I was into Japan before it was cool

From an interview with Murakami Takashi in today's Asahi Shimbun:

Asahi Shimbun: "Cool Japan" has quite the reputation overseas, and you've been seen as one of its standard bearers.
Murakami Takashi: No one talks about "Cool Japan" overseas. That's totally false: just a rumor. It's a term that Japanese people made to satisfy their own narcissism, little more than a catchphrase for advertisers trying to get public money.
. . .
AS: Nevertheless, the Japanese government is tyring to push anime, toys, and fashion as part of "Cool Japan" overseas.
MT: That's just money for people like advertisers. None of it comes back to the artists, and it's a waste of tax revenue. Even in the anime and game industries, the Japanese market share is being taken by foreign companies, and there's no end to the mergers and consolidation. It's really pitiful. Not only do the creators make a pittance, but they also subcontract to other countries so they can't develop their labor force. The ground is sinking beneath their feet.
. . .
[Murakami speaks of the poor state of the art universities]
AS: That being said, didn't Japan develop it's own unique culture? Manga and anime, for example?
MT: After America dropped the bomb and Japan lost the war, Japan didn't even have a definite state but was able to maintain peace by relying on the US. What was born out of that situation was "subculture" and the otaku culture. As culture, they were like a sterile flower.
To make a sterile flower bloom into something worthwhile you need some kind of mechanism, but no one is interested in putting in the effort. I'm concentrated on how I can get to the top on the global stage. Japanese people can't even be number one in golf or tennis. Why is that? Because they can get by pretty easily within the country, they get lazy. Because local governments want to put art all over their cities, artists can get by comfortably without looking abroad, and mere craftsmanship is highly overrated. They're too soft.

I, too, dislike it.

Force of arms

It's been nearly a year since I last posted anything, even though I've slithered back into Japan. I don't even know if anyone still reads this. If you do, I'm sure you're just lazy with cleaning out your RSS subscriptions.

Anyway, that's not the point. The point is I got bored at work today and translated the last few paragraphs of an essay from a magazine I've been reading. So:

Questioning War and Literature, SEKIYA Hiroshi

I’d like to touch on the continuity of the Edo and Meiji periods, but not on how high literacy rates or a developed commercial economy prepared Japan for modernization. Rather, I’d like to talk about the continuity of political culture. 

Japanese society during the Edo period was marked by the expansion of military rule after Sekigahara, which gave way to a period of sustained peace under a national government. Taxation and compulsory government service were ultimately justified by being of  “use to the country” [國の用 kuni no you]. People deemed not “of use” were labeled as such, and if even now, when a public figure is called “useless,” it is taken to mean not a specific deficiency in a certain area but a condemnation of their character as a whole, we are still living in the Edo period in at least that respect. [The literary scholar] Maeda Tsutomu calls the Tokugawa system a “garrison state”[兵営国家 heiei kokka] (Heigaku to shushigaku rangaku kokugaku, Heibonsha). 

In a “garrison state,” the source of political legitimacy is neither a concept of “statehood” nor “virtue.” Political legitimacy comes from (post-Sekigahara) absolute military superiority, as represented by the concepts of “force of arms” [武威 bui] and “authority” [御威光 go-ikou]. The Tokugawa regime quickly collapsed when its “force of arms” was threatened by the landing of Western ships, and the Meiji government that arose in its place took the introduction of Western political systems as its mission, pressing slogans like “enrich the country, strengthen the military,” and “civilization and enlightenment.” 

Yet,  “enrich the country, strengthen the military” is necessarily little more than a modern attempt at acquiring “force of arms.” And what of “civilization and enlightenment?” Perhaps it was simply a declaration that until this point we as a country had been an uncivilized and barbarous. No, in actuality the substance of this “civilization” really didn’t matter. If we take it as instead saying that “for a long time China had been ‘of use,’ but from now on it’s the West, so let’s Westernize!’” then a clear continuity between Edo and Meiji political culture emerges. If that, then, is the case, how do we understand post-Meiji, particularly post-war concepts such as freedom and equality, that is, human rights? 

War is a tired subject, but it is my opinion that this is the question that should really be asked of so-called "war literature."

Sekiya, Hiroshi/関谷博. "Sensou to bungaku wo tou shisen"/「戦争と文学を問う視線」. Kokoro/『こころ』 30 December 2011: 203

Speaking of the Post War

The interplay between Japanese and French intellectual culture is a really interesting subject. The exchange of aesthetics went both ways (think japonisme) but in terms of philosophy and literature, it was mostly an F->J type of arrangement. French prose fiction (particularly Zola) was picked up by a lot of early twentieth-century writers as a model for imitation. Still, there are a few examples of it going the other way. The Tale of Genji (originally through French translations of Waley's beautifully rendered English translation produced from 1921 to 1923) was big in France. On the philosophical front Kuki Shuzo, who was ridiculous, actually introduced Heidegger's thought to Sartre. Which is ridiculous.

I know very little about this pre-war intellectual exchange. What you have up there is about the extent of it. I know even less about the relationship of Japanese and French thought in the post-war, but it's something I kind of want to look into.

Usually, when referring to the post-war period in Japanese, you use the pretty straightforward word 戦後 sengo, which means literally after the war. Apparently, however, this hasn't always been the most common word for it. Check out these screenshots from Kurosawa's "Stray Dog" 『野良犬』(1949):

The use of the word après-guerre to describe the Japanese post war period makes me think that at least for a time, many Japanese people thought of Japan's domestic wartime experience as being somehow similar to that of occupied France. I know that one of the anxieties of the post-war Japanese intellectual culture was that they didn't have any figures like Sartre that they could think of as having put on their beret and done their part for the resistance (whether this was true of France or not).

Again, it isn't really something I've done a lot of reading or thinking about, but it's something that I might pursue in the future.