Sino-Japanese Transculturation: Late Nineteenth Century to the End of the Pacific War 073917150X, 9780739171509

Table of contents :
Preface
Introduction
I: A Shared Heritage
1 Straddling the Tradition-Modernity Divide: Huang Zunxian (1848–1905) and His Poems on Miscellaneous Subjects from Japan
2 Waves from Opposing Shores: Exchanges in a Classical Language in the Age of Nationalism
3 Pan-Asian Romantic Nationalism: Revolutionary, Literati, and Popular Oral Tradition and the Case of Miyazaki Tōten
II: Confrontations with the Modern
4 On the Emergence of New Concepts in Late Qing China and Meiji Japan: The Case of Religion
5 Collaborating, Acquiescing, Resisting: Early Twentieth-Century Chinese Transculturation of Japanese Literature
6 Lu Jingruo and the Earliest Transportation of Western-Style Theatre from Japan to China
III: The Culture of Occupation
7 Affective Politics and the Legend of Yamaguchi Yoshiko/Li Xianglan
8 Japan’s Orient in Song and Dance
9 Manchukuo and the Creation of a New Multi-Ethnic Literature: Kawabata Yasunari’s Promotion of “Manchurian” Culture, 1941–1942
IV: Coming to Terms with History
10 Colonial Nostalgia or Postcolonial Anxiety: The Dōsan Generation In Between “Restoration” and “Defeat”
11 The Road Taken, Then Retraced: Morimoto Kaoru’s A Woman’s Life and Japan in China
12 Re-acting an Actor’s Reaction to the Occupation: The Beijing Jingju Company’s Mei Lanfang
13 “But Perhaps I Did Not Understand Enough”: Kazuo Ishiguro and Dreams of Republican Shanghai
Bibliography
Index
About the Authors

Citation preview

Sino-Japanese Transculturation



Sino-Japanese Transculturation From the Late Nineteenth Century to the End of the Pacific War Edited by Richard King, Cody Poulton and Katsuhiko Endo

LEXINGTON BOOKS Lanham • Boulder • New York • Toronto • Plymouth, UK

Published by Lexington Books A wholly owned subsidiary of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 www.lexingtonbooks.com Estover Road, Plymouth PL6 7PY, United Kingdom Copyright © 2012 by Lexington Books All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Sino-Japanese transculturation : from the late nineteenth century to the end of the Pacific war / edited by Richard King, Cody Poulton, and Katsuhiko Endo. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-7391-7150-9 (cloth : alk. paper)—ISBN 978-0-7391-7151-6 (electronic) 1. China—Foreign relations—Japan. 2. Japan—Foreign relations—China. 3. China—History—19th century. 4. China—Politics and government—1937-1945. 5. Japan—History—19th century. 6. Japan—Politics and government—1926-1945. I. King, Richard, 1951- II. Poulton, Cody. III. Endo, Katsuhiko, 1967DS740.5.J3S565 2012 303.48'25105209041—dc23 2011038569 The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992. Printed in the United States of America

Contents

Preface Introduction Richard King and Cody Poulton I: A Shared Heritage Straddling the Tradition-Modernity Divide: Huang Zunxian (1848–1905) and His Poems 1 on Miscellaneous Subjects from Japan Richard John Lynn Waves from Opposing Shores: Exchanges in a Classical Language in the Age of 2 Nationalism Atsuko Sakaki Pan-Asian Romantic Nationalism: Revolutionary, Literati, and Popular Oral Tradition and 3 the Case of Miyazaki Tōten Faye Yuan Kleeman II: Confrontations with the Modern On the Emergence of New Concepts in Late Qing China and Meiji Japan: The Case of 4 Religion Viren Murthy Collaborating, Acquiescing, Resisting: Early Twentieth-Century Chinese Transculturation 5 of Japanese Literature Karen L. Thornber 6 Lu Jingruo and the Earliest Transportation of Western-Style Theatre from Japan to China Siyuan Liu III: The Culture of Occupation 7 Affective Politics and the Legend of Yamaguchi Yoshiko/Li Xianglan Yiman Wang 8 Japan’s Orient in Song and Dance Michael K. Bourdaghs Manchukuo and the Creation of a New Multi-Ethnic Literature: Kawabata Yasunari’s 9 Promotion of “Manchurian” Culture, 1941–1942 Annika A. Culver

IV: Coming to Terms with History Colonial Nostalgia or Postcolonial Anxiety: The Dōsan Generation In Between 10 “Restoration” and “Defeat” Leo Ching 11 The Road Taken, Then Retraced: Morimoto Kaoru’s A Woman’s Life and Japan in China Cody Poulton Re-acting an Actor’s Reaction to the Occupation: The Beijing Jingju Company’s Mei 12 Lanfang Elizabeth Wichmann-Walczak “But Perhaps I Did Not Understand Enough”: Kazuo Ishiguro and Dreams of Republican 13 Shanghai Richard King Bibliography Index About the Authors

Preface

This book had its genesis in a workshop on “Japan-China Cultural Relations,” organized by the volume editors, which took place in Victoria, British Columbia, in January 2008. The workshop was funded by a grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada; we express our gratitude to SSHRC for its generous support. Workshop organization was handled by the Centre for Asia Pacific Initiatives at the University of Victoria, most notably Helen Lansdowne and Heidi Tyedmers, with the participation of the Centre’s research chairs, Andrew Harding and Wu Guoguang; the Centre’s Stella Chan and Doug Thompson provided continuing logistical and secretarial support. The editors acknowledge the contributions made to the conference by Sonja Arntzen, Richard Calichman, Joshua Fogel, Guo Ping, Robert Perrins, Norman Smith, and John Timothy Wixted. For his considerable expertise and efficiency in preparing the final manuscript, we thank our editorial assistant Scott Aalgaard. Richard King, Cody Poulton, and Katsuhiko Mariano Endo

Introduction Richard King and Cody Poulton

In 1943, at the height of the Pacific War, the Japanese art historian Yashiro Yukio, in his book The Characteristics of Japanese Art, cited this line by the Chinese Tang Dynasty poet Bai Juyi as a touchstone for the “special qualities of Japanese art:”[1] “The time of snow, moon, and flowers, that is when I long for my friends the most.”[2] Bai Juyi had been, since his death twelve hundred years earlier, the Chinese poet most beloved in Japan, an inspiration for Japanese poets in the creation of their own poetry in the Chinese manner (kanshi), and a source for the image of China and Chineseness constructed to complement Japanese sensibilities. Yashiro’s citation of this line of poetry demonstrates that the fondness for Bai Juyi and his poetry, and the construct they evoked, remained constant even in a time of cataclysmic change in the relations between the two nations as political, economic, and military powers in the late nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth, from the last days of Chinese empire until the end of the Pacific War. This shared heritage of sensibility presents both a backdrop and a counterpoint to a period of history that had few of the reflective, moral, and sentimental qualities associated with the poetry of Bai Juyi. At the turn of the twentieth century, Japan was to show in a series of military campaigns what an apt pupil of Western technology and statecraft it had been since the unwelcome visit of American warships under Commodore Matthew Perry in 1853. Following victory over China in 1895 in a war fought over control of Korea, Japan defeated another declining empire—the Tsarist regime—in the Russo-Japanese War, fought in Manchuria (or Northeast China) for control of Dalian’s warm-water port of Lushun, marking the first victory in the modern era for an Asian nation over a European power. Japan’s victory, and consequent ascendancy in North Asia, came at a time when China had recently suffered the humiliation of the incursion of the combined armies of eight foreign nations (Japan being the only nonWestern power among them) to relieve the siege by the Boxer (Yihetuan) rebels of the Beijing diplomatic quarter, and the Qing dynasty was on the point of collapse after almost three hundred years in power. For China’s intellectuals, in the first two decades of the twentieth century, the rise of Japan was a source of both shame and inspiration. The shame came from defeat at the hands of a smaller neighbor which had for centuries been considered a tributary state of the Chinese empire, and from the way that Japan had moved with such ease into the group of nations staking claim to Chinese territory: in Japan’s case not only in Manchuria, but also German possessions in Shandong, which were to be taken over by Japan with German defeat in the First World War. Yet Japan’s rise to the status of a world power also inspired admiration, and created

opportunities among young Chinese who saw the urgent need to reform their own nation. The admiration, derived from Japan’s rapid accession to Westernized modernity, was not only technological and military, but also scientific, philosophical, and cultural. For the Chinese students sent to study in Japan in a belated attempt by the Qing government at reform at the end of the nineteenth century, and for those who acquired their understanding of modernity through books translated into Chinese from Japanese renditions of Western originals, Japan was the primary conduit for knowledge and ideas that could lead to the renewal of China. Through direct or indirect contact with Japan, members of the generation of Chinese intellectuals that was to challenge Chinese tradition in the first decades of the twentieth century learned of Marx and Darwin, and of Western medicine and the enlightenment view of the individual. Those that went to Japan themselves and were able to view from there what they perceived as China’s backwardness and vulnerability derived from that cautionary experience a sense of Chinese nationhood that was to replace traditional notions of their country as a nonpareil civilization surrounded by lesser, even barbaric, cultures. The cases of Lu Xun and Yu Dafu, two of early twentieth-century China’s greatest authors, will be considered below. The Republic that succeeded the fall of empire in 1911 was to suffer the effects of Japan’s unpeaceful rise. In 1931, Japan occupied three northeastern provinces, and established the state of Manzhouguo, which was to become the site for a grand experiment in Japanese “PanAsianist” nation building that was supposed to achieve a harmonious and prosperous society for inhabitants of Japanese, Han Chinese, Manchu, Mongolian, and other ethnicities under Japanese rule. Following Japan’s invasion of the rest of China in 1937, Manzhouguo became the base for Japan’s military operations to the south in the Pacific and Second World Wars. Between 1937 and 1945, much of the rest of China was under Japanese occupation, with the capital being forced from Beijing, first to Nanjing, and thence to Chongqing, as the Chinese fought a desperate war of resistance.[3] Japan was the perpetrator of numerous atrocities during this period, including the Rape of Nanjing in 1937. In the more than sixty years since, the governments of both sides have jealously maintained their authority over this shared history of conflict: the Communist Party of China insists upon a narrative of invasion, failure by the Nationalist government to offer effective opposition, occupation, and heroic communist-led resistance culminating in Chinese victory; in Japan, there has been a continued reluctance to address atrocities committed during the years of occupation and war, veneration for the sacrifices of its soldiers, and cultivation of memories of the horrors suffered by its citizens in the final days of the conflict. Both nations can thereby claim the status of victim in the history of the Pacific War, though these narratives are not immune to challenge. What is often overlooked is that this extraordinarily violent and tragic period for the people of both China and Japan was also a time of unprecedented intellectual and cultural exchange, a process complicated but not prevented by military and political turmoil. Many of the leaders of China’s intellectual and cultural revolutionary movements had formative experiences in Japan; some of their counterparts among the Japanese intelligentsia also travelled extensively in China, and wrote about their experiences for readers at home. These included the novelist Tanizaki Jun’ichirō, who found in China the exotic and refined juxtaposed with the primitive

and crude.[4] After the 1931 establishment of the colonial state of Manzhouguo, a number of leading writers, including Kawabata Yasunari, visited and promoted this Pan-Asian experiment to the people of their homeland. While the traditional reverence for classical Chinese culture instilled into Japanese elites was sustained through the period addressed in this book, it did not stand in the way of a shared modernity. Chinese dramatists, novelists and visual artists learned new means of expression through Japan, and Japanese musicians went to Shanghai, Asia’s most cosmopolitan city, for exposure to jazz players from America and Europe. This exchange between the traditional and modern cultures of both countries and Western cultures introduced directly or through the agency of Asian neighbors, is the transculturation of the volume’s title. The term transculturation is adopted from Karen Thornber’s investigation of the influence of Japanese culture on China and Korea; Thornber cites Sylvia Spitta’s study of the transformation of cultures in the Spanish-speaking world to define it as “the many different processes of assimilation, adaptation, rejection, parody, resistance, loss, and ultimately transformation.”[5] The term has generally been used to describe relations between imperial powers and subject states, but, as will be seen in the chapters that follow, the cultural flows between China and Japan continued unabated even as dominance passed from the more ancient civilization that was China to the more modern state that Japan was becoming. Recalling a shared heritage In his coinage of the term “Sinosphere,” Joshua Fogel offers a way of looking at relations between China and Japan from early contact to the end of the nineteenth century that acknowledges the shifting nature of the geographical boundaries of the jurisdictions sharing the linguistic heritage of classical Chinese and the philosophical and organizational heritage of the Confucian tradition—encompassing at different times not only the various iterations of the Chinese empire and Japan, but also Korea and parts of Southeast Asia, and containing within itself complex political and cultural relations. As the word implies, the Sinosphere had China at its core, though the nature and representation of China was subject to change over the centuries and through the places that made up this fluid confederation. Fogel contends that pre-modern China and Japan can only be understood by considering the relationship between them, and for the intellectual and governing classes up to the end of the nineteenth century, the major link was through the shared use of the classical language. As John Timothy Wixted observes in his study of early modern Japanese intellectuals writing poetry in accordance with Chinese compositional traditions (kanshi), Japanese practitioners were doubly bound to the Chinese tradition: by the written language, since kanshi are written exclusively in Chinese characters, and by the literary allusions that combinations of characters carry with them, directing the encoded reader to passages from earlier works in the Chinese poetic tradition. In his reading of the kanshi of Mori Ôgai, who is better known for fiction strongly influenced by an extensive reading of European literature, Wixted notes references to the persons of, and allusions to the work of, a number of Chinese poets, principally from the Tang and Song dynasties, and their later Japanese inheritors.[6] The Japanese literati who

flourished around the turn of the twentieth century and who were engaged in creating a modern and distinct Japanese culture were thoroughly trained in, and imbued with, the Chinese tradition. From an early stage in the relationship, Japanese identity was articulated in terms of its likeness to, and distinctiveness from, Chinese culture. While implicitly accepting a common heritage, Japanese writers and intellectuals sought to define what made Japan unique from China. As noted in the citation at the beginning of this introduction, even when striving to isolate the essential cultural difference of Japan, recourse could still be made to classical Chinese antecedents. By the late seventeenth century, the adoption of Neo-Confucian thought as a state ideology by the Tokugawa regime during the Edo Period (1600–1867) created a nativist backlash from philosophers who were themselves trained in Chinese studies, men like Kamo no Mabuchi, Motoori Norinaga, and Hirata Atsutane, whose school of National Learning (kokugaku) would play an important role in the restoration of political power to the imperial line at the time of the Meiji Restoration of 1868. Arguably then, the roots of Japanese modernity began in an attempt from as early as the seventeenth century to wean the country ideologically from the hegemony of Chinese thought and artistic expression. The three chapters of this book that make up the first section on this “shared heritage” explore the world of the Sinosphere outside its Chinese core, among both Chinese and Japanese members of an intellectual class that grew up at a time when their shared command of an elite culture created a homeland without national boundaries, an Eden before the Fall of Japanese militarism. Each of the chapters has its focus on one literary figure. Richard Lynn’s chapter on “straddling the tradition-modernity divide” takes the case of the late nineteenthcentury diplomat Huang Zunxian, and his finding of kindred spirits among the scholar-officials of Tokyo who were practitioners of kanshi. In her chapter on “the marginalization of literature,” Atsuko Sakaki considers the Japanese statesman Takezoe Seisei, who was also the author of diaries and poems that form a record of his travels in China. Sakaki observes that while Takezoe, a traditional scholar-official steeped in ancient Chinese culture, bridged tradition and modernity, he was nevertheless one of the last of his kind, soon to be replaced by those with greater knowledge of the West, including a facility with European languages. Sakaki concludes that “the disappearance of men of letters from the centre of bureaucracy and commerce is a marker of modernity,” and notes that modern bureaucrats, lacking a mastery of the Chinese tradition, were unable to communicate with their peers in the Sinosphere as their predecessors had done. The careers of both Huang Zunxian and Takezoe Seisei ended ingloriously: Huang was condemned for his association with the brief reformist movement of 1898, an initiative harshly suppressed by conservative forces around the Dowager Empress Cixi, and Takezoe for his failure to support a progressive anti-Qing faction and protect the Korean royal family in the “Seoul Incident” of 1884. Now both Huang and Takezoe are remembered more for their literary prowess than for diplomatic successes. Faye Yuan Kleeman’s chapter on the early Pan-Asianism of Miyazaki Toten demonstrates that the ideal of Pan-Asianism, later a justification for Japan’s imperialist project in Northeast China and beyond, was not initially as nationalistic as it was to become, and was certainly not anti-

Chinese: Miyazaki was an enthusiastic supporter of the revolution that brought the Chinese Republic into existence, though he was to come to regret his fervor in this cause. Miyazaki was fascinated by the Chinese tradition of the xia (knight-errant) and by the storyteller traditions of medieval China; in a “transnational cross-cultural narrative” he modelled a story of contemporary Japan on the life of the seventeenth-century soldier of fortune Coxinga (Zheng Chenggong), the son of a Chinese pirate and a Japanese woman, who fought the Manchus after the fall of the Ming dynasty, and defeated Dutch colonialists in Taiwan.[7] The three chapters in this initial section serve to present a picture of collaboration and mutual respect that belies the more bellicose narratives that have emerged with historical hindsight. Confrontation with the modern Just as many of those who framed the discourse of Japaneseness were not anti-Chinese, the young Chinese intellectuals who learned in Japan the sobering lesson of what it was to be Chinese in the early twentieth century were not anti-Japanese, however complex their emotions with respect to their host nation might be. Many had gone to study in Japan because it was a closer, and thus less expensive, option than the United States, France, or England; and while they went to learn science and technology, the lessons they sent or brought back to China were far broader in nature, and were to contribute to the cultural and political revolution of the late 1910s and early 1920s known as the May Fourth Movement, which condemned the Confucian traditions of the Sinosphere. Celebrated autobiographical works by two of the leading literary figures of the May Fourth era can be cited here to demonstrate the transformative power of the experience of study in Japan in the early years of the twentieth century: the “Preface” to Lu Xun’s first short story collection Call to Arms (Nahan) written in 1922, and Yu Dafu’s remarkable story “Sinking” (Chenlun), written the previous year. Lu Xun (pen name of Zhou Shuren, 1881–1936) is recognized as the creator of a Chinese literature that was modern in its use of a literary version of the spoken language, its exploration of the psyche, and its radical anti-traditionalism. In his first story, “Diary of a Madman,” the eponymous diarist comes to the conclusion that the entire Chinese tradition is hypocritical in its protestations of virtue, and essentially cannibalistic. Elsewhere in Call to Arms Lu Xun introduces his most famous character Ah Q, a village layabout who combines the worst aspects of what the author considered the Chinese character, chief among them the art of deluding himself that the defeats he suffers are really victories. It was in Japan that Lu Xun developed the sense of shame and revulsion for his fellow Chinese that was to find its literary expression in the figure of Ah Q, for his creator the typical Chinese man of his day.[8] Around the turn of the twentieth century, both Liang Qichao and Sun Yat-sen, leading reformist figures in the late Qing, had fulminated against their fellow nationals, Liang castigating the Chinese for their lack of will for independence and public spirit, and Sun finding the national character to be “servile, ignorant, self-centered and lacking in the ideal of freedom.”[9] As Lydia Liu notes in Translingual Practice, the creation of a national character is a collaborative enterprise, and one of the major collaborators in forging

Lu Xun’s negative opinion of the Chinese character, in addition to Chinese reformers like Liang Qichao and Sun Yat-sen, was the American missionary Arthur Smith, whose 1896 book Chinese Characteristics Lu Xun encountered in Japanese translation while studying in Japan and with which he was sufficiently impressed to plan a Chinese translation.[10] Smith’s book presents the Chinese (particularly the servant classes with whom he had the greatest contact) as the inferiors of Westerners, needing purification (presumably provided by external agency) to achieve the reforms they needed. To this damning portrait, Lu Xun was later to add the British colonial official and anthropologist George Grey’s account of the barbaric practices of Pacific Islanders, combining this with his reading of laudatory tales of sacrifices of their children made by loyal officials to their rulers in Sima Guang’s Song dynasty history Zizhi tongjian (Comprehensive mirror for assisting government), to come up with his metaphor of cannibalism to encapsulate the Chinese tradition.[11] The “Preface” to Call to Arms is a memoir of cathartic experiences reconstructed to explain how Lu Xun became disillusioned with the Chinese tradition, why he went to Japan to study medicine, why he abandoned this goal in favor of literature, and how he was inspired to write the stories in the volume. The most celebrated of these cathartic moments, crafted to explain his realization of what it was to be Chinese abroad, and recounted almost twenty years after the event, is set in the medical school in Sendai that Lu Xun attended at the time the RussoJapanese War was being fought in Northeast China. A slide shown to students after class depicted a Chinese man about to be executed by the Japanese army on suspicion of spying for the Russians; what shocked the young student more than this central tableau, however, was the crowd of apparently robust Chinese onlookers gathering to enjoy the spectacle. Lu Xun’s viewing, as the sole Chinese student in the room, of this scene of national humiliation, convinced him to give up his study of medicine, since he felt that the Chinese people’s spirits needed to be transformed more than their bodies needed to be healed, otherwise they would “still be fit for nothing better than to serve as victims and onlookers at such ridiculous spectacles.”[12] There is no way of knowing if the incident occurred as Lu Xun told it, or even if it occurred at all (there is no extant photograph of the scene on the slide quite as described), but Lu Xun’s description of this moment of awakening national consciousness did much to enhance his subsequent reputation, particularly following his posthumous canonization by Mao Zedong as “the chief standard-bearer” of China’s modern culture. Lu Xun talks in the preface of “having to be part of the fun” at the celebration of Japanese victories, an embarrassing experience for the solitary Chinese trying to fit in with his Japanese classmates; but reconstructions of the incident in Mao-era China show an indignant young man storming out of the hall in heroic protest, an inspiration for the armed resistance that was to follow.[13] His experience in Sendai notwithstanding, Lu Xun remained in Japan until 1909, working with his brother Zhou Zuoren on literary translation projects.[14] Two aspects of Lu Xun’s later writing, his anti-traditionalism and his choice of the vernacular language, may indicate a debt to his reading in Japan. A study by Guo Ping of anti-Confucian themes in the fiction of Lu Xun and the Japanese novelist Shimazaki Toson suggests that Lu Xun might have been influenced by Shimazaki’s novel The Broken Commandment, published in 1906. The protagonist of

Shimazaki’s novel challenges Confucian principles, particularly that of filial piety, and chooses instead to pursue the emancipation of the modern self; Lu Xun’s fiction and essays are virulent attacks on Confucian traditions, which he captures in the “Preface” with the metaphor of an iron house suffocating its inhabitants. The Broken Commandment is sometimes seen as the first novel to be written in a Japanese vernacular, the Chinese equivalent of which, baihua, “plain speech,” Lu Xun was to employ in his own fiction. There is no firm evidence that Lu Xun had read Shimazaki’s novel, but the comparisons are intriguing.[15] Lu Xun remained an admirer of Japan for the rest of his life, retaining the distinctive mustache grown there, enjoying the social life of Shanghai’s Uchiyama Bookstore, and seeking refuge at the Japanese legation in Shanghai during Nationalist roundups of communist sympathizers. The Japanese social critic and sinologist Takeuchi Yoshimi, who studied in China in the early 1930s, found in Lu Xun’s writing a critical spirit in which, he believed, Japanese (or any non-Western) modernity should be rooted. In other words, what Lu Xun saw as the future of China was for Takeuchi precisely what the future of Japan should be. He thought that Lu Xun “represented best the choice all Asians encountered in selecting routes to modernity,” since “Lu Xun’s example projected an image of defending a modernization process which relied neither on Western models nor on reified traditional forms, but on the energy of the masses. Furthermore, his [Lu Xun’s] example constituted for Takeuchi an eloquent reminder of the promise inherent in the play of cultural differences rather than that of sameness.”[16] This concept of “the energy of the masses” was highly celebrated by both Japanese and Chinese intellectuals; it was expected to play a role in bringing about a community in which different ways of living are tolerated, in preference to an exclusionist community is based on cultural sameness. For Yu Dafu (1896–1945), awakening to nationalist consciousness was part of a broader process of coming of age during nine years spent studying in Japan. Yu experienced as a national humiliation the loss of his virginity in a Japanese brothel, a mere “Chinaman” (J: shinajin C: zhinaren, a phonetic rendering without the metropolitan authority implied by the preferred Zhongguoren J: Chūgokujin) coming of age among a newly superior Japanese race. In “Sinking,” his most controversial story, set and written in Japan, and the one which established his reputation in China, the nameless narrator conflates his alienation and sexual frustrations with lament for the humiliation of his nation and the disgrace it confers upon him. [17] Yu Dafu’s student protagonist is a voluntary exile caught between intense patriotism and revulsion at the failure of his nation, to the point where he blames the motherland for his own contemplated suicide. The image of the solitary young man, quoting freely from Western poetry, fascinated by Western ideas but still rooted in the traditional culture he is trying to reject, captures the cosmopolitanism, melancholy, and self-indulgence of early twentieth-century Chinese romanticism. Yu Dafu not only learned what it was to “be Chinese” while he was in Japan, but acquired the form to convey this Chineseness there as well: evident in the story is the influence of the Japanese version of Naturalism (shizenshugi), which, in its focus on unvarnished autobiographical reality and (compared to its precursors) its sexual explicitness, introduced modern subjectivity to Japanese culture and a quest for a transparent and vernacular

literary style with which to express it. The psychological state of an unstable narrator in “Sinking” furthermore brought to China the style of the intensely autobiographical “I-novel” (shishōsetsu), the successor to the Japanese Naturalism, and the form Yu Dafu felt best suited for “dissecting the self.”[18] On the strength of this and other stories written in Japan, Yu Dafu returned to China a literary celebrity in 1922, and quickly involved himself in the cultural maelstrom of the day.[19] Yu was a leading member of the Creation Society (chuangzao she), one of a number of groups that published journals, wrote poetry, fiction, and drama, and engaged in literary and political squabbles through the 1920s. The political event that gave China’s May Fourth cultural revolution its name was a mass reaction led by the students of Beijing to the sense of humiliation felt by Chinese students like Lu Xun and Yu Dafu in Japan. The demonstrations of May 4, 1919, which protested Japan’s plans to take over German possessions in Shandong, and urged the Chinese delegation in Paris to refuse to sign the Treaty of Versailles, are generally regarded as a first popular expression of Chinese nationalist sentiment. The influx of new ideas to China at the time of the May Fourth Movement placed new demands on the language at a time when a generation of intellectuals were rejecting wenyan, or classical Chinese—the lingua franca of the Sinosphere—in favor of the baihua modeled on the spoken language pioneered by Lu Xun, the American-educated Hu Shi, and other reformers. New Western terms flooding into Japan, and thence to China, needed to be represented in Chinese characters, and existing words were reinvented, or characters deployed in new combinations, to represent unfamiliar political, ideological, social, religious, philosophical, and cultural concepts, in a process Lydia Liu describes as translingual exchange, a process providing the language for the transculturation with which this book is concerned.[20] A second group of three chapters in this volume examines the transcultural flows of early twentieth-century Northeast Asia: Japan’s role as a source of Western ideas and the words that defined them in China, Japan itself as a site of modernity for Chinese thinkers and writers, and the influence on one group of May Fourth intellectuals of study in Japan. While Marxism became the most influential Western ideology to enter China through Japan, it was by no means the first: Darwinism and anarchism were influential in both Japanese and Chinese intellectual circles before Marxism took their place from the 1920s. In combination, Western ideologies emphasized the significance of the feelings, customary practices and, above all, the “energy” of everyday people as the driving force of human progress. This kind of spontaneism attracted those who gathered around New Youth and that did not exclude Mao Zedong. Viren Murthy’s study of the particular case of religion demonstrates the way in which the receptions of new concepts in Meiji Japan and late Qing China were intertwined. Karen Thornber’s chapter on “transcultural Japanese literature in semi-colonial China” looks at the process whereby Japanese forms of literary expression and the works which conveyed them were selected by Chinese translators for introduction to Chinese readers, and the influence they were expected to exercise. Siyuan Liu considers the case of Western drama, and its transportation by members of the Spring Willows Society (Chunliushe) to a country with

traditions in sung, rather than solely spoken, theatre when they returned from their studies in Japan. These chapters describe an age in which the Sinosphere was already decentered, with Japan and China becoming part of a much broader network of cultural and intellectual flows that accompanied global capitalism and conflict to East Asia. The culture of occupation In the period of Japanese occupation of Northeast China and the subsequent Pacific War (1931–1945), two parts of China in particular served as crucibles in the creation of modern hybrid artistic, literary, musical, and film culture: the colonized Northeast, under what Chinese histories refer to as the “false” or “puppet” (wei) state of Manzhouguo, and the great port city of Shanghai, where treaty port extraterritoriality, dating back to the treaties that followed Chinese defeat in the Opium Wars of the previous century, meant that most of the city was beyond Chinese jurisdiction, allowing it to become a haven for Western and Chinese capitalists and industrialists, as well as refugees, adventurers, and ne’er-do-wells for whom other parts of the world had, for political, racial, or personal reasons, proved inhospitable. To the population of Japan at the time, and for some post-war historians of the period in Japan, the short-lived Manchurian state was no mere colony; it was the site of a well-ordered utopian state free of Western imperialist domination. Yamamuro Shin’ichi, in his Manchuria under Japanese Domination, quotes a 1965 memoir by Kishi Nobusuke (a prominent official involved in the industrialization of Manzhouguo, and later wartime cabinet minister and postwar prime minister) in which it is claimed that in the establishment of the new state “the ideals of ethnic harmony and peace and prosperity [lit. the paradise of the Kingly Way] shone radiantly. . . . At that time, Manzhouguo was the hope of East Asia.”[21] Yamamuro also points out the darker side to the new state, which makes clear its colonial essence: the ethnocentrism of the Japanese officials which led to differential pay and rations and to an insistence on “making those [of other ethnicities] who are not obedient obedient,” the expropriation of the land of Chinese farmers for Japanese settlers, and the impoverishment and the starvation of much of the Chinese populace.[22] Only the most favorable image of the new state was conveyed to those relocating to Manzhouguo from Japan, or merely visiting the colony as part of a drive to encourage tourism by members of Japan’s growing middle class. From as early as the first Sino-Japanese War, prominent Japanese writers like Futabatei Shimei, Yosano Akiko, and Natsume Sôseki were commissioned by public and private interests to promote the new colony as a place to expand the burgeoning Japanese population, as well as political, industrial and economic interests. [23] In a study of tourism in Manchuria, Robert Perrins points out three ways in which Manzhouguo was marketed: as a place to view historic sites of heroic victories in the war against Russia and thus celebrate the legitimacy of Japan’s claim to the area, as a place of open spaces of unsurpassed natural beauty, and as a luxurious and civilized Pan-Asian paradise, with modern hotels and convenient transportation.[24] Thus, from the early part of the twentieth century until Japan’s defeat in 1945, the Japanese empire was defined in terms of a communication between the homeland (naichi) and its colonies (gaichi).

The outsiders who flooded to Shanghai as it grew from a substantial provincial town to the most cosmopolitan city in Asia in not more than half a century included a substantial number of Japanese migrants. The first generation, in the late nineteenth century, included large and small businesses, religious groups, newspapermen, educators, prostitutes, and diplomats; Shanghai was the location for the first Japanese consulate established overseas.[25] By the 1930s, there were more than twenty thousand residents of the Japanese settlement in the Hongkew (Hongkou) district of Shanghai. In his study of one particular part of the Japanese community of Shanghai between the wars, jazz players, E. Taylor Atkins describes the mentality of this expatriate community as a “frontier,” following a definition of frontiers as “places where cultures contend with one another and with their physical environment to produce a dynamic that is unique to time and place.”[26] During the 1920s and 1930s, writers like Akutagawa Ryūnosuke, Tanizaki Jun’ichirō, and Yokomitsu Riichi ventured to this new frontier, traveling to Shanghai and other parts of China and setting some of their fiction there. Three chapters in the third section deal with this frontier, and the cultural appropriations and reinventions, personal and artistic, that took place under colonialism and extraterritoriality. Yiman Wang, in her chapter on “affective politics,” explores the meaning of the multiple identities of the “Manchurian Lily” Yamaguchi Yoshiko/Li Xianglan/Ri Koran (among other names), one of the great film and singing stars of both Manzhouguo and Shanghai. Born to Japanese parents and educated in China, she was the embodiment of Pan-Asianism, appearing in a series of Japanese-produced melodramas as a Chinese girl who falls in love with a Japanese man, thus contributing both romance and gender hierarchy to the myth of ethnically shared endeavor and prosperity in the new state.[27] Michael Bourdaghs, in his chapter on “Japan’s orient” considers the impostures involved in the production of the Japanese “mainland melodies” popular in Japan in the 1930s and 1940s, of which the most famous was Shina no yoru (China nights), one of many songs set in a kitschy China calculated to appeal to Japanese notions of their continental neighbor. The third of these chapters, by Annika Culver, looks at the contributions of the author Kawabata Yasunari to the promotion of the new culture of Manzhouguo. Culver quotes Louise Young’s characterization of Manzhouguo as being a “blank canvas” on which Japan’s intellectuals could “paint their vision of a utopian society,” though for Kawabata and his fellow-countrymen, this new culture was to be linguistically, educationally, and politically centered on Japan.[28] The dropping of the atom bombs and the end of the war put an end to the short-lived state of Manzhouguo and the larger co-prosperity zone planned by Japan’s leaders, and led to the military occupation of Japan by American forces; within five years, the Chinese civil war ended in Communist victory and the flight of the Nationalist government of Chiang Kai-shek to Taiwan, which had been under Japanese control for half a century by 1945; this was followed by the Korean War and the partitioning of the Korean peninsula. The political face of North Asia had undergone a radical change. Coming to terms with history The record of the period under consideration in this book, from the Japanese military

adventures in Manchuria in the late nineteenth century to the end of the Second World War in 1945, has been subject to patriotic and cynical manipulation in China, Japan, and other parts of Asia for the purpose of directing public opinion, generally with considerable success. In China, the government has been assiduous in its cultivation of periodic outrage at the record of Japanese invasion and occupation, and Japan’s failure to acknowledge it. Visits by Japanese leaders to the Yasukuni Shrine, where the military dead include some condemned as war criminals, the continuing plight of the elderly Chinese, Korean, Taiwanese, and Southeast Asian former “comfort women” forced into prostitution, and editions of Japanese high-school histories that are seen to gloss over atrocities committed by Japanese soldiers are widely reported and evince genuine public outrage. Dissenting views are rarely expressed, and are severely dealt with: after actor and director Jiang Wen’s 2000 film Devils on the Doorstep (Guizi laile), which shows Chinese villagers collaborating with the Japanese and depicts a Japanese prisoner as other than a monster, was shown at Cannes, the Chinese government reacted by banning Jiang from directing in China for the next seven years, ostensibly for failing to get permission for overseas screenings. Jiang’s more likely offense was to have contested, however subtly, a founding myth of the People’s Republic. Nowhere is the memory of Japanese occupation a more delicate matter than in Taiwan, where Japanese occupation was replaced by an occupation by defeated Chinese mainlanders who were not necessarily any more solicitous towards the indigenous population of the islands than their predecessors had been. In the first of the final group of chapters, on coming to terms with the events of the past, Leo Ching looks at the hold that Japanese colonialism has on the generation that grew up under it, inducing a nostalgia that is seldom seen in decolonized states and which is at odds with the overt hostility often displayed on the mainland and in South Korea, which was also under Japanese occupation for much of the same period. In the next chapter, Cody Poulton follows “the road taken, then retraced” by one of post-war Japan’s most celebrated plays, Morimoto Kaoru’s A Woman’s Life, first staged during the bombing of Tokyo in 1945, and invested with different meaning in the postwar era by its playwright, star actor, and audiences, particularly Japanese women. What had been commissioned as a propaganda play in the dying days of the war to glorify Japan’s military and economic presence in China has become since Japan’s defeat a showcase for the Japanese people’s sense of victimization and resistance during the period of Japanese imperialism. Elizabeth Wichmann-Walczak describes a more recent theatrical work that explores the issues raised by the Japanese occupation of China, the “Jingju symphonic dramatic poem” Mei Lanfang, a performance which incorporates incidents from the life of the renowned Chinese actor Mei Lanfang and reprises some of his most famous roles. Mei, who had visited Japan before the war and was much admired by Japanese aficionados of the theatre, is depicted in his most celebrated act of defiance, growing the mustache which signaled his refusal to play the female dan roles that were his specialty while China was under occupation. A work of considerable technical sophistication and stylistic innovation, the drama nevertheless holds true to the dominant Chinese narrative of resistance. The final chapter, by Richard King, moves to an authorial viewpoint removed from the events described in time and space: the novel When We Were

Orphans and the script for the film The White Countess, by the Japanese-born English novelist Kazuo Ishiguro, both of which recall the Japanese presence in Shanghai just before and just after that city became swept up in the chaos of global war. Ishiguro’s focus is on the fallibility of memory and vision, an appropriate conclusion to a book that deals with a highly contested past. Japan’s first postwar prime minister, Yoshida Shigeru, deplored the Sino-Japanese War of the 1930s and 1940s as a “fight between brothers.” The fraternal relationship did nothing to mitigate the rivalry between the two nations, and appears to have added to the ferocity of their animosity. Yet each served for the other at different times as a lens through which modern ideas and sensibilities could be accessed: for the Japanese, China was a window on the Western world in the declining years of the Tokugawa era, as later in the 1920s and 1930s Shanghai would be the stage for a cosmopolitan, popular and profligate culture that militarists in the homeland condemned as unpatriotic. For many Chinese students of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Japan was a model for political, ideological, and artistic reform, but also a mirror that reflected unflatteringly upon themselves. The chapters in this volume look at the full range of this complex process, from the late Qing and Tokugawa dynasties in the nineteenth century to the post-war years of the mid-twentieth century, encompassing Japan and China, Manchuria, Taiwan, and Korea, and examining a broad spectrum of genres, including not only classical and modern poetry and fiction, but also theatre, film, music, popular culture, religion, and philosophy. NOTES 1. Yoshiro Yukio, Nihon no bijitsu no tokushitsu (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1943), quoted in Sonja Arntzen, “A Shared Heritage of Sensibility? The Reception of Bai Juyi’s Poetry in Japan.” Paper presented to the January 2008 worskhop on JapanChina Cultural Relations at the University of Victoria.. Bai Juyi (772–846), better known in Japan as Bai Letian (J: Haku Rakuten), is also known in the West as Po Chü-i, with his name romanized in the Wade-Giles system used by his most celebrated translator, biographer, and advocate Arthur Waley. See Waley, The Life and Times of Po Chü-I 772–846 (London: Allen and Unwin, 1949). Bai Juyi is survived by 2800 poems, more than any other Chinese poet of antiquity, perhaps the most celebrated of them, in both China and Japan, being the narrative poem Changhenge “Everlasting Remorse,” which recounts the tragic love of the Tang Emperor Xuanzong and the Imperial concubine Yang Guifei, the beauty traditionally blamed for the near destruction of the dynasty.

2. This is not one of the poems for which Bai Juyi is best known in his homeland, an example of the differences between the Chinese and Japanese Bai canons. From the poem “Sent to Musician Yin, mainly describing former travels in Jiangnan”: ”Five years we were together in leisure, /but one day we were divided like floating clouds,/ My partners at the zither, poetry and drinking have all left me,/ the time of snow, moon and flowers is when I miss a friend the most.” The editors are grateful to our colleague Lin Tsung-cheng for locating and translating these lines.

3. An account of that war, and the terrible toll it took on China’s citizens, is Diana Lary, The Chinese People at War: Human Suffering and Social Transformation, 1937–1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010).

4. See Atsuko Sakai’s chapter “From the Edifying to the Edible: Chinese Fetishism and the China Fetish,” in Sakaki, Obsessions with the Sino-Japanese Polarity in Japanese Literature (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2006), pp. 65– 102. Tanizaki’s restaurant and toilet experiences are on pp. 82–85.

5. Karen Laura Thornber, Empire of Texts in Motion: Chinese, Korean, and Taiwanese Transculturations of Japanese Literature (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), p.1, quoting Sylvia Spitta, Between Two Waters: Narratives of Transculturation in Latin America. (Houston TX: Rice University Press, 1995), p.24.

6. John Timothy Wixted, “The Kanshi of Mori Ogai: Allusion and Diction,” Japonica Humboldtiana 14 (forthcoming). 7. See: Ralph Croizier, Koxinga and Chinese Nationalism: History, Myth, and the Hero (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1977); Donald Keene, Battles of Coxinga: Chikamatsu’s Puppet Play, its Background and Importance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971).

8. See: Richard King, “Typical People in Typical Circumstances,” in Wang Ban, ed., Words and Their Stories. (Leyden, Brill, 2010). For Lu Xun’s indebtedness to Natsume Soseki’s novel I Am a Cat in the creation of his archetypally Chinese character Ah Q, see Thornber, Empire of Texts in Motion, pp. 363–67.

9. Qt. in Lydia H. Liu, Translingual Practice: Literature, National Culture, and Translated Modernity—China 1900– 1937 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), pp. 48–49.

10. Liu, Translingual Practice, pp. 45–76, her chapter on “Translating National Character.” As Liu observes, the Chinese term guominxing adopted from the Japanese neologism kokuminsei, a response to European debates on national character.

11. Gang Yue, The Mouth that Begs: Hunger, Cannibalism, and the Politics of Eating in Modern China (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999).

12. Lu Xun, Diary of a Madman and Other Stories, trans. William A. Lyell (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1990), p. 23.

13. Lu Xun is so portrayed in one sheet (#4) of the album Lu Hsun: Great Revolutionary, Thinker and Writer. Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1975. For her analysis of this event, see Rey Chow, Primitive Passions: Visuality, Sexuality, Ethnography, and Contemporary Chinese Cinema (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), pp. 4–11.

14. An attempt by the brothers to found their own literary magazine failed for lack of funds, and they contributed instead to another journal; their two-volume anthology Stories from Abroad (Yuwai xiaoshuoji) sold poorly, and plans for further volumes were abandoned. See David E. Pollard, The True Story of Lu Xun (Hong Kong: Chinese University Press, 2002), pp. 33–37.

15. Guo Ping, “Anti-Confucian Themes in Shimazaki Toson and Lu Xun.” Paper presented to the January 2008 worskhop on Japan-China Cultural Relations at the University of Victoria; Shimazaki Toson, trans. Kenneth Strong. Broken Commandment (Tokyo: University of Tokyo Press, 1995).



16. H.D. Harootunian, “Visible Discourses/Invisible Ideologies” in Masao Miyoshi and H.D. Harootunian, eds., Postmodernism and Japan (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1989), pp. 73–74.

17. Yu Dafu, “Chenlun,” Yu Dafu xiaoshuo ji (Collected Stories of Yu Dafu). (Hangzhou: Zhejiang wenyi chubanshe, 1983), pp. 16–50.

18. Liu, Translingual Practice, p. 128. My reading of the nationalistic elements of “Sinking” follows that of Kirk A. Denton, “The Distant Shore: the Nationalist Theme in Yu Dafu’s ‘Sinking’”, Chinese Literature: Essays, Articles, and Reviews 14 (1992), pp. 107–23. For more on Yu Dafu, other May Fourth romantics who were members with him of the Creation Society (Chuangzao she) and the adaptation of this Japanese form of fictional writing, see. Christopher T. Keaveney, The Subversive Self in Modern Chinese Literature: The Creation Society’s Reinvention of the Japanese Shishôsetsu (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004); for Yu Dafu’s friendship with the Japanese novelist Satô Haruo, and the influence of Satô’s Rural Melancholy, see Thornber, Empire of Texts in Motion, pp. 318–19.

19. Yu Dafu’s restlessness was to take him back to Japan, and then to Southeast Asia during the Pacific War, first to Singapore, then after the Japanese invasion, to Indonesia, where he was killed by Japanese troops as the war ended in 1945.

20. Liu, Translingual Practice, pp. 32–33. Liu provides lists of such words and their etymologies in extensive appendices, pp. 265–378.

21. Yamamuro Shin’ichi, Manchuria under Japanese Domination, trans. Joshua A. Fogel (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006), p. 4.

22. Ibid., pp. 198–218, qt. p.201, italics in the original. 23. See Yosano Akiko, Travels in Manchuria and Mongolia: A feminist poet from Japan encounters prewar China. Translated by Joshua A. Fogel (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001); Natsume Sōseki, Rediscovering Natsume Sōseki: with the first English translation of Travels in Manchuria and Korea. Introduction and translation by Inger Sigrun Brodey and Sammy I. Tsunematsu (Folkestone, Kent: Global Oriental, 2000).

24. Robert Perrins, ”Imperial Dreams and Colonial Tours: Japanese Tourism in Manchuria.” Paper presented to the January 2008 worskhop on Japan-China Cultural Relations at the University of Victoria.

25. Joshua A. Fogel, “The Japanese Community of Shanghai: The First Generation,” in Fogel, Articulating the Sinosphere, pp. 67–99.

26. E. Taylor Atkins, “Jammin’ on the Jazz Frontier: The Japanese Jazz Community in Interwar Shanghai, Japanese Studies vol. 19 no. 1 (May 1999), pp. 5–16. The definition of “frontiers” is quoted by Atkins from David J. Weber and Jane M. Rausch, eds., Where Cultures Meet: Frontiers in Latin American History, Jaguar Books on Latin America 6 (Wilmington DE: Scholarly Resources Inc., 1994), p. xiv.

27. See also: Yiman Wang, “Between the national and the transnational: Li Xianglan/ Yamaguchi Yoshiko and pan-Asianism,” IESS Newsletter 38 (September 2005), p.17.

28. Louise Young, Japan’s Total Empire: Manchuria and the Culture of Wartime Expansion (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), p. 248.

I

A Shared Heritage

Chapter One

Straddling the Tradition-Modernity Divide: Huang Zunxian (1848–1905) and His Poems on Miscellaneous Subjects from Japan Richard John Lynn

Huang Zunxian, diplomat, statesman, historian, and, as many would have it, the last great classical Chinese poet, was a native of Jiayingzhou (present-day Meizhou), in Guangdong Province, and came from a Hakka family. His official career began in 1877, when he became counselor (Canzanguan) to the Imperial Chinese Legation in Tokyo, where he was also secretary (Shujiguan) responsible for researching and drafting documents, among other duties, and third in rank after Minister He Juzhang (1838–1891) and Vice-Minister Zhang Sigui (1816–1888), a post he filled until 1882 when he was appointed consul-general in San Francisco. He stayed in California until 1885, returned briefly to China, and the following year was installed as counselor to the Chinese Legation in London. In 1891 Huang became consulgeneral in Singapore, where he remained until 1894. Zhang Zhidong (1837–1909), then acting governor-general of Liangjiang (comprising the provinces of Jiangsu, Anhui, and Jiangxi), had Huang appointed in early 1895 to the staff of his Office of Foreign Affairs (Yangwuju) and put him in charge of cases concerning missionaries and other foreigners. In November 1896 Huang was summoned to two audiences with the Guangxu emperor, who was impressed both by his progressive thinking and his eyewitness accounts of Japanese reform and modernization. The emperor then requested copies of Poems on Miscellaneous Subjects from Japan (Riben zashi shi), which Huang had composed during his posting to Tokyo, and Huang’s Treatises on Japan (Riben guozhi), begun in 1880 and finally published in 1890. Both significantly contributed to

the emperor's appreciation of the Meiji reform movement and strengthened his own determination to embark on a similar program of reforms for China, the ill-fated reforms of 1898. An attempt was made toward the end of 1896 to have Huang appointed ambassador to Germany, but the Germans, determined to stir up trouble because the Chinese were resisting their demands for concessions in Shandong, rejected Huang on the trumped-up charge that he had engaged in corrupt activities in Singapore. However, Huang soon afterwards obtained another office, his first official domestic post in China, when he was appointed Salt Intendant (Yanfa daotai) for Hunan in 1897. There he participated in reforms sponsored by the progressive governor of Hunan, Chen Baozhen (1831–1900), to which he enthusiastically contributed along with Tan Sitong (1865–1898) and Liang Qichao (1873–1929), among others. In June 1898, the emperor summoned Huang to an audience at which he intended to appoint him Minister to Japan, but before Huang reached the capital, the reform movement was crushed and the emperor rendered powerless. Huang managed to avoid arrest and execution by taking refuge in the residence of Narahara Nobumasa (1863–1900), a young Japanese diplomat befriended by Huang during 1879–1882 when Nobumasa was studying Chinese at the Imperial Chinese Legation in Tokyo. Nobumasa took his Chinese studies seriously, for when he was posted to China in 1884, he became a student of the famous educator and scholar Yu Yue (1821–1906), to whom on Yu’s seventieth birthday (1890) he presented a massive collection of kanshi (poetry in Chinese) and kanbun (prose in Chinese) by Japanese authors. This Yu edited as the Dongying shixuan (Anthology of Poems from the Eastern Sea) and published in forty juan (fascicles) in 1903.[1] Nobumasa himself died defending the legation compound in Beijing during the Boxer uprising in 1900. Huang was ultimately saved from execution by the intervention of the former Prime Minister of Japan, Itō Hirobumi (1841–1909), who rallied the Japanese diplomatic corps in China and influential members of the Western community in China—all admirers of Huang whom they respected for his integrity and progressive ideals. Itō had enjoyed a close relationship with Huang since becoming Huang’s kanshi poetry disciple in Tokyo (1877–1882).[2] However, Huang’s official career was at an end, for though spared death, he was cashiered and ordered to return to his native place, Jiaying zhou, where he lived in retirement until his death in 1905. POEMS IN CELEBRATION OF A SHARED HIGH CULTURE Huang’s Japan poems attracted official attention, and immediately on their completion in 1879 the College of Foreign Languages (Tongwenguan) in the Office of Foreign Affairs (Zongli yamen) published them as Poems on Miscellaneous Subjects from Japan in two fascicles. The poems also quickly became popular in Japan, with several editions published in Tokyo and Kyoto during the early 1880s, and when Wang Tao (1828–1897) became acquainted with Huang during Wang’s tour of Japan in 1880, he immediately arranged for an edition with a new preface by himself to be published by his Refuge Cave Under the Southern Sky (Nantian dunku) press in Hong Kong.

Wang Tao’s sympathy with the Taiping Rebellion in South China (1850–1864) aroused the enmity of Qing officials. Forced to flee to Hong Kong in 1862, Wang met the Scottish scholar James Legge (1815–1897), whom he aided for more than ten years in his monumental translation of the Five Classics of Confucianism. Wang spent two of those years with Legge in Britain (1868–1870), where he became acquainted with Western thought and institutions. Once he returned to Hong Kong, he became an independent journalist, founding and editing one of the first modern newspapers in China, the Circulation Daily (Tsun Wan Yat Pao in Cantonese, Xunhuan ribao in Mandarin). Later, he also wrote for the influential Shanghai newspaper Shun Pao (The Report, Shenbao in Mandarin), as did Huang Zunxian, beginning in 1884.[3] In his journalistic writing Wang urged the introduction of Western-style arsenals, shipyards, and mines. He also was one of the first to warn that the strength of the West lay not merely in its superior military technology but also in its political systems and public and private institutions, which provided the infrastructure for superior technology to develop. From his safe havens in Hong Kong and Shanghai, he called for the reform of the Chinese military, educational, administrative, and legal system. Wang’s preface reads in part: It has been more than one thousand years since Japan became a country with a high literate culture, but with the florescence of writing and scholarship nowadays that culture is especially dynamic. Moreover, Gongdu [Huang] is now there to help its vigorous development—an opportunity that comes along perhaps once a millennium. However, this is additional to duties, and Gongdu can attend to it only in his spare time. Just now foreign affairs are expanding daily and the international situation is become ever more urgent—even to the point where friendship or war hang in the balance between the two countries. As a diplomat serving at a great distance from home, Huang must handle matters at his own discretion, and so whatever vicissitudes occur he must trust his own judgment. If too firm, he incurs his neighbor’s displeasure, and if too soft, he sullies his own country’s prestige—so he has to “change direction of critical developments over the wine and meat” and “win a victory at the forum of debate.” How could such things be easily done just in conversation! At present, Gongdu is presenting excellent plans and far-reaching strategies to assist the two Imperial Envoys in their arduous tasks, and when moments of dignified and courteous leisure occur, his conduct is truly unequalled in earnestness and nobility. Moreover, when he did have time free from official duties, he inquired about local customs and collected items of cultural significance to use in composing his Poems On Miscellaneous Subjects from Japan in two fascicles, a total of 154 poems, which describe local conditions, record facts about the native language, reveal the complexity of events, and convey the emotional excitement attached to past and present.[4] Sometimes one poem deals with only one subject, and sometimes several subjects are covered in one poem, but all are examples of evidential research (kaozheng). In general he focuses on account and is unconcerned with polishing diction. Some poems suggest reward and punishment, clearly praise and blame, and harbor subtle meaning. The evidence he cites for all this is broad in scope, his collection of materials clear and explicit. If we compare his efforts with those of the ancients, there are few to whom he would have to yield.[5]

Huang intended his Japan poems to have more than literary impact, for they were meant to enlighten those who wielded power in China by casting modernizing Japan in a positive light, and to convince Chinese readers that Meiji Japan was an appropriate model for reform and modernization. Another important theme was that by modernizing and joining the international community Japan was not sacrificing tradition but was creatively preserving it—thus again the right model for China. To account for Japan’s preservation of tradition, Huang had to link Japanese tradition with the Chinese, which he did in poems emphasizing their common high culture, “This Culture of Ours” (C: siwen, J: shibun).[6] The Poems on Miscellaneous Subjects from Japan is quite broad in scope: Japanese history and geography, Sino-Japanese cultural relations throughout history, elements of Chinese culture in Japan, including poetry

(kanshi) and prose (kanbun), painting and calligraphy, Confucianism and Buddhism, as well as the Meiji Restoration and modernization, with special attention to new political and social institutions, the diet, local government, political parties, museums, police, army and navy, fire control, taxation, the postal system, education reform, women’s education, and the status and social roles of women, among many others. Huang’s preface to the 1890 edition of the Poems on Miscellaneous Subjects from Japan provides an account of his shifting attitude toward the new Japan and outlines the purpose of his poems: Whenever I chose some miscellaneous matter, I always developed a little note on it, which I then embellished with a poem. And these are the poems that have now been published as the Poems on Miscellaneous Subjects. This happened to be the time that the Meiji reform movement had just begun, when everything was being tried for the first time and planning for the most part had not yet stabilized. . . . Many of the friends that I made were scholars of the old school (jiuxuejia), and their subtle and profound analyses, satire and ridicule, and sighs of regret both great and small, filled my ears to overflowing. Although I had to be circumspect as someone living as a guest in their country and so could not challenge what these gentlemen thought was right, new views that differed from theirs as well as old views that coincided with them occasionally appear in my poems. . . . [But] I then came to believe that reform modeled on the Western pattern, which dismissed the old and accepted the new, was eminently the right way for Japan to become a strong and independent country. . . . After a time, I traveled to America, observed Europeans, and looked at their tradition of learning as it relates to politics and institutions and realized that the situation in Japan was, after all, not very different. This year Japan has already opened a parliament. No country in the entire world has ever equaled the speed of its progress. Whenever I occasionally discuss Eastern affairs with high officials and great scholars in Western countries, they always say that the West should keep its hands off Japan and that they admire what it is doing— without a single dissenting voice. . . . Alas! The Chinese literatus, restricted to his narrow and hackneyed view of the world, continues to ignore foreign affairs. Even when he has the opportunity to hear and see something about them, he still responds by dressing up his responses in old, outmoded ideas. However, as complacent and conservative as I then was, doubts began to compromise my faith, and, only after months and even years of deep and extensive study, did I begin to understand what must be right and what wrong, what would succeed and what fail, and what advantages must be adopted and what handicaps should be discarded.[7]

The progress of Huang’s attitude to Japan’s modernization is readily apparent when we compare a poem on newspapers in the 1879 edition with one that replaces it in the 1890 edition. The first reads: A newspaper appears from the Imperial Capital— The newly promulgated laws are even more enlightened. Old fellows sunning under the eaves chat privately about them, Not quite daring to offer their own irresponsible opinions. From the edge of mountains to the shore of the sea, newspapers reach absolutely everywhere. They are excellent when it comes to providing information about current events and the airing of public opinion. However, since Westerners use newspapers to publish everything that happens, they have established laws to deal with slander against the imperial government and criticism of individual wrongdoing in order to prevent irresponsible license. Minor offenses result in fines, and major offenses result in imprisonment. Japan is following their example in all of this. Whenever current government policy is presented in newspapers, if it is not referred to as “civilized” (bunmei), it is called “enlightened” (kaika).[8]

And from the 1890 edition: If you want to know what happened long ago, read the old histories, But if you want to know what’s happening now, read the newspaper. All schools of thought and every thinker are there, not a one’s left out, And it reaches everyone everywhere, so all can share the same words.

Newspapers are for examining current events and keeping the whole country informed—everything is included in them. If anything new happens in any country anywhere in the world, conveyed by telegraph in the morning, it gets published by the evening, so we may say that it is possible to know what is happening in the world without leaving one’s own home. The newspaper originated in the court bulletin (dibao), and it resembles the collectanea (congshu), but, since it is larger in form and wider in function, it surpasses them by far.[9]

In the earlier poem Huang questions the salutary value of newspapers since they seem only to encourage idle conversation and gossip, which he suspects will lead to outright criticism of the government by the unqualified. However, the later poem brims over with enthusiasm for newspapers and justifies their appearance in China by using the age-old stratagem of justifying something new by tracing its origins back to established models in the past. HUANG ZUNXIAN’S JAPANESE CIRCLE AND THEIR “BRUSH TALKS” Huang’s close friends in Japan covered a wide spectrum: from apolitical cultural conservatives, whom he refers to as “scholars of the old school,” to Meiji era reformers at the centre of politics and government. He seems to have maintained cordial personal relations with all kinds of intellectuals, moving easily back and forth among them because they themselves did not constitute exclusive “camps” in either attitude or membership. The cultural conservatives may have been critical of programs and policies of the new government, but they seem to have become resigned to them and to modernization in general—being for the most part more concerned with preserving elements of tradition as essential features of the new developing cultural mix. On the other hand, many early Meiji reformers and government leaders continued to adhere to traditional attitudes and practices—by writing kanbun and composing kanshi, by upholding personal and public Confucian ideals, and by identifying with an expanded “This Culture of Ours,” trans-national and not tied to Chinese ethnicity, as a tradition capable of transplantation, growth, and vigorous developme nt inside Japan. The locus classicus of the expression siwen is the Analects of Confucius (Lunyu): When under siege in Kuang, the Master said, “With King Wen dead, is Culture (wen) not here with me? Had Heaven intended that This Culture of Ours (siwen) should perish, those who died later would not have been able to participate in This Culture of Ours. Heaven is not about to let This Culture of Ours perish, so what can the men of Kuang do to me?”[10]

Siwen had a long tradition of usage that referred not only to Confucian texts but also to Confucian scholars themselves (C: ruzhe, J: jusha, or simply C: xuezhe, J: gakusha). A further extension of the meaning of siwen is its general usage as a term for elegance and refinement (C: youya, J: yūga), used especially for the elegance and grace in writing, painting, and calligraphy, which made it equivalent to C: wenya J: bunga. In Japan, shibun was used largely in the first two senses—Confucian scholarship and scholars—with the ascendency of NeoConfucianism during the Tokugawa era. For example, Kawaguchi Seisai (1703–1754) used it this way in the title of his The Source of This Culture of Ours (Shibun genryū), a history of the origin and development of Japanese Neo-Confucianism. However, as in China, the term in Japan was used in the more general sense of high culture grounded in scholarship, writing, and

art that consisted primarily but not exclusively of Confucian elements. By the early Meiji era, shibun no longer simply meant Neo-Confucianism, but included an expanded China scholarship (kangaku) that covered other aspects of Chinese culture—especially Buddhism— as well as elements of Japanese National Learning (kokugaku) considered to have counterparts in (or at least to be compatible with) subjects proper to China scholarship, all of which were formed into an alliance to balance the flood of Western Learning (yōgaku) then overwhelming Japanese life. In fact, this composite meaning seems to apply in the name of the society to promote “Eastern Learning” (tōgaku), the Sinological Society (Shibun gakkai), founded in Tokyo in 1880 when Huang was still in Japan and a close associate of its founders, the historian Shigeno Yasutsugu (1827–1910), Supervisor of the National Office of Historiography (Shūshikyoku), the educator and sinologue Kawada Ōkō (1830–1896), and Chō Sanshū (1833– 1895), sinologue, kanshi poet, calligrapher, and painter in the nanga tradition (Japanese literati painting derived from Southern Song painting).[11] At the centre of Huang’s circle of Japanese literati friends, mostly far from the corridors of power, were Ōkōchi Teruna (1848–1882), Minamoto Keikaku, former Matsudaira Lord of the Takasaki Domain (Takasaki han jōshu) and Army Commissioner (Rikugun bugyō) during the last year of Bakufu (1867). Ōkōchi served in that same capacity under the new Meiji government during 1868, but immediately after the Restoration, when the former domains were converted into prefectures, he became governor in his former domain, but soon retired as a peer of the realm (kazoku), drawing on his pension as a former domain lord to live a life of elegant quasi-seclusion at his Cassia Grove Villa (Keirinsō), where he pursued classical Chinese studies, the writing of kanbun and kanshi, wine (his heavy drinking probably killed him at the age of thirty-four), and the company of Japanese literati, joined a few years later by Chinese literati—largely members of the newly arrived Imperial Qing legation, Huang Zunxian among them. He was the keeper of a massive collection of “brush talks” (C: bitan, J: hitsudan), thousands of pages of which are still extant,[12] held between the Japanese and Chinese members of the circle, who of course lacked a common spoken language. The brush talks were conducted in a combination of literary Chinese (wenyan) and written guanhua, the original “Mandarin,” at which all members of the circle were adept.[13] The relationship between Ōkōchi and the Chinese began in earnest when Ōkōchi became acquainted with Minister He Ruzhang shortly after the latter arrived in Japan, introduced to him by his personal secretary and tutor Wang Zhiben (born 1835), who also served as occasional attaché at the Chinese legation. However, it is also possible that Huang and other members of the legation made the acquaintance of Ōkōchi through Ishikawa Kōsai (1833– 1918), a well-known Meiji-era poetry and prose writer, scholar of classical Chinese learning, and painter in the Nanga tradition. His residence was located south of the Great Gate (Daimon) of the great Pure Land temple in Shiba (present-day Minato-ku), the Zōjōji, a few minutes’ walk from the first location of the Chinese legation in Tokyo, which he began to frequent soon after it was established there. During the mid-1870s he became kanbun tutor to Ōkōchi’s cousin Baisen, which probably was one link that brought Ōkōchi and the Chinese together toward the end of 1877. Ishikawa became an especially close friend of Huang

Zunxian, whom, among other things, he helped to read Iwagaki Matsunae’s (1774–1849) Brief History of the Nation (Kokushi ryaku), which provided Huang with much of his basic information about Japanese history. AN EPITAPH FOR POEMS AND A SHARED LAUGH Besides the brush talks, two other surviving sources tell us much about the kind of circle to which Huang and Ōkōchi belonged. The first is the Grave Inscription for the Entombed Poems (Zangshi zhongbei yinzhi), composed by Ōkōchi and inscribed on a stele originally erected in the garden of his Cassia Grove Villa but now standing within the precincts of the Heirin Temple, Saitama Prefecture, just north of metropolitan Tokyo, where Ōkōchi’s Minamoto clan have their graves, and the second is the book A Laugh at Mount Shiba (Shizan isshō), edited by Ishikawa Kōsai and published in Tokyo in 1878. First, the stele inscription: This is the grave of the entombed poems of Gongdu [Huang]. . . . One day he came by for a visit and brought his draft of the Poems on Miscellaneous Subjects from Japan to show me. . . . I became so fond of them that I begged that the draft be kept in my home, but Gongdu said, “No, instead I want a clean piece of ground in which to bury these scrolls.” . . . I replied, “For this elegant cultural undertaking, surpassing all others in our age, please make an empty part of my garden their grave.” Consequently, I had Gongdu compose a gravestone title for it and had an engraver carve this inscription on a stone. On the day the inscription was finished, I set out wine cups and invited Gongdu with his friends Magistrate Shen [Shen Meishi], Commissioner Yang [Yang Shoujing], and the tribute student Wang and his brother [Wang Qiyuan and Wang Qinxian]. When we were half rapt with wine, Gongdu placed the draft into the grave and filled it in. Pouring a libation of wine on it, he intoned a prayer: For each scroll of poetry, oh, a cup of earth Poems and earth, oh, together forever. I beg the spirits, oh, protect them, Souls of the buried poems, oh, at the edge of the Sumida River. I composed a prayer in reply: They sing of trifling matters, oh, with concentration so fresh And record the past, oh, so that everything is new again. The poems have such numinous power, oh, the earth is fragrant too, So I wish these beautiful lines and I, oh, shall be neighbors forever. Magistrate Shen and the others all responded with poems too, but the stone is so narrow that there is no room to inscribe them on it. Dated the ninth month of the jimao year of Meiji [October 15–November 12, 1879], composed by Keikaku [Ōkōchi], the calligraphy in his own hand.[14]

Besides Huang and Ōkōchi, the most significant figure mentioned is Yang Shoujing (1839– 1915), who arrived in Tokyo in 1879, was attached to the legation in various capacities, and in 1881 became Secretary to Li Shuchang (1837–1897), the second Imperial Chinese Minister to Japan. Yang’s tour of duty lasted four more years, during which he pursued cultural activities, editing and compiling, calligraphy, and epigraphic, bibliographic and geographic studies, producing dozens of works in all these fields. He is now best known for his Riben fangshu zhi (Record of Searching For Books in Japan) (1897), notes for which were largely complete by 1881 when Li Shuchang (1837–1897) succeeded He Ruzhang as minister. Yang showed Li his

notes, and Li, another ardent bibliophile, joined him in purchasing works lost in China, which they reprinted in Tokyo as the Collectanea of Ancient Lost Editions (Guyi congshu) (1882– 1884). Yang later became consul in Nagasaki, and there as earlier in Tokyo his published collections of inscription rubbings gathered in China, Korea, and Japan as well as his own calligraphy had a great impact on Japanese calligraphy, exerting influence still felt today both directly and through Kusakabe Meikaku (1838–1922), who regarded himself as Yang’s disciple and was perhaps the foremost figure in epigraphy and calligraphy during the MeijiTaishō eras, with monuments inscribed in his hand found all over Japan, his own disciples numbering in the hundreds. Shen Wenying (born 1834), personal name Meishi, was an attaché at the legation. He contributed a preface to Ishikawa Kōsai’s anthology of Meiji kanbun prose, the 1879 Models of Japanese Prose (Nihon bunshō kihan) (1879), as did Huang also, as well as a preface to Ishikawa’s edition of Wang Shizhen’s (1618–1682) Transcendent Insight Into the Living Method for the Study of Poetry (Yuanji shixue huofa) of 1883. Four Wangs from the same clan, natives of Cixi in Zhejiang, came to Japan in the early Meiji era: Fanqing, sobriquet Qinxian, and his brother, Zhiben, sobriquet Qiyuan (born 1835), and apparently cousins Ruxiu and Renqian (born 1853). Wang Fanqing arrived in 1877 and first supported himself by doing calligraphy for public and private stone inscriptions, adding colophons to paintings, and by publishing facsimile collections of his own calligraphy. Wang Zhiben came to Japan in 1875, before the Chinese legation was established, and first made a living as an itinerant tutor of classical Chinese poetry and prose. In 1877 he became Ōkōchi Teruna’s private secretary and tutor and took up lodgings in Ōkōchi’s Cassia Grove Villa. For a short time he also served as an attaché at the Chinese legation. Almost nothing is known about Wang Ruxiu, who also seems to have secured an income from calligraphy commissions. Wang Renqian was a successful merchant, who by 1878 had his own bookstore in Tokyo, selling books published in China and the paraphernalia associated with “the scholar’s studio,” such as paper, ink sticks, ink stones, and brushes—all imported from China. The second source of information on Huang and Ōkōchi’s literary circle, A Laugh at Mount Shiba, is a slim volume of offer and response poems (C: zengda, J: zōtō) exchanged between Ishikawa Kōsai on the one hand and Huang and other legation personnel on the other. Ōkōchi wrote a postscript; Minister He Ruzhang’s younger brother He Dingqiu (born 1855), an attaché at the Legation, inscribed a calligraphic epigraph on the title page, and prefaces were written by Shen Wenying and Wang Zhiben. Additional postscripts were composed by Ukai Tetsujō (1814–1889), Chief Priest of the Awareness of Grace Temple (Chion’in) in Kyoto, sutra scholar, prominent kanshi and kanbun writer, and one of the foremost calligraphers of the Meiji era; by Hata Giō, Chief Priest of the Virtue of Heaven Temple (Tentokuji) in Shiba, northwest of the Zōjōji in Tokyo; and Oka Senjin (1833–1914), sinologue, historian, educator, and prominent kanshi and kanbun writer. The following is an excerpt from Ōkōchi Teruna’s postscript: I often went to Mount Shiba accompanied by my friend Ishikawa Kunka [Kōsai] to hold brush talks with the ministers and all other guests in Japan until day’s end without knowing the least fatigue, the paper piling up to form mountains,

our marvelous discussions becoming complete works. Kunka then copied out several tens of the best of the poems included among these to make a slim volume, called At Mount Shiba—Just Time for a Laugh, so he asked me to write a postscript. As soon as I got it, I quickly read it through again and again, unwilling to put it down, for the poetry is fresh and innovative yet noble and elegant, a sufficient remedy for the evils associated with the irregular way people of the present now interact. Such offer and response poems can also reveal the nature and temperament of the Qing Chinese. When he is free, Kunka always joins us to chant poetry at our literary-wine parties. This is the splendid way the Qing Chinese enjoy themselves—not at all like those Westerners who labor tirelessly, always anxious for success, and obsessed with making all sorts of useful gadgets. They nourish the spirit so that they are easy-going and free from impatience—really admirable! Based on this observation, I offer this piece of advice: You merchants of the capital and gentlemen throughout the Empire, if you seek fame and pursue profit, you should make the acquaintance of Westerners, but if you would lead a life of lofty retirement in which poetry and wine produce their own pleasure, you should make the acquaintance of Qing Chinese. This being the case, it is especially appropriate that people such as Kunka [Ishikawa] and I should find these Qing Chinese visitors good friends—why should we ever want to be like those Westerners with all their intelligence and energy![15]

“Just Time for a Laugh” succinctly sums up the first easygoing year members of the Qing legation and their Japanese friends enjoyed in Shiba, for toward the end of 1878 the legation moved from the Moon Realm Monks’ Quarters (Gekkai sōin), within the precincts of Zōjōji, which the Chinese had rented for legation business and living quarters, to a modern office building in Kōjimachi-ku (present-day Chiyoda-ku), close to the Imperial Palace, government offices, and foreign embassies. Two diplomatic issues were urgently commanding the attention of the legation—contention over sovereignty of the Ryukyu Islands and the dangerous situation in Korea, both of which ultimately proved frustrating and utterly disastrous for the Chinese and anticipated the ever-increasing Japanese imperial ambitions that began in the mid-1880s and the consequent deterioration of Sino-Japan relations in general. I suspect that the title of Ishikawa’s volume was chosen, at least in part, because the Chinese and Japanese literati connected with it were already conscious of how ephemeral their time together was and how slim the chances were that such friendly and relaxed association could continue. DISPATCHES FROM JAPAN While all this convivial literary and social activity was going on in Shiba, Qing legation personnel, of course, were also engaged in the business and social life of diplomacy, associating with those at the centre of civil and military power. Here too Huang made close friends and acquired poetry disciples. Dignified, erudite, congenial, and a poet and prose master of obvious genius, Huang attracted attention and respect throughout government circles. Such friends included Enamoto Takeaki (1836–1908), who rose to become navy minister in 1880 and became minister to China in 1882[16] and Ōyama Iwao (1842–1916), who became army minister in 1880. Huang was greatly interested in military matters, and his poem on the army and navy officer academies is included in both the 1879 and 1890 editions of his Japan poetry: One who wishes to contend against the allied power of Qi and Chu,[17] Must study books never written by Sun or Wu.[18] To shrink the earth and stitch the heavens together, technology exists for both, For, besides steamships, there are flying chariots too.[19]

Officer academies for the army and navy are established whose exclusive mission is to educate military leaders. For everything involved—strategic use of terrain, best use of weapons, disposition of troops, military tactics, strengthening and positioning of fortifications, drilling the proper use of hands and feet—whole books exist on each subject. Illustrations are drawn and written explanations attached, and when these fail to exhaust the subject, models are constructed in wood and clay so that one can understand what is involved in a glance. This is not just “piling up grains of rice to make mountains,”[20] since students personally try things out and practice them. Even when at peace they behave as if they were confronting a great enemy. Westerners have an adage: “Selecting military leaders is harder than drilling soldiers, for soldiers can be made ready in several months but military leaders can only be ready to fulfill duties after many years of training.” And this is how they extend their military power! The Japanese developed their army by emulating the French and Germans and created a navy in imitation of the British.[21]

The Japan that Huang discovered during his posting to Tokyo was, of course, considerably different from his native China, but what he found there had much more in common with late nineteenth-century China than what he was to encounter soon afterwards in the United States and Europe. Present-day Japanese life and past tradition were sufficiently different to engage his curiosity and interest yet not so different that he found them alien. He certainly found kindred spirits among the bunjin friends he made then, and the discovery that he and they shared the same rich cultural and intellectual heritage must have given him much satisfaction and optimism—optimism that the Confucian tradition would continue to span both their cultures and sustain their common ideals and values in the crucial years ahead, when he hoped that China and Japan would stand united and face the Western challenge together. Huang was committed to reform in China but was no revolutionary, so, for him tradition meant strength. During his years in Japan, Huang discovered that “This Culture of Ours” was not limited to “our” Chinese tradition but had become “Our” international tradition that reached beyond the borders of China and the bounds of Chinese ethnicity. His writings from these years are full of enthusiasm and hope for the future—he was inspired to dream great dreams. Although such hopes and expectations were to be utterly confounded by the history of Sino-Japanese relations that was soon to unfold, Huang’s writings about Japan deserve our respect and attention, for they describe a window of opportunity for East Asian cooperation and understanding, which not only opened briefly—and with complete futility—in the past but is now opening again, when, of course, prospects for its remaining open are infinitely better. NOTES 1. See the next chapter in this volume, by Atsuko Sakaki. 2. For Itō’s kanshi, see Itō Hirobumi, Tōkō shizon [Poetry Anthology of Master Tō], Suematsu Kenchō ed. (Tokyo: Hirobumikan, 1910).

3. Xia Xiaohong, “Huang Zunxian yu zaoqi Shenbao guanxi chuizong [Tracing the Relationship Between Huang Zunxian and the Early Shenbao],” Nanjing shifan daxue wenxueyuan xuebao (Journal of School of Chinese Language and Culture, Nanjing Normal University 1 (March 2007), pp. 36-41.

4. Huang’s work exists in two different versions: the first 1879 edition contains 154 poems and a later edition of 1890 contains 200, which repeat almost all of the earlier edition poems and commentaries, omits eight poems and revises others, and adds new poems and commentaries.

5. Cheng Zheng, ed., Huang Zunxian quanji [Complete Works of Huang Zunxian] (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 2005), 1:4-5. 6. This and other related issues are explored in detail in Richard John Lynn, “This Culture of Ours and Huang Zunxian’s

Literary Experiences in Japan (1877–1882),” Chinese Literature: Essays, Articles, Reviews 19 (December 1997), pp. 113– 138, and the review by Richard John Lynn of J. D. Schmidt, Within the Human Realm: The Poetry of Huang Zunxian, 1848–1905 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), China Review International 3:2 (Fall 1996), pp. 1–27.

7. Complete Works of Huang Zunxian, 1:6. 8. Zhong Shuhe, ed., Riben zashi shi guangzhu [Poems on Miscellaneous Subjects from Japan, with expanded commentaries] (Changsha: Yuelu shushe, 1985), p. 642.

9. Complete Works of Huang Zunxian, 1:22. 10. Cf. He Yan (190-249) and Xing Bing (fl. ca. 980), Lunyu zhushu [Analects, With Commentary and Sub-Commentary] (Taibei: Yiwen yinshuguan, 1982 reprint of the 1815 Shisanjing zhushu ed.), 9:2b; translation adapted from Peter K. Bol, “This Culture of Ours”: Intellectual Transitions in T’ang and Sung China (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992), p. 1.

11. Makino Kenjirō, Nihon kangaku shi [History of China Scholarship in Japan] (Tokyo: Sekaidō shoten, 1943), pp. 284–89. 12. See Sanetō Keishū, trans. Ōkōchi monjo [The Ōkōchi Documents] (Tokyo: Heibonsha, 1964); Zheng Ziyu and Sanetō Keishū, ed., Huang Zunxian yu Riben youren bitan yigao [Surviving Drafts of Brush Conversations Between Huang Zunxian and His Japanese Friends] (Tokyo: Waseda daigaku Tōyō bungaku kenkyūkai, 1968); Huang Zunxian quanji, 1:553-814. Although extensive, these collections of brush talks are not complete; all the extant original brush talks are held in the rare book collection of the Waseda University library and have been copied onto microfilm by the Maruzen Company, Tokyo.

13. They could have relied on a translator from the Chinese legation, one Wei Limen, but when Wei once showed up at Ōkōchi’s residence during a brush talk session, Ōkōchi said, “Who is this person, and why must he speak Japanese—it would be better if we only communicate in brush talk.” Ōkōchi insisted on the written record—both to preserve the immediacy of direct communication and to allow the participants to express themselves in exactly their own words.

14. Historical context, sources and photographs, and a complete annotated translation all appear in Richard John Lynn, “At Mount Shiba—Just Time for a Laugh,” Ex/Change (Centre for Cross-Cultural Studies, Chinese University of Hong Kong) 15 (February 2006), pp. 10–16.

15. Ishikawa Kōsai, ed. Shizan isshō [A Laugh at Mount Shiba] (Tokyo: Bunshōdō, 1878), Postscript. 16. A selection of Enamoto’s kanshi is included in Uchida Hisanaga, ed., Kinsei eiketsu shiika shū [Collection of Poetry by Eminent Figures of Our Day] (Nara: Kōbun sho’oku, 1878).

17. Drawing an analogy with the situation during the ancient Warring States era, Wang refers here to alliances between and among contemporary Western powers.

18. Sun and Wu refer to Sun Wu, supposedly a contemporary of Confucius (551–479 B. C. E.), to whom is attributed the Sunzi bingfa [Master Sun’s Art of War], and Wu Qi (ca. 440–ca. 381 B. C. E.), the purported author of the Wuzi [Sayings of Master Wu), another early work of military strategy.

19. “Flying chariots” is a fanciful reference to the dirigibles and balloons just then being adapted to military purposes. However, the term was a neologism derived from missionary-Chinese texts and was in common use in Wang’s day, either in the form feiche or qiqiu feiche, the aerostat—and old term for balloon or dirigible. See Lydia H. Liu, Translingual Practice: Literature, National Culture, and Translated Modernity—China 1900–1937 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), p. 265.

20. The Han general Ma Yuan (14 B. C. E.–49 C. E.) demonstrated for the emperor a battle plan by drawing in a pile of rice with his finger. See Hou Han shu [History of the Later Han Era] (Beijing: Zhonghura shuju, 1973), 24 p. 834.

