2008
January 11th
Medicine on Trial: Meiji Courts, the Popular Press, and the Limits of "State Medicine"
Susan L. Burns, Associate Professor of History and East Asian Languages, University of Chicago
In December 1883, Nishigori Takekiyo, a former samurai who had once served the lord of Nakamura domain, lodged a complaint with the Tokyo Misdemeanor Court, charging that Soma Tomotane , the son and heir of his former lord, was being unlawfully confined within the family’s mansion in Kojimachi. This was the first moment in an interlocking series of civil and criminal cases involving charges of kidnapping, libel and slander, bribery, fraud, and murder, that would not be resolved until 1894. At the heart of what would come to be called the “Soma Incident” was Nishigori’s charge that members of Tomotane’s household had invented the story that he was insane so that they could isolate him and take control of the family fortune. To this end, he claimed, they had enlisted a series of prominent doctors, including Iwasa Jun (personal physician to the Meiji emperor), Nakai Tsunejirô (director of Tokyo’s public asylum), and Sakaki Hajime (the first Professor of Psychiatry in Japan), to aid them. Before the Soma Incident was finally resolved, Yamaguchi Jun, a judge of the Tokyo Court of Appeals, would be arrested, as would Gotô Shimpei then head of the Bureau of Hygiene.
The rumors of a succession struggle within a daimyo family, which called to mind the plots of Kabuki drama, charges of shady dealings on the part of the new official and professional elite, along with hints of sexual malfeasance proved irresistible to the emergent modern press, which quickly became not only an observer but also a participant in the unfolding of the Soma Incident. Newspapers such as Yorozu Chôhô and Tokyo Nichinichi Shimbun engaged in investigative journalism, exposing Yamaguchi’s illicit meetings with Nishigori, as well as the multiple and conflicting diagnoses made by Tomotane’s many doctors. Nishigori published his own account of his involvement, with the sensational title “In a Dark World Without Gods or Buddhas,” in 1892, but it was only one of at least twenty works on the Soma Incident published in that year. A good many of these took the form of “court records” (saiban kiroku), which attempted to record word for word the drama of the various court cases.
In this presentation, I want to explore the Soma Incident as a set of reactions to the formation of a modern medical system ordered by new forms of classification and institutions of confinement and to discuss its significance for the formation of modern medicine, particularly psychiatry, within Japan. Over the course of the Soma Incident, Tokyo authorities began to reform the system of private confinement that had been created in the 1870s, attempting to create some safeguards against its abuse. Moreover, while medical reformers inside and outside of government to this point had evidenced little awareness of the rights of the ill and the disabled, the Soma Incident made possible a new consideration of the relation of the individual and the “public” that was privileged within the discourse of state medicine.
March 7th
Heretics and Heroes in Higashi Honganji: The Re-making of Religion in late Meiji
Jacques Fasan, Doctoral Candidate, Dept. of History, University of Chicago
In the minds of many, talk of Buddhism conjures images of majestic gilded temples and serene sculpted gardens, esoteric initiations, intense meditative practice in pursuit of satori, or the silent murmuring of priests reciting “Namu Amida Butsu.” As with many preconceptions, the reality is a bit more prosaic. In fact, when one surveys the history of Buddhism in early Meiji Japan, the picture is filled with as much intrigue as occurs in any NHK Edo period drama. Embezzlement, sexual affairs, heresy trials, excommunications and even assassination fill the pages of the modern history of the Higashi Honganji, or Ohtani sect, of Jōdo Shin Buddhism. The personages involved are as colorful as the events—there is a cleric who preaches complete reliance on the “other power” of Amida Buddha but who nearly starves himself to death engaging in ascetic practices, and a young priest who claims that the evil are more in need of salvation than the good, and proves his mettle by having an affair with his wife’s young nurse while she is dying of consumption. There are bar brawls among the leaders of the head temple, and a head priest who at times seems more concerned with his Gion geisha than temple affairs.
While these stories and personages are interesting in themselves, the larger goal of this presentation is to look at the political, social and doctrinal transformation of the Higashi Honganji as a way to understand the changing nature of religion in the late Meiji. With the dawn of the Meiji era, anti-Buddhist persecution and disestablishment triggered a profound crisis in the meaning and value of Buddhism as well as in the larger category of religion more broadly defined. Along with the decline in the traditional understanding of the Pure Land as a place where one goes upon death, under the influences of evolutionary thought and Christianity in particular, a new understanding of religion arose that argued for religion as solely a matter of personal experience. While religion had once denoted a wide array of particular practices and beliefs, authentic religion now became located solely within a kind of ineffable experience occurring within the individual – as outrageous, idiosyncratic or even radical as that individual may have been. This presentation will seek to understand some of the historical reasons behind this new understanding of individualized religion, and trace some of its consequences in the modern emergence of Jōdo Shin Buddhism.
