- Convenor:
-
Matilde Mastrangelo
(Sapienza University of Rome)
Send message to Convenor
- Format:
- Panel
- Section:
- Modern Literature
Short Abstract
This panel addresses the relationship between Japan and Otherness (especially Europe) from different perspectives. Four thematic threads emerge: exoticism-localism, humour and identity, nostalgia and anxiety, and the complex dynamics of attraction and apprehension toward the foreign.
Long Abstract
The relationship between Japan and Otherness has long attracted scholarly attention, generating a range of interpretations and methodological approaches. In this panel, we propose four perspectives on the ways in which Japan conceptualised, represented, and negotiated its encounters with the outside world, with particular emphasis on Europe. Across these contributions, four thematic threads emerge: exoticism-localism, humour and identity, nostalgia and anxiety, and the complex dynamics of attraction and apprehension toward the foreign.
The first two papers examine how exotic elements function both as representational devices and as critical lenses through which Japanese society reflected upon itself. The textual strategies of late Edo period sharebon cast light on the imagination of Otherness and the cultural relationship to the foreign. In early Meiji rakugo, the fascination with the foreign, encapsulated in the notion of ikoku shumi, served to highlight socially sensitive or uncommon phenomena within Japan while simultaneously generating humour, surprise, and estrangement. This ambivalent stance, oscillating between outward-looking curiosity and fear of the unfamiliar, reveals a society negotiating its cultural identity in the face of real or imagined foreign presence.
This tension also resonates with the paper addressing the incorporation of Christianity into kabuki narratives involving fantastical overseas adventures. Christianity appears as a destabilising, alien force that evokes both the foreigner’s perceived magical power and the dangers of worlds beyond Japan. Such portrayals reflect mounting social anxiety towards the increasingly intrusive presence of Westerners at the edge of the archipelago.
Finally, the panel turns to the early twentieth century, when foreign perspectives, were invoked in the search for an “authentic” national past. The fourth presentation explores how nostalgic engagement with European visitors’ accounts became a means of articulating and reclaiming cultural identity.
Together, the papers demonstrate how the foreign Otherness has been employed across decades in Japan with the aim of observing and questioning itself. Significantly, the often ambivalent or even xenophobic tones in these narratives can be reinterpreted not simply as rejection of the Other, but as a form of self-critique: a productive, if uneasy, analytical stance, rooted in Japan’s premodern experience, that remains strikingly relevant today.
| Abstract in Japanese (if needed) |
Accepted papers
Paper short abstract
In sharebon, authors embed Otherness within scenes of familiar urban sociability. This paper examines how foreignness is represented within Edo demi-monde and considers what these textual strategies reveal about the imagination of Otherness and the cultural relationship to the foreign.
Paper long abstract
Sharebon is traditionally understood as a literary corpus that is profoundly local, rooted in the tightly circumscribed diegetic space of the Edo-period shogunal capital and, at times, the provincial red-light districts situated along major travel routes. At the same time, as one of the artistic forms both shaped by and giving expression to the cultural phenomenon of the “pleasure quarters” in Edo–Meiji Japan, sharebon participates in the construction of Yoshiwara and other entertainment districts as exceptional, out-of-the-ordinary worlds: settings marked by a distinctive yet mainly rhetorical exoticism and “foreign” flavour. In their detailed evocations of Edo’s soundscapes, sharebon authors frequently stage foreign languages and portray certain teahouse patrons as enthusiasts of things foreign, thus embedding alterity within scenes of otherwise familiar urban sociability.
This paper examines how sharebon authors represent foreignness within the milieu of Edo’s red-light districts and considers what these textual strategies reveal about the Edo-period imagination of Otherness and Japan’s broader cultural relationship to the foreign.
Paper short abstract
This paper examines how rakugo uses food-related humour to address ikoku shumi, satirising curiosity toward foreign cuisine. Through Edo and Meiji examples, it shows how laughter frames Japan’s engagement with cultural Otherness.
Paper long abstract
In rakugo, foreign cultures, customs, and foods that were unfamiliar to contemporary audiences were frequently employed as sources of humor. Food, in particular, is undoubtedly one of the aspects of a foreign culture that arouses the greatest curiosity. At times, it also serves as the easiest means of approaching a different culture and demonstrating one’s ability to remain culturally informed. Among the various ways in which curiosity toward unfamiliar cuisine can be expressed, rakugo often satirizes those who improvise as cooks, those who are hesitant to try new dishes, those who pose as connoisseurs, and those who merely seek to follow trends. In the pre-modern period, food exoticism was similarly represented through stories featuring dishes never before tasted from distant regions, or entirely invented dishes, as exemplified in the classical rakugo Chiritotechin. In Meiji-period new rakugo, such as Shirōto yōshoku (The Western Meal by an Unprofessional), a man improvises as an expert in Western cuisine, producing comical reactions and outcomes. In my part of the panel, I intend to examine how rakugo communicates themes related to ikoku shumi through the strategic use of humor and the elicitation of laughter.
