of the Italian Fascists and German National Socialists, recognized the utility of the malleable imperial institution—a peerless source of legitimacy—and the flexibility of the sacrosanct Meiji Constitution. Well aware that the Meiji genro had led the inherently conservative Japanese populace through revolutionary change under the rubric of "restoration" in the nineteenth century, the "third path" revolutionaries of the 1930s sought to use the same method to lead the nation in a different direction.
Myth and Fascism: On the Idea of "Homogeneity" in Japan and Germany prior to 1945
Klaus Antoni, Tuebingen University, Germany
Traditional or invented mythologies are exceptionally important in evaluating possible parallels between the ideologies of fascist German National Socialism and the ultra-nationalist Shinto kokutai ideology of early Showa Japan. In both systems mythology was taken as a basis for legitimization of ideology in intellectual and religious terms. Mythological events were regarded as manifestations of an ideal past, postulating ethnically and culturally exclusive national identities. In Japan and Germany mythologies portrayed an ideal national "golden age" in remotest times, which could serve as a model for the ethnic state of the future. History was viewed not as an account of progress and development, but as a chronicle of national decline.
Since the days of philosophical speculations of the National School (kokugaku) during the Edo period Japan’s ultra-nationalist ideologues blamed Buddhism and Chinese rationalism for their nation’s cultural decline. In Germany, National Socialists targeted Christianity and the European rationalism of ancient Greece and Rome as the destroyers of the allegedly genuine archaic Germanic culture. Both ideologies stood in total opposition to the ideas of rationalism and enlightenment, as well as to the traditional cultural centers of their respective hemispheres. As a consequence, they elaborated doctrines of ethnically based ways of thinking, determined by racial and cultural conditions.
Japanese Shinto Ultra-Nationalists and German Nazis: The Intellectual Dialogue
Walter Skya, Kenyon College, Ohio
Although a very rich and fascinating intellectual exchange between Japanese Shinto ultra-nationalists and German Nazis took place in the 1930s and 1940s, English-speaking scholars of modern German history and modern Japanese history have almost totally neglected this dialogue. Many people are aware that Adolf Hitler made disparaging references to the Japanese in Mein Kampf, such as referring to the Japanese as "culture-bearing" people rather than "culture-creating" people like the Aryans. However, few know that many German Nazis came to admire, and even to envy, their Asian Axis ally for its Volkish cultural tradition and its rapid rise to world power in the twentieth century.
This paper examines the essay "Yamato" by Japanese ultra-nationalist Kazuichi Miura that appeared in the Nazi SS journal SS Leitheft (Ideological Guidelines for the SS) in March 1942. SS Leitheft was a monthly journal published between 1935 and 1945 in Guben by the Reichsfuhrer SS. That is to say, SS Leitheft was an in-house Nazi journal, written by, and specifically for, the SS. This paper also introduces Nazi propagandist Albrect Furst von Urach’s 1943 book on Japan, Das Geheimnis Japanischer (The Secret of Japan’s Strength). In this work von Urach praised Japan and emphasized that the Axis Pact was not just a treaty of convenience, but a spiritual alliance between two nations with similar ideologies and a similar Weltanschaunng.
Organizer: Robert A. Fish, University of Hawaii, Manoa
Chair: Sheldon Garon, Princeton University
Discussants: Kathleen Uno, Temple University; Sheldon Garon, Princeton University
Keywords: Japan, children, women, Showa, social history.
Through the use of three case studies, this panel examines the relationship between the state and private life in Japan from 1920 to 1960. Analyzing state efforts to shape living circumstances and lifestyles of children, youth, and women, the papers intend to address the following questions: Are "control" and "cooperation" useful concepts to describe the relationship between public and private actors during these years? To what extent can the development of this relationship be characterized by patterns of "interaction"? When focusing on the history of government policy toward "women and children" (from the linked Japanese terms onna kodomo), to what extent does the end of World War II serve as a turning point?
Salomon analyzes Ministry of Education policies towards youth cinema attendance during the years 1920–1945 and argues that their invention and implementation gradually developed into a process of interaction between the public and private realms. In contrast, Hori’s investigation of images of women in the officially sanctioned "Nippon News" during the years 1940–1951 finds state control of these images a fundamental continuity between wartime and postwar Japan. Through focusing on juvenile social welfare during the years 1945–1960, Fish finds that government policy towards youth and family underwent significant adjustments during the postwar period partially to bring them in line with changes in the lives of youth that had their genesis in wartime Japan. Uno and Garon, whose own work has explored these issues from differing perspectives, will utilize the three case studies to comment on the theme questions above.
Motion Picture Attendance of Children and Youth in Prewar Japan: Interactions of the Ministry of Education’s Policies and Urban Lifestyles, 1920–45
Harald Salomon, Berlin Humboldt University
Motion picture exhibition rapidly gained popularity in urban areas of Japan after the Russo-Japanese War. Surviving evidence suggests that contemporary audiences were made up to a large degree of children and youth. To officials and educators, the undesirable influence exerted by this recreational practice on the lives of minors seemed so powerful that they began to speak of the "Problem of Youth Movie Attendance." After initial reluctance, the Ministry of Education began to investigate the problem and to promote the educational potential of film consumption. The paper focuses on the policies developed in order to guide motion picture businesses as well as audiences towards the realization of this ideal. These policies followed the development of the cinematic experience, first centering upon silent film screenings and their interpretation by an orator, then shifting to the exhibition of sound films. While cinemas attracted growing audiences of differing age groups, agents in the Ministry continued to place emphasis on children and youth. Interestingly, the invention and implementation of policies cannot be described as one-sided actions of guidance or control only. Gradually, a process of interaction developed that led to a significant change of attitudes on the part of officials. More and more, motion picture attendance was perceived as a form of "wholesome entertainment" that constituted a value in itself. Therefore, less than a generation after the restriction of admittance to adults had been considered, the consumption of selected movies by children and youth was promoted as an activity complementary to class instruction.
From the Empress to Miss Tokyo: Images of Women in Official Newsreels of Wartime and Occupation Japan
Hikari Hori, Gakushuin University
Scholarship on wartime media tends to stress "particularities," such as depiction of the war effort, praise of motherhood, and use of images of the Emperor and Empress as metaphors for the "family state." In this context, Nippon News, an official weekly newsreel that began production in 1940, has been treated as an example of wartime propaganda. Breaking with this approach, I examine newsreels made both during wartime and during the Occupation era in an effort to uncover the nature of gender politics in these periods. Even after the war, Nippon News continued to report national and social events until 1951, censored first by the Japanese and then by the US militaries. This latter period has been neglected by scholars, but considering it reveals continuities and discontinuities with the early 40’s. For example, depictions of ideal motherhood and prostitution are absent from both wartime and Occupation era newsreels, and illness and health care are consistently feminine realms, but there is a shift from portrayal of women in groups to a focus on individuals like Miss Tokyo, and a reduction in images of the Empress. Based on studies of women’s history in the 40’s and 50’s, research into female images in other media, and interviews with a Nippon News cameraman, I suggest that both continuities and shifts were marked by state control of and surveillance over female bodies, prohibitions on visualization of state intervention into women’s lives ("invisible" issues categorized as "private" but in fact subjugated to the public sphere), and polarization of gender roles in society.
Transforming Policy and Practice to Match Reality: The Care and Welfare of Orphans in Japan, 1945–1960
Robert A. Fish, University of Hawaii, Manoa
Children and the family in Japan underwent numerous changes during and in the immediate aftermath of World War II, including a marked increase in the number of fatherless and orphaned children as well as children living in poverty. For many reasons, both ideological and practical, the state did not adjust its means of providing social welfare to children in need until after the war. This paper analyzes juvenile social welfare policy and practice in Japan during the years 1945–1960, with a particular emphasis on orphans.
I argue that the ideological underpinnings of the juvenile social welfare system itself illustrates a fundamental and sincere discontinuity with government policies during the war as policy moved into line with social reality. Most importantly, children became viewed as legal entities in their own right with a right to basic welfare, as opposed to prewar and wartime policies, which viewed children as a unit with their mother and ultimately part of the "family state." The specific methods of delivering social welfare, however, maintained significant continuities with wartime methods. In particular, Japan maintained a blurry line between the division of public and private in social welfare services during the immediate postwar period. Using documents produced by the government as well as records from an orphanage, this paper analyzes how social welfare policies created by the government were implemented, illustrating the cooperative as opposed to coercive nature of the relationship between child welfare institutions and the state.
Organizer and Chair: Keller Kimbrough, Colby College
Discussant: Kazuo Tokuda, Gakushuin Women’s College
Keywords: Japan, literature, Buddhism, setsuwa, otogizôshi
Late medieval Japan (approximately the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries) saw the production of hundreds of short, often illustrated pieces of fiction. Known collectively as otogizôshi, these works frequently reflect the direct and indirect influences of contemporary proselytizing and philosophical traditions. As such, they offer a unique window onto the vibrant world of medieval, popular Buddhism: a shared religion of and for the masses, inseparable from its defining social context (and opposed, as a category, to "elite" or "scholarly" Buddhism). This panel seeks to explore aspects of this religious and cultural history through an examination of selected otogizôshi, literary artifacts from Muromachi-period Japan.
Hank Glassman will begin by discussing the nature of popular Buddhism and Buddhist discourse in the context of Koyasu monogatari, an otogizôshi with purportedly spiritual aims and effects. Keller Kimbrough. will continue by taking up a single story from Jôruri monogatari, paying particular attention to the influences in this work of sekkyô (preaching) and notions of compassion and spiritual salvation for women. Margaret Childs will discuss the nature of suffering in tales of deities and religious awakenings, as well as the implications of suffering, as a concept, for our understanding of Japanese Buddhism as a whole. Finally, Steven Nelson will introduce the recently discovered Biwa no yurai, and in his examination of this work he will extend the boundaries of our discussion to include aspects of popular religious (not simply Buddhist) belief in music and the supernatural. Our discussant will be Kazuo Tokuda, author of Otogizôshi kenkyû (Miyai Shoten, 1988).
"Popular Buddhism" and the Efficacy of Narration
Hank Glassman, Haverford College
What do we mean when we speak of popular Buddhism? In what ways can we distinguish it from its imagined counterpart, elite Buddhism? Where is the line of demarcation? How are we to understand a literature that, while it entertains and edifies, also claims for itself a powerful religious efficacy? I will take up an otogizôshi called Koyasu monogatari in an attempt to address these questions. This exciting yarn epitomizes the popular. This story, a tale of the fantastic which resists easy summary, explains the origins of the Jizô hall of Kiyomizu-zaka in the capital, famed for its promise of safe childbirth. Koyasu monogatari begins and ends with exhortations to its audience to pursue the way of harmony between man and woman, extolling sexual connection as a religious good. The narrative centers on the plight of a pair of twins, a boy and a girl, joined at the torso from armpit to hip, "like the two halves of a folding screen." These children are born to an old nun living at the time of the Gempei wars. She knows them to be a boon, a miraculous gift from King Emma, but they are persecuted by the authorities as "demon children." In the end they are revealed to be the avatars of Buddhist deities, come to shower blessings on the people of the capital. Koyasu monogatari calls the story it tells both auspicious (medetaki) and strange (fushigi). These two qualities are the hallmarks of popular religious literature in medieval Japan.
The Compassion of a Bodhisattva: Izumi Shikibu and Her Vow to Sleep with 1,000 Men
Keller Kimbrough, Colby College
According to a tale told in the three-scroll Akagi Bunko recension of the otogizôshi Jôruri monogatari, the Heian woman poet Izumi Shikibu once fulfilled a vow to sleep with one thousand men as a means of rescuing her parents from hell and achieving Buddhahood in this life. Instructed by the ghosts of her father and mother (and, later, by Amida Buddha himself) to "love all men, without distinction, from the highest to the lowest," Izumi Shikibu sets out to assuage—in part, at least—the spiritually obstructive sexual desires of mankind. Her actions are not without precedent, either within setsuwa or the Japanese Buddhist tradition, and in her eventual refusal to discriminate among men, regardless of their status, health, or physical appearance, she demonstrates the bodhisattva virtues of compassion, self-sacrifice, and non discrimination. Though lurid and obviously farcical, Izumi Shikibu’s story reveals traces of a medieval proselytizing tradition for women, particularly in a sermon preached by the Kiyomizu Kannon (Izumi Shikibu’s 999th "customer") in his disguise as a dirty beggar. Moreover, as a literary text, the tale displays an ironic complexity insofar as it is recounted (according to the larger narrative frame) by Minamoto Yoshitsune in his efforts to seduce the lovely yet reluctant Jôruri-hime. The Jôruri monogatari Izumi Shikibu account is thus intriguing in its own right—as a work of Muromachi fiction—as well as for the light that it sheds on the pervasive influence of sekkyô (preaching) in the formation of otogizôshi and medieval Japanese literature in general.
Embracing Suffering: The Paradoxical Buddhist Teachings of Otogizôshi
Margaret H. Childs, University of Kansas
A good number of otogizôshi known as religious awakening tales open with references to mujô, or transience, which is shorthand for the pain suffered when, having grown attached to something mutable, one loses it. The original, basic teaching of Buddhism is that we can put an end to such suffering by putting an end to desire, but a close look at tales of religious awakening shows that rather than dealing with how to eliminate suffering, these tales tend to give meaning and value to suffering. There are two ways this is accomplished. First: in many tales desire is depicted as something to be transformed rather than eradicated. Broken-hearted lovers are seen to manage their romantic desire by devoting themselves to praying for the salvation of their loved ones. Second: some tales imply that suffering has value insofar as it motivates one to practice Buddhism. Great pain is shown as leading to great religious commitment or accomplishment. Another example of otogizôshi rendering pain meaningful rather than avoidable is found in honjimono, tales of the original lives of deities. Here, suffering seems to be presented as a measure or indication of divinity: deities are revealed to be those who have endured long and terrible physical and emotional agonies. It is paradoxical that the Buddhist tradition should encompass these attitudes. We cannot know why these ideas appear in this literature, but perhaps a thirst for justice inspired these notions that suffering has value and, ironically, thereby obscured the potentially liberating message of Buddhism.
Music Evoking Spirits, Demons, and Gods: Short Tales in the Nara-ehon Biwa no Yurai
Steven G. Nelson, Kyoto City University of Arts
The Research Archives for Japanese Music of Ueno Gakuen University, Tokyo, is in the possession of an undated nara-ehon, or medieval illustrated scroll, entitled Biwa no yurai ("History of the Biwa Lute"). It narrates and illustrates a number of short tales about the two periods of exile of the master musician Lord Myôon-in, Fujiwara no Moronaga (1138–92), the first in Tosa after the Hôgen War and the second in Owari in the period leading up to the Genpei Wars. The scroll opens with an account of Moronaga’s rise to rank and fame, and then jumps back in time to his first period of exile. He is accompanied on his journey to Tosa by a boy he does not recognize, who reveals himself as an incarnation of the spirit of Genjô, the famous and notoriously temperamental biwa of the imperial house. According to the scroll’s version of events, both of his exiles come to an end after performances of "secret pieces" (hikyoku) on the biwa that summon up demons and gods who promise to assist him. In this paper, I will trace the lineage of each of the tales, and investigate the historical and philosophical backgrounds to the attribution of miraculous powers to the "secret pieces" of the repertoires of gagaku (court music).
