Cognitive Resonance

Bibliographic Data: Conrad, Sebastian. The Quest for the Lost Nation: Writing History in Germany and Japan in the American Century. Trans. Alan Nothnagle. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010.

Main Argument: Sebastian Conrad's important and innovative study places postwar historiography in (West) Germany and Japan in a comparative and transnational framework, arguing that "all pleas for European, universal, or world history notwithstanding, the nation in both countries continued to function as the frequently unacknowledged center of gravity of historical interpretation" (2). Furthermore, Conrad argues, despite common mythology, the critique of the recent past was much more sharply developed and articulated in Japan than in Germany. Methodologically, Conrad's overarching point is that "limiting the development of historiography to the history of its methodology is reductionist at best" (7).

Historiographical Engagement: As a review of the first fifteen years of postwar history writing in both Germany and Japan, the book is focused around this historiography as its sources. Conrad is also arguing against people like Ian Buruma and his claims in The Wages of Guilt, and engaging with, in particular, Franziska Seraphim's War Memory and Social Politics in Japan, 1945-2005.

( Entangled (fraught) histories )

Critical assessment: This is a really, really good and hugely important book with a strong, persuasive argument and larger vision. I can only hope that the fact that it's half about postwar Germany will give it play beyond Japan studies, if only for the fact that I think Conrad does a great job of skewering modernization theory and all the things that are wrong with it (disclaimer: I hate modernization theory), though there's much, much more here that's worth reading about, particular Conrad's arguments about methodological approaches. There were a few points on which I could quibble (in particular, the Frankfurt School and its reconstitution in Los Angeles exile form something of a third term to the German half of the story, as does East Germany at times), but in general I found Conrad's embedding these parallel stories within their global context to be a provoking, fascinating read.

Further reading: Franziska Seraphim, War Memory and Social Politics in Japan, 1945-2005

Meta notes: I think Conrad is right both in his diagnosis (history hasn't been transnational enough) and in his prescription (more transnational history), though I agree with Barshay's comment that Conrad follows his subjects' vision out and above and beyond the nation rather than looking in, under, below it, and that this too is a fruitful avenue of possible inquiry.

I also came away with a new appreciation for the U.S. sub-discipline of Holocaust studies and the fact that there's a Holocaust Museum on the national mall - after reading about the pervasive denial of the reality of the Shoah and the Nazi extermination programs in Germany, well into the 1960s and even 1970s, I can't help but feel that, from an ethical standpoint, these are good things. Someone needed to undertake them, and for all the manifold problems with the way they are taught in U.S. schools and portrayed in popular culture (and oh I could go on about these problems), I am newly convinced that these things are better, on the whole, than not.

Bibliographic Data: Vaporis, Constantin Nomikos. Tour of Duty: Samurai, Military Service in Edo, and the Culture of Early Modern Japan. Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2008.

Main Argument: Arguing hyperbolically that the alternate attendance (sankin kôtai) system was not only "the single greatest accomplishment of Japanese leaders, both of the Tokugawa period and of subsequent times" (4) (!) but that it "was without question the single most important institution affecting economic life in Tokugawa Japan" (2), Vaporis contends that besides all this alternate attendance was also instrumental in both the meteoric rise of Edo and in "the shaping of a national culture" (5) in early modern Japan.

( Assignment: Edo )

Critical assessment: This is an interesting book with a wealth of fascinating details that certainly repays reading, even though I definitely don't buy Vaporis' arguments that alternate attendance was the pivotal sociocultural/economic institution of the Tokugawa period. It's certainly worthwhile to consider, in an age in which travel was, if widespread, illicit, one of the few forms of mass travel that was licit, but I'm not sure what the payoff is, if we don't accept Vaporis' arguments, or we don't see why the purported shared culture alternate attendance purportedly enabled is important. Given that Vaporis himself admits that it's difficult to find evidence for circulation of periphery-center cultural diffusion, I'm not sure the study even succeeds in proving its main point--and Vaporis, frustratingly, leaves evidence on the table. The Tokugawa state had three major centers (Kyoto, Osaka, Edo), each specializing in different aspects of life, and there's plenty of evidence for, say, Kyoto==>Edo influence, but none of this is discussed (and indeed, the question of cultural diffusion is left until the final chapter).

