Colonialism and the Avant-Garde: Kitagawa Fuyuhiko's Manchurian Railway Tradition is something which must constantly be destroyed. The reason is that no matter how much you destroy tradition, it will never be destroyed
completely. A study of the Japanese interwar avant-garde seems fit to confirm Marx's observation of "intercourse in every direction" and "universal interdependence of nations" in
the realm of intellectual, as well as material, production.2
Perhaps the most obvious series of international exchanges in this period were between Japanese writers and artists and those of Europe and Russia. As emblematic moments in this exchange, one could cite the visit of the Russian Futurist David Davidouich Burliuk, who, in flight from his native country, organized an exhibit of Futurist art in Tokyo in October 1920. Or, among the numerous Japanese avant-garde writers and artists who traveled to Europe, one could single out the visual artist Murayama Tomoyoshi, who participated in the Congress of International Progressive Artists in Dusseldorf in 1922.
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However, despite the minor recognition accorded to Murayama, the exchange of information about the avant-garde was an unequal one; although ever-increasing quantities of information circulated in Japan about such European-based movements as Futurism, Dadaism, Constructivism, and Surrealism, little information about the Japanese avant-garde was disseminated in Europe, and the influence of Japanese culture on the European avant-garde was almost exclusively limited to premodern cultural elements—a structure of exchange familiar to readers of Said's
Orientalism.4
Due to the unequal nature of this cultural exchange, Japanese artists were particularly well exposed to the twin artistic anxieties of parochialism and imitation. The charge of imitation was an especially sensitive one, and was used effectively by Murayama himself, who, returning from Berlin in 1923, had these words to offer his fellow artists:
Throw away your albums. Stand up by yourselves. I beg you to stop acting like monkeys. Respect yourselves more…The worst things in this exhibition are Nakahara Minoru's copy of Grosz, Asano
Takeshirô's reproduction of Archipenko,…Yokoyama Junnosuke's reprinting of Rousseau and the copies of the constructivism of the Italian Futurists….Most of it is an imitation of spineless French imperial salon style
boiled down from Picasso and Braque. There's nothing more shameless than this for the Japanese painting world. It makes you want to puke. Oh mates, how far will you be slaves? It is as if you had been born slaves
for generations. Alongside the more visible exchanges between Japan and Europe, however, lies another series of cultural exchanges: the movement of avant-garde writers and
artists between Japan and the neighboring territories of Asia. During the 1920's, Japan served as a training ground and cultural reference point for Chinese and Korean artists subjected to Japanese colonialism and
semi-colonialism.6
Moreover, significant numbers of Japanese writers and artists gravitated to the Asian continent, especially Chinese coastal cities and the provinces of Northeast China known as Manchuria. Just as the exchange of avant-garde information between Japan and Europe was governed, in subtle and complex ways, by the structure of Western colonialism, the Japanese cultural engagement with mainland Asia was inseparable from the Japanese colonialist project. In this paper I will examine the prewar poetry and criticism of Kitagawa Fuyuhiko, which articulated a rare challenge to Japanese militarism and colonialism, and yet could not avoid reproducing the very colonial structures it would critique.
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As a poet, Kitagawa was associated first with the little magazine A, published from 1924 to 1927 in the city of Dalian, Manchuria; with such Tokyo little magazines as Surfaces (Men);
and finally with the journal Poetry and Poetics (Shi to Shiron), which in 1928 united many rising poets and critics from the little magazines and established itself as the leading journal of modernist poetry in
Japan. As a testament to the brutality of this presence, the poems in Kitagawa's War
are characterized by grotesque and often violent images, centering on the combination of man and machine, the transformation of skin into metal, and the mutilation of flesh by shards or blades. This fascination with the fusion of the human and the metallic or mechanical could conceivably place Kitagawa in the lineage of Italian Futurism—a lineage which in Japan would include such figures as Hirato Renkichi, a journalist and poet who agitated for a "Japanese Futurist Movement" in 1921; Kanbara Tai, an artist, poet, translator of Marinetti, and close friend of Kitagawa; and Hagiwara Kyôjirô, a poet who combined futurist graphic techniques with anarchist politics.
