Rethinking Japanese Modernism

Rethinking Japanese Modernism

Rethinking Japanese Modernism

Edited by

Roy Starrs University of Otago

LEIDEN • BOSTON 2012

Cover illustration: photo strip from left to right: Kawabe Masahisa, ‘Mekamizumu’ (1924, Itabashi Art Museum), Koga Harue, ‘The Sea’ (1929, The National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo), Yorozu Tetsugoro, ‘Self Portrait with Red Eyes’ (1912-13, Iwate Museum of Art), and Inagaki Chusei, ‘Tayū’ (1919,  The National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto). Cover calligraphy of the Japanese word modanizumu (meaning ‘modernism’) by Kyoko Goto. This book is printed on acid-free paper. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Rethinking Japanese modernism / edited by Roy Starrs. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13: 978-90-04-21003-5 (acid-free paper) ISBN-10: 90-04-21003-2 (acid-free paper) 1. Japan–Civilization–1868- 2. Japan–Intellectual life–1868- 3. Modernism (Aesthetics)– Japan. 4. Modernism (Art)–Japan. 5. Modernism (Literature)–Japan. 6. Performing arts–Japan. 7. Japan–Social life and customs. 8. Social change–Japan. 9. Popular culture–Japan. 10. City and town life–Japan. I. Starrs, Roy, 1946- II. Title. DS822.25.R48 2011 952–dc23 2011033738

ISBN 978 90 04 21003 5 Copyright 2012 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Global Oriental, Hotei Publishing, IDC Publishers, Martinus Nijhoff Publishers and VSP. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Koninklijke Brill NV provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910, Danvers, MA 01923, USA. Fees are subject to change.

CONTENTS

Acknowledgements List of Figures

ix xi PART ONE

RETHINKING JAPANESE MODERNISM Japanese Modernism Reconsidered Roy Starrs, University of Otago

3

Rewriting the Literary History of Japanese Modernism Suzuki Sadami, International Research Centre for Japanese Studies, Kyoto

37

Modernism and Modernity Charles Shirō Inouye, Tufts University

62

The Modern in Meiji Japan—and Elsewhere in Time and Place Ken Henshall, University of Canterbury

73

‘Overcoming Modernity’ and Conflicting Views of Japan’s Cultural Mission: Inoue Tetsujirō and Sawayanagi Masatarō Yushi Ito, Victoria University of Wellington

83

Awakening between Science, Art and Ethics: Variations of Japanese Buddhist Modernism, 1890–1945 James Mark Shields, Bucknell University

105

vi

contents PART TWO

MODERNISM IN JAPANESE FICTION FROM AKUTAGAWA TO SHIINA A Modernist Nostalgia: The Colonial Landscape of Enlightenment Tokyo in Akutagawa Ryūnosuke and Edogawa Rampo Seiji M. Lippit, University of California, Los Angeles

127

Cosmopolitanism and Anxiety of Influence in Akutagawa Ryūnosuke’s Kirishitan mono Rebecca Suter, University of Sydney

148

Literary Appropriations of the Modern: The Case of Akutagawa Ryūnosuke and August Strindberg Mats Karlsson, University of Sydney

164

Modernism and its Endings: Kajii Motojirō as Transitional Writer Stephen Dodd, SOAS, University of London

188

Shiina Rinzō: A Japanese Literary Response to the ‘Overcoming Modernity’ Symposium Mark Williams, University of Leeds

201

PART THREE

MODERNISM IN PREWAR JAPANESE POETRY AND MUSIC Modernism in Prewar Japanese Poetry Leith Morton, Tokyo Institute of Technology

231

A Modernist Traditionalist: Miyagi Michio, Transculturalism, and the Making of a Music Tradition Henry Johnson, University of Otago

246

Changing the Subject: Modernism and the Travel Poetry of Mori Michiyo Janice Brown, University of Colorado

270

contents Aborted Modernism: The Semantics of the Avant-garde in Yamamura Bochō’s ‘Prismism’ Pierantonio Zanotti, Ca’ Foscari University—Venice ‘Overcoming Modernity’ in Kenji Miyazawa Takao Hagiwara, Case Western Reserve University

vii

286 310

PART FOUR

MODERNISM IN JAPANESE PAINTING Reorienting Painting Matthew Larking, Doshisha University, Kyoto Transcending the Boundaries of the ‘isms’: Pursuing Modernity through the Machine in 1920s and 1930s Japanese Avant-Garde Art Chinghsin Wu, University of California at Los Angeles ‘Fair is Foul, and Foul is Fair’: Kyoto Nihonga, Anti-Bijin Portraiture and the Psychology of the Grotesque John D. Szostak, University of Hawaii at Manoa

323

339

362

PART FIVE

MODERNISM IN JAPANESE POPULAR CULTURE AND EVERYDAY LIFE Japanese Mythological Modernism: The Story of Puck and the Appearance of kindaijin Roman Rosenbaum, University of Sydney Takarazuka and the Musical Modan in the Hanshin Region 1914-1942 Alison Tokita, Tokyo Institute of Technology and Monash University The Department Store: Producing Modernity in Interwar Japan Elise K. Tipton, University of Sydney

387

408

428

viii

contents

Abe Isoo and Baseball—New Social Relations beyond the Family-State Institution Masako Gavin, Bond University

452

PART SIX

MODERNISM TO POSTMODERNISM IN JAPANESE THEATRE AND FICTION Evolutionary Aspects of Modernism in Japanese Drama Yasuko Claremont, University of Sydney Instructing, Constructing, Deconstructing: The Embodied and Disembodied Performances of Yoko Ono Vera Mackie, University of Wollongong Affective and Cognitive Mapping in Post-1960s Japan: The Influence of American Melancholic Modernism and Emerging Postmodernism on Murakami Haruki’s Early Fiction and Beyond Jonathan Dil, Chuo University Index

473

490

502 521

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Many chapters in this book were originally presented as papers at the Otago Conference on Japanese Modernism, hosted by me at the University of Otago in Dunedin, New Zealand, in August 2009. I would first like to thank all those who attended from all points of the globe (at their own expense) and made this such a wonderfully memorable and worthwhile event—exceeding even my greatest expectations. I would also like to gratefully acknowledge the support provided for this event by the Asia New Zealand Foundation and by the Department of Languages and Cultures at the University of Otago. Finally, I gratefully acknowledge support towards the publication of this book provided by the Division of Humanities of the University of Otago. We respectfully dedicate this celebration of the achievements of Japanese modernism to the memory of those who lost their lives in the Tōhoku Earthquake of 11 March 2011. Our tears fall Like blood from a wound— Will it ever heal? Roy Starrs Dunedin, 7 April 2011

LIST OF FIGURES

Charles Shirō Inouye

1. Signs of god with higher and lower figurality 2. Both of these self portraits are figural. But the one on the right, by Yorozu Tetsugorō (1885–1927), has higher figurality than Yokoyama Matsusaburō’s (1838-1884), which tries to hide both the materiality of paint and the presence of a painter

65

69

Chinghsin Wu

1. Kawabe Masahisa, Mekamizumu (‘Mechanism’), 1924 2. NNK and Mavoists, Sanka Exhibition Entrance Tower, 1925 3. Takamizawa Michinao, Model for the Kant 200-Year Memorial Tower, 1924 4. Yanase Masamu, cover for Senki (‘Fighting Flag’), January 1930 5. Yanase Masamu, cover for Senki (‘Fighting Flag’), May 1930 6. Koga Harue, The Sea, 1929 7. Yanase Masamu, Capitalismus, ca. 1924

354 355 356 357 358 359 360

John D. Szostak

1. Tsuchida Bakusen, Hair, 1911. Framed: ink, colour on silk. Kyoto City University. 2. Tōshūsai Sharaku, Actor Sanokawa Ichimatsu III as the Gion Courtesan Onayo, 1794. Colour woodblock print. Tokyo National Museum. 3. Inagaki Chūsei, Oiran, 1919. Framed: ink, colour, gold, silver on silk. Kyoto National Museum of Modern Art. 4. Okamoto Shinsō, Lip Rouge, 1918. Two-panel folding screen: ink, colour, gold, silver on silk. Kyoto City University of the Arts.

365

367

369

370

xii

list of figures

5. Chigusa Sōun, Day Filled with Monotony, 1909. Framed: ink, colour on silk. Kyoto National Museum of Modern Art 6. Kajiwara Hisako, Used Clothing Market, 1920. Framed: ink, colour on silk. Kyoto City Art Museum 7. Takemura Hakuhō, Rikisha Driver and his Wife, circa 1918. Hanging scroll: ink, colour on silk. Hoshino Garō 8. Soga Shōhaku, Beauty (Mad Woman), 1765. Hanging scroll: ink, colour on paper. Nara National Museum of Art 9. Tokuoka Shinsen, Mad Woman, circa 1918. Framed: ink, colour on silk. Tokyo National Museum of Modern Art 10. Kajiwara Hisako, Sisters, circa 1915. Framed: ink, colour on silk. Kyoto City Art Museum 11. Yanagi Miwa, My Grandmothers: Akiyo, Mai, Hitomi and Noriko, 2004. Photograph. Collection of the artist

373

374

375

378

379 380

382

Roman Rosenbaum

1.

Kōsai no umai gunjin (The sociable soldier, 1913) 2. Inaugural issue of the second instalment of Tokyo Puck, June 1912 3. Inaugural issue of Tokyo Puck, Kitazawa Rakuten, April 1905 (Meiji 38), shortly before the focus shifted to the emperor’s declining health

394 397

402

Elise K. Tipton

1. Mitsukoshi cover October 1925 2. Illuminated Mitsukoshi 3. Mitsukoshi lounge

439 440 443

PART ONE

RETHINKING JAPANESE MODERNISM

JAPANESE MODERNISM RECONSIDERED Roy Starrs Il faut être absolument moderne. —Rimbaud1

Solzhenitsyn’s Challenge In an interview with the German magazine Der Spiegel in July 2007, Alexander Solzhenitsyn remarked: Periods of rapid and fundamental change were never favourable for literature. Significant works, not to mention great works, have nearly always and everywhere been created in periods of stability, be it a good or a bad stability. Modern Russian literature is no exception.2

Looking back on twentieth century literature about a year before his death, then, the Russian writer was quite dismissive of its value, and in the process, it seems to me, put his finger on a defining element of modernism—albeit with a negative intention (but negative definitions are sometimes quite useful). Needless to say, Solzhenitsyn was no modernist—neither in his literary practice nor in his social and political views. In fact, he was an arch-conservative in the old Russian manner, a believer in the eternal verities of the Orthodox Church and, as is obvious even in this quote, in the almost absolute value of a stable, unchanging social order. Thus, in a rather deep sense, he was an anti-modernist, because modernism, above all, not only accepts and celebrates change but also sees itself as a force for change. Of course, there are many varieties of modernism but all modernists have this in common: a desire to break with the past and make something radically new, whether their field of action is society, culture, ideology, or the arts. In this widest sense, 1920s avant-garde art was modernist, but so too was 1920s fascism, which sought a radical break from the immediate past even as it 1 Arthur Rimbaud, Une saison en enfer, in Oeuvres complètes, Paris, Gallimard, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 1979, p. 116. 2 Der Spiegel, July 2007.

4

roy starrs

presented itself as an agent for the revival of some distant, mythical past and, of course, made full use of all the latest science and technology. But I evoke the figure of Alexander Solzhenitsyn here not merely to knock him back down as a straw man, as a specimen of a hopelessly anachronistic conservative; I evoke him because I think his challenge to modernism is a serious one, perhaps even an unanswerable one—because ultimately it is based on the metaphysical imponderables of a religious faith—and certainly a challenge that all apologists for modernism would do well to confront. If I may presume to flesh out Solzhenitsyn’s argument a little more, I think it would go something like this: really significant or great works of literature or art are those which speak to all ages, works which, even though they were created centuries ago, are as meaningful to people today as they were when first created. They attain this timeless value by expressing certain universal truths about human nature or human destiny, or, on a more cosmic scale, about nature or God. Modernist art, by definition, belongs pre-eminently to its own age, and thus may quickly become obsolete. For instance, much modernist art is ‘conceptual’ and depends for its effect on the ‘shock of the new’ (in Robert Hughes’ famous phrase); but this is an extremely transient value: the new soon becomes old—the novelty wears off. 1920s Dadaism is a good example—today it seems more quaint than shocking. To take two extreme examples: objets trouvés such as Duchamp’s urinal and Picasso’s bicycle bars. In the 1920s, Marcel Duchamp could put his urinal in an art gallery and call it a fountain, thus cleverly thumbing his nose at the conservative ‘artistic establishment’ of his day; or Pablo Picasso, in a more delightful creative mood, could use bicycle bars to represent a bull’s horns; but if an artist did the same thing today he would be like someone telling a stale joke—although today’s ‘artistic establishment’ might well applaud. In other words, such works are severely ‘time-bound’, their value is historically determined far more than is the value of traditional art: they quickly lose the ‘shock of the new’. This issue of transient versus permanent value goes to the very heart of the matter of aesthetic judgement that modernist art often consciously problematizes. Traditional artistic values such as the technical mastery of media or materials hardly seem to count in such works; their value is pure idea or imagination: a defiant shock value, but also a kind of whimsical humour. Thus, traditionalists such as Solzhenitsyn would argue, they are much inferior to the great art of the past, which was created in periods of stability

japanese modernism reconsidered

5

when moral and aesthetic values were deeply grounded in a timeless system of belief. Only an art rooted in such ‘eternal verities’ can have lasting value. Solzhenitsyn’s is the older ‘religious version’ of this argument, historically grounded in the Catholic/Orthodox ‘universal religion’ of the Middle Ages; there is also a newer, more secular, more explicitly political version, historically grounded in anti-Enlightenment Herderian-Romantic cultural nationalism, which argues that great art or culture in general must be rooted in the everlasting ‘national soul’ or Volksgeist, or at least in the millennial national-cultural tradition. Of course apologists for modernism have many good ways to answer these arguments, not least by attacking the very premises on which they are based: for instance, that there is such a phenomenon as a timeless art embodying universal truth or beauty. Or, of course, one might also challenge the very idea of a stable society or a stable culture—did such a thing ever really exist?—although obviously some societies or cultures may be relatively more stable than others. But, since modernism is, indeed, in a very real sense, time-bound, with its emphasis on the always-new, perhaps the best counter-argument is an historical one: we live in an age of continual crisis and transition, what has been called a liminoid state, always on the threshold but never completely at home, and artists must adjust to this situation just like everyone else. They cannot base their art on a non-existent social stability or non-existent religious, ideological, or national consensus. Artists who try to do so, like Solzhenitsyn himself, inevitably seem anachronistic, relics of a bygone age. The series of revolutions that have occurred since the late eighteenth century—whether social, political, industrial, technological, or scientific—have removed all stability and certainty from our lives. We live in a state of constant flux, and modernism recognizes this fact, speaks to it, and even embraces it, rather than trying to ignore or escape from it. The alternative for us would be to live in hermitic isolation, like Trappist monks. Modernism, then, conceives of itself, in the first instance, as a way of responding to the given realities of the ‘modern condition’—a fresh way of responding to social and cultural conditions that have changed far too radically to be adequately represented by ‘traditional’ modes of expression or traditional ideological interpretations. In other words, modernism firstly is a response to the ‘crisis in representation’ caused by the historical forces of modernity. But what then, more precisely, is the nature of the relation between modernism and modernity?

6

roy starrs Modernism and Modernity

The word ‘modernity’, although vague and perhaps all too encompassing, seems a relatively easy one to define, perhaps because, basically, it refers to a fairly recent phase of historical transformation. Of course, there is disagreement about when the ‘modern age’ actually began, or about what historical forces actually ushered it in, with leading contenders ranging from the Renaissance to the Industrial and Scientific Revolutions, or even, for those who prefer a narrower focus, the First World War. But there seems to be general agreement about what the constituent elements of modernity are: for instance, a postEnlightenment, secular mode of thinking; the rise of modern science and of the modern nation-state; revolutionary social changes such as those towards greater gender, class, and ethnic equality; intensive urbanization and industrialization; an ever-quickening pace of life; the rise of capitalism, consumerism and of the middle class; what Ortega y Gasset referred to as the ‘revolt of the masses’ or ‘the accession of the masses to complete social power’: that is, a general democratization or massification of culture and society (though this did not necessarily result in political democracy—even fascist culture was a culture of the ‘common man’); the dawning of the ‘machine age’ and the resultant mechanization and regulation of more and more aspects of everyday life; and the explosive growth of new technologies, especially ever-faster, ever-wider modes of transportation and communication. Of course, even this rather lengthy list is not exhaustive, given the diverse and multitudinous ways human life has been impacted by modernity. In contrast to ‘modernity’, however, the term ‘modernism’, no doubt because it includes an ideological element (it is an ‘ism’, after all), is rather more problematical—not least when we try to define the precise nature of its ideological relation to modernity. This relation is by no means as straightforward as is generally assumed—and least of all in the Japanese context. For instance, in Japan as elsewhere, modernism can take the form both of a celebration of modernity and of a jeremiad against the ‘modern condition’—oxymoronic as this may seem, the phenomenon of what might be called ‘anti-modern modernism’ is by no means uncommon. Indeed, Charles Inouye argues in his essay here that this contrary impulse is fundamental to the modernist project: ‘This notion that modernists are somehow “more modern than modern” follows from a fundamental misunderstanding of modernity . . . far

japanese modernism reconsidered

7

from being a radical affirmation of modernity, modernism is a reaction to it, or an intended correction.’ On the one hand, because modernism is a socio-political as well as an aesthetic movement, just as modernist artists sought to revolutionize the practice of their arts, so too did political ideologues, feminists, industrialists, journalists, ad men, engineers, department store owners and innumerable other agents of modernity seek—some more consciously than others—to radically transform existing socio-political structures. As illustrated in depth by the chapters in Part Five of the present book, on ‘modernism in Japanese popular culture and everyday life’, the positive ‘modernist forces’ that had profound transformative effects on early twentieth century Japanese society were multiple and diverse: for instance, popular satirical magazines (which, as Roman Rosenbaum argues, ‘emerged as a visual avatar of modernism in Japan’); the Takarazuka popular musical theatre (which, as Alison Tokita explains, was created out of the railway tycoon Kobayashi Ichizō’s ‘commercial interests, supplemented by his paternalistic vision of a modern education for girls and the creation of a modern consumer culture’); new grand-scale department stores (which, as Elise K. Tipton notes, ‘contributed to the valorization of change and innovation as progress’ and ‘fostered the democratization of modernism as well as luxury to the Japanese “masses”’); and even popular new sports such as baseball (seen by the pioneer socialist Abe Isoo ‘as a tool for awakening Japanese to a new behavioural pattern beyond the familystate institution’, as Masako Gavin points out). On the other hand, there was a widely-held view, in Japan as in the West, that modernity had produced a variety of social and psychological ills, including a breakdown of family and community bonds, moral decline or even decadence, and a psychological condition of alienation and anomie. Among the masses of working poor, the industrialization of work often resulted in horrendous working conditions—especially for female workers. Thus, in emotional terms, the prospect of an everaccelerating pace of modernization was as likely to inspire fear and loathing, or unease and foreboding, as it was to be welcomed as a liberating release from the heavy hand of the past. John D. Szostak, for instance, in his chapter herein, finds this more negative view of modernity to be prevalent among the Kyoto Nihonga painters: The Humanist School was not an organized movement, but a shared interest among Kyoto Nihonga painters who chose as their general site of artistic inquiry the negative consequences of Japan’s rapid Westernization, particularly on those who were left behind or victimized in the

8

roy starrs process. The social and cultural landscape they illustrate is not unlike that described 40 years earlier by Émile Zola (1840–1902) when he characterized France as a nation ‘sick with progress’ whose literature was ‘the direct product of our anxiety, of our bitter striving, of our panic, and of the general uneasiness that afflicts a society heading blindly towards an unknown future’.

Similarly, in her study herein of the symbolism of the machine in Japanese modernist art, Chinghsin Wu finds that, as the symbol par excellence of modernity, the machine is fraught with ambivalence. On the one hand, the ‘concept of the machine was often connected with the idea of a bright and optimistic future or praised as a new, fresh, and unconventional image. By applying themselves to this new subject matter, artists would be able to escape the bonds of traditional modes of representation and achieve a revolutionary expression.’ But, on the other hand, ‘the fraught and complicated relationship between humans and machines, and a simultaneous embrace of and resistance against a highly industrialized and mechanized modernity can also be seen in the artworks of the 1920s and 1930s’. For instance, machines were often presented as negative symbols of modernity from a Marxist viewpoint: as weapons of capitalist exploitation of workers and of the dehumanization and alienation of labour. Perhaps because the attitude of modernists to modernity was an ambiguous one, the ‘politics of modernism’ also were just as ambiguous. They could be of the left or right, or even, arguably, apolitical. If we look at the two major literary modernist movements of the 1920s in Japan, for instance, we find that one, the so-called neo-sensory school (shinkankakuha) tended to be aesthetically modernist while politically conservative, while the other, the Marxist-influenced proletarian literature (puroretaria bungaku) movement, was quite the reverse. Thus, although both were ‘modernist’ in the widest sense of the term, in that they believed that the conditions of modernity called for radical change, politically they were very much at odds with each other. Since the same situation obtained in many parts of the world in the 1920s and 1930s, with Marxist modernists accusing aesthetic modernists of being decadent bourgeois ‘formalists’ and even closet fascists (and, of course, some did come out of the closet), and aesthetic modernists counter-accusing Marxist modernists of sacrificing their art to a narrow political dogmatism, it may be tempting to accept this left/right political divide as a universal pattern. But, of course, that too would be an over-simplification: not all artists on the left subscribed to

japanese modernism reconsidered

9

‘proletarian realism’—there were even some surrealists among them, or others who were formally or aesthetically daring or revolutionary in other ways; and, on the other hand, some on the right—officially approved Nazi artists, for instance—were as reactionary artistically as they were politically. Indeed, some leading contemporary scholars of fascism such as Roger Griffin and Emilio Gentile have recently argued that fascism itself was a paradoxical kind of reactionary/revolutionary modernism that proffered an ‘alternate modernity’, an anti-modern modernism that tried to clothe itself in the sacred mantle of a ‘return to tradition’. In his recent major work, Modernism and Fascism, Griffin identifies a ‘profound kinship’ between these two responses to the ‘modern condition’, especially evident in fascism’s revolutionary, palingenetic worldview, its promise of a new beginning, a ‘born-again’ making anew of art or society, a promise it shared with other forms of modernism.3 In the Japanese context, Walter Skya has shown how the Japanese fascism of the 1930s was characterized by a similar kind of reactionary/revolutionary modernism, specifically in its exploitation of the imperial Shinto tradition to fashion a fascist-style ‘radical ultranationalism’ centred on emperor-worship—all represented, of course, as a mythic ‘revival of tradition’.4 And Shinto was by no means the only ‘traditional Japanese religion’ that proved to be of use to the fascists. In his chapter herein, James Mark Shields shows how the ‘existential and aesthetic’ kind of Buddhist modernism constructed by Nishida Kitarō and the Kyoto School, the ‘most prominent philosophical school of twentieth-century Japan’, helped provide, in Christopher Ives’ words, ‘a philosophical foundation for the «holy war» being waged in the name of the emperor’. In short, although modernism certainly did possess a political dimension, it cannot be said to have assumed any single or clearly definable ideological complexion—the ‘politics of modernism’ were as variegated and ambiguous as ‘modernist aesthetics’. For Japan in particular there is one further complicating factor: modernity itself was often perceived as having a suspect alien origin; as in other non-Western nations, modernization was problematized as a form of ‘Westernization’, and thus perceived as a threat to the ‘native tradition’, both by the Japanese themselves and by sympathetic and influential Westerners such as, most famously, the popular Victorian interpreter of Japan, Lafcadio Hearn. Arguably this was all based 3 4

Griffin 2007: 2-8. Skya 2009.