21. Zhong Shuhe, ed., Poems on Miscellaneous Subjects from Japan (Changsha: Yuelu shushe, 1985), p. 652.

Chapter Two

Waves from Opposing Shores: Exchanges in a Classical Language in the Age of Nationalism Atsuko Sakaki

THE MARGINALIZATION OF LITERATURE IN MODERN JAPAN Today, Takezoe Seisei (Shin’ichirō; 1842–1917) is probably best known as the Japanese minister who was in Seoul when the Seoul Incident, a failed attempt of the Korean progressive activists to remove the conservative pro-Qing China faction, broke out in 1884. The activists’ mission, to assassinate their major opponents and execute their plans of modernization through the intervention of Japan, met with less than committed support from the Japanese diplomatic and military agencies led by Takezoe. Consequently, the attempted coup d’état ended in the capture of the Korean royal family by the Qing Chinese authorities in Seoul. The top activists, including Kim Ok-kyun (1851–1894), were compelled to seek political refuge in Japan, leaving Korea with Takezoe and the other Japanese diplomats. Takezoe’s involvement in this incident earned him the reputation of a man of letters rather than politics. His kanbun account of the incident, “Kankyō no hen o kisu” (An Account of the Incident in the Capital of Korea), was celebrated as one of the best prose pieces of the Meiji period,[1] while his career in diplomacy was shattered by Japan’s embarrassing retreat following its failure to protect the Korean royal family as requested. Prominent Korean progressive activists and some Japanese government administrators who were sympathetic to them had been concerned that Takezoe was Confucian, old-fashioned, and literary-minded, and therefore not suited to handle the political tension in Korea of the time. Kokuryūkai’s Biographies of Men of Insight and Political Ambitions in East Asia (Tōa senkaku shishi kiden, 1933; rep. 1966) portrays Takezoe as being just as inadequate as his detractors feared, lacking sufficient determination to help Kim Ok-kyun and his colleagues, who perhaps overestimated Japan’s willingness to help them modernize their country. While it is true that Takezoe proved not to be up to the challenges of managing binational affairs, and that he may probably deserve the accusation of conservatism that in effect, if not in intent, hindered Korea’s own autonomous journey to modernization, the way his failure as administrator is registered by modern historians calls for a review. Ishizaki Hitoshi, a historian of modern East Asia, as well as Kokuryūkai, a prewar (i.e., pre-1945) organization that compiled a history of political interactions among East Asian activists, blames Takezoe for his political incapability that, in their view, is the reverse side of the same coin of his exceptional

literary talent. They seem to take it for granted that someone who is literary cannot be capable in administration. This is quite contrary to the traditional East Asian expectation of bureaucrats, who were supposed to be men of letters as well as capable administrators. Indeed, the disappearance of men of letters from the centre of bureaucracy and commerce is a marker of modernity. So is the marginalization of the classical canon in education, where it was eventually buried in archives. Scholarship in Chinese classics and poetry, once normalized by the government for the purposes of educating future bureaucrats and scholars at official schools, as evident in civil service examinations in China and the institution of the Shogunate schools in the “premodern” age,[2] became irrelevant to the attainment of worldly success. The classical elite belief that the privileged and educated few should control both government and culture broke down, and learning was compartmentalized into fields of expertise to be assumed by professionals with vocational training and terms of employment. Literature and the other arts were no longer essentials for the elite but were fields of production and consumption in a capitalist society. In place of literary Chinese, acquisition of one or more of the European languages in fields of the real world (English in business, French in law, and German in medicine) became imperative and thus compulsory in institutional education. The shift’s effects were not limited to the domestic; the Japanese elite’s loss of literary Chinese affected their ability to correspond with the rest of East Asia. Literary Chinese had long been the lingua franca among East Asians. Since the mid-Meiji on, however, an increasing number of Japanese intellectuals who became more proficient in one or more European languages found it difficult to write in kanbun (prose in literary Chinese domesticated by Japanese). By the Taisho period, the Chinese literary canon became cryptic even to many welleducated Japanese.[3] In addition to the loss of the “universal language” of literary Chinese, lack of familiarity with the modern languages of the East Asian peer countries raised barriers in communication. In other words, spoken Chinese or spoken Korean did not replace literary Chinese as a means of communication for the Japanese in East Asia in the modern age. The “one nation, one language” policy of modern nationalism naturally presents an obstacle to transnational communication that was possible among the elite of a common linguistic culture, a culture of a written language rather than that of any oral native tongue. The only way to overcome the obstacle was to master a European language (English or French), the language of an imperialist nation-state, that of an empire. Thus, in linguistic terms, nationalism worked to replace one civilization (Sinocentric) with another (Anglophone/Francophone), rather than simply unbinding each ethnic entity from the symbolic constraint of Chinese hegemony. It should be stressed, however, that these changes did not take place overnight. In fact, there was a transitional time during which many remained conversant in the classical Chinese canon while acquiring proficiency in European languages and disciplines that originated in Europe. Literary Chinese was effectively employed by the early Meiji bureaucrats and educators who were also Europhiles, to articulate and register their observation of the emergent environment that had not been available to preceding generations, let alone those who invented it in the first place. Furthermore, the Chinese literary canon became a useful medium with which to voice

resistance to nationalism: in opposition to the nationalist promotion of a spoken language, sharing of a common, written language was celebrated as a path to transnational networking. Against the intent of the modern state-endorsed academism of identifying the “canon” exclusively in the “national language,” Tomi Suzuki’s laborious study unearths,[4] the classical Chinese canon, despite the anachronism and Sinocentrism that it might have implied, was given a new role, quite contrary to the old one. Now as we reassess and perhaps seek to neutralize the validity of national boundaries and what they endorse, it is useful to revisit some of the earlier attempts made against nationalist enterprises. It was not only specialists—professional poets and teachers of Chinese literature—who practised composition in kanshibun (poetry and prose in literary Chinese, domesticated by Japanese). Many whose primary occupations were not in Chinese literature are known to have kept diaries in kanbun and maintained the practice of kanshi (poetry in literary Chinese domesticated by Japanese) composition while taking up new topics. Meiji kanshijin (Japanese poets who composed in literary Chinese) included some bureaucrats, and prominent ones at that, who were more like literati than technocrats. Among them was Takezoe, a diplomat assigned to posts in Tianjin, Beijing and then Seoul before he turned to an academic career. He took a leave of absence from his office in Beijing, where he was assigned as a secretary in the Japanese legation, to travel into the depths of Sichuan province and visit literary topoi, a trip that produced his best-known work, Clouds Around the Bridge, the Rain Over the Valley: A Diary and a Manuscript of Poetry (San’un kyōu nikki narabini shisō, 1879).[5] The travel journal, accompanied with copious poems by Takezoe himself, makes frequent tribute to such admired poets as Du Fu and Su Shi, who were from this province, and to precedents of the genre of literary travelogue, most notably Lu You’s (1125–1210) Ru shu ji (1170; partial trans., Diary of a Trip to Shu; another partial trans., A Journey into Shu) and Fan Chengda’s (1126–1193) Wu chuan lu (1177; partial trans., Register of a Wu Boat; another partial trans., Diary of a Boat Trip to Wu).[6] Takezoe’s own work is among many that present an interface of the premodern and the modern. It does so in three ways: through its borrowing of the structure of travelogue as a genre in the Sinocentric East Asian literary tradition; in its use of the format of literary publications, with contributions from individuals other than the author of the main text, significantly including many Chinese; and through its awareness of the potentially Orientalist framework, prevalent both in the classical literary tradition of China and in the modern reconfigured world order. In this chapter, I plan to focus on the three characteristics listed above to do justice to the complexity of this text, which has previously been taken either as a series of simply aesthetic (apolitical) decisions on the part of the author or as signs of his complicity in Japan’s intent to colonize China. By examining select sections of Takezoe’s aforementioned work, I will reveal that the divide between literature and politics itself is political, validated by the modern epistemology, and that literature devoid of direct reference to politics cannot but be political in rhetorical terms. THE STRUCTURE OF THE TRAVELOGUE

For his modern translation of Takezoe’s text, Iwaki Hideo has restructured the original, which the author had divided into a diary and poetry collection, so that the poems composed at a given place at a given time may be inserted within the translator’s footnotes after a corresponding section in the diary. The poems are not given in the original literary Chinese but rather in kundoku (Japanese reading/paraphrasing), which enhances their readability and stylistic proximity to the diary entries. In this way, poetry is reduced to a factual supplement to the day-to-day record, rather than forming a separate entity as art. Poetry, in other words, has become a source of information, rather than a tribute (or resistance) to the existing literary tradition of China. According to Saitō, the format of embedding poems in the diary as in the translation by Iwaki is a newer invention than that of the original, where, observing the tradition of travelogue, prose and poetry are clearly differentiated from each other. Many early modern [i.e., of the seventeenth through the mid-nineteenth centuries] travelogues in kanbun consist of a day-to-day record first, followed by a collection of poems… That mode was more conventional in the tradition of kanshibun. In the Meiji period (1868–1911), however, it was not uncommon to use kanbun or kundoku-tai as the background against which kanshi poems were embedded [within prose] in order to bridge paragraphs in prose.[7]

Thus, Takezoe’s text is of a more traditional structure as far as the prose/poetry divide is concerned.[8] The commentators as well as the author are committed to the distinction between the two parts, with colophons and notes specifically pertaining to and attached to each part, a distinction which defines this particular anthology in accordance with the mandate of the traditional Chinese travelogue, rather than accommodating a newer trend in modern Japan. VOICES OF THE OTHERS Iwaki’s translation has also eliminated the inscriptions, prefaces, commentaries, endnotes of the diary and poetry, and colophons, renouncing the multivalence of the original publication. As I have discussed elsewhere, early Meiji publications are usually accompanied with dedications and comments written by individuals other than the author of the main text (in this case, Takezoe), to honour the publication from the margins.[9] Inscriptions (two of them; one by Sanjō Sanetomi (1837–1891) and the other by Itō Hirobumi (1841–1909)), prefaces (three, by Li Hongzhang (1823–1901), Yu Yue (1821–1906), and Takezoe Seisei himself)), and colophons (five) appear in the pages either preceding or following the diary, and are often given not in typeset but in the contributor’s handwriting with seals—products of another premodern East Asian literati art, that of seal engraving—giving the impression of immediacy and presence of the involved individuals to the readers. Commentaries (twenty for the diary and nine more for the poetry) are placed in the upper column set on each page of the main text. Instead of providing a given commentator’s text in its entirety at one time, comments from individuals are inserted in appropriate places as annotations. Commentaries offer either evaluations or references, contributing praise, critique, or sources of facts or idioms. The endnotes typically relate the circumstances under which some of the commentators read the

diary and/or the poetry, and also offer salutations. These “secondary” authors can be more prominent in society than the primary author, as is the case with many collaborators of San’un kyōu nikki narabini shisō. Thus their additions add lustre to the merits of the text and promote its distribution. In the age of the nationwide readership and distribution system that many have studied and highlighted,[10] the premodern custom of exchanging notes on a given text among those in the intellectual and artistic community acquired a new function of advertisement. Many of these contributing writers were members of a literary society called Kyūu-sha (Society of the Old Friends (literally, “Old Rain,” which is a pun and thus a euphemism for “old friends”), one of the most active and well-known groups of its kind, established in Ueno, Tokyo, in 1872. Some of the commentators were also frequent contributors to the poetry journal Meiji shibun (Prose and Poetry of the Meiji; later renamed Meiji bunshi, meaning the same), a journal founded in 1876 and one of the most influential. There is little doubt that the presence of commentaries by those outstanding poets and prose writers confirmed the respect that this text earned from the literati community. Some others were prominent men in administration, whose association with the author must have helped attract attention from prospective readers. To infer from some of the notes following either the diary or the poetry, each of these individuals had been given a copy of the draft of Takezoe’s text, to which they were invited to contribute words of critique or recommendations. Though these collaborators’ texts may have been physically “marginal,” placed before, after, or literally in the margins of the pages of the diary and the poetry collection, they formed essential parts in the standard early modern publications. As I stated above, however, the modern translation has eliminated these words from others (as well as the author’s own preface and endnote), presenting a monolithic narrative in chronological order, a typical structure of modern Japanese prose. “ORIENTALISM” TWISTED AND TURNED Takezoe’s original publication, while observing the format of preceding publications, marks a significant departure from them as well. Unlike most of its predecessors, it was accompanied with contributions not only from compatriots but also from a number of Chinese men of letters, including Li Hongzhang (1823–1901), a statesman who oversaw many crucial changes in military, diplomatic, and industrial affairs in late Qing China and later represented China to negotiate with Japan the terms in which to terminate the Sino-Japanese War and sign the Shimonoseki Treaty (also known as the Maguan Treaty) in 1895. Also included was Yu Yue (Quyuan; 1821–1906), the editor of Anthology of Poems from the Eastern Sea (Dongying shixuan, 1903), which in forty volumes collects kanshi from ancient times throughout the Tokugawa period (1603–1867); Yu acknowledges Takezoe’s help in the preface to his anthology.[11] The extensive involvement of the Chinese literati was made possible by Takezoe’s personal networking with the Chinese, taking advantage of his earlier positions as a secretary at the Japanese legation in Tianjin, and then in Beijing, but it is also owing to the drastic change in

the Chinese recognition of Japanese literary output in Chinese. Yu’s anthology, which Takezoe helped to compile, is a testament to the newly developed Chinese attention to Japanese poets, a ramification of the radical transformations in diplomatic relations in East Asia. Despite the long tradition of kanshibun, the Chinese had hardly reciprocated the persistent Japanese interest in their writing until the late nineteenth century, when Chinese literati finally began to read what the Japanese had written in literary Chinese (wenyan), a shared language and an emblem of Sinocentricism in the area. It is ironical that this bilateral sharing of the same literary heritage emerged only on the eve of the de-canonization of prose and poetry in literary Chinese in Japan, as the language was about to lose its status as the universal language in East Asia, being replaced by languages of European imperialist nations—a timing that raises many questions as to the implications of the circumstances under which those texts were produced, distributed, and received by readers on both shores of the Japan Sea. Was it a “colonial” act for the Chinese man of letters to acknowledge and promote Japanese contributions to the Chinese literary tradition in order to disseminate them in China? Or was it to commit to Japan’s cultural colonization of China? What does it mean for a modern Japanese man of letters—who, as a diplomat representing his country to China, was supposed to help establish and maintain Sino-Japanese relations as dictated by the demands of the modern Western imperialist age, wherein Sinocentricism was increasingly becoming the order of the past—to faithfully observe the rules and regulations set by China? With the hegemonic language (literary Chinese in this case) and the genre of travelogue structured and formatted in the specific way that we saw above, the Chinese literary tradition had dictated the way in which the Japanese intellectuals thought and wrote. The Chinese recognition of the Japanese application of the Chinese art, one might say, is Orientalist in two senses, one in the context of the literary tradition in Sinocentric East Asia, and the other in light of Japan’s ascension on the ladder of power. It is impossible to determine who was Orientalizing whom, where the two hierarchies met. Unilateral colonization is not identifiable here; instead, power structure is constantly confirmed and unmade, with multidirectional negotiations dictated by different ideologies. MODERN SUBJECTIVITY To shift our attention to the orientation of the travelogue in question, the position of the Japanese author/narrator/speaker is equally and similarly ambiguous. It is often the case that the Japanese man of letters employs traditional Chinese rhetoric and assumes the “colonial” position of the “zhongyuan (J: chūgen)” central government officer observing the periphery (countryside). When the observer happens to be a modern Japanese diplomat in Qing China, between the Opium War and the Sino-Japanese War (1894–1895), how should we identify his position vis-à-vis the target of his gaze? Saitō Mareshi teaches us that the commentatorial or connoisseurial outlook that the narrative agent in early modern Japanese writings often assumes should not necessarily be interpreted as Orientalist. Speaking specifically of Mori Ōgai’s diaries, which outspokenly if not

inappropriately place negative labels on local residents of the area that the traveller visits, while keeping in mind a larger picture of modern travelogues, Saitō relates: It is not necessarily a manifestation of the “imperialist” mentality to portray a character as “barbarous” or “bigoted.” It is the traditional gaze cast from the centre of China toward the peripheries that prevails in the poem: Ōgai who aspires to be a man of letters (importance) is merely conforming to it [the traditional Chinese literary norm].[12]

According to Saitō, it is not the modern imperialist/Orientalist’s gaze but the traditional Chinese officer’s gaze that prevails in Ōgai’s observation of the locals whom he clearly places on the margins of the culture that he purports to represent (despite the fact that he is “merely” Japanese: one from another, and even farther, periphery). Rather than toppling the hierarchy between the Chinese and Japanese, which would be a manifesto of Japan’s intent of colonizing China, Saitō suggests, Ōgai is following the lead of the Chinese bureaucrats from the central government in the capital and thus remains a loyal student of the Chinese literary tradition. While this differentiation between the Orientalist framework and the traditional Chinese bureaucratic framework is theoretically valid and important,[13] I would propose that the two are superimposed onto each other to further complicate the paradoxical relationships between modernity and tradition, Japan and China, and the subject and object. Takezoe was not oblivious to the ambiguity of the composition and presentation of his text, as is evidenced by some of the poems collected in the “Manuscript of Poetry.” Take the following for a manifestation of his self-consciousness of the paradoxical position of the cultural observer vis-à-vis a “natural” (and yet heavily connoted) landscape that he might objectify: “Getting Up at Dawn and Taking a Bath at Lishan Hot Spring” The streaks of haze await the sun that rises late In the chilly winds around Huaqing Palace birds cry sadly at daybreak The saddest is a traveller from afar, worn and weary Like a mirror, the hot spring reflects his brows and beard.[14]

The poem revisits the literary topoi immortalized by Bai Juyi’s (772–846) “Changhenge” (Song of Everlasting Remorse). Lishan Hot Spring is the place where Emperor Xuanzong (685–762; r. 712–756) of the Tang Dynasty first met the woman who was to become his favourite consort, Yang Guifei (719–756), then a wife of one of his sons. Huaqing Palace is an imperial villa at the hot spring, where the emperor enjoyed retreats with Yang Guifei. These are among the places to which literary travellers in the province must pay a visit, which is exactly what Takezoe did. We should appreciate the twist that this poem adds to the formula of homage to the literary topos. Rather than nostalgically lamenting the flow of time that has passed since the demise of Xuanzong’s reign, as is customary in tributes to legends, the speaker of this poem takes a moment to glance at himself whose temporary remoteness as well as spatial distance (“from afar”) from the legend is made obvious by the reflection of his image upon the hot spring which used to reflect Yang Guifei’s beautiful face and soak her luminous skin. The observer is disqualified to become a part of the legend by having grown grey brows and beard, and showing emaciation from his trip from afar. Instead of maintaining the harmony and order

within the picture evocative of the legendary beauty, Yang Guifei, Takezoe has incorporated the traveller who sees himself, in effect to remind the reader of the fact that the observer can never be transcendental, a sober recognition of his corporeal presence and out-of-place-ness. Thus, Takezoe complicates the relationship between the speaker (his alter ego) and his object of observation (a literary topos) and successfully problematizes the Orientalist framework within which the observer was made transparent. The formula of the subject of cultural analysis within the picture of the studied culture itself is evident in another poem: “Composed upon Tiancheng Bridge” It sprinkles upon Jianmen like dust Light and deep green spots are fresh In search of picturesque landscape, not knowing he has become a part of the picture himself A man views the hill standing on Tiancheng Bridge.[15]

This poem is double-decked: on the first stratum, there is a man on the bridge, which bears the ironical name of “naturally built bridge,” who observes the “natural” landscape described in the first two lines of the quatrain. He is so preoccupied with observation that he is unaware of being seen by another observer—the speaker of the poem—who forms the second stratum. The speaker objectifies the man on the bridge as an element in the picture. Immersion in the object of observation, which one might say is the ultimate goal of observation, is so thorough that an aesthetic/critical distance has disappeared, leaving the observer as an object of observation conducted by someone else. The speaker identifies this change of perspective, so that the paradoxical relationship between the subject and object of observation may be effectively conveyed. The position of the observer is neither stable nor neutral, but is instead susceptible to changes that the act of observation—or the object that is under observation—entails. The two poems examined above may appear to be stereotypical homages to literary topoi, but they articulate the ambiguity of the observer who cannot afford to remain neutral and transcendental in the modern epistemology. The framing of the observer is done within the context of the traditional Chinese world order and that of the modern imperialist/colonialist world order, two spheres that the author Takezoe embodies in his two capacities of a man of letters and a modern bureaucrat. CONCLUSION A cursory look at San’un kyōu nikki narabi ni shisō by Takezoe Seisei in terms of the structure of the travelogue, the format of the publication, and the self-awareness manifested in the rhetorical configuration of the subject and object of observation proves that form is not exclusively an aesthetic matter but instead is informed of ideological frameworks. When modern Japanese bureaucrats such as Takezoe applied the framework of the traditional Chinese genre, style, and rhetoric to act on behalf of the nation-state of Japan at the risk of the well-being of East Asian neighbours, with the result of producing praise and input from Chinese literati, the author’s position became most ambiguous. I hope I have been able to

suggest the complexity of the literary negotiations that are by no means “just aesthetic.” NOTES 1. Sensuke Iritani, San’un kyōu nikki narabini shisō. [Clouds around the Bridge, Rain Over the Valley: A Diary and Manuscript of Poetry] (“Kaidai.” [Introduction]), vol. 18 of Nihon kanshi. [Japanese Poetry in Chinese]. Series eds. Fujikawa Hideo, Matsushita Tadashi and Sano Masami (Tokyo: Kyūko shoin, 1988), p. 5.

2. This is not to suggest that every man of letters was active in the “real” world. Indeed, unemployed men of letters were a constant presence over the ages in Japan as well as in China, and held the purist vision that the canon had inherent value regardless of its monetary or social value.

3. Yoshida Ken’ichi points out that Akutagawa Ryūnosuke was able to read kanshibun, which his Japanese teacher in German could not read. Yoshida uses this anecdote to differentiate the two generations of readers. See “Nihongo” (1974), Vol. 24 of Yoshida Ken’ichi chosaku shū [Selected Works of Yoshida Ken’ichi]. (Tokyo: Shūeisha, 1980), p. 264.

4. Tomi Suzuki, “Gender and Genre: Modern Literary Histories and Women’s Diary Literature,” in Haruo Shirane and Tomi Suzuki, eds., Inventing the Classics: Modernity, National Identity and Japanese Literature (Stanford, CA: University of Stanford Press, 2000), pp. 71–95.

5. Collected in Vol. 18 of Shishū Nihon kanshi [Anthology of Japanese Poetry in Chinese]. (Tokyo: Kyūko shoin, 1988), pp. 23–95. A modern translation with annotations by Iwaki Hideo has been published as San’sen kyōu nikki: Meiji kanshijin no Shisen no tabi [The Travels in Sichuan of a Meiji Poet in Chinese]. (Tokyo: Heibonsha Tōyō bunko, 2000).

6. An excerpt from Lu You’s text has been translated by Burton Watson as “Diary of a Trip to Shu” in his The Old Man Who Does As He Pleases: Selections from the Poetry and Prose of Lu Yu (New York and London: Columbia UP, 1973), pp. 69– 121. Several passages from Fan Chengda’s travelogue have been made available in English by James M. Hargett’s On the Road in Twelfth Century China: The Travel Diaries of Fan Chengda (1126–1193) (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag Wiesbaden GMBH, 1989) that, together with his Stairway to Heaven: A Journey to the Summit of Mount Emei (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2006), offers valuable information on the genre of travelogue. A brief excerpt each from Lu You’s and Fan Chengda’s travelogues, with their biographical information, can be found in Richard E. Strassberg, Inscribed Landscape: Travel Writing from Imperial China (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1994), pp. 205–218. I thank John Timothy Wixted for providing me some of the bibliographical information.

7. Saitō Mareshi, “Meiji no yūki: Kanbunmyaku no arika [Meiji Courage: On the Contexts of Chinese Literature].” Meiji bungaku no ga to zoku [Self and Belonging in Meiji Literature]. A special expanded issue of Bungaku [Literature]. (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 2001), p. 52.

8. Note that, while it is not the case with this particular poetry collection, it was customary in premodern East Asia to arrange a given poet’s poems in Chinese in the order of subgenres, categorized by their forms, rather than in chronological order of composition. The chronological editing (“hennentai”) is relatively new in classical Chinese poetic tradition.

9. Atsuko Sakaki, “Kajin no kigū: The Meiji Political Novel and the Boundaries of Literature” (Monumenta Nipponica, Volume 55, no. 1, Spring 2000), pp. 83–108.

10. See for example Maeda Ai, trans. James A. Fujii, “From Communal Performance to Solitary Reading: The Rise of the Modern Japanese Reader,” in Maeda Ai, Text and the City: Essays on Japanese Modernity (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2004), pp. 223–254.

11. Sano Masami’s “Kaidai” attached to Dongying shixuan [Anthology of Poems from the Eastern Sea] (J. Tōei shisen) relates Takezoe’s involvement in the compilation of the volume. For a brief profile of Takezoe and a few examples of his poetry, see Okamoto Kōseki, ed., Meiji kanshibun shū [Collected Works of Meiji Poetry in Chinese], Vol. 62 of Meiji bungaku zenshū [Collection of Meiji Literature] (Tokyo: Chikuma shobō, 1983), p. 410, pp. 46–48 and pp. 247–255.

12. Saito, p. 55. 13. Saitō identifies yet another binary opposition, between rhetoricity and referentiality in landscape description, that he thinks is represented by travelogue in kanbun and travelogue in modern languages. “If it is acceptable to distance the ‘actual landscape,’” Saitō writes, “then the kanbun context was still valid” (Saitō 2001, 57). His argument is an apology for the kanbun rhetoric that is not oriented to describe “actual landscape” as expected in modern journalistic travel accounts: “The style with which to report the ‘actual landscape,’ with no resource other than the ‘actual landscape’ itself, is deprived of the opportunities

to be placed in a perspective by suggestions for revisions and commentaries, and may perhaps appear vulnerable” (Saitō 2001, 57).

14. Seisei Takezoe, trans. and ed. Iwaki Hideo, San’un kyōu nikki: Meiji kanshijin no Shisen no tabi [The Travels in Sichuan of a Meiji Poet in Chinese], Vol. 667 of Tōyō bunko (Tokyo: Heibonsha, 2000), p. 77. The translation is mine.

15. Takezoe p. 82. The translation is mine.

Chapter Three

Pan-Asian Romantic Nationalism: Revolutionary, Literati, and Popular Oral Tradition and the Case of Miyazaki Tōten Faye Yuan Kleeman

Song of Fallen Blossoms (excerpt) One general’s glory leaves ten thousand withered bones, Though this nation takes pride in its wealth and might Thousands of lowly folks sweat and shed tears of blood Like hungry ghosts who are full but never sated, They saunter down the slope to hell Missing the grace of civilization and enlightenment Lost children who were left behind by the floating world Their glory only came when they died Bundled together as low-rank soldiers. If they had survived and returned alive Crying in hunger, their wives and children would rebuke them. If my pity could somehow aid them I would construct in this world a paradise Where all the lands will exist in peace, The four classes will be equal, selfless and free, Outcastes and beggars will wear silk robes Drivers and grooms will ride in carriages, Poor peasants ride in jade palanquins. My heart is broken; all to no avail My plans thwarted, all that’s left The remnants of a dream this Naniwa ballad/warrior. Abandoning my sword, I spread my fan while The booming bell scatters the cherry blossoms. Miyazaki Tōten[1]

INTRODUCTION: REVISITING PAN-ASIANISM Despite centuries of sharing a written language and a rich cultural heritage, modern East Asia since the turn of the twentieth century has been the site of tensions and antagonisms that have led to bitter conflicts and even all-out warfare. Japan’s expansionist ambitions and the subsequent Imperial project destabilized the status quo of a Sino-centric, continentally oriented geopolitical order. Its colonization of Taiwan, Korea, and subsequently many other Asian nations and regions further disrupted the historical connections and the aftereffects can still be

felt through periodic diplomatic incidents. At the popular level, the discourse on Sino-Japan connections remains distrustful, with occasional flare-ups triggered by the differences in their interpretations of historical events. The historical and multi-layered shared cultural heritage, encompassing the writing system, religion, Confucian social ideals, aesthetics, and literature, was not resilient enough to withstand the onslaught of modernity and its trappings of imperialism and power politics. The new millennium and the era of globalization have brought a new awareness of the importance of regional cooperation and heightened the possibility of creating, again, a shared Asian consciousness that can stitch together the fractured fabric into a post-colonial, post-cold war patchwork of integrated alliances among Asian countries. This has rekindled interest in the historical development of Pan-Asiatic ideology, resulting in a number of important publications. For example, Sven Saaler and J. Victor Koschman’s Pan-Asianism in Modern Japanese History[2] explores the ideological construct as a predecessor of contemporary Asian regionalism, both as the basis for efforts at regional integration in East Asia, and as a tool for legitimizing Japanese colonial rule. Other works attempt to broaden their scrutiny of Pan-Asianism into a larger comparative framework, rejecting its definition as merely a Japanese construct. Nakajima Takeshi’s examination of the connections between modern Japanese Pan-Asianism and the Indian Independence Movement,[3] or Aydin Cemil’s attempt to look at the politics of Anti-Westernism in Asia by comparing visions of world order in PanIslamic and Pan-Asian thought[4] are two such comparative efforts. Others avoid the loaded term of Pan-Asianism, opting for a neologism like Neo-regionalism (shin-chiikishugi), employed by Wada Haruki in his discussion of the shared communal ties among the nations of Northeast Asia.[5] Another example is Kang Sang-jung’s elaboration in his Toward a Communal Home for Northeast Asia (Tōhoku Ajia kyōdō no ie o mezashite),[6] using a metophor of a conceptual communal family entity to replace the loaded term Pan-Asianism. Despite the fact that a new energy and urgency has been brought to the discursive space of Pan-Asianism, it has been mostly couched in the frameworks and disciplinary languages of political science, comparative history, international relations, and more recently economic cooperation and integration.[7] My goal here is to bring a cultural dimension to the discussion of Pan-Asianism, in particular between China and Japan at the turn of the twentieth century. Over the first half of the twentieth century Pan-Asianism went through various stages, transforming from a trans-regional, pro-Asian movement resisting Western colonial dominance, into an ultra-nationalist ideology that insisted on Japanese supremacy during the colonial expansion period, to the Greater East Asian Co-prosperity Sphere during the later stage of the Pacific War. In this chapter, I revisit this century-old concept, a unifying utopian vision of Asia that offered the potential of the region functioning as a harmonious whole, before it was overtaken by nationalism and the exigencies of history. Pan-Asianism cannot be comprehended simply as a political ideology. Rather, behind its many manifestations, there are underlying shared cultural elements that support the ideology and a deeply rooted, perhaps somewhat romanticized, notion of shared cultural heritage and sense of destiny. Academic research in Japanese history, literature, and culture has tended to avoid right-wing thinkers and writers,

deeming them ideologically rigid and intellectually wanting. This is no doubt influenced by the Japanese postwar academic discourse, which shows an aversion toward controversial subjects in general. Nevertheless, if we are to understand the full scope of Japanese Pan-Asianism, the cultural and emotional aspects must be assessed in order to show how popular sentiment facilitated and enabled the Imperial project sponsored by the Japanese government. GENESIS OF JAPANESE PAN-ASIAN THOUGHT Although the historical genesis of the modern Japanese right wing can be traced back to the National Learning (kokugaku) movement of the Tokugawa period, its direct modern antecedents can be seen in the early Meiji period, when the Meiji government employed not only state authority but also socio-political civil chivalric societies (ninkyō shudan) to suppress the burgeoning Civil Rights Movement (Jiyū minken undō) in early Meiji, and later, to contain the proliferating Socialist Movement.[8] The contemporary Japanese right wing movement stems more directly from the Taishō (1912–1925) and early parts of the Shōwa period (1925–1989). Its diverse intellectual lineages include figures from the East Asian Alliance Comrade Association (Tōa renmei dōshikai) such as Ōkawa Shūmei, Kita Ikki, and Ishihara Kanji; they overlapped with Nichiren Sect new religion groups such as Kokuchūkai (Pillars of the Nation Association) which boasted prominent members such as the current governor of Tokyo Ishihara Shintarō and the poet Miyazawa Kenji. Others included the author Yasuda Yojūrō from the Japanese Romanticism School (Nihon rōmanha) and Tachibana Kōsaburō who advocates Fundamental Agriculturalism (Nōhon shugi). In contemporary times, members of the Liberal Historical View Studies Group (Jiyūshugi shikan kenkyūkai) like Fujioka Nobukatsu and the members of the group he founded in 1996, the New History Textbook Production Organization (Atarashii kyōkasho o tsukuru kai) such as Nishio Kanji and the journalist Sakurai Yūko, as well as the popular manga author of the visual narrative Discourse on the War (Sensōron, 1998) and Discourse on Taiwan (Taiwanron, 2000) Kobayashi Yoshinori and the recent bestselling essayist Fujiwara Masahiko are considered successors to this heritage of Japanese cultural conservatism. Fujiwara’s runaway best-seller on the renewal of national pride, The Character of a Nation (Kokka no hinkaku, 2005), has been deemed a barometer of popular conservative sentiment in post-bubble Japan.[9] We should also not forget the many conservative listservs, newsletters, and internet sites such as that of the critic/writer Miyazaki Masahiro, whose aggressive reporting of the Chinese Communist Party’s corruption, environmental disasters, contaminated food and merchandise is always accompanied with a dose of cynicism and repeated predictions of China’s demise. There are few studies of the Japanese right wing movement, and it is not the objective of this chapter to sort out its long, complicated history. Rather, my chapter examines the discursive space surrounding the emergence of a modern nationalist ideology in Japan and its interactions with the Chinese nationalist movement around the turn of the twentieth century. Specifically, it deals with the issue of Pan-Asianism (Ajia shugi) at the turn of the twentieth century, revealing the international and transnational aspects of the early Japanese Nationalist Movement by

placing it within the context of Sino-Japanese political and cultural interactions.[10] For this purpose, I will examine the life of an individual, Miyazaki Tōten (a.k.a. Miyazaki Torazō, 1870–1922), who was a well-known historical figure, particularly in China and Taiwan, as one of the few Japanese rōnin activists who aided the Nationalist revolution of 1911 and played a role in the nation building of modern China. While most of the research on Miyazaki has focused exclusively on his political activity, with particular interest paid to his encounters with the founder of the Republic of China, Dr. Sun Yat-sen (C: Sun Wen / Sun Zhongshan / Sun Yat-sen, J: Son Bun), I propose to direct attention instead to less well-known aspects of his life, namely, his role in the Sino-Japanese cultural sphere as a proponent of a Pan-Asianism that was not limited to geopolitics but had larger implications related to issues such as popular culture, the shared values and practices of East Asian elite literati culture, gender issues, and the roles they might play in an (anti)colonial enterprise. I present a cultural and text-based analysis that will differ from the usual political reading of Miyazaki by placing him in the context of the genesis of modern Japanese nationalist discourse. I hope to reveal a rather different constellation of forces at that time, one that transcended the geographical and cultural boundaries of nation-states and sought to forge a Sino-Japanese alliance in countering both the non-Han Manchu overlords of Qing China and the encroaching Western colonial powers. The chapter will first lay out the geopolitical conditions in East Asia at the turn of the century, followed by a close examination of Miyazaki Tōten’s oral performance text Meiji Coxinga (1903). The Chinese vernacular tradition of the knight-errant (lülin haohan; xia) was transposed to a new socio-political framework that served the ideologies of both Meiji modernity and the emerging Chinese Nationalist Movement. Rather than the usual political reading of this fantastically eccentric figure, I hope to shed light on the historical milieu and the larger social and international environment as represented by cultural and literary traditions. Ultimately, the chapter illustrates how the construction of a shared genderized East Asian cultural sphere of heroic and popular orality, underscored by the East Asian literati ethos and socio-political chivalric societies in both countries that promoted a masculine camaraderie, played an unusual role in China’s revolution, and constituted a significant chapter in the modern Sino-Japanese relationship. ARTICULATING A PROTOTYPICAL PAN-ASIAN ROMANTIC NATIONALISM Miyazaki Tōten: The Young Man Who Came Too Late It would seem that nationalism in Japan has taken two distinct (though sometimes overlapping) forms: a more inward-looking ultra-nationalist viewpoint that puts Japan’s national rights and interests above all, and a more global vision of Pan-Asianism that views the West and Western culture as the primary threat, and sees Japan’s place in the world in relation to its Asian neighbors. Individuals might draw from either tradition or mix them idiosyncratically in reacting to the tumultuous events of the Meiji and Taisho periods. Takeuchi Yoshimi called attention to the myriad facets of Pan-Asianism in his Pan-Asianism of Japan.[11] Asianism,

Great Asianism, and Pan-Asianism are the more commonly used terms; at times, they were synonomous with ideas like expansionism (bōchōshugi) and aggression (shinryaku shugi). According to Nohara Shirō’s article on Pan-Asianism, the classic definition of Pan-Asianism is based on the philosophy of thinkers and advocates of the Civil Rights Movement (jiyū minken undō) such as Tarui Tōkichi and Ōi Kentarō. It called upon the nations of Asia to promote democracy in their own nations and form an alliance among themselves to counter the encroaching Western powers. Being a more advanced democratized nation, it was the mission of Japan to extend her hands to help other Asian nations to achieve this goal. This type of cooperative Pan-Asianism is sometimes referred to as Asian Solidarity (Ajia rentaishugi) to distinguish itself from the later, more belligerent and antagonistic kinds. In a sense, Pan-Asianism was an outgrowth of the Civil Rights Movement.[12] But in the second decade of Meiji, with the suppression of the movement, the increasingly authoritarian institutional might of the Imperial state machine, and the drumbeat of future military expansion against Qing China, an aggressive type of Pan-Asianism gradually gained currency among intellectuals and the masses alike. An example of this shift from an egalitarian to a nationalistic stance favoring aggression can be seen in the re-orientation of the regional political action group Genyōsha. Formed in 1881 by the writer/activist/industrialist Tōyama Mitsuru (1855– 1944), who was hawkish on the re-negotiation of unfair treaties with the West and the war with Russia, and advocated expanding Japanese activities abroad (kaigai shinshutsu). Genyōsha’s oversea organization in Manchuria, the Black Dragon Association (Kokuryūkai), provided a base for Japanese activists, including many (continental) rōnin who promoted a theory of Japanese-Korean political unity (Nik-Kan gōhōron) that eventually led to the annexation of Korea. This ideological turn was revealed in 1887 when Genyōsha made a clear philosophical and tactical break by announcing its organizational priority has shifted to national rights (kokken) over equal rights for all Asian people. As a colored race, it is imperative for us to have military facilities and equipment to counter the Europeans and the Americans. Especially, for our country, as a prosperous new up-and-coming nation in Asia, and with our hope to one day become the leader of Asia, this is the right time for state militarism (gunkokushugi).[13]

It is important to understand Miyazaki Tōten’s activities in this historical and geopolitical context. Asianism transformed into an ultra-nationalist discourse, but Miyazaki was one of the rare individuals that stayed true to the classic solidarity-type Asianism to the very end. Born in Arao, Kumamoto in Kyūshu, the Southern island of the Japanese archipelago, he was the youngest child of a samurai family of eight boys and three girls. His father, Miyazaki Chōzō, was a skillful swordsman of the Niten’ichi school. Miyazaki’s eldest brother, Hachirō, was a central figure in the Kumamoto Civil Rights Party (Kumamoto minkentō) and died fighting alongside Saigo Takamori in the greatest of the antigovernment rebellions—the Satsuma Rebellion of 1877. His heroic death made a deep impact on the family and in particular the young Miyazaki (he was seven at the time). “Never serve in the Meiji official government”[14] became the unwritten family motto. At age fifteen, he entered the progressive Ōe Academy (Ōe gijuku) run by Tokutomi Sohō (1863–1957)[15] and then moved on to Tokyo to study English at Waseda University.

In Tokyo, Miyazaki Tōten was introduced to Christianity by his brother. He quickly converted and persuaded his mother to be baptized too.[16] His brief fervor for Christianity was soon replaced by his equally if not more passionate attentiveness to the Chinese Revolution, introduced to him by his brother Yazō, who was a fervent Sinophile. This changed the trajectory of his life. In his twenties, Miyazaki Tōten (a.k.a. Torazō) traveled to Shanghai, assisted Kim Okgyun, the head of the Chōsen Independence Party (Chōsen dokuritsutō) who was in exile in Japan after the revolt of 1884. Miyazaki Tōten married Maeda Tsuchi[17] and was also involved in an agricultural enterprise in Thailand. Miyazaki’s involvement with Chinese politics came in 1897 with the help of the prominent politician Inukai Tsuyoshi (1855– 1932), who secured funding for him to travel to China to investigate Chinese secret societies. That same year, he met Sun Yat-sen in Yokohama and forged a lifelong friendship with the founder of modern China. In 1898, he again traveled to China to help Kang Youwei escape to Japan after his failed reform of the same year (Wuxu zhengbian). Miyazaki tried to bring Sun and Kang together to forge an alliance but failed. He translated Sun’s article “Kidnapped in London” (Japanese title “Record of a Prisoner”) in Genyōsha’s newspaper Kyūshu Daily (Kyūshū nippō)[18] and at Sun’s behest prepared to go to the Philippines to assist in the independence movement. In 1900, he traveled to China, Singapore, and Hong Kong, meeting with Li Hongzhang, Kang Youwei and Sun. His negotiations with the colonial government of Taiwan about providing weapons for the Huizhou Uprising fell apart due to a last-minute change of heart on the part of the colonial authority; moreover, several of the weapons deals that he was involved in encountered problems due to financial misdealings. It was after this that Miyazaki turned to the oral performance of naniwabushi (which I will discuss further below), although he continued to devote his energy and funds selflessly to help the cause throughout his life. Thus Miyazaki, though during his early career closely tied to the regional civil organization Genyōsha, was one of the very rare figures that remained a dyed-in-thewool Pan-Asianist in its classic sense. Aside from the various accounts of Miyazaki’s life and deeds by his contemporaries, the most important sources for insight into Miyazaki’s life are his highly sanitized 1902 autobiography My Thirty-Three Years Dream (Sanjūsannen no yume),[19] and Watanabe Kyōji’s critical reading of the autobiography, A Critical Biography of Miyazaki Tōten (Hyōden Miyazaki Tōten, 1976). Although Watanabe sometimes cannot refrain from psychoanalyzing his subject, he does provide a vivid and thoughtful reading of Miyazaki’s dramatic and tumultuous life that challenges many traditional viewpoints concerning Miyazaki. Watanabe emphasizes the artistic and romantic sides of Miyazaki as the key to understanding his extraordinarily active political engagement. More importantly, he sheds light on the psychological motivation that led Miyazaki to dedicate his life to this cause. The imprint of the failed Satsuma Rebellion (including the death of his brother) and the disappointment of the unfulfilled Civil Rights Movement fueled Miyazaki’s aversion toward the Meiji government. Like many members of newly disenfranchised samurai families, he was forced to seek new possibilities (or simply survival) abroad.[20] Miyazaki’s enterprise in Thailand was mirrored in the tales of thousands of emigrants who migrated to Hokkaidō, Southeast Asia (nanyō),

Hawaii, North America, and South America to seek a better life. He wrote in the preface of My Thirty-Three Year Dream that: I often thought that there is no limitation to what a human can do. To simply indulge in a life of small comforts is indeed wasting the precious gift that heaven bestows. Hence, a grand scheme should be laid out to build the unprecedented enterprise to soothe the life of all human beings. . . . I believed in justice for all human beings, therefore I hate the current condition, where the strong devours the weak. I accept as true that the world is one family, and thus I resent the competition among countries that we see now. Things that are hated must be eradicated; things that are resented must be broken. The dream has come to an end and I realize that real action is needed. Therefore, I designate myself as the revolutionary of the world.”[21]

Miyazaki’s take on civil rights is a sweeping, global view that is not limited to Japan proper. In fact, he sees the expanding and encroaching power of the state manifested in the modern nation building of the Meiji government as an impediment to achieving a utopian world egalitarianism. He further explains that he chose China because China has a massive population and vast land, and moreover was ripe for change (as opposed to Japan, which was gradually coalescing into a Western-style modern state that was leaving Asia behind). He sees China as a key player in building a true Pan-Asian alliance. If China could successfully transform itself from a feudal state to a true independent and egalitarian republic that could stand up to the Western colonial powers, he believed that the future of Korea would be secure and Japan would then be able to reform its socio-political system to place the populace at the center of the nation. Japan’s consolidation of power into the hands of the emperor and a small elite oligarchy certainly did not accord with Miyazaki’s egalitarian principles. The asymmetrical power dynamic between the central government in Tokyo and peripheral regions like Kyūshu, the newly Western-oriented practice of nation building, his traditional Confucian upbringing, and his genuine (though perhaps overly romantic) allegiance to China’s revolution are four key elements shaping the course of Miyazaki’s action-packed life. These ideological forces and the urge to seek fame and fortune abroad, echoed in the popular slogan “fly valiantly across the seas” (kaigai yūhi), combined to create a chapter of modern Sino-Japanese history that is transnational and cross-cultural in nature. Knights-errant, Literati, and the Pan (East) Asian Cultural Sphere In the previous section, I laid out the domestic circumstances surrounding Miyazaki’s political activities, and now would like to look at his endeavor from the perspective of culture, in particular relating his deeds to a pre-modern cultural sphere that was shared by East Asian intellectuals. Here, given the limitations of space, I will focus on two shared Sino-Japanese (if not shared East Asian) cultural aspects that underlie the political ideology of his Pan East Asian nationalism, namely, the elite culture of the refined literati (bunjin bokkyaku) and the traditional ideal of chivalry (C: xia, J: kyō). In the latter half of the eighteenth century, a new literati culture arose in Japan involving the pursuit of refinement and elegance. Well-to-do urban commoners, rich farmers, and samurai attempted to adopt aspects of elite culture, focusing on the elegant classical genres of literature and art. This striving for elegance and refinement was closely tied to a deepening interest in Chinese poetry, fiction, and art. The

newly literate classes found cultural legitimacy in the acquisition of classical Japanese and Chinese culture that had hitherto been the property of either the nobility or the Buddhist clergy. A popular genre such as the late eighteenth-century sharebon (witty vernacular fiction of the licensed quarter) often included a Chinese preface that reflected a desire for the high culture associated with China, and sought to adopt the Chinese cultural model of the scholar-artist.[22] Miyazaki Tōten often self-deprecatingly referred to his efforts with regard to China as “falling blossoms trampled in the mud” and “the fleeting dream of a fool,”[23] yet the bonds between him and the leaders of the Chinese Revolution were real and tangible. Through the course of his life, Miyazaki encountered many of the major movers and shakers of Modern China, including Sun Yat-sen, Kang Youwei, Huang Xing (an especially close personal friend), Chiang Kai-shek, Mao Zedong, Sun Hongyi, Hu Hanmin, and Zhang Binglin, to name a few. These encounters rarely appear in the historical record and are gradually fading from the collective memory in both Japan and China, but physical evidence survives in exchanges of calligraphy, poems, letters, diaries, and memoirs.[24] Although he never really learned the spoken Chinese language, he could write in Chinese and his communications with these figures were either through translators or through writing. The Sinosphere, unified by the use of Chinese characters, fostered cross-cultural communication throughout East Asia. These remnants of cultural transactions demonstrate the cultural affinity that underpinned the political alliances. The other cultural element that explains Miyazaki’s affiliation with China was the concept of chivalry, a Pan-Asian concept that appears repeatedly in biographical writings, popular drama, and literature. It was woven into the core of Miyazaki’s personal philosophy throughout his life and is manifest through all his writing. He prized chivalry above all other virtues. Though Miyazaki sometimes punned on the Chinese word xia (pronounced kyō in Japanese) with its homonym meaning “madness” (C: kuang, J: kyō) in a self-mocking way, he treated the ideal with the outmost sincerity. In a 1907 article titled “Knights-errant, Tokyo-ites, and Naniwabushi” (Kyōkaku to edokko to naniwabushi),[25] he articulated the differences between the Pan-Asian paradigm of xia and the Japanese conceptualization of samurai. Keep in mind that a great proportion of the Meiji bureaucrats were previously samurai, but samurai from the Satsuma area were mostly excluded from office due to their antagonistic relationship with the Meiji government. This personal grudge may have contributed to his harsh assessment of samurai:[26] Since ancient times our country has had the saying: “[The best] flower is the cherry blossom and [the best] human is a samurai” and people regard the way of samurai as the essence of our country. No one can argue with this. However, I think that in the character of knights-errant and the common folk there are beautiful hearts that surpass even those of the samurai. In the beginning, samurai were given stipends and never had to worry about making a living. And it is not just them; as long as they do not commit any big mistake, even their sons and grandsons could rely on it forever. To put it in an extreme way, they were mere fighting dogs waiting for rewards and treats. Therefore, a samurai who is loyal to his master is just fulfilling a common contractual obligation; there is nothing honorable about it.

Knights-errant are different. They are not bound by any social obligation or covenant. They do not receive stipends or

rewards from anyone. They are just nosy people who suffer from being unable to ignore the suffering of others. Once they intervene, though they face swords and saws, they do not retreat. Their masculinity and their spirit are extraordinary even if they are facing death. . . . Their motto is “Defeat the strong and assist the weak.” All they seek is the honorable title of knight-errant, and nothing else.[27]

In other words, whereas a samurai is only devoted to his master in exchange for a living, a knight-errant seeks to bring justice to all people without self-interest, which Miyazaki regards as a higher form of self-sacrifice. In China, knights-errant are almost always anti-authoritarian, oppositional figures. They seek fame and justice not through official venues but through private networks. Their skill in traditional martial arts (C: wu, J: bu) is a counterpart to the civil arts (C: wen, J: bun) employed by the public servant in an administrative bureaucracy. Being a masterless rōnin samurai, Miyazaki empathized with the wandering, selfless character of the knight-errant. His first foray into China was to investigate Chinese secret societies such as the Gelaohui, Sanhehui, and Xingzhonghui. These organizations later merged into the Tongmenghui (J: Dōmeikai) and played a major role in the 1911 revolution, another example of private organizations and individuals that helped to change the world. Miyazaki moved freely between these two cross-cultural spheres, though one cannot help but notice that these cultural spaces (i.e. literati, knights-errant, secret societies) are exclusively gendered, espousing an East Asian aesthetic of masculinity that cultivates and reinforces the homosocial bond of “brotherly” love. He left behind prolific writings ranging from Chinese poetry, calligraphy, essays, diaries, autobiographical records and fiction in his five-volume collected works. One of his fictional narratives will be examined in detail in the following section. CONTEXTUALIZING MEIJI ORALITY: FROM POLITICAL ACTIVIST (SHISHI) TO NANIWABUSHI PERFORMER (RŌKYOKUSHI) Naniwabushi at the dawn of the twentieth century Though it lasted less than a year, the Russo-Japanese War brought many changes. As the first large-scale war fought by Japan outside of Japan proper, it gave the Japanese a true sense of an international engagement. Moreover, perhaps in part because it was the first time in modern world history that an Asian country had defeated a European nation, the war had a great influence on turn-of-the-century Japan. Domestically, the unambiguous victory over Russia consolidated the national identity; internationally, the status of Japan as an emerging world power was raised to equal that of a Western colonial power. It also marked the first phase in the development of modern Japanese media, with the appearance of journals geared toward a mass audience such as Taiyō and a more narrowly defined popular genre that catered to niche markets such as the popular teen magazine Shōnen sekai. Because of these developments in the popular media, the Russo-Japanese War was the first Japanese war to be reported to the general public in real time and the public discourse made a great impact on how the war was fought and perceived.[28] Also for the first time, prominent writers participated in and wrote about the war, either as army commanders (e.g., Mori Ōgai and his “Poetic Diary” [Uta

Nikki]) or as the new genre of battlefield reporters (such as Kunikita Doppō’s Letters to my Beloved Brother [Aitei tsūshin] in the first Sino-Japanese War a decade before), Tayama Katai’s Diary Embedded with the Second Battalion [Dainigun jūsei nikki] and Shiga Shigetaka’s Grand Battle Small Will [Daiyaku shōshi]) and produced numerous records of the war.[29] The growing circulation of newspapers and the popularity of niche magazines targeting specific audiences amounted to a new media. Moreover, the use of photography in reportage of the battlefield and the world outside Japan gave the new media an unprecedented immediacy and impact. Ironically, these new media, and the pressures of the historical moment, also generated a revival of interest in some traditional performing arts. Both rōkyoku (also referred to as naniwabushi,[30] a sentimental narrative chanting of love and duty born as popular Osaka street performance) and kōdan, oral performances that were popular in the Edo period but later were considered arcane and outdated, now enjoyed a resurgence of popularity as audiences flocked to the yose (neighborhood theaters for oral, and sometimes acrobatic and magic performances), to be entertained by the newest gundan (military heroic tales) from the battlefield in China.[31] After his attempted assistance to Dr. Sun Yat-sen’s abortive rebellion in Huizhou (Huizhou qiyi, 1901), Miyazaki was bankrupt and sought a livelihood by becoming a rōkyoku chanter (rōkyokushi). In 1902, Miyazaki formally entered the lineage of Tōchūken Kumoemon, a young man three years junior to Miyazaki who later became the most popular rōkyoku master of his time. Miyazaki took up the artistic name of Tōchūken Ushiemon and worked as a naniwabushi storyteller for the next six or seven years. Despite the renewed interest among the (mostly working class) populace, these communicative performing art forms were on the way out. Instead, a nineteenth-century Western (mostly Western European) influenced literary genre, the fictional narrative (shōsetsu), was attracting the intellectuals. The shift from oral storytelling to the logocentric shōsetsu was not without its skeptics. Tsubouchi Shōyo, the father of modern Japanese drama and an avid promoter and occasional practitioner of the shōsetsu format, grew up with a grandmother who patronized traditional theaters regularly, taking Shōyō with her. As the premier Shakespearean scholar of his day Tsubouchi openly criticized the didactic nature (kanzen chōaku) of Edo’s frivolous and entertaining popular literature (gesaku) and kabuki plays, but the traditional performances remained a cherished guilty pleasure for Shōyō. Another giant of Meiji literature, Natsume Sōseki, who was the first native Japanese professor of English at Tokyo Imperial University (modern Tokyo University) and who wrote numerous modern novels that now have become canonical, professed his love for Sanyūtei Enchō’s rakugo story-telling performance. Shōyō and Sōseki notwithstanding, oral performance gradually fell out of favor with Meiji intellectuals. Among the various oral-performing genres, kōdan and rakugo were considered relatively highbrow, while naniwabushi occupied the lowest position on the totem pole. As a traditional oral performing art, the origin of kōdan can be traced back to the telling of folktales (otogishū) during the Warring States period (1493–1573), with its direct antecedent found in

oral performances such as tsujikōshaku (“crossroads explications”) or machikōshaku (“town explications”) during the Edo period that focused on military tales (gunkimono) and political speeches (seidan).[32] Like kōdan, rakugo as a performance genre also appeared during the late Edo period. It was initially enjoyed by the literati class[33] and by patrons who frequented the pleasure quarters, but was later embraced by the general populace and still enjoys great popularity. Kōdan and rakugo are traditional oral performances which often adapt their material from classical literary and historical sources. Rōkyoku, on the other hand, have their origins in chobokure, a type of religious chanting performed by itinerant street performers (mostly beggars, burakumin outcasts, traveling priests, etc.) who went from door to door to plead for donations through their ballads. Later, rōkyoku merged with another oral form called saimon katari (“stories on sacrificial prayers”) and became the Meiji rōkyoku. The performers as a whole held low social status, and theirs was considered an occupation primarily for the lower orders of Japanese society (senmin) from slums in the Shiba Shin’ami or Yotsuya Samegahashi area in Edo. An article by Tankasei in the November 1906 issue of the magazine Bungei kurabu laid out the reasons why naniwabushi was looked down upon as a low-class performance: The reason naniwabushi is scorned as a performance for the lower classes is because it is inelegant. Most of the performers have come from undesirable areas such as Shin’ami in Shiba or Man’nenchō in Shitaya. . . . They set up portable huts by the main road in bustling areas, receiving a cent or two thrown to them by the audience. People look down upon them as cheap and they are treated with utter contempt by other performers.[34]

Numerous sources reveal disdain for the genre as a vulgar and flippant performance that catered to the poor and the uneducated. When the rōkyoku chanter Hayashi Hakuen asked the author Izumi Kyōka to rewrite his short story “The White Thread of the Waterfall” (Taki no shiraito) into a naniwabushi, Kyoka agreed reluctantly, adding “This story got published because of my mentor, Master Kōyō’s help. However, because Master Kōyō hated naniwabushi when he was alive, I will ignore your stage performance, but for the sake of my former teacher, do not make a recording of the story.” In another story called “Nihon Bridge” (Nihonbashi), Kyōka has one of his characters, Ochiyo, say: [35] My sister protested, saying that if we were to let the short and stodgy Gengo carry a bamboo branch and perform naniwabushi, our precious land would be polluted, and the bridge wasted.

We see a similar sentiment when novelist/playwright Kubota Mantarō (1889–1963) reminisces in his essay “Naniwabushi”: “I dislike naniwabushi tremendously. I feel ashamed even when I hear it on the radio. For me, the lowest of all performers (geinin) are naniwabushi chanters and sumo wrestlers.” Clearly, these derisive comments on the genre were colored by ethnic and class discrimination because of the performers’ social background. There was also, of course, criticism of the subject matter, vocalization, and lyricism.[36] Miyazaki Tōten’s transformation from a political activist (shishi) who came from a reputable (though declining) samurai family to a professional rōkyokushi aroused some rancor

among his family and friends. His wife Tsuchi later recalled that when her husband told her about his plan, she almost fainted and never really accepted it. She gathered some funds for him to go to Europe to learn about revolution and propaganda instead, but Miyazaki used the money to sponsor a tour for the theater.[37] But why did Miyazaki choose to take up rōkyoku? Both economic necessity and a romantic vision led him to this decision, which perplexed many around him. Hyōdō Hiromi, in his superb study on the Meiji naniwabushi boom, outlines the political connections to this form of oral performance within the Meiji Civil Rights movement in the first decade of Meiji era. These longhaired, free-living activists (shishi, sōshi, rōnin) [38] used streetside performing huts to promote political ideals, first through political speeches (seiji enzetsu), later through enka (popular ballads). The dramatic vocal flourishes, or melismas, of enka were strongly influenced by rōkyoku,[39] creating a style that the critic Hanada Kiyoteru refers to as hifunkōgai chō, a chanting style that conveys indignation over injustice and unfulfilled aspirations in a dramatic fashion, that is uniquely associated with rōkyoku, and that has the capability to arouse empathy from the audience. With the Meiji government increasingly cracking down on political speeches in the 1880s, many activists acquired licenses as performers to safeguard their freedom of speech, while many chanters incorporated civil rights subject matter into their stage performances. Miyazaki’s choice to become a performer of naniwabushi was a calculated move (though perhaps overly naïve and romantic) rooted in his political beliefs. At the very beginning of the self-preface (jijo) to My Thirty-Three Years Dream, Miyazaki stated his affinity with music: I, by nature, take pleasure in music, no matter whether it is Eastern or Western, elegant or uncultured. In other words, from gidaiyu, hōkai, and ahodara, to shin’nai, even though people call these types of music vulgar and rustic, they lift up my spirit, although I am thus far not able to perform them myself. When I was little I memorized a single passage of saimon oral chanting: “Chōbei gained fame in Edo. Women loved him, everyone praised him. He was a manly man who could not turn away if someone asked for his help.” I would chant this passage to comfort myself whenever I felt weary. For the past dozen years, I have been wandering to the East and the West, frequently beaten by the stormy waves of the world. I feel that my skills have been improving. That’s the reason why whenever my mind was stirred up by injustice, I would drink wine and raise my voice and let it all out. [40]

In his article titled “Knight-errant, Tokyo-ite, and Naniwabushi,” Miyazaki connected these three, pointing out a shared core value: “assisting the weak and suppressing the powerful” (fujaku zakyō). After the disappointing setback in Huizhou, Miyazaki resolved to spread his political ideals and save the world through words. For him, naniwabushi was an art form that expressed the spirit of the knight-errant. Though a knight-errant might disregard his own wife and children in pursuit of social justice, he has, in fact, the truest heart. The freedom of being a wandering performer who advances justice through his art and who can reach the workingclass people that occupy the bottom of the social ladder must have appealed to him greatly. Certainly, no one, not his master Tōchūken Kumonoemon nor Miyazaki himself, believed that he would become famous as a rōkyokushi; a skill that takes years of training could never be mastered by someone who formally entered the lineage at age thirty. Kumonoemon was more interested in the association with a famous figure to help promote his theater (though later, he himself became much more famous than Miyazaki). He also counted on Miyazaki, who was an

eloquent writer trained in the Chinese classics, to help create a new style of performance (shintai naniwabushi). Miyazaki wrote several scripts for the performance; all have to do with the contemporary political environment and heroic figures. The text that will be discussed below, Meiji Coxinga, is the longest script created by Miyazaki and one that expounds a historical depth and transnational breadth that echoes the political narrative (seiji shōsetsu) that had been all the rage a decade earlier. (Meiji) Coxinga: A transnational, cross-cultural narrative Meiji Coxinga was serialized in the Nichiroku shinpō, the newspaper with the largest circulation at the time, appearing on a daily basis from June, 1903, to the end of January the next year. The full title was “The New naniwabushi/ Unusual Tales Lamenting the World/Meiji Coxinga (Shin naniwabushi/gaisei kidan/ Meiji Kokuseiga) and it extended over 120 chapters (seki).[41] Miyazaki’s style, as seen in My Thirty-Three Years Dream, is a mixture of a highly ornate, flowery Sinified style (kanbunchō) and the popular balladeer style (saimonchō). But for texts intended for oral performance, he employed a more colloquial style, incorporating formal devices that are commonly seen in East Asian literary tradition, such as ending each chapter with a cliff-hanger cliché (“if you want to know what happens, please wait for tomorrow”) that is the standard device for Chinese prompt books (huaben) and traditional chapter novels (zhanghui xiaoshuo). Meiji Coxinga follows the convention for prompt books by employing a third-person narrator. Moreover, as in the Chinese promptbook tradition, the narrator/storyteller often addresses the audience (reader) directly. In these cases, the artistic name Ushiemon is used self-referentially.[42] Meiji Coxinga tells of the adventure of a young boy, Tetsuo (literally, Iron Boy), who was born in Hirato, Kyūshū, the same town where Coxinga was born. Tetsuo’s father, a low ranking samurai, died early and he grew up with his mother, leading a modest life. When he was twelve years old he was so infuriated by the Chishima Karafuto Exchange Treaty (Chishima Karafuto kōkan jōyaku)[43] with Russia that he vowed one day to take back Karafuto Island. At fourteen, he persuaded his mother to let him go and study Russian and martial skill in Nagasaki. At age sixteen, he snuck onto a Russian ship and journeyed to Karafuto. Before embarking on the journey of his life, his mother Sayoko bestowed on him the family sword, admonishing him: “Think of this sword as the spirit of our family. It is not a weapon to kill but a sword to protect oneself and to let others live.” Tetsuo’s nationalist temperament and his antagonism toward Russia was transformed when he met a Chinese named Sun Xiating, who presented him with a book, A Debate on the Sage’s Way and the Human Way, that changed Tetsuo’s life.[44] The book’s assertion that all within the four seas are brothers, equals, and comrades awakened Tetsuo to the fact that Japan’s fate was closely tied to the fate of China and other Asian nations. Tetsuo thus transformed from a narrowly defined Japanese nationalist to a Pan-Asian nationalist. When Tetsuo encountered Sun again in Shanghai, he discovered that Sun was the leader of the Revolutionary Party. They both agreed that “Japan’s fate is tied to the fate of China,” with Russia being their mutual enemy. Tetsuo converted from an Imperialist (kinnōshugi) to a

Republican (kyōwashugi) and joined the Revolution. When the uprising failed, he escaped to Russia. On board the ship to Russia, he met a French doctor who analyzed world politics for him: Indeed the world is as you said a shambles, with the strong devouring the weak. You are also right in saying that Europe is subjective and Asia is a passive object. However, do you truly believe that even if China succeeds in revolution, the competition between nations would cease? No, it will not. The situation would remain the same—the strong devouring the weak—with only the players reversing their positions. . . . If China revived and attacked Europe in a so-called preemptive attack, without knowing it, it would be led astray. If you cannot abandon this irrational attachment to the Chinese revolution, you will end up just being the accomplice of a thief or a toady of the nation.[45]

Tetsuo was moved by the doctor’s reasoning, thinking to himself, “It’s only been five years since I formulated my ambitions and yet within just one year I have heard ideas that changed me twice!”[46] Tetsuo transformed from someone who helped China’s revolution to a true Pan-Asianist that believes in the alliance of all Asians to counter the European colonial powers. Miyazaki chose to tell a contemporary Meiji story of the bildungsroman genre (risshin shussedan) by framing it within the historical tale of Coxinga. This is sketched out at the beginning of the narrative, pointing out the similarity in birthplace, political ambitions, crosscultural and bi-racial features (Coxinga was born to a Chinese father and a Japanese mother), and most of all, the shared quality of a knight-errant. Coxinga was a quintessential historical figure who had a unique transnational resonance in Japan, China, and Taiwan. The dramatization of this figure, variously styled Coxinga and Watōnai in Japan, and Yanping Junwan and Zheng Chenggong in China, was most popular during the early 18th century, when the grand master of bunraku puppet theater Chikamatsu Monzaemon created three lengthy plays based on Coxinga’s life. The most famous of Chikamatsu’s historical plays[47] was The Battles of Coxinga (Kokusenya gassen), which was first performed in 1715; it became his greatest success. The initial performance went on for an unprecedented seventeen months and it has since been performed more often than any other Chikamatsu play. Lesser known Coxinga plays include the sequel, The Battles of Coxinga’s Later Days (Kokusenya kōjitsu gassen, 1717) and The Contemporary Tale of China Ship and Coxinga (Tōsen banashi ima Kokusenya, 1722). Historical figures such as Wu Sangui (Go Sankei) and Zhu Yigui (Shū Ikki) crisscrossed these plays as recurring characters. This series of works provided a dramatic representation of Sino-Japanese relations in the early modern period. For example, The Battles of Coxinga is full of interesting insights into cultural comparison. The play begins with the quotation of a poem by Cao Zhi (192–232) to contrast Watōnai as the dutiful son and Ikkan as the valuable minister, while acknowledging the value of both. The most benevolent ruler cannot keep a worthless minister, Nor can the kindest father love a shiftless son. Thus with China and Japan: though their paths diverged by custom and tradition, They stray not from the Way of Sincerity.[48]

When Kinshijō met Watōnai’s mother (her Japanese stepmother), the chanter describes the meeting of the two, despite the language barrier, they were “like two nightingales from different lands, their songs harmonize and require no interpreter.”

Despite this initial conciliatory tone, the play cannot avoid some harsh cultural clichés, referring to Chinese people as “thickheaded” and “dirty” and remarking on their odd customs throughout the play. There are also numerous expressions of Japanese nationalism: “Japan may be a small country, but its men and women do not forget their duty”; “Mother and son acknowledged each other with a smile—a reflection of the bravery instilled in the Japanese.”[49] It is Coxinga’s bicultural upbringing that connects all these texts, but Miyazaki’s Meiji version is much broader in scope, with a global outlook. Unlike Chikamatsu’s bunraku texts of the eighteenth century that use Kokusenya to clarify distinctions between the Chinese and Japanese socio-cultural milieu, Meiji Coxinga articulated a different vision that reflected contemporary geopolitical anxieties and aspirations. Through the character Tetsuo, Miyazaki eloquently argues for a visionary new world order. He contends that the issues facing Asia cannot be resolved by solving problems in individual countries, be it Japan, China, or Korea. Only an alliance forged among all Asian nations can make Asia strong enough to stand firm against European supremacy. From the French doctor, Tetsuo learned that the concept of the nation-state breeds self-interest and conflict; it is only when one can think outside the strictures of the nation-state (kokka shugi) that a true Pan-Asianism can form. In this sense, the tale is a (not so subtle) rebuttal to the faction of aggressive, nationalistic Pan-Asianists such as Uchida Ryōhei (1874–1937). Another key difference between Miyazaki and other Pan-Asianists is his anti-imperialist stance (tennōsei hitei). This is evident in his association with another anti-imperial thinker, Kita Ikki (1883–1937), with whom he collaborated in publishing the magazine Revolution Critique (Kakumei hyōron). His anti-imperial stance, of course, has to do with regional politics immediately after the Meiji Restoration, as stated before, but deep down in his heart, he was a populist. His sympathy for the common people at the bottom of the society (and by extension, the people of other Asian countries) can be seen (though frequently only implicitly) throughout his writings and speeches, as evident in the Song of the Fallen Blossoms quoted above, where he holds the emperor and the course of modernization responsible for warfare and suffering of the people. It is therefore inaccurate to group Miyazaki casually with other pro-imperial, reactionary right wing figures. In The Ghosts of the Empire (Teikoku no bōrei, 2004), Marukawa Tetsushi portrays the emergence of modern Japanese literature as parallel to the burgeoning of an imperial modernity. Historically speaking, the birth of Japanese modernity, defined by the launch of the Meiji Constitution, was indeed an end result of the lengthy process starting with the Meiji Restoration, continuing through the suppression of the Satsuma Rebellion (1877) and the placating of the Civil Rights Movement. Similarly, modern Japanese literature as we know it now came at the cost of erasing the playful gesaku genre of the Edo period and the early Meiji political novel. Miyazaki Tōten is a product of this transitional period in which modernity was defined and elements of the pre-modern were purged. Miyazaki’s life illustrates the paradox of the Meiji modernizing process. In a sense, Meiji Coxinga presents a counter-narrative to the expansionist nationalist discourse that was popular at the time. Though its vision is forward looking, its stylistic and linguistic features echo a pre-modern sentiment that valorizes time-

honored East Asian ideals of knight-errantry, loyalty, and justice for the disadvantaged. Even though Miyazaki as a political activist has been examined both in China and Japan, his adventurous artistic endeavors have been largely ignored by scholars. Other early Meiji literary genres include the political novel (seiji shōsetsu) and the seafarer novel (kaiyō shōsetsu), works which also encompassed a broad world stage as a narrative device and sought Japan’s freedom from Western colonization and unequal treaties. Miyazaki’s writings present an alternative, though equally valid, aspect of the transition from the pre-modern to modern Japan. To exclude his writings would leave a gap in our understanding of modern Japanese literary history. CONCLUSION: CULTURAL FUSION AND TRANSNATIONAL REGIONALISM In a sense, Japanese Pan-Asianism began with the realignment of relations among China, Japan, and Korea under the threat of imminent colonialization by the West, but it grew through actual involvement with revolutionary (in China, and to a certain degree Korea) or resistance movements (in the Philippines) after the Russo-Japanese War. It gradually morphed into a new order of the Great Asianism (Dai ajia shugi) with Japan as the leader, and later became the blueprint for the conceptualization of the Great East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere in 1940s. With the crumbling of the empire and Japan’s retreat from Asia, Pan-Asianism reached its demise in 1945. Between the polarities of isolation and engagement, the Japanese right wing movement shows its two faces. With the diminishing of the solidarity Pan-Asianist view, the Japanese right wing resorts to (ultra)nationalist posturing toward their East Asian neighbors even to this day. As this chapter has demonstrated through the life of one individual, at its genesis, Japanese right-wing thought understood Japan’s relationship to China and all of East Asia quite differently from today. These paradoxical facets of Japanese conservatism are the result of the complex entanglement of imperialism and nationalism, modernity and tradition, and national vs. local identities as they intersect with issues of gender and social class. Miyazaki last traveled to China in 1921, but by this time, his attention had shifted from the Chinese Revolution to domestic reforms in Japan. The tumultuous political infighting in China following the revolution cooled his revolutionary ardor, as he wrote in the essay collection From the Kotatsu (Kotatsu no naka yori): Now as I look back calmly, I think of my actions—abandoning my birth country to become engrossed in other nations’ revolutionary enterprise—as something only a crazy, reckless person would do; no one with common sense would even attempt them. Moreover, even should I have attained some degree of success, being a foreigner I certainly would not have played a key role in carrying out the idealistic enterprise. As a result, one can only withdraw dejectedly. My craziness surpassed rationality. I was such a fool.[50]

Miyazaki Tōten also criticized the boycott of Japanese-made goods following the May Fourth Movement, cautioning young students not to create a monster out of Chinese nationalism. In his later years, Miyazaki turned to religion, devoting his life to mysticism, the new religion Ōmotokyō, and the cult of Great Universe (Daiuchūkyō). Which leaves us with a final

question: why is it that Miyazaki appears prominently in modern Chinese history books, while in Japan, where history tends to be confined to the domestic realm, Miyazaki is nowhere to be found and nowadays few young Japanese know of his name? This of course has to do with the national construction of collective memory, strategically commemorating and erasing certain parts of the past history to fit into the current national discourse. Pan-Asianism no longer serves any purposes for either country, and thus Miyazaki has to be forgotten. NOTES 1. Miyazaki Tōten, Sanjūsannen no yume [My Thirty-Three Years Dream] (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1993), p. 453. The translation is mine.

2. Sven Saaler and J. Victor Koschman, Pan-Asianism in Modern Japanese History: Colonialism, Regionalism and Borders (London and New York: Routledge, 2006).

3. Nakajima Takeshi, Nakamuraya no Bōsu Indo dokuritsu undō to kindai nihon no ajia shugi [Bose of the Nakamuraya: Indian Independence Movement and Modern Japanese Pan-Asianism] (Tokyo: Hakusuisha, 2005).

4. Aydin Cemil, The Politics of Anti-Westernism in Asia: Visions of World Order in Pan-Islamic and Pan-Asian Thought (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), pp. 39–70.

5. Wada Haruki, Tōhoku Ajia kyōdō no ie: shin chiiki shugisengen [Northeastern Communal Family: A Declaration of a New Regionalism] (Tokyo: Heibonsha, 2003).

6. Kang Sang-jung, Tōhoku Ajia kyōdō no ie o mezashite [Toward a communal home for Northeast Asia] (Tokyo: Heibonsha, 2001).

7. For example, initiatives such as ASEAN+3 (see official homepage of the Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs, http://www.mofa.go.jp) and various Free Trade Agreements between Asian countries demonstrate the increasing importance of the multilateral economic cooperation.

8. Civil chivalric societies, ninkyō shūdan, like many other civil benevolent societies, popped up all over China and Japan during the latter half of the nineteenth century, carried a slightly different trait from the religious, charity, or clan based societies that we see in China. Some of these groups, though with origins in specific localities, soon evolved into political organizations that advocated strong nationalism and worked closely with political parties. Some of the groups also developed into underground organizations that were either linked to or served as front organizations for Japanese mafia (yakuza) organizations.

9. Fujiwara, a professor of mathematics at Ochanomizu University, urges the restoration of the traditional Japanese values of jōsho (emotion) and katachi (form) to counter Western rationalism and globalization. The publisher Shinchōsha originally printed thirty thousand copies, a normal run for a non-fiction book of this nature, but it unexpectedly sold three million copies and became a runaway bestseller; it has gone through twenty-one printings. This attests to the fact that nationalist sentiments apparently resonate with a lot of readers in contemporary Japan.

10. The term Pan-Asianism (Ajia shugi) encompasses a variety of individuals, from ultra-nationalists like Ogawa Shumei and Kita Ikki to Sun Yat-sen or Nehru, whose views are tied to racial discourse. Alternate terms include “Great Asianism” (dai Ajia shugi) and “Pan-Asianism” (han Ajia shugi). At times “Asia” is replaced by kanji compounds like “Tōyō,” “Tōhō,” or “Tōa.” The term kōa (“elevating Asia”) first emerged during the 1880s, but by 1890, it had been appropriated by right-wing organizations, folded into the nationalist sentiment, and imbued with a more aggressive stance toward other parts of Asia. See Matsumoto Ken’ichi, Takeuchi Yoshimi Nihon no Ajia shugi seidoku [A Close Reading of Takeuchi Yoshimi’s Japan and Asianism] (Tokyo: Iwanami gendai bunko, 2000), pp. 2–10.

11. Takeuchi Yoshimi, Nihon no Ajia shugi [Japan and Asianism], in Nihon to Ajia [Japan and Asia] (Tokyo: Chikuma shobō, 2003).

12. I discuss more about the ideological and organizational connections of the two in later parts of the chapter. 13. See note 11, pp. 289–290. 14. The pro-emperor official government was referred to as government (kan) while pro-Shogunate factions were referred to as bandits (zoku).

15. Meiji journalist, historian, and literary critic, older brother of the famous Meiji writer Tokutomi Roka. 16. Many young Meiji intellectuals flirted with Christianity, including, of course, Uchimura Kanzō, but also Nitōbei Inazō, Kitamura Tōkoku, Masamune Hakuchō, and Shimazaki Tōson. Considering the fact that Meiji government did not remove the ban on Christianity until 1873, Miyazaki’s flirtation with the faith, though brief (1886–1889), reveals his penchant for unusual causes even before his involvement in Chinese revolution.

17. Maeda Tsuchi was seventeen when she met Miyazaki Tōten. Coming from a local wealthy family, she was a typical Moga (modern girl) who was into fashion and learning English. Tsuchi married Tōten despite her father’s objection. She was an enterprising woman who took charge of the Miyazaki family estate during Tōten’s frequent and long absences from Kyūshū. They had three children. Satō Tsuneo, Miyazaki Toten (Fukuoka: Ashi shobō, 2000), pp. 43–48.

18. The name “Tōten” was first used for this article as a pen name and later became his pseudonym (gō). 19. Other than the original newspaper serialization in Nishiroku shinpō in 1901, the autobiography had been through five different reprints in 1902 [Kokukō shobō edition], 1926 [Yoshino Sakuzō edition], 1943 [Bungeishunju edition, edited by his son Miyazaki Ryūsuke], 1967 [Heibonsha-Toyōbunko edition], and was also included in his Complete Works (zenshū), vol. 1 in 1971. An English translation by Etō Shinkichi and Marius B. Jansen, My Thirty-Three Years Dream: The Autobiography of Miyazaki Tōten. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982).

20. An ambivalence toward the Meiji government, if not the outright hostility like Tōten’s, can be seen, for example, in the colonial writer Nishikawa Mitsuru, whose regional identification was with Aizu, a Northern region on the main island that sided with the Tokugawa shogunate in fighting against the Imperialists during the Meiji Restoration. Nishikawa spent most of his life in colonial Taiwan until 1946 and was often unsympathetic toward colonial authority and the central government in the metropole.

21. Miyazaki Tōten, Miyazaki Tōten (Tokyo: Shingakusha, 2005), pp. 10–12. 22. Shirane Haruo, Ed., Columbia Anthology of Early Modern Japanese Literature, (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), pp. 17–18.

23. Miyazaki Tōten), Miyazaki Tōten (Tokyo: Shingakusha, 2005), p. 255. 24. For exchanges between Miyazaki and Chinese intellectuals, see Tadokoro Takehiko, Rōnin to kakumeika: Miyazaki Tōten, Son Bun to no hibi [Rōnin and the Revolutionary: Days of Miyazaki Tōten and Sun Yat Sen] (Tokyo: Ribun shuppan, 2002).

25. Miyazaki Tōten, Miyazaki Tōten, pp. 290–298. 26. Ibid., pp. 292–294. 27. Ibid., pp. 293–294. The translation is mine. 28. The public fascination was not limited to his fiction and non-fiction literary works. For example, a riot occurred when some could not purchase a set of commemorative postcards issued by the postal service. This shows the degree of public excitement surrounding the war and the boom in war memorabilia.

29. See Faye Yuan Kleeman, “The Russo-Japanese War and Literary Expression: Voice, Gender, and Colonialism.” In John Chapman and Chiharu Inaba, eds., Re-thinking the Russo-Japanese War Vol. II. (London: Global Oriental, 2007, pp. 243–256) on new and popular media during the Russo-Japanese War.

30. Naniwabushi is sometimes referred to as Ukarebushi in the Western Kansai region. 31. Rōkyoku, also referred to as naniwabushi, tell stories through vocalized chanting, accompanied by the three-string shamisen. Storytelling in kōdan has no musical accompaniment, though a wooden clapper is used to enhance the effect. In general, stories in rōkyoku tended toward the romantic (ninjōbanashi) and individual chivalric hero and kōdan focused more on historical battle (gassennmono) and biographical tales of historical figures (buyūden), though there was a lot of overlap in the subject matter of actual performances.

32. The term kōshaku later became kōdan in the Meiji period. The kōdan genre enjoyed its heyday from the late Tokugawa until the end of the Meiji period. The content was serialized in newspapers and magazines and kōdanbon (kōdan books) published by Tachikawa bunko were highly popular. Kōdan declined due to the rising popularity of manzai (two-comedian standup comedy) and the GHQ’s banning of the performances during the occupation era when the stories advocated feudal values of revenge and militarist force.

33. Edo intellectuals such as Ota Nanbō, Santō Kyōden, Ichigawa Danjurō, and Tachikawa Enba first practiced rakugo as a parlor game at their private quarters or at the pleasure quarters.

34. Hyotō Hiromi, “Koe” no kokumin kokka Nihon [“Voice” of the Citizen/National State Japan] (Tokyo : Nihon hōsō shuppan kyōkai, 2000), p. 46.

35. Masaoka Yō, Kumonoemon igo [After Kumonoemon] (Tokyo: Bunrintō, 1944), p. 3. 36. Criticism on subject matter of the performance such as “Kumonoemon’s second-rate narratives such as Tales of Heroes or General Nogi that aggressively peddle loyalty and filial piety just make one feel like he is forcing a shallow immorality down our throats. For those with noble and refined character, one cannot help but be revolted by it” were commonly seen. Criticism on vocalization and lyrics such as: “the way they force their voices to come from the bottom of their gut is so comical,” “since the lyrics demand a five and seven syllable arrangement, most of these performers lack the proper education and they created numerous strange, vulgar, bad words, though many of those are worth a laugh or two” were also common. Masaoka Yō, Kumonoemon igo [After Kumonoemon] (Tokyo: Bunrintō, 1944), pp. 13–14.

37. Watanabe Kyōji, Hyōden Miyazaki Tōten [A Critical Biography of Miyazaki Tōten] (Tokyo: Yamato shobō, 1976), pp. 190–191.

38. This group of people preferred a hairstyle called sōhatsu, in which one does not shave the forehead but rather lets the hair grow out and ties it into a pony tail. They usually dressed in a traditional kimono with the formal hakama skirt.

39. Alan Tansman, “Mournful Tears and Sake: The Postwar Myth of Misora Hibari.” In John Whittier Treat, ed. Contemporary Japan and Popular Culture (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1996), pp. 112–113.

40. Miyazaki Tōten, Miyazaki Tōten, p. 9. The translation is mine; Etō and Jansen’s translation omitted all the prefaces. 41. Miyazaki used the term seki (literally meaning seat), rather than shō, a conventional literary marker, to demarcate each chapter, in keeping with the tradition of the performing arts. Miyazaki Tōten, Miyazaki Tōten Ajia kakumei kidanshū [Miyazaki Tōten Fantastic Tales of Asian Revolution] (Tokyo: Shoshishinsui, 2006).

42. Ibid., pp. 85, 90, 111, etc. 43. The treaty, signed in 1875, determined the border between Japan and Russia. An earlier border treaty, signed in 1855, had not decided rights to Karafuto, which came to be settled by both Russian and Japanese immigrants. To resolve the constant conflicts between colonists from the two nations, the Meiji government gave up its rights to Karafuto in exchange for the eighteen Chishima islands located north of Tokubu Island. The decision was controversial; Foreign Minister Soejima Taneomi (1828–1905) proposed splitting Karafuto into North and South halves, one for each country. When Soejima was fired for an overly bold proposal to conquer Korea, the government was convinced by the undersecretary of the Hokkaidō Colonization Board Kuroda Kiyotaka’s argument that Japan should give up Karafuto and concentrate on developing Hokkaidō.

44. Ōdō jindō ben [A Debate on the Sage’s Way and the Human Way]. The book is an invention of the author Miyazaki Tōten.

45. Miyazaki Tōten, Miyazaki Tōten Ajia kakumei kidanshū [Miyazaki Tōten Fantastic Tales of Asian Revolution] (Tokyo: Shoshishinsui, 2006), p. 224.

46. Ibid. 47. Although Chikamatsu’s domestic plays (sewamono)—mostly romantic tragedies of star-crossed lovers and double-suicide plays—are the main focus of critical attention and the more frequently performed in modern time, the historical plays (jidaimono) were more important in Chikamatsu’s time. He wrote three times as many jidaimono as sewamono.

48. Shirane Haruo. Ed. Columbia Anthology of Early Modern Japanese Literature. (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), p. 285.

49. Ibid., p. 290. 50. Watanabe Kyōji, Hyōden Miyazaki Tōten [A Critical Biography of Miyazaki Tōten] (Tokyo: Yamato shobō, 1976 ), p. 323.

II

Confrontations with the Modern

Chapter Four

On the Emergence of New Concepts in Late Qing China and Meiji Japan: The Case of Religion Viren Murthy

Scholars have long conceived of Meiji Japan (1868–1912) and late Qing China (1841–1911) as transitional periods during which these two countries confronted the global capitalist system of nation-states. At this time, intellectuals and officials from each of these countries conceived of ways to compete in a world in which they felt that their existence and cultural identity were at stake. In the past two decades, historians have stressed the indigenous developments that led Japan and China to modernity, but one cannot deny that in the late nineteenth century, Chinese and Japanese intellectuals felt a new sense of crisis that was linked to transnational and global processes. This sense of crisis spurred intellectuals to develop new concepts to make sense of their world and imagine possible futures. Much has been written about the institutional and ideological transformations that occurred during this period in China and Japan, and scholars have only recently begun to focus on how intellectual transformations in these countries are inextricably linked. There have already been works that have dealt with problems of translation in Japan and China individually. However, the present chapter emphasizes the way in which the history of conceptual transformation in these two countries was intertwined. Moreover, in what follows, I stress that we should understand the practices of translation and conceptual change in China and Japan in the larger cultural context of global capitalist modernity. Japanese intellectuals would often use character couplets from the Chinese classics and infuse them with the meaning of the term being translated. This is the case for a number of

important terms, such as “science (kagaku),” “freedom (jiyū),” “law (hōritsu),” and “religion” (shūkyō).”[1] Chinese developed translations in a similar process, but because during the late Qing so many intellectuals went to Tokyo to study modern political theory and science, they often used character couplets that were already baptized by Japanese intellectuals and thus had new meaning. In what follows, I will focus on how Japanese and Chinese intellectuals interpreted and translated the concept of religion in order to provide a window into the larger process of cultural exchange between China, Japan, and Europe. The processes of capitalist modernity and nation-state formation each mediated the ways in which intellectuals interpreted the concept of religion on different levels. In particular, we could distinguish an existential level and the level of state-oriented political practice. These two levels are of course intimately connected, but intellectuals in both Japan and China debated how one could resolve the tensions between them. Put simply, at issue here is the relationship between how religion speaks to the problem of human finitude at a personal level by invoking notions of transcendence and how such beliefs in transcendence relate to secular political frameworks. To some extent, people have always dealt with finitude, but, as I explain in the first section of this chapter, I follow Talal Asad in arguing that religion, as a separate realm of study and practice, is a modern invention. I then draw on Georg Lukács to suggest that modern religion functions like modern philosophy as it attempts to overcome the gap between the finite subject and the inanimate world of objects, a gap conditioned by experience in capitalist modernity. As Asad has pointed out, the concept of religion is intimately connected to a number of conceptual shifts associated with capitalist modernity; in particular, he stresses how in the midst of these changes, people separated religion as a body of knowledge from other spheres of life. Subsequently, intellectuals associated religion with individual belief and interiority as opposed to practice. This split between belief and practice in some way maps on to the separation between religion and the state, which played more of a role in the late Meiji than in late Qing China. Moreover, even without the separation of religion from the state, the split between belief and practice is associated with a move to more abstract discourse about religion because ideas about transcendence are now separable from political practices. This abstraction is linked to a space of interiority, but at the same time corresponds to the abstraction of capital and the antinomies of the commodity form. Such abstraction opens a potential space for politics and modern advocates of religion often exploit the space between religion and practice for different political ends. In short, they attempt to reconnect religion and practice in numerous ways. We shall see some of the ways in which intellectuals in Meiji Japan and late Qing China developed narratives to fix the relationship between religion and practice. For example, Inoue Enryō (1858–1919) and Anesaki Masaharu (1873–1949) developed the idea of modern religion in potentially conflicting ways. On the one hand, they distinguished religion from superstition and attempted to reconcile religion with science. But on the other hand, they used religion to emphasize interiority and a transcendent perspective that overcomes the antinomies of capitalist modernity, such as the antinomy between finite subject and object. Both Inoue and

Anesaki would in some way connect this emphasis on interiority and transcendence to an allegiance to the nation. Their contemporary Kiyozawa Manshi (1863–1901) stressed the transcendent dimension of religion and Buddhism in particular to make relative all worldly obligations, including obligations to the state, but he would have no other principles for action. During the late Qing dynasty, Liang Qichao (1873–1929) and Zhang Taiyan (1868–1936) both adopted the Japanese use of the term religion and were influenced by Anesaki Masaharu’s texts, especially An Outline of Religion (Shūkyō kairon). However, in the late Qing, there was less of a tendency to separate religion from politics. Rather, religion was fundamentally thought of in terms of a political project, namely nation-building. Although they were both interested in developing a modern nation-state, they each represented opposite ideological camps and resolved the antinomies between transcendence and politics in different ways. Liang Qichao is famous for promoting reform from within the Qing Empire and Zhang Taiyan, while initially supporting Liang’s project, eventually advocated the revolutionary overthrow of the Qing dynasty. This political difference was connected to their different conceptions of religion and Buddhism in particular; Liang praised Buddhism as analogous to science and fostering links between individual and the state, while Zhang emphasized the power of consciousness and saw here the potential for revolutionary subjectivity. Moreover, Zhang eventually mobilizes his arguments about consciousness against certain institutions of modernity, including the nation-state. While I will focus on some of the different trajectories that the term religion took in Meiji Japan and late Qing China, it is important to stress that all of these thinkers took part in a larger conceptual transformation of which the concept of religion formed a part. Hence before I deal in turn with the introduction of the concept of religion to late Meiji Japan and late Qing China, I begin this chapter with a section describing the general emergence of the concept of religion in relation to social transformations and epistemological change. RELIGION AS A MODERN PHENOMENON In his book, Anthropologies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam, Talal Asad points out that the transformations of modernity, which were inseparable from new political and economic structures, provided the conditions for a mode of subjective belief that could be separated from other realms and named religious. As Asad explains: [W]ith the triumphant rise of modern science, modern production, and the modern state, the churches would also be clear about the need to distinguish the religious from the secular, shifting, as they did so, the weight of religion more and more on the moods and motivations of the individual believer.[2]

Asad cogently stresses the way in which, in the modern world, religion is linked to a new view of human subjectivity based on the individual. However, in order to better understand the appeal of religion in the modern world, we need to ask how the transformations associated with capitalist modernity conditioned the individual believer’s moods and motivations.

