Routledge Handbook of Japanese Media

Fabienne Darling-Wolf

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9781138917415
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317422921
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Ethnic Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

The Routledge Handbook of Japanese Media is a comprehensive study of the key contemporary issues and scholarly discussions around Japanese media. Covering a wide variety of forms and types from newspapers, television and fi lm, to music, manga and social media, this book examines the role of the media in shaping Japanese society from the Meiji era's intense engagement with Western culture to our current period of rapid digital innovation.

Featuring the work of an international team of scholars, the handbook is divided into five thematic sections:

• The historical background of the Japanese media from the Meiji Restoration to the immediate postwar era.
• Japan's national and political identity imagined and negotiated through diff erent aspects of the media, including Japan's 'lost decade' of the 1990s and today's 'post- Fukushima' society.
• The representation of Japanese identities, including race, gender and sexuality, in contemporary media.
• The role of Japanese media in everyday life.
• The Japanese media in a broader global context.

Taking an interdisciplinary approach, this book will be of use to students and scholars of Japanese culture and society, Asian media and Japanese popular culture.

Part I

The rise of Japanese media

1

Who’s the ‘great imitator’?

Critical reflections on Japan’s historical transcultural influence

Fabienne Darling-Wolf

Is this Orientalism? Japan’s early engagement with ‘the West’

In 1867 – about 14 years after Commodore Perry’s arrival on Japanese shores forced the country to open up – Japanese art hit the Paris exposition. By the time the Universal Exposition of 1878 (also held in Paris) closed its doors, enthusiasm for all things Japanese had, according to Ernest Chesneau’s 1878 article Le Japon à Paris, ‘swept through the studios [of Paris] like a flame on gunpowder’ (cited in Napier 2007, p. 29). Speaking of the growth of all things Japanese in the 11 years between the two expositions Chesneau concludes that ‘This is no longer a fashion, this is a passion, this is madness’ (p. 34). Artists and intellectuals enthusiastically started to integrate elements of Japanese visual arts into their own work. They also became enamored with all sorts of Japanese cultural practices – they were, in a sense, the first generation of otaku. Famous Japonisants like the Goncourt brothers or writer Emile Zola and, of course, artists like Monet, Van Gogh or Rodin, not only collected Japanese woodcut prints, but they also drank Japanese sake, ate Japanese food with chopsticks and composed poems of haiku inspiration.

As art historian Siegfried Wichmann (1981) puts it, while ‘[i]‌t is impossible to establish a precise or approximate date when Europe and the Far East can be said to have first encountered one another … From the very beginning, all European references to the subject show an intense interest’ (p. 11). The ‘madness’ would eventually reach far beyond the studios of French artists and intellectuals to permeate all aspects of society as ‘Japonisme soon entered the public domain and was adopted as a favorite style, discernable in such realms as fashion, interior design, and gastronomy’ (Genova 2009, p. 453). Even ‘the way the fashionable Parisienne stood and moved between 1860 and 1900 was, so to speak, imported from Japan’ (Wichmann 1981, p. 19).

The significance of Japanese influence on European arts at the time is well established (see for example, Hokenson 2004; Lambourne 2005; Wichmann 1981) and a detailed analysis of Japonisme’s impact on European visual aesthetic is beyond the scope of this chapter. A few of the best-known examples include Vincent Van Gogh’s numerous paintings ostensibly based on Japanese prints – which Wichmann characterizes as ‘more Japanese than their Japanese models’ (p. 42) – and Claude Monet’s 1876 La Japonaise featuring his wife holding a fan and wearing a red kimono. As Van Gogh himself put it, ‘We like Japanese painting, we have felt its influence, all the Impressionists have that in common’ (cited in Wichmann 1981, p. 42). Later on, the Art Nouveau prints of Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Pierre Bonnard or Jacques Villon, and the works of the French cubists and surrealists would also be associated with the movement. Describing Japonisme as a ‘force that stimulated the development of modern art’ (p. 7) Wichmann notes that it ‘gave rise to a whole new range of subject matter, new techniques and new artistic devices’ (p. 10).

While most often associated with the European – particularly French – context, Japonisme nevertheless quickly spread beyond France’s borders. Siegfried Bing’s Paris-based Japonist review Le Japon Artistique [Artistic Japan] featured French, English and German editions and was read across Europe and the United States by groups of Japanese art aficionados united by ‘shared practices of art appreciation and a desire for antique objects that had not been adapted for the Western export market’ (Rodman 2013, p. 490). As early as 1876, the Japanese exhibit at the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition set off a ‘Japan craze’ on the American continent and by the 1880s ‘Japonisme had become a popular trend that shaped US decor, architecture, and popular culture as much as it did aesthetic debates and the development of fine arts’ (Patterson 2015, p. 667). As Tara Rodman (2013) demonstrates in her analysis of the movement’s influence on modernist theater, diversely localized strands of Japonisme developed from Boston to Seattle. Japanese influence would eventually permeate virtually all aspects of European and American culture – from fashion and advertising (Wickmann 1981) to literature (Patterson 2015), theater (Rodman 2013), music (Stankis 2015) and architecture (Nute 1993) – resulting in ‘a shift of Copernican proportions, marking the end of Eurocentric illusionism and the beginnings of a new, modern way of seeing and recording the world’ (Hokenson 2004, p. 17).

