Modern Japanese Literature

"Bleach" is a manga best-selling in the US and Japan in the early 2000s, published by Shuesha in its weekly "Shonen Jump" imprint; however, in America the "first arc" ("Soul Society Arc") of the story was received to great success, with the "second" ("Arrancar") and "third" ("Hueco Mundo") "arcs" meeting with great derision as "filler material" and plot-recycling.  However, I posit that much of this is due to cultural barriers, as the latter two arcs rely heavily on esoteric Buddhist symbology such as Aizen Myo-o and wish-fulfilling jewels, which were set up in the first arc. 

As such, this paper sets out to show that Buddhist imagery is in "Bleach" and is inherent to literary assessment of the story's value as a whole.  It shows that, in "Bleach," seeking spiritual transcendence drives character development, plot, and setting; that the Buddhist Wheel of Life best explains “powering-up” of characters to higher spiritual and physical planes of being; and that the story’s action and resolution depend on a wish-fulfilling jewel, with several characters rooted in such Buddhist archetypes as nagas (dragon deities), the Wisdom King Aizen Myô-ô, and the Sâkyamuni Buddha.

The thesis also gives many opportunities for further study, such as with the depictions (illustrations and narrative) of women's bodies both in the religious context and modern popular (boys') manga context; the use of religious epics as a means to success in "Shonen Jump's" most popular boys' manga in the US and Japan from 2001 - 2005; and a possible shift away from "necessary" tragic endings (that signal and uphold values of cultural uniformity) towards "happy endings" (that signal cultural acceptance of personal identity singularity) in Japanese manga, among younger creators and consumers.

This paper examines gendered speech in a corpus of 10 popular manga (Japanese comics) series, with attention to realism and genre-based differences. While traditionally described as a highly gendered language, Japanese recently appears to be becoming less so. Manga are often given as one influential factor for these changes, particularly regarding girls’ use of masculine first person pronouns; however, previous research has been contradictory, and the importance of gendered-genres leads one to anticipate differences in characters’ speech. In response, I looked at two markers of Japanese gendered speech, personal pronouns and sentence final particles (SFPs), finding that while personal pronoun usage was generally normative, all genders used a variety of gendered SFPs. While genre-based variations such as more stereotypical speech in manga for boys may reflect narrative differences, I suggest that the data show that manga reflect previously established changes, as with SFPs, thus appearing consistent with reports that mass-media are not a clear source of linguistic change. However, their perception as low texts may be influential in their association with negative changes, even when such claims are not supported empirically, as with PPs. In this way, popular media’s role in changing gendered language is shown to be more complex than commonly assumed.

Key words: Manga, Japanese, corpus linguistics, personal pronouns, sentence final particles, yawakuri-go

In Buddhist culture, the young and beautiful female as corpse has often been presented as a sight of soteriological potential, a demonstration of the illusions of beauty, permanence, and identity coherence. A series of paintings  by Matsui Fuyuko 松井冬子 (b. 1974) is only the most recent example of the genre known as “kusōzu” 九相[想]図 (Pictures of the Nine Stages [of a decaying corpse]) (henceforth kusōzu),  which depicts the subject.  Some half-century earlier, Itō Seiu 伊藤晴雨 (1882-1961)  had also produced a substantial corpus of kusōzu. This essay examines the ways in which these artists treat the theme and how the work of Seiu and the visual culture of his time are discernible in the art of Matsui. Matsui distinguishes her series from the genre as it is generally understood by presenting the nine states of decomposition as the results of nine motives for suicide. This, in addition to a number of other aspects of her work makes the series considerably different from its purported model, and links it to an alternative cultural genealogy. To show this, I will summarize the general understanding of kusōzu as it has been presented so far in scholarship and discuss the erotic and grotesque aspects of kusōzu, before introducing the works of Seiu, with a brief explanation of eroguro. I then position Matsui’s series against both premodern kusōzu interpretations and within modern Japanese visual culture. The introduction serves to support my suggestion that her visual influences, which I locate in the cultural history and images of anatomical dissection, the nude in Japanese art, and of self-mutilation/suicide, are all what we might call, if not Buddhist “corpse contemplations,” “dismemberment contemplations” of one kind or another. By reconceiving the genre within this broader category we can release it from a hermeneutics that confines it to a “religious” framework. Other works of her oeuvre support this, and help to shift interpretation of her kusōzu series away from the contention that it is a simplistic reworking of Buddhist imagery. The origins of this “contemplation of dismemberment” are to be found not only in Buddhist thought and practice, but in the aesthetic of the grotesque, which was properly developed in Japan, especially as eroguro エログロ (“erotic-grotesque”), during the modern period and which engages all three visual influences—anatomical dissection, the nude in Japanese art, and self-mutilation/suicide—I mention above. Thus, we find a convergence of Buddhist ideas and visual culture with those of the grotesque, a convergence that helps us to reappraise both. I additionally propose that while the gazes prompted by the subjects of depictions of bodies of the dissected, of the nude, of suicide, and the grotesque, and the functions of those gazes appear to be significantly different, they in fact present similarities with those ideally galvanized by the kusōzu. The principle similarity is the treatment of unstable boundaries and [dis]memberment. They also present comparable anxieties concerning the act of looking.

