Editor's Introduction

How you see killing, Bruce Suttmeier argues in "Seeing Past Destruction: Trauma and History in Kaikō Takeshi," makes you a certain kind of person. Suttmeier's essay regards the visual politics involved in viewing brutal war images that were released to Japanese viewers in 1965, twenty years after the Fifteen Year War had ended. Viewers glimpsed these long-suppressed images through a framework that novelist Kaikō Takeshi provided. When the Mainichi paper asked Kaikō to frame the photographs of Japanese aggression in words, he drew on insights about looking that he had acquired seeing executions during the U.S. aggression in Vietnam. Kaikō's famous association of Vietnam War images and photoimages of Japanese aggression in Asia was the result.

Kaikō's point was that, far from empathic identification, traumatic viewing gives rise to distantiation and to the easy consumption of death. A palpable reminder of vulnerability and victimization, the Vietnam photos obliterated empathy. Kaikō believed that extreme modes of spectatorship breeds voyeuristic looking. Readers seeing photographs of Japan's aggression in Asia, as if for the first time, saw them without empathy, without identification, in the mode of consumption. No doubt Kaikō should trouble us, too. Our gaze is presently fixed on Abu Ghraib, while evidence of killings in Vietnam, Chile, Indonesia, and Palestine are reduced to nothing. The epistemic privilege of the spectator, Suttmeier reminds us, obliterates the past, naturalizing it and political responsibilities.

This theme of how we are made carries over into Shu Kuge's scrutiny of the bereft category "woman writers" in Tamura Toshiko's stories. In his "Politics of Doodling: Tamura Toshiko's 'A Woman Writer,'" Kuge's premise is that writing never represents a self but rather either engages selves already ideologically predicated or crafts partial, abject ones. Because Tamura's short stories, and particularly her "A Woman Writer," focus on the refusal of writers to stay within the lines, to produce on a regular schedule to assume the burden of secondariness and substitute doodling for work, Kuge asserts that Tamura is primarily a political writer. Tamura does not describe but instead produces alternative feminine subjects. Usually in the absence of a formal plot, and often between fits of time-wasting (husband-beating, complaining, etc.), a Tamura protagonist raises her hands. The politics begin. Kuge's strong, subtle insight is that doodling—not faithfully writing properly—in the grid of machine-formatted, professional, writing paper introjects political resistance into the naturalist mode of expression that was hegemonic in Tamura's era. Naturalism gave no dignified prefigured subject form to women like Tamura. In her resistance to naturalism's erasure of the political domain, Tamura insisted on conjuring the hands that make the world. Hysteria, emotional volatility, and the erratic bodily movement of using hands for doodling inside the parameters of lines comprise, Kuge claims, a violent political effort by Tamura to liberate both her own and other female bodies from the dominant social inscription.

Miyako Inoue's "Things That Speak: Peirce, Benjamin, and the Kinesthetics of Commodity Advertisement in Japanese Women's Magazines, 1900 to the 1930s," by examining a problem of capitalist modernity, concerns itself with subject forms and subject-object relations understood through commodity advertisements. This ambitious article seeks a means of showing how perceptual modernity is instigated through the representation of advertising images and, more importantly, their modes of address. Like Bruce Suttmeier and Shu Kuge, Inoue rewrites the positions of theorists she draws upon as she develops her two basic points: to show the utility of connecting Charles Peirce's semiotics to Walter Benjamin's emphasis on the experiential in modern capitalist society through twentieth-century advertising practices and to initiate a Peircean analysis of popular magazine advertising through a consideration of advertisements in Japanese women's magazines. As the schoolgirl figure became the normative modern figure—the modern girl—for women in the first third of the twentieth century, schoolgirl speech emerged as the written form of female speech as such. It was the ability of schoolgirl speech to allegedly convey historically contingent reality that made it particularly viable in advertising, and it is...