2-3 pages essay East Asia history and gender
Chapter Title: The Mythos of Masculinization: Narratives of Heroism and Historical Identity
Book Title: Gender and Nation in Meiji Japan Book Subtitle: Modernity, Loss, and the Doing of History Book Author(s): Jason G. Karlin Published by: University of Hawai'i Press. (2014) Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt13x1k9w.7
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cha p ter 2
The Mythos of Masculinization Narratives of Heroism and Historical Identity
In imitating the exemplary acts of a god or of a mythic hero, or simply
by recounting their adventures, the man of an archaic society detaches
himself from profane time and magically re-enters the Great Time, the
sacred time.
—mIrcEa ElIadE, Myths, Dreams and Mysteries (1967)
Amid the modernization of Japan from the late nineteenth century, hero worship became an important ideological tool for molding adolescent boys into men who could serve the Japanese empire. In history, the figure of the hero is a cultural construct of idealized masculinity that arises within the context of a struggle over the gendered order. Since the mean- ing of gender is, as Judith Butler argues, always deferred as a kind of imi- tation for which there is no original, the maintenance of masculine values requires the relentless production of ideologies of gender to reinforce the subordination of women and the dominant position of men.1 In many cul- tures, the ideology of “masculine hegemony” finds cultural expression in the figure of the hero, whose exemplary masculinity compels imitation.2 Since, as Butler notes, all gendering is a kind of imitation and impersona- tion that constitutes the performance or production of the self,3 heroes are a significant dimension of the ideological construction of gender ideals. Because identification and desire shape gender presentation, heroes form the structure of impersonation by which gender becomes naturalized. Ac- cordingly, the hero plays an important role in the process of identification among adolescent males since the transition to manhood is predicated upon conformity to normative definitions of gender, which heroes are deemed to exemplify.
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In this chapter, I argue that heroes are one kind of transitional object that is important in the development of identity. Deriving from object rela- tions theory, scholars have begun to examine how our identities are formed out of the relations of the self to external others or objects.4 Throughout our lives, cultural artifacts serve as important transitional ob- jects in an exchange between our inner and outer self. Through a process of object splitting (introjection and projection), the self takes in aspects of others while expelling or projecting out elements of the internal self. On the one hand, this negotiation involves a process of identificatory mime- tism, whereby imitation or modeling creates the effect of an idealized self/ other.5 On the other hand, this same negotiation also involves the violent process of the renunciation of some aspect of the internal self. Through this exchange, the identification with heroes constructs gender identity since the impersonation of the hero shapes one’s gender presentation.6
The purpose for focusing on heroes as objects in adolescence is to better understand gender identity formation. As Michael Messner affirms, “mas- culine identity is neither fully ‘formed’ by the social context, nor is it ‘caused’ by some internal dynamic put into place during infancy. Instead it is shaped and constructed through the interaction between the internal and the social.”7 On the one hand, the essentialism of psychoanalytic inter pre- tations risks reducing issues of development to the problem of the resolu- tion of the Oedipus complex. According to this view, the threat of castra- tion drives the male child away from his dependence on the mother. Such interpretations suggest a universal dimension to the experience of adoles- cence, which fails to problematize cultural differences and the social and historical context. On the other hand, constructivist views of identity, which rely on cultural determinist explanations, assume the direct inter- nalization of the social and cultural world into psychic reality. In the end, culture shapes identity, but it is mediated through a constellation of com- plex emotions and psychological processes.8
I argue that the ideological effect of heroes in shaping gender identity can only be understood in relationship to narrativity since the hero is a product of narrative, and it is only to the extent that human actions and events are articulated in a narrative mode that the heroic finds expression. In other words, only through narrativization is the emptiness of meaning of events in history replaced by a story. The heterogeneous elements of human existence are drawn together and configured into a narrative ex- pressive of the mythic and heroic qualities that resonate with moral mean-
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ing and ideological function in a particular historical and cultural context. As a product of discourse, heroes then are a collective construction of the historical imagination. Though constrained by reality, the “hero” is a nar- rative device for representing events in an imaginary way.
This chapter focuses on the discourse of heroes in Meiji Japan through its principal forms of representation: history and fiction. By examining the narratives of historical biographies and adventure novels during the Meiji period, I will demonstrate how heroes have shaped gender identity in Japan. For adolescent males, images of powerful heroes, like stars or celebrities today, informed gender presentation and served as role models for imitation. As narratives that extolled masculinization as a rejection of femininity, these texts celebrated virility while equating it with national- ism and imperialism. Finally, this chapter will reveal that narratives of heroism in modern Japan have often invoked a popular nationalism that celebrated defiance of state authority.
thE hEro aS thE agENt of ordEr
Hero worship (eiyūron) in Japan was promoted by numerous intellectuals and middle-class reformers from the late Meiji period as a response to the imagined problem of Japanese youth. Unlike the youth of an earlier gen- eration who embraced progressive ideas, the youth of Japan were becom- ing increasingly disillusioned and apolitical and by the late Meiji period many were disaffected with politics. Testimony to this end is abundant in the memoirs and recollections of many, who have observed that the end of the Meiji era brought about a shift in political consciousness. For ex- ample, the philosopher Miki Kiyoshi (1897–1945) recalls from his youth that “during the great event of the First World War, we were entirely disin- terested in politics. In time, we were, on the contrary, consumed with the thought of ‘cultivation.’ It was a feeling of contempt for politics and a re- vering of culture (bunka).”9 As a rejection of the spirit of civilization exem- plified by the enlightenment thought of Fukuzawa Yukichi, “cultivation” emphasized literature and philosophy. This turning away from politics toward culture was an expression of the disillusion that many felt about party politics, especially the elitist domination of politics by the clan-faction cliques (hanbatsu) and business interests.
The chronicling of the lives of public figures in Japan began first among several historians and journalists who wrote “character criticism” ( jin-
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butsu hyōron) for newspapers like Tokutomi Sohō’s Kokumin no tomo or Kuga Katsunan’s Nihon. Around the turn of the century, character criti- cism became a regular feature in newspapers and magazines. Character criticism occupied a tenuous position between history and journalism. The popularity of these essays derived from their sometimes sensational- istic exposés of the personal lives of public figures. Mostly, people read character criticism to learn about the social background and native place identity of government officials, since patronage and pedigree were im- portant to understanding the dynamics of Japanese politics. The practice was not without its own critics. Some argued that these essays amounted to little more than “housewives’ gossip” (idobashi kaigi). As one critic de- scribed it, “they take only what information they need and arrange it into a convenient interpretation in order to condemn or praise as they see fit. . . . Their methods are shamelessly reckless and unruly.”10 Nonetheless, these essays were extremely popular with readers.
Whereas Tokutomi and Kuga saw character criticism as a device for at- tacking hanbatsu (clan-faction) politics, Toyabe Shuntei (1865–1908) devel- oped character criticism as a way of venerating heroes and praising great men. Toyabe’s prominence as the foremost character critic of his time coincided with rising popular interest in the military leaders of the Sino- Japanese War (1894–1895). As a youth, Toyabe enjoyed reading history, biog- raphies, and romantic legends, and it is these works that most shaped his writing style. He wrote character critiques of politicians, diplomats, educa- tors, literary figures, and military officials for several magazines, includ- ing the popular magazine Taiyō. Toyabe saw himself as an observer of human nature in the tradition of the British historian Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881).
Like Toyabe, the journalist and historian Yamaji Aizan (1864–1917) pro- moted the worship of heroes as essential for the initiation of boys into men. In particular, Yamaji wrote of the importance of heroes to the mis- sion of modernizing Japan. As a member of Tokutomi Sohō’s publishing group known as the Min’yūsha, Yamaji viewed hero worship as a means of encouraging Japanese youth to embrace the Min’yūsha’s definition of spir- itual and moral improvement through self-sacrifice and discipline.11 “Great men” from history needed to be extolled and exhorted as exemplars of the liberal belief in human agency that was vital to the process of build- ing a strong nation. Consequently, the discourse on heroes in Meiji Japan was closely tied to the nation.
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The historian Oka Toshirō, who has written extensively on Yamaji, em- phasizes the importance of Yamaji’s personal history in the development of his ideas. Yamaji was the son of a former bakufu retainer (kyūshin) whose family was nearly impoverished as a result of the Restoration. His father fought with the Shōgitai and then fled to Hakodate along with Eno- moto Takeaki. After the surrender at Goryūkaku, his father’s whereabouts were unknown, and his family feared the worst. Unaware that the impe- rial army had imprisoned his father, Yamaji and his mother relocated from Tokyo to Shizuoka along with many other displaced former bakufu retainers. The harsh conditions of the loss of his privileged status forced Yamaji to drop out of elementary school to support his family. He taught himself to read and eventually began learning English. In part, as a way of improving his English, he converted to Christianity. He came to Tokyo in 1889 to formally study English, but later returned to preach the gospel in Shizuoka. Around this time, he began contributing articles on Chris- tian themes to journals such as Jogaku zasshi. He returned to Tokyo again in 1891 to serve as the editor of a Methodist newsletter. For Oka, Yamaji’s status as the son of a former samurai, especially as a direct retainer of the shōgun, shaped his identity as a warrior who valued the spirit of freedom, independence, and resistance.12 Moreover, Oka states that Yamaji’s belief in Christianity contributed to his conviction that there exists a close rela- tionship between compassion in the community of the church and his communal view of the nation.13
Populism (heiminshugi), which was common to many Min’yūsha writ- ers, is reflected in Yamaji’s concept of history. He, like other popular historians, rejected the approach of official historians such as Shigeno Yasutsugu (1827–1910) and Kume Kunitake (1839–1931), who indulged in paleography at the expense of understanding the lives of the people or changes in society.14 Consequently, Yamaji’s writings seek to invest his- torical agency in the people as a way of critiquing the state’s “top-down” nation-state building. Yamaji’s life work, which remained uncompleted at his death, was a work titled Nihon jinmin-shi (A History of the Japanese People). Yamaji had long admired Sohō’s populist convictions. After first meeting in 1889, Tokutomi had encouraged Yamaji not to give up writing. In 1892, he joined Tokutomi Sohō’s Min’yūsha and began to publish arti- cles on history and literature in Kokumin no tomo and Kokumin shinbun. After leaving the Min’yūsha in 1897, Yamaji struck out on his own in the publishing world. Throughout, he wrote numerous articles and editorials
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and traveled around Nagano Prefecture giving speeches. His belief in the importance of people in history made him an important advocate of popu- lar heroes in Japanese history.
When he eventually returned to Tokyo in 1904, he founded the journal Dokuritsu hyōron, which was briefly renamed Nichiro sensō jikki during the period of the Russo-Japanese War in 1904–1905. By this time, Yamaji had become a staunch advocate of Japanese imperialism, believing that the world had fundamentally changed in such a way that the existence of the nation required a more “offensive bearing” (shingekiteki taido). In a series of articles examining the coming new century that appeared in the news- paper Shinano mainichi in January 1901, Yamaji wrote: “Many of the politi- cians in Western countries today have become devotees to imperialism. They think of nothing but asserting the rights of their own nation among the great powers. Knowing this, the twentieth century will be the age of patriotism (aikokushugi). The heroes of tomorrow will all need to give their lives for their country.”15
Yamaji’s belief in the importance of heroes to the civilizing process as well as the nation-building process was shaped by the ideas of the Victo- rian-era essayist and historian Thomas Carlyle. As Sakamoto Takao notes, “The concept of heroes . . . was the central theme of Aizan’s historical methodology and the defining characteristic running throughout his thought.”16 He had first learned of the concept of heroes from his reading of Carlyle’s On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History (1841) dur- ing his time as a Christian preacher living in Shizuoka.17 Carlyle’s book was first published in Japanese translation in 1898.18 As a critic of the im- personal economic forces and abstract ideas of modern society that were undermining communal values, Carlyle expressed the need for dynamic heroes to harness and to direct the spiritual energy of society.19 In Carlyle’s writings about heroes, he emphasizes that the knowledge of the actions and achievements of great men of the past inspires the present and awak- ens man’s inherent heroic nature. According to Hayden White, romanti- cist historical writers, like Carlyle, “repudiated all formal systems of expla- nation and tried to gain an explanatory effect by utilizing the Metaphorical mode to describe the historical field and the mythos of Romance to repre- sent its process.”20 The “Metaphorical mode” represented a “way of per- mitting the historian actually to identify with, resurrect, and relive the life of the past in its totality.”21 For Carlyle, the governing metaphor of “chaos” described the historical field as a disarray of innumerable elements that
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could not be tamed by causal historical explanation. Yet the chaotic dis- sonance of historical time must somehow be made uniform. Carlyle re- solved the paradox of this dissonance by rejecting “any effort to find the meaning of human life outside humanity itself.”22 Into this metaphor of chaos, Carlyle inserted the individual hero from the mythos of Romance as the agent of order who shapes history by imposing his own free will. In this way, the hero configures the narrative and “puts consonance where there was only dissonance . . . gives form to what is unformed.”23 The em- plotment of history in this mode is thus a “paean in honor of the hero” and not a “hymn of praise to ‘history-in-general.’ ”24
As a result, the hero in historical writing is an agent of order who im- poses organizational structure and meaning on the text. Heroes in history then are less a product of actual events than the narrating of those events into a form that conveys meaning. The mimetic representation and orga- nization of past events into a narrative, which is the writing of history, is a process of imposing meaning on the past. In Carlyle’s work, the writ- ing of history structured by heroes affected a literary transference of Ro- manticist categories of emplotment into the field of historical narrative. As a historical approach that emphasized human agency, it shared a convic- tion in the free will of man to determine his own destiny. Unlike historical approaches rooted exclusively in a social scientific understanding of the social and economic constraints on human action, Carlyle’s historical methodology invoked a narrative of nostalgia for the past represented by men of bold action. This idealism in Carlyle’s thought appealed to Yamaji’s own belief in the need to inspire spiritual and moral action to reform Japa- nese youth and to build a strong nation.
