- Convenor:
-
Ran Wei
(Tohoku University)
Send message to Convenor
- Chair:
-
Ran Wei
(Tohoku University)
- Format:
- Panel
- Section:
- Modern Literature
Short Abstract
This panel reconsiders the politics of literary and artistic form by discussing how nature, trauma, and urban margins are represented in modern and contemporary Japanese art, poetry, and essays produced outside of Tokyo; specifically, Sapporo, the city of Nagasaki, and Kamagasaki in Osaka.
Long Abstract
Since the mid-2000s, studies of the politics of form have emphasized that formal analysis is inseparable from ideological critique and formal criticism is influenced by social change. Despite this focus on the complex relationship between form specificity and social infrastructure, the connection between local identities and the affordance of form remains less examined.
This panel reconsiders the politics of literary and artistic form by discussing how nature, trauma, and urban margins are represented in modern and contemporary Japanese art, poetry, and essays produced outside of Tokyo; specifically, Sapporo in Hokkaidō, the city of Nagasaki, and Kamagasaki in Osaka. Each paper focuses on a different period, ranging from the 1920s to the present. “Locating Hokkaido’s Non-Indifferent Nature: Nishimura Makoto’s Experiments in Ecopoetics” elucidates how the ecopoetry and woodblock prints produced by Nishimura Makoto during his involvement with the Sapporo-based coterie magazine Satoporo (1925–1929) informed the philosophies of art, technology, and nature behind his design of Gakutensoku (1928), Japan’s first “artistic” artificial human. “Haiku Reenvisioned: Matsuo Atsuyuki’s Nagasaki Atomic Poetry” spotlights the ways Matsuo Atsuyuki's haiku that evoke nuclear devastation, loss of life, and mourning constitute a radical symbolic and aesthetic departure from conventional haiku expectations. Focusing on the small-circulation coterie magazine Rōmusha Tōsei (The Livelihood of Day laborers, 1974–1985), “The Possibilities of Essay Form: Literary Representations of Personhood, Labor, and Everyday Life in Kamagasaki” examines how the narrative and descriptive features inherent to the essay form, particularly first-person narration and vivid sensory detail, create a sense of intimacy and authenticity in the day laborers’ works about their quotidian pleasures and profound sorrow. Together, these presentations reveal how artistic and literary productions have interrogated and redefined the potential and ethics of form from the 1920s to the present.
| Abstract in Japanese (if needed) |
Accepted papers
Paper short abstract
This talk examines the relationship between local culture and literary form by analyzing how the affordances of coterie magazines enable day laborers in Kamagasaki to construct personhood and reclaim subjectivity.
Paper long abstract
Japan’s largest day-labor area, Kamagasaki, has been depicted in numerous Japanese novels, manga, and films from the 1930s to the present. Some representations sensationalize the area’s poverty, while others romanticize the neighborhood by conflating its precariousness with the promise of escapism.
This talk examines the relationship between local culture and literary form by analyzing how the affordances of coterie magazines enable day laborers in Kamagasaki to construct personhood and reclaim subjectivity. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, with the development of a nationwide collective learning movement, community-based activities, and labor union activism in Japan, literary coterie magazines created by underclass and working-class workers flourished. Against this backdrop, in Kamagasaki, the small-circulation magazine Rōmusha Tōsei (The Livelihood of Day laborers, 1974-1985) emerged as a collective effort by day laborers and activists. The magazine addresses topics ranging from critiques of labor conditions to representations of everyday life to imaginings of solidarity among various marginalized groups in East Asia.
Previous studies have highlighted Rōmusha Tōsei’s contribution to social activism and group solidarity in Kamagasaki (Haraguchi, 2012; Nakayama, 2022). In contrast, by scrutinizing day laborers’ essays on topics such as favorite food, familial nostalgia, and blood selling, I argue that these writings foreground the concept of dignity through their representation of diverse lived experiences—encompassing both quotidian pleasures and profound sorrow. The narrative and descriptive features inherent to the essay form, particularly first-person narration and vivid sensory detail, create a sense of intimacy and authenticity in the day laborers’ works. In doing so, this presentation emphasizes the importance of attending to individual voices in representations of urban margins, rather than projecting revolutionary imaginaries onto residents or privileging collective identity over personal experience.
Paper short abstract
This paper examines how the ecopoetry and woodblock prints produced by Nishimura Makoto during his involvement with the Sapporo-based coterie magazine Satoporo informed the philosophies of art, technology, and nature behind his design of Gakutensoku (1928), Japan’s first “artistic” artificial human.
Paper long abstract
Among the many coterie magazines that flourished in Sapporo during Japan’s interwar years, Satoporo (1925–1929) has been singled out for its remarkable stylistic eclecticism and its early embrace of creative prints (sōsaku hanga) as modernist art. Satoporo was founded by Toyama Usaburō after an encounter with the Tokyo-based artist group Mavo and modeled on the structure of Shi to hanga. Its early issues are replete with locally-inflected modernist poetry and prints inspired by international movements including Symbolism, Dadaism, and Constructivism. This talk departs from previous studies of Satoporo centered on Toyama and the metropole-periphery dynamics manifested during his tenure to consider the neglected role of localized ecological thought.
Rather, I focus on the contributions of Nishimura Makoto, a professor in Hokkaido Imperial University’s marine biology department, who served as the magazine’s third editor and oversaw its expansion into a comprehensive literary and arts magazine. While Nishimura is best known for creating the artificial human Gakutensoku (1928), I will show how the philosophy informing this “artistic” artificial human’s design emerged through numerous poems, prints, and essays Nishimura produced in Sapporo. His ecopoetic engagements with the flatland forest of Nopporo and the marimo indigenous to Lake Akan evince a vision of non-indifferent nature at odds with abstract, disenchanted nature of the modern science in which he was trained. His reflections on woodblock printmaking acknowledge quasi-agentic properties of tools and natural materials that challenge the instrumentalist picture of human artifice dominating unruly nature via technology undergirding Japan’s settler colonialist project in Hokkaido.
Paper short abstract
In this talk, I document how applying this poetic tradition to Nagasaki’s harrowing atomic wasteland has generated a new lineage of haiku that both challenges and adds to traditional expectations.
Paper long abstract
Years after the devastating U.S. atomic bombing of Nagasaki in August 1945, Matsuo Atsuyuki wrote numerous “atomic-bomb haiku,” many of which were collected in a 2015 volume entitled Lamentation (dōkoku). Matsuo’s gruesome and disturbing haiku challenge traditional conventions of the genre, traditionally known for evoking the beauty of the natural word, seasonal changes, and the transience of life. In the context of 1945-Nagasaki, the transience of life must, obviously, be front and forward. However, the beauty and seasonal changes are replaced by horror and catastrophic change. Matsuo’s first-hand experience is presented through scenes of a sprawling scorched earth, flies swarming around his dead child’s face, makeshift grave markers, and the prosaic task of securing death certificates. Later poems express unbearable grief as birthdays of his dead children come and go. Such works challenge conventional haiku expectations of evoking awe, wonder, nostalgia, and joy. Still, the genre’s aim has long been to jolt readers out of their ordinary experience, and therefore Matsuo’s efforts to thrust his readers into the unimaginable and painful atomic hellscape can be viewed as an important contribution to the legacy of Japanese haiku. In this talk, I document how applying this poetic tradition to Nagasaki’s harrowing atomic wasteland has generated a new lineage of haiku that both challenges and adds to traditional expectations. Additionally, I critique attempts to make Nagasaki’s atomic experience a national experience, underscoring the distinctness of each atomic attack and how this is provocatively captured by Matsuo in a handful of syllables.