The Body in Postwar Japanese Fiction

Douglas Slaymaker

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• Print ISBN:
  9780415322256
• eBook ISBN:
  9781134354023
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Japanese History
• Index: History

This book explores one of the crucial themes in postwar Japanese fiction. Through an examination of the work of a number of prominent twentieth century Japanese writers, the book analyses the meaning of the body in postwar Japanese discourse, the gender constructions of the imagery of the body and the implications for our understanding of individual and national identity. This book will be of interest to all students of modern Japanese literature.

1 The discourse on the body

The “body” of this literature

Nikutai is the name of a short-lived journal that began publication in 1947. Its title, The Body, and its date immediately connect it to my discussion and to the postwar interest in the carnal body. The "body" discussed in this literature is the nikutai of the journal title, a term that gained new currency in postwar Japan. In the postwar era, nikutai signified the expressly carnal and physical and was posited as the ground for individual identity.¹ Nikutai (肉体) operates on three semantic axes: first, within a set of works which explore the physical body; second, in the context of the personal and physical which contrasts with the non-physical, roughly equating to the meanings of "spiritual"; and, finally, on the social/externallevel, it operates in contrast to the kokutai (国体), the body politic. Niku (肉), meaning meat, muscle, or flesh, paired with the character for body, the tai (体), connotes the physical carnality of the body and oper-ates on the second axis of body meanings. The postwar usage reflects a group of meanings that builds on a long history of usage to contrast to other words for "body," such as karada (体) or shintai (身体). Iwaya Daishi recalls nikutai being a loaded term (gokan) at this time, noting that "before the war we would not have used nikutai but shintai [when referring to the body]."² While this accurately captures the nuances embedded in the writings I consider here, it seems slightly too schematic given that a number of earlier examples argue against Iwaya's assertion. For one, the authoritative dictionary of Japanese usage, the Nihon kokugo daijiten gives, as definition, "the body comprised of meat/muscle (肉)" and offers karada as one synonym, although qualifying nikutai as "the body [karada] of sexual desire." At the same time, nikutai rōdō, or manual labor, emphasizes the physical muscle necessitated by construction work. For another, and these reach back to much earlier usages, the authoritative dictionary of Japanese, the Nihon kokugo daijiten cites examples of nikutai from Samuel Smiles' Self Help (translated into Japanese as Saikoku risshi hen) of 1877 and Fukuzawa Yūkichi's Bunmeiron no gairyaku of 1875. The nineteenth-century usages associate to the English-language backgrounds of these two works (in that Fukuzawa is drawing from his travels in the West), where the negative associations of the carnal and the sexual resonate. The same connotations appear in other contexts, as well. Nikuyoku, as "carnal desire" (肉欲) is accompanied in the Nihon kokugo daijiten by citations of late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century works by novelists Morita Sōhei and Arishima Takeo. Older citations in the dictionary include the classical niku byōbu, or "flesh screen," where a man is surrounded by beautiful women who screen him off from the cold. Hirabayashi Taiko gives nikutai another nuance in her fiction of the 1930s, consistently using nikutai when she discusses the (female) body in sickness, weakness, pregnancy, and childbirth, which is far from the sensual body imagined by the flesh writers. These contrasting examples show that Iwaya's statement, which seems commonsensical at first encounter, elides the historical usages propelling these postwar invocations.

Shintai (身体) is also a synonym for the "body" and it is often included in dictionary definitions of nikutai. It refers to the physical and material, rather than the carnal and sensual, body Shintai is the word preferred in philosophical discourse, for example in phenomenology.³ The distinction arises in the overtones of baseness and carnality that nikutai incorporates, as opposed to the use of shintai as a more clinical term in philosophic writings. Whereas shintai gives the sense of a solid object as in physical science usage, nikutai generally refers to the subjective and emotion-laden response of a living object. Shintai often corresponds, subjectively, to a more "refined" register of discourse than nikutai.⁴

