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For more information, please contact the WRAP Team at: [email protected] warwick.ac.uk/lib-publications Empire of Culture: Contemporary British and Japanese Imaginings of Victorian Britain By Waiyee Loh A thesis submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English and Comparative Literary Studies University of Warwick, Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies April 2016 1 Table of Contents Acknowledgements 4 Declaration 5 Abstract 6 Introduction 7 “Creative Economy” Discourse and the Global Cultural Economy 12 The Treaty Port System and Meiji Westernisation 14 “Worlding” Neo-Victorianism 19 “Worlding” Shōjo Culture 21 World Literature as Methodology 26 From World Literature to World Cultural Studies 35 A Note on Definitions 37 The Structure of the Thesis 39 Chapter One 42 Supernatural Monsters and Neo-Victorian Detectives: Capitalism, Rationality, and Affect Detective Fiction and the Ideal of Western Rationality in Meiji Japan 44 Science and the Supernatural 50 Monstrous Mothers 56 Happy Families 64 Chapter Two 76 Artists and Adventure Heroes: Rewriting Masculinity Jamrach’s Menagerie: The Adventure Hero as Modernist Artist 79 Jamrach’s Menagerie: The Greenwich Meridian of Literature and the British 88 (Book-Publishing) Empire Kuroshitsuji: The Dandy and the Creative Consumption of Commodities 93 Kuroshitsuji: The Salaryman and Selfless Devotion to Productive Work 99 2 Kuroshitsuji: Competing Masculinities in Late Meiji and Wartime Japan 106 From Liberalism to Neo-Liberalism 117 Chapter Three 119 Emporium of Luxury, Empire of Cool: Imperialism, Commodities, and Cultural Capital Global Commodities I: Clothing and Textiles 122 Global Commodities II: Food 133 Global Commodities III: Women’s Magazines and Shōjo Manga 150 Chapter Four 160 Who Owns the Victorians?: Possession, Japanese Tourists, and the British Heritage Industry Possessing Culture as Property: A. S. Byatt’s Possession 163 Possessing Possession: The Hollywood Film Adaptation 172 Japanese Tourists in Victorian Britain: Japanese Participation in the British 184 Heritage Industry Japanese Tourists in Thornfield Hall: Literary Heritage Tourism 188 Japanese Tourists in Harrods: Acquiring Cultural Capital 190 Japanese Travellers in Victorian Britain: Learning Good Manners 195 Japanese Housekeepers in Thornfield Hall: Managing Other People’s Heritage 207 Japanese Guidebooks to Victorian Britain: Writing and Learning History the 218 Manga Way Conclusion 224 Works Cited 241 3 Acknowledgements I would like to thank the following people for their invaluable guidance and support, which have sustained me throughout the years spent writing this thesis. I would like to thank my supervisors, Dr Ross G. Forman and Professor Michael Gardiner, for constantly urging me to push the boundaries of my thinking, and to write with greater clarity and elegance. I would not be the scholar I am today without them. I would also like to thank my peers in the Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies at the University of Warwick. Many of the arguments in this thesis arose from discussions (sometimes heated) that I have had with my peers during my time at Warwick. A big thank you especially to Michael Tsang, Matsuoka Misato, and Maria Cohut for always being willing to share ideas and to discuss difficult issues. I am also deeply indebted to the tireless efforts of Ohashi Chiaki, who co-organises the Global 19C Network reading group with me. My deepest gratitude goes to Samantha Leong, Sheril Fazlinda Norzali, and Kevin Lam for generously giving up their time to be interviewed, and for allowing me to reproduce their cosplay photographs in the thesis. I would also like to thank the Fashion and Textile Museum, London, for providing a wonderful photograph of the exhibition gallery. Lastly, I would like to thank Christopher Kelsey, who did the cooking and housework whenever I had deadlines to meet and chapters to finish. Without his love and support, finishing the thesis would have been a much more arduous journey. 4 Declaration The material covered in the section “Global Commodities II: Food” in Chapter Three, “Emporium of Luxury, Empire of Cool: Imperialism, Commodities, and Cultural Capital,” is based on a journal article published before I began PhD studies at the University of Warwick. The article appeared in Mechademia 7 (2012), under the title of “Superflat and the Postmodern Gothic: Images of Western Modernity in Kuroshitsuji.” The article has been significantly revised for inclusion in this thesis. I hereby confirm that this thesis is my own work, and that it has not been submitted for a degree at another university. 