On January 2, 1983, the Japanese Diet called upon the Japanese Magazine Publishers Association’s Ethics Committee Chairman for a frank chat about the conspicuous increase of sexual content in young women’s magazines. In particular legislators were concerned about Gal’s Life (Shufu no Tomosha), Kids (Gakushu Kenkyusha), Elle Teen (Kindai Eigasha), Popteen (Asuka Shinsha), Carrot Gals (Heiwa Shuppan), and Maru Maru Gals (Toen Shobo). These were relatively popular titles at the time, with Gal’s Life selling a half-million copies a month and Popteen right behind it at 350K.

The publishing industry did little in response, and so in February 1984, Mitsuzuka Hiroshi, the Deputy Chairman of the Liberal Democratic Party’s Policy Research Council, spoke out in the middle of the Lower House Budget Committee, complaining about the plague of explicit sexual articles in girls’ magazines, which he called “instructional classes on sex.” Mitsuzuka took the struggle from the Diet floor to the media, appearing on TV shows to further indict the publishers. Prime Minister Nakasone also weighed in: “There’s a worry that the sexual depictions in certain magazines for young women may lead to crime” and then hinted that he would be open to legislative or otherwise administrative action against the publishers.

Results were swift. The day after Mitsuzuka’s Diet speech, publishers Heiwa Shuppan and Gakushu Kenkyusha announced they would discontinue Carrot Gals and Kids, respectively. Gakushu Kenkyusha was in a particular bind as it had a huge business in another highly regulated field: educational text books. Popteen meanwhile pledged a new editorial direction. Gal’s Life changed its name to Gal’s City to escape the increasing social stigma and took out all the dirty articles. This was apparently not what readers wanted, however: Sales dropped so violently that Shufu no Tomosha put the title out to pasture one year later.

What was this sexual content that the Liberal Democratic Party were so concerned about? Essayist Sakai Junko remembers Gal’s Life as chock full of “juicy stories that covered the rawer parts of girls’ lifestyle.” Gal’s Life provided a stark contrast to Magazine House’s olive — a title that imagined all Japanese teenagers wanted to imitate the “good sense and elegance of Parisian lycéenne.” While digging through old issues of Gal’s Life, Sakai discovers these article headlines:

• “Takada Namie’s Girl-Fight Dojo”
• “‘I’m sorry, baby’ — Abortion Experiences”
• “The Exciting Vacation Before We Got Secretly Married”
• “I’m not a prostitute! The Lifestyle and Outlook of Miho, who works at a Shinjuku massage parlor”

There are few images of Gal’s Life available online, and this cover from 1980 has much less controversial headlines (although it does sport the amusing promise “You won’t be an ugly girl (busu) if you read Gal’s Life!”) The general sense, however, is that the magazines had a constant stream of salacious articles for young women on sexual topics, all blanketed in a general atmosphere of “documentary” reporting.

In his book Sōkan no Shakaishi (The Social History of Debut Magazine Issues), sociologist Namba Koji mentions a few articles in Gal’s Life such as “Gal Sex Report”, “Document: Love with a Man who Has a Wife and Children”, and “Comparison of Sex from Girls All Across Japan.” He then makes the obvious but crucial point that these are exactly the kind of articles one can expect from men’s magazines.

Framed this way, it is hard to understand the LDP’s crusade against “gal” magazines in the 1980s as anything other than patriarchal sexual hypocrisy. The issue is not “sexual content” itself in the market but who is partaking. As we all know, Japan does not have traditionally puritan attitudes towards sex, and conservatives had traditionally been the staunch advocates of legalized prostitution (against a coalition of women’s groups, socialists, and Christians who worked to outlaw it.) While the 1980s LDP may have been mostly removed from those particular 1950s battles, Mitsuzuka and company did seem bothered with idea that young women — maybe even from good families! — were speaking frankly about sexual experiences and trading tips.

To the LDP’s credit, 1984 was also the year the police started to crack down on an explosion of new sexual services. And perhaps the LDP was most concerned that these magazines explicitly targeted minors and intentionally or unintentionally worked to normalize sexual experiences outside of middle-class social expectations — dating married men, getting eloped, having abortions, working in the sex industry.

Most likely, however, is that the LDP were confused by a different principle all together: the rise of working-class yankii narratives in popular culture. Titles like Popteen and Gal’s Life were not intended for the ojōsama princesses of CanCam or the demure aesthetes of olive. In fact, these magazines built huge audiences by ignoring the slightly imagined, internationalized consumer world of good taste. Instead they spoke to the “real” lives of lower class yankii girls. While the data is not presently on hand, we can assume that working class teens in Japan — who have tended to marry at younger ages, are less busy with schoolwork, cram schools, and extracurriculars, and have less parental supervision — had more sexual experience than their Tokyo upper crust peers. This at least is the message that yankii women have tried to create for themselves in their own media. Starting with these 1980s magazines and carrying all the way to egg and Koakuma Ageha, there have been more explicit sexual articles in yankii/gyaru magazines rather than “good girl” magazines like an•an, non•no, With, or More. And moreover, the most salacious part of the magazine was often the “reader’s column” — where girls told endless and exaggerated sob stories of rapes, bullying, sexual promiscuity, dead boyfriends, and abortions. (I remember reading an issue of egg in 1999, right in the peak of the ganguro movement, that offered a guide to “How to Have Sex in a Car” as well as a particularly graphic reader about group sex in the ocean that involved sea shells.)