10

roy starrs

on a misunderstanding. What these nineteenth and early twentiethcentury observers failed to realize—perhaps because of the dizzying pace of the transformations they were witnessing—was that Japan’s ‘modernization’ did not begin in 1853 or 1868 with its ‘second opening to the West’; it had actually begun much earlier, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and more as a result of internal sociopolitical forces than of any external pressures from the West. Nonetheless, this problematization itself became an important part of the Japanese experience of modernity. As Yushi Ito shows here, already by the late Meiji period certain leading intellectuals were advocating a ‘return to tradition’ as a way of ‘overcoming’ (‘Western’) modernity. And such mistrustful conflations of ‘modernization’ with ‘Westernization’ led ultimately to a nationalist backlash in the fascist years of the 1930s and 1940s, as expressed most explicitly in the ‘overcoming modernity’ symposium held in Tokyo in July 1942, a significant intellectual-historical event touched upon by a number of the essays in the present volume. Interestingly enough, the views on modernity and modernism expressed by those participants who wanted to ‘overcome modernity’ sound remarkably similar to those expressed by Solzhenitsyn over six decades later. And this is no coincidence: the same champion of Orthodox tradition and arch-enemy of the ‘esprit moderne’ of the West—Dostoevsky, who might be called the ‘patron saint of anti-modernity’—stands behind both. As Mark Williams says herein about the symposium: ‘the shadow of Dostoevsky hung over the entire discussion . . . ’ And he notes that Kobayashi Hideo, the most influential critic of the day, learnt from Dostoevsky that ‘literature should not be “regarded as a mere expression of its society and era”’. Rather ‘the challenge confronting the author was [in Harry Harootunian’s paraphrase] to “show how art was able to escape the uncertainties of social change and reflect or signify a life endowed with enduring and lasting meaning”’. For Kobayashi, adds Williams, this was ‘the key to the aesthetic beauty that he saw as the hallmark of enduring art’. The flip side of the view of modernity as something alien and ‘Western’ is the view of Japanese modernism as somehow ‘inauthentic’ because, supposedly, it is a mere copycat version of the ‘original’ Western model. Because modernism was seen as an exclusively ‘Western’ phenomenon, especially in its origins, Western—and even some Japanese—treatments of Japanese modernism in the 1970s and 1980s tended to treat it as derivative, clumsily imitative, inauthentic, a passing

japanese modernism reconsidered

11

fad. It was as if modernism were a kind of aesthetic version of swine flu: young Japanese writers or artists might ‘catch’ the dreaded ‘Western rash’ (seiyō kabure5), especially while overseas, and then exhibit all the symptoms of a high fever, including surrealistic hallucinations and delusional stream-of-consciousness thinking. But, luckily, they recovered once they ‘returned to Japan’ and got down to the serious business of creating an authentically ‘Japanese’ art or literature. The leading postwar art historian, Kawakita Michiaki, for instance, regarded the Japanese versions of ‘futurism, Dadaism, and surrealism’ as examples of the ‘faddism and decadence’ of the modernism that followed the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923—in his view, as a kind of hysterical reaction to the trauma of that event.6 (Actually such modernist movements already existed in Japan years before the great quake, which might have provided a further stimulus to modernism but was by no means the single decisive event that ‘triggered’ it.) Kawakita’s own tastes seem all too orthodox and conservative to us today: he canonizes Yasui Sōtarō and Umehara Ryūzaburō as the two ‘titans of Japanese art’ of the Shōwa era,7 seeing their work as the culmination of yōga—that is, as the first true Japanization or nativization of Western oil painting: ‘The Yasui-Umehara period may be viewed as the formative age of the first genuinely Japanese version of modern Western art. This was the logical and inevitable conclusion of the Western-art movement that had started eighty or ninety years earlier.’8 Kawakita argues that this ‘genuine’ Japaneseness was achieved by combining Western influences with the aesthetics of native painting traditions such as those of the yamato-e and the nanga.9 This may well be true but, from our present perspective, it is hard to accept the Rénoiresque nudes and Cézannesque landscapes of these two painters as the cutting edge of mid-twentieth-century Japanese art—to the contemporary eye their thick, turgid impastos seem stodgy, conservative, and on the whole rather unexcitingly derrière-garde. A dismissive view of Japanese modernism was also prevalent among the postwar generation of Western Japanologists who preferred their Japanese art and literature to seem ‘quintessentially Japanese’—that is, highly redolent of ‘Japanese tradition’. For them, obviously, Japanese 5

See Tyler 2008: 7-8. Kawakita 1974: 121. 7 Kawakita 1974: 110. 8 Kawakita 1974: 124. 9 Kawakita 1974: 123. 6

12

roy starrs

modernist art was not Japanese enough, not authentically rooted in Japanese history and tradition. Thus writers who seemed more ‘traditionally Japanese’, Kawabata Yasunari and Tanizaki Jun’ichirō for instance, were canonized as ‘modern classics’. Nonetheless, even in their cases, it was these writers’ more ‘traditional’ works that were privileged above their more experimental ‘modernist’ works. Donald Keene, for instance, proclaims that: For Tanizaki or Kawabata Modernism was only a passing phase in careers devoted to more traditional literature; to treat them as Modernists would be misleading, if only because their best works are not in this vein.10

This sweeping statement, it seems to me, manages to be wrong in all three of its claims, since modernism, far from being a passing phase, was a profound influence on both these writers’ entire careers, including on their best works; thus it is highly misleading to claim that their careers were ‘devoted to more traditional literature’.11 Conversely, in contrast to such putatively ‘traditional’ authors, writers such as Yokomitsu Ri’ichi, who were seen as more purely ‘modernist’, were given rather short shrift. For instance, another keen critic of Japanese modernism, Dennis Keene, in his pioneering study, Yokomitsu Ri’ichi, Modernist (1980), dismisses Yokomitsu’s modernism, as well as Japanese modernism in general, as inauthentic, shallow, and fundamentally imitative of an ‘authentic’ Western original, which it misapprehends or mistranslates or understands only superficially, by its ‘surfaces’. Thus any Japanese modernist literary work, for instance, seems like ‘a parody written by a schoolboy’.12 In the visual arts, the art historian Joan Stanley-Baker also seemed to subscribe to this cultural-nationalist conception of what makes art ‘authentic’ and, consequently, to a derogatory view of Japanese modernist art: ‘An avant-garde image, despite vigorous promotion by the establishment, lacks a genuine basis and remains an odd phenomenon within Japan. The other arts, however, rooted in long traditions, fairly burst with vitality.’13 In a similar vein, she lauds the sculptor Nagare Masayuki, for being, despite his modernism, ‘never false to his Japanese roots’ and laments the fact that he is ‘largely ignored by the 10

Keene 1984: 631. For an extended analysis of Kawabata’s lifelong modernism, see my Soundings in Time: The Fictive Art of Yasunari Kawabata, especially Chapter Four, ‘Between Tradition and Modernity’. 12 Keene 1980: 62. 13 Stanley-Baker 1984: 198. 11

japanese modernism reconsidered

13

establishment at home for fear of promoting antiquated standards’ . . . 14 ‘Like many Japanese artists of vision’, she opines, ‘he has suffered from the postwar frenzy to create an international face for Japan . . . and the resulting imposition of a rather self-conscious Western standard on Japanese artists’ who were ‘encouraged to emulate the latest innovation seen in foreign art journals’.15 Happily though, she sees hope in the rise of a new Japanese nationalism in the 1980s: ‘The recent rise in nationalism has, however, produced signs of a changing attitude and a growing awareness that Japan’s own traditions are vital and valid.’16 How times have changed! Though a mere quarter century has passed, it is hard to imagine any Japan scholar today writing that sentence. In our present age of globalization and rampant cultural hybridity, few would argue that art must necessarily have ‘deep national roots’. But it was the prevalence of exactly such cultural nationalism as the default view of both Japanese and Western scholars until the 1980s that led to a generally negative attitude towards Japanese modernism until that time. No one ever seemed to ask: how can this ‘inauthenticity’ of Japanese modernism be demonstrated? What are its aesthetic markers? For instance, how can it be demonstrated that a cubist painting such as Yorozu Tetsugorō’s Leaning Person (1917) is less authentic than a Picasso or Braque of the same period? (Indeed, if the artist’s name were unknown, how could anyone even identify his nationality just by looking at this painting?) Similarly, one might ask how Kawabata Yasunari’s literary modernism may be shown to be less ‘authentic’ than that of European writers: for instance, the surrealism of his ‘palm-of-hand stories’ or his highly skilful use of the ‘stream of consciousness’ technique in a work such as Crystal Fantasies (Suishō gensō, 1931). Are these demonstrably less authentic than the modernist styles or techniques of Breton and Joyce? Surely it seems obvious to us today that all such judgements of the authenticity of works of art according to their national origins are highly susceptible to a reductio ad absurdum. As William Gardner observes, ‘this comparativism blinds itself to the ways in which these works respond, not to European modernism, but to their situation within the contemporary Japanese literary sphere and, in broader terms, within their own cultural, technological, and historical moment. . . . ’17 14 15 16 17

Stanley-Baker 1984: 199. Stanley-Baker 1984: 199-200. Stanley-Baker 1984: 201. Gardner 2006: 17.

14

roy starrs

Fortunately, a number of more recent studies, such as Gardner’s own, have done much to correct this kind of invidious comparativism, not only through a deeper understanding of Japanese modernism’s own historical and cultural context but also by seeing modernism itself in wider, more global terms rather than as an exclusively Western phenomenon. As William Tyler notes, since the mid-1980s Japanese scholars in particular have argued for this ‘different view’ based on the idea of dōjisei or simultaneousness: ‘Following the theory of synchronicity or simultaneity, it argues for the point of view that modernism unfolded contemporaneously across the globe, or at least in nations or social sectors sharing analogous levels of economic, technological, and cultural development.’18 For instance, it could be argued that modernism is, above everything else, a product of the new urban culture of the new species of twentieth-century ‘world city’ or ‘megacity’: in other words, it is far more cosmopolitan or cross-cultural than it is ‘national’ or unicultural. The cultural nationalists who dominated academic and critical discourse up to the 1980s seemed unable to recognize this fact. In other words, modernist culture is better seen as the culture of Tokyo as well as Berlin, Shanghai as well as London, rather than as the culture of any single nation-state. In this sense these great ‘modern cities’ have more in common with each other experientially and culturally than they have in common with the hinterlands or even small towns of the countries in which they are located. And, of course, that is exactly why various anti-modern movements, whether cultural, religious or political, from the Nazis to the hippies, indulged in harangues against the ‘decadence’ of the modern city and preached some form of ‘back-tonature’ agrarianism. Needless to say, the essays collected in this volume offer further support for the dōjisei view, as well as, of course, for understanding Japanese modernism on its own terms, within its own cultural and historical context. This is not to claim, of course, that Japanese modernist experiments are always successful—any more than one would claim that of their Western counterparts. It is only to say that the aesthetic success of Japanese modernist works must be judged by the same standards as any other such works—they should not be dismissed simply because of their national origins, or because of any traditional essentialist belief that an unbridgeable cultural gap exists—or should exist—between ‘East’ and ‘West’. Because the fact of the matter is that the argument for 18

Tyler 2008: 16.

japanese modernism reconsidered

15

the ‘inauthenticity’ of Japanese modernism can only be based on traditional cultural-nationalist assumptions. The ‘romantic’ assumption of both Keenes, for instance, is that art and literature must be deeply rooted in national histories and traditions, and that ‘cosmopolitan’ art and literature is inevitably superficial and inauthentic. This, by the way, was exactly the position of the fascist cultural theorists of the 1930s, with their fervent belief in an essentialized ‘national culture’ deeply rooted in ‘blood and soil’ (Blut und Boden). But it was also exactly this traditional romantic view of art and literature that was challenged by the international modernist movement. (Paradoxically, it was also challenged by the reality of the fascist movement itself—which was, after all, an international ultranationalist movement.) Furthermore, when we take a more global or ‘simultaneous’ view of the historical development of modernism, we find good grounds to challenge the earlier view that Japanese modernism had no native historical roots and was purely a cultural ‘transplant’ from the West that consequently failed to ‘take root’ in the native soil. For one thing, this Eurocentric view ignores the deep Japanese roots of international modernism itself—that is, the major contributions from Japanese art and aesthetics to international modernism from its very beginnings in the mid-nineteenth century. Indeed, if we were to accept the culturalnationalist view that the relative ‘authenticity’ of the various national varieties of modernism should be judged according to how deeply rooted they are in their respective national-cultural histories, then the tables might well be turned and Japanese modernism be proved to have the strongest claim to ‘authenticity’. Of course, Western art historians have long talked of japonisme and its significant influences on early modernist Western artists. But most have treated this as a transient phase, and as only one of a variety of such ‘exotic’ influences. Until quite recently, few have recognized the true extent of the revolutionary change in Western aesthetic sensibility and artistic practices induced by prolonged exposure to Japanese art—from Manet to Matisse, from Whistler to Pollock. A significant milestone in this respect was Klaus Berger’s thoroughgoing study of 1980, Japonismus in der Westlichen Malerei (Munich, 1980; Japonisme in Western Painting from Whistler to Matisse, 1992), by far the most exhaustive treatment of the subject to date. As Berger notes, nineteenth-century Western artists and writers were not so reticent as their twentieth-century counterparts about acknowledging the full extent of Japanese influence. For instance, the

16

roy starrs

French writer Edmond de Goncourt, in a journal entry of 1884 in his Mémoires de la vie littéraire, claimed that japonisme was ‘revolutionizing the vision of the European peoples’ with a ‘new sense of colour, a new decorative system, and . . . a poetic imagination in the invention of the objet d’art, which never existed even in the most perfect [Western] medieval or Renaissance pieces’.19 And the Viennese art historian Franz Wickhoff wrote in 1898: ‘To their astonishment, those artists in London and Paris who in the second half of the nineteenth century were at the forefront of the modern movement realized that much of what they had pursued had been achieved by the Japanese; that the Japanese, a nation whose artistic sensibility could be matched only by that of the ancient Greeks, had anticipated the movement of European art.’20 And, of course, that is exactly why Tokugawa art looks more ‘modern’ to us today than eighteenth or early nineteenth century European art—our aesthetic sensibilities have been radically changed by japonisme. Thus, what we now call European modernism, from Manet to Matisse, began with what might be called, with little exaggeration, the ‘Japanization of European art’. This does not mean, of course, that European art became Japanese art—as always, much was lost, or ‘transmuted’, in translation. But even more was gained: the inspiration of Japanese aesthetic tastes and practices transformed Western art irrevocably. Indeed, looking at the matter in wider art-historical terms, the word ‘japonisme’ itself is clearly a Eurocentric term: taking Western art history as primary, it views Tokugawa art as one of the peripheral, even ‘primitive’ traditions that helped shape early ‘modernism’, which is seen as a purely Western phenomenon that began perhaps in 1863, with Manet’s Luncheon on the Grass, or in 1872, with Monet’s Impression, Sunrise. From the more global perspective of the twenty-first century, we may well want to ‘rewrite’ this much-rehearsed art-historical account and argue that modernism actually began in the early 1690s with Moronobu’s Beauty Looking Backwards—or, more generally, with the brilliant popular culture of the Genroku period of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. The Genroku period produced not only ukiyo-e but also haiku poetry, so influential on Western modernist poets, especially the imagists, and it also produced the first masterpieces of kabuki and of the bunraku puppet theatre, and many other popular art forms. From this perspective, the great flowering of modernist art that began in 19 20

Berger 1992: 1. Berger 1992: 2.

japanese modernism reconsidered

17

France well over a century later (‘modernist’ because it initiated a radical break with the post-Renaissance European art tradition and drew closer to post-Muromachi Japanese aesthetics) might then be seen as modernism’s ‘second phase’. At least, this is how things seemed to some pioneer Japanese modernists who found ample precedents in their own tradition for the aesthetic practices of ‘Western’ modernism. As Suzuki Sadami points out herein, the major modernist poet Hagiwara Sakutarō (1886-1942), for instance, claimed that, ‘though nineteenth-century French symbolism led by Mallarmé revolved around the themes of “mysticism, enchantment, ghostliness, and Eastern fatalism”’, the European modernism of his day ‘was finally understanding its essence intuitively and approaching Eastern symbolism, represented by Bashō’. That a recognizably ‘modernist’ art should have appeared in seventeenth-century Japan is not really so surprising, given that some of the general conditions of modernity were already well established. Indeed, it has become a truism among historians of Japan to say that its modernity or modernization did not suddenly begin, as many postwar socalled ‘modernization theorists’ imagined, in 1853 or 1868. By any of a number of the usual, internationally recognized markers or gauges of modernity—increasing urbanization, the rise of a middle class and of a mass-based culture (especially after the invention of printing), secularization, literacy, the development of a capitalist or money economy and of a national communications and transportation infrastructure (encouraged by the shogunate’s policy of sankin kōtai), the development of tourism, even a certain amount of scientific and industrial progress, and of ‘enlightenment-style’ thought—Tokugawa Japan was already well on the way to modernity. Indeed, it is now widely recognized that one major reason why Meiji Japan was able to ‘modernize’ so quickly and with such relative ease was that Tokugawa Japan, by the mid-nineteenth century, had already developed quite far in that direction. Although Japan had severely restricted intercourse with the outside world during the two-and-a-half centuries of the Edo period, it nonetheless went through many of the same stages of social and economic development as Europe in the same period. Of course, this development was uneven: one might say, especially, that Edo Japan did not modernize politically nearly as much as it did socially and economically; and indeed it was precisely the tensions produced by this disparity between a ‘feudal’ political system that remained rather stagnant (for example, as symbolized by the half-hearted Ansei Reform of the 1850s) and a social and economic reality that was changing increasingly into something

18

roy starrs

we would now call ‘modern’, that ultimately caused the collapse of the Tokugawa regime—despite its own best but belated efforts to ‘modernize’ during the bakumatsu period (1853-1868). In the cultural realm, however, the arts in Tokugawa Japan, especially the visual arts, were positively avant-garde by mid-nineteenth-century Western standards—as Goncourt and Wickhoff recognized. Again, if we look to the usual international markers of ‘modernity’ or even ‘modernism’ in the arts, it becomes obvious that, at this point in history, Japanese art was more ‘modern’ or ‘modernistic’ in many respects than Western art at that time—for instance, in its ‘expressionistic’ use of pure, vivid colour and of the expressive, calligraphic line. And this was true even to some extent in literary-aesthetic terms: japonisme was also a significant influence on Western literary modernism, although this influence is less well recognized than that in the visual arts. As Earl Miner, author of a pioneering study of the subject, The Japanese Tradition in British and American Literature (1956), pointed out, the Japanese impact on major literary modernists such as the imagists, Pound and Yeats, was substantial and significant. Such experimental or modernist Western writers and artists looking for new modes or means of expression found in Japanese literature and art ‘a variety of usable literary and artistic forms’.21 More specifically for the imagist poets: ‘These poets, and Pound chief among them, took from Japanese poetry and drama a precision of expression which they were seeking to establish in their own poetry; they saw a technique of imagery which conveyed meaning and tone without discursive statement; and on the example of haiku and nō they devised specific imagistic and structural techniques which have become widely current in our poetry.’22 Indeed, as Miner also points out, W.B. Yeats was even moved to say that ‘the men who devised the nō drama were more like us than the Greeks or Shakespeare and Corneille . . . ’23 Thus, Miner concludes, ‘our tradition has been refreshed, redirected, and enriched by the absorption of Japanese culture . . . ’24 In other words, the earlier dismissive attitude to Japanese modernism on the cultural-nationalist grounds that it was not ‘authentically’ Japanese was based on a short-sighted view of cultural history—that is, on the facile assumption that Japanese modernism was the product of a one-way flow of influence from ‘West’ to ‘East’. Actually a complex 21 22 23 24

Miner 1956: 270. Miner 1956: 275. Miner 1956: 268. Miner 1956: 279.

japanese modernism reconsidered

19

valency of multidirectional forces was at work—indeed more so even than with Western modernism. Thus if we ask: What is the relation of Japanese modernism to Western modernism or ‘modernism in general?’, the answer must take account of that convoluted history of influence and counter-influence—a far cry from a simple matter of one-way influence. At any rate, the upshot of this complex history of influence and counter-influence is the paradox at the very heart of Japanese modernism: because realistic yōga or Western-style painting in the post-Renaissance illusionistic tradition represented the most au courant and most anti-traditional form of ‘modern art’ for the Japanese art world until the early twentieth century, and because japonisme was a major shaping force of Western modernism, Japanese modernism may be regarded at least as much as a return to tradition—albeit a somewhat transformed or alien version of Japanese tradition—as a breaking away from the relatively recent, relatively shallow-rooted ‘Western tradition’ that had also been part of Japanese modernity since the Meiji era. The question then arises: did the long-term shaping influence of japonisme on Western modernism (‘from Manet to Matisse, from Whistler to Pollock’) have any ‘blowback’ effect in shaping Japanese modernism itself? Did it have any relevance to Japanese artists of the 1920s? For instance, did it enable them to more readily absorb the various modernist styles that were then arising in Europe: Dadaism, futurism, expressionism, surrealism, etc.? Not a question that has often been asked—until quite recently—but, as already noted, Suzuki Sadami points out herein in his study of Japanese literary modernism that some early-twentiethcentury Japanese modernist poets and critics understood the affinities between their traditional poetry and French symbolism—a realization that made modernism seem familiar and accessible to them and thus provided them with an ‘in’ to modernism in general. Despite his own jaundiced view of Japanese modernism in general, even Kawakita, unlike his Western colleagues, acknowledges its paradoxical situation, at least in regard to fauvism: in answering his own question as to why ‘fauvism, of all the modern trends in European art, was the one that was the most highly favoured in Japan’, he responds: In Europe, where the mainstream of tradition sprang from strict academic realism, fauvism was a destructive, revolutionary movement, and a conscious one at that. In Japan the opposite was the case. Far from being the mainstream of Japanese tradition, academic realism was the conscious revolution undertaken by artists dissatisfied with the past . . . and

20

roy starrs the subsequent trend through postimpressionism to fauvism represented in many ways the rebirth of the freedom that had been seen in the nanga and the Maruyama-Shijo styles of traditional Japanese art. To Japanese eyes, in short, it required nothing of the ‘wild beast’ to appreciate the fauves. On the contrary, it was like coming home again. . . . In the fauvist medium the Japanese artist could simply let his Japanese self go. Herein lies the reason for the popularity of fauvism among Japanese artists, as well as the reason why the cubist style never caught on.25

It is significant that Kawakita here singles out cubism as a step too far for the Japanese art world. As Charles Harrison points out: ‘It was the development of Cubism in the years after 1907 that most clearly marked a break with previous styles. . . . In 1948 the American critic Clement Greenberg looked back to Cubism as “the epoch-making feat of twentieth-century art, a style that has changed and determined the complexion of Western art as radically as Renaissance naturalism once did”.’26 According to Kawakita, however, cubism ‘never caught on’ in Japan because, unlike fauvism, it lacked roots in the native tradition. But this is certainly an arguable claim. In fact, if one were to look for precedents for cubism in the Japanese art tradition, one could certainly find some convincing examples: in the ‘off-kilter’, spatially disorienting abstract geometric patterns of Zen rock gardens, for instance, or in the way the great medieval ink-painter Sesshū’s powerful ‘axestrokes’ fracture space in a work such as ‘Hui-k’o Offering His Arm to Boddhidharma’ (1496), or in the single simultaneous image of different time-zones in his landscape scrolls of the four seasons. Perhaps this is why the famous Meiji art critic, Okakura Tenshin, claimed that the art of Muromachi-era Zen monks like Sesshū was ‘true modern art’ (shin no kindai geijutsu).27 At any rate, can any other art tradition offer such clear examples of a cubist aesthetic avant le lettre? The truth is that there is a kind of circularity to Kawakita’s argument, and this makes it easy for him to find what he seeks. Because he wishes to privilege a single variety of Japanese modernism, the rather conservative variety represented by Umehara and Yasui, he finds ‘roots’ for their ‘fauvist style’ in the native nanga tradition, and thereupon is able to sanction their work as ‘authentically Japanese’. But he has no taste for the more radical post-cubist forms of modernist practice, and so, as we have already seen, he dismisses not only cubism but ‘futurism, 25 26 27

Kawakita 1974: 118. Harrison 1997: 9. As Suzuki Sadami notes in his chapter herein.

japanese modernism reconsidered

21

Dadaism, and surrealism’ as examples of the ‘faddism and decadence’ of the modernism that followed the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923—and obviously he is unwilling to acknowledge that such ‘passing fads’ could be rooted in Japanese tradition. In other words he seeks to prescribe ‘acceptable’ and ‘unacceptable’ varieties of Japanese modernism, with only the ‘fauvist style’ sanctioned as ‘authentic’ and all other variants dismissed as rootless fads. Of course, one could argue that the very search for the ‘roots of modernism’ in any national tradition is a contradictory, futile exercise based on a fundamental misunderstanding of what modernism actually was. After all, as the distinguished art critic Herbert Read pointed out long ago, Western modernism represented, more than anything else, an ‘abrupt break with all tradition . . . The aim of five centuries of European effort is openly abandoned.’ In short, modernism was a development without ‘historical parallel’.28 And the writer C.S. Lewis also emphasized that modernist artists such as ‘the Cubists, the Dadaists, the Surrealists, and Picasso’ were ‘shatteringly and bewilderingly new’, and that modernist poetry too was ‘new in a new way, almost in a new dimension’.29 In their classic study of literary modernism, Malcolm Bradbury and James McFarlane identify the anti-traditional impulse that is at the heart of the modernist project: ‘the shock, the violation of expected continuities, the element of de-creation and crisis is a crucial element of the [modernist] style’.30 This being the case, why then should we expect any form of modernism, Eastern or Western, to be ‘rooted in tradition’? The very idea seems oxymoronic. Ideologically if not quite in actual fact, modernism must remain rootless, or even ‘uprooted’. And certainly it seems almost perverse to claim that any form of modernism is ‘inauthentic’ on the grounds that it is ‘rootless’. On the contrary, one could argue that the more rootless any particular artwork was, the more authentically modernist it would be (although ‘absolute rootlessness’ is also probably a cultural-historical impossibility). Thus, although Kawakita’s treatment of Japanese modernism seems more knowledgeable and discriminating than Stanley-Baker’s or the two Keenes’, ultimately it bases itself on the same cultural-nationalist doctrine that art, to be ‘authentic’, must be ‘rooted’ in the national tradition. The credo that was at the heart of modernism—that a whole new 28 29 30

Quoted in Bradbury and McFarlane 1991: 20. Quoted in Bradbury and McFarlane 1991: 20. Bradbury and McFarlane 1991: 24.

22

roy starrs

art could be and needed to be created that was ‘liberated’ both from the nation and from tradition, an art that, in response to the conditions and demands of modernity, was both cosmopolitan and radically new or ‘uprooted’—this fundamental modernist credo was given no more credence by Kawakita than by his Western counterparts of the 1980s. The Historical Context of Japanese Modernism At any rate, the best argument for the ‘authenticity’ of Japanese modernism, if one were needed, derives not from its rootedness in Japanese tradition but from its ‘organic’ relation to the actual historical situation of early twentieth-century Japan. Whether in its Eastern or Western varieties, modernism is best seen from such a historicist perspective because it is, indeed, in a very real sense, time-bound, with its emphasis on the always-new. We live in an age of continual crisis and transition, what has been called a liminoid state, always on the threshold but never completely at home, and modernist artists are responding to this new reality of radical impermanence and instability (as Solzhenitsyn himself recognized). If they are ‘authentic’ artists, how can they do otherwise? Needless to say, Japan had been undergoing a ‘period of rapid and fundamental change’, to return to Solzhenitsyn’s phrase, since the midnineteenth century—in addition to the conditions of early modernity already established in the Edo period. As Ken Henshall points out herein, after the arrival of the US Navy’s Commodore Perry in 1853, ‘the threat of being colonized’ was ‘a very significant stimulant to Japan in its extraordinarily fast “modernization”’. And, as in the West, the progress of modernity in Japan was marked by a number of major traumatic events (like the First World War in Europe): most notably, the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-1905, the increasing incidence of popular riots in the 1910s, the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923, and the rise of militarism and of a fascist ‘police state’ in the 1930s and 1940s. As a matter of fact, a similar argument has often been made about Japanese fascism as about Japanese modernism: that it was not a true and ‘authentic’ fascism because of its differences from the ‘original’ European fascism, differences represented especially by its use of certain Japanese religio-political ‘traditions’, such as the emperor-system and national Shinto. In his recent study of the issue, Walter Skya throws much light exactly on this vexed question of how the ‘traditional’ Shinto religion was made to serve the purposes of a ‘modern’ Japanese fascism.

japanese modernism reconsidered

23

Through studies of a number of nationalist ideologues, he shows how radical ultranationalist Shinto was used to ‘mobilize the masses’ for conquest and war—most especially, the ‘holy war’ against the West. At the heart of Skya’s analysis is his contention that ‘a fundamental transformation in the ideology of Shinto ultranationalism took place in the Taishō period’, and that this transformation was necessary because earlier nationalist ideologies (most notably as propounded by Hozumi Yatsuka) portrayed the masses as ‘passive political objects to be acted on’ and thus had little appeal to the masses themselves.31 As with European fascism, a key historical factor in the rise of a new, more populist form of Japanese nationalism was the increasing politicization of the masses in the early twentieth century, beginning with the riots following the Russo-Japanese War in 1905 and culminating in the rice riots of 1918. These demonstrations of popular political power convinced right-wing thinkers that a new form of emperor-centred nationalism was called for, one that would have more popular appeal than Meiji patriarchal authoritarianism. Most crucially, the new ideology would have to inspire an intense religious fervour in the masses, a willingness to sacrifice themselves ‘for the emperor’—or, in other words, for the state. The Japanese did not have to look for a god-like national leader in a Hitler or a Mussolini—they already had one in the emperor, who could just as easily be turned to the uses of a fascist ideology. Right-wing political theorists such as Uesugi Shinkichi and Kakehi Katsuhiko cleverly conjured up the idea of an unmediated union between the emperor and the people, and suggested that all Japanese could bring ultimate meaning to their lives by achieving a kind of mystical union with the emperor—especially, of course, through death in battle. As Skya writes: ‘Loyalty to the emperor was religious devotion. . . . Personal union with the emperor was the individual’s ultimate objective; it was this objective that was at the heart of radical Shinto ultranationalist ideology. The individual was driven beyond the self to his essential being, to the emperor . . . ’32 Emphasizing the religio-political tenor of these developments, Skya characterizes them as shaped largely by the rise of a ‘radical Shinto ultranationalism’. But, as he also recognizes, these developments had much in common with European fascism, which was indeed a major influence on them. In other words, radical Shinto ultranationalism, just like Japanese modernism as a whole, was not a purely 31 32

Skya 2009: 152. Skya 2009: 201.

