Showa period 昭和時代

In perhaps the most memorable line from Japan's surrender radio broadcast of 15 August 1945 Hirohito 裕仁, the Shōwa Emperor (Shōwa tennō 昭和天皇), expressed a desire to "pave the way for a grand peace for all the generations to come by enduring the unendurable and suffering what is insufferable." 1 At first glance, these words appear to constitute a straightforward statement of pacifist sentiment and an overriding determination on the part of the emperor to save his subjects from further suffering. Consequently, they have proven useful for casting the emperor's "sacred decision" (seidan 聖断) to surrender as a benevolent intervention rescuing the people and setting the nation on the path toward postwar peace and prosperity. 2 Alternatively, the expression has been seen as an effort to "seize the moral high ground from the Allies" and as exemplifying Hirohito's self-interested deployment of classical rhetoric and euphemism in order to avoid personal and institutional responsibility for the war. 3

The story “The Execution of Ten’ichibō” (Korosareta Ten’ichibō), written by the lawyer, politician, and mystery writer Hamao Shirō (1896-1935), is sometimes remembered as a small masterpiece of the so-called "Golden Age” of Taishō- and early Shōwa-period mystery fiction. The story first appeared in October 1929 in the monthly magazine Kaizō (Reconstruction), one of the major forums of literature and intellectual opinion in Japan at the
time. Although the story is based upon a popular historical tale set nearly two hundred years ago during the Edo period, this article argues that the story represents a critical investigation into the relationship between truth, justice, and social control—issues of key importance in 1929, a year in which the Japanese government rounded up and aggressively prosecuted countless advocates of what it considered “dangerous thought” (kiken shisō)."

In Japan, marriage ceremonies prior to 1900 wedding of the crown prince used to be secular events, featuring some differences from the current matrimonial practice. This essay explores the Meiji era social engineering invention by looking at the history and practices of an altered ritual.

Nagai Kafū’s Soundscapes: An Iconology of Sound in his early-Shōwa Writings
FOLLACO Gala Maria
It is very well known that urban spatialities play a crucial role in Nagai Kafū’ s oeuvre. As scholarship both inside and outside Japan has demonstrated, the world described by Kafū is first and foremost an urban world. Urban space, in his work, does not only encapsulate manyfold and deep meaning, but helps clarify important themes related to the broader one of 'modernity,' such as 'self,' 'society,' and 'identity.'
Further, the significance of sound ̶ especially music ̶ in his literature has been thoroughly discussed, showing to what extent this author valued music and incorporated it in his writing, from the juvenile years he spent abroad through his most representative novel ̶ "A Strange Tale from East of the River" (1937).
This paper draws on the 'Soundscape' theory formulated by R. Murray Schafer and others in order to analyze the form and function of urban sounds in Kafū’s representation of Tokyo in the fast-changing context of early-Shōwa Japan.
In particular, it focuses on the soundscapes described in “The Voice of the Bell,” “The Ditch” and “Notes from Terajima” (1936) with the aim of discuss- ing his literary influences and the relationship of these zuihitsu with "A Strange Tale," and to gauge the impact of modern urban transformations on Kafū’s writing.

This paper examines the Japanese crown prince and emperor Hirohito during the 1920s to think more critically about how fashion historians can analyze “western” dress in non-western contexts. In particular, this essay looks at Hirohito’s embrace of new forms of middle-class menswear —particularly sportswear and the lounge suit — to signal fundamental shifts in the relationship between monarch and subject. These innovations rested upon far more than simply imitating western centers of men’s fashion. Instead, this paper argues that to understand the meaning of “western” clothing styles in non-western contexts, fashion studies needs a more sophisticated paradigm than the term “western clothes.” While some garments carried strong resonances of their European antecedents, Japanese men like Hirohito adopted them primarily for what they could do in Japan, while also understanding their potential for integrating Japan into the broader world.