The real problem is that, as in Breaking Barriers, Vaporis is far too fond of the "post hoc, ergo propter hoc" fallacy, resorting to it whenever he sees examples of co-incidence without ever actually trying to prove causal linkages. Moreover, I'm so over pussy-footing around calling the Tokugawa regime a federal state. It was! It just was. It was a federal state in which a central authority retained some powers for itself and authorized decentralized authorities to hold certain powers within limited areas, and calling it a "compound" or a "hybrid" state or whatever else needlessly obfuscates and I daresay orientalizes the issue. Given, however, that Vaporis denied any possibility of "nation" in the Tokugawa period in Breaking Barriers, perhaps we ought, historiographically speaking, to be glad to take what we can get from him in this regard. Finally, I wish Vaporis had included more comparisons dealing with power and pageantry in Japan to other early modern polities; that would have been incomparably more interesting, and useful, than an argument that he can't and doesn't try to prove. (NB: this is probably impossible because Vaporis can't see the daimyo for what they really were.)

Further reading: Peter Konicki, The Book in Japan; T. George Tsukahira, The Sankin Kotai System of Tokugawa Japan

Meta notes: Post hoc, ergo propter hoc is not acceptable as a form of academic reasoning.

Bibliographic Data: Driscoll, Mark. Absolute Erotic, Absolute Grotesque: The Living, the Dead, and the Undead in Japan's Imperialism, 1895-1945. Chapel Hill, NC: Duke University Press, 2010.

Main Argument: Joining biopolitics to Marxian theory, Driscoll argues that "…human and nonhuman resources stolen from colonial and domestic peripheries, together with excessive profits jacked from colonized renters and subaltern wage laborers, built Japan's imperial behemoth. … Japan's imperialism was irrefutably modern; there was noting late or lacking about it." (6-7)

( Empire of the living dead )

Critical assessment: I still think The Culture of Civil War in Kyoto is the best book I've read this year, but despite some quibbles I think Mark Driscoll's book is the second-best book I've read, and it deserves to become (much like Berry's book) a contested classic in the field. I have to admit that Driscoll has also succeeded in dethroning Prasenjit Duara's Sovereignty and Authenticity from its high place in my regard; while Driscoll's discussion of Manchukuo does not displace Duara's entirely, largely because they have such different concerns and viewpoints, I find Duara's portrayal of the sham state in toto untenable in light of Driscoll's points.

I’ve read at least one of Mark Driscoll’s articles before, and on that basis I was glad to see that in Absolute Erotic, Absolute Grotesque he’s managed to salt his evident passion with enough reasonably couched statements and superb research that his passion augments rather than detracts from his arguments. Furthermore, unlike his fellow traveler Ken Kawashima, whose The Proletarian Gamble is cited several times in this book, Driscoll never loses sight of the people on whose backs and out of whose lives and deaths the Japanese empire was founded and maintained. Indeed, one suspects that Driscoll’s turn to biopolitics and the thanatopolitics that follow out of it in the modern imperial frame (which Driscoll, somewhat idiosyncratically, insists on terming “necropolitics,” against the majority of those working on these topics) was initially animated by his inability to forget the material suffering of the people who were reduced first to bare life and then to the living dead by the operations of empire.

Having spent my own time in the trenches of the thought and lives of many of the imperial actors and abettors Driscoll identifies and discusses, his frank dismissal of people like Yanagita Kunio is a sly sort of revelation, and his elaboration of the systematic aspects of the thought and policies of people like Gotô Shimpei marks an important departure, I think, from the “model of scholarship still present in East Asian studies that emphasizes a more or less homogeneous Japanese cultural nationalism severed from Asia” (4). I’ve long thought that the only way to “save” Japan studies in the era of China’s rise is to square the circle and be aggressively transnational in our historiography, and at least since James Hevia’s English Lessons, which I was glad to see Driscoll cite, we can no longer afford to ignore the global hybridities and mutual deterritorialization and reterritorialization of empire. Driscoll’s exposure of the complicity in and absolutely repugnant cooperation of people like Fukuzawa Yukichi and Futabatei Shimei, who are still more or less sainted in the standard histories on both sides of the Pacific, is also salutary. Moreover, as someone who has come more and more to feel that seeing the Asia-Pacific Wars as a discrete period underplays the extent to which, as Driscoll insists here, the empire ought not be separated from its military operations. Empires are as much a process as they are stable state structures, and violence of all forms is an integral part of that process.

