2015

September 4th

“A Civic Organization to Bind Together the Many Races”: The Auxiliary Police Force in Wartime Singapore

Clay Eaton, PhD Candidate, Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures, Columbia University

During the Second World War, Singapore (renamed Shōnan by the Japanese Army) fell under the jurisdiction of a number of different regional military administrations. Yet by August, 1942, not a single active-duty soldier remained in the Shōnan municipal government. Instead, this local-level administration was almost entirely staffed by bureaucrats brought in from the various ministries of the home islands. Many of these bureaucrats, including a large contingent of police, belonged to the powerful Home Ministry and had little experience outside of Japan. In order to effectively govern the diverse population of Singapore, the municipal police created Auxiliary Police Squads that would have jurisdiction over every household on the island. Originally conceived of as an analogue to domestic civil defense units (keibōdan), the Auxiliary Police Force soon took on the rationing and surveillance duties of Japanese neighborhood associations (tonarigumi) as well. At September’s workshop I will briefly introduce the creation of the Auxiliary Police Force, consider its connections to control organizations in other parts of the empire, and discuss the problems that Singapore’s diverse population presented to it.

October 2nd

“Nourishing Life: Diet, Body, and Society in Early Modern Japan”

Joshua Evan Schlachet, Ph.D. Candidate, Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures, Columbia University

Following the publication of Kaibara Ekiken’s Yōjōkun in 1713, a variety of medical and popular authors began to address dietary health in a new way—distilling complex, specialized Chinese books on longevity and materia medica into easy to understand, consumer-centered guidebooks, pamphlets, and broadsheets on what to eat and what to avoid. My dissertation (in progress) traces the transformation and ramifications of these direct appeals to individual diet, which empowered regular people with the know-how to take control of what they put in their bodies, while simultaneously consolidating authority over that knowledge in an emerging community of physicians and social commentators with the means to produce and distribute it.

Yet, for purveyors of dietary advice, the consequences of healthy eating reverberated beyond the boundaries of one’s own skin. Edo-era authors expanded the category of dietary health to include social, economic, and moral dimensions in addition to personal well-being, raising fundamental tensions between the idealized image of the working body within the Tokugawa social order and the potential perils posed both by excessive consumption in times of plenty and famine and malnourishment in times of scarcity. By attempting a cultural history of dietary health, my dissertation aims to re-infuse the body and its internal functions into our understanding of Tokugawa-era food culture, to reconnect it with material concerns over safely feeding a hungry populace, as well as economic and moralistic concerns over proper upkeep of the self and society. It thus interrogates the taken-for-granted correlation between what you eat and how you body acts in the world, arguing that the relationship between proper eating and healthy living was not necessarily a self-evident one.

During the October workshop, I will present an overview of the core arguments and chapters of the dissertation (in progress) with special attention the first chapter, “The Yōjōkun Brand: Kaibara Ekiken and Vernacular Dietary Knowledge.”

November 13th

Consuming Art, or Rendering Consumption Artistic: the Seibu Museum of Art in the 1980s

Sarah Walsh, PhD Candidate, Department of History, UCLA

In 1975, the Seibu Museum of Art opened on the top floor of the Seibu Department Store's Ikebukuro flagship as a central pillar of the famous Seibu "culture strategy" (bunka senryaku). In accordance with Seibu director Tsustumi Seiji's objective to introduce a Japanese viewing audience to worldwide icons of modern and contemporary art, the museum's program over the next quarter century included a number of important exhibitions of European and American avant-garde works. The 1982 exhibition Geijutsu to kakumei presented nearly 400 examples of Russian art and design from the period 1911 to 1932; like similar contemporary exhibitions of Soviet art, the exhibition interpreted these works in a largely formalist manner that neutralized their radical politics, presenting them as artifacts of global artistic heritage within a developmental history of art. Geijutsu to kakumei was followed in 1984 by a sister show in Moscow, this time of Japanese art, entitled Japan Design: dentō to gendai, which was a near-copy of 1980's Japan Style, at London's Victoria and Albert Museum. Both exhibitions rehashed familiar stereotypes about "Japanese aesthetics," including the cliché that in Japan, art and life are one. In this presentation, I argue that although these exhibitions may seem like simplistic exercises in cultural nationalism for export on the eve of the Bubble, both Japan Style and Japan Design responded directly to the Seibu Museum's historicization of twentieth-century avant-gardes by tacitly positioning contemporary Japan as a site where the avant-garde desire for a fusion between art and life had already been achieved, through the vector of ethnicity. During the workshop presentation, I will further situate these exhibitions and the Seibu Museum's bunka senryaku within the broader context of "bunka no jidai," both the government-sponsored initiative and general public discourse on national cultural awareness and identity in the age of Japan's post-industrial prosperity.

December 10th

Tachibana Kôzaburô and the Shirakaba-ha: Common Roots and Divergent Visions of Agrarian Communalism in early Shôwa Japan

Ariel Acosta, Ph.D. Candidate, Dept. of East Asian Studies, New York University

Tachibana Kôzaburô, best known as the leader of the civilian participants of the attempted coup of May 15th 1932, was a leading figure of nôhonshugi, an ideology that argued that agriculture was the root of the Japanese nation. Before his participation in the 5/15 Incident, Tachibana was a farmer, educator and writer in Mito, Ibaraki Prefecture. His earliest cohort was not the right-wing ultra-nationalists he was later associated with but writers who took up agrarian lifestyles in part due to the impact of Tolstoyan philosophy and the utopian thought of Robert Owen, Edward Carpenter, and Peter Kropotkin. Tachibana must first be understood in this context, among a group of highly educated cosmopolitan intellectuals who returned to the land to step away from urban modernity, including Tokutomi Roka, Mushanokoji Saneatsu, and Arishima Takeo. Tachibana shared influences with these writers, and was also influenced by them. However, he became increasingly concerned with the economic viability of agrarian communities, in the face of so many failed utopian projects in the West, and the problem of agricultural poverty in Japan. Tachibana addressed these concerns directly to Mushanokoji in 1927, in a series of articles in Mushanokoji’s magazine Daichowa, using the work of German sociologist Franz Oppenheimer, and the examples of several European cooperatives, to suggest a path for agrarian communalism that wouldn’t rely on private wealth. The tensions between their visions of agrarian communalism came into focus, one as a place of retreat and aesthetics still intimately connected with the urban center, and the other as a place of agricultural production and the location of self-sustaining producer and consumer cooperatives.