DOCSLIB.ORG

Marilyn in Tokyo University, Komaba Campus

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

Download full-text PDF Read full-text
Marilyn in Tokyo University, Komaba Campus Morimura Yasumasa. Self-Portrait No. 72 (Marilyn in Tokyo University, Komaba Campus) . 1995. © Morimura Yasumasa. Courtesy of the Yoshiko Isshiki Office, Tokyo. Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/OCTO_a_00205 by guest on 02 October 2021 Modernity and Its Doubles: Uncanny Spaces of Postwar Japan* IGNACIO ADRIASOLA Screening the Japanese Gothic Actress M stands on a platform placed on the desks in a large auditorium, surrounded by students who stare despondently at her. She turns, seeking the camera over her shoulder; she pushes her white dress down as a fan makes it swell and rise above her knees. Dwarfed by the auditorium’s heavy pointed arches, Actress M’s pale, overexposed figure flickers like a photographic ghost. She has become Marilyn Monroe. While usually presented as a single photograph, Morimura Yasumasa’s Self- Portrait No. 72 (1995) is in fact the record of a performance. The rarely seen video recording reveals a heavy and oppressive gesture lurking beneath the comical veneer of camp. Actress M moves slowly between the desks, clenching her fists and emitting sharp, horrific screams that continue throughout the photo shoot. She appears possessed by something invisible to those around her. Morimura, who appears as Actress M, used the shoot as an opportunity to conjure the past at Tokyo University’s Komaba Campus. Twenty-six years earlier, in the same Auditorium 900, author, perennial Nobel Prize contender, and future neofascist terrorist Mishima Yukio carried out his own performance—a provoca - tive debate with the radicalized students of the left-wing group Zenkyôtô. In a subsequent essay, Morimura recalled the uncanny sensation that overtook him during his performance as Actress M. “I am not someone who has researched [the Mishima and Zenkyôtô debate] much. However, something profound struck me as I was invaded by the feeling of having arrived belatedly somewhere.” 1 In his essay, Morimura weaves an intricate web of allusions to the gothic imagi - nary, self-consciously evoking a foreboding sense of recurrence that frames the * I have benefited from numerous conversations as I developed the ideas in this essay. In par - ticular, I would like to acknowledge Gennifer Weisenfeld, Kristine Stiles, Annabel Wharton, Beatriz Balanta, Madhumita Lahiri, and Chase M. Foster. Ikeda Shinobu, Kumakura Takaaki, and Chiba Kei provided thoughtful comments to an early version of this project. Last but not least, I thank Mignon Nixon for her generous editorial comments. Throughout this essay I observe the traditional naming convention for Japanese names of family name first. All translations are mine, unless noted. 1. Morimura Yasumasa, “Onna? Nihon? Bi? Noto” [Woman? Japan? Beauty? Notes], in Onna? Nihon? Bi?—Aratana jendâ hihyô ni mukete [Woman? Japan? Beauty? Towards a new gender critique](Tokyo: Keiô Gijuku Daigaku Shuppankai, 1996), p. 260. OCTOBER 151, Winter 2015, pp. 108 –127. © 2015 October Magazine, Ltd. and Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/OCTO_a_00205 by guest on 02 October 2021 110 OCTOBER existence of a secret. Morimura, however, has already disclosed his secret: He inter - vened in a site haunted by the memory of Mishima and his debate with the Zenkyôtô, only to claim that he has not “researched this much.” He enacts here what Eve Sedgwick once described as the central figure of the gothic novel: the “live burial” of a secret, always too great and terrible to be mentioned, and already nonetheless com - mon knowledge. 2 In Sedgwick’s view, the gothic story hinges on its building on a secret’s deferral to elicit in the reader a sense of unease and foreboding—in its bury - ing of the secret within the text and evocation of desolate landscapes and ruinous structures whose darkness mirrors the terrible past that is being deferred. In this sense, the literary gothic’s concern with affect and temporality prefigured Sigmund Freud’s notion of the repressed; indeed, the gothic directly informed Freud’s con - cern with the immanence of the past in the present, and its uncanny effects. 3 The gothic elements present in Self-Portrait No. 72 illuminate certain neglected aspects of Morimura’s appropriative practice, in particular the political implications of his incessant return to notions of past and history, which had been evident already in his elaborate art-historical tableaux of the 1980s. 4 Indeed, appropriation is firmly rooted in the history of Japan’s postwar avant-garde, in particular the so-called Anti- Art generation and its problematization of discourses of originality and authenticity. 5 As elsewhere, imitation and appropriation were the means by which they challenged modernism, for example in Shinohara Ushio’s “imitation art” and its implicit under - mining of the teleological and ultimately racist hierarchies operative in portrayals of modern Japanese art as merely derivative of Euro-American modernism. Butoh dance co-founder Hijikata Tatsumi similarly reclaimed imitation as a strategy. The most iconic of his performances in the 1960s made productive use of cross-dressing, which he saw as a subversive appropriation of the entrapments of bourgeois society that he sought to harness in a critique of sexual and economic reproduction. 