Drawing on Geörg Lukács and other Hegelian Marxists, such as Moishe Postone and Chris Arthur, one can suggest that although capitalism is a process that encompasses both subject and object,[3] people do not immediately experience it in this manner. Rather, they grasp it in reified form or in “small fragments (kleinen Ausschnitten).”[4] Lukács claims that because people in capitalist society only grasp reality in fragments, they reify the world in terms of subjects and objects, and this affects the way they experience themselves as well: It is true: even for the capitalists there is this doubling of personality, this tearing (Zerreissen) of human beings into an element of the movement of commodities and an (objectively powerless) spectator of this movement.[5]

In other words, the subject in modern “bourgeois” society is split between a spectator, who apparently has the ability to think and act, and an object that is acted on by a vast number of impersonal forces including social processes and natural laws. This split between the subject and object, along with the disenchantment of the world, makes the problem of human finitude central to modernity. Human beings have always been mortal, but in the context of capitalist modernity this mortality reinforces a feeling of meaningless and helplessness in the face of the objective and seemingly eternal forces of the world.[6] In Lukács’s view, German idealists attempted to overcome this antinomy between the human subject and the objective world by positing some type of transcendental subject-object: Speaking purely generally, thus the following tendency for philosophy comes into being: to advance a conception of the subject that can be conceived as the creator of the totality of content. And again, in general, speaking purely programmatically, the following demand (Forderung) comes into being: to find and show a level of objectivity, a positing of the subject, where one annuls the duality of subject and object (the duality between thinking and being is a special case of this structure), where subject and object come together and are identical.[7]

Lukács contends that German idealists, Hegel in particular, attempt to overcome the antinomy between subject and object, but do not understand the social conditions of this antinomy. As a result, they end up reproducing precisely the oppositions they attempted to overcome. While Lukács focuses on philosophy, I contend that his framework applies to many modern forms of religion as well. This is not surprising, since if Lukács is correct, proponents of religion confront the same antinomies of capitalism as do philosophers. In China and Japan, the relevance of Lukacs’ critique of German idealism is especially striking since many proponents of religion in the late Meiji and late Qing periods were themselves in some way influenced by Kant and Hegel. However, to understand more fully the development of the concept of religion in modern Japan and China, in addition to the abstract level of capital and the existential dimension of religion, we must deal with nation- and state-oriented politics. In short, when philosophers or advocates of religion resolve the antinomy between the subject and object by alluding to some type of transcendent unity, they potentially threaten the existence of the nation-state, since the boundaries of such a transcendent unity are unfixed. Thus we shall see the various proponents of religion, such as Anesaki Masaharu and Liang Qichao, each attempting to relate the nationstate in some way to the ontological realm and to the individual. At times, as in the cases of Kiyozawa Manshi and Zhang Taiyan, we will see intellectuals mobilizing this ontological

level against the nation-state in different political contexts. JAPANESE CONCEPT OF RELIGION (SHŪKYŌ): ANESAKI MASAHARU AND HIS CONTEXT The Context of the Translation of “Religion” as “Shūkyō” and the Separation of Belief and Practice The influx of the concept of religion in Japan is inextricably linked to Japanese intellectuals’ perceptions of their position in the world. Religion entered Japan as Japan confronted the global capitalist system of nation-states, and consequently Japanese intellectuals began to have a new perception of the world. Specifically, as Isomae Junichi notes, beginning with the 1858 Treaty of Amity and Commerce between Japan and the United States, Japan became involved in a series of unequal treaties.[8] Moreover, given that these treaties were signed shortly after China’s loss in the Opium War, Japanese intellectuals and officials felt that inequality could translate into a lack of sovereignty. As intellectuals experienced Western nations as a threat, they became increasingly interested in learning from them. The hierarchical division of the world was embedded in the Law of Nations (Bankoku kōhō), which separated countries into civilized (bunmei), barbarian (yaban), and primitive (mikai). According to the above Law, it was only civilized countries that had the right to sovereignty and the obligation to respect each other’s sovereignty. Primitive countries could be outright colonized, and barbarian countries were in a type of liminal space with limited rights to sovereignty. Hence the text posited a type of evolutionary framework in which countries progressed from primitive to civilized; China, Japan, and Turkey were all barbarian countries trying to become civilized by learning from the West. At this point, Japanese were probably familiar with the character couplet “shūkyō,” since it already existed in classical Chinese but had various meanings. According to Di Yongjun, the earliest instance of the character couplet “shūkyō,” zongjiao in Chinese, is in the Songshi (The History of the Song), where zongjiao refers to an official position. Before this, for example, during the Wei and Jin periods, the terms were used separately by Buddhists. Zong was one of the concepts used to interpret Buddhist classics. Later the terms were combined to signify the Buddha’s teachings.[9] In the Japanese context, the term “shūkyō” was also originally a Buddhist term meaning “a truth that could not be expressed in words and the teaching (oshie) that transfers this to human beings.”[10] It was only during the late nineteenth century that Japanese intellectuals began to use this character couplet to translate the modern concept of religion. Their initial translation of this term must be understood as part of a larger project of becoming civilized and in some way dealing with the hierarchical divisions of the world-system of nation-states and becoming a strong capitalist nation. The concept of civilization, however, had religious overtones. In particular, the Law of Nations uses the terms civilized and uncivilized interchangeably with Christian and non-Christian. At the same time, the eighth article of the Treaty of Amity and

Commerce stressed tolerance for both Japanese and American religious practices, which thus allowed Shinto and Buddhism to exist. Subsequently, Christianity became the model for religion and the practices of Shinto and Buddhism were understood by making analogies to Christianity. During this initial stage, translations for religion were mainly used in diplomatic contexts and in addition to the now standard translation of shūkyō, there were a number of competing terms such as shūshi and kyōmon.[11] However, texts already distinguished between religion as belief and religion as practice. This distinction continues through various transformations of the term and serves as the fulcrum around which to parse permissible religion from seditious superstition. In 1874 Itō Hirobumi advocated lifting the ban on Christianity and contended that civilized nations should be tolerant with respect to belief.[12] Shortly after this, the translation of the term religion became fixed in 1878, when religion was translated as shūkyō in the Glossary of Philosophy. As the term for religion became stable, Japanese intellectuals began to use the dichotomy between belief and practice, which was formerly limited to diplomatic contexts. In other words, the consolidation of the translation of religion accompanied a restriction of its meaning and an attempt to attack or re-orient the practice side of the belief-practice antinomy. Scholars and officials condemned practices, such as those associated with Buddhism, as remnants of the past and conflicting with the evolution of civilization. In short, they separated religion from its role in a political system and abstractly associated it with individual belief. In this sense, Japanese intellectuals attempted to de-link shūkyō from its concrete associations in the Buddhist temple system, especially prevalent during the Tokugawa period, and then connect shūkyō as religion with the new politics and practices of the nation-state, enlightenment, and capitalist modernity. However, intellectuals by no means conceived of the relationship between religion and projects of civilization or modernity in a single manner. Initially, Christianity represented civilization and various religions began to compete for a similar status. Combining religion and modernity would at different periods of the Meiji imply overcoming oppositions between religion and science, religion and rationalization, religion and the state, and religion and morality. With respect to the first two oppositions, some promoters of religion would try to rationalize it. By restricting religion to belief, people purge so-called irrational practices from the concept of religion and this is already a gesture towards rationalization. As a result, intellectuals’ interpretation of religions such as Buddhism tended to be more philosophical. The general attempt to separate religion as belief from religion as practice is still somewhat different from rationalization, since a system of beliefs can be considered irrational. Meiji intellectuals would differ on whether to interpret religion as rational and also about how to evaluate either rational or irrational religion. Following Kobayashi Takeshi, one could say that there was a general change in the intellectual climate in Japan from the early to late Meiji periods. While the early Meiji was characterized by a whole-hearted support of capitalist modernization, late Meiji intellectuals became more critical of Western modernity. According to Kobayashi, there are a number of reasons for this shift. First, during the 1890s Meiji society

had already experienced a substantial degree of capitalist modernization and in 1895 they won what was seen as a major victory against the Chinese in the Sino-Japanese War. This victory heightened a sense of nationalism, but the problems associated with capitalism, such as inequality, became more visible. Corresponding to the increasing awareness of such problems, there was an ideological tension between those who promoted an individualism based on the pursuit of interest and those who could not succeed in the capitalist system and tended to promote religious thought that defied contemporary trends in politics.[13] With the deepening of the contradictions of capitalism, intellectuals became enthusiastic about romanticism and individualism, both of which expressed an opposition between matter and spirit. In short, intellectuals began to stress individual spirit, often in connection with some vision of transcendence against matter. The opposition between spirit and matter reflects the structures of capitalism, which are deeper than the structures of the nation-state, and the appeal of religion may lie in its ability to point at a resolution to the opposition between spirit and matter or between subject and object by positing a transcendent unity. However, the nationstate constantly attempts to deal with this individual desire for unity by channeling it in the direction of national identification. Given that this sense of obligation and identification requires not only rationality and science, but also feeling and commitment, intellectuals questioned whether religion could play a positive role in promoting identification with nationstates. In other words, people wondered whether religion could be a means by which the state could capture the very interiority that was protected by the separation of politics and religion. Uchimura Kanzo and the Conflict Between Religion and the State The answer to questions concerning the state and religious belief would revolve around whether religion, morality, or some combination of the two would be best to create a sense of national obligation. Some nationalists feared that religion presented an answer to the problem of finitude that transcended the state.[14] The official response was to separate religion from politics, make religion something private, while morality was connected to public obligations and virtue. The ambiguities associated with this separation are clearly indicated in the famous Uchimura Kanzō Incident. On January 9, 1891, an instructor at Daiichi Koto Middle-school refused to bow his head to the imperial signature because of his belief in Christianity. The event became famous, and Uchimura gained notoriety as a traitor.[15] The above incident involves a clash between the emperor system or loyalty to the emperor-state, which is deemed public, and devotion to some transcendental source, which should be subordinate to public obligations. This began a famous debate about the conflict between religion and education. Nation-states would clearly benefit by channeling a religious type of devotion to the state. But given the above attack on religion from the standpoint of the state, the nation-state would need to develop a religion that was not a religion. Officials invoked State Shintō to inculcate loyalty to the emperor and the state, but asserted that it was a morality and not a religion. This emphasis on morality as against religion is one of the reasons why in Japan, unlike in China, people who promoted Confucianism as a state ideology, such as the philosophers Inoue Tetsujirō (1855–1944) and Hattori Inokichi, did not attempt to create a Confucian religion, but

a Confucian morality, which they would use to criticize religion. To some extent, religion was protected from criticism because the Japanese constitution of 1889 had already institutionalized some version of freedom of religion. Specifically, Article 2 of the Great Imperial Japanese Constitution stated, “to the extent that beliefs do not harm the peace of the Japanese subjects or violate their obligations, people are free with respect to religious beliefs.” The Uchimura incident reflects a potential conflict between the above article and Article 3, which states the “Emperor is sacred and cannot be violated.”[16] Inoue Tetsujirō’s Attack on Religion in Favor of Morality Inoue Tetsujirō perhaps most clearly expresses the critique of religion from the standpoint of national morality. Inoue was trained in both Buddhism and German philosophy and had studied in Germany for seven years. When he returned from Germany in 1880, he taught courses on German Idealism and comparative religions.[17] In 1890, he was appointed the first Japanese full professor in the philosophy department in the University of Tokyo and taught Eastern Philosophy.[18] After the Uchimura incident, Inoue attempted to provide a philosophical justification for the state’s critique of religion and in particular Christianity. In 1892, Inoue published an essay entitled, “The Conflict between Education and Religion (kyōiku to shūkyō no shōtotsu),” in the journal, Educational Times (kyōiku jiron). As Sueki Fumihiko points out, here the term education clearly refers to the imperial edict. In this essay, Inoue criticizes religion by staging a confrontation between Christianity and the imperial edict, which he describes in Confucian terms.[19] He first notes that the imperial edict stresses an ethics of the world, while Christianity stresses a transcendental morality. He points out that the morality of the imperial edict is Confucian, which implies a discriminating love, while Christianity emphasizes an undiscriminating Mohist type of universal love. Moreover, he underscores that Christianity does not advocate loyalty and filial piety. While this critique seems limited to Christianity, in an essay entitled, “The Relationship between Morality and Religion (rinri to shūkyō to no kankei),” published in 1902, he expanded his attack to include Buddhism and we can see from the titles of his essays that he intended to indict religions in general and separate them from morality. Uchimura responded by attempting to show how Christianity was compatible with national obligations, but given that I will focus on Buddhism in the next part of the chapter, I will briefly discuss here the Buddhist perspectives of Inoue Enryō and Kiyozawa Manshi, respectively. On reading Inoue Tetsujirō’s criticisms, the simplest response was to argue that a given religion, far from violating the imperial laws, is compatible with or even strengthens them. This was Inoue Enryō’s strategy. Inoue Enryō and Kiyozawa Manshi: Buddhist Responses and the Politics of Nationalism Inoue Enryō was a practicing Buddhist and is famous for interpreting Buddhist doctrine in light of German idealism, Hegel in particular. He contends that Buddhism, like Hegel, posits an ontological unity between the absolute (unchanging) and relative (temporal) spheres of existence. By postulating such a unified subject-object, Inoue also tried to bring the self

together with the absolute. He claims that one could overcome the self’s finitude by focusing on the inner self, which was one with the absolute. In his essay, “The Study of Comparative Religion (hikaku shūkyō gaku),” he attempts to compare religions based on the criteria of interiority. He argues that one can tell whether a religion has evolved by focusing on the degree to which the religion relies on internal reflection rather than on external forms. He explains that barbarian religions are lower because of their inability to go beyond the external.[20] Inoue’s more political writings show the relationship between truth and the nation. In “On the Relationship between Education and Religion (kyōikushūkyō kankei ron),” published in 1893, Inoue Enryō rushed to support Inoue Tetsujirō’s above remarks about education. In this essay, he criticized Christianity for being irrational and argued that religion and education should be harmonized together for the benefit of the state.[21] In the same year, he published an essay, “Revitalizing Loyalty and Filial Piety (chūkō katsuron)” which claimed that unlike Christianity, Buddhism supported loyalty and filial piety because, according to Buddhist doctrine, such virtues emanated from Buddha-nature. Even when it is limited to belief, religion can be considered threatening to the nation-state, because there is a gap between the level of transcendence and the level of the nation-state. Inoue Enryō attempted to make some type of link between the transcendental or atemporal realm, the nation, and the individual, but Inoue’s contemporary Kiyozawa Manshi took another option, namely, to criticize the state from the standpoint of a deeper ontological source. In an essay, “The Necessary Conditions of Religious Belief (shūkyōteki shinnen no hissu jōken),” published in 1901 in the journal The Spiritual Realm (seishin kai), Kiyozawa made the following comments about religion: If someone seriously wants to enter heaven and earth in a religious way . . . one must renounce one’s relatives, renounce one’s wife, renounce one’s possessions, renounce the state and even renounce oneself. In other words, those who want to enter heaven and earth in a religious manner must reject the filial mind of the mundane world and renounce patriotism. Moreover, they must not look at benevolence and righteousness, morality or philosophy. At this point, for the first time, the vast heaven and earth of religious belief will open up.[22]

Kiyozawa went on to develop a philosophy with which he attempted to overcome the problem of human finitude by positing a unified subject and object, in which the “myriad things are one (manbutsu ittai).”[23] But unlike in the case of Inoue Enryō, Kiyozawa uses this abstract unity to bypass the nation-state and stress a type of universal responsibility. This unity with all things implies a type of unlimited responsibility to save the world. As Lukács points out in the case of Hegel, such abstract resolutions to the antinomies of modern thought end up unable to grasp fundamentally their historical conditions of possibility, namely capitalist modernity. However, we should note that Kiyozawa’s abstract unity has trouble even resisting the state, since, following Sueki, we can see that his unity of all things and universal responsibility is not able to translate into concrete action. While Hegel claims that spirit is embodied in the institutions of modernity thus making spirit historically concrete, Kiyozawa attempts to separate the absolute that one experiences through religion from national morality, only to reunite them later. He claims that religion and morality both need to play their part in state and society and more significantly, once one has seen the light of the matrix of the

thus-come-one (Sanskrit: tathagathagarba), filial action and patriotism are all good. Part of the reason for Kiyozawa’s slippage is precisely the separation in the modern concept of religion between belief and practice. Since religion was now purged of practice, its practices would often come from the historical structures that made it possible and were left unspoken. Anesaki Masaharu, the Study of Religion and National Cosmopolitanism Anesaki Masaharu represents perhaps a more academic response to this discussion of religion and is famous for being the first Japanese intellectual to develop “religious studies.” His career spans the Meiji, Taisho, and Showa years; however, because of the comparative nature of this chapter, we will be primarily concerned with his early work, during the Meiji period, since this was most influential on Liang Qichao and especially on Zhang Taiyan. Anesaki studied with Inoue Tetsujirō at the Tokyo Imperial University, when Inoue was already working on a theory of comparative religions based on an evolutionary perspective. In other words, those religions that were not sufficiently rational were considered less evolved. We have seen this in Inoue Enryō’s attempt to show that Buddhism was more evolved than was Christianity. For example, he claimed, “Buddhism is a purely intellectual religion, while Christianity is an emotional religion.”[24] But Inoue also stressed that there was something universal about religion and barbarian religions also had a kernel of interiority even if they did not realize this and that kernel was lost in popular practices. This view of religion as representing something universal was popular in the 1890s even outside of intellectual circles, which explains why Japan could participate in the World Parliament of Religions in Chicago in 1893. Such a meeting of course presupposes that religion is something that can be abstracted from specific religions. By emphasizing the commonality and the universality of religion, intellectuals waged war against various forms of materialism, which contended that religion would fade away. For example, Kato Hiroyuki attacked religion as anti-scientific and asserted that it would wither away if society was totally enlightened. In such a situation only morality would remain.[25] In the context of these debates, Anesaki Masaharu developed his theory of religion and in 1900 published his pioneering An Outline of the Study of Religion (Shūkyōgaku gairon), where he to some extent follows Inoue Enryō in developing a universal theory of religion. Against Kato Hiroyuki and others, Anesaki argues that religion was part of the human essence and here he chimes in with the emphasis on interiority and the problem of human finitude, which was prevalent during the late Meiji. He thus defines religious studies in the following manner: “The study of religion examines the phenomenal facts of religion as universal basic motivations emerging from the human mind and takes religious phenomena as expressing various aspects of human life.”[26] He further claims that even Inoue Enryō and others who speak of comparative religions pay insufficient attention to the universal human condition at its origins. Anesaki describes the essence of religion succinctly in the following passage: If one talks about immediate motivation [for religion], when the self’s desire transcends (koeru) its ability, in order to realize this desire, the self looks to a human personality above itself.[27]

Like Inoue Testujirō and Inoue Enryō, Anesaki is clearly influenced by German idealism, which he studied during his years as an exchange student in Germany.[28] Hence, he claims that all religions posit a holistic unity to overcome the opposition between the finite human being and the unlimited objective world. He further asserts that the finite and the unlimited are united in an interdependent world of pre-established harmony. “The life of the myriad things between heaven and earth all exists in a relation of sympathetic fusion (dojō yūkai), and from this they vigorously develop. Their relationship is produced through an order that has been continuous since ancient times.” [29] In Anesaki’s view, religions are an attempt to overcome the problems of the phenomenal world and tap into a more ideal order. By grounding religion in a universal human condition and metaphysics, Anesaki legitimates religion and goes against Inoue Tetsujirō who would place morality above religion. Ansaki criticizes scholars and officials who would want to separate Shinto from religion and claims that the practices associated with Shinto are religious.[30] With this gesture, it appears as if Anesaki resists incorporating religion and individual experience into the imperatives of the state. However, he dovetails with Inoue Tetsujirō at a higher level of abstraction. Anesaki unites religion with morality again and combines them with obligations to the state. He writes, By relying on the ideal of belief in religion, one discovers profound meaning in national history, and through this elevates the ideal of the state and purifies it. This is the original mission of religion.[31]

Anesaki lifts the discussion of religion to a higher level of abstraction, by studying religion in general. Thus when he mentions bringing religion and the state together, his links religion to a larger metaphysical position that is independent of any particular religion. In this way, he attempts to affirm both particularity and universality, namely nation-states and a world. In Isomae’s words, “when discussing religion, he claims that it ‘brings the individual mind in contact with the ideal of ubiquitous equality’ and thus has shades of the world citizen. The idea of the universal citizen corresponds with the fact that Anesaki’s idea of the state affirms the national polity on one side, but at the same time faces the world and has the character of an open civilization.”[32] Anesaki attempts to provide a resolution to the problem of finitude through invoking an ontological source as did Inoue Tetsujirō, Inoue Enryō, and Kiyozawa Manshi. They all posit a type of identical subject and object, which then either confronts, combines with, or is confined by the nation-state. Anesaki brings together the nationalism of Inoue Tetsujirō with Kiyozawa’s emphasis on the universal. He diffuses the tension between nation and religion by affirming both particularity as nation and cosmopolitan civilization. In this way, he reproduces an idealized vision of the global capitalist system of nation-states. Below we will look at how the Chinese eventually accepted the modern concept of religion from Japan and then used it in a different context. We shall examine how Liang Qichao and Zhang Taiyan mobilize religion to deal with the antinomies of capitalism and the nation-state. THE CONCEPT OF RELIGION IN CHINA

The Context of Translation and Two Narratives of the Nation The context in which Chinese intellectuals translated the modern concept of religion bears some resemblance to that of their Meiji counterparts. Both China and Japan faced the threat of imperialism and Western dominance in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. But after China’s defeat in the Sino-Japanese War, Chinese officials and intellectuals not only felt behind the West; they were humiliated by a former tribute state. Hence at the end of the nineteenth century, there was increased interest in reform and intellectuals looked to the Meiji state as an example of successful political, economic, and cultural transformation. The late Qing and the Meiji governments both sought to learn from the West and gradually accepted an evolutionary vision of the world, which included a movement from barbarism to civilization. Such a vision accompanied both China and Japan’s respective attempts to enter the global capitalist world. In China since the Self-strengthening Movement in 1860 to the New Government Reforms from 1901–1911, officials implemented a number of reforms which were connected to the development of both foreign and domestic capital and new labor relations. However, the Chinese case is complicated because the Qing government consisted of a Manchu minority governing a Han majority. As a result of a number of failed reforms and other political events, by 1900, Chinese intellectuals were split between the revolutionaries who sought to overthrow the Manchu government and the reformers who sought reform within the Qing dynasty. Both camps used the concept of zongjiao or religion in order to furnish the ideological conditions for China to enter the world-system as a nation-state, but the question was whether to do so under Manchu tutelage or under a new regime. As we shall see, unlike in the case of Meiji Japan, the Qing state did not implement a separation of religion from politics partly because it had not yet established itself as a modern state. Thus both revolutionaries and reformers would openly connect religion to morality in hopes of developing a nation-state. Chinese intellectuals began to translate the concept of religion in the late nineteenth century and they used a number of characters to translate religion before settling on the characters zongjiao. As we have seen in the previous section, the Chinese characters that are now used to translate religion initially referred to the truth of Buddhist teachings in the Wei and Jin Dynasties. Later, Daoists and Confucians also began to use this term to refer to their respective teachings, but the term did not come to refer generically to “religion” until the twentieth century.[33] Thus during the meeting of the World’s Parliament of Religion in 1893, although the Japanese participants already had an understanding of the concept of religion and could think of Buddhism and Shinto as religions, the Chinese participant Peng Guangyu had hesitations. He went to represent the “Confucian religion (kongjiao),” but immediately realized that the Chinese character used to translate religion, jiao, referred to teachings. Moreover, he claimed that Chinese “teachings” emanate from the emperor, while religion refers to a relation between humans and god. Hence he advocated using the term “wu,” which referred to shamanistic practices, to translate religion.[34] However, Chinese intellectuals of the time basically ignored Peng’s translation, and perhaps due to the unique situation of China and its relation to the world and Japan during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Japanese translations played a major role in the

foundation of the modern Chinese lexicon. During the mid- and late-1890s scholars such as Huang Zunxian and Kang Youwei borrowed the Japanese compound “shūkyō,” but their aim was not quite to translate the Western concept of religion. Initially, the term “zongjiao” went from referring exclusively to Buddhism to referring to Confucianism, but now as a national ideology. The mediation of the nation-state and the world-system implies a change along the lines of what Isomae calls the shift from practice to belief, but as we have seen, the nationstate requires more than mere belief. It requires some way of transforming belief into obligation towards and even action for the nation. Thus Confucianism played the role of Jinja Shinto in the Japanese case. Liang Qichao and the Use of Religion-Buddhism for the Nation-State However, in China, intellectuals did not confront a tension between morality and religion. When Anesaki Masaharu invited Kang Youwei’s student Liang Qichao to speak about “religious reform in China,” Liang used the term zongjiao to discuss the Confucian religion, and defined it in the following manner. “Religion (zongjiao) is the medicine with which one molds the brains of citizens.”[35] Hence Liang was not concerned with separating religion from the state even in theory. As Chen Hsi-yüan points out, although Kang and Liang compared Confucianism to Christianity as they made their argument, they understood these as related to some type of political and geographical divisions rather than relating to notions of transcendence. Moreover, critics of Kang Youwei’s position would often suggest some other doctrine, such as Buddhism, as a national ideology. In other words, because they did not have a clear concept of “religion,” they did not really question whether Confucianism was a religion. Kang Youwei and his disciple Liang Qichao attempted to transform the Qing Empire into a modern nation-state from the inside by persuading the Guangxu emperor to implement reforms. This was the plan of their famous 100 Days Reform, which ended in a coup d’état by the Empress Dowager and the execution of 12 reformers. At this time, Kang Youwei and Liang Qichao were among those who fled to Japan and after this Liang Qichao became one of the first Chinese intellectuals to use the Western concept of religion. As Marianne Bastid-Brugière explains: From the second half of the year 1899, as his level of proficiency in Japanese increased, Liang Qichao became capable of reading a larger variety of publications about Japanese and other foreign countries’ histories, morality and political science. Suddenly, his idea of zongjiao changed and took on the same content of the European concept of religion. In other words, it was limited to referring to the realm of faith and the sacred and to beliefs and practices associated with the existence of a supra-sensible reality. From the year 1901, the term “zongjiao” was fixed in Liang’s texts: it referred to the Western concept of religion; it no longer was a general term for thought or ideology. [36]

Interestingly, it is precisely around this time that Liang becomes critical of Kang Youwei’s conception of Confucianism as a religion and begins to promote Buddhism. Chang Hao notes that Liang was probably influenced by Huang Zongxian as he formulated his critique of Kang’s Confucianism,[37] but his reconceptualization of religion also owes to his interaction with Japanese intellectuals.[38]

Although Liang rejected promoting Confucianism as a religion, he searched for a new public faith and discussed this in his essay, “The Relationship between Religion and Governing Society,”[39] published in December, 1902, in Xinmin Congbao. From this essay we can understand Liang’s positive views on religion and the role of religion in relation to politics. Possibly influenced by Kato Hiroyuki, he begins the essay by affirming that although religion is not a necessary component of civilization, China has not yet attained such a high level of civilization and hence religion is essential. Liang then asks the natural question: If China needed a religion, which religion should it adopt? First Liang considers Confucianism, but analyzes the Chinese characters making up the compound “Confucian religion” (kong jiao) and now claimed that the second character in this compound (jiao), which is also used to form the term religion (zongjiao), does not refer to religion, but to education (jiaoyu). Hence Confucianism cannot serve as a new public faith because it emphasizes practice and not belief. Liang then considers Christianity and claims that although this religion helped the Europeans and Americans develop strong states, it is not appropriate for conditions in China. He concludes that Buddhism could be a possible religion for China. Liang provides a number of reasons to support Buddhism, and many of these points echo Inoue Enryō’s ideas and anticipate Zhang Taiyan’s respective discussions of Buddhism. First Liang claims that unlike most religions, Buddhism does not promote superstition. He draws an analogy between religions that posit a creator whose knowledge surpasses human beings and a despotic regime that claims that the common people cannot see the laws. Unlike other religions, Liang opines that Buddhism stresses understanding and the possibility of people becoming the Buddha. By emphasizing that people become the Buddha through understanding, Liang echoes Inoue’s emphasis on interiority, but links such a gesture to equality. In short, while other religions are based on a distinction between the leader of the religion and the common people, in Buddhism the religious master, namely the Buddha, and the followers of the religion are equal.[40] Because Buddhism is based on equality and also helps to cultivate human morality, Liang believes that Buddhism could serve both to promote order and to motivate people to political action and specifically action oriented toward nation-building. Liang tries to motivate people toward human action through Buddhism and like the supporters of State Shinto and Anesaki, he invokes belief to promote a new type of practice, defending or serving a nation-state. Zhang Taiyan’s discourse on religion appears to conform to the same logic, but he has a different idea of the nation as he uses Buddhism to support a vision of revolutionary self-sacrifice. Zhang’s reading of religion goes against the predominant gesture in the late Qing to rationalize religion and taps into precisely an irrational force to promote revolutionary action and to develop a critique of the state. Zhang Taiyan’s Idea of Religion as Revolution and Critique Zhang Taiyan is best known for being an anti-Manchu revolutionary and his thoughts about religion are linked to this revolutionary project. He had been involved in reform movements and was always skeptical of the reformers' attempts to turn Confucianism into a national

religion. He began to attack the reformers' position more vehemently after the failure of the 100 Days Reform of 1898 and especially after the Boxer Rebellion in 1900. These incidents caused Zhang and some other reform-oriented intellectuals to become critical of the Qing court and seek its revolutionary overthrow. After the failure of the 100 Days Reform, Zhang went to Japan, where he was introduced to Japanese writings including those of Anesaki Masaharu. During this period, Zhang’s most famous work was a Book of Urgency (Qiu shu), which he revised a number of times. In the second edition, which was published in 1904, Zhang added an essay called “The Origin of Religion, (Yuanjiao)” the first part of which was basically a translation of a section of Anasaki Masaharu’s An Outline of the Study of Religion (Shūkyōgaku gairon). Zhang translated the basic idea of Anesaki’s work, namely, that religion is part of human nature, but he omitted explanations of Schopenhauer. Kobayashi explains that Zhang was not interested in the more existential aspects of Anesaki’s work because Schopenhauer was relatively unknown in China before 1904, when Wang Guowei famously introduced his works.[41] Anesaki’s use of Schopenhauer was also an attempt to transcend the constraints of the material world and Zhang became increasingly interested in the problem of transcendence and Buddhism after his traumatic jail experience. In 1903, Zhang was sentenced to jail for three years for writing and publishing seditious essays and disrespecting the Qing emperor. As soon as he entered jail, both Zhang Taiyan and his younger revolutionary cohort Zou Rong constantly contemplated death.[42] Zhang noted that when he and Zou first saw the “inhuman” way in which the foreign guards treated the prisoners, he told Zou that it would be better to commit suicide than to be humiliated by white people in a foreign jail. They each knew that if one of them died, it would cause a significant scandal, and officials would be more lenient to the one who survived. Hence Zhang and Zou each offered to sacrifice in order to save the other. Committing suicide was not a simple task, since, as Zhang explains in an essay about his jail experience, they were not allowed to take any pills or knives into their cells. Zhang thus resolved to fast himself to death. After seven days without food, Zhang notes that he was vomiting blood, “since when one does not eat, blood rises.” However, a fellow inmate, who knew what Zhang was trying to do, told him that fasting for seven days is insufficient to end one’s life. He explained that people who take drugs sometimes do not eat for forty-two days, and even if they are dizzy, vomit, and have diarrhea, they do not die. Upon hearing this, Zhang decided to eat again, but notes that the food was so bad and since the husks of grain were not removed, he could even see them in his excrement. Because of these conditions, out of five hundred inmates about one hundred and sixty died every year. The harsh conditions associated with bad food and a monotonous living style[43] were clearly important in initiating the conceptual shift we see in Zhang’s thought about religion and Buddhism. Inmates in jail were not allowed to have people bring common books to them; only scriptures were allowed. A member of the Chinese Society of Education (Zhongguo Jiaoyuhui) in Shanghai visited Zhang every week and asked him if he needed anything. Zhang replied that he wanted to read the Discourse on the Stages of Concentration Practice (C:Yuqie

shidi lun, S: Yogācārabhūmi śāstra) and so another member of the Society, Jiang Zhiyou found these texts in his library and passed them to Zhang Taiyan.[44] Zhang avidly read the Buddhist scriptures when he was in jail, and it was probably the difficult conditions in jail that led him to seek transcendence and search within himself. Zhang Taiyan came out of jail on June 29, 1906 and the Revolutionary Alliance led by Sun Yat-sen sent people to ask Zhang to come to Tokyo to edit the revolutionary People’s Journal (Minbao). Given that the publicity surrounding his jail tenure had made him a notorious revolutionary and future conflicts with the Qing government were inevitable, Zhang accepted the position of editor and left for Tokyo on the eve of June 29th. Zhang had been to Tokyo twice before, but this time was different since he was a revered revolutionary. Minbao was a revolutionary journal, which published essays by famous antiManchu activists such as Hu Hanmin and Wang Jingwei, who wrote about a variety of topics related to revolutionary politics. However, Zhang’s essays are unique since in many of his famous writings in this journal, he discusses Buddhism. In November, 1906, Zhang published his first detailed discussion of Yogācāra Buddhism in an essay called “On Establishing Religion (Jianli zongjiaolun).” This essay develops a Buddhist framework to evaluate religions and Zhang uses Yogācārin principles to deconstruct the mundane world and eventually develop a discourse that identifies the smaller self with a larger self. Zhang begins by following a Yogācārin analysis to dissolve both the subject and the object and this deconstruction extends to political institutions as well. This leaves him with the problem, however, of putting his principles into action and he thus needs to construct a subject who would realize both revolution and negation. Towards the end of the essay he affirms some notion of subjectivity and identification with living things. Unlike in Liang’s discourse, Zhang’s more serious study of Yogācāra Buddhism stemming from his jail experience eventually enables him a certain critical distance from contemporary political structures which he later reproaches. In his previous essay on religions in A Book of Urgency (Qiu Shu), he had already accepted the modern idea of religion as having to do with transcendence and as a concept separate from particular religions. But in “On Establishing a Religion,” Zhang, like Liang Qichao, evaluates various religions based on criteria that he lays down in the beginning of the essay: One cannot determine whether a religion is base or exalted a priori. I take as a standard that religion should not lose truth (zhen) above and it should help the people’s morality below.[45]

It is precisely the gap between these two principles, the above and the below, that separates Zhang’s more profound reading of Buddhism from Liang and others’ more instrumental use of it. Zhang will at times defend Buddhism in terms of something like national morality. He expresses the need for Buddhism in relation to morality in a manner that also shows the historical specificity of his interpretation. Today’s world is not that of the Zhou, Qin, Han, or Wei dynasties. Those times were simple and undifferentiated and so, even Confucius and Lao Zi’s words people were sufficient to transform the people’s customs. Today things are different. The idea of the six paths[46] and the transformation of hell are not useful. If one does not say that there is no life, one cannot get rid of the fear of death. If one does not break the idea of possessions, one cannot get rid of the

worship of money. If one does not talk of equality (pingdeng) then one cannot get rid of the mind of the slave. If one does not say that all things are the Buddha, then one cannot get rid of the mind of retreating. If one does not hold up the purity of the three wheels [the body, speech and the mind, shen, kou, yi] one will not be able to renounce false virtue (dese).[47]

Note that Zhang selects the more philosophical aspects of Yogācāra Buddhism, excluding the complex discussions of hell, which would involve a completely different metaphysics. Moreover, he invokes religion and Buddhism in response to a number of social and political problems, including commodification, the worship of money, and the fear of death and lack of autonomy. However, the logic of Zhang’s discussion of Buddhism goes beyond such explicit links between national or revolutionary morality. In particular, like Kiyozawa Manshi, Zhang will at times confront the state with “truth,” but, partly because in China there was less of a distinction between religion and morality, Zhang’s confrontation will be more direct. Zhang notes that “any philosophy that creates a religion establishes some thing as an ontological ground (benti).”[48] He shows that the “ontological ground,” the identical subjectobject posited by Yogācāra Buddhism, is capable of accounting for the world of subjects and objects, while showing that the world of objects is ultimately illusory, and that these illusions conceal a more primordial ethical subject. Zhang uses the above framework to discredit various religions, including Christianity, pantheism,[49] and “lower” religions that advocate worshiping fire or various material objects: One says that the way (dao) is in barnyard grass and in excrement and mud, but this does not mean that we can take barnyard grass, excrement and mud as the dao. One says that the wall and tiles are Buddha nature, but this does not mean that Buddha-nature stops with the walls and tiles. If one takes barnyard grass, excrement, mud, wall and tiles as being the sole place of the dao and Buddha-nature, this is the fault of the understanding. It is not just lower religions that are like this; the high religions such as Vedanta, Christianity and Islam also take Brahma or Jehovah as the sole place of the dao or the sole place of God and thus are limited by the same reality. They want to take one thing in reality to cover the infinite without boundaries; in the end, they cannot leave the understanding. They are forced to make broad statements which are wild and say that it [god] has a root outside of phenomena.[50]

In this passage, Zhang invokes the famous statement in the “Knowledge Wandering North” (Zhi beiyou) chapter of the Zhuang Zi stating that the way (dao) “is in barnyard grass” and “in excrement and mud.”[51] In the above passage, Zhang echoes Zhuang Zi’s point that although one “must not expect to find the way (dao) in any particular place, the way does not lie outside of things.”[52] The key point here is again similar to that of German idealists, Inoue Enryō and Anesaki Masaharu, insofar as that Zhang rejects spiritual relying on any type of external thing. He turns his gaze on consciousness or to some transcendental source, which must logically precede the reified world of things. Given that religion emerges to help deal with the frustrations of the finite world of things, Zhang contends that Vedanta and Christianity posit a thing that is outside of the phenomenal world. But this positing of a non-phenomenal being that appears to have power over the world of the senses is created by the grasping self and serves only to reproduce its basic structures. [53] Zhang eventually uses the above framework to attack political institutions such as the state.

We cannot enter into the details of his project here, but Zhang uses a Buddhist term, self-nature (C: zixing, S: svabhāva), to show that the state has no real existence, since only atoms or individuals do. In Yogācārin theory, atoms or individual things do not really have self-nature, since they are empty. Zhang points out that when making an argument about individuals and the state, even if one takes atoms to be real, one must say that individuals have no self-nature, since individuals can be broken down into cells. However, when we limit our discussion to political entities, such as states and groups, the individual is real, since cells do not enter into the discourse. Here is Zhang’s often quoted passage: The state is made up of the people and hence each person temporarily has reality, but there is no reality for the state so to speak. It is not just the state, but in a village, a tribe, a group, or an assembly, only the individuals have real selfnature, while the village, tribe, group or assembly have no real self-nature. In short, the individual is real and the group is illusory. This is true for all matters and the examples are too numerous to count.[54]

In making the above argument, Zhang is of course criticizing the reformers who stressed the state and perhaps even the New Government Policies described above, both of which bestowed more reality to the group (qun) than to the individual. Moreover, given that he wrote and presented this text in Tokyo among radical Japanese scholars such as Kōtoku Shusui (1871–1911), he may also have had in mind people such as Inoeu Enryō, who attempted to use Buddhism in order to support the state. Zhang’s critique of the state eventually became part of a vision of a utopian alternative to the modern world. This alternative is developed in an essay that Zhang published in the same year, “On the Five Negations (Wu wu lun). “Put simply, with the five negations, Zhang refers to: no government, no villages or groups, no self, no sentient beings, and no world. He claims that even the radical political activists, such as the anarchists, have not been sufficiently self-reflective and have thus failed to grasp that problems related to the state and imperialism stem from phantoms generated by consciousness. In Zhang’s view true liberation is not possible without a negation of the self construed along Buddhist lines because the power behind modern institutions derives from the progression of karmic illusion. Zhang’s Reverting Back to Subjectivity and Identification For the most part, Zhang uses Yogācāra Buddhism to make relative the mundane world and to show how oppositions such as those between subject and object, along with institutions, such as the state, are produced by the transformations of consciousness. However, towards the end of his essay on religion, Zhang refrains from following Yogācārins to declare the self and world empty and must somehow recreate an agent of transformation. Zhang’s position is similar to Kiyozawa Manshi’s; they both affirm an identification between world and the self, which potentially threatens the state. However, partially because the separation between state and politics was not as salient in the late Qing as in the Meiji period, Zhang attempts to make Buddhism overstretch its limits and catapult religion into the space of political practice. In this context, he re-evaluates primordial delusion or confusion in a positive light and departs from standard readings of Yogācārin philosophy. In Yogācārin philosophy, from the standpoint of ālaya consciousness or the storehouse

consciousness, there is no self, no other, and no things and, in fact, there is not even consciousness as such. It is called the “storehouse consciousness” because it stores the seeds of karmic consciousness that produce our experiences and illusions. To the extent that we are not enlightened we do not experience the truth and non-duality of the storehouse consciousness and necessarily fall into the levels of consciousness that include distinctions between the subject and object. The storehouse consciousness represents a realm that can be theorized from other levels of consciousness, but experientially it can only be accessed by intense meditative states associated with Buddhist practice. Zhang may have had some similar types of experiences in jail, since we know that he was reciting the sutras daily during that period. However, in his essays during the Minbao period, Zhang emphasizes that Buddhism is not a philosophy of quietism and points out that it has practical applications. In a sense, Zhang anticipates criticisms that he received from fellow revolutionaries who chided him for ignoring issues related to the revolution. For example, Zhang responded to Meng An (Takeda Hanshi), a Japanese supporter of the Chinese revolution, in a letter he wrote in 1908, and asserted that Buddhism was not a religion that promoted passivity. However, already in “On Establishing a Religion (Jianli zhongjiao lun),” he urges the reader not to think of Buddhism as mere pacifism with no relation to revolution. At this point, Zhang argues against a total deconstruction of the subject and also expresses a discourse of identification, similar to but not identical with Liang’s. Zhang ties Buddhism to an active philosophy, but due to his long detour through Yogācāra, his goal not only transcends national boundaries, it promotes saving all sentient beings and not just humans. He notes that Buddhism is not a philosophy that promotes “hating the world” and writes: Buddhists do hate the world, but the world they hate is just the world of implements (qi) and not the world of things with feeling. Because the world of things with feeling has fallen into the world of things, one must rescue them out of the three worlds.[55]

Zhang highlights a distinction between sentient beings and the material world in a way that was not present in the original Buddhist philosophical system. Although Yogācārins did distinguish between sentient beings (youqing/zhongsheng, sattva) and the natural world, they considered both to be empty. Zhang’s interpretation enables him to target the world of things from the standpoint of life. He follows Yogācārins in claiming that getting rid of the self involves getting rid of delusion; however, he then distinguishes between active and passive relations to delusion. In short, Zhang suggests that by tapping into the primordial movement of confusion, one can act spontaneously to save all sentient beings from becoming objects. However, at this point, Zhang faces the same problem as Kiyozawa Manshi; namely, how to turn this identification with all sentient beings into political practice. Zhang appears to go further than Kiyozawa in that he will position himself against existing powers and affirm a revolutionary nationalism. But this was a position not necessarily connected to his Buddhist philosophy of negation. After all, he was a revolutionary before he embraced Buddhism. His Buddhist voice is perhaps expressed more fully when he connects Buddhism to anarchism and enters into dialogue with Japanese anarchists such as Kōtoku Shūsui (1871–1911). Hence he

calls for the negation of not only existence but all political structures, such as the state. However, Zhang would never develop a concrete plan for how to accomplish such a radical goal and concluded that in a world of imperialism, the immediate task was to construct a nation-state. Like Anesaki and Liang Qichao, Zhang sees religion as a means to overcome the material world, but instead of legitimating the existing state, it becomes a means to conceive of a world outside of the existing nation-state in search of more just institutions. While it was immediately linked to a particular movement of revolutionary nationalism, his Buddhist voice pointed beyond this to an anarchic utopia. CONCLUSION At one level, Zhang Taiyan and Kiyozawa Manshi appear to end up like Liang Qichao, Inoue Enryō, and Anesaki Masaharu, subordinating the potential of religious interiority and transcendence to the imperatives of the nation-state. However, their philosophies of absolute negation potentially provide a critical distance from existing institutions. This is what I characterize as a move away from the politics of nationalism to the abstract mode of capital, here grasped as the subject-object=ontological source. When Zhang searches for anarchic utopia, he confronts this abstract mode of domination and seeks to go beyond it, at least in thought. We can see elements of this impulse in Anesaki and Inoue, but given the separation of religion and politics, the irrational element in their theory of religion was either relegated to the private realm or incorporated into nationalist discourse. In the context of Japanese intellectual history, we can see the affinity between these discourses of irrational resistance to capitalist modernity combined with an affirmation of the nation-state to attempts to develop a vision of socialism based on the emperor in the 1930s. Zhang’s attempts to turn the Buddhist critique of existence into a theory of political transformation to some extent anticipates such discourses of the pro-War Japanese intellectuals of the 1930s and 1940s, such as Nishitani Keiji, who attempted to mobilize a concept of nothingness in order to negate modernity, but interestingly and anomalously, his discourse resists the attempt to subsume the irrational ontological source into any corporate body. Zhang’s Buddhist discourse transcends anthropocentrism and delves into the ontological ground of confused existence and aims to liberate all sentient beings. However, unlike late Meiji Japan, which one could say was a period in which capitalism was fairly developed, the late Qing represents a period in which the state and capital had yet to be firmly established. This transitional situation may have contributed to the contradictory nature of Zhang’s discourse. Unlike Kiyozawa, he affirmed both extreme nationalism based on Han identity and anarchism, and used Buddhism and religion to support the former and to justify the latter. Hence we see how the modern concept of religion separates belief from practice and then reconstitutes practice in relation to the nation-state. At the same time, however, it opens a space in from which to imagine possibilities against and perhaps beyond the nation-state and perhaps eventually beyond capital as well. Zhang’s works clearly express this contradiction between pro-state and anti-state uses of religion and unconsciously touches the boundaries of

capital. Given his commitment to anti-Manchu revolutionary nationalism, he will often have to balance more particular narratives of identification with universal impulses related to religion. This was especially important given that he was writing in a context where people like Takada Hanshi would constantly demand him to link his theory with immediate projects and translate his Buddhist voice in terms of the people’s or nation’s voice. In many ways, proponents of radical change in China and Japan today, about one hundred years after late Meiji and late Qing, face a similar contradiction between struggling for national autonomy, which one would gloss as independence from a crumbling U.S.-dominated world order, and a call to negate the conditions of such global orders. On the other hand, China and Japan have each emerged from the twentieth century as further integrated into a global capitalist world, which itself has shifted from fordist to post-fordist and transnational modes of capital accumulation. The question for the future is perhaps to what extent, in these new conditions, the impulse to transcendence and negation can find political movements that can effect radical transformation. NOTES 1. For a discussion of the process by which some of these terms were introduced into Japan, see Douglas Howland, Translating the West: Language and Political Reason in Nineteenth Century Japan (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2001). With respect to China, see Lydia H. Liu, Translingual Practice: Language, Culture and Translated Modernity— China 1900–1937 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995). Liu’s book has an appendix which lists many of the terms that were used by Japanese and Chinese to translate terms from modern Western languages.

2. Talal Asad, The Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1993), p. 39.

3. Indeed, Arthur and Postone compare it to Hegel’s Spirit. See Moishe Postone, Time, Labor and Social Domination, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993) and Chris Arthur, Marx’s New Dialectic (Leiden: Brill, 2005).

4. Georg Lukács, Geschichte und Klassenbewusstsein, in Georg Lukács, Werke, Früheschriften 2 (Berlin: Herman Luchterhand Verlag GmbH, 1968), p. 348. Eng trans. History and Class Consciousness, Rodney Livingston trans. (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1971), p. 165.

5. Lukács, Gr., p. 350, Eng. p. 166. 6. Prasenjit Duara refers to this problem as the aporia of time; see Duara, Rescuing History from the Nation: Questioning Narratives of Modern China and India (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), p. 28.

7. Lukács, Gr., p. 301, Eng., p. 123. 8. Isomae Junichi, Kindai nihon shūkyō gensetsu to sono keifu: shūkyō/kokka/shintō [Origins of the Concepts of Religion in Modern Japan: Religion/State/Shinto] (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 2003), p. 32.

9. Di Yongjun, Hanyu “Zongjiao” yi ci de youlai yu yanbian [The origin and transformation of the Chinese word “zongjiao”] in Zhongguo zongjiao [Chinese Religion] Volume 8 (2004), p. 67. See also Chen Hsi-yüan, “‘Zongjiao’: yige jindai wenhuashi shang de guanjian ci” [“Religion”: a keyword in modern Chinese cultural history], in Xin shixue [New Historiography] volume 13.4, 2002, pp. 37–66, p. 47.

10. Nakamura Hajime, Bukkyōgo daijiten [The Great Dictionary of Buddhist Terms] (Tokyo: Tokyo shoseki, 1981), p. 645. Cited from Isomae Junichi, Kindai nihon shūkyō gensetsu to sono keifu, pp. 35–36.

11. Isomae, p. 34. 12. Ibid., p. 36. 13. Kobayashi Takeshi, Shō heirin to meiji shichō mō hitotsu no kindai [Zhang Taiyan and Meiji Intellectual Trends: Another Modernity], (Tokyo, Kenbun shuppan, 2006), pp. 72–73.

14. For a discussion of the way in which various intellectuals in Meiji Japan were critical of religion from the standpoint of state-morality, see Richard M. Reitan, Making a Moral Society: Ethics and the State in Meiji Japan, (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2010), Chapter 3.

15. Hiroshi Miura, The Life and Thought of Kanzo Uchimura, 1861–1930, (Michigan: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company 1997), pp. 37–38.

16. Sueki Fumihiko, Kindai nihon to bukkyo: kindainihon no shisō/shikō II [Modern Japan and Buddhism: Modern Japanese Thought, vol. 2] (Tokyo: Transview, 2004), p. 28.

17. Kathleen M. Staggs, “Defend the Nation and Love the Truth: Inoue Enryō and the Revival of Meiji Buddhism,” Monumenta Nipponica, Vol. 38, No. 3 (Autumn, 1983), pp. 251–281, 258.

18. Kiri Paramore, “Modern Ideology and Anti-Christian Discourse,” unpublished manuscript, p. 5. 19. See Sueki Fumihiko Meiji shisōka ron: kindainihon no shisō/shikō I, p. 65. 20. Isomae, pp. 49–50. 21. Staggs, p. 272. 22. Cited in Sueki, Kindai bukkyo to nihon, p. 33. Kobayashi contends that opposition between spirit and matter was often translated as an opposition between the individual and politics or the state. He cites the Meiji thinker, Tsunashima Ryōsen (1873– 1907), as evidence. “I found myself for the first time in the midst of God . . . one must say that there is little meaning in being loyal to the ruler and in patriotism and that these things have little basis.” Kobayashi, p. 74.

23. Cited from Sueki, p. 33. 24. Cited from Isomae, p. 47. 25. Isomae, p. 46. 26. Anesaki Masaharu, Shūkyōgaku gairon [An Outline of the Study of Religion]) (Tokyo: Kokushokan kokai, 1982, first published in 1900), p. 1. Cited from Isomae, p. 57.

27. Anesaki, p. 569. 28. Indeed, he is renowned for translating Edward Von Hartmann and Arthur Schopenhauer’s respective works into Japanese. 29. Cited from Isomae, p. 128. Isomae points out how this is similar to Inoue Tetsujiro’s idea of the unity between phenomena and reality. “The aspect of the world with differences is called phenomena (genshō) and the aspect of the world that expresses equality is called reality (jitsuzai) and therefore to say that difference is the same as reality is the same as to say that phenomena is the same as reality.”

30. Isomae, p. 121. 31. Anesaki Masaharu, Sankyō kaidō no kansatsu [Examination of the Commonalities of the Three Religions] 1896 in Shūkyō to kyōiku [Religion and Education], (Hakubun kan, 1912), p. 553. Cited from Isomae, p. 60.

32. Isomae, p. 129. 33. Chen Hsi-yüan, op. cit. pp. 48–49. 34. Ibid., pp. 40–41. 35. Ibid., p. 54. 36. Marian Bastid-Brugière, Liang Qichao yu zongjiao wenti [Liang Qichao and the Problem of Religion], in Xiajian Zhishu (Hazama Naoki), ed., Liang Qichao Mingzhi riben, Xifang [Liang Qichao, Meiji Japan, the West] (Beijing: Shehui kexue wenxian chubanshe, 2001), pp. 416–17.

37. Chang Hao, Liang Ch’i-ch’ao and Intellectual Transition in China 1890–1907 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1971), p. 230.

38. Bastid-Brugière suggests that Liang’s ideas of both state and religion were influenced by Kato Hiroyuki and other Japanese scholars (Bastid-Brugière, p. 415). We clearly know that this is true with respect to the state; however, given that Kato Hiroyuki was so adamantly against all religions, including Buddhism, other scholars, such as Inoue Enryo, probably influenced Liang to a greater degree.

39. Liang Qichao, Lun Fojiao yu qunzhi zhi guanxi [The Relationship Between Buddhism and Governing Society], in Yinbingshi wenji [Collected Essays from an Ice-drinker’s Studio] (Taibei: Taiwan Zhonghua shuju, 1970[1902], no. 10), pp. 45–

52.

40. Ibid., p. 46. 41. Kobayashi, pp. 80–81. 42. Zhang’s jail experience is documented in Zhang Taiyan nianpu changbian [Chronology of the Life of Zhang Taiyan], pp. 191–92. Tang quotes from an essay in which Zhang published this information after he was released from jail in a journal called Han Zhi [The Han Flag], vol. 2, 1907.

43. Other than work and visits from foreign missionaries on Sundays, prisoners had very few activities. Tang Zhijun, ed., Zhang Taiyan zhenglun xuanji [Zhang Taiyan: Selected Political Writings] (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1977), pp. 262–63.

44. Ibid., p. 198. 45. Zhang Taiyan, Jianli zongjiaolun [On Establishing a Religion], in Gegudingxin de zheli: Zhang Taiyan wenxuan [The Philosophy of Abolishing the Old and Introducing the New: A Selection of Zhang Taiyan’s Writings] (Shanghai: Shanghaiyuandong chubanshe, 1996), p. 202.

46. Hell, place of demons, animals, Asura, human beings and heaven. 47. Zhang Taiyan, Jianli zongjiaolun, p. 212. 48. Ibid., p. 198. 49. Zhang also criticizes pantheism in his “On Atheism,” which he published in the same year as “On the Establishment of Religion.”

50. Zhang, Gegudingxin de zheli, p. 202. 51. See Zhuang Zi yigu [Translation and Interpretation of the Zhuang Zi]) (Shanghai: Shanghaiguji chubanshe, 1998), pp. 438–439. For an English translation of the passage, see Burton Watson, trans., The Complete Works of Chuang Tsu. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1968), pp. 240–241.

52. Ibid, Chin., p. 439, Eng., p. 241. 53. Since the non-phenomenal being cannot become an object of sense, in Yogācārin terminology, this would be an illusion produced by the sixth level of consciousness. Yogācārin texts often provide the example of a dream in which the sixth consciousness is producing images even though the other five senses are not directly involved in perceiving (vedanā, shou).

54. Ibid., p. 360. 55. Zhang, Gegudingxin de zheli, p. 209.

Chapter Five

Collaborating, Acquiescing, Resisting: Early Twentieth-Century Chinese Transculturation of Japanese Literature Karen L. Thornber

Intellectuals and cultural products circulated vigorously in early twentieth-century East Asia. After Japan defeated China in the Sino-Japanese War (1894–1895) and Russia in the RussoJapanese War (1904–1905) and became a semicolonial, colonial, and world power, hundreds of thousands of educated Chinese, Koreans, and Taiwanese streamed to Japan’s cities.[1] They went primarily for practical training in engineering, medicine, science, and technology, but also for political reasons or to study the arts. Paralleling these flows, thousands of early twentieth-century Japanese educators, journalists, artists, scholars, and other professionals traveled to China, Korea, and Taiwan, drawn by economic opportunities as well as by curiosity about the lands and peoples of Japan’s new dominion. Educated Chinese travelers to Korea and Taiwan were not as numerous as those to Japan, but they too played important roles in intra-East Asian cultural dialogues, as did Koreans in China and Taiwan, and Taiwanese in China and Korea. Countless networks of students, political activists, artists, and cultural products grew out of these multi-directional border crossings. Most accounts of early twentieth-century East Asian intellectuals who traveled and lived abroad have focused on their contributions to state formation and economic growth in their homelands. This policy-oriented approach overlooks many of the rapid and dynamic transcultural contestations that took place throughout (semi)colonial East Asia. Modern Japanese literature was central to these struggles. To be sure, the metropole’s music, fine arts, popular culture, sports, and a variety of media phenomena such as the moga (modern girl) fascinated Chinese, Koreans, and Taiwanese, who actively reconfigured these forms in intriguing ways.[2] At the same time, a number of Japanese eagerly consumed and dynamically reconfigured contemporary Chinese, Korean, and Taiwanese literary products— short stories and essays by the Chinese literary giant Lu Xun (1881–1936), for instance—were popular in Japan, and Chinese, Koreans, and Taiwanese regularly read and reconfigured one another’s creative production.[3] Nonetheless, East Asian and especially Chinese engagement with Japanese literature overshadowed most other intra-East Asian cultural vectors. Although generally depicted as reenacting other literatures—classical Chinese literature through the Meiji (1868–1912) and even Taishō (1912–1926) periods, and Western literatures

from Meiji to the present day—Japanese literature in fact was one of early twentieth-century East Asia’s most widely traveled and frequently transculturated creative products, where transculturation is understood as the “many different processes of assimilation, adaptation, rejection, parody, resistance, loss, and ultimately transformation” of cultures and cultural products.[4] By most estimates, Chinese, Koreans, and Taiwanese read more Japanese drama, poetry, and fiction during the first decades of the twentieth century than their predecessors had in the previous thousand years combined; they continued reading large quantities of this literature through Japan’s defeat in 1945.[5] But unable or unwilling to let the texts they consumed stand intact, East Asian writers—and Chinese in particular—transculturated thousands of Japanese creative works. They recast everything from a handful of pre-Meiji literary texts to large numbers of late nineteenth-century political novels, plays, and shintaishi (poems in the new style), “I-novels” (shishōsetsu) of the 1900s and the 1910s, short-short stories of the early 1920s, proletarian and modernist poetry and prose of the late 1920s and early 1930s, and battlefront literature of the late 1930s and early 1940s. They transculturated interpretively—by writing literary criticism (understood in its broadest sense as discussions about literature regardless of approach), interlingually—by translating and adapting (translating very loosely), and intertextually—by weaving transposed fragments from predecessors into their own creative works. Involving a broad range of authors, genres, styles, and topics, transculturations of Japanese literature were a crucial subset of early twentiethcentury intra-East Asian cultural negotiation.[6] Engaging with Japanese literature was complicated by Japan’s dual position as gateway to coveted Western knowledge and as colonial and semicolonial oppressor. Both canonical and today nearly forgotten Chinese, Korean, and Taiwanese writers—many of whom had studied in Japan and some of whom had close ties with the Japanese literary world—blurred collaboration, acquiescence, and resistance by at once affirming and denying Japanese cultural capital and authority. They did the former by permanently incorporating Japanese literature into their own cultural fabrics via literary criticism, adaptations/translations, and intertextualizations and the latter by picking apart Japanese creative works, if not dismembering them entirely. Our understanding of empire, and the Japanese empire in particular, derives in good part from accounts that focus on the doctrines and methods of imperial state formation as absorbed under duress or voluntarily by colonial and semicolonial peoples. This absorption has been presented as occurring in two principal forms. Imperial powers, often with the support of local collaborators, impose policies that enable them to increase their political and economic penetration; these policies generally exploit colonial and semicolonial resources and frequently attempt to assimilate colonial and semicolonial peoples.[7] In contrast, colonial and semicolonial peoples, as part of national self-strengthening, enthusiastically seek out from imperial powers what they regard as superior ideas, practices, scholarly fields, and institutions, including technology and medicine, social and political doctrines, and language reform.[8] Both modalities of foreign-system integration, while necessarily entailing transculturation, presume a clear hierarchy, whether of oppressor/oppressed or

benefactor/supplicant. More fluid forms of transculturation also proliferate in empire, particularly in what I have identified as artistic contact nebulae.[9] Artistic contact nebulae are creative and physical spaces where dancers, dramatists, musicians, painters, sculptors, writers, and other artists from cultures, societies, or nations in unequal power relationships grapple with and transculturate one another’s creative output in atmospheres of increased reciprocity and diminished hierarchies of authority. Among the most vibrant subsets of artistic contact nebulae are literary contact nebulae, active sites of readerly contact, writerly contact, and textual contact, intertwined modes of transculturation that depend to some degree on linguistic contact and often involve travel. Here “readerly contact” refers to reading creative texts (texts with aesthetic ambitions, imaginative writing) from cultures/nations in asymmetrical power relationships with one’s own, “writerly contact” to creative writers from conflicting societies interacting with one another, “textual contact” to transculturating creative texts in this environment (appropriating genres, styles, and themes, as well as transculturating individual literary works via the related and at times concomitant strategies of interpreting, adapting, translating, and intertextualizing), and “linguistic contact” to engaging with the language of the society oppressing or oppressed by one’s own.[10] The term “contact nebula” is inspired by the term “contact zone,” coined by Mary Louise Pratt to describe “social spaces where disparate cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in highly asymmetrical relations of domination and subordination.”[11] More specifically, the contact zone as Pratt understands it is “the space of imperial encounters, the space in which peoples geographically and historically separated come into contact with each other and establish ongoing relations, usually involving conditions of coercion, radical inequality, and intractable conflict . . . the term ‘contact’ foregrounds the interactive improvisational dimensions of imperial encounters so easily ignored or suppressed.”[12] Both East Asian artistic contact spaces and the spaces Pratt and others have designated “contact zones” are semi-borderless, ambiguous, and constantly changing, and thus are more accurately identified as “nebulae” than as “zones.” [13] But these East Asian spaces differ in two principal ways. Not unique to artistic contact spaces in (semi)colonial China, Korea, and Taiwan, these differences reveal underexamined facets of transculturation in empire, interpreted broadly. First, imperial encounters in early twentieth-century East Asia, far from occurring solely among peoples geographically, historically, and culturally distant (i.e., China, Japan, Korea, and Taiwan vis-à-vis America and Europe), instead were dominated by exchanges among regional neighbors with longstanding relationships. As is well known, China was the cultural center of East Asia until the late nineteenth century, and Korea was an active transmitter of Chinese as well as Korean culture to Japan. Internal chaos and foreign oppression in China, paired with Japan’s emergence as a (semi)colonial power at the end of the nineteenth century, radically transformed rather than introduced contacts among East Asian peoples and cultures. To be sure, early twentieth-century intra-East Asian artistic contact nebulae intermingled with contact spaces that more closely fit Pratt’s definition, namely, those where East Asian and

European/American peoples and cultural products engaged with one another and established ongoing if ambivalent relations. But scholarship that posits imperial encounters, let alone power imbalances, as necessarily occurring between the West and the Rest risks becoming ensnared in some of the same biases it deconstructs.[14] Second, as in other empires and postimperial spaces, transcultural encounters in intra-East Asian artistic contact nebulae, and literary contact nebulae in particular, rarely were characterized by the steep hierarchies promoted by official discourse or presupposed by (semi)colonial peoples. Instead, they were distinguished by atmospheres of relative reciprocity and diminished claims of authority. Whether visiting or residing in Tokyo, Beijing, Shanghai, Seoul, Taipei, or other East Asian cities, Japanese, Chinese, Korean, and Taiwanese writers regularly joined one another’s literary societies, published in one another’s periodicals, and became everything from superficial acquaintances to close friends. These myriad interactions in many cases resulted in intertwined literary cultures long before Japanese political authorities mandated the construction of such communities. But imperial discourse and embedded prejudices exacted their toll, complicating and often compromising artistic relationships. Many colonial and semicolonial dramatists, novelists, poets, and short story writers were troubled by the frequent failure of the metropolitan literary establishment to regard them as true equals. Understanding peoples and cultural products as traversing multiple polymorphous contact nebulae allows for deeper appreciation of the possibilities and nuances of transcultural negotiation. The future of comparative literature lies partly in exploring more fully the dynamics of literary contact spaces, understood broadly; the future of humanistic area studies lies partly in examining a broader range of cultural products in regional and global perspective. The current spotlight on habitually disregarded peoples and cultural phenomena— such as resident Koreans and their literature (in Japan), the Japanese-language compositions of colonial and even postcolonial Korean and Taiwanese writers, the Chinese-language compositions of Japanese writers in both the premodern and modern periods, and the heteroglossia of the Japanophone and the sinophone more generally—is welcome and long overdue. But we also need to look more closely at the rapid circulation, dislocation, and reconfiguration—particularly transculturation—of cultural products. Teasing out local, subnational, national, regional, and global networks of transculturation yields a clearer picture of the world’s artistic landscape and a sharper image of each of its deeply intertwined literatures. In the following pages I take up a key part of this project, focusing on textual contact in intraEast Asian literary contact nebulae, and the substantial early twentieth-century Chinese transculturation of modern Japanese literature in particular. I look at such highlights as Chinese writings on Japanese literature that expose the ambivalence of Chinese intellectuals vis-à-vis its consumption, as well as Chinese translations and intertextualizations of Japanese creative works on Chinese military defeats at the hands of the Japanese that reveal the contradictions inherent for Chinese in attempting at once to expose Japanese aggression and preserve national dignity. Each of these forms of transculturation grants insight into how Chinese grappled with

Japanese writings, underlining the chameleonic and contested role of literature in transcultural negotiations among societies in considerably uneven power relationships.[15] INTERPRETIVELY TRANSCULTURATING JAPANESE LITERATURE: FOLLOWING AND ESCHEWING METROPOLITAN TEMPLATES Literary criticism was a vital subset of early twentieth-century Chinese discourse. Chinese literary critics, like their counterparts elsewhere, often were prominent intellectuals, if not creative writers. Their evaluations of Japanese literature formed an important segment of their discussions of literatures from around the world, launched in the early twentieth century in part to introduce new ideas that would encourage artistic and national reforms.[16] Early twentiethcentury Chinese writings on Japanese literature, like those on many literatures, ranged from unabashed praise to unmitigated critique and from the intellectually rigorous to the impressionistic. At times, Chinese critics compared Japanese and local creative output and variously urged writers to eschew, be wary of, or follow metropolitan templates. More important, Chinese examinations of Japanese literature, even when ostensibly quite narrow in focus, often were concerned more with questions of cultural production and the nature of culture itself than with individual writers or creative works. More so than via many other media, transculturation via literary criticism provided impetus for sweeping assessments of the metropole, toward which critics often revealed great ambivalence. The Chinese intellectual Zhou Zuoren’s (1885–1967) essay “The Development of Japanese Fiction over the Last Thirty Years” (“Riben jin sanshinian xiaoshuo zhi fada,” 1918), the first substantial intra-East Asian examination of Japanese literature, touches on many of the topics that would concern East Asian writers and literature scholars for decades. Zhou Zuoren begins with comments on Japanese creativity, gives an overview of Japanese writings ranging from the early eleventh-century Tale of Genji (Genji monogatari) to Meiji political novels and discusses recent writers and literary trends.[17] He argues that if the Chinese wish to “cure” their fiction and create their own modern literature they must “imitate” foreign works, including those from Japan, just as Japanese “creatively imitated” first Chinese and then Western literatures: “We can say that in general Japanese culture is one of ‘creative imitation’ . . . [The English art critic Laurence Binyon has argued that] ‘believing Japanese art is nothing but an imitation of Chinese art shows a superficial understanding.’ This is also true when talking about Japanese literature.”[18] He urges the Chinese literary establishment to “start from the very beginning” by creating a Chinese Essence of the Novel (Shōsetsu shinzui, 1885), a critical work by the Japanese writer Tsubouchi Shōyō (1859–1935) that called for a new Japanese literature. According to Zhou Zuoren, an avid reader, critic, and translator of Japanese literature of all eras, the Chinese should not only acknowledge but also replicate Japanese strategies of imitation and ingenuity. Other intellectuals went so far as to argue that Chinese familiarity with Japanese cultural products would help determine the future of China itself. In his discussion of the Japanese writer Mushakōji Saneatsu’s (1885–1976) antiwar play The Dream of a Certain Young Man

(Aru seinen no yume, 1916) Lu Xun notes: I already mentioned that the aim of this play is to protest war. There’s no need for the translator to repeat himself. But I think there’ll be some readers who believe that because Japan is a nation that goes to war easily, the Japanese should become familiar with this play, but that the Chinese have no such need. I personally believe this couldn’t be farther from the truth: indeed, the Chinese people themselves aren’t skilled fighters, but they by no means curse war. . . . In discussions of Japan’s recent annexation of Korea we always say, “Korea is really our vassal state.” We should be afraid as long as we hear this kind of talk. I believe this play also can cure many of the chronic illnesses in traditional Chinese thought. Thus, translating this play into Chinese is a matter of great significance.[19]

Here and in other essays Lu Xun urges Chinese to take a closer look at Japanese literature; he believed that learning more about this corpus would help Chinese strengthen their nation. In contrast, the leading Chinese writer Ba Jin (1904–2005) scathingly attacked Japanese literature. In the essay “Some Irreverent Words” (“Ji duan bu gongjing de hua,” 1935) Ba Jin asks rhetorically: “It is said that literature in Japan already has developed to a surprising degree [particularly the popular novel (tsūzoku shōsetsu)] . . . which is all about love and chivalrous swordsmen. Doesn’t the popularity of this kind of novel . . . show that Japanese literature already has fallen to an astonishingly low level?”[20] He also calls dramas by the Japanese novelist and playwright Nagayo Yoshirō (1888–1961) “childish” and argues that they compare unfavorably with their Chinese counterparts; he claims that it is only because the Japanese have such low standards that they applaud Nagayo. Lashing out at Japanese naturalism, Ba Jin declares that in the work of Shimazaki Tōson (1872–1943), “one can find the worst examples [of exploiting others].”[21] Ba Jin concludes, “Japanese literature is not worth looking at . . . it’s a shame I can’t let [the celebrated Japanese writer] Akutagawa [Ryūnosuke, (1892–1927)] hear these irreverent words.”[22] Ba Jin also points in this essay to his frustration with Chinese engagement with modern Japanese literature. He has harsh words concerning Akutagawa’s literary production, announcing that he feels nothing but disgust when reading the Japanese writer and that only one or two stories in the hefty Collection of Writings by Akutagawa Ryūnosuke (Akutagawa Ryūnosuke shū, 1928) are worth rereading. To be sure, several of Akutagawa’s Chinese translators lamented that his texts were not as popular in China as might be expected, but Akutagawa in fact was one of the most frequently consumed and transculturated Japanese writers there.[23] “Some Irreverent Words” thus attacks not only Akutagawa but also Chinese adoration of this Japanese luminary. Even more important, Ba Jin, like many early twentieth-century Chinese intellectuals, mingled evaluations of Japanese creative texts with commentary on other Japanese art forms and on Japanese culture more generally. For instance, Ba Jin begins “Some Irreverent Words” with an abrasive evaluation of Japanese cultural production: It’s been eight years since I read [the Japanese writer Akutagawa’s] “Travel Along the Yangzi” [(Chōkō yūki, 1924). In this text, Akutagawa asked,] “What is there in contemporary China? Politics, scholarship, the economy, art, aren’t they all crumbling? Particularly art—since the mid-nineteenth century has there been a single work of which the Chinese could be proud?” This is what Akutagawa said ten years ago to his friend Nishimura [while in China]. . . . But I don’t know whether the brilliant Akutagawa, after returning home, also ever replaced the word “China” in his question with the word “Japan” and asked the Japanese [whether they had anything of which to be proud].[24]

Ba Jin’s answer, not surprisingly, is a resounding “no,” and to strengthen his position he cites Japanese scholars who have called attention to shortcomings in Japanese culture; Japanese critiques of their own creative products are presumably more credible than those from outsiders. Discussing deficiencies in Japanese music, painting, and literature, “Some Irreverent Words” attacks a multitude of Japanese creative forms. Yet, like so many colonial and semicolonial critics, Ba Jin’s familiarity with the metropolitan corpus paradoxically undermines his diatribe, in part by allowing it to frame the terms of discourse.[25] For his part, the Chinese writer and translator Han Shiheng linked perceived deficiencies in Japanese literature and the Japanese literary establishment with those in the Japanese national character. In the preface of Modern Japanese Fiction (Xiandai Riben xiaoshuo, 1929), his collection of ten Japanese creative works in Chinese translation, he vilifies Japanese literature and argues that its weaknesses stem from the inherent inferiority of the Japanese people: “Regretfully, we must say that Japanese literature truly has no great works. . . . The primary cause lies in the character of the Japanese.”[26] Yet like many Chinese, Korean, and Taiwanese commentators on Japanese literature, Han Shiheng’s essentialist misapprehensions about the metropole and its cultural products did not prevent him from disseminating the latter to his compatriots via both commentary and translation. Just as consuming Japanese literature was something of a guilty pleasure throughout the Japanese empire, textually negotiating with this corpus was a loaded act with multiple ramifications. Whatever they sometimes lacked in penetrating insights into individual writers and creative works, as well as broader literary phenomena, Chinese discussions of Japanese literature were vitally concerned with the place of this literature in their own and other societies. As Zhou Zuoren’s article “The Development of Japanese Fiction over the Last Thirty Years” suggests, a large part of this concern stemmed from doubts about Japan’s cultural authority, based on its sustained emulation of foreign creative production. Critical writings on literature provide sharp insights into negotiations with foreign cultural products. They generally reveal attitudes and positions more openly than other forms of textual contact. Yet interpretive transculturation needs to be examined in conjunction with other forms of reconfiguration, including interlingual transculturation. INTERLINGUALLY TRANSCULTURATING JAPANESE LITERATURE: THE CACKLING CUCKOO AND BATTLEFRONT LITERATURE Recent scholarship has highlighted the political and social ramifications of translation and the ambiguous place of this form of textual transculturation in empire; particular attention has been paid to the exploitation of (semi)colonial peoples by means of imperial translations of both metropolitan and (semi)colonial writings.[27] While providing numerous insights into processes of cultural manipulation, this approach has obscured the multifaceted negotiations and struggles that take place in (semi)colonial translations of metropolitan literatures. Chinese intellectuals, for instance, translated novels, plays, poems, and short stories by writers from every major Japanese literary movement, as well as texts by prominent Japanese writers not

affiliated with a particular coterie. But they also both regularly ignored freshly minted Japanese bestsellers and promoted Japanese creative works little known in Japan. Chinese translators did not blindly follow the dictates of the Japanese literary establishment or the tastes of the Japanese reading public; instead, translating all types of Japanese creative texts, they broke away from Japanese literary edifices and created alternative libraries of Japanese literature.[28] Their translations demonstrate how quickly cultural constructions and cultures themselves can be at once contested and affirmed. Among the most intriguing early twentiethcentury Chinese adaptations and translations of Japanese literature are those based on creative texts on the first and second Sino-Japanese Wars (1894–1895 and 1937–1945), including writings by such bestselling and/or censored Japanese authors as Tokutomi Roka (1868–1927), Ishikawa Tatsuzō (1905–1985), and Hino Ashihei (1907–1960). These interlingual transculturations grapple with imperial rhetoric in ways that highlight the poignant ambiguities of textual consumption and production in empire. Chinese translators struggled with how best to transculturate Japanese creative works that speak of the deaths of their compatriots and the destruction of their homeland. One extreme was to strive to be as faithful as possible to sources, allowing readers a relatively straightforward entry into Japanese writings on military encounters with China. Not surprisingly, few Chinese translations of Japanese writings that feature war with China adopted this approach. To be sure, some Chinese translators of Japanese war literature applauded its “truthful” depictions of life during wartime. Bai Mu, for one, did not mince words in the preface to Soldiers Not Yet Deceased (Weisi de bing, 1938), his translation of Ishikawa Tatsuzō’s banned Living Soldiers (Ikiteiru heitai, 1938): “The novel describes the real conditions of the battlefield in vivid detail. Moreover, the author did not do evil against his conscience and was not willing to cover up the cruel truths of war or the soldiers’ disgust of war. So although this text is by a Japanese writer, its immortal value lies in its objectively portraying the facts of war.”[29] Several years later, the Chinese translator Zhang Shifang similarly argued that the novella “exposes the truth, and isn’t it this ‘truth’ of which the Japanese are most afraid?”[30] Chinese translators likewise emphasized the truthfulness of Hino Ashihei’s bestselling battlefront novel Wheat and Soldiers (Mugi to heitai, 1938). In the preface to his Chinese translation of Wheat and Soldiers (C: Mai yu bingdui), Wu Zhefei admitted that the novel’s exposés of Japanese brutality were not as illuminating as what was available in Ishikawa’s Living Soldiers. Even so, he stated that he translated Wheat and Soldiers because it “objectively, albeit inadvertently, records the truth” and that, “as a living record, the diary of a march, it certainly will contribute a lot to our understanding of resistance.”[31] His publishers also advertised the novel’s exposures of the “truth,” announcing inside the front cover: Although the Japanese author does his utmost to exaggerate the supposed “courage” of the “imperial army,” Wheat and Soldiers in fact exposes the truth of the Japanese army, how they treat prisoners and ravage the people. On the other hand, it shows even more clearly the courage of the Chinese army. In this book we can see much of the “truth of the enemy population.”[32]

But in fact, many Chinese translations of Japanese literature on the first and second Sino-

Japanese Wars were far from faithful recastings of their sources. Japanese “truths” were not disseminated whole and indeed were transculturated extensively for colonial and semicolonial consumption. To begin with, Chinese translations of Japanese creative works on the first and second SinoJapanese Wars often modulate if not eliminate paeans to Japan articulated by both Chinese and Japanese literary characters. The Cuckoo (C: Burugui, 1908), Lin Shu (1852–1924) and Wei Yi’s translation of Tokutomi Roka’s bestselling The Cuckoo (Hototogisu, 1898), rewrites Roka’s and his English translators’ depictions of responses to the arrival of Japanese troops in Hong Kong.[33] While in the first part of Roka’s Cuckoo and its English translation Japanese troops disembark “to great cheers” from a crowd of presumably mixed ethnicity, the Chinese Cuckoo states that the local Japanese population “surged down to the sea to welcome them.”[34] Unlike its Japanese and English sources, the Chinese translation suggests that only Japanese would be excited to see Japanese troops. The Chinese translation of Wheat and Soldiers similarly deletes Hino’s depictions of Chinese civilians applauding Japanese troops, declining to include such passages as: “Today [May 21] seemed like a Japanese national holiday. There were Japanese flags everywhere . . . Some places had red paper stuck on them on which [Chinese] people had written ‘Welcome Great Japan’ ‘Welcome Great Japan, Victorious Friend of China.’”[35] Japanese flags flutter furiously in this section of the Japanese novel but are absent in the Chinese translation.[36] The Chinese translation of Wheat and Soldiers additionally drops many of its Japanese predecessor’s references to Japanese patriotism, including the Japanese narrator’s remark that “when the day comes that I am killed by a bullet and my bones are buried in Chinese soil, more than anything I want to die thinking of my beloved homeland, crying ‘Long live Japan’ until I can breathe no more.”[37] The Chinese translations of The Cuckoo and Wheat and Soldiers modulate celebrations of Japan, regardless of provenance. They likewise play down if not omit celebrations of war. For instance, describing a decisive battle between Chinese and Japanese forces on the Yellow Sea, the narrator of the Japanese Cuckoo speaks exuberantly of waves boiling and foaming around ships like huge serpents coiling around a giant whale. The Chinese Cuckoo declines the opportunity to translate this flowery phrase, which does appear in the English version of the novel, and instead jumps to a straightforward description of troop movement.[38] Some Chinese translations reconfigure Japanese discourse in ways that draw attention to the broader implications of Chinese losses. One of the more noteworthy examples of this dynamic is a comment Lin Shu and Wei Yi insert into the narrative of the Chinese Cuckoo, that the return of the Liaodong Peninsula to China after the 1895 Triple Intervention was “China’s shame.”[39] This remark tellingly offsets contemporary Japanese claims to shame at “losing” the peninsula. As Marius Jansen has noted, “The indemnity [3 million yen to Japan to defray its war costs, which ultimately broke the Qing treasury] was increased in partial compensation, but no amount of payment could make up for the sense of outrage and humiliation that was left by the ‘Triple Intervention.’ An imperial rescript exhorted Japan to remain calm and diligent in adversity.”[40] Contradicting Japanese claims of chagrin, the Chinese Cuckoo asserts that the shame rests solely on China’s shoulders; Western nations were meddling in Japanese affairs,

but the Chinese were even more at the mercy of foreign powers. In fact, China’s shame was less a result of the peninsula having been returned than of its having been ceded in the first place, that is to say, the ease with which Chinese territory was tossed about at the Shimonoseki peace conference (March-April 1895). In the opening lines of the translator’s preface, Lin Shu remarks that the Chinese Cuckoo— depicting the tragedies of young lovers preyed on by cruel elders—is the most heartrending of the dozens of texts he has so far translated. This comment rightly has been construed as a sign of Lin Shu’s great appreciation for Roka’s novel, the only Japanese text out of more than one hundred creative works from eleven countries that he adapted/translated with the help of an interpreter. But also significant is Lin Shu’s quick segue in his preface to war, advising readers that passages in Roka’s novel discuss war in great detail and then spending some time talking about war and its consequences. Lin Shu calls on Chinese to learn from what has happened and reveals concern for the nation’s future. He laments that he is already old, that there is little time left for him to “dedicate my life to the country.” But this novel is a beginning: may its cries, he pleads, rouse his compatriots.[41] On the other hand, some Chinese translators concentrated on distilling Japanese distillations of the horrors of wartime. For instance, the narrator of Hino’s Wheat and Soldiers states that a Japanese battalion crushed the 3,000 Chinese it encountered near Zhaojiaji (in Hebei province); the survivors fled, leaving behind 500 corpses. Wu Zhefei’s Chinese version of Hino’s novel mentions that there were 3,000 Chinese near Zhaojiaji but skips over the part about corpses lying in fields.[42] Likewise, the Japanese narrator talks about how coming across a grape patch in the moonlight reminds him of childhood days gathering grapes. The Chinese translation breaks off here, omitting the subsequent reference in its Japanese predecessor to the discovery of three putrid Chinese bodies.[43] This translation even deletes Hino’s references to Japanese thirst for Chinese blood, excluding the passage: “I wanted to charge with my men. I was consumed with violent hatred toward the Chinese soldiers who so tormented my compatriots and threatened my life. I wanted to charge with my men, and with my hands attack the enemy soldiers, and kill them.”[44] Similarly, Wu Zhefei’s translation of the May 20th diary entry includes the Japanese narrator’s discovery of trenches filled with corpses but downplays his desire to kill, omitting his observation that “On the field, how many times had I wanted to attack the Chinese soldiers with my own hands and kill them.”[45] Furthermore, while Hino’s novel refers to “Chinese corpses,” the Chinese version speaks only of “corpses.” Chinese translations of Ishikawa’s Living Soldiers, as reconfigurations of a banned creative work, flout imperial authority by reviving censored words, especially words that expose Japanese aggression and atrocities in China. On the other hand, failing both to resuscitate censored words that discuss and to replicate censorship marks that point to the exploits of Japanese soldiers in China, that is to say, further sanitizing Ishikawa’s already diluted discourse on Japan’s war with China, they also are in some ways complicit with the literary silence surrounding Japanese aggression. This is especially true of Bai Mu’s translation, titled Soldiers Not Yet Deceased. Divided into thirteen brief chapters, this text converts the Japanese

writer’s broad panoramas of wartime into snapshots. Many of Bai Mu’s chapters zero in on Japanese brutality, mixing words with censorship marks to indicate that much of the story remains to be told.[46] In addition, the chapters in his August 1938 volume Soldiers Not Yet Deceased are preceded by line drawings by Wang Zizheng; seven of the thirteen drawings depict Japanese having just murdered, murdering, or about to murder Chinese, and three of these seven involve the abuse and death of Chinese women, a subject censored by both Chinese and Japanese. But unlike Xia Yan, who followed Ishikawa’s discussion of the December 1937 attack on Nanjing and its environs relatively closely, Bai Mu leapfrogged almost entirely over this portion of his narrative.[47] Chapter 10 of Bai Mu’s Chinese version, drawing from an early section of Chapter 7 of Living Soldiers, describes the conditions of wounded Japanese soldiers in a makeshift Japanese hospital in Changzhou, near Nanjing; Chapter 11 of Soldiers Not Yet Deceased, drawing from Chapter 9 of Living Soldiers, finds Japanese soldiers looking for prostitutes in a defeated Nanjing. Chapter 11 of Soldiers Not Yet Deceased is titled “Nanjing,” and in the August 1938 volume its opening page features a line drawing of burning buildings, but the narrative gives only a fleeting glimpse of the ruined city. Ishikawa’s novella portrays the havoc wreaked by Japanese troops as they marched to Nanjing and their destruction of the Chinese capital, inserting gruesome battle scenes and descriptions of a burning and ruined landscape, whereas Soldiers Not Yet Deceased devotes only several lines to the fires that continue to burn and to the corpses, both human and animal, that litter the streets of the city. The omissions stand out, considering the ease with which Soldiers Not Yet Deceased renders into Chinese other passages from Ishikawa’s novel on the inhumanity of war and on Japanese brutality in particular. Skimming over the Nanjing massacre reinforces the Chinese version’s emphasis on total war with Japan as a chain of lethal events taking place over wide terrain and involving diverse segments of the Chinese populace. But it also highlights the desire of some translators to downplay Japanese atrocities and Chinese losses. In short, as the Chinese translations of The Cuckoo, Wheat and Soldiers, and Soldiers Not Yet Deceased suggest, translating Japanese creative writing on Japanese military campaigns against China was fraught with choices, most of them likely to distort Japanese texts. Altering predecessors is an inevitable part of textual contact, but its implications are especially great when predecessors depict the demise of one’s own people. Chinese translations of Japanese creative texts on the first and second Sino-Japanese Wars expose transculturation as consistently blurring dichotomies of complicity and resistance and in so doing raise numerous questions about the place of creative reconfiguration in wartime. INTERTEXTUALLY TRANSCULTURATING JAPANESE LITERATURE: BLOOD SACRIFICES Colonial and semicolonial East Asian writers, far from remaining indifferent to Japanese literature or viewing it only as a ready conduit to Western creative output (as often has been argued), instead engaged vigorously with the creative products of the imperial hegemon via

literary criticism, adaptation, and translation. But these interpretive and interlingual contacts tell only part of the story; they were paralleled and intersected by intertextualizations. Intertextualizations often provided more tacit but equally powerful means of at once challenging and affirming the cultural capital and authority of imperial Japan. Allusions to Western literature in early twentieth-century East Asian creative works are unmistakable, yet hundreds of Chinese, Korean, and Taiwanese literary texts from this period also actively engage with Japanese novels, plays, poems, and short stories. No piece of literature stands alone, completely untouched by predecessors, indifferent to contemporaries, and unnoticed by successors. Julia Kristeva coined the term “intertextuality” in 1966, but the phenomenon of intertextuality is as old as recorded human history; consciously or unconsciously, eagerly or reluctantly, writers have always woven fragments from textual predecessors into their own creations.[48] Intertextual transculturations come in myriad overlapping forms that seldom can be separated definitively, but the most fundamental division is between those that are passive and those that are dynamic. Passive intertextuality can stem from writers’ employing (but not engaging significantly with) accepted literary practices, having read the same earlier work (but not one another’s), having similar experiences (but no contact with one another’s work), or otherwise seemingly coincidentally composing creative texts with numerous intersections. Passive intertextuality was an important part of textual contact in early twentieth-century East Asia. Japanese, semicolonial Chinese, and colonial Korean and Taiwanese literary works often resemble one another simply because they draw from the same predecessors—whether Western, Japanese, Chinese, or, occasionally, Korean and Taiwanese—not because writers were actively engaging with one another’s output. Many other early twentieth-century intra-East Asian literary connections can be interpreted as instances of artistic confluence, and some appear to be a result of coincidence. Yet because such large numbers of East Asian writers traveled outside their homelands and were avid readers and translators not only of Western but also of one another’s literatures, a sizable portion of intra-East Asian intertextuality is more accurately described as dynamic. That is to say, it results from vigorous, if cloaked, negotiation with literary antecedents. To be sure, it generally is easier to interpret intertextual relationships as resulting from happenstance than to probe multiple and often conflicting webs of dynamic intertextuality. Yet in cases of more active interaction, such coincidental constructions ultimately strip writers, if not groups or societies, of agency. In their premise that there are few means of controlling networks with predecessors, that correlations just happen, interpretations emphasizing or implying coincidence can reinforce the very structures of power and hierarchy they often are attempting to deconstruct. Interpretations allowing for dynamic engagement with predecessors, on the other hand, reveal that intertextuality can be a very effective means of transcultural negotiation. Until recently, scholars regularly clustered many literary relationships under the rubric of influence. Using the influence paradigm allowed critics to demonstrate writers’ fascination with or even outright emulation of textual antecedents, and it served as a gateway to understanding textual networking. But this paradigm also tends to assume an unproblematic transfer of commodities from a “creator” to a “receiver.”[49] In addition, the term “influence”

is inexorably entangled with notions of power; the term suggests unilateral causality and the passivity of an “influenced” under the unchallenged dominance of an “influencer.” Such an approach in many ways holds writers and texts hostage, denying them the possibility of creatively and actively reworking literary predecessors.[50] This is not to suggest that texts never passively flow one into another or that those involved in the creative process are never held hostage by their predecessors, only that these phenomena occur less frequently than has been posited. The influence paradigm has troubling implications when used to discuss textual contact among antagonistic groups, particularly those in unequal power relationships. As Janet Ng has rightly argued, “The reception of a particular literary form from one polity that has aggressive designs on one’s own culture requires tremendous reprocessing and filtering, a procedure so complex and so elusive that traditional comparative or influence studies cannot fully encompass it.”[51] When discussing textual interconnections in the context of empire, we thus need to examine more fully not only the “what” of writers’ intertextual sources and “how” these materials are incorporated, but also the “so what,” the “real implications of dialogues with literary predecessors.”[52] This involves exploring the active engagement with creative antecedents that characterizes much literary production. Allowing texts to intervene in and transform the legacy of their predecessors, intertextualizing is a very effective means of negotiating transculturally,[53] especially in the context of empire. Scholars have documented such challenges facing (semi)colonial and post(semi)colonial writers as using the language of their political and social oppressors and indigenizing metropolitan narrative patterns. We also have discussed general similarities between (semi)colonial and metropolitan texts. But surprisingly few studies rigorously analyze the complicated relationships among specific literary works. [54] Striving to develop modern literatures they could call their own yet that also would become part of world literature, semicolonial Chinese and colonial Korean and Taiwanese writers intertextually reconfigured a tremendous variety not only of Western creative works and predecessors from their own cultures, both classical and contemporary, but also of Japanese literature.[55] One of the most compelling early twentieth-century Chinese intertextualizations of Japanese literature is the Chinese writer Ah Long’s (1907–1967) novel Nanjing (1939), an early Chinese literary account of the Nanjing massacre. This text explicitly transculturates Ishikawa’s Living Soldiers, as well as Hino’s bestselling trilogy Wheat and Soldiers, Earth and Soldiers (Tsuchi to heitai, 1938), and Flowers and Soldiers (Hana to heitai, 1938).[56] Ah Long learned of these Japanese novels from Kaji Wataru (1903–1982) and Ikeda Sachiko (1913–1976), Japanese antiwar writers who were living in China and were involved with Chinese literary circles.[57] Deeply frustrated that Japanese writers were transforming the atrocities of Nanjing and other Chinese battlegrounds into “great works of art” while their Chinese counterparts remained silent, and likely also disturbed by the speed with which Japanese war literature was being translated into Chinese, Ah Long argued in the postscript to Nanjing that creative texts on the Japanese invasion of China should come from China, not Japan:

[The Japanese writer Ikeda Sachiko] told me that, in addition to Ishikawa Tatsuzō’s Living Soldiers, the Japanese recently have published another lengthy report on the war. It [Hino Ashihei’s trilogy] naturally extols invasion and war… I’m ashamed! For myself, and for the Chinese people. I’m ashamed! . . . And behind the shame, I’m angry! I can’t believe these “masterpieces” weren’t produced in China, but instead appeared in Japan, that they weren’t produced by those resisting the war, but rather by the invaders. . . . This is a disgrace! . . . Does China have “masterpieces”? Of course it does! China has “masterpieces” written in blood! Moreover, if the “masterpieces” written in ink are carbon copies of the “masterpieces” written in blood, then the latter can soon come to light. These works will be greater than Hino Ashihei’s Wheat and Soldiers, Earth and Soldiers, and Flowers and Soldiers. Otherwise, it’s China’s humiliation! And this is how I finally came to write Nanjing. But I don’t have wild ambitions. It’s just that my heart’s angry.[58]

Noteworthy here is Ah Long’s assertion that Japan’s “masterpieces” (weida de zuopin) on the war are in fact carbon copies of Chinese texts, but copies that came to light before their sources. Scrambling the usual order of production, he simultaneously confirms and denies Japanese literary authority. Setting off the term “masterpiece” in quotation marks further highlights the ambivalence and the irony of both the Chinese and Japanese projects. An intriguing mix of fiction and reportage, Nanjing focuses on conditions in the city between November and December 14, 1937, the day after Nanjing fell to the Japanese; the novel contains longer and more graphic accounts of the destruction wrought by Japanese and Chinese troops in China than do either the Japanese battlefront novels it transculturates or the Chinese translations of these novels. The first chapter of Nanjing describes the damage Japanese air raids inflicted on the city and its people: “Yan Long witnessed a strong young man die an agonizing death, roaring like a mad dog, his neck pierced by the branch of a tree blown down by the bombs. He saw the peaceful restaurant where he had celebrated his wedding completely blown away by the bombs. And he also saw a severed bloodstained leg wearing silver high heels rolling down the street.”[59] Nanjing likewise at times speaks openly of the brutality of Japanese soldiers, particularly toward Chinese women: The occupation of Nanjing should have marked the end of the bloodshed, but in fact it marked the opposite. It was the beginning of the bloodshed. December 13 was a bloody day. The enemy ransacked the refugee zone and snatched all the money and young people. Smiling, the enemy held a “contest to behead one thousand people” at the base of Zijin Mountain. The enemy invaded Jin Ling Women’s University and captured the women. On the streets the enemy walked around shooting. Blood was flowing in the streets. . . . The enemy stabbed one girl seven times: one gouging her large intestine, one severing her throat, one rendering her blind, one cutting her genitals, one cutting her from her left shoulder to her right buttock.[60]

Even the Japanese are depicted as recognizing the heinousness of their acts: the chapter in which this episode occurs wraps up with a Japanese soldier bursting into tears. Further subverting Japanese war literature, as well as Chinese translations of this literature, Nanjing concludes with a Chinese battle victory. The version of Ishikawa’s Ikiteiru heitai that was to have appeared in the March 1938 issue of Central Review (Chūō kōron), as well as its Chinese translations published later that year, close with Japanese troops leaving a defeated Nanjing and marching to new battlegrounds. In contrast, the epilogue of Nanjing depicts Chinese victory at Wuhu, the narrator declaring in the final lines: “Those responsible for the

slaughter got their comeuppance . . . December 20, Chinese troops took Wuhu.”[61] Ishikawa’s “living soldiers,” transformed by the Chinese translators Bai Mu and Xia Yan into “soldiers not yet deceased,” here perish. But in truth, Japanese soldiers in Nanjing were anything but dead on December 20, just a week into the massacre. Moreover, when Ah Long made these remarks in October 1939, the Japanese held an even stronger position in China than at the time of the assault on Nanjing. Here we perceive clearly the struggle of Chinese writers to expose Japanese atrocities while preserving national dignity. The silence of Ah Long’s novel concerning events in Nanjing on December 20 and surrounding weeks represents a lost opportunity to counter Japanese denials. On the other hand, spotlighting the weeks immediately preceding the Nanjing massacre allows Nanjing to call attention to the atrocities Chinese troops committed against Chinese, a subject for the most part glossed over in other literary accounts of this period. The Chinese military not only torched Nanjing as part of its scorched-earth policy of destruction of land and property in anticipation of invasion, it also wounded and killed Chinese civilians there.[62] By including graphic scenes of Chinese soldiers abusing Chinese civilians, Nanjing stresses more than Japanese battlefront literature and especially Chinese translations of this genre joint Chinese-Japanese responsibility. The Chinese troops that in many places are portrayed sympathetically, and in the end give the nation hope, also terrorize their own people; Ah Long’s novel thus ultimately reveals unconscious complicity between Chinese and Japanese forces in the destruction of Chinese civilians. Early twentieth-century Chinese, Korean, and Taiwanese interpretive, interlingual, and intertextual transculturations of Japanese literature form a major but understudied chapter in the history of East Asian cultural relations. Deconstructing simple dichotomies of collaboration and resistance, they plot indexes of the ups and downs, the tensions, and the ambivalence and contradictions facing Chinese, Koreans, and Taiwanese from all schools of thought as they negotiated with the cultural products of the imperial power that was at once a cultural beacon, a colonial/semicolonial antagonist, and a wartime enemy. The Japanese state most clearly articulated its vision of uniting its empire via the Japanese language and culture in the final decade of the colonial period, when it outlawed the use of Korean and Chinese (in Manchuria and Taiwan) and dispatched Japanese writers, film experts, painters, publishers, reporters, and theater figures across East Asia to “bear witness to Japan’s superior culture.”[63] Capping such efforts were the Greater East Asian Writers Conferences (Dai Tōa Bungakusha Taikai) of the early 1940s, the third of which was held, significantly, in Nanjing in November 1944. These conferences, which assembled leading writers, editors, and critics from Japan, China, Korea, Taiwan, Manchuria, Mongolia, and other parts of Asia, often are seen as marking the formation of an East Asian literary sphere centered on the Japanese cultural tradition and coterminous with the Japanese empire.[64] In fact, not only did these conferences have little effect on literary production,[65] but by the time they were convened, twentieth-century Chinese, Japanese, Koreans, and Taiwanese had been engaging in linguistic, readerly, writerly, and textual contact for decades, creating literary contact nebulae oddly suggestive of, but in the end very different from, the imperial cultural ambit trumpeted by the Japanese state.

