- Convenor:
-
Claire Demenez
(The University of East Anglia)
Send message to Convenor
- Chair:
-
Hannah Osborne
(University of East Anglia)
- Discussants:
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Giuseppe Strippoli
(Tokyo University of Foreign Studies)
Gabrielle Miguelez da Silva
- Format:
- Panel
- Section:
- Modern Literature
Short Abstract
This panel examines how the format of Taishō-era magazines shaped the texts they published. Papers explore how magazines shaped science fiction novelistic works, captured the variety of post-disaster writing, and framed women’s literary production.
Long Abstract
Periodical publications (both journals and magazines) dominated the literary ecosystem of the Taishō era (1912-1926) and played a crucial role in the formation and evolution of modern Japanese literature; they fostered new writers, commissioned and defined new writings, and circulated a flurry of texts through Japan’s urban centres. This panel brings together researchers interested in magazine culture as both the symbol and the vessel of mass urban literacy. We expand on Sarah Frederick’s work on the mediatory role which Japanese magazines – understood both as institutions and as groups of texts – played between readers and the world of cultural production, a role which is a crucial element in understanding the dynamics of literary production and consumption at this key point of modern Japanese literary history.
Individual papers present case studies of Morishita Uson’s sci-fi as it was serialised in Shojo no Tomo between the years 1916-20; the changing space made for women’s writings in Hototogisu magazine in the ‘Kitchen Miscellany’ section across the decade-and-a-half long era; and the Nov-Oct 1923 special issue of Bungei Shunju as a capsule of the Bundan’s disaster writings during the Great Kantō Earthquake. The texts presented in this panel are analysed within the magazine context in which they first appeared to their readership. This framing of the texts as parts of a wider network of writing enables us to prod at the magazine’s role as a space for connections to be formed (or curbed) across genres, gender, and disasters.
The methodology of exploring magazines as complex textual systems offers an alternative prism for understanding modern Japanese literature that goes beyond the traditional focus on single authors or the self-contained work as it is presented in book format. Through our research on these magazines, we highlight some of the unique features of this publication format such as the pivotal role of editors in curating a wide range of narratives within a shared printed space, the influence of paratextual elements surrounding a text on tethering stories to one another, and the impact of a magazine’s layout and structure in shaping a discursive space for its writers.
| Abstract in Japanese (if needed) |
Accepted papers
Paper short abstract
This paper focusses on disaster narratives produced by high-profile Bundan writers for the literary magazine Bungei Shunju during the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923. It explores the complex relationship between disaster and literature within the context of the print industry's recovery.
Paper long abstract
Tokyo’s publishing industry suffered tremendous material damage in the Great Kantō Earthquake (GKE) on the 1st of September 1923. The all-encompassing experience of this disaster also provided the industry with a path to recovery: magazines that were still able to print put together issues devoted to the disaster and its aftermath, addressing popular demand for coverage and narrative representation of this collective event, as if printing themselves out of economic collapse.
This paper considers Bungei Shunju, a high-profile literary magazine still in print today but only a year old at the time of the GKE, as a case study to investigate this literary recovery effort. In particular, it focusses on texts printed in a special ‘disaster writings’ section within the November-December 1923 issue that was put together by the magazine’s chief editor, Kikuchi Kan. Among the writers who responded to his solicitations were Kawabata Yasunari, Yokomitsu Riichi, and Uno Koji – stars of the modern literary scene.
Through its analysis of this issue of Bungei Shunju, this paper charts the varied narratives and representations of the space and the time of disaster, highlighting the diversity of disaster writings that flourished within the close-knit circle of literati (the Bundan) in the immediate and urgent aftermath of the GKE. In doing so, this paper explores the complex relationship between disaster and literature, arguing that a disaster like the GKE is both a pivotal moment of destruction, collective trauma, and uncertainty as well as a creative constraint and an uncharted experience leading to a surge in literary production that is both harnessed and propelled by magazine editors.
In its investigation of the relationship between disaster and literature, this paper’s analytical framework places particular emphasis on the 1920s publication context of mass print media and urban readership. It highlights the relevance of paratextual elements such as advertising, layout, and illustrations, as well as the role of magazine editors in shaping the literary response to disaster and our subsequent understanding of modern Japanese literature.
