Thinking out loud
In the midst of life we are in death, they do say, but in the midst of exam week, a well-know fate worse than death, I'm actually in a pretty good mood. (Well, this morning's lousy Media Culture final notwitstanding, but meh.)
Case in point! The essay-of-death I wrote on Miyazawa Kenji recently was quite well-received. Now I kind of feel like vanity-blogging about the stuff I'm researching and reading at the moment, so sit back and prepare for some particularly non-academic nerd blather, if you please!
I had an argument built around the irony of the fact that Kenji's poetry, particularly "Unbeaten by the Rain," has been appropriated in some circles as a symbol of nihonjinron, while there's very little in Kenji's work as whole to support this kind of reading. To back up -- nihonjinron is loosely collected bundle of texts and theories that all stress how that the Japanese body politic is particularly "unique." Not just "unique," but more unique than anybody else, if that makes sense. Like Orientalism, it sets up a fierce dichotomy of Asia and the West as essentially mutually unintellible, but at the same time, nihonjinron theorists argue that this supposed fundamental difference proves how awesome Japan is for being all homogenous, essential, intangible, socially stable, etc. (*coughbullshitcough*) It's a conception of ethnicity based on physiognomy rather than social transaction, or even upbringing. What's more, it's also tied obliquely to the justifications used for Japan's wars of territorial expansion, and so in the post-war period and until today, Kenji is sometimes criticised for supporting Imperialism, in much the same way that in the West we now grimace at things like Little Black Sambo, or the first few Tintin books. The fact that he belonged to the Nichiren-shu school of Buddhism, which was so strongly allied to Imperial policy, doesn't really help his case.
But! As I said before, this simply doesn't gel with the rest of Kenji's work, insofar as very few of the characters he writes as doing conspiciously Japanese things-- like celebrating O-Bon festival, or engaging with the mahayana Buddhist tradition-- are actually Japanese people! Night Train to the Stars is the most obvious example of this, and I love it to pieces. (But this doesn't even start on the lush and surreal "Ihatovo" series, set in a fantasy country based around Esperanto. Why? It wasn't in Fisher, that's why. ) This technique is operating on a very different principle to, for instance, the fact that a great deal of Studio Ghibli's films are set in a fantasy version of the West; or for that matter the loathsomely common argument that "HURRRR, ANIMU CHARACTERS DON'T LOOK ASIAN."
In Kenji's stories, images of the West aren't used to construct an image of something external or romantic, or to deepen the suspension of disbelief by setting the story in a faraway land. Instead, aspects of Japanese identity are being very conspicuously projected onto Western characters, and vice versa. This is really quite a fascinating phenomenon when you consider that he was writing at the tail end of the Taisho Democracy, a very liberal era in which nihonjinron fell briefly out of favour. The general effect you get is of this heartbreakingly Utopian fantasy Kenji must have had for the future, where the barriers of class, language, culture were all broken down by the power of FWENDSHIP. To say this has anything significant to do with either nihonjinron or imperialism is just disingenuous.
Anyways. Teacherpersonthing apparently agrees, and submitted the finished product as her nomination for the Literary Encylopedia Undergrad Essay Prizey Thingummy. I demand high-fives.
Other than that, I applied for a job at Elizabeth's Bookshop in King St. the other day! They need someone who knows a lot about books, comics and the selling thereof, and I also happened to inadvertantly to wrangle the absurdly Tigger-like night clerk into an hour-long discussion about Chuck Palahniuk, staying at S&Co., and why Joe Quesada is a Bad Thing. I don't want to jinx anything, but I kinda feel like I have a foot in the door this time. X3