I always find the Association for Asian Studies annual meeting a disorienting (no pun intended) experience, and it was even more so this time around.  Jetlag didn't help matters, nor did the fact that it was held in my hometown, meaning I didn't have a handy hotel room to which I could retreat when the panic attacks got to be too much. 

There's just something creepy about being surrounded by 5,000 Asianists.  I suppose this is merely another symptom of typical academic self-loathing.  Every year, I swear this is the last time I'll go, but I'm already booked to attend in 2010 (Philadelphia) and 2011 (Honolulu)....

I did attend more panels than usual this past weekend and generally found them quite useful.  The session I organized, on "How the 1960s Became the 1970s in Japan," went well:  good papers, okay audience turn-out, and interesting comments during and after the discussion period.   The goal was to put some pressure on the standard historical narrative, a generally tragic story that posits a radical break in cultural and political life around 1970, between the radical 1960s and the complacent 1970s.  What does that narrative of discontinuity conceal, and what interests does it serve?  What aspects can we see if we start looking for strands of continuity between the 1960s and 70s?  The panel included papers that took up novelist Oe Kenzaburo (Haga Koichi, Josai International University), photographer Nakahira Takuma (Franz Pritchard, UCLA), and the 1972 Okinawa Reversion (Tanaka Yasuhiro, International Christian University).

I also attended all or parts of the following panels:

"Critical Pluralism:  Cultural/Literary Theory Crossing Borders"

"Cinematic Interactions and Border Politics:  East Asian Film Culture During WWII"

"Reform and Modern Japanese Culture"

"Photographic Practices, Visual Transgression and National Identity in Meiji Japan and Early Republican China"

"Roundtable:  Mapping the Trajectories of Contemporary Japanese Theory"

The last panel featured presentations by two of the most influential contemporary theorists in Japan, sociologist Miyadai Shinji (Japanese-language blog here; English-language introduction here) and philosopher Azuma Hiroki. The publication of Azuma's work in English as Otaku:  Japan's Database Animals (trans. Jonathan Abel and Shion  Kono) was one of the motivations for the session, which will be followed in the coming days by a series of workshops at various universities.  

The panel was designed to introduce North American scholars to developments in Japanese theory and critique since the early 1990s--that is, since the demise of the journal Hihyo Kukan (Critical Space) and the generation represented by such figures as Karatani Kojin and Asada Akira.  The new developments include a move toward cultural studies, an attempt to overcome the insistence on "literature" and a specific mode of "politics" that characterized the preceding generation, and a commitment to grappling with the postmodern not as a matter of discourse but as a real social system.  Azuma and Miyadai both focus on youth subcultures, trying to grapple in their scholarly work at the levels of both form and content with producing a critical consciousness that is grounded in the actual practice of anime, manga, computer games, sexuality and other aspects of contemporary daily life in Japan.   

The panel was informative and exciting, and we in North America clearly need to grapple with the work of Miyadai, Azuma and their peers.  I wrote an article in Kindai Nihon Bungaku a couple of years back lamenting the breakdown since the 1990s of an exhiliarating sense of synchronicity that existed for a decade or so between young scholars in Japan and North America, and clearly this panel offered one attractive solution to that problem.    But, as my own panel's topic hints, I've grown suspicious lately toward narratives that legitimate certain positions by depicting them as radical breaks from what preceded them.  Meet the new boss, same as the old boss, and all that. 

Moreover, while I'm deeply sympathetic (even empathetic) with the turn toward popular cultural studies, I don't understand why that requires us to abandon earlier modes of "literature" and "politics."  I've always been curious about why this gets posited as an either/or choice:  thou may do Basho, or thou may do Neon Genesis Evangelion, but thou must not do both, especially not at the same time.  Why not--especially when crossings between them can be used to trouble, rather than reinforce, existing myths about "Japan" and its place in the world?

Even as I explore pop music, film, and other modes of mass culture and find them to be remarkably complex and rewarding, I also find value in stirring through the embers of whatever is left of "high culture," seeking out any sources of heat they might still contain.   If we ignore those texts, moreover, we end up surrendering them entirely into the hands of critics, scholars, and institutions who would drain the last life out of them and transform them into zombies programmed to carry out deadly ideological missions.   

I seem to have transformed this all into a sleazy horror movie script, rather than an elegant novel.  I wonder which side I'm really on, after all.