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  • Advertising Tower: Japanese Modernism and Modernity in the 1920s
  • Gregory Golley (bio)
Advertising Tower: Japanese Modernism and Modernity in the 1920s. By William O. Gardner. Harvard University Asia Center, Cambridge, Mass., 2006. vi, 349 pages. $42.95.

William Gardner's Advertising Tower will be a staple of modern Japanese literary studies for years to come. The author's command of his subject ranges across a broad thematic terrain, moving from the rarefied problems of poetic form to the geography of empire, from the roots of anarchism to the history of commercial advertising. Advertising Tower thus complements and amplifies upon the best examples of a growing list of recent studies in Japanese aesthetic modernism, including the work of Seiji Lippit, Gennifer Weisenfeld, Hosea Hirata, and Joan Ericson. Focusing on the careers of avant-garde poet Hagiwara Kyōjirō (1899–1938) and popular diarist Hayashi Fumiko (1903–51), Gardner examines the historical meaning of the burgeoning mass media culture of the 1920s and its centrality to Japan's modernist moment. Mass culture defined the readership of the writers in question both as a consumer market and as a political constituency; but it also permeated the [End Page 545] texture of their work in a number of ways. It is Gardner's effort to appreciate the link between "mass culture" as a formal problem and "the masses" as a historical reality that sets his work apart.

If the European avant-garde attacked artistic autonomy by revealing the ideological foundations of art's own institutional structures, as Peter Bürger has famously argued,1 then the relatively un-self-critical works categorized as "modernist" rode the coattails of this revelation. This is no less true in Japan where literary modernism pursued the promise of an aesthetic vision in which "pure literature" (jun bungaku) and "mass literature" (taishū bungaku) would cease to be antithetical terms. The advertising tower of Gardner's title—taken from a line in Hagiwara Kyōjirō's 1925 poetry collection Shikei senkoku (Death sentence)—evinces both the ambition and ambiguity of this vision. Just as Hagiwara's call to replace "all forms of poetic literature" with an "electric-radio advertising tower" compresses into a single image the technical, the commercial, and the revolutionary dimensions of modernity, Gardner's title asks us to understand these features as inseparable (p. 108). The image at the heart of this study thus encompasses both advertising and propaganda, suggesting all the dangers and potentials associated with what Gardner describes as newly emergent categories of social grouping: "'the crowds' (gunshū), 'the people' (minshū), 'the masses' (taishū), and 'national subjects' (kokumin)" (p. 7).

As presented in Gardner's study, Hagiwara Kyōjirō's meditations upon the nature of art and of the self (jiga) (published in an essay entitled "Tōrai shidan e no keikoku" [A warning to the poetry establishment]) reflect the conditions of this new collective reality, offering a concept of a "society-self" (shakaiga) that revolves around a profoundly material vision of interconnection. New social relations were both enabled by and reflected in the permeating technologies of mass culture, so it is no accident that the poet's language refers to the metaphorical physiology of these technical conditions. "All the elements of society course through our blood vessels," Hagiwara writes. "Every possible kind of blood runs through our blood vessels and to our heart." For Hagiwara, then, "society-self" is determined by a constant interaction between individual and environment. "While the blood vessels lead in and out of the heart and permeate the body," Gardner explains in his discussion of this passage, "they are also, in the lungs, part of a system of constant transactions with the 'outside' environment (the exchange of oxygen and carbon dioxide), ultimately effacing the distinction between inside and outside and replacing them with a series of interlacing physical and chemical systems" (p. 91). Gardner's treatment of Hagiwara's "society-self," which he describes as a "proto-cybernetic view of the self and the environment" (p. 92), offers a conceptual model by which to understand the [End Page 546] poet's association with anarchism in the mid-1920s and his link to the...

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