2011
January 7th
The Early Asian Games and Predecessors (1913-1978): Sport and Media Orchestration between Transnational Experience and Representations of the Nation
Stefan Hübner, Research Associate and PhD Candidate Intercultural Humanities (History), Jacobs University Bremen
The Asian Games can look back upon a history of almost a century. Their origins can be found in the Far Easter Championship Games, established by American YMCA members in 1913. After the Second World War Indian International Olympic Committee member Guru Dutt Sondhi spoke up for establishing a new sports organization, this time open to all Asian countries. Having grown in size and importance since the First Asian Games (New Delhi 1951), the Games are now the second largest international sports event in the world.
This paper covers mainly the first chapter of my dissertation, which will deal with the Far Eastern Championship Games. After the first Games, during the 1913 Manila Carnival, they steadily grew in size and were not only the oldest regional sports event, but also remained the largest one until their dissolution in 1934. Until then they were held ten times, with primarily athletes from Japan, the Philippines and China (including overseas Chinese) participating.
I will focus on the cultural history of the Games, especially on their impact on nationalism and on Pan-Asian ideas, based on the analysis of discourses in the media, the performance of the Games and the behaviour of participants. I consider the Games to be public sites in which political as well as cultural questions were dealt with. On the one hand, the Games were meant to foster a ‘regional’ identity and to spread friendship between peoples. This was based on the ‘Olympic Spirit’ as well as the YMCA's attempts to spread ideas of ‘Muscular Christianity’. On the other hand, the Games were part of the nation building and ‘modernization’ projects of individual Asian societies, helping not only to promote a national identity, but also to create healthier people and to gain international prestige. The nation - including its strength and ‘modernization success’ - could be performed not only in the opening ceremony, but also via architecture, trophies, cultural events and the attendance of leading politicians or - in case of Japan - members of the royal family. The competition against people from other nations (not only in the stadium) also served to create nationalism and - in case of victories – sometimes feelings of superiority. Japan's attempts to become the dominant power in East Asia, the Philippine's struggle for independence and China's unification process obviously also influenced the Games.
February 3rd
Blooming Students Middle-class: The Red Gate Consumption Cooperative and Student Life at Todai
Jamyung Choi, PhD Candidate, History, University of Pennsylvania
This paper examines the Red Gate Student Consumption Cooperative (akamon gakusei shōhikumiai, 1928-1940) at Tokyo Imperial University—a branch of the Tokyo University Student Consumption Cooperative led by Kagawa Toyohiko and Abe Isoo—in the context of Japan’s middle-class politics. As middle-class life became a common aspiration in late Meiji Japan, consumption cooperatives, which lowered prices through collective purchase directly from producers, surfaced as a tool to promote a middle-class standard of living.
Exploring the Red Gate Student Consumption Cooperative, I will argue three points. First, I will reconceptualize Todai collegiate society as a life community rather than simply an academic community by demonstrating that consumption of “middle-class” commodities (such as suits), along with education, leisure life, and employment, was a key part of the agenda. In so doing, I will characterize Todai collegiate society as a critical leap board toward middle-class status in interwar and wartime Japan. Second, I will contend that the Red Gate Student Consumption Cooperative promoted middle-class culture among students despite its leftist predilection. Their activities to provide commodities cheaply did not diverge from more modest public professionals like Kagawa Toyohiko who wanted to promote middle-class consumer culture. Third, I will reconceptualize the wartime period as less a “dark valley” than a boon to middle class culture. The Red Gate Student Consumption Cooperative prospered throughout the 1930s as students sought a buffer against wartime inflation. Its dissolution in 1940 did not mean the end of cooperative movements. The nationwide delivery system in wartime Japan marked the culmination of cooperative movements.
March 4th
Representations of Censorship and Propaganda, Japanism and Pan-Asianism in Militarist Japan: Visual Indoctrination in Shashin Shūhō, 1938-1945
Judit Erika Magyar, Waseda University, GSAPS, PhD research in International Studies
Governmental repression, exploitation of the population, harsh laws, violation of civil rights, rising militarism and aggressive imperialism are the trademarks of the period above. Thought control - highly prevalent at the time - was facilitated through The Peace Preservation Law of 1925 (revisions in 1928 and 1941) that meant to tighten the governmental grip on individual, free thinking. Similar techniques were employed by Nazi Germany, Stalinist Russia and Maoist China. Government propaganda of this kind, - paired with media oppression - served as a powerful tool that educated the people of Japan about how to become model citizens, how to represent the proper “Yamato” spirit and how to achieve ultimate self-sacrifice. The manipulation of public sentiment resulted in nearly everyone enthusiastically supporting the war effort. Many scholars argue whether this was due to sociocultural reasons or due to government directives and laws, or police repression. However, undeniably, all of them played a significant part. Direct censorship (prepublication) and indirect censorship (postpublication) were the lieu of the day which relied on administrative management rather than on criminal trials.
