Rethinking Regionalism in Japan: Performance, Literature, and Music

Session Submission Type: Organized Panel

Abstract

"Local literature" scholar Matsumoto Hiroaki sums up the problem of modern Japanese regional consciousness succinctly: Tokyo is a "black hole" which greedily sucks up valuable human and material resources from throughout the nation. This panel makes the observation that this black-hole phenomenon also warps the discursive map, drawing in economic, political, and cultural capital. Tokyo has naturally thus become the largest base of both academic production and focus in Japan: urban studies, historiography of the nation, modern literary studies, etc, tend to focus explicitly on the capital. As a result, much scholarship implicitly divides the country into a center-periphery or us-versus-them model, positing a fundamental polarity between Tokyo and "the regions" [chihou]. Unfortunately, this geographical bias can be problematic when we attempt to write rural culture from inside urban universities.
Conversely, each of the papers presented here attempts to treat a kind of "region" on its own terms by analyzing localized cultural production. We consider writing and performance to be types of theoretical creation, ways in which community members grapple with their "regionality" at an intersection with other aspects of identity like gender, language, and class. Localized literature and performance dually express and confront geographically-inflected cultural constructs and contribute to a wide diversity of regional consciousnesses. By cultivating our awareness of the weightiness of the "center," we attempt to move beyond it, discovering a multiplicity of centers and peripheries, transient regional identifications, and appropriation and parody of dominant discourses which characterize the periphery.

Area of Study

• Japan

Session Organizer

• Joshua Solomon, University of Chicago

Chair

• Joshua Solomon, University of Chicago

Individual Presentations

• Mass Twang /Folk Twang: A Critical Approach to the Aesthetics of Tsugaru-Jamisen - Joshua Solomon, University of Chicago

• Centering on Periphery: Reading Gender and Place in Prose from Iwate Women Writers - Tamara Kamerer, University of Vienna

• Breaking the Mold: The Poetics of “Kata" in Central Japan’s Regional Kabuki Theater - Michael Kushell, Harvard University

• Playing Off the Beat: Critique, Untimeliness, and Musical Events in Contemporary Japan - Scott W. Aalgaard, University of Chicago

Discussant

• Shawn Bender, Dickinson College