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Paper short abstract:

This paper will argue that Edo publishing laid the foundations for modern manga. After the demise of woodblock printing in the 1880s, printing from copperplates met the demand for popular publications. The latter drew upon Edo formats and represent an important step in the emergence of modern manga.

Paper long abstract:

Maeda Ai, a scholar of modern Japanese literature, pointed out that the Japanese woodblock print technology that had dominated the publishing industry in the Edo period (1608-1868) suffered a drastic decline in the early 1880s. This marked the end of popular Edo literary genres, such as gōkan. The woodblock-printed technology continued to be used almost exclusively for expensive illustrated ‘art’ books. The existing scholarship on book history has only been interest in the latter. In addition, recent manga scholarship has suggested that there is a discontinuity between modern day manga and Edo popular literature. They argue that modern manga originated with western influenced artists seeking to create Western-style comic strips for the Japanese market. This suggests that popular Edo literary genres are completely separated from modern manga.

However, this line of investigation needs to be pursued further to engaged with the full range of popular publications appearing in the Japan from the 1880s onward. Since woodblock printing was no longer a viable technology for commercial publishing for a mass audience, the publishers first had recourse to copperplate printings (dōhan) for the production of books for children. Many small-size copperplate children’s books were produced between 1884 and 1898. To satisfy that market, it was essential that publishers employed new technologies so that they could create an affordable produce. At the same time, they continued to draw upon traditional pre-modern formats.

In this paper, I will argue that Meiji popular publications may be regarded as a bridge between Edo children’s literary genres and modern manga. Publishers at this time were struggling to find a way to survive, which led them to adopt new technologies and to develop new genres. However, interestingly, they still used traditional pre-modern imagery, compositions and formats into the early 20th Century. More importantly, this development laid the foundation for the format of post war manga. Edo period children’s books and today’s manga are not presented in the same media, but the dynamism found in the earlier children books paved the way for the development of the today’s manga.

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Paper short abstract:

This paper examines the Outadokoro poets’ embarking upon socio-literary commentaries to unfolding international and domestic events from 1904 onwards, in the form of tanka columns published in the pro-government newspaper Kokumin Shinbun.

Paper long abstract:

The Imperial Poetry Bureau (Outadokoro 御歌所) was established in 1869 as a court ministry in the Imperial Household Agency and as part of a tide of Meiji-era institutions which sought to imitate the Nara-era prestige of the imperial court in order to legitimize the political myth of the Meiji imperial restoration. The bureau consisted mostly of scholars affiliated with kokugaku and Shinto studies. In addition to editing and critiquing poetry by members of the imperial family and court nobility, the most long-lasting of the Outadokoro's activities was the reinvention of the New Year’s imperial poetry competition, utakai hajime 歌会始. In my paper I turn to a less established form of literary and political commentary from 1904 onwards, namely the publication of waka poems by Outadokoro poets in the Kokumin Shinbun 国民新聞. Its leader, Takasaki Masakaze 高崎正風, and other members such as Chiba Taneaki 千葉胤明, Ōguchi Taiji 大口鯛二 and Ban Masaomi 阪正臣 regularly wrote tanka on unfolding international and domestic events, such as the extensively researched Russo-Japanese War. Other significant political events adorned with literary commentary ranged from the Emperor Meiji’s participation to military drills, his visits to Yasukuni shrine, the launching of military vessels during the war, to the 1905 visit of American Secretary of War, William Howard Taft, or the 1909 assassination of Itō Hirobumi. I argue that such tanka publications in columns by Outadokoro members, occasionally accompanied by poems of military generals or state diplomats, can be seen as a literary voice of the government, or state poetry, in the context of the Kokumin Shinbun’s tight relations to the late Meiji government, which gained it the biting epithet of ‘government’s mouthpiece.’ The use of printed media such as national newspapers in the creation of national identity has been thoroughly analyzed by existing scholarship (Anderson 1983). In the pages of late Meiji’s Kokumin Shinbun, the national consciousness was reaffirmed and the government’s watchful eye expressed through the Outadokoro poets’ socio-literary commentary in tanka of warring qualities from the imperial panegyric to empathetic listening to the people’s plight.

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Paper short abstract:

Through a performance-based analysis of Yosano Akiko’s autobiographical texts, this paper lays bare a friction between autobiographical text and biographical representation in the current scholarship on Yosano Akiko and attempts to diversify the ways in which we narrativize Yosano Akiko.

Paper long abstract:

During her life Yosano Akiko (1878–1942) wrote an astonishing amount of texts in an equally astonishing variety of genres, among which many autobiographical texts. Although there exists no detailed analysis of her autobiographical text as a group, previous scholarship has instrumentalized fragments of these texts as “evidence” to prove specific theories about Yosano Akiko, her life, and her work. This paper suggests that relegating these texts to such a supporting role does them insufficient justice, because it leaves the text, its workings, and its context unexplored.

Instead, I will analyze these texts through the framework of life writing, a field in Literary Studies that applies the notion of performative (gender) identity to the reading and understanding of autobiographical texts. The focus on performance entails focusing on the contextuality and gendered aspects of self-representation. Both are especially interesting when looking at autobiographical texts in prewar Japan: in a field where the author was gendered male, how did women writers textually construct their identities as both women and writers? In addition, contextualization calls attention to the performance’s audience—the implied reader—and in doing so examines what is at stake in self-representation, how the text conveys this to its reader, and how a particular self-representation can be situated within various discourses on gender and authorship. In other words, in this paper I move from an approach that instrumentalizes autobiographical texts to construct larger narratives about her life and work, to one in which individual instances of self-representation through autobiographical texts are instrumental to our understanding of Yosano Akiko as a writer.

By exploring the friction between self-representation and biographical representation, this paper aims to rethink the status of autobiographical texts in current scholarly practices. It asks: when bits and pieces of different autobiographical texts are put together to tell a single story, whose story does this narrative tell? This paper proposes that in such heavily mediated accounts we invariably hear the voice of the scholar/biographer, and that a return to the text will allow us a glimpse of Yosano Akiko—how she wrote about herself and why.