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- Convenor:
-
William Marotti
(UCLA)
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- Stream:
- History
- Location:
- Bloco 1, Piso 0, Sala 0.09
- Sessions:
- Friday 1 September, -
Time zone: Europe/Lisbon
Short Abstract:
Our panel offers three cultural historical examinations of pivotal moments in 20th century Japanese history through literary and cultural work. Each paper addresses sociopolitical transformations of urban space by revisiting these as scenes of conflict, irresolution, and possibility.
Long Abstract:
Our panel offers three cultural historical examinations of pivotal moments in 20th century Japanese history. We will be examining these moments through literary and cultural work that foregrounds lives and experiences that escape the normalizing impact of insistently sociological categorizations, institutionalizations, and reductive historicist narratives. Each paper addresses sociopolitical transformations of urban space by revisiting these as scenes of conflict, irresolution, and possibility.
Nate Shockey (Bard College) considers the impact of Tokyo governor Gotō Shinpei's post-earthquake radical reform of the capital's infrastructure through literature that attends to the human remainders of this biopolitical process. In the wake of the 1923 earthquake's devastation, Gotō massively transformed the capital through Haussman-inspired systems of circulation, creating new human relations and surplus populations. Shockey examines the experience of this post-disaster upheaval through the modernist literature of Yokomitsu Riichi as a testimony to the "dialectic of reterritorialization between the human body and the conquest of space." Michael Molasky (Waseda University) addresses the early postwar years through the literature of Nosaka Akiyuki, whose works from the 1960s insistently figure the ways in which memory and experience erupt into a daily life predicated on the artificially tidy historical separation of war and the "postwar." Nosaka explores remembrance as an act of reimagination, employing a prose practice that blurs putative historical distance. Returning to the scene of the black markets, a highly charged symbolic landscape in the interstices between a broken old order and the emergence of a new sociopolitical configuration, Nosaka addresses the lingering presence of this unresolved past. William Marotti (UCLA) considers the production of Shinjuku in 1968 as a space of possibility through the figuring of youth counterculture and the related, abject category of "fūten" (layabouts). As a nexus for these phenomena and their contested representations, Marotti addresses the relation between a politics of violence and the radical cultural politics of the moment, including art, theater, and counterculture, reflecting in turn on the transnational, global dimensions of 1968.
Looking beyond conventional periodization, the papers together bring out the untimely connections of crisis and possibility across these three moments through an expansively conceived cultural historical practice.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Friday 1 September, 2017, -Paper short abstract:
I address the creation of a key politicized space in Shinjuku during the late 1960s, with particular focus on the role of marginalized sociopolitical identities and practices, and in turn, the centrality of Shinjuku in national political struggles over the legitimacy of protest and force.
Paper long abstract:
In my paper, I address the creation of a key politicized space in Shinjuku during the late 1960s, with particular focus on the role of marginalized sociopolitical identities and practices, and in turn, the centrality of Shinjuku in national political struggles over the legitimacy of protest and force.
Divided west to east by a high-traffic train station, Shinjuku in the late 1960s was a site both for massive state investments in the future of the capital and nation, and for improvisational spaces of a radical and internationalized youth culture of dissent. Shinjuku's west side was a primary focus for Tokyo's intensifying economic and infrastructural development, a zone for heavily promoted international investments in Tokyo's first skyscrapers—but also one rapidly claimed by bike gangs enjoying the newly-laid spacious roads. Conversely, the eastern side brought together the afterlives of the black markets and a banned sex trade with a youth counterculture figured in the abject category of "fūten" (layabouts). Decried in media panics and in activist writings alike, such unscripted hanging out attracted youth from far and wide, and paradoxically leant the area an air of possibility—and provided a pivotal catalyst to political actions centered on the station, through which jet fuel and US military personnel were found to pass regularly.
As described in the top secret CIA study, "Restless Youth," a strong part of the global phenomena of the 1960s was the recognition by youth of kindred struggles through a shared and insurgent cultural politics, and Shinjuku was a nexus for such contacts. Reflecting on this as both a deep synchronicity and a new kind of international, mediatized, yet oppositional phenomena, I consider the relation between a politics of violence and space, and the radical cultural politics of the moment, including art, theater, and counterculture. I further consider the relations between space and subjectivation as mobile processes, and the significance of these struggles in thinking about the transnational, global dimensions of 1968.