Without much perspective on these class-clustered sexual mores though, one can understand elitist politicians seeing gal magazines lined up equally on a bookstore rack with those proffering middle-class consumerist values, easily falling into the hands of a girl who would otherwise read about Chanel suits and marrying guys from Todai. She would be ruined forever! This is almost the virgin-whore complex grafted onto government policy. Interestingly, however, one of the main readerships for the controversial gal magazines was likely normal middle-class girls who liked to giggle at the sex stories and make fun of the yankii narratives. Nakasone and Mitsuzuka may have not known that these titles also inspired mockery from the very girls they hoped to protect.

In the end, only Popteen survived the 1984 gal magazine massacre. The editors promised to clean up the content but then slowly brought back articles about sex techniques and teenage delinquent life when the Diet had moved on to other problems and scandals. It may have also helped that society went through a “sex boom” right after the Diet hearing. Akimoto Yasushi’s mass idol group Onyanko Club was suddenly on TV every afternoon singing about how “being a virgin is boring” and how high school girls needed to have sex with their math teacher to get good grades.

In the mid-1990s, however, Popteen eventually dropped the delinquent lifestyle stories and became a pure style bible for the kogyaru army. This may have ironically been key to the magazine’s longevity. Whether advertiser pressure or consumer demand, there seems to be less desire these days for Japanese magazines to do anything other than provide excessive product details on the latest clothing. Even when Koakuma Ageha takes up frank talk about domestic violence and hostess lifestyles, the idea is dealing with harsh realities rather than sensationalizing for girls who want to fantasize about adult activities.

Yet there appears to be latent demand in Japan for female-oriented stories of sexual exploits and tragedies, as evidenced by the rise of the keitai novel — which writer Hayamizu Kenro has linked directly to the “confessional” narratives of yankii ladies biker mag Teen’s Road. The Diet may have temporarily killed off the teenage delinquent narrative industry but they could not stifle all the curiosity.

Bonus trivia: When Mitsuzuka held up Popteen in the Diet, the page was open to an illustration by now famed media critic Miura Jun.

Namba, Koji. “Concerning Youth Subcultures in the Postwar Era, Vol. 5: ‘Ko-gal’ and ‘Urahara-kei,’” Kwansei Gakuin University Sociology Department #100, March 2006.

Namba, Koji. Sōkan no Shakaishi (The Social History of Debut Magazine Issues) Chikuma Shinsho, 2009.

Sakai, Junko. “Girls’ Yankii Spirit.” An Introduction to Yankee Studies. Ed. Taro Igarashi, Kawade Shobo Shinsha, 2009.

Well, it’s time again for the Tokyo gubernatorial election, and this year the vote is likely to be a referendum on three-time incumbent Ishihara Shintarō. You may be familiar with a few of the veteran politician’s recent statements. He called the Tohoku earthquake a “divine punishment” for Japan’s moral misdirection. Earlier in the year he made headlines after spewing bigoted comments towards the gay community, demanding publishers censor virtual child pornography in manga (without doing much to outlaw the possession of actual child pornography in his jurisdiction), and slagging on Japanese youth. One of his golden oldies was the statement in 2000 that sankokujin — an outdated and arguably offensive term for Chinese, Koreans, and Taiwanese living in Japan — would cause social unrest in the event of a major Japanese earthquake. There is not a lot to celebrate about the recent natural disaster, but the peaceful aftermath at least proved his prediction wrong.

Based on this kind of rhetoric, we should assume that Ishihara starts his day by standing in front of the mirror and dreaming up outrageous and ire-raising comments. (Or hey, he may, like top comedians, have a room of writers to think up edgy material.) Yet it’s hard to blame Ishihara for this behavior. His own life story has conditioned him to expect reward for malicious rhetoric. Ishihara — long before he became the figurehead of Japan’s grumpy old male contingent — was the legendary Bad Boy of the Post-War. Back in the 1950s, Ishihara was much more Dennis the Menace than Mr. Wilson. So while there may be much hypocrisy in Ishihara’s current call for a return to archaic Japanese values, we should remember that offending people with utmost confidence has always been Ishihara’s bread and butter.