The sinified compound shintai also overlaps with the native Japanese word karada (体), perhaps the most straightforward equivalent to English "body." Shintai in its philosophical delineation refers to the phenomenological body, the body as material object, as thing, in a society of individuals where each is aware of the other and thereby aware of the self. The idea of an individual "self" incorporates the Japanese seishin (or spirit, 精神), a concept often functioning as a synonym for seikaku (性格, or personality), but which also includes the sense of soul or spirit. This is because the individual person is more than a lump of flesh – nikutai, shintai, karada – but a complete person, a human being, comprised of both fleshly body and spirit (seishin, seikaku). Thus, karada (which Iwaya referred to as the word of choice in the prewar years) is commonly used to discuss the material body. Shintai incorporates both body and spirit, for to be more than material object, one needs awareness of the Other, and this is the work of the personality, the seishin. Seishin may be closest to the various senses incorporated in the French esprit. Seishin does not represent the soul (of Judeo-Christian tradition), but is close to "personality," i.e. that which complements the physical to make a person whole. As set off from the physical and concrete, it also accords with the abstract and ethereal. A person is not complete without the seishin, which is like ether, clearly "there" but only containable in an individual body, the element that gives identity to the individual. That is, shintai seems an amalgam of nikutai and seishin, combining the material and the non-material. Shintai is the physical body incorporating both spirituality and essentiality, the physical and the personality.⁵ The flesh writers focus on the carnal physicality of the nikutai and eschew the seishin which they associate with the propagandistic usages of abstract "spiritual" values.

This is the second axis of meaning, where nikutai appears as the opposite of the seishin, which represents the immaterial and abstract in existence and personality. The Kōjien dictionary offers the initial definition of seishin as "in contrast to matter, body [nikutai]." Seishin, whether invoked directly by the flesh writers or obliquely as the Other to nikutai, forms a chain of meaning linked to the abstractions of wartime ideology. The body stressed in the flesh writers' works opposes wartime ideology and is strengthened in the lexical items and the imagery itself. In Japanese, jidai no seishin can refer to "the spirit of the age," a personality of sorts that goes beyond the individual and incorporates the whole: a "national consciousness," perhaps, that downplays the individual in order to elevate the group or societal experience. Seishin was also a term used with numbing frequency in wartime propagandist clichés such as gunkoku seishin, "the spirit of the military nation," or kōkoku seishin, the "spirit of the Imperial nation."⁶ It is precisely such references to the undifferentiated mass that writers like Tamura and Ango resisted in order to emphasize and glorify the individual. Nikutai bungaku registers the reaction to this emphasis on the seishin, a reaction many readers shared. The flesh writers, by assuming that the body is central to individual identity, and by extension to a national identity, reflect the attempts in the postwar years to come to terms with the war years by both repressing the body through disavowal, and expressing it through carnality.⁷

The opposition of seishin to nikutai is an ancient one. Critic Saeki Junko cites a nineteenth-century example of the terms in relation to the development of an ideal of "love" in Japanese society. She cites Tsubouchi Shōyōs Meiji-era categorization of love (irogoto) in which the pleasure of the flesh (nikutai) and physical enjoyments (nikutai no kairaku) ranked the lowest. Tsubouchi likened pursuing the external only – i.e. physical attraction – while ignoring or not caring about internal attributes, to the sexual attraction of animals, base and uncivilized. Likewise, in Tsubouchi's scheme, the "love" found in barbarian societies was physical and carnal; only in the "progress" towards civilization does lust pass to affection, to true love. That is, a "civilized" and modern society valorizes the spiritual – the abstract and cerebral, as it would seem to the flesh writers – and downplays the physical. It also avoids the simply platonic, the exclusively seishinteki, while striving for a balance between the physical and the spiritual, the internal and the external, in an attempt at balance still operative after the war.⁸

