Narita Ruichi and Iwasaski Minoru, Norma Field wa kataru: sengo bungaku kibo 『ノーマ・フィールドは語る―戦後・文学・希望』(2010). Part of the handy Iwanami Booklet series, in a compact 63 pages this provides an appealing portrait of the life and scholarship of my colleague, Norma Field. In a series of interviews with two of Japan’s leading intellectual historians, she talks about growing up the daughter of an American soldier and a Japanese woman in 1950s Japan, about her intellectual awakening in the 1960s and 70s, and about the ethics of scholarship in today’s tangled academy.

Alexander Saxton, The Great Midland (1948). A recently revived classic of late American proletarian literature, the story of Communist Party activists on the South Side of Chicago: railroad workers (both black and white), University of Chicago armchair radicals (both male and female), immigrants and their children. Reminiscent of early John Dos Passos, the narrative moves forward and backward through the history of the first half of the twentieth century as it depicts the friendships, jealousies, and confusions of a generation of American radicals.

Cornel West, The American Evasion of Philosophy: A Genealogy of Pragmatism (1989). West’s classic account of American pragmatism is driven by great passion and intelligence, and he makes a persuasive case for the relevance of James, Dewey, Peirce and their intellectual descendants in today’s world. But I’m also struck by the remarkable undercurrent of American exceptionalism that runs throughout his argument.

Theory of Literature and Other Critical Writings, a collection of English translations of Natsume Soseki’s writings on literary theory that I co-edited with Atsuko Ueda and Joseph Murphy, is now available in paperback for a mere $27.50. Such a deal!

The volume was originally published in hardcover last year. Public Radio International’s “The World” picked the book as one of its “International Reads for the Holidays,” and the journal Japanese Studies called it “an impressive work of remarkable erudition matched by the precision and lucidity with which the complexity of Soseki’s thought and of its context are presented….eminently readable, lively, and lucid.”

Soon to be a major motion picture, no doubt….

Our Japan@Chicago conference this year was held in late May and devoted to the topic of “Engaging Commodities: Crossing Mass Culture and the Avant-Garde in 1960s Japanese Film, Music, and Art.” The event included several specials guests, musicians who were active in the 1960s rock scene in Japan. They spoke about their experiences then, and they also brought along their guitars and played a few songs for us. These included Alan Merrill, who was active in Japan in the 1960s Group Sounds band The Lead, then as a solo artist signed to Watanabe Productions, and later in the early 1970s pioneering glam rock band Vodka Collins. Here is video of Alan performed his 1973 Vodka Collins hit, “Automatic Pilot.” Alan closed his impromptu set at the conference with a rendition of a song he wrote and first recorded in 1975 with his UK band The Arrows after leaving Japan: “I Love Rock ‘n’ Roll” (video here).

We also were lucky enough to have three original members of the legendary Yokohama band The Golden Cups join us for a question-and-answer session: Eddie Ban (lead guitar), Louise Louis Kabe (bass), and Mamoru Manu (drums and vocals). At the end of the evening we had a jam session with Eddie Ban and Alan Merrill. They played three numbers together, including a sly Japanese-language version of “Sweet Home Chicago” (video here).

It was a terrific year, and we’re already planning some very interesting events for next year….

The Women of Yueh (1)

She is a southern girl of Chang-kan Town;
Her face is prettier than star or moon,
And white like frost her feet in sandals–
She does not wear the crow-head covers

(In these poems, Li Po records what he saw of the “southern” girls in Kiangsu and Chehkiang. These provinces were under the king of Yueh in the 5th and 6th centuries, B.C. Chang-kan is near the city of Nanking, and was at Li Po’s time inhabited by the lower class of people. The “crow-head covers” are a kind of shoes worn by upper-class women of the north. So named on account of their shape and very small size–small feet seem to have been already at a premium. “It is interesting,” remarks a native critic demurely, “to note Li Po’s admiration for a barefoot woman.”)

[Translation and notes by Shigeyoshi Obata, from his edited volume The Works of Li Po, The Chinese Poet (1935)]

(Image source)

The newspapers here are reporting the death of the great novelist and playwright Inoue Hisashi. He was 75 and had been battling cancer for some time. Raised in an orphanage in Sendai, Inoue first attracted attention in the early 1970s with his brilliant, often funny and often sharply critical, fiction. He liked to employ nonstandard forms of writing: he invented, for example, a fictional language for his 1981 masterpiece Kirikirijin. From the 1980s his focus shifted to writing primarily for the stage. Just last year he staged a successful dramatization of the life and work of proletarian literature writer Kobayashi Takiji.

Inoue was also a prominent public intellectual. He lent his voice and pen to a number of worthy causes–most notably the efforts to save Article 9, the no-war clause of the Japanese constitution. On that note, the Yomiuri newspaper is by coincidence also reporting on one of Inoue’s most important legacies. Given the newspaper’s strong bias toward changing Article 9, its coverage of the issue has to be taken with a grain or two of salt. But today’s Daily Yomiuri describes what seems to be a significant change over the past year in Japanese public opinion on the issue:

Thirty-two percent of people surveyed felt Article 9–the constitutional clause renouncing the right to wage war–should be amended as it hampers the country’s ability to deal with related issues because of how the article is interpreted. This number, too, was lower than 38 percent in last year’s survey.

Meanwhile, 44 percent of respondents said related issues–such as the dispatch of Self-Defense Forces on international peacekeeping operations–should be dealt with through the conventional interpretation of Article 9. In the previous survey, 33 percent felt this way.