Paper short abstract
This paper aims at understanding narratives of foreignness in the 1804 kabuki play Tenjiku Tokubee Ikokubanashi vis-à-vis increasing contact with foreign powers during the Kansei era. Here, an ambivalence arises, of both fascination with and anxiety toward the foreign.
Paper long abstract
The protagonist of the 1804 kabuki play Tenjiku Tokubee Ikokubanashi (written by Tsuruya Nanboku) is Tenjiku Tokubee, a historical boat captain who, prior to the 1635 edicts enforcing national seclusion, is said to have voyaged twice to Southeast Asia for trade. In the 1757 Osaka performance of the kabuki play Tenjiku Tokubee Kikigaki Ōrai (written by Namiki Shōzō), Tenjiku Tokubee is reimagined as none other than Nanakusa Shirō, identified with Amakusa Shirō, the leader of the 1637 Shimabara Rebellion, and is portrayed as a figure who employs magical powers derived from a gama. This gama magic is associated with the Chinese immortal known as the Toad Sage (Gama Sennin). The linkage between gama magic and Christianity can be traced to the 1719 jōruri piece Keisei Shimabara Kaeru Gassen (by Chikamatsu Monzaemon).
The staging of Tenjiku Tokubee Ikokubanashi in 1804 must be understood against the backdrop of increasing contact with foreign powers such as Russia during the Kansei era and the growing body of travelogues that included descriptions of foreign lands. Underlying these developments was a popular sentiment characterised by both fascination with and apprehension toward the foreign: an ambivalence arising amid anxieties over the destabilization of the sakoku system.
| Abstract in Japanese (if needed): | 1804年に江戸で上演された歌舞伎『天竺徳兵衛韓噺(てんじくとくべえいこくばなし)』(鶴屋南北作)の主人公である天竺徳兵衛は、鎖国令が出される1635年以前に、2回東南アジア貿易のために渡航した実在の船頭である。 1757年に大坂で上演された歌舞伎『天竺徳兵衛聞書往来(てんじくとくべえききがきおうらい)』(並木正三作)により、天竺徳兵衛は実は七草四郎(1637年の島原の乱の総大将である天草四郎のこと)とされ、蝦蟇の妖術を使う人物として創造された。蝦蟇の妖術は、もともとは中国から伝わった蝦蟇仙人から連想されたものである。蝦蟇の妖術とキリスト教が結びつけられたのは、1719年の浄瑠璃『傾城島原蛙合戦(けいせいしまばらかえるがっせん)』(近松門左衛門作)からである。 1804年に『天竺徳兵衛韓噺』が上演された背景には、寛政期以降(1789～)のロシア等の諸外国の接近と、名所記中の海外描写などがある。つまり鎖国の動揺に不安を持つ庶民の、異国への恐れと憧れがあるのである。 |
Paper short abstract
This paper analyses Nagai Kafū’s literary engagement with Western accounts of life in early modern Japan: he reshapes these narratives into a form of nostalgia, yet reading them sometimes as a mirror of his own times.
Paper long abstract
After purchasing Ernest Satow’s A Diplomat in Japan on June 5, 1935, Nagai Kafū continued, until May 4, 1939, to acquire and read original accounts written by Westerners who had resided in Japan from the late Edo period to the early Meiji era, works that documented contemporary Japanese customs, social conditions, and landscapes. In his historical–critical essay “Tamenaga Shunsui,” completed in August 1941 and published postwar on February 1st, 1946 in the journal Ningen, Kafū remarks, «Some years ago, for a different purpose, I immersed myself in Westerners’ writings concerning Japan’s past».
During this period, Japan’s military was expanding its operations in China and would soon enter the Pacific War; meanwhile, the daily life of Tokyoites was undergoing profound material and psychological changes. Under such circumstances, Kafū turned to these Western accounts of life in Japan, discerning within them lingering traces of Edo and early Meiji, worlds rapidly disappearing before his eyes. Moreover, by exploring his diary, Danchōtei Nichijō, this paper aims at suggesting that he read the depictions of late-Edo social unrest comparing them with the ominous conditions of his own time.
| Abstract in Japanese (if needed): | 荷風は、1935年6月5日にアーネスト・サトウの『日本滞在記』を購入して以降、1939年5月4日に至る間、幕末から明治初期にかけて日本に滞在し、当時の日本の世態人情や風景を記録した欧米人の原書を購入し繙読している。 荷風は、1941年8月に脱稿し、戦後の1946年2月1日に発表された雑誌『人間』所載の考証随筆「為永春水」のなかで「わたしは数年前別の目的で日本の過去に関する西洋人の著書を読みあさったことがある」と記している。 この時期、日本の軍部は中国で戦線を拡大し、やがて太平洋戦争へと突入、東京人の生活様式は物心ともに大きく変化していく。そのような状況下で、荷風が欧米人の滞日記録のなかに失われていく江戸や明治の面影を見ていたこと、また、記録された幕末の世相に現在の不穏な世相を重ね合わせていたことなどを、『断腸亭日乗』の記事のなかに探っていく。 |