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ahorbinskiBibliographic 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).
Introduction: Argument, Sources, Examples Silverberg begins with Charlie Chaplin's 1932 visit to Japan and the assassination of the prime minster, non-coincidentally, the next evening, and concludes that, although she insists that her reading is but one possible reading of the archive and that her work is necessarily incomplete, "the cultural order of modern Japan of the 1920s and 1930s was marked by enormous energy, the urge to create, and acerbic challenges to the status quo" (8). She also argues that "the Japanese appropriation of non-Japanese items and images and gestures" should be understood not as "Americanization" but rather "as a historical process specific to Japan" (9).
Part 1: Argument, Sources, Examples The first chapter, "Japanese Modern Times," lays down definitions of the terms Silverberg is using, including her frankly revisionist takes on "ero," "guro," and "nonsense," the last of which she associates with "a political, ironic humor that took on such themes as the transformations wrought by a modernity dominated by Euro-American mores" (30). "Guro" she associates "with the social iniquities and ensuing social practices of those living within a consumer culture defined by the economic hardships of the depression" (ibid). She further defines and argues that Japanese consumer-subjects consciously practiced code-switching in their navigation of mass culture, arguing that "the notion of a culture organized around borrowing from the West…does not allow food the significance of agency informed by indigenous history" (34). Apropos of Garon above, Silverberg notes that she is concerned rather with "the disjuncture between the state ideology on ethnic, gender, and family identity and the messages disseminated by the mass media" during this time period--and the disjuncture was quite large at times (37). The chapter ends with an extended meditation on the modernologists Kon Wajirô and Gonda Yasunosuke, paying attention to their own interest not only in mores (fûzoku) but also gesture (fûzoku), neither of which have been seen as political before in historiography.
Part 2, Chapter 1: Argument, Sources, Examples This chapter, "The Modern Girl as Militant," argues that the Modern Girl, the archetypal figure of Japan's late 1920s, rather than merely being equated with the flapper, was on a different trajectory. Silverberg examines the discourse on the "Japanese-but-Western Modern Girl" and finds that she was defined by her body, that she refused to accept the gendered division of labor enshrined in the Civil Code--that she was a new Japanese woman, in other words. "This modern young woman," Silverberg writes, "transgressed boundaies of class, gender, and culture. Her resistance was usually not organized, but nevertheless it was political" (64). However, this vision of an "unattached, militant woman who publicly expressed her desires for sex and for work in public places" has vanished from popular memory and the historiographical record (ibid). Silverberg notes that the discourse on the Modern Girl emerged just as the government was considering revising the Meiji Civil Code in 1925, and as women workers were demanding greater benefits and rights; thus, "the obsessive contouring of the Modern Girl as promiscuous and apolitical (and, later, as apolitical and nonworking) can be understood as a means of displacing the very real militancy of Japanese women (just as the real labor of the AMerican woman during the 1920s was denied by the trivializing of the work of the glamorized flapper)" (69). Mainstream male commentators made much of the Modern Girl's non-Japaneseness to minimize the threat that real modern girls posed to patriarchal structures, in a classic bait-and-switch.
Part 2, Chapter 2: Argument, Sources, Examples This chapter, "The Cafe Waitress Sang the Blues," argues that "the Japanese cafe waitress was the working-class embodiment of the Modern Girl and as such she sang the blues," meaning that "while she was commodified as an erotic object, at the same time she articulated her own sensual desires and her protests against the constraints of her workplace," i.e. one of the thousands of cafes in metropolitan modern Japan in which women provided erotically charged service to men. Thus, cafe waitresses were part of the long history of what in Japan has been euphemistically referred to as the "mizu shôbai" in all its various stripes. Silverberg then turns to several explorations of the cafe waitress, namely a sociological survey, an ethnography, and a fictional, semi-autobiographical diary written by Hayashi Fumiko. These sources excavate a world defined by a rigid gender polarity, in which ero represented "male pleasures of physical intimacy with women made available for domination" while iro was "used to refer to women's desire for connectedness to men," and in which ero, not surprisingly, dominated the discourse about the cafes and the cafes themselves (107). Silverberg further argues that there was "pervasive dismissal of the erotic in the play of the cafe waitress and in the sensationalization of the erotic grotesque nonsense of the modern years," and that the legacy of this denial reverberates in contemporary Japanese culture and its obsession with women in pieces (ibid).