This article examines the popular fascination with what was known as "ryōki" (curiosity-hunting) in Japan during the 1920s and 1930s.  In the 1920s, there emerged with the rise of the mass printing industry, a large number of publications dedicated to "strange" and "curious" things, including things associated with foreign cultures and expressions of non-heteronormative forms of sexual desire.  These publications helped establish a dynamic that was characteristic of the 1920s and 1930s culture of ero, guro, nansensu: readers might vicariously enjoy some “strange” or perhaps even transgressive occurrence that, because it was coded as “strange,” necessarily remained at a remove from ordinary life. At the same time, the desire to discover and interact with unusual things (sometimes called ryôki shumi , literally, “interest in, or taste for, curiosity hunting”) in some cases gave rise to a form of active pursuit in which readers set off on their own adventures, becoming “curiosity hunters” (ryōkisha) exploring the city and the fringes of the “known” world, most often in a search for manifestations of eroticism (especially in its non-heteronormative forms) or crime. Such ryōki adventures became a feature of popular modernist literature, especially the genre of mystery writing known as tantei shōsetsu.  This article examines a number of these publications in relation to trends within ethnography, sexology, literature, and the consumption and imagination of urban space in  Japan during the two world wars.

The status of women performers in Noh has been a subject of debate before women's entry into the Nohgaku Kyokai (Nohgaku Performers' Association) in 1948. In 1948, just a few years after the Second World War, several women were allowed to apply for professional status as Noh performers. Before that, women were only permitted to practice Noh as a hobby. Even after women were recognized as Noh professionals, it was not until 2004 that certain female Noh performers were recognized as Intangible Cultural Properties and permitted to enter the Nihon Nohgakukai (Association for Japanese Noh Plays). It means that they were not recognised at the highest levels of professional performance of Noh, though some of them were as skilled as male professionals. After that, however, there still remains a considerable negative attitude to Noh performances by women or women Noh players among critics or audiences. In this presentation, we examine articles on women's Noh performance run in some Japanese general newspapers after the late 19th century to the present and discuss these articles quantitatively and qualitatively. In this way we will find and analyse some tendencies or characteristics in discourse about performance depending on differences in sex, their skill, or their status as the Noh performers. The paper will discuss socially-accepted ideas represented in these articles. This will make it clear that the logic of some negative attitudes to Noh performances by women or women Noh players is based on the tradition of Noh as well as their ability or technique.

The development of populated spaces in Modern Japan into distinct places by government and private actors has been the target of much recent scholarship, particularly concerning the development of urban identities in major cities. However, it has thus far been more limited regarding the mechanics of identity formation in Japan’s colonies, particularly with regard to the settler colony of Karafuto. This paper considers the colonial government’s development of a distinct ‘Karafuto’ identity, which it associated with a supposed 'historical' connection to the land as well as to the Imperial System as the northern guardians of Japan. This paper analyzes the narratives of identity produced in the official local history, which were then disseminated through both a local magazine and the local museum. By looking at these sources, one can see that the same processes and engagement between local government and private actors that were taking place on the mainland were also being implemented in Karafuto. As these processes occurred even in the absence of a pre-existing history or sense of community, they provide an alternative perspective of place and identity formation in Japan. From this, further speculation on the relationship between elite attempts at fostering local identity and local relations to these policies in early 20th Century Japan can potentially be drawn.

La tesi fornisce una nuova prospettiva nei confronti della produzione di Yamanokuchi Baku (1903 - 1963), specialmente quella poetica, analizzando in chiave contemporanea una selezione di poesie (13) a poco più di cinquant’anni dalla sua morte, cercando di abbandonare etichette precostituite e comprendendo i limiti della metodologia utilizzata. Attraverso la sua poetica, Baku mira a una responsabilizzazione collettiva che si rivolge a tutti, giapponesi, ryukyuani e il resto del mondo, affinché si possa parlare seriamente di una rinascita non solo ryukyuana ma, in generale, umana. Infatti, i fattori che hanno favorito gli eventi capaci di ridisegnare il concetto di identità nelle Ryūkyū sono gli stessi che, in realtà vicine o lontane, animano il dibattito tra le minoranze.
Il terzo e ultimo capitolo rappresenta il contributo propriamente letterario di questo lavoro. Dopo una breve premessa e le dovute avvertenze, i paragrafi si
risolvono in una suddivisione tematica che racchiudono una selezione di poesie, al cui testo originale in lingua giapponese si aggiungono la traduzione in lingua
italiana e una dettagliata analisi del testo. Parallelamente alla descrizione delle modalità di analisi e traduzione delle poesie, alcune annotazioni sono state dedicate ai limiti posti in essere dalla traduzione e dalla volontà di comprendere
adeguatamente il contesto storico-letterario delle poesie.
La tesi intende fornire uno sguardo critico verso la questione ryukyuana all’inizio del secolo scorso e, per farlo, intende indagare le poesie di Baku e i modelli da essa proposti, modelli che, ora come allora, continuano a essere i
protagonisti sia dentro che fuori all’arcipelago delle Ryūkyū.

