Roy Starrs

Rethinking Japanese modernism

Edited by Roy Starrs, this collection of essays by an international group of leading Japan scholars presents new research and thinking on Japanese modernism, a topic that has been increasingly recognized in recent years to be key to an understanding of contemporary Japanese culture and society. By adopting an open, multidisciplinary, and transnational approach to this multifaceted topic, the book sheds new light both on the specific achievements and on the often-unexpected interrelationships of the writers, artists and thinkers who helped to define the Japanese version of modernism and modernity. Specific topics addressed include the literary modernism of major writers such as Akutagawa, Kawabata, Kajii, Miyazawa, and Murakami, avant-garde modernism in painting, music, theatre, and in the performance art of Yoko Ono, and the everyday modernism of popular culture and of new urban activities such as shopping and sports.

A Devil of a Job

Few writers since the Marquis de Sade himself have made a more public and provocative ‘‘performance’’ of their ‘‘perverse’’ sexuality – a sexuality, that is, contaminated by violence – than the Japanese novelist, playwright, and rightwing activist Yukio Mishima (1925–70). Much of his life seems to have been spent in rehearsal for his final act: a samurai-style ritual suicide by seppuku – a gruesome process of self-disembowelment and decapitation, explicitly designed to cause oneself maximum pain as proof of one’s ‘‘sincerity.’’ He had ‘‘rehearsed’’ this not only in his fiction and on film but, as we now know from his former lovers, even in his ‘‘actual’’ sexual life. Indeed, with a writer such as Mishima it is difficult to draw a clear line between the ‘‘life’’ or the ‘‘man’’ and the ‘‘art’’ or the ‘‘text.’’ In a sense, he made a ‘‘text’’ out of his whole life, a text that signified, more than anything else, sexual perversity. As one of the most interesting recent writers on Mishima, Nina Cornyetz, has pointed out, he ‘‘performed’’ his sadomasochistic sexuality in an unprecedentedly wide and diverse range of media and sociocultural sites: all these ‘‘life-acts, discursive productions, and art-acts’’ may be regarded as interrelated ‘‘texts’’ constituting a ‘‘gestalt, or performative bundle’’ and ‘‘what Mishima performed in these varied venues were (often hyperbolic or theatrical) reiterations of ways of textualizing/de-textualizing (materializing) desire and sexual/gender performances.’’ But, not only did Mishima make a spectacular public performance of his ‘‘perverse’’ sexuality, he also wrote the first in-depth analysis or diagnosis of its psychological ‘‘origins’’ – long before any biographer, critic, or psychoanalyst attempted that thorny task: his autobiographical novel, Confessions of a Mask [Kamen no kokuhaku, 1949]. Of course, as with any novel that seems obviously ‘‘autobiographical,’’ its use as raw biographical ‘‘source material’’ is problematical. In this particular case, however, it must be said, first, that Mishima’s legion of biographers have been unanimous in accepting the work as factually accurate in its main details, especially in its depiction of the rather bizarre circumstances of Mishima’s childhood. But, of course, roy starrs

Mark R. Mullins and Koichi Nakano (eds), Disasters and Social Crisis in Contemporary Japan: Political, Religious, and Sociocultural Responses

the Great Kanto Earthquake, and how do people today interpret these materials? While Weisenfeld sees spectators as ‘active participants in the formation of visual culture’ (7), it would be interesting to approach images specifically from non-producers’ perspectives. The book’s findings hold many implications beyond Japan as well as for our lives in the twenty-first century. Since the Great Kanto Earthquake, modes of producing, spreading, and viewing images have only diversified and become more complicated. Equipped with handy mobile devices that can easily record photos, video and audio, everyone is at once a producer and a viewer of visuals. This was certainly the case at the time of the earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear accident triple disaster that struck northeastern Japan in 2011. Countless images are now out there, particularly in the cyberspace of Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Instagram. Databases have been developed to preserve this rich resource of photos, videos, and maps as a permanent record. Despite technological advancement, the dynamics around images post-2011 are quite similar to those Weisenfeld describes in this book. Stakeholders from governments and corporations to individuals have turned to images to invest the disaster with meaning. Amid this dynamism, a dominant discourse appears to have converged with the rhetoric of resilience and learning. From authorities, mainstream mass media, academics and individuals alike, the narrative adopted for the 2011 disaster interprets this unprecedented catastrophe as an opportunity for Japan to be more resilient, and reiterates the need to extract lessons for the future. The focus today has thus been on technical issues of predicting, preparing, and responding to natural disasters, an emphasis that could save lives in future disasters. It might even be the right strategy for people to make sense of what happened and to move on from the tragedy. Imaging Disaster made me realize that I myself, as a policy scientist, had taken this narrative for granted in studying the 2011 disaster. But is that it? How else can and should we interpret the disaster? This book encourages us to expand our imagination.

