Tsutsui W.M. A Companion to japanese histоry

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CHAPTER ELEVEN

Intellectual Life, Culture, and the

Challenge of Modernity

Elise K. Tipton

The processes of industrialization and urbanization begun in the Meiji period accel-

erated with expansion of markets for Japanese manufactured goods during World

War I, and a rush of democratic, reformist, and radical ideas and ideologies during the

1910s stimulated social and cultural as well as political change. The 1920s, especially

after the Kanto

earthquake of 1923, was the era when ‘‘modern’’ became the

catchword of the times. The ‘‘modern life’’ became the ideal for Japanese, even

though most could not yet attain it. While the modern life became the ideal, criticism

grew during the 1930s, and a wide variety of intellectuals took up the poet Hagiwara

Sakutaro

’s call for a ‘‘return to Japan.’ ’ Some historians see World War II not only as a

war aga inst the economic and military hegemony of the West, but also as a ‘‘revolt’’

against Western cultural imperialism.

The ‘‘Overcoming Modernity’’ (Kindai no

cho

koku) symposium of 1942 has been seen as both symbol and culmination of this

anti-Western trend among intellectuals.

But not all intellectuals equated modernity with the West. In fact, intellectuals had

great difficulty even defining modernity. However, they all based their evaluations on

what they observed and experienced in the everyday life around them. Everyday life,

the material, social, and cultural changes of the early decades of the twentieth century,

both attracted and repell ed them. In H. D. Harootunian’s phrase, ‘‘the category of

everyday life – its performativity in the present – [became] the informing principle of

modern life.’’ Everyday life constituted ‘‘both a condition of social research and

critique and the occasion for looking to a new social and political imaginary in the

future.’’

Here, culture is understood in a broad sense, to include popular cult ure as well as

‘‘high’’ culture or ‘‘pure’’ literature. T his is important because the emergence of the

‘‘masses’’ in modern culture became one of the aspects of modernity that troubled

intellectuals, and especially writers. The importance of the masses is evident in the

words of the cultural critic Tsuchida Kyo

son, writing in 1932: ‘‘There has probably

been no time in which the ‘masses’ had such weighty significance as at present. It is

possible that it would not be an exaggeration even if one said that the present is the

age of the masses.’’

A wartime cartoon by Sugiura Yukio suggests the extent to which modern values

had been disseminated throughout Japanese society. It appeared in the May 1942

A Companion to Japanese History

Edited by William M. Tsutsui

issue of the officially sponsored magazine Manga.

It strikes a Westerner as a little

odd and humorous, for it depicts a woman bending over on her knees and combing

out dandr uff from her hair. The flakes of dandruff are each labelled, and the

labels are revealing, for they encapsulate the meaning of modernity for government

officials during the prewar and war years: ‘‘extravagance,’’ ‘‘materialism,’’ and

‘‘money worship’’; ‘‘hedonism,’’ ‘‘selfishness,’’ and ‘‘individualism’’; ‘‘liberalism’’

and ‘‘Anglo-American ideas.’’

In this piece of government propaganda, modernity was explicitly associated

with the wartime Anglo-American enemy, but among intellectuals of the 1920s and

1930s modernity was not understood as a mere foreign import. It was no simple

and superficial fad. Rather, modernity comprised ideas and values that had spread

along with or as a consequence of indigenous processes of industrialization and

urbanization. Further, it was not only associated with technological and material

changes, but also with cultural values and modes of social relations and behavior.

Still, participants in the ‘‘Overcoming Modernity’’ symposium could not in the

end find even a common definition of modernity. This was one reason that

the debates about modernity were so complicated and full of ambivalence and

contradictions.

Yet although definitions abounded and evaluations often clashed, some common

themes can be found. Few critics rejected the material improvements brought about

by industrialization and modern economic growth. No machines ar e to be purged in

the Manga cartoon. Moreover, although well-known writers such as Tanizaki

Jun ichiro

lamented the decline of traditional Japanese aesthetic values, they did not

want to give up the conveniences of a modern lifestyle. As Tanizaki concluded in

1934, ‘‘I am aware of and most grateful for the benefits of the age. No matter what

complaints we may have, Japan has chosen to follow the West, and there is nothing

for her to do but move bravely ahead and leave us old ones behind.’’

