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Bibliographic Data: Silverberg, Miriam. Erotic Grotesque Nonsense: The Mass Culture of Japanese Modern Times. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007.
Main Argument: In this book SIlverberg offers a montage of the fifteen year period from 1923-1938 (the Great Kantô Earthquake to Konoe's "new order in Asia," essentially), arguing that these years were anything but apolitical, although they were bounded by continuities: "the continuity of the political power of mass culture and the political continuity of a constitutional structure giving ultimate power to the emperor" (2). In Silverberg's view, the mass culture of Japan's "consumer subjects" in these years constituted "a popular mobilization that offered an alternative to the state ideology of the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s, albeit one positioned from within capitalist structures of domination" (4). Mass culture was intensely, and knowingly, political. The principle of this culture and of popular consciousness in general was the montage, the juxtaposition of pieces of culture fragmented in time and space, pieces selected by an "active and often sophisticated process of moving between pieces chosen from various cultures within and outside Japan," namely code-switching, informed as well by a "documentary impulse" (ibid). Silverberg puts women at the center of her arguments, and further argues that the culture of "ero guro nonsense" continued into the 1940s precisely because Japan's consumer subjects did not want to let go of the modern.
Historiographical Engagement: The Japan scholars whose names recur most frequently are Carol Gluck, Takashi Fujitani, Andrew Gordon, Sheldon Garon; Silverberg mostly agrees with their arguments in general but differs in specifics, particularly with Garon, whose "moral suasion" Silverberg sees as in some sense limited: "my position is that reference to new forms of everyday practice [seikatsu] could be liberatory as well as controlling: that the media and other modern play spaces introduced options to consumer-subjects, and they give us a record of those options" (35).
( The mass culture of Japanese modern times )
Critical assessment: This book is stupendous, both in the sense that it's a masterpiece and in that it is so dense, and its historiographical method so unusual, that at times it is difficult to understand exactly what is going on or what Silverberg is arguing. In the end, she achieves exactly the montage effect she had been aiming for, in that the reader constructs a sense of Japan's modern times for themselves out of the pieces that she has assembled, consciously choosing between them and noting disjunctures (as well as continuities). I'm also thoroughly impressed at her broad and casual command of theory from various disciplines, and the ease with which she integrates it into her study, as well as the depth of her familiarity with the Japanese sources--and the depth with which she explicates them--and her willingness to read fiction as fact in the service of recreating a milieu. All in all, this book is an achievement that deserves to be better read.
Further reading: Mark Driscoll, Absolute Erotic, Absolute Grotesque; Louise Young, Japan's Total Empire; Takashi Fujitani, Splendid Monarchy; Carol Gluck, Japan's Modern Myths; Andrew Gordon, Labor and Imperial Democracy in Prewar Japan
Meta notes: Silverberg passed away in 2008, and the academy is much poorer without her.
Main Argument: In this book SIlverberg offers a montage of the fifteen year period from 1923-1938 (the Great Kantô Earthquake to Konoe's "new order in Asia," essentially), arguing that these years were anything but apolitical, although they were bounded by continuities: "the continuity of the political power of mass culture and the political continuity of a constitutional structure giving ultimate power to the emperor" (2). In Silverberg's view, the mass culture of Japan's "consumer subjects" in these years constituted "a popular mobilization that offered an alternative to the state ideology of the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s, albeit one positioned from within capitalist structures of domination" (4). Mass culture was intensely, and knowingly, political. The principle of this culture and of popular consciousness in general was the montage, the juxtaposition of pieces of culture fragmented in time and space, pieces selected by an "active and often sophisticated process of moving between pieces chosen from various cultures within and outside Japan," namely code-switching, informed as well by a "documentary impulse" (ibid). Silverberg puts women at the center of her arguments, and further argues that the culture of "ero guro nonsense" continued into the 1940s precisely because Japan's consumer subjects did not want to let go of the modern.
Historiographical Engagement: The Japan scholars whose names recur most frequently are Carol Gluck, Takashi Fujitani, Andrew Gordon, Sheldon Garon; Silverberg mostly agrees with their arguments in general but differs in specifics, particularly with Garon, whose "moral suasion" Silverberg sees as in some sense limited: "my position is that reference to new forms of everyday practice [seikatsu] could be liberatory as well as controlling: that the media and other modern play spaces introduced options to consumer-subjects, and they give us a record of those options" (35).
( The mass culture of Japanese modern times )
Critical assessment: This book is stupendous, both in the sense that it's a masterpiece and in that it is so dense, and its historiographical method so unusual, that at times it is difficult to understand exactly what is going on or what Silverberg is arguing. In the end, she achieves exactly the montage effect she had been aiming for, in that the reader constructs a sense of Japan's modern times for themselves out of the pieces that she has assembled, consciously choosing between them and noting disjunctures (as well as continuities). I'm also thoroughly impressed at her broad and casual command of theory from various disciplines, and the ease with which she integrates it into her study, as well as the depth of her familiarity with the Japanese sources--and the depth with which she explicates them--and her willingness to read fiction as fact in the service of recreating a milieu. All in all, this book is an achievement that deserves to be better read.
Further reading: Mark Driscoll, Absolute Erotic, Absolute Grotesque; Louise Young, Japan's Total Empire; Takashi Fujitani, Splendid Monarchy; Carol Gluck, Japan's Modern Myths; Andrew Gordon, Labor and Imperial Democracy in Prewar Japan
Meta notes: Silverberg passed away in 2008, and the academy is much poorer without her.