[ Panels by World Area Main Menu ]
[ View the Timetable of Panels ]
Organizer: Gerald A. Figal, University of Delaware
Chair: Julia Yonetani, University of the Ryukyus
Discussants: Steve Rabson, Brown University; Julia Yonetani, University of the Ryukyus
Keywords: Okinawa, memory, history, anthropology, postwar.
Okinawans have related to the Battle of Okinawa through diverse media, generating a corpus of local knowledges of the wartime past. The palpable sense of this past—embodied in memories of survivors, voices of storytellers, melodies of musicians, bones of the dead, epitaphs at battle sites, and in the topography of the land—draws attention to the corporeality of these local knowledges. They are often performed through bodies in song, dance, pilgrimages, and protests; or they have bodies—dead, maimed, violated, lost—at the heart of their content. And their value often resides in motivating actions in the bodies of their audience.
Each paper in this panel takes up instances of Okinawans engaging the war past through different mediums and contexts. Matt Allen’s piece examines personalized histories drawn from a collective effort to recollect and narrate to local schoolchildren the massacres of civilians that took place on the island at the hands of Japanese military. In this instance, intersections of experience, memory, and history are inscribed in acts of storytelling which have mobilized islander identity. Gerald Figal excavates the history behind the collection and commemoration of war remains. For him, the mediums of representation are bones, concrete, marble, coral, and the soil itself as he tracks the formation of "sacred ground" in Okinawa. Finally, James Roberson addresses popular music as a medium that enacts knowledge of the war past for a war-free future. Cohering around shared thematic content, these papers introduce the range of Okinawan interactions with the war past.
Killing Time: Memories and Massacres on Kumejima
Matthew Allen, University of Auckland
After the Battle of Okinawa ended in late June 1945, a few Japanese army commanders on the outer islands continued to resist the U.S. military, at quite a cost to local civilians. On Kume Island between late June and early August 1945 twenty Kume civilians were executed as a result of Master Sergeant Kayama’s rigid, but thankfully brief, post-battle reign of terror. He and his men are collectively referred to today as "the wolf at the back gate," as opposed to the U.S. military, described as "the tiger at the front gate."
This paper examines an initiative undertaken in 1999 by one of Kume Island’s boards of education (kyouiku iinkai) to remember the past, and to mobilize the elderly people of their community to teach junior high school students about what happened to them on Kume Island during the Battle of Okinawa. The impact of this program on the students was significant, as their letters after the workshop demonstrate. By fore-grounding the violence and tragedy of the past so starkly in these times of relative peace multiple agendas can be played out, but leading these is the idea that the terror of war happened to "people we know." The personalization of history in this context can be framed as the ascendancy of local knowledges, and can be understood as powerful storytelling in the sense that Walter Benjamin uses the term. Such initiatives demonstrate how some Kume Islanders today are negotiating aspects of their own identity.
Bones of Contention: Local and National Stakes in Okinawa’s "Sacred Ground"
Gerald A. Figal, University of Delaware
Today Okinawa has one of the most extensive and challenging areas of World War II history and commemoration in the world. Anchored by the Cornerstone of Peace memorial within a multi-textured Peace Park, Okinawa’s "sacred ground" officially spans a wide zone across far southern Okinawa Island. Bustling with school groups, peace guide tours, war buffs, mourners, and casual tourists, this area has been the focus of disputes over the form, content, and stewardship of commemorative practices and historical representations of the Battle of Okinawa. Such controversies are usually framed as local (Okinawan) versus national (Japanese) interests but, as this paper demonstrates, it is difficult to maintain this facile polarization in the face of the complex historical roots and transformations of postwar Okinawa’s "sacred ground."
While excavating the intricate institutional history regarding the collection and commemoration of war remains during and after U.S. occupation of Okinawa, I highlight the interests—sometimes colliding, sometimes colluding—that groups in Okinawa and from mainland Japan had when staking and marking claims in Okinawan soil. I assess the shifting demarcation of what constituted "sacred ground," who maintained it, how it was maintained, and what value (spiritual, cultural, political, economic) it held. Much of my focus is on the Okinawa Bereaved Families Association and affiliated groups that were key players in bone collection, memorial building, and welfare and relief lobbying. What emerges is a more complicated historicized picture of positions and agency than is usually depicted in present discussions of Okinawa’s political struggles.
Narrating War, Dreaming of Peace: Music and Memory in Okinawa
James E. Roberson, University of New South Wales
This paper provides an interpretation of the crossroads of music and the construction of cultural memory in contemporary Okinawa. In particular, I look at song lyrics which describe wartime experiences among Okinawans or which describe dreams and desires for a peaceful Okinawa. How has Okinawan music narrated these? Which experiences, memories and dreams have been given lyrical embodiment and expression and which have not? What are the historical contexts and what are the cultural-political implications of this?
Over the past several years, on the one hand Okinawa has become a focus of much Japanese and Western media and academic attention, as local Okinawans have protested the continuing presence of and acts of violence committed by members of the U.S. military. Okinawan music has also gained renewed interest and popularity. On the other hand, a body of academic literature is developing which examines the construction of social-cultural memory in and out of Japan. This paper attempts to interrelate these emerging interests, concerns and discourses in a critical interpretation of the implications of the musical compositions of memory and desire related to issues of war and peace in Okinawa.
Organizer: Benjamin D. Middleton, Cornell University
Chair and Discussant: J. Victor Koschmann, Cornell University
Keywords: social science disciplines, Japan, academic culture, critique.
Although the social sciences have a long and prominent tradition in the Japanese academy, intellectual historians of Japan have hitherto paid very little concern to them. Our panel seeks to go some way to correcting this by examining three social science disciplines—macrosociological theory, family sociology and historical science (rekishi kagaku)—that were paradigmatic of modernist social thought through the mid-twentieth century. These projects were also intimately bound up with broader social and political movements such as the reclamation of the sphere of the social in the context of Taisho liberalism, conservative attempts to regulate the sphere of the family, and attempts to create a new nationalist history through a "rediscovery" of and "return" to nativist (kokugaku) texts. The panel’s goal is to show how concept formation in these disciplines created not just new forms of knowledge but also new modes and realms of experience. We take up the history of these disciplines in order to generate new insights into Japanese modernity, and through such engagement, rework sectors of contemporary social theory.
The panel self-consciously seeks to stimulate cross-disciplinary interest and discussion. Although the immediate frame of our work is Japan, the issues we raise are not restricted to a single national context, and so should appeal to a wider social science audience from across the spectrum of Asian studies.
Science of Society Found: Contestations in Japanese Sociology
Benjamin D. Middleton, Cornell University
From late in the Meiji period (1868–1912), the space of the social in Japan was forced into a largely subterranean existence after the mass arrests of socialists in 1908 and 1911 contaminated the concept of society (shakai) with the taint of socialism (shakaishugi). Sociology (shakaigaku), a discipline that self-consciously sought to master the social, was also almost irredeemably tarnished by its sharing the same root (shakai) as socialism. Yet by 1919 sociology had firmly institutionalized itself as an independent discipline, so much so that the 1920s may be described as a golden age of Japanese sociology. How could sociology claim the social as a sphere of legitimate study, sanitized from the fear of conflict, disorder and radical politics that pervaded prior discourse on the social? What visions of the social did Japanese sociology produce to overcome this legacy?
This paper will attempt to answer these questions by examining the work of the period’s most prolific and influential theorist, Takata Yasuma (1883–1972), in the context of a series of debates he engaged in with social organicists and Marxists. Takata radically challenged both these theoretical movements by creatively appropriating theories of European sociologists such as Durkheim, Simmel and Tönnies and developing a highly nuanced concept of the social as association. By contextualizing Takata’s work in relation to the liberalism of "Taisho democracy," this paper will analyze the consequences of these debates for the future development of Japanese sociology.
The Sociology of Knowledge of Family Sociology in Japan: An Examination of the Concept of the "ie"
Yuki Senda, Tokyo University of Foreign Studies
Family sociology assumes an important position in the social sciences in Japan because studies of the family have often been regarded as key to understanding the formation of modern Japanese society. This presentation will demonstrate how very specific representations of the supposedly unique Japanese family structure or "ie" system came to be constructed within this ideologically prominent discipline. After providing a brief historical outline of the theoretical and social context in which such sociological knowledge was produced, this paper will offer a critique of some of the discipline’s major theories. It will focus specifically on the concept of the "ie" (house or family), which figured prominently in modernization theory’s vision of "Japanese modernity."
Unlike the United States, where scholars such as the historian Ronald L. Howard have undertaken much critical research into family sociology, little research has been done in this field in Japan. Despite its long history, there are few historical studies of Japanese family sociology. A critical examination of this discipline therefore has far-reaching implications, as it leads to a reconsideration of a central paradigm of Japanese social science, and a reworking of the idea of "modernity" in Japan.
Recognizing the Already Recognized: The Development of a Positivist Intellectual History and Philology in Japan
Tsutomu Tomotsune, Tokyo University of Foreign Studies
Although methods of European historiography were widely disseminated in Japan during the Meiji period (1868–1912), it was not until the twentieth century that the idea of history as a positive science was applied to the study of nativist (kokugaku) and Shinto texts of the Tokugawa period (1600–1867). This coincided with a rising modernist belief in the possibility of the scientificity of knowledge across the social science disciplines. A key figure in this movement was Muraoka Tsunetsugu (1884–1946), known now primarily as the founder of the contemporary discipline of Tokugawa intellectual history. He advocated a positive and inductive methodology based on the nineteenth-century German philological tradition established by August Boeckh (1785–1867). In Muraoka’s somewhat cryptic formulation, intellectual history is the way to achieve a "recognition of the recognized" in the realm of thought. Yet rather than simply accepting or validating European theory, Muraoka simultaneously held that the famous Tokugawa era nativist scholar, Motoori Norinaga, had already anticipated the methodological work of Boeckh’s philology. Thus, this school of historical science represents an interesting mixture of cosmopolitanism and nationalism. In my presentation, I would like to examine the meanings of the desire to transform Norinaga’s asceticism and textual ethics to make both a universal theory and trans-historical subject in early-twentieth-century Japan, in which any attempt to go beyond textual materiality must be unrecognizable and, instead, is understood as an ethical doxa of faith to "ancient" Japanese.
Organizer: Christena L. Turner, University of California, San Diego
Chair: Frank L. Chance, University of Pennsylvania
Momoyama Western-Style Painting Destiny
Isabelle Charrier, Catholic University of Leuven
During the middle of the sixteenth century and the beginning of the seventeenth century, Japan once had many commercial relationships, first with Portuguese and later with Spanish, English, and Dutch. So Japanese for the first time were able to see western art, especially Christian art which was brought to Japan by the missionaries in order to convert the Japanese people to Catholicism. They also introduced some Japanese craftsmen to European Christian art. At the same time, some painters from the Kanô school started to develop what is called Nanban art in describing the life of the foreigners (barbarians). Nanban art and Christian art flourished until 1637 when the Tokugawa government imposed the closing of the country. Suddenly this western-style art disappeared.
However there is a link which lasts during the Edo period in the Nagasaki school which depicts the Dutch colony based in Deshima Island near Nagasaki. Some works painted by western-style painters of the middle of the eighteenth century show that Nanban art was not dead and that the Christian paintings were still seen in secret.
This paper will show the continuity of the Momoyama western style during the Edo period and its real impact on the evolution of Japanese art.
Early Meiji Exhibitions of Old Works of Art
Hiroko T. McDermott, Oxford University
This paper will discuss the impact on the early Meiji art world of numerous displays of old Japanese artworks that were sponsored by both the government and non-governmental groups in the 1870s and 1880s. While some scholars have rightly stressed the political dimension of the early Meiji government’s efforts to preserve and promote traditional Japanese culture, this paper will focus on the broader social dimensions of these exhibits of old artworks. After analyzing the contents and various purposes of the more noteworthy shows (which were often linked with shows of contemporary art), I will stress the novelty of such shows within the traditional Japanese art world, these shows’ increasing emphasis on the aesthetic dimension of artworks, and the breadth of public interest in the displayed artworks. Held in many cities besides the cultural capitals of Kyoto and Tokyo, these shows aroused considerable attention from a wide variety of urban residents. In addition to contributing to the making of a modern urban culture, these shows could give an important stimulus to the sale of pre-Meiji art. The whereabouts of these artworks became much more public knowledge; the market for old Japanese art became more public and more open, even attracting foreigners; and, the relative status of painting vis-à-vis other types of old Japanese art rose.
Past/Present Culture: Public Art in Japan
Elizabeth Norman, University of Leeds
The title of a recent publication suggests an interesting critical context for an understanding of public art in Japan. Mirror of Modernity: Invented Traditions of Modern Japan (Vlastos, S., 1998) Stephen Vlastos writes of tradition as past/present culture. Public art is just that. It is an art of the present, responding to modern concerns. For the west, that has meant the demands of urban regeneration, property and image reclamation. Its past was of public and political intent, being ornamental and commemorative statuary. For Japan, contemporary public art has had a similarly pragmatic role, involved with city beautification, property development and enhancement. But claiming a tradition has been less certain as sculpture was considered a lesser art and the practice more private, being primarily religious statuary. Thus, ambitious public art projects of recent time in Japan have sought to construct a native as well as a modern style by drawing upon culturally specific references such as certain customs, a love of nature, and architectural forms. From urban projects of the mid-1990s such as Faret Tachikawa and Shinjuku i-LAND to the recent rural Echigo Tsumari Art Necklace project, a deliberate Japanese consciousness has been at work despite its seemingly western appearance. Construction of another form is taking place with the writing of a history of Japanese public art (Takeda, N., 1993, 1995). Public art must be culturally sensitive or inventive in order to be understood and accepted.
Porcelain and Power: Merchandising Policies in Tokugawa Japan, 1800–1870
Ariko Ota, Columbia University
This study comparatively examines merchandising policies of porcelains in 19th-century Tokugawa Japan, the domains of Saga and Owari, and the territorial holding of the bakufu (the central government) Mino. This study discusses merchandising policies that were elaborated through the relationships of those who were engaged in production and distribution of porcelains, the local governmental authorities, and the central government. The study analyzes how variously these relationships were formed and shaped the ways of organizing resources in each region. Comparative analysis of porcelain merchandising policies illuminates regional variances of political economy and dynamics of industrialization in 19th-century Tokugawa Japan.
The study discusses how the relationships among the central government, local rulers, and the subject population shaped the ways of organizing resources, including the degrees of administrative control over porcelain production and distribution. Variant patterns of configuration of capital (organization and accumulation of resources, including the claim and access) and coercion (governmental control) illustrate different contexts in which local producers, merchants, and the governmental authority negotiated, cooperated, and contended with each other to define their capacities of capturing resources for porcelain. Analysis of merchandising policies of porcelain shows how differently interests and claims of particular social groups and the governmental authorities were consolidated and transformed in each region and how implementing the arrangements, overall, undermined the claim of the central government to control transactions in the markets. This study of porcelain merchandising policies, therefore, elucidates regional variances and the complexity of the interrelations of economic, social and political dynamics and, more specifically, industrialization and state formation in 19th-century Tokugawa Japan.
Organizer: Jennifer Amyx, University of Pennsylvania
Chair: Hugh T. Patrick, Columbia University
Discussant: Richard F. Doner, Emory University
Keywords: regional integration, Japan, China, finance, trade.
This panel examines the political dynamics of regional integration in East Asia, with particular attention to trade and financial issues and to Japan’s role, interests and strategies. The papers collectively identify a number of important shifts in policy and strategies employed by the Japanese government vis-à-vis regional cooperation. Some of these changes are explicitly articulated by officials, such as the Koizumi administration’s shift away from staunch multi-lateralism to the embracing of regional free trade agreements. Other changes are less obvious but nonetheless critically important, such as the attempt to morph a network of currency swap arrangements among the ASEAN Plus Threes’ countries from a mechanism for financial crisis into a regional currency arrangement. Underlying all of these changes are important domestic political currents and a sense of urgency to better position the nation for future competition with China. How do these changed policies and motivations affect the long-term prospects for these arrangements? What role is being played by the ASEAN nations—and by Singapore and Malaysia, in particular—in enabling or hindering these shifts? How will these institutions or mechanisms of regional integration and cooperation serve to mediate the process of adjustment in the region to the rise of China? The papers in this panel approach these issues from a number of different angles and in doing so contribute toward a better understanding of the political dynamics of regional integration.
Japanese Approaches to Free Trade Agreements (FTAs) and East Asian Regionalism
Takashi Terada, National University of Singapore
Japan has long been regarded as "the staunchest multilateralist" (New York Times) with an exclusive focus on the GATT/WTO system in terms of trade liberalization. The nation’s recent international trade policy does not seem to follow the WTO-only approaches, however, as seen in the recent conclusion of the Japan-Singapore Economic Partnership Agreement, signed by Prime Ministers Koizumi and Goh in January 2002. Japan has also expressed its interest in promoting regional trading arrangements in East Asia, especially the ASEAN+3 framework, as expressed in Koizumi’s speech in that visit to Singapore. Koizumi stressed the concept of a community in East Asia, despite the fact that Japan had long refused to become involved in the formation of an East Asian regional organization such as the East Asian Economic Caucus (EAEC) idea advocated by Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir, mainly because of the U.S.’s strong pressure. The paper aims to argue how and why Japan has advocated the so-called multilayered trade policy. It does so by emphasizing the significance of bilateral trading arrangements and East Asian regional arrangements, both of which Japan once refused to commit to. The paper also examines what options Japan has so far considered to implement the Koizumi statement and what implications these policy changes in Japan have for East Asian regionalism. The paper features two factors in examining these questions: Japan’s views about the emergence of China as a substantial economy in this region and the United States, which seems to exercise a considerable influence on the direction of Japanese foreign policy.
China Watching: Japan’s Changed Strategy towards Southeast Asia
Julie Gilson, Birmingham University
The nature, dynamics and extent of strategic, political and economic competition between China and Japan have been the subject of a range of studies. However, this paper seeks to examine whether and how the two now compete for economic and political influence within Southeast Asia. Adopting an IPE framework, it explores the competing and complementary business and government interests which serve to propel Japan towards different areas of Southeast Asia, and to analyze the extent to which such interests are driven by concerns over the so-called and well-documented rise of China.
The mid to late 1990s have seen attempts by both China and Japan to foster closer ties with individual member states of ASEAN, particularly in the wake of the Asian financial crisis (for example through the Japan-Singapore FTA), and to embrace the region as a whole, especially through the ASEAN Plus Three process. This paper examines how and why such trends are influenced by the rise of perceived competition with China, particularly in light of China’s entry into the World Trade Organization in 2001 and of the growing trend towards joint participation in region-specific fora. Prime Minister Koizumi’s speech at the Boao Forum for Asia in China in 2002 reinforced Japan’s espoused commitment to the region of East Asia, in order, according to Koizumi, to "advance reform and mutual interdependence between Japan and China." This paper assesses how far that commitment is itself driven by the potential for, if not the reality of, Sino-Japanese competition within the region.
Shifting Objectives and Strategies Underlying Japanese Leadership in Asian Financial Cooperation: Managing the Rise of China
Jennifer Amyx, University of Pennsylvania
This paper attempts to shed light on the political dynamics of regional financial cooperation since 1997 through an analysis of the evolving objectives and strategies behind Japanese leadership in this area. The regional crisis that erupted in 1997 was a clear catalyst for the move toward regional financial cooperation in the region. In this year, Japanese officials proposed the establishment of an Asian Monetary Fund. Although this proposal failed to receive support, a number of other mechanisms for regional financial cooperation have evolved since. Perhaps most notable is a network of currency swap arrangements formed among the ASEAN+3 nations under the guise of the Chiang Mai Initiative (CMI). This paper argues that the initial goal of cooperation among regional actors—provision of the public good of regional financial stability—has gradually been hijacked by Japan’s desire to retain or reassert its role as the core nation in the region. Underlying its leadership role within CMI today is an objective that goes beyond mechanisms for financial crisis manage-ment to the development of a Japan-centered exchange rate regime. In making this argument, the paper delves into the way in which Japan’s protracted economic malaise affects the nation’s financial diplomacy and contrasts Japanese strategies with those employed by China as it participates in regional forums for financial cooperation. The paper suggests that the dynamic of competition between Japan and China critically affects the conditions under which states in East Asia cooperate to promote regional financial stability.
Domestic Political Economies of Monetary Cooperation in Asia
Natasha Hamilton-Hart, National University of Singapore
Regional cooperation on financial issues has begun to take shape in Asia. Recent initiatives include the creation of modest liquidity support facilities, technical assistance and diplomatic coordination. Are these initiatives precursors to more ambitious forms of cooperation? A number of econometric studies suggest that there are potential aggregate benefits from currency cooperation in Asia, at least among sub-groups of regional countries. National policies regarding currency cooperation, however, are unlikely to be determined by estimates of aggregate gains. Overall gains can coexist with losses for some actors, who may be in a position to influence policy. For this reason, analyses of currency cooperation in Asia need to take into account the structure of domestic interests, institutions and political coalitions in particular countries. In this respect, however, we know very little about the domestic political economy of currency cooperation in the region. Who are the domestic winners and losers from regional currency cooperation? How influential are they? This paper provides a map of the interests and institutions that will shape national polices in three countries with different economic structures and political institutions: Malaysia, Singapore, and Japan.
Organizer: Sarah Kovner, Columbia University
Chair and Discussant: Katherine Moon, Wellesley College
Keywords: prostitution, gender, military, occupation, Japan.
America’s military presence brought more than 400,000 U.S. servicemen to Japan during the Allied Occupation (1945–1952) and the Korean War (1950–1953). The first large scale encounters between American men and Asian women occurred in Japan at this time. The bases created to serve U.S. military needs gave rise to a system of military prostitution that subsequently altered local economies and societies throughout Asia. The collapse of a centuries-long system of regulated prostitution and mass poverty created new forms of prostitution in Japan, tailored to meet the needs of GI patrons. This panel focuses on the gendering of mobility by discussing how Japanese and American authorities influenced military prostitution through racialized and sexualized political and economic institutions.
Sarah Kovner discusses fraternization between U.S. servicemen and Japanese women and shows how an angry Japanese population responded, pushing for a law that outlawed prostitution. Michiko Takeuchi focuses on the Japanese government’s mobilization of nationalist sentiment to create a state-sponsored prostitution system. Seung Hye Suh examines a 1950s American comedy, Teahouse of the August Moon, and demonstrates how popular narratives played a role in shaping American representations of Asia, Asian women and U.S.-Asian relations.
To encourage the border-crossing nature of this panel, each presenter will be strictly limited to fifteen minutes. The papers will be followed by a discussion by Katharine Moon, a political scientist known for her work on U.S. military prostitution in Korea. Our aim is to encourage focused commentary from the audience on military prostitution, a topic that affects women throughout Asia.
Reconceptualizing Sex Work in Early Postwar Japan
Sarah Kovner, Columbia University
Streetwalkers, government-sponsored prostitutes and geisha entertainers met the American servicemen who flooded into Japan with the loss of the Pacific War in 1945. Japanese authorities had planned for such interaction with state-sanctioned prostitution. American authorities, however, had not. Issues of venereal disease, public safety, and law, however, forced American occupation and military authorities to grapple daily with the question of fraternization. I will trace the development of fraternization in Japan to show how and why it led to the passing of the Japanese Anti-Prostitution law of 1956.
Licensed prostitution, considered a "necessary evil," had never met with much social opprobrium in Japan, but the new streetwalkers (pan-pan) who appeared at the end of the war did. Walking openly and practicing their trade with American servicemen, the pan-pan drew anger from both the Japanese and the Americans. American authorities concerned themselves with rampant venereal disease, which they blamed entirely on the Japanese population. Local townspeople and their representatives, who needed the economic benefits of American trade in the bars, shops and restaurants, found themselves helpless and agreed to whatever policies the American authorities proposed. The American military presence led to substantial social problems, including rape, disease, raids, unwanted pregnancies and abandoned women and orphans. The dissatisfaction of housewives, mothers and others with the fraternization that they observed set the stage for a law that would outlaw prostitution in 1956.
"Well Sir . . . I’ve Started an Industry": Teahouse of the August Moon, Military Prostitution, and Postwar U.S.-Asia Relations
Seung Hye Suh, Scripps College
This paper will discuss the 1950s blockbuster Teahouse of the August Moon in the context of the U.S. military occupation of Japan. This whimsical comedy, based on a 1951 novel, was adapted for Broadway in 1952 and became a film in 1956, generating enormous popular and critical acclaim. The three versions were contemporaneous with a critical period in America’s history in the Asia Pacific region, Teahouse presented to 1950s American audiences largely unfamiliar with the region representations of Asia, Asian women, and U.S.-Asia relations that remain with us today. I will demonstrate the ways in which postwar American ideological and political imperatives structure Teahouse’s representation of the nature and purpose of America’s role as a military, political, and economic power in Asia. Key to this representation are both U.S. military prostitution and the mystification of it as such. My discussion emphasizes the significance of military prostitution as a racialized and gendered sexual and economic institution of the U.S. occupation in Japan and the role that popular narratives play in shaping American cultural understanding of these relations.
Gendered Nationalism and Sexuality: Japanese State-Sanctioned Prostitution for the U.S. Occupation Forces
Michiko Takeuchi, University of California, Los Angeles
Japan’s defeat in World War II marked the beginning of its term as an occupied country, from 1945 to 1952. One consequence of the Occupation was the control that the conqueror (the U.S.) had over the conquered (Japan) and over the, sexuality of some Japanese women. My paper explores this aspect of the Occupation, focusing on a group of Japanese women specifically organized and sanctioned by the Japanese government, to satiate the sexual "needs" of the U.S. Occupation Forces ("Special Comfort Women"). I argue that the Japanese government mobilized nationalist sentiment to induce these women to participate in this enterprise. The government’s use of nationalism reveals its deeper psychosocial and cultural concerns with the "pure blood" and the chastity of "good" Japanese women. The vast proportion of women who served as "Special Comfort Women" were "ordinary" Japanese women, impoverished by the devastating effect of the war, not prostitutes by trade.
It was not only the Japanese government that was concerned with the sexuality of Japanese women. The U.S. Occupation forces exercised their prerogative power over the sexuality of conquered Japanese women as a sign of victory. The significance of my research is situated in the transnational commodification of women by both conqueror and conquered. Both the United States and Japan benefited from this commodification in different ways despite their asymmetrical power relationship.
Organizer and Chair: Bill Mihalopoulos, University of Chicago
Discussant: Zhen Zhang, New York University
Keywords: cinema, politics.
The panel is organized around the following question: How is politics articulated in Japanese cinema? Mitsuhiro Yoshimoto and Jonathan Hall focus on debates in Japan amongst leftist filmmakers concerning how to transform Japanese cinema into an intellectually powerful critical force capable of jolting Japanese society into change. Sharon Hayashi deals with the politics of play in the films of Shimizu Hiroshi during the war years. Bill Mihalopoulos looks at how Imamura Shohei uses extra diegetic references in his early feature films to produce a critical space to re-examine what it means to be a true and authentic Japanese.
Film, State, and Resistance
Sharon Hayashi, University of Chicago
This paper will explore the films of Shimizu Hiroshi (1903–1966) from 1936–1942 to show the ways in which the expanding Japanese empire influenced and enabled a traveling cinema. Rather than argue for a conscious form of resistance to the colonial project, I will look at the ways in which certain elements of Shimizu’s filmmaking style and themes provided alternatives to the proscribed roles of the family state system and show how travel opened up new subject positions outside of the sanctioned norms of bourgeois domesticity. Shimizu painted a world of social outcasts, migrant laborers, and non-productive members of society in transit who, although they did not "resist" the state’s organization of society, created a utopic space outside of the ideologies of both melodrama and militarism. Through play and travel Shimizu’s films continually refused to participate in the alignment of labor to the national cause. His innovative realist-inspired technique reformulated the question of subjectivity and its relationship to both notions of community and landscape of the time.
Imamura Shohei: A Historian of the Present
Bill Mihalopoulos, University of Chicago
In his early works, Imamura preferred to present his feature films as if they were documentaries of individual lives, caught in the moment of the "now." This paper argues that in this period of his career, Imamura was engaged in a sustained meditation on how can one live a life whilst being true to oneself. I argue that the Imamura’s use of extra diegetic references in his films allows him to raise untimely questions that challenge existing, state defined notions of what it means to be an authentic and true Japanese, and, perhaps more importantly, to suggest that the source of vitality for Japanese life lay in a past that always informed and shaped the "now" as it unfolded into the future.
Film and Politics: Reexamining the "Question Oshima"
Mitsuhiro Yoshimoto, New York University
This paper reexamines some of the widely accepted theses on the cinema of Oshima Nagisa by focusing on his early films and two crucial issues, the relationship between politics and his works, and the context in which he tried to make formally innovative and socially relevant films. Even though Oshima is clearly a sympathizer of the political left, none of his early films is a straightforward leftist film. In fact, the political position articulated in those films is highly ambiguous. For Oshima, to make a film with no political commitment is a waste of time. But the articulation of film and politics is not an easy task to accomplish because politics fundamentally eludes cinematic representation. Politics cannot be presented as mere themes as in socially conscious films of independent production collectives. Nor is it possible to reduce politics to the question of cinematic form and style as is argued by political modernists. This is why so many of Oshima’s films are allegorical, and unlike many other Japanese masters, Oshima situates himself not in the international film history but in the socio-political context of the Japanese nation-state. Oshima’s early films must be understood as an attempt to transform Japanese cinema into an intellectually powerful force comparable to art, literature, and critical discourse that had enormous influence on public opinion in postwar Japan. Paradoxically, because of his inward orientation, it is not too farfetched to say that it is not Ozu Yasujiro but Oshima who is the "most Japanese of all film directors."
