The Alien Within: Representations of the Exotic in Twentieth-Century Japanese Literature

Introduction

I N T R O D U C T I O N Much of what is said here must be said twice, a reminder that no one Takes an immediate interest in the pain of others —Billy Collins My mother was Dutch My father a Jew And that is why I Am so different from you. —Stevie Smith O n a recent visit to the Shibuya ward office, or Shibuya city (these days Tokyo wards are often renaming themselves as cities), to renew my Japanese work visa, I noticed that the gaikokujin töroku area had changed its English sign from “alien registration” to “foreigners [sic] registration.” The registration area was still hidden away in a kind of alcove not easily visible from the main counter area. This shift in translation does not affect the vast majority of Japanese citizens, who know the titles of government services only in Japanese, but it does, perhaps, reflect a deeper understanding of the meanings attached to the English words “alien” and “foreigner.” Movies like the Alien series featuring Sigourney Weaver—the title has been translated into Japanese phonetically as Eirian—have given people some understanding of the negative connotations evoked by the notion of the alien. The idea of “alien” as embracing a core meaning of nonhuman—a complex of associations that summons up the image of something deeply repulsive to one’s own humanity—may nevertheless linger even in the notion of “foreign,” as it has traditionally been understood 2 • Introduction by most Japanese. This connotation became especially embedded in the antiforeign propaganda disseminated by the Tokugawa government, aimed principally at Christianity, during the so-called era of “seclusion” (sakoku) that lasted from the seventeenth to the middle of the nineteenth century.1 Gerald Figal has written of the arrival of Westerners in mid-nineteenth-century Japan as follows: “Since Perry’s arrival in 1853, the increased news, presence , and fear of foreigners—especially among xenophobic commoners—created conditions that were ripe for the strategic use of bakemono (monsters) to exploit a general fear of strangers.”2 Fear of the foreigner is a recurring theme in the cultural history of many nations besides Japan, but given Japan’s relative isolation from other cultures during the Tokugawa era, the theme takes on a certain significance that may be absent elsewhere or at least more attenuated. While most Japanese from the Tokugawa period into the early years of the Meiji regime viewed foreigners with some trepidation, some intellectuals and artists displayed an intense interest in the exotic and the foreign, as is well documented by historians like George Sansom.3 This interest persisted well into the twentieth century and has been linked by cultural historians such as Miriam Silverberg to the emerging Japanese empire, a multicultural empire where the foreign was, in a way, brought home.4 From the Meiji period onwards, the absorption into Japan proper of foreign territories—the Ryükyüs, Taiwan, Manchuria, and Korea to name the most prominent—meant that the foreign and the exotic signified not only the West but also something that was both Japanese and not Japanese, Asian certainly, with affinities to Japanese culture, yet still foreign and exotic, ripe for exploration and exploitation. And this is precisely what Japanese artists and writers did, with increasing gusto, as their literary adventures took them inside Japan as well as outside. This book focuses more on the inside than the outside; that is, I am concerned with how modern Japanese writers discovered the foreign, the exotic, or even the alien within themselves, in some cases within their own bodies, in other cases within their own literary traditions. This study also treats the question of how the foreign has been absorbed into the Japanese literary sensibility, whether by translation, as in the case of translating Shakespeare, or by direct observation, in the form of travel diaries. It is possible to argue that the distinctly twentieth-century literary obsession of Japanese writers with interior states, and the relativizing of the self against the Other in the production of literary texts, owes its impetus in some sense to the massive expansion of the Japanese empire, which brought Japan into wide- Introduction • 3 ranging and extensive contact with the alien for the first time in its history.5 The impact of foreigners on Meiji Japan had been confined to a small number of foreign settlements, and contact with a tiny...