Postwar Japanese Research Articles

The Sense of an Ending: Contemporary Visions of Medea

The story of Medea’s murder of her own children to gain revenge against their faithless father has been tackled from many angles by playwrights and directors from Euripides’ time to the present. In recent years, due to highly sensationalized, real-life cases of mothers murdering their children, it has become fodder for sociologists, criminologists, psychologists, and feminists. Many recent productions (both original plays and directorial approaches to Euripides’ original) have avoided tackling the difficult questions raised by Euripides’ ending, which demands an answer to the following question: how could the gods send down a dragon-drawn chariot to rescue a woman who murdered her own children? Many contemporary authors and directors prefer to eliminate Euripides’ ending in order to focus on more immediate issues, such as the psychological or social damage resulting from patriarchy, colonialism, and misogyny. After considering several such productions, this article analyzes three plays that directly tackle Euripides’ troubling ending: two original scripts, by Heiner Müller and Carol Fisher Sorgenfrei respectively; and a production of Euripides’ original by Japanese director Miyagi Satoshi. Carol Fisher Sorgenfrei is Professor Emerita of Theatre at UCLA. An expert on postwar Japanese and cross-cultural performance, she is also a translator, director, and playwright. The author of Unspeakable Acts: The Avant-Garde Theatre of Terayama Shūji and Postwar Japan (University of Hawaii Press, 2005) and co-author of Theatre Histories: An Introduction (third edition, Routledge, 2016), she has published over a hundred articles, chapters, and reviews. She is an Associate Editor of Asian Theatre Journal and a Fellow of the College of Fellows of the American Theatre.

The Metabolist Imagination: Visions of the City in Postwar Japanese Architecture and Science Fiction by William O. Gardner

The Metabolist Imagination: Visions of the City in Postwar Japanese Architecture and Science Fiction by William O. Gardner

Book Review: Democracy without Journalism? Confronting the Misinformation Society

<p>書評重整作者的論點(美國傳媒過度商業化、低管制與公共媒體規模太小)，同意擴大公服媒最能更新美國的傳播與民主。其次，該書重視美國憲法第一修正案的積極面向，要求立法促進新聞自由，如美國政府曾大量補助報業，二戰後美國曾協助德日公共媒體的建設。最後，本書評另以註解補充三點:(1)聯邦傳播委員會主委在1980年代雖挺市場，但已承認市場失靈並提補助構想;(2)美國至今仍是報業補助大國;(3)記者等工會活動近來在美國強化的原因。</p> <p> </p><p>This book review has three components. First, Professor Pickard’s main argument is reconstructed in a condensed way, and the expanded public service media is concluded to provide a necessary, although insufficient, antidote to the United States’ over-commercialized and least regulated media system as compared with those of other rich and liberal democracies. Second, two crucial arguments that merit more attention are identified. The First Amendment may allow the state to actively strengthen press freedom. And the United States government’s active supports had been fundamental to subsidizing delivery systems for the American press and the transformation of post-war German and Japanese broadcasters into public service media. Finally, endnotes are provided that supplement and emphasize two critical facts: the most market-oriented FCC chairman did recognize the possibilities of market failure and proposed remedies accordingly, and America’s local governments have always given considerable subsidies to the publishing industry. Possible reasons are discussed to explain the recent expansion of labor coverage and news unions across the United States.</p> <p> </p>

Playing in the Shadows: Fictions of Race and Blackness in Postwar Japanese Literature by Will Bridges

Playing in the Shadows: Fictions of Race and Blackness in Postwar Japanese Literature by Will Bridges

The Unnamable Archipelago: Wounds of the Postcolonial in Postwar Japanese Literature and Thought by Dennitza Gabrakova