Keluarga adalah satu institusi penting dalam masyarakat di manapun berada. Dari keluarga individu berasal, tumbuh, dan menjadi dewasa kemudian membentuk keluarga sendiri dan akhirnya meninggal dunia juga dalam keluarga. Jepang yang berada pada belahan timur mengalami perubahan struktur keluarga karena pengaruh politik, ekonomi, dan budaya. Ogawa Yoko seorang novelis Jepang kemudian menangkap perubahan struktur keluarga tersebut dan menawarkan satu struktur keluarga yang disebut dengan interdependent family relationship yang merupakan pengejawantahan dari ideologi yang dianutnya yaitu sekte Konko.

Sementara itu pada masyarakat Indonesia sebagaimana masyarakat Jepang yang merupakan negara bagian Timur memiliki beragam suku dan agama. Keberagaman suku dan agama mempengaruhi struktur keluarga yang terbentuk di Indonesia. Bagaimana implementasi struktur keluarga Jepang dalam keluarga Indonesia merupakan bahasan pada tulisan ini. Pendekatan yang digunakan adalah sosiologi sastra dengan metode kajian pustaka. Hipotesis dari tulisan ini adalah faktor pembentuk struktur keluarga di Indonesia adalah latar belakang suku dan agama.

Kata kunci: sosiologi sastra, keluarga, struktur keluarga, Ogawa Yoko

In Pursuit of Universalism is the first comprehensive, English-language study of early twentieth-century Japanese modern art. In this groundbreaking work, which is also the inaugural recipient of the Phillips Book Prize (awarded by the Phillips Collection Center for the Study of Modern Art), Alicia Volk constructs a critical theory of artistic modernism in Japan between 1900 and 1930 by analyzing the work of Yorozu Tetsugorô, whose paintings she casts as a polemic response to Japan's late-nineteenth-century encounter with European art. Volk places Yorozu at the forefront of a movement that sought to define Japanese art's role in the world by interrogating and ultimately refusing the opposition between East and West. Instead, she vividly demonstrates how Yorozu reframed modern art's dualistic underpinnings and transposed them into an inclusive and synthetic relation between the local and the universal. By looking closely at questions of cultural exchange within modern art, In Pursuit of Universalism offers a new and vital account of both Japanese and Euroamerican modernism. Volk's pioneering study builds bridges between the fields of modern and Asian art and takes its place at the forefront of the emerging global history of modern art.

Reviews:
“Masterfully written. . . . Alicia Volk embarks upon a fascinating journey to develop an alternative perspective for narrating the complexities of the Japanese art scene. . . . Volk’s stimulating book definitively illuminates a new horizon for the field of modern Asian art. . . . It is precisely what the discipline needs.”— Journal Of Oriental Studies

“Forceful and eloquent. . . . Volk masterfully unravels the knotty strands that coalesced to shape one individual artist’s perception of self and his work within existing academic, institutional, and professional structures. . . . [The] book deserves praise for being a substantially rigorous and provocative probe into the search for universalism in a differentiated world.”—International Journal Of Asian Studies

“Deserves to be read by all historians of modern art and East Asian culture.”—Journal Of Asian Studies