"You’ve Got It Wrong, Mr. Oshima": Defining Political Cinema
Jonathan M. Hall, University of Chicago
Although recent analysis of the Japanese New Wave largely has resisted amalgamating the period’s directors and diverse social or political critiques into a single movement, there remains the tendency to understand New wave films and their directors as part of a coherent, unified plane of social opposition. Such indifference to the political folds within the cinematic left has supported a valorization of more "corporatized" directors such as Oshima, Imamura, and Ogawa over independent, avant-garde, or "elitist" auteurs such as Matsumoto, Teshigahara, or Kuroki. More importantly, however, this homogenizing reading has led to a significant underestimation of the importance of debate within left cinema in the late 60s and early 70s over film practice, film form, and the nature of cinematic politics. In this paper, I examine key journals from the period including Eiga hihyo as well as the more marginal Kikan firumu and Shinema to highlight exchanges between leading director Oshima Nagisa and experimental filmmaker Matsumoto Toshio over the requirements for a socially critical filmmaking. In mapping out disjunctive understandings of the political, I locate in the common deployment of sexuality and violence two distinct political affects, a substitutive, critical logic for the cinema and an aleatory, dislocative one. In the final section of the paper, I look to two recent films, Oshima’s own Gohatto and Hashiguchi Ryosuke’s Hush! to identify the continued cinematic mobilization of these two positions.
Organizer and Chair: Michael S. Tangeman, Denison University
Discussant: Richard E. Torrance, Ohio State University
Imported from the West in the late nineteenth century, mystery fiction in Japan was initially, quite literally, an imitation of its Western predecessor in setting, tone, characterization, and often even plot. However, an indication of the maturation of Japanese mystery fiction can be found in writers’ use of the mystery to advance opinions related to social issues.
Kyoko Omori’s paper on Marxist mystery writer and theorist Hirabayashi Hatsunosuke analyzes that writer’s efforts to transform mystery fiction into the genre most attuned to the economic realities of the burgeoning populace of metropolitan Japan in the 1920s. Mark Silver’s reading of prewar mystery giant Edogawa Ranpo, a contemporary of Hirabayashi, suggests that even in tales of bizarre island dystopias, the reader may discern a questioning of the social mores of Japan in the 1930s. Both papers suggest that, while widely regarded as mere entertainment, early mystery writers used the mystery to question important problems.
In the postwar era, socially realistic mystery fiction continues the prewar tradition of social critique, but utilizes generally more believable characterization and plot devices. Michael Tangeman’s work on Matsumoto Seicho considers Seicho’s novel about the murder of a government official and his essay on the murder of a bureaucrat as indicative of Seicho’s gritty realism. In her study of Abe Kobo, Margaret Key shows how Abe uses subversion of the traditional elements of the socially realistic mystery to challenge the conventional wisdom of massive construction projects rampant in the immediate postwar. Both papers detail how these two writers used their work to encourage questioning the official version of events.
Contesting Modanizumu: Hirabayashi Hatsunosuke, Tantei Shôsetsu and Reader Contributions to Shinseinen
Kyoko Omori, Hamilton College
Virtually from its initial use in the 1920s, the term modanizumu has generally been identified with the hedonistic consumption represented by moga (modern girls) and mobo (modern boys). This association has resulted in a critical tendency to dismiss the literature of modanizumu as a marginal and transient phenomenon, especially in relation to the more "serious" groups of the naturalist lineage, proletarian literature and the avant-garde movements that explicitly drew upon Western literary developments. More than simply celebrating mindless commercial consumption, however, various advocates of popular cultural expression at the time actively sought generative solutions to the intellectual and social challenges accompanying the process of modernization in Japan. This paper attempts to map out a fuller picture of 1920s Japanese culture by examining how the influential critic and mystery writer Hirabayashi Hatsunosuke (1892–1931) strove to make tantei shôsetsu (detective fiction) into the genre most appropriate to the transformed economic conditions of modernity. He did so by opening up the process of literary production to include readers, thereby encouraging them to engage with society not just as consumers, but as active, critical participants.
A committed Marxist, Hirabayashi originally directed his efforts in support of proletarian literature. Soon, however, he shifted his approach to seeking venues for educating the new middle class, arguing that it was the petit-bourgeoisie, and not the emergent category of taishû (the masses), that actually needed introduction to democratic ideas. To do so, he not only published critical essays about detective fiction, but he also produced original stories, pursuing a middle ground between a politically instrumental and a purely aesthetic approach to literature.
Irrepressible Deviants and Island Dystopias: Social Criticism in Two Detective Novels of Edogawa Ranpo
Mark Silver, Colgate University
In the performance of its basic narrative labor—the unmasking and punishing of criminals—the Japanese popular detective novel would seem to reinforce the social status quo, to police the boundary between the normal and the deviant. But sometimes this pattern can be undercut. The fundamental impulse behind what a novel labels as deviance may unexpectedly win the reader’s sympathy; or the novel may open for exploration topics that have the aura of taboo, only to retreat with such conspicuous haste to conventional views as to throw convention into question. Such works, then, may contain elements of subversive social criticism, even if it comes into view most clearly when one reads against the grain.
This paper provides such readings of Panorama-tô kidan (The Strange Tale of Panorama Island, 1927) and Kotô no oni (The Ogre on the Desert Island, 1930), both by Edogawa Ranpo (1894–1965). In both we see a man making over an island to embody an alternative to life as it is lived on the Japanese mainland; one man is criminally obsessed with beauty, the other with monstrosity. Though both come to bad ends as the narratives reach their conclusions, neither man’s vision is completely reined in by the narratives’ ritualistic corrections of deviance. In Panorama Island the hero martyrs himself in a way that honors his extreme aestheticism even in death, and The Ogre heals or disposes of its freaks (including a homosexual) with such urgency as to prompt reconsideration of the boundaries of the normal.
Matsumoto Seicho and the Facts behind His Detective Fiction
Michael S. Tangeman, Denison University
In a prolific four-decade career that spanned from 1951 to 1992, Matsumoto Seicho (1909–1992), a writer known for his socially realistic detective fiction, produced over 600 novels, short stories and essays that chronicle the postwar struggles of the Japanese working and middle class. This paper uses the landmark detective novel Ten to sen (Points and Lines, 1957–58) and the essay "Aru shokanryo no massatsu" ("The Death of a Minor Official," 1958) to explore Seicho’s techniques for discussing social problems in his fiction and non-fiction.
In Ten to sen, Seicho critiques the highly competitive postwar bureaucracy. The villain in the novel exploits his position of wealth and power to arrange the death of two innocents in an effort to prevent the discovery of his own criminal dealings with a government ministry. One of the victims is a young bureaucrat at the ministry with which the murderer is illicitly connected. In "Aru shokanryo no massatsu," Seicho explains in careful detail a similar incident in which a manager is murdered to cover up the illegal dealings between a ministry and his company. The immensely popular mystery fiction genre becomes the ideal vehicle for broad dissemination of Seicho’s critique of the exploitation by superiors of the middle manager in large institutions. By tapping into a widely held, but sometimes difficult to substantiate unease about the legitimacy of the relationship between certain businessmen and public servants, Seicho finds a vast audience because his fiction rings true.
Detecting Murder and Myths: Abe Kobo on Dam Construction
Margaret Key, Indiana University
This paper treats two works by Abe Kobo, the detective novel Stone’s Eye (Ishi no me, 1960) and a piece of reportage on dam construction projects, which inspired the novel.
In 1960 Japan was in the midst of a boom in dam construction, promoted by the government under the mantle of "prioritizing public welfare." One local resistance movement led by a landowner attracted national attention at this time. Abe conducted an investigation of this resistance and of dam construction projects throughout Japan. He published a report of his findings, contradicting the myth of the public benefit of dams, exposing corruption, and raising doubts about the motivation of the protest leader, portrayed as an eccentric by the media and as a hero of the democratization movement by sympathetic intellectuals.
Stone’s Eye, set at a dam construction site, is a subversion of the traditional detective narrative in which a murder sets in motion an analysis of evidence and hypotheses about motivation, which lead to the identification of the murderer. In this novel, the murders do not occur until the end and are the result of, rather than the starting point for, "rational" analysis of evidence. Abe uses the detective story structure to dramatize the mind’s cognitive engagement with reality, showing the destructiveness of deductive logic and how interpretative frames distort perception. By subverting the detective narrative and problematizing explanatory models employed by government, media, and intellectuals, Abe attempts to dismantle the myths that structure one’s reading of fiction and one’s perception of reality.
Organizer and Chair: Tomoko Hamada, College of William and Mary
Discussants: Chang Liu, Christopher Newport University; T. J. Cheng, College of William and Mary
Keywords: colonialism, history, textbooks, East Asia.
This interdisciplinary panel (anthropology, political science, history) focuses on school history textbook projects in Japan, Korea and Taiwan. The construction and revision of a nation’s collective history involves dynamic and often contentious processes of meaning creation among multiple stakeholders. Politicians, writers, educators, activists, mass media, bureaucrats, military personnel, parents and children, not to mention outside commentators and foreign governments, all contribute to the process of creating a historical description, to be passed from one generation to the next. The panelists first examine the contending memories of Japanese and Chinese colonialisms in East Asia, and reveal how narratives and material artifacts for teaching schoolchildren unlock a heated debate, opposing moral claims, patriotic mobilization, and even a global civil rights movement. The discussants of the three anthropological papers on the topic delve deeper into how people remember, deny, articulate, modify and forget their past in their efforts to produce the next generation of "historically conscious" citizens. Our objective is to explore (East Asian) histories as cultural representations, constructed and revised in shifting political vistas.
Shifting Memories of the Imperial Sun: Japanese School History Textbooks
Tomoko Hamada, College of William and Mary
This paper analyzes Japanese middle school textbooks as cultural artifacts, and focuses on their descriptions of Japanese colonialism and militarism in East Asia from an anthropological perspective. Key concepts such as "war," "aggression," "advancement," "invasion," and "co-prosperity" are compared and contrasted between these textbooks. In addition, accompanied photos, illustrations, tables and footnotes are examined in order to find the underlying categorical and relational schemes employed by each textbook. In tandem with this documentary research, this paper also investigates major public debates on the school textbook issue, from the first Ienaga textbook trial to the "Atarashii rekishi" (New History) controversy in 2001. It unveils a checkered history of tightening and loosening of the Japanese collective memory-making/ school textbook projects. For example, during the Cold War period, the Mombu-sho tried to undercut the rise of left-wing intellectuals, socialist-communists, and sometimes the teachers union, as they assessed Japan’s past military aggression in Asia. On the other hand, during the most recent public debate on New History in 2001, the government was accused of discouraging not the left, but rather the right-wing, pro-military, and nationalist discourse on the Great East Asia War. The history textbook controversy represents a central arena of public contention concerning Japan’s long-range nationalism agenda that includes the Constitutional reform, the Japanese military and civilian control, and Japan’s relations with Asian countries.
The Japanese History Textbook Controversy and South Korean Responses: A Focus on the Military Comfort Women Issue
Chunghee Sarah Soh, San Francisco State University
In 1982 the Japanese history textbook controversy began as a domestic squabble over the government’s censorship of high school history textbooks and expanded into international incidents, which involved protests, primarily from China and South Korea. The controversy revealed and epitomized postwar Japan’s nationalist view of its colonization of Korea and the imperialist war as an "advance"—instead of aggression—into its neighboring countries. More than two decades later, such nationalistic views continue to serve as a fundamental source of tension and disagreement over Japan’s postcolonial postwar responsibility for Korea in general and for comfort women survivors in particular. This paper will first provide an outline of the South Korean governmental document of 2001, which demands corrections of thirty-five erroneous, distorted, and abbreviated or omitted items in eight Japanese history textbooks that have been approved for use at the middle school by the Japanese government. I will then examine the contents of the Korean Kuksa (National History) textbook used by middle school students, focusing on the description of the military comfort women issue, since it is arguably the most explosive and intractable item to be dealt with in the current controversy. The paper will problematize the inadequacy of the brief and ambiguous description of comfort women in the Korean textbook itself and raise some fundamental questions concerning officially sanctioned ethnocentric perspectives on national history in democratic and pluralistic societies in an era of globalization.
When The Two Colonizers Meet: The Controversy Surrounding Junior High School History Textbooks In Taiwan
Anru Lee, California State University, Sacramento
This paper examines the contending views of Taiwanese national identity as reflected in the debates surrounding two sets of textbooks—junior high school history textbooks and the Learning about Taiwan textbooks. Both are required in Taiwan’s junior high school curriculum. Specifically, this paper looks at the ways Taiwan is related to China and Japan as in the discussion of the Sino-Japanese War, and compares the society’s responses to the different historical perspectives conveyed, in these textbooks. The Sino-Japanese War has been described in junior high school history textbooks as a manifestation of Japan’s long-bred ambition towards China, which subsequently caused the Nationalist Party’s (KMT) defeat in the Chinese Civil War. It was also China’s victory over Japan that decolonized Taiwan, and the KMT’s withdrawal to Taiwan that paved the way for Taiwan’s recent modernization. Taiwanese history is thus subsumed in the larger history of China in junior high school history textbooks. In contrast, Learning about Taiwan, first implemented in 1997, represented the Taiwan government’s effort to build a Taiwan-centered perspective of history corresponding to the country’s new socio-political atmosphere. It treats Japan and the KMT as both external regimes that came to rule a land of indigenous people and migrant populations. The contrasting views of these two sets of textbooks thus highlight the divergent readings of Taiwan’s current political status. As such, they have together drawn criticisms from all ends of the society that hold different expectations for Taiwan’s future.
Organizer: David Lurie, Columbia University
Chair: Indra Levy, Rutgers University
Discussant: J. T. Wixted, Arizona State University
Keywords: premodern, early modern, and modern Japan; cultural history; literature and literary history, writing systems, scholarship and translation.
The practice of translation has consistently occupied a central place in Japanese culture, from the beginning of written history to the present. Rather than mediating between a foreign outside and a native inside, it has served as a crucial catalyst for the creation of the very category of "native," and for the written styles that came to embody it. This panel will examine the powerful productivity of translation in the Nara/Heian, Edo and Meiji periods. In striking and important ways, these three historical moments show remarkably similar dynamics in the interaction between the apparently "external" phenomenon of translation and the development of linguistic and conceptual structures that rapidly came to be perceived as native and "internal."
In the Nara and Heian periods, the newly imported system of kanbun kundoku, which fused reading and translation into a seamless whole, enabled the construction of the first written versions of the Japanese language. Translations of Chinese vernacular fiction in the mid-Edo period created both the conceptual basis for vernacular Japanese literature and a language in which to write it. In the Meiji period, literary translations not only provided the means for creating a new form of vernacular writing, but also became the tacit model for the "raw description" later advocated by the Naturalists. In its juxtaposition of these three different historical periods, this panel emphasizes the repeated fecundity of the practice of translation, and proposes a new framework for conceptualizing its importance.
Nara and Heian Reading/Writing Practices and the Foundations of Japanese Culture
David Lurie, Columbia University
Considerations of premodern Japanese cultural and literary history are dominated by a central opposition between "foreign" Chinese elements and "native" Japanese elements. Yet an examination of kanbun kundoku, the primary method of reading and writing in Japanese through the 19th century, reveals that such an opposition is untenable. Kundoku fuses translation, reading, and writing to associate Japanese readings with texts composed of Chinese characters. Because of the widespread employment of this procedure in pre-modern Japan, we cannot say of any "Chinese" text, even the Analects or the poetry of the Wenxuan, that it was "written in a foreign language"; conversely, because kundoku predated and enabled "Japanese" texts, it is impossible to see such works as written in a purely "native" language. In a dynamic that was to repeat itself in later periods of Japanese history, the acts of translation operative within kundoku simultaneously manufactured both a naturalized "foreign" textuality and a body of "native" writings with hidden, but decidedly foreign, origins.
This paper traces the roots of kundoku in Korean reading practices of the Three Kingdoms period, outlines the adaptation of those practices in 7th-century Japan, and argues for their central importance in texts of the 7th through the 12th centuries. In doing so it insists that the culture of the Nara and Heian courts was not based on a bilingual model, and that a blanket conceptualization of texts written in Chinese characters as "foreign" distorts their significance in premodern Japan.
Setting the Banal on a Pedestal: The Translation of Vernacular Chinese and the Status of Colloquial Japanese in Tokugawa Japan
Emanuel Pastreich, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
By the end of the 18th century, narratives in colloquial language were taken up by a literate audience in Japan as a legitimate subject of literary criticism. One important factor in the recognition, of vernacular language narrative as "literature" was the extensive study of vernacular Chinese language and narrative during the first part of the 18th century. Such study took the form of translations from vernacular Chinese into vernacular Japanese and also vice-versa. The literary content of dictionaries and sample translations employed in the study of Chinese contributed to the shifting discourse on narrative during this period.
The efforts of a large range of intellectuals to learn Chinese as it was spoken had two significant implications for the general field of narrative and language in Japan. First, it made the study of vernacular Chinese literature a legitimate field worthy of attention: specialist scholars like Okajima Kanzan (1674–1728) produced a variety of sophisticated dictionaries and primers, and even translated Japanese texts like the Taiheiki into vernacular Chinese. Second, because the dictionaries and primers employed in the study of vernacular Chinese provided arguments for the importance of the vernacular in general, Japanese vernacular narrative was also highlighted in the minds of intellectuals. Such primers featured translations into vernacular Japanese—a language that otherwise would never have been used in a scholarly work. As a result, similar dictionaries of vernacular Japanese language were compiled and colloquial language became a subject for systematic analysis and a medium for new kinds of literary narrative.
Tayama Katai and the Translation Aesthetic: The Hidden Meaning of "Transparent" Language
Indra Levy, Rutgers University
With the writing of "Rokotsu naru byosha" (Raw Description) and Futon (The Quilt), Tayama Katai secured a permanent place in modern Japanese literary history as a catalyzing force in Japanese Naturalism. Launching an invective against literary artifice, his essay appears to advocate a more transparent language for literature; his novel then appears to put this theory into practice. However, a closer examination of Katai’s oeuvre reveals that he was in fact profoundly concerned with matters of literary style, and that he learned his most important lessons from modern literary translation.
Early twentieth century Japanese Naturalism has often been presented as an attempt to develop straightforward literary representation based on the European model. At the same time, however, Katai and many other Japanese Naturalists looked to the vernacular translations of Futabatei Shimei as a crucial precedent for their own work. In fact, despite its apparent disdain for matters of literary style, Japanese Naturalism was preoccupied with the radically new vernacular style provided by Futabatei’s translations from Russian fiction.
This paper will argue that the aesthetic provided by Futabatei’s radical approach to literary translation not only created a new literary language in Japanese, but also formed the very basis for Japanese Naturalism. For Katai and others, a more "transparent" language had to provide a window not onto Japanese social reality itself, but onto the reality of Western literature itself.
Organizer: Michiko Suzuki, Dickinson College
Chair: Barbara Hamill Sato, Seikei University
Discussants: Barbara Hamill Sato, Seikei University; Kathleen Uno, Temple University
Keywords: Japan, Meiji, Taishô, Shôwa, shûyô, cultural studies (history; literature).
The concept of shûyô (self-cultivation) has long been recognized as an important part of prewar Japanese culture—a reflection of the desire to advance and better oneself. Although most often associated only with Taishô culturalism (kyôyôshugi), the notion of shûyô was already in circulation by the turn of the century with the publication of "self-cultivation books" to educate readers on self-improvement. While the idea of risshin shusse (establish the self, rise in the world) has received a great deal of academic attention, shûyô and its numerous sites of expression require further examination as integral aspects of Japan’s modernity.
Spanning late Meiji to early Shôwa, this panel explores the significance of shûyô from a number of historical, literary and cultural perspectives. As self-cultivation and education relate to discourses of gender and class, and are also deeply enmeshed with concerns of the publishing industry, the panelists particularly emphasize these issues.
Claire Cuccio examines the journal Myôjô (Bright Star, 1900–1908), and its strategies for cultivating readers to become creators and consumers of the arts. Michiko Suzuki re-reads Tanizaki Jun’ichirô’s Chijin no ai (A Fool’s Love, 1924–25), focusing on the issue of female advancement and shûyô. Elyssa Faison explores how discourses of self-cultivation can be understood as a means for bettering the lives of female factory workers as well as a disciplinary strategy. Finally, discussion by Barbara Sato and Kathleen Uno integrates the multidisciplinary perspectives of the panelists, enriching the understanding of this critical, but often overlooked, aspect of prewar cultural history.
Modern Japan and Myojo: Citizens of the Arts, Citizens of the World
Claire S. Cuccio, Stanford University
The late Meiji Japanese literary and arts magazine Myojo (Venus, 1900–1908) is both celebrated and scorned for its romanticist, art for art’s sake vision. But a primary goal of the magazine was to educate its readership. This paper explores Myojo’s mission of fostering cultivation (shuyo) in the arts. Yosano Tekkan, the magazine’s founder and editor, launched Myojo with the specific intention of promoting tanka (31-syllable poems) and his New Poetry Society (Shinshisha). His project expanded, however, and the magazine began to serve as a primer on how to become a writer or artist. Myojo evolved to cultivate critical readers and viewers by printing explications of poetry and paintings and book and exhibition reviews in a variety of modes and by devoting space to theoretical and technical essays on literature and western-style painting.
Many earlier Japanese magazines targeted gender-specific readerships and promoted self-cultivation for the purposes of social and material gain or instilling morality. Myojo created a new specialty magazine for young men and women in an age of industrialization and nation-building when the arts were being neglected. By examining some of Myojo’s text and image responses to censorship and the Meiji nude painting debate (ratai-ga ronso), I read Tekkan’s shûyô project in Myojo as a strategy for molding a citizenry cultivated in the arts as well as for elevating the status of the arts in a modernizing Japan.
Developing the Female Self: Chijin no ai and the Discourse of Shûyô
Michiko Suzuki, Dickinson College
A rich, multi-layered work, Tanizaki Jun’ichirô’s Chijin no ai (A Fool’s Love, 1924–25) has inspired a number of different interpretations. In this paper, I would like to add to this scholarship by presenting a new perspective, taking into consideration the socio-historical context of the 1920s. In addition to its treatment of the "modern life," I contend that this work dynamically engages with a number of contemporary discourses regarding female development. In particular, the novel explores the notion of female betterment through shûyô, or self-cultivation—a key element of identity within the Taisho cultural imaginary.
Of the many practices associated with shûyô, this text addresses two areas—specifically, love marriage (ren’ai kekkon) and the act of reading. The "progressive" practice of marrying for love was popularized as an ideal at this time by Kindai no ren’ai kan (Views of Love in the Modern Era, 1922), a best-selling treatise by Kuriyagawa Hakuson. This non-traditional form of marriage was considered the perfect space for self-cultivation, nurturing the couple’s mutual betterment. The practice of reading was also strongly associated with shûyô, as reflected in the enpon (yen book) boom and the increased publication of magazines. During this period, the consumption of literature became an accessible way to cultivate and better the self.
By discussing how Tanizaki’s Chijn no ai re-writes such discourses surrounding shûyô, I will re-read Naomi’s "progress" as a critical interrogation and parody of the idea of female betterment.
Cultivating Women, Cultivating Workers in Interwar Japan
Elyssa M. Faison, University of Oklahoma
By the time of the emergence in 1920s Japan of what Barbara Hamill Sato has referred to as the "shûyô boom," cultivation (shûyô) had come to mark a crucial site for the rehabilitation of village youth, of women, and of workers. According to social reformers, the new capitalist class and members of the political elite, reform among these most backward elements of society was necessary in order for Japan to claim its place among civilized nations.
For those who formed the object of the discourse on cultivation, shûyô could be either (or both) an avenue of advancement, or an oppressive ideology of control. The labor organization Yuaikai founded by Suzuki Bunji in 1911 promoted shûyô as a means of bettering the lives of workers; but by 1930 female textile laborers were referring to the "evil" cultivation associations that company managers promoted in their factories as a means to control labor organizing.
Considering the broader context of the shûyô movement, this paper examines popular women’s magazines, women’s labor journals, labor management practices and strikes in order to analyze shûyô’s deploy-ment both as an ideology of personal accomplishment and as an institutionalized disciplinary strategy, and the ways its meanings were both gender and class specific.
Organizer and Chair: Christine R. Yano, University of Hawaii, Manoa
Discussants: Theodore C. Bestor, Harvard University; Joseph J. Tobin, Arizona State University
Keywords: globalization, marketing, consumption, transnational, goods, media, local.
This panel examines ways by which the transnational marketing and consumption of Japanese goods and media sheds new light on existing theories of globalization. Whereas most of what has been written on globalization assumes a Euro-American point of origin, by shifting our attention to global products with origins in Japan, panelists reconsider the processes, meanings, and impact of such transnational flows. The consumers the panel addresses range from casual dabblers to true fanatics and collectors, and inhabit diverse locales from Hong Kong to Hawai’i to North America. In some instances the transnational flow of Japanese goods and media triggers national pride in Japan. In other instances these flows create a kind of regionalism for consumers within other parts of Asia or localism in the Asia-Pacific crossroads of Hawai’i. The economic and symbolic power of Japan provides what some consumers talk about as a welcome disruption to the domination of Euro-America. They use Japanese goods and media to claim a personal stake in identity-making at the individual, local, national, and regional levels. As the global and the local shift, so, too, do the meanings given Japan as filtered through its products. This panel looks at various ways by which Japan’s global goods and media may be endowed with different local significance, as well as made significant in people’s lives.
Japanese Fashion Magazines and Shopping for Identity in Hong Kong
Lynne Nakano, Chinese University of Hong Kong
Japanese fashion magazines such as non no, CanCan, Cutie, JJ and An-an have had a wide readership in Hong Kong since their introduction in the 1970s although they are more expensive than local magazines and the overwhelming majority of the magazines’ consumers do not read Japanese. The magazines’ influence extends beyond the number of copies sold, as copies are widely available in waiting rooms and beauty salons and are commonly passed around among friends. "Japanese fashions," which include a variety of clothing, shoes and accessories from Japan and mainland China, are sold in street stalls, shopping malls and department stores across the city. This paper explores the ways in which Hong Kong teenagers and young women appropriate ideas from Japanese fashion magazines to create a physical and social image of themselves as cosmopolitan, attractive, youthful and consumer savvy even as they reassert a regional hierarchy in which Japan is seen to be a step ahead of Hong Kong. It considers how young women in Hong Kong interpret and appropriate ideas gleaned from Japanese fashion magazines in ways that reaffirm their potential for beauty and freedom of choice, even as consuming Japanese fashion forces a recognition of the limitations of one’s physical body, age, income, and the consumer possibilities in Hong Kong. It also considers how young women selectively adopt and reinterpret messages about self, body and beauty intended for women in Japan to establish an identity in relation to friends, family and society in Hong Kong. I suggest that in the process of creating an identity in the context of the particular constraints of their lives, young women break apart and reformulate concepts of what is "Japanese," "Hong Kongese," and "Chinese," and suggest alternative ways in which one may be both a local Hong Kongese and a global consumer.
Kikaida Is Our Hero! Local Nostalgia for a Japanese Live-Action TV Show in Hawai’i
Hirofumi Katsuno, University of Hawai’i, Manoa
From 1974 to 1975, a Japanese-language TV station in Hawai’i, KIKU-TV, aired the Japanese live-action show "Kikaida." It was a unique moment in television history in Hawai’i. Although the TV series gained only moderate popularity in Japan, in Hawai’i it began a craze among young fans, garnering higher ratings than other action programs from the U.S. mainland. The tremendous success of the show was followed by a merchandising bonanza of related goods, such as dolls, T-shirts, books, and recordings from Japan. Twenty-six years later in November, 2001 at the request of diehard fans, KIKU-TV began re-broadcasting the series and issuing a series of goods, bringing about a second Kikaida boom. Consumers include original fans known as "Generation Kikaida" now in their thirties and forties, as well as young children. With guest appearances by the original TV stars and wildly popular public events, Governor Benjamin Cayetano officially declared April 11, 2002 as "Kikaida Day" in Hawai’i, further cementing the place of Kikaida within local culture.
This paper examines the Kikaida phenomenon in Hawai’i asking the following questions: (1) how has Kikaida been consumed as a local Hawai’i superhero by people of various ethnic groups; and (2) how does consumption of Kikaida goods become productive sites of memory and nostalgia for an older generation? This paper takes this ongoing Hawai’i-Kikaida phenomenon as a globalizing confluence of top-down and bottom-up forces, tying together fan culture and locality in the consumption of Japanese products.
