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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 fo