- Convenor:
-
Erin L. Brightwell
(University of Michigan)
Send message to Convenor
- Discussant:
-
Scott Aalgaard
(Wesleyan University)
- Format:
- Panel
- Section:
- Modern Literature
Short Abstract
This panel examines the literary creation and contestation of the Japanese empire. Drawing on works that transgress traditional linguistic, temporal, and/or physically embodied boundaries, it excavates how authors celebrate, challenge, or remember–and re-member–empire itself.
Long Abstract
This panel examines how authors participated in the literary creation and contestation of the Japanese empire in ways that transgress traditional linguistic, temporal, and/or physically embodied boundaries. The writers it examines all exist outside of the imperial "naichi" in one way or another, but common to each is an acknowledgment of the imperial Japanese project as a historical reality. Their works by turn celebrate, challenge, or remember–and re-member–empire itself.
The first paper takes up the literary promotion of the Japanese empire in Nazi Germany via the German-language juvenile fiction of the prolific biracial author, Wilhelm Komakichi von Nohara. Nohara, though an avowed anti-Nazi, was deeply nationalistic. The paper investigates his East Asian adventure stories, set at the borders of Japan’s empire. It argues Nohara exploited traditional German literary tropes to glorify a vision of an expanding, modernizing Japan in terms that appealed to young German readers. The second paper turns to Korean-authored writings produced in sanatoria for Hansen’s patients both during and in the aftermath of the empire. Koreans made up the second largest ethnic group on site, yet these authors likewise find themselves multifariously situated at the edges of imperial Japan, a marginalization that continues well beyond the demise of the empire proper. The paper challenges the physical and discursive exclusion of these bodies: it painstakingly reconstructs and gives voice to the often-imperfectly-preserved works of these Korean patients. The final paper examines Furuyama Kurao’s novel, "Pureō yuitito no yoake" (1970), based on the author’s experiences in Saigon Prison. Through close readings of this Akutagawa-winning work and a rarely-acknowledged earlier version published in 1949, it questions the relationship between literature and historical memory in relation to Japan’s former imperialist efforts in Southeast Asia, stretching the temporal boundaries of what we consider as literature born of empire. Together, this panel’s approach queries the very categories of empire and borderlands, and our collective excavation of these writings facilitates a better understanding of ways in which literature promotes and undermines political ideologies, both the obvious as well as those in the shadows.
| Abstract in Japanese (if needed) |
Accepted papers
Paper short abstract
This paper centers testimony and writing by ethnic Korean patients in Japanese sanatoria, demonstrating how literature became a site of negotiation not only of illness and identity but also imperial belonging and marginalization, a reflection of colonial afterlives that continues into the present.
Paper long abstract
Through their work as doctors, authors, and kataribe (storytellers), Japanese men have been central figures in shaping how the history of Hansen’s disease (leprosy) has been shared in Japan. Their voices have been prioritized and granted authority, and their experiences have often been treated as representative of patient experience as a whole. Yet within Japan’s sanatoria system, women, children, and minority ethnic groups also used literature and testimony to record their experiences of illness and medical quarantine in ways quite different from men. Among these groups, ethnic Koreans constituted one of the largests minority populations within the sanatoria. Furthermore, research by Kim Kibun (2019) demonstrates that ethnic Koreans were disproportionately represented among Hansen’s disease patients in Japan, and their experiences as doubly-marginalized were distinct. In part because of this, writing and testimony by Korean patients is fragmented, in many cases erased, and difficult to trace. This fragmentation and erasure reflects multiple forms of marginalization, including illness, colonial hierarchies, postwar nationality debates, and the pressures of linguistic and cultural assimilation.
Drawing on archives and extant collections of testimony, autobiographical writing, and literary works, by ethnic Koreans who lived in Japanese sanatoria between the 1920s to the 1970s, this presentation examines how literature and testimony, as well as silence and erasure, are negotiations of the conditions of ethnic Koreans living with Hansen’s disease in the imperial afterlife. These silence and the texts that remain can be mapped onto unstable notions of belonging, revealing how patient experience was shaped not only by medical regimes, but also by ethnicity and imperial or citizenship status. By centering marginalized writing, this paper challenges dominant narratives of Hansen’s disease literature and patient experience in Japan, while also demonstrating how oppression is mutifacted continue to shape the histories passed on.
