Author: k24

Actually existing dystopia: imagining Japan through science fiction under late capitalism

Japanese science fiction has become a global cultural phenomenon since the Second World War, evident in the popularity of novels like Sakyo Komatsu’s Japan Sinks (1973) and kaiju films such as Godzilla (1954). Yet, as these examples highlight, the Japanese science fiction genre has been dominated by dystopian “imaginations of disaster”1. Postwar Japanese science fiction and cyberpunk genres at once both reflect long-standing anxieties of the demise of Japanese cultural exceptionality in the confrontation with Western (capitalist) modernity since the 1910s, most famously articulated by Kyoto School debates about ‘overcoming modernity’ in the 1940s,2 yet also indicate a reimagining of Japan, from the Western perspective, as exemplifying “the postmodern present and near-future of the West”3, a “techno-Orientalist”4 imagination that has nevertheless been appropriated and rearticulated in Japanese science fiction itself.

Sato has argued that the fusion of American cyberpunk ideas with Japanese modernization has facilitated the reconstruction of an imagined Japanese unique identity (or, Japanism) that associates Japan with technology and correlates its technological modernization to a reclamation of its past.5 However, the uniqueness of Japan comes from its own monstrosity, its representativeness of a world falling apart. Mark Fisher, the British critical theorist, conceptualised the idea of ‘capitalist realism’, where, under contemporary late capitalism, “it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism”6. Imagining disaster through science fiction becomes a cultural reproduction of a resurgent, techno-capitalist Japan from the 1980s where Japan itself was reimagined as the ‘terminator’, the monster, of world capitalism.7 Dystopia was thus “both frightening and exciting”8; Japanese science fiction epitomises what Walter Benjamin noted in 1936 where humanity’s “self-alienation has reached such a degree that it can experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure”.9

Just as Frankfurt School philosopher Herbert Marcuse described the ‘end of utopia’, where society could now actually achieve ‘utopian’ social transformation and thus negate utopia’s inherent impossibility,10 Japanese science fiction represents an ‘end of dystopia’. Now, dystopia is no longer imaginative but instead “an extrapolation or exacerbation of [reality] rather than an alternative to it”.11 In relating Japanese identity to science fiction themes of hyper-capitalism and technology, through techno-Orientalist tropes, Japan becomes an ‘actually existing dystopia’ where science fiction is no longer an imagination, but merely an extension of reality. In this way, postwar Japanese science fiction, in its imaginations of disaster, paradoxically both reflects the fears and anxieties of the realities of contemporary Japan, where Japanese culture and national essence is eroded by the onset of the ahistorical and culturally detached society of late capitalism and postmodernity, and simultaneously appropriates such dystopia by historically and culturally locating techno-capitalism in Japan in a rearticulation of Japanism as a unique ‘actually existing dystopia’. As Kawamura Takeshi, a contemporary Japanese playwright who gained notoriety in the 1980s for his dystopian and postmodern themes, has argued, “it is absolutely necessary for an age of monsters to put in an appearance” because “such an age has already come very close to us”.12

  1. Susan J. Napier, ‘Panic Sites: The Japanese Imagination of Disaster from Godzilla to Akira’, The Journal of Japanese Studies 19:2 (1993), pp.327-351. [↩]
  2. Kumiko Sato, ‘How Information Technology Has (Not) Changed Feminism and Japanism: Cyberpunk in the Japanese Context’, Comparative Literature Studies, 41:3 (2004), pp.343-344. [↩]
  3. Ibid., p.347. [↩]
  4. David Roh, Betsy Huang and Greta Niu (eds), Techno-Orientalism: Imagining Asia in Speculative Fiction, History and Media (New Brunswick, 2015). [↩]
  5. Sato, ‘How Information Technology Has (Not) Changed Feminism and Japanism’, p.353. [↩]
  6. Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? (Winchester, 2009), p.17. [↩]
  7. Napier, ‘Panic Sites’, p.349. [↩]
  8. Ibid. [↩]
  9. Walter Benjamin, Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, edited by Hannah Arendt (New York, 1968), p.242. [↩]
  10. Herbert Marcuse, ‘The End of Utopia’, lecture delivered at the Free University of West Berlin, July 1967. [↩]
  11. Fisher, Capitalist Realism, p.17. [↩]
  12. Peter Eckersall, ‘Japan as Dystopia: Kawamura Takeshi’s Daisan Erotica’, TDR 44:1 (2000), p.107. [↩]

Religion, philosophy, or neither? The challenges of engaging Confucianism in global cultural dialogues

Throughout the twentieth century, tensions between (Western) modernity and (Chinese) national culture dominated Chinese philosophical and intellectual debates. This was, and continues to be, especially the case in the difficulties in attempts to reconcile contemporary (liberal) political thought with traditional Chinese socio-political culture, questions that have remained “largely unanswered”.1

Confucian revivalism which seeks to relate and place Confucianism into direct conversation with Western-centric concepts can thus be problematic. Whilst conceptually useful in terms of introducing Confucian ‘motifs’2 to non-Sinitic intellectual spaces, its appropriateness in the reverse sense, when framed through non-Confucian notions, can be contested. The hegemony of Western modes of thought means that Confucianism, when related to other schools of thought, is often conceived through the lens of philosophy or religion. Whilst there is value in translating Confucianism into something more directly comparable to Western concepts, enabling Confucian ideas to be reappropriated into different cultural-historical contexts, it is also delimiting, rigidly fixing Confucianism into externally-produced intellectual ‘boxes’. This fails to account for the more comprehensive ways in which Confucianism interacts with, shapes, and is enacted in social and political life. Rather than an abstract ‘idea’ like democracy, liberalism, or Marxism which can be transported to different contexts, or a religion that can be ‘adopted’ and followed, Confucianism is more deeply and specifically entwined within Sinitic civilization or culture.

The civilizational discourse promoted by the New Confucian movement, inspired by the thought of Xiong Shili (1885-1968), thus seems most appropriate for conceptualising Confucianism in a global sense. This approach views connections between civilizations, in their comprehensive totality, as a means for Chinese “national character to reach higher places of perfection”,3 adopting a broader notion of Confucianism as the core of an all-encompassing Chinese civilization. The ‘Confucian Constitutional Order’ advocated by Qing Jiang4 or the political philosophy of “Confucian political perfectionism” envisioned by Joseph Chan5 offer examples of engaging with and at times integrating Western ideas yet remaining fundamentally rooted in and derived from a Confucian basis. These scholars have not pursued a complete Sinocentric approach: they recognise and engage with alternative (namely, Western political-philisophical) models of thinking about society. Yet, they have adapted them into a distinctly Confucian (Sinitic) civilizational framework: Confucianism provides the intellectual lens through which other cultures are approach, rather than fitting Confucianism into external concepts of philosophy or religion. This means that engagement with other cultures can take place through Confucianism in its comprehensive form, as a form of inter-civilizational dialogue, rather than a distorted, appropriated ‘Confucianism as philosophy’ or ‘Confucianism as religion’.

The idea of a ‘world philosophy of culture’ as advocated by the ‘Boston Confucians’6 is a valuable framework at the general, global level. However, when engaging with Confucianism specifically, utilising Western-derived concepts like philosophy or religion can distort, appropriate, and delimit Confucianism. As Sun has highlighted, such discourses have sometimes been reproduced in China itself,7 as, in attempts to relate Confucianism to other (Western) ideas, Chinese intellectuals recast Confucianism according to these conceptual labels, which shapes how Confucianism is studied, imagined and manifested in contemporary China.   Consequently, inter-civilizational dialogue perhaps provides the most appropriate, albeit similarly inherently imperfect, means for intercultural exchange and translation.

 

 

  1. Edmund S.K. Fung, The Intellectual Foundations of Chinese Modernity: Cultural and Political Thought in the Republican Era (Cambridge, 2010), p.94 [↩]
  2. Tu Weiming, ‘Foreword’ in Robert C. Neville, Boston Confucianism: portable tradition in the late-modern world (Albany, 2000). [↩]
  3. Carsun Chung, ‘Manifesto for a Reappraisal of Sinology and the Reconstruction of Chinese Culture’, The Development of Neo-Confucianism, pp.465-483 in W.M. Theodore De Bary and Richard Lufrano (eds.), Sources of Chinese Tradition: From 1600 Through the Twentieth Century (New York, 2001), p.553. [↩]
  4. Qing Jiang, A Confucian Constitutional Order: how China’s ancient past can shape its political future, translated by Edmund Ryden, edited by Daniel A. Bell and Ruiping Fan (Princeton, 2012). [↩]
  5. Joseph Cho Wai Chan, Confucian perfectionism: a political philosophy for modern times (Princeton, 2014). [↩]
  6. Robert C. Neville, Boston Confucianism: portable tradition in the late modern world (Albany, 2000) [↩]
  7. Anna Sun, Confucianism as a World Religion: Contested Histories and Contemporary Realities (Princeton, 2013) [↩]

