Confrontation and Negation: Navigating Representations of Violence in Taishō Literary Media

• In Event: Possibilities of Hope—Horizons of Media(tion): Deterritorializing Representational Regimes in Print Media Across History

Abstract

The period in Japan following the Russo-Japanese War marked a new era in literary and cultural history that emphasized the cultivation of one’s interiority and subjectivity as separate and free from the constraints of moral obligation. While the Taishō period is largely thought of as a period of modernism, individualism and cosmopolitanism, the looming darkness of censorship, militarism and government oppression was omnipresent, particularly following the trial and execution of anarchists including Shūsui Kōtoku. Although many Taishō liberals and intellectuals abandoned politics and overt social activism after 1911, members of the literati, including members of the Shinshisha and the Pan no kai used various media, like the journals Shirakaba, Subaru and Shinshichō to express the institutional violence behind the veil of Democracy, progress, and material culture, that constituted the social experience of Japan’s masses. This presentation will examine the poetry and pose of Murayama Kaita, who represented this socialized violence, was as both a physical and mental burden, in dialogue with the explicit absence (or negation) of the existent social space as seen in the utopian literature of Mushanokōji Saneatsu and the Shirakabaha. Both forms reveal critical discourses on the representational politics of the Taishō Democracy and the dialectic between the needs of the individual and the demands of society. Through the mediation of journal circles, this talk elucidates a textual space for critique of the growing threat of violence that was subsuming daily life in early 20th century Japan.

Author

• Tanya Barnett, Univesity of California, Los Angeles