Change in the Spatial Dimensions of Party Conflict: The Case of Japan in the 1990s

The political landscape of Japan changed drastically in the early 1990s with new parties forming, the main government party losing power temporarily, and the traditional rival parties forming a coalition government. This article examines how the spatial dimensions of party conflict changed according to surveys of the mass public. Contrary to theoretical expectations based on the stabilizing effects of party identification, we find that the structure of public attitudes toward the parties changed considerably as the party system changed. Abrupt changes in the party system were reflected in changed cleavage patterns. Independence increased during this period and changed from being perceived as a separate dimension to being seen as part of an anti-politics-as-usual dimension.     

Stand-up comedy and the legacy of the mature vagina

This article explores the work of older female comedians who explicitly refer to their sexed bodies, and their vaginas in particular, as a playfully political discursive strategy. At its heart are a number of stand-up performances made since 2000 by Phyllis Diller, Joan Rivers and Roseanne Barr, informed and supported by their performances in a variety of other forms and media (including reality television, talk shows and auto/biographical writing). These performances draw attention to the relationship between performative utterance and visuality through the tropes of public confession and allusions to cosmetic surgery and aging genitalia. This can be risky in a genre in which staged persona, body and performance material are so closely yoked. Despite their different ages and signature practices, Diller, Rivers and Barr can be seen to be working in a professional lineage of female comedians, including Sophie Tucker, Jackie “Moms” Mabley, Belle Barth, Pearl Williams and LaWanda Page, who have foregrounded their own sexuality as aging women. In their redeployment of taboos which mark the female body as grotesque and unruly, these women expose the scopic regimes that limit how post-menopausal women are read, and thereby erased, in the public realm.     

Kawabata and cinema: the ambivalence of knowledge,medium, and influence

Abstract

Many researchers have considered the involvement of Kawabata Yasunari in cinema and the medium's possible influence on his literature. Such approaches, however, tend to assume a definition of the motion pictures as visuality or montage that then influences Kawabata instead of first considering Kawabata's own conception of cinema, his own film theory. By analyzing his writings on film, including his film criticism, short stories involving cinema, and his involvement in the film A Page of Madness, this paper outlines Kawabata's conception of cinema and argues that he developed a portrait of cinema that posed it as a challenge to identity, perception and knowledge itself. Often associated with the female body, the movies became to Kawabata both an object of fascination and a threat, something ultimately to be controlled through literature and the literary subject. What influenced his literature was then perhaps this perception of cinema as posing an epistemic crisis. It is his ambivalence towards this challenge that can serve as a key for elaborating on Kawabata's complicated location within prewar modernism.     

The masochist's masquerade: Kōno Taeko's ‘Beautiful Girl’ (Bishōjo)

Kōno Taeko is notorious for her literary masochism, which critics tend to read solely through the narrow lens of psychoanalysis. This article contends that we gain new insights into Kōno's literary life and corpus when historical contexts are also brought to bear. In reading closely ‘Bishojo’ (Beautiful Girl, 1962), a story that appeared at the same time as Kōno's most famous award-winning stories in the early 1960s, I contend that Kōno's fictional world can best be grasped with attention to two key factors: the impact of Kōno's wartime girlhood on her fiction; and, in ‘Bishōjo’ in particular, the Occupation Period (1945–1952) context, which serves as more than mere background to the story's revenge plot. Girls, or shōjo, form the core of the story and expose the disavowed shōjo at the core of protagonist Shōko's psyche. To survive, Shōko must cloak her masculine strengths in a masochistic masquerade indistinguishable from femininity itself. She threads her masochistic masquerade between two abusive men whose efforts to humiliate her cannot be separated from the national Occupation context and postwar masculinity. Finally, this essay demonstrates that Kōno's masochism functions as a literary technique for constructing subjects differently by gender in historical contexts, thereby exposing the psychic distortions that only fiction, as a light into the darkened interior world of human beings, can illuminate.     