5 Abstract Since the 1980s and 1990s, cultural commodities produced in both Britain and Japan have enjoyed an upsurge in global popularity, giving rise to notions of “Creative Britain” and “Cool Japan.” As a result of this boom, British and Japanese governments have attempted to develop and/or collaborate with both domestic and foreign cultural industries as a solution to national economic decline. This turn to culture as a means of generating economic revenue is part of a global trend where neoliberal economic ideas converge with the rise of a “creative economy.” This thesis argues that the image of Victorian Britain in Japanese shōjo manga, as well as in British neo-Victorian fiction, suggests that the history of free trade and British imperialism in East Asia in the nineteenth century underpins this increasing emphasis on cultural commodity production and export in Britain and Japan. In other words, British and Japanese neo-Victorian texts published in the period 1980-present demonstrate that what we call “globalisation” today is deeply informed by economic relations and cultural hierarchies established between distant places in the nineteenth century. Recognising these connections between past and present helps us understand why the Japanese today “choose” to consume British “high” cultural goods, and why the Japanese state and cultural industries “choose” to focus their energies on exporting popular culture products. These “choices,” I argue, are historically conditioned by Japan’s encounter with the West, and especially Britain, in the nineteenth century, and the perception of British cultural superiority that this encounter has fostered. In examining the transnational networks that connect Britain and Japan in the nineteenth century and in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century, this thesis uses a “global history” framework to expand existing approaches to neo-Victorianism, girl culture in Japan, and World Literature. 6 Introduction In October 2015, the Fashion and Textile Museum in Bermondsey, London, launched a commemorative exhibition showcasing clothing and textiles designed and produced by the British department store Liberty since its inception in 1875. The exhibition, entitled Liberty in Fashion, begins with a display of nineteenth-century dressing gowns and wraps in floral patterns, evidently inspired by the Japanese kimono (Fig. 1). Fig. 1: Dressing gowns and wraps inspired by Japanese kimono styles and patterns on display at the Liberty in Fashion exhibition (9 October 2015 to 28 February 2016). Photograph courtesy of the Fashion and Textile Museum, London. Liberty, explains the signboard beside the display, grew out of “[a] dialogue with the East,” selling coloured silks; costumes; china, lacquer and enamel wares; and fans imported from Japan. “With the opening up of Japan to trade with the West in the 1850s,” the signboard reads, “the Japanese look soon became synonymous with Liberty.” This story of Japanese influences on British and European 7 art and commodity culture in the nineteenth century is a familiar one.1 The story of British and European influences on Japan in the nineteenth century is also well-told, as we can see from the large number of chapters dedicated to the “civilisation and enlightenment” (bunmei kaika) movement, and the Meiji state’s Westernisation reforms, in books on the history of Japan.2 This thesis seeks to return to this history of Anglo-Japanese trade and consumption in order to rethink its significance for Britain and Japan in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century. What does this history have to do with the Anglo-Japanese trade today in luxury brands, heritage tourism, comic books, and other forms of cultural goods? This thesis therefore begins in a different, and yet similar, time and place: the Victorian Britain that is imagined in Japanese shōjo manga, a genre of comics that is targeted at a predominantly young female audience ranging from pre-teens to women in their twenties (Fig. 2). Fig. 2: The front jacket cover of Lady Victorian, Vol. 5. Fig. 2 is the front jacket cover of Vol. 5 of Lady Victorian [Redii Vikutorian], a manga series set in Britain in the 1870s, and published from 1999 to 2007 by Akita Shoten under the “Princess Comics” label. The illustration shows the female protagonist being lifted up by her suitor, with the two figures standing against a wallpaper-like backdrop of orange-coloured blossoms on an orange background. The female character, Bell, is wearing a dress made of three different types of cloth. The topmost layer is made of pale pink fabric printed with small pink flowers; the second layer is made of white fabric printed with larger blue flowers and green leaves; and there is an orange and white striped fabric attached to the back of the dress. The printed fabrics of Bell’s dress bring to mind the British-made printed cotton textiles that were exported to Japan in the nineteenth century, and which constituted the corollary to the Japanese 1 See Yokoyama; Wichmann; Lambourne; and Napier, From Impressionism to Anime.