Ishihara grew up in the posh beach community of Shonan, son of a shipbuilding executive. A classic example of the “wealthy furyo” (不良, “no good”), his stable background gave him the economic security to spend years absorbed in artistic appreciation and mild delinquency rather than nose-on-page study. He found his way into the prestigious Law Department at top public school Hitotsubashi University, where apparently “on a whim” he wrote a short novel called Season of the Sun 『太陽の季節』. He won the Akutagawa Prize for the work in 1955, which turned him into an instant literary superstar. The book instantly sold 300,000 copies, but the true full-fledged social phenomenon around Ishihara began when a film adaptation of the work hit theaters in 1956. A cult of personality soon grew around Ishihara and his brother Yujiro, a notoriously delinquent Keio student who made a cameo in Season of the Sun and then starred in the next Ishihara-penned film Crazed Fruit 『狂った果実』. Cultural critic Oya Soichi named the boys and their friends the “Taiyo-zoku” — The Sun Tribe, a pun on their beach-side lifestyle, the book title, and the post-war fallen aristocrats called “Shayo-zoku” (More on the etymology here).

The emergence of the Sun Tribe ran parallel with the birth of the “teenager” in other countries, although the scale and scope in Japan was much less significant than American Graffiti-era teenyboppers in the U.S. The distinction was also more explicitly philosophical than what was happening in the consumer paradise of America. Ishihara and his cohorts were triumphantly eschewing wartime values and embracing a new cultural milieu distinct from their parents. This idea is extremely clear in Season of the Sun.

The main character of the book is Tsugawa Tatsuya — a university student and boxing club member who enjoys womanizing at urban dance clubs and sail-boating out on Shonan Beach. While cruising for babes in Ginza one weekend in his finest suit, he meets the wealthy and intriguingly-decadent Eiko. She ends up stalking him at his boxing match and takes him afterward to the hospital in her own car (which needless to say, was not a “normal” thing for anyone to own at this point in the mid-1950s). Without going into all the gory details, Tatsuya and Eiko go off-and-on again throughout the short novel, pursuing flings to make the other jealous, and being generally mean to each other. The book ends with Tatsuya telling Eiko to end her accidental pregnancy with his child by abortion, but since he has taken so long to make his decision, she goes for a risky late-stage operation — and (spoiler alert) dies. In a fit of self-loathing, Tatsuya storms Eiko’s funeral in the final pages, shattering her portrait on the altar and yelling at Eiko’s family, “None of you understood!”

The story itself plays with the excitement of post-war teenage life, but in order to be entirely clear on his intentions, Ishihara provides long narrative paragraphs on his theory of youth mostly unrelated to the main plot:

If the adult world feared [youth] as a dangerous force, second only to communism, this fear was groundless. A new generation brought forth sentiments and a new code of morals, and these youth were growing up in such surroundings. They stood erect, like cactus, without looking down to see that they were blooming in bare soil.

The young unconsciously tried to destroy the morals of their elders — morals which always judged against the new generation. In the young people’s eyes, the reward of virtue was dullness and vanity. While the older generation thought it was growing ever more broad-minded, but actually grew narrower in outlook, the young looked for something broad and fresh to build on.

For all of the setting up adults as the “enemies” of youth, there is very little actual warfare in the novel. The book may have been most shocking in that all the young rich Japanese characters live in their own little world: hitting hostess bars and dance clubs, driving around in cars, sailing boats, staying at resort hotels, getting abortions. Parents do not appear as oppositional forces — actually, they barely appear at all. The single scene of inter-generational conflict happens in a scene at Tatsuya’s home, when the father is showing off his relatively-preserved physique and asks his son to try punching him in the stomach. The boxer Tatsuya delivers a crushing blow, knocking over the dad and making him spit up blood for days. The episode has obvious Oedipal symbolism, but the rest of the novel focuses more around the joyful absence of parental advisory rather than its overbearing shadow.

The idea of youth-gone-wild in Season of the Sun is clearly what made the novel so exciting to other members of Ishihara’s generation. Ironically, student leftists at the time proclaimed the novel as an anti-establishment manifesto, passing Season of the Sun around during the long waiting periods at the 1956 Sunagawa protests against the extension of a U.S. Air Force base. The book was “progressive” in the sense that it defended youth’s role as a key force for social change and generally advocated the dismantling of the prewar value system.

The Ishiharas were also dashing, wealthy playboys who inspired a generation of post-war youth wishing for a return to prosperity. Fashion critic Takeji Hirakawa explained to me: “This was an era when there were no Japanese heroes. The MP and soldiers were good looking guys and stole all the best women. Everyone knew that the Japanese needed Japanese heroes to really bounce back from the war.” The Ishiharas filled that role, proving to their fellow youth through cocksure success that Japan would no longer have to live in the shadow of America.

While this may seem like a very different philosophical background than the current Ishihara, I would argue that he never made a tenko conversion to the right. There are visible traces of conservative ideology even in his early writing.

Most obviously, Ishihara has smug certainty about his world and believes deeply in the myth of individuals fully in control of their own destiny. The characters of Season of the Sun seem completely oblivious to the fact that wealth affords them the freedom to be delinquent and carefree. The Tsugawa brothers maintain their own sail boats out at Shonan Beach in the early 1950s — an era when much of his fellow citizens had just recently stopped wearing their old wartime rags and worrying about where they were going to get the day’s food. The government only declared the apres guerre period over in 1956, a year when the Ishihara’s were already conspicuously living at a level that would be considered posh even today.

