Drift and Modernity: On Mid-Twentieth Century Japanese Intellectual Discourses

ABSTRACT

This article explores the subject of drifting (hyōryū) at sea and its relationship with modernity in mid-twentieth century Japanese intellectual discourse. During this period, castaway stories and the figure of the castaway or drifter (hyōryūsha) drew the attention of key Japanese intellectuals as an important subject in the formation of the modern world and society. This article focuses on the discourses of three radical and progressive Japanese intellectuals influential in the mid-twentieth century, namely Fukumoto Kazuo (1894–1983), Tsurumi Shunsuke (1922–2015), and Hanada Kiyoteru (1909–1974), whose works engage extensively with the subject of those adrift at sea. While paying attention to the different methodological perspectives of the three intellectuals, this article argues that their discussions of the drift addressed a shared interest in a re-examination of modernity. By addressing the ways in which the sinuous passage of the drift inspired a critical examination of modernity, this article helps expand the discussion of modernity in Japanese intellectual history.

Notes

¹ The number of drift incidents during the early modern period reached three to four hundred, even though these are only the confirmed cases. For a previous insightful study of this theme in English, see Wood (2009).

² For a detailed transition of the trend in historical studies of early modern castaways, see Xing (2019).

³ The figures of the voyager and the seafarer also played a key role in intellectual discourses on modernity such as Friedrich Nietzsche’s reference to Christopher Columbus as a symbolic adventurer after the death of God in modernity and Carl Schmitt’s note to ‘the children of the sea’ – sailors, pirates, and whale hunters – as the subjects initiating the incipient modernity of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (Blumenberg, 1996; Schmitt, 2015[1942]). Furthermore, from Michel Foucault’s ship as heterotopia and Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s sea as a smooth space to Cesare Casarino’s reading of Melville, Paul Gilroy’s ‘Black Atlantic’, and Marcus Rediker’s pirate history, the unique status of the marine space, which also reflects the heterogeneity of the modern world, keeps inspiring scholars to explore its significance. For a survey of this trend, see Chambers (2010).

⁴ Although, during the prewar period, there were some counter discourses of Pan-Asianism or Overcoming Modernity, the emanation model has still endured to constitute an influential discourse on modernity and, through the postwar pursuit of democratization, its narrative was reinforced.

⁵ Koschmann’s work on early postwar discussions on subjectivity also explores Ara Masato’s egoism and Umemoto Katsumi’s critical Marxism. He points out that overall early postwar discussions were not free from the metahistorical narrative and tended to essentialize the individual subject. Meanwhile, Nakano emphasizes that Ōtsuka and Maruyama’s theory of subjectivity also contributed to the prewar mobilization in the Japanese empire. Regarding the connection with the prewar period, Koschmann also finds the influence of the discourse of Kyoto school philosophers (Miki Kiyoshi, Watsuji Tetsurō, and Tanabe Hajime) in critical Marxists’ logic. According to him, the connecting thread is ‘the common conviction that, in the final instance, totality will prevail over partiality and all particularity will be reabsorbed in the universal’ (Koschmann, 1996, p. 148).

⁶ For previous studies of Fukumoto, see Shimizu (2014), Kojima (2005), and Iwami (2010).

⁷ During World War II, the Japanese empire used the idea of the Greater East Asia Co-prosperity Sphere to indicate Japan’s ideological new order covering the Asia-Pacific region.

⁸ How to evaluate Fukumoto’s wartime works when he was under probation varied. While some rejected his wartime works as a simple embodiment of imperial ideology, some tried to see in these works Fukumoto’s effort to improve his intellectual method or even his hidden resistance (Iwami, 2010; Shimizu, 2014). This article rather pays attention to the structural link between his narratives in his wartime and postwar works.

⁹ For a detailed discussions on this subject, see Hoston (1987).

¹⁰ This proximity relationship also warns us that the narrative of an alternative modernity often holds the risk of turning itself into a narrative uncritically affirming a local communal unity, civilizational hierarchy, and its power’s historical dominance. In other words, such a narrative does not necessarily solve the problems of the emanation model.

¹¹ Indeed, not all returned Edo castaways got back to their everyday life smoothly. Tsurumi Shunsuke mentions the cases in which returned Edo castaways committed suicide during their detention. For example, the government recorded that one returned castaway hanged himself because of ‘distraction and rage’ (ranshin gyakujō). See Tsurumi (1964, p. 13).

¹² The drift’s function of undermining order or determined trajectory receives strong attention, for example, in the analysis of urban space from Charles Baudelaire and Walter Benjamin’s flâneur to Situationists’ dérive. For a recent work on ‘drift’, see Ferrell (2018).

¹³ For previous studies of Tsurumi, see Avenell (2008) and Bronson (2016).

¹⁴ Tsurumi approaches history by differentiating the dimension of hope at that time from the dimension of recollection as the retrospective view from the present. He said he learnt this from Robert Redfield’s Redfield, (1955). This distinction later became the title of the interviews with him as a form of autobiography (Tsurumi, 2008).

¹⁵ He even compares the similarity between a naked body and a dead body, implying the proximity of the function of nudity to that of death (Tsurumi, 2001b, p. 45).

¹⁶ In that sense, the nudity in his text actually serves to imply a transformative transition rather than emphasize the original state or essential status.

¹⁷ Ueno Toshiya explains that Tsurumi’s way of building connections is based on what he calls ‘archipelagic thought’. He also points out the importance of drift in Tsurumi and Hanada’s thought. See Ueno (2013).

¹⁸ For previous studies of Hanada, see Yoshida (2012; 2014).

¹⁹ This does not mean that his interest in the question of an incipient modernity was limited to European history. As evidence, in the 1970s, he also wrote a book on the Japanese Renaissance.

²⁰ Enclosure refers to the act of appropriating land, especially common land, by placing a hedge or other barrier around it. Such acts of enclosure were carried out at various periods in England, including between the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries.

²¹ He claimed that the utopian stories of both Thomas More and Francis Bacon were based on voyagers’ hyōryūtan (drifting story).

²² As many scholars have pointed out, temporal differences had been actually re-introduced between those spaces as different stages of ‘progress’, ‘civilization’, or ‘development’ to which they were attributed. For example, see Osborne (2011: ch.1).

Additional information

Funding

This paper was supported by the University Grants Committee (Hong Kong) under GRF [12619422].