Organizer and Chair: Christopher L. Hill, Yale University

Discussant: Thomas Looser, New York University

The margins of urban space played a pivotal role in the apprehension of "society" in modernity. This panel examines interventions in the representation of urban space in literature, ethnography, and photography, and the role of art institutions originating in the urban margins in the transformation of the metropolis itself. Hill's paper discusses the place of the amusement quarter in the social imaginary of Japanese naturalism and its background in the travels of the naturalist novel and turn of the century debates on social problems. Kida Minoru's iconoclastic study of a suburban village during the Asian-Pacific War, Ueno argues, tests the boundaries of such conventions for representing the social in ways that anticipate the "ethnographic turn" of later writers. In Shimizu's view, the phenomenological explorations of the gaze by photographer Miyamoto Ryûji and novelist Abe Kôbô intervene not only in the conventional techniques of urban observation but also in its politics. Finally, Kohso's paper offers another way to reconsider the role of the observer in the constitution of urban space, by directing attention to the institutions of the contemporary art system, whose "white walls" are central in the gentrification of urban areas once colonized by artists. Kohso explicitly addresses the transnational context that informs all of the papers: techniques for representing urban space and increasingly the fabric of the city itself are subject to globalizing tendencies that should propel us to move scholarship beyond national confines.

Christopher L. Hill, Yale University

The urban sakariba or amusement quarter was a privileged figure for the social in the early years of the naturalist novel in Japan. Naturalists such as Kosugi Tengai, who aspired to create a shajitsu shôsetsu ("realistic" novel), gravitated toward liminal areas and liminal characters in their search for new objects of representation. That the far-flung, complexly intertwined characters of Tengai's Hatsu sugata (New Year's Finery, 1900) all appear in the novel's painstakingly orchestrated first scene, set in a popular theater, suggests that naturalist writers' interest in such areas was inspired by more than a pursuit of the louche, however. The amusement quarter and its habitués are material for techniques of representation in early naturalism that emerge as much from the debate on urban shakai mondai (social problems) of the 1890s as from the precedent offered by the sentimental brothel novels of that decade's popular writers. Emile Zola's Nana (1880)—overtly imitated by Tengai—and other works of French naturalism played an important role in this transformation of social imaginaries. We should recognize, however, that as the strategies of representation in French naturalism were entwined with new arguments in medicine and criminology in Europe, so too was the appearance of naturalism in Japan imbricated with other changes in the apprehension and writing of society.

Toshiya Ueno, Wakô University, Japan

In 1946, just after the Japanese defeat in the Second World War, the sociologist and critical essayist Kida Minoru published a series of essays on a small village in the suburbs of Tokyo entitled "Kichigai buraku shûyû kikô" (Travelogue from a Crazy Village) in the left-liberal magazine Sekai. Before the war Kida studied sociology under Marcel Mauss at the University of Paris and translated numerous books by Emile Durkheim, Lucien Levy-Bruhl and Henri Fabre and traveled in Europe, Morocco and other areas. During wartime he was forced to stay in Japan despite a confessed yearning to continue wandering the world. His alternative was to write a strange combination of travelogue, essay, quasi-novel, and ethnography about the village where he moved to escape air strikes. In the essays, published as a volume in 1948, Kida applied various notions from the French lineage of sociology, including the gift, reciprocity, participation, and collective representation. His work cannot be reduced to a mere appropriation of the terms of anthropology and sociology, but can also be read as a variety of what James Clifford, in an effort to explain the relationship between ethnography and surrealism, called "bohemian travelogue." This paper provides a theoretical interpretation of Kida's work that shows its resonance with the "ethnographic turn" in recent anthropological essays by Clifford, Lingis and Taussig.

Tomoko Shimizu, Yamanashi University, Japan

The Japanese photographer Miyamoto Ryûji is known for documenting the unconscious of the city through images of architecture that is the casualty of the process of urban modernization. Miyamoto's photo-project "Danbôru no ie" (Cardboard Houses, 2002) focused on homeless people's dwellings. In his recent series "Pinhôru no ie" (Pinhole Houses) he made giant pinhole cameras that looked like makeshift shelters of the type of homeless people build, set the pinhole houses up amongst actual shelters where homeless people gathered, and covered the inside with film. The large format pictures recorded spectacular panoramas of the homeless camps. This paper compares Miyamoto's photo-projects from "Cardboard Houses" to "Pinhole Houses" and Abe Kôbô's novel Hako-otoko (Box Man, 1973), to examine the politics of the wandering gaze in the process of urbanization and modernization in contemporary Japan.

Sabu Kohso, Independent Scholar

The contemporary art that originated in New York is an expansive entity, both in the sense of concept and physical space. Its formalism has always advocated the expansion of flatness, while its conceptual adventurism has increasingly introduced events from external contexts. The movement, however, has never been a purely artistic enterprise. The white wall that is the common denominator of the expansion has consistently functioned both as a neutral ground for exhibiting art and as the basic element of modernist architecture. That is to say, in the transference of the art center from Soho to the East Village to Chelsea that pioneered the gentrification of New York, we have undeniably observed the expansion of the white wall—first, of the artist's studio, secondly, of gallery and museum spaces, and then finally, of high-priced residences. Now this expansion is global: in most major cities we see museums designed by the same architects in which works by the same artists are exhibited on white walls. Meanwhile the globalizing institution eagerly invites art works from non-Western cultures that have already been adjusted to this common denominator: The recent Japanese intervention called "Superflat" offers an example of a non-Western contemporary art that formally adds a variation to the flatness on the white wall and conceptually fulfills Western expectations. This paper analyzes the indispensable role of the white wall in producing a globalizing culture of self-reference.