Yi Cao (Julian), University of Chicago
"Visualizing Japan’s Wartime Pan-Asianism: The Ideological Landscape in Triumphal Entry into Nanjing"
This thesis examines Kanokogi Takeshirō’s (1874-1941) painting, Triumphal Entry into Nanjing (1940), as a visual representation and witness of Pan-Asianism at its critical transformation in wartime Japan. It depicts the city entry ceremony on December 17th, 1937, shortly after Nanjing fell on the 13th. Nanjing invites a new way of looking at Japan’s wartime record paintings, most of the existing research on which focuses on the representation of either the establishment or disintegration of the human figures. This thesis argues that Nanjing shifts the visual emphasis from figural representation to the identified landscape, thus inverting the pictorial construction by giving both visual and ideological primacy to the compositional background. It overcomes the circumscriptions of both objectivity and a mere record of war. Instead, Nanjing actively witnesses the historical event by involving its viewers into a nationalistic participation, through which the notion of a communal body is given form.
This thesis, while providing a detailed visual examination of Nanjing, combines different types of media and literature in order to demonstrate Nanjing’s departure from a mere realistic record of an incident and show its capacity as an ideologically charged symbolism that uses the landscape to generate a specific interpretation—of the occupied territory and its national icons—that fits Japan’s Pan-Asian and colonial ideals. In general, this thesis intends to shed light on the art historical understanding of the subtlety and ambiguity of Japan’s wartime ideology, one that consists of both violence and a (re)imagination of Asia that overcomes borderlines and modernity.
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Junnan Chen, Princeton University
"Inscription, Before and After"
The paper starts with two aerial shots that are widely circulated immediately after the atomic bombing as the primary witnesses. As the secret power brought by the U.S military has created its image of omnipotence by erasing its own presence, an invisible historicity is carved into the space between the two images. The typographical and epistemological blankness in between the inscription of the “before” and “after” set off the everlasting lure of imagin-izing of atrocity and at the same time, constructed a gaze that not only framed an enduring, controversial, “nuclear orientalism.” While acknowledging the existing significant scholarship on Atomic memory and trauma studies, this paper does not concern itself with producing another approximation of the atomic experience or criticizing the representational strategies of atrocity; instead, it examines the nuclear paradigm together with the photographical paradigm and investigates how every act of visualization embodies and transforms a theory of time and “eventness.” The paper does not turn away from images or stops at claiming the impossibility of representation. On the contrary, it seeks to construct another different archive built from a wide-range of technical images whose surfaces are exteriorizations of a technologized desire to see and to frame time in the atomic era. It asks such as question: can we construct history from image, instead of the other way around?
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Klaus J. Friese, University of Zurich and Ludwig-Maximilians-University Munich
"Aesthetics of War: Japanese War Motif Kimonos"
The first Japanese garments depicting modern war scenes but having a traditional cut appeared during the 1894-95 Sino-Japanese war. In the Shōwa period between 1932 and 1942 textiles showing e.g. tanks, airplanes and soldiers were mass produced. Today those garments are often called war motif kimonos or propaganda kimonos; besides kimonos also other types of clothing like nagajuban under kimono or haori jackets as well as accessories are part of the field.
Those fashion items were part of a larger field of war related objects of everyday life, which involved all age groups and gender. This "merchandise of war" contributed to the production of the social aesthetics of their time: Sensory experiences produced from the elements surrounding people including clothes, objects, colors, buildings etc. made war an accepted part of daily life. The production and merchandising of this fashion is located at the conjuncture of poetics, aesthetics, fashion, commercial interests and politics. This paper traces those circumstances and places the war motif kimonos into the context of the material culture of the production period. Based on this foundation meanings and effects of those garments are
analyzed: They were statements of a (changing) Japanese identity, reflections on "modernity" and "tradition", but also expressions of personal wishes and fears. Multiple interpretation of the buyer's desires are possible, e.g. transfer of strength, protection from what is actually feared or a fashionable following of trends.
Investigating Japanese war motif kimonos contributes to an understanding of how through poetics and social aesthetics war is normalized and included in everyday life. This understanding of the power of textiles can be applied not only to historic Japan but also to present day societies all over the world.