This book was actively difficult to read at times, because as much as I’ve read about the Japanese empire and its colonial sites, I’m not sure I’ve ever encountered descriptions of the actual lived—and died—conditions it created that are as frank as Driscoll’s, and none of my suspicions about why that is are comfortable. I suppose some people will accuse Driscoll of doing a hatchet job on the standard scholarship of Japan's imperialism (starting off with a bang by savaging Yanagita Kunio, rightly, for his "paranoid cultural particularlism" (4) in the introduction), and there is a revolutionary quality to the story he tells, by foregrounding not the question of cui bono? but cui dolori? and by looking not at nation-states but at people and the human costs of capitalist empire. This is a grim, unflinching take on that story, configured very much as a deathride to an absolute wasteland of a conclusion, and indeed my primary quibble with the book is that it ends the only place it can, in the bombed-out ruins of the empire in 1945, with Driscoll declaring that "capitalism itself must be seen as a crime against humanity" (313). But, for the rest of us, my question is, what can be saved from the wreckage?

What can be saved? from the wreckage of Japan studies, from the wreckage of the empire, is essential to ask as an American and as a scholar of Japan, because Driscoll is right if perhaps overreaching when he points out that we in the United States have done these same things too, or at least profited from them. I also think my question is connected to Driscoll's manifest reluctance to deal with ζοη (civilized life, life in society) as opposed to βιος (vita nuda, bare life), which is an interesting gap.

This is a very political book, as any book which talks about the grotesque is by its nature, and my few critiques of Driscoll arise from this fact. He has an unfortunate talent to characterize pre-Meiji periods of history in a way that, while not quite untrue, seems to me to stretch the limits of plausible interpretation, and while I appreciate his critique of contemporary American imperialism and neoliberal/neoconservative intellectual formations, these aren’t incorporated entirely systematically, which is a weakness I’m sure his detractors will seek to exploit. Similarly, he frequently gets carried away by the slickness of his own turns of phrase. But inasmuch as Driscoll’s work is a perfect example of doing what Cary Wolfe argues we must, i.e. instantiate the spectral threat of repositioning historical instances vis-à-vis the current instance, this is an excellent—dare I say vital?—book.

Further reading: Louise Young, Japan's Total Empire

Meta notes: "A more serious sin for materialist thinkers is that disregarding larger structural complexities prevents us from, in the words of Walter Benjamin, 'grasp[ing]…the constellation which [our] era has formed with a definitely earlier one'" (301).

Bibliographic Data: Igarashi, Yoshikuni. Bodies of Memory: Narratives of War in Postwar Japanese Culture, 1945-1970. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000.

Main Argument: Igarashi, in trying "to examine how the past is signified and forgotten through the mediation of history" (3), argues that after the war Japan remembered its past through discursively constructed bodily tropes, and furthermore that after the war the bodies of Japanese people became "sites for national rehabilitation, thus overcoming the historical crisis that Japan's defeat created" (5). A complex movement between memory and forgetting eventually weighed down on the side of forgetting, such that twenty-five years after the war, in Igarashi's view, Japanese society had managed to naturalize forgetting the losses of the war, such that the loss itself was lost.

( A book more of forgetting than of laughter )

Conclusion: Argument, Sources, Examples "After struggling with its conflicting desire both to re-member and to forget its loss, postwar Japan managed to restore nationhood through a teleology of progress and the country's newly acquired material wealth. This recuperation of nationhood as an integral part of re-membering the past." (199) The chapter concludes with an examination of the effect of the 1970s oil shocks on Japanese society and its war amnesia before the obligatory mention of Kobayashi Yoshinori's Sensôron manga, which Igarashi considers to be a failed attempt "to hold the crumbling postwar paradigm together by emphasizing the utility of the war's deaths," which "conceals the historical trauma of 1945" (206).

Critical assessment: Bodies of Memory begins, in the Acknowledgments, by stating that "This book is a personal endeavor to make sense of Japan's postwar history" (ix), and in some sense, though Igarashi advances other arguments, the book's great strength and great weakness is that it never rises beyond that fact.

This is a meaty book that, if it never quite coheres, surveys a vast territory that other scholars have since begun to fill in with greater depth and clarity (Godzilla studies, Olympic studies, to name but a few). For my own taste, I have to admit that I found Igarashi's interpretations to be consistently too informed by a kind of subjugated Freudianism (complete with the total disregard for queerness that accompanies much Freudian critique)--at times he clearly seems to be over-reading various historical texts and incidents. Similarly, the central conceit of "bodies" is excessively vague, and under-theorized; Igarashi never says what he means when he uses the term, which of course allows him to have "bodies" just about every which way he wants.

Igarashi doesn't offer very many new interpretations, but he was the first or at least the earliest notable person to lay out the so-called "foundational narrative" of Japan's postwar, which is certainly something. At the same time, his interpretation of Maruyama Masao in particular is highly questionable, particularly in light of the fact that (unlike many other books I thought of while reading this) Andrew Barshay had already published on Maruyama and modernism long before this book was published--an article that, significantly, is not to be found in Igarashi's bibliography.

Still, if later scholarship has substantially revised various aspects of Igarashi's narrative, there is certainly something to be said for getting in first, and Igarashi has done so with an unusually synoptic survey. That he still manages to ignore manga (!) is symptomatic as well as my personal good fortune.

Further reading: Christopher Ross, Mishima's Sword; Sebastian Conrad, The Quest for the Lost Nation; Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters

Meta notes: David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas was apparently strongly influenced by Mishima. Spoilers: Mitchell does it better.

Bibliographic Data: Totani, Yuma. The Tokyo War Crimes Trial: The Pursuit of Justice in the Wake of World War II. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2008.

Main Argument: Totani assesses the actual proceedings of the International Military Tribunal for the Far East (IMTFE) against the myths that later sprung up in the discourse around the trial, as well as surveying the history of criticism and historical analysis around the Tokyo Tribunal since its conclusion. Many of the myths about the trial, such as the idea that Gen. MacArthur alone kept Hirohito from prosecution, that prosecutors did not address Japanese war crimes in detail, and that the law applied at Tokyo was without precedent, do not match the historical reality of the Tribunal.

Historiographical Engagement: Totani's major innovation, aside from a thorough review of the Japanese-language sources on the Tribunal since its conclusion, was to travel to Australia and to review the court exhibits of the trial, which are vastly longer even than the transcript of the Tribunal's proceedings (which runs to 23 volumes in quarto) and which contain a wealth of additional information that materially affects the understanding of what the Tribunal did, and was trying to do.

( The pursuit of justice )

Critical assessment: This is a strong, beautifully researched study that richly deserves to supplant Richard Minear's jeremiad Victor's Justice as the standard work in English on the Tokyo Tribunal. I could wish for many things about this book--that Totani had more clearly articulated her project, that she had explicitly noted that the first generation of Tribunal analysts were writing during the Occupation, that she took less of a narrow focus on the Tribunal itself in favor of the discourse on it in popular culture--but these quibbles cannot detract from its manifest strengths.

One of the key, and fairly subtle, things that Totani does is to completely downplay, deconstruct, or altogether neglect the key tropes and figures of the Tribunal discourse. She (rightfully) makes Tôjô look like a morally bankrupt weasel, leaves figures like B.V.A. Röling and the Women's International War Crimes Tribunal almost entirely out, and rightfully portrays MacArthur as a megalomaniac who had little personal influence over the fate of Emperor Hirohito, who was spared by a conjunction of Allied inaction and delay. She even, while rightfully exposing the true degree of Joseph Keenan's flaming incompetency, deliberately declines to quote the trial's single most well-known exchange, in which Tôjô blamed the Emperor for the war under Keenan's cross-examination, and declines to condemn Keenan in so many words.

All these choices are deliberate, and the picture Totani paints is stronger for it.

Meta notes: I've done a fair amount of research on the Tokyo Tribunal, and had I fully digested this book before publishing my paper on it last spring I would have substantially rewritten the section concerning Pal in particular, who from an ethical standpoint seems to have totally abandoned any defensible ethical principle in his increasingly fervent propounding of pan-Asianism (!), even to the point of telling convicted B and C war criminals in the 1950s that they had not committed any crimes (!). I also came away with even less respect for Richard Minear, who failed the basic standard of scholarship by declining to base his claims about the Tribunal in its actual historical realities. We all write history for our own times and from our own viewpoints; we must abide by certain basic standards of the practice of history, or everything we write will be, in the end, so much hot air, and just as vain.