Building on this explicit denial of class, main character Tatsuya sees his own successes as triumphs of will against all odds rather than building upon a privileged background. For example, Tatsuya becomes a passable boxer without any real training. It’s his “enthusiasm” and natural skill — rather than hard work — that make him a competitive pugilist. In a similar tone, Ishihara’s younger brother Yujiro quipped to the press about his film career, “Whatever. I can quit doing movies whenever I want.” Ishihara Shintaro is a deep believer in the “myth of natural good taste” — that idea that members of the privileged classes are imbued with greater aesthetics or natural skills without realization of the opportunity and access to cultural capital that come with wealth.

While these ideas stay relatively mild within Season of the Sun, these attitudes have slowly evolved over the last 60 years into something more sinister: Ishihara’s complete lack of sympathy for people unlike himself. He personally overcame difficulty through a minimum of effort, so why can’t everyone else get their act together? Ishihara’s father died suddenly when he was still a student, yet he helped his family make ends meet — in part by becoming a famous writer. Penning an Akutagawa Prize-winning novel took him only a few days. It is exactly Ishihara’s victorious and charmed life — proven at an early age — that make him completely disinterested in those who have to actually work to succeed, or worse, will never succeed at all. He is the classic “self-made man” — who happened to start on a giant pedestal.

Yet this streak of fundamental conservative ideology is of course not what made him so hated in the 1950s. Ishihara was PTA Enemy #1. Together with women’s groups and educational committees, Japan’s Parent-Teacher Association railed publicly against the sexual content of Season of the Sun, which they spun into a broader movement towards stricter censorship on motion pictures. In the book’s most infamous sequence, the main character seduces his girlfriend by punching a hole in a sliding paper door with his erect penis. This did not go down well with the older set.

But it was the third Sun Tribe film The Punishment Room 『処刑の部屋』 that really raised ire. (The novella on which it is based, by the way, is mere sensationalistic violence lacking any literary depth. Avoid.) There is a scene of men spiking girls’ drinks with sedatives to later rape them, and many teenage criminals who attempted similar things told authorities that they got the idea from the movie. Although mild in comparison, the media also devoured a subsequent story about a girl deciding to drop out of high-school after taking up the anti-social message of the film. Parents of all stripes hated Ishihara. While feminists disliked Ishihara’s violent, sexual misogyny, older conservative men had a fit over the Ishihara brothers’ boastful disobedience. They blamed the rise of the Sun Tribe on the formal outlawing of legal prostitution. They argued, if men had a legal sexual outlet for these violent urges, Japan would be free of menacing groups like the Sun Tribe.

But this is Ishihara’s problem today: His outrageous behavior as a youth — which was fresh and probably warranted in the 1950s — still informs his current personality. Shintaro got gray but he never mellowed out nor became self-aware. When he calls for censorship of art, he does not remember that once people much like him now called for the censorship of his own art. But moreover, we should understand him in control of his personality. He is not a “loose cannon,” accidentally saying things he later regrets. He likely thinks that success of his endeavors requires raising the ire of groups to which he does belong.

The question now is whether enough Tokyo voters will decide that Ishihara finally went too far in blaming the earthquake victims. The most likely scenario sadly is that his usual voting bloc will stumble out of JRA Wins en masse and cast some shochu-drenched ballots to make him governor one more time.

Reference works:

Shintaro Ishihara. Season of Violence. Transl. John G. Mills, Toshie Takahama, and Ken Tremayne. Rutland & Tokyo: Tuttle, (1966).

Kosuke Mabuchi. Post-War History of the “Tribes”. Sanseido, 1989.

John Nathan. Japan Unbound: A Volatile Nation’s Quest for Pride and Purpose. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2004.

Across Editorial Desk. Street Fashion 1945-1995. PARCO, 1995.

You may know that in Meiji 6 (1873), Japan officially made the switch from its Tempō reki 天保暦 lunar calendar system to a European-style solar scheme. On the ninth day of the eleventh month in Meiji 5, Emperor Meiji issued the edict entitled “Abandonment of the lunar calendar and promulgation of the solar” (太陰曆ヲ廢シ太陽曆ヲ頒行ス), in which it was declared that “the coming third day of the twelfth month shall become the first day of January in Meiji 6″ (“來ル十二月三日ヲ以テ明治六年一月一日ト被定候事”).

The edict went on: Each year from now shall have 365 days divided into twelve months, it declared, with a leap year every four years. Each day shall be divided into two twelve-hour periods — basically, the adoption of the entire Gregorian/Western timekeeping system, only missing for some reason the except-multiples-of-100, except-multiples-of-400 leap-day rules (this omission was eventually amended in 1898) and not addressing the question of what the years were to be called — i.e., retaining the nengō system).

So, Japan went straight from 05-12-02 to 06-01-01 with only a couple of weeks’ warning. The official calendar industry was devastated. (No, really: They eventually got a decade and a half of government-approved monopoly afterward to make up for it.) Why the change and why right then?

