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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 27 September 2011
This essay examines the political implications of Edo (present-day Tokyo) popular culture in early modern Japan by focusing on the interface between distinct forms of literary and visual representation and the configuration of social order (the status hierarchy and the division of labor), as well as moral and ideological discourses that were conducive to the reproduction of the order. Central to the forms of representation in Edo popular culture was the overarching literary and artistic principle, which I call “dialogic imagination,” a phrase adapted from M.M. Bakhtin's work on Fyodor Dostoevsky. By creating a dialogical interaction of divergent voices and perspectives, Edo popular culture created pluralized, contentious images of Tokugawa society, images that underlined contradictory realities that had become widely discernible around the turn of the eighteenth century. The most salient of all the contradictions was the growing disjuncture between the ideological premise of social and economic hierarchies and their actual reversals. The dialogic imagination captured and accentuated the fluid and dynamic social interactions that threw the formal arrangements of social order into disarray, as well as the widely perceived tensions originating from these interactions, by supplying images that sharply contrasted with those that the Tokugawa authorities worked hard to foster and defend: of a harmonious, self-contained, and perfectly functioning society.
1 I owe this critique of the cultural analysis to William Sewell's discussion in Logics of History (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2005), 172.
2 Jōshin, Miura, Keichō Kenmonshū (Tokyo: Shinjinbutsu Oraisha, 1969), 197–202Google Scholar.
3 Masakatsu, Gunji, Kabuki Hasseishi Ronshū (Tokyo: Iwanami Gendai Bunko, 2002), 247–52Google Scholar.
4 Gunji Masakatsu, Kabuki Hasseishi Ronshū, 253–77. Miura Joshin, Keicho Kenmonshū, 197–202.
5 Hur, Nam-lin, Prayer and Play in Late Tokugawa Japan (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2000), 88CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
6 Dainihon kinsei shiryō: Shichū torishimari suishū, vol. 1 (Tokyo: Tokyo daigaku shuppan, 1959), 68 and 435–6.
7 My views correspond with Harootunian's observation that “Late Tokugawa culture and practice seemed to converge upon the body . . . Despite the variety of forms of verbal fiction that proliferated in the late eighteenth century to meet the rapid diversification of tastes, pleasures, and demands for greater “consumption,” the content of playful culture invariably focused on the activities of the body.” Harootunian, Harry, “Late Tokugawa Culture and Thought,” in The Cambridge History of Japan, vol. 5 (Cambridge: University of Cambridge, 1989), 173Google Scholar.
8 See works by Harry Harootunian, J. Victor Koschmann, Maruyama Masao, Tetsuo Najita, and Nobutoshi Yasunaga. The authors mentioned here focus on different intellectuals of the mid- to late eighteenth century (except Maruyama) whose voices raised fundamental questions about the ideological premises upon which the Tokugawa bakufu constructed and maintained social order. See Harootunian's, HarryThings Seen and Unseen (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988)Google Scholar; Koschmann's, J. VictorThe Mito Ideology (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987)Google Scholar; Masao's, MaruyamaStudies in the Intellectual History of Tokugawa Japan (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1974)Google Scholar; Najita's, TetsuoVisions of Virtue in Tokugawa Japan (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987)Google Scholar; and Yasunaga's, NobutoshiAndo Shoeki (New York: Weatherhill, 1992)Google Scholar.
9 “Social tattoo” is a phrase used by Herman Ooms in “Forms and Norms in Edo Arts and Society,” in Singer, Robert T., ed., Edo: Art in Japan 1615–1868 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), 26Google Scholar.
10 Ogyū Sorai (1666–1728), an eminent Confucian scholar residing in Edo, observed in 1725 that the blurring distinctions between peasants and merchants were commonly observed and called for a reform designed to restore the status order modeled after the system of ancient China. Sorai, Ogyū, Seidan (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1987), 13–14Google Scholar.