Bibliographic Data: Shibusawa, Naoko. America's Geisha Ally: Reimagining the Japanese Enemy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006.

Main Argument: Shibusawa explores how "ideologies in the United States supported American foreign policy" in the initial postwar period, arguing that "how Americans reframed Japan after the war was influenced both by the way Americans came to grips with their new role as global leaders and by the way they viewed the meaning of democracy in a changing world where old hierarchies were being challenged" (11, 6). American rhetoric, particularly that produced by the group Shibusawa characterizes as "postwar liberals," transformed the racialized Japanese other into a feminized and childish figure, thereby too frequently reframing racism in other terms and undermining their own professed anti-racism.

( America's Geisha Ally )

Critical assessment: Shibusawa is an international historian with a background in the United States, and above all it shows in her analysis: this is a book whose subject is very much the United States, with Japan as the object of discourse. There are a lot of niggling infelicities of phrasing that could have been corrected by any competent historian of Japan, and it's a real shame that Shibusawa didn't or couldn't find one to read her manuscript. As a historian whose primary field is Japan, I missed the Japanese perspective on and reaction to the topics discussed here very much.

On the continued theme of "put your biases under a microscope, scholars," it's hard to escape the feeling that Shibusawa's analysis is structured by a sort of latent animosity towards Christianity. Certainly at times she seems to conflate modern/Western/Christian in a way that blunts the power of her analysis and reinscribes some tired dichotomies. Also, I really don't think we should take anything Henry Luce wrote as the belief of America at large, not without actual evidence at any rate.

Another idiosyncracy that blunts Shibusawa's analysis is her persistent tendency to talk about "Euroamericans" as if they were all one monolithic group (!), similar to her tendency to talk about "Cold War liberals" in the United States as though they thought and acted with one mind with respect to Japan. Indeed, one suspects that Shibusawa's real target of analysis is this group, and (in her judgment) their own betrayal of their liberal post-racial vision in their discourses. Additionally, Shibusawa never bothers to prove her contention that the discourses she analyzes were not dictated by the American government but sprang up on their own in tandem but not in sync with government policy.

Finally, while it's not entirely questionable in a book that focuses so heavily on gendered discourse within society, Shibusawa at times seem to push the homoerotic implications of the discourse farther than makes one as a reader or as a historian entirely comfortable vis-a-vis her subjects. I don't think these things are outside the bounds of scholarship by any means (and I'm not surprised Shibusawa's next book project is apparently about gay panic in Cold War politics), but this is definitely the sort of thing that needs to be discussed, if I can be forgiven an uninentional terrible pun, explicitly.

Further reading: Alan Brinkley, The Publisher: Henry Luce and His American Century

Meta notes: Is it possible to assess media in history if your only sources are media? Note as well the persistent problem of assessing what actual impact media have on their audience.

Bibliographic Data: Soh, C. Sarah. The Comfort Women: Sexual Violence and Postcolonial Memory in Korea and Japan. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008.

Main Argument: Soh's main argument is that "the personal tragedies of Korean comfort women arose, in part, from the institutionalized everyday gender violence tolerated in patriarchal homes and enacted in the public sphere (including the battlefront) steeped in what I call 'masculinist sexual culture' in colonial Korea and imperial Japan." Additionally, "the majority of Korean comfort women survivors were not mobilzed as cheongsindae." (3) In other words, the comfort women system cannot be properly understood outside of the structural gender violence prevalent in both Korea and Japan which allowed it to flourish as a transformation and extension of prewar sexual practices.

( The Comfort Women )

Critical assessment: On the whole, this is a strong, necessary book, one that presents what I do think is an important revision to the common understanding of the comfort women system by situating it in a patriarchal culture common to both sides of the Korea Strait and by connecting wartime military sexual violence with its decedents (prostitution as well as outright sexual violence) in the postwar period. For these reasons alone, Soh's book deserves to be read.

