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Organizer: Gary L. Ebersole, University of Missouri, Kansas City
Chair: Jun’ichi Isomae, Japan Women’s University
Discussant: Cosimo Zene, SOAS, University of London
This panel pursues the post-modern critique of the very notion of "Japanese religion" through "archaeological" analyses of some of the consequences of constituting "Japanese religion" as an object of concern by both academics and politicians and public policy makers. Ebersole and Isomae track the discursive footprints of "Japanese religion" (Yes, Japanese ghosts have feet!) in the writings of Western and Japanese scholars respectively. It is these traces that cumulatively give illusive substance and form to the phantom of "Japanese religion." Scholars constituted this discursive figure by conjoining a universal term ("religion") and a delimiting one ("Japan"). Retracing the steps by which "Japanese religion" has been deployed reveals its Janus-like character as it has served both universalistic claims and particularistic ones.
Kubota joins this argument by focusing on the discourse of the separation of church and state in modern Germany and the separation of religion and the state in modern Japan. At a practical or real-world level, "state" and "religion" are not neutral objective terms pointing to existents in the world. Rather, they are already "religious" terms insofar as they conjure up phantoms. Dolce joins the fray by critiquing past studies of medieval Buddhism through an analysis of the symbiotic relationship between doctrine and ritual practice. Whereas Protestant-informed theories of religion have privileged beliefs over rites, she proposes a careful study of cases of ritual "inventions," which better capture the complexity, diversity, and fluidity of enacted medieval Buddhism.
Deconstructing Japanese Religion
Jun’ichi Isomae, Japan Women’s University
The discourse of "Japanese Religion" first emerged in modern Japan as a result of correspondences drawn with Western nations. It is easy to criticize this as an invented tradition and the product of the establishment of the Western nation-state. But the narrative act that constitutes "Japanese religion" has an ambivalent effect that undermines the link drawn between "Japanese religion" and the nation. The term "Japanese religion" allows the exploration of otherwise undefined phenomena by defining borders. At the same time, these drawn borders give a sense of materiality to the ghostly phenomena. My goal is to explore the gap between the concepts of "Japan" and "religion." The former refers to a specific modern nation-state, the latter to something that transcends space and time. I will examine two approaches scholars have taken in attempting to go beyond the differences between religions. The first seeks to understand "religion" as a Westernized concept, the second in terms of how "religion" has been indigenized. While both approaches can be criticized for adhering to the binary opposition between the West and the non-West, we need to retrace the traces of these two terms as an act of deconstruction. Following this path will reveal the ghostly specter of "Japanese religion" across space and time.
Ato (Traces): Absence and Presence in the Discourse of "Japanese Religion"
Gary L. Ebersole, University of Missouri, Kansas City
It is not without consequence that the study of "Japanese religion" in the West began at a time when the concepts of race, culture, and evolution were in the air. This paper will explore the ways in which the concepts of racial distinctiveness, cultural evolution, and the modern nation-state are intertwined with the notion of "Japanese religion." I will track the traces of the academic discourse that led to the positing of this thing called Japanese religion—singular. By tracking how Western scholars deployed the universal and atemporal category of religion, while absorbing and repeating the essentialist claims for Japanese uniqueness, we can see this discursive phantom assume form and substance. Ironically, in many studies, "the Japanese" comes to function discursively to indicate both a unique specificity and a homogeneity. Here again, in academic writing, a phantom subject replaces real individuals who exercised historical agency. In yet other histories of Japanese religion, which adopt a Protestant emphasis on sectarian forms of identity, one finds schools and sects portrayed as historical actors. If the very concept "Japanese religion" falls under suspicion, what kinds of history are possible?
Reconsidering the Notion of "The Separation of State and Religion" and Its "Western" and "Japanese" Contexts
Hiroshi Kubota, University of Tuebingen
The discourse of the so-called seikyo bunri (separation of state and religion), was conceived and constructed primarily as the Japanese equivalent of the Western notion of "the separation of church and state." It emerged and assumed its present form through the half-spontaneous, half-forced occidentalist drive towards self-Westernization at the end of the nineteenth century and, then, more directly after World War II. In other words, it was a Japanese construct imagined as a "Western" and "universal" value.
This paper aims to examine two notions—Trennung von Staat und Kirche (the separation of state and church) and seikyo bunri as these are used in political and academic discourse in Germany and Japan. My goal is not to compare these two concepts or to relativize the Japanese one through the idealization of the "Western" category. Rather my goal is to problematize the modalities of recognition of both sides in relation to the history of religions since the nineteenth century. Specifically, the paper will illustrate how the practical uses of the notions in question are not primarily legally guaranteed and evident terms but are deployed as "religious" language. Neither term is value free in its practical usage; hence, neither can function as an "objective" frame of reference regarding religious issues. These terms are inevitably charged with specific political or religious connotations in their respective socio-political cultural contexts.
Reconsidering Medieval Buddhism Again: Reflections on Ritual and the Study of "Japanese Religion"
Lucia Dolce, SOAS, University of London
The study of medieval Japanese Buddhism has been characterized by binary categorizations and antithetical pairings (old/new, orthodox/heterodox, aristocratic/ popular, imported/indigenous). These are rooted in "Western" academic traditions (whether upheld by Western or Japanese scholars) and frequently have as their referent a "Protestant" view of religion as an intellectualized and individualistic belief based on knowledge and acceptance of specific doctrines. These dichotomous approaches, together with the fragmentation of the study of Buddhism along disciplinary lines with different concerns, have yielded notions of Japanese Buddhism which are inadequate to capture the complexity, diversity, and fluidity of the Buddhist world of medieval Japan.
This paper will reconsider some of these problems in the study of medieval Buddhism by drawing on different strands of the multi-vocal traditions of the West and by focusing on the ritual dimension of the medieval world. I will explore a number of liturgical and iconic features of Kamakura period Buddhism in order to highlight the symbiotic relations between doctrinal formulations and ritual "inventions" and to bring out the importance of the social dimensions of ritual performances. This will invite a broader reflection on the role of ritual in Japanese Buddhism and on how different views of the unity of Japanese religious practice depend on the particular Western paradigm used.
Session 10: The Spirit of Modernization: Science, Religion, and Progress in Tokugawa and Meiji Japan
Organizer: Sumiko Otsubo, Metropolitan State University
Chair: David G. Wittner, Utica College of Syracuse University
Discussant: Morris F. Low, University of Queensland
Keywords: science, religion, ideology, morality, race, gender.
Japan’s successful adoption of Western science was instrumental in transforming Japan from an isolated agrarian society into a modern imperial power in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. This panel explores the relationship between science, religion, ideology, and morality during this remarkable change.
Mobilizing the Hegelian notion of "progress," John Van Sant analyzes Tokugawa scholar Sakuma Shozan, who tried to overcome the predicament of resisting Western colonization while accepting Western ideas and conceptualized the philosophy of "Eastern ethics, Western science."
In his examination of supporters of Herbert Spencer’s Synthetic Philosophy and their opposition among American expatriates, Joseph M. Henning introduces the intriguing Meiji debate over the (in)separability of Christianity and civilization into the literature of foreign policy and culture.
Rumi Yasutake employs gender as an analytical tool to understand the peculiarity of the temperance movement advocated by the World Woman’s Christian Temperance Union in Meiji Japan, where the movement used scientific rather than religious discourse and involved more men than women.
Sumiko Otsubo shows tensions, or the lack thereof, between "Eastern ethics" and "Western science," as well as Christianity and science in the Japanese adaptation of eugenics—the science of race improvement—and tests the validity of recent discussions questioning linear historical views.
In addition to historians of science and religion, we hope to engage a larger audience interested in modernity, intellectual traditions, foreign relations, historiography, race, and gender in our discussion.
Sakuma Shozan’s Hegelian Proposal for Regenerating Japan
John E. Van Sant, University of Alabama, Birmingham
By the mid-19th century, an increasing number of Japanese political leaders (bakufu, daimyo, and imperial) and scholars realized that Japan had to adapt and incorporate some elements of Western-style industrialization into its own political and economic order as the necessary means to remain independent of Western imperialism. Sakuma Shozan, a samurai scholar from Matsushiro, proposed the dichotomous philosophy of "Eastern ethics, Western Science" (tôyô no dôtoku, seiyô no gakugei) as the means to regenerate Japan both internally and externally. Sakuma’s approach to Japan’s dilemmas, I believe, provided crucial building blocks that led the Meiji government and intelligentsia in integrating Western knowledge with Japanese traditions. Moreover, I argue that "Eastern ethics, Western science" can be interpreted within the Hegelian dialectical paradigm of "progress."
Herbert Spencer, Meiji Japan, and American Thought
Joseph M. Henning, Saint Vincent College
The successes of Meiji Japan’s civilization and enlightenment (bunmei kaika) became a useful test case in the late-nineteenth-century U.S. debate regarding the relationship between religion and science. Believing that Christianity and civilization were inseparable, American missionaries claimed that Japanese interest in Herbert Spencer’s Synthetic Philosophy was a primary cause behind Japan’s reluctance to accept Christianity. They decried Spencer’s agnosticism and denounced those who recommended his ideas as a guide for Japan’s social progress. In contrast, secular Americans in Japan promoted Spencer and pointedly challenged evangelical assumptions. Presenting Meiji Japan’s achievements as evidence, they argued that science, not religion, was the root of modern civilization.
This paper contributes to the efforts of scholars such as Michael Hunt and Masao Miyoshi to examine connections between culture, ideology, and foreign policy. American discourses on religion and civilization indeed influenced U.S. policy toward Japan, providing an ideological foundation for the unequal treaties. Meiji Japan, however, also helped to shape these same discourses: it challenged American beliefs about race and religion and fostered internal tensions within the American expatriate community.
Men, Women, and Temperance in Meiji Japan
Rumi Yasutake, Konan University
The Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) was originally a Christian and women’s organization that advocated various middle-class women’s causes including temperance in the United States. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, its international body, the World WCTU, sent its organizers to the world. In Japan, while World WCTU organizers successfully formed middle-class Japanese women’s unions, their efforts in promoting the temperance cause received enthusiastic responses from Japanese progressive men; some were Christian while others were Buddhist or non-religious.
By examining the masculinization and secularization of the temperance movement advocated by the World WCTU in Meiji Japan, my paper analyzes the meaning of religion, science, and progress for American women and Japanese men and women in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It also attempts to untangle the interplay of religion, morality, science, gender, nationality, and modernization that was at work in the rise of the temperance movement in Meiji Japan.
Wakon Yôsai and Japanese Modernity: A Eugenics Perspective
Sumiko Otsubo, Metropolitan State University
Meiji Japan’s quick and selective adoption of Western science and technology was key to Japanese modernization. Central to this dynamic transformation is the concept wakon yôsai, which describes the introduction of Western ideas while preserving the Japanese ethos. Wakon yôsai alludes to tensions between modern scientific and technological knowledge and native cultural and spiritual traditions, which had to be reconciled. Tensions between science and religion are, of course, not unique to Japan. The notable example is that of creationism and evolutionism in the West. While natural theologians hypothesized divine control or "design" of the evolutionary process, Darwinian naturalists emphasized natural selection as the driving force behind evolution of living organisms.
Did such tensions between modernity and tradition and the pragmatic and the spiritual exist in early-twentieth-century Japan? In this presentation, I will examine whether or not the divide existed in the introduction and propagation of eugenics, the science of improving the human race by controlling heredity. More specifically, I will explore the relationship between Christians, including American missionary Sidney Gulick and Japanese convert and educator Naruse Jinzô, and eugenics, as well as the connections between Christian and Buddhist temperance movements and early eugenic legislation campaigns in Japan. I will analyze my findings historiographically in the context of recent groundbreaking works on Japanese science, technology, and modernity by Morris Low and Julia Thomas, who propose to go beyond linear historical views, which have heretofore influenced historian of science Joseph Needham, Japanese modernization theorists, and Marxist historians.
Session 11: Space and Corporeality in Twentieth-Century Modern Japanese Literature
Organizer and Chair: Atsuko Sakaki, University of Toronto
Discussant: Sharalyn Orbaugh, University of British Columbia
Keywords: urban environment, everyday life, boundaries, exteriority, geopolitics.
Landscape in modern Japanese literature has been largely discussed in the metaphysical context of the observer’s formation of interiority, identity, and subjectivity, a prominent example being Karatani Kojin’s "Discovery of Landscape." This panel applies a more physically and materially oriented approach, inspired by Maeda Ai’s Toshi kâkan no naka no bungaku among others, and examines the ways that the exterior, specifically the city, is registered by and in relation to the perceiving subject’s body in its entirety, including and yet not reduced to the eye, relevant to and yet not opposed to the mind. Since Walter Benjamin’s The Arcades Project and Henri Lefevbre’s The Production of Space, inhabiting and walking in the city have been recognized as essential engagements of the modern individual. In addition to the psychological ramifications of the urban environment, such as alienation, melancholy, and liberation, the interface between the physical and textual (writing and reading) activities of literary city dwellers is the subject of critical attention. The shape and structure of the city, the itinerant and kinetic movement of the body within the city, traffic of gaze and gesture between bodies in the city, and the images that the city and the body project onto each other have an inevitable and crucial impact on the ways texts are formatted. The panelists will showcase how the city, the body, and the text help form contingencies of each other, in the genres of science fiction, mystery, modernist poetry, and film-inspired novel of the 20th-century Japanese literature.
Broken Circuits: The Enclosed Worlds of Ogata Kamenosuke and Yi Sang
William O. Gardner, Swarthmore College
This paper will examine the remarkable work of the modernist writers Ogata Kamenosuke (1900–1942) and Yi Sang (1910–1937), both of whose lives were framed by the geopolitical entity of the Greater Japanese Empire. While neither Ogata nor Yi Sang had a major impact on their contemporary literary scenes, both have attracted growing followings among subsequent generations of readers and writers; Yi Sang, who wrote in both Korean and Japanese, is now rightly placed among the most significant figures in modern Korean literary history. In my paper presented at ATJ 2003, I examined the work of pioneering modernist Hagiwara Kyôjirô, arguing that it offered a new model of subjectivity to the Japanese literary world in which the poet, poem, and urban environment interpenetrate each other in a type of organic circuitry prefiguring the postwar concept of the cyborg. In a follow-up to my presentation, this year I will examine the work of two later modernists, in which the circuit between poet and environment has broken down and the poet no longer imagines the ability to effect change on the outside world. While this shift suggests the idea of a poetic retreat, the works of Ogata and Yi Sang stand in contrast to the recuperative poetic retreats in the East Asian tradition of political exiles and recluses. Rather, in their work the environment of retreat itself is deformed—structurally imbued with absurdity in a microcosm of a deformed geopolitical environment. This deformation of the landscape and the domestic interior is closely tied to an estranged and idiosyncratic relationship to language itself. By examining the work of these two writers, I will continue my inquiry into the social and political context of Japanese poetry, emphasizing the challenge that literature of the Japanese colonies poses to conceptions of national literary identity.
The City as Matrix and Metaphor: Mapped Bodies, Embodied Space, and Detective Fiction in Japan
Amanda Seaman, University of Massachusetts, Amherst
Detective fiction, born out of the ferment of nineteenth-century urbanization in Europe and the United States and quickly adopted in the rapidly changing society of Meiji and Taisho Japan, has had a long and intimate relationship with city life and city space. In this paper, I examine how two Japanese authors—Abe Kobo and Matsuo Yumi—use the genre of detective fiction in order to interrogate the relationship between corporeal and urban space and between knowledge of the body and knowledge of the city. In The Ruined Map, Abe follows a private detective as he attempts to solve a missing person case, a quest in which the detective finds himself becoming his own quarry, while in Murder in Balloon Town, Matsuo chronicles the frustrations of a female detective faced with a crime whose solution requires her to enter a world in which the (female) body is both the focus of and the model for social interaction. Despite their differences, I argue, both works share a vision of identity, bodily space, and the city in which each is radically intertwined with the other: Abe’s meticulous account of his protagonist’s daily movements across Tokyo elides into, and then is subsumed by, a narrative of personal transformation, while Matsuo’s quasi-utopian urban environment is so profoundly defined by corporeality that knowledge of the city becomes inseparable from knowledge of the body. In both cases, the detectives’ traditional tools—"street smarts," observation, and analysis—prove to be insufficient, making the solution of the mystery ultimately an existential rather than epistemological task.
Incidentality of Belonging: The Everyday Life in Goto Meisei’s Apartment Megaplex Novels
Atsuko Sakaki, University of Toronto
Goto Meisei (1932–1999) was born and grew up in the present day North Korea where he witnessed Japan’s defeat in 1945 and the Soviet army’s subsequent occupation of the area. The experience of living in an ethnically mixed environment and being forced to "return" to Kyushu, which did not feel like home, inspired him with the recognition that one’s status quo is that of being a stranger wherever he may be at a given moment rather than belonging somewhere. Instead of indulging in nostalgia or romanticizing his status as a self-acclaimed wanderer, Goto is complacent with the lack (and not loss) of roots, painting a comical picture of human beings as intrinsically itinerant. Neither travelers nor natives, "hikiage-sha" (returnees from former "colonies" of the Empire of Japan), "tanshin funin sha" (virtual bachelors temporarily relocated on work assignments), and "danchi-zoku salarii-man" (commuters from apartment megaplexes in the suburbs) as portrayed by Goto encapsulate the curiously ambiguous relationships that modern urban residents all maintain with their own abodes. What sets Goto apart from celebrated travelers in classical Japanese literature who lament the impermanence of life is his tireless curiosity about the physical and mundane details of the lived space and his desire for abstraction thereof. In this paper I will investigate how, in Goto’s fiction, the minutiae of life (e.g., floor plans, plumbing, the vertical and horizontal composition of apartment buildings, laundry and washing dishes) affect the ways that residents grapple with spaciality and temporality in their eternally transient lives.
Session 12: Japan’s Economic Bilateralism: Implications for the World Economy
Organizer: Mireya Solis, American University
Chair and Discussant: Richard Feinberg, University of California, San Diego
Keywords: Japan, regionalism, financial integration, industrial harmonization, trade disputes, free trade areas.
The regionalization of the world economy accelerated markedly in the past few years as many Asian countries for the first time reoriented their foreign economic policies in favor of formal regional cooperation schemes. With remarkable speed, bilateral and trilateral free trade agreements (FTAs) and other mechanisms for regional cooperation have rapidly proliferated in East Asia. Japan in particular has led the way in this embrace of economic bilateralism by actively negotiating regional and cross-regional free trade agreements, pursuing greater de facto industrial integration with Asian producers, and experimenting with new forms of regional financial integration. This panel seeks to underscore the factors behind the emergence of Japanese regional integration initiatives, as well as the likely implications of this major reorientation in the foreign economic policy of the world’s second largest economy. This panel offers a decidedly comparative perspective, contrasting regional initiatives across issue areas and discussing Japan’s economic relations with different prospective regional partners. Solis discusses the origins of Japan’s FTA policy and analyzes the free trade negotiations between Japan and Mexico. Katada analyzes the reasons behind the unprecedented Japanese attempt to build regional financial institutions in Asia. Hatch analyzes sector-specific regional integration institutions championed by Japan (in automobiles and telecommunications, for example). Pekkanen traces the evolution of Sino-Japanese legal trade disputes in the absence of formal integration but in a context of substantial de facto economic integration between these two countries.
Japan’s New Regionalism: The Politics of Free Trade Talks with Mexico
Mireya Solis, American University
In the past few years, Japan reversed its exclusive support for the multilateral trade regime and endorsed for the first time bilateral and preferential trade pacts, signing one with Singapore, currently negotiating another with Mexico, and recently announcing free trade talks with South Korea. The newfound Japanese interest in pursuing free trade agreements (FTAs), therefore, represents one of the most significant departures in Japanese trade diplomacy of the past half-century. This article seeks both to explain the birth of a preferential trading policy in a country that until recently had been a staunch multilateralist and to analyze the reasons for the launch of FTA negotiations between Japan and Mexico. Indeed, one of the most remarkable aspects of Japan’s new trade bilateralism is its cross-regional orientation, seeking preferential trade with a Latin American nation. Trade negotiations with Mexico are of great consequence to the development of Japan’s FTA strategy for one more reason. Japan has embarked on this new regionalism to offset the negative effects of competing FTAs but at the same time has tried to minimize agricultural concessions to its bilateral trade partners. Mexico is the first large agricultural exporter that Japan has approached for trade negotiations and therefore is an important test for the success of the Japanese FTA strategy.
Asia’s Financial Regionalism: Japan Driven by the Domestic-International Political Nexus
Saori N. Katada, University of Southern California
Japan long hesitated to support establishing formal regional institutions, particularly those that exclude the United States and that require large political and financial commitments. In addition, cooperation between the region’s major powers, Japan and China, has always proven to be difficult. Thus, recent waves of regional initiatives in Asia on finance (Chiang Mai Initiative) and trade (various FTA discussions and the Economic Partnership Agreement with Singapore) indicate a shift in the country’s policy direction. By emphasizing the importance of the domestic-international political nexus, I examine the reasons behind the resurgence of political and economic interests in the region among the major actors in Japan. What led the Japanese government to commit itself to initiating and supporting Asian financial institution building? What is the relationship between the financial initiatives and those in other areas of Japan’s economic relationships (particularly trade and investment)? How have the country’s domestic political and economic dynamics influenced its government’s foreign policy positions? The paper analyzes these questions by focusing on the evolution of Japan’s regional initiatives from 1997 at the time of the Asian Financial Crisis through early 2002 at the time of the conclusion of the EPA with Singapore.
Japan’s Agenda for Economic Integration in Asia: Fostering Industrial Harmonization
Walter Hatch, Colby College
Conventional wisdom suggests that the Government of Japan has been reluctant to enter into formal agreements to foster regional economic integration in Asia. As demonstrated by Japan’s opposition to the accelerated opening of certain markets in APEC, this assessment is certainly accurate if applied only to trade liberalization schemes. It is inaccurate, however, when applied to what the government calls "industrial harmonization." Indeed, Japanese bureaucrats have established numerous sector-specific institutions designed to promote tighter cross-border linkages between Japanese manufacturers and their counterparts in Asia. For example, the Ministry of Economy, Trade, and Investment has set up a program, in collaboration with the Japanese Automobile Manufacturers Association, to send experts to countries such as Thailand and Indonesia to help auto parts producers there upgrade the quality of their output. And METI also has set up programs to foster stronger ties between Japanese and Asian firms in the electronics and telecommunications industries.
The WTO and Japan-China Trade Relations
Saadia Pekkanen, Middlebury College
Japan’s legal trade diplomacy, centered on the WTO, has thus far been most consistent with respect to the United States. However, recent events show that the Japanese government is as determined to deal with all its trade partners in the rule-based context of the WTO. Nowhere is this more evident than with respect to Japan’s emerging trade diplomacy vis-à-vis China, which is fast becoming dominant in Japanese trade patterns. This paper focuses on the interplay between WTO law and politics as Japan seeks to deal with China across a number of trade issues and disputes. These issues include safeguards, antidumping, and trade-related intellectual property rights (TRIPs).
Organizer and Chair: Jeff E. Long, Bloomsburg University of Pennsylvania
Discussant: Sharon A. Minichiello, University of Hawaii, Manoa
Keywords: Japan, history, right wing, interwar years.
Intent on explaining Japan’s plunge into the abyss of militarism during the 1930s, early postwar scholars devoted significant portions of their studies to highlighting the role of Japan’s right-wing leadership in the politics of the day. Yet, a new generation of scholars writing in the late 1970s and 1980s contested this limited focus on the interwar political milieu and, as a result, efforts to comprehend the complex intellectual concerns, influences, and impact of Japan’s right-wing leadership tapered off. With the recent textbook controversy and public awareness of the neo-nationalist discourse accompanying that debate, however, a revival of scholarly interest in Japanese right-wing nationalism is under way.
This panel seeks to further this resurgence of interest by addressing a significant historiographical gap in our knowledge of the Right: a dearth of studies that grapple with the diversity of right-wing thought during early Showa Japan. By examining a few of the strands of conservatism and radicalism interwoven into the thought and activities of the right-wing elite, the contributors endeavor to provide a more complex characterization of right-wing intellectual activity and organizational dynamics through the interwar years.
In this panel, Christopher Szpilman explores strains of conservatism in the views of Mitsukawa Kametaro and Kanokogi Kazunobu from the radical Right. Roger Brown’s study of Yasuoka Masahiro’s Confucian-derived discourse on personal and national moral renewal suggests a conservative mode of reformist thought. Jeff Long discerns strands of continuity that transcend Hayashi Fusao’s ideological conversion from radical Marxist to conservative nationalist.
Mitsukawa Kametaro and Kanokogi Kazunobu: The Conservatism of Japan’s Radical Right
Christopher W. A. Szpilman, Harvard University
This paper looks at two Japanese Pan-Asianists and nationalists: Mitsukawa Kametaro (1885–1936) and Kanokogi Kazunobu (1884–1949). Waseda University-educated Mitsukawa was a prolific writer, journalist and professor at Takushoku University. Columbia-educated Kanokogi taught philosophy at the imperial universities of Tokyo and Kyoto and wrote a number of influential works. Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, both actively participated in well-known rightist organizations such as the Rosokai, the Yuzonsha (both founded by Mitsukawa), and the Aikoku Kinroto. Despite their prewar prominence, neither attracted the attention of historians: there is, to my knowledge, nothing in English (and very little in Japanese) on either of them, even if there is a consensus that both were members of the radical Right.
The academic neglect of these two men is unjustified for at least two reasons: first, because Kanokogi and Mitsukawa were highly influential as nationalist ideologues and political activists and, second, because the ideas and ideals they espoused live on in contemporary Japan. I believe that examination of the ideals and the political behavior of these two men is necessary for a better understanding of both what Japan’s right wing stood for before the war and what it represents now.
After outlining the careers of Mitsukawa and Kanokogi, I will discuss their (not necessarily similar) political views and examine how their intellectual positions changed over time. Finally, I will consider the extent and limitations of their radicalism, suggesting that there was a convergence of values between Japan’s radical Right and conservatism.
Shepherding the People toward Restoration: Yasuoka Masahiro and Official Reformism in Early Showa Japan
Roger H. Brown, Temple University Japan
Yasuoka Masahiro (1898–1983) graduated from Tokyo Imperial University in 1922 and embarked on a long career as a private scholar-advisor to court officials, reformist bureaucrats, business leaders, and other political power brokers. While initially forging ties with key individuals later associated with the radical Right, such as Kita Ikki and Okawa Shumei, Yasuoka’s most sustained and important prewar contacts centered on non-party conservatives and moderate reformists within various factions of the ruling elite. In particular, the young Japanist became the favorite ideologue of many members of modern Japan’s first generation of "examination bureaucrats" within the Home Ministry. Drawing on Chinese political philosophy and ideals of self-cultivation derived from both Confucian and neo-Kantian thought, Yasuoka articulated an ideology casting these "men of talent" as the "shepherds of the people" needed to guide a restoration of proper governance in line with Japan’s national polity.
Despite the longstanding appeal of Yasuoka’s discourse in elite circles in both the prewar and postwar periods, he has attracted only minimal attention from historians who, professional and popular alike, have preferred to investigate those rightists associated with incidences of political violence. Consequently, the content and significance of the style of conservative nationalism articulated by Yasuoka have remained poorly understood. Examining the ideals informing his message of top-down reform and the political interests with which he allied, this paper sheds light on the importance of Yasuoka’s thought and activities to the official reformism of the early 1930s and, consequently, to the political and ideological struggles of early Showa Japan.
Tenko, Hayashi Fusao, and the Political Uses of Literature in Interwar Japan
Jeff E. Long, Bloomsburg University of Pennsylvania
Hayashi Fusao (1903–1975) emerged as one of Japan’s representative literati during the 1930s. Hailing from Oita prefecture on the island of Kyushu, Hayashi joined the Shinjinkai (New Man Society) while a Higher School student in Kumamoto. He entered the Law Department of Tokyo Imperial University in 1923 where he took leadership positions within the Gakuren (Student Federation), a national alliance of radical university student groups. Suspended and eventually expelled from Tokyo Imperial University after his arrest in 1926, Hayashi became a member of the left-wing literary movement, contributing short stories and literary commentary with a Marxist perspective until his imprisonment in 1930. Upon his release from prison in 1932, Hayashi began publicly attacking the leadership of the left-wing cultural movement for turning it into a communist movement that privileged politics over literature. As a result, most scholars mark the early 1930s as the beginning of his tenko or ideological conversion to ultranationalism.
In his attempt to use literature to overcome the politicization of proletarian literature, a study of Hayashi furthers our understanding of the formative growth of right-wing nationalism in the 1930s. By examining the conservatism and radicalism evident in his writings and choice of organizational affiliations through that time, this paper intends to show how Hayashi’s tenko was more than just a matter of state power exercised upon the individual; it was also an attempt to articulate an intellectual position separate from both the state and the communist leadership of the left-wing cultural movement.
Session 31: Performing Okinawa: Identity, Politics, and Performance in/out of Okinawa
Organizer and Chair: James E. Roberson, Oxford Brookes University
Discussant: Gerald A. Figal, Vanderbilt University
Keywords: Okinawa, performance, politics, identity, history, memory, diaspora.
Over the past decade, Okinawa has been the focus of renewed scholarly interest and has been described as a "cold war island," as "islands of discontent" where structure and subjectivity are composed in complex interrelationships with overlapping Japanese and American spheres of influence and power. Much of this research has been motivated by a critical approach to Asian studies, in which this panel also participates, and has brought to light issues of power, identity and culture as these are exercised, constructed and practiced in Okinawa.
This panel employs the lens of cultural performance to provide focused yet varied descriptions and discussions of Okinawan identity and cultural politics. The papers provide detailed ethnographic and text based analyses of the ways in which eisa dance performances in Okinawa and Osaka, regional Okinawan stage performances, and Okinawan folk and popular music articulate a variety of Okinawan cultural identities and political positionalities in and out of Okinawa. Revealing the continuing importance of performance in the expression and contestation of Okinawan identities, the papers theoretically map the intersections of cultural memory, political resistance, the multiplicity of identities, and diasporic experience as these are narrated, constructed, and re-invented in local Okinawan cultural performative practices and products, as well as by particular culturally and politically located performers. The panel contributes to understandings of the articulation of political and cultural discourses and practices in Okinawa, and through this suggests the importance of historically contexted approaches to the intersections of culture, identity, politics, and performance in Okinawa, Japan, and Asia generally.
Singing the Okinawan Diaspora; Songs of Home, Departure, and Return
James E. Roberson, Oxford Brookes University
This paper seeks to trace Okinawan articulations of music and migration as manifest in songs which narrate Okinawan diasporic experiences and identities. Beginning with the emigration in 1899 of laborers contracted to work on the sugar plantations of Hawaii, Okinawa became and remains the Japanese prefecture with the highest rate of out-migration. There are estimated to be some 300,000 people of Okinawan ancestry living outside of Japan, with an equal number of Okinawans living outside of Okinawa in other Japanese prefectures. While previous research has examined the importance of "traditional" music and dance performance within these diasporic Okinawan communities, this paper seeks to provide a reading of the construction of the diasporic experience as narrated in the lyrics of songs which sing of departure from and (desired) return to the Okinawan homeland/heartland. Included in the Okinawan musical corpus are songs such as "Hawaii Bushi," "Nan’yo Bushi," "Imin-Kouta," "Nmarijima," and "Ikawu." Of particular interest are how such songs reflect (upon) changes in the historical and political-economic contexts of migration and in the correlated shifting of destinations to which Okinawans have moved. The singing of desires to return to or to remain culturally or emotionally connected with Okinawa on the part of now third and fourth generation Okinawans in diaspora will also be considered. In examining such songs, the paper hopes to contribute to discussions of the performative construction of diasporic identities as sung from the position of the cultural homeland.
Drumming out a Message: Eisa and the Okinawan Diaspora in Mainland Japan
Yoshitaka M. Terada, National Museum of Ethnology, Osaka
In this paper, I explore the relationship between the cultural displacement of Okinawans in mainland Japan and their construction of a diasporic identity through the performing arts. Focusing on a form of Okinawan dance and drumming known as eisa, I discuss the socio-cultural environment in which eisa performances were started by the Okinawan minority in Osaka and how the involvement with eisa is related to the formation of multi-layered identities. Okinawa is known for its high level of emigration. Within Japan, Kansai (Osaka and adjacent areas) has the largest off island Okinawan community. This community is centered in the Taisho Ward of Osaka, where a quarter of the population is estimated to be of Okinawan descent. Okinawan immigration to Osaka dates to the late 1890s and had its first peak in the 1920s. Here, I focus on the period after the reversion of Okinawa to Japan in 1972, when a booming economy attracted many Okinawans to seek employment in Osaka. Threatened by persistent stereotyping and discriminatory practices by the mainland Japanese, they formed an organization for mutual support and began performing eisa to assert their ethnic identity and pride. The selection of eisa is significant because it had been stigmatized in the course of the systematic assimilation of Okinawans and consequent devaluation of their customs and lifestyles. I aim to delineate the striving of young Okinawans against the dehumanizing stigmas and their efforts to develop pride and confidence by exposing their stigmatized art form in public.
The Battlefield of Memory: The Politics of Memoration in Contemporary Okinawa
Christopher T. Nelson, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
In Okinawa, the past lies uneasily beneath the surface of the present like unexploded bombs still embedded in the landscape. Unresolved, it erupts into the everyday, violent and unpredictable. This tension shadows the figure of the yadui as it was deployed in aesthetic representation, political discourse, and ritual practice during the late 1990s. Yadui are villages of déclassé Ryukyuan nobles, sent down to the countryside from the capital. Many yadui were destroyed during the Pacific War, the land confiscated by the American bases that continue to dominate the Okinawan landscape.
Often used by modern poets and writers, the trope of the yadui was mobilized during a series of public hearings held by the prefectural government. In poignant testimony, the hansen jinushi (or anti-war landowners) of Kadena Air Base narrated the destruction of their native yadui. They contrasted the idyllic image of the rural Okinawan village with the historical actuality of their loss, exposing processes of ideological repression that have naturalized the bases in contemporary society. Recalled and recreated in their narrations, the yadui become a basis of action, a source of power from which to enunciate their political position.
