2016

January 13th

Planning Sapporo: City and State in 19th-century Ezochi/Hokkaido

Michael Thornton, PhD Candidate, History Department, Harvard University

Sapporo, the capital of Hokkaido, is Japan’s fifth-largest city and also one of its youngest. Founded in 1869 as the headquarters of the Hokkaido Colonization Agency (Kaitakushi), the city developed hand-in-hand with the full-fledged incorporation of Hokkaido into the modern Japanese state. Yet, Sapporo did not come from nowhere, and its role as Hokkaido’s capital was not preordained. Between the 1780s, when Tanuma Okitsugu was toying with ideas for the economic development of Ezochi, and 1886, when Hokkaido was reunified under Sapporo’s control, a series of debates about the proper form and function of a capital city intersected with Japanese leaders’ arguments about the disposition of Ezochi/Hokkaido. Amidst these widespread debates, several themes are surprisingly constant across this century. Three notable themes are the importance of geography and climate; the relationship between city-building and state-building, particularly in the context of state encroachment in Ezochi/Hokkaido; and the role of Sapporo as a node in commercial, administrative and social networks that extended across Ezochi/Hokkaido, Japan, and the wider world. While the many disagreements and debates leading up to (and beyond) Sapporo’s founding illustrate the contested nature of city-building, these themes also illustrate some continuities between Tokugawa and Meiji that played an important role in shaping the complete absorption of Ezochi/Hokkaido into the Japanese state over the course of the 19th century.

February 26th

Kobayashi Morito, the Imperial Renovation Society and Technologies of Ideological Subjection in 1930s Japan

Max Ward, Assistant Professor of History, Middlebury College, Vermont

In the historiography of modern Japan, nothing symbolizes the turbulent decade of the 1930s more than the phenomenon of tenkō, or “ideological conversion.” From the mass defections of Japanese Communist Party members in the early 1930s, to the rightward shift of public intellectuals in support of Japan’s invasion of China in 1937, tenkō has come to signify the state’s successful suppression of political opposition and the active mobilization of society for total war. In the 1950s, Tsurumi Shunsuke posited an influential definition of tenkō as consisting of two essential elements: the external coercion of state power and the corresponding degree of change of thought in an individual. Subsequently, many studies have reinforced this dualistic understanding of tenkō, emphasizing either state policies or the internal motivations for, or the degree to which, an individual converted. However, this dualistic framework reduces the complex operations of ideology into a simple confrontation between external power and internal ideas, and thus overlooks the important sites of mediation in which “ideological conversion” was produced.

In this paper, I draw upon theories of ideological subjection and ideological state apparatuses in order to analyze a parolee support group—the Teikoku kōshinkai (Imperial Renovation Society)—and its role in rehabilitating ex-communists. Originally established in 1926 as a semi-official welfare center for delinquent youths and paroled convicts, by the 1930s the Imperial Renovation Society oversaw the “ideological conversion” of hundreds of ex-rank-and-file JCP members, establishing protocols for other rehabilitation groups throughout the Japanese Empire. Leading this effort was the head of the Teikoku kōshinkai’s thought section (shisōbu), Kobayashi Morito, who, upon defecting from the JCP himself, was paroled in 1931 and assumed the responsibility of guiding hundreds of his comrades through the process of tenkō. Under the rubrics of social welfare and spiritual support, it was in such semi-official sites as the Teikoku kōshinkai that ex-communists became loyal and productive imperial subjects.

March 25th

"One Giant Test Site": Wagatsuma Sakae and Manchukuo's Civil Code

Colin Jones, PhD Candidate in History, Columbia University

In the final years of World War I, amid social, political, and economic upheaval, private law scholars at Tokyo Imperial University rallied around the idea that Japan’s law needed to be “socialized” (hōritsu no shakaika). As they saw it, the problems Japan faced stemmed from an excess regard for individual rights and legal formalities at the expense of social wellbeing. Borrowing recent sociological legal theories from Europe and the United States, they attempted to reinterpret Japan’s legal system in ways that ameliorated the inequities of the market economy. In their assault on the tenets of laissez-faire, and in their calls for a more just distribution of resources, these jurists resembled progressive reformers. And yet they were indifferent if not opposed to parliamentary democracy, while they considered socialism an outright threat. Unplaceable politics, neither obviously right nor left, and the arcane language of private law in which they expressed themselves, have obscured the tremendous influence this group of scholars exerted on interwar politics and thought.

