Overcoming Modernity’ in Kenji Miyazawa

‘OVERCOMING MODERNITY’ IN KENJI MIYAZAWA

Takao Hagiwara

Problems of Modernity

In this chapter, I use the terms ‘modernity’ and ‘modernism’ primarily to refer to ‘Western modernity’ and ‘Western modernism’. Th us, ‘modernization’ as I use it largely overlaps with ‘Westernization’. Also, as I will further discuss below, I consider modernism, the cultural and artistic movement considered to have arisen in Europe in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, to be a kind of reaction against modernity.1 Sociologist Hitoshi Imamura characterizes modernity as comprising the following: 1. A mechanistic view of the world. 2. An emphasis on rational and systematic methods of production and construction, and on the supposed autonomy of individuals. 3. An emphasis on systematized, citizenship-based societies and governments. .(ڡTh e reduction of all human activities to ‘labour’ (࢈ .4 5. A homogeneous and linear progressive sense of time.2 One might argue that underlying all these observations is Max Weber’s famous thesis that modernity is ‘disenchantment’ (Entzauberung), or rationalization. As Chaplin’s fi lm Modern Times comically yet eloquently shows, the problems of modernity lie in the effi cient but highly mech- anized and alienating (dehumanizing) administrative/bureaucratic systems underlying almost every aspect of human life, from politics and

1 See, for instance, the following: It [Modernism] is the art consequent on Heisenberg’s ‘Uncertainty principle’, of the destruction of civilization and reason in the First World War, of the world changed and reinterpreted by Marx, Freud and Darwin, of capitalism and constant industrial acceleration, of existential exposure to meaninglessness or absurdity. It is the literature of technology. . . . Modernism is then the art of modernization . . . . (Bradbury and McFarlane: 27) 2 Imamura: 236–239. My translation, with modifi cations. Unless otherwise specifi ed, all the English translations in this essay are mine. ‘overcoming modernity’ in kenji miyazawa 311 the economy (capitalism) to communication, family, education, religion, international relations, military aff airs, and so on.

Modernity and Modernism

I think that while modernism is rooted in modernity, modernism is also a kind of reaction against and/or an attempt to overcome modernity: in the sense that it is rooted in modernity, modernism’s attempt is to overcome itself. Refl ecting the negative aspects of modernity described above, (Western) modernism contains many elements of modernity that oft en give the reader excruciatingly frustrating sensations of alienation, absurdity, disruption, incoherence, fragmentation, violence, and destruction, feelings expressed particularly in works employing imagism, cub- ism, fauvism, futurism, expressionism, magic realism, etc.3 However, despite these negative elements, modernist art is aft er all a kind of creation: underlying its negativistic overtones one can glimpse, albeit faintly and ambiguously, some craving for and adumbration of unity, harmony, completion, and salvation (see, for instance, Kafk a’s Kierkegaardian ‘Before the Law’, Th e Metamorphosis, Th e Castle, and Th e Trial; Joyce’s Ulysses and Finnegans Wake; Eliot’s Four Quartets; Pound’s Th e Cantos; Proust’s In Search of Lost Time; and even Beckett’s Waiting for Godot). As he lived in modern, Westernized Japan, Kenji Miyazawa (1896– 1933) inevitably was infl uenced by Western modernity and modernism. And as the following passage from his Nōmin geijutsu gairon kōyō (Notes for an Outline of Agrarian Art) shows, Miyazawa was also keenly aware of the problems associated with modernity: While they were poor, our ancestors once enjoyed life in their own ways. Th ey had both art and religion. Now we have only labour and survival. Religions have been exhausted and replaced by modern science and, moreover, science is cold and dark. Art has departed from us and, besides, it is impoverished and degraded. Now religionists and artists are those who monopolize and sell truth, good, and beauty. We cannot aff ord to buy them, nor do we need such art and religion. We now have to go along the right path and create our own beauty. We must refi ne our grey labour in the furnace of art. Here is our constant, pure and joyous creation. (Miyazawa 1976: 10)

3 For the relation to modernity of the elements of violence, destruction, and fragmentation in modernism as seen in Pound, Eisenstein, and Benjamin, see Hagiwara 2000.