High Modernism and the Fascist Backlash, 1912–1945

When the Italian writer Filippo Marinetti (1876–1944) published his ‘Futurist Manifesto’ on the front page of the leading French newspaper, Le Figaro, on February 20, 1909, the event was almost immediately reported in Japanese newspapers, and the first of many translations of it into Japanese appeared just one month later in the literary journal Subaru (The Pleiades). The translator was no less a figure than Mori Ōgai, widely regarded as one of the two greatest writers of the Meiji period. This shows clearly, first of all, that, already in 1909, the Japanese bundan and gadan (literary and art worlds) were eager for the latest news about the revolutionary movements of early 20th-century European modernism, and, secondly, that they were already in a position to respond to these new developments with surprising alacrity. Over the next two decades they would come to fully participate in the various exciting new avant-garde movements, including futurism, that marked the rise of international ‘high modernism’.

The Novel as Modernist Medium: Modernity and Anti-Modernity in Meiji Fiction

Unlike the popular and humorous Meiji literature already mentioned, which celebrates or satirizes Japan’s ‘instant modernization’ and infatuation with all things Western, the more ‘serious’ or ‘high-art’ Meiji literature often deals with the social and psychological problems that such rapid modernization can cause. In the cultural as well as in the political realm, a sense of loss and a mood of nostalgia for the ‘old Japan’ had begun to appear by the late Meiji period. This was especially true in the big cities, which, of course, experienced both the negative and positive aspects of modernization to the fullest extent — Tokyo most of all. For many sensitive literary observers, (such as Nagai Kafū and Kubota Mantarō) Tokyo’s (or Edo’s) modernization meant its transmogrification: from a quiet and in many parts quite bucolic old city of canals, rivers, wooden bridges, and low wooden buildings in which the main form of transportation was by boat (some early Western visitors called it the ‘Venice of the East’) to a hectic, cacophonous, architectural mishmash of often slapdash structures, the streets clogged with increasingly rapid, mechanized and noisy forms of transportation.

Constructing Meiji Modernity

The modernism that flourished in late 19th-century Japan, as in the West at that time, was, generally speaking, of the simplest, most straightforward variety: an optimistic, positivistic belief in the steady progress of ‘civilization and enlightenment’ (bunmei kaika, a favourite slogan of the age) through the beneficent effects of ‘modernization’ — which, in the Japanese case, was closely identified with ‘westernization’. ‘Modernization’ meant transforming Japan from an isolated, divided, technologically and economically backward country with a tradition-bound, feudalistic sociopolitical structure into a unified modern nation-state open to the world and able to compete on equal terms with the Western powers — culturally as much as economically and militarily. To accomplish this monumental task within a few short decades, every aspect of traditional Japanese life would have to be radically reconstructed along ‘modern’, Western lines. For instance, the existing transportation and communication systems inherited from the Tokugawa feudal regime (1603–1868) were painfully slow and inefficient even by 19th-century standards and would have to be replaced by railways and telegraph lines.

