Akutagawa Ryūnosuke's uncanny travels in Republican-era China

This study focuses on Akutagawa Ryūnosuke's Shina yūki (Travels in China): an account of a four-month journey through eastern, central, and northern China in the spring and summer of 1921. Due to Akutagawa's reputation as a writer and the account's vantage point on a transitional period in Japan's expansion abroad, Travels in China has traditionally enjoyed a prominent place in the canon of twentieth-century Japanese travel writing. What has received less attention, however, is the relation of the work to the rest of Akutagawa's literary corpus. In this paper, I situate Travels in China within the larger context of Akutagawa's ongoing interest in Chinese fiction and drama. Rather than reading Travels in China as a work of journalism, as Akutagawa initially invited his readers to do, I argue that the work is an extended exploration not only of the relationship between ‘New China’ and Akutagawa's beloved traditional Chinese culture, but also of the boundaries separating journalism, fiction, and other literary genres. Ultimately, I connect Travels in China to Akutagawa's later work: texts that similarly interrogate and deconstruct the distinctions between genres and modes of narrating experience.     

The end of literature and the beginning of praxis: Wagō Ryōichi's Pebbles of Poetry

Abstract

On 16 March 2011, shortly after the hydrogen explosion in the third nuclear block, Wagō Ryōichi (1968–), a poet who has lived in Fukushima for decades, started using Twitter as an alternative method for his action poetry. The tweets from his nearly desolate hometown immediately gained public reception, spreading all across the country and beyond, being compiled into an anthology titled Shi no tsubute (Pebbles of poetry). This study examines the flood of words he posted during the critical post-earthquake turmoil, aiming to conceive them as radically redefining (albeit temporarily) the quotidian that has long been institutionalized during the country's recent history. Despite their later publication in book forms, Wagō's tweets initially circulated more like graffiti than printed books, being a more fundamentally contingent form of writing than his previously printed letters. Epitomizing the bio-sociological conditions (or what Karatani Kōjin calls ‘singularities’) arising from the intensified experience immediately following the Fukushima incident, Wagō's scribbles on the internet bear much resemblance to Terayama Shūji's mobilization of street epic in the 1960s–70s, or, more theoretically, Bergson's conception of evolution as multiplicity arising from intense temporality. His graffiti praxis is itself a renewed ethics, sharing the spirit of the-end-of-literature discourses by Karatani and others since the 1980s.     

Narrating the cultural trauma of 3/11: the debris of post-Fukushima literature and film

Abstract

Images of debris dominate our understanding of the 3/11 triple disaster – earthquake, tsunami, nuclear meltdown – that took place in Japan on 11 March 2011. They have been effectively used to rewrite the story of individual suffering into one of collective tragedy. In this article, debris is a locus for examining the construction of the narrative of 3/11 as cultural trauma. The article analyzes three texts that deal directly with images of 3.11 debris: Fujiwara Toshi's documentary film No Man's Zone and two short stories: Murakami Ryū's ‘Little eucalyptus leaves’ (Yūkari no chisana ha, 2012 Murakami, Ryū, 2012b. Yūkari no chisana ha. In: Sore de mo sangatsu wa, mata. Tokyo: Kōdansha, 245–60. [Google Scholar]) and Saeki Kazumi's ‘Hiyoriyama’ (2012) Saeki, Kazumi, 2012a. Hiyoriyama. Trans. Jeffrey Hunter. In: Elmer Luke and David Karashima eds. March Was Made of Yarn. New York: Vintage Books, 163–81. [Google Scholar]. Fujiwara interrogates the position of the viewer via images of destruction, Murakami connects 3/11 to the multidirectional memory of other global traumas like Auschwitz, and Saeki constructs a local narrative that contrasts the personal experience of the disaster with a televisual or filmic representation. These texts are engaged in the cultural work of constructing 3/11 as collective trauma. They create a collective identity, a ‘we’, for this trauma that speaks both for and against the national narratives of recovery. This article examines images of debris around the one-year anniversary of 3/11 and speculates on the concurrent lack of images of bodies.     

