Representing the Other in Modern Japanese Literature

A Critical Approach

Rachael Hutchinson, Mark Williams

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2006
• eBook ISBN: 9781134233908
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Asian History
• Index: History

Representing the Other in Modern Japanese Literature looks at the ways in which authors writing in Japanese in the twentieth century constructed a division between the 'Self' and the 'Other' in their work. Drawing on methodology from Foucault and Lacan, the clearly presented essays seek to show how Japanese writers have responded to the central question of what it means to be 'Japanese' and of how best to define their identity.

Taking geographical, racial and ethnic identity as a starting point to explore Japan's vision of 'non-Japan', representations of the Other are examined in terms of the experiences of Japanese authors abroad and in the imaginary lands envisioned by authors in Japan.

Using a diverse cross-section of writers and texts as case studies, this edited volume brings together contributions from a number of leading international experts in the field and is written at an accessible level, making it essential reading for those working in Japanese studies, colonialism, identity studies and nationalism.

1 Hermes and Hermès
Othernesses in modern Japanese literature

Irmela Hijiya-Kirschnereit

The promise of our topic is this: that in discussing the manifold dimensions of the Other as it is represented in modern Japanese literature we will gain an insight into the ways the ‘world’ of ‘Japanese’ literature is categorized and structured. I prefer to approach it in the form of four concentric circles. As an introduction, let me first of all give a rough historical sketch of ‘Japan and its (exterior) Others’, or at least of some remarkable aspects which may be of relevance for us here. Next, I will briefly discuss the notion of the Other. Then, I intend to take a somewhat closer look at our intellectual agenda, and, finally, I want to present the case of Mishima Yukio and his references to the West and to European literature as an example of a re-invention of ‘modern’ Japanese literature. But let us proceed by highlighting some historical aspects first.

Circle 1: Othernesses formed and formulated

In our quest for ‘Japan and its Others’, it seems appropriate first of all to scrutinize, albeit in a necessarily superficial manner, Japan’s relationship to the world. Let us take a look at that topos which has determined Japan’s image through the centuries more than anything else. At the same time, we also witness Japan’s early encounter with a foreign culture, which had a fundamental influence on her selfimage. We are talking here of the influence of continental culture, above all of China, which served as a point of comparison for the earliest European travelers to the East, who used to describe Japan as being the cultural junior, the younger brother, the emulator and imitator.

From a Japanese perspective, her geographical distance from the continent, on the fringe of the Chinese cultural community, was ideal and resulted in what can be called, after David Pollack (1986), a dialectical relationship in contrast to subjugation or subordination. Japan profited from the achievements of the dominant culture, but her distance made possible ample control over what to accept at what time and to what extent. In this process, China always functioned as a parameter of otherness. By taking in foreign elements, the Other was selectively internalized, so to speak, but at the same time, the very essence of the Self was articulated (Jackson 1990: 256).

For many centuries, down to the so-called ‘opening of the country’ and its orientation towards the West in the nineteenth century, what was Japanese could only be perceived in relation to what was Chinese as the example of otherness. It goes without saying that we are not dealing here with a geographical entity or ‘objective’ cultural facts. ‘Japan’ in this sense is a construct, just as ‘China’ is, and of course, this applies as well to the other entities which come into play, be they called ‘Asia’, ‘Europe’, the ‘Occident’ or the ‘West’. Donald Keene (1973) even goes so far as to see in the relationship of attraction and rejection, in the ‘love– hate’ attitude towards China, a central aspect, not only of literature, but of the whole traditional culture of Japan. As a matter of fact, we could study in literature this process of national, cultural, and aesthetic self-definition vis-à-vis China, a process to which the question of so-called ‘influence’ is less appropriate but which could more adequately be studied as a ‘constructive dialectic’ in the form of a Japanese monologue with herself about China.