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Kurtis Hanlon, University of British Columbia
"What’s in a Game: Imaginings of Early-Heian Poetry Matches"
The late ninth and tenth centuries saw a proliferation of ludic events known as poetry matches (uta-awase). They were often grand gatherings of the upper echelons of the court in which two teams presented poems to be matched and judged, complete with musical performances, expensive accessories, and distribution of material goods. Scholars such as Michel Vieillard-Baron and Gustav Heldt have explored ways that these events can be understood as rituals that negotiated and reimagined the balance of authority in the court. Heldt, especially, argues that through these ritual events, the sponsors were able to imagine themselves as loci of power separate from the sovereign and harmonize various factions of their supporters. Much scholarship compares these events to other contests of skill (waza kurabe), but there is ample evidence that the outcomes of early uta-awase were at times “rigged” with the outcome predetermined. If there were other political rituals that achieved the same negotiation of power, like poetry banquets, why would courtiers go through the motions of competing in a contest? Or, put another way, what were they imagining themselves to be doing when they participated in a game that was not really a game? This paper will build on Heldt’s analysis by exploring the significance and purpose of performing these political rituals in the form of a game. By understanding imaginings of uta-awase at the start of the tradition, we can understand and appreciate why this format had such staying power in premodern Japanese literary history.
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Genevieve Hill, University of Washington
"Disability, Deviance, and Modernity in the Early Works of Edogawa Rampo"
Edogawa Rampo (1894–1965) frequently depicted disability in his novels. From today’s conception of disability, many criticize these works’ highly negative imaginings of disabled characters. But what kind of historical and context and consciousness led to these characters’ conceptions? In an era before the coherent concept of “disability” had congealed, what kind of cultural and political symbols did these figures represent?
As disability studies and its intersectionality with literature gains attention, and as Rampo’s works have seen a recent resurgence in popularity as adaptations, it is important to reevaluate the politics of bodies in Rampo’s works through the lens of disability in order to better understand their identities in the context of 1920s and 1930s mass culture. Reconsidering from our contemporary standpoint lends new insights into socio-cultural consciousness of differently abled bodies in the 1920s and 1930s, and helps us to objectively view relationships with the historical and aesthetic trends of the era, such as modern capitalism, hygiene, militarism, and “ero guro nonsense.”
I will examine Rampo’s imagining of physical disability through four representative works: The Midget (1926-1927), “Caterpillar” (1929), The Demon of the Lonely Isle (1929-1931), and Blind Beast (1931). The characters in these works carry the issues of the era on their very bodies in the form of disability as it is used as a liminal discursive space; their perceived non-normativity is used as tool to physically problematize, question, and challenge ideas about the body, about societal issues, and about norms of the rapidly changing interwar Japan.
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Yuta Kaminishi, University of Washington
"A Historical Poetics of Early Television Documentary: ‘Japan Unmasked’ and ‘Non-Fiction Theater’"
This paper examines two television documentary series, ‘Nihon no sugao’ (NHK, 1957-1964, ‘Japan Unmasked’) and ‘Non-fikushon gekijō’ (Nippon Television, 1962-1968, ‘Non-Fiction Theater’), to delineate a historical poetics of early TV documentary. By focusing on the ‘Japan Unmasked’ debate in Chūō Kōron and related articles, I argue that the fundamental difference between the two series marked a significant shift of TV poetics from TV documentary by amateurs to that by auteurs. In the debate, Hani Susumu emphasized that the kernel of TV aesthetics is amateurism by which TV documentary can be meta-documentary, that is, documentary of documentary making. For him, the political significance of TV as a window in the living room lies in amateurs’ fresh attempts to make documentaries about their experiences using a new unfamiliar medium. The emphasis on amateurism in the TV industry, however, involves an aporia from the beginning: amateurs’ growth into professionals through the production process. Ushiyama Jun’ichi, a producer of ‘Non-Fiction Theater,’ responded to the issue of professionalization by inviting film directors considered as auteurs with political voice like Oshima Nagisa to the TV industry. By doing so, the ‘Non-Fiction Theater’ series aimed to break the emerging conventions of TV documentary by implementing multimedia auteurism rather than amateurism in the TV industry. This breakthrough shed light on the industrial mobility of auteurs between different media as well as established TV documentary as a window through which to perceive and criticize imaginings of Japan in everyday life.