Shashin Shūhō was published between 16th February 1938 and 11th July 1945 by the Cabinet Information Division (内閣情報部, Naikaku Jōhōbu) with the aim of educating the nation about government policy, feeding into the war effort, propagating total war and grooming the Japanese population toward ultimate self-sacrifice. The Division was created in September 1937 and then expanded into the Cabinet Information Bureau in the late 1940. The goal of this agency was to guide the thoughts of newspapermen into the “proper” channels and to provide them with the “correct data”. Hence, Shashin Shūhō came to life in order to influence other magazines and provide “good” media that aimed at helping to achieve the success of government policies at grassroots levels, such as for example garnering domestic support for the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere.
April 21st
Last Try for Utopia: Sex, Gender, and Eros Behind the University Barricades, 1968-69
Chelsea Szendi Schieder, Columbia University / EALAC, Ph.D. Candidate in Modern Japanese History
In the 1960s, an unprecedented number of men and women in Japan, and around the world, participated in higher education. Activism by a significant number of these students reached a fever pitch in the late 1960s. The furor of nation-wide student protests in Japan shared key features with unrest in other developed nations: the tactics included campus protests and urban street actions; the inspirations were postcolonial national struggles. Similarly to many other cases, however, the student movement in Japan failed to ignite labor and other segments in society, and activism eventually relinquished the streets. Single-issue movements turned to righting specific social injustices, and demands for wholesale revolution became the province of an extremist minority.
To tease out this transition in popular activism in the Japanese case, I focus on the issue of gender in the student movement of the late 1960s in Japan. As tertiary education became a mass phenomenon, more women were active in student life at even the most prestigious and traditionally male institutions. Female students also emerged in several critical roles as activists, although their uneasy relationship with their male colleagues and society in general fed into the more narrowly focused women’s lib movement of the 1970s. Throughout the rise and fall of the student movement, the mass media pounced upon female student activists, portraying them by turns as martyrs, manipulators, and femme fatales. As the movement disintegrated, the faces of extremist violence in postwar Japan were often female, another trend with global echoes.
In this presentation, I will introduce materials that show the importance of female participation in the Japanese student movement. This is not to imply that the student movement began to formulate a real response to the issues confronting women in Japanese society. Nor to suggest that these elite students had anything more than an inchoate analysis of how the modes of production and reproduction in their society really operated. The student barricades were no utopia; they were not insulated from the sexism and other prejudices of Japanese society. But they also allowed many young men and women a space in which they could imagine alternative forms of existing and relating, both to each other and to the world. In many ways, the barricades represented a last try for utopia, the fleeting successes and shocking failures of which haunt contemporary Japan.
May 6th
What About Your Friends? Hirabayashi Taiko’s Critical Biographies of Hayashi Fumiko and Miyamoto Yuriko
Joanna Sturiano, Ph.D. Candidate, Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures, Stanford University
Hirabayashi Taiko (1905-1972), best known for her works of proletarian literature and “women’s writing” (joryû bungaku), published criticism on the works of her literary peers regularly throughout her career. Among these critical writings, she most prolifically addressed two writers in particular: Hayashi Fumiko (1903?-1951) and Miyamoto Yuriko (1899-1951), each of whom would become the subject of an eponymous critical biography by Hirabayashi later in her career. “Hayashi Fumiko” was published in 1969, and “Miyamoto Yuriko,” Hirabayashi’s last work, was published posthumously in 1972.
Hirabayashi offered bold social critique and frank, realistic portrayals of the lives of women in her literature. In her two critical biographies she utilized those modes of literary writing, further incorporating her personal perspectives as friend and rival to Hayashi and Miyamoto, respectively. In this presentation I examine and compare Hirabayashi’s critical biographies of Hayashi and Miyamoto, asking how Hirabayashi came to write about these two particular authors using the format of critical biography, in what ways she selectively drew from her personal relationships with each of her two subjects in crafting these critical texts, and what significance we might draw from the appearance of these two works late in Hirabayashi’s career, almost two decades after the year Hayashi and Miyamoto both died.
June 3rd
Entertaining Japan: Japan’s Postwar Entertainment Broadcasting and the Discourse of Media Responsibility
Seong Un Kim, Ph.D. Candidate, History, University of Chicago
Since the allied occupation authority seized the entire Japanese broadcasting apparatus and introduced new types of entertainment features, entertainment programs have played a crucial role in the history of postwar Japanese broadcasting. Especially after 1951, when commercial stations were launched and multiple broadcasting companies started competing with each other to obtain larger audience, broadcasting increasingly focused on how large an audience it could gather in order to increase profits, which led to a growing emphasis on entertainment programs. The advent of television broadcasting in 1953 greatly intensified this tendency to “more entertainment and less information.” From this point on, the “vulgar” entertainment on both radio and television became a contested site in which various social groups—the government, political parties, the broadcasting community, educators, parents, and the audience—articulated their own versions of how to build desirable broadcasting in Japan.
In this presentation, I trace the emergence and the development of radio and television entertainment in the first two decades of the postwar period with regard to the interaction among the state, the civil society and the broadcasting community. As the criticism of “vulgar entertainment” increased, the Japanese government capitalized on this opportunity and made an attempt to revise the Broadcasting Law in order to expand the authority of The Ministry of Posts and Telecommunications (MPT) over NHK and the commercial networks. In response to this state call for “healthy” broadcasting, NHK and the commercial stations advocated the “independence of the broadcasting,” and made it clear they would deal with this issue with their own terms. Parents groups intensely discussed the “evil” influence of television broadcasting upon children. In the meantime, intellectuals like Ōya Sōichi also took part in this discussion of media ethics. Ōya came up with the theory of the “hundred million idiots,” (ichioku sōhakuchikaron) through which he condemned television broadcasting for turning the entire Japanese population towards stupidity.
Focusing on this discussion between various social forces on the issue of “vulgar entertainment” in the formative years of postwar Japanese broadcasting, I hope to find out how power, struggle and negotiations played out in the social discussion of democracy and ethics in broadcasting, and to reconsider the significance of broadcast media in the social life of Japanese people during the first two decades of the postwar period.
July 1st
Planning a Miracle: The Institute of Pacific Relations and Planning for Postwar Japan
Dayna Barnes, Ph.D. Candidate, International History, London School of Economics; Adjunct Professor, University of San Francisco
During the Second World War, the United States faced the challenge of creating sound and useful policy for the treatment of an enemy nation. In order that Japan would never again threaten international stability, government bureaucrats, area specialists and political leaders spent the war years developing plans to rebuild Japan as a peaceful nation and an ally of the United States. The postwar occupation which grew out of these plans is remembered as a remarkable success, measured by stability, economic growth and strength of the US-Japan relationship and has been used as a model for later military interventions.
The policy for this massive undertaking was created over a long deliberative period, during which time a few early think tanks had significant impact in the planning process. This paper will address the role played by one such organization, the Institute of Pacific Relations, in creating a concerted Allied policy in dealing with Japan. Bureaucrats in charge of American foreign policy relied on information and expertise from outside the government to form their views. Specialist research organizations lept to fill gaps in official expertise, providing research products informed by specific points of view represented by the institution. By providing significant and accessible information, through personal networks between IPR members and policymakers, and by creating space for officials and private experts from the business and scholarly communities to discuss ideas, the fingerprints of the IPR are apparent in the plans and aims with which America and the Allies embarked on the project of radically reshaping defeated Japan.
August 5th
State Relief Policy, Child Welfare Reform, and Women's Calls for Motherhood Protection in Early Twentieth Century Japan
Yuko Yokotsuka Kimura, Ph.D. Candidate, History, University of California, Berkeley; International Scholar, Faculty of Arts, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven
In early twentieth century Japan, those concerned with the welfare of children and mothers often discussed international trends in social legislation. Publicly-funded economic aid to mothers, widely adopted in Western societies, attracted their attention as a measure to protect children as well as mothers. With this in mind, by the 1920s, the Japanese policy discussants---made up of government officials in the Home Ministry, social work experts, and female social reformers---began to consider whether their society also needed such legislation. The cause of public support for mothers, or “motherhood protection,” appealed especially to reform-minded women. In 1918, the imported idea sparked a heated debate among four women activists. Two of them, Hiratsuka Raicho and Yamada Waka, actively supported the “motherhood protection” solution, opposing Yosano Akiko, who believed that all women should be able to be gainfully employed and make a living without depending either on male breadwinners or on the state.
