SEHR, volume 5, Supplement: Cultural and Technological Incubations of Fascism
Updated December 17, 1996

how ghostly were the 1920s in japan?

a projection without sources

Yasushi Ishii

The question of fascism in Japan has often been geared towards history and the social sciences.[1] Yet the present article purports to underline the importance of epistemological studies for that inquiry, because I believe that the incubations of fascism in Japan cannot be fully understood without taking into account the epistemological schema that staged and arranged Japanese discursive formation and made it possible for Japan to become a totalitarian state similar to its fascist contemporaries. It is my hypothesis, first, that a schema composed of an origin and its projected images played an important role within the modern episteme, and second, that in Japanese discursive formation during the first four decades of this century, the origin within this schema suffered decisive changes in its status and qualification. I begin by an example of an optical art, since the putative origin-projection schema derives most of all from the optical relationship between a luminous origin (a matter) and its projected images (its form). For further demonstration of the hypotheses, I will present a large set of examples found in Japanese discourses of diverse natures produced during the period between 1919 and 1935. These instantiations are intended to enable us to recognize the traces of the fluctuations of the origin-projection schema therein.

Like those by the Bauhaus artist Lázló Moholy-Nagy, the photomontage[2] by the Japanese avant-garde photographer Iwata Nakayama titled "Fukusuke Tabi" (1930, opposite page), to be discussed later, looks like a reversed X-ray picture but with a difference: it maintains the three dimensional array of photography instead of just the two dimensions of radiography. Moreover, it has been suggested that the concept of dimensionality in optical representation has not always been the same and that the advent of the photomontage is exemplary of one of the changes in optical dimensionality. Unlike previous technologies, photomontages were no longer a projected image from a singular luminous source but from several sources, and hence, hinted at a new relationship between origins and their projected images.

From the Renaissance to the mid-nineteenth century, in the techniques of optical art - ranging from the scenographic perspective and the camera obscura to the basic structure of the photographic camera - the luminous origin of projection was always displayed as unique and privileged. The second half of the nineteenth century, however, witnessed new and different kinds of origin-projection relationships. As was the case with the invisible X-rays, projections began to lose the visible connection to their origins. The origin was still there, but it lacked any readily apparent, luminous continuity with its projection. Primarily, the advent of cinema imposed this new condition upon its audience by isolating the origin (the projecting equipment) in a separate booth and making its audience far less conscious of the fact that the image was projected. Lacking any incentive to turn their heads and to look behind themselves for the source of their entertainment, audiences grew accustomed[3] to watching films in movie theaters without paying attention to the source of the projection or to the physical frame of the screen.[4] Similar novel conceptions of origin-projection relationships in which the origin or source is invisible or imperceptible can be found in the development of other sciences and communication-media technologies of the nineteenth century, namely, evolutionism, genetics, and the invention of the telegraph, telephone and phonograph. In all of these, only the projection, or final result, can be seen or heard, and their origin remains invisible or inaudible. Hence, the phonograph as a projection whose origin is not present is then described by Friedrich Kittler quite appropriately as a kind of writing without a subject.[5]

Although pertaining to a different discursive field, a similar significant feature of the eclipsed origin of projection can be found in the rhetorical figurations of Kyo¯jiro¯ Hagiwara (1899-1938), one of Japan's outstanding avant-garde poets. He joined Renkichi Hirato - one of the major propagators of Futurism - in 1921, and through Hirato came to meet the other Futurist poets. In 1922 he decided to move from his provincial village to the capital, and there joined the group Mavo, one of the most important groups of Japanese Constructivists. Hagiwara himself cannot easily be labeled as a Futurist because he assumed more diverse avant-garde tenets. Rather than writing poems under a specific avant-garde banner, Hagiwara's poetics aspired to an utter negation of the immediately preceding poets, demonstrating his keen perception of the rupture with the immediate past. The following poem "So¯ko¯danki [Armored Motor]," written in 1920 or 1921, belongs to the period during which Hagiwara stood closest to Futurism with almost no residues of traditional Japanese poetry whatsoever:

In the midst of the leaps and bustles of the modern city
I see a gigantic armored motor
puffing off capricious smoke
a slow unsociable fellow

He raises a cry in the military manner
ignorant of such sweetness, colors or delicacy
as those favorites of cities
puffing around bright yellow smoke
litters the city, hurts people's feelings
lies heavy on cowardly hearts

He isn't subject to bullets or the crowd's intention
but to his own will coming from
the reddest savage heart, he tenaciously
suffers a Capitalist world full of bustle
and he emerges out into chaos!

Oh, at oversensitive woman beauty civilization
this unsociable fellow shrugs his broad shoulders
with an ugly face
incapable of expressing either happiness or sorrow

But he cries
at a flash of his strong and stubborn heart
his zeal!
his ability!
his destruction!
his creation!
his truly powerful operation!
struggle for civilization!

Ah I see now!
the gigantic armored motor!
in the midst of leaps and bustles
of the beautiful modern city[6]

In this article, the metaphor of the origin-projection schema will serve as a leitmotif. Even though the schema has so far been presented first as an optical and then as a figurative one, from here on I will be employing it increasingly more often as a theoretical metaphor. But I am not suggesting here that there is a specific, cause-effect correspondence between the origin-projection metaphor and an autochthonously Japanese cultural matrix which makes it appropriate to use this theoretical metaphor to describe a certain period of Japanese culture.[8] Rather, I am suggesting that the schema itself is implicitly, or discursively - in the Foucauldian sense of the term discourse[9] - present in the Japanese texts discussed below. Nevertheless, the argument for the periodicity of this schema is not without foundation. As was briefly mentioned at the beginning, this article will suggest, first, that the origin-projection schema has an epistemological connection to a determined period of world history during which the concept of the projection became important, and second, that understood metaphorically the origin-projection schema appropriately describes epistemological conditions for modern discursive production. In other words, as I shall demonstrate, the theoretical metaphor even in the Japanese case was anchored by a certain historical reality.

By employing the origin-projection schema as the master-metaphor, this paper purports to describe the Japanese discourse network during the period from 1919 to 1935. As I sketched at the beginning, toward the end of the nineteenth century the alteration of the origin-projection relationship was articulated in the shape of the diverse symptoms of science, technology, and art and thus rose into the foreground of historical reality. I would assert that this mutation made possible a novel discursive formation in which discourses were still produced as certain projected images but without a unique privileged origin. Roughly speaking, related symptoms emerged in the Japanese discourse network mostly during the 1920s with an approximately thirty-year delay with respect to the European situation. I will argue that while Japanese discourses prior to 1919 consisted of projections cast from a unique origin, the discourses produced in the 1919-1935 period were composed of projections originating from an imperceptible - or at least invisible - origin. Eventually I would like to demonstrate that those origins made imperceptible could no longer fit into the historical perspective to be taken at the beginning of the 1930s, and consequently yielded to an arbitrarily chosen origin when the fascist period was just around the corner.

More specifically, I would like to postulate here a logical cartography for my argument by dividing the first four decades of twentieth-century Japan into three groupings. First, the period prior to 1919, when the concept of the unique, privileged origin dominates the understanding of projection. Second, the twenties when the origin-projection paradigm itself predominates, accompanied by a dramatic decrease in the awareness of, or anxiety for, the singular origin. Third, the period from the beginning of the thirties onwards when the once-neglected origin stages a comeback within discursive production, but in a definitively modified form: it is now the origin that was longed for or invented by the projected image. The origin was relocated to the foreground, yet in a way being converted into no more than another projected image, a virtual, disembodied origin projected in reverse by other images. In my concluding hypothesis I will argue that it is this reversed relationship between origin and projections that corresponds to one of the most important conditions for Japan to assume certain fascist tenets after 1937.[10]

For the purpose of examining these hypotheses, I would like to propose three different projection schemata in time, space and language: historical time as a structure projected from a singular privileged origin, nation as a formulation projected from the singular source of its master foundational narrative, and rhetorical figures - especially metaphors - as discourses projected from their deeper conceptual content. The three schemata correspond, respectively, to the historical discourse of the newly-institutionalized empire in the nineteenth century, its formation as a nation around the figure of the emperor as founding Father, and the literary discourse of the 1920s.

(1)TIME: The predicament of the origin-projection layout problematized the structure of historical time. Walter Benjamin's remark on the structure of time draws out the difference between Benjamin's own conception of historical time and the conventional concept of historical time as a consistent projection coming from a singular origin:

Origin is the goal.

- Karl Kraus, Worte in Versen, vol.1

History is the subject of a structure whose site is not homogeneous, empty time, but time filled by the presence of the now [Jetztzeit].[11]

The "now" seems to be privileged here, but it is not claimed as an origin but as simultaneously both the site of ongoing time and the site of its articulation. The meaning of the quote from Karl Kraus, that the "origin is the goal," with which Benjamin begins this fragment, now becomes clearer: at the point of the "now," historical time projects itself onto itself as if it were a self-organizing system. Benjamin's thesis reflects a major change in mentality that occurred some time toward the end of the nineteenth century. A comparable thesis can be found in Edmund Husserl's theory of time as a form of experience.[12] In his theory, the present no longer corresponds to any fixed origin of the projection of historical time. The present is both a mobile point for the observation of time and a part of time-flow itself. The site for observing time thus becomes the object of observation as well, but without blurring the difference between its status as a site to articulate time and as a site of time-flow. It is no longer a matter of questioning where the projection of time comes from or what projects it, but rather how it is projected, and what is the nature of the relationship that bridges the past, present, and future.

(2)SPACE: Nineteenth-century Romanticism and its concept of the republican nation fit well in the origin-projection schema, since the nineteenth-century concept of the nation is a space scenographically projected from a singular, privileged origin. In Friedrich Kittler's terms, the nation was an image projected from the origin which was constituted as an identification between Mother and Nature.[13] However, as the complexity within the social system of the nation increased throughout the nineteenth century, especially in terms of gender and racial relations, the ray of light cast from the singular privileged origin suffered diverse refractions and diffusion, and as a consequence of this phenomenon, the continuity between the projected nation and its origin, Mother-Nature, became less consistent. Due to the destabilization of the nation as a uniform, unequivocal projection and the waning of the hegemony of Romanticism as its most powerful endorser, the origins or foundational sources of nationalistic projections also inevitably began to function in less privileged, and consequently, less certain ways.

(3)LANGUAGE: Roughly speaking, one of the major objectives of the literary innovations - from late Parnassianism to Surrealism - at the beginning of the twentieth century can be summarized as the innovation of metaphorical figuration. The metaphors of these literary movements, however, stand apart from those of the Baroque period in not presupposing their full decipherability. The relationship between signifier and signified was no longer as simple as it used to be: signifiers were projected through refractions, suffering rupture and alterations, of which conditions Stéphane Mallarmé's Un coup de dés[14] was symptomatic. Furthermore, avant-garde discourse often sought out the maximum distance between the signifiers and the signifieds. The growing detachment of the signifiers from the signifieds, in turn, contributed to undermining the privileged status of the signified. As we have seen in Hagiwara's "So¯ko¯danki," the unique source of meaning projection now lost its privileged status, allowing its projected figures to thrive with relative independence.

If we accept the above as a description of the general situations in which the origin-projection paradigm found itself at the turn of the century, our task remains to narrow it down to or compare it with the Japanese case. We shall see the three origin-projection schemata in Japan in the following order according to the three Japanese time periods proposed earlier. First, the transplantation onto Japan of the origin-projection schema of the nation and historical time and its subsequent mutation since 1868. Second, the debilitated status of a unique, privileged origin from the year 1919 through the 1920s, and the emergence of a different discursive formation in that decade, especially in the shape of peculiar metaphorical figurations in Japanese literary discourse. Finally, at the beginning of the 1930s there is a returned emphasis on unique, privileged origins to the surface of discursive production, restituting and strongly supporting the origin-projection schema.

projection i: the emperor as origin

The period prior to 1919 can be described as one in which projections were cast from clearly marked origins. In 1868, the emperor's reign was restored after centuries of rule by warlords [sho¯gun]. The emperor's return to power was reinforced by the Constitution in 1889. The creation and institutionalization of this Great Japanese Empire owed much to the adoption of certain modified European models of the nineteenth-century nation. But the Empire adopted this European concept with some internal adjustments: Japan endowed the imported model with a specific teleological worship of ancestors, which, as we shall see later, is a teleology not necessarily prone to fascism.

In order to establish a new political system, the new emperor's regime [Tenno¯ sei] accepted the European model of the nation as a projection from the origin of Mother-Nature. The model, however, was decisively transformed in Japan. The Japanese nation was conceived as being projected not from Mother but from the emperor, the Father-Nature. Since the genealogical source of the people was the emperor, the figure of the Japanese was defined as an image projected from him. This projection lasted until the Empire's defeat in 1945. Since 1868, emperors, especially the emperor Meiji (reign 1867-1912), traveled throughout the national territory, taking over the position of the tribal gods of even the smallest communities and thus became the archetype or incarnate origin of the Japanese tribal gods of agriculture and fishing.[15] The people began to see the emperor as their absolute origin, gradually regarding themselves as his mythically projected offspring, and accordingly came to worship him as the archetype of their ancestors as some continue to do so even today. In order to adopt the European model of the modern nation, the Empire chose to maintain and revert to traditional cosmology and its teleological worship of ancestors.[16] The paradox consists in that it was the reception of the European model of the nation that triggered the invention of the Empire's claim of being hyper-Japanese. It is paradoxical because its impulse came from outside, but the Empire pretended to be the utmost Japanese component of the nation. As we shall see later, the traditional cosmology, now participating in the nation-building, finally became overloaded and almost broke down when, in the 1920s, its contradictions with the novel realities of capitalism became so apparent as to demand an imaginary resolution.

In 1868, the modern emperor was revived as the absolute origin in the Japanese mentality and created the Japanese nation as his projected complement. The emperor, however, was Janus-faced: on the one hand, he was the absolute paternal origin of the nation, on the other hand, the claim to continuity in his genealogy demanded a linear historical time. Owing to both the adoption of the origin-projection schema and the subsequent alterations of the cosmological view, the concept of a steady, linear historical time became an urgent need in Japanese historiography.[17] The ruling class of the new imperial regime found itself in need of a time structure based on the continuity mode in order both to legitimize the emperor's restoration and to endow their collection of historical discourses with a privileged status. Indeed, it was the claim to an uninterrupted continuity in the imperial genealogy that late-nineteenth century bureaucrats employed most effectively in order both to highlight the imperial genealogy's uniqueness as the origin, and to justify their government which was grounded in this privileged genealogy. In fact, one of the most famous fascist ceremonies in Japan was the 2600th anniversary of the imperial family's reign in Japan, celebrated in 1940.[18]

To summarize, the modern regime's ascension to power created a double projection in time and space. First, in time, the claim to continuity supported the far-reaching projection of historical time tracing back to the mythical age of genesis as its origin, but albeit remote in past, this origin was made visible in the singular privileged figure of the emperor. Second, in space, the contemporary emperor, as the paternal origin, was entitled to encompass the entire nation within the range of his proper projection.

projection ii-1: the eclipsed origin and the "gay-twenties"

During the 1920s, the projection schema itself was still maintained, but with an important difference: the awareness of the origin almost disappeared. While the origin-projection schema, foreign to the traditional cosmology, was definitely decaying, the decade of the twenties could have been a sort of homecoming for the native Japanese paradigm, allowing its cosmology to again breathe freely and liberate itself from exploitation by the empire-builders. But the loose relationship between the origin and its projections only overloaded the discursive production as a whole - producing virtually chaotic conditions. Instead of bringing the Japanese society back to the pre-imperial vernacular condition, as we shall see later, an abstract universalism thrived in twenties discourses and the traditional cosmology was put into a deep crisis - even though this cosmology was an important component for maintaining an origin-projection schema that was now in only temporary decay.

I have chosen the time period between 1919 and 1935 in Japan, since the decade of the 1920s evinces - at least apparently - a rupture with the preceding and following periods. The year 1919 was elected because World War I, which ended in November, 1918, brought about unprecedented realities to Japan,[19] and 1935, because it was the moment when the suppression of leftists was violently completed nationwide and the modernist project of the 1920s was put to an end. 1919 also was the year when Haruo Sato¯'s (1892-1964) short story Utsukushii machi [The Beautiful City] was published. It is a story of three men obsessed with the desire to construct an independent "beautiful city" within Tokyo.[20] Their dream, aborted in the short story, would materialize thanks to the urgent reconstruction projects in Tokyo after the great earthquake of Kanto¯ in 1923, in which about fifty percent of metropolitan Tokyo was destroyed, 90,000 were killed, and 700,000 buildings either burned down or were demolished.[21] Futurists and Anarchists accepted, if not welcomed, it as a necessary destruction in order to build a futuristic city, or as an act of anarchist sabotage on a great scale.[22]

The decade of the 1920s prominently stands apart in offering us an apparent void in the historical narrative of Japan. As early as the beginning of the thirties, the twenties were recalled in a highly nostalgic tone as insubstantial, daydream-like, lost moments. In his essay on Surrealism in Japan, Yoshio Abe argues that during the years from the late 1910s to the early 1930s, "it was a sort of optimistic gaiety that set the Futuristic orientation in the avant-garde or modernist atmosphere."[23] Hence the heroic tone of the poem of Hagiwara at the beginning of this article. "It was an atmosphere dominated by aesthetics or poetics which advocated affirmative adaptation to a novel environment."[24] Chiefly because of both the optimism and gaiety of the twenties, the decade became an object of nostalgia. Tai Kanbara, one of the major propagators of Futurism in Japan besides the afore-mentioned Renkichi Hirato, still recalled, although much later, the decade of the twenties with enthusiasm. After winning three wars, Japan's

blind worship of imports from Europe was transformed into a sense of pride in claiming the world belongs to us. While foreign publications, thought, art, culture, merchandise flooded into Japan, the Japanese believed themselves to be already cosmopolitan enough. Hence I was able to sing as part of my own repertoire the hymn to the dynamics of automobiles sung by Futurists. Here, those songs were cultivated in a far happier and far more bucolic environment. Japanese avant-garde art was born as a necessary product of good times, rather than as a form of rebellion.[25]

In contrast, one of the major characteristics of the twenties discourse is the absence of any nostalgic tone. In the twenties, the producers of discourse did not seem to miss the past, be it remote or immediate, in spite of the dramatic changes in themselves and their environment. Instead, their discourse advocated positive adaptation to their novel environment. This is especially the case with most of the Japanese avant-gardes who acted in accordance with the European present. To participate actively in the new environment meant to acknowledge a discontinuity, a rupture with their immediate past without nostalgia, and to welcome a violent conflict with the politics of the continuity of the Imperial Government. It was nonetheless less harsh and violent than expected, for the government had a relatively weak hold on discursive production during the 1920s. The major reason, besides the budget cuts produced by the economic depression, may be found in the person of the emperor Taisho¯ (reign 1912-1926). Unlike his father the emperor Meiji, the emperor Taisho¯'s infirmities paralyzed the government as well as his role as the absolute origin in time and space.[26] The figure of privileged origin and of continuity remained less prominent than before, at least until 1926 when the new emperor, Sho¯wa, was enthroned.

In fact, however, the decade of the twenties was far from a period of cheerful "good times." The government exercised some control over discursive production. While the police force took advantage of the chaos caused by the great earthquake to execute major anarchists, many Korean residents in Tokyo were murdered as the scapegoats for the uncertainty.[27] Recessions periodically struck the economy in 1920, 1924, 1927, and 1929.[28] Already in 1925, without receiving much attention from the public, the Maintenance of the Public Order Act passed by the Diet, which allowed the police to arrest - and, more often than not, to torture and execute - any citizen who sought political changes in the status quo and/or the elimination of private property. The police would make full use of this Act during the fascist period. Government control over the discursive production was thus growing gradually more rigid. As early as 1928, there was a nationwide arrest of about one-thousand labor-movement activists. That all the arrests were made simultaneously at three in the morning demonstrates the full implementation of a national network of intelligence control. The "optimistic gaiety," then, is nothing but a distinguishing stamp impressed on the discourse of the 1920s, not on its politics or economy.

To summarize, despite these unequivocally important events of the twenties, this decade has often been described, and is even described nowadays, as aerial or, if negatively, as ghostly. Even if replete with "optimistic gaiety," it was still as if an enclosed void were circumscribed by a narrative at whose basis was the historical time of continuity, and as such, the decade of the twenties was to be eliminated from the historical perspective at the beginning of the following decade. Schematically speaking, Japanese historical time emerged from a mythical origin, suffered a rupture around the year 1919, then skipped the decade of the 1920s, reaching the 1930s.

From the quote above by Tai Kanbara, and especially from such reminiscences as "the world belongs to us" or "cosmopolitan enough," we can extract one of the popular topoi of 1920s Japanese discourses: belief in universality with its highly abstract concept. A claim for universality prevailed in the twenties discourses and advocated both universalist abstractions and the universal oneness of Japan and the West, while for the writers of the preceding period the most urgent task was to cope with the concrete differences with the West.[29] Shiguehiko Hasumi summarizes this situation:

Needless to say, the culture of Taisho¯[30] differs from that of the former era by the fact that Japan as a modern state came to confront unprecedented reality: internationally, gain of colonial territories[31] as one phase of its imperialist evolution, and domestically, the emergence of a new working class in the major cities. This new reality naturally provoked genuinely concrete conflicts which could not be resolved by any abstract arguments.

Nevertheless, in the journalistic texts on social problems written by critics of this period, we cannot find traces of acknowledgement that their reality was an inevitable historical crisis. Only a set of attractive slogans - moving along from For-the-People through Democracy towards Reform and Liberation - prospered in the discourse of Taisho¯. The optimistic gaiety of this discourse originates from its abstract character.[32]

Due to the abstract nature of such discourse, the socialist or communist labor movements of the twenties were by no means able to understand the specific situation of Korean workers in Japan. Owing to Japanese economic growth and the harsh exploitation of Korea by Japan after World War I, a large number of Korean workers migrated to Japan to form an inexpensive labor force, causing at the same time conflicts with Japanese workers, especially during periods of depression. Those Korean workers, however, were excluded from participation in the labor movements by their Japanese fellow workers because the latter, while believing in universalism, were paradoxically negligent of the colonizer-colonized relationship in which their reality was grounded.[33]

Claims for the universal oneness of Japan and the West also contributed to blurring the hierarchy of the original (European Futurism, for instance) and its copy (Japanese Futurism), allowing the latter to cease to be a mere projection of the former, and to demand legitimation of its own practice.[34] The political agendas of European avant-gardes receded into the background, and the Japanese avant-garde grew increasingly less concerned with what to produce than how to produce, and often converted avant-gardism into a set of techniques.[35] Because Japanese avant-gardists were "cosmopolitan enough," they also stopped worrying about their origins or their genealogies. The claim for universality was subsidized also by the fact that, after World War I, Japan was integrated into the international network of up-to-date information - thanks to which Japanese culture became increasingly parallel to Western culture. The circulation of daily newspapers and popular monthly magazines dramatically increased: total newspaper circulation went up from 1,630,000 copies in 1904 to 6,500,000 in 1924.[36] In 1926 and 1927, there was a boom of mass-produced books, which covered a broad range of paperbacks including a number of translations of both classical and contemporary European literature and philosophy.[37] Marx's Capital was translated by a Japanese national socialist and published for the first time in 1920 and became one of the best selling books of the twenties. Thanks to the success of Capital, the complete works of Marx and Engels were also published in that decade, with the exception of the Communist Manifesto.[38]

Along with this increased availability and popularization of Western knowledge, a more radical change was taking place in the nature of knowledge itself. Until the previous period, culturism, meaning here the assimilated corpus of privileged knowledge, was epitomized by writing in classical Chinese.[39] According to Shu¯ichi Kato¯, only with the 1920s did new intellectuals emerge who neither wrote nor read Chinese verse with ease. Their cultural program had been reoriented to a West that was from then on represented by paperback books in translation.[40] While most of the intellectuals of the previous generation studied in Europe and/or mastered its languages, the intellectuals of the twenties counted on a thoroughly different system of privileged knowledge. The former knowledge system was interrupted, and then later rebuilt according to a different program, which in turn inserted the claims to universality into the discursive system. A definite discontinuity emerged.

Summarizing, in the twenties the claim to universality rose to the surface of discursive production, leveling thus the status of copy and original. The claim to universality contributed to both materializing the sense of rupture from the immediate past and producing optimistic but abstract discourses in the twenties. Historical time seemed to be articulated on the basis of that rupture, instead of being projected by the absolute origin, even if only for a decade. Again, while the origin-projection paradigm persisted in the twenties, only the privilege of its origin became increasingly more neglected. For instance, the absence of the solitary strong figure of the emperor - supposedly capable of encompassing the entire nation - made the twenties appear less tied with a singular, privileged presence and consequently less susceptible to fascism. This shift was simultaneous with the rupture in the Japanese system of privileged knowledge at the beginning of the twenties. The decade was thus to be remembered as "good times," as ghostly but cheerful, despite the critical realities Japanese society confronted which were to shake up and almost asphyxiate the traditional cosmology.

projection ii-2: projected figures

As we have seen at the beginning of this paper, photography explicitly epitomized the new conditions of the origin-projection relationship. The European avant-garde photography differentiated its medium by inserting an utterly mechanistic theory of photography. In Franz Roh's words, the human eye does not see but the Photo-Eye sees.[41] Some photographers came to conclude that the photographic camera was principally a machine, and the photographer, its operator. What was most urgent for photographers rested in their status; were they artists, or insignificant machine operators like a projectionist in movie theaters? It was the question of agency that was at stake.

Avant-garde artists such as Lázló Moholy-Nagy or Man Ray worked with new modes of photographic representation in their search for the unique properties of photography which no other communication media had.[42] Their theory was introduced into Japan during the 1920s, its influence on Japanese photographers culminating on the occasion of the Tokyo showing of the Stuttgart Werkbund Film und Foto exhibition in 1931, originally curated by Moholy-Nagy in 1929.[43] Compared to the synchronism of Japanese literary discourse with its European counterpart, Japanese photography needed about ten years to materialize newly introduced avant-garde - especially Bauhaus - theory. While in the twenties Japanese photography was still dominated by a pictorialism which approximated photography to paintings, new theories were at the same time translated and published in photographic magazines thanks to the afore-mentioned boom of popular publications. Only at the beginning of the thirties, did photographers come to put those new theories into practice.[44]

The photographic journal Ko¯ga [Picture of Light], published from 1932 to 1933, purported to spread even further novel photographic theories, and among some of the articles published there were those by Moholy-Nagy and Roh - both major contributors to the Film und Foto exhibition. Iwata Nakayama (1895-1949), a principal contributor to Ko¯ga, stands out in his earlier assimilation of the new photographic theories. Nakayama studied in California and New York between 1918 and 1926, in Paris between 1926 and 1927, and then returned to Japan, joining the Ko¯ga group five years later.[45] Widely known to the contemporary Japanese audience for being the first-prize winner of the first Kokusai ko¯koku shashin-ten [International Salon of Advertisement Photography] held in Tokyo, 1930, his photomontage titled "Fukusuke Tabi [Advertisement of Fukusuke (Japanese dwarf) brand's digitated socks]" (1930, see fig. at the beginning) was a manifesto of the new photography.[46] It was composed of inorganic elements - a pair of socks and an image of the Japanese dwarf - located on three, only slightly differentiated planes parallel to each other. Due to this deliberate differentiation in planes, this photomontage showed a strangely manipulated optical dimensionality, and more importantly, destabilized the origin-projection structure by undermining the scenographic dimensionality born on that privileged origin of light. Here no single luminous source is privileged, because the picture consists in a condensed surface in no need of the support from that privileged origin. On the one hand, Nakayama was indeed less concerned with the faithfully projected representations of original objects than with his own concept of beauty. In his own words,

I love beautiful things. If, unluckily, I didn't encounter the beautiful, I would like to create it even by faking...I always pursue beautiful photographs. They need not necessarily be faithful to the model, or to nature....[47]

On the other hand, his concept of beauty no longer pertained to the pictorialist school of the twenties but to completely new optical conceptions. In "Fukusuke Tabi" he did employ authentic Japanese imagery, but this imagery constituted a projection without any need to refer to origins for meaningfulness.

The optical configuration of projection schema in photomontage is also precisely opposite from the other configuration supported by certain singular, privileged origin. It was no longer that origin in optical structure of projection, or in some historical claim to Japanese authenticity, that made the image meaningful. The privilege of the origin was thus eclipsed by the new modes of photographic representation. What Nakayama accomplishes in "Fukusuke Tabi" is a juxtaposition of vernacular images reduced to geometrical figures and located almost on the same visual plane: a construction condensed into the surface. It is worth pointing out that photomontage would have been an impossibility without the novel mind-set that allowed a photographer to employ photographic representations in order to construct a visual surface no longer supported by the scenographic schema of projection. Therefore, in epistemological terms, the transition from ordinary, straight photography to photomontage marked a decisive change in artists' mind-set. While still remaining inside the origin-projection schema, "Fukusuke Tabi" thus marks an apogee reached by Japanese avant-garde photography. Anticipating our conclusion, fascism, at least in the Japanese case, was to demand that the origin should be unique, and therefore endowed with an unquestionable privilege. Insofar as origins were less privileged than projected surfaces, photographers' mind-set could remain less susceptible to fascism.

Understood as an origin-projection relationship, the mechanism of meaning production accompanies the origin-projection paradigm itself through its fluctuations. As we have seen at the beginning in Kyo¯jiro¯ Hagiwara's "So¯ko¯danki," we can find comparable symptoms of the eclipse of the origin in figural relations of other 1920s literary discourse. The signified, if understood as the origin presupposed to underlie the surface of a signifier, exists in a hierarchical relationship with its projected signifiers. The origin-projection schema can thus be a hermeneutic one as well. In the realm of literary discourse, the flood of innovative metaphors around 1900 intensified the novel changes in literary production: the tie between the deeper meaning and its signifiers was loosened by the afore-mentioned mutation of the origin-project paradigm. It was not so much that signifiers were fully emancipated from their subordination to meaning as that the meaning now controlled its signifiers only somewhat less rigidly. Even in avant-garde discourses, the search for meaning often persisted. Hence attempts to represent the subconscious by automatic writing. The point here is that the origin of meaning ceased to be as unique and privileged as it used to be, and in meaning a less consistent relationship with its figural projections, allowed for the proliferation of diverse, often uncommon, metaphors. As one of the most important symptoms, uncommon metaphors were also elaborated by the Japanese writers of the twenties.[48] Metaphors controlled less by the origin of meaning can be paralleled to those images on a photomontage's surface. In what follows we shall examine another example of Japanese literary text from the 1920s, which also thematizes the question of metaphorical figuration: Asakusa Kurenaidan [Scarlet Gang of Asakusa] by Yasunari Kawabata (1899-1972).

Kawabata explored uncommon linguistic representations with novel narrative strategies. He wrote his early fictions by piecing together fragments with the least narrative concatenation. His was a montage technique similar to that of such early 1920s photomontagists as George Grosz.[49] Along with Riichi Yokomitsu, Kawabata formed the "New Perception" group [Shin-kankaku-ha] in the twenties which "resisted the Marxist literary movement, looking for inspiration instead to literary techniques of postwar Europe."[50] This "technique," in shorthand, was understood by Kawabata as an exploration of potentials of metaphorical relations at all possible levels of discourse. While Yokomitsu's "new perception" was limited to the use of abstract vocabulary, Kawabata efficaciously exploited, as we shall see immediately below, the positive latency of the loose relationship between the signified and the signifier, and between the referent and the linguistic representation. His agenda remained intact even after he eliminated the contemporary urban environment from his themes in the 1930s and began to write exclusively of the authentic beauty of Japan. Thanks to this conversion to the claim for Japanese authenticity Kawabata would be given the Nobel prize for literature as the novelist of the Japanese nation.

Scarlet Gang of Asakusa is one of his earliest fictions and was published as a serial story in the Asahi daily from 1929 to 1930. This is a novel without a consistent plot, except for an inserted episode of Yumiko, one of its major characters, who seeks revenge on behalf of an elder sister who was left mentally disturbed after being abandoned by her lover. But even the outcome of the attempt at revenge is left unknown. Rather, the book is made up of a montage of fragments Kawabata pieced together in Asakusa, the most popular district in Tokyo at the time. As a commercial and entertainment center, Asakusa developed dramatically after the great earthquake, especially after the first subway in Tokyo, which opened in 1927, and allowed increasingly more people to enjoy the district.[51]

Yumiko appears always in different disguises: sometimes she is a young girl, other times a Chinese girl, a young man, or a street vender. The first-person singular narrator wonders:

I can't help guessing that the young man is the girl's twin brother, whom I saw play the piano. He looks about sixteen years' old, a few years' younger than she. He wears a hunting cap reversed, filthy corduroy trousers, and his face glistens with grime - only bordered by pretty ears like shell works. My cheeks may have just blushed at the sight of his ears and his eyes full of surprise at turning around to find me - he suddenly leaves the candy store.[52]

Not only Yumiko, but also many other characters, disguise themselves without any specific purpose. It seems as if disguises were a new fashion in Tokyo toward the end of the twenties. Only the narrator maintains a constant identity over time as he is confused by the different identities or the absence of identity the people around him take on. Everybody looks so different each time he sees them. The old pretend to be young, younger adolescents to be very mature. A daughter of Russian emigrés asserts she is Japanese to deceive the narrator. Gender, race, age, all mix up and converge into the matrix of disguise - projecting one image while obfuscating the original, eliminating in turn any constant identity. Guises function here as projections in order to obscure their origin, namely, the self-sameness of the subject. Thus, the surface overwhelms the depth.

In that sense, Scarlet Gang of Asakusa can be read as a treatise on disguise on three different levels. First, on the level of linguistic representation, Kawabata was seeking a new discursive strategy: he took recourse to both a loosened tie between the signifiers and the signifieds, and the tension between the latter and their supposed referent. In doing so, he eclipsed the origin of meaning projection in favor of the projected images (linguistic representations) against their ever obscured referent and changing conceptual content. Second, on the level of the disguise of characters, the characters appear to play with the subject's sameness over time by destabilizing their identity, or better, by eclipsing the origin of projection. Third, on the level of Tokyo's environment, Asakusa represents disguises that the cityscape of Tokyo seemed to wear on a day-to-day basis, for Tokyo suffered a complete environmental metamorphosis after the great earthquake. In this novel Kawabata fully exploits the evanescent status of the origin. Importation of discursive strategies of European avant-gardes coincided with the moment of old Tokyo's effacement. Both converged into Kawabata's fictional articulation of his contemporary environment. Clearly marking a rupture, he renewed novelistic discourse by taking recourse to the loose relationship between the signifiers and the signifieds. Kawabata solidified this linguistic condition then by materializing it in the shape of his characters and their environments.

To summarize, with Nakayama, Kawabata, and Hagiwara as discussed at the beginning of this article, we have outlined three positions of the 1920s discourse. They made full use of the increasing distance between the origin and its projection, wrought out respectively in the form of luminous origin and its projection, personality and appearance, and a referent and its rhetorical figures. It may also be worth recapitulating here that the origin-projection paradigm survived the twenties in the shape of a projection with a neglected or obscured origin. More importantly, since the schema itself persisted, that which appeared suspended around 1919 seems only to have been driven into the background until it would later make a comeback. The Japanese polity had to take only one step further to be a fascist state: to resuscitate the origin somehow.

projection iii: return of the origin

The third time period marked by the beginning of the 1930s is the moment of homecoming of the once-eclipsed origin, but not in the powerful and privileged form it had before the twenties. The return of the origin was triggered in the thirties by a search for a unique origin, paradoxically enough, after the relative liberation of projections in the twenties from their origins. The origin was to be discovered or re-invented by projections, regardless of the degree of consistency between them. This return of the origin was decisive in Japan's transition to a totalitarian state much like its fascist contemporaries. There were at least three major factors that made the comeback of the origin possible: the breaking down of the traditional cosmology, the renewal and reinforcement of the emperor's figure, and, strange as it may seem, Marxism.

First, with the overload in the social system of traditional communities there was a demand for definite reduction of complexity and a longing for redemption.[53] As I showed in Projection I, traditional communities and their cosmology were paradoxically conserved in order to facilitate the building of the modern national polity after the 1868 restoration. However, the decade of the twenties brought to an extreme the contradictions and conflicts between the traditional cosmology and the novel realities of an industrialized civil society. In the traditional cosmology there was an attempt to reduce the overcomplexity in its system through both an exclusion of the decade of the 1920s from the paramount reality, a reduction of that decade to no more than an object of nostalgia, and a search for a reconciliation between the teleology of traditional cosmology and that of industrial capitalism. The redemption claimed by the traditional cosmology was not necessarily fascist.[54] Japanese fascism emerged when the privileged origin of its cosmology had to be recovered to let the cosmology function more effectively. As we shall see later, the nation, then, paradoxically began to reproduce its own origin, transforming the origin's status into a sort of virtual image projected by the nation which was understood to be a projected image itself. By projecting the virtual origin this way, the direction of projection was reversed. Moreover, this doubly projected origin was nothing but a huge void, and destined to function as an equivalent of such figures as Hitler or Mussolini.[55] Second, the figure of the emperor was somewhat recuperated by the emperor Sho¯wa, but not to the degree of efficiency of his grandfather Meiji. As Prince Regent he had in reality succeeded his physically delicate father already in 1921 at the age of 20, and then ascended to the throne in 1926. Considering his age, while still too young to be the archetype of Father-Nature at the moment of enthronement, his figure grew increasingly more paternal in the following decade in order to play the role of the projected origin.

Third, toward the end of the twenties a new absolute origin was already reintegrated into the discourse network in the shape of Marxism. According to Ko¯jin Karatani, the most influential ideologue of Marxism around 1930 was Kazuo Fukumoto, who studied with Gyorgy Lukács in Frankfurt and whose theory was heavily based on Lukács' History and Class Consciousness. Fukumoto's theory inserted the question of subjectivity into Marxism, and postulated the Klassenkampf as a question of self-transformation, not exterior, but interior to subjectivity. Fukumoto postulated his Marxist agenda thus as a projection from the external class struggle to the internal of subjectivity. To compartmentalize class struggle within subjectivity consequently reduced Marxism's status to no more than one of possible options.[56] In June, 1933 two outstanding leaders of the Communist Party declared in prison that they had renounced their political agenda because they came to acknowledge that the admiration of the Imperial family is a spontaneous sentiment of the nation. Immediately after their announcement, 546 imprisoned Marxists followed the leaders' example.[57] The abandonment of Marxism only signified another self-transformation for Japanese intellectuals - a simple matter of replacing the origin of projection. Their being was no longer projected from a certain internalized class struggle but from the rationale of the redeemed authenticity of Japan, as it was incarnated in the new emperor.[58] Fukumoto's Marxism, paradoxically enough, facilitated in this manner the restitution of the origin even though it did so with different components.

Whereas in the twenties anything new was legitimately accepted, in the thirties novelties began to be viewed with suspicion and the claim to a rupture with the past was becoming increasingly unpopular. Symptoms of the resuscitation of the origin can be found in the discourses of diverse spheres. If the beginning of our journey into time is represented by Sato¯'s The Beautiful City, its end is marked by the publication of Tatsuo Hori's (1904-1953) Utsukushii mura [The Beautiful Village].[59] Hori wrote in that novel: "Deep in this countryside, I enjoy the pleasure of life, unknown even to you."[60] "Thanks to such recent rural life, the darker half of myself was gradually defeated by the other luminous half."[61] "The darker half," that proliferation of metaphors, disguises and projections over the surface of the city, was now replaced by the bright air and solid soil of the countryside. The Japanese claim to authenticity and continuity returned to the foreground. In fact, around the year 1930, the claim to authenticity and continuity sprang up over and over again in great numbers, gradually eliminating the discourses of discontinuity and inorganic materiality. This phenomenon was due in large part to governmental silencing of the discourses' producers, by either physically eliminating them or imposing a far more rigid censorship on them. Hagiwara could no longer write the kind of poems he used to write in the twenties, Kawabata began to work exclusively on authentic Japanese beauty, and Nakayama did not have any other option but to remain silent, while most of his fellow avant-gardists survived by participating in war journalism and military intelligence activities.

Comparable phenomena can be found in the shift in Japanese eugenics, even though a few years ahead of other discursive areas.[62] The emergence of Western eugenics was parallel to the eclipse of origins within the origin-projection paradigm. As a quick response to the predicament of this paradigm, the nineteenth-century European evolutionism attempted to visualize origins. Eugenics seemed to be grounded in the visibility of race as images projected from the invisible origin of species. For this reason, eugenics must have accompanied fluctuations of the origin-projection paradigm. While the origin remained invisible, eugenics' major issue was the improvement of human species as a whole. But, as the origin-projection schema once again moved to the foreground along with prominent origins, the major issue shifted toward the improvement of a specific nation. The focus of Japanese eugenics shifted thus from the eugenics of human species as a whole to that of the Japanese race in particular. After the introduction of Darwinism in Japan in 1874 and its popularization along with the introduction of Francis Galton's theories in the 1870s and 1880s, the most debated topic in Japanese eugenics rested in a methodological question: in what way could improved offspring be produced?[63] In the 1880s, Japanese eugenics debated the value of the miscegenation of Japanese and Europeans, regarding the Japanese as physically inferior.[64] Rediscovery of Mendelism in 1900 contributed to a scientific theorization of eugenics in Japan - especially by polarizing the nation into the genetically superior and inferior Japanese. With the excuse of Mendelian genetics, a new avenue was paved for Japanese eugenics to improve internally its offspring without intervention of any foreign element. In the mid-1920s, even though the major issue was still the same (improvement of the Japanese race in itself) the formulation of the issue was significantly adjusted.[65] Japanese eugenics became less concerned with the relation of the Japanese to Europeans than with the question of what was authentically better Japanese. On such a basis of Japanese authenticity, the Eugenics Movement Society of Japan was founded in Tokyo in 1926 to implement Japanese nationalism and create the paternalistic state composed of the imperial and ordinary family.[66] Japanese eugenics thus incorporated a claim to hyper-Japanese through the scientific justification of Mendelism. Its precocious restitution of the privileged origin is capable of suggesting that it may have been one of the front bearers of the totalitarian state of the 1930s.

Contemporary Japanese ethnology is no less applicable. As early as 1930, Kunio Yanagita (1875-1962), one of the founders of modern Japanese ethnology, observed that the Japanese came to believe that whatever is inherently Japanese is always ages old and only that which is introduced from abroad is new.[67] Yet, too many phenomena still considered today as ancient Japanese traditions belong to the second half of the nineteenth century. According to Yanagita, the national culinary habit of steamed polished rice, sushi, raw fish, and soy sauce, all originated at that time. Furthermore, most of what is believed to be the major characteristics of Japanese domestic architecture also belong to the same time period: paper windows [sho¯ji], straw mats [tatami] and thin wooden pillars.[68] Although without a nostalgic tone or a claim to authenticity Yanagita simply wonders why their oldness is taken for granted, I would like to postulate that those relatively recent cultural phenomena were projected into the historical perspective of Japanese authenticity since, sometime around then, the once-eclipsed origin was on its way to restitution.

Nostalgia is an overall keynote in Shu¯zo¯ Kuki's Iki-no ko¯zo¯ [The Structure of Iki]. Written in Paris in 1926 by Kuki (1888-1941), a former disciple of Heidegger, it was published in 1930.[69] He sought the origin of a national cultural code among the cultural phenomena in Tokyo, still called Edo, at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Chosen by Kuki as the most relevant code of Japanese authenticity, the enigmatic structure of iki "consists of three motives: that of coquetry, pride and resignation."[70] The Structure of Iki epitomizes the controlling code of his program of Japanese authenticity and covers almost all the cultural spheres: domestic architecture, clothing, music, poetry, paintings, colors, and industrial design - that is, almost any cultural discourse whatsoever. Masao Oka (1898-1982), one of the leading figures of Japanese ethnology since the 1930s, obtained his doctorate in Vienna in 1934 and returned to Japan in 1940. His dissertation, titled Konihon-no bunkaso¯ [The Cultural Stratum of Ancient Japan], had a decisive influence on the ethnologists of his generation. They sought the origin of the Japanese nation in the territories occupied at the time by the imperial military forces, and contributed, willingly or unwillingly, to the possible legitimization of the Japanese invasion during the war period as a recovery of the lost territories of the ancestors.[71]

As these instantiations of the returning origin in various spheres of discursive production demonstrate, there was an insistence upon the origin. It seems significant that this movement coincided with the overload of a traditional cosmology in need of redemption. They both must have contributed to producing something close to fascism through a search for origins. In sharp contrast with this insistence upon the origin, Nakayama's photomontage, together with Hagiwara's poem and Kawabata's novel, showed the insistence upon the surface, where the projected images themselves proclaimed their ability to construct a meaningful reality, without any need to refer to origins for meaningfulness. After the ghostly decade when the surface was thus foregrounded, the origin would be recuperated, but with a difference: it was not the nineteenth century bureaucrats but the anonymous mass of people that longed for the origin. However, when the nation recovered its supposed origin, the direction of the projection was inevitably reversed: it was the nation that converted the emperor into a projected image.

The emperor Sho¯wa indeed considered himself to be projected by the nation. In his remarks on the World War II period, published in 1990 through the diaries of one of his chamberlains, he commented that "as a constitutional monarch, I must consent to the opinions agreed to by both the High Command and the Government," and "if I sanctioned what I liked and did not sanction what I did not, I would be no different from a despotic monarch."[72] While the nation - principally his projection - began to search for its lost origin, even if that meant to invent it, the unique, privileged origin of the Father-Nation now regarded himself to be his projection's projection. While in European fascism there stood out one figure endowed with priority over all, in the Japanese case everyone began to regard him- or herself as a projection of somebody else, including the emperor himself. The Japanese equivalent of that outstanding figure therefore could not be found anywhere else but in an outstanding, strongly supported void,[73] out of which everything was projected and into which the question of agency and responsibility vanished.[74] It was then that Japan became a totalitarian state similar to its fascist contemporaries.

Notes

[1] There have been diverse opinions on the suitability of the term fascism for describing the Japanese government during the 1937-1945 period. Takafusa Nakamura posits the question in the following manner: "Could there exist a fascism without a dictator endowed with utmost priority over any political constitution?" Indeed, Japan lacks such strong figures as Mussolini or Hitler. See Takafusa Nakamura, Sho¯washi: I 1926-1945 [History of the Sho¯wa Era, vol.1: 1926-1945] (Tokyo: To¯yo¯keizaishinpo¯sha, 1993) 369. My translation. All the quotes from Japanese texts are my translation, unless otherwise stated. Kyo¯ji Watanabe rather seems to take the term for granted in his way of using it even though modified with the adjective Imperial: "Imperial despotism of the Meiji Era [1868-1912] proceeded into the Imperial Fascism of the Sho¯wa Era [1926-1988] ." Original emphasis. See Kyo¯ji Watanabe, Kita Ikki [Ikki Kita, a Biography] (Tokyo: Asahishinbunsha, 1978)119.

[2] Photomontages are composed of "images from various representational modes yoked together in pictures" [Ian Jeffrey, Photography: A Concise History (London: Thames and Hudson, 1981) 128] . Beaumont Newhall writes, "Each individual image reacted with its neighbor in sympathetic reinforcement or in violent opposition. The process was no doubt inspired by the introduction into abstract paintings of printed matter - usually newspaper clippings - and small objects that were glued to the canvas.... The beginning of photomontage as an artistic medium may be traced to the Dada group of modern painters" [The History of Photography (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1982) 210] . Among its advocates were Lázló Moholy-Nagy, Max Ernst, John Heartfield, and George Grosz. "Fukusuke Tabi" differs from typical photomontages in that its digitated socks and Japanese dwarf were probably not combined as two separate photographic images, but set up together before being photographed.

[3] Even in the beginning, audiences were not very aware of the source of the projected images, as is shown by the panic caused by the image of an arriving train in the Lumière brothers' first cinematographic demonstration. Also, Hisaki Matsuura proposes a trinity composed of cinema, the Freudian psychoanalysis, and fascism to define the characteristics of the twentieth century episteme. See Matsuura, "Eiga [Cienma] ," Munesuke Mita, et. al. eds., Shakaigaku-jiten [Encyclopedia of Sociology] (Tokyo: Ko¯bundo¯, 1988) 82.

[4] In anticipation of the final thesis of this paper, I need to remind the reader not to confuse a projectionist with the creative subject, since the projectionist does not make films him- or herself but only operates films distributed by someone else. In other words, the question of agency should be bracketed in the figure of projectionist. See also Melissa Goldman's paper in this volume.

[5] Friedrich Kittler, Grammophon Film Typewriter (Berlin: Brinkmann & Bose, 1986) 71, quoted in Shu¯hei Hosokawa, Reko¯do no bigaku [The Aesthetics of Recorded Sound] (Tokyo: Keiso¯ Shobo¯, 1990) 53. Also, see Martin Jay's concept of "subjectless experience" in Martin Jay, "Experience without a Subject: Benjamin and the Novel," New Formations, 20(summer, 1993)154.

[6] Kyo¯jiro¯ Hagiwara Shikeisenkoku [Death Sentence] (Tokyo: Cho¯ryu¯sha, 1925) 2-3.

[7] Here, the first character means elastic force, and the second, a mechanism or machine. Hence, although very rarely used, its current meaning of any elastic, spring-like device [Ko¯jien dai 2 han, ed. Izuru Shinmura (Tokyo: Iwanamishoten, 1969) 1407] .

[8] Although no work on etymology is available, even the noun 'projection [eisha] ' or the verb 'to project [eishasuru] ' do not seem to be ancient words, but are a relatively modern coinage. It was urgent for Japanese language to cope with concepts inexistent at the moment of assimilating Western thought during the second half of the nineteenth century. An infinite number of words were coined for that purpose.

[9] While discourse may mean a set of sentences linked with each other and situated in a context for communicative use, Michel Foucault underscores that discourses are historically grounded phenomena, and that their systematic regularity designates discursive subjects and objects. See Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language, tr. A. M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Pantheon Books, 1972) and Roger Fowler, ed., A Dictionary of Modern Critical Terms (London and New York: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1987) 62-66.

[10] On this point Takashi Fujitani argues that "genesis amnesia" [quoted from Pierre Bourdieu] was a nationwide experience in modern Japan. In my discussion, I shall add to his argument only that even after the foundational moment of the origin is no longer remembered, the origin-projection schema itself can remain operationally functional by replacing the genesis with an origin made virtual. See Fujitani, Tenno¯-no pe¯jento: kindai nihon-no rekishi-minzokushi-kara [Emperor's Pageant: Viewed from the Ethnography of the History of Modern Japan] , tr. Lisa Yoneyama (Tokyo: Nihonho¯so¯shuppankyo¯kai, 1994) 3-9 and 141-169.

[11] Walter Benjamin, "Theses on the Philosophy of History," Illuminations, tr. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1969) 261.

[12] Edmund Husserl, On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time (1893-1917), tr. John Barnett Brough (Dordrecht, Boston, London: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1991) 8 and passim.

[13] Friedrich Kittler, Discourse Networks 1800/1900, tr. Michael Metteer, with Chris Cullens (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1990) 25 and passim.

[14] First published in 1897.

[15] Yoshihiko Amino, Chizuko Ueno and Noboru Miyata, Nihon O¯kenron [A Treatise on the Right of Japanese Kings] (Tokyo: Shunju¯sha, 1988) 221-224; Takaaki Yoshimoto, Zen-tenno¯-sei shu¯kyo¯-ron shu¯sei: part 3, 'Shin'-no ko¯zo¯ [A Complete Collection of Treaties on Imperial System and Religion by Yoshimoto: vol.3, Structure of Belief] (Tokyo: Shunju¯sha, 1989) 9-16. Characterization of Japanese emperors has been a topic of debate among scholars, especially regarding their character as ritualistic king and/or political king. My argument here is nothing but a shorthand summary of their ritualistic king character.

[16] For a broader discussion of the nationalist rituals in Japan, see Fujitani, 1994.

[17] For a broader discussion of the trajectory of the concept of time in the nineteenth-century Japanese historiography, especially on "folk chronotope," see Harry D. Harootunian, Things Seen and Unseen: Discourse and Ideology in Tokugawa Nativism (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1988).

[18] The name Zero of one of the Japanese fighter planes derives from the fact that it was adopted by the government in 1940, the imperial year 2600. Besides the emperor's religious function as the tribal god, all the governmental body, including the Cabinet, Diet, and Ministries were considered to belong to him. Indeed, the former Constitution (1889-1945) assigned the title of commander general to the emperor, thus establishing the military forces as his personal property. Because the military forces were considered to belong to the person of the emperor, the Imperial Army and Navy had only to present their yearly budgets to the Diet, and it was the latter's task to fit the former's demand somehow into the national budget plan. Even though the government did negotiate with, and sometimes achieved control of, the military forces, the Diet or Cabinet were not allowed, at least in theory, to interfere with the command or budget formulation of the military. It has been said that one of the reasons why the Imperial Army escaped the government's control in the 1930s, and led the country to total war, lies in its commanding officers' claim that the government was not endowed with any executive power over its forces. Indeed, all the personal and material assets in the military, even a shoestring of a boot, was claimed to be granted by the emperor himself. This convention lasted until 1945. Article 9 of the present Constitution prohibits Japan from possessing any military force and from waging war, a statute nonetheless undermined by the existence of the so-called Self-Defense Forces.

[19] By the end of the nineteenth century, Japan freed itself from international treaties of unequal nature, won the Japanese-Chinese War over the right of profit in the Korean Peninsula in 1895, won the Japanese-Russian War over the right of profit in China in 1905, annexed Korea in 1910, and, in 1918, for its participation in World War I, won Germany's colony in China. World War I also brought a boom period for Japanese industry by draining European and American products from Asian market, and this growth intensified the need of an even larger market for exports and for natural resources for further production. Since neither a larger market nor natural resources were quickly obtained, the boom was shut down by the depression of 1920. In 1919, Japanese society thus confronted for the first time in its history the concrete outcomes of straight-forward imperialist expansionism and, domestically, the economic growth enhanced the tension between social classes.

[20] "Utsukushii machi," "Supeinken-no ie" hoka 6-pen ["The Beautiful City," "The House of the Spanish Dog" and 6 Other Short Stories] (Tokyo: Iwanamishoten, Iwanamibunko, 1992) 5-80.

[21] Greater Tokyo and its neighboring prefectures.

[22] Some members of the afore-mentioned Constructivist group Mavo, architects and designers, actively participated in the reconstruction projects of Tokyo.

[23] Yoshio Abe, "Ima¯ju syu¯rurearisuto-ron josetsu [Introduction to a Treatise on the Surrealist Image] ," Yuriika, 8.7(1976)18; my emphasis.

[24] Abe 19.

[25] Tai Kanbara, "Miraiha-ya rittai-ha ga toraishita jidai [The Era When Futurism and Cubism Arrived] " (1963), quoted by Abe, in Abe 18; my emphasis.

[26] He was effectively succeeded by his young son, later the emperor Sho¯wa, in 1921 when the latter became the Prince Regent.

[27] Although precise figures are impossible to obtain, the number of murdered Koreans is said to be from about 2,700 to more than 6,000 (Nakamura 64).

[28] The 1920s were a decade not of economic growth but of cartelization and trusts. Four of the largest financial groups [zaibatsu] , Mitsubishi, Mitsui, Yasuda, and Sumitomo, grew even larger throughout the depressions, assimilating smaller companies. Only during the 1932-1936 period did Japanese heavy chemical industry grow significantly, especially such industries as of steel, machines, electric machines, and chemicals. Their growth was boosted by lower interest rates, war, and farm relief expenditures. During those five years, trusts were established among the major corporations, and larger trust companies attained overwhelming market share. The heavy industry was led by Mitsubishi financial group, along with such new financial groups as Nakajima Air Industry, Nissan, etc. Roughly speaking, the heavy industry production was quadrupled between 1923-1925 and 1935-1937 (Nakamura 169-172).

