Useless Losers: Marginality and Modernization in Early Meiji Japan

Abstract

Nation-building initiatives during Japan's Meiji period (1868–1912) erected a rigid normalcy that galvanized a culture of exclusionism. They afforded broader spheres of social activity but a narrower range of acceptable behaviors, greater opportunities for individual empowerment but less tolerance for individuality itself. Backward-looking artists and writers were particularly susceptible to these developments, many earning repute as “useless losers,” heretics, or traitors. This article speaks to the dynamics between modernity and marginalization through an analysis of the exclusionism that accompanied Japan's modernization initiatives in the late nineteenth century. It demonstrates how Meiji's modernization program fostered the development of new paradigms of knowledge while condemning non-conformists as social misfits. The article begins with a review of early Meiji's construction of normalcy and then proceeds with a discussion of talented writers and artists rendered irrelevant by this process, ultimately exploring how conceptions of marginality played out in the social, political, and cultural contexts of that period.

Notes

The author wishes to thank the anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments.

1. This phrase appears in the Charter Oath, issued by the Meiji Emperor in 1868. It must be acknowledged that, paradoxically, while the Meiji state sought rapid implementation of modern reforms, it found the restoration of certain historical traditions an important means of doing so. Symbols of the past like the Imperial institution and Shinto as a state religion were, it found, useful strategies of mobilizing popular support that would ultimately expedite modernization. The Great Promulgation (daikyô) of cultural reform initiated in 1870 took as its mandates reverence for the Shinto deities (kami), the country, and the Emperor. The Constitution (1889) and the Imperial Rescript on Education (1890) also framed modernity and change as the resurrection of a reinvented antiquity (Marius B. Jansen, The Making of Modern Japan [Cambridge, MA: Belkhap Press of Harvard University Press, 2000], 354, 395, 458). For further discussion of the complex strategies and processes of Meiji statecraft, the reader is directed to Carol Gluck, Japan's Modern Myths Ideology in the Late Meiji Period (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985).

2. These developments emerged as only the latest manifestations of tensions between political control and cultural independence visible throughout Japan's history. H. D. Harootunian, Hayashiya Tatsusaburō, Conrad Totman, among others, have observed patterns of interplay between politics and culture, particularly as new regimes appropriate culture to minimize dissent and legitimize their right to rule. For a discussion of these authors and how the cyclical rise and fall of political regimes corresponds to interplay between ideology and culture, see W. Puck Brecher, “Kōetsumura: Of Rhythms and Reminiscence in Hon’ami Kōetsu's Commune,” Japan Review 22 (2010): 27–53.

3. See Michel Foucault, “Society Must Be Defended:” Lectures at the College de France, 1975–1976, trans. David Macey (New York: Picador, 2003).

4. Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, trans. and ed., James Strachey (New York: W. W. Norton, 1961), 73.

5. John W. Hall, “Changing Conceptions of the Modernization of Japan,” in Changing Japanese Attitudes toward Modernization, ed. Marius B. Jansen (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1965), 21. The findings of these discussions were published in a series of six edited volumes (all issued between 1964 and 1971 by Princeton University Press) on disparate topics surrounding the problem of Japanese modernity. This series included studies of changing Japanese attitudes toward modernization, the state and economic enterprise, aspects of social change, political development, tradition and modernization, and the dilemmas of growth.

6. William De Bary, Carol Gluck, and Arthur Tiedemann, eds., Sources of Japanese Tradition, Vol. II: 1600 to 2000 (New York: Columbia, 2005 [1958]), 672.

7. Mita Munesuke, Social Psychology of Modern Japan, trans. Stephen Suloway (London: Kegan Paul International, 1992), 151.