Part 2, Chapter 3: Argument, Sources, Examples This chapter looks at the magazine Eiga no tomo from the years 1931-1941 and "reveals a transition from a focus on sensual pleasures grounded in sexualized gender difference, and on a discourse of national difference that also insisted on universalizing, to a transposition of seikatsu onto the Japanese occupation of China. […] In other words, ero was displaced by reportage on empire" (108). That said, the magazine's refusal to let go of Hollywood until legally compelled to do so is a linchpin in Silverberg's conclusion that consumer-subjects did not willingly let go of the modern, and the magazine writers and critics she quotes as the 1930s wear on are often surprisingly blunt in their refusal to participate in fascist discourse on its own terms, as when one 1938 roundtable participant asks, "Where does it say that it's necessary, by choice, for all of Japan to be rural?" (qtd. 133). Before that, however, the discourse on ero in the movies revealed a distinction between the erotic and the pornographic, and the fact that women's eroticism consisted of body parts, while men's consisted of social rather than bodily forms. Moreover, by this point eroticism had become tied to gender ambiguity, even as gesture (and in particular Japanese actresses' failure to be convincing at making foreign gestures) became an important site of critique. When war first appeared in the pages of Eiga no tomo, it was as another scene in the montage, but the discourse on seikatsu shifted over the decade: it first referred to "the erotic life of the senses, along with the every day gestures of Hollywood and Japanese movie stars. […] By the late 1930s, Eiga no tomo attempted to eroticize empire through an attempt to let go of Hollywood fantasies, through the redefinition of the priorities of Japanese spectators, and thirdly, through an engagement with the everyday [seikatsu] on the Chinese continent" (131). Silverberg also makes, in passing, what I consider to be the only necessary comment on the regime's 2600th anniversary celebrations for the dynasty in 1940: "it may be said that the state officially inaugurated an end to the celebration of the new with its celebration of cultural continuity" (140).
Part 2, Chapter 4: Argument, Sources, Examples This chapter looks at the magazine Shufu no Tomo and how its pages chart the course by which, to borrow the chapter title, the household became modern life.
Part 3, Chapter 1: Argument, Sources, Examples This chapter, "Asakusa Eroticism," argues that Asakusa was honky-tonk, not only because of its "more desperate aspects" but also "to help recall the energy, the tempo, and the sensuous pleasures to be had in this 'park.' Yet my comparison of honky-tonk culture with Asakusa happenings can only go so far, for a central element in the culture of Asakusa was the inseparability of worship from corporeal pleasures" (177). Silverberg argues that Asakusa in the modern years was erotic, and that this eroticism, which celebrated the sensuality of both men and women, "could be defined by sensation, food, motion, and vision" (178). Gonda Yasunosuke saw Asakusa as the site of a particular set of experiences (Asakusa movies, Asakusa sushi…) and also that it was "where the masses created culture" (182). Reading the poetry of Soeda Azenbô, Silverberg argues that "of course [Asakusa] was a pornographic space where women's services were sold, but it also included women as agents in its search for unending pleasures and shifting gender" (186), an argument reinforced by her interrogation of the figure of Yumiko in Kawabata Yasunari's novel Asakusa Kurenaidan (1930). Moreover, borrowing from Audre Lorde, Silverberg argues that we should "view the Japanese modern era as characterized by Lorde's 'electric charge,' the creative energy that can exhibit itself in love, work, and other aspects of everyday life" (185). Reading two movie critics, Iwasaki Akira and Ozaki Midori, Silverberg attempts to excavate the moviegoing experience, and its eroticisim; Iwasaki, she argues, is taken in by Hollywood exoticism, while Ozaki's work si notable for her "presumption of an experience shared by Western and Japanese audiences" (202). This would become an impossible position by the end of the decade, when play would become "national play" and seikatsu would become kokumin seikatsu.