24

roy starrs

indigenous phenomenon and can be properly understood only within the context of the international rise of fascism in the 1920s and 1930s. Indeed, as already noted, scholars of fascism such as Roger Griffin and Emilio Gentile have recently demonstrated that fascism itself may be legitimately regarded as another form of modernism.33 Thus, in Japan, as among its fascist allies in Europe, fascism was another ‘modernist product’—and another, albeit negative, warrant of the ‘authenticity’ of Japanese modernism. The political history of the Taishō/early Shōwa period, the period of ‘high modernism’ in Japan as in the West, thus shows clearly that the same forces that produced artistic modernism— especially the rise of a new mass culture—also produced the dangerous form of political modernism known as fascism. Like its European counterpart, Japanese fascism often disguised its radical novelty or modernism as a ‘return to tradition’ or as a ‘revival of tradition’. In his recent study of the ‘aesthetics of Japanese fascism’, for instance, Alan Tansman has shown how this ‘deception’ was achieved in cultural terms, the fascistic artwork clothing itself in the fascinatingly seductive raiment of the native literary and artistic tradition: ‘the traditionally sanctioned aesthetics of the pathos of melancholy loss, revolving around the affective pull of a feminine figure—a figure that appears across culture, whether in a complex modernist essay or a sentimental popular movie’.34 From a more purely historical perspective, Tansman agrees with Roger Griffin and other recent interpreters of fascism regarding its paradoxical relation to modernity and modernism: in short, fascists were ‘anti-modern modernists’.35 In this respect, Japanese fascism arose from the same historical conditions as its European counterpart: ‘In Japan, as in Europe, fascism emerged as a reactionary modernist response to the threats of social and political division created by the economic and social crises following the First World War.’36 In the political context of the 1920s, Japanese fascism was a reaction against ‘Taishō democracy’ and its ‘cosmopolitan liberalism’, just as German fascism was a reaction against the liberal values of the Weimar Republic.37 Against diversity, cosmopolitanism, and modernity, it opposed a mythical national unity and tradition: the ‘Japanese fascist response to modernity shared much 33 34 35 36 37

See Roger Griffin, Modernism and Fascism. Tansman 2009: 15. Tansman 2009: 17-18. Tansman 2009: 3. Tansman 2009: 9.

japanese modernism reconsidered

25

with other inflections of fascism: it provided the possibility for an experience of immediacy and unity that countered the alienation and fragmentation of the modern individual, and it promised an end to class division by promoting the myth of a nation unified by natural bonds of its blood and spirit’.38 Thus, fascist aesthetics were designed as a kind of ‘cure’ to this perceived cultural crisis of modernity and to the sense of malaise and anomie that accompanied this, attempting ‘to resolve the conflicts of modernity by calling for complete submission, either to absolute order or to an undifferentiated but liberating experience of violence’.39 But there was also a hidden price to be paid: ‘It offered a cure to the ills of modernity with solutions that began in the imagination but ended in a politics of death.’40 In order to persuade the public to accept the ‘fascist solution’, then, it was first necessary to convince them that modernity itself was a kind of chronic cultural disease. As Tansman writes, an ‘atmosphere of crisis’ had to be created, and it was in this task, first of all, that writers and artists proved to be of great help to the state. The Japanese Romantic School leader, Yasuda Yojūrō, for instance, obligingly proclaimed that he and his fellow Japanese were ‘mourning the loss of both the gods and ancient Japan itself ’ and that their wounded souls could be consoled only by rapt contemplation of the beauty of traditional Japanese bridges—among other things.41 But, as Tansman points out, Yasuda’s famous essay on the ‘cultural and literary meanings of Japanese bridges’ carries a nasty political punch: ‘from innocent musings on bridges Yasuda arrives at a spiritual glorification of the shedding of blood’.42 Other writers were less wittingly complicit. Certainly Akutagawa, when he ‘sang the swan song at what appeared to be the collapse of modernity’, had no idea of the political implications of his lamentations.43 As Tansman writes: ‘I do not mean to say that Akutagawa’s writings in the 1920s were responsible for the development of fascist aesthetics, only that his melancholy modernism of fragmented, musical moments provided glimpses of things to come and set into motion the beginnings of the fascist aesthetic in its literary form.’44 Nonetheless, 38 39 40 41 42 43 44

Tansman 2009: 3. Tansman 2009: 3. Tansman 2009: 3. Tansman 2009: 16-17. Tansman 2009: 49. Tansman 2009: 40. Tansman 2009: 39.

26

roy starrs

although Akutagawa ‘never married those aesthetics to a politics of violence or death’, Tansman argues that ‘Kobayashi Hideo’s modernism, so richly informed by Akutagawa’s, made that very turn.’45 And, for Tansman, Kobayashi’s work is at the ‘heart of the fascist aesthetic’.46 Furthermore: ‘To readers of Kobayashi’s literary essays the people on the battlefield seem like battalions composed of Shiga Naoyas, men of clear vision, concrete experience, and pure action. War provided the aesthetic solution offered by a writer like Shiga. . . . To dispense with literature is to learn to think simply, and to cease and desist from criticizing war.’47 Of course, Akutagawa cannot be blamed for any of this, but, as Tansman states earlier, ‘writers can aesthetically sow the seeds of a fascist atmosphere without intending to do so’.48 Tansman’s argument on this rather delicate and controversial point is given considerable strength and subtlety by his use of the concept of ‘fascist moments’. ‘Through an analysis of these moments’, he writes, ‘we can begin to see the relation between Japanese fascism and its corresponding cultural texts.’49 These are moments of ‘binding’ (musubi) between self and other, moments that provide the glue for the ‘new myth of wholeness’ based on the ‘mystique of national and racial destiny’.50 In their more active, war-like phase, fascist moments ‘offered images of self-obliteration evoked through the beauty of violence, often in the name of an idealized Japan’.51 The apotheosis of all such moments was the achievement of ‘union’ with the emperor by death in battle. Yasuda in particular ‘wrote prose that bestowed beauty on the act of self-immolation in war’, offering a cure to the ‘wounds of modernity’.52 The aesthetico-spiritual experience of becoming one with nature or works of art could thus slip imperceptibly into the religio-political experience of becoming one with the emperor or the state: ‘Rife with state religious implications, musubi suggests the harmonizing powers of the gods and, by extension, the binding power of the state.’53 State power is thereby given a religious rather than a political foundation,

45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53

Tansman 2009: 40. Tansman 2009: 32. Tansman 2009: 238. Tansman 2009: 2. Tansman 2009: 18. Tansman 2009: 18. Tansman 2009: 18. Tansman 2009: 53. Tansman 2009: 19.

japanese modernism reconsidered

27

leading Japanese fascism to a ‘disavowal of its own politics’.54 Tansman’s study might be regarded as the aesthetic equivalent of works on ‘fascist Zen’ such as James Heisig and John Maraldo’s Rude Awakenings (University of Hawai’i Press, 1995) or Brian Victoria’s Zen at War (Rowman and Littlefield, 2006)—a salutary reminder that even high cultural aesthetic or spiritual traditions can be turned to nefarious uses in an age of ascendant fascism. The Legacy of Japonisme in Japan Itself There are, of course, some significant historical differences here between the Japanese and Western developments of modernism—as is only natural when we consider the different historical situations and forces they responded to. Thus we have a pretty clear idea of what past artistic traditions Western modernism was breaking with, along the lines specified by Herbert Read. But what artistic tradition was Japanese modernism breaking away from? Those who regard it as ‘inauthentic’ might well answer: ‘none at all’, and offer this as further proof of its inauthenticity. And, indeed, it is true that the answer to this question may not seem as immediately clear in the Japanese as in the Western case—mainly, I think, because of two paradoxical historical facts that complicate the relationship between ‘modern’ Japanese and ‘modern’ Western art. On the one hand, for a long time after Meiji artists began to paint ‘Western-style paintings’ (yōga) more or less in the conventional realistic or illusionistic manner of post-Renaissance art alluded to by Herbert Read, this was what was considered ‘modern art’ in Japan—in other words, exactly the ‘traditional’ art that Western modernists were, at the same time, busily trying to break away from. On the other hand, the Japanese art and aesthetics that Western modernists were so eagerly incorporating into their own artistic practice was exactly the artistic ‘tradition’ that the most ‘advanced’ Meiji artists were breaking away from. In short, the two art worlds were to some extent at cross-purposes: the Western artist’s ‘tradition’ was the Japanese artist’s ‘modernity’, and vice versa. As late as the 1970s, for instance, the leading Japanese art historian already referred to, Kawakita Michiaki, argued that the ‘foundation for modern Japanese art was laid in the Edo, or Tokugawa, period (1603–1868). Indeed . . . 100 years before 54

Tansman 2009: 19.

28

roy starrs

Meiji began . . . It is clear that the modern Japanese culture of the Meiji era and after began to take form well before 1800 and in some ways manifested itself in a purer state before 1868 than afterward.’55 But what this eminent art historian means by ‘modern Japanese art’ is by no means any kind of modernism. It is rather the early Japanese attempts to imitate traditional Western illusionistic or naturalistic oil painting techniques. Quite the opposite of what would be regarded as ‘modern art’ in the West. Indeed, although the art-historical perspectives of the two sides have begun to come more ‘into alignment’ in recent years, the apparent paradoxes and potential misunderstandings that can arise from this cultural ‘reverse-vision’ are still with us. In his recent study of Japanese cinema, Scott Nygren notes, for instance, that the great postwar film director Ozu Yasujirō is often considered a traditionalist in Japan (for his ‘Zen minimalism’, etc.), but just as often as a major modernist in the West (for his ‘Zen minimalism’, etc.).56 Nygren calls this ‘paradoxical modernism’: The most familiar example of paradoxical modernism in Japanese film is Yasujiro Ozu. As Mitsuhiro Yoshimoto has argued, Ozu’s films are simultaneously considered to be traditionalist in a Japanese context but are treasured as modernist in the West by critics as diverse as Burch, on the one hand, and David Bordwell and Kirsten Thompson, on the other. . . . Ozu’s development of traditional Japanese aesthetics within cinematic form . . . parallels the adaptation of Japanese tradition by Western modernism, although Ozu’s follows from entirely different circumstances.57

Nygren also points out that Ozu’s filmic aesthetics were developed during Japan’s fascist era, and: ‘The isolationism of the period invited both an emphasis on traditional values and innovation in cinematic form outside the conventions of Hollywood classical practice’—which again brings us back to the vexed question of the relation between modernism and fascism.58 Since the early Meiji period, when the new revolutionary regime resolved to ‘modernize’ by a wholesale adoption of all aspects of Western civilization, and much of the population at large seemed to be seized by a mania for all things Western, issues of ‘imitation’ and ‘authenticity’ haunted Japan’s relation with the West. Famous Victorian visitors to 55 56 57 58

Kawakita 1974: 11. Nygren 2007: 34. Nygren 2007: 34. Nygren 2007: 34.

japanese modernism reconsidered

29

Japan such as Rudyard Kipling and Pierre Loti began to propagate the stereotype of the Japanese as a ‘race of clever imitators’. The nadir of this trend was symbolized by the Rokumeikan or ‘Deer Cry Pavilion’, a British-designed mock-Renaissance Victorian structure built in 1883 as a guesthouse for foreigners. More importantly, it was also designed as a pleasure palace where upper-class natives and foreigners could socialize in the latest and most fashionable Western style: through ballroom dances, costume parties, Venetian fêtes, billiard games, and other pleasantries. The building itself, and the famous social events held within it, became forever identified with the early-Meiji establishment’s slavish imitation of all things Western, the elite version of the national cult of modernity. In sponsoring these grand soirées the government was hoping to convince the Western powers that Japan was now as ‘civilized and enlightened’ as the West and thus worthy of being treated as an equal—and, more specifically, that the ‘unequal treaties’ they had imposed on Japan after its ‘opening’ in 1853 should be revised. But within a few years the government began to realize that its plan had backfired: the pleasure palace had inspired mostly mockery both from their Western guests and from the Japanese public at large, who openly ridiculed the so-called ‘dancing cabinet’. Not surprisingly, the building was sold in 1889, the very year when the adoption of the Meiji Constitution marked the beginning, in many respects, of a ‘return to tradition’. By the late Meiji period, then, the Japanese themselves had already become sensitized to charges that their version of ‘modernity’ was ‘imitative’ and ‘inauthentic’. Thus it is hardly surprising that certain leading intellectuals welcomed the evidence—in the form of japonisme—that Westerners too were not above ‘imitation’ and had to struggle with their own issues of ‘authenticity’. (How ‘authentic’, for instance, are Van Gogh’s copies of Hiroshige or Eisen, complete with garbled attempts to represent Japanese writing?) Noting that the writer Akutagawa Ryūnosuke (1892-1927) ‘was particularly sensitive to the charge of imitation given the critique of his own fiction as being overly reliant on prior literary sources’, Seiji Lippit in his chapter here quotes the following passage from a late essay by Akutagawa: Westerners are contemptuous of the Japanese for their skill at imitation. . . . The Japanese are skilled imitators. One cannot dispute the fact that our works are imitations of Westerners’ works. Yet they too, like us, are skilled at imitation. Is it not the case that Whistler imitated ukiyo-e in his oil paintings?

30

roy starrs

This is a clear expression of what we might call the ‘first stage’ of the Japanese response to japonisme: the simple realization that ‘the Westerners are imitating us, just as we are imitating them’—obviously a confidence-building realization. But soon this evolved into a ‘second stage’ that was far more important in its creative or cultural ramifications: ‘Western modernists are learning so much from the Japanese artistic tradition because there is so much in that tradition that is still of high value; the early Meiji attitude towards Japanese tradition—that it must be abandoned for the sake of modernity—was thus obviously mistaken; tradition and modernity are not necessarily at odds in Japan, and we Japanese modernists should make full use of our own artistic traditions.’ As a number of the authors herein demonstrate, the immediate result of this ‘second-stage’ realization was a revival of native artistic traditions in a ‘modernized’ form. There was also a ‘third stage’, somewhat less salutary in its effects: the rise of a nativist, exclusivist cultural nationalism which, by the 1930s, had allied itself politically with fascist ultranationalism. Indeed, those writers who resisted the Zeitgeist of the 1930s nativist ‘cultural revival’ already seemed to belong to an earlier, more innocent age. As Stephen Dodd points out in his study here of a writer he portrays as a ‘transitional’ figure, Kajii Motojirō: Kajii differs qualitatively from 1930s writers who articulate desire for a ‘pure’ Japanese experience that transcends western influences. It may be that Kajii shares with such writers a tendency to lace rural depictions with a mood of sentimentality and nostalgia, but his texts are driven by anxiety over personal, not national, identity. In that sense, Kajii retains the air of a more individualistic, introverted Taishō writer.

Thus, between the 1870s and the 1930s, the pendulum swung from one extreme to the other: from a total self-abasing surrender of national cultural autonomy to a ‘superior’ foreign civilization to an extreme triumphalist assertion of national-cultural autonomy and superiority. What makes this particularly ironic is that the ‘motive force’ of the pendulum swing was the weight of Western opinion—in cultural terms at least, japonisme. More specifically, the most significant ‘blowback effect’ of japonisme in Japan itself, it seems to me, is the line of what might be called ‘Japanese traditionalist modernism’: that is, the movement to ‘modernize’ traditional native art forms as an alternative to the kind of wholesale adoption of Western art practices initiated by the ‘Meiji modernizers’.

japanese modernism reconsidered

31

Certainly some of the most interesting and impressive works of modern Japanese art and literature belong to this category. For Japanese writers and artists they provide an easy way to evade the ‘anxiety of (Western) influence’; and it must be conceded that they are also especially appealing to Western tastes because they seem ‘uniquely Japanese’. A number of the authors herein focus on this ‘hybrid’ variety of Japanese modernism—as opposed to what might be called the ‘pure’ Western-style high modernism of, for instance, Japanese cubists, Dadaists, Mavoists and surrealists. As our authors show, this line of ‘traditionalist modernism’ is traceable back not only to Ozu’s films but to a vast and diverse range of artworks in many different media: including, for instance, Kawabata Yasunari’s ‘haiku novels’,59 Maekawa Samio’s modernist tanka, Miyagi Michio’s modernist koto music, modernist ‘anti-bijin’ nihonga paintings, the ‘modern Noh plays’ of Mishima Yukio, zen-ei shodō or avant-garde calligraphy,60 and also, going in the opposite direction, those yōga oil paintings that drew inspiration from eighteenth-century Sino-Japanese bunjinga painting. As Leith Morton suggests in his study here of the 1920s movement to ‘reform’ the traditional short-poem (31-syllable) genre of tanka (tanka kakushin) led by Maekawa Samio: Modernism not only exercised a powerful influence over tanka, but . . . actually inspired traditional tanka, and after modernist verse was suppressed in the late 1930s onward, and poets like Samio had transformed Modernism into a more Neo-Classical mode of composition, this lesson was not lost. This was especially the case for the new generation of tanka poets who began to dominate the scene from the 1960s onward, and for many of whom, Samio was their only true progenitor.

As Henry Johnson illustrates, at about the same time the modernist composer Miyagi Michio similarly succeeded in ‘renovating’ traditional koto music, overcoming the resistance that had existed up to that point to ‘mixing’ traditional (Japanese) with modern (Western) musical forms. As Johnson writes: During the Meiji period, in music as in the other arts, the ‘traditional’ was soon strictly separated from the ‘modern/Western’, as if they were two entirely different species of art that could not and should not be ‘interbred’. It was only some decades later, during the modernist Taishō period, that some artists began to realize that actually the two ‘streams’ had far 59 On Kawabata’s modernist ‘haiku novels’ see my Soundings in Time: The Fictive Art of Yasunari Kawabata. 60 On zen-ei shodō see Starrs 2008.

32

roy starrs more in common than was previously recognized and that some creative good could come out of their ‘intermarriage’. It took some boldness and vision for these artists to break what by that point had become almost a taboo. But also the time was right: they were brought to this realization mainly by their encounter with Western modernism, since it obviously, and by no coincidence, had many affinities with ‘traditional’ Japanese art and aesthetics.

In the visual arts too, John Szostak focuses on the modernist response to the traditional bijin (‘beautiful women’) genre of nihonga or Japanese-style watercolour painting: what he calls ‘anti-bijin paintings’, which ‘turned the concept of the bijin on its head by celebrating abject or grotesque images of women’. These ‘neotraditional’ or ‘progressive’ nihonga painters, as Szostak points out, ‘were able to address many of the same issues explored by Yōga painters while avoiding the pitfalls of stylistic mimesis’ [of Western art]. Furthermore, their ‘paintings of grotesque beauties allowed painters to address what amounts to a conflict of artistic identification stemming from an ambition shared with oil painters to contribute to the development of modernist Japanese art counterbalanced by a desire to preserve and promote received artistic traditions’. Indeed, going in the other direction, Japanese Western-style oil painters too, as Matthew Larking shows, began at about the same time to try to ground their art in the Sino-Japanese tradition, drawing inspiration from eighteenth-century bunjinga or literati painting. In the postwar period, zen-ei shodō or avant-garde calligraphy applied a modernist aesthetic to the ancient art of Sino-Japanese calligraphy and became a major and exciting new art form that linked up with the major international modernist art movement of abstract expressionism.61 In the postwar period too, Mishima Yukio’s ‘modern Noh plays’, as Yasuko Claremont demonstrates, represent a remarkably successful amalgam of tradition and modernity, and are ‘able to achieve [the medieval aesthetic quality of] yūgen in modern terms through sharp contrasts: beauty and death, time and timelessness, and the transience of experience on earth’. That this line of ‘traditionalist modernism’ continues on and still has powerful appeal even into the postmodern present is demonstrated here most strikingly by Vera Mackie’s study of Yoko Ono. In Ono’s ritualistic performance art, which is often ‘paradoxical and aporetic, almost like a Zen kōan’, Mackie finds the kind of severe, pared-down minimalism long associated with the aesthetics of 61

See Starrs 2008.

japanese modernism reconsidered

33

Zen Buddhism. Ono evokes what Scott Nygren refers to as the ‘abstract modernism of Japanese tradition’.62 In other words, the internationalist movement of modernism paradoxically encouraged a revival of tradition in Japan, which, in the 1930s, sometimes devolved into a nativist or cultural-nationalist traditionalism that explicitly called for an alternate modernism that would ‘overcome (Western) modernity’ by returning to (Japanese) tradition— and ultimately found expression in the ‘Overcoming Modernity Symposium’ mentioned by several of the authors here. As Takao Hagiwara illustrates in his chapter, one common expression of this ‘return to tradition’ was the beautiful natural lyricism and mysticism of writers such as Miyazawa Kenji—and one could add Kawabata Yasunari, Shiga Naoya, and other major writers of the age, who invoked the power of traditional East Asian nature mysticism as a way of ‘salvation’ from the ‘alienation’ of the modern condition. But, as Alan Tansman and others have recently shown, this ‘reactionary modernism’ was also readily made to serve the purposes of the fascist regime—a less salutary expression of the ‘blowback effect’. Indeed, this may well be regarded as the ultimate paradox of Japanese modernism. But this new nativist or nationalist spirit was also challenged by a new spirit of cosmopolitanism—often in the same writer or artist. An interesting example of what Janice Brown calls ‘double-edged cosmopolitanism’—a cosmopolitanism delicately balanced against nationalism—may be found in the globetrotting Mori Michiyo, whose poetry collections Brown presents here as ‘examples of female intervention in the production of the cosmopolitan and cross-cultural in Japanese literary modernism’. Of her several volumes of poetry written during her travels in Europe and Asia, she wrote two in French and three in Japanese. As Brown points out, ‘Mori’s collection thus presents a kind of double-edged cosmopolitanism. On one hand, by presenting her travels in Asia as global experience, Mori sought to appeal to a wider, international body of readers. On the other hand, she also sought recognition and approval from her fellow Japanese, whom she expected to have a different view of her journey. The poet is keenly aware of the requirements of the two separate audiences. . . . ’ Cosmopolitanism was of course a characteristic feature of modernism and of the age in which it flourished—in Japan as elsewhere. Japanese modernists were quick to stake their claim to being bona fide 62

Nygren 2007: 34.

34

roy starrs

members of the international avant-garde. As Pierantonio Zanotti finds in his study herein of the ‘aborted modernism’ of the pioneer modernist poet Yamamura Bochō, by inventing a new ‘ism’, namely ‘prismism’, he ‘revealed for a short while, and probably too early, the potential for a local exploitation of the symbolic capital incorporated in the latest things coming from the West. We might even say that, in many ways, it was a mere mise à jour of a well-established power vector (“The West” → Japan) within the international république mondiale des lettres.’ But, as Seiji Lippit also points out herein, this local exploitation of Western symbolic capital no longer equated, in the 1910s, to a ‘sense of cultural subjugation to Western civilization’: ‘In the cosmopolitan intellectual environment following the Russo-Japanese War (1904-05), a time when Tokyo was being proclaimed as the capital of an extensive empire to rival those of the West’, the erstwhile ‘sense of cultural subjugation to Western civilization’ lacked all currency. The typical Taishō intellectual such as Akutagawa felt himself to be the legitimate heir of a global culture that included both the Eastern and Western traditions—and he was also absolutely au courant with the latest European literature and literary trends. Of course, like many other writers, Akutagawa was not entirely free of the ‘anxiety of influence’—and Mats Karlsson provides conclusive proof herein of one possible source of that anxiety: the extraordinary extent to which Akutagawa’s supposedly ‘autobiographical’ study of his own ‘descent into madness’, Cogwheels (Haguruma, 1927), was actually closely modelled on another writer’s work: August Strindberg’s Inferno (1897). Likewise, Rebecca Suter, in her study of Akutagawa’s kirishitan mono or stories of Japanese encounters with Christianity in the sixteenth century, finds that: ‘The notions of cosmopolitanism and anxiety of influence are central to the stories, both on the thematic and on the narrative/linguistic level.’ And also that, although it is the foreign character Organtino who experiences ‘anxiety at the loss of his cultural identity’, nonetheless ‘Akutagawa displaces his own sense of trauma as a modernised/Westernised Japanese onto the foreign characters in order to construct his identity as a cosmopolitan modern intellectual.’ Thus: ‘The story can . . . be read as a compelling universal metaphor for the encounter with the Other, which applies equally well to the Jesuit mission, to Commodore Perry’s gunboat diplomacy, and to Taishō Japan’s own oscillation between cosmopolitanism and nationalism, multiculturalism and assimilationism.’ But Seiji Lippit also finds that Akutagawa managed to turn the tables on the West, in his fiction at least, not just by an ‘appropriation of the

japanese modernism reconsidered

35

colonial gaze’—the claim to parity as an imperialist power already alluded to—but, far more significantly from an intellectual-historical perspective, by a quite cogent claim to a superiority of knowledge: ‘For Akutagawa, the imbalance of geopolitical power (it is the Westerners “who rule the world”) is countered by a differential access to cultural knowledge: the contemporary Japanese intellectual has a superior knowledge of both Japan and the West.’ In other words, the Taishō intellectual could claim, quite justifiably, that his knowledge of the West was far deeper and more extensive than the contemporary Western intellectual’s knowledge of Japan (and, of course, this ‘imbalance of power’ in the realm of knowledge still largely obtains even today). Interestingly, Jonathan Dil finds that a major contemporary Japanese writer such as Murakami Haruki, unlike his predecessor Akutagawa, is completely free of any ‘anxieties of influence’ based on a perceived absolute cultural divide between Japan and ‘the West’. Although, as Dil points out, Murakami’s ‘early development as a writer owes much to the influence of American modernism, particularly F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby’, he is ‘a writer very much at home with his primarily American literary influences and acutely aware of how his ability to borrow, transform, and ultimately transcend these influences without anxiety helped him to create his own literary style’. In other words, the struggle between nationalism and cosmopolitanism initiated by Japanese modernism in the early twentieth century seems to have finally been resolved in favour of the latter almost a century later, in the postmodern and thoroughly globalized Japan of the early twenty-first century.

36

roy starrs References

Klaus Berger, Japonisme in Western Painting from Whistler to Matisse, translated by David Britt. Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992. Malcolm Bradbury and James McFarlane, eds. Modernism: A Guide to European Literature 1890-1930. London: Penguin, 1991. William Gardner, Advertising Tower: Japanese†Modernism and Modernity in the 1920s. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Asia Center, 2006. Roger Griffin, Modernism and Fascism: The Sense of a Beginning under Mussolini and Hitler. London: Palgrave, 2007. Charles Harrison, Modernism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. James Heisig and John Maraldo, Rude Awakenings. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1995. Kawakita Michiaki, Modern Currents in Japanese Art. New York: Weatherhill, 1974. Dennis Keene, Yokomitsu Ri’ichi, Modernist. New York: Columbia University Press, 1980. Donald Keene, Dawn to the West: Japanese Literature of the Modern Era. New York: H. Holt, 1984. Seiji M. Lippit, Topographies of Japanese Modernism. New York: Columbia University Press, 2002. Earl Miner, The Japanese Tradition in British and American Literature. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1958. Scott Nygren, Time Frames: Japanese Cinema and the Unfolding of History. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007. Walter A. Skya, Japan’s Holy War: The Ideology of Radical Shintō Ultranationalism. Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2009. Joan Stanley-Baker, Japanese Art. London: Thames and Hudson, 1984. Roy Starrs, Soundings in Time: The Fictive Art of Kawabata Yasunari. Richmond: Japan Library (Routledge/Curzon), 1998. Roy Starrs, ‘Ink Traces of the Dancing Calligraphers: Zen-ei Sho in Japan Today’, in Henry Johnson and Jerry C. Jaffe, eds., Performing Japan: Contemporary Expressions of Cultural Identity. London, Global Oriental and Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2008. Alan Tansman, The Aesthetics of Japanese Fascism. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009. William Tyler, ed., Modanizumu: Modernist Fiction from Japan, 1913-1938. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2008. Brian Victoria, Zen at War. Rowman and Littlefield, 2006.

