Art and Engagement in Early Postwar Japan

Justin Jesty

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781501715051
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Japanische Geschichte

Justin Jesty's Art and Engagement in Early Postwar Japan reframes the history of art and its politics in Japan post-1945. This fascinating cultural history addresses our broad understanding of the immediate postwar era moving toward the Cold War and subsequent consolidations of political and cultural life. At the same time, Jesty delves into an examination of the relationship between art and politics that approaches art as a mode of intervention, but he moves beyond the idea that the artwork or artist unilaterally authors political significance to trace how creations and expressive acts may (or may not) actually engage the terms of shared meaning and value.

Art and Engagement in Early Postwar Japan centers on a group of social realists on the radical left who hoped to wed their art with anti-capitalist and anti-war activism, a liberal art education movement whose focus on the child inspired innovation in documentary film, and a regional avant-garde group split between ambition and local loyalty. In each case, Jesty examines writings and artworks, together with the social movements they were a part of, to demonstrate how art—or more broadly, creative expression—became a medium for collectivity and social engagement. He reveals a shared if varied aspiration to create a culture founded in amateur-professional interaction, expanded access to the tools of public authorship, and dispersed and participatory cultural forms that intersected easily with progressive movements. Highlighting the transformational nature of the early postwar, Jesty deftly contrasts it with the relative stasis, consolidation, and homogenization of the 1960s.

PART ONE

Arts of Engagement and the Democratic Culture of the Early Postwar

CHAPTER 1

Participatory Culture and Democratic Culture

The battles over culture after 1945 were battles for the heart and soul of Japan. Government officials responded to defeat by proclaiming the goal of rebuilding Japan as a nation of culture (bunka kokka), a campaign that Carol Gluck notes was intended to displace politics with culture, particularly in relation to the imperial institution.1 On the other side of the political spectrum, the Japanese Communist Party strove for a cultural revolution (bunka kakumei) that, while hostile to the emperor, trumpeted its own version of a “healthy” national history and heritage. Despised by both was the entrepreneurial and irreverent bootleg (kasutori) culture that thrived in strip shows and pulp magazines.2 Intersecting with these battles was a groundswell of popular desire to self-educate and have culture enrich daily life. Surveying the top ten bestselling books in Japan each year from 1946 to 1949, John Dower concludes that they “collectively conveyed an impression of cosmopolitan breadth and serious purpose never again to be matched, as ordinary citizens proved responsive to writings that addressed abiding issues of human nature and social responsibility.”3 Kitagawa Kenzō has shown that titles in the Prange Collection, which includes nearly every journal and newspaper published in Japan in the period 1945 to 1949, affirm this passion for high culture. Within the category of entertainment and culture magazines, literary magazines make up the largest number of titles (879), followed by haiku (673 titles), then tanka (497 titles). By contrast, there are only 133 sports titles.4

Culture was deliberately and intensely politicized, and particularly noteworthy is how active the investment was at the grassroots. Dower concludes his analysis with a consideration of Kike Wadatsumi no koe (Listen to the Voices of the Sea) (1949), a collection of diary writings by young soldiers who died at war. It was a runaway bestseller, but the sales figures are only part of the story. The book spawned numerous reading groups where participants reexamined their own experiences of the war, some of which produced their own self-published writing, again to be shared with others.5 There are many examples of this kind of active readership in which readers formed groups to discuss issues raised in major publications.6 Active listenerships and viewerships also flourished, in the form of music and film appreciation societies.7 Along with these active receivers of culture were groups of producers: amateur poets, nonfiction writers, historians, painters, woodcut makers, and performers in theater, dance, and chorus groups. Some film appreciation societies even got involved in film production.8

These groups were generally called circles. Thousands existed nationwide, their membership possibly reaching into the millions.9 Their sheer number and variety makes generalization difficult, but we can group them roughly according to how they were affiliated and what kinds of activity they undertook. Workplaces undoubtedly had the highest concentration.10 A given company might have dozens of culture circles, which were popular among young, single workers who had time in the evening and on weekends to participate in regular meetings. Workplace circles were generally sponsored by the company or the union, although some were independent of both.11 Large workplaces often had multiple circles in a particular genre with competing identities. Circles that formed outside the workplace are more various. They sometimes grew out of, or into, grassroots social movements. They could be affiliated with local governance initiatives such as the New Life Movement. They could be linked with Japanese Communist Party (JCP) organizing. They could be unaffiliated, such as groups that used a kōminkan (community center) or a member’s home to hold their meetings. Finally, the activities of many circles had little to do with specific social campaigns: many, if not most, were “just for fun.”12