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Kang MinJoo, Seoul National University
"Undifferentiated Imports: Poetics and Politics of Mori’s Juxtaposition of Literary Imaginings and Psychopathology"
Mori Ōgai (森鷗外, 1862-1922) was a modern Japanese novelist, and at the same time, was a surgeon and scientist. As a surgeon, he specialized in hygienics, physiology, and bacteriology. However, the fact that Mori was interested in psychopathology is less well-known compared to his interests in other branches of science. He was fully informed on the scientific theories on mental diseases and insanity of his times. Mori’s such interest in psychopathology is also well reflected in his literary works. From his famous debut short story “Dancing Girl” (Maihime, 1890) to the late historical novels, Mori consistently dealt with themes related to mental diseases through the medium of fiction. In doing so, his works juxtapose a branch of medical science into literary imaginings.
This unique juxtaposition is different from attitudes shown in Mori’s professional, non-fictional statements as a surgeon, and creates affects that construct identity of Japan by participating in Meiji Japan’s major dilemma: Can we localize this western-oriented, universal modern science? If this is universal, what would our past and our identity be? Meiji era was the time when Japan slowly found answer to these questions by enforcing modernization and waging wars to confirm legitimacy of Japan as a modern, universal identity. Therefore, Mori’s works also embodies political stance behind the power structure of Meiji Japan. In this study, I will go through poetics and politics in Mori’s novels published in 1890s and 1910s. The relationship between, and the meaning of chronological changes of poetics and politics will become clear when we understand the role of psychopathology in Mori’s divided career-as a surgeon and as a literary figure.
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Reyhan Silingar, Boğaziçi University
"The Role of the Emperor in Postwar Japan: An Analysis of Emperor Showa’s Addresses at Parliament Openings"
Japan has the oldest and yet still continuing monarchy in the world. Despite the change of the emperors along with Japanese history, the question remains the same: What precisely is the role of the emperor in a highly developed country with liberal democracy? This thesis will attempt to answer this continuously asked question with a discourse analysis of Emperor Showa’s addresses at the opening ceremony of the National Diet (Japanese parliament) between 1947 and 1988. By putting forward the context of the Showa emperor, one of the most controversial figures in modern times in terms of the role he is believed to have played in the decade of Japanese expansionism during WW II, this study will argue that the emperor is not a mere symbolic figurehead. This study will ultimately prove with its empirical findings that the emperor serves the collective memory of Japan possessing an integrative power and thus contributes to the stabilization of the country.
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Claire Stanford, UCLA
"Ready Player One and the Samurai Cybertype"
After Japan’s economic rise in the 1980s, American science fiction responded to the ensuing Japan panic with visions of Japanese or Asian-dominated futures. But while the Japan panic of the 1980s and early 1990s led to an influx of Japanese imagery in science fiction, Japan’s role in the science fiction imagination by no means ended with the country’s economic downturn. If techno-orientalism was American science fiction’s response to Japan’s economic rise, then how has it responded to Japan’s economic stagnation?
In looking at this question, I focus on Ernest Cline’s bestselling 2011 novel Ready Player One, which features a contest that revolves around 1980s video gaming and pop culture. I read the contest as geopolitical allegory, in which Japan and the United States compete for an economic future that is almost exclusively associated with the Internet. Building on Lisa Nakamura’s concept of the samurai cybertype, I argue that the novel reduces its Japanese characters to tropes of pre-modern Japan, forcing the Japanese characters into a position of historical nostalgia, one which promotes the idea that Japan’s greatest period is several centuries in the past and diminishes its role in the late 20th and early 21st century. Ultimately, I argue that by re-Orientalizing the Japanese characters through their virtual avatars, the novel takes a period of global economic tension between the U.S. and Japan and recasts it as one of U.S. control, simultaneously reasserting U.S. economic supremacy in the present day.