My presentation is drawn from the third chapter of my dissertation. It hinges on the participation of Wagatsuma Sakae, perhaps the most eminent Japanese private law scholar of the last century, in drafting a new civil code for Manchukuo. Compiled in just a year and three months, from spring 1936 to the summer of 1937, Manchukuo’s civil code was, for Wagatsuma, an opportunity to test a theory of modern law he developed over the previous decade and a half. I trace the evolution of his ideas about law from his student days in the late-1910s, when Todai’s Faculty of Law was enthralled by social jurisprudence, to his role in the ‘30s as an architect of the legal structure for Japan’s expanding empire. Wagatsuma’s trajectory suggests how a movement that began with the effort to reform the state in the name of society came to embrace dirigisme.

April 22nd

Black, White, and Read All Over: The Comic, the Vulgar, and the Rise of News Media in Modern Japan

Kenneth Masaki Shima, PhD Candidate, Asian Languages and Cultures, UCLA

How have we grown accustomed to a world delivered to us by page? Extracted from lived experience, the event (contemporaneity) produced in news is historically interwoven with the production of the desires of the modern citizen, consumer, and state. This presentation evolves from anonymous guerrilla medias prohibited until the mid-19th century (kawaraban, rakusho), to explore questions of legibility of the ‘worlds’ represented and consumed in interstitial periodicals (nishiki-e shimbun), focusing especially on how the humorous and the visual (comic, illustration, graphic) intervened in the production and definition of rational state subjects. From the beginning of Meiji period (1868-1912), reporting and news media were embraced by the state as an organ of liberal indoctrination. Yet, the speed and low cost of new writing and publication technologies also maintained and widened what could be called the mode “refined vulgarity”—satiro-critical inversion of class and cultural hierarchies—in periodicals maintaining dialogue with subversive, contesting voices. The mass-ness of visual media (Puck, Punch, giga) of this period remains a largely ephemeral archive—a contentious body of intervening in popular sentiment through humor, destabilizing rising forms of legitimacy, facticity, and ideology that were changing how people conceived of themselves and society. This talk is a sketch of the first two chapters of my dissertation that examines the tangential medias residing on the fine line between suppressed and sensational, subversion and censorship, and seriousness and play to destabilize meaning, expose incongruity allow critical voices to emerge.

May 27th

The Imperial Art World of Modern Japan

Magdalena Kolodziej, PhD Candidate, Art History & Visual Studies, Duke University

Art historians working on the modern period in Japan have predominantly focused on the role of art in the building of the nation-state. This emphasis has led to a one-sided interpretation of Japan’s modern art that does not acknowledge the simultaneous and equally crucial role of art in the making of the Japanese empire. My dissertation project, Empire at the Exhibition: The Imperial Art World of Modern Japan (1907-1937), addresses this lacuna by investigating the annual government-sponsored fine arts exhibitions in Tokyo, colonial Seoul, and Taipei that provided the crucial infrastructure for connecting the respective local art worlds. To illuminate the integral relationship between artistic practice and imperialism, I examine the discourse concerning the “progress of art” and the relationship between the arts and society that surrounded the establishment of the three official exhibitions. Moreover, I demonstrate how the imperial expansion provided many career opportunities, with artists active as brokers of the empire and colonial bureaucrats taking on the guise of art critics. I argue that the appointment of Japanese artists as jurors in the two colonies, the display of modern Japanese paintings as reference works, and the establishment of the first permanent display of modern Japanese art in colonial Seoul in 1933 had a crucial impact on the formation of the canon of modern Japanese art.