REWRITING THE LITERARY HISTORY OF JAPANESE MODERNISM Suzuki Sadami Modernism and Research Methods for its Reception History The Exhibition Lost Paradise: Symbolist Europe held at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts in 1995 was a large-scale attempt to capture the entire history of symbolism. It went beyond the narrow definition of symbolism, following its trail to expressionism and to early modernism.1 In the field of French art, as its aficionados would agree, the borders of the subject progressively move towards the informal in the works of the master symbolist Gustave Moreau (1826–1898). The impulse to shift to the abstract had already begun by the end of the nineteenth century, and some of Moreau’s disciples even became important members of fauvism, the forefather of early modernism. 1 Modanizumu (modernism) in the field of art and architecture can be defined as a movement that begins with a rejection of traditional forms and values. There are three main shifts that are categorized under its name: 1) The move from 1860s impressionism to 1880s neo-impressionism represented by Georges Seurat (1859–1891), with its method of separating colours. This was then followed by symbolism and art nouveau in the late nineteenth/early twentieth centuries. 2) The birth of abstract art from the progression of fauvism (1905–) to expressionism (1905–), cubism (1907–), futurism (1909– ), constructivism (1912–), and finally to vorticism (1914–). 3) The shift from dadaism (1916–) to surrealism (1924–) following the end of the First World War. In the first half of the twentieth century, these were often referred to as the avant-garde as well, and the movements at the beginning of the century came to be known as ‘early modernism’. Modanizumu flourished in the post-First World War era, in the 1920s and the 1930s and was carried over to the 1960s. Today, ‘modernism’ has come to encompass contemporary art such as advertisements and designs on daily goods and has become a relatively stable word in the quotidian vocabulary. In the field of literary arts (bungei), imagism in English poetry, and the French esprit nouveau, named by Guillaume Apollinaire (1880– 1918), are customarily taken up as key examples. Also, ‘post-impressionism’ comes from the exhibit ‘Manet and the Post-Impressionists’ organized by Roger Fry (1886– 1934) and exhibited in London in 1910–1911. This term mainly refers to works by Paul Cézanne (1839–1906), Paul Gauguin (1848–1903), and Vincent van Gogh (1853–1890). Cézanne worked within the impressionist circle, but in the twentieth century, Gauguin and others took him up as a special case. This term has not completely stabilized in its usage. It sometimes includes Henri Matisse (1869–1954), or it could refer to those after ‘neo-impressionism’ and the Nabists. Furthermore, recent scholarship has witnessed the use of the term ‘late-modernism’ in relation to the idea of ‘post-modernism’. These terms appear to refer to two eras: post-First World War and post-Second Word War.

38

suzuki sadami

Within this artistic shift, could we also locate a connection between the representative symbolist Stéphane Mallarmé’s (1842–1898) treatment of Hindu mythology in Contes Indiens (1893) and Moreau’s interest in India (indianisme)? As with Moreau, who was also known for his japonisme, Pierre Bonnard (1867–1947), famous for his turn-of-the-century ornamental style during his days in Les Nabis, followed the impressionists in expressing his fascination with Tokugawa era ukiyo-e (pictures of the floating world). In 1891, he exhibited a work consisting of four screens entitled Femmes aux Jardins at the Salon des Independents, stating that the work was ‘inspired by Japanese byōbu screens, except I separated each panel’. Could we see this perhaps as an example of ‘translation’ where the form of Eastern ‘everyday art’ (seikatsu geijutsu) was translated to fit the rigid criteria of a tableau? This chapter aims to introduce a new historical perspective into the history of modern and contemporary Japanese literary art (bungei). Drawing connections between literature, art, and aesthetic theory, I want to propose a research method that links the broader reception history of modernism (from European symbolism to early modernism) and the history of ‘traditional art’ criticism. In particular, I will focus on the reception of symbolism in order to analyse Japanese ‘modernism’ in the literary arts, for the shift and ‘translation’ of what ‘symbol’ signified pushed forward the progress of modernism and were the first steps for the movement in Japan. The French impressionists praised the beauty of ukiyo-e, in particular the works of Katsushika Hokusai (1760–1849). In contrast, William Anderson’s Pictorial Art in Japan (1886) and Ernest Francisco Fenollosa’s (1853–1908) Revue of the Chapter on Painting in L’art japonais by Louis Gonse (Japan Weekly Mail, July 12, 1884) located the essence of ‘Japanese art’ in Muromachi-era Zen paintings. Art historian Inaga Shigemi elaborates on this point.2 Likewise, Anderson and Fenollosa, before moving to Japan, had the preconception that through screen paintings and ceramics, one could locate the essence of ‘Chinese art’ in sansuiga (landscape paintings). Okakura Tenshin (1862–1913), inspired by both Anderson and Fenollosa, began a new movement in Japanese art, along with Yokoyama Taikan (1868–1958) and Kanō Hōgai (1828–1888). He conducted 2 Inaga Shigemi, ‘Nihon bijutsuzō no hensen—inshōshugi nihonkan kara ‘Tōyō bigaku’ ronsō made’ [Transitions in the Image of Japanese Art—Impressionist View of Japan to the ‘Eastern Art’ Debate] Wa (Summer 2001): 201–202.

rewriting the literary history of japanese modernism 39 excavations of Buddhist statues along with Fenollosa, who worshipped Hegel’s Vorlesungen über die Aesthetik (Lectures on Aesthetics, 1835). In Tōyō no risō—nihon bijutsu o chūshin to shite (The Ideals of the East with Special Reference to the Art of Japan), Okakura appropriated the Hegelian aesthetic notion of the three domains3—metaphorical or Eastern, classical, and romantic, or Christian—to designate the art of Muromachi-era Zen monks like Sesshū (1420–1506) as examples of ‘Asian romanticism’ (Tōyōteki roman shugi).4 He claimed their art to be the ‘true modern art’ (shin no kindai geijutsu) that encapsulated the essence not just of the art of Japan but of Asia as a whole.5 Should we see this as an ‘appropriation’ of Western art, a ‘translation’, or a cunning ‘switch’? In the aforementioned work, Inaga Shigemi also describes how, with the 1900 exhibit of Japanese art in Vienna, the German Secession Movement began to discuss an artistic method that could ‘awaken the sentiments (Stimmung)’ of the beholders.6 Inaga thus reveals how Japanese ukiyo-e and woodblock prints contributed to the dominance of the Hegelian theory of ‘feelings and mood’ (kibun jōchō) among the imported aesthetics of German sentimentalism.7 3 Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Vorlesungen über die Aesthetik [Lectures on Aesthetics] (1835, 1931), ‘Prospects’ in the introduction, Bigaku (the 1st in 3vols), tranlated into Japanese by Takeuchi Toshio, Complete Works of G. F. Hegel, vol.18, Iwanami-shoten, 1954, pp. 144–182. 4 Mutō Michio, ‘Tenshin no yūshū—sono biishiki no mumeisei’ [Tenshin’s Melancholy—the Anonymity of his Aesthetic Consciousness], in Nihon no geijutsuron— dentō to kindai [On Japanese Art—Classical and Modern], ed. Kanbayashi Tsunemichi (Kyoto: Mineruba shobō, 2000), pp. 218–241. This work shows that in the English translation of Lectures on Aesthetics by the British Hegelian Bernard Bosanquet (1848– 1923) (1886, stored at the Tokyo Art School Library) purchased in 1891 by the Tokyo Art School and someone has translated and written in some of the vocabulary. Even though the time period cannot be determined, Mutō suggests that this was the handwriting of Okakura Tenshin, thus claiming that he had read the work (p. 226). It is also well known that this English translation, along with Rudolph Hertmann Lotze’s (1817– 1881) German version, was commonly sold in Tokyo bookstores. See the ‘bunkai ihō’ (Bulletin of the Literary World) section in Waseda bungaku (October 1892) 18 and Hijikata Teiichi History of Literary Critics in Modern Japan (Kindai Nihon Bungakuhyōronshi, Seitou-shoten, 1937), 95. 5 Okakura Tenshin, ‘Tōyō no risō—nihon bijutsu o chūshin to shite’ [The Ideals of the East with Special Reference to the Art of Japan], in Okakura Tenshin zenshū 1 [Complete Collection of Okakura Tenshin 1], (Tokyo: Heibonsha, 1980), 84. 6 Inaga, ‘Transitions in the Image of Japanese Art—Impressionist View of Japan to the “Eastern Art” Debate’, 202. 7 ‘Feelings and mood’ is a key concept in Hegel’s Lectures on Aesthetics, in the section called ‘Natural Beauty’ (Part 1, Chapter 1, Section 3), Bigaku (the 2nd in 3 vols), translated into Japanese by Takeuchi Toshio, Complete Works of G. F. Hegel, vol.18, Iwanamishoten, 1960, pp. 337–365.

40

suzuki sadami

Two phenomena thus become clear. Within the shift from symbolism to early modernism in Europe, one could locate hints of Japanese and Eastern art. Furthermore, Western aesthetics produced a new way of appreciating ‘traditional’ art in Japan, and there is clear evidence that these two phenomena intercrossed and unfolded together. No matter how one may situate ‘modernism’ in the artistic context, the main focus of this essay is to explore the connection between art or aesthetics (art criticism) and literature, and to investigate the exchange and the trade of artistic stimulation between Europe/the United States and Asia/Japan. As a side note, however, it is beyond the scope of this chapter to include fields such as music. In Japan, modernism was overlooked for a long time in academic studies.8 However, in the early 1980s, sociologists such as Minami Hiroshi first turned critical attention to the movement by expounding on the emergence of mass society (taishū shakai) in Japan. He accomplished this feat through an examination of the left-wing criticisms that undermined the dissemination of Americanism in post-earthquake (The Great Kantō Earthquake, 1923) Japan.9 It is unarguable that artistic modernism in Japan became an official movement after the 1923 earthquake. Murayama Tomoyoshi (1901– 1977), studying abroad in Europe, returned home that year, equipped with the vigor of German avant-gardism, and began a movement in both art and theatre. In the literary field, in October of the following year (1924), Kataoka Teppei (1894–1944), Kawabata Yasunari (1899– 1972), and Yokomitsu Riichi (1898–1947) began publishing Bungei jidai (The Era of Literature). Yokomitsu’s ‘Head and Stomach’, the opening tale of the first volume, contained a new kind of depiction that depended on various metaphors. For example, the work begins with the famous line: ‘It was high noon. The special express train was running at full speed, completely full. The small station along its trail was silenced like a stone.’10 8 One could trace the root of this sentiment to the fact that both the Communist International Theses (1932) and Essays on the Development of Capitalism in Japan, written by Japanese Communist economists, figured prewar Japan as a (half-) feudal society, and this historical perspective was carried into and dominated postwar Japan as well. 9 Minami Hiroshi, ed., Nihon modanizumu no kenkyū—shisō/seikatsu/bunka [Studies on Japanese Modernism—Intellectual History/Daily Life/Culture] (Tokyo: Burên shuppan, 1982). See also Minami Hiroshi, ed., no.188 of Gendai no esupuri: Nihon modanizumu—ero guro nonsensu [Esprit d’Aujourd’hui: Japanese Modernism—Erotic Grotesque Nonsense] (Tokyo: Shibundō, 1983). 10 Yokomitsu Riichi, ‘Atama narabini hara’ [Head and Stomach] (1924), in vol.1 of Yokomitsu Riichi zenshū [Complete Collection of Yokomitsu Riichi] (Tokyo: Kawade shobō shinsha, 1981), 396–403, quote on 396.

rewriting the literary history of japanese modernism 41 Whereas ‘like a stone’ is a simile (chokuyu), he also uses personification by stating that the station was ‘silenced’. Starting from around the beginning of the twentieth century, writers began to use various metaphors like the above to represent in a realistic manner the ‘impressions’ of the five senses. This is not to mean that they were trying to directly ‘recreate’ the realism of impressions, but rather to replace them with expressions that were new and unexpected for the reader.11 Chiba Kameo (1878–1935), one of the top literary critics at the time, named Yokomitsu’s style ‘New Sensationalism’ (shinkankaku). This attracted the attention of literary circles and became one of the keystones of Japanese modernism. Following this, in the early 1980s, literary scholars came to focus on Yokomitsu’s statement in his ‘Memorandum 8’: ‘When I look back, the Great Kantō Earthquake of Taishō 12 greatly influenced Japanese citizens, an influence that could only be matched by that of world wars.’12 This analogy then came to serve as grounds for using the earthquake as a historical divider. However, today, this kind of perspective has come to be amended. Unno Hiroshi came to lead this reexamination, when he refuted the idea of the earthquake as a shifting point in his Modan toshi Tōkyō— 1920 nendai (Modern City Tokyo—the 1920s, 1983). He presented the 1920s depictions of cityscapes and the emergence of mass culture as phenomena that occurred simultaneously with the rest of the world. Following his book, two exhibits—one called ‘Japon des Avant-gardes’ in Paris (1986), the other called ‘Exhibit on mobo/moga’ (1998), organized by Sydney University’s John Clark and Mizusawa Tsutomu of Kanagawa Modern Art Museum—came to reexamine the periods of 1910–1970 and 1910–1935, respectively. We also cannot forget Omuka Toshiharu’s 11 Kawabata Yasunari also uses a similar method. The famous opening line of his book Snow Country (originally published as ‘Yūgureiro no kagami’ [Twilight-Coloured Mirror], 1935) reads: ‘The train came out of the long tunnel into the snow country. The bottom of the night sky turned white.’ Here too, the white snow-covered field at night that the narrator witnesses after the train passes the tunnel is described by the metaphor ‘the bottom of the night sky’ (yoru no soko). These impressionistic metaphors gave a whole new, refreshing sense to the readers of this period, who were used to the [more transparent] depictions of the Japanese Naturalists. At the same time, the Japanese Marxists, who reduced the issue of representation to a scientific deduction, denounced the New Sensationalists’ style as a symptom of ‘bourgeois’ art that relied on cheap tricks. For the opening line of Snow Country, see Kawabata Yasunari, Yukiguni [Snow Country], in vol.5 of Showa bungaku zenshū [Complete Anthology of Showa Literature] (Tokyo: Shōgakukan, 1986), quote on 31. 12 Yokomitsu Riichi, ‘Oboegaki 8’ [Memoir 8] (Original publication date unknown), compiled in Oboegaki [Memoirs] (1935), in vol.6 of Yokomitsu Riichi zenshū [Complete Collection of Yokomitsu Riichi] (Kawade shobō shinsha, 1982), 225.

42

suzuki sadami

Taishōki shinkyō bijutsu undō no kenkyū (Research on Taishō Era AvantGarde Art, 1995), which emerged right between those two exhibits. However, in the field of Japanese literature, there is nothing that matches this development in art history. In the final volume of the tenvolume collection Modan toshi bungaku entitled Toshi no shishū (Collected Poetries of the City, 1991),13 I introduced poems that captured the 1910s city as a spectacle. Since then I have tackled this issue by connecting it to the notion of ‘Taishō Life-centrism’ (Taishō seimei shugi), a discourse that bloomed right after the Russo-Japanese War (1904–1905). Just as the First World War brought about a crisis in modern European civilization, Japan went through a similar experience, even though their own cities had not been burnt to the ground. These crises involved the death and injury of numerous soldiers in the Russo-Japanese War (death toll of 230,000), the sudden, drastic shift within the industrial structure that pushed for the establishment of large factories and heavy and chemical industries, and the ensuing expansion of the city. Many sought to end such detriments, and art and aesthetic theory arose with this cause as their basis. From the late nineteenth century to the twentieth, gaining a great understanding of the shift that was occurring in Europe around the same time, the art and aesthetic theory of Japan developed into their own individual movements. On a separate note, studying the reception history of art and aesthetics also leads us to the problem of cultural translation (bunka honyaku). This problem is made clear just by looking at the vocabulary of translation. A word whose concept matches that of a Western word is chosen as a receptor from traditional conceptions (dentō gainen). It is then transformed into a new word; but depending on the difference between the existing conceptual system (gainen hensei) and the value system that supports it, it results in gaps and biases. There are cases where these things are eventually corrected, but in general it is difficult to reconfigure words whose meanings become rooted and systematized by the sphere of education or publication. An example of this cultural translation is the various significations for the word ‘art’.14 13 Unno Hiroshi, Kawamoto Saburō, and Suzuki Sadami, ed., vol. 10 of Modan toshi bungaku: Toshi no shishū [Modern City Literature: Collected Poetries of the City] (Tokyo: Heibonsha, 1991). 14 See Suzuki Sadami, ‘ “Geijutsu” gainen no keisei, shōchō bigaku no tanjō—wabi, sabi, yūgen zenshi’ [The Construction of ‘Artistic’ Concept, the Birth of Symbolist Aesthetics—Pre-history of ‘Wabi, Sabi, Yūgen’], in Suzuki Sadami and Iwai Shigeki, ed., Wabi, sabi, yūgen—kono ‘Nihonteki naru mono’ e no dōtei [Wabi, Sabi, Yūgen—Its Processes of ‘Japan-esque Things’] (Tokyo: Suiheisha, 2006), 65–164.

rewriting the literary history of japanese modernism 43 This chapter will first sketch out Japan’s broader reception theory of modernism by tracing the shift in its conceptual system and aesthetic principles and then turn to examples of actual works. I will then take up Matsuo Bashō’s haikai as an example of how this reception emerged through a reevaluation of classical literature. Lastly, through an examination of Bungei jidai and ‘The New Sensationalism Manifesto’, I will shed light upon the efficacy of this research method by showing the continuity of Japanese modernism, from its broader sense of the term to its more limited signification, and also by pointing out the rupture that interceded between them. The Reception of Modernism and its Aspects—Conceptual System, Aesthetic Ideas, Works The Establishment of the Conceptual System From the latter half of the nineteenth century, Japan became engaged in constructing the field of ‘literature’ (‘literature’ referring to university literature departments) by modelling it after the conceptual system of the humanities in modern Europe. In general, the transitional era of the twentieth century points to a period where modern Western formations became incorporated. To cite a clear example, around 1910, the word ‘art’ (bijutsu) became limited to the field of paintings and sculpture,15 and ‘literature’ (bungaku) (the narrow sense) or ‘literary art’ (bungei) became deployed among intellectuals to connote works of linguistic art (and their research), mainly poetry, novels, and dramas. It was around this time that a new history of linguistic art emerged. Different from the ‘Japanese literary history’ constructed in 1890 and modelled after humanities, this history eliminated kanbun (Chinese Texts) and focused on the current trends in literary art.16 However, Japan’s ‘humanities’ did not define the humanities as a study of the human in opposition to Christian theology. Rather, it brought religious studies into the field, and following other models of European nationalism [that established their own national religions, especially in Germany], it placed Shintoism at the root of its nationhood. Consequently, neither art history, nor the history of linguistic art, distinguishes art from material or linguistic works belonging to religious thought 15

See footnote 8. Suzuki Sadami, Nihon no ‘bungaku’ gainen [The Concept of ‘Literature’ in Japan] (Tokyo: Sakuhinsha, 1998), see chapter 8, 230–260. 16

44

suzuki sadami

(Shintoism, Buddhism).17 In late Meiji theories on art, there existed also a certain tone of argumentation that emphasized religious elements and spirituality in their aesthetic reception. Their ideas were tied to Emerson’s (1803–1882) transcendental spiritualism, Hegel’s Lectures on Aesthetics, and the theories of Hartmann (1842–1906), who incorporated the ideas on the unconscious of Schopenhauer (1788–1860) and Schelling (1775–1854) into his own art theory. As the representative receivers and translators of these thoughts, one could name Kitamura Tōkoku (1868– 1894), Fenollosa, Okakura Tenshin, and Mori Ōgai (1862–1922). Inaga Shigemi has examined the concept of ‘Japanese art history’ (l’histoire de l’art du Japonais), publicized and created purely for the 1900 Paris World Fair Exhibit. He shows how the image of Japanese art was constructed with early modern European folk art at its centre, and how its historical perspective focused on ancient Buddhist statues.18 Okakura Tenshin, one of the key members of this construction along with Fenollosa, focused on Nara-period Buddhist statues, which in Hegel’s Lectures on Aesthetics, would be deemed as ‘symbolic and/or Eastern art’. Okakura regarded these statues as an art form that corresponded to the Greek and Roman sculptures of Hegelian ‘classical art’, representing the balance between spirituality and materiality.19 There was, however, a difference in the historiography of Fenollosa and Okakura. Fenollosa, who returned to the US in 1890, used the Song Dynasty in China as the classical or the revival era of the classical in

17 This phenomenon has many causes. One is that the Meiji government proclaimed ‘National Shintoism’ to be the act of worshipping the nation’s ancestors, and thus ‘not a religion’. Another is that Romanticism in modern Europe took up both Christianity and paganism as their religious subject. Furthermore, works by Nitobe Inazō, who was influenced by German Protestant theology, and those by Kakei Katsuhiko helped establish the idea of Shinto as a form of national religion (minzoku shūkyō). See Nitobe Inazō, Bushido, the Soul of Japan; An Exposition of Japanese Thought (1899), cf. 5th ed. (Tokyo: Shōkwabō, 1901). The book, originally published in English, was translated into Japanese by Sakurai Ōson in 1911. There is also a New York edition: Bushido, the Soul of Japan: An Exposition of Japanese Thought (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1908). Also see Kakei Katsuhiko, Koshintō daigi [The Great Cause of Ancient Shintoism] (Tokyo: Shimizu shoten, 1912). 18 Inaga Shigemi, ‘Kindai no kokka korekushon to minkan korekushon no keisei’ [The Construction of the Modern National Collection and the Civilian Collection], in Korekushon no kigōron [Semiotics of Collections], ed. Japan Semiotic Society (Tokyo: Tōkai daigaku shuppankai, 2001), 80–82. 19 Okakura Tenshin’s Tōyō no risō [Eastern Ideals] rephrases the notion of ‘symbol’ as an expression of ‘formalism’ (keishiki-shugi), or in other words as a pursuit of formalistic beauty. It modifies Hegelian theory by claiming that in Eastern ‘symbolic’ art, it is the form of the material that governs the spirit. See this footnote 5, vol.1 of Okakura Tenshin zenshū, 83–84.

rewriting the literary history of japanese modernism 45 his analogies.20 Okakura, on the other hand, located ‘the Eastern ideals’ (tōyō no risō) in T’ang Dynasty ‘classics’, and defined the sansuiga (landscape paintings) ranging from the Song Dynasty to the Muromachi period as ‘true modern art’ (shin no kindai geijutsu). This discrepancy between Fenollosa and Tenshin in the ‘translation’ game of Hegelian aesthetics leads us to explore the relationship between the reception of Western art and the evaluation of classical texts in Japan and the East. What was happening in the case of literary art? Aesthetic Principles (geijutsu rinen) In the early and mid-Meiji period, two literary methods arrived in Japan: realism, which sought to capture the reality of civil societies, and romanticism, which placed its value on creativity and imagination. Chinese poetic writings (kanshibun), whose spirit also upheld reality, and nativist thought (kokugaku) functioned as their receptors, and the principle of depicting realistic feelings and landscapes became very visible.21 During the transition to the twentieth century, however, this went through a complete makeover. Let me summarize this transformation by dividing it into five points. 1) German critic Johannes Volkelt, in his Asthetische Zeitfragen (1895), criticized the move from naturalism to symbolism, focusing on writers such as Henrik Ibsen (1828–1906), Gerhart Hauptmann (1862– 1946), and Joris-Karl Huysmans (1848–1907). These were playwrights and novelists who originally began as naturalists, but who moved towards symbolism, as they began to be interested in the mysticism that could be found in the depth of nature or in the instincts of organisms. Volkelt compared these writers to Max Klinger’s (1857–1920) sculptures and fantastic lithographs, naming them Post-naturalists 20 Boston Museum, Kyoto, Daitokujizō, chūgoku kodai butsuga tokubetsuten kyatarogu [Catalogue on Special Exhibit of Kyoto, Collection at Daitokuji, and Ancient Chinese Buddhist Paintings] (Boston Museum, 1894). Yamaguchi Seiichi, vol.2 of Fenorosa [Fenollosa] (Tokyo: Sanseidō, 1982), 40. In the works of Fenollosa, following his return, one could trace his departure from the Hegelian three-step theory. 21 One could locate this in criticisms of Manyōshū and The Tale of Genji, methods for tanka (short poems), and concepts for novels. See Suzuki Sadami, ‘ “Nihon bungaku” to iu gainen, oyobi koten hyōka no hensen—Manyō, Genji, Bashō’ [The Concept of ‘Japanese Literature’ and Transitions in Classical Criticism—Manyō, Genji, Bashō], in vol. 22 of Nichibunken sōsho [Nichibunken Japanese Studies Series], Katoki no bungaku [Transitional Era Literature], ed. Inami Ritsuko and Inoue Shōichi (Kyoto: International Research Centre for Japanese Studies, 2000). Furthermore, the spirit of valuing direct expressions of one’s emotions, the building of the populace, and linguistic movements came from Ming dynasty China, in particular from late Ming thought, and it continued to be developed throughout the Tokugawa era.