Part 3, Chapter 2: Argument, Sources, Examples This chapter considers Asakusa grotsquerie, or, the lives of those who were "down and out in Tokyo" in the 1930s. In Silverberg's view, this grotesquerie "included expressions of awareness and protest against this very marginalization. These were protests by those imagined as voiceless, far from able to give voice to a social critique" (203). Importantly, Silverberg argues that "we cannot, and we need not" separate fact from fiction when considering these Asakusa down-and-outs: "As long as we place both survey categories and surveyors within a politicized moment that has been dismissed as the playful transitional time of a decadent erotic grotesque nonsense, a history of the Asakusa down-and-out can emerge," informed by Ted Porter's Trust in Numbers, which argues that "every category has the potential to become a new thing" (205). Asakusa beggars were heirs to a beggar culture that had experienced a decisive break at the time of the Meiji Restoration, while the vagrants' social cohesion would be challenged by the Depression of the 1930s, which saw them transformed in discourse from "furôsha" to lumpen (rumpen), in a clear sign of the penetration of Marxist analysis into Japanese popular consciousness. Here is part of the appeal of Charlie Chapin, who has flitted throughout this work: in his roles as the lumpen hero, "Charlie belonged to Japan because he belonged to the world" (213). The other categories of the Asakusa down-and-out were juvenile delinquents, hawkers--who had their own language, much like Cockney, and their own systems of social cohesion--and freaks, which in Asakusa meant foreign entertainers, "who were doubly marked as object and other within the world of spectacle" (228). These "freaks of culture" "were indeed members of the racially marked underclass" (ibid). Interestingly, as with her discussion on juvenile delinquents, Silverberg in this section straight-up treats fiction as fact by returning to Asakusa Kurenaidan.
Part 3, Chapter 3: Argument, Sources, Examples This chapter, "Modern Nonsense," looks at nonsense movies, achakara comedy, and other forms of resistance and criticism, arguing that all of these supposedly "nonsensical" forms shared the "inability to speak positively" which "also meant its inability to affirm lies" (232). Achakara comedy, the Asakusa comedy that came from "over there," "implied that both the class hierarchy and the mores were constructs, and that changes should and could be made" and relied on "code-switching, gags (the neologism gyagu was used), and other gestures marked as modan" (239). But Silverberg also documents the "dimming of the modern" through Takeda Rintarô's Asakusa Threepenny Opera (San Mon Opera, 1932), and Takami Jun's Under Whatever Star (Ikanaru Hoshi no Shita ni, 1939), which was not a clear trajectory of replacement but was nonetheless a form of tenkô and then simply of extinguishing Asakusa culture as "the emperor system, if not the nativist, statist, expansionist ideology, had clearly won out" (254). Although some artists resisted the system from within by retaining the erotic of the modern years in wartime, such as blues singer Awaya Noriko, the end of the war reconfigured "power both within culture and between cultures" (257) such that another book would be required to determine whether modern times ended at Pearl Harbor, and whether and how they rose up again in the postwar.
Conclusion: Argument, Sources, Examples After a series of "freeze frames," Silverberg concludes that
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).
Introduction: Argument, Sources, Examples Silverberg begins with Charlie Chaplin's 1932 visit to Japan and the assassination of the prime minster, non-coincidentally, the next evening, and concludes that, although she insists that her reading is but one possible reading of the archive and that her work is necessarily incomplete, "the cultural order of modern Japan of the 1920s and 1930s was marked by enormous energy, the urge to create, and acerbic challenges to the status quo" (8). She also argues that "the Japanese appropriation of non-Japanese items and images and gestures" should be understood not as "Americanization" but rather "as a historical process specific to Japan" (9).