“An impressive book, beautifully produced and sustaining intellectual rigour with its detailed, stimulating research.”— Japanese Studies

“Excellent. . . . Exquisitely written.”—The Art Bulletin

"Written beautifully and compellingly... Volk has made an important contribution to the growing literature on alternative artistic modernisms." --The Journal of Japanese Studies

"In presenting readers with this most cogent argument for the emergence of Japanese modernism through the artistic engagement of one of its central players Volk has made a genuinely original contribution to the field."--New Zealand Journal of Asian Studies

"This is an... intellectually nourishing read, in which Volk's voluminous knowledge of art movements and discourse creates a text of commanding erudition."--The Japan Times

“Volk's impressive study rethinks the East-West binary often reiterated in discussions of Japanese modernism by reinserting local aspects into the universalizing tendencies of modernism itself. The book makes an important contribution to the growing literature on modern Japanese art history by providing an alternative comparative framework for understanding the global development of modernism that decenters Euro-America. Rigorously historical in her critique, Volk destabilizes our understanding of the Japanese experience of modernity through the prism of Yorozu's singular vision of the self, leaving us questioning conventional wisdom and contented to wobble.”—Gennifer Weisenfeld, Duke University

“In Volk's affectingly stunning and deeply reflective study of the Japanese artist Yorozu Tetsugorō's work between 1910-1930, we have a profoundly historical reminder of how modernism everywhere struggled to meet the demands of the new with the readymades of received artistic practices. In this study of Yorozu's utopian universalist project, Volk has imaginatively broadened our understanding of the modernist moment and perceptively captured its global program to unify art and life, contemporary culture and history.”—Harry Harootunian, author of Overcome by Modernity: History, Culture and Community in Interwar Japan

Published on the fifth anniversary of the March 11, 2011 earthquake, tsunami, and Fukushima meltdown, this book explores the ways that many of Japan's most important poets have written about and represented the disasters in their work.  This book contains a study of the themes, functions, and issues in that literature as well as copious translations of the original poetry. 

"In a time that for many of us in Tokyo and beyond feels far removed from the events of March 11, 2011, when we are not sure how to retain and respect those moments and their aftermath, this collection does exactly that. Jeffrey Angles' smart, useful introduction and the poems in this collection help us find a language of grace, dignity and poignancy, not only to look back but also to look forward." --David H. Slater

Yaoi/BL Fandom Survey (only takes 10 mins to complete): https://leeds.onlinesurveys.ac.uk/blfandomsurvey
Male–male sexuality is the central trope of Boys’ Love (BL) manga with stories tending to revolve around a central uke-seme (‘bottom’–‘top’) pair. Although focused on men, BL is produced and consumed primarily by women. This article presents, from an anglophone British perspective, analysis of age-stratified male–male romance – paederasty – as portrayed in BL. My corpus consists of 234 commercially-translated original Japanese BL manga stories, created by 100 different mangaka (author-artists), published commercially in English between 2003 and 2012. A total of 68 (30%) of these stories were identified as involving agestratified relationships, eight of which were selected for detailed analysis. Seven were selected for typicality: Waru (2007) by Yukari Hashida deemed the most typical. Fangs (2008) by Hiroki Kusumoto was also included in analysis as the most atypical age-stratified story in order to test the robustness of identified patterns. I argue that that, from an anglophone perspective, the characteristic themes of age-stratified BL map surprising well onto the eroticised intra-familial dynamics of Freud and the intra- and inter-familial economics of Lévi-Strauss. The patterns identified are evidenced and discussed under the following headings: the mother identified son, the doubly divested man, the castrated father, men on the market and the mother with the phallus. These themes help build and substantiate my argument that age-stratified BL might work, within an anglophone context at least, as a feminist critique of patriarchy through the mechanism of phallic divestiture.

Nella cultura italiana, come in quella occidentale in generale, la locuzione "letteratura per ragazze" può essere usata per indicare un insieme eterogeneo di libri, dai racconti per bambini ai romanzi per adolescenti a sfondo romantico, fantasy o fantascientifico. Al contrario in Giappone la letteratura per ragazze fa parte di un complesso sistema di mezzi espressivi chiamato shōjo bunka ( 少女文化), "cultura delle ragazze", che pur presentando differenti manifestazioni pratiche (fumetti, teatro, vestiario) risponde ad un'identica estetica di fondo, che ebbe una sua definizione recente negli anni Settanta, ma che trova le sue origini all'inizio del secolo scorso, con la nascita delle riviste dedicate specificatamente alle adolescenti.

