MIAMI UNIVERSITY The Graduate School

Certificate for Approving the Dissertation

We hereby approve the Dissertation

of

Dominic James Ashby

Candidate for the Degree:

Doctor of Philosophy

______LuMing Mao, Director

______Kate Ronald, Reader

______Jason Palmeri, Reader

______Lisa Weems, Graduate School Representative

ABSTRACT

ENACTING A RHETORIC OF INSIDE–OUTSIDE POSITIONALITIES: FROM THE INDEXING PRACTICE OF UCHI/SOTO TO A REITERATIVE PROCESS OF MEANING-MAKING

by Dominic James Ashby

This project rethinks the study of comparative rhetoric and its contributions to the global turn in rhetorical study. It theorizes a rhetoric of inside–outside positionalities, building on the uchi/soto (inside/outside) dynamic, a feature of Japanese language and social interactions. Inside–outside positionalities offers new ways of understanding instances of meaning-making brought about by intercultural interactions, and highlights the importance of comparative approaches for engaging with global and local rhetorics. Alongside developing a new theory, the project makes a case for comparative epistemologies as both means and ends for ethical rhetorical study in a globalized world. Chapter 1 rethinks the indexical (pointing to established meanings) dynamic of uchi and soto as constitutive of new meaning. Drawing from Jane Bachnik’s work with uchi/soto, which explains Japanese social interactions as shifting between insider and outsider status, this chapter recuperates the uchi/soto dynamic as a rhetoric of inside- outside positionalities, a meaning-making principle that is reiterative (as developed by Judith Butler) rather than indexical. Chapter 2 uses inside–outside positionalities to rethink the construction of cultural identity. It explores how those things regarded as representing the innermost (i.e., essential) ideals of a culture or group draw from both outside and inside cultural influences. Such readings destabilize notions of cultural essence. Two sites are explored: The Japanese Christmas cake and the animated series Taishō Baseball Girls. Chapter 3 turns to the troping of Japanese women as an enactment of inside– outside positionalities in creating a modern national identity. The first portion of the chapter discusses the “troping” of women by Japanese elites to shape Japanese cultural identity; the latter portion addresses how these tropes can be resisted through critical recombination. Changing images of the Japanese schoolgirl identity, ranging from its early 20th century emergence to the later “kogal” identity of the 1990s and 2000s, serves as an example. Chapter 4 presents a comparison of inside–outside positionalities and Burke’s theory of identification. It shows that inside–outside positionalities complements identification as a means of interpreting and establishing affiliations, demonstrating how this global rhetoric can enrich foundational but euro-centric notions of rhetoric.

ENACTING A RHETORIC OF INSIDE–OUTSIDE POSITIONALITIES: FROM THE INDEXING PRACTICE OF UCHI/SOTO TO A REITERATIVE PROCESS OF MEANING-MAKING

A DISSERTATION

Submitted to the Faculty of

Miami University in partial

fulfillment of the requirements

for the degree of

Doctor of Philosophy

Department of English

by

Dominic James Ashby

Miami University

Oxford, Ohio

2013

Dissertation Director: Dr. LuMing Mao



Dominic James Ashby

2013

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Table of Figures...... v

Acknowledgements ...... vi

Introduction: Inside, Outside, and the Global Turn: Positioning Japanese Rhetoric as Intercultural Meaning-Making ...... 1 Methodological Considerations: Engaging Euroamerican and Japanese Rhetoric...... 6 Locating Japanese Rhetoric Within Comparative Inquiry...... 9 Inside, Outside, and Shifting Identities in Japanese Rhetoric...... 11 Inside–Outside Positionalities and Its Contributions to Rhetoric and Composition..... 14 Overview of Chapters ...... 16

Chapter 1—Negotiating Inside and Outside: From Uchi/Soto to Inside–Outside Positionalities...... 18 Situating the Uchi/Soto Dynamic...... 20 The Limitations of Uchi/Soto as Epistemic ...... 24 From Shifting Relations to Making Meanings: Uchi/Soto and Chino’s Double Binary...... 27 From Indexing to Performativity ...... 35 Extending the Uchi/Soto Dynamic: Examining Inside–Outside Positionalities...... 36 Conclusion ...... 38

Chapter 2—Positioning Cultural Inside and Outside: Icons of Foreignness and Nostalgic Identities ...... 40 Inside–Outside Positionalities as an Alternative to Hybridity ...... 42 Reading Inside and Outside in Japanese Christmas...... 44 Cultural Continuity and Nostalgia ...... 51 Reading Nostalgia and Inside–Outside Positionalities in Taishō Baseball Girls...... 56 Conclusion ...... 63

Chapter 3—Japanese Femininity as a Trope for Maintaining a Regional Identity...... 66 Women as Representations of Inner Japan ...... 69 Women and Ideals of Japaneseness ...... 71 Girls’ Education and Conflicting Ideals of Inside and Outside ...... 76 Popular Media and New Ways of Being...... 80 Rethinking Tropes as Recombinant...... 81 The Kogal as a Resistant Re-Combination of Ideals of Japanese Girlhood and Femininity ...... 84 Conclusion ...... 89

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Chapter 4—Traversing Burkean Identification: Inside–Outside Positionalities as a Theory of Transcultural Affiliations...... 91 Some Common Ground between Identification and Inside–Outside Positionalities...... 92 The Problems of a Universalist Perspective ...... 95 Universalizing in Burke ...... 96 Static and Dynamic Selves...... 97 Anecdotes of Affiliation ...... 101 Conclusion ...... 107

Conclusion—A Generative Shifting between Japanese and Euroamerican Rhetorics ...... 108 Reflection 1: Why Japan? ...... 109 Reflection 2: Shifting the Goals of This Project...... 110 Contributions: The What and How of Studying Inside–Outside Positionalities ...... 112 Looking Ahead: Where To Go From Here? ...... 114 The Elusive “Why”: Comparative Rhetoric as Both Ends and Means of the Global Turn...... 115

Works Cited...... 117

iv TABLE OF FIGURES Figure 1: Chino’s Double Binary, modified from Chino 25...... 30 Figure 2: Kogal in school uniform (photo by Purves) ...... 84 Figure 3: Loose socks and short skirt (photo by Nesnad)...... 84 Figure 4: After hours kogals (photo by Beyond My Ken)...... 85 Figure 5: Ganguro style (photo by Chan)...... 85 Figure 6: Traditional whiteface (photo by Cuizon) ...... 86

v ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Those things most worth doing are never achieved alone or without the influence of others. Completing this dissertation and the years of graduate education that led to it has involved the contributions of so many. First and foremost, thank you to my parents, James and Johanna. Thank you for encouraging me to experience many things, to read widely, and to follow my interests. You always believed and encouraged me to keep going. That I have finished this dissertation is as much your achievement as it is mine. Thank you to my college professors at West Virginia Wesleyan College, especially to John Saunders, Devon McNamara, Boyd Creasman, Irene McKinney, and Bill Mahoney. You made this first-generation college student feel welcome and helped me to rethink the purpose of a college education. Thanks to David and Kate, who have stayed true friends and have always been there with an encouraging word and helping hand when I need it. My mentors and friends at West Virginia University, you led me to think deeply about theory and pedagogy, and gave me the opportunity to start seeing myself as a teacher-scholar. I will always think fondly of the WVU Department of English, whether it is in Stansbury or Colson Hall. Special thanks to Laura Brady, Dennis Allen, and Jay Dolmage—you helped me to find my love of teaching and scholarship, and urged me to go on with my studies when I most needed it. Thank you to the community at Miami University, for expanding my understanding of rhetoric, writing, and academic life. It has been a joy to learn and grow here as a PhD student and candidate. Thank you John Tassoni for furthering my training as a writing instructor; Heidi McKee for introducing me to person-based research; and Mike Curme in Business and the Howe Writing Initiative for the opportunity to work with Writing across the Curriculum. Thank you to those graduates who came before and continued to support all of us newcomers to the program by offering advice and helping to navigate the process of graduate school—especially Caroline Dadas, Kerrie Carsey, Bre Garrett, and Aurora Matzke. Thank you to my dear friends and writing group members Lisa Blankenship and Ann Updike—writing alongside you made it all seem possible, and saved me from those moments when I started to doubt. And thanks to Kevin Rutherford and Jen Barnett, who have helped me maintain that important balance between work and social life—you’ve made Oxford feel like home. Last but certainly not least, many, many thanks to the members of my dissertation committee—during coursework you energized my thinking, and as members of my committee, you continued to encourage and challenge me to think capaciously about rhetoric. Ever an inspiration, Kate Ronald, Cindy Lewiecki-Wilson (who continued to give feedback even after retiring from Miami), Jason Palmeri, and Lisa Weems—thank you for believing and for all your care and insights. Thank you especially to my friend, mentor, and dissertation director, LuMing Mao. Your guidance, suggestions, and questions brought out a level of theorizing and writing that I would not have achieved alone. Thank you for always having faith in me and helping me to see that I did, in fact, have something to say and contribute to our field.

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INTRODUCTION Inside, Outside, and the Global Turn: Positioning Japanese Rhetoric as Intercultural Meaning-Making Studies in rhetoric and composition have made great strides in expanding global definitions of rhetoric and contributing to intercultural understanding among many of the world’s traditions. In a 2006 PMLA article Wendy Hesford calls for replacement of nation-bound identities and methodologies with more global perspectives in rhetoric and composition studies. Attention to global identities, geographies, histories, and pedagogies (to name a few “globalities”) offers a way of expanding our horizons of understanding of human communication and meaning-making. Many other scholars in rhetoric and composition have anticipated and responded to Hesford’s call.1 As an area of specialty, comparative rhetoric is an important participant in the “global turn” of composition and rhetorical studies. The growing body of comparative inquiry has not only helped combat once-common notions of the euroamerican tradition as the only rhetoric or as the pinnacle of rhetorical development. It has also encouraged cross-border borrowings between rhetorical traditions and continued to develop methodologies for responsibly engaging traditions outside the dominant euroamerican tradition. In this dissertation, I further contribute to the “global turn” of rhetoric and composition studies by engaging with Japanese rhetoric, particularly a key meaning- making feature that research in linguistic anthropology identifies as the “uchi/soto dynamic” (Bachnik; Rosenberger). Uchi and soto, or inside and outside, shape many Japanese social interactions and sense of self (Bachnik; Rosenberger; Kondo). I enlarge upon the meaning-making potential of this dynamic, and in the process, develop a theory I call inside–outside positionalities, a theory which has relevance not only to Japanese rhetoric, but to the global turn of rhetoric and composition at large. In this introduction, I provide some context for my study by first discussing comparative rhetoric as an important and contributing specialty within rhetoric and composition studies. I then lay out the methodological considerations that informed my research. With those guiding principles in mind, I turn to surveying previous work that has focused on Japanese rhetoric, pointing out that it is largely a neglected area of study within the field. After situating Japanese rhetoric within comparative inquiry, I explain my focus on inside and outside in Japanese rhetoric and my work to expand that dynamic into a rhetorical theory of meaning-making that has relevance for study of rhetoric both within and beyond Japan, a contribution to the global turn. I end the introduction with a brief overview of the remaining chapters.

The Purpose(s) Of Comparative Rhetoric(s) George Kennedy defines comparative rhetoric as “the cross-cultural study of rhetorical traditions as they exist or have existed in different societies around the

1 The New London Group in literacy studies; Bruce Horner, Min-Zahn Lu, John Trimbur, Suresh Canagarajah in composition studies; and Paul Matsuda and Tony Silva in second language writing come to mind, among others.

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world” (1). Unfortunately, Kennedy proceeds through his broad study of rhetorics around the world by taking a very euro-centric view, one grounded in a universalist approach to knowledge.2 The end result is a vision of comparative rhetoric with a very limited understanding of what it means to do comparative work—Kennedy spends much of his energy on describing various rhetorical traditions in light of terms and concepts developed by the Greek and Roman traditions that he is already familiar with and invested in. Other comparative scholars, while supporting Kennedy’s motive of cross- cultural study, bring greater attention to the need to focus on the rhetorics of other cultures on those traditions’ own terms, and not merely based on how they relate to the dominant euroamerican tradition. Addressing study of the history of rhetoric, Carol Lipson and Roberta Binkley in their collection Rhetoric Before and Beyond the Greeks note the need for “studies that approach the analysis of ancient cultural rhetorics from perspectives that do not seem to reify classical rhetoric as the culmination of the development of ancient rhetorical systems” (2). Lipson, Binkley, and other contributors to both their first edited collection and its companion, Ancient Non-Greek Rhetorics, address oft little-known rhetorical traditions, demonstrating those traditions’ depth, complexity, and independence from the Greek tradition that forms the basis for so much of Western thought. Although focusing on and describing traditions based on their own merits, such study is not meant to be done in a vacuum, and when doing comparative rhetoric we certainly do not leave behind all our prior assumptions or knowledge of our own cultures’ rhetorics—nor should we want to. As LuMing Mao points out, it is often necessary to begin to understand a tradition from an outsider’s “etic” perspective before we can ever hope to begin to gain an inner “emic” understanding, one that sees from the perspective of the cultural insider (“Reflective Encounters”). Further, being able to not only transition between these etic and emic perspectives but also put them in conversation is pragmatically quite important, as a contribution to intercultural communication. Carol Lipson raises some concerns with the use of the term “comparative” to describe the type of work often described as “comparative rhetoric” (20–22). Writing particularly in regards to historical study of ancient rhetoric, she addresses the issue that while increasingly comparatists “would like to examine the texts and rhetorical approaches of an ancient culture within that culture’s own framework, in its own terms,” these scholars “are often pressed by reviewers to address the similarities and differences with respect to approaches in classical [Greek] rhetoric” (20). As a counter-measure, she suggests instead identifying this work using the term “cultural rhetoric,” borrowing from the term coined by Steven Mailloux in Reception Histories (Lipson 22). Lipson points to the flexibility of the term as used, for example, by the faculty of the PhD program in Composition and Cultural Rhetoric at Syracuse University,3 as well as to the common understanding within that program of all “rhetorics as intimately connected to the cultures they arise in, and as constituting and affecting cultures as well as being constituted by cultures” (22). Lipson’s use of cultural rhetoric, then, seems to gesture toward a

2 I take up a critique of such universalizing in Chapter 4. 3 See http://ccr.syr.edu/

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reconsidering of the study of rhetoric in general, not only as a way of reframing and naming a particular specialization or approach to rhetorical study. For that reason, I see the term cultural rhetoric as having the potential to further muddy the waters regarding what it is that (what we currently call) comparative rhetoric does. If cultural rhetoric, as the acknowledgement of “rhetorics as intimately connected to the cultures they arise in,” becomes more broadly associated with all sorts of rhetorical inquiry (which the Syracuse Composition and Cultural Rhetoric program website’s statement of engagement with “technical writing,” “Digital rhetoric,” global English,” and “feminist studies,” among other areas, suggests), then the intervention that comparative rhetoric tries to make loses its defining term and risks disappearing from the list of recognized areas of interest (while “Caribbean rhetoric” appears on the CCR site, no umbrella category for study of the rhetorics of or associated with non-euroamerican cultures appears, since “cultural rhetoric” as used on the site applies to all rhetoric). While perhaps ultimately an erosion of distinctions within the field of rhetoric and composition is desirable (such that digital rhetoric and women’s studies are a given as part of rhetorical study, for example), as a perspective that is still a sort of minority within rhetorical study, having a name to gather around is, at this stage, still important. Further, as Arabella Lyon points out, while problematic in some regards, the term comparative links the study of comparative rhetoric nominally to cognate specializations in other fields, such as comparative philosophy, religion, and literature (351), connections that promote interdisciplinary conversations and alliances. All this raises the question, what is the purpose of comparative rhetoric? Or more broadly, as scholar of comparative literature R. Radhakrishnan asks, “Why Compare?” and, “who will benefit from the comparative performance?” (458). One response is that comparative studies make us rethink the traditions that we identify with. In a special issue of College English focused on Chinese rhetoric, Mao writes that the “recent turn to Chinese rhetoric—and to other rhetorical traditions—has been largely mobilized by the need to reexamine and reconceptualize rhetoric’s purposes and functions beyond the paradigm of Western rhetoric” (“Searching” 330). Through such study we are also “engaging the Other” (338), an interaction which has the potential to not only change our own ground that we stand on, but also the space of the “contact zone” (Pratt) shared between cultures. Comparative rhetoric helps us to value difference and communicate between and within cultures. Kennedy, while his methods are problematic, also gives several compelling reasons for doing comparative work. Although couching it in terms of a search for universals and a quest for “a General Theory of Rhetoric that will apply in all societies,” Kennedy calls for a searching for commonality that acknowledges the “different forms in different cultures” that rhetoric takes (1). Kennedy also foregrounds application, although he places that goal outside of the scope of his own book. The findings and productions of comparative studies should not simply serve to increase one or another group’s knowledge, but should be “appl[ied …] to contemporary cross-cultural communication” (1). Work done in comparative philosophy may also shed some light onto the purpose or goal of comparative work in general. Doing extensive comparative study of Chinese philosophy, David Hall and Roger Ames, whose work has been influential on work in comparative rhetoric (e.g., Mao; Combs), address their work as paving the way for a dialogue between cultures. In their introduction to Anticipating China, they reflect on

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their project as being “about the activity of intercultural philosophy” and state that “its ultimate aim is to encourage strategic and tactical reflections that serve to abet intercultural conversations” (xxiii). They also see their work as being inwardly directed to euroamerican thinking as well as outwardly to Chinese thought, facilitating greater understanding of both and allowing for borrowing, integration, and responsible appropriation of ideas from both sides. To be responsible, such appropriation must be paired with an understanding and ongoing reevaluation of both sides: “We hope, as well, that our work will help to recover novel elements within our own cultural resources that resonate with aspects of the classical Chinese sensibility. For it is only when we become sensitive to indigenous [euroamerican] elements that resonate with the important Chinese values and doctrines that we will be able to appropriate elements of that alien [sic] culture to enrich our own experience,” a process which they hope “will [also] facilitate the complementary operations on the part of Chinese translators of Western concepts” (xxiii). It is important here that Hall and Ames characterize those doing comparative work as “translators,” which highlights the work of localization, of the reworking of metaphor and idiom that textual translation involves. Comparative work “translates” between cultures, but does not simply transmit ideas unchanged. Hall and Ames also emphasize their hope for their own comparative work to benefit all cultures involved, to encourage dialogue and enrichment that flows both ways. “In sum: the path we are endeavoring to clear to China should encourage traffic in both directions” (xxiii; emphasis added). I see as valuable in Hall and Ames’s reflection that they acknowledge that through comparison, cultural appropriation will take place; what is important is that such appropriation be carried out responsibly and respectfully, through a thorough (though necessarily also always partial) understanding of how those things appropriated fit and resonate within their natal and adopted contexts. Another way to think of the purpose of comparative rhetoric is as striving to build a greater understanding of our fellow humans and to further a sense of global commonality and community. Although not focused on comparison per se, in Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, pragmatist Richard Rorty puts forth “sensitivity” to others as a requirement for “human solidarity.” As Rorty puts it, “increased sensitivity makes it more difficult to marginalize people” (xvi); such sensitivity is brought about by imagination and description, tasks that fall into the purview of comparative work. Rorty writes that the process of increasing sensitivity for all people “is a matter of detailed description of what unfamiliar people are like and of redescription of what we ourselves are like” (xvi). Such an agenda of (re)description certainly resonates with Lyon’s call for “thick cultural description” as an element of comparative approaches (351) and with Hall and Ames’s careful contextualization applied to all sides of a comparison, not just toward looking out and cataloguing what is seen. A further purpose of comparative rhetoric is to contribute to broader efforts at epistemological decolonizing, a response to the continuation of universalizing and eurocentric “enlightenment” thinking within, especially, the American academy. In her 2012 Conference on College Composition and Communication Chair’s Address in St. Louis, Malea Powell calls on the conference to work toward a decolonizing of rhetoric. Powell points to a necessity of rethinking composition and rhetoric in all its forms, to move beyond the imperialist moment of its founding. As she states:

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Our discipline founds itself at the heart of the narrative of modernity, and it is deeply mired in the muck of the logic of coloniality. We mark our origin in precisely the same way—and in the same moment—as the colonial matrix of power—in the Renaissance’s reinvention of classical Greece and its own middle ages, a reinvention necessary for empire. We are a part of it, we are part of maintaining it, and now, I believe, we must be part of de-linking and de-chaining those discourses from their imperial designs. (393–94) A part of this de-linking involves broadening perspectives on effective and valid ways of making meaning. Addressing both scholarship and teaching, Powell urges us to “recogniz[e] all available knowledge-making practices as real options, and about representing them as viable and valid” (401; emphasis in original). Attending to how we teach writing classes, Powell points to an ethical imperative for scholars and educators to learn deeply about more than just a single strain of rhetoric: “if we’re really trying to teach them [our students] to use ‘the available means of persuasion,’ like I’ve always been told we are, then let’s all learn the logics of more than one culture’s available means!” (402; emphasis in original). In this call, Powell echoes Arabella Lyon’s urging of composition scholars to study deeply the rhetoric of at least one other tradition (Lyon 364). I see the work of comparative rhetoric as contributing to this broadening of understanding and teaching of myriad forms of meaning-making that Powell urges all branches of rhetoric, communication, and writing studies to take up. Notions of what comparative rhetoric is and what it does continue to develop. During the 2013 Rhetoric Society of America Summer Institute, participants in a seminar focused on comparative rhetoric and led by LuMing Mao and Arabella Lyon drew up an as-yet unpublished manifesto outlining “the what and how of comparative rhetoric.” This manifesto lays out many of the principles outlined above. It lists two of the goals of comparative rhetoric as aiming “to discover and/or recover under-represented and under- recognized discursive practices” and “to enrich, engage, and intervene in the dominant, euroamerican rhetorical traditions and practices,” objectives which underline the notion of comparative rhetoric as both a looking out and a looking in. The manifesto also states a goal of “promot[ing] and practic[ing] a way of knowing and being that moves away from defining/claiming a finite set of objects of study and that transcends borders, binaries, and biases.” By questioning and blurring traditional boundaries, comparative rhetoric does important work in promoting connections between and interdependence among cultures, communities, and disciplines. In doing so, comparative rhetoric breaks down the modernist (and “scientistic,” to borrow James Berlin’s term) divide between objective (and often privileged and presumed wiser) observer and subject (often exoticized, objectified, and disempowered). In this way, comparative rhetoric reaffirms its commitment to the path taken by feminist epistemologies and the critical turn in anthropology, as well as other critically-conscious movements. Such a stance opens those doing comparative rhetoric to change as they engage with others. As Lisa Blankenship suggests in her dissertation on “Rhetorical Empathy,” this kind of opening to the other requires vulnerability, and only through this vulnerability is it effective. Radhakrishnan also points to the necessity of a possibility of change for comparison to be meaningful, as well as to the need for comparison to take place “within the coordinates of a level playing field” wherein all participants (including those initiating the comparison) are “willing to be rendered vulnerable by the gaze of the ‘Other’” (471). Finally, as a fourth goal the

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comparative rhetoric manifesto calls to “embrace different grids of intelligibility or different terms of engagement for opening new rhetorical places/spaces,” a goal that broadens the scope of what it means “to compare.” Today’s comparative rhetoric does more than look for how other cultures’ communication practices match with existing notions of rhetoric (e.g., Kennedy’s approach). Rather, it actively works to expand what is meant by “rhetoric” and to develop new ways of conducting rhetorical study. While some scholars continue to do important and constructive work focused on formalized traditions of communication and persuasion, others look more broadly to engage multiple forms of meaning-making. The various goals and perspectives of comparative rhetoric have developed from engagement with numerous scholars within and without the fields of rhetoric and composition scholarship. They have also evolved through the ongoing inquiries and theories of scholars who identify themselves as doing comparative rhetoric. What is important from this work is the variety of ways they embody the theories behind comparative rhetoric into their own work and how that work feeds back into the evolving theories and methodologies of comparative rhetoric.

Methodological Considerations: Engaging Euroamerican and Japanese Rhetoric By focusing on Japanese rhetoric I am studying a culture I am not born to, and by setting out to extend the applicability of certain Japanese rhetorical features, I not only speak as a cultural and linguistic outsider, but am also certainly appropriating parts of that culture for my own ends. How then do I engage responsibly with Japanese culture and rhetoric? How do I meet my goal of improving intercultural understanding, as well as expanding rhetoric and composition studies’ vision of rhetoric and the “available means” of persuasion and meaning making? How do I make sure that any cultural appropriation of elements of Japanese traditions and ways of meaning-making that occur as part of this project is done responsibly? I certainly do not find these challenges insurmountable, and as my discussion of uchi and soto (Japanese inside and outside) in Chapter 1 will show, distinctions between inside and outside are not absolute. Others have shared my ethical concerns before, and I am fortunate to have a range of perspectives to draw from as I strive to see Japanese culture from an increasingly insider perspective, account for the influence of my own cultural heritage, identify the new meanings and associations resulting from the intellectual mingling of the two, and take care to respect all involved. In addition to those principles laid out by the RSA comparative rhetoric manifesto, I consider research in comparative rhetoric as guided by a consciousness of the dangers of orientalism and a dedication to thick description as a way to mitigate those risks. While Edward Said’s pioneering work Orientalism focuses primarily on euroamerican constructions of the Middle East, his attention to the exoticised Other as a euroamerican construct applies in other regions and cultures studied by comparative rhetoric as well. One means of guarding against such exoticism is a combination of deep reading and thick description, as advocated by Arabella Lyon. Similar to Jacqueline Jones Royster’s use of thick description to present the lives of African American women rhetors as a means to describe without appropriating, Lyon calls for use of “thick cultural description” and the “deep study of key texts” as a way for euroamerican rhetoricians to

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responsibly study and write about another culture’s rhetorical traditions (351). Lyon’s recommendation and Said’s critiques inform my approach as a whole. As mentioned previously, I also position my project, and the work of comparative rhetoric as a whole, as contributing to a global turn within rhetoric and composition studies. Such a turn involves not only a looking outward, but also a recognition of commonality and interconnectedness. Although in the body of the dissertation I argue for a high degree of transferability for Japanese notions of uchi/soto beyond their home context, I do not mean to ignore the situatedness of that rhetorical tradition, nor the very meaningful distinctions between the Japanese and euroamerican traditions. I draw from Hall and Ames’s comparative work with classical Chinese and European philosophy to establish a few guiding principles for my engagement with Japanese rhetoric of uchi/soto. First, I maintain a focus on features that are “importantly present”—not just “merely present,” but having a significant impact on people’s lives (see Hall and Ames Anticipating China; I return to this concept in Chapter 1). Attention to “importantly present” features not only keeps us focused on salient features, but also on ones that are more easily and widely verifiable. Uchi/soto is widely observed by scholars and laypersons alike. Secondly, Hall and Ames’s work demonstrates a need for awareness of ways of thinking that are culturally contingent— and that study of a different culture often requires close attention to and explicit re- examination of one’s own. I try to follow this directive by examining interactions between Japanese and euroamerican cultures by putting uchi/soto and my interpretations of it into conversation with other theories in rhetoric and composition, particularly Burke’s identification in Chapter 4, as well as postcolonial hybridity in Chapter 2. Paired to a need to identify those features that are “importantly present” is a need to focus on examples that are representative, narrow enough to distinguish the feature they claim to represent while broad enough to accommodate the variety of experiences they must account for. To this end, I draw guidance from Kenneth Burke’s “representative anecdote.” In A Grammar of Motives, Burke lays out the importance of the kinds of examples and terms one uses for explicating a theory. Burke introduces what he calls a “representative anecdote” as a way to find terms appropriate to talk about that which is being represented “as a form in conformity with which the vocabulary is constructed” (59). The anecdote requires enough scope to be applicable to what it represents (in this case, rhetoric); it also must be reduced or narrow enough to be useable as a descriptive tool. It follows, then, that the choice of anecdote shapes the terms and resulting discourse: “If the originating anecdote is not representative, a vocabulary developed in strict conformity with it will not be representative” (59). By Burke’s explanation, choice of anecdotes as well as how they are characterized sets the horizon for what can and cannot be seen as rhetoric. Focus on the “importantly present” and careful choice of “representative anecdotes” both guide my choice of sites of inquiry within Japanese rhetoric and inform my theory-building. While these principles help direct choice of topics and development of terms, the question of transferability or relevance across cultures remains. The comparative rhetoric manifesto, in its statement on methodology, calls for “an outright rejection of assumed parity, equivalence, difference, or similarity” (emphasis added). Certainly it is dangerous to simply take as a given that the concepts from one tradition are

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equally significant, useful, or even useable within another culture. Hall and Ames provide some theoretical justification for the possibility of transfer, a possibility they hold is necessary if we are ever to think comparison and intercultural dialogue is even achievable. They hold that cultural differences are not inherently incommensurable, and defend a concept of a single human “capital-C Culture” as an antidote to the paralysis of cultural relativism. As they describe it, “small-c cultures are but particular manners in which the vague field of principles and practices constituting capital-C Culture is variously focused,” a claim they put in contrast to a universalist vision of “one culture” (Anticipating 166). Differences and commonalities exist, and communication is possible between cultures, at least to the extent that such communication is still productive for all sides, even without a total transference of nuance. Hall and Ames’s notion of “Culture” constituted by many “cultures” resonates with Rorty’s ideal of solidarity, which similarly relies on some measure of commensurability between the world’s many ways of being. I take these ideas as an underpinning for my approach to Japanese rhetoric, particularly to my argument that the meaning-making dynamic of inside and outside is both most clearly seen in the context of Japan, where it is importantly present, but that as a theory it can apply much more broadly, thanks to the commonality of metaphors of inside and outside in many cultures, particularly the prevalence of those metaphors within existing rhetorical scholarship and theory (a connection and line of thinking I develop in Chapter 1). Finally, a word about the texts that inform my study. One of the challenges I face in this project is my position as cultural and linguistic outsider. While I have some training in speaking and reading Japanese, my ability is nowhere near that of a native speaker and reader, keeping me largely reliant on translated texts. Further, I form a number of my conclusions by looking closely at English-language scholarship in fields of anthropology, linguistics, religion, art history, and cultural studies. Many of these works discuss phenomena which, when considered from a disciplinary perspective within rhetoric and composition, can be seen as instances of rhetorical action and a vibrant, local rhetorical tradition. As fitting for a comparative, theory-building project, I also draw on several euroamerican texts and ideas, putting them in conversation with the processes of inside–outside meaning-making I see at work in Japanese rhetoric. In particular, I look closely at Kenneth Burke’s theory of identification, putting it alongside inside–outside positionalities as a theory for the building and maintaining of affiliations. I also, though less extensively, put inside–outside, intercultural meaning-making in Japan alongside the idea of postcolonial hybridity (Bhabha). In both cases, I undertake what Hall and Ames call a method of “ars contextualis, [which] presumes that it is often impossible to clarify what something is without saying a great deal about what it is not” (Anticipating xx). By engaging these various theories, I distinguish them and further illuminate the potential contributions of both. The goal of this contextualizing is not to diminish one or the other, but to highlight what they do differently, where they overlap, and gesture toward how they might work alongside one another to do productive work. While I often read historical events and trends as “texts,” focusing on the meaning-making work of various activities, policies, and beliefs, I also focus on several print and video texts. These texts are themselves intercultural in nature and focus. At several points I engage with manga and anime text that are available to both Japanese and English-speaking fans. Manga are Japanese comics, usually published serially in weekly or monthly magazines running several series at once. Popular titles are often made

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available in compilation volumes—manga localized for the U.S. are mostly found in this latter form. Anime are animated television series and movies; among North American fans, the term refers to cartoons of Japanese origin, while in Japan it refers to animation in general. Many, but not all, anime storylines originate from popular manga series and “light novels” (serialized text-only novels often published in the same magazines that run manga series). Manga and anime both are directed to a wide range of audiences, usually characterized by age group and gender. These pop culture works are important not only for their content and the role they play in maintaining (and challenging or changing) a sense of Japaneseness in Japan (propositions I explore in Chapters 2 and 3), but as texts that explore and build connections to the outer world. These texts and their availability to fan communities outside of Japan demonstrate transnational flows moving from Japan to euroamerican cultures, a reversal of the oft-studied flow from the United States and Western Europe to other parts of the world. Interestingly, as global fans of anime and manga have become more aware of the intricacies of Japanese language and culture, they demand greater attention to quality of translations. Fan produced translations and professional localizations alike regularly include explanations of cultural references and areas where translation may be disputed or have multiple meanings. In addition to these pop-culture texts that are directed primarily to Japanese audiences but are increasingly available to global audiences, I also make use of memoirs written by two American authors of Japanese ancestry, reflecting on their experiences shifting between cultures and building identities as Asian American. These texts, which I address in Chapter 4, demonstrate the use of inside–outside positionalities for building identity and negotiating between cultures outside of Japan. Together, these texts and sites of inquiry provide a foundation for the theory of inside–outside positionalities. While this dissertation focuses on building that theory, it will be the place of future work to further develop and apply that theory as it fits and pertains to other sites in addition to Japan.

Locating Japanese Rhetoric Within Comparative Inquiry As a specialty within rhetoric and composition studies, comparative rhetoric has engaged with a wide variety of rhetorical traditions and cultures as it continues to expand the envelope of understandings of rhetoric. Scholars of Chinese rhetoric—an area of study of Asian rhetorics that has received a great deal of attention—have contributed to changing the terms of engagement in comparative studies by exploring and applying key terms from classical Chinese rhetoric rather than relying on the classical Greek lexicon. Xing Lu’s Rhetoric in Ancient China, Fifth to Third Century B.C.E. is a strong example of such comparative work, as are essays by Marry Garret, LuMing Mao, and Arabella Lyon, among others. Such comparative work does not limit itself to studies of ancient rhetoric. Xing Lu’s Rhetoric in Ancient China includes a section on “Implications of Contemporary Chinese Communication,” focusing on “two areas of contemporary Chinese communication […] demonstrably influenced by the schools of thought and individual thinkers” discussed in the rest of the book, and examining their appearance in Mao Zedong’s government and in contemporary interpersonal communication in China

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(303–4). Xiaoye You’s Writing in the Devil’s Tongue, while primarily focusing on the history and localization of English composition in China from 1862 to the present, addresses the continuity of certain classical Chinese rhetorical traditions and their influence on contemporary Chinese and English composition in China. Studies of comparative rhetoric also extend into studies of rhetorics of the diaspora; notable in the realm of Asian American rhetoric are LuMing Mao’s Reading Chinese Fortune Cookie, Morris Young’s Minor Re/Visions, and their co-edited collection Representations. Comparative rhetoric also shares a strong affinity with studies of what are sometimes called indigenous rhetorics, discussing lineages of pre-colonial traditions and engagement with, appropriation, and hybridization of euroamerican rhetoric (e.g., Stromberg; Powell; and Baca; see also the 2011 CCC special issue 63.1 on indigenous and ethnic rhetorics). While study of Chinese, Indian, First People’s, and diasporic rhetorics have established those respective cultures as important sites of rhetorical study, scholarship in comparative rhetoric has only tentatively begun to engage with Japan’s rhetorical tradition.4 Study of Japanese rhetoric offers an important contribution to studies of comparative rhetoric and the global turn of composition and rhetoric studies in general, especially because of its unique discursive history with the West and China. However, works announcing themselves as studies of Japanese rhetoric often dwell on the history of euroamerican rhetoric in Japan or focus primarily on literary traditions. Massimiliano Tomasi’s Rhetoric in Modern Japan deals mostly with the euroamerican tradition as adopted in Japan. Tomasi devotes one chapter to the “Japanese Rhetorical Tradition prior to the Meiji Era” (i.e., prior to 1868 C.E.), which surveys traditions of literary criticism and poetry, formal preaching training in some schools of Buddhism, comedic storytelling, and “itinerant speaking” of storytellers and preachers. Satoshi Ishii calls for greater attention to Japan’s pre-Meiji rhetoric, which he characterizes as “a strong deep undercurrent of speech activities in Japanese society” (391). Problematically, Ishii describes Buddhist preaching strategies side-by-side with the five canons of Aristotelian rhetoric (395–96), an approach that anticipates Kennedy’s and risks ensconcing western rhetoric as the standard for measuring rhetorical awareness in a culture. In common amongst these examples of “indigenous” Japanese rhetoric described by Tomasi and Ishii is a limiting of rhetoric to traditions involving formal training. Other studies of Japanese rhetoric look at specific instances of rhetorical practice, uncovering interesting cases but not identifying trends or theories having wider application: Stephen Carter explores courtiers’ uses of early Japanese literature to transmit (and thereby preserve) imperial court culture to the new warrior elites following the 12th Century rise of the military government (or bafuku) and the waning of the imperial court’s political power. Other works abound that, while not announcing themselves as rhetorical studies, focus on topics listed by others (e.g., Tomassi) as making up part of Japan’s rhetorical tradition, particularly literary criticism, preaching, and story-telling. Works by Heinz Morioka, Miyoko Sasaki, and Lorie Brau examine continuations of Buddhist preaching practices and how these have carried on into story telling and comic story telling (rakugo) performances. William LaFleur, writing from the perspective of comparative literature,

4 More work is available on Japanese American rhetoric, as part of studies of Asian American rhetoric.

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explores the influence of Buddhist themes on Medieval Japanese literature and Nō theater. Again, these works focus on particular cases without promoting a broad-reaching theory of a Japanese regional rhetoric. Departing from the model of rhetoric as formalized training that Tomasi and Ishii seem to share, while also identifying broader trends that extend beyond the individual case, Kathy Wolfe explores pre-Meiji Japanese rhetoric in action, focusing on “the right use of true words.” Wolf identifies a rhetorical tradition at work in Shingon Buddhism (a form of esoteric Buddhism that traveled from India, through China, and to Japan in the 8th Century) and Shinto (Japanese animism), exemplified in the metaphysical power ascribed by both religions to particular words and ways of speaking, and harnessed by the nascent imperial family in its use of Shinto histories to legitimize its political power. Wolfe argues that “lingering traces” of “the right use of true words” continues in modern Japan, particularly in linguistic indirectness, the ideal of “heart-to-heart communication” between Japanese, and the distinction between polite outer (tatemae) and inner “true” (honne) feelings (213–15). In my own comparative work with Japanese rhetoric, I adopt a perspective similar to Wolfe’s in that rather than relying on explicit training as a defining feature of sites of rhetoric, I search for signs of a rhetorical tradition revealed by enactment and use, and that is enriched by its engagements with outside forces. Positioning my study as part of the “global turn” of rhetoric and composition, I also seek to bring some key features of Japanese rhetoric into conversation with other traditions. To that end, I focus on the dynamic between inside and outside within Japanese culture, a dynamic that shapes Japanese communication and meaning-making, and which I also leverage as the foundation for what I believe is a more broadly applicable theory of rhetoric that I call inside–outside positionalities.

