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Paper short abstract

This paper examines ways in which Japanese postwar poetry describes the experience of total war, focusing on Ayukawa Nobuo and Arechi (The Waste Land) group.Ayukawa treated the war period as a material to think about fanatic totalitarianism, and I attempt to clarify the uniqueness of his works.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines ways in which Japanese postwar poetry describes the experience of total war, focusing particularly on Ayukawa Nobuo and Arechi (The Waste Land) group. Generally, Arechi group, representing postwar poetry, expressed bitter experience as war "survivors." Ayukawa, the central figure of Arechi, is said to have composed poems as an "executor" for the war dead. Notably, as the phrase "100 million Gyokusai (honorable deaths for all Japanese)" suggests, Japan, then suffering from abnormal spiritualism, did not envision the possibility of living in a postwar period, regardless of whether on the battlefield or the home front; this was especially true of the younger generation. Previous studies have highlighted the pain of war in postwar poetry, but none have questioned how the image of the "extinction of everything related to oneself" was perceived and transferred after the war. In my opinion, Ayukawa Nobuo pursued the meaning of the national total war experience; however, doing so was actually rare among other postwar poets. For example, Tamura Ryuichi, another Arechi poet, in the poetry collection ' Four Thousand Days and Nights' (1956), likens the war period to the myth of floods. Similarly, many poems from the early postwar period use mythological metaphors to describe the survival of war's oppression. In contrast, Ayukawa never described the war period as an abstract trial but as Japan's specific situation wherein the country had fallen into fanatic totalitarianism, as in ' if there is tomorrow' (1956). This difference is significant in considering Japanese postwar poetry as "poetry that thinks." Therefore, in this paper, I attempt to clarify the uniqueness and significance of Ayukawa's idea of "after war" as "after death" through two comparisons, namely, between Arechi group and the other poetic group during the early postwar period and between Ayukawa and other Arechi poets.

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Paper short abstract

The study clarifies how the repatriates' works have been excluded as the darkness of modern Japanese literature by analyzing the conflicts between the repatriates' perpetrator consciousness and victim consciousness.

Paper long abstract

There were more than six million repatriates who had withdrawn from colonies and occupied territories in post-war Japan. Some of them told their repatriation experience in novels. They are called "repatriation writers", and their works, based on their own repatriation experience, are called "repatriation literature".

　Repatriation literature, a product of imperialism, is an important part of Japanese literature for the post-war imperialism and colonialism studies because it depicts the experience of colonists. However, the repatriation literature has been rarely studied until recently, because the repatriation literature, stories told by colonists and perpetrators, was considered as negative in post-war Japan.

　In post-war Japan, victim consciousness, such as'war criminals'and 'atomic bombs', became the dominant ideology. Therefore, the repatriation literature, symbolizing the perpetrators, were excluded by society. The repatriation writers could hardly tell their memories of the past. Besides, the works written by the repatriates who were recognized as perpetrators were not appreciated. In other words, the oppressor's point of view in the repatriation literature was deliberately eliminated by the mainstream ideology in post-war Japan.

　In the post-war Japanese society where victim consciousness occupies the mainstream ideology, the voices of the repatriates as both colonists and perpetrators were inevitably oppressed and became a dark part of the society. Also, the excluded part, or the dark part of the society, strongly suggests that post-war Japan is still influenced by imperialism.

　This paper analyzes the repatriation literature written by Abe Kōbō, a representative repatriation writer, and focuses on the perpetrators' aspects depicted in Abe's works, which was written in post-war Japanese society where victim consciousness occupies the mainstream ideology. The paper analyzes how the oppressive discourses of the repatriates have been represented in the social context where victim consciousness is emphasized. Furthermore, the study clarifies how the repatriates' works have been excluded as the darkness of modern Japanese literature by analyzing the conflicts between the repatriates' perpetrator consciousness and victim consciousness.

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Paper short abstract

This presentation will compare Mishima’s “Ai no shokei” with Hagakure and Nanshoku Ookagami to explore how Mishima understands gay love and updates the shūdō tradition in his attempt to create an autonomous voice for the gay collective in Japan.

Paper long abstract

The magazine Adonisu was created post-war by Japanese intellectuals, such as Mishima Yukio, Nakai Hideo, Iwakura Tomohide, and comprised of short stories and novels written by famous or anonymous authors who were interested in gay love. The concrete work, “Ai no shokei”, written under the name of Sakakiyama Tamotsu was published in the first special edition of Adonis, called Apollo. “Ai no shokei” is very close to the main literary representers of the shūdō tradition, that is, Hagakure and Nanshoku Ookagami in its content and shape. Mishima describes a customary love story between a nenja, (an older partner) and a wakashū (a young boy). However, in contrast to the previous two works, Mishima’s short novel is very innovative and presents the shūdō tradition from a completely new and modern perspective. Along with the elements that could be described as typically belonging to Mishima‘s aesthetic world (the connection between blood, suffering, eroticism and pleasure), it also includes the inversion of sexual roles (the nenja becomes the passive agent whereas the wakashū becomes the active one), the application of the samurai love code to everyday modern life, the westernization of the male’s body etc. that cannot be found in any other work of the time. By doing that, Mishima not only makes a big contribution to the effort the Adonis group carried out to create an autonomous voice for the big collective of men loving men, but he also formulates a new gay love paradigm far from homoerotic Western ideals. He traces the shūdō tradition to its sources, updates it and shows that a different way of traditional gay eroticism (merging the temptation of the flesh and ennobling moral precepts) is not only possible but even desirable in order to achieve understanding and forgiveness from the society.