Selling Japanese Monsters on the Global Marketplace
Anne Allison, Duke University
When Pokemon, the media-mix entertainment complex and mega kid’s hit, took off in the States, the Japanese press reported it as a sign of Japan’s "cultural power" that was finally gaining recognition and cachet around the world. It was telling that reception of this Japanese pop product counted for so much in the States, itself the longtime world capital of children’s fantasy-production and hegemonizer of global (including kid’s) culture. What does it mean though to calculate national prestige on the basis of imaginary monsters packaged in the form of commodity fetishism targeted to a global (and millennial) consumerism? And does the success of Japan’s children’s entertainment industry with Pokemon and other properties in the 1990s (which, according to some, is part of a wider "expressive strength" that promises even bigger capital of all sorts for Japan in the 21st century) indicate a shift in the geo-political domination of global trends by Euro-America and particularly the United States?
I address these questions by examining two sets of shifting junctures—culture/commodity and global/ national—against each other in the case of marketing Pokemon both in Japan and the U.S. My discussion is based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted both in Japan and the United States on the entertainment fad of Pokemon with producers, designers, marketers, parents, children, child experts, scholars, reporters, and activists. How, I will ask first, has a discourse embedding national(ist) pride and cultural identity in the global success of children’s play products been constructed in Japan? And, second, how have Pokemon marketers in the U.S. dealt with what they perceive as its "cultural" inflection when (re)package-ing the property for American kids? The culturaliz-ation of a global property like Pokemon can, and is, read in various ways, I conclude. But it is also true that the global success and prominence of Japanese fantasy production is giving Japan a symbolic capital which is historically new both for Japan and the world mapped by/onto cultural trendsetting.
Organizer: Jason Creigh, University of California, Los Angeles
Chair: Jonathan Zwicker, University of Michigan
Discussant: Leslie Pincus, University of Michigan
Keywords: Japan, history of the book, nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Despite occasional murmurs of revision, approaches to the book in the field of Japanese cultural history tend to run along one of two paths. Along one path, the book serves as a window unto social reality. Largely unmediated and cut off from the social base of its production, the book functions as pure source material. Along the other, the book exists primarily as a world turned in upon itself. As a closed set of signs, the book is an effect of discourse, offering up example terms and concepts. In both cases, the book’s status as a material object is taken for granted or overlooked. In keeping with recent trends in the history of the book, this panel seeks to address the problem of the book as a material object embedded in specific social contexts of patronage, publishing, circulation, reading, and preservation. By tracing the lives of particular books in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the presentations taken as a whole both expose a critical transition in the history of book-making technologies—from manu-scripts and block-printing to movable-type printing and the mass-produced book—and also comment upon larger cultural dynamics, including the market in political ideas, the spatial dimension of cultural consumption, the role of images in structuring class affinities, and the effects of form on cultural description. In the end, at a time when the archive is increasingly being digitalized, these presentations demonstrate the continuing relevance and necessity of encountering books in their original forms.
The Prehistory of a Book: Seji kenmonroku and Its Readers in Nineteenth-Century Japan
Jason Creigh, University of California, Los Angeles
Since an authoritative modern edition was published in 1926, the Seji kenmonroku (1816), or "Record of Worldly Things Both Seen and Heard," has remained a central source for the study of early-nineteenth-century Japanese cultural history. Part moral-politico comm-entary, part micro-cultural analysis, its pages have been culled time and time again for colorful descriptions of life in Edo and its environs in the waning years of the Tokugawa era. The fact that the text was written anonymously has only enhanced its truth-telling aura. Divorced from a life history or collection of works, it appears as pure discourse, lending itself easily to the evidentiary needs of researchers. Equipped with a readable modern edition, researchers have felt little need to repeat the steps taken generations ago and to dig up the primary versions. When we do this, however, an entirely new history presents itself. This is the history of the book. In the absence of an "original," we are left with a variety of handwritten copies and partial woodblock-printed editions. In reconstructing the prehistory of these different versions and the paths they took to their final forms, including the marginalia written in them by their readers, we encounter the history of official and commercial book production, of the scribe and the printer, and of the effects of form on meaning in the nineteenth century. In this way, the Seji kenmonroku, positioned at the intersection of a diversity of competing writing, printing, and reading practices, takes on a new and unexpected significance.
Importing the Novel to Japan: The Jin Yun Qiao and the Viscidities of Cultural Consumption in Nineteenth-Century Japan
Jonathan Zwicker, University of Michigan
In 1827, Kyokutei Bakin published the first volume of a new gôkan (illustrated novel), the Fûzoku Kingyoden, which, as he explained in the book’s preface, had been commissioned by a publisher eager to capitalize on the success of a Chinese novel that "had become extremely popular with the reading public since appearing in a vernacular translation in 1763." Bakin’s illustrated adaptation of the Jin Yun Qiao is quite unremarkable save the frontispieces to each of the book’s eight slender volumes, which suggest a great deal about the traffic in texts and images between Edo Japan and late imperial China: each shows one of the novel’s Japanese heroes viewing a mirror from which is reflected a Chinese visage.
The relationship between the development of Japanese fiction and the novels of late imperial China in the nineteenth century is often mentioned but rarely discussed in great detail. And rarer still are studies that look at the material and social lives that these novels led when they reached Japan. This paper serves as a sort of biography of one of those novels, tracing out its social life from the first appearance of the title in the Nagasaki customs records in 1754; through its translation and publication in Japanese in 1763; into its many adaptations and rewritings and even piracies across the nineteenth century; and finally into the catalogue of a commercial lending library published in Osaka in 1891 from which point it seems to have more or less vanished from the literary record. That the traces surrounding the social life of this novel should disappear at just the moment when the Meiji market for European translations was beginning to take off is suggestive of the ways in which patterns of cultural consumption were beginning to change in Japan at the end of the nineteenth century; and yet what the remarkable history of this novel shows is that many of the devices and patterns of cultural production and consumption that drove that later market—translation, adaptation, piracy—were already present in the late eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries and that to begin to fully understand the history of the trade in foreign books circa 1900 we must first begin to apprehend the history of the trade in foreign books circa 1800.
Hand-Held Cameras and Pocket Knowledge: How-To Books and the Camera Enthusiast in Interwar Japan
Kerry L. Ross, Columbia University
Just as camera companies, domestic and foreign alike, were touting the portability and efficiency of their new hand-held cameras in the 1920s and 30s, publishing companies like Arasu and Asahi Shinbunsha promoted their inexpensive handbooks, often pocket-sized editions, as the perfect companions to hobby photography. Written for all levels of hobby photographers and published on a mass sale, how-to books detailing photographic technique represented a shift in the circulation of photographic knowledge from face-to-face training in the context of the commercial photo studio to a commodified and more privatized form of practical, text-based instruction. Though these books promoted an individualized approach to knowledge acquisition, how-to writers frequently adopted the paternalistic tone of an experienced photographer whose job it now was to pass on first-hand expertise. Despite large circulation numbers—Takakuwa Katsuo’s Fuirumu no shashin jutsu (The Techniques of Film Photography, 1920) reportedly sold over 100,000 copies—how-to books have left few historical traces and only a handful have been preserved in libraries or archives. Today they are most likely found among dusty piles in the corners of used book stores. In my presentation, I will look at one of these books—Miyake Kokki’s Shumi no shashin jutsu (Tasteful Photographic Techniques, 1919), reprinted over 86 times in four years—to consider more broadly the role of printed matter in leisure-time activities.
The Discovery of Folklore Studies: Yanagida Kunio and the Book
Kenji Sato, University of Tokyo
Book-printing technologies played a critical role in Yanagida Kunio’s construction of minzokugaku (folklore studies). This presentation explicates the profound connections between Yanagida’s experience with books and contemporary methodological approaches to historical research by addressing such issues as the following: the significance of "the library" as a form of collection; the discovery of the body of the reader in a reading space occupied by both manuscripts and printed books; the technological problem presented by the index; the discovery of the voice from inside the world recorded in print; the deciphering of the power inherent in kakareta mono (the written); and book production itself as an exercise.
Organizer: Nanette Gottlieb, University of Queensland, Australia
Chair and Discussant: Morris F. Low, University of Queensland, Australia
Keywords: Japan, Internet, identities, discrimination, cultural studies.
In this panel, participants build on their track record in Internet research (Japanese Cybercultures, Routledge, 2003, in press) to discuss new aspects of electronically mediated communication. The papers approach the common theme from a variety of perspectives, but all interrogate the use of this technology in the creation of online identities: as a site of resistance against discriminatory attacks, as a means of polishing a politician’s image, as an engrossing means of mobile-phone communication, and as a tool for exposing one’s "self" to the world. Gottlieb discusses the role of the Internet in facilitating attacks on Japan’s socially ostracized Burakumin community and the online countermeasures they have launched. McVeigh examines the important effect that online communication via mobile phones has had in the offline lives of university students, to the extent that, for many, life without their keitai (mobile phone) is now quite unimaginable. Mackie compares the Japanese Prime Minister’s homepage with those of other world leaders, addressing ideals of masculinity, heterosexuality and homosociality as presented by politicians. Holden assesses fan pages, showing how representations of one’s self are mediated through the activities and personality of the featured celebrity. Each paper deals with an aspect of Internet use specific to Japan, the linking theme being that use of the Internet has transformed some aspect of Japanese life, whether for better or worse. The panelists will outline their main points in 15-minute presentations. Subsequently, a 15-minute summary from the discussant will seek to stimulate a lively debate with the audience.
Hate Speech on the Japanese Internet: The Burakumin Experience
Nanette Gottlieb, University of Queensland, Australia
Japan’s socially ostracized Burakumin community has long experienced attacks of hate speech and negative stereotyping. In the second half of the twentieth century, such attacks in mainstream public media came to be controlled through concerted activism against offenders by Burakumin groups, so that today the media is its own best watchdog in avoiding the use of offensive terms and descriptions. The burgeoning use of the Internet, however, has provided a fertile new ground for anti-Burakumin abuse, in particular on the unmoderated Channel Two website. The Burakumin community has been at pains to construct an online presence which aims to educate those interested both within Japan and overseas about the discrimination it continues to face. They have not been slow to respond to online attacks. This paper examines the characteristics of anti-Burakumin hate speech on the Channel Two website and discusses the online measures instigated by Burakumin groups to counter discrimination in cyberspace. These include the setting up of the International Network against Discrimination on the Internet (INDI) and the New Media Human Rights Association, both of which aim to contribute to the protection of human rights in the face of new threats from advances in information technology. In this Burakumin case study, the Internet functions not only as allowing an extended arena of attack unconstrained by physical location but also as a site for effective and determined resistance by those whose social identities such attacks seek to undermine or demean.
Identity, Individualization, and the Internet: Japanese University Students and E-Mail
Brian McVeigh, Tokyo Jogakkan College, Japan
What does the explosion of e-mailing and Web surfing via cellular phones in Japan tell us about the relationship between identity, social norms, and technology? What is produced by the convergence of self-expression, aesthetics, and consumerist capitalism? A cornucopia of choices, an abundance of information, freedom from time and space? Or, is Internet use shaped by the very nature of subjective experience, social expectations, and politico-economic structures? I discuss practices associated with e-mailing and surfing via mobile phones and examine common themes (convenience, saving time, access to information, privacy, changing social relations) that emerged from interviews with Japanese university students about how they use mobile phones. I also explore how "individualization" (practices that isolate and identify the individual from the social mass) and an individual’s "interiority" (i.e., an increasingly "interiorized" autonomous self of wants and wishes socialized by and for the demands of emerging capitalist consumerism) are augmented by consumption patterns. These processes highlight identity and personal distinctiveness and are implicated in self-expression. I contend that accentuation of individuality, as a manifestation of individualization, may be described in either: (1) positive terms, as "personalized individualization" (expansion of social networks, increased access to information, consumer empowerment, commerce); or in (2) negative terms, as "atomized individualization" (fragmented social structure, trivializing of information, simulated social relations). As an example of personalized individualization I discuss how the very object that connects students to the Internet, the cell phone, is also used for purposes of self-presentation and is related to an aesthetics of "cool" and "cute."
The Home Page and the World: National Leaders on the Internet
Vera Mackie, Curtin University of Technology, Australia
In this paper I consider the presentation of selected national leaders in the Asia-Pacific region through home pages. The Japanese Prime Minister’s home page will be compared with those of other national leaders in the region. I argue that these home pages play a part in the production of the identities of national leaders, both as sexed and gendered individuals and as representatives of their national communities. The following questions will be explored, using the methodologies of gender studies, cultural studies and queer theory. What is the relationship between the "home" and the "home page"? Does the home page produce an image of the leader as having a private life embedded in a heterosexual nuclear family? Is it true to say that the leader represents not only the national community, but also the ideals of the monogamous, heterosexual nuclear family? In most national polities there is a naturalized assumption of the connection between "masculinity" and "leadership." How is masculinity produced in the case of male leaders, and how are potential contradictions between "femininity" and "leadership" dealt with in the representation of female leaders? International politics is said to be based on "homosociality," as male national leaders operate through social bonds with other leaders who are similar in terms of class position, social location and masculine gender identity. How do the home pages portray these homosocial links? Are female leaders admitted to these homosocial networks, and how are potential contradictions dealt with in the production of the public identities of female leaders?
"Welcome to My Page . . .": Fan Sites as a Strategy for Defining Self
Todd Joseph Miles-Holden, Tohoku University, Sendai, Japan
One of the major themes in Internet studies is the matter of distortion, alteration, even wholesale invention of user identity. While some users speak of the great freedom the technology affords to explore and experiment with "who they are," other users decry the inability to truly know who is on the other end of the screen. In previous research on deai kei, a sort of Internet-based dating service in Japan, a co-researcher and I found that users were more than occasionally tripped up by the technological veil: the person they became enamored with enough to meet in the flesh turned out to be quite different from the person who actually materialized. Although appearance versus reality in mediated social relations is a significant concern, in this work I shift my attention to the other side: the active construction of user identity. In particular I focus on fan pages, one of the major forms of communication in Japanese-language Internet. Whether tribute pages convey actual identity is difficult to verify; what is noteworthy, though, is the extensive amount of personal discourse they harbor. Qualitative content analysis demonstrates how representations of self are mediated through the activities and personality of the featured celebrity. Important in this process of personal identity construction are user diaries, photographs, recommendations, links, webcraft, and aesthetics. Reading these pages in their totality, we find today’s Japanese eager to declare more than their love for idols. We behold page creators asserting their own existence, exposing their deeper selves, and striving to convey their uniqueness.
Organizer and Chair: Willian Londo, Albion College, MI
Discussant: William R. Lafleur, University of Pennsylvania
Keywords: apotheosis, hagiography, Japan, Shotoku Taishi, Kobo Daishi, Minamoto Yoritomo.
This panel will focus on the posthumous deification of three Japanese historical figures: Shotoku Taishi, Kobo Daishi, and Minamoto Yoritomo. Though each of these figures led very different lives, Shotoku Taishi as an early quasi-political figure, Kobo Daishi as a religious leader, and Yoritomo as a military and political figure, the image of each became an object of devotion at a time after his death. The purpose of this panel is to explore the processes and products of these three apotheoses. How and why did these figures achieve divine status? What drew adherents to these figures, and what was their significance in premodern Japanese society?
In his study of the cult of Shotoku Taishi, Kevin Carr will show how the appropriation of the figure of Prince Shotoku by the leaders of newly established religious groups allowed them to legitimize their organizations in the context of mappo thought. William Londo will discuss the genesis of the cult of Kobo Daishi, whose image began a rise to divine status some two centuries after his death and has manifested itself in a variety of ways since. Elizabeth Oyler will present a different kind of apotheosis, that of Minamoto Yoritomo, in her discussion of how he came to be portrayed as a semi-divine figure in certain medieval narrative and performative pieces.
The aim of this panel is to stimulate a discussion about the variety of the courses deification may take and the contours of the cults that result.
Shotoku, the "Mappo Gap," and Apotheosis in Medieval Japan
Kevin Carr, Princeton University
The concept of the "end of the Dharma" (J. mappo) and its overcoming constitutes one of the defining myths of the Pure Land sects in Japan. Taking the medieval cult of Prince Shotoku as exemplary of more general trends, this paper examines how notions of mappo conditioned the phenomenon of deification in Japan. It shows how the negotiation of the status of sacred personages like Shotoku stood at the core of the attempt of medieval cult leaders to bridge or even abrogate the "gap" of time, space, and salvation that mappo beliefs implied.
Believed to be an emanation of Kannon, and posited as "Japan’s Sakyamuni," Shotoku was seen as an ideal bridge across the soteriological gap posed by mappo. While stories and images of his past lives as Queen Srimala, Hui Si, and others deepened his sacred authority, it was Shotoku’s actual life in Japan, witnessed by physical relics and identifiable places, that was his most compelling aspect for post-mappo believers. It can further be shown that Shotoku represents a case in which the "apotheosized" human was thought by some to even surpass the "gods"—he was uniquely close in time and place, palpable and present in actual sites and objects, powerful spiritually, and organically linked to the believer by virtue of being counted among the spiritual founders of the country. Thus, an examination of the apotheosis of Shotoku raises questions about the meaning of "deification" in Japan and provides insight into the fundamental motivating factors of medieval religions.
Rise to Apotheosis: The Case of Kobo Daishi
William Londo, Albion College
Kobo Daishi, more commonly known as Kukai, is perhaps one of the most widely revered figures in Japan’s religious landscape today. He is the subject of the Shikoku pilgrimage, undertaken by thousands of faithful every year, and reverence for Kobo Daishi figures prominently in most of the rituals and observances conducted on Mt. Koya. Cults centering on Kobo Daishi seem to have begun to develop in the late tenth and early eleventh centuries, and their initial appearance seems to have occurred on Mt. Koya. In this paper I will explore some of the factors that led to the apotheosis of Kobo Daishi at that time. I will review the hagiography of Kobo Daishi that began to appear in the tenth century, stories which clearly provide an opening for his deification, and I will also show that concrete developments on Mt. Koya at this time gave the initial impetus for people at all levels of society to begin to embrace him as a palliative and salvific figure. I will argue that the apotheosis of Kobo Daishi developed as a result of an extant hagiographic tradition, the actions and efforts of certain influential individuals, and a social climate in which there was "space," both physical and mental, for another figure to become an object of religious devotion.
Minamoto Yoritomo, In and Out of Medieval Narrative
Elizabeth Oyler, Washington University, St. Louis
Minamoto Yoritomo remains one of Japan’s most important historical figures, personifying the rise of the warrior class as a political entity. His Kamakura government effectively attenuated aristocratic control of provincial areas, leading to the domination of the political realm by non-aristocrats. Although Minamoto victory in the Gempei War is a significant topic of narration in the medieval period, Yoritomo himself is almost absent in these accounts on the battlefield activities of his kinsmen (particularly his brother Yoshitsune, whose death Yoritomo later orders) and the Taira warriors they defeated. Narratives specifically focused on Yoritomo only appear later and usually in more peripheral narratives and performance pieces, including one pilgrimage practice engi and several daimokutate and kowakamai pieces, in which he is attributed divinity or semi-divinity.
This study explores the troubling presence of Yoritomo, at once founding father of the warrior class and murderer of kinsmen, through the lens of apotheosis. First, I investigate the traditional trajectory of apotheosis emphasized in peripheral narratives about him. I focus on the interplay between his corporeal history and the ethereal past lives and divine visitations that add significance to his presence by locating it within larger cosmological frameworks I consider his absence in the Heike monogatari as a complementary form of apotheosis, in which narrative silence reflects an awed deference to a historical figure. My goal is to begin to map the complex contours of Yoritomo in the medieval popular imagination while concomitantly posing a productive model of apotheosis for the medieval Japanese context.
Organizer: Ian Jared Miller, Columbia University
Chair: Gregory M. Pflugfelder, Columbia University
Discussant: Conrad Totman, Yale University
Keywords: history, Japan, animals, animality, environment.
Animals are so woven into the fabric of everyday human experience and so central to notions of progress and development that we have been unable to fully assess their significance. As Japan modernized new taxonomic regimes, economic imperatives, and notions of humanity demanded repeated reconsiderations of human relations with animals and the natural world. Historians have long recognized the importance of the human-animal metaphor to the production of identity and difference; we take this recognition one step further, asking what happens when actual animals are allowed into studies of the past.
Whether as food, companions, tools, or specimens animals have played a role in nearly every aspect of modern Japanese life. In work on prewar wolf extinction Brett Walker identifies the emergence of an inclusive "historical ecology" which placed humans in the natural world rather than above and outside it. Aaron Skabelund’s study of Hachikô and the pursuit of pure canine breeds argues that dogs mediated the spread of fascism into the realms of childhood and pet keeping. Ian Miller’s investigation of mass-mediated animal sacrifice at the Ueno Zoological Garden reveals the roles that zoo animals played in the formation of wartime popular culture and war memory.
Adding our voices to recent work in anthropology, psychoanalysis, geography, and feminist theory, we hope to begin evaluating what animals may or may not be able to tell us about the Japanese past and what the specificity of Japan’s history may tell us about human-animal relations broadly defined.
Wolf Extinction Theories: The Birth of a Japanese Ecology
Brett L. Walker, Montana State University, Bozeman
In 1902, a famous debate broke out in the journal Science on the origins and the meanings of the word "ecology," a debate that should be seen as an early attempt to fine tune the role of "ecology" as an emerging scientific methodology and academic discipline.
Only three decades after this debate, Japanese-ecologists began fashioning their own version of this new science, preferring, at least when explaining the 1905 extinction of the Japanese wolf, the discipline of "ecology" over others like "ethology." That is to say, when crafting theories of wolf behavior and extinction, Japanese ecologists preferred to look at the impact of the environment on "animal societies" as a whole, and not at individual "social animals" and the internal mechanisms behind their struggle with the outside world. Even the renowned primatologist Imanishi Kinji fancied himself as an ecologist of wolf extinction. The driving premise behind this paper is that theories regarding wolf extinction posed not just by Imanishi, but by Yanagita Kunio and others, serve as ideal vehicles for investigating the emergence of a Japanese ecology, one more inclusive, at least compared to Western traditions, to the place of humans as natural actors in shaping ecosystems.
I focus primarily on two early essays that theorized wolf extinction: Yanagita’s 1939 Koen Zuihitsu (Miscellaneous Writings on the Lone Monkey) and Imanishi’s 1946 Dobutsuki (Animal Journal). I also compare Japanese ecological writings to the Western tradition. Through this comparative approach, I hope to illustrate not only the development of the Japanese ecological tradition, but how this tradition influenced Japanese attitudes toward the natural world.
Dogs of War: Chûken Hachikô (1925–1937) and the Breeding of Japanese Fascism
Aaron Skabelund, Columbia University
Few people in Japan axe unfamiliar with the story of "Chûken" Hachikô (1925–1937). Every schoolchild has probably heard the tale of this "loyal dog" that was said to have awaited his deceased master’s return at the Shibuya train station year after year. A bronze statue of the Akita outside of Shibuya Station and Hachikô’s mounted figure at the National Science Museum in Ueno stand as material reminders of his legacy. In a recent survey conducted by the national postal service, the public selected the dog as one of 180 images that most aptly illustrate the Japanese experience in the twentieth century.
This sentimental tale has a darker side, though. In the early 1930s, the Ministry of Education and the Society for the Preservation of the Japanese Dog, a private organization, joined forces in casting Hachikô as an exemplar of what they defined as the "Japanese" dog: loyal to a single master, pure in blood, and fearless. Using Hachikô and other dog stories in textbooks, comics, and sculpture, these two organizations encouraged children and adults alike to emulate the qualities supposedly embodied by these "Japanese" dogs.
This message was effective precisely because the protagonists were dogs. It created and took advantage of an enthusiasm for pet keeping, particularly among the young of the emerging middle class in early-20th-century Japan. Even most grown-ups perceived these commonplace companions as ideologically benign. Unable to speak, Hachikô and other dogs were used as a subtle but powerful tool to prepare children to serve the emperor bravely in war.
Animal Martyrs and Imperial Sacrifice at Ueno Zoo, 1937–1945
Ian Jared Miller, Columbia University
In the summer of 1943 twenty-seven animals of fourteen species were systematically put to death at the Ueno Zoological Gardens in Tokyo. Far from being nameless specimens, these animals were famous in wartime Japan, known by name throughout country. Press releases from the office of the Tokyo governor said that the "animal martyrs" were sacrificed to protect Tokyoites should a cage be breached in American bombings and that a memorial service would be held to mourn their passing. This lavish commemoration marked a watershed in the zoo’s wartime function, signaling a shift from a culture of imperial celebration—girded by the display of animal "heroes" from the front lines—to a culture of sacrifice. The ceremony was a transformative moment wherein animals were sacrificed not to safeguard Tokyo’s residents but to prepare Tokyoites for their own martyrdom.
In the postwar period Ueno’s "poor elephants"—helpless, loyal, and betrayed—have featured in best-selling children’s literature, official textbooks, plays, and television and radio programs. Generations who did not experience the war have mourned its losses with tears for "Hanako" and "Tonki," elephants that were intentionally starved to death rather than evacuated to mountainous areas where they might have survived.
The sacrifice and its postwar memorialization mark the zenith (or nadir) of the use of Ueno’s animals as ideological media, providing striking insight into the ways that captive animals can arbitrate the movement between ideology and emotion.
Organizer: Hiroko Johnson, San Diego State University
Chair: Gordon M. Berger, University of Southern California
Discussant: John E. Van Sant, University of Alabama, Birmingham
Keywords: Westernization of Japan, Japan, art history, history, Bakumatsu/Meiji, 19th-century.
When Japan agreed to U.S. demands for trade in 1854, centuries of self-imposed isolation ended and Japan began to Westernize. To look at the issues historically, an interdisciplinary panel was formed with art historians and historians to present different perspectives of Japan’s Westernization.
Two papers by art historians examine the aesthetic perspectives. Hiroko Johnson focuses on the aesthetic differences in journalism/photojournalism practiced by Westerners in Japan and the Japanese through an analytical study of the infamous murder incidents, the "Richardson Incident" of 1862 and the "Kamakura Incident" of 1864 as reported in Illustrated London News, The Japan Herald and Ukiyo-e Newspapers.
Yoshie Itani looks at Japan’s quest for Westernization in porcelain. She examines the changes in the selection of motifs, using the Seto kiln as an example. In accordance with Western aesthetics, she argues that the rose became a popular motif replacing traditional motifs based on painting.
Two papers by historians focus on the complexities of government involvement in Westernization through technology. Martha Chaiklin will show the failure of traditional industry to transform to Westernized models under imported foreign craftsmen by examining the glass industry and the government-sponsored Shinagawa Glassworks.
David Wittner will discuss one of government’s first attempts at industrial modernization, using the example of ironworks at Kamaishi. He argues that the program at Kamaishi was driven more by notions of creating "civilization and enlightenment" through the infusion of the latest Western mining and smelting technologies than it was based on the consideration of technical or economic factors.
A World without Windows: Glass Production in the Modernization of Meiji Japan
Martha Chaiklin, Milwaukee Public Museum
Glass production functions as an excellent case study with which to chart the conflicting tensions between continuity and disruption from the past that modernization represented for Meiji Japan. When the Meiji Government began the process of institution-alized modernization, glass was one of the industries it chose to support. Why glass? The exorbitant cost of importing glass windows, for all the new Western-style buildings being constructed was bankrupting government construction projects. Sheet glass was one of the most difficult to manufacture, and only panes of minimal size could be produced with the old technology. Glass had been produced in Japan since at least the eighth century, but never in the same quantities as in the West. Yet, the government-funded Shinagawa Glassworks did not rely on ancient expertise, but rather, imported foreign craftsmen to educate their workers. Glass production was therefore a vital part of the new face the Meiji Government wished to present to the world. This paper will discuss glass production in Meiji Japan discussing the social and cultural factors surrounding the transition from craft to industry with special emphasis on sheet glass using government documents and craftsmen’s memoirs.
All the Right Choices for All the Wrong Reasons: Forging a Modern Nation at Kamaishi Ironworks
David Wittner, Utica College
In 1871, when the Meiji government decided to nationalize a handful of iron mines and build an ironworks at Kamaishi, in present day Iwate prefecture, a small group of bureaucrats, Ito Hirobumi and Yamao Yozo among them, envisioned a modern, Western-style facility that would supply enough iron for all of the nation’s needs. Yamao in particular argued that a national ironworks would provide the iron with which to raise Japan’s "level of civilization," allow Japan to end its reliance of foreign iron, and build a modern navy. By 1882, the Kamaishi venture was deemed a failure and abandoned; civilization building and defense would remained reliant on imported iron for another decade. Kamaishi’s critics were quick to identify the ironworks’ technology as inappropriate and Japanese mining and metallurgical engineers as too inexperienced to operate a fully modern, i.e., Western, facility. I argue that although the Meiji government’s choice of technique was appropriate, many of the choices were made for the wrong reasons. Selection of technology was based less on technical or economic feasibility that on an artifact’s ability to impart a social value, such as "modernity or civilization," to Japan. Although economic and technical reasons were given as the basis for the decision to abandon the project, factors well beyond cost and function had greater consequence for the future of the ironworks.
Export Porcelain by Seto in the Meiji Era as an Example of Westernization
Yoshie Itani, University of Oxford
I would like to focus particularly, on export porcelain rose designs by Seto. These designs symbolized the Japanese longing for the West, as expressed during the Meiji period.