April 4th
When She Stepped off the Podium: Nakajima Toshiko's _Shōen Nikki_ (1891-1901) and the Negotiation of Gender in the Diary Narrative
Mamiko Suzuki, Doctoral Candidate, Dept. of East Asian Languages and Civlizations, University of Chicago
Nakajima, or Kishida Toshiko (1864 – 1901) is most often remembered for her pioneering activity from 1882 to 1884 as one of the few female orators in the People's Rights Movement. She dazzled thousands with her refined and magnetic presence at the podium. But she lived for almost 20 more years after the movement and published regularly in those latter years, particularly as an essayist. Several of her fictional works, such as one adaptation of Edward Bulwer Lytton's _Eugene Aram_ the semi-autobiographical novel _Sankan no meika_ (A celebrated flower in the mountains), and her Chinese poetry have received some attention in English scholarship. But as a writer, her presence within Meiji literary histories has yet to be fully examined. Given the limited political and educational resources for women to write, let alone publish, in the Meiji 20s and 30s, it is no surprise that Toshiko was one of the few women writers featured along with such figures as Higuchi Ichiyo, Miyake Kaho, and Shimizu Shikin as a keishū sakka, or lady writer, in the special women writers' edition of _Bungei kurabu_ in 1895.
Toshiko's education, upbringing, and celebrity provide the background for her unique perspective on writing as a woman in the Meiji 20s and 30s. By focusing on her diaries, a text that both reflects the private concerns and undertakings of her relatively sequestered and privileged life from the mid-1880s on and the public nature of her role as the wife of a well-respected politician and a political resource and educator in her own right, I will draw out both the limitations and opportunities found in Toshiko's writing and the inseparability of the boundaries against women in politics from the narrative perspective and voice chosen by Toshiko for her diaries. That a life such as Toshiko's was rarely depicted in fiction and described from the focal point of a women writer is one reason for my focus on _Shōen nikki_. Through this analysis, I hope to further expand the ways in which to consider Meiji women, both historical and fictional. Specifically, this presentation will examine the gender of the prose style used in Toshiko's diaries, the conflicting gender roles depicted in the diary narrative, and the construction of the narrative voice.
May 9th
Tokyo Protestant Churches as Spaces for Imagining the Nation, 1880-1931
Garrett Washington, Doctoral Candidate, Dept. of History, Purdue University
The rapid diffusion of modernity throughout Japan from 1890 onward gave the new national government the means and power to reach into and affect innumerable aspects in the everyday lives of Japan's citizenry. The same forces of modernity that enabled the state's pervasiveness, however, also created the conundrums of nationalism and national identity that each imperial subject had to resolve individually. The newly centralized modern state specifically utilized gathering spaces to instill approved forms of nationalism and proper citizenship in the minds of the Japanese. These ranged from the private space of the home to the new public spaces of the school, military barracks, political assembly hall, hospital, and court to Buddhist and Shinto religious spaces. There was, however, at least one equally modern space where state rhetoric had to compete with other visions of the nation, and its frequenters left an indelible mark on Japan before and after 1945.
Before the preponderance of national militarism in 1931, the pastors, members, and passers-through of Tokyo's four largest and most influential Protestant churches formulated original strands of nationalism and national identity. The very dissimilar, Ivy League-educated pastors of these four churches implored their listeners to think about the nation and national citizenship in terms beyond those being propagated in spaces under more direct state supervision. In a period of well-regulated conformity, many of their listeners found inventive ways to influence education, journalism, literature, political theory, social reform, medicine, representative government and women's rights. Their significant contributions to modern Japan are well known. Yet scholars have not examined the impact on their public lives that these figures themselves attribute to church attendance. In my dissertation, I argue that Tokyo's Protestant churches occupied a unique physical and intellectual space in pre-war Japan and played a significant role in fostering these oft-noted alternative nationalisms and national identities. I present an analysis of the activities and discursive exchange occurring inside the Hongo, Reinanzaka, Bancho, and Fujimicho churches, their impact on attendees, and the history of the church buildings themselves.
My presentation will deal with the following themes that constitute three of the six body chapters of my dissertation: The imagination and creation of a unique new urban space pastors Ebina Danjo, Kozaki Hiromichi, and Uemura Masahisa; Pastoral discourse on the nation and national identity by these pastors and their successors; the effects, in their own words, of the church experience on selected well-studied male and female attendees.
June 13th
What's Left for the Right?