Scholarship on intra-East Asian transculturation, with its emphasis on pre-twentieth century sinocentrism and late twentieth and early twenty-first century popular culture flows, generally overlooks the twentieth century. At the same time, scholarship on twentieth-century intra-East Asian relationships focuses almost exclusively on geopolitical concerns. These dominant narratives obscure the vibrant intra-East Asian cultural and particularly literary interactions that took place throughout the turbulent 1900s and continue into the new millennium.[66] China, Japan, Korea, and Taiwan all remain active sites, and their textual creations dynamic sources, of intra-East Asian transculturation. Divisions among peoples and languages rarely constrain cultural products, which throughout the ages have relentlessly interpenetrated and grappled with one another, almost heedless of ethnic, linguistic, geographic, political, and ideological frontiers. Literature, one of the most widely traveled and frequently transculturated creative forms, is a particularly significant site of transcultural negotiation and struggle. Studying East Asian literatures—whether classical or modern—in geographic or linguistic isolation risks imposing artificial frameworks that impede our comprehension of this dynamic part of the world. Examining them together opens broad perspectives appropriate to the vibrant transcultural interactions that long have characterized human experience throughout the region. NOTES 1. Japan colonized Taiwan in 1895; it declared Korea its protectorate in 1905 and colonized the peninsula in 1910. In 1931, Japan seized Manchuria, establishing in 1932 the puppet state (informal colony) of Manchukuo; by 1938, Japan also controlled the eastern coast of China and part of Inner Mongolia. The term “semicolonial” designates the multinational yet fragmented political, economic, and cultural domination of China by Japan and numerous Western nations from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century. Scholars have proposed alternate designations, such as multiple colonialism, hypercolony, and politically compromised, but semicolonial best describes China’s situation at this time. Cf. Paul A. Cohen, Discovering History in China (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), pp. 144–45; Selçuk Esenbul, “Japan’s Global Claim to Asia and the World of Islam: Transnational Nationalism and World Power, 1900–1945,” The American Historical Review 109:4 (2004): pp. 1140–70; Ruth Rogaski, Hygienic Modernity: Meanings of Health and Disease in Treaty-Port China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), pp. 15–16.

2. For more on such dynamics see Jina Kim, “The Materializing and Vanishing Modern Girl: The Circulation of Urban Literary Modernity in Colonial Korea and Taiwan” (Ph.D. diss., University of Washington, 2005); Pak Ch’anho, “Shokuminchika no Chōsen to sono zanshi” [Colonial Korea and its Remnants] in Nitchō kankei shi ronshū: Kan Tokusan [Kang Tŏksang] sensei koki – taishoku kinen [Collection of Essays on the History of Japanese-Korean Relations: Commemorating Professor Kang Tŏksang’s Seventieth Birthday and Retirement], ed. Kan Tokusan [Kang Tŏksang] Sensei Koki Taishoku Kinen Ronbunshū Kankō Iinkai [Committee Overseeing the Collection of Essays Commemorating Professor Kang Tŏksang’s Retirement] (Tokyo: Shinkansha, 2003), pp. 190–217; Shu-mei Shih, The Lure of the Modern: Writing Modernism in Semicolonial China, 1917–1937 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), pp. 292–99; Aida Yuen Wong, Parting the Mists: Discovering Japan and the Rise of National-Style Painting in Modern China (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2006).

3. Fujii Shōzō, “Lu Xun in Textbooks and Classes of Chinese: A Study of the Introduction of Modern Chinese Literature before the War in Japan,” in The Force of Vision: Proceedings of the XIIIth Congress of the ICLA 4 (Tokyo: University of Tokyo Press and International Comparative Literature Association, 1995), pp. 18–26; Fujii Shōzō, Ro Jin [Lu Xun] jiten [Lu Xun Reference] (Tokyo: Sanseidō, 2002), pp. 286–92. See also Karen Thornber, “Cultures and Texts in Motion: Reconfiguring Japan and Japanese Literature in Polyintertextual East Asian Contact Zones (Japan, Semicolonial China, Colonial Korea, Colonial Taiwan)” (Ph.D. diss., Harvard University, 2006), pp. 311–91.

4. Sylvia Spitta, Between Two Waters: Narratives of Transculturation in Latin America (Houston: Rice University Press,

1995), p. 24.

5. Before the late nineteenth century, Japanese literature was available almost exclusively in Japan and read and reworked almost solely by Japanese. Peter Kornicki, The Book in Japan: A Cultural History from the Beginnings to the Nineteenth Century (Leiden: Brill, 1998), pp. 277–319. For exceptions see Lin Wen-yueh, “Literary Interflow between Japan and China,” in International Congress of the P.E.N. Clubs, The Voice of the Writer 1984: Collected Papers of the 47th International P.E.N. Congress in Tokyo (Tokyo: Japan P.E.N. Club, 1986), p. 188; Wang Xiaoping, Jindai Zhong-Ri wenxue jiaoliushi gao [A Sketch of Early Twentieth-Century Sino-Japanese Literary Exchange] (Hunan: Hunan Wenyi Chubanshe, 1987), pp. 405–12.

6. In focusing on intra-East Asian transculturations of Japanese literature, I am not implying that we replace sinocentrism and Eurocentrism with Japancentrism. Rather, by probing the intricate webs of transcultural interaction that characterized early twentieth-century East Asian literatures, that is, the blurred boundaries and complicated relationships among the Chinese, occupied Manchurian, Japanese, Korean, and Taiwanese literary worlds, I analyze (semi)colonial East Asian transculturations of Japanese literature as the most active but by no means the only vectors of intra-East Asian cultural negotiation.

7. See David P. Barrett and Larry N. Shyu, Eds., Chinese Collaboration with Japan, 1932–1945: The Limits of Accommodation (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000); Timothy Brook, Collaboration: Japanese Agents and Local Elites in Wartime China (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005); Peter Duus et al., eds., The Japanese Informal Empire in China, 1895–1937 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989); Peter Duus et al., Eds., The Japanese Wartime Empire, 1931–1945 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996); Carter Eckert et al., Korea Old and New: A History (Seoul: Ilchokak Publishers, 2000), pp. 254–326; Poshek Fu, Passivity, Resistance, and Collaboration: Intellectual Choices in Occupied Shanghai, 1937–1945 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993); Ramon H. Myers and Mark R. Peattie, eds., The Japanese Colonial Empire, 1895–1945 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984).

8. See Kim Ch’aesu, Hanguk kwa Ilbon ŭi kŭndae ŏnmun-ilch’i hyŏngsŏng kwajŏng [Development of the Korean and Japanese Modern Unification of Spoken and Written Languages] (Seoul: Pogosa, 2002); Lydia Liu, Translingual Practice: Literature, National Culture, and Translated Modernity—China, 1900–1937 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), pp. 265–374; Ming-cheng M. Lo, Doctors within Borders: Profession, Ethnicity, and Modernity in Colonial Taiwan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002); Sanetō Keishū, Chūgokujin Nihon ryūgakushi [History of Chinese Students in China] (Tokyo: Kuroshio Shuppan, 1960), pp. 331–407; Yi Hanbyŏn, “Sŏyu kyŏnmun e pat-adŭlyŏjin Ilbon ŭi hanjaŏ e taehayŏ” [On Japanese Words written in Chinese Characters in Observations from a Journey to the West], Ilbonhak 6 (1987), pp. 85–107.

9. I introduce the concept of contact nebulae in “Early Twentieth-Century Intra-East Asian Literary Contact Nebulae: Censored Japanese Literature in Chinese and Korean,” The Journal of Asian Studies 68:3 (August 2009), pp. 1–27, and Empire of Texts in Motion: Chinese, Korean, and Taiwanese Transculturations of Japanese Literature (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009), pp. 2–3.

10. Cf. Roland Barthes, S/Z (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1970), 10. Barthes uses the neologisms “readerly” (le lisible) and “writerly” (le scriptible) to refer to texts, distinguishing between “classic” texts and those that make the reader “no longer a consumer, but a producer.” Linguistic, readerly, writerly, and textual interactions also occur among peoples and cultural products in more balanced power relations, but the focus here is on these contacts in empires and postimperial spaces, interpreted broadly.

11. Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2008), p. 7. 12. Ibid., p. 8. 13. Scholarship appropriating Pratt’s understanding of the contact zone includes David L. Curley, “Maharaja Krisnacandra, Hinduism, and Kingship in the Contact Zone of Bengal,” in Rethinking Early Modern India, ed. Richard B. Barnett (New Delhi: Manohar, 2002), pp. 85–117; Karsten Fitz, Negotiating History and Culture: Transculturation in Contemporary Native American Fiction (New York: Peter Lang, 2001); Renée Green, Ed., Negotiations in the Contact Zone (Lisbon: Assírio & Alvim, 2003); Noreen Groover Lape, West of the Border: The Multicultural Literature of the Western American Frontiers (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2000); Katie Pickles and Myra Rutherdale, Eds., Contact Zones: Aboriginal and Settler Women in Canada’s Colonial Past (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2005); Susanne Reichl, Cultures in the Contact Zone: Ethnic Semiosis in Black British Literature (Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, 2002).

14. See Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin, Post-Colonial Studies: The Key Concepts (New York: Routledge, 2000); Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin, The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2002); Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (New York: Routledge, 1994); Nicholas Harrison, Postcolonial Criticism: History, Theory and the Work of Fiction (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2003); Padmini Moniga, Contemporary Postcolonial Theory: A Reader (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997); Bart Moore-

Gilbert et al., eds., Postcolonial Criticism (New York: Longman, 1997); Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman, eds., Colonial Discourse and Postcolonial Theory: A Reader (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994).

15. For more on linguistic, readerly, and writerly contacts in early twentieth-century East Asia, see my Empire of Texts in Motion, pp. 1–82. I analyze a broad range of twentieth-century intra-East Asian textual transculturation (primarily prewar and wartime, but also postwar) in “Cultures and Texts in Motion: Reconfiguring Japan and Japanese Literature in Polyintertextual East Asian Contact Zones (Japan, Semicolonial China, Colonial Korea, Colonial Taiwan)” and Empire of Texts in Motion, which are based on four years of research in vernacular archives in China, Japan, Korea, and Taiwan.

16. For more on this phenomenon see Kirk A. Denton, “General Introduction,” in Modern Chinese Literary Thought: Writings on Literature, 1893–1945, ed. Kirk A. Denton (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), pp. 1–61.

17. Writers mentioned include Tsubouchi Shōyō (1859–1935), Higuchi Ichiyō (1872–1896), Futabatei Shimei (1864–1909), Ozaki Kōyō (1867–1903), Kōda Rohan (1867–1947), Kitamura Tōkoku (1868–1894), Kunikida Doppo (1871–1908), Natsume Sōseki (1867–1916), Mori Ōgai (1862–1922), Nagai Kafū (1879–1959), and Tanizaki Jun’ichirō (1886–1965).

18. Zhou Zuoren, “Riben jin sanshinian xiaoshuo zhi fada” [The Development of Japanese Fiction over the Last Thirty Years], Xin qingnian [New Youth] 5:1 (1918), p. 27.

19. Lu Xun, “Yige qingnian ren de meng yizhe xu er” [The Dream of a Certain Young Man, Translator’s Preface 2], in Lu Xun yiwen ji 2 [Collection of Lu Xun’s Translations] (Beijing: Renmin Wenxue Chubanshe, 1959), pp. 523–24. For more on Lu Xun’s translation of The Dream of a Certain Young Man see Yamada Keizō, Ro Jin [Lu Xun] no sekai [The World of Lu Xun] (Tokyo: Taishūkan Shoten, 1977), pp. 192–229. Although long an admirer of Mushakōji’s work, Lu Xun did not meet his Japanese counterpart until 1936.

20. Ba Jin, “Ji duan bu gongjing de hua” [Some Irreverent Words], in Ba Jin quanji [The Complete Works of Ba Jin] 12 (Beijing: Renmin Wenxue Chubanshe, 1986), p. 512.

21. Ibid., p. 514. 22. Ibid., p. 515. 23. Early twentieth-century Chinese translated nearly one-fourth of Akutagawa’s creative output and transposed echoes of his writing appear in numerous Chinese novels and short stories. Many Chinese were stunned by his suicide, and several Chinese periodicals published special issues in his memory.

24. Ba Jin, “Some Irreverent Words,” p. 511. See also Akutagawa Ryūnosuke, “Chōkō yūki” [Travel along the Yangzi] in Akutagawa Ryūnosuke zenshū [The Complete Works of Akutagawa Ryūnosuke] 11 (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1996), p. 254.

25. Ba Jin’s attitudes, like those of a number of (semi)colonial East Asian critics of Japanese literature, changed dramatically after the war. For instance, in the essay “Fifty Years of the Literary Life” (“Wenxue shenghuo wushi nian,” 1980) he reveals that he considers among his teachers such leading early twentieth-century Japanese writers as Natsume Sōseki, Tayama Katai, Akutagawa, Mushakōji Saneatsu, and especially Arishima Takeo (1878–1923), one of whose essays he “sometimes recites.” Ba Jin xuanji [Selected Works of Ba Jin] 1 (Chengdu: Sichuan Renmin Chubanshe, 1982), 4. In the postwar years Ba Jin counted many Japanese writers among his friends.

26. Han Shiheng, “Xiandai Riben wenxue zagan (daixu)” [Random Thoughts on Modern Japanese Literature (in Lieu of a Preface)], Xiandai Riben xiaoshuo [Modern Japanese Fiction] (Shanghai: Chunchao Shuju, 1929), pp. 2–3.

27. See Sandra Bermann and Michael Wood, eds., Nation, Language, and the Ethics of Translation (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005); Eric Cheyfitz, The Poetics of Imperialism: Translation and Colonization from The Tempest to Tarzan (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997); Tejaswini Niranjana, Siting Translation: History, Poststructuralism, and the Colonial Context (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992); Maria Tymoczko and Edwin Gentzler, eds., Translation and Power (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2002).

28. For indexes of Chinese translations of Japanese literature see Kondō Haruo, Gendai Chūgoku no sakka to sakuhin [Modern Chinese Writers and Writings] (Tokyo: Shinsen Shobō, 1949), pp. 105–93; Kang Dongyuan and Kuroko Kazuo, Nihon kin-gendai bungaku no Chūgokugoyaku sōran [Comprehensive Bibliography of Chinese-Language Translations of Modern Japanese Literature] (Tokyo: Bensei Shuppan, 2006); Wang Xiangyuan, Ershi shiji Zhongguo de Riben fanyi wenxue shi [History of Twentieth-Century Chinese Translations of Japanese Literature] (Beijing: Beijing Shifan Daxue Chubanshe, 2001).

29. Bai Mu, “Yizhe xu” [Translator’s Preface], in Weisi de bing [Soldiers Not Yet Deceased] (Shanghai: Zashishe, 1938), p. 1. Living Soldiers depicts a platoon of patriotic soldiers who, in addition to slaughtering Chinese on the battlefield, loot Chinese homes and shops, rape Chinese women, and ruthlessly murder innocent civilians. See Ishikawa Tatsuzō, Ikiteiru heitai [Living Soldiers], Chūō kōron [Central Review] 53:3 (March 1938), pp. 1–105. Ishikawa’s novella was scheduled to appear in the

March 1938 issue of the Japanese journal Central Review, but censors forced its withdrawal just hours before its expected release. See Haruko Taya Cook, “The Many Lives of Living Soldiers: Ishikawa Tatsuzō and Japan’s War in Asia,” in War, Occupation, and Creativity: Japan and East Asia, 1920–1960, ed. Marlene J. Mayo et al. (Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2001), pp. 149–75. Although little more than a title to most wartime Japanese, Living Soldiers was translated into Chinese several times during the spring and summer of 1938; its first Chinese translation, a serialized version by Bai Mu in the Shanghai newspaper Great American Evening News (Damei wanbao), began its run on March 18, 1938, exactly a month after the novella was to have been made available to Japanese readers. Bai Mu’s version came out as a separate volume in Shanghai in August 1938 and was so popular that a reprint edition was published in 1939. See Ishikawa Tatsuzō, Weisi de bing [Soldiers Not Yet Deceased], trans. Bai Mu, Damei wanbao [Great American Evening News], March 18-April 8, 1938) and Weisi de bing [Soldiers Not Yet Deceased], trans. Bai Mu (Shanghai Zazhishe, 1938). Zhang Shifang and the revolutionary writer Xia Yan, a prolific translator of Japanese literature, also published translations of Living Soldiers in 1938: Zhang Shifang in June in occupied Shanghai as Living Soldiers (Huozhe de bingdui) and Xia Yan in July in Guangzhou as Soldiers Not Yet Deceased (Weisi de bing). See Ishikawa Tatsuzō, Huozhe de bingdui [Soldiers Not Yet Deceased], trans. Zhang Shifang (Shanghai: Wenzhai, 1938); Weisi de bing [Soldiers Not Yet Deceased], Xia Yan quanji [Complete Works of Xia Yan] 14, trans. Xia Yan (Hangzhou: Zhejiang Wenyi Chubanshe, 2005), pp. 683–757. Xia Yan’s translation was particularly popular, appearing in at least four editions within the next two years. Kang Dongyuan and Kuroko Kazuo, Nihon kin-gendai bungaku no Chūgokugoyaku sōran (Comprehensive Bibliography of Chinese-Language Translations of Modern Japanese Literature), 38.

30. Zhang Shifang, Zhanshi Riben wentan [The Wartime Japanese Literary World] (Qianjin: Qianjin Xinwenshe, 1942), pp. 8–13.

31. Wu Zhefei, “Yizhe de hua” [Translator’s Note], in Mai yu bingdui [Wheat and Soldiers] (Shanghai: Zazhishe, 1938), p. 1. 32. Hino Ashihei, Mai yu bingdui [Wheat and Soldiers], i. 33. The Cuckoo at once celebrates Japanese military prowess in the Sino-Japanese War and narrates the moving love story of the Japanese naval officer Takeo and his wife Namiko. The novel quickly became a worldwide phenomenon. In the years following its publication, it was translated into a dozen languages, including Chinese and Korean. The Chinese Cuckoo was one of the few early twentieth-century East Asian translations of Japanese literature based on a Western translation, in this case Sakae Shioya and E. F. Edgett’s Nami-ko: A Realistic Novel (Tokyo: The Yurakusha, 1905).

34. Tokutomi Roka, Hototogisu [The Cuckoo], in Nihon kindai bungaku taikei [Modern Japanese Literature Compendium] 9 (Tokyo: Kadokawa Shoten, 1972), 267; Nami-ko: A Realistic Novel, 74; Burugui: Aiqing xiaoshuo [The Cuckoo: A Love Story], trans. Lin Shu and Wei Yi (Shanghai: Shangwu Yinshuguan, 1908), p. 35.

35. Hino Ashihei, Mugi to heitai [Wheat and Soldiers], Kaizō [Reconstruction] 2:8 (August 1938), pp. 206–7. 36. When Chinese translations of Japanese battlefront literature do retain depictions of Chinese waving the Japanese flag or having on their person Japanese insignia, the surrounding narrative often specifies that possession of these emblems does not necessarily signify Chinese support of Japan. In Hino’s Earth and Soldiers (Tsuchi to heitai, 1938), for instance, the Japanese narrator voices his suspicion that those waving flags are in fact Chinese soldiers or spies. Hino Ashihei, Tsuchi to heitai [Earth and Soldiers] (Tokyo: Kaizōsha, 1938), pp. 114–15; Tu yu bing [Earth and Soldiers], trans. Jin Gu (Beijing: Dongfang Shudian, 1939), pp. 52–53. In Ishikawa’s Living Soldiers, the peasants wearing Rising Sun armbands are described as downtrodden people simply submitting to their conquerors, as they have for generations. Ishikawa Tatsuzō, Ikiteiru heitai [Living Soldiers], 9; Weisi de bing [Soldiers Not Yet Deceased] (Bai Mu, Shanghai Zazhishe), p. 6; Weisi de bing [Soldiers Not Yet Deceased], Bai Mu, Damei wanbao [Great American Evening News], March 18, 1938); Weisi de bing [Soldiers Not Yet Deceased] (Xia Yan), p. 693.

37. Hino Ashihei, Mugi to heitai [Wheat and Soldiers], p. 199. 38. Tokutomi Roka, Hototogisu [The Cuckoo], p. 355; Nami-ko, p. 218; Burugui [The Cuckoo], p. 26. 39. Tokutomi Roka, Burugui [The Cuckoo], p. 55. 40. Marius Jansen, The Making of Modern Japan (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000), p. 433. 41. See Lin Shu, “Xu” (Preface) in Burugui: Aiqing xiaoshuo [The Cuckoo: A Love Story], trans. Lin Shu and Wei Yi (Shanghai: Shangwu Yinshuguan, 1908), pp. 1–3.

42. Hino Ashihei, Mugi to heitai [Wheat and Soldiers], p. 138; Mai yu bingdui [Wheat and Soldiers], p. 27. 43. Hino Ashihei, Mugi to heitai [Wheat and Soldiers], p. 193; Mai yu bingdui [Wheat and Soldiers], p. 58. 44. Hino Ashihei, Mugi to heitai [Wheat and Soldiers], pp. 172–173; Mai yu bingdui [Wheat and Soldiers], pp. 50-51.

45. Hino Ashihei, Mugi to heitai [Wheat and Soldiers], pp. 203–204; Mai yu bingdui [Wheat and Soldiers], p. 63. 46. Some of the censorship marks replicate those in the Central Review (Chūō kōron) version of Living Soldiers (Ikiteiru heitai), while others appear to originate with Bai Mu or perhaps his editor.

47. One telling exception is Xia Yan’s silent deletion of Ishikawa’s claim that Chinese soldiers in Nanjing, having littered the streets with their discarded uniforms, are hiding among civilian refugees and thus are making it increasingly difficult for Japanese soldiers “to dispose of just the actual [Chinese] soldiers.” Ishikawa Tatsuzō, Ikiteiru heitai [Living Soldiers], p. 86; Weisi de bing [Soldiers Not Yet Deceased] (Xia Yan), p. 744. Here Xia Yan’s text masks both Japanese atrocities in Nanjing and the partial culpability of Chinese soldiers in the murder of Chinese civilians.

48. Michael Worton and Judith Still, Intertextuality: Theories and Practice (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1990), p. 2. See also Julia Kristeva, “Word, Dialogue and Novel,” in The Kristeva Reader, ed. Toril Moi (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), pp. 34–61.

49. See Claudio Guillén, The Challenge of Comparative Literature (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993), pp. 56–57; Ronald Primeau, “Introduction,” in Influx: Essays on Literary Influence, ed. Ronald Primeau (Port Washington, N.Y.: Kennikat Press, 1977), pp. 3–12; Jay Clayton and Eric Rothstein, “Figures in the Corpus: Theories of Influence and Intertextuality,” in Influence and Intertextuality in Literary History, ed. Jay Clayton and Eric Rothstein (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991), pp. 3–36.

50. The notion of the writer being held hostage is from Stanley Sultan, Eliot, Joyce, and Company (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), p. 6.

51. Janet Ng, The Experience of Modernity: Chinese Autobiography of the Early Twentieth Century (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2003), p. 15.

52. In Joyce, Bakhtin, and the Literary Tradition: Toward a Comparative Cultural Poetics, M. Keith Booker notes that while many scholars have pointed out the “what” of Joyce’s intertextual sources, and some the “how,” “surprisingly little has been done to illuminate the ‘so what’ of Joyce’s intertextual poetics” (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995), p. 10. As Booker suggests, it is not enough simply to call attention to the presence of intertexts. A mere list of actual or potential “origins” indicates only that the writer is well-read. Kristeva and others have warned of the perils of a simple “study of sources” and wisely advocate focusing on how material is transposed as it moves from one format to another. See Julia Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language, trans. Margaret Waller (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), p. 60.

53. See Mieke Bal, Quoting Caravaggio: Contemporary Art, Preposterous History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), pp. 8–9, cited in Atsuko Sakaki, Obsessions with the Sino-Japanese Polarity in Japanese Literature (Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2005), p. 8. I outline various forms of dynamic intertextualizing in Chapter 5 of Empire of Texts in Motion.

54. Several (semi)colonial/post(semi)colonial intertextual engagements with canonical metropolitan literary works that have garnered significant critical attention include the Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe’s (1930–) reconfiguration of Joseph Conrad’s (1857–1924) Heart of Darkness (1902) in Things Fall Apart (1958) and the West Indian novelist Jean Rhys’s (1890–1979) intertextual reconfiguration of Charlotte Bronte’s (1816-1855) Jane Eyre (1847) in Wide Sargasso Sea (1966). I discuss additional examples in Chapter 5 of “Cultures and Texts in Motion” and Chapter 5 of Empire of Texts in Motion.

55. I outline the multiple vectors of early twentieth-century intra-East Asian intertextual transculturation in the Overview to Part 2 of “Cultures and Texts in Motion” and in Chapter 5 of Empire of Texts in Motion.

56. Written in 1939, Nanjing was not published until 1987, and even then it was greatly abridged and renamed Nanjing Blood Sacrifice (Nanjing xueji). For more on the publication history of this novel see Michael Berry, “A History of Pain: Literary and Cinematic Mappings of Violence in Modern China” (Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 2004), pp. 72–86, and A History of Pain: Trauma in Modern Chinese Literature and Film (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008); Ken Sekine, “A Verbose Silence in 1939 Chongqing: Why Ah Long’s Nanjing Could Not Be Published,” MCLC Resource Center, 2004.

57. Kaji wrote a preface for Xia Yan’s translation of Living Soldiers.. See Kaji Wataru, “Xu” [Preface] in Weisi de bing [Soldiers Not Yet Deceased] (Xia Yan), pp. 685–7.

58. Ah Long, Nanjing xueji [Nanjing Blood Sacrifice] (Beijing: Renmin Wenxue Chubanshe, 1987), pp. 222–23. 59. Ibid., p. 3. 60. Ibid., pp. 190–91. Most passages on the abuse of Chinese women in the “original” Nanjing were excluded from the novel’s 1987 version. Ken Sekine, “A Verbose Silence in 1939 Chongqing,” p. 8.

61. Ah Long, Nanjing xueji [Nanjing Blood Sacrifice], p. 215. 62. Jonathan D. Spence, The Search for Modern China (New York: W. W. Norton, 1990), p. 423. Ah Long was one of the few Chinese writers to address China’s scorched-earth policy. Michael Berry, “A History of Pain,” p. 80; A History of Pain, p. 148.

63. Marlene J. Mayo, “Introduction,” p. 15. 64. Faye Kleeman, Under an Imperial Sun: Japanese Colonial literature of Taiwan and the South (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2003), p. 2.

65. Edward Gunn, Unwelcome Muse: Chinese Literature in Shanghai and Peking, 1937–1945 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980), pp. 31–34.

66. I discuss postwar intra-East Asian transculturation in “Cultures and Texts in Motion: Reconfiguring Japan and Japanese Literature in Polyintertextual East Asian Contact Zones (Japan, Semicolonial China, Colonial Korea, Colonial Taiwan),” pp. 743–841; Empire of Texts in Motion: Chinese, Korean, and Taiwanese Transculturations of Japanese Literature, pp. 375– 86; “Legitimacy and Community: Traveling Writers and Texts in Post–1945 East Asia,” Para-doxa: Studies in World Literary Genres 22 (September 2010), 1–33, and Texts in Turmoil: Reimagining Regions and Worlds (unpublished book manuscript, in preparation).

Chapter Six

Lu Jingruo and the Earliest Transportation of Western-Style Theatre from Japan to China Siyuan Liu

Among members of the Spring Willow Society (Chunliu She), the Chinese student group accredited for bringing Western-style spoken drama from Japan to China, Lu Jingruo (1885– 1915) is less known than Li Shutong (1880–1942), the group’s founder who later became a prominent Buddhist monk, or Ouyang Yuqian (1889–1962), whose lifelong devotion to modern Chinese theatre earned him wide admiration. Lu was not involved in the first two Spring Willow productions, a one-act of La Dame aux Camélias in early 1907 and Black Slaves’ Cry to Heaven (Heinu yutian lu), the adapted version of Uncle Tom’s Cabin that is commonly acknowledged as the curtain-raiser of modern Chinese theatre, in June of that same year. Lu was also unable to make further contribution to the huaju (spoken drama) movement due to his premature death in 1915. However, in the short period between joining the group in late 1908 and his untimely passing in 1915, Lu was the group’s leader in both Tokyo and Shanghai, in part, because he was the only member who had received formal training in both forms of modern Japanese theatre—shinpa (new school drama), the hybrid form of kabuki and European melodrama, and shingeki (new drama), a later and more intellectual adoption of contemporary Western drama. An aesthetics and psychology major at Tokyo Imperial University, Lu first studied in Tokyo Actor’s School (Tokyo Haiyū Yōseijo), created by the famous shinpa actor Fujisawa Asajirō (1866–1917), and later the Literary Society (Bungei Kyōkai), one of the earliest shingeki groups created by Tsubouchi Shōyō (1859–1935), Japan’s first translator of Shakespeare’s complete plays. Lu also acted in minor roles both in a star-studded shinpa production in 1908 and then in the Literary Society’s 1911 productions of A Doll’s House, Merchant of Venice, and Hamlet.[1] As a result, Lu was widely admired as “number one among new dramatists”[2] by his fellow practitioners in Shanghai in the 1910s, when new drama was known as wenmingxi (civilized drama), a liminal and hybrid form between traditional sung-dance theatre and spoken drama. Indeed, as I will document in this chapter, his contribution to the beginning of modern Chinese theatre was significant in at least three areas: a recognition that intercultural theatre should start with transportation of successful foreign productions; an understanding through direct contact with leading shingeki figures about the supremacy of the written scripts; and finally an effort to start creating a new Chinese dramaturgy inspired by Western and modern Japanese theatre.

TRANSPORTATION OF THEATRICAL PRODUCTIONS Significantly, because his southern Chinese accent did not fit the northern dialect used in Spring Willow’s productions, Lu was not admitted into the Spring Willow Society until late 1908 when the original organizers of the group—Li Shutong and Zeng Xiaogu—were beginning to retreat from the group. In fact, the change of leadership was so significant that the group’s subsequent productions were staged under a different name, the 1908–1909 Society (Shenyou Hui).[3] An even more significant change, though, came in terms of play selection. Spring Willow’s early production either followed one-acts or excerpts of European plays or used their own adaptations, as in the case of Black Slaves’ Cry to Heaven, which followed a well-known translation of the anti-slavery novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Lin Shu.[4] None of these followed any shinpa production, although a couple of them were coached by Fujisawa Asajirō and many of the group’s actors mimicked their favorite shinpa models. This apparently was not enough for Lu Jingruo, whose immersion in the theatre world must have taught him to view theatre as a comprehensive art that can only be transported through specific productions. It was this insight that guided his first few efforts to bring modern theatre to the Chinese audience, staging productions first in Tokyo in early 1909 and then three more in Shanghai between 1910 and 1911. In all of them, he adapted scripts of successful shinpa productions into Chinese, often localizing character and place names, but otherwise largely following original shinpa productions. His first attempt was to adapt a shinpa version of Victorien Sardou’s La Tosca as staged in 1907 by Ii Yōhō and Kawai Takeo, two of the genre’s brightest stars. While he made certain changes, including the character names and a couple of sequences of events, surviving documents, including memoirs from Ouyang Yuqian who played Tosca and similar stage shots from both productions, indicate that the Spring Willow production indeed followed Ii and Kawai’s precedence from acting to scenery to stage pictures.[5] As a result, this production, only the second multi-act production by Spring Willow following Black Slaves’ Cry to Heaven, marked a significant step toward spoken drama: As a spoken drama, this play’s production format was more uniform and purer than that of Black Slaves’ Cry to Heaven—the complete reliance on the script and tight transitions between acts; the tight arrangement of story organization, plot development, and character deployment; the flow of actions with no additional and unreasonable interjections, hastily added characters, audience-pleasing tricks, exaggerated acting. . . . Jingruo was quite good at playwriting and directing, so he paid special attention to the unity of stage images.[6]

Encouraged by the success of his first shinpa adaptation, Lu, even before his graduation and formal return to China in 1912, introduced three more shinpa productions to Shanghai during the summer vacations of 1910 and 1911. These include a spectacular English melodrama, The Bondman (Nuli) and two original shinpa plays, The Tide (J: Ushio, C: Meng huitou) and The Echo of Cloud (J: Kumo no hibiki, C: Shehui zhong). All three plays, plus La Tosca, became the core of Spring Willow’s repertoire later in Shanghai where former Spring Willow members regrouped under the banner of Spring Willow Theatre (Chunliu Juchang). Among these plays, The Echo of Cloud (1907) and The Tide (1908) were written by the

journalist and playwright Satō Kōroku (1874–1949) and were among the few shinpa hits that were written specifically for the shinpa stage, not adaptations of popular novels. The Bondman was based on a 1909 production by the famous shinpa actor Kawakami Otōjiro who in turn followed a sensational London production at Drury Lane in 1906.[7] At the time, the Japanese playwright and translator Matsui Shōyō (1870–1933) was touring Europe together with the kabuki star Ichikawa Sadanji II and saw the English production. Based on a novel originally written by Hall Caine (1853–1931) in 1890, The Bondman was set in Iceland and the Isle of Man and centered on revenge and love between two half brothers, whose bond is forged during the climactic eruption of a sulphur mine where both are serving hard labor. Caine then adapted the novel into a five-act play reset in Sicily in part for a spectacular onstage eruption of Mt. Etna. Matsui, impressed by the Drury Lane production’s melodramatic power and technical sophistication, learned the mechanisms of the volcano eruption and translated the script into Japanese.[8] When Kawakami Otōjiro staged the play in 1909, the scenes were set in Japan and the Philippines, which again became the site for another onstage volcanic eruption. During summer vacation in 1910, Lu Jingruo transported Kawakami’s production, now set in China and a southeastern island into yet another spectacular production in Shanghai’s Weichun Yuan Garden.[9] Taking his cues from Kawakami, Lu also emphasized scenic spectacles, where “during the volcano scene, bright fireworks shot up from the mountain top of the oilpainted backdrop, dazzling the Chinese.” A Japanese reporter who saw the production was especially impressed with the production’s technical sophistication and its resemblance to shinpa productions: Of productions in Western and Chinese costumes, this was the first that utilized Japanese-style curtain opening, wooden clapper tapping,[10] and curtain closing. The words on the drop curtains were written by Chinese, but the painting was done by Japanese ceramic painters working at the local Ishikawa Company. The musical instruments were Western and were played, as was the custom, in front of the stage. The backdrop was painted by the local Mitsugashira Company and was better than those seen in Japan. The set pieces like trees, falling branches, window shades, and haze curtains were all in Japanese style and the wigs were made in Japan. In other words, the bones of this production were Western, its flesh and joints Japanese, and skin Chinese.[11]

Indeed, if we consider the script as the bone and the final product in front of the audience as the skin, then it was the Kawakami production that Lu followed that served as the flesh and joints that linked the play from the script to the stage. Of course, this keen sense of productionoriented transportation does not mean Lu was in any way negligent of the written script. On the contrary, he and his fellow Spring Willow actors were staunch defenders of the supremacy of the written script against the common wenmingxi practice by almost all other companies that used scenarios supplemented by onstage improvisation. As detailed in the next section, Lu and Spring Willow based some of their arguments for the script on those made by leaders of the shingeki movement. More specifically, it was most likely Lu’s direct contact with at least one of the leaders of the shingeki movement that facilitated the transportation of these arguments which often originated in Europe.

SUPREMACY OF THE WRITTEN SCRIPT One of the fundamental issues during the first decade of spoken drama, the debate over the role of the written script, was waged in Shanghai during the pre-May Fourth era of early and mid1910s. Like many other cultural events in China at the turn of the twentieth century, the debate in a way was a rehash of an earlier debate in Japan where as early as 1889, Mori Ōgai (1862– 1922), having recently returned after four years of study in Germany, declared: “First the drama, then the performance. The drama is primary, the performance secondary.”[12] Following the recent rise of European naturalist and modernist theatre over commercial melodrama, Ōgai denounced recent attempts in reforming kabuki as “productions strong on props and weak on drama”,[13] targeting the kind of elaborate contemporary and Westernized productions staged at the Shintomi-za theatre by its owner Morita Kan’ya XII (1846–1897) and star Ichikawa Danjūrō IX (1838–1903). One such play, entitled The Strange Tale of the Castaways: A Western Kabuki (Hyōryū kidan seiyō kabuki), told the story of a father and a son separated at sea outside Japan only to be rescued by British and American ships and taken to their respective countries as the premise for an elaborate showcase of the American and European continents. This is the type of production popular in Shanghai in the mid-1910s by both wenmingxi and reformed jingju (Beijing opera) companies, where the more successful wenmingxi companies such as the New People Society (Xinmin She) and the People’s Voice Society (Minming She) were known for their use of scenarios, improvisation, singing, slapstick, outlandish plot, and elaborate set. These shows all used scenarios that required improvisation based on stock characters and a role category system similar to that of jingju. By contrast, Spring Willow Theatre, in its opening poster in April 1914, upholds the supremacy of the script as the first of five distinguishing features:[14] Playwriting is a comprehensive art that encompasses literature, fine art, music, as well as human action and language. An actor needs to follow all these arts and will destroy a play if they are improperly balanced. Therefore, a play must be based on a script. Our repertoire includes adaptations of well-known literary novels, translations of famous European and Japanese plays, and original plays scrupulously written by our members. We never borrow from worthless pingtan[15] and popular novels in order to please the lower elements of the society. Therefore, our plays are somewhat high-minded and rarely illogical.[16]

These words exuded a confidence—even a bit of arrogance—that was in part based on the belief of modern spoken drama as being more evolutionarily advanced than traditional sungdance theatre, an idea Mori Ōgai advanced in his 1889 speech mentioned above. Arguing that “storytelling and singing accompanied by musical instruments” belonged to “simpler” human societies like ancient Greece and India, Ōgai noted that the split between drama and opera appeared in Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. As a result, opera resembled “a jidaimono in kabuki and a jōruri puppet play,”[17] where stage spectacular was adopted to compensate the slow action (Handlung). In contrast, in drama, “[a] play should be given life through its text: it should present poetic nuances in dialogue form, with the actor bringing the script to life.” He thus concluded that “distracting ‘operatic’ elements in our national practice

[should] be eliminated” so as “to transform our theater into an art form equal to its counterparts in the West.”[18] This alignment of traditional theatre with opera and spoken theatre with drama, often utilized by Chinese huaju practitioners later in their effort to “reform” traditional theatre, found its way into a 1914 essay by the Spring Willow member Feng Shuluan: “There are two major types of theatre today: jiuxi (old theatre) and xinxi (new theatre). . . . Western theatre is divided into drama and opera. There is no singing in drama while singing is the focus in opera. The xinxi in our country actually originated from Western drama while our traditional theatre is similar to opera”.[19] In the same writing, Feng, who had never been to Japan and whose writings seem most likely a reflection of the collective wisdom of Lu Jingruo and other Spring Willow members, offered a more specific argument for the supremacy of the script, directly connecting Lu to shingeki and modern European theatre: The script is the primary element of a play, with the second being scenery and third costume. To understand the reason behind this, one has to know that the characters are in fact marionettes whose lines and actions are passive instead of active, mechanical instead of natural. If the actors are passive puppets, then who is their controller? The script, since it controls when to make an entrance, when to finish an act, when to sit, when to lie down, when to laugh, and when to cry. Everything is dictated by the script, which the actor should carefully follow. Therefore, the actor is the puppet and the script is the wires that control it. The person who can manipulate the wires to make the puppet talk and move is none other than the playwright.[20]

The comparison of the actor to a puppet or marionette (kuilei) controlled by a handler reminds one of Gordon Craig’s famous 1907 essay “The Actor and the Ueber-Marionette.” In fact, Craig was indeed Lu’s inspiration and the medium that linked Craig and Lu was none other than Osanai Kaoru, whose November 1909 production of Ibsen’s John Gabriel Borkman at the Free Theatre (Jiyū Gekijō) is commonly acknowledged as ushering shingeki into modern Japanese theatre. Osanai was “attracted strongly by the ideas of Edward Gordon Craig, in superficial ways the very antithesis of the kabuki theatrical tradition”[21] after severing ties with the shinpa star Ii Yōhō, for whom he had worked between 1904 and 1907 as a translator and advisor, and declaring that shinpa was “not art” for “young people of the Meiji.”[22] In 1908, Osanai translated Craig’s long essay The Art of the Theatre: The First Dialogue (1905). Written as a dialogue between a playgoer and a stage-director, the essay seeks to establish the absolute power of the director, comparing the theatre to a ship and proclaims that “until discipline is understood in a theatre to be willing and reliant obedience to the manager or captain no supreme achievement can be accomplished.”[23] Towards the end of the essay, after discussing the necessity for the designers’ obedience to the director, Craig turns to the actor: Playgoer: But are you asking these intelligent actors almost to become puppets? Stage-Director: A sensitive question! Which one would expect from an actor who felt uncertain about his powers. A puppet at present is only a doll, delightful enough for a puppet show. But for a theatre we need more than a doll. Yet that is the feeling which some actors have about their relationship with the stage-manager. They feel they are having their strings pulled, and resent it, and show they feel hurt—insulted.[24]

Here, Craig sees the director as the captain to whom every department of the theatre, including the playwright, should be obedient. Although this eventually became Osanai’s position later, in 1924, when he established the Tsukiji Little Theatre (Tsukiji Shōgekijō), in 1909, he seems to be still following Ōgai’s argument of the supremacy of drama over performance, regarding the script, not the director, as the puppet controller: All the actors already scheduled to be engaged in this movement [i.e., the Free Theatre] are ready to become the dolls of a script. I will admit newcomers only when they agree with this. To follow a script absolutely is a means of expressing one’s own technique absolutely. No actors can help this movement unless they are conscious of this.[25]

This passage comes from a series of letters, published in the famous theatre magazine Engei Gahō (Entertainment Illustrated) over the course of 1909, between Osanai and the playwright Mayama Seika (1878–1948) about the philosophy of the Free Theatre, including Osanai’s famous proclamation of turning professional actors into amateurs. As can been seen from the above quote, Osanai indeed expected his actors to be ningyō, which Maki Isaka Morinaga translated here as “doll” and Brian Powell translated as “servant,”[26] but which can be equally validly rendered as “puppet.” Regardless of the translation, the idea of Osanai proclaiming the actor serving as the puppet of the script is clearly established in this passage. Given Engei Gahō’s immense influence, it would be nearly impossible for Lu to have missed these letters, especially given the fact that Lu was studying at the time at Tokyo Actor’s School where Osanai was teaching “Introduction to Play Script.” Osanai most likely emphasized this point in his class since the two exam questions he asked were “Discuss the relationship between the script and the actor” and “Discuss your thoughts on modern Western plays.”[27] Therefore, it seems entirely possible that Osanai’s interpretation of Craig’s famed metaphor made a deep impression on Lu Jingruo, who subsequently adopted it in Spring Willow rehearsals, where he paid “special attention to the unity of stage images.”[28] While Osanai’s 1909 letters looked forthright in light of his success at the Free Theatre, which became a rallying point for the shingeki movement in Japan, and while similar arguments would have prevailed in China in the post-May Fourth 1920s, asking actors to become puppets of the script was simply not practical for wenmingxi practitioners and audience. Most of them had no point of reference other than traditional and folk theatre, plus the popular reformed jingju, another hybrid form like wenmingxi. Even the Spring Willow Theatre was eventually driven to rely on scenarios for the majority of their productions due to competition and the demand for constant new plays. Still, the plays Lu adapted, along with the one play he wrote as a complete script, Love and Hatred in a Family (Jiating enyuan ji), were widely acknowledged as the best of wenmingxi scripts. In particular, Love and Hatred in a Family stands out as a clear example of his effort to create a new Chinese dramaturgy inspired by both Western and modern Japanese theatre. ESTABLISHMENT OF A NEW CHINESE DRAMATURGY After his four adaptations from successful shinpa productions, Lu formally returned to China in

1912, when he formed the New Drama Society (Xinju Tongzhihui) with several former Spring Willow members and wrote one of the most successful and best-regarded plays of the wenmingxi era, Love and Hatred in a Family. Like a typical shinpa domestic play and unlike most scenario-based wenmingxi plays with rambling and episodic plots running in double-digit acts, Love and Hatred in a Family is composed of seven acts. It tells the story of Wang Boliang, an officer of the imperial army who comes to riches during the 1911 Revolution by holding on to official supplies. He meets a prostitute, Xiao Taohong, in Shanghai whom he marries and brings home to Suzhou, but she is followed secretly by her lover Li Jianzhai. When Wang’s son Chongshen discovers their affair, they scheme against Chongshen and have him expelled by Wang. Wronged by his father, Chongshen kills himself with Wang’s pistol, driving his fiancée and Wang’s stepdaughter Meixian to insanity. When Wang finally learns of Xiao Taohong’s affair, he kills her, donates his properties to an orphanage, and returns to the army to serve the nation. Love and Hatred in a Family was one of the most popular plays of wenmingxi, a staple at the Spring Willow, the New People, and the People’s Voice, the big three companies of the era. [29] One reason for the play’s popularity lies in its theatricality, a testament to Lu’s dramaturgical capability. Ouyang recalls that two scenes were especially popular: The first is when Xiao Taohong frames Chongshen for poisoning his father on his birthday. Enraged, Wang threatens to expel his son and then drinks until falling onto a couch in his study. Chongshen approaches to explain to his father but is unable to wake him up, his tearful pleas only met with mumbled slurs. Finally, Chongshen shoots himself in despair. With the gunshot, Wang makes a turn but wakes up only after chaotic rambling in the house. The other scene is after Chongshen’s death when the deranged Meixian comes to the garden every evening to look for her fiancé, calling for her brother. When Wang wants to avoid her in the garden, she approaches him and asks where her brother has gone. He replies, “Your brother won’t be back!” In performance, this scene was quite frightening. At the time, the actors usually tried to be as realistic as possible: I once saw Jiangshi collapsing on a chair full of tears after this scene.[30]

Ma Jiangshi, who played Meixian, was one of the original members of the Spring Willow Society. He was known for his tragic female roles, include the heroine Namiko in the canonical shinpa play The Cuckoo (Hototogisu), which Ma adapted from Japanese. The Spring Willow was well known for their gut-wrenching scenes like these two that build sustained dramatic tension in well-developed acts. With his background in shinpa and European theatre, it is easy to see where Lu obtained his inspiration. One of his sources seems to be Shakespeare, with whom he was familiar through his involvement in the Literary Society productions of Hamlet and Merchant of Venice in 1911 and his adaptation of Kawakami’s version of Othello in 1915.[31] Meixian’s insanity, for example, apparently came from Ophelia’s mad scene in Hamlet. More specifically, the stage effect Lu sought to establish was most likely inspired by the Literary Society’s 1911 production. Here is an excerpt from Act Six of the play: (Enter Meixian, gaunt, in disheveled mourning clothes, distracted) Meixian: Brother, brother! . . . Why did you abandon me? Why did you leave me alone? . . . (Looking up at the sky where a full moon is suddenly covered by rising dark cloud) Moon, moon, did you hide away because you don’t want to see me? Come out fast! Oh, abominable dark cloud. Why did you cover the moon? I hate you! (Crosses to the flowers, picks up one and sings) Flowers bloom and fade year after year. No one returns once they’re dead! (Suddenly staring forward) Ah! Aren’t you my brother? I’ve got a flower for you here. Brother, brother, you can’t

leave anymore! (Springs forward for an embrace, in vain) Brother, why do you evade me! Oh, I know, you don’t like me. (Collapses on the floor, weeps, desperately tears up the flower in hand and throws the petals up, which falls down like rain. Then stands up and sees Boliang. Leaps forward to embrace Boliang’s knees, crying) Brother, brother, you are here.[32]

Lu Jingruo was part of the Literary Society’s 1911 production of Hamlet in which he most likely played one of the guards.[33] This explains his familiarity with the text and production of Hamlet, notably Ophelia’s mad scene in Act 4, Scene 5 in which she enters “distracted” and sings: “He is dead and gone, lady,/ He is dead and gone;/ At his head a grass-green turf,/ At his heels a stone. . . . Larded all with sweet flowers;/ Which bewept to the grave did not go/ With true-love showers.” As shown in Lu’s stage directions, he was obviously envisioning this scene in the mode of the Literary Society production, from looking up to the moon, to the use of flowers, to falling petals. Some scholars have hinted that the other scene mentioned by Ouyang, the one in which the son Chongshen shoots himself after being misunderstood by his father, could be inspired by Hamlet since “such depiction of the misery [of being wronged by the father] had probably never been seen in traditional Chinese theatre.”[34] This scene takes place in Act Five when Chongshen, after being ordered by his father to leave the house, appears disheveled, covers up his drunk and sleeping father with his own jacket, weeps in front of his dead mother’s portrait, and readies to shoot himself with Wang’s pistol when Meixian comes on stage. They talk but a determined Chongshen succeeds in tricking Meixian off stage and then killing himself. Indeed, his suffering may well have been inspired by Hamlet and the conversation between him and Meixian motivated by the Hamlet and Ophelia’s “Get thee to a nunnery” dialogue in Act 3 Scene 1. Yet, Lu’s act is much more melodramatic than tragic since the tension of the dialogue between Chongshen and Meixian is premised on the hidden gun with which Chongshen is about to shoot himself. On the other hand, Wang Boliang’s impulsiveness and gullibility seem to be modeled after Othello, whom Lu believed to be “simple-minded and superficial but also straightforward and naïve.”[35] The play’s climax, when Wang kills Xiao Taohong and comes close to taking his own life, clearly emulates Othello. In both cases an enraged husband kills his wife/concubine for what they believe is adultery before taking (or attempting to take) his own life. The dramatic highlight in both plays is the struggle between the two before the eventual killing: Xiao Taohong: (Calmly picking up the admission note [from Li about their liaison], reads it, and sneers) Very well! I thought it was some huge event, and it’s nothing more than Little Li. To be frank, what’s the problem for concubines like us to have a lover? After all, chastity arches are not for the likes of us. You look petty. Why make a fuss out of nothing! Wang Boliang: All right! You sure are something. Having done this treacherous deed, you turn around and make it into a nothing. According to you, it still wouldn’t mean anything even if you murdered me, right? Xiao Taohong: I don’t have to murder you. I didn’t come here myself. You married me. So if you want to keep me here, fine. Otherwise, let’s separate on good terms and let me leave. Wang Boliang: Let you leave! What complete nonsense. Not so easy. Xiao Taohong: Oh yes? Won’t let me leave? Why? I have my freedom! I wasn’t sold to you for life. Wang Boliang: You, you are what I bought. Whatever I want to do with you, you have to listen to me, understood? Xiao Taohong: Understood? I understand much more than you. You said you bought me, all right, show me the indenture contract. Hurry up, show me!

Wang Boliang: Ah . . . Xiao Taohong: Come on, show me the contract! Wang Boliang: (Enraged, madly waves the sword over Xiao Taohong’s forehead) I’ll cut you up, shameless bitch. That will make me happy. Xiao Taohong: (Holding it off with a pillow) Come on, my master . . . [36]

Similar as this scene seems to Othello, there are certain differences in the two cases as Desdemona is innocent of the accused crime, while Xiao Taohong openly questions whether adultery is sinful for a prostitute. This scene is probably more indicative of, on the one hand, the melodramatic shinpa dramaturgy and, on the other, Lu’s ambivalence towards misogyny and prostitution in the liminal ideological state of the pre-May Fourth 1910s. Indeed, written in the chaotic era just one year after the fall of the Qing Dynasty, the play seems to be following shinpa’s melodramatic formula that foregrounds order over chaos, as argued by Cody Poulton in his investigation of the shinpa playwright Izumi Kyōka (1873–1939). Following Peter Brook’s argument that the birth of European melodrama corresponded with the chaotic years following the French Revolution, Poulton points out: The parallels between melodrama’s rise in Europe as an expressive form and the situation in Japanese arts and letters during the Meiji era are significant, for reasons to do not only with the direct influence of European culture on Japan during this period. Japan underwent similar social, political, and technological change during its own modernization; melodrama undoubtedly reflects a natural human tendency to structure representations of the imagination in certain common, archetypal ways, especially when faced with similar circumstances in the world at large.[37]

Similarly, the “social, political, and technological changes” during the heyday of wenmingxi were sandwiched between the collapse of multi-millennium old feudal dynasties and the impending New Cultural Movement that was to storm through the country calling for total Westernization. As such, in dramaturgical, theatrical, and ideological terms, wenmingxi melodrama can be construed as an attempt to impose a moral order defined by feudal ideology of filial piety, male chauvinism, and misogyny onto the unhindered pursuit of individual freedom in China after the 1911 Revolution. Looking at the final scene in this light, Lu’s depiction of Xiao Taohong, a prostitute who remains in contact with her lover after marrying Wang, seems to follow the traditional treatment of an unfaithful woman who plots against her husband and stepson. In fact, the son’s name Chongshen is a compound of two historical princes of the Spring and Fall Period (722 BC–481 BC), Shensheng and Chong’er, whose stepmother schemed to have the elder brother killed and the younger one exiled. In Lu’s play, Chongshen tells Meixian the story of the princes to warn her against Xiao Taohong and to show that even though he is aware of the same danger, he still will not leave his father, just like the good and filial Shensheng, to protect the family’s good name. At the same time, however, Lu Jingruo was not unaware of the rise of the new woman, having most likely witnessed first-hand the stormy love affair between Matsui Sumako (1886– 1919), the Nora of the Literary Society, and her director Shimamura Hōgetsu (1871–1918), an affair that eventually led to the breakup of the Society. Indeed, certain lines by Xiao Taohong in the above passage, such as her calm and sarcastic retort, can easily be construed as bordering on the subversive. She keeps teasing and then pleading with Wang until eventually slain by him. This bold and independent woman is in fact not too far removed from Spring Willow’s Tosca,

or the heroine of a play called Pan Jinlian, written a decade later by Lu’s close friend Ouyang Yuqian. In that play, Ouyang transforms the protagonist from a notorious woman of lust, who kills her husband out of love for his brother Wu Song, into an individualist and a modern woman. Before being killed by Wu Song, she unabashedly declares her love for him: “Ah, you want my heart. That’s very good. I’ve already given you my heart. It was here, but you didn’t take it. Come and see—(She tears open her clothing) inside this snow white breast is a very red, very warm, very true heart. Take it!”[38] In the end, though, while Pan Jinlian caused a sensation when Ouyang performed it in Shanghai in 1927, Xiao Taohong of the pre-May Fourth wenmingxi era (sympathetic treatment from Lu notwithstanding) has to die begging for forgiveness: Xiao Taohong: (holding the pillow with one hand, shaking) Ah . . . oh! Master . . . forgive me, let me make a fresh start, from now on I . . . will change . . . for sure. Wang Boliang: No! Someone like you can no longer live in the world. If I let you go, who knows how many more you will destroy! (With that, pierces through Xiao Taohong’s heart with his sword, killing her in bed. Then takes a breath, pulls down the canopy, opens the door, and calls) Here! [39]

Apart from the different treatment of the heroine, another point of departure between Othello and Love and Hatred in a Family is that after killing Xiao Taohong, Wang does not immediately take his own life. Instead, he asks his servant to bring a letter to his friend He Sanshan, writes his suicide note, and is ready to commit suicide when He arrives just in time to persuade Wang to devote his energy to serving the nation.[40] Significantly, this happy conclusion not only differs from Shakespearean tragedy but also the two shinpa plays that Lu had previously adapted, especially The Echo of Cloud, which ends with a kabuki style triplesuicide. Written by the playwright and journalist Satō Kōroku, The Echo of Cloud is set around the Ishiyama family who have become social pariahs simply because the father has stolen a bottle of milk for his starving second son Otoji, whose mother had died right after giving birth. Even after moving to the countryside, they are still haunted by their infamy, forcing the elder son Sōta to steal for his sick father and mentally ill brother. When the father dies, Sōta steals the moneyoffering box from the neighboring Chōanji monastery to bury his father. Meanwhile, their sister Osumi, a maid in Baron Sahara’s family, is also sacked when Otoji goes to the baron’s house to see her and gives up Osumi’s family relationship with the ill-famed Sōta. After enduring much hardship and societal bias and being denied a final chance of redemption, Sōta brings his starving sister and brother to the bell at the Chōanji monastery where his face is molded into the church bell to be eternally smacked by the villagers. In the final scene, Sōta stabs Osumi and Otoji before crashing his head to the bell.[41] When Lu Jingruo adapted the play in Shanghai in 1911, he only localized the place and character names and left the plot intact. Although it became one of the most popular plays of the Spring Willow Theatre because of its social message and dramatic appeal, the play is essentially Japanese in its moral absolutism, depiction of social customs, and reference to native theatrical traditions such as the kabuki-inspired triple-suicide. This is probably one of the reasons why the play, popular as it was with the Spring Willow Theatre, was never staged

by other companies. It formed a sharp contrast to Love and Hatred in a Family, which indeed managed an ending more suitable to the Chinese aversion to tragic endings, a sentiment that Wang Guowei (1877–1927), one of the most perceptive literary critics of the era, famously attributed to the Chinese national character in an essay written in 1904: The Chinese spirit is worldly and carefree. As the representative of this spirit, our plays and novels are all shaded in such cheery colors. Those that begin with tragedy will end in comedy; those that begin in separation will end in reunion; those that begin in poverty will end in prosperity. Violators of this rule can hardly satisfy their readers.[42]

In this sense, Lu’s alteration of the ending of Love and Hatred in a Family can be viewed as a necessary compromise between Western and modern Japanese theatre and the horizon of expectation of his Chinese audience in the early and mid-1910s. There is no doubt that Lu was the first Chinese playwright to borrow Western dramatic themes and techniques to build a dramaturgy that was both ahead of and emblematic of his time, striving for a balance between maintaining existing social order and anti-traditional transgression as well as between preference for theatrical acculturation and literary fidelity to Western drama. As such, Love and Hatred in a Family stands out as the first attempt towards a new dramaturgy for spoken drama. In the end, the road to the compromise Lu keenly sought turned out to be quite tortuous and frustrating, as the Spring Willow Theatre was increasingly compelled to follow the example of other companies and use scenarios and improvisation to supplement its short supply of complete scripts. Eventually, they were forced out of Shanghai in mid-1915 to embark on road tours in surrounding cities, just as three years earlier, when wenmingxi had not yet found its foothold in Shanghai. This change of location, however, seemed to have triggered a revisit to Lu’s suppressed plan of introducing modern Western plays, as he found time during a brief respite between performances to sit down at the tranquil West Lake in Hangzhou to translate “Tolstoy’s Resurrection, Ibsen’s Hedda Gabbler, and two comedies by Molière.” Unfortunately, he soon died in Shanghai and “these transcripts are nowhere to be found”.[43] Had Lu survived the wenmingxi era, he would most likely have played a vital role in China’s huaju movement that started in the 1920s and which was, in part, based on the shingeki model. Indeed, apart from Ouyang Yuqian, who remained one of the most prominent leaders of modern Chinese theatre until the 1960s, another key figure this time was Tian Han, whose six-year experience in Japan between 1916 and 1922 “most certainly shaped [his] perception of modern theatre, influencing his plays, translations, and choices in theatre and education”.[44] Given Lu’s remarkable education in modern theatre and his active role in bringing that theatre to China in both theoretical and practical spheres, it is not hard to imagine the significant role he could have played. Even without the hypothetical, what I have shown in this essay clearly demonstrates the significant role Lu played in the initial transportation of Western-style spoken drama from Japan to China, particularly in transporting theatrical productions as the foundation of new drama, establishing the supremacy of the written script, and seeking a new Chinese dramaturgy.

NOTES 1. Nakamura Tadayuki, “Chunliu She yishi gao (2) —xian gei Ouyang Yuqian xiansheng” [Unknown Facts about the Spring Willow Society (2)—To Mr. Ouyang Yuqian], in Xiju-Zhongyang Xiju Xueyuan xuebao [Drama: Journal of the Central Academy of Drama] (4) (2004), pp. 14–30 and Ouyang Yuquin, “Huiyi Chunliu” [Recollections of the Spring Willow Society], in Tian Han et al., eds., Zhongguo huaju yundong wushi nian shiliao ji [Collected Resources of Fifty Years of Chinese Spoken Drama], Vol. 1 (Beijing: Zhongguo xiju chubanshe, 1985), pp. 13–46.

2. Yihua, “Liunian lai haishang xinju dashiji (1)” [Major Events of Six Years of New Drama in Shanghai (1)], in Zhou Jianyun, Ed., Jubu congkan [Collection of Essays on Theatre], Vol. 1. (Shanghai: Jiaotong tushuguan, 1922), pp. 212–28.

3. Li Shutong and Zeng Xiaogu, together with Huang Ernang, were the first Chinese Western painting students in Tokyo School of Arts when they started the Spring Willow Society in 1907. They were the forces behind the success of the Black Slaves’ Cry to Heaven production, with Zeng as the playwright, Li as the designer, and all three playing multiple roles. However, during their subsequent production in April 1908, Li received harsh reviews that made him quit the stage permanently. While Zeng was invited to write a one-act play for the group’s next production in January 1909, he was not part of their subsequent productions. See Ouyang Yuqian. Ziwo Yanxi Yilai [Since I Started Acting.] (Taipei: Longwen chubanshe, 1990): pp. 14–16.

4. These included an act of La Dame aux Camélias in early 1907, a European romantic melodrama called Sheng xiang lian [Love Sick] in April 1908, and a French one-act Minbuping [Cry of Injustice] in late 1908. Love Sick is a version of Koi No Yamai, Ozaki Kōyō’s adaptation of Molière’s Le Medicin Malgré Lui. Cry of Injustice is based on Jules Jouy’s L’Échelle sociale, ou les principes de 89.

5. Liu Siyuan, “Adaptation as Appropriation: Staging Western Drama in the First Western-Style Theatres in Japan and China,” Theatre Journal 59 (3) (2007), pp. 423–28

6. Ouyang 1985, p. 31. 7. Shirakawa Nobuo, ed., Kawakami Otojirō Sadayakko: shinbun ni miru jinbutsu zō [Kawakami Otojirō, Sadayakko: Their Personalities as Seen in Newspapers] (Tokyo: Yūshōdō shuppan, 1985), p. 476 and Vivien Allen, Hall Caine: Portrait of a Victorian Romancer. (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1997), p. 314.

8. Shirakawa, p. 476 and Brian Powell, Japan’s Modern Theatre: A Century of Change and Continuity (London: Japan Library, 2002), p. 34.

9. Zheng Zhengqiu, Ed., Xinju kaozheng baichu [One Hundred New Drama Plays] (Shanghai: Zhonghua tushu jicheng gongsi, 1919), pp. 25–27.

10. The striking together of two wooden blocks (hyōshigi), which is a tradition of Japanese theatre to mark the start of a theatrical performance.

11. The original report was published in the September 1910 issue of Kabuki magazine and was quoted in Nakamura 1956: 42, 2004: 27–28.

12. Mori Ōgai, “Engeki Kairyō ronja no henken ni odoroku” [Surprised by the Prejudice of Theatre Reformers], translated by Keiko MacDonald in J. Thomas Rimer, Ed., Not a Song Like Any Other: An Anthology of Writings by Mori Ōgai (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2004), p. 145.

13. Ibid., p. 149. 14. The poster lists five distinguishing features of the Spring Willow Theatre over their rivals: noble scripts, beautiful scenery, appropriate costume, mature art, and hygienic theatre.

15. A collective term that includes pinghua—story-telling without music and tanci—story-telling with music. Both forms were popular in Shanghai and surrounding cities like Suzhou.

16. Chunliu Juchang, “Chunliu Juchang kaimu chuandan” [Spring Willow Theatre Opening Poster], in Zhongguo xiandai huaju wenxue shilue [A Brief History of Modern Chinese Dramatic Literature] (Hefei: Anhui jiaoyu chubanshe, 1990).

17. Jidaimono means history plays in kabuki. Jōruri is another name for the bunraku puppet theatre. 18. Mori, p. 148. 19. Ma Er Xiansheng, “Xixue jiangyi (1)” [Lectures in Theatre], in Youxi zazhi [The Pastime] (9) (1914), pp. 1–6. 20. Ma Er Xiansheng, “Xixue jiangyi (4)” [Lectures in Theatre]. In Youxi zazhi [The Pastime] (12) (1914), pp. 1–11.

21. Powell, p. 33. 22. Osanai Kaoru, “Shingeki higeijutsu ron” [Why the New Theatre Is Not Art], in Sugai Yukio, Ed., Osanai Kaoru engekiron zenshū [The Complete Writings on Theatrical Theory of Osanai Kaoru],Vol. 1. (Tokyo: Miraisha, 1964), p. 10.

23. Edward Gordon Craig, On the Art of the Theatre (Chicago: Browne’s Bookstore, 1912), p. 172. 24. Ibid., p. 168. 25. From Osanai, pp. 104–105. The English translation is by Maki Isaka Morinaga in “Osanai Kaoru’s Dilemma: ‘Amateurism by Professionals’ in Modern Japanese Theatre,” in TDR: The Drama Review 49 (1) (2005), pp. 119–133.

26. Brian Powell, “A Parable of the Modern Theatre in Japan: The Debate between Osanai Kaoru and Mayama Seika, 1909.” In Sue Henny and Jean-Pierre Lehmann, eds., Themes and Theories in Modern Japanese History: Essays in Memory of Richard Storry (London: Athlone Press, 1999), p. 164.

27. Itō, Shigeru, “Tengze Qian’erlang yu Zhongguo liuxuesheng Chunliu She jiaoliu de dingwei” [The Place of the Exchanges Between Fujisawa Asajirō and the Chinese Student Spring Willow Society], in Zhongguo huaju yanju [Studies in Chinese Spoken Drama] 10 (2004), p. 74.

28. Ouyang 1985, p. 31. 29. Seto Hiroshi, “Burugui he Jiating enyuan ji bijiao” [Comparison between The Cuckoo and Love and Hate in a Family], in Zhongguo huaju yanju [Studies in Chinese Spoken Drama] 10 (2004), pp. 51–52.

30. Ouyang 1985, p. 36. 31. Liu Siyuan, “Adaptation as Appropriation: Staging Western Drama in the First Western-Style Theatres in Japan and China,” in Theatre Journal 59 (3) (2007), pp. 417–23.

32. Lu Jingruo (retold by Hu Hengsheng), “Jiating enyuan ju” [Love and Hatred in a Family], in Weimin Wang, Ed., Zhongguo zaoqi huaju xuan [Selected Plays of Early Chinese Spoken Drama] (Beijing: Zhongguo xiju chubanshe, 1989), pp. 238–39.

33. Nakamura, p. 25. 34. Seto, p. 57. 35. Ouyang 1985, p. 35. 36. Lu, pp. 247–48. 37. Poulton 2001, p. 19. 38. Ouyang Yuqian, “P’an Chin-lien,” translated by Catherine Swatek in Edward M. Gunn, Ed., Twentieth-Century Chinese Drama: An Anthology (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1983), p. 73.

39. Lu, p. 248. 40. Ibid., p. 249. 41. Satō Kōroku, “Kumo no hibiki” [The Echo of Cloud], in Meiji bungaku zenshū [A Collection of Meiji Literature] Vol. 86 (Tokyo: Chikuma shobo, 1969) and “Shehui zhong” [The Bell of Society], translated by Lu Jingruo in Wang Weimin, Ed., Zhongguo zaoqi huaju xuan [Selected Plays of Early Chinese Spoken Drama] (Beijing: Zhongguo xiju chubanshe, 1989).

42. Wang Guowei. “Honglou meng yanjiu” [On Dream of the Red Chamber], Chapter 3. Available online at http://fanjin.bokee.com/378140.html. Wang later modified his position and found true tragedies in Yuan Dynasty (1279–1368) dramas, but not in plays since then.

43. Ouyang Yuqian, Ziwo yanxi yilai [Since I Started Acting] (Taipei: Longwen chubanshe, 1990). 44. Liu Siyuan, “Tian Han, Western Theatre, and Japan—The Problem with Source-based and Target-based Models of Interculturalism,” in Stratos E. Constantinidis, ed., Text & Presentation, 2005 (London: McFarland, 2006), p. 115.

III

The Culture of Occupation

Chapter Seven

Affective Politics and the Legend of Yamaguchi Yoshiko/Li Xianglan Yiman Wang

Yamaguchi Yoshiko, also known as Li Xianglan, Ri Kōran, Shirley Yamaguchi, and most recently, Otaka Yoshiko, epitomized phenomenal identity fluidity that evolved under specific historical and political circumstances, notably Japan’s imperialist expansion during World War II, the postwar American occupation of Japan, the unfolding cold-war political climate, and late twentieth-century globalization. Born in 1920 to Japanese parents in Fushun, northeast China, Yamaguchi spent her life in China, Japan, and America under different names. A decade after her birth, northeastern China was formally occupied by Japan following the Manchurian Incident of Sept. 18, 1931, and in the following year, the region was transformed into Manchukuo, a puppet state figure-headed by Pu Yi, the last emperor of the Qing Dynasty. Yamaguchi’s accidental birth into a contested geographical area that was undergoing rapid political remapping and regime change seemed to foreshadow a legendary life premised upon continuous role-shifting and identity transformation throughout the twentieth century. Three crucial experiences in Yamaguchi’s early years directly enabled her life of identity vacillation and performance. The first was her adoption by her father’s two Chinese friends, which led to her two Chinese names, Li Xianglan and Pan Shuhua. The former was to become her stage name in China, and is engraved in the Chinese collective memory. The second was the name that she took while enrolled in a Beijing high school, where she not only perfected her Mandarin Chinese and passed as a Chinese national, but also became acutely aware of the predicament of dual emotional and political allegiances, a situation aggravated by the

developing Sino-Japan confrontation. During a 1936 students’ meeting commemorating the Dec. 9, 1935, student protests against Japanese invasion, where every student in attendance expressed his or her patriotism, the only “promise” that Pan (Yamaguchi) could offer was to stand on the Great Wall and subject her body to bullets from either the Japanese or the Chinese side. In an earlier study of Yamaguchi’s negotiation of national-transnational tension, I described the image of her standing on the Great Wall—the symbol of China’s self-defense— as a powerful trope for the ambivalence of border-crossing. Whereas the ability to cross the border, or to “pass” as a Chinese (as in Li’s case), may entail freedom and a utopian vision of de-territorialization and deracination, it simultaneously accentuates the risk of being disowned and victimized by both camps.[1] The third factor that contributed to Yamaguchi’s life of performance and identity vacillation was her classical vocal education received from an Italian dramatic soprano, Madame Podresov. Her formal vocal training, combined with her good looks, rendered her an ideal vehicle of entertainment and propaganda for Japan’s wartime ideological apparatus. Growing up bi-lingual and bi-cultural, trained in classical vocal performance, the teenaged Yamaguchi was scouted by Fengtian Broadcasting. Under the name of “Li Xianglan,” she performed “New Manchurian Songs” (Manzhou xin gequ), which jumpstarted her acting career as a leading star in the newly established Manchurian Motion Picture Corporation (or Manei), known as the best-equipped film company in the Far East. As a semi-official corporation with the purpose of “contributing to the exaltation of the national spirit and to the promotion of national education,”[2] Manei focused on educational documentaries as well as entertaining films, which combined to inculcate the audience. Following the directive issued by the company managing director Amakasu Masahiko, “Making Films for the Manchurians,”[3] the company adopted the strategy of recruiting local actors who would appeal to the local audience. Yamaguchi therefore continued to be billed as Li Xianglan—a “Manchurian star”—in her screen debut Honeymoon Express (Mitsugetsu kaisha, 1938). As she continued to star in more films, especially the “national policy” films (kokusaku eiga) of the early 1940s which included the continent trilogy comprised of Song of the White Orchid (Byakuran no uta, 1939), Vow in the Desert (Nessa no chikai, 1940), and China Nights (Shina no yoru, 1940), “Li Xianglan” became a well-known “Manchurian star” and a “goodwill ambassador” amongst the “five ethnic groups,” and acquired more and more of a following in Japan and all parts of the Japan-occupied areas. Yamaguchi’s “passing” as a Manchurian or Chinese both on and off the screen was not only engineered by the Fengtian Broadcasting Station and Manei management, but also her own self-conscious efforts. In a 2003 interview, Yamaguchi, now known as Otaka Yoshiko, observed, “I masked the fact that I was a Japanese completely, making sure that I didn't behave in a way that betrayed my Japaneseness.”[4] Interpreting Yamaguchi’s ethnic and cultural masquerade from the perspective of stringent national politics, Chinese film historian Zhu Tianwei explicitly describes “Li Xianglan” as a “lie” concocted by the Japanese invaders, and by the militarist Manei management in particular, with the express purpose of duping and coercing Chinese and

other Japan-colonized subjects.[5] Interestingly, Zhu’s demystification and denunciation of Li Xianglan are premised upon acknowledging the effectiveness of the Li Xianglan myth. As Zhu puts it, Li’s delicate figure, fluent Chinese and melodious singing voice allowed her to play a range of loveable Chinese maiden roles, which captivated and “poisoned” the audience, thus effectively fulfilling the Japan-engineered fabrication.[6] If, as Roland Barthes argues, demystification does not necessarily dispel the appeal of the myth or invalidate the myth,[7] then the Li Xianglan myth is even more persistent to the extent that attempts at demystification and denunciation have been constantly intertwined with discourses of distraction, annulment, and redemption. Two instances testify to such ambivalent co-existence. The first was the postwar trial of Li Xianglan as a traitor in China. She was ultimately acquitted upon proving her Japanese nationality, for the charge of treason against China, by definition, can only apply to Chinese nationals. Li was subsequently repatriated to Japan as Yamaguchi Yoshiko. During the cold war era, as China and Japan started to approach each other in the early 1970s with an eye toward restoring their diplomatic relationship, Yamaguchi found herself in the spotlight once again for openly admitting to Japan’s war crimes and guilt vis-à-vis China, as well as for repenting her own role in the war machine. By so doing, Yamaguchi transformed from a wartime “goodwill ambassador,” produced by Japan’s pan-Asianist imperialism, to a postwar volunteer spokesperson for intra-Asian peace and cooperation. Her redemption not only synchronized with and facilitated the Sino-Japan political shift, but also revived and perpetuated her legendary allure. Importantly, both during and after the war, the Li Xianglan myth hinged upon two elements: her shifting identity and her vocal performance. Her wide identity repertoire, as produced by the war machine and her postwar migratory experiences, was emphatically unstable and adaptable, evoking what Étienne Balibar and Immanuel Wallerstein term as the “fictive ethnicity.”[8] Her singing voice, attached to the Li Xianglan iconography, has oftentimes been reified as an affective stimulant that transcends geopolitical and historical boundaries. Armed with an identity that is flexible, interstitial, and cosmopolitan, and a voice that is deemed ahistorically enchanting, the Li Xianglan myth seems to have consistently defied the issue of “borders” (be it national, cultural, political, or temporal) throughout a historical panorama that has witnessed intense border conflicts and remapping. In this chapter, I argue that the erasure of “border” suggested by the Li Xianglan myth should be understood precisely in relation to the shifting cultural politics of the twentieth century. My previous study of Li Xianglan and her postwar “afterlife” emphasized the intractable persistence of “borders” that enable and necessitate constant negotiation between the national and the transnational.[9] In this chapter, I extend the thought, and use the Li Xianglan myth to explicate the symbiotic relationship between border politics and the apparently borderless affect. The borderless affect derives from decontextualized reification and reprisal of Li’s vocal and visual appeal both during and after the war, with special emphasis on its apolitical and apparently universal sentiment that resonates with listeners as well as viewers from diverse backgrounds. Border politics, on the other hand, stresses the importance of

differentiation and stratification. Border politics consist of two dimensions. The first refers to the political circumstances that necessitate the existence of the boundary line and the constant redrawing of the line. The second has to do with the political effects produced by the persistent, albeit shifting, boundary. One of the major effects has to do with the reconceptualization of the Self and the Other, or of identification and difference on the collective as well as the individual levels. Each different historical stage of the twentieth century gives rise to a specific set of strategies of Self/Other demarcation and alignment, which entails a different mode of border politics. The Li Xianglan myth that unfolds and transforms itself along with historical shifts can thus be seen as emblematizing the kaleidoscope of border politics. It does so by inflecting border politics oftentimes through an aestheticizing prism and by privileging affective responses. In the following pages, I first study how the Li Xianglan myth is (re)constructed to elicit apolitical affect that both registers and distracts different modes of border politics at variant historical conjunctures. I then turn around and discuss the ways in which affect is ultimately inextricably tied up with border politics. My use of affect follows Brian Massumi’s explication of Deleuze and Guattari’s theorization of this concept. Specifically, I emphasize affect as “a prepersonal intensity corresponding to the passage from one experiential state of the body to another.” Such intensity is transmitted amongst bodies, both affecting others and allowing oneself to be affected, leading toward connections that precede will and consciousness. Consequently, it tends to galvanize individual bodies that may otherwise hold very different ideological positions.[10] Such a group formed on the basis of shared affective experiences exceeds predictable systematicity and approaches a rhizome-like structure characterized by contingent, contagious, and unexpected liaisons. This rhizome-like community cemented with affective and oftentimes multivalent intensity is crucial to my analysis of the affective politics of the legend of Li Xianglan at different moments of the twentieth century. AFFECT WITHOUT POLITICS: ALLURE—GUILT—NOSTALGIA Mass media such as cinema and pop music tend to be perceived as entertaining, apolitical, even ahistorical. Because of this, politics, and border politics in particular, oftentimes harnesses mass media in order to pass off its political agenda in aesthetic, depoliticized, and universalist terms. Roland Barthes’s discussion of the modern “myth” is instructive here. Barthes sees myth as a form of “metalanguage” that depoliticizes through “celebrating” things, rather than “acting” them.[11] To celebrate means not simply to affirm, but more importantly, to elicit affect, to confirm, to naturalize, to solicit collective participation, and ultimately to produce group acquiescence and consensus. This operation of myth was clearly seen in Japan’s wartime propaganda of the sphere of pan-East-Asian co-prosperity and the “goodwill cinema,” both of which rhetorically emphasized harmonious co-existence between five different East Asian ethnic groups and East Asian autonomy after terminating Western colonialism. The intent to inculcate and entertain the diverse subjects-audiences and to convey the image of “same difference” necessitated a public figure who could felicitously pass into various

contexts, meet different expectations, yet maintain consistent recognizability. The bilingual, bicultural singer, Yamaguchi Yoshiko, promoted as “Li Xianglan,” a Manchurian star, fit the role perfectly. A 1940 photo spread, emphatically entitled “Ethnic Harmony–the Transformations of Ri Kōran,” carried in Manei’s magazine, Manchurian Film, displayed her malleability by presenting her in five different ethnic outfits. Li’s easy masquerade helped to naturalize the imperialist co-prosperity project.[12] Not only her physical appearance, but also her vocal performance facilitated Japan’s southward expansionism. In a 1942 roundtable discussion entitled “Musical Films Have No National Borders,” Japanese actor/director Shima Koji pointed out that nearly 80 percent of the films people watched in the South Pacific were musicals. He emphasized to Li Xianglan that “true friendship between ethnicities begins with music . . . music can communicate when words cannot.”[13] Musicals were thus privileged as the universal vehicle that could facilitate racial/ethnic harmony. Indeed, the musical was so elevated that it was seen as an art form that would potentially outlive and transcend Japan’s imperialist war, which it was initially designed to serve. Li’s 1943 Manei-Toho coproduction, My Nightingale (Watakushi no uguisu) (dir. Shimazu Yasujiro), was a case in point. Costing nearly two years and 250,000 Japanese yen (five times the regular movie budget), both the director and the leftist critic Iwasaki Akira believed that, despite Japan’s inevitable defeat, this film was to survive as evidence of Japan’s capacity to produce art films that were superior to Euro-American productions.[14] Unsurprisingly, therefore, all of Li’s wartime films privileged her singing, blending the melodramatic with the musical, infecting and affecting her broad range of audiences. Her fans and reviewers testified to the effectiveness of her visual and vocal performance. A Japanese male fan raved about her persona in Song of the White Orchid, saying that “Your bewitching continental looks and beautiful voice are just as popular now as when you debuted as a Manchurian actress. Your personality and looks perfectly suit Manchurian, Chinese, Korean, Japanese, or even Western clothes, depending on how one looks at you.”[15] Luo Fu, a Shanghai film buff who served as a temporary continuity person on the Shanghai set of Eternal Fame (Wanshi liufang, 1943), a Manei co-production with the Shanghai-based China United Productions (CUP) (Zhonghua lianhe zhipian gufeng gongsi), had a chance of witnessing Li’s acting in the film. “Awed and wowed within a few hours” of witnessing Li acting, he described Li as a lovely “purple lily.” He also marveled at the fluent English that she employed in responding to Western journalists’ questions, and expressed high expectations for her musical numbers in the film, given the Shanghai audience’s love for her earlier song, A Manchurian Girl.[16] Another report told the Chinese audience of Li’s recording contract with Pathé, and of her busy schedule traveling all over the sphere of co-prosperity.[17] As expected, Li’s two songs in Eternal Fame, Candy Song (Maitang ge) and Quitting Smoking Song (Jieyan ge), became instant hits all over China.[18] Kawakita Nagamasa, designated by the Japanese army to monitor and harness the Shanghai film industry, reportedly took great pride in the film’s screening not only in Japan-occupied area, but also in southwest China, the site of wartime governance of the Nationalist Party, and in Yan’an, the Communist base.[19] On July 21, 1945, shortly before Japan’s surrender, the Japan-sponsored journal, Zazhi

yuekan, hosted a social event where Li, the “top-ranking East Asian female star,” met Eileen Chang, “the top-ranking Chinese female writer.”[20] Interestingly, when asked what kind of script Chang would write as a vehicle of Li, Chang replied that no script would suit Li well. The reason was that Li sang like a fairy or an Oriental bird; her rendition of Shina no yoru (the theme song from the film China Nights) was aerial and totally dissociated from human concerns, as opposed to Watanabe Hamako’s performance of the same song, which was fleshy, tangible and earthy. Change further observed that Li’s effortless acting in Eternal Fame also distinguished her from Chinese actresses, who had the tendency to over-act. Differences notwithstanding, Chang confirmed Li’s popularity with the Chinese audience, thanks to her loveable personality and melodious voice.[21] What defined Li’s performance seemed to be her rarification or detachment from immediate circumstances, and its resultant malleability and easy re-contextualization. In contrast to Li, other Japanese and Chinese actresses were solidly grounded in specific historical and cultural contexts, which led to the development of consistent identities. As Michael Bourdaghs argues in his chapter in this volume, the Japanese singers of “continental melodies” (tairiku merodei), including Watanabe Hamako, did not intend to “pass” as Chinese, but rather emphatically sported their Japaneseness under the Chinese guise, thus presenting a parodic “counterfeit culture.”[22] Li’s chameleon-like ability to “fit” allowed her to not only blend the melodramatic and the musical, but also conjoin interracial romance with war, thus exemplifying wartime entertainment at its best (i.e., depoliticization and aestheticization of Japan’s expansionism). Her wide appeal rendered her postwar condemnation a thorny issue. If the legal charge of treason was dropped following the restoration of her Japanese citizenship, the moral charge remained unabsolved. The judge who acquitted her of legal responsibility found it necessary to pursue her guilt for being “a Chinese imposter who used her outstanding beauty to make films that humiliated China and compromised Chinese dignity.”[23] Li also reportedly signed a document at the end of the trial, indicating her “profound regret for playing in films that degraded China.”[24] Nevertheless, the question of to what extent and in what ways an individual should or could shoulder and channel the guilt produced by the war machine-cum-“desiring machine” (to appropriate Deleuze and Guattari’s term) remains unresolved. Whereas Li/Yamaguchi has always readily admitted to her war guilt on the part of the Japan nation-state, she also problematized the Chinese assumption of her volition or knowing participation by claiming to be politically obtuse. According to her account, she was recruited by Manei while still a teenager, and her instant pan-East Asian stardom made her busy traveling from one film set to another without ever having a chance to see or learn about the films she starred in. Consequently, she stated, she did not see the films that she made with Manei until the 1980s when she started to write her first autobiography.[25] Such obtuseness, however, seemed to redouble her remorse. She cried at her first encounter with the films half a century later, and repented, “How could I have starred in such stupid movies! What could I have been thinking, I wondered; I became desperate to the point that I even thought of suicide.”[26]