Reviewed by: The Unnamable Archipelago: Wounds of the Postcolonial in Postwar Japanese Literature and Thought by Dennitza Gabrakova Annmaria Shimabuku (bio) The Unnamable Archipelago: Wounds of the Postcolonial in Postwar Japanese Literature and Thought. By Dennitza Gabrakova. Brill, 2018. 210 pages. €88.00, cloth; €88.00, E-book. The Unnamable Archipelago: Wounds of the Postcolonial in Postwar Japanese Literature and Thought by Dennitza Gabrakova is a unique delight. It is a study of Japanese literature published in English that bears the fruit of graduate study at the University of Tokyo rather than a program in the Anglophone academy. In a study on the "postcolonial," the reader is given the expected references to Edward Said, Gayatri Spivak, and Homi Bhabha, [End Page 418] but yet is struck more profoundly by a sustained engagement with Japanese-language theorists such as Ukai Satoshi, Komori Yōichi, and Takahashi Tetsuya. In a study of the "postcolonial" in "postwar Japanese literature," one might assume a focus on texts emanating from the legacy of Japanese colonialism in Hokkaido, Okinawa, Taiwan, the Korean peninsula, and beyond. But this is not the case here. The texts are—I daresay—ineluctably Japanese, albeit in a radically different manner. They are "Japanese" in a way that the author might argue is "unnamable." In all of these ways, this work displaces the centrality of Anglophone scholarship with archipelagic thought infused into postwar literature in Japan. Archipelagic thought has been explored through the work of the writer Shimao Toshio who conceptualized Yaponeshia, or the merging of the words for "Japan" and "islands" (p. 157). Shimao was largely concerned with displacing the centrality of a purportedly homogenous Japan by engaging with the peripheral islands of Okinawa. Gabrakova, however, is more informed by the cultural anthropologist Imafuku Ryūta's world theory of the archipelago which she reads in a deconstructive vein. In her approach, engagement with islands does not reaffirm the continental stability of the writer but, rather, provides a reflection on the fragmentation and multiplicity that was always already there, within "Japan." The first two chapters provide a theoretical foundation for the middle three chapters, which examine literary texts. Chapter 1, "Archipelagic Thought and Theory's Gift," engages with Imafuku's theory of the world through the guntō or archipelago and the art critic Taki Kōji's notion of the same. Taki follows Kant's division of "the transcendental subject into several faculties representing islands" and examines the "movement between them" that he calls the "archipelago" (p. 20). Whereas the transcendental subject synthesizes these faculties in an act of self-determination, Gabrakova, via this constellation of theorists, is more interested in the generative power of the individual faculties, or islands themselves, and their intercourse. She is critical of iterations of Japan in which its archipelagic diversity is eliminated by synthesizing itself internally in the name of sovereignty that gives protection but also asks for conformity in return. Archipelagic thought, following Gabrakova's reading of Trinh T. Minh Ha, "give[s] without obligation or debt involved and, without expecting any form of return" (p. 14). This is the "un-give in giving" (p. 14) and points to "Japan strictly enforcing Article 9" as a "gift of a higher degree that cannot involve reciprocation but rather anticipates a dissolution of sovereignty" (p. 28). Chapter 2, "Translating Shame and the Wound of Ethnicity," operates as a "supplement to Imafuku's 'archipelago'" (p. 61). If the disjointed motion of the archipelago is the euphoric moment of the "un-give in giving," then this chapter examines the painful moment of shame when confronting the gendered and ethnic implications of the failure to erect a sovereign [End Page 419] national polity. Through a Ukai Satoshi–inspired reading of Ruth Benedict, Gabrakova argues that whereas guilt is rooted in abstractions of the moral, shame is located in bodies marked by ethnicity, gender, and sexuality. The "wound" or gaishō is literally an "external wound" (p. 47), or that passage where one is both wounded by the outside while also opened up to it. Quoting Ukai, she prioritizes the "poetics of translation" (p. 53) in thinking about ways to negotiate this wound. She invokes Ukai's question: "How could one...