The Japanese art industry was supported by the government, not only for the purpose of enriching the country, but also, more importantly, to enable the introduction of the essence of Japanese art to the rest of the world. Japanese decorative arts had been given an enthusiastic welcome at the London Exhibition of 1862. However, they had already gone out of fashion when the Paris Exhibition got under way in 1900 and traditional Japanese design had clearly lost its popularity.
When traditional designs (including flower and bird painting, Kachouga) lost popularity in the world exhibitions, the Meiji government specifically advised Japanese artists to learn from the West. This influence can be seen in the increased importance of the rose motif. The roses on export porcelain suddenly became fashionable in the Meiji era, but although they are still used in both domestic and export designs, it is now no longer the object of adoration that it then was. The beading decoration on export porcelain from Seto was like European royal porcelains. The gilding contained a high percentage of gold and they had many gilding styles.
I intend my work on export porcelain to contribute towards showing how specific traditional social and cultural practices have survived intact or have been transformed by the process of Westernization in Japan.
Aesthetic Differences in the Practice of Journalism between the Westerners in Japan and the Japanese during the Nineteenth Century
Hiroko Johnson, San Diego State University
Conflicts between the Japanese and foreign settlers in Yokohama were constant at the time of early Westernization in the nineteenth century. The two most infamous incidents were the "Richardson Incident" in 1862 and the "Kamakura Incident" in 1864. In the "Richardson Incident" a British merchant, Richardson, and his group disturbed the procession of the Satsuma daimyo. Angered, retainers of the Satsuma domain killed Richardson and injured his companions. In the view of the feudalistic society of Japan, the act of the retainer was justified and praiseworthy; for the British, it was a retaliatory act. The British and Japanese points of view were so different that motives were misjudged and actions misunderstood, causing retaliation by the British, the Satsuma-British War. The "Kamakura Incident" occurred when a fanatic member of the Japanese Nationalist faction assassinated two British officers in Kamakura. The assassins were captured and a public execution was conducted. The gibbeted head of the assassin was on public display.
Contrary to the placid presentations of incidents by British journalists, the Japanese aesthetics emphasized the bloody, gruesome aspects of incidents. Graphic depictions of hideous scenes were the norm for Japanese journalism. The paper investigates the aesthetic differences in reporting the news based on the Herald Japan, Illustrated London News, and Japanese Ukiyo-e Newspapers.
Organizer: Hiromi Mizuno, University of Minnesota
Chair: Susan J. Napier, University of Texas, Austin
Discussant: Sharalyn Orbaugh, University of British Columbia
This interdisciplinary panel examines the politics of science fiction in twentieth-century Japan, with each paper analyzing widely consumed yet understudied works from the 1900s (Bensky), the late 1930s–early 1940s (Mizuno), the 1950s (Marran), and the 1980s–90s (Long). The aim of this panel is to explore critical and historical readings of science fiction. In order to create focused and active discussion, we will follow an unconventional format. We will start with the announcement of two sets of questions, to which each presenter will respond in his/her paper, and end with the discussant’s own interpretation of the questions to help us draw historical, literary, and sociological conclusions.
The questions are: (1) What can intellectuals say about contemporary society in the language of science fiction that they cannot say otherwise? Does science fiction necessarily defamilialize the present as Fredric Jameson and others argue? (2) What kind of science is invoked for what vision? For example, what sorts of the bodies (gendered, racial, national, etc.) are imagined based on what kinds of science (medical, military, reproductive, etc.)? How is a particular body of science used to promote or deny a particular ideological world?
Scholarly examination of Japanese science fiction has recently begun, but much of its attention has been paid to post-1950s works. This panel covers the early to late twentieth century, seeing how styles, tropes, and themes in science fiction change over time. While we trace the history of the genre, our primary concern is to explore what we mean when we speak of "science" in science fiction and to examine expressions of ideological coercion and critique.
Adventure and Empire: Meiji Era Science Fiction
Xavier Benjamin Bensky, University of Chicago
Along with rapid advances in science and technology, literary expressions of the scientific imagination proliferated during the Meiji period. Although these were mostly in the form of translations of Jules Verne and other Western scientific adventure novelists at first, they soon emerged within genres such as the political novel (seiji shôsetsu), the speculative novel (mirai shôsetsu) and the scientific adventure novel (bôken kagaku shôsetsu).
This paper will examine two popular yet understudied science fiction works: political novelist Yano Ryûkei’s Tale of Ukishiro [Ukishiro Monogatari] (1890) and adventure novelist Oshikawa Shunro’s Kaitei Gunkan [The Undersea Warship] (1900), which was inspired by it. In both novels, the protagonists defeat pirate ships with advanced military technology created in a secret laboratory on a deserted island. However, whereas Yano’s protagonists, true to the anti-government stance of Japanese political novels, aim to create a free and independent country in theretofore uncolonized central Africa, Oshikawa’s heroes use military superiority (a futuristic submarine) to protect Japanese territory from Western colonial expansionism and fight for the glory of their nation as loyal subjects of the Japanese Empire. The Tale of Ukishiro was written at the end of the age of political novels. By the writing of The Undersea Warship, however, Japan had already made its first foray into colonialism by annexing Taiwan. I feel that comparing and contrasting two thematically connected works produced under these different historical circumstances will shed insight on the ways in which the scientific imagination negotiated Japanese geopolitical identity in reaction to Western imperialism.
From Science to Utopia: Wartime Science Fiction in Japan
Hiromi Mizuno, University of Minnesota
This paper examines works published as "science fiction" during the Pacific War (1937–1942), mainly Unno Jûza’s Floating Airfield [Ukabu Hikôtô] (1938) and Kigi Takatarô’s The Flag of the Green Rising Sun [Midori no Nisshôki] (1939–1940). First serialized in popular children’s magazines, both works portrayed a scientific Japan but in different ways. Unno’s work, arguably the best known science fiction novel of the time, is an action-adventure story of Japanese soldiers who disable a Western powers’ secret mission. Kigi’s lesser known work provides a fascinating example of how "scientific" Japan was imagined in the colonial context; in Kigi’s work, Manchuria provides a site for scientific and technological perfection. Despite their popularity and influence on postwar science fiction, scholars have yet to seriously examined wartime science fiction.
Does science fiction function as a critique of existing systems or rather turn attention away from the present? Wartime science fiction in fact does not fit either interpretation. In Unno’s and Kigi’s works, inventions—strictly related to production and military technology—devised a technologically invincible and scientifically superior Japan and expressed the loyal imperial body, both male and female. While their works can be read as a critique of unscientific Japan, I argue that such a critique went hand in hand with the wartime state’s mobilization of science. I call this politics of wartime science fiction "scientific nationalism"—the mobilization of the youth with the vision of a scientific Japan for the division of the world according to the official ideology.
Race in Space: Numa Shozo’s Pet Yapoo
Christine Marran, University of Minnesota
This talk explores the extraordinary popularity of a satirical science fiction novel serialized in the 1950s that parodies sexual and racial economies of WW2. This cult classic by Numa Shozo depicts a diminutive Japanese man who embraces a submissive position on the planet Empire of a Hundred Suns which is governed by women of Germanic descent. In this futuristic world, power (and who has it) is determined explicitly by race and gender. Whereas the female is often aligned with Nature, especially in the modern western context, in this novel, technology and its political control are gendered female. Power is wielded only by Caucasian women. These women, furthermore, are of extraordinary scientific prowess and use it to transform male bodies into hierarchically ordered mutated objects of pleasure and practical use. The lowermost rung of this servant population is the "yellow race." The unsung focus of this complex saga of empires is a masochistic Japanese man, Rintaro, who eventually embraces his new weakened position in the universal sphere in sexual terms.
In this paper I suggest why this configuration of sexual and political power had such appeal in the 1960s as seen in the extraordinary praise for the book by such distinguished intellectuals as Haniya Yutaka, Endo Shusaku, and Mishima Yukio. I will question whether this rewriting of prewar sexual and technological economies whereby men not only become incapable of sexual and technological prowess but also positively reject it, functioned as a (successful) critique of heterosexual masculine desire and Japanese or German imperialism.
Are Otaku Naturally Selected? Some Feminist Implications
Margherita Long, State University of New York, Buffalo
Fans of Japanimation know that the word otaku is derogatory, conjuring youths whose obsessive devotion to anime’s cyber-frontiers leads to social maladjustment and even violence. The word can also be said to express a more ambivalent anxiety—toward the dehumanizing effects of technology, on the one hand, and the fear of increasingly intelligent machines, on the other. A certain irony surfaces: Otaku cannot relate to humans, but their very failure positions them to excel in a fast-approaching future when all life will be artificial, and all intelligence will be disembodied. Evolutionarily speaking, they seem among the best adapted to our changing environment. Still, is the future they imagine via anime, now Japan’s most popular science fiction, really disembodied?
Vicki Kirby has written that "the question of sexual difference is inseparable from the more general question of corporeality as such." If women are generally put on the "body" side of the mind/body split, does the fantasy of pure intellect moving freely through the Internet do away with the body, and femininity, entirely? More specifically, what happens to the need for maternal bodies when life becomes fully artificial? The paper examines the problem of procreation in two starkly different anime to suggest that they both treat life-giving in refreshingly interesting ways. Kawajiri Yoshiaki’s Wicked City (Yoju toshi, 1987) is often classed as hentai or crudely perverted anime "that only otaku could like." Oshii Mamoru’s Ghost in the Shell (Kôkaku Kidôtai, 1995) offers a scientifically complex account of sex and procreation. The paper argues that both films show great respect for the maternal body and its importance for variation and adaptability in the creation of the new.
Organizer: Ulrike Schaede, University of California, San Diego
Chair: Cornelia Storz, Philipps-Universität Marburg, Germany
Discussant: T. J. Pempel, University of California, Berkeley
Keywords: economic-political change, Japan, interdisciplinary, contemporary.
How and to what extent will Japan change in response to growing external pressures on its political economy, exerted through globalization of the rules of trade, business, law, and politics? While for a long time Japan has been quite successful in letting emerging global rules (such as through the WTO, corporate practices and strategies, or geopolitical alliances) coexist with protectionist, and fundamentally exclusionist, policies at home, the pressure for change is clearly rising. The first question tackled by this panel is whether Japan’s processes and institutions are in fact changing across several areas, second, to what extent this change is attributable to global pressure, and third, what this global influence means for the domestic institutional realignment of Japan.
In order to highlight current opportunities and challenges for Japan from multiple dimensions and perspectives, this panel addresses these questions in an interdisciplinary, multinational, and multidimensional approach, by bringing together researchers from Germany, Japan and the United States. Panel topics include: pressures on corporate strategies and keiretsu; pressures on political processes and corruption; pressures through industrial regulation and standards; and pressures through global environmental policies.
The panel will be highly interactive: panelists and the discussant will be asked to speak for no more than 15 minutes, and then be prepared to comment on each others’ papers, which in turn will stimulate, and be built into, a lively discussion with the audience.
Buying Influence: Private Money, Public Decisions, and International Standards
Verena Blechinger, Harvard University
It is widely recognized that one of the forces affecting change in Japan’s political economy is the flow of money from private interests to public officials. Over the last decade, rules governing contributions to public officials have been revised repeatedly, in a process culminating in political finance reform in 1994 that shifted donations from politicians to parties and introduced public funding for political parties. Moreover, on the international level, the 1999 OECD Convention on Bribery made it a crime to offer, promise or present a bribe to a foreign public official in order to obtain or retain international business deals. The ratification of the Convention made it necessary for Japan to implement corresponding legal change at home.
This paper addresses the policy processes leading to these changes and analyzes their outcomes. How effective is the new Japanese legislation? And will international treaties such as the OECD Convention really reform this prominent aspect of Japan’s political economy? The paper argues that these formal changes have not significantly affected the de facto relationship between power and money and between private interest and public officials. The pace of change is also much slower than expected, because regulators implement reform only in reaction to external demands or in response to actions by the regulated. While politicians appear willing to consider radical change, the bureaucracy has adopted a rather conservative stance both in implementation of international agreements and in reform of domestic legislation.
International-Domestic Linkages in Environmental Politics in Japan
Miranda A. Schreurs, University of Maryland
Japan’s environmental policies have been strongly affected by international environmental developments and agreements. Pressures on Japan to shift policy approaches have covered a wide range of environmental issues, including climate change, stratospheric ozone depletion, tropical deforestation, wildlife protection, multinational corporate behavior overseas, the use of environmental impact assessments, and the role of non-governmental organizations in all of these. The responses by Japan to this pressure and its efforts to influence the direction of international developments have differed substantially across these areas. This paper will compare across several issues-areas examining how international environmental developments and domestic politics have interacted to produce different policy outcomes.
Rumble in the Boardroom: Changed Structures, Improved Efficiency?
Andreas Moerke, German Institute for Japanese Studies
The ongoing economic crisis has brought to the fore issues concerning the opaqueness and low efficiency of Japan’s corporate governance model. Corporate boards of directors are a central part of this model: analysts have argued that they are too large and consist of too many insiders to provide effective monitoring. Commercial Code revisions in the 1990s brought new rules on outside auditors, but little real change. In contrast, more recent amendments seem more fundamental, in that they allow a company to choose between the (old) Japanese and the U.S. board model, facilitate the use of stock options, and others.
This paper traces the origins of these changes and discusses whether, and with what effects, they have been adopted. It then investigates empirically changes in board structure of Tokyo Stock Exchange-listed Japanese firms. Finally, the paper raises qualitative aspects of corporate governance and the process of change, as the recent Enron and Worldcom cases have raised new doubts about the adequacy of the U.S. model, as well as calls for a reconsideration of the relative benefits and efficiency consequences of the Japanese model.
Global Pressures on Japanese Corporate Strategies
Ulrike Schaede, University of California, San Diego
Ever since Japan’s flagship companies started to relocate production abroad (and in particular, in Asia) on a large scale in the 1980s, Japanese policymakers, analysts, and media have listed the threat of "hollowing out" (kudoka) as a leading industrial policy concern for the country. Recently, in a comment that was only partially tongue-in-cheek, one official remarked that if the current process of "hollowing out" were to continue, in twenty years there would be no manufacturing plants left in Japan. Unemployment, industrial decline, social unrest and a host of other problems are being feared.
This paper argues that from a corporate perspective, the problem is not that Japan has too much "hollowing out," but that it does not have enough. By looking at data and activities by Japanese companies in Asia, and in particular in China, the paper will analyze the limited extent of Japanese production there, compared to the companies’ competitors in world markets. It is quite possible that if the current trend continues, Japan’s flagship companies may not be able to compete in the world economy in the long run.
Organizer: Peter D. Shapinsky, University of Michigan
Chair: Mimi Hall Yiengpruksawan, Yale University
Discussant: Wayne Farris, University of Tennessee
Until recently, historiography of premodern Japan has focused its attentions on land-centered institutions of authority and largely ignored the importance of the sea. But works by Amino Yoshihiko, Murai Shôsuke, and others in the past twenty years have pushed historians to re-examine the place of the archipelago in larger East Asian maritime systems and the influence that Japan’s geography as a mountainous archipelago has had on its social fabric. This panel seeks to situate English-language scholarship within these recent trends by taking a diachronic look at various aspects of Japanese interaction with a maritime environment. In these papers, the sea provides both linkages and discontinuities. Sea lanes both separate places and tie them together in regional and world systems networks. It was a barrier requiring expertise to cross that landed authorities did not possess, forcing them to come to terms with the littoral population.
Mimi Yiengpruksawan examines late-Heian Japan in the wider East Asian maritime world to question the idea that tenth-century Japan closed itself off from the rest of East Asia allowing the growth of a distinctly Yamato culture. Peter Shapinsky demonstrates ways in which pirate bands came to wield authority over the sixteenth-century Inland Sea. Tom Nelson examines early-seventeenth-century Japanese settlements in Southeast Asia to demonstrate the extent of maritime-based, non-official, non-diplomatic exchange. And Michael Wood situates castaway narratives as repositories of a maritime discourse which were appropriated by a late-Tokugawa state ever more wary of the threat from over the water.
The Transmarine Factor in Kyoto Culture circa 1000
Mimi Hall Yiengpruksawan, Yale University
With few exceptions virtually every standard work on Heian Japan posits minimal intercourse with continental neighbors. It is widely assumed that Japan, as represented by Kyoto, looked inward and away from the mainland societies that had given shape in earlier times to its political and cultural institutions. The result of this inward turn was a uniquely Japanese cultural and social order that existed in self-imposed isolation from the rest of the world. This conceptualization has allowed commentators since the late nineteenth century to claim for much of premodern Japan a cultural and political unilateralism born of isolation and indigenization.
This paper presents three case studies that demonstrate how misleading it is to accept such conceptualizations about the Japanese past. It shows that it is possible to construct another kind of Heian Japan, where active engagement with the world beyond was a given, and the position of difference or uniqueness the sign of an exuberant participation, as one distinct culture among many, in a global community held together by a web of commerce and competition across the high seas of East Asia.
With the Sea as Their Domain: Pirates and Local Maritime Authority in the Seto Inland Sea in the Sixteenth Century
Peter D. Shapinsky, University of Michigan
In 1588, Toyotomi Hideyoshi issued a famous edict that has until now been interpreted as meaning simply the outlawing of piracy. However, as this paper intends to demonstrate, a careful investigation of the maritime situation in the Japanese archipelago in the sixteenth century presents an alternate interpretation, that of Hideyoshi’s need to eliminate independent, sea-based authority. This paper will explore the forms such nautical power took and argues for the need to re-examine conceptions of space and authority to fit a maritime context. The term kaizoku though translated as "pirate" transcends any one-dimensional meaning. Aside from attacking ships, these "pirates" were leaders of littoral communities, controlled fishing villages, operated toll barriers, were maritime mercenaries, and came to wield actual authority over the sea lanes of the sixteenth-century Seto Inland Sea, the jugular transportation route of the premodern archipelago.
The decentralization of political authority and the concurrent rise of competing regimes that characterized the Sengoku period allowed bands of these "pirates" to develop into independent local maritime authorities. Instead of a dominion defined by control of provinces, groups such as the Murakami family dominated many of the nautical linkages of the Seto Inland Sea: shipping lanes, port workers, toll barriers, ships, etc. from small island fortresses. Those who sought safe passage through the Inland Sea paid the tolls and received either personal escort or a standard to fly at the prow of the ship. Landed daimyo all tried to gain pirates as allies in order to secure their coastal borders and nautical transportation arteries.
Merchants and Mercenaries: The Overseas Japanese Diaspora in East Asia in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries
Thomas Nelson, University of Tokyo
Foreign policy is a valid subject for research in most areas of the world even in the premodern period. However, Japan was too geographically isolated from the rest of Asia to have regular day-to-day diplomatic contact with other countries. Nonetheless, from the sixteenth century onwards Japanese maritime communities appeared in many parts of East Asia with the notable exception of China. In sixteenth-century Korea and in seventeenth-century Siam, Cambodia, Batavia, Manila and southern Vietnam (Cochin-China) communities of Japanese merchants-cum-mercenaries interacted with the local peoples, the representatives of European trading companies and religious orders and with the Chinese trade diaspora. An examination of their activities can tell us much about the position of Japan relative to the rest of East Asia in terms of cultural self-awareness, economic potential, military power and technology.
In all the counties where they settled, Japanese acted as traders or warriors as opportunities for power and profit presented themselves. In Siam and Cambodia, political conditions led to their military role taking precedence. In Vietnam, the highly militarized nature of local society meant that the commercial aspect was more important. In Manila, the community arrived mainly as religious exiles and later took on a variety of roles. After Japanese were prohibited from having private ties with foreign lands, these now isolated trade communities had to find new ways of supporting themselves, often acting as intercultural commercial brokers between European trading companies and the host communities.
"Sea, a body dost thou make. . .": Late Edo Castaway Narratives and Writing the National Subject
Michael Wood, University of Oregon
Regulation of maritime travel beyond the immediate confines of the Japanese archipelago in the late sixteenth century is often associated with the beginnings of early modernity and the extension of centralized authority over an emerging nation-state. The formation of maritime prohibitions (kaikin) and repatriation policies became significant tools in governing the porous littoral. With an increase in both domestic shipping and the encroaching presence of foreign ships in the waters off the Japanese coast however, the number of seafaring accidents only increased throughout the Edo period. The fact that several hundred castaway narratives (hyôryûki) from this period remain today serves as testament to both the extent of contact and the importance of representing these experiences. Although these narratives are almost always framed as truthful documents based on the perspective of an eyewitness, in fact they were almost always mediated through the language and knowledge of scholars whose identity was grounded on the land and who aimed to enforce Japan’s geographic and cultural boundaries. The poly-vocal nature of these texts therefore presents a space in which a history from the perspective of the sea is contested and ultimately rearticulated in terms of terrestrial familiarity. This presentation will consider specific narrative strategies employed in writing these texts and how the drifting subject is reterritorialized in terms of the national subject. Reading the castaway narrative in these terms, I will also gesture toward a transnational history that reveals the intimate connections between a distinct cultural form and concrete geopolitical situations.
Organizer: Shinju Fujihira, Tufts University
Chair and Discussant: Peter J. Katzenstein, Cornell University
Keywords: Japan, security policy, North Korea, China, terrorism, 9/11.
Since the mid-1990s, Japanese security policy has centered on the revitalized U.S.-Japan security arrangements to meet the regional contingencies in Asia, and after 9/11, the global challenge of terrorism. While the U.S.-Japan alliance has been described as the "cork in the bottle" of Japanese remilitarization in the past, it has also operated as a driver of enhanced military activities of Japan’s Self-Defense Forces in recent years. North Korea’s uncertain strategic intentions, growing Japan-China frictions, regional suspicions toward Japan’s assertive foreign policy, and cooperation with the United States in the "war on terror" place Japan at the center of Asian security concerns. Japan’s response to its new security threats looms large in the strategic and political calculations of major foreign policy actors in today’s Asia-Pacific region, and merits attention from specialists of all Asian states and beyond.
Does 9/11 mark a dramatic departure of Japanese security policy, or reinforce currents that already were under way in the post-Cold War world? This panel will debate this question by drawing on a diverse array of perspectives—historical, institutional, cultural, and discursive. Individually, the papers focus on Japan’s new tensions with North Korea, security relations with China, legal and institutional changes enabling Japanese participation in multinational efforts around Afghanistan and possibly elsewhere, and the constructions of threat and personal safety that have defined Japan’s approach to counterterrorism. Collectively, the papers aim at illuminating the key constraints and opportunities facing Japan as it adapts to a markedly changed security environment.
Testing the Waters: Japan’s Use of Force and the North Korean "Threat"
Sheila A. Smith, University of Hawaii, Manoa
For more than half a century, Japan has focused on developing an "exclusively defensive" military, the Self Defense Force (SDF), whose primary planning mission was territorial defense. North Korean activities in and around Japan over the past several years have tested Japan’s policies with regard to the use of force. In 1998, North Korea fired a Taepodong missile over Japanese territory. In 1999, Japan’s Maritime Self-Defense Force fired warnings across the bow of North Korean ships suspected of illicit activities. In December 2001, Japan’s Coast Guard pursued and ultimately sank a "suspicious" North Korean fishing vessel.
Two aspects of Japan’s response to recent North Korean activities bear closer scrutiny. The first is the decision-making process that led to Japan’s use of force, and particularly the roles of civilian and military decision makers. As Japan has not had to consider the use of force since SDF’s creation in 1954, this series of interactions with North Korea suggests a unique opportunity to look at Japan’s polices with regard to the SDF rules of engagement, as well as the political process by which the initiation of military action might occur.
Second, the North Korean case also offers the opportunity to consider how the public (as well as Japan’s security policymakers) evaluates the threat to Japan in the post-Cold War world. Public reaction to the missile test and to recent North Korean activities has revealed a complex set of attitudes regarding the use of the SDF, and potential "threats" to Japan.
The Rise of China and Japan’s National Security
Shinju Fujihira, Tufts University
Since the early 1990s, the rise of China has emerged as perhaps the most passionately debated issue among Japanese security policymakers. China’s growing military, economic, and diplomatic clout in Asia has generated both pessimistic and optimistic assessments of Japan-China security relations. This paper makes two arguments with regards to Japan’s security policy toward China. First, Japanese policy rests on three pillars to deal with particular security issues: revitalized U.S.-Japan security arrangements, enhanced bilateral Japan-China defense exchanges, and multilateral institutions and military exchanges in Asia that include China. Second, these policies reflect the resilience of an exclusively defensive nature of the Japanese state, and the political institutions that support it.
The paper elaborates on these arguments by conducting five case studies. First, it examines Japan’s changing assessment of China’s military power, including the latter’s army, navy, air force, nuclear forces, missile capabilities, and budget increases. Second, a peaceful resolution of the Taiwan question remains one of Japan’s key security interests, though Japan has yet to increase its diplomatic clout in the U.S.-China-Taiwan interactions. Third, Japanese officials have adopted bilateral dialogues to express their concerns about the activities of the Chinese marine and naval research ships in Japan’s Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ). Fourth, China’s theater ballistic missiles have emerged as one of Japan’s chief security concerns. Finally, Japan-China bilateral military exchanges and security dialogues have become an important part of Japan’s security policy. The paper buttresses these claims by incorporating evidence from press releases, government reports, and interviews.
Japan’s Response to September 11 and the Continuing Politics of Domestic Antimilitarism in the Twenty-First Century
Andrew Oros, Washington College
Terrorist attacks in the United States on September 11, 2001, and the resulting "war on terrorism" launched by U.S. President George W. Bush demanded a clear response from Japan, one of America’s closest allies. This situation evoked memories of Japan’s perceived timidity and indecisiveness at the outbreak of the Persian Gulf War in 1991, leading many to wonder if Japan’s response to this international crisis would differ from Japan’s actions a decade earlier. Despite the policy precedents evident in Prime Minister Koizumi’s response to September 11, symbolized most dramatically by Maritime Self Defense Force (MSDF) ships departing Japan for the first time since their creation, a "politics of domestic antimilitarism" continues to structure discussions of security policy in Japan today.
Domestic antimilitarism is rooted in an historic political compromise forged early in the postwar period and continues to structure political outcomes today through its embeddedness in contemporary political institutions. It greatly limits the development of Japan’s armed forces by proscribing their involvement in policy formulation and participation in international conflict. Moreover, it limits general Japanese participation in international conflict.
Domestic antimilitarism plays two roles in shaping contemporary policy outcomes: it acts both as a constraint on new policy innovation and as a tool used by political actors to further their own objectives. Even in post-September 11 Japan, one must begin to understand Japan’s recent security moves by considering the central characteristics of this long-standing political compromise and how domestic and international political actors use it to further their policy objectives.
Scaring the Japanese for Their Own Good: Japan’s Public Awareness Programs on Terrorism
David Leheny, University of Wisconsin, Madison
The Japanese government faces tight constraints on the creation of genuine counterterrorism policies. It cannot negotiate easily with terrorist groups because of international treaties that prohibit concessions to terrorists, and long-standing restrictions on the use of force have inhibited the development of antiterrorism units similar to American or British special forces. Even so, Japanese officials believe that they will be punished if they allow Japanese to lose their lives in terrorist attacks overseas. "Doing nothing," it seems, is similarly out of the question.
Among Japan’s responses before the September 11th attacks was the creation of public awareness programs designed to teach the Japanese public more about threats overseas. In the animated videos and documentaries produced with government funding, terrorist crises are compared with crime, swindles, and other problems that Japanese travelers can face overseas. These programs have been an unusual but vital part of Japan’s handling of this type of security threat because they have sought to ensure that Japanese protect themselves where the government cannot.
This paper compares these programs before and after the September 11th attacks, asking how the iconography of threat has changed. Before September 11th, terrorism was seen as the kind of quotidian nightmare that can befall Japanese when they travel abroad. Since that time, however, some of the security professionals responsible for creating these programs have tried to focus more on the specific nature of the al-Qaeda threat in a ways that reflect primarily American thinking about terrorism and the danger from Islamist movements.
Organizer and Chair: Tom Howell, University of Pennsylvania
Discussant: Susan B. Klein, University of California, Irvine
Keywords: Japan, literature, setsuwa, waka, monogatari, preaching.
The short narratives which we today identify as setsuwa operated outside the established canon to achieve different purposes. In works whose primary intent was to convey a Buddhist message, they often reworked obscure sutra materials into more familiar oral settings. In literary works they may represent the infusion of marginal elements that disturb the dominant style or message, while opening other interpretive perspectives. Setsuwa thus appear at a point of insufficiency within other texts, adding another truth that yet remains in question.
Tom Howell will investigate the way in which waka and setsuwa both illustrate and contaminate doctrinal points in the Buddhist guidebook Hôbutsushû (Collection of Treasures). Michelle Li will discuss how setsuwa elements insert the realm of the body directly into The Tale of Genji, opening it up to a set of associations and meanings in some ways antithetical to its expressive protocols. Charlotte Eubanks will examine how the fluidity of an oral preaching scene in the Hyakuza Hôdan Kikigakushô (Notes from One Hundred Sessions of Sermons) is fixed, yet transformed, by being written down. Susan Blakeley Klein will use her perspective on the part played by setsuwa in medieval literary commentaries to further expand discussion of the problem.
