ABSTRACTS
Lani ALDEN, University of Colorado Boulder
“Her Body Should Serve the World” – Constructing the Scientific Woman in Modern Japan
“Her Body Should Serve the World” – Constructing the Scientific Woman in Modern Japan
In Japan’s mid-to-late 19th century, intellectuals deployed newly imported scientific naturalism to help define and codify aspects of society that were previously considerably more fluid. Entirely new terms were constructed and published in dictionaries, popular science journals, and handbooks. Meiji scholars invented words like josei (jo = woman, sei = inner nature) or dansei (dan = man, sei = inner nature) in order to construct a new, “scientific” vision of gender. Though often these definitions were oppressive, restrictive, and clearly sought to reinforce existing power dynamics, at times, these definitions could also be liberating. In the Edo-era, there was more clearly a differentiation of learned gender and biological sex and public thought allowed for a wide variety of alternative femininities and masculinities to be considered acceptable. Meiji-era terminology, however, sought a simultaneous eradication of this differentiation and acceptance alongside a legalistic liberation of the new members of the constructed josei category.
The term josei, in particular, represents this contradictory dynamic of eradication and liberation. By contrasting Edo-era thought on gender and sex with the Meiji-era construction of terms like josei or dansei in dictionaries and scientific texts, it becomes possible to reconstruct the reality of the Meiji-era “scientific” woman and begin to probe why she was constructed and how her construction impacted the way women at the time thought about their own female-ness.
Pontus ANDERSSON, University of Helsinki
Gendered Language Ideology in Japanese: Queerness as Linguistic Resistance
Gendered Language Ideology in Japanese: Queerness as Linguistic Resistance
My paper is based on a small-scale pilot project consisting of in-depth interviews with both speakers of Japanese of different sexual orientations and gender identities (primarily, if problematically, stated in terms of ‘cisgender’ and ‘transgender’, ‘gay’ and ‘straight’, or similar). The discourse in the materials concerns varied themes, such as—but in no way limited to— masculinity and femininity, bodies and voices, social roles, ‘Japaneseness’, and how these relate to language. There is also a wealth of meta-linguistic reasoning concerning lexical, grammatical, and pragmatic areas of language, as well as speech acts. In the context of this, I use the materials to investigate how the linguistic norms of gender as well as Japaneseness are constructed and defined, and how these are variously resisted and maintained through linguistic and semiotic acts. The focus is on “common sense knowledge” of language and gender, which is taken to be ideological in the sense that it is taken for granted, even if it can be criticised and questioned. These critiques are accomplished through various strategies, with various degrees of success, including introducing queerness alongside gender identities, as well as other forms of boundary work relating to social groups and the personal circumstances of informants. The materials are subjected to an analysis grounded in pragmatics and a discourse analytical approach, and will be presented as excerpts.
Pedro BASSOE, UC Berkeley
Lost Voices: Women, Song, and Storytelling in the Fiction of Izumi Kyōka
Lost Voices: Women, Song, and Storytelling in the Fiction of Izumi Kyōka
Izumi Kyōka’s fiction has frequently been noted for incorporating elements of Edo period literature into the form of the modern novel, but a focus by scholars on canonical sources for his writing has often led to an oversight of the role played by genres associated with women, particularly songs and oral narratives, which were not preserved in literary texts. Beginning with Shining Leaf Theater (Teriha kyōgen) in 1896 and ending with The Votive Light Volume (Tōmyō no maki) in 1933, Kyōka would reference the song “Three Sisters Have I” (“Ora ga anesan sannin gozaru”) in at least six different novels. The song was a temari uta, or a variety of time-keeping tune traditionally sung by young women to the bounce of an embroidered handball. In his stories, Kyōka can be seen drawing on both the form and content of the song, by which he demonstrates a deep familiarity with its narrative details as well as an appreciation for its rhythmic qualities. When referencing temari uta in his texts, he often features them as fragments and memories, thus replicating the real process by which women’s narratives were both remembered and written over in Meiji period texts.