The Metabolist Imagination: Visions of the City in Postwar Japanese Architecture and Science Fiction by William O. Gardner

Reviewed by: The Metabolist Imagination: Visions of the City in Postwar Japanese Architecture and Science Fiction by William O. Gardner Franz Prichard The Metabolist Imagination: Visions of the City in Postwar Japanese Architecture and Science Fiction by William O. Gardner. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2020. Pp. viii + 223. $108.00 cloth, $27.00 paper. This comparative study explores how selected Japanese architects and writers imagined, represented, or visualized the city. Describing in vivid detail their shared investments in what Gardner usefully terms the narrative "elements" of the city, this book offers a captivating mapping of two deeply entangled domains where Japan's urban imaginaries took on new contours during the decades of the 1960s and 1970s. Deftly attending to the speculative dimensions of both literary and architectural discourses of the city, Gardner's book opens new interdisciplinary entryways to Japan's vocabularies of urban environments and planetary urbanization, analyzing the role of speculative futures therein. This volume complements a growing body of scholarship that explores the architectural and visual-cultural histories of the Japanese Metabolist movement, known for its visionary attention to urban design processes that proponents likened to organic processes. This scholarship examines the impact of the Metabolist movement on Japan's architectural and design history.1 It also includes studies of individual Metabolist architects, such as Isozaki Arata 磯崎新 (b. 1931), [End Page 165] Tange Kenzō 丹下健三 (1913–2005), Kikutake Kiyonori 菊竹清訓 (1928–2011), and Kurokawa Kishō 黒川紀章 (1934–2007), as well as studies of the Metabolist movement's central role in the 1970 Osaka World's Fair, Expo '70.2 Moreover, the book makes a significant contribution to interdisciplinary scholarship on the history and contemporary afterlives of the urban transformations of Japan's discursive and built environments more broadly during the 1960s and 1970s.3 Gardner's primary focus is not the Metabolists' iconic architectural designs and large-scale regional redevelopment plans. (The book does include a number of well-chosen color illustrations and photographs of Metabolist works, for which the press should be applauded.) Rather, he focuses on an evocative survey of central Metabolist keywords, such as "process," "megastructure," "capsule," and "ruins." Gardner's aim is not merely an intellectual history of Metabolist thought. The book dynamically sifts through Metabolist vocabularies to explore the intersecting narrative dimensions of what Gardner calls "imaginative simulation" (p. 1) undertaken by both architects and science-fiction writers to reimagine Japan's built environments and social conditions. The representative central figures of this study are architect Isozaki Arata (whose early writings bleed into speculative fiction territory) and celebrated science-fiction author Komatsu Sakyō 小松左京 (1931–2011) (who participated directly in the planning of Expo '70). Bringing such figures into critical dialogue, the book traces the direct and indirect exchanges among their narrative imaginaries of the city, as well as the formative role these exchanges played in developing the discourses of information society, cybernetics, systems theory, futurology, and planetary catastrophe in Japan. Gardner's lucid inventory of the complex entanglements during this pivotal historical period thus makes significant contributions to an interdisciplinary understanding of Japanese architectural and literary visions of the future city (mirai toshi 未来都市). While the chapters proceed in a linear fashion temporally from the [End Page 166] early 1960s to roughly the early 2000s, the resultant survey of narrative and imaginative figurations of the city is decidedly nonlinear. Capturing the connective threads of discursive exchanges among discontinuous media and moments, Gardner's meticulous focus on the narrative effects and changing imaginaries of the future city weaves together a nuanced collection of recurrent motifs and circular eddies across the chapters of the book. Chapter 1 situates the emergence of Metabolist architects' diverse process-oriented visions within a shared interest in the city's continuous metamorphosis, likened to the metabolic processes of living organisms. Gardner contends that "by stressing the processes of becoming, transforming, and even disintegrating, the Metabolists introduced a narrative element into their architectural theory" (p. 43). He offers a highly compelling reading of the literary forms that Metabolist thinkers Kawazoe Noboru and Isozaki Arata, as well as non-Metabolist Itō Toyō 伊東豊雄 (b. 1941), deployed to articulate their speculative architectural visions. Chapter 2 deepens this understanding of the role of narrative form through the...