Organizer: Ann Sherif, Oberlin College
Chair: Leslie Pincus, University of Michigan
Discussant: Edward B. Fowler, University of California, Irvine
Keywords: Mass culture, art, politicization, censorship, Tenkô, morality.
This panel explores the politicization of aesthetic culture in mid- to late-twentieth-century Japan. While all cultural production is inherently ideological, the papers consider specific instances in which politics became the defining aspect of certain works of art, and in turn, the ways that politicization functioned to shape readers’/ viewers’ horizons of expectations. The rendering political of works and genres of art that may or may not define themselves as overtly political occurs in a number of ways: (1) through the invocation of the legal system as a means of controlling the production and of defining public morality; (2) through self-censorship; and (3) through critique of the reception of the work.
The unprecedented dominance and scale of mass culture in the 1950s through the 1990s led to conflicts over the value of "high" culture of the elite and "low" or popular culture, a debate which similarly brought a political dimension to criticism and art by invoking the specter of class conflict in an age of unprecedented affluence. The legacy of the Pacific War complicated the politicality of art. We will look at the politicization of literature, theater, and manga through works of art that generated public spectacles: avant-garde art yanked from a mass publication; the censorship of a wildly popular genre of manga; a writer working between genres in an attempt to make sense of the controversy over his works; and censorship trials of translated foreign literature. These cases serve to illustrate the parameters/limits of discourse in affluent culture.
The Third Path: Redefining Tenkô, Time, and the State in Abe Kôbô’s Enomoto Buyô
Mark Gibeau, Sapporo University
Enomoto Buyô is the last defender of the Tokugawa, founder of Asia’s first republic, central architect of Meiji government policy, and title character of an Abe Kôbô novel and play. Branded a turncoat for the ease with which he made the shift to Meiji, Enomoto’s obscurity and dubious reputation inspired Abe to write his only historical novel in 1964, two years after being purged from the Japanese Communist Party. Abe uses the figure of Enomoto Buyô to question the foundations of such concepts as tenkô (ideological conversion), loyalty, and historical time. The novel is criticized from all sides and in 1967 Abe stages the play Enomoto Buyô to highlight the "allergic reaction" to works that question the structural and historical bases of postwar morality.
Stepping back from the finger-pointing that characterized most debates, Abe uses both novel and play to reposition tenkô as a historical process. By focusing on tenkô as a product of shifting ages and ideological decay Abe is able to move beyond interpretations of tenkô as a "flaw" in the character of a nation or people and interrogate its very structurality. My paper will examine Abe’s critique of national temporality and his attempt to provide a "third path" in the form of Enomoto’s doomed republics. In creating republics without history, without tradition and without a future I will show how Abe attempts to open lines of escape from the oppression of dominant ideologies and offer the reader a revolutionary vision of the community, state, and individual.
Creativity and Constraint in Amateur Manga Production
Sharalyn Orbaugh, University of British Columbia
This paper will address questions raised by theorists of mass culture, regarding the potential for a mass culture phenomenon to promote social change in the face of such contrary forces as commercialization/ commodification and sometimes outright government censorship.
The mini-komi zasshi boom in 1970s Japan, fueled by advances in cheap printing and distribution technologies, allowed a nascent independent and amateur manga subculture from the 1960s to expand exponentially. Amateur manga production continued to grow throughout the 1980s and most of the 1990s, with manga distributed through established independent channels such as dôjinshi mailing lists and the enormous open Comic Markets held in Japan’s major cities. Beginning in the 1970s the majority of these independently produced manga have featured narratives challenging conventional notions of sex, gender, and sexuality. (The so-called yaoi sub-genre, of narratives of male-male eroticism produced by and for young women, is a prime example.)
While the mini-komi zasshi phenomenon has been compared superficially to ‘zine culture in North America, I would argue that an exploration of the specific circumstances of amateur manga production in Japan reveals significant differences from those mass culture phenomena that have been extensively theorized thus far. In this paper I will discuss appropriation, simulation, parody, and other techniques of subculture self-expression considered resistant to dominant narratives, and the limits placed on resistance by market-driven and disciplinary forces as these play out in the Japanese context, with the goal of recasting some important aspects of mass culture theory.
A Triumph of Democracy? Lady Chatterley, Japanese Judges, and Obscenity
Ann Sherif, Oberlin College
Why did the Lady Chatterley’s Lover censorship trials happen when they did in Japan? These showcase trials, which spanned the Allied Occupation and post-Occupation periods (1950s), focused on the publication of a translation of a British novel that had not yet been openly published in the English-speaking world. Some have asserted that the trials indicated the success of the U.S.’s introduction of a democratic constitution in Japan. Others have regarded the trials as the beginning of a liberalization of social morality. Etô Jun and Jay Rubin have used these trials as an opportunity to debate the effect of Occupation censorship on Japanese literature as a whole.
In my paper, I will explore other social and economic dynamics at work behind the publisher’s and translator’s (Itô Sei) decision to introduce Lawrence’s novel to Japanese readers at this point in time, and the ways that such cultural and business practices became politicized by the invocation of the legal system. Were the notions of obscenity, freedom of speech, and community standards really on trial? To what extent did the selling power of sex and the advent of mass culture and consumerism in Japan influence these proceedings? I will also argue the importance of employing the insights into gender and power that have been raised by more recent feminist debates concerning pornography, gender, and censorship.
Parody Journalism of Akasegawa Genpei’s Sakura gahô
Reiko Tomii, Independent Scholar
In 20th-century art, works with political subjects abound. When we examine the circulation and consumption of such works, an uneasy question arises: when politics enters art, how does art, if ever, engage politics? In this context, the work of Akasegawa Genpei makes an interesting case study. Emerging as a central member of the Anti-Art avant-garde in 1960s Japan, Akasegawa became keenly aware of the futility and limitations of the clandestine operations he and his vanguard colleagues had staged in public spaces through his experience with the criminal trial involving the fake 1,000-yen notes he created. After his guilty verdict in 1967, his works took on a decidedly political tone, which he presented in the public arena of printed media. The most radical among them was Sakura gahô (Illustrated Cherry), first serialized in the popular weekly Asahi Journal, with a circulation of 300,000, from August 1970 to March 1971. As the country simultaneously experienced economic prosperity and continued political turbulence, his "parody journalism" offered candid though often irrelevant social commentaries in manga style, showing ample sympathy toward the student radicals and protesters. However, his brand of satiric humor was a two-edged sword: Sakura gahô was suspended after Asahi recalled the issue carrying the 31st installment due to his allegedly libelous expression, "the morning sun (asahi) is red."
Organizer and Chair: Patricia G. Steinhoff, University of Hawaii, Manoa
Discussant: Merry I. White, Boston University
Japanese delinquency rates have been spiking periodically for three decades, shattering old images of a society full of obedient and hard-working students who are too busy studying to get into trouble. The mass media are full of reports about problems in the schools, including bullying of students, disruptive classroom behavior, refusal to attend school, and violence against teachers. Parents, schools, and communities have all been trying to resolve these problems, with very limited success. Rather than blaming any one of these sectors, the sociological studies reported in this panel all examine the interactions between school, community, and family as they deal with young people.
Based on intensive field research using multiple methods, the three studies cover a broad range of social settings in contemporary Japan. Their strikingly similar conclusions point toward basic structural problems that are only exacerbated by the current policies. Two of the papers, by Gesine Foljanty-Jost and Cindy Montgomery, deal with the youth problems and institutional reforms of the 1990s. The third, by Robert Yoder, is an unusual long-term follow-up study that began with some of the same problems and institutional solutions in the early 1980s, and traces their consequences for a cohort of adolescents who are now young adults. With the aid of discussant Merry White, who has a distinguished career of research on Japanese youth, we hope to explore with the audience how such studies can contribute to understanding these complex problems in contemporary Japan, and what kinds of fresh approaches they may suggest.
Who Controls Whom? Patterns of Social Control in Japanese School Districts
Gesine Foljanty-Jost, Martin Luther University
Students’ disruption of classes became a social issue in Japan during the late nineties. This indicates a breakdown of controlling young people inside and outside of schools. Student unrest has created a crisis resulting in a new conceptualization of education calling for more adult control involving parents, teachers, and the school. This paper deals with what kinds of control are employed by whom in daily life inside and outside of school. Combining both the new concepts of cooperative education by the Ministry of Education and my research in three Japanese school districts in the city of Niigata, the paper will question the pattern of cooperation between parents, schools, and local neighborhoods in shaping and controlling youth behavior under pressure of the school administration having lost control.
Social control theory (by Peters, Darge, and others) will be employed to analyze three levels of control: structural control by institutional arrangements, general control of students, and specific controls aimed specifically at deviant students. The paper will demonstrate that while rhetoric suggests a new participatory and integrative approach, the reality is an unchanged and unbalanced pattern of control dominated by local school administrations. The consequence of this is an intense, unspecific net increase in social control by schools and local volunteers that results in less parental participation and more control over parents regarding the education of their children.
Discipline and Deviance: How Methods of Discipline and Conflict Resolution Influence Youth Delinquent Behavior in Japan
Cindy Montgomery, University of Hawaii, Manoa
In the past decade, Japan has witnessed a steady increase of youth deviant behavior. Nowhere is this trend more evident than in the public elementary and middle schools, where violence, school allergy, and classroom disruptions continue to intensify in both frequency and severity. The Japanese Ministry of Education has responded with a series of school-based reforms, including the implementation of a five-day school week, the introduction of school counselors, and the restructuring of curriculum and class-hour management. Such reforms could have limited efficacy, however, owing to the fact that a significant part of the problem may lie in the methods of conflict resolution offered to Japanese children. Utilizing current data gathered from 42 in-depth interviews and more than 2,000 questionnaires from parents and teachers living in rural and urban areas throughout Japan—Shimane, Tochigi, Yokohama, and Hiroshima—this study will explore how discrepant beliefs between the home and the school regarding appropriate forms of discipline and conflict resolution may negatively influence youths. Specifically, this paper will examine how teachers’ and parents’ methods for dealing with bullying, school allergy, and disrespect may in some cases lead to the onset of problematic youth behavior.
Youth Rebellion, Conflict, and Social Reproduction of Class: Youth Deviant Behavior and Later Young Adulthood for a Selected Group of Lower- Working- and Middle-Class Youth in Japan
Robert Stuart Yoder, Chuo University
Japanese youth rebellion against adult authority and its consequences are examined by comparing the adolescent and later adult lives of lower-working-class and middle-class youngsters in two contrasting communities in Kanagawa prefecture. Conflict labeling theory is applied to understand class conflict as central to labeling and the maintenance of the status quo among Japanese youth. The original field research on all adolescents of middle-school and high-school age in the two communities was conducted in 1983–1985. The first questionnaire follow-up was carried out in 1987. A second follow-up involving both questionnaires and direct contacts was carried out in 1998 and 1999 with the same subjects, who are now young adults. Area and family social class differences account for greater youth misconduct among lower-working-class youth. In both school and neighborhood, strict, stigmatized adult social controls are applied against lower-working-class but not middle-class youngsters. A counter-school culture group that forms among lower-working class middle-school students in reaction to a discriminatory, middle-class-oriented educational system plays a significant role in producing differences not only in youth deviance but also in young adult life. The long-term consequence of class culture and youth deviance is a social reproduction of class when these youngsters become young adults.
Organizer: Jan Bardsley, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
Chair: Laura Miller, Loyola University of Chicago
Discussant: Sally A. Hastings, Purdue University
Keywords: women, magazines, Japan, 1950s.
Women who came of age in Japan in the late 1950s speak of that period in their lives as marked by the stories of two Michikos: Shoda Michiko, who became Crown Princess in April 1959, and Kamba Michiko, a student activist who was killed in the June 1960 protest against the U.S.-Japan Security Treaty. Intense media coverage encouraged romantic readings of both women as individuals who had met extraordinary fates, and also interpreted their stories as signs, albeit very different ones, of the New Japan.
How did the stories of the "two Michikos" get appropriated as interpretative keys to fifteen years of change in Japanese women’s lives? Our panel explores this question by turning first to the desires of ordinary women as revealed through a 1955–56 series of magazine articles that became a best-selling lifestyle guide for women. Examining this series establishes the sense of hope and confusion about postwar reforms felt by many women. Paradoxically, among those most at a loss were women affected by the passage of the anti-prostitution law in 1956. Intended by its supporters to "liberate" Japanese women from sexual servitude and "reform" postwar morality, the law was perceived by prostitutes themselves as discriminatory and counter-productive. Several of them left accounts of the period that will be examined here. We then proceed to the media’s creations of the princess and the martyr, showing how these stories were interpreted as dissimilar answers to the same issues raised in the lifestyle guides. We conclude by considering how four different narratives—the stories of the ordinary woman, the prostitute, the princess, and the martyr—continue to infuse individual and activist narratives of Japanese history.
Desires and Anxieties: Postwar Reforms and Women’s Multiple Identities
Barbara Hamill Sato, Seikei University, Tokyo
This paper explores the differently emphasized aspects of young unmarried women’s desires and anxieties in the early postwar period and their relationship to the Occupation reforms. The Constitution of 1946 and the revised Civil Code of 1947 brought women voting privileges, the right to own property, and provided equal access to family inheritances. However, when one left the realm of politics and moved into the everyday world, problems centering on marriage and family also became conspicuous. Article 24, which stated "marriage shall be based on the mutual consent of both sexes and shall be maintained through mutual cooperation with the equal rights of husband and wife as a basis" wrought confusion in city and country.
In response to this confusion, the late 1940s saw a boom in roundtable discussions carried in popular women’s magazines like Shufu no tomo and Fujin kôron that focused on the issues married women faced in making the transition to a "democratic" society. The seven-volume series put out by Kadokawa Publishing Company between 1955 and 1956 and titled Modern Women: A Series of Readers’ Forums was comprised of roundtables for young unmarried women who grappled with the postwar reforms from the vantage point of their own personal dreams. Volumes in this series such as Women’s Personal Fulfillment, Love and Marriage, and Happiness Inside and Outside the Home became immediate best sellers. By exploring themes promoted in Modern Woman, I examine how women’s desires and anxieties were imagined, and what avenues for self-expression were suggested.
Women against the Anti-prostitution Law of 1956
Gaye Rowley, Waseda University, Tokyo
In the summer of 1957, former geisha Masuda Sayo expanded an essay she had written the previous year for the women’s magazine Shufu no tomo into a full-length autobiography. She was motivated at least in part by a sense of outrage at what she felt was the hypocrisy surrounding the Anti-prostitution Law (Baishun boshi ho) which had come into effect earlier that year. "Just passing laws banning prostitution isn’t going to accomplish anything," she predicted. Masuda knew, because she had been there herself. In the summer of 1952, her younger brother had been diagnosed as suffering from tuberculosis and admitted to a hospital. Their savings from working as black market traders were soon exhausted and Masuda could not earn enough on her own to pay for her brother’s medical treatment. The only option she could see was to begin working as a prostitute.
