Abstracts
James Stone Lunde, UC Berkeley
Treating the Enemy, Healing the Scars: Japanese Medical Conscripts of the Chinese People's Liberation Army, 1945-1958
Following the surrender of the Japanese imperial army in 1945, over six million Japanese individuals - of whom over 50% were non-military - found themselves in the abruptly contracting boundaries of Japan's former colonies. The majority were given the ability to return home; however, amidst the repatriations, as many as 25,000 Japanese individuals were forcibly conscripted into the New Fourth Army and the Eighth Route Army, Chinese communist military forces that became the People's Liberation Army (PLA). Some of these Japanese members of the PLA were captured soldiers of the Imperial army, exposed to an ideological conversion programme devised by Nosaka Sanzo and Comintern agents in Yan'an, and sanctioned by Mao and the communist high command. Others were civilians, caught in the crossfire of the Sino-Japanese and Chinese civil war, informally absorbed by the splinter units of the Eigth Route Army tasked with the consolidation of Manchurian territory after Japan's surrender.
One of the principal purposes of the 'guerrilla conscription' of Japanese civilians was in order to provide medical personnel to support the 8RA's ongoing engagement with the nationalist armies. Large numbers of Japanese civilians - some with medical training, but the majority not - were press-ganged into service, providing medical care and nursing for soldiers of the Chinese Communist armies. In my talk, I will describe the general outline of this process and the underlying ideological ramifications that it had for the meaning of Japanese bodies and their incorporation - both physical and discursive - into the sacrosanct corpus of the PLA. I will then provide the details of one woman's experience as a conscripted nurse, and one man's experience as a conscripted surgeon. The latter component of my talk will be based on interviews conducted in person.
Ariko Shari Ikehara, UC Berkeley
Okinawa’s America: Mixed Life and Language
In my work, I pursue a translational possibility of a third language as a decolonial passage that functions as a comparative, transnational, and translational methodology. I seek to bring Asia-Pacific into the folds of western academic discourse on race, empire, and language through the mixed space where Okinawa and America intersect at the crossroad of people and power.
During the U.S. military occupation of Okinawa from 1944 to 1972, “the influence of the United States in the form of American culture is seen in Okinawa in its basic life culture, such as food, clothing, and shelter, in Okinawa after the war, and it still exists today in the citizen’s everyday lives as a part of postwar Okinawa’s cultural formation” (Iguchi 2008). A former military town, Koza, represented this mixed life, and produced a “peculiar atmosphere” that affects the racial episteme of the people as belonging to a “third race,” “neither belong to Japan nor American” (Iguchi). In such a precarious location of Koza in between place, “race,” and space, I explore “Okinawa’s America,” a mixed life that develops from the U.S. military occupation and presence. Moreover, I resituate Asian language in context of this history as a translational tool that facilitates a linguistic flow between Okinawan, Japanese, and English whereby producing an inter-lingual knowledge at the U.S.-Asia border that pushes the boundaries of nation, history, and culture. I ask, can Okinawan and Japanese become palpable and equal to English in the productions of knowledge?
Natalia Duong, UC Berkeley
Exposing Agent Orange: Việt, Đức, and Transnational Repair
Việt and Đức Nguyen were born March 6, 1980 in the Kon Tum province of the central highlands in Vietnam: a region later found to be heavily sprayed by Agent Orange. Like others who continue to experience the effects of environmental warfare, their conjoined bodies became the site where environmental, medical, and national conflicts were staged. As conjoined twins, Việt and Đức represented hope for national unity following the war. Their anatomy paired with what was described as their “dazzling eyes” and “innocent smiles” performed the possibility of peace while also being an embodied reminder of the trauma of chemical warfare. However, transnationally, Việt and Đức represented the potential for reparation between countries.
Việt and Đức were sponsored by several Japanese individuals who came together to create The Group Hoping for Việt and Đức’s Development, a group that sponsored medical support for the twins, citing empathy for the suffering caused by chemical warfare waged by Japan and Vietnam’s “shared enemy,” the United States. In recent years, environmental and cultural researchers have compared the effects of the atomic bombs in Nagasaki and Hiroshima, and the events of 3-11 in Fukushima to the ongoing environmental effects of Agent Orange in Vietnam. This paper thus examines Japanese involvement in the rehabilitation of Việt and Đức within the larger discourse about disability and embodied trauma in the wake of environmental contamination. I investigate the role of embodied transfer in nation-building: which bodies are recruited to represent a thriving national body politic and which bodies speak and act otherwise?
Kerry Shannon, UC Berkeley
Hygiene for the Masses: Public Health and Local Praxis in Meiji Japan
At the end of the nineteenth century, the site and practice of healing and health in Japan underwent paradigmatic shifts from focus on the village and family to a national policy of remaking Japanese bodies into civilized and disciplined subjects. Part of this project involved the dissemination of new modes of public health through locally-based hygiene associations (eisei kumiai), which played a critical role in distributing and publicizing government dictates on modern notions of cleanliness, sanitation and disease prevention.