Empty and Marvellous: Japan in the ‘Postmodern Age’, 1970–2010

The deaths of Tanizaki Jun’ichirō in 1965, Mishima Yukio in 1970, and Kawabata Yasunari in 1972 deprived Japanese literature of its three major living writers in less than a decade and created a vacuum that, I think many critics would agree, has never since been filled. All three writers were cultural nationalists who, despite their undoubted modernism, also felt themselves to be deeply rooted in the literary and cultural traditions of an eternal ‘Japan the beautiful’, as Kawabata called it. All three would have subscribed to Yeats’ principle that ‘there is no fine literature without nationality’. And all three had a clear vision of what was meant by ‘Japanese tradition’ and were well aware that their considerable international as well as national appeal was in large part predicated upon their status as ‘modern interpreters’ of their national tradition.

From Mishima to Aum: Religio-political Violence in Late Twentieth-Century Japan

On November 25, 1970, the internationally famous writer Mishima Yukio, a frequent nominee for the Nobel Prize, shocked the world by committing an act of suicidal terrorism. With half a dozen members of his private army, the ‘Shield Society,’ he entered the office of the commanding officer of a Tokyo military base and forcibly took him hostage – delivering sword blows to some other officers in the process. Then he coerced the commander to call an assembly of his troops on the parade ground outside. While helicopters hovered noisily overhead, almost drowning out his words (the media-savvy Mishima had summoned the Press that morning to record what he called his ‘little show’), he stood precariously perched on the balustrade of a balcony high above the assembled troops and harangued them at the top of his voice. If he had fallen off at that point, as seemed quite likely, his ‘attempted coup’ would have come to the abrupt and farcical ending that perhaps it deserved. But, luckily for Mishima, he kept his balance, and for ten minutes or so tried to incite the troops to rebel against a ‘corrupt’ government that had consigned them to the ‘shameful’ status of a mere ‘self-defense force’ – in such sad contrast to their proud erstwhile role as the ‘Imperial Army,’ the shield of the divine emperor and the scourge of all his enemies. It was as if he were addressing a pathetic paper tiger that had been de-fanged and de-clawed, imploring it to recover its fighting spirit.

The Anti-Modernist Backlash: Constructing Meiji Tradition

It was almost inevitable that there would be a ‘counter-reaction’ against the excessive and uncritical ‘West-worship’ of the early Meiji period. There were bound to be heirs to the xenophobic samurai of the 1850s and ’60s as well as to modernists such as Fukuzawa. Some of the earliest Meiji forms of anti-modernism or anti-Westernism took rather quaint and somewhat comical forms, similar to the Luddites’ attacks on machines in early industrial England. For instance, there were samurai groups who refused to walk under telegraph lines for fear they would somehow be spiritually polluted by the electric current1; or the Buddhist priest Sada Kaiseki, who wrote a famous polemic, ‘Lamps and the Ruination of the State’ (Rampu bokokuron, early 1880s), advocating the boycott of Western goods such as oil lamps (albeit, like the Luddites, with a serious economic purpose: the protection of traditional trades and industries).

Introduction: Politics and Religion in Japan

In May 2000, at the very dawn of the twenty-first century, the then Prime Minister of Japan, Mori Yoshirō, caused a storm of protest, both domestically and internationally, with his declaration before a meeting of lawmakers belonging to the Shintō Seiji Renmei (Shinto Political League) that ‘We [have to make efforts to] make the public realize that Japan is a divine nation centering on the Emperor. It’s been thirty years since we started our activities based on this thought’.1 Although some foreign observers may have been genuinely shocked by Mori’s reactionary, ‘atavistic’ stance, no one who knew Japan or Japanese politics well was particularly surprised. Indeed, members of his own party generally did not challenge the validity of his remark; they merely regretted its indiscretion as a public pronouncement. As the unintentionally revealing excuse offered by the Secretary General of the party explained: ‘the comment was probably a platitude for the religious group’.2 In other words, in the circles in which Mori and his colleagues moved, the belief that ‘Japan is a divine nation centering on the Emperor’ was merely an accepted truism, so that nothing much should be read into the Prime Minister’s remark – in the context in which it was given, it certainly did not represent any revolutionary departure from the norm. As Klaus Antoni has pointed out, despite the Emperor Hirohito’s renunciation of his ‘divine status’ in 1946, ‘the Japanese emperorship receives its whole spiritual and religious authority, now as before, from the religious-political ideology of Shintō’.3