Decadence Begins with Physical Labor: The Postwar Use of the Body in Sakaguchi Ango’s The Idiot and Tamura Taijirō’s Gateway to the Flesh

Abstract

Japan’s defeat in World War II caused a rupture in the national polity, but it was not of course limited in the realm of geopolitics and the economy. Primarily, it was the common people who faced drastic changes in everyday lives and ideological mindsets. One of the harbingers of this shift was the postwar discourse of Decadence, full of ideologically charged dictums that proposed the reconstruction of human beings. Here, it is necessary to note the semantic shift surrounding the term “decadence.” Before the war, during the Shōwa interwar period, Yasuda Yōjūrō added his voice to the debate over Japanese modernity, advocating “decadence” (“botsuraku,” “daraku,” “dekadansu”) as the basis for recuperating the national ethos. In entering intellectual discourse as an ironic way to describe Japan, this range of words denoting “decadence” was considered a nihilistic gesture in search of a historical catachresis. The speech act of decadence was employed to purge Japan’s logic of modernity, that is, in Yasuda’s view, a shallow, cosmetic borrowing from the Western other. From a nativist standpoint, Yasuda criticized Japan for its inability to propound its own socio-cultural legacy and refuted the country’s relationship with the West since the Meiji Restoration. In turn, in the post World War II years, Sakaguchi Ango (1906–1955) wielded the concept of “decadence” (“daraku”) in order to address the feigned morality of wartime Japan.KeywordsPhysical LaborJapanese PeopleEpistemic ModelLiterary DiscourseSexual LiaisonThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.