6 There is, in all this copying, all these imitations, a particular affective quality, 2. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, The Coherence of Gothic Conventions (New York: Arno Press, 1980). 3. In his essay on the uncanny, Freud acknowledged that gothic literature had anticipated the fun - damental psychoanalytic notion of the repressed. Sigmund Freud, “The Uncanny,” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud , ed. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1953–1974), vol. 17. 4. Morimura’s work first came to public attention in the mid-’80s, when he began an increasingly elab - orate series of photographic tableaux that placed him as the protagonist in canonical European paintings. These included a series of self-portraits as Vincent van Gogh ( Portrait—Van Gogh , 1985), an ambitious reproduction of an objet by Marcel Duchamp ( Doublenage B , 1986), and, most famously, a japonisant version of Édouard Manet’s Olympia (Portrait—Futago , 1988). The Japanese critic Sawaragi Noi first theorized these works in relation to Jean Baudrillard’s notion of the simulacra, grouping Morimura in what he called “sim - ulationism” with other artists of his generation. Morimura’s early work is surveyed in Morimura Yasumasa “kûsô bijutsukan” kaiga ni natta watakushi [Morimura Yasumasa: Self-portrait as art history] (Tokyo: Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo and Asahi Shimbunsha, 1998 ). 5. A thorough discussion of the problem of originality and imitation in postwar Japanese art can be found in Reiko Tomii, “‘International Contemporaneity’ in the 1960s: Discoursing on Art in Japan and Beyond,” Japan Review 21 (2009), pp. 123–47. 6. Hijikata rehearses this problematic conflation of cross-dressing and male homosexuality and its deployment as socioeconomic critique in his essay “ Keimusho he ” (1968). An English translation has been published as Tatsumi Hijikata, “To Prison,” trans. Nanako Kurihara, TDR/The Drama Review (Spring 2000), pp. 44–45. On Hijikata’s early happenings and the development of butoh , see dance his - torian Kuniyoshi Kazuko, “Hijikata Tatsumi to ankoku butô—midasareta nikutai” [Hijikata Tatsumi Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/OCTO_a_00205 by guest on 02 October 2021 Modernity and Its Doubles 111 one that I would describe as gothic. A sense of malaise seems to adhere to these appropriative projects, and it becomes acutely evident in Morimura’s Actress series, which enacts what we might call the uncanniness of the double. In this series, Morimura invites us to reconsider the defamiliarizing effects of the copy— and how, in eliciting a sense of discontent that transports the viewer to an idea of a past not yet overcome, it casts doubt on the implications of modernism’s teleo - logical narrative of rupture, specifically that in postwar Japan. 7 Freud considered the uncanny to be an aesthetic phenomenon and situated it squarely in the realm of affects—diffuse, indeterminate, and inarticulate sensations, surging from the unconscious, disrupting everyday life. In his discussion of E. T. A. Hoffman’s gothic stories, Freud characterized the uncanny as an instance where an unnameable and unspecified “something” elicits in the subject an intense sensation of dread. 8 The nature of this “something” is difficult for the subject to establish, but its effects are immediately recognizable. Freud recognized in Hoffman’s pre-psycho - analytic articulation of the uncanny the sense of recurrence (Wiederholung ) that was critical to his own theories of the unconscious, and he characterized this sensation as symptomatic of a splitting and alienation of the ego. 9 Ultimately, the analytic signifi - cance of the uncanny resided in how the feelings of dread evoked in the subject signal to a past that is altogether present, because “this uncanny is in reality nothing new or alien, but something which is familiar and old-established in the mind and which has become alienated from it only through the process of repression.” 10 and the dance of utter darkness: recovered flesh], in Hijikata Tatsumi no butô—nikutai no shûrurearizumu, shintai no ontorojî , ed. Kawasaki-shi Okamoto Tarô Bijutsukan and Keiô Gijuku Daigaku Âto Sentâ (Kawasaki: Okamoto Tarô Bijutsukan, 2003). See also Bruce Baird, Hijikata Tatsumi and Butoh: Dancing in a Pool of Gray Grits (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2011). 7. “[T]he trope of modernity may in that sense be considered as self-referential, if not performa - tive, since its appearance signals the emergence of a new kind of figure, a decisive break with previous forms of figurality, and is to that extent a sign of its own existence, a signifier that indicates itself, and whose form is its very content.” Fredric Jameson, A Singular Modernity: Essay on the Ontology of the Present (London: Verso Books, 2002), p.