Valerie BLACK, UC Berkeley
Corporate Wellness in Japanese Tech Companies: Obligations of Care, Surveillance, and Self-Disclosure
Corporate Wellness in Japanese Tech Companies: Obligations of Care, Surveillance, and Self-Disclosure
What obligations of care, surveillance, and self-disclosure do corporate health policies and practices create in Japan? Do Japanese workers at Tokyo’s Silicon Valley-headquartered tech companies—who encounter US corporate ‘wellness culture’ alongside conventional Japanese workplace health monitoring and care practices— feel cared for by these policies and practices? Moreover, is feeling cared for necessarily in opposition to feeling surveilled? I attempt to address these broad questions by examining the ways in which menstruation is monitored, disclosed, and concealed in the Japanese corporate workplace. First, I describe how both Japan’s seiri kyūka (workplace menstruation leave) policies and government-mandated employee kenkō shindan (annual medical health checkups) indicate a model of corporate care that is contingent upon employee vulnerability through self-disclosure to the corporation. I then question whether the introduction of US corporate wellness practices to the Japanese workplace influences how employees experience these policies—does corporate wellness amplify or decrease the need for employee self-disclosure? Finally, I consider how employees’ use of menstruation self-tracking smartphone apps may affirm the centrality of corporate care.
Caitlin CASIELLO, Yale
Reeling Rainbow: Japanese Queer Identity at the Tokyo International Lesbian and Gay Film Festival, 1992-2016
Reeling Rainbow: Japanese Queer Identity at the Tokyo International Lesbian and Gay Film Festival, 1992-2016
Queer identity, globally and in Japan, is constructed partly through depictions of LGBTQ subjects in media which produce and transmit knowledge about queer experience; LGBTQ film festivals, beginning in 1970s San Francisco, spread globally as one space which allowed LGBTQ filmmakers and audience to construct community identity, both on screen and in gathering together as viewers. The Tokyo International Lesbian and Gay Film Festival (now known as Rainbow Reel Tokyo) was founded in 1992 in the midst of the 1990s shift by the Japanese LGBTQ community towards political/legal activism under the influence of the global gay rights movement. TILGFF, with international activist underpinnings, curates for Tokyo audiences visions of international queer experience (primarily Western but increasingly Asian), encourages the development of independent Japanese queer filmmakers through prizes, and provides a space for the LGBTQ community to commune around film. Drawing on theorizations of film festivals as spaces which function as central nodes in the production of knowledge through and about film, I discuss a film from each of three years of TILGFF— Okoge (1992, screened in 1993), Sugar Sweet (2001/2001), and West North West (2015/2016)—and the overall programming and media around each year to discuss how the festival changes over time, as well as how screening within a festival context changes how we read these particular films, as the Japanese queer community navigates the complexity of defining not only the multiplicity of sexual identity but also what sexual identity means in intersection with national/cultural difference.
Deirdre CLYDE, University of Hawaii, Manoa
Henshin among Gaijin: Gender, Spirituality, and Transformation among American Fans of Japanese Pop Culture
Henshin among Gaijin: Gender, Spirituality, and Transformation among American Fans of Japanese Pop Culture
Androgyny and gender switching are common tropes in Japanese comics and animation, inherited from mythology, classic literature, and theatrical traditions. These themes may be taken for granted by a Japanese audience, but American fans of Japanese pop culture media, particularly those who identify as trans, gender-variant, or queer, take up these images and apply a different set of interpretations to them, often discovering a source of inspiration and a sense of belonging in such media forms. This speaks not only to established concepts of queer theory such as Butler’s work on the performative nature of gender, but also to Jennifer Robertson’s discussion on the Buddhist idea of henshin, or transformation. Robertson explores henshin as a way of articulating the approach that cross-gender performers in Kabuki or the Takarazuka Review may take in both their internal and embodied processes of transformation. This, of course, in turn is often the inspiration for the themes my subjects resonate with in the media they consume. To many Westerners, especially those outside the community of anime fandom, the notion of spirituality in anime may seem odd, but my subjects have indeed picked up on the spiritual elements in such transformations, as well as in the environmentalist themes of animators such as Miyazaki, whether they interpret these elements as Buddhist, Shinto, or reminiscent of Western Neo-Paganism. In a series of interviews with such fans, I explore these experiences and interpretations.