It was the

changes in social roles and cultural values that worried critics, and the loss of

communal spirit and creativity that they mour ned. Modernity was clearly located in

the city, but the city was alienating as well as alluring. It meant unceasing and often

bewildering change, both the ‘‘speed’’ and fast ‘‘tempo’’ of city life and material

changes, and the swirl of new ideas and theories about art, aesthetics and literature as

well as science, society and politics.

In addition, it is significant that the Manga cartoon depicts a woman in Western

dress, rather than a man, needing to get rid of the scurf encrusting her head.

The behavior and values associated with the modern life threatened to upset the

role for women that not only the government, but also most of society endorsed.

The Meiji government had promoted the ideal of ‘‘good wife, wise mother’’ for

middle-class women, which situated women’s proper place in the home. Neverthe-

less, by the 1920s higher levels of education, lifestyle aspirations, and financial need in

a period of economic stagnation motivated an increasing number of middle-class

women to enter the paid workplace and other public places. This growing trend

created fears that changed gender roles would undermine the family, which was both

the political and social unit at the foundation of the Japanese family-state. The

‘‘woman question’’ was a so urce of intellectual and social debate from the 1910s

onward. Essays on aesthetics and novels of the period reveal a contradictory attraction

toward modern women but also a distaste for their independence and public visibility

190 ELISE K. TIPTON

(and especially their bodies) as well as a lament for the disappearance of ‘‘traditional’’

ideals of femininity.

To understand the multiple facets of modernity and the challenge they posed in the

view of intellectuals during the 1920s and 1930s, we can begin with the values

singled out in Sugiura’s cartoon and the diverse responses to the m among social

critics. Here I shall focus on the cultural and social values, that is, all except for

liberalism which represents political ideas and ideologies dealt with elsewhere in this

volume. We shall then explore some of the attempts made to meet the challenge,

leading to the ‘‘Overcoming Modernity’’ symposium. This will highlight the com-

plexity and ambiguity characterizing responses to modernity and the nature of

intellectual life in Japan during these decade s.

Materialism and Money Worship

Materialism and money worship were not new values of the interwar years. Concern

about them can be traced back to the late Meiji period when the meaning of

‘‘success’’ (risshin shusse) began to change. As Earl Kinmonth has demonstrated in

his study of youth magazines,

wealth rather than governmen t office became the goal

of upwardly mobile youths, and individuals increasingly soug ht success for themselves

more than for their families or communities. During the late 1890s the Christian

critic Uchimura Kanzo

sarcastically criticized the desire for money:

Get money; get it by all means, for it alone is power in this generation. Wish you to be

patriotic? Then get money, for you cannot better serve your country than by getting

money for you and it. Be loyal? Then get money, and add wealth to your Master’s land.

Be filial to your father and mother? You cannot be so without getting money. The

strength of your nation, the fear of your name – all come from money. Morality ever

for the sake of money.

After the Russo-Japanese War social critics became even more conscious of the

changes. In the words of one commentator, ‘‘never since the dawn of world history

has the growth of the individual been so respected and material happiness so sought

after as in present day Japan.’’

That commentator should have waited another decade or so to make his declar-

ation, for the commercial developments of the 1920s made the getting of money

even more desirable. During the early 1920s ‘‘culture’’ (bunka) became a catch-

phrase, and various industries successfully promoted a ‘‘cultured life’’ (bunka sei-

katsu) to the new white collar salaried middle classes in the cities. The economist

Morimoto Ko

kichi established the Cultured Life Research Association (Bunka

Seikatsu Kenkyu

kai), which published two periodicals aimed at women’s higher

school graduate s. Morimoto enthusiastically called for the establishment of a cultured

life, identifying it with ‘‘rational, efficient living.’’

Prominent writers and intellec-

tuals, including Arishima Takeo, contributed to these journals, and the phrase ‘‘cul-

tured life’’ was quickly picked up in more popular media.

Living a ‘‘cultured life’’ consequently became less associated with artistic, literary,

or other strictly cultural pursuits than with obtaining its material symbols, namely a

INTELLECTUAL LIFE, CULTURE, AND MODERNITY 191

‘‘culture house,’’ filled with ‘‘culture pots,’’ ‘‘culture knives,’’ and other ‘‘culture’’

gadgets and appliances. The burgeoning mass media of national circulation news-

papers, popular commercially oriented magazines, and foreign films as well as the

transformation of department store s and shopping centers presented images of an

affluent ‘‘cultured life’’ and later in the decade a ‘‘modern life’’ (modan seikatsu or

modan raifu) to Japanese people beyond the circles of the elite. As Jordan Sand has

shown, displays of Western-style culture houses were more for looking at than

buying, however, since most ‘‘salarymen’’ could not yet afford them.