Load more

Recommended publications
  • Mother of the Nation: Femininity, Modernity, and Class in the Image of Empress Teimei
    Mother of the Nation: Femininity, Modernity, and Class in the Image of Empress Teimei By ©2016 Alison Miller Submitted to the graduate degree program in the History of Art and the Graduate Faculty of the University of Kansas in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. ________________________________ Chairperson Dr. Maki Kaneko ________________________________ Dr. Sherry Fowler ________________________________ Dr. David Cateforis ________________________________ Dr. John Pultz ________________________________ Dr. Akiko Takeyama Date Defended: April 15, 2016 The Dissertation Committee for Alison Miller certifies that this is the approved version of the following dissertation: Mother of the Nation: Femininity, Modernity, and Class in the Image of Empress Teimei ________________________________ Chairperson Dr. Maki Kaneko Date approved: April 15, 2016 ii Abstract This dissertation examines the political significance of the image of the Japanese Empress Teimei (1884-1951) with a focus on issues of gender and class. During the first three decades of the twentieth century, Japanese society underwent significant changes in a short amount of time. After the intense modernizations of the late nineteenth century, the start of the twentieth century witnessed an increase in overseas militarism, turbulent domestic politics, an evolving middle class, and the expansion of roles for women to play outside the home. As such, the early decades of the twentieth century in Japan were a crucial period for the formation of modern ideas about femininity and womanhood. Before, during, and after the rule of her husband Emperor Taishō (1879-1926; r. 1912-1926), Empress Teimei held a highly public role, and was frequently seen in a variety of visual media.
    [Show full text]
  • A Brief Summary of Japanese-Ainu Relations and the Depiction of The
    The road from Ainu barbarian to Japanese primitive: A brief summary of Japanese-ainu relations in a historical perspective Noémi GODEFROY Centre d’Etudes Japonaises (CEJ) “Populations Japonaises” Research Group Proceedings from the 3rd Consortium for Asian and African Studies (CAAS) “Making a difference: representing/constructing the other in Asian/African Media, Cinema and languages”, 16-18 February 2012, published by OFIAS at the Tokyo University of Foreign Studies, p.201-212 Edward Saïd, in his ground-breaking work Orientalism, underlines that to represent the “Other” is to manipulate him. This has been an instrument of submission towards Asia during the age of European expansion, but the use of such a process is not confined to European domination. For centuries, the relationship between Japan and its northern neighbors, the Ainu, is based on economical domination and dependency. In this regard, the Ainu’s foreignness, impurity and “barbaric appearance” - their qualities as inferior “Others” - are emphasized in descriptive texts or by the regular staging of such diplomatic practices as “barbarian audiences”, thus highlighting the Japanese cultural and territorial superiority. But from 1868, the construction of the Meiji nation-state requires the assimilation and acculturation of the Ainu people. As Japan undergoes what Fukuzawa Yukichi refers to as the “opening to civilization” (文明開化 bunmei kaika) by learning from the West, it also plays the role of the civilizer towards the Ainu. The historical case study of the relationship between Japanese and Ainu from up to Meiji highlights the evolution of Japan’s own self-image and identity, from an emerging state, subduing barbarians, to newly unified state - whose ultramarine relations are inspired by a Chinese-inspired ethnocentrism and rejection of outside influence- during the Edo period, and finally to an aspiring nation-state, seeking to assert itself while avoiding colonization at Meiji.