46

suzuki sadami

(Nachnaturalismus). Mori Ōgai then introduced his work to Japan as Sanbi shinsetsu (New Theories on Aesthetic Appreciation, 1900). Subsequently, during the rise of religious sentiments and the heightening of spirituality in post-Russo-Japanese-War Japan, European symbolist art and its movement towards mysticism, represented by Maruice Maeterlinck (1862–1949), was taken up. As representative examples of this trend, we can cite Ueda Bin’s (1874–1916) introduction of ‘symbolist poetry’ in the first half of the 1900s, Kanbara Ariake’s (1875– 1952) works, and the proposal for ‘New Naturalism’ (shin shizen shugi) put forward by Iwano Hōmei (1873–1920) and Shimamura Hōgetsu (1871–1918). Also, the November 1910 issue of the coterie magazine Shirakaba (White Birch) published a special issue on Auguste Rodin (1840–1917), bringing about a Rodin boom among young intellectuals; and his sculptures too were interpreted as symbols of a certain profound ‘life’ (seimei). 2) Henri Bergson’s Matière et mémoire (1896) and William James’ ‘A World of Pure Experience’ (1903) were introduced to Japan. These new philosophies captured consciousness (represented by the senses, perception, direct experience or pure experience) as the basis of human recognition and brought about a trend that focused on the five senses and their impressions, unification with nature, and the unification of the subject with the object. Tayama Katai’s ‘‘Sei’ ni okeru kokoromi’ (An Experiment on ‘Life’, 1908) expands on this emphasis on the five senses by describing it as ‘to write as a phenomenon of just seeing, listening, and touching’.22 Takamura Kōtarō, in his ‘Midori iro no taiyō’ (Green Sun, 1910), also declares that ‘if the sun appears to be green, it is fine to depict it as green’. Theories on the unification with nature could be seen in writings such as Fujioka Sakutarō’s criticism of the Manyōshū (Collection of Ten Thousand Leaves, ca.759), the essays on poet Yamabe no Akahito in his Kokubungakushi kōwa (Lectures on National Literary History, 1907), and Mushanokōji Saneatsu’s ‘Rodan to jinsei’ (Rodan and his Life, 1910). 3) The notion of ‘feelings and mood’ within the imported aesthetics of German sentimentalism became an important issue. A clear example of this can be seen in Kitahara Hakushū’s statement: ‘My symbolic poems mainly revolve around the impressions of sentiments and the symphony of mood’, cited in the introduction to Jashūmon (Heretics, 1909). 22 Yoshida Seiichi and Wada Kingo, ed., vol. 3 of Kindai Bungaku Hyōron Taikei [Collection of Critical Essays in Modern Japan] (Tokyo: Kadokawa-shoten, 1972), 448.

rewriting the literary history of japanese modernism 47 4) In 1911, Abe Jirō published his ‘Naiseikatsu chokusha no bungaku’ (Literature of the Portrayals of Inner Life) in the 29 August issue of Tokyo Asahi Newspaper. The term ‘inner life’ refers to the inner workings of life, or how the mind (kokoro) functions. Around the same time, art critic Louis Hynde’s The Post Impressionists (1911), based on Roger Fry’s London exhibit of ‘Manet and the Post-Impressionists’, became popular among those interested in French art. Kimura Shōhachi thus translated the entire text in the 1913 (vol.17) issue of Gendai no bijutsu (Contemporary Art), accompanying the translation with twenty-four illustrations. Hynde states in the text that representing the object’s appearance is merely an explanatory, outmoded method, that ‘art is what expresses one’s emotions (kanjō)’.23 5) These trends then became categorized under the rubric of ‘the symbolic expressions of life’ (seimei no shōchō hyōgen). This idea does not point to any religious gods or to any matter or laws of motion pertaining to materialism. It is not a universal principle, but rather an expression that upholds the notion of ‘life’ (‘true life’, ‘the great life of the universe’) and places this idea at its centre. ‘Life-centrism’ in Japan, or ‘Taishō-life-centrism’, emerged from the ‘Life-centrist’ thought in turnof-the-century Europe. Lev Tolstoy (1828–1910) in his A Confession (1879–1881) and in On Life (1887) proposed that ‘God is life’. German biologist Ernst Haechel wrote his ‘Theory on All Things Possessing Life’ in Die Lebenswunder (1904). Wilhelm Dilthey (1833–1911) expounded on ‘interpretations of life’ or ‘philosophies on life’ (Lebensphilosophie), while Bergson published his Creationist Evolution (1907). Japan was also introduced to the philosophy of the women’s liberation movement led by Swede Ellen Key (1849–1926), at the core of whose ideas lay ‘the religion of life’. Taishō ‘life-centrism’ was a diverse discourse, which incorporated not only all of these European ideas, but also blended together various ideas such as modern biology (especially theories on evolution) and the Eastern (or Chinese) notion of ‘qi (Spirit)’, Buddhism (especially Zen), the philosophy of Wang Yang-Ming, including its ‘left branch’, and Shintoism. Beginning with Kitamura Tōkoku’s ‘Naibu seimei ron’ (On Inner Life, 1893) and ‘Biteki seikatsu o ronzu’ (On Aesthetic Life, 1901) by Takayama Chogyū who was inspired by Nietzsche (1844–1900), various forms of thought were born, their philosophers ranging from biologists to Buddhists and Shintoists. 23 Kitazawa Noriaki, Kishida Ryūsei to Taishō avangyarudo [Kishida Ryūsei and Taishō Avant-Garde] (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1993), 45.

48

suzuki sadami

Some of these examples are: Iwano Hōmei’s ‘Shinpiteki hanjū shugi’ (Mystical Satyr-ism, 1906), Kinoshita Naoe’s Zange (Confession, 1906), Ueda Bin’s ‘Shin dōtoku setsu’ (New Lectures on Morals, 1910), Nishida Kitarō’s Zen no kenkyū (Studies on the Good, 1911), Kakei Katsuhiko’s Koshintō taigi (The Great Cause of Ancient Shintoism, 1912), Kuriyagawa Hakuson’s Kindai no ren’ai kan (Modern Views on Love, 1921). In the field of aesthetic theory, we can also cite Okakura Tenshin’s Tōyō no risō (The Ideals of the East, 1903), Iwano Hōmei’s Shin shizenshugi (New Naturalism, 1908), Mushanokōji Saneatsu’s ‘Rodan to jinsei’ (Rodin and His Life, 1910), Shimamura Hōgetsu’s ‘Seimei’ (Life, 1912), Watsuji Tetsurō’s Gūzō Saikō (Revival of Idols, 1918), Nishida Kitarō’s ‘Bi no honshitsu’ (The Essence of Beauty, 1920), Saitō Mokichi’s ‘Tanka ni okeru shasei no setsu’ (Theories of Depiction in Short Poems, 1920–1921), and Kitahara Hakushū’s ‘Dōyō shikan’ (My Views on Children’s Songs, 1926). Whether one intended to deepen or heighten one’s emotions, trying to depict one’s experience in a realistic manner, or one wanted to be able to close one’s mind, everything translated into ‘symbols of life’. The artistic theory of ‘the symbolic expression of life’ implied a certain way to free oneself from all boundaries of expression, and each strand of thought came to seek its own form of expression that suited its ideals. The European movement of artistic modernism underwent this trend as well. Italian futurism, influenced by Bergson’s Creationist Evolution, vorticism in Britain, and French surrealism, which was derived from Freudian (1856–1939) psychoanalysis, are all examples of this life-centrism.24 24 The phrase ‘expression of life’ (seimei no hyōgen) appears, for example, in Yves Duplessis, Le Surréalisme (1950), trans. Inada Sankichi, in Collection Que Sais-Je?, no.432. (Tokyo: Hakusuisha, 1963), 105. However, the words of Man Ray, who incorporated the spirit of surrealism in photography, probably reveal its signification in a more concrete manner:

No matter what, an effort pushed by desire must be supported by a subconscious energy that automatically helps establish it in reality. It is from this energy that we attain an endless amount of resources. In other words, the resources are retained and ready within ourselves, so all we have to do is to expel all the entrapped emotions. Like magicians, who deal with many natural phenomena, and like scholars, who employ various contingencies and rules, creators devote themselves to the human value. They submit themselves to the power of the unconscious, tainted by one’s own personality, in other words, to the universal desire of human beings. This is how they bring forward the motives or instincts that have been long suppressed and that serve as the basis for philanthropy and trust. Man Ray, ‘L’age de la lumière’, in Minotaure, no.134 (December 1933), Quoted from Tokyo National Modern Museum, Shintai to hyōgen 1920–1980 [Body and Expression 1920–1980], (Tokyo: Tokyo National Modern Museum, 1996) 254.

rewriting the literary history of japanese modernism 49 Creating Actual Works In turn-of-the-century literary art, there is an attempt to learn from the timely sketches of the impressionists and capture shifts in natural scenery. Tokutomi Roka’s Shizen to jinsei (Nature and Life, 1900) and Kunikida Doppo’s Musashino (The Field of Musashi, 1901) are two examples of this. They drew their ideas from Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot’s (1796–1875) landscape art and William Wordsworth’s (1770–1850) poetry, respectively, and stated that they were trying to depict and write about the essence of nature, or in other words ‘life’.25 In the field of art, Fujishima Takeji (1867–1943) painted ‘Chō’ (Butterfly, 1900). In it, he tried to capture the shift from pleinarism to romanticism.26 Using the story of Psyche in Greek mythology as his topic, he arranged his work based on the symbolic expressions of French romanticism. In 1900, Aoki Shigeru (1882–1911) also became a seminal figure in introducing impressionism, pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood works, and works by Moreau and Chavannes (1824–1898). Aoki’s representative work ‘Umi no sachi’ (Product of the Sea, 1904) gave him the opportunity to become friends with Kanbara Ariake, who composed the poetry anthology Shunchōshū (Collection of Spring Birds), which is seen as the first Japanese work to actually capture the principles of symbolism. The word ‘symbol’ was first introduced to Japan in Véron’s Aesthetics (1884–1885) translated by Nakae Chōmin (1847–1901).27 Eugène Véron, in his L’Esthétique (1878), criticized the training method at the Academie des Beaux-Arts, which consisted of copying other 25 For reference, see Suzuki Sadami’s aforementioned ‘The Concept of “Literature” in Japan’, section 10.2, and Suzuki Sadami, ‘ “Genbun itchi” to “shasei” sairon—“ta” no seikaku’ [Rethinking ‘the Unification of Speech and Writing’ and ‘Sketches of Natural Life’—the Characteristics of the Ending ‘Ta’], Kokugo to kokubungaku (July 2005): 1–21. 26 Pleinarism was a method where instead of the traditional method of finishing up landscape paintings using the artificial light inside the art studio, one would instead pay attention to the effect that light brought upon the figure’s shape and shades, in addition to things like moisture level in the air. In England, Joseph Mallord William Turner (1775–1851) was the representative artist of this movement, as was Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot (1796–1875) in France. They both learned from artists in mid-nineteenth-century Rome, who placed their canvases outdoors and depicted the landscapes there. Claude Monet (1840–1926) and other impressionists all followed this trend, but the term ‘pleinarism’ has also been used to designate the artists belonging to the Ecole de Barbizon, who often chose the forest of Fontainebleau as their subject. Kume Keiichirō (1866– 1934), who studied in Paris, and Kuroda Kiyoteru (1866–1924) brought this method home and started a new era of Western painting in Japan. 27 Kimata Satoshi, ed., Kindai nihon no shōchō shugi [Symbolism in Modern Japan] (Tokyo: Ôfū, 2004), see10.

50

suzuki sadami

masterpieces, and propounded that the expression of the artist’s individualism and emotions could only be born from depicting actual objects. In other words, he sought to accomplish what the romantics envisioned by using the methods of realism. He states that in the art of the past, ‘even sculptors all turned to statues of gods or heroes as their topic. If not, they sculpted strange objects that resisted interpretation and claimed them to be symbols of religious sublimity.’28 His ideas here recall Hegel’s, in that he sees art as a method that symbolizes primitive religious notions, no matter how artistic principles may vary. Separate from this, there was also another use of the word ‘symbol’, which was used to designate a new movement in the arts. Ueda Bin is credited with being the first person to use this term, when in the January 1904 issue of Myōjō (Morning Star), he translated the title of the Belgian poet Émile Verhaeren’s (1855–1916) poem as ‘Washi no uta (shōchōshi)’ (Eagle’s Songs (Symbolist Poem)). Beginning with this, many symbolist works began to be translated and introduced. However, the terms ‘symbolist poetry’ or ‘symbolism’ in Japan came to connote various different movements in turn-of-the-century Europe. Not only limited to French symbolism, it included the symbolist poems of Austrian poet Hugo von Hofmannsthal (1874–1929), who emphasized the ‘feelings and mood’ aspect of German Romanticism, and whose poems were described as touching on the secrets of life. It also referred to the aesthetic appreciation of English critic Walter Pater (1839–1894) and to the works of Arthur Symons with his aestheticism, which appeared between impressionism and symbolism. Rosetti’s sonnets such as ‘The House of Life’ also emerged during this shift, and Verhaeren’s Les Villes Tentaculaires (1895) even compared machine civilization to an organism, singing about its moving powers and its joys and sorrows. Symbolism, then, was a flexible term that encompassed all of the meanings above, not distinguishing one movement from another. This complicated situation also applied to the reception of European paintings, where impressionism, les Nabis, symbolism, and postimpressionism all arrived in Japan as intermixed movements. Students of Western painting like Okada Saburōsuke (1869–1939), Sakamoto Hanjirō (1882–1969), Nakamura Tsune (1887–1924), and Yasui Sōtarō (1888–1955) came to assimilate these various styles. From the 1910s to the 1920s, this extended to the arena of Japanese paintings as well, and 28 Hijikata Teiichi, ed., vol. 79 of Meiji bungaku zenshū [The Complete Anthology of Meiji Literature] (Tokyo: Chikuma shobō, 1976), see 115.

rewriting the literary history of japanese modernism 51 it may be said that the only difference between Japanese and Western paintings lay in their use of pigmentation. Hayami Gyoshū (1894–1935) adopted bold compositions from traditional elements. Tsuchida Bakusen (1887–1936) borrowed from Gauguin’s themes and arrangements. Within the Kyoto art circles, many proto-expressionist artists emerged, including Kawabata Ryūshū (1885–1966), who deployed daring compositions and use of colour. At the same time, Japan also witnessed a revival of nanga—paintings by literary scholars that were adopted from the tradition of China’s nanshūga (Zen painting) and emerged as its own movement during the Tokugawa period. It is said that the revival of nanga occurred along with that of kangaku (Chinese studies) in the 1890s,29 but as far as actual works are concerned, their creation took place around the 1920s.30 A similar trend can be located in the watercolours of Yorozutetsu Gorō (1885–1927) and Murayama Kaita (1896– 1919), both of whom were known as painters in the early modernist style. This is also especially visible in the works of Tomioka Tessai, who in his late years became interested in the School of Yang-Ming. With his free-flowing use of the brush, he created numerous ink paintings that could almost be mistaken for expressionist art, and this style led him to become internationally acclaimed.31 The seeds of European early modernism were being blown over to Japan, landing one after another, all around the same time. With this, the art world of Japan finally came to witness an incredible flowering of talents who appeared to bloom all at once. When Filippo Marinetti (1876–1944) delivered his ‘Futurist Manifesto’ in Paris on 20 February 1909, the Japanese response was swift. Takamura Kōtarō, who was in France at the time, immediately sent his observations to the Japanese newspapers, and Mori Ōgai’s abridged translation of the manifesto appeared in the literary journal Subaru (The Pleiades, 24 March 29

Anonymous, ‘Meiji bijutsu shōshi’ [Short History of Meiji Art], Taiyō 18.3 (September 1912): 196–205. 30 Sakai Tetsurō, ‘Taishōki ni okeru nanga no saihyōka ni tsuite—shinnanga o megutte’ [The Reevaluation of Southern Paintings in the Taishō Era—Tracing New Southern Paintings], Miyagiken bijutsukan kiyō, no.3 (1988). Also see Chiba Kei, ‘Tanaka Yoshikura Nanga shinron ni okeru bunka honyaku no seijigaku’ [The Politics of Cultural Translation in Tanaka Yoshikura’s New Theories on Southern Painting], Shakai bunka kagaku (February 2003). Inaga Shigemi, ‘Bunjinga no shūen to kakusei— Tomioka Tessai bannen no bunjinga/nanga no kokusai hyōka’ [The Death and Awakening of Literati Painting—The International Evaluation of the Literati and Southern Paintings of the Later Years of Tomioka Tessai], Aida (February 2003). 31 Sen Gyōbai, Tessai no yōmeigaku [Tessai’s Yomei Philosophy] (Tokyo: Bensei shuppan, 2004).

52

suzuki sadami

1909) one month later. Following this, the ‘Futurist Manifesto’ was retranslated about every other year. Kanbara Tai (1898–1997), who published his so-called ‘post-cubist poems’ in coterie magazines from the mid-1910s, began to explore a new painting style along with Tōgō Seiji (1897–1978). This style aimed to divide the movements of the body into units of time. Let me cite from Kanbara’s representative work ‘Manatsu (kōki rittai shi)’ (Mid-Summer (Post-Cubist Poem), 1917): oxygen, nitrogen, argon the trembling of the atoms that dance frantically and in disarray air, factories, plants, and roads too come together, unify, then separate to dance to the rhythm of the sun now every colour, every light, every moment infused with life the suffering life of automobiles, cars, airplanes, and bombs all become ours. Oh Mid-Summer, Oh Mid-Summer, Oh the Midday of Mid-Summer thus, Oh Sun now, every living thing, every breathing thing, every moment that will be filled listen to my humble plea and drink them all up32

In 1922, poet and painter Ogata Kamenosuke too produced lyrical abstract art, reminiscent of the constructivism of Wassily Kandinsky (1866–1944). In the field of tanka (short poems), Maeda Yūgure (1881–1951) stands out as the exemplary figure. In the introduction to his third poetic collection Ikuru hi ni (Days of Living, 1914), he states that he created poems that ‘made me feel as if they possessed the most direct connection to the self, gave the strongest sensation of tugging at the self, and gave the feeling of sensing the self ’s own flow of life’.33 Among the poems here are ones influenced by Van Gogh and the Norwegian painter Edvard Munch (1863–1944). One can even find phrases like ‘Remembering the painting of Van Gogh in prison walking in a circle of prisoners’, ‘In the blazing sun, the hollyhock there yonder colours the corner of my world yellow’, ‘Remembering Munch’s The Room of 32 Suzuki Sadami, ed., vol.10 of Modan toshi bungaku [Modern City Literature], Toshi no shishū [City Poetry] (Tokyo: Heibonsha, 1991), see 87–88. 33 Maeda Yūgure, Ikuru hi ni [Days of Living] (Tokyo: Hakujitsuha, 1914).

rewriting the literary history of japanese modernism 53 the Deathbed, I listen to the night wind, trying to sleep.’ There are also post-impressionist style poems that sing of a certain beauty in the wild, filled with light: ‘The diving girl, who strips her kimono in the setting sun, turns towards the ocean and becomes completely naked.’34 In the famous work by Saitō Mokichi, Shakukō (Red Light, 1913), too, one finds similar phrases: ‘The red head of the lion is soaked in the spinning light of the heavens’, ‘Upon looking at the self-portrait of Gauguin, I remember the day when I killed the yamako (mountain demon) in Michinokuni’, ‘The flower field dripping with the red light of the setting sun, blurs and melts in the distance.’ In Aratama (Unpolished Soul, 1921) also, a poem reads: ‘soaked in the tide, naked boys come towards the fires on the beach, transparent and low’. These examples reveal how Western art, from impressionism to expressionism, had deeply embedded itself in the sphere of Japanese literary arts by the 1910s.35 Criticism of Bashō and the Shin kokinwakashū In the introduction to Shunchōshū (Collection of Spring Birds, 1905), Kanbara Ariake claims: ‘When Bashō emerged in the Genroku era, he succeeded in creating a certain spirit by endowing sekku (short verses) with the Zen philosophy of Genchi36 and interweaving with it the ordinary. This is the closest to symbolism in our literature.’37 In other words, Bashō managed to inscribe the secret of the universe in just a few words, while at the same time creating a sense of heightened spirituality through quotidian words. As is evident here, the discovery of symbolism in Japan greatly affected its criticism of classical literature. 34 Maeda Yūgure, ‘Yūgure no uta’ [Song of Twilight], in Maeda Yūgure zenshū [Complete Anthology of Maeda Yūgure] (Tokyo: Kadokawa shoten, 1972), quotes on 112, 114, and 129, respectively. 35 I omitted the reception history of ‘the stream of consciousness’, a characteristic in modernist novels. For reference, see Suzuki Sadami, Kajii Motojirō no sekai [The World of Kajii Motojirō] (Tokyo: Sakuhinsha, 2002), especially chapter 8.7. Also see my ‘Nakamura Shin’ichirō Kumo no yukiki—aruiwa ‘umaku tsukurareta henbō’’ [Nakamura Shin’ichirō’s The Coming and Going of Clouds—or ‘a Well-Constructed Transfiguration’], in vol. 36 of Nichibunken sōsho [Nichibunken Japan Studies Series], Hyōgen ni okeru ekkyō to konkō [Border-Crossing and Mixing in Expressions], ed. Inami Ritsuko, Inoue Shōichi (Kyoto: International Research Centre for Japanese Studies, 2005), see also notes on 134–136. 36 Genchi’s teachings explored the secret source of the world in intellectual Taoism. 37 Kanbara Ariake, Shunchōshū [Collection of Spring Birds] (1905), in vol.58 of Meiji bungaku zenshū [The Complete Anthology of Meiji Literature], ed. Yano Hōjin (Tokyo: Chikuma shobō, 1967), quote on 286.

54

suzuki sadami

Comparing Bashō’s haikai to Japan’s symbolist poetry thus became a popular practice. Noguchi Yonejirō (1875–1947), who actually began his career as a poet in the US, was invited to London in 1914, after his return to Japan. There, he lectured on ‘The Spirit of Japanese Poetry’ (1914, Japanese translation 1915) and spread haiku criticism in Europe. He compared haiku to the poetry of William Butler Yeats (1865–1939) and William Blake (1757–1827), who were fascinated with world excavations and mystical symbolism. Their poetry could be seen as carrying on the ideas that Arthur Symons expressed in The Symbolist Movement in Literature (1899). In contrast to the popular belief that Japanese haikai was merely a form of linguistic play, Noguchi introduced Bashō’s haikai as something that intensifies one’s spirituality in short, easy words. His words affected his own home country as well and brought about a growing interest in Bashō among symbolic poets like Mikiro Fū (1889–1964).38 The movement to reevaluate Bashō reached a peak in the 1920s. Poet Ōta Mizuho (1876–1955) became the centre of this movement and examined classical poetry as symbolic expressions of universal life. He praised Saigyō’s poems, with strong overtones of Buddhism, as a form of high art, and he also applauded Bashō’s notion of sabi (quiet elegance). In 1920, Ōta established a research group on Bashō’s hokku (opening phrase of a renga), along with writer Kōda Rohan (1867–1947), haiku poet Nunami Keion (1877–1958), critic Abe Jirō (1883–1959), Abe Yoshishige (1883–1966), Komiya Toyotaka (1884–1966), and Watsuji Tetsurō. Their meeting minutes were serialized in the poetic journal Chōon (Sound of the Tide). Abe Jirō, Abe Yoshige, and Watsuji Tetsurō were seminal figures in the philosophy of universal ‘life’, and their studies—Bashō haiku kenkyū (Study of Bashō’s Haiku, 1922), Zoku Bashō haiku kenkyū (Sequel to Study of Bashō’s Haiku, 1924), Zoku Zoku Bashō haiku kenkyū (Sequel to the Sequel to Study of Bashō’s Haiku, 1926)—were published by Iwanami-shoten, along with Ōta Mizuho’s Bashō haikai no konpon mondai (Fundamental Issues of Bashō’s Haikai, 1926) and Bashō renga no konpon kaisetsu (Fundamental Interpretations of Bashō’s Linked Poetry, 1926).

38 Hori Madoka, ‘Noguchi Komejirō no eigo kōen ni okeru nihonshi karon—haiku, Basho, shōchōshugi’ [The Poetics of Japanese Poetry in Noguchi Komejirō’s English Lectures—Haiku, Basho, Symbolism], Nihon kenkyū, no.32 (March 2006): 39–61.

rewriting the literary history of japanese modernism 55 With this movement in motion, Bashō’s reevaluation also escalated within the bundan (literary circles). Satō Haruo, in ‘“Fūryū” ron’ (On ‘Fūryū’, 1924) names the moment where nature and the self come together as ‘fūryū’ (refinement) and cites Bashō’s literary world as the epitome of this idea. He calls out to writers to go beyond the modern novel, which focuses on the struggles of the human will, by applying this philosophy. Uno Kōji also states in ‘‘Watakushi-shōsetsu’ shiken’ (My Perspective on ‘The I-Novel’, 1925) that, although no Japanese writer could write great novels like Balzac (1799–1850), no Western writer could recreate the world of Bashō. He corrects his former opinion that works in essay style like Shiga Naoya’s ‘Kinosaki nite’ (At Kinosaki, 1917) could not be considered to be a particular style of fiction and comes to accept the value of ‘shinkyō shōsetsu’ (mental-state fiction), where writers express their state of mind in essay style.39 Meanwhile, poet Hagiwara Sakutarō (1886–1942), who used to be critical towards conceptual symbolist poetry and even wrote an essay called ‘Banish the Poetry of the Mikiro Fū School’, began hailing Bashō’s name as well. In ‘Shōchō no honshitsu’ (The Essence of Symbols, 1926), he claims that, although nineteenth-century French symbolism led by Mallarmé revolved around the themes of ‘mysticism, enchantment, ghostliness, and Eastern fatalism’, today’s European modernism was finally understanding its essence intuitively and approaching symbolism in the East, represented by Bashō.40 This may sound like an unsubstantiated claim, but he was actually basing his ideas on the words of Ivan Goll (1891–1950).41 The German expressionist poet, who was born in Alsace and even partook in the French avant-garde poetry movement, argued once that ‘the model for symbolism is the Japanese haiku’. Following this, Japan witnessed various influences of haiku in the Western world: Ezra Pound’s (1885–1972) imagism, the French poet Max Jacob’s (1876–1944) short poetry movement, and the Russian film director Sergei Eisenstein’s (1898–1948) method of montage.

39

Suzuki Sadami, The World of Kajii Motojirō, see 331, 595. Hagiwara Sakutarō, ‘Shōchō no honshitsu’ [The Essence of Symbols] (1926), in vol. 8 of Hagiwara Sakutarō zenshū [The Complete Works of Hagiwara Sakutarō] (Tokyo: Chikuma shobō, 1976), quote on 26. 41 Hagiwara Sakutarō, ‘Sanbunshi no jidai o chōetsu suru shisō’ [Thought that Surpasses the Era of Prose Poetry] (1927), in ibid., quote on 64. Suzuki Sadami, ‘Taishō jūgonen’ [Taishō 15], Hennentai taishō bungaku zenshū: taishō jūgonen [Historical Chronology Format Complete Collection of Taishō Literature: Taishō 15] (Tokyo: Yumani shobō, 2003), 654–655. 40

56

suzuki sadami

Hagiwara Sakutarō, then, in a later essay called ‘Nihon shiika no shōchō shugi’ (Symbolism in Japanese Poetry), professed Shin kokinwakashū (The New Poetic Anthology of the Present and the Past, 1205) to be the embodiment of Japanese symbolism. In this manner, Bashō’s haikai and the imperial anthology Shin kokinwakashū came to be narrated as being representative of ‘Japanese symbolism, the king of all symbolisms.’ In the 1930s, this trend continued to be developed by people like Ōnishi Yoshinori (1888–1959), known to be the first researcher of Japanese aesthetics, and Okazaki Yoshie (1892–1982), who promoted ‘the study of Japanese literary art’ (nihon bungeigaku). Borrowing the notion of ‘sentimental symbolism’ from German aesthetics, they spearheaded the argument that ‘things of Japanese-ness’ (nihonteki narumono) were represented by Shin kokinwakashū and by the ideas of wabi (aesthetic of rustic solitude), sabi (aged tranquility), and yūgen (mysterious subtlety) propounded by the great Noh playwright Zeami (ca.1363–1443).42 For this thought to concretize, the Iwanami publishing house once again came to provide the necessary media. Rupture from Early Modernism The word modanizumu in Japanese literary history has often been used to point to the New Sensationalists and their surroundings. However, this designation only looks at the surface of the phenomenon, focusing on the writers’ new metaphorical method or their popular subject of cityscape. This understanding of modanizumu overlooks the important shift in representation that had been taking place since the turn of the century, mainly the move from direct representation (object to representation) to the representation of impressions (object to impression to representation). There was also a new form of representation that dealt with the expression of inner life (naibu seimei). In fact, the manifesto published by the New Sensationalists in their seminal journal Bungei jidai was also infused with the notion of ‘life’. Kataoka Teppei’s ‘Wakaki dokusha ni atafu’ (For the Young Readers, December 1924) emphasized the negotiation between a work’s material and the writer’s ‘life’. Kawabata Yasunari’s ‘Shinshin sakka no shin keikō kaisetsu’ (Analysis of New Trends of the Up-and-Coming Writers, January 1925) stated that ‘new happiness’ (atarashii yorokobi) arose 42 For reference, see Suzuki and Iwai, Wabi, sabi, yūgen—These ‘Japan-esque Things’, cited above.

rewriting the literary history of japanese modernism 57 from being able to swallow everything (banbutsu) into your subjectivity (shukan) and that, vice versa, if one could allow one’s subjectivity to be swallowed up by everything, that would serve as a ‘new salvation’ (atarashii sukui). Kawabata summarizes that it is precisely this ‘unification of the subject and the object’ that governs the newly rising writers of his time.43 The New Sensationalists were trying to theorize the new textual form that was touched off by French works like Paul Morand’s Ouvert la nuit (1922), where numerous metaphors were freely used as a form of style. In ‘Kankaku katsudō—kankaku katsudō to kankakuteki sakubutsu ni taisuru hinan e no gyakusetsu’ (Sensationalism Movement—Sensationalism Movement and the Paradox of Criticizing Sensationalist Works, February 1925; later called ‘New Sensationalism’), Yokomitsu Riichi defines his meaning of ‘sensation’, the symbol of ‘sensation’, as: ‘the instinctive trigger within one’s subjectivity that functions to strip away nature’s outside appearance and jump into the thing itself ’.44 This passage has long attracted the attention of scholars, but it is not as if his ideas were so different from those of Kataoka Teppei or Kawabata. To describe subjectivity as something that ‘strips away nature’s outside appearance and jumps into the thing itself ’ is to say, according to Saitō Mokichi, ‘to enter into reality and depict first-hand the unification of nature and the self ’. In fact, Yokomitsu follows up on the earlier comment and states: ‘With this alone, it would just be an eccentric explanation, and I have not yet experienced the newness within that new sensation.’ Yokomitsu continues to argue that the older notion of ‘sensation’ is something that directly symbolizes the content of one’s intuition: ‘One’s intuition turns into “pure subjectivity” because it bypasses subjectivity and projects the object [of the empty subject].’45 As opposed to this, ‘new sensation’ represents an expression where the dynamism of the intellect (i.e. the action of understanding taking on a dynamic form) takes one’s obtained cognition (the ‘pure subjectivity’ that emerges as the object within one’s subjectivity or ‘subjective objectivity’) and translates it into a ‘symbol’. He was promoting a way of effacing subjectivity 43 Kawabata Yasunari, ‘Shinshin sakka no shin keikō kaisetsu’ [Analysis of New Trends of the Up-and-Coming Writers] (1925), in vol.30 of Kawabata Yasunari zenshū [Complete Works of Kawabata Yasunari] (Tokyo: Shinchōsha, 1982), quote on 177. 44 Yokomitsu Riichi, ‘Kankaku katsudō—kankaku katsudō to kankakuteki sakubutsu ni taisuru hinan e no gyakusetsu’ [Sensationalism Movement—Sensationalism Movement and the Paradox of Criticizing Sensationalist Works] (1925), in vol.13 of Yokomitsu Riichi zenshū [Complete Works of Yokomitsu Riichi] (Tokyo: Kawade shobō shinsha, 1981), quote on 76. 45 Ibid., 80.