The obvious reason for the change is the big M: modernity. A lumpy, irregular, lunar calendar just doesn’t go with steam trains and Prussian naval uniforms. (For one thing, it makes scheduling those trains a real bitch.) Recalculating dates when dealing with foreigners — even the year can be different in some cases! — is a hassle too. A solar calendar solves these problems in a pleasingly scientific and merciless way, and if you’re going to adopt a solar calendar, you might as well make it the one that the guys with all the money and guns are using.

Still, this doesn’t explain why the change was made at the end of year 5, in such a rush. This specific timing was chosen for another big-M reason: money.

Under the lunar calendar, Meiji 6 would have been a leap year, with an extra intercalary month. Government employees receiving a monthly salary would receive it thirteen times. By switching to a 12-month solar calendar at the end of Meiji 5, the cash-strapped Japanese government saved 1/12 of Meiji 5′s projected salary budget and cut down Meiji 6′s by 1/13 as well. They also got two days of work for free, because no-one got paid for the last two days of Meiji 5. (An edict on the 23rd of the eleventh month tried to declare them “the 30th and 31st of the eleventh month,” although it was withdrawn on the 24th, possibly because it rendered the original edict unclear. If 12-02 is actually 11-31, how do you know when 12-03 → 01-01 is?) According to Wikipedia, the new calendar also had less than half as many holidays as the old, just to rub salt in the wound.

Naturally, it wouldn’t be a huge modernization without Fukuzawa Yukichi 福沢諭吉 getting involved somehow, and he does indeed turn up in this story. Upon hearing the news at the end of Meiji 5, he rushed out a book called Kaireki ben 改暦辨 (idiomatically, “The New Calendar for Dummies”), which you can read online courtesy of Waseda University.

[...] I imagine that many people have their doubts about [the new system, and particularly the vanished 27 days of Meiji 5], and so I have done some research in books from the West in order to explain the differences between the solar calendar used in those countries and the lunar calendar used in countries like China and Japan.” (… 世間にこれを怪しむ者多からんと思ひ西洋の書を調て彼の國に行はるゝ太陽暦と古来支那日本等に用いる太陰暦との相違を示すこと佐の如し)

The explanation begins at the very beginning (“Taiyō 太陽 refers to the sun…”), but eventually moves on to the benefits of the new calendar: You don’t have to look at a calendar to see when Higan is every year; it won’t have those “stupid” auspicious and inauspicious days which “sow the seeds of superstition” and can, for example, cause the postponement of a funeral until a more auspicious day even in the height of summer. In summary, he declares, once you know why the calendar has changed, why the new system is better, and why you haven’t really “lost” those 27 days, you’d have to be an uneducated and ignorant fool (“無学文盲の馬鹿者”) to oppose the change. Indeed, he says, “you might say that this change is a test to separate the wise from the foolish throughout Japan” (“此度の一条ハ日本國中の知者と馬鹿者とを區別する吟味のいふも可なり”).

All this and an appendix on how to read a clock. No wonder he sold 100,000 copies.

(Act One, Scene 1 can be found here.)

Disclaimer: The following is for reference only. Its sole purpose is to give readers an overview of the history of modern Japanese literary criticism. I have avoided using all features common to the dramatic form, including plot, character development, word play, humor, Verfremdungseffekt, involution, and any explicit or implicit references to myself, Ryan Morrison, and the narrow world I inhabit.

Dramatis personæ, in order of appearance

• Akagi Kōhei 赤木桁平 (1891-1949)
• Ikuta Chōkō 生田長江 (1882-1936)
• Orikuchi Shinobu 折口信夫 (1887-1953)
• Satō Haruo 佐藤春夫 (1892-1964)
• Nagai Kafū 永井荷風 (1879-1959)
• Nakano Hideto 中野豪人 (1898-1966)
• Arishima Takeo 有島武郎 (1878-1923)
• Hirotsu Kazuo 広津和郎 (1891-1968)
• Kikuchi Kan 菊池寛 (1888-1948)
• Satomi Ton 里見弴 (1888-1983)
• Chiba Kameo 千葉亀雄 (1878-1935)
• Kume Masao 久米正雄 (1891-1952)
• Edogawa Rampo 江戸川乱歩 (1894-1965)
• Aono Suekichi 青野季吉 (1890-1961)

Act 1: The Meiji and Taishō Periods (Continued)

  Act 1, Scene 2

It is now 1916, and despite the portentous chill felt by Ōsugi Sakae and others, Taishō (1912-1926) is turning out to be a rather pleasant and prosperous era. The early-Meiji spirit of liberalism has been revived, and the Blue Stockings (Seitō, 1911-1916), Japan’s first feminist group founded by Yosano Akiko and Hiratsuka Raichō at the behest of Ikuta Chōkō, wages war against the patriarchy and its essentialist myths. Such progressivism, however, has produced a wave of conservative detractors, including the reactionary disciple of Sōseki, Akaki Kōhei.