July 1st

On The Soil: Nagatsuka Takashi’s Literature of the Never Lost Home

Tyler Walker, PhD Candidate, East Asian Languages and Cultures, Columbia University

The pinnacle of the short and unlikely career of Nagatsuka Takashi (1879-1915) was one of the great literary catastrophes of late Meiji. Written for the Tōkyō Asahi Shimbun at the behest of Natsume Sōseki, Nagatsuka’s first and only novel Tsuchi (The Soil, 1910), an unflinching portrayal of the hardscrabble lives of Ibaraki farmers, incited such an overwhelmingly negative response that the newspaper’s editors pleaded with Nagatsuka to cut it short. His refusal to do so produced a staggeringly long work that would develop a curious afterlife—revisited by majorbundan figures amidst soul-searching over so-called “furusato” literature in the late 1910s, hailed from the left by radical agrarian art movements in the 1920s, and even adapted (to decidedly non-leftist ends) as a film in 1939.

Lost in a range of more recent attempts by Western scholars to understand The Soil as a kind of ethnographic document, or to hastily dismiss its impact in light of Sōseki’s reluctantly penned introduction—a master class in damning with faint praise—is the fact that Nagatsuka’s work represents a highly ambitious, even experimental piece of literature produced by a singular figure in late Meiji literature. This presentation will introduce material from a dissertation chapter in progress, covering the implication of major figures and institutions from Masaoka Shiki to Sōseki and the Tōkyō Asahi Shimbun in the novel’s initial “failure,” while addressing the ways in which neglect of The Soil and its reception history has limited studies of everything from furusato literature, which has privileged the attitudes of urbanites like Shiga Naoya and Shimazaki Tōson to interpret writing on the rural through the lens of “nostalgia,” to radical agrarian cultural movements, whose manifestoes must be understood in part as efforts to preempt the kind of reception afforded Nagatsuka a decade earlier.

August 5th

Invisible Empires: Preliminary Notes on Japanese Shipping in the 1930s

Elijah Greenstein, PhD Candidate, Department of East Asian Studies, Princeton University

On July 1, 1937, seven of Japan’s largest shipping companies formed the Shipping Autonomous Alliance to institute “voluntary control” over maritime enterprise and thereby ensure fair shipping operations in the face of imperial crisis. The timing was fortuitous: six days later Japanese and Chinese military forces exchanged fire outside of Beijing, and with the onset of the Second Sino-Japanese War, the Shipping Alliance served as the initial mechanism through which shipping companies sought to ensure the efficient transport of overseas resources critical for munitions production. Existing scholarship has thus primarily discussed the Shipping Alliance as the seed of more extensive wartime controls instituted over shipping in the years to follow.

This presentation, which draws from a dissertation chapter, takes a different tack by focusing on the conditions under which shipping executives chose to form the alliance, rather than its eventual utilization during the war with China. In the early 1930s, Japanese shipping made a spectacular economic recovery after more than a decade wallowing in the doldrums. Swept out by a tide of inexpensive manufactures, ships flying the rising sun flag sailed forth into major shipping routes and asserted a new influence in ports worldwide. In response, established shipping interests, particularly those in the British Empire, sought to erect barriers against the expanded reach of the Japanese merchant marine, and shipping competition therefore became a major source of international friction by mid-decade. This presentation seeks to evaluate the role of such conflicts in the adoption of such strategies as the Shipping Alliance, while at the same time offering some preliminary comments on Japan’s shipping influence as an aspect of “invisible” imperial power.

September 2nd

Cleanliness and Civilization: Public Health in the Early Meiji Period

Kerry Shannon, PhD Candidate, Department of History, UC Berkeley

Following the 'Restoration' of imperial rule in 1868, a powerful coterie of medical bureaucrats implemented new methods of disease prevention, hygiene and sanitation that sought to control Japanese subjects as much as it did to cure them. Based on cursory observations of public health systems in Europe and the US, these officials worked to cultivate a collective mentality of “hygienic self-governance” (eisei jichi) that would enable smooth dissemination of nationally-dictated policies on quarantine, disinfection and disease outbreaks.