Masuda’s plight—and her attitude toward the Anti-prostitution Law—was typical of many Japanese women who worked as prostitutes in this period. Why were the very women the new law ostensibly aimed to liberate opposed to it? By examining Masuda’s account of her experiences, as well as those of other women affected by the law, I hope to suggest some answers to this question and also to consider the function of prostitution, as both labor and discourse, in debates about Japanese women and the state in the 1950s.
Fashioning the People’s Princess: Japanese Women’s Magazines and the Royal Wedding of 1959
Jan Bardsley, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
In the spring of 1959, no story absorbed more attention in Japanese women’s magazines than the upcoming wedding of Shoda Michiko to Crown Prince Akihito. Most lavished attention on Michiko’s girlhood, her romantic meeting with the prince on a tennis court, and her preparations to become a bride and a princess. Photographs of the young couple appeared everywhere. Their smiles easy and their posture relaxed, they embodied youth, freedom, and love. Most women’s magazines interpreted these photographs and the match itself as symbols of a democratized imperial family. They characterized Michiko, who was wealthy but not of the nobility, as the "people’s princess."
Yet the "Michiko Boom," as the phenomenon was called, also had its opponents. Departing from other women’s magazines, Fujin kôron published articles questioning what this fever said about the project to humanize the emperor, about imperial war responsibility, and about the people’s sentiments. Much later, feminist critics in the 1980s and 1990s revisited the wedding to focus specifically on Michiko’s imperial transformation. They showed how the publicity surrounding the princess gave form to the postwar ideals of love marriages, nuclear families, and "My Home-ism."
My paper examines how women’s magazines fashioned Shoda Michiko as the "people’s princess" in 1959 through photographs, articles, and advertisements. I investigate how her image, in turn, worked to construct an equally magical idea of the "people." I will also discuss what about this romantic narrative and its framing of postwar history has so troubled Japanese critics past and present.
Memories of New Japan: The 1960 Anti-Ampo Movement and the Other Michiko
Hiroko Hirakawa, Guilford College, Greensboro, NC
To this day the turmoil surrounding the 1960 ratification of the revised U.S.-Japan Security Treaty (abbreviated in Japanese as Ampo) serves as a key reference for progressives’ narration of postwar Japanese history. They cite the Left’s losing battle against the 1960 Ampo and its hasty ratification by conservative politicians as a critical turning point in Japanese politics. Here, they argue, the promise of a New Japan was "derailed" by the government and the people, who chose instead the single-minded pursuit of high economic growth. Feminists have been equally fascinated with the narrative power of the 1960 Ampo struggles. For example, Saito Chiyo, who founded the magazine Agora in the 1970s, singles out her anti-Ampo involvement as the motivating experience for her later feminist activism.
Why has this 1960 conflict continued to exert such force over the progressive imagination? This paper addresses this question by focusing on the social imagination surrounding the death of Kamba Michiko, a female student, who was killed in the confrontation between the anti-Ampo protesters and the police in June 1960. I explore how major newspapers and magazines created, out of Kamba’s death, the martyr heroically dying for the original promise of New Japan. To consider the long-term effects of this creation, I also examine a 1986 survey of women, who had been 15 years old or above around 1960 and listed the most noteworthy stories of 1960 as those of the "two Michikos." Bringing our panel back to its starting point, I ask how ordinary women interpret these spectacular events.
Organizer: Heather Bowen-Struyk, University of Chicago
Chair: Sarah Anne Frederick, Boston University
Discussant: Miriam R. Silverberg, University of California, Los Angeles
As the dominant literary and intellectual movement of the prewar period, Proletarian literature raised important questions about how literature is evaluated. Nevertheless, neither proletarian literary critics nor literary historians have questioned the role of autobiographical truth in Proletarian writing. This panel looks at the work that autobiography does in Proletarian writing. Not only will it tell us something about the unspoken politics of Proletarian literature, it will also tell us something important about autobiography in general, and in particular, the I-novel (shishosetsu); the purportedly a-political literary form that rose to power as Proletarian literature waned.
Sarah Frederick’s work on the "true stories" printed in the women’s Proletarian journal Nyonin geijutsu investigates the way that gender and genre affect the interpretation of autobiographical writing. Heather Bowen-Struyk’s discussion of the discourse of "real experience" calls attention to the implicit, political role that autographical details play in the evaluation of great Proletarian literature. Elyssa Faison’s work on Nakamoto Takako and Sata Ineko investigates the uses of autobiography in women’s testimonial writing. Together, these papers challenge assumptions regarding autobiography as they investigate an important prewar literary movement.
"True Stories": Personal Narratives and Political Literature in Women’s Magazines
Sarah Anne Frederick, Boston University
From July 1928 through June 1932, a group composed primarily of leftist Japanese women produced a monthly journal entitled Women’s Arts (Nyonin geijutsu), which doubled as a place for women writers to publish fiction and as a forum for political debate and social criticism. The women involved in this publication struggled with the question of what forms of writing and editing would best achieve their political and artistic objectives and examined the nature of the relationship between art, politics, and popular readership.
This paper focuses on the "true story" (jitsuwa), a label used for many of the works published in this magazine, usually by working women who had no fame as professional writers. Even when based on life experiences, this title was never used for the works of well-known writers such as Sata Ineko and Nakamoto Takako when they published in the same magazine, suggesting a complicated interplay between literature and personal narratives. Originally the jitsuwa was a type of column found in more popular women’s magazines, usually containing sensational accounts of seduction or poverty as experienced by anonymous readers, printed primarily for entertainment. The familiarity of this form among working women who had read popular magazines may also have been part of the strategic choice to use it in this more politically motivated journal. The paper considers the effects of the appropriation of this editorial practice from popular journalism to use women’s personal testimonials to politically motivate women readers.
"Real Experience" in Hayama Yoshiki’s Early Works
Heather Bowen-Struyk, University of Chicago
The life experience of the author does matter, in different ways at different times. Nevertheless, an already discursive "real experience" is a powerful and potentially dangerous tool. When Kuroshima Denji sought to defeat his political adversaries in 1928, he summoned up Hayama Yoshiki’s "real experience" as a worker that could be "seen dancing vividly in the background" of the fiction. When Uranishi Kazuhiko sought to save Hayama’s writing for the future of Japanese literature, he summoned up Hayama’s articulate desolation in the trope of the prisoner in his fiction, arguing that, "Here Hayama’s real feelings as a prisoner breathe, raw and unadulterated."
By seeming to answer directly to something primary, something real, "real experience" is in fact powerfully political. The "real experience" that I will trace here specifically is the legacy of Aono Suekichi’s attempt to give the Proletarian literature movement "purpose." The plan backfired, and instead, anything "purposeful" was dismissed as unthinking dogmatism while "experience" and "natural growth" became terms to praise thinkers who refused a Party line. The impact of this dispute still lingered in the 80s and 90s, leaving scholars like Uranishi to clarify that Hayama was a writer of "experience." Because this "real experience" is implicated in a political debate, it is explicitly political. Moreover, it is implicitly political in the sense that it is a discourse of power that disarms its would-be critics with a preemptive strike. In this paper; I will examine the implicit politics of autobiography in early Proletarian literature.
Literary Forms, Political Voicings: Historicizing the Work of Nakamoto Takako and Sata Ineko
Elyssa M. Faison, University of Oklahoma
This paper examines Sata Ineko’s "The Caramel Factory" (1928) and Nakamoto’s "Tokyo Muslin Factory Number 2" (1932) to suggest that fiction written by women during the 1920s and 1930s often used personal experience and autobiography in a way that forces us to rethink our understandings about two of the dominant Japanese literary forms of the period—Proletarian writing, and shishosetsu (the "I-novel"). Nakamoto Takako is virtually always characterized as a "proletarian author," even though the style and form of her fiction cannot be contained squarely within the boundaries of that genre. Influenced by the Shinkankaku-ha style as well as by proletarian writers, Nakamoto’s acts of writing were political acts that aimed both at instruction (raising women workers’ consciousness) and representation (narrativizing the injustices of capitalism for a mass audience). Employing a style part fictional, part autobiographical, and part documentary, Nakamoto used third-person narration to indicate her own ambivalent position as an intellectual, a labor activist, and a supporter of the Kameido workers, but not one who could claim a proletarian subjectivity. Sata Ineko’s works of the period, meanwhile, were also often based on her own experiences, and have had several characterizations: as proletarian, "I-novel," and "women’s writing." This paper situates the works of these authors within the context of recent writings on (international) women’s autobiography and testimonial literature to conclude that the use of personal experience in fiction was part of a political strategy for Japanese women to "speak and become visible" as political, working, and writing subjects.
Organizer: Annette Skovsted Hansen, Aarhus University, Denmark
Chair: J. Scott Miller, Brigham Young University
Discussant: James Keith Vincent, New York University
Keywords: Japan, history, sociolinguistics, 19th and 20th centuries.
This panel presents insights into the relationship of language to power, representation, and respect in Japan. The papers approach this common theme from different perspectives of time and place. Hansen discusses how lexicographers, publishers, and the buying public of nineteenth-century dictionaries of indigenous languages invested power and respect in language. Yui analyzes the introduction of Japanese as the national language in Micronesia in the first half of the twentieth century. Gottlieb examines the effects of protest from disability support groups on the language used by Japanese media from the 1970s onward. Carroll focuses on the need to revisit official language policy on the expression of respect to reflect changes in Japanese society as a major subject of debate by the National Language Council of Japan since the mid-1990s. Power and respect are fundamental to each of the papers: dictionaries gave language status as an institution by codifying it; imperial language policies in Micronesia accorded the Japanese language power and respect as the national language throughout the empire; people with disabilities fought for respect in an area where government policy has not kept pace with social change; and language policy on respect language has evolved from its postwar focus on democracy to contemporary considerations of communication. The panelists will outline their main points in fifteen-minute presentations. Subsequently, a fifteen-minute summary from the discussant will seek to stimulate a lively debate with the audience.
Empowering Language: Investing Power in Language by Compiling and Publishing Dictionaries of Indigenous Languages
Annette Skovsted Hansen, Aarhus University, Denmark
In order for language to empower or disempower people, language as an idea has to be empowered. One of the institutions that have given language power is the dictionary. The art of compiling dictionaries in Japan as well as in countries in Europe and the Americas underwent many changes as part of the nation-building processes of the nineteenth century. Dictionaries contributed to the legitimization of the geopolitical borders of nations by mapping where one national language ended and another began. In this context the indigenous languages posed both a challenge and an opportunity, because scholars categorized them as different from the official national language, yet as legitimately within the boundaries of the nation. Throughout the nineteenth century non-indigenous travelers, government officials, and settlers in Ezo/Hokkaido compiled Ainu-Japanese and Japanese-Ainu dictionaries. These dictionaries mapped the Ainu languages as different from the official national Japanese language and invested power and respect in the latter as superior to other languages used within the nation. By giving language a concrete form, lexicographers gave language status as an institution. Also publishers and the public who consulted and bought dictionaries invested power and respect in the institution by referring to the dictionaries as absolute, exclusive, and exhaustive descriptions of the languages included. As a result, many people came to regard dictionaries as prescriptive authorities on language. In turn, language came to represent power and respect.
From Nihongo to Kokugo: Establishing Japanese Power in the Micronesian Islands
Kikuko Yui, Kyoto University of Foreign Studies
By the end of World War II, Japan was a multiethnic (taminzoku) empire. Japan had ruled Taiwan, the Korean peninsula, North-Eastern China, and the Micronesian Islands (nan’yo-gunto) for more than thirty years. Approximately thirty percent of the population was from non-Japanese linguistic and cultural backgrounds. The imperial Japanese government set up a system of public schools for Micronesian pupils (kogakko), in order to educate them as imperial citizens (komin). The aim of the schools was to consolidate Japanese power and instill respect by turning Micronesian children into true subjects of the Japanese emperor. Japanese government officials perceived language to be one of the main obstacles to achieving this goal and introduced Japanese language in the curriculum to eliminate indigenous properties such as the home language of the pupils. At first, Japanese government documents on language instruction referred to the Japanese language as nihongo (Japanese language). Realizing that the term ‘Japanese’ implied something foreign to Micronesians, the government officials soon adopted the term kokugo (national language) to symbolize the unification and inclusion of all ethnicities within the empire. This paper argues that the use of the term kokugo, particularly when used in contexts where it is contrasted with nihongo, empowered the process of standardization and signaled a concomitant lack of respect for the indigenous languages and cultures. Kokugo, which was a metaphor for shared "blood," concealed the fact that Micronesian imperial subjects were classified as fourth-class citizens.
Language, Respect, and the Power of Protest: Linguistic Stereotyping and People with Disabilities in Japan
Nanette Gottlieb, University of Queensland, Australia
Discriminatory language became an important social issue in the west in the late twentieth century, when debates on political correctness and minority rights focused largely on the issue of respect in language. Japan is often criticized for having made only token attempts to address this issue. This paper investigates how one marginalized group—people with disabilities—has dealt with discriminatory and disrespectful language. The debate has been played out in four public spaces: the media, the law, literature, and the Internet. The paper discusses the kind of language, which has generated protest, the empowering strategies of direct action employed to combat its use, and the response of the media, the bureaucracy, and the literati. Government policy has not kept pace with social change in this area; where it exists at all, it is often contradictory and far from clear. I argue that while the laws were rewritten primarily as a result of external international trends, disability support groups achieved domestic media compliance by exploiting the keen desire of media organizations to avoid public embarrassment. In the absence of language policy formulated at the government level, the media effectively instituted a policy of self-censorship through strict guidelines on language use, thereby becoming its own best watchdog. Disability support groups have recently enlisted the Internet as an agent of further empowerment in the ongoing discussion of the issue.
Kore Kara No Keigo Revisited: Honorific Language for the Twenty-first Century
Tessa Carroll, University of Stirling, Scotland
In 1952, the National Language Council (kokugo shingikai) issued recommendations on keigo (honorific language) usage in a document entitled "Kore kara no keigo" (Honorific Language Henceforth). In response to the general mood of democratization of the immediate postwar period, the document argued that the honorific language in the future should be seen as a tool for expressing mutual respect as the basis of democracy, rather than it being based on relative status. As Japanese society and honorific language usage have changed, the 1952 recommendations have grown increasingly outdated. Nevertheless, honorific language continues to be highly valued, and complaints about its misuse are frequently voiced in the media. In 1996, the National Language Council was asked to discuss setting out new guidelines for honorific language usage (kotobazukai) and language change (kotoba no yure). In subsequent reports, the Language Council takes a broader perspective by adopting the idea of "expression of respect" from contemporary Japanese sociolinguistics. Council statements emphasize the role played by the expression of respect in ensuring that communication progresses smoothly, and further de-emphasize relative status and hierarchy. The aim is to provide descriptions and recommendations on honorific language appropriate for today’s society, prioritizing efficient and harmonious communication.
Organizer: Robert J. Pekkanen, Middlebury College
Chair and Discussant: T. J. Pempel, University of Washington
Keywords: Japan, politics, LDP, DPJ, PARC, administrative reform, electoral reform.
