Inexorable Modernity: Japan’s Grappling with Modernity in the Arts (review)

It should be stated at the outset that the editor and authors of this excellent volume wholeheartedly agree that the notion of linear or universal modernity is a vexed one. By critiquing a wide spectrum of practitioners and theorists, the authors aim “to capture the multifariousness of modernity in the period spanning the 1850s through the 1970s and to tease out more delicately shaded understandings of how Japan modernized” (5). The artists and theorists discussed had distinct ideas about how (and even whether) Japan could or should become “modern.” Is modernization synonymous with westernization? Is Japanese modernity a unique item found by looking inward or even backward? Or is modernity for Japan some fusion of these dichotomies? While only four of the articles deal directly with theatre, the entire book offers tantalizing glimpses of key social and artistic trends that demonstrate the connections and clashes between and among the various arts and theories.

The first section considers art and aesthetics, a field that offers extraordinary riches for understanding intellectual currents. The rapid influx of internationalization, economic and social transformations, including the development of a highly educated and economically vibrant urban sphere during the Meiji era (1868–1912), led artists to search for a sense of national and artistic identity and to question the role of art and the artist. For visual artist Kawanabe Kyōsai (1831–89), this meant arrest and punishment by the censors for blatant political and social satires on the one hand, while winning awards and honors on the other. As Brenda Jordon states, “It would be going too far to suggest that Kyōsai was a radical in the sense of the sōshi shibai actors [militant, untrained, often student actors advocating political change], but he clearly chose to contribute satirical, humorous, and anti-authoritarian imagery to the ongoing ideological debate” (39). In contrast, Mikiko Hirayama argues that the attacks of art critic/historian Kojima Kikuo (1887–1950) on prewar avant-gardism were not the result of academic conservatism, but offered an alternative, eclectic version of Japanese Western-style painting (yōga), termed “a new realism” (atarashiki shajitsushugi)—an ideal that would fuse naturalistic and modernist approaches with traditional East Asian modes of visual expression. Hirayama tellingly notes that “[a]lthough he never made an explicit value judgment throughout his articles, his comments clearly imply the superiority of Japanese painting to Western painting” (62). The issue of national identity, couched in terms of superiority or inferiority to the West, may be said to define a century and a half of Japanese struggles with modernization.

The other two articles in this section discuss the paradoxical ascendancy of yōga (Western-style painting) during the war years, and the complex ethical/artistic concepts of theorist Watsuji Tetsurō (1889–1960), one of the most influential thinkers of Japan’s twentieth century. His deeply nationalist and particularistic philosophy strongly supported the emperor system and cultural nationalism: art was valid only if it served a moral purpose. His romantic, ahistorical longing for the ancient Japanese past coincided with his turn to the right. Like the powerful ultranationalists of today, he imagined an “original, idealized Japan, where he could validate his cultural identity” (107). In defining this idealized Japan, he nevertheless turned to Western romantic yearnings, insisting on the fundamental affinity between Japanese and ancient Greek culture.

These essays pave the way for the four dealing with theatre. Jonah Salz discusses the history of inter-genre kyōgen experiments in the postwar period, noting that the first three such works were implemented not by the heads of schools, but by subordinates, and that these three plays all dealt with incompatible spouses. By “inter-genre,” Salz means the officially unacceptable, but trendy mingling of actors from disparate Japanese genres (such as nō, kabuki, bunraku, kyōgen, Takarazuka, or shingeki). He reminds us that kyōgen has always been about the “spirit of irrepressible insubordination” (129), and he...