As in the writings of Carlyle, Yamaji’s work erases women from history. This erasure is totalizing in its occlusion of the female from the historical narrative, including the near absence of the role of women as mothers or wives in the lives of its male protagonist. Agency and subjectivity in his- tory are thus represented as an exclusively male domain, since feminin- ity is perceived as antithetical to the process of nation building.25 The cre- ation of this all-male community in the text emphasized an essential notion in Victorian discourse on masculinity: “It is when men come to- gether to form communities that the nation becomes powerfully virile. It is when men become atomized, distanced from one another, that the na- tion becomes effeminate.”26
In addition, the hero in such texts has a distrust of language that makes
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him inarticulate or reluctant to express or represent his position. This stoic sincerity as a defining characteristic of the hero led Carlyle to call his heroes in history the “great silent men.”27 In particular, Carlyle described Oliver Cromwell as an “inarticulate Prophet” as a way of contrasting the hero from the garrulous politicians of his day.28 Male virility is threatened by language as a system of representation not only because it is associated with the glib and crafty deceptions of politicians and women, but because all systems of representation—including language—signify something other than that which is present and authentic.29 The hero does not need to represent his position since “actions speak louder than words.” Conse- quently, the hero rejects the false appearances associated with the repre- sentational act. Carlyle contrasted this image of the hero with the figure of the dandy, who manipulated, fabricated, and embellished his image. In Carlyle’s conception of hero worship, the opposition between hero and dandy was one of the “founding symbolic oppositions of Victorian dis- course.”30 Consequently, Carlyle’s ideas of heroes and essential self hood came to exert influence on Japanese conceptions of masculinity and gave rise to the masculine ideal of stoic sincerity.
Like Carlyle, Yamaji often blurred the distance between history and fic- tion in his writing about heroes in Japanese history. During his life, Yamaji had planned to write a ten-volume series on Japanese history titled “Japa- nese Heroes of Their Time” ( Jidai daihyō Nihon eiyū-den), which would describe the distinct characteristics of various times in Japanese history through representative heroes who had shaped the course of history. Al- though the series was incomplete, Yamaji had completed volumes on Ashikaga Takauji (1338–1358), Minamoto Yoritomo (1147–1199), and Saigō Takamori (1827–1877).31 He also wrote historical biographies of Minamoto no Tametomo (1139–1170), Toyotomi Hideyoshi (1536–1598), Tokugawa Ieyasu (1542–1616), and Katsu Kaishū (1823–1899), among others.32 In these works, Yamaji emphasizes the role that each of these great men played in changing society. Many of Yamaji’s biographical works often focus on the social-historical conditions that shaped the lives of those he writes about. In this regard Yamaji often balanced his view of human agency with deference to the socioeconomic conditions that gave rise to “great men.”33 In these works, Yamaji would often criticize those forces of inertia that opposed progress. For Yamaji, the state’s hegemonic hold on society was achieved through its control over learning and the arts to maintain the status quo. The existing social order, however, could only be overthrown
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through the emergence of “men of talent” ( jinzai), who would usher in a new age. These were the heroes of history whose role was to defy conven- tion and spiritual domination through the cultivation of free will. While such conditions prevailed in the early Meiji period, Yamaji began to be- lieve that by the late Meiji period, the time of heroes had passed away. This realization spurred Yamaji to exhort Japanese youth in the late Meiji pe- riod to emulate and to learn from the heroes of Japanese history. Tokutomi Sohō echoed this point in 1908, lamenting that the worship of heroes had been replaced by a “narrow-minded” (henkyō-naru) tendency toward self- worship ( jiko sūhai-shugi).34
Yamaji argued that the materialism that had accompanied the progress achieved in the early Meiji period risked producing a youth that was merely materialistic and self-centered. In a speech in Shizuoka in 1890, Yamaji argued that “today if we are to validate, enliven, and perpetuate our civi- lization, along with the currently proceeding construction of a material enlightenment, we also must take steps toward the construction of a more noble spiritual enlightenment.” Yamaji felt that this could only be achieved by cultivating the character of Japanese youth.35 For Yamaji, one means of achieving this was by “making heroes from heroes” (eiyū o motte eiyū o tsukuru). The heroes in history could serve as sources of inspiration since “heroes are good models for other heroes.”36 According to Yamaji:
If such a nation or hero rises, one wave shall move ten thousand, one voice
will echo to the four corners, many little heroes shall link great and small,
and, in this way, they shall bring about a revolution, restore the health of
our country, become the salt of the earth and the light of the world.37
The image of heroism promoted by Yamaji aimed to cleanse society of the material decadence that he associated with the Meiji state and its poli- cies. A revolution from within would renew the nation, leading to national greatness. Heroism and moral character thus overlapped in Yamaji’s im- age of the ideal hero. He wrote:
The greatest nations perhaps follow the greatest heroes; and the smallest
nations perhaps believe in the smallest of heroes. The reason is no secret
that can necessarily only be understood from reading Carlyle. If a nation low-
ers its ideals, then its people too shall become lowly; but if a nation raises its
ideals, then they too shall rise. For that reason, we must revere heroes, and
those heroes must be the absolute purest.38
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In worshipping heroes, Yamaji emphasizes the importance of choosing “pure” heroes for achieving national greatness. The moral failings of the early Meiji period, represented by the material decadence and corruption of the Meiji leadership, made Japan into a “small nation.” In the rhetoric of hero worship, Yamaji articulated a critique of his times that was consistent with the Min’yūsha’s view of the moral failings of the Meiji state.
Similar to other Min’yūsha writers such as Tokutomi Sohō and Takeko- shi Yosaburō, Yamaji did not separate history from contemporary politics. As Yamaji noted, “In ancient history, I see new life. I know that history is the politics of the past and that politics is the history of the present. . . . I believe that the past is nothing more than a mirror of the present.”39 This presentist conception of history (shigaku) in early Meiji was strongly influ- enced by the work of Victorian-era historians such as John Robert Seeley (1834–1895) and Edward A. Freeman (1823–1892), who maintained that his- tory should be studied for the practical purpose of solving existing politi- cal questions. Consequently, Yamaji’s interest in the “heroes” of Japan’s past was a means of criticizing the spiritual weakness of contemporary political leaders and to exhort others, especially Japanese youth, to learn from the examples of past heroes.40 The lessons of the past were not related to specific policies or choices, but rather to the character of leadership. Therefore, writing about heroes in history was ultimately an allegory for present-day demands. In this regard, the narrating of the lives of heroes in Japanese history was never merely a mimetic process of representing the past through the lives of great men, but was an active means of fashioning the contemporary image of the hero in the likeness of the past.
Paul Ricoeur argues that narrative not only shapes representation, but also informs the temporal characteristics of the text.41 Since “there can be no thought about time without narrated time,” the configuration of the narrative shapes our understanding of time and history. I argue that the discursive production of hero narratives in Japanese history and literature produced a historical consciousness that sanctioned direct political action in the reader’s imagination. Since “the world unfolded by every narrative work is always a temporal world,”42 for those readers of hero fiction and historical biographies of great heroes in the past, the temporal distance that separated the past from the present is bridged. In this way, the inter- section of the world of the text and the world of the reader creates a “fusion of horizons” that permits the past to call into question the reality of present- day experience.43 Through a rupture in the linear representation of time
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whereby the age of heroes has retreated into the distant past, the present is perceived as a time of chaos, lacking in bold men who can shape the course of history. Between the horizon of expectations and the space of experi- ence emerges the initiative to create the “historical present” through an eternal return to the time of heroes. By making present that which is aligned with the past through narrative, the hero becomes the agent of action to shape the present in the image of the past. In other words, the historical agency of the hero awakens a sense of subjectivity in the reader that permits identification with the hero and his mission to bring order and direction to the world.
advENturE NovElS, hEroES, aNd ImpErIalISm
History shares with literature a narrative structure that shapes the social and political context of its production. The writing of history and the writ- ing of fiction are not disconnected processes reducible solely to authorial intent, but are socially situated within a broader field of textual produc- tion. As systems of representation structured by rhetorical tropes, litera- ture and history mutually inform and structure one another. In addition, they share common forms of emplotment and characterization that rein- force ways of narrating events and imagining the past. Just as history bor- rows from literature, fiction too imitates history. While history differs from fiction in its claims to constitute a true narrative, fictional narrative is always richer in its nostalgia for order because it is unconstrained by the “truth-claim” of historical narrative.4 4 Such texts then are not just passive reflections of the literary and historical imagination, but actively contrib- ute to the production of reality.
The reality of the hero is itself separate from the myth and is thus sub- ordinate to the hero narrative that resonates and conforms to the desires of its audience. The varieties of hero narratives are multitudinous and often culturally specific. Nonetheless, some hero narratives, such as the martyr or avenging hero, are common to many cultural milieux. For Yamaji, like Carlyle, the discourse on heroes was closely connected to the writing of his- tory, especially historical biographies about men who defined the course of history through political action. Yet as historical biographies grew in pop- ularity in Meiji Japan, they fostered the rise of adventure (bōken shosetsu) and hero novels (eiyū shosetsu) as popular genres of adolescent fiction. To- gether with a renewed interest in popular national heroes following the
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Russo-Japanese War, hero myths came to increasingly emphasize the na- tion as the medium of individuation.
The adventure novels of the late Meiji period by authors such as Oshi- kawa Shunrō (1876–1914) and Uka Senshi (1857–1930) drew from numer- ous sources, including the genre of political novels (seiji shōsetsu) that had thrived during the 1890s. In contrast to the mass-produced boys’ fic- tion of the later Taishō and early Shōwa periods, late Meiji-period adven- ture novels often express strong political opinions, especially criticism of the government. In this regard, adventure novels share the antigovernment sentiments of the Freedom and People’s Rights Movement (Jiyū Minken Undō, 1874–1889) that had inspired the writing of political novels (seiji shōsetsu). Like Yano Ryūkei’s political novel Ukishiro monogatari, which was serialized in Hōchi shinbun in 1890, and Suehiro Tetchō’s Seiji shōsetsu ōunabara, which was published in 1894, adventure novels also popular- ized notions of imperialist expansion toward the south (nanshinron). They share with these two earlier works common tropes, including the promo- tion of science and military technology as well as the mission of assisting anticolonial movements.
