The Politics of Dialogic Imagination

Power and Popular Culture in Early Modern Japan

Katsuya Hirano

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780226060736
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Weltgeschichte

In The Politics of Dialogic Imagination, Katsuya Hirano seeks to understand why, with its seemingly unrivaled power, the Tokugawa shogunate of early modern Japan tried so hard to regulate the ostensibly unimportant popular culture of Edo (present-day Tokyo)—including fashion, leisure activities, prints, and theater. He does so by examining the works of writers and artists who depicted and celebrated the culture of play and pleasure associated with Edo's street entertainers, vagrants, actors, and prostitutes, whom Tokugawa authorities condemned to be detrimental to public mores, social order, and political economy. Hirano uncovers a logic of politics within Edo's cultural works that was extremely potent in exposing contradictions between the formal structure of the Tokugawa world and its rapidly changing realities. He goes on to look at the effects of this logic, examining policies enacted during the next era—the Meiji period—that mark a drastic reconfiguration of power and a new politics toward ordinary people under modernizing Japan. Deftly navigating Japan's history and culture, The Politics of Dialogic Imagination provides a sophisticated account of a country in the process of radical transformation—and of the intensely creative culture that came out of it.

ONE

Strategies of Containment and Their Aporia

Ideologies and mystifications are based upon real life, yet at the same time they disguise or transpose that real life.

HENRI LEFEBVRE, CRITIQUE OF EVERYDAY LIFE

The appearance of an alternative symbolic universe poses a threat because its very existence demonstrates empirically that one’s own universe is less than inevitable.

PETER L. BERGER AND THOMAS LUCKMANN, THE SOCIAL CONSTRUCTION OF REALITY

The Tokugawa shogunate (1603–1868)—the shogun and his top echelon of advisers and officials—had since its establishment considered domesticating the body as an integral part of the complex set of strategies required to construct and maintain social order. Within two decades of its rise to power, the shogunate implemented a series of policies aiming to regulate popular practices and spectacles that threatened to subvert a specific meaning and function it sought to endow on the body. Kabuki dancing (kabuki odori

)—the early form of female kabuki performance initiated by Okuni of Izumo and her troupe—was outlawed because its transvestism and “unduly” erotic choreography were viewed as inciting “debaucheries among high and low” and for perturbing core moral values that the shogunate exalted to consolidate new social order.¹ A new form of kabuki (wakashūu kabuki

) that used male youths in place of banned female dancers met with the same repressive measures. Tokugawa authorities judged the youths’ erotic female impersonations to be “corrupt,” “perverse,” and “licentious,” and accused the young actors of enticing their patrons to commit the “irremissible sins of male-male love.”² The kabuki-mono (

, which, in its literary sense, meant a person with idiosyncratic appearance and unrestrained or nonconformist behavior), from whom the term kabuki was said to be derived, also became targets. These men and women roved the streets of castle towns with ostentatious appearances and, at times, insolent behavior and were apprehended by the authorities for spreading “lawlessness” and disrupting “public morals.”³ Other entertainers such as itinerant female shamans, dancers, blind street diviners, fishmongers, and puppeteer-prayer nuns, who made a living by offering both religious and sexual services and thus bore very little social stigma during the medieval period, were also forced to settle as “prostitutes” in fringe areas of castle towns, transportation nodes, or commercial routes as part of the shogunate’s policies of delineating palpable social boundaries for the construction of “proper” mores.⁴ By the mid-seventeenth century, all these itinerant entertainers and “delinquents” would be incorporated as bottom rungs in the social hierarchy: as outcasts called hinin (nonhuman), a status equivalent to that of beggars and vagrants. They would be confined within the walls of prisons or such specially designated areas as entertainment districts located at the margins of cities, so that “their perilous influence on the larger social whole” could be controlled and contained.⁵

Despite the Tokugawa authorities’ incessant attempts to segregate and contain the undesirable body, by the early eighteenth century, there emerged through popular literary and visual imaginations in major castle towns, in particular in Edo (present-day Tokyo), a variegated, novel representation of the body, which was antithetical to the official conception of the ideal body. The popular imagination foregrounded “unproductive,” “idle” bodies immersed in the culture of pleasure and play associated with various forms of entertainment, including kabuki, that had been regulated, if not proscribed, and reviled by the shogunate for diffusing “follies” and “debaucheries.”⁶ The authorities took punitive measures, albeit fitfully, against those who produced, disseminated, and consumed the new forms of culture and entertainment, but people in Edo continued to explore and celebrate the new possibilities that these playful and provocative bodily images presented.