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Anthony Stott, University of Chicago
"Affect between Nuclearization and Personal Matters: The Emergence of a Post-Nuclear Present in the Works of Ōe Kenzaburō"
Engaging with Raymond Williams and Lauren Berlant and their exhortations to consider how a moment is sensed as present in the writing of history, this presentation explores how a particular post-Hiroshima political moment is negotiated through aesthetic forms across three mid-1960s works of Ōe Kenzaburō (1935- ), a prominent voice for nuclear arms control and a member of the second generation of Japanese writers to deal with the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In Ōe’s works, this 1960s nuclear present emerges through encounters between nuclear proliferation and crises claimed as “personal,” which are conjoined by affect in ways that shape, repel, and drive reflection. Placing these structures in dialogue across a diverse set of aesthetic mediations (two novelistic works and an idiosyncratic book of essays) discloses a capricious nuclear moment that is characterized by a precarious improvisatory mode of being, vigilant against settling into fixed forms and attuned to the ambivalences of its present. Finally, this presentation asks how similar methods of reading for affect might be adapted to other works that engage with not only the events of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki but also the implications of these bombings for subsequent historical moments.
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Tatiana Sulovska, UCLA
"Solidarity Imagined Or, Three Drunkards, Bringing the War Home: Transcending National Identity through Comedic Repetition"
In his 1968 film Three Resurrected Drunkards Nagisa Oshima deploys repetition as means to explore the complex abstractions of state and nationalism, as they shape the everyday, directly implicating individuals in the seemingly remote warfare. While categorized as a madcap comedy by the US distributor, the film directly addressed itself to the ongoing Vietnam War, to the Cold War, and to the Korean War, thus its political engagement is impossible to overlook. By repeat meta-text citation to a Pulitzer-prize winning war photograph, by methodically turning tables on popular culture in casting successful folk singers as leading stars, even deriving the film title from their breakout hit, the filmmakers (including Adachi Masao as one of the script writers) deploy precisely the type of humor recognized by philosopher Alenka Zupančič as containing the potentiality for subjectivation, within a moment of politics, articulated in turn by Jacques Rancière. The poetry of a tender song lyric about the river Imjin underscores what I argue is an early attempt to articulate landscape theory in film, by pointing to visual cues of political geography as an arbitrary determinant to national identity. Leaning on Zupančič and Rancière, I explore here, how meaning and politics are generated along with laughter, and in this process of comedy, what is communicated about repetition and violence, or even repetition and history.
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Lin Meng Walsh, Stanford University
"Myths and Manchukuo: Grand Romanticism of Kitamura Kenjirō"
The Mukden Incident in the year of 1931 bared Japan’s determination to further its imperial dominance over its Asian neighbors. The incident soon gave birth to Manchukuo, a nominal nation state and a de facto colony. The Japanese government urged its citizens, many of which heavy industrial workers, to relocate and populate the newly established state. Among those who emigrated were also writers, who would eventually leave behind a Japan-Manchurian literary legacy that recorded voices enunciating both imperial allegiance and political dissent. One key figure of this period was Kitamura Kenjirō, who bid farewell to his coterie, the Japan Romantics (日本浪曼派), and left for Manchukuo in pursuit of “the Grand Romanticism” (「大きなロー マン」). Kitamura founded the literary journal Manshū Rōman (『満州浪曼』), and remained the chief editor throughout its lifespan. Meanwhile, he continued to produce essays and fictions, one of which was effusively praised by Kawabata Yasunari as “the highest achievement of Manchurian Literature” (「建国十年間の満州文学のおそらく最高の収穫」).
This paper revolves around Kitamura’s works, his vision of Manchurian literature, and the meaning of his “Grand Romanticism.” While centering on Kitamura, the paper also draws in the literary rhetoric of his former coterie, the Japan Romantics. The comparison between Kitamura and Japan Romantics will then evolve into a discussion on the tenuous relationship between the political and romanticist visions that wrestled through the difficult decade of the 1930s.