This presentation draws from a single chapter of my dissertation on public health and discourses of cleanliness in Japan and Korea from the 1870s to the early 1900s. As Japanese expansionists began to propagate narratives of other countries’ medical deficiencies in the 1890s—especially Korea’s—they remained deeply concerned about their own nation’s ability to maintain and display certain levels of hygiene and sanitation. One of the main objectives of Meiji public health policy was to convince Japanese subjects to perform acts of cleanliness that would demonstrate a higher level of civilizational progress. Nevertheless, I argue that many local actors manipulated new modes of disease prevention and dictates on hygiene for decidedly different ends. Newspaper reports and medical journals from the time reveal how public health functioned less as a medium for civilization and enlightenment and more as an excuse for the pursuit of private interest and the perpetuation of discriminatory politics. A key implication of this talk is thus that at the precise time when Meiji statesmen began trumpeting the potential benefits of Japan’s medical interventions abroad, Japan’s own public health system remained mired in dysfunction and uncertainty.

October 7th

"Temporary Ruins:” Miyamoto Ryūji’s Architectural Photography in Postmodern Japan

Carrie Cushman, PhD Candidate, Department of Art History and Archaeology, Columbia University

The work of the acclaimed Japanese photographer Miyamoto Ryūji (1947- ) deals with a range of structures and spaces that I describe as “ruinous” – demolition sites, the man-made shelters of the urban homeless, and the aftermath of natural disasters. These collections of photographs raise a series of provocative questions concerning the significance of the ruin in a country where memories of ruins largely outweigh their physical presence. Japan’s remarkable physical and economic recovery after World War II has been the subject of historical debate and fascination for decades, and rapid reconstruction, including the removal of all signs of wreckage, has continued to define the government’s reactions to disasters since 1945. As Lisa Yoneyama has demonstrated in the case of Hiroshima, ruins have the potential to become representations of memories, and their erasure from the landscape can incite a painful process of “secondary loss.”

Miyamoto himself was profoundly affected by his youth in the wrecked landscape of Tokyo immediately after the war, and he claims to find something jarring, or even unnatural, about the sudden absence of ruins in Tokyo’s postwar landscape. I argue that his work is a response to this trauma, a form of preservation which seeks to provide a source for memories with the potential for sociopolitical critique. This presentation draws from the chapter of my dissertation that focuses on Miyamoto’s 1988 photobook, Architectural Apocalypse (Kenchiku no mokushiroku), a collection of photographs of demolition sites that Miyamoto terms “temporary ruins.” I will demonstrate how Miyamoto’s photography of “temporary ruins” speaks to the conditions of the Japanese urban experience in the 1980s, while simultaneously opening up a space for the narration of individual memories of World War II and its aftermath, memories that were necessarily rendered irrelevant in the process of Japan’s rehabilitation as a peaceful, Modern, cosmopolitan nation.

December 9th

The Police Go to War: The Tokyo Keishi-tai in the Satsuma Rebellion

Ryan S. Glasnovich, PhD Candidate, History and East Asian Languages, Harvard University

The chaotic period following Japan’s 1868 revolution was one in which social identities had the potential to change rapidly. Accordingly, the low-ranking samurai recruited to serve as Tokyo’s first modern police force seized this opportunity. Loathe to abandon their martial identity in the face of the abolition of the samurai class, and desperate to distinguish themselves from both the outcast groups who had played a central role in policing Edo and Japan’s new army of peasant conscripts, the Tokyo police crafted a social identity that situated them as the true heirs to a semi-imagined Japanese military tradition.

While the crafting of this martial identity proceeded in several stages, this presentation draws from my dissertation chapter on one of the pivotal turning points in the creation of the modern Japanese police identity. With the outbreak of rebellion in 1877, a police force staffed with combat veterans, and a new conscript army of uncertain ability, the Meiji government made the decision to deploy some nine thousand Tokyo police officers to the front lines of the Satsuma Rebellion. The Tokyo police who fought for the government in the Southwestern War incorporated their experiences into a unique identity that contrasted with both the conscript soldiers they occasionally served beside and the rebellious samurai they fought against.