2012

January 12th

Privacy and Fiction: A lexicon of the Utage no ato trial, 1961-1964

David Boyd, Department of Contemporary Literary Studies, University of Tokyo

In 1961, retired politician Arita Hachirō filed a complaint against popular novelist Mishima Yukio, his publisher Satō Ryōichi, and the publishing company Shinchōsha. Arita claimed that Mishima’s sensational novel Utage no ato (After the Banquet, 1960) had violated his privacy, since much of its story was indisputably based on Arita’s life. In the ensuing Tokyo District Court trial, which was Japan’s first test of the right to privacy, Mishima and his co-defendants were found liable and ordered to pay the plaintiff a substantial fine.

Although Japan’s lawmakers had not yet addressed the basic principles of the legal concept of privacy, the court was charged with the difficult task of trying a rather atypical violation: one that occurred within a novel. Thus Japan’s literati perceived the trial as a threat not only to Mishima’s novel but to the world of literature. They were concerned that Arita’s ambiguous concept of privacy would be, in effect, a “blank check,” one that could be manipulated into a patently anti-literary law.

In my presentation, I will focus on the malleable language of the landmark trial, mapping the trajectories of several key terms: nozokimi (peeping), moderu shōsetsu (model novel), ippan dokusha (general reader) and puraibashī (privacy). These terms, which were assigned radically new meanings in the courtroom, shaped Arita’s anti-literary concept of privacy as well as the judges’ subsequent condemnation of Mishima’s novel. In my exploration of the use and misuse of these terms, I hope to shed some light on the trial’s considerable contribution to the postwar legal discourse on fact, fiction and literature.

February 10th

Colonial Taiwan in Japan's Southern Frontier (1895-1914): Empire Recentered

Seiji Shirane, Ph.D. Candidate, Department of History, Princeton University; Visiting Researcher, University of Tokyo (Tobunken)

Within the field of Japanese history, scholarship on Japanese imperialism has predominantly concentrated on Korea and Northeast China. As a result, historians have developed a teleological narrative of Japan's expansion northward: after acquiring Taiwan (1895), Japan colonized Korea (1910), and then Manchuria (1931) as the "jewel in the crown." Historians have only incorporated the story of Japan's southern empire after 1936, when the Imperial Army and Navy agreed on a unified military policy of "southern advance" (nanshin), which culminated in the outbreak of the Pacific War and the occupation of Southeast Asia. By reorienting our geographic focus to the understudied southern half of Japan's empire, my dissertation illustrates how Japanese officials, entrepreneurs, and intellectuals took seriously Japan's relations with South China and Southeast Asia well before 1936.

Drawing on archival sources from Tokyo and Taipei, this paper examines the central role that colonial Taiwan played in Japanese interests in southern China from the Sino-Japanese War (1894-95) up to World War I (1914-1918). As Japan's first overseas colony, Taiwan was the maritime gate through which the Japanese extended their economic, geopolitical, and cultural interests across the straits in Fujian province. While previous historiography has emphasized the cooperative nature of Anglo-Japanese relations in the late Meiji period (1868-1912), highlighted by the 1902 Anglo-Japanese Alliance, this paper reassesses the competitive imperial relationship between the two nations along Japan's southern imperial frontier.

April 27th

Kinchan’s Queer Family? Laughter as intimacy in the variety shows of Hagimoto Kin’ichi

David Humphrey, Ph.D. Candidate, Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures, University of California, Berkeley

This paper examines the 1970s and 1980s television variety shows of the comedian Hagimoto Kin’ichi (a.k.a. Kinchan), investigating their mobilization of laughter in the creation of affective intimacy between television viewers and performers. Acclaimed for creating ‘warm’ and ‘healthy’ laughter, Hagimoto’s self-titled shows Kinchan no don to yatte miyō! (hereafter, Kindon) and Kinchan no doko made yaru no!? (hereafter, Kindoko) reduced the affective distance between television viewers and performers through techniques considered novel at the time. Featuring viewer written sketches,Kindon provided viewers the opportunity both to participate in the production of television, and to have their jokes ‘gotten’ by Hagimoto, his celebrity guests and other viewers. Likewise, although a variety show, Kindokoborrowed from the television drama format, casting Hagimoto with an on-set family, whose largely unscripted interactions created, for viewers, a sense of familial intimacy with the performers both on-screen and off.

Through his variety shows, Hagimoto established himself as the paternal figure in a television family that extended beyond the frame of the television, but he did so as the object of the feminine laughter that structured that family. Namely, the ‘warm’ laughter of Hagimoto’s shows was most often an audibly female one—a consequence of Hagimoto and his co-producers having actively targeted female homemakers. Focusing on this role played by gender in the shows’ creation of viewer-performer intimacy, this paper draws on the contemporary media discourse that framed Kindon and Kindoko’s production and reception, in order to illuminate both the discursive construction of that intimacy as well as its consequences.