This panel examines the momentous changes that have taken place in Japanese politics since the early 1990s, arguably the greatest transformation since the American Occupation. Each paper explores one particular aspect of this transformation in great detail, but together they constitute a comprehensive and integrated approach to the changed and changing role of politicians in politics and policymaking. As Krauss and Pekkanen argue in their paper, a fundamentally new set of political relationships has emerged to replace the ‘55 system that dominated Japanese politics from 1955 to 1993. Krauss and Pekkanen call this new set of relationships the "‘94 system." Although their paper is based on a holistic examination of this emerging institutional watershed, its focus is on the Liberal Democratic Party and the causes and consequences of the changes in various key internal and external relationships. McKean and Tatebayashi’s paper zeroes in on one internal component of the LDP in their study of the Policy Affairs Research, past and present. It is the most in-depth analysis of the PARC and its relationship to electoral competition ever conducted. Their findings, as well as the attention they pay to changes in PARC over time, will inform our understanding of the changed dynamics of the ‘94 system. These two papers on the LDP are complemented by Scheiner’s focus on opposition parties in the 1990s. Scheiner examines the difficulties of party formation and the problems the Democratic Party of Japan has had in establishing and communicating its policy platforms. His work addresses for the first time structural determinants of a fractured opposition party in Japan. Shinoda’s paper on administrative reform highlights key aspects of the new ‘94 system, the altered relationship between the parties and the bureaucracy, as well as the new role of the Prime Minister. Individually, these papers illuminate pieces of the emerging ‘94 system, but we intend the whole to be more than the sum of its parts: to generate an integrated view of how these key elements relate to each other. Author of Regime Shift, T. J. Pempel is the ideal discussant for this panel.
The ‘94 System
Ellis Krauss, University of California, San Diego; Robert J. Pekkanen, Middlebury College
This paper traces the transformation of the relationships among political actors that defined the ‘55 system into a fundamentally new arrangement we call the ‘94 system. Our focus is on the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) because both in its internal workings and its relations to other actors, the party has changed more than any other actor in the political economy.
Under the surface of continued LDP governance, the "1955 system" of politics in Japan collapsed in the early 1990’s. In the ‘55 system, the LDP consistently dominated a socialist opposition at the polls. The party pursued high-economic growth, weighted by the Policy Affairs Research Council’s (PARC) policies for distribution of disaggregable goods, even while ceding bureaucrats primacy in other aspects of policymaking. A weak prime minister headed a party powerfully divided by factions. By the 1990’s, these core relationships were being made over. The economic bubble burst, ending the era of high growth. The socialist opposition was in tatters, but the LDP ruled through coalition government. PARC lost crucial functions, and factions didn’t play a key role in the election of Koizumi as Prime Minister—even as the office became more substantial in policymaking. Parliamentarians drafted more laws themselves and clashed openly with bureaucrats over policy issues. In short, the ‘55 system was being replaced by a fundamentally novel political economy—the ‘94 system.
In explaining this transformation, we examine independent variables, including the new electoral system, administrative reform, changes in the media and public opinion, the end of the Cold War, economic catch-up, and demographic changes. In conclusion, we suggest that many of the elements of the LDP in the ‘94 system—diminished factions, electoral competitiveness and coalition government, strengthened prime minister, and decline of bureaucratic primacy—are making and will make Japan more similar to most parliamentary democracies in advanced industrialized states.
Vote Division and Policy Differentiation Strategies of LDP Members under SNTV/MMD in Japan
Masahiko Tatebayashi, Kansai University, Japan; Margaret A. McKean, Duke University
This paper deals with the strategies that LDP (Liberal Democratic Party) politicians used under the SNTV/MMD (single non-transferable vote in multi-member districts) electoral rules of 1947–1993 in Japan. We claim that LDP members tried to overcome the severe intra-party competition caused by these electoral rules by using one of two strategies to divide the vote in their districts, either geographical division or division by socioeconomic sector. To divide the vote geographically, LDP members gathered their votes from their own narrow geographical territory within their districts, but to divide the vote by socioeconomic sector they developed a different policy specialty from that used by other LDP colleagues within the district. We further conclude that this choice of strategy then determined the nature of LDP Diet members’ legislative and party activities. The paper uses data from the LDP’s Policy Affairs Research Council (PARC) rosters of LDP assignments to PARC committees along with data on general elections for the House of Representatives from the 1980s and early 1990s. We found that there were indeed two types of LDP legislators. The first type were strongly committed to geographically-concentrated policy delivery such as agricultural and construction policies, and in such districts—presumably those whose LDP voters wanted pork—it was not unusual to find that all LDP representatives served on Agriculture and Construction committees. The second type of LDP legislator served on other kinds of PARC committees (Education, Posts & Telecommunication, and so on), and they tended to avoid committee assignments that overlapped with their colleagues in the district. One implication of these findings is that under SNTV/MMD there was actually internal evolutionary pressure away from the patronage practices of dispensing pork, and toward providing topics and issues of concern to district constituents. We certainly agree with many observers that the new electoral rules used since 1994 should increase the incentive for all Japanese politicians to emphasize issues more than in the past, but we also see glimmers of this pressure even under the old SNTV/MMD system as well and even within the LDP.
Top-Down Party Formation and the Ills of the Democratic Party of Japan: Problems of Organization and Policy Coherence
Ethan Scheiner, Harvard University
Party formation in Japan has tended be a result of defections of sitting national level politicians from already existing parties. As a result, Japan’s new parties—which since 1993 have made up the heart and soul of the opposition to the LDP—have typically: (1) been composed of only a few individuals, all defectors from the same party (e.g., the LDP), or (2) are made up of a number of politicians from various different pre-existing parties. In the first category of new party, the party is too small to become strong. In the second, the party has difficulty organizing its members and agreeing on policy positions. Japan’s major new parties of the 1990s were mostly of the second type, with members coming from a number of different pre-existing parties.
Using interviews I conducted with local organizations in the leading opposition party in Japan today, the still rather new Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ), I demonstrate the troubles the DPJ has had locally organizing politicians, supporters, and voters who came from a variety of different parties. Using my own survey of national level politicians, I show the substantial confusion that exists regarding the policy preferences of the different groups within the DPJ. Finally, using public opinion surveys, I demonstrate how these difficulties harm the DPJ, as much of voters’ uneasiness with new parties is due to the new parties’ problems organizing themselves and the lack of certainty of just what such parties stand for. The latter problem is particular burdensome for parties, such as the DPJ, that rely on the support of urban voters who place weight on parties’ policy positions.
Hashimoto’s Administrative Reform and Changing Bureaucratic-Political Relations
Tomohito Shinoda, International University of Japan
Under the Ryutaro Hashimoto administration (1996–98), strong public sentiment against the national bureaucracy emerged in Japan. In 1996, Hashimoto initiated his effort in administrative reform. When Hashimoto’s popularity rating dropped dramatically, however, LDP’s zoku members took the opportunity to attack the Prime Minister’s administrative reform plan. Hashimoto had to abandon his controversial scheme of privatizing postal services. The final results of Hashimoto’s reform were often seen as a major setback.
As a result, the most significant achievement in Hashimoto’s reform is often cited as reinforcing the power of the Cabinet and the Prime Minister. Hashimoto’s administrative reform efforts as well as the 1994 electoral system reform and the Diet and government reform will shape the leadership of the future prime ministers. The 1994 electoral changes would eventually make future elections more party-oriented. This would contribute to stronger control of the Prime Minister over his own party, and thus over his Cabinet. The 1999 Diet and government reform would increase the power of the Cabinet vis-à-vis the bureaucracy, by introducing deputy ministers to increase the Cabinet control over the bureaucracy and by abolishing the government commissioner system to force the Prime Minister to form a more competent Cabinet. Also, the 2001 administrative reform would provide the Prime Minister with clear legitimacy to take stronger policy initiatives and empower supporting organs to carry out his policy objectives. This paper will analyze the impact of these changes on the power balance between the Cabinet and the bureaucracy.
Organizer and Chair: Doug Slaymaker, University of Kentucky
Discussant: Linda H. Chance, University of Pennsylvania
Keywords: Modern Japan, history and literature, French literature and thought, identity, self, nation.
The members of this panel will explore the imagery of France circulating in Japan during the Meiji, Taisho, and early Showa eras and informing conceptualizations of the self and nation. Panelists come to these images from various disciplinary backgrounds: from history to explore sources of political imagery; from French literature to interrogate the tradition of French thinking on the writer Sakaguchi Ango; from Japanese literature to explore the French experience of prewar novelists Shimazaki Toson and Yokomitsu Riichi. These presentations all concern the role of artist in society; each artist takes France, whether "actual" or representative, and from different subject positions, as the location from which to configure that imagination. These readings and lineages tell us much about the individuals under discussion, the reception of imagery of France in Japan, the history of that reception, and the ramifications to Japanese intellectual thought, which are found to continue in societal considerations. The gaze towards France was motivated by a desire to understand "home" as the basis for identity; the images that support the sense of individual and place are central to this panel’s discussions.
Embodying France as Political Criticism in Meiji Japan
Kevin M. Doak, University of Illinois, Urbana
This paper will explore the interest in French social theories in the early Meiji period, particularly how France served as a model for ideas of nation and citizen. The role of France as one of modern Japan’s Others was instrumental in creating cultural and political discursive traditions for modern Japan that raised troubling questions about the space for liberty and individualism within the new Meiji state, while also providing a means of mediating the social transition during the 1870s to Western norms of "civilization." Central to this process was the construction of a cultural or artistic field that would serve as a substitute for identity-expression that was unable to find articulation in the political field from the mid-1880s on.
Ango as Japanese Humanist
Anna Ogino, Keio University
This presentation attempts to situate Ango Sakaguchi in the Occidental tradition of humanists. French scholar as he was, Ango read contemporary authors such as Jean Cocteau and Andre Gide; I will trace here the ideas he took from them. I will explore the manner in which, like them, Ango excelled in the rhetorical field, where he developed a kind of spiral logic by exploring ambiguities of a few key words such as "substance" and "necessity", particularly in "A Personal View of Japanese Culture." Further discussion addresses Erasmus and Rabelais as the predecessors of Ango’s ideas of "paradox," which constitute Ango’s literary backbone.
Etoranzê: The Foreign and the Familiar in Toson’s Reminiscences of France
Marvin Marcus, Washington University
Shimazaki Toson’s France writings cover a gamut of narrative styles and genres: shosetsu (fiction), bunmeiron (culture criticism), kansobun (narrative impressions), zuihitsu (discursive essay), kikobun (travel narrative), and dowa (children’s tales). Writing for diverse audiences and drawing upon a repertoire of episodes and literary agendas, Toson “converted” his France experience of 1913–1916 into an ongoing reflection upon self and society.
Here I propose to examine two of the France reminiscences, which provide sharply contrasting accounts of the overseas stay: Osanaki mono ni (For Young People, 1917) and Etoranzê (Foreigner, 1922). The former, written shortly following Toson’s return from France, was the author’s first serious attempt to write for the burgeoning youth readership. In the space of some 80 short episodes, he exploits the France experience as an occasion to promote a traditionalist morality of Confucianist virtue and a chauvinist appreciation of the Japanese homeland. Aside from its appeal as an exotic foreign landscape, France and its people are essentially written out of the narrative. With Etoranzê, aimed at the adult reader, Toson brings into play the narrative introspection he had crafted as a pioneering Naturalist writer, recalling the anxiety and alienation he endured as a stranger in a strange land. Here, too, the self-absorbed narrator is ultimately indifferent to the foreign milieu except as a vehicle for reflecting upon himself and his Japanese identity.
I will remark in passing on relevant aspects of the Taisho bundan milieu and will draw comparisons from the work of other authors who wrote of their France sojourns: most notably, Nagai Kafu. My overall aim will be to call attention to the creative “deconstruction” that underlies the art of literary reminiscence.
Yokomitsu Riichi and the Longing for Home
Doug Slaymaker, University of Kentucky
This paper focuses on Yokomitsu Riichi’s Ryoshu (Travel Weariness/Nostalgia) a work tracing the experiences and crises of identity among an expatriate Japanese community in France during the 1930s. Yokomitsu traveled to Europe to report on the 1936 Berlin Olympics; the experience of that trip went into this novel. The imaginative landscape is France and East/West dichotomies attendant upon identity issues are attenuated in contrast to earlier work, especially Shanghai. The identity issues that propel these narratives—i.e., the meaning of being Japanese and the meaning of "Japan" at a time when Japan was rapidly tightening its militarist/fascist grip—took on prime importance to his readers. The work was being serialized in large circulation newspapers in Japan in the late 1930s and remained unfinished when Yokomitsu died in 1947. France provided a foil for Yokomitsu by its otherness and exoticism to explore the meanings of being Japanese and the degree to which he and his cohorts should accommodate the West and become like the Frenchmen they see. In Ryoshu the Other that provides the imagery for such enunciation is France and the French experience. Yashiro, for example, thinks only of Japan while in France; as the ship draws closer to France there is a corresponding degree to which "Japan" fills his head. Thus when he actually arrives in Marseilles he finds it difficult to disembark from the ship. The Europe that he has never seen or experienced is now before him and "home" fills his thoughts. In Europe his thoughts turn to "home," subsumed within it an inquiry into the meaning of a "self" and more broadly, of being "Japanese."
Organizer: Paul Clark, West Texas A&M University
Chair: David O. Mills, University of Pittsburgh
Discussant: J. Marshall Unger, Ohio State Univeristy
Keywords: Japanese language development, Meiji era–present.
By its very nature, the field of Kokugo Studies in Japan incorporates an interdisciplinary approach to the study of the Japanese language. This allows scholars to examine broad questions of theoretical significance. This panel brings together language specialists from linguistics, anthropology, literature, and history to lead in the exchange of ideas on the form and function of "proper" language since the Meiji Restoration.
The papers intersect in significant ways to illuminate trends in language usage, ideology, and reform. Tai and Clark investigate the creation of kokugo and its reception in both Japan and Taiwan around the turn of the twentieth century. They reveal the extent to which the newly codified language worked as a tool for the development of a more cohesive nation in Japan and the colonies or, conversely, the ways in which regional identification was protected by the appropriation of the form of the national language, but not the internalization of national ideology. Wetzel and Van Compernolle examine language development and usage in the context of the drive towards standardization. Their papers demonstrate that authors, intellectuals, and educators affected standards applying to all Japanese. These four papers meet at the nexus which is kokugo, addressing issues of state policy, education and curriculum control, ideology, and the struggle to define the boundaries of "proper" Japanese in the modern era.
From Ideology to Policy: The Creation of Kokugo in Late Meiji Japan
Paul Clark, West Texas A&M University
The foundation for the language of contemporary Japan (kokugo) was laid late in the Meiji era by authors, educators, and policymakers participating in the nationalizing movements to build a more cohesive, unified state. The new language, which was based in part on the genbun’itchi literary movement of the middle Meiji years, remains one of the most successful, yet problematic achievements of the era. Though, in its simplest translation, kokugo means "national language," it has evolved to assume greater importance in Japanese society and has become an essential marker of cultural identification. Modern Japanese did not spring forth anew and remain unchanged as a result of the language reforms of this era. However, the philosophical models which undergirded its rise and led to the dominance of kokugo discourse in the late Meiji era have yet to be replaced by other ideological paradigms.