‘Genderism vs. Humanism’: The Generational Shift and Push for Implementing Gender Equality within Soka Gakkai-Japan

This paper investigates how young Japanese women in contemporary Soka Gakkai (SG) navigate Japan’s continuous gender stratified society that remains culturally rooted in the ‘salaryman-housewife’ ideology. How are young SG members reproducing or contesting these hegemonic gender norms that few seek to emulate? While SG has long proclaimed that it stands for gender equality, its employment structure and organization in Japan until recently reflected the typical male breadwinner ideology that came to underpin the post-war Japanese nation-state and systemic gender division of labor. As shown here, this did not mean that SG women were without power; in fact, in many ways they drove organizational developments in the Japanese context. The recent imposition of the global framework for Sustainable Development Goals of 2015 has enabled SG to more substantially challenge its own patriarchal public front. Based on long-term fieldwork, in-depth interviews and multiple group discussions with SG members in their 20s, this article explores how SG-Japan is being challenged to follow its own discourse of ‘globalism’ and ‘Buddhist humanism’, promoted by Daisaku Ikeda since the 1990s. Using Bourdieu’s analysis of symbolic power, the research shows how Japan’s powerful doxa of ‘genderism’ that held sway over earlier generations is currently being challenged by a glocalized Buddhist discourse that identifies Nichiren Buddhism as ‘humanism’ rather than Japanese ‘genderism’.

Review: American Survivors: Trans-Pacific Memories of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, by Naoko Wake

Naoko Wake’s American Survivors: Trans-Pacific Memories of Hiroshima and Nagasaki centers her eighty-six interviews with U.S. hibakusha (atomic bomb survivors), conducted in English and Japanese from 2011 to 2017, and two other oral history collections in our memories of nuclear holocaust. By giving voice to the U.S. citizens who lived with sickness and scars for decades after August 1945, Wake dismantles the United States’s righteous atomic victory narrative. Wake’s work is indeed trans-Pacific, reflected by her definition of U.S. survivors as Japanese Americans with U.S. citizenship living in Japan in 1945 and post-war Japanese and Korean immigrants to the United States who became citizens, and by her focus on how survivors defied and deconstructed national boundaries and memories.After a detailed introduction to the project’s methodology and its themes of colonialism, justice, remembering, and gender, Wake organizes her work into six substantial chapters covering the 1880s to the early 2000s. She positions Hiroshima and Nagasaki as immigrant cities where American-born Japanese and Korean residents experienced layered identities that later undermined national narratives. Her analysis of American victims’ memories destabilizes ideas about belonging and shows how nuclear holocaust’s horrors crossed boundaries of “nationality, age, class, or gender” (pp. 74–75). These categories re-emerged as survivors interacted with each other: men focused on saving other victims while women made medicine and cared for hibakusha. Wake posits that U.S. survivors responded to their identity with silence from 1945–1960, marking an era of cross-national “hiding and healing” (p. 133). Starting in the 1960s, U.S. survivors used community ties, personal testimony, and alliances to create a collective memory that fought for medical care from the U.S. government.Wake’s meticulous analysis adds crucial strands to atomic bomb history, including her documentation of the erasures U.S. survivors experienced in America. She notably argues that the Korean War introduced U.S. survivors still in East Asia to U.S. service personnel, resulting in marriages and convincing Korean survivors to immigrate to the United States. Wake proves that the Cold War obstructed survivors’ voices as the U.S. fixated on future nuclear destruction, but their interactions with each other during this era resisted historical portrayals of the United States, Japan, and the Korean peninsula as purely national actors. American Survivors is grounded in immigration, identity, and the Cold War, yet it avoids familiar cultural and political assessments of Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and geopolitics in favor of counter-memories that ask new questions about nuclear holocaust’s morality and that link the silences of hibakusha to those of the United States’s incarcerated Nikkei. One of Wake’s major contributions is her critique of the ways U.S. racism and nationalism forced survivors to negotiate their identities as Americans in a society that marked them as Asian and foreign. This affected medical care available to hibakusha—especially women—and caused American citizens to seek treatment in Japan, reminding them again of their status as “perpetual foreigners.”Chapter introductions are sometimes too lengthy, but provide the nuance needed for the oral histories that follow. Survivors’ stories are occasionally incomplete as Wake privileges analysis over narrative; this may be purposeful, but it does leave unanswered questions. Ultimately, Wake presents a complicated, ambitious addition to atomic bomb historiography in an accessible style that builds upon her scholarship on gender, medicine, and the Hiroshima Maidens. She gives power to unheard survivors, many of whom had never been interviewed. She questions the U.S. government’s refusal to confront the universality of the horrors it inflicted on its own citizens, including radiation sickness, discrimination, legal and human rights violations, and lack of American justice.