Before 1868, Chinese was, with but a few exceptions, the only foreign language read in Japan. On the other hand, written Chinese had a very hybrid status because of the Japanese ‘invention’ of kanbun, which permitted a Japanese author to write a text in Chinese without being able to speak a word of the language. By this procedure of reading or articulating the written text as Japanese, not only was the otherness of the Chinese text suspended, but also the polarity of symbol and meaning was neutralized. It was only the encounter with the West which forced upon the Japanese a new understanding of ‘translation’, for they were now for the first time confronted with the fact that symbol and meaning do not coincide, that the connection between the written characters and what they denote is arbitrary and that therefore the meaning of a text in a foreign language can only be disclosed by a ‘real’ translation (Jackson 1990: 259).

On the other hand, however, for the first time in several centuries there was a chance to meet foreigners in Japan,¹ or, as a member of a delegation, abroad. How these Japanese travelers to the West on an official mission, beginning with the January 1862 mission, explored foreignness in very concrete terms is as fascinating a chapter in history as is the experience of Western diplomats and of the Western consultants called into the country by the government in Tokyo. Fortunately, both these explorations are well documented in Japanese as well as in Western languages.²

No less engrossing are the experiences of Japanese writers since the late nineteenth century in America and Europe which, in literary form, highlight the cultural shock and the different phases of self-exploration abroad and after returning home. But for the great majority of Japanese writers and intellectuals, their encounter with the West took place in their own country, although their spiritual and mental commitment was no less intense, with Christianity and Marxism being two focal points of their involvement.

For the young elite of early modern Japan, Christianity as a ‘window to the West’ held a great attraction, embodying in their eyes a value system which seemed suited to help shatter traditional feudalism. Christianity undoubtedly served as a spiritual catalyst for the Japanese search for identity, which frequently followed the characteristic pattern of a ‘return to Japan’ (Nihon e no kaiki): this pattern consists of a phase of enthusiastic adoption of Western culture and civilization and of Christianity, followed by rejection and a turning to whatever was considered to be traditional Japanese spirit and values. Nevertheless, the whole body of modern literature is interspersed to an astonishing extent with Christian motifs and biblical references, and these aspects exist independently of how intensively and how long the author was personally involved with Christianity (see Williams 1996: 156–74).

The encounter with Marxism is of no less importance to Japanese intellectuals, although, like Protestantism in the late nineteenth century, it hardly affected the bulk of the population. Its influence on the country’s elite, however, was all the more intense. During the Taishō period (1912–26), Marxism widely dominated intellectual life, as it offered a comprehensive model for interpreting history as well as the present age. Marxism therefore held great fascination both as a ‘science’ and as a revolutionary idea leading to concrete action, and continued to exert its influence even in cases where scholars and writers had to recant under political pressure (tenkō ).

Japan’s colonial experience in the first half of the twentieth century, which Komori Yōichi and others interpret as a form of compensation to divert herself from external colonial pressures,³ represents another set of encounters with the Other both within and beyond the boundaries of the Japanese islands. Here, the experience becomes even more complex, as the colonial Other is superseded by a second plane resulting from that conscious or unconscious act of self-assertion in the face of internal colonization. Thus, Japan has been conducting a dialogue with the Occident for more than a century, one that has, however, been largely ignored by the West.

Circle 2: Dialectics of difference: methodological considerations on the notion of the Other

A culture that discovers what is alien to itself simultaneously manifests what is in itself.

(McGrane 1989: 1)

This statement by Bernard McGrane aptly summarizes our expectations for the topic at hand. The alien, or the Other, as we here term it, is a relational notion. It assumes a dialectical relationship between the Self and the Other. The Self becomes aware of itself only through perceiving the Other, and cognizance of the Other is possible only to the extent that the Self consciously objectivizes and relativizes its own system of codes. As for possible definitions of the Other, we are faced with a wide spectrum of differing notions: there is the normative versus the cognitive Other, the intra- and the intercultural Other, ethnic Otherness, outsiders and outcastes, the unknown as a source of fear and fascination, the exotic and the intellectually attractive, the foreign and the non-member (non-belonging), the temporally or spatially distant, the repressed, the enigmatic and the uncanny or numinous (Wierlacher 1993: 39). All these concepts have been productive in literature in Japan and other regions of the world for centuries, although they have only rarely been studied in a systematic way. Modern disciplines such as law, sociology, cultural anthropology, theology, philosophy, and mathematical logic all define their own specific notions of Otherness depending on their research objectives. But even disciplines such as ethnology have so far refrained from attempting a precise definition of the notion. Xenology, or the study of the Other, as an interdisciplinary and interculturally oriented field of Cultural Studies, has, however, received a boost since the later 1980s due, inter alia, to the political situation after the breakdown of the Soviet Union, an accelerated globalization, the North–South conflict, and migration problems in the wake of such events. What has been a constant concern in this context is the question of how to thematize different cultures as systems of rules and hypotheses without subjugating them or alienating them from themselves. The question culminates in the observation that we will have to accept an incommensurable rest of cultural Otherness, which should be not suppressed but accepted within the framework of a critically informed hermeneutics (ibid.: 48–9).