Paper short abstract
This paper examines Furuyama Komao's novella, Pureō yuiito no yoake (1970), based on his experiences as a former soldier detained on suspicion of war crimes in Saigon Prison, and an earlier version from 1949, to consider the stakes of (re)writing Japan's imperial past and one's role therein.
Paper long abstract
This paper examines the novella, Pureō yuiito no yoake (Daybreak over Préau huit, 1970) by Furuyama Komao (1920-2002), which centres on a group of Japanese soldiers interned in Saigon in 1945 (in French, préau refers to a prison courtyard; huit, to the number eight). Drawing on Furuyama’s experiences as a former soldier in the Japanese Imperial Army detained on suspicion of war crimes, and weaving actual events into its narrative, Préau huit presents a genuinely rare literary perspective onto a specific historical moment. Préau also received the Akutagawa Prize, with the writer and judge Ōoka Shōhei remarking that it far surpassed his own acclaimed record of captivity in the Philippines, Furyoki (1948).
More significantly, in Préau Furuyama appears to have revised his earlier, more literal account, Hadaka no mure (The naked herd), which was published one year after Furyoki in 1949. As a text that sits between literature and reportage, Hadaka garnered little critical attention and is frequently omitted from the timelines chronicling Furuyama’s biography in his key publications. This paper departs from this coincidence between Préau’s success at the height of the Vietnam War and Furuyama’s apparent revision of his personal past to consider the complexities of writing and rewriting history, especially amid contested stakes and legacies in the present. Connecting the liminality of Furuyama’s prison setting to the position of these works between historical fact and creative fiction, this paper considers the value that such lesser-seen narratives of imperial encounters carry within the landscape of Japan’s post-war literature.
Paper short abstract
This paper analyzes Wilhelm Nohara’s German renderings from the 1930s of Japan, China, and Manchuria to uncover how his young adult adventure stories of the “Far East” legitimated Japan’s imperial vision of itself as a modernizing, expansionist power to its ally’s next generation of readers.
Paper long abstract
Studies of the cultural products of the alliance between Nazi Germany and imperial Japan have blossomed in the last decade. Yet despite work on the role of children’s literature in promoting imperialism more broadly or that focusing on the role of ideology in juvenile fiction from the Third Reich, the young adult literature of the German-Japanese entanglement remains largely ignored. It is a comparatively small body of writings, to be sure, but works such as the German-language adventure stories by Wilhelm Komakichi von Nohara (1899-1950) sold well. They clearly had a role to play in introducing “appropriate” messaging regarding the “Far East” and Japan’s role there to young German readers.
This paper analyzes Nohara’s German-language renderings of sites at the edges of Japan’s wartime empire to uncover how his young adult adventure stories of the “Far East” glamorized and legitimated Japan’s imperial vision of itself as a modernizing, expansionist power. Nohara’s early young adult novels are written in the tradition of German adventure stories in exotic locales, reflecting his cosmopolitan upbringing and familiarity with German literary tropes: they promote a nostalgic vision of a German colonial empire. But in the mid 1930s, Nohara wrote two adventure novels about East Asia that portrayed current events. These reveal a much more nationalistic side to Nohara’s juvenile fiction. "Erwin in Schanghai" (Erwin in Shanghai, 1934) recounts a young German hero’s adventures during the Japanese attack on the Zhabei district in early 1932. "Drei Schwestern gehen nach Tokyo" (Three Sisters go to Tokyo, 1938) features the titular three sisters, all of whom journey to Tokyo to contribute to the war effort, as well as a heroic seafaring elder brother who washes ashore in Manchuria. Through a close reading of these two works, I examine how Nohara moves from a relatively nuanced depiction of Chinese, Japanese, and German relations in the earlier work to full-on promotion of imperial Japan’s war effort and involvement in Manchuria in the second. This highlights how juvenile fiction could serve the Japanese empire not only within the empire and its holdings but also much farther afield.