Gender and Nation in Meiji Japan: Modernity, Loss, and the Doing of History

Chapter 4 The Lure of the Modern: Imagining the Temporal Spaces of City and Countryside

177 chapter 4 The Lure of the Modern Imagining the Temporal Spaces of City and Countryside It is because this New World is constituted for us as place, a narrative of displacement, that it gives rise so profoundly to a certain imaginary plenitude, recreating the endless desire to return to “lost origins,” to be one again with the mother, to go back to the beginning. . . . Who has not known, at this moment, the surge of an overwhelming nostalgia for lost origins, for “times past”? And yet, this “return to the beginning” is like the imaginary in Lacan—it can neither be fulfilled nor requited, and hence is the beginning of the symbolic, of representation, the infinitely renewable source of desire, memory, myth, search, discovery. —Stuart hall, “Cultural Identity and Diaspora” (1990) As new social practices were introduced into Japan during the early Meiji period, they disseminated unevenly from the cities to the countryside. While Western fashions were adopted initially among the elite, who had ties to the government and who were concerned about promoting Japan’s image as a civilized nation, they soon spread to members of the middle class, who embraced Westernization as a means of social mobility and distinction. The high cost of Western fashions limited their widespread appeal, but by the Taishō period (1912–1926) and the introduction of uniformed clothing in various work professions, Western fashion became increasingly commonplace in Japanese cities. Nonetheless, Western fashions were slow to be adopted in rural farming villages. The distance between the city and the countryside created a sense of disjunction in lifestyles that became exacerbated in time, producing an ever-widening gap between the center and the periphery.1 In part, 178 thE lurE of thE modErN the lifestyle of farmers was not reconciled to the need for Western fashions . Aside from the problems of poverty and illiteracy, the means of communication or mass media that served to disseminate rapid social changes in social practices were underdeveloped in the rural regions of Japan. Yamashita Fumio, writing about his childhood living in a small village in northeast Japan during the 1930s, describes the feeling of backwardness in village life that transcended the problem of poverty. Unlike poor villagers living in the central regions of Japan that are closer to the major cities, those on the periphery felt a heightened sense of temporal dislocation . Yamashita writes, “Those of us from the northeast felt that, in terms of our everyday-life culture (seikatsu bunka), we were at least 20 to 30 years behind the times. . . . When I entered elementary school, the villages in the Kantō or Kansai regions were dressing in the styles of the Taishō period, but my dress and appearance was more like that of Tokyo during the [earlier] Meiji period.”2 As a result, a time lag in the flow of social practices, styles, and tastes between the city and the countryside produced the sense that the space of Japan shared different temporalities. With modernization, the rapid changes in fashions accelerated the experience of time. Though the spread of fashions was dependent upon the mass media, particularly newspapers and magazines, for producing a shared culture, the asymmetry of the media in its penetration resulted in the perception of both a spatial and temporal distancing of rural Japan. As the countryside (inaka or denen) emerged as a subject of discourse during the Taishō period in response to growing concerns about the “backwardness ” of village life, a way of speaking about the relationship between the city and the countryside was conceptualized in temporal terms. The perception of a temporal gap between the city and the countryside, signified by the lag in the spread of fashions (ryūkō), fostered a growing belief in cultural disjunction that is echoed today in discussions about globalization and the growing digital divide. While the concentration of economic wealth and media in the center produces inequalities that share a colonial praxis of exploitation and extraction, it also shares a discursive mode of constructing the periphery as its object or other. Johannes Fabian observes that the taking of the other as the subject of discourse often employs various devices of temporal distancing that negate the coeval existence of the other.3 This assumption of a separation or distancing when speaking about the other, notes Fabian, draws from Enlightenment thought and ideas of evolutionism.4 The “backwardness” of village life was thus a dis- thE lurE of...