This paper is the first study of Ikeda Sakae's letters and articles in the journal "Light from the East" and his theories elucidated therein that Jǐngjiào (Nestorianism) came to Ancient Japan. The paper provides a descriptive overview and analysis of the letters and articles comparing them to previous incarnations of the theory.

This article makes use of the most recent western and Japanese scholarship on pre-war Japan’s consumer culture and the so-called moga (modern girls) phenomena in order to more deeply explore the consumption patterns, shopping-based lifestyles and values of Tokyo’s middle and upper-middle-class women during the first decade of the Showa era. To these new secondary sources, the author adds a close reading of key archival photographic and film-based sources as well as new Japanese language work in the area of consumer and business history. Its goal is to examine the extent to which middle-class Tokyo women had adopted western-style fashions as part of a dual lifestyle or nijū seikatsu in the immediately pre-war years. Using a multi-disciplinary approach, but one that is firmly based around an analysis of documentary and photographic-based evidence, it seeks to explore the nature and meaning of the pre-war Ginza shopping experience for middle- and upper-class women. Focusing on the impact of department stores and the consumption of western-influenced clothing, makeup and accessories, it also uses five key movies featuring women living a nijū seikatsu to argue that the years 1935-37 marked a high point of modernity in Japanese urban culture.

In 1958 thousands of Japanese teenagers, heavily influenced by the new "rockabilly" music that had recently swept the U.S., and emboldened by the new post-war consumer culture, fashioned a so-called rokabiri bumu, the first popular culture movement of the post-occupation Japan. Centered around the Western Carnival concert in Tokyo, the rokubirizoku" (rockabilly tribes) who made up the raucous audience for the new music were soon targeted by police, local authorities and PTAs as a source of juvenile delinquency. Coinciding with massive protests by student radicals against the staunchly pro-American administration of newly elected Prime Minister Nobusuke Kishi, the rokabirizoku (rockabilly tribe) movement proved short-lived but paved the way for the development of highly developed pop culture industry in the early 1960s.

L'auteur analyse la spécificité de l'institution impériale japonaise, capable de surmonter toutes les ruptures historiques nationales, de la période Tokugawa, à la Rénovation Meiji, à 1945. Cette résilience pose la question de la légitimité au Japon et du lien avec l'exercice, ou plutôt le non-exercice du pouvoir :
" Il est gênant de parler du régime impérial comme d’un régime politique. Décrire une institution semble impliquer qu’on puisse la dissocier de ceux en qui successivement elle s’est incarnée. Plutôt qu’une institution impériale, il existe au Japon un lignage, une famille souveraine, dont la continuité est la valeur suprême. Il y a là une donnée fondamentale, car la continuité a fini par devenir la substance de la légitimité, par se confondre avec elle. "

L'intervention de l'auteur est suivie d'une transcription des débats avec les autres intervenants du colloque.

This article makes use of the most recent western and Japanese scholarship on pre-war Japan’s consumer culture and the so-called moga (modern girls) phenomena in order to more deeply explore the consumption patterns, shopping-based lifestyles and values of Tokyo’s middle and upper middle class women during the first decade of the Showa era. To these new secondary sources, the author adds a close reading of key archival photographic and film-based sources as well as new Japanese language work in the area of consumer and business history. It’s goal is to examine the extent to which middle class Tokyo women had adopted western style fashions as part of a dual lifestyle or nijū seikatsu in the immediately pre-war years. Using a multi-disciplinary approach, but one that is firmly based around an analysis of documentary and photographic-based evidence, it seeks to explore the nature and meaning of the pre-war Ginza shopping experience for middle- and upper-class women. Focusing on the impact of department stores and the consumption of western-influenced clothing, makeup and accessories, it also uses five key movies featuring women living a nijū seikatsu to argue that the years 1935-37 marked a high point of modernity in Japanese urban culture.