But what were the historical implications or connotations of the proliferation of a novel representation of the body that defied the officially prescribed body? Did it suggest that the shogunate’s earlier strategies of building and maintaining social order through the domestication of the body had lost their efficacy? Did it also then represent a new historical situation in which the mechanism of the shogunate’s power and domination was rendered obsolete? If so, what were the historical conditions that contributed to the waning potency of Tokugawa rule? Furthermore, did the new representation of the body constitute part of the growing historical consciousness that recognized the increasingly conspicuous and irreparable disjuncture between the ideological premise and the ongoing social and economic transformations of Tokugawa Japan, a consciousness articulated by critically minded intellectuals from the early eighteenth century onward?⁷ If so, how did popular cultural imaginations of the body communicate such a consciousness?

Tokugawa Ideology: Configuring the Body in the New Social Order

What guided the Tokugawa regime’s strategies during its early formative years to contain the undesirable body epitomized by kabuki, kabukimono, and semireligious itinerant entertainers was its commitment to creating a populace whose daily endeavors would be devoted to the task of contributing to the preservation of social harmony, a task that the regime proclaimed to be the most fundamental moral duty for every single person living in Tokugawa Japan. The means through which one was expected to perform this duty varied, depending on one’s designated place in society. During Tokugawa times, every individual was born with a predetermined status (mibun

) and a particular occupation (shokubun

or yaku

) that corresponded to that status within the matrix of hereditary social relations. From the womb to the tomb, individuals carried supposedly unalterable markers, or “social tattoos,” reflected in their speech, appearance, and habitation, which signified their permanent belonging to a given group and social function.⁸

This highly rigid classificatory system was devised to institute and perpetuate the hierarchical arrangement of authority and to facilitate the interdependent relations of material production. Peasants and artisans were allotted manual work and merchants served a distributive function, while the ruling samurai status groups held bureaucratic responsibility for monitoring and regulating the mechanisms of production and distribution. In practice, of course, these distinctions were not always observed with strict consistency; functions of commerce and material production were more frequently merged in the same person from the eighteenth century onward.⁹ But the general distinction was not on that account to be overlooked.¹⁰ The classificatory scheme set up by the founders of Tokugawa Japan to organize people into different status categories and to require them to perform assigned productive functions constituted an essential part of the system of rule designed to lubricate the social hierarchy’s interdependent relations.

Given this reproductive configuration of social relations of production, the shogunate swiftly discerned that the body—especially that of the common person—should be understood exclusively in terms that were both moral and utilitarian: the body was valuable only as an instrument satisfying through its productive function the moral imperative to preserve social unity. Measuring commoners’ existential worth by how—and how much—they contributed through industrious devotion to the social whole, the shogunate placed peasantry engaging in the most laborious work higher than artisans and merchants in the status hierarchy and relegated the merchants whose work was considered to be least onerous, even “parasitic” by some, to the bottom of that hierarchy.¹¹ And, “outside of” or “beneath” the formal structure (seigaisha

or jingaisha

), there was the populace—entertainers, prostitutes, and vagrants—bearing the outcast status of “nonhuman” whose activities were considered to be utterly unproductive by the shogunate. The status hierarchy therefore reflected the Tokugawa government’s core ideological value that the productiveness of one’s body was the prerequisite for one to be accredited with moral worth and “humanity.”

It is no coincidence that around the same time the shogunate set out to contain the undesirable body—the early seventeenth century—influential ideologues such as Suzuki Shōzan (1579–1655) and Yamazaki Ansai (1618–82) began extensively writing and promulgating their deprecating views of the body. Suzuki, an ex-samurai Zen Buddhist monk and ardent spokesperson for the shogunate, theorized the body in an absolutely negative light and limited its meaning and function to an idea of duty that called for selfless and industrious devotion to the well being of the whole. In his essays, Suzuki pressed the idea that the cardinal truth for humans to recognize and accept was the utter worthlessness of their bodies. “If one knew how impure the body is,” Suzuki wrote, “how could one ever attach any importance to it? It is a conglomeration of filth, that is, fluids of eyes and nose, urines and feces, the five entrails—not one of these is clean.” Furthermore, he continued, “the body is compounded of suffering,” but people “believe it to be a source of pleasure. … Where does suffering come from? Only from love of the body.”¹² For Suzuki, the body was not only impure and filthy but also plagued by desires and passions, and this disturbing truth was the underlying cause of human beings’ distressing conditions: “It all too often happens that the sensual self becomes the fortified headquarters of the desires. Then the mind becomes an unenlightened master [that produces] bad karma and destroys the self. Such a mind is our enemy. This body is a bag of desires.”¹³ Low and useless as filth, the body should never be perceived in a positive light unless it strived to fulfill the moral duty of contributing to the whole through hard work. Peasants, according to Suzuki, must not think that they “need leisure to pray for Rebirth” because “people realize Buddhahood only by tormenting both body and mind in their quest for enlightenment.” For Suzuki, only by “work[ing] painfully hard as [they] assault body and mind,” could peasants keep their mind “untroubled” and thereby reach the state of Buddhahood.¹⁴

