2007
January 19th
Translating “Colonial Kitsch” and “National Tradition”: Chang Hyŏkchu’s Retelling of The Tale of Spring Fragrance (Ch’unhyang chôn)
Nayoung Aimee Kwon, Doctoral Candidate, UCLA; Visiting Researcher, Waseda University
Spring 1938. The Japanese wartime empire was expanding into China and beyond, and imperial policies in colonial Korea were fluctuating accordingly from differentiation toward assimilation, with the catchy slogan Naisen Ittai (One Body of Japan and Korea) mobilized to garner the support of Koreans for war. It was a time when Japanese was the official language in the empire, and Korean language cultural productions were increasingly censored in the colony. A highly anticipated Japanese-language theatrical adaptation of The Tale of Spring Fragrance (Ch’unhyang chon), a Korean folktale of oral “tradition,” opened to rave reviews in major metropolitan cities in Japan. The popularity of the performance ignited an encore run later the same year throughout colonial Korea, triggering a wide discourse in the metropole and the colony. The play was commissioned by Murayama Tomoyoshi the Japanese tenkosha and jack-of-all-trades and was staged by his Shinkyo Theater Troupe. The script was penned in Japanese by Chang Hyokchu, a bilingual Korean writer in the Japanese literary establishment.
In my presentation, I consider a moment of colonial “collaboration” between Korea and Japan when their literary histories converged on a much publicized spectacle performance in the Japanese language kabuki rendition of a p’ansori tale, considered the epitome of Korean “tradition.” I read the tensions between the receptions in Japan and Korea and the differences between the reproduction and consumption of the tale as trendy “colonial kitsch” and as timeless “national tradition.” By paying close attention to untranslatable gaps in these parallel nostalgic appropriations and the double bind of the translator perched in-between, I read the performance not as the embodiment of harmonious assimilation of Korea and Japan as touted by pundits, but as a “monstrous translation” performing its anxieties and breakdown.
I then turn to one of the numerous roundtable discussions inspired by the performance and featuring major cultural figures from Japan and Korea, with Chang Hyokchu again caught in the middle. I read the multiple levels of censorship at work, during the event and on the printed pages of the discussion, which become evident when two different published versions of the roundtable, one from a colonial Korea daily and the other from a metropolitan Japanese literary journal, are juxtaposed. I conclude that the roundtable, which was staged to discuss the translatability and open cultural exchange between Japan and Korea, ironically reveals the un-translatability of conflicting desires between the colonizers and the colonized, and thus enacts the utter failure of dialogue and of the vision for a utopian cosmopolitan community under uneven conditions of empire.
February 9th
Approaching Asianism through its critics: The propagation and rejection of a political concept in Taishô-Japan
Torsten Weber, Doctoral Candidate in the Department of Japanese and Korean Studies, Leiden University and German Institute for Japanese Studies
Scholarship of modern Japanese history typically dismisses the concept of Asianism (Ajiashugi) as a euphemism for expansionism and a policy of aggression, void of any significant intellectual content. Only recently have some scholars begun to pay more attention to Asianism as an intellectual concept containing a critique of prevailing political and civilisational discourse. As a result, it has increasingly been acknowledged that “the ideology itself cannot be dismissed merely as disguised imperialism” (Duara).
But what exactly did contemporary participants of the discourse understand by “Asianism”? How did the concept relate to other important concepts at the time? And what is the significance of Asianism discourse for modern Japanese history?
In my presentation I will approach these questions through the writings of nationalist and internationalist critics of Asianism during the Taishô period. In particular, I will focus on the anti-Asianist thought of Ninagawa Arata (1873-1959), the most persistent nationalist critic of Asianism, and on writings published in Daigaku Hyôron, one of the representative journals of “Taishô democracy”. In addition, I will examine how Chinese critiques of Asianism, most prominently voiced by socialist thinker Li Dazhao and the “father of the Republic”, Sun Yat-sen, can be integrated into the Japanese discourse.
By focusing on the critique of Asianism and including Chinese contributions, I aim at illustrating the diversity of thought contained in Asianism discourse as well as the far-reaching impact of the debate beyond national and intellectual borders. I will offer an interpretation of Asianism as an intellectual manifestation of resistance against both Western aggression and competing Asian nationalisms, while also considering its conflation with Japanese expansionism.
March 2nd
Adultery, Gender Equality, and the Law in Prewar Japan
Harald Fuess, Professor, Sophia University
The presentation explores how the legal framework of adultery served to construct a state-sanctioned ideal of a modern monogamous marriage and a new social and sexual order by blending legal models from abroad with Japanese customary beliefs between 1868 and 1950. The presentation will be divided into three parts: (1) the development of what one may call a modern consensus on the gender gap in adultery codes during the Meiji decades (2) the contestation of adultery in the courtroom and changes in jurisdiction (3) the ensuing revision attempts and public debates in the early twentieth century turning adultery regulation into a symbol of gender inequality and the progress of Japanese Civilization as well as problematizing male sexuality. The conclusion will address one of the riddles of Japanese gender history: the contradiction between Confucian-inspired strict moral norms and promiscuous prewar popular customs in Japan.