Madness,mystery and abnormality in the writing of Yumeno Kyūsaku

Yumeno Kyūsaku (1889–1936) has been labeled a writer of henkaku detective fiction since submitting his debut story, ‘Ayakashi no tsuzumi’ (‘The demonic hand drum’), to Shinseinen magazine for a competition in 1926. The term henkaku is rooted in the historical context of the 1920s and 1930s as a modifier of a subgenre of mystery fiction that eschewed puzzle-solving in favor of gothic atmospheres and strange happenings. This article considers the relationship between henkaku and gendered, early twentieth-century discourses of hentai (abnormality). Transitioning from an early emphasis on ‘abnormal sexology’ to ‘abnormal psychology’, Kyūsaku used the affective potential of visceral henkaku narratives to not only entertain readers, but to shock them into an examination of their own psyches and the limits of modern, rational thought. Kyūsaku's skepticism toward the ‘isms’ of his day resonated with a new audience, bringing the spirit of henkaku into the post-Second World War period when his works were rediscovered in the context of 1960s sub- and counter-culture.     

From mourning to allegory: Post-3.11 Space Battleship Yamato in motion

Abstract

Since 1977, when the first movie version was premiered, Uchūsenkan Yamato (Space Battleship Yamato) has fueled the continuance of an earlier anime boom in Japan, and in the past decades, the anime text has generated multifarious interpretations. One of the most widely embraced readings contextualizes Yamato within Japan's defeat in the Second World War and this approach to the anime not only celebrated its scientific imagination but also legitimized, with a revisionist tone, the country's righteousness in the war. In the wake of the 3/11 earthquake and the subsequent Fukushima disaster, however, this line of canonical reading has declined. In turn, users of internet social media such as Twitter and 2 Channel have revamped the significance of Yamato, largely extolling the anime text as a prognosis of the Fukushima crisis. Surrounding Yamato, those clamorous voices on the internet appear to have grown into what Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri call ‘multitude’, a social body of collaboration. Online constituents of multitudes are, though still randomly and loosely connected, gravitating to Yamato's newly discovered quality as the allegory of apocalyptic post-3/11 Japan. Whereas concrete action is yet to be taken, the internet multitudes of Yamato fans have engaged in various brainstorming conversations that concern Japan's future and its relation with nuclear technology.     

Borders of memory: affirmation and contestation over Japan’s heritage

Abstract

This essay, introducing the special issue on ‘Borders of Memory’, aims to shed light on the links between memory and heritage in contemporary Japan. It does so by examining how heritage sites serve as spaces within which collective memory is both affirmed and contested. Heritage sites enable us to survey the contours of the borders of memory that exist between different memory collectives. An analysis of South Korean and Chinese objections to the Meiji Industrial Sites shows how these heritage sites work as borders of memory, spaces where the competing collective memories of neighbouring East Asian governments and societies clash and rub up against one another. This analysis is then extended to the four articles that make up this special issue. In each case, it is the competing meanings invested in the site, and the struggle over the narrative within which it is incorporated, that results in such sites coming to be demarcated as borders of memory. Understanding these heritage sites as bordered spaces allows us to see such them as being not only where antagonistic collective memories come into contact, but also spaces through which they connect. The existence of such spaces enables the political process of articulating the stories associated with different memory collectives.     

Meiji Japan's China solution to Tokugawa Japan's China problem

The underlying concern of this article is with the function and purpose of the normative imaginary of ‘China’, Chūgoku (Zhongguo) or Chūka (Zhonghua) in the Japanese discourse up to and around the mid-nineteenth century; namely, how it was deployed to make sense of the historical situation facing the contemporaries amid the combined internal and external crises and how it structured the range of options available to them. To exemplify this, we first turn to the debate of the shape of the polity that straddled the critical decades of 1850s–1860s. The self-conscious restoration of a past political ideal was the ostensible justification of the revolutionary overhaul, but in terms of the models of polity, there existed very different versions and understandings of what past could or should be restored. In the classical conceptual language of politics, the choice was between the hōken and gunken model. While the year 1871 saw a closure that cast Meiji as a gunken revolution, the debate continued beyond and the shift of preferences from hōken to gunken needs to be explained. In arguing for Meiji as a ‘Chinese revolution’, we can further point to the surprising degree of overlap between the concerns of earlier Edo-period commentators and the actual factors of the revolution when it finally arrived. Lastly, the normative imaginary of China is shown to have served as the key mediating filter for processing and appropriating the West both before and after the Meiji revolution.     