Tanizaki’s

popular novel Chijin no ai (A Fool’s Love, translated as Naomi), serialized in 1922,

was largely situated in such a culture house. His description of it as a ‘‘fairy-tale

house’’ reflects the extent to which the cultured lifestyle became a widespread ideal

and how Japan was becoming a mass consumer society during the 1920s.

Ten years later in his essay In ei raisan (In Praise of Shadows), Tanizaki acknow-

ledged and lamented the popularity of mod ern household items over traditional

Japanese ones. In particular, he noted that lacquerware was now considered ‘‘vulgar

and inelegant,’’ blam ing this on ‘‘the much-vaunted ‘brilliance’ of moder n electric

lighting.’’ He much preferred lacquerware to ceramics which ‘‘lack the shadows, the

depth of lacquerware’’ and ‘‘clatter and clink.’’ Similarly, for aesthetic reasons he

preferred Japanese building materials of paper and wood to glass and metal: ‘‘unfin-

ished wood as it darkens and the grain grows more subtle with the years acquires an

inexplicable power to calm and soothe.’’

But in his conclusion Tanizaki had to

admit that he did not want to give up the conveniences of modern culture, and

according to his wife’s recollections, he did not in fact want to live in the kind of

house that he described in the essay. Another major writer Nagai Kafu

, known even

more than Tanizaki for his elegiac novels about the waning of Edo culture, criticized

the Westernizing of Japan as superficial but built himself a ‘‘truly Western’’ house

with no tatami on the floors.

The destruction caused by the Kanto

earthquake in 1923 had accelerated these

consumer trends. Companies moved their offices out of the old downtown business

district of Nihonbashi to Marunouchi, and their managers an d workers moved their

homes to suburbs south and west of the city. Many did not retu rn to live in the central

business area even after reconstruction was complete. Private railway companies re-

inforced suburbanization by extending their lines and building culture house devel-

opments to attract commuting customers for their new lines. The railway companies

also constructed department stores and shopping centers near railway stations, railway

terminals, and transfer points, such as Shinjuku. Department stores, especially those in

Ginza, had previously sold mainly expensive imported goods and specialty items, but

in the aftermath of the earthquake they responded to people’s needs for everyday

living. They also let in the masses by allowing customers to keep on their shoes and

opening dining rooms with Western tables and chairs where diners could keep on their

coats. For the first time, middle-class women felt comfortable about eating out in

public. Many were now earning incomes in the new occupations open to middle-class

women, such as teaching, nursing, clerical and other office work, and retail sales. Most

still could not afford to buy many of the fashions and other goods on display in

department stores, but browsing and window shopping became a respectable leisure

pastime. In fact, it prompted the coining of a new term, ginbura (‘‘passing the time in

Ginza’’ or ‘‘cruising the Ginza’’).

192 ELISE K. TIPTON

Many photographs from this period feature fashionabl e women window shopping

or striding purposefully on the streets of the Ginza. Department stores and consumer

product manufacturers targeted women with their advertising and other promotional

activities, and the new popular women’s magazine s and Hollywood movies defined

women as consumers. None symbolized the new consumerism more than the ‘‘mod-

ern girl’’ (modan ga

ru or moga), who grabbed the attention of journalists and

intellectuals from the mid-1920s until the early 1930s. The numerous heated debates

attempting to define her display the confusion, contradictions, ambivalence, and

emotion appropriate to the complicated modernity that she represented. One trait

was universally attributed, however: preoccupation with consumption, especially

Western clothes, make-up, and hairstyles, and the latest movies and fashion maga-

zines. Wearing a short Western dress and accessories, made up with bright red lipsti ck

and Western cosmetics, and coiffed in a short bob haircut or permanent wave, the

modern girl appeared ubiquitously in advertisements for Shiseido cosmetics, Sapporo

beer, Suntory wine, and even the Calpis health drink. Matchstick boxes, graphic

prints, and even shinhanga (new woodblock prints) depicted her, usually with a

Western cocktail and a cigarette in hand as well. Intellectuals as well as journalists

could not stop writing about her. As Miriam Silverberg has pointed out, me mbers of a

round-table discussion in the January 1928 issue of Shincho

were supposed to talk

about urbanization and various aspects of modern life, but they could not keep away

from discussing the modern girl.

