Author: Vicky

The Tourist Gaze in the 21st Century: a need for critical self-reflection?

by Vicky

The concept of the ‘Tourist Gaze’ is not a new one. We love to travel, and we love to tell other people about it. It would be no exaggeration to say that humans have been writing about their travels for as long as we have been able to put pen to paper. In my own experiences I have almost nothing to speak about, having travelled abroad for the first time in my life at the age of a quarter-century, so it is perhaps not surprising that as a child I soaked up the tales of my father and grandfather, whose work took them across the globe.

As an adult, these stories of far-off lands remain no less enthralling than as a child, but with a much more nuanced eye and ear. This leads back to my opening words. Take, for instance, the documentary Done Bali. Produced in 1992, it is now thirty years old, and yet much of the themes are still no less relevant today than they ever were, or perhaps ever will be. The documentary takes a standard format, with the history of the island narrated and interspersed with a variety of interviews, from residents to hotel owners, anthropologists to tourists, farmers to historians, and so on. One interviewee that stood out to me the most was Manuela Furci, a Bali expat from Australia who owned a clothes business. She stated that her original motivations to travel to Bali for tourism was that it was cheap and a great way to see another culture for less expense than travelling around Australia1. However, later in the program she noted the changes that she had seen over the past 13 years with the growth of tourism. Although she criticises what she deems to be a lack of work ethic in trying to run a business in Bali due to the number of religious ceremonies, she follows by lamenting the fact that it was even then becoming increasingly modernised, with the status quo changing from the simplicity of having hot water to an increasing level of competition for amenities such as a swimming pool or tennis court.

“All the things that I loved about Bali changed…it’s becoming more and more like the west in that sense. And that was the thing I didn’t like about it, the simplicity’s changed. It’s become more complicated and more about the rat race.”2

Furci, for her part, did not seem to acknowledge the inherent contradiction in her view, but in doing so she provides a perfect example of the tourist gaze. Although she had obviously made a home and living in Bali, she still wanted to hold on to the fascination with the idea of Bali as some kind of idyllic paradise which first drew her there. Yet, in order to run a business, she also required access to western amenities and way of life to facilitate this. This same wish for the ‘best of both worlds’ is one of the fundamental aspects of tourism anywhere in the world and is perhaps one of the most difficult things to reconcile. We travel because we want to see something different, but not so different that we feel uncomfortable.

As stated, Done Bali was produced in 1992. Towards the end of the program the various contributors discuss the rise of eco-tourism and criticism of tourism in general, which has obviously grown massively in the last three decades. Yet, for as much progress has been made, I could not help but feel that there is still a long way to go. With the growth of post-colonialism comes a welcome level of critical self-reflection as the western world comes to terms with the history of tourism and the colonial attitudes that this has entailed over the years.

For the prospective traveller wanting to be able to say that they, too, have ‘Done Bali’, perhaps the best advice could be to make sure that they have done their historical research as well.

  1. Done Bali, 6:49-7:17 [↩]
  2. ibid, 44:07-44:42. [↩]

Modern innovation or symbol of colonial control? The case of the department store in early 20th century Korea and Taiwan

by Vicky

One might think on the surface that the history of department stores would be pretty dull stuff. On the contrary, it is a fascinating topic, with an almost unlimited scope to draw from. In particular, Brian Moeran’s paper on the history of Japanese department stores reveals a wealth of information about the changing nature of shopping and consumerism in Japan. Having studied modernism and consumer culture for my long essay last year, focusing especially on the flagship companies of Mitsukoshi and Shiseido, I was eager to learn more about department stores, this time taking a look not at the goods on display inside, but from a conceptual stance on how the very concept of a department store was seen as a site of contradiction and control.