8. Munesuke, Social Psychology of Modern Japan, 160.

9. Yanagita Kunio, Japanese Manners and Customs in the Meiji Era, trans. Charles Terry (Tokyo: Ōbunsha, 1957), 96–98.

10. Munesuke, Social Psychology of Modern Japan, 177.

11. Anne Walthall, “The Life Cycle of Farm Women in Tokugawa Japan,” in Recreating Japanese Women, 1600–1945, ed. Gail Lee Berstein (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1991); and “The Family Ideology of the Rural Entrepreneurs in Nineteenth Century Japan,” Journal of Social History 23 (1990): 463–83.

12. Kurozumi Makoto, “Tokugawa Confucianism and Its Meiji Japan Reconstruction,” in Rethinking Confucianism: Past and Present in China, Japan, Korea, and Vietnam, ed. Benjamin Elman, John B. Duncan, and Herman Ooms (Los Angeles, CA: UCLA Asian Pacific Monograph Series, 2002), 387.

13. For further discussion of ideological efforts to instill conformity in early Meiji, see W. Puck Brecher, “Eccentricity as Ideology: Biographies of Meiji Kijin,” Japanese Language and Literature 44.2 (October 2010): 213–37.

14. H. D. Harootunian, “Late Tokugawa Thought and Culture,” in The Cambridge History of Japan, vol. 5, ed. Marius Jansen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 258.

15. Michael Marra, ed., A History of Modern Japanese Aesthetics (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2001), 7.

16. Jay Rubin, Injurious to Public Morals: Writers and the Meiji State (Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press, 1984), 6.

17. Ernest F. Fenollosa, Epochs of Chinese and Japanese Art: An Outline History of East Asian Design, vol. 2 (New York: Dover Publications, Inc. 1963 [1913]), 165.

18. “Kōgeisha no gobyō,” Dainihon bijutsu shinpō 38 (31 October 1886): 7–8.

19. William Reynolds Braisted, trans. Meiroku Zasshi: Journal of Japanese Enlightenment (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1976), 372–73.

20. A comprehensive discussion of aesthetic detachment and eccentricity in Asian culture is beyond the scope of this article. For more on this important topic, see Alan J. Berkowitz, Patterns of Disengagement: The Practice and Portrayal of Reclusion in Early Medieval China (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000); and W. Puck Brecher, “Down and Out in Negishi: Reclusion and Struggle in an Edo Suburb,” Journal of Japanese Studies 35.1 (Winter 2009): 1–35.

21. Nishimura Shigeki writes of this phenomenon in Meiroku Zasshi (16 March 1875), calling for more modern, less discriminatory treatment of those on the losing side (Braisted, Meiroku Zasshi: Journal of Japanese Enlightenment).

22. The fourth century BCE text Zhuangzi first expounds on the use of uselessness through characters for which “utility has made life miserable.” “It is this unusableness,” the text asserts, “that the Holy Man makes use of!” (Burton Watson, trans., Chuang Tzu: Basic Writings [New York: Columbia University Press, 1996], 60–61).

23. Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason (New York: Pantheon Books, 1965), 53.

24. Tekishū, Meijin kijin, vol. 1 (Tokyo: Shigensha, 1926), 1.

25. Uchida Roan, Yamaguchi Masao, and Tsubouchi Yūzo, eds., Roan no Meiji (Tokyo: Kodansha, 1997), 188–89.

26. Richard Smethurst, A Social Basis for Prewar Japanese Militarism: The Army and the Rural Community (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1974), xvii.

27. Okitsu Kaname, Itan no aruchisantachi (Tokyo: Yomiuri sensho, 1972), 210.

28. Okitsu, Itan no aruchisantachi, 210–11.

29. Karaki Junzō, Muyōsha no keifu (Tokyo: Chikua Shobō, 1960), 103.

30. Jay Rubin, Injurious to Public Morals: Writers and the Meiji State (Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press, 1984), 36.

31. Miyatake adapted the moniker Gaikotsu, meaning flesh on the inside, skeleton on the outside, from his childhood name, Kamenosuke (kame meaning turtle).

32. Shiba Shirō, who studied in the United States from 1879 to 1885, wrote under the penname Tōkai Sanshi. Princess Myeongseong was actually assassinated by agents employed by the Japanese minister Miura Gorō (1847–1926).

33. Maeda Ai, Text and the City: Essays on Japanese Modernity, ed. James A. Fujii (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004), 54.

34. Okitsu, Itan no aruchisantachi, 30–31, 47–53.

35. M. William Steele, “Meiji Twitterings: A Parody of Fukuzawa's An Encouragement of Learning,” Asian Cultural Studies 18.5 (March, 2010): 61–62.

36. Steele, “Meiji Twitterings,” 30–34.

37. Quoted in John Pierre Mertz, Novel Japan: Spaces of Nationhood in Early Meiji Narrative, 1870–88 (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2003), 97.

38. Mertz, Novel Japan, 74.

39. For a comprehensive discussion of Ōga's satirical writings, particularly his parody of Fukuzawa, see Steele, “Meiji Twitterings.”

40. Okitsu, Itan no aruchisantachi, 34. Not all agree that Ōga's career ended in failure. Steele argues that the body of media produced by Ōga and his colleagues not only successfully competed against more mainstream forms of art and literature, but opened up a public sphere wherein interested citizens engaged in debate over the country's modernization initiatives (“Meiji Twitterings,” 3).

41. Okitsu, Itan no aruchisantachi, 213–14.

42. Okitsu, Itan no aruchisantachi, 251.

43. Yahei supported the Tengu-tō, a royalist faction from Mito, and the Shōgitai, a militia of samurai that remained loyal to the deposed Tokugawa.

44. Yamaguchi Masao, Haisha no seishinshi (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1995), 103.

45. Yamaguchi, Haisha no seishinshi, 104, 109–10, 113.

46. Most of Chingaku's works were lost in the Great Kantō Earthquake (1923).

47. Yamaguchi, Haisha no seishinshi, 119–22, 188.

48. Oda Susumu, Nihon no kyōkishi (Tokyo: Shisakusha, 1990), 336.

49. Shinichi Segi, Yoshitoshi: The Splendid Decadent, trans. Alfred Birnbaum (Tokyo: Kodansha International, Ltd., 1985), 42.

50. Tsuji Nobuo, ed., Bakumatsu, Meiji no gakatachi: bunmei kaika no hazama ni (Tokyo: Perikan-sha, 1992), 22.

51. Timothy Clark, Demon of Painting: The Art of Kawanabe Kyōsai (London: British Museum Press, 1993), 15, 21, 23.

52. Ayakashi to tsuya: Bakumatsu no jōnen (Tokyo: Itabashi Ward Museum, 2003), 74–76.

53. Tsuji, Bakumatsu, Meiji no gakatachi, 24; Kyōgoku Natsuhiko, Kyōsai yōkai hyakkei (Tokyo: Kokushokan kōkai, 1998), 145. For a slightly different version of this story, see Josiah Conder, Paintings and Studies by Kawanabe Kyōsai (Tokyo: Maruzen kabushiki geisha, 1911).

54. Conder, Paintings and Studies by Kawanabe Kyōsai, 2–4.

55. Kyōgoku, Kyōsai yōkai hyakkei, 146.

56. Kawanabe Kyōsai, “Kyōsai gadan,” Nihon egaron taisei, vol. 4, ed. Yasumura Toshinobu (Tokyo: Perikansha, 1997), 281–97.

57. Tsuji, Bakumatsu, Meiji no gakatachi, 23.

58. Ronald Loftus, “The Inversion of Progress: Taoka Reiun's Hibunmeiron,” Monumenta Nipponica 40.2 (1985 Summer): 196; Uchida Roan, Yamaguchi Masao, and Tsubouchi Yūzo, eds., Roan no Meiji (Tokyo: Kodansha, 1997), 188–89.

59. Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973), 203.

60. See, for instance, Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York: Vintage, 1995); and Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason (New York: Pantheon Books, 1965).