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Entanglements of Plant Life and Human Subjectivity in Modern Japan

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Entanglements of Plant Life and Human Subjectivity in Modern Japan Becoming Botanical: Entanglements of Plant Life and Human Subjectivity in Modern Japan By Jon L Pitt A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Japanese Language in the Graduate Division of the University of California, Berkeley Committee in charge: Professor Alan Tansman, Chair Professor Daniel O’Neill Professor Kristen Whissel Fall 2019 Abstract Becoming Botanical: Entanglements of Plant Life and Human Subjectivity in Modern Japan by Jon L. Pitt Doctor of Philosophy in Japanese Language University of California, Berkeley Professor Alan Tansman, Chair This dissertation argues that plant life offered a number of modern Japanese writers and filmmakers a model through which to rethink human subjectivity in response to turbulent historical events. Informed by the adaptability and resilience of vegetal life (so-called phenotypic plasticity, in which plants change in response to changes in their environments), the authors and directors I discuss posit a form of destructive plasticity available to humans in the face of crises brought on by war, colonial violence, natural disaster, and economic depression. Across genres and media—in poetry, novels, scientific writing, and films—subjectivity is reconfigured beyond the confines of the human body, beyond conventional sense perception, and beyond human temporality. Drawing from Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus, I call the reconfiguration of subjectivity in cultural texts inspired by plant life “becoming botanical.” My first chapter examines two writers: poet and novelist Osaki Midori and biologist Imanishi Kinji. For both, evolutionary thinking informed by new research in botanical science provided a framework to think through and reconfigure human subjectivity amidst the violence of the early Shōwa period, as well as providing a means to envision a notion of family through shared resemblance that included plants. From their utopian figurations of becoming botanical I turn to the dystopian critique of colonial modernity written into Abe Kōbō’s 1949 novella Denodorokakariya (Dendrocacalia). A tale of metamorphosis in which a human turns into a plant native only to the Bonin Islands, Dendorokakariya uses new theories of botanical life that exposed the previously hidden internal life of plants (as characterized by the novella’s diegetic inclusion of Russian botanist Kliment Timiryazev’s scientific treatise The Life of the Plant) to expose a history of colonial violence seemingly fading from memory in the postwar moment. Chapter three examines how three writers (postwar novelist and critic Haniya Yutaka, parascientist Hashimoto Ken, and novelist and rapper Itō Seikō) situate human subjectivity on a spectrum between life and death at the intersection of science and spirituality, and posit a continuation of identity after death within the vegetal world of the forest. This chapter reads trees in the works of these three writers as media that open a channel between the living and the dead in order to work through contemporaneous trauma. Chapter four takes up the eco-films of Yanagimachi Mitsuo and Kawase Naomi, and examines how human subjectivity becomes a part of a greater forest assemblage. In this chapter I argue that Yanagimachi’s Himatsuri (Fire 1 Festival) and Kawase’s Vision look to stage a renewal of Japan’s rural forestry communities through the logic of disturbance ecology. In both films, a ritual engagement with fire is introduced into the forest ecosystem in order to open space for a future to take hold. 2 Table of Contents Acknowledgments ii Introduction: Men are Grass iii Chapter 1: Fellow Travelers in Familial Deep Time: 1 Osaki Midori, Imanishi Kinji, and Evolutionary Resemblance Chapter 2: Plant Metamorphosis and Colonial Memory: 31 The Entangled Histories of Abe Kōbō, The Bonin Islands, and Botanical Science Chapter 3: Plant Media and the Search for Dead Spirits: 58 Haniya Yutaka, Hashimoto Ken, and Itō Seikō Chapter 4: Disturbance Ecology: 88 Visions of Fire and Regeneration in the Eco-Films of Yanagimachi Mitsuo and Kawase Naomi Bibliography 123 i Acknowledgements I would like to thank my dissertation committee for their guidance and help throughout the research and writing process. Thank you to Alan Tansman for his careful and continued attention to my work, and for helping me become a better writer. Thank you to Daniel O’Neill for his constant support and for introducing me to many of the theoretical works that have informed this dissertation. Thank you to Kristen Whissel for helping me work through the varied intersections of media and the environment. I offer a special thank you as well to Professor Toba Kōji of Waseda University for his help during my time in Tōkyō, and in particular for his expertise in all things Abe Kōbō. I would also like to thank