We should reject the abuse of printing techniques in poetry. By abuse of printing techniques, I mean making certain printed characters excessively large, printing others upside down or on their side,
using mathematical signs or other symbols, and recklessly employing the arrangement of printed characters as an expressive method. The abuse of printing techniques in poetry kills the poem's spiritual sense,
and defiles the poem's impression. It does not increase the poetic effect the slightest bit. Techniques such as those used by Kyôjirô are unconvincing and incomplete. If printing techniques are
so precious, then surely one should carry through with the graphic arrangement of characters until it forms a pictorial poem. However, since Guillaume Apollinaire's collection "Calligrames," from about the year
1916, this has already proven to be a splendid failure. Although he is primarily interested in attacking Hagiwara, and thus claiming his own position in the Japanese poetry scene, Kitagawa's critical frame of reference is the
European avant-garde. Indeed, his rather hasty dismissal of Apollinaire's "Calligrames" suggests some anxiety towards European hegemony, and to the possibility that Japanese poetry might be a mere imitation. It is also
noteworthy that, despite the recurrent Western fascination with the "calligraphic" or "ideographic" aspects of the Japanese writing system, Kitagawa expresses no hope that Japanese experiments with "pictorial poetry"
would have any more success than those in European languages. What, then, does Kitagawa propose in contrast to Hagiwara's alleged "abuse of printing techniques"? His answer also lies within the realm of the printed
page—instead of Hagiwara's chaotic arrangement of characters, Kitagawa proposes the use of blank space:
The most effective printing technique is the use of "blank" (space). This corresponds with that excellent method of achieving visual effect in which the painter skillfully uses the ground of the
canvas.…With regard to the use of blank space, I believe that Anzai Fuyue's "Townscape and Civilization Ranged in File," from the third issue of Kitagawa's use of the term buranku
(blank) from English can be read both as a way to emphasize the materiality of poetic text, and as an attempt to avoid such terms as ma or kûkan
which would invoke the long and prestigious career of negative space in Japanese aesthetics. In any case, the use of gaps or "blanks," both visual and conceptual, is an important aspect of the "short poem"
form developed by Anzai and Kitagawa in the magazine A. Different aspects of this technique can be observed in Anzai's above-mentioned poem and in Kitagawa's most famous "short poem," "Horse":
Townscape and Civilization Ranged in File The photography studio which advanced civilization into the future is wearing with age amidst the scenery.
(At this toffee-colored crossroads, "municipal reform" has already arrived.)
Horse
Intestinizing the military port.13
Each of these "short poems" can be divided into two parts,
but the gap between the parts is of a different nature in each. In Anzai's poem, the "blank" is a physical one, making precise use of the "printing technique" identified by Kitagawa. Conceptually, however, there is
little gap between the two parts, with the second line performing an ironic parenthetical commentary on the first. In Kitagawa's poem, on the other hand, the physical "blank" between the two parts is rather small, but
the conceptual gap between them is formidable: the reader is left to determine the relationship between the title, which in effect forms the first line of the poem, and the enigmatic second line, with its deformed verb
"intestinizing" (naizô shite iru). The technique of placing a conceptual gap between two lines or images in a poem is, of course, a characteristic feature of the Japanese haiku (typically performed
by means of a kireji
or "cutting word" which places a grammatical pause between two lines or syllabic groupings of the haiku). Indeed, the similarities between the haiku and Kitagawa and Anzai's "short poetry" might lead one to question the latter's formal innovation, or at least wonder how these modernist poets defined their relationship to the Japanese poetic "tradition." In fact, Kitagawa seldom discussed his poetry in relation to classical Japanese forms. Instead, he defined his poetry as a reaction to the long-winded free verse of the previous generation of modern Japanese poets, pointed to the affinity of his works to those of contemporary European poets,
It is in reference to this dilemma that the setting for Kitagawa's poetry takes on new significance. By locating his poetry in the imaginative space of the Asian continent Kitagawa is able to perform an urgent
critique of Japanese colonialism and militarism. Yet this choice of materials also affords Kitagawa a welcome escape from the dualism of Japan and the West.
It is in the first section of Kitagawa's poetry collection War
that Kitagawa gives his most forceful political critique. The centerpiece of this section is the poem "Railway of Annihilation," which, without naming names, strikes at the heart of the Japanese colonial enterprise in Manchuria:
Railway of Annihilation The military state's railway progressed through the frozen desert planting numberless teeth, numberless teeth that sprouted spikes.
Suddenly, one clod of streets appears. In this frozen ash-colored desert, where not one bush grows, not one bird flies. Around the caterpillar-like railway construction cars, the constituent elements of a town
gather one by one. Such as the prostitutes whose legs are already frozen. The inflexible hierarchy of a train of railway cars. The railway will only be completed with pain to human beings. Human arms
change shape beneath the railroad ties. More readily than a rotting leaf separating from a tree, The completion of the railway is the extinction of the town. Instantly, the flock of humans scatters.
The desert returns to a desert. Leaving a long scab which touches the stars. In the end, the military state, wearing away this one scab, extends its arm. Towards ruin.
