Two Cultures: Kuwabara Takeo, F. R. Leavis, and the Democratization of Traditional Literary Arts in Mid-Twentieth Century Japan and Britain

• In Event: Culture and Democracy in the Making of Modern Japanese Intellectuals

Abstract

Kuwabara Takeo (1904-1988) and F. R. Leavis (1895-1978) were iconoclastic critics who sought to make literary culture – which they saw as the traditional domain of elites and dilettantes – more relevant to the lives of a broad readership in democratic society. Contemporaries with each other, Kuwabara and Leavis shared mutual influences and a similar ambivalence about American popular culture. Yet despite significant overlap in their visions for literature, the work of these two thinkers was received in starkly different ways in their respective national contexts. Kuwabara became famous in 1946 after criticizing the literary world of professional haiku poets (haidan) as pretentious and guild-like. He is remembered as a strident, Eurocentric modernizer who declared the art of haiku inferior to that of novels. Conversely, Leavis came to be seen as an outspoken defender of traditional literary values after intervening in the controversial “Two Cultures” debate over science and the humanities in the 1960s. Against these conventional images, focusing on the methodological and intellectual connections between the two thinkers brings Kuwabara’s traditionalist side and Leavis’s modernist side into view. Both thinkers were a part of an interwar, transnational project to reimagine the relationship between traditional literary canons and democratic culture. I argue that this project later became associated with modernism in Japan and traditionalism in Britain due to the different relative positions of these two countries during the Cold War and the timing of their postwar economic growth spurts.

Author

• Adam Bronson, Salisbury University