Because the practice and study of Japonisme involves the borrowing of Eastern cultural elements by representatives of the West, ‘the provocative comparative model of Orientalism has become an obvious referent’ (Genova 2009, p. 455) for its academic critique (see, for example, Evett 1982; MacKenzie 1995; Yoshihara 2004). Describing Said’s 1978 publication of Orientalism as a ‘bombshell that even several decades later continues to exert enormous influence on the study of … the interaction between Western and non-Western cultures’, Susan Napier (2007, p. 7) discusses the difficulty of resisting this seductively simple ‘theoretical straightjacket’ (p. 10). Certainly, European and North American encounters with Japanese culture were, and often continue to be, imbued with ‘teeth-grittingly offensive examples’ (p. 9) of racism and misrepresentations, and elements of Orientalism can clearly be found in many European Japonist texts – Pierre Loti’s Madame Chrysanthemum, which Jan Walsh Hokenson (2004, p. 23) rightly characterizes as illustrating ‘some of the basest aspects of “orientalist” colonial paternalism, with a contemptuous feminization of the subject’ comes to mind. However, the blanket application of Said’s concept to all aspects of Euro-American engagement with Japanese culture is not particularly productive. A number of features specific to the nature of the movement and to Japan’s historical relationship to ‘the West’¹ significantly complicate the picture of this multidimensional phenomenon.

First of all, the specifics of Japanese history resulted in a different positioning in relationship to Europe and the United States than that of most of the other nations Said discusses. Unlike India and most of Asia, Japan was never formally colonized by Western powers. Because it was ‘encountered so late in the long bloody history of colonialism, Japan did not fit into the established rubrics of the Orientalist enterprise’ (Hokenson 2004, p. 25). While the leaders of the 1868 Meiji Restoration were clearly reacting to the menace of Western domination made obvious by the arrival of Perry’s ‘black ships’ in Uraga Harbor, Japan’s ‘revolution from above’ was a strategic effort to thwart the kind of military intervention suffered by other Asian nations (Duus 1998). Their decision to open Japan’s borders and actively import Western technology, institutions and philosophies was often fueled by anti-foreign rhetoric – the original slogan of the restoration was ‘Revere the Emperor and Expel the Barbarians’ (Dower 1993, p. 3) – rather than admiration. And if Westernization was recognized as a crucial step on the road to modernity, Western influence was merged with Japanese tradition to (re)define the country’s modernization process as uniquely Japanese and ultimately justify its own imperialist aggression in other parts of Asia (Boyle 1993; Rado 2015).

Furthermore, Japan’s opening to the West was a carefully orchestrated two-way process. As essentialized visions of ‘the West’ penetrated the Japanese cultural imaginary (Ivy 1995) Japan, in turn, entered the imagination of Parisian artists and intellectuals. Thus, as French cultural critic Denise Brahimi (1992) concludes, ‘what [Western nations] were looking for, when going to Japan … was the example of a country capable in every way to resist occidental enterprises, without nevertheless giving up on the advantages that come with being a civilized nation’ (p. 21). As a result, the intensity and depth of Europe’s engagement with Japan at the time was qualitatively different from its relationship to other Asian nations. Wichmann (1981) notes, for instance, that ‘Japonisme penetrated every area of the fine arts in Europe far more thoroughly than chinoiserie did in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries’ (pp. 18–19). Art critic Lionel Lambourne (2005) points to high levels of admiration and respect in ‘The West’s love affair with Japan’ (p. 7). While some forms of engagement remained mired with stereotypes and misconceptions, ‘more and more writers endeavored to understand the fundamentals of Japanese aesthetic theory’, and by the end of the nineteenth century ‘writers of a variety of styles were seeking to integrate essential principles of Japanese art into their work, as they aimed to analyze, modify, and personalize Eastern aesthetics, translating the ideas from painting to the new medium of creative language’ (Genova 2009, p. 454).

In other words, Japonisme’s multifarious nature and the scale of its influence suggest that it cannot be fully understood through a purely Orientalist lens. If, as ‘a style emerging out of Western gestures of imitation’ of Eastern cultural elements Japonisme is, as Pamela Genova (2009) reminds us, ‘always already an art of the other’, it is not ‘a single entity or a consistent stance’ (p. 455). Rather than a discursive practice, Japonisme represented a much broader aesthetic shift – conditioned, as noted above, by a two-way transcultural exchange – that would ripple through all dimensions of European and North American cultural production. Unfortunately, academic disciplinary boundaries often result in scholars focusing on individual texts when analyzing historical examples of the movement without questioning their alleged positioning within a broadly assumed Euro-American ‘Orientalist discourse’.