Few of Kitagawa's readers in 1929
would have failed to connect this "military state's railway" with the South Manchuria Railway, which was a core element of the Japanese colonial enterprise on the Asian continent. The South Manchuria Railway was a
private company administrating the railway land which the Russians ceded to Japan in the Treaty of Portsmouth (1905) following their defeat in the Russo-Japanese War. The company was at the forefront of Japan's
commercial and territorial interests on the Asian mainland.17
Protected by the Kwantung Army (a semi-autonomous Japanese military organization), it was financed by a huge infusion of government and private capital and sustained by the often deadly exploitation of coolie labor. The company not only ran extensive railroad and mining operations throughout Northeast China, but also exercised control over taxation, law, urban planning, education, and health facilities in a 475-mile corridor from Chang Chun in the North to Lü Shun (Port Arthur) in the South; its famous Research Department was active in producing knowledge of the colonial subject. Moreover, the South Manchurian Railway was a centerpiece of Japanese colonial rhetoric about bringing "civilization" and "modernity" to her neighbors.
Kitagawa himself was brought up in the midst of this colonial venture, crossing to Manchuria at the age of six when his father, an engineer, joined the South Manchuria Railway Company. He moved from place
to place along the railroad line throughout elementary school, and attended middle school in Lü Shun. When his father sent him back to Japan to attend preparatory school and college, it was on the assumption that he
would return to enter the South Manchuria Railway Company upon graduation. Accordingly, the poet's view of the railway is from the inside: the predominant "ruin" and "pain to human
beings" associated with the railway's expansion is located within the colonizing force itself, and not with those in the subjugated territory, which is represented as devoid of human life. The prostitutes and
"inflexible hierarchy" of workers may either be indigenous or imported, but in any case are "constituent elements" of the incursive force. Furthermore, it is noteworthy that Kitagawa's railroad expands
across a vast desert; while most of Manchuria was actually a fertile agricultural region. This points to a disturbing collusion between Kitagawa's poetic vision and the myth, current in Japan, of an unpopulated
Manchuria. This myth helped conceal the forceful displacement of Chinese farmers in the 1930's, when hundreds of thousands of Japanese so-called "pioneer" farmers emigrated to the puppet state of Manchukuo.
As this one poem indicates, Kitagawa's collection War
presents a complex repertoire of political and poetic gestures. Indeed the very title of the collection, like the final line of "Railway of Annihilation," strikes present-day readers with the force of historical prophesy: two years after the publication of Kitagawa's collection, on September 18, 1931, Japanese Kwantung army officers blew up a section of the South Manchuria Railway near Shenyang (Mukden) and attributed the explosion to Chinese sabotage. This was used as a pretext to attack Shenyang and to seize direct military and political control over most of southern Manchuria—a series of events widely regarded as the beginning of the Asian-Pacific War. The "military state's railway" did indeed lead the way towards total warfare and eventual ruin.
But while the overtly political elements of Kitagawa's collection are perhaps the most striking, the significance of the title War
is not limited to politics alone. In the preface to the first edition, the novelist Yokomitsu Riichi positions Kitagawa at the front lines of an entirely different war—the battle to create a new poetry:
What joys did my dear friend Fuyuhiko bring to his life as a poet? Like any commonplace poet, he loved the senses. He loved symbols. He loved song. However, this is but the product of his
cultural upbringing. If only he could feel the whip of an Presently, his poetry began to dismember his unlucky god. A war with a god was born. The rise and fall of an idol which destroys an idol; a faith in hypothesis; and then, the melee and retreat:
calculating the space of being and void; the height measured by the fall from the ultimate heights—in this manner, my dear friend Fuyuhiko has charged uphill to a "War." That relentless gaze undreamt of until now,
that physique like a precipitous iceberg, that providential wrinkled shadow. If we wish to comprehend the foundation of this exalted "War," the best we could do would be to stare in amazement at its
three-dimensional form. Yokomitsu's dense hyperbole conflates the violent imagery in Fuyuhiko's War
with the military imagery of progression, reconnaissance, and patricidal attack central to the self-definition of many twentieth-century artistic movements, and fully captured in the phrase "avant-garde" itself. Yokomitsu's rhetoric, in fact, not only embraces this aggressive aspect of the avant-garde, identified by Renato Poggioli as
antagonistic, but, with such phrases as "the extinction of self" and "the fall from the ultimate heights" aspires to the state of the agonistic, in which "followers of the avant-garde in the arts act as if
they were disposed to make dung-heaps of themselves for the fertilizing of conquered lands, or mountains of corpses over which a new generation may in turn scale the besieged fortress."21 Kitagawa's geographical association with Manchuria enabled him to escape the dichotomy of
Japan and the West and to claim his own "territory" for the avant-garde. Yokomitsu contributed to Kitagawa's self-positioning through his portrait of the poet as a heroic warrior battling his own gods and demons at the
edge of an abyss, in an "abstruse gorge." Although Yokomitsu speaks only in the most cryptic and metaphorical terms, the abyss to which he refers can be reconstructed concretely as Japan's precarious Manchurian frontier.