April 6th
What makes a good life? : Self-making through creative production among Japanese migrants in New York City
Olga Sooudi, Doctoral Candidate, Department of Anthropology, Yale University
Thousands of Japanese "lifestyle migrants" make their home today in New York City. While Japanese lifestyle migration occurs in many different places around the globe, for those who choose New York, the decision is often tied to an idea of self-making through engagement in creative or artistic work. Individuals may come to New York as artists, seeking a broader community and opportunities, or they may abandon a corporate office job to pursue their artistic goals, such as writing, art, music, or photography. Why do these individuals feel that they should leave Japan to pursue their personal dreams, and how does New York index a place of expanded creativity and opportunity to develop oneself for them? More broadly, how are practices of transnational mobility bound up with concepts of self-making and the imagination? This presentation will begin to address these questions, based on my dissertation fieldwork in New York City (2005-6) and in Japan (2006-7).
May 11th
Friendship, Solidarity and Fair Play: Gender and the Olympic Games in Twentieth Century Japan
Robin Orlansky, Doctoral Candidate, East Asian Languages and Civilizations, University of Pennsylvania
When Baron Pierre de Coubertin decided to revive the ancient Olympic Games at the end of the 19th century, his primary goal was not just to organize a large-scale international sports event, but indeed to create a better world through sport practiced without discrimination. According to Coubertin's Olympic Charter, sport is a human right, and every individual deserves to practice it in the Olympic spirit, which requires "mutual understanding with a spirit of friendship, solidarity and fair play." Beyond these idealistic aims, the Olympics have had significant, often transformative effects on the nations that participate in and/or host the event. In the case of Japan, several scholars have focused particularly on the impact of the 1964 Tokyo Olympics on the nation's post-war infrastructure and psyche. An area that has received far less attention, however, is how the Olympics have affected gender issues in Japan, both before and after 1964. Because of the heavily publicized nature of the event, there is a wealth of discourse about women's participation in the Games – discourse can be used to highlight turning points in gender ideology in Japan. My presentation, based on primarily text-based research carried out in Japan over the past year, will focus on Japanese women's participation in the Games from 1928 to the present in an effort to shed new light on discussions of gender in twentieth century Japan. The remarkable ideological and financial support received by female athletes in Japan seems to stand in stark contrast with the image of Japanese society as being highly patriarchal and imbalanced in terms of opportunities for women. I will explore this paradox using the examples of several path-breaking female Olympians in order to highlight pivotal moments in the discourse on gender in twentieth century Japan. I ultimately aim to show that while some of his goals may have proven naively optimistic, Coubertin's Olympic ideal of "fair play" has been far from lost in the case of Japanese women.
June 1st
Narrating Japan Through the “Other”: Russia and Ainu in Modern Japan’s National Identity
Alexander Bukh, JSPS Postdoctorate Fellow, Waseda University
This paper examines Japan’s national identity discourse through two narratives on two different “others”, Russia and the Ainu. It starts with analyzing the origins of modern Japan’s perceptions of Russia and examines the usage of Russia in Japan’s national identity discourse in late 1970s and 1980s. This discourse created a hierarchical binary betweeen Japan and Russia’s national characteristics that presented both of the nations as historically static and unchanging. The paper follows by arguing that one of the functions of this temporally static construction was to suppress the challenge posed by the reevaluation of Ainu history and culture in the 1970-80s to Japan's claim to the Northern Territories as an "inherent Japanese territory."
June 22nd
Contesting the Future at the 1964 Tokyo Olympic Games
Scott Smith, Doctoral Candidate, Indiana Unviersity
The 1964 Tokyo Olympics are remembered today as representing a golden era of cooperation when Japanese of all walks of life worked together and sacrificed their time, labor, and money for a chance to show a ‘new,’ Japan to the world. For some Japanese the Olympics represent a turning point in modern history, a moment in which Japan atoned for its wartime past and was once again welcomed into the international community. For others the Olympics represent rebirth—of Tokyo, rising phoenix-like from the flames of the war, and of individual prosperity and stability returning to daily life. For most Japanese of that era the Olympics were also a defining period in their personal lives, a period that has become the standard to which the present is compared. Asking elder patrons of a local bar, “What were you doing during the Tokyo Olympics?” is sure to garner stories about how good the ‘old days’ were and how much things have changed since then. In short, the Tokyo Olympics usually represent something important and something positive in popular memory.