This paper examines the local hygiene association’s crucial task in implementing a nationwide public health system in Meiji Japan. I argue that the local hygiene association functioned as an important medium that helped shape individual Japanese bodies and the larger Japanese body politic by facilitating the extension of regulatory and disciplinary power over extant networks of health and healing. Yet while many studies view the late-nineteenth century transition in health praxis as part of an abrupt shift to a complete system of “hygienic modernity,” this paper also demonstrates how local hygiene associations interpreted and manipulated new notions of public health for their own ends, using the state’s discourses of cleanliness in order to mete out private political objectives. By examining the local hygiene association not merely as the functionary of a totalizing Meiji health regime, but rather as a contested avenue for adjudicating notions of health and the body, this paper thus provides a more variegated account of hygienic policy and practice in the making of modern Japan.
Sayaka Mihara, Keio University
Vitalism and Technology for Babies in Modernizing Japan
Therapeutics for sick infants in early-twentieth-century Japan revolved around the concept of vital force (sei-ryoku), which provided a functionalist explanation to generalized weakness of preterm infants as a newly discovered target of pediatrics and obstetrics. By focusing on vitalism in neonatal medicine, this paper aims to demonstrate how reciprocal interplay between medical concepts and technologies shaped therapeutics for vulnerable bodies of infants in a modernizing society. In the early 1900s, pediatricians at elite hospitals started to utilize imported infant incubators to preserve vital force of preterm infants. Then, since the 1920s upon the rise of large-scale maternity institutions according to the imperialistic nation’s public health agenda, obstetrician-gynecologists took over the leadership of neonatal medicine and exploited female sex hormone products as potent stimuli of vital force of preterm infants. However, institutionalization of neonatal medicine was still a limited phenomenon. A detailed patient survey conducted in an urban district of Tokyo in the late 1930s indicated that the majority of deliveries and perinatal care still took place at home, attended by midwives working closely with local obstetrician-gynecologists. Home care of preterm infants remained conservative, relying on household equipment to replace incubators while lacking pharmacological stimulation therapies. I hope the reassessment of technological and social environment for preterm infants in the early twentieth century Japan will provide refreshed insights on conception and clinical management of debilitated bodies of newborn babies.
Lani Alden, University of Colorado at Boulder
Building Modern Women: Fukuzawa Yukichi's Dialogues with Naturalism and Gender Equality
In the final years of the nineteenth century and his life, Fukuzawa Yukichi, possibly Japan's first feminist, put pen to paper on two works which would begin serialization on April 1st in the Jiji Shimpō. The first of which, A Critique of The Greater Learning for Women, sought to criticize and disassemble the popular women's pedagogical text The Greater Learning for Women. The second, A New Greater Learning for Women, sought not only to tear the Greater Learning down, but also to replace it, thereby aiming to supplant one of the dominant pedagogical texts of his era with his own visions for women and education. The reaction was immediate and severe. Almost overnight, newspapers and magazines of all sizes began to pick up discussions that Fukuzawa began.
In these serialized works on women, Fukuzawa argues using the language of sexologists and naturalist proponents advocating for an essentialist, inferior, though necessary, female role. However, he does so for the stated purpose of women's liberation. Yet, as he couches his argument primarily in the “natural,” while he attacks The Greater Learning, he ends up modernizing many of its problems. This paper will inspect the ways in which Fukuzawa uses dual discourses of liberation and essentialism in the realms of gender performance and sexual roles in order to construct liberation strictly on terms of the Japanese nation-state and within the context of modernist scientific movements.
Lisa Reade, UC Berkeley
The Ephemerality of the Dialectic: Lafcadio Hearn's Kokoro as Transnational Love Story
This paper, extracted from my dissertation, examines a collection of ethnographic writings on Japan called Kokoro: Hints and Echoes of Japanese Inner Life (1895) by the Victorian writer and essayist Lafcadio Hearn. In keeping with the theme of embodied identities and temporality, I explore the implications of Hearn's obsession with the "spectral" and the "ghostly" throughout these essays by drawing on Jacques Derrida's concept of temporal disjunction in Specters of Marx. Hearn focuses at length in his essays on Japanese ancestor worship, and the relations between the living and the dead that he observes in Japanese customs, rituals, and folklore. Although many Westerners had seen the persistence of ancestor worship in late 19th century Japanese culture as an anachronistic residue of pre-modernity amid its otherwise rapid scientific and military progress, Hearn saw no contradiction in this. Instead, he believed that "the doctrines of Shinto...offer some very striking analogies with the scientific facts of heredity," since in both "the world of the living is directly governed by the world of the dead," and he strived to reconcile his readings of 19th century evolutionary science with his observations of Japanese kinship relations. I argue that Hearn's essays on Japanese kinship can be read as a critique of Western modernity's obsession with linear temporality, and that the constant presence of the dead amid the living that Hearn describes as central to Japanese life constitutes an alternative mode of inhabiting modern temporality.
Kanako Shimizu, Jichi Medical University
Pathological Bereavement in Japan
Bereavement is a sorrowful and traumatic experience that can affect anyone. Human beings require mourning to release their sorrow. Mourning includes the symbolization of the dead by holding a funeral and building a tomb. In Japan, the dead are mourned by the family and community members as “mono no aware,” which refers to sadness.
Currently, Japan is an ageing society, the function and support offered by the community is weakening, and there is an increased nuclearization of the family. Therefore, bereavement occurring in old age may intensify loneliness more than it did in the past.
