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Reviewed by:
  • Absolute Erotic, Absolute Grotesque
  • Janis Mimura
Mark Driscoll, Absolute Erotic, Absolute Grotesque (Durham: Duke University Press 2010)

In this self-consciously revisionist study of Japanese imperialism, Mark Driscoll takes up the old question of “how Japan came to be a world power in a few short decades” from a subalternist, Marxist perspective. (ix) Criticizing the traditional focus on the metropolitan, Euro-American inspired core of Japanese élite leaders and institutions, he concentrates on the “peripheral marginalia” of Chinese labourers, Japanese pimps and forced female sex workers, and Korean tenant farmers, who he sees as the driving forces of empire. By examining Japanese imperialism at its outer edges, far away from the centres of power, he seeks to reveal Japanese imperialism’s true logic, mechanisms of power, and horrific, exploitative nature.

Driscoll’s Absolute Erotic, Absolute Grotesque is informed by an elaborate theoretical framework which he lays out in his preface and introduction. Synthesizing a number of perspectives, including Marx’s theory of capital, Foucault’s biopolitics, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s critique of capitalism, Japanese modernist discourse of erotic-grotesque (ero-guro), Tanabe Hajime’s absolute dialectics, and the bio-philosophy of Minakata Kumagusu, he argues that Japanese imperialism was characterized by a central, unresolvable struggle between two forces: the erotic – “the vital productivity of desire” – and the grotesque – “the violent usurpation of this desire by hegemonic power” (Marx’s “capital”). (10) For the modern, biopolitical, capitalist Meiji state, the motor force of profits (surplus) and hegemonic power was human life and its erotic, creative, life-producing energy. In its colonies, the state condoned and expropriated (“grotesqued”) it, and in the process became [End Page 347] deformed by it, especially from the 1930s. At the base of this weighty theoretical structure is the Marxist view of Japanese imperialism as an advanced stage of capitalism, by which capital searches overseas for new markets and resources (labour) to exploit and “subsume.”

The book is divided into three parts which examine the successive stages of Japanese imperialism: biopolitics (1895–1914), neuropolitics (1920–1936), and necropolitics. Part I examines Japanese imperialism in its biopolitical form in the first two decades of colonizing Taiwan, Korea, and Manchuria. The first chapter examines Chinese migrant workers and their pivotal role in making Japanese imperialism possible. Driscoll portrays Gotō Shinpei as the consummate “biopolitician” who endeavoured to both improve life in Taiwan by promoting better hygiene and skim off profits from opium consumption by placing it under government regulation. Chapter 2 relates the accounts of Japanese pimps such as Muraoka Iheiji in squeezing out Chinese traffickers from the profitable trade in abducted Japanese female sex workers, the subject of the third chapter. Japanese pimps and prostitutes had been left to fend for themselves or “liberated” from the biopolitical Meiji state (as well as their families) to make a better life on the continent and send back profits. In Chapter 4, we see how Korean tenant farmers stepped in to perform the labour originally intended for Japanese settlers and pay exorbitantly high rents to absentee Japanese landlords.

As Japan entered the neuropolitical stage, a more advanced level of consumerist capitalism was made possible by colonial profits. During this stage, we see the “real subsumption of living labor becoming dead, objectified labor” (17) as a result of its commodification and consumption. Chapter 5 examines Japanese sexologists and their creation of an oversexed Japanese masculinity. Chapter 6 introduces some of the representative ero-guro literature and shows how military officers consumed it in increasingly sensationalist, morbid ways, especially on the battlefield.

In the final stage, beginning with the occupation of Manchuria in 1931, Japanese imperialism took on a necropolitical form characterized by the “deformal subsumption” of capital as the biopolitical life-sustaining, regenerative aspects of rule were abandoned in favour of the consumption and disposal of the “living dead” through forced labour policies, drugs, rape, pillage, and murder. Chapter 7 analyzes Manchukuo’s drug trade, money-laundering schemes, and forced labour policies under the “new bureaucrat” Kishi Nobusuke, the gangster Amakasu Masahiko, and Nissan president and Mangyō chief Ayukawa Giisuke. The last chapter covers old ground on Manchukuo, but highlights the corruption, sexual escapades, and forced labour...

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