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…)

Back in the Néomarxisme days, one of the first major debates was the state of Japan’s “postmodernity”: whether Japan perfectly embodied the ideal postmodernist society, and therefore, was the best place to look for clues to our global future. In his newly-translated book Otaku: Japan’s Database Animals
(originally published in 2001 as 『動物化するポストモダン―オタクから見た日本社会』), professor and critic Azuma Hiroki (東浩紀) deconstructs this self-association with postmodernism in Japan, arguing that the idea of a “postmodern Japan” has more to do with 1980s’ narcissism than proper theoretical conclusions. (Wikipedia links added by editors.)

Theories of postmodernism emerged in France in the 1960s, spread to the United States in the 1970s, and were imported into Japan in the 1980s. Postmodernism is a complex and difficult discourse that grew out of an amalgamation of structuralism, Marxism, theories on consumer society, and critical theory. Its circulation was thus largely confined to universities. In Japan, however, it was acclaimed outside universities in the mid 1980s as a fashionable mode of thought for the younger generation, but then subsequently forgotten together with the era. As a fad in theory, Japanese postmodernism was often referred to as “New Academism.” Even after postmodernism (i.e., “New Academism”) disappeared from Japan, theories on postmodernism remained a subject of study in English language universities throughout the world and affected subsequent academic trends. As I have written on these differing circumstances in an earlier essay, I ask those who are interested to consult that text. In any case, what is important here is not really the content of the theories of postmodernism but the fact that in Japan this highly complex body of thought turned into a kind of faddish media frenzy.

As a few critics at the time have already pointed out, this postmodernism fad was connected to the narcissism that permeated Japanese society in the 1980s. The discourse on postmodernism popular in Japan at the time was unique in the way it deliberately confused and intermingled questions over what encompassed “postmodernism” and what encompassed “Japaneseness.”

The claim endorsed by postmodernists at the time went something like this: Postmodernization refers to a process that occurs after modernity. However, Japan was never completely modernized in the first place. Until now this has been considered a defect; but as we progress to a new stage of world history from modernity to postmodernity, it rather promises to become a benefit, because this nation, never fully modernized, is easily able to embrace the process of postmodernization. For instance, as modern perceptions of humanity never fully penetrated Japan, it can adapt to the collapse of the concept of subjectivity with little resistance. In this way, Japan will emerge in the twentieth century as a leading nation boasting a fully matured consumer society and technological prowess…

Whereas modernity equals the West, postmodernity equals Japan. To be Japanese is thus to be standing at the forefront of history. Historically, this simplistic formula could be conceived as a repetition of the claims of the prewar Kyoto School that Japan was able to “overcome modernity.” Concurrently, it was also a direct reflection of the economic climate of the times. In the mid-1980s, in direct contrast to the United States, which had been suffering a protracted period of economic tumult since the Vietnam War, Japan suddenly stood at the zenith of the world economy, having entered a period of short-lived prosperity that would end in the bubble economy.

Postmodernists in Japan during this time elected to draw on the work of the French philosopher Alexandre Kojève. Nothing better expresses the reality of Japanese postmodernists’ desires than this choice. As I explain further in the following chapter, Kojève is known for ascertaining two different types of possible social formation in the postmodern era: the animalization of society as seen in the U.S. model and the spread of snobbery as illustrated in the Japanese model. In this regard, Kojève is oddly sympathetic towards Japan, and he predicts that the Japanization (or snobbery) of Westerners will prevail over Americanization (or animalization). In the eyes of Japanese in the 1980s, the prosperity of the times no doubt signified that we were heading toward the realization of this prospect.

Phrased another way, the prosperity of the 1980s enabled Japanese society to forget superficially the existence of its complex towards the United States, which we have examined. “Now the United States has been defeated! We no longer have to speak about the penetration of Americanization in Japan but rather must consider the advancement of Japanism in America!” The rise of postmodernism as an intellectual fad was supported by a climate that produced such claims. This same set of factors in turn aided the spread of otaku culture. The image of Japan that obsesses otaku is in fact no more than a U.S.-produced imitation, yet the atmosphere described above was the very thing that conveniently allowed people to forget about these origins. (16-18)

On February 20, 1909, French newspaper Le Figaro printed a piece called “The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism” on its front page — written by a relatively-unknown 32 year-old Italian poet named F.T. Marinetti. (I highly recommend taking a few minutes to read the full text.) The bombastic and incendiary tract sent shock waves through the European artistic community in its call for a total upheaval of preexisting artistic convention. The poet advocated the demolition of museums, libraries, and traditional morality. And in the ruins, Marinetti wanted to foster a new aesthetic called Futurism that would embrace technology and the modern psychology of the machine age, echoed in the famous line that “a roaring motor car which seems to run on machine gun fire is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace.” Although Picasso’s cubist paintings had ushered in the age of modern art years before Marinetti’s writing, the Manifesto articulated the Modernist ethos as a philosophy for all artistic pursuit, and in the process, provided a high-energy clarion call for the subsequent century’s avant-garde artists, social visionaries, trouble-makers, and all-around punks.

