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. Chapter one, “‘Genuinely’ Japanese and ‘Falsely’ Japanese in Hayashi Kyôko’s ‘Yellow Sand,’” unpacks race-based Japanese nationalism by closely analyzing the tension between a Japanese street prostitute and middle-class Japanese mothers in Shanghai at the onset of the second Sino-Japanese War. Chapter two, “Resistance and Protest by Diasporic Korean Women: Lee Yang-ji and Theresa Hak Kyung Cha,” metaphorically places Lee and Cha into dialogue, revealing that Korean women’s bodies are political battlefields. Chapter three, “More as a Critic than as a Participant of the Empire: ‘Landscape with a Patrolman: A Sketch from 1923,’” analyzes how the ideological structure of the Japanese Empire regulates, fixes, and generates everyday life in colonial Korea, arguing that Nakajima Atsushi’s insight both implicitly and explicitly stood against the Japanese Empire’s totalitarian ambitions. The chapter demonstrates the similarity of Nakajima’s major and minor works, revealed in the rhetorical choices he makes and his ethical orientation toward others. Chapter four, “I Perform, therefore I am not: Ri Kôran’s Building of the Empire,” focuses on the film Suzhou Nights (1941) and elucidates the working dynamics of Japanese language education, bio-power, (carefully avoided) inter- racial marriage, and (implicitly avoided) inter-racial reproduction. The chapter argues that the film approximates the Nazi’s contemporaneous idea of racial purity. A translation of Ri Kôran’s speech on comfort women as a feminist activist appears in an appendix. The speech was published at the turn of the millennium. i Table of Contents Table of Contents..............................................................................................................................................i Acknowledgments..........................................................................................................................................iii Dedication………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………...v Introduction......................................................................................................................................................1 Chapter One “Genuinely” Japanese and “Falsely” Japanese in Hayashi Kyôko’s “Yellow Sand” (1977)………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..7 I. Situating Hayashi Kyôko II. A Japanese Street Prostitute in 1930s Shanghai as “National Shame” III. Outside Within: Okiyo-san as a “Disgrace to our Nation” IV. The Eccentric and Ironic Manifestation of National Pride V. “Nihonjin no kuse ni” (Despite Being Japanese) VI. A Fictive a priori Racial Homogeneity VII. Hakata-woven Undersash Chapter Two Resistance and Protest by Diasporic Korean Women: Lee Yang-ji and Theresa Hak Kyung Cha........................................................................................................................................................27 I. Lee Yang-ji as a Zainichi Korean Woman Writer II. Methodology III. Overview of Kazukime IV. Body as a Battlefield V. Anal Intercourse as Non-Exploitative VI. Mt. Fuji and Jeju-do VII. Diasporic Korean Women VIII. Subject-Formation via Language, Labor, and Affective Mood Chapter Three More as a Critic than as a Participant of the Empire: “Landscape with a Patrolman: A Sketch from 1923” (1929) by Nakajima Atsushi……………………………………………………………..67 I. Situating Nakajima Atsushi II. Colonial Experiences ii III. “You are also Korean, are you not?” IV. Eloquent Silence when Writing is Compromised V. Difficulty or Impossibility of Having a Korean Identity VI. Nakajima in a Larger Context VII. Proximity between the Canon and Colonial Works Chapter Four I Perform, therefore I am not: Ri Kôran’s Building of the Empire…………………………………102 I. Who is Ri Kôran? II. Manchukuo’s Mottos and Man’ei III. Manchukuo: an Arty Ideological Devise IV. Ri Kôran and her Performances V. Peculiarity of Suzhou Nights VI. Implications of Languages: Japanese, Chinese, and German VII. Popular Music and the Empire VIII. Biopower IX. Inscribed Rising Sun (hinomaru) in Japanese Education X. An Encouraged Intra-racial Marriage and an Avoided Inter-racial Reproduction Appendix I “My Thought” by Ôtaka Yoshiko…………………………………………………………………………………..138 Appendix II A Timeline of Japanese Imperialism……………………………………………………………………………...141 Coda ................................................................................................................................................................146 Notes to Chapter One ………………………………………………………………………………………………..150 Note to Chapter Two………………………………………………………………………………………………….156 Notes to Chapter Three…………………………………………………………………………………………......170 Notes to Chapter Four………………………………………………………………………………………………..177 Bibliography................................................................................................................................................190 Vita……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….199 iii Acknowledgements First and foremost, I would like to express my heartfelt appreciation and sincere gratitude to my advisor and mentor, Professor Edward Mack. Without his intellectual gifts, profound patience, confidence in me, and easy going personality, this dissertation would not have come into being. Under the direction of Professor Mack, I have had the best mentoring possible. He spent countless hours advising, proofreading and encouraging me. He has been a careful and meticulous critic and pushed my thinking farther than I imagined possible. For all these, I am eternally grateful. I would also like to acknowledge the generous support, wisdom, and kindness of my committee members: Professor Yomi Braester, Professor Chandan Reddy, Professor Vicente Rafael, and Professor Stephen Sumida. They formed the most excellent team. Without their various talents and collaborative effort, this cross-disciplinary dissertation would have never come into life. I am greatly indebted to all my committee members. I would like to express my special thanks to Professor Francisco “Kiko” Benitez, Professor Brett de Bary, Professor Shirley Samuels, Professor Cynthia Steele, Professor Jennifer Bean, Professor Davinder Bhowmik, Professor Iwasaki Minoru, and Professor Uemura Tadao. I owe a special thanks to Professor Kôno Kensuke, Professor Kawamura Minato, Professor Ko Youngran, Professor Odaira Maiko, and Professor Hibi Yoshitaka, who offered exciting seminars on modern Japanese literature here in Seattle as Visiting Japanese Scholars at the University of Washington. Thank you so much, Professor Tsuboi Hideto, Professor Ichiyanagi Hirotaka, Professor Satô Izumi, and Professor Gomibuchi Noritsugu for patiently listening to me and giving me productive and creative feedback on my project. Professor Alys Weinbaum, I cannot thank you enough for your contribution to this dissertation: two chapters emerged from your seminars. Thank you, Professor Ishihara Shun for sharing your provocative ideas on the Pacific. Thank you, my “sempai” at Uemura-zemi and my long-time friend, Professor Odawara Rin. I am indebted to Professor Kondô Takeo and Professor Hanada Masanori. The former as being a scholar in special needs education, the latter as a theoretical physicist; yet, I truly enjoyed conversations with them, which inspired my project in unique ways. All these aforementioned distinguished scholars had a profound impact on my work and helped me grow as a scholar. I have had many fabulous friends who supported me at various stages of my personal and intellectual trajectory. I will name only some of them but my gratitude is extended to iv their surrounding communities as well: Amal Eqeiq, Chong Eun Ahn, Hanawa Yukiko, Su- ching Wang, Sarah Clayton, Igarashi Kaori, Alan Williams, Nancy