That said, Soh's treatment does feature persistent infelicities in framing which, while never rising to the level where they outweigh the value of Soh's arguments, do prevent a strong study from reaching true excellence. The first, as might be forgiven of an anthropologist writing a profoundly historicized study, is a series of bizarre gaps in Soh's background reading--I looked in vain for Cynthia Enloe's Bananas, Beaches, and Bases in the bibliography, or for almost any historical treatment of what Soh terms Korea's colonial modernity. The second, less obviously, is that this is a profoundly sex-negative book, which viewpoint Soh never quite states explicitly. Instead, she persistently frames her discussions so as to foreclose the possibility of women ever being desiring (sexual) subjects in their own right. Instead, in Soh's view, for women sex is always sexual labor, whether in marriage or in prostitution (and indeed, these seem to be the only venues in which women have sex).

For all that Soh discusses, rightly, structural violence and its role in propagating the comfort women system, she seems to be unwilling to discuss the role the structural violence of the Japanese imperial army, which is very well-documented, may have played in the comfort women system. For instance, the fact that imperial soldiers were not granted leave, ever, would seem to deserve more than a single mention in passing in explaining the widespread nature of the comfort women system.

There are other niggling errors, such as Soh's misunderstanding of the nature of war crimes--it's fine to argue for a different conception of war crimes, but to do so you need to contrast your definition explicitly with the one that is agreed upon in international law. She also gets the English name of my home institution in Japan, Doshisha University, wrong, which is the sort of thing that unfortunately leads readers to question your accuracy in general. It's also odd to read her relate her experiences being harangued by many of the South Korean activists with whom she used to work: the subaltern can indeed speak, and it's surprising that Soh doesn't seem to realize how many grenades she's lobbing into the discourse by calling out both sides of the debate.

Indeed, I'm told that Soh burned every bridge she had to write this book, which is part of the reason I wish it were an unqualified success, but regardless, this is a strong and important study that deserves to be the standard work on the subject.

Further reading: Bruce Cumings, Korea's Place in the Sun: A Modern History

Meta notes: This book sits oddly in the Chicago Press "Worlds of Desire" series, which focuses on "sexuality, gender, and culture"--none of the other books in the series appear to take on comparable subject matter.

Bibliographic Data: Yonemoto, Marcia. Mapping Early Modern Japan: Space, Place, and Culture in the Tokugawa Period (1603-1868). Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2003.

Main Argument: Yonemoto argues that "spatial and geographic discourses inhered in the political practices and cultural forms of the early modern period" (2), and that by examining the texts that "shaped and spread geographic consciousness," it is possible to examine "the elusive processes by which people came to name, to know, and to interpret the natural and human worlds in which they lived" (1-2).

( Mapping as a cognitive & cartographic process )

Critical assessment: Overall, this is a strong, well thought-out book. I don't love it as much as Prof. Berry does, but given that she supervised Yonemoto's original dissertation, that seems understandable. In particular, I found Yonemoto's analysis in the last chapter to be somewhat questionable--I don't fully buy her characterization of geographical satires of the pleasure quarters as "anti-politics of pleasure." (Also, maybe I've spent too much time reading scabrous Roman writers, but she misses some really obvious innuendoes in those satires.) Satire is, as far as I'm concerned, inherently (socio)political (this, actually, would be its salient difference from parody). If these writers were writing satires that weren't directly political, maybe they weren't writing satire. Or, I could just be way too overexposed to Horace, Juvenal, and Swift, and be completely wrong here. But, that is my interpretation and understanding.

The other thing about Yonemoto is that she is maniacal about insisting that early modern Japan was not a nation in the modern sense, which I think is at this point pretty well agreed upon, to the point where all of her denials go too far in the other direction and ring hollow--if imagined places are not national spaces, as she subtitles her conclusion, then how do all the mapping schema she documents make sense as such? How can you have an image of "Japan" created in maps and in travel writing without "Japan" to depict? I'm with David Howell and Beth Berry on this one--if there hadn't been an early modern nation, the Meiji state would've had a much harder time creating a modern nation. Heterogeneous as early modern nations worldwide were, nations they still remained.

Further reading: Mary Elizabeth Berry, Japan in Print; Laura Nenzi, Excursions in Identity; David Howell, Geographies of Identity in Nineteenth-Century Japan

Meta notes: Ideology doesn't necessarily equal deception.

Bibliographic Data: Azuma Hiroki. Otaku: Japan's Database Animals. Trans. Jonathan E. Abel & Shion Kono. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009.