This paper will document one of the most important accomplishments in the movement to reform the Japanese language during the Meiji era: the shift, between 1895 and 1905, from the development of language ideology to the implementation of language policy. The leader of this movement was Ueda Kazutoshi, Professor at Tokyo Imperial University, linguist, government official, and manager of the first National Language Research Council. This organization, building on the early reforms begun by the Ministry of Education and Imperial Society for Education, met to decide the form and function of the new language in education. In so doing, they initiated the process of creating and disseminating the Japanese standard language still in use today.
The Role of Kokugo in Colonial Education
Eika Tai, North Carolina State University
Kokugo (national language) education began in Taiwan as soon as the Japanese empire took over this island as its first formal colony in 1895. Although the concept of kokugo was constructed as part of a nationalist ideology and this role was officially stressed from the very start of colonial education, it was kokugo’s role as a tool for communication that was the key to its implementation. In this paper, I want to examine the importance of the latter role of kokugo for both colonial officials and colonial subjects. Colonial officials encouraged kokugo education among Han Taiwanese for the development of vocational skills, all the while seeing kokugo education as a method for "taming" aboriginal Taiwanese. Though forced to study and respect kokugo, colonial subjects learned to use the language for their own advantage; for example, they used it as a lingua-franca for interethnic communication. After the late 1930s, kokugo’s linguistic ideology became central to the "imperialization" (assimilation to imperial subjects) movement. The mastering of kokugo was seen as equivalent to the acquisition of the Japanese spirit. Yet, in reality kokugo’s importance continued to revolve around its practical use. Kokugo was necessary for communication between ethnic Japanese and Taiwanese in the military. Many of those who were honored as members of "kokugo families" saw the use of kokugo as a way to receive material rewards. It was after the end of colonization that the notion of kokugo began to refer to the spread of its ideological significance.
Contesting Literary Style in Meiji Japan: The Paratext in the Field of Cultural Production
Timothy J. Van Compernolle, University of Michigan
The persistence with which writers in the mid-Meiji period (1880s and1890s) focused on issues of language and literary style in prefaces and reviews is striking. These statements accompanied the radical linguistic and stylistic experiments in the fiction of the period and often focused on defining "proper" or "acceptable" literary style. Elements outside the text proper, such as prefaces, afterwords, advertisements, reviews, and polemic essays constitute what Gerard Genette calls the paratext—the linguistic elements that surround the text and contribute to its reception. The paratext is an important site where we can gain insight into the contest for positions of power, authority, and distinction (what can be grouped under the rubric "cultural capital") in the literary world, which constitutes what the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu would call a field of cultural production. I will argue in this paper that an examination of the paratextual elements surrounding the texts of such authors as Futabatei Shimei, Yamada Bimyo, Ozaki Koyo, and Kosugi Tengai will give us an understanding of the contest for authority and distinction in the Meiji literary world, a contest in which the issue of defining proper literary language and style becomes especially prominent. This conceptualization has important implications for thinking about vernacularization, or genbuh’itchi, in the Meiji period. Genbun’itchi is viewed here less as a "real" aspect of a certain literary style, than as a set of signifying practices designed to elevate some writers and devalue the work of others. Genbun’itchi is implicated in the creation of a literary avant-garde in the late 1880s and in Japanese Naturalism’s ability to situate itself in a position of distinction in the early 1900s.
The Invention of Keigo
Patricia J. Wetzel, Portland State University
The keigo paradigm as it is understood by Japanese people today is relatively recent. What is recognized in modern Japan as keigo is actually a construct that was not fully recognized until after WWII. There is no question that language levels have a long and complex history in the Japanese language, but the modern incarnation of keigo is a product of lengthy argumentation by kokugo scholars with its origins in the Meiji Era intellectual movement known as genbun’itchi. The word keigo is not an import from China but a word coined by intellectuals such as Natsume Soseki, Mori Ogai, and Mozume Takami of the late nineteenth century. What is more, there was nothing like universal agreement about just what keigo referred to as scholars debated and ruminated on Japanese grammar for the first half of the twentieth century. Discussions of kokugo and standardization included the question of how keigo was to be analyzed and what was to be included in the keigo category. It was not until linguistic standardization actually emerged out of the trauma of WWII that Japan reached agreement on just what keigo is, at which point it quickly joined the ranks of common sense. Thus kokugo textbooks printed before WWII vary widely in their treatments of keigo—sometimes not even using that word—while postwar textbooks reflect unified and consistent analysis.
It is safe to say that all Japanese today have some consciousness of keigo. Whence that consciousness comes—the school system, example at home, or on-the-job training—is a matter of speculation. Nonetheless, keigo is a frequent source of sanction in everything from job interviews to media coverage of the royal family. Keigo has joined the ranks of other grammatical phenomena as an immutable formal category. But the story of its development demonstrates forcefully the contingency of linguistic analysis. This is a lesson that western scholars might profit from as readily as their Japanese counterparts.
Organizer and Chair: Louise Cort, Smithsonian Institution
Discussant: Richard L. Wilson, International Christian University
Keywords: decorative art, material culture, Japan, art history, Edo period.
The movement of images across diverse media and spaces in early modern Japan—with special attention to the intersections of technology, visuality, and markets—is the topic of this panel. Taking visual imagery beyond the category of "mere decoration," the four papers highlight its unstable, mutable nature by describing how imagery added value when borrowed from one medium/context and applied to another; how imagery was transformed by reduction, diffusion, and symbolic shifts; how new technology affected imagery; and how the market propelled the movement of imagery styles across media and up or down the cultural ladder. The panel topic complements The Potter’s Brush: The Kenzan Style in Japanese Ceramics, a special exhibition on view at the Freer Gallery of Art, Smithsonian Institution, at the time of the annual meeting, and a new book by Richard L. Wilson (panel discussant) on the Freer’s Kenzan ceramic collection. Book and exhibition describe a Kenzan "brand" that originates with the work of Ogata Kenzan (1663–1743) and evolves across a spectrum of activities by Kenzan’s successors, other workshops in both Kyoto and Edo, and nineteenth-century imitators supplying a new foreign market. Key to the Kenzan "brand" is a variety of imagery that Ogata Kenzan introduced on his ceramic products, translating from other media including both Chinese-style and Japanese-style painting and their associated literary traditions. Here, then, Kenzan-style migrations of meaning and form provoke an increasingly cross-disciplinary Japanese art history.
Distorting Characters: Calligraphic Inscriptions on Japanese Ceramics
John T. Carpenter, SOAS, University of London
This paper is a meditation on an issue that cuts right to the core of the definition of calligraphy in the East Asian tradition. Is calligraphy an expressive art essentially denatured (or made decorative) when transferred to non-paper media such as ceramics? Or should it be considered the record of a performative art that takes into full consideration the challenge of the writing surface? I shall investigate what happens when inscription occurs on surfaces such as ceramics that are either super-absorbent or non-absorbent, unresponsive to the brush in the characteristic ways, create distortions when written on curved or irregular surfaces, and then are subjected to the not always predictable effects of glazing and firing. Part of the attraction of calligraphy on ceramics is recognition of the calligrapher’s partial surrender to the medium. Fluidity, ink tone, and absorption are more difficult, sometimes impossible, to control when writing on clay. Yet, the aesthetic conventions involved still are derived from brush-writing on paper or silk. The consideration of how ink is absorbed, especially to the degree it reveals the pace and rhythm of writing, is one of the ultimate criteria for the connoisseur to separate levels of quality of calligraphy, not to mention originals from good copies. To grasp how ceramic artists cope with or exploit this special challenge of inscribing calligraphy on intractable materials, I shall analyze inscriptions on the ceramic art by Ogata Kenzan.
Allusion and Audience: Intersections of Maker, Merchant, and Market in Early Edo Textile Production
Mary Dusenbury, University of Kansas
The primary garment worn by affluent Japanese women in early modern Japan was the kosode, forerunner of the modern kimono. It was usually made of silk, with patterns that had both decorative and symbolic significance. The tone for seventeenth-century kosode production was set by merchant houses, such as the Kariganeya in Kyoto, that catered to (and were members of) a cluster of wealthy samurai, merchant, and aristocratic families, linked by an intricate web of social and political ties and a shared classical heritage. This paper will situate early Edo kosode in a matrix of allusions to this heritage, a composite collection of imagery and referents that flowed freely throughout literature, calligraphy, ceramics, textiles, lacquer, and painting in the early modern period. The paper will also explore the specific materiality of textile imagery, including intersections of technical matters, social capital, and the polity. Textiles were both a primary locus of Tokugawa regulations designed to enforce strict social distinctions and a focal point of maker/merchant/market ingenuity to circumvent the intent of those regulations.
The richly patterned and often technically virtuosic kosode of the early Edo period gave material expression to a widely shared vocabulary of classical literary allusions, while knowledge of textile production techniques allowed a privileged audience to decode messages about wealth, social status, and power embedded not only in the imagery but encoded in the materials and techniques themselves.
The "Eight Views of Ômi": Idyllic Landscape Tinged with Political Sentiment?
Lee Bruschke-Johnson, University of Leiden
The Eight Views of Ômi (Ômi hakkei) is the first Japanese landscape theme that was freely adopted into the ink painting repertoire. Artists working in lacquer, ceramic, textiles, and other media quickly embraced the subject. The woodblock print artists Shigenaga (1697?–1756) and Hiroshige (1797–1858) created multiple versions of the theme, indicating a tremendous vogue for these prints.
This paper begins by exploring the literary origins of Ômi hakkei. Inspired by the Eight Views of the Xiao and Xiang—a Chinese poem-painting tradition that had a great impact on art and literature of Japan—an aristocrat of the Konoe family composed poems to create a new Japanese counterpart. These poems concern specific sites situated around Lake Biwa, a large lake in Ômi Province (now Shiga Prefecture), an area of critical economic importance and where historically the Konoe owned territory. Rather than merely celebrating famous places of scenic beauty, the poems allude to a violent past and to political exile. Having defined the poetic basis of these landscapes, a second section concerns the pictorial tradition, including a definition of the visual clues associated with each scene, an examination of the placement and order of the sites, and a discussion of how media affected the depiction of the sites. Finally, the paper explores the continued popularity of the Ômi hakkei theme: were these simply famous sightseeing locations or did elements of the original political intent remain? What other elements might have influenced this vogue?
Dematerialization of Early Modern Japanese Art: Korin and Modernism
Toshio Watanabe, Chelsea College of Art and Design, England
Our understanding of historical artifacts, such as a work of art from premodern Japan, is always problematic and incomplete, but there is in general a tacit agreement that it is better to experience such an artifact directly and, if possible, in the so-called "original" environment true to its historical and geographical circumstances. When we examine the reception of the painter Ogata Korin (1658–1716) in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, however, we realize that Korin joined the international pantheon through the very dematerialization of his art—the elimination of its physical, historical, and geographical materiality.
Dematerialization occurred in premodern Japan through the translation of the physicality of an "original" into reproduction, as can be seen in printed catalogues such as Korin Gafu (1802), which played a major role in the posthumous reputation of Korin. Then, during the modernist period, Westerners deemed Korin’s art to conform to universal principles—what Clive Bell called "significant form"—regardless of its antiquity and non-European origins. Critics both in Japan and the West also argued for the importance of decorativeness (soshokusei) in art, which dovetailed with the modernist emphasis on formal characteristics of art over the narrative. The emphasis on the decorativeness of Korin’s art plays an important role in the history of its appreciation, but there is an obvious irony in asserting that Korin’s epitomizes Japanese art—based on an argument that effectively requires the absence of Japanese specificity and materiality.
Organizer: Indra Levy, Rutgers University
Chair and Discussant: Paul Anderer, Columbia University
Keywords: Japan, literature, modern.
Historians and critics of modern Japanese literature have emphasized the profound cultural dislocation that attended Japan’s encounter with the modern West, and charted the successive ideological movements that helped to perpetuate that sense of dislocation. From Romanticism to Naturalism, Taishô Humanism to Marxism, fascism to postwar humanism, these ideological movements have been related in complex ways to specific concepts of the body, bodily practices, and experiences. This panel examines some key areas of concern in the relationship between the body and prevailing ideologies in modern Japanese literature.
Lippit’s paper examines the condition of the body in postwar literature in its relationship to fascist ideology, material and spiritual deprivation, and the physical memory of imprisonment. Levy’s paper focuses on the demands made on the body as a transparent medium for translation in Naturalist theater. Suzuki’s paper examines the disjunction between linguistic formations of gender and the absence of women’s writing during the establishment of modern colloquial literary style. Karatani’s paper resituates the dichotomy of the Ken’yusha and Meiji Romanticism within the shift from merchant to industrial capital, revealing the unconscious ideologies that underpin their competing views of love. Considering the body in its relationship to political ideology, physical experience, cross-cultural aesthetics, literary ideology, national language, and finally ideology in the broadest Marxist sense, this panel hopes to provoke discussion on the possibilities and limitations of the body as a critical category in modern Japanese literature.
Literature of the Body: Shiina Rinzô and Postwar Fiction
Seiji Lippit, University of California, Los Angeles
Nikutai no bungaku, or "carnal literature," refers to a specific form of fiction of the postwar period, focusing on depictions of eroticism and decadence. Although often critically maligned, its most prominent practitioner, Tamura Taijirô, argued that the representation of the body served as resistance to the "disembodied" ideology of emperor-system fascism. Beyond this narrow group of writings, however, the body constitutes a significant topos across a range of postwar writings, marking in particular the site of an ambivalent relationship to history. Amid radical ideological transformation and social collapse, the representation of the body materialized a double experience of rupture from and continuity with the past.
This paper focuses on the writings of Shiina Rinzô (1911–1973) published soon after the war, especially "Midnight Banquet" (Shinya no shuen, 1947) and "In a Heavy Current" (Omoki nagare no naka ni, 1947). These stories chronicle the experience of physical, emotional, and intellectual deprivation of the immediate postwar period. On one level, Shiina’s works describe the collapse of state institutions and ideologies, as well as the circulation of democratic ideals. At the same time, however, for Shiina’s characters the visceral experience of life in the postwar period is a repetition of a prior history of imprisonment in prewar and wartime Japan. In this sense, these writings chronicle a fragmentation of subjectivity, a disintegration of consciousness into a disembodied and immaterial "spirit" on the one hand, and an abject, material body on the other. This paper argues that this fragmentation provides one template for postwar fiction.
Matsui Sumako’s New Woman: The Spectacular Embodiment of "Nature" in Translation
Indra Levy, Rutgers University
The early Shingeki (new theater) productions of Shimamura Hôgetsu and Matsui Sumako—the "woman problem" plays of Henrik Ibsen (A Doll’s House, 1911) and Hermann Sudermann (Magda, 1912)—established a new paradigm in the relationship between Japanese bodies, modern Western literary texts, and their Japanese translations. Hôgetsu called for a fundamental reform of Japanese theater that would both elevate its texts to the level of literature and reject the "unnatural" acting styles of Kabuki and Shimpa (including female impersonation). Building upon the vernacularist movement in fiction, which sought to elevate the status of the novel by rendering its language more transparent, the Naturalist theater called for the human body to serve as its transparent medium. In that sense, Matsui Sumako can be seen as the spectacular embodiment of Japanese Naturalist ideology.