The popularity of adventure novels was initially promoted through their serialization in boys’ adventure magazines, which developed out of the popular enthusiasm for the Russo-Japanese War. The most influential adventure magazine of the late Meiji period was Bōken sekai (Adventure World), which appealed to male students and focused on the serialization of adventure and hero novels, reports on world exploration and travel, tales of bravery and valor, and sports news. Frustrated with the naturalist litera- ture movement and its rejection of idealism, its editor-in-chief, Oshikawa Shunrō—who as a student had avidly read English-language adventure novels and science fiction—took advantage of the popularity of national heroes in the wake of the Russo-Japanese War to launch Bōken sekai in 1908. In rejecting naturalism, Oshikawa was defying one of the central char- acteristics of modern thought. Authors, like Oshikawa and Uka, are often neglected in discussions of modern Japanese literature, where the empha- sis on canonical writers has tended to marginalize popular juvenile fic- tion. Giving greater attention to popular novelists is important for under- standing how certain narratives were transmitted and became prominent in Japanese popular culture.
Oshikawa authored more than sixty adventure and hero novels and short stories during his lifetime. It is difficult to precisely measure the
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popularity of his works, but anecdotal evidence suggests that his novels were popular among male middle and high school students, who were also the primary readers of Bōken sekai. The right-wing militarist intellec- tual Ōkawa Shūmei (1886–1957), who was later prosecuted as a Class A war criminal at the Tokyo tribunal, had read Oshikawa’s novels as a child. In his diary, written while a fifth-year middle school student in Yamagata Prefecture in 1904, Ōkawa describes his excitement at reading Oshikawa’s adventure stories.45 Similarly, Miki Kiyoshi (1897–1945)—whose ideas gave rise to the “Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere”—recalls that when he graduated from middle school in 1914, “Oshikawa Shunrō’s Bōken sekai was a well-received magazine among middle school students at the time.”46 For adolescent males in the late Meiji period, Oshikawa undoubtedly was an “epistemic authority,” whose knowledge and beliefs were deemed authoritative for structuring personal knowledge and shaping social reality.47
The dissemination of adventure novels among middle-class male ado- lescents in the late Meiji and Taishō periods produced a culturally compe- tent audience, who derived pleasure from the genre’s repetition of motifs and themes.48 Like other popular narrative forms, the “art” of the adven- ture novel was one of rendering common plot elements, characterizations, and situations. Each novel has certain original features, but the pleasure of the text lies in the way it delivers the cliché.49 The genre of adventure novels, including the subgenre of hero novels, was not only a means of orga- nizing texts according to an accepted set of generic conventions, but as Rick Altman argues about genre classifications in general, structured the audi- ence’s understanding of the text in a particular way that reduced the field of play and encouraged a predetermined reading.50 Consequently, the pleasure from reading adventure novels derives less from the poetry and emplotment than from an established code. Central to the organization of the genre of Japanese adventure novels was the repetition of symbolic vio- lence toward women and the representation of masculine omnipotence. Adventure novels likely resonated with young boys since their familiar narratives enacted the symbolic struggles of adolescence. Japanese hero narratives often function as cautionary tales against the lures of romantic love and the loss of male autonomy resulting from dependence on the maternal. Consequently, juvenile fiction, particularly the genres of adven- ture and hero novels, are important sources for understanding gender at- titudes in prewar Japan.
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While the creation of masculine heroes was central to Oshikawa’s ad- venture novels, his ideas of heroism were closely linked to the struggle against Western imperialism. In general, the fascination with adventure in late Meiji-period Japan was a product of Japanese military expansion- ism. The ideas of adventure and exploration in boys’ adventure magazines and novels were often little more than veiled euphemisms for Japanese imperialism. Edward Said’s work on culture and imperialism demon- strates the close connection between travel literature and imperialism. “[T]he writing and reading of adventures and other novels, both in Europe and in the colonies themselves, were part of the process of (ideological and material) colonialism. Adventures constructed imaginative space in which colonization could take place, and sometimes mapped the course of that colonization.”51 In Japanese adventure novels, the sanctioning of imperial- ism became fundamental to the narrative structure.
One of the characteristics of Oshikawa’s adventure novels was a ten- dency to fictionalize or speculate on real events and people in order to lend greater verisimilitude to his stories. This breaching of the boundaries be- tween fiction and nonfiction constituted an early form of popular history distinct from historical biographies. For instance, two of his novels focus on the disappearance of the Japanese battleship Unebi, which was reported to have last departed Singapore in December 1886.52 The mystery sur- rounding the Unebi’s disappearance encouraged Oshikawa to weave his stories into the real disappearance of the ship, inventing the circumstances surrounding its disappearance and its subsequent, supposed adventures fighting to free Asia from colonial aggression. In another novel, Shin Nihon-tō (The New Japanese Archipelago, 1906), Oshikawa builds from survival theories (seizonsetsu) that Saigō Takamori had not died on the battlefield in Kagoshima during the Satsuma Rebellion of 1877 but had fled to the Philippines, where he secretly commanded a liberation army struggling against American colonization. In many of Oshikawa’s novels, the characters fight against Western imperialism by supporting nation- alist independence movements seeking to free Asia from colonial op- pression. As Oshikawa writes in the preface to his serialized novel Tessha oukoku (Iron Car Kingdom), “sooner or later, we the peoples of the East (tōyō minzoku) will have to fight it out with the Western nations. . . . We are an Eastern nation, and we the Japanese are the champions of the East. . . . When the time comes, we will rouse ourselves in fierceness and advance in anger as we smash the false civilization of the West.”53 In this way, Oshi-
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kawa’s adventure novels serve to justify Japanese imperialism in contrast to Western colonial rule.
For Oshikawa, modernity had brought a “false civilization” (nise bun- mei) that was corrupting Japanese youth. He blames Japan’s political lead- ers for corrupting Japanese youth by their self-serving promotion of this “false civilization.” Oshikawa writes:
The people of the false civilization and their countries are becoming de-
based. They have forgotten to worship heroes, and instead have become
perverted worshippers of money, carnal desire, and prostitutes. Their cor-
ruption and depravity is beyond contempt. They are no better than worms
or dogs. We should spit on their faces.54
The branding of the West as a “false civilization” was Oshikawa’s way of condemning the decadent character of Western material culture that he felt was corrupting Japanese youth.
While throughout the Russo-Japanese War, the media served the inter- ests of the state in instilling national pride and promoting wartime hero- ism, popular discontent with the terms of the Portsmouth Treaty follow- ing the war’s conclusion fed a heightened sense of frustration with the Meiji government. Feelings of frustration and betrayal continued even af- ter the Hibiya Riots of 1905 and fostered a desire for bold heroes to remedy the cowardliness and weakness of the Meiji state.
In Uka Senshi’s (Shibue Tamotsu) adventure novel Shin kaitei ryokō (New Travels on the Bottom of the Sea), which was published in 1905 after the end of the Russo-Japanese War, the story opens with a son, Takemaru Fumimaro, imploring his mother for permission to undertake a voyage to explore the bottom of the sea. After lamenting the Triple Intervention— in which France, Germany, and Russia intervened to prevent Japan from taking control of the Liaodong Peninsula following the Sino-Japanese War in 1895—and denouncing the “cowardly cabinet” for agreeing to the “humiliating” terms of the Portsmouth Treaty after the Russo-Japanese War, Fumimaro explains the reasons for his mission:
Since the area of the five great powers (before the Russo-Japanese War) is
approximately 27,000 square li and their annual income totals 254 million
yen, we had to sign that humiliating treaty [Portsmouth Treaty]. If our land
and income were 10 or even 100 times its current level, even those fools in
the cabinet would not have sold out. What if, we were somehow able to live
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on the ocean floor and make every last inch the territory of Japan. Would
that not be the best policy for creating a rich country with a strong army
( fukoku kyōhei)? If you carefully consider it, while the territory of the world
including the six continents amounts to an area of merely 52 million square
li, the total including the ocean floor is 145 million square li—three times
the size of the continents. Moreover, the area of the Pacific Ocean alone—
which is 70 million li—is 20 million li larger than the six great continents.
If we made this all our territory and rendered all its wealth our own, then
people from various countries would invariably come to be naturalized citi-
zens and we would be entirely without enemies in the world.55
The novel thus reads like an allegory for the colonial project by exploring and conquering the ocean floor, which—like foreign lands—is occupied by dangerous creatures. Indeed, in these works, the motivations for adven- ture are closely linked to the desire to expand the Japanese empire.
As fiction, adventure novels were far from the naturalist literature that dominated the literary landscape of the late Meiji period. Instead, they were romantic novels that imagined worlds peopled with strong heroes and helpless beauties menaced by mythical creatures and ferocious beasts. Rather than reducing Japanese literary history of the Meiji period to the Western realist novel, it is important to note that a variety of different ways of writing and representation flourished, often in ways that borrowed from endogenous literary traditions. In Japanese adventure novels, the sto- ries are often set at the edges of the world, typically to the south in the spaces beyond “civilization.” The reality they projected was little more than a fantasy world where men expressed themselves through bold ac- tion, daring, and adventure. Amidst the violence of nature, man’s strength and vigor is awakened, and he is cleansed of the decadence of material civilization. By describing a proving ground of masculine values, the ad- venture novel promoted chivalry and moral courage. Either in rescuing helpless women in distress or liberating Asian peoples from the yoke of colonial oppression, adventure novels depicted the nobility of struggle as a spiritual quest that molded strong men and forged great nations.
The trope of rescuing women from the dangers of an unfamiliar and hostile world is common throughout many of these stories. The preva- lence of this theme raises important questions about the nature of the passage from adolescence to manhood. Rather than erasing women from these narratives altogether, adventure novels often depict “beautiful women”
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(bijin) as helpless victims. By rescuing endangered women, the hero dem- onstrates that he is no longer dependent upon women, but has discovered his own subjectivity. Put another way, the endangerment of the female becomes the enabling condition for the hero to realize his own subjectivity (manhood). Female agency is thus subordinated to the male, rendering them helpless objects who serve only to define the male protagonist. In this way, hero narratives create a clear gendered hierarchy whereby the male’s passage from dependence on to domination over women shapes gender relations. The punishment of women becomes the enabling condi- tion for male heroism, as women are often represented as needing protec- tion and rescue. In this way, the male adolescent’s subjectivity is founded on not only escaping female dependence, but on the punishment of women.
In Oshikawa’s serial novel Kaitei hōkutsu (The Ocean Bottom Treasure Grotto), which appeared in Bukyō sekai from March to August 1913, a group of Japanese adventurers sailing near the Chagos Archipelago in the Indian Ocean come to the assistance of a German passenger steamship, which has drifted toward a mysterious island believed to be haunted. After a boat- swain claims to see a “ghost-like apparition” in the water, several passen- gers gather on deck. As one Japanese female passenger leans over the rail to spot the apparition, she is pulled from the deck by a strange “white crea- ture.” While the group explores the mysterious island to rescue the missing Japanese female, the creature again abducts a Japanese woman, the sister of one of the explorers named Tsuyuko, while the adventurers have camped on the island. The creature is believed to have taken the women into the interior of the island, which is surrounded by sheer cliffs, through an un- derwater tunnel. The narrative focuses on the efforts of its male protago- nists to rescue the women from the creature. As a result, the emphasis of the narrative, like many of Oshikawa’s novels, lies exclusively on the hero- ism of his male heroes and their mission to rescue women from danger.
The heroism associated with the mission of rescuing helpless females is closely connected to the geography of adventure. Not only do the primi- tive civilizations encountered by Japanese adventurers in these stories con- trast with the high level of Japanese civilization, thereby justifying Japa- nese adventurism in the language of scientific exploration and the spread of civilization,56 they suggest a fear and anxiety regarding primitive and uncontrollable desires. In Kaitei hōkutsu, the strange island with a myste- rious cavern is described as having been carved out of rock by an ancient civilization more than three thousand years ago. In their depiction of for-
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eign lands, adventure novels thus employ the metaphor of the “unknown” (michi no sekai) or the “mysterious” (kikai) to symbolically represent the dangers and fears associated with the opposite sex. By mapping onto the geographies of wilderness, jungles, the bottom of the ocean, and vast des- erts a gendered identification with the female, adventure novels also stage their narratives in the metonymic language of male sexual awakening.