The lingering success of this strategic positioning is evident from the language which Japanese critics use to describe the unique qualities of Kitagawa's work. Egashira Hikozô, for example, concludes his
reading of War with the following: "Does it not represent the attempt to demolish the traditional literature of interior sentiment and personal lyricism—to institute a new, international
vision of humanity, and establish a human character with a continental view?" From the beginning, this poet's works have had no connection with the damp and shady climate of Japan. This island country's characteristically muggy atmosphere and its cozy sentimentalism are
entirely foreign to his dry, large-scale poetic. Irrespective of Orient or Occident, the vast Continent and its arid landscape fittingly set the foundation for his poetic images. I believe that among all modern
poets, Kitagawa Fuyuhiko is the greatest cosmopolitan. The willingness of such critics to assign Kitagawa a de-politicized "cosmopolitanism" or "internationalism" points to the success of the poet's subterfuge of
the Japan/West dichotomy, and creation of a new modernism based on "Asia" or "the Continent." Kitagawa's collection stands in opposition to Japanese capitalism and "modernization" as represented by the
Manchurian railway. Yet from a historical vantage point, it can be read as part of a larger structure in which Manchuria served as a laboratory for Japanese modernity. According to evolutionary accounts of literary
history, Kitagawa and Anzai's "short poetry movement" was an important step in the development of modern poetry, their journal A serving as a forerunner to Poetry and Poetics. Poetry and Poetics, in
turn, is taken to be the apex of prewar modernism and the direct ancestor of postwar "contemporary poetry" (gendaishi). There are numerous other examples in which Manchuria played a similar
preparatory or vanguard role in Japanese modernization. The most ambitious city planning efforts in prewar Japan, for instance, were spearheaded by the government administrator Gotô Shinpei, who gained his first
experience with large-scale city planning as president of the South Manchuria Railway (1906-1908). When the fires of the Great Kanto Earthquake leveled most of Tokyo in 1923, Gotô, as Home Minister, was in a unique
position to direct a major transformation—indeed a major "modernization"—of the Japanese cityscape. Kitagawa's attack on the capitalism and "modernization"
represented by the Manchurian railway can thus be reinscribed within a distinct topos of modernization. This contradiction is in fact a contradiction of the avant-garde itself, a contradiction in which, as Andreas
Huyssen writes, "modernism, even in its most adversary, anti-bourgeois manifestations, is deeply indicated in the processes and pressures of the same mundane modernization that it so ostensibly repudiates." Huyssen,
claiming the hindsight of a postmodern historical position, notes that this "subterranean collusion of modernism with the myth of modernization" becomes more visible "in light of the ecological and environmental
critique of industrial and postindustrial capitalism, and of the different yet concomitant feminist critique of bourgeois patriarchy."