The contributions of Korean and Taiwanese authors to the many and varied formulations of interwar pan-Asianism have so far remained a relatively unexplored subject of scholarly research, despite an unbroken interest in the trajectory of state-based Japanese pan-Asianism. Focusing on Korean students and independence activists, this article discusses alternative configurations of regional unity and solidarity that emanated from the interactions among Korean, Taiwanese, and other Asian actors who resided in Tokyo during the 1910s and 1920s. When the ethnic-nationalist interpretations of the Wilsonian principle of self-determination failed to materialize, a portion of anti-colonial activists in Asia began to emphasize the need for solidarity by drawing on what they perceived as traditional and shared " Asian " values. While challenging the Western-dominated international order of nation-states that perpetuated imperialism, such notions of Asian solidarity at the same time served as an ideology of liberation from Japanese imperialism. Examining journals published by Korean students and activists, including The Asia Kunglun, this article adds another layer to the history of pan-Asianism from below, a perspective that has often been neglected within the larger context of scholarship on pan-Asianism and Japanese imperialism in Asia.

This paper is about Tanizaki Jun’ichirō’s views on Japanese aesthetics through the images of ideal women in his landmark work «Each to his own» (蓼食う虫, 1929). This novel was published in parts during twelve months in the newspapers “Tokyoū nichinichi shimbun” and “Ōsaka maunichi shimbun” from 1928 to 1929. The novel is a milestone, for it marks Tanizaki’s transition from the “early creative work”, when he was admired by Western culture and his ideal woman was a “modern girl”, a follower of Western culture, to the “late creative work”, when Tanizaki Jun’ichirō’s national identity came to the fore. Having realized that the unique home world in which he had lived his whole life might disappear, Tanizaki Jun’ichirō joined of the discourse of that time with his ideas of beauty. He used his literature as a dissemination tool for his ideas and formation of national concepts. However, the national question was just purely aesthetic for the writer. The novel reflects both the writer’s personal drama – a rather complicated relationship with his first wife Chiyoko and his first attempt to demonstrate the loss of interest in Western aesthetics through the protagonist’s loss of the sexual attraction to his West-oriented wife. In his essay “Love and Sensuality” (恋愛及び色情, Ren’ai oyobi shikijoū) written in 1931, in which Tanizaki Jun’ichirō invited Japanese to rethink their views on the traditional conception of life, he clearly stated that in “Each to his own” he described his own philosophical ideas and his new feminine ideal a “doll-like” woman of the past. The novel fits into general trend of the late 1920s, when the whole Japanese culture had a tendency ‘return to Japan’. This is also due to fatigue caused by the inferiority complex, which Japan had suffered toward the West for a long time.     
 
Keywords: Tanizaki Jun’ichirō, novel “Each to his own” (蓼食う虫Tade kū mushi), Japanese traditional culture, image of ideal Japanese woman, female beauty in Japan 

Author. Mazay Selimov, graduate student of Institute of World Literature of the Russian Academy of Sciences.  ORCID: 0000-0001-6937-0948; E-mail: mazay_sv@yahoo.com