One may question the ingenuousness of her claim or the reliability of her memory. During a 1942 roundtable discussion, Li explicitly acknowledged the Chinese audience’s negative reaction to “goodwill films” like China Nights and Moon over Shanghai as being due to a lack of “understanding of the good side of China and its people”[27] on the part of the producers. This indicates that even if Li did not see her films at the time of making, she was by no means unaware of their ideological prejudice and the Chinese audience’s discontent. That is, it is unlikely that she was completely politically obtuse during the war. Nonetheless, the affect produced by her vocal-visual performance remained undeniable, and perhaps beguiling even to herself. Shimizu Akira usefully attributes Li Xianglan’s affective power to “her attractive Chinese style, her captivating singing voice and her fluency in Japanese,” which combined to conjure “an idealized image of China.”[28] To be sure, such idealization was premised upon feminization of China as submissive, sentimental, and awaiting rescue. After Japan’s surrender and war crimes trials, Li’s singing voice was quickly replaced by a voice of repentance. The functions of her voice, however, remained surprisingly similar. If her wartime audio-visual performances served to wrap her East Asian audiences in the borderless affect of melodrama and romance, thereby facilitating Japan’s wartime propaganda, then her postwar voice of guilt again appealed to people across the Sino-Japanese border, contributed to ameliorating the Sino-Japanese animosity, thereby facilitating the restoration of the diplomatic relationship between Japan and China. To understand guilt as a collective affect that does not necessarily block entertainment but might in fact enable it, we need to analyze Li’s discourse of guilt in depth, taking the following points into consideration. First, Li already had to admit to her guilt not after, but rather prior to, Japan’s surrender. Second, her admission of guilt did not invalidate the allure of her vocal performance. Third, the discourse of guilt was notably absent during the 1950s and '60s in Hong Kong and Hollywood, where she resumed her acting career. Finally, her singing voice has reemerged, starting in the 1990s, as the locus of nostalgia and melancholy, and her voice of guilt has since been reinterpreted as her victimhood by her time. According to her two autobiographies, Li first encountered the issue of guilt in 1943, following the release of Eternal Fame. Torn between dual identities, she decided to publicize her Japanese nationality at a press conference held in Beijing. When consulting with Mr. Li, her friend who was also the director of the journalists’ association, the latter decidedly stated, “Absolutely no! Even if some Chinese know you’re actually a Japanese, they will not acknowledge it. You must remain a Chinese star. Please do not ruin our dream.”[29] In her 2005 autobiography, she rephrased the incident by asking herself, “Two hours ago, I decided to declare my Japanese identity. Yet, I ended up not being able to articulate. Why?”[30] As her account unfolds, it becomes clear that her Chinese audience needed her Chinese identity not only to maintain their “dream,” but also to act out a moral drama. Toward the end of the 1943 press conference, a Chinese journalist questioned, “Aren’t you a Chinese? How could play in films like China Nights and The Song of White Orchid? What happened to your pride and dignity as a Chinese?” Prohibited from revealing her Japanese identity, Li could only apologize, “I was wrong. I was very young and didn’t think much. I really regret that I did that,

and promise never to let it happen again.” Surprisingly, the audience responded by applauding her apology. Then she realized that they had known she was actually Japanese, but simply wanted to hear her apologize.[31] This incident suggests that the Chinese audience reception of her was strategically bifurcated. The audience members simultaneously partook in nationalist politics (resulting from Japanese invasion into China) and continued to indulge in sentimental melodrama-musicals. By singling Li out as the “guilty” one (confirmed by her self-deprecation), her audience could lay claim to their own innocence, and then proceed to enjoy her vocal-visual performance as defused entertainment. The audience’s self-cleansing was necessary, for as Itami Mansaku argues, “The one who deceives someone is guilty, but so is the one who is deceived.”[32] Guilt is a collective affect that transmits within a community. To maintain communal health, guilt has to be contained among a few scapegoated individuals. That is, to unknowingly buy into Li’s movies would mean being party to the guilt; yet to enjoy her movies after having “seen through” their true nature would allow the viewer to do so with good conscience. Such repudiation of guilt is the precondition for accessing entertainment. Entertainment thus does not exist independently of guilt, but is rather constituted by it (even if through its repudiation). Subjected to such bifurcated appropriations (incrimination on the one hand, popularity on the other), the Li Xianglan figure became a prismatic lens that enabled and refracted divergent agendas and desires. This was further demonstrated as Li was expatriated back to Japan in 1946 under the name of “Yamaguchi Yoshiko.” As her boat plowed away from the Shanghai port, she heard a female voice singing Night Fragrance (Yelai xiang); it turned out to be her own voice when she was known as Li Xianglan. At this historical threshold moment, her previous schizophrenic identity was clearly bifurcated into the past and the present, the Chinese and the Japanese, the enchanting voice and the guilty body. Whereas the guilty body had to be banished out of the Chinese borders, the enchanting voice was to remain ingrained in collective memory, waiting to be revived in different contexts. As Japan’s imperialism was condemned and China’s national politics reinforced through postwar trial and cleansing, Li’s musical affect continued to enchant the public and distract from, even disrupt the “correct” ideology. For Yamaguchi Yoshiko, Li Xianglan’s voice came back as the uncanny and ever-affective Other, not only at the point of repatriation, but also many years later. Recalling China Night, one of her incriminating goodwill melodramas in which Li played a Chinese woman who took a slap from the Japanese male protagonist and thereupon transformed from a Japanese hater to a selfless lover, Yamaguchi observed, “I feel a mixture of emotions, embarrassment about the movie and fondness for the music.”[33] Such confusion, according to her, characterized the rest of her life. “I seem to be destined to encounter the same contradiction that finds no answers.”[34] She attributed the schizophrenic feelings to the “rigidity of the situation” in which her citizenship was hereditary rather than based on her birthplace. Otherwise, hypothesized Yamaguchi, “I could have held Manchurian citizenship, and I think I likely would have gone about things a bit differently.”[35] Yamaguchi thus saw her predicament as arising

from the lack of a “third” option, which resulted in the intractable incommensurability between her existential interstitial experiences on the one hand, and the prescriptive national politics that demanded her undivided allegiance on the other hand. To the extent that her songs were composed by Chinese or Japanese musicians (Li Jinguang and Hattori Ryoichi, in particular) who eclectically drew upon a wide range of Western as well as East Asian musical elements, with the express purpose of appealing to a wide audience base, it is not surprising that her singing remained affective, challenging rigid temporal and geopolitical borders both during and after the war. Demystification of Li, therefore, did not annul the allure of her vocal performance. Furthermore, the discourse of guilt was notably absent in the postwar media coverage of Li/Yamaguchi in Hong Kong, Southeast Asia (as illustrated in local Chinese language film magazines), and Hollywood. A 1948 interview with Li described her as a “winter jasmine” (yingchun hua) blooming in Tokyo, which evoked one of her Manei films, Yingchun hua (dir. Yasushi Sasaki, 1942) and her titular song.[36] Interestingly, despite the fact that the journalist was attempting to revive Li’s continental fame, his interview demonstrated an interesting tension by observing Li’s insistence on being addressed as “Miss Yamaguchi” (rather than Miss Li). During the interview, she also stated that Japanese cinema should become more radical by producing democratic art and educating the Japanese people about the ridiculousness of their past beliefs. Regarding the possibility of visiting China, Li expressed hesitation due to her stigma as “the subject of a defeated country.” All of this suggested an acute awareness on her part of the historical transition that had taken place, and her strong support for Japan’s (self-)reparation both as a victim (“the defeated country”) and as the culprit. However, the discourse of “guilt” was notably absent. When this interview was reprinted two years later in Screen Voice (Dianying quan), a Shaw Bros. house magazine published in Singapore, a preface was added, highlighting Li’s upcoming plan to study opera in New York and film in Hollywood.[37] Thus, Li’s post-China, postwar glamour was not tainted or diminished, but rather enhanced by her continued cosmopolitan flair, which was extended to one of the postwar superpowers—the USA. Follow-up reportage on Li in 1951 discussed her secret return to Japan following her operatic success in America, which led to Japanese film companies’ competing bids for her, and to increasing requests from Hong Kong to broadcast her songs on radio.[38] Other reports on her barely mentioned her Japanese nationality, but rather tended to emphasize her northern Chinese birth, even attributed her Japanese name and dual nationality to her presumptuous adoption by Japanese parents.[39] Another publicity focus was her “education” and popularity in America. She went to America with the express purpose of learning how to kiss. She became more athletic, learned the American style of make-up, improved her English, and was elected Asian movie queen by Life magazine.[40] Finally, Li was sensationalized as “the first female star from occupied Japan” (zhanling xia de diyiwei nu mingxing), who had ironically successfully occupied Hollywood with her beautiful voice and looks.[41] Meanwhile, American publicity of Li (billed as Shirley Yamaguchi, “Shirley” being the corruption of her Chinese first name—Xianglan) trumpeted her Oriental sensuality, which both

fascinated the Western audience and reassured them of Western superiority. During her 1950 America tour, she was advertised as a “Japanese star who came here to study kissing” and “Broadway English”.[42] A few years later, Yamaguchi played a Japanese woman secretly married to a dead American man in Sam Fuller’s House of Bamboo (1955). Fox Studio’s publicity document, entitled “Vital Statistics on House of Bamboo,” emphasized Japan’s defeat and occupation by America, hence its disciple status vis-à-vis the America-led capitalist camp in the cold war era. Accordingly, the role of Yamaguchi was to embody Japan’s physical and ideological allegiance to America. Her leaving China in 1946 was interpreted as fleeing the Communists (rather than expatriation following Japan’s surrender). Furthermore, as America began to modify Japanese “conservativism,” and foreigners were “permitted to come to know Japanese womanhood and to appreciate it,” Yamaguchi became “one of the first Japanese women to circulate freely to the admiration of the world.”[43] Not only was she attractive in her custom designed kimonos; her sturdy physique also allowed her to be “slapped and generally knocked around by the rest of the cast,” and to always stand up cheerfully, which made her “an outstanding acting talent.”[44] All of this media coverage of Li Xianglan/Yamaguchi Yoshiko/Shirley Yamaguchi in the proAmerica camp played down the guilt discourse, and instead continued her mystification by emphasizing her Oriental visual-vocal sensuality, compounded by postwar American imperialism and her expanding cross-border marketability. The discourse of guilt has become further dissipated and transvalued in China and Hong Kong since the 1990s due to two major developments. The first is the increasing problematization of macro and national history (or history from above) and refocusing on micro and individual history (or history from below); the second is the accelerating commercialization in postsocialist China, spurred by late twentieth-century globalization. As a result of these developments, it has become commonsense knowledge that national borders are porous, and that individual choice/enjoyment transcends nationalist interpellation. Under such circumstances, Li’s individual guilt of participating in China-humiliating films and of confounding the Sino-Japanese borderline was either disavowed, or re-signified as the tragedy of an individual in the whirlpool of national politics. Chinese writer-critic Wang Meng’s 1992 essay provided the intellectual rationale for Li’s recuperation after the 1990s. In his essay entitled “Ren, lishi, Li Xianglan” (Human, History, Li Xianglan), he reflects upon Yamaguchi’s 1987 autobiography and Asari Keita’s musical opera Li Xianglan, which was staged fifteen times in 1992 in various northern Chinese cities, and was attended and applauded by Chinese high officials. Wang states that an individual is oftentimes thrown into a historical role without comprehending the larger design; nonetheless, no political overdeterminism can preclude aberrant figures who could break away without becoming adversary, as demonstrated by Li and many of her Japanese, Chinese, and Russian friends.[45] Wang’s analysis calls for a new historiography that treats the individual as not only inevitably sutured into the macro-history, but also capable of evolving his/her microhistory, demonstrating the complexity, multi-directionality, and lacunae of history. By refocusing on an individual’s micro-history, Wang does not invalidate macro-politics, but

rather produces another mode of power structure that acknowledges political hegemony without assuming its totalizing effect. Nevertheless, Wang’s model of individual deviance from mainstream history can also be easily appropriated for de-politicization and re-mystification of the individual, as is apparent in Li’s contemporary revival as a popular legend. Such remystification again hinges upon Li’s vocal performance—apparently the most inalienable and infectious aspect of her appeal. If her singing voice was once eclipsed by the voice of guilt (in China at least), it has now returned to enable the contemporary Li Xianglan legend. Asari’s opera, Li Xianglan, is a case in point. Asari stresses the importance of understanding Li in her specific political context. As he contends, “Li Xianglan can be seen as the victim of her times. She was exploited. To single mindedly focus on her life exclusively would prevent us from understanding why she almost lost her life simply because she was involuntarily involved in singing and acting.”[46] Having laid out this tenet, however, Asari’s play does just the opposite. The opera not only ends with Li singing out her gratitude toward China amidst the angry shouts of the Chinese attending the court trial; the judge also sings of the moral of “repaying resentment with virtue” (yi de bao yuan) to appease the crowd. This transforms the angry cacophony into collective chorus. The opera thus closes in harmonious singing and communal “musicking.”[47] Bathed in the affect of music, the wartime politics of Japanese imperialism and Chinese nationalism become dissolved by inter-subjective affective transmission. By re-imagining Li’s postwar trial with a festive, musical twist, the play surreptitiously evacuates Li’s specific political context, and rationalizes the restoration of a Sino-Japanese diplomatic relationship. The affective investment in the Li Xianglan legend at the turn of twenty-first century demonstrates what Jackie Stacey calls the “iconic memory,” that is, memories of a “frozen moment; a moment removed from its temporal context and captured as pure image.”[48] Through collective remembrance and reiteration of a reified image, the Li Xianglan icon and more specifically, her singing voice, become the ideal channel of affect, which is mobilized from the wartime up to the present day to build an expansive community. As stated in the introduction, a community formed on the basis of affective transmission and resonance exceeds homogenous politics, and instead evolves as a rhizomic structure traversed by contingency and unexpected linkages. My analysis above shows that Li’s wartime star allure in the pan-East-Asian theater and postwar expansion to Hollywood led to diverse fan bases that shared the common attraction to the affective power of her vocal-visual performance. Starting from the 1990s, her resurgent popularity in East Asia has once again proven the “iterative force” of her singing voice, if not her visual performance. The iterative force, as Derrida explains, refers to an object’s capacity to operate in different contexts.[49] Jeremy Gilbert attributes such iterative force of music to its non-significatory affective power.[50] Yet, it is important to emphasize that neither music nor Li’s singing voice simply reappear on its own. Rather, each reiteration takes place in a specific context that produces a certain taste, sentiment, and affective investment. An indication of Li’s iterative vocal performance is the emergence of various cover versions of her Japanese and Chinese songs, such as Suzhou Serenade from Shina no yoru, He’ri jun

zai lai (When Will You Come Back?) from Song of the White Orchid, and Ye lai xiang (Night Fragrance) from Woman of Shanghai (Shanhai no onna, dir. Inagaki Hiroshi, 1952). In fact, Woman of Shanghai, a Japanese film made shortly after the war, was already premised upon reprising Li’s Mandarin songs. The director described his plan for Li “to sing all her [famous] songs in that beautiful Mandarin of hers.”[51] The film deals with the issue of war guilt, and is roughly based on Li’s own wartime experiences, which justified frequent singing sequences. Furthermore, her character’s successful passing as a Chinese in a nightclub is attributed precisely to her excellence as a singer. Baskett argues that the film personifies war as the source of suffering, and thereby stresses Japanese victimization. It constitutes “cinematic reclamation of the Japanese empire as a reaffirmation of a national Japanese identity.”[52] Reflections on war guilt are thus intertwined with nostalgia for empire, which typified the Japanese postwar cinema.[53] In other words, the reiteration of Li’s Mandarin songs, based on the “iconic memories” of the Li Xianglan myth, were intractably correlated up with sentimentalization of Japan’s imperial experience. This does not mean that Li’s songs were simply recollected and sentimentalized as a result of a persistent imperial ideology; rather, these and other wartime songs and music enabled recollection of imperialism and its sentimentalization. The reason is that the melodies seemed to be stored in the physical bodies that had survived the war and imperial egomania. By reactivating the physically ingrained melodies, these surviving bodies learned to restore their relationship with the past, thereby reorienting themselves vis-à-vis the changed environment. That is, the postwar reprisal of Li’s wartime songs in Japan served a therapeutic function, one that was aligned with imperial nostalgia. How then do we understand the cover versions produced in other postwar and post-1990s East Asian and Southeast Asian areas, especially Hong Kong and Taiwan? Li’s Japanese Suzhou Serenade (composed by Hattori Ryochi, partially inspired by a southeast Chinese folk ditty and a famous Tang Dynasty poem) instantly spawned a Mandarin Chinese version performed by Bai Hong, Li’s contemporaneous Chinese singer-actress. Bai’s Mandarin rendition has been preserved on record and appropriated in various later films. The song also led to a Taiwanese version performed by Ji Luxia in the 1950s. Addititionally, it was reputedly recorded in English under the title “China Baby in My Arms.” Li’s two other songs, He ri jun zai lai and Ye lai xiang, have also been frequently reprised by singers from Japan, Korea, China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan. One of the most important singers was Teresa Teng (Deng Lijun), a Taiwan-born pop singer idolized throughout East and Southeast Asia for her performances in Mandarin Chinese, English, and Japanese from the late 1960s to early 1990s. Heri jun zailai (composed by Liu Xue’an) was first performed by Zhou Xuan (a 1930s Shanghai top pop singer nicknamed “golden throat”) in a commercial film, Sanxing banyue (The Stars Accompanying the Moon, dir. Fang Peiling, 1937). The song was featured again two years later in an anti-Japanese film, Gudao tiantang (Paradise on the Orphan Island, dir. Cai Chusheng). Meanwhile, it was introduced to Japan, translated into Japanese, and popularized by Watanabe Hamako, whose Japanese version was recorded by Japan’s Columbia Music Entertainment, Inc. This then led to Li Xianglan’s Mandarin

renditions in her Manei film, Song of White Orchid, and in the postwar Japanese film, Woman of Shanghai. Li’s rendition, recorded by both Teichiku and Paramount Recording Companies in 1940, overshadowed previous versions, triggering further reiterations in the following decades, which elicited conflicting political interpretations, even censorship. Ye lai xiang, on the other hand, was a song rescued by Li Xianglan from the trash. Composed by Li Jinguang in 1944, the song combined Chinese folk music and rumba. Li’s performance made the song an instant hit, which she reprised at her 1945 concert conducted by Hattori Ryochi and Chen Gexing (another important musician in Shanghai in the 1930s and '40s). There have since been over eighty cover versions of this song produced internationally. Teresa Teng, again, was an important inheritor and promoter of this song. Her Japanese as well as Chinese renditions produced outside mainland China eventually enabled the song’s comeback within mainland China, after decades of ideological strictures on such poisonous “yellow music.” When the song was performed by the leading actress in Asari Keita’s music opera, Li Xianglan, the Chinese audience was reportedly enthusiastic.[54] Not only have Li’s own songs been frequently evoked and reworked throughout the twentieth century; the highly sentimental theme song of the 1992 TV drama, Sayonara Ri Kōran, coproduced by China and Japan, achieved wide success as well. Entitled Ikanaide (Don’t Go) and composed by Tamaki Koji, the song was soon reworked into one Cantonese and two Mandarin Chinese versions. Of these, the Cantonese version, entitled Li Xianglan and performed by the Hong Kong cantopop star Jackie Cheung, is most well known.[55] This song was most recently staged on June 28, 2002, at Jackie Cheung’s fund-raising concert “Beijing Expects You in 2008.” Following Tamaki’s melancholic cue, the Chinese lyrics, written by Zhou Limao, conjure a lingering sense of longing and loss that “I” feel for a faded photo, a flower that is no longer red, and ice that does not freeze. The song makes no explicit reference to Li Xianglan, but rather deploys a series of images of desolation to sentimentalize an imaginary rapport with a highly asetheticized past. Importantly, the rapport is desired, yet not achieved, since “I” cannot understand the “myriad words” emitting from the past, nor find a “crack in time” to go back. Ultimately, the “dream” turns out to be “petrifying.” Thanks to the prevailingly mournful tone, the complexity of Li Xianglan as a historical figure who had to constantly negotiate specific historical and geopolitical issues is rarified and reified into an icon anchoring contemporary nostalgia and imaginary grief. Jackie Cheung reportedly shed tears three times while performing this song at his 2002 concert. If, as Eileen Chang commented in 1945, Li’s singing style was immaterial and dissociated from worldly worries, then such dematerialization has been taken to an extreme in the late twentieth century. As Luo Changping worries in his scathing condemnation of Cheung’s Cantonese version of Ikanaide, today’s youth who become fans of the song tend not to bother to find out who Li is, and instead simply imitate Cheung as if it were simply a love song.[56] Indeed, the mobilization, evocation, and reiteration/re-presentation of Li’s vocal as well as visual performances at different stages of the twentieth century all actively maximize their affective powers. During the war, her singing was directly harnessed for Japan’s propaganda machine. Yet, the songs she performed remain affective despite critical efforts to demystify and

denounce the blatantly militarist narrative. During the Cold War era, Li and her vocal-visual performance continued to be tokenized and promoted, this time as sensuous Oriental femininity and America’s submissive disciple-cum-ally vis-à-vis the Communist camp. Once again, affect both vehiculated and disguised politics. In Taiwan’s case, the postwar flourishing of Taiwanese cover versions of Japanese songs, including Ji Luxia’s rendition of Suzhou Serenade, signaled a specific tactic of healing the postcolonial severance. The 1945 termination of Japanese colonial rule and the takeover by the Nationalist Party led to new rounds of high-pressure policies and social turbulence. The resultant Taiwanese resistance against the Nationalist Party went hand in hand with (imaginary) reversion to Japanese governance. As Ji Luxia explains, since the new ruling government banned Japanese songs and songs with Japanese lyrics, the recording companies adopted the tactic of setting Taiwanese lyrics to Japanese as well as Western melodies,[57] so as to continue the affective attachment to Japanese (colonial) culture while complying with the new government’s policies. The reiteration of melody in a different guise thus facilitated the healing of postcolonial severance in the postwar Taiwan. Since the 1990s, the Li Xianglan myth has made a comprehensive comeback not only in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Japan, but also in mainland China. The reiteration and contagious popularity of songs performed by Li and about Li indicates the songs’ “iterative force” and perpetual charm on the one hand, and the homogenization of popular taste on the other. I have shown that Li’s vocal performances during the twentieth century have been mobilized and oftentimes received as decontextualized and apolitical artifacts eliciting romantic, sensuous, or melancholic sentiments. Nevertheless, as de-contextualized as it may seem, each Li Xianglan myth is embedded in a historical period characterized by specific geopolitics. Yet, to reduce her vocal affect to nothing more than negative political schema misses the opportunity of understanding the complex process through which the Li Xianglan myth addresses and affects the mass audiences across the border both historically and geographically. The difficulty in assessing the politics of affect or affective politics is manifested in Luo Changping’s problematic critique of Jackie Cheung’s “Li Xianglan.” Luo condemns the song for its poisonous effect (dusu xiaoying). According to Luo, while the lyrics seem innocuous on the surface, the corrosive effect becomes unmistakable once they are placed in their historical context. Luo then evokes Li’s wartime participation in Japan’s militarist expansion, and then critiques a common practice in Hong Kong pop music circles, that is, to set Cantonese lyrics to Japanese and Western melodies regardless of the melodies’ original political implications. Such practice, combined with several other pro-Japan events involving Hong Kong and mainland Chinese media celebrities, leads Luo to conclude that the “wound of history” has once and again been excluded from public attention, which suggests not only public ignorance of history, but more importantly, willful historical amnesia.[58] Not surprisingly, Luo’s critique of popular culture, which rubbed against contemporary collective popular sentiment, provoked immediate protest from netizens such as the “Iron Blood Community” (Tiexue shequ). Luo was pathologized for his dogmatic pan-politicization. One netizen questioned, “If the listener didn’t know the historical background, how could

he/she be ‘poisoned’ by this song?” Other netizens underscored the borderless charm of music and romance, independent of Japanese government’s militarism. The netizens’ main target was Luo’s labeling of the song as “poisonous,” which erased the audience’s agency, and assumed their passive ignorance, victimhood, even cooption. Thus, whereas Luo was correct in attempting to understand the song in its political, historical context, his simplistic understanding of ideological operation failed to consider the affective power of music, and was therefore scoffed at as a symptom of ultra-leftism and pan-politicization—an anachronism that reminding people of the undesirable era of Cultural Revolution. Luo’s failed attempt to politicize the song challenges us to find a more productive approach to grapple with the politics of Li’s affective performance and conversely, the affect of politics. In the following section, I examine the complex intersections and mutual constitution of the political and the affective. POLITICS OF AFFECTS AND AFFECTIVE POLITICS During World War II, the imbrication of politics and affect was deliberately engineered by Japan’s propaganda machine. Yamaguchi Yoshiko was selected and renamed Li Xianglan, billed as “the Manchurian singer and actress,” precisely with the aim of facilitating Japan’s pan-Asianist ideology. As the war ended with Japan’s defeat, Li reverted to her Japanese identity; and her vocal-visual performance also took a new form. In the postwar and Cold War eras, her popularity switched from China to Hong Kong and America as the icon of Oriental femininity. Once again, the political baggage associated with Li was sensationalized and/or (deliberately) misinterpreted. In Hong Kong, she was described a Chinese adopted by Japanese parents who had chosen to prioritize her Japanese identity in the postwar trial. In America, she was the hero who had escaped from Communist China, returned to Japan, and had become America’s willing disciple. In media publicity, Li’s songs continued to provide a fertile site where variant political assumptions were projected. Her song “Shina no yoru” was popularly known as “She Ain’t Got No Yo-Yo” to the American GI’s stationed in Japan and Korea.[59] The reason was not simply that the song was an important piece in the music repertoire in Japanese and Korean bars; more importantly, the titular film, Shina no yoru, was used by the American government as a textbook to teach servicemen about Japan.[60] The government-endorsed appropriation of a musical melodrama as a textbook for cross-cultural understanding and information gathering testified to not just willful genre confusion, but also to the affirmation of an implicit connection between affect and politics, which served to facilitate America’s Cold War politics more than any sort of genuine cross-cultural understanding. If Cold War politics managed to harness the wartime vehicle of entertainment for a different project, this Cold War rhetoric was, conversely, also appropriated for purposes of entertainment. Following her inroad into Broadway and Hollywood (playing in two films, Japanese War Bride [dir. King Vidor, 1952] and House of Bamboo), Li, known as Shirley Yamaguchi, was jokingly billed as “the first female star from occupied Japan,” who ended up

occupying America. The rhetoric of invasion was mobilized to playfully pit women-centered entertainment against men-centered politics, both, unsurprisingly, being premised upon Li’s affective vocal-visual performance. Thus, Li’s “reverse occupation” re-inscribed the cold-war political logic even when it played off of it lightheartedly. In Taiwan in the 1950s and 1960s, the continued appeal of Li’s songs signaled another instance of skirting postwar politics. The Taiwanese cover versions suggested affective attachment to Japanese colonial governance, which was preferred over the new regime of China’s Nationalist Party. Yet, to the extent that the therapeutic reiteration of Li’s music was necessitated by Taiwan’s postwar, postcolonial geopolitics, the musical affect was inextricably correlated with politics. By the late 1980s and the early 1990s, Li’s interstitial position and schizophrenic identity came to be seen as analogous with that of the pre-postcolonial Hong Kong—the British crown colony that was to be returned to China in 1997. Tapping into the pre-turnover collective anxiety, some Hong Kong directors considered adapting Li’s life for screen, seeing her as an apt vehicle for addressing the issue of political borders or lack thereof.[61] The same collective urge to appropriate the “Li Xianglan” myth for contemporary purposes (oftentimes with a tinge of nostalgia) also led to Li Xianglan film retrospectives that were sponsored by the Hong Kong and Taiwan governments.[62] Li’s late twentieth-century revival and re-mystification parallels the postwar rehabilitation of another controversial figure involved in the Fascist propaganda machine—Leni Riefenstahl. In both cases, their war-related incrimination became apparently defused in comparison with their affective and/or artistic achievements. Susan Sontag described Riefenstahl’s rehabilitation as an “insinuative” process in a liberal society, as opposed to a top-down, official Soviet decision.[63] As Sontag put it, “It is not that Riefenstahl’s Nazi past has suddenly become acceptable. It is simply that, with the turn of the cultural wheel, it no longer matters. Instead of dispensing a freeze-dried version of history from above, a liberal society settles such questions by waiting for cycles of taste to distill out the controversy.”[64] Sontag’s analysis emphasized gradual change in Western liberal society, assuming that such a society is relatively stable and amenable to change through forgetting or selective remembrance, rather than through radical re-orientation. To an extent, the changing “cycles of taste” similarly contributed to the late twentieth century re-mythification of Li Xianglan. Li’s audiences and fans throughout the twentieth century had to constantly negotiate with national/transnational politics on the one hand, and Li’s performative affect on the other. The late twentieth century comeback of the “Li Xianglan” icon derived precisely from the collective taste shift toward the apolitical aestheticization that defies and transcends political supremacism. To that extent, what had been experienced as Li’s universal musical affect became naturalized and celebrated in isolation from Li’s political circumstances and subtext. Nevertheless, unlike Riefenstahl’s rehabilitation that resulted from gradual social change, Li’s revival in mainland China in the late twentieth century stemmed from rapid social transformation from socialist pan-politicization to postsocialist commercialism and neoliberalism. This means that forgetting, or historical amnesia, took three forms that counter-

acted against each other. The first was compulsory forgetting, necessitated by constant historical upheaval. Thus, as mainland China liberated itself from Japanese and Western colonialism, becoming a socialist state, “Li Xianglan” was erased from public memory. In the late twentieth century, Li came back in two ways. In the official domain, she returned as a diplomatic figure—as a bridge between China and Japan in the restoration of their diplomatic relationship. The form of forgetting in this context was that her involvement in Japan’s wartime propaganda was simultaneously evoked and disavowed and transvalued, so that she could be converted into a benign liaison during the peaceful era. Such selective forgetting allowed her to be appropriated for contemporary national politics. For the mass audience/consumers, Li came back as a cosmopolitan legend with eternal charm. This was premised upon the third form of forgetting, which was to collectively elide the political role she played during the war so as to enable the celebration of her cosmopolitan mobility. This form of selective forgetting had to do with officially imposed forgetting during the Cold War era, which led to general ignorance about Li in the first place. Yet, it also consciously reacted against officially imposed forgetting, thereby gestured toward history rewriting. These three modes of forgetting signaled the interaction and counteraction between the historical, the official, and the popular/commercial agendas. All three modes shifted drastically with the geopolitical turbulence in China and in East Asia in general. Therefore, what enabled Li’s constant re-mythification and contemporary relevance was not gradual change in “cycles of taste,” but rather vying strategies of selective forgetting/remembering and transvaluation of what had been disavowed and repressed. To the extent that Li’s border-crossing existence makes her a most appropriate emblem of the prevalent diaspora and transnationalism in the late twentieth century, her controversy does not get distilled out with shifting tastes and the passage of time, but rather emerges into the foreground and becomes a privileged example illustrating an individual’s existential dilemma in the era of globalization and dislocation. The reworked “Li Xianglan” myth thus resonates with the contemporary “taste” for and anxiety over the interstitial and the aberrant, which are oftentimes articulated in ostensibly a-political and sentimental terms such as nostalgia and melancholia, as illustrated in Ikanaide and its cover versions. The apolitical surface is symptomatic of another political phenomenon, that is, China’s postsocialist commercialization that is developing in tandem with world-wide globalization. Sponsored by the government, commercialization and the attendant reaction against Cold War– era pan-politicization contribute to the nostalgia craze that effectively legitimizes mass indulgence in what used to be stigmatized as anti-socialist and unorthodox. The fact that the popular audience chooses to focus on Li’s China period, yet tends to know little about her acting in postwar Japan, America, and Hong Kong, or about her political career from 1974 to 1992, testifies to the postsocialist fantasy about China’s semicolonial era, spurred by commercialism and collective political apathy. The commercialism of the nostalgic fantasy is born out in the reissue of Li’s songs, which quickly translates into profit. Whether this postsocialist turn might prompt serious rethinking of the official Chinese history of its semi-colonial past is not clear. What it has achieved, on the vernacular level at

least, is to aestheticize politics, which feeds into the current conservative neo-liberalism. To the extent that depoliticization itself is a form of politics that arises from the escalating globalization in the world system, the affective emphasis should be understood as political affect, that is, affect with political underpinning, and politics that works on the affective level. CONCLUSION My delineation of the shifting manifestations of the Li Xianglan myth at various historical conjunctures throughout the twentieth century (including colonialism, Pan-Asianism, Cold War separatism, and contemporary globalization, commercialism, and neo-liberalism) demonstrates that Li’s vocal performance has been mobilized and appropriated to elicit collective sentiments that could work for different implicit political agendas. Nevertheless, the resultant sentiments or affect also necessarily exceed political designation. Yamaguchi’s personal attachment to her songs in the Manei films that she learned to condemn indicates the persistence of musical affect despite her political consciousness. Therefore, to simplistically equate affect with sugarcoated poisonous ideology, as Luo Changping does in his condemnation of Jackie Cheung’s cover version of Ikanaide, would miss the complex operation of political interpellation, and also fail to take into consideration the audiences’ interactions with performative affect. We may argue that affect and politics have different modes of addressing the audience, even when they end up serving the same ideological agenda. And the affective mode of address enables multiple channels of audience response even if it is explicitly harnessed for one single political purpose. The significance of affective politics has to do with precisely its ability to constantly split its audiences by encouraging border politics, yet at the same time muddling the border and reconnecting the audiences in a rhizomic structure. On the one hand, affect defies political dogmatism through celebrating and reifying collective sentiments. On the other hand, it does not depart from politics, but rather intersects with it with the result of reinforcing, derailing, or reconstituting political discourses. To return to Barthes’ understanding of myth as “metalanguage” that “celebrates,” we may conclude that mythification of the iconic Li Xianglan celebrates affects; yet the affects are ultimately driven by different political agendas, which constitute the very raison d’etre of Li’s mythification. NOTES 1. Yiman Wang, “Between the National and the Transnational: Li Xianglan / Yamaguchi Yoshiko and Pan-Asianism,” IIAS Newsletter 38 (Sept. 2005): p. 7.

2. Manchurian Motion Picture Corporation, p. 5, qt. in Michael Baskett, The Attractive Empire: Transnational Film Culture in Imperial Japan (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2008), p. 29.

3. Amakasu Masahiko, “Manjin no tame ni eiga o tsukuru,” [Making Films for the Masses] in Eiga junpo [Cinema Chronicle] (Aug. 1, 1942): p. 3, qt. in Baskett, p. 29.

4. Ri Kōran and Tanaka Hiroshi et al., “Looking Back on My Days as Ri Koran (Li Xianglan),” in Sekai [World] (Sept. 2003):

pp. 171–75, trans. by Melissa Wender. Available online at http://www.zmag.org/znet/viewArticle/7000.

5. Zhu Tianwei, “Riben qinluezhe xuyi zhizao de ‘Li Xianglan’ huangyan” [The “Li Xianlan” Lie Deliberately Manufactured by Japanese Invaders], in Dianying yishu [Film Art] No. 5 (1994): pp. 69–75.

6. Ibid., p. 74. 7. Roland Barthes, Mythologies, trans. Annette Lavers (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1972). 8. See Étienne Balibar and Immanuel Wallerstein, Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities, trans. by Chris Turner (London: Verso, 1991), p. 49.

9. Wang (2005), op. cit. 10. See Brian Massumi’s preface to Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis Press, 1987), xvi, and Brian Massumi, Parables For The Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation (Durham: Duke University, 2002), p. 29.

11. Roland Barthes, “Myth Today,” in Mythologies (1972), op. cit. pp. 142–45. 12. This is discussed in Baskett, p. 78. 13. “Ongaku eiga ni kokyō nashi,” [There are no Borders or Music and Film.] in Eiga no tomo [Friends of Film] (July 1942): p. 34, qt. in Baskett, p. 52.

14. San Xian, Shanghai hongyan wangshi [The Romantic Bygones of Shanghai] (Harbin: Harbin chubanshe, 2005), available online at http://book.sina.com.cn/longbook/sal/1103532844_shanghaihongyan/29.shtml.

15. Taguchi Masao, “Ri Koran ni okuru kotoba,” [Words Addressed to Ri Koran] in Eiga no tomo (Jun. 1941): pp. 98–99, qt. in Baskett, p. 78.

16. Luo Fu, Yapian zhi zhan: Wanshi liufang kaipai huaxu [Opium War: On the Set of Eternal Fame], in Huabei yinghua [Hua Pei Movie] (Beijing) No. 27 (Jan. 15, 1943): p. 27.

17. Huabei yinghua [Hua Pei Movie] (Beijing) No. 28 (Feb. 15, 1943): p. 12. 18. Li Xianglan, Wo de bansheng [The First Half of My Life], trans. Jin Ruojing (Hong Kong: Baixing wenhua shiye, 1992), pp. 228–29.

19. Tan Zhongxia, Yiye huanghou: Cheng Yunshang zhuan [An Overnight Queen: A Biography of Nancy Chan] (Hong Kong: Dianying shuangzhoukan chubanshe, 1996).

20. “Naliang huiji” [Minutes of the Summer Evening Reception], Originally published in Zazhi yuekan [Zazhi Monthly] (Aug. 1945), reprinted in Lianhe wenxue [Historical Monthly] 9. (July 1993): p. 100.

21. Ibid., pp. 103–104. 22. See Michael Bourdaghs’ chapter in this volume, “Japan's Orient in Song and Dance.” 23. Yamaguchi Yoshiko, Li Xianglan zizhuan: zhanzheng, heping yu ge [Li Xianglan’s Autobiography: War, Peace and Song], trans. Chen Pengren (Taipei: Taiwan shangwu chubanshe, 2005), p. 67. This is translated from Yamaguchi’s second autobiography, Senso to heiwa to uta, Ri Koran kokoro no michi [The Path that Ri Koran’s Heart Has Taken Her], published in 1993.

24. San Xian (2005). 25. Tanaka et al. (2003), op. cit. 26. Ibid. 27. “Zadankai: tairiku o kataru,” [Roundtable: Talking About the Mainland] in Eiga no tomo (Jan. 1942): pp. 24–15, qt. in Baskett (2008), p. 82.

28. Shimizu Akira, Senso to eiga: Senjichu to senryoka no Nihon eigashi [War and Film: The History of Japanese Film During War and Occupation] (Tokyo: Shakai Shisosha, 1994), p. 62, qt. in Isolde Standish, A New History of Japanese Cinema (New York: Continuum, 2005), p. 124.

29. Yamaguchi Yoshiko and Fujiwara Sakuya, Zai Zhongguo de rizi [My Days in China], translated by Jin Ruojing from Ri Koran - Watashi no hansei [Li Xianglan: My Half Life] (Hong Kong: Baixing wenhua shiye youxian gongsi, 1989).

30. Yamaguchi (2005), trans. Chen, op. cit. p. 63. 31. “Li Xianglan chuanqi: shengyu Zhongguo de Renben ren” [The Legend of Li Xianglan: A China-born Japanese], Oct. 23,

2007, http://club.xilu.com/lovecho/msgview-887044-2659.html

32. Qt. in Mitsuyo Wada-Marciano, Nippon Modern: Japanese Cinema of the 1920s and 1930s (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2008), p. 136.

33. Tanaka et al. (2003), op. cit. 34. Yamaguchi (2005), trans. Chen, op. cit. p. 37. 35. Tanaka et al. (2003), op. cit. 36. Koizumi Isao, “Wo huijian le Li Xianglan” [I Met Li Xianglan], trans. Meng Jianhua, in Yingmi julebu [Movie Fans’ Club], No. 3 (1948): p. 8.

37. Dianying quan [Screen Voice] No. 156 (April 15, 1950): pp. 6–7. 38. Miao Ying, “Li Xianglan xingzong shenmi” [The Secret Traveling of Li Xianglan], Dianying quan [Screen Voice] No. 169 (May 15, 1951).

39. “Li Xianglan de sige shiqi” [The Four Periods of Li Xianglan] in Dianying xiaoshuo Yanqu yinghun [Illustrated Film: Escape at Dawn] (Singapore: Yuandong wenhua gongsi), n. p. The film was directed by Senkichi Taniguchi in 1950. This film was a pitched as a Sino-Japanese co-production with an anti-war message, and Li’s vocal performance was a major selling point.

40. “Dongfang youwu Li Xianlan zai Meiguo shang jiewen ke [The Oriental Vamp Taking Kissing Lessons in America]”; “Li Xianglan zhanling le Meiguo” [Li Xianglan Has Occupied America], in Dianying xiaoshuo Yanqu yinghun [Illustrated Film: Escape at Dawn], n. p.; “Meiguo shenghuo zazhi xuanju chu de yinghou Li Xianglan” [Li Xianglan Elected the Movie Queen by Life Magazine in America], in Linxing meiren tekan [Special Issue on Comet Beauty/Ryusei] (Singapore), n.p.

41. “Li Xianglan zhanling le Meiguo” [Li Xianglan Has Occupied America], in Dianying xiaoshuo Yanqu yinghun [Illustrated Film: Escape at Dawn], n. p.

42. Yamaguchi (2005), trans. by Chen, pp. 85–86. 43. “Vital Statistics on House of Bamboo,” prepared by Harry Brand, Director of Publicity 20th Century-Fox Studios, 1955, Margaret Herrick Library.

44. Ibid. p. 7. 45. Wang Meng, “Ren, lishi, Li Xianglan” [Human, History, Li Xianglan], in Du Shu [Reading] No. 164 (1992): pp. 9–17. 46. Luan Chao, “Li Xianglan: bei liangge guojia silie de mingxing” [Li Xianglan: A Star Torn between Two Countries], in Zhongguo bailaohui [Chinese Broadway] http://www.musicalchina.com/information/articleshow.asp?ID=244.

(2002),

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online

at

47. Michael Bourdaghs, “Japan’s Orient,” discusses the active musicking performed by the singers and fans, which both flirted with and reinforced the Sino-Japanese boundaries. He draws upon Christopher Small’s theorization of “musicking,” defined as communal performance in sync at multiple locations.

48. Jackie Stacey, Star-gazing: Hollywood Cinema and Female Spectatorship (New York: Routledge, 1994), p. 318. 49. Jacques Derrida, Limited Inc (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1988). 50. Jeremy Gilbert, “Signifying Nothing: ‘Culture,’ ‘Discourse,’ and the Sociality of Affect,” in Culture Machine (2004), available at http://culturemachine.tees.ac.uk/frm_f1.htm.

51. Inagaki Hiroshi, Nihon eiga no wakaki hibi [The Early Days of Japanese Film] (Tokyo: Manichi Shinbunsha, 1978), p. 204, qt. in Baskett (2008), p. 143.

52. Baskett (2008), p. 144. 53. Baskett (2008), p. 143. 54. Yamaguchi (2005), op. cit. p. 212. 55. The other Cantonese version is entitled “Qiuyi nong” [Maturing Autumn], also performed by Jackie Cheung. The Mandarin version is by Zhang Liji, entitled “Yisheng meng yi yuan” [Fading Dream].

56. Luo Changping, “Zhang Xueyou xianru zhengzhi xuanwo; “Li Xianglan” geyong reben junguo zhuyi?” [“Jackie Cheung Caught in Political Whirlpool; “Li Xianglan” Champions Japanese Militarism?”] (July 11, 2002), available online at http://yule.sohu.com/18/35/article164593518.shtml.

57. Shi Jisheng compilation, “Ji Luxia de ge he ta de niandai: Li Luxia, Li Kuncheng duitan” [The Songs of Ji Luxia and Her Times: Dialogue between Ji Luxia and Li Kuncheng], in Zhongguo shibao renjian fukan [China Times: The Human World supplement] (Dec. 1, 2006), available at http://www.cstone.idv.tw/index.php?pl=525&ct1=81.

58. Luo (2002), op. cit. 59. See Chris Sarno’s

memoir of his experience in the early 1950s Korea as a serviceman. Available at http://www.koreanwar-educator.org/memoirs/sarno/p_sarno_78_appendix.htm

60. Yamaguchi (2005), op. cit. p. 76. 61. Yamaguchi (2005), ibid., pp. 216–17. 62. Ibid. 63. Susan Sontag, “Fascinating Fascism,”

in New York Review of Books (Feb. 6, 1975), available online at http://www.history.ucsb.edu/faculty/marcuse/classes/33d/33dTexts/SontagFascinFascism75.htm.

64. Sontag (1975), ibid., emphases mine.

Chapter Eight

Japan’s Orient in Song and Dance Michael K. Bourdaghs

Li Xianglan or Ri Kōran (Yamaguchi Yoshiko), the Japanese singer/actress who infamously “passed” for Chinese in wartime mass culture, and the subject of the previous chapter, is perhaps best remembered for her role in the 1940 film, China Nights (Shina no yoru). Her embodiment of Japanese fantasies about the ideal Chinese woman render her into a fascinating case study of Asian-originated forms of mass-culture Orientalism, one that helped produce the structures of feeling needed to sustain Japanese expansionism during the 1930s and '40s. Desires that could not be summoned up domestically could still be solicited via her supposed foreignness. As an early review of the film noted, its hackneyed plot sustained interest only because of the exotic setting. “For example, if the sailors’ hotel in Shanghai or the Manchurian location shots were replaced by a Tokyo apartment or Inogashira Park [in suburban Tokyo], it would be so puerile we couldn’t bear to watch it.”[1] At the same time, the film presented the fantasy of a China that desired Japan. As Yiman Wang argues, Ri Kōran’s act of passing “conjoined Japan’s pan-Asian entertainment and imperialism,” thereby playing “a crucial role in the symbolic power representation by convincingly passing as a Chinese waiting to be transformed into a Japanese.”[2] Here, I take up a popular music genre that was closely associated with Ri Kōran, but which aimed at a subtly different effect. I will look at three singers in particular: Watanabe Hamako, on whose hit song the movie Shina no yoru was based; Hattori Tomiko, who played a Japanese woman in that same film (for which her brother Hattori Ryōichi composed the score); and Kasagi Shizuko, who as Ryōichi’s protégé would emerge in the postwar era as the Japanese Queen of Boogie Woogie but who began her recording career a decade earlier. All three recorded continental melodies (tairiku merodei), a genre that enjoyed enormous popularity in the years following the 1937 Marco Polo Bridge incident. These songs incorporated Orientalist elements, both musically and lyrically, to signal fantasy forms of Chineseness. Moreover, Hamako and Tomiko in particular would sometimes appear in Chinese dress with Chinese hairstyles and all three would occasionally sing phrases in Chinese. Hamako even recorded cover versions of Chinese songs. Despite these Orientalist flourishes, though, no one would ever mistake these singers for Chinese. Their performances included elements believed to be Chinese, but unlike Ri Kōran they made no attempt to “pass.” In fact, a large part of the enjoyment of their performed Chineseness lay in the unmistakable fact that the singers were Japanese. In other words, these performers engaged in a game of masquerade, and their songs produced pleasure by openly acknowledging their counterfeit status. What sort

of Japan-China relationship did this genre of explicitly counterfeit culture entail?[3] In taking up the “tairiku melodies” as an instance of counterfeit culture, as a lie that paradoxically admits its own falsity, we enter the realm that George Lipsitz calls “dangerous crossroads.” In looking at how post-colonial artists appropriate the commodities of popular culture to perform new imaginary identities, identities that are not yet able to exist as political realities, Lipsitz argues that they engage in “strategic anti-essentialism.” By engaging in masquerade, they appropriate “a particular disguise on the basis of its ability to highlight, underscore, and augment an aspect of one’s identity that one can not express directly….The key to understanding each of these groups is to see how they can become ‘more themselves’ by appearing to be something other than themselves.”[4] Lipsitz celebrates musicians from socially and economically marginalized groups who resort to masquerade—for example, working-class African-Americans in New Orleans who perform each year as Mardi Gras Indian “tribes”—in order to signify forms of identity that are otherwise silenced. As Lipsitz acknowledges, this strategy is double-edged. The “key question,” he writes, is to determine “which kinds of cross-cultural identification advance emancipatory ends and which ones reinforce existing structures of power and domination?”[5] Clearly such a distinction is necessary, and any cultural form must be carefully historicized when we begin to draw it. But counterfeit cultures also suggest that a clear distinction may not be possible: counterfeit cultures are often both emancipatory and enslaving at the same time. The Mardi Gras Indians, for example, do not sit well with many Native Americans. As one critic of Lipsitz has noted, “hybridity is no guarantee of postcolonial self-determination; it is as available to the colonizing practices of capital as it is to local strategies of resistance.”[6] The tairiku melody boom in Japan took place from about 1931 to 1943. Edgar Pope, author of the most extended study of the genre available, has identified 500 songs that were released during the boom, with the peak coming in 1938–1940.[7] These were precisely the years when the unruly “erotic grotesque nonsense” culture that Miriam Silverberg has explored was increasingly the target of state suppression.[8] In what was proclaimed a period of national crisis, with the potentially subversive pleasures of the body seeing stricter regulation, Japanese popular audiences turned to tairiku melodies for the sort of intense embodied pleasures and emotions that music, especially dance music, provided. That pleasure came with complex ideological layering: enjoying this music meant literally to internalize it, allowing the rhythms and melodies of the songs to reorganize the listener’s body at the most intimate level. At the same time, paradoxically, the exoticizing elements that characterized the genre solicited an act of externalization, a pushing away of the music as alien and foreign. In sum, through the acts of “musicking” performed both by musicians and their fans, tairiku melodies provided embodied modes of performance that both blurred and reinforced the boundaries between Japan and China.[9] Enjoying this music meant both transgressing and enforcing racialized boundaries. The inherent ambiguity arising out of this counterfeit status allowed the music to speak to real social contradictions, transforming them into a source of intense pleasure for Japanese listeners and for continental Asian fans as well. This intense pleasure was often enlisted in service of the ideological mission of the Japanese fascist state, yet it was also

potentially dangerous to that state: embodied pleasures have a way of leading to undisciplined outcomes. It was this aspect that led to the virtual banning of tairiku melodies by the early 1940s, a fate similar to that suffered by the Chinese counterpart to the genre, the hybrid “yellow music” of 1930s China that Andrew Jones has analyzed.[10] In trying to understand this genre and the sorts of desires it invoked, I have found it useful to turn to recent studies of American blackface minstrelsy.[11] Obviously, there are enormous cultural and historical differences between tairiku melodies and the blackface performances carried out on the New York stage in the 1840s and 1850s or on the Hollywood silver screen in the 1920s and 1930s, differences that we ignore only at tremendous risk. But there are also intriguing parallels that make me want to pursue the comparison to see what it might tell us about the tairiku melodies. Moreover, there are direct historical connections between the two genres, and their juxtaposition helps us locate early twentieth-century relations between China and Japan within a more global framework. Blackface minstrelsy was a primary technology by which marginal American ethnic groups—be they Irish immigrants from the 1840s or the children of Jewish immigrants in the 1920s and 1930s—performed into being their own status as white, that is, as civilized. By appropriating in parodic fashion the racist stereotypes of African-American appearance, speech, and culture, these groups transgressed the color line, only thereby to redraw the line, this time with themselves situated on the white side of the boundary, the side of civilization and enlightenment. At the same time, the genre provided an outlet for transforming potentially explosive social contradictions—ethnic, class, and gendered conflicts—within the “white” community into sources of carnivalesque pleasure. Blackface minstrelsy has been proclaimed America’s first vernacular form of national popular culture.[12] In the U.S., the “development of a distinctive national identity,” one distinct in particular from its former colonial masters in Europe, derived “from a proclaimed intimacy between whites and peoples of color,” an intimacy that was at the same time a form of exclusion.[13] Tairiku melodies functioned similarly as a technique for performing into being Japan’s own status as a civilizing power, as the honorary whites of East Asia, even as it celebrated colonial intimacy with continental Asia. They likewise functioned as a channel for eliciting the desires and defusing the painful contradictions that this civilizing mission required. As a parodic appropriation of Chinese cultural forms, tairiku melodies helped reconfigure ideologically Japan’s relations to China in a way that made pleasurable sense to the very consumer-subjects (to borrow Silverberg’s phrase) who were being called upon to sacrifice their own pleasures, and their own lives, in the imperial mission of the Japanese nation-state. Yet the pleasures and desires that it produced were potentially dangerous to that mission, since they could not be so easily policed. In fact, this riskiness was crucial to the effectiveness of the genre: tairiku melodies had to be potentially dangerous in order to produce the intense affect that imperialism required. This was precisely the game that a counterfeit culture enabled, one that a realist or supposedly authentic culture could not support. A number of historical starting points are available for the story I am telling here. We could begin in the 1840s and 1850s, the period in which American blackface minstrelsy first emerged and when the Opium War and the Perry Expedition brought to a crisis point the

reorganization of the previous Sino-Centric geopolitical order in East Asia. When Commodore Perry’s fleet landed in Japan in 1853 and again in 1854, they bore numerous curious gifts for their unwilling Japanese hosts. Perhaps the most curious of these was the “Ethiopian Concert,” a blackface minstrel show performed by members of Perry’s crew.[14] A tradition of blackface performance was quickly established in Japan, one that continues to this day.[15] Travel narratives written by Japanese who journeyed to the West in the 1860s and 1870s show how quickly the lesson of minstrelsy was learned: frequent descriptions of savage “darkies” show how the possibilities for achieving honorary whiteness by Japan were grasped. As Masao Miyoshi notes in his discussion of disparaging comments toward Africans and AfricanAmericans made by members of the 1860 Japanese embassy to the U.S., In their identification with the white Americans, they were prepared to reject any people the white Americans scorned. Thus American racism did not bother them much, nor did white supremacy, since the Japanese would be like the whites some day.[16]

The reverberations of Perry’s minstrel show would reach the American side of the Pacific as well. One of the first exhibitions in the U.S. of Japanese curios following Perry’s expedition was held at P.T. Barnum’s Great American Museum in New York City—at the time a primary performance venue for blackface minstrel shows.[17] Moreover, this was not the first time Japan had entered the imaginary field of American blackface performance: H.J. Conway’s proSouthern theatrical version of Uncle Tom’s Cabin was staged at the Boston Museum in 1852, and we know from correspondence between the playwright and theater manager that they considered at one point including Japanese elements in their dramatization of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel.[18] This intertwining between Japan and blackface would persist. One of the most influential portraits of Japan in nineteenth-century American popular culture came from Madame Butterfly, originally a short story by John Luther Long (1897), then adapted into a successful Broadway play by David Belasco (1900), and finally into Puccini’s opera version (1904). In its language and structure, Long’s original short story clearly translates elements from blackface minstrelsy, a linkage that echoes connections found elsewhere between the nineteenth-century genres of blackface, sentimental fiction, and melodrama.[19] The heroine Cho-Cho-San’s mangling of English is supposed to represent a Japanese accent, but seems much closer in form and tone to blackface. In a comic sequence, she performs for her loyal maid, imagining the day her beloved Pinkerton will return. She describes how she will introduce him for the first time to his own son:[20] “Well,”—she was making it up as she went,—“when tha’s ‘s all done, he loog roun’ those ways lig he doing ‘mos’ always, an’ he see sump’n’ an’ he say: ‘Oh, ’el-lo! Where you got that chile?’ I say: ‘Ah—oh—ah! I thing mebby you lig own one, an’ I buy ’im of a man what din’ wan’ no bebby with those purple eye an’ bald hairs.’ An’ he as’ me, ‘What you pay?’ Americans always as’ what you pay. I say: ‘Oh, lem me see. I thing, two yen an’ two sen. Tha’s too moach for bald bebby?’”

Notice the language here not only sounds like blackface burlesque of African-American English, but also that Cho-Cho-San explicitly uses the notion of buying and selling human beings as part of her performance—this in a story that revolves around the issue of colonial “white slavery.”[21] Shortly thereafter, still for the benefit of her maid, she grabs not a banjo

but a samisen and sings a ditty that Pinkerton has taught her, the narrator informing us that she performs with the purpose of “making it as grotesque as possible the more to amuse him.” Another potential starting point for my story comes with developments in modern mass media taking place around 1915, the year after the establishment of the first recording studio and record pressing plant in China.[22] D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation was beginning the process of bringing blackface racial fantasies from the theatrical stage to the new medium of film, while in Japan Matsui Sumako became Japan’s first modern recording star. Sumako’s recording of “Katchūsha’s Song” (“Katchūsha no uta”), the featured song in her appearance as the heroine in a popular stage version of Tolstoy’s Resurrection, sold 20,000 copies. The first Japanese recording to sell in large quantities, it was based in part on racial masquerade, as Sumako played a white woman, as she had in several other theatrical productions. This masquerade also spelled the beginning of the end for gender-crossing in the modern Japanese theater: Sumako was the major figure in the transition from the “barbaric” use of biologically male onnagata actors for female roles to the use of biologically female performers on the dramatic stage. Her performance was a crucial turning point in Japanese popular culture’s rise to a self-conscious modernity: that is to say, her performance of proper gender boundaries on the stage and in the recording studio was an important turning point in the civilizing process in Japan, in Japan’s performance of the role as the honorary white power of East Asia.[23] Another starting point lies with the 1924 Immigration and Alien Exclusion Act of the United States. This severely limited immigration by groups that were not thought to be sufficiently white—including Asians (especially Japanese: Chinese immigration had already been banned by earlier laws) and Eastern Europeans, especially Jews. For Jewish immigrants to the U.S., the overt racism of the new immigration law was a sign of rising anti-Semitism, one that increased the urgency of assimilation into mainstream white society—an assimilation carried out in mass culture by the blackface songs of such popular Jewish performers as Al Jolson, Eddie Cantor, and George Jessel. By temporarily becoming black, these performers helped acquire the status of white. For Japanese musicians, on the other hand, the 1924 law meant that travel to the U.S. to learn the new music of jazz firsthand became increasingly difficult. As a result, to learn their musical chops after 1924 they increasingly traveled to Shanghai, the jazz capital of East Asia in the 1920s and ’30s.[24] Ri Kōran, Watanabe Hamako, and Hattori Tomiko all performed in Shanghai, often in musical revues staged by Hattori Ryōichi, who spent most of the war years in the city working together with Japanese, Chinese, and other Western and Asian musicians. Tairiku melodies were in many ways the mixed-blood children of the lively Shanghai musical scene. That city also gave birth to many aspects of postwar Japanese popular music as well: it was in Shanghai, for example, that Hattori Ryōichi first encountered the sheet music for the song “Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy,” setting him off into experiments with that new up-tempo jazz style that would lead to such postwar hits as Kasagi Shizuko’s “Tokyo Boogie Woogie.” It was also in Shanghai that Ryōichi became close friends with the Chinese composer Li Jinguang, whose song “Ye Lai Xiang” would become an enormous hit in 1949 for Yamaguchi Yoshiko (the former Ri Kōran), with Ryōichi acting as arranger and producer.[25]

Finally, I might start my narrative of tairiku melodies with the mid-1930s crackdown on dissent and decadence in Japan. Dance music in popular jazz-derived genres was increasingly targeted for suppression. The revision of Japan’s censorship laws in 1936 extended the domain of media requiring pre-publication censorship to include records, and numerous songs were banned as injurious to public morals—including Watanabe Hamako’s 1935 debut single, “Don’t You Dare Forget Me” (“Wasurecha iya yo”).[26] Police monitored live performances and dancehalls as well for conduct deemed unbecoming for imperial subjects, and in particular Western jazz came in for scrutiny and censure. Dancehalls were all finally shut down in November, 1940, and public performances of jazz became largely impossible after Pearl Harbor.[27] In sum, by 1937 it had become increasingly difficult to express directly the erotic and political pleasures of the body in the sorts of jazz songs that had boomed earlier in the decade. Popular music saw a shift similar to that which Silverberg identifies as taking place in film magazines such as Eiga no Tomo during the period: By the second half of the 1930s there was a shift from emphasis on eros to emphasis on empire. . . . 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 on the Chinese continent.[28]

The tairiku melodies emerged at this point to provide pleasures of a potentially less dangerous sort and to mobilize bodily desires in service of the imperial mission by creating a fetishistic fantasy version of Asia as an object for desire. But this counterfeit genre was not completely safe: even tairiku melodies were viewed suspiciously by censors and other government officials. Censor Ogawa Chikagoro in 1941 wrote: Every company has a large number of songs about Shanghai. They are full of sentimentalism and eroticism—falling lilacs, the scent of horse chestnut trees (I doubt whether there ever are any such trees in Shanghai!) . . . and the nearly obligatory appearance of a guniang weepily playing her lute around the window of a tea house. This sort of thing might pass in lyrical poetry, but it has no spirit.

Such music, Ogawa complained, had “a profound influence over the masses” and made it almost “impossible to extract the vulgarity from these songs.”[29] In other words, even in the fetishistic, explicitly colonizing and racializing form of the tairiku melodies, the bodily pleasures produced through musicking were simultaneously a disciplining and an opening onto unruliness, a site where dangerous social contradictions might erupt unexpectedly. Let me turn now to my three singers and their songs in an attempt to trace through some of the tangled strands that went into tairiku melodies. I cannot pretend to provide a comprehensive survey of the genre, but I do hope to identify some of the questions it raises that help us see the complexity of Chinese-Japanese relations during the age of Japanese imperialism. Watanabe Hamako (1910–1999), the recognized queen of the genre, was born and raised in the former treaty port of Yokohama, meaning that already from childhood she lived in a contact zone between China, Japan, and the West.[30] The second daughter of an English teacher at a women’s college, she was educated at a mission school, where her musical talents led her teachers to recommend she pursue advanced training. In 1930, she enrolled in an elite musical

conservatory, Musashino Ongaku Gakkō (forerunner of today’s Musashino Academia Musicae), graduating in 1933. Shortly thereafter, she signed a recording contract with Nippon Victor and made her debut as a popular singer. In 1935, as I’ve already noted, Hamako enjoyed her first hit record, “Wasurecha iya yo,” a song that came in for censorship for its supposed excessive sensuality. In 1937, Hamako joined the Nippon Columbia record label, and it was there that she would enjoy her greatest success. In 1938, she paid her first visit to China in a morale-boosting tour for Japanese troops organized by a Japanese newspaper. Shortly after returning from that tour she recorded what would become her biggest hit: “China Nights” (“Shina no Yoru”). She quickly became recognized as the queen of tairiku melodies. She scored another hit in 1939 with a Japaneselanguage adaptation of “Heri Jun Zai Lai” (When Will You Return, J: “Hōri Chun Tsairai”; music by Yen Lu, lyrics by Bei Ling), previously a hit in China for singer Zhou Xuan. Hamako spent the remaining war years traveling back and forth between Japan, China, Korea, and Manchuria. On August 15, 1945, Hamako heard the emperor’s surrender broadcast in Tienchin, China. She spent several months in a repatriation camp there, performing regularly for Japanese awaiting transport home (Chinese troops insisted she change the lyrics of her bestknown “Shina no Yoru” to a more respectful “Chūgoku no Musume”)[31] and finally returned to Japan in May, 1946. In the postwar era, she continued to record, including such Orientalist numbers as “San Francisco Chinatown.” She is perhaps best remembered today for her 1952 hit, “Night Deepens at Monten Lupa” (“Monten Rupa no Yoru wa Fukete”), a song composed by two members of a group of convicted Japanese war criminals awaiting execution in the Philippines. Hamako visited the prisoners at New Bilibid prison in the Philippines on Christmas, 1952, and the following year her efforts and those of other supporters led to the prisoners being allowed to return to Japan, their death sentences commuted.[32] Her death on December 31, 1999, symbolically brought to a close Japan’s turbulent twentieth century. Her body was sent to the crematorium holding a Chinese-style fan in her hand.[33] Watanabe’s 1940 hit “Suzhou Serenade”—“Soshū Yakyoku” (music by Hattori Ryōichi, lyrics by Saijō Yaso)—is “often cited as the best of the tairiku songs, and is certainly the one that has been best remembered in the postwar years.”[34] The song was initially composed for the film Shina no Yoru, where it was sung by Ri Kōran and her male co-star, Hasegawa Kazuo. For the record version, Watanabe sang in duet with the popular male singer Kirishima Noboru (who also recorded several tairiku melodies). Initially an enormous hit, like so many tairiku melodies the song was eventually banned for being “decadent and sentimental.”[35] The lyrics evoke images of moonlight, weeping willows, and floating down the waterways of Suzhou. The first and third verses are sung by the female, while the middle verse is sung by the man, and if we connect these voices to the film version, Watanabe sings here in the guise of a Chinese woman, while Hasegawa voices the role of her Japanese male lover. We imagine a fleeting romantic encounter with a native woman in an exotic locale, a fantasy that the music of the song only strengthens. The melody signals Chineseness in numerous ways: Watanabe sings her lyrics in Japanese, but in a nasal tone at the upper range of her soprano voice and with

frequent melisma and vibrato, producing a warbling sound that Japanese listeners thought resembled typical Chinese singing (these techniques are much less pronounced in passages sung by Kirishima). Likewise, the violin played at the opening and during the bridge imitates a Chinese bowed lute, we hear a muted gong at the fade out, and the song includes multiple other instances of Western instruments counterfeiting what were thought to be Chinese sounds. The pentatonic melody also signifies Chineseness, and while published scores for the song identify it as being in the key of B-flat Major, the song also flirts with the relative minor key of G minor. Hence, Pope argues that the song is marked by an ambiguous minor/major key, which he notes is another common musical marker used to express Chineseness in tairiku melodies. These Orientalizing gestures themselves were in many ways counterfeit: composer Hattori acknowledged that his song borrowed as much from American Tin Pan Alley Orientalism as from actual Chinese sources.[36] Like minstrel songs, tairiku melodies pretended to voice the emotions and thoughts of a racialized other. Morever, like minstrel songs, tairiku melodies tend to belong to two broad types. A typical minstrel show would feature in its first half rowdy songs adopting the position of a “black dandy” in a northern urban setting, while sentimental and romantic ballads set on southern plantations dominated in the second half (the 1854 “Ethiopian Concert” aboard Matthew Perry’s flagship was no exception). This standard division was well-known in Japan. A 1939 review in a Japanese music magazine of a recent album of compositions by Stephen Foster noted, “Among his works are some that are the despairing, mournful howl of the negroes, while others display their other face: optimistic, cheerful songs.”[37] “Suzhou Serenade” parallels the former style, its nostalgic romanticism recalling such Foster compositions as “Old Black Joe,” “Come Where My Love Lies Dreaming,” or “Old Folks At Home,” works that by 1940 were already well loved in Japan. In minstrel shows, the counterfeit nature of these sad ballads allowed working-class audiences to voice resentful sentiments that were likely too dangerous to express directly.[38] Working-class audiences in 1850s New York, undergoing economic hard times, used blackface culture to both express and deflect class rage. As Lott notes, “Minstrelsy was a prime example of the sometimes contestatory character of plebeian culture, articulating class difference, intentionally or not, by calling on the insurrectionary resonances of black culture.” Blackface was a performance strategy of “corporeal containment”: the potentially insurrectionary pleasures of the body were allowed expression, but only so as to contain them again, so that class hatred was translated into racial hatred and “anticapitalist frustrations stalled potentially positive racial feelings and significations, revealing in the end the viciously racist underside of those frustrations.”[39] Moreover, it provided “the emotional form to mourn the loss of the old” by serving as “the transitional object whose emotional linkage to a world left behind facilitated movement forward and away.”[40] Tairiku melodies seem to function in similar ways. As E. Taylor Atkins notes in an article on Japanese appropriations of the song “Arirang” during the Korean colonial period, what seemed on the surface to be a song about Korea actually gave indirect voice to social antagonisms in metropolitan Japan. “Arirang” to Japanese listeners, “served as both an

ethnographic lens through which to gaze on the Korean psyche and a mirror for self-reflection. In the context of colonial rule, observations gleaned through the lens might be useful for drafting cultural policy, yet the mirror revealed uncomfortable truths about Japan’s abandonment of traditional lifeways.”[41] In other words, the song that Korean colonial subjects used to mourn loss of national sovereignty sounded to Japanese ears like a lament for the contradictions and traumas induced by modernity. “Suzhou Serenade” provided intense pleasure by giving voice to social resentments in a historical situation marked by rigid suppression of dissent. At the same time, the songs projected China as a place where, for better or worse, such antagonisms did not exist—thereby creating both a positive utopian and a negative primitivist imagery. The painful strictures that an industrializing capitalist economy and an increasingly authoritarian state imposed on mass audiences were expressed in potentially troubling ways yet also transformed into a source of intense, seemingly harmless, pleasure. As a result of the disciplining Japanese consumersubjects had undergone over the course of several decades, they had been forced to surrender the pleasures of a Sino-centric order, including musical forms that did not translate well to modern Western-originated modes of transcription; they had been submitted to industrial disciplining and increasing class conflict, especially in the years of the Great Depression; they had been forced to adopt standardized national language and thereby surrender the pleasures of speaking in local dialects; they had been subjected to normative modes of gender and sexuality that rendered illegitimate forms of pleasure and lifestyle that had earlier seen wide acceptance; they had been forcibly mobilized to supply the troops and infrastructure needed to carry out the state’s expansionist policies. The counterfeit performance of Chineseness in “Suzhou Serenade” gave voice to the resentments that these changes had brought about, it opened up potentially dangerous forms of pleasure by linking Japanese to Chinese bodies, yet it at the same time it solicited consumer-subjects to desire their own domination as cogs within the new world order the state was attempting to produce. Moreover, under conditions of a capitalist culture industry, the record offered itself as a therapeutic commodity that promised to dull the pain. The dangerous crossroads along which the song traveled allowed Japanese listeners to play at being Chinese females, blurring their identities as Japanese only to reinforce them. These tendencies were not unique to Japan, of course: “Suzhou Serenade” also achieved popularity in the English-speaking world under the title “China Baby in my Arms.”[42] According to composer Hattori, the song also enjoyed wide popularity in China, where listeners and performers no doubt derived from it equally dangerous pleasures and desires. In all of these settings, it was the counterfeit nature of this tairiku melody that allows it to flirt with what would be too dangerous to express directly in a medium that laid claim to realism and authenticity. The careers of Hattori Tomiko (1917–1981) and her brother Ryōichi were intertwined from the start. The two were raised in Osaka, the jazz mecca of Japan early in the Shōwa era. The youngest daughter in a poor but highly musical family of five children, Tomiko joined the allfemale Takarazuka Theatrical Troupe in the early 1930s to study voice.[43] She would

subsequently appear as a chorus girl in a number of Takarazuka Revues in Osaka and Tokyo. In September, 1935 she made her recording debut, singing her brother’s jazz chorus number “Drink Your Morning Tea!” (“Asa no Kōcha wo Meshiagare”) for the Nittō label. In 1934, she followed her brother to sign with the Nippon Columbia label, where she debuted with “LittleBird Girl” (“Kotori Musume”), another of her brother’s compositions and the first of the “girl” numbers for which she would become known.[44] In 1938, composer Koga Masao lured Tomiko away to Teichiku records, and it was with that label in December, 1938, that Tomiko released what became her signature number, “Girl of Manchuria” (“Manshū Musume”).[45] Tomiko would subsequently go on to co-star in both the 1940 film Shina no Yoru and in the 1940 Enoken musical-comedy spectacular, The Monkey King (Songoku, alongside Watanabe Hamako and Ri Kōran), set in an Orientalized fantasy version of ancient China, where she played a young Chinese maiden.[46] She frequently performed and was photographed in Chinese dress during this period.[47] During the war, she traveled to China, often in the company of Watanabe Hamako, to appear in morale-boosting shows for Japanese troops at the front lines. In China, she also linked up with her brother in Shanghai.[48] She would continue her work as a singer in the postwar years, frequently recording her brother’s compositions—including the 1949 release “Bye Bye Shanghai.” She also accompanied Ryōichi, Watanabe Hamako, and Kasagai Shizuko on a triumphant 1950 American concert tour. “Manshū Musume” (music by Suzuki Tetsuo, lyrics by Ishimatsu Shūji) belonged to a lineage of 1930s “musume” songs with lyrics often set in exotic colonial locations: “The Chieftan’s Daughter” (“Shūchō no Musume,”, 1930), “Island Girl” (“Shima no Musume,” 1932), “Flower Girl” (“Hanauri Musume,” 1934), “Stylish Girl” (“Oshare Musume,” 1936), “Banana Girl” (“Banana Musume,” 1937), “Shanghai Flower Girl” (“Shanhai no Hanauri Musume,” 1939), “Canton Girl” (“Kanton Musume,” 1940), “Peking Girl” (“Pekin Musume,” 1940), “Nanking Girl” (“Nankin Musume,” 1941), etc.[49] As Pope notes, the songs often featured a female vocalist singing in the first person, voicing the desires of a young girl—age sixteen seems standard.[50] “Musume” songs usually feature cheerful, bright melodies, while the lyrics often rely on a sense of innocence or cuteness to produce a kind of indirect, disavowed eroticism. In Tomiko’s hit number, the musume is a sixteen-year-old girl stuck in the middle of the Manchurian winter, dreaming of the coming spring when she will finally marry her beloved Wang. Censors considered the song decadent, but supposedly allowed it to be released on the condition that it not be heavily promoted.[51] The record nonetheless became an enormous hit, and its refrain, “Wan-san, mattete chōdai, ne” (Mr. Wang, please wait for me, okay?), became a popular catchphrase. Tokiko revived it in her 1950 recording “Hello, Mr. Wang” (“Harō, Wansan”), where it became “Harō Wan-san, mattete” (Hello, Mr. Wang, wait for me). The lyrics to “Manshū Musume” are in Japanese, though a couple of Chinese words are thrown in for flavor. Musically, the song conveys Chineseness through many of the same techniques found in “Suzhou Serenade”: pentatonic melody, a nasal warbling vocal style, gongs used to provide color, and Western instruments masquerading as Chinese counterparts. But the song is clearly a counterfeit: no one would mistake the singer or the composition for being “authentically”

Chinese. As Pope notes, unlike “Suzhou Serenade,” this and the other “musume” songs do not suggest romance between a Chinese woman and a Japanese man. Here, both lovers are explicitly Chinese. Knowledge that the singer was “really” a Japanese woman, however, and that she was expressing desire for a Chinese man, probably lent the song a risky erotic charge for contemporary listeners.[52] But even if we accept the lyrics’ premise that the female character is Chinese, it is clear that the song exoticized its singer in ways that were ideologically effective in late 1930s Japan. In other words, the counterfeiting of China is used here to give expression to social antagonisms that troubled 1930s Japan. Again, we can turn to blackface minstrel songs to try to understand the desires, fears, and pleasures that this counterfeit song was attempting to solicit and manage. In response to anxieties provoked by changing norms for gender and sexuality, American minstrel shows of the 1850s often staged parodic and grotesque romances between supposedly black females and males (all roles played, of course, by white men). In the “doubled structure of looking” that such sequences enacted, white spectators could fantasize about spying on black figures as they looked at one another. The grotesquely performed female bodies allowed white male spectators to access forbidden preOedipal pleasures (and terrors) of the body. Simultaneously, these grotesque performances gave outlet to various forms of the unspeakable: white male desire for black male bodies, for example, and white male misogyny directed at white females.[53] In the face of industrial capitalism’s challenges to existing modes of masculine self-identity, blackface provided a source of fetishistic enjoyment to male spectators anxious about their own status as patriarchs. Similarly, “Manshū Musume” hints that Chinese, especially Chinese females, retain something that Japanese (and Japanese females in particular) had lost, a something on which Japanese male listeners might well stake their own masculinity. In the face of the aggressive “Modern Girl,” who militantly demanded sexual, political, and economic autonomy, and in the face of rapid changes in economic and social structures that rendered older modes of masculinity untenable, anxieties about gender and sexuality were part and parcel of the crisis situation perceived by Japanese consumer-subjects in the late 1930s. That the audience for “Manshū Musume” also included many Japanese females as well as males complicates matters, as well. Moreover, a 1940 article in a Japanese music magazine written by a soldier at the front reported that he often heard Chinese children sing the song.[54] A 1933 article on Chinese jazz published in a Japanese music magazine suggests reasons why “Manshū Musume” would, a few years later, prove so popular among Japanese listeners. The article celebrates the great diversity of musical performance venues and performers available in Shanghai, which far surpass those that could be found in Tokyo. Nonetheless, as it surveys the works of composer Li Jinhui and performers such as Wang Renmei and Li Minhui, it finds that in terms of technique and intelligence, Chinese jazz musicians lag behind those in Japan. This lag, however, might in fact work to the benefit of the Chinese musicians: Westerners who compare Chinese [shinajin] and Japanese all say the same thing: while in terms of degree of modern culture they overwhelmingly respect Japan, in terms of humanness they sympathize more with the Chinese. Japanese are indecisive and self-conscious, while Chinese are unrestrained and emotional. In jazz performance, Paul Whiteman has said, emotions and sentiment are of primary importance. The reason the inferiority of their [Chinese] compositions

ends up winning sympathetic acceptance as something charming is that their melodies and songs give off the emotionalism that is in the Chinese national character. When Chinese feel pain they say that it hurts, and when they want to laugh they just laugh. It is pleasurable [omoshiroi] to feel such undistorted emotions. And this is what Japanese simply cannot do. We have been taught that even when we are happy, it is more virtuous to act as if we were not happy. Accordingly, when we listen to Japanese popular songs, we can see too clearly the technique: a sad song is sung in a self-consciously sad manner. I’ve never heard a single melody that made me feel so good I spontaneously wanted to dance. This is why Japanese jazz performances are lousy.[55]

The patronizing descriptions of Chinese simplicity and emotionality echo the words the blackface minstrel performers and fans used to describe African-American culture and song. The apparent sympathy that the counterfeit culture of minstrelsy showed for African-American music parallels that of this 1933 Japanese jazz critic, who follows the above passage by directly linking Chinese jazz to Stephen Foster, the king of minstrel composers: That’s why it is so remarkably pleasurable to listen to Chinese jazz. I enjoy its truly bright and cheerful spirit, its carefree melodies. The pure humorousness of the Chinese ethnic character more than makes up for the technical deficiencies. . . . Since the Shanghai Incident, I’ve managed to listen to ten new records of Chinese popular songs. Among them was a jazz arrangement of Foster’s “Oh Susanna” sung in Chinese by Wang Renmei. It’s the same old unvaried accompaniment, but listening to it I sense a genuinely intimate ease [hedate no nai kokoroyasusa] and an uninhibited gentleness, and I feel such pleasure I can’t help but smile [lit.: can’t prohibit myself from smiling: bishō o kinjienai].[56]

Like Wang’s “Oh Susanna,” “Manshū Musume” provided the fantasy image of a feminized China, a realm where women were still women: emotional, obedient, and dependent. The song solicited, that is, the fetishistic desire for a world where men could still act as men: a pleasure that could now only be had in Japan, fleetingly, by buying and enjoying the commodity that was the song. Kasagi Shizuko (1914–1981) is best known for her string of postwar boogie-woogie songs, which provided the musical soundtrack for the American Occupation period (1945–1952). But her recording career dates back to the 1930s. Another product of the lively 1920s jazz scene in Osaka, she debuted there in 1927 as a chorus girl in the Shōchiku Musical Revue. The following year, she moved to Tokyo to further her career, and in 1934 she made her recording debut. In 1939, she linked up with Hattori Ryōichi, and he would subsequently compose or arrange all of her recordings until her retirement as a singer in the mid-1950s. She became the dominant female singer in the early postwar years, with such hit numbers as “Tokyo Boogie Woogie” (1947), “Jungle Boogie” (1948, featured in Kurosawa Akira’s film Drunken Angel), and “Shopping Boogie” (“Kaimono Boogie,” 1950).[57] It is her 1940 recording of a Hattori composition, “Hot China” (“Hotto Chaina”) that I will take up here. If it were included in an evening of blackface minstrel performances, this number (like most of Kasagi’s hits) would clearly belong to the rowdy first half of the program. The lyrics tell of a lively Chinese night-time festival; rather than provide a narrative, they catalog a series exotic images, both visible (e.g., female guniang performers) and audible (e.g., “Chinese cymbals, jang-jang-jang”)—but mostly, they repeat a series of phrases and onomatopoeiac sounds: “Bonbo bonbo,” “wasshoi” [a rhythmic word often chanted at Japanese festivals], and above all “China.” The music uses many of the sound cues for Chineseness we’ve seen in the other two songs, and Pope argues that its melody echoes that of

the Chinese folksong “Lake Tai Boat Song” (J: “Taikosen,” C: “Tai Hu Chuan”).[58] But in this song, the Orientalist features seem more ornaments attached to a song that is at its core not Chinese, but rather hot jazz, perhaps in its Shanghai variation. Kasagi’s singing style is brassy and energetic, playfully syncopating the breakneck rhythm, and except for a couple of throwaway lines in which she deliberately mirrors the Orientalist coloring of the orchestral accompaniment, she does not mimic the stereotype for a Chinese singing voice. Kasagi was in particular famous for the way she used her body in performance. Given her close association with African-American genres such as the blues and boogie-woogie, she did not escape the processes of exoticization and racialization in her career. These transformed her into a sexualized spectacle. Kasagi frequently expressed discomfort with this aspect. She adopted a strategy in her performance of standing back and lampooning the very stereotypes she was supposed to be portraying, a self-knowing winking that give the lie to the lyrics she is singing: another kind of counterfeiting. It is reminiscent of the manner in which Billie Holiday appropriated the trite—and often racist—lyrics of Tin Pan Alley songs, using her performance to transform them into something else, unleashing a “capacity to speak the unspeakable, to convey meanings that differed from and sometimes contradicted the particular terms employed to express them,” thereby establishing “an almost magical control of the tired words, revitalizing them and pushing them toward a criticism of the very cultural context out of which they were born.”[59] As in many Tin Pan Alley Orientalist songs from the period, such as “Chinatown, My Chinatown,” Kasagi’s song “constructs a musical Chinatown that sounds faintly exotic, yet safe, familiar, and ultimately knowable.”[60] Here, though, identities are troubled through gender, not race: rather than adopt the pose of a Chinese woman, Kasagi seems to appropriate the position of a Japanese man, enjoying the sensual pleasures of China. This masquerade, along with the over-the-top quality of her singing performance in the song, has the effect of distancing the singer from the exoticism that she is nonetheless mouthing. Moreover, given the overtly American sound of the music and the use of the English name for “China” in the lyrics and title (though “Shina” is also used), we get the strong sense that she is taking up and parodying the role of an honorary white man. She is, that is, appropriating Tin Pan Alley and Hollywood Orientalism through her counterfeit performance, opening up through her playful mimicry a new realm of impossible pleasures.[61] Blackface works, Daphne Brooks argues, by “conserv[ing] the performance of ‘whiteness’ and ‘blackness,’ holding them in tension with one another and grotesquely exposing the mutual constitution of the former with the latter.”[62] I have argued here that tairiku melodies work similarly. Perhaps the best theorist of this counterfeit culture of the tairiku melodies was the novelist Tanizaki Jun’ichirō, who himself frequently engaged in an ironic exoticization of Chinese culture.[63] In his 1928 novel, Some Prefer Nettles (Tade kuu mushi), the hero Kaname, unable to generate sufficient desire to keep him interested in his wife, pursues a sexual relationship with Louise, a Eurasian prostitute. As with so many of Tanizaki’s works, Kaname’s desire is fetishistic, characterized by equal parts of attraction and disgust. This is how Louise is described.

Indeed, almost her whole body was covered with a delicate coating of white powder—Kaname had had to wait more than a half-hour for her to finish powdering herself after her bath. She said that her mother had some Turkish blood, and that she felt she had to hide the darkness of her complexion. As a matter of fact, though, it had been the dark glow of her skin, with its faint suggestion of impurity, that had attracted Kaname.[64]

Louise is undeniably a product of the Japanese empire, formal and informal: apparently the daughter of a Russian and a Korean mother, she has drifted through the empire all her life and even dreams of leaving Japan for Harbin. What is it that makes her so desirable to Kaname? Is it the whiteness of her body powder, the powder that after sex with her “seemed to sink deep into his skin,”[65] rubbing her whiteness off onto him? Or is it rather the “dark glow of her skin” that shows through the white powder? “Kaname admired the natural golden brown of her skin, but even so he was unwilling to break the spell of the white coating.”[66] It is, I think, precisely the oscillation between the two that drives Kaname’s desires and pleasures, an oscillation that derives from the counterfeit nature of her performance. The blatant falsity of her whiteface performance allows Kaname to desire both whiteness and Asianness—and to feel simultaneously disgust for both. This is the sort of fetishistic enchantment that drove tairiku melodies: the very counterfeit nature of the performance of Chineseness allowed disgust and fascination with both China and Japan. Moreover, despite (or perhaps because of) the counterfeit nature of the genre, tairiku melodies do establish a relationship, or rather, a series of often contradictory relationships, between Japan and China. Riding the transnational currents of the globalizing culture industry, songs like “Suzhou Serenade” or “Manshū Musume” open up a kind of contact zone, a site for musicking available to persons in both Japan and the Asian continent—even if the relationships established on that site are antagonistic and mutually opaque. Tairiku melodies found fans in China, Manchuria, Taiwan, and elsewhere. Anti-Japanese nationalists rejected the songs and denounced their local fans as collaborationists, but such denunciations could not entirely erase the pleasures the songs solicited. The relationality becomes even clearer when we consider a song such as “Heri Jun Zai Lai,” a “yellow music” hit for Zhou Xuan that was subsequently a tairiku melody hit in Japan for Watanabe Hamako. When Japanese film director Yoshimura Kōzaburō visited Shanghai in 1940, shortly after the song’s popularity had peaked in Japan, he found the same melody on everyone’s lips. Yoshimura is already aware of the nationalist spin that some had given to the song’s lyrics: that for some, the “you” whose return the singer pines for might signify Chiang Kai-shek. Yoshimura hopefully argues, however, that probably for most Chinese, the “you” means peace, an end to war.[67] Even as he tries to contain them, though, Yoshimura has inadvertently acknowledged the existence of alternate ways of enjoying the song. Tairiku melodies existed on a dangerous crossroads. To be effective ideologically in covering over social antagonisms, these counterfeit songs had to provide an opportunity for intense desires and pleasures—which, once unleashed, might develop in unpredictable directions. As Pearl Harbor neared, America was increasingly viewed as the enemy, and American popular culture, notably jazz music (a term widely used for all popular dance music), was banned. A 1940 article celebrated on patriotic grounds the ban on jazz music in Japan, but it picks out a strange target for special condemnation:

Together with the edict banning all luxury goods, a total ban on escapist, frivolous jazz-style popular songs has been announced in the record industry. This is a fine development, and like the order banning luxury goods its enactment comes if anything too late. It will be a great relief when we no longer hear in the streets such lyrics as “in a certain Chinese town” or “a China girl did such-and-such in Shanghai,” all sung to a melancholic, fin de siècle tune.[68]

The article goes on to insist that the blame for the omnipresence of tairiku melodies in Japan lies not with the masses, who turn to such music “instinctively,” in response to the increasingly hectic pace of modern life, but rather with the composers and record companies who supply them with such poison. Nonetheless, it is not so much the American origins of jazz that come under attack here (in fact, the article mounts an interesting defense of some American jazz as being worthy of musical appreciation) as the decadent, false enjoyment that tairiku melodies have provided for too many Japanese. In attempting to provide ideological medicine for the social antagonisms of 1930s and 1940s Japan and Asia, the music threatened always to reveal that the enemy was us. NOTES 1. Review of Shina no Yoru (China Nights), Kinema Junpō 721 (11 July 1940), p. 57. All translations of Japanese-language materials are my own, except where otherwise noted.

2. Yiman Wang, “Screening Asia: Passing, Performative Translation, and Reconfiguration,” positions 15:2 (2007), pp. 319-43. The quoted passages appear on pp. 328–29.

3. “Counterfeit” here is something akin to what Miriam Silverberg describes as the parodic aesthetics of the “phony” (inchiki) in 1930s Tokyo performance culture: see Silverberg, Erotic Grotesque Nonsense: The Mass Culture of Japanese Modern Times (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), pp. 235–53. It also parallels the “ventriloquism” that Hosokawa Shuhei discusses in his “Blacking Japanese: Experiencing Otherness from Afar,” in David Hesmondhalgh and Keith Negus, eds., Popular Music Studies (London: Arnold, 2002), pp. 223–37. I also have in mind Derrida’s use of the term, but as will become apparent below, I am more cautionary about its deconstructive potential: See Jacques Derrida, Given Time 1: Counterfeit Money, trans. by Peggy Kamuf (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992).

4. George Lipsitz, Dangerous Crossroads: Popular Music, Postmodernism and the Poetics of Place (London: Verso, 1994), pp. 62–63.

5. Lipsitz, Dangerous Crossroads, p. 56. See also Lipsitz’ discussion of American minstrelsy on pp. 53–56. 6. Rosemary J. Coombe, The Cultural Life of Intellectual Properties: Authorship, Appropriation, and the Law (Durham: Duke University Press, 1998), p. 215.

7. Edgar W. Pope, “Songs of Empire: Continental Asia in Japanese Wartime Popular Music.” (Doctoral Dissertation, University of Washington, 1993), p. 3.

8. Silverberg, Erotic Grotesque Nonsense. 9. I follow here Christopher Small in considering music less as a noun than as a verb, a communal activity in which agency exists simultaneously at multiple locations. See Small, Musicking: The Meanings of Performing and Listening (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1998).

10. Andrew F. Jones, Yellow Music: Media Culture and Colonial Modernity in the Chinese Jazz Age (Durham: Duke University Press, 2001).

11. On American blackface minstrelsy, I have relied on Eric Lott, Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993); Michael Rogin, Blackface, White Noise: Jewish Immigrants in the Hollywood Melting Pot (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996); Daphne A. Brooks, Bodies in Dissent: Spectacular Performances of Race and Freedom, 1850–1910 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006); and David R. Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (London: Verso, 1991), esp. pp.

115–31.

12. See Brooks, Bodies in Dissent, for an alternate view: she argues the nineteenth-century minstrelsy is in fact a transatlantic cultural phenomenon.

13. Rogin, Blackface, White Noise, p. 25. 14. The program

for the concert is available http://ocw.mit.edu/ans7870/21f/21f.027j/black_ships_and_samurai/core_encounters_west.html

on

line

at:

15. John G. Russell, “Consuming Passions: Spectacle, Self-Transformation, and the Commodification of Blackness in Japan,” positions 6:1 (Spring 1998), pp. 113–77. See also Hosokawa, “Blacking Japanese.”

16. Masao Miyoshi, As We Saw Them: The First Japanese Embassy to the United States (1860) (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979), p. 64.

17. The Barnum Japan exhibit is mentioned in Christine Guth, Longfellow’s Tattoos: Tourism, Collecting, and Japan (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2004), pp. 12–13. On Barnum’s role in promoting blackface minstrelsy, see Lott, Love and Theft, 75–77 and Rogin, Blackface, White Noise, p. 52.

18. Conway ultimately rejected the proposal to use what he calls “the Jappanese [sic] idea” in his play. See Bruce A. McConachie, “H.J. Conway's Dramatization of Uncle Tom's Cabin: A Previously Unpublished Letter,” Theatre Journal, Vol. 34, No. 2, (May, 1982), pp. 149–54. A 1907 production in Japan of Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Li Shutong and Ouyang Yuqien, two pioneers of Chinese modern drama (itself based on an earlier Japanese Shinpa [new school drama] production of the play), is conventionally identified as a turning point in the rise of modern theater in China. See Siyuan Liu, “The Impact of Shinpa on Early Chinese Huaju,” Asian Theatre Journal 23.2 (2006), pp. 342–55; and Carol Martin, “Brecht, Feminism, and Chinese Theater,” The Drama Review 43.4 (1999), pp. 77–85.

19. Brooks, Bodies in Dissent, p. 30. 20. John Luther Long, “Madame Butterfly,” The Century Magazine (January 1898), pp. 374–92. The passages quoted below all appear on p. 380.

21. Mark Anderson has also noted the resemblance of Cho-Cho-San’s language to blackface minstrelsy conventions, and he called my attention to the work of Arthur Groos, who notes that Cho-Cho’s spoken English “sounds more like something from one of Joel Chandler Harris's darkies than the immediate source of 'Un bel di.'” See Groos, “Return of the Native: Japan in Madama Butterfly/Madama Butterfly in Japan,” Cambridge Opera Journal, 1 (July 1989), pp. 167–94. This passage appears on p. 172.

22. Jones, Yellow Music, p. 53. 23. On Matsui Sumako, see Ayako Kano, Acting Like a Woman in Modern Japan: Theater, Gender, and Nationalism (New York: Palgrave, 2001).

24. On the role Shanghai and other continental Asian locales played in the development of Japanese jazz, see Ueda Ken’ichi, Shanhai bugiugi 1945: Hattori Ryōichi no bōken [Shanghai Boogie Woogie 1945: The Adventures of Hattori Ryōichi] (Tokyo: Ongaku no Tomo Sha, 2003); and E. Taylor Atkins, Blue Nippon: Authenticating Jazz in Japan (Durham: Duke University Press, 2001), esp. pp. 127–63.