Part 1: Argument, Sources, Examples The first chapter, "Japanese Modern Times," lays down definitions of the terms Silverberg is using, including her frankly revisionist takes on "ero," "guro," and "nonsense," the last of which she associates with "a political, ironic humor that took on such themes as the transformations wrought by a modernity dominated by Euro-American mores" (30). "Guro" she associates "with the social iniquities and ensuing social practices of those living within a consumer culture defined by the economic hardships of the depression" (ibid). She further defines and argues that Japanese consumer-subjects consciously practiced code-switching in their navigation of mass culture, arguing that "the notion of a culture organized around borrowing from the West…does not allow food the significance of agency informed by indigenous history" (34). Apropos of Garon above, Silverberg notes that she is concerned rather with "the disjuncture between the state ideology on ethnic, gender, and family identity and the messages disseminated by the mass media" during this time period--and the disjuncture was quite large at times (37). The chapter ends with an extended meditation on the modernologists Kon Wajirô and Gonda Yasunosuke, paying attention to their own interest not only in mores (fûzoku) but also gesture (fûzoku), neither of which have been seen as political before in historiography.
Part 2, Chapter 1: Argument, Sources, Examples This chapter, "The Modern Girl as Militant," argues that the Modern Girl, the archetypal figure of Japan's late 1920s, rather than merely being equated with the flapper, was on a different trajectory. Silverberg examines the discourse on the "Japanese-but-Western Modern Girl" and finds that she was defined by her body, that she refused to accept the gendered division of labor enshrined in the Civil Code--that she was a new Japanese woman, in other words. "This modern young woman," Silverberg writes, "transgressed boundaies of class, gender, and culture. Her resistance was usually not organized, but nevertheless it was political" (64). However, this vision of an "unattached, militant woman who publicly expressed her desires for sex and for work in public places" has vanished from popular memory and the historiographical record (ibid). Silverberg notes that the discourse on the Modern Girl emerged just as the government was considering revising the Meiji Civil Code in 1925, and as women workers were demanding greater benefits and rights; thus, "the obsessive contouring of the Modern Girl as promiscuous and apolitical (and, later, as apolitical and nonworking) can be understood as a means of displacing the very real militancy of Japanese women (just as the real labor of the AMerican woman during the 1920s was denied by the trivializing of the work of the glamorized flapper)" (69). Mainstream male commentators made much of the Modern Girl's non-Japaneseness to minimize the threat that real modern girls posed to patriarchal structures, in a classic bait-and-switch.
Part 2, Chapter 2: Argument, Sources, Examples This chapter, "The Cafe Waitress Sang the Blues," argues that "the Japanese cafe waitress was the working-class embodiment of the Modern Girl and as such she sang the blues," meaning that "while she was commodified as an erotic object, at the same time she articulated her own sensual desires and her protests against the constraints of her workplace," i.e. one of the thousands of cafes in metropolitan modern Japan in which women provided erotically charged service to men. Thus, cafe waitresses were part of the long history of what in Japan has been euphemistically referred to as the "mizu shôbai" in all its various stripes. Silverberg then turns to several explorations of the cafe waitress, namely a sociological survey, an ethnography, and a fictional, semi-autobiographical diary written by Hayashi Fumiko. These sources excavate a world defined by a rigid gender polarity, in which ero represented "male pleasures of physical intimacy with women made available for domination" while iro was "used to refer to women's desire for connectedness to men," and in which ero, not surprisingly, dominated the discourse about the cafes and the cafes themselves (107). Silverberg further argues that there was "pervasive dismissal of the erotic in the play of the cafe waitress and in the sensationalization of the erotic grotesque nonsense of the modern years," and that the legacy of this denial reverberates in contemporary Japanese culture and its obsession with women in pieces (ibid).
