Part 2. Modernity and Identity

In Tokugawa Japan (1603-1868), identity was rarely an issue of concern for the vast number of people, whether samurai, peasant, craftsperson, or merchant (shi-nō-kō-shō 士農工商). However, with the Meiji Restoration and the rise of imperialism, militarism and nationalism, and later during post-War reconstruction, with rapid changes in gender roles and norms, the issue of identity came to the fore, specifically, the question of what it means to be "Japanese," and what it means to be a modern "Japanese man" or "Japanese woman".

This part of the course focuses on the problematic concept of Japanese identity by investigating the history of the construction of the "Yamato spirit” (yamato-damashi 大和魂), focusing on its weaponization during the period of Japanese imperialism and its use in Japanese WW2 propaganda, specifically the use of the idea of a "Yamato" essence to propagate notions of Japanese exceptionalism, purity, and racial superiority among the so-called "Asiatics". This racial and cultural exceptionalism was an undercurrent of the many verified accounts of Japanese war crimes against POWs and civilian populations.

Students will examine the history of the idea of a Japanese essence and its exceptionalism, its lasting legacy to the present day, particularly its impact on the colonization and marginalization of the Ainu people (an indigenous people of Hokkaido), its role in legitimating the use of flying suicide bombers (kamikaze) during WW2, and its place in the continuing controversy over veneration of the Japanese war dead at Yasakuni Shrine (Tokyo), some of whom have been deemed class-A war criminals. 

Part 3. Modernity and Fantasy

This part of the course examines the Japanese post-war burst in interest in fantastic creatures, fantasy worlds, and fandom as propagated through mass media, focusing on its impact on popular religious practice, and on cultural products like manga, cinema, and anime, and activities like cosplay and sports fandom, many of which work by blurring the lines between reality and fantasy, and some of which perpetuate gender hierarchies while others work to challenge gender roles and expectations. Certainly, they reflect new ways of creating identity and individuality, and new efforts at escaping, if only temporarily, increasing economic anxiety, social conformity, intense workplace stress and burnout, and perhaps even a world "disenchanted". We will investigate the contemporary resurgence of interest in magical religious practices and objects, the historical roots of Studio Ghibli films in Shinto and Buddhist imagery and European Romanticism, the historical origins and the dark side of "cuteness" culture, and the dynamics of baseball fandom and fanaticism in post-war and contemporary Japan.

For many centuries, premodern Japan had long, rich, and vibrant literary and artistic traditions of representing monsters, ghouls, goblins and anomalous spirits, sometimes paired with religious rituals and myths that presuppose a world populated by extraordinary but hidden beings and forces. These were ways of imagining alternate, parallel realities, and such imaginings not only carried out a variety of cultural, religious, and social functions, but in other contexts, they also provided literary enjoyment and theatrical entertainment. In Japan, the line between serious imagining and playful fantasy was always blurred. Thus, the fantastic and the monstrous are not by any means new or modern, though the modes of producing and conveying narratives and images of such creatures and "others" have very much been modernized, commodified, and more recently, digitized and embedded in cyber-worlds, video games, and social media networks.

This part of the course investigates how traditional Japanese Buddhist, Shinto and syncretic religious practices focused on attaining this-worldly benefits (genzei ryaku 現世利益) are seeing a remarkable resurgence, despite (or because of) the supposed rise of secularism and a sense of "disenchantment" in the modern age. Students will examine the emergence of a kind of "new religion" (shin shūkyō) in contemporary Japan, one which is less doctrinal, less institutionalized, less communal, and more individualized, that is, more amenable to the commodification of "spiritual experiences" and more responsive to consumerist impulses to buy and sell markers of religious identity and practice. Recent decades have seen an explosion in a religious marketplace characterized by the buying, selling, and collecting of magical charms, magatami beads, omikuji fortune-telling, faith healing, talismans, and pilgrim stamps. Students will be asked to explain the marked tendency to swing back and forth between a kind of playful joy in purchasing and collecting religious kitsch and serious belief in occult forces. Students will attend to the blurry line between religion as trafficking in entertainment and tourism, and religion as expressing wonder and anxiety about fate, fragility, and death. Students will be asked to view these new Japanese religious phenomena not so much as "superstition" but as cultural practices which shuttle back and forth on a spectrum whose two extreme ends are defined by two kinds of play, one kind of play engaged in for the serious matters of life and death and the other, a kind of play engaged in for fun and social media sharing.