Disquieting growth: urban space in Kawashima Yūzō's film Suzaki Paradise Red Light

This article examines how Japanese postwar cinematic texts manifest and comment upon contemporary political and economic events, and considers the usefulness of cinema for a more complete historical understanding of the period. In particular, it argues for the significance of fūzoku eiga, or ‘films of customs and manners’ by analyzing a representative text of that genre, Kawashima Yūzō's 1956 film Suzaki Paradise Red Light. Although Kawashima's film has been treated as an apolitical melodrama, a close textual analysis reveals it to be a counter-narrative to the success story of postwar economic recovery and growth that the Japanese state sought to promote. Key to this analysis is an examination of the urban space of the Suzaki neighborhood in Tokyo, as depicted in the film. Kawashima's tour of Suzaki addresses the issues of the economic stagnation within the metropolis, uneven development, and the liminal space of muen, or ‘no ties,’ which offers a brief refuge from an increasingly disciplined everyday life.     

Competing Visions of Japan’s International Engagement: Japan First vs Global Japan

ABSTRACT

The state and direction of Japan’s international engagement can best be understood as a competition between the ‘Japan first’ and ‘global Japan’ schools of thought. In light of the ever worsening security environment surrounding Japan, the gap between the Japan first school advocating a focus on the immediate needs of Japan’s territorial defence and the global Japan school arguing for more global engagement is widening. The competition between the two will continue to shape the direction of Japan’s foreign and security posture – and importantly, the global Japan school is far from winning, contrary to what Abe’s hyperactive diplomacy might suggest.     

Crisis ideology and the articulation of fascism in interwar Japan: the 1938 Thought-War Symposium

In early 1938, the newly formed Cabinet Information Division (Naikaku jōhōbu) held a closed-door Thought-War Symposium (Shisōsen kōshūkai) in Tokyo with over 100 bureaucrats, military officers, media executives and academics in attendance. While the ostensible purpose of the symposium was to discuss propaganda following Japan's full-scale invasion of China in July of 1937, the presentations had very little to do with the practical coordination of information. Rather, the symposium participants brought their specific areas of expertise to bear on elaborating the curious term ‘thought war’ (shisōsen), a term that had only recently been used with any regularity but which had become invested with critical urgency following the invasion of China.

In the conventional literature, the term ‘thought war’ is understood as marking a new modality of state propaganda as Japan moved towards a total war system. However, this reading overlooks the ideological investments in thought war discourse, as well as how ‘thought war’ inherited a multivalent sense of crisis that had crystallized around thought and culture earlier in the 1930s. In this article, I explore how the 1938 symposium reveals a combined sense of historical crisis and an urgent call for the total overhaul of Japanese state and society, a combination which, I argue, underwrote the development of fascism in Japan. I trace how three earlier discourses of crisis – the ‘Manchurian Problem’, the ‘thought problem’ and the ‘movement to clarify the kokutai’ – converged within thought war discourse, thus investing it with fascist urgency.     

Contemporary art and unconditionality: ‘the genus of art’ in the art criticism of Chiba Shigeo

This article examines art criticism of the 1980s that sought to address the context and continuity of postwar Japanese avant-garde art. The emphasis is placed on the notion of ‘the genus of art [rui to shite no bijutsu]’, which the art critic Chiba Shigeo discussed in his Gendai bijutsu itsudatsushi (1986). Chiba argued for an autonomous current of postwar Japanese art separate from Western art history but the argument has been largely overshadowed by his ostensible nihonjinron. The term ‘the genus of art’, therefore, has not yet received an adequate critical treatment. The article rephrases this notion as a call for a more inclusive definition of art designed to challenge the conditions that regulate non-Western art. Rather than simply being a nationalist polemic against Western art history from a marginalized place, Japan, ‘the genus of art’ was intended to revitalize and redefine the aims of the avant-garde within the context of ‘contemporary art’. By fleshing out the textual details of ‘the genus of art’ and situating the notion within a larger discourse that interrogated the semiotic role of ‘Japan’ in a global exhibition context, the study repositions Chiba's writing as a potential argument for unconditional acceptance, or unconditionality, as one important ethical contribution of contemporary art.     

Introduction: Kawabata Yasunari in the twenty-first century

Abstract: This introduction argues that there is a need to engage in a fresh re-reading of Kawabata Yasunari. It proposes several possible approaches, including using Kawabata as a model for understanding processes of literary canonization, a rethinking of his reception around the globe during the Cold War period, and a historicization of his work in relation to the various censorship regimes that existed in twentieth-century Japan. It also provides brief summaries of the articles contained in this special issue.     