11 David Howell shows in Geography of Identities that the status system was the foundational principle that organized and regulated social, economic, political, and cultural boundaries in Tokugawa Japan, despite the fact that status was rather a fuzzy concept and status hierarchies were not always strictly observed. Particularly noteworthy is his argument that in the realm of occupation (a particular kind of social function assigned to each individual according to his or her status), not livelihood (means of subsistence that was often devised by individuals for their personal gains besides their occupations), status was a determining factor in dividing Tokugawa Japan into different social groups and assigning them particular kinds of labor. Howell, David, Geographies of Identity in Nineteenth-Century Japan (California: University of California Press, 2005)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
12 Yokota Fuyuhiko points out that during the Tokugawa period, the idea of productivity functioned as an organizing principle for configuring the hierarchical order of society, whereas purity had played the same role during medieval times. While Yokota's recognition of the idea of productivity as key to the bakufu's structuring of the status order is correct, he seems to misrecognize or overlook the primary role played by the bakufu's moralistic view of the world in the formation of its view of political economy. People in power regarded production and consumption as essentially a moral issue. Fuyuhiko, Yokota, “Geino, bunka to mibunteki shuhen,” in Shimahiko, Kurume, Fuyuhiko, Yokota, et al. ., eds., Mibun wo toinaosu (Tokyo: Yoshikawa kobunkan, 2000), 29–48Google Scholar.
13 Shōzan, Suzuki, Selected Writings of Suzuki Shōzan, trans. Tyler, Royall, Cornell East Asian Papers (Ithaca, NY: China–Japan Program, Cornell University, 1977), 32Google Scholar.
14 Ibid., 26–32.
15 Ooms, Herman, Tokugawa Ideology (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989), 139Google Scholar.
16 Suzuki Shōzan wrote, “[S]ervice is ascetic practice” in Selected Writings of Suzuki Shōzan, 39.
17 Sokō, Yamaga, “Shido,” in Tsunoda, Ryusaku, et al. ., comps., Sources of the Japanese Tradition (New York: Columbia University Press, 1958), 399Google Scholar.
18 Botsman, Daniel V., Punishment and Power in the Making of Modern Japan (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005), 10Google Scholar.
19 Ibid., 20 and 83.
20 Chū (loyalty) and kō (duty or filial piety) were often paired and used as an idiom in the official discourse of social values deemed essential for realizing and maintaining proper social relations during the Tokugawa period. The very pairing of these two terms seems to represent the official view that one's loyalty to superiors could be demonstrated only through the performance of one's duty to the social whole.
21 Botsman uses a materialist approach in a Foucauldian sense, and what I am suggesting by “interrogating the complex relations of the symbolic and the material” is an approach grounded in the marrying of cultural and Marxian materialist analyses. This approach aims to investigate the intertwined relationship between the production of cultural form, and that of economic and political circuits of power by taking the two as semi-autonomous yet mediated by the relations between them. My perspective is largely inspired by Fredric Jameson's critical reworking of Louis Althusser's concept of base and superstructure relations in his attempts to reinvigorate cultural analysis within the materialist epistemology. See Jameson, Fredric, The Political Unconscious (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1981), chap. 1Google Scholar.
22 These are wordings used by William C. Dowling to explain Marx's view of ideology in The Eighteenth Brumaire. It is my understanding that Lukacs's theory of ideology as reified consciousness is identical with the formulation put forward by Marx in this work. Dowling, William C., Jameson, Althusser, Marx (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1984), 53Google Scholar.
23 Jameson, The Political Unconscious, 54–5.
24 Ibid., 53.
25 Jameson argues that his concept of ideology finds resonance, not dissonance, “with poststructural philosophies which repudiate such ‘totalizations’ in the name of difference, flux, dissemination, transgression,” or heterogeneity, because these concepts can be articulated only when one recognizes “some ideology of unification already in place, which it is the poststructuralists’ mission to rebuke and to shatter.” I find this formulation of the dialectical relationship between “totality” and “heterogeneity” useful particularly for our understanding of the contestatory interplay between politics (ideological and institutional regulation) and poetics (symbolic transgression) of the body during the late Tokugawa period. Jameson, The Political Unconscious, 52–4. It should also be noted that the term “heterogeneous” indicates, to follow Georges Bataille's formulation, that “it concerns elements that are impossible to assimilate” or reduce. Bataille, Georges, Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927–1939 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985), 140–41Google Scholar.
26 Ooms, Tokugawa Ideology, 91.
27 Ooms, Herman, “Neo-Confucianism and the Formation of Early Tokugawa Ideology: Contours of a Problem,” in Nosco, Peter, ed., Confucianism and Tokugawa Culture (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984), 57Google Scholar.