One hundred years later, Marinetti’s Manifesto no longer succeeds in épater les bourgeois, and many of its core ideas — once intended to stab directly into the eye of the aging establishment — sound like romanticized justifications for powerful forces of reactionary evil. The Futurists’ push to “glorify war” sounded righteous in the nationalistic atmosphere of the early 20th century but almost instantly became abominable as millions were slaughtered in the trenches of the Great War. Marinetti’s misogyny (“contempt for women”) and racism (comparing factory sludge to the breast-milk of a Sudanese wet nurse, for example) have not accompanied the arc of progressive Western society. Even Marinetti’s cavalier espousal of “the love of danger, the habit of energy and rashness” takes on a sinister ring as we seek to hose down the conflagration of the Bush presidency. Marinetti is often roundly dismissed as a proto-Fascist. True, he was an early supporter of Mussolini. And even if we counter that the poet eventually felt betrayed by his old pal when Fascist Italy took on a necrophilic infatuation with ancient Rome, you can still draw a straight line between the idea of Futurist “cleansing violence” to Nazi and Fascist Europe. And in our new battle against environmental depletion, Marinetti is again on the wrong side of history. He loves industrial waste and factory exhaust — his verse potential PR copy for the defenders of polluters on K Street.

The Manifesto does, however, contain sympathetic and benevolent ideas, but these have lost their impact for a totally opposite reason. Futurism now suffers from its success: the last century has been Marinetti’s. The Italian poet’s revolutionary embrace of automotive beauty is no longer novel in the shadow of dime-store hot-rod culture and widespread SUV mania. Marinetti’s preference for youth and novelty has morphed into the central philosophical engine to consumerist culture. Creative destruction is not just for poetry, but guided American capitalism to international dominance. Technology has permanently nestled into creative culture and can no longer be cleanly removed. The power-drill pulse of gabba music, for example, would surely overshadow the wildest ambitions of Russolo’s intonarumori. Like all great cultural innovators, Marinetti has seen his legacy suffer by being successfully subsumed. His angry manifesto now graces a million creased textbook pages — the kind of yellowed volumes he would want drowned in a diverted Venetian canal.

And like all prophets, he was completely wrong about the future. The Manifesto does not make specific predictions, but Marinetti tied the particulars of the Futurist aesthetic to his own historical circumstances. The idea of cacophonous technology is pure nostalgia: ancient dynamos may have been ear-piercing, but our cornucopia of truely life-integrated personal gadgets make no external sound at all. Marinetti heard the future as a bang, but the art of product design has offered a century of softer and softer whimpers. Our latest and greatest vision of the future wants technology to design itself out of the picture: eco-consciousness is poised to erase the modern era with the same scorn as Marinetti feels for classical times.

And yet, the Manifesto can still be a useful corrective for any contemporary artist and writer and thinker, with applicable lessons for this deeply Futurist-inspired future. Despite the familiarity of the Manifesto’s convictions, I still swoon in its romantic energy. Even in translation, Marinetti’s prose jabs against familiar rivals with the speed of a master pugilist, almost proto-gonzo. Thank god for the historical detail of good newspaper placement, or otherwise he could be easily charged with unbearable pretension and self-indulgence. But it is exactly Marinetti’s choice of romantic idealism over cynicism that allows the text to still feel alive today. His belief in belief comes in stark contrast to our sour generation, who protest equally at no one and everyone, spit at meaning, conviction, and hope. Ha, you say: these “suspect” virtues recently elected a president! That may be true, but they are still fundamentally unwelcome in the corrosive culture of cool that permeates every part of the youth culture experience. We are stuck in a strange corner: worshiping the romantic idealism of the past while immediately tearing down anyone attempting a modern analog.

The word “futurism” now regrettably refers mainly to Alvin Toffler types, sober armchair sociologists trying to predict coming waves of complex patterns for an audience of Sunday afternoon dreamers and long-term stock analysts. Marinetti had no aims on Nostradamus, but instead, aspired to be a kamikaze pilot nosediving towards stale convention, walking the walk, dreaming of poetic suicide — and yes, counting the days until “younger and stronger men” would throw him “in the waste paper basket like useless manuscripts!” So what would Marinetti think of our rotting shell of a pop culture, still looking to its 1960s Old Masters, judging all success against the unrepeatable case studies of Lennon/McCartney, Zimmerman/Dylan, Keroauc, slouching against the canonical ideas of 20th century art under the legitimizing banner of post-modernist sampling and pastiche. Marinetti’s call for constant artistic progress still inspires! But alas, the irony: when we waste “the best part of our strength in a useless admiration of the past,” this time Marinetti is part of the problem. To love Marinetti is to bury him. You cannot just kill your idols, but you must also burn your “Kill Your Idols” T-shirt.

