ASCJ 2017 Abstracts 1 SATURDAY MORNING
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
ASCJ 2017 Abstracts SATURDAY MORNING SESSIONS: 10:00 A.M. - 12:00 P.M. Session 1: Room 5121 Mediated Frontiers of Japanese Culture and Society: Borders Drawn, Translated, or Transported Organizer and Chair: Andre Haag, University of Hawai‘i at Manoa To what extent were the political, social, and cultural identities of a putatively insular “Japan” forged through encounters with frontiers real and imagined? A growing body of scholarship has explored how Japanese discourses surrounding culture and nation were formed and deformed through negotiation with liminal spaces and marginalized peoples. This panel begins from a similar premise in order to examine mediated experiences of cross-cultural contact in frontier-scapes ranging from colonial Korea, to tropical imaginaries of the South Seas, to the heart of the metropolis itself. We show that the construction of Japan’s borderlands relied on an array of cultural technologies including translation, adaptation, ethnography, and caricature. Simultaneously, the processes that enabled the center’s internalization of its periphery produced disparate effects and affects within culture: ecstasy, empathy, adventure, romance, conflict, and fear. Andre Haag traces Takahama Kyoshi’s use of haiku-derived prose “sketching” to make space for newly- annexed Korea within metropolitan culture, even as it distorted the limits separating colonizer and colonized. Mark Ombrello contextualizes colonial projects in the South Seas and the creation of an imaginary discursive space capable of affirming modern identities in the 1930’s children’s comic, Bōken Dankichi. William Hedberg explores representations of Japan in Chinese fiction—in particular Japan’s transformation from epistemological frontier into a locus of political authority through the act of translation. Kate McDonald analyzes how literary and social policy depictions of rickshaw pullers served as a nexus of critiques for theories of social change and nationhood in Meiji Japan. 1 ASCJ 2017 Abstracts 1) Andre Haag, University of Hawai‘i at Manoa Blurred Lines: Sketching the Frontier of Imperial Subjectivity in Takahama Kyoshi’s Chōsen (1911) Imperial Japan’s annexation of Korea in August 1910 triggered a mass-mediated spectacle in the metropolitan press back home, where triumphalist narratives and visual images commemorated a union that promised--or perhaps threatened--to radically redefine the empire’s boundaries and the scope of who was considered Japanese. Largely absent amidst this celebratory boom, however, were expressions of overt criticism of expansion on ideological or ethical grounds. Curiously, writer and poet Takahama Kyoshi’s 1911 narrative Chōsen, the first Japanese novel to survey the cultural topography of newly- colonized Korea, has been characterized by critics as either a metropolitan intellectual’s conscientious objection to his nation’s imperialistic enterprise or, alternatively, a literary accomplice to colonial policy on the peninsula. Part of the confusion may originate in the pose of calculated ambivalence assumed by the novel’s traveling narrator, which throws into uneasy suspension both nationalist pride and humanistic guilt. Yet, this paper seeks to complicate the narrow interpretative model that pits cultural complicity against principled anticolonial opposition, by examining how Kyoshi’s novel works to create a space for colonized Korea within the domain of metropolitan Japanese cultural production. I emphasize how the haiku poet’s “sketching” (through shaseibun) of this unsettled colonial milieu, marked by depictions of cross-ethnic close encounters and fleeting glimpses of subversive conspiracies, articulates not direct critique but instead anxious apprehension toward the menace that shifting imperial frontiers pose to the integrity of national subjectivity. 2) Mark Ombrello, Kansai University Welcome to Fantasy Island: Othering the South Seas in Shimada Keizō’s Serialized Comic, Bōken Dankichi From 1933 to 1939, the highpoint of colonial activity in Japan’s central Pacific territories (Nan’yō shotō), Shimada Keizō entertained children of the metropole with his serialized comic, Bōken Dankichi (Adventure Dankichi). The story centered on a boy protagonist, Dankichi, and his trusted mouse sidekick, Kariko, who drifted to a fantastic 2 ASCJ 2017 Abstracts South Seas island. Upon landing, the heroes encountered fierce but naive natives and easily persuaded the locals to quickly crown the outsider their new monarch. The island was also home to an assortment of exotic flora and wild fauna as geographically and temporally far removed from Oceania and the twentieth century as lions and dinosaurs. Throughout its six-year run, the illustrations and accompanying text