A new pathological bereavement diagnosis was proposed in clinical psychiatry in 2013. It is called “complicated grief,” and is characterized by an intense yearning for the deceased that continues for at least 1 year. The incidence rate of complicated grief is 10% in the USA. In Japan, although there are many people suffering with persistent pathological bereavement, the rate of complicated grief is less than a quarter of that of the USA. The reasons why are unknown.
Japanese culture still regards the avoidance of openly sharing anguish with others as a virtue. This makes it difficult to express sadness of loss to others clearly. Instead, individuals express their sorrow through physical symptoms and visit a physician to relieve their symptoms. This too, may be considered a symbolization of the dead.
I will present pathological bereavement in Japan, by discussing clinical cases.
Mariko Takano, UCLA
Anti-life Discourse by Hanada Kiyoteru
This paper analyzes the “anti-life” discourse by a literary critic Hanada Kiyoteru (1909 – 1974) . In his essays written during early 1940s, Hanada repeatedly advocates death as the embryo of the new life, and claims the importance of the organizing process of death to rebirth while dismissing the glorification of life. My first goal is to clarify what Hanada meant by this paradoxical theory. Just to be sure, Hanada was not a ultra-nationalist that praised the death under the war. He was rather seeking for a possible resistance after the leftist movement was almost completely smashed. That said, my second aim is to locate Hanada’s “anti-life” bodily language within the larger context of the contemporary cultural discourse around 1940. To see the use of language of life and body, I will look into the literary circle’s overall response to the crack down of leftist writers, including so called “literary renaissance” (bungei fukkō) trend. While examining the language that represents the situation of the cultural production, I will also analyze the content and language of individual works, especially those by the "converts”. Another contemporary referential point will be the concept of body and spirit by Nishida Kitarō (1870 – 1945) and Kyoto School philosophers, which Hanada was reading when he was young. Through examining Hanada, I hope to shed light on the complex intersection of the language of body and life, and the cultural production in the early 1940s.
Shelby Oxenford, UC Berkeley
Disastrous Bodies: The Unmaking and Remaking of the Post-3.11 World in Kawakami Mieko’s “March Yarn”
In a darkened hotel room, in Kyōto Station at twilight, somewhere between wakefulness and sleep, a wife recounts to her husband the dream she just had:
“Our baby was born,” she said. “It was yarn.”
… “Even March was yarn,” she said eventually.
“March?”
“Yeah. March.”
“March was yarn?”
“That’s right,” she said. “In that world, even March was made of yarn.”
“I don’t think I get it,” I said after a while.
“What’s not to get?” she said.
This enigmatic dream of an unborn child, a world, and of time itself being made of yarn, forms the center of Kawakami Mieko’s short story about the March 11, 2011 triple disasters in northeastern Japan, “Sangatsu no keito" [“March Yarn”]. In this work, Kawakami renders the disasters’ catastrophic, violent forces of unmaking and remaking into a language of non-extremity, ambience and affect, in order to represent displacement and the experience of disaster from a distance. Her work depicts the body and the world as a coalescence of time, all of which are made of the same malleable materials. Through this, her work argues for the body as the site of apprehension and transmission of the triple disasters, knowledge of which can only belatedly and incompletely be understood.
Drawing from Lauren Berlant’s concept of the present moment as “impasse” (or “a stretch of time in which one moves around with a sense that the world is at once intensely present and enigmatic,” and understands “the ordinary” to be “a zone of convergence of many histories”), I argue Kawakami’s work demands we grapple with the tensions between the “nowhere/now here” sense of dislocation disaster brings (borrowing from film and media scholar Akira Lippit). Through the body at the borderland (kokkyō) between dream and life, in the old capital (kokyō) of Kyōto, Kawakami’s work argues for the readjustments needed and the recalibration of and to life that occur in the aftermath of disaster.
Shoan Yin Cheung, Cornell University
A Therapeutic for a New Millennium: The Birth Control Pill as “Medicine” in Contemporary Japan
While popular discourses in “Western” media have celebrated the birth control pill as a liberating technology that decouples sex from reproduction, hormonal contraceptives in contemporary Japan are considered an undesirable form of “medicine” that harms the body. Due to widespread fear of “side effects,” only 1.3% of Japanese women using birth control use the pill as a contraceptive. The pill, legalized in Japan in 1999 alongside Viagra and SSRI anti-depressants, is a “lifestyle drug” for a new millennium: women use it occasionally to “stop” a period to make work easier or leisure more pleasurable. The pill is a therapeutic to customize menstruation, biomedically enhancing the body’s flexibility and productivity in a post-bubble economy that has placed increasing demands on women’s labor. Examining how Japanese women use the pill to meet the demands of modern life reveals the pill’s promise to synchronize women’s bodies to the rhythms of global capitalist production and consumption operating against the logic of “culture,” which frames the pill as a harmful form of synthetic “medicine” that disrupts the body’s natural cycles. This paper extends upon Margaret Lock’s notion of “local biology” to elucidate the logics through which the pill as “medicine” is thought to compromise the health and “nature” of Japanese bodies. The pill’s classification as “medicine” acts as a moral discourse warning of an economy that calls upon its workers to act autonomously— a woman can “choose” to “stop” her period— to navigate the demands of a world which has lost stability, security, and support.