Calls for Neo-Futurism will go unheeded, and I doubt I will see a day when artistic manifestos are screamed to the world from the front pages of a major daily news publication. The Futurist Manifesto, in the end, never embodied an eternal, absolute, and ahistoric philosophy, able to be adopted afresh by every waking generation, but instead is merely a single, well-executed love poem to the future of Marinetti’s present — a grip of the razor edge and sharpened point, a vivid dream of routing a long list of gray demons and sagging enemies, an artistic mission to realize the perfect human community. Marinetti seems more charming in the haze of hindsight — a contemporary version would rightly feel like an obnoxious demagogue — but admit your admiration: who does not dream of standing on the world’s summit and launching once again an insolent challenge to the stars!

In the early 1930s, the prostitution abolition movement — led by women’s, Christian, and socialist groups — strongly petitioned the Home Ministry to abandon the “license system” that essentially legalized the world’s oldest profession in Japan. After mounting domestic and international pressure to stop condoning the practice, the Home Ministry announced in 1934 an intention to abolish Japan’s system of licensed prostitution.

Prostitution, however, stayed legal in Japan until 1958. What got in the way of bureaucratic action?

The pimps.

Their official lobby — National Federation of the Brothel Trade — sponsored and mobilized a large group of Diet members to fight against any government moves to outlaw licensed prostitution. In his excellent book on “moral suasion” campaigns in early 20th century Japan Molding Japanese Minds, Sheldon Garon recalls the following anecdote related to the pimp-politician pushback (bold mine):

Brothel owners made large contributions to the political parties, and they were not shy about offering free favors to the many politicians who frequented the quarters.

Nor were the friends of the brothels within the Diet shy about defending one of Japan’s “beautiful customs.” Their unabashed support of the license system sharply contrasts with the relucatance of late nineteenth-century French parliamentarians to discuss the question of prostitution openly. When Purity Society (純潔会) members in 1931 introduced a bill in the Lower House that would abolish licensed prostitution, Yamazaki Dennosuke responded with a speech laced with obscenities and graphic language. Since lust was absolute, he argued, to try to repress it would only bring on masturbation, the chief cause of respiratory problems. (105)

Faced with this tripartite argument on the grounds of business, culture, and public health, the government had no choice but to back down, and johns everywhere breathed a collective sigh of relief with their healthy, healthy lungs.

Introduction

Kanikōsen 蟹工船, (The Crab Cannery Ship) has recently received much attention in the Japanese and foreign press for being one of the least expected publishing successes of 2008. Written in 1929 by Kobayashi Takiji 小林多喜二 at the height of Japan’s proletarian literature movement, the book tells the story of the eponymous cannery ship and its workers of northern Japan: their desperation, their wretched prospects, their exploitation at the hands of the bosses and the ruling class … and, eventually, what they do about it. Kobayashi later joined the Communist party and was tortured to death by the police in 1933, but the unpolished urgency and populism of his work has kept it in the canon — a cult classic subject to periodic revivals.

The first revival, of sorts, was in 1953 — the year after the Occupation ended — with the release of the film adaptation. Technically, the postwar boom had begun by this time; in practice, very little of it had trickled down to the general populace. The Red Purge of recent years had made it clear that Japan and U.S. leaders would not tolerate anybody trying to rewire the system. There was frustration and dissatisfaction in the air, and the release of Kanikōsen capitalized (!) on that.

But we know how things eventually worked out: Japanese industry and government working together managed to get enough citizens employed on agreeable terms that most of the previous dissatisfaction evaporated. Postwar Japan’s economic success was so great that the country came to be seen as a serious threat to the U.S. itself.

Then the bubble popped. Corporations restructured, cutting costs by relying more on contract employees (契約社員) or dispatch workers (派遣社員) and less on the seishain (正社員) — “true company members” — who had come to expect lifetime employment and other inconvenient things. Young people entering the workforce are faced with the choice of either taking these less desirable temporary jobs, sacrificing much of their personal life to compete for the few coveted seishain spots — or just not working at all. And so today you have an under-30 underclass which feels exploited and locked out of “real” adult society.

Working the register at 7-11 or answering phones in a Shinjuku high-rise may not be back-breaking labor, but the problems of “freeter” life are real: few opportunities to build a real career, patronizing and insulting treatment from people on the traditional career path, working the exact same job as the seishain but only receiving 40% pay and no chance to bounce to the management track, and growing uncertainty about whether they’ll be able to receive social security if and when they retire — despite the contributions deducted from their paycheck every month. This is the background against which the Japanese Communist Party is enjoying increasing interest from under-30s and the background against which Kanikōsen is enjoying its latest revival as a metaphor for modern Japan. People are responding once again to its vivid worldview: an undeserving but firmly entrenched ruling class who live luxuriously and hypocritically, an exploited working class kept hidden below decks, and tales of ill-specified external threats, used by the former to keep the latter in line.

Chapter 1

“Oi! We’re off t’Hell!”

The two fishermen leaned over the deck’s guardrail, craning like snails stretching out of their shells to view the ocean-hugging town of Hakodate. One of them spat out a cigarette he had smoked down close to his fingers. The cigarette tumbled and whirled as though clowning as it scraped its way down the tall side of the ship. The fisherman’s entire body stank of booze.