The monsters and creatures that populate adventure novels also com- plicate and question the opposition between male and female. The crea- ture in this particular novel is an uncivilized inhabitant of a “lost civili- zation.” Like the monsters of classic Hollywood horror cinema, “the relationship between the monster and the hero plays out a number of op- positions, such as inhuman versus human, uncivilized versus civilized, sexual versus asexual, and monstrous versus normal.”57 When Tsuyuko is abducted from the party’s tent during the night, the first-person narrator catches a glimpse of the creature, which he describes as “tall with what looked like scales covering its entire body and disheveled long, dark-red hair around its frightening face; its narrow legs looked like withered trees and its hands and feet appeared to be webbed.”58 According to the narrator, the creature is an “aquatic race” (suizoku jinshū) that is “half-man, half beast.” Noël Carroll describes this confounding of species as the “intersti- tiality” of many monsters of the horror genre, insofar as they are defined by categorical oppositions and contradictoriness.59 In its interstitiality, the monster represents “the feared power and potency of a different kind of sexuality” that is other. As Linda Williams argues, “[i]n this difference he is remarkably like the woman in the eyes of the traumatized male: a biological freak with impossible and threatening appetites that suggest a frightening potency precisely where the normal male would perceive a lack.”60 The power and potency of the nonphallic sexuality of the monster threatens male power and therefore must be punished. In short, “the monster as double for the women” share a similar status in that she, like the monster, is an “exhibitionist-object by the desiring look of the male” and a source of fear and imagined dread to his potency.
torturE thE womEN!
In Meiji-period adventure and hero novels, women supplement the male’s identity by figuring as victims whose rescue necessitates the activation of the hero’s subjectivity. In order to confirm his male identity, however, the
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90 thE my thoS of maSculINIz atIoN
adolescent boy must first repudiate the female within a narrative of female punishment. Sigmund Freud described this as “the degradation of the love principle,” whereby the male adolescent must renounce his depen- dence on the female world of maternal nurturing. In the transition from adolescence to manhood, “[t]he process of disidentifying with the mother takes on an all-or-nothing character, which among other things includes an often violent rejection of everything feminine, so that masculinity be- comes defined as the opposite of, and a distancing from, femininity.”61 In some societies, the ritual of passage from dependence on the mother to male autonomy is highly ritualized through violent puberty rites. Donald Roden discusses a similar form of ritualized hazing aimed at masculin- ization in his description of the student culture of the higher schools of Meiji Japan.62 The adventure and hero novel also serve as a narrative of passage or coming of age achieved through the reader’s identification with the male protagonist.
For example, Oshikawa, whose novels were often first serialized in magazines, penned a serialized adventure novel titled Kaijin tettō (The Mysterious Creature of the Steel Tower) starting in the inaugural issue of Bōken sekai.63 The story centers on a dark forest located fifty miles south- west of Sydney, Australia, where a “half-man, half-beast” has imprisoned a young Japanese woman named Namiko in a steel tower. The first-person narrator of the story is a young explorer named Narushima Haruo, who while traveling by steamship to Australia to investigate rumors of the crea- ture, meets Namiko and her wealthy parents. During the voyage, a giant black bird plucks Namiko off the deck of the ship, transporting her across the ocean to the mysterious steel tower inhabited by the “half-beast crea- ture” (Fig. 2.1).64 The mission to rescue Namiko from the creature is inten- sified through the foreshadowing of violence (Fig. 2.2):
At the top of the mysterious tower rising into the sky, which was colored in
the blood-red rays of the morning light spilling in all directions, the crea-
ture wielded a scimitar in his right hand and clutched the elegant Namiko
by the shoulder with his left. . . . Like two mysterious stars, the creature’s
eyes flashed terribly as he drew to one edge of the top of the tower. With his
left hand grasping Namiko, he held her out over the edge. Namiko’s foot
rose off the tower, and her body appeared to float in mid-air. Oh, how fright-
ful! If the creature were to let her go, she would fall like a cannonball, her
beautiful figure certain to be smashed into pieces. I could not bear to
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thE my thoS of maSculINIz atIoN 91
watch any more, but I could not look away. While I watched with binoculars
pressed to my face unable to tear my eyes away and praying that Namiko
would somehow be protected, the creature suddenly dropped her off the
edge. Her body fell from the top of the tower like a shooting star.65
Witnessing this scene from the roof of a hotel at a distance, his view par- tially obscured, Narushima later discovers that the creature had not dropped Namiko, but instead held her by a rope tied around her waist. With the hap- less Namiko suspended and dangling in mid-air off the tower, Narushima sets off on horseback through a dark forest to rescue her. Thus the descrip- tion of Namiko’s fall from the edge of the tower enables the description of her violent death, while deferring her real death to some later point in the narrative. Through this device, the repetition of violence is sustained yet achieves its demonstrative effect. In his description of the novels of the
fIgurE 2.1. “Beauty
Floating.” An illustra-
tion from the serialized
adventure novel Kaijin
tettō (The Mysterious
Creature of the Steel
Tower). The caption
(left) reads, “Oh, what a
strange sight! What is
the fate of this beauty?
See the adventure
novel ‘Kaijin tettō’
in this issue.”
SourcE: Bōken sekai 1,
no. 1 (Jan. 1, 1908).
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92 thE my thoS of maSculINIz atIoN
Marquis de Sade, Gilles Deleuze writes, “it is through the intermediary of description and the accelerating and condensing effect of repetition that the demonstrative function achieves its strongest impact.”66 In these ad- venture novels, one thus discovers an affinity for the repetition of violence toward women that exceeds the dictates of the genre and strains the coher- ence of the narrative.
The demonstrative function of this sadist aesthetic is most evident in the writings of Shibue Tamotsu, who wrote numerous adventure novels for the Hirobunkan publishing company under the pen name Uka Senshi. Shibue studied English from an early age and is credited with having authored the first complete history of English literature in Japanese, Eikoku bungaku-shi (A History of British Literature), which was published in 1891. He worked throughout his life as a translator, teacher, journalist, and novelist. He even
fIgurE 2.2. “On the
Verge of Death.” The
caption (left) reads,
“What is the fate of
the elegant, flower-
like Namiko being
held by the strange
half-beast creature
at the top of a mys-
terious tower soaring
into the sky? Read
the adventure novel
‘Kaijin tettō’ inside
this issue to find
out.” SourcE:
Bōken sekai 1, no. 8
(Aug. 5, 1908).
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thE my thoS of maSculINIz atIoN 93
served briefly as a teacher to Yamaji Aizan at Keio Gijuku (later Keio Univer- sity), where he taught Aizan the theories of John Stuart Mill and Herbert Spencer.67 He is perhaps best known, however, from Mori Ōgai’s historical biography of his father, Shibue Chūsai, which was published in 1916.68
In his adventure novel Shin kaitei ryokō (New Travels on the Bottom of the Sea), published in 1905, Shibue’s descriptions of the victimization and torture of its central female character, Beniko, structure the central narra- tive. Published during the Russo-Japanese War, the novel describes a mis- sion to colonize the ocean floor for Japan in order to reap its mineral and natural wealth. Wearing special diving gear, the group of explorers is at- tacked by various underwater sea creatures.
As Beniko was deep in sleep, she felt something on her thigh. Surprised,
she woke up to discover two giant octopuses larger than Suribachi Hill at
Ueno. With tentacles longer than 11 meters, they grasped her around her
thighs and steadily pulled her towards them. In shock, Beniko thought
to herself, “I have often heard and read stories about giant octopuses that
snatch cows off the shores and pull them under the seas where they suck
out their blood. I wonder if they intend now to suck out my blood too? Oh,
how horrible!” She then thought to quickly pull out her sword. “Come, you
poor thing, pull out your sword.” But as she tried to move her arms, they
would not budge. “That’s strange!” she thought. When she looked, 24 octo-
puses shaped like bells with tentacles growing from them had rushed in
from behind her and were holding down her arms so that they could not
move. Startled, she lost all hope. She thought to at least try to call out as
much as she could, and in her loudest voice, she yelled out several times:
“Husband! Takemaru-san!” She also called out several times, “Brother!
Botta-san!” But alas no one responded.
Amid all this, including the giant octopuses in front of her and the me-
dium-sized octopuses behind her, Beniko was finally pulled into a dense
thicket of seaweed, where a swarm of around five to six hundred small octo-
puses scrambled to attach themselves, covering her entire body without so
much as the smallest gap. “I will never be able to withstand all these octo-
puses sucking out my blood,” she thought. She writhed her body to break
free, but she was unable to move even an inch. The five to six hundred small
octopuses then proceeded to suck her blood. It felt painful, itchy, and ticklish
all at the same time, such that she was unable to think of anything else.
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94 thE my thoS of maSculINIz atIoN
However, this was nothing, for now the large octopuses, rounding their
mouths like trumpets, began to suck her blood. Beniko at last fell into a
dream-like state. She was unable to see with her eyes, but she had still not
truly lost consciousness. As she experienced this condition, she shuddered
anew and unconsciously screamed in agony.69
When her husband, Takemaru, discovers that she is missing after suc- cessfully defeating around thirty ferocious sea snakes, he and the others in the party set off to search for Beniko. One of the members of the search party tells him that he has spotted a body floating above near the surface.
In shock, Takemaru immediately rushed to the place, where a naked female
body was being buffeted in the waves. “Oh no, it looks like Beniko!” . . . At
that moment, owing to the waves, the body was floating on its back. Its face
was pointed in his direction, but since it was floating somewhat vertical, it
was hard to tell—yet with the waves, it appeared to be Beniko. “Quick,” they
shouted as they rushed towards the body.
How cruel! Just at that moment, a shark appeared and chomped off her
head in one bite. In despair and anger, Takemaru swam down to the ocean
floor to retrieve his rifle, and with one shot he killed the beast. He cut open
the shark’s stomach to look inside, but with its sharp teeth, it had mangled
her face beyond all recognition. All that remained that resembled Beniko
was her long hair.70
Despite this, Beniko survives. Although straining the coherence of the plot, the female victims of such torture are miraculously saved, only to be subjected to the next round of violence. In the next chapter, Beniko returns by cutting her way our of the belly of a black whale, which—she explains—had swallowed her whole just as she was being attacked by the octopuses. Her return provides the opportunity for the narrator to repeat the description of the details of the octopus attack, thereby further sus- taining the narrative’s repetition of violence.71
In narrative fiction, the reader must infer or select information in order to “fill in gaps with essential or likely events, traits and objects which for various reasons have gone unmentioned.”72 The coherence of the narrative thus depends on the reader’s ability to select or infer based on existing narrative elements. If such narrative elements are missing, thus prevent- ing the reader from selecting or inferring the continuum of events, the
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thE my thoS of maSculINIz atIoN 95
author must provide some explanation for the discrepancy. In adventure fiction, such explanations are often lacking. For example, the naked body of the female whose head is bitten off by the shark is later revealed not to have been Beniko. Yet the author provides no explanation for why another dead naked female body was floating in the middle of the ocean at the ex- act time and place of the narrative. Consequently, coherence has been sac- rificed to a more essential element of the narrative—the sadist aesthetic. The sadist aesthetic, the form of expression, is primary to the plot or con- tent of the narrative. In this regard, adventure novels share a structure similar to “slasher” or horror films in their subordination of plot to the relentless repetition of violence.
While violence and danger is essential to the genre of the adventure novel, the elaboration and repetition of ritualized violence, usually di- rected toward female characters, raises questions about the representation of gender in these novels. Illustrations that accompany the stories in the magazine center on dead female bodies or the depiction of imminent vio- lence toward women (Fig. 2.3).73 Though violence toward male characters is certainly not uncommon in adventure novels, the textual descriptions as well tend to be more graphic and detailed when it concerns women.74 For example, as in Beniko’s attack by the octopuses, the protracted death of the female is depicted in such a way as to allow for the victim to contemplate her imminent demise. Women thus serve as the victims in these texts, their bodies subjected to sadistic fantasies of vivisection and carnality. The re presentation of feminine victimization through the repetition of vio- lence is not for identification, but possession, domination, and ultimately the negation of the female. As Gilles Deleuze observes, “[s]adism is in every sense an active negation of the mother and an exaltation of the father who is beyond all laws.”75 It is the desire to enter into the realm of the father—manhood—that makes the hero narrative an ultimately sadis- tic fantasy.
As a result, the promotion of male heroism in Meiji Japan contributed to a misogynist view of women, rooted in the fear of a regressive return to a state of maternal nurturing and dependence, since femininity was perceived as inimical to the nation. The topos of misogyny is common through out Western intellectual thought and literature as well as in the warrior culture of medieval Japan, reaching an apex during the Middle Ages in Europe and the medieval period in Japan.76 Folklore, in particular, often invokes images of malevolent women in allegorical cautionary tales.