For example, in her otherwise excellent discussion of the intersection between Japanese (trans)nationalism and gender dynamics, Mori Yoshihara (2004) begins with a description of Madame Butterfly as a ‘quintessential Orientalist narrative’ that ‘echoed the numerous existing texts of European Orientalism’ (p. 975). However, her own analysis of the opera’s trajectory onto the US stage and, in particular, of the performance and reception of Japanese singer Tamaki Miura (1884–1946) challenges, or at least complicates, this characterization. While Yoshihara recognizes this fact, she nevertheless continues to uncritically position the text within a taken-for-granted Orientalist discursive tradition. Her conclusion that ‘to see Madama Butterfly simply as a cultural product of racialized and sexualized Western fantasies misses the complex layers of its functions for the performers and audiences across the Pacific’ (p. 996) and points to the need to at least question the validity of the Orientalist lens when engaging with Japonisme’s snarled complexity. The trick, then, is to approach Japonisme as ‘a creative endeavor, inflected differently by different writers’ and artists ‘without imposing “orientalist” standards of measure that the texts themselves may invert or repudiate’ (Hokenson 2004, p. 27). As Pamela Genova (2009) concludes, ‘[T]‌he exploration of Japonisme finds its most fertile context in the post-Said framework of more recent trends in critical analysis and cultural theory’ (p. 456) – a point to which I will shortly return.

Orientalism’s problems

The orientalist lens frequently applied to the study of Japonisme has had a number of problematic consequences on scholars’ interpretations of the movement and, more generally, on discussions of transcultural exchange between Japan and ‘the West’. Perhaps most problematically, the suggestion that European artists’ infatuation with Japanese style stemmed from a relatively superficial desire for an exoticized and eroticized ‘Other’ akin to their engagement with the populations of colonized Islamic and Hindu regions massively downplays the importance of the movement. As noted above, Japonisme revolutionized European art. Without it, impressionism might never have happened – as Van Gogh wrote to his brother Theo in 1886, ‘In a way all my work is founded on Japanese art … Japanese art … takes root again among the French impressionist artists’ (cited in Wichmann 1981, p. 52), or as Monet explained,

We needed the arrival of the Japanese prints in our midst, before anyone dared to sit down on a river bank, and juxtapose on canvas a roof which was bright red, a wall which was white, a green poplar, a yellow road and blue water. Before the example given to us by the Japanese this was impossible.

(Quoted in Lambourne 2007, p. 48)

In other words, as Jason Farago (2015) put it in a BBC story titled Hokusai and the wave that swept the world, without Japonisme ‘the global art world we today take for granted might look very different indeed’.

Interest in Japanese aesthetics, however, did not stop with the impressionists. Japanese transcultural influence continued far beyond the 30 years or so (in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries) most frequently associated with the Japonist movement. Hokenson (2004) traces its impact on French intellectual production from the early days of Japonisme to the dawn of the new millennium. Moving beyond the already clearly established link between Japanese art, impressionism and early modernism (Patterson 2015; Rodman 2013), he teases out the ongoing significance of Japanese thought and aesthetics in the works of such diverse figures as Marguerite Yourcenar, André Malraux, Jean-Paul Sartre, Roland Barthes, Jean-François Lyotard, Julia Kriteva and Hélène Cixous (to name only a few). The often canonic position of these individuals on the global intellectual scene suggests that Japan – even if in translation through the works of French intellectuals (a point I will also return to in a moment) – is still present in the ‘mind of the West’ (Napier 2007). To put it bluntly, Japanese influence is a pretty big deal. Dismissing European engagement with the Japanese aesthetic as mere Orientalism, however, effectively conceals Japan’s crucial role in the development of European artistic and intellectual thought. Consequently, as cultural critic Armando Martins Janeira (1970) notes, ‘When we read any book on general literature, or on the theory of literature, very seldom do we find a reference to the literature of Japan. Studies of a general nature about the modern novel or about poetry are written as if Japanese literature did not exist’ (p. 14).

Subsuming Japonisme under the broad lens of Euro-American historical relationship to ‘all things oriental’ also fails to do justice to the specifics of both its contexts of origin and reception, and to the plurality of forms the movement eventually took – Shūji Takashina (1988) speaks of ‘Japonismes’ (plural). In France, for instance, the early spread of Japanese arts must be understood in relationship to a shift in governmental cultural policy toward greater cultural democratization that took place, not coincidentally, in the late nineteenth century and, more broadly, within ‘[t]‌he complex web of Franco-Japanese artistic relations’ (Hokenson 2004, p. 27). As Hokenson reminds us, French Japonisme is ultimately ‘primarily about France, about problems in the French practice of occidental arts and letters’ (p. 21).

Japonisme, however, is also very much about Japan. Positioning the latter as a passive victim of Euro-American Orientalist discourse only paints (at best) a partial picture. First of all, placing Japan in the same camp as other Asian nations colonized by European powers erases the country’s own history of imperialist aggression throughout Asia. Noting that Said treats Japan ‘predominantly as...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction: Why the Japanese media?
• Part I The rise of Japanese media
• Part II Media, nation, politics and nostalgia
• Part III Japanese identities – plural: race, gender and sexuality in contemporary media
• Part IV Japanese media in everyday life
• Part V Japanese media and the global
• Index