The collaboration of ‘ghostwriting’ and literature – the case of Kawabata Yasunari

Abstract: Kawabata Yasunari is Japan's first Nobel Prize recipient for literature and thus an emblem of the modern Japanese writer, but as this essay demonstrates, this writer's career, like that of so many throughout Japan's premodern and modern history, is spanned by the curious practice of ghostwriting. Taking up the specific case of Kawabata, the article exposes a wider conflict between the modern West's notion of the original artist, underwritten by its idea of individualized creativity, and modern Japan's persistent adherence to ghostwriting's more collaborative premodern concept of creativity. Subjecting fine-grained literary historical analysis to its far-reaching theoretical consequences for the modernness of modern literature, Japanese and otherwise, this essay shows how the spectre of Kawabata's ghostwriting haunts our contemporary, and therefore possibly anachronistic, understanding of ‘modern’ literary practice.     

Japan-North Korea Relations From the North-South Summit to the Koizumi-Kim Summit

Prime Minister Koizumi's visit to Pyongyang has enabled Japan to dig itself out of an ever deepening and divisive policy rut with regard to North Korea. However, the ability of Japan to exploit the opportunities opened up by the summit still remains indeterminate. So states Christopher Hughes, senior research fellow at the Centre for the Study of Globalisation and Regionalisation, University of Warwick, UK, in the following article. Japan in the past has constructed around itself a framework of international and domestic policy constraints that have impeded and remain a latent impediment on its ability to fully engage North Korea. Hughes suggests that, Koizumi's visit to Pyongyang is a bold policy initiative worthy of praise and one which sets Japanese policy on a surer footing than at any time over the past decade. Nevertheless, Japan could still find itself as the most reluctant and least able of the trilateral partners to fully engage the North due to international constraints, domestic policy splits, and anti-North Korean sentiment in Japan.     

Changing biases in the operation of the UK's electoral system, 1950–97

The biased outcomes of recent British general elections, whereby the two main parties (Conservative and Labour) would have achieved different percentages of the seats in the House of Commons for the same percentages of the votes cast, are explored, using a method of bias decomposition developed by a New Zealand political scientist. Overall, the situation changed markedly between 1950 and 1997: the biases in the system strongly favoured the Conservatives in the 1950s and early 1960s, but Labour in 1992 and 1997. Examination of the seven components of the bias measure shows that most of these moved in Labour's favour over the 50-year period, with a major shift between 1992 and 1997 because of the greater geographical efficiency of the Labour party's vote at the latter date: reasons for this are suggested.