Numerous negative evaluations of the modern girl focused on her superficial

appearance. When the intellectual women’s journal Fujin ko

ron, for example, gath-

ered together opinions in its January 1927 issue, Okada Hachiyo’s viewpoint was

representative:

I do not think that modern girls are particularly modern in their way of thinking; they

just look moder n. You see them wearing flashy clothes – a shiny purple and green dress

with a big sash tied under the bosom. If that is the criterion for being modern, it

is pitiful. It is an insult to the real modern girl even to use a word like modern girl,

which has such derogatory connotations. For me, the word connotes someone who is

a total fake, heavily made-up, and who is satisfied with just having something that is

new.

Marxist a nd other socialist intellectuals saw the modern girl’s (and modern boy’s)

preoccupation with consumption as a way for the bourgeoisie to divert her attention

from more significant political and economic issues. Gonda Yasunosuke condemned

the consumerist trends and the ‘‘moder n life industry’’ in an article published in the

leftist intellectual journal Kaizo

, entitled ‘‘Modan seikatsu to hentai shiko

sei’’ (Mod-

ern Life and Perverse Tastes):

If I were to define the essence of modern life, I would say that people without ties to

labor and production are responsible for creating this society. In terms of class, they are

members of the leisure class, or at least those connected to the petty bourgeoisie. Having

no direct connection to labor, their lives are rooted solely in consumerism. In terms of

age, they are young men and women for whom the name modern boy and modern girl is

appropriate.

INTELLECTUAL LIFE, CULTURE, AND MODERNITY 193

The Marxist poet Nakano Shige haru critiqued the commodification of culture in his

1926 poem ‘‘Imperial Hotel’’ (Teikoku Hoteru). During the early twentieth century

the nouveau riche in Tokyo frequented the Imperial Hotel, designed by the pre-

eminent modernist architect Frank Lloyd Wright. The second part of the poem

sarcastically describes the hotel as:

A large hole

A large whorehouse

A large saloon

A large dampish prison

A big and seedy sample Japanese marketplace

Undestroyed even by the earthquake

In the center of Tokyo

Over our heads

Squats, letting loose a stench.

Hedonism

As revealed in Nakano’s poem, hedonism often went hand in hand with materialism

and consumerism, but hedonism – decadence was another word – referred more

specifically to the pursuit of commodified pleasure and to immoral leisure activities

and behavior. These were the ‘‘perverse tastes’’ that Gonda Yasunosuke referred to in

his 1929 Kaizo

article, while another leftist intellectual, Kurahara Korehito, used the

term ‘‘cultural hedonism’’ to describe the commodification of the everyday. As in the

case of consumerism, the modern girl often figured as the central symbol and object

of criticism.

Hedonism, like materialism, had been a worry among social critics earlier in the

century. Then, as in the 1920s and 1930s, it was applied to the younger generation –

‘‘decadent youth.’’ Unlike the materialistic ‘‘success youth’’ who strived for money

and their own individual wealth, decadent youth abandoned self-discipline, frugality,

and filial piety in pursuit of sensual pleasures, extravagance, and ostentation. Issuance

of the Boshin Impe rial Rescript in 1908 had attempted to stem the tide and reinstill

values of diligence, frugality, and loyalty. Its failure was evident in the recurrence of

similar complaints among both intellect uals and government authorities during the

interwar decades. Now, however, they blamed the modern entertainments of the

cities for spreading ideas of romantic love, free love, and female sexuality and focused

their criticisms on young women as well as young men.

These ideas had been entering Japan since the 1910s through translations of

Western writers and theorists and through discussions in the feminist literary journal

Seito

(Bluestocking) as well as other intellectual journals such as Kaizo

and Chu

ron. Then in 1922 a new magazine with an unconventional word for ‘‘woman’’

as its title, Josei, began publication.

Its stated purpose was to introduce the modern

to educated women. Despite being inaugurated by the Kurabu (Club) cosmetics

company, the magazine contained relatively little advertising, and the contributors

were well-know n writers, literary critics, and intellectuals, representing a wide

range of ideological perspectives, such as liberals, feminists of various kinds, and

socialists. A 1980s women’s magazine described Josei as the ‘‘bible’’ of the modern

194 ELISE K. TIPTON

girl, but perhaps because of the high reputations of its contributors, many of its

readers were also men.