What circles might mean is at least equally complex. Participation does not have a political valence in and of itself, nor is it in a privileged relationship with left, right, or center on the political spectrum. Andrew Gordon writes that workplace recreation appeared early in the twentieth century when owners of textile mills recruited rural women by promising “to educate and cultivate them in place of their parents.”13 He also points out that company-sponsored recreation activities existed throughout the war. However, Kurahara Korehito, a leader of the proletarian literature and arts movement, introduced the term “circle” (sākuru) to Japan from the Soviet Union in 1931.14 Kurahara hoped to use culture circles as staging points for political dissemination and mobilization—an aspiration that was soon to be crushed by the state. The strategy was revived as part of the JCP’s cultural strategy in the early postwar years.

The competing investments in circles in the 1950s grew more complex with the mid-decade importation of mass society theory (taishū shakai-ron) to Japan.15 Mass society theory laid out a critique of modernity that contrasted with what at the time was a widely accepted understanding of Japan’s descent into fascism: Maruyama Masao’s theory that fascism was a symptom of Japan’s incomplete modernity, its failure to fully liberate individual energies from feudalistic superstition and prejudice. Mass society theory raised serious questions about the modernity Maruyama championed, focusing on its negative effects such as the isolation of the individual and the consequent opportunities for increasingly sophisticated forms of bureaucratic administration. Within this critique, the small group, or shōshūdan, was promoted as a social form that could intervene between the nation and the individual and be a theater where alienation would be ameliorated and overbearing state apparatuses kept at bay. As Mizutamari Mayumi explains, the discourse of shōshūdan “created great hope in the circle movements of the late 1950s by indicating an alternative to established political institutions.” It showed how the small group had an important role to play in overcoming the perceived top-down character of communist mobilization on the one hand and the top-down bureaucratization of the postwar state on the other. In sum, people took circles seriously in the 1950s. Although intellectuals, union organizers, company managers, and political and civic activists promoted them toward different ends, one common thread among their ideas was that through circles, individuals would become more self-consciously and actively involved in a collective process and that that engagement would improve both the individual and the process as a whole.

Circles have received renewed attention recently. Reflecting the diversity in circles at the time, recent studies have been careful to emphasize that the circle movement as a whole did not entail a particular politics: some circles were politically active, some were not, and those that were politically active worked toward different ends and used a variety of tactics and organizational styles. The tendency in scholarship after 1960 was to dismiss circles as JCP staging points. That is clearly an incomplete picture. Michiba Chikanobu has argued against that tendency, writing that we should “imagine people’s desire for expression and its concrete realization as being sustained by liberation under the postwar constitution, the expansion of opportunities for free subjective self-expression, and a hope for progress that foreshadows recovery and high growth,” not the JCP’s narrow idea that Japan was being “colonized” and “militarized.”16 Speaking to a more general question, Narita Ryūichi has proposed a classificatory division between leisure (goraku) circles, which came together primarily to share the joy of reading, talking, and socializing, and circles that had some relationship to a social movement or public concern.17 While the division between these two categories is not precise or stable, it is important to keep in mind that while many circles did form out of or feed into grassroots political movements, such circles represent only a subset of participatory culture as a whole. Many circles had no identifiable political goals at all.

It is in response to this issue that I propose the term democratic culture as a way to draw together the politically or publicly oriented subset of participatory culture. This term allows us to delineate the dispersed, diverse, and politically active associational experiments of the early postwar period as related phenomena.18 Four basic characteristics warrant the term democratic culture. These can be further subdivided into two categories that correspond with two ways of using the term “culture.” According to one usage, culture designates a collection of works published or performed in recognized genres, such as poetry, theater, (auto)biography, and music. This understanding of culture deliberately refines and invests certain forms of activity with significance: the “new observations and meanings,” the “creative,” the “finest individual meanings,” to return to the words of Raymond Williams.19 As it relates to this meaning of culture, the democratic aspect of democratic culture is apparent in two ways. The first is in the value and effort placed on overcoming barriers of class and education to find contexts for association and creative endeavor: a movement toward greater accessibility and cultural enfranchisement that involved both elites and non-elites. The second is in the attention given to taking control of the means of cultural production so that publicity, publication, and the development of networks of reception would remain in the hands of people concerned with the message.