Broad-floating steamboats with bellies like fat red drums; boats still being loaded up, tilted precariously to one side as though someone were pulling at their sleeve; buoys like thick yellow chimneys and great bells; launches weaving between one boat and the next nimble as fleas; the chill murmur of the waves, bobbing with soot and chunks of bread and rotten fruit, like some unique fabric… Above the waves, smoke streamed before the wind, bringing the thick smell of coal. Every so often a winch’s rattle would carry across the water to echo nearby.

This was the Hakkōmaru, a crab cannery ship, and directly before it a sailboat with peeling paint was letting out an anchor chain from the a hole in the bow like a bull’s nostril. Two foreigners smoking wide-bowled matelot pipes could be seen running back and forth between the same two places like clockwork dolls. A Russian boat, no doubt. A surveillance craft assigned to Japan’s crab cannery fleet.

“I ain’t got a mon to my name,” said the fisherman. “Shit. Here.”

So saying, he moved his body closer to the other man’s. Then he grabbed the second man’s hand and brought it to his hips. He touched it to the pockets of the corduroy pants he wore under his hanten jacket. There seemed to be a small box in there.

The second man looked wordlessly at the first man’s face.

The first man giggled. “Cards,” he said.

On the boat deck, the captain was looking like a shogun, smoking a cigarette as he wandered about. When he exhaled, the smoke bent at an acute angle just past his nose before breaking up and drifting away. Sailors dragging their wood-soled straw sandals on the deck carried food buckets busily in and out of the forward cabins. Preparations were complete, and the ship was ready to leave.

Peering down the hatch to the workers’ quarters, they could see them down there, making a racket in their bunks at the gloomy bottom of the ship like baby birds peeping in a nest. They were all boys of fourteen or fifteen.

“Where you from?”

“_______ Street.” Everyone gave the same answer. They were all children of the slums. They made up a crowd all by themselves.

“Those bunks?”

“Down South.”

“And those?”

“Akita.”

There were bunks for every area.

“Where in Akita?”

The boy’s nose dripped like a weeping sore; his eyes were rimmed with red. “North Akita,” he said.

“You a farmer?”

“Yup.”

The air was humid and had a sour smell like rotten fruit. Pickle barrels were stored by the dozen in the room next door, so there was a smell like shit in the mix too.

“Don’t worry, daddy’ll sleep with you.” The fishermen guffawed.

In one dim corner, a mother peeled an apple and fed it to her son, who was lying on his stomach on the floor. She wore a hanten coat, momohiki pants, and on her head a kerchief — probably a day laborer. She herself ate the long loops of peel as she watched her child eat. Every so often she would speak a few words, or open and retie the bundle beside her child. There were six or seven others like her. The children from inland, the children that no-one had come to say goodbye to, occasionally stole a glance at them.

One woman, hair and body covered in cement dust, was dividing caramels from a box between all the children near her — two each. “You take care of my Kenkichi on the job, alright?” she said. Her hands were like the roots of a tree: ugly, huge, and rough.

Some mothers were blowing their children’s noses, others were wiping their faces with handkerchiefs, and still others were speaking to their children in quiet, urgent tones.

“You got a strong boy there, looks like,” one mother said to another.

“Strong enough.”

“Mine here’s a weakling. Don’t know how he’s gonna do, but you know…”

“Anywhere else’d be the same. Yeah.”

The two fishermen pulled their faces back out of the hatch with some relief. Now in a bad mood, they left the suddenly crowded worker’s hole and returned to the stern, where their own trapezoid nest was. Every time the anchor rose or fell, everyone stumbled and bumped into each other as though they had been thrown into a cement mixer.

In the gloom of their quarters, the fishermen lazed like pigs in a smell just like that of a pigsty, a smell that made them want to vomit.

“What a fuckin’ stench.”

“Yeah, because we fuckin’ stink. Can’t live like this without startin’ to smell sooner or later.”

A fisherman with a head like a red mortar was pouring sake from a two-quart bottle into a rice bowl on the edge of a shelf and using it to wash down the cuttlefish he was munching. Beside him another man lay flipped over on his back, eating an apple and reading a beaten-up pulp magazine.

The four of them were sitting in a circle and drinking together when another, still sober, broke in.

“Shit, man. Four months on the open sea. Didn’t think I could do this any more.”

He was burly man who kept licking his lips. He narrowed his eyes as he continued.

“But then I look at my savings.”

He waved his empty coin purse at eye level; it was flat as a dried persimmon.

“That hooker was skinny like this too, but she sure knew how to work it!”

“Shut the fuck up already!”

“Nah, go on!”

The other man sniggered.

“Look at that!” said one of the fishermen. “Ain’t it a beautiful thing?” He lowered his drunken eyes beneath the opposite floor, pointing with his chin and a grunt to the fisherman handing money over to his wife there.

“Look! Look at ‘em!”

The two of them had a small box, where they had laid out and were now counting wrinkled bills and notes. The man was busily writing in a small notebook with a pencil.

“See that?”

