Generation(s) of Inscription, Generation(s) of Empire—Reading “Anachronism” in Natsume Sōseki’s Sanshirō Through Inscription Technologies
Danlin Zhang, University of Chicago
This paper studies Natsume Sōseki’s 1908 novel Sanshirō and its keyword “anachronism” from the angles of generation and inscription technologies. The phrase “anachronism” appears in the novel as anakuronizumu/時代錯誤—“Both the material and spiritual worlds of Japan are like this.” Anachronism is also reflected in generations, as an unbridgeable gap seems to emerge between characters born before the year Meiji 15 (1882) and those after. Yet, a character comments that even though the protagonist Sanshirō was born in Meiji 18, because he is from Kyushu, his mind is still in Meiji 1. Different generations’ experiences can appear incommensurable, but they also collapse onto each other. Anachronism thus highlights the sense of “mistake”—conflicts and convergences between the temporalities of different generations.
Even though “generation” has long been adopted as a key framework to elucidate Meiji modernity, it cannot simply be reduced to something biological or natural. Instead, I argue that the novel Sanshirō presents generational experiences in terms of how characters relate themselves to different infrastructures, specifically inscription technologies. Using scholarships from media studies, I treat inscription technologies as “infrastructural” in my reading. The characters’ orientations towards different inscription styles and technologies allow me to analyze two aspects of the generational experiences in the novel—namely, their inextricable relationship with the developmental temporality of the nation-empire, and the individuals’ desires to generate alternative senses of time. In this way, I explore how the desires for different inscriptions in Sanshirō can open up our understanding of Meiji Japan’s fin-de-siècle “anachronism”—not only in terms of negativity (as in the sense of 錯誤 “mistake”) but as something generative yet in tension with Japan’s developmental empire.
(De)mobilizing National Literature: The Alternative Temporality in Kojima Nobuo’s “The American School"
Alice Tseng, Pennsylvania State University
Under the Cold War framework, the making of modern literature in postwar Japan was partially sustained by a teleological view that supposed the American way as the ultimate goal for modernization. Such a perception cemented the supreme state of the superpower. It also tasked Japan with the impossible mission of “catching up” while being by definition always a step behind the superpower. Tethered to such carefully contrived discursive structure, Japanese literature occasionally found itself awkwardly deployed to a stagnant temporality, since the wartime rhetoric, while functioning as proof for backwardness, was also repurposed to serve the effort of a pending war. Accordingly, Japanese literature was simultaneously demobilized and mobilized, stuck in the past while reaching for a future never to come. This paper looks at Kojima Nobuo’s “American School”, published two years after the Treaty of San Francisco came into force. By analyzing Kojima’s writing strategies, I argue that the short story highlights the limbo space of postwar Japan and contend that the difficulty of communication, a recurring theme in Kojima’s writings, echoes the writer’s attempt to negotiate an alternative way of expression which escapes the teleological temporality that encouraged mobilization under the guise of democratization. Presenting life under American occupation to lay bare the flimsiness of the progressive discourse, Kojima’s “American School” is more than either a biting critique of American imperialism or a bitter self-mockery. It preserves the sincere wish to make oneself heard, in whatever language available, which opens up the possibility to break away from the over-arching Cold War framework and gain the momentum to navigate the confusing space in postwar Japan. In particular, focusing on feelings and emotions incommensurable with state-approved discourses, this paper explores the possibility of going beyond the “progressive” mindset that assumes American-style modernization to be the sole destination worth striving for.
As Time Errs: Refugee Temporality in Japanese-repatriate and Vietnamese-refugee Fiction
Suong Thai, UCLA
This paper critically juxtaposes the memories of defeat in Japanese-repatriate and South Vietnamese-refugee fiction following their historical loss in Japan's Fifteen-year War (1945) and the Vietnam War (1975), respectively. While both the Japanese and South Vietnamese processings of their interrupted history occurred against the perpetual presence of the American empire and its Cold War rhetoric, this paper seeks to elude the national temporality that makes defeat a singular mode of periodization dictating the overturn of history. Instead of reiterating the temporal structure that organizes history based on the survival or demise of the nation-state, I attend to how the prominence of defeat in the Japanese and South Vietnamese postwar historiography overrides a rather complex reality of postcoloniality in which the longue-durée genealogies of settler colonial and imperial violence continue to unfold to sustain the postwar order. Through a close analysis of the Japanese fiction Manshū ha shiranai (I don't know Manchuria, 1985) by Tomoko Yoshida and the South Vietnamese refugee fiction Biên giới (Borders, 1997) by Nguyễn Hương, I examine how the protagonists' journey to recuperate their undone identities after defeat illuminates the geographies of violence beyond the temporal and spatial borders of the postwar nation, enabling a mode of relationality wherein the defeated subjects find moments of intimacy with the marginalized others in the ruins of humanist temporality.