As for merchants, Suzuki went on to explain, they must “[b]ear clearly in mind that in the business of buying and selling [they] fear this [heaven’s punishment for their selfish and greedy deeds], and only in casting off all personal desire, can [they] function as an officer entrusted by heaven with assuring free flow [of goods] throughout the land.” “Offer this body to the world,” Suzuki implored merchants, “and make up your mind that what you do is only for the sake of the land and of the whole.”¹⁵ For both peasants and merchants to effectively perform their public duties, Suzuki concluded, they must succeed in regulating, even negating the corporeality of their existence, that is, “forgetting the body.”¹⁶ Ascetic life realized through rigorous self-discipline was thus a prerequisite for every Tokugawa subject to follow.

Similarly, Yamazaki Ansai, a synthesizer of Shinto and Neo-Confucianism and a principal contributor to the formation of Tokugawa ideology, advocated the strict regulation of the bodily self. Placing an exclusive emphasis on the virtues of “reverence” (kei

), by which he meant “restraint, discretion, deference, prudence, and self-control,” as a way to keep the purity of one’s mind, Yamazaki told his followers that reverence “dominates the entire life of the mind because it regulates all activities and disciplines the body.”¹⁷ When facing difficulties in keeping the whole of the bodily self under the mind’s control, “one must struggle through quiet sitting to the point of spitting blood.”¹⁸ Yamazaki’s formulation of repressive rigorism was the normative basis of Tokugawa Neo-Confucian thought: for the purpose of subduing what Neo-Confucians viewed as the disturbing human reality—the animality of the body, it advocated, in a manner similar to Zen Buddhists, such mottoes as “abiding by stillness,” “abiding in oneness without motion,” and “control of the floating mind,” and resorted to “quiet sitting” (seiza

), or “meditation,” as a means of self-discipline or “self-cultivation.”¹⁹

Underpinning the official conception of the body, as expressed in writings by both Suzuki and Yamazaki, was language that drew a sharp distinction between the mind and the body. Abstract thought and moral cultivation were regarded as the expression of the individual’s higher self and the higher reality, while sensual or corporeal experience was an inevitable yet lower reality—a shifting, uncertain, disorderly world of appearances, ephemeral and uncontrollable. This binary formulation divided the world into a high mental reality and a low material reality, stripping the mortal body of its spiritual truths and assimilating it into the mass of things. Yet, because humans were schematized as beings possessing minds, who thus occupied a status superior to that of animals, they were figured as residing in an ambivalent place between the mental and the material. If the mortal body was completely assimilated into the mental, human reality was sacred, but that reality was profane insofar as the mental was held captive by the sensual. Thus, the ideologues of the Tokugawa shogunate insisted that the higher reality of the mind had to vanquish the body and its senses—or at least regulate them by subordinating them to its sovereignty.²⁰

These stark binary oppositions of body and mind paralleled the ideological notion that the ruling class embodied the higher realm of the mental self, whereas commoners belonged to the lower realm of the corporeal self. Much as the mind was given a sovereign position from which it could make the body conform to its commands and its truths, the samurai class assumed a position enabling it to rule and regulate the common classes. Suzuki Shōzan, in the treatise discussed above, adamantly maintained that “[o]rdinary people must first recognize that they are sick. … the diseases of greed and wrong views abide there [within their mind], as do those of laxity and iniquity.” “So do not undertake the means,” Suzuki warned, “which goes beyond your capacity and your station in life. … Horses are horses, cattle are cattle, and fowl are fowl; and each has its own role.” Only those who are capable of attaining “victory over the teeming thoughts” should “ride above all things. … Such a man is not an ordinary man but a man I call a follower of the Way ...