“I got a wife and kids, too, pal!” The fisherman who’d spoken of the hooker spoke, sudden anger in his voice.

On one bunk a few yards away lay a young fisherman with a long, hungover face, swollen and pale. “I thought f’sure I wouldn’ come on board this time,” he said loudly. “But I got fucked around by th’ agencies, left without a mon. Now I get t’ work myself half-dead again for a while.”

A man with his back turned, who seemed to have come from the same place as the long-faced fisherman, whispered something to him in reply.

A pair of pigeon-toed feet showed through the hatch briefly before a man with a bulging, old-fashioned drawstring bag over his shoulder climbed down the ladder. He stood on the floor looking around until he saw an open bunk and then promptly climbed into it.

“Good day,” he said, nodding to the man next to him. His face was oily and dark, almost stained-looking. “Guess we’re going to be pals.”

It wasn’t until later that anyone learned that this man had worked in the Yubari coal mines for seven years, right up until he came to the ship. After nearly dying in the recent gas explosion — something which had happened several times before, of course — he grew too terrified of coal mining to do his job, and came down from the mountain.

At the moment of the explosion, he had been pushing a cart through the same mine. He had piled the cart full of coal and was on his way to unload it, passing through somebody else’s area, when it happened. It was like a hundred magnesium flares being struck before his eyes at the same time. And then, less than 1/500th of a second later, his body was blown up and away like a scrap of paper. Carts, too many carts to count, tumbled through the air lightly as empty matchboxes, driven by the gas pressure. That was where his memory cut out.

Who knows how much later, he woke to the sound of his own groans. Supervisors and workers alike were building a wall in the mineshaft to contain the danger of explosion. From behind the wall, he heard them: coal miners, some of whom could still have been saved, calling for help with awful clarity — a sound that seemed to have been sewn into his soul ever since he had heard it. He stood up suddenly, and screamed like a madman — “No! Stop!” — as he leapt into the group building the wall. (He had helped build walls after previous explosions himself. Those times, nothing had happened.)

“You crazy fuck! You let th’ fire get in here, we’re all done for!”

Couldn’t they hear the voices, growing weaker and weaker? Beside himself, he waved his arms, shouted, started running down the tunnel. He tripped and fell who knows how many times, hitting his head against the wooden mine girders. His whole body became covered with grime and blood. Halfway there, he tripped on a crossbar of the minecart track, flipped like a judo student, and hit his head on the rails, losing consciousness again.

“Yeah, things ain’t much different here,” said one young fisherman who heard his story later.

The miner fixed his eyes, dull yellow in that way that only miners’ are, on the fisherman, without saying a word.

Some of “farmer fishermen” who’d come from Akita, Aomori, and Iwate sat with their legs broadly crossed and their hands stuffed between them; others leaned against pillars, knees pulled up to their chest, listening without interest to the drinking and conversation all around them. These were men who had gone out to the fields every morning while it was still dim, found that they couldn’t earn a living, and been chased out here. Eldest sons stayed behind on the farms — not that they could earn a living either — but daughters had to work in factories, and second and third sons had to set out and find work of their own somewhere else. Like beans shaken from the pot, leftover humans were thrown off the land and flowed into the cities. All of them planned to “put some money aside” and return home. So they started working, put their feet on the ground, they only to find themselves like birds who’d stepped on sticky mochi, flapping uselessly in Hakodate or Otaru. Before they realized what was happening, they’d be stripped naked as the day they were born and thrown out on their bare asses. How could they go home now? With no family nearby, the only way for them to survive the snowy Hokkaido winter was to sell their bodies, and for less than you’d make blowing your nose. No matter how many times they repeated this cycle, they would casually (?) do the same thing the following year, like children who just wouldn’t learn.

A woman shouldering cardboard boxes full of sweets for sale came through, along with apothecary and a man selling toiletries and other daily goods. They each chose a spot in the center, apart from the others like distant islands, and laid out their wares there. People leaned out of their bunks, top and bottom, from all around to joke and jeer.

“Y’got somethin’ sweet for me there, darlin’?”

The woman jumped. “C-cut that out!” she said, flustered. “Touchin’ people’s asses an’ all! Creep!”

Mouth stuffed full of cake and self-conscious at the center of everyone’s attention, the man guffawed.

“She’s a fine one, eh?”

A drunkard staggering back from the bathroom with one hand on the wall used the other to pinch the woman’s ruddy, swollen cheek.

“And what was that for?”

“Aw, don’t get all mad. — Someone sleep with this girl, huh?”

He grinned to show her he was clowning, and everybody laughed.

“Oi! Manjū! Manjū!” shouted someone from way in the corner.

“Coming up!” The woman’s voice was clear and carrying, a rarity here. “How many?”

“‘How many’? I look like I need two manjū? Just gimme a manjū here!” Everyone within earshot broke into laughter.

“They say this guy Takeda dragged that mannjū girl somewhere private once. Sounds like fun, right? But it wasn’t no good, ‘s what I hear.” The storyteller was young and drunk. “She’s wearing shorts, right? Takeda grabs ‘em, pulls hard as he can and tears ‘em off, but she’s got another pair underneath. — Said she was wearing three pairs in all.” The man lowered his head and burst out laughing.

