Afterword: Japanese Modernism Today

Almost a century and a half after the Meiji Revolution (which was disguised as an imperial ‘restoration’) the concepts of ‘modernity’ and ‘modernism’ have worn rather thin. One might even say that they now seem a little old hat. The world continues to change – even more profoundly or frenetically than before – but we have become so used to constant change as a basic condition of ‘modern life’, in everything from fashion and technology to current jargon and social mores, that it hardly seems worth remarking upon. In other words, we are now so far removed from ‘tradition’ that we feel little need for contrary terms such as ‘modernity’ and ‘modernism’. The terms ‘postmodernity’ and ‘postmodernism’, although useful to some extent, perhaps represent, in the ﬁnal analysis, only a feeble attempt to revive the moribund freshness or sense of novelty and excitement once possessed by the word ‘modern’ and its various derivatives. Without ‘tradition, ‘modernity’ has little meaning or function.
In the Japanese case in particular, another major difference between ‘now’ and ‘then’ is that, today, Japan is no longer a net ‘importer of modernity’ but is itself

276

Afterword: Japanese Modernism Today 277

a major agent of global change. In the past few decades there has been a momentous shift in the cultural ‘balance of power’ between East and West, with Japan, and increasingly its larger East Asian cousin China, a major contributor to the new global economy and culture of the 21^stcentury. Although it still continues to absorb foreign cultural influences, like every other country, Japan itself now represents ‘cutting-edge modernity’ to the rest of the world, and especially to its Asian neighbours. It no longer looks so much to the West for models to emulate, but has itself become, in many fields, the object of imitation.
Thus it is perhaps hardly surprisingly that contemporary Japanese writers and artists, such as the ‘two Murakamis’, evince none of the transnational ‘anxiety of influence’ that so much troubled their predecessors. No longer perceiving any great cultural divide between East and West, or between tradition and modernity, they naturally feel completely at home in the hybrid global culture of the 21^stcentury and hardly seem to spare a thought for ‘national origins’.
Japan today, of course, plays an important role in all our lives, as an economic superpower and as a major contributor to 21^st-century global culture. But its historical experience of modernity is of wider interest for a number of other reasons too. As a once-remote nonWestern society that existed in relative isolation and evolved its own distinctive culture for centuries before its sudden ‘opening’ to Western modernity in the mid19^thcentury, Japan provides almost a ‘textbook case’ under almost uncontaminated ‘laboratory conditions’ of the ways in which modernity radically transforms societies and cultures and the political, social, cultural,

278 Modernism and Japanese Culture

and psychological responses such transformations can elicit. Furthermore, Japan is in a unique position, historically speaking, as a country that has been both passive recipient and active agent of modernity. From the very earliest phase of their modern encounter with the West, the Japanese have helped to deﬁne what modernity is, for Westerners as well as for themselves. Thus a deeper understanding of ‘Japanese modernity’ will help us, in more ways than one, understand our own experience of this crucial phenomenon in the West.

Notes

Introduction: Modernity and Modernism in a Japanese Context

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123
The photograph may be viewed on Wikipedia under ‘Tokaido’.

Wilde, The Artist as Critic, p. 315.

The exact state of the ‘modernity’ of Tokugawa Japan (1600–1868) is a matter of dispute among historians, with the recent consensus being that it was ‘early modern’ rather than ‘premodern’, and that consequently the mid-19^th-century ‘opening to the West’ only accelerated a historical process that was already in progress. Although politically Tokugawa Japan was clearly feudalistic, socioculturally and even economically, as I shall argue later, it had already begun to ‘modernize’. But, of course, a Western visitor of the 1850s would not have noticed this: to him or her Japan would have seemed to be caught in a ‘medieval’ time-warp. The reasons for this are historically and culturally complex and beyond the scope of the present book, but to list just a few of the more obvious ones: the quick achievement of a high degree of national unity and national consensus in the early Meiji period, a high level of literacy and national education, and intelligent, effective leadership at the top, including from the elite government bureaucracy, combined with a high level of social discipline and work ethic among the people at large.
456

Harootunian, Overcome by Modernity, p. 94.

This view is, in fact, somewhat over-simplified and needs significant qualification. The onset of modernity was not so sudden an event as once thought: as we shall see in Part II, we also need to be cognizant of the irony that ‘Western modernism’ itself, in the realm of the arts, was substantially shaped by Japanese aesthetic traditions. A good argument could even be made that aesthetic modernism, which ultimately became a global phenomenon, actually had its beginnings in late 17^th-century Japan.