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96 thE my thoS of maSculINIz atIoN
Owing to its roots in folklore and folk tales, juvenile literature not only seeks to entertain, but also achieves a similar normative function. David D. Gilmore defines misogyny as “an unreasonable fear or hatred of women that takes on some palpable form in any given society.” According to Gil- more, however, misogyny is not merely a single-sided hatred of women, but rather the result of an “affective ambivalence.”77 As Gilmore notes, mi- sogyny often appears together in cultures that also idealize women. This “psychic ambivalence” is present in Japanese popular culture in its swings between the extremes of anaclitic idealization and the abject denigration of women. In analyzing the topos of misogyny in Japanese popular cul- ture, including the graphic victimization of women in detective fiction discussed by Sari Kawana, the systematic denigration of women serves as a reminder that gender ideologies are multitudinous and complex.78 In
fIgurE 2.3. “A Wonder-
ful Dead Beauty.” An il-
lustration from the se-
rialized short adventure
story “Bijin yūkai sen”
(The Kidnapped Beau-
ty’s Ship). The caption
(left) reads, “This cave
is a tomb. Who is this
mysterious dead beauty
appearing from out of a
barrel? If you want to
know more about this
strange tale, see ‘Bijin
yūkai sen’ in this issue.”
SourcE: Bōken sekai 1,
no. 9 (Sept. 5, 1908).
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thE my thoS of maSculINIz atIoN 97
this regard, misogyny as a literary trope is not merely the product of the pathology of men’s desire to subordinate and punish women, but rather is fundamental to the psychic struggle in male adolescence.79
from BoyS to mEN
Middle-class mothering practices in the Meiji period underwent a pro- found transformation as a result of the modernization of everyday life wrought by the Meiji state. From the late nineteenth century, the Ministry of Education promoted the ideology of “good wife, wise mother” (ryōsai kenbo) in order to define the roles of women in the imperial state system. As a result, official state propaganda joined with the exhortations of jour- nalists, educators, and reformers in urging Japanese women “to contrib- ute to the nation through their hard work, their frugality, their efficient management, their care of the old, young, and ill, and their responsible upbringing of children.”80 While much historical scholarship has fo- cused on the effect of the “good wife, wise mother” ideology on women— particularly feminism, labor, and education in modern Japan—little atten- tion has been given to its profound impact on the psychological development of children.
The Meiji state’s official ideology on women not only encouraged mothers to stress filial piety to parents and devotion to the emperor for their children, but it also shaped Japanese child-rearing practices in a way that would create a significant psychic struggle for masculinization among adolescent males. With rising incomes now earned by fathers in white-collar jobs far removed from the domestic sphere, middle-class women pursued the goal of freedom from work in order to dedicate them- selves to their families as part of the state’s aim of discouraging women’s public activities and promoting the patriarchal family-state. As Mariko Tamanoi observes in her work on female child care givers (komori), “Be- cause of new economic conditions that permitted upper- and middle- class women to devote greater time to child rearing, they gradually ac- cepted a mother-centered approach to child care.”81 In exhorting women to devote more time to their children, the state and its ideologues fash- ioned a model of new middle-class maternity that, while not realistic for farmers or lower-class families, was nonetheless a goal to which many women aspired.82
Encouraged by the state’s program of “good wife, wise mother,” middle-
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class women in the Meiji period, their role in society limited, dedicated them- selves slavishly to child rearing. One Western observer of upper middle- class Japanese mothering practices in 1891 wrote:
The Japanese mother’s life is one of perfect devotion to her children; she is
their willing slave. Her days are spent in caring for them, her evenings in
watching over them; and she spares neither time nor trouble in doing any-
thing for their comfort and pleasure. . . . The Japanese woman has so few
on whom to lavish her affection, so little to live for beside her children, and
no hopes in the future except through them, that it is no wonder that she
devotes her life to their care and service.83
As Mark A. Jones has detailed, family reformers and scientific experts produced a voluminous discourse on child rearing in Meiji Japan.84 Ac- cording to Jones, this new moral and scientific conception of child rearing created a strong “interventionist” (kanshō) approach to the child’s develop- ment. Active attention was given to all aspects of the child’s development, including the minute details of the child’s daily affairs. Many mothers even kept a child development diary (ikuji nisshi) to monitor whether their child’s maturation conformed to scientific notions of normative develop- ment and progress.
The excessive attention lavished on children by their mothers, which was promoted by both state and society, sought to connect the role of the mother as educator to the state’s mission of modernization. By advocating women’s education as a means of producing “wise mothers” who could better educate their children to become servants of the state, the Meiji government first implemented policies aimed at fostering women’s educa- tion.85 For Mori Arinori (1847–1889), who was appointed the first minister of education in 1885, mothers were the “natural teachers” (tennen no kyōin) for cultivating patriotism in children. Consequently, “mothers were tied to the state through their twin roles as a medium for instilling an absolute patriotic spirit in their children and as a patriot who devoted herself to childrearing in order for her children to learn to serve the state.”86 Middle- class advocates, writing in the new medium of women’s magazines, em- braced the state’s policies of integrating the private sphere of the home into the national mission. They “exalted the educated woman as the cor- nerstone of the nation and declared the tasks of her daily life, from sewing to cooking to childrearing, to be matters of national importance.”87 As women thus expressed their commitment to the Japanese nation through
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their dedication to the care and upbringing of their children, their roles as mothers became conflated with their duty to the nation.
For the children, especially adolescent males, the figure of the mother loomed large in their everyday lives (a problem exacerbated by the absence of the father). Since boys were expected to “rise in the world” (risshin shusse) to become a new middle class in the service of the Japanese nation, the weight of the expectations from their mothers to succeed was immense. Raised under such conditions, the ubiquitous presence of the mother be- came an obstacle to the development of their own sense of autonomy. In- stead of the Confucian-style family of the past that emphasized the elderly and ancestors, the new modern discourse on motherhood exalted the child.88 In the struggle to define their own identity apart from their moth- ers, many Japanese boys looked to heroes in history and popular culture.
Nancy J. Chodorow claims that “women experience a sense of self- in-relation that is in contrast to men’s creation of a self that wishes to deny relation and connection.”89 The assertion of independence by men thus arises from an anxiety about intimacy, especially dependence on women, which is associated with an unmasculine identification with the child- hood need for nurturing and succor. From the intense attachment that develops out of the close relationship with the mother during infancy, the child bears the “narcissistic wound” of this awareness of weakness and dependence. As Dorothy Dinnerstein writes in regard to the symbolic role of the mother in the formation of the self,
even while she provides support for the early growth of the self, the mother
is inevitably felt as a menace to that self. She is the outstanding feature of
the arresting, sometimes overwhelming, realm within which the self’s
boundaries must be defined. The multiple rhythms of this outside realm,
its pulls, pressures, and distractions, can threaten to swamp the nascent
self ’s own needs and intentions, to blur its perceptions of its own outlines,
to deflect its inner sense of direction and drown out its inner voice.”90
The child psychoanalyst Melanie Klein, in her discussion of how the child detaches himself from his mother and achieves independence, observes a tendency toward hero worship.91 According to Klein, “There is thus in the unconscious mind a tendency to give her [the mother] up, which is coun- teracted by the urgent desire to keep her forever. These conflicting feel- ings, together with the emotional and intellectual growth of the child which enable him to find other objects of interest and pleasure, result in
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the capacity to transfer love, replacing the first loved person by other peo- ple and things.”92 In turning away from the parents, Klein notes that the new objects may include “idealized figures such as famous men and women, authors, athletes, adventurers, imaginary characters taken from literature.”93 As object-relations theory explains, however, feelings of anxi- ety and conflict are not eliminated but are transferred to new objects of love and hate that serve as mere substitutes for the primary object.94
During the transition to adolescence, which corresponds to the age of the primary readership of boy’s adventure magazines and hero novels in Meiji Japan, the child reaches a stage of “object relinquishment and ob- ject finding.”95 As he turns away from the familial objects of mother and home, he seeks new objects to facilitate the transition to the nonfamilial relational world. For the adolescent male, he must give up his identifica- tion with the omnipotent mother and find new objects of identification, who demonstrate not only subjectivity and independence, but mastery over women. In demonstrating this independence from women, namely the mother, the male child is attracted to heroes, who communicate views about gender difference and sexuality in society. The hero serves as a means of gender identification by enabling the child to repress the “differ- ence within” and validate masculine superiority. Boys can thus fantasize about escape from female dominance by retreating into the homosocial world of the text, where idealized models of masculinity demonstrate their mastery over women by rescuing them from danger. Nonetheless, this sense of masculinity is predicated on the devaluation of women. As Chodorow describes, “he tends to deny identification with and relation- ship to his mother and reject what he takes to be the feminine world; masculinity is defined as much negatively as positively.”96
Consequently, the problem of disidentifying with the mother requires the transitional object of the hero to bridge the psychic ambivalence be- tween the wish for symbiosis and the conflicting desire for separation/ individuation. In discovering new objects to compensate for the relin- quishment of the mother, the hero facilitates the transition to manhood and the awakening of the libido. As a result, modeling and identificatory mimesis is part of the normative process of adolescent development. By offering idealized images for imitation, the hero serves as a means for over- coming dependence and discovering one’s own subjectivity. If the adoles- cent, however, remains indefinitely in the transitional phase of develop- ment or prolonged adolescence, he may retreat into a state of self-isolation
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marked by a withdrawal from society. As Peter Blos described in his fa- mous study of adolescence, “[a]dolescent individuation is accompanied by feelings of isolation, loneliness, and confusion. Individuation brings some of the dearest megalomaniacal dreams of childhood to an irrevocable end. They must now be relegated entirely to fantasy: their fulfillments can never again be considered seriously. The realization of the finality of the end of childhood, of the binding nature of commitments, of the definite limitation to individual existence itself—this realization creates a sense of urgency, fear, and panic.”97 How the child negotiates this transition is significant for psychological development and the resolution of the Oedipal conflict.
In short, boy’s adventure and hero novels in Meiji Japan allowed readers to fantasize about escape from female dominance by retreating into a homo- social fictional world where an idealized masculinity permitted identifica- tion with heroes who demonstrate their mastery over women. Notably, in the prewar discourse on heroes in Japan, however, one finds that the hero image, which serves as the psychic process of the transition to manhood and individuation, becomes imbued with an overvaluation of the nation. Because individuation is subordinated to the idealization of the nation as the new primary love object, symbolized by “national” heroes, male adolescents risked failing to develop a sense of autonomy but instead a pathology of de- pendence characterized by subordination to the will of the collective. In the discourse on masculinity in Japan, this tendency is apparent in the devalua- tion of romantic, heterosexual love as a decadent expression of individual- ism incompatible with the nation. This point is illustrated in the following passage from Oshikawa Shunrō’s serialized adventure novel Kaijin tettō, which appeared in Bōken sekai in 1908. The first-person narrator sees a beautiful woman while traveling by steamship to Australia:
What was it that struck my eye? It was a woman of unparalleled beauty, so
truly lovely that I would go so far as to say that she was like a flower.
You, the readers, will likely reprimand me for speaking in this way: “You
are a swashbuckler (banyū-kan). Don’t speak of such uncharacteristic things!
Are you not a mysterious explorer with a great purpose who is in the midst of
a great quest? It’s outrageous to be stopping to look at beautiful women!”98
The author’s decision to directly address his reader in the passage above suggests the degree to which romantic love and femininity were perceived as violating the all-male space of the text. This signifies that women pose a danger to the all-male community of the nation by subverting its strength
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and unity. The alignment of women with sexual as well as moral debase- ment thus equates women with chaos since “[s]he is the apotheosis of all that opposes order, corrupts, subverts, derails the spiritual quest.”99 The mission—the nation—must precede the selfish desires of the individual. Through introjection, the nation is taken into the self and internalized as a fantasy of the unified subject. In the conflation of the hero with the na- tion in the search for a transitional object in adolescent development, women and femininity become rejected through the process of object splitting in the ideological construction of masculine heroes. This defense mechanism ensures that the emerging sense of subjectivity and identity is strengthened by internalizing the good object (nation/hero) and punish- ing the bad (mother/female).
oShIkawa ShuNrō aNd thE crEatIoN of hypErmaSculINE hEroES
As a child, Oshikawa Shunrō displayed a defiant temperament that would later become the basis for his strongly antiauthoritarian and violent phi- losophy. His father, Oshikawa Masayoshi (1851–1928), was a leading figure in the Japanese Christian movement and the founder of Tōhoku Gakuin (which later became Tōhoku Gakuin University). At age fourteen, he en- rolled at Meiji Gakuin, where he spent most of his time absorbed in play- ing baseball. To force his son to study, his father had him transferred to Tōhoku Gakuin to keep a closer eye on him. Oshikawa rebelled against the strict, authoritarian culture of the missionary school. He got into a fist- fight with one of the foreign teachers, killed a dog and then cooked and ate it in one of the classrooms, and set one of his fellow students’ long hair on fire with petroleum. In Sennen-go no sekai (The World 1,000 Years Hereafter), Oshikawa writes with narcissistic rage:
Since the time I was a child, I have always been extremely rebellious. I have
revered the heroism of the East, and I have understood that the true character
of men is to be composed and collected. However, whenever I see those who
quibble and boast, it galls me to no end. I hate the hypocrites the most.
