The Crisis of Language in Contemporary Japan: Reading, Writing, and New Technology Jun Mizukawa Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY 2013 © 2013 Jun Mizukawa All Rights Reserved ABSTRACT The Crisis of Language in Contemporary Japan: Reading, Writing, and New Technology Jun Mizukawa My dissertation is an ethnographically inspired theoretical exploration of the crises of reading and writing in contemporary Japan. Each of the five chapters examines concrete instances of reading and writing practices that have been problematized in recent decades. By calling attention to underlying moral assumptions, established sociocultural protocols, and socio-technological conditions of the everyday, I theorize the concept of embodied reading and writing thresholds. The scope of analysis is partly informed by popular discourse decrying a perceived decline in reading and writing proficiency among Japanese youth. This alleged failing literacy figures as a national crisis under the assumption that the futurity of children’s national language proficiency metonymically correlates with the future well being of its national cultural body. In light of heightened interests in the past, present, and future of books, and a series of recent state interventions on the prospect of “national” text culture, it is my argument that ongoing tensions surrounding the changing media landscape and semiotic relations to the world do not merely reflect changes in styles of language, structures of spatiotemporal awareness, or forms of knowledge production. Rather, they indicate profound transformations and apprehensions among the lives mediated and embodied by the very system of signification that has come under scrutiny in the post-Lost Decade Japan (03/1991- 01/2002). My dissertation offers an unique point of critical intervention into 1) various forms of tension arising from the overlapping media technologies and polarized population, 2) formations of reading and writing body (embodiment) at an intersection of heterogeneous elements and everyday disciplining, 3) culturally specific conditions and articulations of the effects of “universal” technologies, 4) prospects of “proper” national reading and writing culture, and 5) questions of cultural transformation and transmission. I hope that the diverse set of events explored in respective chapters provide, as a whole, a broader perspective of the institutional and technological background as well as an intimate understanding of culturally specific circumstances in Japan. Insofar as this is an attempt to conduct a nuanced inquiry into the culturally specific configurations and articulations of a global phenomenon, each ethnographic moment is carefully contextualized to reflect Japan specific conditions while avoiding the pitfall of culturalist assumptions. Understanding how an existing system of representation, technological imperatives and sociohistorical predicaments have coalesced to form a unique constellation is the first step in identifying how the practice of reading and writing becomes a site of heated national debate in Japan. Against theories that problematize the de-corporealizing effects of digital technology within reading and writing, I emphasize the material specificity of contemporary reading and writing practices. Table of Contents Introduction 1 Chapter One: Embodied Connoisseurship 45 Chapter Two: It’s Me! It’s Me! 97 Chapter Three: Disorder of the Mind 140 Chapter Four: Kanji no yure – A Space of Indeterminacy 192 Chapter Five: Breath and Strokes 243 ConcLusion 295 BibLiography 306 Appendices 319 i ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Words can hardly express my gratitude; I am nonetheless compelled to proceed with my thanks to the following people. I believe it to be my good fortune to have been able to work under the guidance of an inspiring advisor, Professor Marilyn Ivy in the Department of Anthropology at Columbia University. I am deeply grateful for her continuous support, insightful suggestions and generous mentoring through and through. I would like to thank Professor John Pemberton for introducing me to many conceptual foundations for this project. I am also thankful for Professor Tomiko Yoda, Professor Thomas Looser, and Professor Michael Taussig for agreeing to serve on my committee. The department of Anthropology Sheldon Scheps Memorial Library Research Grant funded my preliminary research in 2004 and 2005. For twenty months in 2007 and 2008, Social Science Research Council—International Dissertation Research Fellowship enabled me to stay without interruption to conduct my dissertation fieldwork in Japan. When it was time for a follow-up research in 2009, Columbia University Weatherhead East Asian Institute Weatherhead Ph.D. Training Grant came through to make it happen. I am forever indebted to Yasuo Hatsugai and his son Yasuyuki, Kōnosuke Hashiguchi, Ryōta Saito, Shigeki Yoshida, and Yukio Nishiaki for their interests in my work, hospitality and candid mentoring during my fieldwork in Kanda Jimbō-chō. Special thanks to the members of Tokyo Koten-kai and Tokyo Kosho Kumiai, without whose understanding and support, I would never have been able to set a foot inside their headquarters and auctions. I am grateful for rare friendship extended to me by Kazuhiro ii Yamaji, Maki Uehara, and Tomoaki and Yuki Tatsumi during my research in Tokyo and thereafter. I also thank Professor David Slater at Sophia University and staff at the Institute of Comparative Culture at Sophia University for their assistance during my fieldwork in Tokyo. Needless to say, many who remain unnamed also helped me complete this journey as I moved back and forth between Tokyo and New York, from New York to Boston, and finally from Boston to our current home Chicago. I could not have been here without them. I was fortunate to have a number of opportunities to present my work at various stages of dissertation writing, where I encountered sobering critique and received invaluable advice. I owe some of my major rethinking to the participants who have either read drafts of the chapters or generously engaged in congenial dialogues with me at workshops below: From Fieldwork to Text at Columbia University, Infrastructure Workshop at University of Chicago, Japan at Chicago: ReMediations I&II at University of Chicago, and Writing Workshop at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. To my parents, Hajime and Michiyo Mizukawa, my sister, Yuki, my parents-in- law, James and Rochelle Fisch, and my adopted parents in Tokyo, Masaki and Yukiko Yanagita for their good humor, numerous care packages, and most of all, their undying faith in me. To Frederick for reminding me everyday at 5 p.m. that it is time to put down the pen (figuratively speaking) and feed him, and that there is a life beyond the computer screen. To my son, Kai, for coming into our lives. And, to my husband, Michael, for everything else. iii Note to the reader Wahon is a generic term used among the antiquarian booksellers in Japan when referring to the pre-Meiji publication and the style of bindings. Although some historians make a distinction between kinsei and kindai by giving a chronological specificity by designating a term, early-modern for kinsei and modern for kindai, in this dissertation for the convenience of the argument, I will describe wahon as “pre-modern” publication in accordance with the understanding that the dawn of modernity arrived in Japan with the Meiji Restoration of 1868. Kanji is another term that makes a repeated appearance in this dissertation. Since a direct translation of kanji is Chinese characters, the term, Chinese characters, is usually used in English publications. However, at the risk of burdening the reader, I will use kanji instead of Chinese characters in order to provide consistency to the discussions of the dissertation. On occasion when I use the term, Chinese characters, the use is with reference to Chinese characters used in other East Asian languages. In sum, my use of the term, kanji, is always in reference to and within the context of discussions on Japanese language and the reading and writing practices in Japan. All the translations from Japanese texts are mine unless otherwise noted. Whenever I consider beneficial to the reader, I cite terms and passages in the original Japanese (rendered in romanization and/or Japanese scripts). All names in this dissertation are cited with given names first, followed by family names, including the names of the scholars not published in English, for the sake of uniformity. Throughout this dissertation, I employ the term “analog” and “digital.” Often time, it is used as a prefix to specify a sociocultural and technological generation, and the designation alludes to the underlying logic of an alleged divide. Although the categories of “analog” and “digital” are self-referential when used to portray a certain group of population in Japan, my use the word “analog” and “digital” with regard to technological generation assumes the following logic. On the one hand, analog technology has an indexical relation between the medium and the script, which focuses on what stems from sensorial input and understands body as a channeling medium thus foregrounding the immediacy of the bodily materiality. On the other hand, digital technology forces what is imperceptible to eyes (or undetectable to sensorial normal/natural capacities) to become “rendered” or “converted” so that we can see the “effect”