People in Motion: Introduction to Transnational Movements and Transwar Connections in the Anthropological and Genetic Study of Human Populations

People in Motion: Introduction to Transnational Movements and Transwar Connections in the Anthropological and Genetic Study of Human Populations

Deconstructing the ‘Yoshida Doctrine’

AbstractThere is a consensus that the post-war Japanese foreign policy is based on the Yoshida Doctrine or Yoshida Line, which refers to the strategies of former Prime Minister Shigeru Yoshida, who relied upon US military security, and maintained limited defense forces while focusing on economic recovery and growth. This paper reconsidered the Yoshida Doctrine, referencing multiple related arguments and evidence, reaching a conclusion that post-war Japanese foreign policy should not be called the Yoshida Doctrine or Yoshida Line. The Yoshida Doctrine is an analytical concept created by researchers in the 1980s to justify Japanese foreign policy. This was done in response to the domestic and foreign criticism of low-level military spending, despite the flourishing economy. The Yoshida Doctrine differs from other foreign policy doctrines and has no merit for being called a doctrine. Furthermore, the ideas supporting this doctrine are not based on definitive proof; rather, they merely represent Yoshida's image, and a spurious correlation, drawn between limited defense spending and high-economic growth. The analysis carried out in this study reveals that the Yoshida Doctrine is fundamentally flawed. As a result, this study insists that it is necessary to abandon the Yoshida Doctrine as a base for future research on Japanese diplomacy.

Population aging, government policy and the postwar Japanese economy

This paper analyzes the Postwar Japanese economy with a parsimonious neoclassical growth model that incorporates the demographic transition in Japan. We find that i) the increase in the aged population share can account for most of the decline in employment and reduced output by 8%, ii) workweek shortening policy led to a 20% reduction in output from its potential level by reducing hours worked over the 1988-1994 period, iii) the rise in labor tax led to an 11% reduction in output from its potential level by discouraging hours worked, iv) the shift in the composition of government spending may have caused a slowdown in productivity growth and hence a reduction in the potential output level itself.