Whenever I see a hypocrite, I feel—for no reason—like destroying every-
thing in this society.100
After Oshikawa failed to be accepted into the Sapporo Agricultural School, his father, through his connections with Ōkuma Shigenobu, arranged to
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have him admitted to Tokyo Senmon Gakkō (which later became Waseda University) in 1895. At Tokyo Senmon Gakkō, Oshikawa studied English literature and politics and avidly read English-language adventure novels and science fiction, especially the work of Robert Louis Stevenson and Jules Verne. It was during this time that he completed his first adventure novel, Kaitei gunkan (Undersea Battleship), which was published in 1900.
In this novel, an adventurer named Yanagawa Ryūtarō travels about, exploring the world for several years before deciding to return by steam- ship to Japan. Throughout the novel, the narration makes no mention of family or other obligations that might restrain the hero’s actions. As he is about to return, he meets an old friend in Naples, whose wife and son will be returning to Japan on the same ship. The wife is returning to care for her ailing brother; his friend is sending his son, Hideo, back to Japan to attend a military academy since “a Japanese child who is not educated on Japanese soil will lose his patriotic spirit.”101 The father, who is a mer- chant, hopes that his young son will become a “great naval sailor who will protect the Japanese Empire.”102 The father serves as an example of the absentee father, whose concern with daily vocational activities makes him an unavailable model for masculine role identification. During the return journey to Japan, their ship is rammed and sunk by pirates in the Indian Ocean. In the chaos of the ship’s sinking, his friend’s wife is carried away on the waves and is presumed dead. Supporting Hideo in the rough sea, Yanagawa manages to find an empty lifeboat, which carries them to a seemingly deserted island.
The remainder of the novel unfolds as an adventure story that describes how young Hideo, with Yanagawa’s instruction, learns to become a man who can serve the Japanese empire. The parents’ removal as models for identification in the narrative furthers the aim of emphasizing the impor- tance of masculine role identification centered on nonfamilial hero arche- types. With the “death” of his mother, Hideo is forced to learn to survive in a dangerous world by discovering his own subjectivity. Throughout the text, Yanagawa serves as an archetype of male virility, which the reader is encouraged to emulate. Through the experiences of young Hideo, the reader is meant to discover his own inner strength, which is realized through the transitional object of the hero figure who symbolizes the de- sire to replace dependency on the maternal in boyhood with self-direction and purpose in manhood.
Such archetypes of male virility and heroism abound in Oshikawa’s
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works, but in the character of Danbara Kentōji, who appears in several of Oshikawa’s novels, the hero becomes an expression of hypermasculine omnipotence. In the novel Shin Nihon-tō (New Japanese Archipelago, 1904), Oshikawa describes Danbara as follows:
At more than six feet tall with a body that looks to have been made of iron,
he clutches a lion by the mane in his left hand as if it were a small calf and
wields an eight-sided iron club in his right hand. With the Siberian wind
blowing his long hair, he endures the biting cold gusts that cut through the
night. As he strides over the iron bridge spanning the murky waters below,
the gate of the mysterious tower comes into view. With a flash of his eyes,
he glares at the tower above before drawing up the iron club in his right
hand and readying his body to smash the gate in one fell blow.
Who is this marvelous man? He is the realm’s most fearless warrior
and boldest knight—Danbara Kentōji. From where and how has he come
to this place? Alone, with a lion at his side, he raids the mysterious tower.
Nothing, not even the most impregnable fortress, stands in his way. He
fears no man.103
The fantasy of male mastery represented by hypermasculine heroes in these novels is achieved through a narrative that demonstrates the hero’s ability to assert control over a dangerous world. A code of excess in the narrative highlights the hero’s mastery of his body to achieve impossible physical feats. The excess and exaggeration of the hero’s feats undermine realism in the narrative while furthering the fantasy of male omnipo- tence.104 This excess is suggested, for example, by Danbara’s traveling with a lion that accompanies him like a pet. In the passage above, Danbara raids a mysterious tower to free Saigō Takamori, who had been taken pris- oner during his struggle to support Philippine independence from Ameri- can colonial rule. In the novel, Oshikawa sanctions the myth of Saigō’s survival by imagining that he survived the Satsuma Rebellion (1877) and escaped to the Philippines, where he was fighting for Philippine indepen- dence. In the novel, Saigō’s American captors have turned him over to the Russians, who have imprisoned him in Siberia. Since Saigō is an iconic figure of heroism from Japanese history, the conflation of history and fic- tion in this work heightens the reader’s identification with the hero and the narrative. Like fan fiction that reworks plots based on established and familiar characters, the depiction of popular historical figures in adven- ture novels is a form of “textual poaching” that substitutes familiar his-
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torical narratives and characters.105 For Oshikawa, appropriating Saigō’s image was about removing him from his original historical context and placing him into a new narrative. In light of the popularity of historical biographies in the Meiji period, the audience’s assumed familiarity with Saigō makes Oshikawa’s novel resonate with its readers by drawing on a set of shared cultural values and assumptions at the intersection between history and literature.
IcoNIc hEroES IN hIStory
In the pages of the adventure magazine Bōken sekai, Oshikawa actively promoted hero worship as a way of promoting spiritual direction and na- tional greatness. The stories and articles in the magazine celebrated hero- ism, including in a regular column that sought to introduce the “famous men” (meibutsu otoko) of the student world to its readers as models of emulation and reverence. These purportedly “true” stories of the exploits of young male students were often written as paeans of male virility, ex- horting students to achieve in sports, avoid crying, protect the weak, and punish the corrupt.106
Oshikawa proclaimed in the magazine that “those who faithfully wor- ship heroes will advance themselves to become heroes; those countries that faithfully worship heroes will rise to become heroic nations!”107 These exhortations appeared in a September 1908 column announcing a call for readers to submit their choices for the greatest heroes in the world. On a special questionnaire that appeared in the following three monthly issues, readers were asked to vote on who they thought were the “greatest heroes of all time” (kokon no eiyū).108 The results of the survey, announced in the January 1909 issue, were presented in the style of a sumo ranking chart (banzuke), which sorted heroes “east” against “west” (Fig. 2.4). Nota- bly, heroes from the “east” were all iconic figures from the distant past, such as Toyotomi Hideyoshi (1536–1598), Genghis Khan (1162–1227), Toku gawa Ieyasu (1542–1616), and Hōjō Tokimune (1251–1284). With the exception of Saigō Takamori, none of the selected heroes were contemporary or recent figures, which suggested to the young readers of Bōken sekai that the time of heroes was in the past. In publishing this special insert to the maga- zine, Oshikawa urged his readers to tear down from the wall their rank- ings of popular actors and guides to the pleasure quarters and replace them with this poster-sized chart of world heroes in order to inspire them
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fIgurE 2.4. “Bōken sekai Reader’s Choice—The Ranking of
the World’s Heroes.” The top five heroes for the “west” included
Napoleon, Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, Peter the Great,
and Oliver Cromwell, respectively. SourcE: Bōken sekai 2, no. 1
(Jan. 1, 1909).
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to imitate these great men.109 For Oshikawa, the worship of actors, whose ephemeral popularity epitomized the decadence of Western mass culture, represented the antithesis of the veneration of the timeless heroes of the past. As in the United States, the typical idols and heroes in popular maga- zines were shifting from those of production to consumption, such as entertainers.110 According to Daniel J. Boortsin, the cult of hero worship carries with it contempt for democracy.111 As an expression of an authori- tarian call to order, it invokes “folk” heroes from the past in defiance of the rise of the masses.
In September 1912, Bōken sekai produced a special issue on the theme of “heroes and troubled times” (eiyū to fū’un) that reinforced the impor- tance of hero worship to the spiritual development of Japanese youth (Fig. 2.5). In this issue, Yamaji Aizan writes about the important role heroes play in shaping historical events as well as the role history plays in creating heroes.112 Throughout Japanese history, he notes that heroes such as Saigō Takamori had responded to the circumstances of history in order to bring about progressive change and usher in a new era of history. In his 1910 biography of Saigō, Yamaji similarly describes Saigō’s historical signifi- cance in terms of his progressive role in bringing about the collapse of the feudal system.113
A focal point of the debate over heroes was the ambiguous legacy of Saigō Takamori and his place in history. The image of Saigō Takamori as a virile popular hero was largely a construct of the late Meiji period. When Saigō led Satsuma forces in an open rebellion against the state in January 1877, the generally recalcitrant press practiced restraint, reporting the events of the war with uncharacteristic moderation. Some even ex- pressed disappointment and contempt for Saigō.114 By the turn of the cen- tury, however, many youths came to worship an idealized image of Saigō. The memory of Saigō thus embodied the profound conflicts within mod- ern Japanese society itself. He suggested to many not only the binary op- positions between the past and present, but the unexplored alternatives in Japanese history. In an essay in this special issue exploring the question of what would have happened had Saigō prevailed in his rebellion, the jour- nalist Fukumoto Nichinan (1857–1921) sought to shape historical memory of not only the Satsuma Rebellion, but the ambiguous legacy of Saigō’s role as a hero in Japanese history. Fukumoto worked as a journalist, pen- ning political commentaries for the conservative newspaper Nihon, and later became an early advocate of Japanese expansion into Southeast Asia
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and the Pacific (nanshinron). In his work, Fukumoto wrote extensively on the importance of great men in history, including his own treatise on heroes, Eiyūron (1911), which borrowed the title from the translation of Car- lyle’s book.115 For Fukumoto, Saigō was a great patriot whose actions were motivated by a purity of spirit and a love of the Japanese people. Fukumoto concludes, “If Saigō had won the civil war of 1877, then undoubtedly Korea and Manchuria would have been ours long ago without the great sacrifices of the Sino-Japanese and Russo-Japanese Wars.”116 In addition, Fukumoto was convinced that Saigō, unlike the Meiji leadership who “brought about disorder to political society and were the frequent focus of severe accusa- tions,” would have brought about a “true” (shinsei) constitutional govern- ment since he harbored no wish to create an aristocratic system based on titles of nobility. He notes that although Saigō would have ruled by military
fIgurE 2.5. The Bōken
sekai cover of the spe-
cial issue on “Heroes
and Troubled Times.”
SourcE: Bōken sekai 5,
no. 12 (Sept. 1, 1912).
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thE my thoS of maSculINIz atIoN 109
force, this would only have been a temporary measure until the establish- ment of a constitutional government. According to Fukumoto, “It would be unfortunate if there should not arise a true patriotic hero with the great strength, sincerity, devotion, and righteousness of Saigō to reform the me- diocrity and abuses in all areas.”117 Fukumoto’s depiction of Saigō as a champion of the people, particularly popular rights and constitutional government, was part of a broader discourse that sought to link the image of Saigō to the idea of the nation.
Heroes of the Meiji period such as Saigō Takamori, who lingered in the public imagination, symbolized a new relationship between the people and the nation. In the discourses of nationalism, Saigō looms larger than life because the ambivalence of Saigō’s own history lent itself to the pro- duction of a multiplicity of popular myths. Like the “cultural ubiquity” of Elvis myths in twentieth-century American popular culture,118 the vast discourse on Saigō attests to the power of cultural objects to shape iden- tity. One factor in the production of the myth of Saigō was the growth of consumer capitalism, such as the numerous postcards, nishikie, and biog- raphies that circulated in the prewar period. However, the commodifica- tion of the image of Saigō fails to entirely explain his cultural presence. Although capitalist forces in the form of print media contributed to the pro- duction of the phenomenon of Saigō’s star image, the consumption of the image of Saigō attests to his enduring popularity as an icon of cultural ideas and values that resonated with his followers and supporters. While his image was being fervently promoted and defended by his followers and the mass media, the emotional affinity and self-identification that drove this fascination for Saigō cannot be explained merely in terms of the cal- culated manipulation of militarist symbols, but rather by the way in which the narrativization of his life story lent itself to a popular myth of heroism that gave expression to the frustrations many felt with the elitism and cor- ruption of the Meiji state.
