Session 19: Room 11-311
Individual Papers on Asian Cultural History
Chair: Alexander Vesey, Meiji Gakuin University
1) Hongwei Lu, University of Redlands
New Urban Cinema: Transformation of Urban Space and Familial Intimacy in Contemporary China
Toward
the late 1990s, a different group of urban films were produced in
China. Unlike the underground 6th Generation films, this new group of
urban films has been both warmly received by the domestic audience and
accepted by government censors. Chinese journalists immediately put a
label to these films, classifying them as “New Urban Cinema” in an
attempt to differentiate them from the urban films made by earlier
filmmakers. The new label is also invented to define an
up-to-the-minute sense of urbanity. What is embedded within the New
Urban Cinema phenomenon is the rhetoric of urban space transformation
shaped by post-reform expansion of urbanity. These films revolve around
themes of socially produced spatiality and personal, family, and social
relations from the perspective of the urban middle class. A fundamental
unsettling of interpersonal, familial, and social relationships
accompanies the post-reform “concrete revolution.” In this paper, I
focus on two major films of New Urban Cinema: Spring Subway and
Shower. Both films touch upon displacement in urban spatial
experience, focusing on the transformations of public communal space
and private living space. Spring Subway creates a mode of transit and
emotional experience associated with the libidinal energy and social
potency of a supermodern “non-place” space, whereas Shower creates an
intimate mode of locational experience anchored in the traditional
“anthropological place” space.
2) Masumi Kagaya, Tsukuba University
Social Hierarchy and Class in Meiji period: Spectacles of Slum described in Documentaries by Gennosuke
Yokoyama
The
division of classes into samurai, farmer, artisan and tradesman was
abolished in the Meiji period. The revolutionarily changes in economic
and social system caused many people to moved into big cities in search
for jobs. The new circumstances caused them many hardships, and many
were forced to live in slums. These people became the subject of
documentaries that gained immediate popularity. Most documentary
writers focused on the poverty of these people, and the readers were
very curious to learn about the slum world described in these works.
For
the ordinal people, the slum seemed a completely different world. Slums
in the Meiji era were not a new phenomenon but differed in many ways
from those of the Edo Period. This was because the strict hierarchy of
Edo period was dissolved after the Restoration, followed by fast paced
economic developments.
The emergence of slums was
recognized by all the documentary writers as a popular theme. But
Yokoyama took a different stance. The difference between him and other
writers was the way he understood slums. The other writers did not see
the slums as a social phenomenon, unique to the Meiji era. Yokoyama,
however, concentrated on the sociological aspect of slums. For him a
slum was a panorama of ordinary people’s daily life of the time and
also a social condition brought forth by Japanese modernization.
This paper focuses on the birth of modern slums in Japan by analyzing them through the writings of Yokoyama
3) Shiho Maeshima, Kanagawa University/University of British Columbia/The University of Tokyo
Rethinking Women’s Magazines: Mass-Market Women’s Magazines and Reading Culture in 1920s–30s Japan
In
the 1920s and 30s, mass-market women's magazines triggered numerous
controversies among intellectuals in Japan. Interestingly, these
arguments reveal that the periodicals they discussed were quite
different from how one would imagine "women's magazines" today.
First, while these discussions used the term "fujin-zasshi" (women's
magazines 婦人雑誌), many of them took it for granted that these so-called
"women's magazines" were read not only by women, but also by men.
Secondly, sometimes overtly and other times covertly, the discourse on
women's magazines centered mainly on the issue of democratization of
print culture. Indeed, unlike their marginalized position in most
historical studies of print culture, women's magazines played a
trailblazing role in the democratization of publishing practices in
Japan and maintained an undisputed lead in circulation until the late
1930s. They developed writing styles with a heavy emphasis on orality,
which, combined with illustrations and photos, gave less-educated
readers easy access to the articles. The magazines' diverse contents,
including amply entertaining articles and photo sections, attracted a
widespread readership among both genders and cultivated new reading
practices. Such changes in magazine styles as well as reading habits
severely disturbed the existing order of reading culture. Analyzing
various discourses on and in women's magazines during the 1920s and
1930s, this study reexamines the significance of this particular type
of periodical in modern Japanese print and reading culture.
4) Yusuke Tanaka, International Christian University
Freedom from the Press: Intellectuals and Their Response to the Tokyo Newspaper Strike in 1919
In
August 1919, sixteen Tokyo-based newspaper companies joined together
and suspended publication for four days as a countermeasure against a
strike by newspaper workers demanding improvement of labor conditions.
The Tokyo Newspaper Strike (toka shinbun dōmei kyūkan jiken) is a
little studied episode in the history of both the labor movement and
journalism in modern Japan. The incident gave an unprecedented
experience to urban newspaper readers: the absence of a familiar modern
mass media that plays an important role in creating the imagined
community that made up the Japanese "nation." This paper will examine
how this unusual occasion was understood by intellectuals in the Taisho
period. The sudden absence of the modern media led them to re-think the
necessity (or lack thereof) of reading of the daily affairs happening
in the secular world. For some, the incident was manifest evidence that
Japanese society was entering a new stage where blue-collar workers
have become exerted power in aggravation of class conflict. In
contrast, for some others the absence of daily news was a rare chance,
after a long interval, to flee from ordinary everyday affairs and
instead to devote themselves to an authentic life where they pursue
cultural values that exist beyond time. Through the analysis of their
remarks on the incident, this paper will discuss how Japanese
intellectuals perceived the world and their social mission in the new
age of imperial democracy.
5) Lisa Yinghong Li, J.F. Oberlin University
Reinventions of the Female Self: Recent Additions to China Fictions in Foreign Languages
The
female bildung is one the favorite narrative structures that women
writers in general use to explore issues of female identity and
possibilities, or frustrations, for young women to become integrated
into the largely patriarchal society while claiming their own agency.
This paper will focus on three mainland Chinese women writers who have
made new attempts at rejuvenating this conventional genre. Writing from
a diaspora position and in a time when postsocialism reshaped many
aspects of Chinese reality, these women writers provide new angles to
examine Chinese women’s literature. Their texts can be seen as
conscious or subconscious efforts at writing beyond limitations
inflicted by the expansive cultural production of the so-called chick
lit, as well as the increasingly casual, if not suspicious, practice of
self-eroticism that magnifies the polymorphous female body. Shan Sa’s
novel The Girl who Played Go, Wang Lulu’s The Lily Theater, and Guo Xiaolu’s A Concise Chinese –English Dictionary for Lovers
are first-person narratives that are set in different and crucial times
of modern Chinese history: from Japan’s occupation of Manchuria in the
1930s, to the Great Proletariat Cultural Revolution of the 1960s and
70s, to the beginning of the socialist-capitalist China of the 2000s.
In these texts, the modern Chinese female self in maturation struggles
to search and define a historic space and time to reinscribe their
female agency and subjectivity. Their journeys to self-identity prove
to be tumultuous and even fatal. Hence, these texts problematize
postfeminist acceptance of material contentment and physical pleasure.