Our panel, composed of early-career to senior scholars of modern Japanese literature, history, and cultural studies, aims to complicate this bifurcation. We do so by exploring the conceptual, aesthetic, and formal continuities linking wartime, postwar, and New Left discourses, opening up new ways of narrating the contemporary cultural history of Japan. Rather than dwelling on conventional historiography, however, our three papers (15 minutes each) shift the focus to poetic thought, or the critical writings of poets who, when taken together, form a critical genealogy that links the experience of collective reckoning with war and defeat with concerns over language, embodiment, and subjectivity that animated Japan’s New Left and continue to resonate today.
Jack Wilson begins this discussion by examining the work of Kuroda Saburō (b. 1919-1980), a core member of the post-World War II poetry group, The Waste Land (Arechi). In the 1940s and 1950s, Kuroda deployed the figure of the “mob” (gunshū) to describe a conformity of thought and action in modern Japan that dominated the modern epoch. To counter this tendency, Kuroda advocated for first-person poetic writing as an effective means for people to better know themselves and articulate thoughts and feelings that had been suppressed from public life. Yet Kuroda’s poetry during this period seemed to cast doubts on this proposal, depicting a sense of “disillusionment” and a “distrust of words” (kotoba no fushin). Wilson situates this dialectic of thought and feeling within the historical and political stakes of The Waste Land’s collective intervention.
Mariko Takano then traces the development of this “disillusionment” into the 1960s by positing poet and critic Yoshimoto Takaaki (1924−2012) as the lynchpin that connects frameworks of postwar and New Left thought. The lineages of the New Left in Japan are vast in scope, encompassing politics, literature, activism, art, communication and more. What makes the New Left in Japan even harder to pin down is how often its ideas and axioms overlap with that of the postwar. Combined with the postwar, she argues, the scope of the questions and methods of the New Left extend from the 1940s to the present. Especially in the field of literary studies, the New Left had significant afterlives within methodological criticism in the following decades. Giving an overview of Yoshimoto Takaaki’s works from the 1950s and how his works were received both positively and negatively, Takano posits Yoshimoto as a figure that connects the questions and temporality of the New Left with that of the postwar.
Alex Murphy’s paper develops upon Takano’s framing with a consideration of the poet and artist Yoshimasu Gōzō (b. 1939), one of the few surviving exponents of the Tokyo avant-garde art scene that emerged in the 1960s. Although Yoshimasu is rarely mentioned in studies of the New Left, Murphy explicates Yoshimasu’s place within this firmament by examining his engagements with the writing of Yoshimoto Takaaki, and his theorization of “self-expression” (jiko-hyōshutsu) in particular. At the same time, he reads this relationship through the lens of Yoshimasu’s debt to Tamura Ryūichi (1923-1998), a member of the postwar Arechi group whose poetry informed Yoshimasu’s view of language not simply as self-expression but as a conversation with “the voices of the dead.” Murphy then argues that the convergence of these currents can viewed mostly clearly in Yoshimasu’s “Dear Monster” (2012-2016) project, in which he performs an act of “poetic obligation” to the victims of the 2011 Fukushima disaster by transcribing Yoshimoto’s written corpus over the course of four years.
Seiji Lippit will conclude with a 10-minute response to the papers. The remaining 20 minutes will be dedicated to a discussion amongst presenters and audience members.