Session 10: How to Construct the Bunka Kokka? Contestations of Cultural Democracy in Early Postwar Japan

Organizer and Chair: Peter Siegenthaler, University of Texas, Austin

Discussants: Reiko Tomii, Independent Scholar; Wesley Sasaki-Uemura, University of Utah

Keywords: Postwar Japan, culture, bunka kokka, democratization.

A dialogue among historians and art historians, this panel builds on earlier studies of Japanese postwar democratization by focusing on the goals and legacies of government-sponsored programs directed toward cultural preservation, aesthetic renewal, and the promotion of local cultural activity at the end of the Occupation and in the years immediately following it.

Official calls for the construction of a "nation of culture" (bunka kokka) began soon after the end of the war in 1945, gaining strength as Occupation influence waned. Manifestations of the official view of bunka kokka were varied, from educational reform proposals to the establishment of local cultural protection societies. The slogan, however, was increasingly criticized as mere rhetoric, seen as masking a larger conservative effort to roll back democratization’s gains. This panel’s presenters explore often overlooked interactions between official programs and practitioners in the cultural domain, highlighting the intentional and unintentional effects and consequences of government actions and revealing the lasting influence of responses those official programs provoked.

The papers bring together aesthetic, political, and sociological views of the workings of postwar democratization. Gerteis explores the efforts of a primary government opponent, organized labor, in its creation of culture circles. Tezuka examines the skillful resistance to official policies pursued by a leading impresario in Nô drama, and Siegenthaler traces the limitations and unintended byproducts of official efforts to expand architectural preservation programs. The varying approaches taken by the papers’ authors form the basis for further critical explorations by the audience and the panel’s two discussants.

Worker’s Culture as National Culture: The Worker’s Culture Movement as Labor’s Leftist Critique of Postwar Japan

Christopher Gerteis, Coastal Carolina University

Recent studies of state and society in postwar Japan have reconceived civil society to encompass the participation of individuals and organizations not usually perceived as interested, much less vested, in affairs of state. While organized labor is a well-studied component of civil society, this paper will expand the scope of those studies to include the cultural productions union activists deployed to shape the political discourse of postwar Japan.

By the late 1940s Japan’s left-led unions were in close collaboration with sympathetic artists and intellectuals to create what they hoped would become the basis of a new, socialist national culture. This late 1940s collaboration of artists and union activists augured the formation in the early 1950s of a formal organization known as the Kokumin Bunka Kaigi (People’s Culture Council, or KBK). The KBK’s primary role was to arrange labor-friendly publications, essays, lectures, talks, and speeches by prominent activists and intellectuals. The KBK also brokered important labor connections, funding, and mass political support for scholars, writers, and activists who themselves belonged to, or headed up, a wide range of left-leaning activist groups and think tanks.

In 1954, the national labor federation Sôhyô funded a KBK initiative to produce a worker’s culture movement intended to foster the cultural conditions for socialist victory in the national legislature. I will focus my presentation on the political satire produced by KBK-affiliated cartoonists who during the mid-1950s generated a unique genre of cultural critique that simultaneously illustrates the social context and political machinations of postwar Japan’s left-led unions.

From Confrontation to Pluralism: Takechi Tetsuji and the Contemporary Nô Theater

Miwako Tezuka, Columbia University

As part of the larger project to promote Japan as a "nation of culture," Japanese governments in the first postwar years reconsidered values associated with the traditional arts and advanced the virtues of their preservation. In particular, the official dictum for designating "intangible cultural properties" underwent scrutiny in the early 1950s. Thereafter, noted practitioners of the performing arts began to receive official support toward the transmission of their skills to future generations. Ironically, in the Nô theater, arguably the most respected and conservative of Japanese cultural genres, such protective measures yielded ill effects. According to critics and Nô actors of the time, they stifled creativity and caused discord among individuals practicing the craft.

Within this context, Takechi Tetsuji (1912–1988), an aficionado of Japanese performing arts, pursued a personal mission to rejuvenate Nô. Having startled the world of kabuki with his "Takechi Kabuki" movement in the late 1940s, from the mid-1950s he struck directly at the heart of Nô theater and its apparently anachronistic values, habits, and mores.

This paper examines Takechi’s attempts to modernize Nô through his collaboration with an avant-garde artists group, Jikken Kôbô (Experimental Workshop), for the production of Pierrot Lunaire. This 1955 theatrical work, based on Arnold Schoenberg’s music, was comprised of an eclectic mixture of modernism, the aesthetic of Nô, and its comedic cousin Kyôgen. I aim to show that in the Pierrot Lunaire project Takechi shifted away from a confrontational approach in order to make the genre of Nô more accommodative, pluralistic, and experimental.

Bunka-zai no Minshu-ka: Folk Houses and the Democratization of Culture in Early Postwar Japan

Peter Siegenthaler, University of Texas, Austin

Many Japanese viewed with deep suspicion their government’s implicit association of bunka kokka and postwar democratization, and frequent invocations of the idealized "nation of culture" to support a return to centralized education and a dominant state presence in the arts only reinforced such doubts. In one realm of cultural activity, however, government-sponsored cultural programs and the project of democratization were explicitly linked. That realm was the protection of cultural assets, in particular the preservation of folk houses (minka).

Beginning with a 1951 announcement that minka would for the first time join prominent temples and shrines, castles, and elite residences on the lists of protected buildings, the "democratization of cultural properties" (bunka-zai no minshu-ka) was articulated as a goal of the architectural conservation bureaucracy. That democratization was to take two forms: the establishment of local conservation societies (hozon-kai) to include local citizens in cultural affairs of national importance and the protection of notable folk houses as valued cultural properties.

This paper explores the experience of that cultural democratization project by tracing the successes and failures of government efforts to include folk houses in the larger protection scheme. Following the course of minka preservation from the early 1950s into the 1960s, we find that factors as varied as financial considerations, cultural authorities’ professional standards, and residents’ attitudes toward the houses themselves all worked against the protection of minka. Ultimately, however, when residents’ attitudes began to change and incentives were strengthened, the groundwork established through earlier government programs facilitated and supported folk houses’ protection.