Prostitutes, Hostesses, and Actresses at the Edge of the Japanese Empire

Fragmenting History

Nobuko Yamasaki, Nobuko Ishitate-Okunomiya Yamasaki

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9780367648381
• eBook ISBN: 9781000398458
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Asian Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Analysing materials from literature and film, this book considers the fates of women who did not or could not buy into the Japanese imperial ideology of "good wives, wise mothers" in support of male empire-building.

Although many feminist critics have articulated women's active roles as dutiful collaborators for the Japanese empire, male-dominated narratives of empire-building have been largely supported and rectified. In contrast, the roles of marginalized women, such as sex workers, women entertainers, hostesses, and hibakusha have rarely been analyzed. This book addresses this intellectual lacuna by closely examining memories, (semi-)autobiographical stories, and newspaper articles, grounded or inspired by lived experiences not only in Japan, but also in Shanghai, Manchukuo, colonial Korea, and the Pacific. Chapters further explore the voices of diasporic Korean women (Zainichi Korean woman born in Japan, as well as Korean American woman born in Korea) whose lives were impacted, intervening ethnocentric narratives that were at the heart of the Japanese empire. An appendix presents the first English translation of a memorable statement on comfort women by former Japanese propaganda actress, Ri K?ran / Yamaguchi Yoshiko.

Prostitutes, Hostesses, and Actresses at the Edge of the Japanese Empire will appeal to students and scholars of Japanese literature and film studies, as well as gender, sexuality and postcolonial studies.

1 A skeptic more than a participant

Nakajima Atsushi writes (against) the empire

Introduction: situating Nakajima Atsushi

Nakajima Atsushi (1909–1942) is perhaps best known to audiences of modern Japanese literature as the author of “Sangetsuki” (The Moon over the Mountain, 1942), in which young Richō faces his “timid pride and arrogant sense of shame” (okubyō na jisonshin to sondaina shūchishin) at being a low-ranking civil servant (Nakajima 2014: 34). Richō recognizes himself as a mere tool for a higher authority, and eventually, driven by the paradox of arrogance and shame, he leaves his position in disappointment. He refuses to succumb to what he calls bureaucratic “vulgar evil” (zokuaku). He cannot give up his dream of becoming a poet, and he finally leaves his town and disappears into a forest, turning into a tiger.

“Sangetsuki” was first published in the literary journal Bungakukai, which is known for its preference for what is deemed “pure literature” (junbungaku) among Japanese literati (bundan). “Sangetsuki” is now considered a masterpiece of Japanese literary short fiction, and the majority of Japanese high school textbooks (authorized by the Ministry of Education) published between 1951 and 2020 have included it in their curriculum.¹ Literary scholar Sano Miki, who used to teach high school, has thoroughly investigated how “Sangetsuki” has been used for the purpose of didactic, prescriptive, and moral education, as well as forming a nationalist imagination in postwar capitalist Japanese society (Sano 2013).

Speaking of Nakajima’s status as an author of “national literature” (kokumin bungaku), Kawamura Minato notes that “Sangetsuki” and some of his other works, such as “Teishi” (1943) and “Riryō” (1943), are read by almost all high school students in Japan in Japanese (kokugo) class as part of their state-mandated study of Japanese language and literature. Kawamura points out that many Japanese recall their first encounter with Nakajima as a writer included in their high school textbooks, and that 18 out of 20 Japanese textbooks incorporated Nakajima’s pieces in 2002. Moreover, Kawamura claims that Nakajima, due to the frequency of his appearance in Japanese textbooks, has attained almost equal status to Natsume Sōseki (1867–1916), Akutagawa Ryūnosuke (1892–1927), and Mori Ōgai (1862–1922), which demonstrates that Nakajima constitutes an essential part of the canon in the history of Japanese literature.

Nakajima has been legitimized as a canonical literary figure in Japan, and as such his works have been used to contribute to knowledge production, directed by the bureaucratic Japanese education system. Yet this system, as I argue in this chapter, encourages readings that depart from Nakajima’s literary ethos. Komori Yōichi has fiercely criticized the postwar education that reduces “Sangetsuki” to nothing more than a “banal moral thesis” (bon’yō na dōtokuteki shudai; Komori 1998: 242). Instead, Komori calls for a rereading of Nakajima from the perspectives of “difference and otherness” (sai to tashasei; Komori 1998: 253). In this context, passages such as this, from the 1942 “Rōshitsuki,” take on new meaning:

Everyone looks down upon this man. But if we are patient enough to try to understand his slow expressions, might we figure out the thoughts that he manifests emotionally and scatters throughout these pages with his words? I suppose we simply lack the ability and perseverance to find out. Moreover, how might we begin to understand the psychological necessity of why he always acts in ways that compel others to think him an idiot. Perhaps it’s his inescapable idiosyncrasy that makes him feel like a cipher. He can digest heavy, difficult words well. Then, we may begin to feel the impossibility of placing him in a hierarchy of value, at least subjectively. Why should Mr. M be Mr. M? Why are we who we are, or why should Goethe be Goethe? (Nakajima 2015: 260)

For decades, bureaucratic appropriation of Nakajima has passed his writing off as “safe” for young minds and the future of the nation.² In this chapter, I will elucidate how naïve is this bureaucratic judgment. Furthermore, my analysis of vignettes in his story “Landscape with a Patrolman” (1929) discerns a series of conceptual elements that will recur through this book, guiding the discussion of other, less-canonical materials.

Brief biography

To deepen our understanding of Nakajima’s intentional skepticism of Japan’s colonialism, it helps to consider how his life experiences and background contributed to shaping the critical voice behind his works. Nakajima lived in Seoul, Korea, from 1920 to 1926. In 1920, when he first moved to Seoul, he was 11 years old, and 10 years had already passed since the Japanese annexation of Korea. He attended an elementary school in Keijō (Gyeongseong), and then Keijō Middle School. His father, Nakajima Tabito (1874–1945), taught classical Chinese literature (kanbun) at Ryūsan (Yongsan) Middle School. All these schools, which were directed by imperial Japan, were located in current-day Seoul.

In 1925, Tabito left his position in Seoul and moved to Dairen (Dalian) to teach kanbun at Dairen Daini Chūgakko (middle school). Another city ruled by imperial Japan, Dalian is located at the tip of the Liaodong Peninsula in Northeast China and is an entrance into Manchuria.³ Atsushi remained in Seoul to finish his studies, though he visited his father periodically in Dalian. He lived with his aunt who, like many of Atsushi’s family members, played an official role in the colonies, working for an all-girls’ school in Seoul, at that time called Keijō Kōritsu Joshi Kōtō Futsū Gakkō (Kyŏngsŏng Kongnip Yŏja Kodŭng Pot’ong Hakkyo).⁴

In 1926, Nakajima returned to Japan to enter the First Upper School in Tokyo (Kyūsei Dai Ichi Kōtō Gakkō), a feeder school for Tokyo Imperial University. This boys’ boarding school was established to educate elites who were expected to lead the Japanese empire in the future and attracted students from all over Japan and the Japanese imperial sphere.

After graduating from Tokyo Imperial University in 1933, Nakajima taught English and Japanese language and literature at a private all-girls’ high school in Kanagawa Prefecture, Yokohama Kōtō Jogakkō. In 1941, he was sent to Palau by the Nan’yōchō (1922–1945), the South Pacific Mandate (recognized by the 1919 Treaty of Versailles as a result of the defeat of Germany in World War One), to educate the “illiterate” natives and compile Japanese-language textbooks for them.

During his tenure in Palau, Nakajima traveled to various islands in Micronesia, such as Saipan, to observe Japanese schools for natives who were educated in Japanese. Yet, Nakajima was sensitive to the role of education in shaping children in the colonies into ideal subjects for the empire—and to the part he was playing in that process. In letters to his wife Taka, he expressed doubts about his mission:

Well, I clearly started to see how nonsensical it is to compile textbooks for natives. There should be something that is more important than that to make them happy. The textbooks are the least important matter. I cannot do the job to make them happy at present. Under the current circumstances, it is becoming more and more difficult to provide them with enough housing and food. At this very moment, what do slightly more-refined textbooks do for the natives? Some education may make them unhappy. I no longer have a passion for the compilation work. It is not because I don’t like the natives. It is because I love the natives. (Nakajima 2002: 179)

This private correspondence (dated November 9, 1941, three months before “Sangetsuki” was published) reveals that Nakajima did not agree with the empire’s rhetoric of “all the world under one roof” (Hakkō ichiu),⁵ by which it justified its dominance over other races and spaces under the name of the Japanese emperor. Additionally, Nakajima understood the role of language education as a tool of empire: language is a force that collectively shapes students’ identities and thought processes, and which can be used to discipline and control subjugated populations. Nakajima’s letter reveals his sense that the goal of the empire’s educational system is useless: it doesn’t help the natives in the South Seas to improve their material existence, but rather contributes to their sense of dejection.

