High Modernism and the Fascist Backlash, 1912–1945

Abstract

When the Italian writer Filippo Marinetti (1876–1944) published his ‘Futurist Manifesto’ on the front page of the leading French newspaper, Le Figaro, on February 20, 1909, the event was almost immediately reported in Japanese newspapers, and the first of many translations of it into Japanese appeared just one month later in the literary journal Subaru (The Pleiades). The translator was no less a figure than Mori Ōgai, widely regarded as one of the two greatest writers of the Meiji period. This shows clearly, first of all, that, already in 1909, the Japanese bundan and gadan (literary and art worlds) were eager for the latest news about the revolutionary movements of early 20th-century European modernism, and, secondly, that they were already in a position to respond to these new developments with surprising alacrity. Over the next two decades they would come to fully participate in the various exciting new avant-garde movements, including futurism, that marked the rise of international ‘high modernism’.