The Grotesque Connection: A Setsuwa Style of Representation in The Tale of Genji
Michelle Li, Stanford University
Although we often think of the Genji monogatari as the most refined work of Japanese literature, bizarre and incongruous elements more common to relatively unpolished stories come into play in many episodes. For example, Suetsumuhana is a somewhat grotesque character, reflecting negatively on Genji in his sexual and political pursuits. Moreover, her red nose acts as a physical manifestation of her comic yet pathetic role. Problematic noses also appear in setsuwa, most memorably in the tale of the Imperial Chaplain whose long and deformed nose prevents him from eating without someone holding it up. Elements of Yugao’s death also evoke strange short tales: dan six of the Ise monogatari, a related Konjaku narrative involving the demonic consumption of an abducted woman, and various stories of haunted mansions such as the Kawara no in. There are a number of weird incidents in the Uji chapters of Genji as well, including the discovery of Ukifune at Uji Villa and her subsequent life with the nuns.
This paper will consider the relationship of such unsettling elements in Genji to the grotesque in setsuwa, not to argue the existence of direct links but rather to highlight aspects of Genji that share with setsuwa a sensibility centered on the body and its vulnerabilities: an unpolished aesthetic often considered alien to the most privileged canonical literature and therefore rarely discussed. I will demonstrate how putting Genji into dialogue with setsuwa in this way gives us a deeper and fresher reading of certain parts of the tale.
Setsuwa as Vocal Literature: The Hyakuza Hôdan Kikigakishô
Charlotte Eubanks, University of Colorado, Boulder
Shortly after New Year’s Day one year late in the Heian period a certain Imperial Prince arranged for the performance of one-hundred consecutive days of sermonizing on the Lotus Sutra. Somewhere in the audience, someone began taking notes, forming a collection of setsuwa known today as the Hyakuza Hôdan Kikigakishô (Notes from One Hundred Sessions of Sermons).
Setsuwa often inhabit a highly contested space, tracing a sometimes hostile border between oral and written, entertainment and edification. Due to its method of production, the Hyakuza offers a rather unique opportunity to scholars for examining those very dualisms, the interrogation of which helps to shed light on the continuing debate over whether such collections should be evaluated as texts for reading (yomihon) or texts for oral improvisation (tanebon).
Ultimately, however, rather than attempt to claim the Hyakuza explicitly as either a written or an oral text, the goal of this paper will be an exploration of the collection as a piece of what Barbara Ruch has dubbed "vocal literature," a type of literature that, while possessed of a textual basis, requires vocal extemporization and is focused on the emotional involvement of the audience. Though Ruch situates her theories much later in historical time, this paper will show how the "literary revolutions" she posits may have begun much earlier.
Waka Performing as Setsuwa: The Case of the Hôbutsushû
Tom Howell, University of Pennsylvania
In the Hôbutushû a narrator, who does not name himself but is discernable through clues as Taira Yasuyori, returns from exile and goes on a pilgrimage to the Saga Seiryôji to see the main Sakyamuni image of that temple, and overhears a local monk win an argument to the effect that Buddhism is the greatest treasure of the world. This monk, in response to questions from a woman in attendance, goes on to explain the nature of the six realms, and the way to a successful rebirth. The bulk of the text is given as the narrator writing down the monk’s recitation.
The text is a composite, pieced together from fictional devices, setsuwa tales, historical narratives, Japanese waka poems, Chinese allusions, and sutra quotations. It neither stages itself as a literary work such as a monogatari or poetry collection, nor as a formal offering of Buddhist doctrine. But this very ambiguity may be a clue to its ability to interest readers of medieval Japan. It is a kind of narrative experiment in fusing disparate elements, particularly in positioning waka as a kind of concrete proof of the applicability of Buddhist tenets in a Japanese setting. I will investigate how the waka poems serve the overall discourse, while also altering its contours, even displacing the setsuwa tales which one would assume to be essential to preaching. Ultimately waka function in this text not as exemplars of a literary style, but as a form of description of the world.
Organizer: Kota Inoue, University of California, Irvine
Chair and Discussant: Alan S. Christy, University of California, Santa Cruz
Keywords: Japanese empire, film, literature, 1920s and 1930s.
Recent controversies over history textbooks and "comfort women" suggest that Japan’s imperial past remains a key to understanding Japan today more than 50 years after the end of the Fifteen-Year War. Through the examinations of films and literature of the 1920s and 1930s, this panel aims to re-define the interwar culture, often characterized as cosmopolitan and peaceful, as distinctively shaped by Japan’s imperial context.
Scholars of Japanese film and literature have tended to confine the study of interwar film and literature within the domestic context, without sufficient attention to the large circulation of goods, currency, information, and people between the Japanese main islands and the colonies at the time. In recent years a number of important studies on pre-WWII Japanese society and culture in diverse disciplines have begun examining the imperial context. However, they tend to focus solely on culture and society in the colonies, such as literature and films produced in the colonies, forfeiting the opportunity to re-conceive the main islands of Japan as part of the whole empire by examining the symbiotic relations between the colonies and Japan proper in the realm of cultural production and consumption. Coming from diverse disciplines such as history, literature and film studies, presenters on this panel will discuss films and literary works that were produced in Japan in order to delineate the imperial contour of the prewar domestic culture.
Shinseinen and Popular Fiction in Imperial Japan
Satomi Saito, University of Iowa
In the period when Japan was expanding its colonies in Asian countries, the first issue of the then most popular mystery magazine, Shinseinen (1920–1950), was published in order to raise the morale (shiki) of young imperial citizens (seinen). The magazine, featuring mystery, fantasy, and science fiction, has produced major detective fiction writers such as Edogawa Rampo and Yokomizo Seishi. Corresponding to the pro-war sentiment of the magazine, fantasies of the exotic South Seas (Japanese colonies) conditioned the ideological framework of the stories. The detective fiction in this period, in spite of its literary status as a genre governed by logic and reason, most prominently tried to express the anxiety of the urban culture consisting of multiethnic crowds against imperial unity.
In my presentation, I will discuss the relationship between Japan’s cultural context of the 1920s and the rise of Japanese detective fiction by focusing on Shinseinen. I would argue that Japanese detective fiction has developed not simply as an influence of foreign detective fiction but was also internally prepared by the urban culture particular to the imperial context in Japan. In other words, Japanese modernism is mediated by Western culture and the colony as its antithesis. By examining popular fantasies in the realm of cultural consumption, I will give an overview of popular fantasy in the 1920s.
The Colonial Narrative in Tanizaki Jun’ichirô’s Naomi
Kota Inoue, University of California, Irvine
Naomi (Chijin no ai, 1924–25) is generally regarded as Tanizaki Jun’ichirô’s most representative work from the Taisho period. Many critics have found in the novel Tanizaki’s recurring theme of a male protagonist who is dominated by the sexuality and vitality of a female character. Others have discussed the work as the culmination of Tanizaki’s brief infatuation with things Western, particularly as represented in the Western appearance and taste of the protagonist Naomi, often juxtaposing his "infatuation" with the broader cultural climate of the cosmopolitan Taisho period. In other words, Naomi has tended to be read within the development of Tanizaki’s personal aesthetics and themes, or seen as a work that attests to Japan’s intense encounter with the Western urban culture.
But the seeming peacetime of Taisho cosmopolit-anism was also a period of social unrest which pitted Japan’s imperialist policies, both domestic and international, against labor and socialist movements. This paper situates Naomi in the context of Japan’s colonial endeavor during the interwar years, and attempts to re-read the novel as a text that interacts with the Japanese empire. My analysis, for instance, concerns the novel’s narrative strategy which unambiguously frames the whole story as the male protagonist’s confession. When examined in this light, Naomi’s "Western" appearance begins to have complex layers. The paper dissects the narrative voice of the novel as a process in which imperial subjectivity emerges. The urban entertainment in the novel, such as exposition and dance halls, will also be examined in Japan’s larger colonial trajectory.
The Colored Imperial Body: National Identity in Interwar Cinema
Mitsuyo Wada-Marciano, Carleton University
My paper focuses on the filmic image of the body as a site for discourses of the interwar period. Apart from elaborating the body’s function as compensation for Japanese anxieties towards modernization, I attempt to bridge the particular aesthetics of the filmic text and the social contexts in the process of writing a film history.
The 1928 Olympics in Amsterdam played as radio drama in Japan, where listeners were enthralled with the first success of Japanese Olympians abroad. Viewed in relation to Japan’s modernization efforts, the Olympics represent the enactment of Japanese desires for equal status with the West. The spectacle of the small Japanese bodies was embedded with the nationalistic expression of a distinct Japanese identity yamato damashii (the Japanese spirit).
My analysis of the film Why Do the Youth Cry? (1930) views this type of national discourse as the imbrication of ideology and the material body, in which the body in its depictions quite literally represents a national identity. On the surface the film seems to emulate Western and modern elements, yet it deploys these elements to lead the audience to a nationalistic affirmation of an ideal Japanese national body. The central issue is how the film constructs this national body alongside the suppressed anxieties of Japanese desires towards the West. I view the film’s image of the star’s body as an "eclipse," a dual sign for both the filmic text and its social context, analyzing this image alongside the extra-diegetic existence of the actor Suzuki Denmei.
The Uncanny Advent of the Film Japan in Time of Emergency (1933) during "The Interval of Peace"
Naomi Ginoza, University of California, Los Angeles
This paper discusses the Army-backed film, "Hijoji Nippon" (Japan in Time of Emergency, 1933). While historical studies have illuminated the process of Japan’s so-called "fascization" in the 1930s, popular memories of the early and mid-1930s tend to emphasize the flourishing culture of consumption, as if Japan had enjoyed an "interval of peace" between two historical incidents—the 1931 Manchurian Incident and the 1937 Marco Polo Bridge Incident (the outbreak of total war with China). In fact, urban dwellers continued to go shopping, dancing and to the movies, in contrast with their counterparts in devastated agrarian communities. Unlike its title, Japan in Time of Emergency informs the social psyche of the interval of peace, more than emergency: what the film calls the crisis of the national spirit is expressed through the figures of a dance-crazy mother and an aggressive "modern" girl, who are equated with Western vices. While consumption seized the Japanese populace, the Army studied mobilization, and the police and Home Ministry suppressed communists. At this ideological juncture, this film was born from the collaboration of three agents: one major newspaper, the Army and one film company. The Osaka Mainichi chose as the main speaker in the film the incumbent Army Minister, Araki Sadao, who was popular for his jovial personality. His participation ensured wide support from the military. The film emphasizes the Imperial Army’s presence on the Chinese continent as the core of Japan’s international security after its secession from the League of Nations. My paper examines how rhetoric peculiar to the early 1930s is revealed in a bizarre mixture of the general’s didactic narration, documentary footage, and inserted omnibus dramas.
Organizer: Ann Sherif, Oberlin College
Chair and Discussant: Ken K. Ito, University of Michigan
Keywords: Natsume Sôseki, modern Japanese literature, critical reception, the state.
Of all Japanese writers, Natsume Sôseki (1867–1916) is best loved by the reading public and stands most firmly at the core of the Japanese literary/cultural canon, as his portrait on the ubiquitous thousand-yen bill shows. Yet, the meaning and significance of his works and career continue to be vigorously debated, with no consensus in sight.
Although Sôseki’s fascination with the notion of modern individuality makes him seem an obvious choice for the national currency, our panel proposes a reexamination of the reasons for Sôseki’s constant canonical status in the academy, educational system, and print culture, as well as the state’s affirmation of his art. Our papers revisit the dynamics of Sôseki’s radically shifting critical reception.
In Meiji, Sôseki’s literary and theoretical texts, as well as his critical stance toward the state, led critics to lionize him as a champion of a libratory version of modernity. In the early postwar period, when the very future of Japanese culture seemed at stake, critics and readers alike looked to Sôseki’s novels as either links to the past or guides to subjectivity in a new democratic age. The 1980s and 1990s witnessed yet another Sôseki boom, with poststructuralists and feminists celebrating a new image of Sôseki as a radical skeptic of modernity. The diversity of readings of Sôseki and the vigor with which the most influential critics of each era joined in the debate, as well as the state’s perhaps parodoxical validation of Sôseki, offer proof of the many ways that Sôseki’s career and writings continue to resonate with the most immediate concerns of a changing Japanese society and the perceived need to define a national literature.
Sôseki’s "atarashii onna" (New Woman): Fujio and Mieko
Reiko Abe-Auestad, University of Oslo
With Ibsen’s death in 1906 came the first tide of the "Ibsen boom" to Japan. His controversial female characters such as Nora and Hedda Gabler attracted much attention, popularizing the image of the "atarashii onna" (New Woman) of the twentieth century. The 1911 publication of Seito, the first feminist journal of its kind in Japan, fueled the debate on the "atarashii onna," culminating in the "Go shiki no sake" (Five-colored Sake) and the Yoshiwara scandals of 1912 in the media.
This paper will examine the critical reception of Fujio in Sôseki’s Gubijinso (Poppy Seeds, 1908) and Mieko in Sanshiro (Sanshiro,1909) during the decade after publication of these novels in order to explore how these characters were received as representatives of the Japanese "atarashii onna." The canonical status of Sôseki’s work served to reinforce the desire of many male critics to regard the characters Fujio and Mieko in a certain manner, which, I would argue, had the unfortunate effect of veiling some aspects of Sôseki that deserve more attention. The question of how their female contemporaries responded to the male readings of "atarashii onna" will be also addressed.
Sôseki is perhaps like a chameleon that changes colors according to who the reader is, and what the reader is looking for. Through the presentation of widely differing receptions of Fujio and Mieko (including my own), I will focus on the versatility in Sôseki, which I believe is one of the reasons for his everlasting popularity and relevance.
The Currency of Literature: Sôseki and Etô Jun
Ann Sherif, Oberlin College
After Japan’s defeat, Japanese writers and intellectuals immediately launched the project of defining anew modern Japanese literature and criticism. Some involved in this vigorous debate focused om a new, democratic subjectivity (shutaisei) and the role of the Left. Others—most notably the young critic Etô Jun (1932–1999)—asserted the importance of reinterpreting preexisting canonical modern literature and its critical traditions.
It is no coincidence that Etô, who would later become one of the postwar period’s most controversial public intellectuals, chose Meiji novelist Natsume Sôseki as the subject of his first critical inquiry in 1955. In my paper, I will examine Etô’s role in fundamentally altering the understanding of Sôseki’s novels and career and in defining Sôseki as central to Japan’s new cultural identity. In addition, I will trace the ways Etô molded a new masculine ideal of tie critic and intellectual while asserting the importance of literature to the mission of the state.
In his groundbreaking postwar study of the already canonical Sôseki, Etô broke new ground by presenting "a picture of Sôseki that was radically different from the accepted image, a Sôseki who embraced his own darkness and faced his own moral questions as he handled the tension between self and other, Japan and the West, the individual and the nation," as Angela Yiu has written.
Many readers remember Etô for his provocative conservative political writings on Japanese nationalism, U.S.-Japan relations, and militarism. Yet Etô left behind another equally significant legacy in his highly influential and extensive literary critical works.
Lingering with the Dead
Daniel O’Neill, University of California, Berkeley
Moving from the subject of war and settling on the theme of romance, Sôseki’s Shumi no iden (Heredity of Taste, 1905) has been read as an ameliorating fiction that chronicles the mourning process of a narrator haunted by his friend’s death. The story’s conclusion presents us with a narrator reappearing as a happy consciousness whose difficult journey toward this state replicates the difficult project of cultural healing, responding, as it were, to the social and political upheavals following the Russo-Japanese War.
This paper will discuss how postwar readers of the story have facilitated this project of cultural healing. The first part of the story powerfully describes the narrator’s visions of the war dead, but it is the second section, in which a beautiful woman appears before the narrator with the promise of romance, that has monopolized critical attention. In prioritizing the second section, readers transform the subject of war into a backdrop for the unfolding drama of romance.
Though this drama has found an enduring niche in Sôseki criticism, I will argue that romance does not complete the story. The project of cultural healing, here rearticulated as an obsessive impulse to displace the topic of war from the history of the story’s emergence, is also a narrative that forces to the surface the unresolved problem of how to live with the undying dead of Japan’s prewar history and literature, a problem which, in its power to generate ever more elaborate postwar allegories, is our problem of re-reading and lingering with Sôseki.
The Never-Ending Story: Kokoro and Contemporary Japanese Cultural Criticism
Michael Bourdaghs, University of California, Los Angeles
In the mid-1980s, the world of literary criticism in Japan was occupied by a fierce debate over Natsume Sôseki’s Kokoro (1914), one ignited by radical re-readings of the novel proposed by a new generation of critics and scholars. The debate marked a crucial turning point in the acceptance of new theories and methodologies of literary criticism in Japan, including structuralism, psychoanalysis, and semiotics. Moreover, as the "old guard" opponents to the new re-readings declared, the younger generation of critics presumed, among other things, the death of the author—the keystone that had anchored previous versions of interpretation and canonicity.
This conflict between orthodoxy and heterodoxy can be understood in part through Bourdieu’s sociology of cultural production, an approach that allows us to see the debate as an active sate for working through the tensions of its historical situation.
But other aspects evade a sociological approach—including the uncanny manner in which, as earlier commentators have noted, the structure of the debate came to resemble the plot of the novel Kokoro itself. This paper explores the debate in terms of its structure as an object of sociological knowledge, but also takes up those aspects that fall within the blind spots of the sociological gaze and which demand an alternative, perhaps literary, form of understanding. It argues that contemporary cultural criticism must employ both forms of knowledge in a process of never-ending mutual supplementation to recover critical possibilities from the Kokoro text and its (inevitably failed) attempts to represent death.
Organizer: Lewis Emery Harrington, Cornell University
Chair: Linda H. Chance, University of Pennsylvania
Discussant: Ayako Kano, University of Pennsylvania
In recent years, studies of Japanese colonialism have expanded to allow productive exchange between earlier investigation of top-down policy, and new analysis of the workings of specific policies on the ground. This panel aims to deepen interdisciplinary discussions of a key dimension of Japanese colonialism: the role of intellectuals in conceptualizing, implementing, and resisting the Great East-Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere. Drawing on the disciplines of history, literature, and philosophy, the panel focuses on three groups of intellectuals whose participation in Japanese colonialism range from active enforcement of colonial policy, to ambivalent appropriation of colonial culture, to academic underpinning of colonialism’s aim.
Drawing on extensive archival research, Taeyoon Ahn elucidates the colonial bureaucrats’ use of motherhood ideology to integrate Koreans into its war effort during the late colonial period. Ahn also contrasts the voice of the government bureaucrats with the voices of the Korean women themselves. Noriko Horiguchi continues the discussion of gendered colonialism by investigating Japanese women writers who wrote about colonial contexts. Focusing in particular on close readings of works by Hayashi Fumiko, Horiguchi analyzes how Japanese women writers ended up supporting colonialism, in part as a result of efforts to escape the confines of domestic life. Finally, Lewis Harrington extends the discussion of colonialism into the realm of academic philosophy. Scrutinizing wartime writings of Miki Kiyoshi and Kôyama Iwao on world history, Harrington shows how these philosophers, despite engaging in rigorous critiques of Euro-American imperialism, were blind to their own imperialist character in providing support for Japanese colonial policy.
Mothering the Empire: The Mobilization of Women in Late Colonial Korea
Taeyoon Ahn, University of Pennsylvania
This paper examines the ways in which the Japanese colonial government sought to integrate Korean women in its war efforts during the late colonial period starting with the Sino-Japanese War (1937) and ending in the Pacific War (1945). After the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese War, the colonial government established wartime rule in Korea and consolidated the lives and daily customs of the Korean people to support the war. As seen in other studies, the colonial government forced Koreans to comply with wartime rule, recruiting men as laborers and soldiers and women as laborers and sexual slaves.
My paper demonstrates how the Japanese colonial construction of gender and womanhood was strongly based on motherhood, which was closely linked to Japanese imperialism and militarism. I highlight three aspects of motherhood that the colonial government deployed to integrate and mobilize Korean women during the wartime period: First, by promoting pro-natal policy, the regime stressed the productive role of mothers, demanding more babies in order to ensure a large population for military recruitment and forced labor. Second, it sought to organize and discipline mothers of schoolchildren to comply with colonial education policies by specifically assigning women the task of educating their children to become obedient colonial subjects. Third, it demanded that women espouse military conscription of their sons by the militaristic propaganda of glorifying "patriotic" motherhood. I will also reveal the lived experiences of wartime Korean women by collecting oral histories and explore women’s agency as well as their double subordination under Confucian patriarchy and colonialism.
Adrift in the Empire: The Body in Hayashi Fumiko’s Works
Noriko J. Horiguchi, University of Tennessee, Knoxville
This presentation examines the ways in which the migrant bodies of the female characters in the works of Hayashi Fumiko (1904–1951) delineated, confined, and/or expanded the political boundaries of the modern Japanese national empire. In particular, my analysis of Hayashi’s works focuses on the following question: How do the wandering bodies of the heroines disturb the state-driven nationalist discourse on ethnicity/race and gender and yet paradoxically stabilize it?
On the one hand, Hayashi’s depiction of bodies disturbs the state-defined conception of "Japanese women" by exposing the female characters’ opacity as Japan’s subjects. By constantly moving through the inner and outer territories of Japan and being unstable, Hayashi’s heroines are antithetical to the domesticated wives and mothers who support the families and the nation-state in the imperial discourse. On the other hand, however, it is through the incorporation of the nation-state’s imperialist discourses of growth, liberation, and salvation into their personal stories that Hayashi’s characters attempt to attain senses of fullness, freedom, and security. Therefore the female body as discourse in Hayashi’s works functions as one of the discursive strategies for the writer/reader in encoding her own subjectivity that survives, makes progress, and attains power and liberation in the restricted circumstances of the pre- and post-war eras. My analysis of the bodies of women within the expanding body of the national empire of Japan sheds light on the politics of the "personal" experiences, the possibilities and impossibilities for the individual to move out of the nation, and the continuity and changes of the boundaries of the Japanese national empire.
Philosophizing the Empire: The Wartime "Philosophy of World History" of Miki Kiyoshi and Kôyama Iwao
Lewis Emery Harrington, Cornell University
The obsession with the so-called "world-historical" in prewar and wartime Japanese discourse experienced its first boom immediately following the outbreak of war with China in 1937. The philosopher Miki Kiyoshi (1897–1945) was a leader in the dissemination of this rhetoric of the "world-historical" and his "The World-Historical Significance of the China Incident" (1937) was one of the first instances in which the connection was posited between Japan’s war in Asia—soon to be called the Greater East Asia War—and the emergence of a putatively new epoch of pluralistic world history that would in theory transcend the Eurocentrism of previous exclusionary, monistic conceptions of world history.
The Kyôto school philosopher Kôyama Iwao (1905–1993) had similar ideas about pluralistic world history, and it is his Philosophy of World History (1942) and his participation in the roundtable discussions comprising The World-Historical Standpoint and Japan (1943), with which the wartime "Philosophy of World History" is most often linked.
This paper will show that a comparison of Kôyama’s understanding of Japan’s putative "world-historical mission" with similar notions found in the work of Miki can contribute greatly to the analysis of why such concepts as the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere and its slogan of the "liberation of Asia from Euro-American imperialism" were so seductive for many intellectuals during the war, as well as for textbook revisionists today. For the revisionists share with both Miki and Kôyama a similar disavowal of the imperialist character of their own philosophies of anti-imperialism.
Organizer and Chair: Eileen Mikals-Adachi, Ochanomizu University
Keywords: Japan, literature, love, romance, women, gender, language.
An age-old theme enticing readers throughout the ages, "love" is currently the buzz word not only in such arenas of popular culture as music, film, and TV drama, but also in the more conservative circles of mainstream Japanese literature. Today, bookstore shelves abound in titles like Lovers Looking Back (Yuikawa Kei), Loveholic (Yamamoto Fumio) and Extravagant Lovers (anthology of short stories), with romantic novels also capturing major literary prizes. Yet, the term ren’ai (love) has, over the years, been loosely attached to any work with an inkling of romance or any writer whose personal life suggests the same, and the genre of ren’ai writing has still to be defined.
While discussing literary works from the early modern to contemporary periods, this panel will consider various issues related to romantic writing in Japan. Copeland will focus on the quest for love in Shimizu Shikin’s work. Beichman will challenge the conventional view of Midaregami as primarily autobiographical love poems. Sasaki will analyze contemporary terms of endearment and related gender differences in the best-selling novel Between Composure and Passion. Mikals-Adachi will examine Japan’s new wave of romantic writing, ren’ai shosetsu, and the implications thereof. In conclusion, the panel will engage the audience in a roundtable-type discussion on the changes and continuities seen in discourse on love and the reasons for the unwavering Japanese infatuation with ren’ai, or romantic, topics. The ultimate question posed, moreover, will be: What exactly constitutes ren’ai writing, be it poetry or prose?
"What’s Love Got to Do with It?" Shimizu Shikin and the Quest for Romance
Rebecca Copeland, Washington University, St. Louis
What’s love got to do with it? Everything, according to Shimizu Shikin (1868–1933) and other enlightened members of the Meiji era. "Love" of the profound, spiritual variety eventually to be known as "ren’ai" was the single most discussed subject among the young male poets and female students in the 1880s and 1890s and largely the catalyst for the romantic movement in Japanese letters. Young poets yearned for muse-like women to whom they might devote a worshipful solicitude. Young women dreamed of sensitive husbands who would cherish them. Many sought ren’ai. No one, it seems, could secure it, thus imbuing the entire dialectic with a romantic fatalism. Shimizu Shikin is representative of women writers/activists of the time who were inspired by the quest for ren’ai. In my presentation, I will discuss briefly the historical development of ren’ai in Meiji-era literature and Shikin’s contribution to this discourse. Central to my discussion will be her short stories "Koware yubiwa" (The Broken Ring, 1891) and "Ichi seinen iyo on jukkai" (A Young Man’s Surprising Reminiscences, 1892).
"Land of Spring, Country of Love": The Imaginary Landscape of Yosano Akiko’s Midaregami
Janine Beichman, Daito Bunka University
Midaregami is considered one of the great collections of Japanese love poetry. The first few poems of the collection constitute a kind of poetic manifesto for the idea that love and poetry are one and that both together constitute the locus of supreme value. Thus, even though not all the poems that follow are about love, love and poetry are established as the collection’s overriding themes. The publication of the early love letters of Akiko and Yosano Tekkan in the 1950s added another element, in the form of biographical information about Akiko’s life at the time she wrote much (though not all) in the collection. This information was "read back" into many of the poems. As a result, today Midaregami is often thought of as purely autobiographical. Scholarly commentators who are aware that, on the contrary, many of the poems are exercises in fantasy, still tend to read biographically, sometimes even taking them as parables based on Akiko’s life.
My own reading of Midaregami differs from others in its stress on the variety that characterizes Midaregami—not only the variety of themes and subjects, but also the variety of its imaginative sources, which range from Japanese and Greek myth to Italian Renaissance painting. I will discuss three poems which illustrate this. Each is connected to a different painting by the Italian Renaissance painter Titian. One is about love, though not in the autobiographical sense; another is about breastfeeding; and a third is part of a kind of creation myth.
A Template of Endearment: Ekuni Kaori and Tsuji Hitonari’s Novel Between Composure and Passion
Yasuko Sasaki, Ochanomizu University
An all-or-nothing philosophy professing a passionate devotion to a singular objective has no place in present-day Japan. Phrases like "love is everything" or "work is everything" are as outdated as the act of concentrating one’s energy on an isolated goal. Young people prefer a "go with the flow" and "take life as it comes" type of lifestyle. While using a very ordinary story as its template, the recent best-seller Between Composure and Passion by Ekuni Kaori and Tsuji Hitonari portrays the ambivalent nature of Japan’s new generation. In addition, the novel magnifies their desire not for a state of "composure" or "passion," but instead for a comfort zone between these two conflicting emotions.
With the theory that Between Composure and Passion is representative of a new type of love story, this paper will study the terms of endearment used to narrate the tale and discuss recent changes in the Japanese language of love. Gender differences in such language will also be examined together with the novel’s unique format. The effectiveness of this serialized "exchange" of chapters in relating the story from both the male and female point of view will be considered and the meaning of the "comfort zone" created will be studied. And, finally, the question of why this particular love story touched the hearts of so many Japanese will be addressed.
"Love Is in the Air"—Ren’ai Shosetsu: Japan’s New Wave of Romantic Writing
Eileen Mikals-Adachi, Ochanomizu University
Launched by the high tide of the present economic recession or perhaps by a persistent ripple lingering in the wake of WWII turbulence, a new wave of literature has been thrust on Japan’s peaceful shores and is taking the nation by storm. And, in accord with patterns seen in the Heian and Edo periods when the nation was similarly "at peace," a major component in the literature of the new millennium is romance. Today’s ren’ai shosetsu, or love novels, paint Japan’s "bubble" generation in tones of Heian extravagance, and this true-to-life picture of the new "townspeople" of Edo is presently enjoying popularity of phenomenal proportions. Most distinctive in this latest development is, moreover, the prominent role women writers are playing in setting yet another literary trend. Their work will thus be the focus of this paper.