The figure of the yadui is also central to eisa (the dance for the dead). While important work has been done concerning the politicality of memoration, little attention has been paid to eisa, the most widespread modality of public memorative practice in Okinawa. In eisa, performers struggle to both re-create the figure of a lost everyday and transform themselves into subjects capable of this production.
The Politics of Performance in the Local History of Okinawa
Kazuma Maetakenishi, Columbia University
In 1972, the year Okinawa reverted from American occupation to Japanese control, the Yokatsu area was confronted with the construction of immense oil storage facilities. This project met with strong opposition from some residents and enthusiastic support from others. This situation in turn led to growing awareness and transformations of local customs such as rituals related to ancestor worship, the practices of Yuta (shamans), and community rituals involving animal sacrifice.
Among the oil storage facility opposition faction, many cultural performances were (re-)invented through such transformations. Kimutaka no Amawari, a community-based schoolchildren’s performance, is now popular in the Yokatsu area. Inspired by the inscription of Katsuren castle as a World Heritage property, the performance has tried to re-inscribe and glorify the history of Amawari, a "notorious" feudal lord who resisted submission to the Ryukyuan Kingdom. The performance also incorporates "traditional customs" such as folk songs, dances for the ancestors, and Ryuka (thirty-syllable Okinawan poems).
This paper compares differences between contemporary performances in Yokatsu and those from the 1970s. I focus on the function of performance as a form of local resistance against a new political-economic environment not only in the context of the local community ritual but of civil society at large. The question here is how the Yokatsu performance—staged between custom and art form and based on a dying language that haunts the rupture between the state and the society—has contributed to the contestational re-interpretation of local history and the re-invention of local identities.
Session 32: Critical Issues in the History of Japanese Photography
Organizer: Julia Adeney Thomas, University of Notre Dame
Chair: Gennifer S. Weisenfeld, Duke University
Discussant: John Whittier Treat III, Yale University
Photography is a maverick medium, moving among the disciplines of history, art, politics, and technology and among the realms of the amateur, the commercial designer, the photojournalist, and the artistic visionary. As such, it provides a crucial means for understanding the interrogation of these disciplines and practices in the twentieth century. This panel proposes to examine Japan’s distinct contribution to the modern medium of photography and what it reveals about the contested perceptions of the aesthetic and the political from the 1920s to the 1980s. The four papers cover a wide range of photographic practices, locating them within their social contexts both at home in Japan and internationally.
Topics to be considered are: the role of amateurism and hobbyists in constructing a photographic discourse centered on technique; the applications of modernist photomontage techniques to the commercial realm of corporate advertising in the 1930s; the use of documentary photographic strategies to construct a culture of democracy in the postwar period; and a comparative historicization of the production and reception of two published photographic albums issued thirty years apart that represent the historical landmark the Katsura Imperial Villa.
Between Art and Industry: The Hobby Photographer and Middlebrow Aesthetics in 1920s–1930s Japan
Kerry L. Ross, Columbia University
Pictorialism was the primary aesthetic language of hobby photography in the 1920s and 1930s, and, as a technique, demanded concentrated effort in the darkroom. Hobbyists regularly employed materials and handwork difficult to master in making their art. In fact, it was the entire photographic process, not only the final image, that compelled the hobbyist in his leisure-time activity. Indeed, the hobby photographer was a knowledgeable consumer, skilled technician, and amateur artist. The two essential ideological elements of modern shumi (hobbies) were the acquisition of highly specialized skills and the cultivation of individual expression. In journals and contests, the photographic industry marketed these elements in defining the legitimate aesthetics of hobby photography. Nearly all of the popular photographic journals, such as Shashin Geppo, Fototaimusu, and Kamera Kurabu, selected and then published images submitted by readers. The selection process, while not explicitly spelled out, was often implied in columns that explained the editors’ choices. And the selections themselves served as a kind of representational barometer for readers. Contests, perhaps even more boldly, promoted rigorous artistic standards and often required participants to use particular products or techniques. These sources remind us that the application of rigorous artistic standards was not the singular concern of modernists and the avant-garde but also of middlebrow photographers. However, in contrast to the modernist fetishizing of the image, the hobbyist was consumed with the hidden forces of production.
Montage and Marketing in Japan
Gennifer S. Weisenfeld, Duke University
Montage has been recognized as one of the privileged languages of the avant-garde for its ability to disrupt the illusionism of mimetic modes of representation and for reflexively instantiating the experiences of alienation and fragmentation in modern daily life. Montage has also been widely studied for its unique communicative abilities in political propaganda in the spheres of left-wing and right-wing revolutionary politics. But between the two worlds of the avant-garde and political propaganda was another sphere of dynamic montage production that drew from both—commercial advertising.
Like their colleagues abroad in the 1930s, the Japanese became infatuated with montage aesthetics as a quintessentially modern form of expression. Commercial designers working for major Japanese corporations like the Kao Soap Company, Morinaga Confectionary Company, Matsushita Electronics, and a range of others actively employed montage to promote their new consumer goods, thus refunctioning montage as a corporate marketing strategy. These manufacturers employed montage to promote their products precisely because of its close associations with the modern, the new, the productive, the scientific, and the machine aesthetic. And corporate advertising campaigns were often keyed to state policy initiatives tying private sector goals to national welfare.
By closely examining the diverse applications of montage and the specific contexts of its use in the marketing of various commodities, this paper will demonstrate the central role Japanese corporate advertisers played as innovative cultural producers, merging avant-garde strategies with commercial and national interests.
"Democratic Photography" in Occupied Japan
Julia Adeney Thomas, University of Notre Dame
After Japan’s surrender in 1945, the American Occupation was intent on creating a democratic culture in what was perceived as a feudal nation, and photography was deemed instrumental to that democratizing mission. Horace Bristol, George Miller, Joe O’Donnell, and others arrived in Japan, carrying not only cameras, but also the conviction that documentary photography could broaden the public sphere there as it had in the United States. Their models, photographers such as Walker Evans and Dorothea Lange employed by Roosevelt’s Farm Securities Administration, had contributed to the inclusion of the destitute and other outsiders in America’s vision of itself during the 1930s, and this impulse was transferred to Japan along with other New Deal ideals. In contrast to the high modernist aesthetic embraced by fascism, these photographers attempted to create a more homely popular idiom. The first goal of this paper, then, will be to investigate the ideology and practices of American photographers active during SCAP’s dominion, understanding them within the context of mid-century cultural politics.
However, the use of photography to promote democracy in Japan also raises important theoretical questions both about the medium and about cross-cultural transmission. In what ways can photography be deemed a democratic practice? Is it because of the information images supply about other people and their living conditions? In other words, is photography democratic because it represents reality? Or, alternatively, does photography’s democratic potential arise from the aesthetic qualities of particular modes of photography? Do the formal aspects of certain photographs teach us how to look at others as citizens equal to ourselves? Or, and this is a third alternative, is photography democratic simply because of the number of people who wield a camera? Whether it is as data, art, or social practice that photography lays claim to democratic potential, it is also crucial to ask how likely it is that American versions of the practice were easily transferable to Japan. The second goal of this paper will be to explore these theoretical issues about the nature and global reach of photography’s political allegiances.
Ishimoto Yasuhiro and a Tale of Two Katsuras
Jonathan M. Reynolds, University of Southern California
Ishimoto Yasuhiro has photographed the famed Katsura Villa on two occasions in his prolific career—in 1954 not long after he had returned to Japan after many years living in the United States and studying at the modernist bastion Illinois Institute of Technology, and a second time in 1982 following a major renovation of the 17th-century complex. In each case Ishimoto published his work in collaboration with a major architect. After Ishimoto had visited the villa for the first time in the company of MOMA’s Arthur Drexler and took a few preliminary photographs he approached Tange Kenzo with the idea for a book. He piqued the interest of this rising modernist star by calling attention to similarities between Katsura and Mies van der Rowe’s canonical Lake Shore Apartments. For this effort, Tange contributed a substantial essay and the modernist patriarch Walter Gropius wrote a preface. On the second occasion Ishimoto teamed up with a new star (and former Tange student) Isozaki Arata. For this second publication, Isozaki offered an intriguing historiography of architects’ writings on the complex since the 1930s.
Many, including Isozaki and Ishimoto himself, have called attention to the differences between Ishimoto’s two photographic interpretations of Katsura. The black-and-white series from 1954 has been recognized as a high modernist reading of the villa that emphasized geometry and simplicity and tended to obscure some of the complex’s more decorative qualities. The later, color series highlighted Katsura’s rich materials and subtle ornamentation. The Katsura that emerged in the photographs of 1982 reflected a visual complexity that was not always consonant with earlier high modernist aesthetics.
In this paper I propose to examine both sets of photographs in relation to the texts with which they were published. To what degree does the modernist Katsura identified with the set depend on the texts by Tange and Gropius that appeared alongside them? Did Isozaki’s attempt to reanimate multiple voices encourage viewers to see Ishimoto’s later photographs as "heterogeneous" (to borrow Isozaki’s term)? Exactly how do text and image work together in these landmark publications? In each case I will discuss these collaborative efforts in relation to broader developments in the Japanese and overseas architectural communities at the times they were produced.
Session 33: INDIVIDUAL PAPERS: Topics in Japanese Functional Linguistics
Organizer and Chair: Julian Ross Paul King, University of British Columbia
A Case Study of the Communicative Functions of the Japanese Conditional Form Tara
Sono Takano Hayes, Carnegie Mellon University
This presentation introduces a case study of the communicative functions of the Japanese conditional form, tara, indicating how language expressions are used to present a speaker’s emotive stance, worldview, and manner of communication. In addition, the study discusses how to introduce the conditional form in Japanese as a Foreign Language (JFL) by emphasizing discourse and socio-cultural functions that highlight the connection between language and culture.
Typically, the tara form is studied synchronically as a connective in comparison with ba, to, and nara (Hasunuma, Arita, & Maeda 2001; Yamada 1988) and diachronically with the old Japanese tari (the source of the Modern Japanese tara) (Fukuzawa 1997). In addition, tara has been analyzed in discourse contexts (Akatsuka 1986; Fujii 1993). However, this presentation will identify discourse functions of tara by focusing on previously neglected areas: (1) tara’s emotive/subjective meanings in discourse contexts and the developmental paths in which the Old Japanese perfective auxiliary tari evolved to encompass temporal/conditional/emotive functions as seen in the present-day Japanese tara; (2) how such a functional development can be viewed in the context of the theory of grammaticalization/subjectification (Traugott 1995; Hopper and Traugott 1993); and (3) how tara’s discourse functions can be introduced in the JFL classroom. This study also echoes the notion that it is better to understand the use of language expressions in Japanese socio-cultural contexts as a key to understanding a country’s people, society, and culture.
The Structure of the Japanese Inferential System: A Functional Analysis of Daroo, Mitai, Rashii, Soo, and Yooda
Hidemi Sugi, University of California, Los Angeles
The paper investigates the contemporary Japanese inferential system, in which rashii, yooda, mitai ‘seem’, daroo ‘will’, and soo ‘look’ appear intertwined with each other in their uses. Due to the similarities in their uses on syntactic and pragmatic levels, researchers tend to rely on semantics to distinguish the subtle differences among the forms. Since Kindaichi (1953) applied epistemic modality to the Japanese inferential auxiliaries, epistemic modality has become the analytical tool used to analyze the system. Despite numerous subsequent investigations into the system, grammatical analysis has hitherto not successfully explained it.
Based on data comprised of approximately 10,000 instances the paper concludes that previous research into the inferential system is fundamentally distorted. The distortion is mainly caused by the importation of linguistic frameworks used to account for English. However, the Japanese system cannot be shoehorned into a broad theoretical framework based on truth-value.
The postulated system presented comprises two levels, Inference Relevant and Inference Not Relevant, respectively. Subcategories further divide the auxiliaries into those that allow the speaker to emphasize or not emphasize on inference. Therefore in the system there is a one-to-one relationship between form and meaning. For instance, if a speaker presents his inference forcefully based on a certain event, then he may choose the Inference Relevant–HIGH FOCUS auxiliary. On the other hand, if he reserves his inference because it is not newsworthy to his addressee, such as an obvious inference about the addressee, then he uses the LOW FOCUS auxiliary that is obligatory under the circumstance.
The Japanese Sentence-Final Particle Kana: Its Function as a "Mitigation Marker" in Conversation
Yuka Matsugu, University of Arizona
The Japanese language is well known for its sentence-final particles (SFPs hereafter) that express modality (Konoshima 1966; Kitahara 1998; Satoo 2000). Although modality would seem to be inseparable from context, only a limited number of studies have sought to explicate the nature of SFPs based on data from naturally occurring conversations (e.g., Maynard 1993; Okamoto 1996; Ide 1997). Moreover, despite the fact that SFP kana is one of the ten most frequently used particles in everyday conversation (Matsugu, ms.), it is typically analyzed as a combination of SFPs ka and na rather than being considered in its own right.
In this paper, therefore, I examine how SFP kana is used in over 400 minutes of talk (127 speakers, 48 situations, recorded between 1988 and 2002). I propose that SFP kana, which is commonly defined as a ‘self/other-addressed interrogative marker’ in dictionaries and in language textbooks, frequently functions as a mitigation marker (232 cases out of 318). My investigation also explores how speakers use this function at the sentence level (e.g., reducing the certainty/assertion of information) and at the interactional level (e.g., downplaying one’s previous statements or expressing disagreement implicitly) as well as at the discourse level (e.g., creating side-sequences). These findings have important implications for language teachers. In teaching spoken language, we should teach not only the traditional understanding of kana as an interrogative marker but also its functions as a mitigation marker which can be used to present one’s knowledge without imposing and/or could be used in a potential conflict situation.
Analysis of Narratives of Non-Native Speakers of Japanese
Hiromi Nishida Urayama, University of California, Berkeley; Masahiko Minami, San Francisco State University
The present study examines adult Japanese-as-a-foreign-language learners’ oral personal narratives in order to track the nature of the development of their narrative abilities and to determine whether learners become able to utilize appropriate narrative devices for producing native-speaker-like narratives. In first language acquisition, an individual’s narrative style varies depending on both the cultural or social setting and the stage of language development. Although the acquisition of culture-specific thought processes has been broadly studied in native languages, relatively little work has been done in how second-language learners develop this ability in the target language. The current study, which examines the development of narrative patterns in the course of second-language acquisition, investigates whether learners of Japanese eventually produce patterns similar to those of native speakers as their language proficiency levels increase. Narrative patterns were compared between intermediate and advanced learners and between non-native and native speakers of Japanese. The results indicate the following: (1) advanced learners produce longer narratives than intermediate learners by providing more background information (orientation statements in particular); (2) language learners, as they approach higher proficiency levels, tend to construct longer narratives than do native speakers; (3) non-native speakers provide more orientation statements whereas native speakers provide more appendages such as attention-getters. The differences identified between the narratives of non-native and native speakers suggest that learners of a foreign language are likely to apply culturally specific methods of communication used in their mother tongues to the target language.
Organizer: Martha Chaiklin, Milwaukee Public Museum
Chair: Lee Butler, Brigham Young University
Discussant: Luke S. Roberts, University of California, Santa Barbara
Keywords: pre-modern Japan, gifts, Dutch East India Company, aristocracy, Shogunate.
Gift-giving is an archetypical representation of Japanese culture. Studies of modern gift-giving in Japan are numerous, but little attention has been paid to the historic context of those practices. This panel will analyze gift-giving in pre-modern Japan from the perspectives of an anthropologist, an art historian, and two historians in order to elucidate practices among several social strata from the end of the medieval through the early modern periods. This was an important time for gift-giving because, as our papers will show, exchanges were no longer limited to a narrow elite: warriors, commoners, and foreigners also participated, and the meanings of gift-giving accordingly became more complex.
Lee Butler provides a wide view of society in a time of transition through the practices of gift exchanges maintained, created, and ignored by courtiers, warriors, and commoners in Warring States Japan (1467–1600). Lee Bruschke-Johnson will examine the relationship between the aristocracy and the emerging shogunate in the early years of the Tokugawa period through a rare instance of one-sided gift-giving—the last will of Konoe Nobutada (1565–1614).
Two papers focus on the relationship between Japan and the outside world after the establishment of the Tokugawa shogunate. Martha Chaiklin will show the added cultural value of gift-giving in the politics of the shogunate through a case study on live animal gifts from Dutch traders, and Margarita Winkel examines these international relations through the personal contacts of scholars, showing the motivations and results of gift-giving by Japanese and foreign intellectuals.
Gift-Giving in Warring States Japan: Maintaining and Reconfiguring Relationships
Lee Butler, Brigham Young University
One theme that runs through Marcel Mauss’s The Gift is the idea that gift-giving was a social act that forged ties between individuals and provided a basis for a stable society. Mauss argued that the exchange of gifts, though fraught with tension and often competitive in nature, was nonetheless a means to enhance human solidarity. Drawing upon this concept, my paper will examine gift-giving practices during Japan’s Warring States era (1467–1600), a period marked by social and political dislocation, not human solidarity. What, then, happened to customs of gift-giving? And in what spheres, and in what manner, did the exchange of gifts continue to take place? These are the questions I will address.
I am particularly interested in gift-giving across class and status lines, for example, between courtiers (for whom gift-giving was a long-established custom) and warrior upstarts and between courtiers and commoners. Sources reveal that many warriors offered and reciprocated gifts to the court and its members and that the same was true of commoners. In the process of these exchanges, ties were created that were not easily broken. One result, I will argue, is that gift-giving, as a conservative social and political force, ultimately affirmed the place of the court (and priesthood) and helped re-establish vertical ties between members of the elite and other classes. At the same time, some warriors clearly used their gifts to raise themselves politically and socially. Lesser warriors and commoners, not surprisingly, were ultimately put back in their places.
Preparing for Death: Konoe Nobutada’s Will of 1613
Lee Bruschke-Johnson, Independent Scholar
This paper examines the political repercussions of gift-giving for the aristocracy in the highly charged atmosphere of the newly established Tokugawa shogunate through Konoe Nobutada (1565–1614), a talented and flamboyant member of a high-ranking aristocratic family. The study will focus on his will, written in the eleventh month of 1613. Nobutada was seriously ill when he wrote it, yet letters confirm that he was keenly aware of the imminent and inevitable conflict between Tokugawa Ieyasu, founder of the new government, and Toyotomi Hideyori, son and heir of deceased rival warlord Hideyoshi. This contest was of vital interest to the nobility in Kyoto, who believed Hideyori would better preserve the cultured world of the Imperial Court.
Nobutada’s will serves as a microcosm of this political landscape, representing how gift-gifting, which in this case were bequests, reflected both familial relationships and political ties through bequests made to daimyo. Nobutada’s diary will be used to amplify the relationships outlined in the cut and dried list of recipients in the will. Special emphasis will be placed upon Nobutada’s relationship with Hideyori as he was one of the key players in the struggle for power in the early seventeenth century.
The Merchant’s Ark: Live Animal Gifts in Early Modern Dutch-Japanese Relations
Martha Chaiklin, Milwaukee Public Museum
The Dutch East India Company had only precariously retained trading privileges in seventeenth-century Japan when the Portuguese, the only other Western traders then remaining, were expelled in 1639. Part of the terms of these trading privileges was an annual presentation of gifts to the shogunate and officials involved in foreign trade. While the practice of oiling trading relationships with gifts was not unique to Japan, the gold, jewels, and other precious materials so often favored in other Asian nations rarely made an appearance among the gifts given to the shogun and his officials. Much more common were live animals.
This paper will use archival Dutch trade records (negotie journalen) and diaries (dagregisters) from the Dutch East India Company as well as printed Japanese primary sources like the Tokugawa jikki and Tsuko ichiran to determine what kinds of animals were brought to whom. The role of animals within Japanese culture will be examined to understand the interplay of supply from the Dutch and demand as an expression of personality in the context of the growth of science as a discipline within an isolated Japan.
Research and Recognition: International Friendship Ties and Intellectual Exchange in the Late Tokugawa Period
Margarita Winkel, Leiden University
"That friendship lasts longest—if
there is a chance of its being a success—in which friends both give and receive
gifts."
(Havamal cited in Marcel Mauss, The Gift, Cohen and West,
Ltd., London, 1970, p. xiv.)
Essay sur le don (1950; The Gift [1954] in English), by French social scientist Marcel Mauss is a thought-provoking essay on gift-giving and the social forces that invoke reciprocity. In his words, the inherent power of a gift is to "compel the recipient to make a return" (p. 3). For Mauss, neither gifts nor return gifts were necessarily material objects.
I intend to discuss the social dynamics of gift-exchange between Japanese and European scholars around the turn of the eighteenth century through their private correspondence and their scholarly publications, both in Japan and in Europe. The basis for these international friendship ties was a mutual research interest in a wide array of topics: history, botany, geography, ethnography, medicine, etc. I maintain that through these informal contacts the Japanese scholars viewed themselves as belonging to an international scholarly research community decades before the official opening of Japan in the 1850s.
Session 51: Education and Politics in Japan: The What, Why, and How of Change and Its Absence
Organizer and Chair: Julian B. Dierkes, University of British Columbia
Discussant: Leonard Schoppa, Jr., University of Virginia
Keywords: education, politics, postwar Japan, sociology, anthropology.
Education in Japan has been described as a case of "immobilism" in the making and implementation of policy. This panel assesses whether or not Japanese education remains "immobile" and reassesses reasons for its immobility and for the changes some perceive. Three panelists, Aspinall, Cave, and Dierkes, examine particular subject areas (English, Integrated Studies, and History). Dierkes argues that the reasons for immobilism in the historiography that has dominated Japanese history education are institutional rather than ideological. Aspinall argues that the continuing inadequacy of foreign language education is better explained by ideological and structural factors than by Schoppa’s immobilism model. Cave argues that recent curricular reform introducing Integrated Studies suggests that immobilism has significantly weakened but that change at the school level is evolutionary rather than revolutionary. Meanwhile, McVeigh argues that exclusive attention to immobilism ignores active efforts to renovate and strengthen the status quo in the interests of nationalism. The panel discussant is Leonard Schoppa, originator of the "immobilism" thesis. This panel brings together German, American, and British scholars based in four countries and with perspectives rooted in three disciplines—sociology, anthropology, and political science—to reappraise a topic of widespread interest.
An Institutional Perspective on the Stability of Postwar Japanese History Education
Julian B. Dierkes, University of British Columbia
The "immobilism" of Japanese policymaking has been demonstrated in various arenas. Whereas this perspective emphasizes the extent to which reform is prevented by a stalemate between various policy-actors, I examine a specific policymaking arena, junior high school history education, which has been dominated by one actor, the Ministry of Education, since the decline of its opposition counterpart, the Japanese Teachers’ Union.
Whereas the Ministry fought rearguard actions against the union and other politically progressive voices from the Occupation Period through the 1960s, it has used its power since then to reinforce the empiricist historiographical perspective that was institutionalized by the late 1950s. Through the emphasis of historical facts, i.e., events, their locations, and associated actors, this historiography studiously avoided more analytic approaches. Although this perspective has been maintained for over 50 years now, I show that it arose out of the specific institutional circumstances of educational policy-making in the immediate postwar period rather than being based on a particularly conservative or nationalist ideology.
The stability of the content of postwar Japanese history education flies in the face of internationally comparative analyses that have found a great amount of change in history curricula. Such global trends have come to emphasize an analytical approach to history education that is almost entirely absent from Japanese junior high schools.
Explaining Policy Failure in the Case of Foreign Language Education in Japan
Robert William Aspinall, Shiga University
This paper considers various political science models and other types of explanation that could be used to explain the failure of the Japanese education system to provide the country with a number of citizens sufficiently skilled in the use of modern foreign languages (especially the global lingua franca, English) to enable Japan to "punch its weight" in international forums.
Schoppa’s model of immobilism is not sufficient because, according to his model, policies of internationalization in the 1980s were received with an across-the-board consensus. Schoppa, however was not concerned in his analysis with the details of implementation of policy (where there was no deliberate political opposition). This paper will discuss different but interlinked ways in which there can be a failure to implement policy due to ideological and structural factors that are out of the immediate control of actors within the policymaking process. Ideological factors that will be considered are the culture of learning in Japan as well as nationalist opposition to English linguistic imperialism. The main structural factor to be considered is the system of exams used for entrance into high schools and universities.
Educational Reform at Elementary and Secondary Schools in Contemporary Japan
Peter Cave, University of Hong Kong
The agenda of recent educational reform in Japan encourages increased diversity and favors independent, self-motivated, exploratory, and creative thinking in pupils, though this has been balanced by measures to reinforce children’s social skills and moral values. This paper analyzes the major reform measures taken at the elementary and secondary levels, together with their significance. It argues that the major reforms to take place were curriculum reform and the introduction of a five-day school week, both introduced in 2002. Particularly interesting is the introduction of a major new subject at the primary and secondary levels, Sogo Gakushu (literally, "Integrated Studies"). The paper examines the implementation of the new curriculum in selected elementary and junior high schools, finding that one way these schools have coped with the new demands is to adapt pre-reform activities under the new label of "Integrated Studies." In several cases, the new subject is being used to address widespread concerns within Japan about children’s lack of integration into the local community or their supposedly weak moral sense. However, there is also evidence of curricular evolution, with pupils more engaged than before in designing and carrying out their studies independently. The findings suggest that the new curriculum has been effective in changing learning patterns, but that what is taking place is to a large extent evolutionary adaptation of pre-existing practices rather than a revolutionary introduction of a new learning model.
Higher Education Reform in Japan: From "Immobilism" to National Renovation
Brian J. McVeigh, University of Arizona
Schoppa’s important work on "immobilism" (1991) has become a sort of reference work for examining policy-making related to educational reforms in Japan. "Immobilism" suggests different actors blocking each other and locked in a state of inertia and inactivity. Though certainly useful in a certain sense, I contend that such a characterization, focusing on "what isn’t there" (reform), runs the danger of missing "what is there" (intensification of and activity associated with educational nationalism). The actors opposing reform are not so much "anti-reform" or even "pro-status quo"; rather, they are keenly in favor of renovating, improving, and strengthening the structures of the status quo.
I provide some context and position the debates about Japan’s higher education reform within more inclusive discourses about education reform in general, politico-economic reforms, and, at the most inclusive level, what might be called "reform nationalism." To support my arguments, I offer examples of recent reform efforts within the arena of higher education and their significance, thereby illustrating what is "real," "rhetorical," and possible in the way of reform given the ideological and institutional constraints in post-Imperial Japan.
Organizer: Thomas Looser, McGill University
Chair: Marilyn J. Ivy, Columbia University
Discussant: Midori Matsui, Tohoku University
Keywords: Japan, media studies, society, art, economy.
By the late 1990s, the immersion of Japanese daily life in increasingly globalized forms of consumer capitalism, and in the digital electronic technologies that go with global capital, led to conditions that were felt by many to imply the inauguration of a fundamentally new world—conditions that changed the grounds of sociality, including the basic foundations of identity and difference. One of the most visible and influential sites of expression—and practice—of these changes is the "Superflat" group of artists and critics.
One of the basic premises of Superflat work is a rejection of the (largely modernist) vision of aesthetics as an autonomous realm, independent of social and economic utility. For Superflat artists/critics, aesthetic form is not only implicated in and conditioned by the economic and technological conditions of the new globalization, it also articulates new possibilities for social form that emerge out of these conditions.
This panel will take a critical look at the aesthetics of the Superflat, including the sometimes emancipatory social claims made about these aesthetics. In keeping with the material, the papers approach the Superflat from a variety of disciplinary perspectives; each paper works both with aesthetic content and the theoretical claims about this content. The aim is not only to address ethnographic and historical questions about fundamental changes in the positioning of Japanese (and, perhaps, global) identity, but also to see what these changes imply for the practice of historical and cultural analysis.
Superflat Metamorphosis: On Aesthetic Difference and Commodification
Marc Steinberg, Brown University
For art historian Sawaragi Noi, the Superflat images the loss of difference in contemporary society. Yet many of the images Murakami Takashi assembled for his Superflat exhibition display a morphic quality that points toward the very explosion of difference. These morphic images, which I will situate as a counter-genealogy within the Superflat, raise two main issues, which I intend to explore. The first is their relation to the idea of difference. Do morphic images multiply differences, or negate them? Is aesthetic difference flattened or is it emergent? The second is the relation between these images and commodification—a theme key to the Superflat which refuses the separation between art and economy. Is this morphic counter-genealogy of the Superflat not itself reflective of, or immanent to, the contemporary logic of the proliferation of commodities, insofar as these commodities themselves are based on a logic of metamorphosis? That is, in the transformations that characterize the serial licensing of brands, concepts, and narratives, do we not find the same logic of metamorphosis that animates the morphic works of the Superflat artists? Or does difference in the morphic works operate according to a logic distinct from the logic of product differentiation and transformation that informs the serial licensing and proliferation of commodities under late capitalism?
The Early Modern Origins of a Superflat Japan
Thomas Looser, McGill University
The positioning of Japanese identity is complicated in Superflat art. There is a general acceptance among Superflat artists and critics that identity (and art) can now only emerge through the conditions of global, commodity capitalism. Further, tied to these economic conditions there is a privileging of digital technologies—especially insofar as these technologies seem to offer a new, perhaps more open relation to the world, which no longer allows for the single unified subject position generally associated with modernity.
Yet this is not a simple, postmodernist view of a commoditized world without history, or without real national identity. Superflat artists and critics almost uniformly see a contiguity between the Edo era and contemporary "Superflat" conditions. Both eras stand outside Japan’s modernity, and the Edo era serves to ground a national (even nationalistic) "Japanese" identity—even though from within the globalizing conditions of consumer capitalism and digital-like technologies. This raises questions not only as to the modes of origination that are seen to be part of our digital world but also as to the status of the early modern era itself.
This paper takes up those claims regarding early modern conditions. The focus is on the Edo era, and in particular, changing relations to the kind of subject positioning that comes from single-point perspectival space. Economic contexts are taken up as well. This is a means not only of examining the Edo period, but also of looking (critically) at "Superflat" history and its implications as grounds for identity in Japan today.
Superflat Children
Marilyn J. Ivy, Columbia University
This paper examines the aesthetics of Superflatness via the work of Nara Yoshitomo, lingering specifically on the place that childhood occupies in his imaginings. How does the motif of the child—perverse, ever-cute, or otherwise—motivate his Superflat productions? How does the child as the intensifed object of capitalist solicitation intersect with Yoshitomo’s creations of "characters"? How does the child-figure work to produce the sense of virtuality gone awry in Nara’s work? My paper will seek to address these queries (and others) within a reconsideration of the Superflat surround of Nara’s aesthetics.
Superflat Differences (Locating Japan in the Superflat)
Toshiya Ueno, Wako University
This paper works at three levels: (1): the term "Superflat" can/should be examined as a concept articulating the distinction between modernity and post-modernity—for instance, by examining the significance of "superficiality" in the theoretical discourse on the postmodern context in Japan (as in Shigehiko Hasumi’s work); (2) as Benjamin already remarked in the 30s, Disney’s "Mickey Mouse" was the "figure of a collective dream," regardless of ideological direction. How does this compare to Murakami Takashi’s character "Dob"? And to extend this question, what is the role of animals or "cute-beasts"/techno-hybrids in Japanese subcultures and expressive cultures, including visual art, techno music, animation, and manga? This can be traced back to the usage of the term "kawaii" (cute) in the postmodern condition in Japan; (3) When arguing about Japanese subcultures in general, how can we, as Japanese scholars or intellectuals concerned with Japanese culture, avoid becoming the native informant, and eschew the posture or tendency towards "Japanese specificity" (Nihon Tokyushu Ron)?
In the 50s, influential theoreticians, including Barthes and Kojeve, developed cultural theories based on travels to Japan. Particularly relevant is Kojeve’s process of "animalization," referring to cultural life and difference in the U.S. and Japan. Questions can be raised, including: whether this notion of "animalization" can be related to the myriad figures and characters in Japanese expressive subcultures such as the Superflat; what the implications for this kind of approach are; and how it compares with recent approaches (e.g., Azuma Hiroki, one of the "ideologues" of Superflat).
Organizer: Anne Sokolsky, University of Southern California
Chair: Kathleen Uno, Temple University
Discussants: Kathleen Uno, Temple University; Jan Bardsley, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
Tamura Toshiko (1885–1945), a feminist writer of modern Japan and a representative "New Woman," is mainly known for her fiction published from 1911 to 1918. Her works tend to be read as a feminist critique of Japan’s heterosexual patriarchy. Yet, this is only half of her writing story.
From 1918 until her death in 1945, she crossed several national borders and witnessed racism on both sides of the Pacific Ocean. She left Japan during its Taisho democracy, lived in North America at the height of anti-Asian sentiment, returned to Japan colonizing its neighbors, and lived her final years in Japanese-occupied China. These numerous border-crossing experiences are discussed in the short stories, essays, and poems she wrote later in her career. Yet, these works have been relegated to the margins of literary history. The reason most often cited is that they are not of the same literary quality as her earlier works.
This interdisciplinary panel, using postcolonial theory as a framework, will examine how ideas of nation, race, and gender get woven into the writing Tamura produced in the last three decades of her life. Noriko Horiguchi will consider Tamura’s journalistic and fictional works written during her Vancouver years from 1918 to 1933. Anne Sokolsky will discuss the stories and essays Tamura wrote while in Japan from 1936 to 1938; and Peichen Wu will consider Tamura’s political activities as editor of the Chinese magazine Nu-Sheng. The two overarching questions this panel will try to answer, from both a literary and historical perspective in the responses of discussants Jan Bardsley and Kathleen Uno, is why do women writers such as Tamura usually get read solely in terms of personal gender issues devoid of a broader political stance and what constitutes literary worth? This panel will try to show how Tamura’s final years as a writer are worthy of study both in discourses of postcolonial theory and Japanese writers’ reactions to Japan’s militarist policies.
Body, Migration, and Empire: Tamura Toshiko’s Writing in Vancouver from 1918 to 1933
Noriko J. Horiguchi, University of Tennessee, Knoxville
This presentation examines how Tamura Toshiko’s writing on the female bodies of the Japanese migrants operated in the context of the expanding body of the Japanese empire and its relationship with Canada. With the focus on Tamura’s poems and essays published in Canadian local newspapers during her fifteen-year stay in Vancouver from 1918 to 1933, this study analyzes her writing in the political and social contexts of anti-Japanese movements and measures, within which the Japanese migrants struggled to construct their identity, secure their position, and survive as residents and workers in Canada.