Main Argument: Drawing on postmodern and critical theory, Azuma argues that otaku--Japanese fans of anime, manga, and video games, called in Japan the "contents industry"--are a new, postmodern type of human being (shinjinrui) whose subjectivity has no need for the "grand narratives" that framed the modern era. Instead, otaku care only for little narratives at the level of simulacra, i.e. at the level of the actual media they consume, and for "grand nonnarratives" at the level of meaning behind those media, which Azuma terms a database. In their ability to instantly gratify their desires with little narratives, Azuma sees otaku as animals in the Kojévean sense, but in his view they do maintain a vestigial humanity, in the Enlightenment sense, at the level of the database. Thus, they are database animals.

( Postmodern, database, animal )

Critical assessment: It's been two years since I first read this book, and my reaction to it now is much more complex. It was obvious to me in 2009 that Azuma was bringing brilliant theoretical insights to the table, and that is still very much true, but on the other hand, the flaws and weird gaps in his argument are much more obvious this time around. Also, the book is now ten years old despite the fact that the English translation only appeared two years ago, and its age is beginning to show; someone very much needs to bring out Azuma's newer books such as Tokyo kara kangaeru and Yûbinteki fuantachi, to say nothing of the sequel to this book, Gêmu teki rearizumu no tanjô.

I more or less agree with most of what Azuma says in the second, principal chapter of the book concerning the idea of the 'database' and otaku (fan) consumption of its elements; with only cosmetic (surface) changes of terminology, these premises apply readily to English-language media fandom, and they're quite insightful. I have problems with Azuma's treatment of factors that he relegates to the periphery of his argument, namely (in no particular order) gender, queerness and sexuality, passive versus active consumption, and the uniqueness of Japan vis-a-vis global (post)modernity and capitalism.

To take the last of these first, Azuma buys into really tiresome (and tired) ideas about the rupture in Japanese modernity constituted by the American Occupation of Japan from 1945-52 after Japan's defeat at the end of the Asia-Pacific Wars and consequently, to my mind, overplays the uniqueness of otaku subculture as an inheritance of the Edo period (?!), when in reality, I think, the more interesting frame in which to interpret otaku subculture is to consider it as a local form of a praxis that emerges as an effect of advanced capitalism globally. Despite his (rightly) criticizing Murakami Takashi for Murakami's appropriating otaku aesthetics to turn a profit in the pop art world, Azuma more or less agrees with Murakami's superflat thesis. He also is, on the whole, pessimistic about the possibility of forging genuine emotional connections and alternative social spaces and economies through otaku praxis, which seems to me wholly unwarranted. Even more infuriatingly, Azuma notes in passing that not all fans of the contents industry in Japan are male, but proceeds to assume that all otaku are heterosexual men (and to mention homosexuality and pedophilia in the same breath as behaviours of choice) and to more or less follow Saitô Tamaki's offensive, and wrong-headed, Freudian interpretation of anime and manga and to bend that interpretation back on otaku. As people like Fujimoto Yukari, Sandra Annett, and many others have made clear, otaku are not the sum total of Japanese fans, and to assume a priori that all otaku are heterosexual men is deeply problematic. Azuma also underplays, to a criminal extent, the fact that otaku and fan praxis worldwide is defined not by passive consumption, but by investment and involvement in media to an active degree that wider society regards as abnormal at best. Fans aren't passive consumers; that's wider society. Fans are the people who actively take apart, reassemble, tinker with and critique the media they love, in all metaphorical registers of those words--Azuma is dismissive of such central otaku sites as the doujinshi (fanworks) markets, which seems--and I use this word in the full knowledge of how Azuma employs it in text--snobbish, despite the fact that half the examples in this book are drawn from girl games.

It will be clear from these remarks that my own estimation of these matters, including the nature of the relationship between modernity and postmodernity, is much closer to the line that Tom LaMarre takes in The Anime Machine, though I don't think that even Tom goes far enough in reckoning with gender. The thing I really think Azuma misses about otaku is--two things, actually. I mentioned his wrongheaded ideas about the nature of otaku consumption above, but the other thing I think he doesn't grasp, or at least doesn't talk about, is the fact that otaku consumption is knowing. Fujoshi and otaku know that they're primed to like characters with hair that sticks up because the hair is a moe thing, and they like those characters despite recognizing the conscious manipulation. There's a middle ground to fan subjectivity that Azuma barrels past, and I think teasing it out is important. Still, Azuma is an essential thinker in these matters, and someone with whom we must all reckon (and riddle) before we proceed.