Beyond Place and Time: “Sinospheric Orientalism” and the West Lake Imagination in Akutagawa, Tanizaki, and the Xihu Jiahua (西湖佳話) Tradition
Julia Zhou, Yale University
When Japanese translator Totoki Baigai (1749-1804) prefaced the reprinting of the 1673 Chinese story collection Xihu Jiahua, he confessed that his sole encounter with West Lake was second-hand—a chance meeting with a Chinese scholar in Nagasaki. Having never seen West Lake, Totoki furnished the text with his own sketches, offering readers the "armchair travel" (gayū no tanoshimi) of vicarious experience—a sustained pleasure he characterized through Su Shi's (1037-1101) canonical metaphor of contemplating a beauty "lightly adorned or richly made up." Pleasure was inseparable from deferral. West Lake was fully apprehensible as a palimpsest of accumulated literary moments.
This paper reads the subsequent journeys of Akutagawa Ryūnosuke (1921) and Tanizaki Jun'ichirō (1918) in light of literary memory. For Akutagawa, the eruption of Western-style tile buildings around the lake registered as a violent temporal rupture—the dream-time of classical China colliding with Republican modernity. For Tanizaki, the moonlit water briefly dissolved historical distance altogether, allowing the textual ideal to persist, shimmering, just long enough to be written down.
Drawing on Joshua Fogel's model of the Sinosphere and Edward Said's concept of imaginative geography, this paper argues that Japanese literary travel to West Lake both resembled and fundamentally differed from the Orientalism Said diagnosed in the European encounter with the Middle East. Where Said's traveler affirmed a stable, timeless Orient, the Japanese writers’ imagination was saturated by both imperial confidence and centuries of inherited reverence. West Lake was both an exotic other to be possessed and an impossible ideal to be mourned. The melancholy suffusing both Akutagawa's disenchantment and Tanizaki's reverie is less the triumphalism of the colonial gaze than something closer to Genji's clinging to evening dew—a knowing grasp at a shimmering cultural inheritance, complicated by Japan's simultaneous role as imperial power in the China it continued to romanticize.
The Eruption of the Past: Inherited Perpetrator Guilt and the Performance of Atonement in Japanese Independent Theater
Ray Matsumoto, UCLA
In 1991, an independent Japanese theater performer named Watanabe Yoshiji traveled to Northeast China with his wife, Yokoi Kazuko, to face the historical guilt inherited from his father, a former Manchukuo Army Officer and Class-C war criminal. At the Museum of the Imperial Palace of Manchukuo, a photograph of a smiling Japanese soldier beside severed Chinese heads provoked a revelation—Watanabe recognized his father’s face in the image and felt confronted by the spirits of the dead, who seemed to say: “You survived instead of us—and you dare to seek happiness? We cannot allow such absurdity.” This moral awakening led him and his wife to create theater productions about Japanese war atrocities under the name Imagine 21.
This paper examines Watanabe and Yokoi’s artistic works through the framework of Walter Benjamin’s “messianic time.” Through a close reading of their plays, I argue that Watanabe and Yokoi seek to atone for their fathers’ war crimes and complicity by transforming second-generation Japanese perpetrator guilt into a performance of remembrance and responsibility. By incorporating entangled temporalities, Watanabe and Yokoi’s narratives demonstrate how the past erupts into the present as a demand for moral and historical reckoning. The moment of Watanabe’s realization in Harbin and the couple’s continued engagement with the past through theater constitute what Benjamin describes as the potential for redemption embedded in history’s fragments. By treating performance as a site of temporal interruption, Imagine 21 renders visible the unredeemed suffering of the past and gestures toward the possibility of historical atonement—not through closure, but through the perpetual reactivation of memory in the present. This understanding of entangled temporalities requires not only an engagement with history and artistic representation as objects of study, but also a deep reflection on positionality that probes how one is implicated in legacies of violence.