Grifﬁn, Series Preface, in Turda, Modernism and Eugenics, p. ix.

7

279

280 Notes

Part I Constructing ‘Modernity’ and ‘Tradition’: Modernism and Anti-Modernism in Meiji Japan, 1868–1912

Chapter 1 Constructing Meiji Modernity

1 See Marius Jansen in The Cambridge History of Japan, p. 337. 2 W.G. Beasley, The Japanese Experience, p. 225.

3 The Confucian scholar Aizawa Seishisai wrote the polemical tract that had the deepest and most widespread inﬂuence on the young revolutionary leaders of the Meiji Restoration (and also on later Japanese nationalists), New Theses (Shinron, 1825), the

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main source for the ideology of sonno joi (‘expel the barbarian, revere the emperor’) and kokutai (‘national essence’). ‘It was a virtual bible to activists….’ See Bob Tadashi Wakabayashi, Anti-

Foreignism and W e stern Learning in Early-Modern Japan: The New Theses of 1825, p. iv.
4 Sources of Japanese Tradition, p. 13.

5 Ibid., p. 8. 6 Ibid. 7 Henshall, A History of Japan, pp. 71–2. 8 Ibid., p. 13. 9 Ibid., p. 15.
10 Fred G. Notehelfer, Sources of Japanese Tradition, pp. 17–18.

11 Hirakawa, in The Cambridge History of Japan, p. 462. 12 Jansen, The Making of Modern Japan, p. 321.

13 Ibid., p. 322. 14 Apart from Fukuzawa, another famous Japanese expression of this link between ‘individualism’ and ‘modernity’ was by

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the leading Meiji writer, Natsume Soseki, in his 1914 talk,

‘My Individualism’ (W a takushi no kojin-shugi). (See Natsume

2005). On the other side of the coin, of course, modernity was also blamed for the emergence of ‘mass man’ in the early 20^thcentury.
15 See Masako Gavin, in Starrs, Japanese Cultural Nationalism, p. 203.

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16 Y. Takahashi ‘Nihon jinshu kairyo ron’, Meiji bunka shiyo sosho
6 (Tokyo: Kazama Shobo, 1961), p. 49.
17 Ibid., p. 46. 18 Ibid., p. 17. Rumi Sakamoto, ‘Race-ing Japan’, in Starrs, Japanese

Cultural Nationalism, pp. 185–6.
19 Turda, Modernism and Eugenics, pp. 4–6.

Notes 281

20 Grifﬁn, Series Preface, in Turda, Modernism and Eugenics, p. xiv. 21 See Sakamoto, ‘Race-ing Japan’, in Starrs, Japanese Cultural

Nationalism, pp. 180–5.

22 Ibid., p. 185.

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23 Yo Hirayama, Fukuzawa Yukichi no Shinjitsu (The Truth about

Fukuzawa Yukichi, 2004), argues that an editor of Fukuzawa’s

Complete W o rks in the 1920s and ’30s erroneously included

unsigned editorials written by Fukuzawa’s colleagues, including

the datsu-A ron article.

24 Sakamoto, ‘Race-ing Japan’, in Starrs, Japanese Cultural Nationalism, p. 182.
25 Ibid.

26 Beasley, The Japanese Experience, p. 225.

27 Kanagaki, ‘The Beefeater’, in Keene, ed., Modern Japanese Literature, pp. 31–2.
28 Hattori, ‘The Western Peep Show’, in Keene, ed., Modern Japanese

Literature, p. 34.

29 Ibid., p. 35. 30 Stanley-Baker, Japanese Art, p. 192.

Chapter 2 The Anti-Modernist Backlash: Constructing Meiji Tradition

1 For a ﬁctional depiction of these groups, see Mishima Yukio’s

novel, Runaway Horses.

2 Walter Skya has pointed to the numerous other afﬁnities

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between Japanese (Shinto) and Islamic ‘religious terrorism’. See

Skya, Japan’s Holy War, pp. 3–5.
3 Alexandre Kojève, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel (quoted in
Wolfe, Suicidal Narrative, p. 19).

4 Mitford himself was a signiﬁcant ﬁgure; he went on to write

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Tales of Old Japan, which includes the story of the 47 ronin, and shows his own keen awareness that he was witnessing the vanishing of ‘old Japan’. He was also the grandfather of the celebrated Mitford sisters.
5 Mitford, Mitford’s Japan, p. 87. 6 Ibid. 7 Ibid., pp. 87–8. 8 Ibid., p. 86. 9 Ibid., p. 250.