The women advocates of motherhood protection not only challenged the alternative prescription for the improvement of women’s economic status presented by Yosano, but also the pre-existing relief policy approved by Home Ministry officials. In the early twentieth century, Japanese male social policymakers and their advisers in social work circles carefully studied child-protection programs favored by different Western nations. Despite their interest in Euro-American standards of child welfare, however, they were not ready to form an alliance with the female activists. This presentation aims to show that public assistance to poor mothers was at odds with some of the basic values that had been shaping Japanese relief policies during the first two decades of the twentieth century, and thus Japanese officials and relief experts were not necessarily receptive to the cause of motherhood protection. Ultimately committed to the national slogan of “making the nation wealthy and strengthening the military,” they emphasized the prevention of poverty as well as the increase of economic productivity in each household. Recipients of public relief had to be strictly restricted to those without any family members and relatives to turn to and physically unable to work. In the relief policy discourse, children were regarded as unfit for gainful employment but mothers were not. It was only after Japanese child-protection workers became acquainted with the Western idea that mothers’ nurture was indispensable to children’s well-being and proper development that they began to consider the need for the different treatment of the female and male poor in their welfare policy.
September 2nd
Cinematic Rorschach Test: Incoherence and Fetishism in the Minor Film Fandom of Inagaki Taruho, Shibusawa Tatsuhiko and Mishima Yukio
Ryan Cook, Ph.D. Candidate, Yale University, Film Studies and Japanese Literature; Visiting Researcher, Waseda University
The transition of Japanese cinema at the end of the 1950s is a familiar story of mass commercial decline and of new waves, of political shifts and “movements,” and of changing critical conceptions of what cinema itself should be, with new formulas for the proportion of “actuality” to film language and expression. The test of these well-rehearsed historical narratives is to be found in what I cautiously call the “minor literature” of this cinematic turning point. This paper examines the writing of three such minor literary film fans – Inagaki Taruho, Mishima Yukio, and Shibusawa Tatsuhiko – whose contributions were essentially estranged from movements, uniquely semiotically wired, “primitivist” or otherwise outdated, and fetishistic.
These writers are also set apart by the fact that they belong to the so-called pre-war or wartime generations in contrast to the proper postwar generation who came of age in a democratic Japan. Taruho, who was born in 1900 and first made his name as a prewar literary modernist, had a tendency to revisit the past, and the operative concept in his film writing is “kotomukei,” an approximate equivalent of “nonsense” with a nuance of incoherence. This was the quality of the disjointed misemono silent films remembered from his youth. However, to recall these films was not merely to project backward; these recollections were part of an ongoing postwar rewriting and a rhetoric on behalf of something like a cinematic ontology. Mishima also wrote of his affection for the “kotomukei” quality of earlier fantastical adventure films (conceivably borrowing from Taruho) in contrast to his disdain for the naturalism of present-day melodramas in the 1950s. And Shibusawa, translator of Sade and collector of decadent specimens from European art history and literature, drew inspiration from surrealism and engaged the prewar term “photogénie” to promote cinema’s capabilities to bypass logical thought and reason and to put the “irrational” into direct expression.
In a moment of change and reinvention, these writers thus incongruously emphasized prior cinematic modes that turned away from a critical semiotics of engagement. In other words, they promoted the power of cinema to evade or trouble “sense,” particularly in the form of coherence. What I call their minor status is itself an expression of incoherence, and of individual fetishism which overvalued the role of the cinephile “subject” in “creating” a film while at the same time revealing the conditions of this authorship to be arbitrary, an unreasonable form of coherence that confessed its own nonsense (kotomukei). I propose that such minor positions alter the established cinematic landscape of the 1960s, especially with respect to the diversity of practice and the expectations of film movement spectators for whom cinema and liberation were equally elusive ideals.