The Expo Pavilion as Healing Enclosure: Regenerative Technology and Atmospheric Empathy in Naomi Kawase’s Dialogue Theater at Expo 2025 Osaka
Mia Parnall, USC
Naomi Kawase, a filmmaker best known for her depictions of personal and collective healing in rural Japan, recently translated her highly sensory cinematic world into a spatial installation with her pavilion at Expo 2025 Osaka, Dialogue Theater — Sign of Life. Combining found materials, film, and responsive sensory experiences in partnership with cosmetics company Shiseido, the pavilion responded to the Expo’s theme of “Designing Future Society for Our Lives” and its showcase of agricultural and health technologies, environmental initiatives and interactive media installations.
Dialogue Theater presented a kind of atmospheric distillation of Kawase’s films, which also thematise healing through sensory reintegration within heterotopic spaces and therapeutic connections between tradition and the contemporary. Partially constructed from the disused wooden materials of two abandoned rural schools, and centered around an uncanny media spectacle involving live telepresence technology, the pavilion cast an ambivalent eye toward the future-focused exuberance of the wider Expo. Yet while acknowledging social issues of interpersonal alienation and rural depopulation, it also explored the possibility of their temporary alleviation. With its theme of “healing divisions,” the pavilion attempted an atmospheric cultivation of “empathy” (共感), enveloping its artefacts of infrastructural fracture and disconnected human visitors into an experience of presence, connection and calm.
Drawing comparatively on Yuriko Furuhata’s (2022) research on atmospheric technologies at Osaka’s Expo ‘70, and informed by an understanding of world expositions as sites where (national) modernities are offered as sensory experiences, I explore atmosphere as a model for the pavilion’s experimentation with emotional engineering and biofeedback to cultivate connection between strangers in shared space, while also enfolding images of rupture and rural dilapidation into sensations of organic renewal. How does the “presencing” rhetoric of atmosphere cohere developmental narratives and seal the frayed edges of troublesome pasts and problematic elsewheres — and may it also clear space for reflection and critique?
Beyond the Procession: Material Assemblages and the Afterlives of Ritual Time in Medieval Japan
Róisín Lacey-McCormac, University of Michigan
This paper examines the temporal entanglements produced through ritual processions in Japan during the late Heian (794–1185) and Kamakura (1185–1333) periods, with particular attention to the material assemblages deployed therein. Comprising portable shrines (mikoshi), bells (suzu), banners (dō), and narrative handscrolls (emaki), these objects did more than mark cyclical or seasonal time: they actively mediated relationships between human participants and tutelary deities (kami), generating forms of temporality that were recursive, participatory, and materially sustained.
While previous scholarship has emphasized the role of processions in structuring communal time, less attention has been paid to how their material components functioned within these temporal frameworks. Addressing this gap, my paper develops a comparative analysis of processions at two shrines—Tomobuchi Hachiman Jinja in Wakayama and Nara—through a close formal and contextual study of their ritual assemblages. I argue that these materials operated as intermediaries that enabled participants to renew and renegotiate their sacred relationships with local deities, positioning ritual actors not as passive observers but as agents in the ongoing production of religious time.Extending beyond the spatial and temporal limits of the procession itself, these assemblages generated afterlives through representation. In particular, emaki depicting processions did not merely record past events but reactivated them, allowing viewers to re-experience ritual sequences across time. Through their sequential format, such handscrolls produced a recursive temporality in which past processions remained accessible, repeatable, and affectively present.
By situating processional materials within a broader framework of temporal entanglement, this paper reconceptualizes ritual processions as temporally diffuse phenomena that exceed linear chronology. In doing so, it contributes to a more nuanced understanding of medieval Japanese religiosity as an ongoing negotiation of presence, memory, and renewal mediated through material form.