25. The 1949 version had lyrics translated into Japanese; earlier, during the war years when she was still known as Ri Kōran, she had recorded the song in Chinese.

26. Silverberg, Erotic Grotesque Nonsense, p. 26. 27. Silverberg, Erotic Grotesque Nonsense, p. 172. 28. Silverberg, Erotic Grotesque Nonsense, p. 131. 29. Quoted in Baskett, Attractive Empire, p. 119; translations by Baskett. The original source is Ogawa Chikagorō, Hayariuta to Sessō: Jihenka ni okeru kayō no shimei [Popular Songs and the State of the World: The Duty of Music in a Time of War] (Tokyo: Nihon Keisatsu Shinbunsha, 1941), p. 179.

30. Details on Watanabe’s life come from her autobiography, Watanabe Hamako, Aa wasurarenu kokyū no oto: Watanabe Hamako fuoto jijōden [Ah, The Unforgettable Sound of the Kokyū: The Illustrated Autobiography of Watanabe Hamako] (Tokyo: Senshi Kankō Kai, 1983), and from Nakata Seiichi, Monten Rupa no yoru wa fukete: Kikotsu no hito Watanabe Hamako no shōgai [Night Deepens at Monten Lupa: The Life of an Indomitable Woman, Watanabe Hamako] (Tokyo: NHK Shuppan, 2004).

31. Nakata, Monten Rupa no yoru, p. 116. 32. Nakata, Monten Rupa no yoru provides extensive information on this incident. See also John Dower, Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II (New York: Pantheon, 1999), pp. 514–15, for a less celebratory version.

33. Nakata, Monten Rupa no yoru, p. 18. 34. Pope, “Songs of Empire,” p. 371. 35. Pope, “Songs of Empire,” p. 382. 36. See the musical score for “Soshū yakyoku” [Suzhou Serenade] in Nihon no uta [Songs of Japan], 8 volumes (Tokyo: Nobarasha, 1998), 2: p. 321–22; and Pope, “Songs of Empire,” pp. 376–79.

37. Noguchi Hisamitsu, “Fosutaa no meikyokushū o kiite” [Listening to a Collection of Foster’s Masterpieces], Rekōdo ongaku [Music on Disc] 13:8 (August 1939), pp. 90–94. This passage appears on p. 92. Noguchi concludes his very celebratory review by recommending the new Foster recordings as an album that belongs in every Japanese home and proclaiming Foster “the American Schubert.”

38. Pope makes a similar case for the ways that “exoticism” in popular culture such as tairiku melodies can give voice to notions that “ideology” tends to silence. This is particularly the case, he argues, in the face of the “stress” produced by modern urban life in Japan. See “Songs of Empire,” esp. pp. 46–52 and pp. 106–12.

39. Lott, Love and Theft, pp. 87, 118, and 135. 40. Rogin, Blackface, White Noise, p. 147. 41. E. Taylor Atkins, “The Dual Career of ‘Arirang’: The Korean Resistance Anthem That Became a Japanese Pop Hit,” Journal of Asian Studies 66:3 (2007), pp. 645–87. This passage occurs on p. 647.

42. Minami Yōji, CD liner notes to Watanabe Hamako, Shina no yoru (Nippon Columbia COCA-10763, 1993). 43. Hattori Ryōichi, Boku no ongaku jinsei [My Life in Music] (Tokyo: Chūō Bungeisha, 1982), pp. 93–95. 44. Hattori, Boku no ongaku jinsei, pp. 131–36. 45. Hattori, Boku no ongaku jinsei, pp. 177–78. 46. Baskett, Attractive Empire, pp. 124–28. On Songoku, see also Silverberg, Erotic Grotesque Nonsense, pp. 263–65. See also Fig. 37 in Silverberg’s volume for a photograph of Enoken performing in blackface in a 1930s Tokyo musical revue.

47. Pope, “Songs of Empire,” p. 356. 48. Hattori, Boku no ongaku jinsei, p. 207. 49. Michael Baskett, The Attractive Empire: Colonial Asia in Japanese Imperial Film Culture, 1931–1953, Doctoral Dissertation (University of California-Los Angeles, 2000), pp. 114–16.

50. Pope, “Songs of Empire,” pp. 348–51. 51. Footnote to musical score for “Manshū musume” [Girl of Manchuria], Nihon no uta 2: [Japanese Song] p. 194. 52. I am grateful to Richard Calichman for pointing this out. 53. Lott, Love and Theft, pp. 146–53. 54. Fukuhara Akio, “Sensen tsūshin” [Report from the Front], Rekōdo Ongaku [Music on Disc] 14:2 (February, 1940), pp. 68–69. Fukuhara writes that “Manshū Musume” was the second mostly popular song among Chinese children he encountered. The first was “Aikoku Kōshinkyoku” [“Patriotic March”]. He also mentions hearing children sing “Shanhai no Hanauri Musume” [Shanghai Flower Girl] and “Shina no Yoru” [China Nights].

55. Kawaguchi Shigeru, “Shina no jazu” [China’s Jazz], Rekōdo Ongaku [Music on Disc] 7:7 (July 1933), pp. 105–107. This passage appears on pp. 106–107.

56. Kawaguchi, “Shina no jazu,” p. 107. 57. Details on Kasagi’s career can be found in the CD liner notes to Kasagi Shizuko, Bugi no joō: Kasagi Shizuko [Queen of Boogie-Woogie: Kasagi Shizuko] (Nippon Columbia 72CS-2894-96, 1988); Hattori, Boku no ongaku jinsei [My Life in Music]; Hosokawa Shūhei, The Swinging Voice of Kasagi Shizuko: Japanese Jazz Culture in the 1930s,” Japanese Studies Around the World 2006: Research on Art and Music in Japan (Kyoto: International Reseach Center for Japanese Studies, 2007), pp. 159–85; and in Kasagi’s autobiography: Kasagi Shizuko, Utau jigazō: Watashi no VugiUgi Denki [Self Portrait in Song: My Boogie-Woogie Story] (Tokyo: Hokuto Shuppansha, 1948).

58. Pope, “Songs of Empire,” pp. 237–239. 59. Davis, Blues Legacies and Black Feminism, pp. 168–69. 60. Charles Hiroshi Garrett, “Chinatown, Whose Chinatown? Defining America’s Borders With Musical Orientalism,” Journal of the American Musicological Society, 57:1 (Spring, 2004), pp. 119–73. This passage appears on p. 134. As Garrett notes, both William Jerome and Jean Schwartz, the composers of the Tin Pan Alley classic “Chinatown, My Chinatown,” started their professional careers working in the blackface minstrelsy genre; moreover, the song became a featured part of the latecareer performances of blackface king Al Jolson.

61. On the hybrid nature of the song, see Hosokawa, “The Swinging Voice of Kasagi Shizuko,” pp. 172–74. 62. Brooks, Bodies in Dissent, p. 29. 63. On Tanizaki’s exoticizing appropriation of China, see Thomas Lamarre, “The Deformation of the Modern Spectator: Synaesthesia, Cinema, and the Spectre of Race in Tanizaki,” Japan Forum 11:1 (1999), pp. 23–42.

64. Junichiro Tanizaki, Some Prefer Nettles, trans. Edward G. Seidensticker (New York: Vintage International, 1995), p. 161. 65. Ibid., p. 164. 66. Ibid., p. 170. 67. Yoshimura Kimisaburō, “Chū-shi rokeeshon yuki” [On Location in China], Eiga no Tomo 18:5 (May 1940), pp. 82–83. Yoshimura’s claims rest on racialized stereotypes of Chinese culture: Chinese lack any “nuance” and are solely interested in utilitarian, materialistic matters, and the ongoing war interferes with their ability to pursue those interests.

68. Noguchi Hisamitsu, “Rekōdo jazu kinsei sonota” [The Ban on Jazz Records and Other Issues], Eiga no Tomo 18:10 (October 1940), pp. 102–3.

Chapter Nine

Manchukuo and the Creation of a New Multi-Ethnic Literature: Kawabata Yasunari’s Promotion of “Manchurian” Culture, 1941–1942 Annika A. Culver

INTRODUCTION In 1941, at the height of Japan’s war with China and at the beginning of the Japanese military’s invasion of southeast Asia, the prominent Japanese author and critic Kawabata Yasunari (1899–1972) was twice invited to the nominally independent “nation” of Manchukuo [Manzhouguo][1] by the Manchuria Daily News (Manshū nichi’nichi shinbun) and the Kantō Army in accordance with the propaganda prerogatives of the state-run Manshūkoku kōhōsho (Manchukuo Publicity and News Bureau). This organization first invited the writer for a tour of Manchukuo and then enlisted him to participate in a star-studded round-table discussion (zadankai) of Japanese intellectuals in Tokyo debating the topic of culture in Manchukuo, the proceedings of which appeared in the above newspaper. Kawabata soon obligingly published a serialized novel for the same paper and helped edit at least two collections of literary works by the five “official” ethnicities in the new state. These collections appeared in Japanese, the language of the imperial center.[2] In his introduction to one of the volumes, Kawabata warned of the Chinese “threat” while extolling the past accomplishments of the Han Chinese ethnicity, whose now-moribund nation could only revive through Japanese guidance and cultural superiority. The zadankai and these editions compiled by Kawabata asserted that Manchukuo was a template for the future establishment of Pan-Asian ideals elsewhere, and particularly in conquered areas in China and Southeast Asia. The fact that a prominent cultural figure of Kawabata’s stature from the imperial capital became a mouthpiece of the new “Manchurian literature” and Japanese cultural superiority is historically significant. It further reveals that Manchukuo was not “independent” from domestic Japan (naichi), despite official rhetoric, and that this interdependence between the two “nations” functioned in a hierarchical, paternalistic fashion. Cultural production in the form of literature here served as a means of cultural integration with domestic Japan, now viewed as crucial to the success of the Japanese imperial state in wartime. Despite Kawabata’s utopian intentions, his writings and frequent trips to Manchuria and China illustrate that the creation of an independent literary culture in Manchukuo was soon subsumed under the exigencies of war.

This chapter is part of a larger study investigating the wartime activities of prominent Japanese avant-garde writers and artists, and seeks to address the little-known role of this future Nobel Prize winner in literature in promoting culture and literature in Manchukuo in the early forties. [3] CULTURE IN THE MODERNIST UTOPIA OF MANCHUKUO UNDER “EAST ASIAN” PRINCIPLES The nominally “independent” state of Manchukuo was founded under Japanese directives in 1932, soon accompanied by Japan’s withdrawal from the League of Nations and progressive military involvement in China south of the Great Wall. Manchukuo symbolized the political initiatives of the imperial Japanese government and that of certain intellectuals concerned about “finding in Manchuria a frontier where they could realize a vision that many considered impossible to achieve in the established society of Japan.”[4] Against this epistemological backdrop, Manchuria became the utopian canvas upon which the realization of a Japanese-led East-Asian modernity under traditional Confucian principles was depicted by visiting intellectuals from the naichi. However, the new state ultimately became inextricably subsumed into the imperial project of the Japanese nation; as Prasenjit Duara asserts, “As a national idea, Manchukuo was predictably weak, because the commitment of its makers to independence from Japan was weak and variable.”[5] Clearly, Manchukuo could never have survived for almost fifteen years without the sustained aid of the onsite South Manchuria Railway Company (SMRC, also known in Japanese as “Mantetsu”)[6] or the leadership of local Chinese elites.[7] However, its main political infrastructure was based on a Japanese model under Japanese guidance issuing from the imperial capital, Tokyo. The Japanese government had long viewed Manchuria as a critical part of the Japanese empire not only for economic reasons but also because it symbolized the strength of Japan’s civilizing mission and cultural dominance in a framework of modernization, and later, a paternalistic Pan-Asianism. The area became culturally important to the extension of Japanese civilization immediately after the Mantetsu conglomerate began to develop the southeastern part of the region in the wake of the 1905 Japanese victory in the Russo-Japanese War. As a matter of company policy, the corporation soon began inviting notable cultural figures (bunkajin) from Japan like Natsume Sōseki (1867–1916) to tour the region and portray its development favorably in their works. Louise Young notes that in the following decades, the tour of Manchuria and Manchukuo even served as a form of “cultural legitimation of those who aspired to the high arts.”[8] Manchuria’s initial economic, military, and cultural ties to Japan through the South Manchurian Railways Company, Kantō Army connections to the Japanese military, and peripatetic colonial settlers ensured that the region remained firmly entrenched in the Japanese imperial sphere. For nearly three decades, the narratives of visiting Japanese intellectuals helped to support the spread of Japanese economic development in Manchuria and the cultural rhetoric behind it. After 1932, Japanese policy makers in Manchukuo actively promoted the creation of a new

national culture, art, and literature in addition to a body of work describing the physical and symbolic construction of the new multi-ethnic nation. Military mastermind Ishiwara Kanji (1889–1949) and others emphasized Manchukuo’s cultural uniqueness and independence despite its establishment under Japanese guidance and directives from the imperial government. According to Duara, the discourse of culture could provide a unifying role in the ideological formation of the state: “Culture, as produced in the new nationalism, represented an important and novel form of knowledge to address problems generated by the divergence of imperialism and nationalism.”[9] Culture, in the symbolic space of Manshū (Manchuria), now functioned as a means to differentiate Manshūkoku (Manchukuo) from Japan. Rather than serving as a gauge to measure the region’s level of bunmei (civilization) against the backdrop of the paternal imperial state as it had in previous decades, culture in the new nation of Manchukuo now became an important propaganda tool, emphasizing its uniqueness and the political harmony of divergent cultures or ethnicities. However, as evidenced in the works of authors including Kawabata, this uncoupling from Japan and its imperium through culture was only partially achieved by the discursive separation of a conceptual Manshū from the state entity of Manchukuo. As emphasized by Kawamura Minato and Komagome Takeshi, culture in Manchukuo was in reality characterized by a primary focus on imperial Japan as the center, with the Japanese language as the official, dominant means of communication at the top of a hierarchy where the Chinese and Korean languages were relegated to a semi-colonial status, despite the Manchukuo government’s official promotion of the harmony of the five races/ethnicities (gozoku kyōwa).[10] This is evident in the fact that most sources by state propaganda organizations are printed in Japanese, with English a close second, and occasionally in Mandarin Chinese. In these materials, the hybrid culture of a country described as the “Paradise of the Kingly Way,” or Ōdō-rakuchi, and represented by the propaganda slogan gozoku-kyōwa, was intended to reflect a modern, Westernized, multi-ethnic nation rationally ordered by traditional (East Asian) Confucian principles. However, it is clear in many of these materials (including those written or edited by Kawabata) that the audience is Japanese, or at least Japanese-speaking. Indeed, after 1937, all schoolchildren received their education in Japanese, and Japanese became the lingua franca in the Manchukuo educational system. Duara notes that state-sponsored organizations such as the Concordia Association (Kyōwakai) formed “to realize a visionary modern polity” and carry out the political and cultural ideals of the new state, blending Western modernity with familiar Eastern values.[11] This new culture of Manchukuo, while intrinsically doomed to fail due to its own internal contradictions, initially provided Japanese intellectuals with what Young calls a “blank canvas” on which they could “paint their vision of a utopian society.”[12] The above ideals were supported by the Manchukuo Publicity and News Bureau, the propaganda arm of the Concordia Association. The vision of a multi-cultural utopia disseminated by the Kyōwakai and other official propaganda organs was artificially created through a Japanese lens, with Japanese as the dominant form of cultural and linguistic representation. As a result, Japanese nationals in Manchukuo and naichi visitors received the

majority of funding for cultural endeavors or informational tours from a state obsessed with representing itself. This includes “collaborationist” Manchurian Chinese writers like Gu Ding (1909–1960), who co-edited two collections of Manchurian literature with Kawabata and participated in literary activities with Japanese.[13] Here, the nation truly becomes “narration.”[14] In truth, Manchukuo was largely a part of the Japanese cultural and linguistic sphere despite its nominal independence. Its regime attempted to fashion the culture of the new state into one that reflected how the five official ethnicities harmoniously accepted Japanese culture while only superficially recognizing cultural difference. THE WARTIME CONSOLIDATION OF CULTURAL ACTIVITIES IN MANCHUKUO After the 1937 eruption of the second Sino-Japanese War, the consolidation of state control and the official sponsorship of cultural activities in Manchukuo soon paralleled that in the naichi. Official aims to promote a new culture in Manchukuo as an independent entity in the early to mid-thirties were soon subsumed under those of the Japanese state with the advent of the total war system, or sōryokusen taisei, in 1938.[15] After this date, culture, literature, and the arts in Manchukuo were aggressively manipulated to showcase the ideals of a benevolent Japanese empire and the interdependent relationship of Manchuria to the naichi in correspondence with Pan-Asianist beliefs. Cultural activities were linked to those in domestic Japan by various state organizations in the new wartime climate. Though Manchukuo was never officially a colony of Japan, this evinces a facet of the process of transculturation where the periphery determines the center in its “obsessive need to present and re-present its peripheries and others continually to itself,” a concept described by Mary Louise Pratt.[16] The presence of transculturation in Manchukuo and the naichi became even more notable during wartime, as Japan waged a war against China also on the cultural front. During the intensification of the China conflict, inviting naichi intellectuals, journalists, and government officials to Manchukuo became a crucial part of state policy to augment the ideological mission of Japanese nation-building across Asia by solidifying support for the Japanese empire through cultural endeavors. The reinforcement of Japanese culture in the border region of Manchuria was now of utmost strategic importance due to its geographical location between the communist Soviet Union to the north and Republican China as an enemy of Japan south of the Great Wall. Individuals from domestic Japan, including Kawabata Yasunari and Haruyama Yukio (1902–1994), were sponsored by organs of the Manchukuo government. They brought the culture of the naichito the Manchurian region while serving as authoritative sources of information about the new state during wartime. They were also enlisted to explain the political and strategic importance of Manchukuo to domestic Japan in cultural terms. Behind this rhetoric lies an assumption that culture, and specifically Japanese culture, needed to be strengthened and expanded throughout the region to support the new wartime initiatives of imperial Japan. The close relationship between Japan and Manchukuo was highlighted by the wartime reorganization of cultural organizations and activities. Many of the same wartime

transformations of institutions in Japan were later instituted in Manchukuo. Officially recognized artists’ associations, exhibition venues, and writers’ groups were forcibly consolidated by the Japanese state in domestic Japan around 1940.[17] Not surprisingly, this process of consolidation began a year later in Manchukuo in connection with mass mobilization in the naichi and its colonies. The intensification of the war effort in 1941 prior to the attack on Pearl Harbor marks a key date for the beginning of the consolidation of cultural activities in Manchukuo, while the nation was prepared as a military base from which to attack Southeast Asia when conducting long-term operations in China proper. This state-sponsored consolidation marks a fundamental change in Manchukuo’s formerly liberal cultural policies advocated by Ishiwara Kanji (1889–1949) since the early thirties. THE MANCHUKUO PUBLICITY AND NEWS BUREAU AND THE 1941 “PROSPECTUS FOR THE GUIDANCE OF THE ARTS AND CULTURE” A key example of this trend of cultural consolidation in both Japan and Manchukuo during wartime is when, on March 23, 1941, the Manchukuo Publicity and News Bureau issued the “Prospectus for the Guidance of the Arts and Culture” (Geibun shidō yōkō) at the national Arts Congress (Geibun daikai) in the capital city of Shinkyō (contemporary Changchun).[18] The six officially recognized “arts” of literature, art, music, dance, theater, and film were now subsumed under this propaganda organization. This order put the arts under direct control of this centralized bureau and divided up cultural activities and art education into research organizations in five different categories.[19] Not surprisingly, as one of Japan’s most prominent writers, Kawabata Yasunari was invited to Manchuria by the Manchuria Daily News to observe its cultural activities immediately afterwards in April, and sojourned there until May.[20] In connection with this prospectus issued in March, a six-part series of a round-table discussion called “Round-Table Discussion: Inquiring of News and Publicity Bureau Chief Mutō” (Zadankai: Mutō Tomio kōhōshochō ni kiku, headed by Mutō Tomio (1904–1998), appeared in the widely read Manchuria Daily News Japanese-language newspaper from July 4–9, 1941.[21] As the chief of publicity for the Manchukuo general affairs department, Mutō served as both the moderator and facilitator using his rhetorical talents that would later earn him the moniker of the “Joseph Goebbels of Manchukuo” from the Americans. This Tokyobased round-table discussion held in June boasted an impressive group of Japanese cultural critics, thinkers, and writers, many of whom had Marxist[22] inclinations: Kyoto School philosopher Miki Kiyoshi (1897–1945), the cultural philosopher Tanigawa Tetsuzō (1895– 1989), former Asahi shinbun reporter and Mantetsu research department employee Ozaki Hotsumi (1901–1944), and of course, the popular novelist Kawabata. The writer was invited specifically by this newspaper (also under the auspices of the Manchukuo Publicity and News Bureau) as an authoritative cultural figure from domestic Japan to take part in this highly publicized debate on culture. With firsthand knowledge of Manchukuo, where he also met with Manchurian writers to discuss the future of literature and view the new state’s educational

system, Kawabata lent an “authenticity” to this published debate. By inviting Japanese cultural figures important to the arts and literature to Manchukuo, publicity chief Mutō hoped to strengthen the new state’s cultural ties to the naichi and foster a multi-ethnic “Manchurian” culture. His initiatives as head of the state’s propaganda organization reflect Pratt’s concept of transculturation where the periphery is informed by the metropole and the metropole obsessively represents itself to the periphery in various media. [23] Gennifer Weisenfeld notes that, in the case of imperial Japan, “identities of the metropole/empire and the periphery/colony were mutually constitutive . . . the colonies by their very existence reformed Japan as much as Japan shaped colonial space.”[24] The same process appears in state-supported cultural initiatives such as the above in Manchukuo of the early forties. Notably, this is seen in descriptions of writers from domestic Japan, like Kawabata and the avant-garde critic and poet Haruyama Yukio (1902–1994), who wrote about Mutō’s consolidation of the arts through the “Prospectus for the Guidance of the Arts and Culture,” and how it inspired his own thoughts on Japanese culture and the new nation of Manchukuo. This writer also visited the new state on two occasions, once in 1940 and then again in 1942, prompting two books published in Japan or Manchukuo on the natural features of Manchuria and the culture of the region.[25] Haruyama, as former editor of the influential 1930s avantgarde poetry magazine Poetry and Poetics (Shi to shiron), describes in philosophical terms the fundamental changes in Manchukuo’s cultural policies connected to the prospectus after the spring of 1941 in his 1943 account Manchurian Culture (Manshū no bunka).[26] In the essays in this book, Haruyama assumes the role of the cultural critic in explaining why Japan should take control of China’s culture in ways resembling Mutō’s scientific consolidation of culture in Manchukuo as proposed by the Prospectus of March 1941. Haruyama apparently views the region of Manshū (Manchuria, discursively separated from the state of Manchukuo) as a part of China in at least cultural terms. According to his book, the cultural sphere of Chinese civilization once included the Manchurian region, but it is now part of Manchukuo, a modern state fashioned under Japanese guidance.[27] Haruyama echoes Kawabata’s ideas (discussed in the following section) and argues that China’s culture has become stagnant, and that this necessitated the infusion of Japanese culture, which was more adaptable to modern conditions.[28] His voice resembles that of many avant-garde writers who underwent political conversion (tenkō) in the early thirties and renounced their left-wing political beliefs in support of the Japanese government’s paternalistic Pan-Asianist ideology in regards to China. According to Haruyama, one of China’s faults was that it was a country that possessed civilization—a fixed entity with inherent, essential qualities (bunmei), but not culture—a mutable property with the ability to change and adopt scientific innovation (bunka), and therefore, Japan should export its technological expertise to Manchuria to supplement a traditional Chinese civilization now moribund due to national degeneration and foreign domination.[29] His words clearly reflect the cultural preoccupations of the Japanese imperial state concerning Manchukuo and the key role of Japanese intellectuals in disseminating these ideas. Not surprisingly, Haruyama’s ideas had previously been voiced by Kawabata in 1942.

KAWABATA’S ROLE IN PROMOTING “MANCHURIAN” CULTURE UNDER JAPANESE AUSPICES Japan’s leading role in the process of wartime cultural consolidation in Manchukuo was evident even in how the new nation’s literature itself was being represented to readers in the naichi by prominent Japanese cultural figures enlisted by the Manchukuo government like Kawabata. Young notes that so many Japanese writers traveled to Manchukuo, which had the effect of further boosting their credentials upon their return, that “this parade of literary luminaries made the Manchurian tour a badge of distinction.”[30] In addition, according to Kawamura Minato, going on the Manchurian tour after the founding of Manchukuo in 1932 often served as a public display of the renunciation of left-wing beliefs by Japanese writers who had undergone tenkō.[31] After 1932, various state propaganda organizations connected to the Manchukuo Publicity and News and Bureau as well as the Kantō Army began to organize visits by Japanese cultural figures, while the SMRC had previously been the main sponsoring organization for these literary tours. The production of literature in Manchukuo or with the new nation as its topic soon became a collaborative effort between naichi and colonial Japanese writers, a process that intensified in wartime. This included the limited participation of Chinese writers involved in Japanese-supported literary organizations. In the early forties, various presses in Tokyo and Manchukuo published bound editions of literary works to show how writers of diverse ethnicities/races engaged in cultural production in support of the new state. Representing the cultural interdependence between the center and the periphery, these editions were often edited back in domestic Japan by famous literary establishment (bundan) authors like Kawabata. As noted before, he visited Manchukuo in the spring of 1941 from April to May to learn about the aforementioned round-table discussion sponsored by the Manchuria Daily News that took place in Tokyo in June. He then returned to the region in autumn 1941 and toured from September to November with Hino Ashihei (1907– 1960) and others invited by the Kantō Army.[32] In the above newspaper from 1943–1944, Kawabata also wrote an unfinished serialized novel entitled Tōkaidō (The Way East) about a high school teacher named Ueda who lectures his daughter on the essence of Japanese culture and the importance of travel in the literary pursuits of Japanese writers in the Heian (792– 1185) and other periods.[33] Here, the prominent Japanese author appears to be communicating the belief that “Japaneseness is a special, nontransferable racial virtue,” an assumption that Gavan McCormack notes is common to many of the endeavors surrounding the Japanese-generated culture of Manchukuo.[34] Indeed, since Kawabata’s first mention of Manchuria in his 1933 work “Of Birds and Beasts,” his recurring obsession with the region and its phantom-like intrusion into his texts parallels that of official media in Japan and other parts of the empire.[35] In addition, Kawabata was involved in the “composition movement” (tsuzurikata undō), in support of which he toured elementary schools throughout the region in spring 1941 and gave a talk broadcast over the radio entitled “Compositions in Manchuria” (Manshū to tsuzurikata).[36] The products of Kawabata’s visits to Manchukuo were published not long after his return and served the cultural propaganda purposes of his two

hosting institutions—the primary news organ and military of the new state. Why did Kawabata so readily travel to Manchukuo and conform to Mutō’s cultural mission for the new state? Aside from the intrusion of the fascist state into all fields of cultural production, what appealed to him in this endeavor? Was Kawabata a relentless opportunist who saw his connections to the Manchukuo Publicity and News Bureau and the Kantō Army as yet another means to further his career?[37] Or, is the reality a more complex mix of historical factors?[38] Robert Tomes, in his study on American intellectuals during the McCarthy period, provides an intriguing explanation for this phenomenon, which can also be anachronistically applied to the Manchukuo example: In a society where intellectuals play a primarily affirmative role, the mutually exclusive lines between government policymaking and intellectual discourse become blurred. When intellectuals accept and ratify a society’s power structure, again the lines become blurred as successful intellectuals rise in that power structure. It is not unreasonable to assume that intellectuals who celebrate the authorities will autonomously employ their talents and energies to forward the objectives of those authorities, whose point of view they will in some cases come to see as related to their own.[39]

Despite his early career as an avant-garde modernist with surrealist tendencies, Kawabata was now very much an establishment intellectual despite his protestations to the contrary in the postwar period. He was able to further cement his status as one of imperial Japan’s most important literary figures when his aims merged with those of the new state. The questions behind Kawabata’s intellectual engagement towards Manchukuo may never be conclusively answered and are part of a larger constellation of issues surrounding the wartime activities of Japanese intellectuals. However, it is possible to investigate and analyze concrete examples of his views in the introductions to his edited collections. In the early forties, to further enact his ideals fostering the new culture and literature of Manchukuo, Kawabata helped edit Japanese-language collections of short stories or poetry by Japanese and other Manchurian natives, including Anthology of Compositions by Each Ethnic Group/Race in Manchukuo (1) (Manshūkoku kaku minzoku sōsaku senshu (1)) in 1942, and Anthology of Compositions by Each Ethnic Group/Race in Manchukuo (2) (Manshūkoku kaku minzoku sōsaku senshū (2)) in 1944.[40] While Kawabata was listed as editorial representative (hensan daihyō-sha) on the copyright page[41] and wrote the introduction, other editors of the two collections included Yamada Seizaburō (1896–1970), Kitamura Kenjirō (1904–1982), Gu Ding, Kishida Kunio (1890–1954), and Shimaki Kensaku (1903– 1945).[42] Some of the Japanese writers, like Yamada and Shimaki, had formerly been leftwing activists or involved in the proletarian literature movement prior to their tenkō in the 1930s. Gu Ding chose the Chinese writers to appear in the collections, who include Shan Ding, Yi Chi, Shi Jun, and Wu Ying.[43] All works by Chinese and Russians were translated into Japanese, despite the multi-ethnic composition of the writers. In contrast to the Han Chinese, Kawabata described the White Russian writers as retaining the true traditions of Russian culture and diverging from the path of Soviet literature. Perhaps, he also viewed Manchurian Chinese as the “true” inheritors of China’s literary future. These editions were part of his initiative to portray the pioneering efforts of Manchukuo’s new multi-ethnic and multi-racial

(but not multi-lingual) literary culture to domestic Japan and the colonies. Notably, in the first collection, Japanese authors dominate (contributing fourteen works), with a handful of Han Chinese (4)[44] and Russians (2)[45] contributing, while works by Koreans are conspicuously absent. This is also true of the second collection from 1944, where only eight Japanese authors contributed, with six Chinese, two Russians, and one Mongol.[46] This omission of Korean authors by Kawabata incensed the Manchukuo-based Korean author Yom Sang Seop (1897–1963) whose criticisms appeared in Bukwon (Northern Fields), a 1943 anthology of the short stories of Ahn Su-Kil that he edited.[47] Kim Jaeyong, a Korean colonial literature specialist, believes that this indicates a discrepancy between the Manchukuo state’s gozoku kyōwa ideals and the reality of its treatment of Koreans. He also notes that this exclusion of Korean authors like Yom was due to the fact that his inclusion was felt as “dangerous” and highlights the regime’s fear of Koreans, who were joining resistance movements in border areas.[48] In 1944, Kawabata, though his name is still listed as head editor in volume two along with the others listed above, seems to have retreated from the Japan side of the project in releasing himself from total responsibility for it.[49] The fewer Japanese authors represented and the addition of more Chinese authors along with one Mongol author show a desire to achieve more “balance” among the ethnic groups represented.[50] Other reasons for this may include the intensification of the war in Japan with the disruption of frequent Allied bombings and the consequent displacement of Kawabata and his other Japanese editors. These factors were compounded with the growth of an anti-Japanese resistance movement amongst Han Chinese in Manchukuo that also affected surveillance over the Japanese population. Yet, continued Chinese involvement in Kawabata’s project from 1942–1944 was seen as crucial to the building of a new multi-ethnic literature, and therefore, culture, in Manchukuo. In his introduction to the edition Anthology of Compositions by Each Ethnic Group/Race in Manchukuo (1), Kawabata points out his role as a traveler receiving a glimpse of the new creation of literature in Manchukuo, and cautiously states In my role as tourist, I momentarily had two viewpoints concerning Manchukuo’s literature. One of these was the issue of the lofty ideals of Manchurian literature. As said by the writers of this country, literature as new as the country perhaps creates a myth of national construction, or perhaps, guides a history of its creation. Moreover, five ethnicities (races) are launching this type of literature together. On this virgin soil, both the significance of literature and its mission have appeared as extremely clear to me. Another one of my viewpoints concerned the issue of Manchurian literature’s mundane reality. The exhortations of the nation and its general desires are still dawning, organizations to publish literature still have not been set up, and the market is constricted.[51]

While supporting ethnic cohesion in literary endeavors in this “virgin” territory now under Japanese guidance, Kawabata advocates the creation of a publishing infrastructure to develop a market for new literary production while the nation converts its ideals into reality. He is particularly concerned about the role of literature in creating a national narrative. In fact, the Japanese author strongly believes that literature is directly tied to the successful communication of national ideals in Manchukuo. Though most compositions in both the nature of the topic and the author featured reflect Japanese cultural concerns in the wartime climate, a few works achieved Kawabata’s utopian

dream of cultural and literary innovation in the new nation. For example, the author’s same edition includes the short story “The People Going to Dunzi” (“Tonsu ni iku hitobito”)[52] by the avant-garde former proletarian writer Nogawa Takashi (1904–1944), whose work was even nominated for the Akutagawa prize.[53] Finding his own rural utopia in Manchukuo, the writer portrays Chinese peasants in a sympathetic light while viewing their communal society as consistent with his former Marxist ideals. Some themes echo those of the past proletarian literature movement of the twenties and thirties, while lacking its political import. Nogawa’s short story suitably fits Kawabata’s qualifications for describing the development of the new state in agricultural areas while Japanese are shown working harmoniously with other ethnic groups like the majority Han Chinese. However, contrary to Kawabata’s hopes, most of the texts in these two volumes were largely influenced by the Japanese effort to set up a utopian fantasy of racial harmony and cooperation. The stories provide scenes of local color in an exotic, fertile space for the inception of Manchukuo’s ideals.[54] His very introduction notes that Manchurian literature is important in that it provides a template for Japan’s endeavors in the “advance southward,” with Han Chinese enjoying a leading role. The increasing percentage of Han Chinese authors and, to some extent, White Russians, with the corresponding omission of Korean authors, is a primary example of this. Thus, the texts have little to do with the positive portrayal of Manshū or the creation of a national narrative for Manchukuo for each ethnic group/race. Presumably, the Japanese authors of these works either lived in Manchuria/Manchukuo or spent a significant amount of time there developing their literary careers before their return to Japan. The bulk of the literary compositions were written by Japanese men in Japanese, with a few exceptions as noted previously, which were translated into Japanese. Despite Kawabata's best intentions, it is clear from his introduction and these prose writings he edited that his utopian desire to set up an independent literary culture in Manchukuo is soon subsumed under the cultural propaganda of imperial Japan's war effort. This can been seen in his introduction to Anthology of Compositions by Each Ethnic Group/Race in Manchukuo (1), where Kawabata stresses the Japanese army’s progressive wartime “advance” into the less developed regions of Southeast Asia, while asserting that Manchukuo now serves as a template for the building of culture in other nations in the Japanese-controlled Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere.[55] He views this as a joint effort between the Japanese and Han Chinese ethnic groups in the context of Manchuria, and believes that literature in particular has a role to play in the creation of Manchukuo’s new culture and the ideals of the state. The Japanese author states Japan has now even progressed southward in its war, yet there is no other country but Manchukuo constructing its nation with other ethnicities and launching its culture. Because Pan-Asian ideals were first put into practice in Manchuria, if they are not attained here, then not only might it be assumed that they cannot be attained anywhere, but this is also of importance because we are implementing them together with the Han ethnic group (race)—these are Manchuria’s most important raisons d’être.[56] It goes without saying that this is because there is no other superior race quite like the Han Chinese ethnic group (race). In looking at the cultural domain, it is obvious that this is so.[57]

Kawabata proposes that Manchukuo’s cultural development, with the help of the Chinese,

should provide a shining example for other countries in Asia to establish Pan-Asian ideals in the other nations “liberated” by Japan. In early 1942, Singapore is conquered by Japanese troops, and Japanese intellectuals are sent there by the naichi government to support the propaganda efforts of the renamed Japanese-led state of Shōnan, or “Enlightened South.” Kawabata refers to this in his introduction, but expresses some doubt as to when these ideals can be achieved. This area also harbored populations of Chinese merchants and elites—a fact often not evident in Japanese publications about the area.[58] However, in contrast to the efforts to entrench Japanese culture amongst peoples of mostly Malay descent in newly conquered territories in southeast Asia,[59] Kawabata asserts that the Han Chinese are the only culturally superior ethnic group in Asia (like the more modern and adaptable Japanese who initially adopted their culture).[60] Therefore, he believes that they are worthy of the establishment of Manchukuo as an independent new nation under an initial Japanese tutelage, and this is the reason why the project is of such importance.[61] As noted by Richard H. Mitchell, Japanese Sinologists (and, arguably, others who boasted some expertise on China) often viewed China as symbolic of “their cultural roots, a foil for the problems of modernity, and the referent for their concepts of Asia.”[62] This idea of China as an “other” and convenient point of comparison to a more dynamic Japan resembles Kawabata’s complex attitude and anxieties expressed towards China as seen in his introduction. Interestingly, here he warns of the current Chinese threat while still professing great admiration for China’s traditional, and therefore unchanging, culture. This general idea is echoed later in the writing of the author’s contemporary, Haruyama Yukio, who focused on the issue of culture in Manchukuo and Japan’s leading role in supporting it. On the way back to Japan after his spring 1941 visit to Manchukuo before the aforementioned Tokyo round-table discussion on culture published in the Manchuria Daily News, Kawabata stopped in Beijing where he met with Chinese writers. Chinese authors in occupied Beijing and Manchuria show interesting parallels in the desolation they depict in their works, while “the negativity of local Chinese literature testifies to the alienation most writers felt towards Japanese colonial rule.”[63] Kawabata must have sensed the inner turmoil of his Chinese counterparts and departed with mixed feelings. While the famed Japanese author generated warm memories of his visit in the Japanese-occupied former imperial capital of the Qing dynasty, his hosts appear to have expressed a more cautionary view of Japan’s politics now that historical conditions prompted hostilities between the two nations. This is evident in how Kawabata advocates literary creation as a positive, cooperative effort between Japanese and Han Chinese writers in Manchukuo, but then adds a most disconcerting caveat in the light of the current wartime political conditions between the two nations: “As I had traveled to Beijing myself, I knew that there were Han Chinese who stretched their hands out to Japanese literary figures who should put their strengths together to construct a new path of literature. Our greatest friend as well as our greatest enemy can be none other than the Han ethnic group.”[64] Moreover, the cover of the first volume of Anthology of Compositions by Each Ethnic Group/Race in Manchukuo (1) also shows a stylized watercolor of a spiraling red and green opium poppy on an ominous, cloudy black background—not the cheeriest image for a literary

collection with lofty purposes. On the one hand, it is obvious that the Japanese writer assumes that the cultural views of Chinese in Japanese-occupied Beijing are no different from those in Manchukuo in terms of the joint mission to create new literature in territories under Japanese occupation. However, most importantly, these phrases betray Kawabata’s knowledge of Han Chinese writers’ cooperation with resistance movements against Japan, and disillusionment with the Manchukuo political project. Wu Ying, a Chinese woman writer in Manchukuo whose work appeared in both volumes, supported anti-Japanese resistance—as did Gu Ding to varying degrees.[65] Norman Smith notes that this duplicity resulted because “Colonial officials sponsored Chinese literary production in order to legitimate their rule, but they could not completely control writers who were influenced not only by censors and state directives but also by their own agendas and audiences.”[66] Indeed, the bleakness of Manchukuo depicted in Wu Ying’s works and those of her counterparts (and on the cover of the literary collection) seem to belie the bright vision that Japanese propagandists like Mutō Tomio had for the new state. This passage in the introduction by an important literary figure from domestic Japan further reinforces the great contrast between the utopian ideals generated by the Japanese-led establishment of the new nation of Manchukuo, and the violent reality of military aggression behind its takeover that eventually led to the second Sino-Japanese War, sparked by the Marco Polo Bridge Incident outside of Beijing. CONCLUSION As resistance by anti-Japanese movements increased amongst Han Chinese and ethnic Koreans, the diverse cultures of the five ethnic groups/races officially composing the state of Manchukuo were no longer viewed as harmonious, but as potential threats that could cause subversion and centrifugal political tendencies through the raising of ethnic/racial consciousness, or minzoku ishiki, that could be used against the unity of the state. In his introduction to a volume celebrating the literary compositions of Manchuria’s five ethnicities, Kawabata Yasunari, as one of Japan’s most prominent critics, even warned about the potential danger of Han Chinese nationalism to the Manchukuo state oriented towards a predominantly Japanese culture. The Manchukuo regime under the relatively liberal policies of Ishiwara Kanji allowed mild criticism of its endeavors by Japanese intellectuals until the early forties. However, with the entrance of the United States into World War II in the wake of the attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941, the political climate in Manchukuo drastically changed, and the state launched an all-out attack on political expression diverging from national aims.[67] Mass arrests of suspected communists occurred in 1942 amongst a Japanese population already subject to selfdisciplining by organizations like the Concordia Association and the ever-present surveillance of the military police (Kempeitai). In early July of 1937, this region began to serve as a military base for the attack on China south of the Great Wall, and after 1941, Manchukuo soon became the center for operations in Southeast Asia. Writers in Japan and the colonies were

progressively drafted to depict the war effort in China proper and elsewhere with the advance of the conquering troops as part of a “Pen Brigade” (pen-butai). As shown in this chapter, cultural initiatives were part of their wartime duties. Kawabata was initially attracted to a project showcasing Manchurian literature among the five races due to both its idealism, and because he was compelled to do so in a political climate where all of his counterparts mobilized their pens for war. It is evident that Manchukuo’s cultural activities along with its political fate remained inseparable from control by the naichi after the advent of total war and Japan’s deepening military engagement in China. Much of the media produced after visits to Manchukuo by Japanese intellectuals reflects its political bond with Japan. In the early forties, Kawabata Yasunari served to bring legitimacy to Manchukuo’s cultural endeavors as an important naichi literary figure. However, the pervasive intrusion of the war into even the cultural domain ultimately made the realization of his ideals extremely difficult, if not impossible, on all but a propaganda basis. His retreat from the project in 1944 seems to hint at his growing disillusionment with the growth of a multi-ethnic literary culture in Manchukuo. The collected stories Kawabata edited are important to historians today in that they convey the sentiments of a failed utopian experiment in nation-building on the part of imperial Japan as an earlier precedent to the ruthless pan-Asianist policies enacted in conquered areas of Southeast Asia from 1942–1945.[68] NOTES 1. In this chapter, I will use the name “Manchukuo” for this nominally independent nation, since this is the term most commonly used in English-language scholarship. In Japanese, the term is Manshūkoku, and in Chinese, it is Manzhouguo, usually prefaced by wei [false]. For more about the nomenclature of Manchukuo, see Prasenjit Duara, Sovereignty and Authenticity: Manchukuo and the East Asian Modern (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, 2003); Gavan McCormack, “Manchukuo: Constructing the Past,” in East Asian History, no. 2 (1991), pp. 105–124; and Yamamuro Shin’ichi, Kimera: Manshūkoku no shōzō (Chimera: A Portrait of Manchukuo) (Tokyo: Chūō kōronsha, 1993).

2. After 1937, Japanese was the official “national language” of Manchukuo, belying its ethnic diversity and supposed utopian respect for the five ethnicities.

3. I thank the librarians at the Nihon kindai bungaku-kan (Museum of Modern Japanese Literature) in Tokyo for locating and copying rare sources for me in 2004–2005 and in July 2008. This chapter evolved out of the fortuitous discovery of the two original volumes of literature edited in part by Kawabata in 1942 and 1944. They have recently been reprinted by Yumani Shobō as part of the Nippon shokuminchi bungaku-sei senshū (Collection of the Essence of Japanese Colonial Literature) series (2000). I also wish to express my gratitude to Iino Masahito, curator at the Yamanashi Prefectural Museum of Art, for sending me invaluable materials, including the privately published ‘Manshū bijutsu’ nenpyō (Chronology of “Manchurian Art”) and a chronology of the wartime activities of artists entitled Sensō ni itta gakkatachi (Artists at War). For an expansion of the topics discussed in this article, see Annika A. Culver, Chapter Five, “The Japanese Avant-Garde in Service of the State, 1932–1943,” in “‘Between Distant Realities’: The Japanese Avant-Garde, Surrealism, and the Colonies, 1924–1943” (Ph.D. diss., University of Chicago, 2007), pp. 333–429. I also thank Charles Cabell of Toyo University for sharing with me key chapters of his dissertation, including part three, “The Empire Dressed in Nationalist Drag: Kawabata’s Essays on Manshūkoku,” in Charles Cabell, “Maiden Dreams: Kawabata Yasunari’s Beautiful Japanese Empire, 1930–1945.” (Ph.D. diss., Harvard University, 1999). Cabell also gave astute comments on my translated passages from Kawabata’s introduction, illuminating often grammatically complex passages.

4. Duara, Sovereignty and Authenticity, p. 62. 5. Duara, Sovereignty and Authenticity, p. 2.

6. Nishizawa Yasuhiko believes that without the political power and financial backing of the South Manchuria Railway Company, the Kantō Army’s engineering of the “Manchurian Incident” would never have occurred, and the subsequent founding of Manchukuo could never have been achieved. The Kantō Army originally developed out of a small police force maintained to patrol SMRC-administered portions of track garnered by Japan in the wake of the Russo-Japanese War. Nishizawa Yasuhiko, Mantetsu:“Manshū” no kyojin [The South Manchuria Railway Company: “Manchuria’s” Giant] (Tokyo: Kawade shobō, 2000), p. 70.

7. See Rana Mitter, The Manchurian Myth: Nationalism, Resistance, and Collaboration in Modern China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000).

8. Louise Young, Japan’s Total Empire: Manchuria and the Culture of Wartime Expansion (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), p. 267.

9. Duara, Sovereignty and Authenticity, p. 17. 10. See Kawamura Minato, Bungaku kara miru “Manshū”: “gozoku kyōwa” no yume to genjitsu [Envisioning Manchuria in Literature: The Dream and Reality of the “Harmony of the Five Races”] (Tokyo: Yoshikawa kōbunkan, 1998) and Umi wo watatta Nihongo: shokuminchi no “Kokugo” no jikan [The Japanese Language Overseas: The Time of “National Language” in the Colonies] (Tokyo: Seidō-sha, 1994); and Komagome Takeshi, Shokuminchi teikoku Nihon no bunka tōgō [The Cultural Integration of Imperial Japan and the Colonies] (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1996). The term “ethnicity” is probably more appropriate, rather than “race,” for zoku, because other than a small White Russian and European population, most inhabitants of Manchukuo were Asian, with the largest numbers belonging to the Han Chinese. White Russians and other Caucasians were not often included in Japanese accounts as part of the officially designated “five ethnicities,” even though they take the place of Koreans in the two collections of Manchukuo literature that Kawabata helped edit. For more on “ethnicity” and “race” in Manchuria and Manchukuo, see Mariko Asano Tamanoi, “Knowledge, Power, and Racial Classifications: The ‘Japanese’ in ‘Manchuria,’” The Journal of Asian Studies, vol. 59, no. 2 (May 2000), pp. 248–76.

11. Duara, Sovereignty and Authenticity, p. 75. 12. Young, Japan’s Total Empire, p. 248. 13. Gu Ding, as a member of the Yiwenzhi-pai [Chronicle of the Arts faction], is usually called “collaborationist” by Chinese nationalist scholars due to his participation in joint literary endeavors with Japanese writers in Manchukuo. He was part of the Shinkyō-based Manzhou wenyi-jia xiehui (Manchukuo Writers and Artists Association). However, he has also been viewed by Heng Hsing Liu as closer to Japanese left-wing intellectuals, having attacked Manchukuo’s literary policies since 1937. Gu Ding’s complexity supports Rana Mitter’s assessments of Chinese collaboration as motivated by both personal and national agendas.

14. See Homi Bhabha, Nation and Narration (London: Routledge, 1990). 15. For a detailed account of the economic and social ramifications of this system, see Kobayashi Hideo, Teikoku Nihon to sōryokusen taisei [Imperial Japan and the Total War System] (Tokyo: Yūshisha, 2004).

16. Mary Louise Pratt, “Introduction,” in Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London: Routledge, 1992), p. 6.

17. See Culver, Chapter One, “Transnationalism, Surrealism, and the Avant-Garde in the Japanese Empire, 1924–1941,” in Culver, “Between Distant Realities,” pp. 45–147.

18. Iino Masahito, ‘Manshū bijutsu’ nenpyō [Chronology of “Manchurian Art”] (Kōfu: Yamanashi Prefectural Museum of Art, 1998), 4. For a contemporary description by a Japanese writer describing the consolidation process under the prospectus and its effects on culture in Manchukuo, see Haruyama Yukio, Manshū no bunka [Manchurian Culture] (Hōten [Fengtian, Manchukuo]: Osakaya go shoten, 1943), p. 356.

19. Iino, ‘Manshū bijutsu’ nenpyō, p. 70. 20. In fact, Kawabata spent a third of 1941 in Manchukuo. He was invited to Manchuria again by the Kantō Army in September and stayed until November.

21. Iino, ‘Manshū bijutsu’ nenpyō, p. 72. This round-table discussion was actually held in Tokyo on June 10, 1941, though the findings are published nearly a month later for the public. Strangely, the microfilm copies of the July 7th edition of the Manchurian Daily Times were missing in Waseda University’s microfilm media collection for the newspaper. July 7, 1941, marks the fourth anniversary of the beginning of the Second Sino-Japanese War.

22. Both Miki Kiyoshi and Ozaki Hotsumi would be brought into police custody for their Marxist convictions or alleged

communist connections not long after participating in this round-table discussion. After his arrest in the early forties, Miki later died in prison in September 1945. During the infamous 1941 Mantetsu jiken (SMRC Incident), Ozaki was implicated in the Sorge Affair, in which he was accused of spying for the Soviet Union due to his connections with Richard Sorge and Agnes Smedley. He was executed after trial.

23. Pratt, “Introduction,” p. 6. 24. Gennifer Weisenfeld, ed., “Guest Editor’s Introduction,” in Special Issue “Visual Cultures of Japanese Imperialism,” positions: east asia critique, vol. 8, no. 3 (Winter 2000), p. 592.

25. Haruyama’s impressions from his first visit to Manchukuo appeared in his first book; see Haruyama Yukio, Manshū fūbutsushi [An Account of the Natural Features of Manchuria] (Tokyo: Seikatsu-sha, 1941).

26. See Haruyama, Manshū no bunka, pp. 334–36. 27. Haruyama, Manshū no bunka, pp. 329-30. 28. Haruyama, Manshū no bunka, p. 331. 29. Haruyama, Manshū no bunka, pp. 330–31. 30. Young, Japan’s Total Empire, p. 267. 31. Kawamura Minato, “One View of the History of Japanese Proletarian Literature: On Nogawa Takashi,” David Rosenfeld trans., essay delivered at the Proletarian Literatures of East Asia Symposium, University of Chicago, 2002, pp. 1–4.

32. Donald Keene, Dawn to the West: Japanese Literature of the Modern Era (Fiction) (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), p. 820.

33. Keene, Dawn to the West, p. 821. 34. McCormack, “Manchukuo: Constructing the Past,” p. 109. 35. In the story appearing in Kaizō [Reconstruction], Kawabata’s character Chikako goes to Manchukuo after her failure as a dancer in Japan, with seemingly transformative effects upon her return due to her presence in the frontier under Japanese development. The “wildness” of the region apparently further distorts her feminine character and sexuality, while calling her Japaneseness into question. Discussed by Charles Cabell, “Eugenic Thought in Kawabata Yasunari’s ‘Of Birds and Beasts’,” presentation at the March 2009 Annual Meeting of the Association for Asian Studies, Chicago.

36. Discussed by Hiromi Dollase, “Kawabata’s Wartime Message in Utsukushii tabi [Beautiful Voyage],” presentation at the March 2009 Annual Meeting of the Association for Asian Studies, Chicago.

37. I thank Kawabata scholar and translator Martin Holman of the University of Missouri for pointing this out after my presentation of parts of this text at the 2009 AAS meeting. He noted that, in part, we are all complicit as scholars in the agendas of our state and federal governments in terms of receiving funding for our institutions and for research. Kawabata’s attraction in his day to the Manchukuo endeavor, gozoku-kyōwa ideals, and Pan-Asianist rhetoric supported by a fascist Japan at war may have parallels to our own current focus on globalization initiatives and diversity education in state-run academic institutions. The growth of Asian Studies programs also seems to have these broader governmental initiatives in mind.

38. I confront this larger issue in a forthcoming book, Japanese ‘Avant-Garde’ Propaganda in Manchukuo: Modernist Reflections of the New State, 1932–1945 (University of British Columbia Press), where I look at how the talents of formerly left-wing avant-garde writers and artists (including Yamada Seizaburō, Fuchikami Hakuyō, Ai Mitsu, Fukuzawa Ichirō, and others) were mobilized to support a right-wing version of socialism in Manchukuo. They were attracted to Manchuria by the push of persecution in the naichi in the wake of the Manchurian Incident in addition to the compelling pull of helping form narratives and depictions of the “utopian” new state.

39. Robert R. Tomes, Apocalypse Then: American Intellectuals and the Vietnam War, 1954–1975 (New York: New York University Press, 1998), p. 37.

40. Kawabata Yasunari, Manshūkoku kaku minzoku sōsaku senshū 1 [Anthology of Compositions by Each Ethnic Group/Race in Manchukuo 1] (Tokyo: Sōgansha, 1942); and Kawabata Yasunari, Manshūkoku kaku minzoku sōsaku senshū 2 [Anthology of Compositions by Each Ethnic Group/Race in Manchukuo 2] (Tokyo: Sōgansha, 1944).

41. See the original copyright page in Kawabata Yasunari, Manshūkoku kaku minzoku sōsaku senshū 1 (Tokyo: Sōgansha, 1942).

42. Kawabata is indicated as first among the list of editors in the 2000 reprints of the two editions. See Manshūkoku kaku minzoku sōsaku senshū 1, 2 (Tokyo: Yumani shobō, 2000). In fact, in the two originals from 1942 and 1944, he is listed as first

on the second line of editors, after Gu Ding.

43. One of these is an important Chinese woman writer in Manchukuo, Wu Ying (1915–1961). For more on Wu Ying and the complex role of other Chinese women writers in Manchukuo, see Norman Smith, Resisting Manchukuo: Chinese Women Writers and the Japanese Occupation (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2007).

44. These include Shan Ding (1914–1995), Yi Chi (1913), Shi Jun (1912), and Wu Ying. Shokuminchi bunka kenkyū-kai [Colonial Culture Research Group], Manshūkoku bunka saimoku [Index of Culture in Manchukuo] (Tokyo: Fuji shuppan, 2005), pp. 199–200. I thank Norman Smith for giving me the dates for these authors. Information on Shi Jun and others can be found in Xu Naixiang and Huang Wanhua, eds., Zhongguo kangzhan shiqi lunxianqu wenxue shi [History of the Literature of the Enemy Occupied Territories During China’s War of Resistance] (Fuzhou: Fujian jiaoyu chubanshe, 1995).

45. These include Boris Yu’ilski (1911–unknown) and Arseny Nesmeyelov (dates unknown). Manshūkoku bunka saimoku, pp. 199–200.

46. See Manshūkoku bunka saimoku, pp. 201–202. 47. I thank Kim Jaeyong, professor of Korean literature at Wonkwang University, South Korea, for pointing this out to me after his lecture on “The Representation of Manchuria in Korean Literature in the Late Colonial Period,” at the July 7, 2008 meeting of the Manshūkoku bungaku kenkyū-kai (Manchukuo Literature Research Group) in Tokyo. Kim clarified my questions on Yom’s dates and edited work via email on April 21, 2009.

48. Kim Jaeyong, comments, Tokyo, July 7, 2008. 49. Manshūkoku bunka saimoku, p. 202. 50. Ibid., p. 202. 51. Kawabata, Manshūkoku kaku minzoku sōsaku senshū 1, p. 6. 52. Kawabata, Manshūkoku kaku minzoku sōsaku senshū 1, pp. 250–77. 53. Nogawa’s novel Gobō [Burdock Root] was nominated for the Akutagawa prize. Kawamura, “One View of the History of Japanese Proletarian Literature,” p. 4.

54. This may be a facile assessment at best of the 37 works in the two collections, which beg translation by future scholars as historical documents indicative of the climate of the era. Individual stories, like those by Nogawa and Gu Ding, evince the influence of proletarian literature. My own work on Kitagawa Fuyuhiko (1900–1990) and Anzai Fuyue (1898–1977) has shown that proletarian themes can be intertwined with more complex agendas and political sympathies on the part of the author. See Annika A. Culver, “Colonial Manchuria in the Surrealist Imagination: The Poetry and Prose of Kitagawa Fuyuhiko as Modernist History,” Proceedings of the Association for Japanese Literary Studies (PAJLS), Volume 4 (2003), pp. 264–77; and “Two Japanese Avant-Garde Writers’ Views of Gender Relations and Colonial Oppression in Manchuria 1929-31,” US-Japan Women’s Journal (USJWJ), Number 37 (2009), pp. 91–116.

55. Kawabata, Manshūkoku kaku minzoku sōsaku senshū 1, p. 5. 56. I thank Charles Cabell for answering my questions about this phrase and offering feedback on my translation. 57. 57 Kawabata, Manshūkoku kaku minzoku sōsaku senshū 1, p. 5. 58. Many of these Chinese are actually Hakka, from Fujian and Guandong provinces, and ethnically distinct from the Han Chinese of Manchuria who originally came from the northern Chinese provinces of Shandong and Hebei. Due to their diet and genetic makeup, northern Han Chinese tend to be taller than people in the southernmost regions of China and Southeast Asia.

59. For more on this topic, see Faye Yuan Kleeman, Under an Imperial Sun: Japanese Colonial Literature of Taiwan and the South (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2003).

60. Kitagawa, a surrealist poet active in the proletarian literature movement in the thirties who was sent to Singapore in February 1942 with a troop of writers, wrote disparagingly of the shorter, darker-skinned inhabitants. See the conclusion of Annika A. Culver, “Modernity in Conflict: Destabilizing Visions of the Modern in the Poetry of Kitagawa Fuyuhiko,” Master’s Thesis, University of Chicago, March 2002.

61. Kawabata, Manshūkoku kaku minzoku sōsaku senshū 1, p. 5. 62. Richard H. Mitchell, “Japan’s Peace Preservation Law of 1925: Its Origins and Its Significance,” Monumenta Nipponica, vol. 28, no. 3 (Autumn 1973), p. 269.

63. Smith, Resisting Manchukuo: Chinese Women Writers and the Japanese Occupation, p. 10. 64. Kawabata, Manshūkoku kaku minzoku sōsaku senshū 1, p. 6.

65. See Smith, Resisting Manchukuo: Chinese Women Writers and the Japanese Occupation. 66. Smith, ibid., p. 11. 67. For a more detailed description of the Manchukuo regime’s organized targeting of a supposed communist conspiracy by the persecution of intellectuals and others allegedly sympathetic to communism or Marxist movements, see Young, Japan’s Total Empire, pp. 301–302.

68. Part of the research for this chapter was funded by an Association for Asian Studies Northeast Asian Committee (NEAC) summer research grant in Tokyo during July 2008. Prior research was also conducted in Tokyo at Waseda University under a 2004-2005 Fulbright Graduate Research Fellowship. I also thank Tan’o Yasunori of Waseda University for finding an original 1942 copy of the volume Manshūkoku kaku minzoku sōsaku senshū (1) for me to purchase through a bookseller he knew. This chapter was initially presented at the November 2007 Association for Japanese Literary Studies at Princeton University, and in a much-revised version at the March 2009 Annual Meeting for the Association of Asian Studies in Chicago in a panel entitled, “Re-Examining Kawabata Yasunari: Cultural Nationalism and the War.” I thank panel organizer Miho Matsugu, discussant Eiji Sekine, and fellow panelists Charles Cabell and Hiromi Dollase, along with all those who gave comments at the end of our panel.

IV

Coming to Terms with History

Chapter Ten

Colonial Nostalgia or Postcolonial Anxiety: The Dōsan Generation In Between “Restoration” and “Defeat” Leo Ching

INTRODUCTION On the morning of June 7, 2007, Lee Teng-hui, the former president of Taiwan and selfproclaimed one-time Japanese subject, fulfilled one of his long-standing wishes and visited the Yasukuni shrine. Lee insisted that he took the pilgrimage only to mourn his late brother who perished ghting in the Japanese navy in 1945. Lee’s brother, who died in the Philippines, was enshrined under his Japanese name, Iwasato Takenori. Just before going to the shrine and amidst a media blitz, Lee told reporters that this was a personal matter and asked them not to construe his visitation in any political or historical context. He added that since his father did not believe his older brother was killed, they still had no memorial tablet at home, nor had they held a memorial service on his brother’s behalf. Lee’s personal journey to the controversial shrine expectedly drew the ire of the Chinese government which has long regarded Lee as promoting Taiwan independence and defying the one-China policy insisted upon by the communist state. On September 17, 2007, the Presidential Committee for the Inspection of Collaborations for Japanese Imperialism of South Korea published a report on 202 Koreans who had collaborated with the Japanese between 1919 and 1937. Established in 2005 by “the special law on the inspection of collaborations for Japanese imperialism,” the Committee published

106 names in December 2007 for the rst period between 1904 and 1919. As stated on its ofcial website, the aim of the Committee is to “reveal the actual state of collaborations done in the period of Japanese imperialism in Korea to ensure historical truth and the national legitimacy and thereby to realize a just society.” Furthermore, the Committee is entrusted to embark on a historical mission to rectify the shameful history of its colonial past in “preparing the start of a new national history at the beginning of the twenty-first century.”[1] The contrast between the two events to memories of Japanese colonialism cannot be more stark. It reafrms the common perception that the Taiwanese are unilaterally pro-Japanese and that the Koreans are unequivocally anti-Japanese. For Lee, the visit to the shrine was a symbolic gesture (his disclaimer notwithstanding) to reconnect with Japanese rule and to reassert Taiwan’s historical identication with Japan. For the presidential committee, the inspection is to purge elements of Japanese rule and its symbolic collaborators from its national history and to reclaim its autonomy from the memories of colonialism. In both cases, the personal and the national intertwine, but in diametrically opposing ways. Lee’s brother, or more precisely his spirit as a former colonial subject, is resurrected as a mediating force that rekindles both familial and colonial relations, and this reconrms Lee’s and Taiwan’s historical and emotional connectivity to Japan. (Lee claims that he wasn’t aware that his brother’s spirit was enshrined in Yasukuni when he visited Japan as vice president in 1985). The one thousand and five traitors, with their individual names and crimes publicly displayed and some with their properties and assets posthumously conscated, demonstrate the resolve of the state to punish those who conspired with the Japanese and to insist on a radical break from Korea’s “shameful history.” It is not the purpose of this chapter to elaborate on the difference between Taiwan’s pro-Japanism and Korean’s anti-Japanism. Any comparative methodology based on the putative national frame is obviously inadequate to account for the myriad historical causes and contingencies in both pre- and post-colonial contexts.[2] Instead, I am interested in exploring the sentiment of nostalgia and intimacy towards Japanese colonialism as displayed by former colonial subjects such as Lee and the “Japanese-speaking tribe” (nihongo zoku) of his generation, or what the Japanese writer Shiba Ryōtarō affectively referred to as the “old Taipeis” (lao taibei). What I want to suggest is that the favorable and at times intense feelings toward “Japan”—imagined or real—must be grasped as a desire to recuperate a sense of loss in both personal and historical terms. With many of these men (and a few women) in their late 70s and early 80s, and as the last generation of Taiwanese who had signicant contact with Japanese rule, they fear that their impending death will also mean the end of the historical linkage between Japan and Taiwan. From a regional perspective, their sense of loss is exacerbated by the real and perceived decline of Japan and the rise of China in East Asia. Their anxiety, I want to argue, is symptomatic of the larger historical shift in the region. The modern/colonial and postwar/Cold War systems in Asia characterized by the dominance of Japan appears to have come to an end. And their desire for reconnection and anxiety for Japan’s regeneration are only its symptoms. Furthermore, I want to resist judging these aged but spirited voices as simply the nostalgic yearnings of the formerly colonized or the illusory fantasies of the feeble-minded. Instead, I understand their passion as a belated plea

for recognition from the former colonizers of their marginalized existence since the end of formal colonialism. Their efforts, despite the obvious pro-Japan sentiments, interrupt the linear narratives of 1) Colonialism—>restoration—>nation-building and 2) colonialism—>wardefeat—>nation-building schematics espoused and expounded by the KMT and the Japanese state, respectively. THE DŌSAN GENERATION Unlike the young consumers of the so-called Japan-fever tribe (Hari-zu) in contemporary Taiwan whose identification with Japan is driven exclusively by consumption, the older generation’s relation to Japan is mediated through recollections of belonging, social order, and the lament of being abandoned. As mentioned earlier, there are a couple of terms used to refer to this generation of pro-Japanese Taiwanese: the “Japanese-speaking tribe” (nihongo-zoku) or “old Taipeis” (lao-taibei). However, I would like to use the personable and Taiwanized term “dōsan” to describe them. The word “dōsan” derives from the Japanese “tōsan” meaning father. “Dōsan” has enjoyed some currency in (post)colonial Taiwan among the Taiwanesespeaking families and conveys an amicable and respectful sentiment. The slippage from the original “tōsan” to the bastardized “dōsan” signies not only the traces of colonialism but also the process of acculturation and appropriation. In 1994, Wu Nien-Jen’s Dōsan, a lm based on Wu’s father’s life living through Japanese and Nationalist rules, gained critical attention and brought the term to popular and public consciousness. Dōsan therefore refers to the generation of men who spent their formative years under Japanese rule and traumatized by the ensuing recolonization by the KMT. For years living in relative quietude under the KMT’s anti-Japan policy and authoritarian regime, the dōsan-generation only began to publicly express their thoughts in their memoirs in recent years. As depicted in the lm, Dōsan exudes a sense of masculine dignity, sadness, and loneliness from the alienation he suffers under the new regime and the longing for a Japan that is no longer in his “borrowed life.” Largely because of their explicit pro-Japanese sentiment and their seemingly anachronistic existence in contemporary Taiwan, the dōsan-generation has found sympathetic ears among the Japanese neoconservatives. More often than not, they are being propped up as simply conrming the conservative and nationalist agenda. The complicated and contradictory emotions and sentiments effected by the historical shift from colonial to postcolonial conditions and Japan’s “responsibility” towards these former subjects are rarely mentioned or interrogated. Their “otherness” is again being assimilated into a “Japaneseness” that they can never possess, but can only lament at its alleged passing much like their own tumultuous lives.[3] The complicity between the dōsan-generation and Japanese neoconservatives is neither new nor surprising. As Mori Yoshio has argued, several former advocates of Taiwan independence residing in Japan such as Huang Wen-hsiung and Jing Mei-ling have switched from their earlier critique of Japanese rule to become the spokespersons for the Japanese neoconservative agenda. This radical turnaround, Mori suggests, is largely due to the political democratization of Taiwan since the 1990s, which increasingly diminished the relevance of Japan-residing pro-

independence advocates. The conservative-turn was induced by a number of political failures and their own sense of irrelevance, not to mention the effort to rationalize their struggle and existence. The desire to be heard hence pushed them toward a mutual utilitarianism with Japanese neoconservatives. More important and instructive here is Mori’s harsh indictment of postwar Japanese leftists’ indifference to and ignorance of the voices of the formerly colonized. Progressive and leftist intellectuals, Mori argues, in their postwar political correctness, have bought into the “pro-Japan Taiwan” and “anti-Japan China/Korea” binary structure of the Cold War. Since Taiwan under Chiang Kai-shek’s rule was ostensibly a client state of the United States, it automatically meant all voices from Taiwan are anti-Communist and hence non-progressive. Mori points out that this radicalism actually concealed the arrogance of the former colonizer in its refusal to actually confront Japan’s own colonial history. The inattentiveness and marginalization of Taiwan by the Japanese leftists ironically obscured the colonial connection between Japan and Taiwan in the postwar years. Furthermore, the Japanese government acquiesced to the authoritarian Chiang regime by forcefully repatriating pro-Taiwan independence student leaders residing in Japan in the 1970s so they could be prosecuted upon their return.[4] NIHONJINRON FROM TAIWAN The texts I have chosen for this study can be categorized under the larger rubric of “Nihonjinron from Taiwan”—writings on Japan and the Japanese in the (post)colonial era. This corpus of works can be classied under the following categories: 1) Periodization—from postwar to the end of martial law (1945–1987) and from post-martial law to the present; 2) Authorship—texts written by the so-called “waishengren” (mainlanders and their descendants) or “benshengren” (native Taiwanese); and 3) Languages—those written in Chinese or Japanese.[5] According to the study by Huang Chih-Huei, between 1947 and 2000, approximately forty books were published in the Chinese language with the majority coming only after 1987.[6] In the immediate postwar years, as is to be expected, books on Japan were mostly written by “waishengren” from the perspective of a victor’s nation. Even if they were written by “benshengren,” they were published only with the tacit approval of the “waishengren” ruling party reecting the political view of the KMT. Sentiments about personal relations between the former colonizer and the colonized are subsumed and silenced under the binary between the “victor” and “loser” nations, the heroic anti-imperialists and the evil colonizers. In short, during this period, Chinese-language writings on Japan reected the “waishengren’s” perspective of the “invaded peoples” (as opposed to the “colonized” peoples). It is the perspective concurrent with anti-Japanism in the mainland during the war of resistance. The subtle but unmistakable distinction between the “invaded peoples” and the “colonized peoples” is important for it not only marginalized the experience and perspective of the Taiwanese, it also rendered colonialism invisible in the postwar nationalist discourse. In the post-martial law era, writing about Japan from the perspectives of the formerly colonized ourished, especially from the 1990s onward. Twenty-four Taiwanese Nihonjinron

books were published between 1992 and 2003. These works are mostly written in Japanese by “benshengren” and are either self-published or published in Japan. Most of these were penned by non-professional writers and employed mostly the literary forms of biography, memoirs, autobiography, and poetry. These works recollect and reexamine with immense emotion and conviction their personal experiences ranging from ardent condemnation of the Japanese rule to the equally passionate affirmation of Japanese colonialism. The shift from the perspective of the “invaded” to that of the “colonized,” propelled by the democratic movement in Taiwan since the 1990s, opened up a new space for a more Taiwan-centric understanding of its own history, especially in the colonial period. I have chosen for analysis four recent works that follow the Taiwanese/colonized viewpoint that express profound nostalgia and fondness for Japanese colonialism. The choice is not entirely arbitrary. First, they are published in Japanese under a book series entitled “Pride of the Japanese” by Sakuranohana [Cherry Blossom] Publishing House, a small publisher that obviously harbors a neoconservative and neo-nationalist agenda. The series title seems to elicit a double reading of “Japanese”: those former subjects who are proud of their once being Japanese and Japanese today who are being called forth to be proud of their country. Secondly, these texts share, if not dutifully expound, the rhetoric and discourse of neoconservatives such as Ishihara Shintarō and Kobayashi Yoshinori. The facile thing to do is to assume that they are nothing but dummies spewing the words of their Japanese ventriloquists. However, I would like to argue, in the context of (post)colonial Taiwan/Japan/China, their discourse of nostalgia has to be apprehended as a rupture from the linearity of historical progress from colonialism to recovery and nally, to nation-building. By equating their voices simply as conservative and reactionary gibberish by people in the twilight of their lives is to reproduce the colonial violence that constructed their subjectivity in the rst place. It is also to atten out the ambivalence of colonial power and the false faith in “liberation.” The nostalgic mode of their writing forces us to confront the continued violence from the colonial past to the (post)colonial present. “PRIDE OF THE JAPANESE” In the context of South Korea’s investigation into former collaborators of the Japanese, the dōsan-generation appears to be worse than “traitors” since they openly praise Japanese rule. [7] The series “Pride of the Japanese” has published four books since 2003: The Japanese were Wonderful (Nihonjin wa totemo subarashikatta) by Yang Suqiu/Yō Soshū (2003), The Unreturned Japanese (Kaerazaru Nihonjin) by Cai Minsan/Sai Binzō (2004), Motherland is Japan, Fatherland is Taiwan: A Taiwanese from the Japanese-speaking tribe (Bokoku wa Nihon, Sokoku wa Taiwan: aru Nihongozoku Taiwanjin) by Ke Desan/Ka Tokuzō (2005), and Wonderful! Japanese Teachers and Their Education (Subarashikatta Nihon no sensei to sono kyōiku) by Yang Yingyin/Yō Ōgin (2006).[8] With Yang Suqin/Yō Soshū as the sole woman, they all fit the profile of the dōsan generation: they were mostly born in the 1920s and 1930s and spent their formative years during the period of imperialization (kōminka) and war

mobilization; they encountered the end of war in their youth with a strong sense of confusion and depletion; they also lived through the rule of the “recovering” nationalist regime. When these books were published, the authors were already in their seventies and eighties. Before examining the formal structure of their writings—what I call the nostalgia mode—it is important to look at the role these writings purported to serve under the series “Pride of the Japanese.”[9] According to the editor, the goal of the series is to explore and reconrm the essence that forms the spirit of the Japanese at a time of the nation’s uncertainty and instability. The story is a familiar one. The crisis of the nation, despite its relative economic wealth gained since the end of World War II, is that Japan and its people are not being respected by other nations. The examples of servile diplomacy towards China and North Korea and the controversy over the prime minister’s visit to the Yasukuni shrine all point to the lack of sovereign power. The culprits, the editor insists, are postwar institutions such as the Japan Teachers’ Union and leftleaning media such as the Asahi Shimbun. This “masochist view of history” rendered Japanese colonialism as evil and invented war crimes beyond the normative violence of war. The fabrication of the Nanjing Massacre is its prime example. Contrary to these claims, the editorial asserts, Japan modernized Taiwan and Korea with infrastructure-building, education, a sense of public duty, and legality unlike the exploitative colonialism of the Western powers. These are claimed to be exemplary accomplishments that only the Japanese achieved.[10] The “advancement” of Japan in Asia, accordingly, was not based on avarice but selfdefense. While there were some ambitions, Japanese expansionism was vital to Japan’s selfpreservation and to secure the Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere from Western encroachment. While it would be wrong to embellish all acts conducted by Japan, it is the goal of this series to “capture and rectify the historical truths that have been unjustly distorted.” The editorial then goes on to explain the different reactions to Japanese rule by the Taiwanese and the Koreans despite the mutual benet of colonialism. As far as Taiwan is concerned, the oppression of the nationalist regime (as evident by the Feb. 28 Incident) has further exploited and infuriated the people of Taiwan and made the Taiwanese long for its former ruler. Korea, by contrast, was blanketed by an anti-Japan system under the watchful eye of United States. The nationalists, denying any contribution by Japan towards Korea’s modernity, fabricated and brainwashed people with their own national superiority and the inherent evilness of the Japanese for the last sixty years. The editorial goes on to call for a racial and regional solidarity to oppose the continued Euro-American racism and hegemony in the world today. It calls for the construction and the deepening of spiritual, economic, and political linkages among the yellow race nations and to create civilization/culture that is distinct from that of Euro-America. This is the only way to reverse the long-standing tradition of white/west envy of the Asians. As if to reconstitute the Co-Prosperity Sphere of the 1940s, Japan, Taiwan, China, Korea, Thailand, Myanmar, Indochina, Mongolia, Tibet, Bhutan, Nepal, and Sri Lanka—the Buddhist and Confucian cultures—must afrm their similar values. It is only then there can be an Asian race worthy of the respect by the European race which has ruled much of modern human history. To illustrate

Japan’s “positive” colonial experience and its relevance today, the editorial ends with words from the former Thai Prime Minister Kukrit Pramoj. In expressing his gratitude to the former Japanese military commander stationed in Thailand, Nakamura Aketo, in 1955, Pramoj writes: “Thanks to Japan, all Asian nations have gained independence. Japan, the mother, has had complications during this difcult birth. However, all the children are growing up quickly and healthily. Whom should we thank today that peoples of Southeast Asia can speak to the United States and England as equals? It is due to our mother, Japan, who sacriced herself for the benet of all. The 8th of December [the attack on Pearl Harbor] is the day mother showed us this important thought when she wagered her life for a critical decision. August 15th [Japan’s surrender] is when our dear mother rested in her sick bed. We should never forget these two dates.” The evocation of the old colonial east/west binary seems ludicrously outdated and ideologically suspicious under today’s capitalist globalization. It amounts to a feeble gesture to resuscitate the logic of regionalism under Japan’s leadership. In this context, the former colonial subjects are ushered in as witnesses of Japan’s colonial achievements and advocates for the repressed unspeakable truth in contemporary Japan about its past. It is the intention of the publisher to reconstitute the pride of being Japanese through the voices of the former colonized and they seem happy to oblige. However, I want to suggest that through the analysis of their nostalgia mode, the voices of those who once were Japanese cannot be so easily assimilated. THE NOSTALGIC MODE Despite chronicling their individual life stories within the larger historicity of colonial/(post)colonial Japan and Taiwan, writings by the dōsan-generation share a common narrative structure and rhetorical strategy that we might call the nostalgic mode. The nostalgic mode calls upon us to view (post)coloniality in a particular order that corresponds to the lives of the dōsan-generation. Personal experiences become testimonies to the larger historical events, and historical events inform the trials and tribulations of the individual lives: a dialecticism that underscores the connectivity and organicity between Taiwan and Japan. The text would usually begin with the author reecting on an individual or a group of Japanese whom the author either owed gratitude to or shared fond memories with. This “peaceful and stable time” was characterized by the presence of “kind and gentle policemen and soldiers,” and “wonderful teachers.” It will then recount the numerous achievements of modernization that Japanese rule has accomplished in Taiwan such as education, infrastructure-building, medicine, law and order, etc. The benet of Japanese colonialism is then followed and juxtaposed by the ruthless authoritarian rule of the KMT, usually highlighting the infamous Feb. 28 Incident and the white terror era of the 1950s. The book will generally end with the author’s opinion on and concern over the “degeneration” of the Japanese nation today and his/her plea for the Japanese to remember the historical connection between Japan and Taiwan and to be proud of their nation. The titles of the books connote the sense of nostalgia, a lament and fondness for a constructed past—suteki datta [it was wonderful], subarashikatta [it was

marvelous]. The authors often play the role of former Japanese subjects much like adopted children who were left behind with Japan’s defeat and repatriation. They are witnesses to the greatness and benevolence of Japanese colonialism—opinions and convictions that have been refuted and repressed in Japan since 1945. Their functions are thus liminal and surrogate— both inside and outside of Japan—as indicated by the titles “The Unreturned Japanese” and “Motherland is Japan; Fatherland is Taiwan”—as former Japanese, they can speak for the conscience of Japan that has been silenced in the postwar (post)colonial years. Nostalgia has been a key concept in understanding postmodern aesthetics and politics under late-capitalism.[11] More specically, it has been considered as the symptom/cause of the rift between historical signiers and their signied. More often than not, nostalgia has become a term employed to charge attachment to and affect for the past with being too politically reprehensible and empirically untenable. Both charges depended on a particular understanding of the proper way of relating to the past: it was only after history was understood as necessarily emancipatory, progressive, and rationally comprehensible that affect for the past could come to be condemned as an irrational obstacle. Those devoted to the past—or to that which becomes coded as the past—inhibit history’s progressive movement towards less exploitative modes of production.[12] The nostalgia expressed by the dōsan-generation is indeed politically conservative and preserves class privilege. However, it is also a struggle for recognition from the former colonizers. In an unintended way, (post)colonial nostalgia fractures the ideology of historical progress from colonialism to postcolonalism, from liberation/recovery to nation-building—that history is the narrative of progress towards an improved state. Nostalgia is a symptom of the real unease caused by an unjust condition caused by the double articulation of “liberation” and “defeat.” This nostalgia is about affect, a sense of intimacy and sentimentality that is corporeal. As Ke Desan writes about his relationship to Japan: “After all, I am nostalgic. Although it is only my personal opinion, my feelings toward Japan are not about like or dislike. I am nostalgic. It is probably something that has seeped deep into my body and soul that made me think this way.”[13] But this sentiment also has its material conditions. Ke continues: “For example, I can’t express myself without using Japanese. Although I use Taiwanese in my daily conversation, there are many expressions in Japanese that are missing in Taiwanese. When I read and write, it is mostly in Japanese. Mandarin Chinese is the third language I learned after the war. Compared to the young people, I am poor at it. It is a fact, however, through Japanese I have expanded my thinking and knowledge. It has been a plus to my personal growth.”[14] Since Taiwanese is mainly a spoken language and Mandarin Chinese was imposed after “liberation,” it is not surprising that Japanese, which he learned under the colonial education system like most Taiwanese of his generation, dened and constructed his thoughts and worldview. It is precisely this colonial condition that Ke cannot ontologically see himself ever separating from Japan: the very condition of possibility that dened his being in the world. He continues: “Today, even if I wanted to cut all my ties to something called Japan, I can’t. It is because the blessing of (Japan’s) raising me and the nostalgia that remains with me. Japan has already become part of me. This is my conclusion.”[15] It is easy to either celebrate Ke’s

reection as conrmation of the greatness of the Japanese empire (the perspective of the neoconservatives) or to condemn it as a false consciousness of a “collaborator” (the perspective of the nationalists). Those two diametrically opposed readings are indeed possible, and seem to be the only ways these soliloquies can be read. However, I would argue for another possibility. The sentiment attached to the inseparability between Japan and the former colonial subject testies to the repressed continuum of colonialism, in the form of a “distorted Japanese” in the (post)colonial present. The continuity is obviously not the same colonialism, but the forgotten and neglected former colonial subject reclaiming his subjectivity as traces of a undeniable coloniality. It is a colonial difference that can neither be subsumed entirely under the category of “Japanese” nor can it be fully dened as “Taiwanese” or “Chinese.” “JAPANESE SPIRIT” All the writers, when reecting on what they missed most about the colonial period, unanimously point to the loss of the “Japanese spirit,” not only in postwar (post)colonial Taiwan, but in contemporary Japan as well, and that the dōsan generation embodies and inherits the “Japanese spirit.” Kobayashi Yoshinori enthused in Taiwan-ron that the “Japanese spirit,” lost and forgotten in Japan, can only be found in Taiwan. It is important, however, to understand the notion of “Japanese spirit” is different from the amorphous idea of the Japanese national essence associated with wartime mobilization. Instead, as Mori Yoshio has demonstrated, the Taiwanese reading of “Japanese spirit”—“ribunjinshin”—is a decidedly postwar and (post)colonial term. That the Taiwanese usually use the Taiwanese pronunciation “ribunjinshin” rather than the Japanese “nihonseishin” only underscores this colonial difference. Unlike “nihonseishin,” which projects a sense of dedication and commitment to the Japanese nation and the emperor, “ribunjinshin” denes a more quotidian and practical understanding of social etiquette and communal conduct. It is construed less about the nation, but everyday lives and their organization. Most Japanese neoconservatives, including Kobayashi Yoshinori, eager to recuperate an imaginary past ideal, often project their own notions of “nihonseishin” onto the Taiwanese “ribunjinshin.” The Taiwanese locution points to attitudes and behaviors that suggest moral and ethical virtues. It points to a wide spectrum of conducts and behaviors that is associated with respect to the greater whole: punctuality, justice, diligence, willingness to abide by the law, responsibility, sincerity, humaneness, etc. It is important to note here that these attitudes are associated not with “Japan” per se, but with the perceived Japanese “period” in contradistinction from the renegade government from the mainland. It is only through the historical trauma of another (post)colonial colonial rule, that the Japanese colonial period appears to be righteous, just, and orderly. Thus the nostalgia for the colonial period—despite its real discrimination and injustice—is projected to underscore the rampant corruption of the “liberation” and the authoritarian regime of the KMT where former colonial subjects are viewed with suspicion and disdain. It is by associating “ribunjinshin” as a modern moral and ethical conduct for the “greater good,” a philosophy of

the public, that the former colonized also laments its passing in contemporary Japan, where they see rampant social ills that they attribute to an increasingly self-centered populace which has abandoned the notion of the common good. In the critique of contemporary degeneration, the dōsan-generation shares a similar conservatism with the Japanese neoconservatives and sees the regeneration of the Japanese nation as their most urgent calling. If the nostalgia for “ribunjinshin” is for the period of Japanese rule rather than Japan itself, the evocation of “ribunjinshin” is almost always rendered in contrast from the post-liberation rule of the KMT from 1945 to 1987. “Ribunjinshin” then undergirds the imagined period that critiques the (post)colonial era and further emphasizes the schism and incommensurability between “China” and “Taiwan.” The contradistinction between Japanese rule and Chinese rule is usually posited between that of modernity and primitivity, dignity in defeat and avarice in victory, that overturn the normative relationship between loser and victor in war. The writers uniformly comment on the images of the take-over Chinese military as haggard and beggar-like in their appearances and lacking military discipline. Their crassness and idiocy are documented and repeated in several rumors about their incapability to understand or use modern technology: a Chinese soldier trying to switch on a light bulb without connecting it to the outlet; another soldier buying a water faucet and being furious at the sales-clerk because no water would come out after he attached the faucet to a wall. It is these rumors and caricatures that reinforce the conviction that Japan lost to the Americans, and not to the Chinese. The stories of the primitive soldiers reverse the dominant discourse of “restoration” that justified the KMT rule over Taiwan. In Taiwan, decolonization, unlike the normative Third World discourse, was not about liberation or independence, but a “restoration” (guangfu) to the fatherland, China; while third-world discourse is about independence, for the Communist Party in China it is a matter of is emancipation (fanshen) or liberation (jiefang). As the KMT maintained its symbolic legitimacy over the representation of China, “restoration” of Taiwan meant re-Sinicization of the Taiwanese from their fifty years of “enslavement” (nuhua) by the Japanese. It is important to note the subtle but crucial differences in which Korean and Chinese discourses constructed its internal other, the collaborators with the Japanese, and the Chinese representation of the Taiwanese subjects. It is instructive that the words for collaborators in Korean and Chinese are “chinilpa” (pro-Japanese faction) and “hanjian” (traitor to the Han race), respectively, whereas Japanese colonization in Taiwan is apprehended as a period of “enslavement.” The Taiwanese are collectively rendered as “slaves” of the Japanese. By describing the colonial period as “enslavement,” the KMT not only legitimized itself as a superior culture, but also availed itself unconditional power to unenslave its subjects and to expel any remanent of colonial rule in total and any means necessary. Whereas their internal other—“chinilpa” and “hanjian” must be tried, exhibited and executed, the “slaves,” by definition of another ownership, are not only “saved” by the nationalists, they also must be “reeducated” and its culture “reconfigured.” “Enslavement” therefore led to the necessity for “eradication” of all traces of colonialism, meaning anything that could be associated with Japanese rule, from language to education, from clothing to architecture. During this time of “transition,” Taiwanese intellectuals pleaded for a more moderate process of “translation”—

translating what is modern and useful from the Japanese to Chinese. But this was completely ignored for the patriotic process of Sinicization. Taiwanese intellectuals were therefore deprived of their role as active subjects of decolonization. Instead, they became passive objects of re-Sinicization. The primitivity of the “victorious” army is further compounded by the rampant corruption and brutality of the new regime. All the writers mention the infamous Feb. 28 Incident in 1947 when native discontent and frustration over corruption, social disorder, military abuse, and economic hardship exploded to an island-wide protest against the nationalist regime. This led to a severe military crackdown where tens of thousands of Taiwanese were killed and arrested. In the time of turmoil and confusion, the Japanese language was used by the Taiwanese as the only way to distinguish the Taiwanese from the Chinese. A scene from Hou Hsiao-hsien’s The City of Sadness (Beiqing chengshi) brilliantly captures this irony of how the colonial language becomes a means of resisting the “liberating” people from the “liberated.” “Liberation” is followed by the forty-year authoritarian rule of the KMT after relocating to Taiwan in the wake of its defeat by the Communists. What ensued was a period of white terror aimed at squashing political dissent and exercising ideological control in the name of antiCommunism under the Cold War structure. The KMT launched several anti-Japanese measures to consolidate its rule and to re-educate the Taiwanese from their “slave” mentality. The longing for “ribunjinshin” and the Japanese period, unlike most theories on nostalgia, is not simply a passive and conservative reaction of status quo or lamenting the passing away of a particular privilege. Instead, it is an active demand for reparation and redress. It certainly should lead to the interrogation of the linear narrative of colonialism-->anti-colonialism->liberation-->nation-building prevalent in most third-worldist discourse. The nostalgia for “ribunjinshin” as a counter-narrative to their second colonization under the nationalist regime thus forms an anti-Chinaism in the dōsan-generation that is both culturalist and racist. Their post-liberation experiences consolidated in their minds that the Chinese are prone to lying and therefore untrustworthy; that they always rationalize their actions and are inherently corrupt. From one’s own “waishengren” brother-in-law to generalized remarks about rude and shoplifting Chinese tourists, all “waishengren” and mainlanders are conated and stereotyped if not demonzied as insidious, corrupt, and haughty. Not only is the Japanese period then rationalized as better and just, but all criticism of Japanese colonialism is also regarded as Chinese conspiracy and slander. In their resolute anti-Chinaism, the dōsangeneration envisions themselves in their twilight years as humble former subjects reminding a degenerating nation of its past grandeur and accomplishment in the midst of the rise of China. The ambiguity and double-meaning of “ribunjinshin” and “nihonseishin” connects the former colonized’s plea for recognition and the former colonizers’ desire for national revival. This shared ethos emerges as a mechanism to imagine a future that was denied to the former colonial subjects. They take pains to explain that their opinions about contemporary Japan should not to be construed as “criticism” but as “kind advice” from those who were once Japanese. Many lament about their old age but hope to awaken and revitalize Japan through their feeble but genuine acts. They urge the Japanese to develop historical consciousness about

Japan’s colonial relationship to Taiwan, to rekindle the pride the Japanese once had during the colonial period and postwar reconstruction, and to remember the once beautiful and wonderful nation. What is clear from this desire for re-connection between Taiwan and Japan and Japan’s revival is their acute sense of threat from the rise of China. All the texts present the emergence of China as a danger to the co-prosperity of the region. They still view the new China through the lens of old stereotypes and are unable to reconcile the gap between their “seeing” the astonishing economic growth and “believing” in their memories of underdeveloped China. What I would like to suggest is that the anxiety over China and the sense of urgency for reconnectivity and revitalization point to the very shift of the regional order from that of the modern/colonial model of Japan and/in Asia in which Taiwan was subsumed since the late nineteenth century and throughout the postcolonial postwar years. What this anxiety reveals is precisely the passing of Japan as the sole leader in the region. With the economic and cultural development of South Korea, Taiwan, and the so-called greater China, Japan, for the rst time in its modern/colonial history, has to confront its neighbors as equals. The eclipsing of the Japan-centric model is crucial to the neoconservatives’ attempt at recuperating its “pride of the Japanese.” For the dōsan-generation, it is also an attempt at making sense of their tumultuous lives under various periods of colonization. It is a desperate yearning for recognition, a truncated identity that with their passing, will be forgotten and buried with their remains. Abandoned by Japanese colonialism after Japan’s defeat, oppressed by the KMT because of their Japanese heritage, they found no viable channels to express their feelings, emotions, and longings other than in the privacy of their homes, with their families and friends. That the Japanese neoconservatives became the only group who would mobilize their memories and stories is only a testament to the tenacity of the traces of colonialism and the bitter-sweetness of the postcolonial condition between Japan and Taiwan. CONCLUSION Frantz Fanon has said that decolonization is always a violent phenomenon. It is “quite simply the replacing of a certain ‘species’ of men by another ‘species’ of men. Without any period of transition, there is a total, complete, and absolute substitution.” It is a historical process where “the last shall be rst and the rst last.” This reversal of fortune can take place, he warns us, only “after a murderous and decisive struggle between the two protagonists.”[16] The decolonization process between Japan and Taiwan was violent, but the violence that ensued was not between the colonizer and the colonized, but between the liberating semi-colonized and the colonized. Whereas Fanon has cautioned about reproducing the structure of the colonizer under the national bourgeoisie after liberation and the implication of neocolonialism, decolonization in Taiwan produced two different but interrelated trajectories: a process of “recolonization through liberation and decolonization through defeat.” Liberation became another form of exerting external control over the natives, inheriting the colonial structure left behind by the former colonizer. In this (post)colonial condition, the last remained last. Japan’s war defeat meant that the Japanese empire was liquidated without intense

struggles in the former colonies: defeat simply replaced decolonization. The rst didn’t become last. It is this paradoxical condition of (post)coloniality that I call the “nondecolonization” between Japan and Taiwan. “Non-decolonization,” as a historical condition, problematizes the teleological discourse of colonization-->decolonization-->liberation. The purpose is not to imagine what could have been if there were “true” decolonization. Instead, it points to the convoluted and violent process of East Asian (post)coloniality where antiJapanism and pro-Japanism are only its belated manifestations. Japan has always had an ambivalent relationship to its Asian neighbors. It has viewed itself as simultaneously both part of Asia and apart from Asia—racially similar but culturally superior. This modern/colonial perspective is fast becoming outdated given the rise of China and other Asian nations such as South Korea and Taiwan. It is telling that recently the resident-Korean critic Kang Sanjun has asked if the Japanese is willing to be “the orphan of Asia” if it continues to serve as client state of the US and ignore its Asian neighbors. It is ironic that Kang uses the word “orphan” to describe Japan today. Orphan of Asia is a book written in Japanese by the Taiwanese author Wu Zhouliu during the war years that describes the painful realization of a Taiwanese identity after being rejected by both Japanese colonialism and Chinese nationalism.[17] After all, Japan and Taiwan are connected in some way. For the dōsan-generation, the desire for recognition derives from the ambivalence of their colonial and (post)colonial identities. Ke Desan writes that during colonial times when he visited Japan, he was asked by the Japanese where he came from. Once he told them Taiwan, he was asked if he is related to the headhunting aborigines. In (post)colonial times, the question is still where you are from, and then why you speak Japanese so uently. Postwar and (post)colonial Japanese simply cannot fathom the existence of people who once were Japanese. This inability to relate to the former colonial subject is symptomatic of the larger forgetting of colonialism in postwar Japan. For the dōsan generation, unfortunately, time may not be on their side. NOTES 1. The previously viewable official page is no longer available. The committee disbanded after four and half years of classifying all pro-Japanese collaborators and their activities. The effort resulted in a collection of twenty-five volumes, 21,000 pages in all, listing 1005 collaborators. I would like to thank Lee Hyunjung for translation assistance.