In discussing the way that the department store brought modernity to Japan, Moeran states that it “personified the new intelligentsia’s aspirations for enrichment, self-fulfilment and gracious living during the period of Taishou democracy.”1. In contrast, Jina Kim’s work Urban Modernities in Colonial Korea and Taiwan shows how this was no less true in Korea and Taiwan, but that it came with an inherent contradiction for those living under colonial control. In her chapter on consuming modernity, Kim takes a different angle of analysis in looking at how department stores were viewed in literature, taking two specific short stories as her basis. Like Moeran, she begins by giving a historical overview of department stores in Japan, but then turns her attention to how they were brought over to Korea and Taiwan as part of the Japanese occupation. She shows how what is now such a staple part of daily life was viewed with fear and conflicting feelings for those living under colonial control, as it was a symbol of modernity, but a forced modernity, brought not by their own wishes but as the coloniser’s desire to shape Korea and Taiwan according to their own view of what a ‘modern’ nation ought to look like.

Kim’s work is fascinating for showing how literature can be used as a contemporary source for historical analysis. She notes that the decades of the 1920s and 30s saw heavy crackdowns on political and activist groups, and so literature allowed authors to “spiritedly engage with the changing attitudes toward modern life and the best possible way to make sense of the often insensible modern world.”2 By depicting scenes of modern life replete with vivid descriptions of western clothes, shops, food and goods of all kinds, authors were able to make “subtle yet strong leftist critiques” which “[made] the reader question the conditions of urban life.”3 By contrasting authors in Korea and Taiwan, Kim shows the similarities and differences in attitudes in the two countries. Although her analysis on Taiwan is far shorter and could benefit from further examples, her detailed discussion on Korea and the work of Yi Hyosǒk shows how fiction can reveal a wealth of information about daily life and the contradictory views of the time. While the historian has to keep in mind issues with straying into literary analysis, Kim’s work is a brilliant example of how it can be done while keeping a firm historical focus and bringing a new perspective into the existing work on imperialism and colonialism.

  1. Brian Moeran, ‘The Birth of the Japanese Department Store’ in Kerrie MacPherson (ed) Asian Department Stores, (Honolulu, 1998), pg. 142 [↩]
  2. Jina E. Kim, Urban Modernities in Colonial Korea and Taiwan, (Boston, 2010), pg. 100. [↩]
  3. ibid. [↩]

Thoughts on the Letters of Donald Keene

by Vicky

 

The letters of Donald Keene to Theodore (Ted) du Bary and Otis Cary stand out as a stark picture of life during the Asia-Pacific war. As an American, Keene’s reflections on his experiences and observations show the reality of life on the ground as he was sent from post to post. In a time when propaganda on both sides showed the glory of war and pushed the message of righteousness of their cause, Keene offers a very different viewpoint. His letters are in places difficult to stomach for a modern reader, as he describes the atrocities that both American and Japanese soldiers committed against each other, especially in the treatment of prisoners and their corpses1

What really stands out in Keene’s letters is his views on war and his hope for the future. In the same letter as he describes the mutilation of corpses, he ends by saying that

If it were possible, I think the best solution would be to forget the past and to attempt a real reconversion of the Japanese nation. I think that we have a good chance of arousing the interest and active cooperation of many young Japanese. Intelligence on our part can really win the war. I wonder if Americans won’t find the Japanese the most agreeable people in Asia from almost every standpoint. The Japanese will certainly admire the Americans. With this initial advantage we can create a powerful and meaningful friendship.2

Keene’s view was, by his own admission, not widely shared. He recounts that he often found himself on the ‘wrong’ side of arguments by attempting to show his peers a different viewpoint on war and their opinion of the Japanese people. To attempt to change the mindset of an entire nation would be beyond the ability of any single person, but Keene did not let this deter him. He went on to become a highly respected scholar in Japan, even going as far as to renounce his American citizenship in favour of Japanese and adopting the phonetic rendering of his name in Japanese. He remained highly respected in Japan until his death in 2019.