May 11th

The Rhetoric of Protest: Identity, Violence, and the 1995 Okinawa Rape Incident in the Works of Medoruma Shun

Daryl Maude, Research Student, Graduate School of Education, Waseda University

The 1995 Okinawa Rape Incident, (Okinawa beihei shōjo bōkō jiken) in which a 12 year old Okinawan girl was kidnaped and raped by three US military personnel, became the cause of massive protest. Okinawan writer and critic, Medoruma Shun (b. 1960) uses the Incident and the subsequent protests prominently in both the short story, Hope (Kibō, 1999), which discusses the possibility of murderous revenge against the US forces, and the full-length novel The Rainbow Bird, (Niji no tori, 2004), which contrasts the Incident with the rape and violent exploitation of an Okinawan girl by a local gang.

In this paper I seek to explore the ways in which these two works of Medoruma engage with the 1995 Incident and the subsequent anti-base and anti-rape protest movements, and how the works critique the movements and contribute to the discussions surrounding them. I will also discuss how the works function within wider discourses about Okinawan identity and agency that imagine Okinawa as a place of healing or a site of resistance. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, in her reading of Hope, compared it to Can the Subaltern Speak? as a work of postcolonial literature that seeks to violently protest oppressive imperial hegemonies and looks forward to an 'undetermined' postcolonial future. While the label of 'postcolonial' is appropriate, both works are complicated and multi-faceted, critical of imperial powers and anti-imperial protest movements alike. I will therefore also demonstrate the ways in which the postcoloniality of the works is qualified and complicated, and argue for a more nuanced and complicated reading of the texts.

June 8th

From hoken (insurance) to hoken (health preservation): life insurance, normativity and health promotion campaigns in inter-war Japan

Ryan Moran, Ph.D. Candidate, History, University of California, San Diego

In 1922, the post office run Kan’i seimeihoken gaisha, or Kanpo, opened the first health guidance station in Tokyo. For the families of laborers, and other low-income people who were the targets of the Kanpo life insurance system, these health guidance centers offered an important vehicle by which they could receive health inspections and basic treatments. From the perspective of the state, the health guidance stations provided an opportunity to train the lower classes to incorporate healthy living into their everyday life practices, which marked a change from the more reactive public health policies of the late 19th century. The well-known rajio taisô (radio calisthenics) program that Kanpo started in 1928 best exemplifies this more proactive approach to health. Overall, the health guidance stations were successful at expanding health services and, at their peak, they served more than 100,000 customers per month at over 100 offices throughout the empire. Kanpo continued to manage the health guidance stations until 1944, when they were transferred to the Ministry of Health and Welfare (Kôseishô).

In my paper, I will analyze the vision of health promoted by the state at the health guidance stations. In doing so, I wish to draw attention to the overlap in the logic of society utilized by life insurance firms in their general operations and in the health guidance stations. My examination of the history of life insurance in Japan focuses on the logic of social connection enabled by probability and statistics, two key intellectual technologies of the life insurance industry. The importance of probability and statistics are most concretely manifested in the mortality tables, which are the core of the modern practice of life insurance. By creating a picture of the lives of a group as something that could be grasped as an aggregate, the logic of life insurance made life an actionable thing, on which state bureaucrats could enact social policies. For firms, the mortality rate of a group defined a norm against which they could compare a specific policyholder. In the hands of state bureaucrats, the mortality rate became a benchmark that they could deploy to enact specific policies, such as the creation of the health guidance stations. At the same time, these health policies should be read as an attempt to stave off more radical possibilities for political action. In other words, I examine the implications of the emergence of a vision of social life as a normative object that could be managed and acted upon; a crucial turning-point in the history of science and government.

July 20th

Carbon Technocracy: Coal Power in Japanese Manchuria, 1932-1945

Victor Seow, PhD Candidate, History, Harvard University

This paper examines the history of the coal mining industry in Manchuria during the region’s decade and a half as a Japanese client state. In particular, it focuses on areas of technocratic planning, from the introduction of official monopolies and rationalization efforts, to the development of synthetic fuels through coal liquefaction and the mobilization of energy resources for empire and war. Taking Timothy Mitchell’s idea of “carbon democracy” -- in which the workings of fossil fuels within industrial economies can be credited with the opening and closing of democratic possibilities -- as a starting point, the paper proceeds into an exploration of the extraction, circulation, and consumption of Manchurian coal and the relationship among these processes, the materiality of the coal itself, and the exercise of socio-political power. In so doing, it seeks to foreground the competing interests among reform bureaucrats, military officials, colonial industrialists, and migrant laborers that made and maintained this imperial energy enterprise.