Inside, Outside, and Shifting Identities in Japanese Rhetoric I center my dissertation work around shifting notions of inside (Japanese uchi) and outside (J. soto). I suggest that Japan has been engaged in a long tradition of cultural “shifting,” which extends (though expressing itself in forms both old and new) to the present. Through this interplay of cultural inside and outside, Japan borrowed from and localized new traditions, in the process changing both the things borrowed as well as notions of what constitutes “Japaneseness.” The oldest known records by Japanese writers, Kojiki or Records of Ancient Matters and Nihongi or Chronicles of Japan, date to 712 and 720 C.E. respectively. These early eighth-century texts represent the beginning of any documents rhetoricians might study for features of a local rhetorical tradition.5 The archaeological record certainly extends much further back, and the early Japanese records, modeled on Chinese

5 Chinese histories mention the land of Wa (Japan) in the first century B.C.E. and help fill some of the gaps before the 721 date.

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imperial histories, claim to record part of what must have been an extensive oral history.6 These early accounts are part political history and part religious cosmology bound inseparably together. These texts, alongside sacred practices of what became known as Shinto, may, as Kathy Wolfe suggests, carry traces of an indigenous rhetorical tradition. What can be named as Japanese rhetoric, then, begins in an indeterminate space where it is impossible to know where native traditions and trends end and external, particularly Chinese, influences begin. Early records were written using Chinese characters, in texts modeled on Chinese genres (histories and poetry collections), for a court modeling itself after the imperial pattern of the Tang dynasty (618–907 C.E.). Yet, it seems these records were composed with an eye toward establishing Japan’s own sovereignty and uniqueness, maintaining its own cosmology and positioning itself as its own center, rather than peripheral to the Tang.7 Considering these intertwined trends, these texts represent a tradition that blends and modifies inside and out. Already aware of a potentially disruptive relationship with a powerful and also different neighbor (the Tang), early historical Japan might be thought of as (always) already globalized.8 Connected by diplomatic envoys and trade, and borrowing heavily from Tang culture, the kingdoms that eventually became imperial Japan found themselves both desiring Tang cultural innovations and goods, while also wanting to maintain their own traditions and perception of uniqueness.9 In this setting I see what I believe is a key feature of Japanese rhetoric at work, a shifting between insider and outsider status, what anthropologist Jane Bachnik calls the “uchi/soto dynamic.” I present this example of the uchi/soto dynamic at work in early Japanese history to establish a few key points. First, that the uchi/soto dynamic may or may not be an indigenous tradition—we see it at work today in Japanese culture as a way of negotiating affinity and difference (as I explain in Chapter 1), but we already see its effects in the historical record during a moment of rapid cultural change (and no doubt, upheaval). It is

6 Thomas Kasulis suggests that Kojiki and Nihongi (also called Nihonshoki) have different audiences: Kojiki, written in Japanese, was for a home audience (though still limited to the literate elite), while Nihonshoki, written in Chinese and following a Chinese style, “would be accessible to any elite, educated East Asian reader” (81). Kasulis sees Nihonshoki as “part of a larger international public relations campaign” to present Japan as an established, civilized country to its East Asian neighbors (81). 7 In their introduction and explanatory notes accompanying translations of Chinese imperial accounts of contact with early Japanese, de Barry et al note the early Japanese court’s “pretensions to equality with the Chinese” (6). 8 Some readers may object to my use of terms like globalized and nation to discuss developments prior to the spread of European imperialism, colonialism, and modernity. I intentionally dehistoricize these terms in order to emphasize similarities between rhetorical practices surrounding cultural identity in early Japan and those issues scholars now study as part of the “global turn”; that is, to extend the global turn in Rhetoric and Composition to include historical as well as contemporary studies. Further, I want to disengage the forces or trends represented by these terms from reliance on contact with euroamerican cultures (the West is not the predicate for the contact zone). 9 See Chino; I explore this idea in detail in Chapter 2.

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less important to know whether what became the uchi/soto dynamic had already developed in the Japanese archipelago prior to contact with the Tang, as a result of contact, or even as a borrowing itself; what is meaningful is that for as long as uchi/soto10 has existed in a form identifiable by 21st Century observers, as long as there has been a historical record that the dynamic might be assembled and retroactively identified from, the uchi/soto dynamic has been used not just internally between Japanese but also between Japan and other cultures to establish and modify an identifiably “Japanese” cultural identity. While Bachnik’s uchi/soto dynamic names a particularly pervasive feature of Japanese communication, deserving of study for its own sake, the concept has wider applicability as well. As Bachnik points out, the uchi/soto dynamic is based in a seemingly fundamental concept in many if not all human culture: the metaphorical use of inside and outside (“Introduction” 6–7). Throughout this project, I work to recuperate the uchi/soto dynamic as rhetoric, as a key element within the Japanese rhetorical tradition and as an element central to construction and maintenance of a Japanese cultural identity. Moreover, I further extend this element as the basis of a theory of inter-group interaction and meaning-making that I call inside–outside positionalities. My project on the uchi/soto dynamic as rhetoric directly participates in the on- going dialogue in rhetoric and composition scholarship on the use of metaphors of inside and outside, or on a range of related spatial metaphors, as means of describing and strategizing rhetorical moves. Spatial metaphors—of which inside/outside is but one— have a long history in theories of rhetoric. Nedra Reynolds points out that in Phaedrus, “Plato draws attention to the role of place” in rhetoric (1; emphasis in original). Tellingly, the scene involves moving from inside of Athens to the outside, into the countryside. Also pointing to the early connection between place and the Athenian tradition, Jenny Rice reminds us that topoi, so important in Aristotle’s theories of rhetoric, are rhetorical spaces that, in the case of “regional rhetorics,” actually “help to create space” (203). Most of us are familiar with the metaphor of “common ground” often applied to Kenneth Burke’s theory of rhetorical identification, and the “scene” of his pentad adds another “place” to the spatial lexicon of rhetorical theory. Krista Ratcliffe employs spatial metaphors as part of “rhetorical listening,” identifying place as central to both modern and postmodern theories of identification ranging from Freud, to Burke, to Fuss, to Butler, as well as her own (49). In describing the rhetorical “moves” (another spatial metaphor) of rhetorical listening, Ratcliffe lists “promoting an understanding of self and other” (26; emphasis original). She glosses understanding in terms of “standing under, that is, consciously standing under discourses that surround us and others while consciously acknowledging all our particular—and very fluid—standpoints” (28). This list could easily go on, as we need not look very far to find other spatial metaphors in our theories of rhetoric.

10 I am not claiming the process described or thought of in terms of uchi and soto; rather, that something that we today can read using these terms and the dynamic they represent was present in early historical Japan.

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While spatial metaphors—including metaphors of inside and outside—abound, some scholars warn of the potential exclusionary bias built into theories based around such figurative language. Deborah Mutnick raises the concern that in writing classes, “to become an ‘insider,’” students “must assume the existence of outsiders and accept a system of exclusion” (quoted in Noe 596). Mark Noe, responding to Mutnick and others’ concerns, “question[s] the continued usefulness of inside/outside as a liberatory metaphor” (596). Noe argues that the pairing of inside/outside relies on the idea of an exclusionary “boundary,” a division often enforced and policed by power (whether border patrols or academic gatekeepers, the effect is nearly the same). Echoing Gloria Anzaldúa, Noe suggests a turn to border metaphors, suggesting “that the border does not trace a line between the inside and the outside” but rather “conceptualizes an amorphous space that is neither inside nor outside, that resists being conceptualized in terms of binaries” (597). Through my exploration of the Japanese uchi/soto dynamic, I offer another way of imagining the relationship between inside and outside, not as containerization or organized around static boundaries, but as a fluid process involving many back-and-forth movements across a place of familiarity and attentive to how each such movement helps define, qualify, or shape that relationship.

Inside–Outside Positionalities and Its Contributions to Rhetoric and Composition I consider this dissertation project as both a study into intercultural meaning- making and as a study of Japanese rhetoric. To claim it is first and foremost one more than the other would be misleading. As a work of comparative rhetoric, it is simultaneously focused inward and outward, and studies Japanese rhetoric for its own sake and as a way to expand not just what we think of as Japanese rhetoric, but rhetoric in general. Inside–outside positionalities, the result of appropriation and repurposing, helps track and foster other appropriations within cultures and to see and enhance our global interconnectedness. As an appropriation and expansion of the uchi/soto dynamic, inside–outside positionalities engages what has previously been seen as a way of indexing social relations and recasts it as a process of meaning-making that draws on notions of cultural inside and outside (domestic and foreign, indigenous and exogenous, etc) to construct and maintain cultural, regional, and other group identities. I use the descriptor inside–outside positionalities to name my evolving model for several reasons. I include a dash between inside and outside rather than a slash as seen in the uchi/soto, because a slash often appears in descriptions of binary pairings, highlighting the terms’ “or” relationship. While a slash can signify an alternate meaning and the closeness of flip-sides of a card or coin, the slashed pairing maintains an ease of separation, as well as an acknowledgement that the slash joining is more commonly perceived as separate entities. A slash can indicate an alternate term, but suggests that one or the other could work just fine. A dash signifies a more fundamental joining of terms— a separation of the two breaks or diminishes the meaning. The dash between inside and outside also visually represents the pairing as polar, in the sense that Hall and Ames use the term, as conceptual opposites who are joined such that one flows into and constitutes the other, to such a degree that one cannot ever say where one begins and the other ends. The polar, dash pairing represents a process of becoming; to recall Hall and Ames’s

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example, “‘as different as night and day’ in this [polar] world becomes ‘as different as night-becoming-day from day-becoming-night’” (Thinking From 127). I use the term positionalities to invoke the idea of positionality from feminist epistemology, particularly Alcoff’s use, and social science research methodologies. Alcoff offers a definition of woman as positionality, an account that highlights context and relations with others. “The positional definition[…] makes her identity relative to a constantly shifting context, to a situation that includes a network of elements involving others, the objective economic conditions, cultural and political institutions and ideologies, and so on” (433). Alcoff’s concept of positionality also situates woman as actor within the network of meaning-making: “this view should not imply that the concept of ‘woman’ is determined solely by external elements and that the woman herself is merely a passive recipient of an identity created by these forces. Rather, she herself is part of the historicized, fluid movement, and she therefore actively con- tributes to the context within which her position can be delineated” (434). Like Alcoff’s positionality, I want to emphasize the relationships that define inside and outside as shifting, contextual, linked to identity and relationships, and involving agency. In anthropology and other field research, positionality often refers to researchers’ insider or outsider positions in relation to the groups they study; i.e. inside and outside are positionalities one occupies. Drawing from feminist theory, these methodological positions are likewise contextual. They are also epistemic in that they influence the kind and shape of the knowledge made through research, another connotation I hope to carry over to my theory. My pluralization of the term into positionalities suggests a simultaneous multiplicity of positions, both between inside and outside but also of the location of the terms themselves—the expanding horizon that can never fully encompass inside–outside. The plural form also better accommodates some of the more complex and interesting examples of inside–outside meaning-making present in Japan and other points of inside–outside contact and appropriation. Developing a theory of inside–outside positionalities, a move I undertake in Chapter 1, contributes to rhetoric and composition studies and the broader field of English in several ways. By focusing on Japanese rhetoric, the study contributes several cases of meaning-making in Japan, a site largely overlooked by rhetoric and composition scholars. My work brings a new perspective to the body of Japanese studies scholarship (largely anthropological and linguistic). By bringing in consideration of meaning-making and the epistemological focus of rhetorical studies, it both casts previous research in a new light and makes new connections between those works. This study expands understanding of rhetoric. Much of my work focuses on meaning-making over time, wherein the rhetorical effect is sometimes more historic than immediate. I also look at meaning-making as it applies to performativity and activity— not only to spoken words, but also lived, repeated actions and the effect they have on changing notions of cultural identity. I look at memory as rhetorical action—not as the memorization of a speech or other performance in preparation for delivery, but as means, end, and site of rhetorical action (see especially the latter half of Chapter 2, on nostalgia). As a rethinking of how notions of inside and outside contribute to new meanings, this project offers alternatives to theories of hybridity and creolization as explanations of intercultural meaning-making.

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Overview of Chapters In Chapter 1, “Negotiating Inside and Outside: From Uchi/Soto to Inside–Outside Positionalities,” I introduce the grounding concept of my project, the “uchi/soto dynamic,” and work through the necessary moves to expand it into a theory of inside– outside positionalities. Drawing from Jane Bachnik and others’ work in Linguistics and Anthropology, I survey previous explanations of the dynamic. I demonstrate how this principle is “importantly present” at all levels of Japanese culture, as well as having relevance to other world cultures. I explore how earlier explanations miss the meaning- making potential of the uchi/soto dynamic, and propose some amendments to those theories to bring the concept more in line with studies of rhetoric. Perhaps of most importance, I argue for moving from a theory based in linguistic indexing to one based in reiteration, highlighting the historicity and meaning-making potential of the dynamic. In addition to applying the theory to interactions between individuals and small groups, as seen in previous work on uchi/soto, I gesture toward an expansion of the dynamic from a micro to a macro level, applying it to intercultural interactions, a move I develop more fully in the following chapter. In Chapter 2, “ Positioning Cultural Inside and Outside: Icons of Foreignness and Nostalgic Identities,” I make the case for expanding the uchi/soto dynamic into what I call inside–outside positionalities. I further develop my reimagining of the uchi/soto dynamic by integrating art historian Kaori Chino’s theory of a “double binary” and cultural “safety valve” at play between early Japanese and Tang-dynasty Chinese art. This re-visioning of Bachnik and Chino’s models provides a new way of seeing the construction of a regional or cultural identity based on interaction and interdependence between regional groups. It also acts as an alternative to hybridity as an interpretive schema, one that avoids both the cultural specificity and baggage the term sometimes carries (Taylor) and the effacement of specificity blanket use of the term sometimes entails (Mao Fortune Cookie). Also in this chapter, I further develop understanding of inside–outside positionalities by linking it to nostalgia. Nostalgia involves a reworking of memory and often conflates “inner” with “past” and “outside” with “present” or “modern.” Nostalgia acts as a form of comparison across time, and though it ostensibly looks back, it is more often about the present and future than the actual past. I argue that nostalgia is a mode of doing inside–outside positionalities, a way of recasting historical notions of inside and outside to structure a new sense of inner cultural self for the present and future. In Chapter 2, I explore two sites: The Japanese Christmas cake as an example of inside–outside meaning making occurring over time; and the anime series Taishō Baseball Girls (2009) as a case of a nostalgic reimagining of Japan’s pre-war past that celebrates the shifting and flux of Japan’s rapid modernization and that re-remembers Japan as “always already” incorporating inside and outside elements. In Chapter 3, “Japanese Femininity as a Trope for Maintaining a Regional Identity,” I turn to the troping of Japanese women as another recurring feature in Japanese rhetoric and interpret the trope as an enactment of inside–outside positionalities. Numerous studies of Japanese history point to the symbolic importance of women in religious, social, and political structures. Taking a cue from art historian Kaori Chino’s reading of Heian-period culture as aligning the feminine with “Yamato,” the inside or

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ideological core of Japanese culture, I suggest that construction and deployment of women’s social positions has long been a trope used in defining uchi/soto relationships at the level of the nation. While often politically disempowered, Japanese women have simultaneously stood as symbols of Japan and figured prominently in how Japan has defined itself as distinct from other countries; women as trope have figured prominently in Japanese incorporations of outside cultural influences. In this chapter, I focus on how clothing, language, and the available “ideals of femininity” have all been used to characterize women as representations of an inner core of Japaneseness. Because of the cultural capital the association with Japaneseness gives to women, women have often been the subject of greater scrutiny and policing, to limit their available “ways of being” to those that fit with ideals of Japaneseness. In the first portion of the chapter I focus on what I call the “troping” of women by Japanese (mostly male) elites for purposes of shaping Japanese cultural identity, and which I associated with what Burke calls the “master tropes”. In the latter portion of the chapter I address how these imposed tropes can be resisted. As part of this turn, I shift from a focus on troping in terms of figures, to recombinant construction or remixing of parts of previous ideals and tropes. As an extended example throughout the chapter, I focus on changing tropes of the Japanese schoolgirl, looking first at the emergent schoolgirl identity in early 20th century Japan, and then to the later “kogal” or “high school gal” identity that emerged in the 1990s as a resistant recombination of various normative tropes of girlhood. In Chapter 4, “Traversing Burkean Identification: Inside–Outside Positionalities as a Theory of Transcultural Affiliations,” I present a comparative study (in the more traditional sense of comparative) between inside–outside positionalities and Burke’s theory of identification. I use this comparison as groundwork from which to demonstrate how my expanded notion of inside–outside positionalities offers a potential extension of identification as a means of interpreting and establishing affiliations between groups. Rather than what I argue are the more static identifications Burke’s model describes, inside–outside positionalities offers dynamic and shifting affiliations, which are perhaps more strategic, but no less influential for their fluidity. In addition to contextualizing inside–outside positionalities alongside Burke’s identification, in this chapter I also look at memoirs by two Asian American authors, Lydia Minatoya’s Talking to High Monks in the Snow and Kyoko Mori’s Polite Lies as examples of the crafting of individual identities through the shifting affiliational strategies of inside–outside positionalities. In my Conclusion, “A Generative Shifting between Japanese and Euroamerican Rhetorics,” I reflect on my own process of negotiating inside and outside as I worked through this project. I use those reflections as a way into considering the implications and contributions of this dissertation project, focusing on its usefulness to research and pedagogy. Looking ahead, I suggest some directions the idea of inside–outside positionalities may be taken, pointing to future potential research sites and topics to which it might be constructively applied. I end by reflecting on how my project, and the specialization of comparative rhetoric, contribute to the global turn. I argue for comparative rhetoric as both a means and end, a way of realigning the work of rhetoric and composition studies in more inclusive ways.

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CHAPTER 1 Negotiating Inside and Outside: From Uchi/Soto to Inside–Outside Positionalities

In English-language rhetoric and composition studies, spatial metaphors, of which inside and outside are but one, are often used to describe discourse and writing strategies. For example, Nedra Reynolds’s movement and dwelling, Krista Ratcliffe’s “understanding” as “standing under”, David Bartholomae’s “Inventing the University” as movement from outside to inside a discourse community, Gloria Anzaldua’s “borderland,” and Mary Louise Pratt’s “contact zone,” to name just a few influential scholars and theories, all use spatial metaphors to explain interactions and meaning- making. In light of these ways of spatially conceptualizing rhetorical processes, I propose a theory of inside–outside positionalities both as a means to describe and as an inventional strategy for inter-group/inter-cultural meaning-making. In developing this theory, I turn to the Japanese social and linguistic dynamic between uchi (inside) and soto (outside). The “uchi/soto dynamic” (Bachnik “Introduction”) is what Hall and Ames might call an “importantly present” feature of Japanese culture. I use the importance and prevalence of what I describe as inside–outside meaning-making in Japan as a site for developing this theory of inside–outside positionalities, while also arguing that the theory has a wider applicability. The “mere presence” of spatial metaphors in other languages and cultures suggests at least some commonality with the meaning-making processes seen in Japanese culture. Such similarity opens the possibility that while some elements of inside–outside positionalities may be more grounded within a Japanese context, that these ways of thinking and interacting can find a place within our discourses to enrich and add nuance to how we think about inside–outside, self–other, and us–them. While the theories differ significantly, inside–outside positionalities takes work in linguistic anthropology on the uchi/soto dynamic as its starting point. The relationship between Japanese notions of uchi (inside) and soto (outside) is a significant feature of Japanese communication. Scholars have investigated this interplay primarily as a linguistic feature, albeit one with an important role in regulating and even constituting social interactions, while leaving the rhetorical or meaning-making elements of the uchi/soto dynamic unexplored. Seemingly a common orienting feature in many, if not all, languages, the positions of inside and outside11 take on particular significance in Japanese

11 In the introduction to Situated Meaning, a collection of anthropologic and linguistic studies of uchi and soto in Japan, Bachnik includes the following passage by Mark Johnson to demonstrate the use of inside and outside in English to situate people and things in relation to one another: You wake out of a deep sleep and peer out from beneath the covers into your room. You gradually emerge out of your stupor, pull yourself out from under the covers, climb into your robe, stretch out your limbs and walk in a daze out of the bedroom and into the bathroom. You look in the mirror and see your face staring out at you. You reach into the medicine cabinet, take out the toothpaste, squeeze out some toothpaste, put the toothbrush into your mouth, brush your teeth in a hurry, and rinse out your mouth. At breakfast you perform a host of further in-out moves—pouring out the coffee, setting out the dishes, putting the toast in the toaster, spreading out the jam on the toast, and on and

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language and culture. As linguistic anthropologist Jane Bachnik explains, “although usually unnoticed [in many languages], these distinctions [between inside and outside] are crucially important: uchi/soto is a major organizational force for Japanese self, social life, and language. In uchi/soto, the ‘inside/outside’ orientations are also specifically linked with another set of meanings, denoting ‘self’ and ‘society’” (“Introduction” 3). Like the English inside and outside, uchi and soto can refer to physical spaces as well as relationships between people and groups. Bachnik, Quinn, Rosenberger, and others use the uchi/soto dynamic to redefine euroamerican scholarly understandings of the Japanese self. As these scholars describe it, the uchi/soto dynamic ties linguistic indexing—using words and other behaviors to ‘point’ to one’s situation within a social context—to construction and maintenance of a social, relational self (Bachnik “Introduction” 5). While Bachnik and her colleagues describe uchi/soto from an anthropological and linguistic perspective as a theory of the self and society in Japan, I reinterpret their model to form the basis of a rhetorical theory of what I call inside–outside positionalities. In this chapter I review previous work on the uchi/soto dynamic, directing attention to the rhetorical elements in Bachnik’s theory of the dynamic and enacting several extensions and modifications to recuperate its rhetorical potential. While Bachnik and others base their explanations of the uchi/soto dynamic in indexing, I argue that the uchi/soto dynamic acquires greater applicability, especially for broader cultural and textual analysis, when reinterpreted as a process of meaning-making rather than indexing. I undertake this reorientation by taking both an inside and an outside approach. From the “inside” of work in Japanese studies, I draw inspiration from art historian Kaori Chino’s theorization of what she calls a “double binary” and cultural “safety valve” at work between early Japanese and Tang-dynasty12 Chinese art. In Chino’s model, “inside” and “outside” become associated with (inner) Japan and (outer) China, with a “safety valve” functioning to slow down and control the effects of “outside” culture on Japanese traditional art—ideas I return to later in the chapter. Use of Chino’s theory to recuperate Bachnik’s uchi/soto dynamic as rhetoric is also an “inside” intervention in that Chino’s model similarly identifies an interplay between inside and outside as central to the construction of a Japanese cultural self. The “safety valve” Chino describes allowed for a concurrent separation and gradual mingling of Tang and so-called indigenous Japanese cultural elements. I use Chino’s analysis to rethink the uchi/soto dynamic as a way to interrogate the process of determining and generating what knowledge, practices, and objects “count” as uchi or culturally “inside,” especially in discourses about what it means to be Japanese. I also undertake the recuperation of the uchi/soto dynamic as rhetoric with an “outside” intervention, drawing from Judith Butler’s discussion of reiteration to redefine the dynamic as performative rather than indexical. This reworking brings something new into the uchi/soto mix, revitalizing it with a different disciplinary perspective. Thus

on. Once you are more awake you might even get lost in the newspaper, might enter into a conversation, which leads to your speaking out on some topic. (Qtd. in Bachnik “Introduction” 6 and “Two Faces” 8) 12 618–907 C.E.

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reconsidered, uchi/soto changes from a system of gauging social relations and enacting subject positions based on indexing—reflecting supposedly pre-existing meanings and relations—to a process of recontextualizing and recombining older meanings and associations to create new meaning. Like the hybridity of post-colonial theory, the meanings generated via uchi/soto offer a “third space” (Bhabha), new meanings not present before. While outside of or “foreign” to earlier models of uchi/soto, performance theory quickly proves quite compatible, becoming part of the inside of a new perspective generated by contact between the theories. Recuperating and reimagining the dynamic via Chino’s safety valve and Butler’s performance theory results in a new rhetorical theory and methodology, one I call inside– outside positionalities, which facilitates analysis of acts of meaning-making at a macro, inter- and intra-group level; it also functions as an inventional strategy or perspective in the spirit of Krista Ratcliffe’s rhetorical listening and Kenneth Burke’s identification. For rhetorical study, a theory of inside–outside positionalities provides several advantages: it (1) opens up new sites for rhetorical inquiry; (2) provides the basis for a new analytical tool that applies globally; and (3) suggests new (at least, for non-Japanese) ways of negotiating and interacting between divided groups, offering an alternative to theories based on identification and negotiating from points of common ground. I continue to explore inside–outside positionalities throughout my dissertation, further developing the concept while using it as a lens to read the workings of inside–outside in Japan and demonstrating its relevance for rhetorical study writ large.

Situating the Uchi/Soto Dynamic Previous work explaining the uchi/soto dynamic sets the groundwork for conceptualizing the meaning-making dynamic between inside and outside. As an epistemological model, it focuses on self and society as contextual, ongoing, and interdependent processes. The phenomenon Bachnik calls the uchi/soto dynamic involves the measuring or “gauging” of degrees of insider-ness and outsider-ness between people in any given social situation (“Two Faces” 10). It also involves the “shifting” of relationships to be more or less uchi or soto depending on context. That is, the self presented and the relationships enacted vary by context. One thing that makes the shifting of uchi/soto in Japanese communication remarkable is the degree to which it is overtly practiced and acknowledged, a point I return to below. The introduction or removal of participants in a social interaction can change the situation and so require an uchi/soto shift, as can changes in location (e.g.,, from work to a bar) or time (e.g., from work to after hours; see Rosenberger “Dialectic”). Various social shifts may also trigger physical shifts in location to better reflect (and reinforce) the social situation. Negotiation of uchi/soto may involve changes in verbal and nonverbal behavior and communication strategies, such as word-choice, gestures, posture, and topics of conversation, to name a few.13

13 Bachnik shows how behavior and presentations of self shift along the uchi/soto axis with an example of a visit with a Japanese household, the Katoo family, who she knows from a previous

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While prior works established the importance of uchi/soto pairings in Japanese culture (e.g., Bachnik 1992, Rosenberg 1992 & 1989, Tobin 1992), the concept coalesces as a well-defined theory in the edited collection Situated Meaning: Inside and Outside in Japanese Self, Society, and Language (1994). The chapters in that volume, particularly Bachnik’s introduction, synthesize previous research on the Japanese self and society, including analyses of other word pairings than uchi/soto, 14 under the banner of “the uchi/soto dynamic.” The contributors center their focus on uchi/soto, rather than another related pair, holding that “the directional coordinates of uchi/soto are basic to the other

extended home stay. A familiar figure in the house, she and the father’s sister (obasan or aunt) are visiting with the father and mother. Bachnik and the aunt are guests but also close family (the aunt) and an old friend (Bachnik), meaning the situation is rather relaxed. The mother serves tea to the guests, and they all sit in a comfortable, informal, and well-used room in the house. Conversations turn to local and family gossip, told “ in extremely informal language punctuated by howls of laughter from the okaasan, as she slaps her sister-in-law on the back” (Bachnik “Indexing” 150). In her analysis, Bachnik explains how the social relationships are reflected in the participants’ actions, including informal word choice and discussion of familial, “inner” topics; she also addresses the significance of the location—the family room rather than a more formal space, which both reflects and reinforces the closeness of the participants’ relationship and the informality of the visit. The situation shifts drastically when a phone call announces that the Katoos’ eldest son’s fiancé and some of her relatives will be arriving to visit several hours earlier than expected. The aunt (obasan) immediately shifts from being a guest to helping with the now-hurried meal preparations, and Bachnik likewise acts as even more of an insider rather than a guest as she is sent off to buy supplies and later assists the hosts with entertaining the (new) guests. This latter task takes place in a formal part of the house. As opposed to the earlier family room with its comfortable clutter, worn appearance, and only a partial facing onto the Katoos’ decorative garden, this “room is open to the garden on two sides, and this openness makes it seem as if we are almost in the garden […] At the end of the room farthest from the garden is an alcove which has a flower arrangement—made from flowers in the garden. A scroll, mounted on silk, hangs in the alcove” (149). In contrast to the crackers and simple teapot used to entertain the earlier guests (now turned confederates with the hosts), the fiancé and her family are treated to “an elaborate meal that is tastefully laid out on the Katoos’ best hand-painted porcelain and lacquerware serving dishes” (149). Conversation is more general, covering topics such as “local dialects” and “pickle making” and is “punctuated by quiet pauses” (149). The changing scenario illustrates how the hosts “gauge” degrees of inside and outside between themselves and their guests, changing their behavior or presentations of self accordingly. As I suggest in my reading of the scene, this gauging also influences the range or compass of uchi relative to the extension of soto: Bachnik, already a close guest but nonetheless soto in relation to the Katoos, becomes more inside when the new, comparatively distant guests’ arrival extends the reach of the soto pole. 14 Bachnik mentions the pairing ura (“in-back”) and omote (“in front”), a pairing she continues to use alongside uchi/soto in a later chapter in Situated Meaning; Chino, meanwhile, translates the terms as equivalent to inside and outside. Bachnik also mentions ninjoo (“the world of personal feelings”) and giri (“social obligation”), as well as honne (“the inner life of feelings”) and tatemae (“the surface world of social obligations”) (“Introduction” 6). She also notes the terms “ooyake-goto ‘public matters’ and watakushi-goto ‘private matters’; and hare ‘sacred, extraordinary, formal’ and ke ‘profane, ordinary, informal’” (31).

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paired sets of terms as well, making uchi/soto the most fundamental of all the terms” (Bachnik “Introduction” 7).15 In introducing the linguistic and anthropological model of the uchi/soto dynamic, I draw primarily from the chapters of Situated Meaning, while also referencing some of the contributing authors’ earlier works that form the basis for their later theorizing of uchi/soto; I also cite studies of other paired terms, such as omote (in front) and ura (in back), that belong under the umbrella of uchi/soto.16 Observing that “Japanese terms for self and person… are unstable over time, constantly shifting and contextually dependent in use,” Bachnik argues “that the distinctions between self and social context are not drawn as sharply for Japanese as they are for us17—that self is not viewed as ‘fixed’” (15). Since the self is not “fixed,” it relies on context and relationships with others to “situate” itself; likewise, society and social groupings (and the hierarchies within) are delimited and ordered by the relationship between the group and the self. Rosenberger observes, “in Western cultures, the self is positioned on one side of a boundary, in opposition to the group, but in Japan, the self moves over boundaries between inner and outer and between spontaneity and discipline” (“Dialectic” 94).18 She further describes the Japanese model of the self as one where regular shifting between modes of self is not only acceptable but the social norm and a requirement for a healthy existence: “Japanese accept the idea of division in the everyday

15 These authors are not the only ones discussing uchi and soto, but stand out for their strong pairing of the terms into a dynamic. Seiichi Makino explores the “metaphorical extensions” of uchi and soto in Japanese culture and language (29). While finding “that uchi-soto metaphors underlie many key cultural concepts in Japan” (62), Makino focuses on related linguistic metaphors rather than indexing or any of the elements I categorize as meaning-making. Interestingly, though citing one of Quinn’s contributions to Situated Meaning, Makino ignores pairing of the term in an indexical relationship and Bachnik’s work is not referenced at all. Makino’s work is instead a cataloguing of metaphoric meaning attached to uchi and soto. 16 Next to uchi/soto, the omote/ura pairing receives the most attention in works on Japanese self and society. Of particular interest, psychologist Takeo Doi writes about how views from a Japanese cultural context suggest significant alternatives to euroamerican views of the self and mental health. Doi describes the omote/ura pair as universal but “cultivated to an unusual extend in Japan so that it has come to represent a definite pattern of living” (85), much like Bachnik’s description of uchi/soto. Doi also explains that “the ease with which one shifts from omote to ura and back again without much strain is regarded as the measure of one’s social maturity” (86). Joseph Tobin discusses omote and ura when explaining kejime, “the knowledge needed to shift fluidly back and forth between omote and ura” (Tobin 24). Bachnik takes Tobin’s discussion further, suggesting “kejime refers, not to the content of omote and ura, but rather to a participant’s ability to differentiate between them, and is therefore meta-level knowledge” (“Kejime” 156). 17 Bachnik’s “us” is problematic. The context suggests a euroamerican, mostly North American “us,” but remains broadly vague. Does she mean Americans in general? Anthropologists and linguists? All scholars? Euroamerican scholarly understandings of the self have continued to change since she wrote the statement in 1994, perhaps making it sound more reductive in 2013 than it did then. 18 Again, this statement may have seemed less reductive when published in 1989.

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presentation of self. Rather than the Western ideal of integration of self in all contexts, manipulation of self between categories is a feature of mental health and morality in Japan. The person who can switch between modes of self is able to achieve a balance that is beneficial to both body and mind” (97). Takie Lebra, whose earlier work Bachnik and Rosenberger reference in support of their characterization of the Japanese self but who also writes on the topic more recently, observes that “to the extent that the social construction of the self is a universal fact, it may be restated that the Japanese person not only acts in response to but also perceives his[sic]/herself as contingent upon a given social nexus. The result is the consciously socialized self” (127, emphasis in original). The self, we might say, is a very rhetorical production. One of the key advantages of the uchi/soto dynamic as a perspective on inside and outside is that it is a polar perspective, rather than a binary. This polar relationship between inside and outside means there is always a connection between the two, that they flow together and that movement between them is possible. Hall and Ames, explaining the “polar sensibility” of classical Chinese philosophy, describe the terms constituting the ends of a polar relationship (e.g., inside–outside) as “porous and interdependent […]. ‘As different as night and day’ in this world becomes ‘as different as night-becoming-day from day-becoming-night.’ Precisely where does the difference [between the polar terms] lie?” (Thinking from the Han 127). Further, as Bachnik describes it, the uchi/soto dynamic remains “anchored” only at the uchi end, leaving soto free to encompass new categories—there is no ‘outer limit’ to soto, meaning that as context and experience changes, what at one moment might seem the most extreme, furthest point possible from uchi can become much closer to or even part of the inside once perspective shifts to expand the field or horizon of our focus. Finally, the uchi/soto dynamic emphasizes movement and process. Whereas some composition scholars critique metaphors of inside and outside as being inherently exclusionary (Mutnick; Noe), these are mitigated by the porosity of the divide between inside and outside. As I suggest in the introduction, another advantage of the uchi/soto dynamic as an entry point into the meaning-making potential of notions of inside outside is that while “importantly present” in Japan, it also taps into a more broadly present feature of language. Although focusing her work on language and social interaction in Japan, Bachnik emphasizes that the inside/outside pairing underlying the uchi/soto dynamic is universal (“Introduction” 6-7), suggesting that many of the implications of a study of uchi/soto have broad applicability. At the same time, she highlights the special significance given to inside/outside orientations in Japanese language and culture: “the universally defined orientations for inside/outside are linked with culturally defined perspectives for self, society, and language in Japan” (7, emphasis in original).19 While inside/outside indexing is seemingly ubiquitous, uchi/soto deserves attention as a facet of

19 “Universal” here should be understood as a linguistic universal, such as the presence of what (in English) we call nouns and verbs in all languages. Bachnik supports her claim for the pervasiveness of inside/outside indexing by reference to several other cultures that include such orientations, citing studies of communication practices in Samoa and Java, and among the Philippine Ilongot and Egyptian Bedouins, in addition to broader cross-cultural studies (“Introduction” 18-19).

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Japanese rhetoric because it is more “importantly present” in Japanese culture than in many others. Being “importantly present” makes the phenomenon more readily identifiable in a Japanese context, but does not entail that it is only present there. Hall and Ames employ the “Principle of Mere Presence” to evaluate the significance of an idea or practice’s presence within a culture. Following this principle, “the mere presence of an idea or doctrine in a particular cultural matrix does not permit us to claim that the doctrine or idea is importantly present—that is, present in such a way that it significantly qualifies, defines, or otherwise shapes the culture” (Anticipating xv; emphasis added). Uchi/soto being more “importantly present” in Japan means observers may more easily identify its effects and features in that culture than they could its “merely present” counterparts in other cultures; however, just because the dynamic is less pronounced in other cultures does not mean it lacks relevance there or is untranslatable between cultures where it is and is not importantly present. Rather, mere presence may serve as a starting point for intercultural borrowing, collaboration, and meaning-making. In the case of my project, I suggest that the “mere presence” of inside/outside orientations in English, for example, helps non-Japanese relate to and approximate the uchi/soto dynamic, and provides an in-road for adopting inside–outside positionalities, a recuperation and extension of the uchi/soto dynamic, as a trans-cultural rhetorical theory. The assessment that uchi/soto is importantly present in Japanese culture gains support from the attention Japanese give explicitly to learning to shift between contexts of inside and outside; recall Lebra’s characterization of the Japanese socially constructed self as “consciously socialized” (127). Quinn describes uchi/soto as “a lifeway, a socially learned way of construing, approaching, and moving through one’s world” (“Terms” 39). Several studies of Japanese education characterize early childhood schooling as focused on establishing distinctions between uchi and soto contexts and relationships, and the proper behavior of shifting between them (see also Tobin on omote/ura (exterior or surface and back) and tatemae/honne (pubic feelings and private feelings); Ben-Ari and Peak on uchi/soto). Rosenberger also links learning the nuances of a shifting self to the Japanese education system: “Development of self in various modes of thought and behavior from kindergarten through high school encourages the ability to participate in and switch among multiple expressions of self […] in appropriate contexts” (“Dialectic” 109). Several sources identify the ability to appropriately shift between the poles of uchi and soto as a sign of a mature person. As Rosenberger indicates, “the mature Japanese has a highly developed ability to shift between these modes of self, not only between contexts of home and work… but even within the context of the workplace, bar or home, according to the people gathered” (“Dialectic” 97; Doi and Tobin also both link maturity and shifting).

The Limitations of Uchi/Soto as Epistemic The uchi/soto dynamic demonstrates great potential as a meaning-making system, but can still be taken further as a rhetorical concept. Bachnik and Quinn in particular often describe the dynamic as constitutive, but their use of the term appears limited. Under their explanations, uchi/soto approaches being epistemic, but never quite reaches that point, a limitation I attribute to the theory’s reliance on the idea of indexing. Bachnik and the other contributors to Situated Meaning “propos[e] that both self and social order

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are reciprocally—and indexically—defined in Japan” (5). In her analysis, Bachnik uses indexing to explain the “pointing” or “gauging” she sees underlying the uchi/soto dynamic. As she explains, “indexes are highly contextual, signaling spatiotemporal relations between two points in a context. Indexes do not name objects; they are used to identify and measure degrees, magnitudes, and numbers of specific observations […] indexes work by gauging positions along a scale” (Introduction” 24). The concept of indexing comes from the work of Charles Sanders Peirce, undergoing further refinement by other linguists. Peirce describes the index as having a “real relation” to the thing it symbolizes, as reflective of some reality, rather than having an arbitrary relationship to it. The index “is something which, without any rational necessitation, is forced by blind fact to correspond to its object” (“Index”). Studies in linguistic anthropology have extended the reach of the term beyond Peirce’s parameters. Michael Silverstein explores how language indexes social status and group membership and can be used strategically to claim a particular status or belonging. Elinor Ochs links indexing to constitution of gender identity (295). Both Silverstein and Ochs, while describing indexing as potentially strategic, also explain it as reflective of or referential to existing meanings, without addressing the generation of new meanings the indexical process might draw from. Bachnik follows in this tradition of the reflective index, ignoring or limiting the meaning- making potential of the uchi/soto dynamic, a point I return to further below. The fixity of Bachnik’s model shows quite clearly in her description of indexing as a very exact process of measuring or gauging:20 Indexes do not name objects; they are used to identify and measure degrees, magnitudes, and numbers of specific observations. Thus, indexes work by gauging points along a scale. This can operate, for example, between high and low (in gauging wind velocity), hot and cold (a thermometer) […] The logic involved in indexing relates the terms at each end of the scale inversely to one another. Being hot is inversely related to being cold, so that being hot means being not cold. Moreover, hot is defined according to degrees along the temperature scale, so that each degree of being hotter varies inversely (and precisely) with the corresponding degree of not being colder. (“Two Faces” 10)21 Bachnik describes self and society as mutually constitutive, with uchi (as in-group) acting as the “deictic anchor” (Wetzel), the point from which degrees of uchi (as closeness) and soto are measured. By this measurement, social actors determine the appropriate governing social order and their social self or identity (we might also use the familiar term persona here). The two (self and social order) are “mutually constitutive” in that the social order shapes what is proper behavior—what the role of each person is— while the relationship between members of the group (uchi) shapes/determines what the

20 While limiting in regards to meaning-making, Bachnik’s figuration of indexing in uchi/soto as “gauging” between inside and outside benefits our understanding of uchi/soto as process and accentuates the interdependence of the two points—uchi and soto (or whatever term fills those roles) only means something in relation to the other. 21 Bachnik includes a briefer version of this explanation in the Introduction to Situated Meaning (24).