Hannah E. DODD, Ohio State University
“Welcome to the Sorority”: Second-person pronouns and the diverse readership of Comic Yuri Hime
“Welcome to the Sorority”: Second-person pronouns and the diverse readership of Comic Yuri Hime
Yuri (‘lily’) is a subgenre of Japanese shōjo manga (‘girls’ comics’) that centers on same-sex romantic and/or erotic relationships between female characters. Comic Yuri Hime, originally a quarterly but now monthly manga magazine, is the longest-running and currently only magazine dedicated exclusively to the yuri subgenre. The magazine, though both written and consumed by a predominately female audience, also has a sizable male readership. In an attempt to cater to this portion of the readership, the publisher Ichijinsha briefly ran a male-targeted version of Comic Yuri Hime known as Comic Yuri Hime S from 2007 to 2010.
In a comparative look at Comic Yuri Hime and Comic Yuri Hime S, this presentation aims to illustrate the role of second-person pronouns in advertisements and extra-textual commentary in indirectly addressing the variously gendered readership of both magazines. Japanese has multiple second-person pronouns as its disposal, each of which carries its own indexical weight regarding the gender, social status, and familiarity of its referent as well as its speaker. By analyzing the second-person pronoun as a means of creating a gendered space as well as delineating a target audience on the part of the writers and publishers, we gain a deeper understanding of the indexical potential of Japanese pronouns as macrocosmic communication devices.
Stephanie HOHLIOS, UC Berkeley
The Naturalized Body As Insurgent Body: Ri Reisen As The Snake Princess Akebi In Kara Jūrō’s Hebi-himesama
The Naturalized Body As Insurgent Body: Ri Reisen As The Snake Princess Akebi In Kara Jūrō’s Hebi-himesama
In Kara Jūrō’s 1977 play Hebi-himesama: Waga kokoro no Naja (Snake Princess: Nadja of My Heart) for the underground Gekidan jōkyō gekijō (Situation Theater) Ri Reisen, a third-generation Zainichi ethnic Korean actor born in Japan, performed as the Snake Princess Akebi and garnered impassioned response from critics. The character Akebi appears in this surreal narrative as an alluring yet violent figure of unknown origin—indeed reminiscent of Nadja in André Breton’s 1928 novella—who in the play’s climax transforms into a massive black serpent. On stage sticky rubber cords—sinuous like snakes—issued from Ri’s body, ensnaring and uniting with her own the bodies of others, thereby rendering vulnerable the boundary between self and other. As part of this itinerant production, an advertising poster reads, the “country bumpkin” Ri made her “naturalization pilgrimage” to Tokyo and inaugurated her new Japanese citizenship.
This paper explores how Ri and the Gekidan jōkyō gekijō deployed the unsettling capacity of the (transgressive) Zainichi female body in order to interrogate conventional borders and markers of ethnicity and identity, and to destabilize normative roles of gender and sexuality. Described by critics as a “vampirical” fantasy that creates “extreme discomfort” between the actors and audience, and as the terrible “metabolization” and “assimilation” of bodies on stage, Ri’s role as Akebi inspired fascination and polarized critique in its moment and raises complex questions about the “passably” (Elaine Ginsberg’s term) Japanese Zainichi body—as an (in)visible source of anxiety vis-à-vis the fantasy of a homogenized, normative modern Japan.
Andrea HORBINSKI, UC Berkeley
Something Postmodern Going On: The Queering of the Manga Sphere in the 1970s
Something Postmodern Going On: The Queering of the Manga Sphere in the 1970s
The 1970s witnessed extraordinary developments in manga. In the first half of the decade young female creators transformed the shojo category from a despised afterthought to a genre that pushed comics expression globally further than ever before, introducing new degrees of psychological and dramatic complexity. Their manga quickly came to dominate the medium and was a mainstay of the manga fan cultures that Comic Market, now the world’s largest fan event, incubated after its foundation in 1975.
Drawing on archival and comparative research, this paper argues that the shojo revolution, particularly its creation of shonen ai manga— love stories between boys written by women for consumption by girls and women—and the explosion of fan production in Japan in this decade were both postmodern and queer. They were postmodern in that both were enabled by the advent of postmodernity in Japan and the transformations in publishing and media that accompanied it, and they were queer in the sense that both were what Abigail De Kosnik calls “acts of queering.” Specifically, the manga of the shojo revolution and the fan production it enabled must be understood as a transgression against compulsory heterosexuality in Japan, just as fan production is legally a transgression against intellectual property and copyright law. Fans of all genders who read these manga and participated in fan production activities, moreover, queered themselves in respect to mainstream publishing and sexuality in Japan, and their legacy proved pivotal for the Japanese mediascape and society in the decades thereafter.