    [Show full text]
  • Kamikaze Diaries: Reflections of Japanese Student the Broader Question the Book Raises Is to What Ex- Soldiers
    774 American Anthropologist • Vol. 109, No. 4 • December 2007 Although Miller is brave to put her body in the hands The seven soldiers whose writings are translated in the of quack practitioners, at times I felt that I wanted to hear book were student soldiers, three of whom were in the “Spe- more how “believers” in the beauty work experienced the cial Attack Forces” (tokubetsu kougeki tai). Most attended products and services. Also, for some of her sources, she re- Japan’s highest-ranking public or private universities and lies on surveys conducted in popular magazines. A discus- came from families of considerable learning and privilege. sion of their reliability—or, perhaps, of their complicity— (Of the approximately 4,000 young men recruited into the in the pushing of trends or conceptualizations of the body special forces, 1,000 were university students, graduated would have been quite useful to better understand Miller’s early so they could be drafted.) data and analysis. Finally, it would have been interesting The writings offer compelling reading, both for stu- had there been a discussion of the counter-globalization dents who may harbor stereotypical images of sword- of Japanese beauty ideas and products. Japanese cos- wielding samurai and resolute pilots, and for those metic companies and fashion designers, forms of “soft interested in prewar intellectual history. The students’ en- power,” are increasingly powerful players on the world gagement with thinkers from Immanuel Kant to Natsume market. Suseki opens a window into not only the ideas available to In conclusion, Beauty Up is well-written, accessible, and intellectual citizens in the years surrounding Japan’s mili- an excellent contribution to the recent discussions on glob- tary ambition but also into how these ideas were embraced.
    [Show full text]
  • The Legalization of Hinomaru and Kimigayo As Japan's National Flag
    The legalization of Hinomaru and Kimigayo as Japan's national flag and anthem and its connections to the political campaign of "healthy nationalism and internationalism" Marit Bruaset Institutt for østeuropeiske og orientalske studier, Universitetet i Oslo Vår 2003 Introduction The main focus of this thesis is the legalization of Hinomaru and Kimigayo as the national flag and anthem of Japan in 1999 and its connections to what seems to be an atypical Japanese form of postwar nationalism. In the 1980s a campaign headed by among others Prime Minister Nakasone was promoted to increase the pride of the Japanese in their nation and to achieve a “transformation of national consciousness”.1 Its supporters tended to use the term “healthy nationalism and internationalism”. When discussing the legalization of Hinomaru and Kimigayo as the national flag and anthem of Japan, it is necessary to look into the nationalism that became evident in the 1980s and see to what extent the legalization is connected with it. Furthermore we must discuss whether the legalization would have been possible without the emergence of so- called “healthy nationalism and internationalism”. Thus it is first necessary to discuss and try to clarify the confusing terms of “healthy nationalism and patriotism”. Secondly, we must look into why and how the so-called “healthy nationalism and internationalism” occurred and address the question of why its occurrence was controversial. The field of education seems to be the area of Japanese society where the controversy regarding its occurrence was strongest. The Ministry of Education, Monbushō, and the Japan Teachers' Union, Nihon Kyōshokuin Kumiai (hereafter Nikkyōso), were the main opponents struggling over the issue of Hinomaru, and especially Kimigayo, due to its lyrics praising the emperor.