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social order is. The two reflect and respond to each other. As an infinitely recursive loop, one or the other could shift at any time, causing a corresponding shift in the other. Such a constitutive pairing gives participants/subjects a degree of agency, as their actions, though constrained by the social order, can also cause it to shift, affording them some control over the setting in which they act. However, while the pieces in Bachnik’s model may move to change the configuration, the image remains reflective of and limited by what already is, proceeding like a flow chart or series of if-then programming statements. While an understanding of uchi/soto as a process of indexing can achieve significant cultural work, it falls short as a rhetorical system. It can explain subject construction in the present through the use of connotative meanings attached to words by past usage, but does not adequately account for making of new connotations. For example, from a perspective of indexing, the process goes this way: Teachers and students interact in a certain way; A and B are interacting this way, so they must be teacher and student; or, A and B are teacher and student, so they will act this way; or, friends act this way; C and D want to be friends, and so act in the way friends do. Student-teacher-ness, or friend-ness, correspond to certain measures of behavior; those measures can be used to read or identify a relationship, or those measures can constitute a relationship, one person acting in a way that represents friendship, thereby inviting the other to participate in the same behavior. Sometimes this invitation can be more forceful (or even coercive) than others, depending on context and power dynamics. Left out of these accounts is the very mechanism that makes social indexing viable—the creation of new meanings that indexing draws from when constituting self and social order. Although I characterize the indexing behind the uchi/soto model as reflective, Bachnik does distance her indexical model of uchi/soto from a positivist stance, favoring context over absolutes. She explains the goal of study of uchi/soto as a “focus, not on the inside, as a means of penetrating the core of Japanese society, but on uchi/soto as uncovering the process of indexing that is crucial to the delineation of a ‘situated’ social order—and a relational self—both highly embedded in social context” (5). Bachnik goes to great lengths to emphasize that the model of the self she suggests is not built around any sort of essential core, as a discussion of “inner” and “outer” might at first suggest: “At stake here is a constitutively oriented approach toward social life. In other words, the organization of self or society is not reducible to a ‘core’ of patterns or structures; or even a ‘core’ of person that is found ‘behind’ social contexts, like the object lies ‘behind’ its wrappings, and social order ‘behind’ its participants” (5). Quinn likewise identifies uchi/soto as a means of knowledge making, or at least knowledge shaping, when he states that uchi/soto and other related word pairs “constitute22 a lifeway, a socially learned way of construing, approaching, and moving through one’s world” (“Terms” 39). He describes these linguistic pairs as “no longer simply reflective of such behavior, but constitutive of it as well” (40). While in this latter use of constitutive Quinn posits a separation between reflection and constitution, this move makes only a surface

22 I read Quinn’s use of constitute in this quote as different from Bachnik’s use. Rather than a fluid process, Quinn’s use points to the formation of a particular lifeway, one shared by all or most Japanese.

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separation. He confirms that speaking formally, for example, does not just happen in response to a soto relationship (does not reflect “reality”), but rather is part of what makes the setting formal (helps constitute the setting). However, Quinn’s separation of reflection and constitution falls short of meaning-making in that it, like Bachnik’s use of indexing, assumes the perfect repetition of behaviors for the social situation to be gauged (and constituted) from. While a social “reality” may not be reflected, the norms and behaviors that in Quinn’s interpretation constitute/index self and society are reflected. Although Bachnik and Quinn reject essential cores and focus on process, their concentration on indexing limits their model to a reflexive sort of constitution following fixed norms, rather than a process allowing for variation and generation of new meaning. Bachnik’s explanation of uchi/soto leaves out that, even at the most basic level of uchi/soto, more is happening than indexing. Speakers are not just acting out roles in accord with social order, nor changing that order just by changing their (inter)actions. Rather, participants constantly (re)make the meaning of their relationship, their subject positions, even the meaning of their words and other actions. We need a system that recognizes that through their interactions, A and B are generating anew what a student- teacher relationship means, or that C and D are not just acting out a ritual of friendship, but are making a new, specific case that, subtly or drastically, reshapes what counts as friendship. I see previous explorations of uchi/soto as limiting the dynamic to the relatively stable repetition of reflection—though the mirrors might move (the shifting of uchi/soto), what is available for reflection remains the same.

From Shifting Relations to Making Meanings: Uchi/Soto and Chino’s Double Binary Certainly there is much that Bachnik’s uchi/soto dynamic has to offer to a rhetorical understanding of inside and outside as fluid and interdependent. Her model emphasizes context, movement, as well as the interconnectedness of what, from a euroamerican perspective, are often considered sharply divided categories. However, the uchi/soto dynamic still has limitations as a theory of meaning-making. Its greatest limitation as a rhetorical concept is its reliance on indexing. Bachnik’s explanations often seem too mechanical—the “gauging” of inside and outside is too exact and leaves no room for meaning-making. From this perspective, people seem to ‘click’ into pre-existent categories or relationships (e.g., such and such degrees of uchi to soto equal “friend,” or vice versa). Bachnik’s model allows for the category of soto or outside to expand, but does not account for how new types of relationships or other new meanings that include such modifications to soto are formed. In addition, Bachnik and her colleagues focus specifically on how people shift between poles of uchi and soto, but leave largely unexplored how ideas, practices, or other things might shift, leaving open the question of how people’s perceptions of things as culturally uchi or soto might change and manifest. Bachnik’s accounts of shifting social dynamics in the home show how place can affect and reinforce uchi/soto dynamics between people (e.g., a relaxed family room vs. a formal sitting room—see Bachnik “Indexing”), but the indexical meaning of those places is assumed as constant. To take full advantage of concepts of inside and outside in intercultural interactions, we need to see how new meanings and associations with places and things are made.

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As I mention previously, Bachnik and her colleagues give their attention to small group interactions ranging from small social and familial groups (Rosenberger “Gender”; Bachnik “Indexing”), to interactions within a company (Kondo; Hamabata). However, Bachnik also raises but then then leaves undeveloped the notion that the uchi/soto dynamic can map interactions between cultures as well, albeit between individual representatives of those cultures. She explains that in some situations uchi/soto operates epistemically by indexing social “perspective” in terms of “degrees of sharedness/ nonsharedness […] differentiating between knowledge that is familiar, known, experienced in common—or uchi—versus the unfamiliar, unknown, not experienced in common—or soto” (Bachnik “Introduction 29). This epistemic level of the dynamic involves indexing relationships with others in terms of shared knowledge; as Bachnik elaborates, “the point is that ‘knowledge’ here is not defined in ‘either/or’ terms but along a scale that prioritizes shared experience (as uchi) and fades into more remote, secondhand information (as soto)” so that shared experiences and knowledge determine who is “uchi” (“Hierarchy” 241). That is, uchi/soto is not just a way of dividing physical space and metaphorically categorizing and negotiating interactions between people—it is also a way of explaining relationships to ideas and concepts, a mapping of degrees of personal, experiential knowledge and abstraction. This scale does not only represent what information or topics may arise in conversations (e.g., that more abstract topics are shared with those further on the soto end), but also indicates how shared experience and information shapes who might be considered more or less uchi, with the greater the shared experience, the more uchi. I find this facet of the uchi/soto dynamic particularly important, as it opens up space for applying uchi/soto as a conceptual grid to interactions of a larger scale, such as those between cultural groups. As Bachnik explains, the distinctions of “perspective” indexed “differentiate my/our cultural perspective (as uchi) from yours (as soto), thus enabling indexing of degrees of cultural shared/nonsharedness” (“Introduction” 29, emphasis in original). While Bachnik identifies a connection between uchi/soto and cultural perspective, the only chapter in Situated Meaning to address this epistemic level focuses on “indexing relationships between dualisms” (30) using a formal linguistic approach to catalogue various Japanese word pairings that index uchi and soto, without turning to “cultural shared/non-sharedness” more broadly (see Quinn “Tip of a Semiotic Iceberg”). This gap in the development of the theory of uchi/soto provides an opening to connect the linguistic and anthropologic treatments of uchi/soto to other theories involving the sliding or shifting of identity in Japan and to develop a rhetorical theory of uchi/soto. Uchi/soto understood only in terms of indexing runs into trouble when it comes to interactions between cultures. Here, relationships become hazy—in the contact zone (Pratt), what norms exist that can be reflected? Even Bachnik’s focus on mutual constitution as a facet of uchi/soto indexing, while affording some agency for participants, presupposes the prior existence of a range of selves and social orders to choose from rather than the generation of new meanings and relations.23 I turn to an essay

23 This critique applies not only to Bachnik, but also to others referenced and involved in the Situated Meaning project. Many of these studies focus on learning appropriate behaviors and

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by art historian Kaori Chino for some insight into recuperating the uchi/soto dynamic as rhetoric. Chino also addresses relationships between outside and inside, but at a cultural level, looking at the influence of Tang-dynasty Chinese art in Japan. Rather than indexical shifting, Chino describes the flow and transformation of meaning through a cultural “safety valve.” Her analysis shows new meanings and new relationships forming, rather than just being indexically reflected or pointed to; while the new relationships and meanings may function as the bases for future indexing, they are not themselves the result of indexing. Chino reads Japanese art from the Heian24 to the start of the Meiji25 period (794- 1868 CE) as making use of a “double binary”26 to accommodate influences of Tang Dynasty (618-907 CE) art into Japanese culture while also protecting older Japanese traditions from perceived outside threats. Extended contact with China during the latter part of the Tang dynasty brought many changes to Japan, including the introduction of a system of writing, the Chinese imperial political model, and new religions and philosophies (most influentially various schools of Chinese Buddhism, but also Taoism and Confucianism). The Heian period marked a time of enthusiastic adoption and adaptation of Tang culture, symbolized by the new capital of Heian-kyo (Kyoto) itself being styled after Chinese models of city planning and architecture. Chino uses a schematic of a double binary to explain the relationship between Chinese Tang (Japanese Kara) culture and the development of early Japanese (Yamato) culture (see figure 1, below). While describing the two as a “Kara other” and an “indigenous Self” (22), Chino also sees Japan internalizing many Tang influences. Thus, the double binary includes a split between Kara (A in figure 1) and Yamato (B), while Yamato itself consists of another pair, of “Kara-within-Yamato” (a) and “Yamato-within- Yamato” (b). Chino describes the pairs in terms similar to Bachnik’s uchi/soto: “The binary pairs ‘A/B’ [Kara/Yamato] and ‘a/b’ [Kara-within-Yamato/Yamato-within- Yamato] both indicate a distinction between ‘public/private’ and ‘outer/inner’ (omote/ura)” (Chino 25). While omote/ura is one of the paired terms Bachnik lists as falling under the uchi/soto dynamic, Chino does not explain their relationship in terms of indexing. Of Chino’s doubled pairs, A/B are distinctly separate, while B (Yamato) itself

shifting between selves. I do not read Bachnik et al as denying that new meanings and relations are constructed during these interactions—rather, that they overlook this important rhetorical element of the uchi/soto dynamic by focusing so closely on indexing. 24 794 to 1185. Named after the Japanese imperial capital, Heian-kyo, present-day Kyoto. 25 September 1868 through July 1912. Named for the reign of emperor Meiji, whose rule saw the end of the Shogunate, forced opening to trade with the United States and Europe (Japan had previously been isolationist for roughly 200 years), and the beginning of Japan’s rapid modernization to ‘catch up’ with (and protect itself from) colonial powers. 26 Chino’s use of binary is somewhat unfortunate because of the negative connotations the term carries in many disciplines, particularly its association with either-or thinking and oppositional absolutes. However, Chino focuses more on the “paired” sense of the word, and her doubling of the “binary” conjures a nested pair with fluid boundaries—see fig. 1.

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“is a continuum that has within it the spectrum with the two poles ‘a’ and ‘b’,” which she describes as “two tendencies at opposite ends of a spectrum” (25; emphasis added).

Figure 1: Chino’s Double Binary, modified from Chino 25 Kara as outsider (“A” in the graphic) functions “not so much as a historical entity but as a function or category” and after the actual Tang dynasty’s fall was more of “a phantom ‘Kara’ (or, rather, a phantom ‘great foreign country’)” (24). Thus, the outer Kara, or whatever entity we might fit into that role, was an Other that early Japan (Yamato) compared itself to. At the same time, Yamato culture itself encompassed both Kara and traditional Yamato elements, filling the categories Chino calls Kara-within- Yamato and Yamato-within-Yamato. Chino describes the interaction between Kara and Yamato as generating the first self-consciously “Japanese” culture: “Taken together, ‘Kara’ and ‘Yamato’ created a unified ‘Japanese’ culture for the first time” (23). Chino sees this unified yet paired or doubled culture represented by a visual component of the Japanese enthronement ceremony, which “involved preparing two screens, one encompassing Chinese pictorial subjects and one encompassing Japanese ones. The ceremony visually instantiated the emperor’s total control over Japan, that is, over the two realms of the binary structure” (24). In the art Chino describes, Kara pieces popular with the Japanese court often depicted stylized landscapes, capturing large areas of land and either devoid of people or depicting them as very small in comparison to other features; popular Kara art also included depictions of powerful or mythical animals. In contrast, Yamato art tended to focus on smaller scenes, such as gardens instead of landscapes, and people might take up a greater focus in the work. Although Chino does not directly address the rhetoricity of the Kara/Yamato pairings, her description of the pairing of the two styles is clearly of a meaning-making process, one based on new meaning and identities emerging from ongoing contact between ostensibly separate groups. Chino’s explanation shows a shifting national identity, created by ongoing interactions between cultures, or at least between one culture and the idea of the other culture.27 Kara and Yamato paintings and other art act symbolically as China and Japan,

27 As Chino points out, both art from China and art made by Japanese in the Tang style could hold the place of “Kara-within-Yamato.”

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while together creating new meaning about what Japan “is” at any given moment in time. Although Chino characterizes these interactions as a double binary, Kara-within-Yamato and Yamato-within-Yamato are not a negating, either/or pairing but an interdependent grouping in the spirit of what Hall and Ames call “polar.” These Kara/Yamato interactions creating new meanings, stepping beyond both the negations of a binary and the mere reflection of an index. In contrast to the measured gauging Bachnik employs to describe the shifting of the uchi/soto dynamic, Chino characterizes the transformative action of the double binary as a “safety valve” that selects what elements to allow in (from Kara), giving them a role (as Kara-within-Yamato) within Japanese culture, and which might then be absorbed into “traditional” Japanese culture (Yamato-within-Yamato). Chino explains that the double binary of “Kara-within-Yamato” and “Yamato-within-Yamato” in Japanese art allows for adoption of outside influences and preservation of the old: This complex structure was like a safety valve that allowed for the acceptance of the Tang’s advanced art and literature into the Yamato context. With a prepared place for the acceptance of the Tang-within-Yamato, there was no threat to the art from more ancient times, the Yamato-within-Yamato. Japan could take in and adopt only what it liked and wanted of the newly arrived art of foreign countries. (24) The safety valve Chino describes illustrates some of the meaning-making potential of interactions between outside and inside to cause the “inside” to change. Yamato and Kara emerge through the process of interaction, an idealized “Japan” paired with an idealized “foreign other” (in this case, Kara). Importantly, the meanings and relationships made through the interaction of the two do not become static, but continue to interact and shift their meanings in relation to one another as part of an ongoing process. Chino describes this ongoing process of early Japanese and Chinese art’s interaction over time this way: As the newly adopted arts were assimilated, they became gradually equated with the previous, existing arts, and they then shifted to the category of Yamato- within-Yamato, which allowed room for yet another absorption of newly arrived art in the space known as Kara-within-Yamato. Because this arrangement effectively renews itself as it absorbs arts and cultures from without, the category of Yamato-within-Yamato undergoes constant change and stubbornly survives. (24)

Put another way, what the category of “traditional Japanese” or “Yamato-within- Yamato” art refers to constantly shifts or changes. While Chino focuses primarily on the shifting perceptions of what is “Kara” and “Yamato” art, she also discusses the role of Chinese writing and written language and the development of Japanese script to explain the double binary.28 Chino’s extension of the

28 Chino uses the example of the development of Japanese hiragana script as emblematic of the relationship between early Japan and Tang China, a relationship resulting in a Japanese cultural self independent of—yet still connected to—Tang-culture China. Initially, Japanese writers used

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double binary to the cognate area of written language, although undertaken to reinforce her discussion of the visual arts, suggests the concept’s broad applicability; unfortunately, she leaves this potential unexplored. Following this lead, I apply Chino’s concept of a safety valve more broadly than readings of Chinese and Japanese art. Picking up this loose thread from Chino and stitching it into the pattern of uchi/soto that Bachnik began, the dynamic acquires a more historical dimension. However, such a knitting together of theories requires some further unraveling of both pieces before they can be usefully joined. While some of the distinctions between Chino and Bachnik’s models can help to revise the uchi/soto dynamic to make it a better lens for intercultural rhetorical study, putting the theories side-by-side also reveals some shortcomings of Chino’s theory, particularly in the terms of how Chino treats inside and outside. Despite certain similarities between the Kara-within-Yamato and Yamato-within-Yamato continuum and the sliding scale of uchi/soto, Chino’s use of inside/outside (ura/omote) is not the same as Bachnik’s (uchi/soto). The uchi/soto dynamic accounts for more interaction between inside and outside than Chino’s double binary; the dynamic also accounts for how one might shift between being an insider or an outsider, with movement back and forth between those poles. The pairings in Chino’s schematic are quite different. First, the outer binary of Kara/Yamato, as Chino describes it, remains absolute— her diagram shows a clear break between Kara and Yamato, in contrast to the undefined field between Kara-within-Yamato and Yamato-within-Yamato nested within Yamato. “Kara” in this model is a “phantom” outsider, an idea that might gradually change form in the Japanese imagination, but with which there is no actual interaction. In contrast, the uchi/soto dynamic allows the possibility for interaction along with a shifting of identity— today’s outsider might someday prove to be more of an insider, although such a move would also result in some other becoming an outsider (perhaps a former insider takes that role, or some newly discovered Other). In uchi/soto, the horizon of “outside” can always be pushed further afield, encapsulating the old outer limit into the inside. Turning to the nested paring of Kara-within-Yamato and Yamato-within-Yamato, Chino’s description of these as a continuum, also described in terms of inside and outside, seems similar to the uchi/soto axis. However, there are several important distinctions. First, the possibility of shifting along the continuum of Kara-within-Yamato/Yamato-within-Yamato is a shifting only within Yamato, within the cultural “inside” of Japan. While there is a sense of cultural outside and inside, of foreign and domestic origins, all are put to use as part of a

Chinese characters and wrote in the Chinese language. Over time, the Japanese developed a modified writing style to represent spoken Japanese, using both Chinese characters (kanji) and a new phonetic script (hiragana). As Chino explains, [I]n the case of Japanese hiragana, the ‘characters of Kara’ were not abandoned, and Chinese ideographs were maintained as Chinese ideographs while at the same time Japan created a separate ‘not-Kara-but-our-own-characters’ in the form of simplified, cursive versions of the original Chinese characters. In other words, this writing did not represent the creation of a self through the complete denial of Kara but rather imagined the coexistence of the Kara Other and the indigenous Self, each having a different existence and value. (22)

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Japanese culture. That is, both together make Yamato and so in some sense are equally uchi or inside. This nested, shifting innerness contributes to our understanding of the uchi/soto dynamic by demonstrating how what I think of as ideals of insideness, or the sense of what “counts” as inside, shift as well. Though Chino does not address this idea, I suggest that when an ideal of insideness changes, this also changes interactions between inner and outer, uchi and soto. Second, the movement from Kara-within-Yamato and Yamato-within-Yamato, as part of the “safety valve,” is one-way. Chino’s explanation of the process suggests that foreign art (and other influences) has two possible roles or stages. First it occupies a role as foreign, in part valued and doing its cultural work as a representative of an outside culture. It may gradually shift and be absorbed as part of traditional Japanese culture by going through the process of the safety valve. Chino emphasizes that the borrowing or appropriation of the safety valve is selective. As I interpret it, the process of the safety valve does not necessarily erase the provenance of individual artifacts or even practices, but rather obscures the traces of their influence, such that a particular painting may be remembered as Chinese while changes brought to the works of Japanese painters under its (or its period or technique’s) stylistic influence vanish into the category of “traditional Japanese,” for example. In such cases we see a forgetting of previous borrowing, a complete move from soto to uchi. I see this dimension of Chino’s work as an oversimplification of the process, as it ignores other possibilities of the ways in which cultural borrowings may act, and loses much of the potential for negotiation of meaning the back and forth shifting of uchi/soto presents. What about cases of invented foreignness, such as when the inside’s imagining of the outside creates practices or artifacts that exist nowhere else, and so are quintessentially “inside,” yet “count” as outside? What of borrowings that remain marked as outside while taking on meanings, forms, and uses found only in the adopting culture?29 As Chino’s model suggests, within Japanese culture there is a space or role assigned for foreign elements as foreign (e.g., Kara-within-Yamato) as well as for elements that are considered traditional or indigenous (Yamato-within-Yamato). As she suggests, these map to ideals of outside and inside, such that those marked as “inside” elements are “truly” Japanese, with both functioning together to define a Japanese cultural identity. Chino focuses on those foreign elements acting as signs of the foreign; she also explains how those elements take on particular significance in Japan that they did not have in China. These artworks take on new, localized (Japanese) meanings that differ from their significance in their original context (Tang China). However, Chino misses an opportunity by not going further in investigating how the meanings of these icons of outsideness change (though understandably so, since her focus is on visual art whose artist, subject, and provenance are often known). While she addresses how certain outside elements change and become more overtly inside, the shift she outlines is a result of a process of forgetting. I find a great deal of value in expanding her analysis to also

29 I explore an example of this marking, the example of the Christmas cake in Japan, in Chapter 2.

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look at those things whose (at times supposed) origins are remembered, their outsideness marked and even celebrated, and their increasing insideness hidden or ignored.30 Finally, Chino’s model is also flawed in that it favors the most inner category, Yamato-within-Yamato. In the descriptions of the safety valve, it is what is protected; it is the thing that grows and acquires new meaning. She gives less attention to how the category Kara-within-Yamato changes, other than by having new elements added in, which gradually become part of Yamato-within-Yamato. Her graphic (figure 1) does a better job of showing the relationships between the categories, and suggests more equality between them, while her written exposition restricts that potential. I find that the descriptions lose track of how Yamato-within-Yamato is only part of the larger category Yamato. However, I find her presentation still quite interesting in that it reveals an important trend in depictions of Japanese culture: that what “counts” as Japanese—the ideals of insideness—often only accounts for part of what constitutes the inner whole, yet is often presented as though it were an independent, cultural core.31 This limited view highlights the need for studies of inside and outside in Japan to pay close attention to any distinction between what “counts” or is overtly recognized and discussed as inside (whether that inside be Japanese or any other identity) and what has an “inside effect.” By “inside effect” I mean the totality of things acting as a cultural inside, regardless of whether they are marked or acknowledged as inside. The value of the double or nested binary is that it can let us see how cultural actors or subjects present certain cultural elements (to both themselves and outsiders) as emblematic of their (in this case Japanese) inner culture, and other elements as emblematic of outside or foreign culture, when in practice both elements are inside and constitutive of that culture. In bringing together the uchi/soto dynamic and safety valve, I necessarily modify both. The influence of Chino’s safety valve historicizes the dynamic between outside and inside and introduces an instance of meaning-making resulting from inside–outside interactions. The concept of a double binary relationship between Kara and Yamato introduces an important distinction between what I call ideals of insideness and the entirety of things having an inside function (e.g., that Yamato-within-Yamato is just the idealized part of a larger inside category, Yamato). What I perceive as Chino’s over- emphasis on the Yamato-within-Yamato category acts as a reminder to look closely for the presence and treatment of multiple layers of categories of inside. Meanwhile, I maintain the more dynamic, back-and-forth mutability of identity and affiliation introduced by Bachnik’s uchi/soto. Although taken together Bachnik and Chino’s models weave a more comprehensive understanding of inside–outside relationships as generative of new meanings, the recuperation of these processes as rhetoric is not yet complete. In the next section, I put this evolving construct in conversation with performance theory.

30 Again, my interpretation of the Christmas cake in Chapter 2 provides an example of such a reading. 31 Bachnik mentions that looking at “inside” and “outside” is not a search for a true or essential “core”—the social reality consists of both (“Introduction” 5).

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From Indexing to Performativity Even with the modifications to uchi/soto made through paring it with Chino’s theory, this model still overlooks a great deal of the meaning-making potential found in interactions between inside and outside. As I interpret it, Chino’s safety valve involves an ongoing process that contains a promise for meaning-making; however, while Chino’s model does make some account for meaning-making, the safety valve or continuum within the nested binary is not where meaning-making takes place. On closer inspection, the double binary of Kara and Yamato explains only one moment of meaning-making: the generation of a regional sense of self, or what Chino calls “a unified ‘Japanese’ culture” (23). This identity relies on the roles of Kara-within-Yamato and Yamato-within-Yamato, with their respective meanings of outside and inside. The movement through the safety valve that Chino describes is a movement from one role or meaning to another. While the associations with a particular element may change (from being considered foreign to being thought of as traditional or indigenous), there are only two sets of roles. That is, we run into the same problem as with indexing in the uchi/soto dynamic: things shift positions, but only by sliding into a limited number of pre-existing categories. In Chino’s model, the focus often remains withdrawn, at a high or macro level, and considers only the very large-scale instance of meaning-making represented by the generation of a regional self and the maintenance of that self. As implemented, the perspective shows how the sense of a Japanese self changes as a result of forgetting and reassignment demonstrated by the safety valve, but this is merely a change in the components, while the form stays the same. Such an approach is appropriate for the sort of analysis that Chino makes in the rest of her essay, which turns to a gendered reading of the double binary she explained in the first portion, but does not show us how the perspective might help us see other moments of meaning-making resulting from intercultural contact. Thus, while Chino’s model demonstrates the potential for meaning-making within inside– outside interactions, the process remains obscure. We can free uchi/soto from the limitations imposed by indexing by expanding reflection to reiteration, and indexing to performativity. The reinterpretation of the uchi/soto dynamic as performative applies equally Chino’s safety valve. We can read the shift Chino describes as art forms shift from being labeled as outside, Kara art, to Kara- within-Yamato (“outside” art that suddenly has a particularly local significance or meaning), to Yamato-within-Yamato art (as “traditionally” Japanese) as an instance of so-called “failure” of repetition. The gradual shifting of meaning seen within the so- called double binary may be better understood as the accrual and generation of new meanings over a span of ongoing reiteration. To further develop the rhetorical potential I see in earlier texts on uchi/soto and to engage with the meaning-making activity I think of as part of uchi/soto, I turn to reiteration, from Judith Butler’s explanation of performativity, as a replacement for indexing. This move still accounts for the shifting and mutual constitution found in Bachnik’s indexical model, but opens more theoretical space for generating new meaning. Reiteration—ongoing repetition of norms but always with “failure” and with surplus of meaning—allows generating of new meaning along with the (always imperfect) continuation of traditional patterns.

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For Butler, reiteration lies at the center of performativity. In her discussion of the forming of sexed identities, Butler describes the reiterations of sex and gender performances as both ongoing and imperfect. Thanks to the “failures” of reiteration, possibilities exist to resist and subvert the demands of normative culture (Butler, Bodies that Matter). In Excitable Speech, Butler looks at hate speech as a kind of performative speech act—calling someone a name actually does something to that person, putting her or him into a particular category or identity. Hate speech assumes words mean (both denotatively and connotatively) the same each time people utter them as a performative. However, as Butler points out, people can reclaim names and redirect meanings, making new meaning and reconstructing the identities the terms name. Incrementally shifting the context and connotations of hate speech (Butler uses the example of the reclamation of queer) undermines derogatory uses of the words and refigures denigrated identities into markers of a positive solidarity. The reiterative use of language Butler describes as performative differs substantially from the reflective use found in indexing. Both rely on a historicity of language and emphasize ongoing interactions; however, indexing assumes a static history to measure meaning against, while performativity relies on history’s mutability. An indexed utterance takes on meaning by reference to past meanings and contexts, where a performative, reiterative utterance creates meaning via references that reinterpret and add to the past. Understanding the uchi/soto dynamic as performative rather than indexical better explains the process Bachnik et al have documented. The dynamic Bachnik describes functions more as an ideal of uchi/soto, an ideal nearly mathematical in its insistence on measurements and gauging. Performativity reveals the impossibility of that ideal and helps us to recognize and recover some of the “excess of meaning” ignored in the indexical accounts. A reinterpretation of the uchi/soto dynamic as based in reiteration rather than indexing opens up analyses based on the dynamic to greater attention to the particular. While the analyses in Situated Meaning and related works focus on context and on experience over abstraction, they still seem to assume a certain number of at least quasi- permanent relational forms. While the uchi/soto dynamic responds to specifics, the shifts described fit into easy categories once one knows to look for the shifting. As I have stated earlier, I believe this static view is a result of a focus on indexing. This approach does have its advantages—by focusing on more-or-less set forms of relationships, it is easier to demonstrate the relevance of particular cases to larger groups that share those forms. For considering behavior and broad social trends, such a schema has its uses. The conceptual move from indexing to reiteration and performativity is more helpful for rhetorical inquiry in that it forefronts both the uniqueness of each act or experience and the commonality of the processes behind them. Further, rethinking uchi/soto in terms of reiteration foregrounds agency and thus challenges existing power dynamics.

Extending the Uchi/Soto Dynamic: Examining Inside–Outside Positionalities The broader reading of inside–outside relations offered by integrating Bachnik’s uchi/soto dynamic, Chino’s safety valve, and Butler’s performativity allows for more nuanced readings of some of the more complex and rhetorically interesting facets of

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cultural borrowing found in Japanese culture. This broadening of uchi/soto shows how some outside influences remain marked (at least for extensive periods of time) as “foreign” while simultaneously becoming more uchi. Certain borrowings and influences are rigorously marked as foreign, much as in Chino’s schema. However, whereas Chino’s double binary imagines a role for outside influences (Kara-within-Yamato), which may then shift and blur into Yamato-within-Yamato, in my view a borrowing or influence might function both symbolically as foreign or outside, while also becoming more distinctly Japanese. My reading, a coming together of the shifting of the uchi/soto dynamic and the poles of Kara-within-Yamato/Yamato-within-Yamato, complicates both and reveals some new insights about the workings of inside and outside in Japanese (and other) culture(s). As in Chino’s example, “Kara-within-Yamato” involves both the role of cultural artifacts produced in China and brought to Japan, as well as pieces produced in Japan by Japanese in the Kara style, a created foreign-ness. We can see analogues today in the use of English words in Japan. Many English words are spoken and written in Japan as English words, demonstrating Japan’s language ideology in the cachet of using English (Seargeant 30, 64). Japanese language employs many loan words whose meanings have substantially changed from how the word is commonly used in English- speaking countries; for example, “the Japanese word manshon, phonetically derived from the English word ‘mansion’ but having a meaning far closer to ‘apartment’” (75). As explained by Seargeant, the idea of English holds special significance in Japan and functions as a means of defining Japanese identity—as cosmopolitan, in-step with modern Europe and the United States (64); as well as a means of marking Japanese language and culture as distinct from euroamerican cultures and languages (153). As another example, modern written Japanese contains additional examples of the interplay of uchi and soto as a safety valve, marking certain borrowings as foreign while often changing and localizing the meanings through “failed” or “imperfect” repetition, make them more Japanese than foreign. Japanese uses three scripts: kanji, or Chinese characters, hiragana, a syllabary for Japanese-language words, and katakana, a syllabary for Japanese onomatopoeia and for loan words. Additionally, Japanese today use many words written in Roman script, or romaji. The use of romaji and spoken European, especially English, words in advertizing, on t-shirts, in pop-music, and elsewhere gives a sheen of internationalism and has a “cool factor.” To a UK or American English speaker, such words may seem completely out of context or to be used incorrectly, having taken on altered or entirely new meanings in Japan; however, the “coolness” of the word relies on its foreignness, so even though the meaning in context is a new, local meaning, its “value” lies in its supposedly foreign meaning, marked through script and pronunciation. Words that enter more fully into common Japanese usage often undergo shifts in pronunciation and from roman script to katakana. Some loan words retain their old meanings (like コーヒー or koohii, meaning coffee), while others take on substantially new meanings (like mansion becoming manshon, マンション, an apartment). Despite their common usage and otherwise unremarked integration into everyday Japanese, these words remain clearly marked when seen printed on a page, their stroke style visually distinct from kanji and hiragana. The tendency to rigorously mark outside influences, to maintain a distinction between native Japanese and foreign even when the “foreign”

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feature has become more Japanese than anything else, is an important element of the uchi/soto dynamic when applied to intercultural contacts.32 The process is not simply an application of a veneer of Japaneseness to imported elements or a casting of an illusion of cultural continuity (although such an illusion may also be present, as I discuss more fully in later chapters). The foreign forms change substantially over time, becoming something they previously were not and generating something new within Japanese culture. Taken together, the many modifications to Bachnik’s uchi/soto via Chino and Butler, and my extension and repurposing of the dynamic and safety valve constitute a new vision of the rhetoricity of insider-outside relations in Japanese history and discourse. I call this theory inside–outside positionalities, and put it forth as both a model of inside–outside rhetoric in Japan and a theory and inventional strategy more broadly relevant and globally applicable.

Conclusion In this chapter I have recuperated the uchi/soto dynamic from what scholars in Linguistics and Anthropology have interpreted as a linguistic and cultural index. I have highlighted those features of uchi/soto I see pertaining to rhetoric and drawn attention to where I believe previous scholarship has provided evidence for, yet overlooked, the fact the dynamic’s meaning-making, rhetorical elements. I have expanded the reach of the dynamic from small-scale and more-or-less immediate interactions (as described by Bachnik et al) to broad cultural interactions over extended periods of time by rethinking the theory via art historian Kaori Chino’s reading of a double binary and safety valve at work between Tang Chinese and early Japanese art. Finally, I have argued that the uchi/soto dynamic, at all its levels, is more recognizably rhetorical if we read it as performative rather than indexical, as a process of meaning-making through reiteration. Rethought in these ways, the dynamic of inside and outside has become something much

32 Whether a thing is more “Japanese” than “foreign” is not the only consideration in distinguishing between uchi and soto. Rosenberger and Bachnik also discuss uchi/soto in terms of constraint and freedom or relaxation. In terms of interpersonal relationships, a more uchi environment lends itself to and is created by more freedom of expression and behavior; for example, one can relax and let loose with friends at a bar or with immediate family at home after work (Rosenberger). Importantly, such personal scales of uchi and soto do not always match with cultural scales of uchi and soto: in my above discussion of uchi/soto and the safety valve, some of those things considered most culturally uchi (most traditionally Japanese) might actually elicit more constrained behavior (e.g., a tea ceremony versus an American-style bar in Tokyo). Alternatively, a person participating in a formal tea ceremony may feel closer to those participants, who share a high degree of cultural knowledge/experience, than with a group of foreigners in a bar, even though all participants may have been fairly relaxed. At times, culturally outside or soto elements are important components for creating or maintaining uchi, not as an opposite or Other to measure against, but as a part of uchi interactions. In these examples we see different types of uchi, different contexts, and different roles for cultural uchi/soto (at the level of Japanese/foreign). What arises is a dense web of interactions and ongoing processes wherein a single signifier (such as a foreign word or tradition) might take on numerous, often very different, meanings.

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more than what Bachnik described as the uchi/soto dynamic or Chino a double binary, constituting a perspective I call inside–outside positionalities. Inside–outside positionalities describes an ongoing process of meaning-making that is contextual, historical, fluid, and rich with (and generative of) meanings in excess of previous iterations.

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CHAPTER 2 Positioning Cultural Inside and Outside: Icons of Foreignness and Nostalgic Identities In popular euroamerican imaginings of a globalized future, Japan often appears as the hybrid culture par excellence. Such a characterization is particularly prevalent in science fiction works, such as Ridley Scott’s film Blade Runner and William Gibson’s novel Neuromancer, which align Japan with both technology and tradition. For euroamerican audiences, the locale Japan (as in the case of Neuromancer) or Japanese- ness (as in Blade Runner’s futuristic LA) represents a blend of the exotic and the familiar, of (supposedly) pre-modern tradition and cutting-edge (and once western) technology. While it is perhaps not surprising that the exoticism of “the Orient” is played up in these western imaginings of the Other, representations of Japan within Japanese popular culture evoke similar themes, as Japan’s presentation of itself to insiders and outsiders alike often involves elements of antiquity and hyper-modernity—Shinto shrines and bullet trains; kimono and smart-phones. The use of “Japanese elements”33 to create highly marked, composite images of Japan —as “foreign” and “domestic,” “modern” and “traditional”— demonstrates inside–outside positionalities in action in popular culture. In popular depictions of Japan there often is a sense of hybridity, particularly of welding outside technologies with Japanese tradition, as part of what defines Japanese culture. Certainly all cultures contain influences from others; inspection shows that their defining features are often traceable to borrowings from or changes in response to contact with earlier and neighboring cultures. No culture exists in a vacuum or can claim essential purity. However, Japan stands out for how regularly it is characterized (again, both from within and without) as a culture that has borrowed extensively from others, voraciously integrating outside behaviors, beliefs, and technologies (particularly from China, Western Europe, and the United States). As the narrative goes, Japan picks and chooses outside influences, changes them as part of the process of integrating them, and ultimately makes those borrowings into something “distinctly Japanese.” Such treatments of Japanese hybridity act as part of larger narratives of Japanese exceptionalism and cultural essentialism. As Koichi Iwabuchi observes, many cultural critics and anthropologists present the process of hybridity as one where Japan absorbs and localizes outside elements while a Japanese cultural essence stays the same (49-84). Commentators assume a sort of unchanging cultural core, which powerfully affects and changes any non-Japanese elements in its proximity. “Japan” does not change; outside borrowings do. Like Chino’s safety valve discussed in Chapter 1, these characterizations of the process of localization and hybridization reveal a deep and extensive anxiety about the many borrowings that constitute so much of Japanese culture. The underlying anxiety-prompting question seems to be, ‘if so much is borrowed, what—if anything—is Japanese?’ This “anxiety of influence,” to appropriate Harold Bloom’s phrase, prompts

33 By “Japanese elements,” I invoke Hiroki Azuma’s “elemental” theory of narrative consumption by otaku, wherein anime, manga, games, and other parts of the media mix use combinations of recognizable, popular elements to construct characters and narratives that appeal to consumers, rather than relying on grand narratives (39–47).