As one of the migrants, Tamura created characters situated in dialectic relationships to the dichotomies of "home country"/"foreign country" and Japanese women/Canadian women. More specifically, Tamura produced her own form of nationalism as a tool in constructing the collective community of the Japanese female migrant mothers and workers, separate not only from the "foreign women" in Canada but also from mothers, workers, and students in Japan. With the backdrop of the Japanese nation-state’s mobilization of its subjects, Tamura provided the Japanese female migrants in Canada with specific roles and responsibilities for Japan. In her call for the female migrants to work with their bodies and elevate their status in the West’s territory and consequently raise the position of Japan in the world, Tamura’s inscription of the female migrant bodies in Vancouver operated within the Japanese nation-state’s discourse, which highlighted racial hierarchy and the putative civilization gap between the West and Japan and which thematized Japanese emigration and expansion.
Writing between the Spaces of National and Cultural Boundaries: Tamura Toshiko’s 1930s Fiction
Anne Sokolsky, University of Southern California
Many critics consider Tamura Toshiko the archetypal Japanese New Woman writer. While this label might accurately describe Tamura’s progressive lifestyle, it does not reflect her own ambivalence about Japan’s modernization in terms of not only gender but race and social class as well. In this paper, I will argue that Tamura’s sphere of observation and writing went beyond the typically gendered stereotype of a woman writer capable of only writing about the personal. Rather, I will show how Tamura was an astute observer of socio-political issues. She subtly indicted and exposed the fallacious foundations upon which ideas of nationalism and colonialism were justified during her time in stories she wrote from 1936 to 1938, when she returned to Japan and before she moved to China. These works are based on both Tamura’s eighteen-year residence in North America, in which she witnessed the racism that Japanese immigrants had to endure, as well as her reaction to Japan’s expansionist militarism. Using the theoretical framework of post-colonialists such as Homi Bhabha and Trinh Minh-ha, I examine how Tamura, through her protagonists, who must find identities in interstitial spaces rendered by social class, political beliefs, or nationality, reveals the false premises and paradoxes upon which ideas of cultural supremacy and nationalism were used as rhetorical weapons to justify one group’s oppression of another during the politically turbulent years of the 1930s.
The Transformation of Women’s Issues in Occupied Shanghai: Sato (Tamura) Toshiko’s Nu-Sheng and Women’s Literature in Propaganda Magazines
Peichen Wu, University of Tsukuba
In 1936, Sato (Tamura) Toshiko returned to Japan after living in Vancouver, Canada, for eighteen years. Two years later, she moved to China as a correspondent for Chuo Koron, and later she became editor-in-chief of a Chinese women’s magazine called Nu-Sheng. On the surface, Nu-Sheng appeared to be a "propaganda" magazine backed by the Japanese authorities; in reality, most of the writers in Nu-Sheng, including Toshiko’s assistant, the Chinese female writer Guan-Lu, were underground members of the Chinese Communist Party. Tamura was in charge of the letters to the editor column, the most popular section of this magazine.
Zhang Ai-Ling, a modern Chinese female writer, began her writing career in 1943 in Shanghai and was one of the most popular writers in occupied Shanghai. Focusing on women’s issues, most of Zhang’s works were published in magazines supported by the Japanese authorities, such as Za-Zhi and Gu-Jing; in fact, her most active writing period seems to have coincided with the Japanese occupation in Shanghai. The problems faced by the heroines in her novels often overlapped with similar problems mentioned in the letters to the editor column edited by Tamura for Nu-Sheng.
In this paper, I will locate the position of the "propaganda" magazine Nu-Sheng by examining similarities in the treatment of women’s issues in the letters to the editor column in Nu-Sheng and in Zhang’s novels. Through such a comparison, I hope to shed light on Tamura’s perspective as an international feminist during her Shanghai period.
Organizer: Akiko Takenaka-O’Brien, Yale University
Chair and Discussant: Laura Hein, Northwestern University
Keywords: modern Japan, nationalism, militarism, Yasukuni Shrine.
Yasukuni Shrine—a symbol of modern Japan’s militarism and imperialism—has generated volumes of scholarly and journalistic commentary, most of which tends to err on the side of oversimplifying the issues, either by insisting that Yasukuni Shrine coerced innocent masses into destructive militarism or that those who are enshrined there willingly gave up their lives for the emperor. These simplifications reduce the presence of Yasukuni to a convenient symbolic or stereotypical representation of each interest group.
In order to present more of the complexity of issues associated with Yasukuni Shrine, this panel takes a multidisciplinary approach to examine the significance of the shrine’s historical and contemporary presence. Akiko Takenaka-O’Brien analyzes how traditional folk beliefs regarding death and the afterlife were aestheticized and appropriated, over many decades, into what is known today as the Yasukuni ideology. David Earhart focuses on the home front, and examines the furthest extent of Yasukuni ideology as depicted in wartime print media. By examining Yushukan, the newly renovated military museum, Takashi Yoshida critiques Yasukuni’s recent attempts to involve younger generations in Yasukuni nationalism. John Nelson uses his documentary video filmed on site to propose ways to incorporate Yasukuni and related issues into the teaching of nationalism and social memory. Such attention to artistic, religious, and educational elements shows how the shrine has worked as a political symbol in both the past and the present. Together, these papers help us understand Japanese wartime and postwar nationalism and critically expand the discussion of Yasukuni beyond its current symbolisms and stereotypes.
From Folk Beliefs to Yasukuni Ideology: Yasukuni’s Appropriation of Beliefs in Death and the Afterlife
Akiko Takenaka-O’Brien, Yale University
Most studies of Yasukuni Shrine examine its current position in Japanese domestic politics and international relations or its historical role in promoting militarism in the modern era. They fail to explain how it so successfully enticed the majority of the population to participate in the aggressive and often self-destructive military campaign of the Asia Pacific War. The propaganda claiming that those who died at war would be enshrined at Yasukuni as a protector god of the nation and receive the emperor’s visits was effective at convincing those at the battlefront to fight destructively, as well as those at the home front to support the troops and sacrifice their own lives when necessary. Death was aestheticized, and a human life became disposable. My presentation examines how this propaganda was effective only because it could be grounded on existing folk rituals and beliefs in death and the afterlife held in rural Japan even through the modern era. To show how these beliefs were appropriated by the state to create the ideology of Yasukuni, I draw parallels between the traditional family system and the modern system of the nation-state, as well as between rituals and festivals traditionally conducted at the family level and Yasukuni events. I argue that Yasukuni ideology would never have been as successful nationwide without having incorporated these folk beliefs. The association of the Yasukuni ideology with death-related folk beliefs and traditions adds a level of complexity to the current attempts to solve contemporary issues associated with Yasukuni.
Yasukuni Ideology and the "Kamikazefication" of the Home Front as Seen in Shashin Shuho, 1938–1945
David C. Earhart, University of Montana
This presentation employs a series of slides to discuss the manner in which wartime print media, specifically the Japanese government’s official weekly newsmagazine, Photographic Weekly Report (Shashin Shuho, 1938–1945), disseminated Yasukuni ideology and how that ideology changed over the course of the war.
Throughout the Asian Pacific War (1937–1945), Yasukuni ideology promised soldiers who died "in the service of the emperor" a place among the spirits of the imperial ancestors. As the war expanded to the Pacific and finally to the Japanese home islands, the semi-military government called upon "home-front soldiers" (many of them women and children) to fight to the death and to sacrifice themselves rather than be taken prisoner. While this policy of "kamikazefication" (kamikazeka) of the Japanese public represents the furthest extent of Yasukuni ideology, women and children on the home front (even those who died in combat) were never honored with a place in the Valhalla of Yasukuni Shrine, not during the war and not after the war ended. This limitation in Yasukuni ideology is reflected in a remarkable change in depictions of the war and its heroes, and of Yasukuni, itself in the pages of Shashin Shuho.
Sowing Nationalism, Reaping Skepticism: The Renovation of Yushukan War Museum
Takashi Yoshida, Western Michigan University
To celebrate its 130th anniversary, the Yasukuni shrine expanded and renovated its war museum Yushukan. Reopened to the public in July 2002, the new museum features an exhibition space twice its previous size. The museum hopes to play a central role in educating youthful Japanese about the "true" history of modern Japan, as it did in the prewar and wartime period. Because many veterans and elderly members of the bereaved families are dying, the shrine is attempting to sell nationalism among young Japanese. The new museum takes full advantage of high-tech visual and audio devices to appeal to young visitors. I will first discuss the history and the politics of Yushukan since its inception in 1882. I will then analyze how the displays in the renovated and expanded museum differ from their predecessors. Finally, I will argue that the shrine is unlikely to achieve its goals of instilling patriotism and romanticizing the war era unless it replaces its extremely nationalistic image with a less controversial one. As of the end of 2002, no high or junior high school anywhere in Japan had made an excursion to Yushukan. In the current political climate in Japan, no teacher could advocate such a field trip without facing significant protests from parents and political organizations like the Teachers’ Union. My analysis will also include the role of shugaku ryoko (school excursions) in postwar Japanese peace education.
Framing Yasukuni Shrine: A Documentary Video on Nationalism and Social Memory
John K. Nelson, University of San Francisco
Nationalism is undoubtedly one of the most critically important topics students encounter at the university level. In studying Japan, the term all too frequently becomes an easy solution used to answer questions about the country’s prewar military and industrial power, the postwar economic miracle, or politicians’ controversial visits to Yasukuni Shrine. This presentation (and the video it will reference) uses the example of Yasukuni to suggest a more contextualized reading of and instruction about nationalism and social memory. Themes for teaching these topics—such as valorizing the war dead, reformulating existing cultural practices into new meanings, or sanctifying places, events, and times to create solidarity among diverse social classes—will be illustrated using excerpts from my documentary video. While focusing specifically on the shrine, the film combines theories from anthropology, history, and cultural studies to form an interpretive approach useful for any investigation into the study of nationalism and social memory.
Session 72: "Magnificent Obsession": Japanese Studies and Japanese Popular Culture
Organizer and Discussant: Brett de Bary, Cornell University
Chair: J. Victor Koschmann, Cornell University
Keywords: popular culture, Japan, visual studies, cultural studies, modern.
For well over a decade, the temptation has been palpable to celebrate Japanese popular culture’s arrival on the scene of global cultural fantasy and to find it a mesmerizing imaginary staged at the intersection of domestic hyper-consumerism and the forces of the transnational entertainment market. Yet the process through which, with accelerating elaboration, widely divergent practices have been codified, within North American Japan Studies, as the object of study called "Japanese popular culture" has rarely been reflected upon. Seen by some to have emerged naturally from the decline of "pure literature" (junbungaku) and the proliferation of new technologies of image consumption, Japanese popular culture has often been linked to the return of a repressed (premodern) visuality and has been overwhelmingly defined in terms of visual genres like film, manga, and anime. When such work has contributed to dissolving hierarchical distinctions between "high" and "low" cultures, it has enabled previously marginalized perspectives and practices to come to the fore. At the same time, what are the risks of reconstituting Japan under the sign of the visual, thus retracing classic representational rules of Orientalism? And what have been the investments of Japanese studies itself, as it has frankly sought to guarantee its own survival through an embrace of these genres and the enthusiastic promotion of pedagogical approaches to them? The panel will take up these and other questions as it historicizes and contextualizes work on Japanese popular culture from diverse perspectives.
Girl Talk: Japanese Popular Culture and the Question of Gender
Tomiko Yoda, Duke University
It is often noted that teenage girls play significant roles as both the subjects and objects of desire in post-1970s Japanese popular culture. They are known as vanguard consumer-subjects in contemporary Japan with their tastes, behaviors, and attitudes closely monitored by marketing and advertising industries. Images of teenage girls, furthermore, are ubiquitously circulated commodities in popular cultural mediums including anime, manga, and the entertainment business. Some of the most influential studies on contemporary Japanese popular culture have examined an extensive socio-cultural impacts wielded by idioms and attitudes that germinated in female youth culture. Meanwhile, a number of critics have identified the voracious consumption of eroticized girl-iconography as one of the key features of the so-called otaku culture.
This paper studies the manners in which the girls and girl culture have been analyzed in Japanese popular cultural studies both in Japan and in North America, considering whether they have offered productive means of addressing the question of gender in the study of contemporary Japan. To what extent have existing treatments of the issue engaged with and thrown new light on the understanding of gender construction and gender relations in the Japanese society? Through these inquiries, I explore historically and socio-politically informed approaches to the subject that may help move the discussion beyond the customary observation that teenage girls in popular culture represent a counterpoint to the subject formation promoted by the male-dominated Japanese socio-economic and political order.
Rethinking Mise-en-Scène in Japanese Popular Culture
Michael Raine, University of Chicago
In the late 1950s, critic and filmmaker Jacques Rivette dismissed culture as an explanatory frame for Japanese cinema: "Is it not a case of trying to explain the unknown by the unknowable?" For Rivette and other nouvelle vague champions of cinema over language, such explanations were not only impossible but unnecessary: Mizoguchi Kenji and others spoke the international "language of mise-en-scène." Rivette’s Orientalism is obvious, but his foregrounding of the non-linguistic patterning of image and sound in the cinema also evokes what W. J. T. Mitchell calls the "pictorial turn" in recent thought. Mitchell, like James Elkins, provides an art-historical account of visual culture in which pictures turn out to be surprisingly voluble: the image itself is a form of thought. This paper will explore whether such loquacity is available to less elevated texts.
In the humanistic study of Japan, Mitchell’s transformative (or interrogative, disruptive, etc.) encounter with the work of art complements anthropological work in which the text dissolves into social practices. In both cases, the recent rise of cultural studies and the attention to globalization has dethroned philology and de-emphasized autochthony, resulting in more historicized accounts of literature and the avant-garde and participant observations of hybrid or mass cultural forms. But what of texts that are neither exemplary nor contemporary? Examining a short sequence from Taiyo no kisetsu, I argue for the continued usefulness of a concept of mise-en-scène to the medium-sensitive understanding of "vernacular visuality" in 1950s Japan. Defining "image" as a determinate (historically, but also ideologically, perceptually, technologically—that is, worldly) instance of representation, opposed to linguistic signification but by no means limited to vision, allows us to see the value of studying quotidian images without succumbing to an over-enthusiasm for the special access of non-linguistic media to Japan and to the students who study it.
The Trauma Industry: Displacing Japan into Global Culture
Thomas LaMarre, McGill University
This analysis of Japanese popular culture begins with Sawaragi Noi’s critique of the attempt by Murakami Takashi, Ootsuka Eiji, and others to place contemporary forms like anime and digital art in a line of descent from Edo art (ukiyo-e) and cultural practices (of chonin). Sawaragi argues that this disavows the impact of Americanization on postwar Japan—an impact that extends from defeat in war to the Occupation and economic miracle. Countering the beautiful lineages proposed by Murakami and others, Sawaragi offers a different way to talk about what the status of "Japan" within contemporary Japanese culture is—via national trauma. While this analysis does not ultimately side with Sawaragi, it finds in his discussion another way to read the success of certain Japanese animated films and popular art in the global market—as generic national trauma—most evident in the success of anime characters with multiple or secret origins who desperately search for their self, identity, and memory.
Session 73: Against the State? The Culture of Protest in Early Meiji Japan
Organizer: Brian Platt, George Mason University
Chair: M. William Steele, International Christian University
Discussants: M. William Steele, International Christian University; Stephen G. Vlastos, University of Iowa
Viewed from the perspective of the central government, early Meiji reforms can be seen as rational, even necessary steps towards the goal of administrative centralization and national strength. The radical nature of those reforms, however, brought jarring consequences for many localities and social groups, some of whom responded by taking an oppositional stance towards the new government.
This panel seeks to explore some of the sources and expressions of that opposition during the 1870s. One paper addresses incidents of violent popular resistance to Meiji schooling; another examines the participation of women in the Popular Rights Movement; a third attempts to explain the increasing involvement of schoolteachers in oppositional politics. The papers highlight the diversity of early Meiji oppositional movements. The major actors in these movements represent three different social groups: poor to middling farmers, local elite women, and male educators and intellectuals. The sources of their discontent, as well as their modes of expressing that discontent, also varied widely.
Although all three papers deal with oppositional movements, they call into question the notion that the relationship between state and society in early Meiji Japan should be seen principally in terms of opposition. Instead of seeking simply to uncover the sources of opposition, they attempt to locate the role of opposition within the overall dynamics of state formation in Meiji Japan.
Sifting the Schoolhouse Ashes: A Re-examination of Anti-education Protest in Early Meiji Japan
Abigail Schweber, University of South Australia
Descriptions of burning schoolhouses and murdered teachers feature prominently in the English-language discourse on early Meiji education reform. The vivid, even lurid, images seem to present compelling evidence of widespread discontent over the introduction of public schools and compulsory enrollment, further bolstered by protesters’ demands for school closings. The new education system is then presented as one-third of a triumvirate of grievances of the Japanese people against their government, along with the institution of the draft and the revision of the tax code. This paper examines the evidence for anti-education sentiment, focusing on three elements: explicit anti-education demands issued by protest leaders, school burnings, and attacks on teachers.
The 1870s and early 1880s, when mass protests occurred, were a period of rapid inflation followed by rapid deflation, with this financial instability engendering economic hardship. In this context, constructing demands by protesters for relief from the financial burdens created by the introduction of new schools as opposition to public education is highly problematic. Likewise, school burnings, when contextualized within the broader practice of protest-related arson, appear as collateral damage rather than direct attacks on the education system. The rare occurrences of physical violence perpetrated against individual teachers were motivated by either mistaken identity or personal grudges. These findings call for a re-examination of our understandings of both the popular response to the introduction of a national system of compulsory education and the causes of popular protests in early Meiji Japan.
Teachers and Political Activism in Early Meiji Japan
Brian Platt, George Mason University
This paper seeks to examine the involvement of teachers in the Popular Rights Movement in Nagano Prefecture. In Nagano, as in several other prefectures, teachers were a driving force behind the various organizations and activities that are generally grouped together by scholars under the rubric of the Popular Rights Movement. Teachers dominated the membership of most political study groups. Schools became a meeting place for political speech meetings and a site for mobilizing activists and recruiting new members. Furthermore, the message of the movement was infused with a critique of educational policy; the rhetoric of popular rights, freedom, and localism was readily transferred from the realm of politics to that of educational policy, and vice-versa.
What was the context for such active teacher participation in these activities? This question is particularly salient to the broader study of early Meiji oppositional movements when we consider that many of the teachers who flocked to the Popular Rights Movement in the late 1870s had contributed enthusiastically to the local implementation of national educational policy in the early- to mid-1870s. In this paper I explore this shift in attitude among local educators. One factor behind this shift was the growing systematization of what had in the early 1870s been a collegial, voluntaristic movement among local activist educators to bring order and enlightenment to local society through educational reform. A second factor, I argue, was the incipient growth of a professional identity among teachers, which provided an alternative—and often safer—basis from which to critique state policy on education.
A Woman’s Place Is in the Diet? Gender and Political Culture in Meiji Japan
Marnie S. Anderson, University of Michigan
The Japanese historian Inada Masahiro has argued that the significance of the People’s Rights Movement (jiyu minken undo) of the late 1870s and early 1880s lies not in its "failure" to bring about democracy but rather its success in politicizing the general populace and triggering the formation of a modern political culture centered on newspapers and enzetsu (speech performances). Although women do not appear in Inada’s work, I would argue that women too were politicized during the early Meiji period; in fact, a number of women were active on the margins of the People’s Rights Movement. By 1890, however, the Movement was dead and the possibilities for women to engage in political action were severely diminished. Women could no longer deliver or attend political speeches or join political parties. To make matters worse, the proposed Diet Code of 1890 included a provision that barred women from attending Diet sessions.
The proposal promptly met with outrage in some circles and was eventually overturned. This paper focuses on the actions of a number of elite women who protested the legislation, namely that of a group calling themselves "The Representatives of Concerned Women" (Yushi Fujin Sodai) and the individual writings of Shimizu Toyoko (also known as Shimizu Shikin). I address how these women utilized petitions and media publicity—technologies of the new political culture—to successfully mobilize support for their cause. On what grounds did they object to the proposed code? What kinds of discursive strategies did they wield to press their case while simultaneously toeing the boundaries of acceptable gender and class behavior?
Session 74: Ties That Bind? Negotiating Gender, Family, and Employment in the Post-Bubble Era
Organizer and Chair: Glenda S. Roberts, Waseda University
Discussant: Merry I. White, Boston University
Keywords: Japan, gender, family, employment, post-Bubble.
In the ongoing recession and in the pressures of a global society and economy, the employment practices that saw Japan’s major institutions through the growth era and into the Bubble economy—lifetime employment, seniority wage, and the corporate welfare and government tax policies that accompanied them and supported the gendered division of labor—are increasingly unraveling, while the government and corporate sectors struggle to redefine the status quo. At the same time, young adults themselves are challenging the gendered division of labor of their predecessors as they experiment with new modes of work and family life. Who ends up on the winning and the losing ends of new governmental and corporate initiatives toward gender equality? What ties bind men and women to their jobs, and what loosens those ties? How do dual-career couples negotiate and configure their parental and work responsibilities in this environment? In the rhetoric of gender equality, where are the fault lines in everyday practice, and what tensions can be seen among government policy, corporate strategy, and working couples’ lives? This panel will bring to bear perspectives of political economy, anthropology, and sociology to analyze current trends in gender, family, and employment, as seen through current qualitative and quantitative research in both urban and rural Japan, as we question the nature of the ties that bind these institutions today. We will limit presentations to fifteen minutes to allow ample time for discussion and audience participation.
The Limits of Gender Equality Reform in Japan: Positive Action or Part Time-ization?
Charles M. Weathers, Osaka City University
My research examines reasons for the slow pace of workplace gender equality in Japan. I focus largely on the interaction between official policymaking and employment trends to explain policymaking contradictions. Although women have gained greater representation in the Diet and shingikai, and social attitudes are changing, policymaking continues to conform largely to longstanding patterns. It is primarily bureaucratic-led, economic objectives that are emphasized over social, and there is great reluctance to infringe on managerial prerogatives. A typical result is the Revised Equal Employment Opportunity Law (1999), which only incrementally strengthened equality regulations.
At present, professional women are generally gaining better career opportunities because many companies want to utilize their talents. However, national bureaucrats and courts have deliberately dodged the issue of indirect discrimination, enabling companies to continue and often even intensify the practice of hiring women as non-regular, especially part-time, employees. Recent employment policies encourage these trends by making it easier to hire non-regular workers. Ironically, a prime case is daycare, a service necessary to enable women to work, but one in which deregulatory and privatization policies are lowering wages and increasing the ratio of non-regular workers among childcare workers. As a result, wage and skill differentials between a minority of professional women and lower-qualified and paid women can be expected to increase.
Linked Lives, Linked Careers: Dual-Earner Couples in Contemporary Japan
Yuko Ogasawara, Nihon University
Existing literature on labor in Japan assumes that a man’s career decision is made prior to his wife’s decision and that the former is not influenced by the latter. Such an assumption is founded on the gender stereotype that a husband is the primary earner and will continue working until retirement.
The present research based on separate interviews with husbands and wives of full-time working couples suggests that this is not necessarily the case. Many men are found to take into account not only their own career concerns but also those of their wives. These men sometimes ask for relocation, take childcare leave, work short hours, or forgo promotion.
Although most husbands are constrained to some extent by their wives’ decision to continue working, quite a few also voice that the spouses’ work has broadened their life choices. The wives’ stable income has enabled some men to take the risk and become self-employed or change jobs. Others have found that they are able to afford taking time off from work to care for their children or to resume study. Even when they have not actually taken steps to alter their career, many profess that they are freer from the pressure to make a living than their colleagues with stay-at-home wives. Having a working wife thus seems to allow some men to become less wedded to the company and thereby exempts them from the pervasive "corporate warrior" work-style.
Slouching toward Domestic Equality? The Slowly Shifting Patriarchal Paradigm in Middle Japan
Scott North, Osaka University
This paper investigates change in rural Japan’s complex patriarchal edifice. It is based on interviews about work-family compatibility with the parents of young children residing in Toyama prefecture, all of whom hold identical full-time jobs in the public sector as koumuin.
Revealing the continuing influence of patriarchal tradition, most of these career women still do the bulk of the second shift. The historicity of that domestic tradition is generally unappreciated: all the couples state that their division of family work came about "naturally." "Gender = fate" summarizes the biologically-based, non-overlapping, unconditional character of traditional gender role obligations. In spite of the obvious inequality, this dogma of essential difference forestalls the need to negotiate new arrangements and supports patriarchal persistence. Even the most patriarchal men, however, are anxious to point out how fatherhood is more salient for them than for their own fathers and increased male involvement in childcare is often the gateway to performing simple household chores.
The most pragmatic couples embrace imported ideals of companionate marriage and mutual professional respect. Their communication style reflects their greater freedom to imagine alternatives to the patriarchal order. Nevertheless, they may still feel constrained by the normative gaze of their families or communities and are cautious about speaking in public about their home life. Especially in front of older colleagues, they couch their contributions in the rhetoric of "family service."
Views from the Few: Work/Life Balance in Corporate Japan
Glenda S. Roberts, Waseda University
The salaried employees of Japan’s corporations have been the subject of much research over the post-war decades. Due to the gendered division of labor in society, most of this research has concerned either male, core workers or female peripheral workers. Since the latter 1980s, however, there have been some changes in this "male breadwinner model," brought about such factors as new legislative frameworks, the demographics of the low birthrate/aging society, changing aspirations among women toward higher education and careers, and a recessionary economy. Whereas in decades past it was rare indeed to see married women with children employed in career positions in major corporations, it is no longer so.
Incorporating data from studies of two large corporations in Japan, one a U.S.-based multinational financial services corporation, the other a Japanese manufacturer, this paper will explore corporate strategies to afford employees more flexibility in their working lives and also examine how women and men make use of these policies to negotiate work/life balance. While government and corporate policies are making changes to foster both balance and gender equality, a work culture that breeds long hours for core white-collar workers, embedded gender roles, the ongoing recession and a lack of enforcement mechanisms for work/life balance initiatives dilute efficacy. Moreover, policies themselves sometimes end up reinforcing the gendered division of labor. Still, many interviewees at these firms see themselves as the lucky few among women trying to balance careers and personal lives.
Session 75: INDIVIDUAL PAPERS: Contemporary Japanese Society
Organizer and Chair: Gregory J. Kasza, Indiana University
Eyeing up Nikkei: Portrayal of Japanese Americans on a Japanese TV Drama
Christine R. Yano, University of Hawaii, Manoa
This paper examines ways in which NHK’s 2002 asadora (morning serialized drama) "Sakura" becomes a site of narrative practices and readings surrounding Nikkei (persons of Japanese ancestry). In Japan the series was broadcast from April through October 2002, with an audience viewership of approximately 23%. The series was subsequently viewed in Hawaii and parts of California on cable channels. The plot concerns a young fourth-generation Nikkei woman from Hawaii, significantly named Sakura (cherry blossom; symbol of Japan), who spends one year in Japan teaching English at a private middle school. In the process, she becomes "more Japanese than most Japanese," championing Japanese values, expressing fondness for things Japanese, and exhibiting that central feature of Japaneseness, kokoro (heart, mind, spirit). In this paper, I analyze this and other portrayals of Nikkei within "Sakura" as forms of ideology set forth by a statist institution, NHK. I ask, what is the work that these portraits intend? How do Nikkei, as prodigal Japanese, become exemplars of what Japan has lost? Furthermore, how does this media image of white-collar, female American Nikkei stand in direct contrast to the everyday reality of blue-collar, primarily male South American Nikkei now resident in Japan? In a final section, I contrast these portrayals with reactions from Nikkei viewers in the U.S. Although these vary, the general consensus is discomfiture with the wrongness of the portrait, even as many Nikkei are flattered that Japanese TV would include them within its fold.
Low Birth Rates and High Times in the Sex Industry: Struggles over Productive and Reproductive Sex in Contemporary Japan
Suzanne O’Brien, Loyola Marymount University
The prolonged recession of the past decade and a birth rate that has declined consistently even as longer life expectancies swell the ranks of the elderly serve as the backdrop to wide-ranging struggles over sexuality and the national interest unfolding in Japan today. Hopes for alleviating both those conditions rest in part on attempts to harness the fecundity of women’s bodies, as both providers of sexual services and producers of children. Economic concerns have brought tens of thousands of young women into the sex industry, one of the few expanding sectors of Japan’s economy. Its insatiable appetite for female workers has encouraged traffickers to bring in increasing numbers of foreign women, primarily from Asia but also from Eastern Europe and Latin America. The industry’s "success" has spawned a host of how-to books on opening venues for commercial sex, while pundits have even suggested that spending on sexual services might be a way out of Japan’s recession. At the same time, concern has been growing among officials and a host of NGOs over Japan’s declining birth rates, prompting the passage in July 2003 of a national policy initiative to increase the birth rate through such measures as promoting infertility treatment, reducing the costs of child rearing, and encouraging businesses to provide family leave benefits. My paper will examine the contemporary struggles over sexuality in Japan as transnational phenomena exerting new pressures on both women and men, mobilizing both state and non-state actors, and rendering thousands of women vulnerable to (inter)national and commercial exploitation.
Japan’s Vibrant Civil Society
Mary Alice Pickert, University of Washington
Scholars have long considered Japan to be a civil society laggard because Japan consistently ranks at the bottom of the advanced democracies in citizen participation in cross-national studies. However, about ninety percent of Japanese belong to neighborhood associations and Japanese join PTAs more than three times as often as Americans. How can we explain this apparent contradiction?
This paper argues that there is a consistent bias in the comparative civil society literature in favor of issue-based organizations (prevalent in the U.S.) to the exclusion of community-based organizations (prevalent in Japan), leading to gross underestimations of volunteer participation in Japan. In order to explain why people volunteer for different types of organizations, I utilize survey data on eleven OECD countries gathered from the World Values Survey dataset, supplement them with membership data from some community-based organizations, and run a series of OLS regressions. The statistical analysis supports my argument that people in countries, such as Japan, that think that the government has a responsibility to care for its citizens tend to have more volunteers in community-based organizations, whereas people in countries, such as the United States, that think that individuals should care for themselves tend to have more volunteers in issue-based organizations. The paper concludes with some observations about the implications of this finding for our understanding of Japan’s civil society. It also challenges scholars to broaden their research agendas to include community-based organizations in their studies of civil society for a more accurate understanding of civil society around the world.
Reconstructing "The Japanese Woman": Stereotype and Self-Presentation in Intercultural Interactions
Aya Kitamura, University of Hawaii, Manoa
This paper focuses on the stereotypes of Japanese women in the contemporary, international context. While much research has been devoted to demystifying traditional images of quiescent, passive, and obedient Japanese women, the Orientalist preconception has yet to cease affecting actual interactions. As sociological studies of social interaction suggest, social actors often refer to stereotypes to conduct a smooth interaction in a given setting. Therefore, Japanese women in intercultural situations are likely to face the biased picture of "the Japanese woman" that other actors may project on them. The dynamics of such interactions is the focal point of this paper. On one hand, how do non-Japanese actors interpret their direct interactions with Japanese women? How do the experiences influence their preconceptions? On the other hand, how do Japanese women present themselves on such occasions? What conflicts and struggles do they experience? Aiming to shed fight on these critical questions, this paper analyzes the interview data obtained from 1998 to 2001 in Japan. The interviewees, chosen among those who have experienced internal situations and grouped analytically according to their gender and nationality, included thirty-two "Japanese females," six "Japanese males," eleven "non-Japanese females," and nineteen "non-Japanese males." The retrospective narratives indicate that the interviewees’ strategic interactions, inevitably pivoting on stereotypical notions, reinforce and subvert the prevailing image simultaneously. It is the ultimate goal of this paper to illuminate the dynamic processes in which social actors interactively reconstruct "the Japanese woman."
Elementary Education in Japan and the (Limited) Production of Disability
Jeffrey Maret, University of Hawaii, Manoa
In the emerging field of disability studies "impairments" are often characterized as a set of socio-historical constraints that that cry out for critique. Yet in the popular and academic press, "impairments" (physical, cognitive, and behavioral) are frequently discussed exclusively within the powerful discourse of bio-chemistry and genetics. My doctoral research on Japanese special education highlights the importance of cultural norms, institutional procedures, and transnational discourses on disability in the attribution of "impairment" in contemporary Japan. In short, I argue that there is both a cultural and a transnational dimension to "impairment." I also show how Japan’s public schools play a gatekeeping role in the designation and labeling of children who are deemed to have a disability (shogai). While my doctoral research focuses on borderline children whose "invisible impairments" are not clearly written on their bodies, in this paper I outline various Japanese public school programs that are designed for a range of special needs children. This paper draws on my ethnographic research in a fukushiki (multi-age) classroom for children marked as having "emotional" (jocho-teki) and/or cognitive (chiteki) impairments. Through extensive classroom observations and interviews over an 18-month period, I probe what is at stake for these children and their caregivers in the designation of impairment at the primary school level. I also explore how the discourse and theory of special needs education, which is primarily a U.S. export commodity, is impacting on cultural debates about personhood and emotionality in contemporary Japan.
Session 91: Protocol, Prayer, and Politics: Daimyo Networks in Tokugawa Japan
Organizer: Marjan Boogert, Harvard University
Chair: Harold Bolitho, Harvard University
Discussant: Mark Ravina, Emory University
The political system of the Tokugawa period is generally understood in terms of a dichotomy between a central government (responsible for foreign affairs, religious organizations, and lands under direct shogunal control) and autonomous daimyo domains. In practice, however, this seemingly clear-cut division does not always explain the interactions between them, not least because the daimyo were required to spend half of their time in Edo under sankin kôtai regulations. Largely deprived of means to make a name for themselves and their houses, daimyo were constantly trying to express or enhance their authority and status, to which end they maintained ties with a wide range of individuals and institutions. The four papers in this panel discuss different aspects of daimyo networks and daimyo society in the domain and in Edo. The first paper shows how good relationships with religious institutions in localities even far away from the domain could work to the daimyo’s advantage. The second and third papers both focus on daimyo in Edo; they discuss networking opportunities associated with life-cycle rituals and a daimyo’s contacts with bakufu officials and fellow daimyo. The final paper looks at daimyo from a slightly different perspective; it illustrates how changing shogunal attitudes toward daimyo influenced the spatial structure of daimyo compounds and thus of the city of Edo. By investigating this theme from the angles of religion, ceremony, politics, and architecture, we hope to shed light on daimyo activities and their implications for our understanding of the bakuhan system.