28 Ooms, “Forms and Norms in Edo Arts and Society,” 29.
29 Sorai, Ogyū, Seidan (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1987), 102Google Scholar.
30 Ibid., 103.
31 Ooms, Tokugawa Ideology, 145.
32 For the term “unproductive expenditure,” I draw on Georges Bataille's formulation in “The Notion of Expenditure,” in Visions of Excess, 118.
33 Yoshifumi, Uramoto, Edo/Tokyo no Hisabetsuburaku no Rekishi (Tokyo: Akashishoten, 2003), 119–125Google Scholar.
34 Ofuregaki Tenpō Shūsei, vol. 2 (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1958), 439.
35 This phenomenon had been already observed by Ogyū Sorai as early as the 1720s. Asked by the shogun's advisers to offer his opinions about the most imminent problems of Tokugawa society and political prescriptions for them, Sorai submitted the lengthy thesis titled Seidan (On Politics), in which he warned of the dangerous implications of the rising influence of townspeople and their culture among villagers and even samurai.
36 Inshi, Buyō, Sejikenbunroku (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1994), 281–84Google Scholar. Buyo wrote this treatise in 1816.
37 “Empty formalism” is a phrase used by Herman Ooms to describe the fragile nature of the Tokugawa bakufu's ideological structure. Ooms, “Forms and Norms in Edo Arts and Society,” 35.
38 Ogyū Sorai, Buyō Inshi, and the Tokugawa bakufu all used these adjectives to refer to the entertainments in the districts.
39 Hiraga Gennai (1728–79), whom I will discuss later in the article, made this astute observation about the Ryōgoku market and entertainment district in his uniquely playful way. The rest of his statements can be found in Rootless Weeds, trans. Chris Drake, in Haruo Shirane, ed., Early Modern Japanese Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), 474–5. See also Makoto, Takeuchi, Edo no sakariba kō (Tokyo: Kyoiku shuppan, 2000), 12–14Google Scholar.
40 Bakhtin, Mikhail, Rabelais and His World (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984)Google Scholar. See also Stallybrass, Peter and White, Allon, Politics and Poetics of Transgression (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1987)Google Scholar, Introduction and chap. 1. My argument differs from the perspective put forward by people such as James Scott that privileges marginality as an essential condition for generating counterculture. This theoretical position posits that marginality in itself guarantees the possibility of the culture of dissent, which, of course, ignores many historical cases demonstrating that marginalized social groups tend to develop an ambiguous, even ambivalent, relationship with dominant culture and its norms. Scott, James, Domination and the Arts of Resistance (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990)Google Scholar.
41 Buyō, Sejikenbunroku, 362.
42 Ibid., 77–81.
43 Sanji, Mikami, Shirakawa Rakuoko to Tokugawa Jidai (Tokyo: Yoshikawa, 1892), 85–7Google Scholar.
44 Takeuchi Makoto, Edo no sakariba kō, 118–20.
45 Ibid., 41.
46 Nam-lin Hur, Prayer and Play, 75–80 and chap. 3.
47 Ibid., 117–19.
48 Screech applies the term “the iconography of absence” (fuzai no zuzōgaku) used in the field of art history to the analysis not only of visual materials but also of city planning. Screech, Timon, Edo no Ōbushin (Tokyo: Kōdansha, 2007)Google Scholar.
49 This wording is taken from Terry Eagleton's discussion of the revolutionary potential of Bakhtin's formulation of carnival in Walter Benjamin: Or, towards a Revolutionary Criticism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976), 150.
50 Hiraga Gennai was born into the family of a low-ranking samurai in Sanuki (present-day Kagawa) but renounced his hereditary rights in his late twenties to move to Edo and to live there as a townsperson until the end of his life. He described the lack of his stable status within Tokugawa social hierarchies as “a privilege that allows me to live freely without any masters to serve; that is, to be able to say ‘yes’ and ‘no’ as I want.” Hiraga Gennai, Gennai, Hiraga, Hōhiron kōhen (On Farting, Part 2) in Nihon no Meicho, vol. 22 (Tokyo: Chūō koronsha, 1984), 391Google Scholar. Gennai's samurai origin suggests that the increasing mixture of samurai and commoner classes in cultural formation had become commonplace by the late eighteenth century, and that the politics of culture needs to be understood not in terms of a clear-cut dichotomy between high and low cultures, but in terms of what LaCapra calls “a circular relationship composed of reciprocal influence” in his critical assessment of Ginzburg's study The Cheese and the Worms. LaCapra, Dominick, History and Criticism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985), 59Google Scholar.