Nathaniel M. Smith, Doctoral candidate, Yale University Department of Anthropology
The term uyoku (literally "right-wing") is popularly used to refer to both Japanese rightist groups and the political ideologies they support. The paradigm of right-wing activism in Japan rests upon a constellation of ideological tenets, styles of political activism, and social characteristics that mark these groups in relation to one another, to the Japanese public, to the media, and to agents of the state. Based on extended ethnographic engagement with rightist activists, my talk will explore challenges to that paradigm amid changing standards of political engagement. I will address the following questions suggested by my talk title: First, what represents "the Left" for rightwing groups and how are across-the-aisle political relationships experienced by activists on "the Right"? Second, what are the conditions and prospects for rightwing activism in contemporary Japan, how are groups and activists negotiating social and political change, and what can it tell us about the nature of social experience in this sector of political activism?
Beyond physical enemies such as the broadly conceived "Left" and agents of the state, rightist groups also wrestle with enemies that are more ethereal, like competing interpretations of pre-war and post-war Japanese history, the diverse relationships Japan has to Asia and to United States (and by extension, to American Imperialism), and over basic disagreements about Japan's place in the world. Considering "the enemy" is in its role as an "Other" used in the constitution of the self, I will highlight ways in which images of the Left (and of Communism more generally) affected the post-war Right, often motivating unexpected associations of expediency. The "strange bedfellows" of the right wing in Japan are found in shifting linkages with religious groups, government and police forces, industry, organized crime, and at times the radical left. Whether (and how) to come to terms with those relationships has been a key concern of right-wing groups in the past several decades as they engage the public, the Left, and other groups on the Right. I will introduce several case studies that highlight how the creative transgressions of the rightwing activist paradigm are both lauded and sanctioned, and offer insight into how individual activists and groups draw and redraw both historical lineages and current social relationships in an attempt to keep their activism relevant to contemporary Japan.
July 11th
The Censor as a Music Critic: Ogawa Chikagoro and popular music censorship before 1945
Hiromu Nagahara, Doctoral Candidate, Dept of History, Harvard University
In the first years of the Showa era, record companies like Columbia and Victor began producing an unprecedented number of phonograph records featuring Japanese popular songs. Along with sound film (“talkies”), mass journals, and radio, these records formed a growing web of mass entertainment media that was made available to the Japanese consumers, who were becoming increasingly eager and able to afford them.
With the revision of the Publication Law in 1934, however, these songs were enmeshed in another, more ominous kind of web—the vaunted censorship apparatus of the Home Ministry’s Criminal Affairs Bureau, which already controlled a wide range of media, from newspaper to film. In the same year, Ogawa Chikagorō was selected to head the Bureau’s newly created Record Censorship Room, a position he occupied for the following decade. During that time, Ogawa left an impressive number of writings, both public and internal, that gives us valuable insight into the inner workings of popular song censorship under the prewar and wartime state.
In this presentation, I will use Ogawa’s writings to highlight the logic and motives behind the censorship conducted by the Home Ministry, which, along with the activities of its infamous Special Higher Police (Tokkō), has often been cited as one of the prime examples of the growing militarization of Japanese society and the extensive “thought control” that went along with it. In particular, I will assess Ogawa’s activities and thoughts in relation to that of contemporary critics of popular songs and entertainment media outside the state, including music critics, social researchers, and journalists. By doing so, this presentation seeks to underscore the extent to which state policies regarding censorship were under the influence of external debates and to explore the possibility that government officials were drawn into those discussions as participants.
August 1st
Embracing the Embarrassing: Japanese Governmental Policies towards the Anime Industry
Kukhee Choo, Doctoral Candidate, University of Tokyo
Popular culture texts such as manga and anime emerged as powerful entertainment media for the Japanese during the postwar period. Artists such as Tezuka Osamu set the grounds for the manga and anime industry that Japan now boasts in the global market. During the formative postwar years of this industry, which is now embraced by the Japanese government under the title “Content Industry”, manga and anime were not considered a part of ‘valid’ art form of Japan culture. Considering such history, the current, and rather abrupt, shift in focus by the Japanese government to support the Content industry proposes a vital exploration into the lineage of Japanese cultural policies from the Meiji period, the dawn of modernization, to the current day post-bubble era.
Japanese traditional arts were once considered backwards in early Meiji, yet rediscovered under the gratification for western audience. Though postwar Japan witnessed a humbling scale of cultural promotion after the defeat, which introspectively focused on preserving domestic artifacts, in year 2000, the Japanese government once again embraced a culture once deserted and launched the largest economic based cultural policy in Japanese history. Japanese manga and anime have been considered ‘vulgar’ and was never incorporated into the government official’s sensibility until the late 1990s.
By examining the history of Japanese cultural policies in relation to the west, my presentation will attempt to bridge the seemingly abrupt gap that appears along the latest decision for the Content Industry. The self-perpetuating negotiation of Japanese identity in relations to the west manifests itself through the current governmental support, and it is pertinent to analyze the overarching cultural policies in order to better grasp how the Japanese view and construct their positions in the global sphere.
September 5th
Yasuoka Shôtarô and the Histories of Shôwa
Kendall Heitzman, PhD Candidate, East Asian Languages and Literatures, Yale University
In the waning days of the Shôwa era (1926-1989), the Akutagawa Award-winning writer Yasuoka Shôtarô published the three-volume Boku no Shôwa-shi (My Shôwa History), an autobiography-cum-history of the period that had encompassed Yasuoka’s entire personal memory. Beginning with his earliest recollection, the public mourning for the death of the Taishô Emperor, Yasuoka presents a history of Shôwa in which the present is always obscured--and the future is always prefigured--by the past. It is a history in which the “facts” of received history are often undermined by individual experience, and clear only in retrospect, if at all; assassinations and wars are shrouded in rumors and theories that never completely unravel, and the postwar is declared over so many times that it surely persists.
Like many of Yasuoka’s previous works, this is not easily categorized as literature or history, as fiction or non-fiction. Yasuoka’s narrative interacts with those of other tellers of Shôwa, such as professional historians, cultural and literary critics, and amateur jibunshi writers of the 1980s. At the same time, the work is refracted through the lens of collective memory and the media through which such memory is brought into focus: novels (including his own), films foreign and domestic, and the “great events” to which those who experienced them inevitably return.
Boku no Shôwa-shi raises questions regarding the claims to truth of history and literature, the boundaries of individual and collective memory, and the tension between individual, national, and global conceptions of “history” in all senses of the word. This presentation will begin to address these very large issues as they relate to this singular work.
October 3rd
Museal Hauntings: Image and Affect at the Yûshûkan and Shôwakan
Franz Hofer, PhD Candidate, Cornell University
In his Poetics, Aristotle passed on an awareness of the artificial nature of narrative with his famous remark that "the plot is the mimesis of a praxis." More recently, scholars such as Hayden White and Paul Ricoeur have drawn attention to a similar aesthetic dynamic at work in the production of versions of past events. In the wake of this interrogation of the status of historical narrative as literary artefact, theorists and practitioners of history are beginning to develop an understanding of the dynamics of poesis and aesthesis as they operate in the visual realm of representations of the past. As part of this increasing interest in visuality as it pertains to historiography, I would like to consider how the images arrayed within the museum generate an affective response on the part of the spectator. The museum presents a particularly fruitful means through which to think about empathic and affective response in that it incorporates image, text, and atmospherics such as sound and lighting into a spatially organized narrative which itself posits a version, or "image," of the past. How do images – photographs, works of art, graphic design, film, television, manga, and the like – function in the poesis of this overarching image of the past on display in the museum? That is, why are certain images and installations selected and subsequently installed in a particular order to engender a particular effect?
What is more, the walls of the museum are eminently permeable, admitting of debates over what image of "Japan" vis-à-vis the antecedents and outcome of the Asia-Pacific War educators, curators, politicians, artists, filmmakers, scholars, and others active in the sphere of cultural production will bequeath to future generations. Two museums in central Tokyo offer an interesting perspective from which to consider these debates: the Yūshūkan on the grounds of Yasukuni Shrine, and the Shōwakan located nearby in the shadow of the Imperial Palace. Both of these sites are permeated by the spectral presences of the dead as well as of the living. Not only is the memory of heroic death and sacrifice conjured up by the visual narrative in each respective museum. The visitor to these museums also encounters the charge of recent and ongoing debates surrounding war responsibility, historical revisionism and the textbook controversy as manifested in such works as Kobayashi Yoshinori’s widely read Sensōron (On War), as well as what might be termed the "infinite postponement of atonement" popular among certain segments of Japanese society and most forcefully articulated in Katō Norihiro’s Haisengōron (Defeat and the Postwar).
The Yūshūkan and the Shōwakan underscore the stakes of this contestation over the shaping of contemporary historical imaginings. The poesis of visual narrative in the museum recalls Aristotle's formulation, but with a novel twist: the plot is less the mimesis of a praxis than it is the poesis of memory which attempts to position the museum-goer as a member of a particular ethnicity or community.