    [Show full text]
  • Sample Chapter
    Constructing Empire The Japanese in Changchun, 1905–45 Bill Sewell Sample Material © UBC Press 2019 Contents List of Illustrations / vii Preface / ix List of Abbreviations / xv Introduction / 9 1 City Planning / 37 2 Imperialist and Imperial Facades / 64 3 Economic Development/ 107 4 Colonial Society / 131 Conclusion / 174 Notes / 198 Bibliography / 257 Index / 283 Sample Material © UBC Press 2019 Introduction The city of Changchun, capital of the landlocked northeastern province of Jilin, might seem an odd place in which to explore Japan’s pre-war empire. Just over fifteen hundred kilometres from Tokyo, Changchun is not quite as far away as the Okinawan capital, Naha, but lies inland more than six hundred kilometres north of Dalian and Seoul and five hundred kilometres west of Vladivostok. Cooler and drier than Japan, its continental climate compounds its remoteness by making it, for Japanese, a different kind of place. Changchun, moreover, has rarely graced international headlines in recent years, given Jilin’s economic development’s lagging behind the coastal provinces, though the city did host the 2007 Asian Winter Games. In the twentieth century’s first half, however, Changchun figured prominently. The Russo-Japanese War resulted in its becoming the boundary between the Russian and Japanese spheres of influence in northeast China and a transfer point for travel between Europe and Asia. The terminus of the broad-gauge Russian railroad track required a physical transfer to different trains, and, before 1917, a twenty-three- minute difference between Harbin and Dalian time zones required travellers to reset their watches.1 Following Japan’s seizure of Manchuria, Changchun, renamed Xinjing, became the capital of the puppet state of Manchukuo, rec- ognized by the Axis powers and a partner in Japan’s Greater East Asia Co- Prosperity Sphere.
    [Show full text]
  • Myths of Hakkō Ichiu: Nationalism, Liminality, and Gender
    Myths of Hakko Ichiu: Nationalism, Liminality, and Gender in Official Ceremonies of Modern Japan Item Type text; Electronic Dissertation Authors Teshima, Taeko Publisher The University of Arizona. Rights Copyright © is held by the author. Digital access to this material is made possible by the University Libraries, University of Arizona. Further transmission, reproduction or presentation (such as public display or performance) of protected items is prohibited except with permission of the author. Download date 01/10/2021 21:55:25 Link to Item http://hdl.handle.net/10150/194943 MYTHS OF HAKKŌ ICHIU: NATIONALISM, LIMINALITY, AND GENDER IN OFFICIAL CEREMONIES OF MODERN JAPAN by Taeko Teshima ______________________ Copyright © Taeko Teshima 2006 A Dissertation Submitted to the Faculty of the GRADUATE PROGRAM IN COMPARATIVE CULTURAL AND LITERARY STUDIES In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements For a Degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY In the Graduate College THE UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA 2 0 0 6 2 THE UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA GRADUATE COLLEGE As members of the Dissertation Committee, we certify that we have read the dissertation prepared by Taeko Teshima entitled Myths of Hakkō Ichiu: Nationalism, Liminality, and Gender in Official Ceremonies of Modern Japan and recommend that it be accepted as fulfilling the dissertation requirement for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy _________________________________________________Date: 6/06/06 Barbara A. Babcock _________________________________________________Date: 6/06/06 Philip Gabriel _________________________________________________Date: 6/06/06 Susan Hardy Aiken Final approval and acceptance of this dissertation is contingent upon the candidate’s submission of the final copies of the dissertation to the Graduate College. I hereby certify that I have read this dissertation prepared under my direction and recommend that it be accepted as fulfilling the dissertation requirement.
    [Show full text]
  • MARTIAL MOTHEROOD in MODERN JAPAN, 1905-1955 by HILLARY
    MARTIAL MOTHEROOD IN MODERN JAPAN, 1905-1955 by HILLARY JOYCE MAXSON A THESIS Presented to the Department of History and the Graduate School of the University of Oregon in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts June 2012 THESIS APPROVAL PAGE Student: Hillary J. Maxson Title: Martial Motherhood in Modern Japan, 1905-1955 This thesis has been accepted and approved in partial fulfillment of requirements for the Master of Arts degree in the Department of History by: Dr. Jeffrey Hanes Chair Dr. Andrew Goble Member Dr. April Haynes Member and Kimberly Andrews Espy Vice President for Research & Innovation/Dean of the Graduate School Original approval signature are on file with the University of Oregon Graduate School. Degree awarded June 2012 ii 2012 Hillary Joyce Maxson iii THESIS ABSTRACT Hillary Joyce Maxson Master of Arts Department of History June 2012 Title: Martial Motherhood in Modern Japan, 1905-1955 Over the course of forty years, from 1905-1945, Japan’s Ministry of Education successfully formed, propagated, and invented the martial mother tradition. The stories compiled in the Ministry of Education’s textbooks taught young women not only to encourage their future sons’ patriotism, but also to enter public spaces themselves and show their own patriotism or matriotism . Throughout wartime Japan many mothers behaved as stoic, tear-less, child-sacrificing martial mothers in public; however, in private they shared very close and loving relationships with their adult children. While many mothers told their departing soldier sons to “come back dead” in public, the dynamics of their private relationship with their sons were quite different.