The notion of Otherness, however, prefigures a certain understanding rooted in the semantics of English. Research on the phenomenon in other languages may produce other distinctions and problematics, depending on different semantic fields in their respective notions. In English, foreigner and stranger designate non-membership of an ethno-political unit, or of one of its segments such as local communities, social class etc. respectively, while alien refers to a natural given otherness. The same tripartite structure holds for Italian with forestiero, straniero, and alieno, while French covers the first two categories by étranger, whereas the third category is represented by autre or d’autrui. Of particular relevance to our topic are, of course, the respective Japanese terms, from the binary notions of uchi versus soto (the ‘inner’ or ‘own’ versus ‘the outer’) or the distinction of ji (self) versus ta (the other) to terms designating a person’s spatial, social, ethnic, or cultural otherness such as yosomono, bugaisha, gaijin, gaikokujin, ijin, ketō, nanban, etc. The rigidity or fluidity of these distinctions is also an aspect to be considered. In England, in early modern aristocratic households we find lists of visitors, which contain only two categories: ‘domestics’, i.e. those attached to the house by relationship or service, versus ‘others’. Or take the basic distinction of friend and foe with the implication that in tribal societies there was no third status in between tribal brother and enemy. The eminent importance of the status of guest in older societies can be explained by the fact that it provided the only chance of a temporary change from one to the other side of the binary distinction (Stagl 1997: 88). It goes without saying that all these distinctions on the level of everyday speech are reflected in the respective scholarly discussions. Research in German, for example, differentiates between the Strange (das Fremde) and the Other (das Andere), the Strange being Otherness interpreted (as ‘Interpretament’) (Wierlacher 1993: 62).⁴

Not just in modern writing but within the history of what has traditionally been understood as Japanese literature in a wide sense, including genres such as travelogues (kikōbun), literary diaries (nikki) as well as topographies such as the Fudoki, essays (zuihitsu), anecdotal literature such as setsuwa and other forms, we can study the whole cultural spectrum of possible Othernesses, from ethnic and sociological to anthropological and existential, or from epistemological to political aspects.

Let these very rough and cursory remarks suffice to demonstrate that our concern lies right in the center of an increasingly dense network of studies dedicated to aspects of the Other and fed by a wide range of disciplinary approaches and methodological premises.

Circle 3: Japaneseness and liminalities: practical considerations

It may make sense to ponder a while about the implications and ramifications of ‘Japan and its Others’, before we plunge into an ocean of case studies. Put briefly, the focus of this volume is an examination of the ways in which authors writing in Japanese have constructed divisions between center and periphery/Self and Other in literary texts. This starting point – or should I better say purpose – of our investigations is naturally based on a number of premises, and it is these premises which deserve our attention, as they will inevitably shape the results of our work. What is it, then, that we are looking for as we investigate the Japanese Self as manifested in literary texts? Or, to put it more radically: What do we talk about when we talk about Japan? And does it make sense at a...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Series page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction Self and Other in modern Japanese literature
• 1 Hermes and Hermès: Othernesses in modern Japanese literature
• 2 Meet me on the other side Strategies of Otherness in modern Japanese literature
• Part I External others
• Part II Internal others
• Part III Liminal sites
• Index