Finally, on the third axis, nikutai contrasts with kokutai, the body as nation, or national polity. The organic imagery of body-as-nation was not newly emphasized in the postwar years; rather it is a reworking, and at times an attempt at recuperation, of prewar and wartime discourses. As Yoshikuni Igarashi writes in the context of analyzing the body imagery that arose in the construction of postwar memory, "Japanese bodies had already been at the heart of nationalistic discourse before 1945."⁹ The contrast between an individual body and the national body had increased resonance in the postwar years precisely because, it seems, of the way the distance between them had been collapsed during the war and prewar years: "the distance between mind and body was collapsed in wartime efforts to create a nationalistic body. What was regarded as 'unhealthy' – unproductive and unreproductive – was branded as threatening national interests."¹⁰ A heightened sense of the physical seemed so unremarkable, and the appearance of a "literature of the body' so emblematic, in the postwar years, that Maruyama Masao doubted there was any need for a term such as nikutai bungaku ("body literature'') at all. He found carnal, physical concerns – of an erotic sort – sufficiently pervasive to label all postwar fiction "carnal" or "bodily." Maruyama clearly considered this obsession with the body a negative trend in literature and not at all representative of the majority of the populace, noting that "people often argue that the state of postwar sex life itself is characterized by irresponsibility and that literature is only reflecting a real situation. Of course this might be true if we were considering only one segment of present-day society," but not all of it. He feared that, in the future, observers "would get the idea that in about 1949 the Japanese people had their heads filled constantly with the business of coitus."¹¹ Tsurumi Shunsuke, in a more political approach, explains it this way,

The concept of kokutai or "national structure" derived from the fundamental insularity and isolation of the Japanese. The concept served as a powerful linguistic weapon for both attack and defense in the political arena of the period 1931-1945. Although the expression "national structure" disappeared with Japan's defeat in 1945 and a new style of political argument was initiated by the United States occupation, the concept, if not the term, is still alive in a submerged form in Japanese politics ... After the Meiji Restoration, "national structure" was used to signify the uniqueness of the existing government of Japan.¹²

In wartime talk and propaganda, the individual body (nikutai) was set in opposition to the national (kokutai). A great wealth of material exists concerning the concept of the kokutai. George Wilson reflects much that energizes the idea as I am referring to it. In the Tokugawa period, he argues, the Imperial realm was holy; the Meiji Restoration replaced this realm with the nation-state. Even though the nation-state had political power, it could never attain the moral authority of the realm, much as it might wish to. Thus,

When twentieth century Japanese "ultranationalists" championed the kokutai, they were nostalgically harking back to the notion of the realm. Its function was central and it was "religious" in character, so it is appropriate to the sense of metaphor to follow George Elison in translating kokutai not as "national polity" but as "the mystical body of Japan."¹³

The kokutai became something of a state religion, with the mystical emperor at the apex, and it transformed in the war years into a particularly formidable edifice that brooked no dissent.

Such explicit connections between concerns of the body and authoritarian governments are a feature of the twentieth century: the "histories of the body" that have emerged since Michel Foucault's groundbreaking work have often stressed just this relationship. This physical body carries specific political meanings; emphasizing the body, carnality, and sexuality functions is explicitly counterhegemonic because it defies the primacy of the national body: such characterizations have applicability for contexts much wider than the flesh writers only. Refusal to subordinate individual desires to national projects serves as revolutionary act and protest. In earlier periods – eighteenth-century France is a notable example – the king's body symbolized the State, and punishment for treason was, correspondingly, excruciatingly physical, as indicated in the detailed description of a man being drawn and quartered that begins Foucault's Discipline and Punish. Treason was imagined as a physical offense against the physical body of the king, and the appropriate punishment was physical.

Foucault has written of the body that it "is also directly involved in a political field; power relations have an immediate hold upon it; they invest it, mark it, train it, torture it, force it to carry out tasks, to perform ceremonies."¹⁴ This understanding of the body and its direct relation to political realms illuminates much in the postwar Japanese context. As Dorinda Outram reminds us, "Modern histories of the body originated during the same era as the high point of European Fascism. The 1930s and 1940s saw an intense focus in many of the social issues which fed into historical enquiry on the social functions of the human body."¹⁵ The chronicling, control, and categorization of bodies focused seemingly unlimited energies in the early decades of this century throughout the world.

The kokutai was synonymous with the government but it was also an all-pervasive system of imagery that, even if submerged, persisted in postwar political society, still resonant with mystical, spiritual overtones. This normalizing force that was (and is) the kokutai was established ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 The discourse on the body
• 2 The (gendered) discourse and a (woman's) body
• 3 Tamura Taijirō
• 4 Noma Hiroshi
• 5 Sakaguchi Ango
• 6 When women write postwar Japan
• Conclusion
• Notes
• References
• Index