Short Abstract

I trace how the concept ‘shumi’ was rhetorically deployed to shape how people sensed, behaved and consumed. More than a translation of ‘taste’, I claim that ‘shumi’ tied aesthetic sensibility to social participation, benefiting specific actors as middle-class identities formed in modernizing Japan.

Long Abstract

This paper positions the concept of ‘shumi’ – introduced into the Japanese vernacular in the late 19th century as a translation for the word ‘taste’ – as a marker that reveals how the cultivation of a sensibility toward nature and art was directly tied to socio-economic participation. I demonstrate how the language of ‘shumi’ was deployed in a broad spectrum of socio-historical contexts to shape how people ought to behave, sense, and consume, while serving the interests of specific individuals and institutions. An analysis of ‘shumi’ thus goes beyond merely acknowledging the friction that arises when abstract concepts are transposed across cultures and languages. Rather, this paper sheds light on how the often ambiguous discursive language of beauty disrupts and conditions the socio-political realm, serving as a medium through which newly emerging middle-class identities were negotiated and established.

Drawing on Jacques Rancière’s idea of ‘le partage du sensible’ – the sensible as that which is simultaneously shared and divides – I argue not only that ‘shumi’ holds a unique status among the many translation words from the same period tasked with sustaining the rhetoric of a modernizing nation-state, but also that it represents the intersection of aesthetics and politics in late 19th and early 20th century Japanese literary discourse and fiction.