John Mark Wiginton University of Michigan
The Fire across the River: HIV/AIDS in Japan
The past decade has seen an increase in HIV/AIDS cases in Japan, with approximately 1,500 new cases per year since 2007, the highest rate Japan has seen. Most new diagnoses have been among men who have sex with men (MSM), these rates more than doubling since the early 2000s. AIDS cases have also been increasing, with 30% of newly diagnosed individuals having already advanced from HIV to AIDS. Given such trends, the prevalence rate among MSM could grow from 2.1% to 10.4% over the next 30 years. These increasing rates have made Japan an anomaly, as advances in biomedicine and other interventions have resulted in decreasing rates in other wealthy, industrialized nations, not to mention many developing ones. Japan’s value on socio-cultural homogeneity provides some insight into this anomaly, as this value has characterized society’s and the government’s response – or lack thereof – to HIV/AIDS and to PLWHA in Japan. HIV/AIDS has been recurrently relegated to a place ‘across the river’ from Japan and Japanese people – a place populated with minority bodies conceptualized as ‘foreign’ due to national origin, initially, and due to sexual behavior/orientation, currently. So-called ‘modern’ non-heteronormative identities and behaviors, plus the disease that has become associated with them, violate notions of morality and tradition and impede resistance to socio-cultural modernity, leaving MSM, HIV/AIDS, and PLWHA foreign and ignored. To honor the health and human rights of all identities, spur increases in equality and equity, and stop the spread of HIV/AIDS, such views must be identified, challenged, and changed.
Sara Klingenstein, Harvard University
One Time, One Meeting: The Transience of Gestures in Chanoyu and Zen
A chanoyu gathering consists of the highly formalized preparation and consumption of matcha and a meal. The gestures in chanoyu are the same basic gestures as occur in everyday life, wrought to a high level of precision and awareness: simply picking up an object, looking at it, putting it down; standing, walking, sitting - the atoms of our physical-temporal existence in the world. Chanoyu is frequently described as a Zen practice, and “tea, Zen - one flavor” (茶禅一味 ) is a common catchphrase, but the precise Zen-ness of chanoyu is difficult to ascertain. This paper attempts to locate the religiosity of chanoyu within the body, by reading the physicality of chanoyu as a bodily enactment or calling-forth of Zen principles. Through loose analogy with Bruno Latour’s religious speech-act, I argue that the intense formalization of these routine bodily gestures within chanoyu acts as a physical religious speech-act that repeatedly draws attention to the simplest facts of the body, wresting these closest gestures from invisibility and compelling them to be seen, calling the dynamism and impermanence of the body to be laid bare.The repetition of a gesture is always imperfect, inevitably marked with slippage that thereby betrays the impossibility of either perfect emulation or perfect repetition, laying bare the irrefutability of change and a palpability to the impermanence of the body. As such, the physical activity of chanoyu draws the practitioner close to the deep reality of impermanence, a central focus in Zen Buddhism.
Shoko Kikuta, Seijo University
Gender Roles and Responsibilities in Urban Festivals in Japan: A Case Study of Narita Gion
This presentation will explain the comparative roles of women and men in urban festivals in Japan (hereafter referred to as urban festivals). Specifically, we will use the Gion Festival in Narita, Chiba Prefecture, Japan, as our case study. In order to study the festival, I participated in it from 2012 to 2016 in the town of Nakanocho, a small town of 29 households where has been formed in the Edo period.
In many urban festivals, the primary participants are male, women tend to be marginalized. As such, there are few previous studies that focus on the role of women in this discipline. In this presentation I will use years of participant observations to make clear the difficult-to-visualize position of women in these male-centric organizations.
Furthermore, while it is often stated that the reason for marginalization of women in these festivals is the continued belief that they are “impure,” my research on Narita does not bear this out. Instead, I found that this marginalization is an extension of daily life, as well as the difference in bodily strength between the genders.
In research about urban festivals, thoughts about gender roles tend to be taken as based in rituality. However in this presentation we hope to shed some lights on the relationships between gender roles in festivals and sports, and how people live in a small traditional town.
Melissa Van Wyk, University of Michigan
The Curious Case of Sawamura Tanosuke III: Gender, Disability, and Performance in Bakumatsu Japan
In 1862, the twenty-one year old star onnagata Sawamura Tanosuke III fell on stage and sustained injuries that would later lead to gangrene and eventual amputation. Despite losing both legs and a hand, the female role specialist renowned for his beauty would return to the stage and captivate audiences with the emotional weight of his performances and his “doll-like” or “puppet-like” appearance on stage. In this paper, I will draw on contemporary sources to examine how descriptions of Tanosuke’s performances narrativized his “disability (fujiyū na karada)” and its impact on his performance in relationship to emerging discourses about onnagata aesthetics, gender, and disability in Bakumatsu and early Meiji Japan.
In the past decade, there has been new attention to the relationship between disability and performance, but this scholarship has been predominantly focused on western examples. My aim is, by examining a particular example of how performance and disability were intertwined in a very different historical and cultural context, to explore how an attention to disability can give new purchase on the history of drama in nineteenth-century Japan. I also hope to complicate and question assumptions that have grounded this literature in the examples of Europe and America, contributing to a wider and ongoing examination of culturally-constructed and shifting definitions of disability.