58

suzuki sadami

and creating a situation where subjectivity and objectivity were unified. This would result in a new cognitive content, and by endowing the content with an intellectual operation, one would be able to re-construct and create a ‘symbol’. Yokomitsu defines ‘new sensation’ as a way of taking apart a form in order to create a new form. He points to various movements as his examples: futurism and its notion of time, cubism and its concept of space, and the Dadaist and expressionist expression of mental images. From the 1910s onward, Japanese philosophers called what William James (1842–1910) termed as ‘direct experience’, ‘pure consciousness’, or ‘non-reflective consciousness’ as ‘pure objectivity’ (junsui kyakkan) taken in subjectivity. This phrase was used to capture the concept where one effaced self-consciousness and subjectivity in order to unify it with the object. Yokomitsu saw the attempt to directly recreate this ‘pure objectivity’ as an ‘out-moded expression of sentiments’ (kyūrai no kankaku no hyōgen) and called for a way of representing this through a more intellectual method. For this reason, New Sensationalism, for Yokomitsu, did not imply how one sensed or felt the object, but how to create a different world through new uses of metaphors and their fragmentation. This resonates with what Nishida Kitarō claimed in ‘Bi no honshitsu’ (Essence of Beauty, 1920), compiled in Geijutsu to dōtoku (Art and Morality, 1923). In this essay, Nishida applies Bergson’s theory of ‘creative evolution’ and claims that ‘the root of artistic creation lies in élan vital (vital force)’.46 He uses French post-impressionist paintings as examples to define art as a form that represents the ‘life’ resulting from the unification of subjectivity and objectivity. He argues that the essence of art lies in the ‘symbol’, which is to create an independent object of aesthetic appreciation by conflating one’s perception with one’s mentality. He also calls this blending of the various perceptions ‘the construction function’ (kōsei sayō). Art is not a matter of cognition. Rather, as Nishida goes on to explain, it is perception (chikaku) that should be reconstructed as the object of aestheticization. As a literary example of how this ‘unification of the perceptions’ that Nishida propounds in ‘Essence of Beauty’ could be expressed, one may turn to Kajii Motojirō’s ‘Remon’ (Lemon, 1924). This may be a renowned text, but not until recently was its connection to Nishida made clear. 46 Nishida Kitarō, ‘Bi no honshitsu’ [Essence of Beauty] (1920), in vol.3 of Nishida Kitarō zenshū [Complete Works of Nishida Kitarō] (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1965), quote on 270.

rewriting the literary history of japanese modernism 59 In the story, a lemon—like the ones that were actually sold in the city at the time, a product of California—helps brighten up the narrator’s life, dispersing his depression. In that moment, the ‘I’ feels as if that one lemon is worth ‘every good thing and every beautiful thing’ put together.47 In order to write about this experience of inverted values, he recalls every sensation associated with the lemon—its coldness, scent, colour, and shape—and reconstructs it into a physical object. In other words, he transforms the senses (minus, of course, taste and hearing) into a three-dimensional object—the definition of cubism. Except of course, sentences, unlike paintings, are not limited to the sense of sight. Kajii then summarizes this experience as ‘simple senses of cold, touch, smell, and vision’, attributing Chinese characters to each of the senses.48 This strong linking of Chinese phrases signifies the author’s engagement with the reconstruction of the five senses.49 At the Third Institution of Higher Education, Kajii was a student in the science department. Inspired by Hermann von Helmholtz’s (1821-1894) anatomical chart of the sensory organs, he thought of creating a mechanism of communication in literary works that would transport its material from its conveyor to its receiver. From an early age, Kajii had grasped the notion that an expression possesses material form, and was not only the one-way expression of the consciousness of the artist. It is virtually undisputed that Kajii was familiar with Nishida’s ‘Essence of Beauty’, and he was also interested in the avant-garde art of Kandinsky and Picasso (1881–1973). Yokomitsu Riichi too stated that his ‘interest was moving’ towards the constructivist movement led by Kandinsky and others.50 Constructivism sought to assemble colours and shapes without an actual subject of the painting. Cubism witnessed the same phenomenon as well. Around 1913, Georges Braque (1882–1963), together with Picasso, pioneered the method of papier collé by cutting up newspapers and wallpapers and creating a surface by gluing them together. This implied a move away from an art form like still-life, where one would take apart the optic angles of the subject matter and assemble them together onto a single surface. In other words, they sought to skip the subject matter—its senses and impressions—in its entirety and attempted to pursue the beauty of simply 47 Kajii Motojirō, ‘Remon’ [Lemon] (1924), in vol.1 of Kajii Motojirō zenshū [Complete Works of Kajii Motojirō] (Tokyo: Chikuma shobō, 1999), quote on 11. 48 Ibid. 49 Suzuki Sadami, The World of Kajii Motojirō, 55–60. 50 Yokomitsu Riichi, vol.13 of Complete Works of Yokomitsu Riichi, 80.

60

suzuki sadami

creating a surface. The artist’s senses, perception, and cognition would be turned strictly to the surface itself, and inorganic substances like paint, canvas, and tableau must be recognized for what they are—inorganic substances. Furthermore, Dadaists and surrealists then turned to creating ‘objet’ using merchandise products, completely turning away from the use of paint in the case of painting, but also from plaster, bronze, and wood in the case of sculptures. Marcel Duchamp (1887–1968) titled a ready-made urinal ‘Fountain’, signing his name as ‘R. Mutt’, and in 1917 tried to submit this to the Independent Exhibit in Paris, of which he was a committee member. The work was rejected, but it was an attempt to undermine the argument that an artwork must be an expression of the inner self. In Japan, Murayama Tomoyoshi is said to have introduced and created the first objet, when he had just returned from Germany in 1923. That technique continued to be developed internationally, even after the Second World War, and today, it can even be found among everyday ornaments. To summarize, Yokomitsu Riichi’s ‘sensationalist movement’ attempted to consider the materiality of works deemed important by the avant-garde movement and to then expound his own interpretation of avant-garde art as a whole. Of course, his movement was limited by linguistic boundaries and could not break away from the perception of demonstrative objects. Although he used the word ‘symbol’, his definition was completely different from that of Saitō Mokichi, who used the term from the point of view of universal ‘life’ and narrated its significance as if it had derived from ancient China. The stance of Yokomitsu, even though he used the same word ‘symbol’, was thus completely different from that of Saitō Mokichi, who situated himself in the more traditional discourse of symbolic representation within Eastern thought. For Yokomitsu, Saitō’s theory of depiction was only a [direct] recreation of ‘pure subjectivity’. One may go as far as to say that he saw it as an expression of Naturalism. In fact, as we have seen, Japanese Naturalism aimed for a direct representation of impressions. Yokomitsu, on the other hand, was calling for a revolution of representative methods, where one could reconstruct ‘pure subjectivity’ in a more complex manner with expressions that could stimulate the reader and turn it into an object of appreciation, the textual work itself. It should now be clear why I focused on the reception of symbolism in order to analyse Japanese ‘modernism’ in the literary arts. It is because the shift and ‘translation’ of what ‘symbol’ signified pushed forward the progress of modernism, at least in its limited sense. ‘Symbol’ helped Japan’s modern literary perspective divorce itself from the reproduction

rewriting the literary history of japanese modernism 61 of actual feelings or landscapes. It instead turned to reproducing impressions or the beauty of yūgen and to ‘feelings and mood’ (kibun jōchō), finally shifting to the construction of images in material forms (busshikiteki keishō). At the time when France was witnessing a Catholic reaction following the collapse of the 1848 revolution, the French symbolists called upon the symbols of paganism for their poetry and art. When that method was then transported in the twentieth century to a foreign land, the Eastern religious concept of ‘yūgen’ came to be ‘translated’, resulting in the invention of ‘Japan’s traditional aesthetics’. These two events took place side by side. By examining the shifts in both European and Japanese literature and art, I believe that a clearer picture of Japanese modernism’s development has been established. The reception of Japan’s classical art acted as a stimulus for European modernism, and, in turn, this was then received by Japan and advanced her own modernism. In this manner, Japan’s modernism in the literary sphere was engaged in a constant dialogue with other movements, such as the new developments in art and aesthetics, which advanced through reciprocal interactions with foreign countries and also with critiques of classical literature. When we place it in this context and rethink its position as being intertwined with all these discourses, Japanese modernism emerges with a completely new historical face.

MODERNISM AND MODERNITY Charles Shirō Inouye The imprecision of certain key terms of cultural analysis is astounding. One such word is ‘modernism’, which is often confused with ‘modernity’. Although many refer to the cause of modernity as modernism, this is far from the truth. Understandably, this confusion follows from a lack of clarity about modernity’s nature. In order to gain a clear understanding of modernism, we will first have to gain a better grasp of the modern. In Japanese, the two notions are more easily separated than in English. The term ‘early modern’ is ‘kinse’ (䖥Ϫ) and ‘modern’ is ‘kindai’ (䖥ҷ); whereas ‘modernism’ usually occurs in the transliterated form of ‘modanizumu’ (ɪɈɻȬɂɨ) or sometimes as ‘modān’ (ɪɈόɻ). As a generic term that expresses a time distinguishable from the past, ‘kindai’ is actually ancient in usage. In my own reading of Japanese literary texts, the oldest occurrence I have come across is in Kamo no Chōmei’s (ca.1153–1216) Anonymous Writings (Mumyōshō), written sometime between 1211 and 1216. In the section of the work where he sets out his theory of yūgen (mystery), he writes of a ‘modern form of poetry’ (kindai no uta no tai). While providing examples to illuminate his idea about a possible future for Japanese poetry, he consistently differentiates between now (ima no yo) and the past (mukashi).1 It would seem that by this time, people had an awareness of their place in time, a point also suggested by Kawabata Yasunari (1899–1972) who could speak of The Tale of Genji as a modern text.2 Of course, the notion of modernity has accrued many layers of meaning since Chōmei’s time. The modern is often associated with a number of values: progressive, Western, scientific, rational, technologically advanced, and so on.3 Based on such nuances alone, a confusion of modern with 1

Takayashi Kazuhiko, ed., Mumyoshō, (Ōfūsha , 1975), pp. 70–79. See his acceptance speech for the Nobel Prize. Thomas Rimer and Van Gessel, eds., The Columbia Anthology of Modern Japanese Literature volume 2 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), p. 523. 3 To this list, we could easily add a number of negative modifiers: alienating, fascistic, racist, sexist, genocidal, and so forth. 2

modernism and modernity

63

modernism is only to be expected. The often referred to international aspect of the modernist movement—where we find Kitasono Katue (1902– 1978) corresponding with Ezra Pound—could be seen as an extension of western influence. Or, to give just one other example of how modernism might be seen as an extension of the modern, the cubist experiments of Yorozu Tetsugorō (1885–1927) could be understood as a multiplication of the truth of perspectivalism. That modernism is often understood as a radical or advanced form of the modern is, in fact, a common misperception with which the cultural critic must deal today. This notion that modernists are somehow ‘more modern than modern’ follows from a fundamental misunderstanding of modernity. Here I will argue that, far from being a radical affirmation of modernity, modernism is a reaction to it, or an intended correction. This is not to say that modernism is always nostalgic, or that it lacks a progressive aspect. From a certain point of view, it is forward-looking, as I will explain below. Once again, the essence of modernism is unclear since the nature of modernity is not well understood despite its centrality to our understanding of the human experience. So then, what is modernity? By what standards would we judge something to be modern? Dissatisfied with the various ways modernity has been defined to this point, I have tried to examine Japanese expression in a way that might reveal something like a modern cultural pattern. Why not survey human expression over large periods of time with the hope of determining what the larger trends are? An analysis of these trends might tell us what we want to know about consciousness in general, and about modern consciousness in particular. Assumed by this social semiotic approach are a few controversial points. One is that there is no way to know modern thought and sentiment unless it has been expressed, and that external expression is an integral part of what we call consciousness (since the mind is continuously rearranging the world ‘out there’ to facilitate the workings of the mind ‘in here’). Indeed, I would hold that modern consciousness—like consciousness in general—is unknowable unless it has been expressed or signified; and that fMRI images of the brain at work are not really expressions of consciousness. This leads to a second, equally problematic point. Our understanding of this expression would require that it be at least semi-permanent, which is to admit that much of the semiotic record has already been destroyed and is unavailable for our perusal. A third point would be that our understanding of the semi-permanent

64

charles shir inouye

residue of modern expression always is an interpretation, possibly reflecting eccentric, self-interested points of view. These difficulties notwithstanding, there is one great advantage in launching a wide investigation of modern expression. Even if diminished, the semiotic record actually exists. A written text, a painting, a photograph, a film, a building, a road, a garden, a statue—any of these might be considered a fossil of past thought. As elements of the semiotic record, they are available for our scrutiny. We can examine them and determine whether they belong to this or that era by noting any significant patterns in their make-up. We can also evaluate these patterns against content (what was trying to be expressed); and we can note the proximity of both to events (what happened at such and such a time). By taking note of these correlations, we can categorize and date various semiotic patterns to see if something like a modern consciousness is expressed by the fossil record. The details of this study are contained in my next book, Figurality and the Development of Modern Consciousness.4 Here brevity requires me to sum up my findings quickly in order to bring them to bear on the problem at hand. If we scrutinize the semiotic field in Japan, certain patterns do in fact emerge. I have identified three trends. One is towards sound-oriented signs, or phonocentrism. A second is towards the homogenization of signs, or realism. And a third is the use of signs to accomplish a symbolic framing of reality, or perspectivalism. To go directly to the main point, what all three of these trends—phonocentrism, realism, and perspectivalism—have in common is a suppression of figurality. Figurality is the term I use to refer to the expressive potential of the grapheme; where the grapheme is, of course, the visible, material aspect of a sign. Obviously, not all expression over the past few centuries conforms to these trends. But when we examine the evidence broadly, the semiotic record yields these general patterns, which are closely tied to each other. They are, in fact, mutually supportive. They confirm an even larger overall pattern of anti-figurality that begins somewhere around 1590 and continues until about 1970, what I take to be the beginning and ending dates of Japan’s modern period. After this date, this movement

4 Treatments of many of the topics covered in the book have appeared in articles. For a brief summary of the main argument, see ‘Figurality ǽ䖥ҷᛣ䄬ȃⱎሩ’ (Figurality and the development of modern consciousness) in Nihon kenkyū 34, pp. 13–49.

modernism and modernity

65

towards lower figurality begins to swing towards higher figurality; thus marking an important turning point in human expression. What these results tell us is that, for whatever reason, modernity does not thrive in a semiotic environment that is high in figurality. Indeed, it seems that without its suppression, modern consciousness would not have been able to develop. But it did. And so we are left to wonder. Why was this suppression of the grapheme necessary? And what made this suppression possible in the first place? In order to find answers to these questions, I have devised a simple exercise that I call the figurality test. I give people thirty seconds to draw a picture of god on one side of a white piece of unlined paper. I then give them the same amount of time to write the word for god on the opposite side. The results are revealing. For one thing, people in Japan draw pictures of god more easily than people in the United States, Canada, and Mexico. Many Japanese draw trees, mountains, rivers, and other elements of nature; though some draw men with beards, and others slip into symbolism, which indicates an interesting misunderstanding of the exercise. By contrast, many Americans struggle to draw anything at all. When asked why, the answers are various: ‘I don’t believe in god, so how could I draw such a picture?’ or ‘God is invisible, so what you’re asking is impossible.’ Others have been taught that to create such an image is sacrilegious. Still others have never acquired the ability to draw anything, even at the most fundamental level. Whatever the reason, even those who have struggled, when asked to write the corresponding word, have no trouble doing so at all. Thirty seconds is more than enough time for everyone to write kami, ǠȔ⼲, god, God, G-d, or Dios.

Figure 1. Signs of god with higher and lower figurality

66

charles shir inouye

I point out that if the picture and the word are both signs for the same thing, why do we struggle to produce one kind of sign and have no difficulties with the other? Why does the picture somehow require more reflection? Why is it more revealing of what we really think? This leads to a fruitful discussion of the fundamental difference between pictures and words: the abundance of figurality in the former, and the lack of it in the latter. Signs with high figurality cause us to pause because they display something much closer to our personal, embodied understanding of reality. On the other hand, words, which are a type of symbol, carefully control, limit, and standardize figurality. As such, they are much easier to produce because, for one reason, they are designed to mask over these differences of personal understanding. By contrast, they give us a sense of agreement, as if we share this or that idiom when in fact we do not. This might explain why even those who could not draw a picture of god could so easily produce another kind of sign for the same referent thirty seconds later.5 As for how this relates to the question of modernity, the semiotic record shows us with surprising clarity that certain kinds of signs dominate during the modern era. These are those with low figurality: the prosaic and colloquial novel, maps, realistic images, newspapers, portraits of the emperor, uniforms, and so on. As for why this should be the case, it probably has much to do with the way that such signs are capable of masking over differences of actual understanding and thereby promoting fictive understanding. We actually disagree. But we can be trained to ignore this disagreement. Why is the suppression of the grapheme useful to the development of modern consciousness? In a word, signs with low figurality are helpful to modernization because, in the modern attempt to discover the vastness of the world, the need arises to give order to the Other on a neverbefore-accomplished scale. In other words, signs with low figurality lend themselves to manageability through the formation of massive social groups—nations, races, classes, political parties, and so forth: people of various backgrounds and understandings who, nevertheless, come to see themselves as one. Shared points of imagined community also make possible mass social movements—such as colonization, mercantilism, fandom, war, and so on. They do this by establishing ever 5 Of course, we might argue that one need not believe in anything to use such a term, or any other term for that matter. I might write, for instance, ‘I do not believe in god.’ But this is beside the point. The issue here is not what we believe, but how figurality forces us to ask the question about belief.

modernism and modernity

67

more conceptual and abstract points of union: big ideas (such as god, nation, country, empire) that each member of the collective thinks he understands in the same way but, in fact, does not. As Benedict Anderson has pointed out, a nation is an imagined community.6 It is not naturally occurring, but needs to be imagined into existence. What I would add to this discussion is that such communities form by way of a semiotic field that consistently supports what Elizabeth Eisenstein has called ‘an invisible public from afar’.7 It does this by masking over actual understanding and replacing it with fictive understanding. This, in turn, is accomplished by lowering the figurality of the signs employed. This latter kind of (fictive) understanding is one that we assume to share, even when we know we actually do not. A semiotic field with low figurality fosters the needed presumptuousness. Without a semiotic field with lowered figurality, modern aggression would be impossible. I agree with Anderson’s point that modern understanding is fictional in nature.8 The dominance of the novel in the modern era was not simply a coincidence. His showing how a fictive context engulfs the various characters of a novel or the events reported upon in a newspaper is important because it illuminates the mechanism by which the citizen becomes engulfed by the state. But there are additional issues to consider. Even more to the point of fictionality, why is it that the novelist tries so hard to make something we accept as being ‘made up’ seem believable and true? Why is verisimilitude a necessary quality of modern fiction? Why this attempt to make fabrications plausible? With equally profitable result, we might ask these same questions of the nation state, the political party, the empire, and so on, these institutions that share a fictive essence. What the figurality test shows us is that, since our actual understanding of reality is so varied, we can only come together as a group if we allow ourselves this ability to think we feel the same way about our commonality when, in fact, we actually 6

Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities (New York: Verso, 1983). Elizabeth L. Eisenstein, ‘Some Conjectures about the Impact of Printing on Western Society and Thought’, Journal of Modern History 40:1 (March 1968), p. 42. Quoted in Anderson. 8 Anderson argues that the essence of the novel and the newspaper appears as an assumed understanding of the larger reality into which various events neatly fit, like incidents of a fictive narrative work. Such forms of expression acculturate the reader to other fictions, such as the national life, where ‘ . . . fiction seeps quietly and continuously into reality, creating that remarkable confidence of community in anonymity which is the hallmark of modern nations’. See page 36. 7

68

charles shir inouye

do not. This self-contradictory state of understanding, this believable fiction in which modern consciousness roots itself, establishes realism, this mode of expression that brazenly claims to have a special relationship with the real. Signs with lower figurality make this kind of contradictory consensus possible. For this reason, modernity has taken an essentially prosaic approach to reality. It attempts to be inclusive, popular, massive, and, again, realistic. Its need for deception favours fiction over poetry, realism over fantasy, and symbolism or ideological clarity over the chaos of ‘art for art’s sake’. For this reason, modernity makes the gothic problematic, just as it rules out superstition and belief in its drive for consensus and general theories of truth. What the phonocentric novel, the realistic painting, the radio broadcast, and symbolically charged signs such as flags, portraits of leaders, and military uniforms all have in common is this shared lowering of figurality. Sharing this characteristic, they all support a masking of the limitations of actual understanding even as it puts forward a type of fictive understanding that makes such a proposition as e pluribus unum tenable. Ironically, fictional representation can become so thoroughly systematic and vast that it comes to appear as the very lack of distortion: true reality in a modern hegemonic sense. Now, if achieving this kind of massive distortion was one of the principle goals of modernity, exposing this distortion as distortion has been one of the enduring goals of modernism. This is one way to understand the iconoclastic, non-realistic, expressionistic aspects of what many understand to be modernism. To some, ‘modern art’ is unrealistic and essentially non-figural. On the other hand, to equate realism with the figural is to risk another misunderstanding, since the modernist impulse actually takes us towards a restoration of the figurality that modern trueness to the figure consistently suppresses. (A realistic portrait can be figural. But the figurality of such portraits is often suppressed since the expressive potential of each point on the surface of such an image is disciplined so that it does not stand out but, rather, lends itself to the expression of the larger whole.) It is by way of this (realistic) homogenization and (perspectival) use of symbols that the systematically universal context for the modern self is set down. Modern consciousness aggrandizes the self, but only to the extent that this self finds itself within a grid of power relations established by a symbolically omnipresent and stabilizing point of view or perspective. Modernity’s visual mode is realistic in the sense that realism is systematically controlled vision, where the parts are atomized and

modernism and modernity

69

Figure 2. Both of these self portraits are figural. But the one on the right, by Yorozu Tetsugorō (1885-1927), has higher figurality than Yokoyama Matsusaburō’s (1838–1884), which tries to hide both the materiality of paint and the presence of a painter.

given meaning as constituent elements of the whole—where hydrogen is a part of water, a tree is a part of a landscape, a citizen as part of a nation, or a gear is a part of a transmission. This kind of modern individualism is oriented (and made possible) by the vastness of symbolic framing that manifests itself not only as an inclusion of detail in all its variety, but also as an abstract, generalizing source of authority, meaningfulness, fame, and so on. Thus, the surrealistic attempt to go beyond realism is a rebellion against hegemonic vision because it reveals the otherwise hidden mechanics of modern vision, which attempts to homogenize all constituent points of an image through their relationship to a single consistent (and distanced) point of view. Fascist aesthetics are the epitome of modern expression. This is because both are based on notions of comprehensibility and purity (where what is not seen is as important as what is seen, and where the non-standard is consistently and aggressively marginalized and eliminated). What various forms of modernism have in common is an interest in resisting hegemony by restoring figurality and thus disrupting the holistic mirage of fictive agreement. Of course, this is only another way to say that modernism manifests itself as a renewed interest in the ‘stuff ’ of art: words, paint, clay, light, and so on. Just as impressionist painters focused on light as the fundament of painting, so did

70

charles shir inouye

the neo-perceptionalist writers draw attention to literature at the level of the word. This occurred in opposition to the position of the naturalist writers and painters who, in their interest in shasei (sketching), sought to establish a transparent medium that would be appropriate for describing or depicting things just as they are (ari no mama), with no elaboration, flourish, or distortion. Thus, modern artists such as Kuroda Seiki (1866–1924), Masaoka Shiki (1867–1902), and Shimazaki Tōson (1872–1943) came to advocate a descriptive mode that might set things down just as they are seen by the objective eye.9 Needless to say, this modern impulse ran counter to what had for centuries been the fundamental aspect of the Japanese aesthetic tradition: lyricism. A person’s ability to meld one’s sensitivities with the concrete particulars of one’s immediate, physical, and visual-spatial environment had always been crucially important. Indeed, in the eyes of many critics of Japanese culture, this lyrical impulse never did get completely replaced by a more distanced, descriptive mode, even in the modern Japanese novel.10 Certainly, the animistic impulse that provided the foundation for this lyricism was severely compromised by various modern developments, including the consolidation of local worship in the form of State Shintō, a national religion that was instituted in order to establish a monotheistic, symbolic centre of Japanese culture in 1871. In the end, localized animism was not fully eradicated by this generalized apotheosis of Japanese-ness. If anything, locality seems to have made a significant comeback in recent years, thus reinforcing the notion of significant space as a foundational aspect of postmodern culture. If these three semiotics trends towards phonocentrism, realism, and symbolic framing made the development of modern consciousness possible, then modern consciousness began to weaken (and the modern period came to an end) once these trends began tracking in the opposite direction: not away from but towards higher figurality. Why did this happen? Perhaps we could say that modernity was fated to undo itself. Its abiding interest in the inclusive discovery of vastness led to the 9 This attempt at honesty also led many to write first-personal narratives that did not employ the usual methods of modern fictionality: third-person, past-tense narration. Many have written about the so-called I-novel, but one simple way to understand this ‘aberration’ of modern fiction is as a carryover from the lyrical tradition, where the truth emanates from a place that is not separated from one’s immediate space. 10 For appraisals of this lyrical tendency in modern Japanese fiction, see Edwin McClellan, ‘Impressionistic Tendency in Some Modern Japanese Writers’, Chicago Review 17:4, pp. 48–60; and Edward Seidensticker, ‘The Unshapen Ones’, Japan Quarterly 11, pp. 64–69.

modernism and modernity

71

technological development of expressive devices such as the moveabletype press, the camera, the telegraph, and the radio. The deployment of these machines had the effect of moving the semiotic field away from figurality and towards an (invisible) voice as the ultimately meaningful expression.11 Yet the continued development of technology that also led to the further invention of off-set printing, the cinema, and television had the effect of making human expression higher in figurality and thus, increasingly expressive of actual rather than fictive understanding. In a word, in a modern environment, distortion is masked over so that it appears as the lack of distortion. In this sense, realism is the greatest distortion of all, even to the point of appearing ‘realistic’. (As the figurality test shows, diversity, not agreement, is our actual reality. We know this because the chances of everyone drawing the same thing in the same way are so very remote.) By contrast, in a postmodern environment, distortion is allowed to appear as distortion, and consequently it emerges as a rejection of hegemonic vision. Thus, modernist attempts to be non-realistic (and thus expose the limitations and dangers of modern hegemony) can be seen as precursors of postmodern expression. In the end, depending on one’s perspective, modernism can be seen as a retrograde attempt to restore lost figurality, or as a futuristic attempt to establish a new fructified realm of super-figurality. The status of the novelist and playwright Izumi Kyōka (1872–1939) is instructive in this regard. Was he ahead of his time—the forward-looking gothic writer that we now read with interest—or a throwback to the past, ridiculed in his own day as being hopelessly old-fashioned and indebted to Tokugawa-period picture books?12 Kyōka’s most ardent admirers, who mostly came from the two generations younger than his—Tanizaki Jun’ichirō (1886–1965), Akutagawa Ryūnosuke (1892–1927), Kawabata Yasunari, and Mishima Yukio (1925–1970)—understood his position within the panoply of modern writers as tenuous. Yet they applauded it, even to the point where Mishima, who was by far the most modern of all these writers, declared Kyōka to be the only real genius among modern Japanese writers.