Part 2, Chapter 3: Argument, Sources, Examples This chapter looks at the magazine Eiga no tomo from the years 1931-1941 and "reveals a transition from a focus on sensual pleasures grounded in sexualized gender difference, and on a discourse of national difference that also insisted on universalizing, to a transposition of seikatsu onto the Japanese occupation of China. […] In other words, ero was displaced by reportage on empire" (108). That said, the magazine's refusal to let go of Hollywood until legally compelled to do so is a linchpin in Silverberg's conclusion that consumer-subjects did not willingly let go of the modern, and the magazine writers and critics she quotes as the 1930s wear on are often surprisingly blunt in their refusal to participate in fascist discourse on its own terms, as when one 1938 roundtable participant asks, "Where does it say that it's necessary, by choice, for all of Japan to be rural?" (qtd. 133). Before that, however, the discourse on ero in the movies revealed a distinction between the erotic and the pornographic, and the fact that women's eroticism consisted of body parts, while men's consisted of social rather than bodily forms. Moreover, by this point eroticism had become tied to gender ambiguity, even as gesture (and in particular Japanese actresses' failure to be convincing at making foreign gestures) became an important site of critique. When war first appeared in the pages of Eiga no tomo, it was as another scene in the montage, but the discourse on seikatsu shifted over the decade: it first referred to "the erotic life of the senses, along with the every day gestures of Hollywood and Japanese movie stars. […] By the late 1930s, Eiga no tomo attempted to eroticize empire through an attempt to let go of Hollywood fantasies, through the redefinition of the priorities of Japanese spectators, and thirdly, through an engagement with the everyday [seikatsu] on the Chinese continent" (131). Silverberg also makes, in passing, what I consider to be the only necessary comment on the regime's 2600th anniversary celebrations for the dynasty in 1940: "it may be said that the state officially inaugurated an end to the celebration of the new with its celebration of cultural continuity" (140).
Part 2, Chapter 4: Argument, Sources, Examples This chapter looks at the magazine Shufu no Tomo and how its pages chart the course by which, to borrow the chapter title, the household became modern life.
Like the other segments making up my montage, it spoke in terms of a post-earthquake break in history resulting in new expressions, an upbeat tempo, a questioning of gender categories, an intensification of erotic experience, and an association of all of the above with an everyday that extended beyond the borders of Japanese culture. In contrast to the state ideology positing a traditional woman within the family, this women's magazine sided with an idea of a modern woman within a modern home. (143)Shufu no Tomo did this during the period in which the patriarchal, multi-generational ie of the Meiji ideology was under attack from Marxism, from economic hardship, and from the rise of love marriages, thus creating the figure of the shufu, the housewife, who was the mistress of her own modern "culture home" and who was legitimized within the magazine's pages in several ways: "by finding a mate, by discord [with her husband], and by being a housewife in and of the modern world" (148). SnT, moreover, both celebrated rational domesticity and portrayed housewives as either past, future, or current workers (and vice versa), challenging official ideology once again. By the end of the 1930s, however, the shufu had been associated not with the Modern Girl and the modern katei but with the figure of the wartime mother, and the seikatsu on which the magazine focused became that of colonial Manchuria, as the "modern" retreated from the naichi of Japan. Silverberg explicitly sees the innovations in gesture, food, and household management introduced in SnT not as Sheldon Garon's "moral suasion" from above but as a series of choices originating from below.
Part 3, Chapter 1: Argument, Sources, Examples This chapter, "Asakusa Eroticism," argues that Asakusa was honky-tonk, not only because of its "more desperate aspects" but also "to help recall the energy, the tempo, and the sensuous pleasures to be had in this 'park.' Yet my comparison of honky-tonk culture with Asakusa happenings can only go so far, for a central element in the culture of Asakusa was the inseparability of worship from corporeal pleasures" (177). Silverberg argues that Asakusa in the modern years was erotic, and that this eroticism, which celebrated the sensuality of both men and women, "could be defined by sensation, food, motion, and vision" (178). Gonda Yasunosuke saw Asakusa as the site of a particular set of experiences (Asakusa movies, Asakusa sushi…) and also that it was "where the masses created culture" (182). Reading the poetry of Soeda Azenbô, Silverberg argues that "of course [Asakusa] was a pornographic space where women's services were sold, but it also included women as agents in its search for unending pleasures and shifting gender" (186), an argument reinforced by her interrogation of the figure of Yumiko in Kawabata Yasunari's novel Asakusa Kurenaidan (1930). Moreover, borrowing from Audre Lorde, Silverberg argues that we should "view the Japanese modern era as characterized by Lorde's 'electric charge,' the creative energy that can exhibit itself in love, work, and other aspects of everyday life" (185). Reading two movie critics, Iwasaki Akira and Ozaki Midori, Silverberg attempts to excavate the moviegoing experience, and its eroticisim; Iwasaki, she argues, is taken in by Hollywood exoticism, while Ozaki's work si notable for her "presumption of an experience shared by Western and Japanese audiences" (202). This would become an impossible position by the end of the decade, when play would become "national play" and seikatsu would become kokumin seikatsu.