In a study of three anthologies of "love stories" by women writers, Love Songs (1999), Lovers (2001), and Scarlet Labyrinth (2002), characteristics of the Heisei version of ren’ai writing will be examined. Of special note will be Yuikawa Kei, Japan’s most recent female recipient of a prestigious literary award for romantic adventures in prose: Lovers Looking Back (Katagoshi no koibito, 2001; 126th Naoki Prize, 2002). Of particular concern will be the traditions both retained and newly created in current ren’ai writing. And, the central point of issue will, of course, be whether Japanese literary circles are entering a new era or merely passing through a cyclical encounter with romance.
Organizer: Saadia Pekkanen, Middlebury College
Chair and Discussant: Edward J. Lincoln, The Brookings Institution
Keywords: Japan and trade, multilateralism, regionalism, bilateralism, World Trade Organization (WTO), Free Trade Areas (FTAs).
Over the course of the last decade, Japanese trade diplomacy has undergone such profound changes that it can no longer be described as passive or defensive. Instead, as the actions of the Japanese government demonstrate, it has become increasingly proactive across a number of multilateral, regional, and bilateral forums. This panel traces the emergence of Japanese proactivism in trade, with the goal of assessing its sources, directions, and implications. What has led Japan to focus on the antidumping agenda so closely in the WTO system (Pekkanen)? Why has Japan been more willing to liberalize agricultural policies in the GATT/WTO than in bilateral trade negotiations with the United States (Davis)? How can we compare Japan’s strategies across different regional forums such as ASEAN Plus Three and APEC (Ravenhill)? Why is Japan engaging in bold experimentation with preferential trading in the form of bilateral free trade agreements, such as with Singapore and Mexico (Solis)?
Why the Relative Political Power of Domestic Industries Matters in the WTO: The Steel Industry and Japan’s Antidumping Agenda
Saadia Pekkanen, Middlebury College
Antidumping has been one of the most contentious bilateral issues between the U.S. and Japan and it provides an excellent illustration of the way the nature of U.S.-Japanese trade relations and trade policies have been changing. Since the birth of the WTO in 1995, Japan has taken up the banner against antidumping in the WTO arena far more forcefully, especially against the United States. A statistical examination of all of Japan’s WTO dispute settlement activities reveals a startling concentration on the antidumping agenda. How can we account for this concentration? I trace the evolution of Japanese legal tactics related to antidumping in the WTO since 1995, and relate them to domestic political factors and processes. I argue that the relative political power of industries at the domestic level has important consequences for governments’ legal actions in the WTO. A closer look at domestic politics reveals that the steel industry is the single most important beneficiary of Japan’s legal tactics related to antidumping, and has increasingly become a major vocal force favoring the WTO. Although the Japanese government has filed complaints on behalf of other industries, the pattern of WTO dispute settlement activities clearly reveals that it has not been as active on their behalf as it has been for the steel industry.
Why Rules Persuade More Than Threats: The Role of GATT/WTO in Japanese Agricultural Trade Liberalization
Christina Davis, Princeton University
The political influence of farmers in Japan is well known and accounts for the extensive government intervention into agricultural markets that make Japanese farmers among the most protected in the world. However, while farmers are powerful, they are not all powerful. Negotiations on agricultural trade policy have included both dramatic negotiation failures and negotiations that produce substantial liberalization. What accounts for the surprising success of some negotiations, such as the 1988 decision to open beef markets and the 1993 decision to end the ban against rice imports? Common explanations that foreign pressure from the United States forced these changes provide only a partial answer that is unable to explain why U.S. demands in bilateral negotiations and APEC have been less successful than its demands in the GATT/WTO multilateral framework. This paper argues that the dispute settlement process of the GATT/WTO increases the negotiation stakes and changes the domestic political balance in Japan to favor liberalization. I evaluate the argument with statistical analysis of U.S. negotiations on agricultural trade with Japan from 1970 to 1999 and with more detailed discussion of several important negotiation cases. The findings show that legal framing in the negotiation structure adds more leverage for liberalization than threats. In a final broader comparison, I provide evidence that Japan is particularly responsive to pressure from international trade law relative to other governments and explain this as a function of its trade interests and strong sense of duty towards international rules.
Japan, Regionalism, and Transregionalism
John Ravenhill, University of Edinburgh
Since joining the GATT in 1955, Japan has been among the most enthusiastic proponents of multi-lateralism in international trade relations. Japanese governments have been outspoken in their condemnation of discriminatory regional trade agreements, particularly the various incarnations of the European Union. To the extent that Tokyo itself promoted regionalism in the Asia-Pacific in the last quarter of the twentieth century, its preference until the White Paper on International Trade of 1998 was for collaborative arrangements that were non-discriminatory towards non-member states, and which extended beyond East Asia. The Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) grouping appeared to be a very close fit with Japanese preferences for regional design. The 1998 White Paper signaled the adoption of a new stance on preferential trade agreements, labeled by the Japanese government as a "multi-layered" approach. Since then, Tokyo has engaged in discussions with several other governments to explore the establishment of bilateral free trade agreements, the first treaty from which was signed with Singapore in January 2002. In addition, Japan has participated in various East Asian (ASEAN Plus Three) initiatives. This paper explores the implications of Japan’s new approach to regionalism for collaboration at two levels: the "regional," that is, with other East Asian countries through ASEAN Plus Three, and the "transregional" level, that is, the broader APEC grouping.
The Politics of Free Trade Agreements: Japan’s Trade Strategy in the Twenty-First Century
Mireya Solis, Brandeis University
Japan’s bold experimentation with preferential trading in recent years represents one of the most significant departures in Japanese trade policy of the past half-century. Why is Japan now interested in pursuing bilateral free trade negotiations, given that in the past it clearly rejected this policy option? This paper seeks to identify the causes (domestic and international) behind Japan’s recent endorsement of preferential trading. A major concern is whether the recent FTA negotiations represent a break from past patterns of Japanese trade policy-making (in terms of domestic interest group representation and bureaucratic politics). For instance, will agriculture continue to block liberalization strategies or will a coalition of exporters and investors, enticed by the promise of privileged market access in a FTA area, prevail? Finally, this paper intends to compare Japanese FTA negotiations with Singapore and Mexico in order to understand more the Japanese criteria for the selection of preferential trading partners.
Organizer: Melanie Trede, New York University
Chair and Discussant: Christine Guth, Independent Scholar
Keywords: fragmentation of artifacts, Japan, art history, cultural studies, premodern to modern periods.
Dismemberment and reevaluation of the resulting fragments has been a long-standing cultural practice in Japan. Whole buildings were dismantled and reassembled in other places and contexts; garments were cut apart and preserved in pieces, assuming divergent social, religious and cultural meanings; even paintings and calligraphies were cut up, remounted and reappraised for various reasons and purposes. Despite the ubiquity of this phenomenon, there is little conceptual or empirical research dealing with the mechanics or meanings of fragmentation in Japan.
Our panel seeks to profile this issue by presenting three case studies that examine objects of different media, including hanging scrolls, handscroll paintings, and textiles, created in premodern periods. The "lives" of these artifacts following their fragmentation, dispersal and dislocation will be explored, focusing on their nineteenth and twentieth century reception. Particular attention will be devoted to the role of art historical scholarship and terminologies, social networks, art markets, and other factors that contributed to the heterogeneous fates of these "objects in pieces." In keeping with the interdisciplinary nature of the topic, panelists will draw on a variety of methodologies, ranging from collecting theories and anthropological concepts to social and art historical approaches.
While incompletely produced works of literature and art ("Bruchstücke") were a hallmark of the aesthetics of German romanticism, the Japanese practice of actively dismembering artifacts and adapting them for use, display, and appreciation is of an entirely different nature. The commentator of this panel will expand the horizons of the papers by offering comparative analyses and intercultural perspectives.
Arhats in Boston: The Case of the Daitokuji Five Hundred Rakan
Gregory P. Levine, University of California, Berkeley
From December 1894 to March 1895, Bostonians had the opportunity to view Buddhist paintings of startling iconography and description never before shown in the West: forty-four Chinese images of Arhats, part of the one-hundred scroll set of the Five Hundred Rakan completed in ca. 1178 and held for centuries by the Japanese Buddhist monastery Daitokuji.
Exhibited at the Museum of Fine Arts, the Daitokuji paintings sent ripples of sensation among the city’s Victorian cognoscenti, connoisseurs, and followers of Buddhism. The Rakan were also exhibited in New York, Philadelphia, and, apparently, in Europe. Not only did the MFA exhibition foster a spectacle of viewing, it led to a spectacular acquisition.
Ten paintings, touted as masterpieces of Song Chinese Buddhist art, were singled out, purchased for the sum of $10,000, and came to reside permanently in Boston never to return home to Kyoto. In the first decade of the twentieth century, two additional paintings entered the collection of the American millionaire Charles L. Freer. This paper examines the journey of the Daitokuji Rakan during the late nineteenth century and introduces materials that help us better understand their departure from the monastery, reception abroad (in popular and art historical contexts), diasporic fragmentation, and later re-constitution (re-incarnation) at Daitokuji. As a meditation on the lives of valued art objects, it suggests that physical relocation, fragmentation, and recuperation are to be expected but that, along the way, art history produces particular dis-integrations and "disfigurements."
Aesthetic Evaluations, Fragmentations, and the Art Market of Japanese Handscrolls: A Case Study
Melanie Trede, New York University
This paper contrasts the "lives" of two sets of narrative paintings, both of the same subject matter and format, the Konda sôbyô engi emaki (Illuminated Handscrolls of the Miraculous Stories of the Konda Imperial Tomb). The earlier work dates to the fourteenth century and can be traced in three fragments covering six separate scenes which survive in different collections. The later set of the early fifteenth century has remained intact in the original collection of the Konda shrine in Osaka prefecture and was designated an important cultural property. Why have these two sets of scrolls met such different fates?
Tracing the histories of the two scrolls in regional guidebooks, handscroll evaluations of the early-modern and modern periods and other secondary sources, the following problems will be discussed. The breaking up of handscrolls has been a practice in Japan from at least the fifteenth century on, but the factors which contribute to the fragmentation of specific scrolls while others survive untouched have not been analyzed in scholarship to date. The formation of an aesthetics of modern art history in the treatment of scroll paintings plays an equally important role in this process as does the art market and collecting activities both in Japan and outside.
While focusing on a case study, this paper seeks to broaden the critical thinking about handscroll fragment-ations by raising larger issues involving the aesthetic and commercial reception of paintings in Japan and outside.
Tsujigahana: A Modern Label for Sixteenth-Century Japanese Textile Fragments
Terry Milhaupt, Independent Scholar
This paper situates the fragmentation and labeling of Japanese textiles at the crossroads where collecting practice intersects with the art market. Many textile fragments bearing the tsujigahana label today were initially produced as secular garments in sixteenth-century Japan. Subsequently donated to temples upon the death of their owners, the garments were reconfigured into altar cloths or banners. In the late nineteenth century, these sacred textiles emerged from their religious sanctuaries and circulated as collectible items in the antique market. Today, tsujigahana fragments sell for enormous sums at art auctions.
A strong correlation exists between a textile’s identification as tsujigahana and its aesthetic and economic appreciation. Yet the sixteenth-century meaning of the term is debated among Japanese scholars, who have yet to recover physical or documentary evidence linking the word tsujigahana (often translated as "flowers at the crossroads") to fabrics labeled as such in modern scholarly publications.
A coterie of modern painters, dyers, and dealers played a pivotal role in transforming tsujigahana from a term describing garments into a label for highly coveted museum objects. As they preserved and classified fragments of clothes originally worn by the upper classes of sixteenth-century society, these collectors constructed the modern-day brand name of tsujigahana. By tracing the four-hundred-year life of a select group of fragments, this paper reveals the process through which a specific type of cloth, today referred to as tsujigahana, attained its name and present status within the hierarchy of Japanese textiles.
Organizer and Chair: Elizabeth Lillehoj, DePaul University
Discussants: Ellen P. Conant, Independent Scholar; Satoko Tamamushi, Musashino Art University; Toshio Watanabe, Chelsea College of Art and Design; Gennifer S. Weisenfeld, Duke University; Leila Wice, Columbia University
Keywords: art, historiography, collection, exhibition.
This roundtable addresses various issues stemming from the creation of Japanese art history, an academic method that emerged in the late 19th–early 20th centuries based on Western models. These issues include: (1) what is Japanese art history’s relation to other scholarly fields and social discourses; how was it informed by pre-existing Japanese modes of chronicling art; and what impact has its categories had on the study of Japanese visual and material cultures? (2) what spurred collection and exhibition during this period and what spurred artists of the day (related to a recent boom in exhibitions and publications about Meiji/Taishô art, ranging from Nihonga to export wares)? (3) what media have been included/excluded from the parameters of "art" with the elevation of painting, sculpture and architecture to high arts and the concurrent devaluation of ceramics, lacquer and textiles to decorative arts?
We encourage participants to highlight one or more of the above issues in relation to his/her publications, exhibitions and research. The participants hold academic and museum positions in the U.S., Europe and Asia, representing various professional backgrounds and levels. They include researchers of architecture, textiles, painting and prints.
Before the conference, each participant will post a specific question to the Japan Art History Forum e-mail list for the group to begin considering, and at the roundtable participants will have 10 minutes each to offer comments, followed by open discussion. This format should catalyze a lively exchange of ideas and maximize the participation of our scholarly community.
Organizer: Scott P. O’Bryan, University of Alabama
Chair: William M. Tsutsui, University of Kansas
Discussants: Sheldon Garon, Princeton University; William M. Tsutsui, University of Kansas
Keywords: Japan, post-World War II, economics, consumption, economic growth.
The intellectual, institutional, and technological foundations of the mass consumption economies of the industrialized world largely took shape during the middle decades of the twentieth century, and they continue today to govern the economic life of nations and individuals alike. This panel examines the obsession with the dream of the "abundance economy" as it was increasingly displayed in official and scholarly conceptions of a reconstructed Japan in the first two decades after World War II and then consciously transmitted through a variety of campaigns and educative initiatives to a national public audience. Panel presenters consider the relationship between ideologies of rapid material expansion and mass consumption as expressed by economic experts and bureaucratic planners and the reception and experience of these as they played out in the lives of individual Japanese. The panel also introduces a transnational perspective by speaking to the newly large role of America as the metropole of economic and technical expertise during the postwar period and to the reception in Japan of American visions of postwar abundance as the answer to the ills of twentieth-century capitalism. More broadly, the panel attempts to situate Japanese experience within the larger postwar history of a preoccupation with economic growth based on the engine of mass consumption lifestyles. In an effort to encourage lively discussion among panelists and our audience, we will not read papers, but rather will each give a spoken talk limited strictly to fifteen minutes, followed by comments from the discussants on common themes.
Statistical Knowledge and Consumption as Virtue in Post-World-War II Japan
Scott P. O’Bryan, University of Alabama
New modes of knowledge emphasizing aggregate analysis of empirical fact began to change the face of economic practice in industrialized nations around the world in the mid-twentieth century. Focusing on the fields of statistical analysis that lay at the heart of these changes, this presentation attempts to recover the history in Japan of the macroeconomic statistic of GNP, which by the 1950s and 1960s came fundamentally to govern the ways national economies were conceived and regulated in terms of "growth." My presentation continues by showing the ways in which this emerging field of GNP analysis contributed to an increasingly intense focus on measuring and promoting national consumption. The accounting techniques of GNP studies required aggregate measurement of the component flows of the macroeconomy taken as a whole. Key elements of this statistical vision of the economy as a unified ledger were statistical gauges of aggregate consumption. These in turn supported Keynesian principles that understood consumption as the engine of a healthy economy. Government bureaucrats and scholars, enamored by the late 1950s with the apparent predictive power of macroeconomic analysis, turned with vigor to the tasks of producing consumption statistics and demand models by which they hoped to promote national consumption. Through their conscious presentation of these research agendas to a wider public, economists helped popularize a national vocabulary of economic growth and contrib-uted to the legitimization of a new order of mass consumption by linking the daily behavior of individual consumers to the largest questions of national power and purpose.
From Peasant to Consumer: Hopes and Choices in a Postwar Village Family
Simon Partner, Duke University
How much control did ordinary farm families have over the enormous changes in their lives during the early postwar decades? To what extent did they acquiesce in the dominant ideologies of the postwar, and to what extent did they resist? What considerations guided their choices of spending, saving, and consumption? And how satisfied were they with the new shape of postwar rural life?
I seek to address the above questions by focusing on the postwar experiences of a rural family in Niigata prefecture. Like other rural Japanese, the members of this family were the objects of a series of "top-down" programs to change their daily lives in the first three postwar decades, starting with the "democratization" initiatives of the allied occupation, and continuing with the "lifestyle improvement" activities of the Ministry of Agriculture, and the marketing activities of corporations interested in coaxing thrifty farmers into a consumption-oriented lifestyle. All these programs were predicated to a greater or lesser extent on ideologies of a "brighter" life, offering linked visions of political liberation and material abundance to those who acquiesced.
Through a close study of the economic progress, choices and coercions, labor and leisure, expressed desires, sacrifices and trade-offs, and ultimate transformation of the daily life of a single family, I seek to superimpose this family’s story against well-established ideological, economic, and historical constructs, highlighting the areas of elision as well as those of divergence.
Ishibashi Tanzan and the "Positive Policy" in Economics
Mark Metzler, Oakland University
In the long history of economic thought, pro-consumption, pro-spending views have until recent times been both rare and morally suspect. In modern Japan, this sense remained strong in the early twentieth century, when well established anti-spending themes were echoed in a series of governmental campaigns to promote popular frugality. It was in the context of the drive to promote frugality that economic journalist Ishibashi Tanzan articulated a pro-consumption counter-vision. Ishibashi’s ideas, first laid out in a 1931 national radio broadcast directed to the women of Japan, were impossible of realization at the time. After briefly sketching the shape of Ishibashi’s ideas, I will explore some of the ways that as postwar Finance Minister, MITI Minister, and Prime Minister, Ishibashi took the political lead in realizing the dream of a mass-consumption economy.
Organizer: Patricia Welch, Hofstra University
Chair: Lorie Brau, University of New Mexico
Discussant: J. Scott Miller, Brigham Young University
Keywords: Japan, rakugo, performance, oral narrative, cultural critique, humor, wordplay, identity.
A story popularized in mid-Meiji rakugo narrates the encounter between blind men and an elephant. Having taken hold of three different parts of the elephant, their fingers "see" entirely different animals. Once so confident in their own critical authority, each man comes to doubt the others’ versions (as well as his own?). It is no accident that this story was popular during the Meiji period, a time of immense social change and cultural dislocation. "Elephants" lurked everywhere and rakugo provided much-needed popular entertainment and commentary on a rapidly changing society. The power to name and explain through language in play is central to rakugo, historically and at present.
This interdisciplinary panel raises fundamental questions about the relationship between wordplay, oral narrative, and literary texts, to show that rakugo wordplay is more than fun and games. Focusing primarily on her own ethnographic research, Lorie Brau argues that performers and fans use rakugo language to construct identity and manage significant social transactions. Taking a more literary-historical perspec-tive, Patricia Welch demonstrates how storytellers create a multi-functional liminal space where social reality is confronted, challenged, and re-created. Noriko Watanabe relates how rakugo capitalizes on varieties of linguistic incompetence as a prominent source of humor. Joshua Young examines some Meiji-era writings on rakugo to explore the problems that this performance form, and its tradition, presented to the vision of a national cultural and literary sensibility. These presentations contribute to the growing field of research on Japan’s oral narrative performance genres.
Linguistic Incompetence in Rakugo Stories
Noriko Watanabe, Baruch College, City University of New York
Rakugo is a verbal art and a comic entertainment genre at the same time. Its humor draws upon a variety of theme sources. In my presentation, I will show that rakugo capitalizes on the linguistic incompetence of characters in the story as a prominent source of humor. The incompetence ranges widely across linguistic levels: vocabulary, idioms, grammar, and readings of kanji and texts, to more pragmatic and interactional uses of various speech genres, such as greetings, small talk, and stories.
A story titled Amida ike, performed by Katsura Beicho, is filled with such linguistic humor. It features a fool who is unable to re-tell jokes he has just heard. In other words, it is a comical story about bad joke-telling, i.e., an act that normally mobilizes one’s ability to manipulate language rules and exercises creativity. The fool’s linguistic incompetence produces humor through multiple layers of mesmerizing language mistakes: on the vocabulary level homophone mix-ups lead to word-level puns, on the interactional level a memorized small talk does not work in a new context, and mistakenly the fool uses a punch line as an answer to a serious question, all of which results in a complex triple entendre grand punch line that cuts across multiple levels of the story structure.
Combining additional examples from other stories, I will illustrate the humor in the verbal art that is created against the backdrop of a culture that is highly literate yet values sophistication in orality.
Authenticity, Authority, Adaptability, and the Rakugo World
Patricia Welch, Hofstra University
This presentation will demonstrate the cultural implications of rakugo performance in the Meiji period, particularly its uneasy role in the development of a new "modern" Japanese subject after the Meiji Restoration of 1868. My presentation illuminates how storytellers used themes common in the age—authenticity, authority, and adaptability—within the space of performance. Using examples from rakugo texts such as "Toku the Boatman," I will show how rakugo performers critiqued the excesses of unchecked modernization, put voice to the anxieties of the age, while simultaneously helping to mold spectators into the newly-emerging social norm. My presentation demonstrates how rakugo performers created a multi-functional, liminal space where social reality was confronted, challenged, and re-created. Although rakugo provided a forum for social resistance through carnivalesque inversions, it was also a culturally conservative entertainment promoting conformity appropriate for the age. By investigating the connection between themes common in the Meiji story world and the "real world" outside the yose, I hope to reveal the intricate nuances of the interplay between these realms. For example, Toku in "Toku the Boatman," the wastrel son of a powerful merchant, attempts to become a boatman after his disinheritance. Using the actual authority of his higher social position, he claims false authority in the role of boatman, demonstrated speciously through costume and the assumption of a "boatman-like" name. The story’s conclusion reveals the limits of his adaptability, and in this manner explores the cultural dislocation that lay at the heart of the development of a new Japanese subject.
Rakugo Rhetoric as Cultural Capital in Contemporary Japan
Lorie Brau, University of New Mexico
In rakugo storytelling, language is power. It symbolizes class distinctions in Aona, a story in which a humble gardener becomes fascinated by and unsuccessfully mimics his wealthy employer’s kakushikotoba (hidden language, code). In Kohome, it is manipulated (ineffectively) to wheedle a drink. And in other stories, it enables neighborhood know-it-alls, who pretend they understand big words, to feel big. In fact, countless rakugo tales demonstrate the potential (usually unrealized, to hilarious effect) of speech acts to perform identities, achieve personal gain, and violate boundaries.
In this paper, I look beyond the stories themselves to inquire into the role of rakugo’s performance culture in creating identities, asserting power, and flouting convention in contemporary Japan. I argue that rakugo today constitutes a kind of kakushikotoba or code, a resource to be exploited by performers and fans. Storytellers underscore the potential for jokes to serve as exchange objects in social relations when they offer them up to their audiences as "miyagebanashi" (gift stories). Nowadays, however, it is not only knowledge of jokes but also familiarity with rakugo’s archaic vocabulary that confers distinction on the producers and consumers of the art.
My presentation draws on storytellers’ present-ations of self on stage, as well as on fan discourse and my experiences as a storyteller’s apprentice, to examine how rakugo wordplay and valorization of rhetorical competence function in storytellers’ and fans’ constructions of identity and social interactions.
The Educating of Meiji Rakugo
Joshua Young, Cornell University
While the popular theater of rakugo, with its performances in small halls dotted around the city and its stories focusing on events of contemporary language use, still flourished at the end of the nineteenth century, the form also became an object of theoretical interest for intellectuals and an object to publish in the new media of the newspaper. In this presentation I will look at some of the Meiji-era writings on the rakugo performance form, examining in particular the problems that this performance form, and its tradition, presented to the vision of a national cultural and literary sensibility.
In essays such as Wajutsu shinron (A new hypothesis of the storytelling arts) and Share no tetsugaku (A philosophy of wit), the popular and comical art form was viewed seriously as an opportunity for social betterment. These texts worked with a certain understanding of language as a closed system, and promoted the performer to the role of a commanding narrator, or translator, who could master ambiguity and transmit stable meanings to a comprehending audience. Though these theoretical critiques of rakugo are generally acknowledged to have had little impact on the tradition itself, since there are no records of performers reading such writings, I would like to pose the question as to whether the re-evaluation of the form found in these writings has actually remade the rakugo tradition by impacting the way we have read this form in the twentieth century.
Chair: Christena L. Turner, University of California, San Diego
Public Welfare and the Abuse of Free Speech: Cultural Values in the Interpretation of Free Speech in Japan and the U.S.
Yuri Obata, University of Colorado, Boulder
The Japanese Supreme Court often uses the concept of "public welfare" to support its decisions. Although the Japanese Constitution prohibits the governmental prior restraint, the concept of public welfare gives the Court a means of overriding this constitutional language. In the obscenity decisions, public welfare is used to prevent a free exchange of ideas in a democratic environment. The Court holds that the public welfare requires a peaceful, non-controversial society—although achieving one may contravene the Constitution.
This paper will use historical and legal analysis to investigate the development of the concept of public welfare in Japan. The paper posits that the concept of public welfare originated in pre-modern Japanese society, and has been adapted to different political and social discourses. Contemporary Japan continues to rely on these past ideologies to maintain the uniqueness of its culture.
To focus on the concept of public welfare in Japan, this paper will compare the Japanese Supreme Court’s obscenity decisions with obscenity rulings by the U.S. Supreme Court. This paper posits that both courts arrive at the same point—finding obscenity to be outside free speech protection—but by different routes. Japanese courts find obscenity to be an abuse of public welfare, while American courts rely on moral criteria to hold that the First Amendment does not protect obscene publication. Although such differences are based on the cultural values unique to each society, this paper argues that the concept of public welfare applied in Japanese Supreme Court is antithetical to free speech.
Japanese Adult Karaoke Learning
Hideo Watanabe, William Paterson University
There has been a dramatic jump in the number and involvement of Japanese adults studying karaoke in the last decade. Housewives and retired people enjoy karaoke learning in groups at community centers, private institutions, and karaoke bars. Compared with traditional forms of learning such as Noh chanting, karaoke learning offers more freedom, simplicity, and is less expensive. This newer form of learning makes students’ participation in the social world easier. Karaoke learning is based on students’ interests and spontaneity, and thus is not "education" but "learning." The learning is self-directed, generative, and dynamic, and as a multi-purpose activity, it allows students many individual benefits. Students participate in various activities, experience different worlds, and consequ-ently establish a new sense of identity. These characteristics of karaoke learning perfectly match current Japanese adults’ interests and make the learning very popular.
Karaoke learning represents a successful reconciliation of individual expression with group conformity. On one hand the Japanese value coop-eration, harmony, and solidarity, with group behavior being a significant part of Japanese life. On the other hand, respect for individual idiosyncrasies is also pervasive among the Japanese. They perceive that the postwar education’s emphasis on individualism and egalitarianism has increased their interest in and respect for the individual. These opposing values are well blended in karaoke learning where Japanese adults apply individual interests onto a group environment, and individual benefits are achieved by group collaboration. This grafting of innovation onto a traditional and formalized learning system reflects adults’ increasing appreciation of individualized and egalitarian types of social affiliation in Japanese society.
New Music for New Communities: Festival Creation and Musical Innovation in Contemporary Japan
Shawn Bender, University of California, San Diego
A number of anthropologists have noted how local governments in Japan have encouraged the creation of community festivals (matsuri) as a means of cultivating a sense of belonging in newly-amalgamated communities. While the friction and strife that these festivals often unintentionally cause has been well studied, less scholarly attention has focused on how the need for these festivals to be novel community events has spawned the creation of new forms of artistic performance and participation in community life.
This paper traces the connection between the establishment of new community festivals and the innovations in one of their essential features: drumming. Drumming on large, barrel-shaped drums called taiko has been a part of shrine-centered festivals in Japan for centuries. Since the 1980s, however, new kinds of taiko groups, which differ from their predecessors on the basis of membership, gender, repertoire, and performance style, have proliferated in Japan. I argue that the distinctive features of these groups can be attributed to the social context of non-shrine-centered festivals in which they first emerged.
While this paper contributes most directly to the substantial literature on festivals in Japan and to the emerging literature on taiko performance, it also suggests that the simple distinction in Japan between folk music—characterized by the performance of traditional pieces by a parish community—and popular music—characterized by authorship, open participation, and creativity—needs to be redrawn. Additionally, it seeks to counterbalance critical studies of community-building efforts in Japan with evidence of popular forms of community-based participation.
The Invisible Code: Socio-economic Status, Parenting, and Schooling in Japan
Yoko Yamamoto, University of California, Berkeley
"Single-class, middle class society" is a picture of Japan believed not only worldwide but also inside Japan. Egalitarianism is especially emphasized in the field of education, and social class has been a sensitive topic in the field of child development. Early-childhood educators in Japan may say that the research on socio-economic status (SES) is dangerous, that it holds potential for further segregation of people depending on high and low SES. However, without examining and finding elements that determine the reproduction of status through education, unequal educational opportunities remain and continue. Why are there different educational opportunities depending on SES? What is the culture of different socio-economic classes like?
This study, which focuses on social class in the realm of education and parenting, challenges the long-held assumptions that Japanese society and the educational system are egalitarian. In this paper, I analyze the cultures of SES groups which are likely to impact upon parental beliefs, goals, and styles of child education in Japan. By examining literature, I investigate factors which influence schooling and parenting in each class. Furthermore, I argue that the invisible code is shared and transmitted to children in each class as a way to reproduce the SES. Connections between family life and school which influence parental goals, beliefs in children’s ability and maternal involvement, and available resources for child education are distinctively different depending on the socio-economic status of the family.
Japanese People Watching Subtitled Japanese TV Shows: Function or Aesthetic?
Yuki Watanabe, University of Texas, Dallas
In the mid-1990s, Japanese television shows began using subtitles in programs targeted for native speakers of Japanese. The purpose of these subtitles was not to provide a translation for foreigners. The target audience was native speakers of Japanese after all. This raises the question of why native-to-native subtitling rose to prominence and why it endures today. Rather than waning, this trend appears to be intensifying as new computer graphics technology enables ever more sophisticated integration of subtitling into Japanese programming. This paper analyzes the Japanese subtitling phenomenon and develops a new explanation of why it occurred. The paper identifies several distinct uses of subtitling in contemporary Japanese television and proposes that these disparate functions interact synergistically to create new dramatic forms. Paradoxically, these new dramatic forms serve to express traditional Japanese aesthetic norms. In particular, Japanese subtitling: (1) helps viewers understand softly spoken or unclearly articulated dialogue by providing a visible transcript; (2) adds emphasis to the timing of punch lines or other important moments with flashy fonts; (3) intensifies and dramatizes scenes by adding parenthetical statements not actually articulated by the people on screen; and (4) helps viewers understand unfamiliar terms by providing additional information and/or background. These different functions of subtitling feed back into the content realm of TV shows. Above all, subtitling allows those who are on screen to "stay subtle," in accordance with well-known aesthetic norms in Japan. Thus, new technology augments an established medium, creating new channels through which to deliver a traditional Japanese message.
Organizer: Simon Avenell, University of California, Berkeley
Chair and Discussant: Patricia G. Steinhoff, University of Hawaii, Manoa
This panel explores innovative strategies in four Japanese social movements. From the perspectives of minority, pollution, peace, and proposal movements, our papers reveal the crucial role of activists in formulating new strategies and mobilizing new resources. Research on social movements confirms the role of institutions in patterning and structuring collective behavior. Nevertheless, beyond institutional constraint there remains a space for tactical innovation. Our panel spotlights this space, highlighting the all-important intermediary role of activists in translating potentialities into social movements.
Timothy George identifies four tactical approaches to mercury poisoning in Minamata. Not only does he show how tactics changed temporally, but also, how they differed among activists depending on individual preferences and assessments. Movements, activists, and strategies, George reminds us, are never monolithic.
Tessa Morris-Suzuki considers the potential of new media in the peace movement. Through comparison with "pre-Internet" movements, she suggests that the impact of such media is contingent on both the technology itself, and also macro-transformations in social movements and public-private sphere interaction.
Akemi Nakamura analyzes the anti-fingerprinting movement, arguing that participation by majority Japanese stimulated mass mobilization among Koreans. Activists realized that many Koreans consid-ered themselves "residents of Japan." Success thus depended on stimulating this identity by giving the movement mainstream legitimacy.
Simon Avenell looks at proposal-style citizen movements from the 1970s. While agreeing that material conditions and events laid the foundation for these movements, he argues that activists’ preferences and innovative conceptual work were crucial in effecting the shift to proposal and shaping its subsequent development.
Minamata Activists and the "System" from Meiji to Heisei
Timothy S. George, University of Rhode Island
Minamata, because of the mercury poisoning of tens of thousands of people, is a symbol of the costs of high growth and of the citizens’ movement. Focusing on specific individuals and groups, this paper looks at the strategies of activists (victims and supporters) in dealing with the "system" (company and central and local governments), revealing four basic and often overlapping patterns.
First, victims, operating from a position of relative weakness, have often had to beg for compensation from a system they see as powerful and unchangeable. This was the pattern followed by patients for several years after the discovery of Minamata disease in 1956, and has been the strategy since the 1920s of the fishing cooperatives whose livelihood has been affected by pollution from the Chisso factory.
Second, activists, without joining or overturning the system, have occasionally been able to use new assets and allies to shift the balance of power enough to force the "system" to recognize the legitimacy of victims’ complaints and to compensate them substantially. This pattern was most prominent from the late 1960s to the early 1970s, when Minamata’s national and international exposure peaked.
Third, especially since the 1990s, some have worked with or within the system, though only at the local level, to expand and improve compensation and to rebuild the local society and economy.
Finally, some refuse to ask the system for anything, in order to avoid being swallowed up or defined by it, and instead have worked to rebuild individual and community identity.
The Interrelated Nature of Three Perspectives and the Success of the Anti-fingerprinting Movement in Japan, 1980–1991
Akemi Nakamura, University of Hawaii, Manoa
Scholars of social movements tend to apply only one of three dominant theories to explain social movements: political opportunity, resource mobilization, or framing. However, such analysis, especially of movements by the powerless, seems insufficient since the access of such groups to any of these means is often limited if not completely blocked. Moreover, on their own none of these factors can bring success to a movement: they are interrelated and complement each other’s shortcomings.
By analyzing why and how the anti-fingerprinting movement that began in Japan in 1980 emerged, developed, and succeeded, this paper illustrates the interrelated nature of these theories. It argues that it is necessary for movements of the powerless to achieve all these factors to succeed, and it is this interrelated nature that ultimately brought success to the anti-fingerprinting movement. It claims that successful mobilization of the Japanese majority in support activities was the key for mass mobilization of Koreans into the movement—a mobilization which eventually created opportunities. Though Japanese society had long discriminated against Koreans, this collaboration was made possible first, by generational changes in identity claims among Koreans which shifted from a diasporic identity to an identity as residents of Japan, and second, by the development of a civil society more tolerant toward such claims.
The paper also addresses the separation between Koreans and their ethnic organization, responses from the Japanese government to unexpected disorientation, and political interactions between the Japanese and South Korean governments to solve the anti-fingerprinting problem.
New Media and Civil Society in Japan
Tessa Morris-Suzuki, Australian National University
The Internet and other new media are used by a growing number of social movements in Japan (as elsewhere) to disseminate their messages and rally support for their cause. This paper examines the use of new media by such movements, and offers some preliminary thoughts about their potential and limitations.
To understand the potential of contemporary on-line social movements, it is important to consider, not just Internet technology and its potential uses, but also the way in which changing media interact with transformations in the nature of social movements and the relationship between the "public" and "private" spheres.
Focusing particularly on the case of peace movements in Japan, this paper will compare the communication of information by "pre-Internet" movements such as the anti-Vietnam War group Beheiren with those of more recent groups, particularly the peace groups which have emerged in response to the September 11 attacks and their aftermath. I consider how the repertoires of action of such groups are evolving in the context of the spread of new media and the shift from "world war" to "global war," and use this as a basis for some reflections on the changing nature of "civil society" in the twenty-first century.
Reframing Japanese Citizens’ Movements: From Protest to Proposal
Simon Avenell, University of California, Berkeley
In the mid-1970s a group of activists began to transform the prevailing logic of protest in Japanese citizens’ movements. Rejecting what they termed the "accusation-style" of 1960s social movements, citizen activists conceptualized a new "proposal-style" of activism. Instead of accusing the state or corporate Japan of authoritarianism or environmental destruction, they suggested that citizens should channel their autonomous energies into the creation of alternatives which in time would lay the foundation for a different—and perhaps better—Japan.
My paper explores the dynamics of this transformation from "accusation" to "proposal." I argue that the role of core activists as "idea producers" is crucial in explaining the shift in movement style. By drawing on cultural resources from earlier movements, by framing their ideas to resonate with constituent group identities, and by skillfully identifying new opportunities for activism, movement activists successfully mobilized and developed a new generation of citizens’ movements. While accusation-style movements by necessity continued to exist, they were now supplemented by a new realm of alternative activism. And significantly, it was this new cluster of movements that formed one important basis for non-profit-sector expansion since the 1980s.
My paper addresses two central questions. What changed in citizen activism with the advent of proposal movements, and why? And what were the long-term impacts of proposal-style activism for Japanese civil society, if any?
Organizer: Maki Fukuoka, University of Chicago
Chair and Discussant: Charles Shiro Inouye, Tufts University
Keywords: Japan, 19th century, art history, cultural history, media studies.
Over the past twenty years, the study of visual culture in Japan has exploded as an exciting new field. In particular, groundbreaking research by historian Naoyuki Kinoshita has been a catalyst to numerous books and exhibitions revealing the modern history of Japanese visual media, including painting, photography, architecture and war memorials.
This panel explores developments in Japanese visual culture in the 19th century with an eye to key innovations in the techniques and technologies of visual representation. These changes encompassed Japanese methods of painting and illustration as well as new visual forms imported from the West, such as oil painting, photography and filmic projection. An instrumental role was played not only by artists, but also by Japanese technicians, bureaucrats, and entrepreneurs. The impact of their innovations extended beyond the world of art to affect Japanese thought and language, science, politics, and social practices.
Naoyuki Kinoshita analyzes images connected to the Battle of Hakodate (1865) to show how war was visualized, commemorated and inscribed into the political and cultural memory of modern Japan.
Maki Fukuoka examines evolving visual techniques in botanical illustration between 1850 and 1870 to probe their relationship to the concept and language of accuracy, authenticity, and reality, the increasingly significant concepts during the period.
Andrea Lee explores how the spread of photography led to the popularization of portraiture in society and had implications for changing conceptions and representation of self, family, ritual and memory.
War and Visual Culture in Japan, 1860–1880
Naoyuki Kinoshita, University of Tokyo
Japan’s transition from the Tokugawa regime to the Meiji government was accompanied by several civil war battles and military conflicts with European and American powers. These battles coincided with the emergence of photography and newspapers as important new visual media that changed drastically the nature of Japanese war journalism.
This paper explores visual representations of the Battle of Hakodate, which clinched the victory of the new Meiji government over its adversaries. In October 1868, Enomoto Takeaki, a Shogun’s retainer opposing the shift in power, led eight fleets of ships and groups of men to Ezo, present-day Hokkaido. In the battle of Hakodate, Enomoto and his men held out for some seven months in an unsuccessful attempt to realize the establishment of an Ezo Republic until finally surrendering to the new government.
The paper will investigate visualizations of the battle by both the losing and winning sides in order to identify their respective differences. It will illuminate the interactions between new visual media and historical events, as well as the processes by which images of war were formed, commemorated and inscribed into the political and cultural memory of modern Japan.
Seeing and Knowing: Botanical Illustrations and Shifting Concepts of Accuracy
Maki Fukuoka, University of Chicago
This paper examines the activities of Shohyaku-sha, a group of botanists and zoologists working from 1830s on in Mino-han, the present-day Gifu area, and investigates their historical relationship to the concept of accuracy. In particular, I focus on prints made with inyo zuho, a method of making botanical illustrations employed predominantly by Shohyaku-sha members. It is a method of printmaking that involved rubbing ink on botanical specimens and taking impressions from them. These representations approximated the actual size of the plant and served as direct impressions and testimonies of the specimens in their studies, commanding a relationship to "actuality" in ways that woodblock prints, sketches, or copper-etching prints could not.
The ardent enthusiasm for and instrumental role of inyo zuho within the studies of Shohyaku-sha point to a system of evaluating accuracy in relation to veracity and actuality that these representations were thought to convey. Shohyaku-sha members like Ito Keisuke and Tanaka Yoshio also went on to occupy positions of prominence after the Meiji restoration in the institutionalization of natural science and museums. Their continued practice of inyo zuho at these new establishments attests to the pivotal role that inyo zuho played in the organization and distribution of knowledge in Meiji Japan.
By situating the prints of inyo zuho and the activities of Shohyakusha within the context of visual culture, I hope to shed new light on the questions of accuracy and veracity in pictorial representations in the late Tokugawa and early Meiji Japan.
The Popularization of Portrait Photography in Meiji Japan
Andrea Lee, University of Tokyo
The introduction of photography in 19th-century Japan was critical to the popularization of portraiture as a general social practice. Prior to the arrival of photography, the production of portraits had been confined largely to the social elite, including high-ranking aristocrats, military leaders, priests, or wealthy merchants. The diffusion of the camera by mid-Meiji Japan gave others unprecedented access to this practice. Yet demand for portraits among the general populace was not automatic. Exponents of portrait photography faced many obstacles, both technical and cultural, including fears that portrait taking would shorten the lifespan of the subject. Photographers and portrait studio entrepreneurs thus worked to teach their customers the value and desirable benefits of sitting before a camera. This paper traces the efforts of leaders of the movement to establish portrait taking as a common social practice. It also examines the impact they exerted on Meiji Japanese conceptions of self, family, ritual and memory. The paper draws upon a wide range of early Meiji materials including newspaper articles, photographs, advertisements, photographic manuals, and literary works.
Organizer and Chair: Brian O. Ruppert, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
Discussant: Janet Goodwin, Independent Scholar
Keywords: Japan, Hyiri, Buddhism, Institutions.
Generally envisioned as monks independent of major Buddhist temples who engage in one or another form of social welfare, the shadowy hijiri ("holy men") increasingly left traces from the twelfth century on, as they sometimes recorded their activities, and numerous other sources depicted them. At the same time, many studies of hijiri have focused on their presumably solitary origins rather than their connections with Buddhist institutions.
This panel focuses on relations between hijiri and Buddhist institutions as reflected in historical, literary, and pictorial sources in order to re-examine their social positions and representations in medieval Japan. Hiroki Kikuchi analyzes jikyosha ("upholders of the Lotus Sutra") of Todaiji to argue that such figures held official status in large temples. Brian Ruppert examines kanjin hijiri of Todaiji to clarify their affiliation with Shingon as well as the related connection between Shingon monks, Kami-Buddha amalgamation, and the Todaiji community. Haruko Wakabayashi explores historical, literary, and aesthetic representations of the hokaso (tonsured/lay entertainer) figure Jinen Koji (mid-late 13th c.) to understand how depictions of his affiliation with Zen reflect differing views of the Zen establishment. David Quinter analyzes Eison’s (1201–90) and Ninsho’s (1217–1303) emulation of Gyoki to clarify the differences and similarities in their views, attempting thereby to understand the character of their so-called institutionalization of hijiri.
Through examining these cases, we attempt to clarify the positions of hijiri in medieval Japanese society and to challenge assumptions that such figures were usually independent figures having few connections with powerful institutions of their day.
Medieval Todaiji and Jikyosha
Hiroki Kikuchi, Princeton University
Jikyo-sha refers to ascetics who "upheld" the Lotus Sutra in their practice. Scholars often note that they were especially active among the populace in mountain regions but, in fact, they also held status in major temples. A close examination of relevant sources reveals that many jikyosha were organized and given official status in Todaiji and, it would seem, other powerful temples in the medieval era.
First, Shunjobo Chogen, famous for his efforts to reconstruct Todaiji, previously practiced with jikyosha. In his later years, he sometimes held services with jikyosha for Todaiji’s reconstruction; indeed, he regarded activities of the jikyosha as important and apparently saw himself as one. Moreover, even after his death, jikyosha stayed in Todaiji and their activities there continued. One hundred jikyosha of Todaiji and Kofukuji recited 1,000 volumes of the Lotus Sutra in front of the Todaiji Daibutsuden in a well-funded annual rite. Most belonged to Hokkedoshu or Chumondoshu groups resident in the temples, were highly organized on the occasion, and together constituted at the rite an officially recognized group in Todaiji.
Their daily activities can also be understood through examining Nigatsudo and Hokkedo records. The famous Shuni’e (O’mizutori) rite was practiced by the Rengyoshu, some of whom were jikyosha. We can also glimpse their activities through the diary of Jinson, abbot of Daijoin, Kofukuji. He organized jikyosha for memorials honoring previous Daijo’in abbots.
In this paper, I will demonstrate that the jikyosha, a kind of hijiri, possessed status and continued their activities in major medieval temples.
Chogen and Shoshu: Shingon and Ise in "Kanjin Hijiri" Construction Efforts at Medieval Todaiji
Brian O. Ruppert, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
The illustrious monk Chogen (1121–1205) is known for his activities as the figure employed to gather materials and financial support (kanjin) for the reconstruction of Todaiji in the late 12th century. For the most part, scholars have seen Chogen as a figure independent of the Buddhist schools of his day, a hijiri who maintained no clear sectarian affiliation. However, while his active Pure Land interests are well known, the direct relationship of those interests to relic veneration and, by extension, Shingon Buddhism have only recently been investigated. Indeed, careful examination of relevant sources such as his Sazenshu (Collection of Good Works) indicate that Chogen continued throughout his life to be a Shingon monk, suggesting that his status as a "hijiri" was in no way incongruent with his sectarian affiliation. Moreover, analysis of his pilgrimage to Ise to pray for success in the construction efforts also suggests an intimate connection between Shingon, Kami-Buddha amalgamation (shinbutsu shugo), and medieval Todaiji.
Furthermore, Shoshu (1219–91), Chogen’s successor in kanjin at Todaiji, constituted a very similar figure and followed a similar pattern of conduct and affiliation. Shoshu was a fully affiliated Shingon monk throughout the period of his activities, and even made a pilgrimage to Ise, using Toji relics to pray for success in construction efforts at Todaiji.
I would like to suggest, in the light of this study, that scholars re-examine the notion that the hijiri are independent figures, and attempt to clarify the related association between medieval Todaiji, shinbutsu shugo, and Shingon.
The Hokaso Jinen Koji and His Affiliations with Zen
Haruko Wakabayashi, University of Tokyo
Jinen koji is a figure that appears in a number of No plays as a popular entertainer and preacher. He is identified as hokaso, or tonsured/lay entertainers who played various instruments as they danced and sang songs, many of which included Zen Buddhist teachings. In recent years, scholars have discovered sources that suggest that Jinen koji was a historical figure, possibly a disciple of Enni (1202–80), the founder of Tofukuji, one of the "Five Mountains" in Kyoto. These contemporary documents reflect two diverse views of Jinen koji. On the one hand, sources like Keiran shuyoshu, an encyclopedic work on Tendai Buddhism compiled in the early fourteenth century, mentions him in a chapter criticizing Zen, particularly Enni and his school. In such works, Jinen koji is treated as a member of the Zen establishment and is used to denounce Zen. On the other hand, sources such as Tengu zoshi, a narrative scroll from the late thirteenth century, distinguish him from the mainstream Zen schools. The Tengu zoshi depicts Jinen koji and his fellow hokaso as those who wrongly claim themselves as being Zen monks, misleading the mass from the true teachings of Buddha.
This paper, will first review the historical life of Jinen koji, not as a popular entertainer, but as a religious, hijiri-like figure through surviving sources. Then, it will examine how a figure like Jinen koji and his activities were perceived by various sectors of the Buddhist community, and how those perceptions reflect their assessment of the Zen establishment.
Emulating Gyoki: Ninsho, Eison, and the Institut-ionalization of the "Hijiri"
David Quinter, Stanford University
Study of the Shingon Ritsu founder, Eison (1201–90), has been greatly facilitated by a detailed autobiography he left behind. However, his leading disciple, Ninsho (1217–1303), wrote very little, and scholars therefore often turn to Eison’s work for glimpses into Ninsho’s character. Arguably the most revealing passages are entries describing Ninsho’s informal tonsure at his mother’s deathbed request, then his resolve to draw Mañjusri images and enshrine them at hinin (outcast) communities for the thirteenth anniversary of her death. Significantly, this account marks the introduction of both Ninsho and the Mañjusri cult to Eison’s order, and from this time on, the order combined its characteristic emphasis on the precepts with social welfare activities.
Both Eison and Ninsho are well known for emulating Gyoki (668–749) in their social welfare activities, and Gyoki—long hailed as an incarnation of Mañjusri—is widely considered the prototypical hijiri. At the same time, it has been argued that a major difference between the two Shingon Ritsu leaders is that Ninsho showed more affinities with hijiri than the scholar-monk Eison did, and the aforementioned passages are part of the evidence cited. Yet what it means to characterize Ninsho in hijiri terms, or to call Gyoki the prototypical hijiri, depend very much on one’s understanding of "hijiri." This paper will thus analyze the passages introducing Ninsho and the Mañjusri cult to the Shingon Ritsu school in light of differences between Ninsho’s and Eison’s emulation of Gyoki as well as recent reconsiderations of the term hijiri.
Organizer: Hikari Hori, Barnard College
Chair and Discussant: Tina Takemoto, Loyola Marymount University
Keywords: pornography, Japanese women, feminism, queer theory, postwar Japan.
A decade after "pornography for women" came into existence in Japan in the early 1990s, this panel examines issues of women and pornography in Japan from the immediate postwar period to today from various feminist perspectives. Based on an understanding that the relationships between overt representation, projected sexual fantasy, and actual sexual desire are not transparent, the papers conduct two-fold analyses of different genres of pornography by examining reception within the socio-historical specificity of each genre, and by performing close readings of sample texts.
Hori examines the discourse of "Freedom of (Sexual) Expression" in 1970s obscenity trials, especially that of Ohshima Nagisa’s self-proclaimed porn film, "In the Realm of the Senses" (1976), showing how the liberal discourse on pornography is masculinized through obsessive representation of female sexuality. In contrast, Mori and Mizoguchi discuss pornography for women. Mori analyzes "ladies’ comics" that depict sexually explicit episodes played out by adult female protagonists, demonstrating how they specifically cater to women’s sexual fantasies despite their overt similarity to men’s porn, which also displays women’s naked bodies. Mizoguchi examines how yaoi fictions, male homosexual romance comics and illustrated novels created by women for women in Japan, work for both straight women and lesbians as representations of their own sexualities and desires precisely because female bodies are not represented.
Romanticizing Sex: "Freedom of Expression" and Female Bodies in Japanese Cinema of the 70s
Hikari Hori, Barnard College
By examining the 1976 obscenity trial concerning Ohshima Nagisa’s "In the Realm of the Senses," I analyze that era’s discourse of "Freedom of (Sexual) Expression," revealing how it attempted to reconstruct national identity by means of oppositions between Japan and the West, naturalized misogyny among leftists, and obsessive representation of female sexuality. Ohshima’s film was based on the true story of Abe Sada (1905–?) who killed her lover and cut off his penis in Tokyo in 1936. First screened in France as a hard-core art film, it was shown in Japan with tremendous editing, as hard-core was and still is prohibited there.
I begin by briefly summarizing the history of sexual expression in postwar film, from the 1946 lifting of the ban on kiss scenes, through the 1960s erotic "pink" films, to the Nikkatsu studio series of "romantic" soft porn in the 1970s. I then analyze the discourse of freedom of expression employed in Ohshima’s and other contemporary "obscenity" trials, revealing how it recuperated the trauma of Japanese masculinity by representing sexualized female bodies in the name of a rebellious gesture of opposition to the authority of the Emperor system. In this context, the romantic love story presented in the film actually serves to repress women’s sexual desire. Finally, I contrast trial testimony by women’s lib advocates on behalf of Ohshima with the popularity of the 1975 French porn film "Emmanuelle" among Japanese women, thereby examining the limitations of the discourse of free expression from feminist perspectives.
Women’s Pornography: "Lady’s Comics" in 1990s Japan
Naoko Mori, Ochanomizu University, Tokyo
Among comic magazines that were started in the 80s with an intended audience of adult women, those that began focusing on porn in the 1990s are referred to as "lady’s comics" (redikomi). Such magazines are still a significant genre of pornography for women in contemporary Japan: their total circulation is almost 100 million, and approximately 50 titles are published each month. The purpose of this paper is to examine these comics to reveal the way this genre presents the sexual positionality of its female readers and accommodates their masochistic sexual fantasies.
I begin by introducing two preceding genres: women’s magazines and girls’ comics (shojo manga). Since the 1960s stories and letters about readers’ sexual experiences have been popular features in women’s magazines, and from the mid-80s those letters have sometimes been visualized as comics. On the other hand, girls’ comics have been a venue for the discussion of issues of female sexuality since the 1970s. Next, I compare lady’s comics and porn comics targeted at men, revealing different presentations of sexual acts. For example, lady’s comics narrate female characters’ thoughts much more often than men’s porn, and they devote more pages to women’s emotional motives for sex. In lady’s comics, women’s sexual desire is supported and affirmed by techniques developed from preexisting genres: female readership is secured in part by depiction of female sexual confession derived from non-comic women’s magazines, and foregrounding of women’s first-person monologues that stems from girl’s comics.
Homophobic Homos, Rapes of Love, and Queer Lesbians: Yaoi as a Conflicting Site of Homo/ Hetero-Sexual Female Sexual Fantasy
Akiko Mizoguchi, University of Rochester
The subject matter of my presentation is the seemingly male homosexual comics and illustrated novels created by women for women in Japan, called yaoi. Today the commercial yaoi genre caters to half a million readers, producing twenty-two magazines and approximately thirty paperbacks each month. How do these male homosexual stories work for female readers (straight and lesbian) as their representations of (or in relation to) their own sexualities? Addressing this question, I argue, first, that precisely because female bodies are not represented in yaoi, it works as pornography for women as subjects of sexual desire. Secondly, I argue that because the yaoi space is the thoroughly sexualized female space, women are able to participate in what might be called a "collective virtual sex" regardless of their sexual orientation. I intend to recuperate yaoi as a lesbian genre in addition to the straight one, as well as problematize the fixity of such sexual categories.
I begin by briefly summarizing the history of yaoi, from the "beautiful boy" (bishonen) comics within the "girls’ comics" (shojo manga) genre of the 1970s, the rise of amateur "fanzines" (dozinshi) in the 1980s, the massive commercialization after the 1990s. I then discuss how the most contemporary yaoi texts contain five unrealistic and homophobic tropes involving rape as an expression of love, "straight" status for a male protagonist in a gay relationship, fixed top/bottom roles that correspond with the protagonists’ masculine/ feminine roles, and obligatory anal intercourse. Lastly, I analyze how the recent appearance of likable lesbian characters does not contradict the overt homophobia.
Organizer and Discussant: Lawrence E. Marceau, University of Delaware
Chair: Sumie Jones, Indiana University
Since 1997 a team of specialists has been engaged in identifying and cataloguing the early Japanese books and manuscripts housed in several divisions of the Library of Congress, Washington, DC. The results of this survey will appear in published form in March, 2003. The LC’s collections of early Japanese books and manuscripts date from the first decade of the twentieth century, but have not, until now, been fully surveyed. Three eminent scholars of Japanese literature and bibliography led successive teams of specialists on surveys of the collections over intensive visits between 1997 and 2002. Their research reveals much about the state of information gathering on the part of the United States government a century ago, as well as opening a window on the survival of pre-Meiji Japanese books and manuscripts of all varieties several decades into the Meiji era.
Kenji Watanabe provides an overview, featuring both the breadth and strengths of the collection, as well as identifying some of the truly rare materials housed within. Kazuaki Komine focuses on the efforts of Asakawa Kan’ichi, who, financed by the Library, traveled to Japan for the purpose of collection development, and did much to shape its future course. Osamu Kigoshi takes up the transformation of early-eighteenth-century fiction in the mid-nineteenth century, and its importance in terms of publishing patterns and readership demands in the late Edo period. Lawrence Marceau, who has worked with the collections extensively, serves as discussant, and Sumie Jones chairs the panel.
Broad, Deep, and Strewn with Gems: Early Japanese Materials at the Library of Congress
Kenji Watanabe, Rikkyô University
The LC collections of early Japanese printed books and manuscripts have grown over several stages, punctuated by intensive periods of purchase and donation. The first, and perhaps most important period of growth began with the 1905 donation of ukiyo-e woodblock prints, printed art books, and albums of drawings and sketches by Crosby Stuart Noyes, a Washington newspaper publisher. With his gift, Noyes expressed the hope that the collection would serve as "an illustration of the extraordinary variety in Japanese art and an instructive and timely insight into their history and culture." The "timeliness" of this interest in Japan coincides, of course, with the sudden appearance on the international stage in the aftermath of Japan’s unexpected defeat of the Russian fleet in the Russo-Japanese war. This gift immediately preceded the LC-funded Asakawa purchase of historical and literary materials.
The literary works found in this collection include several items that either no longer survive in Japan, or survive only in poor condition. One of the characteristics of the LC literary collection, in fact, is the high level of quality of the books, many of which are in pristine condition. Another characteristic is the depth of some of the selections. For example, the well-known illustrated novel, Nise Murasaki Inaka Genji (A Murasaki Impostor’s Rustic Genji) survives in three separate editions, each of which exhibits printing differences. This presentation explores this and other prime examples from the collection, and aims to underscore its importance in the field of early modern Japanese studies.
The Asakawa Purchase of Japanese Books at the Library of Congress
Kazuaki Komine, Rikkyô University
Asakawa Kan’ichi, a professor of Japanese history at Yale University who also served as East Asian Librarian at Yale, utilized his background and skills to increase Japanese holdings in the United States. At the request of the Librarian of Congress, Asakawa returned to Japan in 1907 and, while in residence there, systematically identified and purchased several thousand books and other bibliographic resources for the LC and Yale collections. A survey of the materials that form the core of the Yale collection occurred in 1989, with a catalogue published as a result. The LC materials, however, have not until the 1997–2002 survey received detailed attention.
