Performing the Village Square in Interwar Japan: Toward a Hidden History of Public Space

Abstract

Histories of public space generally assume a strong correlation between the health of a nation's civil society and the vibrancy of its public sites, in so much as the latter provide an observable venue for free assembly and popular protest. This essay, while not opposing such a view, offers a corrective to the kind of history it encourages, wherein public space appears politically relevant only at its most visible moments. Framing the analysis is Japanese provincial writer Miyazawa Kenji (1896–1933) and his “Poran no hiroba” (Poran's Square), which survives as a piece of school theater and an evolving prose narrative about a rural youth who reclaims for his agrarian community a site of shared assembly. By interrogating public space as an object of the literary and theatrical imagination, specifically in the context of interwar rural Japan, the author argues that its less visible aspects have much to tell us about its relation to civil society, both perceived and actual, in the waning years of “Imperial Democracy.”