Аннотация. Данная статья посвящена взглядам писателя Танидзаки Дзюнъитиро на японскую эстетику через образы идеальных женщин в знаковом для литератора произведении «О вкусах не спорят» (蓼食ふ蟲, Тадэ ку: муси, 1929). Роман выходил сериями на протяжении двенадцати месяцев в газетах «Токё: нитинити симбун» (東京日日新聞) и «Оосака майнити симбун» (大阪毎日新聞) с 1928 по 1929 год. Это произведение является рубежным, ибо маркирует переход от «раннего творчества» писателя, когда он восхищался западной культурой, идеалом для которого была «новая японка», следовавшая веяниям западной моды к «позднему», когда национальная самоидентификация писателя вышла на передний план. Осознав то, что тот родной уникальный мир, в котором он прожил всю свою жизнь, может исчезнуть, Танидзаки Дзюнъитиро влился в дискурс того времени со своими представлениями о прекрасном. Он использовал литературу как инструмент для их распространения, формирования национальных идей. Однако, вопрос национального для писателя был сугубо эстетическим. В романе «О вкусах не спорят» нашла отражение как личная драма писателя – сложные отношения с его первой женой Тиёко, так и первая попытка продемонстрировать потерю интереса к западной эстетике через потерю интереса главным героем к собственной жене – приверженке западных взглядов на жизнь. В 1931 году в своём эссе Любовь и сладострастие» (恋愛及び色情, Рэнъай оёби сикидзё), в котором писатель Танидзаки Дзюнъитиро призвал японцев пересмотреть свои взгляды на традиционное миросозерцание, он недвусмысленно заявил, что описывал в романе «О вкусах не спорят» собственные представления, свой новый женский идеал – «женщину-куклу», прообразом которой является идеальная красавица прошлого. Роман вписывается в общую тенденцию конца 20-х годов XX века, когда во всей японской культуре наблюдался «возврата к истокам». Это также объясняется усталостью от комплекса неполноценности, который Япония испытывала по отношению к Западу в течение длительного времени.       

Ключевые слова: Танидзаки Дзюнъитиро, роман «О вкусах не спорят» (蓼食う虫, Тадэ ку: муси), японская национальная культура, образ идеальной японки, женская красота в Японии.

Автор: Селимов Мазай Гаджимагомедович, аспирант Института мировой литературы им. А. М. Горького РАН. ORCID: 0000-0001-6937-0948; E-mail: mazay_sv@yahoo.com

Few events have symbolized the interwar Japanese intellectual community’s inability to put up a principled resistance to the Japanese government’s growing authoritarianism like the tenkō phenomenon of the 1930s (the political and/or ideological renunciation of the Communist Party and its affiliated organizations and activities).  Instead of eliminating its political dissidents in the 1920s and 1930s, the Japanese state arrested them, placed them in solitary confinement, and then used inducements to encourage them to sign a tenkō statement, hence, rehabilitating and returning them to Japanese society.  Previous studies have highlighted the institutional elements of repression, the intellectual’s personal struggles to remain committed to Marxism, or more recently the rejection of Leftist thought as a starting point for the rise of ethnic nationalism during the early Shōwa years (1926-1937).

Prioritizing the agency of the individual, this monograph is an attempt to engage the tenkō phenomenon from the intellectual’s perspective, examining the tenkō of writer and literary critic Hayashi Fusao (1903-1975).  Hayashi was a member of the Japanese literati whose turn to ultranationalism in the 1930s and 1940s was so extreme that scholars often discount altogether his time in the radical student movement and his participation in the proletarian literature movement.  Flipping the mirror on this interpretation, here we examine Hayashi’s tenkō through a close reading of his proletarian short stories.  As a result, this work also draws attention to one of the more controversial intellectual and cultural issues during Japan’s “red decade” (1925-1935), the political role of literature in contesting the state’s dominance of state-society relations in imperial Japan.

Le conservatisme semble avoir au Japon une force peu commune, si on en juge par la longévité au pouvoir du Parti Libéral-Démocrate et ses liens avec le monde des affaires. Pourtant, alors que le Japon connaît plus que jamais des tensions avec ses voisins, rares sont les ouvrages à en retracer l’histoire. Par sa trajectoire intellectuelle et politique, entièrement vouée à la défense du confucianisme dans la société moderne et à la défense du régime impérial face à la montée de la démocratie, Yasuoka Masahiro (1898-1983) offre les moyens d’en comprendre les idées et les réseaux humains qui l’animent.

In early 20th-century Japan, the son of lower-class goldfish sellers falls in love with the beautiful daughter of his rich patron. After he is sent away to study the science of goldfish breeding, with strict orders to return and make his patron's fortune, he vows to devote his life to producing one ideal, perfect goldfish specimen to reflect his loved-one's beauty. This poignant and deft tale is presented along with the story of a pauper from Kyoto who teaches himself to be an accomplished chef.

