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- Convenors:
-
Mariko Naito
(Meiji University)
Christian Uhl (Ghent University)
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- Format:
- Panel
- Section:
- Intellectual History and Philosophy
- Location:
- Lokaal 0.3
- Sessions:
- Sunday 20 August, -
Time zone: Europe/Brussels
Short Abstract:
This panel examines the manner in which numerous intellectuals drew on the past to rethinking their political presents and futures. Together the various papers show how the past is not something that is a finished object but constantly returns to haunt the present.
Long Abstract:
This panel poses a simple question, namely how one should understand modern attempts to draw on the past to criticize the present. Some would contend that when people appeal to the past as a conceptual resource to show the limits of capitalist modernity and point to a different future, they are engaging in a romanticism that could be dangerous and even lead to fascism.
However, the politics of time is not unique to the modern period and appears in different ways across Japanese history.
The first speaker’s paper outlines the contours of the panel by examining how the practice of the tea ceremony beginning with Monk Eisai during the Kamakura period, through Sen Rikyū from the Tokugawa period to the 1930s. Through this she shows how Japan embodied the contradictory relations of colonized and colonizer.
The second speaker examines the work of Ishikawa Takuboku and how he draws on the village to confront alienation in capitalist modernity.
The third speaker completes the panel by bringing Naitō Konan’s history of East Asia into dialogue with the Marxist Ishimoda Shō’s reading of Japanese history in relation to the Third World.
Together the three papers explore how various visions of the past were mobilized to criticize the present and point to a different future. A key point of the panel is that calls to mobilize the past are often politically ambivalent combining different political impulses, including, colonialism, anti-colonialism and socialism.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Sunday 20 August, 2023, -Mariko Naito (Meiji University)
Paper short abstract:
My paper explores how intellectuals in Japan developed different “writing back” strategies to the empires by constructing discourses on Japan’s tradition by focusing on the practice of the tea ceremony, which was originated in ancient India and China and later introduced in medieval Japan.
Paper long abstract:
My paper explores how intellectuals in Japan developed different “writing back” strategies to the empires by constructing discourses on Japan’s tradition. I will particularly focus on the practice of the tea ceremony, which was originated in ancient India and China and later introduced in medieval Japan. I will examine how critics and practitioners of the tea ceremony in Japan in the twelfth century, the sixteenth century, and the 1930’s, discussed the origin of the tea ceremony and its development in Japan. I will conclude that, discourses on Japan’s tradition, which wove the complex “colonizer” and “colonized” relationships of Japan with other areas in East Asia, Europe, and the U.S., showcase a contestation of various strategies of “writing back” to the empires.
I will start by indicating that Monk Eisai (1141-1215), who introduced the tea ceremony in Japan after traveling in China to study Zen Buddhism, attempted to “write back” to the cultural and religious empires, namely India and China, by describing the tea ceremony as a traditional custom conducted not only in India and China but also in Japan, by which he could demonstrate that there was no hierarchical orders among these regions in terms of the way in which the ceremony was conducted.
Moving on to the late nineteenth century, I will argue that modern practitioners of the tea ceremony in Japan such as Okakura Tenshin (1862-1913) attempted to decolonize the custom of the tea ceremony from the Chinese influence by demonstrating that the ceremony had been valued as tradition in Japan, while those practitioners resulted in colonizing the tea ceremony.
I will finally focus on Horiguchi Sutemi (1895-1984), an established Japanese architect and poet, who developed a contradictory concept of “Japanese-ness”, which could mean both the pursuit of modernist aesthetics and the embodiment of unchanging tradition. I will demonstrate how Horiguchi attempted to overcome the power relationship between European modernity and Japanese pre-modernity as well as the hierarchical order of the origin and the evolution of the tea ceremony between China and Japan.
Christian Uhl (Ghent University)
Paper short abstract:
This paper will use a selection of poems by the modern tanka-poet, Ishikawa Takuboku, that circle around the notion of furusato, in order to illustrate aspects of the modern condition humaine, such as, unequal development, non-simultaneity, and the temporalities of capitalist modernity.
Paper long abstract:
The poet, Ishikawa Takuboku (1885 - 1912), famous for his modern tanka-poetry and the innovations that he achieved within this traditional form, once explained in a conversation with a fictive friend that he devoted himself to the tanka form because it is the perfect vehicle for expressing the transitory, every-day “sensations” that may be regarded as petty and insignificant, but are in fact the building blocks of any real, lived experience. On the basis of the presumption that any such subjective experience corresponds with the objective political and economic circumstances that enable and condition it, we will use a selection of Ishikawa’s tanka, thematically circling around the notion of furusato – the “old village”, the place where one is coming from - in order to illustrate and to theorize some of the fundamental aspects of the modern condition humaine: urbanization and dislocation, uneven development and the simultaneity of the non-simultaneous, and the tribulations of the temporalities of capitalist modernity. This, indeed, also includes such notions as “tradition”, “history”, and “heritage” that in the form and content of Ishikawa’s oeuvre, and in his evocations of “the mountains back home”, are emphasized and undermined in a particularly striking fashion that, arguably, is symptomatic for a time of still ongoing transition, such as the late Meiji-period: “Here, it is easy to return or dream one’s way back to older times … Nature, and more than that, the ghost of history comes very easily … in a country with a particularly large amount of pre-capitalist material … ” (Ernst Bloch).