For Faith and Prestige: Daimyo Motivations for Buddhist Patronage
Alexander Vesey, Stonehill College
The relationship between samurai elites and Buddhist institutions in the early modern period was often a complex formula that juxtaposed warrior mistrust of the clergy with continued warrior support for temples and their abbots. Extensive studies of bakuhan religious regulation and the impact of Confucian and Nativist thought on warrior perceptions have elucidated many ramifications of the anti-Buddhist tenor in warrior culture and practice, but the potentially amicable elements of the relationship have garnered less scholarly attention. This paper will consider this second facet of warrior-temple interaction with a two-part analysis based upon the Shingi Shingon temple Yakuoin in Takao and its relationship with the Wakayama cadet branch of the Tokugawa house. Although Yakuoin was not located within the Wakayama domain, successive generations of daimyo turned to the temple for "worldly benefits" (genze riyaku) prayer rituals on behalf of their house. Accordingly, the first segment will examine the place of temples within both the personal and family contexts of samurai religious practice. The second part uses gifts of lanterns and altar implements adorned with daimyo family crests to consider the potential social benefits of such patronage. Somewhat akin to mansions and processions, the paper will argue that temple facilities, accoutrements, and rituals offered the daimyo a ready-made template for displaying the prestige and heritage of their respective houses. As such, rather than being mere objects of antagonism, Buddhist venues could constitute a medium for public expressions of daimyo authority.
Growing up as a Daimyo: Life-Cycle Rituals and Networking in Tokugawa Japan
Reiko Sono, University of Massachusetts, Amherst
Ritual activities occupied a major part of a Tokugawa daimyo’s life and had two crucial functions for the continuance of this highly hierarchic feudal society. First, they served to emphasize differences among people’s status. Second, they had the effect of sustaining personal, intimate relationships among the participants. The most representative of the latter were rituals marking the transition from one phase of life to another, i.e., life-cycle rituals. These life-cycle rituals of the daimyo often entailed ample gift exchanges to soften the transitions and to develop new relationships accordingly. At gempuku, or the coming-of-age ritual, a young daimyo heir would form a fictitious father-son relationship with an influential person and offer a sword and other gifts to him. To be qualified as a daimyo, he also had to have an audience with the shogun. This first audience, usually more intimate than the countless ones to follow, was considered especially important and the young audient as well as his father would thank the shogun with gifts. In addition, marriage offered the heir an opportunity to greatly broaden his personal network and thus the burden of gift-giving associated with weddings was tremendous. Upon his father’s death, he would inherit the domain and become a daimyo. To facilitate this major transition, he offered personal items of his deceased father to the shogun, which as "inalienable possessions" were often returned to him. Intimate relationships thus nurtured through life-cycle rituals helped a daimyo maneuver and maintain his house in the rigid hierarchy of Tokugawa society.
Daimyo Politics in Edo: The Network of Matsudaira Naonori
Marjan Boogert, Harvard University
Matsudaira Yamato no kami Naonori (1642–1695) was a shinpan daimyo with a domain of 150,000 koku. A great-grandson of Tokugawa Ieyasu, Naonori had a sizable domain and high status, but his ancestry made him ineligible for bakufu office. It was therefore important for Naonori to find alternative avenues to influence and information by maintaining close ties with various bakufu officials and fellow daimyo. This paper analyzes these contacts, based on examples from Naonori’s diary. Ceremonial visits and gift-giving surrounding important life-cycle events such as weddings and births illustrate his ties with tairo Sakai Tadakiyo; extensive diary entries concerning his move from Murakami domain to Himeji in 1667 clarify his communications with bakufu insiders and his contacts with fellow daimyo who gave him advice on the proper conduct in this situation. By investigating the networking roles of daimyo as well as bakufu officials this paper aims to add to our understanding of Tokugawa period politics in practice.
Two Spatial Cultures in Edo: The Shogun’s O-Nari and Daimyo Compounds
Masaki Fujikawa, Tsukuba Women’s University
Many daimyo compounds were built in Edo, the capital city of Tokugawa Japan. Two spatial cultures in these compounds in particular have been appreciated from the point of view of the quality of their design. One is the gorgeous architecture of kami-yashiki compounds built in the early Tokugawa period, the other the gardens of shimo-yashiki compounds constructed in the middle and late period. Since these two cultures were quite different from each other with regard to their location in the city and the concept of their design, they have never been discussed jointly. This paper argues that the difference between these two cultures was the result of the different character of the shogun’s o-nari (visits to his vassals’ residences) ceremonies of each period. O-nari ceremonies in the early Tokugawa period, mainly held with large tozama daimyo, were public and formal. In the middle and late period, most o-nari ceremonies were held with fudai daimyo; they were private and for the pleasure of the shogun. Therefore the quality of space necessary for these ceremonies changed. This change began as early as the first half of the seventeenth century, when the splendid architecture of o-nari halls no longer fitted the character of the ceremonies. Based on this analysis, this paper furthermore argues that o-nari as a political ceremony fundamentally defined the spatial structure of the city of Edo.
Organizer and Chair: Ken K. Ito, University of Michigan
Discussant: Alan Tansman, University of California, Berkeley
Keywords: Japan, melodrama, literature, theater.
In his 1915 Garasudo no uchi, Natsume Sôseki recalls telling a friend how distrustful he is of the theater, and kabuki in particular. "I am terrified," he says, "at the idea of being tricked into shedding tears."
The sense of unease and mistrust with which Sôseki regards the sentimental excesses of kabuki suggest something of the profound ambivalence of many Meiji writers and intellectuals—from Tsubouchi Shôyô to Ozaki Kôyô, from Tokutomi Roka to Sôseki—toward the cultural forms of the early nineteenth century. But this ambivalence is itself also a sign of the strength that the rhetoric of melodrama—characterized by a dualistic morality pitting good against evil and a resulting extravagance of sentiment—continued to exercise on the social imagination even as writers self-consciously wrestled with the weight of past literary and cultural forms.
In contrast to the wealth of research available on the melodramatic imagination in Western theater and fiction, very little attention has been devoted to the place of melodrama in the cultural imagination of nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Japan. This panel will look at a range of melodramatic practices from Japan’s "long nineteenth century"—from late Edo into early Meiji—with the intent of reexamining some of the most important and problematic aspects of Japanese literary history: the genealogy of forms from Edo to Meiji; the relationship between the high and the low; the structuring of the Meiji literary field; and the ways in which we can understand the ideological work performed by specific texts in relation to genre and history. We seek in our papers to treat specific sites of the Japanese melodramatic imagination, but we hope also to begin a longer range dialogue on the meanings of this cultural mode more broadly for the study of Asian literature in the early-modern and modern eras.
Our Hearts Aroused by the Bell of Dawn: Melodrama and Meiji Theater
Cody Poulton, University of Victoria
Kabuki and many other forms of traditional Japanese theater are "melodramatic" if we understand "melodrama" as primarily a form of musical drama. What Peter Brooks has called the "melodramatic imagination" can also be observed in kabuki’s portrayal of an essentially moral universe of heroes and villains in which virtue is rewarded and vice is punished. Here I would like to examine how this dominant mode of theatrical and literary expression in nineteenth-century Europe had an impact on the development of modern Japanese drama. Shinpa, Japan’s first overture toward a modern theater, attracted large audiences in the 1890s with its dramatizations of popular novels by writers like Ozaki Kôyô, Tokutomi Roka, and Izumi Kyôka, writers inspired by the melodramatic fiction of Hugo, Dumas, Dickens and others. It was a particularly Japanese expression of what has been called "the universal way of reading modern life." But by the first decade of the twentieth century shinpa was rejected by reformists for not being realistic enough to theatricalize modernity. I will discuss how shinpa melodrama was a form that straddled both time and genre: the early and late modern periods, on the one hand; and, on the other, two modes that vied for the imagination of the Meiji Japanese fantasy and realism.
Stage and Spectacle in an Age of Tears: Melodrama and the Social Imaginary in Nineteenth-Century Edo
Jonathan Zwicker, University of Michigan
In 1832 the essayist Terakado Seiken wrote that the essence of the theater was "to move audiences and bring them to tears." He aimed not only to suggest the important place that affect and sentiment had come to assume within the theaters and on the stages of nineteenth-century Edo, but also, and more broadly, the currency of a melodramatic imagination within the social and cultural fabric of the city. In Seiken’s account, the playhouse and the theater district were at the heart of the city’s prosperity and by the early years of the nineteenth century the stage had emerged as a crossroads for the production of a range of lucrative cultural commodities—from the plays themselves to illustrated playbills and actor prints, novels, reviews, advertisements, even fans and kites and board games—to be sold and bought and traded upon.
This paper will explore the place and play of melodrama within the theaters of nineteenth-century Edo but also, and more importantly, the "melodramatization" of everyday life. By taking seriously Roland Barthe’s notion that a history of tears reveals as much about those who shed them as about those who made them flow, I will argue that melodrama must be understood not only in formal terms as a set of literary and theatrical conventions and practices but also as ways of feeling and thinking shared and indulged far beyond the walls of the theater. The tears that flowed across the nineteenth-century stage not only reveal a central mode of the social and cultural imagination of that century, they also render less visible its great divide at 1868; those tears allow us then to imagine a long nineteenth century in Japanese literary and cultural history.
Excessive Feelings: The Melodramatic Failures of the Meiji Kannen Shôsetsu
Daniel O’Neill, University of California, Berkeley
Meiji literature often displays a concern with the workings of feelings, with the articulation of human emotions and the body’s ability to react to outside stimuli. Classical notions such as ninjô and giri were redefined and became essential to understanding contemporary society and how individuals may be inserted in society through their ability to establish a sympathetic identification with those around them.
The works of Izumi Kyôka and Kawakami Bizan reflect a shared fascination with emotions as the site for literary innovation. This paper will examine the early writings of both writers, with a focus on their kannen shôsetsu, a type of social novel often disparaged for its theatrical displays of good confronting evil and for its lavish sentimentality. To generate new understandings of melodrama, the paper will examine how the codes of sentimentality are staged in this degraded form of the novel and how this staging participated in larger aesthetic projects, such as questioning the nature of art and representation.
To encompass the genre’s cultural and historical significance, this paper will also explore how the staged thematic between sympathy and duty—a conflict embodied in the figures of the lawyer, the police, and the doctor—is linked to a wide network of social and political discourses. I will argue that in representing social problems as affective ones, the kannen shôsetsu offers an understanding of melodrama as an important cultural formation, one that re-imagines a more difficult ethical and political life for both the writers and readers of modern fiction.
What’s Modern about Meiji Melodramatic Fiction?
Ken K. Ito, University of Michigan
When Masamune Hakucho famously dismissed Natsume Soseki’s novel Gubijinso as a "modernized version of Bakin," he attempted to link the 1907 work to the past. In pointing out resemblances between the Soseki work and the Edo-period gesaku writing of Takizawa Bakin, he suggested that the novel followed the moral formula of kanzen choaku, or encourage good and vanquish evil, that the earlier writer had adopted as his credo. Yet the melodramatic mode, which Gubijinso displays, has been consistently characterized as a modern phenomenon, most notably by Peter Brooks, its most famous critic. In Brooks’ formulation, the melodramatic imagination is a means for "uncovering, demonstrating, and making operative the essential moral universe in a post-sacred era." I intend to explore both Meiji melodramatic fiction’s ties to prior cultural forms and its location in its own historical moment in order to consider what is modern about this kind of writing. Using Gubijinso and a number of other novels of the period, I will argue that such works constitute what Brooks calls a "melodrama of manners," a morally engaged fiction deeply concerned with immediate social problems. My paper will consider how the Meiji melodramatic novel applies a dualistic moral framework—found in both Edo gesaku and 19th-century Western fiction—to undertake ideological work directed toward the present. In its effort to force its polarized moral vision upon tangled Meiji discourses of family, class, and gender, Meiji melodramatic fiction cannot but face ideological contradictions. I hope to show how both the desire for moral certitude and the inevitable contradictions are tied to the Meiji present.
Session 93: Institutions and Incentives in Contemporary Japanese Politics
Organizer: Ellis Krauss, University of California, San Diego
Chair: Susan J. Pharr, Harvard University
Discussant: Leonardo Morlino, University of Florence
Institutions were the common focal point of political science research in the U.S. during the 1980s. Thereafter, two different broad streams of institutional research diverged: historical institutionalism and "rational choice" theory. Both agreed institutional incentives were key to understanding the behavior of individuals and collectivities, but historical institutionalism centered on the origins of institutions, their particularity, and inductive approaches, while rational choice focused on outcomes, universal theory, and deductive approaches. Japanese politics became a chief battleground between these approaches, with each considering the other’s explanations of behavior as "unscientific" and unconvincing.
Recently, several, especially younger, Japan political scientists conversant both with rational choice theory and Japanese institutions have been trying to bridge this gap. This panel tries to further this synthesis in two ways. First, it brings together for the first time those currently working with new approaches to institutional incentives related to the behavior of political parties and politicians in different contexts. Blechinger-Talcott looks at the structural incentives for corruption built into Japan’s politics; Pekkanen and Krauss evaluate how the changed incentives of the 1994 electoral reforms have affected career patterns within the LDP; Scheiner and Muramatsu argue that incentives are key to comprehending the perpetual failure of opposition parties in Japan; Masuyama and Kawato elucidate the institutional incentives in Japan’s National Diet. Leonardo Morlino, our discussant, a very respected Italian expert on parties and institutions, brings a comparative perspective to the panel. Second, the panel and each of its papers share the goal of attaining a more sophisticated and empirically-grounded understanding of institutional incentives, thus helping us to revise our concepts on the outcomes and nature of incentives to better conform to reality.
Electoral Reform and Career Paths of LDP Politicians
Robert J. Pekkanen, Middlebury College; Ellis Krauss, University of California, San Diego
The electoral reform of 1994 fundamentally changed Japan’s electoral system from a multi-member one, upon which many of the sins of Japanese politics were blamed, to a hybrid of single-member and proportional representation districts. Electoral theorists predicted that the new system’s changed institutional incentives should result in the local party branch replacing the koenkai, in the reduction of specialization on, and perhaps even the demise of, the LDP’s Policy Affairs Research Council (PARC) and its zoku giin, and in the disappearance of factions. Our previous research through interviews with LDP politicians indicates that, although there have indeed been changes in the predicted direction, these organizations continue to exist because the koenkai adapted to the new electoral incentives and PARC and factions continued to perform the non-electoral function of managing and controlling career paths in the party and government for LDP politicians.
In this paper we look explicitly at how the electoral reform has affected LDP representatives’ career paths. Using a database on the party and government careers of LDP politicians from 1980 to 2000, factional membership, and characteristics of their constituencies, we analyze career patterns in elections under the old multi-member system and in the two elections under the new system. Did the electoral reform accomplish its intended objectives to decrease incentives to cater to special interests and factional politics and increase incentives to respond to a broader mass public’s desires? Tracing the typical career paths of LDP politicians before and after the reform to see its affect on PARC and governmental career paths should reveal some clues to answer this question.
How Corruption Persists: Institutions, Incentives, and Information Brokers in Japan
Verena Blechinger-Talcott, Hamilton College
Political reforms in the 1990s in Japan repeatedly revised campaign finance legislation, introduced a new electoral system, and strengthened the position of parties. The literature on political competition predicts that reforms designed to increase the importance of parties over candidates and heighten the stakes for politicians to get reelected should lead to a decrease in corruption. Japan’s reforms followed this path, yet by several measures corruption did not decrease and some suggest that it has even spread to new areas. How can we explain the persistence of corruption in Japan despite a decade of reforms?
This paper addresses incentives for corruption embedded in central institutions in Japanese politics. It employs a rational institutionalist approach to analyze regulation, deregulation, and re-regulation of economic activity and practices of parliamentary democracy in Japan. The limited effectiveness of reforms in reducing corruption illustrates that electoral rules and campaign finance legislation are only part of the incentive structure that leads public and private actors to engage in corrupt behavior. Specifically, regulatory institutions concentrate strategic information in exclusionary bureaucratic and political circles and thus create a market for inside knowledge among political actors and their private sector counterparts. The persistence of corruption is best explained by the institutionalized control over information and by changes in regulatory conditions that offer new opportunities for political actors to serve as information brokers.
Incentives, Institutions, and Bureaucrat-Politician Relations in Japan
Michio Muramatsu; Ethan Scheiner, Stanford University
Most conceptions of modern democracy are premised upon the notion that elected representatives make policy. However, elected representatives cannot act in all areas of policymaking and bureaucrats are given substantial discretion and power. The problem of bureaucratic discretion has attracted great attention in the literature on Japanese politics, where many have argued that bureaucrats are particularly independent and powerful. In this paper, we use elite surveys conducted in the 1970s, 1980s, and early 2000s with bureaucrats, politicians, and interest groups to examine the various relations between these groups in Japan and the influence of each in the policy-making process. The paper considers the impact of institutions on the changing nature of the incentives that drive these relationships and offers insights into the applicability of different theories of bureaucratic-politician relations, including principal-agent models.
Institutions and Incentives in the Japanese Diet
Mikitaka Masuyama, Seikei University; Sadafumi Kawato, Tohoku University
One of the central themes in legislative studies is to investigate the legislative consequences of institutions. The Japanese Diet has several institutional features that together create a "short session" system, and the scarcity of legislative time makes the possession of agenda power a central concern of parliamentary politics. During the course of this paper, I will attempt to show how the institutionally-induced scarcity of time affects the way in which both the government and the opposition exercise the parliamentary prerogatives and bias the legislative outcomes to their advantage. To take into account the time factor and the censored nature of legislative process, I will apply a duration model to estimating the likelihood of a legislative proposal to pass the Diet.
Combining micro-level legislative data from the major postwar sessions, I will show that the likelihood of successful legislation is associated with the timing of a proposal, conditional on the ruling majority’s ability to select the parliamentary officers and to control the flow of legislative proposals. The findings should shed new light on the institutionalization of parliamentary rules in the Diet. The implications not only force us to reassess the literature on party politics in Japan but also contribute to a comparative understanding of legislative institutions with respect to procedural restrictions and the incentives they provide.
Organizer and Chair: Nam-lin Hur, University of British Columbia
Discussant: Peter Nosco, University of British Columbia
Keywords: divine country, Yamaji Aizan, Mito scholars, Hideyoshi, collective identity.
"The divine country," or shinkoku, is a key metaphor that has shaped the contours of Japanese history. Throughout Japanese history we see different versions of this metaphor, but its fundamental mythology remains constant and, indeed, seems to be engraved deep within the Japanese psyche. Yet historians have by and large ignored it. This panel, which offers four papers, asks: how has the discourse on the "divine country" affected the historical imagination of Japanese people?
Yeounsuk Lee looks at the work of Yamaji Aizan in order to address the racism embedded in Imperial Japan’s attempt to assimilate other peoples into its "divine" domain. Kate Wildman Nakai looks at the paradoxes of "divine country" discourse among late Mito scholars (who promoted sociopolitical reforms while pursuing their desire for Chinese learning). Nam-lin Hur explores how Hideyoshi tried, through promulgating the notion of the "divine country," to motivate as well as to justify his aggression against Korea. Last, James E. Ketelaar examines the "discontinuous structure" of the idea of the "divine country" as a tool of historical appropriation.
Combining these four papers, this panel aims to show the importance of the idea of the "divine country"—an idea that has been prevalent throughout Japanese history and that has clearly affected Japan’s collective identity.
The Divine Country and Racism: Yamaji Aizan’s View of Imperial Japan
Yeounsuk Lee, Hitotsubashi University
Yamaji Aizan (1864–1917), a journalist and historian, left a manuscript on the history of Japan’s imperial expansion. This manuscript, which reveals his ideological shift from "peopleism" to "emperorism," was posthumously published under the title Nihon jinminshi (History of Japanese People).
In this book Aizan, who perceives Japan as "a life community founded on the emperor system," divides the country’s residents into two groups: (1) those who are "Japanese in a narrow sense" (i.e., those who have been directly involved in constructing the community under the leadership of the emperor); and (2) those who are "Japanese in a wide sense" (i.e., those who have failed in the struggle for survival and have thrown themselves upon the mercy of the Japanese emperor). Examples of the latter group are the Hayato, the Kumaso, the Ainu, and Korean immigrants.
With this perspective, Aizan tries to "scientifically" prove the "inevitable trajectory" of Imperial Japan’s history in order to justify its present and future imperial expansion. In this endeavor he uses race-centered "scientific history" as well as social evolutionary theory. Interestingly, in doing this Aizan suggests that the Japanese emperor should be defined in terms of politico-military authority rather than in terms of mythical-religious authority. This paper examines how Aizan, an influential public intellectual, endeavored to reconfigure history and, thereby, to inextricably associate himself with the inevitable glory of the "divine country."
The "Divine Country" in Late Mito Thought
Kate Wildman Nakai, Sophia University
Various factors contributed to the emergence and development of the idea of Japan as a "divine country" (shinkoku). For Confucians in the Tokugawa period, one important element was the weight of the traditional China-centered East Asian international order. To term Japan a "divine country" helped counter the implications that, as seen from China, Japan was a "barbarian state" subordinate to the "central country." The notion of "divine country" was not oriented solely towards the outside world, however. For some it served as a device to remind the populace of the blessings of living in a country founded by divine entities, blessings for which ongoing devoted service was owed in return. In my paper I will explore some of these aspects of the idea of shinkoku through a consideration of its place in the thought of the late Mito school.
Mito use of the notion of shinkoku (or shinshu) calls attention to several paradoxes of "divine country" discourse. Most notably, while highly nationalistic in orientation, the identification of Japan as shinkoku did not necessarily translate into a rejection of "non-Japanese" traditions in favor of "native" ones. To the contrary, although they termed Japan (rather than China) the "central country" as well as the "divine country," the Mito scholars steadfastly affirmed the relevance of Chinese Confucian teachings to a true understanding of the nature of Japan as shinkoku.
The Country of the Gods and Hideyoshi: Warfare and Ideology in Premodern East Asia
Nam-lin Hur, University of British Columbia
In 1592 the Hideyoshi regime of Japan invaded Korea on the pretext of conquering Ming China. Hideyoshi’s aim was to impress Confucian countries with a vision of the "divine country." In attempting to understand the causes and processes of the Imjin (Bunroku-Keicho) War, this paper looks at how the notion of a "prestige economy" played out among Japan, Korea, and Ming China with respect to geopolitics, military confrontation, and diplomacy.
If one is to understand the war that embroiled Korea, Japan, and China for seven years, then one must understand the issues pertaining to ideology and geopolitics. Both Koreans and Chinese regarded Hideyoshi and his armies as exemplifying the essence of barbarism, and they fought against his invasion, which they defined as a scourge brought on by warriors untutored in Confucianism. For his part, Hideyoshi denounced Korea and China as "long-sleeved countries" (a reference to the alleged effete nature of Confucian officials) that should be replaced with "a country of vigorous martial arts" securely rooted within, and devoted to, the idea of the "divine country." Interestingly, the myth of the divine country—the source of the premodern Japanese worldview—was theorized and promoted by leading Buddhist monks who, as diplomats and advisors, served the Hideyoshi regime. It should also be noted that the clash between these irreconcilable worldviews occurred when a tidal wave of European trade, firearms, and Christianity washed over East Asian geopolitics.
Gods Walk the Earth: Building a Divine Nation
James Ketelaar, University of Chicago
"Japan is the Land of the Gods" is a turn of phrase that appears in various forms, in a wide array of writings and with numerous political and religious intentionalities. While particular historical moments are without question noteworthy (Hideyoshi’s rescripts limiting trade with the Catholic nations, the creation of the Meiji imperial structure, the creation of pacific war ideological images), it is also crucial to see the depth and range of this important idea structure across the range of history on the Japanese archipelago. This paper attempts to trace the "discontinuous structure" of the idea of the "divine nation" by beginning with its most fulsome examples as found in the most ancient texts of the Kojiki and the Nihongi. The point here is not to create a "now is then" (ima wa mukashi) parable of an always already present vision of divine nationality but, rather, to demonstrate how this particular idea came into focus in a particular milieu and was subsequently used as a tool of apprehension in strikingly different periods with often distinct ends. The "nation" may "always" have been "divine" but never in the same way twice. The point of such an exercise, of course, is to historicize ideals of "nation" and of "divinity," hoping to provide critical edges useful for close readings of Japanese history and historiography more broadly.
Session 110: Fallout from the Kafû Boom: Critique and Resistance in Modern Japanese Literature
Organizer: Rachael Hutchinson, University of Leeds
Chair: Mark Williams, University of Leeds
Discussant: Charles Shiro Inouye, Tufts University
Keywords: Nagai Kafû, Self/Other, Meiji-Taishô literature, cultural studies, literary theory.
This panel seeks to re-read or reinterpret the works of Nagai Kafû (1879–1959) in the light of current literary theory and contemporary criticism. The "Kafû boom" of the last decade in Japan saw a great revival of interest in this writer, whose self-styled gesaku stance is now being taken at more than face value. While Kafû posed as a connoisseur of the "floating world" and populated his works with geisha, dancehall girls, and prostitutes, he was also deeply critical of his own society and sought to express this critique through fiction. Kafû’s critical eye and politics of resistance may be seen from his early travel works Amerika monogatari (1908) and Furansu monogatari (1909), in which Self and Other, Orient and Occident, are juxtaposed and deconstructed for critical effect. Kafû’s positioning of himself vis-à-vis many different Others in these works prefigures a "Theory of the Orient" in which Japan itself is positioned in relation to the rest of the world. The question of how Japan was to modernize and yet retain its cultural heritage is examined at great length in the series of works known as the Returnee Stories (1908–1912), in a critique of modernity which culminated in the famous Bokutô kidan, or "A Strange Tale from East of the River" (1937). By foregrounding Kafû’s critique and resistance, this panel seeks not only to engage with the "Kafû boom" but also to see where research is headed now as a result of that boom—not only in respect to the fiction of Nagai Kafû but also the field of modern Japanese literature as a whole.
A Strange Tale for Hard Times: Kafû in the Thirties
Stephen B. Snyder, University of Colorado, Boulder
"Il me paraît à peu près impossible
aujourd’hui, dans la société capitaliste où nous vivons encore, que la
littérature de valeur soit autre chose qu’une littérature d’opposition."
—André Gide, in 1935 at the First International Congress for the Defense
of Culture
Nagai Kafû (1879–1959) spent much of his career cultivating the role of contrarian. After writing Yume no onna (1903), arguably the best work to come of "Zola fever" and one that helped give rise to Japanese Naturalism, he aligned himself with the han-Shizenshugi movement. After establishing himself as an astute observer of the West and situating himself in the literary avant-garde with the travel volumes Amerika monogatari (1908) and Furansu monogatari (1909), he published a series of attacks on modernization and Westernization and began his long cultivation of the persona of a latter-day gesaku writer; that is, at the height of the Taishô frenzy of the new he re-created himself as a throwback to the world of Edo Japan.
This contrarian habit becomes most significant, however, two decades later after most of the rest of the nation had made a seemingly similar kaiki with the revalorization of native culture in the days leading up to the Pacific War. Given his reputation as a proponent of Edo culture, Kafû’s major work from this period, Bokutô kidan (1937), might have qualified him as an avatar of cultural authenticity (indeed, Kuki Shûzô all but identifies him as such in Iki no kôzô). Against this interpretive grain, this paper reads this work, and several relevant texts from the period, as evidence that Kafû once again chooses to buck the prevailing cultural current, creating, in Bokutô kidan, a form of littérature d’opposition, one that implicitly, and in places, explicitly, offers up a critique of nationalism and cultural imperialism.
Positioning the Observer: Interrogations of Alterity in Amerika Monogatari
Rachael Hutchinson, University of Leeds
When speaking of Meiji literature it is easy to focus on the discursive configuration of binarism, which sets Japan against the West in a dialectical relationship of mutually defining opposites. To focus solely on the binary construct of Japan and America in Amerika monogatari (1908), however, is to fail to credit the critical faculties of Nagai Kafû and other writers like him, who often comprehended (and represented) the world in a more flexible way. This paper shows how Kafû uses the Other as contrast in Amerika monogatari but avoids limiting himself to a strict binary structure, rather taking up an array of flexible positions on a constructive field. America and Japan emerge not as simple binary opposites, but as points on an axis of varying degrees of "Americanness" and "Japaneseness."
The first set of stories of Amerika monogatari (written 1903–04) deals with the Japanese immigration experience in Seattle and Tacoma. In these stories Kafû interrogates the idea of "alterity" or "Otherness" in America through his own position as external observer-narrator. Kafû’s own encounter with America is colored by the high expectations and disillusionment experienced by many immigrants at the turn of the century, but at the same time Kafû was ever conscious of his own social standing as a gentleman’s son and a scholar. The paper examines a number of the immigrant stories to show how Kafû used the alterities of class, race, and even sanity as complicating constructs to the seemingly simple binary pattern of Self and Other.
Artists in Furansu Monogatari: Position and Position-Taking in Nagai Kafû
Tomomi Parren-Ota, University of Paris
In Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field, Pierre Bourdieu develops the theories of position, dispositions and position-taking in the Literary Field and analyzes the parallel between the position and the position taking.
This paper examines this parallel of the position and the position taking of Nagai Kafû through the analysis of three of his works in Furansu monogatari (1909): Hitori tabi, Saikai, and Karuchie ratan no ichiya, in which artist painters play main or secondary characters. Nagai Kafû portrays in these works the desire and refusal of success, that is, a dilemma between fame or commercial success and purely symbolic success in the Artistic Field. This dilemma seems to be that of the author himself.
The position-taking of Kafû inside those short stories, that is to say, his choice of the theme of "artists" inside his literary works, corresponds to the position as a writer of aestheticism that the newcomer Kafû tries to occupy in 1909 by hiding his literary ambition and also by creating an image of "artist" for himself, especially after the ban of Furansu monogatari. The image, the portrait, or the representation of Kafû as an "artist" is then confirmed and established by the discourses of his contemporary critics who describe him as a writer of "art for art’s sake," the personification of art.
Organizer: Robert Weiner, Cornell University
Chair: John C. Campbell, University of Michigan
Discussant: Robert M. Uriu, University of California, Irvine
Keywords: Japan, bureaucrats, politicians, electoral system, leadership.
The last decade’s transformations have led scholars of Japanese politics to revisit some of the field’s most popular research problems. The balance of power between politicians and bureaucrats shapes policy-making—how has this balance changed with the rise of coalition government, new parties, and ministry reorganization? The electoral system shapes both party behavior and policy outcomes—how have electoral system effects changed since the adoption of a mixed-member system after 1993?
But are these the questions we should be asking in the first place? Our panel argues that these well-worn analytical strategies are overextended. We question how well they explain pre-1993 politics, and introduce alternative theoretical approaches, with an eye toward reorienting post-1993 debates.
John C. Campbell challenges the "bureaucrats vs. politicians" framework. His fragmentation-of-power theory instead finds a key determinant of policy-making patterns in the balance between the decentralized power of specialist, rank-and-file politicians and bureaucrats and the centralized power of generalist "heavyweights." Robert Weiner critically reviews the widespread use of the single non-transferable vote (SNTV) as an explanation for everything from factional wrangling to defense policy. He presents new evidence that challenges SNTV-based theories’ causal claims and identifies broad types of political outcomes for which we should first look to alternative explanations. Finally, Alisa Gaunder turns our attention to an explanatory factor often overlooked in Japan: political leadership. Her study of why political reform movements succeed or fail illustrates how effective leadership can often prove decisive over policy outcomes and why it should never be ignored.
Sometimes an Electoral System Is Just an Electoral System: What SNTV Does and Doesn’t Explain about Japanese Politics
Robert Weiner, Cornell University
Research on Japanese politics often revolves around the effects of the single non-transferable vote (SNTV), the electoral system used in Lower House elections until 1994 and still used at subnational levels. Electoral systems are influential institutions in any democracy, and theories pointing to electoral-system effects are attractive for their parsimony. The fruits of this work have improved our understanding of both Japanese and comparative politics. But SNTV seems to have become an analytical cure-all, invoked to explain outcomes in Japan ranging from party organization to nuclear energy policy to labor market distortions. The broad application of SNTV-centered arguments has inevitably stretched them too far.
I review SNTV-centered research and develop two basic critiques. First, I identify several empirically untenable claims that run through the literature. I pay particular attention to one: that SNTV led the Liberal Democratic Party to engineer efficient vote splits among multiple LDP candidates running in the same multi-member district, and that the party’s vote-splitting methods led it to value pork-barrel politics. Next, I typologize political phenomena according to their likely susceptibility to electoral-system effects. Where we might expect such effects to be relatively weak—for example, in shaping such broad outcomes as economic inefficiency or the direction of defense policy—I call for greater attention to possible alternative explanations.
Fragmentation and Power: Politicians and Bureaucrats in the Japanese Decision-Making System
John C. Campbell, University of Michigan
The literature on Japanese policy-making has made great efforts to decipher "who governs"; politicians or bureaucrats? This question dominated Japanese politics research for at least a decade before the fall of the "1955 System" in 1993. In the decade since, scholars of policy-making have not abandoned this concern: taking as a starting point their conclusions about the pre-1993 balance of bureaucrat and politician power, they ask how this balance has changed with the rise of coalition government.
But this starting point itself is faulty. Analyses that neatly divide actors into politician and bureaucrat camps have clouded the real dynamics of power in Japan. This paper argues that policy-making in Japan is best understood not as a series of politician-bureaucrat battles but through shifting patterns of centralization and decentralization. This "fragmentation of power" approach distinguishes between subgovernments, made up of both politicians and bureaucrats who specialize in particular policy areas, and general-arena "heavyweights," who are party and cabinet heads and leaders of powerful ministries. Policy-making is ultimately shaped by the actions and interactions of these different groups and by the balance between the decentralized and centralized powers they respectively wield. The analysis offers a new perspective on the locus-of-power debate in the pre-coalition era in Japan and provides a more appropriate starting point for studies of policy-making under the new system.