One characteristic of the Asakawa purchase is that all of the books, whether blockprinted or manuscript, were rebound in a western-style hardcover format. While the decision to rebind the books removed them from their original context, one benefit was that the books were protected from damage over the course of a century of shifting from shelf to shelf. Another characteristic is that many of the manuscripts are actually Meiji-era copies of earlier texts. Some of these copies are of works which are no longer extant, and as such are extremely important. In this manner the Asakawa purchase is a valuable resource for understanding both the state of collection development a century ago, and for researching rare materials no longer available elsewhere.
A Text and Its Reincarnations: The Pictorial Biography of Umewaka in the Library of Congress
Kigoshi Osamu, Kanazawa University
The book in the LC Japanese collection, Umewaka ichidai ki zue ("The Pictorial Biography of Umewaka"), is actually a reissue of Ejima Kiseki’s novel, Miyako-dori tsumakoi-bue ("The Capital-Bird and the Wife-Longing Flute"), published in 1734. Umewaka is not identified in any contemporary references, and as such is an important addition to our knowledge of Japanese publishing practices in the early modern period. Umewaka does not carry a publisher’s colophon, but, judging from book advertisements included within, we can estimate that it was published ca. 1856.
Kiseki’s Miyako-dori appeared in a retitled version twice before the newly-discovered 1856 edition. The first, Umewaka-maru ichidai ki ("The Biography of Umewaka-maru"), appeared as a Buddhist lecture (kange) version in 1788. Again, in 1842, the work appeared as a yomihon-type historical novel, entitled, Baika ryûsui ("Plum Blossoms and Willow Waters"). Yokoyama Kuniharu has examined the transformations of this text between 1734 and 1842 in his 1974 study, Yomihon no kenkyû ("Yomihon Research"), but with the latest discovery, we can see that Kiseki’s text can claim a history of at least four incarnations over a period of over 120 years.
In the past I have argued that Miyako-dori served as a model for a class of works of the fantastic called "Sumida River Tales," but, with the appearance of the LC collection’s 1856 Umewaka, I wish here to reexamine my earlier findings. From various perspectives, the latest transformation of Kiseki’s original novel provides plenty of evidence for understanding more fully literary trends in the bakumatsu period.
Organizer: Christopher D. Scott, Stanford University
Chair: Jim Reichert, Stanford University
Discussant: Lisa Yoneyama, University of California, San Diego
Keywords: Japan, postwar, literature, resident Koreans.
So-called Resident Koreans (zainichi Chosenjin/ Kankokujin) have long been considered an "invisible" minority in Japan. Are they so invisible, though? Racially, they may resemble other Japanese, and cultural and linguistic assimilation surely allows many Resident Koreans to "pass" as Japanese. But what f(r)ictions are involved in "passing" as Japanese—racially or otherwise? How do Resident Koreans complicate the historical delineation of racial, ethnic, and national boundaries? What can this tell us about the way Japan has reimagined itself since 1945?
These questions frame this panel, which examines some of the places inhabited by Resident Koreans in postwar Japanese literature. From Cheju Island to Osaka Castle, our papers explore the evocation of place and the excavation of the past in a diverse group of texts by three male Resident Korean writers. Where, we ask, does their writing "belong" in the cultural and historical landscape of postwar Japan? We focus on the period from the early 1970s to the early 1990s, during which Resident Koreans achieved an unprecedented degree of visibility in Japanese society. And yet, as we show, their very presence calls into question the absence—or, rather, the shadowy persistence—of colonial and wartime memories in postwar literary and cultural discourse.
Christopher Scott’s paper discusses a ghostly figure from Kim Sok-pom’s literature as both a reflection of the Resident Korean condition and a commentary on memory and mourning. Yoko Uchida’s paper revisits Hiroshima from an unexpected perspective in a novel by Tsuka Kohei to question the rhetorical claims of "truth" and "history." Finally, Melissa Wender’s paper reads the (male) body in a work by Yang Sogil as a site of active engagement with political and socioeconomic issues in contemporary Japan.
Haunted by the Past: Kim Sok-pom’s Mandogi yurei kitan
Christopher D. Scott, Stanford University
Kim Sok-pom’s Mandogi yurei kitan (The Ghost Story of Mandogi, 1971) was written on the eve of two landmark events: the first awarding of the Akutagawa Prize to a Resident Korean writer in early 1972 (Ri Kaisei shared it with an Okinawan writer), and the return of Okinawa to Japan later that same year. On the surface, Kim’s text seems to have little to do with either Resident Koreans or Okinawa. This paper, however, argues otherwise.
Mandogi is set on Cheju Island (South Korea) and follows the life of a simple-minded monk named Mandogi who becomes caught up in the so-called April 3 Incident of 1948–49, when thousands of islanders were slaughtered as part of anti-communist purges by the South Korean government and their American backers. Mandogi is killed and returns as a ghost to haunt his tormenters—or so we think. Depending on one’s reading, he may or may not be a ghost. This ambiguity suggests a more nuanced way of interpreting the Resident Korean presence in Japan as something both visible and invisible, both threatening and transformative.
The uncertainty of Mandogi’s fate and the unresolved history of the April 3 Incident (it was suppressed in South Korea until only recently) also recall Japan’s own problematic attempts to remember wartime atrocities and mourn for its war dead. By questioning the comprehensibility of the past, Mandogi exposes critical gaps in the construction of "public" history and "private" memory. This paper represents an attempt to re-read Kim’s important text both in terms of Resident Korean representation and in light of the place of the past, particularly Korea and Okinawa, in postwar Japan.
Hiroshima and a Zainichi Korean in a Rhetorical World
Yoko Uchida, University of Washington
On August 6, 1945, four hundred thousand lives were lost in Hiroshima by the first A-bomb in human history. This historical fact has been transformed, in Hiroshima ni genbaku o otosu hi (1986), into the Korean protagonist’s act of releasing the A-bomb toward his lover who is, below his eyes, spreading her arms to receive it. What this paper attempts to discuss is how in this apparent absurdity, Tsuka Kohei, an award-winning second-generation Resident Korean writer, has created a rhetoric that allegorizes, or parodies, Hiroshima.
Drawing on historical fact (or collective experience), various narratives have emerged in search of a truth. "Hiroshima" is the text of such interwoven discourses represented by such phrases as "only A-bombed nation," "the martyr of human sin," "Korean hibakusha," and "a necessary evil for deterrence." In Tsuka’s Hiroshima, these discourses are endlessly summoned only to lose their legitimacy. Instead, a baseless and paradoxical truth possesses the characters. The protagonist, the only descendant of the last Korean dynasty, who devotedly serves the Imperial Headquarters, drops the bomb to actualize a "love worth a nation’s fate" by destroying it. He believes that Korea is ruined and its people are enslaved only to actualize the truth. Here, the binary concepts that have legitimized the postwar paradigm of resident Koreans, such as the colonizer/colonized, collaborator/patriot, and the Japanese/Korean, are neither affirmed nor denied, but endlessly relativized. The question remains whether or not our literary critics can accept this prodigious rhetoric.
The Body Remembers: Yang Sogil and the Postwar
Melissa L. Wender, Bates College
Yang Sogil is perhaps best known as the taxi driver turned author upon whose writings the 1993 hit film Tsuki wa dotchi ni dete iru (Which Way Is the Moon?) was based. The success of Tsuki catapulted Yang into the public eye. His spate of works since have not only earned him the praise of critics but a dedicated and sizeable readership. Much of this fiction steps back into the early post World War II era, and in particular into that world as experienced by Resident Koreans in Osaka.
Yoru wo kakete (All Night, 1994), for example, leads readers into the lives of the so-called Apache Tribe, Resident Koreans who scavenged for iron in the ruins of the large munitions factory on the grounds of the Osaka Castle. As in much of Yang’s literature, the focus here is life lived in the human body—more specifically, the male body. Sometimes this is a pained body, engaging in hard labor, fighting, hungry, exhausted, but at other times it is humorous: bawdy, drunken, klutzy, defecating.
What does Yang accomplish by foregrounding the flesh? As Yang and his critics have observed, his work shows or reminds readers what it is like to live fully in the needs and desires of the physical body, and thereby forces them to recognize the emptiness of living in contemporary Japan, where the system (economic and social) oppresses and confines their bodies to an extent that life sometimes doesn’t seem worth living. Yang believes not only that there is "nothing so honest as the flesh," but that the failure of the Left to help people out of this system derives from an inability of its members to see the degree to which this is true not only for the masses they purport to lead but for us all.
It is not surprising that such ideas have currency in Japan’s current depressed climate, but it behooves me to ask what it is that these notions, which so romanticize the fleshly body, can really do for contemporary Zainichi and other residents of Japan. What are its possibilities, and what are its dangers? It is with such questions in mind that I will read Yoru wo kakete.
Organizer and Chair: Henry D. Smith II, Columbia University
Discussants: Thomas Harper, Leiden University; Henry D. Smith II, Columbia University
Keywords: Forty-Seven Rônin, Chûshingura, Japan, history.
Spring 2003 marks the 300th anniversary of the denouement of the historical vendetta of the Forty-Seven Rônin of Akô, and provides a fitting occasion to reconsider in broad perspective the significance and historical evolution of the vast constellation of retellings of the incident that have come to be known collectively as "Chûshingura." This panel envisions the Chûshingura phenomenon as a complex and still ongoing dialogue of history and fiction, a give-and-take between the certain knowledge that something like this really happened in the years 1701–1703, and the continuing will to carry it to new levels of creative inspiration and entertainment by way of speculation and fantasy. The panel will offer three specific case studies of retelling the story, in different media and different eras: a Buddhist preacher of the mid-18th century, a wildly popular naniwabushi storyteller of the 1900s, and a French choreographer of the 1980s. All represent original research into previously little-explored corners of the Chûshingura phenomenon. The two discussants will try to place these episodes into the broad picture of the way in which the historical event has itself been reconceived in the process of retelling over the past three centuries. The story of the Forty-Seven Rônin continues to stir great passions among all who study Japanese culture, since none can remain untouched by what is indisputably Japan’s national legend, and we anticipate lively audience participation.
The Young Motoori Norinaga Hears the Story of the Akô Rônin from a Buddhist Preacher
Federico Marcon, Columbia University
In the autumn of 1744, some four decades after the culmination of the Akô Incident, a traveling monk by the name of Jitsudô arrived at the temple of Jukyôji in the town of Matsusaka, Ise province, to perform a series of sermons that included a serial recounting of the tale of the famous vendetta of the Forty-Seven Rônin. In the audience, the fourteen-year-old Motoori Norinaga (1730–1801) paid close attention to the story told by Jitsudô in more than twenty sessions, and recorded it in detail in a manuscript that is now preserved in the Motoori Norinaga Memorial Museum in Matsusaka. Beyond the sheer interest of this youthful feat of memory by the man who would become one of the greatest scholars of Tokugawa Japan, Norinaga’s account is of great importance as virtually one of the only records of an oral performance of the story of the Akô vendetta before the late 19th century, and is particularly remarkable for its relatively early date, four years before the appearance on stage of Kanadehon Chûshingura in 1748. Through a comparison with surviving jitsuroku manuscripts and early theatrical and fictional accounts of the Akô Incident, we can begin to recreate the role of oral performance in the critical early decades of the formation of the Chûshingura legend, shedding light on the critical role of itinerant monk-storytellers in the spread of news and information in early modern Japan.
Naniwabushi Narration and the Modernization of Chûshingura
Hyodo Hiromi, Gakushuin University
Of all the media that promoted the popularization of Chûshingura in modern Japan, none was more important than the form of musical narration known as naniwabushi. The art of naniwabushi emerged out of a diverse variety of forms of musical narration by professional storytellers that flourished in 19th-century Japan, in particular the two types known as chongare and saimon. These were usually performed by a narrator-singer and a single shamisen accompanist. Naniwabushi appeared in yose vaudeville halls around the time of the Sino-Japanese War (1894–95), and reached a peak in popularity following the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–05. From the end of the Meiji period on through World War II, naniwabushi was the king of the popular performance arts in Japan.
The performer who triggered the naniwabushi boom of late Meiji was Tôchûken Kumoemon (1873–1916), a performer who had emerged from Shiba-Shin’ami-chô, one of the "three great slums" of Meiji Tokyo. His greatest hits were performances of the Akô "gishiden," tales of the Forty-Seven Rônin based upon quasi-historical "jitsuroku" versions of the Chûshingura legend. It was through Kumoemon’s naniwabushi that Chûshingura became the "national epic" (kokumin jojishi) of modern Japan, influencing versions of Chûshingura in film and popular fiction both directly and indirectly. Thus both the art of naniwabushi and the Chûshingura story worked in concert to play a critical role in the creation of the modern "Japanese people."
Maurice Béjart’s The Kabuki and the Western Re-gendering of Chûshingura
Junko Saeki, Doshisha University
The ballet of Maurice Béjart (1927–), The Kabuki, which received critical acclaim when first performed in 1986 in Japan and then throughout Europe, is based on the kabuki version of Kanadehon Chûshingura, and serves as a revealing example of the reception of the Chûshingura legend in the West. The Akô Incident of 1701–03 itself involved a brotherhood of males avenging the death of their male master. In the kabuki play, various female characters were introduced, but none of them participate in the vendetta in any direct way, and are depicted in a largely negative way, as the fundamental cause of the tragedy that drove the daimyo to his death. The play itself, just as much as the original incident, thus tends to reflect the male-centered homosociality of Japanese society in the Edo period. Maurice Béjart’s ballet version, however, while perpetuating the male-centered structure of the play, rearranges it in a way that conveys the modern Western emphasis on heterosexual couples through his emphasis on the female dances as a central attraction. Béjart also adds elements not found in the Japanese original by the symbolic association of women with nature through the use of trees and other motifs. But at the same time, Béjart is heir to the orientalist images of "seppuku" and "geisha" that hark back to the work of the actress Kawakami Sadayakko (1871–1946) when she performed in Europe in the Meiji period.
Organizer: Torquil Duthie, Columbia University
Chair and Discussant: Haruo Shirane, Columbia University
Keywords: poetry, travel, identity.
One of the most fundamental characteristics of classical Japanese poetry (waka) is the presence of a spatiotemporal discourse which defines the capital as its political and cultural center. The framework of this discourse can be appreciated most clearly in seasonal topics and poetic topoi (meishô), as well as in poems on travel.
This panel examines three instances in different historical periods of poetic journeys away from, and towards, the capital. In all of these instances, the plot of travel introduces a dialectic of "other" and self through which the traveling subjects and implied audience are spatiotemporally defined. In this context, the production and reception of poetry becomes an exercise in identity building and self-legitimization.
Within the framework of this topic, each of the presentations examines texts from different periods and also represents a different type of inquiry. Torquil Duthie discusses the relation between the production of poetry and the production of history in the Asuka period. Christina Laffin relates her analysis of Izayoi nikki to the historical context of changing marriage and inheritance practices in the thirteenth century. Joshua Mostow’s main focus is on the reception of the Tales of Ise as ritualistic tourism in the modern period. Thus, the panel draws together a wide variety of interests and approaches into an analysis of the relation between the spatiotemporal discourse of poetic travel and configurations of identity. Haruo Shirane will act as discussant.
The Poetic and Historical Place of the Early Ritsuryô Court: The View of the Ômi Capital
Torquil Duthie, Columbia University
In the early Man’yôshû, coinciding with the establishment of the early Ritsuryô State and the building of the first "permanent" capital at Fujiwara, there emerges what I term a "poetry of kingship." This poetry is characterized by: (1) a vassal-subject that describes the relation between ruler and realm; (2) the formal expression of that relation in terms of a spatial order centered around the palace of the ruler; and (3) the temporal expression of the spatial order as a new and transcendent "present" that defines the historical identity of the subjects of the Jitô court.
My presentation will focus on Hitomaro’s poem "On Passing the Ruined Palace of Ômi." For the Jitô Court, who belonged to the Tenmu-Jitô faction that had won Jinshin War, the pre-Jinshin Ômi capital was a site of problematic significance. I will argue that the traveling subject’s perception of the Ômi palace, which is mediated by transmitted narrative, knowledge of the poetry of the Ômi Court, and the sight of the ruins, produces a particular perspective of the "present" in relation to the "past" of the Ômi capital. This perspective constitutes the traveler and implied audience within a totalized historical order and a valuable poetic tradition.
Izayoi nikki as Poetic Appeal
Christina Laffin, Columbia University
Izayoi nikki (1283) focuses on a fourteen-day journey from Heian-kyô to Kamakura, undertaken by Nun Abutsu (1222–1283) four years after the death of her husband, Fujiwara Tameie (1198–1275), to appeal her son’s right to a land inheritance. I will show how Izayoi nikki may be read as Abutsu’s attempt to secure the Hosokawa Estate by asserting her own position within the Mikohidari poetic tradition and by proving her son, Tamesuke (1263–1328), to be the true heir to this tradition.
Abutsu’s poems in Izayoi nikki trace her journey to Kamakura as they draw from canonical examples of travel poetry and compare these to her own experiences. In particular, the introduction and final chôka function as an appeal for her son’s right to the inheritance while also describing the injustices he has suffered at the hands of Tameuji (1222–1286), a son by Tameie’s first wife. Abutsu uses her poetic expertise and her position as a tonsured widow (goke ama) to secure cultural and economic capital through the production of a travel diary that effectively rewrites the history of her cultural lineage.
In addition to examining Abutsu’s use of poetry in the diary, I will consider how her status within late thirteenth-century marriage and inheritance practices allowed her to gain property rights, and how her journey fits into the general phenomenon of travel in the medieval period.
Narihira’s "Journey to the East" as Travel Paradigm in Japan
Joshua Mostow, University of British Columbia
The tenth-century court romance, the Tales of Ise (Ise monogatari), has historically been most often read as an account of the journey to Eastern Japan (azuma-kudari) of the poet and aristocrat Ariwara no Narihira.
While in the Heian period Narihira’s journey was to a part of the country considered "barbarian" and remote, the establishment of Japan’s first military government in Kamakura in 1185 led to a great increase in traffic on the very road Narihira traveled, the Tôkaidô, or "Eastern Sea Road." Medieval travelers felt it de rigeur to add their own poetic efforts to the famous places of Narihira’s poems. Narihira’s apparent transmission of courtly culture to Eastern Japan took on even more significance with the establishment of Japan’s early modern administrative center in Edo at the beginning of the Tokugawa period. Visual images of Narihira passing Mount Fuji became ubiquitous, and served as an important sub-text, visual and verbal, in the explosion of popular culture that attended the flourishing of print capitalism.
My particular interest in this paper, however, is in how Narihira’s "Journey to the East" remained, and remains, paradigmatic for Japanese travelers in the modern era. This modern function entails the reification of "courtliness" (miyabi) itself, its identification with a purportedly transhistorical Japanese identity, and its purveyance as cultural commodity to an overwhelmingly female consumer. In other words, I would like to explore how Japan’s "classical" culture, as exemplified by the Tales of Ise, is used to construct a ritualistic itinerary that allows citizens to perform, and thus produce, both "Japaneseness" and "femininity" or, more properly, "Japanese femininity."
Organizer and Chair: Dina Lowy, Gettysburg College
Discussants: Jan Bardsley, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill; Sally A. Hastings, Purdue University
Keywords: marriage, Japan, history, literature, 20th century.
This panel will examine how the options surrounding marriage can complicate and/or enhance women’s lives. The papers will focus on various examples of "modern" Japanese women in order to explore how they negotiated a predominantly mate-centered society and how successful their efforts were to create more advantageous opportunities for women. Dina Lowy will examine how Hiratsuka Raicho, founder of the feminist magazine Seito (1911–1916), opposed the existing marriage system by turning to "Western expert" Ellen Key to lend legitimacy to her vision of a marriage system based on freedom, equality, and love. Eleanor Hogan will explore some early-20th-century fictional works by Nogami Yaeko in order to reveal some of the obstacles and choices women faced whether entering a conventional marriage or following a less conventional path. Christienne Hinz will investigate how entrepreneurial women often opted not to marry in order to maintain a more productive business career.
At the beginning of the panel we will ask the audience to think about the impact marriage had (if any) on the people they research. Was marriage an integral part of their identity? Did it help or hinder their careers? Did they react against the existing system, try to change it, or work within it? If they found the existing system oppressive, did they find fruitful alternatives? We hope this will encourage lively discussion that will help us place our own work in a broader, richer context.
Love and Marriage: Ellen Key and Hiratsuka Raicho Explore Alternatives
Dina Lowy, Gettysburg College
Ellen Key (1849–1926), Swedish feminist, teacher, writer, and lecturer, was one of the major Western advocates of maternal feminism at the turn of the 20th century. Two ideas in particular dominate much of Key’s writings: the importance of motherhood and the need for relationships based on love. Both ideas would exert a heavy influence on Japanese feminist Hiratsuka Raicho (1886–1971). Raicho turned to a variety of sources for inspiration in her attempts to broaden Japanese women’s awareness and opportunities during the increasingly conservative Taisho period. Her exposure to Ellen Key’s ideas on love and marriage in the 1910s helped Raicho articulate her own views on these controversial topics.
This paper will focus specifically on the impact of Key’s book Love and Marriage on Raicho’s own views and writings. Only a few months after Raicho began translating parts of Love and Marriage in the pages of Seito, Raicho published her piece "Yo no fujintachi e" in which she clearly stated her opposition to the existing marriage system and state-sponsored role of "good wife, wise mother." I will examine how Raicho used Key’s ideas to reinforce an alternative vision of intimate relations that offered freedom, rights, and happiness, and how successful this vision was in challenging the status quo.
To Marry or Not to Marry? Nogami Yaeko’s Fictional Portrayal of Marriage
Eleanor Hogan, Gettysburg College
Japanese writer Nogami Yaeko’s (1885–1985) early works revolve around marriage. Her protagonists marry, refuse to marry or contemplate marriage. "Light and Dark" (1906), "The Aster" (1908) and Machiko (1928–30), examine marriage through the perspectives held by various characters—parents, siblings, relatives, friends, and the young men and women themselves. By portraying these various viewpoints, Nogami illustrates her keen perception of the disparities between male and female, old and young, and rich and poor in early-20th-century Japan.
It is difficult to determine where Nogami herself stands on the issue of marriage, particularly because she married only once and she and her husband raised their three children together. While Nogami made no free-love proclamations nor went on record as being anti-marriage, I argue that her early works (1906–30) were critical of the marriage system. By examining Machiko in light of Nogami’s earlier works, I will show that while Nogami’s heroine Machiko could expect a much brighter future than her predecessors who refused to marry, ran away from their husbands or committed suicide, the issues of love and marriage for young, educated women from late Meiji through early Showa were complex and thought provoking.
Women Beyond the Pale: Sex, Gender, and Marital-Norm Aberrance among Japanese Women Entrepreneurs
Christienne Leigh Hinz, Southern Illinois University, Edwardsville
This paper attempts to demonstrate and explain a correlation between marital norm non-compliance and entrepreneurship among Japanese women. According to my research, female entrepreneurs are four times more marital-norm aberrant than the general female population. Furthermore, one out of five women’s businesses surveyed belongs to a portion of the service sector known as mizu-shobai. Mizu-shobai (literally: "water trades") is most easily described as the "after-hours" industry. It is a vast array of restaurants, eateries, drinkeries, coffee shops, inns, pubs, bars, music halls, karaoke clubs, dance halls and sex clubs which cater primarily to the middle class business world.
Marital-norm non-compliant women, in choosing not to marry or in choosing to divorce, control their own access to the interfaces binding male-gendered businesses and female-gendered businesses. Marital-norm non-compliant women are able to, or in some cases must, capitalize on that which the constructed sexual segregation of Japanese society is meant to control: sexuality itself. For women with no means of forging respectable access to the male sphere, sexuality is a powerful currency, perhaps such a woman’s only currency. Sexuality and sexual tension are the hallmark of the vast, disrespected, but vital world of mizu-shobai. It is women’s exploitation of this market niche that accounts for the correlation between marital-norm aberrance and female entrepreneurship, and the high percentage of mizu-shobai businesses owned and operated by Japanese women.
Chair: G. Cameron Hurst III, University of Pennsylvania
Connecting Global and Local Societal Activism: International Politics, NGOs, and the Environmental Movement in Japan
Kim Reimann, Georgia State University
Environmental protest movements in Japan face many political and cultural barriers to organization and were relatively quiet from the mid 1970s to the late 1980s. Since the early 1990s, however, Japan has experienced a wave of citizen-led environmental activism. To understand how environmental activists have recently overcome some of the domestic barriers to organization, this paper looks at the role of international institutions in legitimizing and supporting environmental movements at the national level. Building on the new literature on transnational advocacy networks and transnational social movements and using the cases of citizen protest campaigns against the Nagara River Estuary Dam and the Isahaya Bay Land Reclamation Project, we show how international actors, organizations and norms were effectively used by activists to build national networks, gain media attention, establish legitimacy in the eyes of the public, and call into question state practices that had long excluded citizens from the policy-making process.
Contradictions of Transnationality: Okinawan-Bolivians in Bolivia and Japan
Taku Suzuki, University of Minnesota
In 1954, the U.S. government, the U.S. military-backed Okinawa civil government, and Bolivian government sponsored Okinawan immigration to rural Bolivia to ease overpopulation and social unrest in Okinawa, which was transformed into a strategic "keystone" of the U.S. military policy in East Asia in the 1950s. Colanias Okinawa, the Okinawan immigrants’ agricultural colony in Santa Cruz, Bolivia, survived numerous adversities, thanks partly to the Japanese government’s consistent financial assistance. Since the 1980s, hundreds of young Okinawan-Bolivians left Colonias Okinawa for mainland Japan, hoping to accumulate capital to start their own farm back home. Despite their ambition, however, they often fail to achieve socio-economic upward mobility in both locations. While many Okinawan-Bolivians in Japan work in a segregated blue-collar labor market, their counterparts in Colonias Okinawa suffer from an increasing debt from the unstable farming operation.
The concept of "cultural citizenship," a cultural process of subject-making and being-made within power dynamics of state and capital, is helpful for understanding the seemingly contradictory outcomes of transnationality of Okinawan-Bolivians. The marginal-ization of Okinawan-Bolivians in Bolivia and Japan manifests a form of "racial citizenship," which I define as the discourses and practices that produce, classify, and naturalize individual bodies as a marker of "cultural" belonging of the nation-state. The trans-national Okinawan-Bolivians are made (and self-made) to be distinctively "alien" to the culturally defined racial citizenship of Japan and Bolivia, which makes their transnationality a handicap, rather than an asset, for their quest for capital accumulation.
Japanese Herditary Parliamentarians and Political Leadership in the Twenty-First Century: The Case of the Fourth Generation of the Hatoyama Dynasty
Mayumi Itoh, University of Nevada, Las Vegas
Japanese politics is plagued with "inbreeding." Currently, as many as 29% of House of Representatives (HR) members of the Japanese Diet inherited their seats from their fathers or grandfathers, whereas 17% of House of Councillors (HC, a nominal upper house) are the so-called "hereditary Diet members." While the phenom-enon of political dynasties has appeared in American government, from the Adams, the Roosevelt, the Kennedy, to the Bush families, it is more extreme in Japan. Their instant name recognition and automatic transfer of election districts from their forebears give hereditary candidates for the Diet an enormous advantage over non-hereditary candidates. The increasing number of hereditary Diet members is alarming, causing grave side effects for Japan’s representative democracy, making the system elitist, unresponsive, and ultimately incompetent. Their prevalence ossifies the Japanese political system and accelerates political decay.
The Hatoyama family is the pioneer for hereditary Diet members, in that no other Japanese family has produced Diet members in its direct lineage in four successive generations. Kazuo (the first generation) was HR speaker; Ichiro (the second generation) was prime minister; Ichiro (the third generation) was an HC member and foreign minister; and Yukio and Kunio (the fourth generation) created the Democratic Party of Japan, currently the second largest party. The paper examines the issues of hereditary Diet members through the case of the Hatoyama dynasty’s fourth generation.
The Loci of Anti-American Sentiments and Discourse in Contemporary Japan
Yasushi Watanabe, Keio University, Japan
The American influence on the global political economy ("hard power") and culture ("soft power") is extremely profound and far-reaching today, and various localities around the world are struggling, one or another, to make sense of this historically and culturally unique development. Interestingly enough, the so-called "identity" and "tradition" in localities are often defined vis-à-vis "America (Americanness)." How to construct, and deal with, "America" thus poses a stringent question, and Japan is never immune from it, of course. The communication network between the U.S. and Japan has become more solidified than ever. It can be suspected, however, that Japanese public discourse and sentiment are getting rather negative, or at the best apathetic, to the U.S: One can easily come across with such new tides as America no Hitorigachi o Yurusuna (Don’t Let the U.S. Monopolize the Game), America no Oouso (America’s Big Lies), and Nichibei Bunmei no Syototsu (The Collision of Civilizations between Japan and the U.S.). These are only a few examples of recent popular literature on American society, and such a sensational and critical tone is proliferated and propagated through magazine articles and TV and radio commentators. What kind of "America" is constructed and traded there? Who consumes and appropriates that "America"? This presentation aims at exploring these questions in reference to recent developments in globalization theories.