Calligraphy of Images: Artworks by Yukei Teshima

Postwar Japanese calligraphy has been little studied in Western art history, and in particular, there is no analysis of the work of one of the most important calligraphers of postwar Japan,Yukei Teshima (1901–1987). The relevance of this research lies in the fact that the Calligraphy of Images (Japanese “Shosho”), created by the master, is an example of building a dialogue between fundamentally different traditions of Western and Eastern art, a dialogue that allows the calligrapher to see the uniqueness of Japanese calligraphy, including its spiritual and aesthetic content. The purpose of this study is to determine the specifics of Teshima’s work, using the example of his most famous artworks: “Hokai” (literally “Collapse”) (1957), containing the image of houses collapsing one after another from the explosions of aerial bombs at the end of World War II; and “Tsubame” (“Swallow”) (1960), giving rise to the feeling of flight through a “dancing” movement of a bird. The authors conclude that, although Tesima’s “calligraphic paintings” show a connection simultaneously with the Chinese roots of Japanese calligraphy and the avant-garde painting of the West, the calligrapher remains faithful to the Japanese artistic and aesthetic tradition. Unlike Chinese calligraphy, traditionally understood as a tool for “nurturing life”, or avant-garde painting generated by Western conceptuality, Teshima’s calligraphy expresses the Buddhist ideals of accepting one’s destiny (one’s path to enlightenment) and lack of attachment. The calligrapher uses the “hisshoku” (“rusty brush”) writing technique, which involves “overcoming” the brush and conveying the tactile sensation of a stroke (a symbol of overcoming the materiality of the world), and also forms the “boundless space” of the sheet, i. e. “aki”, which he calls “Space of [divine] love” and connects with the free soaring of the spirit.

Call for Contributions: Fafnir—Nordic Journal of Science Fiction and Fantasy Research

611 NOTES AND CORRESPONDENCE NOTES AND CORRESPONDENCE SFCS Book Award, 2020. The Speculative Fictions and Cultures of Science Book Award (previously the Science Fiction and Technoculture Studies Book Prize) honors an outstanding scholarly monograph that explores the intersections between popular culture, particularly science fiction, and the discourses and cultures of technoscience. The award recognizes groundbreaking and exceptional contributions to the field. Books published in English between 1 January and 31 December 2020 were eligible for the award; this year’s jury included Aimee Bahng (Pomona College), Elizabeth Swanstrom (University of Utah), and Sherryl Vint (University of California, Riverside), with Pawe³ Frelik (University of Warsaw) serving as jury chair. After intense deliberations, the jury has announced that the ninth annual SFCS book award is awarded to Melody Jue, a professor of English at the University of California, Santa Barbara, for Wild Blue Media: Thinking Through Seawater (Duke UP 2020). Wild Blue Media treats the global ocean as itself a speculative, science-fictional medium and an entity that provokes speculation. The study expands the principal focus of its “ecological” turn by engaging with a variety of artistic and cultural objects and practices. One judge described the monograph as “a beautifully rendered, deeply situated study of underwater mediations, from coral mapping to deep-sea photography”; another praised its role in helping readers to “think beyond conventional Western epistemologies as it repositions cognitive estrangement and ‘diving as method’ as modes of humanistic enquiry that are embodied, ethically attentive to their interactions with their objects of enquiry, and reflexively open to making knowledge anew.” By theorizing the ocean as “a science-fictional medium of estrangement,” Wild Blue Media provides new ways to understand kinship and connectivity. The judges also recognized two works as particularly strong runners-up: William O. Gardner’s The Metabolist Imagination: Visions of the City in Postwar Japanese Architecture and Science Fiction (Minnesota UP 2020) and Christopher B. Paterson’s Open World Empire: Race, Erotics, and the Global Rise of Video Games (New York UP 2020). One of the judges praised Gardner’s book as “a powerful example of how science-fiction imaginaries shape collective cultural ways of understanding and inhabiting urban space,” approaching speculative architecture by raising intertwined questions of technology, media, and environment. Another judge singled out Paterson’s study as “taking seriously the pleasures afforded by gaming, even as it demonstrates gaming’s uncomfortable connections to global exploitation and racism”; the book “not only calls attention to the limitations of the ‘freedom’ gaming promises but also interrogates the play that eludes game design imperatives.”—Pawe³ Frelik, University of Warsaw Call for Contributions: Fafnir—Nordic Journal of Science Fiction and Fantasy Research. Founded in 2014, Fafnir is a World Fantasy Award-winning, peer-reviewed, interdisciplinary journal published by the 612 SCIENCE FICTION STUDIES, VOLUME 48 (2021) Finnish Society for Science Fiction and Fantasy Research. The journal, which publishes two issues each year, provides an open-access international forum for scholarly exchanges on science fiction, fantasy, other speculative genres, and issues current in the field. Fafnir welcomes contributions from a wide range of perspectives. The editors are particularly interested in innovative (yet rigorous) approaches to scholarship, and give submissions from emerging scholars, independent researchers, and researchers from non-traditional backgrounds the same careful consideration shown to established and university-based scholars. Articles can be in English or in any of the Nordic languages. Authors are very welcome to query the editors about proposed research at . Fafnir also maintains a lively book-review section; inquiries about providing books for review can be directed to . The journal’s entire archive is available online at no cost, along with our submission guidelines at .—The Editors of Fafnir Mass Markets: Studies in Franchise Cultures: New Book Series. Sturgeon’s Law—Theodore Sturgeon’s claim that “90% of everything is crap”—suggests that most cultural production is not worthy of our attention, except perhaps as a guilty pleasure. Yet as popular media storyworlds increasingly dominate the global entertainment landscape, they call out for serious criticism. The “Mass Markets” of our series title refers both to the audiences who consume media franchises and immerse themselves in those storyworlds and to one of the key media forms through...