Unpublished draft read at the conference "Environments: Landscapes and the Mind" (Goldsmiths University, London, June 19th 2015)

Matsumoto Takashi (b. 1949) is a Japanese lyricist, poet and novelist best known for his work with Happy End (はっぴいえんど), an influential rock band of the early 1970s. In this paper, I propose a close reading of the lyrical cityscape that Matsumoto crafted for the band's 1971 concept album Kazemachi roman ('Wind City Romance'), and an exploration of how this landscape inscribed itself into the tradition of spatialised representations of Japanese urban identity. Simultaneously romantic and sardonic, Kazemachi roman struck a chord with a generation of youths that in the wake of the failed student movement of the late 1960s had become largely depoliticised. The album blends surrealistic Japanese-language lyrics and American West-Coast rock to imagine a Tokyo that appears both nostalgic and modern: a fictional space of bucolic suburbs and bustling downtown city life that in reality had already been largely erased by the frantic pace of post-war city planning in the lead-up to the 1964 Olympic Games. This paper argues that Matsumoto employs a technique of projecting a panoramic collage of the past onto the landscape of the present to cope with the losses that homogenising modernity has inflicted on the urban environment. In doing so, he draws on a tradition of fantastic literature by Japanese interwar writers such as Miyazawa Kenji or Edogawa Ranpo, while distancing himself from the major trends in popular music lyrics of his age: the confessional poetry of the folk movement and the sentimentalist-nostalgic mode of the kayōkyoku genre. The result is a fantasist-nostalgic gaze that prefigures the post-modernist urbanism in the works of novelists such as Murakami Haruki.

The aim of this paper is to provide some hints for a critical discussion about the question of nihilism in Japan from a cultural and philosophical viewpoint. Through the perspectives of Foucault and Bourdieu, different cultural phenomena in modern Japan could be defined as “technologies of the self” and “habitus”: the practice of writing among some novelists; the practice of philosophy and (self-) awareness among thinkers influenced by Buddhism; as well as, in a completely different field, the practice of performing arts (dance, theatre, music), or martial arts (budō). The focus of this essay is on recognising two commonly spread hermeneutic tendencies: 1) nihilism in Japan has been more often discussed in the context of the problem of the individual than the problem of truth. 2) The debate on the individual and nihilism in Japan has not been dealt with in exclusively intellectual terms. Rather it has immediately referred to practical levels in which the dialectics between technologies of political control and technologies of the self have played a fundamental part.

This paper studies the role played by fansubbing groups in the distribution and translation of “hentai”, anime (Japanese animation) with pornographic content. The chapter starts by defining anime and hentai, then describes the main consumers of this medium, the otaku, as well as explaining how (hentai) anime is distributed online by human (the “otaku”) and non-human actors (bots, seeders and leechers). Afterwards, the article discusses fansubbing, the fansubbing of hentai, censorship in anime and hentai anime, and concludes with a critical analysis of two controversial hentai genres, lolicon and shotacon, pondering over the ethical aspects of the translation and distribution of this material. The author concludes that even if lolicon and shotacon are controversial genres, they should not be banned and its consumers should not be prosecuted. The reasons why people view these genres and, crucially, how and why they are translated and distributed, are more important and relevant aspects of study for scholars.

In the modern age, Occidentalism as a process of signifying practices based upon the notion of “the West” has played a hegemonic role in the configuration of collective identity and alterity. The imaginary geography of “the West” has been one of the most effective in inscribing the whole world and humanity along hierarchic and fluid lines of inclusion and exclusion, encompassing global relations of power in geopolitical contexts, as well as knowledge practices in geocultural spheres. In spite of post-colonial engagements aimed to de-naturalize the notions of “the West” and “the East”, little critical attentions has been paid so far to the inter-relational and complicit processes between Occidentalism, Orientalism and self-Orientalism.           