Yet the privileged object of representation in Hôgetsu’s theater was not the truth of "nature" per se, but "nature" as defined by Western texts whose verbal idioms and body language were clearly exotic to Japanese audiences. Why was Sumako’s performance of a Norwegian housewife perceived as an unprecedented example of a Japanese woman acting "naturally"? What was at stake in a Japanese woman playing this kind of role? And upon what basis were men and women able to identify with her performances? This paper will examine contemporary views of modern literature, the modern self, and the racially and sexually defined body that both enabled and constrained Sumako’s meteoric rise to stardom.
Gender and Politics of Language in Meiji Japan
Tomi Suzuki, Columbia University
The modern Japanese literary language developed in close relationship to the political process of linguistic unification, which attempted to build a common consciousness of the "national subject" through the construction of a standard national language. A discourse on new literary language emerged from the 1880s to the 1900s, contributing to the construction of a normalized "standard language" and promoting the phonocentric notion of genbun-itchi ("unification of spoken and written languages"). This paper analyzes the figures of body and gender that permeated these discussions as organizing metaphors, naturalizing various binary notions such as reason ("masculine") and emotion ("feminine"). New normative definitions of gender emerged such as the idea that through the "unification" of the hitherto "gendered" practice of "masculine" kanbun (Chinese) style and "feminine" wabun (Japanese) style, the distinction between female and male (bodies) would be more "naturally" reflected in a new "transparent" (genbun-itchi) language. But while the new literary language actively participated in the construction of a national "standard language," there was a distinct difference between the official, authoritative written language used in the legal/administrative sphere and the "standard language" (as well as the new colloquial literary language) until the end of World War II. I will examine the paradoxical fact that despite the "feminine" implications of the new literary language (as opposed to the "masculine" association of the legal/administrative language), emergent women novelists largely disappeared from the literary stage during the period of the establishment of the new colloquial literary language from the mid-1900s through the early 1910s.
Competing Economies of Love: Kitamura Tôkoku and Ozaki Kôyô
Kojin Karatani, Kinki University
In the Meiji 20s, Ozaki Kôyô, then the most powerful novelist in Japan, revived the work of Ihara Saikaku. Initially, the Meiji Restoration’s lifting of feudal restrictions on the commodity economy seemed to endow Saikaku’s views with renewed relevance: specifically, the superiority of the merchant made possible by currency (Eitaigura), and the superiority of the woman aware of her own value as a commodity (Kôshoku ichidai onna). Yet in reality, the Meiji system promoted state-based industrial capital, which became prominent in the Meiji 20s. At this time, modern literature developed along two axes: Kôyô’s iki (urban sophistication) versus Kitamura Tôkoku’s ren’ai (romantic love). From that perspective, Kôyô’s last novel Konjiki yasha (The Gold Demon), written in the Meiji 30s, seems a mere anachronism. But in fact, the issues it raises have greater significance today.
This paper will consider the underlying connections between merchant capital, industrial capital, and the views of love and women put forth by Tôkoku and Kôyô. Specifically, the story of Omiya’s betrayal, Hazama Kan’ichi’s disillusionment in love, and his bitter pursuit of profit as a loan shark in Konjiki yasha will be read as a literary mediation of the decline of merchant capital. Significantly, as Marx said, the essence of capitalism lies in merchant capital. Ironically, from today’s perspective, the old-fashioned world of Kôyô seems more real than the world of Platonic love and hard work advocated by Tôkoku.
Organizer: Lori Watt, Columbia University
Chair and Discussant: Daqing Yang, George Washington University
Keywords: postwar Japan, Taiwan, demobilization, repatriation, decolonization.
Japan’s defeat in World War Two marked the end of the Japanese Empire in Asia as well as the demise of Japan’s military forces. New research has advanced our understanding of Japan’s mobilization for war and empire; this panel focuses on the opposite process, the dismantling of the military forces and colonial institutions that sought to dominate Asia. The taking apart of the military/imperial complex, conducted partly under the duress of the Allies, has had a lasting impact on Japan’s postwar relations with its Asian neighbors as well as on the course of Japanese domestic social and political history. Takuji Kimura explicates the disarmament, demobilization, demilitarization and social rehabilitation of the nation’s 8 million military personnel. Lori Watt focuses on repatriated Japanese civilians, and how they worked to create lives without the structures of empire to sustain them. Steven Phillips examines the complications of abrupt decolonization in Taiwan, including the deportation of 400,000 Japanese nationals, the repatriation of 200,000 Taiwanese colonial military personnel, and the arrival the Nationalists from the mainland. All of these transformations had distinct international and domestic faces, with certain narratives for international bodies such as the Allies and the UN, and others for domestic consumption. The conflicts that have occurred at the unintended crossings of the separate narratives, at points such as the death of Emperor Showa and the 50-year anniversary of the end of the war, demonstrate the need to illuminate Japan’s "postwar clean-up" in the decade following the end of the war.
Postwar Reintegration of Demobilized Japanese Military Personnel
Takuji Kimura, Hitotsubashi University
Between 1945 and 1949, Allied and Japanese military forces cooperated in the nearly complete dismantling of the Japanese Imperial Army and Navy, powerful institutions that had dominated both Japan and the rest of Asia for decades. This story of successful demilitarization conceals a number of problems. Decisions made about demobilization in the immediate postwar period had a dramatic impact on the lives of former military men. Occupation authorities, in an attempt to remove all aspects of militarism from Japanese society, forbade the payment of any military pensions. Newly unemployed with no pensions or other institutional maintenance, former soldiers had no means to support themselves or their families. Indeed, many of the politically conservative organizations of former military men, such as the Kaikôsha, began around 1950 as political action groups seeking some sort of compensation for years of government service. Occupation authorities and critics within Japan found it convenient to promote the idea that innocent Japanese citizens had been led into a disastrous war by an evil military. What remains largely unexplored is the impact of the "evil military" explanation on former military men. Impoverished by their lack of government support and shunned by a vociferously anti-military society, these men faced economic and spiritual hardship in the postwar world but were denied any means of discussing their wartime experiences and postwar predicament. Subsequently, many sought solace through a variety of former military-based groups.
Dilemmas of Defeat: Japanese on Taiwan, 1945–1949
Steven Phillips, Towson University
The role of Japanese in immediate postwar Taiwan presents an excellent case study of the dilemmas of abrupt decolonization. Between August 1945 and the end of 1946, 400,000 Japanese soldiers and civilians on Taiwan returned to Japan, 200,000 Taiwanese in the colonial military came home, and 40,000 Nationalist bureaucrats and soldiers moved to the island. The Nationalists, Taiwanese, and Japanese soon discovered that disentangling the island from colonial rule was more complex than putting people on ships.
Because the Japanese had ruled Taiwan since 1895, the island was thoroughly integrated into the empire, thousands of Taiwanese had joined or were drafted to assist the war effort, and thousands of Japanese had been born and raised on the island. Complicating this picture was the fact that many Japanese and some Taiwanese had little respect for the Nationalist Chinese.
Publicly, the Nationalists sought to repatriate Japanese personnel and eradicate signs of their influence. In private, mainlanders realized that they needed Japanese technicians and engineers to maintain the island’s transportation and communication infrastructure, and assist in postwar reconstruction. This paper will examine the conflict between national pride and pragmatism by focusing on Nationalist efforts to separate the Taiwanese and the Japanese while utilizing Japanese technical experts. The Nationalists’ anti-Japanese sentiments and propaganda, a legacy of the Eight-Year War of Resistance, presented the newly-arrived administration with agonizing choices. Even in defeat, Japanese offered a model for modernization for some Chinese.
When Empire Comes Home: Repatriation in Postwar Japan
Lori Watt, Columbia University
On August 15, 1945, 6.6 million Japanese nationals found themselves outside the suddenly and dramatically reduced borders of Japan. They had been changed overnight from soldiers and colonial rulers of the Japanese empire into refugees from a defeated nation. With the help of the Allied militaries and American ships, over 3 million soldiers and 3 million civilians were successfully repatriated to Japan between 1945 and 1949. While the immediate objective of the repatriation project—sending people back to their "proper" national home—was accomplished, problems surrounding repatriation, or the lack thereof, have continued to trouble East Asia.
The Ministry of Health and Welfare processed repatriates at ports throughout Japan and provided them with emergency relief in terms of food, clothing, and shelter. The media criticized these efforts as hopelessly inadequate and championed the repatriate cause. At the same time, they created the image of the pitiable and pathetic repatriate/war victim. Novelists and film-makers found the repatriate story irresistible. In popular cultural representations, repatriates are marked as misfits and mavericks. Repatriates themselves bristled at all of these categorizations and held their own with a barrage of memoirs, documentaries, and educational materials about their experiences. Pursuing the repatriate story through government discourse, media and popular cultural representations and self-depictions show one of the ways that Japan refashioned itself from the Empire of Japan into a "peaceful nation of culture." Focusing on overseas repatriates, whose return from the colonies was mandatory, demonstrates the complications of empire coming home.
Organizer, Chair, and Discussant: Richard Jaffe, Duke University
Keywords: Japan, Buddhism, modernity.
The construction of Buddhism as an essentialized, text-centered pan-Asian tradition in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by European scholars had profound implications for the development of modern Buddhism and Buddhist studies within Japan and the rest of Asia. While always bearing in mind that the emergence of modern Japanese Buddhism (and other Asian Buddhisms) occurred against the backdrop of a Western-dominated colonial order in Asia, it is crucial to understand how Japanese Buddhists, mining traditional models of practice and scholarship, utilized the new discourses about religion and Buddhism to reconstruct the tradition for their own purposes. At the same time, it is also essential to consider that these Japanese clerics and scholars helped shape modern conceptions of Buddhism in the West.
In this panel we hope to elucidate the complicated network of global exchanges that resulted in the creation of modern Buddhism. These three papers from international scholars demonstrate how Western understandings of religion and Buddhism figured in the re-formation of Japanese Buddhism at the most fundamental levels. The panelists will also demonstrate the ways in which Japanese Buddhists actively deployed new conceptions about their tradition and the latest scholarly methods as an integral part of their own apologetic and missionary strategies at home and in the West. As the presenters variously show, the novel representation of the Japanese tradition both as "Eastern Buddhism"—which like other aspects of Japanese culture, was simultaneously superior to but rooted in the broader pan-Asian tradition—and as a fundamentally textual tradition centered on the teachings of the historical Sakyamuni as embodied in a shared canon of textual sources, helped turn Western scholarly assumptions about the nature of Buddhism in Asia into reality.
The Significance of the Publication of the Taisho Tripitaka in Modern Buddhist Studies
Shimoda Masahiro, University of Tokyo
Modern Buddhist studies in Japan, beginning with the introduction of Western Buddhist studies at the start of the Meiji period, has demonstrated a number of characteristics that distinguish it from traditional Japanese approaches to the subject. One representative example of the distinctive nature of modern Japanese Buddhist studies was the publication of the Taisho daizokyo, a collection of Buddhist texts that includes material from India, China, Korea, and Japan. The publication of this work was of great significance in that it has become the international standard text for the study of Buddhism.
The compilation of the Taisho Tripitaka was the product of the concerted efforts of Japanese Buddhist scholars between 1921–34, under the direction of Takakusu Junjiro, a professor of Indian literature at the University of Tokyo. Should one wish to precisely evaluate the significance of the appearance of this vast collection in Japan, a simple review of this mere thirteen-year history would be quite inadequate. While on the one hand possessing a prehistory of almost two thousand years in East Asia, this particular collection of Buddhist texts had close connections with the rise of modern Buddhist studies in Europe during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This latter point in particular has hitherto attracted very little attention, but it provides an extremely important perspective when distinguishing the Taisho Tripitaka from earlier traditional compilations of Buddhist scriptures. Rethinking the significance of the publication of the Taisho Tripitaka is not simply a matter of relating stories of bygone events connected with its publication; rather, it must be an act of looking back over the history of Buddhist studies that have developed around the Buddhist canon. Through this process it becomes possible to clarify the position in which contemporary Buddhist studies finds itself.
Buddhist Scholarship and the Production of the Buddhist Canon in Modern Japan
Silvio Vita, Italian School of East Asian Studies, Kyoto
The years between the early Meiji and late Taisho periods were of paramount importance for the development of Buddhist studies as a modern academic discipline in Japan. Buddhist intellectuals had to adapt to new models of scholarship rooted in the reorganization of the various branches of learning within modern universities. The shared set of rhetorical devices and hermeneutical rules governing the field gradually changed in the course of two generations, in a process that can be defined, borrowing an expression from the history of science, as the "professionalization" of scholarship within the new university system.
Against this historical background my paper will deal with the creation of modern canonical sources, i.e., the printing of the so-called "Buddhist Canon" in the Meiji and Taisho periods: the Dai Nippon kotei daizokyo (1881–1885), the Nippon kotei daizokyo (1902–1905) and the companion collection, the Dai Nippon zoku zokyo (1905–1912), and the Taisho shinshu daizokyo (1924–1932). By studying the background of the figures involved in their publication, their motives and aims, I will sketch the intellectual history of two generations of scholars of Buddhism: those who lived through the collapse of the Tokugawa political and cultural order and those born after the start of the "enlightened" era of Meiji. From this analysis emerges a contrast between the study of texts as a religious practice and a style of learning which was shaped by the conventions of the modern academy.
Creating Eastern Buddhism: The West in the Formation and Representation of Modern Japanese Buddhism
Judith Snodgrass, University of Western Sydney
The now widely used category "Eastern Buddhism" was created by Japanese delegates to the World’s Parliament of Religions in 1893 as part of their campaign to present Japanese Buddhism as the universal religion of the modern world. "Eastern Buddhism" was a careful repackaging of the new Buddhism of Meiji revival directed to fulfilling the needs of a modern, scientific worldview and meeting the needs of the Western educated elite of new Japan. As the other speakers on the panel also show, Meiji Buddhism was already, to a certain extent, shaped in response to Western Buddhist scholarship. The presentation at the Parliament, however, was consciously directed to a Western audience and planned with the explicit aim of winning its esteem. The delegates were well informed in Western Buddhist scholarship and of contemporary interest in Buddhism among Western intellectuals; they consciously spoke to issues of Western interest, stressing its compatibility with science and most particularly, its concordance with Western idealist philosophy. Of particular importance, given the imperatives of Western scholarship at the time, was proving that the Mahayana had indeed been taught by the historical Buddha, Sakyamuni.
In defining the new category of Eastern Buddhism in Western discourse, Japanese Buddhists aimed to encompass all that was approved of in Pure Buddhism, the Western construct of Theravada based on the Pali texts (Southern Buddhism)—the ideal of a humanist ethical philosophy—but distance their religion from Western criticisms that Buddhism was nihilistic and world denying. Eastern Buddhism also distanced the religion of Japan from the then much maligned Mahayana Buddhism of Tibet and China, the "Northern Buddhism."
Since the delegates were all well-respected Buddhist scholars, the point is not that they "misrepresented" Buddhism, or that their claims were unjustified; rather the aspects of Buddhism they selected from the possibilities available, and the language they used in their translations, reveal strategic imperatives. The paper not only seeks to complicate simplistic notions of the West in Meiji Japan but also to challenge simplistic notions of "orientalism" in the formation of Western knowledge of Buddhism. As this event shows, the formation of Western images of Japanese Buddhism was a much more interactive process than critical assumptions of Orientalist scholarship commonly assumes; a process involving "oriental" agency, deploying Western authority within a local discourse, in spite of a clear awareness of its limitations.