10 Satow, A Diplomat in Japan, p. 343.

11 Ibid., p. 344. 12 Mitford, Mitford’s Japan, p. 250.

282 Notes

13 Ibid. 14 The most striking ‘modern myth’ associated with the ‘death of samurai tradition’ as one of the immediate and most obvious

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consequences of Japan’s ‘modernization’ is that of Saigo Takamori (1827–1877), sometimes called the ‘last samurai’. He was not the ﬁrst nor the last Japanese nationalist/patriot to have an ambivalent attitude towards ‘modernization’: at ﬁrst one of the central pillars of the new Meiji government, he then turned against his fellow modernizers when they took a step too far, issuing a decree that disestablished and outlawed the very samurai class itself in 1876. See Mark Ravina, The Last Samurai: The Life

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and Battles of Saigo Takamori.

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15 Mori Ogai, The Incident at Sakai, p. 105.

16 Ibid., p. 109. 17 Ibid., p. 116. 18 Mishima, On Hagakure, p. 99.

19 Stokes, The Life and Death of Yukio Mishima, p. 47. P.M. Sato

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called Mishima kichigai, ‘crazy’.
20 Mishima, Runaway Horses, p. 391.

21 Wolfe, Suicidal Narrative, p. 33.

22 Ibid. 23 Ibid., pp. 34–5. 24 Ibid., p. 35. 25 Ravina, The Last Samurai, p. 190. 26 Ibid.

27 Carol Gluck, Japan’s Modern Myths.

28 Ravina, ‘The Apocryphal Suicide of Saigo Takamori’, p. 691.

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29 Ibid., p. 696. 30 Ibid. 31 Ibid., pp. 701–2. 32 Ibid., p. 702. 33 Mishima, My Friend Hitler, p. 2. 34 Loti, ‘A Ball in Edo’, p. 4. 35 Ibid., p. 10. 36 Akutagawa, ‘The Ball’, p. 151. 37 For instance, David Rosenﬁeld, ‘Counter-Orientalism and Textual

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Play in Akutagawa’s ‘The Ball’ (‘Butokai’)’, in Japan Forum, 12(1) (2000), p. 53.
38 Mishima, My Friend Hitler, pp. 20–1.

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39 Quoted in Kosaka, Japanese Thought in the Meiji Era, vol. IX,

p. 379.

40 Sources of Japanese Tradition, vol. 2, p. 746.

41 Ibid.

Notes 283

42 Quoted in ibid., p.360. For a reprint of the Japanese original, see

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Kosaka 1999.
43 Gluck, Japan’s Modern Myths, p. 136. Gluck is quoting from

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Chogyu zenshu, vol. 4, pp. 434–5.

44 For nuanced and balanced analyses of Japanese pan-Asianism that take into account both the idealistic and cynical uses made of it, see Duara, ‘The Discourse of Civilization and Pan-Asianism’, and also Han, ‘Envisioning a Liberal Empire’.

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45 See Kosaka, Japanese Thought in the Meiji Era, p. 347. 46 Berlin, The Roots of Romanticism, p. 64.

47 Ibid., p. 65.

48 Hearn, Kokoro: Hints and Echoes of Japanese Inner Life, p. 6. 49 Ota, Basil Hall Chamberlain, pp. 186–9.

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50 Quoted in Kosaka, Japanese Thought in the Meiji Era, p. 379.

51 Quoted in Bourdaghs, The Dawn That Never Comes, p. 4.

52 Hearn, Japan: An Attempt at Interpretation, p. 333.

53 Spencer’s advice was sought by the Meiji government in 1892 and he wrote a letter in response basically recommending that Japan, for the sake of its own survival, should keep its distance from the West and from Westerners in every way possible. The letter was published as an appendix to Hearn’s Japan: An Attempt

at Interpretation after Spencer’s death. See Henshall, A History of Japan, p. 78.

54 See, for instance, the articles reprinted in Mutsu, The British Press

and the Japan-British Exhibition of 1910.

55 Nish, ‘Nationalism in Japan,’ in Michael Leifer, ed., Asian National-

ism, pp. 83–4.
56 O’Connor, ed., Japanese Propaganda: Selected Readings.

57 Makino, ‘Lafcadio Hearn and Yanagita Kunio’. 58 In a conversation of 1988, Nakasone told Tony O’Reilly that
Hearn ‘made my childhood, and that of almost every other child in the Japan I grew up in’. See O’Reilly, ‘Foreword’, in

Sean G. Ronan, ed., Irish Writing on Lafcadio Hearn and Japan,

p. xi. No less a personage than Emperor Hirohito was equally laudatory of Hearn’s work in a speech welcoming the Irish President in 1983 (The Irish Times, Dublin, June 4, 2002).
59 Shirane, ed., Inventing the Classics, p. 14. 60 Ibid., p. 51. 61 Ibid., p. 32. 62 Ibid., p. 36. 63 Ibid., p. 35. 64 Ibid. 65 Ibid., p. 37.