The Unnamable Archipelago: Wounds of the Postcolonial in Postwar Japanese Literature and Thought. By Dennitza Gabrakova. Leiden: Brill, 2018. 210 pp. ISBN: 9789004365919 (paper, also available as e-book).

The Unnamable Archipelago: Wounds of the Postcolonial in Postwar Japanese Literature and Thought. By Dennitza Gabrakova. Leiden: Brill, 2018. 210 pp. ISBN: 9789004365919 (paper, also available as e-book). - Volume 80 Issue 4

Midori Yoshimoto. Review of "The Metabolist Imagination: Visions of the City in Postwar Japanese Architecture and Science Fiction" by William O. Gardner.

Midori Yoshimoto. Review of "The Metabolist Imagination: Visions of the City in Postwar Japanese Architecture and Science Fiction" by William O. Gardner.

Re-staging postwar Japanese photography: Ōtsuji Kiyoji, APN and straight photography

In both English and Japanese-language scholarship, Domon Ken’s ‘realism photography’ grounds the history of photography in postwar Japan. Domon proclaimed that photographs should deal directly with social phenomena, and that photography should never mix with other media. This essay introduces an alternative to Domon’s realism, through a series of abstract, studio-based photographs that were published in the pages of the popular magazine Asahi Graph between 1953 and 1954. The photographer Ōtsuji Kiyoji (1923–2001) produced this series (collectively known as the APN photographs) in collaboration with other artists, while simultaneously criticizing Domon’s dogma in print. This essay argues that Domon’s ‘realism photography’ should be reconceived as a form of straight photography, a tradition of modernist purism couched in a moral language that also reflects heterosexual anxiety over the stability of identity. The APN photographs themselves play with the conventions of realistic representation, and the critical nature of Ōtsuji’s writing remains unexplored in scholarship to date. Shifting attention towards Ōtsuji loosens the hold of realism on postwar photography in Japan, and also brings the conditions of prewar photography into view.

Crisis of Time! The Tyranny of the Immediate and Community in Two Literary Works by Takahashi Gen'ichirō

ABSTRACT In his fiction, Takahashi Gen’ichirō often portrays crises of contemporary life where characters do not identify with shared ideologies or communities, instead resorting to repetitive actions to survive in their empty daily existences. This article argues that a central factor for such crises is a shattering of perceptions of orders of time, predicated on problematics linked to the lingering postwar Japanese context, and leading to an overextended present as the only dimension that matters. Characters can only focus on acting in their proximate realities, without critically confronting themselves with others or with wider issues in society. Often, this type of compulsive action is in response to sudden violent stimuli, also of a sexual nature. Ultimately, a possible way out of the never-ending cycles of the present is to reconstitute a community based on mutual understanding. This article examines these occurrences of the dominating immediate and community in the salient examples of the novel Godira and the stories in Kimi ga yo wa chiyo ni yachiyo ni. Through this analysis, the article shows the relevance of the theme in Takahashi’s fiction and how it contributes to the broader field of Japanese literary studies, especially vis-à-vis the discourse on post-Fukushima productions.