Akaki Kōhei: The moral fabric of our society is unraveling! Everywhere is depravity and corruption! I hereby call for the extirpation of all profligate literature (yūtō bungaku no bokumetsu), including that of the whore-mongering, self-obsessed Naturalists! Those in the Aestheticist (tanbishugi) camp shouldn’t sit too comfortably, either. They too shall be eradicated!

Ikuta Chōkō: Now, now, don’t be so hard on the Naturalists. They’ll dig their own graves just fine without us. To me, the worst are the “ludicrously idealistic” (medetai risōshugi) Shirakaba writers, who write in a bloated, lofty style as if Naturalism had never happened. Even as we speak, they’re building some absurd utopian village (Atarashiki mura, 1918-present) in the hills of Kyūshū, led by their Tolstoy-inspired guru Mushanokōji Saneatsu. What would Nietzsche — whom I was the first to translate, mind you! — have to say about such puerility (osanago-shugi)?

Orikuchi Shinobu: Yeah, the Shirakaba group is pretty lame. But who fares better? The Aestheticists? They’re just as out of touch with reality — look how they gush like schoolboys over every new exotic fad, whether it’s from Edo, China, the West, or the Southern Barbaries.

It is now 1919, and Satō Haruo, Nagai Kafū, and Nakano Hideto are discussing the various modes of criticism.

Satō Haruo: All criticism is ultimately impressionistic, despite Kikuchi Kan’s claim that subjective criticism is the preferred method of charlatans. Criticism — regardless of what it’s “about” — is ultimately a discourse of the self. [Kobayashi Hideo, as we'll see in the next act, would later build on this.]

Nagai Kafū: I’d much rather wander the shitamachi streets half-drunk than get lost in the labyrinth of the self. Yet I can understand your reluctance to confront the world directly. As I explain in my recent essay “Hanabi” (“Fireworks”), I was enraged by the High Treason Incident of 1910, which the authorities used as an excuse to establish a surveillance state. Yet I did nothing. A coward, I am capable only of retreating into the long-vanished world of Edo. If anyone needs me, you can find me in one of its brothels, courtesan breast in mouth.

Nakano Hideto: Solipsistic impressionism, anti-modern escapism . . . when are we going to get serious about confronting reality? Let this moment mark the beginning of Japan’s proletarian movement — a “people’s arts” (minshū geijutsu) for and by “the fourth class” (daiyon kaikyū)!

It is now 1922, and Arishima Takeo and Hirotsu Kazuo are discussing their role in the class struggle, while Kikuchi Kan and Satomi Ton are engaged in their “Content Value Controversy” (Naiyōteki kachi ronsō), which, like most literary debates, will end without conclusion.

Arishima Takeo: As much as I’d love to keep fighting for the workers, Mr. Nakano, I’m afraid the movement has no place for educated aristocrats like myself. [Arishima, sadly, would die in a love-suicide (shinjū) the following year.]

Hirotsu Kazuo: Come on, people! What’s all this talk about class? Art transcends class! The tent of literature is big enough for us all… so long, of course, as you find your proper, class-determined role within it.

Kikuchi Kan: You know, I’ve recently stopped giving a shit about “formal or aesthetic beauty” (biteki kachi). For me, “content value” (naiyōteki kachi) is the only thing that matters. Even the most poorly constructed story can move me to tears if its subject is powerful enough.

Satomi Ton: Horseshit, Kikuchi. Subject alone is worthless. Value is to be found only in form.

Two years have passed, and the discussion has moved to the merits of prose versus that of poetry.

Hirotsu Kazuo: Forget about the form-content problem for now. I want to talk about prose versus poetry. Prose, I claim, is superior to poetry, as it is that which mediates between poetry and life. Of all the arts, prose is closest to life and cannot be disentangled from it. Hence, it is meaningless to speak of “pure form” in works of prose. Wouldn’t you all agree?

Satō Haruo, Arishima Takeo, and Kikuchi Kan (in unison): We agree.

Ikuta Chōkō: Ignorant clods! I’m entirely unconvinced. Life is contingent, subordinate — even irrelevant — to art! Art exists for its own sake, and should be assessed by standards that are independent of life. [With this begins the famed "Debate on the Art of Prose" (Sanbun geijutsu ronsō), which would run out of steam before the year's end.]

Chiba Kameo: I’m starting to notice some trends in your bickering. Since the Great Kantō Earthquake last year, writers have split into two camps: the Proletarian camp, rallied around the magazine Bungei Senzen, and the New Sensation School — Shinkankaku-ha, a word I coined, mind you! — centered around the magazine Bungei Jidai. My allegiance is with the latter, which boasts two of our greatest writers, Kawabata Yasunari and Yokomitsu Riichi.

It is now 1925, the last year of Taishō, and writers are largely unprepared for the turbulence that would come in the first two decades of the Shōwa period (1926-1989).