Although Nakajima may have achieved wide recognition through his inclusion in literature primers, his ideas on colonial Korea, Dalian, and the Pacific have never been fully explored.⁶ Publishers of official state textbooks generally only include selections of Nakajima’s works that support a grand narrative of national literature; other works of Nakajima’s, which do not uphold this narrative, have been quietly dismissed as “minor” expressions of the author’s creative spirit. Yet Nakajima clearly knew how to craft subtle critiques of the repressive Japanese empire, evading censorship without compromising subversiveness. I argue that Nakajima’s colonial works deserve more attention, since they foreground asymmetrical power dynamics between the Japanese and their former colonial subjects, as well as the violence that permeated everyday life in the colonies. Most importantly, Nakajima’s canonical work, as represented in “Sangetsuki,” should be reread and reexamined in light of his colonial works, as exemplified in “Landscape with a Patrolman” (1929). They echo one another, crossing time and space. Nakajima’s skeptical view of imperial bureaucracy is consistent across his entire corpus.⁷ Moreover, both works present a protagonist’s role which Nakajima himself performed: a bureaucrat, father, and husband who has to compromise his ideals in order to provide for his wife and children.

Intervening in empire: the other as individual

Nakajima’s work makes the empire’s once-invisible colonialist motives visible, putting them in sharp relief. His work was, however, unique among counterculture writers. Unlike Japanese Marxists at the time, whose writings were also censored for their critiques of the empire, Nakajima presented imperial subjects—whether Koreans, natives of Palau, or other colonized populations—not as a unified mass, but rather as a mosaic of individuals, complicating notions of ethnicity with attention to distinctive singularities in age, gender, occupation, and social status of each of his characters.

Watanabe Kazutami has criticized the portrayals of Koreans by leftist writers as being “generic” and full of clichés, such that the word “Korean” in their works might easily be replaced with terms for other marginalized groups, such as Chinese or burakumin, Japan’s outcaste class (Watanabe 2003: 30–31).⁸ This rhetorical equivalence was common among interwar-period Marxist writings, which prioritized class struggle over other struggles, such as those centered on ethnicity or gender, in order to heighten solidarity among the proletariat. By contrast, rather than flattening or erasing the otherness of Koreans living under Japanese imperial rule, Nakajima sketches them sensitively, presenting them as irreducible individuals.

Lee Yŏng-chŏl, a faculty member at Korea University (Chōsen Daigakkō) in Tokyo, has singled out Nakajima’s receptivity in the face of the other as potentially forming an ethical condition of responsiveness toward others.⁹ Lee says that he does not find in Nakajima that narcissism which would foreclose relation to Koreans, and he admires Nakajima’s unique disruptive potential, his ability to intervene in discourses of empire from within as only a Japanese national can.

Although Lee is a foundational scholarly voice who encourages readers to see the value of Nakajima’s work, his critical responses, while praiseworthy, are unfortunately vague, leaving room for other critics to delineate more clearly how Nakajima’s work imaginatively challenges Japan’s colonialism. The secret to Nakajima’s ability to disrupt these discourses lies in his recognition that there are elusive others whose experiences and essence he cannot fully capture in his writing. Nakajima was aware of the limit of his power of reason to grasp such alterities as those of Mr. M in “Rōshitsuki,” an old man of the Pacific in “Tori” (1942), or the prostitute Kim Dongnyŏn in “Landscape with a Patrolman.” The awareness of such limitations, I argue, allows Nakajima to open up the beginning of an ethical relation to the Other.

“Landscape with a Patrolman”: the ideology of empire

We can trace the origins of Nakajima’s critical gaze to his short story, “Landscape with a Patrolman” (1929), in which he used his creative imagination to interrupt the empire’s colonist agenda.¹⁰ Nakajima published the short story in Kōyūkai zasshi, a small student journal organized by the First Upper School. From this school would emerge literary circles that formed much of the so-called bundan literati; indeed, such writers and critics as Kawabata Yasunari, Tanizaki Jun’ichirō, Yanagita Kunio, Watsuji Tetsurō, and Nakamura Shin’ichirō all contributed early works to the journal. Therefore, while not a commercial venture, Nakajima’s publication of “Landscape with a Patrolman” constituted a remarkably risky act. Produced by students of an elite educational institution, and directed primarily to an audience of family members who figured among the leaders of the Japanese empire, the Kōyūkai zasshi was a strange publication in which to place a story that presented the colonial oppression and exploitation ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of figures
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Dwelling on/in History
• 1 A skeptic more than a participant: Nakajima Atsushi writes (against) the empire
• 2 I perform, therefore I am not: Ri Kōran’s building of the empire
• 3 Hayashi Kyōko: A Japanese girl and a Japanese prostitute at the edge of the empire
• 4 Yi Yang-ji: The body as a battlefield
• 5 I resist, therefore I am: Mother in Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictée
• Coda: Listening to Silence
• Appendix: My thought: Ōtaka Yoshiko [Ri Kōran/Yamaguchi Yoshiko]
• Index