- Convenor:
-
Mami Fujiwara
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- Format:
- Panel
- Section:
- Modern Literature
Short Abstract
This panel reconsiders the “South” in modern Japanese literature as a concept shaped by transnational and intermedial perspectives, examining how Sato Haruo, Akutagawa Ryūnosuke, and Yang Kui engaged with Asian, Western, and local sources to shape literary and cultural representations.
Long Abstract
This panel reconsiders the concept of the “South” in modern Japanese literature by examining its geographical, cultural, and epistemological assumptions. Rather than treating the South as a self-evident geographical entity, the panel approaches it as a concept shaped through multiple intersecting perspectives. Representations of the South were not produced solely from a Japanese viewpoint but emerged within transnational networks of literary and cultural exchange.
Modern Japanese writers imagined the South through engagement with diverse sources, including Western literature and visual arts, Orientalist discourses, classical Chinese texts, and Asian intellectual traditions. As a result, the South appears as a mediated, multilayered space, integrating Western visions of the tropics, reconfiguring Asia in the context of Japanese modernity, and overlapping with regions such as Taiwan, China, India, Southeast Asia, and the Pacific.
By analyzing literary works and visual culture, this panel examines how modern Japanese literature received, adapted, and transformed external perspectives on the South, highlighting it as a space where global and regional imaginaries intersect.
The individual presentations approach this topic from complementary angles. The first paper focuses on Sato Haruo, examining his travel writings on Indonesia and the expansion of the “South” in his works from Kumano to Taiwan and Fujian, culminating in Indonesia as a key point of southward exploration. The second paper examines Akutagawa Ryūnosuke’s representations of the South, emphasizing the influence of Western painting on his literary imagination. The third paper considers Taiwan-born writer Yang Kui, focusing on The Newspaper Delivery Man and its reception within proletarian literature, while noting how he was framed as a “Southern” writer. Drawing on Yang Kui’s self-positioning, the paper argues that the South should be understood not as a geographical origin, but as a category produced within literary and political contexts.
Taken together, the panel presents the South in modern Japanese literature not as a fixed geographical reference, but as an imaginative space through which literary culture and Japan’s engagement with regional and global contexts were shaped. By emphasizing transnational and intermedial perspectives, it offers new insights into the study of modern Japanese literature and spatial representation.
South / Southern Imaginaries
| Abstract in Japanese (if needed) |
Accepted papers
Paper short abstract
Early twentieth-century Japanese writers turned toward the “South” alongside imperial expansion. Influenced by Gauguin and Lafcadio Hearn, Akutagawa Ryūnosuke’s Momotarō reveals the South as a site where literature, art, and imperial ideology intersect.
Paper long abstract
In the first half of the twentieth century, Japanese writers and artists shared a sustained gaze toward the “South,” a gaze that developed in parallel with Japan’s imperial expansion. Akutagawa Ryūnosuke, in particular, showed a keen interest in Paul Gauguin’s aesthetics of the “primitive,” as well as in the works of Japanese painters influenced by Gauguin, such as Tsuchida Bakusen, and in the “southern” imagery found in the art of Hashiguchi Goyō and Yasui Sōtarō.
At the same time, the Japanese state, drawing upon the colonial policies of Western imperial powers, openly articulated its nanshin (southward advance) as a national strategy. Representations of the South in literature and the visual arts were thus produced within, and in dialogue with, this expanding imperial imagination. Moreover, the southern orientation of Lafcadio Hearn—one of Akutagawa’s key intellectual influences—was itself shaped through transnational networks, including his engagement with figures such as Rudyard Kipling. Akutagawa’s vision of the South, therefore, should not be understood merely as an expression of exoticism, but rather as part of a broader cultural network formed within the global context of colonialism.
Against this backdrop, this paper examines Akutagawa’s representations of the South, with particular attention to Momotarō. Focusing on the binary opposition between civilization and barbarism, it seeks to reposition Akutagawa’s “South” as a site where literature, visual culture, and imperial policy intersect. By situating Akutagawa’s work within these historical and international frameworks, the paper aims to shed new light on the ideological and aesthetic dimensions of southern imagery in modern Japanese literature.
Paper short abstract
This paper examines the concept of the “South” in Haruo Sato’s writings, focusing on his Indonesian travel works. It explores how Indonesia functioned as the furthest expansion of his southern imagination, shaped by wartime discourse as well as personal engagement with cultural difference.
Paper long abstract
In the literary works of Haruo Sato, the “South” emerges not as a self-evident geographical entity but as an imaginative space that is gradually formed and expanded through its contrast with the “North.” In his early writings, Kumano is depicted as a space of wildness infused with nostalgia, standing in opposition to the pastoral imagery conventionally associated with Musashino. This contrast already signals Sato’s distinctive orientation toward the South as a space marked by alterity and emotional depth. As his literary career developed, the scope of this southern imagination expanded beyond the Japanese archipelago to encompass Fujian and Taiwan, and during the wartime period it was directed more explicitly toward Southeast Asia, particularly Java.
A key moment in this process was Sato’s journey to Southeast Asia between October 1943 and May 1944. Traveling through Manila, Singapore, and Malacca, he arrived in Jakarta in mid-November, then moved on to Surabaya and Bali before returning to Japan in late May 1944. These experiences of travel and movement played a crucial role in giving concrete geographical and cultural form to the South within Sato’s literary imagination.
This paper examines Sato’s Indonesian travel writings, with particular attention to The People of the East Indies and A Journey to Bali. In these texts, representations of Indonesian culture are shaped by the ideological climate of wartime Japan and by contemporary discourses surrounding the “South.” At the same time, however, Sato’s writings also display a personal mode of engagement grounded in sensory perception and curiosity toward cultural difference. His depictions of landscapes, religious practices, and everyday life reveal a layered image of the South that cannot be reduced to political rhetoric alone.
By focusing on the intersection of wartime perspectives and individual imagination, this paper explores how the boundaries of the South were formed and transformed in Sato’s literature. It argues that Indonesia represents a critical point in the expansion of Sato’s southern horizon, functioning as a space where ideological frameworks and personal sensibilities converge, and where the limits of his southern imagination are most fully articulated.
| Abstract in Japanese (if needed): | 佐藤春夫の文学において〈南〉は、固定された地域概念ではなく、〈北〉との対照関係のなかで次第に広がっていく想像的な空間として描かれてきた。初期作品に見られる熊野は、武蔵野的な田園空間とは異なり、郷愁を内包した野性の空間として表象されており、そこにはすでに佐藤春夫固有の〈南〉への志向が認められる。その後、この〈南〉の射程は福建・台湾へと広がり、戦時期には爪哇を含む東南アジアへと具体的に向けられていく。 1943年10月、佐藤春夫は東南アジアへ渡航し、マニラ、シンガポール、マラッカを経由して11月中旬にジャカルタへ到着した。その後、スラバヤ、バリ島などを巡り、1944年5月下旬に帰国している。こうした移動の経験は、佐藤春夫の文学的想像力において〈南〉の地理的・文化的輪郭を具体化する重要な契機となった。 『東インドの人々』や『バリ島の旅』におけるインドネシア文化の描写には、戦時下の日本社会に共有されたイデオロギーや「南方」言説の影響が色濃く反映されている一方で、異文化への関心や感覚的な魅了に基づく、佐藤春夫独自の南方像も重層的に読み取ることができる。本稿は、戦時的な視線と個人的な南方想像が交錯する地点に注目し、佐藤春夫文学において〈南〉の境界がいかに形成され、変容していったのかを明らかにするものである。 |
Paper short abstract
This paper examines how the Taiwan-born writer Yang Kui entered Japanese-language literature from the late 1920s and how his work was received. Focusing on The Newspaper Delivery Man, it questions his identification as a “Southern” writer, the “South” being a literary and political construct.
Paper long abstract
This paper examines the emergence of the Taiwan-born writer Yang Kui on the Japanese-language literary scene from the late 1920s onward, with particular attention to the conditions of his reception within proletarian literary circles and beyond. Writing in Japanese while moving between colonial Taiwan and metropolitan Japan, Yang Kui occupied an ambivalent position that rendered him both visible and marginal within the literary field of early Shōwa Japan.
The analysis focuses primarily on The Newspaper Delivery Man, Yang Kui’s most famous work of the period, which draws on his experiences of labor, poverty, and student life in Tokyo. The text was largely read through the interpretive framework of proletarian literature. At the same time, however, this reception was also mediated by Yang Kui’s status as a Taiwanese writer. His work was read simultaneously as proletarian literature and as an expression of colonial difference.
The paper argues that Yang Kui was frequently identified as a Taiwanese writer, a label that was shaped by imperial spatial imaginaries, colonial hierarchies, and expectations of alterity. This identification intersected with contemporary debates on colonial literature, proletarian internationalism, and the limits of literary universalism within the Japanese empire. Attention is also given to Yang Kui’s own positioning. While he actively engaged with proletarian literary movements and shared many of their political commitments, his writings suggest a strategic negotiation of literary affiliation.
By examining both reception and self-positioning, this paper reconsiders the “South” as a historically contingent and relational construct produced at the intersection of literary institutions and imperial power. Through the case of Yang Kui, it sheds light on the persistent role of colonial difference in shaping literary value and visibility in interwar Japan, even within proletarian circles.