Sayonara Amerika, Sayonara Nippon

Here’s a scan of a very nice column (Japanese-language only) that Oe Kenzaburo published in yesterday’s Asahi newspaper about his visit last week to the University of Chicago. (Click on the image to get a larger version).

I had the honor and pleasure yesterday of introducing and serving as interpreter for Oe Kenzaburo, 1994 Nobel Laureate in Literature, in this year’s installment of the Tetsuo Najita Distinguished Lecture series here at the University of Chicago. Professor Najita was in attendance, too, and it turned into a very moving tribute from one old friend to another.

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.

Below is the announcement for an event we’re pretty excited about here. The Independent newspaper (London) called Oe “the world’s greatest living novelist in any language.” I’ve just started reading his Suishi (Death by drowning, 2009)???which Oe says is likely to be his last full-length novel. It’s a compelling work in the vain of Natsukashii toshi e no tegami (Letters to a Sweet Bygone Year, 1987) or Jinsei no shinseki?(An Echo of Heaven, 1989): an aging novelist travels back to his birthplace in rural Shikoku to confront his own familial and literary past, in this case in particular the life and death of his own father.

Here’s the announcement:

Over at The Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus this week, they have a set of excellent new translations by Roger Pulvers of tanka poems by the one and only Yosano Akiko (1878-1942). Akiko broke all the rules of decorum when she began publishing her passionate, disorderly poems in the first decade of the twentieth century, and she is still capable of astonishing readers today. Here’s a sample, but by all means check out the whole collection:

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A few years back, as part of an ongoing project to rethink the works of novelist Natsume Soseki (1867-1916) in relation to the rise of modern regimes of property ownership, I wrote an article on him in relation to Mizuno Rentaro (1868-1949), chief architect of Japanese’s 1899 copyright law, a legal code that remained in effect — albeit with amendments — until 1970.

Under that law Soseki’s copyrights expired in the 1940s and his works entered the public domain. But in 1979, when Readers Digest Japan advertised a new series it was publishing that reproduced first editions of Soseki’s works, it found itself the target of multiple lawsuits filed by various publishing houses and other parties. The plaintiffs claimed that they held intellectual property rights in the physical appearance of those first editions. In essence, a moral right of authorship was being asserted for the acts of typesetting and printing of a book. As a result of out-of-court settlements in the Readers Digest Japan case, a new “right of reproduction” became standard in the Japanese publishing world. In a move the current U.S. Supreme Court would no doubt beam down upon with approval, the locus of the creative, original mental labor that was the original justification for copyright protection was shifted away from the personality of the author and onto the act of investment of the publishing house. Capital was granted the status of moral personality.

In a depressingly similar move, this week the NFL claimed ownership over the “Who Dat?” slogan used by fans of the New Orleans Saints football team. Though the phrase has a long history preceding the 1988 trademark registration filed by the team, the NFL is claiming exclusive authorship privileges and threatening to sue anyone who uses the phrase without permission. The NFL claim rests on very shaky legal ground; in fact, another business registered a trademark on the phrase several years before the Saints did, and the phrase has been in popular circulation for more than a century. But few small businesses or individuals have the financial capacity to engage in a court battle with a huge corporation like the NFL when it mounts this sort of intellectual enclosure.

This sort of situation is increasingly common in trademark law. Trademark originally was supposed to pertain only to specific, denoted meanings of a phrase, but increasingly legal decisions are expanding its domain to include secondary connoted meanings produced in the public commons by anonymous users of the phrase. Hence, McDonalds Corporation, for example, has claimed to own the nickname “Mickey D’s.” As legal scholar Rosemary Coombe notes:

The trademark owner is invested with authorship and paternity; seen to invest ‘sweat of the brow’ to ‘create’ value in a mark, he is then legitimately able to ‘reap what he has sown.’ The imaginations of consumers become the field in which the owner sows his seed—a receptive and nurturing space for parturition—but consumers are not acknowledged as active and generative agents in the procreation of meaning. The generation of new, alternative, or negative connotations are ignored, denied, or prohibited because patrilineal rights of property are recognized as exclusive: no joint custody arrangements will be countenanced.

(Coombe, The Cultural Life of Intellectual Properties: Authorship, Appropriation and the Law. Duke University Press, 1998, p. 71)

The author may be dead in literary studies, as we focus more on the dialogic process by which meaning is produced through the relationships between author, text, and the community of readers. But in trademark law, the High Romantic version of the Author as the seminal source of all Meaning remains alive–or, more accurately, undead, a kind of zombie creature that lives on by sucking the living blood of readers and, now, of football fans.

It’s another instance of what scholars like Kembrew McLeod (the man who trademarked the phrase “Freedom of Expression”) and James Boyle have attacked as the contemporary equivalent to the enclosure of public commons land during early capitalism. It’s depressing to watch Japan in recent years follow the lead of the U.S. (which in turn is following the lead primarily of the motion picture and television industry) and propose extending the length of copyright protection to seventy years. I’m not opposed to copyright per se, but we are seeing an alarming destruction of the public domain, assaults on the notion of fair use, and a general attempt to transform into private capital the cultural and intellectual discourse that by its nature must be shared in common.

The New Year sumo tournament is heading into its final days now with yokozuna Asashoryu holding the lead at 11-1 and fellow yokozuna Hakuho lingering one step behind at 10-2. Hakuho just lost today to ozeki Harumafuji, but perhaps the most exciting match so far was yesterday’s face off between Asashoryu and sekiwake Baruto. See if you can tell who won from this photograph (link courtesy of Moti’s sumo news mailing list). Meanwhile, the sport’s backstage politics have hit the front pages, as former yokozuna Takanohana pursues his reform effort by seeking a spot on the Sumo Association’s board of directors.