11 The logocentrism of which Jaques Derrida wrote is a part of this larger modern trend. As his critique of Rousseau suggests, the ‘West’ possessed an inclination towards phonocentricity. But this is not to say that phonocentricity is inherently Western. 12 This is a subject taken up in my The Similitude of Blossoms: A Critical Biography of Izumi Kyōka (1873–1939), Japanese Novelist and Playwright (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998).

72

charles shir inouye

Finally, we come to the question of whether Japan was postmodern before it was modern. Noting similarities between the illustrated forms of kibyōshi and manga, we might make the claim that Japan was in some sense ahead of its time. In my opinion, the problem with both the commonly held notion that Japan did not begin modernizing until the Meiji period and this idea of Japan’s early postmodernity is that they disregard the actual semiotic evidence. What the evidence suggests is that Japan began modernizing, albeit in fits and starts, long before the Meiji era, which was without question a time of more rapid development. Once again, Japan’s rather lengthy modern period probably began in the final decade of the sixteenth century and continued to about 1970, when television became dominant and other advanced technologies contributed to a resurgence of Japanese pictocentrism. It is true that some reactions against modernization, such as the rejection of the moveable-type press in the early decades of the seventeenth century, came as traditional last gasps of a weakening lyrical tradition; but others, such as a flourishing of monstrosity or the so-called ero guro nonsense that preoccupied Tanizaki for some of his career, came as precocious flare-ups against the hegemonic claims of modernity. Small fires can become a conflagration. Japan is today a world of everyday animism and sacred monsters. The novels of Kawabata Yasunari, the manga of Mizuki Shigeru (1922–), or the animated films of Miyazaki Hayao (1941–) contain both premodern and modernist/ postmodern elements; and a competent critic will be able to sort out these various influences—whether backward- or forward-looking. What my recent study of the globalgothic seems to reveal is that the crucial factor in a critical appraisal of Japanese culture in general is the role that animism anciently played in sensitizing the Japanese people to significant space and, thus, to the meaningfulness of (visible) locality. The expression of this sensitivity to one’s immediate physical environment was lyrical. Being spatially oriented, it was also acutely visual. It appreciated figurality in its various manifestations. But with the development of modern consciousness, lyricism yielded to realism. Today, with the advent of postmodernism and at the expense of realism, both animism and a lyrical sensibility seem to be making a comeback, albeit in new technologically enhanced forms. As a precursor to postmodernism, Japanese modernism similarly moved Japan in this deconstructive direction by making manifest the various limitations of modern system. As entangled as modernism and modernity were, however, the latter was not simply an affirming exaggeration of the former.

THE MODERN IN MEIJI JAPANAND ELSEWHERE IN TIME AND PLACE Ken Henshall Worldwide, modernism is mostly identified with the early decades of the twentieth century, and in Japan’s case it is usually associated with later Taishō and early Shōwa. By contrast, this paper primarily focuses on concepts of the modern in Meiji Japan, covering a range of topics from literature to hair-styles. A secondary aim is to show that modernism is a relative matter, and that it is dangerous to attempt to narrow it to any specific time period. To this end examples of concepts of ‘modernism’ will be given from a variety of countries and cultures, including Heian Japan and eighth century Britain. My main focus here is the ‘modern’ in Meiji, but first I would like to dwell briefly on the elusive and relative nature of the term ‘modern’ and direct associates. The word stems from the Latin term ‘modus’ meaning ‘manner’ or ‘style’, and the most direct derivative is ‘mode’, usually used of fashion. This suggests a strong relationship with cultural matters. Indeed, the term ‘Modernism’ with a capital ‘M’ is normally taken to refer to a specific era in the early twentieth century that saw significant cultural developments around much of the world, such as in architectural styles, art, ‘daring’ new fashions, and dances based on selfexpression. Self-expression is important here, for nowadays, as Talcott Parsons and others have indicated, we probably tend to see the ‘modern’ as associated with recognition of the individual, and along with that the idea of related rights, as for example in ‘Thoroughly Modern Millie’. But of course, what is ‘modern’ today is ‘past’ tomorrow, so the term has no absolute meaning, and those who appropriate the term and glorify it with a capital ‘M’ are on shaky ground. They have no exclusive claim. ‘Modernism’, even with a capital ‘M’, can also, for example, be applied to jazz music in the 1950s, which in turn is said to be the source of the term ‘Mod’ as in the Mods and Rockers of the 1960s (at least in the UK). Taking a more common-sense approach and simply seeing ‘the modern’ as a sense of recency that somehow differs significantly from the past, this is surely commonplace around the world. Yes, fashion still

74

ken henshall

plays its part in this sense of change—though some of us are old enough to have experienced modernity twice in the form of bell-bottoms, twenty-five years apart! Going much further back in history, in 793, when Lindisfarne was brutally pillaged by the Vikings in their first serious attack on Britain, the contemporary scholar Alcuin lamented inter alia the irony of the recent fashion among young Anglo-Saxon men, especially nobles, to imitate the beard and hairstyle of the Northmen, who had now shown how inappropriate they were as ‘models’ (another term derived from ‘modus’).1 Other indications of modality/modernity in fashions can be found in Seneca the Younger’s condemnation of the latest fashion among mid first century AD Roman women in showing off their bodies by wearing translucent silk recently imported from China,2 and of course the late Heian period in Japan, which saw noble men and women with blackened teeth and painted faces indulging in the latest divertissements at court, which was a sort of fashion show perhaps surpassed only by the court of Louis XIV in seventeenth century France. Fashion is arguably in itself relatively trivial in the big scheme of things, often being transient and fickle, but there are other matters that bring about an awareness of significant difference between what was and what is now. A breakthrough in technology is one major example. The Industrial Revolution springs to mind, as does the Information Revolution that we are currently experiencing, making many older people feel very much ‘un-modern’. But we should still bear in mind that technological breakthrough itself is relative. As a ‘primitive’ illustration, twenty thousand years ago the Solutreans from what is now central France—seemingly the first ‘Europeans’ to set foot in the American continent, many millennia before the Vikings3—developed the needle, which very likely contributed to their ability to produce more effective clothing and thereby survive the arduous journey of skirting the ice-sheet that spanned the Atlantic at that stage (from southern France to Nova Scotia). How is ‘the modern’ treated by historians? For Western historians, ‘early modern history’ usually spans from the end of the Renaissance in the sixteenth century to the beginnings of the Industrial Revolution 1

Alcuin, ‘Letter to Ethelred, King of Northumbria’, in Whitelock, D. (ed.), English Historical Documents, v.1, Eyre Methuen 1979, p. 843. 2 Seneca the Younger, Declamations v.1. 3 Stone Age Columbus, BBC2, 2002; transcript at www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/ transcripts/3116_stoneage.html

the modern in meiji japan

75

in the late eighteenth century, from which point it becomes ‘modern history’—and then (for some historians) ‘postmodern’ and/or ‘contemporary’ from around the 1970s, though I will not pursue these later movements. Of course no-one in seventeenth century Europe thought of themselves as ‘early modern’; they would surely have seen themselves as 100% ‘modern’—but they lacked the benefit of hindsight. And interestingly, ‘modernization’ is almost always seen as progress, though that is not in itself a given. In Japan’s case the Tokugawa/Edo Period is usually treated as ‘early modern’, and Meiji as the start of ‘modern Japan’, the period wherein Japan ‘modernized’. When it comes to ‘Modernism’ with a capital ‘M’ Japan is in line with world trends, usually seen as later Taishō and to some extent early Shōwa. The terms ‘chic’, and ‘mobo’ (‘modan bōi’) and ‘moga’ (‘modan gāru’) are very much associated with this period. In this chapter I focus on the Meiji period, and what was new/‘modern’ about it, because I believe that events in Meiji helped Japan’s emergence as a ‘modern nation’ more so than events in Taishō. Indeed, I believe Japan had become a fully-fledged ‘modern nation’ before the Taishō period. The writer Tayama Katai (1872–1930) is certainly one who would share this view, for he was enraptured by developments during Meiji, referring in his memoirs of 1917 to Japan’s progress in terms of modernization as being ‘like some sort of magic’,4 and how, by the death of Emperor Meiji in 1912, it was ‘enjoying a state of wonderful international nationhood’,5 its coming of age symbolized by the nation’s military victories over China and Russia. I will also quote at some length from Katai’s best known and largely autobiographical work Futon of 1907, which contrasts a Meiji modan gāru, embodied in the form of a live-in pupil who came to study under his tutelage a few years earlier, with an old-fashioned woman, embodied in his much maligned wife: With the sudden rise of women’s education over the past four or five years, the establishing of women’s universities, and the fashion for lowpompadour hairstyles and maroon pleated skirts, women no longer felt self-conscious about walking with a man. To Tokio [Katai himself] nothing was more regrettable than his having contented himself with his wife, who had nothing to offer than her old-fashioned round-chignon hairstyle, waddling walk, and chastity and submissiveness. When he compared the 4 Tayama Katai, Tōkyō no Sanjūnen, 1917, trans Henshall, K., as Literary Life in Tokyo 1885–1915, Brill, 1987, p. 264. 5 Ibid., p. 248.

76

ken henshall young, modern wife—beautiful and radiant as she strolled the streets with her husband, talking readily and eloquently at his side when they visited friends—with his own wife—who not only didn’t read the novels he took such pains to write but was completely pig-ignorant about her husband’s torment and anguish, and was happy as long as she could raise the children satisfactorily—then he felt like screaming his loneliness out loud. Just like Johannes in Lonely Lives [the similarly frustrated protagonist of Gerhart Hauptmann’s 1891 drama Einsame Menschen], he could only feel how insignificant his own domestically minded wife was.6

Clearly, Katai believed the modern age had come to Japan by this stage, symbolized by modern girls such as his pupil. When Perry steamed into Edo Bay in 1853 Japan—at that stage isolated from the world at large for over two centuries—got one heck of a wake-up call. For a start, weaponry had come on a pace relative to the cumbersome arquebuses the Portuguese had brought with them three centuries earlier. The Japanese had seemingly chosen to believe that they were keeping in touch with Western developments via the Dutch settlement in Dejima, but their belief was far removed from reality. They could not ‘fart away’ Perry and the Western barbarians, as popular cartoons of the day would have it.7 They were in serious trouble, for this was the age of ‘new imperialism’, and America in particular, driven by its so-called Manifest Destiny, was keen to expand its territorial influence.8 Though it is not widely known, Perry himself was keen to occupy part(s) of Japan, but in the end the Americans focused on easier and richer pickings in China and elsewhere, along with other Western powers, and settled merely for a diplomatic presence and various non-territorial concessions. Though it seems to have been downplayed, the threat of being colonized was in my view a very significant stimulant to Japan in its extraordinarily fast ‘modernization’. As Masako Gavin has shown, as late as 1887 the geographer-intellectual Shiga Shigetaka (1863–1927), based on his travels to Australia and New Zealand, sounded a warning about a possible Western take-over of Japan by Anglo-Saxons. He remarks, in

6 Tayama Katai, Futon, 1907, trans. Henshall, K., as The Quilt and Other Stories by Tayama Katai, University of Tokyo Press, 1981. 7 See Steele, M. W., Alternative Narratives in Modern Japanese History, Routledge, 2003, p. 14, and Henshall, K., A History of Japan: From Stone Age to Superpower, Palgrave Macmillan, 2nd edition 2004, p. 70. 8 See, for example, Barber, L. and Henshall, K., The Last War of Empires, Bateman, 1999, pp. 36–37.

the modern in meiji japan

77

a recorded conversation with a Maori chief Wi Tako who was angry at the British control over Aotearoa, that …some [of our Japanese] clans had disputes with the British. Fortunately they had not been of such serious nature as to threaten invasion, and we have been able to maintain our independence thus far, but I had to admit this could only have been due to good fortune. … Alas! Japan could be another New Zealand. … I fear the threat to my country far away. … I—as a son of the new Japan—must take immediate action to make my people aware of this possibility happening back home.9

But by this stage the Japanese had already taken significant steps to prevent colonization, though they were still theoretically vulnerable. Indeed, they wanted not only to be able to stave off the West, but to become a leading ‘Western-style’ power in their own right. And what did this entail? It entailed adopting a similar infrastructure to the Western powers in spheres such as the political, educational, economic and military, and—as the icing on the cake—overseas territory. Indeed, before too long—from 1881 in fact—Fukuzawa Yukichi was even to suggest disassociating the nation from Asia. The modernization process of Meiji Japan has been well documented, but I will just give an outline below. In 1867–1868 a coup known as the Meiji Restoration was staged by nationalist samurai—who were, fortunately for Japan, genuinely capable and genuinely concerned for the welfare of the nation and not just their own personal welfare—to clear the way by removing ‘dead wood’: namely disestablishing the shogunate, almost certainly assassinating Emperor Kōmei10 (who favoured retention of the shogunate), and installing a fifteen-year-old puppet emperor who danced to their tune, they themselves becoming oligarchs. As early as April 1868 the new emperor proclaimed the Charter Oath, which included the abandoning of ‘evil customs’ of the past and the seeking of knowledge throughout the world in order to strengthen the nation. Reflecting this latter point, the earlier slogan of sonnō jōi (‘Revere the Emperor, expel the barbarians’) was now replaced by the more constructive wakon yōsai (‘Japanese spirit, Western knowledge’). Presently missions were sent overseas to bring back knowledge, and vast numbers of Western specialists in a range of spheres—from banking to the navy to mining to railroad construction—were brought 9

Gavin, M., Shiga Shigetaka, 1863–1927, Curzon, 2001, pp. 83–84. See in particular Calman, D., The Nature and Origins of Japanese Imperialism, Routledge, 1992, pp. 90–93. 10

78

ken henshall

to Japan as advisers. The salaries of these advisers are a testimony to Japan’s commitment to modernization, for they accounted for 5% of all government expenditure during Meiji.11 Other evidence of serious commitment is seen in the disestablishment during the 1870s of the samurai—the very class from which the oligarchs of Japan had come—to be replaced by a conscript army. The oligarchs obviously realized that samurai, who generally fought singly, were no match for a massed enemy, especially one using projectile weapons as opposed to swords. (However, during the 1930s Japan was to revive a very idealized form of the so-called samurai code of bushidō and apply it to all soldiers.) Other early policies include (in no particular order) abolition of Tokugawa/Edo Period classes (April 1868); freedom of movement, residence, and occupation (April 1868); a proto-Constitution (July 1868) that provided for a national assembly; replacement of feudal domains and their daimyō with prefectures and governors (1871); and an Education Act (1872) stipulating compulsory education. The Western solar calendar was adopted in place of the old lunar one (1873), telegraphs were installed (1869), a postal service was established (1871), modernstyle newspapers were encouraged and by 1875 there were over a hundred of them. Western-style dress became compulsory for civil servants in 1872. Staying with the fashion scene, Western-style dress became increasingly popular among the general public, especially males. The Emperor himself generally wore Western dress. Western-style haircuts also became very popular very quickly, again especially in the case of males. In 1872 only 10% of males had a Western-style haircut, but a mere fifteen years later in 1887 this had leapt to an astonishing 98%.12 The lyrics of a popular song at the time were that if you tapped a head with a Western hairstyle it would play a tune of ‘civilization and enlightenment’— bunmei kaika, another slogan of the age. The rapid development of the railroad from 1872 on, with 8,000 km of track in place by the turn of the century, was a particularly important agent of modernization. It represented a truly epochal change from the past in that it not only permitted easy, cheap, and speedy movement, it enabled a separation between residence and place of work. That is, 11 See Beauchamp, E., ‘Foreign Employees of the Meiji Period’, in Kodansha Encyclopedia of Japan, v.2, 1983, p. 311. 12 Mita, M, Social Psychology of Modern Japan (tr. Suloway, S.), Kegan Paul, 1992, p. 198.

the modern in meiji japan

79

it ushered in the age of commuting—for which Japan is of course now notorious—and new patterns of urbanization that included outer suburbs, and new centres of population where rail-lines intersected. Other epochal moments can be seen across many sectors. In political terms, for example, there is the proclamation of the Meiji Constitution in February 1889, the first election for the Diet in July 1890, and the convening of the Diet in November 1890, and later the Anglo-Japanese Alliance of 1902 (the first ever equal treaty between a Western and a non-Western nation). And in matters military, Japan achieved victory over China in 1895 and over Russia in 1905, the first ever defeat of a Western nation by a non-Western nation since the days of the Mongol invasions. It also resulted in their acquisition of territory, such as Taiwan in 1895 and the southern half of Sakhalin in 1905, plus a silent sanction to expand into Korea shortly afterwards. In the economy, the government also played a major constructive role in establishing key new industries, also making use of the advantage of being a late developer able to select the best of processes and equipment that had been trialled by earlier developing nations. In more intellectual and abstract terms, the Meiji period saw a huge influx of Western ideologies and literature, often through translation but much of which was read in English as knowledge of English spread. One has to feel considerable sympathy for Japan here, for so many oftenconflicting ideologies came into the country in such a short time that it must have been very confusing. In literature for example, political novels, neo-classicism, romanticism, and naturalism were condensed into a fraction of the time similar movements had occupied elsewhere. Some writers, such as Shimazaki Tōson and Tayama Katai, switched saddles in midstream and went from romanticism to what is normally seen as its effective opposite, naturalism, within the space of a few years. Samuel Smiles’ ‘self-help’ utilitarian philosophy was hugely popular earlier in Meiji and was encouraged by the government—within limits (become a strong individual but use your strength for the good of the nation)—but at almost the same time Turgenev’s ‘superfluous man’ appeared in the works of Futabatei Shimei (and later also Katai) as a sort of fatalistic consolation for ‘losers’. It was, of course, winners that Japan was most interested in, not losers, and so Darwin’s theory of evolution, and Spencer’s extension of this to the idea of ‘survival of the fittest’ among nations, were also extremely popular. In fact, we are not just talking about private individual readers in this latter case, but the government, for in 1892 the Japanese government secretly approached

80

ken henshall

Spencer for advice on how to become one of these fittest modern nations. Spencer gave his advice on condition that his role should not be published until after his death, for fear of accusations of treason. His advice was along the lines that Japan has sometimes been criticized for, such as keeping racial purity and not letting foreigners buy up land, and yes, there was indeed an uproar after he died in December 1903 and his advice became public in Britain shortly afterwards.13 As we can see, Japan’s modernization is very close to being one and the same as Westernization. Nanbara Shigeru, President of Tokyo University, said in 1949 that modernization in Meiji had been external and had omitted to focus on humanistic values.14 It is of course true that it is easier to accept external objects and systems and structures than it is to accept external values, and one notes that the time in which he made this comment was the height of the ‘American’ Occupation, a massive external impact. I myself would argue that, notwithstanding the great waves of external influence that came into Japan during the Meiji period, Japan still retained key values. Importantly, the influx of external/Western elements in the Meiji period was largely voluntary (the main exception being the entry into the country of ‘barbarian intruders’ immediately after Perry’s arrival), unlike the case with the Occupation, in which Japan had relatively little control over imposed Western elements. And, as a number of scholars have argued, Japan tends to adapt rather than simply adopt wholesale, and this is certainly true of the Meiji period. For example, the Imperial Rescript on Education of 1890 deliberately included Confucianist and Shintō elements, encouraging reverence for a divine and paternalistic emperor, while textbooks on morals gradually replaced Western models such as Abraham Lincoln with Japanese models such as the industrious Ninomiya Sontoku (aka Kinjirō). This merging is of course in line with the idea of wakon yōsai. Even with some Japanese elements included, newness of the scale seen in Meiji can cause unhelpful disorientation, as is seen for example in the ‘Ee ja nai ka’ mass hysteria at the beginning of the period. And one of the ways the oligarchs helped assuage any such anxiety was, while getting rid of ‘dead wood’ in many areas, somewhat paradoxically 13

Spencer’s advice was first published in The Times (of London) on 18 January 1904. A convenient copy is given as an appendix to Lafcadio Hearn’s Japan: An Attempt at an Interpretation, Macmillan, 1904, pp. 481–484. 14 See Dower, J, Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II, Norton, 1999, p. 71.

the modern in meiji japan

81

borrowing the authority of tradition in others, sometimes even inventing it. For example, the policies adopted under the oligarchs in early Meiji towards the West reflect many of the elements of the policies of Yamato-Nara period Japan towards China—a potential threat and colonizer, just like the West was to be in early Meiji. It was a similar attitude of keeping the Japanese spirit while learning from Chinese knowledge and practices, and proving oneself as a respectworthy nation. Commonalities include playing the role of respectful student, centralizing government in a new capital, nationalization, implementing large-scale taxation reforms, drawing up a constitution, and so on. I personally am convinced that, faced with the potential threat of the West and the task of urgently strengthening/modernizing the nation, the oligarchs deliberately drew on history for help in terms of precedent. Numerous other examples of ‘invented tradition’ can be seen in Meiji, such as for example the Shintō wedding, which the vast majority of Japanese even today think of as going back into ancient history, when in fact the first such marriage was that of Crown Prince Yoshihito (later Emperor Taishō) in 1900, with the first commoner Shintō wedding taking place the following year. Another Meiji myth, as Carol Gluck has indicated,15 is the seeming power and centrality of the emperor, whereas throughout much if not most of Japan’s history emperors were peripheral and their power was in name only—including, in actuality, Emperor Meiji. It would seem that, as Hobsbawm has argued in general terms,16 such ‘tradition’ gives a solidity to things, and can make them more acceptable. That is, it would seem we are not necessarily at ease with a perceived excess of modernity, and need the stabilizing presence of tradition—or if that is not available, pseudo-tradition. In summary, I believe that concepts relating to ‘modern’ are relative and largely universal through much of time and place, and that the term should not be used lightly or exclusively. I also believe that, while bearing in mind the previous sentence, when we talk of the modern in Japan—or at least in Japanese history and in terms of modernization— then the Meiji period is where we should be focusing. In my view, Japan had become a fully-fledged modern nation well before the days of the Taishō moga and mobo and Taishō chic.

15 16

See Gluck, C., Japan’s Modern Myths, Princeton, 1985. Hobsbawm, E. and Ranger, T., The Invention of Tradition, Cambridge, 1983.

82

ken henshall References

Alcuin, 793: ‘Letter to Ethelred, King of Northumbria’, in Whitelock, D. (ed.), English Historical Documents, v.1, Eyre Methuen 1979, p. 843. Barber, L. and Henshall, K., 1999: The Last War of Empires: Japan and the Pacific War, Bateman. Beauchamp, E., 1983: ‘Foreign Employees of the Meiji Period’, in Kodansha Encyclopedia of Japan, v.2, p. 311. Calman, D., 1992: The Nature and Origins of Japanese Imperialism, Routledge. Dower, J., 1999: Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II, Norton. Gavin, M., 2001: Shiga Shigetaka, 1863–1927, Curzon. Gluck, C., 1985: Japan’s Modern Myths, Princeton. Hearn, Lafcadio, 1904: Japan: An Attempt at an Interpretation, Macmillan. Henshall, K., 2004: A History of Japan: From Stone Age to Superpower, Palgrave Macmillan, 2nd edition. Hobsbawm, E. and Ranger, T., 1983: The Invention of Tradition, Cambridge. Mita, M., 1992: Social Psychology of Modern Japan (tr. Suloway, S.), Kegan Paul. Seneca the Younger, 1st century AD: Declamations v.1. Steele, M. W., 2003: Alternative Narratives in Modern Japanese History, Routledge. Stone Age Columbus, BBC2, 2002; transcript at www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/transcripts/3116_stoneage.html Tayama Katai, Futon, 1907, trans. Henshall, K., as The Quilt and Other Stories by Tayama Katai, University of Tokyo Press, 1981. Tayama Katai, Tōkyō no Sanjпnen, 1917, trans. Henshall, K., as Literary Life in Tokyo 1885–1915, Brill, 1987.

‘OVERCOMING MODERNITY’ AND CONFLICTING VIEWS OF JAPAN’S CULTURAL MISSION: INOUE TETSUJIRŌ AND SAWAYANAGI MASATARŌ Yushi Ito Introduction At a symposium held in Kyoto in July 1942, a prominent group of Japanese intellectuals discussed the question of how to ‘overcome modernity’ (kindai no chōkoku) and the meaning of the war for the nation (Kawakami and Takeuchi 1990).1 This symposium was not the first occasion when the problem of overcoming modernity was debated. It had been debated since the mid-Meiji period when Meiji ‘civilization and enlightenment’ came under scrutiny.2 As Harry Harootunian has suggested, ‘the later defense of cultural spirit (bunka seishin) and widescale rejection of Meiji civilization in the 1930s’ was already prefigured in the late Meiji period (Harootunian 2000: x).3 This paper discusses the conflicting ideas of overcoming modernity of two eminent Meiji/ Taisho intellectuals, Inoue Tetsujirō and Sawayanagi Masatarō. In the course of the civilization and enlightenment movement after the Restoration of 1868, Japanese intellectuals came to feel, by the turn of the century, that Japan’s progress was deadlocked due to ‘increasing tensions between labour and management, exhaustion in the countryside, the decline of agriculture, and the suppression of traditional indigenous culture’ (Matsumoto 1979: i). It was under these circumstances that Japanese intellectuals emphasized the importance of the rediscovery of Eastern culture and cast doubts on the value of a Meiji modernity created 1 Roy Starrs has argued that the ‘overcoming modernity’ discourse is a common ploy or trope of international fascism—an integral part of fascist modernist discourse (Starrs 2009). In this chapter, I discuss conflicting aspects of the ‘overcoming modernity’ discourse presented by Japanese intellectuals in the Meiji and Taisho periods. 2 Kenneth Pyle argued that young people of the Meiji period ‘saw in Westernization the destruction of Japanese identity’ (Pyle 1969: 4). 3 In reference to Takayama Chogyū’s Biteki seikatsu o ronzu (1902), Harootunian regards Takayama’s criticism against Japan’s mediocrity, impoverished creativity, and cultural imitation as a forerunner of the wide-scale rejection of Meiji civilization in the 1930s.