Organizer: William Marotti, New York University
Chair and Discussant: Harry D. Harootunian, New York University
Keywords: memory, representation, violence, culture, Okinawa, politics, art, avant-garde, anarchism, everyday life, history, nostalgia, betrayal.
Narratives of politics and political action in postwar Japan have tended to compress the category of the "political" to a narrow range of institutions, actors, and actions. As part of this reductive definition, such political phenomena have tended to be historicized along similarly narrow lines. Similarly, "cultural" phenomena have been conceived of as largely separate from this reduced notion of politics, despite the strong cultural dimensions of many of the key conflicts in the postwar era.
The purpose of this panel is to present several diverse case studies of overlooked forms of political action to begin to explore the wider range of these "cultural" forms of activity. Panelists will consider cases involving the remembrance in writing and performance of the Koza Riots in Okinawa, artists in the 1960s revisiting the anarchical concept of "direct action," and film work addressing issues in cultural-historical memory personified in the lives of the marginalized.
It is our contention that such cultural forms of political action and organization not only are over-looked instances of political agency, but moreover reveal unrecognized dimensions of political conflict and contestation fought upon the terrain of daily life and historical memory.
Led off by our distinguished discussant, we hope to provide an occasion for an extended discussion among panelists and audience on the individual cases, the larger issues raised in this presentation of cultural politics and politicized culture, and their implications for historical work on postwar Japan.
The Streets of Koza: Conflict, Memory, and Everyday Life
Christopher Nelson, University of Chicago
On a December evening in 1970, a drunken American serviceman driving through the streets of Koza City struck an Okinawan and attempted to flee—a pattern of irresponsibility all too common during the Occupation. Yet the outcome of this incident differed significantly from others suppressed by American administrators. Angry demonstrators gathered at the scene and efforts by the Military only inflamed the crowd. The crowd swept through the streets, burning dozens of American vehicles before breaching the fence at Kadena Air Base, burning the guard post and an elementary school. By morning the streets were littered with the smoldering hulks of American cars and swept by military patrols.
In this paper, I will consider the continuing memoration of the Koza Riot more than three decades later, with particular emphasis on its representation in popular culture as well as critical discourse. How has it been understood in the context of the explosive political oppositional movements that swept the world at the end of the 1960s? How has it been situated in a specific Okinawan context, with its history of Japanese colonialism, wartime genocide and American imperialism, of local social movements that struggled for political representation and civil rights, for reversion to Japanese sovereignty and against the war in Indochina? Finally, how can it be understood in the context of Okinawan culture, with particular consideration to vernacular forms of violence—ritual and otherwise?
Trains and Guillotines: Art and Direct Action in the Early 1960s
William Marotti, New York University
This paper investigates the post-Anpo revisitation of the anarchical and even regicidal discourse of direct action (chokusetsu kodo) by artists in the early 1960s.
In the wake of the Shimanaka incident and the failure of the Anpo demonstrations, artists associated with the art journal, Image, began to explore a notion of an artistic practice that might effectively engage with the everyday world, with radically transformative political consequences.
Writing under a pseudonym, one of the editors broached the issue of regicide in a modest proposal for a guillotine/artistic object to be set up before the Imperial Palace. This proposal’s revival of the Furyu Mutan imagery became the opening topic in a key series of artist discussions held by the journal beginning in late 1962. Entitled “Signs of Discourse on Direct Action,” they revisited the anarchical concept made famous by Kotoku Shusui, and associated with his involvement in the Great Treason incident. These highly charged political references opened a critique of their own practice, engaging after Anpo with both the promise and threat of the repetition of Left-State confrontations earlier in the century.
These debates led to the concept of an artistic practice of direct action, one central to both the formation of the avant-garde group, Hired Center, and Akasegawa Genpei’s infamous 1,000-yen note printing project.
I explore the significance of their vision of a new cultural politics and the possibilities of an artistically enabled political agency engaged in the critique of the transforming everyday world of 1960s Japan.
Memory and History: the Ethnography of Imamura Shohei
Bill Mihalopoulos, University of Chicago
This paper focuses on a series of documentaries by Imamura concerning people found on the margins of society: barmaids, prostitutes, and Japanese soldiers who chose not to return to Japan once the Pacific War ended.
I argue that Imamura’s documentaries were a sustained critique of contemporary Japan’s taking for granted and accepting economic growth under the umbrella of US hegemony in Asia as the best of all possible worlds.
In these works, Imamura rereads a social and geographical distinction between center and periphery as a temporal distinction between the modern and older forms of Japanese life that were preserved in the experiential wisdom of subjects found in the outer limits of Japanese society. The aim of the documentaries was to tell a political history that was different from "official history" by introducing a different kind of memory, nostalgia, to remember the past. By focusing on people far removed from modern Japanese society, Imamura facilitates a remembering that disturbs the naturalness of the present by showing the betrayal, broken promises, and fantasy of modern life under the dictatorship of work, order, and status.
Japanese Constitution from the Perspective of a Political Refugee: Oyama Ikuo and Chicago Shimpo in Postwar Politics
Naoyuki Umemori, Waseda University
The debate on the legitimacy of the Japanese Constitution is interwoven with the "nationalistic" character of Japanese postwar discourse. While advocates of constitutional amendments have criticized it as "imposed," defenders have claimed that it was established through the democratic desires and traditions of the Japanese people. Neither party questions the basic premise of both arguments, however: that the Japanese Constitution must be established for the Japanese, by the Japanese. Accordingly, the debate has functioned to exclude certain "outsiders" from the discursive space constructed on the Japanese Constitution. In January 1947, Oyama Ikuo contributed an article on the Japanese Constitution to Chicago Shimpo, a Chicago based Japanese-American newspaper. This article contradicts the "nationalistic" narrative structure of Japanese constitutional debate in several important ways. On the one hand, Oyama was one of the most active Japanese democrats in prewar Japan, obliged to spend almost sixteen years (1932–1947) as a political refugee in the suburbs of Chicago. On the other hand, Chicago Shimpo was established in 1945 for Japanese-Americans in Chicago, many of whom had "relocated" from the West Coast through various Relocation Centers. For Oyama as well as many readers of Chicago Shimpo, the constitutional problem was related more closely to the protection of a "minority" than to the production of national identity.
I interpret Oyama’s article in Chicago Shimpo as a constitutional message issued by a political refugee for his fellow "immigrants," to present an interpretation of the Japanese Constitution radically different from the view of conventional constitutional debates.
Organizer: John W. Traphagan, University of Texas, Austin
Chair: Satsuki Kawano, University of Notre Dame
Discussants: Scott Clark, Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology; Scott Schnell, University of Iowa
Keywords: contemporary Japan, ancestors, gender, afterlife, anthropology.
In an era of organ transplants, digital cameras, and the Internet, contemporary Japanese people engage seemingly traditional conceptualizations of death and the afterlife with persistence—even with a renewed vigor. To what extent have images of ancestors and ghosts been influenced by material and demographic changes? How are images of the afterlife gendered? What do they say about values and social relations in Japanese society? Using ethnographic data from different parts of Japan, the presenters explore the meanings and cultural constructions of "the afterlife" in Japan and consider the implications of ghosts and ancestors for understanding contemporary Japanese society.
Specifically, Williams reveals the persisting relevance of ancestors and ghosts for the Japanese youth, although it is often assumed that young people are less religious in modern societies. Traphagan explores the gendered aspects of ancestor-visitation narratives and links them to the roles of women in a wider Japanese social life. Kawano examines the ways in which a new burial practice—scattering cremated ashes—redefines ideas of the afterlife. All presenters will use visual images to make their presentations accessible and to stimulate the audience. In addition, this panel involves two discussants to promote lively exchanges between panelists and the audience. Scott Schnell, a specialist of Shinto religion, examines proposed papers in the context of Shinto and contemporary religious life in Japan. Scott Clark will explore the implications of Japanese afterlife concepts in broader contexts of Japan anthropology.
Will the Real Ancestor Please Stand Up? The Social Construction of Ancestors, Kami, and Obake in Modern Japan
E. Leslie Williams, Clemson University
In the worldview of present-day Japanese, a variety of supernatural entities are recognized that are thought to be capable of influencing the living. In this paper, these supernatural beings can be divided into three broad categories: ancestors (hotokesama; senzo), Shinto spirits (kamisama), and "changeling goblins" (bakemono).
Members of Japanese society regularly identify ancestors as the spirits of deceased human beings, who are still very much connected to the living, and are usually memorialized using Buddhist rites. Shinto spirits are most often explained to be entities that inhabit the natural features of the landscape, but occasionally collective perceptions regarding these spirits overlap with those of ancestors. Social ideas regarding changeling goblins, while being rather distinct from ancestors, do seem to share particular characteristics with Shinto spirits. How and why do these categories seem to overlap? How do ancestors fit into the socially constructed continuum of Japanese spirits?
This study is the outcome of 25 interviews that were conducted with Japanese informants between 1997 and 2001. The findings begin to explicate the heretofore fuzzy boundaries of these three socially-defined sets of spiritual entities. In particular, this paper delineates concrete members of each set of beings, places at which each type of spirit can be encountered, and specific characteristics for each category. Furthermore, analysis of the data with regard to gender, age, and the level of education of informants reveals that these specifics shape individuals’ perception of spirits more than any other factor.
Ancestral Dreams and Well-Being in Japan
John W. Traphagan, University of Texas, Austin
Ritual activity as it is expressed in practices related to ancestor veneration in Japan is a means of enacting collective well-being for one’s family. Just as the descendants keep the ancestors socially involved in the world of the living through ritual performance (omairi), the ancestors are seen as watching over and protecting the people whom they have left behind. In this paper, I will argue that the appearance of ancestors in dreams is often interpreted as an indication that the living are observed by their ancestors and that the ancestors maintain an interest in the world of the living. Using ethnographic data collected during the summer of 2000 in Akita Prefecture, in which informants discussed and described dreams in which ancestors appeared, I will explore the meanings associated with ancestral dreams and how Japanese interpret these dreams as indicators of potential problems with family health and well-being. I will suggest that the appearance of ancestors in dreams is gendered; although men do sometimes talk of ancestral visitations in dreams, women are more likely to have experienced such visitations. The gendered nature of ancestral visitation in dreams is, I will argue, closely related to Japanese tendencies to center responsibilities for taking care of family health matters on women.
Scattering Cremated Ashes: Alternative Destinations, Unexplored Endings
Satsuki Kawano, University of Notre Dame
In contemporary Japan, 99.8% of human bodies are cremated. Cremated ashes are often placed in ceramic urns and kept in the underground structure of the family graves. However, some bodily remains find alternative destinations, such as the mountains, the sea, the back yard, or a classroom in a medical school. This paper examines a non-conventional journey some bodily remains partake after death—the scattering of cremated ashes—and their implications.
Scattering has recently become a socially acknowledged way of ceremonially depositing the remains. Yet, the new practice has also raised many questions and concerns regarding notions of the afterlife and veneration practices for the dead. The new burial practice potentially endangers the cherished presence of the family dead in Japanese social life. For many people, the cremated remains embody the family dead, and the grave is most commonly considered the house of the dead. Considering the social and cultural importance of grave visits (ohakamairi), losing a place where the deceased is memorialized is problematic. Furthermore, scattering potentially evokes the image of selfish descendants who dispose, rather than treasure, the remains of their ancestors. Despite these potentially negative implications of scattering, ash scatterers have built positive images of the afterlife for those whose remains are scattered. By examining an alternative treatment of cremated ashes, this paper highlights competing ideas of ancestorhood and personhood in Japan’s changing society.
Organizer: Jason G. Karlin, Michigan State University
Chair: Tessa Morris-Suzuki, Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies, Canberra
Discussant: Stefan Tanaka, University of California, San Diego
The papers on this panel explore the nexus between nationalism and celebration by emphasizing the role of commemoration and public ceremonials in the construction of national identity. Celebrations are not only occasions for the simultaneous imagining of the nation, but societal events for inventing the past and fashioning national memory. The ceremonies, commemorations, and monuments through which national memory has been elaborated in modern Japan share the purpose of creating a sense of historical continuity amid the contingency and uncertainty of the modern age.
In examining the commemorative idioms and ceremonial forms in prewar Tokyo, each paper is attentive to the temporal and spatial dimensions of commemorative activity. The presenters seek to deconstruct the rhetoric of commemoration to reveal the politically and socially constructed nature of memory in modern Japan. Like historical writings, the rhetoric of commemoration constructs a narrative of the past that serves particular political interests and ideological objectives. Furthermore, the presenters share a common concern for revealing the aestheticization and mystification of space through the process of commemoration. While space may serve to objectify memory, it is also socially produced within the historical imagination. Like nations, national memory exists across both time and space.
The Tricentennial Celebration of Tokyo: Inventing the Modern Memory of Edo
Jason G. Karlin, Michigan State University
This paper examines the tricentennial celebration of Tokyo held in 1889 to argue that commemorative activity in Meiji Japan was a contested process that resulted as much from the actions of critics and opponents of the new regime as it did from the "memory machine" of the Meiji state. Although recent scholarship on memory tends to link commemorative activity in Meiji Japan to the notion of a monolithic state ideology, the tricentennial celebration was planned and organized by a group of former bakufu retainers who hoped to preserve the social memory of the achievements of the Tokugawa era. In response to the process of renewal and rapid social change in the early years of the Meiji period, they invented the modern memory of Edo as a way of resisting the acceleration of history and the eradication of the legacy of the Tokugawa era. However, the tricentennial celebration was not merely an act of resistance to state power and official history, but was equally productive of its own national narrative centered on the culture, practices, and tastes of the Edo period. This paper seeks to move beyond a narrow emphasis on commemorations and celebrations as sites of the production of state ideology, and to begin to address the multiplicity of actors in the production of national identity.
Architecture and Nationalism in the Imperial Capital: The Reuse of Meiji Monuments in Wartime Tokyo
Akiko Takenaka-O’Brien, Yale University
Historians of Japanese architecture and urbanism generally agree that, unlike countries such as Germany and Italy, Japanese architecture and urban planning were not influenced by and did not influence the political situation in the years that Japan was involved in the Asia-Pacific War (1931–1945). Their reasons include the absence of a specific, sanctioned architectural style that can be clearly separated from the other years, the lack of systematic government control over architectural design and the drastic decline in construction due to the lack of resources. In this paper, I will challenge the third point, as I have previously contested the first two.
I will first examine the transformation of Tokyo in the prewar years, including the construction of Yasukuni Shrine in 1869, conversion of former temple grounds into public parks in the 1870s, and the triumphal boulevards and arches built for the victory celebrations of 1906. Many of these alterations to the physical fabric of the capital were aimed specifically to entice mass participation in events to promote nationalism and to convert Tokyoites into imperial subjects. An examination of the use of these spaces during the later war years demonstrates that, while wartime construction did not occur at the majestic scale of contemporary Italy and Germany, structures and spaces that can be utilized for the promotion of nationalism already existed in the city of Tokyo. This paper, which challenges the existing scholarship on wartime Japanese architecture, will offer new insights into the political power of architecture and urban space in both Meiji and wartime Japan.