Leadership Looming Large: The Process of Political Reform in Japan
Alisa Gaunder, Southwestern University
Most scholarly accounts of political reform efforts are pessimistic about the prospect of anything but glacial change. They focus on constraints, in the form of institutions or collective action dilemmas, that prevent politicians from passing laws affecting their own behavior. Political leadership is secondary at most. In Japan, leadership is thought to be of particularly little consequence.
An exploration of when and why political reform was implemented throughout the postwar period in Japan, however, demonstrates that quite the opposite is the case: leadership matters, and effective leadership can overcome institutional and strategic constraints. I find that the quality of political leadership is the crucial determinant of whether electoral and campaign finance reform drives succeeded or failed between 1975 and 1994. Although scandal is necessary to open a window of opportunity for reform, scandal is not sufficient to produce reform. A leader with a certain set of resources and personal attributes is also needed, both to persuade self-interested politicians to support reform and to keep this support mobilized. The findings force a reconsideration of core debates in political science in general and of the conventional wisdom on Japanese politics in particular. Leadership might not be easy to measure, but it is essential to consider.
Session 112: INDIVIDUAL PAPERS: On the Margins of Modern Japanese Society
Organizer and Chair: G. Cameron Hurst, University of Pennsylvania
Going the Distance: Resident Koreans in Japanese Cinema
Noboru Tomonari, Carleton College
In the 1990s, several decades later, the representations of zainichi became further diverse as the resident Koreans themselves began to take a leading role in depicting themselves in cinema. This paper discusses three films: a feature film Tsuki wa docchi ni deteiru (Where Is the Moon) made in 1993; GO, made in 2001; and Zainichi: A History of Koreans in Postwar Japan, made in 1998. Through the discussion of the three films, I will reflect on recent changes in zainichi representations observed in Japanese cinema.
The 1993 film portrays the protagonist as very much connected to the community of zainichi and his colleagues. The film GO underlines the sense of being deracinated, of having departed from earlier set boundaries. The 1998 documentary Zainichi demonstrates that zainichi were active participants in the making of their own history and not merely the victimized. Like the protagonist of GO, this documentary suggests that being a zainichi is by no means conclusive to their living. Those that are interviewed in the film are not defined by their ethnic heritage alone. In this, their view is similar to that of GO’s protagonist.
My comparison of the three films makes clear that there is an increasing turn towards diversity and individualization on the part of zainichi’s representations in Japanese cinema. While many of them remains squarely facing their ethnicity as before, the interpretation of how to live as a zainichi is now much more varied and is becoming a matter of individual choice.
The State, Society, and Immigrants: A Comparative Study of the Korean Diaspora in Japan and the United States
Kazuko Suzuki, University of California, San Diego
This study compares the role of the state and society in incorporating immigrants into the nation. Studies of immigrant adaptation have paid much attention to human capital and the cultural values of immigrants. By comparing the adaptation patterns of three Korean diasporic groups in Japan and the United States that are entrenched in very different racial and ethnic relations, my study aims to demonstrate that contextual factors play a decisive role in immigrant adaptation, sometimes to the extent that they can nullify the advantages of immigrants’ human capital.
The study identifies four major contextual factors that determine the fate of the same ethnic groups: these are the historical context of migration, the host state’s policy and ideology of nationhood, prevailing patterns of race and ethnic relations within a host society, and the existence and nature of co-ethnic communities in the host country. By so doing, the study argues that immigrant adaptation is an outcome of the mode of incorporation in which these major contextual factors are intricately entangled in a particular historical context. Therefore, deciphering the combination of the contextual factors and their impact on the experiences of Korean immigrants is critically important in order to understand divergent outcomes in their adaptations.
For the Sake of the Japanese Public: Earthquake, Rumors, and Vigilante Violence in the Japanese Empire, 1923
Jin-hee Lee, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
The experience of violence has powerful consequences in the transformation of culture. The Great Kantô Earthquake of 1923 marked a moment of unprecedented material destruction and cultural rupture in the Japanese Empire. The disaster soon became subject to human interpretation and political manipulation, for the trauma of the catastrophe produced not only physical chaos but also rumors and violence against the colonized people in the metropolitan area. Such social violence manifested itself in the massacre of six thousand Koreans immediately following the earthquake—triggered by rumors of arson, murder, and rebellious riots by Koreans in the metropole. Despite the shock of the rumors and the mass murder, the lack of critical evidence and the contradictions in the surviving sources have rendered the incident a "historical enigma," if not a "panic-driven aberration" or "imperialist conspiracy," in modern Japanese and Korean history.
Interestingly, precisely because of this controversial and obfuscated nature of the violence—which thus defies any singular master narrative that satisfactorily explains the incident empirically—the massacre of Koreans effectively sheds light on the subjective interpretations within the social sphere facing the earthquake, rumors, and the collective violence. The multiple responses and the patterns of choices over the development of the event provide an excellent lens to explore the webs of relationships among disaster, rumor, violence, and narratives. As a part of my larger project, this paper examines the rise and spread of rumors against Koreans and explores various records, reports, and reactions by the people concerning the rumors across the post-earthquake metropole and the colony. In this paper, I highlight the politics of rumor as a window on the complicated context and meanings of the massacre, for rumor proved a powerful social phenomenon, both motivating and justifying the collective violence. I read rumors as an important site to contemplate the multi-layered fears of the colonized and the crowd, as well as the political authority that imperial subjects in the metropole had to bear within the structure of imperialism. By examining this cultural terrain and the social impacts of the experience of violence, I call attention not only to the dynamic impact of the presence of the colonized in the metropole but also to the power of human imagination in producing rumor and interpreting violence in the form of competing narratives, as well as the potential for both resisting and recovering from violence.
Gendered Experiences of Japanese Wives of American GIs in Post-World War II Japan
Ayako Mizumura, University of Kansas
This paper explores the experiences of Japanese women who were so-called "war brides" and married American servicemen in post-World War II Japan and moved to the United States. Based on interviews I conducted with these women, my paper explores how their lives were shaped by the U.S. occupation and continuing military presence in Japan. In addition to gaining an understanding of individual experiences of these women, the study locates "war brides" in the historical context of post-war Japan and links their gendered experiences to the lager socioeconomic structures that have affected women’s lives differently from men’s. By focusing on Japanese women’s experiences, I include women’s insights into cultural and historical processes of that period, which deserve attention because their standpoints had been absent from dominant historical and cultural discourses.
Key issues I explore are: Within what economic and political climate of post-war Japan did the practice of boundary crossing between American GIs and Japanese women occur? What were the views of Japanese women about the changes in post-war Japan that included the presence of a large number of American bases, American men, and Western cultures and practices? How did gender, race, ethnicity, and class affect boundary crossing in the context of unequal power relations between the U.S. as the conqueror and Japan as the conquered? What kinds of gender roles were expected and practiced in the workplace, dating situations, and marriage?
Session 130: Gender, Sexuality, and the Law in Meiji-Taisho Japan
Organizer: Susan L. Burns, University of Chicago
Chair: Gail Bernstein, University of Arizona
Discussant: Anne Walthall, University of California, Irvine
Keywords: Japan, law, gender, sexuality.
Beginning in 1870, the Meiji government began to act aggressively to carry out legal and judicial reform. Not only was a coherent and comprehensive system of national laws viewed as a defining component of the modern nation-state, but legal reform had become a requirement for the revision of the unequal treaties of the Bakumatsu era. As a result, the government oversaw the promulgation of new criminal and civil codes and sponsored the creation of institutions necessary for the enactment of these codes, most notably courts and prisons.
In this panel, we place the legal reforms of the Meiji period in the context of their multiple and unstable interactions with other forms of discourse, such as medicine, racial theory, colonial policy, and gender ideology. From this perspective, we aim to explore the impact of the law and its institutions for issues of gender and sexuality by interrogating specific moments of practice. In her paper, Susan Burns focuses on the discourse on "sex crimes" in the Meiji period and examines how the multiple actors involved in cases of rape, incest, and adultery explained and judged these acts in light of still fluid theories of sexual aberrance and gender identity. Daniel Botsman examines the push for the creation of specialist prisons as the product of popular and political concern for the emergence of specifically "female" forms of criminality. Barbara Brooks explores the institution of the household registration system in colonial Korea, where the "mixed" identities that emerged through marriage, birth, and adoption did not mesh easily with the legal distinction between "colonized" and "colonizer."
Rethinking Sex as Crime: Sexuality, the Law, and the Courts in Meiji Japan
Susan L. Burns, University of Chicago
The Shinritsu Koryo, the first general law code issued by the Meiji government in 1870, defined as sexual offenses not only such familiar crimes as rape, statutory rape, sodomy, and incest, but also consensual sexual relations between men and women who were not married. Over the course of the Meiji period, this initial attempt to define what constituted sexual crimes and appropriate punishment was revised several times, in the Kaitei Ritsurei of 1873, the Criminal Code of 1880, and the revised Criminal Code of 1904. This paper traces the development of concepts of sexual offenses as the intersection of a variety of discursive forces, among them medical theories of sexuality, the influence of Western jurisprudence and juridical practice, and evolving conceptions of social order, the family, and gendered subjectivities. The shifting ideas of criminal sexuality were acted upon most overtly in the arena that was the modern courtroom. Using trial records from the local courts as well as the Daishinin, the high court of review in Tokyo, I will explore how defendants, victims, witnesses, prosecutors, and judges explained and evaluated the sexual acts designated as criminal by deploying and contesting the still fluid conceptions of "normal" sexuality. My aim then is to analyze how such acts as rape, incest, and adultery were represented and constituted within the arena of courtroom, which was of course explicitly shaped by authority and power even as it claimed to embody ideals of objectivity and ethicality.
Of Pity and Poison: Women in Prison in Meiji Japan
Daniel V. Botsman, Harvard University
Focusing specifically on the development of prisons for women in the late Meiji period, this paper provides a new perspective on larger questions concerning gender ideology, criminality, and subject formation in modern Japan. For most of the Meiji era women constituted no more than 6 or 7% of Japan’s total inmate population, and by the early twentieth century this number (already small in comparison to the United States or Britain) seemed to be declining even further. In spite of this, from 1903, the government began establishing new women’s prisons, entirely separate from the overwhelmingly male institutions in which female convicts had previously been held. Throughout the Meiji period public interest in female criminality had been fueled by a steady stream of sensational newspaper stories describing the exploits of villainous "poison women," but this push for specialist prisons for women is best explained in terms of the emergence of new ideas about sexuality, child development, and family life. On the one hand, the central role that lower class women played in child-rearing, not only as mothers, but also as maids and babysitters (komori), was thought to give particular urgency to the task of correcting crime and deviance amongst them. At the same time, however, female criminals themselves were increasingly seen as unfortunate victims of circumstance and upbringing, more piteous than poisonous, who needed special kinds of help in order to overcome their weaknesses. Ultimately, it will be argued, the production of knowledge about what kinds of strategies worked best in this regard only served to further entrench and deepen the prevailing gender ideology.
Mixed Marriage, Hybrid Children, and the Japanese Empire: Cases from Legal Handbooks on Household Registration in Colonial Korea
Barbara J. Brooks, City University of New York, City College
This paper will explore how the legal system of colonial (gaichi) versus domestic (naichi) household registration (koseki seido) categorized individuals in colonial Korea who, through marriage, adoption, or birth, did not fall easily into the binary of "colonized" versus "colonizer." The relatively ample number of these handbooks and their cases suggests that the work of the prewar registration system was far from easy or straightforward. Policies also shifted over time, reflecting increasing attempts to place more Japanese women married to Korean men into the gaichi registers, while some numbers of Koreans, by means of adoption (often as sons-in-law) or marriage, moved from the colonial to metropolitan registers and to full Japanese citizenship. Indeed, by the end of the colonial period, bureaucrats were moving to merge the two registers into one unified system as part of the policy to extend the homeland (naichi encho) to include colonial Korea and Taiwan. Additionally, these cases indicate how difficult it could be to determine the status of individuals in "mixed" families, giving rise to confusion across the system that might have been eliminated with the planned merger of the two registers.
Oguma Eiji, Tessa Morris-Suzuki, and other scholars have recently discussed how the theory of Japan’s "mixed race" origins played out in colonial policy, while Ann Laura Stoler and other scholars of European colonialism have focused on understanding the culture of colonialism through examination of interactions across the sexual divide between colonizer and colonized, especially instances of mixed marriage and hybrid offspring. This paper will employ the contributions of such scholarship as it attempts to offer preliminary insights about the instability of legal barriers, as represented in the cases in these handbooks, which were designed to uphold the divide between colonizer and colonized.
Session 131: Pop Matters: Japanese Entertainment, Leisure, and Power in a Changing Asia
Organizer: David Leheny, University of Wisconsin, Madison
Chair and Discussant: Theodore C. Bestor, Harvard University
Keywords: Japan, modern, politics, popular culture, transnational.
It is no secret to politicians that popular culture matters; leaders often try to use, vilify, or control popular culture for any of a variety of motives. In Japan, these concerns have long been a mainstay of foreign relations, whether in government promotion of traditional Japanese arts to head off Western influences or by negotiations about allowing Japanese music stars to perform in South Korea. But the relationship between culture and politics has been a tricky one for academia because culture studies/political science border tensions are often fiercer than those between states.
This panel takes an interdisciplinary approach to the study of Japanese pop culture in transnational perspective. Although all four papers deal with the ways in which state and market shape the currencies of power, they each approach the phenomenon differently. Two papers discuss the cultural and political forces in Japanese popular culture in comparative terms, one by focusing on different approaches to cultural diplomacy (Katzenstein) and the other by contrasting the appropriation of symbols across contexts (Kinsella). Two others deal with specific representations of cultural change, Japanese tourism policy (Leheny), and the rise of Japanese female hip-hop (Condry). Collectively, all four papers ask how power is reflected and changed within popular culture, and how various agents categorize popular cultural forms as "Western," "Japanese," "Asian," or "modern." Japanese popular culture may have become a currency in its own right, but its syncretic links with global mass entertainment suggest that we need to develop more systematic and interdisciplinary approaches to our understanding of power.
Japan’s Cultural Diplomacy in Comparative Perspective
Peter Katzenstein, Cornell University
Japan’s cultural diplomacy is a timely and understudied topic at a time when Japan’s "Gross National Cool" in the area of popular culture has attracted wide attention. The paper contrasts Japan’s late conversion to an economic and bilateral strategy of foreign cultural diplomacy with Germany’s early, explicitly political, and multilateral approach. While this contrast holds up well into the 1980s, in the last fifteen years Japan’s approach has begun to shift, largely in response to the rise of civil society politics and the third sector and a growing delegitimization of the state since the mid-1990s. Together with the rise in the attractiveness of Japan’s popular culture industries, this opens up avenues for Japan’s international influence in an area in which it supposedly was lacking in "soft power," as the current Dean of Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School, Joseph Nye, argued famously in a book published in 1990. The paper will conclude by drawing out the implications of this argument for the character of regional politics in contemporary East Asia. This paper is based on extensive documentary research and interviewing of government and foundation officials in Tokyo and Berlin.
A Preliminary Comparison of the Content and Context of Blackface Minstrelsy in Nineteenth-Century America and Lolita Complex Culture in Contemporary Japan
Sharon Kinsella, Yale University
There may be an interesting parallel between the intense male cultural interest and production of girl (shojo) characters in modern Japan, particularly in the last two decades of the twentieth century, and the phenomenon of blackface minstrelsy in the north-eastern states of America in the mid-nineteenth century. Between the 1840s and the 1880s white vaudeville entertainers, including a high proportion of Irish men, blacked up with greasepaint, or burnt cork, and adorned comically outsized "Negro" costumes, in which they performed songs, dancing, comic dialogues, japery, and narrative skits to white audiences. Staged minstrelsy was accompanied by the circulation of plantation songbooks, minstrel theatrical reviews, and classical, abolitionist novels. Black impersonation became "the most popular entertainment form of the nineteenth century" (Lott 1993:4), a racial system of cultural communication which critics suggest was integral to the emergence of American popular culture. In the twentieth century, most female impersonation by male writers, directors, and artists in Japan has been mediated and reproduced through the press and lens. Reportage, novels, films, animation, pornography, and comics about girls dominate the content of contemporary Japanese culture and news reportage to such a degree that it is not possible to separate the epochal expansion of the media industries in the 1980s and 1990s from the driving attraction to these cultural caricatures. This paper, with some audiovisual illustration, will use the example of blackface minstrelsy as just one means to help us think more about the deeper nature and specific historical context of male cultural production and consumption about girls in Japan. It is related to a larger study of the racialization of girls in twentieth-century Japan, included in a forthcoming book, Girls as Energy.
Women in Japanese Hip-Hop: Responses to Global Machismo
Ian R. Condry, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
As entertainment industries increasingly connect youth cultures worldwide in a common vocabulary of fashion, film, and music, what are the possibilities for imagining new social worlds through popular culture? This paper explores the case of Japanese popular music with a focus on women Japanese rappers, who recently have been making their mark as alternative voices in the male-centered machismo of hip-hop in Japan. The masculine aggressiveness of hip-hop in Japan has at times been used as a weapon against different visions of the uses of economic and military power, such as the dangers of American wars and the failed economic policies of Japanese leaders. How do women use hip-hop style for self-expression? Although female vocalists have achieved impressive commercial success with a Japanese R&B melody-centered style reminiscent of kayokyoku (pop songs) with sampled hip-hop beats, few female rappers have cracked the testosterone-charged walls of rap music proper. A noteworthy exception is Miss Monday, who over the past 10 years has gone from silent backup dancer to solo rap star with her second major label album release in 2003. She is emblematic of the lands of negotiation between foreign or "global" ideologies, which are significant not only for the ways they interact with ideas of "Japaneseness" but also for other aspects of cultural politics, including diasporic uses of masculinity and femininity in an idiom of black culture. As such, this paper explores some of these new forms of gender politics from a transnational perspective.
The State of Japanese Travel: Japan and the Structuring of Tourism in the Asia-Pacific
David Leheny, University of Wisconsin, Madison
When Japan’s Ministry of Transport created the "Ten Million Program" in 1986, it did more than announce a public effort to promote more Japanese outbound tourism to offset persistent trade surpluses. It also inaugurated a series of innovations that resulted in new government organizations dedicated to the promotion of a particular "style" of travel from Japan to its Asian neighbors. Using development assistance funds, Japanese policymakers instructed travel professionals from around the region about the special travel needs of the Japanese—travel needs that were inferred from long-term study of "normal" tourism by Americans and Europeans, mixed with putatively unique elements of Japanese culture.
Using interviews and primary documents, this paper seeks to place the state, as an institutional construct, at the center of analysis of cultural globalization. It argues that Japanese policymakers work in a context in which leisure is a public—even political—phenomenon and one more arena for marking Japan’s relative level of development. Informed both by international standards of development and by theories of Japanese uniqueness, these policymakers have exported a hybrid model of Japanese tourism that simultaneously recommends standardization of tourist practices while extolling the virtues of Japanese distinctiveness. The consequences for tourism investment have at times been extraordinary and have had legacies lasting after the collapse of Japan’s bubble economy in the early 1990s. The paper explores how states understand problems and how they may be responsible for standardizing cultural behavior even when leaders believe themselves to be doing the opposite.
Organizer: Fumiko Nazikian, Princeton University
Chair and Discussant: Wesley M. Jacobsen, Harvard University
Keywords: grammar instruction, communication-oriented language teaching.
The way that languages are taught has greatly changed over the past decades. Japanese is no exception. The focus of language instruction has shifted from a grammar-oriented approach to a more context- and/or communication-oriented approach. Developing communication ability has come to be more emphasized over teaching discrete grammar structures of the language. Accordingly, more context-oriented practice has taken over the dialogue memorization or structural drill practice. The linkage of culture and language teaching has received more interest and attention, although there has been relatively little agreement made on how to link them.
In spite of different approaches to language teaching, it is still undeniable that learners need to learn the grammar of the target language. This panel aims to explore various methods of grammar instruction in Japanese. Focusing on grammar instruction, four panelists will discuss their approach to language teaching from different perspectives. The panel addresses the theoretical issue of grammar instruction from the perspectives of (1) sociolinguistic approach, (2) the linkage of culture and grammar instruction, (3) cognitive approach to language teaching, and (4) proficiency approach to language teaching. Each panelist will address theoretical issues related to each perspective and then will make pedagogical suggestions about grammar instruction, teaching materials, and curriculum in general. The panel will also invite the audience to participate in the discussion.
Why Do Japanese and Korean Children Master Conditionals One Year Earlier than English-Speaking Children?
Noriko Akatsuka, University of California, Los Angeles
Conditional sentences have typically been analyzed in terms of the domain of truth and inference. Yet our research (e.g., Akatsuka 1991, Akatsuka and Clancy 1993, Clancy, Akatsuka and Strauss 1997, Akatsuka and Strauss 2000) has shown that natural language conditionals are also important devices for encoding the speaker’s affect. The relevant notions are the desirability/undesirability of the action, state, or event in question rather than the logician’s notion of true vs. false.
The first empirical support for our desirability-based analysis comes from Japanese and Korean two-year olds. They begin to use conditionals one year earlier than children who are speakers of familiar European languages, including English (Akatsuka and Clancy 1993).
In Japanese and Korean, an extremely common way of giving orders and prohibitions, "Do X/Don’t do X," is to use deontic conditionals in which the speaker’s evaluation of the antecedent as desirable or undesirable is coded in a semantically transparent fashion in the consequent clause (e.g., dame ‘is no good’ [Japanese], antway ‘won’t do’ [Korean]). All the Japanese and Korean children in our data used deontic conditionals first and then proceeded to use regular conditionals.
Culture in Grammar: How Universal Spatial Notions of Uchi and Soto Are Metaphorically Used in Japanese Grammar
Seiichi Makino, Princeton University
Chomsky has beautifully demonstrated the autonomy of linguistics as a branch of learning since his publication of the famous 1957 monograph Syntactic Structures. Before Chomsky, linguistics was a part of anthropology—the study of human culture—especially in the U.S. My intention is to take an anachronistic position to put language back into culture so that I can discuss a fascinating interplay between language and culture. Here I define culture as a set of cognitive and perceptive "styles" which in turn produce all sorts of secular and religious practices and tangible products. I take a position that there is no unique human culture and also that human culture is merely a part of ecological culture. Such assumption should be able to eliminate the stereotypical view of human language and culture.
I will focus in my paper on the stylistical manners in which universal concepts of uchi and soto are used culturally and metaphorically in language, especially in grammar taken in the widest sense. Basic cultural notions such as amae, hon’ne vs. tatemae, haji, sekentei, miren, and giri vs. ninjoo, among many others, can be explained spatially using uchi and soto. Quinn’s (1994: 42) lexical study of uchi and soto stated: "since earliest written texts, uchi has been used in greater variety of contexts than (so)to." I will introduce a metaphorically used spatial notion of uchi and soto to explain quite basic grammars such as: (1) giving/ receiving verbs, (2) demonstratives, (3) wa vs. ga, (4) informal/formal shift, (5) tense shift, (6) nominalization, and (7) noda construction, and will show how culture is an integral part of grammar.
Grammar in the Native Context
Fumiko Nazikian, Princeton University
It is generally believed that learning a second language in a native environment is more effective than learning language in the classroom. Many believe that natural exposure to native speakers or to daily language outside the classroom is the key to successful second language acquisition. This is an interesting perspective as it represents an indirect criticism of formal methods for teaching language, despite the fact that one environment is totally structured whereas the other is completely unstructured. Why is this so? One answer is that in a natural environment the student is fully engaged in the process of communication. This idea has been carried into the classroom. In contrast to the traditional teaching environment where the focus is placed on language, modern teaching methods have shifted towards a focus on interpersonal communication. Teachers try to see to it that students learn how to use the language for communication. However, do current textbooks really reflect such natural language based philosophy? Do they reflect the way the language is used in communication in the native environment?
In this study I compare conversations between: (1) native speakers, (2) conversations in the classroom between teacher and learners, and (3) textbook conversations. In so doing the goal is to elucidate the differences in the naturalness of conversation from the following points of view: (1) the way the language is presented (e.g., the variety of vocabulary, structures, interpersonal language devices, etc.); (2) the variety of speakers who are involved in conversations (e.g., gender, age, professions); (3) the type and variety of language events (e.g., greetings, purchasing, inviting, declining, etc.); and (3) the type and variety of cultural elements (e.g., cultural products or concepts). Based on these findings, pedagogical suggestions will be made aimed toward improving Japanese language teaching in the classroom and in textbooks.
Grammar as a Basis for Action or "Where’s Waldo?"
Patricia J. Wetzel, Portland State University
Perhaps more than any other area of inquiry, education relies on the models and metaphors emanating from the fields that inform it (psychology, sociology, information technology, assessment and measurement, etc.). In the case of language education, this includes a reliance on linguistics and, by extension, grammar.
My title refers to a well-known children’s book series that has the same character—Waldo—appear in a succession of complex illustrations, where the viewer’s task is to find the character amid the maze of visual distractions within which he is embedded. The field that we call "language teaching" has changed over time, and the role of grammar, like Waldo, pops up in various locations and guises in the maze of just what it means to learn a language. This paper will examine "grammar" in some of its historical guises, and as it is alternately apprehended by the professional linguist and the language learner. It unpacks the unwritten assumption on the part of many that our current models capture greater "truth" than past descriptions and that they represent linear movement in an inexorable path toward perfection. Rather than adhering to a theoretical paradigm, I suggest an alternate set of metaphors for the process we call "language learning," where grammar is best viewed as an aggregate of underspecified "rules of thumb" which form the basis for performing culture.
Session 133: Tawada Yoko Does Not Exist
Organizer and Chair: Doug Slaymaker, University of Kentucky
Some years ago Roland Barthes suggested that "the author" is dead. We do not wish, in this panel, to suggest that the author Tawada Yoko has died, but we do wish to explore the ways that she exists in different ways, which is to suggest how, in other ways, she does not. Tawada is one of the most creative writers working today, working in a variety of different media and idioms: she creates in Japanese and German (having won prestigious prizes for her work in both languages) even as she exists in English. And, therefore, for those of us who know no German, for example, she is rumored to exist in German, but it is difficult to determine with certainty. Her characters, and the texts within her texts, inhabit the interstices of identities marked by these idioms: sometimes Japanese in non-Japanese contexts, sometimes Japanese in Japan, sometimes of indeterminate identity, these national identities are neither radically rejected nor compulsively insisted upon. This seems to mark the death of something, the absence and the presence of something else. Those "somethings" comprise the focus of this panel.
Tawada’s presentation, containing the suggestions of her own non-existence (as contained in her abstract), will spark lively interaction. Tawada suggests that her texts should be read as "non-existent," as translations without an original, as a Freudian dream, perhaps a fantasy. The participation of Margaret Mitsutani, who has translated much of Tawada’s work into English, will encourage development of these themes. The trio of presentations will provide more space for Tawada to develop her contentions and also allow extensive audience participation.
Tawada Yoko Does Not Exist
Tawada Yoko, Independent Scholar
What is a literary scholar to do when faced with a translation of which there is no original? Tawada Yoko’s "The Bath" is just such a work. There are German translations, English translations, and Italian translations. There are two different versions that have been broadcast on television, one in German and one in Spanish, with an admixture of German. For all that, there is no original Japanese-language version available. With the existence of an original, one could compare the English and German versions to the original and determine which is most faithful. But since no original exists, such speculation is moot. One is left with no option but to search for another point of view with which to approach the possibility of translation.
Freud has claimed that dreams are a translation for which no original exists. Many have pointed out the ultimate futility of authoritative explication of a literary text; it then exists like this dream, and there seems to be no original. In that case, translated literature is not simply a necessary evil, but is literature’s essential form. We no longer need to know what the author was thinking. There are many students who come to the author seeking interviews for the purpose of school reports, but it would be better if they considered the author dead and gone. The original creator and the creation both should be buried six feet under, leaving us to take up the literary text which transforms before each reader. We are all better off treating translated literature as though it has this dreamlike constitution, a translation without an original.
Tawada Yoko and the Characterization of No Place
Doug Slaymaker, University of Kentucky
This presentation will discuss individual character/ narrators as they navigate space and absence in the works of Tawada Yoko. I will look most closely at her recent (2002) "Yogisha no yako ressha" (The Fugitive’s Night-Time Railway). This collection of stories of travel is organized as descriptions of ostensible journeys to particular places, but the "goal" is never reached; even the ostensible travelers are amorphous. Interactions along the way highlight confused individuals narrating the tales. They are "confused," I suggest, by the border crossings of their travels, which are suggestive of the post-ethnic, post-national subject that exists within borders that are not firm or, ultimately, meaningful. This serves as another permutation on the individual/ text as a translation of a non-existent original, as Tawada will develop in her, presentation. Characters search for a place, try to travel to a place, but that locale is ultimately immaterial; the narrators are associated with a place, as are the other passengers (fugitives?), but these associations are misleading for, like Freud’s dreams, the originary identity is non-existent. I will pursue the ramifications of these characterizations within the fiction itself but also by contextualizing her writings in relation to other writers who explore simultaneous existences, or the transgression of space, writing in Japanese, such as Hideo Levy, Mizumura Minae, and Ogino Anna. These are all writers who have come to think hard about the meaning of being "Japanese" and its problematics, i.e., what is a self and where is it located; is it at all meaningful to discuss a coherent self, and what is the relationship between self and identity to nation and language.
Missing Heels, Missing Texts, Wounds in the Alphabet
Margaret Mitsutani, Kyoritsu Women’s University
In Tawada Yoko’s fiction, "essential" texts tend to get lost. The narrator of "Missing Heels," for example, leaves an academic paper entitled "The Heel and Other Cultures," which would presumably tell her why everyone is staring at her heels, on the bus, and the narrator of "The Wound in the Alphabet" loses the manuscript of the translation she has painstakingly completed on the way to the post office. The lost translation is not one that would please most editors, though, for the words and phrases have been faithfully "thrown over to the other side" one by one, leaving a series of fragments from which the reader must reconstruct meaning. When language is fragmented in this way, reduced to its most basic elements—phrases, words, letters—it is released from the sentence (the basic unit of the conventional text) where we would expect to find meaning. These language fragments have a poetic, sometimes almost mystical power, as in "The Gotthard Railway," in which the place name Goeschenen—"stone become word"—saves the narrator from the blankness of a snowy field. In Tawada’s writing, the loss of the text is therefore also the discovery of the power and strangeness of language itself. It is a discovery that takes place on the border between two languages, and in this sense Tawada’s characters are is a position that is quite similar to that of a translator.
Session 149: The Ambiguous Borders of Colonial Authority: Japanese Consular Police in Northeast Asia
Organizer: Erik W. Esselstrom, International Research Center for Japanese Studies
Chair: Mark R. Peattie, Hoover Institution
Discussant: Frederick R. Dickinson, University of Pennsylvania
Keywords: Japan, police, colonial empire, China, Korea, Taiwan.
The aim of this panel is to introduce some early results from a recently launched collaborative research project on the history of the Japanese Foreign Ministry police. Comprised of participants in the consular police research group at the Institute for Research in the Humanities of Kyoto University, the session features four papers that explore the complex ways in which the history of the consular police as a quasi-colonial security apparatus compels historians of modern Japan to reconsider the hard boundaries often drawn between the spheres of "formal" and "informal" empire. As a branch of Japan’s legally recognized consular system in Northeast Asia that nonetheless performed police duties different only in name from the colonial police forces of Taiwan and Korea, the nature and scope of consular police activity provides a heretofore unstudied perspective on the workings of Japanese imperialism at the local level. Naoki Mizuno and Toshihiko Matsuda will both discuss the role of the consular police in different periods of Japan-Korea relations, while Toyomi Asano will present his work on police affairs in colonial Taiwan and the south China coast. Finally, Erik Esselstrom will explore the position of Foreign Ministry police within the Japanese constructed "puppet state" of Manchukuo. These papers represent the fruits of the first comprehensive research project on the consular police carried out in both the East Asian and Western language academic communities. Frederick Dickinson will provide critical commentary on each paper, and the audience will be encouraged to pose questions and offer feedback on the topics and ideas put forth in the session.
Japanese Suppression of the Overseas Korean Independence Movement: Consular Police, Nationality, and Public Security Law
Naoki Mizuno, Kyoto University
During the era of Japanese colonial rule over Korea, the Korean independence movement developed mainly outside of the peninsula. In particular, after the March 1 independence uprising of 1919, the movement became more closely connected with armed resistance and more deeply linked with socialist ideology. In response to this, Japanese authorities at the time (namely the Government-General of Korea and the Foreign Ministry), along with strengthening and expanding the consular police whose responsibility it was to control resident Koreans beyond formal Japanese territory, also revamped laws related to the maintenance of public peace and security. In order to facilitate the ability of consular police to control resident Koreans, Japanese authorities maintained a law stipulating that even if those residents became naturalized in their country of residence they would not be allowed to give up their Japanese nationality. Furthermore, many Koreans in the Jiandao region after 1930 joined and participated in the Chinese Communist Party. In order to facilitate their arrest and prosecution, it was necessary to create a new interpretation of the public security law, one that said people involved in foreign communist movements could be punished. This paper sheds new light on the characteristics of Japanese colonial rule by examining the construction of this suppression system, which was rooted in the interactions of the consular police, naturalization, and public security laws.
The Japanese Consular Police and Social Control in Colonial Taiwan and the South China Coast
Toyomi Asano, Chukyo University
Even after Taiwan became a Japanese colonial possession, the island’s social, economic, and cultural connections with the south China coast continued, In fact, relations with the coast were so important that Goto Shimpei once wrote "what we call our rule of Taiwan is really a matter of managing the coastal region." In 1917, the Taiwan Government-General sent its own police forces to the coast while local Foreign Ministry outposts simultaneously began stationing consular police in their own offices. Why was the dispatch of such police forces necessary? Despite the human and material connections between the two locales, both regions were moving in different directions. Under the direction of Japanese colonial administration, Taiwan was becoming more stable, while the south China coast was descending further into social and political disorder as a consequence of the Chinese revolution. Let us view that process as one in which a pluralistic society that crossed the straits was being torn apart by conflict between the worlds of colonial modernity and "premodern" society. Because of the Chinese revolution, the continental coast of China was becoming a hotbed of political plots, "terrorism," and civil war, which threatened the stability of continued colonial development on Taiwan. Using the experience gained up to that time through the policing of residents in Fuzhou and Guangdong, the dispatch of Taiwan police and the strengthening of local consular police could work to secure public peace in this increasingly chaotic environment. What kind of cooperation and/or conflict existed between these different Japanese police forces? Could they effectively bring about the social order they desired there? Moving beyond the boundaries of "formal empire" in Taiwan, this paper will focus on the expansion of Japanese authority over Taiwanese subjects through administrative police functions like controlling the drug trade and maintaining census figures on local resident populations.