2. The different attitudes toward Japanese rule between Taiwan and Korea can be attributed to 1). Korea’s precolonial history as as a dynastic state within the tributary system of the Chinese empire which provided a sense of commonality among its peoples, whereas Taiwan, while a province of the Qing Empire, was largely neglected and had little sense of shared belonging. 2). Postwar postcolonial occupation by the renegade Nationalist Party significantly impacted the way Taiwanese people came to compare the two rules. The divided system in the Korean peninsula and US occupation further strengthened Korean nationalism and its shared antipathy to Japanese colonial rule.

3. For a critical analysis of the film, see Chen Kuan-hsing, “Why is ‘Great Reconciliation’ Impossible? De-Cold War/Decolonization, or Modernity and its Tears (Part 1),” Inter-Asia Cultural Studies 3, no.1 (2002), pp. 77–99.

4. Mori Yoshio, Taiwan/Nihon—rensa suru koroniarizumu [Taiwan/Japan—interconnecting colonialisms] (Tokyo: Impakuto Shuppankai, 2001).

5. “Waishengren” and “benshengren” are categories specific to the postwar Taiwan context. “Waishengren,” which literally means “people outside of the province,” refers to those who came to Taiwan from mainland China after the years 1945–1949. “Benshengren,” or “local province people” refers to those who came before 1945–1949. These concepts are only meaningful in

relation to each other.

6. Huang Chih-huei (Huang Zhihui), “Zhan-hou Taiwan de ‘Riben wenhua lun’ shuwu zhong xianxiande‘dui-Ri guan‘.” [Attitudes to Japan manifested in post-war books from Taiwan on “Discourse on Japanese Culture], Ya-Tai yanjiu luntan [Forum for Asia-Pacific Debate] 26 (2004), pp. 94–118.

7. It should be noted that “pro-Japan” (C: qinRi, K: chinil) has very different nuances in Taiwan and Korea. In Taiwan, the term connotes an affinity to Japan or things Japanese; in Korea, the term is used derogatively for collaborators during Japanese rule, especially those branded chinilpa.

8. All titles published by Sakuranohana shuppan [Cherry-blossom Press]. 9. The series has recently added “testimonies” from Sri Lanka, Indonesia, and the Philippines. 10. The editorial can be found at http://sakuranohana.jp/hokori.html. The assertions cited echo Kobayashi Yoshinori’s “comparison” of Japanese colonialism to Western colonial rule. He categorized Spanish rule in Latin America as a “plundering” type, British rule in India as an “exploiting” type, and Japanese rule in Taiwan and Korea as an “investing” type. See Kobayashi Yoshinori, Shin-gōmanizumu sengen. Special Taiwan ron [A manifesto of the new pride: A special theory of Taiwan] (Tokyo: Shōgakukan, 2000).

11. See, for example, Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, Or, The Logic of Late Capitalism (Post-Contemporary Interventions) (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991).

12. See Marcos Piason Natali, “History and the Politics of Nostalgia,” Iowa Journal of Cultural Studies, 2007. http://www.uiowa.edu/~ijcs/nostalgia/nostfe1.htm.

13. Ke Desan, Motherland is Japan, p. 232. 14. Ibid, p. 232. 15. Ibid., p. 233. 16. Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (New York: Grove Press, 1963), p. 37. 17. Wu Zhuoliu, Ajia no Koji, (1945) trans. Ioannis Mentzas as Orphan of Asia (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006).

Chapter Eleven

The Road Taken, Then Retraced: Morimoto Kaoru’s A Woman’s Life and Japan in China Cody Poulton

Written and first staged in the dying days of the Greater East Asia War, A Woman’s Life (Onna no isshō) has been (after Kinoshita Junji’s Twilight Crane) the most popular play of postwar Japan. Since 1945 it has been performed close to a thousand times and was for over fifty years the signature work of one of twentieth-century Japan’s greatest actresses for stage and screen, Sugimura Haruko (best known perhaps to international audiences for her role as Shige, the shrewish hairdresser daughter in Ozu Yasujirō’s classic 1953 film Tokyo Story). According to Sugimura, a 1947 production of A Woman’s Life saved the Bungakuza (Literary Theatre) in the precarious postwar years and ever since has been something of a cash cow for this successful theatre company.[1] But A Woman’s Life is not a postwar play; it was written and first performed in the dying days of the Greater East Asia War and was in fact commissioned by the militarist government to promote such principles as “co-existence and co-prosperity” and “independence and amity” among Asian nations in their struggle against Western colonial aggression—in short, the ideology of Japanese militarist expansion, specifically in China. A Woman’s Life was subsequently used to project a pacifist and contrite image of a postwar Japan, playing in both the Soviet Union (1959) in a Russian translation and twice in China (1960 and 1965) to great success. The play has thus managed, better than any work of art of its time, to speak to diametrically opposed views of the Japanese and their presence in China over the past century. Just as the fortunes of the Bungakuza are tied to this play, A Woman’s Life and the theatre company with which it has been so long associated are deeply implicated in Japan’s wartime and postwar history. The Bungakuza was established by playwrights like Kishida Kunio (1890–1954) and Kubota Mantarō (1889–1963) in 1937 as a company devoted to the pursuit of high literary and artistic standards. This was, of course, the year of the China Incident, the beginning of full-blown war with China; in fact, the Bungakuza’s star actor Tomoda Kyōsuke died in action shortly after being drafted there. The Bungakuza was a reaction against what had become the dominant, leftist trend in modern (shingeki) Japanese theatre at the time, exemplified by such companies as the Shinkyō Gekidan and Shin-Tsukijiza. Although the 1920s and 1930s were, to be sure, a difficult time to be a leftist in Japan, theatre people put up more concerted and courageous resistance to the militarists than did most other intellectuals in Japan —until, that is, August 14, 1940, when the government cracked down on leftist elements in the

theatre world and hundreds were arrested. Within months of this crackdown, Bungakuza’s leading playwright Kishida accepted the position of director of the cultural section of the Imperial Rule Assistance Association (Taisei Yokusankai), Japan’s fascist wartime cabinet. He would resign from this position a year later, but the Bungakuza remained one of the very few companies that escaped government oppression throughout the war and was the only shingeki theatre that survived the war. One of this faction’s most talented playwrights was Morimoto Kaoru (1912–1946). Gekisaku (Playwriting), a magazine edited by Kishida, published one of his earliest plays, A Splendid Woman (Migoto na onna), in 1934, while he was still an English literature student at Kyoto University. (An avid fan of the plays of Somerset Maugham and Noel Coward, Morimoto’s senior thesis had been on Congreve.)[2] Considered one of the most accomplished dramatists of his generation, Morimoto prided himself on being able to write under practically any condition. At a point in the early 1940s when it appeared that even the Bungakuza might have to close under government pressure, it is reported that Morimoto insisted that the show must go on; his ambition to make art trumped whatever political qualms he might have had regarding the conditions under which it was made.[3] His perennial subjects were, like much of his circle, resolutely focused on the private lives of individuals, namely women and the family, but his later plays reflect wartime conditions and concerns. He no doubt felt that some sort of collaboration with authorities was inevitable; after all, the vast majority of leftist intellectuals underwent ideological conversion (tenkō) and began to support the militarists, many sincerely, though some paying only lip service. And so, Morimoto’s association with the “literary” school of playwrights put him in the collaborationist camp. He had joined the Bungakuza in December 1940, a few months after the crackdown on theatres; two years later, he was listed as one of the playwrights in the Japanese Literature Patriotic Association (Nippon Bungaku Hōkokukai), a league charged specifically with promoting Japan’s imperial designs in Asia. In 1943, in a last ditch effort to justify Japan’s military and imperialist expansion into Asia, the Tōjō cabinet convened the Greater East Asia Conference. Late in that year, six novelists and five playwrights from the Japanese Literature Patriotic Association were commissioned to write works promoting the pan-Asianist “five principles” (including mutual cooperation and respect for one another’s traditions) of the conference, but only two writers followed through: Dazai Osamu, with Sad Parting (Sekibetsu), a story about Lu Xun’s sojourn in Sendai, and Morimoto Kaoru, with A Woman’s Life. Morimoto finished the script in February 1945 and it went into rehearsal the following month. By that time, most of Tokyo’s theatres had been razed, and theatregoing was a risky business. The mecca for modern Japanese drama, the Tsukiji Little Theatre, was destroyed in the firebombing of March 10 that claimed over a hundred thousand lives and the company had to seek rehearsal and performance space elsewhere; to save his manuscript from destruction, Morimoto had several copies made. Despite these setbacks, the play went into production in April of 1945. Audiences attended A Woman’s Life wearing helmets and air-raid hoods. Indeed, bombing pre-empted the performance so many times that one actress (who didn’t

appear until Act IV) complained she hardly had a chance to perform.[4] In tracing the lives of the title character Nunobiki Kei and her adopted family, the play presents a potted history, albeit a biased one, of Japan’s relationship with China during a crucial period from the 1890s until the 1940s. The story is framed by a prologue and epilogue, both set on New Year’s Day, 1942, as Japan is still celebrating its recent victories at Pearl Harbor and Hong Kong. This segues into Kei’s memory of another celebration thirty-seven years earlier—New Year 1905, noisy with the cries of banzai and gunka (military songs) commemorating Japan’s victory at Port Arthur in the Russo-Japanese War. It was on this day that Kei ran away from an abusive aunt and threw herself on the mercy of the Tsutsumi family, who had made a fortune in an import-export business with China. Both Kei and the Tsutsumis have deep personal connections to China: Kei’s father had died in the First Sino-Japanese War ten years earlier; the head of the Tsutsumi family had established his business there the same time, and his younger brother Shōsuke had served there. (Shōsuke lost not only a leg in the war, but also a fiancée to another man.) The Tsutsumi patriarch has since died and left his business to his widow, Shizu. The family takes a shine to Kei—both Shizu’s sons, Shintarō and Eiji, are smitten by her—and they take her in. Thus ends Act I. In Act II it is four years later, spring 1909. Kei is a canny businesswoman who has proven her worth to the Tsutsumis. Shizu proposes that she take over the family business, on condition that she marry the eldest son, Shintarō, a scholarly sort who, though a great Sinophile, has shown no interest in making money. Kei accepts, but it means that she must abandon her love for the younger brother. The brokenhearted Eiji runs away to China to become, as he calls it, a “continental vagabond” (tairiku rōnin). Act III opens six years later. It is the summer of 1915. Kei and Shintarō have a six-year-old daughter, Chie. She is now a successful businesswoman, whose opinion on China is solicited by politicians and financiers. She has become tough and pragmatic but also a little heartless. Kei and Shintarō engage in a heated debate over Japan’s relationship with China. For Kei, the “China Problem” is “ultimately a matter of money,”[5] one that has nothing to do with politics or ideology; when the Chinese realize that they’ll be so much better off with Japan, they’ll settle down, she says. For the studious Shintarō, however, “no issue between two nations can be resolved without mutual respect for each other’s culture and tradition.”[6] But it’s not the China Problem that is eating Shintarō so much. He suggested to his wife that she betrayed her “own heart for the sake of becoming head of the Tsutsumi family.” [7] Kei has become estranged from both her husband and daughter, and in Act IV they both leave her. It is mid-August 1928. Shintarō has already left his wife and is eking out a living teaching Japanese to Chinese and Indian foreign students. In the meantime, Eiji has married a Chinese woman and has four daughters. He has returned to the Tsutsumi residence where he has been lingering under rather mysterious circumstances. He too argues with Kei over Japan’s involvement with China, insisting that “all foreign countries must take their hands off China.”[8] For Kei, however, China is like a weak little brother that needs Japan’s support and protection. We discover that Eiji has been working in the anti-Japanese resistance in China and has returned home to drum up more support for the cause. (The postwar version explicitly tells

us he is a communist.) Kei betrays him to the secret police and, confronted by her daughter Chie, claims that there are higher ideals than one’s own desires, or even the needs of one’s family. Chie accuses her of losing what little human feelings she had left, and she leaves home to live with her father. Even Shōsuke, who had vowed never to leave her, is shocked by her callousness. It is winter the same year in Act V, sc. i. Eiji has been thrown into prison. In the meantime, his Chinese wife has died, and their four daughters have come to live with Kei. As Inoue Yoshie has noted, the daughters’ names—Kazuko, Kae, Hiroko, and Midori—together stand for the eternal amity of China and Japan and their pan-Asianist ideals.[9] Thus, Eiji’s politics are implicitly portrayed as a misguided attempt to realize a goal better served by the Japanese militarists. Shintarō visits Kei to tell her that Chie has received a marriage proposal. He asks that his wife accept their daughter back in the Tsutsumi residence until she marries because it would not be good for her to be seen living alone with her father. The old couple finds that their old resentments have melted away, and Kei asks her husband if he’d be willing to move back too. Shintarō agrees, but just as he is leaving, he collapses. In the last scene we return to the same setting as in the opening scene. Once again, it is New Year’s Day, 1942. We learn that Shintarō has died, and Shōsuke has avoided the Tsutsumi house ever since Kei betrayed Eiji to the secret police. In the wartime version, Kei tells us that Eiji committed tenkō in 1937 and returned to China to work as a Japanese government agent. (The postwar version keeps him in jail until the liberation of political prisoners.) Kei reflects that When I look back, the disagreement between my husband and myself, the arguments between Eiji and me, prove to be mere indications of our respective ways of loving that mysterious country [China]. [10]

In Chinese dress, Eiji’s four orphaned daughters file in and beg their aunt to tell them the story of her life, but Kei replies: My life starts today. I’ll raise you all to be decent adults and then turn you over to your father. That’s my life. You’ll all become mothers when you go back to China and create a new era. . . . [The soldiers] are also marching to the front to create a new era. My past life is nothing compared with what that new era will be.[11]

The shifting political tides demanded that the play present the war as either glorious victory over “the American and British beasts and devils” (kichiku bei’ei) or the dawn of Americanimported freedom and democracy. In the opening scene of the wartime version, Kei portrays the conflict to her Chinese nieces as a holy, race war: This is a day that was bound to come. December 8 of 1941—well, it’s already last year—the day when we finally had to grapple with the mother of all the wars we’ve had to fight, from the First Sino-Japanese War of the Meiji period to the one going on today. For a long time we’ve heard the approaching footsteps of this inevitable day. This war puts our country at a crossroads. Our country may rise or it may perish. But the war can also be the purifying fire through which Japan will die and be reborn. That, however, is true not just for my country Japan, nor just for China where you were born, but true also for all countries where people live who share with us the same colour eyes and skin. (Act I, sc. i.)[12]

It is passages like these that stick in the craw today, and it is no wonder then that the most

extensive revisions to the play were done on the opening and closing scenes where the propaganda is thickest. The postwar versions—and Guohe Zheng counts at least five of them[13] —differ radically. Act V, sc. i, for example, is variously set in 1937, 1942, or even February 1945. The prologue and epilogue are set in October 1945. In the final scene, Eiji, his leftist principles uncompromised, is freed from prison by the Occupation. He encounters Kei in the ruins of the bombed out Tsutsumi residence. Again the play ends on a hopeful gesture toward a promising future, though one radically different from the version written just months before, prior to Japan’s defeat. Eiji, not Kei, is the spokesperson for postwar optimism: All of Japan is staggering in the first real devastation it has ever experienced. But someday our wounds will heal. The only way that can happen, though, is through the collective efforts of us all. On the site of these ruins, extending as far as the eye can see, something new will grow, something the old Japan has never known.[14]

It is interesting, however, that both wartime and postwar versions engage in the same trope, representing Japan as a kind of phoenix that will rise from the ashes of destruction. Indeed, even the wartime version seems pessimistic about the short-term prospects of Japan while trying to be hopeful about its long-range future. Where the postwar version especially differs is less in its patriotism than its portrayal of women. Eiji goes on to claim that women like Kei will have a role to play in the new Japan: “There are only too many women in Japan who have led lives like yours till now. But the Japanese woman of the future will surely lead a different life.”[15] The postwar version ends with the lovers Kei and Eiji reunited in their autumn years, dancing a quadrille on the ruins of their home. At first glance, the weakest moments of this play, in both wartime and postwar versions, are when it attempts to shoehorn history into a domestic saga and use its characters as mouthpieces for the prevailing politically correct line. Clearly Morimoto himself had serious misgivings about the play and its message. After its first production in April 1945, he returned to Kyoto to convalesce from a relapse of his chronic tuberculosis. By Japan’s capitulation in August of that year, he was mortally ill, and one of his last tasks as a writer was to revise the play for publication by Bunmeisha in October, the month he died. Here too Morimoto had to write with one eye on the censors, this time SCAP’s watchdogs. He wrote Sugimura Haruko to say that he felt caught in an ideological struggle between leftists and the authorities and describes wanting to write a play questioning the nature and existence of freedom; he imagined the end of it as a Sprechtchor of the homeless, locked in a debate between war criminals and those who stood on the sidelines.[16] (One might entertain wishes that Morimoto had written such a conclusion: it would indeed have marked a remarkable digression from the ideology and style of the wartime version of the play’s ending!) In his final months, Sugimura visited him to ask if Bungakuza could stage A Woman’s Life in a commemorative performance for him and he told her how he hated (iya) the play, suggesting that they do another one, So It Is New Year (Kakute shinnen wa, 1936), instead. Morimoto and Sugimura had been lovers over the winter of 1944– 1945; theatre historian Ōzasa Yoshio has written that he wrote A Woman’s Life with her in mind as muse, both model for Kei and star of the play.[17] No doubt Sugimura felt the play belonged as much to her as to Morimoto, and it was literally over his dead body that A Woman’s Life was chosen to represent his work at his commemoration at the Mitsukoshi

Theatre in August 1947. The director for that production, Inui Ichirō, revised Morimoto’s own revisions, mostly (he claims) to meet the approval of the Occupation censors, but other practical and artistic considerations certainly came into play.[18] Years later, the veteran shingeki actor Nakamura Nobuo would cite the constant “fiddling with” the script of A Woman’s Life as one reason for leaving the Bungakuza after more than twenty years in the troupe. Morimoto would have been mortified by the revisions, he said, and since the author was dead, they should have left things well enough alone.[19] Certainly revision to the prologue and epilogue alone was not enough to purge the play of its prewar, militarist apologetics; the play is littered throughout with large chunks of regurgitated history: references, both direct and allusive, to Teddy Roosevelt, Yuan Shikai, Sun Yat-sen, the Kuomintang, World War One, the Twenty-one Demands, the loss of Japan’s claims on Chinese territory at the Treaty of Versailles, labor unrest, the crackdown on leftists with the Peace Preservation Law, the Jinan Massacre (called, in typical Japanese parlance, an “incident”), the Marco Polo Bridge Incident … the list of “incidents” and accidents goes on. As noted, some of this sits uneasily with the domestic drama of Kei and her adoptive family, but it could equally be argued that it was, after all, Morimoto’s mandate as a wartime artist to portray just how political was the personal life of his heroine. The sheer impossibility of completely amputating these propagandistic elements no doubt contributed to Morimoto’s reluctance to see this play performed in any form after his death, much less become (as it has) the work that defines his oeuvre. Indeed, the conflict between the personal and the political is the central drama of this play, and it is for this reason that Inoue Yoshie, no friend to fascists, has nonetheless claimed that the wartime version is artistically a superior work and should be called the “definitive version” (teihon) of the play.[20] This is because, for all the play’s trumpeting of Japan’s noble Asianist mission, it presents a deeply ambivalent and nuanced portrait of its heroine. On the face of things, Kei has done her part diligently to promote Japan’s interests in China, and she had done so under claims that she and Japan are acting in that country’s own best interests. She has done what her adoptive family, the times, and the circumstances demanded of her. But the toll on herself and those around her has been considerable. She loses all the men in her life—her mentor Uncle Shōsuke, her husband Shintarō, and her lover Eiji—and becomes estranged from her daughter. She tries to justify her betrayal of the only man she has truly loved, Eiji, as a politically commendable act, but her family reacts in horror and disgust. Shōsuke tries to defend her toughness by telling Eiji that “it’s extremely unfair to make her do the work when she is needed, then blame her for the effect it has left on her,”[21] but even he (who has secretly loved her all these years) finds her betrayal unconscionable. Kei reflects: What would pass as noble if done by others appears disgusting if done by me. Obnoxious, self-righteous, cold-hearted, and inhuman . . . I’ve gradually come to realize how I look in people’s eyes, but there’s nothing I can do about it. It’s only to be expected that people should run away from me. I’ve come to find myself repugnant.[22]

The woman displays no self-pity or remorse for her actions, but she does reveal in the end a remarkable degree of what can only be called stoic self-loathing, hardly an appropriate stance for the heroine of a propagandistic drama. Indeed, she is rightly a tragic figure who, over the

course of her life, one which parallels and indeed stands as a metaphor for that of Imperial Japan, gradually comes to an awareness of her own fatal flaws as a human being. In retrospect, in both versions, the war is presented as a kind of deus ex machina that saves its heroine from herself by justifying her sacrifice to Japan’s future. A refrain of Shōsuke’s throughout the play has to do with the dubious effect of the best of intentions. “Human beings can’t help but make mistakes,” he says. “Sometimes it almost seems that they go about doing things just so they can.”[23] The second time he directs these words at Kei just after her husband, claiming that she has “betrayed her own heart to become the pillar of the Tsutsumi family,”[24] walks out on her. Kei counters Shōsuke’s remark on failure with a line that has become something of a showstopper for this play: “No one else chose this life for me. It’s the road I chose to walk by myself. If I know it’s mistaken, I’ll change it so it’s not.”[25] This is a line that has been kept in all versions of the play. So memorable was this line that Sugimura Haruko picked it for the title of her autobiography, The Road I Chose (Jibun de eranda michi). Kei denies anyone else having responsibility over the course of her own life and by implication she also denies having made any false steps. She seems assured of her own agency and she takes her responsibility as matriarch of the Tsutsumi family very seriously. It is not a role she was born into, after all, but one she chose. The line in essence captures the appeal of this play, especially to its female audiences. Sugimura recalls how impressed her own landlady was when she saw the 1947 production. Kei’s mettle struck a chord with many women who, during the war, had to take over the reins of both business and domestic affairs when their men went to the front. [26] This appeal, above all, kick-started Bungakuza’s postwar career at a time when its fortunes, like those of the rest of Japan, seemed so uncertain. Like Kei, many Japanese women of that time had been criticized for having lost “that essential quality of a woman”—accused, in short, of losing their femininity precisely when society itself demanded that they take on the role of men as well. This aspect of the play, of the tragic dilemma of a heroine found fault with only because she has sacrificed her own feelings for the sake of family and public service, is closer to the melodramatic territory of the earlier shinpa theatre, which cashed in on plays pitting duty (giri) against the desires of the heart (ninjō). Thwarted love, after all, is the very lifeblood of shinpa domestic tragedies. By the same token, however, there is a perhaps even more tragic blind spot in the heroine Kei’s reasoning. As Inoue Yoshie points out: There are plenty of women in Japan who like Kei have worked incredibly hard, people who have never been able to do what they love. These women convince themselves all the while that the life they’ve lived was in fact the path they chose, that they had to live they way they have—and these are the ones who precisely feel so drawn to Kei.[27]

“The work has become a perfect textbook for convincing women that, under the guise of having chosen their own path, they have to put up with things,” Inoue points out.[28] Kei claims it was her life to choose, yet all the evidence points to social and historical forces determining the course she has taken. After all, it was not her desire to marry Shintarō. The arranged marriages in this play are typically unhappy ones; in contrast, Chie is able to escape her mother’s fate by marrying for love. It is doubly ironic, then, that another matriarch, Shizu, was the one to make

her an offer she couldn’t refuse, not unless she wanted to find herself out on the street again. Kei’s marriage spells success for the family and its business with China, but at a heavy spiritual cost, one that eventually tears the family apart, just as Japan is heading at breakneck speed toward apocalypse. For it must be stressed that, although the framing scenes of this play are set in that brief moment when Japan could deceive itself that it was omnipotent, it was written and first performed at a time when Japan’s imperial fate was a foregone conclusion. A sense of ironic, bitter resignation throws a shadow over the drama that no bright talk of military glory can dispel. True enough, the play portrays women who, on the face of things, display an admirable sense of strength and agency, but the world shown here (as feminist Ueno Shizuko has characterized much of postwar Japanese society) is a “transvestite patriarchy” in which women have internalized and perpetuate the old, male-dominated regime. In the epilogue of the postwar version, Morimoto has Kei finally question the certitudes that had compelled her to be and act the way she did: “I feel as if something had suddenly snapped inside me, something that held my body and soul together. Anything I did would be useless, I feel, but I just can’t stand still and do nothing, either. I’m completely lost.”[29] It is here that Eiji gives his speech about a new Japan rising from the ruins of the past, but there is no indication that his words have provided any solace: I keep asking myself these days: what kind of life have I led? When I was a child, I worked solely for the sake of others, and when others told me to do something, I’d do it. Then all my loved ones abandoned me, saying I should never have done what I did. And when they finally came home, all hell broke loose. I can’t help but wonder, where on earth is that person, the one I call myself?[30]

Again, Eiji tries to give her courage, saying a new Japanese woman will take her place, but Kei isn’t buying it and the future doesn’t solve her own quandary anyway. Only an understanding of the past can do that. There is a certain vacillation, an uncertainty in Morimoto’s treatment of Kei and her fate. The ambiguity of her character, the awakening of her self-consciousness is startlingly modern. This allows the play and its heroine to cross the ideological divide from wartime to peacetime, but in either case she is finally too uneasy and (perhaps like Morimoto himself) too compromised a heroine for propaganda of any kind. NOTES 1. “Onna no isshō wo kataru Sugimura Haruko [Sugimura Haruko Discusses A Woman’s Life].” An interview by Senda Akihiko. Shiatā Ātsu [Theater Arts] 6 (December 1994), Special Issue on Onna no Isshō, pp. 4–10. To date, the only other study of this play in English is Guohe Zheng’s “Reflections of and on the Times: Morimoto Kaoru’s A Woman’s Life,” in David Jortner, Keiko McDonald, and Kevin Wetmore Jr., eds. Modern Japanese Theatre and Performance (Langham, Boulder, New York, Toronto, Oxford: Lexington Books, 2006.) A translation by Zheng of the original version, with the postwar prologue and epilogue included in an appendix, remains unpublished.

2. For a discussion of Morimoto’s early career, see Abe Itaru, “Morimoto Kaoru ron [Discussions on Morimoto Kaoru].” Kindai gekibungaku no kenkyū [Research on Modern Dramatic Literature] (Tokyo: Ōfūsha, 1979), pp. 53–106.

3. Yamamoto Shūji, “Morimoto to Kyoto [Morimoto and Kyoto],” Higeki kigeki [Tragedy and Comedy], October 1965; cited in Abe, 64.

4. The actress was Nitta Eiko, who played Chie. See Sugimura, p. 8.

5. Quotations from the play are taken, with some changes, from A Woman’s Life, translated by Guohe Zheng. Unpublished manuscript. The original text used for the first production in April 1945 was not published until 1994; only one copy, Sugimura’s, survived. Translated from Morimoto Kaoru, Onna no isshō, found in the original Japanese in Theatre Arts (1996-III), pp. 86~134. This quote is from p. 112.

6. Translated from Morimoto Kaoru, Onna no isshō, found in the original Japanese in Theatre Arts (1996-III), pp. 86~134. This quote is from p. 118.

7. Ibid. 8. Ibid., p. 122. 9. Kazuko, Kae, Hiroko, and Midori, respectively stand for Japan, China, East Asia and the evergreen youthfulness of their union; see Inoue Yoshie, “Jiko kettei no gensō: Morimoto Kaoru no Onna no isshō [The Illusion of Self-Determination: Morimoto Kaoru’s A Woman’s Life]” in Kindai engeki no tobira wo akeru [Opening the Door on Modern Theatre] (Tokyo: Shakai Shisōsha, 1999), p. 40.

10. A Woman’s Life, translated by Guohe Zheng. Unpublished manuscript. Translated from Morimoto Kaoru, Onna no isshō, found in the original Japanese in Theatre Arts (1996–III), pp. 86~134. This quote is from p. 133.

11. Ibid., p. 134. 12. Ibid., p. 88. 13. Zheng, op. cit. 14. Act V, sc. I of the postwar version of the play. See Itō Sei, Sugawara Taku, Toita Yasuji, Nakajima Kenzō, Yamada Hajime, eds. Gendai Nihon gikyoku senshū [Selected Contemporary Japanese Plays], Vol. 10 (Tokyo: Hakusuisha, 1956), p. 426.

15. Ibid., p, 427. 16. Cited in Inoue, op., cit., p. 35. Such a conclusion sounds rather like the brilliant, rap-like bakabayashi (fool’s dance) ending to Kurosawa’s film version (1957) of Gorki’s The Lower Depths. The Sprechtchor was a device used in German expressionist theatre, and was adopted by leftist theatre in prewar Japan.

17. In a roundtable discussion, “Nihon kindai engeki to josei [Women and Modern Japanese Theatre]” Shiatā Ātsu [Theatre Arts], op. cit., pp. 38–39.

18. See Inui Ichirō, “Onna no isshō jōen daihon ni tsuite 1 [Regarding the Performance Script of A Woman’s Life: 1],” Shingeki [New Theatre] (January 1961), 8: 3, pp. 114–120, and “Onna no isshō jōen daihon ni tsuite 2 [Regarding the Performance Script of A Woman’s Life: 2],” Shingeki [New Theatre] (April 1961), 8: 3, pp. 54–64.

19. Cited in Inoue, p. 5. Nakamura also appeared in many Ozu films, including as Sugimura’s bean-eating husband in Tokyo Story, and after leaving the Bungakuza in 1969 he became a stock actor for Betsuyaku Minoru, Japan’s Beckett. Sugimura counters that, since he was a rich boy (the son of the president of Komatsu), he could afford political principles. Sugimura, op. cit., p. 10.

20. Inoue, p. 61. 21. A Woman’s Life, translated by Guohe Zheng. Unpublished manuscript. Translated from Morimoto Kaoru, Onna no isshō, found in the original Japanese in Theatre Arts (1996–III), pp. 86~134. This quote is from p. 122.

22. Ibid., p. 126~27. 23. Ibid., p. 105 24. Ibid., p. 118. 25. Ibid., p. 105. Showstoppers (meizerifu, literally, famous or memorable lines) are a rarity in the naturalistic shingeki theatre and more a hangover from the melodramatic shinpa.

26. Sugimura, p. 9. 27. “Nihon kindai engeki to josei,” p. 40. 28. Kindai engeki no tobira wo akeru, p. 61. 29. Act V, sc. I of the postwar version of the play. See Itō Sei et al., eds. Gendai Nihon gikyoku senshū [Selected Contemporary Japanese Plays], Vol. 10, 425.

30. Ibid., p. 427.

Chapter Twelve

Re-acting an Actor’s Reaction to the Occupation: The Beijing Jingju Company’s Mei Lanfang Elizabeth Wichmann-Walczak

Mei Lanfang (1894–1961), who performed the dan (young female) role in jingju (Beijing/Peking “opera”), is the best-known and most widely acclaimed Chinese actor of the twentieth century. Among the many aspects of personal and artistic experience often included in introductions to his life, two that directly involve Japan-China cultural relations are almost always featured: in 1919 he made his first performance tour to Japan, where he was warmly welcomed and highly acclaimed; and less than twenty years later he refused to perform for the Japanese during their occupation of China, retiring from the stage completely and growing a mustache as a concrete symbol of this act of resistance. These two incidents form the basis of Mei Lanfang, an original production by the Beijing Jingju Company that premiered on May 1, 2004, in honor of the 110th anniversary of Mei’s birth, and has been performed a number of times since. I was able to attend the final days of rehearsal and the premiere performance in Beijing, as well as an additional performance in Dec. 2004 at the Fourth National Festival of Jingju Art in Shanghai. Billed as a “jingju symphonic dramatic poem” (jingju jiaoxiang jushi),[1] Mei Lanfang’s unusual directorial concept, performance style, and creative choices provide a highly theatrical and contemporary re-acting of these historical cultural relations. Mei Lanfang is comprised of five sections, termed Movements rather than acts or scenes in keeping with the “symphonic” nature of the production. Each Movement employs one or more aspects of Mei’s own work in its realization, generally including music. Except for the fourth, each takes its name from one of Mei’s representative performance pieces. Throughout, one actor plays Mei Lanfang in life (Mei-in-life), and a second actor plays Mei portraying the characters he created (Mei-in-character). Movement I: “Scatters flowers,” (san hua) short for A Heavenly Maiden Scatters Flowers (Tian nü san hua). Most of Movement I is set in 1919 Japan, and concerns Mei Lanfang’s reception there. After an image of the historical Mei Lanfang in the role of the Heavenly Maiden is projected against a vast sea of clouds, Mei-in-life, wearing a three-piece swallowtailed suit, is surrounded by a large group of admirers in kimono and reporters in Western dress. He warmly responds to their questions, and demonstrates some hand gestures upon request. Indian poet and playwright Rabindranath Tagore then strides on stage and recites a poem dedicated to Mei. Shortly thereafter, the lights go black; sounds of airplanes and bombs are heard, and red fire rises. When the lights come back up, Mei-in-character is performing the

role of the Heavenly Maiden on a small traditional thrust stage; he drops the ribbon used in her dance and with a grim face has his costume removed as the fire and sounds of war continue. Movement II: “Farewell my concubine” (bie ji), short for The Hegemon King Bids Farewell to His Concubine (Bawang bie ji), better known in English as Farewell My Concubine. Movement II takes place during the Japanese occupation of China. It is set in Shanghai, where Mei and his family and troupe have resettled. Mei-in-life and his wife are joined by Mei’s old friend and amateur student Chu Minyi, escorting a Japanese visitor. Remembering the warm welcome he received in Japan, Mei graciously listens to and comments on the visitor’s Meistyle singing of a passage from Farewell My Concubine. Chu then reveals that the visitor is Matsui (C: Songjing), the Commander-in-Chief of the Japanese Imperial Army in the East China Region, who wants Mei to become his teacher. While Mei reacts in shock, Chu reminds him that he has a theatre troupe to support. They are then joined by the elderly actor Yang Xiaolou, who says that after a lifetime of portraying loyalty and righteousness on the stage, he’s not about to eat from the hands of the Japanese, and is returning to his village home in the north despite his age. Yang gives Mei the wire-rimmed jingju stage beard (rankou) he used when they performed Farewell My Concubine together, saying that this time they really are parting, and Mei calls his children out to bid farewell to Yang. Mei-in-character as Yu Ji (the concubine) and Yang-in-character as the Hegemon King perform upstage behind a large, transparent mirror while Yang-in-life gazes at them, sits as if entranced, and then dies, and Mei-in-life weeps beside him. Movement III: Memorial at the River (Ji Jiang), the full name of the play. As Movement III opens Matsui, wearing a Noh-like red lion wig and costume, sings from Farewell My Concubine and dances slowly at center stage in a small, roofed, three-sided room constructed of white paper. A Japanese officer marches down towards him from upstage, appearing as a huge looming shadow. The officer asks what to do with those in Nanjing; Matsui steps out of his costume, polishes a sword while continuing to sing, and then suddenly cries, “Kill!” Lights flash and smoke rises as Matsui’s room is drawn off stage. Then in red light and swirling smoke, Mei-in-character as the Heavenly Maiden dances with two attendant heavenly maidens while Mei-in-life sings of his sorrow. Mei-in-life vows to perform no more; Yang-in-character as the Hegemon King and the ghost of Yang-in-life enter and help Mei-in-life put on the stage beard that Yang gave him. Movement IV: “Grow a beard” (xu xu), the first half of the phrase “xu xu ming zhi,” “grow a beard to evidence one’s will,” the classical phrase used to describe Mei’s symbolic mustache. The two Mei children who later became jingju performers, Mei Baojiu and Mei Baoyue, practice basic jingju skills in front of a tall flight of stairs, and Mei’s mother-in-law prepares to sell family possessions to help Mei meet expenses and maintain his vow. Mei’s principal artistic advisor Qi Rushan arrives and announces that he has successfully found buyers for Mei’s paintings; he and Mei’s wife and mother-in-law reminisce happily about Mei honoring the artist Qi Baishi as his painting teacher, while Qi Baishi appears seated near center stage. Chu Minyi arrives and says that the buyers are Japanese; the Mei women vow to sell no more paintings, and Chu says this will mean performing for the Japanese to survive. All

shun him; he looks for Mei, and when Mei-in-life enters, he is horrified to see that Mei has grown a mustache. Mei and Chu debate, and then break off their long-standing relationship, Mei saying that if he were to perform anything, it would be Resisting the Jin Troops (Kang Jin bing), a clear parallel for resisting the Japanese. Chu, alone on stage, is confronted by ten versions of the leading character in that play, Liang Hongyu, all dressed in identical, full stage armor with swirling flags. Chu is driven off, and the Mei women and Qi Rushan return, distraught—some inoculations make Mei run a dangerously high fever, but he is going to have one to insure that he cannot be forced to perform. A threatening offstage voice orders, “Mr. Mei, please get in the car!” Movement V: “Intoxicated” (zui jiu), short for The Favorite Concubine Becomes Intoxicated (Guifei Zui Jiu), better known in English as The Drunken Beauty. In Movement V the ten Liang Hongyu from Resisting the Jin Troops provide a backdrop for the entire Mei family and members of Mei’s theatre troupe as they gather to see him off. Mei-in-life is dizzy from the shot, but insists that he drink three cups of wine (jiu) with them to mark their parting; first with his wife, then with Qi Rushan, and finally with his qinshi (the musician who plays the leading jinghu, the principal melodic instrument in jingju). Gradually Mei’s family and colleagues disappear, and he enters the world of his characters, first dancing with the ten Liang Hongyus. They then disappear, and Mei-in-life sings and dances with Mei-in-character as Yang Guifei (Yang the Favorite Concubine) from The Drunken Beauty. They are joined by two other Mei characters: the Goddess of the River Luo, from Goddess of the River Luo (Luo shen); and Ma Gu, a celestial maiden from Ma Gu Pays Respects to the Venerable (Ma Gu xian shou). The stage fills with long banners that drop down from above, each depicting a different dramatic character played by Mei Lanfang, and Mei-in-life declares his love for the characters he has created. Rabindranath Tagore enters and recites his poem to Mei again. The curtain closes and then re-opens on Mei’s real-life son, Mei Baojiu (1934–), himself a renowned performer of dan roles. He performs the movements to a passage of recorded Mei-style singing. The two children who portray Mei Baojiu and his sister Mei Baoyue join him; he bows to them, and they exit together. CREATIVE CONCEPT AND PROCESS The initial idea for Mei Lanfang came from Zhang Heping, a former Beijing Department of Culture official then in charge of planning the opening ceremonies for the 2008 Olympics,[2] who is termed the “overall planner” (zong cehua) for Mei Lanfang in programs distributed at performances. As Zhang tells it in his program notes, he was climbing Xiang Shan in Spring 2002, hiking by Mei Lanfang’s tomb, when he conceived of putting Mei on stage as a character in a piece performed by the Beijing Jingju Company’s Mei Lanfang Troupe. That same evening he discussed the idea with director Chen Xinyi, who was excited by it, and the project began. [3] According to Chen, it was also Zhang’s idea to focus on the Japanese occupation, and specifically on Mei’s act of “growing a beard to evidence one’s will.”[4] Chen Xinyi, originally a professional performer in regional xiqu (literally “theatre [of]

song,” often called Chinese “opera” in English),[5] has long been a National Director of the First Rank; she had already directed a number of xiqu plays, two of which had recently won national awards. Within the broad parameters of Zhang’s initial idea, Chen wielded primary creative authority in establishing major aspects of the creative framework, and in making specific creative choices during the creative process. She wanted to use Mei’s plays to form “an inner journey” that would complement and illuminate his actions in life.[6] “I realized that if [the playwright] wrote only about Mei growing a mustache to make his will clear, this was only one wing. We needed to fold in his artistic creations, to make the War of Resistance a background for them. So his art and personal life became the two wings—his artistic spirit and his personal spirit.”[7] The two “wings” were necessary to understand the extent of Mei’s personal and artistic sacrifice. And to this end, Chen believes that “My first big creative act was to make three of Mr. Mei’s representative works the main musical motifs and dramatic themes: The Heavenly Maiden Scatters Flowers, Farewell My Concubine, and The Drunken Beauty.”[8] Chen met with award-winning playwright Sheng Heyu, and “told him what I envisioned… including the use of Movements rather than scenes or acts.”[9] Chen is very proud of her overall concept for the production, a “jingju symphonic dramatic poem.” She believes that it comes from Mei Lanfang’s own artistic work; as a teenager, she attended Mei Lanfang’s performances of Farewell My Concubine and The Drunken Beauty, and they had a profound impact on her. “Mr. Mei . . . [himself] turns history into poetry. He pulls apart and separates, and only expresses a moment. . . . In Farewell My Concubine, he expresses only the emotions of a loving couple with no way out, through song, speech, acting, and dance . . . taking the finest part of his art and concentrating it in some tens of minutes, and you are immediately shocked by it.”[10] And in terms of language, she says “I feel my dramatic poem form was . . . derived from the lyrics of Yang Guifei [the “favorite concubine” of The Drunken Beauty],” who expresses her delight in an anticipated visit from the emperor by singing of the beauty of her surroundings, rather than through realistic narrative description. [11] A dramatic poem “is a poem made out of theatrical elements,” and the Mei Lanfang portrayed in Mei Lanfang therefore “is and is not Mei Lanfang.”[12] According to Chen Xinyi, a dramatic poem requires “the use of succinct, poeticized stage language and the technique of ‘metaphoric imagery’ (bi, xing; literally ‘compare, stir’ or ‘comparison, increase’).”[13] The primary metaphoric imagery in Mei Lanfang is found in the featured plays and characters created by Mei. As Chen sums it up, in Movement I the use of music and other performance elements from A Heavenly Maiden Scatters Flowers represents the peaceful intentions of both Mei and his Japanese hosts in Mei’s post-World War I performance tour to Japan.[14] In Movement II, “Mei Lanfang and Yang Xiaolou don’t want to perform for the Japanese, so they part like the Hegemon King and Yu Ji [his concubine].”[15] Yang also parts with life, and Mei seriously considers formally leaving the stage, accompanied by the music and at times segments of the actual performance of Farewell My Concubine. In Movement III, the Heavenly Maiden appears again, this time as if in mourning for the loss of peace and the death of those massacred in Nanjing, and in Movement IV, the ten identical versions of Liang Hongyu from Resisting the Jin Troops represent the strength of Mei

Lanfang’s spirit of resistance. Movement V then features The Drunken Beauty. The intoxicated Yang Guifei (Yang the Favorite Concubine) is the Emperor’s official favorite, but that is an uncertain state; she becomes intoxicated because the emperor decides to visit another concubine instead, by herself drinking some of the wines for the feast she had ordered for his promised arrival. In Chen Xinyi’s view, “Yang Guifei can sum up Mr. Mei’s artistic world,”[16] and Mei fully conveyed Yang’s inner world by having the character be one third drunk, allowing complete expression of her “seductiveness, her lack of restraint, and her infatuation with and faithfulness to the Tang Emperor’s love.”[17] In Movement V, through intoxication brought on by inoculation and the wine of parting, Mei is similarly able to fully convey his love for Yang Guifei and ultimately for all the characters he created. Yang Guifei “expresses the spiritual love of Mei Lanfang for his artistic creations,”[18] at a point when he may be parting from all that he loves, perhaps forever. Chen Xinyi also describes the style of a dramatic poem as “a refined expression of human emotion, and not an event.”[19] In her directions to National Actor of the First Rank Yu Kuizhi, the actor playing Mei-in-life, she stressed the need for precise, detailed, and complex emotional resemblance “to Mei Lanfang’s [actual] emotions, and not to generalized emotions,” and with him watched documentary films of Mei interacting with a range of people, from foreign dignitaries to family members. [20] The de-emphasis on event that accompanies this specific, multi-layered and reality-based emotional expression is clearly evident in the narrative structure of the piece.[21] For instance, “After the wine is drunk [in Movement V], I feel that the [actual following] events are not important. So at the end we absolutely do not show whether or not the Japanese actually took Mr. Mei into custody. At that point, he has entered his own spiritual world,”[22] and the focus of the piece is entirely upon the interplay of Mei’s emotions. For Chen Xinyi, Mei Lanfang similarly has multiple and highly detailed thematic layers. For instance, in Movements I and III, The Heavenly Maiden Scatters Flowers as metaphoric imagery is intended most fundamentally to evoke images of peace, but it is also meant to convey the state of the artist’s inner world in relationship to the events of his time. “One passage of lyrics is very interesting. ‘Peaceful clouds meander to the far shore of heaven, leaving behind the Kingdom of Myriad Fragrances to experience the world. Many worlds seem like light smoke wafting before one’s eyes,’ and then the original text of the next line is ‘in a blink I’ve arrived at Bibo Cliff,’ but we changed this to ‘in a blink I’ve arrived at Mt. Fuji.’ Which is to say, Mei’s state [of mind and emotion] at that time [his 1919 trip to Japan] was the same as the Heavenly Maiden’s.”[23] In 1919, Mei Lanfang chose The Heavenly Maiden Scatters Flowers for his May 1st premiere in Japan. Just the month before, in the Versailles Treaty settlement concluded at the Paris Peace Conference that followed the end of World War I, Japan’s Twenty-One Demands were affirmed, and Shandong Province, which Japan had taken from Germany during the war, was formally awarded to Japan. Three days after Mei’s Japan premiere, students at Peking University demonstrated against these circumstances, giving rise to the seminal May Fourth Movement. This timing is highly significant to Chen. She relates that as a child in Beijing, Mei Lanfang had seen his grandfather humiliated by the Ba Guo Lian

Jun (literally, “Eight Countries’ United Armies”), which entered the city to suppress the Boxer Rebellion in 1900, and had experienced the “helplessness of the Chinese people of that time. . . . In the eyes of others, Chinese people at that time were men in pigtails and women with bound feet . . . sick, stupid East Asians, anyone could . . . humiliate them. And Mr. Mei was driving the ‘aircraft carrier’ of Chinese culture toward the other shore . . . I feel that Mr. Mei’s artistic ideal, artistic spirit, are all expressed in this.” In Chen’s view, performing this play at his 1919 premiere in Japan was about “building up the self respect of the Chinese people.”[24] And for her, this production of Mei Lanfang has a similar role today. “On the stage, we use the spirit of theatre to affect the audience . . . the Mei Lanfang on our stage . . . is a spiritual ideal that we want to express. I feel that China today, speaking of material and economic conditions . . . has already been recognized. But in the realm of constructing culture . . . it still lags far behind. . . . We are engaged in cultural construction, and I hope that our culture can be equal to China’s position in today’s world. In the first part of the Twentieth Century Mr. Mei drove the ‘aircraft carrier’ to send China’s culture to the other shore—a century later are we unable to do this? On the surface this play tells a story about Mei Lanfang, but it is also about the self-respect of the Chinese people.”[25] As embodied in Chen’s Mei Lanfang, the ultimate metaphoric imagery for that self-respect is the love of the artist for his creations. “[T]he artist creates one image after another of the emotional world that s/he yearns for. . . . The feeling at such a time is extremely lonesome, extremely isolated,”[26] as it must have been for Mei when he forswore the stage. In terms of each individual movement, the relevant metaphoric imagery relates to the specific circumstances portrayed in that section; cumulatively, however, the resonances of these several Mei plays and characters directly reference the relationship of Mei Lanfang to his creations, and by extension of all artists to the results of their creative work. And in the course of the full performance, the audience is taken progressively deeper into that relationship. By Movement V, Mei-in-life directly interacts with his characters, and tells them of his feelings for them, while the audience shares in their remarkable spiritual interconnection. In many ways, Chen’s presentation of Mei Lanfang as an icon symbolizing Chinese national culture is similar to the presentation of Mei in the Republican era as described by Joshua Goldstein.[27] But Chen’s presentation is in specific relationship to Japan, primarily during the War of Resistance, and for her a crucial aspect of Chinese national culture, especially in that circumstance, was clearly articulated by playwright Sheng Heyu: “Chinese people have the character of water; water naturally flows down hill, always finds its own level . . . whether insignificant or mighty . . . in a river, all are taken in and held. This has formed our ethnic nature, and it is the finest embodiment of Mei Lanfang’s nature. Mei Lanfang would not perform for the Japanese... and what was relied on wasn’t tough confrontation.”[28] Rather, in Chen’s words, Mei’s resistance “was an artist’s resistance. . . . The playwright used a passage of Laozi as the core of this play . . . ‘the highest good is like water,’ [which] is the core of the image of Mei Lanfang.”[29] The historical context is clearly central to this imagery. CREATIVE CHOICES IN RELATION TO HISTORY

Chen Xinyi is adamant that a dramatic poem can and must “deal very freely with history.”[30] Nonetheless, she “spent a year and a half seriously seeking out and studying materials about Mei Lanfang . . . and the War of Resistance.”[31] Perhaps because of this apparent dichotomy, in Mei Lanfang the relationships between what Chen calls “the real and the imaginary”[32] also provide resonating metaphoric imagery. Several men who were real friends and colleagues of Mei appear in Mei Lanfang as important supporting characters, including Qi Rushan, Qi Baishi, Yang Xiaolou, Rabindranath Tagore, and Chu Minyi. According to Chen Xinyi, Chu Minyi “really existed, he was Mei’s friend and fan. They were very close, but Chu became a traitor to China, so Mei broke off relations with him.”[33] Since this is essentially what happens in the production, in these basic terms his portrayal can be considered real. And in similarly broad terms, Rabindranath Tagore, Qi Rushan, Qi Baishi, and Yang Xiaolou are also real. Tagore admired Mei, and wrote the poem that the Tagore character recites in Chinese translation at the end of the first part of Movement I, and again at the end of the final Movement. In Tagore’s own English translation, it reads: You are veiled, my beloved, in a language I don’t know, As a hill that appears like a cloud, behind its mask of mist[34]

But the real Tagore met Mei in Beijing in 1924, not Tokyo in 1919, and wrote the poem some time later than that. In the spirit of her dramatic poem concept, Chen Xinyi wanted a nonJapanese foreigner to appear, to convey the sense of Mei’s international fame, “a great artist who would express understanding of Mei in one brush stroke.” After considering Stanislavsky, Brecht, and Meyerhold, and actually signing an actor to play Charlie Chaplin, she and Sheng Heyu decided on Tagore, since “he is a great Asian artist, with the quality of Asian culture, which makes him easier to portray within jingju . . . also, Indian culture and the Heavenly Maiden are related, many of her hand gestures having originated in India.”[35] Tagore’s appearance is both practical and metaphoric, suggesting the interrelationship of Indian, Chinese, and Japanese culture as well as Mei’s international stature, an important aspect of his iconic status.[36] Qi Baishi was Mei’s friend and teacher, Qi Rushan his friend and artistic advisor, Yang Xiaolou his friend and colleague. But Qi Baishi was in Beijing throughout the entire Japanese occupation, where he “led a secluded life and would have nothing to do with the invaders.”[37] Yang Xiaolou “created plays featuring patriotic martial heroes” in response to early Japanese aggression, and died in Beijing in 1938, just a few months after the occupation began.[38] And Qi Rushan did not approve of Mei leaving Beijing, where he himself stayed, precipitating a permanent break in their more than twenty-year association when Mei moved to Shanghai.[39] In Chen’s view, bringing these men together as characters in Movements II and IV is appropriate because “all were resisting Japan.” Their resistance enhances the resonance of Mei’s “growing a beard to evidence his will,” suggesting that the dignity of great artists requires such acts. And their presence allows Chen to create other supporting layers of metaphoric imagery, as when Yang Xiaolou gives the child Mei Baojiu a brief ride on his back

while they are saying farewell. Yang and Mei roomed with the same family as children, and the older Yang took Mei to school, often “astride his back,” a well-known image.[40] Longstanding bonds between artists are thereby evoked in this metaphoric stage action, and the pain of this final farewell intensified. There is clearly also some distance between Mei’s own activities during the occupation years and their portrayal in Mei Lanfang, although historical accounts themselves do not agree on all the details. According to two generally reliable sources, A.C. Scott and the Mei Lanfang Museum, Mei moved his family to Shanghai in 1932. Fighting broke out in Beijing in 1937, and Mei again moved his family and troupe, this time to Hong Kong in early 1938, where Mei performed in May.[41] Scott reports that Mei left the stage right after his May 1938 performances, when Japan attacked the Fujian coast.[42] The Mei Lanfang Museum reports that Mei left the stage in 1941, and “grew a beard to evidence his will” at that time.[43] Scott does say that Mei was repeatedly asked to perform by Japanese military authorities in 1941, so the museum may very well be correct, Mei might have grown his mustache at that time to avoid performing. “Their requests were always polite and equally politely declined.”[44] In 1942 Mei was summoned to Canton by a Japanese general, and according to Scott was determined to refuse but expected to be shot for it; he sold his camera through a friend to provide some funds for his family. But Mei was asked to attend a celebration instead, and told that he could return to Shanghai.[45] Mei and his family then moved to Shanghai that same year.[46] Scott adds that in Shanghai, “The Japanese did not trouble him further and although they always hoped he would relent, they never used any coercion. It was a remarkable proof of their respect for an artist.”[47] But Wu Zuguang, a scholar and film director who worked with Mei Lanfang in the 1950s, presents somewhat different general circumstances and timing, saying that Mei grew his mustache “in enemy occupied Shanghai,” where “he coped with all kinds of harassments. He pawned and sold his belongings to support his family and impoverished friends and managed to earn a living through painting. He retired from the stage for precisely the eight long years of Japanese occupation without bowing to the wishes of the enemy.”[48] In his discussion of Mei’s life during the Japanese occupation (1937–1945), Wu probably exaggerates the length of Mei’s retirement from the stage. And he does not mention Hong Kong at all, although the facts indicate that Hong Kong is where Mei spent more than half of that eight-year period. By ignoring the tale of multiple moves and misunderstood circumstances recounted by Scott and the Mei Lanfang Museum, Wu Zuguang’s simplified version of events reads more like the description of a national hero. And it is also closer to the scenario followed in Mei Lanfang, where a succinct description of Mei’s travels is given in only two lines of the lengthy aria Mei’s wife sings at the beginning of Movement II, before Mei-in-life joins her: Having left Beiping we passed through many places, Hoping once in Shanghai for Peach Blossom haven.[49]

“Many places,” however, does not deny the time in Hong Kong, as does Wu’s description—it simply directs attention elsewhere. In the context of Chen’s dramatic poem, the structure of metaphoric imagery is complemented by succinct, streamlined narrative; too much narrative

detail equates with documentary realism. The chronology of Mei’s life during the occupation is essentialized into what for Chen are the most redolent and potentially resonant elements, the emotional implications of his act of resistance and their relationship to the experience of the artist. The Japanese occupation of China and the Nanjing Massacre remain vividly real even today for many Chinese. Japanese forces laid siege to the then-Chinese capital on Dec. 10, 1937, and Nanking [Nanjing] fell three days later, opening the door to a six-week campaign of pillaging and executions of unarmed civilians. China says at least 300,000 people were killed. Japan, which describes the events as the “Nanjing Incident,” says that the deaths were a fraction of that. Some Japanese deny the massacre altogether.[50] Officially, “the International Military Tribunal of the Far East estimated that more than 260,000 noncombatants died at the hands of Japanese soldiers at Nanking.”[51] Iris Chang reports that “[t]he brunt of the blame for the Nanking atrocities fell on Matsui Iwane.” Initially Commander-in-Chief of Japanese forces in the Shanghai-Nanjing region, and Commander-in-Chief for the entire Central China Expeditionary Forces by the time of the Nanjing Massacre, Matsui was certainly an historical personage. But apparently the real Matsui was in many ways very different from the Matsui portrayed in Mei Lanfang, differences going well beyond those of time and place. In Chang’s words, “historians have suggested that Matsui may have served as the scapegoat for the Rape of Nanking. A sickly and frail man suffering from tuberculosis, Matsui was not even in Nanking when the city fell.”[52] Elsewhere she describes him as “a devout Buddhist from a scholarly family,”[53] and says that before Japanese troops entered Nanjing, Matsui gave orders for an occupation that would “sparkle before the eyes of the Chinese and make them place confidence in Japan.”[54] In spite of this, a secret order saying “Kill all captives” did go out from the headquarters of another commander, Prince Asaka Yasuhiko, an uncle of the emperor, who was theoretically under Matsui’s command.[55] Because of his illness, Matsui did not enter Nanjing until four days after it was taken, and when he “began to comprehend the full extent of the rape, murder, and looting in the city, he showed every sign of dismay.” He issued a press release offering sympathy “to a million innocent people,” publicly rebuked three hundred officers and commanders including the prince for the “orgy of violence,” and was sent back to Shanghai, where “he confided his worries to the New York Times, and even told a foreign correspondent that ‘the Japanese army is probably the most undisciplined army in the world today.’”[56] When asked about the extensive differences between the real Matsui and Matsui as portrayed in Mei Lanfang, Chen Xinyi explains that “the character in the play is part history, part imagination,”[57] and that in Mei Lanfang, “the Japanese characters cannot be realistic.”[58] As he makes his first entrance, in Movement II, Matsui is singing softly about Mei Lanfang moving Japanese audiences with just one song. “Why this arrangement? I don’t want him to be a Japanese devil. . . . He must be just a fan of Mei, simply and utterly enchanted by Mei Lanfang . . . truly respectful [as in the final line of his initial entrance song, when he sings the words], ‘My island nation to this moment remembers Mei-san.”[59] This clearly relates to her vision of artists sharing a desire for peace. “If there were no war, the Chinese

and Japanese cultures could connect beautifully . . . that is why Matsui is a Mei fan. This is imaginary, this imaginary Matsui loved art, and probably could sing nō.” But there is another edge to this metaphor. In Chen’s view, the cultural connection between Japan and China can be made with ease at least in part because “much art in Japan came from China.”[60] The Matsui in Movement II is almost a supplicant. And in Chen’s vision, Matsui’s state of being somehow smaller, lesser, than Mei is taken further in Movement III, and related to Japan as a whole. “The Japanese have no room, they needed to expand, so they became an empire. And Matsui enters in a little cage to express this —in such a little space, he still wants to do something repeatedly, to sing nō.”[61] “This is the technique of ‘metaphoric imagery.’ The Hegemon King and Mei Lanfang are both imprisoned [by their historical circumstances], and Japan is imprisoned by smallness.”[62] But having undergone training in Kabuki and to a lesser extent in Nō movement, I was initially disturbed by Matsui’s performance in the “cage.” He does not sing nō, he sings jingju, and his movement seems to incorporate additional, more disparate cultural influences. The actor playing Matsui had no teacher for his “nō” movement; Chen reports that they looked at reference material, including some video and film, and otherwise relied on their memories of live performances. [63] In the portrayal of Matsui, as in the costumes designed for the Japanese characters, one finds the memory of another culture, modified over time by the aesthetics of those doing the remembering. And here too, the results are somewhat problematic when viewed as an actual Japanese theatre form and an aficionado of it, but have real emotional meaning when viewed in relation to Chinese culture, especially as seen through Chen’s interconnected metaphoric imagery. In the creation of Mei’s inner world, however, multi-layered, reality-based precision is evident, similar to that required of Yu Kuizhi’s emotional resemblance in portraying Mei Lanfang. The three plays selected as featured metaphoric imagery did in fact have special significance for the real Mei Lanfang. Mei selected The Heavenly Maiden Scatters Flowers for his premiere performance at Tokyo’s Imperial Theatre in 1919, as discussed above, and he chose The Drunken Beauty for his closing performance in that venue. According to the scholar Mei Shaowu, another one of Mei’s sons, in 1956 Mei Lanfang “made his… most meaningful visit to Japan,” one that “marked a major event in the cultural exchange between the two countries. At the time, diplomatic relations between China and Japan had still to be restored. Father went there on a mission entrusted to him by . . . Premier Zhou Enlai, to forge new friendly ties between the two countries.”[64] On this tour, Mei Lanfang performed in Tokyo, Osaka, Kyoto, Fukuoka, and Nagoya. He had created over a hundred characters in approximately as many plays, but for this tour he chose to present precisely the three plays that serve as metaphoric imagery in Mei Lanfang: The Heavenly Maiden Scatters Flowers, Farewell My Concubine, and The Drunken Beauty.[65] Chen Xinyi’s precise, detailed, reality-based approach to Mei Lanfang’s inner world can also be found in her adherence to the words Mei actually spoke in crucial situations, further increasing the focus in Mei’s thoughts and feelings as metaphoric imagery. In jingju this is quite a challenge, especially in song, since lyrics are written in couplets of equal-length lines,

usually seven or ten characters to the line, with conventionalized rhyme throughout. Nonetheless, Chen explains that in her first meeting with playwright Sheng Heyu, “I told him to take Mei’s actual words from his arrival speech and turn them into lyrics.”[66] “‘I saw doves flying across the accumulated snow of Mt. Fuji, a small stream dripping with sunlight,’ the passage that begins this way. . . . I said . . . we don’t need to change the original words of this passage, just use it as it is. And afterwards when working with the composer, I also told him that for this passage, don’t talk about proper rhyme and form, don’t change a word, just sing it as it is.”[67] Among them, Chen, Zhu Shaoyu the composer, and Yu Kuizhi the actor playing Mei-in-life succeeded in making this sung passage a quietly but deeply joyous, emotional high point of Movement I; it provided an exceptional contrast for the later pain of Mei’s act of resistance. For the impact of that act of resistance on Mei’s inner world, Chen has structured a momentby-moment specificity of emotional expression. “We cannot fully imagine the implications of growing a mustache for a [male] dan performer, and Mr. Mei grew a mustache at his artistic peak. . . . Shortly before the third act concludes, he slowly puts on the Hegemon King’s beard . . . and then sings, from ‘Strength that can pull up a mountain, spirit that can enwrap the world . . .’ through ‘but cannot stop tears like torrential rain.’ The inner monologue is, ‘At more than forty years of age, I’ve spent almost a life time of effort, with great difficulty finally attaining the beauty of femininity, and now I must completely discard this feminine beauty. Do I want to portray men? Is it necessary for me to become a Hegemon King? All right, I’ll change, I’ll change . . .’ A man who with a man’s physique has spent a lifetime enriching his inner life, looking inwardly for the beauty of femininity, in the moment when he decides to grow a beard, he must discard it all. He becomes a male performer, becomes a Hegemon King, and his spirit can enwrap the world. But at this point it is still not over. At the greatest climax, completely motionless, the entire stage quiet, himself also quiet, suddenly come ‘tears like torrential rain.’ After he completes this change, he himself cannot bear it, is in extreme pain.”[68] REALIZATION Chen Xinyi was determined to make Mei Lanfang a theatrical work that could represent China as a major, contemporary presence on the international stage. It is therefore not surprising that she considered casting very carefully. In jingju as in all forms of xiqu, casting means starting with a careful consideration of role type. Because Mei Lanfang was a dan performer, casting renowned laosheng actor Yu Kuizhi to play Mei-in-life provided real challenges for the actor, and an initial shock at his first passage of laosheng-based singing for many critics and audience members, including myself. However, the actual Mei Lanfang was of course not a young woman, so the choice of role type makes realistic sense. Similarly, young male dan performers were quite rare in 2004, and audiences were not accustomed to seeing them in major national productions. But the decision to have Mei-on-stage played by Mei Baojiu’s personal disciple Hu Wen’ge, a national pop star since the late 1990s, made excellent theatrical sense not only because Mei was and Hu is a male performer of the young female

role, but because both share the Mei style as well as visible positions in popular culture. In almost all other cases, the role types of the actors selected to play other singing roles are immediately logical in the context of jingju. But the casting of Matsui initially surprised me. Since the character is the commander-in-chief of the Japanese Imperial Army in the East China Region, I expected a wusheng (martial male) or a hualian (bravura, painted-face male) interpretation. Instead, this character—presented in Mei Lanfang as the sole initiator of the Nanjing Massacre—is portrayed by Li Hongtu, a xiaosheng (young male role) actor. The use of this role type gives the character a youthful appeal, and enhances the initial impression that Matsui has come to Mei Lanfang in peace, as a devotee of Chinese culture and Mei’s art. In practical terms, this role type facilitates the dan role singing undertaken by the character, since xiaosheng, like dan, use a falsetto voice. As metaphoric imagery, the youth and falsetto voice of the role type reinforce the initial image of Matsui as a supplicant to Mei, and thereby the larger imagery of Japan as “imprisoned by smallness.”[69] Furthermore, the role type also indicates a fundamental immaturity and potential for rash behavior, suggesting that Matsui’s decision to “Kill!” is at least in part the impetuous act of an ill-governed teenager rather than the considered decision of a ruthless adult. This casting seems to provide a potential basis for understanding and perhaps even ultimately forgiving the actions attributed to Matsui, and may reflect the fact that the mid-to-late 2000s was a period of economic and political rapprochement between China and Japan. The music for Mei Lanfang, composed by National Composer of the First Rank Zhu Shaoyu, similarly makes new applications of jingju conventions for significant thematic reasons. For instance, dan role singing elements are included in the laosheng music sung by Mei-in-life, and this intra-jingju type of hybridity appears in other aspects of the sung music as well. There is frequent quotation, especially from the pieces used as metaphoric imagery, but also from the revolutionary model (geming yangban) jingju of the Cultural Revolution era, which I find both striking and appropriate. For instance, when Mei appears at the top of a tall flight of stairs and reveals his newly grown mustache to Chu Minyi, traces of sung music performed by the hero Guo Jianguang in Shajiabang can be heard, musically indicating the fundamental heroism of Mei’s act. Other musical aspects of the revolutionary model jingju found in Mei Lanfang include the symphonic orchestra and the extensive use of music unrelated to jingju song. The Western-style operatic chorus that at times accompanies the symphonic orchestra takes these Western-inspired elements a step further, alluding to Mei’s cosmopolitanism and international status. Musical intertextuality and hybridity serve as metaphoric imagery throughout, enriching the realization of Chen Xinyi’s concept for Mei Lanfang. Among other things, in the context of the War of Resistance, music that remembers the model revolutionary jingju reminds its listeners of the dramatic ways in which the Japanese met defeat in many of those works. The overall staging of Mei Lanfang also relates directly to Chen’s conceptual, structural, and stylistic emphasis on metaphoric imagery. And it clearly reflects her implied desire to give this symphonic dramatic poem an imposing presence, to make it an “aircraft carrier” transporting a major, contemporary Chinese artistic vision to the world. Staging effects are opulent, and set pieces are few and striking. For instance, in Movement I, red rose petals cover

the floor around Mei Lanfang and his admirers; that red is then ironically echoed in the red fire and smoke of war that lap the traditional stage which appears at the end of the movement. The mirror in Movement II, the only set piece for that section, is oversized, set in a massive wooden stand, and pierced and cracked by an also-oversized bullet hole. Chen says that she chose a mirror because of its importance to an actor; the bullet damage of course “expresses the war of that time. . . . But the image is not realistic, it’s expanded [kuoda] by the scenic artist.”[70] And the imagery of Movement III is expanded even more. The small white paper “cage” at the center of a large, unlit black stage is itself highly theatrical; the harsh white backlights first produce a soldier’s huge looming shadow and, after Matsui cries out “Kill!,” then “shoot” directly at the audience, flashing on and off, quite literally—and exceptionally— striking. Immediately thereafter, lightning strikes violently down from above, leaving what appear to be cracks in the sky. When the scene shifts to the bank of the Yangzi River, with Mei and the Heavenly Maiden mourning the deaths in Nanjing, a huge red moon appears and casts red light through those cracks in the sky; red light and swirling smoke fill the stage, obscuring the floor, and autumn leaves fall from far above. Nature and the spiritual world are seen reacting to what Matsui in his youthful impetuousness has wrought. Even costume design conveys metaphoric imagery. For instance, Chu Minyi wears Zhongshan zhuang (lit. “Zhongshan clothing”), the jacket style originally popularized by Sun Zhongshan (Sun Yat-sen), the leader of China’s 1911 revolution, respected in Chinese society throughout the world. On the surface this appears to align Chu with an inclusive Chinese nationalism. But in present-day China, this type of clothing, which is better known in the West as a “Mao jacket,” may also have connotations of both rigid conservatism and a change from positive to negative behavior, a metaphor appropriate for a character who has been a great friend to Mei, but whose collaborationism compels Mei to break off all ties. In my view, the costumes for Mei’s Japanese admirers in Movement I, and for Matsui in Movements II and III, then serve as metaphoric imagery in a different and more complex way. Performance programs refer to Mei’s admirers in Movement I as “male and female Kabuki [performers].”[71] Chen herself sometimes refers to Movement I and its Japanese characters as “Kabuki,” and says that the costumes are based on a photograph of Mei with kabuki, shingeki, and nô performers taken at a welcoming reception in Tokyo in 1919.[72] I have not seen her particular photo, but am familiar with the circumstance in which it was taken, since photos of Mei posing for photographers at that event are available in several published sources, and have closely examined the photos to which I have access.[73] It appears to me that at least one and probably three of those greeting Mei Lanfang are kabuki onnagata (male performers of female roles) in full costume and makeup. However, the room is a very large one, containing well over eighty people. Several are women in formal kimono, but the great majority are men in western suits, most of them dark formal suits with swallowtail coats similar to the one Mei himself is wearing in the photo. In Movement I, however, only Mei wears formal western dress, while the two or three Japanese reporters wear more casual western-style clothes. The approximately twenty other characters greeting Mei all wear what I think of as an “interpretive version” of traditional Japanese dress and/or Kabuki costume. Many women and some men are

dressed in exaggerated versions of Japanese clothing for women and female Kabuki characters —soft, very loosely worn versions of extremely colorful kimono and obi (sashes)—and wear complex black wigs decorated with an abundance of flowers, some in large clusters falling from near the tops of their heads to their shoulders, and others with large, long tassels in the same position. Some performances have also included several men dressed in a softened, more flowing version of kamishimo (traditional formal dress for men), including both the kataginu upper garment and the wide hakama pants, with top-knotted skull caps on their heads. In keeping with Chen Xinyi’s metaphoric imagery for this Movement, the overwhelming presence of characters clearly intended to represent performing artists of some sort deepens the sense that Mei and these artists of Japan are actively pursuing peace. Moreover, since all of these costumes seem to be hybridized versions of the Japanese originals, modified by the aesthetics of traditional Chinese theatrical costumes, they have emotional meaning when viewed in relation to Chinese culture, but are somewhat problematic when viewed as actual Japanese dress and costume. The overall effect is that of the memory of another culture, modified over time by the aesthetics of the one remembering. The only Japanese character in Mei Lanfang that is a major, singing role is Matsui. He wears a simple dark robe and jacket in Movement II, which in overall silhouette rather closely resembles a fuller version of Mei’s traditional Chinese long robe and jacket (changpao magua) for this section. Matsui’s jacket is a large, loose version of a haori and has traditional crests (mon) on the sleeves. Taken together, this costume also has the aesthetic effect of resembling the memory of another culture, rather than being a contemporary study of it. And the similarity of Matsui’s costume to Mei’s helps to establish a possible artistic link between the two characters at the beginning of the section while creating a resonance with the Japanese artists who welcomed Mei in 1919. In Movement III, Matsui wears a smaller version of a long red “lion wig,” and is initially dressed in what appears to be a softer, more flowing version of a nō-like costume for shosagoto, with a happi coat and wide, stiff ōguchi pants over a kimono. The costume seems overly large, making Matsui appear somewhat like a child in adult’s clothing. As soon as the officer announces that he has come to make a report, Matsui rips open and steps out of the nō-like costume, and stands dressed in wide, jodhpur-like military pants and high black boots. Still in the nō-like long red wig, he takes up a twentiethcentury military sword. While some vestiges of traditional artistic culture still cling to him, they are blood-red, and enhance the menace of what is now predominantly a military figure of the modern era. This highly theatrical image also resonates strongly with history, both realistically and symbolically. FINAL THOUGHTS Chen Xinyi believes that “Mei Lanfang is not a Chinese theatre piece, it is an international theatre piece in Chinese.”[74] And although the piece is redolent with and in many ways defined by Chinese culture, in terms of theatrical style and conception I certainly understand what she means. The complexity of her overlapping and interrelated metaphoric imagery

produces a theatrical piece that is certainly not narrative centered, the normal structure for jingju plays, both traditional and newly created. Without question, Chen’s Mei Lanfang has substantial postmodern elements, and I know of no jingju precedent for this. Its creative process was more concerned with the construction of metaphoric imagery than with scripted text. While narrative is used, it is also repeatedly broken, thoroughly imagistic, and several times slips away entirely, especially toward the end of the piece. Standard modes of presentation and perception are countermanded in performance, including fundamental modes of jingju character portrayal in the case of Mei and his artistic creations. Different performance textualities and forms are used, often simultaneously. And the production creates its own self-conscious atmosphere, one that moves away from surface reality toward the reality of the artist’s inner world in relationship to great extremes of Japan-China cultural relations. Most significantly, Mei Lanfang is clearly associated with cultural memory on many levels, from the repeated and varied memories of another culture, modified over time by the aesthetics of those doing the remembering, to the temporally and spatially altered memories of an earlier jingju world, to the potently present memories of Mei’s creations. Marvin Carlson writes of the “halo effect” of celebrity and its role in theatrical cultural memory,[75] and that effect is certainly present in Mei Lanfang, in several permutations: the performance company includes a number of contemporary jingju celebrities, as epitomized by Yu Kuizhi, the actor who plays Mei-in-life and is perhaps the leading laosheng in China today; Hu Wen’ge, the actor who plays Mei-in-character, is a real life pop star, whose teacher is Mei Lanfang’s son Mei Baojiu, a renowned dan actor in his own right; Mei Baojiu himself appears on stage at the end of the play, gesturing beautifully to a passage of recorded Mei-style singing, leaving the audience to speculate—is it Mei Baojiu’s student Hu Wen’ge, Mei Baojiu, or Mei Lanfang himself that they are hearing? Chen does not give us the answer, but this and other unanswered questions, including that of the immediate outcome of Mei’s summons by the Japanese, help to bring the import of the thematic material into the present. As the signature Mei-style sound and the cumulative power of Chen’s potent metaphoric imagery fill the auditorium, Mei’s iconic presence does too, reverberating throughout the present performance company, the artists and times being portrayed, and the collective members of the audience. Aleida Assman has said that “[c]ollective memory simplifies, doesn’t tolerate ambiguity, reduces events to archetypes, narratives to myths—it removes historic experience from concrete conditions to become timeless myths, passed on as long as they are needed.”[76] In this sense, Mei Lanfang is very much like collective memory—events are certainly reduced in number and essentialized, and emphasis is directed from concrete conditions to the inner world of the creative artist, assailed by the times but ultimately timeless. The thematic dynamics of that inner world, woven from Chen’s interrelated metaphoric imagery, begin with the desires of Chinese and Japanese artists for peace; its environment and textures come from the artist’s 1919 visit to Japan in pursuit of peace and Chinese self-respect, and the blossoming of that self-respect during the War of Resistance; the entire theatrical piece becomes a “cultural construction” of that self-respect in the 2000s; and the love of the artist for his creations

emerges as the primary metaphoric imagery for that self-respect. In the jingju symphonic dramatic poem Mei Lanfang, the resonation of imagery intermingles the real, semi-real, and imaginary, historical, and personal memory, and acts of creation and portrayal. Chen Xinyi set out to reveal the spirit of an artist and a nation in resonance with Japan-China cultural relations and the War of Resistance. In doing so, she has created an allusively rich, symphonic work of metaphoric imagery which truly exemplifies the words of Walter Benjamin: “It is not that what is past casts its light on what is present, or what is present its light on what is past; rather, image is that wherein what has been comes together in a flash with the now to form a constellation” of meaning.[77] Such imagery illuminates the perceiver, as well as the parameters of the perceived. NOTES 1. This and all other translations, except as otherwise noted, are my own. 2. Chen Xinyi, telephone interview by author. Shanghai and Honolulu, 24 November, 2007. 3. Jingju jiaoxiang jushi Mei Lanfang [Jingju symphonic dramatic poem Mei Lanfang], 2004, program printed in May for premiere performances at Beijing’s Chang’an Theatre and in December for performances at Shanghai’s Meiqi Theatre as part of the Fourth National Festival of Jingju Art.

4. Cheng Bofeng, “Xunzhao ‘ju shi’ pin ge—yu Chen Xinyi daoyan tan jingju ‘jiaoxiang jushi’ Mei Lanfang de chuangzuo” [“Seeking the quality and style of a ‘dramatic poem’—discussing the Jingju ‘symphonic dramatic poem’ Mei Lanfang with director Chen Xinyi”], in Xin Juben [New plays]), vol. 3 (March, 2004): p. 3.

5. Jingju is one of approximately three hundred forms of xiqu, the indigenous Chinese conception of theatre. In the early twentieth century, Western-style theatre was introduced to China via Japan, and came to be known as huaju, “spoken drama.” Because both xiqu and huaju are “theatre” in its broad sense, a third word, xiju (literally “theatre [of] drama”), came to serve as the Mandarin Chinese generic for all forms of theatre, both those in China and those found internationally.

6. Chen, 24 November, 2007. 7. Cheng, “Xunzhao”, p. 3. 8. Chen Xinyi, interview by author. Beijing, 29 April, 2004. 9. Chen, 24 November, 2007. 10. Cheng, “Xunzhao”, p. 4. 11. Ibid., p. 5. 12. Chen, 4 December, 2004. The term “dramatic poem” (jushi) is not in fact original with Chen Xinyi. Zhang Geng, one of the most important xiqu theorists of the twentieth century, developed what is termed the “dramatic poem theory” (jushishuo) to illuminate the core aesthetic values of traditional xiqu, including the relationships between dramatic text and stage performance, and between character portrayal, dramatic action, and daily reality.

13. Cheng, “Xunzhao”, p. 5. When asked what she meant by “bi, xing,” Chen Xinyi paraphrased the term as “metaphor/analogy (biyu)” and further explained it as “implied meaning (yuyi)” saying that the bi, xing technique is intended to “expand meaning (kuoda yisi)” (Chen, 11 November, 2007). In classical Chinese literary criticism, bi and xing are important terms representing fairly complex concepts. Discussing an early sixth-century treatise, Stephen Owen translates them as “comparison” and “affective image,” respectively. (Stephen Owen, Readings in Chinese Literary Thought [Cambridge, Massachusetts, and London, U.K.: Council on East Asian Studies, Harvard University; distributed by Harvard University Press, 1992], pp. 256–57).

14. Chen, 29 April, 2004. 15. Chen Xinyi, telephone interview by author. Wuhan and Honolulu, 17 November, 2007. 16. Cheng, “Xunzhao”, p. 8.

17. Chen, 29 April, 2004. 18. Ibid. 19. Cheng, “Xunzhao,” p. 4. 20. Ibid., pp. 9–10. 21. In theatrical theory and criticism, “narrative” is a general term referring to storytelling/storyline and traditional definitions of plot. The conceptualization of “narrative” as opposed to “non-narrative” performance is similar to that of “figurative” as opposed to “abstract” painting and sculpture.

22. Cheng, “Xunzhao,” p. 6. 23. Ibid., p. 5. 24. Ibid., pp. 4–5. 25. Ibid., p. 10. 26. Ibid., p. 8. 27. Joshua Goldstein, Drama Kings: Players and Publics in the Re-creation of Peking Opera, 1870–1937 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2007), pp. 264–80.

28. He Lulu and Cai Daizheng, “Jingpin gongcheng 30 jin 10 qidong, Sheng Heyu zui kan hao Mei Lanfang” (Finest works project selecting 10 from 30 begins, Sheng Heyu most favors Mei Lanfang), in Beijing Morning News (19 September, 2006), available online at http://ent.sina.com.cn. The translation of this phrase from the Daddejing is taken from Jia-fu Feng and Jane English, ed. and trans., Laotsu: Tao Te Ching (New York: Vintage Books, 1989), Chapter 8.

29. Cheng, “Xunzhao,” p. 9. 30. Chen, 17 November, 2007. 31. Cheng, “Xunzhao,” p. 3. 32. Chen, 24 November, 2007. 33. Ibid. 34. Wu Zuguang, Huang Zuolin, and Mei Shaowu, Peking Opera and Mei Lanfang: A Guide to China's Traditional Theatre and the Art of Its Great Master (Beijing: New World Press, 1981), p. 64.

35. Cheng, “Xunzhao”, p. 8. 36. c.f. Goldstein, p. 264–89. 37. A.C. Scott, Mei Lanfang, Leader of the Pear Garden (Hong Kong and London: Hong Kong University Press and Oxford University Press, 1959), p. 77.

38. Zhongguo Da Baikequanshu: Xiqu Quyi [Great Encyclopedia of China: Xiqu [and] Quyi]. (Beijing and Shanghai: Zhongguo Da Baike Quanshu Chubanshe [Great Encyclopedia of China Publishers], 1983), p. 533.

39. Scott, p. 69 and Gong Hede, “Zhong kan jingju Mei Lanfang, ganshou Mei Lanfang jingshen de shixing biaoda” (“A serious look at the jingju Mei Lanfang, experiencing the poetic expression of Mei Lanfang’s spirit”), in Xin lang yule [New wave entertainment), 29 September, 2006, available online at http://ent.sina.com.cn.

40. Scott, p. 22. 41. Scott, p. 120 and Mei Lanfang Jinian Guan [Mei Lanfang Memorial Museum]), ed., Mei Lanfang zhencang: lao xiang ce [Mei Lanfang treasury: a volume of old photographs] (Beijing: Wai Wen Chubanshe [Foreign Language Press], 2003), p. 222.

42. Scott, p. 121. 43. 43 Mei Lanfang Jinian Guan, p. 223. 44. 44 Scott, pp. 121–22. 45. Ibid., p. 122. 46. Scott, p. 122, and Mei Lanfang Jinian Guan, p. 223. 47. Scott, p. 122.

48. Wu et al., p. 13. 49. Sheng Heyu, “Mei Lanfang”, in Xin Juben (New Plays), vol. 3 (March, 2004), p. 16. 50. Tim Johnson, “Chinese Still Agonize Over Nanjing Massacre After 70 Years.” (The Honolulu Advertiser, 13 December, 2007), p. A21.

51. Iris Chang, The Rape of Nanking (New York: Penguin Books, 1998), p. 4. 52. Ibid., p. 174 53. Ibid., p. 37. 54. Ibid., p. 39. 55. Ibid., p. 40. 56. Ibid., p. 51. 57. Chen, 24 November, 2007. 58. Cheng, “Xunzhao”, p. 10. 59. Ibid. 60. Chen, 17 November, 2007. 61. Cheng, “Xunzhao”, p. 10. 62. Chen, 17 November, 2007. 63. Ibid. 64. Wu et al., p. 48. 65. Scott, p. 131. 66. Chen, 24 November, 2007. 67. Cheng, “Xunzhao,” p. 8. 68. Ibid., p. 7. 69. Chen, 17 November, 2007. 70. Cheng, “Xunzhao,” p. 6. 71. Jingju, 2004. 72. Chen, 17 November, 2007. 73. Mei Lanfang Jinian Guan, p. 147 and Wu et al., pp. 50–51. 74. Chen, 17 December, 2007. 75. Marvin A. Carlson, The Haunted Stage: The Theatre as Memory Machine (Ann Arbor, Michigan: University of Michigan Press, 2001), pp. 58–59.

76. Aleida Assman, untitled talk at the conference on “Cultural Memory and China” (Berlin, Germany: March 24, 2006). 77. Quoted in Freddie Rokem, Performing History: Theatrical Representations of the Past in Contemporary Theatre (Iowa City, Iowa: University of Iowa Press, 2000), p. xiii.