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efforts to solidify a sense of cultural self, involving what in the previous chapter I call “ideals of inside” and “ideals of outside”—efforts to clearly demarcate a division between what is “essentially” Japanese and what is borrowed. These essentializing treatments of Japan’s engagement with globalization are often nostalgic in their yearning for a stable identity as Japanese, a sense of self supposedly available to Japanese prior to Japan’s engagement with modernity. Yet, as demonstrated by Chino’s account of Kara and Yamato art, a recognizably Japanese culture has always relied on and included contact with and influences from the outside. Further, while nostalgia involves looking to and valuing the past, such a past need not always be a site of supposed stability, nor does such looking always need to involve detrimental or retrograde longing. While essentialism can rework hybridity to erase its critical discomfort (the sense of the “unhomely” Bhabha mentions), nostalgia can be harnessed for critical ends, as a means for revealing a dynamic past and building toward better futures—a topic that I will address in some greater detail in the second half of this chapter. My explication of inside–outside positionalities in this chapter focuses on construction of regional or national identity through the interaction (and interrelation) of inside and outside, global and local. Inside–outside positionalities offers a method for thinking about identities linked to place, and the rhetoric used to construct them. It draws attention to naturalized rhetorical moves that are based on notions of inside and outside, and to tropes that assume or attempt to construct a binary division between inside and outside which, on close inspection, are polar, in the sense used by Hall and Ames (see Chapter 1). Inside–outside positionalities helps us to look anew at discourses of regional identity, foregrounding the connections between cultures and how those interactions and borrowings help constitute “traditional” symbols of local uniqueness. In this chapter, I present inside–outside positionalities as a meta-perspective for analyzing intercultural and inter-group meaning-making, using two “representative anecdotes” (Burke Grammar 59) to both make the case for the theory’s usefulness and to further develop an understanding of its features. I look first at how the adoption and localization of the American Christmas celebration has functioned as a means of establishing and maintaining a “modern” Japanese cultural identity. I give particular attention to the Japanese Christmas cake, an “invented tradition” (Hobsbawm 1–2; Vlastos 1–5) that exemplifies the local meaning-making through intercultural contact that inside–outside positionalities makes possible. After exploring this first anecdote, I turn to nostalgia as a popular mode for constructing a sense of a historical cultural inside. Seen as part of inside–outside positionalities, nostalgia indicates one variation of the seemingly pan-human desire to, at times, withdraw from the uncertainty of the larger complex world to the supposed certainty, stability, and safety of a smaller or exclusive inside. Following a discussion of nostalgia as related to inside–outside, I read the anime series Taishō Baseball Girls as a second anecdote. Taishō Baseball Girls presents a conflict between two views of the place of modernity and tradition in Japanese identity, or a division between two ways of relating past/present with inside/outside. As a 21st century representation of 1920s Japanese urban life, the text presents a past that supports and anticipates Japan’s globalized present. While in the story the hybrid present wins out

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over valorization of the past, the series also maintains a narrative of cultural continuity by putting certain values outside of time. My reading shows that cultural identities based on hybridity and those based on cultural continuity are not mutually exclusive. It also presents nostalgia as a way to reengage with the past to construct new narratives of cultural identity for the present or future. Taishō Baseball Girls is a case of a nostalgic text that yearns not for a stable past (a trend many critics associate with nostalgia) but for a past of rapid change, flux, and hybridity, yet which remains iconically Japanese. As a whole, readings based in inside–outside positionalities open space for greater intercultural communication by tracing points of connectedness where more absolute divisions are often imagined. Inside–outside positionalities keeps us focused on the historicity and rhetoricity of cultural and other group identities. By emphasizing historical interdependence and exchange, an inside–outside perspective keeps us looking dually inward and outward, a perspective both locally attentive and globally cognizant. By focusing our attention on the interactions, borrowings, and other processes of cultural identity construction between nominally different cultures, inside–outside positionalities offers an alternative to what Hesford and others have characterized as a reliance on nation-bound methodologies and notions of identity.

Inside–Outside Positionalities as an Alternative to Hybridity In this chapter, I analyze intercultural meaning-making practices that from time to time I describe as “hybrid.” Indeed, at first glance the two anecdotes—the formation of a local holiday tradition that draws from American and Japanese influences, and a fictional account of the renegotiation of girlhood and femininity resulting from contact of traditional Japanese and imported western ideals—may appear as ideal candidates for readings using the lens of theories of hybridity. However, part of the purpose behind developing inside–outside positionalities as a theory is to offer an alternative to hybridity as a perspective from which to unpack the complexity of local cultures and meanings that result from ongoing intercultural interactions. Inside–outside positionalities addresses concerns with hybridity as a critical term that has in same cases become too specialized and in others used too loosely. On the one hand, hybridity as developed by Homi Bhabha, and used to significant effect within post-colonial critique and theory, is perhaps becoming too fine-tuned and specialized. The concern in this case is that critics’ use of the term in settings outside of the postcolonial is not appropriate or carries associations that overshadow local particularities (see Diana Taylor). On the other hand, generalized uses of hybrid or hybridity as a descriptor—as an easy sort of catch-all for any and all practices, traditions, identities, and meanings that develop out of instances of intercultural contact—devalue the things the terms are used to describe. Such a less rigorous use of hybridity, while widely applied, may lose track of particularity (Mao Reading 25) or even co-opt the term for essentialist purposes (Iwabuchi). Of these two strains of hybridity as means of describing and analyzing intercultural meaning-making, the latter seems to be an outgrowth of the popularity of the former, an uncritical application of a powerful, context-specific concept to settings removed from the point of inquiry it was developed in response to. Inside–outside

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positionalities can act as an alternative to post colonial hybridity and as a corrective to challenge and revitalize less critical uses of hybrid and hybridity as descriptors. Homi Bhabha situates hybridity firmly in the (post)colonial context: “Hybridity is the sign of the productivity of colonial power... Hybridity is the revaluation of the assumption of colonial identity through the repletion of discriminatory identity effects” (112); “Hybridity is a problematic of colonial representation and individuation that reverses the effects of the colonialist disavowal” (114). Nonetheless, the theory is often applied to other contexts as a way of naming and explaining the ways that new cultural productions emerge from how one (colonized) culture takes up and alters elements (imposed or borrowed) from another (colonizing) culture. Performance theorist Diana Taylor discusses the regional specificity of the term hybridity as used in post-colonial studies, suggesting that it may not be as appropriate when applied to cultures whose experiences of colonialism differ substantially from that found in the experiences of “Indian and black cultural theorists” (102). Following Taylor’s reasoning, study of Japanese rhetoric of cultural identity requires other terms as well. Japan has never been a colony, although it has had many euroamerican ideals forcefully introduced as a result of the U.S. Occupation. Japan has felt the effects of what might be termed cultural imperialism rather than colonialism; however, that is also too simple of an appraisal, as in most of its interactions with “great foreign powers” (Chino)—whether Tang China, Europe, or America—Japan has acted selectively and preemptively to adopt and adapt elements of those cultures to make its own culture and polity resistant to take-over or displacement from outside. In addition to acting as an alternative to the specialized use of hybridity in postcolonial scholarship, inside–outside positionalities works to counter the decontextualizing effect that the general descriptor hybrid can have when applied to cultures, rhetorics, and practices. To recall LuMing Mao’s concerns with application of hybrid to Chinese American rhetoric, The image of a hybrid severs the concrete link between different histories and experiences and their corresponding particularizing contexts, but it is precisely the intermingling of these two sides that produces and informs the particular manifestations and distinctive experiences of Chinese American rhetoric. Herein actually lies a paradox: the image of a hybrid purports to transcend situated rhetorical differences and dominance, but it is the situated, the specific, that grounds our experiences and that underpins our complex forms of participation. (Reading Chinese Fortune Cookie 26) A major advantage of inside–outside positionalities as an alternative to hybridity is its use of a very different driving metaphor. Adding inside–outside positionalities to our theoretical toolkit provides a tool that can work alongside these other theories, and may work better in certain situations. With its driving metaphor based in the shifting, polar dynamic of uchi and soto, inside–outside positionalities better enables historiographies of meaning, mappings of shifting meanings and relationalities across contexts. Such readings emphasize the shifting subjectivities of notions of belonging and intimacy. Rather than assuming some ideological false-consciousness, blindness, or naïveté about the nature or “location of culture,” inside–outside positionalities highlights

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how the participants in such positioning practices have varying degrees of awareness of the interconnection between inside and outside. As a further advantage, inside–outside positionalities as a perspective travels more easily than hybridity, in part because of its basis in spatial metaphors already prevalent in the locations of inquiry, and in part because, unlike the hybridity of postcolonial theory, it is not grounded in a specific set of historical conditions. Further, while exploring shifting dynamics of an interdependent inside and outside lends itself readily to political inquiry (e.g., of Power), it itself lacks the political charge of what Taylor describes as the racialized, genetic, or sanguineous metaphor underlying hybridity. Importantly, this difference in metaphor frees inside–outside positionalities from focus on an end result (a hybrid cultural product) and emphasizes ongoing process and motion. With these concerns and objectives in mind, I turn now to the first of two cases of inside– outside positionalities in action, the Japanese Christmas cake.

Reading Inside and Outside in Japanese Christmas Responding to a felt need to appear both globalized and true to an indigenous heritage, Japanese construction of a regional or cultural identity often involves a clear marking of things foreign and things domestic. Recalling the discussion of Japan’s three- part writing system in Chapter 1,34 the visual marking of western loan words (outside) with the use of syllabic katakana script and the reservation of kanji characters for Chinese words (inner) and a combination of hiragana script and kanji for Japanese words (even more inner) serves as a good example of such a division. This marking serves to create a sense of a continuous Japanese culture distinct from cultures it borrows from. Such a separation of cultural inside and outside obscures the new meanings and practices constructed through the interaction of inside and outside. Chino’s safety valve, which I discussed in Chapter 1, gives an example of how outside influences on what was considered Japanese tradition were hidden; in the following, I explore an example of the reverse. I discuss how Christmas traditions in Japan, particularly the Christmas cake, are

34 Japanese writing uses many characters borrowed from Chinese writing. These borrowed characters are called kanji, which can represent a single word or a sound making up part of a word. Other Japanese linguistic features that do not fit easily with kanji, such as Japanese particles and connectors, use hiragana; hiragana is read phonetically, and can be used to write out any word that could also appear in kanji (in this way, it is used to help children learn to read kanji). Japanese also uses katakana, another syllabic form that uses a more block-like script. Katakana are used for Japanese onomatopoeia and for western loanwords. The three types of writing are visually distinct. For example: English restaurant becomes レストラン or resutoran; the Japanese equivalent, ryōriya (literally, “cuisine shop”), might appear in hiragana as りょうりや or in kanji as 料理屋.

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marked as “outside,” while under closer inspection through the lense of inside–outside positionalities appearing more Japanese than foreign in origin. Such purposeful marking stoutly remembers foreign origins and “forgets” or ignores the changes that make those things more locally Japanese than foreign. Such marking serves a rhetorical purpose, one that inside–outside positionalities makes clear. These parts marked as foreign, while still exerting an inside effect, are read as “outside” of Japanese cultural identity and contrasted with those things marked as “indigenous,” which represent what I call the ideals of insideness—an opposition the case of the Japanese Christmas cake demonstrates. Christmas has become a well-established tradition in Japan. On its surface, Japanese Christmas looks very familiar to American audiences, with public and private decorations that include Christmas trees, reindeer, and the iconic red-and-white bedecked Santa Claus. These resemblances can be explained by similarities in the American and Japanese engagement with modernity and by the influence of America during and after the U.S. occupation of Japan. Plath suggests that many countries have looked to America “not only of ways to become modern, but also of ways to cope with living in a modern milieu. They seek not only the institutional forms of modernity; they seek as well those symbolic forms that can make modernity a meaningful way of life” (309). The American- style Christmas celebration is one such form for “mak[ing] modernity a meaningful way of life,” Plath argues. While on the one hand modern Christmas celebrations function as a redefinition or “self-restatement” (Plath) of traditions destabilized by and in danger of fading due to modernity, Plath holds that outside of America, particularly in largely non- Christian cultures like Japan, the appeal is not in the specifics of the traditions preserved via repurposing, but in the meaning the event brings for those living in modernity. Associated with the outside, both modernity and Christmas help to redefine Japanese regional identity. The meanings Christmas conveys in Japan differ from those of American Christmas in several ways; rather than religious symbolism, much of Christmas’s meaning comes from associations with America. Plath writes that Christmas decorations, cards, and gifts appeared in upscale Tokyo stores in the 1870s; “by the I920s, Christmas was percolating downward and outward into the lower classes and rural regions” and “by the early I930s, ‘annual events’ (nenjū gyōji) handbooks for teachers sometimes included a section on Christmas” (309). Implied in Plath’s chronology is that Christmas was linked to ideals of euroamerican modernity that Japan was keen on adopting. After the Second World War, Christmas seems to have taken on additional connotations of democracy (Plath) and “allowing […] greater expression of personal sentiment” than traditional Japanese gift-giving holidays (Creighton 684). Christmas seems also to have filled some “gaps” in the Japanese celebratory calendar. Creighton suggests that “the imported holidays which have been most noticeably incorporated into Japanese life,” including “Mother’s and Father’s Day, Christmas, and Valentine’s Day,” have found a place in Japan because they “filled a gap that could not be filled by holidays defined as Japanese” (683). The holidays recognized as traditionally Japanese already had set meanings and purposes which prevented them from fulfilling certain new needs and values introduced by modernity and the shift in values accompanying it and the constitutional reforms following the war; clearly marked as symbols of traditional Japan, the old holidays not only already had ideological work to do, but could only do it if kept free (at least on the surface) from associations with newly adopted “outside” ideals like democracy and

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gender equality. In a similar vein, Konagaya describes Christmas as centered on the nuclear rather than extended family (as is the case for traditional gift-giving events like New Years) and as a “child-centered event” (131); she also notes the growing importance of Christmas as a romantic holiday for young couples since the 1990s. Kimura and Belk argue that association of Christmas with local meanings and symbols not found in euroamerican cultures are “creolized or hybridized adaptations of Christmas in Japan […that] help incorporate Christmas into Japanese culture” (326). Ultimately they conclude, “in contrast to the hybridization of European Christmas traditions in the US during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Japan has kept Christmas at arm’s length so that it continues to be perceived as fanciful and foreign. […] The hybrid adaptations […] have not done away with Western Christmas iconography nor have they made Christmas in Japan uniquely Japanese” (327; emphasis added). Kimura and Belk’s use of this notion of “uniquely Japanese” misses that what gives the holiday its local meaning are the very ways it is consumed and its associations with “American” ideals. My previous discussion of several meanings and associations of Christmas shows how the holiday has taken on new significance as it is practiced in Japan. Kimura and Belk object to the Japanese-ness (or lack thereof) in the Japanese Christmas based on a lack of (from their perspective) sufficiently distinctive surface changes. Their insistence that Japanese Christmas is not “uniquely Japanese” is exactly the kind of split of insideness that I refer to in Chapter 1 when I extend Chino’s safety valve to a doubled inside consisting of both ideals of insideness and things exerting an inside effect. In the case of Christmas celebrations, as other scholars have shown, the holiday clearly has a role in performances of the modern Japanese self—while it retains its markings as an “outside” tradition, it still exerts an inside effect and has been reshaped in ways that allow it to convey meanings that support the Japanese sense of self in ways that American (and other) Christmas traditions do not. Kimura and Belk list and acknowledge several ways in which Christmas traditions in Japan have acquired local forms, though discounting them as constituting new, Japanese traditions. Key among these local variations—indeed, a local invention— is the Japanese Christmas cake, a feature noted in nearly all scholarship mentioning Japanese Christmas (Kimura and Belk; Plath; Minowa, Khomenko, and Belk; Creighton; Konagaya). Creighton observes that “as celebrated in Japan[,] Christmas has two primary associations, giving toys to children and eating Christmas cake” (685). Plath likewise notes the association of Christmas with children and a special kind of cake, and as being open to participation by both men and women. Kimura and Belk list the purchase of “fancy and expensive Christmas cakes” as part of the Japanese Christmas tradition, regarding the cakes as “virtually the only food associated with Christmas in Japan” (326). Plath notes the cake, very different “from our fruitcakes and cookies,” has no direct American predecessor, despite its association with an “American” style Christmas (312). Within Japanese celebrations of Christmas, the Christmas cake developed as an important, invented symbol and tradition that expresses local values that are enhanced by their associations with American Christmas. Although representing both longstanding local values often seen in other Japanese festival foods and regional associations with America and Christmas (associations not necessarily shared by the supposed home culture), the cake seems to be rigorously marked as a “foreign” tradition.

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Konagaya provides us with a close reading of the meanings carried by the Japanese Christmas cake, focusing on its ingredients, color, and shape, as well as its place within the larger Japanese festival cycle and post-war identity. I read Konagaya’s analysis as demonstrating the following: 1) the role of “foreign” traditions as a means to redefine the Japanese sense of cultural self, particularly for distancing from wartime- and occupation-era Japan; 2) recognition (or imagining) of gaps in the national self reflected by traditions—if “tradition” expresses elements of some essential (ideological) self, and post-war Japan sees its previous self as missing certain features (e.g., ideals of democracy), then extant traditions do not support these exogenous values; and 3) adoption of “outside” or foreign values is reflected and reinforced by practicing outside traditions. Konagaya focuses her discussion of Japanese Christmas tradition particularly on the cake, describing it in ways that make it a condensed symbol of the other meanings and associations attached to Christmas in Japan: “A noticeable material difference [between Japanese and American celebrations] is the use of a round white cake decorated with red strawberries. As a festival food it expresses symbols that communicate cultural values, social relations, and the distinctive identity of modern Japan” (121). She characterizes “the Christmas cake as a symbol of the incorporation of American values” and suggests that the cake acts as an effective and widely adopted symbol because it fits “within the dual aspects of Japanese culture: the divisions between wa (Japan) and yo (American and European countries) and also the division between hare (sacred) and ke (secular)” (121-22). Konagaya matches wa and yo with uchi and soto, explaining that “Japanese culture often distinguishes the category of wa (Japan) from that of yo (America and European countries), which parallels another division of uchi (inside) and soto (outside)” (123-24). As she explains, “yo-gashi [western-style sweets] tended to be associated with modernity, West, and social status” (124). Following the war and in response to the scarcity of ingredients necessary for making yo-gashi due to rationing, the sweets rose in popularity. Konagaya sees this consumption as part of the expression of a new cultural self; as she puts it, “consumption of yo-gashi […] represented a rise of the national standard of living. Yo-gashi implied a transformation into an affluent life in a new democratic society” (125). This association of euroamerican sweets with democracy dovetailed with the associations of Christmas in general with democracy and other euroamerican ideals valued by post-war Japan. The Christmas cake, with its use of sugar, cream, and their production by European-trained confectioners, shared in the glow of other yo-gashi. “Through purchase of the cake, ordinary households in Japan could symbolically celebrate the nation’s rising economic prosperity” (127). The Japan suggested by Konagaya positions certain practices as culturally inside and outside. By embracing admired outside values and practicing associated traditions, these outside elements slide closer along the inside–outside pole. In part, this shifting succeeds because what is being practiced is actually something new and laden with local meaning, not wholly foreign, but bearing traces of outside origin. While these practices have a strong inside effect, shaping and expressing inner, local meaning, the appearance of a strict separation of ideals of inside and ideals of outside remains in effect. The façade protects the two ideals of inside and outside from suspicion of cross-contamination, while allowing the flouting of such strict division to take place just below the surface.

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Like Creighton, Konagaya sees Christmas filling a niche in the new Japan that traditional holidays—which I see as acting in the role of an ideal of insideness—cannot. Konagaya takes this assertion further by suggesting that the foods eaten during the event must also appropriately match the values—meaning that wa-gashi, the idealized traditional Japanese sweets, do not fit with the meanings of Christmas (though they do with the traditional Japanese New Year celebrations). The cake does double duty, however, by being both associated with the American Christmas and invoking several important Japanese associations found in other festival foods. Konagaya identifies these features as roundness, as found in traditional rice-gluten mochi and signifying unity; the white color, similar to many hare or sacred festival foods; and the red of the strawberries, red being “the color to repel evil spirits,” red and white together appearing on the national flag and an important color in wedding ceremonies (133). These doubled associations demonstrate the hybrid character of the Christmas cake—it is not just a modification of a tradition to better fit locally, the cake is an “invented tradition” (Hobsbawm; Vlastos) that draws from two cultures.35 The point of my reading of the Christmas cake—or of the notion of inside–outside positionalities in general—is not to suggest that the Japanese (or any other local culture so studied) are somehow unaware of the interweaving of domestic and exogenous practices. As Iwabuchi points out, Japan’s history of adopting and adapting outside influences, of remaking them into “distinctly” Japanese versions, has long been remarked on as an “essential” Japanese trait. Iwabuchi sees this recognition as taking a negative, nationalistic turn, developing into what he calls “strategic hybridism,” an awareness of repurposing and blending that avoids the destabilizing and critical potential found in hybridity as theorized by postcolonial scholars. Iwabuchi characterizes the awareness of cultural hybridism as creating a “fluid essentialism” that assumes that any outside

35 The example of the Japanese Christmas cake focuses on what can be seen as euroamerican influence impinging Japanese culture—while the meaning made is a local invention, it is in response to and a partial adoption of American influence. However, as a “representative anecdote” demonstrating inside–outside positionalities, what I hope this case represents is the generative interaction of cultural inside and outside and the constructed and polar/contiguous nature of those categories, not dominance of one culture over the other. Inside–outside positionalities need not involve east-west categories (though it can be used to read them). Further, the meaning-making processes of inside–outside positionalities do not only flow one way. For example, numerous art historians and other commentators have demonstrated the powerful influence Japanese artistic traditions have had on European and American art (Napier; Weisberg’s). Although such borrowing and influence may not appear overtly rhetorical, it certainly helped develop a sense of what it meant to be part of 19th and early 20th century European and American (at least artistic) culture. Contemporary Japanese popular culture is also instructive as a transnational flow moving into the United States: Anime (animated works) and manga (graphic novels and comic books), while inspired from initially western styles and technologies, have become distinct artistic and entertainment forms of their own, which in turn have a strong effect on western comic and animated art. Anime and manga have also prompted the growth of a substantial global fan community that strategically borrows images, phrases, and practices to construct and police degrees of inside and outside, citing Japan to define and distinguish itself from other fan groupings (see also Napier; Allison).

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influence becomes domesticated and fundamentally changed by an incorrigible Japanese cultural character (54). Iwabuchi sees in such discourses a continuation of “the [essentializing] slogan ‘wakon yōsai” (Japanese spirit, Western technologies)” (54).36 Inside–outside positionalities, through its attention to how ideals of insideness and outsideness both contribute to the totality of an inside effect, and how slippage occurs between inside and outside, challenges notions of an unchanging, overpowering cultural core that the fluid essentialism of hybridism assumes. Put in conversation with Iwabuchi, some elements of Konagaya’s cake analysis seem to take on tones of hybridism. Konagaya concludes her analysis by suggesting the cake demonstrates a process by which older, fading Japanese traditions, threatened by rapid industrialization, “survived by taking on American images” (134), that they survived by appearing foreign. This suggestion is a sort of inversion of Chino’s double binary, where traditional Japanese art (or rather, the idea or category of such art) survives by taking in and adapting outside influences, but keeps the appearance of being traditional or domestic. Konagaya, like Chino, focuses intently on a one-way flow in her analyses. Her conclusion posits a continuity of older Japanese traditions that stay essentially the same by taking on a veneer of American-ness; in this account, Japanese meanings don’t change, only foreign ones do. Further, Konagaya’s conclusion downplays the construction of new meaning, focusing instead on preservation of the old. Understood through inside–outside positionalities, the case of the Japanese Christmas cake demonstrates a reimagining of both American and Japanese traditions—a “failure” to repeat or replicate them, if you will—to constitute a wholly new Japanese tradition, one whose meaning (indeed, its surplus of meanings) relies on both evoking other Japanese traditions and appearing or being marked as “American.” My reading of the Japanese Christmas cake maps a portion of a gradual process of shifting of cultural symbols between inside and outside and the interpenetration of inside and outside. Christmas seems to have become early on a signifier of modernity, particularly of American modernity and values (Plath; Creighton; Konagaya). By taking in the trappings of the Christmas holiday tradition, Japanese signaled to themselves and others their embrace of those associated values. At the same time, such symbolic adoption (through practice and consumption) immediately changes the meaning of—or creates a new meaning for—the foreign holiday. Significantly for understanding inside– outside positionalities, the shift from foreign to local significance is in many ways immediate. Once employed as a meaning-bearing event, Christmas enters into the cultural imaginary and, through virtue of being conceptually “placed” on the soto/outside end of the uchi-soto pole, becomes connected to and part of the sense of Japanese uchi. Once incorporated as part of the uchi-soto pole, the idea of Christmas is open to

36 While Iwabuchi’s critique of hybridism—which he accuses several academics, Japanese and euroamerican alike, of being guilty of—is an important warning about the tenacity and variety of shapes taken by cultural essentialism, his analysis focuses particularly on material production of exportable goods (including popular entertainment culture like animation). Iwabuchi focuses on what Japan says about itself to others through its transnational products (and attitudes about them), whereas I am interested in what it says to itself through hybrid or transnational practices, which is the focus of Konagaya’s analysis of the Christmas cake.

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numerous uses and transformations. Celebrating Christmas becomes a performance of a particular kind of self, a self defined in part by the group’s longing for a particular (internally imagined) outside. With contact established, and therefore the first local meaning attached, the outside object has the possibility of shifting back and forth and generating new objects and meanings, the Christmas cake being one example of an expression and result of a more “uchi” Christmas. Christmas as a holiday has very local, inside significance in Japan but appears soto in comparison to New Year’s; the cake has strong local meanings, but appears soto in comparison to mochi. As discussed above, much of the local, inside meaning of those things (Christmas and New Year’s, cake and mochi) is their difference from one another as representatives of outside and inside. Traditional holidays and sweets are inside because of their comparative position and Christmas and cake likewise gain their own local, inside meaning through their role in this opposition. This kind of reading of inside–outside as both deeply interpenetrated and as a process differs significantly from more common interpretations of how Japanese culture interacts with and assimilates outside influences. A prevalent theme in discourses of Japanese history and culture is the supposed Japanese tendency or ability to selectively take and transform valued outside practices and technologies and to make them distinctly Japanese. As mentioned above, Iwabuchi calls this tendency to consider the hybridity of Japanese culture as changing what is brought in but not what Japanese culture is “strategic hybridism.” He observes how the complex and multi-directional processes of hybridization evident in Japanese culture have become “strategically represented as a key feature of Japanese national identity” a representation he calls “strategic hybridism” (53). This “strategic hybridism” ignores the critique of narratives of cultural purity found in critical discourses of hybridity. Instead, “Japanese hybridism aims to discursively construct an image of an organic cultural entity, ‘Japan,’ that absorbs foreign cultures without changing its national/cultural core” (53; emphasis added). Many observers (both inside and outside of Japan) attribute Japanese culture with some undilutible essence that makes all things it touches distinctly Japanese.37 Characterizing practices such as buying and eating Christmas cakes as part of a foreign holiday tradition rather than as a local invention helps to maintain a rhetorically potent separation between foreign and local, outside and inside. While such divisions rely on spatial metaphors, their practice is also historical in focus and effect. My analysis of the Christmas cake, for example, traces the history of the practice, the changing meanings and accretions of significance over time. Conversely, the ideologically motivated marking of the cake as “foreign” dehistoricizes the practice and links it to an imaginary euroamerican past, decoupling it from local Japanese processes of meaning-making. Such dehistoricizing replaces complex pasts with idealized phantom histories, a tendency often associated with nostalgia.

37 To echo my earlier critique and complication of Chino’s meaning-making model in Chapter 1, cultural commentators falling prey to the lures of “strategic hybridism” are ignoring the entirety of things having an inside effect in favor of only looking at the ideals of insideness; so idealized, inside has no connection to outside, other than how it appropriates and localizes it.

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Cultural Continuity and Nostalgia Academic and popular discourses alike often emphasize the continuity of Japanese cultures. This trope of cultural continuity maintains a separation between ideals of inside and outside, often glossing over or ignoring the interrelationship of the two. Strategically overlooking and forgetting connections and joint histories, these narratives of continuity and essence are heavily nostalgic in process and appeal. While the theory of inside–outside positionalities purposefully works to destabilize essentialist notions of cultural/regional identity, cases of Japanese meaning-making that involve the process that inside–outside positionalities explains may resort to narratives of continuity and essence. Cultural continuity appears as a common trope in many discourses of Japanese regional identity. Kathy Wolfe suggests that the purpose of the early 8th Century Japanese histories Kojiki (Record of Ancient Matters) and Nihon Shoki (The Chronicles of Japan), also called Nihongi (Japanese Chronicles), was in part to create a narrative of imperial continuity, a familial, cultural, and religious core that justified the rulers’ authority and early Japan’s autonomy. Kasulis’s claim that the Kojiki was aimed to internal and Nihon Shoki to external audiences suggests that these texts also sought to establish a continuity that legitimized Japan as a distinct empire from neighboring China as well as from other non-Chinese, “barbarian” groups (80–85). Looking at feudal Japan, Carter demonstrates that aristocrat-scholars used a continuity narrative to convince new military elites of the shogunate to adopt and continue many elements of court culture. Continuity relies on gaps in memory; tradition, as respect for things and practices from the past, utilizes nostalgia in its connection of past and present through idealization and gaps of memory. As Moonyoung Lee writes of nostalgia, “to miss the past or to project it onto the future, it [the past] must be idealized” (163). A break must be made between present and past in order to bring them back together via nostalgia; as Lee puts it, “ignorance via oblivion is a prerequisite for nostalgia” (163). Reconstruction of the past into a nostalgic vision involves “selective oblivion” (164). I see nostalgia as part of the process of constructing cultural identity. It is a way of interacting with and mobilizing history; in this sense, nostalgia acts as a form of popular, remembered, and—like all histories—constructed and shifting history. As Lee and Dai Jinhua both observe, nostalgia makes the past part of the present. This present- ing of the past results in part from nostalgia’s role as a way of judging or evaluating the present (things aren’t as good as they used to be), but also from nostalgia’s selective looking back and seeing from the present—the nostalgic past both springs from the present and affects it. Although some theorists of nostalgia limit its reach to events that the person experiencing or enacting nostalgia has lived through, others (e.g., Jinhua 148; Williams; and Emoff) give nostalgia greater reach, observing that people can feel nostalgic for things outside their so-called home culture, even for things with no direct connection to their lived experience. Considering nostalgia through the lens of inside–outside positionalities highlights its role in constructing cultural identity. Looking through this lens reveals nostalgia’s reshaping of memory into an idealized tale of the past to be a performative act, a rhetorically charged (mis)remembering. Uncritical nostalgia dehistoricizes and

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disconnects related elements, while inside–outside positionalities understands inside and outside as idealized points and emphasizes the interdependence and historicity of cultures. Engaging nostalgia through inside–outside positionalities challenges uncritical applications and brings out nostalgia’s potential as a way of engaging past, present, and future. Linking nostalgia to performativity38, I read it as a process whereby cultural meanings are constructed through “failed” or “flawed” repetitions of past performances— reconstructions of the past that change understandings and significance of the past and creating new traditions, images, and meanings. Nostalgia creates new memories of the past that become part of the present’s (and future’s) sense of cultural or regional self. Nostalgia defines cultural inside and outside and is an avenue for the (re)constitution of “outside” elements, either by emphasizing or even inventing divisions between inside and outside in the past (what Boym equates with nationalist nostalgia; see below), or more positively as part of a new, inclusive inside. Nostalgia offers a way to reengage with the past in order to shape cultural or regional identities in the present, as well as offer new directions for the future. I describe it as “performative” to emphasize nostalgia as a process and as a constructive deviation from or misremembering of the past. Rethought as performative, nostalgia becomes another way of “doing” inside–outside positionalities and draws attention to how memory is another aspect of the practice of shaping and shifting ideals of inside and outside. Although nostalgia carries negative connotations of fixation on an idealized past, several scholars address the positive uses and possibilities of nostalgia. Debbora Battaglia writes of a productive or “practical nostalgia” in the context of postcolonial Papua New Guinea. She writes, Nostalgia may in fact be a vehicle of knowledge, rather than only a yearning for something lost. It may be practiced in diverse ways, where the issues for users become, on the one hand, the attachment of appropriate feelings toward their own histories, products, and capabilities, and on the other hand, their detachment from—and active resistance to—disempowering conditions of postcolonial life. (77; emphasis in original) Battaglia sees some forms of nostalgia, which she calls “practical or active nostalgia,” as having critical and creative potential: “In permitting creative lapses from dominant realities, it is such a nostalgia that enables or recalls to practice more meaningful patterns of relationship and self-action” (78). As opposed to nostalgia that merely focuses on loss, according to Battaglia, practical or active nostalgia allows for the introduction of irony, and so allows for critiquing of dominant social dynamics both in the metropole and in the (temporally and spatially) distant “home” that forms the locus of nostalgic memory.39

38 Lundgren also looks at nostalgia as performative in her analysis of how the elderly use nostalgia as part of the performance of their identities as elders. While not refering thoeries of performativity, Pickering and Keightley describe nostalgia as “action” (937). 39 Battaglia posits a difference between “a nostalgia synthetic and historically modern” (78), seemingly associated with euroamerican modes of nostalgia, and the “practical or active nostalgia” of postcolonial experience.

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Svetlana Boym theorizes a different, though related, binary of nostalgia in her work focusing largely on Eastern European, post-Communist nostalgia. Boym categorizes nostalgia as either “restorative” or “reflective.” She describes restorative nostalgia as yearning for “total reconstruction of monuments of the past, while reflective nostalgia lingers on ruins” (41). She links restorative nostalgia to nationalist nostalgia, to a quest for “the restoration of origins,” prone to conspiracy theories (43). Retrograde in the extreme, this sort of nostalgia looks uncritically at an imagined past that excludes others and rigidly demarcates cultural inside and outside, with an eye toward recreating lost utopias that never were and which often entail dystopic futures for outsiders. I see this mode of nostalgia as a yearning for (and perhaps actively acting toward, in the case of nationalist mobilizations of nostalgia) the restoration of the imagined ideal past, a restoration free from, and indeed blocked by, conspiratorial others who supposedly oppose the aspirations of the nostalgics. “Restorative” nostalgia is anything but, and rather threatens the interconnected present through its unreflective denial of a history of interdependence in favor of an uncritically independent cultural past.40 In contrast to restorative nostalgia, Boym describes “reflective nostalgia” as having the potential for being more critical, by including space for irony and humor (49) and allowing for critical thinking (50). Importantly, the two forms support different views of others outside the nostalgia-defined group. Boym sees reflective nostalgia as engendering sensitivity to past experiences that humanizes others, whereas restorative/nationalist nostalgia dwells in sentimentality for the past (337–338). Battaglia and Boym both discuss nostalgia in ways that focus on group identities and defining of as well as negotiation between insiders and outsiders. Whereas negative or uncritical nostalgia, the type most often associated with the word nostalgia, tends to reject diversity and interconnection of inside and outside, Battaglia and Boym see nostalgia as also having the potential to contribute to dialogue and inclusion. Similarly, Pickering and Keightley see nostalgia as having positive and utopian potential: Rather than dismissing it as a concept, we should perhaps reconfigure it in terms of a distinction between the desire to return to an earlier state or idealized past, and the desire not to return but to recognize aspects of the past as the basis for renewal and satisfaction in the future. Nostalgia can then be seen as not only a search for ontological security in the past, but also as a means of taking one’s bearings for the road ahead in the uncertainties of the present. This opens up a positive dimension in nostalgia, one associated with desire for engagement with difference, with aspiration and critique, and with the identification of ways of living lacking in modernity. (921)

40 While narrow nationalist nostalgia constructs narratives of past exclusivity, nostalgia for a metropolitan past, observed in many former colonial centers (e.g. Alexandria, Dora; St. Petersburg, Boym; Madagascar, Emoff), demonstrate more inclusive nostalgias that may still overlook power imbalances at the center of those longed for pasts.

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Even when deployed uncritically, nostalgia can have positive effects as a contributor to group identity, constructing and maintaining a sense of community. Uncritical nostalgia maps to notions of inside and outside in simple, binary fashion: the (reimagined) past as the “true” inside, the present as alienating, more outside (and often as becoming increasingly so). Uncritical nostalgic narratives also may acknowledge change and process, but as a process of degradation, a turning away from a more understandable, secure past. Hope for the future lies in returning to or restoring that vanishing core (as seen in Boym’s “restorative nostalgia”). Several scholars have critiqued trends of uncritically looking back to the “good old days” in Japanese (particularly popular) culture. While not directly linking their appraisals to nostalgia, the type of longing and recreation of the past they describe is very much in a nostalgic mode. Commenting on Japanese otaku (devoted or hardcore fan) culture,41 Hiroki Azuma argues that “the history of otaku culture is one of adaptation—of how to ‘domesticate’ American culture” (11). He sees this process of domestication at play in many anime, manga, and video games, which portray what he calls a “pseudo- Japan.” Looking at the “Edo boom” of the 1980s and 1990s (the period when 19th Century Tokyo culture became widely celebrated in pop culture and academic circles as the ideal Japan), Steinberg observes that to many writers, both popular and academic, “Edo was the site of the lost-but-not-forgotten authentic Japan, the pre-Western 'outside' of modernity. It was also, conversely, the precursor and reflection of Japan's consumerist, postmodern present” (449). Steinberg and Azuma both address how postmodern theorists in Japan during the 1980s and 90s made claims “that the Edo period was in fact already postmodern” (Azuma 22). Azuma notes a tendency to compare the 1980s with the Edo period; he explains this as a way to “forget defeat [of World War II] and remain oblivious to the impact of Americanization” (22). This connecting of the Edo with the postmodern posits cultural continuity without acknowledging outside influences. If the Japan of the 1980s and 1990s was an embodiment of the postmodern (a view positioning Japan as exceeding the modernity of the euroamerican West), how much more reassuring in terms of cultural pride if that postmodern existence was actually a return to a pre-Westernized state of being. Azuma and Steinberg both critique this view of Edo continuity as basing itself on an idealized Edo, “often not based on reality but rather comprise[ing] a form of fiction constructed in an effort to escape the impact of Americanization” (Azuma 22).42 Azuma’s critique focuses largely on science fiction stories that incorporate “Japanese elements” in what he sees as an otherwise westernized world. He cites the

41 I find Marc Steinberg’s explanation of otaku useful: “The term otaku, which was coined in 1982 and came into popular usage by 1989, is usually translated as 'geek' or 'aficionado'… Reproached for their inability to communicate and the difficulty they have in functioning in everyday life, otaku are sometimes taken to task as symbolic of the anomie of contemporary Japan. Over the past few years, however, the otaku have come to be recognized as veritable subcultural heroes, ones, moreover, who are unique to Japan” (453). 42 Azuma reduces otaku culture to a response to the Japanese defeat by the allies and American occupation: “Lurking at the foundations of otaku culture is the complex yearning to produce a pseudo-Japan once again from American-made material, after the destruction of the ‘good old Japan’ through the defeat in World War II” (13).