284 Notes

Chapter 3 The Novel as Modernist Medium: Modernity and Anti-Modernity in Meiji Fiction

1 Tsubouchi, The Essence of the Novel, in Keene, ed., Modern
Japanese Literature, p. 57.
2 Weller, Modernism and Nihilism, p. 24. 3 Quoted in Ryan, Japan’s First Modern Novel, p. 20.

4 Japanese naturalism was a literary movement inspired by turnof-the-century French and German naturalism, and like writers such as Zola, for instance, it was famous – or notorious – for its frank and explicit treatment of sex.

5 Mori, Y o uth and Other Stories, p. 222. 6 See Nagashima, ed., Return to Japan from ‘Pilgrimage’ to the W e st.

7 Junshi was the occasional samurai practice, outlawed by the
Tokugawa government, of a vassal committing ritual suicide on the death of his feudal lord, with the idea of serving him even in death (the original meaning of ‘samurai’ being ‘one who serves’).

8 Mori, The Incident at Sakai, p. 66. 9 Marcus, Paragons of the Ordinary: The Biographical Literature of

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Mori Ogai.

10 Natsume, Kokoro, p. 246. 11 Ibid., p. 246. 12 Ibid., p. 245. 13 Natsume, And Then, pp. 60–1. 14 Ibid., p. 72. 15 Shimazaki, Before the Dawn, p. xi. 16 Ibid., p. 84. 17 For an explanation of the useful concept of a ‘sheltering sky’, see

Grifﬁn, Modernism and Fascism, pp. 76–8.

Part II High Modernism and the Fascist Backlash, 1912–1945

1 Arthur Rimbaud, Une saison en enfer, in Oeuvres complètes, Paris,

Gallimard, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 1979, p. 116.
2 Wiesenfeld, Mavo, p. 2. 3 Ibid. 4 Ibid., p. 1. 5 Ibid., p. 3. 6 Ibid., p. 2. 7 Ibid., p. 5.

Notes 285

8 Ibid., p. 3. 9 Ibid.
10 Ibid. 11 Szostak, ‘“Fair is Foul, and Foul is Fair”: Kyoto Nihonga, Anti-
Bijin Portraiture and the Psychology of the Grotesque’, in Roy

Starrs, ed., Rethinking Japanese Modernism (forthcoming 2011).

12 Ibid. 13 Wu, ‘Transcending the Boundaries of the “isms”: Pursuing
Modernity through the Machine in 1920s and 1930s Japanese Avant-Garde Art’, in Roy Starrs, ed., Rethinking Japanese Modernism (forthcoming 2011).
14 Ibid.

15 Grifﬁn, Modernism and Fascism, pp. 2–8. 16 Skya, Japan’s Holy War, p. 201. 17 Der Spiegel, July, 2007.

18 Williams, ‘(Re)constituting the Historical Trauma of the War in
East Asia: A Literary Response to the “Overcoming Modernity”

Symposium’, in Roy Starrs, ed., Rethinking Japanese Modernism

(forthcoming 2011).
19 See Tyler, Modanizumu, pp. 7–8.

20 Kawakita, Modern Currents in Japanese Art, p. 121.

21 Ibid., p. 110. 22 Ibid., p. 124. 23 Ibid., p. 123.

24 Keene, Dawn to the W e st, p. 631.

25 For an extended analysis of Kawabata’s lifelong modernism,

see my Soundings in Time: The Fictive Art of Kawabata Y a sunari,

especially Chapter Four, ‘Between Tradition and Modernity’.

26 Keene, Y o komitsu Ri’ichi, Modernist, p. 62.

27 Baker, Japanese Art, p. 198. 28 Ibid., p. 199. 29 Ibid., pp. 199–200. 30 Ibid., p. 201.

31 Gardner, Advertising Tower: Japanese Modernism and Modernity in the 1920s, p. 17.

32 Tyler, Modanizumu, p. 16.

33 Berger, Japonisme in W e stern Painting from Whistler to Matisse,

p. 1.
34 Ibid., p. 2. 35 The signiﬁcant inﬂuence of traditional Japanese architecture and interior design on Western modernist architects such as Frank Lloyd Wright, Bruno Taut and Le Corbusier has been well documented by other scholars.

