Advertising Tower: Japanese Modernism and Modernity in the 1920s (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Advertising Tower: Japanese Modernism and Modernity in the 1920s Alisa Freedman Advertising Tower: Japanese Modernism and Modernity in the 1920s. By William Gardner. Harvard University Asia Center, 2006. 349 pages. Hardcover $42.95/£27.95/€39.50. In the 1920s and 1930s, Japan experienced an intensification of historical and literary movements that had begun earlier, including rapid urbanization, the rise of new social groups and changing gender roles, proliferation of mass media, and development of popular entertainments. Concurrently, police control increased, and imperialist ventures in Asia were extended. Tokyo became the site and symbol of the confluence of these trends and provided visual evidence of the successes and failures of Japanese modernization projects. Authors, artists, and filmmakers with varying ideological and aesthetic goals gathered in Tokyo and developed cultural forms to depict and critique their historical moment. In particular, modernists (more commonly referred to by the literary factions to which they belonged) experimented with techniques to convey an immediate experience of the city. They were influenced by the popular journalism that flourished at the time and had an ambivalent relationship to the urban masses, both identifying with and desiring to stand apart from them. These young writers opposed the proletariat literature being written at the time, which they criticized for advancing political ideologies at the expense of aesthetics and for being focused on despair, and they sought to extend the scope of the more established literary world. Over the past few years, interwar Japanese history and literature have received increasing global attention. Several scholarly studies on the effects of urban space on cultural production have been published worldwide, and a few Tokyo stories and magazines [End Page 587] have been reprinted as expensive paperbacks and glossy multivolume sets. Although nostalgic books about the mid-1950s and early 1960s are currently proliferating in Japan, several collections on modernist art of the prewar era have also appeared. Art exhibitions have highlighted topics such as Modern Boy, Modern Girl: Modernity in Japanese Art, 1910-1935 (1998, in Kamakura and Sydney) and Taisho Chic: Japanese Modernity, Nostalgia, and Deco (Honolulu, 2002; Berkeley, 2005). All of these texts and displays have encouraged the growth of an important academic subfield concerned with reexamining this complex historical time (the effects of which are still felt today) and reconsidering literature once dismissed as elitist experiments or urban decadence. William Gardner's Advertising Tower: Japanese Modernism and Modernity in the 1920s is an exciting contribution to this growing body of research. Full of literary translations, this thorough book offers even more than its title promises. Gardner furthers the argument advanced by other current studies that interwar modernist literature was shaped not through adoption of Western culture but instead by the historical context of 1920s and 1930s Tokyo. Two of the most influential forces, he argues, were the rise of mass media and the conception of mass society, which was created through state institutions and commodity capitalism and perpetuated by the circulation of newspaper and magazine images. Gardner adopts a case approach that combines historical research and literary analysis to carefully reexamine the ideological and aesthetic positions, major works, and career trajectories of two well-known writers: the anarchist poet Hagiwara Kyōjirō (1899-1938) and poet-author Hayashi Fumiko (1903-1951). He is especially interested in Hagiwara's and Hayashi's depictions of the ways the urban environment shaped human subjectivity and their negotiation between the desire for individual agency and participation in larger collectivities of the state, local communities, and the literary world. Comparing these writers reveals much about the composition and insularity of the early Shōwa literary world and provides insight into why many modernists supported Japanese imperialism and war. Additionally, through explication of literary examples, Gardner shows that experiments with Japanese language were integral to modernism and argues for the significance of interwar poetry, an overlooked genre. As an unadvertised bonus, he provides appendixes containing twenty-six biographies of prewar literary figures and several of his own excellent translations of Hagiwara's poems and manifestos. Gardner's choice to focus on Hagiwara and Hayashi is based on their thematic similarities, shared interest in formal experimentation, analogous personal experiences, and different attitudes toward mass...