Paper short abstract:

This paper explores Japanese avant-garde's godfather Hanada Kiyoteru and his contribution to the national postwar debate on renaissance/reconstruction and subjectivity/humanism. I focus in particular on his use of zoological, biological, and environmental metaphors and their transnational sources.

Paper long abstract:

In postwar Japan, “Renaissance” became a catchword for political, moral, and economic reconstruction. In this context, works on the Renaissance which had been conceived before or during the war, such as Hayashi Tatsuo’s Bungei fukkō (1933) or Watanabe Kazuo’s Runesansu no hitobito and Furansu Runesansu Danshō (1949; 1950), became guiding lights for moral and social reconstruction. These essays could be read as part of a more general trend in the reaffirmation of subjectivity as a human (citizen’s) prerogative.

However, there was one voice which stood out of the crowd. One of the main postwar works on Renaissance’s imaginary was Hanada Kiyoteru’s Fukkōki no seishin (1946). The book was a collection of essays, mostly penned during the war. In the early 1940s, Hanada had developed an ambiguous but critical relationship with the militarist regime. After the war, he became a leader of the avant-garde movement in Japan and developed a form of dialectic materialism, which he named mineralism (kōbutsuchūshinshugi). His mineralism preached the unity of contraries left in their irreducible difference, and the equal respect of all things, beyond humanism, including inanimate matter. This anti-humanistic perspective was consubstantial to Hanada’s original anti-Renaissance as expressed in Fukkōki no seishin. Hanada made clear that Renaissance is but another face of death, the natural return of what has reached its own end, not an emancipation of man from nature.

The proposed paper explores the transformation of Hanada’s renaissance as expressed in Fukkōki no seishin, from its embryonal form, when he was linked to Nakano Seigo’s fascist national revival, up to his last work and extensive contribution on the concept of “renaissance,” Nihon no Runesansujin (1974). In particular, I will try to trace the sources which provided Hanada with his powerful toolbox of biological and environmental images, such as that of the clavelina – a tunicate which reverts to embryonic stage and returns again to a developed status in order to adapt to environmental changes, and which, in Hanada’s mind, is a symbol of the limitedness of Renaissance-inspired humanism – or the recurring image of the desert with its hidden microbial, vegetable and animal life.