This presentation argues that while the Games were (and still are) enormously popular, they were also a source of forgotten tension and contention. The 1964 Summer Olympics were the largest to date, and incredibly expensive. The preparations for the Games involved massive infrastructural changes that cost taxpayers billions and required some citizens to sell their land to the government while others would be forced to endure five years of continuous construction in their neighborhoods. Most importantly, the were seen as a chance to envision and present a ‘new Japan’ or a ‘future Japan,’ yet the officials responsible for organizing the Olympics and the public responsible for creating the Olympics were often at odds over what that new/future Japan would be. Re-examining the Olympics by focusing on these areas of tension and contention reveals that far from a golden era of cooperation, the period from 1959 to 1964 was one in which the Liberal Democratic Party, the Tokyo Olympic Organization Committee, and the general public struggled against each other to rewrite the past and to steer the nation toward fantastic visions of the future.
August 3rd
Translating Practices: Tea Ceremony In and Out of Japan
Kristy Surak, PhD Candidate, Department of Sociology, UCLA
How is culture used to produce nationness? How do cultural practices operate as a resource for nation-work? In this presentation I examine how cultural items and forms serve as practical resources used to make the “nation” concrete, adjudicate belonging, define the content of membership, and produce good members.
National culture is objectified culture, i.e. it exists through objectifications used to make the abstract concept “nation” concrete. Objects or practices transformed into national culture can make the nation real though symbolic representation. But, more powerfully, they can serve as edificatory sites – places where the nation is explained or inculcated. To begin to understand how culture is used as a practical category to make the nation real and consequential, I discuss three types of nation-work: symbol-work, explanation-work, and cultivation-work. This approach moves beyond a common assumption in cultural nationalism and boundaries literature that all members stand in the same relationship to what is constructed as national culture. In contrast, I examine differences in goodness-of-example (i.e., some members are better members than others) and address the prior question of how possession is attained.
The analysis is based on five years of ethnographic, interview and historical research on tea ceremony in modern Japan. Not only is tea ceremony a rich site condensing several forms of nation-work, but it also highlights the ways they may be gendered in their instantiation. First, I address how tea ceremony was historically constructed as a distinctively “Japanese” practice in a particularly gendered manner. Then, I take up a contemporary example of how tea is used to make the nation experientially real and concrete in everyday life though making better Japanese.
September 7th
Noodling around Asia: the politics of eating in Taisho era Japan
Barak Kushner, University of Cambridge
Have you ever dined on Japanese "victory cuisine"? Tasted delicacies such as Hôten (Shenyang) soup, Port Arthur Arrowroot Fry, or Karafuto cake? Maybe you missed another mellifluously labelled popular food product, Smash the Baltic Fleet Memorial Tôgô Marshmallow, probably a kid’s favorite, commemorating Admiral Tôgô Heihachirô’s stupendous naval Battle of Tsushima against Russia in 1905. Still pondering why Tanizaki Junichiro lauded Chinese cuisine but claimed it made his piss smell? If you think all Japanese cuisine is kaiseki, dainty zen meals and tranquil garden settings – think again! Tantalized to learn more about the 1909 science journal article, Excrement and Rice – Which Is More Valuable?
Why did a low class Chinese food for students and laborers gain followers in Japan and what exactly can we learn from food culture history? Japanese ramen tells an historical story different from our stereotyped assumptions of national cuisine and tastes. The Japanese colonization of Chinese food products and the remarketing of them as national Japanese dishes unlocks mysteries of Japan’s late Meiji and early Taisho era foreign communities and their influence on the development of the Japanese diet and national identity through food. The background of ramen’s history in Japan opens a path to visualize how the Japanese diet evolved and thus how Japanese society changed.
I am in the midst of writing up a history of ramen – looking at Sino-Japanese relations through food in the late 19th century and early 20th centuries. I would be eager to gain feedback for my research. It will be an academically based talk, though perhaps the content is not what would be considered traditional. Thrill to the challenge of learning about the history of cultural interaction and of having fierce dialogue about food culture and nationalism.
October 12th
The Acacia and the Poppy: Drugs and Development in Japanese Dairen, 1905-1945
Miriam Kingsberg, Doctoral Candidate in modern East Asian History, University of California at Berkeley
My presentation examines political and social outcomes of the narcotic economy of Japan`s Kwantung Leased Territory (KLT) in the early twentieth century. During the forty-year period of Japanese imperial rule, the KLT, and in particular its most important city, Dairen (now Dalian), functioned as the shipping depot and distribution nexus of the flourishing north China drug trade. This trade included not only the smoking opium popular during the nineteenth century, but also the new and deadly refined opiates of morphine and heroin. By the 1930s, the KLT, more than a mere gateway to the Chinese market, suffered from the highest rate of per capita illegal drug consumption in the world.