 

  1. Donald Keene to Ted du Bary, September 23rd 1945, pp. 127-28. [↩]
  2. ibid, pg. 130 [↩]

Space and the Concept of edo-guro-nansensu in the Early Works of Edogawa Rampo

by Vicky

Edogawa Rampo was a rather fascinating man. He deserves to be admired for his dedication to his craft, which saw him almost single-handedly translate the concept of detective fiction to Japan1. His fascination with the West allowed him to hone his craft through imitation, then invention, putting his own spin on the books he read, and which saw him create his name through a combination of homage and some very clever wordplay.

He is perhaps best known, though not in the West, where his namesake still reigns supreme, for his locked-room murders. In a translation of Rampo’s early work, William Varteresian argues that Rampo’s skill lay in just how he managed to do this. In discussing one of his earliest stories, The Case of the Murder on D Hill, he states that Rampo wrote it deliberately  “as a response to critics who argued that it was impossible to set the secret incidents and mysterious dealings which formed the core of the modern Western mystery in the open, wood-and-paper houses of Japan”.2

It was obviously a success. However, reading through Rampo’s early work, the theme that stood out the most to me was not the specific elements of the locked-room mystery as a trope, but the common thread of the personality types that he employed, both for the victims and perpetrators of crime. In the collection of short stories published before the invention of his long-running detective, Akechi Kogoro, he wrote a series of unrelated mysteries, published in English as Japanese Tales of Mystery and Imagination. Rather than the typical detective fiction of a murder and resolution, these instead read as more akin to Roald Dahl’s Tales of the Unexpected. At a total of nine stories, it is a relatively short read, and yet they are the kind of stories that linger long after the reader has finished. From the beginning, they establish a gruesome fascination with the human body, warped and twisted both mentally and physically. Each one ends abruptly, with no resolution, and, in the case of The Cliff, quite literally on a cliff-hanger.

These stories belong to a sub-genre known as ero-guro-nansensu, or ‘erotic, gruesome nonsense’. Varteresian argues that this fascination with ero-guro-nansensu allowed Rampo to “explore the extremes of ugliness” in his work, and that “[his] concern is always more for the sensational effect of bizarre appearances and chilling deeds than for social realities.”3

Varteresian ties this fascination with the bizarre to the timeframe that Rampo lived through. Born in 1894, Rampo lived through the upheaval of the first half of the twentieth century in Japan. A time of massive upheaval and westernisation, he argues that Rampo’s fascination with and observations on the West is precisely what allowed him to create a new genre of detective fiction. By playing on the ‘newness’ of all things Western, Rampo was able to create a new and unsettling style of writing. His familiarity with all things Western meant that he was able to depict Western rooms, clothing, objects and even speech with ease, things which would not necessarily have been familiar to his readers. This creates a kind of superiority in his writings, almost an arrogance at deliberately including knowledge that he knew not all of his readers would understand.

To the modern reader, many of his descriptions are, as Varteresian puts it, “horrifically insensitive”, but it is exactly this that makes it effective4. Rampo himself considered these stories the weakest of his work, and this becomes clear when comparing it to his later work. Sadly, very little of his work has ever been translated, and so this and The Early Cases are some of the only works available in English. Interestingly, despite this dissatisfaction in Japanese Tales, he oversaw the English translation of it himself, working painstakingly line-by-line with the translator, James Harris, to ensure that the resulting work was as close to the original Japanese as possible5.  However, with the recent rise in popularity in Japanese works throughout the West, there is hope that Rampo’s work may be translated in the future, where he can be placed in equal renown of his Western counterparts.

  1. Edogawa Rampo, The Early Cases of Akechi Kogoro trans. William Varteresian, (Fukuoka 2014), pg ix [↩]
  2. Ibid, pg xi. [↩]
  3. Varteresian, Japanese Tales, pg. xvi [↩]
  4. ibid [↩]
  5. Edogawa Rampo, Japanese Tales of Mystery and Imagination trans. James B Harris, (Tokyo, 1956), pg. iii [↩]

The Truth is Duller than Fiction? Theories of Tropicality in the Perception of India in the 1800s

by Vicky

The history of ‘Tropicality’ is a long one, with the first writings dating back to Hippocrates, the ‘father of medicine’. In his Airs, Waters, Places, he outlines the climatic differences in Asian and the supposedly corresponding racial characteristics. Just as Galenic theories on humours were to dominate medicine until well into the early modern period, these perceived links between climate and character were held as fact in Britain and Europe throughout the 18th and 19th centuries, and used to justify colonial expansion and control.

These theories are naturally now considered untenable to the modern reader. This does not mean that reading them is not without worth, not least because of the massive contradictions that they contain, and more so that this appears to be completely disregarded within them.

To take one of the greatest examples, look to Montesquieu’s The Spirit of the Laws, specifically his ideas on the climate of Asia. His argument was that the ‘strength’ of Europe vs the ‘weakness’ of Asia could be entirely explained by Europe’s temperate climate compared to Asia’s lack of a temperate zone, whereby “the places situated in a very cold climate there are immediately adjacent to those that are in a very warm climate”, and so “the brave and active warrior peoples are immediately adjacent to effeminate, lazy and timid peoples; therefore, one must be the conquered and the other the conqueror.”1 He explains his reasoning as the fact that Asia had been ‘subjugated’ 13 times compared to Europe’s 4, which he gives as Roman, Barbarian, Charlemagne, and Norman2 He then gives the determining factor of Europe’s relative peace and stability as the broadness of the temperate zone, in that while there is a huge difference in temperature between the northern- and southernmost reaches of Europe, the climatic change is so gradual that “there is not a noticeable difference between them.”3. As such, “the strong face the strong”, and so one ‘race’ is unable to subjugate the other4.

This contradiction of temperature and racial characteristics can be further seen in later accounts of the Tropics, particularly with regards to India. In taking writers such as Hippocrates and Montesquieu as undoubted fact, the perception of Asia and India was that of a single and relatively unchanging climate. David Arnold then takes this further in his work Tropics and the Traveling Gaze: India, Landscape and Science, 1800- 1856 by showing how the perception of the Tropics was then muddled even further through the growth of popular fiction. This led to the creation of what he terms “a single impression of colour, light, exuberance, and elegance.”5 Arnold shows that when faced with the reality of India and Asia’s hugely varied climate and areas of seemingly dull, barren plains instead of the rich, Edenic visions made popular through stories such as the Arabian Nights, travellers could find themselves becoming weary and despondent. In particular, he gives the example of Victor Jacquemont, a French naturalist who travelled to India to study botany. Arnold argues that Jacquemont’s previous visits to Haiti, where his brother was a businessman (and possible plantation owner), had given him an idealised view of the Tropics which he then expected to see replicated in India. He was then “bitterly disappointed” to find out that this was not the case.

Rather than admit his own shortcomings or attempt to view India with a more benevolent eye, Jacquemont followed in the same tradition as Hippocrates and Montesquieu. He concluded that “the fault is not in myself: it lies with the things themselves, with the country.”6 Whether this was any consolation to him seems doubtful, but in this at least he was following in the footsteps of his predecessors, and those that followed after him kept his words in mind themselves, just as many travellers no doubt do the same today.

  1. Charles de Secondat Montesquieu, Spirit of the Laws ed. Anne M. Cohler, Basia Carolyn Miller and Harold Samuel Stone, (Cambridge, 1989), pg. 280 [↩]
  2. ibid, pg. 281. [↩]
  3. Ibid, pg. 280 [↩]
  4. ibid. [↩]
  5. David Arnold, Tropics and the Traveling Gaze: India, Landscape and Science, 1800- 1856, (Washington, 2006), pg. 112. [↩]
  6. ibid, pg. 132. [↩]

Prisons as Internal and External Space: The cases of Lushun and Seodaemun

by Vicky

 

The study of prisons from a spatial aspect is an interesting one. There are the architectural studies, which analyse the shape of a building and never begin without first referring to the famous Bentham Panopticon, then there are the multitude of ethical and moral studies, as well as philosophical, historical, legal, the list goes on.

For my essay I am focussing specifically on two prisons under Japanese rule, Seodaemun in Korea and Lushun in Dalian (Manchuria, formerly Port Arthur). Both are brilliantly covered in Shu-Mei Huang and Hyun Kyung Lee’s work Heritage, Memory and Punishment: Remembering Colonial Prisons in East Asia. Their work covers all aspects of prisons, showing how prison architecture in east Asia developed through Western influences. Crucially, they show how this evolved not just in an architectural sense, but also in line with legal, judicial and penal reform itself.

What I am most interested in is the difference in prisoner treatment between Seodaemun and Lushun. As Huang and Lee state, Lushun was not originally built as a Japanese prison, but taken over after the defeat to Russia in the Russo-Japanese War in 1905. The plans for the prison had originally been drawn up by the head of the Russian Pacific Fleet, and so there is a clear visual demarcation in the architecture denoting the extent of the original Russian construction and the later Japanese additions.1 This is important to keep in mind, as Lushun was used to hold the captured Russian prisoners of war after 1905. Perhaps this was an attempt at keeping the prisoners aware of their defeat, but the accounts of those held there show that they were treated remarkably well. I argue that the location of Lushun in Manchuria is central to this, as it was seen as an already contested space- having gone variously through Russian, Chinese and Japanese control. Furthermore, the Russo-Japanese War was Japan’s first global conflict, and so Lushun represented Japan’s willingness to abide by the relatively new European treaties of human rights. I therefore argue that the treatment of prisoners in Lushun was not a case of Japan’s magnanimity to their fallen enemies, but a deliberate ploy to be viewed as civilised and modern by the rest of Europe, in order to prove their ‘enlightenment’ and modernisation.

The proof is clear when contrasted against the conditions and treatment of prisoners in Seodaemun prison. Unlike Lushun, Seodaemun was constructed by the Japanese imperial government after the signing of the Japan-Korea Protectorate Policy in 1905, which formally brought Korea under Japanese control2. It was therefore a clear symbol of Japanese Imperialism and their view of Japanese superiority. Huang and Lee argue that it was designed specifically to hold ‘“dangerous figures” such as political offenders’, with the ‘”objective” [own emphasis] of separating them from society’3. I argue that it was this viewpoint of the Japanese as superior to the Koreans that explains the mistreatment of those held in Seodaemun prison. Taking the spatial angle, it is clear that Seodaemun, being located in Korea and fully under Japanese control, was thus perceived as an ‘internal’ space compared to Lushun’s ‘external’ space.

  1. Shu-Mei Huang and Hyun Kyung Lee, Heritage, Memory and Punishment: Remembering Colonial Prisons in East Asia, Oxon, 2020, p. 57 [↩]
  2. Ibid, pg. 76 [↩]
  3. Ibid, pg. 77 [↩]

Forward planning: A comparison of population control in Manchuko and the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom

by Vicky

A common thread with ideas of Utopian cities is the importance of planning, especially town planning. In the context of Manchuko, these Utopian ideals were made possible through its conception as an entirely new city, a literal blank slate from which to build a perfect regime. However, as with all concepts of Utopia dreamt up so far, what seems perfect on paper is always difficult if not impossible to make reality.

Take two examples of a Utopian ideal: Manchuko, an area of China under Japanese control, and the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom of Korea. Both are examples of a Utopian ideal that aimed to create a perfect world order according to the leader’s ideas. Both enjoyed a large degree of success in their formative years, and yet both ended up struggling to maintain that order as the cities grew.

The greatest similarity I found between these two examples is that of housing and the settlement structure. Both were designed around a rigid system of strictly controlled numbers for houses, whereby the entire population was compartmentalised into numerical blocks of houses, streets, villages, and districts. The aim in both was to instil a sense of duty and order in the inhabitants as well as create stronger bonds. I argue that while this may have been the case for some, this tightly controlled system of planning set itself up for failure from the beginning as both cases failed to take proper account of population demographics and long-term planning.

Let’s compare the statistics. David Tucker sets out the numbers for Manchuko in his chapter City Planning Without Cities: Order and Chaos in Utopian Manchuko. Accompanied at every stage with clearly labelled diagrams, he shows the proposed outline of Manchuko. It was ordered into a system of hamlets, with each one surrounded by fields and woodland and bordered by a gated wall and moat1. Each hamlet consists of a community building with a central plaza, and rows of houses arranged around it. Each one would have 150 houses, with each household comprising 5 people and allotted 15 acres of fields. The scale then ascended with 3 hamlets forming a village of 450 households of 2250 people2.

Tucker states that these numbers were very carefully chosen as it was based on an assumption that 150 households of 5 people each would mean an average of about 200 working-age men to provide labour, who would be equally split between guarding and agricultural duties. The designation of 3 hamlets into a village would be enough to provide “a sufficient economic base for shared educational, cultural and administrative facilities”3

These numbers were roughly the same in the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom. Instead of villages, families were grouped together into 25 households, although the size of each household was not regimented4. What sets it apart from Manchuko is the religious aspect. As the name suggests, the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom was a religious organisation, and so the fundamental doctrine is very different from the economic foundation of Manchuko. Perhaps the most striking difference is Taiping’s absolute segregation of the sexes and total prohibition on sex even between married couples, punishable by death5. This appears to have been far more of a religious order than any attempt at population control, and in any case was dropped after the inevitable loss of morale.

What does need to be considered is the sheer scale of population that both Manchuko and Taiping had to plan for. At it’s height, Manchuko had a population of 300,0006. A sizeable number, but comparatively easier to plan for. Taiping, on the other hand, had at its greatest height up to 2 million people7. This is of course impossible to verify and includes people on the periphery who may have proclaimed themselves a follower but not actually lived in a Taiping-controlled city. Nevertheless, the numbers speak for themselves.

In both cases, then, it was not so much a case of a lack of planning, but of fundamental population oversights. Both Manchuko and Taiping were founded on a basis of control of growth; economic for Manchuko and religious for Taiping. For Manchuko, the tightly regimented, perfect-on-paper outline could never have worked in reality as it failed to account for pretty much all aspects of population demographics. Such strictly controlled numbers of households and villages may have seemed like it could have been added to as required, but it takes an all-or-nothing approach and so does not account for the ‘in-between’ stages. Especially for a campaign that aimed to entice Japanese citizens to move in huge numbers, it would have required huge levels of pre-emptive statistics to be able to successfully house the numbers they required and neatly sort people into such a system.

Taiping, in the same vein, placed huge importance on proselytising and enticing new converts. In this sense, it is a contrast to Manchuko as there was far more planning for the governmental and political control than on a daily level, with far vaguer outlines for the distribution of land and labour. The emphasis was on communal life, but without the same kind of structural, regimented divisions seen in Manchuko.

 

Both Manchuko and Taiping are therefore brilliant case studies of the difficulty an urban planner faces in trying to marry a Utopian ideal with the lived reality of the human population. Manchuko arguably enjoyed a greater degree of success due to the smaller population overall, while Taiping could not cope with the sheer overwhelming scale of its devotees. It would thus be interesting to take this discussion further, perhaps in a longer essay than the scope of a blog post allows.