Embracing the Land: Interweaving Legacies of “Resistance by Remaining” in the Miyako Islands, Okinawa, Japan
Natalya Rodriguez, UC Santa Barbara
“As the sea fig tree embraces the soil, so shall I root myself in this island!” proclaims a line from the centuries-old folk song “The Sea Fig of Ishimine.” The speaker, a female weaver of the traditional cloth Miyako Jofu, invokes ecological connections to cleverly refuse an off-island official’s proposal. Today, the majority-women Miyako craftspeople continue to embrace the land through textile production: harvesting ramie plants from their gardens, peeling the fibers with iridescent abalone shells, and soaking the ramie threads into indigo dye baths. These multispecies webs are the lifeblood of Miyako Jofu, whose designation criteria as an Important Intangible Cultural Property of Japan stipulate the use of 100% handspun ramie fiber and plant-based pigments only.
How do heritage textile techniques forge more-than-human webs that resist the dispossessive logics of empire and capital? The Miyako Islands are an apt site for this question because their historical encounters with three imperialisms—Japanese, American, and Chinese—continue to shape the craftspeople’s memories and landscapes. Now, tourism development rapidly diminishes locals’ access to land; the heightening U.S.-China rivalry has prompted the Japan Self-Defense Forces to announce in 2025 a plan for forcibly “evacuating” all Miyako islanders should China invade Taiwan, which sparked outrage among many Miyako Jofu makers, who insisted on remaining in place.
Based on 15 months of fieldwork in the Miyako Islands (2024-2025) that combined craft apprenticeship, oral histories about imperial oppressions, and archival research on folk resistances, I trace how craftspeople’s “resistance by remaining” draws on memories of peasant refusal in the Ryukyu Kingdom and forced evacuation during WWII. Amid the tourism boom and military tensions, I argue that the webs of Miyako Jofu production create “rooted resilience”—the ability to endure shocks by embracing the inseparable entanglements between people, land, and memory.
The Japanese “Landscape” from Korea to the Space Age: Temporal Problems in the Interpretation of Tea Bowl Aesthetic
Eli Troen, University of Kansas
In his Chawan series (2011–present), American artist Tom Sachs (b. 1966) collides futuristic space aesthetics with Japanese ritual, exploring cultural identity through the form of the tea bowl. Although Sachs attributes his inspiration to a distinctly Japanese aesthetic from the sixteenth century, the tea bowl’s keshiki—a surface “landscape” of glaze, cracks, textures, and forms—emerges from a far more entangled history. This paper reconceives keshiki as a palimpsest, a surface upon which layered cultural interventions and chronological flows crystalize. To begin, I consider three medieval Korean tea bowls that are translated into the Japanese vernacular through acts of rupture and repair on the surface. These examples’ physical and poetic changes preserve the traces of multiple agents and material encounters. I then analyze a nineteenth-century Raku bowl that incorporates Korean stamped motifs, where form and surface produce a layered and unstable visual field. Finally, I examine Tom Sachs’s HELLRAISER (2016), a bowl which extends these processes into the present through a self-described “bricolage.” Across these case studies, I examine the tea bowl’s keshiki through both diachronic and synchronic acts of appropriation—where interventions accumulate across time and where forms and motifs are variably retained, transformed, or overwritten across cultural contexts. Ultimately, I argue that the keshiki functions as a temporal site structured through these interwoven processes of inscription. In demonstrating that both nonmodern and contemporary practices operate through similar material logics of transformation, this research shows how the tea bowl’s surface reveals temporalities that exceed the interpretive categories used to describe them.
Crip Horizons in Sagawa Chika’s Disability Poetics
Amy Wei, Cornell University
This paper examines the disability poetics of Sagawa Chika, an important experimental voice in the avant-garde literary landscape of early 20th-century Japan, as a particularly potent site for the assertion and exploration of embodied, crip temporality. While many have discussed the significance of Sagawa as a female poet writing in the male-dominated literary scene and situated her alongside her contemporary modernist poets and writers, less attention has been paid to the ways in which disability shaped her lived experience and her poetic practice. In this work, I position Sagawa first and foremost as a disabled poet, tracing the entangled relations between mediative, theoretical, editorial, and translational practice across the 20th- and 21st-centuries that make possible this critical disability approach to Sagawa’s poetics. Alongside Sagawa’s poetry, I examine the resurgence in interest in her work, catalyzed by Sawako Nakayasu’s English-language translation, in conversation with the editorial choices across different media in preserving Sagawa’s poetry and the expanded possibilities for crip imaginaries in our contemporary moment—each of which imbricates a different temporal imprint. This imbricated mapping enables us to attend to orthographic ambiguity and formalistic experimentation in Sagawa’s reanimations and articulations of particular sensorial engagements with time as expressions of “otherwise” temporalities that break open and actively contest the idea of the singularity and universality of normative “time.” Doing so, I argue, allows us to assert Sagawa’s work as a vibrant locus of embodied, crip poetic expression and urges us to ask critical questions about alternative ways of relating and being—about the entanglements necessary to make thinkable “otherwise” modes of world-knowing, world-intimating, and world-making.