Asheli MOSLEY, International Christian University
Social Inclusion: The Impact of Race and Assimilation in a Japanese Context
Social Inclusion: The Impact of Race and Assimilation in a Japanese Context
Does Japan see race? Many would argue that Japanese society, being portrayed as a homogenous entity, doesn’t see race or feel that race affects its society in any nominal way. However, because there is very little research in this field there is no degree of certainty in how racial stimuli actually affect Japanese society. This study analyzes race and assimilation within a social inclusion framework by using Experimental Vignette Methodology (EVM). 8 different surveys were circulated among 546 college students in Japan. Within these 8 surveys, there are 4 different races and 2 different assimilation degrees displayed. The results of this study illustrated four different trends. (1) Non-Asian races had little variation within the survey’s assimilation degrees, whereas, Asian races had considerable variation. (2) Within the assimilation degree displaying assimilated behavior, Non Asian races were more favorably judged and Asian races were more harshly judged. (3) Within the assimilation degree displaying non assimilated behavior racial disparities tend to disappear. (4) The assimilation degree displaying non-assimilated behavior generated a more favorable response than those that displayed assimilated behavior (this trend is stronger within the Asian races). In conclusion, the combination of race and assimilation variables did have considerable effects on the social inclusion measures. In addition, race-based groupings did take shape within the results illustrating racial awareness within Japanese society.
Kim McNELLY, UCLA
When Patrons Fall: Early Medieval Women’s Writing of Grief
When Patrons Fall: Early Medieval Women’s Writing of Grief
From the ninth to the fourteenth centuries, aristocratic women in Japan produced a large corpus of literature that continues to be read today. Within this body of literature, works by aristocratic women of the Heian period have received considerable scholarly attention, but early medieval literary production by women has been largely ignored, especially in English language scholarship. The few works by medieval aristocratic women that have received attention are traditionally dismissed as inferior or imitative of Heian predecessors.
This paper examines a subset of these understudied materials that are centered on the theme of grief. In the chaos of political unrest in the early medieval period, many aristocratic female attendants faced the sudden death or exile of their patron. The writing about their subsequent grief from unexpected loss brings together personal Buddhist practices with a struggle to express the depth of their feelings within socially accepted practices and literary conventions. As the death of their patron altered their identity within the court, the resulting process of identity re-definement circuitously meanders between their former active attendant duties and the liminal stages of grief.
This paper will draw from Kenreimon’in no Ukyo no Daibu shū (The Poetic Memoirs of Lady Daibu, ca. 1220), by an attendant serving Kenreimon’in; Tsuchimikado’in nyōbō nikki (The Poetic Memoirs of a Female Court Attendant of Retired Emperor Tsuchimikado, after 1231); and GoHorikawa’in Minbukyo no suke shū (The Poetic Collection of GoHorikawa’in Minbukyō no suke, 1234), by an attendant who sequentially served Emperor GoToba, then Sōhekimon’in— Emperor GoHorikawa’s empress and mother to Emperor Shijō—then Emperor GoHorikawa.
Sayo SAKAMOTO, University of Washington
The Paradox of Fuji Keiko: the Boundary between Shinjuku and furusato
The Paradox of Fuji Keiko: the Boundary between Shinjuku and furusato
This paper explores a triangular relation between an enka singer Fuji Keiko (1951-2013), Shinjuku, and furusato (hometowns). Enka is a Japanese ballad and generally considered as traditional. Today’s audiences might have common perception of the key features of performance by female enka singers that they basically wear kimono and tearfully sing unrealistically romantic lyrics. However, in fact enka is a quite new genre of popular music established in the late 1960s as part of counterculture. Fuji had a significant role not only in establishing enka, but also representing the mentality of audiences by mediating two conflicting but important concepts in the 1960s and 1970s—Shinjuku as sakari-ba (amusement spot) and furusato. Fuji performed as one of those who left her hometown and now lived in Shinjuku, which was a magnetic place for youths who participated in antiestablishment movements and underground culture in the 1960s.
Fuji’s image as enka idol who has unfortunate upbringing and discontent with the social reality was made up and exploited by her producers. Fuji’s popularity declined when other female singers appeared as a new type of enka idol who has the image of healthy and innocent youth bearing a positive relationship with the provincial areas of Japan. In this regard, Fuji didn’t stand only at a boundary between the concept of the urban city and furusato, but also stood at the transition period in the perception of enka in which we can see a crucial moment of the formation of gender roles in Japanese popular music.