Just as his untimely death made Elvis into a “popular medium,” the death of Saigō transformed the production of his image into the popular domain. No sooner had news of Saigō’s death been reported in newspa- pers than “sightings” began to be reported, particularly by newspapers or tabloids in Kagoshima. In death, Saigō became part of a “semiotic system of preservation” that referenced a historical identity that was becoming increasingly untenable amid the modern changes of the Meiji period.119 While rumors and sightings were one means of preserving the body of
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Saigō in the popular imagination, historical biographies were perhaps the most prevalent form of cultural “taxidermy” aimed at arresting the decay of Saigō’s image. In the prewar period, historical biography was one of the most widely read and popular literary genres.120 Miki Kiyoshi recalls that during his middle school years, he had read many of Yamaji’s biographical works.121 Perhaps no other figure inspired as many historical biographies as Saigō in the prewar period. Beginning with Katsuda Magoya’s five- volume biography of Saigō published during the Sino-Japanese War (1894– 1895), amid one of the earliest “Saigō booms,” and Uchimura Kanzō’s pub- lication of Daihyōteki Nihonjin (1894) that placed Saigō among the greatest figures of Japanese history, the canonization of the myth of Saigō in popu- lar biographies reflected popular fascination with the potential of history. In the domain of popular memory, the endless production of Saigō biog- raphies reveled in the subjectivity of history by casting the events of Saigō’s life into a narrative that celebrated both his heroism in leading the Meiji Restoration and his righteous defiance of the Meiji state in the Satsuma Rebellion. With each iteration, Saigō narratives nurtured and sustained a narrative of popular resistance to the state.
With Saigō’s death on the battlefield at Shiroyama in 1877, his legend only grew. As Mark Ravina has described, history has tended to remember the death of Saigō as a glorious yet tragic suicide (seppuku). According to Ravina, this is one of the myths surrounding Saigō that aimed to recast the narrative of his death from “farce” to “tragedy.” Through careful analy- sis of historical records, Ravina has revealed that Saigō was shot through the hip on the battlefield and was decapitated by one of his followers who sought to protect his legend. Saigō’s head was buried to hide his identity, but it was later discovered. This less-than-spectacular death for a figure who would come to epitomize the warrior ethos necessitated the invention of the myth of his ritual suicide to inspire his followers and to preserve the memory of his defiance of the Meiji state.122
Those who had served with Saigō in the Satsuma Rebellion felt a sense of betrayal toward the Meiji state and its leaders, especially Ōkubo Toshi- michi (1830–1878), whom they felt had quashed Saigō’s plans to invade Korea in 1873 and had plotted to assassinate Saigō in the days leading up to the Satsuma Rebellion in 1877. Though a groundless rumor, the belief that the government was plotting to assassinate Saigō fueled discontent among the students of Saigō’s academy. Even before Saigō’s death, his fol-
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lowers, enraged by the rumors of a conspiracy to kill Saigō, had begun plotting revenge against Ōkubo. After Saigō’s defeat, his students who sur- vived the rebellion sought vengeance against the Meiji leaders who had destroyed Saigō.
On the morning of May 14, 1878, Shimada Ichirō (1848–1878) assassi- nated home minister Ōkubo Toshimichi at Kioizaka in Tokyo as he left his residence to call on the emperor. Shimada, a former army captain, was one of more than one hundred disgruntled former samurai who were impli- cated in the assassination. Just as Ōkubo boarded his carriage, six assassins brandishing swords appeared and cut down the horses attached to Ōkubo’s carriage to prevent his escape. With the carriage leaning to one side from the weight of the fallen horses, the assassins then slashed the driver. They pulled Ōkubo out of the carriage and slaughtered him in the street. After slaying Ōkubo, Shimada and the others fled toward the Department of the Imperial Household, where they surrendered to the authorities. Following their trial, Shimada and his five coconspirators were sentenced to death, and twenty-six other accomplices were sentenced to prison.
For Shimada and the five others who conspired to assassinate Ōkubo, the killing was not only an act of vengeance, but a political statement that imitated history through the re-enactment of the heroism of the assassins of Ii Naosuke at the Sakurada Gate in 1860. Ii, who served as honorary chief councilor to the shogun, outraged imperial loyalists by signing the Treaty of Amity and Commerce Between the United States and Japan (Harris Treaty) in 1858, against the wishes of the imperial court. As Chōya shinbun noted in its report on the assassination of Ōkubo, “every single government official down to the lowest level without exception were re- minded of the events of Ii Naosuke at the Sakurada Gate during the old shogunate.”123 On Shimada’s person, the police found a “letter of ven- geance” (zankanjō) signed by all six men. In addition to the copy of the letter found on Shimada, an associate had posted two copies of the letter to the periodicals Kinji hyōron and Chōya shinbun at Shimada’s request.124 While the motivations for the assassination itself were perhaps deeply rooted in bonds of personal loyalty, the publication of the letter aimed to publicly cast the assassination in the rhetoric of political justice.
The letter, which was intended to explain their reasons for killing Ōkubo, was written by Kuga Kyūkō (Yoshinao) (1843–1916) at the request of Shimada. Kuga was a former samurai from Kanazawa who violated or-
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ders against travel and made his way to Kyushu during the Restoration to join with Saigō. According to Kuga’s testimony, Shimada had approached Kuga about writing a letter as early as the spring of 1877 during the Sat- suma Rebellion.125 Kuga acquiesced to Shimada’s request and drafted a letter. After deciding to wait for a more opportune moment to attempt the assassination, Shimada burned the original letter. In the spring of the following year, when Shimada’s resolve had hardened, he asked Kuga to rewrite the original letter. Kuga rewrote the letter based on his memory of the earlier draft, but claims to have revised the letter in light of recent events, such as the death of Saigō. Though Kuga denied that the letter was an expression of his own feelings, it was nonetheless an eloquent expres- sion of popular nationalist sentiment that sought to condemn the inequi- ties, corruption, and incompetence of the Meiji state and its leaders. It criticized the government for not only “stifling public debate, suppressing the people’s rights, and abusing public office for private gain,” but for “for- feiting national sovereignty by choosing the wrong path in foreign rela- tions.”126 The letter further called for the assassination of others, including Itō Hirobumi and Kido Takayoshi. Later that same year, police arrested a suspect for plotting to assassinate Itō. According to the indictment issued by the public prosecutor, the suspect had acquired a copy of Shimada’s let- ter, which inspired him to attempt to assassinate Itō.127
Even Fukuzawa Yukichi, the paragon of Meiji-period liberal thought, expressed sympathy for Saigō. While others accused Saigō of being a “trai- tor” (kokuzoku), Fukuzawa defended him in an essay written shortly after the Satsuma Rebellion. Although not published until 1901, the essay praised what Fukuzawa described as Saigō’s “spirit of resistance” (teikō seishin).128 Fukuzawa wrote, “In fact, if one were to argue on the point of the spirit of the people, then the birth of a ‘second Saigō’ (dai-ni no Saigō) is something that should be celebrated for the sake of the nation, but I am afraid that I can only regret that such a person will not arise again.” In lamenting that there was no one to assume the mantle of Saigō, Fukuzawa bemoaned the lack of government criticism, especially among newspaper reporters, who he described as “government lapdogs.” In this way, the legacy of Saigō Takamori was promoted not only by disfranchised samurai who resented the Meiji state’s program of popular conscription and the commutation of stipends, but also by those who invoked the spirit of the Freedom and People’s Rights Movement to advocate greater representa- tion in the name of the people.
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NatIoNalISm, vIgIlaNtE juStIcE, aNd thE polItIcS of dIrEct actIoN
The narrative of heroism in modern Japan grew out of the discourse of popular nationalism that celebrated defiance of state authority, party poli- tics, and big business. Unlike such heroes as Lieutenant Hirose Takeo (1856–1904), whose death during the Port Arthur blockade in the Russo- Japanese War was fashioned into a narrative of self-sacrifice that supported state nationalism, the popular heroes discussed herein were ones who es- poused a different conception of the Japanese nation from that promoted by the Meiji state. The heroism of these men was not sanctioned by the state with the aim of making the Japanese people into good national sub- jects, but was an expression of a competing nationalism that articulated itself in opposition to the Japanese state.
Evidence of this contested nationalism can be found throughout the Meiji period, particularly in the discourse of hero worship. For example, Tanaka Hozumi (1876–1944), a professor at Waseda University, gave a speech to his young male students in 1910 (reprinted in Yūben [Oratory]) in which he emphasized the importance of heroism and bold action. Tanaka was a scholar of finance who later served as the fourth president of Waseda University from 1931 to 1944. Tanaka states:
The fortunes of states depend upon whether, at the right time, bold men
(gōketsu) will come forward. If such bold men should fortunately appear at
the right time, then the state can be greatly at ease; but if unfortunately bold
men do not appear in response to the times, then the country cannot escape
falling into decline. Throughout history in most cases—owing to the strange
providence of heaven—suitable, bold men are born at the right moment.
However, in some countries, no heroes appear in response to the times. If
society does not give birth to bold men who respond to these moments, then
these decaying societies, without a thread of hope or a spark of life, shall but
decline.129
Tanaka laments to his students that whereas the early Meiji period had seen the rise of heroes such as Saigō Takamori, Ōkuma Shigenobu, and Iwakura Tomomi, the late Meiji period was lacking in “bold heroes” (eiyū gōketsu).
A common refrain in the popular discourse on heroes was a denuncia- tion of politicians and the corruptness of party politics. In his speech Tanaka notes that, unlike the heroes of the early Meiji period, “the hon-
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ored members of the Diet chosen by the people sacrifice the welfare of the nation to their own personal profits and selfish desires.”130 As a conse- quence, national heroes were defined as those bold men of action who would deliver justice to those who betrayed the nation through their indi- vidual and selfish desires. The ideal Japanese man was thus an avenging hero who acted in the interest of the nation by defending the collective good. But his exhortations to action, while motivated by a strong belief in the nation, were often driven by a distrust of party politics. What mattered most was the sincerity of the individual’s actions, particularly as it related to the welfare of the nation. The reason for this contempt for party politics derived not only from the numerous scandals that tested popular belief in democratic institutions, but from the widespread belief that democracy had been bestowed on the Japanese people by the emperor. Following on the legal theories of the constitutional scholar Hozumi Yatsuka, Tanaka argues in his speech that many take for granted their right to vote, and thus the emperor’s gift of democracy was like “casting pearls before swine” (neko ni koban). Tanaka urged his audience to take greater interest in poli- tics and to be more politically ambitious, since the times desperately de- manded heroes. As a result, the hero archetype of the late Meiji period did not serve the interests of the state, but rather glorified righteous resistance in defiance of state authority.
The genealogy of the theory of direct action as a means for affecting political change in Japan is often linked to the philosophy of Kōtoku Shūsui (1871–1911). Like many of his contemporaries, Kōtoku’s image of radical thought and popular action derived from his identification with the Restoration shishi.131 As one of the early leaders of the socialist move- ment, Kōtoku was a harsh critic of the Meiji state and its policies.132 In his early career, Kōtoku’s deep hatred of clan-faction politics (hanbatsu seiji) made him sympathetic to the ideas of anarchism. From 1897–1901, Kōtoku often wrote the satirical “chasetsu,” or humorous editorial column, in the caricature magazine Marumaru chimbun under the pen name Iroha-an. In scathing attacks on the hanbatsu, Kōtoku gave expression in these edi- torials to the idea that the Meiji leadership was corrupt and illegitimate. Although he distrusted politics, Kōtoku did not entirely reject the Meiji constitutional system prior to around 1905, when he came to embrace the ideas of anarchism. Instead, he despised the clan-faction politics that de- parted from the constitutional system and the political parties that com- promised their principles to the interests of their clan-faction allegiances.133
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The notion of dissolving social hierarchies in anarchist philosophy ap- pealed to Kōtoku as a means for remedying the inequities of clan-faction politics.
