Organizer: Mariko Tamanoi, UCLA

Alex Bates, University of Michigan

The 1923 Great Kanto Earthquake will forever be associated with two post-quake atrocities: the murder of leftist intellectuals and activists by police and military officials, and the massacre of Koreans. The former called attention to abuse of power within the imperial regime and thus condemnation by proletarian writers was natural and unproblematic. The Korean massacre, however, was a more ambiguous crime. Among those who killed the over six thousand Koreans were members of the working classes, previously idealized in leftist rhetoric. Thus, this massacre forced writers in the emerging Japanese proletarian movement to rethink their stance vis-à-vis the masses they were out to save. Proletarian writer Ema Shû assessed the situation bluntly, "After the quake, I lost my faith in the masses." My paper examines how proletarian writers reconciled the leftist idea of "the masses" with the popular participation in the massacre. I explore a variety of responses from writers such as Ema Shû and Aono Suekichi and read these texts within the context of contemporary debates surrounding the role of the masses in the revolution. Some writers attempted to exonerate the working class from blame while others used the massacre to emphasize the importance of a strong vanguard. My paper shows how ideas regarding the masses changed in response to the Korean massacre and the ways in which that transformation impacted political and literary debates within the movement. The variety of responses highlight the difficulties in assigning a political identity to something so nebulous an idea as "the masses."

David A. Henry, University of Michigan

Tales (mukashibanashi) were used in Japanese Language Readers (kokugo tokuhon) from the late 1880s in Japan and were quickly adapted for use in Taiwan after it came under Japanese control. In Taiwan, Japanese tales were used in educational media including textbooks, readers, picture charts (kakezu), songs, games, and school plays. Citing oral interviews of three elderly Taiwanese men and the research of Ito Ryuhei, I will first explore the reception of the Momotaro tale in their memories of colonial education. Momotaro was one of several cultural heroes that solidified identification with Japan for Taiwanese colonial subjects. In Japan the Momotaro tale was instrumental in inculcating values sanctioned by the government, including filial piety from the late Meiji period and militarism by the early Showa period. These trends in adapting the story were earlier seen in Taiwanese Japanese language textbooks. By exploring the tension between the development of textbooks at home (naichi) and in colonies abroad (gaichi), I hope to add to the discussion of how modernity in the homeland is often first articulated in colonial holdings. This paper is part of a larger project exploring how folktales were used to imagine and perform the nation in modern Japan and its colonies.

Reginald Jackson, Princeton University

My aim in this presentation will be to investigate the mechanics of the representational decay that attends illness. The specific question I’ll be addressing is: What and how does illness signify in the context of the Illustrated Handscrolls of the Tale of Genji? I hope to demonstrate the extent to which illness as a motif informs, directs, and even infects the composition and choreography of certain calligraphic and pictorial portrayals. Specifically, in the midare-gaki passages of the "Kashiwagi" and "Minori" sections of the Genji Scrolls, writing subject and written object wither as one: the script and paper designs used to represent the scenes of fatal illness simulate characters’ paced dying. The notion of "decomposition" becomes an important concept to consider at these junctures because the textual corpus becomes markedly engrossed with moribund bodies—aestheticized figures that infirmly resist conventional modes of reading with their rhythmic decay. Taking these decrepit displays seriously requires a rigorous questioning of the manner in which they interact with their margin and threaten continually to overrun the utmost limit of their framing context. In this vein, my discussion of painting, text, paper design, and calligraphy will blend to form a whole that is coherent, but that—like the death-bound script itself—nonetheless pressures against the exclusive (and exclusionary) classification as solely "art historical" or "literary." In considering how illness choreographs these sections into a spectacular tangle of image and text, the Genji Scrolls become a venue in which to critique and permeate such disciplinary boundaries.

Susan Lee, Florida State University

Images such as the Mansion Screen housed in the Freer Gallery in Washington D.C. portray the "pilgrimage" of Zen exemplars to an urban brothel. Surrounded by fellow pleasure-seekers in an extravagantly appointed architectural interior, these religious figures revel in their worldly environment. What is the significance of the site of the prostitution house in the contemporary urban culture? What is communicated by the spectacular representational means of the screens, namely, the indulgent employment luminous gold leaf and sumptuous celebration of visual detail, color, and pattern? Perhaps most intriguingly, what is the significance of the "pilgrimage" of figures who exemplify transcendence of the illusory world (samsara) to a site that epitomizes this material world of carnal desire? These images need to be contextualized within the vibrant urban cultural aesthetic that developed in the early half of the seventeenth century. Expressed both in texts and in imagery, brothels of the thriving cities of Kyoto and Edo were celebrated as sites of sophisticated urban play. Contemporary fiction, travel guidebooks, and courtesan critiques constructed two figural types who represented the paradigmatic sophisticated urbanite: the male dandy who roamed the cities with such worldly style and the cultivated prostitute. How does the Zen exemplar fit into this discourse? On the one hand, these paintings celebrated the worldly, in their sumptuous celebration of visual splendor (stylistically and thematically). On the other hand, the parody of the spiritual pilgrimage undertaken by Zen exemplars positioned the image as an argument for the Buddhist concept of non-duality. This paper explores these complex images as it examines their unique, parodic expression of the pilgrimage ideal.

Jan C. Leuchtenberger, University of Puget Sound

A popular fascination with the "foreign" during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in Japan inspired a variety of texts about faraway places and "others," with particular emphasis on "kara," or China, and the kirishitan (Christian). Most research on Christianity in Japan has focused on historical accounts, though George Elison’s book Deus Destroyed includes an annotated translation of the kanazôshi Kirishitan monogatari(1639, 1665). This talk will examine another tale about the kirishitan, commonly known under the title Kirishitan shûmon raichô jikki (True Record of the Arrival of the Kirishitan Sect), which circulated only in manuscript from the late seventeenth century until it was first printed in 1868. Recent archival research by the author has catalogued the existence of extant manuscripts of the tale under a surprising 65 different titles. While in some cases only one copy of a given title exists, in others there are up to eighteen copies of a title, bringing the total number of extant copies to approximately 150. After giving a brief account of these findings, this talk will analyze the representation of the so-called Kirishitan in the tales as a discursive strategy that worked to allay the anxiety brought on by a new, more comprehensive understanding of Japan’s place in the world and by the ever growing, unsettling presence of Western ships offshore. In the tales, the threatening Kirishitan demons and would-be conquerors are subjugated not only through their expulsion by Hideyoshi, but also in their representation as an exoticized but thoroughly domesticated "other."