New Nationalisms

UITV Program Schedule

The New Nationalisms Symposium was fabulous! Our writers were super-fabulous! Thank you all for coming and contributing to the discussion. Please continue to share your ideas, questions, and comments here.

On Tuesday, February 21, Tomoyuki Hoshino and Chizuko Naitô visited my seminar in modern Japanese literature. They answered students' questions about literature, nationalism, the emperor system, national identity, social justice, violence, and their thoughts on the future. After a long journey and with only a short night's sleep, they provided us all with a very memorable experience.

Two are already en route (in Detroit, waiting for a connecting flight to Cedar Rapids as I type). One more will be arriving tomorrow! If you have questions you'd like to ask them, please post them (in English, Chinese, or Japanese) below under the "comments" section.

Yutaka Tsuchiya's 1999 documentary Atarashii kamisama ("The New God") will be screened this Friday, February 17, at 6:30 p.m. in the Iowa Room (335) at the Iowa Memorial Union.

As is the case with all the events connected with "New Nationalisms," this event is free and open to the public.

From the director's statement:

What is happening? Compelled by accelerating capitalism, have we all become drifting cells desperately seeking firm ground? Perhaps we have indeed. The modernist tales about Nation, Company, School, and Family have started to collapse, and individual value systems are beginning to be challenged. We are now just floating along.

And yet why does nobody say it? That we don't need a buoy; that the "Grand Tale" is now finished. I don't need any fairy tale that I cannot control. The exit lies in the smaller relationships between autonomous individuals. That is the only way for "Our Tale" to begin.

Film critic Chiseko Tanaka writes:

Through this film, the filmmaker Tsuchiya proposes that the Japanese people say a long good-bye to the [emperor] system. This is why I think The New God is a splendid and unique documentary.

Here are some links for those interested in reading more about this film:

symposis and interviews

Berlin International Film Festival entry

director info and videography

Midnight Eye review

It warrants mention that the main subject of this documentary, Karin Amamiya, travels to North Korea, where she meets with very significant figures from the Japanese Red Army/ Red Army Faction who have been living there since hijacking a plane (with swords) in 1970 (the "Yodo-go" Incident). She travels with Takaya Shiomi, who spent twenty years in prison for his connection to the incident.

from "Chino" by Tomoyuki Hoshino (translated by Lucy Fraser)

Tomoyuki Hoshino lived in Mexico for many years and has travelled extensively in Spain and Cuba. He also briefly worked as a Spanish translator. Many of his novels are set in Mexico or South America, and many of his characters speak Spanish or work in jobs that require some fluency in Spanish. In his 1998 novella Uragiri Nikki ("The Treason Diaries"), Hoshino takes the figure of the (invariably male) teen killer that dominated the Japanese media in the late 1990s and places him in Peru, where he joins the Tupac Amaru Revolutionary Army in the siege of the Japanese Embassy in Lima. You can read more about this bold story here. His short story "Chino" involves a Japanese youth in search of guerrillas in the mountains "below Mexico." His essays on Spanish-language cinema, Che Guevara, and Spanish and Latin American literature appear in Japan's largest newspapers and journals. In the zuihitsu tradition, he writes essays on his own daily life and a wide range of other subjects for publications such as the Nihon Keizai Newspaper and the Tokyo Newspaper. Hoshino is also an avid soccer fan and amateur player whose commentaries on the game (including the politics of the 2002 FIFA World Cup co-hosted by Korea and Japan) have attracted quite a following independent of his fiction.

"Tokyo Lets Loose Lapdogs of War" by Chalmers Johnson

"Mitsubishi, Historical Revisionism and Japanese Corporate Resistance to Chinese Forced Labor Redress"

"The Tokyo Tribunal, War Responsibility and the Japanese People"

"Female on throne could marry foreigner, Hiranuma warns"

"Seoul Mayor Lee takes heat over Asian nationalism remark"

"Aso's Yasukuni Remarks"

While the New Nationalisms symposium is decidedly literary in focus and not, for example, a gathering of political scientists to discuss current events in East Asia, the complex interplay among storytelling practices, the media, political discourse, and the arts underwrites much of what we will hear. As is the case with so much excellent fiction (even that which is set in the past or in fantastic alternate realities), specters of the present and its troubles loom large. Whether it is in the figure of a child emperor in My Life as Emperor or a middle-aged woman who succeeds her brother as emperor in Lonely Hearts Killer, reminders of our current world and its debates are many in the works that will be discussed (and read) on February 25.

Here are some links to essays and news reports that underscore why writers and critics might be drawn to such themes these days:

"Abe downplays Aso's call for emperor to visit Yasukuni Shrine," January 30, 2006 (Kyodo News)
"Koizumi's obstinacy could isolate Japan: Yasukuni and Asia,", January 26, 2006 (Znet)
"Okinawa Base Plan Boosted by Election," January 24, 2006 (Japan Focus)
"Another side to Japanese-Korean history," January 30, 2006 (Japan Times)
"Flags of our fathers: commemorating Iwo Jima," January 16, 2006 (Znet)
"S. Korean film looks kindly at Northerners," January 18, 2006 (International Herald Tribune)

You can find more in previous posts.

Chizuko Naitô will discuss the recent rise of so-called "gender bashing" and neonationalism in contemporary Japan. She will relate what she calls the Loliconization of Japanese society (Lolicon being the abbreviation for "Lolita Complex") to the "problem of gender inherent in neonationalism." Using texts such as Gender Free Trouble (edited by Ryôko Kimura and published in 2005) and the award-winning fiction of Yoriko Shôno, Naitô will elaborate on how sexuality, gender, and "the nation" are configured (and re-configured) in Japan today.

Su Tong's young emperor in My Life as Emperor embodies a brutality and fear underwriting "nation-building." As John Updike writes, "Gradually, [the young emperor] realizes that he possesses the power to 'obliterate' anything that annoys him." And Tomoyuki Hoshino's novel Lonely Hearts Killer includes descriptions of an unnamed and "alternate reality" Japan as "islands of children" whose prolonged reliance on an imperial father (His Majesty) has brought out the most "grotesque" (to borrow Hoshino's word) in interpersonal relationships.

English language readers are able to enjoy excellent translations of Su Tong's novels (such as My Life as Emperor and Rice). Earlier posts provide reviews, book publication and sales information, and news related to Su Tong's most recent project. Please browse the archives to read more. There are many fans and scholars of Su Tong's fiction, and my hope is that more of you will contribute comments. To post comments, click on the "comments" link after each post.

Hoshino's works are not yet available in English translation (with the important exception of Lucy Fraser's wonderful translation of "Chino"), so I'm translating and uploading as much as possible here. I'm posting my translation of the opening of The Story of Rainbow and Chloe, which was released just last week, below. I included the full text of a speech by Chizuko Naitô (translated by Maiko Shiota) in the first blog entry. Through the archives, you can also find excerpts from the opening of her new book Empires and Assassinations and other works by Hoshino. I've translated these shorter excerpts hastily in the interest of introducing blog visitors to as much as possible before the symposium. I hope to post more from Empires and Assassinations in the coming weeks.

For Hoshino readers, The Story of Rainbow and Chloe offers some immediately familiar images (projected light and sound, for example), and the gender-free bodies/language one finds in some of his other work is also evident. But I think many will agree this novel also marks quite a departure from his previous work. Here is roughly the first page:

Fetus

The unborn child of a twenty-year pregnancy.

That is my life. I have been inside my parent's body since I began residing in this world as a fetus approximately twenty years ago. There is no way for me to understand why I have been on hold and as yet unborn. My parent thinks about things like, What stroke of fate has arrested this child's development in the form of a comma-shaped stone? It keeps living inside me, just clinging on and blowing up like a sparkler bomb at the end of the umbilical cord without the strength to make my belly bigger or the strength to be born.

My own sense is that I am probably only existing as a head. Anyway, that is how I see things. At least one thing I know for certain is that only my head has grown.

For good reason I only learned of this very recently. Until then, I had never given a thought to my form. I did not even have a sense of "myself," so that was only natural.

My earliest memories go back quite a way. I heard sounds, I sensed faint shadows and light, I felt good, and I felt uncomfortable.

I heard all sorts of sounds. The sounds of my parent's heartbeat, digestion, and bones; the sounds of my parent speaking, sounds my parent heard, and the sounds of my parent's thoughts. Above all, I was transfixed by the light shows streaming in through my parent's eyes. Occasionally I experienced tremors and constriction, and I also remember the pain of times when I absorbed too much of my parent's stress.

Somewhere along the way I learned words. [and the paragraph continues...]

"Even when His Majesty died, I wasn’t fazed, not even un poquito."

And so goes the first line of Lonely Hearts Killer by Tomoyuki Hoshino.

For a few days, you could read the first 38 pages of LHK in translation on this very post, but now you can click here instead.


In the current issue of Bungei, Hoshino writes:

After writing [Lonely Hearts Killer], I was asked the following by my students and young writers. "We don't understand why you'd want to problematize the emperor. Is the emperor really that big of a presence in the lives of people over thirty?"

I felt the same way when I was younger. But then I wondered what would happen to the people of Japan if right here and right now the emperor system was abolished?

For the February 25 "New Nationalisms" symposium, Su Tong and Tomoyuki Hoshino will read from their respective novels My Life as Emperor and Lonely Hearts Killer. There will also be time for audience members to ask them questions. As I mentioned in earlier posts, the University of Iowa is delighted to welcome back Su Tong and truly honored to host Tomoyuki Hoshino's first public reading in the United States!

We are also very fortunate that the literary, media, and cultural critic Chizuko Naitô has agreed to join the symposium. This is only her second presentation in the U.S. (She spoke at a MLK Week conference on the arts and social justice at Stanford University in 2004.) Her much-anticipated new book Empires and Assassinations (see this earlier post) includes a chapter on the High Treason Incident of 1910 and the distorted story of the sole female defendant spun by the Japanese media at the time. That woman, a popular figure among UI Japanarchy students, was Kanno Sugako.



The Iowa City community will no doubt be interested to know that Emma Goldman decried the High Treason Incident and spoke out in support of Kanno and the other defendants.

In her talk for the symposium, Naitô will discuss neonationalism and "gender bashing" through the fiction of Yoriko Shôno, the 1994 winner of the Akutagawa Prize for her novel The Time Slip Industrial Complex (Taimu surippu konbinaato).

Please visit the archives (to the left), where you can find the first post on this blog from December 3, 2005. There you can read more about Naitô, who is pictured here.

From Hoshino's online diary entry of 1/7/06:
"For some reason I've published a new book in January for three years in a row. This year, it's The Story of Rainbow and Chloe (Kawade Publishing), which goes on sale today."

The Bungei Hoshino Tomoyuki Special Issue features a new short story by Hoshino ("The Fatherless Kids' Club"), some pieces on his background and works, and all sorts of interviews essays, and props, including some with/by Tsushima Yûko, Matsuura Rieko, Shimada Masahiko (who has been a guest of UI's International Writing Program), and Yamada Eimi (just to name a few). Hoshino also provides his own commentaries on his works and some pictures.





January 14 update:
I'm reading through the new Tomoyuki Hoshino Special Issue of the literary journal Bungei, and one light-hearted (yet telling) passage made me laugh. It veers from our theme, but I decided to post this for Japanese film and pop culture enthusiasts. Masahiko Shimada poses the following question to Hoshino: "If they were going to make one of your works into a movie, which one would you want it to be? And how would you cast it?"

Hoshino replies: "Naburiai, directed by Seijun Suzuki. With Kaela Kimura as Petite, Ringo Sheena as Grande, and Masanobu Andô as Medio. I'd also like it if they made it a musical."

I was a little surprised, but I would like to see that movie too. Here's a very quickly penned (well, typed) translation from Naburiai since I know many will not have read it. (There are no gender markers in this passage in the original – other than those that might be associated with the characters' names.)

I gave my eyelids, which felt as dry as cornflakes, a good rub and then looked around the room again. Two people were curled up asleep on the wooden floor. Grande, the bigger of the two, slept in a Vassallo kick pose, as if launching into a backstroke with both arms outstretched from behind the ears and up above the head. The liquid light from the aquarium fell on those ears and spread to the scruff of the neck. The smaller one, Petite, had both arms tucked in tightly between the thighs, just like a folded-up collapsible umbrella. My leather jacket lay between the two of them like a cast-off hide. I had been sleeping face down in that hide. The three of us must have been forming the Chinese character for river, 川, on the floor in our sleep.

And here's a little more from later on in the story:

As soon as we finished work, I asked the two if they’d like to go enjoy some sunshine and beer in the grassy park. We asked an employee for directions to a liquor store, bought a pack of Tecates, and headed to the park. The sunning bench was very warm, as if a cat had just finished resting there. The three of us sat down in unison, stretched out our legs, sighed, and looked one another in the face. All of our expressions were relaxed, dripping with irrepressible smiles. The dazzlingly bright sun drew a sunny scent from our faces. We opened the bottles, toasted a perfunctory “kanpai” as if reciting a magic spell, clinked our bottles together, downed the contents – purging the bottles of their spirits, sighed yet again, sat back deep into the bench, and on my left, Petite let out a “oh, that’s good” mixed in with a long breath.

“The sun here is fabulous! Isn’t this park the perfect spot for drinking beer?” Grande squinted and looked up at the sun. I nodded my head in sincere agreement. The sweet fragrance of daphne flowers drifted in from somewhere. “Everyone is so uptight. I’ve invited them out many times, but all they ever want to do is sip tea.”

“When you say ‘everyone’, do you mean Satô and the rest?” Petite’s breath emanated dorsally and pushed across me over to Grande.

“No, no, the company people are hopeless. I meant the other translators' cliques.”

“Oh, the cliques. Why do people swarm together in cliques like that anyway?” I picked up a plum blossom that had fallen at my feet. The stamen was hairy like eyelashes and looked a little obscene.

This news comes courtesy of Hualing Engle.

Su Tong was commissioned by Canongate in England to write a novel based on a Chinese mythological story. Several Nobel laureates have received similar commissions from Canongate. Su Tong has just completed the novel, a poignant story of the toll of "greatness" and political power on "ordinary" lives. A man is drafted along with hundreds of other laborers by the first emperor of China to build the Great Wall. After many years, his wife embarks on the long and arduous journey over hundreds of miles to look for him. When she reaches a spot where the wall has collapsed, she finds her husband dead amid the debris. Many of Su Tong's novels have been translated, so hopefully we can look for this one too in the coming years.

Here are some translations to check out:

English:

My Life as Emperor (我的帝王生涯)
Translated by Howard Goldblatt
Published by Hyperion East

Raise the Red Lantern (大红灯笼高高挂)
Translated by Michael S. Duke
Published by Harper Perennial

Rice (米)
Translated by Howard Goldblatt
Published by Harper Perennial
 
 French:

Epouses et concubines (妻妾成群)
Published by Le Livre de Poche

Fantes De Papiers (纸鬼)
Translated by A. Auger
Published by Desclée De Brouwer

Je Suis l'Empereur de Chine (我的帝王生涯)
Translated by Claude Payen
Published by Editions Philippe Picquier

Riz (米)
Translated by Liliane Dutrait
Published by Flammarion

Visages fardes (红粉)
Translated by Denis Bénéjam
Published by Editions Philippe Picquier

You can also look for the following in:

German:

Die Opiumfamilie (罂粟之家)
Published by Rowohlt

Rice (米)
Published by Rowohlt
 
Italian:

Moglie Concubine (妻妾成群)
Published by Theorio

Spiriti Senza Pace (碎瓦)
Published by Feltrinelli

I due volti del mondo (枫杨树故乡)
Published by Neri Pozza

Quando ero Imperatore (我的帝王生涯)
Published by Neri Pozza
 
Dutch:

Rijst (米)
Published by Uitgeverij De Geus

Drie Lantaaarns (妻妾成群)
Published by Amerika
 
Su Tong has other works in translation in Sweden, Norway, Japan, and Turkey.

Well, not the symposium, but the topic certainly shows up a lot in the news these days.

Many thanks to Natasa Durovicova for bringing the following two pieces to my attention:

"Koizumi's Obsession with the Past Makes for an Uncertain Future" by Weiland Wagner for Der Spiegel (Dec. 23, 2005).

"Beijing's Historical Fantasies" by Brahma Chellaney for the International Herald Tribune (Dec. 12, 2005).


I'm sure many of you also saw this from today's Reuter's Reuter's wire:

Japan should try harder to convince China that Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi's visits to a shrine for war dead do not glorify militarism, Chief Cabinet Secretary Shinzo Abe, a top contender to succeed Koizumi, said on Sunday.

But Abe also indicated he too might pay his respects at the shrine, seen in Beijing and Seoul as a symbol of Tokyo's past military aggression, if he became prime minister in September.


If you're going to be in the Bay Area in late January, you can come hear my talk about Hoshino's novella The Treason Diaries at Stanford University.

Hoshino is also now listed on the Korean literary site Moonji Publishing. More here!

Finally, if you can read Japanese, I urge you to check out Hoshino's online journal. It is, as the kids say, "off the hook." Click on the "Hoshino Tomoyuki Archives" link to the left, and then scroll down to find: 言ってしまえばよかったのに日記.

Hoshino has already written a new novel, The Story of Rainbow and Chloe. Timed to coincide with the publication of this new novel on January 7 of 2006, the preeminent journal Bungei is releasing a special issue on Hoshino Tomoyuki! It may be a while before the new issue gets to the University of Iowa library, so I would love to hear from those of you who get to see it first! If you visit Hoshino's website (link to the left), you can see the jacket cover for The Story of Rainbow and Chloe.

You'll also want to check out Lucy Fraser's excellent translation of the story "Chino" at the Japanese Fiction Project sponsored by the Japanese Literature Publishing and Promotion Center (J-Lit Center).

Last month, my students and I discussed the following article, which speaks to the need for a symposium such as New Nationalisms.

"Ugly Images of Asian Rivals Become Best Sellers in Japan"

Some highlights:

A young Japanese woman in the comic book "Hating the Korean Wave" exclaims, "It's not an exaggeration to say that Japan built the South Korea of today!" In another passage the book states that "there is nothing at all in Korean culture to be proud of."

In another comic book, "Introduction to China," which portrays the Chinese as a depraved people obsessed with cannibalism, a woman of Japanese origin says: "Take the China of today, its principles, thought, literature, art, science, institutions. There's nothing attractive."

The two comic books, portraying Chinese and Koreans as base peoples and advocating confrontation with them, have become runaway best sellers in Japan in the last four months.

It isn't hard to find news stories (on Japanese history textbooks or North Korean abductees) that might fuel the market for such "ugly images." According to the Kyodo Newswire, the Japanese Foreign Minister, Aso Taro, characterized China's increased military spending as a "considerable threat" just last week, and stories of North Korean "threats" are almost part of the daily fare in today's Japanese news media.

Many of you will remember that Chinese Prime Minister Wen Jiabao recently decided to cancel his scheduled meetings with Prime Minister Koizumi when the Japanese prime minister continued to visit the Yasukuni Shrine (even after a High Court decision in September ruled that these highly controversial trips to the shrine were unconstitutional).



Here you see a photo of Koizumi visiting the shrine, as well as some images of people protesting his visits (with signs in Japanese and Korean), demanding he listen to "the voices of Asia."

















Suggested reading:
"Asia Battles Over War History"
"The Emperor Showa Standing at Ground Zero: On the (Re-)configuration of a National 'Memory' of the Japanese People"
"The War Anniversaries: Harbingers of Things to Come"
"The Social Origins and Consequences of Contemporary Japanese Populism"
"Empire and Nation Revisited: Fifty Years After Bandung"
"What Role Japan's Imperial Family?"
Official Website for the Yasukuni Shrine

Please feel free to post comments and questions by clicking on "comments" below.

Click on the image below to view a larger version of this essay, which appeared in Japan Book News (Winter, 2002). If you prefer to see the piece in its original context, click on this link and then click on the "Japan Book News" icon. (You'll need Adobe Acrobat to read it.) You might also be interested to see Hoshino quoted in a Guardian essay on Ôe.


The original Japanese is essay is here.

What an honor it is for the University of Iowa to host what will be Hoshino Tomoyuki's first public reading in North America!

Hoshino is a prolific writer who has been celebrated for both his innovative use of language and provocative (and politically charged) fictional worlds. He stands at the vanguard of the contemporary Japanese literary scene. His new novel The Worussian-Japanese Tragedy first appeared alongside a piece by Nobel laureate Ôe Kenzaburô in last year’s New Year's special issue of the preeminent literary journal Gunzô.

The critic Kawamura Minato writes, "The power to imagine is the power to transform reality. In that sense, [The Worussian-Japanese Tragedy] wholly demonstrates a genuinely powerful imagination."

Hoshino will be reading from his 2004 powerhouse novel Lonely Hearts Killer. This richly layered novel begins with the sudden death of a fictional young emperor, a bold move for several reasons that I will discuss more in future posts to this blog.

If you have read Lonely Hearts Killer and would like to comment on it or share your thoughts (or questions for the author), please use the "comments" link below.