several other professors and lecturers at UC Berkeley who have helped me along the way: Jinsoo An, Dana Buntrock, H. Mack Horton, John Wallace, and Jonathon Zwicker. I would like to extend my sincere gratitude to the staff of the East Asian Languages and Cultures, in particular Jan Johnson and Grant Tompkins. Thank you as well to my colleagues at Berkeley for their help, support, and friendship: Pedro Bassoe, Xiangjun Feng, Daryl Maude, Matt Mewhinney, Ezra Toback, Chelsea Ward, Matt Wild, and Linda Zhang. Thank you also to Eric Siercks for his help with and feedback on Chapter 2. I received generous support from The Japan Foundation and The Center for Japanese Studies at UC Berkeley to research and write this dissertation. Thank you in particular to Ayumi Takita at the Japan Foundation and to Kumi Hadler from the Center for Japanese Studies at UC Berkeley. Thank you to the staffs of the C. V. Starr East Asian Library at UC Berkeley, the Waseda University Library, the National Diet Library of Japan, and the National Film Archive of Japan. A special thanks is due to several people who helped me early on at UC Santa Cruz. Thank you to Sakae Fujita for introducing me to the study of the Japanese language, and for her continued support. Thank you also to Earl Jackson Jr., who likewise introduced me to the study of Japanese literature and film. Thank you to Pat Noonan for over a decade of friendship and guidance. I thank my mother Jacqueline for her love and support. I thank my late father Lawrence for instilling in me a love for reading and, in his words, teaching me “the gift of gab.” This dissertation is dedicated to his memory. Thank you to Keryn for being a partner, a sounding board, a voice of reason, and my biggest supporter. In the spirit of this project, I would also like to offer thanks to several nonhumans who helped me along the way. First, thank you to the trees along Arlington Ave in Berkeley that dropped massive branches on my car on two separate occasions, forcing me to take seriously the power and animacy of the botanical world. Thank you to the forests of the Jemez Mountains in northern New Mexico, who have been teaching me about fire and regeneration for nearly twenty years. Thank you to the cacti, moss, and polka dot plant that sat at my writing desk in my apartment at Waseda University in Tōkyō and oversaw much of the writing of this dissertation. Thank you to the kinmokusei tree for its unforgettable fragrance and for helping me better experience the writing of Osaki Midori. Thank you both to the primeval forests of Sapporo and to the endemic species of Ogasawara, in particular the maruhachi for showing me how (in the words of Anna Tsing) “livable ecologies come back.” ii Introduction: Men are Grass This dissertation argues that plant life offered a number of modern Japanese writers and filmmakers a model through which to rethink human subjectivity in response to turbulent historical events. Informed by the adaptability and resilience of vegetal life (so-called phenotypic plasticity, in which plants change in response to changes in their environments), the authors and directors I discuss posit a form of plasticity available to humans in the face of crises brought on by war, colonial violence, natural disaster, and economic depression. Across genres and media— in poetry, novels, scientific writing, and films—subjectivity is reconfigured beyond the confines of the human body, beyond conventional sense perception, and beyond human temporality. Drawing from Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus, I call the reconfiguration of subjectivity in cultural texts inspired by plant life “becoming botanical.” A “becoming” is an ongoing process in which two or more entities enter into an alliance that creates something wholly new that is “neither one nor two, nor the relation of the two; it is the inbetween…”1 The writers and filmmakers I take up proffer this in-between space of human and plant life as holding the possibility for overcoming the crisis unfolding—dramatically, slowly, or even imperceptibly—around them. These writers and filmmakers see “becoming botanical” as a means to adapt to ongoing crises and to construct notions of futurity that reach beyond the immediate violence of the present. This adaptation to crisis can be understood as a form of plasticity, which Catherine Malabou characterizes as “as a sort of natural sculpting that forms our identity, an identity modeled by experience and that makes us subjects of a history...”2 Plasticity makes fundamental changes in identity and/or subjectivity possible. It allows us to understand the human as an environmental subject, an “open, living system” that slowly but persistently adapts to (often catastrophic) change.3 I map the ways in which writers and filmmakers in Japan turned to the botanical world in response to a backdrop of violence and explored both the destructive and generative qualities inherent in the plasticity of human subjectivity.
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