Kume Masao: Nakamura Murao and Ikuta Chōkō insist that the “authentic novel” (honkaku shōsetsu) is superior to the “I-novel” (shishōsetsu), but they are wrong. The “I-novel” — or, as I call it, the “state-of-mind novel” (shinkyō shōsetsu) — is Japan’s only true novel. All else is vulgar, artificial and commercial and should be renamed “light fiction” (tsūzoku shōsetsu). [Ikuta and Nakumura counter, and the famous "I-Novel Debate" (Watakushi shōsetsu ronsō) continues for several more months.]

Edogawa Rampo: Kindly add to your list, Mr. Kume, the “detective novel” (tantei shōsetsu), of which I am Japan’s foremost practitioner. Yet recently I’ve come under attack from leftists like Maedakō Hiroichirō, who dismiss the genre as “bourgeois” frivolity. What they fail to understand, however, is that the “detective novel” is more than a game of cat and mouse: it is the purest representation of the enquiry into the human psyche. It is akin to — no, it is symbolist poetry. For the pursuit of the fantastic (gensō) is the pursuit of human knowledge itself!

Aono Suekichi: Right, right, whatever. Now help me hand out these pamphlets, which include excerpts from my recent translation of Lenin’s What Is To be Done? Now the revolution can begin in earnest!

(To be continued…)

Disclaimer: The following is for reference only. Its sole purpose is to give readers an overview of the history of modern Japanese literary criticism. I have avoided using all features common to the dramatic form, including plot, character development, humor, word play, Verfremdungseffekt, involution, and any explicit or implicit references to myself, Ryan Morrison, and the narrow world I inhabit.

Dramatis personæ, in order of appearance:

• Tsubouchi Shōyō 坪内逍遥 (1859-1935)

• Futabatei Shimei 二葉亭四迷 (1864-1909)
• Mori Ōgai 森鴎外 (1862-1922)
• Yamaji Aizan 山路愛山 (1864-1917)
• Kitamura Tōkoku 北村透谷 (1868-1894)
• Masaoka Shiki 正岡子規 (1867-1902)
• Takayama Chogyū 高山樗牛 (1871-1902)
• Tayama Katai 田山花袋 (1872-1930)
• Hasegawa Tenkei 長谷川天渓 (1876-1940)
• Sōma Gyofū 相馬御風 (1883-1950)
• Shimamura Hōgetsu 島村抱月 (1871-1918)
• Abe Jirō 阿部次郎 (1883-1959)
• Natsume Sōseki 夏目漱石 (1867-1917)
• Uozumi Setsuo 魚住折蘆 (1883-1910)
• Ishikawa Takuboku 石川啄木 (1886-1912)
• Uchida Roan 内田魯庵 (1868-1929)
• Ōsugi Sakae 大杉栄 (1885-1923)

Act 1: The Meiji and Taishō Periods

  Act 1, Scene 1

1885-7

Tsubouchi Shōyō: Away with the past and its frivolous traditions, its didacticism (kanzen chōaku) and improbable romances! Like the Jacobins of the French Revolution, we shall turn back the clock to the Year Zero and begin anew! Let the modern novel supplant our substandard genres. Young writers, take as your model the novels of Victorian England, which through natural description and psychological realism faithfully portray modern life and human emotions!

Futabatei Shimei: I hear you, Shōyō. However, your novel Portraits of Contemporary Students (1885) is clearly flawed. Take a look at my new novel, Ukigumo (1887). Let it be remembered as Japan’s first authentic novel (honkaku shōsetsu), and the first to unify the spoken and written languages (genbun itchi)!

1891

Mori Ōgai: You were right, Shōyō, when you elsewhere warned of the dangers of a merely subjective kind of criticism. But you were wrong to insist that criticism was not dependent upon the idée. Empirical observation alone is not sufficient. You see, the Germans have made me an Idealist (kyokuchishugi), while the English tradition has made you a Realist (shizenshugi). But realism does not go far enough: we must grasp the idée that lies behind the thing. Contrary to your claims, Shakespeare’s works abound with ideas.

Shōyō: You’re missing my point. I’m not claiming that there are no ideas in Shakespeare. I admit they are everywhere. Shakespeare presents us with manifold ideas, in dramatized form; yet he himself adheres to none.

Ōgai: One cannot avoid the idée! It is the foundation of all art!

Shōyō: Oy vey, I can see this is going nowhere . . .

Shōyō was right, the debate — which would become known as the botsurisō ronsō, or the “submerged ideals debate” — was in fact going nowhere, largely due to the confusion over the new terms myōsō, risō, shisō (idée, ideal and thought, respectively). Like most subsequent literary debates, this one would peter out before reaching a consensus. Now it is 1893, and Yamaji Aizan and Kitamura Tōkoku are arguing over the social role of literature.

Yamaji Aizan: Novels must enlighten the public. If they don’t, they are useless. The writer is responsible first and foremost to his society.

Kitamura Tōkoku: Cut the crap. The sole duty of the writer is to faithfully record his internal life (naibu no seimei). The external world — historical events, social realities, the public, other people — exists only for his amusement.