The most frequently discussed topics in Josei proved to be chastity (teiso

) or the

‘‘new chastity’’ and free love. Writers boldly discussed sexual behavior and relation-

ships and challenged established notions of monogamous marriage. Fujii Kenjiro

,for

example, introduced the views of English social refor mer Henry Sedgwick, who

argued that marriage was not only to produce children and that sex in marriage was

also for pleasure. Sedgwick’s views were similar to those of the influential sexologist

Havelock Ellis. Although ultimately conservative in his support for monogamy and

the importance of the family, Ellis and other sex researchers we re radical in their

emphasis on the legitimacy of women fulfilling their sexual needs. Their advocacy of

‘‘companionate marriage’’ and the importance of love in marriage found acceptance

among the writers in Josei. Some contributors, such as Tsuchida Kyo

son, favored free

love, taking pains to make clear that it did not mean promiscuity. Others, however,

such as Wada Tomiko, criticized the selfish individualistic pursuit of sex, and Fujii

Kenjiro

argued that personal desires and lust needed to be kept in check for the good

of so ciety.

The modern girl and new urban entertainments provoked reactions like

Wada’s a nd Fujii’s. With her short skirt and bobbed hair, the modern girl literally

exhibited her body, moved it confidently as she cruised the Ginza and, in the

new leisure spaces of the cafe and dance hall, expressed her sexuality. Intellectuals

debated whether or not this represented women’s emancipation. Murobuse

shin (Takanobu) was one who celebrated the liberating qualities of the cafe

where both women and men could mix together freely and seek romantic

love (ren ai). He extolled the cafe as the symbol of modernity and considered

it more significant than even the establishment of the Diet, for, in his view,

it represented youth and the future rather than the old bourgeois elite.

Others,

however, saw only threats of moral depravity and decadence in the erotic service

proffered by cafe waitresses. Cafe waitresses appeared frequently as characters in

movies and popular fiction of the late 1920s and early 1930s, as women who brazenly

flaunted their sexuality and availability. Several years before the heyday of cafes

Tanizaki’s Naomi had epitomized these traits, leaving the male protagonist Jo

at home to go to dance halls and taking up with one lover after another. The modern

girl in this novel is unfaithful and promiscuous, but nevertheless impossible for Jo

ji to

reject.

One might find it unsurprising for a male author to project his fears of losing male

domination onto the modern girl, but some prominent feminist theorists also

doubted that the modern girl was really free in her pursuit of sexual pleasure.

Hiratsuka Raicho

, the founder of Seito

, quest ioned the seeming freedom of working

women who had the time and money to spend in Ginza department stores and cafes.

She saw them instead as fashion slaves and the objects of men’s physical desires. A real

modern girl would have a social conscience. While she did not see any in Japan of the

1920s, she did have hopes for such women emerging in the future. Marxist feminist

Yamakawa Kikue was even more critical of the dissolute lifestyle engaged in by both

modern boys and modern girls, but unlike Raicho

, was not optimistic about their

future. Rather, she saw their obsession with sensual pleasures as signs of the ruling

class in decline.

INTELLECTUAL LIFE, CULTURE, AND MODERNITY 195

The threat posed by the exposure of women’s bodies, their sexuality, and their

visibility in public places also underlay Tanizaki’s regret for changing ideals of

women’s beauty. He much preferred women in kimono, especially the way that

female bunraku puppets were represented with their bodies, legs, and feet concealed

in a long kimono. In his words,

To me this is the very epitome of reality, for a woman of the past did indeed exist

only from the collar up and the sleeves out; the rest of her remained hidden in darkness.

A woman of the middle and upper ranks of society seldom left her house, and when she

did she shielded herself from the gaze of the public in the dark recesses of her palan-

quin.

Tanizaki also praised the old customs of blackening the teeth and using a green-black

lipstick to hide the red of the mouth and ‘‘push everything except the face into the

dark.’’ Nostalgically, he recalled his mother going out in a gray kimono with a ‘‘small,

modest pattern.’’ ‘‘Women in those days had almost no flesh. . . . Chest flat as a

board, breasts paper-thin . . . to give the impre ssion not of flesh but of a stick.’’