William O. Gardner Notes 1 Kitagawa Fuyuhiko, "Bundan ni tsuite," A
34 (September 1927), reprinted edition (Beppu, Japan: Beppu Daigaku Bungakubu Kokubungakka Kenkyûshitsu, 1981) [unpaginated]. All translations are my own unless otherwise noted. 2 Karl Marx and Friedrich Engles, "Manifesto of the Communist Party,"
The Marx-Engels Reader, ed. Robert C. Tucker (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1978) 476. 3 Omuka Toshiharu, "David Burliuk and the Japanese Avant-garde,"
Canadian-American Slavic Studies 20.1-2 (Spring-Summer 1986): 111-33. Gennifer Weisenfeld, "Mavo's Conscious Constructivism: Art, Individualism, and Daily Life in Interwar Japan," art journal
55.3 (fall 1996): 64-73. ¯Omuka Toshiharu, Taishôki shinkô bijutsu undô no kenkyû (Tokyo: Sukaidoa, 1995) 129-238, 361-452. 4 Edward W. Said, Orientalism
(New York: Pantheon Books, 1978). 5 Quoted and translated by John Clark, in "Artistic Subjectivity in the Taisho and Early Showa Avant-Garde," Japanese art after 1945: scream against
the sky, ed. Alexandra Munroe (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1994) 42. 6 See Ralph Croizier, "Post-Impressionists in Pre-War Shanghai: The Juelanshe (Storm Society) and the Fate of
Modernism in Republican China," Modernity in Asian Art, ed. John Clark (Canberra, Austrailia: Wild Peony Press, 1993). Shu-Mei Shih, "Gender, Race, and Semicolonialism: Liu Na'ou's Urban Shanghai Landscape"
Journal of Asian Studies 55.4 (Nov 1996): 934-956. Kim U-Chang, "The Situation of the Writers under Japanese Colonialism" Korea Journal (May 1976): 4-15. 7 For alternative considerations of the problem of colonialism and Japanese modernist poetry, see Higuchi Satoru,
Shôwashi no hassei: 'Sanshu no shiki' o mitasu mono (Tokyo: Shinchôsha, 1990); and Kawamura Minato, Ikyô no shôwa bungaku: 'Manshû' to kindai nihon (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1990). 8
I am using "little magazine" to refer to coterie journals produced by a group of like-minded writers, working independently of any major publishing company. Such journals proliferated in Japan in the 1920s, and were an
important force in the development of modernist and avant-garde art and literature during this period. Circulation of these journals was often fewer than 200 copies. 9 An overview of the history of modernist and avant-garde poetry in Japan, as well as a translation of Hagiwara Kyôjirô's poem "Edible Frogs," can be found in Hosea Hirata's
The Poetry and Poetics of Nishiwaki Junzaburô: Modernism in Translation (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1993) 131-148. 10 Quoted in Sakurai Katsue, Kitagawa Fuyuhiko no sekai
(Tokyo: Hôbunkan, 1984) 133. 12 The original poem was printed on one page, with a line framing the entire poem, and Anzai's name in small characters below the title; between the two lines of the poem was a space of roughly ten lines.
A 2.3 (March 1925) [unpaginated]. 13 Nihon gendaishi taikei vol. 10, ed. Hinatsu Kônosuke (Tokyo: Kawade Shobô, 1975) 252. 14 Although the similarities between the work of the Japanese "short poem" poets and the Anglo-American Imagist and Vorticist poets are striking, Kitagawa discusses his work primarily in relationship to contemporary French poets such as Max Jacob and Jean Cocteau. Of course, the French modernist poets, as well as the Imagists, showed a high degree of interest in the haiku: see, for example, the special issue of the
Nouvelle Revue Française (September 1920) devoted to this form. For an analysis of the relationship between French and Japanese modernist literatures, see Vera Lingartová, Dada et Surréalisme au Japon
(Paris: Publications Orientalistes de France, 1987). 15 Quoted in Fukuda Rikutarô, "Kitagawa Fuyuhiko ron," Shôwa shijin ron, ed. Nihon Gendaishi Kenkyûsha Kokusai Nettowaaku
(Tokyo: Yûseidô, 1994) 75. 16 Nihon gendaishi taikei vol. 10, 243. 17 See Ramon H. Myers, "Japanese Imperialism in Manchuria: The South Manchuria Railway Company, 1906-1933,"
The Japanese Informal Empire in China, 1895-1937, ed. Peter Duus et al. (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1989) 101-132. 19 See Gavan McCormack, "Manchukuo: Constructing the Past"
East Asian History 2 (December 1991): 199-121. 20 Nihon gendaishi taikei vol. 10, 242. 21 Renato Poggioli, The Theory of the Avant-Garde
, translated from the Italian by Gerald Fitzgerald (Harvard: Belknap Press, 1968) 68. 22 Egashira Hikozô, "Kitagawa Fuyuhiko 'Sensô'" Kokubungaku: Kaishaku to kyôzai no kenkyû
12.5 (May 1967): 72. 23 Yoshida Seiichi, quoted in Fukuda 87. 24 See Koshizawa Akira, Manshûkoku no shuto keikaku
(Tokyo: Nihon Keizai Hyôronsha, 1988) and Tôkyô no toshi keikaku (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1991). 25 McCormack raises some of these issues in his article (108-109); see also
Louise Young, "Imagined Empire: The Cultural Construction of Manchukuo," The Japanese Wartime Empire 1931-1945, ed. Peter Duus et al (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1996) 71-96. Despite the special role afforded to
Manchuria in Japanese modernization, it should not be forgotten that in many respects, such as the exploitation of coolie labor, Japanese business and government agencies in Northeast China pursued a typical colonialist
policy of underdevelopment. 26 Andreas Huyssen, After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1986) 56. |
© 1999 Stanford Humanities Review unless otherwise noted. |