In Matsuura Rieko’s Oyayubi P no shugyō jidai (親指 P の修業時代, “My Big Toe P’s Training Period”), sex... more In Matsuura Rieko’s Oyayubi P no shugyō jidai (親指 P の修業時代, “My Big Toe P’s Training Period”), sexuality and gender are presented as a nebulous undercurrent that drives a story based on the absurd concept of a big toe spontaneously becoming a penis. While trends in the art world are inevitable, and artists who use human language can never fully disengage from an oppressive cultural ideology no matter how much they may wish to, Oyayubi is an example of a work which is simultaneously able to depict sexual and gender minorities in a surrealist manner which exposes the flaws in the dominant perception of them, and do so in a way which is palatable to the average, non-academic audience. This paper will show the various ways in which Matsuura succeeds, and fails, to expose the societal truths behind the experience of being a sexual or gender minority, and why this work is no less relevant today than when it was written in the early 1990s.
While frequent earthquakes, tsunami and fires have been the subject of a long history of disaster... more While frequent earthquakes, tsunami and fires have been the subject of a long history of disaster literature in Japan, Kimura Saeko argues that the nature of the 3-11 nuclear disaster gave rise to a genre of literature focusing on the voices of the dead. She supports this argument by reading several key works on the subject of 3-11 through a lens of Derrida's theory of hauntology. In this paper, I further focus the argument on the relationship between the voices of the dead and their bodies, examining the way in which Itō Seikō's Sōzō Radio presents a theory of reality in which human beings are inhabited by two distinct souls: a spiritual soul and a corporeal one. By doing so, Itō attempts to tackle the mountainous task of how to cope with a reality suddenly forced to be shared with innumerable ghosts. Moreover, I argue that two distinct features of the 3-11 disaster-the combination of living in an age of mass communication and the physical limitations of efforts to recover from radiation exposure-compel us to cope not only with the loss of human life, but also with the overwhelming presence of former humans, reduced to their composite parts under the eyes of the world. In giving a voice to bodies, who still share the shape of what we lost, Itō suggests that the nature of human psychology requires living alongside ghosts, whose presence may be no more than imaginary, but no less real than the memory of the living who were.
Examines the validity of works about ethnic minorities in Japan being written by those in the eth... more Examines the validity of works about ethnic minorities in Japan being written by those in the ethnic majority, using Tsushima Yuko's work inspired by the lives of Ainu, Emishi and Christian minorities in the early Meiji Period, Jakka Dofuni.
In Matsuura Rieko’s Oyayubi P no shugyō jidai (親指 P の修業時代, “My Big Toe P’s Training Period”), sex... more In Matsuura Rieko’s Oyayubi P no shugyō jidai (親指 P の修業時代, “My Big Toe P’s Training Period”), sexuality and gender are presented as a nebulous undercurrent that drives a story based on the absurd concept of a big toe spontaneously becoming a penis. While trends in the art world are inevitable, and artists who use human language can never fully disengage from an oppressive cultural ideology no matter how much they may wish to, Oyayubi is an example of a work which is simultaneously able to depict sexual and gender minorities in a surrealist manner which exposes the flaws in the dominant perception of them, and do so in a way which is palatable to the average, non-academic audience. This paper will show the various ways in which Matsuura succeeds, and fails, to expose the societal truths behind the experience of being a sexual or gender minority, and why this work is no less relevant today than when it was written in the early 1990s.
While frequent earthquakes, tsunami and fires have been the subject of a long history of disaster... more While frequent earthquakes, tsunami and fires have been the subject of a long history of disaster literature in Japan, Kimura Saeko argues that the nature of the 3-11 nuclear disaster gave rise to a genre of literature focusing on the voices of the dead. She supports this argument by reading several key works on the subject of 3-11 through a lens of Derrida's theory of hauntology. In this paper, I further focus the argument on the relationship between the voices of the dead and their bodies, examining the way in which Itō Seikō's Sōzō Radio presents a theory of reality in which human beings are inhabited by two distinct souls: a spiritual soul and a corporeal one. By doing so, Itō attempts to tackle the mountainous task of how to cope with a reality suddenly forced to be shared with innumerable ghosts. Moreover, I argue that two distinct features of the 3-11 disaster-the combination of living in an age of mass communication and the physical limitations of efforts to recover from radiation exposure-compel us to cope not only with the loss of human life, but also with the overwhelming presence of former humans, reduced to their composite parts under the eyes of the world. In giving a voice to bodies, who still share the shape of what we lost, Itō suggests that the nature of human psychology requires living alongside ghosts, whose presence may be no more than imaginary, but no less real than the memory of the living who were.
Examines the validity of works about ethnic minorities in Japan being written by those in the eth... more Examines the validity of works about ethnic minorities in Japan being written by those in the ethnic majority, using Tsushima Yuko's work inspired by the lives of Ainu, Emishi and Christian minorities in the early Meiji Period, Jakka Dofuni.
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