Treating the Enemy, Healing the Scars: Japanese Medical Conscripts of the Chinese People's Liberation Army, 1945-1958
Following the surrender of the Japanese imperial army in 1945, over six million Japanese individuals - of whom over 50% were non-military - found themselves in the abruptly contracting boundaries of Japan's former colonies. The majority were given the ability to return home; however, amidst the repatriations, as many as 25,000 Japanese individuals were forcibly conscripted into the New Fourth Army and the Eighth Route Army, Chinese communist military forces that became the People's Liberation Army (PLA). Some of these Japanese members of the PLA were captured soldiers of the Imperial army, exposed to an ideological conversion programme devised by Nosaka Sanzo and Comintern agents in Yan'an, and sanctioned by Mao and the communist high command. Others were civilians, caught in the crossfire of the Sino-Japanese and Chinese civil war, informally absorbed by the splinter units of the Eigth Route Army tasked with the consolidation of Manchurian territory after Japan's surrender.
One of the principal purposes of the 'guerrilla conscription' of Japanese civilians was in order to provide medical personnel to support the 8RA's ongoing engagement with the nationalist armies. Large numbers of Japanese civilians - some with medical training, but the majority not - were press-ganged into service, providing medical care and nursing for soldiers of the Chinese Communist armies. In my talk, I will describe the general outline of this process and the underlying ideological ramifications that it had for the meaning of Japanese bodies and their incorporation - both physical and discursive - into the sacrosanct corpus of the PLA. I will then provide the details of one woman's experience as a conscripted nurse, and one man's experience as a conscripted surgeon. The latter component of my talk will be based on interviews conducted in person.
Ariko Shari Ikehara, UC Berkeley
Okinawa’s America: Mixed Life and Language
In my work, I pursue a translational possibility of a third language as a decolonial passage that functions as a comparative, transnational, and translational methodology. I seek to bring Asia-Pacific into the folds of western academic discourse on race, empire, and language through the mixed space where Okinawa and America intersect at the crossroad of people and power.
During the U.S. military occupation of Okinawa from 1944 to 1972, “the influence of the United States in the form of American culture is seen in Okinawa in its basic life culture, such as food, clothing, and shelter, in Okinawa after the war, and it still exists today in the citizen’s everyday lives as a part of postwar Okinawa’s cultural formation” (Iguchi 2008). A former military town, Koza, represented this mixed life, and produced a “peculiar atmosphere” that affects the racial episteme of the people as belonging to a “third race,” “neither belong to Japan nor American” (Iguchi). In such a precarious location of Koza in between place, “race,” and space, I explore “Okinawa’s America,” a mixed life that develops from the U.S. military occupation and presence. Moreover, I resituate Asian language in context of this history as a translational tool that facilitates a linguistic flow between Okinawan, Japanese, and English whereby producing an inter-lingual knowledge at the U.S.-Asia border that pushes the boundaries of nation, history, and culture. I ask, can Okinawan and Japanese become palpable and equal to English in the productions of knowledge?
Natalia Duong, UC Berkeley
Exposing Agent Orange: Việt, Đức, and Transnational Repair
Việt and Đức Nguyen were born March 6, 1980 in the Kon Tum province of the central highlands in Vietnam: a region later found to be heavily sprayed by Agent Orange. Like others who continue to experience the effects of environmental warfare, their conjoined bodies became the site where environmental, medical, and national conflicts were staged. As conjoined twins, Việt and Đức represented hope for national unity following the war. Their anatomy paired with what was described as their “dazzling eyes” and “innocent smiles” performed the possibility of peace while also being an embodied reminder of the trauma of chemical warfare. However, transnationally, Việt and Đức represented the potential for reparation between countries.
Việt and Đức were sponsored by several Japanese individuals who came together to create The Group Hoping for Việt and Đức’s Development, a group that sponsored medical support for the twins, citing empathy for the suffering caused by chemical warfare waged by Japan and Vietnam’s “shared enemy,” the United States. In recent years, environmental and cultural researchers have compared the effects of the atomic bombs in Nagasaki and Hiroshima, and the events of 3-11 in Fukushima to the ongoing environmental effects of Agent Orange in Vietnam. This paper thus examines Japanese involvement in the rehabilitation of Việt and Đức within the larger discourse about disability and embodied trauma in the wake of environmental contamination. I investigate the role of embodied transfer in nation-building: which bodies are recruited to represent a thriving national body politic and which bodies speak and act otherwise?
Kerry Shannon, UC Berkeley
Hygiene for the Masses: Public Health and Local Praxis in Meiji Japan
At the end of the nineteenth century, the site and practice of healing and health in Japan underwent paradigmatic shifts from focus on the village and family to a national policy of remaking Japanese bodies into civilized and disciplined subjects. Part of this project involved the dissemination of new modes of public health through locally-based hygiene associations (eisei kumiai), which played a critical role in distributing and publicizing government dictates on modern notions of cleanliness, sanitation and disease prevention.