What a contrast to the modern girl out in public with her bright red lipstick, long

exposed legs, and colorful, form-fitting dress!

Tanizaki’s regrets for the passing of traditional Japanese ideals of female beauty

(and passivity) and aesthetic tastes of darkness and shadows came in the wake of the

‘‘erotic, grotesque, nonsense’’ (ero-guro-nansensu) fad that swept literary circles as

well as popular entertainments during the early 1930s. This was the height of the

Depression, so one can underst and why many Marxist as well as right-wing critics

interpreted it as a reflection of the last days of decadent bourgeoi s capitalism. Besides

the cafes, ero-guro was also represented by the large-scale, glitzy stage revues in

Asakusa’s Sixth District. These musical productions at theatres such as the Casino

Folies featured chorus girls in scanty but elaborate costumes.

The renowned novelist and postwar Nobel laureate Kawabata Yasunari contributed

to the fascination with Asakusa’s nightlife with his novel Asakusa kurenai dan

(Asakusa Crimson Gang), which was serialized in the Tokyo Asahi shinbun from

1929 to 1930. He had visited Asakusa every day for three years in preparation for

writing the novel, which utilized modernist writing techniques to produce kaleido-

scopic impressions of the entertainment district. Asakusa had been the place for

modern entertainments in Tokyo since the Meiji period, but by the late 1920s had

been superseded by Ginza. Consequently, while still extremely popular, especially for

the latest movies and the revues, Asakusa had become somewhat tawdry and cheap.

Kawabata’s descrip tions made it a fashionable place for slumming and turned Casino

Folies into a household word.

Individualism and Selfishness

As Donald Roden has pointed out, the character Yumiko in Asakusa kurenai dan

flouts conventional sex roles by alternating between a ‘‘masculine’’ young woman

and a ‘‘feminine’’ young man by changing clothes, language, gestures, and even her

name. This, Roden argues, reflected fascination with sexual ambivalence in both the

196 ELISE K. TIPTON

popular and high arts of interwar Japan, which, in turn, points to the transition from

the Meiji civilization of character to a Taisho

culture of personality. According to

Roden, ‘‘in the culture of personality, the self-actualizing needs of the individual

derive from sexual urges as well as philosophic quests.’’

Contemporary critics of modernity could thus trace both the hedonism and

materialism characterizing young modern men and women to individualism and

selfishness. Like other Marxists, O

ya So

ichi considered the decadence and perversity

as part of the modernist ‘‘culture of feeling’’ in ‘‘a society in the last stage of

capitalism,’’ but he reg arded the modern boys and modern girls who were defying

bourgeois notions of respectability and assigned gender roles as the ‘‘vanguard’’ of

the next historical stage.

In contrast, ther e were other intellectuals, notably the

psychologist and birth control advocate Yasuda Tokutaro

, who welcomed the break-

down of sexual barriers and the culture of personality. In a 1935 essay on homosexu-

ality, Yasuda concluded that freer sexuality woul d lead Japan to a higher level of

cultural development.

In the shift to the culture of personality from the civilization of character, instead of

self-restraint there was an emphasis on self-expression, and instead of value placed on

the normative, there was value placed on the idiosyncratic. Much of the literature of

the period exemplified this shift, epitomized in the ‘‘I’’ novel (shisho

setsu) which

became the distinguishing genre of Japanese fiction during the 1920s. Although

literary critics and historians vary as to what constitutes an ‘‘I’’ novel, Donald

Keene says that it is confessional, rather than just a recounting of personal events.

Authors in the Naturalist tradition especially were ‘‘likely to portray [themselves] in

the least attractive light, as being shiftless, dissolute, incapable of writing’’ and often

led the dissolute or deviant lives portrayed in their works.

Keene points to Kasai

Zenzo

, who ‘‘drank in order to write,’’ as the ‘‘emblematic example’’ of an ‘‘I’’

novelist.

Comparing Kasai to another ‘‘I’’ novelist, Makino Shin ichi, Kawakami

Tetsutaro

found commonalities in ‘‘their doggedness, their intense immersion in

their own mental states, the brutal sadism they directed at their own or other people’s

sentimentality and pride.’’

Keene distinguishes the ‘‘mental attitude’’ novelists from the ‘‘I’’ novelists.