Dandelions dancing in the snow

Abstract: This article is a translation of the keynote address delivered at the ‘Relire Kawabata au 21e siècle – modernisme et japonisme au-delà des mythes’ conference hosted by the Maison de la culture du Japon (Paris) and Université Paris Diderot-Paris 7 on 17–18 September 2014. It situates Kawabata Yasunari's late unfinished novel Tanpopo (Dandelions) within Japanese modernity and literary history, in particular drawing an array of connections between the work and the history of the rural northern mountain country of Japan.     

Japan: the contested boundaries of alien suffrage at the local level

The provision of local level electoral rights in Japan for tokubetsu eijūsha (special permanent residents) and eijūsha (permanent residents) has sparked an ongoing controversy between opponents and proponents of extending the boundaries of suffrage. Periodically igniting for over a decade, the debate has involved politicians from across the political spectrum as well as local authorities, non-governmental organizations and academic scholars, yet remains locked into a cycle in which a period of optimism is followed by inaction and stagnation. In January 2008 the leader of the main opposition Democratic Party of Japan reignited the issue once more. Against this background, the goal of this paper is to highlight and trace the way in which the mainstream debate for and against electoral rights is being played out in the public arena. In so doing this paper makes two claims. First, we need to recognize the way that certain historical–social influences emanating from the processes of state-building since 1945 influence the current debates. Second, this must combine awareness of both legal/constitutional and normative aspects, as well as a sense of intra-party and inter-party political contestation.     

‘Ek sê, heita!’: Kwaito and the construction of community

Abstract

Kwaito can be described as the new music of the new South Africa. Since its emergence over a decade ago, kwaito still blasts from minibus taxis, on the new urban commercial stations formed after media liberalisation, and on street corners from Cape Town to Johannesburg. Kwaito is young, vibrant and decidedly black. This is hardly surprising in a context where music, like everything else, is a highly racialised terrain. This article describes the emergence of kwaito, and explores community radio station, Bush Radio's, broadcasts of kwaito music, looking at how these broadcasts create a sense of community. First, kwaito's emergence within the context of South Africa's mainstream cultural industries is articulated. Then kwaito music is explored as a signifier of black identity. This article is located within a cultural studies framework, which approaches musical genres as cultural texts capable of generating multiple meanings (Grossberg, 1993).     

Japanese revisionists and the ‘Korea threat’: insights from ontological security

Abstract

This article contributes to the debate on Japanese security. Drawing on insights from ontological security, it challenges conventional understandings that China and North Korea are Japan’s main security threats. It argues that South Korea poses a powerful threat to the Japanese right-wing revisionists’ perception of Japan. The revisionists have attempted to secure Japan’s identity from the ‘Korea threat’ by labelling South Korea a ‘non-democracy’, and this tactic has been taken up by the Japanese government as well. The article concludes by pointing out that such moves could unwittingly result in the emergence of security dilemmas between the two main democracies in Northeast Asia.     

Addressing the Allied POW Issue in Japan: The Case of POW Research Network Japan

Since the mid-1990s the Japanese government has pursued reconciliation initiatives aimed at fostering understanding between Japan and former POWs. Nevertheless, the POW issue remains relatively unknown in Japan. This article describes the profile and activities of the POW Research Network Japan (POW kenkyūkai), a civil society group consisting of professional and shimin (citizen/non-professional) researchers as well as concerned citizens investigating the subject of Allied POWs in Japan. The article explores how POWRNJ participated in and contributed to the contestation of memory of the Asia-Pacific War (1931–1945) during the last decade. It describes the manner in which the group promoted its views and strived to achieve its goals. On the basis of these findings, the article identifies the kind of roles the group played, and how it mattered in the debates on Japan's wartime past.     

From Freud to funny music in films: The case of Blazing Saddles

Abstract

This article contends that music creates comedy in film in two significant ways: first, by ‘setting us up’ and confirming our understanding of purely musical, cinematic musical, and cultural musical codes in the symbolic order of film, only to play with or subvert our established responses to such codes thereafter; and second, by a reliance on age-old rhetorico-musical techniques associated with musical comedy. An analysis of selected scenes from the film Blazing Saddles, directed by Mel Brooks and released by Warner Brothers in 1974, follows, wherein such techniques of musical comedy are shown to be evident. By way of reflecting on these techniques, some thought is given to Sigmund Freud's understanding of the continuum of humour involving play, jest and jokes, within the context of his notion of the principle of economy in psychical expenditure. Accordingly, the author concludes that the political discourse of Blazing Saddles is effective precisely because it is clothed in humour.