Send message to Author

Paper short abstract

This paper examines how the ecopoetry and woodblock prints produced by Nishimura Makoto during his involvement with the Sapporo-based coterie magazine Satoporo informed the philosophies of art, technology, and nature behind his design of Gakutensoku (1928), Japan’s first “artistic” artificial human.

Paper long abstract

Among the many coterie magazines that flourished in Sapporo during Japan’s interwar years, Satoporo (1925–1929) has been singled out for its remarkable stylistic eclecticism and its early embrace of creative prints (sōsaku hanga) as modernist art. Satoporo was founded by Toyama Usaburō after an encounter with the Tokyo-based artist group Mavo and modeled on the structure of Shi to hanga. Its early issues are replete with locally-inflected modernist poetry and prints inspired by international movements including Symbolism, Dadaism, and Constructivism. This talk departs from previous studies of Satoporo centered on Toyama and the metropole-periphery dynamics manifested during his tenure to consider the neglected role of localized ecological thought.

Rather, I focus on the contributions of Nishimura Makoto, a professor in Hokkaido Imperial University’s marine biology department, who served as the magazine’s third editor and oversaw its expansion into a comprehensive literary and arts magazine. While Nishimura is best known for creating the artificial human Gakutensoku (1928), I will show how the philosophy informing this “artistic” artificial human’s design emerged through numerous poems, prints, and essays Nishimura produced in Sapporo. His ecopoetic engagements with the flatland forest of Nopporo and the marimo indigenous to Lake Akan evince a vision of non-indifferent nature at odds with abstract, disenchanted nature of the modern science in which he was trained. His reflections on woodblock printmaking acknowledge quasi-agentic properties of tools and natural materials that challenge the instrumentalist picture of human artifice dominating unruly nature via technology undergirding Japan’s settler colonialist project in Hokkaido.