This paper shall explore the historical genalogy of discourses on Italy (Italianism) in modern Japan, which brought to the Italian boom in the 1990s, elevating at present Italy to the rank of the most-loved foreign country among Japanese women and youth. This study suggests that the prevailing image of Italy has been articulated and re-produced since modern age as an ambivalent icon: a superior-seeming and ‘archetypical West’ based on the insistence of its antique and classical features (Roman Empire, Humanism, Renaissance), and at the same time, an inferior-seeming and ‘backward West’ based on the insistence of its pre-moderns aspects (history, gastronomy, fashion, landscapes, cheerful people, etc.). The popularity of this configuration suggests the strategic relevance of the Italian looking glass self which enables to mediate deep rooted and contradictory pro-western and anti-western tensions in modern and contemporary Japan.

This volume contributes to an emerging field of German Asian studies by bringing together cutting-edge scholarship from international scholars in a variety of fields. The chapters survey the history of German-Japanese relations from 1860 to 2000, examining many facets of their dynamic, ever-evolving relationship. While the focus is on transnational encounters between Germany and Japan, the volume also acknowledges in some instances the usefulness of comparative studies. Moreover, by rejecting traditional dichotomies between the East and the West, the chapters gathered here highlight the rather intimate ways in which Germans and Japanese cooperated and negotiated the challenges of modernity in a range of topics that include culture, diplomacy, geography, history, law, literature, philosophy, politics, and sports.
The book actually appeared on Dec. 15, 2015.

Critical debate on Enchi Fumiko’s historical fiction Onnazaka (tr. The Waiting Years) has overlooked her text’s dialogue with transnational psychoanalysis and feminist reappropriations of its canonical parables. This paper examines Enchi’s engagement with the Oedipus myth of European psychoanalysis and the Ajaatas’atru/Ajase myth of Buddhism, which Japanese psychoanalyst Kosawa Heisaku used to formulate an alternative to the Oedipal paradigm. I argue that Enchi critiques both traditional and psychoanalytic readings of the Buddhist sutra as inherently anti-feminist. Although she acknowledges the moral and ideological power of the parables of Oedipus and Ajaatas’atru, she ultimately rejects both models of subjectivity within the family and forwards a new model of feminine subjectivity.

Like many Japanese intellectuals, Akutagawa Ryūnosuke had a deep interest in European traditions, including Christianity. Scholars have often looked at Akutagawa's representations of religion to shed light on the author's personal beliefs; in this article I focus on the writer's portrayal of the Kirishitan of the seventeenth century as a metaphor for the ideological and cultural transformations of modern Japan. Through a close reading of three short stories, I investigate the interplay of perceptions and representations of national past and foreign culture in Taisho Japan and the role that Akutagawa's "rediscovery" of early Kirishitan culture played within this context.

This essay examines representations of the hermaphrodite
in Japan during the Meiji and Taishō periods. The advent
of sexology, which promoted a strict binary sexual paradigm,
increasingly denied the existence of “true” hermaphroditism,
as it challenged categories of female and male, as sexologists
defined them, physically, emotionally, and behaviorally. The
acceptable gendered behavior of the hermaphrodite, who had
the sex organs or tissue of both sexes, could not be known.
Discourse on the hermaphrodite emerged to counter the science of sex, representing those who violated the expectations of either category of sex. Specifically, I interrogate the trope of hermaphroditism in the stories of Shimizu Shikin (1868-1933) and Tanizaki Jun’ichiro (1886-1965), who use it for
different purposes. Shikin aims to advance the cause of women’s rights, while Tanizaki employs it for aesthetic reasons.
The hermaphroditic figure is viewed in a positive light in Shikin’s
work, and as intriguing, though decadent in Tanizaki’s.

This paper examines four of Nagai Kafu's works, each featuring a strong female character, to analyze how the author's perspective on women in society developed over time. The first two stories examined are 'The Inebriated Beauty' and 'The Snake Charmer', from his time abroad in America and France. In these stories, gender is mediated by race, but the male narrator is exposed as being deeply embedded in the Meiji discourse on women. The next two stories examined are 'May Darkness' (from 'Night Tales of Shinbashi') and 'During the Rains', both of which are set in Japan. Here, the women are not marginalized due to their race but by their very position as women in Japanese society. Kafu examines their roles as sex workers in the capitalist economy, subjecting men and male discourse to critical scrutiny. As a writer who built his oeuvre on constructions of the 'Other', here we see Kafu as keenly aware of the processes of Othering at work in his own society.