The Colonization of Korea and the Consular Police, 1904–1910
Toshihiko Matsuda, International Research Center for Japanese Studies
It is well known that Japan’s prewar continental policy and diplomacy were not unified; they developed instead along a rather ad hoc pattern through rivalry and competition between numerous institutions. Japanese colonial control over Korea took formal shape after the Russo-Japanese War, but when we consider the role of the consular police in that process we also find a similar piecemeal evolution of policy at work. In other words, because the police system in Korea at the time consisted of consular police as well as Japanese military police and Japanese police advisors "hired" by the Korean government, it is necessary to bring into our view the relationship between the consular police and these other forces. At the time of the Russo-Japanese War, the consular police felt pressure to be placed under the control of the Japanese Army in Korea and its military police. Consular police also supported the establishment of the police advisor system by adding to its pool of human resources. However, with the establishment of the Residency-General in 1905 and the reform of provincial police forces under Japanese control, the functions of the consular police were absorbed into the police advisor system, until ultimately, after the conclusion of the 1907 treaty, the Korean police system under Japanese authority took its formal shape. Then, shortly before the formal annexation of Korea, local police autonomy disappeared entirely under the formation of the Japanese military police system. The story of how these events unfolded casts new light on the process by which Japanese influence in Korea evolved from "informal" economic imperialism of the late nineteenth century to formal colonial conquest of the early twentieth century.
The Myth of Army Unilateralism: Japan’s Consular Police in Manchukuo, 1930–1937
Erik W. Esselstrom, International Research Center for Japanese Studies
The Kanto Army’s creation of "Manchukuo" in 1932 is often viewed as a crushing blow to the jurisdictional prerogatives of the Japanese Foreign Ministry in Manchuria. Through exploring the history of the local consular police, however, a different picture emerges. Far from having their role usurped by military extremism, the creation of Manchukuo helped to facilitate the execution of security policy objectives that the Japanese consular police in Manchuria had been pursuing for more than a decade. Historians have long depended on the notion of unilateral action by the Kanto Army thrusting Japan back into a pattern of "formal" empire building. The position of Japan’s consular police in those events complicates that paradigm and suggests that the historiographical distinction between the informal empire of the 1920s and the formal wartime empire of the 1930s is both incomplete and problematic. In particular, the relations between the Japanese consular police and the Kanto Army within the "puppet state" of Manchukuo suggest a great deal of continuity between what came before and what followed the alleged watershed of 18 September 1931.
Organizer: Robert Hellyer, Allegheny College
Chair and Discussant: Kären Wigen, Stanford University
Keywords: Japan, Satsuma, center/periphery, politics, maritime, religion, sexuality.
Western historians have produced surprisingly little research on the Satsuma domain which played a leading role in the Edo period state, the Meiji Restoration, and the subsequent Meiji national government. This panel seeks to fill this void by examining how the case of Satsuma presents new perspectives on two larger issues: center/regional (center/peripheral) dynamics and related power relationships within the Edo and Meiji state structures. For one, the panel demonstrates how the Tokugawa bakufu exercised little control over coastal defense, an area often viewed as largely under bakufu purview. In turn, it also explores how certain center/regional definitions shifted after Satsuma men gained national power in 1868 and assumed a new status as the leaders of the central authority. Specifically, it examines how national opinion-makers, opposed to the policies of the Satsuma dominated Meiji regime, sought to discredit the Meiji leadership by constructing Satsuma as a sexually deviant periphery.
The panel also suggests new ways to see a center/regional power dynamic at work on a lower political level: the Edo period domain. By illustrating how the Satsuma leadership exercised only limited control over religious and political activities, the panel urges a reconsideration of the perception that domain authorities easily extended their "central power" throughout the domain. In other words, the panel also demonstrates how political and religious peripheries existed not only within the "national" Edo state structure, but within the domainal framework as well.
Where Were the Pirates? The Significance of Satsuma’s Commercial Networks in Nineteenth-Century Japanese Foreign Relations
Robert Hellyer, Allegheny College
Nineteenth-century Japan is usually portrayed as plagued by poor coastal defenses and widespread political and social unrest, factors that contributed to the profound political change of the Meiji Restoration of 1868. Yet while Japan was certainly weak and disunited, it was remarkably free of piracy, a scourge that afflicted the Chinese coastline in the same period. Why was this case?
Historians normally explore such defensive and foreign policy questions by examining the actions of the central authority, the Tokugawa shogunate. This paper challenges this focus on central agency and instead suggests that the Satsuma domain played a crucial foreign relations role, as illustrated by its commercial networks that prevented the rise of coastal piracy.
In the early nineteenth century, Satsuma developed a broad commercial network by first placing coastal smuggling with Chinese merchant vessels under its direct control, thereby providing smugglers a "legitimate" outlet that mitigated their transformation into pirates. In subsequent decades, Satsuma further expanded this network by forming new domestic connections and by exploring commercial ties with Asian and Western states. All told, Satsuma’s commercial activities demonstrate that the domain often exercised more control over foreign trade and coastal defense than the shogunate. In a broader sense, Satsuma’s key role in foreign relations also suggests new ways to explore the power relationships between domains and the shogunate that helped define the wider political culture of nineteenth-century Japan.
Prohibition or Proliferation: Domainal Politics, Hidden Buddhists, and Local Identities in Satsuma
Derek Wolff, Harvard University
Scholars have long depicted Edo period Satsuma according to a strong local identity that emerged out of a historically common culture. The absence of local violence has indicated a sense of broad domainal authority, popular submissiveness, and shared cultural attitudes. In particular, the domainal prohibition of Jôdo Shinshû Buddhism has been seen as crucial to the domain’s grip on economic, social, and ideological power. In spite of this prohibition, by the 1840s there were 2,000 devotional scrolls floating around the domain and 140,000 people secretly practicing Jôdo Shinshû. Moreover, the Satsuma practitioners were part of a broad network of Jôdo Shinshû followers which traversed the archipelago.
Such a vast, yet "hidden" movement challenges common perceptions of domainal identity and hegemony and presents an opportunity to interrogate the intersection of religion with politics, resistance, and identity formation in early modern Japan. The pervasiveness of Jôdo Shinshû practice in Satsuma demonstrates the degree to which large portions of the population actively evaded domainal authority through subtle, non-violent means. Moreover, the study of Jôdo Shinshû points to religion as a field where political views were enunciated and shows that the political implications of religious affiliation and belief were expressed in both doctrine and practice. Ultimately, movements such as the "hidden Buddhists" of Satsuma demonstrate the degree to which individuals and groups formed identities across a much wider spectrum of ideas and practices than those allowed by the political order.
The Satsuma Habit: Siting Male-Male Desire in Meiji Japan
Gregory M. Pflugfelder, Columbia University
During the Meiji period, the southwestern prefecture of Kagoshima (formerly the early modern domain of Satsuma) came to be habitually regarded as a hotbed of male-male sexuality. My paper explores the reasons for this geographic association. Rejecting a purely sociological explanation that would assume that male-male sexual practices were actually more prevalent in this region than elsewhere, it focuses instead on the discursive and political processes at play. Of particular import were the activities of the turn-of-the-century liberal press in Tokyo, which critiqued the oligarchic government of the so-called Satsuma clique (Satsubatsu) by associating that region with uncivilized, outdated, and implicitly anti-"national" sexual practices. In addition to fomenting a moral panic over male-male sexual assaults in Tokyo (supposedly, although not always statistically, carried out by Kagoshima males residing in the capital), national opinion-makers transformed Japan’s southwestern periphery into an "anachronistic space" where sexual barbarism was imagined to have survived, unreformed and unabated, into an otherwise enlightened era. In much the same way that Western sexual cartographers painted Europe’s colonial periphery as a vast "sotadic zone" of flourishing male-male sexual practice, Meiji Japanese constructed their own zone of non-normative erotic desire, the geographic boundaries of which lay, paradoxically, both inside and outside of Japan’s "national" space.
Session 151: Noh and Its Intertexts
Organizer and Chair: Beng Choo Lim, National University of Singapore
Discussant: Karen Brazell, Cornell University
Keywords: Noh, intertextuality, Zeami, Teika, the "Other."
A prominent feature of the traditional Japanese theater generally is its intertextuality and yet Noh theater has traditionally been understood as a self-contained theatrical genre. In fact, Noh theater is an example par excellence of intertextuality, a complex tapestry of literary, religious, and historical intertexts. The presence of these intertexts in the Noh theater is not restricted to the context of the plays, i.e., performance, but also extends to the treatises produced by Noh masters. The discursive environment of the genre integrates and influences its reception and perception, resulting in a complex and dynamic theater. Our discussion of the presence of the other elements in the imagery, treatises, and context of the Noh theater highlights the highly complex and intricate nature of the genre. Each paper in our panel investigates and exemplifies the intertextuality of the Noh theater from various perspectives. Susan Klein examines the complex imagery of the poet Ariwara no Narihira and his representations in Noh and other literary genres. Lewis Cook deciphers the weaving together of poetic principles, theater practice, and aesthetic discourse in one of Zeami’s treatises. Scot Hislop focuses on one play, Teika, examining its multi-layered intertextuality. Lim Beng Choo discusses the presence of the "Other," represented by the Chinese and Indian cultural elements, in Noh plays. All together the papers in our panel will not only demonstrate the complexity of Noh’s discursive context but show that it contains intriguing surprises that have heretofore been overlooked.
Zeami’s Perfect Vision: "Riken no Ken" and Other Metaphors of the Ineffable
Lewis Cook, City University of New York, Queens College
One familiar claim regarding Zeami’s textbooks and treatises on the theory and practice of Noh is that they are consistent with and to some extent even a continuation of the discourse of early medieval poetics, primarily that which draws upon the language and authority of Fujiwara Shunzei, Teika, and their heirs. To put it crudely, both Teika (laconically) and Zeami (with an eloquence which borders on volubility) were seeking, it appears, to "eff the ineffable," and both took key elements of their technical vocabulary from well-known syncretic Buddhist treatises (sutras and commentaries), in particular those which afforded a metaphorics of transcendence as visualization, insight, or "seeing beyond what is (merely) visible." Manifest differences between the range of effects achievable by performance arts versus those of language, even waka (and the consistency in question is by no means restricted to that dimension of the former which subsumes the latter), never seem to disturb Zeami. On the contrary, his confidence that he is not only making sense but offering practical advice to the actor-in-training (and, perhaps, to the reader of poetry?) is overwhelmingly evident. Is he persuasive? Do his metaphors do the work he seems to expect of them? In this paper, I will propose answers to these questions by way of a reading of one of Zeami’s treatises of the early 1420s, "Yugaku Shudo Fuken," which offers an exceptionally stark analogy between visions of performance and of those of poetry.
Fickle Rain, Healing Rain: Images in Motion in the Noh Play Teika
Scot Hislop, National Museum of Japanese History
The Noh play Teika is based on a legend about a love affair which reputedly took place between the famous waka poets Fujiwara Teika (1162–1241) and Shokushi Naishinnô (died in 1201). After briefly summarizing the play, I will then examine the changes in the image of "rain" in the play. I have chosen the image of "rain" because it undergoes changes in both connotation and denotation during the play and because it is an image that is a special feature of this play. The word "shigure" is used more often in Teika than in any other Noh play. I follow the motion of the image rain through the play from its mention in the first line of the play where, as "shigure" it is associated with real rain and indeterminacy to its final mention in act two, as "ame," where it is associated with the mythical rain of the Buddha’s dharma and constancy. I also explore the changes that the image undergoes while it is in motion between these two extremes, drawing heavily on semiotic theory and the work of Roland Barthes in order to explain how "rain" is able to undergo these changes.
Down the Primrose Path: Narihira as Love God in Medieval Poetic Commentaries and the Noh
Susan B. Klein, University of California, Irvine
In the Kamakura period a relatively obscure poet and Shingon priest, Fujiwara Tameaki, developed a widely influential pedagogical system of poetry initiations based on the Shingon esoteric Buddhist system (kanjô). At these initiation ceremonies, commentaries containing esoteric poetic "secrets" were transmitted to the initiate along with genealogical documents purportedly authenticating an unbroken line of transmission back to Heian period oracular revelations, revelations provided by the patron deity of poetry, Sumiyoshi Daimyôjin. Tameaki appears to have been an adept in the infamous Tachikawa sect, which advocated tantric sex as a means to enlightenment, and his commentaries transform the late-Heian period Tales of Ise into a complex tantric allegory. Tales of Ise, a collection of poem tales (uta monogatari) that in the medieval period was popularly understood to describe the love affairs of the Heian court poet Ariwara no Narihira, was perfect for such tantric allegorization. The scholar Itô Masayoshi has shown that the influence on Noh of Tameaki’s esoteric commentaries was profound. However, for a variety of reasons—including earlier literary scholars’ antipathy to Tachikawa—the tantric content of Noh has been left largely unexplored. In this talk I will trace the image of Narihira as tantric deity in medieval commentaries and the Noh, including his apotheosis as okina (the manifestation of a shrine kami as uncanny old man), kabu no bosatsu (bodhisattva of song and dance) and in’yô no kami (kami of sexual union).
Defining the "Other": Presentation of Chinese and Indian Elements in Noh Plays
Beng Choo Lim, National University of Singapore
One interesting yet often neglected feature in Noh plays is the presence of the Chinese and Indian elements. There are characters such as Princess Yôkihi in Yôkihi and the young man Rosei in Kantan, or the brusque unicorn monster Ikkaku Sennin in the play of the same name. Creatures such as tigers and dragons steal the limelight, too, in another Chinese inspired play, Ryôko. Zeami in his treatise Fushikadenshô addresses the technique of performing Chinese subjects, amongst other role types such as old men and deities. Zeami’s emphasis was clearly on the stage presentation of the Chinese roles (karagoto), but what exactly does a "Chinese" role, or a non-Japanese role, entail? Does the category of a Chinese role differ from the other categories in the same treatise? Other than character roles, allusions to and adaptations of historical and poetic texts from Chinese sources can also be found in Noh plays. These presentations, sometimes vastly different from the original texts, may look contorted to our modern eyes. However, such representations provide an excellent starting point for an understanding of the medieval imagination of the Other. Such an imagination is a result of the interaction with the specific cultural, societal, and historical contexts in which these plays are produced and consumed. My paper discusses the discursive construction of the image of the "Other," focusing on the Chinese, and its significance in the understanding of the Japanese medieval period.
Organizer: Deborah J. Milly, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University
Chair: David Arase, Pomona College
Discussant: T. J. Pempel, University of California, Berkeley
Keywords: Japan, policy, comparison.
Japanese policymakers face interconnected challenges: the economy has been feeble since 1991 and a fertility rate of 35% below replacement level promises further economic stresses due to imminent population implosion and rapid aging. As Japan’s policymakers contend with what are perceived as grave issues, policymakers in continental Europe are fretting over some of the same problems. They, like Japanese policymakers, often contend with a shifting political landscape. Where policies are made, how policies are discussed, and whose voices are included affect the respective countries’ policy trajectories. This panel will compare Japanese policy efforts related to demographic change and a weak economy with those in continental Europe and Asia. Each paper will examine contemporary Japanese policy responses alongside of those in one or more other countries and explore explanations for the similarities and differences. The panel includes three papers on major policy areas related to demographics (immigration; pronatalism; work-family tensions in societies where women are expected to carry out traditional gendered care-taking responsibilities) and one on policy to promote a major industry (telecommunications) so as to reinvigorate the economy.
Cooperative Capitalism in the German and Japanese Telecommunications Industries?
Mark Tilton, Purdue University
Various observers have described a pattern of cooperative capitalism in Germany and Japan, characterized by stable ties between firms, long-term employment, and a supportive working relationship between firms and the state. Politics in both Germany and Japan has been overshadowed by concerns that stable market ties and labor relations may be partly to blame for slow economic growth over the past decade. Telecommunications has been seen as central to developing the information technology that both states desperately want to foster, yet developing a vibrant telecommunications sector requires the state to deftly intervene to create competition. Regulators must force established firms to grant access to their networks at prices that will attract new entrants. Setting the rules of competition entails an ongoing contest between interest groups and between competing visions of how capitalism works best. How much should the dominant firm be favored, either because regulators emphasize the importance of a stable capital base to promote technological advancement, or because of pressure from the dominant firm and its workers? Telecommunications in both Japan and Germany has undergone enormous regulatory, technological, and market change, yet at the same time the old established carriers, NTT and Deutsche Telekom, have a far stronger market position than does any single firm in the U.S. Is there a German and Japanese cooperative capitalist pattern at present in the telecommunications sector? If so, why, and what significance does this have for advances in the industry?
Familialistic Welfare States in a Postindustrial World: A Comparison of Policy Responses in Japan and South Korea
Ito Peng, University of Toronto
The paradox of familialistic welfare states is nowhere more obvious than in Japan and South Korea. Familialistic welfare states such as Japan and South Korea have been facing unprecedented fertility decline, the cause of which appears to lie with the structure of these welfare regimes, which subscribe to traditional familial welfare responsibilities. The lack of state support for social welfare services and the under-developed private care market have created serious cases of family care crisis as women’s labor market participation and the need for child and elder care are increasing simultaneously. Difficulties associated with harmonizing family and work responsibilities in these countries have also been identified as a key factor in changing marriage and fertility patterns, such as delayed marriages and postponing or forfeiting of child birth. The cost associated with raising children, including education, is also seen as a contributing factor in declining fertility. Moreover, the delayed labor market entry for young people in these countries is thought to be causing the delayed family formation for the young and a new form of family burden for their parents. This paper will compare how postindustrial pressures related to changes in labor market structure, family and gender relations, and demographic patterns impact on the familialistic welfare states of Japan and South Korea and how these welfare states are in turn responding to these pressures. The paper will be based on: (1) a quantitative/numerical comparison of labor market, family, and demographic changes in Japan and South Korea, and (2) analyses of policies and programs related to the family, women, youth, labor market, and fertility issues in these two countries.
Political Permeability and Technocratic Elites: The Policy-Making Process in France and Japan
Patricia Boling, Purdue University
This paper explores similarities between the Japanese and French policy-making processes with respect to policies to support families. Both are strong states with powerful bureaucracies and high degrees of public consensus about social policy, and both have pronatalist policy agendas (albeit with important differences in the magnitude and kinds of family support policies they have adopted). The paper provides a thumbnail sketch of the policies each country employs to address issues of low fertility and supporting working mothers, but the real focus is on the role of the bureaucracy and related participants in the policy-making elites, especially experts such as demographers and scholars in government-affiliated think tanks, in Japan and France. It demonstrates the existence of common assumptions and worldviews among these elites and argues, first, that the policy process has become somewhat cozy and insular in both countries, and, second, that this affects issue framing, agenda-setting, and the recognition and inclusion of constituencies with important stakes in the policies.
The State, Advocacy, and Policy for Foreign Residents: Emerging Processes of Policy Change in Japan, Korea, and Italy
Deborah J. Milly, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University
This paper compares the impact of nongovernmental advocacy groups in Japan on immigration policies and policies for foreign residents with advocates’ impact in two other countries of recent immigration: Korea and Italy. A major policy challenge related to immigration for governments and nongovernmental groups alike is that chronic gaps exist between formal government policy and actual practice, whether these concern human rights protections or border control policies. Despite variations among the political systems of the selected countries, this problematic disparity arises in strikingly similar ways. In contending with this reality, nongovernmental groups that work with immigrants are positioned to play an important role. Unlike most national government officials, networks of advocacy groups have first-hand knowledge of circumstances that contribute to policy failures, contradictions in policies, and failures in government processes that officials are often slow to recognize. As states attempt to develop effective policies, advocacy groups have become key contributors to policy discussion processes in the countries chosen, but variation exists in how their voices are included at local, regional, and national levels varies. How have advocates used their knowledge of actual practice and formal policy to try to bring about changes, and with what results? How have advocacy groups cooperated with one another and interacted with government officials and politicians and what accounts for variations found across countries? The paper presents an analysis of patterns found in the three countries.
Organizer: Ken-ichi Miura, Temple University
Chair: Kyoko Ômori, Hamilton College
Discussants: Itô Hiromi, Independent Scholar; Ken-ichi Miura, Temple University
The poet, writer, and performance artist Itô Hiromi (1955–) has made a career out of transgressing boundaries in her work. Since her debut in 1978, she has crossed boundaries of established morality by consistently addressing taboo subjects and providing explicit descriptions of female sexuality. She has crossed linguistic boundaries by using the Japanese language in ways that emphasize its sonic qualities and by incorporating foreign languages into her work. She has even crossed the boundaries of culture and nation by relocating to the United States, a move that she discusses often in her recent work.
This panel examines a number of ways in which Itô probes linguistic, cultural, and national boundaries within her literary production. Each of the three papers examines different sorts of boundaries within works from different stages of Itô’s literary career. Ken-ichi Miura considers her early, explicitly sexual poems in light of the Lacanian notion that sexuality represents a means of traversing ordinary boundaries of gender to rediscover an androgynous, non-sexed state. Jeffrey Angles focuses on her long, later poem "Watashi wa Anjuhimeko de aru" (I Am Anjuhimeko) as a bridging of Japanese legend and contemporary poetry and as a study of psychological dynamics associated with the boundary between self and other. Kyoko Ômori examines Itô’s recent move from poetry to prose and her concurrent move from bodily to botanical imagery in order to capture the sense of migrancy and displacement that marks contemporary global existence.
Most importantly, the panel seeks to cross the disciplinary borders between scholarship and creative writing by inviting Itô Hiromi herself to participate as a discussant.
Return to Lost Wholeness: Sexuality in Itô Hiromi’s Early Poems
Ken-ichi Miura, Temple University
One of the most significant aspects of sex and sexuality as depicted in Itô Hiromi’s early poems is summarized in "Seitakaawadachisou" (Tall Golden-rods). In this work, she expresses a desire to erase gender and achieve androgyny by means of sexual intercourse. This theme coincides with Jacques Lacan’s contention that through sex one really desires a return to an androgynous, non-sexed (and therefore immortal) state, the original wholeness of which is only observable in the womb. Lacan holds that by experiencing sexual union the subject comes closest to recovering his or her lost wholeness. In other words, sexual union offers the one false hope of retrieving that androgynous origin.
Itô’s presentations of sex and sexuality are indeed Lacanian in nature. In another example, "Yugamasenai you ni" (Lest you misshape them), the poet presents a lovemaking couple attempting to achieve unity by assimilating androgynous rice dumplings. Furthermore, in "Ikita otoko no ichibubun" (A Part of a Live Man), the poet discusses Abe Sada, who excised her lover’s penis after killing him during intercourse. Itô analyzes the tragedy, focusing on sex as a forged passport to the closed land of androgyny.
Thus, Itô presents mankind as "sexed" beings in search of an eternally lost home. While some nearly achieve this goal, others remain totally lost. It is my intention to illustrate the poet’s depictions of attempts at gender-erasing, intercourse as démarche, the link between sex and death, and defiance to rejection.
The Fantasy of Filicide, Reintegration, and Rebirth in Itô Hiromi’s "Watashi wa Anjuhimeko de aru" (I Am Anjuhimeko)
Jeffrey Angles, Ohio State University
One highlight of Itô Hiromi’s career as a writer was the 1993 publication of her long narrative poem-cum-performance piece "Watashi wa Anjuhimeko de aru" (I Am Anjuhimeko).1 Quick to receive critical appraisal, this provocative work was quickly recognized as one of the finest works of one of the most distinctive poets of postwar Japan.2 The text, which Itô reads rapidly with drum accompaniment in her performances, tells the story of an abused and murdered infant who rises from her grave and searches through a purgatory-like world for her lost parents. In the process, she learns to articulate the trauma which has befallen her, and her quest becomes one of healing and the search for rebirth.
In the narrative, Itô borrows from the legend of Anju and Zushio, folktales about Yamanba, as well as the Kojiki’s account of the primordial birth of the gods. The poem, however, represents more than just a reworking of legend. It offers Itô’s most detailed study of the psychology leading to infanticide—a theme that recurs frequently in her early poetry and non-fictional writings on childcare.3 More importantly, the poem offers a challenging study of rejection, abjection, and the subsequent psychological reintegration inherent in individuation, ego formation, and psychological healing. After examining the relationship between this work, other writing by Itô, and Japanese legend, this paper argues that Itô draws upon her recent experience with counseling to offer a challenging study of themes of crucial importance in both psychology and literary theory.
1. Itô Hiromi, Watashi wa Anjuhimeko de aru (Tokyo: Shichôsha, 1993), 8–32.
2. The opening portion of the poem was selected to represent Itô’s work on the recording Tsuji Yukio, Nagase Kiyoko, Tanikawa Shuntarô, et al, Nihon gendai shi no roku-nin: Masters of Modern Japanese Poetry—Six Distinctive Voices of the Postwar Era, CD, Watchworld, 1999.
3. See for instance, Itô Hiromi, "Kanoko-goroshi," Teritorii ron 2 (Tokyo: Shichôsha, 1985), 142–53; Itô Hiromi, "Iya sakasaka sakasa no sanosa," Teritorii ron (Tokyo: Shichôsha, 1987); and Itô Hiromi, Onaka hoppe oshiri soshite futomomo (Tokyo: Shûeisha bunko, 1996), 174–85.
An Anti-domestic Indulgence: Botanical Metabolism in Itô Hiromi’s Novellas
Kyoko Ômori, Hamilton College
Since her celebrated debut in 1978, Itô Hiromi has gained notice from critical and popular audiences for her radically physical imagery of body parts and processes. Especially concerned with sex, she frankly discusses such corporeal substances as skin, wombs, mucus, semen, blood, breast milk, and embryos. In the last decade, however, Itô’s focus has shifted from bodily to more botanical imagery. Coincident with this change, Itô’s chosen medium of expression has also shifted from poetry to prose. When she received the Noma Bungei Shinjin Award in 1999 for La Niña, she noted that writing prose liberated her from poetry’s "rules, flow, self and form," which she had assigned herself. Despite these changes of subject and form, however, in both her early and more recent work, Itô examines various expressions of metabolism—now that of plants and trees constantly growing and dying in Southern California, where she has resided since 1997—in order to give voice to the condition of hybridity, migrancy, and displacement that marks contemporary global existence. Thus, unlike more traditional immigrant writers’ depictions of plants as a way of lamenting their transplantation into foreign soil or their longing for the homeland as embodied in an Asian fruit, Itô’s use of botany focuses on the intrusion of "foreignness" into daily life and the notion of a constantly shifting self that arises through cultural performance. Hence, her work suggests the need to expand our conception of Japanese literature beyond the political boundaries of the nation.
Session 169: The Tale of Genji as Cultural, Political, and Critical Commodity
Organizer: Patrick Caddeau, Amherst College
Chair and Discussant: Haruo Shirane, Columbia University
The Tale of Genji has inspired a wealth of commentary, criticism, parody, appropriation, adaptation, and translation over the last thousand years. Authority, canonicity, and cultural identity have long played significant roles in the transmission and interpretation of this complex work of prose fiction. The field of Genji reception thus provides a spectacular vantage point from which to observe the evolution of cultural, political, and critical ideas and standards as they relate to a common text over time. Panelists will present papers focusing on a primary source or sources produced in response to The Tale of Genji. Individual papers of the panel are designed to address specific issues of Genji reception relevant to diverse periods in Japanese history. Royall Tyler considers the insights a contemporaneous Heian monogatari has to offer on the early reception of Genji. Patrick Caddeau examines the place of Edo-period Genji commentary in the development of Meiji literary theory. Michael Emmerich explores the views of a respected author and critic in his evaluation of Genji in Taisho and early Showa. Carole Cavanaugh investigates aspects of the Genji legacy in contemporary popular culture. Discussion among panelists, led by Haruo Shirane, will be devoted to points of commonality beyond the specifics of individual papers and periods with a view to furthering collaborative efforts in the field.
Shared Motifs in the Tales of Genji and Sagoromo
Royall Tyler, Australian National University
Sagoromo monogatari (ca. 1080) has long been noted for its close ties to Genji monogatari (ca. 1010). In scope and style the two differ in significant ways. However, the frequency with which isolated details and motifs from Genji appear in Sagaromo suggests that it is plausible to imagine Sagoromo being read by eleventh-century readers not simply as a work of fiction but also as a response to Genji. Motifs shared by the tales of Genji and Sagoromo may offer some insight as to how Genji was received by its earliest readers. In most cases, isolated similarities between the two texts fail to significantly advance our understanding of Genji or how it was read. Situating shared motifs within the larger framework of plot in the two monogatari yields far more persuasive evidence. In particular, the legitimization of Sagoromo’s ascension to the rank of mikado in the narrative provides a clue as to how Genji’s ascension to the title of jundajou tennou was perceived by readers in the eleventh century. This paper will offer some observations as to how shared motifs in the tales of Genji and Sagoromo can be used to gauge issues of Genji reception before they were addressed in the earliest commentaries.
Appraising Genji in Early Modern Japan
Patrick Caddeau, Amherst College
Genji criticism came of age during the Edo period. Advances in philology made more reliable and consistent reading of the text possible. The rise of commercial publishing led to a much wider circulation of both text and commentary. In concert, these developments produced more informed and persuasive analysis of the tale’s literary and stylistic qualities. By late Edo, critical discourse began to take its rightful place alongside well-established issues such as poetic composition, didacticism, and canonical status. Hagiwara Hiromichi transcended the didacticism and ideological rancor of his predecessors, most notably Motoori Norinaga, and consistently placed the analysis of literary style and structure before ideology in his Genji monogatari hyoushaku (An Appraisal of Genji, 1854–61). He also integrated techniques from the interpretation of popular fiction and Chinese vernacular prose with his analysis of the text. These innovations established him as one of the finest literature scholars of the late Edo period. Despite these accomplishments, his views on Genji were rarely promoted in the Meiji period. However, the insights he articulated were not overlooked. In this paper I argue that scholars formulating theories of the novel in Meiji Japan were influenced by the interpretive insights pioneered by Hiromichi in his work on Genji but found his strategy of divorcing literary interpretation from ideology to be unappealing. Ironically, Meiji scholars promoted Norinaga’s work on Genji as the touchstone of premodern literary criticism for many of the same reasons that ultimately render it inferior to Hiromichi’s scholarship.
Masamune Hakucho and the Modern Tale of Genji
Michael Emmerich, Columbia University
The novelist, playwright, and critic Masamune Hakucho (1879–1962) no longer has much of a readership, but his infamous evaluation of Genji monogatari as "a peerlessly bad piece of writing" (murui no akubun) continues to trouble and even anger contemporary scholars of that work. Akiyama Ken has responded repeatedly to Hakucho’s essays on Arthur Waley’s translation of the tale; Chiba Shunji has argued that these same writings best symbolize the "ironic" position Genji occupies in modern Japanese literature. In this paper, I examine three of Hakucho’s essays: "Koten o yonde" (1926), "Eiyaku Genji monogatari" (1933), and "Futatabi eiyaku Genji monogatari ni tsukite" (1933). The first expresses Hakucho’s frustration with the original, the last two praise Waley’s translation. Together, they argue that only translation makes classics speak to the present.
Offering a reading of the essays that places them in historical context, I argue that Hakucho’s rejection of the original and his praise for Waley’s translation cannot be considered ironic. The essays are provocative and—from certain perspectives—dangerous because they refuse to participate in dominant interpretations of national identity and its ties to national literature. By implication, they also challenge the view that sees translation as little more than a flawed copy of a self-contained original text. Hakucho prods readers of Genji to trace the origins of the standards they use in evaluating its style and its content and asks us to reconsider the powers and the meaning of literary translation.
Reframing Genji Monogatari for the Second Millennium
Carole Cavanaugh, Middlebury College
Genji monogatari has served as reluctant source text for the contemporary media of film, manga, and anime. This icon of culture has been reclaimed in a handful of live-action film versions and one animated version (Sugii, 1987). In contrast, the famous suicide story of the forty-seven ronin has accommodated scores of movies. Beyond the obvious oppositional pairings (a preference for the masculine over the feminine, for event over subject, for death over love, or for history over fiction) suggested in this comparison, cinematic versions of Genji monogatari are burdened by an inherent dynamic in the tale itself. Film must respond to the ontological tension in the original narrative between unity and fragmentation. This tension expresses itself internally, for instance, in the attempt of the Kiritsubo chapter at recapitulation but also externally in the tradition of Genji readership, initially expressed in Murasaki Shikibu’s concern about fragmented readings of her manuscript. Film versions try to resolve the anxiety of fragmentation through processes of excess, such as reframing the fiction of Genji with the "fact" of Fujiwara Michinaga. The paper will trace the transformation of fragmentation into cinematic excess in Sennen no koi: Hikaru Genji monogatari (Horikawa, 2001) and other Genji films.
Session 170: Culture as Transgression in Postwar Japan
Organizer, Chair, and Discussant: Seiji Lippit, University of California, Los Angeles
This panel is part of a broader interdisciplinary research project on cultural practice in postwar Japan. It aims to contribute to newly emerging intellectual and cultural histories of the postwar period through the examination of diverse cultural forms in terms of questions of transgression, resistance, and conflict, the construction of historical memory, and trans-nationalism.
This panel brings together scholars working in three disciplines (literature, history, and film). It focuses on the construction and representation of the historical memory of war and empire in different cultural forms, as well as their relation to the transgression of national boundaries as a defining rubric for cultural practice. Serk-Bae Suh’s paper examines the national literature debates in postwar Japan and relates them to the prewar debates on the role of Korean literature within such a framework. While postwar literary history is predicated on the concept of a national literary practice, this paper shows that the formation of the concept of national literature was implicated in a history of colonial discourse that was subsequently obscured. Michael Baskett’s paper examines contemporary cinema as a site of production and repository for memories of Japanese empire, and analyzes the relationship between the concept of transnationalism on the level of content (in the form of empire) and its significance on the level of production. Miriam Silverberg examines the striking, cartoon-like work of contemporary artist Nara Yoshitomo with a focus on its critique of nationalist discourse and its transnational reception.