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appeal of Edo-period features that appear in many anime as a prime example of such inclusion of Japanese elements. Edo buildings, clothing styles, and other cultural elements are a favorite sign of Japaneseness in many series—Azuma cites Saber Marionette J as an example of Edo in science fiction; Gintama is another example that is still airing on Japanese television and streaming worldwide. Azuma argues that the appeal of Edo depictions is that they hark back to the time prior not just to American intervention, but widespread European influence in general, and a time free of the shadow of militarism. While of course the depictions of Edo or Edo-like features in anime and manga are fictional representations, the very sense of Edo that they cite as their basis is already a fiction—already a “pseudo-Japan” (Azuma 22). While Azuma does not directly invoke the idea of nostalgia, collective nostalgia is clearly at work in the citation of Edo culture and other “traditional” Japanese features (such as miku or shrine maidens; see Azuma 14) in otaku culture. Such looking to Edo or “Edo viewing” (Steinberg) represents a larger trend of looking for (and creating the appearance of) cultural continuity via popular culture. Marc Steinberg comments on two strains of “Edo viewing” or looking back to the Edo period in modern Japan, once during the early 20th century and again in the 1980s and 1990s. While noting similarities in the object of this “viewing,” Steinberg notes that the nostalgia of the two is quite different: While the two periods share an impulse to find an 'outside' to modernity and, for some, a state of ostensibly pure Japaneseness, the mode of nostalgia and the sense of temporality governing each is, I would argue, profoundly different. Where the Edo of the 1920s and 1930s is figured as a disappearing past which is nevertheless still capable of resurrection in one form or another, the 1980s and 1990s Edo is both completely past and completely present. It is a past present: temporally it is the precursor of and yet simultaneous with the present. In other words by the 1980s and 1990s Edo can be accessed only in terms of its relation to the present. Edo, now more than ever, functions as a way of thinking about the present; a mirror, perhaps, by which the present beholds itself. (Steinberg 450)

Similar to the safety-valve Chino describes at work in early Japanese art and which I extend to other aspects of Japanese culture as a meaning-making strategy, cultural continuity works as a trope in many parts of Japanese cultural discourse. For example, many analyses of manga and anime point to the supposed origin of manga in traditional Japanese art, as suggested in titles such as Koyama-Richard’s One Thousand Years of Manga and Japanese Animation: From Painted Scrolls to Pokemon, and Bouquillard’s Hokusai43, First Manga Master. Such studies suggest that while contemporary manga contains euroamerican influences, the core of what differentiates manga from (especially) American comic book art originated within a Japan free of outside influence. Nostalgic yearning for and recreation of selective parts of the past act

43 Hokusai is an Edo-period engraver famous for The Great Wave of Kanagawa.

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as part of these narratives of continuity. The citation of Edo culture that Azuma describes is one iteration of this trend in otaku culture.44 The interweaving of cultural continuity with nostalgia need not always deal with the interaction of inside and outside in such a way that supposes a static core. As an example, the anime series Taishō Baseball Girls evokes a recent past in a way that is nostalgic for a Japan in the midst of modernization. Its nostalgia is not for a lost pre- modern past, but for the excitement and potential of the negotiation of culture, a yearning for a past in flux.

Reading Nostalgia and Inside–Outside Positionalities in Taishō Baseball Girls Taishō Baseball Girls (hereafter, TBG) follows a group of Tokyo schoolgirls who form a baseball team to play against a neighboring boys’ team as a way of making a statement about gender equality. The series begins in Taishō 14 (or 1925), a year that equates the 14-year-old main characters with the period itself. TBG references several key issues or themes popularly and historically associated with the Taishō period (July 30, 1912–December 25, 1926): Westernization, feminism, modernity, urbanization, and cosmopolitanism. The series has a nostalgic bent in that it addresses these themes from an idealized perspective. Battaglia states that “practical” or “active” nostalgia allows for ironic and thereby potentially critical engagements with the past, casting irony as a requirement for any nostalgia that would do more than maintain the status quo. On its surface, TBG is cheerily un-ironic—no direct critique of past or present is launched in the series. However, whether intentional or not, the anime includes several gaps where ironic critique of the glossy surface of the fantasy peeks through. While it may lack the strongly critical potential Battaglia associates with “active nostalgia,” TBG still represents a positive nostalgia in that it foregrounds and values flux, change, and negotiation of tradition and modernity, rather than an idealization of a stable past as the “good old days” lost to a (post)modern present. On several occasions it depicts and employs practices of meaning-making that are instances of inside–outside positionalities. TBG is a paean to Taishō middle-class, urban life. Taishō enthusiasm for western goods and attitudes is a constant theme, one the series highlights from the beginning of the first episode. The central character, Suzukawa Koume, prepares to head to school dressed in her usual kimono and hakama (a unisex split skirt), but is stopped by her parents, dressed in western fashions, who want her to wear a new “sailor suit” school uniform instead. Her father tells her, “this is the Taisho reign we’re in; kimono are out.

44 Shiro Yoshioka describes the conscious deployment of this trend in the work of animator Hayao Miyazaki (Princess Mononoke; Spirited Away). Yoshioka observes that “what Miyazaki does [when recreating a Taisho era town in Spirited Away…] is not literal or cinematic preservation so much as a novel artistic recreation of the past. […] Miyazaki is attempting to create an imaginary past that affects his audience sentimentally” (267). Such “recreations” suggest a continuity of certain features and ideals between past and present, rather than calling for perfect repetition of material features. As Yoshioka suggests, Miyazaki’s use of nostalgia invokes a hybrid past and links it to a hybrid present.

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Ladies will be wearing western clothes from now on!”45 The overjoyed Koume heads to school in her new seeraa fuku (セ–ラ–服), dashing through Tokyo and passing various landmarks mentioned in the 1919 song “Tokyo Bushi,” sung in the background by Koume’s voice actor. This opening scene and song overtly announce the nostalgic, fairytale nature of the series: Several of the landmarks mentioned in the song and visited by Koume in 1925 were destroyed in 1923 by the Great Kantō earthquake; further, the scene ends with Koume waking up to the sound of a ringing alarm clock (itself a western feature) in a bedroom otherwise marked as traditionally Japanese by its tatami (woven rushes and rice straw) floor mats, low table, and futon for sleeping. The “real world” that Koume awakens to, however, still has its share of western influence, presented in ways that demonstrate a renegotiation of cultural inside and outside taking place, of Japanese identity in transition. Koume’s home is typical of a Japanese small family business, of the kind Kondo describes (Crafting), and demonstrates the omote/ura (front/back) divide Bachnik discusses (“Self” 150–155): Private family quarters, in this case furnished in traditional fashion, are found behind and above the street-facing, public restaurant the family runs. Adding to the omote/ura divide, the restaurant serves western-style food and all the patrons shown during the series come dressed in western clothes, sit at western-style tables and chairs, and dine with knife, fork, and spoon. The father (a cook) and his apprentice, Saburou, wear button-up collared shirts, pants, and apron; by contrast, Koume and her mother, who serve customers as well as help the men in the kitchen, wear kimono, hakama, and aprons. Koume, still thinking of her dream, requests of her father to “buy me a sailor school uniform. Girls don’t wear kimono these days,” to which he replies, “girls have been wearing kimono to school just fine, ever since the Meiji reign”. Koume goes on to lament, “just about all the new students this year will be wearing sailor uniforms,” but to no avail.46 As Koume’s request suggests, her classmates sport a combination of styles. Throughout the series some wear traditional clothing, others dress in modern sailor suits. The divide of modernity/tradition along lines of women’s clothing is particularly emphasized in the case of twin sisters Tsukubae Tomoe and Shizuka, the former wearing a sailor suit and sporting short hair, the latter wearing kimono and long hair. The pairing is further complicated by the fact that loud and brash Tomoe is a star of the kendo club, and appears focused and serious when dressed in the kimono and hakama that make up her club’s uniform, a transition that emphasizes the connection made in the anime between clothing and attitude. Following this pattern, Shizuka, always wearing kimono, is also always formal, serious, and grounded. In these ways, the anime presents quick visual arguments or statements about characters, introducing them with a shorthand that Azuma describes as an “elemental” approach to character design and storytelling common in anime (39-47).

45 All quotations from the anime Taishō Baseball Girls are from the English subtitles supplied by Sentai Filmworks. 46 Later when complaining to her friend Akiko about her father not letting her wear a sailor uniform to school, Koume says grumpily, “he may appear all ‘Taisho’ on the outside, but under the surface he’s still stuck in the Meiji era.”

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In addition to the negotiation of traditional Japanese and western culture, the opening scene of TBG also reveals a gap for an ironic reading of the cosmopolitan Tokyo idealized in the anime. The song “Tokyo Bushi” is an appropriation of the tune “Marching Through Georgia,” written by Henry Clay Work and published in 1865 to commemorate General Sherman’s military campaign in Georgia during the American Civil War (Tome). While the lyrics of “Tokyo Bushi” included in TBG are light fluff, fitting with a nostalgic view of Taishō Tokyo, other verses of the full song are quite critical of life in Tokyo. The verses in TBG celebrate “Hibiya Park,” the “Houses of Representative and Peers,” the “fashionable Imperial Theater,” and the “Metropolitan Police Department,” framed by the nonsensical refrain “Ramechantara gitchonchon de paino paino pai! Parikoto panana de furai furai furai.”47 Later verses, not included in the anime, describe Tokyo as “crawling with 3,000,000 people who live without manufacturing their own rice,” “famous for its packed trains,” as an “island” where “even the sun does not appear,” and “dark and smelly, like a hole” (Yano 252–54). A still recognizable song in Japan today (several modern reinterpretations exist, such as Zazen Boys’ 2011 rock rendition), “Tokyo Bushi” dually harks nostalgically to Taishō popular music (which Yano describes as being an important factor in forming the “imagined community” [Anderson] of Japan as a nation-state) and evokes the criticism of modernization and urbanization shared by the songwriter and at least some listeners at the time of its composition. Regardless of whether the double-meaning of the song (the idealized, cutesy image of Taishō Tokyo portrayed in the anime and the criticism within the full 1919 song) is intentional on the part of the directorial and writing team behind TBG, “Tokyo Bushi” introduces a layer of self-critique into the episode. It highlights that TBG is an idealized portrayal of 1920s Tokyo urban life and that other sides to the tale exist. The song is also quite fitting for a series focusing on urban Japan renegotiating its identity as a Japan that draws from both tradition and (western) modernity: Just as the girls central to the story are recasting themselves through dress, attitudes, and activities (e.g., the American sport of baseball) but still see themselves as Japanese, “Tokyo Bushi” is a song steeped with local meaning but drawing from an outside musical score. Further moments of shifting and negotiating inside–outside positions occur throughout Taishō Baseball Girls. These negotiations, while involving and affecting the characters of the story, address the audience with an argument about the past and Japanese identity. TBG presents a stylized and idealized version of history that valorizes not just westernization, but cultural change and negotiation more broadly. It is a nostalgic view of shifting notions of what is culturally inside and outside of the modern Japanese cultural self. Seeing Japanese femininity and girlhood as a locus of what is most inner and Japanese about Japanese identity (an assertion I defend more fully in the following chapter), the adoption of multiple “western” practices by the girls in this series recasts those things as part of a newly authenticated and acceptable way of being Japanese.48

47 The blogger “night reader” suggests the lines are meant as onomatopoeia of foreign words including “Paris coat” or parikoto and “banana” or panana. Other words may capture other sounds of the city. 48 In a similar vein, Khanh Trinh’s commentary on the 2008 art exhibit “Taisho Chic” observes that art from the period (at least the art collected for that particular exhibit) demonstrated a

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These characters stand in for a new generation that embraces change and an ongoing process of negotiation between inside and outside as constituting Taishō Japan. The characters’ inclusion of markedly western products and practices alongside markedly traditional Japanese things validates both and expands what constitutes an “inner” Japan. Along these lines, what is rejected in the series—both cultural beliefs overtly rejected by the characters (such as the older ideals of femininity they combat) and historical developments studiously ignored by the narrative (particularly the developing militarism that lead to the Pacific war)—is ousted as having no place in the 21st century Japan that is simultaneously the producer and legacy of the idealized past portrayed in TBG. What Lee calls “selective oblivion” (164) shapes both the past and wished-for future (163). A narrative that celebrates some instances of hybridity, TBG welcomes some formerly outside ideals (e.g., certain forms of women’s rights) and ousts formerly “inside” traditions to make way for the new. This shifting process is not a simple trading out of one thing for another; rather, both change form and meaning, shifting as part of the adoption of a larger cultural package. Like the Christmas cake discussed earlier in this chapter, many of the western things in TBG remain both overtly marked as western and gain their (local) significance from that association. As described by Creighton, Konagaya, Seargeant, and others, the west—especially America and English—are associated in Japan with ideals like democracy and equality. Of central significance to the plot, TBG links the American sport of baseball with women’s equality. Baseball takes on a loaded significance. Playing the sport is the series’ defining act of rebellion against older ideals of Japanese feminine behavior and women’s social status, ideals still held in the story by many faculty members in both the girls’ and boys’ schools, by the boys’ baseball team, and by at least two of the central girls’ parents. Playing baseball becomes the girls’ way of addressing the incongruity of a society that embraces many western ideals, but without fully extending them to women. The idea for the girls’ team emerges from Akiko’s disagreement with her fiancé49 about women’s role in the new Japan; to prove a point about women’s equality, Akiko wants to beat school baseball star Sousuke at his own game. Other girls join her effort, sometimes under pressure from Akiko, out of friendship, or interest in the sport. The nascent team finds a champion and coach in their (American) English teacher, Anna Cartland. Their teacher and coach is marked as American in many ways, exhibiting many stereotypes of American idealized behavior, some of which the girls are seeking to incorporate into their own sense of a modern Japanese female self, others which they value in their coach as foreign outsider, but which they themselves do not fully emulate (nor seek to). Blonde-haired, blue-eyed, and a skilled baseball player, loud and outspoken Anna-sensei stands with the girls to go against the principal’s rejection to their request to start a team and to gain (provisional) approval from the school’s chairwoman. As a character, Anna-sensei is multiply marked

“balance between modernity and nostalgia. They clash violently at times but then again they can be found in a close embrace” (85). Notably, “the dichotomy becomes apparent in the image of women” (85). 49 Both Akiko and Koume have arranged marriages by the end of the series; I discuss the topic of arranged marriage in the series further below.

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as a representative of a desired outside culture. Her participation in the girls’ scheme also marks their team as one that incorporates Japanese ideals of America. As a representative of the outside, Anna’s presence validates the team as an amalgam of inside and outside. Her accentuated femininity—styled hair, high heels, lipstick—paired with her “American” personality traits introduce an alternate but recognizable ideal of femininity to her students. While the “outside” ideal Anna represents challenges the traditional ideal of femininity that several of the boys and older adults expect of the girls, it is also shown to be compatible with other accepted ideals. An accepted figure in the school, Anna represents the possibility of a constructive and harmonious coexistence between American/western and Japanese ideals. While the girls on the team learn from Anna- sensei’s example and guidance to stand up and push against resistance to their desire to play baseball (a stand-in for gender equality), they do so in ways that fit with their prior sense of politeness; they become determined and at times forceful but without the swagger their teacher exhibits. TBG associates gender equality with euroamerican ideals and links it to the process of Japan’s 20th century modernization, a connection generally supported by the historical record. The series characterizes the change in gender ideals as another borrowing or result of outside influence. While supporting this connection of equality with the outside, TBG also links the shift in gender roles to Japan’s older “inner” heritage. At the start of the series, Akiko refers to baseball as “that which boys do,” a characterization paired with a passage Akiko reads from the Tosa Diary (Tosa nikki; 935 C.E.) during a scene set in her classical Japanese class. The author of the diary begins by stating, “a diary, I am told, is something written by a man. I, too, shall write one to see how a woman can do” (TBG). The female voice in the Tosa Diary deciding to take up the conventionally masculine activity of writing a diary in 935 is obviously meant to pair with Akiko’s wish to go against gender expectations and play baseball in 1924. The quote highlights that gender expectations change with time and suggests that challenging such expectations is itself an established facet of Japanese heritage—that the girls’ rebellion through baseball is nothing new. The pairing of the two acts also opens a gap for irony. As the liner notes in Sentai Filmworks’ English subtitled version of TBG reveal, the Tosa Diary is considered a work of fiction, written by a man, Ki no Tsurayuki, from the perspective of his wife (to add to the illusion, he wrote it using the “women’s hand” kana script mentioned in Chapter 1, rather than “masculine” kanji, or Chinese characters). However, the pairing remains ironically appropriate, in that TBG the anime began as a light novel series written by a male author and serialized in a magazine targeted to teen boys. The story thus is a nostalgic rendering of Taishō girls’ struggle for equality against male notions of proper femininity, written for young men by a male author. While the antagonisms in TBG revolve around gender, the lines of conflict actually break along differences in age and involve disagreement over what behaviors and ways of living are “Japanese” or not. Although the team is formed directly in response to a disagreement between Akiko and her fiancé, the boys’ team itself is shown steadily progressing from not taking the girls seriously as rivals to respecting their ambition, and finally working to actively support their wish for a formal game between the two teams. While the boys’ attitudes are an impetus, it quickly becomes clear that their resistance is simply in response to what adults have been saying; when prompted by the girls’ actions to reflect, it only takes a little to convince them to not only change their

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minds but to also challenge the attitudes of their male coach and principal on their own. The other male character around the girls’ age group, Koume’s fiancé supports her wish to play baseball as soon as she explains it to him and later tries to sway her father to support her as well. The real conflict in TGB is less defined by gender (although it is about gender), than by age. The principal of the girls’ school is against the formation of the team and dislikes the chairwoman’s decision to allow it; the boys’ principal refuses to let the boys’ team play an official game with the girls; late in the series Koume’s father says he would rather disown her than have a daughter playing baseball, while her mother remains more neutral on the subject, displaying more shock that Koume would want to play than disapproval; and Akiko’s mother refuses to let her out of the house the day of a big game once she learns what her daughter is doing. These older characters’ actions and attitudes create a generation divide that associates westernization and women’s rights with youth and the future on one hand, and tradition and patriarchy with age and the past, on the other. However, this age division is disrupted by three key characters: Anna- sensei, as an icon of America and things western, stands on the side of the girls by her nature as a foreigner. The school chairwoman is an older woman, smartly dressed in western clothes (the principal, while wearing western clothes, has a character design more like a schoolmarm), needs little convincing to allow the formation of the team. The third, an older man dressed in traditional Japanese garb and sporting a white beard, becomes an admirer of the girls after they save him from thieves in an early episode; later, it is revealed he at least knows or perhaps is friends with the chairwoman, and is a key member of the boys’ school board, able to demand that the principal let the game between the teams proceed. In his rebuke of the boys’ principal, the board member suggests that the girls’ dedication to sport is more in keeping with Japanese values than the principal’s refusal to allow the teams to compete. The board member and chairwoman’s support, and the board member’s character design as dressed in traditional attire, suggest a link between the earlier Meiji period’s moves to adopt western learning and the Taishō enthusiasm for social reform seen in the girls’ love for baseball. As the two highest ranking (and perhaps oldest) representatives of the older generations (clearly a generation or more older than the girls’ parents), these two act as a voice of “inner” authority declaring a compatibility—if not continuity—of spirit between the eras. As can probably be expected, by the end of the series the girls win the moral battle. While they lose the baseball game against the boys, they are able to hold a lead for a while and the game remains close to the end. The boys’ team reaffirms their support for the girls and Sousuke sincerely apologizes to Akiko (and it’s clear his mind had already been changed well before that). The girls’ principal, in her role as choir director, reconsiders her earlier opposition and comes to the game to support the team. Of course, Koume’s parents show up to cheer their daughter on, the father cheering the loudest of anyone in the growing crowd, and in the prologue Koume is shown going to school in a new sailor suit, presumably purchased by her converted father. The sailor suit ending suggests an eclipse of traditional Japan (the kimono) by western ways and values (the sailor suit). However, for contemporary audiences (both Japanese and overseas anime fans) the sailor suit has itself become a symbol of Japanese

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school life.50 While it was adopted in response to school fashion in England and Germany, the girl’s sailor suit has since become a localized tradition while falling out of use in European schools (Galbraith 198). Other girls on the team who at the start of the series wear kimono are not shown making a transition, suggesting that rather than replacement of tradition by the modern, the clothing of Japanese girlhood had expanded to include more possibilities. While much of TBG involves changing traditions and the girls’ assertion of independence, the two arranged marriages in the series are a striking exception. As mentioned previously, at the start of anime, Akiko has already had a long-standing arranged engagement to Sousuke. Akiko is a member of high society, living in a western- style mansion with multiple servants; her disagreement with Sousuke takes place at a formal dinner, suggesting his family is of similar status. It seems likely the marriage is either a financial or political alliance. Koume belongs to a middle class family, living above the restaurant they own. Halfway through the series, her father decides that she and his apprentice Saburou should be engaged.51 Viewers never see the outcome of the engagements—Koume’s father suggests the marriage would take place in six years, when she is twenty—but neither Akiko nor Koume resist their families’ decisions regarding their conjugal futures. Akiko works to make sure her fiancé respects her, but opposing the arrangement never arises as something she even considers. Koume, while surprised at the suddenness of the decision, adjusts quickly and seems quite happy to go along. In a story focusing on cultural change and evolving women’s rights, TBG leaves this particular long-standing tradition of arranged marriages unchanged and unchallenged. As part of a nostalgic reconstruction of girlhood in 1920s Tokyo, the treatment of arranged marriage or miai does not seem an oversight but an intentional component of an idealized past. Miai are still practiced in present-day Japan, though more often as a way of introducing prospective partners than the sort of paternal command it is depicted as in TBG (Hendry 151). At the same time, Japan has experienced a declining birthrate and lowering rates of marriage; perhaps anxiety over young people’s lack of interest in starting their own families has carried over into TBG’s depiction of a Japan in the midst of change, one with a growing population ensured by family-guided decisions about marriage and marriage partners. With nostalgia acting as reconstruction of the past, reflection of the present, and a projection into the future (Lee 163), or a celebration and call for the preservation of certain perhaps overlooked elements (Yoshioka), TBG’s treatment of arranged marriage suggests a wish that at least some parts of “good old Japan” had not gone away as Japan continued to change after the Taishō period. It includes marriage—and by extension reproduction—as part of what constitutes ideal Japanese behavior and problematically removes it from scrutiny as an issue of gender equality. Marriage in service of family remains marked in TBG as an inviolable part of inner Japanese-ness, something unaltered (and which, the series seems to suggest, should

50 For example, Azuma lists it as a common element appearing in anime. 51 Since there are no sons in Koume’s family, it is possible Saburou would be adopted into Koume’s family as part of the marriage, taking on the Suzukawa family name and becoming the successor to the business.

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not have been altered) by outside influence. While the series highlights the constructedness of some ideals and their contingency (i.e., that their form can change while still upholding certain ideals), it puts others off limits to questioning and change. Unlike the topics TBG rejects by ejecting them from the narrative (e.g., Japan’s militarization), topics like arranged marriage are made off limits by their very centrality within the plot. Marriage and family come up repeatedly, yet appear as an integral and inevitable part of the girls’ daily lives—the girls don’t question these institutional expectations any more than they question that they are living in Tokyo. As my reading suggests, TBG presents a view of Taishō Japan that presents a positive view of a rapidly globalizing (and localizing) past in ways that celebrate many elements of gender equality, while at the same time naturalizing several antifeminist practices as central to Japanese cultural identity. It counters other expressions of nostalgia that long for the “good old days” as ones free of outside influence (such as the Edo- viewing critiqued by Steinberg and Azuma), but commits its own oversights. It challenges some notions of cultural continuity while spinning its own narratives of continuity. As another “representative anecdote” of identity-building along shifting lines of inside–outside, TBG demonstrates the tenacity of the categories (or ideals) “inside” and “outside.” Even when the divisions are recognizably fluid and polar, as imagined through the easy shifting of inner Japan (e.g., the Taishō girls) to incorporate outside influences (e.g., western things, especially European sailor suits and American Baseball), certain things remain hallowed as part of a continuous thread connecting to the past. Unchallenged icons of an inner past, such as the arranged marriages, are not attached to any given time period, unlike those things newly adopted (the sailor suit, arriving as part of Taishō modernization) or things left to the past (the kimono and hakama as a school uniform, associated with the Meiji-period establishment of national girls’ schools). Things that remain unquestionably uchi in the series float freely outside of time, while things that shift in and out of uchi and soto are clearly linked to certain times, with the progression of time acting as a form of explanation for why the shift happens (“this is the Taisho reign we’re in; kimono are out”). TBG privileges some ideals by dehistoricizing them. Those things it challenges it contextualizes, linking them to specific eras so that their change becomes seemingly inevitable as time passes. As such, the attitude represented toward much of the past by the heroines of TBG is in keeping with the common narrative of modernity: that “progress” and “development” are both inevitable and lead toward a greater good.

Conclusion The two anecdotes presented in this chapter, the cases of the Christmas cake and Taisho Baseball Girls, show the constructing and shifting of ideals of inside and ideals of outside as part of the process of creating and maintaining a Japanese regional identity as a modern nation. Both demonstrate the marking of cultures as “inside” and “outside.” In the cake example, the surface appearance of the cake as a foreign tradition contributes to its efficacy. The invented-ness of the cake is ignored in the narratives surrounding it; a local invention having a powerful “inside effect,” the cake represents many Japanese ideals of the outside. In comparison, TBG accentuates the negotiation between the (inner) Japanese past and (outer) western present that constructs a new, inner Taishō present.

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While the cake anecdote is instructive for showing how narratives of cultural identity often focus on the smaller (and often illusory) ideals of inside rather than the larger category of things having an “inside effect,” TBG, by including the process of negotiation between inside and outside as part of its narrative, more fully maps those things having an inside effect with the emergent Taishō Japan. In contrast to many nostalgic views of the past, TBG thus associates the present with inner, the past with outer; however, the series also holds on to cultural continuity. Some elements of Japanese culture still appear as “essential” in the series, but not everything in Japan’s past is necessary to that essence, a characterization that allows for greater compatibility with outside influences. The conflict of the series revolves around disagreements about what constitutes Japan: the parents equate surfaces with essences, fearing that a change in the girls’ behavior would mean a loss of Japaneseness, whereas the girls and their supporters see themselves as still expressing Japanese ideals through their new ways of being. Again seeing Anna as an ideal of outside, the girls’ adaptation of those ideals represents a new Japan. Another facet of TBG is that it puts some elements of traditional Japanese identity outside of time; in this case, cultural continuity is not about linking the present to the past, but rather a setting of those valued traditions (e.g., arranged marriage and filial piety) outside the flow of time. The cases of the Christmas cake and Taishō Baseball Girls both illustrate the importance of process, repetition, and the changes and shifts in meaning brought about by “failures” of repetition, to borrow language from Butler’s performativity. The Christmas cake is a constructive failure to repeat or replicate ideals of America and ideals of Japan, a deviation from the supposed (and imaginary) original that constitutes a new local tradition, one whose meaning relies on both evoking other Japanese traditions and being marked as “American.” Nostalgia as part of the creation of narratives of regional identity is likewise powered through failure to replicate representations and memories of the past. Recalling Lee’s characterization of reconstruction of the past as involving “selective oblivion,” nostalgia gives not just a picking and choosing of outside influences (Chino 24), but a picking of what and how to remember, a process that changes visions of the past and the meanings and relations of the present. Nostalgia acts as a way of mobilizing and shaping memory, of linking individual and group memory. Such memories are intimately tied to the performative. Often flawed, incomplete, and utopian, nostalgic rememberings themselves are and support further “failures” of repetition that drive the meaning-making of performativity. The strength of inside–outside positionalities lies in its use of a deep-seated metaphor of inside and outside. Applied broadly, readings based in inside–outside positionalities open space for greater intercultural understanding by tracing points of connectedness where more absolute divisions are often imagined. Inside–outside positionalities keeps us focused on the historicity and rhetoricity of cultural and other group identities. By emphasizing historical interdependence and exchange, an inside–

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outside perspective keeps us looking dually inward and outward, a perspective both locally attentive and globally cognizant.52

52 A modified version of this chapter’s discussion of the Christmas cake and some explanatory material about inside–outside positionalities from Chapter 1 appears in my article “Uchi/Soto in Japan: A Global Turn,” published in Rhetoric Society Quarterly 43.3 (2013): 235–269.

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CHAPTER 3 Japanese Femininity as a Trope for Maintaining a Regional Identity Inside–outside positionalities in Japan has often been employed in constructing a sense of cultural identity. As seen in the previous chapter through the example of the Christmas cake, such identity construction may involve surface appearances of a strict divide between inside and outside, while closer inspection reveals a deeper interaction between those extremes. The Christmas cake highlights how notions of an inner cultural core can be “protected” by also creating ideals of outsideness, of which the supposedly “American” nature of the Christmas cake is one instance. In this chapter, I will focus on how women and ideals of femininity have been linked with “inner” Japan as part of the construction of a Japanese cultural and national identity. Just as marking certain “outside” features and traditions as non-Japanese helped to maintain an appearance of an ongoing and clearly identifiable sense of Japaneseness, linking women to ideals of insideness gave a “face” to those ideals. I use the term “troping” to describe the process of linking Japanese women to notions of an inner Japan and the deployment of women as a means for shaping inside–outside relations. While a trope often refers to a literary device,53 for purposes of this project, I use troping to refer to a meaning-making practice. I focus on the “troping of women” to discuss the association or linkage of women—both as figures and as real, embodied people—with ideals of Japaneseness or a sense of “inner” Japan. This troping of women plays out through the deployment of actual women in such ways that they perform Japaneseness—for example, through the wearing of traditional dress during ceremonial occasions. Due to Japan’s history of associating women with “inner” Japan, women have a greater impact when acting as representations of Japaneseness than men would; Japanese women in traditional attire, for example, more strongly evoke Japaneseness than would men. Note that this example of women in traditional attire evoking inner Japan is largely indexical, in that it is “pointing to.” Women are associated with inner Japan; traditional clothing is associated with inner Japan; women wearing traditional clothing are doubly associated—these linkages simply make use of existing ways of pointing to the ideals of inner Japan. Where this “troping” becomes a process of meaning-making is that because of the strength of the association between women and inner Japan, things and practices that were previously not thought of as Japanese but which are taken up by women can also become linked to Japan. Their association with Japaneseness has given certain women the authority (and burden54) to be able to validate and bring outside elements into

53 More expansive uses of trope also exist. Notably, Krista Ratcliffe refers to “gender” and “race” as tropes, and argues that “because all language is inherently figurative […] all terms are tropes” (111). 54 The association of women with “inner” Japan extends to private spaces as well as playing out on the national stage. Nancy Rosenberger reads women’s roles as both being more restricted than that of Japanese men and having special significance to maintaining group identity. Rosenberger’s work on the uchi/soto dynamic maps uchi to women and soto to men. She writes that in uchi situations, an adult woman often “stage-manages uchi contexts and facilitates the

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Japanese culture. For example, the Meiji empress and her women attendants adopting western formal wear makes a case for the compatibility of those fashions with ideals of Japaneseness. In this way, the troping of women acts as a way to shape Japanese culture and identity. Powered by the linkage of women to tradition and to a supposedly unchanging cultural core, the effect of this troping is to simultaneously reinforce a sense of continuity of the old ways and to introduce change. Treated as representations of inner Japaneseness, the image of women was deployed both in support of a vision of the nation as maintaining its customs and distinct essence, and for the purpose of facilitating Japan’s modernization and the adoption of western learning. What is also important to note about troping of women as a meaning-making practice is that it deals with both ideals and real people; it is both discursive and embodied.55 The process makes flesh-and-blood women into representations of an abstraction; such an act creates a locus for the ideal, a rhetorically potent condensation of something nebulous. Such characterizations also means that women become idealized, and their range of acceptable behavior greatly restricted. Troping of women, then, also describes the way that Japanese women are coerced into particular subject positions that correspond to ideals of Japaneseness: the “good wife,” the “wise mother.” The government officials and intellectuals56 behind this reconceptualization of the nation and who guided this strategic deployment of the image of women, while committed to Japan’s modernization, were also invested in maintaining Japan’s cultural independence and uniqueness. Largely, they saw these goals as self supporting (westernization was needed to defend a distinct Japanese culture from colonial usurpation), but also distinct—much like the Heian period court culture sought to bring in Tang learning while preserving a distinct inner core of Yamato-within-Yamato (Chino). Within this late 19th and early 20th Century version of the “double binary,” Japanese women were deployed in differing ways for outside, western audiences and inner, participation of males (as well as females)” and “facilitates group harmony” (“Gender” 101). This “stage-managing” of uchi situations often comes at the price of the “managing” women experiencing “tension and subordination in these relations,” but Rosenberger also asserts that, in their role of contributing to overall in-group (uchi) harmony, such “unequal gender relations are dynamic and useful” (108). Rosenberger’s account points to the cultural capital held by Japanese women, but also to the enforcement of subordinate status that accompanies it (and which men unequally benefit from). 55 Ratcliffe also notes the importance of recognzing that tropes of gender and race are both embodied and discursive, writing that tropes “become embodied in people via socialization” (156). 56 These influential elites were initially part of the “Meiji Restoration,” the reform movement that worked to overthrow the government of the shogun, the defacto ruler of Japan, and “restore” authority to the emperor, a position that had been largely symbolic for centuries. This revolution and its ensuing program of westernization was thus cast as a return to ancient Japanese cultural ideals, a “corrective” to a (centuries long) “deviation” from how Japan “should” have been, with westernization seen as a necessary step for protecting Japanese inner culture. Later officials, including rising businessmen, members of the old aristocracy, and western-educated academics continued their reforms in a similar spirit.

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Japanese audiences, with an inevitable overlap between these performances of Japaneseness. Women were shown variously as adopting western fashion and as fitting with ways of being that matched with western ideals of gender and civilization; at the same time, women continued to be associated with non-western, Japanese “tradition.” The (mostly male) elites controlling the construction and performance of the new Japanese nation needed women to be associated with both inside and outside, but did not want them to actually change as a result of being part of that dialectic, as from their perspective that would mean that Japanese essence had changed as well. This impossible goal was one those directing the troping process tried hard to enforce and make real. In an effort to maintain a division between inside and outside and to preserve a cultural core, these elites used the troping of women as both a means for constructing a national identity, but also for constructing and enforcing ideals of femininity. By constructing normative ways of being female and Japanese, the appearance of an inner divide between modern Japan and its inner culture core (similar to the Kara-within- Yamato/Yamato-within-Yamato pairing) was maintained for a time. However, the tropological power women were invested with, and even the elite’s very construction of normative ways of being for women to follow as a means to shore up the inside/outside divide, opened a means to resist those normative identities and undermine the artificial divide of outside and inside, modern and traditional. I read this resistance to change and its inevitable failure to keep inner Japan isolated from outer influences as yet another example of the inexorable dynamic of inside–outside. In this chapter, I explore the troping of women as part of Japanese identity construction, as a means for making and policing normative ideals and performances of femininity, and as a recombinant form of meaning-making that draws across the spectrum of the inside–outside polarity, which ultimately undermines the imposition of a hard divide between inside and outside that Japanese cultural elites tried to enforce. To this end, I present several brief examples of the troping of women as representations of Japaneseness, drawing from Burke’s “four master tropes” to explain those connections between women and Japan; I then present the figure of the Japanese schoolgirl as an identity category that emerged from the deployment of women as part of the construction of a new Japanese identity. The schoolgirl represents a blending of and speaking to both inside and outside, and that identity and surrounding subculture became a site of conflict in the struggle to maintain a division between modernization and an inner cultural core. As I will argue, the crises and responses surrounding the schoolgirl have had lasting effects on Japanese ideals of femininity and Japaneseness. Finally, I turn to contemporary schoolgirl culture57 to demonstrate how as an ideal, the schoolgirl remains a site of contestation as well as resistance to dominant norms. Re-examining the notion of trope as a set of recognizable, recurring, and recombinant features, I suggest that the schoolgirl as a figure has continued to shape and reshape her own tropes in ways that draw from and

57 This jump over construction of schoolgirl identity during the war years and the U.S. Occupation is due to the disruption of those narratives during that time. While I make some connections between pre- and post-war periods, they are less detailed than my discussions of the periods before or after.

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resist older imposed or coerced constructions of Japanese femininity. Whereas earlier troping by cultural elites acted to restrict the intertwined and meaning-making relationship of contact between inside and outside, the interconnections seen in inside– outside positionalities reasserts itself through women and girls’ resistant and recombinant self-troping, as exemplified by the later “kogal”58 or “high school gals” movement. The subversive kogal identity demonstrates how the dynamic of inside–outside continues to drive change and new meanings from within previously stable and naturalized identity tropes, adding another facet to where and how inside–outside positionalities functions.