This paper examines the local hygiene association’s crucial task in implementing a nationwide public health system in Meiji Japan. I argue that the local hygiene association functioned as an important medium that helped shape individual Japanese bodies and the larger Japanese body politic by facilitating the extension of regulatory and disciplinary power over extant networks of health and healing. Yet while many studies view the late-nineteenth century transition in health praxis as part of an abrupt shift to a complete system of “hygienic modernity,” this paper also demonstrates how local hygiene associations interpreted and manipulated new notions of public health for their own ends, using the state’s discourses of cleanliness in order to mete out private political objectives. By examining the local hygiene association not merely as the functionary of a totalizing Meiji health regime, but rather as a contested avenue for adjudicating notions of health and the body, this paper thus provides a more variegated account of hygienic policy and practice in the making of modern Japan.
Sayaka Mihara, Keio University
Vitalism and Technology for Babies in Modernizing Japan
Therapeutics for sick infants in early-twentieth-century Japan revolved around the concept of vital force (sei-ryoku), which provided a functionalist explanation to generalized weakness of preterm infants as a newly discovered target of pediatrics and obstetrics. By focusing on vitalism in neonatal medicine, this paper aims to demonstrate how reciprocal interplay between medical concepts and technologies shaped therapeutics for vulnerable bodies of infants in a modernizing society. In the early 1900s, pediatricians at elite hospitals started to utilize imported infant incubators to preserve vital force of preterm infants. Then, since the 1920s upon the rise of large-scale maternity institutions according to the imperialistic nation’s public health agenda, obstetrician-gynecologists took over the leadership of neonatal medicine and exploited female sex hormone products as potent stimuli of vital force of preterm infants. However, institutionalization of neonatal medicine was still a limited phenomenon. A detailed patient survey conducted in an urban district of Tokyo in the late 1930s indicated that the majority of deliveries and perinatal care still took place at home, attended by midwives working closely with local obstetrician-gynecologists. Home care of preterm infants remained conservative, relying on household equipment to replace incubators while lacking pharmacological stimulation therapies. I hope the reassessment of technological and social environment for preterm infants in the early twentieth century Japan will provide refreshed insights on conception and clinical management of debilitated bodies of newborn babies.
Lani Alden, University of Colorado at Boulder
Building Modern Women: Fukuzawa Yukichi's Dialogues with Naturalism and Gender Equality
In the final years of the nineteenth century and his life, Fukuzawa Yukichi, possibly Japan's first feminist, put pen to paper on two works which would begin serialization on April 1st in the Jiji Shimpō. The first of which, A Critique of The Greater Learning for Women, sought to criticize and disassemble the popular women's pedagogical text The Greater Learning for Women. The second, A New Greater Learning for Women, sought not only to tear the Greater Learning down, but also to replace it, thereby aiming to supplant one of the dominant pedagogical texts of his era with his own visions for women and education. The reaction was immediate and severe. Almost overnight, newspapers and magazines of all sizes began to pick up discussions that Fukuzawa began.
In these serialized works on women, Fukuzawa argues using the language of sexologists and naturalist proponents advocating for an essentialist, inferior, though necessary, female role. However, he does so for the stated purpose of women's liberation. Yet, as he couches his argument primarily in the “natural,” while he attacks The Greater Learning, he ends up modernizing many of its problems. This paper will inspect the ways in which Fukuzawa uses dual discourses of liberation and essentialism in the realms of gender performance and sexual roles in order to construct liberation strictly on terms of the Japanese nation-state and within the context of modernist scientific movements.
Lisa Reade, UC Berkeley
The Ephemerality of the Dialectic: Lafcadio Hearn's Kokoro as Transnational Love Story
This paper, extracted from my dissertation, examines a collection of ethnographic writings on Japan called Kokoro: Hints and Echoes of Japanese Inner Life (1895) by the Victorian writer and essayist Lafcadio Hearn. In keeping with the theme of embodied identities and temporality, I explore the implications of Hearn's obsession with the "spectral" and the "ghostly" throughout these essays by drawing on Jacques Derrida's concept of temporal disjunction in Specters of Marx. Hearn focuses at length in his essays on Japanese ancestor worship, and the relations between the living and the dead that he observes in Japanese customs, rituals, and folklore. Although many Westerners had seen the persistence of ancestor worship in late 19th century Japanese culture as an anachronistic residue of pre-modernity amid its otherwise rapid scientific and military progress, Hearn saw no contradiction in this. Instead, he believed that "the doctrines of Shinto...offer some very striking analogies with the scientific facts of heredity," since in both "the world of the living is directly governed by the world of the dead," and he strived to reconcile his readings of 19th century evolutionary science with his observations of Japanese kinship relations. I argue that Hearn's essays on Japanese kinship can be read as a critique of Western modernity's obsession with linear temporality, and that the constant presence of the dead amid the living that Hearn describes as central to Japanese life constitutes an alternative mode of inhabiting modern temporality.
Kanako Shimizu, Jichi Medical University
Pathological Bereavement in Japan
Bereavement is a sorrowful and traumatic experience that can affect anyone. Human beings require mourning to release their sorrow. Mourning includes the symbolization of the dead by holding a funeral and building a tomb. In Japan, the dead are mourned by the family and community members as “mono no aware,” which refers to sadness.
Currently, Japan is an ageing society, the function and support offered by the community is weakening, and there is an increased nuclearization of the family. Therefore, bereavement occurring in old age may intensify loneliness more than it did in the past.