Collusive Nationalism: National Literature Debates in Postwar Japan
Serk-Bae Suh, University of California, Los Angeles
This paper will examine the debates on national literature in the immediate postwar period in Japan. By reading them in conjunction with texts of the prewar national literature debates I intend to reveal the colonial connections embedded yet suppressed in the discourse on national literature. The paper also exposes the operations of colonialism, which polices the borderline between colonizer and colonized, and that of nationalism, which works to configure and reconfigure the boundaries of the nation.
While raising strident voices against the colonial presence of the U.S. in Japan as well as in East Asia, Japanese leftist intellectuals leading the postwar national literature debates ironically contributed to blurring Japan’s own colonial history. Although they took pains to differentiate their version of nationalism from the prewar right-wing nationalism, which collaborated with the Japanese war efforts against Asia, they adhered to a representation of "Japan" that was premised on the notion of the homogeneous national community. Such a premise was possible only by obscuring the vivid memories of Japan’s own colonial expansion and by ignoring the presence of former colonial subjects in Japan. Rather than making a totalizing criticism of leftist nationalism by simply aligning it with right-wing nationalism, I will attempt to look at the intersections on which the two visions of the nation converged. This examination will offer a critique of the concept of national literature by exposing the collusion between nationalism and colonialism in the discourse on national literature.
T.R.Y. and Try Again: The Politics of Re-imagining Empire in Two Recent Japanese Films
Michael Baskett, University of Oregon
For the past two decades, the historical memory of the Japanese empire has increasingly become a site of great interest to filmmakers both in Japan and throughout Asia. Whereas Japanese nationalist films like Pride (2000) and Merdeka 17805 (2001) subsumed Asia as a space of Japanese empire within a predominantly national narrative, more recent films like T.R.Y. (2003) and Spy Sorge (2003) fundamentally question such national boundaries by resituating the discourse of empire within a transnational context.
This paper examines ways in which T.R.Y. and Spy Sorge employ narrative and production strategies in order to illustrate the ambivalent nature of Japan’s cinematic memory of its empire. T.R.Y.’s representation of transnational space is transgressive of national narratives in that the memory of Japanese empire is always represented as a multicultural space of constant conflict and debate. As the first Japanese/Chinese/ Korean co-production, its destabilization of Japanese hegemony is manifest on both narrative and production levels. The politics of multiethnic casting was a strategy to make the film more attractive to prospective Asian audiences but also illustrates an awareness of a growing Asian film market. This too, is ambivalent, however, as the recuperation of the memory of empire itself is literally represented on screen. On a formal level, Spy Sorge similarly inverts the focus away from Japanese informant Ozaki Hotsuki to German/Russian Richard Sorge, creating an unusual shift in perspective that examines Japanese empire from the outside in.
Generation before Nation: Nara Yoshitomo’s Girls with Knives
Miriam R. Silverberg, University of California, Los Angeles
In the October 6, 2000, entry in the diary of international cause célèbre Nara Yoshitomo (b. 1969), the artist asked himself whether the adulational crowd at the opening of his show in Krakow perceived his work as kitsch. This query, however, was only of passing concern. Nara’s inability to write as he sat trembling after a visit to Auschwitz the previous day was of much deeper concern to him. Working from the artist’s images and multilingual words, as well as interviews and catalog copy, this presentation examines how culture can in one site be considered kitsch, while at the same time it can be transgressive or co-optive in other locales. It discusses how Nara’s deceptively simple figures of angry little girls, giant girls, and even sculpted Cup Kids, are expressions of his rejection of the parochialism of postmodern Nihonjinron thought. As part of Nara’s discussion of what he terms the seduction of language, he has criticized Tokyo mayor Ishihara Shintaro’s celebration of nationhood.
As part of a new project on intimacy in 20th-century Japan, this talk elaborates on Nara’s critique of Ishihara through a discussion of affect in the Chibi Maruko anime television series, which, like Nara’s work, is globally distributed. While focusing on Nara’s work as transgressive in its historicist treatment of wartime and post-postmodern Japan, as seen in the icon of little girl as kamikaze pilot, it also raises anew questions regarding the relationship between the avant-garde and politics and the difference between resistance and transgression.
Session 171: On the Road Again: Money and Movement in Medieval and Early Modern Japan
Organizer and Chair: Ethan Segal, Michigan State University
Discussant: William B. Hauser, University of Rochester
Keywords: Japan, money, travel, pilgrimage, village, medieval, early modern.
If money "makes the world go ‘round," then it must be because money is so mobile itself. Pilgrims spend it while traveling and offer it at holy sites. Merchants devise innovative ways to safely transport large sums over great distances. Even within a single village, residents borrow from each other to cover debts and make investments. In this panel, approaches from anthropology, religious studies, and history are combined to explore money and movement from Muromachi to Meiji Japan.
Segal looks at the origins of long-distance money remittance and how it enabled rural estates to forward money to the capital. Unlike Chinese copper coins, the staple of the medieval economy, bills of exchange appear to have been quite different from their continental counterparts.
Gay and Nenzi examine pilgrimage from new perspectives. Gay uses illustrated materials to highlight the birth of travel and tourism in the Sengoku period. Nenzi uses the records of early modern pilgrims to look at their spending habits and challenge the notion that most commoner pilgrims were destitute. She also looks at intra-village relations, examining the social and economic impact of pilgrimage on those left behind.
Danely also explores intra-village social relations, contending that villagers may have lent money out in part to dodge complicated village and/or family obligations. By keeping their money on the move, villagers could honestly claim to have no funds when relatives came seeking to borrow from them.
Together, the four papers reveal social and economic continuity across the divide that separates medieval from early modern.
"Flying Cash": Bills of Exchange in Medieval Japan
Ethan Segal, Michigan State University
Shipping money or goods to the capital was a dangerous and expensive proposition for medieval estate managers. As the political order broke down in the late Kamakura and Muromachi periods, pirates, bandits, and bad weather all kept many estates from paying their taxes on time. To help circumvent those threats, Japanese merchants developed a system of long-distance money remittance known as kawase (bills of exchange). Circulating widely in the provinces in a way that resembled paper money, bills of exchange probably saw more of medieval Japan than did most people.
This paper uses fifteenth-century temple correspondence to explore key issues in the development of trust and trade networks involving bills of exchange. How were bills able to move so easily through Japanese society, especially given that there was no state authority backing them up? How could an estate manager trust that a bill would be honored? What do these developments reveal about monetization and the state of the medieval Japanese economy? Finally, how did kawase lay the groundwork for later Edo economic growth? These and other topics will be addressed from the perspective of economic and social history, and comparisons will be drawn with similar Chinese and European monetary institutions.
Social and Economic Aspects of Late Medieval Pilgrimage
Suzanne Gay, Oberlin College
This paper analyzes different forms of travel to religious institutions in the late medieval (15th–16th centuries) period and explores their social and economic significance. In the earlier Kamakura period, although there was much mobility at all levels of the population, formal pilgrimages were quite limited to elites or religious figures. In the Tokugawa period, on the other hand, travel, often in the form of pilgrimages, came within the reach of much of the populace despite formal strictures on movement. In between was the late medieval period, two transitional centuries during which travel routes with amenities such as inns were established, and even a nascent form of tourism could be detected. At elite levels there were formal, elaborate processionals designed for spectacle as well as religious observance. Merchant travel to religious sites as a form of guild observance was also increasingly common. Annual pilgrimages in memory of Shinran, moreover, attracted hundreds of thousands of pilgrims during the late fifteenth century. Along with conventional historical materials like official documents, I will employ illustrated screens and literary sources in this study.
Poor Pilgrims? Rethinking Early Modern Nukemairi from an Economic Perspective
Laura Nenzi, University of California, Santa Barbara
Scholarship on early modern religious travel presents nukemairi (French leave pilgrimage) as the unannounced and unauthorized departure of marginal, often illiterate, social figures toward Ise shrine, and associates it with begging and alms-giving. While the authorities cracked down on the practice, communities accepted the departure of their members because pilgrims brought back amulets that extended the gods’ blessings to the entire family or village. This paper adds a new dimension to such commonly accepted descriptions by looking at the practice from a monetary angle. Aside from legal ordinances, the accounts of nukemairi pilgrims (such as Konno Oito’s Sangu dochu shoyoki, 1862), of travelers who met with them (Kiyogawa Hachiro’s Saiyuso, 1855), and village records will be used to rethink nukemairi. I will contend that: (a) not all nukemairi pilgrims were destitute. Many in fact traveled with substantial amounts of cash and were entirely able to support themselves along the road—to the point that they could afford to purchase souvenirs, enjoy various forms of entertainment, and even buy travel permits for certain stretches of the road; (b) at the same time, their unannounced departures stirred up controversy at home, where employers, landlords, and family members, impacted by the disruption of economic balance, voiced strong opposition to the practice and often succeeded in having the pilgrims return home before the completion of their journeys.
Moneylending for Wealth Preservation in Early Modern and Meiji Villages
Jason Danely, University of California, San Diego
The picture that emerges from late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century ethnographies of village life of Japan is one in which everyone seems to be borrowing and lending money. The relationship between debtors and creditors in these accounts reveals much about the connections between mutual aid, self-interest, and social organization. This paper tests a model wherein lending can be a means of retaining one’s money by making it unavailable to other persons (especially kinsmen) to whom one might be obliged to surrender it. Findings suggest that loans designed to preserve wealth were made to persons who were neither too intimate nor too distant from the lender (either of whom might not repay the debt). In other words, villagers "invest" in a realm of relationships where money can be successfully "stored." By focusing primarily on existing historical and ethnographic accounts of moneylending practices in Japan this paper supports the claim that small, individual-to-individual and extra-legal loans afforded villagers ways to manipulate the system of social obligations that underlie moneylending transactions in order to preserve their wealth. Through this manipulation, Japanese moneylenders kept money flowing between debtors and creditors in a pattern that reflects both Japanese attitudes concerning wealth and obligation and the vicissitudes of village life.
Organizer: Ryoko Kato Tsuneyoshi, University of Tokyo
Chair: Catherine C. Lewis, Mills College
Discussants: Gary DeCoker, Earlham College; Catherine C. Lewis, Mills College
Keywords: education, Japan, reform, policy implementation, sociology.
While admired abroad, Japanese education is currently the target of intense criticism and wide-ranging reforms at home. The most recent revisions of the compulsory education curriculum, implemented in 2002, called for a shift away from whole-class, teacher-led knowledge transmission in order to promote "new academic abilities for the 21st century," such as problem-solving skills and intrinsic motivation. Even before its implementation, however, the new curriculum provoked intense criticism from groups concerned about basic skills. This panel will present case studies of three recent educational changes—Integrated Period, English Activities, and "New Abilities"—followed by cross-case comparative comments from two discussants. To facilitate a thoughtful exchange, all cases will respond to a shared set of questions: (1) Reform Design: Why and how did this reform originate? What problems was it designed to address, and what data and public perceptions contributed to its development? What models (domestic and international) informed the design? (2) Policy Context: What were the goals of the reform and how did various constituencies influence it? (3) Reform Implementation: What problems did the reform pose for educators, and how did they change the reform at the school site? How has the knowledge from early implementation efforts been shared with teachers and reformers? (4) Implications: How does the case change our understanding of education reform in Japan and more broadly?
In order to facilitate audience participation, 55-minutes will be reserved for audience discussion, and audience members will receive a brief table summarizing cross-case findings on the four issues.
A Japanese Vision of 21st-Century Abilities: The Integrated Period, Basics, and Reforms
Ryoko Kato Tsuneyoshi, University of Tokyo
This paper will provide an overview of Japan’s recent educational reforms as well as an in-depth view of a crucial aspect of the reform—the seemingly conflicting promotion of basics together with the "new academic abilities"—as it has evolved in a diverse large urban area. National curriculum revisions occur about once a decade in Japan; the most recent revisions of compulsory education were designed against a contradictory background of concern about an overly exam-oriented system, high achievement of Japanese students on international tests, and concern over the deteriorating socialization environment of children, and later, against intense debates on an academic achievement "crisis." The new national curriculum reforms, while stressing "new abilities" needed for the 21st century, including critical thinking, willingness to solve novel problems, and intrinsic motivation to continue learning, simultaneously tightened its stance on the importance of basics. This paper will trace the course of the "new academic abilities" reform and its interplay with the back-to-basics movement, both at the macro level (documenting debates and the Ministry policies) and at a large urban school district (based on ongoing fieldwork). The contention over this reform testifies to Japan’s struggle over how to maintain achievement as measured by traditional tests, while also promoting new types of abilities. The Japanese dilemma has implications not just for understanding Japanese education and policy implementation, but also for other nations (particularly in Asia) that share common model elements with Japanese education (e.g., centralized curriculum, examinations, and whole-class instruction).
Decentralizing the Japanese Curriculum: Two Case Studies
Christopher Bjork, Vassar College
In recent years, policymakers and international funding organizations have thrown their weight behind decentralization of education systems around the globe. Japan recently followed that course of action, adding an "Integrated Period" to their national curriculum, designed in part to augment local educators’ influence over curricula and to encourage experimentation with innovative instructional methodologies. Schools were given great flexibility to determine the length, focus, and instructional methodology of Integrated Period lessons. Although comparative studies of education often highlight the high degree of professional expertise, commitment, and skills for instructional improvement displayed by Japanese educators, preliminary reports of the implementation of the Integrated Period offered ambiguous data. Evidence suggested that, although some schools enacted innovative programs, teachers in many locations struggled as they attempted to follow Ministry directives. This paper will explore the responses of two public schools—one elementary and one junior high—to the Integrated Period reform. It will focus on the challenges that teachers faced as they attempted to enact the program in their classrooms. Attention will be paid to the social, cultural, and institutional factors that encouraged or deterred teachers from playing an active role in curriculum design, a responsibility that has historically been entrusted to officials working at the Ministry of Education. Teachers’ responses to the Integrated Period offer data for considering the role of Japanese teachers in educational reform and the meanings of educational decentralization in particular national contexts.
The Implementation of English Activities in Japanese Elementary Schools: Implications for Global Citizenship
Pui Shan Tam, University of Tokyo
In order to help students develop the communication skills and personal qualities needed for international participation, "English Activities" were recently introduced into Japanese elementary schools. Teachers may choose to implement English Activities as an optional part of international understanding (a sub-area of the newly implemented "Integrated Period"). Drawing on fieldwork, interviews, and documents from strategically selected school sites, this presentation investigates how the reform has been interpreted and modified at these sites. The presentation will document both the original vision of the reform and the dilemmas involved in carrying it out, with a focus on understanding how the loosely defined framework of the Integrated Period influenced the reforms implementation. Data will be presented from sites including a designated research school for English Activities in Tokyo. The data suggest that the loosely defined framework of the Integrated Period results in considerable inter- and infra-school variations in English Activities, and that the variation is related to individual schools’ and teachers’ interpretations of ideal English learning, as well as to differences among schools in the resources that can be mobilized for English Activities. The impact of these variations, some of which could be interpreted as alterations of the government’s original model, will be discussed. In addition, the implications of the data for (1) reform of language education; (2) development of dispositions for global citizenship; and (3) decentralization of education will be discussed.
Session 188: Working Class Back In: Labor and Politics in Postwar Japan
Organizer: Christopher Gerteis, University of Puget Sound
Chair and Discussant: Andrew Gordon, Harvard University
This cross-disciplinary panel draws from the fields of history, labor studies, anthropology, women’s studies, and culture studies in order to re-center the narrative of Japanese labor now dominant in Japan and the United States back onto the intersection of labor and politics. Four presenters will introduce diverse projects ranging from David Obermiller’s examination of the identity politics of union activists who agitated against the permanent stationing of American troops in Okinawa to Michael Gibbs’ look at the cultural agenda of filmmakers, closely associated with the labor movement, who used class as a lens to reframe images of the Japanese nation. Christopher Gerteis narrates how a few of the film workers introduced by Michael Gibbs also constructed gender roles, for women unionists in particular, that underpinned an institutional vision of a male-centered Japanese nation. Takehiro Watanabe investigates the poetics of work, body, and politics as expressed in the poetry of mineworker-poets at the Besshi Copper Mine on the southern island of Shikoku. All four papers argue that perception as much as the materiality of class relations influenced the political discourse of postwar Japan, and the papers also pay particular attention to how popular notions of national culture, ethnicity, and gender roles were produced through a highly contentious, politically charged conflict between established institutions and grassroots activists. The panel runs against a tide of neo-nationalist (and perhaps neo-liberalist) literature that depicts postwar Japan as pro-capitalist, masculine, and comprised only of the four main islands.
Class in Motion: Postwar Images
Michael Gibbs, University of Denver
This paper looks at how progressive filmmakers used class in presenting both descriptive and prescriptive images of the postwar nation. It will focus on the work of the cohort of directors who came dramatically to the fore after 1945: Kurosawa, Kinoshita, Yoshimura, and Imai, with particular emphasis an Yoshimura, who has been relatively little discussed abroad. It will use both visual and written sources to connect these progressive filmmakers with the labor and leftist political movements. It will look at leftist film societies, organized initially in support of the Toho Studio union, and how they supported the work of progressive filmmakers. It will also consider the structure of the film industry as a factor. This paper will discuss how filmmakers presented both the use and the misuse of class and how social classes were but one subject of the progressive film—along with "the people," the citizenry, youth (the younger generation), and women. The paper will also attempt to deal with the issue of elite creators and organizers trying to represent "the people" or "the workers." What, ultimately, did class mean in the fluid context of postwar Japan?
Gender, Nation, and the Radical Unions of Occupied Japan
Christopher Gerteis, University of Puget Sound
At first glance, the American campaign to promote unionism among Japanese women appeared by 1947 to have been very successful. Activists in twenty-eight national unions, and some eight thousand union locals, established in the early postwar years Women’s Sections that in turn helped to convince a million and a half women to join their representative union. Ironically, the strongest Women’s Sections sprang from some of Japan’s most militant, Communist unions. American labor officers reported to their superiors in Tokyo that they feared Communist cadres in league with the Soviet Union were using women unionists to recruit for the Japan Communist Party. Indeed, many Women’s Section activists were working in league with the Communists with whom they found common cause in their mutual desire to improve the status of Japanese women. However, women activists encountered within even these Communist unions strongly conservative social norms that by the late 1940s re-institutionalized their customarily second-class status relative to men. In the spring and summer of 1948, the Communist-affiliated labor federation Sanbetsu Kaigi coordinated a national media campaign, in support of a strike by the Toho film workers, which portrayed Japanese women as the embodiment of Japanese culture and directed union activists nationwide to mobilize "In Defense of the National Culture." This paper will explore how women labor activists in Occupied Japan navigated between U.S. Occupation policies and their union leadership. I will present texts, cartoons, and posters that constituted the leftist critique of the Occupation, analyze the American response to that critique, and discuss how several women activists of the period later understand their experiences inside the radical unions of Occupied Japan.
Dreaming of Ryukyu: Labor and Resistance in Occupied Okinawa
David Obermiller, University of Wisconsin, Superior
Unlike Japan’s seven-year occupation, the Ryukyu Islands (Okinawa) endured twenty-seven years of direct U.S. military occupation. During this time, the Pentagon created a mammoth military infrastructure to ensure Okinawa would be the U.S. military’s "keystone" in East Asia. America’s omnipresent militarization changed all facets of Ryukyuan society. A salient feature of this change was the transformation from a prewar subsistence agrarian society into a postwar wage-based economy that primarily revolved around the military bases. Despite the lack of a prewar history of class-consciousness, much less labor activism, workers in postwar Okinawa wasted little time in organizing, especially Zengunro (All Okinawa Military Employees Trade Union). Zengunro’s political independence, and militancy, however, generated much consternation among U.S. military officials. Occupation officials had wanted to mold American style "bread and butter" that were non-ideological and apolitical. This effort was unsuccessful as unions such as Zengunro reacted by becoming politically active in the Reversion Movement, a mass movement that called for reunification with Japan. This paper examines the evolution of the labor movement in Okinawa, particularly Zengunro, and how such unions used their participation in the Reversion Movement to strengthen their bargaining position during contract negotiations with the American military. This paper also examines a fundamental contradiction of Zengunro’s involvement in the Reversion movement: while reversion necessitated the elimination of the American bases, bases provided the livelihood for Zengunro. Last, the paper will explore how American responses served to further antagonize relations with Zengunro yet simultaneously reinforce the symbiotic relationship that existed between them.
Writing against Labor: The Body in Postwar Mineworker Poetry
Takehiro Watanabe, Columbia University
From 1925 to 1945, the Sumitomo Company taught the art of haiku and tanka to mineworkers of the Besshi Copper Mine (Shikoku, Japan) as part of a program to prevent the unionization of radical workers. In the postwar period, union leaders discouraged traditional Japanese poetry in favor of ideologically-driven literary forms. Yet mineworker-poets avoided radical politics and proletarian literature, seeking self-expression through classic poetry to convey their everyday experience of modern mining. They were not average workers, many of them illiterate, nor did they fit the profile, idealized by union leaders and corporate executives alike, of men dedicated to collective action to achieve democratic and economic modernization.
Based on interviews, local publications, and ethnographic research on working-class culture, this paper investigates how Besshi mineworker-poets envisioned themselves to be beyond the clutches of both the union and the company. These poems imagined a transhistorical body that refused to pose as a political symbol, thereby circumventing the arbitrariness of ideological lexicons galvanized after the war. This body also renounced the abstraction of its own labor. Capable of both mining and writing, the mineworker-poet’s body became a provenance of singular poetic experiences that performed a "natural" language derived from seasonal and human life cycles, thus infusing objects (such as sweat) and persons (such as co-workers) with life and death. The poetic practice of Besshi mineworkers threatened the prosaic corporate hegemony, not by attacking the managerial class but by mimicking their aestheticism and thereby destabilizing subject positions dictated by class politics.
Session 189: Japan’s Entertainment Industry in Global Perspective
Organizer and Chair: Ronald A. Morse, University of California, Los Angeles
Discussant: Kelly C. Crabb, Morrison & Foerster
Keywords: Japan, pop culture, entertainment, anime, global.
Japan’s cultural strengths and distinctiveness are well documented, but for over a decade the Japanese have been combining culture with digital technology to create an internationally competitive business in the mass arts. The focus of this panel is on what is usually referred to as the entertainment industry or what the Japanese often refer to as pop culture in global perspective.
Specifically, the panel will explore how Japanese visual culture, combined with digital technology, foreign management training, and major U.S. entertainment industry acquisitions, is transforming the Japanese arts scene.
Collectively, the panel probes the issue of Japanese entertainment from several "border-crossing" perspectives and disciplines—the Japanese cultural base for this development (Morse and Napier), the cross-border educational side (Kagon), and the global business and legal perspective (Crabb).
The primary formula for this success has been in linking traditional Japanese image culture with the strong Japanese capability in manufacturing and electronics. But equally important has been the Japanese effort to study and learn from the Hollywood experience.
Tokyo’s strategy for the global entertainment marketplace is in the convergence of digital technology, Japanese aesthetic sensibility, and the mass market for popular culture products. It is based on the synergy of media, entertainment, hardware industries, and merchandise marketing.
The Japanese entertainment industry is culturally important, but it is also big business. In revenue terms, it is about 4–5% of GDP or $400–500 billion annually. Digital culture can be thought of as a content industry. It has many segments: motion pictures, manga (comics), anime (animation), video arcade games (machines for malls and shops), computer and console games for the home, cable TV, cell phones, music, toys and character goods, fashion and design, gambling and pachinko, theme parks, and internet games.
Techno-Aesthetics: How Japan Is Turning Its Mass Culture into a Global Business
Ronald A. Morse, University of California, Los Angeles
Science-fiction author William Gibson argues that "Japan is the global imaginations’ default setting for the future." And Douglas Gray, in a Foreign Policy magazine (May/June 2002) article titled "Japan’s Gross National Cool," argues that Japan’s global cultural influence is a new way to measure Japan’s GNP.
It is by drawing on the principles of Japanese traditional visual aesthetics (woodblock prints, calligraphy, painting) and combining them with new technological capabilities (the cell phone, video games, animation) that Tokyo has created a universally attractive digital (techno-aesthetic) cultural industry. This industry has many segments and the Japanese are strong in most of them: motion pictures, manga, animation, video arcade games, computer and console games for the home, cable TV, cell phones, music, toys, character goods, fashion and design, pachinko gambling, theme parks, and Internet games.
Ironically, Japan’s greatest pop culture success has been in the Asian market, traditionally an area resistant to Japanese cultural products.
Just Another Fad? The American Response to Japanese Anime and Manga
Susan J. Napier, University of Texas, Austin
In the 150 years since Japan was opened to the West, Westerners have embraced, incorporated, and acknowledged the influence of Japan in a variety of cultural moments. Beginning with the French aficionados of Japanese art in the 1870s, continuing with the enthusiasts of the tea ceremony at the turn of the century, and including the many fans of haiku in the 1950s and 60s, Westerners—and perhaps especially Americans—have explored Japanese culture in ways that have advanced understanding of Japan and have also been influential on American culture.
Over the last decade a new Japan-related interest has arisen—the current boom in Japanese popular culture, especially animation and manga comic books. This presentation argues that, while related to previous "Japan fads," this current interest engages in a more complex dynamic between Japan and the West that touches on issues of globalization and glocalization, transnational culture streams, and a new form of "imaginary community" that I term the "fantasyscape."
The paper will give a brief historical overview but will focus mainly on questions raised for contemporary culture by this new form of cross-cultural engagement.
Studying Hollywood: How Japan’s Entertainment Industry Recovered
Jane Kagon, University of California, Los Angeles
The Japanese government and media industry have been studying Hollywood for decades as a model for their own entertainment industry. The first phase of the story is about how the Japanese entertainment industry began in the late 1980s when the Japanese electronics giant Sony Corporation paid $3.4 billion for Columbia Pictures Entertainment. Two years earlier Sony had bought CBS Records for $2 billion. The goal was to have a company that would be in every segment of the entertainment market.
At the time, what Sony and the other Japanese companies failed to realize was that they lacked the managerial skill in the entertainment field. But, even more important, they did not pay attention to the weakness in their domestic film and content industries that would give them competitive capacity.
Over the last decade or two, Japanese have learned a great deal by getting training for their executives and government officials in programs that are offered at the UCLA Extension and other entertainment programs in the Los Angeles area. For example, the Fuji Television Corporation (a multimedia conglomerate) and the Japanese Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (which oversees the entertainment sector) have proceeded very differently in their working with the UCLA Extension Entertainment Program in preparing their executives for the entertainment sector. This presentation will examine the issues in foreign media training for Japanese.
Session 190: How Japanese Can It Be? National Identity through the Border-Crossing Lens
Organizer: Vimalin Rujivacharakul, University of California, Berkeley
Chair: Elizabeth Lillehoj, DePaul University
Discussants: Vipan Chandra, Wheaton College; Elizabeth Lillehoj, DePaul University
Keywords: education, cross-cultural, knowledge transaction, architectural history, historiography, Meiji, ideology, nation, civilization, myth, belief, material culture, folk art, festivals.
Must studies of national identity in architecture always be limited by the geographical and sociopolitical definition of the "nation"?
This panel aims to challenge the popularized notion of the singularity of a nation-state in modern architectural discourse by looking at how the Meiji public reached out to a multitude of cultural sources to define national-cultural identity in Japanese art and architecture. In "Past-Modern Architecture," Don Choi focuses on the changes in architectural education at the Imperial College that took place in response to the Meiji government’s attempt to introduce building technology from Europe. These "foreign" frameworks, Choi argues, became the immediate vehicles for architects to look into the national past and (re)discover national identity in Japanese buildings. Vimalin Rujivacharakul’s "National or Civilization Identity" shares a similar interest in education, but she defines the commonly geographically delimited scope of national architecture by introducing the interchangeability between national and civilizational identities. In asking when national and civilizational identities were differentiated in the writings of architectural history, she explores how Japanese architectural historians constructed and appropriated a broader cultural vision of an historical civilization as their referential ground for founding national cultural identity. In "An Iconography of Empire," Sean McPherson takes on a similar challenge but approaches it by investigating the localization process of national ideologies. His critical reexamination of festival float architecture (dashi) through iconographical analyses illustrates how the official ideologies of nationalism and national identity were diluted when mediated by local myths, beliefs, and festivities.
By refuting the singularity of a nation-state, emphasizing historical interaction in cultural-knowledge transactions and de-emphasizing the high state of nationalist discourse in non-Western modern architecture, the three papers in this panel feature new methodologies in discussing national identity through cross-cultural, cross-regional, and cross-disciplinary perspectives.
Past-Modern Architecture: (Inter)National Identity in the Meiji Period
Don H. Choi, California State Polytechnic University, Pomona
The standard story of architecture during Japan’s Meiji period focuses on the large-scale, Western-style buildings erected to house the functions of a modernizing state. In order to train architects to design such works, the Department of Public Works established the first site of formal architectural training in Japan, the architecture department of the Imperial College of Engineering (ICE). Founded in 1873, the ICE produced the architects who developed and dominated the realm of architecture through the Meiji period. Both contemporary and later historians have interpreted the ICE as a British-style institution because of the provenance of its faculty and explicit content of its curriculum.
This paper argues, though, that by applying British frameworks of architecture and education to the Japanese context the ICE caused students to turn to the history of Japanese architecture. In other words, the rediscovery of Japan inhered within the British paradigm of architecture. Students began to search national history for attributes that could furnish the foundations for modern architecture. Coming during the bunmei kaika era of optimistic Westernization, this turn to the past suggests the immanence of national history even during the supposedly uncritical introduction of modern Western technology. The emphasis of the ICE students on materials, climate, and habits shows how objects and spaces, as well as intellectual characteristics such as aesthetic preferences, were excavated from the past to serve the future. This discovery of a usable past for architecture provided suggestions for hybrid architecture, paralleling the slightly later efforts of the Seikyôsha for Japanese society in general.
National or Civilizational Identity: Japanese Architectural History and the Search for East Asian Roots, 1893–1937
Vimalin Rujivacharakul, University of California, Berkeley
In the early 1890s, the College of Engineering (Kôka daigaku), part of Imperial University in Tokyo, launched a campaign to search for national identity in Japanese architecture. Through the next four decades, the scope of this cultural-political project expanded far beyond the "geographical borders" of Japan. Archeological artifacts and architecture of China, Korea, and Southeast Asia became sites of historical reference for Japanese architectural roots and were soon integrated into the writing of Japanese architectural history. This leads one to question: how could cultural artifacts and historical sites become the media for one single nation to establish its national identity upon the territorialized ground of an historical civilization? More importantly, in the discourse of architectural history, could there ever be a clear borderline between national identity and civilizational identity?
This paper traces the process of historical representation and hierarchization of national and civilizational identities through the research accounts of two major architectural historians of the Imperial College, Sekino Tadashi and Ito Chûta. Their research routes covered a vast area from Korea to Tibet, and from China to Burma, while their research projects covered a variety of subjects on Japanese architectural history and East Asian architectural heritage. Their intellectual struggles and research methodologies shed light on the delicate interconnections between national identity and civilizational heritage. By critically examining these intellectual threads in cross-cultural architectural historiography, the paper illustrates how the two categories of nation and civilization were differentiated and hierarchized in the writing of national architectural history.
An Iconography of Empire: Architecture, Sculpture, and the Ritual Process of Chita Dashi Festivals
Sean McPherson, Wheaton College
Festival art, architecture, and ritual are most commonly represented as folk material culture and praxis, largely isolated from wider social conflict and change. However, during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, festivals were greatly impacted by the Meiji state’s agendas of ritual regularization and administrative consolidation. Although thousands of local festivals were lost through shrine and municipal consolidation, the Chita Peninsula of Aichi Prefecture witnessed an efflorescence in festival float construction, rebuilding, and sculptural elaboration. Through an exploration of formal and iconographic changes in festival float (dashi) architecture and sculpture, as well as an examination of transformations in ritual process, this paper will explore the ways in which official ideologies of cultural identity, nationalism, and imperialism were mediated at the local level.
This paper will ask how the official Meiji regularization of the rites and sites of festivity altered the cultural landscape of festivity in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. By looking closely at discourses of the folk and of folk art exemplified in the work of Yanagita Kunio, Kon Wajirô, Yanagi Sôetsu and others, this study also seeks the origins of the prevailing categorization of festival art and architecture as folk art in the late Meiji and Taisho periods, when emerging discourses of folk material culture became subsumed into wider discourses of national cultural identity. In order to contextualize the discussion of wider intellectual trends within the realm of material culture, this study will examine the work of the sculptor and antiquarian Takeuchi Hisakazu, professor of sculpture under Okakura Tenshin at the Tokyo Bijutsu Gakkô, as well as that of Chita area sculptors such as Niimi Horitsune. I will argue that despite the abundant evidence of ritual and iconographic influence of imperial agendas, the art, architecture, and ritual of Chita dashi festivals were impacted by a process better seen as additive and eclectic rather than totalitarian.
Organizer: Michael S. Tangeman, Denison University
Chair: Hiroaki Kawamura, University of Findlay
Discussant: Charles J. Quinn, Jr., Ohio State University
This panel will examine how learners participate in Japanese behavioral culture in various settings. The papers of this panel will use "performance" (Hymes 1975, Carlson 1996, Walker and Noda 2000) as a common conceptual framework to consider how learners develop skills to act out their various "social selves" (Goffinan 1922, James 1925) in Japanese culture. This panel will adopt an interdisciplinary approach in examining learners’ performance in the contexts of classroom language learning, study of literature in translation, teacher training, and study abroad.
Kawamura’s paper will focus on the issue of power in performance. He will argue that learners’ performance is strongly influenced by various power relationships and learners themselves are active negotiators in power competition.
Noda’s paper will consider the importance of performance in the design and implementation of teacher-training programs. Her paper discusses the process of training teachers in theories of language performance so as to allow them to instill in their students memories of performed culture.
Nussbaum suggests a systematic link between language classrooms and study abroad experiences. His paper draws on theories of performance, landscape, and ethnography to discuss effective curricula through which students will develop skills and gain knowledge to perform Japanese culture in culturally appropriate ways.
Tangeman’s paper will consider the role of performance in the literature in translation classroom. He argues that even in encountering Japan through the mediated format of translated Japanese, students can still be encouraged to create memories that can lead them to perform Japanese culture in a culturally acceptable manner.