An Allegory of Utopia: The 2,600th Year of Kigen Commemorations in 1940 Tokyo
Sandra Collins, University of Chicago
As an equivalent to the national birthdays of other western nation-states, Japan planned elaborate commemorative ceremonies for its 2,600th birthday in 1940 (Kigen 2,600nen). Throughout the expanding Japanese empire, celebrations were invented, planned, and choreographed in order to project a new vision to the world of the expanding Japanese empire from her founding moment 2,600 years ago.
As the capital, the city of Tokyo was subject to extensive planning for staging the most spectacular of ceremonies. This presentation will analyze how Tokyo was transformed into a sacred imperial capital through several key ceremonies held during the year-long commemorative festival. In particular, close readings will be made of the "ceremonial idioms" enacted to portray the mythic history of Japan within the 1940 context of Japan as an established empire. The argument will be made that the 2,600th Year of Kigen can also be read as an allegory of utopia for the expanding empire of Japan.
Organizer and Chair: Stephen D. Miller, University of Colorado
Discussants: Charles J. Quinn, Jr., Ohio State University; H. Mack Horton, University of California, Berkeley; Paul Warnick, Brigham Young University; Joshua Mostow, University of British Columbia; Edith Sarra, Indiana University
Interest among students at North American universities in premodern Japan has lagged behind that in modern and contemporary Japan. The reasons are varied, but there is now the perception of easy accessibility to cultures that a generation or two ago were regarded as distant and impenetrable.
Those who study and teach early Japan may also see in this trend an opportunity for reflection and renewal. Whether the focus is modern or ancient, Japanese studies is not and cannot be what it was twenty years ago. At the same time, many of the philological skills necessary for firsthand study of the distant past have changed little. How do we realign the two in ways that will attract capable students and do a better job of helping them acquire those skills? This panel poses the question in regard to the teaching and learning of classical Japanese language (bungo).
The panelists are teachers of classical Japanese who, while hailing from different disciplinary backgrounds, share an interest in making their students’ initial study of bungo an experience that excites them to study the worlds of early Japanese texts. Two come from backgrounds in literary and critical studies; the remaining two have focused on linguistics and language pedagogy. None prepared in any formal sense to teach classical Japanese.
The roundtable provides a forum that brings teachers and learners of early Japanese together to share the insights that different disciplinary perspectives naturally produce. We hope to contribute to developing a more integrative philology, the kind that can underwrite an effective pedagogy of classical Japanese.
Organizer: Saadia Pekkanen, Middlebury College
Chair and Discussant: Edward J. Lincoln, Brookings Institution
Keywords: Japan and foreign policy, World Trade Organization (WTO), regionalism, Foreign Direct Investment (FDI), US-Japan Security Treaty.
Most observers of Japan continue to be absorbed with its domestic recession, and thereby neglect the prospects of an overhaul in Japan’s foreign policy. Yet Japan’s position in the world is arguably at a crossroads. From key economic matters to ongoing security concerns, Japan is grappling with the forces of the past while forging a path for the future. Which way, how, and whether Japan’s foreign policy is being revamped is an issue of vital concern to Japan’s allies. Is Japan using the multilateral rules of the WTO as a new trade strategy, or is it too succumbing to the forces of trade regionalism so apparent elsewhere (Pekkanen)? Are Japanese multinationals engaging in their own global corporate foreign policies that undermine the effectiveness of Japanese government policies (Nelson)? Will Japan continue to view the US-Japan security alliance as the foundation of its security policy, or will domestic and regional changes suggest the possibility of a different path—a path that allows Japan to leave its constitutional baggage behind (Smith)? Focusing on the common theme of changes in Japan’s foreign policy, panelists analyze these three central emerging policy agendas that are likely to confront Japan and her allies in the coming years.
Bilateralism, Regionalism, or Multilateralism? Choices and Strategies in Japan’s Foreign Trade Diplomacy
Saadia Pekkanen, Middlebury College
Most observers focus on the bilateral, regional, or multilateral forums through which Japan conducts its foreign trade diplomacy. Thus there continues to be controversy over whether Japan is still beholden to the US-Japan bilateral trade relationship, or whether, in keeping with the regionalism trend worldwide, it is increasingly focusing its energies on regional arrangements like APEC or FTAs with other Asian countries. While these two forums merit our attention in the short run, it is a safe bet that in the long term Japan will increasingly channel its disputes and structure its agendas with partners like the US, EU, Canada, and increasingly China, through the legalized multilateral forum of the WTO. This is because, given its volatile bilateral past with the US and its contentious historical legacy in Asia, Japan’s ability to interact with its trade partners on an equal basis depends heavily on the legal rules of the WTO. Stripped of the procedural, substantive, and legitimate weight of the WTO rules, the Japanese government realizes it is more likely to flounder in confronting its major trade partners. Only with the "legal legitimacy advantage" afforded by the WTO can Japan’s foreign trade diplomacy have the vision and bite that it has thus far been lacking.
The Force of Business? Multinationals as Policymakers
Patricia A. Nelson, University of Edinburgh, Scotland
Multinationals are becoming an increasingly controversial force in the global arena, and Japanese. multinationals are among the largest in the world. In foreign direct investment strategies, particularly in East Asia, Japanese multinationals are seen to lag behind their American and European counterparts. Japanese multinationals began by setting up export platforms, and have only recently begun to integrate production within the East Asian region. Their incentive was two-fold, worsened economic conditions in Japan and expansion into host country markets. However, in the aftermath of the economic crises in East Asia, major Japanese multinationals have had to adapt their strategies once again to new conditions. Now they also face growing popular unrest such as has occurred at international economic summits from Seattle to Genoa. As Japanese multinationals become more dependent on the global market, are they loosening their ties to their home country? As they face popular protest, are they developing global corporate foreign policies to protect their cross-border interests? If so, are these corporate policies in conflict with—or do they undermine the effectiveness of—Japanese government policies? This paper explores these questions through case analyses of the policymaking process in Japan and in several major Japanese multinationals operating in East Asia.
Challenges to the US-Japan Security Bargain
Shiela A. Smith, East-West Center
Since the end of the cold war, a key challenge for the US has been the "redefinition" of its security alliance with Japan. The US argues that the world is less predictable, and Japan should consider the impact that crises on the Korean peninsula and Taiwan straits may have on its own security. US efforts to urge Japan to move further and faster in its preparations for dealing with potential crises are likely to continue. But there are significant changes going on within Japan that call for greater US attention. Public attitudes within Japan are also changing. There is still consensus within Japan on the continued importance of the US-Japan Security Treaty for regional stability. But Japan’s political leaders are much more willing to enhance Japan’s own security while being less tolerant of criticism from China. Moreover, the Japanese public now expects its government to address Japan’s security policy in a more forthright and transparent manner. Unlike the past, therefore, Diet deliberations today focus on the nuts and bolts of security cooperation, and old "taboos" have gone by the wayside. This new enthusiasm for security issues may signal new opportunities for strategic cooperation in the US-Japan alliance, but it is also creating new challenges. US policymakers, and in particular the US military, are expected to demonstrate greater accountability and transparency. Is the alliance in Japan’s interests? Is the US held accountable to Japan’s citizens? This paper will explore these new Japanese attitudes in two key policy issues: the development of a Theater Missile Defense program, and the US handling of its forces and bases in Japan.
Organizer and Chair: Polly Szatrowski, University of Minnesota
Discussant: Jenny Mandelbaum, Rutgers University
Although storytelling is an important activity, which involves perspective taking, critical thinking, and theory reconstruction (Ochs et al. 1992), it has received minimal attention in Japanese textbooks. The goal of this panel is to investigate event and recipient design in native and non-native Japanese oral and written storytelling. We go beyond Labov’s (1972) definition of narrative as at least two clauses combined by a temporal disjuncture, by pointing out complexities in the connection and expression of events. We also demonstrate that oral storytelling is an interactional achievement highly dependent on recipient participation (Goodwin 1984).
Japanese non-native story writers are shown to use more connectives and conjunctions of the AND/SO-type, while native writers use relative clauses and BUT-type connections. In contrast, in oral storytelling, Japanese native speakers used more connectives, and subordinate clauses to initiate story units than non-native speakers, who used more hesitations and topic expressions. In oral retellings of an animated cartoon, native storytellers repeated clauses using syntactic forms which were more dependent on the following than the preceding clause to reflect both the separation and connection between events. Although native recipients participated in the construction of storytelling using aizuti, clarification requests, co-construction, and laughter in natural Japanese conversation, they rarely used multiple aizuti and comments to end story units when the storyteller was a non-native speaker.
These papers provide systematic studies of oral and written storytelling by native and non-native Japanese speakers, suggest applications for teaching Japanese as a second language, and provide areas of investigation for further studies of narrative in natural conversation.
Sentence Connection in Stories Written by Native and Non-native Japanese Writers
Mariko Masuda, University of Tokyo
In this paper, I compare the use of sentence connection in stories of 4-frame comics written by native and non-native Japanese writers. I use the term sentence connection to refer to the relations established between sentences/clauses using connective expressions, conjunctions, relativization, etc. Previous researchers compared native and non-native Japanese spoken stories about 4-/6-frame comic strips (Tochigi 1989, Watanabe 1996). Watanabe (1996) pointed out that demonstratives, passive voice, verbs of giving and receiving and the V-te "V and" form are important devices for creating text cohesion in Japanese stories. The present study adds to this research by analyzing text cohesion in native and non-native Japanese written stories. Analysis of 115 stories written by native Japanese writers and 96 stories by non-native Japanese writers about 7 4-frame comics shows the following:
(1) Non-native writers used more connective expressions (sosite ‘then,’ sikasi ‘however’) and conjunctions (kara ‘because,’ keredomo ‘but’);
(2) Unlike non-native writers, native writers often used non-restrictive relative clauses as in (a) to connect sentences which could by related by connectives as in (b).
(a) Kodomo ga itazura o sita. Okotta oya wa kodomo o sikatta.
The child did a naughty (thing). The parent, who got angry, scolded the child.
(b) Kodomo ga itazura o sita. Sorede, oya wa okotta. Sosite, kodomo o sikatta.
The child did a naughty (thing). So (lit. being that) the parent got angry. Then, (she/he) scolded the child.
(3) While non-native writers tended to use "AND/SO-type" connectors (kara ‘so,’ sosite ‘and,’ ‘then’), native writers used more "BUT-type" connectors (ga ‘but,’ no ni ‘although’).
Clausal Self-Repetition in Japanese Animation Description Narratives
Fumio Watanabe, Yamagata University
In this study, I analyze 26 cases of clausal repetition in 15 oral Japanese animation description narratives, and demonstrate that the preceding clauses were more independent than the repeating clauses.
Building on Tannen’s (1989) definition, I define clausal self-repetition as repetition of the immediately preceding clause by the same speaker, with the same predicate and argument structure as the preceding clause, as shown in b. and c. in the first paper presentation.
(1) a. Atatte (The snowball) hit (the kite) and,
b. omomi de okkotta n da kedo, it’s that (it) fell down with the weight, but
c. okkotta toki ni, when (it) fell down,
d. kowareta. (it) broke.
I summarize the forms used in self-repetition clause pairs in the following table where A–D indicate increasing levels of independence according to Minami’s (1974, 1993) hierarchical model of Japanese syntax.
Preceding Clause |
Level |
Repeating Clause |
Level |
No. of Cases |
Main Clause |
D |
X-siTE, ‘He did X AND’ |
B |
10 |
X-sita TOKI ‘When he did X’ |
B |
3 |
||
X-siTARA, ‘When he did X’ |
B |
2 |
||
X sita n da KEDO, |
C |
5 |
||
‘It’s that he did X BUT’ |
||||
X-sita KARA, ‘He did X SO’ |
C |
1 |
||
X-sita n da KEDO, |
C |
X-siTE, |
B |
2 |
X-sita TOKI |
B |
2 |
||
X-siTARA, |
B |
1 |
Results suggest that the repeating clauses were more connected syntactically with their subsequent than with their preceding clauses. I conclude that speakers used clausal self-repetition to indicate that the propositional content of preceding and repeating clauses is semantically related to two different information clusters (Chafe 1980, 1994) at the same time. This reflects both the separation and connection between narrative events in the speaker’s cognitive processes.
Story Units in Animation Storytellings by Japanese Native and Non-native Speakers
Polly Szatrowski, University of Minnesota
Based on an analysis of the way Japanese native and nonnative speakers indicated the beginning and ends of story units and important information while telling the story of an animated cartoon, I demonstrate that the non-native storytellings were more fragmented and lacked many of the devices used by native speakers.
Although previous studies have analyzed and characterized units in Japanese casual conversation (Szatrowski 1991, 1993; Suzuki 1994, 1995; Sakuma 2000) and first time meetings (Kato 1999, Nakai 2000), few studies have investigated units in Japanese storytellings. Results of a survey in which informants indicated major unit boundaries and important utterances while watching videotapes of native and non-native speakers telling the story of an animated cartoon showed the following:
(1) Native storytellers initiated story units using connectives, hesitations, time and place references, topic expressions, quantifiers, and deictic gestures, but non-native storytellers used fewer of these devices with the exception of hesitations and topic expressions, which they overused. While native storytellers tended to begin story units with subordinate clauses, non-native storytellers used more nominal phrases.
(2) Native recipients of both native and non-native storytellings ended story units with aizuti and laughter, but only recipients of native Japanese storytellings used multiple aizuti and comments.
(3) While native storytellers tended to give important information in the beginning of story units, non-native gave important information more at the end. Unlike non-native storytellers, native storytellers used the extended predicate, . . . -te simatta ‘ended up doing . . . ’ forms and inverted sentences, often accompanied by iconic (pictorial) gestures to express important information.
Co-telling My Story: An Analysis of the Recipients’ Roles in Storytelling in Japanese Conversation
Chisato Koike, University of California, Los Angeles
In this paper I demonstrate how the storyteller and story recipients collaboratively participate in a story-telling about the storyteller’s personal experience in a face-to-face Japanese conversation among three female friends. I analyze the roles of recipients in the storytelling focusing on: (1) aizuti, (2) clarification requests, (3) co-construction, and (4) laughter. Unlike previous researchers who have examined these features individually, following C. Goodwin (1984) and M. H. Goodwin (1997), I show how these features are used interactively by the storyteller and the story recipients in the storytelling.
I will demonstrate how the recipients systematically used: (1) vocal as well as non-vocal (head nods) aizuti to facilitate smooth transitions in the story development, (2) clarification requests to help the storyteller provide adequate information in order to tell the story effectively and insure that the recipients properly understand the story and give appropriate responses, and (3) co-construction to show their involvement in and understanding of the storytelling. Finally, I demonstrate that (4) recipients laugh at the right moments in the storytelling not only to show their understanding of the punch line of the story but also to encourage the storyteller to extend the storytelling by repeating the punchline.
I conclude that even when the storyteller is telling about her own personal experiences, the recipients’ active participation and collaboration using aizuti, clarification requests, co-construction, and laughter to show their involvement is crucial for the success of the storytelling.