Disability as Becoming in Shinjuku, Shinjuku Becoming in Disability: Rearticulating Yokota Hiroshi in Postwar Japan’s Shifting Politics of Injury
Tamane Takehara, UCLA
This paper centers disabled writer-activist Yokota Hiroshi’s performance “You Forbid me to Walk” in the film Sayonara CP (1972), reconsidering the site in which it was performed, Shinjuku, as a vital space in which disability and culture are mutually informative. Yokota impedes the smoothed, streamlined space-time of the concrete metropole, visualizing the foreclosure of this speed to marginal corporealities despite the ostensibly democratic distribution of this “New Life.” 1968 Shinjuku also served as a theater where protests attempted to disrupt the transportation of jet fuel to American military bases meant for the debilitation of Korean peoples– an action reflected in the problematization of the streamlined temporal traffic of the “postwar” in addressing the longue durée of colonial incapacitation. Indeed this streamlined temporality and politics was championed in the spatial and ideological logic of the 1964 Tokyo Olympics and Paralympics and the 1970 Osaka Expo.
In critically exploring the rehabilitation of a post-mass disabling “event” Japan, I situate Yokota’s declaration of a disabled identity within the urban design and surveillance of Tokyo and the site of national(istic) events, and further, the state’s attempts to smooth the politics of its reconsolidation of its colonial networks that enabled the theater in which both the protesters, and Yokota performs. Who is able to enunciate their disabled identity? The elements of gender and nationality which enable Yokota’s declaration are in tension with the varied temporalities and corporeality of subjects at the intersections of various violences, such as the ethnic communities which were removed as part of the clean-up of the Olympics, or the foreclosure of recognition and care for debilitated hibakusha other than Japanese. Through Critical Disability Theory, I examine Yokota’s performance by interweaving the networks of injury and rehabilitation in Tokyo’s urban, colonial, and temporal context.
We Need No One Else: Liminal Spaces, Corporeal Prisons, and Osmotic Masochism in Hotel Iris
Tabreya Ryan, Princeton University
My presentation stems from a larger project on female masochism’s role in reimagining liberation in post-1990s Japan. That project, tentatively titled, “Unmasking Eros: Demystifying the Liberative Potential of Female Masochism,” situates female masochism within the broader Japanese literary tradition by comparing its representation to canonical depictions of male masochism. Drawing on Monica Swindle and Honda Masuko’s theories of “girl” elusivity, I argue that while male masochism often embodies discourse regarding national identity, female masochism offers a fluidity less tethered to nationalist ideals, enabling more adaptive and discursive representational politics. In this context, I examine tensions within Japan’s Women’s Liberation Movement–particularly following the 1994 publication of the women’s studies journal Joseigaku Nenpō–which addressed rifts between mainstream feminism and marginalized groups. I suggest that female masochism inherits the burden of these divisions, reactively challenging dominant feminist structures to offer alternative forms of emancipation for those excluded from mainstream discourse.
This presentation focuses on a single section of that broader project. Using Ogawa Yōko’s novel Hotel Iris and its film adaptation as a case study, I examine how women deploy Deleuzian masochistic contracts to navigate oppressive matriarchal structures. I draw on Frantz Fanon’s postcolonial theory to analyze how the film reconfigures space and race; on Jules Gill-Peterson’s framework of the mobility of violence to trace the circulation of masochism among feminized bodies; and on Jack Halberstam’s concept of queer time to explore how female masochism distorts temporality, extending its effects and affects to other marginalized figures, including disabled and trans subjects. I conceptualize this spatial, social, and temporal dynamic as “osmotic masochism.”
Ultimately, my project highlights the evolving significance of female masochism as a means of contesting dominant social structures and rethinking the intersections of body, space, time, and liberation.