Chapter Thirteen

“But Perhaps I Did Not Understand Enough”: Kazuo Ishiguro and Dreams of Republican Shanghai Richard King

The Japanese-born British author Kazuo Ishiguro set much of his fifth novel When We Were Orphans (2000) in pre-war and wartime Shanghai, at the time when that city was being drawn inexorably into global conflict. He did so, he explained in a conversation with the Canadian novelist Carole Shields before an audience in Victoria, because it seemed to him that this was a place and a time in which anything could happen. Ishiguro was to return to the same territory with his screenplay for The White Countess (2005), the final collaboration between director James Ivory and producer Ismail Merchant before the latter’s death. Both works are concerned with the relations between the ethnic communities of republican Shanghai: Anglo-American, Japanese, and Chinese in When We Were Orphans, with Russian and Jewish refugees added in The White Countess. Both further share themes familiar to readers of Ishiguro’s other fiction, a body of work which includes An Artist of the Floating World, The Remains of the Day, and Never Let Me Go: imperfect vision, flawed understanding of events remembered, inability to perceive hierarchies of significance, pious hopes dashed, and cherished dreams lost. In an interview shortly after the publication of When We Were Orphans, Ishiguro drew attention to the way in which his narratives are made up of their characters’ recollections of events: “I'm interested in memory because it's a filter through which we see our lives, and because it's foggy and obscure, the opportunities for self-deception are there. In the end, as a writer, I'm more interested in what people tell themselves happened rather than what actually happened.”[1] Ishiguro presents an image of Shanghai that combines small incidents that may be significant only to those who experience them with the wider picture of a city, and a world, on the brink of disaster. His image of Shanghai draws implicitly on histories of the period, and more importantly on a mythology cultivated in the 1930s by writers, filmmakers and the creators of popular song, recreating in the twenty-first century a dreamscape of a halcyon moment of illusory beauty before the descent into chaos. THE MYSTIQUE OF “THE ORPHAN ISLAND” By the 1930s, the period in which the stories of When We Were Orphans and The White Countess begin, Shanghai’s unique political and social circumstances were acknowledged internationally and celebrated in the city’s cosmopolitan popular culture. Republican Shanghai

was truly, as Marie-Claire Bergère describes it, “the other China.”[2] Status as a treaty port, isolation from much of the political turmoil of the Chinese state, and what was effectively colonial rule over much of the city, had allowed the creation of a burgeoning metropolis, its industry fueled by foreign and domestic investment, attracting refugees, adventurers, and migrants from the neighboring cities and villages, the inland provinces of China, and the rest of the world, all seeking wealth, adventure, or safe haven in a volatile age. Shanghai rivalled London, Paris, New York, and Tokyo in size and style, but Shanghai was an upstart nouveau riche among the great cities of the world, its modern, almost instant, prosperity created by migrants and outcasts. The iconic images of elegance and prosperity—the magnificent hotels, the broad tree-lined boulevards, the massive cast-iron lions outside the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank building, the waterfront promenade known internationally by its colonial title of the Bund—derive from the “extraterritorial” or self-governing foreign settlements, the International (known in Chinese as the Yingzujie or British concession) and the French, the foreign inhabitants of both generally staying clear of the closely packed Chinese city, demonized as a place of squalor and danger.[3] In his study of the city in the literature and film of republican China, Yingjin Zhang recalls the popular image of the gudao (“orphan” or “solitary” island) of Shanghai, isolated from the rest of the nation and its traditions, and “precariously plunged into a sea of modernity.”[4] Zhang notes that the city “gradually acquired, over the course of the [twentieth] century a cluster of connotations related to, among other things, flow, fluidity, instability, transience, fantasy, phantasmagoria, intoxication, and disillusionment.”[5] In the Western and Chinese mythologies alike, Shanghai is celebrated for its exoticism and for the possibilities it affords young men for adventure, wealth, and advancement; at the same time, the poverty and exploitation that made the glamor and wealth possible for a minority are acknowledged. The Western cliché of Shanghai as the “paradise of adventurers” held true for the (invariably male) Chinese urban adventurer as well; understandably, Chinese authors, especially those of the emerging political left, were inclined to be more painfully aware of the degradations endured by their compatriots. For writers like Mao Dun and Mu Shiying, Yingjin Zhang observes, “Shanghai is imagined as a prosperous treaty port with all kinds of possibilities and as a humiliating reminder of the foreign economic and military presence.”[6] In keeping with its role as a prize to be pursued, taken, and exploited by the young adventurer, Shanghai is typically gendered as female, and nowhere are its seductive and perilous charms more memorably dramatized than in the first chapter of Mao Dun’s 1933 novel Midnight: the deeply conservative patriarch Mr. Wu, flushed from his rural retreat by political unrest, and forced to seek the protection of his wealthy son in Shanghai, suffers such a sensory overload of noise, perfume, and fashion (a combination that enchants the son who accompanies him as much as it outrages Mr. Wu) that he expires within hours of his arrival, smothered, in his dying vision, by a multitude of dancing, quivering breasts.[7] Chinese film-makers, in the city that was the centre of the Chinese cinema industry as well as the entry-point for Hollywood, chose the less prosperous and more sordidly commercial side of Shanghai glamor to characterize the city.[8] The two best-known products of the

Shanghai studios in the 1930s, the silent film The Goddess (Shennü) and the “talking (and singing) picture” Street Angel (Malu tianshi), focussed respectively on the prostitute (the “goddess” of the title in the slang of the period) and the tea-house singer to represent the exploitation of women; the starring roles in the two films were taken by China’s greatest silentscreen tragedienne, Ruan Lingyu, and by the leading actress-singer Zhou Xuan, respectively.[9] Ruan Lingyu’s goddess is the prostitute with the noble spirit and the tragic life, a literary staple that goes back to the late Ming stories of Feng Menglong, and the imported Western tradition represented by Alexandre Dumas fils’ 1848 novel La Dame aux Camélias (introduced to Chinese readers by the translator Lin Shu in the late nineteenth century) and Giuseppe Verdi’s operatic rendition of the story as La Traviata.[10] Street Angel featured not only the “golden voiced” Zhou Xuan as the tea-house singer Xiao Hong, but added Zhao Huishen in the sympathetic role of the singer’s sister Xiao Yun, a downtrodden streetwalker, thus presenting two versions of female servitude for male pleasure. Elsewhere in popular culture, it is the dance-club (a range of establishments from the glitzy to the sordid) that represents the microcosm of Shanghai life, with its surface gaiety and underlying sadness. The dance culture of Shanghai, like the music that accompanied it, exemplified the city’s cosmopolitanism, the product of cultures that included African American, White Russian, and Japanese musicians, and a generation of Chinese composers, musicians, and singers who embraced the new jazz and dance rhythms.[11] The central figure is the taxi-dancer, a woman paid with tickets for each dance. Chinese authors naturally chose to focus on Chinese taxi-dancers, but this was also a means of employment for refugee women from Eastern Europe, among them Russians of noble blood who had fled the October Revolution, and who took the floor alongside Chinese colleagues of humbler origins. “Look at her,” sings Zhou Xuan in “Night Shanghai” the popular song that best captures the age, “Smiling face so welcoming,/ Who knows her sorrow and frustration?/ Leading a night life,/ Paying for clothing, food and alcohol,/ Wasting youth recklessly./ . . . Pondering the life of nights gone by,/ As if waking from a dream.”[12] As Leo Lee notes in his reading of fiction set in the night-club milieu, the dance hostesses of popular imagination are larger than life, from the downtrodden figures in leftist works to the more dynamic figures that appeared in the fiction of authors like Liu Na’ou and Mu Shiying, whose works portray an exotic city in a style influenced by the Japanese “new sensationalists.”[13] Perhaps the most memorable Chinese encapsulation of Shanghai, as “a paradise built on hell,” occurs at the end of a story about a dance hall, “Shanghai Foxtrot,” by one of the Chinese “new sensationalists,” Mu Shiying.[14] The key passage of this story is a dance-scene that, to Yingjin Zhang, reads like the waltz it describes, “progressing not in a linear direction, but in a circular motion.”[15] For Japan, republican Shanghai was a new frontier, militarily, politically, and culturally. Invasion at the turn of the twentieth century and occupation of Manchuria in the early 1930s came either side of Japan’s claim to sovereignty over German possessions in Shandong, ratified at the Treaty of Versailles, and confirmed Japan’s status as the major power in Asia. Japan was a prominent member of the international community in Shanghai, with considerable industrial and commercial interests in the city. The combination of revulsion and admiration

towards Japan that had characterized Chinese attitudes for most of the twentieth century is evident in the writings of May Fourth intellectuals like Lu Xun and Yu Dafu, who had studied and travelled in Japan in the early years of the twentieth century. Japanese musicians and writers, like their diplomatic, military, and industrialist compatriots, were also travelling to China, either directly from Japan or from the occupied territories of Manchuria: Japanese jazz musicians in Shanghai ranked second only to the Americans in Shanghai, and the Manzhouguobased Japanese singer Yamaguchi Yoshiko/ Li Xianglan was among the celebrated recording artists.[16] The resentment of Japan’s commercial clout surfaced in Shanghai with strikes by the newly radicalized proletariat aimed at Japanese textile mills in 1925, boycotts of Japanese luxury goods, and student demonstrations that resulted in the May 30th (1927) massacre in the international Concession. The city of the Japanese “new sensationalist” Yokomitsu Riichi’s novel Shanghai, written at the end of the 1920s and set against the May 30th events, combines the limited observations of its author, in a one-month visit several years earlier, news reports from China, and a vision of Shanghai, especially the International Settlement, articulated by Yokomitsu a decade after he wrote his novel, as “the world in microcosm.”[17] Yokomitsu’s Shanghai is a confusing, chaotic, and dangerous place; the story unfolds among members of the Japanese community in what Leo Lee, in his reading of Shanghai, characterizes as “a dark, poverty-stricken underworld of squalor.”[18] The novel’s major characters are mostly young Japanese men moving within the international community (the exception is the Chinese female revolutionary Fang Qiulan), though other foreign nationals make an appearance. In a conversation about Japanese entrepreneurs between a German, an American, and the Japanese woman Miyako, the nature of the Japanese men in Shanghai is the subject of criticism; the German blames the strikes against Japanese businesses on the Japanese themselves, claiming that “Japan always sends overseas the kind of man who doesn’t respect foreigners.”[19] The mystique and cachet of Shanghai past was only enhanced in the latter part of the twentieth century by the city’s reassertion of its identity in the Deng Xiaoping era. In Shanghai itself, the author Wang Anyi focussed her attention on the city in its present form in her early stories, written in the 1980s; but in 1995, she went back in time, beginning her novel Song of Everlasting Sorrow (Changhenge) in the republican period, referencing the opening montage of Street Angel, with its cityscapes, alleyways, and flocks of pigeons, in her first chapters, and introducing her central character Wang Qi’ao with a life-changing trip to a film studio. Thereafter, much of the novel takes place in territory pioneered in the 1940s by the novelist Zhang Ailing (Eileen Chang), intrigues in intimate surroundings in the alleyways of the city, a setting more claustrophobic than exotic.[20] The reappearance of republican Shanghai in the West was represented by British author J.G. Ballard’s 1984 autobiographical novel Empire of the Sun, which begins in wartime Shanghai, as the idyllic life of privilege in the International Concession enjoyed by the central character Jim is shattered by the Japanese takeover of the city following the attack on Pearl Harbor, leading to his internment. The final words of the novel, like the final words of Mu Shiying’s story quoted above, give the narrator’s judgement of Shanghai, in this case as “that terrible city.”[21]

“BUT IN THE END . . . THIS CITY DEFEATS YOU”: IDYLLS LOST AND DREAMS BETRAYED IN WHEN WE WERE ORPHANS What was indeed to become a “terrible city” for Christopher Banks, the central character and narrator of the novel When We Were Orphans, and his childhood playmate Akira Yamashita seems congenial enough initially; the two boys, only a month apart in age, live in substantial houses adjoining each other on Bubbling Well Road (now Nanjing Road West) in the International Concession. Christopher’s family lives in a house owned by trading company Butterfield and Swire, his father’s employers. Despite a rivalry between the two boys, brought about in part by Akira’s fierce patriotism for a Japan he barely knows, they are the most important figures in each others’ lives, engaging in fantasies and acting out dramas of their own invention. For both, as they later admit, the International Concession is their “home village;”[22] for Christopher, that security is lost when first his father and then his mother disappear, and he is “returned” to the alien environment of an English boarding school, dependent on what he believes (wrongly, as with most of his beliefs) to be the charity of an aunt. The story is told by Christopher in a series of narratives in which flashes of memory are interwoven with his accounts of the present. As a narrator, Christopher is of limited reliability, hampered by the inability of the child to understand the adult world, by the loyalty of the son wanting to believe the best of his parents and their friend, and by his fixation with his own affairs over those of the outside world. Over the course of the novel, Christopher is engaged in a painful attempt to piece together the events that led to his parents’ disappearance, even as he tries to establish himself in British society, first at school, then at university and in fashionable London society, and in his chosen career as a consulting detective, prepared for with Akira in staged heroic missions to locate and rescue his father, always culminating in elaborate ceremonies of welcome and celebration. Christopher’s imperfect recollection of his past and his account of the present reveal the awkwardness of a young man ill at ease with his place in society and his relationship with the beautiful and ambitious Sarah Hemmings. The narrative is focussed on Christopher’s priorities of the moment, both childhood games and adult encounters, as the events that will shape his life appear at the periphery of his memory and consciousness. In this, he resembles Stephens, the butler at the centre of The Remains of the Day, obsessed with the minutiae of the household while his master unwittingly furthers the Nazi cause. The adult Christopher recalls that in the year he was nine, lonely in Shanghai after Akira took a trip to Japan, “a few small events did occur . . . which I have subsequently come to regard as being of particular significance;”[23] these were his father’s unsuccessful attempts to impress his wife and meet her expectations of him. In this section, and elsewhere in the narrative, Christopher admits to lapses of memory and confusion as to his role in the relationship between his parents: “But perhaps I did not understand enough.”[24] By the time that Christopher returns to Shanghai to solve his most important case, that of the disappearance of his parents, which he hopes will conclude with the triumphant ceremony rehearsed with Akira with only his father gone, the city is no longer the one he remembers. By

then, it is the fall of 1937, and the Japanese attack on the city (outside the International Settlement) has begun. The quixotic attempt by Sarah’s well-connected but ineffective husband Sir Cecil Medhurst to mediate between opposing factions has failed, and Sir Cecil has gambled himself into ruin and taken out his spite on Sarah. After three weeks back in Shanghai, Christopher observes a custom he believes to be unique to Shanghai, where it is common to all races and classes: “namely, the way people here seem determined at every opportunity to block one’s view.”[25] The blocking of his view is not simply physical: nobody is particularly interested in assisting him in his quest for his parents, and those he considers obliged to aid him are happy to see him misled. He is further disgusted at the members of the foreign community who regard a nightclub floorshow at the Cathay Hotel and the shelling of Chapei (Zhabei) as alternative diversions, demonstrating utter callousness at the fate of the Chinese occupants of the city. What outrages him most, however, and highlights his lack of perspective on issues outside his own business, is their failure “to rise to the challenge of the case [of his parents’ disappearance].”[26] He fails to accept that the officials assigned to assist him have other interests, or to see that they are merely humoring him and monitoring his investigations. Through a process of memory, detection, and luck, Christopher is able to piece together a story which revolves around his strong-minded mother and the two men who love her, his father and “Uncle Philip,” a former Butterfield and Swire employee engaged in charitable work in the city; much of what really happened is told to him when he and Uncle Philip meet late in the novel. Christopher’s mother Diana is furious that Butterfield and Swire are heavily involved in the opium trade (in collusion with the nationalist government) and organizes opposition among the international community. Christopher has heard (but not really understood) her arguments with his father, who cannot afford to leave the company; he further witnesses her striking a Chinese man whom Uncle Philip has brought to their house. This man is later identified as a warlord she had believed would be an ally in her opposition to the opium trade, only to learn that he is prepared to take the profits for himself. Christopher’s father’s disappearance is not the abduction the boy imagines: he simply leaves his wife, knowing she will never think him worthy. Uncle Philip sides with the communists, believing they will end the opium trade; he then removes Christopher from the house on an errand while the warlord abducts and enslaves Christopher’s mother as a punishment for slapping him, while providing the allowance that sees Christopher through school and university. Later Uncle Philip betrays the communists as well, becoming a shadowy underground figure known as Yellow Snake. The childhood friends are finally reunited in the ruins of the city, where Akira has been captured by the Chinese resistance. This time, blinded by both personal loyalty and his desire to solve his most demanding case, Christopher protects Akira, a Japanese soldier, from the Chinese who are holding him: “‘But he’s not your enemy,’ I went on. ‘He’s a friend. He’s going to help me. Help me solve the case.’”[27] When the quest for the house in which Christopher believed he would find his parents ends in failure, they are seized by a detachment of Japanese soldiers, and Akira is taken away as a traitor. It is left to the Japanese officer, the anglophile Colonel Hasegawa, to explain the simple realities that overshadow Christopher’s personal

quest: that the invasion of China is necessary if Japan is to become a world power, and that the world will shortly be engulfed in war. Though Christopher is finally reunited with his mother in a nursing home in Hong Kong, she does not (or will not) recognize him. The celebrated Chinese detective Inspector Kung, who was placed in charge of the search for the Banks parents after their disappearance and ends his life a pathetic figure in a cheap hotel, tells Christopher the truth of his own life and a prediction of Christopher’s failure to resolve the mystery: “‘But in the end,’ he concludes, ‘this city defeats you. Every man betrays his friend.”[28] POLITICAL TENSION IN THE ESTABLISHMENT OF DREAMS Betrayal is a feature of human relations in The White Countess as well: both the central characters in the film, the former American diplomat Todd Jackson and the Russian countess turned taxi-dancer Sophia Alexeevna Belinskaya, are deceived by those close to them (friend and family, respectively) before each saves the other. Sophia and her family have, like many of the aristocrats of pre-1917 Russia (the “White” Russians defeated by the Bolshevik “Reds”), lost everything and fled to one of the few places they were permitted to live, rubbing shoulders with Jewish refugees from Nazi-controlled countries and the Shanghai populace. Like Christopher Banks in When We Were Orphans, though for somewhat different reasons, Jackson is unable to see things clearly. Present at the Versailles negotiations after the first World War that led to the founding of the League of Nations, he now finds himself disillusioned by the failure of the League to provide international order and stability; he dreams of creating his own perfect world, a place for all nationalities and factions to meet and exchange ideas in beautiful and sophisticated surroundings, in the cosmopolitan setting of Shanghai. In The White Countess, as in the song and fiction of the republican period itself, the ideal world in microcosm is a cabaret; in this case, the bar and dance-club of the film’s title, named for Sophia, the woman at its centre. Jackson cannot admit to the impossibility of creating an island of peace and harmony in the midst of chaos. He berates a young (and more clear-sighted) colleague early in the film for his failure to “see all there is to see”; later, when The White Countess (the dance-club) is in operation, and the same man warns him of the danger he is in and the mistake he is making, he continues to insist on the value of what he has created “Don’t you see all this? . . . You don’t see the beauty!”[29] The makers of the film chose to emphasise Jackson’s failure to see reality by making him physically, as well as metaphorically, sightless; he has been blinded in an explosion on a streetcar that also killed his daughter. Jackson’s blindness was not part of the script originally written by Kazuo Ishiguro, but was added by the director at the suggestion of Ralph Fiennes, the actor playing the character in the film. With a novel, it is the reader’s good fortune not to know the process whereby characters and incidents take on the form they do; as readers, our implicit contract with the author provides that we are presented with a completed work to enjoy and (if we so choose) analyze, the end product of a solitary creative undertaking. With the infinitely more collaborative medium of film, directors and actors, as well as

screenwriters, have a hand in the shaping of the final version. Directors also frequently explain, in commentaries on the film provided in the additional materials on DVD releases, how it was that the film came to be made. The commentary by James Ivory and the late Natasha Richardson (the actress playing Countess Sophia), reveals the change to Jackson’s character, and deals at length with the mechanics of the production (and the particular challenges of filming in China) and the portrayal (including the aspects of acting, direction, filming, and costume) of Natasha Richardson’s character.[30] James Ivory reveals that for him, what he was filming was not a realistic story but an impressionistic one; much as Jackson built the bar of his dreams, Ivory and his crew built a set for The White Countess, in large part from their imagination, as there was nobody they could find that remembered the bars of the 1930s and 1940s.[31] Though the film was shot entirely in China, 1930s Shanghai (as Ivory notes in his documentary “The Making of the White Countess”) no longer exists, and much use was made of ready-built sets for film and television dramas, and locations outside Shanghai.[32] The last director to have been able to film extensive exterior scenes in the city for a film set in the republican period was probably Steven Spielberg, whose 1987 film version of Empire of the Sun included magnificent overviews of the Bund and Suzhou Creek in early sequences in which the young Jim and his parents drive through restive crowds in the city to a fancy-dress party. Interiors, many of them lovingly restored, still remain available to film-makers, and can be seen in Chinese productions like Song of Everlasting Sorrow, or Zhang Yimou’s Shanghai Triad (Yao yao yao, yaodao waipo qiao); the emblematic image of the Peace Hotel appears in The White Countess, where it substitutes for a ballroom in pre-revolution Russia, in dancers revolving around the camera in a scene that calls to mind Mu Shiying’s waltz from the story “Shanghai Foxtrot.”[33] The Peace Hotel, opened in 1929 as the Cathay Hotel, was an important part of republican Shanghai, and remains an enduring symbol of that past.[34] The hotel was also the venue for the earliest revival of republican-era jazz in the post-Mao era: in the late 1970s and further into the 1980s than should have been the case, a group of elderly musicians who had played in different clubs and ensembles for the Shanghailanders of the 1940s was assembled to entertain the growing tourist trade with their renditions of the old favorites.[35] A quarter of a century later, when The White Countess was being filmed, the standard of playing in the clubs of the city was happily greatly improved: the film features performances by a much younger group directed by the Australian musicologist John Huie, which beautifully captures the ambience of the time as it might now be imagined.[36] The songs performed include “Rose, Rose, I Love You” (Meigui, meigui, wo ai ni), the only song of the Chinese jazz era (as far as I know) to become a hit in America.[37] The film also includes cabaret performances by Russian artists, that (as director James Ivory admits in his commentary) may well be finer and more elaborate than anything staged in Shanghai at the time the film is set. The Japanese presence in Shanghai is seen, fittingly, largely in the context of the bar scene: it comes in the elegant, urbane, and sinister form of Mr. Matsuda (played by Hiroyuki Sanada) who befriends Jackson at a bar both frequent. The two men share more than a fondness for the “establishments” of Shanghai; both also have an interest in international relations and

diplomacy. Jackson, whose participation at Versailles is envied by Matsuda, laments the “mistrust, deceit, viciousness and chaos” pervading the world as they speak. It is to Matsuda that Jackson first articulates his dream of creating an “establishment” which will provide what the League of Nations failed to achieve, a meeting-place for nations and factions. The quality that he desires, and finds lacking in existing clubs, is “political tension,” something Matsuda offers to provide through his influence with “a certain person” connected to all sides. Jackson surmises that this “certain person” is “a hood,” and it is tempting for the student of Shanghai history to imagine him as Du Yuesheng, the most celebrated gangster of his day, though such speculation is unsupported. When the White Countess becomes the meeting place of communists, nationalists, and the Japanese, Jackson expresses himself “beholden” to Matsuda, and trusts him despite his pointed refusal to answer the question “just what is it that you do, Mr. Matsuda?” Matsuda is reported to be preparing the way for the Japanese take-over of Shanghai; the nearest he comes to explaining his role is his articulation to Jackson of his dream of a “broader canvas” which will see Japan becoming a great nation in the manner of the European powers and the United States. Before Japanese troops enter the city, Jackson is sufficiently blind to reality that he defends Matsuda to his young colleague as a friend; but at the two friends’ last meeting, in a deserted White Countess after his patrons and staff have joined the flight out of Shanghai, Jackson is forced to acknowledge his failure to see Matsuda as his superior in the art of diplomacy. While Matsuda continues to express the view that the two men have created something of beauty together, Jackson now realizes that “your [Matsuda’s] broader canvas will crush my little world.” The dream of the extraterritorial dance-club, like the dream of the extraterritorial city that could accommodate it, is ineluctably swept aside by the realities of a world at war. DREAMS OF SHANGHAI, RUDE AWAKENINGS Defending his choice to visit an insalubrious bar after a tiresome business meeting, Todd Jackson claims: “This is Shanghai . . . a person can do much as he pleases.” Not, evidently, much as shepleases: Kazuo Ishiguro’s Shanghai, like that of the authors and songstresses of the 1930s and 1940s, was a more awkward, and less rewarding place for women than it was for men. While they might feature as objects of desire in a glamorous world, the practicalities of survival were more at issue than fortune and conquest. The Shanghai dreams of triumph— including magnificent ceremonies of welcome in Jessfield Park to celebrate the freeing of Christopher Banks’ parents, or Todd Jackson’s success with the White Countess club in creating an atmosphere for international rapprochement—are male ones, though they may fail because of the dreamers’ blindness to the evidence of larger realities. The dream of triumph and conquest that was to dominate Shanghai in both of Ishiguro’s works was the one expressed by Colonel Hasegawa (in When We Were Orphans) and Mr. Matsuda (in The White Countess), that of making Japan a world power. That this stage of that dream would also end in ruins is not the concern in either of these works; they are set in China, and like most of the collective memory in that country, they focus on invasion and occupation rather than the ending of the

Asian war.[38] What Ishiguro does is to revive the dreams of Shanghai at the end of the era of extraterritoriality, its veneer of gaiety no more able to cover a crueler reality than were the heavy wooden doors of The White Countess able to keep the rest of the world at bay. NOTES 1. http://archives.cnn.com/2000/books/news/10/27/kazuo.ishiguro/ 2. Marie-Claire Bergère, “‘The Other China’: Shanghai from 1919 to 1949,” in Christopher Howe, ed., Shanghai: Revolution and Development in an Asian Metropolis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), pp. 1–34.

3. For more on expatriate life in Shanghai and the other “treaty port towns,” see Frances Wood, No Dogs and Not Many Chinese: Treaty Port Life in China 1843–1943 (London: John Murray, 1998); for relatively recent photographs of some of the finest public and residential buildings of the republican period, see Tess Johnston and Deke Erh, A Last Look: Western Architecture in Old Shanghai (Hong Kong: Old China Hands Press, 1993), and other works by the same authors from the same press. A popular guidebook from the 1930s recently reprinted is All About Shanghai: A Standard Guidebook (Hong Kong: Oxford University Press, 1983). The term “Bund,” meaning “embankment,” originates from what is now Iraq, and was incorporated into Urdu and colonial usage.

4. Yingjin Zhang, The City in Modern Chinese Literature and Film: Configurations of Space, Time, & Gender (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), p. 117.

5. Ibid. 6. Zhang, p. 176. 7. Mao Dun, Ziye (Beijing: Kaiming shudian, 1933), trans. by Xu Mengxiong and A.C. Barnes as Midnight (Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1957), reprinted 1979.

8. For more on cinema in republican Shanghai, see Leo Ou-fan Lee, Shanghai Modern: The Flowering of a New Urban Culture in China 1930–1945 (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), pp. 82–119.

9. Nüshen [The Goddess], dir. Wu Yonggang (Shanghai: Lianhua Film Company, 1934). Intertitles translated by Yomi Braeseter available at htttp://faculty.washington.edu/yomi/goddess.html; Malu tianshi [Street Angel], dir. Yuan Muzhi (Shanghai: Mingxing Film Company, 1937). Text translated by Andrew F. Jones available on http://deall.ohiostate.edu/denton.2/angel/. For readings of The Goddess, see also Kristen Harris, “The Goddess: Fallen Woman of Shanghai,” in Chris Berry, ed., Chinese Films in Focus: 25 New Takes (London: British Film Institute, 2003), pp. 111–19. Prostitution in Shanghai is the subject of Gail Hershatter, Dangerous Pleasures: Prostitution and Modernity in Twentieth Century Shanghai (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997).

10. Among the finest of Feng Menglong’s courtesan stories is his version of the “courtesan’s jewel-box” story, as “Du Shiniang nu chen baibao xiang” Jingshi tongyan (Beijing: Renmin wenxue chubanshe, 1981, pp. 485–500), translated as “Tu Shih-niang Sinks the Jewel-box in Anger,” in Y.W. Ma and Joseph S.M. Lau, eds., Traditional Chinese Stories: Themes and Variations (New York: Columbia University Press, 1978), pp. 146–160. For a description of Lin Shu’s tear-soaked rendition of La Dame aux Camélias, see Leo Ou-fan Lee, The Romantic Generation of Chinese Writers (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1973), pp. 44–46.

11. A pioneer of Chinese popular music was Li Jinhui, whose achievements are enumerated by both Isabel K. F. Wong in “The Incantation of Shanghai: Singing a City into Existence,” in Timothy J. Craig and Richard King, eds., Global Goes Local: Popular Culture in Asia (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2003), pp. 246–264, and Andrew Jones in Yellow Music: Media Culture and Colonial Modernity in the Chinese Jazz Age (Durham: Duke University Press, 2001). A cultural history of Shanghai cabaret culture is Andrew David Field, Shanghai’s Dancing World: Cabaret Culture and Urban Politics 1919–1954. (Hong Kong: Chinese University Press, 2010).

12. Translation by Isabel Wong, “The Incantation of Shanghai,” p. 246. The chapter includes analysis of this song and others of the era. Ye Shanghai is included in many collections of the songs of the period, including vol. 2 of the songs of Zhou Xuan in the Qunxinghui (Gathering of Stars) collection released by the Golden Penguin Recording Company in Taibei (n.d.).

13. Leo Ou-fan Lee, Shanghai Modern, p. 26; pp. 190–231. 14. A translation of Mu Shiying’s story

by

Andrew

Field

is

available

online

at

http://shanghaijournal.squarespace.com/journal/2011/3/20/shanghai-fox-trot.html. I am grateful to Andrew Field for directing me to his “Shanghai Journal.” For more on the Chinese “new sensationalists,” see Steven L. Riep, “Chinese Modernism: The New Sensationalists,” in Joshua Mostow, ed., The Columbia Companion to East Asian Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), pp. 418–24.

15. Yingjin Zhang, The City in Modern Chinese Literature and Film, p. 162; emphasis Zhang’s. 16. See the chapter by Yiman Wang in this volume. A selection of Li Xianglan’s songs can be found as vol. 42 of the Qunxinghui (Gathering of Stars) collection mentioned in note 12 above.

17. Qt. by Dennis Washburn in his postscript to Yokomitsu Riichi, Shanghai, translated with a postscript by Dennis Washburn (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Center for Japanese Studies, 2001), p. 228.

18. Leo Ou-fan Lee, Shanghai Modern, p. 137. 19. Yokomitsu Riichi, Shanghai, p.122. 20. Wang Anyi, Changhenge (Beijing: Zuojia chubanshe, 1996); the title is taken from Bai Juyi’s narrative poem about the fatal attraction of the Tang Emperor Xuanzong and his concubine Yang Guifei. Translated by Michael Berry and Susan Chan Egan as The Song of Everlasting Sorrow: A Novel of Shanghai. (New York: Weatherhead Books, 2008). A film of the same title, directed by Guan Jinpeng and starring Zheng Xiuwen in the central role, was produced by the Shanghai Film Studio. For more on the novel, see Emma Eustace, Lament Everlasting: Wang Anyi’s Discourse on the “Ill-fated Beauty,” Republican Popular Culture, the Shanghai Xiaojie, and Zhang Ailing (MA Thesis, University of Victoria, 2004).

21. J.G. Ballard, Empire of the Sun (London: Panther Books, 1985), qt. p. 351. 22. Kazuo Ishiguro, When We Were Orphans (London: Faber and Faber, 2000), p. 256. 23. Ibid., p.79. 24. Ibid., p.81. 25. Ibid., p.153. 26. Ibid., p.162. 27. Ibid., p.251. Italics in the original. 28. Ibid., p.204. 29. Quotations transcribed from The White Countess, dir. James Ivory. Sony Pictures, 2005. 30. The actress notes among other matters that in preparing for the role she read Harriet Sergeant’s Shanghai (London: John Murray, 1991), and learned from it that even in reduced circumstances, Russian aristocrats were distinguished by their erect bearing, a quality she cultivated in playing Sophia.

31. Not that there is any shortage of bars and dance-halls in Shanghai these days; venues where the performers featured in the film regularly appear are listed, with the performers themselves, on http://www.shjazz.com/artists.html. Had the film been made a couple of years later, the producers could have visited the refurbished Paramount (Bailemen), completed in 2007. I am grateful to the Hong Kong film scholar Emilie Ye for this information, in a conversation at National Chiao-t’ung University, Hsinchu, Taiwan, in November 2007.

32. This documentary is also included in the additional materials on the DVD of The White Countess. 33. As Ivory notes in his commentary, the art deco of the Peace was standing in for the rococo more likely to have been found in Russia; he describes in some detail the lengths to which his crew went to produce the spinning of the dancers for that scene.

34. A virtual tour of the hotel today can be taken at http://china.showhotel.com/shanghai/peacehotel/history.htm. 35. I heard the group play several times while working as a tour guide from 1979–1980, and while doing thesis research at Fudan University in Spring 1981. In 1981, my former fellow student Michael Schoenhals and I also spoke to band-member Harold “Zing” Wu (as he introduced himself to us) about his experiences and those of his fellow musicians.



36. The artists that make up the “White Countess band” are profiled (in another context) on the website http://www.shjazz.com/artists.html.

37. The song was a hit in the US for Frankie Laine in 1951. 38. See Kirk A. Denton, “Heroic Resistance and Victims of Atrocity: Negotiating the Memory of Japanese Imperialism in Chinese Museums,” http://www.japanfocus.org/products/details/2547; for Japanese and American collective memory, see Laura Hein, “Curating Controversy: Exhibiting the Second World War in Japan and the United States since

1995,”http://www.iias.nl/nl/45/IIAS_NL45_14.pdf.

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Index

affect: border politics and, 1 , 2 ; consciousness and, 1 ; emotion as, 1 , 2 ; from Li Xianglan, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 ; from Li Xianglan, 1 , 2 ; myth and, 1 ; nostalgia as, 1 ; without politics, 1 ; politics of, 1 ; Ah Long, 1 , 2 . See also Nanjing Akutagawa Ryūnosuke, 1 , 2 , 3 America: African-American language, 1 ; Li Xianglan and, 1 , 2 American blackface minstrelsy, 1 , 2 ; tairiku merodei compared to, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 Anderson, Mark, 1 Anesaki Masaharu, 1 , 2 , 3 ; Inoue Tetsujirō compared to, 1 , 2 ; for religion, 1 Anthology of Poems from the Eastern Sea, 1 , 2 Anzai Fuyue, 1 artistic contact nebulae, 1 , 2 , 3 “The Art of the Theatre: the First Dialogue” (Craig), 1 Asad, Talal, 1 , 2 Asaka Yasuhiko, 1 Asari Keita, 1 , 2 Asian Solidarity, 1 . See also Pan-Asianism Assman, Aleida, 1 Atkins, E. Taylor, 1 , 2 Bai Hong, 1 Bai Juyi (Bai Letian) (Po Chu-e), 1 ; poems of, 1 , 2 , 3 Bai Letian. See Bai Juyi Bai Mu, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 Ba Jin, 1 , 2 Balibar, Étienne, 1 Ballard, J. G., 1 Barths, Roland, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 Baskett, M., 1 Bastid-Brugiére, Marianne, 1 , 2 battlefront literature, 1 The Battles of Coxinga (Chikamatsu), 1 ; cultural comparison in, 1 Benjamin, Walter, 1 benshengren, 1 , 2 Bergère, Marie-Claire, 1

Black Slaves’ Cry to Heaven, 1 , 2 , 3 The Bondman, 1 Booker, M. Keith, 1 Book of Urgency (Zhang Taiyan), 1 , 2 border politics, 1 , 2 Bourdaghs, Michael, 1 , 2 The Broken Commandment (Shimazaki), 1 Bronte, Charlotte, 1 Brook, Peter, 1 Brooks, Daphne, 1 , 2 Buddhism, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 ; anarchism and, 1 , 2 ; above and below in, 1 ; Christianity compared to, 1 ; Liang for, 1 ; state and, 1 ; for Zhang Taiyan, 1 , 2 , 3 . See also Yogācāra Buddhism Bungakuza (Literary Theatre), 1 Cai Minsan/Sai Binzō, 1 Caine, Hall, 1 capitalism, 1 , 2 ; reality and, 1 ; religion compared to, 1 , 2 Carlson, Marvin, 1 Cemil, Aydin, 1 censorship, 1 , 2 . See also suppression Chang, Eileen (Zhang Ailing), 1 , 2 , 3 Chang, Iris, 1 The Character of a Nation (Fujiwara), 1 Chen Xinyi, 1 , 2 , 3 ; See also Mei Lanfang Cheung, Jackie, 1 ; song by, 1 , 2 Chiang Kai-shek, 1 , 2 Chikamatsu Monzaemon, 1 , 2 China, 1 , 2 ; culture of occupation in, 1 ; Kawabata and, 1 ; language of, 1 ; Miyazaki Tōten for, 1 , 2 ; reforms in, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 ; victory over, 1 ; China Nights (film), 1 , 2 ; criticism of, 1 , 2 ; song from, 1 ; “Chinatown, My Chinatown”, 1 , 2 ; Chinese, 1 , 2 ; character of, 1 , 2 , 3 ; Han, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 Chinese literary criticism, 1 , 2 ; of Ba Jin, 1 , 2 . See also Lu Xun; Zhou Zuoren Chineseness: in literature, 1 ; of songs, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 Christianity, 1 , 2 ; Buddhism compared to, 1 ; Confucius compared to, 1 , 2 ; Meiji intellectuals for, 1 , 2 ; respect for, 1 Chu Minyi, 1 , 2 , 3 class, 1 ; performances and, 1 ; Song of Fallen Blossoms, 1 ; songs and, 1 Clouds Around the bridge, the rain over the valley: A diary and a manuscript of poetry (Takezoe), 1 , 2 ; postscripts for, 1 ; structure of, 1 collaborators, 1 , 2 ; colonialism and, 1 ; in Korea, 1 , 2 , 3 ; Morimoto as, 1 . See also dōsan colonialism, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 ; collaborators and, 1 ; decolonization and, 1 ; imperialism and, 1 ; inspection on, 1 ; language and, 1 ; liberation compared to, 1 ; literary Japanese and, 1 ; non-

decolonization and, 1 ; nostalgia and, 1 , 2 ; as restoration, 1 . See also dōsan; postcolonialism communication, 1 ; brush talk for, 1 , 2 , 3 . See also languages Confucianism, 1 , 2 Confucius, 1 , 2 ; Christianity compared to, 1 , 2 ; religion and, 1 , 2 , 3 Conrad, Joseph, 1 consciousness, 1 , 2 , 3 ; national, 1 , 2 ; self-, 1 ; for Zhang Taiyan, 1 , 2 , 3 contact zone, 1 Conway, H. J., 1 Coxinga (Zheng Chenggong), 1 , 2 , 3 . See also Meiji Coxinga Craig, Edward Gordon, 1 , 2 The Cuckoo (Tokutomi Roka), 1 , 2 cultural authority, 1 , 2 culture, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 ; counterfeit, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 ; of occupation, 1 ; similarities in, 1 , 2 ; SinoJapanese, 1 , 2 , 3 ; siwen as, 1 , 2 , 3 . See also Manchukuo culture; transculturation Deleuze, G., 1 Derrida, J., 1 , 2 Devil on the Doorstep (film), 1 dōsan, 1 ; democratization and, 1 ; Hari-zu compared to, 1 ; Japanese neoconservatives with, 1 . See also Pride of the Japanese Dōsan (film), 1 dramatic poem, 1 ; jingju symphonic dramatic poem, 1 , 2 The Dream of a Certain Young Man (Mushakōji), 1 Duara, Prasenjit, 1 , 2 Duman, Alexandre, fils, 1 dynamic intertextualizations, 1 Earth and Soldiers (Hino), 1 The Echo of the Cloud (Satō), 1 Empire of the Sun (Ballard), 1 Empire of the Sun (film), 1 Enamoto Takeaki, 1 Essence of the Novel (Tsubouchi), 1 Eternal Fame (film), 1 , 2 , 3 ethnicities: fiction of, 1 , 2 , 3 ; within Manchukuo, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 ; in Manchukuo culture, 1 , 2 ; music and, 1 ; race compared to, 1 Fang Qiulan, 1 Fanon, Frantz, 1 Feng Menglong, 1 Feng Shuluan, 1

Fiennes, Ralph, 1 film, 1 , 2 , 3 ; audiences of, 1 ; Shanghai and, 1 , 2 . See also Li Xianglan; specific films Flowers and Soldiers (Hino), 1 Fogel, Joshua, 1 Foster, Stephen, 1 , 2 , 3 Fujioka Nobukatsu, 1 Fujiwara Masahiko, 1 , 2 Fukuhara Akio, 1 Garrett, Charles Hiroshi, 1 gender: “Chinatown, My Chinatown” and, 1 ; “Girl of Manchuria” and, 1 , 2 ; for Kazuo, 1 ; masculinity, 1 ; in The White Countess, 1 Genyōsha, 1 The Ghosts of the Empire (Marukawa), 1 Gilbert, Jeremy, 1 “Girl of Manchuria”, 1 ; appeal of, 1 ; for children, 1 , 2 ; Chineseness in, 1 ; gender and, 1 , 2 Goldstein, Joshua, 1 government: factions concerning, 1 , 2 ; intellectuals’ role and, 1 ; samurai and, 1 ; state as, 1 , 2 . See also nationalism Grave Inscription for the Entombed Poems (Ōkōchi), 1 , 2 Grey, George, 1 Griffith, D. W., 1 Groos, Arthur, 1 Guattari, F., 1 Gu Ding, 1 , 2 , 3 Guohe Zheng, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 Guo Ping, 1 Hamlet (Shakespeare), 1 Hanada Kiyoteru, 1 Han Chinese: in Manchukuo, 1 , 2 , 3 ; Manchukuo culture and, 1 Han Shiheng, 1 Hari-zu (Japan-fever tribe), 1 Haruyama Yukio, 1 , 2 Hata Giō, 1 Hattori Ryōichi, 1 , 2 ; Kasagi and, 1 ; with sister, 1 Hattori Tomiko: films of, 1 ; songs of, 1 , 2 He Ruzhang, 1 Hino Ashihei, 1 , 2 Hiroko, 1 , 2 Holman, Martin, 1 Hosokawa Shudei, 1

Hou Hsiao-hsien, 1 House of Bamboo (film), 1 huaju (spoken drama), 1 , 2 , 3 Huang Chih-Huei, 1 Huang Wen-hsiung, 1 Huang Zunxian, 1 , 2 ; brush talks of, 1 , 2 ; collections from, 1 , 2 ; Itō and, 1 ; for Japan, 1 , 2 ; Japanese friends of, 1 ; for military, 1 ; on newspapers, 1 ; poems of, 1 , 2 ; preface from, 1 , 2 ; Wang Tao on, 1 ; on Westernism, 1 Huie, John, 1 Hu Wen’ge, 1 Hyōdō Hiromi, 1 identity, 1 ; border politics and, 1 ; Chinese culture related to, 1 ; fluidity of, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 ; of post-colonial artists, 1 Immigration and Alien Exclusion Act (1924), 1 imperialism, 1 ; biases related to, 1 ; colonialism and, 1 ; conferences for, 1 ; in intertextualizations, 1 ; of Japan, 1 ; regionalism and, 1 ; tairiku merodei and, 1 ; transculturation and, 1 , 2 , 3 ; on translations, 1 Inoue Enryō, 1 , 2 ; on conflicts, 1 ; on interiority, 1 Inoue Tetsujirō, 1 , 2 ; Anesaki compared to, 1 , 2 Inoue Yoshie, 1 , 2 interlingual transculturation, 1 interpretive transculturation, 1 intertextualizations: agency in, 1 ; (semi)colonial/post(semi)colonial, 1 , 2 ; cultural authority and, 1 ; dynamic, 1 ; imperialism in, 1 ; influence in, 1 ; passive, 1 intertextual transculturation, 1 Ishikawa Kōsai (Kunka), 1 , 2 , 3 Ishikawa Tatsuzō, 1 . See also Living Soldiers Ishiwara Kanji, 1 , 2 Ishizaki Hitoshi, 1 Isomae Junichi, 1 Itami Mansaku, 1 Itō Hirobumi, 1 ; postscript from, 1 Ivory, James, 1 , 2 , 3 Iwagaki Matsunae, 1 Iwaki Hideo, 1 Iwasaki Akira, 1 Izumi Kyōka, 1 , 2 Jansen, Marius, 1 Japan, 1 ; atrocities by, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 ; cooperation with, 1 ; defeat of, 1 ; distrust in, 1 ; expansionism of, 1 ; Huang Zunxian for, 1 , 2 ; imperialism of, 1 ; inspiration from, 1 ;

invasion by, 1 , 2 ; Korea and, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 ; Lu Xun in, 1 ; power in, 1 ; shibun in, 1 ; Uncle Tom’s Cabin in, 1 , 2 , 3 ; war guilt of, 1 ; in The White Countess, 1 . See also Manchukuo Japanese literature: availability of, 1 , 2 ; complications with, 1 ; Lu Xun for, 1 , 2 . See also transculturation; specific works Japanese Literature Patriotic Association, 1 Japanese Nationalist Movement, 1 Japanese Pan-Asianism: avoidance in, 1 ; Civil Rights Movement and, 1 ; demise of, 1 ; genesis of, 1 , 2 ; Right Wing Movement and, 1 . See also Manchukuo Japanese spirit, 1 ; Japan-centric model in, 1 ; terms for, 1 jazz, 1 ; Foster and, 1 ; patronization and, 1 ; suppression of, 1 Jerome, William, 1 Jewish immigrants, 1 Jiang Wen, 1 Jidaimono (history plays), 1 , 2 Ji Luxia, 1 jingju (Beijing opera), 1 , 2 ; wenmingxi and, 1 jingju symphonic dramatic poem, 1 , 2 Jing Mei-ling, 1 jiuxi (old theatre), 1 jōruri (puppet theatre), 1 , 2 kabuki, 1 , 2 Kae, 1 , 2 Kaji Wataru, 1 , 2 kanbun (prose in Chinese), 1 , 2 ; context of, 1 , 2 Kang Sang-jung, 1 Kang Sanjun, 1 kanshi (poetry in Chinese), 1 kanshibun (poetry and prose in literary Chinese), 1 , 2 ; prevalence of, 1 Kasagi Shizuko: Hattori Ryōichi and, 1 ; performance of, 1 ; songs of, 1 , 2 , 3 Kato Hiroyuki, 1 ; Liang and, 1 , 2 Kawabata Yasunari, 1 ; Chikako from, 1 ; China and, 1 ; editorial work of, 1 , 2 ; invitations for, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 ; on nationalism, 1 ; propaganda and, 1 ; role of, 1 Kawada Ōkō, 1 Kawaguchi Seisai, 1 Kawakita Nagamasa, 1 Kawatami Otōjiro, 1 , 2 Kazuko, 1 , 2 Kazuo Ishiguro, 1 , 2 ; gender for, 1 ; for Shanghai, 1 Ke Desan/Ka Tokuzō, 1 , 2 ; nostalgia of, 1 Kim Jaeyong, 1 Kim Ok-kyun, 1

Kishida Kunio, 1 Kitagawa Fuyuhiko, 1 , 2 Kita Ikki, 1 Kiyozawa Manshi, 1 , 2 ; on renunciation, 1 ; on unity, 1 knight-errant, 1 ; masculinity of, 1 ; Miyazaki Tōten for, 1 , 2 ; naniwabushi compared to, 1 ; samurai compared to, 1 kōa (elevating Asia), 1 Kobayashi Takeshi, 1 Kobayashi Yoshinori, 1 , 2 , 3 ; on Tsunashima, 1 kōdan, 1 , 2 Korea: collaborators in, 1 , 2 , 3 ; exclusion of, 1 ; Japan and, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 ; Taiwan compared to, 1 ; transculturation and, 1 , 2 Koruryūkai (Black Dragon Association), 1 , 2 Koschman, J. Victor, 1 koshaku (kōdan), 1 Kōtoku Shusui, 1 Kristeva, Julia, 1 , 2 Kubota Mantarō, 1 Kukrit Pramoj, 1 kundoku (Japanese reading/paraphrasing), 1 Kuroda Kiyotaka, 1 Kurosawa Akira, 1 , 2 Kusakabe Meikaku, 1 Laine, Frankie, 1 , 2 languages, 1 ; African-American, 1 ; appendix for, 1 ; of brush talks, 1 ; of China, 1 ; colonialism and, 1 ; of Manchukuo culture, 1 , 2 ; myth and, 1 ; of nihonjinron, 1 , 2 ; nostalgia and, 1 ; similarities of, 1 , 2 ; wenyan as, 1 Laozi, 1 A Laugh at Mount Shiba, 1 ; postcripts for, 1 Law of Nations, 1 , 2 Lee, Leo, 1 , 2 Lee Teng-hui, 1 , 2 Liang Qichao, 1 , 2 ; for Buddhism, 1 ; for China’s religion, 1 ; against Confucianism, 1 , 2 ; Kato and, 1 , 2 ; for reforms, 1 Li Hongzhang, 1 Li Jinhui, 1 Lin Shu, 1 ; on losses, 1 ; nationalism and, 1 ; rewriting by, 1 ; translations by, 1 Lipitz, George, 1 Li Shuchang, 1 Li Shutong, 1 , 2 literary Chinese, 1 , 2 , 3 ; colonialism and, 1 ; communication from, 1 ; kundoku compared to,

1 ; nationalism and, 1 ; wenyan as, 1 literary contact nebulae, 1 , 2 , 3 literary Japanese, 1 Literary Society, 1 ; love affair in, 1 ; for Shakespeare, 1 , 2 ; See also Love and Hatred in a Family Liu, Lydia, 1 ; appendix from, 1 ; terminology from, 1 , 2 Living Soldiers (Ishikawa Tatsuzō): Bai Mu on, 1 , 2 , 3 ; censorship of, 1 , 2 ; against China, 1 ; Japanese support in, 1 ; Kaji for, 1 ; transculturation of, 1 ; translations of, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 ; Xia Yan on, 1 , 2 , 3 Li Xianglan (musical opera) (Asari), 1 ; affect from, 1 , 2 ; political context of, 1 “Li Xianglan” (song), 1 ; critique of, 1 Li Xianglan (Yamaguchi Yoshiko, Ri Kōran, Shirley Yamaguchi, Otaka Yoshiko): affect from, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 ; America and, 1 , 2 ; background of, 1 ; bifurcation of, 1 ; borders and, 1 ; compulsory forgetting and, 1 ; confusion of, 1 ; cycles of taste for, 1 , 2 ; denunciation of, 1 ; detachment of, 1 , 2 ; expatriation of, 1 ; exploitation of, 1 , 2 ; fictive ethnicity of, 1 , 2 , 3 ; as film star, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 ; globalization and, 1 ; as goodwill ambassador, 1 , 2 ; guilt of, 1 , 2 , 3 ; historical amnesia and, 1 ; for Hong Kong, 1 , 2 ; as iconic memory, 1 ; identity fluidity of, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 ; macro- and micro-history of, 1 ; malleability of, 1 ; media for, 1 , 2 , 3 ; musicals for, 1 ; as myth, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 ; names of, 1 ; national policy films for, 1 ; neoliberalism and, 1 ; obtuseness of, 1 ; as Oriental femininity, 1 , 2 ; ownership of, 1 ; political awakening of, 1 ; postwar glamour of, 1 ; redemption of, 1 ; reiterations from, 1 ; remorse of, 1 , 2 , 3 ; reverse occupation of, 1 ; role of, 1 , 2 ; selective forgetting and, 1 ; songs of, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 ; for Taiwan, 1 ; as traitor, 1 , 2 ; visual-vocal performance of, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 ; vocal education of, 1 ; vocal performance of, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7 , 8 Long, John Luther, 1 Lott, Eric, 1 Love and Hatred in a Family (Lu Jingruo), 1 , 2 ; adultery in, 1 , 2 ; alteration of, 1 ; Hamlet in, 1 ; history in, 1 ; madness in, 1 , 2 ; murder in, 1 ; Othello in, 1 , 2 ; popularity of, 1 ; Shakespeare in, 1 ; story of, 1 ; theatricality of, 1 , 2 Lu Jingruo, 1 ; adaptations by, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 ; admiration for, 1 ; background on, 1 ; Craig and, 1 ; final work of, 1 ; inspiration for, 1 , 2 ; Osanai and, 1 ; perspective of, 1 ; prostitution and, 1 , 2 ; script for, 1 , 2 ; technical innovations from, 1 ; theatricality of, 1 , 2 ; See also Love and Hatred in a Family Lukács, Georg, 1 , 2 ; on transcendental subject-object, 1 Luo Changping, 1 ; critique from, 1 , 2 ; protest against, 1 Luo Fu, 1 Lu Xun, 1 , 2 ; Call to Arms, 1 ; in Japan, 1 ; for Japanese literature, 1 , 2 ; modernity from, 1 ; national consciousness of, 1 Lu You, 1 Madame Butterfly, 1 Maeda Tsuchi, 1 , 2 , 3

mainland melodies, 1 Ma Jianshi, 1 Manchukuo, 1 , 2 ; ethnicities within, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 ; Han Chinese in, 1 , 2 , 3 ; Kawabata for, 1 ; Manchuria and, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 ; Mantetsu for, 1 ; Pan-Asianism and, 1 , 2 ; Pearl Harbor and, 1 ; Pu Yi for, 1 ; resistance in, 1 , 2 ; socialism in, 1 Manchukuo culture: Chinese culture related to, 1 , 2 ; ethnicities in, 1 , 2 ; Han Chinese and, 1 ; Japan throughout, 1 , 2 ; language of, 1 , 2 ; literary tours for, 1 ; Manchukuo Publicity and News Bureau for, 1 ; manipulation of, 1 ; “Pen Brigade” of, 1 ; round-table discussion for, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 ; uniqueness of, 1 Manchuria. See “Girl of Manchuria”; Manchukuo Manchurian Incident, 1 , 2 , 3 Manchurian Lily, 1 Manchuria under Japanese Domination (Yamamuro), 1 Manei (Manchurian Motion Picture Corporation), 1 Mantetsu. See South Manchuria Railway Company Manzhouguo, 1 ; positivity and, 1 ; without Westernization, 1 Mao Dun, 1 Marahara Nobumasa, 1 Marukawa Tetsuchi, 1 Marxism, 1 Masao Miyoshi, 1 masculinity, 1 Massumi, Brian, 1 Matsui Iwane, 1 , 2 ; costumes for, 1 Matsui Shōyō, 1 Matsui Sumako, 1 , 2 May Fourth Movement, 1 , 2 , 3 Ma Yuan, 1 McCormack, Gavan, 1 media: for Li Xianglan, 1 , 2 , 3 ; on Russo-Japanese War, 1 . See also newspapers Meiji Coxinga (Miyazaki Tōten), 1 ; The Battles of Coxinga compared to, 1 ; nationalism and, 1 ; Pan-Asianism in, 1 , 2 ; story of, 1 , 2 , 3 ; structure of, 1 , 2 ; Meiji Japan, 1 Mei Lanfang, 1 ; background of, 1 ; as icon, 1 ; Japan premier for, 1 ; resistance of, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 ; tour for, 1 Mei Lanfang (theatrical production), 1 ; cast for, 1 ; collective memory from, 1 ; costume design for, 1 ; creative authority for, 1 ; cultural memory from, 1 ; emotion in, 1 , 2 ; idea for, 1 ; inspiration for, 1 ; internationalism of, 1 , 2 ; lyrics of, 1 ; Matsui Iwane in, 1 , 2 , 3 ; metaphoric imagery in, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7 ; modernity of, 1 ; Movement I, 1 ; Movement II, 1 ; Movement III, 1 ; Movement IV, 1 ; Movement V, 1 ; music for, 1 ; nō movement in, 1 ; performances of, 1 ; realization of, 1 ; resistance in, 1 , 2 , 3 ; role of, 1 ; staging for, 1 ; structure of, 1 ; Tagore in, 1 , 2 ; thematic layers of, 1 , 2 ; Yang Guifei in, 1 , 2

Mei Lanfang Museum, 1 Merchant, Ishmael, 1 Midori, 1 , 2 Miki Kiyoshi, 1 Minamoto Keikaku, 1 Mitchell, Richard H., 1 Miyazaki Masahiro, 1 Miyazaki Tōten, 1 ; anti-Imperialism of, 1 ; autobiography of, 1 , 2 ; background of, 1 ; for China, 1 , 2 ; Chinese language for, 1 ; chivalry for, 1 ; civil rights for, 1 ; ideals of, 1 , 2 ; for knight-errant, 1 ; marriage of, 1 , 2 ; music for, 1 ; name of, 1 , 2 ; for naniwabushi, 1 , 2 , 3 ; nationalism without, 1 ; Pan-Asianism compared to, 1 ; in Pan-Asian romantic nationalism, 1 ; politics of, 1 , 2 ; against revolution, 1 ; as rōkyokushi, 1 , 2 ; role of, 1 ; Sun Yat-sen and, 1 , 2 ; Watanabe Kyōji on, 1 ; See also Meiji Coxinga; Song of Fallen Blossoms modernity, 1 , 2 , 3 ; Buddhism and, 1 ; classicism and, 1 ; from Lu Xun, 1 ; of Mei Lanfang, 1 ; men of letters and, 1 , 2 ; in religion, 1 ; sharing of, 1 Moon over Shanghai (film), 1 Morimoto Kaoru, 1 ; as collaborator, 1 ; revision by, 1 , 2 ; Sprechtchor for, 1 , 2 ; Sugimura and, 1 ; See also A Woman’s Life Mori Ōgai, 1 ; on opera, 1 ; perspective of, 1 ; script and, 1 , 2 ; travelogues of, 1 Mori Yoshio, 1 , 2 Mushakōji Saneatsu, 1 Mu Shiying, 1 music: for ethnic harmony, 1 ; iterative force of, 1 , 2 ; jazz, 1 , 2 , 3 ; for Mei Lanfang, 1 ; for Miyazaki Tōten, 1 ; as verb, 1 . See also songs; specific theatrical productions musicals, 1 musicking, 1 , 2 ; with tairiku merodei, 1 Mutō Tomio, 1 , 2 My Nightingale (film), 1 My Thirty-Three Years Dreams (Miyazaki Tōten), 1 Nagayo Yoshiro, 1 Nakajima Takeshi, 1 Nakamura Nobuo, 1 , 2 naniwabushi (narrative chanting), 1 , 2 , 3 ; appearance of, 1 , 2 ; class and, 1 , 2 ; criticism of, 1 ; knight-errant compared to, 1 ; Miyazaki Tōten for, 1 , 2 , 3 Nanjing, 1 , 2 ; scorched-earth policy and, 1 , 2 ; in Soldiers Not Yet Deceased, 1 , 2 ; women’s abuse in, 1 Nanjing (Ah Long), 1 ; complicity in, 1 ; graphic accounts in, 1 ; nationalism and, 1 ; transculturation in, 1 ; victory after, 1 ; women’s abuse in, 1 , 2 narrative, 1 , 2 , 3 ; See also naniwabushi nationalism, 1 , 2 ; colonialism and semicolonialism on, 1 ; forms of, 1 ; from Fujiwara, 1 ; Genyōsha for, 1 ; Kawabata on, 1 ; kōa for, 1 ; Law of Nations and, 1 ; Lin Shu and, 1 ;

literary Chinese and, 1 ; Meiji Coxinga and, 1 ; without Miyazaki To1ten, 1 ; Nanjing and, 1 ; from political societies, 1 , 2 ; romantic, 1 ; from Russo-Japanese War, 1 ; Tōyama for, 1 National Learning (kokugaku), 1 , 2 , 3 nation-state: Christianity or, 1 ; religion or, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 Naturalism (shizenshugi), 1 Neo-regionalism, 1 Nesmeyelov, Arseny, 1 newspapers: enthusiasm for, 1 ; Huang Zunxian on, 1 ; suspicion of, 1 Ng, Janet, 1 “Night Shanghai” (song), 1 , 2 nihonjinron ((post)colonial era writings on Japan and Japanese): authorship of, 1 , 2 , 3 ; Feb. 28 Incident in, 1 ; Japanese spirit in, 1 ; languages of, 1 , 2 ; nostalgia of, 1 ; periodization of, 1 ; perspective of, 1 ; Pride of the Japanese, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 ; structure and strategy of, 1 nihonseishin, 1 , 2 Nishikawa Mitsuru, 1 Nishitani Keiji, 1 Nishizawa Yasuhiko, 1 Nitta Eiko, 1 Nogawa Takashi, 1 , 2 Noguchi Hisamitsu, 1 ; for Foster, 1 Nohara Shiro, 1 nostalgia: as affect, 1 ; Chinese rule and, 1 , 2 ; class and, 1 ; colonialism and, 1 , 2 ; as key concept, 1 ; language and, 1 ; late-capitalism and, 1 ; of nihonjinron, 1 ; of restoration, 1 Ogawa Chikagoro, 1 Ōkōchi Teruna: background of, 1 ; for brush talk, 1 , 2 , 3 ; postscript from, 1 ; works of, 1 , 2 “On Establishing Religion” (Zhang Taiyan), 1 Osanai Kaoru: Craig and, 1 , 2 ; Lu Jingruo and, 1 ; script and, 1 Ouyang Yuqian, 1 ; for modern woman, 1 Owen, Stephen, 1 Ōyama Iwao, 1 Ozaki Hotsumi, 1 Pan-Asianism: from Civil Rights Movement, 1 ; culture and, 1 ; Manchukuo and, 1 , 2 ; Manchurian Lily as, 1 ; in Meiji Coxinga, 1 , 2 ; Miyazaki Tōten compared to, 1 ; Nohara Shiro on, 1 ; political ideology and, 1 ; reforms from, 1 ; revisiting, 1 ; romantic nationalism and, 1 ; the term, 1 ; in A Woman’s Life, 1 , 2 . See also Japanese Pan-Asianism Pan-Asianism in Modern Japanese History (Saaler and Koschman), 1 Pan-Asianism of Japan (Takeuchi), 1 Pan Jinlian (Ouyang), 1 passive intertextualizations, 1 Peng Guangyu, 1

performance, 1 ; class and, 1 ; criticism of, 1 , 2 ; director of, 1 ; of Kasagi, 1 ; kōdan, 1 , 2 ; narrative, 1 , 2 ; poster on, 1 , 2 ; rakugo, 1 , 2 ; range of, 1 ; of shōsetsu, 1 ; start of, 1 , 2 ; See also naniwabushi; specific performers Perrins, Robert, 1 Perry, Matthew, 1 , 2 , 3 Po Chu-e. See Bai Juyi poems: of Bai Juyi, 1 , 2 , 3 ; chronology of, 1 ; cultural analysis of, 1 ; of Huang Zunxian, 1 , 2 ; perspective within, 1 ; Qing Chinese for, 1 ; strata within, 1 ; subjectivity within, 1 . See also dramatic poem; specific poems Poems on Miscellaneous Subjects from Japan (Huang Zunxian), 1 , 2 ; Ōkōchi on, 1 ; preface from, 1 , 2 ; scope of, 1 political ideology: Pan-Asianism and, 1 ; religion related to, 1 , 2 , 3 ; spirit compared to, 1 political societies, 1 , 2 politics, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 ; of affect, 1 ; affect without, 1 ; border, 1 , 2 ; of Miyazaki Tōten, 1 , 2 Pope, Edgar, 1 , 2 , 3 ; on musume songs, 1 , 2 postcolonialism, 1 , 2 ; artists, 1 . See also nihonjinron Poulton, Cody, 1 power: of directors, 1 ; influence as, 1 ; in Japan, 1 Pratt, Mary Louise, 1 , 2 Presidential Committee for the Inspection of Collaborations for Japanese Imperialism of South Korea, 1 , 2 Pride of the Japanese, 1 , 2 , 3 ; goal of, 1 , 2 ; Japanese spirit in, 1 ; racial and regional solidarity in, 1 ; regionalism in, 1 prostitution, 1 , 2 ; Lu Jingruo and, 1 , 2 Pu Yi, 1 Qi Baishi, 1 Qing China, 1 , 2 ; legation, 1 , 2 Qi Rushan, 1 rakugo, 1 , 2 Record of Searching For Books in Japan (Yang Shoujing), 1 reforms: in China, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 ; Pan-Asianism from, 1 “The Relationship between Religion and Governing Society” (Liang), 1 religion, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 ; Anesaki for, 1 ; Asad on, 1 ; as belief compared to practice, 1 , 2 , 3 ; belief for, 1 , 2 ; capitalism compared to, 1 , 2 ; Confucius and, 1 , 2 , 3 ; constitution on, 1 ; education and, 1 ; finitude in, 1 ; interiority of, 1 ; Law of Nations and, 1 ; modernity in, 1 ; nation-state or, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 ; pantheism, 1 , 2 ; political ideology related to, 1 , 2 , 3 ; practice and, 1 ; rationalization compared to, 1 , 2 ; reality compared to phenomena, 1 , 2 ; science compared to, 1 ; shūkyō as, 1 ; terms for, 1 , 2 ; transcendence of, 1 ; universality of, 1 ; zongjiao as, 1 , 2 , 3 . See also consciousness; specific religions ribunjinshin, 1 , 2 ; nihonseishin compared to, 1 , 2

Richardson, Natasha, 1 , 2 Riefenstahl, Leni, 1 , 2 Ri Kōoran. See Li Xianglan rōkyoku. See naniwabushi rōkyokushi, 1 , 2 “Rose, Rose, I Love You” (song), 1 , 2 Ruan Lingyu, 1 Russo-Japanese War, 1 , 2 ; media on, 1 ; migration after, 1 , 2 ; nationalism from, 1 ; treaty after, 1 , 2 Saaler, Sven, 1 Saitō Mareshi, 1 ; on kanbun context, 1 , 2 samurai, 1 Sanjō Sanetome, 1 Sardou, Victorien, 1 Satō Kōroku, 1 , 2 Schwartz, Jean, 1 Scott, A. C., 1 script: actors compared to, 1 ; drama related to, 1 ; Feng Shuluan for, 1 ; for Li Xianglan, 1 ; Lu Jingruo for, 1 , 2 ; Mori Ōgai and, 1 , 2 ; Osanai and, 1 ; purity of, 1 , 2 ; supremacy of, 1 ; wenmingxi and, 1 Senkichi Taniguchi, 1 Seoul Incident, 1 Sergeant, Harriet, 1 Shakespeare, William: Hamlet from, 1 ; Literary Society for, 1 , 2 ; Othello from, 1 , 2 Shan Ding, 1 , 2 , 3 Shanghai, 1 , 2 , 3 ; Bund in, 1 , 2 ; character of, 1 ; dance-clubs and, 1 , 2 , 3 ; dreams for, 1 ; film and, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 ; as frontier, 1 ; Japan and, 1 ; for jazz, 1 ; Kazuo for, 1 ; May 30th (1927) massacre in, 1 ; migration to, 1 ; Peace Hotel in, 1 , 2 ; status of, 1 ; Yingjin Zhang on, 1 ; See also When We Were Orphans Shanghai (Sergeant), 1 Shanghai (Yokomitsu), 1 Sheng Heyu, 1 , 2 , 3 Shen Wenying, 1 Shiba Ryōtarō, 1 Shields, Carole, 1 Shigeno Yasutsugu, 1 Shi Jun, 1 , 2 Shima Koji, 1 Shimamura Hōgetsu, 1 Shimazaki Tōson, 1 ; Ba Jin against, 1 Shimizu Akira, 1

Shinchōsha, 1 shingeki (new drama), 1 ; Osanai for, 1 ; showstoppers in, 1 shinpa (new school drama), 1 ; adaptations of, 1 ; The Cuckoo, 1 , 2 , 3 ; The Echo of the Cloud, 1 ; See also Love and Hatred in a Family shōsetsu (fictional narrative), 1 Shōwa period, 1 shūkyō, 1 ; origins of, 1 ; as religion, 1 Silverberg, Miriam, 1 , 2 , 3 Sima Guang, 1 Sino-Japanese War, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 ; Triple Intervention in, 1 Sinosphere, 1 siwen (“This Culture of Ours”), 1 , 2 , 3 Small, Christopher, 1 , 2 Smith, Arthur, 1 Smith, Norman, 1 SMRC. See South Manchuria Railway Company Soejima Taneomi, 1 Soldiers Not Yet Deceased (Bai Mu), 1 , 2 ; censorship in, 1 ; drawings in, 1 ; Nanjing in, 1 , 2 “Some Irreverent Words” (Ba Jin), 1 Some Prefer Nettles (Tanizaki), 1 “Song of Everlasting Remorse” (Bai Juyi), 1 Song of Everlasting Sorrow (film), 1 , 2 Song of Everlasting Sorrow (Wang Anyi), 1 , 2 Song of Fallen Blossoms (Miyazaki Tōten), 1 , 2 Song of the White Orchid (film), 1 songs:Chineseness of, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 ; class and, 1 ; continental melodies, 1 ; cover versions of, 1 , 2 ; de-politicizing of, 1 ; lyrics, 1 , 2 ; musume, 1 ; of Watanabe Hamako, 1 , 2 ; xiqu for, 1 , 2 , 3 ; See also tairiku merodei; specific singers; specific songs Sontag, Susan, 1 South Manchuria Railway Company (SMRC) (Mantetsu), 1 Spielberg, Steven, 1 Spitta, Sylvia, 1 Spring Willows Society, 1 ; changes in, 1 ; first productions of, 1 ; transformation of, 1 ; See also Love and Hatred in a Family Stacey, Jackie, 1 Stowe, Harriet Beecher, 1 strategic anti-essentialism, 1 Sugimura Haruko, 1 , 2 ; autobiography of, 1 ; Morimoto and, 1 ; Nakamura and, 1 Suiki Fumihiko, 1 Sun, 1 Sun Wu, 1

Sun Yat-sen, 1 ; Miyazaki Tōten and, 1 , 2 suppression: of jazz, 1 ; tairiku merodei and, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 ; of theatrical productions, 1 , 2 , 3 “Suzhou Serenade”, 1 , 2 Tagore, Rabindranath, 1 , 2 tairiku merodei (continental melodies), 1 , 2 , 3 ; American blackface minstrelsy compared to, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 ; contradictions from, 1 , 2 ; criticism of, 1 ; imperialism and, 1 ; musicking with, 1 ; suppression and, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 . See also Kasagi Shizuko; Watanabe Hamako Taishō period, 1 Taiwan, 1 , 2 , 3 ; benshengren and waishengren in, 1 , 2 ; decolonization of, 1 ; dōsan in, 1 ; Feb. 28 Incident in, 1 ; Hari-zu in, 1 ; Japanese spirit in, 1 ; Korea compared to, 1 ; Lee Teng-hui for, 1 ; Li Xianglan for, 1 ; nihonjinron from, 1 ; non-decolonization of, 1 ; proJapan in, 1 ; rebunhinshin of, 1 ; restoration of, 1 Takeuchi Yoshimi, 1 , 2 Takezoe Seisei, 1 , 2 , 3 ; networks of, 1 ; self-consciousness of, 1 ; travel journal by, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 ; Yang Guifei related to, 1 Tamaki Koji, 1 Tanizaki Jun’ichiro, 1 , 2 Tankasei, 1 Teng, Teresa, 1 , 2 theatricality, 1 , 2 , 3 ; of Love and Hatred in a Family, 1 , 2 theatrical productions, 1 ; suppression of, 1 , 2 , 3 ; transportation of, 1 . See also script; specific theatrical productions; specific types of productions Thornber, Karen, 1 Tian Han, 1 Tōchūken Kumonoemon, 1 Tokutomi Roka, 1 , 2 Tokutomi Sohō, 1 , 2 Tomes, Robert, 1 Tōyama Mitsuru, 1 transcendence, 1 , 2 transculturation, 1 , 2 , 3 ; appreciation of, 1 ; colonialism and semicolonialism on, 1 ; conferences for, 1 ; contact nebulae in, 1 , 2 ; contact zone in, 1 ; imperialism and, 1 , 2 , 3 ; Korea and, 1 , 2 ; of translation, 1 ; in twentieth century, 1 ; types of, 1 , 2 . See also Manchukuo translations, 1 ; of battlefront literature, 1 ; choices regarding, 1 ; distillations in, 1 ; imperialism on, 1 ; independence in, 1 ; by Lin Shu, 1 ; objectivity in, 1 ; transculturation of, 1 ; by Wu Zhefei, 1 , 2 . See also specific works treaties, 1 , 2 , 3 ; inequality from, 1 Treatises on Japan (Riben guozhi) (Huang Zunxian), 1 Treaty of Amity and Commerce (1858), 1 , 2 Tsubouchi Shōyō, 1 , 2

Tsunashima Ryōsen, 1 Uchimura Kanzo, 1 , 2 Ueno Shizuko, 1 Ukai Tetsujō, 1 Uncle Tom’s Cabin (Stowe), 1 ; in Japan, 1 , 2 , 3 Verdi, Giuseppe, 1 Wada Haruki, 1 waishengren, 1 , 2 Wallerstein, Immanuel, 1 Wang Anyi, 1 Wang Fanqing, 1 Wang Guowei, 1 , 2 Wang Meng, 1 Wang Renqian, 1 Wang Ruxiu, 1 Wang Shizhen, 1 Wang Tao, 1 , 2 , 3 Wang Zhiben, 1 , 2 war, 1 , 2 , 3 ; battlefront literature, 1 ; in The Dream of a Certain Young Man, 1 ; postwar, 1 , 2 , 3 ; Song of Fallen Blossoms and, 1 . See also specific wars Watanabe Hamako, 1 ; songs of, 1 , 2 Watanabe Kyōji, 1 Wayley, Arthur, 1 Wei Limen, 1 Wei Yi, 1 wenmingxi (civilized drama), 1 , 2 , 3 wenyan, 1 Westernism, 1 , 2 Wheat and Soldiers (Hino), 1 , 2 ; objectivity of, 1 ; transculturation of, 1 When We Were Orphans (Kazuo), 1 , 2 ; indifference in, 1 ; memories in, 1 ; mother in, 1 ; opium trade in, 1 ; perspectives in, 1 ; priorities in, 1 ; reunion in, 1 ; story of, 1 The White Countess (film), 1 , 2 ; betrayal in, 1 ; blindness in, 1 , 2 ; disillusionment in, 1 , 2 ; gender in, 1 ; Japan in, 1 ; story of, 1 , 2 White Countess band, 1 , 2 Wixted, John Timothy, 1 Woman of Shanghai (film), 1 , 2 A Woman’s Life (Morimoto), 1 ; ambivalence within, 1 , 2 ; betrayal in, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 ; bombings and, 1 ; China Problem in, 1 ; as commemoration, 1 ; contradictions within, 1 , 2 ; militarisms within, 1 ; optimism in, 1 ; Pan-Asianism in, 1 , 2 ; political resistance in, 1 ;

popularity of, 1 ; postwar versions of, 1 , 2 ; responsibility in, 1 ; showstopper in, 1 , 2 ; story of, 1 ; translations of, 1 , 2 , 3 ; unhappy marriage in, 1 , 2 ; wartime and, 1 , 2 ; women in, 1 , 2 women, 1 , 2 ; abuse of, 1 , 2 , 3 ; adultery of, 1 , 2 ; male actors as, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 ; musume songs for, 1 ; prostitution, 1 , 2 , 3 ; Yang Guifei, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 . See also Li Xianglan Wu, 1 , 2 Wu, Harold “Zing”, 1 Wu Nien-Jen, 1 Wu Ying, 1 , 2 , 3 Wu Zhefei, 1 , 2 Wu Zhouliu, 1 Wu Zuguang, 1 , 2 Xia Yan, 1 , 2 , 3 xinxi (new theatre), 1 xiqu (theatre of song), 1 , 2 , 3 Yamaguchi Yoshiko. See Li Xianglan Yamamuro Shin’ichi, 1 Yang Shoujing, 1 Yang Suqiu/Yō Soshū, 1 Yang Xiaolou, 1 Yang Yingyin/Yō Ōgin, 1 Yashiro Yukio, 1 “Ye Shanghai” (song), 1 Yi Chi, 1 , 2 Yiman Wang, 1 Yingjin Zhang, 1 , 2 Yogācāra Buddhism, 1 , 2 , 3 ; consciousness in, 1 ; delusion in, 1 ; departure from, 1 ; discussion of, 1 , 2 ; hate and, 1 ; materialism and, 1 ; ontological ground and, 1 ; pantheism and, 1 , 2 ; self-nature in, 1 ; sentient beings in, 1 , 2 Yokomitsu Riichi, 1 Yom Sang Seop, 1 Yoshida Ken’ichi, 1 Yoshida Shigeru, 1 Yoshimura Kimisaburō, 1 Yoshimura Kōzaburō, 1 Young, Louise, 1 , 2 , 3 Yu Dafu, 1 , 2 , 3 ; celebrity of, 1 ; national consciousness of, 1 Yu’ilski, Boris, 1 Yu Kuizhi, 1 , 2 , 3

Yu Yue, 1 , 2 , 3 Zeng Xiaogu, 1 , 2 Zhang Ailing. See Chang, Eileen Zhang Geng, 1 Zhang Heping, 1 Zhang Shifang, 1 , 2 Zhang Taiyan, 1 , 2 , 3 ; Buddhism for, 1 , 2 , 3 ; consciousness for, 1 , 2 , 3 ; five negations from, 1 ; against pantheism, 1 , 2 ; in prison, 1 , 2 , 3 ; revolution and, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 ; state and, 1 , 2 ; suicide for, 1 ; Zhang Zi for, 1 . See also Yogācāra Buddhism Zhang Zhidong, 1 Zhang Zi, 1 Zhou Enlai, 1 Zhou Xuan, 1 , 2 , 3 Zhou Zuoren, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 Zhu Shaoyu, 1 , 2 Zhu Tianwei, 1 zongjiao, 1 , 2 , 3 Zou Rong, 1

About the Authors

MICHAEL K. BOURDAGHS Michael K. Bourdaghs is associate professor in East Asian Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago. He is the author of The Dawn That Never Comes: Shimazaki Tōson and Japanese Nationalism (2003) and Sayonara Amerika, Sayonara Nippon: A Geopolitical Prehistory of J-pop (2011), as well as the editor of The Linguistic Turn in Contemporary Japanese Literary Studies: Politics, Language, Textuality (2010) and of the English translation of Kamei Hideo’s Transformations of Sensibility: The Phenomenology of Meiji Literature (2002). LEO CHING Leo Ching is chair and associate professor in the Department of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at Duke University. He is the author of Becoming “Japanese”: Colonial Taiwan and the Politics of Identity Formation (University of California Press, 2001; Chinese and Japanese translations are available from Maitian chuban and Blues Interactions). His writings have appeared in Public Culture, boundary 2, positions: An East Asian cultural critique, and several other edited volumes. He is currently completing a book manuscript on anti-Japanism in postwar postcolonial Asia and popular culture. ANNIKA A. CULVER Annika A. Culver serves as assistant professor of Asian History and Asian Studies Coordinator at the University of North Carolina at Pembroke. She has also taught at the University of Chicago, Skidmore College, and Beijing University, with research interests in Japanese cultural imperialism and Sino-Japanese cultural history. Her forthcoming book, Japanese “Avant-Garde” Propaganda in Manchukuo: Modernist Reflections of the New State, 1932–1945 (University of British Columbia Press), investigates how formerly leftoriented Japanese writers, artists, and photographers mobilized their talents to produce multivalent works depicting Japanese development and labor in occupied northeast China after a tour or sojourn. Culver has published articles and reviews in History Compass, US-Japan Women’s Journal, Stanford Journal of East Asian Affairs (SJEAA), Journal of North Carolina Historians, and Perspectives. After a Fulbright Graduate Research Fellowship at

Waseda University (2005), she received her doctorate in modern Japanese intellectual history from the University of Chicago (2007), and a master’s degree in Regional Studies East Asia from Harvard University (2000). Culver’s next project, “Consuming the West: Sino-Japanese Consumption of Wine, Cigarettes, and Soap from the 1880s–1938,” examines from a cultural history standpoint this triad of “Western” commodities symbolizing a progressive modernity for urban middle-class Chinese and Japanese during a period of rising nationalisms in East Asia. KATSUHIKO ENDO Katsuhiko Endo is assistant professor of modern Japanese history at the University of Victoria, Canada. He is editor and translator of Rekishi to Kioku no Kōsō [The Struggle Between History and Memory] (2010), Harry Harootunian’s collection of essays on postwar Japan, and wrote the forward for that work. He is currently working on his book, titled Empire State of Mind, Volume I: Fukushima, Japanese Baseball, and World History. RICHARD KING Richard King is professor of Chinese at the University of Victoria, specializing in modern and contemporary Chinese fiction and popular culture. He is the editor of Art in Turmoil: The Chinese Cultural Revolution 1966–76 (2010) and coeditor of Global Goes Local: Popular Culture in Asia (2002), the translator of Liu Sola’s novel Chaos and All That (1994), and Zhu Lin’s Snake’s Pillow and Other Stories (1998), editor and cotranslator of Heroes of China’s Great Leap Forward (2010), and the editor and cotranslator of Living with Their Past: PostUrban Youth Fiction by Zhang Kangkang (2003). FAYE YUAN KLEEMAN Faye Yuan Kleeman teaches modern and contemporary East Asian culture and literature at the University of Colorado, Boulder. Her research focuses on comparative studies of China and Japan, Japanese colonial literature in Taiwan and Manchuria, Japanophone literature, Japanese film, women writers, and outcast writers. Her works include Under an Imperial Sun: Japanese Colonial Literature of the South (2003), “Gender, Ethnography and Colonial Cultural Production: Nishikawa Mitsuru’s Discourse on Taiwan” (2006), “Postwar Japanese Language Literature” (2006), “Murakami in America, America in Murakami: Between Textual Translation and Cultural Translation” (2009). SIYUAN LIU Siyuan Liu is an assistant professor of Theatre at the University of British Columbia. He has

published widely on twentieth-century Chinese and Japanese theatre and other topics in academic journals such as Theatre Journal, TDR, Asian Theatre Journal, Text & Presentation, and Journal of The National Academy of Chinese Theatre Arts (in Chinese) and book anthologies such as Avant-Garde Performance and Material Exchange: Vectors of the Radical and Asian Canadian Theatre: New Essays on Canadian Theatre Vol. 1. He is a guest editor of the First Generation Asian Theatre Scholars series for Asian Theatre Journal (Fall 2011) and the President of Association for Asian Performance (2011–2013). RICHARD JOHN LYNN Richard John Lynn, retired professor of Chinese thought and literature, University of Toronto, is Professor Emeritus in the Department of East Asian Studies. He is a Fellow of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland. His publications include Kuan Yün-shih (1286– 1324) (Twayne, 1980), Chinese Literature: A Draft Bibliography in Western European Languages (Australian National University Press, 1980), Guide to Chinese Poetry and Drama (G. K. Hall, 1984), The Classic of Changes: A New Translation of the I Ching as Interpreted by Wang Bi (Columbia University Press, 1994), The Classic of the Way and Virtue: A New Translation of the Tao-te ching of Laozi as Interpreted by Wang Bi (Columbia University Press, 1999), editor, James J. Y. Liu; Language—Paradox—Poetics: A Chinese Perspective (Princeton University Press, 1988). He has authored more than one hundred book sections, journal articles, and reviews, many on pre-modern Chinese poetry and poetics, literati culture, intellectual history, and the visual arts. His current works include a translation and study of the Daoist classic, Zhuangzi, with the commentary of Guo Xiang (d. 312) (Columbia University Press), and a study of Huang Zunxian’s literary experiences in Japan (1877–1882). VIREN MURTHY Viren Murthy teaches Chinese and Japanese history at the University of Ottawa. His primary interest is in modern Chinese and Japanese intellectual history and the problems of global capitalist modernity. His book, The Political Philosophy of Zhang Taiyan: The Resistance of Consciousness, was published by Brill in 2011. CODY POULTON Cody Poulton is professor of Japanese literature and theatre at the University of Victoria, Canada. His recent publications include Spirits of Another Sort: The Plays of Izumi Kyōka (2001), twenty entries on modern Japanese theatre for The Oxford Encyclopedia of Theatre and Performance (2003) and A Beggar’s Art: Scripting Modernity in Japanese Drama, 1900–1930 (2010). He has also been active as a translator of kabuki and modern Japanese

drama, for both publication and live stage productions in Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom, Ireland, Australia, and Japan. He is currently completing (with Mitsuya Mori and J. Thomas Rimer) The Columbia Anthology of Modern Japanese Drama. ATSUKO SAKAKI Atsuko Sakaki is professor in the Department of East Asian Studies and a member of the Centre for Comparative Literature at the University of Toronto. Her most recent publications include “The Face in the Shadow of the Camera: Corporeality of the Photographer in Kanai Mieko’s Narratives,” Mechademia 7 (Fall 2012); “Tanizaki Jun’ichirō, or Photography as Violence,” Japan Forum (2010); “Taming of the Strange: Arakida Rei Reads and Writes Stories of the Supernatural,” in Peter Kornicki, Gaye Rowley, and Mara Patessio, eds., The Female as Subject: Reading and Writing in Early Modern Japan (Center for Japanese Studies, University of Michigan, 2010); and “Kaisetsu: Yume no hon to soine shite,” in Kanai Mieko, Kishibe no nai umi (Kawade bunko, 2009). She is also the author of Obsessions with Sino-Japanese Polarity in Japanese Literature (Hawai’i, 2005) and Recontextualizing Text: Narrative Performance in Modern Japanese Fiction (Harvard, 1999), and translated and edited The Woman with the Flying Head and Other Stories by Kurahashi Yumiko (M.E. Sharpe, 1998). Currently she is working on three book projects, “Corporeality and Spatiality in Modern Japanese Literature” (Gotō Meisei, Abe Kōbō, Hasegawa Shirō, Horie Toshiyuki), “Photographic Rhetoric in Modern Japanese Fiction” (Tanizaki, Abe, Mishima, Kanai, and Horie) and a translation of short stories by Horie Toshiyuki. KAREN THORNBER Karen Thornber is associate professor and Director of Graduate Studies of Comparative Literature at Harvard University. Her research and teaching focus on world literature and the literatures and cultures of East Asia. She received her PhD in 2006 from Harvard’s Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations. Her first book, Empire of Texts in Motion: Chinese, Korean, and Taiwanese Transculturations of Japanese Literature (Harvard, 2009), won two major international awards: the 2011 John Whitney Hall Book Prize from the Association for Asian Studies, for the best book on either contemporary or historical topics in any field of the Japanese humanities or social sciences; and the International Comparative Literature Association’s 2010 Anna Balakian Prize, for the best book in the world in the field of comparative literature published in the last three years by a scholar under age 40. Empire of Texts in Motion explores interactions among the Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Taiwanese literary worlds in the Japanese empire (1895–1945). Professor Thornber’s second book, Ecoambiguity: Environmental Crises and East Asian Literatures (forthcoming, Michigan, 2011) analyzes how literatures from East Asia and other parts of the world depict the ambiguous interactions between people and their biophysical environments. A third book,

Texts in Turmoil: Global Health and World Literature (currently in preparation), analyzes twentieth-century cultural flows between East Asia and South and Southeast Asia, the Middle East, and Africa. YIMAN WANG Yiman Wang is assistant professor of film and digital media at the University of California, Santa Cruz. His research and teaching interests include early cinema, border-crossing film remakes, transnational Chinese cinemas, DV image-making in contemporary China, ethnic star studies, theories of translation, postcolonialism, race and gender. His scholarly writings have appeared in Quarterly Review of Film and Video, Film Quarterly, Camera Obscura, Journal of Film and Video, Literature/Film Quarterly, Positions: East Asia Cultures Critique, Journal of Chinese Cinemas, Chinese Films in Focus: 25 New Takes (Chris Berry, ed. 2003), Stardom and Celebrity: A Reader (Sean Redmond et. al., eds. 2007), Violating Time: History, Memory, and Nostalgia in Cinema, (Christina Lee ed. 2008), Idols of Modernity: Movie Stars of the 1920s (Patrice Petro, ed. 2010), The New Chinese Documentary Film Movement: For the Public Record (Chris Berry, Lü Xinyu, and Lisa Rofel eds. 2010), Cinema at the City’s Edge: Film and Urban Networks in East Asia (Yomi Braester and James Tweedie, eds. 2010). His recently completed book project is entitled Remaking Chinese Cinema: ShanghaiHong Kong-Hollywood since the 1920s. ELIZABETH WICHMANN-WALCZAK Elizabeth Wichmann-Walczak is professor of Asian Theatre in the University of Hawai’i at Manoa Department of Theatre & Dance. While carrying out the field research for her doctoral dissertation (Nanjing 1979–1981), she became the first non-Chinese to perform Jingju (Beijing/Peking “opera”) in the People’s Republic of China. Since that time she has written & published on the performance structure & aesthetics of Chinese theatre, including the recent “King Lear at the Shanghai Jingju Company: Dream of the King of Qi,” in Alexander Huang & Charles Ross’ Shakespeare in Hollywood, Asia, & Cyberspace. She has also translated & directed one modern, two “newly-written historical/mythological,” & four classical Jingju plays taught to University of Hawai’i students by major Jingju artists from China; at Chinese invitation, three classical productions have been presented in mainland China. Dr. WichmannWalczak is the first honorary (& first non-Chinese) member of the National Xiqu (“Chinese opera”) Institute and of the Chinese Theatre Artists Associations of Shanghai & Jiangsu Province. She has been awarded the National Xiqu Music Association’s Kong Sanchuan award for excellence in research, creation, & performance, as well as the National Festival of Jingju’s Golden Chrysanthemum Award for outstanding achievements in promoting & developing Jingju.