Many other Meiji-period youth followed a similar path from criticism of clan-faction politics to the sanctioning of direct action. What motivated this attraction was a sense of hopelessness and despair regarding contemporary society. As Kōtoku writes in 1901, not just anarchists, but those of all classes become hopeless: “With the daily intensification in the corruption and vice of our national society and the hardship of daily life, they lose all hope for the future and fall into complete despair. Nothing in the world is as coura- geous, dauntless, and stalwart as the desperate. Supposing that their ambi- tion grows, they may become desperate enough to believe that they have no other means to achieve greatness except through violence.”134
Since the philosophy of direct action in modern Japanese history draws on the ideas of Kōtoku, who himself came to embrace the anarchist phi- losophy of Mikhail Bakunin (1814–1876) and Peter Kropotkin (1842–1921), the focus of political action was one that generally emphasized collective as opposed to individual action. Consistent with the philosophy of anar- cho-syndicalism, the tactic most often advocated by Kōtoku and other radi- cal socialists including Yamakawa Hitoshi (1880–1958) was to organize a general strike that would force political change by disrupting the econ- omy. Owing to the influence of socialist ideas, the concept of direct action was strongly rooted in the idea of collective group action based on the mo- bilization and solidarity of workers. Individual acts of political violence, such as assassination, were not explicitly among the stated tactics of anar- chist or socialist political philosophy.
Much as the sōshi (political ruffians) of the Freedom and People’s Rights Movement had invoked the legacy of the shishi (men of high purpose) to explain the purity of their motives, the “ultra-nationalists” of the 1920s and 1930s made similar appeals to invoke the spirit of the bakumatsu-era imperial loyalists to justify their actions in calling for a “second Restora- tion” (dai-ni ishin). Following the restoration of imperial rule in 1868, indi- viduals responded to the crisis of their times by advocating the revolution- ary idea of a “second Restoration” by reinterpreting the events of the Meiji Restoration to suit their political objectives.135 During the 1920s and 1930s, political extremists invoked the idea of the return to imperial rule (ousei fukko) through a so-called “Shōwa Restoration” (Shōwa ishin). The sup- porters of a Shōwa Restoration imagined themselves as antishogunal shi-
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shi seeking a restoration of imperial rule. While likening the contem- porary political conditions to the crisis during the bakumatsu era, they resolved to take action. They legitimized their actions by advocating as synonymous the renewal (ishin) and revival ( fukko) of imperial rule and by longing for the realization of reform of the current regime into one that unified sovereign and subject.136 In rationalizing their calls for direct political action, the identification of the present as a period of chaos that paralleled the conditions prior to the Meiji Restoration became the under- lying principle for the assertion of individual action.
Consequently, individual acts of political violence aimed at effecting political and social change in modern Japan were often self-conscious enactments of a heroic narrative that was rooted in the mythology of the Meiji Restoration. In one of the first political assassinations that inaugu- rated what historians have described as the “era of political assassina- tions” in Japanese history, Asahi Heigo (1890–1921) killed the entrepreneur Yasuda Zenjirō in his home before committing suicide on September 28, 1921. In his “letter of vindication” (zankanjō), which he wrote to explain his actions, Asahi appealed to other young shishi to help bring about the Restoration. Asahi’s act of writing a zankanjō was, amid the mass culture of the 1920s, an anachronism invoked as a nostalgic conceit. By carrying with him this letter, he was quoting the actions of Shimada Ichirō. Though a more or less forgotten tradition since Shimada’s assassination of Ōkubo Toshimichi, the writing of zankanjō had become a common literary trope in the historical fiction (rekishi shosetsu) of the Taishō period. In this way, Asahi’s letter was a redemptive gesture of the heroic spirit of Shimada that borrowed on a literary tradition that had been reworked in popular histori- cal fiction. His actions were structured by his identification with the pro- tagonists of popular narratives, including the historical narrativization of the Meiji Restoration and popular biographies of Restoration-period heroes. Even his own suicide following the assassination was intended to bring closure to the narrative. As Asahi notes in his letter, “rather than dying a natural death, it is the dream of all men to die slaying a villain.”137 In killing the “villain,” Asahi had established his heroism in accordance with the historical and literary narratives that informed and structured his actions. In the wake of rising political violence, the Christian socialist Abe Isoo (1865–1949) called for greater police regulation of ballads (nani- wabushi) and storytelling (kōdan) that romanticize violence as heroic, and
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he urged the revision of national textbooks to “steer the ‘nation’s heart’ (kokumin no kokoro) away from violence.”138
In his letter of vindication, Asahi writes that business leaders such as Yasuda think only about how they can profit and not about the nation or their responsibility to society. In the discourse of “ultra-nationalism,” such as Asahi’s zankanjō, hostility toward the state is expressed through con- tempt for the government and its leaders. Asahi writes,
To the genrō, politicians, and high officials, I tell you that while you hide
behind the banner of the imperial nation (kunkoku), you use your position
and plot with your henchmen to deceive the loyal and naive people (koku-
min) by imposing laws that serve your interests, accumulating your dirty
riches, and—even more offensive—assuming command over the wisdom
of his majesty. You conspire with the profiteers to persecute his majesty’s
subjects and express no regret for your evil deeds. As a result of all your
wicked acts, you are destroying our glorious national polity (kokutai). Do you
wish to demolish the distinct character and culture of Japan that our fore-
fathers labored to maintain?139
In this letter, Asahi portrays himself as a vigilante hero who defends the nation against the crass interests of politicians and business leaders. Al- though his language borrows from the rhetoric of anarchism and com- munism, he points out that he does not share their sympathies. While Asahi’s assault on the hypocrisy of the upper classes suggests a strong class consciousness, he couches his rhetoric in the idiom of nationalism.
Kita Ikki (1883–1937), whose 1919 Nihon kaizō hōan taikō (Outline Plan for the Reorganization of Japan) inspired Asahi, later claimed to have re- ceived a posthumous note from Asahi after his suicide. “Kita hung the note up on the wall and then, while chanting the Lotus Sutra, he saw a vi- sion of Asahi’s smiling face. . . . Kita doubtless felt a personal connection with Asahi in the case of reforming Japan, just as Asahi had identified with Kita’s ‘Outline Plan.’ ”140 In the February 26 Incident (1936), which led to Kita’s execution for his complicity in the plot, a group of young mili- tary officers led around 1,500 men in an attempt to bring about a “Shōwa Restoration” of imperial rule. In addition to occupying the Diet and War Ministry buildings, they killed or wounded numerous government offi- cials. Among the leaders of the coup was Isobe Asaichi (1905–1937), who had previously been arrested for conspiring to assassinate high-ranking
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government and military officials in November 1934 ( Jūichigatsu jiken). Isobe believed it was his destiny to lead the low-ranking military men of Chōshū in a second imperial restoration. Isobe came from a small, impov- erished village in Yamaguchi Prefecture (Chōshū), but was unofficially adopted into the middle-class family of Matsuoka Zenjirō after completing elementary school. Matsuoka was a government clerk, from a family that traced its lineage to the warrior class (shizoku). Although the father of three sons, Matsuoka took an interest in Isobe, whom he felt had a better chance than his own sons of realizing his dream of producing a scion who could serve the empire as a soldier. “As a child, Matsuoka idolized those Chōshū shishi who gave their lives for the Meiji Restoration, and he famil- iarized himself with the life stories of Yoshida Shōin (1830–1859) and his followers such as Takasugi Shinsaku (1839–1867) and Kusaka Gensui (1840–1864) to the point that he could recite their biographies.”141 He often recited these stories to Isobe, who felt a strong connection to these men rooted in their shared local identity. When Isobe spoke to his comrades about leading a second Restoration, he often invoked Takasugi and Kusaka as examples of men who had taken direct action. As a friend of Isobe de- scribed him, “Isobe was the kind of man who immediately expressed his thoughts into action.”142
The act of impersonating the spirit of the Restoration-period shishi was about recovering one’s historical identity. Like Saigō, the shishi of the Res- toration were popular mediums that carried stories about the past by serv- ing as a reference and guide to dictate the actions of the present. The re- vival of popular fascination with Restoration-period heroes thus gave rise to acts of impersonation that sought to bridge the gap between the past and the present. Yet the knowledge that informed this longing for a con- nection to the past was shaped by popular narratives, such as the stories, rumors, and biographies of these popular heroes. These narratives be- came part of the Japanese militarists’ own self-representation that permit- ted them to identify with the shishi and their mission to redeem the nation. In this regard, the cultural practice of reviving the spirit of the shishi was based on popular memory that was shaped and structured into a narrative of heroism.
In the early 1930s, Japan was shaken by a further wave of political assas- sinations. The Ketsumeidan Incident and May 15 Incident were acts of political assassination that sought political renovation through the pun- ishment of “corrupt” public figures. In his analysis of the public Ketsu-
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meidan Incident and May 15 Incident trials in 1933 and 1934, Stephen S. Large reveals how political assassins came to be portrayed in the media as “heroic saviors of the nation.”143 Buddhist priest Inoue Nisshō (1887– 1967), who was the mastermind behind the Ketsumeidan Incident, testi- fied about the Ketsumeidan’s motives for assassinating Inoue Junnosuke (1869–1932) and Dan Takuma (1858–1932). He described their motives as inspired by the desire to cleanse the decadence of Western influence. Invoking the heroes of the Meiji Restoration, he recounted how he had recruited his accomplices:
Nearby this small temple there was a museum . . . erected to commemorate
the Mito heroes of the Meiji Restoration [of 1868] who killed the evil Bakufu
leader, Ii Naosuke, in the Sakuradamon Incident, in 1860. All of the fourteen
or so pure-hearted young men I recruited from villages in the surrounding
area grew up knowing the famous story and like myself, they later thought
of themselves as martyrs of the coming Shōwa Restoration—just like the
Mito martyrs of the Meiji Restoration.14 4
The political assassinations of the 1930s were structured in narrative terms by the actions of the past. At the conclusion of the trial, Inoue’s tes- timony garnered sympathy from the public who identified with the purity of his patriotic motives since his actions were aimed at punishing the “wicked” ruling elites who sought wealth and power at the expense of the people. The narrative of the Ketsumeidan’s heroism, like the narratives of all those heroes both great and small who sought to impersonate the ac- tions of the heroes in history, is evidence of how narrative shapes the pres- ent through the eternal return of the past.
In conclusion, for adolescent males in prewar Japan, an emerging con- sciousness of history and destiny informed hero narratives not only by providing historical precedents for contemporary problems, but by offer- ing models for emulation that were based on the legacy and achievements of Japan’s national heroes. Moreover, heroism itself was a concept that was closely related to the consciousness of history as it was shaped by great men in the past. In this regard, heroism was not perceived exclusively as an inherent characteristic of a few great men, but rather—like the heroes in history and fiction—was the destiny of all men who were determined to take bold actions. The issue of historical agency was thus fundamental to the debate on heroes, which asserted the priority of human action to shape events in history. Exhortations to heroism thus were calls to take
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bold, decisive action, since only human agency could change the direction of history.
Heroes, like stars and celebrities today, were important in shaping gen- der identity in prewar Japan. Hero narratives that circulated in the media shaped the self-presentation of male adolescent identity, encouraging youths to imitate the actions of heroes. In the process of modeling behav- ior after national heroes, issues of historical agency overlapped with the desire for male autonomy in the struggle for masculinization. Young boys were initiated into a process of rejecting female dependence by valorizing the empire and nation as the masculine space of bold action. As a result, the ideology of nationalism operated in popular culture to navigate the transition to adulthood and shape gender identity.
The hero myth was thus an ideological means for motivating direct action and self-understanding. By drawing on the literary and historical heroes in adolescent fiction and narrative history, it tied the actions of adolescent males to the innate desire for subjectivity, the belief that one could make a difference in history and that one’s actions are tied to the fate of the nation. Such questions are inextricably bound to the psychic dilemma of what the male subject takes to be the self. While narratives of heroism can be didactic allegories for understanding morality and defin- ing self-purpose, they can also sanction acts of unspeakable violence and destruction. Popular narratives of heroism in prewar Japan not only struc- tured illiberal and radical responses to the state as a struggle against elit- ism and the corruption of party politics, they also formed the situational conditions that modeled acts of self-sacrifice into suicide attacks and a culture of national martyrdom.
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