Cultural Performance and Power in the Beginning Japanese Language Classroom: Acting in Bourdieu’s "Field"
Hiroaki Kawamura, University of Findlay
Language pedagogues have demonstrated that Japanese culture presented in the classroom is a product developed through political processes (Tanaka and Komagome 1999, Kubota 2003). Some scholars have attempted to incorporate critical analysis of Japanese culture into language curricula (Ohara et al. 2001, Matsumoto et al. 2002). This paper will analyze power competition involved in "performance" (Carlson 1996, Walker and Noda 2000) in the Japanese language classroom using the concepts of "capital" and "field" (Bourdieu 1977). The language classroom is a field in which various agents compete for access to cultural capital, which is determined by the notion of cultural legitimacy. Questions to be examined in this paper include: (1) What types of power relationships exist in the beginning language classroom? (2) How do such power relationships influence learners’ performance? (3) How do the power relationships of society at large influence learners’ performance in the classroom? (4) How do learners deal with various power relationships in the course of their study of Japanese language and culture? Data collected through observation and interviews demonstrate that learners’ performance is strongly shaped by power relationships in and outside the classroom. The language classroom is indeed a place of power negotiation, regardless of whether it is intended as such. This does not, however, suggest that learners are passive and powerless agents in their performance. This paper will argue that Japanese language learners are creative negotiators in a dynamic power struggle who attempt to access cultural capital by adopting various strategies.
Performance-Based Teacher Training in East Asian Languages
Mari Noda, Ohio State University
This presentation outlines the treatment of performed culture (Walker, 2000) in the context of training teachers of Chinese and Japanese and poses some issues for further consideration. Performance-based teacher training has as its major components the examination of performance content, instruction of performance, and assessment of performance. When performance criteria (Walker and Noda, 2000) are applied to the review of pedagogical materials, it is found that most currently available materials fall short of providing adequate models or mechanisms for learners to develop culturally appropriate performances in the target East Asian language. Instruction of performances, therefore, is concerned with the development of stories or personalized memories of situated language use (Walker, 2000) that will become usable beyond the classroom. From the perspective of teacher training, this will mean inculcating in the teachers the ability to produce various and numerous related and relevant events for language learners to experience as performances. Parallel to the training of language learners, training of teachers requires a careful balance among adequate modeling, graded exercises designed to develop classroom techniques, and the opportunity to rehearse the performance of teaching. In the area of assessment, performance provides guidelines for producing both single-skill and integrated assessment tools, including daily grading (Samimy and Choi, 2002) and prochievement oral interview.
Performance as a conceptual framework provides ways to overcome the key difficulty that often remains unresolved in the communicative approach: the treatment of behavioral culture (Hammerly, 1985). Performance-based teacher training faces such challenges as a lack of qualified teacher trainers, funding, and specific local conditions that may not endorse the approach.
A Performative Approach to Study Abroad
Stephen P. Nussbaum, Waseda University
As more students travel to foreign cultures, it becomes increasingly important that we move from classroom models of considering linguistic and cultural differences to dynamic ones linked to experiences on-site. Such modes of knowing offer two distinct advantages: (1) they are situational tutorials of immediate value to the learner; and (2) since these tutorials emerge from interaction with local people, they are closer to the lived experience than the interactions students normally encounter in their classrooms. In traditional modes of on-site learning in which students are left largely on their own to bridge between classroom knowledge and personal experiences, learning is both less efficient than it might be and it often fails to stimulate deeper thinking about more abstract issues.
In the shift from "library knowledge" to what we might refer to as "field knowledge," the notions of performance, landscape, and ethnography become key concepts. I argue that this shift needs to fully recognize local social and linguistic conventions and that the experience of foreign students and academics in Japan presents a privileged realm for advancing this new field. This is because of a strong tendency in Japan for interactions to be framed by social groupings and for such interpretation to be highly marked in language. Insights from social deixis and semiosis present immediately usable tools for mapping emerging landscapes, and ethnography provides a powerful tool for capturing these landscapes. This new performance-based approach challenges language and culture pedagogues to rethink processes of students’ on-site learning.
Performing Culture in the Undergraduate Literature Classroom
Michael S. Tangeman, Denison University
This paper grows out of an attempt to come to terms with questions about a perceived gap in my approaches to teaching two distinct types of courses: language, and literature in translation (hereafter, literature). In the Japanese language classroom, I encourage students to engage in culturally appropriate performance (Walker and Noda, 2000), based on an understanding of the inseparable band between language and culture. My objective as teacher is to have them participate in the culture of the target language by performing in situations appropriate to their linguistic capabilities.
This paper will argue that this same concept of "performing culture" can be applied to the literature classroom as well. Although the students encounter translated Japanese, they can nonetheless be encouraged, through participation in discussion-based activities, to create memories of culture designed to contribute to their understanding of the culture in which the Japanese language is performed. In selecting works to be read, the teacher of literature chooses a series of performances to be studied. Directing students’ encounters with these performances provides a means of introducing artistic, but no less authentic, individuals and relationships that offer insights into Japanese culture intended to inform students’ use of Japanese. In the literature course, just as in the language courses, the teacher must be ever mindful of students’ penchant for interpreting the target culture viewed through the often distorting lens of the base culture. Both types of classes seek to help students not only recognize another culture, but also participate in that culture.
Organizer and Chair: Cheryl Crowley, Emory University
Discussant: Eri F. Yasuhara, California State University, San Bernardino
Keywords: Japanese literature, early modern Japan, haikai, poetry, Matsuo Bashô , Shômon, Kagami Shikô, Zhuangzi, Yosa Buson.
In the seventeenth century, the number of haikai practitioners grew steadily, and the genre attracted an enthusiastic audience in urban and rural settings all over Japan. However, the success of haikai was problematic, as some poets equated popularization with vulgarization. Most prominent among them were Matsuo Bashô (1644–94) and his disciples, the Shômon. The Shômon competed for influence with other haikai schools, particularly those who practiced tentori (point-garnering) haikai and maekuzuke (verse-capping) whose main objective was amusement rather than literary expression. While they deplored such "popular" haikai, at the same time Shômon poets capitalized on the reputation of their school’s founder to attract students and secure their own positions within the haikai community.
This panel explores how poets associated with the Shômon were active in both resisting and promoting the popularization of haikai. David Cannell examines tentori haikai and maekuzuke—often dismissed by scholars as unliterary and beneath consideration—which shed light on the value structures of the Genroku period. Peipei Qiu studies the works of Bashô disciple Kagami Shikô (1665–1731), showing how his interpretations of the Zhuangzi adapted to demands of a growing audience of haikai writer-readers in the early eighteenth century. Cheryl Crowley explores the complex relationship of Yosa Buson (1716–83) with the Shômon, arguing that though Shômon poets were useful allies in Buson’s efforts to reform haikai they also were a source of anxiety, as they represented a challenge to his carefully constructed literary identity.
The Changing Views of the Zhuangzi in Shikô’s Haikai Theory
Peipei Qiu, Vassar College
The use of Daoist ideas in haikai during the late seventeenth and the early eighteenth centuries was a prominent phenomenon. While presenting different interpretations, three major haikai schools of the period, the Teimon, the Danrin, and the Shômon (Bashô school), shared a conspicuous interest in using Daoist ideas to justify haikai and to construct its themes, theories, and values. The Shômon, in particular, sought inspiration in the correspondences between Daoist principles and the Chinese recluse tradition, and the leader of the school, Matsuo Bashô (1644–94), made the Zhuangzi a fundamental source of his poetry that opposed market values. After Bashô’s death, Shômon poets remained interested in Daoist sources, but they tended to shift away from the spiritual and literary values that Bashô had emphasized. Consequently, allusions to Daoist texts in Shômon writings of the post-Bashô period were often regarded as no more than catchphrases or ornaments showcasing their author’s Chinese learning.
This paper takes a close look at such seemingly meaningless use of Daoist sources in the works of the productive but controversial Shômon theorist, Kagami Shikô (1665–1731). Tracing Shikô’s changing interpretations of the Zhuangzi, I examine how his view of the fundamental way of haikai gradually moves away from Bashô’s concepts that are deeply informed by Daoist ideas, and how Shikô’s replacing Daoist principles with Confucian values at the center of his haikai theory reflects an impulse to meet the taste of the public and the demands of the popularization of haikai at the time.
Issues of Value in Genroku Haikai
David Cannell, University of California, Irvine
This paper is an examination of the notions of value that structure haikai practice and discourse in the Shômon (Bashô school) and, by way of contrast, in commercialized forms such as tentori (point-garnering) haikai and maekuzuke (verse-capping). Matsuo Bashô (1644–94) and his circle of poet-disciples were powerful critics of commercial haikai, and in the past most scholars have tended to follow his lead in dismissing it as frivolous, lacking distinctive literary value, and even as an unredeemable capitulation to the market. Recent work on tentori haikai verse by scholars in Japan, however, suggests that the verdict may still be pending on the literary merit of this kind of haikai.
With this in mind, my paper examines the nature of the so-called capitulation on the part of tentori and maekuzuke to uncover what insights it might yield into the value structures of the urban haikai field. In doing so, I show how structures of value—socioeconomic as well as literary—are refracted in literary practices, representations, and poetic images of the Genroku period (1688–1704). I also bring to bear on this topic an analysis of Ihara Saikaku’s (1641–93) writings on merchant culture, as Saikaku’s fascination with the fungibility of just about everything in the new commercial economy makes him an indispensable source of any consideration of value in Genroku Japan.
Yosa Buson and the Shômon (Bashô School): The Anxiety of Reception
Cheryl Crowley, Emory University
While haikai was enormously popular in the middle of the eighteenth century, many poets felt that the genre was in a state of crisis. One factor was the dominance of tentori (point-garnering) haikai, in which people competed to see who could score the most points; another was the proliferation of factions whose leaders’ main interest was attracting the maximum number of students in order to gain the most profits. In response to this, the Back to Bashô movement, a loose affiliation of poets who called for a return to the ideals of Matsuo Bashô (1644–94), began to emerge in the 1760s. A leader of this movement was Yosa Buson (1716–83), whose Yahantei school became a center of activities aimed at resisting what its members viewed as the negative effects of the popularization of haikai. For Buson, however, the Back to Bashô movement was a source of anxiety as well as support. This was not an anxiety of influence, as Buson’s concern was not with outperforming his great poetic predecessor, who represented an important source of authority. Rather, Buson’s anxiety centered on his reception by readers, particularly his own acquaintances within the Shômon (Bashô school), who were rivals as much as they were colleagues.
This paper focuses on Buson’s letters and prose works such as Shin hanatsumi (New "Flower gathering") and the Shundei kushû (Shundei verse anthology) preface to explore the anxiety surrounding his relationship with the Shômon and his efforts to establish an independent identity as a poet.
Session 209: Japanese Returning to Japan: Social and Psychological Effects
Organizer and Chair: Jonathan Dresner, University of Hawaii, Hilo
Discussant: Michael Weiner, San Diego State University
Keywords: Modern Japan, migration, diversity, social science.
It is now well known that Japanese society is neither closed nor homogeneous, but intercultural contact and diversity are still problematized. Perhaps most troubling to the stubbornly uniform Japanese self-conception is the Japanese who have been socially, economically, or psychologically transformed by experiences overseas. It does not seem to matter whether the experience is a relatively short-term "study abroad home stay" or generations of immigrant assimilation, differences are carefully noted.
This panel examines the process of travel, transformation (or lack thereof), and return through a wide variety of disciplines—anthropology, comparative literature, history, political sociology—and the papers address the whole historical range of Japanese migration and returns. Two papers address short-term migrations with limited personal change: Jerrod Hansen examines a Canadian study abroad program to see how it sheltered its Japanese subjects from cultural or psychological challenges; Jonathan Dresner recounts the way Meiji era labor migrants used their newfound economic strength and travel experiences to subtly transform the rural societies from which they came. The other two papers examine the return of diaspora Japanese: Lan Dong analyzes David Mura’s sansei memoir of personal transformation through travel to Japan; Masa Higo does a comparative analysis of Japanese government attitudes towards kikokushijo and the children of Brazilian Japanese.
This multi-dimensional study of Japanese travelers and their relationship with Japanese society should reveal a strong, if still tense, transnational thread in Japanese society. The concept of Japanese as a people is fruitfully complicated by taking the diaspora into account.
Going Home: International Labor Migrants Return to Meiji Era Yamaguchi and Hiroshima
Jonathan Dresner, University of Hawaii, Hilo
International labor migration from Meiji era (1868–1912) Japan was intensely concentrated: over sixty percent of the twenty-nine thousand participants in the government-managed Hawaii emigration program came from seven coastal counties around the Hiroshima-Yamaguchi border. Though the government (and Hawaiian employers) expected the return rate to be nearly one hundred percent, a little more than half of the emigrants returned to their hometowns rather than stay overseas. This paper will examine what happened to returning emigrants and to their home communities. Since the migration was primarily economic in nature, the effect of migrant earnings was carefully monitored and is frequently cited by modern scholars. Surveys showed high rates of debt repayment and savings, and improved living conditions, but there is little evidence of investment in economic development. High-emigration regions rarely became economic centers of any importance. Less carefully studied are the non-economic effects of this labor program, partially because Japanese who returned immediately after their work terms expired had little contact with Hawaiian or Caucasian culture and thus had little direct cultural effect on their hometowns. Local officials in Yamaguchi seemed proud of the lack of social change. However, continuing connections with Japanese who remained overseas longer and Japanese who labored outside of the plantations had more contact with non-Japanese society and did bring some of that experience back. Returnees, particularly in Yamaguchi, often did not settle down but moved on to Japanese colonial territories, creating multilateral and complex relationships with overseas communities.
Ethnic Identity Crises and the Politics of Assimilation in Contemporary Japan: An Extension of the Critical Sociology of Strangerhood
Masa Higo, Boston University
The kikokushijo phenomenon, a well-documented cultural re-assimilation problem of return migrant Japanese children since the early 60s to the late 90s, has become less controversial to both public and academic concerns as a serious social maladjustment issue in postwar Japan. Much research suggests the rise of a celebratory notion of transnational human agents and state internationalism as indicators of increasingly porous cultural and political boundaries and growing interconnectivities between people, material, and symbols.
However, critical review of the adaptation policy of the Japanese Ministries of Education and Foreign Affairs towards kikokushijo reveals that, clearly against internationalism, their policies have been based on highly xenophobic ethno-nationalist reassimilation. Furthermore, the Japanese Brazilians, who have been returning to their ancestral country in significant numbers since the mid 1980s, have been currently exposed to the socio-cultural system based upon the persistent assimilationism in their ethnic homeland. The processes of ethnic identity crises, negotiation, and transformation of school age children of Japanese Brazilians, as a critical sociological frame of stranger-hood indicates, sharply reflects the determining and confining power of the local socio-cultural structure over individuals’ subjectivity.
From Foreign Country to Cultural Home: Japan in a Sansei’s Mind
Lan Dong, University of Massachusetts, Amherst
In the recent discussion on identity of the Sansei (third-generation Japanese Americans), scholars, such as Tasuko Takezawa, have addressed the topic in relation to the redress movement in the 1970s and 1980s. This paper examines this issue as it is connected to their place of ethnic heritage—Japan. Focusing on David Mura’s Turning Japanese: Memoirs of a Sansei (1991) this paper explores how a Sansei gains further understanding and realization of his ethnic identity as a Japanese American in multi-ethnic America through the re-established connection between him and his place of cultural origin—Japan. Mura, born and raised in the Midwest, recollects his experience and psyche in Japan supported by a U.S./Japan Creative Artist Exchange Fellowship in 1984. The book ends with his realization that "Japan allowed me to see myself, America, and the world from a perspective that was not white America." (368). My argument draws upon his procedure of "turning Japanese" as simultaneously a process of turning Japanese American. Along the thesis of the Sansei’s identity construction, the following questions will be addressed: (1) starting his trip as a self-identified American, how is Mura challenged and therefore forced to re-consider his identity during his one-year residence in Japan; (2) how does he pursue his connection with Japan, which that has been absent in his childhood; and (3) how does such re-connection profoundly influence his understanding of identity, namely, change his self-identification from an American to a Japanese American?
There’s No Place Like Home: The Influence of Canadian Host Families on Japanese High School Study Abroad Participants
Jerrod Hansen, Kyoto University
Some second-year Japanese high school students, after returning to Japan from a year-long homestay in Canada, displayed a surprisingly superficial degree of change, especially with regard to their awareness of self and culture. The students’ experiences abroad and the influence of the structure of the study-abroad program must be examined to understand what kinds of social relationships dominated the overseas experience and how those experiences affect how students think about their personal, social, and cultural environments.
Prolonged contact with another culture causes changes in modes of thinking and behaving, and it is reasonable to expect changes following a long-term sojourn in a host country with significant cultural differences. However, in this case, the host-family/ student relationship actually resembled the social structure of Japan to such a degree as to limit or preclude radically different interpersonal experiences. The host-family/student relationship is an interdependent relationship, similar to typical Japanese relationships. Additionally, the realities of rural Canadian life and the structure of the program imposed additional impediments that restricted some students’ ability to socialize freely with peers, which increased the amount of time spent with the host-family and further enhanced the impact of that relationship.
Organizer: Mayumi Itoh, University of Nevada, Las Vegas
Chair: Jeffrey G. Barlow, Pacific University
Discussant: Barbara Lynne Mori, California State Polytechnic University, Pomona
Keywords: Japan’s pan-Asianism, transnationalism, China-Japan relations in the early 20th century, modern history, politics.
The Supreme Commander of the Allied Powers (SCAP) banned Japanese prewar political associations that advocated pan-Asianism, such as Kokuryukai (Amur Society) and Genyosha (Black Ocean Society), as "ultranationalist" and "ultrafascist" during the postwar occupation of Japan. However, notwithstanding these labels, some of their leaders, such as Toyama Mitsuru, had been at odds with the Japanese military regime and supported revolutionaries in China and elsewhere in Asia. Rather than being ultranationalist, these associations were aiming at transnational cooperation and regional integration against "Western imperialism." Nevertheless, these groups were often identified with the military regime because of the SCAP’s "indiscriminate" purge. Since then, studies of the so-called right-wing political associations and their leaders have been neglected.
Half a century after the end of the occupation, there seems to be a need to reassess the nature of these political associations and their leaders’ views on China. Scholars of diverse nationalities (American, Dutch, German, and Japanese) from interdisciplinary backgrounds (history, economics, political science, and sociology) reexamine Japanese (both ideologues and intellectuals) views on Sino-Japanese relations in the early 20th century, with a special focus on transnationalism in Asia. By so doing, this panel also invites debate on one of the most fundamental ideological questions in the disciplines of humanities and social sciences: the identification of the right-wing and the left-wing in political history.
Pan-Asian Societies in Prewar Japanese Foreign Relations: Uchida Ryohei and the Kokuryukai
Sven T. Saaler, German Institute for Japanese Studies
In the history of prewar Japanese foreign relations, small political associations exerted a considerable influence, particularly on Japan’s relations with China and other Asian nations. One of the best-known examples for this kind of political association is the Kokuryukai (Amur Society), which was founded in 1901 and banned as an ultranationalist association in 1946. SCAP also identified the Kokuryukai as the center of an expansionist conspiracy. Ultranationalist, patriotic, and expansionist are still the main attributes connected with this kind of political association. However, in the middle of the association’s activities, we can identify transnational rather than "nationalist" or "patriotic" objectives and above all the striving for cooperation with China and a broader regional, or pan-Asian, unity against the menace of the imperialist West. The Kokuryukai was involved in intensive networking activities, and the building-up of social capital, involving not only Japanese but also Chinese politicians and diplomats. The association’s activities reached their climax in the late 1910s, and with the death of founder Uchida Ryohei in 1938, effectively ended.
In the absence of detailed studies of the Kokuryukai, this paper reexamines its political views and activities. The paper also reassesses the Kokuryukai’s influence on Japanese foreign relations by drawing on primary sources, such as the association’s official publications (kikanshi) and its leader’s memoranda.
Forgotten Leaders in Sino-Japanese Relations: The Case of Toyama Mitsuru, Sun Yat-sen, and Chiang Kai-shek
Mayumi Itoh, University of Nevada, Las Vegas
Toyama Mitsuru (1855–1944) is an enigmatic figure in Japanese modern history. He was a leader of the right-wing political association, Genyosha (Black Ocean Society), which the General Headquarters of the Supreme Commander of the Allied Powers labeled as an ultrafascist and ultranationalist organization in 1946. Nevertheless, Toyama was a follower of the radical jiyu minken undo ("freedom and popular rights movement") initiated by Itagaki Taisuke (1837–1919). Toyama was also against the Japanese wars with China and denounced the Japanese military’s move as "foolish action." In fact, Toyama helped Chinese leaders, such as Sun Yat-sen and Chiang Kai-shek, in their revolutionary efforts to establish a democratic China through the Kuomintang (KMT, the Nationalist Party). It is incomprehensible that the person who had supported "popular rights" for the Japanese and opposed Japanese war with China would be the leader of such an ultranationalist association.
This paper reexamines Toyama’s views on pan-Asianism and analyzes how and why Toyama helped the KMT’s leaders. It also analyzes why Toyama, who had opposed the Japanese invasion of China, ended up condoning the creation of Manchukuo, while supporting Chiang Kai-shek. By so doing, this paper sheds new light on the complex Sino-Japanese relations in the early 20th century.
Forgotten Leaders of the Interwar Debate on Regional Integration: Introducing Sugimori Kojiro
Dick Stegewerns, Osaka Sangyo University
In Meiji Japan’s race to catch up with Western civilization, the ideas on an alliance of Asian nations had seemed snowed under by Fukuzawa Yukichi’s famous adage of "stepping out of Asia." By the Showa period such ideas had resurfaced and become such a part of rightist rhetoric and government propaganda that in hindsight they were looked upon as part of the notorious "Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere." Accordingly, when such ideas were discovered to have existed among "respectable" intellectuals on the prewar Japanese scene, they tended to be ignored or downplayed. They were swept together under the name "Asianism," a tag that, because of its prewar, often dubious content, has now strong negative connotations. Still, it is hard to deny that ideas on Asian integration were a constant element in the intellectual makeup of the Japanese political discourse.
This paper examines the ideas on regional integration of Sugimori Kojiro (1881–1968), a Waseda University professor of sociology, psychology, and several other academic disciplines but also an influential opinion leader in his day. Although he featured prominently in major magazines during the 1920s and 1930s and functioned as an important adviser to Nakano Seigo (member of the Japanese Diet and the Genyosha), he is largely forgotten. This paper focuses on Sugimori’s views of the post-World War I world, his conceptualization of the formation of a regional unit in Asia, and his proposals on Japan’s policy towards China.
Session 211: Japanese Buddhist Art/Objects in Ritual Context
Organizer and Chair: Chari Pradel, California State University, Northridge
Discussant: James C. Dobbins, Oberlin College
Keywords: art history, Japan, ritual.
The study of religious ritual can illuminate and be illuminated by the study of objects and images. In the case of historical research, the relative durability of paraphernalia versus the temporal and performative nature of rituals makes reintegrations of the two a particularly difficult task. Nonetheless, even approximations and tentative reconstructions can shed considerable light. The papers of this panel will each take up a specific rite, or body of rites, and the images and objects connected to them. The overall aim is to present case studies that suggest how a variety of interdisciplinary approaches can illuminate our understanding of the visual and material culture of religious ritual. Yui Suzuki explores the function of Yakushi Buddha images in a Tendai ritual, and Candice F. Kanda argues for the central role played by Amida raigo paintings in Pure Land Buddhist practices espoused by Honen. Karen Gerhart and Gene E. Phillips examine rites concerned with the afterlife. Gerhart addresses the issues of patronage and display of painted memorial portraits in fourteenth-century Japan. Phillips analyzes the paraphernalia, which includes a set of paintings of the Ten Kings of Hell, that was used in a ritual that began in the late tenth century and whose traces can be found in rituals performed nowadays. As a religious historian, the discussant James Dobbins will expand on the papers by offering comparative analysis of methodologies of both religious and art historians and suggest alternative interdisciplinary approaches.
The Magnificent Seven: The Esoteric Rite of the Seven Medicine Master Buddhas in the Heian Period
Yui Suzuki, University of California, Los Angeles
A large number of extant wooden statues of Yakushi (Medicine Master Buddha) from all regions of Japan dated to the Heian period indicate the popularity of this deity during this time. While there are religious and anthropological studies of devotional worship of Yakushi and art historical scholarship on the statuary, they rarely explore the relationship between belief and its imagery. In an effort to reconstruct the ritual context in which sacred icons were used, my paper will focus on the connection between Tendai praxis and Yakushi images. I will first examine the textual history of the Central Hall at Enryakuji and the statues that were once housed there. This important worship hall, first built by the founder of the Tendai school, Saicho (767–822), enshrined a total of ten Yakushi images in the ninth century. Seven of them were conceived as Shichibutsu Yakushi, consisting of Yakushi and its six other manifestations.
By relying on both textual and visual sources, I will explore how these images in the Central Hall were utilized in the esoteric Shichibutsu Yakushi ho (The Rite of the Seven Medicine Master Buddhas) throughout the latter half of the Heian period. During this time, Tendai monks effectively monopolized Yakushi as an efficacious deity for its healing powers as well as for its abilities to provide relief from calamities and to bestow good fortune. This culminated in the patronage of majestic Shichibutsu Yakushi halls and images by members of the imperial family and the nobility.
In Pursuit of the Highest Rebirth: Honen’s View of Raigo Imagery
Candice F. Kanda, Harvard University
The Amida shoju raigo paintings depict the descent of the Amida Buddha with his celestial assembly to a Pure Land Buddhist practitioner at the moment of death. The raigo paintings have been regarded as a visual aid to salvation at the deathbed ritual, largely on the basis of the contemplative visualization of Amida’s descent advocated by Genshin (942–1017) in his seminal text, the Ojoyoshu (985). The raigo genre’s functionality is thought to have diminished in succeeding centuries since the subsequent Pure Land Buddhist master, Honen (1133–1212), abandoned Genshin’s Tendai meditative practice in favor of the salvific invocation of Amida’s name. Honen’s doctrinal pronouncements are recorded in his Senchaku hongan nenbutsushu (1198) and are coupled with a remarkable aloofness to the visuality of devotional art. This inattention to religious imagery has been misunderstood as an indication that raigo paintings in the time of Honen were relegated to a mere didactic medium for expositing the concept of raigo (Amida’s welcoming descent). This paper takes as a case study the raigo imagery of the Gosho Mandara at Seiryoji, dated around 1200. The painting was given by Honen to his leading follower, Kumagai Naozane. Evidence from Honen’s personal correspondence shows that he encouraged ardent disciples to exercise their piety by seeking the highest rebirth in paradise through the salvific agency of raigo images. Thus, in contrast to the demoted position of images espoused in his doctrinal pronouncements, Honen left artistic and textual testimonies that manifest the vital functionality of raigo painting in Pure Land Buddhism.
The Role of Portraits in the Performance of Mortuary Rituals for the Elite: A Case Study Based on Moromoriki
Karen M. Gerhart, University of Pittsburgh
The process by which people pass from life to death is an important one that requires special forms of art and architecture to assist mourners and the deceased in making the transition. Inspired by Buddhism, Japan’s medieval elite produced screens to shield the coffin, consecrated paintings and carved portraits of the deceased for their memorial services, and built special halls to accommodate the generations of images. My paper examines the role painted portraits played in the memorial rites conducted far Nakahara Morosuke (d. second month, 1345) and his wife Zenni Onkata (d. fourth month, 1345), as chronicled by their second son, Nakahara Moromori (dates unknown), in Moromoriki (Diary of Moromori, fourteenth century). Based on information in the diary, I will discuss when and by whom images of the deceased were commissioned, when and where they were hung, and the types of offerings provided for them.
The Material Culture of Gyakushu
Gene (Quitman) E. Phillips, University of Wisconsin
In East Asian Buddhism, gyakushu ("pre-emptive ritual") is a loose and varied body of ritual actions based on the rites for the dead and meant to aid the living in securing good fortune after death. Most typically, the believer performs rites or has them performed on his or her own behalf. In Japan, gyakushu emerged at least by the late tenth century, and vestiges of such practices survive today. Historically, the forms of gyakushu varied considerably, ranging from a close emulation of merit-transferral rites for the dead (tsuizen) to special rituals involving texts and images related to the Ten Kings of Hell. The material culture of gyakushu thus resists generalizing explanations. In this paper, I will focus on four particular groups of ritual objects with the aim of exploring how fully functional explanations account for them as historical deposits. First, I will discuss those objects that appear in descriptions of gyakushu rites performed by and for the nobility of the Heian Period. The rituals themselves appear to have approximated tsuizen rites closely and thus called for the same sorts of objects. In this case, there is a sort of borrowed functionality. Second, I will look at images of the Ten Kings from the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries and explore what should be a fairly close relationship between form and function. Third, I will discuss selected portraits, which served a number of functions including being a focus of gyakushu. Fourth, I will introduce some modern variations of gyakushu beliefs and rites.
Organizer: Roy Ron, University of Tokyo
Chair: H. Paul Varley, University of Hawaii, Manoa
Discussant: Andrew E. Goble, University of Oregon
Keywords: warfare, weapons, samurai, warriors, armor, warrior society, warrior culture, mounted archery, Kamakura.
Weapons and armor were far more than prosaic tools of battle to Japan’s early medieval warriors. They defined, as well as reflected, their bearers’ socio-cultural identity. Comprehending the hows and whys of early medieval samurai armaments is thus essential to understanding the warrior society that emerged during the period.
This panel explores the development and role of weapons as instruments of war in the context of politics, technology, economy, and society, and as elements in socio-cultural activity of warriors in search of self-identity. Thomas D. Conlan examines the effect of fourteenth-century warfare on technological developments in armor. Karl Friday demonstrates how various factors influenced the nature of early medieval battle tactics. Mikael Adolphson analyzes the use of weapons by warrior monks in relation to the social background of these monks. And Roy Ron evaluates the role of mounted archery in the formation of a new warrior culture in Kamakura.
By considering the various features and functions of weapons during a transitional period (i.e., the Kamakura period) in which warriors moved away from court traditions toward a distinct warrior culture, we demonstrate how weapons were part of and contributed to the transition into military professionalism and social distinction.
Adapting to Endemic War: Fourteenth-Century Improvements in Arms and Armor
Thomas D. Conlan, Bowdoin College
Fourteenth-century Japan witnessed marked improvements in arms and armor in response to the onset of an indeterminate civil war. Through analysis of how warriors were wounded, and how the nature of these wounds changed, one can ascertain the effectiveness of these fourteenth-century improvements in helmets, leg armor, and face guards, and in turn, swords and bows as well. Close analysis of petitions for rewards, which document these wounds, and surviving material sources allows for one to understand fourteenth-century tactics and, for that matter, to date accurately visual sources depicting medieval Japanese war.
Samurai in Monk Robes? Monastic Warriors in Heian and Kamakura Japan
Mikael Adolphson, Harvard University
The sohei, or monk-warriors, of Heian and Kamakura Japan fare poorly in comparison to the samurai, both in terms of historical reputation and representations in popular culture. Often maligned and criticized for their "unjust" involvement in politics and landed wealth, they have been understood as figures separate from the larger military class. Nothing seems to underscore this division more than the stereotypical image of the monk-warrior donning a black robe with a hood, and armed with swords and a naginata. However, an examination of the social origins of monk-commanders of the late Heian age, for example, reveals a common ancestry and kinship with influential figures in the warrior class. Furthermore, the warfare strategies and weaponry of those who fought in the name of monasteries and shrines also suggest that the two were all but inseparable. The denial of this common ancestry is in itself of great value to historians as well. It is as part of the ruling warrior class’s efforts to distinguish itself and create a more unique identity in the fourteenth century that distinct images of armed monks begin to appear. This process continued throughout the Tokugawa period and has been sustained by most scholarship in the twentieth century. By thus separating later images from contemporary accounts, we not only learn about the context in which early monastic warriors fought and lived but also gain insights into the milieu in which later representations were created.
Once Upon a Horse: Polity, Technology, and Tactics in Early Medieval Japan
Karl Friday, University of Georgia
The face of war in early medieval Japan was shaped by a complex and multifarious confluence of geography, available resources, ideology, polity, technology, goals, and mission. It was an age in which struggles between competing political centers at once spawned and masked the rise of new socio-economic structures on the land. And yet, while warfare changed a great deal in terms of scale, duration, and frequency, it changed far less in terms of strategies and tactics. Throughout the period, the contours of battle followed terrain defined by a unique style of archery from horseback.
Indeed, this technology created the samurai and determined the form of their armor and other equipment—and this, in turn, circumscribed what they could and could not do in combat. The peculiar tactics they developed were further rooted in the political, legal, economic, and cultural circumstances of the Heian-Kamakura age.
The pertinacity of hoary tactical paradigms reflects the survival of key socio-cultural imperatives at the eye of a swirling maelstrom of change. Foremost among these were the samurai’s identity and self-image and the belief in the existence of a centralized, national power structure. Together, these ideological constructs stayed warriors from fully exploring the possibilities being opened by advances in weapons technology and military organization.
This paper discusses the shape of the early medieval "Way of the Bow and Horse" and its relationship to the strategy and grand tactics—raiding and the use of fortifications—that dominated the era.
Targeting Dogs, Entertaining Gods: Practice and Performance of Mounted Archery in the Kamakura Period
Roy Ron, University of Tokyo
Mounted archery had been established as the primary method of conducting warfare during the Heian period, eventually leading to its incorporation into the social and religious practices of the aristocracy. When in the late twelfth century warriors sought to mold a unique warrior culture in Kamakura, they adopted familiar socio-cultural patterns of aristocratic warriors of the Heian period, among them two forms of mounted archery: yabusame and kasagake. Yabusame was a formal performance displayed regularly at the bakufu’s Tsurugaoka Hachiman shrine-temple complex. Kasagake was an informal, occasionally improvised form of mounted archery that resembled yabusame and was usually performed within a warrior’s residence. In addition, early Kamakura warriors created a new form of mounted archery—inuomono—for the specific purpose of preparing themselves for battle. Though all three forms of mounted archery originated in warfare, they became an integral part of Kamakura warriors’ social and religious activities.
This presentation shall explore the role of the three forms of mounted archery in the molding of a unique warrior culture in Kamakura.