    [Show full text]
  • Japan and Its East Asian Neighbors: Japan’S Perception of China and Korea and the Making of Foreign Policy from the Seventeenth to the Nineteenth Century
    JAPAN AND ITS EAST ASIAN NEIGHBORS: JAPAN’S PERCEPTION OF CHINA AND KOREA AND THE MAKING OF FOREIGN POLICY FROM THE SEVENTEENTH TO THE NINETEENTH CENTURY DISSERTATION Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of The Ohio State University By Norihito Mizuno, M.A. ***** The Ohio State University 2004 Dissertation Committee: Approved by Professor James R. Bartholomew, Adviser Professor Philip C. Brown Adviser Professor Peter L. Hahn Graduate Program in History Copyright by Norihito Mizuno 2004 ABSTRACT This dissertation is a study of Japanese perceptions of its East Asian neighbors – China and Korea – and the making of foreign policy from the early seventeenth century to the late nineteenth century. Previous studies have overwhelmingly argued that after the Meiji Restoration of 1868, Japan started to modernize itself by learning from the West and changed its attitudes toward those neighboring countries. It supposedly abandoned its traditional friendship and reverence toward its neighbors and adopted aggressive and contemptuous attitudes. I have no intention of arguing here that the perspective of change and discontinuity in Japan’s attitudes toward its neighbors has no validity at all; Japan did adopt Western-style diplomacy toward its neighbors, paralleling the abandonment of traditional culture which had owed much to other East Asian civilizations since antiquity. In this dissertation, through examination primarily of official and private documents, I maintain that change and discontinuity cannot fully explain the Japanese policy toward its East Asian neighbors from the early seventeenth to the late nineteenth century. The Japanese perceptions and attitudes toward China and ii Korea had some aspects of continuity.
    [Show full text]
  • Rebellion and Defiance in the Japanese Army, 1860-1931
    Culture of Disobedience: Rebellion and Defiance in the Japanese Army, 1860-1931 The Harvard community has made this article openly available. Please share how this access benefits you. Your story matters Citation Orbach, Dan. 2015. Culture of Disobedience: Rebellion and Defiance in the Japanese Army, 1860-1931. Doctoral dissertation, Harvard University, Graduate School of Arts & Sciences. Citable link http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:17467476 Terms of Use This article was downloaded from Harvard University’s DASH repository, and is made available under the terms and conditions applicable to Other Posted Material, as set forth at http:// nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:dash.current.terms-of- use#LAA Culture of Disobedience: Rebellion and Defiance in the Japanese Army, 1860-1931 A dissertation presented by Dan Orbach to The History Department, Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the subject of History Harvard University Cambridge, Massachusetts May 15th, 2015 © 2015 Dan Orbach All rights reserved Dissertation Advisor: Professor Andrew D. Gordon Dan Orbach Culture of Disobedience: Rebellion and Defiance in the Japanese Army, 1860-1931 Abstract Imperial Japanese soldiers were notorious for following their superiors to certain death. Their enemies in the Pacific War perceived their obedience as blind, and derided them as “cattle”. Yet the Japanese Army was arguably one of the most disobedient armies in the world. Officers repeatedly staged coups d’états, violent insurrections and political assassinations, while their associates defied orders given by both the government and high command, launched independent military operations against other countries, and in two notorious cases conspired to assassinate foreign leaders.