Women as Representations of Inner Japan In discourses of Japanese national identity, women and femininity are often treated as symbols or embodiments of Japaneseness. This troping is embodied through women’s daily lives and their performances of self; it acts directly upon women, circumscribing the “acceptable” possibilities for their daily lives and constructing normative subject positions to which Japanese women are expected to conform. Due to the repeated associations of women with ideals of Japaneseness, any representation of women and femininity, any performative variation or revision of “womanhood,” can potentially impact those ideals. What I describe as the troping of women in Japan is another instance of inside– outside positionalities in action. Women are often positioned as simultaneously inside and outside, not only as shifting between the ideals of inside and outside while drawing from both (a positioning showcased by the Christmas cake example in Chapter 2), but simultaneously at multiple points along the inside–outside polarity. This simultaneity of positions is particularly evident in the troping and rhetorical deployment of Japanese women during times of cultural rupture or upheaval caused by contact between Japan and a powerful outside Other, such as seen during contact between Heian-period Japan and Tang-dynasty China, and during the period of modernization following Japan’s forced “opening” to the west by Admiral Perry and the United States Navy. Particularly in the latter instance, time and again women were regarded as both symbols of tradition and progress, associated with Japanese exceptionalism as well as Japan’s compatibility with outside culture. Like other instances of inside–outside positionalities in action, the troping of women in Japan is part of an ongoing meaning-making process, a part of the construction and negotiation of ideals of Japaneseness. In discussing the troping of women by Japanese elites, I draw from Burke’s discussion of the meaning-making devices he calls the four “master tropes” (Grammar 503–517). My usage of trope emphasizes the “acting upon” women, an imposition of an ideal and a concurrent policing of women’s behavior to make sure it matched that ideal. The “troping of women” implies a removal or diminishing of agency, and a turning of women into objects that are “used” or “acted upon.” As an idealization and conflation of women and Japaneseness, it is an objectification in the most negative sense. While the

58 Kogal is an Anglicization of Japanese kogyaru; as an already anglicized word, I leave it unitalicized.

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same power might also be wielded by women, drawing on their own cultural capital and authority, this potential was largely headed off by women’s behavior being subject to increased scrutiny and policing. Seen from the perspective of Burke’s “master tropes” as laid out in A Grammar of Motives, the figure of women and femininity acts tropically in several ways. While it is possible to list the four “master tropes” separately and to characterize the troping of Japanese women through those four devices, the four run into and shape one another. The linking of women with Japaneseness is metaphoric, as in that Japan characterized itself as feminine (see Chino; more on this below). Burke pairs metaphor with perspective and characterizes it as “a device for seeing something in terms of something else”; it focuses on the “character” of one thing to highlight something about the character of another (503). Casting ideals of Japaneseness through the lens of the (imagined) character of Japanese women shapes how both women and nation are considered. It also reinforces the patriarchal, family model the Meiji political reformers wanted to institute, with men (and the emperor as family head) “protecting”—while also supported and nurtured by— women and a feminine national essence. The troping of women is metonymic, in that women are associated with the nation, with tradition, and with inner Japan. Burke describes metonymy as “convey[ing] some intangible state in terms of the corporeal or tangible. E.g., to speak of ‘the heart’ rather than ‘the emotions’” (506). He also links metonymy to the act of “reduction” in what he calls the world view of “scientific realism” (506). Metonymic troping of women with the nation gives a tangible form to an ideal; it also perpetuates a type of essentializing, as the “essence” of Japaneseness is “reduced” or “distilled” down from the amorphous nation, all of which reinforces the acceptance of these figurative acts and associations as being “real” connections between state and women. Troping of women is synecdochic in that women are a part of (notions of) the nation while standing in for the whole; Burke connects synecdoche with representation, and describes “metaphysical doctrines proclaiming the identity of ‘microcosm’ and ‘macrocosm’” as “the perfect paradigm or prototype” for other uses of synecdoche (508). As opposed to male political representatives of Japan who might speak for the nation, as a representation of Japaneseness, women must constantly enact and embody ideals of Japaneseness; this synecdochic connection, once naturalized and considered real, leads to a perceived need for greater scrutiny and policing of women’s behavior. Troping of Japanese women involves not just the discussion of women, but also their performance of self. As I will discuss in a later section of this chapter, Japanese officials, diplomats, and intellectuals (mostly male) elevated certain groups of women (e.g., aristocratic and urban middle class women) to national and international attention, while closely regulating their behavior and disparaging other groups of women for not living up to those ideals. Finally, the troping of women is ironic. Burke pairs irony to dialectic; it is here that meaning-making through interaction between persons or ideas takes place (511– 512). Burke explains dialectic/irony in contrast to relativism. He claims that relativism has no irony, because it decontextualizes one figure or idea from those around it; in contrast, “irony arises when one tries, by the interaction of terms upon one another, to produce a development which uses all the terms” (512). As an example, he observes how “we should ‘ironically’ note the function of the disease in ‘perfecting’ the cure, or the

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function of the cure in ‘perpetuating’ the influences of the disease” (512). For Burke, meaning and innovation come about through consideration of a whole which includes disagreement, absurdity, and (apparent) oppositions. As Burke’s treatment of irony is multivalent, the tropic deployment of women is ironic on multiple levels. Though associated with the nation, Japanese women are quite often disempowered by that association (and that association often relies on their disempowerment). The troping of women is also ironic in that women, in all their other associated meanings, are put in dialectic with men and masculinity in order to define the Japanese nation as a whole. In the same vein, women are figured ironically in that while linked (metaphorically, metonymically, and synecdochically) to notions of an idealized inner Japan, they are also linked to various “outside” borrowings and expectations. While linked to ideals of Japaneseness and figured as preservers of Japanese culture and traditions (Ashikara 63), Japanese women were also expected to adopt various western or western-influenced customs as part of their performance of Japan as modern nation. Considering the troping of women through the lens of Burke’s “master tropes” helps us to conceptualize the linkage of women with ideals of insideness. Burke’s connection of irony and dialectic also points us toward the meaning-making potential of women’s association with both inside (tradition) and outside (western practices and products). The master tropes remain limited, however, in that while they help to describe the ways women are linked with Japaneseness, they do not help with tracing the specific forms those associations took on, nor how the troping process also loops back to alter those ideals. While irony/dialectic acknowledges potential for meaning-making through tropes, Burke’s categories still only help in labeling the kind of action taking place. In this sense of acting as broad labels, the “master tropes” encounter a similar limitation as indexing—they help in pointing to and describing relationships and kinds of meanings, but do not aid in describing how those associations came about or change. While productive in its own right as a way of categorizing, we need to look elsewhere to expand our understanding of troping as meaning-making. Linking the master tropes to inside–outside positionalities gives us an avenue into thinking about how the ideals of insideness that give power to the troping of women are themselves altered over time and through use. While the troping itself presupposes a divide between inside and outside that protects the ideals of inside from changing, such a divide is illusory and change inevitable. In the following, I explore several examples of how women were figured as representations of inner Japan as a means to both associate Japan with western ideas and to preserve traditional ways of being. These examples show how a divide between inside and outside was upheld, and how new practices and ways of being were created in order to maintain that divide—effectively changing ideals of insideness in the name of protecting them from change.

Women and Ideals of Japaneseness Chino’s work with inside and outside in Heian-period art provides a reading of an early example of the linkage of women and ideals of Japaneseness. These associations functioned in ways that elevated women’s symbolic power while limiting their social mobility and independence. Chino sees a strong association between the inner, Yamato

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ideal of Heian Japan and femininity. Listing terms relevant to art history and criticism, she associates “femininity” with “small, delicate, soft, modest, ephemeral, private, diverse, calm, harmonious,” and emphasizes that these terms, “drawn from a Japanese context,” are “positive and affirmative,” without the “derogatory connotation” they carry in English-language art history discourse (21). Chino would rather that “’masculinity’ and ‘femininity’ […] be placed on either end of a conceptual axis of affirmative and positive values” (21).59 In Chino’s reading, during Heian-period Japan the concepts of women and femininity were separated, such that Men could move through the “masculine” [Kara, public, outer] and the “feminine” [Yamato, private, inner] realms at will, while women, except for special occasions, were confined to the “feminine” realm. […] Notice, however, that for the Japanese people of the period, their identity as Japanese was located not in the “masculine” but in the feminine.” Heian-period men sought their identity in the “feminine.” (Chino 27) This separation between the categories or descriptors “women” and “femininity” made the feminine the purview of both Japanese women and men. However, despite this functional separation, aristocratic women still were often the embodied symbol of feminine/Yamato/inner ideals. Chino reads the association of certain art styles (yamato-e) and writing (kana60 script) with women as reinforcing those art objects’ status as part of “inner” Japanese culture (Yamato-within-Yamato). Although “femininity” held positive connotations for Heian Japan, as a value system it still had an oppressive effect on women. As Chino states, “precisely because it [Heian Japan] was a culture that put value on the ‘feminine,’ the social pressure to keep ‘women’ confined to the interior worked all the more strongly” (32). While these “feminine” elements may be accessible to both Japanese women and men, “proper” women are idealized as always displaying them. Protecting these ideals, then, took on the form of policing women’s behaviors to limit them to only expression of those idealized elements; this scrutiny and policing of women’s behavior continues to be present in later cases of troping of women with Japaneseness, a topic I return to below. In the conclusion to her chapter, Chino argues that Japanese attitudes toward masculinity and femininity changed from the Meiji period (1868–1912) onward, as a

59 Chino’s recasting of “feminine” characteristics as “positive and affirmative” corresponds in some ways to what Alcoff characterizes (and critiques) as the approach of cultural feminists: “the cultural feminist reappraisal construes woman’s passivity as her peacefulness, her sentimentality as her proclivity to nurture, her subjectiveness as her advanced self-awareness, and so forth. Cultural feminists have not challenged the defining of woman but only that definition given by men” (407). However, by separating “femininity” from “women,” and linking femininity to the range of performances available to Japanese men, Chino highlights that the characteristics of “femininity” are also a (male) construct, linked to women by convention rather than by any sort of natural fact. 60 Kana refers to both hiragana and katakana scripts; their association with Japan comes from their having been developed by Japanese speakers rather than borrowed directly from China, like the kanji characters.

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result of contact with western thought, including western traditions of art history. Whereas before masculine and feminine acted as ends on a positive continuum (at least in the art world and Japan it represented), “during the Meiji period, Japanese leaders who had studied in the West aggressively sought to valorize ‘masculinity’” and devalued the feminine (33). Chino associates this hyper-masculinization with denigration of both Japan’s past and of other Asian cultures, and ultimately to the rise of Japanese militarization.61 While Japanese intellectuals’ attitudes toward “masculinity” and “femininity” may have changed, reformers in the Meiji period still deployed women and ideals of femininity as part of the movement to ‘modernize’ Japan in the 19th and early 20th century. During this period, women were regularly associated with both traditional values and newly imported elements of western culture. While Japanese women were linked to things both “inside” and “outside” of Japanese traditional culture, the power these associations had in the construction of a Japanese national identity all drew from assumed connections between women, femininity, and Japaneseness. That is, because they were associated with ideals of Japaneseness, Japanese women brought a certain authenticity to things considered traditional; at the same time, as symbols of Japaneseness, women legitimized new practices adopted from outside cultures as compatible with Japanese “spirit.” The advocates of modernization who deployed women as part of the process of constructing a new national identity reached out to two kinds of audiences, outside observers (such as diplomats from other nations) and the Japanese people. As such, reformers’ messages were often of both “proving” that Japan was a modern nation as judged by the west and that while it was changing as a nation, that it was not losing sight of its cultural values and heritage; women became a trope for both tradition and modernity, a connection that highlights the interdependence of inside and outside as it relates to the construction of cultural or group identity. The outward-facing rhetorical mobilization of women focused on responding to western expectations of what a “civilized” or “modern” nation looked like. The outward- facing troping of women resulted in many changes in Japanese culture, some decreed by law, others encouraged (or coerced). The implicit claims of these representations of women are essential—‘this is what Japanese women are like’; ‘this is what the Japanese nation is like’. However, the very intervention of law (indeed, the fact that the very situation those new laws changed were the results of previous laws and policies) demonstrates their intentionally constructed nature. One case in point involves laws regarding women on the stage. As part of its efforts to ‘prove’ itself as a modern nation to the West, the Japanese government revoked earlier laws that prohibited women from acting on stage, urging women’s roles to be played by women instead of men specializing in women’s roles (Kano 11, 15). By controlling women’s place in Japanese theater, the government was attempting to control what was acceptably Japanese. Kano observes, “not only was ‘the actress question’ a part of larger discussion about the status of women

61 In contrast to Chino’s characterization of Japan from the Meiji period and beyond as having shifted toward masculinity, Michiko Suzuki characterizes Taishō culture “as the emergence of a feminized culture” (4).

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and the status of theater, but… a part of the process of building Japan as a modern nation- state” (15). Kano argues that the government no longer wanted kabuki theater, with its all-male casts and oft-critical depictions of Japanese elites and official institutions, to be associated with Japanese high art. Reforming women’s roles on stage allowed a drastic reform in theater, creating one the government felt more comfortable presenting to foreign dignitaries. This law effectively changed an older “inner” tradition of Japanese theater by claiming to be returning to an earlier, “purer” form of Japaneseness, claiming that Japanese women could only adequately be represented by actual Japanese women, not men trained to play women’s roles, as had been the practice. Dually positioned to “speak” to both inside and outside audiences, the role played by women in these performances of national identity responds both to western expectations of women’s behavior and assumptions about the relationship between women and national character, as well as existing Japanese ideals of (aristocratic) femininity. While speaking to both inside and outside, and claiming to be representing an inner cultural core, the ideals women were troped to represent were also already representative of a culture constituted by inside and outside influences. Many “local” ideals of supposedly pan-Japanese femininity were largely based on Edo/Tokugawa period (1603–1868) rules of conduct specifically for samurai women, which did not apply to Japanese women broadly. The highly patriarchal samurai household structure was itself based in Neo-Confucian values, values developed by Japanese intellectuals drawing from Chinese texts. These inner ideals were already a result of inside–outside interactions, and their provenance during pre-Meiji Japan was limited to a particular social class, a world largely outside of the majority of Japanese lifeways. These traditions were expanded or reinterpreted during the Meiji-period as applying to all women, with particular responsibility for preserving them put on middle-class women.62 Since many of the early western-focused performances of femininity involved royal and aristocratic women, the role of (inner) preserver of traditions went to women of the rising middle class (Ashikari 64). In response to the disruptions to old Japan as part of a forced increase in intercultural contact and rapid modernization, the values and traditions of “old Japan” were re-imagined and the past re-signified. Again, much of this change was enacted by changing expectations and redeployments of Japanese women as symbols of Japan. While of course the cultural changes affecting Japan during the Meiji and Taishō periods touched the whole of Japan, women in particular were in the very midst of negotiations between inside and outside, euroamerican and Japanese, change and tradition. While the nation as a whole experienced the shifts between inside and outside, women were doubly pressured to both adapt to new ways of being, and to preserve older traditions. Their lives and the expectations placed upon them, again, suggest the pervasiveness of inside– outside and the necessity of that dynamic as part of intercultural communication, as well as for the construction and maintenance of cultural identity in a globalized world.

62 As Mikiko Ashikari explains, while women of the samurai class in pre-Meiji Japan were expected to follow strict codes of behavior, they “did not have any particular responsibility for preserving tradition and cultural identity” (63). However, just such a responsibility and burden was placed on Japanese middle-class women during the Meiji period.

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Changes in clothing styles and fashion were seen early in the Meiji period as an important way for women to perform Japaneseness as congruent with modernity. Initially, this display of Japan’s modernity was carried out primarily by men. Diplomats, officers, and other officials (all male) who were in regular contact with western representatives quickly transitioned to wearing western-style clothing and uniforms, a shift supported by official proclamation in 1872 (Hastings 679). The wives and female relatives of these functionaries at first continued wearing traditional Japanese attire, suggesting a clear gendered association with western and traditional Japanese culture. However, this separation at the point of contact between Japan and the west could not hold, given the message Japan wanted to send to the outside world. Meiji Japan associated the idea of civilization and modernization with westernization; since it was important to show that Japan was “civilized” to its core, women, as representations of that core, had to match the outer performance of their male counterparts. Mikiko Ashikari relates how traditional ideals of female appearance involved use of heavy white makeup, shaving or plucking eyebrows and a drawing in of false brows high on the forehead, and blackening of teeth—of which, the latter two practices westerners seemed to find particularly shocking. Responding to the reaction of westerners to the fashions of Japanese women at formal events, elite women increasingly wore western fashions. The transition of the Empress and her attendants to western dress in 1886 made a notable impression on westerners and Japanese alike. Although such performances were primarily directed outward, they also flowed inward—over time, Japanese women of various social classes and contexts increasingly wore western fashion. Hastings writes that “when the empress adopted Western dress in 1886, she issued a court circular requiring all women at court to do the same. In her pronouncement, the empress assured women that Western dress was consonant with the national essence” (682, emphasis added). The case of the empress and her attendants adopting western dress for formal events while insisting that it “was consonant with the national essence” suggests that an attempt was being made to insulate existing ideals of Japaneseness as represented by women. The message was that while outward appearances were changed, that the inner core remained the same, an attempt to assure the imperial subjects that nothing that really mattered about Japanese culture had changed. But of course, everything was already in the process of changing. These cases of troping of women were an important element of the construction of a new Japanese sense of self, as part of Japan’s nation-building and modernization project. Women were presented in ways that represented a changing sense of Japaneseness to both the outer world and to Japan. Women’s performance of femininity was thus one of many locations for negotiating how tradition and modernity would interact. While much of this early troping was directed outward, the adopting of modernity that it implied had a broader impact (Hastings; Ashikari). Other efforts to associate Japanese women with modernity faced both outward and inward, and had a more widespread and direct effect on women’s lives. Women’s education was one such major area of change, responding to both outward and inward facing concerns. Not just a surface change, as the literal “dressing up” of the upper classes constituted, these changes and their accompanying effects did much more to change “inner” Japan.

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Girls’ Education and Conflicting Ideals of Inside and Outside Meiji education policies constitute a site where Japanese girls and young women experienced a doubled and conflicting association with both modernization and tradition. Changes in education policies and the resulting development of “school girl culture” in late Meiji and early Taishō periods involved contrary troping of women as both modern and traditional, both of which turned on the association of women with Japaneseness. The social conflict that resulted was another important location for the working through of conflicting visions of what Japan should be. Looking outward, education for women was necessary to claims of parity with western powers. Broader education of both men and women was also necessary for supporting the state’s agenda of modernization; however, the institution of broader education for women (and the concurrent creation of a new social demographic, the school girl) produced a great deal of concern and pushback by many intellectuals and social watchdogs. Where the objective of boys’ schools was to expose boys and young men to western ideas and learning which they would use to modernize the nation economically and militarily and so ward off the aggressive western colonization Japan saw its neighbors suffering under, the goal of girls’ schools was to develop “good wives and wise mothers” who could support their future westernized husbands and children, but while upholding older cultural ideals (Ashikara 63; see also Wilson). Because of the very different goals for girls’ education, perceived changes in their behavior brought about by attending school caused a sort of moral panic; this was particularly true when girls began using foreign words learned in school in their speech and exhibiting other behaviors their elders associated with foreign culture (Inoue “Things” 513; Vicarious 63).63 Where boys’ westernization was encouraged and their use of markedly “western” behavior approved, girls’ behavior, especially language-use, underwent particular scrutiny (Inoue “Things” 513; Nakamura 34). The ensuing moral panic and various societal responses say much about the perceived role of women and girls within Japanese cultural identity; the dialogues around this panic also further shaped that role and brought about new ways of performing femininity and Japaneseness. The greatest impact of this panic was on the idea of a Japanese “women’s language” or joseigo.64 Faced with a new demographic of girls and young women who

63 Separating women from other languages has roots at least as far back as the Heian period. Chino comments that Heian women were expected to at least feign ignorance of understanding Chinese characters (i.e., masculine writing), although evidence shows this was truer in concept than in practice (25). Inoue sees male social commentators in the early 20th Century decrying schoolgirls’ use of Chinese word and expressions in both speaking and writing, casting them as masculine (Vicarious 63); English was similarly considered “masculine” (64). 64 “Women’s language,” is characterized as bring more polite than Japanese men’s language (Ogino, Misono, and Fukushima), as favoring certain first- and second-person pronouns, and using distinctive sentence-final particles (Ide and Yoshida); additionally, at least prior to the U.S. occupation, “proper” women’s language was expected to avoid non-Japanese words (Inoue Vicarious 64). While many of the politeness markers of women’s language are the same as those used by men, women are expected to use a higher degree of politeness more often. For example, first-person pronoun watashi tends to be used by men in formal settings, while women tend to use it in informal settings. Sentence-final particles are another element that marks Japanese women’s

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were increasingly familiar with western learning and thought (further making this “outside” learning part of Japan’s “inner” learning), elites who wanted to maintain the old social order and their familiar sense of Japaneseness needed a way to keep this group that was both Japanese and not (ideally) Japanese in line. The girls’ new language practice was an easily observable and clearly marked indicator of this new group and their “deviance” from older ideals. Those who sought to control the shape of the new Japan again turned to the troping of women. The response took two forms—immediate opprobrium of the new “schoolgirls’ speech” and a longer-term co-opting of that language back into the ideals of Japanese femininity, part of a language-planning program that continues to affect the way women are thought of and expected to speak today. Looking at “women’s language” in contemporary Japan, Inoue observes, “this linguistic consciousness of how women speak is closely connected with notions of culture and tradition in the assumption that women’s language is uniquely Japanese, with unbroken historical roots in an archetypical, imaginary Japanese past…” (Vicarious Language 2). As is common for many nations, the national language in Japan is regarded as a feature that differentiates Japanese culture and people from others. A striking feature of Japanese language is its bifurcation into (unmarked) men’s speech and marked women’s speech. Japanese women’s speech or joseigo is widely regarded as having a basis in ancient Japanese history, and an important part of Japan’s heritage. As Inoue comments, “Women’s language is […] viewed as an emblem of nation and tradition—as against the West and even modernity itself” (Vicarious 3). While often considered a part of Japanese cultural identity, many studies argue that joseigo, at least as it is known in modern Japan, developed as part of a language-planning project begun by the Meiji government and draws many of its features from literary approximations of newly emergent (and once heavily criticized) schoolgirl speech. The process of change from vilified schoolgirl speech to standard “women’s language” is also an instance of inside– outside movement, one that was naturalized and recast as “tradition” to cement it within Japanese culture. Inoue show how novels (Vicarious) and magazine advertising (“Things”) naturalized features of formerly non-normative and reviled “schoolgirl speech” as part of an acceptable “women’s language.” Popular publications did more than just model and naturalize a way of speaking, however. Along with the language used, these publications language as different from (unmarked, male) standard Japanese. Ide and Yoshida explain sentence-final particles as “linguistic features that index the speaker’s various cognitive and emotional assessments concerning… contextual factors. Some sentence-final particles characterize male or female speech because of their exclusive use by one sex or the other” (463). They go on to observe that “people who frequently use wa, wane, and wayo [used for building rapport or to soften a statement] thereby also index their identity as female, while people who tend to use zo or na [used to show insistence or emphasis] at the end of utterances index their identity as male” (466). Of the ways joseigo is marked, sentence-final particles are the most significant in regards to the redefining of Japanese ideals of femininity and their relation to Japaneseness.

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presented ways of being feminine to readers. Several scholars of Japanese media show how these various presentations of girls’ and women’s lives could be at times progressive or even resistant, at others, conservative and normative (see Kenko Kawasaki; Inoue “Things”; Suzuki). Magazines such as Shōjo no tomo (English Girls’ Friend) and Shōjo no kurabu (Girls’ club) were directed toward the emerging schoolgirl culture (Tsuchiya Dollase). While the presumed locus of this culture was initially small (mostly daughters of the urban, particularly Tokyo, middle class), its effects were much broader. As Suzuki argues, “although many fads and trends for young women developed within higher girls’ schools, magazines and stories targeted at girls in this age range reached a wider audience in terms of class and geography—well beyond the limited number of girls who actually attended such schools” (Suzuki 32). Much of this demographic’s influence was made possible through print media. Magazines targeting this group served to popularize and spread schoolgirl culture beyond its initial bounds; literature, magazines, and advertising directed toward adults also had a powerful impact, especially on the eventual integration of schoolgirl speech into a national “women’s language.” As part of the policing of women’s behavior to keep it in line with the ideals of Japaneseness it was supposed to represent, schoolgirl speech was closely scrutinized, criticized, and eventually co-opted into “traditional” Japanese femininity. Officially, “women’s language” became associated with Japan’s distant past, placing the origin of women’s language in “the feudal… Muromachi Period, 14th-16th centuries,” when “indications appear of a planned and systematic effort to spread a language style exclusively for women” (Tanaka 25). During this time the language seems restricted to the courts. Later, “the ‘womanly/feminine’ language was systematically inculcated in women from the beginning of the Edo period (1603-1868)” (25). Recasting elements of schoolgirl speech into a pan-Japanese “women’s language” served the purpose of codifying a national language and strengthening a patriarchal and class-based power structure, and helped produce a desired kind of citizen (Nakamura 34–35). Being able to mark women’s language made it easier to set girl students apart from boy students, and to criticize and control women’s activities. The idea of “women’s language” also served as an Other against which to define an unmarked, masculine standard form of Japanese (34- 5). Japan’s language-planning movement and program, the “genbun itchi”65 or “unifying of speech and writing” movement, aimed to connect the written and spoken forms, as a way of demonstrating parity with European languages. Again, here is a strategy at work for reframing Japan that is aimed both inward and outward. It changes accounts of Japaneseness in order to modernize—it changes Japan’s inside (its language use) because of outside influence (the norms and expectations modern European powers had of the relation between spoken and written language). The development of a “women’s language” as part of this movement helped to maintain gender roles, casting women by their very speech as hierarchically lower than and subservient to men; it cast women as “naturally” less direct and less likely to question (male) authority. While the literature does not indicate this, the surrounding practices of troping women raises the question of

65 Sometimes also transliterated as genbun’itchi or gembun’itchi.

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whether the appending of women’s language to the movement gave it a veneer of authenticity it would have lacked. In order to connect written and spoken language, a “correct” form of spoken Japanese had first to be identified, or rather, created. This process of language planning focused on an upper-middle-class Tokyo dialect and involved a distinction between men and women’s speech. Inoue argues that women’s speech arose from literary devices used to capture non-linguistic features. Many of the distinguishing forms began as an approximation or code rather than a literal mirror of language, but were adopted into the new national language (Inoue, “Gembun’itchi” 62).66 By associating women with a particular way of speaking in print and by women’s acceptance and adoption of these supposed norms into their everyday speech, they were again figured as a particular kind of citizen, “naturally” different from men even in their language—another way of troping women with elite, masculine visions of their ideal Japanese culture. This linguistic marking of difference also reinforced the notion of women as preservers of Japanese traditional culture. With “women’s language” naturalized as the continuation of old ways of speaking, women speakers of the norm were seen as living up to the demands of their idealized subject positions—even though the “past” they were “preserving” was a modern invention. As a fictive imposition, “women’s language” is not actually spoken by many women, though even in contemporary Japan it is represented and sought after as a prestige language that marks speakers as fitting into ideals of Japaneseness and femininity (see Okamoto and Shibamoto Smith). Even in Tokyo, many women and especially girls do not follow the speech patterns of “women’s language.” However, conduct manuals still teach use of “women’s language,” and the popularity of these texts suggests that it is still aspired to as a prestige language, a way of making the speaker more “Japanese.” “Women’s language” represents both an invention resulting from inside–outside interaction, and an imposition upon women as representations of inner Japan, in the name of “protecting” the inner cultural core of Japaneseness from change. As a product of inside–outside meaning-making, it emerged from Japanese school girls’ language inovation in the new school setting (associated at the time with the west), from Japanese authors’ responses to western ways of writing (especially conventions of the novel), and the Japanese government’s desire for a national language that combined speech and writing (another European standard). That this early 20th Century invention became associated with ancient tradition and linked to ideals of both femininity and Japaneseness is another irony of the ways Japanese women’s lives have been shaped to conform to their being troped as protectors of Japanese tradition.

66 Inoue suggests the language markers associated with Japanese “women’s speech,” particularly ending particles, arose as part of Japanese novelists’ attempts to capture “linguistic excess in the text with verb-ending forms.” As she observers, “depending on the verb-ending form one chooses, different pragmatic effects, with the same referential value, are produced as to how the narrator (speaker) narrates (talks) to the reader (listener) about the characters and events” (“Gembun’itchi” 61).

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Popular Media and New Ways of Being While print media helped to shape and naturalize “women’s language,” it also influenced the development and spread of schoolgirl culture and the shōjo identity. Kenko Kawasaki places the appearance of girls’ magazines in 1902 (294). Kawasaki argues that “the appearance of a new female student readership brought about the boom in the publication of girls’ magazines during this period, but it is equally true that the development of a new community of girls was driven by the magazine industry that served them” (294). Economic shifts tied to “changed notions of the ‘child’ and ‘youth’, and promoted new styles and expressions of gender differentiation (Kawasaki 294). As Kawasaki, Nakamura, Suzuki, and others suggest, the cultural, economic, and educational transitions in late 19th and early 20th century Japan both constituted and were influenced by a new young women’s identity, which eventually became known as shōjo. This modern category emerged from and led to new ways of thinking about women’s lifecycles and their relationship with the nation. Suzuki sees the late Meiji period, with its growing economy and new education system, as leading to new ways of thinking of Japanese femininity. “Newly emergent discourses and social changes from the 1910s made concrete the idea of female identity as a developmental trajectory. Instead of a simple two-stage shift from girlhood to adulthood, the female lifecycle became more complex as a result of the new educational system, ideas of sexual development, delayed age for entry into marriage, and even the emergence of age-specific media such as magazines for adolescents” (6). Intellectuals, policy-makers, and advertisers took great notice of this newly categorized demographic. Their engagement with shōjo culture brought it into a sort of alliance with the larger agenda of Japanese nation-building and modernization. Perhaps it is not surprising that these popular magazines67 tended to reflect and support the political leanings of their day, supporting westernization when it was at the center of the government agenda, promoting a return to traditional styles when war became eminent. Western fashion and art styles dominated girls’ magazines, often appearing in fanciful illustrations of Japanese girls dressed in western fashions. The images accompanied (often romantic) stories and discussion forums that helped construct ideals of girlhood (the shōjo). Hiromi Tsuchiya Dollase discusses how in the years from 1937–1945 messages about western fashion and values changed as Japan prepared for war with western nations. Art styles and fashions in the magazines changed and the editors spoke out against Western decadence. The ideals portrayed in stories in the magazine changed as well, moving away from romance and dreams to dedication to family and nation, to supporting the soldiers overseas. Similarly, women were encouraged to join war support clubs, promoting an ideal of “good wives, wise mothers” (Wilson). This propaganda was not just about shaping women’s behavior, but the effect it would have on keeping the nation as a whole focused on war, and on morale of soldiers abroad and at home. Significantly, during and following the US occupation, shōjo magazines returned to westernized themes; they also became a venue for discussing and

67 Weekly sales for women’s magazines in Tokyo in the 1910s ranged from a few thousand to tens of thousands (Inoue Vicarious 116).

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negotiating changes that took place regarding the legal rights of Japanese women (Bae). While these shifts in focus of popular magazines were in part a reaction to prevailing societal trends, it also helped to shape them. The stories and art of shōjo magazines helped to shape the lifeworlds of young readers, influencing their dreams and aspirations. By adjusting (and at times censoring) the fantasies they provided, the magazines had a strong influence on what was accepted as part of Japanese femininity. While these magazines had a hand in constructing and maintaining normative ideals of girlhood and femininity that were in keeping with state ideologies of Japanese nationhood, they did not entirely exclude alternate models of girlhood. Although the linguistic practices of schoolgirls (the eventual shōjo) were co-opted into dominant language ideology that gave rise to patriarchal notions of a “women’s language” (Inoue), and though girls’ magazines were at various points complicit in supporting state agendas of, alternately, modernization and later anti-western and militaristic ideals (Takahashi; Washi; Bae), these publications and the associated culture often provided resistant spaces and non-dominant narratives. As Kenko argues, there were spaces in shōjo culture for marginal voices and representations of alternative ways of being from early on (296), a potential that continues on into contemporary pop culture. In part reflective of trends and movements of the time, shōjo magazines spread awareness of potential ways of being that did not conform with standard narratives of daughters growing up to be housewives, caring for modern husbands and sons—they celebrated possibilities of Japanese women being modern themselves. During the 1920s and 1930s, “the schoolgirls who enjoyed the shōjo magazines and culture were now not entirely restricted to becoming the housewives of the new middle class,” and stories in the magazines began to present a wider range of possibilities (Kenko 296). While war-time censorship largely put a stop to anything radically non-normative, and the occupation press office was at first similarly restrictive, post-war magazines would once again become a space where alternative identities and ways of being Japanese could be explored.

Rethinking Tropes as Recombinant While many of the changes surrounding education and language policy were either directly imposed or influenced by intellectuals, publishers, and government officials in support of their vision for the Japanese nation, not all changes were directed from above. Stories that exemplified various types of school girl behavior, of women working in professions in the city, depictions of the “moga” or “modern girl,” as well as tradition roles as wives and mothers expanded readers’ options for models of ways of being Japanese women. The same power behind the governmental troping of women to invoke and shape national ideals could be used by women to resist imposed norms and shape their own trends and ideals of Japaneseness. Bohn and Matsumoto suggest that while the government “doubtless […] had a strong influence on the establishment of the modern ideologies surrounding women’s language,” that young women in the Meiji period created “linguistic innovations and trends […] without official sanction or the approval of traditionalists” (52). Adding to previous work looking at the role of young women in the development of what is now considered “women’s speech,” Bohn and Matsumoto “suggest that young female speakers of the Meiji period can be viewed as having served as the trendsetters of the era, rather than as simply passive targets of

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ideological conditioning” (53). Similarly, Suzuki sees Japanese women in the early 20th century as having more agency. She describes the process of Japanese modernity as one in which “prewar women fashioned themselves as active participants […] by taking part in the process of continual progress and change” (5). By including stories (factual and fictional) of women’s lives, these publications diversified the ideals of femininity available to readers; these models constitute another way of “troping,” involving recurring and recombinant character types and attributes, an understanding of trope as recurring themes, laden with meaning and acquiring more meanings through each use. This other way of thinking about tropes provides a needed expansion to the broad, descriptive categories Burke provides, offering a way of thinking about how these figures change and can be selectively recombined to generate new patterns and meanings. To explain this second type of troping, an alternative to the “master tropes,” I turn to the wiki tvtropes.org. The tvtropes site crowdsources the collection of a growing list of “tropes” found in television, manga, anime, videogames, and other popular modes of storytelling. The wiki’s main page describes trope as “devices and conventions that a writer can reasonably rely on as being present in the audience members' minds and expectations” (Main). The tropes of tvtropes are recurrent and rely on audience knowledge—but they also shape that knowledge, as each iteration or use of a recognizable trope refigures it in some way, adding to the body of experience that informs the figure. Considering this potential for flux, consideration of trope should involve attention to interaction of patterns, process, and audience reaction, a focus that helps to trace how tropes evolve, change, and draw from one another: Above all, a trope is a convention. It can be a plot trick, a setup, a narrative structure, a character type, a linguistic idiom... you know it when you see it. Tropes are not inherently disruptive to a story; however, when the trope itself becomes intrusive, distracting the viewer rather than serving as shorthand, it has become a cliché. On this wiki, "trope" has the even more general meaning of a pattern in storytelling, not only within the media works themselves, but also in related aspects such as the behind-the-scenes aspects of creation, the technical features of a medium, and the fan experience. The idea being that storytelling is not just writing, it is the whole process of creating and telling/showing a story. (Main/Trope) Tropes as examined in tvtropes replicate and evolve meaning in a “citational” fashion, in the sense developed by Judith Butler. Each use affects understandings of a trope across time, as new turns of the trope, especially if it is in someway noteworthy or subversive, affect understandings of previous and future uses of that device. The cataloging of tropes by tvtropes foregrounds the recombinant nature of the storytelling devices. While stories share many elements in common with other stories, variations in both how they take shape and what other tropes they are used in combination with (some combinations together becoming their own identifiable trope) all contribute to newness and variation in storytelling. As both citational and recombinant, these kinds of story tropes fit well with Azuma’s theorization of a “database” of character and story elements that underlies anime and manga storytelling. Azuma describes Japanese anime, manga, and related products as drawing from a conceptual database of repeatable and

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recombinant elements, which range from physical and behavioral characteristics of characters (hair color; clothing; dialect and speech patterns), to personality types, to plot devices (42–47). The “elemental” components that make up the database may be combined, recombined, and altered in such ways as to make stories whose pleasure lies in both their newness and their recognizability. Openness of the system allows influences from without (say, from other story lines or genres), and variant recombinations68 and repetitions of recognized elements generate new ideas from within (such as reworking a familiar narrative with a twist that deconstructs it); the system works as an engine that keeps moving because it changes over time. Like the tropes tracked by tvtropes, the troping of women in Japan involves various themes, meanings, and associations being repeated over time, interpreted and decoded based on a widely shared and recognized body of knowledge. Like the storytelling tropes and the elemental database-remix that Azuma describes, repetition and citation both strengthen some trends or meanings, and open up space for change. Of course, the troping of women involves not just fictional characters or actors portraying a role, but living people. It is a historical troping, a process of meaning-making active across time. However, this historical emplaced-ness does not distance the troping of women in Japan from poetic troping in television, manga, and other popular media. Thinking of the way “tv tropes” act citationally to affect meaning synchronically and diachronically, both notions of trope clearly act across time. Tropes, like nostalgia, reengage people with past, present, and future. The reworking does not erase past histories, events, or texts, but changes the way living people engage them. While the troping along the lines of metaphor, metonym, synecdoche, and irony help conceptualize the ways or purposes of how women’s behavior was deployed to send and shape messages about Japaneseness, this sort of character troping involves the models of femininity or ways of being that evoke these other tropic associations. Ways of speaking, dressing, working, and other elements (to recall Azuma’s database theory) can be used to constitute new ways of being women and being Japanese. While troping of women as part of nation-building in the late 19th and early 20th century largely involved what can be described as “controlled troping” by male elites, this top-down and coercive shaping and deployment of women’s identities was met with increasing resistance. Resistant self-troping took advantage of the recombinant potential of character tropes, of the kind catalogued by tvtropes, and was especially taken up by youth cultures at various points in Japanese history. In the following section, I turn to a more contemporary example of female youth culture that makes use of such self-troping, the “kogal.” I focus on this historically later case for the striking ways in which it reworks and counters many of the troping strategies used in the early 20th century to shape schoolgirls’ behavior. Set next to those earlier cases, which were shaped by elite controlled troping, kogal recombinant self-troping demonstrates a move from constructions of femininity and Japaneseness that tried to maintain a sharp inside/outside divide, to a construction and performance that sees inside–outside as fluid and interconnected.

68 See also Laurence Lessig on “remix.”

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The Kogal as a Resistant Re-Combination of Ideals of Japanese Girlhood and Femininity The kogal or kogyaru—a shortening and combination of the terms kōkōsei, high school student, and gyaru, a transliteration of English “girl” or “gal”—is an urban Japanese girl subculture first appearing during the 1990s. The term echoes this resistant identity’s hybrid nature—a blending of the familiar, “wholesome” high school girl with the resistant “gal,” a name also previously associated with resistant female identities, what Miller describes as a “vintage loanword” carrying resistant overtones as far back as the 1920s (227). Kogals resist idealized norms of female behavior by taking tropes of femininity and turning them on their heads—or more accurately, pulling those and other available tropes apart, picking and choosing from their features, and recombining them in unexpected ways that still cite the accepted ideals, but in a subversive fashion. Kogals are a resistant youth culture that brings in additional outside elements to previously stable inside–outside identities, such as the schoolgirl, especially the shōjo ideal. They challenge these identities that have become normative and accepted as representative of Japaneseness, making those accepted elements once again un-Japanese by emphasizing existing western influences as well as adding new ones.

Figure 3: Loose socks and short skirt Figure 2: Kogal in school uniform (photo by Nesnad) (photo by Purves)

The kogal is a female youth identity or subculture readily identifiable by members’ dress, language, and other behavioral practices. Kogals are associated with two sorts of fashion—a modified schoolgirl fashion and an “after hours” style (Kinsella 230). The kogal school dress is associated with wearing uniform skirts rolled under at the waist to convert them into mini skirts, wearing of loose socks (knee-length socks worn low; see figure 2), and the wearing of Burberry scarves during cold weather. In contrast to the regimental tidiness school uniforms were meant to evoke, the kogal way of wearing them

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“suggested laxness: a contradiction of the formal expectations that school girls should be impeccably neat and perfectly pure” (230). Kogal “after hours” wear has been described as “mature, semi-classical and showy,” often using “cheap imitations of expensive materials” (Kinsella 230). This way of dressing runs counter to the ideals of purity associated with “proper” schoolgirls, particularly the shōjo ideal. Equally noticeable is their use of hair dye, contact lenses, make-up, and tanning (see figures 4 and 5). Kogals often dye their hair blonde, brown, or streaked. Tinted contact lenses are popular, often blue or hazel (Black 241). Kogals make use of tanning salons and further accentuate the effect with additional dark foundation and wearing of pale or white, thick lipstick and eye shadow. Daniel Black characterizes the kogal’s appearance as a “bricolage” of racial characteristics that counters normative attitudes toward race and highlights its constructedness. While some western observers have characterized the kogal use of hair dye and contact lenses as an attempt to look western, and others—especially those who achieve an extremely deep tanning as part of a sub- style called ganguro (see figure 5)—as attempting to emulate black culture, researchers and observers more familiar with kogals describe it as more of a conscious rejection of assumptions about racial phenotypes. Miller describes kogals as adopting an intentionally non-cultural specific appearance, an “aesthetic of mukokuseki” or “stateless globalism” (229).