Meanwhile, in another fine old Japanese cultural institution, the Emperor’s New Year waka poem for 2010 (source):

Where rays of sunlight
Filter through the trees I see
In the middle of the path
Carpeted with fallen leaves
A clump of green grass growing.

The assigned theme this year was “light.” Back in the old days, this would have been by definition the best poem of the year.

Although I have my doubts about the accuracy of the crowd count figure given, this article shows that legendary J-Rock band X-Japan can still pack them in, even in Los Angeles. Meanwhile, the Tokyo Shinbun newspaper is reporting (Japanese-language only) on the hit chart bounce enjoyed by artists featured on the NHK Kohakau Utagassen New Year’s Eve television spectacular. Ikimono Gakari’s “YELL/Joyful” (performed to great effect in the NHK broadcast with the backing of a choir of junior high school students) jumped from #23 to #12 on the Oricon charts the week after the show, while Kimura Kaera’s “Butterfly” moved up from the teens to the #1 slot on several music download sites, including I-Tunes Japan.

This has nothing to do with any of the above, but recently while wading through the Internet, I came across some amazing live performance of Iggy & The Stooges from 1970. Let’s call it “The Sweet Bloom of Youth.” Subtitle: “A Boy and his Peanut Butter.”

The last two decades have seen dizzying changes in Japanese society and culture. The truisms that I was taught about Japan in the 1970s and 80s largely no longer hold in the wake of the economic dislocation and the neo-liberal government responses to them that have taken hold since about 1991. The lifetime employment system is now largely a thing of the past, the celebrated education system has broken down, and it is no longer true that everyone in Japan considers themselves middle class. New lifestyles and new cultural forms have emerged in response to these changed circumstances, and the changes in the way people imagine their community are palpable to anyone who has spent time there.

Yesterday, my colleague Norma Field gave an interesting talk here on “From Literature to Labor in Contemporary Japan and Other Nonprofessional Reflections.??? She connected her own scholarly work on proletarian literature author Kobayashi Takiji (1903-33) and the recent boom in interest in his writings in Japan with the drastic alterations in Japanese labor conditions, as well as with recent work by activists trying to respond creatively and effectively to the new harsher conditions. She also reflected on her own efforts to relate academic work to political activism.

These questions are being addressed by a variety of scholars from a variety of positions. Last September at the British Association of Japanese Studies annual meeting, University of Tokyo economist Genda Yuji gave an interesting talk on “Japanese Youth, Employment, and Hope.” While I had some qualms about the prescriptions for action that he proposed, Professor Genda pointed out some interesting structural factors in the economic changes Japan has faced. I’m doing this from memory and may have some of the facts off, but as I recall, he argued that the origins of the structural changes should be located not in the bubble burst of 1991, but rather in the decade before. Already by 1984, the single-person household had become the dominant domestic form in Japan, meaning that older familial support networks had largely disappeared by that time. Moreover, he argued, at around the same time the non-elite track for achieving economic security had disappeared: previously, large numbers of students dropped out of formal education after middle school and pursued apprenticeship-like positions in their late teens before moving on to establish their own independent small businesses in their twenties, but by the mid 1980s that pattern had entered into a decisive decline. Instead, such persons are now likely to end up in the precarious situation of being “freeters.”

Radical restructuring of the education system in Japan is both a cause and a result of these economic and cultural changes. Anthropologist David H. Slater has a fascinating article this week at The Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus on “The Making of Japan’s New Working Class: “Freeters??? and the Progression From Middle School to the Labor Market.” He explores how students in the lower rungs of the educational system get trapped into work roles that provide no security and little future. He also explicates the mechanisms that hinder the rise of a new sense of class identity among these workers.

In Japan, the educational system has probably been the primary institution most responsible for both of these functions. That is, schooling is the primary site for the development of shared patterns of representation and whole-culture forms so central to the integrity of adult culture and social cohesion, and at the same time, it is the primary mechanism for the social and cultural differentiation of different segments of the population into distinct class trajectories which is central to the reallocation of young people into a highly diversified labor market.

Change is bad: it’s one of the governing motifs of this blog. The last two decades of life in Japan provide a prime example. Structural changes also, however, create opportunities for creating new forms of community and new networks of mutual support (this was one of the main points of Professor Field’s talk yesterday). In other words, the process of change hasn’t yet reached any stopping point. I’m hardly the only one who feels simultaneously pessimistic and optimistic about the future in Japan–and elsewhere.

A few days ago, I finally managed to drag myself across the final page of the second volume of Murakami Haruki’s latest magnum opus, 1Q84. 1100 pages long, the story of budding novelist Tengo and female assassin Aomame starts out strong, but after a couple hundred pages, it felt like the fizz drained out of the tale. Even Murakami’s usual skill at polishing up gems of sentences seem to fade. I generally like Murakami’s works (I’ll be teaching the brilliant Sputnik Sweetheart this coming quarter, for example), but this one just didn’t do it for me. In particular, the second volume dragged on. And on. And on.

Now word comes that a third volume of the saga will be published in a couple of months. Granted, there are all sorts of loose plot ends to resolve (whatever happened to Komatsu, the editor, for example), but having only just escaped from the tome, I feel little real need to trace those through to some sort of conclusion. On the other hand, with 1100 pages of reading labor already invested in the narrative, can I afford not to read the conclusion when it appears? What is a harried professor of Japanese literature to do?

Maybe I’ll just go back and read 1973-nen no Pinball again. It’s shorter, for starters.