The untimely deceased architect-poet, Michizō Tachihara (1914-39), a city-boy born in the center of Tokyo, forged his path as a fledging poet from the time he was in higher school; a legacy that would, in time, place him in the aegis of the literary circles of Tatsuo Hori and Saisei Murou. His correspondence with Hori and Murou enabled him to annually visit the countryside of Shinano-Oiwake as an undergraduate. Here, he nourished his romantic piece, “Buildings in the Artists’ Colony at the foot of Mt. Asama,” his 1937 graduation project.
He, living in the city and the suburb, has ever been concentrated on the subject of “the artificial and the natural” to reach a transcendental view of architecture finally theorized in his diploma thesis “Methodology” in December 1936, and his ideal architecture was the Hellas-Gothic, a possible style truly Classical that should involve the spirits of the Greek –Reason– and of the Gothic –Mercy– to become something beyond them. All his theories only should have been constructed by a man-in-the-middle; a Hyacinthus, his mythical self-definition as a god, beloved and killed by Apollo who is longing in vain to be a child of Dionysos.

(East Asian Architectural Conference 2015, 2015)

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

El concepto de la Nueva Mujer surge en el siglo XIX como un amplio ideal de corte feminista que representa los cambios producidos en el rol femenino en la sociedad occidental del momento. La mujer, relegada hasta entonces a un papel secundario en las sociedades europeas, empieza a presentarse entonces como un individuo educado que reclama sus derechos e independencia, y denuncia la situación de represión que ha sufrido hasta la fecha, a la sombra de la figura masculina que predominaba en las sociedades patriarcales de los países más avanzados. En la Literatura, diversas autoras y autores comenzaron a reflejar, de forma principalmente artística pero también reivindicativa, la circunstancia de la mujer en su secesión de la sociedad. En Japón, la Restauración Meiji (jp. Meiji Ishin 明治維新) de 1868 significó la apertura definitiva del país tras más de dos siglos de las llamadas políticas sakoku 鎖国, que habían regulado las relaciones internacionales del país hasta la fecha. Dicha apertura dio lugar al período de modernización de Japón, durante el cual comenzaron a llegar las últimas tendencias e innovaciones del exterior. Esta época de Ilustración o Bunmei-kaika 文明開化 trajo consigo la influencia de las ideologías occidentales, dando lugar, entre otros, a avances sociales (jp. Risshin shusse 立身出世) en todos los niveles de los colectivos.

Ryu Murakami’s "Sixty-Nine" (1987) is a semi-autobiographical story about a high school rebel’s path to personal growth in the late 1960s in the small town of Sasebo where Murakami spent the defining years of his youth. Besides being a humorous narrative about a student’s disillusion with his teachers and his subsequent revenge on them, Sixty-Nine shows Murakami’s consistent interest in the young generation and Japan’s education system. The novel deals with significant issues which this article identifies as the attitudes of young people in 1969 and Western influence on Japanese youth culture – especially the impact of foreign music, movies and philosophy, Japan during a modernization period and a process of redefining national identity after World War II, and an ideological gap between the generations. This article seeks to analyze these key issues and to put them in relation to the narrative of Sixty-Nine with the aim of providing an insight into Murakami’s artistic work.

The career of novelist Haruki Murakami has conventionally been divided into two periods: detachment and commitment. Murakami's transition to commitment, in the sense of a social engagement with a defined political sensibility, is generally seen to begin with the novel The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle [1995]. However, the so-called Rat Trilogy (Hear the Wind Sing [1979], Pinball, 1973 [1980] and A Wild Sheep Chase [1982]) sees Murakami address the concept of shutaisei—the question of individual agency and subjectivity at the centre of Japan's student activist movement in the late 1960s. Examining the trilogy's central characters through the lens of shutaisei, I argue that a commitment to political and historical awareness can already be found in Murakami's early works.

Histoire@Politique, Politique, culture, société (Revue scientifique du Centre d’histoire de Sciences Po), « Comptes rendus – ouvrages »,
http://www.histoire-politique.fr/index.php?numero=31&rub=comptes-rendus&item=627
Mis en ligne le 23 mai 2017

Wednesdays 1:15 pm -4:00 pm classroom: Kohlberg 334 office: Kohl 336 x6875 [email protected] Office hours: Mon and Tues 3:30 -4:30 and by appointment Course description: A lively and cosmopolitan modernist literature and art scene thrived in early 20th Century Japan, as cities such as Tokyo and Osaka grew rapidly, and writers and artists established connections with their counterparts across the globe. During the same decades, stylish "modern girls" and "modern boys" in Japanese cities were hailed in the press as avatars of newly liberated lifestyles and fashions, or derided by conservatives as the dupes of corrupt Western influences. This course will explore Japanese modernist literature, its global connections, and its social context, using a seminar format. Topics include: Japanese avantgarde literature, film, and art; gender, sexuality, and modernism; the politics and aesthetics of "modern" life and lifestyles; socialist and anarchist literature; "ero-guro-nonsense" as subversive literature; wartime censorship and propaganda; and Japanese influences on global modernisms. Readings and discussion will be in English; students with advanced Japanese reading ability are encouraged to read the texts in the original. Humanities. 1 credit. Eligible for Asian Studies credit.

In the first half of the twentieth century, when Japanese and Arabic poets began writing free-verse poetry, many terms were proposed as labels for the new form. In addition to the calques on " free verse, " neologisms were created to name the new poetry. What is striking is that, in these two quite different literary spheres, a number of the proposed neologisms were the same: for example, in both Japanese and Arabic the terms prose poetry, modern poetry, and colloquial poetry were proposed (among others) as alternatives to the label free poetry. This essay provides an annotated list of the neologisms in Japanese and Arabic, with a list of English terms for comparison; and by referring to the contemporary Japanese and Arabic criticism on the topic of poetic innovation, this essay attempts to explain the similarity between the Japanese and Arabic neologisms. In short, the Japanese and Arabophone arguments in favour of adapting the free-verse form were based on similar premises regarding modernity, freedom, and a vision of literary history that was rooted in an evolutionary theory of genre development.

Visual and cultural analysis of Maekawa Senpan's Shitōchō  偲糖帖 (Remembered Sweets, 1945), a woodblock-printed compendium of sweets that was conceived of and executed during a period of severe wartime food shortage. The book is in the Pulverer Collection of Japanese illustrated books of the Freer Gallery of Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC and is featured on The World of the Japanese Illustrated Book website. My commentary, along with a complete set of readable images of the book,  may be found here: http://pulverer.si.edu/node/455/title/1.

Visual and cultural analysis of Nihon no yūshū 日本の憂愁 (1955), a posthumous book featuring prints, poems and other texts by the artist Onchi Kōshirō. The book is part of the Pulverer Collection of Japanese illustrated books of the Freer Gallery of Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC and is featured on The World of the Japanese Illustrated Book website. My commentary, along with a complete set of readable images of the book, may be found here: http://pulverer.si.edu/node/461/title/1.

This research aims at uncovering the structure of Japanese family set up by Ogawa Yoko in her three novels, i.e. Kifujin A No Sosei, Hakase No Aishita Suushiki, and Miina No Koushin. It is a qualitative research using library research as its method. Social field proposed by Bourdieu and ie system of Japanese traditional family have been chosen to analyse the issue. This research has found out that Ogawa Yoko had caught the change of the family structure taking place in her society and has expressed it in her three novels. The family structure Ogawa Yoko has developed differs from both the structure of Japanese traditional family and modern family. Thus, Ogawa Yoko has developed interdependent family relationship / 相互依存的家族関係 (sougoizonteki kazokukankei).

Ogawa Yoko as a Japanese novelist mostly features the life of contemporary Japanese society in her novels. One that stands out from her works is the image of the Japanese family structure. Ogawa outlines the Japanese family structure in contrast to the Japanese family structure in actual society, as in the novel Kifunjin A No Sosei, Hakase No Aishita Suushiki, and Miina No Koushin. These three novels depict Japanese family structure more complex than her other novels. How Ogawa described Japanese family structure in the three novels is the issue on this article. This article is a literature study; data were collected from the three novels and analyzed using sociological literature approach and the concept of Japanese traditional family known as ie system. This paper shows that there was an implementation of the ie system in the three novels yet it was only a part of the ie concept.