Finally, the translation is very good overall, but contains some minor factual errors (Cardcaptor Sakura is a manga by CLAMP, for instance) and a few infelicities of English terminology (no one calls AMVs and vids "mad movies").

Further reading: Thomas Lamarre, The Anime Machine; Anne Allison, "The Cool Brand, Affective Activism, and Japanese Youth"

Meta notes: The Sherlockians give themselves a lot of press as the first fans--and the "good" ones, whatever that means--and it seems to me that, as much as widespread fandom is clearly an effect of advanced capitalism globally, just like capitalism has always carried within it the seeds of its advanced form, elements of fandom can be discerned going as far back as, say, the 1840s, when fans of Dickens gathered on the wharfs of New York City to find out about Little Nell's fate. The seriality of media is an essential precondition for the fannish impulse.

Bibliographic Data: Berry, Mary Elizabeth. The Culture of Civil War in Kyoto. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994.

Main Argument: The century-long upheaval of the Sengoku (Warring States) period that began in Kyoto with the Ônin Wars (1467-77) were felt in the capital distinctly differently than in the rest of the country, partly because Kyoto was virtually the only city of note in the country and partly because the shogunate and its welter of challengers, allies, and enemies--and what all of them wanted out of the shogunate and out of the imperial court--were centered on Kyoto. This urban experience of civil war developed its most distinctive features in the politics of demonstration, which relied on the power of mass witness to make its point, even as all the old certainties were discarded and put to the test, whether in the culture of tea or in the Lotus Uprising, in which sectarian commoners governed the city autonomously for nearly four years before being violently suppressed. The era of civil war defies an easy narrative, and Professor Berry doesn't succumb to the temptation to give it one; there was no clearer view in the 1550s than in the 1460s of how any sort of unity could be reknit out of the shattered pieces of Japan, of how that a society that had for all intents and purposes come apart at the seams could be bound up again. How and why it did--and, moreover, in virtually an entirely new form--is another, more reassuring book.

( Cultures of lawlessness and of demonstration )

Critical assessment: This is one of the best works of history I've read, and it is unquestionably the best book I've read all year. As much as I thought Japan in Print was great, this book is even better.

I know that I have, in this review, utterly failed to convey the sheer verve and genius that animate this book. If I could have everyone who reads this blog read just one book, it would unquestionably be this one; what Berry says about cities, change, war, demonstration, politics, resistance, complicity, negotiation, are relevant wherever there are cities and those who live in and would claim power over them. Cities, as someone once said, are humanity's greatest invention, and Berry's book provides as clear a demonstration as any why that is: the potential and the power that accrues when so many people gather together in one specific place, even though it inevitably fractures into factionalism, is nothing short of revolutionary, and at certain moments when it is unified it is earth-shattering. Prof. Berry was inspired to write this book by the Lebanese civil war, which was fought primarily on urban battlefields, and a clear sense of the danger, fear, and chaos that urban wars engender among inhabitants pervades the book. But reading it today, during an Arab Spring that has produced transcendent results (Tunisia, Egypt) and ongoing struggles whose results are much more ambiguous so far (Libya, Syria, Bahrain, Yemen, Jordan), the real courage that danger inspired in Kyotoites and in people across the Arab world who faced and are facing it are as inspiring as the eventual end of the Lotus Uprising, and the statist violence that peaceful demonstrators have faced across much of West Asia, are sobering. This book makes eminently clear, as well, that it wasn't Twitter and Facebook that created those revolutions; Twitter and Facebook simply enabled people to re-cognize the potential of the city around them, to know--contrary to what dictators in command of 20thC communications technology had told them--that they were not alone.

As I said before, I don't know how the uprisings across West Asia will turn out, though I know what I hope, and I know that the region will never be the same. By the same token, as Berry's narrative proceeds, it rends my heart as someone who had the privilege of being a Kyotoite for a year and who considers the city a home to see the city convulsing, to read the chronicle of its destruction and to chart the progress of its conflagration. But, however unlikely it may have seemed to Kyotoites at the time and however unwelcome those changes were, it is also possible to see the city I know and love, however slowly, being born.

Further reading: Mary Elizabeth Berry, Hideyoshi; James C. Scott, The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia