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Overview
After discussing the role of the fantastic in everyday Japan at the eve of the Meiji period, Figal draws new connections between folklorists, writers, educators, state ideologues, and policymakers, all of whom crossed paths in a contest over supernatural terrain. He shows the ways in which a determined Meiji state was engaged in a battle to suppress, denigrate, manipulate, or reincorporate folk belief as part of an effort toward the consolidation of a modern national culture. Modern medicine and education, functioning as a means for the state to exercise its power, redefined folk practices as a source of evil. Diverse local spirits were supplanted by a new Japanese Spirit, embodied by the newly constituted emperor, the supernatural source of the nation’s strength. The monsters of folklore were identified, catalogued, and characterized according to a new regime of modern reason. But whether engaged to support state power and forge a national citizenry or to critique the arbitrary nature of that power, the fantastic, as Figal maintains, is the constant condition of Japanese modernity in all its contradictions. Furthermore, he argues, modernity in general is born of fantasy in ways that have scarcely been recognized.
Bringing unexplored and provocative new ideas to the Japan specialist, Civilization and Monsters will also appeal to readers concerned with issues of modernity in general.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780822396338 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Duke University Press |
| Publication date: | 01/17/2000 |
| Series: | Asia-Pacific |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 304 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
About the Author
Gerald Figal is Associate Professor of History and East Asian Studies at Vanderbilt University.
Read an Excerpt
Civilization and Monsters
Spirits of Modernity in Meiji Japan
By Gerald Figal
Duke University Press
Copyright © 1999 Duke University PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-9633-8
CHAPTER 1
Bakumatsu Bakemono
The entire square to the other side of these teahouses was occupied by the Muraemon-za Theater, the "Three Sisters" female kabuki, peep shows of Chushin-gura, Naniwa-bushi chanting (also known as chobokure), uta-saimon beggar's opera (also called deroren), raconteurs, archery booths, barbershops, massage healers, and around them peddlers of toys, loquat leaf broth, chilled water, "white jade" and "Domyoji" confectionery, chilled and solidified agar-agar jelly, sushi vinegar rice, tempura, dumplings, stuffed Inari fritters, fried eel livers, insects, lanterns, as well as wandering masseurs and Shinnai balladeers, peddlers of all sorts, blowgun booths, dokkoi-dokkoi-dokkoi [snatches of a refrain], fortune-sellers with lanterns dangling from their collars, vendors of "streetwalker" noodles, drunks, quarrels, pests, public urination.
— Kajima Manbei, Edo no yubae (The evening glow of Edo)
Monsters share more than the root word with the verb "to demonstrate"; monsters signify.
— Donna Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women
In 1922, Kajima Manbei offered the above recollection of what the scene at Ryogoku Bridge in Edo looked like circa 1865, about three years prior to the Meiji Restoration. Located on the lower Sumida River between Nihonbashi and Honjo, Ryogoku Bridge was the site of the most famous late-Tokugawa-period form of popular entertainment and entrepreneurship, known as misemono (exhibitions, sideshows). Kajima's marvelous yet ultimately subdued sampling here fails to mention the more ghastly category of attractions for which the Ryogoku carnival had become famous: freaks and monsters. A whale washed ashore and advertised as a monster sunfish, a hideously ugly "demon girl," a scale-covered reptile child, the fur-covered "Bear Boy," the hermaphroditic "testicle girl," giants, dwarfs, strong men (and women), the famous "mist-descending flower-blossoming man" who gulped air and expelled it in "modulated flatulent arias," and the teenager who could pop out his eyeballs and hang weights from his optic nerve, all attest to a libidinal economy in which a fascination with the strange and supernatural conditioned and sustained the production, consumption, and circulation of sundry monsters as commodities in "the evening glow of Edo."
Bakemono of the bakumatsu (literally, "end of the shogunal government," i.e., late Tokugawa) and early Meiji periods did not exist simply as quaint rural throwbacks or captivating commodities at urban misemono. They manifested themselves in numerous forms among commoner and intellectual cultures where their use value was found not in procuring an economic profit at a carnival, but in signifying social and political protest in a crisis. The explosion of bakemono in various cultural productions of the mid-1800s occurred amid a period of social, economic, and political unease, a coincidence that has led the cultural anthropologist Komatsu Kazuhiko to suggest a fundamental link between "times of crisis" and the prodigious appearance of monsters in narrative, visual, and performative art. In his analysis, power and authority in Japan had, from imperial rule in the seventh century to the founding of the military government of the Tokugawa clan in the seventeenth century, relied not only on the conquest of real enemies, but subsequently on the maintenance of symbolic control over surreal "demon" enemies posited beyond the borders of the central realm (usually in the largely undeveloped regions to the north) and concentrated in special sacred and mysterious areas within the realm. Magicoreligious ceremonies directed at such sites were devised to draw an aura of awe and authority from these objects of fear thus controlled. If such symbolic management appeared inadequate — for example, in times of famine, epidemics, and other natural catastrophes or even in the invasion of strangers from overseas — these outside demons would be tied to elements within society, usually those that for whatever reason could be seen as a threat to order. Those stigmatized elements could then be controlled, thereby indirectly controlling the demons on the outside in a scapegoat mechanism rigged to uphold the integrity of a rule whose authority rested on calming the fears of its subjects, whether those fears be of natural or supernatural origin.
This hypothesis lends a double edge to Komatsu's general theory of the symbolic use of the supernatural throughout Japanese history. From the Nara period to modern times, the representation and magicoreli-gious management of an "other world" of symbolic demon-enemies and the dark outer regions of the country associated with it has been used by emperors as well as shoguns to secure and display power and authority; it has also been used by discontented factions (peasants, disgruntled samurai, religious groups, opposition parties) as a means to protest authority through carnivalesque reversal and parody (in which monsters become champions of the common folk), or by directly designating the authorities themselves as evil monsters. In such instances, bakemono were consciously being used as signifiers in a discourse while they were being produced as commodities to gratify morbid fascinations in the marketplace. There are some doubts about the general applicability of Komatsu's paradigm, but it does offer a way other than the grossly economic to explain, for example, the licensing of pleasure quarters, the strict regulation of itinerant travel, and the increasing number of sumptuary laws applied during the last part of the Tokugawa reign, when the means of central government control rapidly decayed. At the very least, Komatsu's suggestion that an inordinate appearance of the weird seems to coincide with periods of crisis and transition in Japanese history provides a point from which to begin an examination of the proliferation of supernatural signs that spread from late Tokugawa into early Meiji Japan.
From the array of disruptive events of bakumatsu Japan — earthquakes, fires, rice riots, disease epidemics, the arrival of Commodore Perry's "blackships," and the civil wars leading to and in the wake of the Meiji Restoration — catastrophic change itself was often portrayed as a monster to be feared. The development of an economically potent but politically neutered merchant class and of a thriving but officially disdained popular culture had also contributed to a social existence among the populace that had become increasingly disjointed from the official representation of social order and the organization of society informed by this representation (crudely expressed in a Confucian-derived "natural" hierarchy of shi-no-ko-sho: warrior, farmer, artisan, and merchant classes). These extraordinary conditions facilitated the resuscitation of extraordinary cultural forms such as bakemono in the signification of dis-ease and discontent. This reading is at least one way to interpret the conspicuousness of supernatural images in public places in bakumatsu Japan, whether they were overtly charged with a political meaning in a public protest or merely offered as exotic grotesqueries in a commercial spectacle. In either case, supernatural signifiers commonly associated with the beliefs of an unsophisticated rural populace (although equally produced and reproduced in the city) saturated both city and country in mid-nineteenth-century Japan to a surprising degree and were available for reuse in new texts and contexts. Through a sketch of some of the cultural and intellectual sites where bakemono figured prominently in late Tokugawa and early Meiji Japan, this chapter sets as its modest goal the mise-en-scène of the conditions for a newdiscourse on fushigi that arose with Japan's modernity.
Because Tokyo, as a progressive and bustling city, would become a symbol of the modern in Japan, the monsters and spirits abiding there from late Edo days command our attention in an investigation of the folk and the fantastic in Japanese modernity. Indeed, the city became the center for the production and organization of a modern discourse concerning items of fushigi gathered from peripheral regions, for which reason I focus the stage setting of this chapter primarily on the cultural scene of mid-nineteenth-century Edo/Tokyo. Whereas bakemono had persisted for centuries throughout the archipelago, they now appeared in Edo/Tokyo with alarming gusto and new social significance. Certainly not the only urban area that possessed the means of reproducing the supernatural in the forms of commodities and signifiers to be consumed, exchanged, and used (the Kansai area was also extremely vital in this respect), the Kanto region did possess the additional attribute of being the seat of the sho-gunal (and then Meiji) government. If bakemono were to take on a political inflection as the shogunate deteriorated, they would best conduct their hauntings among the daimyo (feudal lords) mansions concentrated in Edo. Still, because many supernatural motifs had been transplanted from rural origins owing to Edo's relative youth and distinctive demographic melange, it is also useful to consider, if only briefly, how they were mobilized in demonstrations throughout the countryside during this same period. Finally, to underscore the modern aspect of the intellectual preoccupation with the folk and the fantastic that concerns the body of this study, I round off this chapter with a glimpse at prior intellectual engagements with the supernatural as represented in the late Tokugawa kokugaku (nativist) thought of Hirata Atsutane.