Keywords: Ogawa Yoko, ie system, family structure

ABSTRAK
Ogawa Yoko sebagai seorang novelis berkebangsaan Jepang kebanyakan menampilkan kehidupan masyarakat Jepang kontemporer dalam novel-novelnya. Salah satu yang menonjol dari karya-karyanya adalah gambaran struktur keluarga Jepang. Ogawa menguraikan struktur keluarga Jepang bertolak belakang dengan struktur keluarga Jepang dalam masyarakat yang sebenarnya, seperti pada novel Kifunjin A no Sosei, Hakase no Aishita Suushiki, dan Miina no Koushin. Pada ketiga novel ini terlihat penggambaran struktur keluarga Jepang lebih kompleks bila dibandingkan dengan beberapa novelnya yang lain. Bagaimana Ogawa menggambarkan struktur keluarga Jepang dalam ketiga novel di atas menjadi permasalahan pada tulisan ini. Tulisan ini merupakan kajian kepustakaan dengan data dikumpulkan dari ketiga novel kemudian dianalisis menggunakan pendekatan sosiologi sastra dan konsep keluarga Jepang tradisional, yaitu sistem ie. Dari tulisan ini diketahui bahwa pada ketiga novel masih terdapat penerapan sistem ie namun hanya bersifat sebagian saja dari konsep ie.

Kata kunci: Ogawa Yoko, sistem ie, struktur keluarga

Stylistically breaking from his 1960s Nikkatsu films, cult director Suzuki Seijun entered Japan's pre-World War II era with Zigeunerweisen (1980). Suzuki forgoes conventional narrative to set up a world of random associations and misleading mismatches and recreates the unevenness and double life of the culturally shifting prewar era. From his position in late postwar Japan, he questions the nature of representation and the discourse of authenticity surrounding history and culture in the 1920s and 1930s. His deliberateness in this comments on the process of representation, the function of nostalgia, and the definition of modernity itself, as Suzuki translates prewar culture into film.

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

Visual and cultural analysis of Nihon no hana 日本の花(1946), a book pairing pictures and poetry by diverse artists and poets on the theme of flowers. The book is part of the Pulverer Collection of Japanese illustrated books of the Freer Gallery of Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC and is featured on The World of the Japanese Illustrated Book website. My commentary, along with a complete set of readable images of the book, may be found here: http://pulverer.si.edu/node/462/title/1.

In this paper, I analyse the Japanese reception of Cubist Poems, a collection of experimental poetry published in 1914 by the American painter Max Weber (1881‒1961).[2] First, I provide information on this little-known collection and its author, before offering a general description of the field of cultural production in 1910s and 1920s Tokyo, a period that roughly corresponds to the reign of Emperor Taishō (1912‒1926). I employ a number of theoretical tools drawn from the works of Pierre Bourdieu. Part 2 of the paper is structured as a historical survey of the presentation of Cubist Poems in 1914‒1925 Japan. In the Japanese cultural world, Weber’s collection attracted an interest that was unparalleled in any other country, perhaps even in the English-speaking world. Finally, I offer interpretations of the causes and characteristics of this reception.

The focus of this thesis is an analysis of Kirino Natsuo’s novel Poritikon (“Politikon”, 2011). The thesis follows two major threads:  Poritikon  as a Kirino Natsuo novel and a presence of motifs present  in  her  prior  work  (such  as  her  handling  of  genre/s,  portrayal  of  characters,  themes, messages or criticism), as well as a utopian or dystopian novel. To this end, the thesis is introduced by  extensive  chapters  on  Kirino’s  oeuvre  and  the  utopian/dystopian  literature,  respectively,
followed by an analysis of  Poritikon  from these two angles. It is my concern to introduce a broader perspective on Kirino Natsuo’s writing (as she is often regarded as an author of crime fiction), as well as introduce the novel as an interesting example of her writing, since utopian literature is an untypical, or not the most popular genre within the literary landscape of Japan.