August 3rd

Creating a German Japan: the Wartime Writings of Kitayama Junyû

Erin L. Brightwell, PhD Candidate, East Asian Studies, Princeton University

In the decade from 1934-1944, Kitayama Junyû 北山淳友 (1902-1962) produced dozens of German-language writings that purported to introduce Japan to his local audience in Germany. This makes him one of the most prolific Japanese authors in Germany during the Nazi era. There is no question that the Japan of Kitayama’s writings is informed at least in part by his chosen idiom of expression, as well as his uncommon position of writing in the Third Reich. Given this, I suggest his works constitute a corpus well-suited to an examination of the rhetorical project of creating a nation through language. This is a task I will consider from the following perspectives: What is the shifting Japan Kitayama shapes for German consumption? How does she stand in relation to Germany and the rest of Asia? The past and modernity? Where does the creator of this land, Kitayama, position himself in the discourse? Building on Peter Burke’s discussion of “cultural translation” in a broad sense, this project examines the generative collision between languages and cultures in the fashioning of one man’s Japanese-authored German-language vision of Japan in the 1930s and 40s.

September 14th

The Encounter Between Fox Possession and Mental Illness in Meiji Japan

Yumi Kim, Phd Candidate, History, Columbia University

Foxes, badgers, snakes, dogs. Far into the Meiji period (1868-1912), many believed that the spirits of these animals could possess humans, throwing them into states of disturbance. The afflicted would often babble nonsense, lose sleep, and act violently. Among the Meiji reformers who tried to dismantle this belief in animal possession, psychiatrists played a particularly active role. With their European-derived knowledge, academic psychiatrists branded the belief as superstition and declared instead that the afflicted were suffering from various forms of mental illness (seishinbyō).

Scholars and general readers alike tend to see this redefinition of animal possession as mental illness as one of the many examples from the Meiji period in which so-called rationality and modern science eclipsed traditional folk beliefs. But close readings of fieldwork reports on fox possession written by psychiatrists suggest otherwise. In their attempt to dismantle the belief in fox possession by describing its supposedly superstitious characteristics and related religious rituals—enactments of fox-like behavior and Buddhist exorcism prayers, for instance—the psychiatrists inadvertently revealed the source of its persuasiveness: the belief forged social bonds and resolved tensions between the afflicted, their families, and village communities. By highlighting the social dimensions of belief and illness, the reports suggested an answer to why some explanations of the seemingly unexplainable gain traction and others do not, and what the fate of mental illness as the new explanation might be.

November 16th

The Impact of the Russian Revolution on Japanese Intellectuals, 1917-1930

Tatiana Linkhoeva, PhD Candidate, History, University of California, Berkeley

This project will investigate how Japanese public intellectuals in the early 20th century conceived of social transformation, and in particular how the advent of the Russian Revolution in 1917 affected their thinking and patterns of political action. This was more than a matter of observation from a distance and comparison with home experience. Japan and Russia were “real-time” rivals and had a fraught, even violent relationship. Conceptualizations of historical change drawn from observation of events in Russia were thus fatefully caught up in urgent questions of the two empires’ near-term collisions over their respective territorial interests. My objective thus is to understand the intellectual landscape of the 1920s, how positions became firm, ideologies tried on and embraced, and finally, how enemies, both internal and external, were created. To do this, I will focus on how the categories of “revolution,” “nation,” and “empire” were defined and interpreted by Japanese Marxists, national socialists, right-wing intellectuals, and liberals.

December 7th

Twilight of a Nightsoil Economy: The political ecology of shit in Kantō, 1918-1955

Paul Kreitman, PhD Candidate, History, Princeton University

Until World War I the residents of Tokyo were in the habit of selling the contents of their privies to farmers, who would collect it to use as fertiliser in nearby fields. But as alternative fertilisers became available, and the city's rural periphery retreated, the purchase price of nightsoil dropped - until residents began to find they could not even give their excrement away. In the words of one municipal councillor, Tokyo became a city "besieged by shit". The city began to rely on full-time excrement collectors/fertiliser dealers, who earned their margin by charging a fee to both the producer and the consumer of the product they transported.

Shit, as it circulated across the Kantō plain, took on a double aspect: it could, depending on time, place and perspective, be either an unhygienic waste product or a resource. The city initially subsidised the private collectors; even when it partially municipalised the collection of human waste in the 1930s, it went to great efforts to maintain the practice of "returning it to agriculture" (nōson kangen). The nightsoil collectors for their part recast themselves as sanitation specialists, lobbying the city to preserve their autonomy and entrench their privileges. If they never quite convinced the authorities of their hygienic efficacy, they nevertheless continued to collect the bulk of Tokyo's human waste until they were wiped out toward the end of the Pacific War. Besieged by shit once more, the city turned to desperate measures, negotiating with neighbourhood associations, commuter railways and agricultural cooperatives to help transport human waste from urban latrines to rural vegetable plots. These "golden carriages", which ran until 1955, constituted the last permutation of Kantō's nightsoil economy.