Session 107: Perspectives on Genbun Itchi: From Vernacular to National Language in Pre-War Japan

Organizer: Seth Jacobowitz, Cornell University

Chair and Discussant: John B. Whitman, Cornell University

Keywords: Japan, linguistics, national language, modern literature.

Genbun itchi, or "the unification of speech and writing," is often regarded as the culmination of the debates on national language and script reform that began in the Meiji period (1868–1912). Articulated as a strategy for approximating the vernacular dialect of the capital in writing to linguistically consolidate the imagined community of the archipelago and its colonies, genbun itchi was also associated with the phrase "to write things as they are" (ari no mama ni utsushitoru) that became a compositional imperative for modern Japanese literary realism. This panel offers three chronologically sequential examinations of the intersections of these defining linguistic and literary characteristics of genbun itchi discourse.

Junji Yoshida’s paper historicizes how advocates of people’s rights (minken) circumvented a censorious state authority with politically charged speech couched in the idiom of oral performance genres such as rakugo from the 1870s to 1890s. Seth Jacobowitz addresses how the late 19th century media of phonography and photography contributed to the belief that shorthand notation could transcribe in words an actuality rather than the essence of what was said. Parallel to this faith in the fidelity of recording came the Romanticist-influenced ideology of the authenticity of the ethnic folk (minzoku) as the foundation for the nation (kokumin). Melek Ortabasi’s paper attends to Yanagita Kunio’s critique of the Meiji state’s efforts to supplant the diversity of languages spoken throughout Japan with a national standard. She explores his paradoxical attempts to reinstate a folkish voice even as he remonstrated that he, too, had been linguistically disenfranchised by these same policies.

The Policing and Politics of Vernacular Entertainment in Early Meiji Japan

Junji Yoshida, University of Oregon

In 1871 the Meiji government inadvertently allowed the French acrobat Sourie to perform in Tokyo outside the concession ports. Once the 1858 commercial treaties that prohibited such activities were breached, other foreign entertainers were emboldened to demand similar exemptions. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs responded by denouncing such spectacles as "superfluous art unconducive to national interests" (kokka ni ekinaki yūgei). The Meiji administration’s views on entertainment expressed two conflicting ideological forces: Neo-Confucianism and Western nationalism. I contend, however, that as they negotiated between these poles, many Japanese "discovered" oral forms of entertainment as a positive value, particularly when delivered in vernacular language. It prompted them to re-envision social relations within the nation-state in a new linguistic and political light.

Fukuzawa Yukichi (1834–1901) championed oratory as a pillar of Western civilization and identified rakugo as its closest Japanese equivalent, even inviting celebrated raconteur Sanyūtei Enchō to perform The Biography of Shiohara Tasuke at Keio University. Whereas Enchō stressed centrist values such as frugality and diligence, political theorist Ueki Emori (1857–1892) and progressive actor Kawakami Otojirō (1864–1911) subsumed "people’s rights" (minken) in a vernacular theatricality to avoid censorship by a government intent on asserting the sovereignty of the state (kokken). Hence the most radical political dissents were voiced in the guise of popular entertainment. This paper historicizes these oratorical subjects and their vernacular humor until their eclipse by the phonocentric discourse of genbun itchi which, in privileging realist and inward-looking confessional novels for portraying "things as they are," silenced a vibrant politics of laughter.

The Haunted Origins of Modern Japanese Literature: The Transcription of Enchō’s Ghost Story of the Peony Lantern

Seth Jacobowitz, Cornell University

Modern Japanese literature begins with a ghost story. Transcribed in phonetic shorthand and published as a series of pamphlets in the mid-1880s, Sanyūtei Enchō’s rakugo performance Ghost Story of the Peony Lantern was immediately upheld as a model for the nascent national language and literary realism of genbun itchi. The genealogies of modern literature that begin with Tsubouchi Shōyō’s The Essence of the Novel and Futabatei Shimei’s Floating Clouds as "Japan’s first modern novel" have long signaled The Peony Lantern as a source of fleeting inspiration, but have otherwise bypassed shorthand’s compositional strategies and critical appraisal by Shōyō and others, leaving it to haunt the margins of the canon as a ghostly remainder. Contrary to prevailing interpretations of literary realism as a strictly epistemological or narratological event, I seek to reveal the dialogue between literature and new media technologies through shorthand.

Accordingly, we should say modern Japanese literature begins with the multiple postings of a ghost story, from rakugo to shorthand and then into print. My analysis is less concerned with the content or purported recording fidelity of Enchō’s tale than to address how shorthand’s conceptual vocabulary—known as both phonography and the "photographic method of words"—seeded, or rather acceded to, the twin hallmarks of modern Japanese literature: phonetic transparency and mimetic realism. Indeed, by the late 1890s the stated imperative of shorthand to "write things down just as they are" would be co-opted by the realist literature, whose name, shajitsushugi (lit., "capturing the real"), likewise reflects shared media origins.

Authentic(ating) Voices of the Folk: Yanagita Kunio’s Criticism of Language Reform

Melek Ortabasi, Hamilton College

Yanagita Kunio (1875–1962) is best known as an expert on premodern Japanese folk traditions. While his research on dialect is often relegated to the disciplinary boundaries of minzokugaku, he also shares much in common with the Meiji and Taishō literary community in his concern with the possibility for representing an authentic reality through national language. In tandem with his research on regional expressions, he offers severe criticism of centralized language reform. His main concern is over a gradual and increasing loss of personal voice, which he believes is caused by the "parroting" and "memorization" perpetuated by the mass media and the school system. He proposes an alternate method for creating a nationally shared language: a pedagogical stance that draws upon what he saw as the natural "language-creating" abilities of the folk. Conversely, he wonders whether this approach is still possible, given the radical changes that have taken place in the national language even during his own lifetime. Seemingly concerned about the populace in general, he presents himself as part of this pre-linguistic double-bind. In his long career as a writer and speaker, Yanagita observes that he has "not once . . . felt that [he] was able to write or say just what [he] thought." He asks, how can one record things "as they are" when one no longer has the words to think them with? This paper will expose the disjunctures between self, language and national identity found primarily in Yanagita’s critical writings on language and dialect such as Kagyūkō (Reflections on Snails, 1927).