84

yushi ito

under the influence of Western civilization. In his popular book, Ideals of the East (1903), Okakura Tenshin, a leading figure in the art world at that time, argued that ‘today the great mass of Western thought perplexes us’ while the ‘mirror of Yamato is clouded’ (Okakura 1986: 209; Okakura 1903: 243). In his view, in the middle of this confused world, Asians should protect and restore ‘the Asiatic modes’, which he thought were well preserved in Japan, ‘a museum of Asiatic civilization’ (Okakura 1986: 207, 20; Okakura 1903: 240, 7). Okakura Tenshin’s views expressed in his Ideals of the East reflected the fact that some Japanese questioned Western civilization and reevaluated Eastern traditional culture at that time. It has been suggested that Okakura had a sense of mission: Japan, which could stand up to the West, should play a major role in developing Asian culture (cf. Aoki 1999: 153). Later, in 1934, such a nationalistic view was repeated by Abe Jirō, who had ‘a sense of mission’ as a Japanese and a leader of ‘the Return to Japan Movement’ (Nihon eno kaiki undō) in the 1930s (Miyagawa 1977: 128). In his work on the Society for the Promotion of International Culture (Kokusai bunka shinkōkai), established in 1934, Shibazaki Atsushi has discussed the nature of Japan’s ‘international cultural project’ (kokusai bunka jigyō) in the prewar period. In his view, Japan performed its dual cultural mission: namely, both to become superior to the uncivilized countries (the East) and to become equal to the civilized countries (the West) (Shibazaki 1999: 256).4 After the end of the Russo-Japanese War (1904–1905), those who advocated Japan’s cultural mission tended to regard Japan as the most superior country in the world, a country that could take the lead in unifying Eastern and Western cultures, and they emphasized the importance of making other countries ‘correctly’ understand Japan and Japanese culture (Shibazaki 1999: 220). It is not the case, however, that such an argument for Japan’s cultural mission was not criticized during the period between the RussoJapanese War and the early Showa period. In this paper I discuss the conflicting views of Japan’s cultural mission between Inoue Tetsujirō and Sawayanagi Masatarō, both of whom were concerned with the ‘undesirable’ outcome of Meiji civilization and enlightenment. In doing so, I suggest that Inoue’s attempt to search for the Japanese traditional spirit in order to overcome Meiji modernity faced strong opposition from more liberal intellectuals like Sawayanagi, who showed keen 4 Kokusai Bunka Shinkōkai was dissolved when the Japan Foundation was established in 1972 (Shibazaki 1999: 256).

‘overcoming modernity’ and conflicting

85

interest in promoting international education in order to remove barriers between the countries of the world. Inoue Tetsujirō’s View of Japanese Uniqueness Inoue Tetsujirō, a philosophy professor at the Imperial University of Tokyo, was a key educator who promoted the spirit of loyalty and patriotism through the state-centred education system in the prewar period (Kano 1971: 72). In 1877, Inoue enrolled as a student of philosophy at the Imperial University and studied under Professor Ernest Fenollosa (1853–1908), a disciple of Herbert Spenser (1820–1903) (Tucker 2002: 37–38). John Tucker considers Inoue to be ‘one of the most overtly and aggressively nationalistic, militaristic, and imperialistic ideologues emerging from the academic arena in the first half of the twentieth century’ (Tucker 2002: 70).5 In fact, the works of Inoue Tetsujirō could be seen as supporting evidence for Shibazaki Atsushi’s claim that those who talked about Japan’s cultural mission in the prewar period tended to emphasize the superiority of Japanese culture and the importance of making other countries ‘correctly’ understand Japan and Japanese culture (Shibazaki 1999: 220).6 In his New Generation in Meiji Japan, Kenneth Pyle has argued that Inoue was one of the Japanese intellectuals who felt an intense need ‘for a national identity in the modern world’ (Pyle 1969: 189). In the midMeiji period, when doubts began to be cast on Meiji civilization, Japanese intellectuals reconsidered Japanese history and tradition in order to find the country’s destination in the future (Pyle 1969: 190–191). Following the promulgation of the Constitution of Great Imperial Japan in 1889, which established the emperor system, the Imperial Rescript on Education was promulgated in 1890 in order to instill the spirit of loyalty and patriotism into people through school education (Kano 1999: 82). In the following year, 1891, journalists and scholars accused the Christian Uchimura Kanzō of lèse-majesté after he failed to bow before a copy of the Imperial Rescript on Education at its ceremonial presentation at the First Higher School in Tokyo. Christian cosmopolitanism 5

John Tucker has discussed Inoue Tetsujirō’s view of bushido as if Inoue did not face any serious objection in his time (Tucker 2002: 35–70; cf. Shillony 2006: 23–52). 6 It should be noted that Inoue Tetsujirō hoped in his early academic career that the ‘inferior’ Japanese would avoid close contact with ‘superior’ Westerners until they became able to compete on equal terms (Inoue 1889).

86

yushi ito

was attacked on the grounds that it contradicted state-centred nationalism (kokkashugi). In 1891 Inoue Tetsujirō, a young professor at the Imperial University at that time, published his Chokugo engi (A Commentary on the Rescript) and took the lead in criticizing Christianity.7 It was under these circumstances that intellectuals like Inoue and Takayama Chogyū advocated the principle of ‘Nihonshugi’ (Japanism), which emphasized the uniqueness and superiority of Japanese culture and attempted to overcome Meiji modernity.8 In May 1897, after the Sino-Japanese War, intellectuals including Inoue Tetsujirō and Takayama Chogyū published the first issue of the magazine Nihonshugi. In his speech for a meeting on Nihonshugi in June 1897, Inoue explained what he meant by the term (Inoue 1898: 1). Around the time of the Meiji Restoration, he argued, the Japanese considered Western civilization to be more advanced and therefore decided to introduce Western learning, which made it possible for them to create the present-day Japanese civilization. With the progress of this civilization, however, the Japanese thought it necessary to consider whether or not they should continue to import Western civilization (Inoue 1898: 2–3). Inoue’s answer to this question was that Japan should cultivate ‘the spirit of independence’ and ‘make other countries assimilate to Japan’ (Inoue 1898: 4). While advocating the principle of Nihonshugi, Inoue argued against the Christian cosmopolitanism introduced from the West. In Inoue’s view, Christianity contradicted national moral education because it was based on the idea of a universal truth. In order to advocate his principle of Nihonshugi, Inoue insisted that ‘cosmopolitanism’ (sekaishugi), transcending the boundaries of states, was not practised anywhere in the world (Inoue 1893: 131–134). In his view, the idea of cosmopolitanism was ‘vague’ and ‘intangible’. Japan should not follow the trend of the times as lesser powers did, but should exert its influence on the world (Inoue 1898: 8–9). The nation would become weak if faithful to the principle of cosmopolitanism. Great powers in Europe supposedly followed the principle of cosmopolitanism, but never looked down on their own country. Each of them watched ‘with gleaming eyes’ for the right moment to violate the rights of other countries. They pretended not to violate them, but ‘actually invaded’ the other countries. Japanese 7 Watanabe Kazuyasu has emphasized the importance of the thought of Inoue Tetsujirō in Japanese intellectual history (Watanabe 1985: 100). 8 Yamaji Aizan criticized the vagueness of the concept of Nihonshugi used by Inoue Tetsujirō (Yamaji 1898: 420).

‘overcoming modernity’ and conflicting

87

people were rejected in Hawaii, and an ‘anti-Japanese campaign’ had started in various countries. Therefore, there was not really any country that practised the principle of cosmopolitanism. If people were faithful to this principle, Inoue thought, their country would be disadvantaged (Inoue 1898: 10–11). In this way, Inoue argued that Japan could not maintain its independence unless united under the principle of Nihonshugi, which was ‘the fundamental principle of the state’, rather than follow the principle of cosmopolitanism. John Tucker has suggested that ‘Inoue was probably influenced by Fenollosa’s call for the preservation of Japan’s cultural heritage’, but Tucker has not shown any concrete evidence to support his suggestion (Tucker 2002: 37–38). In fact, Inoue relied on a Japanese classical source in his argument for Japan’s cultural tradition. In his Kokumin dōtoku gairon (An Outline of National Morals, 1912), he referred to Hirata Atsutane (1776–1843) as an eminent scholar who revived old Shinto. In Inoue’s view, Hirata emphasized the importance of ‘the spirit of ancestor worship’ and argued that there had been ‘an unbroken line of emperors’ from the Sun Goddess Amaterasu (Inoue 1912: 99–105). Inoue may have been influenced by Fenollosa’s call for the preservation of Japan’s cultural heritage, but he actually found inspiration in the work of Hirata Atsutane, whose ideas remained influential among Japanese nationalists in later years (cf. Skya 2009: 218). In reference to the forty-seven rōnin in Akō, John Tucker has also asserted that Inoue ‘surely hoped to redirect the kind of ultimate loyalism manifested by the rōnin away from feudal lords and towards the imperial throne’ (Tucker 2002: 45). In Tucker’s view, Inoue valued the spirit of loyalty displayed by the rōnin and ‘was not bothered by the fact that the rōnin were criminals in their own days’ (Tucker 2002: 36). It should be noted, however, that Inoue never liberated the ‘private’ sphere from that of the ‘public’. Inoue’s recognition of the primacy of the ‘public’ sphere over the ‘private’ can be seen in his argument that Japan should be spiritually unified under the principle of Nihonshugi. While believing that Japan had to create a new civilization, adopting the strong points of other countries, Inoue argued that Japan should build a civilization on the basis of state-centred nationalism. In his view, if each individual stuck to his own principle and public opinion was not unified, the nation would disintegrate. If foreign ideas were introduced, Japan might be in danger of being spiritually disunited. In Inoue’s opinion, it was natural for the Japanese to adopt the principle of Nihonshugi, which was ‘a fundamental principle

88

yushi ito

for the state’, and they should ‘eternally maintain this principle’ (Inoue 1898: 11–12). Inoue believed that the word Nihonshugi implied dantai no shugi (groupism), which displayed the Japanese national spirit, and he refused to put the ‘private sphere’ of the individual ahead of the state (Inoue 1898: 5–8). Furthermore, he asserted in his article published in 1900 that moral conduct should be ‘objectively’ correct and that it was not sufficient to be ‘subjectively’ correct (Inoue 1900: 60). Thus, he never suggested that the individual’s conduct could be evaluated without reference to ‘public’ national morals. Inoue Tetsujirō’s View of Japan’s Cultural Mission Inoue came to positively express his view of Japan’s cultural mission in the world after the Russo-Japanese War. In his essay ‘Tōyō bunka to waga Nihon no shimei’ (Eastern Culture and Our Country’s Mission, 1924), he argued that Japan should take the lead in harmonizing Eastern and Western cultures (Inoue 1924: 38). In his Ideals of the East (1903), Okakura Tenshin had asserted that Japan was ‘an isolated island country’ and that its geographical condition made it ‘a genuine storehouse of Asian thought and culture’ (Okakura 1986: 20). Like Okakura, Inoue insisted that Japan was located in ‘a special position’ where it could harmonize Eastern and Western cultures. In his view, many Japanese admired Western culture but did not appreciate ‘the value of Eastern culture’. Westerners in general did not understand Eastern culture and most Western scholars of Oriental studies did not fully appreciate the value of the Orient because they saw it from the Western point of view. In contrast, because the Japanese imported Eastern culture including Buddhism and Confucianism in the past, they had an ability to understand ‘the essence of Eastern culture’ (Inoue 1924: 34–35). Therefore, Inoue asserted, it was certain that Japan’s mission to the world was to display ‘the essence of Eastern culture’ and harmonize it with Western culture (Inoue 1924: 37–38). Although attempting to harmonize Western with Eastern culture, Inoue did not tolerate foreign ideologies such as socialism and anarchism, which he thought might be harmful to Japan. He emphasized that Japan had not indiscriminately introduced foreign cultures in the past. In his view, Japan selectively adopted the good aspects of foreign cultures, eliminating their harmful elements. For instance, Japan introduced Chinese and Indian cultures and assimilated them. As regards

‘overcoming modernity’ and conflicting

89

Buddhism, Japan had not adopted the ‘vulgar Buddhism’ of the Hinayana school, focused more on practice for individual liberation, but had accepted ‘the highest Mahayana Buddhism’, based on the possibility of universal liberation from suffering for all beings (Inoue 1924: 28–29). The idea of revolution was cherished in China, and Confucianism also contained the idea of revolution and emphasized that the ruler’s power was based on a mandate from Heaven, which could be revoked. In Inoue’s view, such an idea of revolution caused dangerous incidents such as the High Treason Incident of 1910.9 Excluding elements that were not suitable for Japan from Confucianism, Japan became ‘the ideal Confucian country’ with the help of its national polity (Inoue 1924: 30–33). Since the mid-Edo period, medicine, military science, natural science and arts were introduced from the West and, after the Meiji Restoration, the educational system was reformed and Western culture was actively imported. As a result, some Japanese were fascinated by Western ideas such as socialism and anarchism and ‘disturbed the peace and order of society’, but Inoue believed that they did not have enough power to change the whole nation (Inoue 1924: 33–34). After the appearance of Nitobe Inazō’s internationally popular book Bushido in 1899, Inoue Tetsujirō published his Nihon kogakuha no tetsugaku (Japanese Confucian Philosophy) in 1902. In this book, Inoue challenged Nitobe’s central thesis that there were similarities between bushido and Western chivalry and argued that foreigners had not produced anything comparable to bushido. He believed that the spirit of bushido would serve as the foundation of Japanese morals for the future (cf. Tucker 2002: 42–43). In his essay ‘Tōyō bunka to waga Nihon no shimei’ (Eastern Culture and Our Country’s Mission), Inoue argued that Japan should display the spirit of bushido, which he thought was ‘the unique Japanese spirit’ (Inoue 1924: 38). In his view, Japan had maintained ‘its own culture’ despite its importation of foreign cultures since ancient times. The ‘unique’ Japanese thought is ‘Shinto in a broad sense’, which was not introduced from a foreign country. This thought did not have a name, but was later named as ‘Shinto’ in order to distinguish the belief in gods from the belief in Buddha. Bushido, which was related to Shinto, developed only in Japan (Inoue 1924: 28). Thus, Inoue believed that Shinto and bushido were ‘the unique Japanese spirit’ and 9 Kōtoku Shūsui, who was executed for high treason in 1911, read the Russian anarchist Kropotkin’s Fields, Factories, and Workshops (Notehelfer, 1971: 112).

90

yushi ito

‘the unique Japanese culture’, and argued that Eastern and Western cultures should be harmonized on the basis of this Japanese unique spirit. In his essay ‘Nihon tokuyū no mono towa nan zoya’ (What are things unique to Japan?, 1926), Inoue further discussed Japanese uniqueness and urged his countrymen to develop ‘things unique to Japan’ (Inoue 1926: 1). In his view, first, ‘the Japanese people themselves’ were unique in the world because Japan was one of the five great powers and no other non-Western country ranked with the great powers. Second, Japan’s national polity was unique to Japan. A similar sample of national polity which was ‘based on an unbroken line of emperors’ could not be found elsewhere in the world. Third, Shinto had a unique nature as a spiritual product of the Japanese people. ‘The original form of Shinto’ was similar to shamanism, but nothing like Japan’s Shinto could be found in the surrounding countries, including China and India (Inoue 1926: 2–3). Fourth, bushido was unique to Japan. There was something like bushido in China and Western countries, but Japan’s bushido was related to its national polity. Japan’s bushido was not just the spirit of bravery but ‘the way of the empire’ (kōkoku no michi), or ‘the idea of moral principles’, which had been maintained since the foundation of the country. Bushido was modified during the age of Civil Wars, but was revived in the Meiji period and adjusted to a new age (Inoue 1926: 6–7).10 Inoue insisted that the Japanese, who were unique in the world, should ‘assimilate everything to them’ and contribute to the world (Inoue 1926: 9–10). It seems that Inoue’s thought became more isolated and Japan-centred when he regarded not only Shinto, bushido and Japan’s national polity but also the Japanese people themselves as ‘things unique to Japan’. Inoue’s Japan-centred view of the world hardened when Japan was internationally isolated in the 1930s. After the Manchurian Incident of 18 September 1931, Japan was criticized by other countries and, as a result, withdrew from the League of Nations in March 1933. In his essay ‘Koritsu Nihon no shōrai’ (The Future of Isolated Japan), published in April 1933, Inoue wrote that one should not worry about Japan’s isolation. In his view, Japan’s isolation was generally ‘fortunate for Japan’. Since the Meiji Restoration, Japan had tended to follow the West in its diplomacy, politics, business and education, and lacked ‘the spirit of independence’. After the First World War, Japan was annoyed by ‘dangerous foreign thought’ and noticed its harmful influence on soci10 It has been suggested that Inoue Tetsujirō neglected historical facts when arguing that bushido was developed around the core of the imperial house (Ôshima 1975: 69).

‘overcoming modernity’ and conflicting

91

ety (Inoue 1933b: 53). Henceforth, Japan could introduce ‘education based on Nihonshugi’ and display ‘the spirit of independence’ and ‘Japanese uniqueness’. Each nation had its own character, and if it displayed that, it could contribute to ‘the development of world culture’. Inoue believed that Japan should contribute to ‘the development of world culture’ through selectively adopting and harmonizing various ideas, beliefs and arts from foreign countries (Inoue 1933a: 54–55). In the same essay, Inoue also discussed ‘the way of the gods’ (kannagara no michi) as something unique to Japan. In his view, even if isolated in the world, Japan had ‘the way of the gods’ which had been maintained since ancient times. Successive Japanese emperors embodied ‘the way of the gods’, and the Japanese diplomat Matsuoka Yōsuke took an active role in the League of Nations with the spirit of ‘the way of the gods’. From now on, the Japanese should make efforts to ‘clarify the way of the gods and make other countries follow this way’. Inoue thought that his countrymen should become aware of the fact that they had been ‘given the best chance’ to achieve such a cultural mission (Inoue 1933a: 71; cf. Inoue 1933b: 934). Thus, Inoue fanatically insisted that it was necessary for Japan to propagate ‘the way of the gods’ in the world when it became isolated from other countries. Kagoya Jirō has pointed out that Inoue changed his interpretation of the Imperial Rescript on Education around 1930, and came to understand all virtues in terms of the idea of ‘assistance to the imperial house’ (kōun yokusan) (Kagoya 1988: 390). John Tucker has suggested that Inoue’s writings became increasingly nationalistic in the final decade of the Meiji period, and continued to be so during the ‘liberal’ 1920s (Tucker 2002: 39). Inoue’s view of Japan’s cultural mission became mainstream in prewar Japan, but still faced strong opposition from more liberal intellectuals like Sawayanagi Masatarō. Sawayanagi Masatarō’s View of National Moral Education During the Meiji and Taisho periods, Sawayanagi Masatarō, a leader of the Taisho Liberal Movement in Education, was opposed to Inoue Tetsijirō’s view of national moral education. Sawayanagi worked as headmaster of the First and Second Higher Schools, vice minister of the Ministry of Education, member of the House of Nobles, president of Tōhoku Imperial University and of Kyoto Imperial University, and headmaster of Seijō Primary School (Mizuuchi 1989: 149–165). Ozawa

92

yushi ito

Yūsaku has argued that Sawayanagi was ‘a whole-hearted imperialist who was eager to rule other peoples’ (Ozawa 1979: 206). Nakano Hikaru has also argued that Sawayanagi supported ‘Japan’s imperial ambitions’ such as the Russo-Japanese War and Japan’s annexation of the Korean peninsula, while he was a leader of the liberal education movement in the Taisho period (Nakano 1990: 43, 54). In opposition to these opinions, Nitta Yoshiyuki has asserted that, after the SecondWorld War, the achievements of leading Japanese figures of the past including Sawayanagi Masatarō were critically examined from an ideological point of view (Nitta 2006: iii). As will be discussed, although not raising objections to Japan’s imperial policies, Sawayanagi criticized national moral education and encouraged the Japanese to ‘contribute to the world’ through the promotion of economic development and the advancement of learning. Sawayanagi Masatarō was known as a liberal educator but, like Inoue Tetsujirō, he accepted the Imperial Rescript on Education as a guideline for moral education. Sawayanagi published Waga kuni no kyōiku (The Education of Our Country) in 1910, which was a draft of the speech he had planned to give at London University in 1908. Like Inoue, Sawayanagi argued in this work that the Japanese developed ‘the spirit of loyalty’ and ‘the spirit of bushido’ while harmonizing the ‘yamato damashii’ (Japanese unique spirit) with Eastern thought such as Buddhism and Confucianism. Since the introduction of Christianity, science, philosophy, laws and social institutions from the West, however, the Japanese became confused about morals. The Imperial Rescript on Education (1890) clearly showed the present-day Japanese morals, which adopted ‘the spirit of Western civilization’ on the basis of ‘Japan’s unique morals’. Sawayanagi asserted that the Imperial Rescript on Education contained not only all morals practised in the society of the day, but also the ‘morals of all ages and civilizations’ (Sawayanagi 1910a: 70). Thus, he attempted to show that ‘Japan’s unique morals’ developed under the influence of Eastern and Western thought. Furthermore, like Inoue, who emphasized ‘the imperial way’ (kōkoku no michi), Sawayanagi did not doubt ‘the unbroken line of Japanese emperors’ (bansei ikkei no kōtō). He thought that it was difficult for foreigners to understand that the Imperial Rescript on Education was the basis of moral education in Japan. In his view, the emperor was situated in the centre of education and the Japanese could be proud of ‘the unbroken line of emperors’. The national character of the Japanese was the spirit of loyalty to the emperor and had ‘not changed since the

‘overcoming modernity’ and conflicting

93

foundation of the country’. In the age of warriors, it was believed that the source of power was the emperor, who had the power to appoint civil servants and military officers even if in name only. Sawayanagi asserted that even in the age when the emperor did not hold real power, people believed that the imperial house was ‘sacred and inviolable’ (Sawayanagi 1910a: 71–72). Thus, Sawayanagi’s argument for the Imperial Rescript on Education is seemingly similar to Inoue’s idea of education. In his ‘Chokugo to dōtoku kyōiku tono kankei’ (Relations between the Rescript and Moral Education, 1893), however, Sawayanagi insisted that Inoue’s interpretation of the Imperial Rescript on Education was not sufficient and was misleading. In Sawayanagi’s view, scholars and educators argued about ‘the policy of moral education’ when the Rescript was promulgated. The point in dispute was what policy should be taken for moral education, but people could not decide between one policy and another and could not reach a conclusion. Then, the Rescript was promulgated and the policy of moral education was clarified in it. Moral education, however, was not ‘just to teach the knowledge of morals’ because people may go wrong even if they know what is good and what is evil. Therefore, it is not enough just to teach the knowledge of right and wrong in moral education; it is important for people to learn how they can actually do good things. In Sawayanagi’s view, Inoue Tetsujiro’s Chokugo engi discussed why the spirit of loyalty was considered to be moral perfection, but what one should investigate was the method of cultivating the will to carry out the morals mentioned in the Rescript (Sawayanagi 1893: 363–371). In his ‘Sengo no shakai jōtai to kyōiku’ (Social Conditions and Education in the Post-war Period, 1916), Sawayanagi further argued that national morals should be practised in deed. After the High Treason Incident of 1910, Inoue published Kokumin dōtoku gairon (An Outline of National Morals), in which he attempted to clarify the ‘true meaning’ of the Imperial Rescript on Education in order to protect his countrymen from the ‘harmful’ Western ideas that were cherished by those who were executed for high treason (Inoue 1912: 10–13). In contrast, Sawayanagi argued that it was not necessary to clarify the meaning of the Imperial Rescript. What was important for the Japanese was to put the knowledge of national morals shown in the Rescript into practice. Although some people were eager to establish an education system based on militarism in order to prepare for war in the future, Sawayanagi was strongly opposed to such an idea (Sawayanagi 1916: 381). While some regarded ‘the promotion of national morals’ as most important

94

yushi ito

for education, Sawayanagi thought that the established national morals themselves were nothing but ‘empty and formalistic statements’. The spirit of loyalty and patriotism should be raised, but such a spirit should be ‘substantial’. There was no point in advocating ‘the prosperity of the imperial house’ in words only. One cannot support ‘the fate of the eternal imperial house’ by using ‘empty words’ such as ‘I do not care about my life and property’. Instead, Japan should ‘contribute to the world’ through the promotion of economic development and the advancement of learning. Then, the prosperity of the imperial house would be naturally achieved and it was not necessary to emphasize ‘the promotion of national morals’ in education (Sawayanagi 1916: 383). In this way, Sawayanagi accepted the Imperial Rescript on Education as a guide for national morals, but was strongly opposed to the moral education which forced people to blindly learn the knowledge of national morals. In his ‘Shisō no dōyō ni tsuite’ (About Intellectual Turmoil, 1919), Sawayanagi did not accept the Japan-centred view of the world and urged his countrymen to contribute to ‘the culture of the world’. According to him, those who held the Japan-centred view of the world maintained that Japan was ‘a holy country’ or ‘an ideal country’ or ‘the best country in the world’. In his view, people should have the idea of making Japan ‘the best and most beautiful country’, but the self-centred idea that Japan was ‘the top country in the world’ would hinder the development of the country. The Japanese should acknowledge their country’s good points and should remedy its defects. Modern Japan associated with the Western powers diplomatically but those countries were suspicious and envious of Japan. It was certain that no other country wanted Japan ‘to earn further advancement’. Therefore, Sawayanagi argued, it was important for the Japanese to ‘partially observe’ the position of their country in the fields of business, learning, education, culture and morals in the world (Sawayanagi 1919: 462–465). In this way, he believed that the Japanese should abandon a Japan-centred view of the world in order to avoid international isolation, as revealed in the anti-Japanese campaigns in the USA and China, and in the Korean independence movement.

Sawayanagi Masatarō’s View of Japan’s Cultural Mission Kenneth Pyle has suggested that young intellectuals of the Meiji period complained that Japan’s national progress had been material and had neglected spiritual values (cf. Pyle 1969: 24–25). Although at that time

‘overcoming modernity’ and conflicting

95

Japan attempted to catch up with the industrial and commercial powers of the West, the materialism of the Meiji Enlightenment period was often seen as the main cause of the neglect of spiritual values. As will be shown, Sawayanagi was one of the intellectuals of the Meiji period who were dissatisfied with the materialism of the day and attempted to overcome it by promoting spiritual ideals. In his article on ‘Chi to toku