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Paper short abstract

This paper examines early stories by Izumi Kyōka alongside illustrations published in children’s magazines during the Sino-Japanese War and argues that these stories exemplify strategies used to create sympathy for war among readers, while also raising deeper ethical and philosophical questions.

Paper long abstract

Izumi Kyōka, who would go on to become Japan’s most important fantasy writer during the early twentieth century, began his career publishing genre fiction in popular magazines, including war stories in children’s magazines, during the 1890s. After making his debut with a an old-school tale of civil unrest and martial outlaws in 1892 with Kanmuri Yazaemon, followed by an Edgar Allan Poe-style mystery with Iki ningyō (The Living Doll) in 1893, Kyōka published a series of children’s stories centered on themes including expelling foreigners from Japan, military confrontation with China, triumphs of the Japanese military and navy, filial piety, and bravery at sea. Such work has had a troubled reception in studies of Kyōka’s literature, often being interpreted as juvenilia written for profit early in the author’s career, with guidance and prompting from his literary mentor, Ozaki Kōyō. Such work is moreover troubling because of its deeply xenophobic portrayals of non-Japanese, which is a feature of only very few of Kyōka’s earliest stories, written during the Sino-Japanese War, and is nowhere repeated in the many hundreds of stories that he would go on to write over many decades. In my presentation, I argue that the aesthetic and cultural value of such works continues to be severely limited by their propagandistic nature, but that they are useful as documents that illustrate how sympathy for war is generated among young readers by drawing on tropes of traditional warfare, adventure, and fantasy. By examining Kyōka’s early children’s stories, including “Yamato gokoro” (1894), “Kaisen no yoha” (1894), and “Tabisō” (1895), published in children’s magazines and collected volumes, alongside illustrations featured in these publications, I will show how popular media portrayed violent military conflict through the frameworks of traditional stories of heroic bravery and skilled martial combat. Such work depicted war as a kind of adventure that takes place in impossibly distant lands, introducing supernatural figures and fantastic realms in ways that disguise the violence of military conflict. As I will also show, however, Kyōka’s stories also raise important questions about standards, responsibilities, and consequences in warfare.