Paper short abstract:
This paper explores how novelist Nosaka Akiyuki deployed the trope "burned-out ruins/black markets" in his writing to challenge dominant narratives of postwar history—regardless of whether those narratives emphasize "continuity" or on "disjuncture" between the prewar and postwar eras.
Paper long abstract:
The idiosyncratic writer and all-around provocateur, Nosaka Akiyuki (1930-2015), famously remarked in his 1967 acceptance speech for the Naoki Literary Prize, that he viewed his work as belonging to the "Burned-out Ruins/Black Markets" (yakeato/yamiichi-ha) school of postwar Japanese literature. Of course, no such a "school" existed until Nosaka coined the term at that time, and it is unclear whether any other writer ever joined him. Yet an entire generation of Japanese maintained powerful memories of the iconic urban postwar landscapes evoked in Nosaka's phrase. Arguably, no contemporary Japanese writer demonstrated such a consistent commitment to interrogating the fraught relationship between personal and social memory, or to exploring how fictional narratives might complicate popular understandings of national history.
This paper explores how Nosaka's rhetorical use of the trope "burned-out ruins/black markets" in his stories, essays, and published dialogues serves to challenge dominant narratives of postwar history—regardless of whether those narratives emphasize "continuity" or "disjuncture" between the prewar and postwar eras. I argue, in fact, that Nosaka reveals such debates over "continuity vs. disjuncture" to be reductivist and simplistic, rooted as they are in a binary opposition that relies on a linear conception of historical time. Nosaka, in contrast, exposes how the postwar is thoroughly constituted by the war and defeat, and he further shows us how the past can suddenly and unpredictably erupt into individual consciousness as traumatic memory, disrupting popular assumptions about time and place, history and memory, and thereby questioning—while he himself relies on—the usefulness of signifiers such as "era" (jidai) in shaping our understanding about the past and its relationship to the present.
Paper short abstract:
This paper examines the imagination of Tokyo as disease in the period following the Great Kanto Earthquake. I take up the work of governor Goto Shinpei, a former doctor and colonial administrator, as well as fiction by the modernist Yokomitsu Riichi to present a picture of the city as a sick body.
Paper long abstract:
This paper considers the reconstruction and reconceptualization of the city of Tokyo through discourses on the management of disease in the 1920s. Fukuzawa Yukichi once famously described civilization as an outbreak of "measles" (hashika), and viruses played roles both real and metaphorical in creating image and infrastructure of the modern metropolis. Gotô Shinpei (1857-1929), a bureaucrat of Haussmanian stature, was a doctor who served as Minister of Health, Chief of Civil Administration in colonial Taiwan, and head of the Manchurian Rail Company before taking over as mayor of Tokyo in 1921. As mayor, Gotô instigated a plan for urban growth that drew on his experience developing vaccines and inoculating colonial populations, rethinking the city as an organic body to be regulated through road, rail, water, electricity, and sewage networks. In Gotô's Tokyo, people, products, and problems flowed through urban arteries and circulatory passages; like an ill patient, the city could be managed and transformed into a healthier mass organism. I consider Gotô's approach in tandem with close readings of short stories by the modernist writer Yokomitsu Riichi (1898-1947), whose urban fiction sketches parallel representations of the city as sickness. In "Kôkasen" (The Elevated Line, 1930), Yokomitsu tells the tale of a group of drifters living under one a rail line, the diseased bodies shunted aside by the expansion of a rail network built to diffuse and transmit a consumer lifestyle. In "Napoleon to Tamushi" (Napoleon and the Rash, 1926), Yokomitsu describes the dialectic of reterritorialization between the human body and the conquest of space, as the colonizers' body is transformed into a viral map. These stories both critique and reinforce the image of the city as an ill body criss-crossed by networks of authoritarian power - by taking together the work of the bureaucrat and the literatus, it is possible to see a vision of 1920s Tokyo as an organism that produced sickness contra the promotion of healthy hygienic urban space.