October 6th
Disciplining Complex Natures in the Ogasawara Islands
Colin Tyner, Ph.D candidate, Department of History, University of California, Santa Cruz
After almost a decade of campaigning, the Ogasawara Islands have become one of the newest members of Japan's growing list of UNESCO World Heritage sites. Despite its branding as the "Galapagos of the Orient” (Tôyô no Gorapagusu), the islands’ inclusion in the list was a drawn out process. One thing that undermined the islands' efforts for inclusion until June 2011 was that endemic species of flora and fauna on the islands had a lot of unwanted company, having played host to a substantial resident population of “invasive species” (gairaishuseibutsu). Remarkably, many of these “invasives” were introduced during a sustained period of large-scale agriculture during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. From the mid-1880s, large numbers of species were introduced to the islands through successive waves of Japanese settlement and government-initiated projects to develop the islands through industrial agriculture.
This presentation considers how Japanese colonizers from the 1880s to the 1930s attempted to make the Ogasawara Islands into a disciplined instrument of production through the enrollment of species from elsewhere. These nonhuman partners enrolled in the making and maintenance of the agricultural system included such things as potentially invasive plants and animals. The Japanese state and its human collaborators powered the agricultural system not only by human work but also through a series of nonhuman partnerships, which acted through a logic and energy that humans did not fully command -- or understand. Illustrating some of the challenges of enrolling these nonhuman partners highlights some of the workplace hazards that the stake-holders in the islands’ agricultural landscape had when delegating work to things that could not be easily reasoned with, browbeaten, or terrified.
November 4th
The Ones Who Leave: The Alien Land Law of 1920 and the Japanese American Family Drama
Andrew Leong, Ph.D. Candidate, Department of Comparative Literature, UC Berkeley
The California Alien Land Law of 1920 prohibited “aliens ineligible for citizenship” from owning land or holding land in guardianship for children with citizenship. In addition to immediate economic damage, the law also caused massive shifts in patrilineal lines of authority and inheritance in Japanese American agricultural families. Most historical records do not speak directly to the domestic and emotional fallout of the law, but these topics were a central focus for numerous works of literature produced by Japanese living and writing in the United States.
Although most of these works focus on the period after the law, Nagahara Hideaki’s play, “The Ones Who Leave” (Sariyukumono, 1928) is notable for being set in “the year before the passage of the Alien Land Law.” Nagahara’s play suggests that the grounds for fragmentation of patrilineal inheritance and authority were already in place well before 1920. Through explorations of scandalous subjects such as spousal abandonment, pre- and extra-marital affairs, male impotence, and homoerotic attraction, “The Ones Who Leave” presents the phenomenon of iede (lit. leaving the household) as a pervasive and inevitable condition, rather than a rare anomaly.
The destruction of patrilineal lines of authority and inheritance also mirror a series of anxieties about the preservation of history and the future of Japanese-language literature in the United States. In “The Ones Who Leave,” characters who are unable to leave behind children or land hold out a desire for literary or artistic fulfillment, but these desires are marked for failure through their association with impotence and non-generative homoeroticism.
December 9th
Yumeji as Brand: Takehisa Yumeji’s Images of Beauties in the Early Twentieth Century Japanese Art Context
Nozomi Naoi, Ph.D. Candidate, History of Art & Architecture, Harvard University; Visiting Researcher, Waseda University
The turn of the twentieth century gave way to a new media culture in modern Japan that transformed the woodcut medium from its ‘floating world’ legacy of the previous century into a means of popular culture and avant-garde pictorialism. The graphic works by the modern Japanese artist Takehisa Yumeji (1884-1934) serve as a fulcrum point at which artistic, socio-historical, literary, and commercial spheres overlap in early twentieth century Japan. In response to the establishment of an official government-sponsored system of art production and exhibition and the newly developing media culture, the print media both served as a catalyst for the emergence of a collective popular culture and as an alternative production for avant-garde artists.
In particular, images of beauties, or bijin-ga, occupy a crucial part in the new media spheres and respond to the new social types of women through figures that resonate with the broader twentieth century context. Yumeji’s well-known bijin-ga, even referred to as Yumeji-style beauties (Yumeji-shiki bijin), played a crucial role in magazines and novels targeted towards a new demographic of female readership. His bijin-ga display a distinct modern type of beauty that inspired the realm of commercial design, marking a shift to an active female involvement in shaping popular culture.
Yumeji’s bijin-ga achieved greater circulation and a higher degree of identifiability in the socio-historical context of the growth of female readership and consumerism. His reception among this new demographic deserves further exploration that will provide a basis for examining the rise of a new media environment that both utilized and embraced the shifting status of the reproducible arts as both a medium for artistic production and popular consumption throughout Japan’s development as a modern nation.