Figure 4: After hours kogals (photo by Figure 5: Ganguro style (photo Beyond My Ken) by Chan)

The tanned look adopted by kogals is particularly notable (and noticeable) as subversive in Japanese culture, where a pale, white appearance has long been valued as the ideal. Daniel Black notes that Japan has a thriving market for skin-whitening products and highlights a desire for whiteness as a cultural norm (241). Ashikari describes how women’s putting on “whiteface” has had long associations with ideals of femininity in

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Japan. Prior to the Meiji period, men and women alike wore whiteface, a process that also involved shaving and redrawing eyebrows, and blackening teeth for formal occasions. This practice shifted to only be carried out by women after the Meiji restoration, as men began to take on western fashions and practices. As Meiji women began to adopt more western fashions, whiteface dropped the practice of eyebrow shaving and teeth blackening, and use of heavy white became reserved for formal and traditional events, such as coming of age ceremonies and marriage, or worn by traditional entertainers (see figure 6); everyday use of whiteface continued (and became more widely practiced across social classes) through the form of wearing white foundation. Ashikari’s argument is that practices of wearing whiteface became more strongly associated with Japaneseness and femininity as a result of the social changes, as traditional whiteface was associated with formal occasions and everyday, more “natural” whiteface became the norm for all women. In this context, then the kogal preference for a tanned appearance stands out as a resistant behavior. Alongside their anti-normative appearance, kogals practice a way of using language that sets them apart and clearly runs counter to the norms and expectations of Japanese language ideology, especially the conventions of “women’s language.” Laura Miller provides a detailed explanation of kogal language innovation (231–36). Several features stand out, including the creative reworking of English-derived words, clipping or shortening of words, orthographic mixing that flouts norms of written Japanese as well as spoken, and the unencumbered use of “hypermasculine” word forms alongside their other remixing of the language. Reflecting on this latter point, Miller writes that, “Kogals do not qualify their use of “strongly masculine” forms by giggling or using hedges or quotatives in order to indicate a lingering discomfort in breaking gendered language norms,” behavior other researchers have observed when studying use of “masculine” speech forms by female Japanese speakers (234).

Figure 6: Traditional whiteface (photo by Cuizon) Equally important to changes to the form of language, are also topics of conversation. As part of a larger pattern of norm-flouting behavior, kogals are direct with their language and do not shy away from taboo topics, such as sex. They can also be openly critical of authority figures. Miller describes kogal identity performance as

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unquestionably resistant. Citing Susan Gal’s criteria for resistant behavior, Miller describes the kogal as defiantly maintaining their performance in the face of broad social censure: Susan Gal has written that “Resistance to a dominant cultural order occurs in two ways: first, when devalued linguistic forms and practices. . . . are practiced and celebrated despite widespread denigration and stigmatization. Second, it occurs because these devalued practices often propose or embody alternate models of the social world” (1995:175). Japan’s Kogals are a good example of exactly these processes of resistance. They maintain their own language forms in the face of negative sanctions and openly endorse a denigrated philosophy that celebrates the self above any other social concern, rejecting the premium put on female self- sacrifice in mainstream Japanese culture. (231) I see the kogal identity as another “trope” of femininity that subverts other Japanese tropes of femininity. Particularly noticeable is their reworking of fashion and language, both key avenues through which earlier controlled troping shaped women and girls’ behavior and ways of being; kogal resistance focuses squarely on these established means of control. Their acts of subversion works by taking older, accepted tropes of female behavior apart, recombining them with parts of other tropes while also introducing other, “outside” features to the mix. The kogal way of wearing school uniforms is a good example of subversive recombination. The required components are there, citing to the same ideal of schoolgirl that the pure shōjo adheres to, but worn the “wrong” way, intentionally “failing” to perform the ideal of schoolgirl purity. The kogal “after hours” wear also cites existing tropes of femininity, drawing from more mature, adult fashion, and recombining it with a schoolgirl setting. Their reworking of adult fashion becomes a sort of female drag of femininity. By reaching outside of the accepted clothing options for their age group, the kogal take a way of performing femininity that is acceptable for another group of Japanese women, and makes it again strange and transgressive. This reworking and making strange of components of previously accepted tropes is further accentuated by use of cheap or imitation materials. On the one hand, this “kitschy” and cheap element of kogal fashion has the effect of giving the girls wearing them what Kinsella calls a “prostitute chic” appearance (231), itself again contesting the ideals of how young women “should” look and behave. Miller argues that it also makes the subculture more egalitarian; while very much built around materialism and at least the appearance of conspicuous consumption, the actual cost of entry can be kept low. Makeup and hair dye, again associated with femininity, are used resistantly by kogals. The markers of femininity are present, but deployed “against the grain” and for a very different effect. Miller points out that the use of dye, makeup, and the tanning aesthetic come together in ways that are intentionally unattractive by traditional standards, a mix of “calculated cuteness and studied ugliness” (228). The entire ensemble of clothing, makeup, and accessories are selected to be both cute and ugly at once. Kogals also seem to pick up on the trope of shōjo as an in-between state, a girl between childhood and adulthood who is sexually mature but innocent, who is growing into adult behavior but still holds onto childhood habits. The kogal, in addition to adult fashions mentioned earlier, also seem to delight in child-oriented accessories, such as Hello-Kitty purses, which Miller points out might hold both chewing gum and condoms; Kinsella

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points to acrylic nails and temporary tattoos as another mode of adult-like play (230). The kogal takes the in-between trope of idealized shōjo girlhood and reworks it as a “naughty” liminality. The kogal further subverts tropes and ideals of Japanese femininity through language use. Whereas Japanese women in general are expected to speak a certain way (or, are expected to want to speak a certain way, as a prestige language), the kogal also define themselves through a recognizable way of using language—one that runs counter in almost every way to the idealized norm. This resistance to language norms puts kogals outside of the ideals of Japanese femininity, yet it is certainly a way of performing a kind of femininity. Miller, Black, and Kinsella all describe kogal behavior as eliciting intense media interest and criticism. Kinsella points out that part of the kogal performance has become an act of parodying the very attention and criticism they have received from the media. Described by mainstream media as materialistic and vain, kogals put on a show of primping, posing, and photographing themselves and one another, a “staged and conspicuous flashiness […that] made a mimicry of the media image of the materialistic high-school girl prostituting herself for money” (230). There have been efforts made to mainstream the kogal. Kinsella and Miller both mention various magazines directed toward kogals as a demographic, and a recent BBC Online article reports on how companies are looking to kogals as trendsetters and innovators for new fashions both in Japan and for export abroad (Oi). However, it is clear from all these accounts that, unlike the cooptation of schoolgirl culture by publishers in the ‘20s and ‘30s, current and former kogals are directly involved as editors and staff within these companies. Miller compares the social critique of kogal to earlier moments of critique, including of the “degenerate schoolgirl” of the early 20th century (226). Miller notes that in previous instances of female youth innovation in language and ways of being, that those movements, while dismissed at the time as aberrant, went on to have a powerful effect on broader social trends. Looking ahead to the future as more kogals become adults, Miller observes that “Kogals may give up their extreme subcultural identities, but when they enter their adult years they are unlikely to live only for the sake of their husbands and children, as women in Japan have always been taught to do,” and expresses her hope that “Kogals will continue to have a strong sense of self” (241). The BBC Online article also points to the future of kogals and their affect on broader Japanese culture. While pointing to the efforts of Japanese companies to further commodify kogal fashion, the article also points to the new adult identity of a “gyaru mama,” mothers who still live the life and are raising children with the same aesthetic. While the BBC report focuses on the ugly-cute kogal- inspired toys now available for gyaru babies, what is probably more telling is that, as Miller had hoped, they are holding onto at least part of their transgressive identities. And, as another (non-gyaru) mother interviewed by BBC indicated, other mothers are starting to ask the gyaru mamas for advice (Oi). Miller and Oi’s discussions of the kogal point to the subversive elements of this new trope of femininity as offering a sustainable new way of being a woman in Japan. While the kogal identity itself may fill a transitional phase, much like the shōjo—Miller typifies kogals as being between the ages of 14 and 22 (225))—the sense is that the outlooks embraced during that time will continue to shape women’s interactions later in

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life. Oi’s report also suggests that the impact of kogal lifestyle is rippling beyond those who live it, similar to how early schoolgirl culture affected women’s lives beyond the confines of that social group (and beyond that identity trope). This extension of influence suggests also a greater reach of identity troping as recombinant. Women who conform to other ways of being are also challenging and reshaping those ideals, drawing, as Oi suggests, from the kogal for inspiration. This interplay of different elements of ways of being women in Japan suggests another way that inside–outside positionalities functions as a theory of meaning-making. As a dynamic system, ideals and ideas accepted into an “inner” position can continue to interact with other “inside” features to create new, hybrid, and potentially subversive meanings and ways of being. As in the case of the kogal, which leveraged and drew from various accepted tropes of Japanese femininity to create a new set of tropes, things that become accepted or “naturalized” as belonging within a cultural group do not stay still; nor do they necessarily need to reach back “outside” of the culture to generate the kind of productive disruption that we associate with the meaning-making of the contact zone or of cultural hybridity. The kogal selects and recombines or remixes various inner elements to create for herself a new subversive identity that stands “outside” of mainstream ideals of Japanese femininity while still citing to those “inner” ideals; concurrently, the kogal remains citable by others who remain closer to the “inner” ideals of the mainstream but still want to change them. Such recursive, “self troping” allows a meaning-making dynamic of cultural identity to continue to drive itself both from within and without.

Conclusion The troping addressed at the beginning of this chapter fits with a view of indexical shifting that sees “inside” as inviolable, much like the idealized “Yamato-within- Yamato” in the “double binary” arrangement in Chino’s work. Such action is “indexical” in that certain figures point or correspond to certain ideals, such as western clothing pointing to modernity and Japanese women pointing to Japaneseness. Like Chino’s double binary, such a system is based on an assumption that while outside influences might be given a role within Japan, they can be kept separate from and prevented from affecting an inner cultural core, which women are associated with. This troping as part of the construction of a modern Japanese identity resists the inevitable changes to the ideals of insideness that Chino describes as functioning as a “safety valve.” I believe this is in part because the process of slow change assumed in the safety valve model was simply not possible in later eras; with the rate of influx of outside influences happening in the Meiji and Taishō periods especially, change would simply happen too quickly to be covered over and slowly adapted, as seemed to be the case with adoption of Tang art and learning into Yamato ideals during the Heian period. This troping of women most certainly resisted the flow of influences that inside–outside positionalities describes. As I have pointed out throughout the chapter, that aversion to change was not able to stop it from happening, and as the very metaphor of a “safety valve” that Chino uses suggests, not having such a method of release would certainly lead to eventual back-pressure or push-back.

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While the inside/outside troping of women attempted to maintain a clear divide between tradition and modernity, or between Japan and the globe, the ideals of inside of course (and inevitably) changed, and the process of what happened fits much more with the flux of inside–outside positionalities. In the case of schoolgirl identity in particular, the girls continually took control of the ways of being that were available to them, reworking them to form new identities that no longer fit with older expectations of “proper” Japanese behavior. The co-opting of schoolgirl speech into women’s language was able to counter some of this resistant reworking, but it simply moved in another direction. In addition, other social forces were at play as well. Modernity permeated Japan, and ideals of inside and ideals of outside interacted constantly; economic situations changed, new generations came to power, and western learning became more accepted as either compatible with or part of Japaneseness. Keeping these other concurrent changes in mind, it is perhaps not surprising that schoolgirl culture in the late 20th and early 21st century were more able to act out against the ideals of femininity that were imposed more stringently on their foremothers. It is possible that adults simply would have seen less at stake in the youthful rebellion of kogal fashionistas. Examples of the troping of women as part of the construction of Japanese cultural identity show how inside–outside positionalities as a theory helps to complicate actions that try to simplify themselves as occurring along a sharp divide of inside and outside. The recombinant troping carried out by kogal performance, meanwhile, point to further complexity within inside–outside positionalities. The meaning-making that occurs through interactions of inside and outside can also include the remixing of once-outside features that have been adopted and accepted as part of the new inside. In the case of the kogal identity, recombining of accepted clothing, accessories, ways of speaking, and the schoolgirl identity itself created a new identity that challenged social norms by being “non-Japanese,” while also being an entirely local, Japanese invention. Rejected by various social watchdogs as not representing Japanese ideals, kogal identity nonetheless drew from other ways of being that were in their previous forms perfectly acceptable. Criticized for defying norms of Japanese girlhood, kogals are using some of the very same strategies use to construct and naturalize those norms to begin with, to answer back with their own, resistant tropes of Japanese femininity.

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CHAPTER 4 Traversing Burkean Identification: Inside–Outside Positionalities as a Theory of Transcultural Affiliations Kenneth Burke’s theory of identification has had a lasting influence on scholarship in rhetoric, grounding the “art of persuasion” in acts of affiliation. Considering identification as the basis for rhetoric brings more acts under the umbrella of rhetoric, refocuses what we might consider as the goals or ends of rhetoric, and emphasizes the centrality of rhetoric to everyday human experience. A strength of the concept is its wide applicability—“identification” can be invoked to refocus studies of rhetoric and to guide its active use, and consideration of the foundational idea behind rhetorical identification, in particular the “common ground” of consubstantiality (discussed in more detail below), can function as ethical touchstones for thoughtful human(e) behavior. However, the wide-ranging nature of the theory can be a liability. In some ways, identification fits or travels so well because Burke leaves the specifics vague. As opposed to, say, his system of dramatism, which is extensively developed in numerous permutations and illustrated with multiple examples, identification seems more of a working or floating term, with brief references and explanations scattered across many of Burke’s works—a key, yet not fully developed concept. In this chapter, I offer a comparison of inside–outside positionalities with Burke’s theory of identification. As part of this comparison, I address the universalizing tendencies in Burke’s work, how that tendency interferes with comparative projects and understanding of meaning-making between cultures, and how inside–outside positionalities offers an alternative theory for guiding such inquiry. In the latter part of the chapter, I look at the identity-building strategies of two Japanese-American authors, Lydia Minatoya and Kyoko Mori. Reading their memoirs from a perspective of inside– outside positionalities demonstrates how that theory applies to meaning making acts undertaken by individuals within the context of their social environments, in addition to those made between cultural groups, as has been the focus of previous chapters. I begin my discussion of transcultural affiliations with a simple comparison of the common points between Burke’s identification and inside–outside positionalities. I use this comparison as groundwork from which to demonstrate how inside–outside positionalities offers an extension of identification as a means of interpreting and establishing affiliations within and between groups. Inside–outside positionalities and Burke’s identification are similar in that they both explain interactions between individuals, groups, and the divisions and connections between them; however, the theories espouse radically different viewpoints about self and society, unity and diversity. Inside–outside positionalities offers a more fluid and contextual understanding of affiliation by avoiding the universalizing tendencies and western assumptions that underlie Burke’s identification. Comparing these theories demonstrates how inside– outside positionalities addresses many of the important concerns about human interaction and attachments that Burke engages, but in ways that offer new perspectives on the bonds we build, particularly the fluidity and interdependence of our individual and group identities.

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Burke addresses those ideas, mental associations, and acts that bridge the separations between individual human beings. What makes discrete beings see themselves and behave as though consubstantial with another? What causes separation, and how can it be overcome, for the sake of greater unity and an avoidance of conflict (in Burke’s search, particularly war)? Burke’s answer to all of these questions, which explains both acts of kindness toward insiders and violence toward outsiders as means for building and maintaining group affiliation, is identification. His answers and characterization of identification are, perhaps not surprising, grounded in perspectives that mark his own identification as part of a modernist, western philosophical tradition. As I argue below, Burke’s cultural grounding, while enabling his many contributions to rhetorical scholarship and cultural critique, also locks his theory of identification into the very cycle of solidarity and division that he laments as an unfortunate component of human interaction (Rhetoric 23). Of particular concern to my work, the major pitfall and limiting assumption found in Burke’s work on identification is a universalizing, euro- centric perspective that leaves little room for difference and promotes stasis as an endpoint and as the usual state of identification. Considering inside–outside positionalities alongside identification’s affordances and limitations helps to clarify the potentials of the latter as a rhetorical theory, furthering my cause of applying inside– outside positionalities more broadly to contexts in addition to Japan. Bringing the two into conversation also helps recognize those important distinctions that allow an inside– outside perspective to see and interpret texts and events differently than a perspective founded in Burke’s identification.

Some Common Ground between Identification and Inside–Outside Positionalities In my analysis of Burke’s theory of identification, I focus primarily on three works: Attitudes Toward History (1937; revised 1959), Philosophy of Literary Form (1941; revised 1967), and A Rhetoric of Motives (1950). It is possible to interpret Burke’s treatments of identification across these works as directed toward different purposes, as the first two deal with art and literary criticism, and the latter overtly with rhetoric; however, all three deal with political action and communication with an eye toward persuasion (as well as identification), so all three are concerned with rhetoric. One could object that the earlier two works represent the theory in an early stage, making identification in the Rhetoric the more finalized version; however, many of the streams of thought seen in the earlier works continue into the Rhetoric, and Burke makes no move to repudiate those earlier versions, nor does he change them in the revised editions. Reading across the works to assemble a more thorough system of identification is also common practice for many scholars dealing with Burke (e.g., Ratcliffe; Zappen; Davis), establishing such reading as an accepted approach. Like inside–outside positionalities, Burke’s identification addresses mobile, rhetorically constituted notions of affiliation, of belonging and not belonging. A Rhetoric of Motives contains Burke’s best-known explanation of identification. In that work, he links identification to the idea of consubstantiality (substance, a focus of A Grammar of Motives, acts as a bridge between the two):

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A is not identical with his colleague, B. But insofar as their interests are joined, A is identified with B. Or he may identify himself with B even when their interests are not joined, if he assumes that they are, or is persuaded to believe so. Here are ambiguities of substance. In being identified with B, A is “substantially one” with a person other than himself. Yet at the same time he remains unique, an individual locus of motives. Thus he is both joined and separate, at once a distinct substance and consubstantial with another. (20-21; emphasis in original) Burke’s focus on the individual and a consubstantial other, on the personal as “both joined and separate,” has similarities to the uchi/soto model of self (a foundational idea of inside–outside positionalities discussed in Chapter 1), which characterizes the individual in relation to a group and where the self is constituted by relationships with others. Marking people as “belonging” and “not belonging” is also a key concept in both identification and inside–outside positionalities. As Burke explains, identification is always accompanied by division: “one need not scrutinize the concept of ‘identification’ very sharply to see, implied in it at every turn, its ironic counterpart: division” (23). By identifying with one group, one may divide oneself from another. Inside–outside positionalities and identification both explore how one’s role within a group or society at large is marked and demonstrated by the donning and use of artifacts, ritual action, ways of speaking, etc. Burke’s attention is on immediate human action, while inside–outside positionalities also extends to larger contexts, addressing more directly how physical spaces can shape and be shaped by other behaviors (e.g., as in Chino’s reading of Kara and Yamato art). As another point of commonality, Burke’s identification and inside–outside positionalities, as theories of interpersonal communication and of the self, both allow for agency while accounting for the influence of context. In Krista Ratcliffe’s reading of Burke, identification theorizes a space69 for personal agency within a network of material and discursive influences (58). Building on Frank Lentricchia’s description of Burke’s rhetorician as “an agent of change,” Ratcliffe comments, “this agent of change both shapes and is shaped by identification, which is a site where the agent of change may transform him- or herself and/or others and/or cultural practices as he or she is

69 Although perhaps a tangential connection, both models also share metaphors of space—in the case of identification, places of common ground and situatedness of identities and bodies; in the case of inside–outside positionalities, movement (both physically and conceptually) between inside and outside. Ratcliffe links identification to place, paraphrasing Burke as “assum[ing] identification to be a place where conscious and unconscious rhetorical exchanges transpire” (Ratcliffe 49). According to Ratcliffe, postmodern theorists Diana Fuss and Judith Butler also link identification to place: “in sum, theorists agree that because people are always historically and culturally situated, so, too, are their embodied identifications—hence the linkage of identification with place” (49). As discussed earlier, Bachnik also links uchi/soto to place, or rather, spatial relations as an index. As she explains, “[i]nside/outside are defined by the movement of our bodies in space” (“Introduction” 6). Also, as seen in the example of Chino’s work with Japanese art, marking of space and place as inside our outside shapes narratives of cultural identity.

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transformed by them” (58). Ratcliffe’s characterization of the rhetorical agent acting in a space of identification echoes Bachnik’s description of (albeit limited) agency within the mutually-constituting system of self and society within the uchi/soto dynamic, which “includes the process by which participants constitute social situations, and thereby participate in a dynamic that includes the mutual process of their constituting and being constituted by social order” (“Introduction” 5, emphasis in original). As I discuss in Chapter 1, uchi/soto becomes more dynamic when reconsidered as performative instead of as indexical, a rethinking which entails a shift to generating meaning rather than reflecting pre-existing realities. Interestingly, Burke’s identification shares more points in common with the indexical model of uchi/soto rather than the rhetorical (or performative) model of inside–outside positionalities. Identification’s attention to finding common ground shared by or available to different groups and individuals suggests a measure of similarity to indexing in that it can involve pointing to something that is already there. Burke’s characterization of two rhetoricians debating over commonality and division suggests a Platonic vision of uncovering some ultimate Truth through dialectic—of together pointing to a pre-existing meaning or affiliation. While sharing some commonality, inside–outside positionalities and identification differ at a fundamental level in the two theories’ treatment of their bounding extremes: the polar extremes of inside and outside for the one, and the ironic pairing of identification and division for the other. The affiliations and identities described by inside–outside positionalities are fluid, existing along an expanding and contracting continuum. Similarly, Burke describes the two extremes of his theory—identification and division—in terms reminiscent of a continuum as well. Elaborating on the connection of strife, identification, division, and rhetoric, Burke writes, In pure identification there would be no strife. Likewise, there would be no strife in absolute separateness, since opponents can join battle only through a mediatory ground that makes their communication possible… But put identification and division ambiguously together, so that you cannot know for certain just where one ends and the other begins, and you have the characteristic invitation to rhetoric. (Rhetoric 25) In contrast to the complete, binary distinctions of “pure identification” or “absolute separateness,” there can be some grey areas between identification and division, uncertain spaces that “invite” rhetoric. However, as noted above, Burke’s description presents a dialectic between rival rhetoricians haggling over where the line between division and identification lies—these are competing interpretations at work trying to convince audiences to accept one over the other. In Burke’s formation, the line between identifications moves depending upon the interpretations and persuasive ability of rhetoricians looking at a relatively stable arena of common ground and division. Debate allows shifts in identification to occur, but these changes are more long lasting and often drastic or acute than the ongoing shifts I associate with inside–outside positionalities (as discussed below, Burke often describes changes of identification in terms of making complete breaks with old affiliations).

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The Problems of a Universalist Perspective Euroamerican philosophic traditions, which Burke draws heavily from, often start from a universalizing perspective. Hall and Ames, when investigating some of the problems that have faced euroamerican comparative study of Chinese culture, point to “the universalist impulse associated with Western rationality” as a major barrier to intercultural understanding (Anticipating xv). Looking at the history of western philosophy starting with the ancient Greeks, Hall and Ames argue that a “universalist impulse” has long been present and, though modern philosophers have challenged many universalist claims, continues to ground and shape much of euroamerican thinking. As Hall and Ames observe, “the narrative we have provided [of the history of western philosophy] is one which tells of the invention of interpretive constructs that remain essential to the cultural self-consciousness of our late modern era” (91). A universalist view assumes unchanging, ultimate truths that apply in the same way in all times and places, a view Hall and Ames contrast with ways of thinking that prioritize contingency and change, a perspective they associate with classical Chinese thought. Looking at Chinese and European philosophy, they characterize these competing tendencies as “first problematic” and “second problematic” thinking.70 They describe euroamerican (they use the term Western) culture as favoring “second problematic” (or “causal thinking”) over “first problematic” (“analogical or correlative”) thinking (xvii). First problematic thinking, which they associate with Chinese thought, “accepts the priority of change or process over rest and permanence, presumes no ultimate agency responsible for the general order of things, and seeks to account for states of affairs by appeal to correlative procedures rather than by determining agencies or principles” (xviii). In contrast, they link second problematic thinking with ways of accounting for the world (whether dealing with religion, science, or history) that “privilege the notion of permanence, structures, stability, and law over that of process and change” (16). As Hall and Ames explain, it is not that euroamerican philosophical thought is without influence by first problematic thought, but that second problematic became and remains more prominent. From Hall and Ames’s perspective, one major problem of a universalizing view for comparative study is that it assumes certain values and truths which make cultures that do not share them look nonsensical (or worse from a logo-centric perspective,

70 This schema of first and second problematic may appear as yet another binary, or to imply that China is stuck in some early stage European culture has already progressed beyond—a reading the numbering of “first” and “second” might suggest. Rather, Hall and Ames employ the schema to identify analogical points of comparison that set a starting point from which to enter into their comparative project, as well as to indentify and bracket out those areas of difference where the concerns and assumptions of euroamerican thought are not only irrelevant or incompatible to Chinese though, but would drastically skew interpretation and efforts to engage (in their case) Chinese thought on its own terms. The category “first problematic thinking” itself is an imposition of the euroamerican tradition, but one that remains useful for situating comparative work, so long as applied with caveats. As Hall and Ames point out, the category “first problematic thinking” is “something like” the classical Chinese world view, rather than a perfect description.

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irrational). It blocks observer/visitors from recognizing and appreciating those things that are meaningful and “importantly present” within myriad non-euroamerican locales.71 The act of universalizing risks (and often results in) establishing one worldview as the standard against which all other systems are judged (and usually found lacking), a problem that can extend to recent rhetorical scholarship that grounds itself in the European tradition, the field’s turn to the “new rhetoric” not withstanding. For example, George Kennedy, in his Comparative Rhetoric, proposes that the objective of such study should be to arrive at an understanding of a universal rhetoric. The result of such a search for commonality is a taxonomy that puts all rhetorical traditions outside of the dominant euroamerican tradition along a trajectory ranging from the communication of animals and culminating with Aristotelian rhetoric and its successors. It suggests an endpoint, the possibility of an ultimate understanding of rhetoric toward which many cultures may aspire, and, once attained, would remain constant. In search of a universal rhetoric, such approaches discount the value of rhetorical diversity, instead imposing a hierarchy with the euroamerican tradition at the top.

Universalizing in Burke Although strongly influential on understandings of rhetoric as epistemic and knowledge as contextual, Burke’s writings on rhetoric carry a strong universalizing tendency, in particular a yearning for a transcendent rhetoric that could overcome the division inherent in what Burke sees as our usual practice of identification (which always involves division). In Rhetorical Listening, Ratcliffe confronts Burke’s universalizing tendencies as they pertain to social justice. The universalizing trend in Burke means his theory of identification does not allow much, if any, discursive space for difference. In Ratcliffe’s view, “Burke’s identification does provide a place of personal agency and a place of commonality, yet it often does so at the expense of differences. As a place of common ground, Burke’s identification demands that differences be bridged. The danger of such a move is that differences and their possibilities, when bridged, may be displaced and mystified” (53). She quotes Burke from Philosophy of Literary Form that “identification should ‘confine differences solely to those areas where differences are necessary’” (Ratcliffe 59), raising the questions, “what happens to the unnecessary difference?” and “who defines the terms of commonality, and who decides which differences must be bridged and which differences must be deemed excess and relegated outside the consubstantial place of identification?” (59). For Burke, the paradox of identification’s link with division can seemingly be overcome through critical evaluations of identifications and divisions, the job of the rhetorician; such analysis should focus on finding what Burke regards as “unnecessary” divisions, to expand the area of common ground in a way that highlights the universality of human experience, emphasizing our unity and removing the necessity of war. Rhetoric should challenge identifications that cause divisions, reveal those identifications that

71 I explain Hall and Ames’s distinction between “importantly present” and “merely present” in the introduction.

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enable certain groups to profit from war, and challenge the citizenry’s identifications with them. The goal of critically aware identification, then, is not so much to create a space of complete cooperation, but the removal or neutralization of dangerous identifications and divisions alike. However, here is where Burke gets into trouble, as his system leaves little room for non-dominant voices and seems to suppose a generalizable experience or truth. Although Burke challenges the notion of the universal and differentiates it from transcendence (Rhetoric 23), what is “transcending” division other than reaching a universal in its most ideal sense? Ratcliffe concludes that “in Burke’s theory, differences… learn to submit [to power]” (60). In her reading, Burke favors a search for common ground at the expense of difference—differences become read as causes of the division his system tries to transcend. James Zappen also highlights the impulse toward the universal found in Burke’s work, although his reading takes a less critical stance toward Burke’s treatment of difference than Ratcliffe’s. Zappen argues that Burke, in the final section of the Rhetoric, addresses the problem of identification intrinsically causing division: “identification as a means of inducing cooperation is inherently limited since any identification necessarily also entails a division… however, the third part [of the Rhetoric] seems rather to offer a bold and creative solution to the problem by merging dialectic and rhetoric with dialogue and poetic myth in a dialectical-rhetorical transcendence” (280). To quote Zappen at length, In the Rhetoric, it [the solution to ideological division] is dialectical and rhetorical and also dialogical and mythic—a meeting of rhetorical partisans in dialogical exchanges that lead dialectically to higher-level generalizations represented in mythic images through the power of the poetic imagination […] These dialogical exchanges can lead to “pure persuasion”—which exists, if at all, only in ritual performances or utopian visions having no persuasive intent or effect—and to “ultimate identification”—the province of mysticism and poetic imagination […] More pragmatically, these exchanges can also seek to encompass a diversity of individual voices in larger unities that preserve, but transcend, any one of them. (281) The transcendent impulse Zappen sees in Burke’s writing on rhetoric suggests a moving away from uncertainty and division toward perfect understanding. Unlike Ratcliffe, who sees Burke leaving no room for difference, here Zappen sees Burke’s rhetorical transcendence as providing space “to encompass a diversity of individual voices.” However, the tying of Burke’s hoped-for transcendence to “the province of mysticism and poetic imagination” seems to prefigure a connection to the divine or sublime as a precondition of unity—a touch by ultimate reality that dispels certain views as clearly mistaken. In this scenario, the “diversity of individual voices” would include only those still speaking after contact with a revealed—and universal—consubstantiality. Such transcendence, no matter how well intentioned, cannot help but silence certain voices.

Static and Dynamic Selves As a corollary to certain universal groundings that allow for rhetorical transcendence, the self that takes part in such interactions and affiliations that Burke

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describes is relatively stable, or at least resistant to change. As I discuss in Chapter One, the self that Bachnik and Rosenberger describe, and which underlies the inside–outside positionalities, constantly shifts in response to context. At first blush, the Burkean notion of self seems equally dynamic: “The so-called ‘I’ is merely a unique combination of partially conflicting ‘corporate we’s’” (Attitudes 264). Burke’s definition posits a social self, an “I” formed by various relationships. However, though the Burkean self might be composed of “a unique combination of… ‘corporate we’s’,” the overall result is conceptualized as fairly constant. In the Rhetoric, when looking forward to the subject of the never-completed Symbolic of Motives,72 Burke characterizes the individual self, separated from other people, as “at peace” and “outside the realm of conflict” (22). Here, “the individual is treated merely as a self-subsistent unit proclaiming its peculiar nature. It is ‘at peace,’ in that its terms cooperate in modifying one another” (23; emphasis in original).73 This passage suggests that, once formed, the Burkean notion of self can “be” or “proclaim” its self on its own. Only once put in contact with other selves, the potential for conflict, and so, rhetoric, arises—however, this place of contact is an arena of individual selves interacting, not constituting one another through that interaction. The Burkean self may engage in discourse without itself being wholly discursive. Diane Davis suggests that Burke’s identification is complicated by the fact that he grounds identification in two different bases, social interaction and a distinct biological self. Examining Burke’s identification across several of his works, Davis notices that the link between identity and identification involves “two non-harmonious Burkean drifts” (127): [W]hat I habitually call “my” identity is the product of an identification with figures or symbols that reside outside my self […] the relation to symbolic structure precedes the relation to the self. Inasmuch as “my” identity is an effect of “my” inscription by this structure, “I” am always already other than myself, non-present to myself, inessential […] Paradoxically, however, and here’s the second drift, to say that identification depends on shared meaning, on the intervention of already meaningful figures, is also to presume—as the condition for identification—a subject or ego who knows itself as and through its representations. (127)

72 The third piece of Burke’s planned trilogy beginning with A Grammar of Motives and A Rhetoric of Motives. 73 This same section (Rhetoric 22 and 23) may suggest that identity and identification should be considered separately, in that identity, which (for Burke) exists in the individual, can exist in the “symbolic,” whereas identification occurs in the realm of rhetoric, where multiple identities interact. Also see Rhetoric 27, where identification is shown to apply to principles and activities, not just to groups (though, of course, principles and activities have to be held and performed by people to exist). Again, Burke seems to indicate that identification only exists in the realm of rhetoric, while identity can exist in the Symbolic. One might argue, then, that inside–outside positionalities combines identity and identification in an inseparable form, where Burke seems to allow for their separation, at least analytically; inside–outside positionalities, on the other hand, always insists we consider them together.

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By making identification “compensatory to division” (Rhetoric 22), Burke links acts of identification to a presupposed and essential division between inherently separate individual identities. Returning to Davis’s explanation, “Prior to language acquisition, psychosexual development, and class consciousness, Burke proposes, there is biological estrangement, ontology’s insurance premium for securing his entire rhetoric of relationality […] the division between self and other is the ‘state of nature’ that is identification’s motivating force” (128). That is, the self that identifies and is shaped by identification seems to have a non-discursive core. Davis concludes that “Burke describes identity as an effect of the processes of identification and identification as the achievement of an already discernable (biological) ‘identity’” (128). In contrast, inside– outside positionalities makes no hard divisions between an inner and an outer world, nor does it allow room for any kind of essential self, a legacy of its grounding in the uchi/soto dynamic; as Bachnik notes, “the lack of compatibility of uchi/soto with the notion of an external ‘world’ must be extended to its lack of compatibility with the notions of “self” as a bounded, inner, reflective psychological essence” (Bachnik “Introduction” 23). In light of Burke’s definition of identity from Attitudes Toward History and his positing of the possibility of a self that is able to be a “self” all on its own in the Rhetoric, the self involved in identification has limited opportunity for change, especially in comparison to inside–outside positionalities. Looking across several of Burke’s works, it quickly becomes apparent that while individuals certainly can shift their identifications, such shifting tends to be drastic or even traumatic, at least in the examples Burke presents. In Attitudes Toward History Burke acknowledges that “changes of identity occur in everyone,” while some changes are more “acute” than others (269)—that is, some changes might slip under the radar while others are more noticeable and/or traumatic. However, these latter “acute” instances take up much more of his attention, suggesting he sees them as more meaningful (or somehow more deserving of analysis). Furthermore, the language Burke uses to describe even the non-acute instances suggests disruption and trauma, involving “rebirth” and occurring as a result of “conflicts among our ‘corporate we’s’” (268–69). Change in the self is figured as difficult and disruptive. Ratcliffe’s reading of Burkean identification also finds a self that resists change. Focusing on Burke’s statement that “a change of identity […] would require a change of substance” (Ratcliffe 57; quoting Burke Philosophy 41), Ratcliffe finds that “malleability [of identity] fosters fear and resistance of itself […] despite the malleability of identity, the fear and resistance of this malleability render identity not easily changed” (57). The Burkean self can shift through changes in identification, but does so by moving completely from one state to another. Unlike the contextual shifting of inside–outside positionalities, changes in identification involve replacement, with little chance for a return to previous identifications without equally drastic measures. Rather, Burke casts the process of re-identification in violent—and final—terms: We should also note that a change of identity […] would require nothing less drastic than the obliteration of one’s whole past lineage. A total rebirth would require a change of substance; and in the overlapping realm of familistic and causal ancestry […] a thorough job of symbolic rebirth would require the revision of one’s ancestral past itself […] Hence, from this point of view, we might

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interpret symbolic parricide as simply an extension of symbolic suicide, a more thorough-going way of obliterating the substance of one’s old identity—while, as we have said before, this symbolic suicide itself would be but one step in a process which was not completed until the substance of the abandoned identity had been replaced by the new substance of a new identity. (Philosophy 41–42; emphasis in original)

Here, Burke envisions a total change in identity—a drastic disavowal of the old self and allegiances, not the more incremental and strategic shifts that Ratcliffe is talking about as the point of “rhetorical listening” as a strategy, nor the ongoing, situational shifting characterized by inside–outside positionalities. Burke’s identification aims toward an end point, a state of connection or consubstantiality that remains relatively permanent once established, barring violent disavowals. Perhaps as a result, he also does not write about maintaining relationships formed through identification. Inside–outside positionalities, on the other hand, draws attention to relations and self as ongoing processes of becoming. I propose that identifications tend toward stasis in Burke’s model because he sees identification (and communication in general) as means to an end, the end being the establishment of common ground and the “compensation” for division. Each identification clears a space of common ground. Conflicting identifications might obscure or destroy other common ground, hence the resistance to major changes in identity and the drastic nature of the changes in identification Burke describes. Inside–outside positionalties, by contrast, emphasizes an ongoing process, a state of flux involving porous boundaries between states of being. The relationships (between people; between ideas) in inside–outside positionalities are both means and end. While identification yearns for an unattainable universality, inside–outside positionalities deals in contingency and shifting focal points. Solidarity remains an important goal within Japanese rhetoric of inside–outside, but it is a solidarity of shifting memberships and boundaries, and one without a universal, static (second problematic) ideal. Burke grounds solidarity in a striving for universals, while inside–outside positionalities creates contingent solidarities that expand and contract with context.74 Returning to a definition of rhetoric as meaning-making, the meanings made by identification and by inside–outside positionalities are different kinds. The meanings of identification are made to point toward a universal truth, a consubstantiality that transcends divisions. While identification involves process and negotiation (though, again, negotiation as dialectic, which implies uncovering of a Truth), this process is always undertaken with an end in sight. On the other hand, for dynamics of inside– outside the meanings made are contingent truths and the very relations that allow the dynamic to function. While responding to context, and perhaps undertaken strategically, the purpose is interaction, a “dwelling” (Reynolds) within a context that neither assumes

74 See Bachnik “Indexing Self and Society” on changing meanings of uchi and levels of formality as different guests drop by; see also Rosenberger “Indexing Hierarchy” for gendered roles in maintaining family solidarity in social situations.