Yamaji Aizan: Oh, my naïve Tōkoku. There are two worlds, you see, the “real world” (jitsusekai) and the “conceptual world” (sōsekai). The task of the writer is to mediate between the two. Today there are two kinds of writer: those like the Ken’yūsha writers who turn a blind eye to reality, preferring instead fantasy and abstruse wordplay, and those like Hirotsu Ryūrō, Kawakami Bizan and Izumi Kyōka who boldly confront the bitter realities of life in their “social novels” (shakai shōsetsu), “tragic novels” (hisan shōsetsu), “profound novels” (shinkoku shōsetsu), and “conceptual novels” (kannen shōsetsu). What with all that’s going on now — rapid industrialization, the new Constitution, the recent Sino-Japanese War — how can we retreat into solipsism?

The debate ends inconclusively, and the individual-society problematic is to remain a major fault line in literature for years to come. It is now 1898, and Masaoka Shiki is calling for a revolution in poetry.

Masaoka Shiki: Tsurayuki sucks, his Kokinshū is a worthless document! The essence of our poetic tradition is to be found instead in the unadorned language of the Manyōshū and the manful haiku of Buson! Away with the girlish poetry of Bashō! We must reform hokku — we shall henceforth call it haiku! — through selective realism, “sketching” (shasei), and a commitment to “sincerity” (makoto).

Three years pass. It is now late 1901, and the fervent nationalism that swept the country during the Sino-Japanese War has produced a wave of romantic individualism. At the head of this movement to forge a “modern self” is Takayama Chogyū, who, having abandoned the jingoistic Japonism (Nihonshugi) in favor of a Nietzsche-inspired egoism, now expounds a philosophy based on “instinct” (honnō).

Takayama Chogyū: The most we can hope for in this life, friends, is the satisfaction of desire. Ethics should be replaced with aesthetics, animalism, sex, love. Away with the tradition, with Saikaku, with Genroku haiku. Only Chikamatsu should be spared, for he espoused a kind of proto-individualism, and his young sensuous heroines were quite vivid. Where are the great critics of our age? Where is our Tolstoy, our Whitman, Ibsen, or Zola? We haven’t any, I’m afraid; here are only obsequious flatterers.

Tayama Katai: I dig your egoism, Chogyū, but I still detect a romantic sensibility in your style. In prose writing, let us have plain delineation (heimen byōsha) and scientific naturalism. (Which means, in practice, that I get to describe in great detail my obsession with pre-nubile girls (shōjobyō)!)

1906-7

Hasegawa Tenkei: O, ours is a spiritless age of despair and disillusionment (genmetsu jidai). Materialism and science have made empty symbols of things: the temple, that shrine, a distant landscape. Katai is right the only artistic method appropriate in such a time is “an unadorned art which portrays the truth.”

Sōma Gyofū: You make it sound as if objectivity were possible, truth knowable, as if writing itself were a passive activity. But the writer, friend, is no transparent glass through which the Real is transmitted; rather, he must actively incorporate his own subjectivity into his work. Just look at what’s happening in Europe, where science and its pretensions of objectivity are destroying an entire civilization!

Two years have passed. It is now late 1909.

Shimamura Hōgetsu: It is the duty of art to bear witness to the world (sekai o kanshō). Let us have more “conceptual novels” that address social ills! Let us embrace and cultivate our subjectivity! Long live Naturalism!

Abe Jirō: Don’t get your hopes up, Hōgetsu. Nagai Kafū was recently attacked for his Epicureanism (kyōrakushugi), yet a closer look reveals that Epicureanism and Naturalism (as practiced here) are really two sides of the same coin. Japanese Naturalism in fact very has little to do with French Naturalism. It’s closer to Romanticism. Mark my words, the end of the Naturalists’ reign is nigh!

Uozumi Setsuo: Abe’s right. Japanese Naturalism was bound to fall into decline due to its irreconcilably diverse origins, namely, scientific determinism and egocentrism.

Natsume Sōseki: Isms, isms, isms. No ism can contain the whole. Or even if it could, we wouldn’t know it, having only half-digested western thought. Our so-called “civilization,” friends, will forever remain a botched one so long as it’s externally motivated (gaihatsuteki).

Ishikawa Takuboku: The High Treason Incident this year has exposed the barbarity that lies just beneath the surface of our suffocating age (jidai heisoku). Ours now is the formidable task of resolving the contradictions inherent in the socio-economic system. Naturalism sure isn’t up to it, so let us forge a new kind of literature, inspired by the anarcho-socialism of Russia!

1912-13

Uchida Roan: Has anyone noticed how poppy literature is getting? It’s well-nigh become a national business. I say it’s time to get serious and start writing political novels and shed this old notion of Shōyō’s — which I once supported — that the novel should be concerned primarily with human emotions.

Ōsugi Sakae: The High Treason Incident has ushered us into a new wintry age (fuyu no jidai). Resistance requires “the expansion of life” (sei no kakujū), and a subscription to Kindai Shisō (Modern Thought), my new anarchist magazine.

(To be continued…)