Creative Nothingness: Dada as Art, Politics, and Religion in Interwar Japan

Dada is not art, not literature, not social movement, not religion, not science. It is not futurist or expressionist, and at the same time Dada is all of them.

—Tsuji Jun, "Bungaku iga?" Kaizō 5, no. 1 (1923)

Anarchism is not so much a grand unified theory of revolution based on a socio-economic metaphysics and a philosophy of history, as a moral conviction, an ethical disposition that finds expression in practice and as practice. Anarchism is a different way of conceiving and enacting social relations between people, where they are not defined by the authority of the state, the law and the police, but by free agreement between them.

—Simon Critchley, introduction to The Anarchist Turn (2013)

Introduction

This article examines some key aspects of the development of Dada in Japan by examining the life and work of Tsuji Jun, Takahashi Shinkichi and the Mavo movement, highlighting the relationship between Japanese Dada and classical (and post-) anarchism, as well as potential connections between Dada and (Zen) Buddhism. The concept of "translingual practice" as developed by scholars of East Asia such as Lydia Liu and Sho Konishi provides a framework; in particular, Konishi's argument that much of Japanese "modernity" can be understood as a translingual practice of "self-liberation" (as opposed to Liu's "self-colonization").

Anarchism in Japan

While some scholars such as David Graeber have argued for a recognition of anarchist practices and habits in many traditional cultures across the globe, and others, such as Peter Marshall, have made the case for a classical East Asian source for anarchistic ideas in the Chinese classic Daodejing, this article limits its focus on anarchism to the (admittedly multiform) set of ideas and practices that have self-consciously adopted the (initially pejorative) term "anarchy" as a banner under which to construct a radical reevaluation of modern society without—or with an extremely limited—state or overarching set of laws and institutions.¹ For most scholars of anarchism, this includes a familiar litany of names, such as Max Stirner (1806–56), Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (1809–65), Mikhail Bakunin (1814–76), Peter Kropotkin (1842–1921), Errico Malatesta (1853–1932), Emma Goldman (1869–1940), and Gustav Landauer (1870–1919), with a few others, such as William Godwin (1756–1836), Josiah Warren (1798–1874), Leo Tolstoy (1828–1910), Elisée Reclus (1830–1905), Benjamin Tucker (1854–1939), and Alexander Berkman (1870–1936), filling out the broader field.² Again, while noting the diversity of thought in the work of this baker's dozen of foundational anarchist thinkers, they generally shared the following principles: 1) opposition to hierarchy; 2) decentralization; 3) commitment to freedom and autonomy; and 4) opposition to vanguardism as expressed in some forms of socialism.³

In its early stages, on the basis of a shared opposition to private property (centralized in Proudhon's famous gambit: "Property is theft!") anarchism naturally flowed into the broader net of "socialist" thought and practice, though the famous falling out between Marx and Bakunin at the First International (1868) was prescient of what would later emerge as a seemingly endless battle between those "socialists" who believed in some form of state control of the means of production—and/or "dictatorship of the proletariat"—and those, the anarchists, who were suspicious that the state or any sort of "dictatorship," however progressive or benevolent in intention, could ever solve the problems of capitalist alienation. That said, even in the European context the lines between anarchism and other forms of socialism were never so clear on the ground as they seemed to be in the debate halls and print journals. This was even more so in anarchism's "diaspora"—including the United States and Japan, two very different countries where anarchism had a brief but lively flowering from the 1890s through 1920s before dying out just prior to World War II.⁴

Although Bakunin himself spent time in Japan in 1861, a few years prior to the Meiji Restoration, anarchist ideas really began to filter into Japan in the 1880s and 1890s, along with many other currents of liberal and progressive...