  1. Tucker, David “City Planning Without Cities: Order and Chaos in Utopian Manchukuo” in Mariko Asano Tamanoi (ed)., Crossed Histories: Manchuria in the Age of Empire, p. 60 [↩]
  2. Ibid, p. 61 [↩]
  3. Ibid [↩]
  4. Wm. Theodore de Bary (ed), Sources of Chinese Tradition, pg. 225 [↩]
  5. Reilly, Thomas H. The Taiping Heavenly Kingdom: Rebellion and the Blasphemy of Empire, University of Washington Press, 2011, p. 142 [↩]
  6. Tucker, pg. 53 [↩]
  7. Philip A. Kuhn. “The Taiping Rebellion” in Cambridge History of China, p. 275 [↩]

Comparisons of Marxist theory in the concept of the ‘everyday’ in Henri Lefebre and Tosaka Jun

by Vicky

Like their theories, Henri Lefebre and Tosaka Jun existed in different yet similar worlds. Both were born at the turn of the 20th century, and yet had very different paths in life. Lefebvre’s life stretched across almost the entire century, while Tosaka died at the age of 45 just before the end of World War II.

The two seemingly had nothing in common. One a renowned French Marxist and intellectual who undoubtedly helped to shape theories in almost too many disciplines to name, while the other appears little known outside of Japan.

It would be forgiven, then, to ask what use there is in comparing the two. The answer lies in the remarkable similarity between their theories of the ‘everyday’. For Lefebvre, this arose from his deeply held love of the Pyrenees countryside that he grew up in and which he retained throughout his life. Tosaka too spent time in the countryside, but it was in Tokyo that he formed most of his theories, and it was there that he formed his major critiques on journalism, which led to his ideas on the ‘everyday’.

As yet, it appears that there has been no major study comparing these two thinkers. There are several possible reasons for this. The first is that in the west French Marxism simply receives the major share of attention, with the East by comparison remaining much less studied, although this has begun to change in recent years. Another may be the circumstances of their lives. Lefebvre lived to the ripe age of 91, and wrote and published prolifically during his life. The major difference here is that he was allowed to. Lefebvre joins a long list of Western intellectuals who each sit proudly on their pedestal, and which no work is deemed complete without extensive name-dropping of each other – our class discussion ended up with almost two dozen names in one week’s reading!

The west celebrates its thinkers, Marxist or otherwise. Even during times of their theories having fallen out of fashion, or spoken of in derisory tones of the figures of yesteryear, they are still spoken about. In contrast, the political situation in Japan was far more fraught in the first half of the 20th century. Lefebvre was a proud member of the French Communist Party for thirty years, and although it possibly cost him his job as a teacher, it did nothing to silence him1. Tosaka was not nearly so fortunate. His involvement with the of Yuibutsuron Kenkyūkai (Society for the Study of Materialism) saw him and his fellow members arrested and imprisoned under the harsh Peace Preservation Law in force in Japan during the 1930s, and it was the circumstances and treatment in this that led to his death. Harry Harutoonian compares Tosaka’s treatment to Gramsci, noting that while the latter was allowed to both read and write during his imprisonment, Tosaka and his fellow prisoners received much harsher treatment, with the state aiming to “obliterate his memory altogether.”2.

This is obviously an area that requires further study, and it would make for an interesting essay topic to delve into this further. Both Lefebvre and Tosaka’s theories centre on the conception of the relationship between different kinds of space and time. For Lefebvre, this is the idea of a ‘traid’ of space as ‘conceived-perceived-received’, as well as his idea of three ‘kinds’ of time; ‘free/leisure-working-constrained’3. Rather than a triad, Tosaka examined four different kinds of space, focusing more on a critique and analysis of existing theories:  the symbolic space of psychology, Kantian (philosophy), geometric (mathematical), and material (physics)4.

Both men then used this analysis in their conception of the theory of the ‘everyday’. Lefebvre’s views were very much shaped by his ideas of the rural-urban divide and his own lived experience of the growing industrialisation of the Pyrenees. His ‘everyday’ was the theory that rural sociology should be considered ‘horizontally’ and ‘vertically’, with horizontally being developments in difference places in the same historical period and vertically being historical developments over time in any given location5. Tosaka’s theory is somewhat similar to this, but his argument was for time and space to be seen not as a linear, unending ribbon, but as a series of individual days, which cannot be ‘exchanged’ for one another. Combining Lefebvre’s horizontal and vertical time, Tosaka rejected the idea of ‘historical time’, arguing instead for time to be compartmentalised and configured into ‘periods’, turning ‘historical time’ from a “mere process of thought” into what periods of “configured orientation”6.

An essay idea would therefore be to compare these two theories in a more in-depth manner, examining the circumstances of Lefebre and Tosaka’s lives in an attempt to discover the differences between their theories. It would require deeper comparison of French and Japanese Marxism in the 20th century, which also appears to lack scholarship. Doing so would bridge this gap between East and West in a small way and allow for a better comparison of the ways in which Marxist theories were changed and shaped around the world. It would by necessity be limited to the first half of the 20th century and so may have difficultly incorporating Lefebvre’s later theories, but there would certainly be more than enough scope to compare their ideas from several different angles.

 

  1. Elden, Stuart. Understanding Henri Lefebvre: Theory and the Possible. (London,2004), pg. 3 [↩]
  2. Tosaka, Jun. Tosaka Jun: A Critical Reader. (New York, 2013), pg. xviii [↩]
  3. Elden, pg. 115, 190 [↩]
  4. Tosaka, pg. 128 [↩]
  5. Tosaka, pg. 136 [↩]
  6. ibid. [↩]

Worlds Apart: examining some differences in locations of treaty ports in China and Japan

by Vicky

Nield, Robert, “Beyond the Bund: Life in the Outports”, in Brunero, Donna, Stephanie Villalta Puig eds. Life in Treaty Port China and Japan. Singapore: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018.

 

Catherine L. Phipps, Empires on the Waterfront: Japan’s Ports and Power, 1858–1899 (BRILL, 2020)

 

Nield’s chapter does a brilliant job in bringing to life the lived experience of life for those stationed in the ‘outports’ in China. By taking the picture further than the ‘big cities’, Neild shows what life was like for those in more remote areas, and in doing so reveals some of the problems faced by the British in the foundation and running of treaty ports. He notes that these locations were chosen due to the belief that “so many millions of potential customers must surely lead to profitable business” [1]. He goes on to show just how misguided this belief turned out to be, stating that “there were a number of consuls who could easily vie with one another for the dubious title of ‘loneliest member of the service’” [2].

 

In contrast, Phipps shows how difference the situation was in Japan. She argues for the deliberate, strategic choice of ‘Special Treaty Ports’, which allowed Japan to retain a far higher degree of control over port locations than was the case in China. Firstly, Phipps makes clear the difference between a treaty port and a special trading port. The distinction, in her words, is that a Special Trading Port was not bound by existing treaty port legislation, and thus, crucially, they were not subject to extraterritoriality [3].

 

Comparing Nield and Phipps therefore paints very different pictures of China and Japan. Where Nield focuses almost entirely on primary sources to show the experience of the British stationed abroad, Phipps instead uses a wealth of secondary literature and archival material to chart the foundation and growth of both treaty ports and special trading ports across Japan. Both methods have merit. Neild is able to draw on the human element and show what daily life was like, while Phipps is more clinical in her approach. It is beyond the scope here to fully debate which method has more merit, if either. There is also the issue of language to discuss, as Nield uses no sources from the interior, focusing entirely on English writings, while Phipps draws heavily from Japanese archives. The issue of translation and sources is obviously a hurdle for anyone with an interest in these areas, but if comparing these two works proves anything, it is how effectively these limitations can be overcome.

[1] Brunero, Donna, Stephanie Villalta Puig eds. Life in Treaty Port China and Japan. Singapore: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018. Ch 4 “Beyond the Bund: Life in the Outports”, pg. 79.

[2] Ibid, pg. 80.

[3] Catherine L. Phipps, Empires on the Waterfront: Japan’s Ports and Power, 1858–1899 (BRILL, 2020). Introduction pp1- 16, Ch 1 Special Trading Ports, pg. 21