Part 3, Chapter 2: Argument, Sources, Examples This chapter considers Asakusa grotsquerie, or, the lives of those who were "down and out in Tokyo" in the 1930s. In Silverberg's view, this grotesquerie "included expressions of awareness and protest against this very marginalization. These were protests by those imagined as voiceless, far from able to give voice to a social critique" (203). Importantly, Silverberg argues that "we cannot, and we need not" separate fact from fiction when considering these Asakusa down-and-outs: "As long as we place both survey categories and surveyors within a politicized moment that has been dismissed as the playful transitional time of a decadent erotic grotesque nonsense, a history of the Asakusa down-and-out can emerge," informed by Ted Porter's Trust in Numbers, which argues that "every category has the potential to become a new thing" (205). Asakusa beggars were heirs to a beggar culture that had experienced a decisive break at the time of the Meiji Restoration, while the vagrants' social cohesion would be challenged by the Depression of the 1930s, which saw them transformed in discourse from "furôsha" to lumpen (rumpen), in a clear sign of the penetration of Marxist analysis into Japanese popular consciousness. Here is part of the appeal of Charlie Chapin, who has flitted throughout this work: in his roles as the lumpen hero, "Charlie belonged to Japan because he belonged to the world" (213). The other categories of the Asakusa down-and-out were juvenile delinquents, hawkers--who had their own language, much like Cockney, and their own systems of social cohesion--and freaks, which in Asakusa meant foreign entertainers, "who were doubly marked as object and other within the world of spectacle" (228). These "freaks of culture" "were indeed members of the racially marked underclass" (ibid). Interestingly, as with her discussion on juvenile delinquents, Silverberg in this section straight-up treats fiction as fact by returning to Asakusa Kurenaidan.
Part 3, Chapter 3: Argument, Sources, Examples This chapter, "Modern Nonsense," looks at nonsense movies, achakara comedy, and other forms of resistance and criticism, arguing that all of these supposedly "nonsensical" forms shared the "inability to speak positively" which "also meant its inability to affirm lies" (232). Achakara comedy, the Asakusa comedy that came from "over there," "implied that both the class hierarchy and the mores were constructs, and that changes should and could be made" and relied on "code-switching, gags (the neologism gyagu was used), and other gestures marked as modan" (239). But Silverberg also documents the "dimming of the modern" through Takeda Rintarô's Asakusa Threepenny Opera (San Mon Opera, 1932), and Takami Jun's Under Whatever Star (Ikanaru Hoshi no Shita ni, 1939), which was not a clear trajectory of replacement but was nonetheless a form of tenkô and then simply of extinguishing Asakusa culture as "the emperor system, if not the nativist, statist, expansionist ideology, had clearly won out" (254). Although some artists resisted the system from within by retaining the erotic of the modern years in wartime, such as blues singer Awaya Noriko, the end of the war reconfigured "power both within culture and between cultures" (257) such that another book would be required to determine whether modern times ended at Pearl Harbor, and whether and how they rose up again in the postwar.
Conclusion: Argument, Sources, Examples After a series of "freeze frames," Silverberg concludes that
The ero made pornographic may have been grotesque at times, and the grotesquerie of the lives of those living in the depths of poverty may have at times appeared nonsensical, but the modern moment of Japan in the years of erotic grotesque nonsense was not in any way nonsense. The history of modern Japanese culture was suffused by meanings and tensions, created, consumed, and then not forgotten by the women, the men, and the children who went out to play in the city streets, and who were then sent to war, before they were told not to remember. (269)
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.