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Paper short abstract

This paper examines the convergence of diverse cultural practices around the figure of the rose in Japan around 1970. Rather than conveying a shared meaning, the rose functions as an organizational principle linking heterogeneous works across media, politics, and aesthetics.

Paper long abstract

In Japan at the turn of the 1970s, one can observe what appears to be a convergence of a wide range of cultural practices around a single recurring figure: the rose. Concentrated primarily between 1968 and 1969 this “rose phenomenon” cuts across multiple domains of cultural life ranging from mainstream advertising and the press to commercial cinema, artistic production, and the so-called underground and avant-garde circles. This configuration can be observed, for instance, in Hosoe Eikoh’s Barakei (1963; reissued in 1971 with graphic design by Yokoo Tadanori), in Mishima Yukio’s writings, as well as in works by authors such as Nakai Hideo or Shibusawa Tatsuhiko. It is equally present in cinema—most notably in Matsumoto Toshio’s Bara no sōretsu (1969) and Fukasaku Kinji’s Kurobara no yakata (1969)—as well as in critical discourse, as exemplified by Matsuda Masao’s essay collection Bara to mumeisha (1970). The rose-connoted works do not conform to a common thematic program, nor do they exhibit symbolic coherence; the rose functions as an underlying organizational principle linking, by virtue of structural affinity, heterogeneous productions whose internal logics remain divergent or even opposed. Taking this convergence as its object, this paper will pursue three related aims: (a) to demonstrate, through Félix Guattari’s concept of “a-signifying chains,” how the use of the rose motif, be it conscious or unconscious, draws disparate materials into a single organizational grid, hierarchizing and overcoding variegated semiotic contents; (b) to question the centrality accorded to “meaning” in dominant interpretive approaches to cultural phenomena; and finally (c) to outline the problems posed by the concept of “culture” insofar as it operates as a flattening and generalizing analytical category, and to attempt its deconstruction.