Andrea J. Horbinski (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
ahorbinski) wrote2015-03-23 07:29 pm
ahorbinski) wrote2015-03-23 07:29 pm
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Brief notes on Kajii Jun's Tore, yôchô no jû to pen
This book is probably the first non-fiction Japanese book I ever attempted to read, back when I was on a Fulbright in Kyoto from 2007-08. I was writing about contemporary hypernationalist manga, and Kajii was one of the few writers I could find with my then-resources who talked about wartime manga in depth. I couldn't really read Japanese at the point, but I didn't let that stop me. Seven years later, I read the whole book in a few days, an amount of time which before would have netted me only a few pages, and I can say that part of the problem I had back then is that Kajii's prose is kind of opaque. Unlike Shimizu Isao, he doesn't write in a conversational style, and he uses a lot of uncommon words. So it was still slow going, even now that I'm literate, and it took me about half the book before Kajii's prose style clicked in my mind and I was able to start skimming with more confidence.
I was glad I did go back and read the whole book, because the second chapter in particular caused me to significantly revise my views on Kajii as a critic. Kajii argues that Kodansha in general, and Tagawa Suihô's Norakuro in particular, were significantly responsible for teaching kids militarism in the 1930s. He really hates Tagawa, which is clear from the simplistic way he goes about criticizing Tagawa and Norakuro. To wit, rather than taking the expected tack that the author is dead (paging Derrida, etc, etc) and that even though the military hated Norakuro and basically no one who was a kid reading Norakuro at the time agrees with the idea that it taught them to be militaristic, Norakuro did contribute to militarism in society despite Tagawa's intentions--rather than that, his strategy is to argue that because Tagawa was a mobo (modern boy) and an artist involved in the MAVO movement, and because his wife took over writing their joint memoir for the years after 1923, Tagawa wasn't actually a good person. (This goes against literally every other attestation I have read as to Tagawa's character, incidentally.) It's not even sexism that has Kajii hating on Tagawa Sayako, it's just hatred, because he quotes the memoir of another mangaka's wife about that guy's life later on in the book without any kind of complaint or note about its trustiworthiness.
It's worth noting that "Norakuro taught militarism" was the commonplace position amongst people who care about this sort of thing for about 50 years, but recently critics such as Natsume Fusanosuke have moved towards the position that I myself hold: Norakuro was popular because it was a good manga, and the story of a stray dog joining the military appealed to children because they already liked dogs and the military. Japan was a empire that had never lost a war in 1931, and it was its pre-existing, if not fundamental, militarism that in no small part led to the Manchurian Incident that year. It wasn't having read Norakuro that caused young people to join various imperial ventures in the 30s and 40s; it was poverty, desperation, and conscription. That Tagawa wasn't any kind of true believer in the empire, and yet wrote a manga that was so heavily imbricated in the empire and its military, is a sign of just how iron that iron consensus in society was: it was inescapable.
When he's not ranting and raving about Tagawa, Kajii mostly seems to realize this, and the rest of the book made some good points, though there was less attention to Katô Etsurô, the anarchist-turned-Japanese Nazi right-winger-turned-communist cartoonist who was the most vocal supporter of the New Order in national manga circles, than I remembered. (I've read Katô's wartime tract, and it contains literal Nazi propaganada alongside its apologia for the Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere. Why any academic gives Watsuji Tetsuro, the "overcoming modernity" idiots, or proto-Nihonjinron people the time of day I will never understand, given that all of them were more or less fascist and the ideas are basically right out of the Nazi theories of the Volk and the Blud und Boden, however watered down that aspect became by the 1980s.) Kajii really hates anarchists--he accuses Tagawa of being one, and he can't quite grasp the fact that anarchism to fascism was actually a pretty common intellectual move in the 1930s. Takamure Itsue was one of many people who made it, though in fairness, if you were an anarchist or a communist in the 1930s you could either "return to Japan" under your own power or do it via torture, blacklisting, and imprisonment, if not outright state-sponsored murder. So Kajii can't really deal in any functional way with Katô, who was an anarchist originally, which is too bad. That said, his description of Katô's bromance with another mangaka, Sugiura Yukio, was touching.
I was glad I did go back and read the whole book, because the second chapter in particular caused me to significantly revise my views on Kajii as a critic. Kajii argues that Kodansha in general, and Tagawa Suihô's Norakuro in particular, were significantly responsible for teaching kids militarism in the 1930s. He really hates Tagawa, which is clear from the simplistic way he goes about criticizing Tagawa and Norakuro. To wit, rather than taking the expected tack that the author is dead (paging Derrida, etc, etc) and that even though the military hated Norakuro and basically no one who was a kid reading Norakuro at the time agrees with the idea that it taught them to be militaristic, Norakuro did contribute to militarism in society despite Tagawa's intentions--rather than that, his strategy is to argue that because Tagawa was a mobo (modern boy) and an artist involved in the MAVO movement, and because his wife took over writing their joint memoir for the years after 1923, Tagawa wasn't actually a good person. (This goes against literally every other attestation I have read as to Tagawa's character, incidentally.) It's not even sexism that has Kajii hating on Tagawa Sayako, it's just hatred, because he quotes the memoir of another mangaka's wife about that guy's life later on in the book without any kind of complaint or note about its trustiworthiness.
It's worth noting that "Norakuro taught militarism" was the commonplace position amongst people who care about this sort of thing for about 50 years, but recently critics such as Natsume Fusanosuke have moved towards the position that I myself hold: Norakuro was popular because it was a good manga, and the story of a stray dog joining the military appealed to children because they already liked dogs and the military. Japan was a empire that had never lost a war in 1931, and it was its pre-existing, if not fundamental, militarism that in no small part led to the Manchurian Incident that year. It wasn't having read Norakuro that caused young people to join various imperial ventures in the 30s and 40s; it was poverty, desperation, and conscription. That Tagawa wasn't any kind of true believer in the empire, and yet wrote a manga that was so heavily imbricated in the empire and its military, is a sign of just how iron that iron consensus in society was: it was inescapable.
When he's not ranting and raving about Tagawa, Kajii mostly seems to realize this, and the rest of the book made some good points, though there was less attention to Katô Etsurô, the anarchist-turned-Japanese Nazi right-winger-turned-communist cartoonist who was the most vocal supporter of the New Order in national manga circles, than I remembered. (I've read Katô's wartime tract, and it contains literal Nazi propaganada alongside its apologia for the Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere. Why any academic gives Watsuji Tetsuro, the "overcoming modernity" idiots, or proto-Nihonjinron people the time of day I will never understand, given that all of them were more or less fascist and the ideas are basically right out of the Nazi theories of the Volk and the Blud und Boden, however watered down that aspect became by the 1980s.) Kajii really hates anarchists--he accuses Tagawa of being one, and he can't quite grasp the fact that anarchism to fascism was actually a pretty common intellectual move in the 1930s. Takamure Itsue was one of many people who made it, though in fairness, if you were an anarchist or a communist in the 1930s you could either "return to Japan" under your own power or do it via torture, blacklisting, and imprisonment, if not outright state-sponsored murder. So Kajii can't really deal in any functional way with Katô, who was an anarchist originally, which is too bad. That said, his description of Katô's bromance with another mangaka, Sugiura Yukio, was touching.