In winter, he had worked at a rubber boot factory. When spring came and that work dried up, he came out to Kamchatka in search of more. The factory and the crab ship were both what you call “seasonal work” (like most of the jobs in Hokkaido), so when he got a chance at the night shift, he could work right through till dawn. “If I can live three more years, I’ll be happy,” he’d say. He had dead-colored skin like low-grade rubber.

Some of the fishermen were from land developments far inland; others had been sold by an “octopus” to labor gangs laying the railroads; still others were wanderers, luckless wherever they went; and then there were those who just needed booze to be happy. Also mixed in with the group were farmers, men who “knew nothing” but were “trustworthy as tree-roots”, chosen and sent here by their virtuous village elders down Aomori way. —And to gather together such a motley crew, various and fragmented, suited the management just fine. (The Hakodate unions were killing themselves trying to get organizers into the crab ships and among the Kamchatka-bound fishermen. They kept in close contact with the unions in Aomori and Akita, too. That was what management feared most.)

A waiter in starched, pure-white clothes that included a short overcoat was scurrying back and forth through the salon, “Tomo,” serving beer, fruit, and glasses of wine. In the salon were the “company bigwigs, the captain, the supervisor; and also the boss of the destroyer that’d guard the ship in Kamchatka, the chief of the Coast Guard, and some briefcases from the Seamen’s Union.”

“Fuckers can really put it away,” the waiter muttered.

In the fishermen’s “hole,” light bulbs like beach tomatoes lit up. The cigarette smoke and body heat made the air thick, foul, turned the hole into one big cesspit. Humans loafed in their divvied-up bunks, looking like a swarm of caterpillars. —Down through the hatch came the fishing supervisor, followed by the captain, then the factory representative, and finally the worker’s foreman. The captain, concerned for his moustache and its turned-up ends, kept a handkerchief pressed to his upper lip the entire time he was down there. The walkway was covered in discarded apple and banana peels, wet socks, sandals, flimsy wrappers with grains of rice still clinging to them. It was a gutter that had stopped flowing. Eying the garbage with distaste, the supervisor spat on the floor. All of them looked to have been drinking; their faces were red.

“I’ll make this brief.” The supervisor was burly as the foreman on a building crew and stood with one foot up on a bed rail, working his mouth with a toothpick as he spoke. Every so often he would pause to spit out what he had dislodged from between his teeth.

“As some of you may know, it goes without saying that this crab ship’s operations are not just about one company making a profit. They are an extremely grave international issue. Do we have — do we, subjects of the Japanese empire, have the upper hand? Or do the Russkies? This is a battle, one-on-one. And if — if, you understand! It could never happen, but if we did anything like losing, we ball-dangling sons of Japan would have our guts cut out and be kicked into the Kamchatka sea. We may be smaller than them, but I’ll be damned if I’m going to lose to those idiot Russkies.

“To continue, there is more to our Kamchatka fishing industry than crab canning. It is also important for salmon, trout; speaking internationally, the maintenance of territories so rich that no other country’s can even compare. It is a mission vital to the domestic problems of population and food that have Japan up against the wall. I don’t expect any of you to understand a word of this, but nevertheless, know that this is a serious mission for the Japanese empire, for which we put ourselves on the line and brave the choppy northern seas. That, after all, is why one of the emperor’s warships will be protecting us at all times while we are out there… Now, I know that copying the Russkies has become a bit of a trend these days. But if anyone pulls anything like that out there, if anyone feels like instigating something, he will have done the unforgivable: sold out the Japanese empire itself. I don’t expect this to happen, but I will have you remember what I have said.”

The supervisor sneezed over and over again as he started to sober up.

Stinking drunk, the destroyer’s captain stepped jerkily as a clockwork doll down the gangplank to the waiting launch. Sailors held him from above and below, only barely keeping him upright; he was like a pebble in a Canton bag. He waved his arms and dug in his heels and bitched and moaned, and spat right in the sailor’s faces more times than they could count.

Once they’d hustled the captain on board, one of the sailors turned back to unhook the rope from the gangplank platform. “Always talkin’ big about this and that,” he muttered, stealing a glance at the captain. “Look at ‘im now.”

“You wanna finish him off?”

For a moment, neither of the two sailors breathed… but then burst out laughing together.

When Edward Said sent shock waves through the academic world by adding “-ize” to the word “Oriental,” writers and scholars everywhere were forced for the first time to think long and hard about the way they represent “the other” (i.e., non-Westerners). No one wanted to be branded with the new label of “Orientalist.” But what Said failed to identify in his study (in his defense, it was beyond the scope of what he set out to do) was Orientalism’s mirror phenomenon, Occidentalism: the East’s construction(s) of the West and, by extension, itself.

With the discovery of this new phenomenon, critics of Said were free again to voice their objections to his ideas — why worry about being called an Orientalist, they asked, when Orientals have been orientalizing themselves all along? As recent scholarship has shown, many of the stereotypes Said viewed as creations of the Western imperial imagination seem to have been, in fact, jointly created. Alastair Bonnett takes it one step further in his The Idea of the West: Politics, Culture and History (2004) and argues that the notions of both “East” and “West” may largely have been inventions of non-Westerners themselves. The case of writer Tanizaki Jun’ichirō (谷崎潤一郎) (1886-1965) can be seen as further evidence in support of Bonnett’s argument. Tanizaki’s famous essay “In Praise of Shadows” 「陰翳礼讃」 (1933; translated by Edward Seidensticker in 1977) is an excellent example of Tanizaki performing, and ultimately subverting, the two major East-West discourses.

Before I address Tanizaki’s essay, let me first identify the two major East-West discourses of the day. The first saw Asia as inherently inferior, backward, and existing outside human history, while the West was seen as a beacon of light at history’s center. This mode of discourse was exemplified by Fukuzawa Yukichi 福澤諭吉 (1835-1901), who promoted a Western-style nationalist agenda that sought to position Japan toward the West and away from Asia and its negative stereotypes. Fukuzawa’s ultimate goal was not to imitate and join the West for its own sake, however, but rather to become independent and autonomous from it. The only way this was possible, he argued, was through the creation of a modern nation-state.

Fukuzawa helped create and propagate many of the Orientalist stereotypes about the East, as evidenced by his many disparaging remarks about Asian, and particularly, Japanese culture, which he saw as backward, passive, and weak. He was especially critical of the Chinese influence on Japanese culture, which he held as responsible for Japan’s low international status at the time. He saw a “static and passive” China to be representative of Asia as a whole and urged Japan to move away from the lagging East in order to fulfill its “new destiny.” In his essay “Good-bye Asia” 「脱亜論」 (1885), he urges the Japanese to shed their passive “Asiatic” traits and abandon “our bad [Asian] friends,” so that they may advance through the creation of a modern, Westernized nation-state.

Although a fervent nationalist, Fukuzawa ended up “deploy[ing] a form of Orientalism in which Asia [was] cast as a separate and primitive realm, to be distinguished from both the West and their own nations. […] Rather than importing or translating a ready-made idea of the West, Fukuzawa actively fashioned a certain representation of the West to suit his own (and, in large measure, his social class’) particular political ambitions” (Bonnett, 70). Again, the driving factor behind Fukuzawa’s push to westernize was the desire to stave off subjugation. In this sense, like Tanizaki in “In Praise of Shadows,” Fukuzawa can be seen as consciously manipulating East-West representations for particular ends.

This first discourse eventually evolved into a counter-discourse that reconfigured the East in terms of spiritual purity and the West in terms of materialism and moral decay. Japan’s jingoistic and racist rhetoric of the 1930s drew from both the Fukuzawan discourse and the counter-discourse, merging them into a single anti-Western Occidentalism that served to bolster the justification for the Greater East Asian War (大東亜戦争). This counter-discourse was exemplified by Okakura Kakuzō 岡倉覚三 (1862-1913), a Japanese scholar who was instrumental in propagating the view of Asia “as a space of spirituality” (80). Tanizaki’s “In Praise of Shadows” can be seen partly as a parody of Okakura’s writings, most notably The Ideals of the East 『東洋の理想』 (1904) and The Book of Tea 『茶の本』 (1906). Okakura argued that Easterners were innately concerned with the Ultimate and Universal, while Westerners cared only for Particulars — a very dubious claim given that Confucianism tends to be an anti-Idealist and pragmatic philosophy. His notion of an Asia unified under the banner of “spiritualism” too was hard to swallow for those who saw India, Japan, and China as historically and culturally distinct entities.

The case of Okakura is one of the many examples of self-orientalization that challenge the notion that “Asian spirituality” was “essentially a Western idea.” Rather, the Asia-as-spirit concept was manufactured first by modern Asians, within the discourse of various projects of modernization (Bonnett, 96). “Asia is better understood,” Bonnett writes, “to have been created, re-invented and re-valued by Asians themselves” (81).

It is these two East-West discourses that Tanizaki subverts by employing a self-orientalizing first-person narrator to ruminate on the subject of “Eastern aesthetics.” His central argument in “In Praise of Shadows” is that the East — though it has recently lost its way — has traditionally valued shadows over the glaring lights that boorish Westerners so admire.

Whenever I see the alcove of a tastefully built Japanese room, I marvel at our comprehension of the secrets of shadows, our sensitive use of shadow and light. […] The ‘mysterious Orient’ of which Westerners speak probably refers to the uncanny silence of these dark places. And even we as children would feel an inexpressible chill as we peered into the depths of an alcove to which the sunlight had never penetrated. Where lies the key to this mystery? Ultimately it is the magic of shadows. (20)

According to the narrator, evidence for the Eastern man’s innate love of shadows can be seen in numerous places: traditional architecture, washitsu rooms with their dark alcoves, the dark, earthy beauty of the noh theater, the inconvenient yet aesthetically satisfying toilet facilities and appliances, ink brushes, Chinese paper, lacquerware, and the lovely “grime” of Eastern jewelry. Japanese food also utilizes contrasts of light and is thus “to be looked at” and “meditated on” rather than eaten. The female puppets of bunraku too — with their blackened teeth and stock figures and faces that can be barely seen amid the shadows — suggest that beauty is not a thing in itself, but rather “the pattern of shadows, the light and the darkness, that one thing against another creates” (a notion altogether different from Aquinas’s “radiance, harmony, and wholeness,” which he held to be the three requisites of beauty). Nor are shadows limited to the spatial world, for the pauses (ma) that are so important in traditional Japanese music are in a way temporal shadows.

Why this love of darkness? Tanizaki’s narrator explains:

In my opinion it is this: we Orientals tend to seek our satisfactions in whatever surroundings we happen to find ourselves, to content ourselves with things as they are; and so darkness causes us no discontent, we resign ourselves to it as inevitable. If light is scarce then light is scarce; we will immerse ourselves in the darkness and there discover its own particular beauty. But the progressive Westerner is determined always to better his lot. From candle to oil lamp, oil lamp to gaslight, gaslight to electric light — his quest for a brighter light never ceases, he spares no pains to eradicate even the minutest shadow.

What are we, the readers, to make of all this? Traditionally, there have been two ways of reading “In Praise of Shadows.” The first is what I call the “nescient reading,” which is the out-dated, once-conventional interpretation that professors today try to steer their students away from. According to this reading, Tanizaki’s “essay” (the word “essay” is not an entirely appropriate translation for the Japanese literary genre of zuihitsu 随筆, which typically allows for more fictive elements) is naively read as the author’s treatise on a dubiously broad and ahistorical “Eastern aesthetics,” and the points presented in the text are all taken at face value. What the careful reader notices as satire (e.g., when the narrator, echoing the fascist propaganda of the 1930s, extols the “superiority of the Japanese toilet”) is missed by the nescient reader, who unquestioningly accepts the assumptions of the two Orientalist/Occidentalist discourses (“dark East” versus “bright West”; “spiritual East” versus “material West”). Today, very few read “In Praise of Shadows” in this way, and I venture to guess that those who do are in Japan where there is still a market for this sort of self-orientalizing.

The second reading is the “ironic reading,” which sees the work as Tanizaki’s satire of the described East-West discourses of the day. This way of reading the work paints Tanizaki — who was not known for his resistance to the war — as a principled critic who defiantly mocks his age from behind the mask of his narrator. Readers from this camp put great emphasis on distinguishing the narrator from the author himself and insist that Tanizaki believed very little, if any, of the points articulated by his narrator. Instead, they argue, Tanizaki uses the narrator only as a prop to undermine the very rhetoric espoused in the essay.

But to Tanizaki’s credit, neither the “nescient” nor the “ironic” reading is wholly sufficient by itself. While certain sections are obviously intended to be humorous, the work seems to be hinting at something more than strict parody, and the way the work simultaneously demands multiple interpretations is a testament to its resilience. Tanizaki anticipates both the “ironic” and the “nescient” readings, and navigates carefully between the two. In the end, his readers are not sure whether to take the work as a parody of Orientalism/Occidentalism or as an Orientalist aesthetic treatise; and it is this resulting confusion that attests to Tanizaki’s ability to transcend ideology. For on the one hand, it is hard to say that Tanizaki is entirely insincere — a glance at his body of work shows that he later employs much of what he advocates in the essay. In his A Style Reader 『文章読本』 (1934), too, he talks about the importance of “shadows” and obfuscation in literature: 「余りはっきりさせようとせぬこと」. Moreover, it is hard to believe that his entire “return to Japan” (「日本への回帰」) phase was mere farce. On the other hand, it would be equally difficult to argue that “In Praise of Shadows” should not be read, at least in part, as a satire on the essentialist claims of Orientalism and its mirror, Occidentalism.

In the end, Tanizaki leaves his readers in a state of aporia — irresolvable paradox — which is perhaps the ultimate aim of art. The best we can do at this point is to accept the work as a kind of half-parodic, half-sincere monologue that performs all of the discourses mentioned above without advocating (explicitly or implicitly) for any of them. Thus, the case of “In Praise of Shadows” presents a challenge to Said’s argument that Westerners are to blame for the East-as-shadow/East-as-spirit stereotypes and lends further credence to Bonnett’s theory that it was the non-Western world that willfully invented and manipulated ideas about East and West for political — and aesthetic — ends.

Bonnett, Alastair. The Idea of the West: Culture, Politics and History. Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire; New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004.

Tanizaki, Jun’ichirō. In Praise of Shadows. Translated by Edward G. Seidensticker, foreword by Charles Moore, afterword by Thomas J. Harper. Leete’s Island Books, c1977. Originally published in 1933.

谷崎潤一郎.『陰翳礼讃』. 東京: 中央公論社, 1995. 初出版 1933.

谷崎潤一郎.『文章読本』.東京: 中央公論社, 1996.