Elizabeth von Arnim’s The Pastor’s Wife: A Reassessment

Abstract

The Pastor’s Wife (1914) may seem at first reading simply another depiction of a woman struggling for liberation in the decades following the work of Thomas Hardy and Henrik Ibsen, being the story of how Ingeborg Bullivant escapes from an English patriarchal home, only to find herself trapped in another one in Germany. The novel, however, marks a turning point in Elizabeth von Arnim’s career; it is a novel that looks back to previous themes while anticipating those to come. It demonstrates, with comedy and bitterness, themes of alienation and exile; satirizes German codes and class; and provides a lyrical Romantic vision of the natural world. It also presents the married woman as a prisoner in a way that anticipates Vera (1921). The novel can also stand alone as an underrated classic that plays an important part in the history of English literature. Published at the beginning of high modernism, it shows, unlike the work of some canonized writers of the time, a fusion of realism and modernism. This essay argues that the novel is a proto-feminist work that is radical in its portrayal of women’s experience and influenced by literary naturalism in its childbirth scenes, but pessimistic about possibilities for change. The essay shows how the novel is modernist in its depiction of the alienated experience of the city; uses nineteenth-century realism in its narrative structure and comedy; and yet is forward-looking in its use of endings. A book that begins as a comedy but ends as a tragedy, The Pastor’s Wife deserves equal recognition with the work of H. G. Wells and E. M. Forster, writers with whom von Arnim was connected and by whom she was influenced.     

佛教与日本语言文学关系的研究述评

20世纪80年代后期以来大陆佛学研究出现了一股“文化热”,将佛教作为一种文化,看做是中国传统文化的重要组成部分,研究佛教与文化千丝万缕的联系。跟随着这股潮流,有关日本文化的研究也掀起了高潮且日趋精进。据不完全统计,近20多年来发表的论文达上千篇。通过国内出版的著作和学术杂志上所发表的论文,对佛教和日本语言文字、文学方面的研究成果作分析综述,以期廓清这些领域的发展趋势和研究动态。     

简论日本战后民族主义文学

日本战后的民族主义文学表现在对侵略战争的认知态度、对日本战败的屈辱感受和右翼民族主义的复兴。日本“战后派”的作品很少反省日本发动侵略战争的责任,相反还存在有意无意弱化甚至掩盖战争“侵略本质”的倾向。以林房雄为代表的右翼作家变本加厉,民族主义思想走向极端化和系统化。随着20世纪60、70年代的经济恢复和高速发展,日本当代文坛“集体失忆”,将目光转向个人内心的不安和日常生活,形成“反抗战后”的文学潮流。20世纪80年代以来,以石原慎太郎为代表的极右作家,强调民族精神,美化侵略战争,谋求世界霸权。战后日本文学民族主义的根底是日本民族优越论。     

日本国有铁路民营化改革的绩效与经验

二战后,日本国有铁路公社在促进日本经济发展、改善国民生活水平、加速地区发展等方面发挥了重要作用。本文在分析日本国有铁路公社民营化改革的过程和绩效的基础上,总结了日本国铁改革中值得我国借鉴的几点经验,如以法律为基础、引入竞争机制、兼顾效率与公平等。     

高等教育的困境与出路——以日本专门学校制度为核心的考察

20世纪70年代,在广义高等教育的指导思想影响下,日本专门学校制度产生了,它旨在满足人们对高等教育需求量的增加及社会对多种实用型人才的需要,它的产生完善了日本高等教育体系。本文论述了日本专门学校制度产生的历史背景,分析了专门学校制度在培养适应经济社会发展的应用型人才方面的突出作用,提出了我国应借鉴日本专门学校制度的成功经验,大力发展我国的高等职业技术教育。     

中国日语教育史视阈中的张我军论

张我军主编的《日文与日语》杂志作为“民国以来国人创办的第一份有影响的日语研究期刊”,对日语语言文学学科而言,具有重大的学科史意义;张氏日语系列教材大大推进了日语在中国各阶层普及;作为一位师者,他不仅以有中国特色的日语教学法培养了一批精英之才,更以高度的社会责任感,为将日语教育引入正轨做出了自己的努力。“研究者、编者、著者、师者”四重身份的重合、互动使张我军成为中国日语教育史上具有划时代意义的教育家。