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

Preface

1 Preface Modernity is the transitory, the fugitive, the contingent, the half of art of which the other half is eternal and immutable. —charlES BaudElaIrE, The Painter of Modern Life (1964 [1863]) In the discourses of modern Japan, the term ryūkō proliferated as an expression of the rapid social changes fostered by the rise of print media and capitalism. Since language provides us with the means to make visible the zeitgeist of a particular period in history, I began this study by examining how this term was deployed in the Meiji period (1868–1912) to not only deprecate the process of Westernization but also as a means of conceptualizing the experience of time. As linguistic markers of the conditions of our changing world, new words and the frequency of their use provide insight into the movement of history. Much as Reinhart Koselleck sees the German Neuzeit (modern times) as a term of temporalization that registered a discursive shift in the conceptualization of history,1 I argue that ryūkō permitted temporal notions of novelty and change to enter into everyday life. While the term ryūkō was used regularly from the seventeenth century in reference to the rise of popular fashions from within the pleasure quarters of the Edo period (1603–1868), it wasn’t until the Meiji period that it widely penetrated the language of everyday life.2 In contrast to earlier periods of Japanese history, the term ryūkō pervaded discourse in the period following the Meiji Restoration with a distinct valence that suggested novelty and change associated with the process of Westernization. In Japanese, ryūkō is distinct from clothing or dress ( fukusō) as an expression for what is “fashionable.” According to the sociologist Yamamoto Akira, “ryūkō refers to a fashion, device, gesture, or word that involves many people for a short 2 prEfacE period of time. The characteristic of ryūkō is something brought within the group from outside or something created within the group that gradually permeates the members of the group until reaching a certain point after which it suddenly explodes and is adopted by a large number of people .”3 In modern Japan, the mass media produce a voluminous discourse on ryūkō, ranging from trends (hayari-mono) and popular songs (ryūkō-ka) to vogue words (ryūkō-go).4 The rapid dissemination and adoption of fads result from the autopoiesis of media discourse that promote and spread new practices as fashionable. What makes fads compelling as subjects of historical analysis is less their particular form or substance, but rather their ability to connote the present. At the root of this phenomenon is the ideology of novelty and social change. Indeed, how a society perceives and responds to social change is important to understanding the process of modernization. Although this book began as a genealogy of the discourses of rapid social change, it soon evolved into an exploration of the ways that modern forms of nostalgia become articulated in the language of gender and nation . Since the rapid changes in modernity hasten the process of forgetting , the memory of the past is threatened by the relentless pursuit of novelty. With the intensification of change, as in the Meiji period, there comes a nostalgic longing for continuity and return. As Peter Fritzsche writes, “nostalgia stalks modernity as an unwelcome double.”5 Through the anxieties provoked by the contingency and dislocation of modernity, the longing for a return to the past achieves its mythic potential. In tracing the contested meanings attached to the discourses of rapid social change, I found truth in Svetlana Boym’s claim that “there is a codependency between the modern ideas of progress and newness and antimodern claims of recovery of national community and the stable past.”6 This dialectic between the transitory and the eternal is an essential dimension to the experience of modernity. In the representations of historical time, Benedict Anderson argues that the modern conception of time is “homogenous, empty time” as opposed to the medieval conception of time as noncausal and heterogeneous. In premodern societies, notions of time are eternal, or what Walter Benjamin called “Messianic time.” This sacred belief in the eternal represents a temporal organization that is neither past nor future, but rather constituted as immutable and continuous. It is the time of myth or “simultaneity of past and future in an instantaneous present.”7 In societies organized prEfacE 3...