Although recent Japanese-language scholarship has shed light on Japan`s wartime-era narcotics policy in China, the early history and context of state-sponsored drug dealing remain largely unexplored. I seek to respond to this void in the literature with a chronological framework that spans both the pre-Manchukuo and Manchukuo eras, demonstrating a fundamental continuity of rhetoric and results across the traditional 1932 divide. On a macro level, the scope and significance of opium trafficking influenced local, regional and empire-wide decision-making and the balance of power in critical and unseen ways throughout the period. On a micro level, imperial drug policy provided the Japanese regime with new mechanisms of control over Dairen urban society (though not in the crude sense of "drugging the Chinese into submission", as contemporaneous observers and current scholars have alleged). To probe narcotics policy as a lever of social control, I analyze continuity and change in the construction of opiates, the medicalization of addiction as well as the stereotyping of the addict, and the role of race in the illegal economy.
November 16th
Hot Tempers: Firefighters, Street Violence, and Status in 19th-Century Edo
Steven Wills, Doctoral Candidate, Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures, Columbia University
In 1805, a fight between sumo wrestlers and townsman firefighters belonging to an Edo fire company called the Me-gumi escalated into a full-scale riot that left one of the firemen dead and nearly a hundred men injured. By the end of the eighteenth century, Edo’s firemen had become notorious for their violent outbursts, and while this incident was hardly the most disruptive of their frequent brawls, it occupied a special place in the popular imagination during the nineteenth century. Public storytellers immediately began recounting the tale in their performances, and elements of the story found their way onto the kabuki stage as early as the 1820s. This process of narration and adaptation culminated in 1890 with the first performance of the kabuki play commonly referred to as Me-gumi no kenka, or the “Me-gumi Brawl.”
In this presentation, I will discuss the origins of the violent culture of Edo’s firemen by placing the Me-gumi incident in the broader context of the city’s development during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This violence was one consequence of the shogunate’s efforts to shift the heavy burden of contending with Edo’s perennial fires from the warrior elite to the city’s commoners. It became increasingly clear that the authorities could not manage fire without the day laborers (tobi ninsoku) who were the core of the townsman fire brigade, yet these workers’ efforts to claim a higher status for themselves were continually rebuffed. I will demonstrate how the violent behavior of these beleaguered firemen was linked to their ambiguous place within the city’s status system. In doing so, I also hope to shed new light on questions of civil unrest and resistance to the Tokugawa regime that have largely been addressed in the context of peasant protests.
After exploring the factors that help explain why firefighter violence was so common, I will briefly consider the Me-gumi incident as a nineteenth-century cultural phenomenon. In 1890, the actor Kikugorô V won over audiences in a powerful turn as the Me-gumi boss Tatsugorô, helping to solidify the iconic image of townsmen firefighters as potent symbols of commoner masculinity at roughly the same time that the last vestiges of the Edo-period firefighting institution were being replaced by new technologies, institutional arrangements, and notions of professional discipline. The firefighters’ acts of aggression may not have helped them win a better position within the early modern status system, but they created a quasi-heroic outlaw image that lasted well into the modern period.
December 7th
Shinnyo-en and the Formulation of a New Esoteric Iconography
Pamela D. Winfield, Assistant Professor, Department of Religion and Philosophy, Meredith College
When Shingon Esoteric Buddhism entered Japan in the early ninth century, its normative influence spread rapidly throughout the Buddhist establishment. Contrary to popular perception, however, the canon of esoteric art, ritual and doctrine did not remain fixed over time, but rather divided into distinct dharma lineages that show striking evidence of dynamic change and sectarian variation even into the modern period. This article explores the innovative ways in which standard esoteric icons and mandalas were recreated, reconfigured and reimagined in Shinnyo-en, a so-called New Religious group founded in 1936 by the Shingon master and self-taught Buddhist sculptor Ito Shinjo (b. Fumiaki 1906-1989) along with his mediumistic wife Tomoji (1912-1967). By tracing the development of Shinnyo-en's eclectic yet syncretic imagery, this study focuses on the important role that religious imagery plays in legitimating institutional authority, shaping ritual performance and reinforcing new doctrinal claims in the modern period.
In some ways this discussion of Shinnyo-en's imagery is an old story, for religious groups throughout history have always created imagery to establish, advance and perpetuate their authority through art's ritualistic and didactic functions. In other ways, however, the case of Shinnyo-en is exceptional, as it allows a rare opportunity for eye-witness access to that highly intentional and vital process of sectarian identity-formation, updated by a wide variety of twenty-first century media technologies that document and disseminate its images with unprecedented speed, clarity and geographic range. As a result, this study of Shinnyo-en provides a model case study for the use of visual culture n sectarian identity-formation in modern Japan, and speaks to the power of imagery to attract and maintain over 850,000 adherents worldwide in this highly visual age.