In contrast to the nihilism of the ‘‘I’’ novelists, they found ‘‘depth and beauty

in incidents of daily lives.’’

The disciples of Shiga Naoya in the Shirakaba

(White Birch) group typified the ‘‘mental attitude’’ novelists. Generally regarded

as the quintessential Taisho

writers, these self-pronounced Tolstoyan humanists

often wrote about intergenerational conflict and criticized General Nogi Maresuke’s

suicide following the death of the Meiji emperor as anachronistic and inhu-

mane.

Despite these differences in attitude, both ‘‘I’’ novelists and ‘‘mental attitude’’

novelists looked inward in their writings. Roy Starrs notes this difference between

writers of the interwar years and those of the Meiji period. Even writers, such as

Akutagawa Ryu

nosuke, Kawabata Yasunari, and Tanizaki Jun ichiro

, who wrote

neither ‘‘I’’ novels nor ‘‘mental attitude’’ novels, did not write novels relevant to

nation-building or modernization as did Mori O

gai or Natsume So

seki of the Meiji

period.

This again was part of the shift from civilization to culture that distinguishes

Taisho

culture.

Among these, Keene describes Akutagawa as ‘‘the most striking

literary figure’’ of the Taisho

period. Akutagawa’s almost godlike eminence is

INTELLECTUAL LIFE, CULTURE, AND MODERNITY 197

revealed in the fact that the prize established in his name in 1935 by his friend Kikuchi

Kan, the editor of the popular monthly Bungei shunju

, was the most sought-after

prize among writers. That such a successful writer should commit suicide as he did in

1927 sent a shock wave through not only the literary world, but also the general

public. According to Keene, commentators interpreted the suicide as ‘‘a symbolic act,

an expression of profound anxiety over the state of the times, or of personal inability

to resolve the conflicting attraction of Japanese tradition and the wave of the future,

represented by proletarian literature.’’

Modernism versus Marxism

The late 1920s literary world, however, was less marked by an opposition between

Japanese tradition and a Western-inspired proletarian literature than by a clash

between two modern literary forces – proletarian literature and another Western-

inspired movement called New Sensationalism (Shinkankaku). Proletarian literature

stood for ideological principles, writing fiction for social purposes, while New Sen-

sationalism stood for literary principles. The New Sensation group, led by Yokomitsu

Riichi, were modernists with a capital ‘‘M’’ who experimented with new literary

techniques created by European writers after World War I. James Joyce, Marcel

Proust, and Paul Vale

ry influenced them greatly. Along with other modernist groups,

including Dadaists, Surrealists, Futurists, and Expressionists, the New Sensation

writers deliberately broke with traditional grammatical rules and structures and

utilized uncouth expressions. Rather than the self-absorbed confessional writings of

‘‘I’’ novelists, New Sensation novelists wrote in the detached style of an observer,

but created often surrealistic images and intense atmospheres through their uncon-

ventional sentences and expressions.

Yokomitsu’s ‘‘The Machine’’ (1930) and

Kawabata’s Asakusa kurenai dan stand out as successful examples of these modernist

writings.

Members of the proletarian literature movement decried the New Sensation group

and other modernists for their preoccupation with form, which went hand in hand

with a denial of moral content. Writers in the Japan Proletarian Literary Federat ion

(Nihon Puroretaria Bungei Renmei) wanted to produce novels with literary quality,

but the primary social purpose of advancing the proletarian revolution restricted

creativity, especially because of ideological parameters set by the Soviet Union.

Most leaders did not come from the proletariat, and when one who did, Tokunaga

Sunao, urged creation of popular literature that the proletariat could enjoy, Kobayashi

Takiji denounced him for ‘‘right-wing, opportunistic tendencies.’’

Tokunaga left

the movement the following year in October 1933, protesting against the domin-

ation of political over literary concerns.

Tokunaga’s withdrawal was part of a wave of conversions or, tenko

, from Com-

munism that led to disbandment of the prolet arian literature organization in 1934.

Proletarian literature had enjoyed a heyday in the last years of the 1920s. Many

writers had turned to the left after Akutagawa’s suicide, including several from the

New Sensation group. However, suppression of the Communist Party and its sym-

pathizers began with mass arrests in March 1928 and April 1929. Kobayashi Takiji’s

death in jail from police torture suggests the role played by the threat of physical

198 ELISE K. TIPTON