Review: The Metabolist Imagination: Visions of the City in Postwar Japanese Architecture and Science Fiction

Book Review| September 01 2021 Review: The Metabolist Imagination: Visions of the City in Postwar Japanese Architecture and Science Fiction William O. Gardner The Metabolist Imagination: Visions of the City in Postwar Japanese Architecture and Science Fiction Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2020, 232 pp., 16 color and 4 b/w illus. $108 (cloth), ISBN 9781517906238 Zhongjie Lin Zhongjie Lin University of Pennsylvania Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians (2021) 80 (3): 366–367. https://doi.org/10.1525/jsah.2021.80.3.366 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Twitter LinkedIn Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Zhongjie Lin; Review: The Metabolist Imagination: Visions of the City in Postwar Japanese Architecture and Science Fiction. Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 1 September 2021; 80 (3): 366–367. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/jsah.2021.80.3.366 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentJournal of the Society of Architectural Historians Search Over the past decade, the publication of several notable books, including historical accounts, a collection of interviews, and an exhibition catalogue, has attested to growing academic interest in the history of Metabolism, Japan's postwar avant-garde architectural movement.1 Departing from the movement's earlier historiography, which centered on criticism of modernism and megastructure, these recent accounts have attempted to shift attention to the movement's influence on and implications for the city of the present and the future. William O. Gardner's The Metabolist Imagination is the most recent addition to this literature, focusing specifically on the intersection between Metabolist urban imageries and works of science fiction generated during the 1960s. Alongside his examination of this dialogue, which continued into the following decades, Gardner presents many relevant examples of architectural, literary, and film production. The book is organized into six chapters that can be roughly divided into two parts. The introduction and first... You do not currently have access to this content.

Shimizu Ikutarō and the Precarious Coexistence of Progressivism and Conservatism

Abstract Shimizu Ikutarō (1907–1988) is one of the most controversial postwar Japanese intellectuals. His transition from the icon of the Anpo protests to an advocate of a nuclear Japan has been considered an intellectual conversion (tenkō). Instead of revisiting the notion of conversion, this study shows that his wartime thoughts—bottom-up nationalism in particular—continued to influence Shimizu’s postwar writings and activism on both conservative and liberal sides. Shimizu delineated his historical concept of how ordinary people in Meiji and Taisho Japan had contributed to the development of a modern society and called for the construction of a new system. Endorsing Japan’s wartime efforts, Shimizu strove to center nationalist energies by ordinary Japanese on his concept of a new Japan. However, Shimizu’s adherence to bottom-up movements in wartime and postwar Japan reflects his problematic interpretation of Japanese history. Neglecting Japan’s nationalistic path to colonial violence, his writings on the society and culture of wartime and postwar Japan affirm grass-root nationalism as Japan’s key to modern development. This line of thinking was later associated with anti-American nationalist movements in the 1950s. His notion of civil society movements soon encountered a highly nationalistic project of a nuclear Japan in the 1970s.

The Metabolist Imagination: Visions of the City in Postwar Japanese Architecture and Science Fiction. By William O. Gardner. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2020. viii, 223 pp. ISBN: 9781517906245 (cloth, also available in paper and as e-book).

The Metabolist Imagination: Visions of the City in Postwar Japanese Architecture and Science Fiction. By William O. Gardner. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2020. viii, 223 pp. ISBN: 9781517906245 (cloth, also available in paper and as e-book). - Volume 80 Issue 2