The term “culture” can also designate more commonplace patterns that permeate all behavior, meaning, value, and expectation, what Williams termed the “ordinary processes of human societies and human minds.”20 In the ongoing, self-conscious attention to protocols of participation and representation within participatory cultural groups, particularly their care in trying to make all voices audible, we can see attempts to enact patterns of behavior that often explicitly contrasted with the repressive elitism of fascism. Finally, in the way that these small groups connected issues of local concern and self-development with the big questions of Japanese public life in the early postwar—particularly peace and democracy but also the rights of the individual, gender roles, and public health—they can be thought of as the grassroots of larger movements that pushed for change in large-scale patterns in Japanese society.

These four characteristics constitute my definition of democratic culture as it can be seen as a subset of the more general efflorescence of participatory culture in the early postwar. The first characteristic of the early postwar’s democratic culture is the emphasis on interaction between elites and non-elites, the attention to finding value and meaning in creative border crossing, and the idea that cultural production should be open to anybody. After 1945, many intellectuals attempted to overcome their failures during the Fifteen Year War, and many of them conceived that as a project of building a more direct relationship with the great mass of Japanese people. On the other hand, at the same time that elites were attempting to build a new common culture, there was great popular interest in culture developing at the grassroots. These two trajectories often met in circles. Some examples of the most direct experiments in intellectual leadership are the free schools of the late 1940s that were organized by intellectuals who had moved to the countryside to escape aerial bombardment during the war. Leslie Pincus analyzes one such example, the Hiroshima Culture Movement of 1945–1947, led by Nakai Masakazu.21 Nakai had been on Kyoto University’s prestigious philosophy faculty before being stripped of his position during the war for thought crimes. In 1945, he began a project of teaching European Enlightenment philosophy to local farmers in Hiroshima prefecture. One of his goals was to undo patterns of thought and life that had led to people’s unquestioning participation in militarism. The problem as he saw it was that “peasants have found themselves trapped in a formation where they are continuously confronted with crises that threaten to destroy whatever cultural foundation they have managed, at great cost, to build,” leaving them no space for culture or reflective thought. Nakai hoped to help people develop a “salon of the soul” (tamashii no hiroma) as a space for such reflection and questioning.22 Nakai’s movement developed into a traveling summer university in 1947, with lecturers including prominent left-leaning intellectuals such as Hani Gorō, Hirano Yoshitarō, Taketani Mitsuo, and Shinmura Tōru.

Although the creative activity of these groups was often initiated and led by intellectuals, it cannot be written off as the effect of elites mobilizing the unsuspecting into pliant “democratic” citizens. To continue with the example of free schools, the students in those schools took things from their experience that exceeded, or were simply different from, the investment of teachers (and are available to us thanks to the small publications that were the original vehicles of the students’ public expression). Amano Masako relates how the co-ed student body at the Kyoto Jinbun Gakuen (Kyoto Institute for the Humanities) became a forum for the first blossoming of postwar feminism.23 In part 2 of this study we will see how reportage artists interacted with a group of worker-poets in South Tokyo. The artists undeniably brought technical knowledge and cultural access to the amateur producers while gaining valuable material for their own artwork. But neither that artwork nor the activities of the circle in question (which continued for ten years after their visits) can be defined by the interaction. This aspect of democratic culture was something that existed uneasily, episodically, and imperfectly across class and amateur-professional divisions. I suggest that what brought together groups that might otherwise have been distant was the idea that whatever the common culture might turn out to be in form or content, it would and should involve the expressive involvement and creative work of many.

The second characteristic of democratic culture is the deep investment in material aspects of communication. Producer groups staged their own performances and published their own hand-printed journals; they were engaged in semi-public production. This entailed not only producing the content of their work but maintaining new public contexts that they controlled. The condition of culture’s visibility and audibility itself was a central issue, and circles attempted to lay hold of the means of their cultural production. Participants in many movements believed that it was the practice of written expression that would create a space where self-consciousness and self-examination might develop. But it was the practice of printing and distribution that made this part of a publicly shared process. While these independently maintained material supports for culture remained small in scale, there was considerable permeability in the cultural field. As already seen in the case of Listen to the Voices of the Sea, collections of amateur writing regularly became bestsellers and films. In this sense, the small local contexts for independent cultural production were not subcultures: “independent” was not constituted in antagonism to “mainstream.” Rather, producers and audiences at all scales seem to have recognized the value of a culture constituted by many channels leading back and forth from local to international.

The work of publication also made it possible for networks of circles to develop communities of interest that were not tied to locale. Historian Sasaki-Uemura introduces the Yamanami no Kai (Mountain Range Society), a network of circles...