51 The earliest record about this entertainment was written in the 1770s, the time when Hiraga Gennai wrote Hōhiron. There were also several folk stories and urban legends about flatulence and the “fart-ist” printed and reprinted between the 1810s and the 1840s by publishers in Edo. Tamio, Satō, “He no saho ni tsuiteno kosatsu,” in Shinzō, Ogi, ed., Edo to Tokyo, vol. 4 (Tokyo: Akashi shoten, 1991), 250Google Scholar; and Seika, Honda, “Asakusa okuzan jidai no misemono,” in Shinzō, Ogi, ed., Edo to Tokyo, vol. 1 (Tokyo: Akashi shoten, 1991), 16Google Scholar.
52 Gennai, Hiraga, On Farting, trans. Sibley, William, in Najita, Tetsuo, ed., Readings in Tokugawa Thought (Chicago: University of Chicago the Center for East Asian Studies, 1998), 171Google Scholar.
53 Ibid.
54 Hiraga, On Farting, 172.
55 Ibid., 170.
56 Ibid.
57 Ibid., 172.
58 Ibid., 172–3.
59 Sorai, Ogyū, Benmei, in Najita, Tetsuo, ed., Tokugawa Political Writings (London: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 28Google Scholar.
60 Ibid., 72.
61 Hiraga Gennai, On Farting, 173.
62 Hiraga Gennai, Soshirigusa (Slandering), in idem, Hiraga Gennai shū (Tokyo: Tokyo shoi'n, 1923), 56.
63 Hiraga Gennai, On Farting, Part 2, 388.
64 Kitagawa Utamaro (1753–1806) was an Edo townsman who founded the Kitagawa School of painting and contributed to the formation of the golden age of woodblock prints. He was a friend of Hiraga Gennai.
65 There were two categories of outcast, the defiled (eta) and the nonhuman (hinin), in Tokugawa society. Setta belonged to the latter, together with the various entertainers mentioned in this article.
66 Yukio, Hattori, Sakasama no yūrei (Tokyo: Heibonsha 1989), 46–68Google Scholar.
67 Utagawa Kuniyoshi (1797–1861) was an Edo townsperson who was famed for his woodblock prints of warriors and demons and his satirical depictions of authorities.
68 Quoted in Hiroshi, Kurushima, Kuniyoshi (Tokyo: Asahishinbun 1998), 57Google Scholar.
69 For a historical account of the yakko (hatamoto yakko and machi yakko) and their relation to popular culture in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries see Leupp's, Gary fascinating essay “The Five Men of Naniwa: Gang Violence and Popular Culture in Genroku Osaka,” in Osamu, Wakita and McClain, James, eds., Osaka (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999), 125–55Google Scholar.
70 Gunji Masakatsu, Kabuki Hasseishi Ronshu, 151–62.
71 Leupp, “Five Men of Naniwa,” 146.
72 Kurushima, Kuniyoshi, 54–6.
73 Utagawa Kunisada's print, A Giant Asahina (1847), depicted the actual bamboo doll of Asahina which was removed from the fair. In light of Kunisada's print, Kuniyoshi's was clearly a parody of the samurai Asahina. His yakko bears no swords and samurai attire.
74 Althusser, Louis, “Contradiction and Overdetermination,” in idem, For Marx (London: Verso, 2005), 87–128Google Scholar.
75 Harpham, Geoffrey G., On the Grotesque: Strategies on Contradiction in Art and Literature (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1982), 74Google Scholar.
76 Volosinov, V. N., Marxism and the Philosophy of Language (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985), 23Google Scholar, original emphasis.
77 Althusser, For Marx, 211.
78 Ibid., 94.
79 Eagleton, Terry, Ideology (London: Verso, 1991), 101Google Scholar. Italics are mine.