describing Dankichi’s adventures echoed overtly racist attitudes and mirrored constructed hierarchies affirming Japanese superiority in the colonial periphery. This paper will explore the representation of islanders and the positioning of protagonists detailed in the comic, paying particular attention to paradigms and iconography reflective of a greater discursive tradition that transformed the South Seas into a malleable conceptual playground where visions of modern Japanese identity formation could find expression and take shape. This paper will also discuss the legacy of Bōken Dankichi by tracking the perpetuation of Orientalist tropes lodged in cultural production on the South Seas since the end of World War Two. 3) William Hedberg, Arizona State University Civilization and Its Discontents: Glimpses of Japan in Meiji-Period Translations of Late Imperial Chinese Fiction The centrality of The Water Margin (Shuihu zhuan) in the Chinese canon must be counted among the great ironies of late imperial Chinese literary culture. A work explicitly concerned with popular insurrection, The Water Margin was nonetheless positioned at the center of larger discussions of Confucian ethics and political ideology. These debates survived the novel’s exportation to Japan, where beginning in the Meiji period, the work was presented as a potential heuristic for understanding the contemporary China newly open for firsthand experience, exploration, and later, colonization. This presentation explores the Japanese translation and reception of Chen Chen’s Sequel to ‘The Water Margin’: an early Qing-period work whose action unfolds on an international stage comprising Siam, the Ryukyus, and most notably, Japan. Although most critical interest has been directed at Siam’s significance as a possible allegory for Zheng Chenggong’s regime on Taiwan, less attention has been paid to the presence of Japan: a nation that, in the novel, mounts a punitive attack against the Chinese colonizers of Siam that results in a massive (and ludic) defeat of the Japanese forces. My presentation examines the ways in 3 ASCJ 2017 Abstracts which the novel’s author employs China, Siam, and Japan to explore lines of demarcation between both center and periphery, as well as civilized and barbaric behavior. These issues were complicated further upon the novel’s translation into Japanese during the 1880s and 1890s: translations that attempted to use the novel as a way of representing and explaining colonial realpolitik during Meiji Japan’s expansion abroad. 4) Kate McDonald, University of California, Santa Barbara Moving Lines: Rickshaw Pullers and the Boundaries of the Social in Matsubara Iwagorō’s Saiankoku no Tōkyō and Yokoyama Gennosuke’s Nihon no kasō shakai This paper examines how the figure of the simple transport worker became the site of the contested boundaries of Japanese society in the Meiji era. Focusing on the representation of rickshaw pullers in Matsubara Iwagorō’s Saiankoku no Tōkyō (1893) and Yokoyama Gennosuke’s Nihon no kasō shakai (1898), the paper argues that these works’ use of rickshaw pullers to expose the dark side of Japanese modernity illuminates a significant debate over how to understand social change. Matsubara and Yokoyama wrote in dialogue with Booth’s In Darkest England and Harkness’s In Darkest London to formulate a critique of industrial society from the perspective of the simple transport worker. Casting an equally global net, social policy experts such as Kanai Noboru drew from the works of German and American social economists to argue that the social problem could be solved by improving the circulation and distribution of jobs and goods. For social policy experts, transport was a social system. In contrast, for Matsubara and Yokoyama, transport was a necessary and precarious livelihood for Japan’s growing underclass. The different concepts of transportation led the two groups to formulate radically different proposals for resolving the threat that endemic poverty represented to the future of the Japanese nation. For social policy experts, the simple transport worker constituted a border in time—they represented the edge of Japan’s rapidly receding past. For Matsubara and Yokoyama, however, the simple transport worker exposed the emerging boundary between labor and capital in modern Japanese society. Discussant: Greg Dvorak, Hitotsubashi University 4 ASCJ 2017 Abstracts Session 2: Room 5124 The Causes of the Misunderstanding and Conflict between Japan and the US Organizer: Yoshiaki Katada, Meijo University Chair: Akira Iikura, Josai International University Our panel will examine why Japan entered the Pacific War, which culminated in the devastation of its entire society. In order to do so, we will explore the US-Japanese relations in trade, cultural, and diplomatic terms