The big story, in other words, is a large shift in public sentiment toward keeping Article 9 in its present form. Last year 52% supported and 36% opposed constitutional revision, while this year the figures were 43% and 42% respectively. Of course, the headline to the Daily Yomiuri story chooses a different angle: “Poll: Public split over amending Constitution / Over 70% think govt should discuss issue.” (The headline on the original Japanese-language version of the article does a better job of conveying the story, I think).

Of the nine prominent intellectuals who in 2004 launched the citizens’ movement to save Article 9, only six are still with us today. But as the story above shows, their efforts are bearing fruit. I’ll resist the temptation here to use the cherry blossom metaphor, although it seems quite apt.

In his lecture at the University of Chicago last month, Oe Kenzaburo noted that there are now more than 700 local chapters affiliated with the movement across Japan. To paraphrase another playwright, the good Inoue Hisashi did lives on after him. Rest in peace.

The other thing that became clear to me at the event, as it has at every recent scholarly event I’ve been to, is how much pressure everyone is facing in this time of slashed budgets, rising costs, and uncertainty about the future. These are challenging times for people who care about scholarship in North America–and in East Asia, too.

Yesterday, I was up at Princeton participating in the Workshop on Postwar Literary Criticism, the initial event in an exciting new collaborative research project that brings together faculty and students from the University of Chicago, Princeton University, and Waseda University. On the morning panel, Toeda Hirokazu (Waseda) presented some very intriguing ideas about how we should bring in the issue of censorship when we rethink literary criticism from early postwar Japan. He’s one of the editors of a new series of books that collects Occupation-period censorship records, and in his talk he showed us some remarkable instances of the conditions under which Japanese writers and editors functioned in the late 1940s.

Sakakibara Richi (Waseda) spoke on the 1946-7 “Politics and Literature” debate among leftist and Marxist critics, noting the implicit rise through the course of the debate of a series of shared concepts and keywords among participants who seemingly agreed about nothing. She also traced through how those same concepts and keywords meant something very different for the participants in the debate from what they mean today. I spoke about the same “Politics and Literature” debate as an early instance of Cold War culture, situating the works of such Japanese critics as Hirano Ken, Ara Masahito, and Nakano Shigeharu alongside that of some of their contemporaries in North America. In the afternoon, we had some excellent suggestions for the papers and projects from two discussants, Victor Koschmann (Cornell) and Richard Calichman (City University of New York). Then we had another terrific session in which graduate students from the three schools presented their thoughts about how to translate and annotate texts from early postwar literary criticism in ways that will address a variety of different kinds of readers.

The joint research project is off to an exciting start. We’ll bring the group together again for another workshop in Tokyo at Waseda this summer and then wrap things up with a formal international conference at Chicago next year. It’s the sort of project that makes you feel hopeful for the future, despite all the bad news about budgets that plague academic life in both Japan and North America these days.

The agenda for today is to carry out some sightseeing in Philadelphia with my daughter and to catch a panel at AAS tonight. Tomorrow morning I’ll visit another panel or two, visit the publishers’ exhibition hall to say hello to some editors I work with, and we’ll be on a plane back to Chicago tomorrow afternoon.

Finally, say “happy birthday” to one of my childhood heroes. I’m going to have check out that new DVD set….

Oe took up Najita’s landmark study, Visions of Virtue in Tokugawa Japan: The Kaitokudo Merchant Academy of Osaka, and traced its impact on his own life and writing. It turns out that Oe’s own Great Grandfather studied at a merchant academy much like the Kaitokudo in nineteenth century Osaka, where the Confucian concepts of “kogi” (ancient meanings) and “gi” (righteousness) were crucial. An old school building his Great Grandfather erected that still stands on the grounds of Oe’s family home in Shikoku has hanging on its wall calligraphy samples of those two phrases, and Oe himself ended up using those words frequently as the names for characters in his novels.

Oe revealed that Najita’s book was in many ways responsible for his most recent novel, Suishi (Death by water, 2009).　　Najita’s study of the intellectual tradition of Osaka merchant culture opened Oe’s eyes to ways that his own father’s life could be understood as something other than a failure: it allowed him to make sense of his own father’s life and death, which in turn made it possible to realize his long-held desire to write a novel about his father’s death in a flood in 1945, just before the end of the war.

Oe praised Najita’s writing style for its warmth, rhetorical skill, and intellectual rigor. He then cited a talk Najita gave at a 2004 symposium in honor of Masao Miyoshi, in which Najita proposed a radical rethinking of the Japan’s “peace constitution” as being instead a “peace and ecology constitution,” a reinterpretation that would vastly expand the concepts of sovereignty. Oe said that he has frequently quoted this passage to great effect in talks he gives across Japan to groups organized to defend Article 9, the “no war” clause of the Japanese constitution, and he traced how Najita’s contemporary ethical claim was rooted in his historical scholarship on the eighteenth century thinker Ando Shoeki.

Oe concluded by celebrating what he called his “three American tutors”: Najita, Miyoshi, and Edward Said. He quoted a phrase Said used just before his death to describe the stance he sought to maintain despite the difficulties of today’s world situation: “optimism as an act of will.” It was a phrase, Oe declared, that applied to all three men.

We’ve videotaped the lecture and will post it on the Center for East Asian Studies webpage in the near future. In the meanwhile, I remain delighted and more than a little astonished to have been able to be a small part of such a meaningful and historic event.

Here’s the announcement: