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

Chapter 1 Competing Masculinities in Meiji Japan

19 chapter 1 Competing Masculinities in Meiji Japan When we say that the eternal return is not the return of the Same, or of the Similar or the Equal, we mean that it does not presuppose any identity. On the contrary, it is said of a world without identity, without resemblance or equality. It is said of a world the very ground of which is difference, in which everything rests upon disparities, upon differences of differences which reverberate to infinity (the world of intensity). —gIllES dElEuzE, Difference and Repetition (1994 [1968]) As officials and leaders in the Japanese government traveled to the West in the Meiji period, they looked to the lifestyle of the European gentleman as a model of sophistication and style. They cultivated a concern for fashion, accomplishment of manners, and superiority in taste as an expression of refinement and civility. This genteel form of masculinity reconciled with their belief in civilization and progress and conformed to their desire to appear civilized in the eyes of the West. Nevertheless, their attempts to master the corporeal signs and social conventions of European bourgeois society made them the targets of derision and caricature by those outside the government. These critics denounced the reception of Western culture as imitative and shallow, and they argued that the Japanese experience of modernity was concerned only with appearance and form. They condemned Western decadence by linking it to the effeminacy of fashion, consumption, and materialism. Implicit in these criticisms was not only anxiety about the threat of feminization, but concerns that modern life in Japan lacked morality, spirit, and ideals because it had been imposed by the West. The inscription of femininity upon the ostensibly masculine figure of 20 compEtINg maSculINItIES IN mEIjI japaN the Meiji leadership forces us to re-examine what has been repressed in the discourses of gender. Following from the work of Abigail SolomonGodeau , who describes a process of “internal gendering,” I would like to consider the “difference within” that had to be disavowed in Japanese discourses of masculinity.1 For Solomon-Godeau, the “difference within” is the femininity that exists inside the masculine as an otherness that disrupts rigid categorization. This difference is realized through the disclosing of the techniques and representational strategies that sustain the myth of an essential masculinity and conceal the performative or socially constructed nature of gender identity. This perspective thus questions the “natural” association of sex with gender and recognizes Judith Butler’s claim that gender is “a construction that regularly conceals its genesis.”2 In Meiji Japan, the socially constructed identification of femininity with the pejorative, regressive qualities of fashion, consumption, and materialism resulted in femininity being constrained and condemned as inimical to Japanese nationalism. As a consequence, displays of manliness expressed through the rejection of Western material culture became a way of demonstrating one’s commitment to the nation. Solomon-Godeau’s work reveals the way representations of masculinity tend toward polar types that are expressed alternatively as a “feminized ” masculinity and a “masculinized” masculinity.3 Within gendered representations, masculinity and femininity serve as signifiers of difference . Representations are inflected masculine or feminine as a way of expressing judgments related to questions of power and politics. As Shoshana Felman argues, “masculinity and femininity are both defined by the way they differentially relate to other differences.”4 In this chapter, I consider two opposing expressions of masculinity in Meiji Japan. I examine first a “feminized” masculinity centered on the image of the Japanese gentleman and then its antithesis represented by a “masculinized” masculinity that rejected Western material culture. Each constituted differing responses to the problem of modernity. One elicited anxieties about the decadent, artificial, and performative nature of modern life, while the other sought to erase the feminine by validating the authentic, primitive, and spiritual. These two archetypes of masculinity are constructions arising from the discursive practice of condemning and caricaturing the ephemerality and superficiality of modern life in Japan. The practice of parodying and satirizing forms of masculinity is not specific to Japan but has compEtINg maSculINItIES IN mEIjI japaN 21 served as a common means by which definitions of masculinity are articulated and contested. A close parallel to this practice can be found in the caricatures of the Macaroni, English dandies of the eighteenth century who affected continental ways. Among the growing bourgeoisie, “the image of the Macaroni was used to attack the perceived vanity, irresponsibility , effeminacy, and lack...