    [Show full text]
  • The Battlefield Experience of Japanese Soldiers in the Asia- Pacific War
    Volume 18 | Issue 19 | Number 2 | Article ID 5488 | Oct 01, 2020 The Asia-Pacific Journal | Japan Focus The Battlefield Experience of Japanese Soldiers in the Asia- Pacific War Yoshida Yutaka Preface and Translation by Bo Tao Translator’s Preface Abstract: The total number of Japanese The article translated below was written by casualties in the Asia-Pacific War (1937-1945) Yoshida Yutaka, emeritus professor at is estimated to be around 3.1 million, with Hitotsubashi University, for a 2006 edited military fatalities accounting for 2.3 million. In volume on various aspects of the battlefield contrast to the popular image in Japan of these experience of Japanese soldiers during the war dead as “noble heroes” (eirei) who fought Asia-Pacific War.1 Since then, Yoshida has valiantly in service of the nation, however, the expanded his work on the topic into a full- realities of war were quite different. Rather length book, which was published in 2017 than being killed in combat, some sixty percent under the title, Nihongun heishi: Ajia-Taiheiyō of soldiers (1.4 million) died away from the sensō no genjitsu (Soldiers of the Japanese battlefield, succumbing to disease andMilitary: The Reality of the Asia-Pacific War).2 starvation. Others suffered from the military’s The book has attracted a great deal of attention failure to secure dependable supply lines to in Japan. It was awarded the Asia-Pacific provide food and equipment replenishments, Special Award and the Shinsho Award in 2019 resulting in a large number of otherwise and has sold over 200,000 copies.3 One of the preventable deaths.
    [Show full text]
  • Fragmenting History: Prostitutes, Hostesses, and Actresses at The
    Fragmenting History: Prostitutes, Hostesses, and Actresses at the Edge of Empire Nobuko Ishitate-Okumiya Yamasaki A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy University of Washington 2014 Reading Committee: Edward Mack, Chair Yomi Braester Chandan Reddy Stephen Sumida Program Authorized to Offer Degree: Department of Comparative Literature © Copyright 2014 Nobuko Ishitate-Okumiya Yamasaki University of Washington ABSTRACT Fragmenting History: Prostitutes, Hostesses, and Actresses at the Edge of Empire Nobuko Ishitate-Okumiya Yamasaki Chair of the Supervisory Committee: Associate Professor Edward Mack Department of Comparative Literature and Department of Asian Languages and Literature By exploring various figures of gendered and sexualized female workers, such as street prostitutes, hostesses, comfort women, teachers, idols, and actresses, this dissertation reveals that women’s bodies were highly contested territories of knowledge in the Japanese Empire. Their bodies were sites of political struggle where racial, national, and class differences met, competed, and complicated one another. The dissertation elucidates the processes by which those women’s bodies became integral parts of Empire building during the imperial period (1894-1945), suggesting that its colonial and imperial legacies are still active even today. Unlike some preceding works on Japanese colonial literature have shown, many of these figures fall away from normative discourses of the trope of family contributing to Empire building. In other words, theirs is a politics of the perverse. With careful attention to intersections of race, sex, class, and affect, the dissertation contributes to the study of Japanese Empire, which tends to focus on men and avoids subtle readings of women’s bodies.
    [Show full text]
  • The Art of Constitutional Legitimation: a Genealogy of Modern Japanese
    Title Page The Art of Constitutional Legitimation: A Genealogy of Modern Japanese Political Thought by Tomonori Teraoka Bachelor of Law (LL.B.), Tohoku University, 2010 Master of International Affairs, The Pennsylvania State University, 2013 Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of the Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy University of Pittsburgh 2020 Committee Page UNIVERSITY OF PITTSBURGH DIETRICH SCHOOL OF ARTS AND SCIENCES This dissertation was presented by Tomonori Teraoka It was defended on August 14, 2020 and approved by David L. Marshall, Associate Professor, Department of Communication Paul Elliott Johnson, Associate Professor, Department of Communication Dissertation Directors: Olga Kuchinskaya, Associate Professor, Department of Communication and Ricky Law, Associate Professor, Department of History (Carnegie Mellon University) ii Copyright © by Tomonori Teraoka 2020 iii The Art of Constitutional Legitimation: A Genealogy of Modern Japanese Political Thought Tomonori Teraoka, PhD University of Pittsburgh, 2020 This dissertation examines rhetorical and historical issues of the two Japanese constitutions, the Meiji constitution (1889 − 1946) and the postwar constitution (1946 −). It examines a rhetorical issue of how persuasive narratives ground a constitution. It also examines a historical issue of modern Japan, that is to say, the re-emerging issue of whether or not, how, and how much Japan needed to domesticate foreign paradigms, a core of which was a modern constitution. The dissertation’s analysis of the two issues shows how the scholarly discourse in modern Japan (1868-) responded to the re-emerging issue of political/constitutional legitimacy across both the Meiji constitution and the postwar constitution.
    [Show full text]