Paper short abstract
This paper examines Morishita Uson’s (1890-1965) “Kagaku shōsetsu: Kaisei no himitsu” (“The Secret of the Mysterious Planet: A Scientific Novel”), written for the magazine Shōjo no tomo (Girls’ Friend) in 1916, as a counternarrative to the magazine’s depiction of science and technology.
Paper long abstract
Morishita Uson (1890-1965) is known in the history of popular fiction primarily for his role as the first editor of the literary magazine Shin seinen (New Youth, 1920-50), where he promoted detective fiction. However, Shin seinen was not the first magazine with which he was associated. Morishita made his debut as a fiction writer in Shōjo no tomo (Girls’ Friend, 1908-55), one of the most widely read literary magazines for young girls during the Taishō and early Shōwa periods. Over four years, from 1916 to 1919, he published six serialised novels in the magazine. Although most of these works feature plots centred on mysteries resolved through investigation, foreshadowing Morishita’s later interest in detective fiction, none were explicitly presented to readers as detective novels. Instead, the editors designated the literary genres of these stories using various tsunogaki (two-line subtitles), such as kagaku shōsetsu (scientific novel) and bōken shōsetsu (adventure novel). This paper focuses on “Kagaku shōsetsu: Kaisei no himitsu” (“The Secret of the Mysterious Planet: A Scientific Novel”, February-November 1916), the first story Morishita wrote for Girls’ Friend.
I argue that the story serves as a counternarrative to the magazine’s prevailing depiction of the relationship between girls and technological and scientific discourse. Consistent with the concept of ryōsai kenbo (good wife and wise mother) that shaped Taishō era discussions of female education, Girls’ Friend promoted, through various texts—including commercial advertisements, essays on female educators who were also inventors, and educational articles on scientific topics—a vision of science and technology as integral to girls’ domestic life. In contrast, “The Secret of the Mysterious Planet” employs science and technology to transport its young female characters beyond the domestic sphere, enabling them to embark on an adventure in an alien world characterised by curiosity and courage.
Paper short abstract
This presentation maps women's columns in Taishō-era Hototogisu and asks how women’s haiku were presented through paratextual elements such as page layout, adjacency, and typography, reading these elements as thresholds that invite publication yet mediate visibility through a gendered framework.
Paper long abstract
Drawing on original issues of the magazine Hototogisu from the Taishō era (1912–1926), this presentation traces the emergence and transformation of women’s columns (joryūran), investigating how these spaces shaped women’s visibility within the modern Japanese haiku scene. Following Takahama Kyoshi’s (1874–1959) editorial reforms, which recentered haiku as the magazine’s core, a series of recurrent sections dedicated to women’s haiku were introduced in 1913, and a substantial number of women poets soon made their debut in Hototogisu’s pages.
Attending to the conditions under which women’s writing was published and received, I investigate the magazine issue-by-issue, mapping column titles, page placement, adjacency, sequencing, typography, and submission instructions, using these features to trace how the magazine mediated women’s participation. As a lens, I draw on Gérard Genette’s concept of paratext to read these visual elements as a system of thresholds that surround submissions. Moreover, because these elements are often lost in anthologies and text-only formats, the archive preserves context that cannot always be recovered from content alone.
To exemplify how these thresholds operate, I focus on the Kitchen Miscellanea and Family Miscellanea columns. While these spaces offered an accessible gateway for amateur poets without prior ties to the magazine, they also imposed submission requirements—such as restricting haiku topics to domestic themes—that operated beyond poetic content alone: they oriented readers toward how women’s poems should be read, and women toward how to compose, effectively assigning a gendered framework tied to domesticity.
Meanwhile, scholarship has been centered on recovering individual poets’ lives and their works, and less attention has been given to the venues through which women’s haiku emerged as a category. Ultimately, this presentation argues that because paratext operates through spatial and visual elements, the archive itself becomes an interpretive threshold for understanding the magazine’s gendered frameworks of women’s visibility.