Mutsuo Takahashi is one of contemporary Japan's best known poets and one of the most daring queer writers of the mid-twentieth century.  Takahashi’s writing shows an almost gleeful willingness to subvert the boundaries that have traditionally separated the high-brow writing of the literary academy and other, more plebeian writing, such as pornography. One way he does this is by describing erotic activity using the dense, highly wrought language typically found in poetry. Another way is to use his work to explore the kinds of existential and phenomenological themes seen in earlier 'literature of the flesh’ (nikutai bungaku).  Drawing on Lacanian theory, this article demonstrates that a major theme of Takahashi’s early writing is the incomplete and void nature of the self and the natural human inclination to reach for things outside the body. What makes Takahashi’s work so interesting, however, is not just the simple fact that he creates a ‘literature of the flesh’ that centres on homoeroticism, but the fact that by concentrating on homoerotic activity, he attempts to depict more than just the psychological dynamics involved in the sexual experiences of queer men. In homoeroticism, Takahashi finds an especially revealing case study that he believes to illustrate the dynamics of sexuality in general.  In this way, he resists the literary establishment's tendency to view literature about male homoeroticism as 'marginal' and shatters expectations about the place of homoeroticism within the broader system of literature.

(I am more than happy to send you an electronic copy upon request. You should also be able to find a PDF by Googling the title.)

Japan in the 1930s was a culturally complex land combining various syntheses and juxtapositions of Western and Japanese culture and thought. One phenomenon that exemplifies this is Japanese-style composition—here defined as music based on Western principles of composition but adopting elements from Japanese music and culture—which became a notable and debated new trend among Japanese composers in the late 1930s.

The main objective of this thesis is to understand Japanese-style composition as a phenomenon in the 1930s: what it was musically, why it emerged, and how it related to the social developments of the time. To accomplish this, the present study discusses the musical work and thought of the founding members of the composer group Shinkō sakkyokuka renmei (Federation of Emerging Composers).

By adopting Carl Dahlhaus’s structural study of history and the examination of musical works in their socio-cultural context, this thesis discusses the works of Shinkō sakkyokuka renmei as discourses that convey the ideas and values of their time. The approach is linked with studies emphasizing the “imaginary” and constantly changing nature of culture and nations: the thesis does not claim to recognize that which is, but which has been thought of as being Japanese. Identifying these musical elements—a procedure for which the thesis proposes a methodology—is considered to be the first step in enabling more contextualized analysis.

The results of this thesis suggest that Japanese-style composition in the 1930s was not a monolith, but followed various viewpoints and approaches. The motivations to adopt them ranged from the defense of the traditional Japanese way of life to the pursuit of the modernist aim of developing and renewing expression in Western-style music. These results suggest that prewar Japanese music introduced significantly more versatile viewpoints into Japanese-style composition than has been recognized to date—including even the use of relatively modern compositional techniques such as microtonality as a “Japanese element.” The musical approaches of each composer also merge with the discourses of the time related to traditionalism, modernism, and nationalism, and reflect the confusion between Japanese and Western culture apparent in Japan of the time. From this perspective, they end up constituting the social and cultural issues of their time.

Despite its centuries-long tradition of literary and artistic depictions of love between men, in the late nineteenth century, Japanese culture began to portray same-sex desire as immoral and even pathologically deviant. Writing the Love of Boys looks at the response to this mindset during the critical era of cultural ferment between the two world wars as a number of Japanese writers challenged the idea of love and desire between men as pathological.  This book focuses on a handful of key, modernist writers from the Taishō (1912-1926) and the first two decades of the Shōwa period (1926-1989), examining how they experimented with new language, genres, and ideas to find fresh ways to represent love and desire between men.  In particular, the book focuses on the personal and literary relationships between contemporaries such as the poet Murayama Kaita, the mystery writers Edogawa Ranpo and Hamao Shirō, the anthropologist Iwata Jun’ichi, and the avant-garde innovator Inagaki Taruho.

Writing the Love of Boys shows how these authors interjected the subject of male–male desire into discussions of modern art, aesthetics, and perversity. It also explores the impact of their efforts on contemporary Japanese culture, including the development of the tropes of male homoeroticism that recur so often in Japanese girls’ manga about bishōnen love.