[29] Shiguehiko Hasumi "'Taisho¯teki' gensetsu-to hihyo¯ [Characteristic Discourse and Criticism in Taisho¯] ," Hihyo¯ ku¯kan, 2(1992)10 and passim.

[30] Hasumi refers to the years covering roughly between 1905 and 1923 [Hihyo¯ ku¯kan, 2(1992)22] .

[31] Japan annexed Taiwan (1895-1945) and Korea (1910-1945), occupied Ch'ing-tao (1918-1922) and Manchuria (1915-1945).

[32] Hasumi 11; original emphasis.

[33] Hiroshi Unno, Modan toshi Tokyo [Tokyo, a Modern City] (Tokyo: Chu¯o¯ko¯ronsha, Chu¯ko¯bunko, 1983) 289-290.

[34] Walter Benjamin, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," Illuminations, tr. Harry Zohn (New York: Shocken Books, 1969) 221-224.

[35] This phenomenon is best described in the continuity between Futurism and Surrealism in Japan, whereas in Europe those two movements had opposite political agendas. See Abe 17-18.

[36] Shu¯ichi Kato¯, A History of Japanese Literature: vol.3, The Modern Years, tr. Don Sanderson (Tokyo, New York, London: Ko¯dansha International, 1990) 247; Originally published in Japanese as Nihon-bungaku-shi josetsu: ge [A History of Japanese Literature: vol.2] (Tokyo: Chikumashobo¯, 1980).

[37] Ko¯jin Karatani "Kindai nihon-no hihyo¯: Sho¯wa zenki I [Criticism in Modern Japan: Early Sho¯wa Era I] ," Shicho¯, 5(1989)50.

[38] Nakamura 100.

[39] Japanese writing was clearly marked by gender: writing in Japanese used to be considered as a female activity. Male intellectuals were supposed to write in classical Chinese, an equivalent of Latin writing in Europe.

[40] Kato¯, 228-229.

[41] Jeffrey 112.

[42] Moholy-Nagy summarizes the agenda of their exploration as photograms, reportage, snapshots, prolonged time exposures, micro-photography, filter-photography, radiography, automatic photomontage, and distorted optical procedure ["From Pigment to Light" (1936) in Photography in Print, ed. Vicki Goldberg (Albuquerque, New Mexico: University of New Mexico Press, 1981) 346] .

[43] Toshiharu Ito¯, Tokyo shintai eizo¯ [Images of Body in Tokyo] (Tokyo: Heibonsha, 1990) 24.

[44] Ito¯ 22-26.

[45] He was closely related to the Futurist Enrique Prampollini in Paris.

[46] After the prohibition of walking barefoot in Tokyo, ordinary people had two options: wearing sandals or digitated socks - a two-toed Japanese sock with the big toe separated from the rest of the toes, which facilitates wearing sandals and can even be used as a substitute for sandals. Kunio Yanagita points out the issue of digitated socks in 1930: "In June, 1901, the municipality of Tokyo prohibited walking barefoot. Although the major reason for the prohibition was claimed to be that of hygiene, actually at work was the motive of pride in a country that had recently freed itself from all the international treaties of unequal nature. Indeed, the municipality had begun to place more rigid controls on people who were partially or totally undressed in public." Kunio Yanagita, Meiji Taisho¯-shi seso¯hen [History of Manners in Meiji and Taisho¯ Era (1868-1925)] (1930) (Tokyo: Heibonsha, 1967) 28.

[47] Iwata Nakayama, "Dekoreishon [Decoration] ," Kamerakurabu [Cameraclub] , January, 1938, quoted in Ko¯taro Iizawa, Toshi-no shisen [Urban Gaze] (Tokyo: So¯gensha, 1989) 142.

[48] The necessity to coin new, uncommon words was the most urgent task assumed by the Japanese language since the second half of the nineteenth century. At the moment of assimilating Western concepts, a myriad of new words had to be introduced because many Western concepts did not exist in the Japanese language.

[49] Unno 57.

[50] Kato¯ 242.

[51] Besides the opening of subways, the 1920s witnessed the proliferation of electric railways connecting the downtown and its suburbs. In the metropolitan Tokyo area, two lines opened in the early 1910s, seven more were inaugurated in 1922-1930 period (two of them existed earlier using steam locomotives).

By the reconstruction project of Tokyo after the great earthquake, streets of Tokyo became much wider, thus facilitating automobile traffic. Ford and GM, in 1924 and 1925 respectively, installed their assembly factory using imported parts. Total number of passenger automobiles rose from 7,000 in 1920 to 58,000 in 1930, that of trucks, from 900 to 31,000.

Radio broadcast began in March, 1925, and still-expensive radio receivers soon became popular (Nakamura 71-72).

[52] Yasunari Kawabata, Asakusa Kurenaidan [Scarlet Gang of Asakusa] (Tokyo: Senshinsha, 1930) 19.

[53] Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, "The Redeemers of Victory," a presentation at the Fascinating Fascism: Culture and Politics During the Ventennio symposium, Stanford University, October 23, 1993.

[54] Gumbrecht, as above.

[55] For a broader discussion of the concept, see Fujitani, 167.

[56] Karatani 50-59.

[57] Nakamura 180-182.

[58] Karatani 50-59.

[59] Framing the period in question with these two fictions has already been proposed by Hiroshi Unno. See Unno 314-317.

[60] Tatsuo Hori, Utsukushii mura [The Beautiful Village] (1933), Kazetachinu, Utsukushii mura [The Wind Has Risen, The Beautiful Village] (Tokyo: Shincho¯sha, Shincho¯bunko, 1987) 12.

[61] Hori 26.

[62] For a broader discussion of eugenics, see Phillip Thurtle's article, and on American eugenics, Christine Holbo's, both in this volume.

[63] The Origin of Species was translated in 1896. Zenji Suzuki, Nihon-no yu¯seigaku [Japanese Eugenics] (Tokyo: Sankyo¯shuppan, 1983) 22-27.

[64] Suzuki 32-38.

[65] Suzuki 51-126.

[66] Among its founders, we find two aristocrats, one minister, four Diet members, seventeen medical doctors, and four military officers. Its leader was strongly under the influence of German eugenics during his stay there between 1920 and 1924, especially on such points as the importance of the autonomous system and the Wandervogel movement (Suzuki 114-125).

[67] Yanagita 99.

[68] Yanagita 47-50, 67-69, 76, 86.

[69] Kuki's Heideggerian aspect is evident in some remarks: "The central meaning of iki has been utterly confirmed and understood only when we grasped its structure as a self-revelation of our national being." (Original emphasis, Shu¯zo¯ Kuki, Iki-no ko¯zo¯ [The Structure of Iki] (Tokyo: Iwanamishoten, Iwanamibunko, 1991) 95-96. Heidegger's "A Dialogue on Language" is dedicated to Kuki's theories. [Martin Heidegger, On the Way to Language (New York: Harper San Francisco, 1982)] .

[70] Kuki 27.

[71] Osamu Murai, "Konkisutado¯ru-no 'seifukukokka' ['Conqueror State' of Conquistador] ," Yuriika, 21.7(1993)169-170.

[72] Hidenari Terasaki and Mariko Terasaki-Miller, Sho¯wa Tenno¯ Dokuhakuroku - Terasaki Hidenari Goyo¯gakari Nikki [Monologues of the Emperor Sho¯wa - Diaries of His Chamberlain Hidenari Terasaki] (Tokyo: Bungeishunju¯sha, 1991) 75, 136. Also see Yoshio Yasumaru, Kindai tenno¯-zo¯-no keisei [Constitution of the Figure of Modern Emperor] (Tokyo: Iwanamishoten, 1992) 5-6.

[73] A similar idea has already been proposed by Fujitani, 3-9.

[74] Masao Maruyama argues that the Japanese imperial regime was a system which bracketed out the sense of responsibility. Maruyama, Nihon-no shiso¯ [Thoughts of Japan] (Tokyo: Iwanamishoten, Iwanamishinsho, 1961) 37-39.