Kirsten SEUFFERT, University of Southern California
Exam Room vs. Waiting Room: Datai and the Gender Politics of PInk Reproductive Cinema
Exam Room vs. Waiting Room: Datai and the Gender Politics of PInk Reproductive Cinema
The cinema of filmmaker and screenwriter Adachi Masao is often celebrated for its political subversiveness and critical relevance to its turbulent sociohistorical context, particularly as explored by such scholars as Yuriko Furuhata, Go Hirasawa, and Sharon Hayashi. However, what the discourse surrounding Adachi’s films lacks are questions regarding alterity, agency, and how power and normativity are negotiated both within the texts themselves and in their relation to Japanese society. Through a focus on gender and sexuality, this project examines Adachi’s work as an unstable mixture of power and powerlessness, otherness and belonging, and activism and exploitation, foregrounding the existing imbalances between filmmaker, narrative representation, audience, and society. Through a close reading of the 1966 Adachi–Wakamatsu Kōji pink collaboration Datai (Abortion) as a mixed-genre work that both interrogates and reinforces existing power structures, this project identifies within Adachi’s films possibilities for both subversion and normative adherence. It argues that Datai functions both as a sociopolitical call for improvement in the reproductive and sexual rights of women in mid-1960s Japan and as a co-optation of the female voice and body for the sake of cinematic activism. While not denying Adachi’s artistic and intellectual influence as filmmaker and theorist, this project highlights the problematic nature of his cinematic efforts to effect political change by speaking for and through the other.
Wakako SUZUKI, UCLA
Refusing to be a Man: Rhetoric of Metamorphosis in the Work of Izumi Kyōka
Refusing to be a Man: Rhetoric of Metamorphosis in the Work of Izumi Kyōka
This paper examines Izumi Kyōka’s novella “Kechō” (“Monster Bird,” 1897), which is based on the themes of childhood, and a child’s near-death experience, alongside the motifs of folklore such as metamorphosis. The text pivots on the threshold between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, mirroring a world that would soon disappear but not without marking the bitterness of a vanishing cultural past while illuminating the intoxicating childhood memories that move beyond a linear account of time and space. Reading this text, I analyze how a boy is portrayed as a figure that does not fit in, but deviates from, the image of little citizens as prescribed by the Meiji government in relation to the ideology of risshin shusse (rising in the world). The boy protagonist whom Kyōka depicts is the complete opposite of Meiji state’s ideal boys—those who should devote themselves to the national community as future militants. He expresses his naiveté and sensibility, both considered negative traits in Meiji society, based on the principle of masculinity and the slogan of fukoku kyōkei (enrich the country and strengthen the military). With the depiction of the boy who gains a special knowledge of human life or nature through non-rational experiences of metamorphosis, Kyōka critiques the Meiji educational ideology as the major fault line in the national projects. “Kechō” also presents an alternative means of expression that could escape the clichés of the dominant literary movements such as genbun itchi (unification of speaking and writing) by metamorphosing vernacular languages into childish voices.
Justine WIESINGER, Yale
There is Always a ‘We’: The Dramatic Construction of the Great Kantō Earthquake Victim
There is Always a ‘We’: The Dramatic Construction of the Great Kantō Earthquake Victim
Jeffrey C. Alexander discusses the creation of a ‘we’ as a traumatized community, and the designation of victims through a dynamic discursive—and especially performative—process of collective trauma creation in his Trauma: A Social Theory. In my analysis of Japanese plays and descriptions of films remaining from the years immediately after the Great Kantō Earthquake, I argue that the typical victim of the disaster, and especially of the violence of the Korean massacre that followed, is figured as an ethnically Japanese male. I will discuss the process by which Japanese men are centered, and the victim status of women and particularly ethnic Koreans, is marginalized in performance texts, demonstrating how Japanese men stand in for Koreans as victims of vigilantes, and female victimhood is depicted as bloodless and prompting of moral reform, when acknowledged at all. I will examine how this has shaped the popular understanding of the trauma of the earthquake even to the present day. Finally, I will discuss the implications of ‘victimized’ Japanese masculinity and ethnicity with regard to the ensuing progression toward war in the following decades.