A new pathological bereavement diagnosis was proposed in clinical psychiatry in 2013. It is called “complicated grief,” and is characterized by an intense yearning for the deceased that continues for at least 1 year. The incidence rate of complicated grief is 10% in the USA. In Japan, although there are many people suffering with persistent pathological bereavement, the rate of complicated grief is less than a quarter of that of the USA. The reasons why are unknown.
Japanese culture still regards the avoidance of openly sharing anguish with others as a virtue. This makes it difficult to express sadness of loss to others clearly. Instead, individuals express their sorrow through physical symptoms and visit a physician to relieve their symptoms. This too, may be considered a symbolization of the dead.
I will present pathological bereavement in Japan, by discussing clinical cases.
Mariko Takano, UCLA
Anti-life Discourse by Hanada Kiyoteru
This paper analyzes the “anti-life” discourse by a literary critic Hanada Kiyoteru (1909 – 1974) . In his essays written during early 1940s, Hanada repeatedly advocates death as the embryo of the new life, and claims the importance of the organizing process of death to rebirth while dismissing the glorification of life. My first goal is to clarify what Hanada meant by this paradoxical theory. Just to be sure, Hanada was not a ultra-nationalist that praised the death under the war. He was rather seeking for a possible resistance after the leftist movement was almost completely smashed. That said, my second aim is to locate Hanada’s “anti-life” bodily language within the larger context of the contemporary cultural discourse around 1940. To see the use of language of life and body, I will look into the literary circle’s overall response to the crack down of leftist writers, including so called “literary renaissance” (bungei fukkō) trend. While examining the language that represents the situation of the cultural production, I will also analyze the content and language of individual works, especially those by the "converts”. Another contemporary referential point will be the concept of body and spirit by Nishida Kitarō (1870 – 1945) and Kyoto School philosophers, which Hanada was reading when he was young. Through examining Hanada, I hope to shed light on the complex intersection of the language of body and life, and the cultural production in the early 1940s.
Shelby Oxenford, UC Berkeley
Disastrous Bodies: The Unmaking and Remaking of the Post-3.11 World in Kawakami Mieko’s “March Yarn”
In a darkened hotel room, in Kyōto Station at twilight, somewhere between wakefulness and sleep, a wife recounts to her husband the dream she just had:
“Our baby was born,” she said. “It was yarn.”
… “Even March was yarn,” she said eventually.
“March?”
“Yeah. March.”
“March was yarn?”
“That’s right,” she said. “In that world, even March was made of yarn.”
“I don’t think I get it,” I said after a while.
“What’s not to get?” she said.
This enigmatic dream of an unborn child, a world, and of time itself being made of yarn, forms the center of Kawakami Mieko’s short story about the March 11, 2011 triple disasters in northeastern Japan, “Sangatsu no keito" [“March Yarn”]. In this work, Kawakami renders the disasters’ catastrophic, violent forces of unmaking and remaking into a language of non-extremity, ambience and affect, in order to represent displacement and the experience of disaster from a distance. Her work depicts the body and the world as a coalescence of time, all of which are made of the same malleable materials. Through this, her work argues for the body as the site of apprehension and transmission of the triple disasters, knowledge of which can only belatedly and incompletely be understood.
Drawing from Lauren Berlant’s concept of the present moment as “impasse” (or “a stretch of time in which one moves around with a sense that the world is at once intensely present and enigmatic,” and understands “the ordinary” to be “a zone of convergence of many histories”), I argue Kawakami’s work demands we grapple with the tensions between the “nowhere/now here” sense of dislocation disaster brings (borrowing from film and media scholar Akira Lippit). Through the body at the borderland (kokkyō) between dream and life, in the old capital (kokyō) of Kyōto, Kawakami’s work argues for the readjustments needed and the recalibration of and to life that occur in the aftermath of disaster.
Shoan Yin Cheung, Cornell University
A Therapeutic for a New Millennium: The Birth Control Pill as “Medicine” in Contemporary Japan
While popular discourses in “Western” media have celebrated the birth control pill as a liberating technology that decouples sex from reproduction, hormonal contraceptives in contemporary Japan are considered an undesirable form of “medicine” that harms the body. Due to widespread fear of “side effects,” only 1.3% of Japanese women using birth control use the pill as a contraceptive. The pill, legalized in Japan in 1999 alongside Viagra and SSRI anti-depressants, is a “lifestyle drug” for a new millennium: women use it occasionally to “stop” a period to make work easier or leisure more pleasurable. The pill is a therapeutic to customize menstruation, biomedically enhancing the body’s flexibility and productivity in a post-bubble economy that has placed increasing demands on women’s labor. Examining how Japanese women use the pill to meet the demands of modern life reveals the pill’s promise to synchronize women’s bodies to the rhythms of global capitalist production and consumption operating against the logic of “culture,” which frames the pill as a harmful form of synthetic “medicine” that disrupts the body’s natural cycles. This paper extends upon Margaret Lock’s notion of “local biology” to elucidate the logics through which the pill as “medicine” is thought to compromise the health and “nature” of Japanese bodies. The pill’s classification as “medicine” acts as a moral discourse warning of an economy that calls upon its workers to act autonomously— a woman can “choose” to “stop” her period— to navigate the demands of a world which has lost stability, security, and support.