286 Notes

36 Miner, The Japanese Tradition in British and American Literature,

p. 270.
37 Ibid., p. 275. 38 Ibid., p. 268. 39 Ibid., p. 279. 40 Quoted in Suzuki, ‘Rewriting the Literary History of Japanese

Modernism’, in Roy Starrs, ed., Rethinking Japanese Modernism

(forthcoming 2011).

41 Kawakita, Modern Currents in Japanese Art, p. 118.

42 Harrison, Modernism, p. 9. 43 See Suzuki, ‘Rewriting the Literary History of Japanese Modernism’. 44 Quoted in Bradbury and McFarlane, Modernism, p. 20. 45 Quoted in ibid., p. 20. 46 Ibid., p. 24.

47 Skya, Japan’s Holy War, p. 152.

48 Ibid., p. 201.

49 Tansman, The Aesthetics of Japanese Fascism, p. 15.

50 Ibid., pp. 17–18. 51 Ibid., p. 3. 52 Ibid., p. 9. 53 Ibid., p. 3. 54 Ibid. 55 Ibid. 56 Ibid., pp. 16–17. 57 Ibid., p. 49. 58 Ibid., p. 40. 59 Ibid., p. 39. 60 Ibid., p. 40. 61 Ibid., p. 32. 62 Ibid., p. 238. 63 Ibid., p. 2. 64 Ibid., p. 18. 65 Ibid. For a fascinating account of how a ‘philosophy of musubi’ provided a justiﬁcation for Japanese imperialism see also Henshall,

A History of Japan, pp. 113–14.

66 Ibid. 67 Ibid., p. 53. 68 Ibid., p. 19. 69 Ibid.

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70 Tanahashi, ed., Moon in a Dewdrop: Writings of Zen Master Dogen,

p. 32.
71 Heraclitus: fragment 49a. 72 Weller, Modernism and Nihilism, p. 33. The quotes are from
Nietzsche.

Notes 287

73 Kawakita, Modern Currents in Japanese Art, p. 11. 74 Nygren, Time Frames: Japanese Cinema and the Unfolding of History,

p. 34.
75 Ibid., p. 34. 76 Ibid., p. 34. 77 Quoted in Lippit, ‘A Modernist Nostalgia: The Colonial Land-

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scape of Enlightenment Tokyo in Akutagawa Ryonosuke and

Edogawa Rampo’, in Roy Starrs, ed., Rethinking Japanese Modernism

(forthcoming 2011).
78 Hayter, ‘Genealogies of Perception’ (unpublished conference paper).

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79 Dodd, ‘Modernism and its Endings: Kajii Motojiro as Transi-

tional Writer’, in Roy Starrs, ed., Rethinking Japanese Modernism

(forthcoming 2011).
80 On Kawabata’s modernist ‘haiku novels’ see my Soundings in

Time: The Fictive Art of Kawabata Y a sunari.

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81 On zen-ei shodo see Starrs, ‘Ink Traces of the Dancing Calligraphers: Zen-ei Sho in Japan Today’.
82 Morton, ‘Modernism in Prewar Japanese Poetry’, in Roy Starrs,

ed., Rethinking Japanese Modernism (forthcoming 2011).

83 Johnson, ‘A Modernist Traditionalist: Miyagi Michio, Transculturalism, and the Making of a Music Tradition’, in Roy Starrs,

ed., Rethinking Japanese Modernism (forthcoming 2011).

84 Szostak, ‘Fair is Foul, and Foul is Fair’: Kyoto Nihonga, Anti-
Bijin Portraiture and the Psychology of the Grotesque’, in Roy

Starrs, ed., Rethinking Japanese Modernism (forthcoming 2011).

85 Ibid. 86 See Starrs, ‘Ink Traces of the Dancing Calligraphers: Zen-ei Sho in Japan Today’.
87 Claremont, ‘Evolutionary Aspects of Modernism in Japanese

Drama’, in Roy Starrs, ed., Rethinking Japanese Modernism (forth-

coming 2011).
88 Peter Eckersall, ‘Towards Staging Liquid Modernity: Hirata Oriza’s
“Tokyo Notes”, the Everyday and the New Modern’, paper delivered at the Otago Conference on Japanese Modernism, August 2009; and Vera Mackie, ‘Instructing, Constructing, Deconstructing: The Embodied and Disembodied Performances of Yoko Ono’, in Roy

Starrs (ed.), Rethinking Japanese Modernism, Leiden: Brill, 2011.