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that context’s permanence nor presumes some ultimate understanding. With dynamics, truths, and affiliations all in flux, one might only “dwell” for a time, but not take on a static permanence that is the end-point of classic euroamerican thinking. If we think of the “journey” of identification as following a unidirectional path, inside–outside positionalities involves moving back and forth across a field of interaction. While identification aims for a stopping point or ultimate goal, inside–outside positionalities involves movement that may center around a focal point, but which can also shift to other parts of that same field without giving up or permanently cutting itself off from those places it was before. This conceptualization of movement over a focused area captures the importance not only of movement but of repetition, the repeated passing over or through an area. Such repetition does not necessarily mean sameness of action— the movement is not on rails, so to speak, but allows for deviation. For inside–outside positionalities, repetition of actions is critical to the generation of new meanings. As I discuss in Chapter 1 and demonstrate in Chapter 2 with the example of the Japanese Christmas cake, the constructive “failure” to perfectly repeat and replicate leads to new meanings and practice. As such, inside–outside positionalities as an analytical tool is very interested in tracing the chains of activity that link outside practices to inside understandings and traditions. In contrast, Burke, in his writing on identification, glosses over repetition in favor of focusing on more spectacular or isolatable actions. Although Burke addresses repetition in the Rhetoric, he treats it derisively, dismissing it as an unfortunate reality that in a more perfect world he would not have to deal with. As he puts it, “often we must think of rhetoric not in terms of some one particular address, but as a general body of identifications that owe their convincingness more to trivial repetition and dull daily reënforcement [sic] than to exceptional rhetorical skill” (26, emphasis in original). I focus on Burke’s description of such rhetoric as “trivial repetition” and “dull daily reënforcement.” Here, Burke strikes me as disdainful of or disinterested in the everyday—and deeply ideological, in the sense that Fairclough characterizes successful ideologies as seeming commonsensical—works of rhetoric. In the quoted passage, Burke focuses on the repetitive works of mass media, perhaps betraying some nostalgia for the loss of “aura” resulting from mass production.75 However, the characterization applies equally well to the daily micro-moves and reiterations of the average person’s (highly interactional) life. While not an outright rejection, Burke’s derogation of this kind of reiterative rhetorical (and performative) action favors certain kinds of reading when using identification as theory.

Anecdotes of Affiliation An explication and rereading of one of Burke’s examples of identification may help to crystallize the distinctions between identification and inside–outside positionalities. In the introduction to A Rhetoric of Motives, Burke offers the brief example of “the politician who, addressing an audience of farmers, says, ‘I was a farm

75 For the idea of “aura,” see Walter Benjamin, “Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.”

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boy myself’” as a case of identification (xiv).76 Burke’s politician, by evoking a shared past as a farm boy, claims a measure of consubstantiality with his audience. Though he may no longer be a farmer, he lays claim to a substance, an assumedly formative set of experiences that cannot be taken away—short of through complete disavowal and an identificatory “death” and “rebirth”—and which links him at a deep level to his audience. The politician may need to present his credentials, so to speak, through sharing stories, use of specific terms, or other shibboleths that the audience may or may not accept, but the act of identification is conducted by drawing on a supposedly stable part of his self. From a perspective of inside–outside positionalities, by claiming a shared past as a farm boy, the politician establishes a point of commonality which, when measured against points of difference, helps establish how much of an insider or outsider he is. Moving beyond mere indexing, the politician might also use the intersection of historical meanings and associations of being a farm boy—the shared cultural experience or tradition he claims with his audience—with the current context of his speaking to build a new sense of what it means “to be a farm boy.” Or, drawing from the narrative of farm- boy-ness and other experiences “outside” of that narrative (say, of being a state-house politician), he might build a new sense of what it means to be a politician, or of what it means to be a representative of the particular audience he is addressing. And, of course, in a good speech all of these possible choices likely overlap and are used together. The point is not that using identification as a lens disallows such readings, but that it focuses on relatively stable states—either their creation or their revelation—while an inside– outside perspective foregrounds process and flux.77 Burke’s farm boy turned politician relies on a (perhaps imagined) shared past, a sense of an essential connection linking speaker and audience. Not only shared experiences, but shared values (or the assertion of sharing such things) help to bind speaker and audience together. But what occurs in interactions between more diverse groups? Can these interactions be reduced to some points of common ground, or opposition to some common opponent? Explaining the constitution of affiliations is difficult if constrained by the perspectives of identification. Particularly problematic is Burke’s preference for stable identity suggested in his violent descriptions of breaking off

76 In typical fashion, Burke leaves this example hanging, with little explication, ripe for reader interpretation. 77 Burke’s example of a politician speaking to farmers and self-identifying as having been a farm boy also demonstrates that identification can both serve as an interpretive theory and as rhetorical praxis. That is, we can “read” the actions of the politician using the terms and questions of identification (we assume he is identifying in some way and look for how); we can also apply identification actively, as the politician does in his speech. As with any rhetorical act, this application may happen unconsciously or more intentionally—as James Berlin writes, “[t]he study of rhetoric is necessary […] in order that we may intentionally direct this process rather than be unconsciously controlled by it” (166). The rhetoric of inside–outside positionalities is no exception. In comparing inside–outside positionalities with Burke’s identification, I often discuss it as an interpretive theory; however, it also acts as a dynamic in action. Of course, by looking at inside–outside positionalities in action, I am using the theory as an interpretive lens to explain those actions.

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identifications. Negotiation is often popularly described in terms of “back and forth”; then how can new identities and affiliations form if moving out of an identification is always destructive? If the correctness of one’s worldview is assumed, how can outsiders ever be consubstantial, short of conversion and assimilation into the speaker’s group? In previous chapters I have focused on inside–outside positionalities as it pertains to cultural identity, taking a macro-level view of how large groups shift attitudes toward others and how the meanings of certain practices and artifacts shift as signifiers of inside and outside. While Burke often looks equally broadly when discussing groups, he at the same time often links discussion of the performances of membership to the individual. For example, while membership in a group may be demonstrated through the wearing of regalia that is accepted and given meaning by the group, the choice to wear (or to reject and thereby disidentify from) those trappings is one made by an individual. Similarly, in the well-known politician/farm boy example, one speaker is invoking and performing his affiliation with a larger group. What do the actions of the individual within the rhetoric of inside–outside positionalities look like, and do they differ meaningfully from the individual as seen through identification? I approach this question with my earlier critique of identification in mind, that Burke’s identification, heavily influenced by a universalizing perspective, depicts a too- static sense of the self in relation to others. Letting Burke’s farm boy stand as a “representative anecdote” (Grammar 59) for identification, I offer some alternative performances of identity and belonging that represent a more fluid, shifting self that samples and moves between cultures to craft a new sense of contextual self. As I argue above, inside–outside positionalities allows greater flexibility of self and affiliation. For examples of such flexibility in practices of self and affiliation, I turn to the memoirs of two Japanese-American authors, Lydia Minatoya’s Talking to High Monks in the Snow and Kyoko Mori’s Polite Lies. I focus on these memoirs as examples of writers relating their ongoing process of identity formation and their forging of bonds with new and old communities. These authors work to position themselves within multiple cultures, building and maintaining affiliations with multiple groups simultaneously. While at times defining themselves or the groups they belong to oppositionally, links to those groups are not broken, though perhaps changed. Notably in this regard, Mori, who emigrates from Japan to the United States and identifies most strongly as American, distances herself from certain parts of her Japanese past in developing her American present, but this break is not a “symbolic parricide” nor a complete casting off and rejection of Japaneseness. Rather than the drastic acts of changing identification that Burke describes, the authors’ lives represent a constant repositioning and dialogue, a reworking of personal and familial history and affiliations. In reading these memoirs through a lens of inside– outside positionalities I focus both on the rhetoric depicted in the stories—the authors’ accounts of conversations and interactions— and on the meta-rhetoric of the works—how the authors engage the readers, the way they present themselves and build affiliations with the reading audience. Mori and Minatoya rhetorically move across a spectrum of identifications, identifying as American, Japanese, Asian, Japanese-American, Asian-American. These shifts allow Minatoya and Mori to establish different kinds of authority, depending on their purpose at various points in their memoirs. Their shifting allows them to craft

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identities that both share and are distinct from the groups they might be drawn (or assumed by readers) to belong to. Their self-positioning is more than an act of resistance or a denial of groups they do not want to identify with. Rather, their shifting along axes of inside and outside also allows them to complicate and critique those groups they seem to work hardest to belong to. Looked at this way, inside–outside positionalities can be seen as a complicating of identification—in the cases of Minatoya and Mori, crafting meaningful identifications involves leveraging notions of belonging and not belonging, of identifying and disidentifying with the groups they most strongly relate to. Minatoya, born in the United States, and Mori, who first came to the United States from Japan as a college student, establish themselves as having the authority to write about Japan and Japanese culture, while also presenting themselves as outsiders to that culture. To this end, they present themselves as more “American” than “Japanese,” while also being sure to present experiences that cast them as different from the dominant or mainstream. At times they identify as generically American, allied with the idyllic myths of the American Dream, and sometimes they are specifically Japanese-American, performing identities that challenge the easy binaries of “American” and “Japanese.” Minatoya begins her memoir with an account of her mother telling a story, establishing herself (Minatoya) as both heir to her mother’s culture and outsider to whom it must be explained. In this way, she establishes a lineage, a right to talk about her ancestors’ culture, and creates a connection with readers—at various points throughout the memoir, she is learning about Japanese culture and Japanese-American experiences from her relatives’ stories, just as readers are learning from her memoir. However, as Aki Uchida points out in an article about Minatoya’s work, unlike many memoirs wherein the mother stands as the representative of Japan, Minatoya’s mother also strongly self- identifies as American. Her mother, the daughter of Japanese immigrants, was born in America, sent to Japan with her siblings to be “properly” educated, and moved back to the United States as a young adult. Minatoya’s mother thus becomes both the figure of Japanese expert for her daughter as well as an experienced Japanese-American. She already dwells within a version of the shifting, in-between position Lydia Minatoya works to establish for herself throughout the memoir. Minatoya constantly complicates what “American” and “Japanese” mean. Many of her references to individual Americans name them with a hyphenated signifier (e.g., Irish-American, Italian-American) or by region (e.g., New England, California). Further, several of the Japanese she meets have spent time in America—her cousin Yoshi, who studied at University of Arizona and came back speaking fluent English and dressing like a cowboy; her Japanese teachers the Kinjos, who studied in the United States as teenagers; and her aunts and uncles who, like her mother, were born in the United States but spent their childhoods in Japan—figures who at various points are presented as Japanese, at others as American, sometimes as both. That is, American and Japanese are not presented as absolutes or essential categories, but rather as fluid, negotiated identities, much like the one Minatoya establishes for herself through the memoir. Minatoya’s journey through her memoir is one of self-discovery, whereby she becomes increasingly aware of her heritage and embraces a hybrid cultural identity as Japanese-American. Similarly, Mori focuses on becoming Japanese-American and on shifting from Japanese to being a Midwesterner. At times she strategically shifts to

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identifying more strongly with her Japanese childhood, but these moves nearly always end with her expression of discomfort with those experiences. In such cases, she identifies with her past in Japan as a way to more strongly identify with her present as an American adult. One of the primary tools she uses to establish such identifications is the motif of language. Mori and Minatoya both use discussion of language in their memoirs to establish themselves as insiders and outsiders of both Japan and mainstream (Anglo) American culture—language acts as a way of connecting out to other cultures. This use differs from more traditional narratives of coming to a new culture (i.e., America) through language, a rhetorical use of language in memoir Sean Butler discusses in regards to European immigrant memoirs. Rather, Talking to High Monks in the Snow and Polite Lies are narratives of being distanced from the older (Japanese) culture by language. However, it’s more than just speaking and reading the language—rather, it’s an issue of the intricacies of using the language in an acceptable way that causes the separation. While Mori and Minatoya both lay claim to two languages, they do so in ways that intentionally mark themselves in the eyes of their Japanese family as American, even when speaking Japanese. Mori, a native speaker of Japanese, states she cannot compose in Japanese or even translate her own works—she explains that she was never taught to write in Japanese. “I was never taught to write in what was my native language. My public education in Japan prepared me to make the correct letters to spell out the correct sounds, but that is not the same as teaching me how to write” (164). Mori, once established in the American Midwest, finds difficulty even communicating with her Japanese relatives. She reflects on a discussion with her uncle about the loss of some of her deceased mother’s diaries— he apologizes for having damaged some of them as a child, an apology she tries to convince him is unnecessary. “I’m not sure if Kenichi was convinced. I couldn’t explain my feelings to him very well […]” She wishes for the ability to do “the impossible: that I had the eloquence to tell my uncle, in his language, what I can only write in mine” (34-5). These are just two key examples of Mori explaining a disconnect she feels with her first language, Japanese, while claiming American English, and the Midwestern culture she has acquired along with it, as her language, the only tongue she can effectively communicate with. Minatoya writes about taking Japanese language classes while teaching U.S. servicemen at an airbase in Okinawa—she never makes clear how fluent she is in Japanese, but she seems to understand her relatives well enough. Rather, she gives more attention to the cultural implications of using the language, in particular of politeness. Many times when speaking to her Japanese relatives, Minatoya seems to use her infelicity with the language as a shield to shelter herself from cultural disjunctions and from transgressions of politeness—“forgive my most unskillful Japanese” becomes a refrain (93). Within the context of the memoir, Minatoya’s discussion of language and her mistakes is an example of her identity sliding across a range or field of identifications. She is at once both expert and novice, knower and student, knowledgeable and ignorant of her Japanese family’s ways of being. The references she makes to language ability function rhetorically to explain communication and politeness gaps to her family and

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strangers alike; it also functions to maintain, in the eyes of reading audiences, the position of expert/outsider she has worked to establish since the beginning of the memoir. Minatoya and Mori’s strategic self-positioning as cultural insiders and outsiders helps them to establish a critical distance from which to discuss the cultures they claim— American, Japanese, and specific regions within the United States. They tend to soften critiques by implicating themselves as still being members of the groups and at times complicit in the acts they criticize —thereby claiming authority to critique and avoiding shutting down communication with their readers who might also be indicted in these critiques. By establishing themselves as belonging to a range of cultures, the authors can call upon multiple identifications to comment on and critique. They are insider and outsider at once, though sometimes they fill one role more fully than the other. Minatoya and Mori both identify and disidentify with American and Japanese ideals of belonging. They strategically claim affiliation with both groupings and use their insider status to claim authority to write about and to authorize and soften critiques they level at both. In addition to demonstrating shifting affiliations based on context, their writing both identifies and disidentifies with accepted notions of Japaneseness and of the “American Dream.” Disidentification, as described by performance theorist José Esteban Muñoz, acts to challenge and critique the dominant culture, what could be thought of as a larger common ground, in an effort to change it.78 Muñoz describes disidentification as a description “of the survival strategies the minority subject practices in order to negotiate a phobic majoritarian public sphere that continuously elides or punishes the existence of subjects who do not conform to the phantasm of normative citizenship” (4). Disidentification as a strategy answers back to the normative influence of Burkean identification, which, as mentioned above, Ratcliffe characterizes as dismissive of difference for the sake of common ground. Mori and Minatoya enact a rhetoric of self and a construction and critique of cultural affiliations that show an ambivalence toward the major groups they might be labeled into and portrays them as engaged in a process of negotiation and becoming. The extant categories of Japanese, American, and Japanese- American are not treated as static in their memoirs, nor are they accepted or rejected in total. Their recounting of personal and familial experiences demonstrates how outsiders becoming insiders (even if temporarily) can disrupt the mechanical, indexical pointing from one accepted meaning to another accepted meaning that a static view of identity and affiliation presumes. Enacting themselves as both expert insiders and displaced outsiders, Mori and Minatoya present shifting affiliations and demonstrate the fluidity of ways of belonging, challenging mainstream American understandings of categories such as Asian-American, Japanese, and American.

78 I have some trepidation about disidentification’s reliance on an oppressive majoritarian other to work in opposition to. While such opposition does clarify the purpose of disidentification as a strategy, it suggests that the inside constituted by the disidentifying group is bound together more by a common experience of exclusion and a goal of resistance. Further, though Muñoz’s disidentification very brilliantly explores how dominant meanings are remade through disidentification (i.e., how dominant culture is queered), its focus on resistant readings and meanings leaves less room for interdependence.

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Conclusion Through this comparison of inside–outside positionalities with Burke’s identification, paired with a brief reading of Mori and Minatoya’s memoirs, I hope to demonstrate how inside–outside positionalities differs from other theories of rhetorics of affiliation and self. Paired with earlier chapters, which focused more broadly on cultural identity, this chapter also further links inside–outside rhetoric to individual actors as well. In the next chapter, I return to a focus on popular culture and explore how North American fan communities take up Japanese anime and manga, a further exploration of how inside–outside positionalities is enacted to construct new, transnational identities. Inside–outside positionalties, as already shown in earlier chapters and further developed here, starts from a different set of assumptions than Burke’s identification, and so enables different ways of seeing and being in the social world. Foremost, it eschews universalizing, taking instead a contingent view of reality more akin to a focus-field perspective. Inside–outside positionalities values process and becoming over any endpoint, setting it apart from Burke’s transcendent vision. It favors movement over stasis; resists universals and absolutes, instead favoring the contingent and mutable; and forms relations that are both means and ends of rhetorical action.

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CONCLUSION A Generative Shifting between Japanese and Euroamerican Rhetorics Throughout this dissertation project I have focused on the interactive, dynamic relationship of inside and outside as a powerful way of making meaning. I have described it as potentially transformative, a way of constructing, maintaining, and changing identities and affiliations. In the main chapters of this dissertation, I have taken a broad view of rhetoric, describing meaning-making as performative, embodied, and as acting over time. Such a view of rhetorical action is an extension of the view of rhetoric as epistemic. While some definitions of rhetoric continue to focus on persuasion—for example, Kennedy’s definition of rhetoric as the force behind how “individuals everywhere seek to persuade others to take or refrain from some action, or to hold or discard some belief” (3)—an epistemic approach focuses on how rhetoric shapes and makes meaning, and therefore how it shapes the ways humans filter and experience the world. The broad view of what constitutes rhetoric or rhetorical action taken in this dissertation focuses on the everyday and repeated actions of daily life that shape—and shift—perceptions of the world. This way of engaging with the everyday as part of meaning-making processes and so part of rhetoric has an affinity with Norman Fairclough’s discussion of ideology as the “naturalization” of ideas, attitudes, and ways of doing or being, such that they become “common sense” (33). Projects that trace these sorts of everyday meaning-making activities are important for revealing the contingency of the meanings they make and the worldviews they support. As James Berlin says of the importance of studying language and the way it shapes our world, language is social and “embodies a multitude of historically specific conceptions that shape experience […] The study of rhetoric is necessary, then, in order that we may intentionally direct this process rather than be unconsciously controlled by it” (166). Fairclough and Berlin both write with an eye toward enabling resistance and increasing personal agency through awareness of those things shaping our social discourse-driven world. My contribution to this “discourse about Discourse” (Gee),79 to which an understanding of rhetoric as epistemic belongs, is to offer a way of looking at interactions between discursive and ideological systems (e.g., between cultures). Inside–outside positionalities is a theory of rhetoric as meaning-making that focuses on the generative dynamic between notions of inside and outside. Rather than a sharp divide between the two, the theory sees inside and outside as ends of a spectrum, two ideals that are inseparable from and part of one another. Attention to the dynamics of inside–outside, by tracing connections between the meanings created and valued by different groups and how they shape one another, emphasizes those groups’ interdependence. It challenges notions of essential cultural difference, while also acknowledging their situatedness. As a scalar theory, inside–

79 Inside–outside positionalities functions on both the meta level and discursively—it both shapes behavior broadly and functions on the level of what James Gee refers to as “little d” discourse— or “language-in-use” as well as the “non-language ‘stuff’” including “one’s body, clothes, gestures, actions, interactions, symbols, tools, technologies” etc—operating within “big D” Discourse, which more closely matches the Foucaultian use of the term (Gee 7).

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outside positionalities can apply to intergroup interactions and meaning-making at a range of levels or degrees of focus. My various examples and readings throughout the dissertation exemplify how the theory can apply at a macro and a micro level, and in fact shift between them, facilitating a movement between thinking how notions of inside and outside play out within a culture at large, how they may manifest at the level of a few individuals, and how those individuals’ actions can represent, challenge, and change larger cultural meanings and associations. As such, the theory supports readings of changes to culture and ideology that can be simultaneously personally rooted and regionally relevant. My own experience with negotiating inside and outside while working through this project may shed some further light on what this kind of comparative work can offer to the study and teaching of rhetoric. While the topics I have covered in this project have been temporally, geographically, and culturally distant cases, the process of researching and writing has certainly led to my own deeper personal investment and sense of connection to Japanese culture and rhetoric. The “doing” of this project and development of a theory of inside–outside positionalities has itself been a process of meaning-making through interactions of inside and outside, and I as comparative rhetorician have seen myself shifting often along the pole of inside–outside.

Reflection 1: Why Japan? I have not always been connected to study of Japanese culture, and since declaring my intention to study Japanese rhetoric several years ago, as a white American of European ancestry, born in Germany and raised in Appalachia, I often am asked the question, “why Japan?” Such questioning is always well-meaning, though the stakes feel somewhat raised when such questions are asked as part of a job interview. Was your father stationed in Japan? Did you live there? No, I have to reply; the answer is always more roundabout. The short answer is that simple interest led to more and more reading about Japan that eventually led to my wanting to study Japanese rhetoric. But the short answer always makes me feel like the archetypal orientalist sitting in his armchair, studying the Other so as to somehow “own” it. The longer answer still admits of a driving interest, but couches it in a recursive, self-checking comparison, and, I hope, points to the value of deep engagement with cultures to which we are not born. I often start my explanatory narrative by pointing back to my college days, although in retrospect I could push contact with elements of Japanese culture in my life back even further; but college marks a turning point in thinking about many of those things as Japanese and a turn in how I thought of Japan in relation to the United States and Europe. As an undergraduate I double majored in English and History. Most of my history coursework focused on European history, especially that of Germany; Japan came up, but always on the periphery—as the Asian nation that defeated a European power (Russia) at war, or the key non-European member of the Axis Powers. One of the final courses I took as a history major was a non-western survey, which focused (quite broadly) on central Africa, China, and Japan. Around the same time, a friend introduced me to the Japanese animation form known as anime, which fascinated me with its familiar-yet-different stylistic and story-telling conventions. Less than a month of my

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history class focused on Japan, and Japanese pop-culture was still hard to come by in the small West Virginia town where my college was located, but those experiences were enough to prompt me to start rethinking what I knew (or thought I knew) about Japan, about its interactions with the west, about similarities and differences in the histories and cultures of Japan, western Europe, and America. Moving on to graduate school in English, I took my interest in Japan with me as a side project, leading to more reading about Japanese history, finding and watching or reading Japanese popular culture (particularly anime and manga, but also music), learning about Japanese Buddhism, and beginning to study the Japanese language. As my academic interests turned from English literature toward rhetoric and composition, my independent study of Japanese culture increased as well, and the two came together later in my doctoral work. In retrospect, I see that as I became more knowledgeable about Japanese culture, the more I would compare my home culture to it. As a culture I admired, Japan became a place to look for alternatives to familiar ways of doing things. I can’t place an exact date when I began to do this, but it is a tendency that has increasingly played out, and one that has contributed to my study of rhetoric. My answer to the question of why, then, becomes more of an explanation of how. What I hope others may find helpful about this answer of “why” with “how” is that while it names a few key points, the narrative avoids labeling a particular reason or exact place of origin for my engagement with Japanese culture. Indeed, I could easily extend the narrative further back, to include numerous points of contact I had with Japanese anime and other products that, at the time, I had no idea were “Japanese,” but simply assumed they were “American” in origin.80 As I have indicated, though, ongoing contact and engagement with Japanese culture has allowed me to take a comparative stance toward my own surroundings in America. To recall Rorty’s argument for the value of sensitivity toward others that I raised in the Introduction, my increased contact, indirect and channeled through research and commodity consumption as it has been, has led not only to a greater sensitivity toward Japan, but to ways of thinking that offer alternatives to those I was previously familiar with. While Rorty puts emphasis on sensitivity as a way of seeing all humans on equal footing and so as sharing a solidarity, I believe that same sensitivity opens up and necessitates a valuing of their epistemologies as well, which puts all our ways of interpreting the world into meaningful conversation.

Reflection 2: Shifting the Goals of This Project This productive conversation that I entered into as a student of history and fan of Japanese pop culture is one that I hope to bring others into as a scholar. As a scholar of

80 Only later did I realize the Japanese influence in many formative franchises from my childhood—Transformers and Voltron for example were packaged and (in the case of the animations) dubbed in ways that erased any obvious reference to Japan. Similarly, numerous video games available in arcades and on home consoles sold by Ninendo and Sega just seemed American to my friends and me as we grew up, despite being written, designed, and produced in Japan and only secondarily localized to the U.S.

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rhetoric, I have thought increasingly of how ways of doing and being in Japan and America might complement one another, looking at historical interactions and thinking of potential ways the cultures can learn from one another in the present. The work of this dissertation has been one way of addressing those thoughts. I began this project focused on looking for and describing key features of Japanese rhetoric. And indeed, that attention to description of elements of Japanese rhetorical practice that centered on notions of inside and outside remained, though the purpose motivating those descriptions shifted as I both became more invested in and informed about the rhetoric I was studying and as I had more opportunities to discuss and share that rhetoric with other colleagues who were “outside” of that tradition. As I mentioned above, the experience of engaging Japanese rhetoric and discussing that rhetoric with others has very much been its own process of shifting inside and outside, ultimately leading to my own new meanings and understandings about the work I do, about comparative rhetoric, and about rhetoric and composition more broadly. While I first thought of this project solely as a study of Japanese rhetoric, as it evolved I came to think of it as more a work of theory-building, directed toward the field of rhetoric writ large. As a grounding point for my study of Japanese rhetoric, I focused on rethinking the idea of the uchi/soto dynamic, previously the focus of study in linguistic anthropology, as a rhetorical dynamic of meaning making, not only of pointing to (or indexing) recognizable, existing meaning. This initial work to recuperate uchi/soto as rhetoric fortuitously ran alongside acceptance of my topic proposal to the Rhetoric Society of America’s 2012 conference. That year’s convention topic was on re-engaging identification, and I had proposed a paper examining commonalities and differences between Kenneth Burke’s identification and the uchi/soto dynamic as theorized by Jane Bachnik. Concurrent work on the recuperation project and the RSA comparative talk quickly became intertwined, and the writing process for both took on the feel of what Hall and Ames describe as ars contextualis, a development of an understanding of what something is by also seeing what it is not (Anticipating xx). Identification contributed a sort of “etic grid” (Mao; Hymes) to provide some initial framing for uchi/soto as rhetoric, and as I became more immersed in uchi/soto, that new understanding conversely provided its own etic perspective from which to rethink identification. Working through the two together foregrounded the value of comparative work for understanding all the rhetorics involved. I attended the conference excited to share my work on identification and uchi/soto (which later formed the foundation of Chapter 4), but was dismayed when my panel attracted only one attendee, a good friend and fellow Miami University doctoral candidate who was already familiar with my work and how it applied to rhetoric studies broadly. The other conference attendees, I imagine, saw “Japanese” in the panel and presentation titles and decided that other sessions were more relevant to their work. I had, I realized at that moment, become something of an outsider within my own disciplinary field, and I resolved to bring myself and the importance of the Japanese rhetoric I was studying back into it. Luckily, earlier in that same year I had the opportunity to propose an article as part of a special issue for Rhetoric Society Quarterly focused on new directions in comparative rhetoric. I proposed an article that would showcase how uchi/soto shaped

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Japan’s interactions with other countries in constructing its national identity; I situated my topic as both a case and a model for comparative projects that look beyond ideas of the nation to focus instead on global and intercultural interactions. Happily, this project along with the rest of the issue proposal was accepted. Returning to work on that article after my experience at the RSA conference, I re-engaged uchi/soto not only as an element of Japanese rhetoric, but as the foundation for a more widely applicable theory of meaning-making through interaction, a theory I believed had wider relevance for rhetorical study as a whole. Work on this article changed the way I thought of the contributions of uchi/soto, and led to the development of a theory of inside–outside positionalities to explain not only meaning-making practices in Japan, but which could be extended to other settings as well. Part of the journey of this project, then, has involved a process of becoming an insider (partially, provisionally) to Japanese rhetoric. Becoming more of an insider to Japanese rhetoric has allowed me to also see euroamerican rhetoric differently. As an insider also to the euroamerican tradition through upbringing and by training, I find myself wanting to add to that tradition by introducing features from Japanese rhetoric— hence my development of a new theory of inside–outside positionalities that incorporates elements of Japanese meaning-making and euroamerican theory, particularly performativity. However, theory-building through disciplinary interaction and (I hope responsible) appropriation has brought me back to that question of “why Japan?” If someone were to press the issue and ask why Japan rather than, say Germany, as a site of inquiry, I could still only answer with an explanation of the how—following from point to point, I eventually found myself more and more surrounded by elements of Japanese culture. I could answer that knowing the culture and a little of the language helps me to better connect with my Japanese students in writing classes—but there were few enough Japanese students at the university where I taught in West Virginia, and far fewer in Oxford, Ohio. I can say that having a deeper familiarity with another culture does help to think and see the world from more angles, to not take the euroamerican perspective for granted as the only way of seeing or being. Having done more research in the history of rhetoric, comparative rhetoric, and Japanese rhetoric, I can now point more confidently to specific instances of Japanese meaning-making that members of other traditions can learn from. With greater experience with doing comparative rhetoric I can also argue more persuasively for how those elements of Japanese rhetoric can apply more widely or be used to broaden and change how rhetoric is used and studied in North America—I can point to both what and how, although the answer to “why” remains elusive.

Contributions: The What and How of Studying Inside–Outside Positionalities Work in this dissertation has presented several cases of how, while inside and outside together are interdependent and have a productive meaning-making relationship, they are often presented and/or idealized as being strongly divided. In Chapters 1 and 2, I explain this division in terms of there being a difference between the “ideals of inside” and those things having an “inside effect,” demonstrating a distinction between how things are rhetorically marked and their underlying broader, richer meanings (e.g., the

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Christmas cake, marked as an outside borrowing, is an invented tradition within Japan that is rich with local significance). Inside–outside positionalities offers a way of reading to uncover those additional meanings that have been covered over by claims of division. These claims of division may be rhetorically powerful—the distinguishing of an inner Japanese cultural core from outside influences, for example, helped to counter fears of a loss of a distinct Japanese identity and to protect certain power inequalities from being eroded by “western” ideas of democracy. However, once in contact, inside and outside affect one another and lead to new, local ideas and meanings. By marking women’s rights as a “western” phenomenon, for example, social conservatives could “Other” Japanese feminists as not representing Japanese values; but inexorably, Japanese notions of women’s rights continued to change and led to new ways of being women in Japan. My discussion of the “troping” of women as representations of inner Japan in Chapter 3 is a continuation of this theme of separating ideals of inside and outside, showing another way those ideals were invoked and constructed. By refiguring troping as a way of meaning-making, I theorize how the conflation of femininity and Japaneseness both contributed to the generation of a new Japanese cultural identity and led to new “ways of being” for women. The troping of women was another way of negotiating between inside and outside; it is also itself another dynamic form of what I describe as recombinant meaning-making, a “remix” of identity positions that can produce both normative and resistant models of femininity. My linking of nostalgia to the workings of inside–outside positionalities in Chapter 2 broadens theoretical understanding of nostalgia as rhetorical action and offers new ways of thinking of time and memory as part of processes of meaning-making. Nostalgia is itself a concept whose global relevance has been contested. While some scholars argue for it as a western idea and imposition, others argue that, while its categorization and naming may have taken place initially in European countries, that nostalgia or something like it can be observed in non-Europeanized cultures. Wider application of nostalgia geographically has also gone hand-in-hand with a broadening of its meaning. As the overview of nostalgia in Chapter 2 illustrates, nostalgia now refers to much more than the pathologized longing for home suffered by 17th Century Swiss mercenaries (Davis). Presenting nostalgia as another way of negotiating inside and outside and how its use of and impact upon memory is rhetorically effective in shaping regional/cultural identity further expands our understanding of nostalgia as rhetorical and expands the importance of memory as part of rhetorical action. By engaging with Kenneth Burke’s identification theory in Chapter 4, I put inside–outside positionalities in conversation with one of the more influential ideas informing rhetorical theory today. Although identification has been invaluable in expanding notions of rhetoric beyond the “art of persuasion,” I argue that it still has an underlying western bias and a tendency for displacement of difference (see also Ratcliffe; Stromberg). Inside–outside positionalities provides an alternative to ways of building and maintaining affiliations between individuals and groups. It also offers another theory for tracing the movements of affiliation, positing them as more easily shifted and much more dynamic than what is suggested by Burke’s characterization of a drastic severance of ties as part of moving out of an identification. To be sure, inside–outside positionalities is not a replacement for identification, but it does allow for more nuanced readings of affiliation and opens a way for thinking of affiliations from a non-Eurocentric perspective.

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In addition to these chapter-specific contributions, inside–outside positionalities can act broadly as a guiding metaphor and strategy for tracing cultural interactions and meaning-making. Bruce Horner and Min-Zhan Lu have demonstrated the value of tracing language change as a way of challenging notions of a “standard” language. This can be achieved by a “comparison of examples of officially ‘correct’ writing from different historical periods and across genres and disciplines [to] challenge the static character of canonical standards” (154). By tracing how what is considered “standard English,” for example, the arbitrary nature of that standard becomes apparent. It shows the importance of context and how inside and outside influences have affected a language over time. Inside–outside positionalities can fill a similar role for questioning notions of “mainstream” or normative culture and rhetoric, for example, or deconstructing elements of regional cultures that are simply taken for granted or as essential to the identity of a particular region. In this latter sense, inside–outside positionalities can contribute to the work undertaken by critical studies of regional rhetoric, as exemplified in the Rhetoric Society Quarterly special issue on Regional Rhetoric edited by Jenny Rice, which characterizes regions not as divided from other parts of the world by essential differences or characteristics, but as “saturated with relationships among people, places, and histories” and “not so much places but ways of strategically describing relationships among places” (Rice 206). Similarly, inside–outside positionalities focuses on relationships, their strategic deployment, and the ways that interactions between groups (e.g., regions) make new meanings and shape the groups involved in those interactions.

Looking Ahead: Where To Go From Here? Looking ahead, the theory of inside–outside positionalities should lead to and will benefit from additional research. The work in this project has stayed focused on cases of Japanese meaning-making, put in conversation with several western theories (hybridity; identification; performativity). The theory will benefit from additional application both inside and outside of Japan. Since the dynamic of inside and outside is so important within Japanese ways of meaning-making, the sites of this project have necessarily only dealt with a few of them. Each case examined has further refined understanding of inside–outside rhetoric; further study of Japanese sites is therefore likely to further refine understanding of that dynamic, bringing attention to the culturally specific and the globally relevant. Such study is also needed to reveal additional companion strategies, such as the use of nostalgia and the troping of women. This study focuses on developing a theory of inside–outside positionalities and provides several exploratory cases that help to flesh out how the dynamic between inside and outside functions to make meaning and build affiliations. While I make claims for its broader applicability, those claims remain to be tested and enlarged upon. How well does inside–outside positionalities work to explain social dynamics and interactions outside of Japan, such as in the United States? How, for example, might inside–outside positionalities help to work through the “toxic rhetoric” (Duffy) that causes so much deadlock in our current political climate? In Chapter 4, I begin the groundwork for launching such inquiry by putting the theory in conversation with Burke’s identification. A generative place to begin, then, may be to examine various cases of building affiliation through the lens of identification and through inside–outside positionalities.

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The Elusive “Why”: Comparative Rhetoric as Both Ends and Means of the Global Turn If still asked to answer that question of “why Japan,” I can return again to Hall and Ames’s idea of “importantly present,” drawing from it to argue that certain features, while they may be relevant or compatible elsewhere, are more present, more noticeable, more part of the culture in some regions than others. I can also point to the importance of Japan internationally as a political and economic partner on the global stage—greater understanding of Japanese rhetoric and its potential for contributing to greater understanding between residents of Japan and the United States, for example, is certainly a positive goal. However, such a perspective threatens to position Japan and study of Japanese rhetoric as merely a means to an end that benefits American interests. My own ongoing engagement with Japanese culture and rhetoric goes hand-in- hand with my continuing use and study of euroamerican rhetoric. Study of both contributes to and enlarges understanding of the human condition and helps to better understand this thing that we label rhetoric as a part of how humans communicate and are in the world together. Active engagement with both—together—also opens avenues for meaning-making that would not exist were the two merely observed in isolation. One of the contributions that this dissertation makes, then, is to point to how comparative rhetoric in general contributes to the field of rhetoric and composition as a whole. My project does this by demonstrating how study of a particular culture’s rhetoric reveals things about that culture and the comparatist’s home culture. Trying to answer this question of “why Japan,” then, raises another issue—how to answer without belittling other potential sites of comparative study? Certainly I believe that Japanese rhetoric has a great deal to offer to rhetorical scholarship, but that does not make it more important than studying, say, Thai, or Chinese, or First People’s rhetorics. Each study of rhetoric (comparative or otherwise) is a study of a case, and as such, functions to sensitize us to the particulars of that case, perhaps even acting as a representative of a larger grouping of cases, enriching our understanding of the larger totality that is human experience, but not a replacement for those other examples. I see the topics covered in this dissertation as representative of Japanese rhetoric of inside and outside, cases which will sensitize us to the particulars of that culture, as well as adding to a broader understanding of the diversity of ways humans construct, leverage, and react to notions of inside and outside, inclusion and exclusion, and belonging or not belonging. Inside–outside positionalities offers another way of thinking of the work of comparative rhetoric, adding to those purposes and goals I address in the introduction. By seeing comparative study as a way to link cultures, not just as a matter of comparing and contrasting, we can reconceptualize the act of “comparison” as a tracing of the interactions of inside and outside, giving attention to interconnection of self and other. This project, then, develops inside–outside positionalities not only a topic of comparative study, but a way of doing comparative rhetoric. In the introductory chapter, I open with a reference to Hesford’s call for a “global turn” in rhetoric and composition studies. Comparative rhetoric is, I believe, essential to the endeavor of a globally-focused and active field of rhetoric and composition. Later in

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the introduction I make an argument for the importance of comparative rhetoric and suggest ways it can contribute to the larger discipline, to the ways it can be a means for achieving goals held in common across the broader field. However, I think that comparative rhetoric, like the sites and cultures it engages with, should be more than just a means for enabling other rhetorical work and agendas. While I do think it is important at this juncture for comparative rhetoric to maintain a readily identifiable designation as a specialization within rhetorical study, ultimately I hope that all rhetoric will come to involve some elements of comparative methodology and purpose. In this sense, I see comparative rhetoric as a (momentary) end unto itself; although, as my formulation of inside–outside positionalities suggests, that notion of an end can only ever be momentary, as the specialization and field continue to shift and horizons expand. Why study Japanese rhetoric? Because it and the meaning-making ways of all cultures enrich our understanding of human experience and strengthen our ability to see the world from many perspectives, a necessary step for enhancing our empathy and sensitivity for one another.

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