John Mark Wiginton University of Michigan
The Fire across the River: HIV/AIDS in Japan
The past decade has seen an increase in HIV/AIDS cases in Japan, with approximately 1,500 new cases per year since 2007, the highest rate Japan has seen. Most new diagnoses have been among men who have sex with men (MSM), these rates more than doubling since the early 2000s. AIDS cases have also been increasing, with 30% of newly diagnosed individuals having already advanced from HIV to AIDS. Given such trends, the prevalence rate among MSM could grow from 2.1% to 10.4% over the next 30 years. These increasing rates have made Japan an anomaly, as advances in biomedicine and other interventions have resulted in decreasing rates in other wealthy, industrialized nations, not to mention many developing ones. Japan’s value on socio-cultural homogeneity provides some insight into this anomaly, as this value has characterized society’s and the government’s response – or lack thereof – to HIV/AIDS and to PLWHA in Japan. HIV/AIDS has been recurrently relegated to a place ‘across the river’ from Japan and Japanese people – a place populated with minority bodies conceptualized as ‘foreign’ due to national origin, initially, and due to sexual behavior/orientation, currently. So-called ‘modern’ non-heteronormative identities and behaviors, plus the disease that has become associated with them, violate notions of morality and tradition and impede resistance to socio-cultural modernity, leaving MSM, HIV/AIDS, and PLWHA foreign and ignored. To honor the health and human rights of all identities, spur increases in equality and equity, and stop the spread of HIV/AIDS, such views must be identified, challenged, and changed.
Sara Klingenstein, Harvard University
One Time, One Meeting: The Transience of Gestures in Chanoyu and Zen
A chanoyu gathering consists of the highly formalized preparation and consumption of matcha and a meal. The gestures in chanoyu are the same basic gestures as occur in everyday life, wrought to a high level of precision and awareness: simply picking up an object, looking at it, putting it down; standing, walking, sitting - the atoms of our physical-temporal existence in the world. Chanoyu is frequently described as a Zen practice, and “tea, Zen - one flavor” (茶禅一味 ) is a common catchphrase, but the precise Zen-ness of chanoyu is difficult to ascertain. This paper attempts to locate the religiosity of chanoyu within the body, by reading the physicality of chanoyu as a bodily enactment or calling-forth of Zen principles. Through loose analogy with Bruno Latour’s religious speech-act, I argue that the intense formalization of these routine bodily gestures within chanoyu acts as a physical religious speech-act that repeatedly draws attention to the simplest facts of the body, wresting these closest gestures from invisibility and compelling them to be seen, calling the dynamism and impermanence of the body to be laid bare.The repetition of a gesture is always imperfect, inevitably marked with slippage that thereby betrays the impossibility of either perfect emulation or perfect repetition, laying bare the irrefutability of change and a palpability to the impermanence of the body. As such, the physical activity of chanoyu draws the practitioner close to the deep reality of impermanence, a central focus in Zen Buddhism.
Shoko Kikuta, Seijo University
Gender Roles and Responsibilities in Urban Festivals in Japan: A Case Study of Narita Gion
This presentation will explain the comparative roles of women and men in urban festivals in Japan (hereafter referred to as urban festivals). Specifically, we will use the Gion Festival in Narita, Chiba Prefecture, Japan, as our case study. In order to study the festival, I participated in it from 2012 to 2016 in the town of Nakanocho, a small town of 29 households where has been formed in the Edo period.
In many urban festivals, the primary participants are male, women tend to be marginalized. As such, there are few previous studies that focus on the role of women in this discipline. In this presentation I will use years of participant observations to make clear the difficult-to-visualize position of women in these male-centric organizations.
Furthermore, while it is often stated that the reason for marginalization of women in these festivals is the continued belief that they are “impure,” my research on Narita does not bear this out. Instead, I found that this marginalization is an extension of daily life, as well as the difference in bodily strength between the genders.
In research about urban festivals, thoughts about gender roles tend to be taken as based in rituality. However in this presentation we hope to shed some lights on the relationships between gender roles in festivals and sports, and how people live in a small traditional town.
Melissa Van Wyk, University of Michigan
The Curious Case of Sawamura Tanosuke III: Gender, Disability, and Performance in Bakumatsu Japan
In 1862, the twenty-one year old star onnagata Sawamura Tanosuke III fell on stage and sustained injuries that would later lead to gangrene and eventual amputation. Despite losing both legs and a hand, the female role specialist renowned for his beauty would return to the stage and captivate audiences with the emotional weight of his performances and his “doll-like” or “puppet-like” appearance on stage. In this paper, I will draw on contemporary sources to examine how descriptions of Tanosuke’s performances narrativized his “disability (fujiyū na karada)” and its impact on his performance in relationship to emerging discourses about onnagata aesthetics, gender, and disability in Bakumatsu and early Meiji Japan.
In the past decade, there has been new attention to the relationship between disability and performance, but this scholarship has been predominantly focused on western examples. My aim is, by examining a particular example of how performance and disability were intertwined in a very different historical and cultural context, to explore how an attention to disability can give new purchase on the history of drama in nineteenth-century Japan. I also hope to complicate and question assumptions that have grounded this literature in the examples of Europe and America, contributing to a wider and ongoing examination of culturally-constructed and shifting definitions of disability.