The misemono at Ryogoku Bridge were one of the major cultural productions relevant to the circulation of forms of fushigi in the late Tokugawa period. The history of the bridge itself is fittingly framed by the spirits of the dead. The plaza on the Honjo side of the river, one of two that became sites for the Ryogoku misemono, was adjunct to the Ekoin temple, a memorial situated on the mass grave of the victims of the Mei-reki fire that devastated the area in 1657, two years before the bridge's completion. More than two and a half centuries later, in the early Taisho period, Ryogoku Bridge became known as a popular suicide spot. Between those times, from as early as the 1730s to as late as the 1880s, misemono at the bridge's plazas displayed diverse oddities that often featured bakemono of one form or another. Despite the hideousness of some exhibits, the misemono during the Edo period were free from official censure and boomed in the nineteenth century, suggesting that authorities did not consider them particularly threatening. The attraction of bakemono exhibits in general is also demonstrated by the unexpected crowds that traveled eight miles outside of Edo to see the monster-filled "haunted teahouse" that theater set designer Izumiya Kichibei, specialist in supernatural scenes, built in 1830 in Omori. Due to its persistent draw of crowds to this suburban area, it became one of the few exhibits ordered to be closed by local authorities. The same Izumiya also designed in the 183 os a sideshow depicting grisly scenes such as "mutilated corpses bound to tree trunks, disembodied heads swinging by the hair, a wizened corpse peering from its coffin, etc." Hashizume Shinya confirms that a "haunted house" (obake yashiki) boom began at Ryogoku from about March 1838 and notes that one popular misemono of the time was an archery shooting gallery that had assorted monsters as the targets.
Within five years after the Meiji Restoration, however, misemono themselves became the targets of a series of ordinances that initiated their demise. The new morality, the new technology, and the new economy of the Meiji establishment were the ostensible justifications for clearing out the open-air Ryogoku carnivals. A law of 1870 banned fraudulent displays; an ordinance of 1872 prohibited, on humanitarian grounds, the display of human deformities; an 1872 government requisition of lands for the building of telegraph offices appropriated the western Ryogoku plaza; and ordinances in 1873 banned the makeshift construction of temporary screen booths such as those used in misemono, which were not subject to property taxes. Soon after this legislation, items of entertainment appropriate to civilization and enlightenment were later introduced from the West: the gramophone, the Edison kinetoscope, and eventually cinema. Many ex-misemono entertainers sought new life in the yose (variety halls) that housed vaudeville acts as well as rakugo raconteurs, but it is significant that popular performers and the crowds they attracted were effectively taken off the open streets (historically the space of revolutionary action) and contained within a controlled economy of structures. It seems fitting that the word for the variety halls called yose signifies "a place that brings in the crowds."
The history of the yose and their principal attraction, the tellers of generally comical but often ghostly stories known as rakugo, roughly paralleled that of the misemono as a popular form of commoner culture in Edo. Offering a type of hanashimono (spoken thing), rakugo tellers were an auricular counterpart of the misemono spectacle. The first permanent yose in Edo was established in 1798 and, like the misemono, had boomed by the mid-nineteenth century; by 1855 there were 172 yose in Edo, a number that did not decline appreciably until the late Meiji period. Among the stories told by rakugo performers a good number were ghost stories, especially during the eighth month, the traditional time for tales of spirits. Others dealt with supernatural or occult figures such as the tengu goblin, yamabushi (mountain ascetics), and mysterious ijin (strangers). Regardless of the specific type of character or setting involved, Sasaki and Morioka argue that "ultimately, dramatization in rakugo is achieved through the skillful coupling of the real with the unreal" (434).
From this juxtaposition of the real, everyday world as the audience knew it with an unreal, fantastic world that defied the laws of that everyday world, rakugo attained its grotesque (and usually humorous) effect and its power as a carnivalesque expression of social critique. Sasaki and Morioka have argued that the grotesque exaggeration and distortion used to elicit laughter in rakugo "exists between two worlds, our real world and, at the same, something that surpasses it" and thus serves to dramatize an alienated world to which the artist can respond with a positive attitude about the superiority of this world or with a negative attitude that criticizes it: "Objectively looked upon with detachment, grotesque is an unrealistic description of the real world. But from the subjective point of view of the expressing artist and what he is trying to express, grotesque can be a pointedly realistic denunciation of a sham Reality, of a world that has become absurd and fake" (435). Much in the same vein as Komatsu's theory of monsters appearing in spades in times of crisis, Sasaki and Morioka point out that the critical attitude of grotesque art and literature is likewise especially evident in such times of social and political anxiety. They directly link the eruption of late Tokugawa rakugo with the increasing dissonance between the ideological representation of the strict class hierarchy of warrior-farmer-artisan-merchant and the social reality engendered largely by an aspiring merchant class and burgeoning commoner culture. However, because the satirical social criticism that rakugo could deliver was in the setting of a witty and playful entertainment, Sasaki and Morioka conclude that, like the practitioner of grotesque art in post-Romantic Europe, rakugo raconteurs of the late Tokugawa period did not intend disseminating "serious moral and social messages" (436). In this judgment Sasaki and Morioka take the playful aspect of rakugo's social satire perhaps a bit too lightly. If organized and sustained beyond the moment of ritualized reversal and release, carnivalesque laughter could become a powerful catalyst for action that seriously upsets a reigning social order. Because the disorder of bakumatsu social reality, in contrast to its imagined conception, was the implied subject of parody in many rakugo, it is not unlikely that in the laughter of the yose serious social commentary existed. The question is how it became mediated to do otherwise.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Civilization and Monsters by Gerald Figal. Copyright © 1999 Duke University Press. Excerpted by permission of Duke University Press.
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