November 14th
Cultivating Possession and a Model for Japanese Silk in Thailand
Lisa Onaga, PhD Candidate, Science & Technology Studies, Cornell University
In this paper, I analyze how the dispatch of Japanese silk experts to Thailand signifies the importance of science and technology for countries vested in taking a certain place on the global stage. The symbolic and actual work produced through the creation of a model Japanese sericulture apparatus not only highlighted Japanese interests in Thailand¹s sovereignty, but it also stood as a dual testing ground for improving Japanese silk production and investigating the basic principles of what would be called Mendelian inheritance, or genetics.
Between 1902 and 1912, about fifteen Japanese sericulture experts were hired by the Thai government under King Chulalongkorn (Rama V) to teach, organize, and bolster silk production in the northeastern region between Bangkok and Korat. Strongly urged by the first Japanese resident ambassador to Thailand at the time, Inagaki Manjiro, the stimulation of "modern" (i.e., Japanese-style) silk works came to be viewed as a geopolitical necessity for the protection of Thailand¹s independence, especially from the encroachment of the French in neighboring Vietnam. Agricultural scientist Toyama Kametaro (1868-1918) was to lead the project.
One reason for failure of the Japanese-designed model for sericulture in Thailand was said to lie in Toyama¹s goal to "improve" the Thai silkworm. This rested upon a cross between Japanese and Thai silkworm varieties that would result in hybrids bearing the disease-resistance and environmental acclimation of the Thai larvae and the commercially viable qualities of Japanese silk cocoons. Rearing enough Japanese silkworms in Thailand was a constant challenge, and the breeding project was eventually abandoned. Toyama¹s work, however, soon led to a ground-breaking international announcement in 1906, one year after he returned from Thailand: silkworm heredity is also governed by the principles of Mendelian inheritance. These findings would lead to a total overhaul of the business and practice of Japanese silkworm breeding by 1911.
Toyama's assignment in Thailand was hardly an anomalous or negligible disruption to his career. But, how did he manage his obligations as a contractor for the Thai government and as a Japanese state scientist? Moreover, how may his experience in Thailand have granted him license to proffer unique expertise on sericulture upon his return to Japan? In the name of improvement, continuity in Toyama¹s breeding studies and the burgeoning science of genetics, as seen through his government, scientific, and public writings, provide a lens through which to examine the space in which the possession of Japanese scientific knowledge is both demonstrated and cultivated.
December 5th
Toyotomi Hideyoshi as World War II Hero: Yomiuri shimbun and Yoshikawa Eiji Rewrite the Taikô for the Sake of the Nation
Susan Westhafer Furukawa, PhD Candidate, Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures, Indiana University
The meteoric rise to power and equally dramatic fall from grace of Toyotomi Hideyoshi, the great military and civil leader who helped unify Japan at the end of the sixteenth century, have made him one of Japan’s most popular historical figures. Even today, Hideyoshi is remembered as the loyal vassal who warmed his lord Oda Nobunaga’s shoes in the breast of his kimono and who organized hundreds of men to repair Oda’s castle wall in three days. This man who showed great ingenuity and perseverance on his way to becoming the ruler of the realm is also remembered for the ruthless violence he perpetrated against both friend and foe at the end of his career.
Varying accounts of his colorful life are often the basis for television dramas and historical novels, which “re-write” the history surrounding his rise and fall in an attempt to redefine the Japanese national discourse, particularly during World War II and the postwar period. Nowhere is this more evident than in the multiple “new” rewritings of Oze Hoan’s 1625 biography Taikôki (The Records of Toyotomi Hideyoshi), such as Yoshikawa Eiji’s Shinsho Taikôki (The new records of Toyotomi Hideyoshi, 1950) and Shiba Ryôtarô’s Shinshi Taikôki (The new historical record of Toyotomi Hideyoshi, 1973).
Not long after Yoshikawa Eiji began serializing his Shinsho Taikôki, which ran in the Yomiuri newspaper from January 1, 1939 until August 23, 1945, the paper hosted a round-table discussion of leading critics, historians, and military men of the day called “Taikô wo kataru” (Let’s talk about Toyotomi Hideyoshi). This discussion became the basis for a series of nineteen articles published by the paper. With titles like “Hideyoshi, Japan’s Collective Hero” and “War and the Problem of Inadequate Provisions,” these articles were part history lesson, part blatant propaganda—the link between Hideyoshi and the newspaper’s support for the war is unmistakable. This presentation will consider Yoshikawa Eiji’s Shinsho Taikôki and the manipulation of Hideyoshi’s image during World War II, showing how articles printed immediately before and during the serialization of this novel position Yoshikawa’s text within Japan’s war propaganda machine and considering how Yoshikawa (like other popular fiction writers at the time) was implicated in this process by the type of Hideyoshi he created.