Resituating Esperanto in East Asian world imaginaries

Esperanto, a ‘planned’, universal language created by Ludovic Zamenhof in 1887, enjoyed particular popularity in Japan and, to a lesser extent, China in the early twentieth century; Japan was home to the largest Esperanto community outside Europe in the 1920s and 1930s.1 Developing in the paradoxical era of the early twentieth century which involved the simultaneous intensification of nationalism and the emergence of ideas of internationalism, the universalism and ahistoricity of Esperanto meant it was envisioned as a transnational medium to connect all peoples on a non-hierarchical, international basis whilst preserving national identities.

Traditionally, the focus on either cosmopolitanism introduced through interaction with the West, or Pan-Asianism as the reactionary other leaves less space for the appraisal of Asian forms of cosmopolitan internationalism. Esperanto’s popularity in Asia should arguably be viewed in terms of what it represented and its fusion with ideas developing out of Japan and Asia of universalism, global humanity, and world integration: for example Kang Youwei’s visions of world unity from China2 or Kotoku Shusui’s anti-imperialist critique of the Russo-Japanese War as part of the Nonwar movement and his utopian imaginations of transnational sokuin dojo (compassion or empathy).3 Consequently, Esperanto provides a frame through which to examine Asian conceptions of ‘worldism’, which derived as much from indigenous imaginations as ideas transposed from the outside.

In the ‘worldist’ imagination, whose roots are traced back to the Nonwar movement by Kanishi, utopian peace could never emerge through cooperation between nation-states. Instead, they advocated a more total vision of heimen (‘the people’) as a global, transnational construct that “transcended nation-state borders”.4 Esperanto must be viewed through this complexity; its popularity acted as a manifestation or exemplification of an alternative visions of world unity emerging from Asia which embraced cultural diversity and cosmopolitanism and transcended the (Western) system of international relations. In this light, the European roots of Esperanto and its inscribed Eurocentrism are of less immediate relevance, as it is argued that it not necessarily the content of Esperanto that mattered, but more what it symbolically represented. As Rapley rightly emphasises, Esperanto represented both a medium of global communication and, critically, an idea or ideology of world unification.5 ‘Worldism’, of which Esperanto is imagined as a constituent part, takes the world (‘sohei’) and ‘the people’ (‘heimen’), in the abstract sense, as its fundamental basis, rather than the nation or ‘the people’ with the emphasis on ‘the’. As Chan notes, historicising Esperanto brings to light its importance in China as a propaganda medium against both Japanese imperialism and, for the Communist Party, in the civil war against the Nationalists.6 In Japan itself, Konishi argues that it should be considered as part of anti-imperial resistance, part of projections of world order that equally contested Japanese state participation in, on the one hand, Western ‘international relations’ based on the primacy of territorial sovereignty and, on the other, anti-colonial (yet often imperialist) pan-Asian constructions of an Asian collective ‘other’.7

This is not to deny the significance of transnational connections and networks of intellectual exchange; imaginations of internationalism and cosmopolitanism are impossible to conceive in closed spaces and are thus inherently products of transnationalism. Yet, at the same time, reframing Esperanto in this way, as an idea which fused with preexisting and emerging conceptions of world unity, an endpoint for East Asian cosmopolitan imaginaries, helps to rebalance transnational relations between East and West, and highlights that, for some, Esperanto marked a useful endpoint for their ‘worldist’ visions, rather than being the starting point for a new Asian cosmopolitanism. East Asia, especially Japan, was a receptive audience to Esperanto not just because it represented something new, but also because it could be integrated into local imaginations of ‘worldism’.

  1. Ian Rapley, ‘A Language for Asia? Transnational Encounters in the Japanese Esperanto Movement, 1906-1928’, in Pedro Iacobelli, Danton Leary and Shinnosuke Takahashi (eds.), Transnational Japan as History: Empire, Migration, and Social Movements (London, 2016), p.167. [↩]
  2. Kang Youwei and Laurence G. Thompson, Ta T’ung Shu: The One-World Philosophy of K’ang Yu-wei (London, 1958). [↩]
  3. Sho Kanishi, ‘Translingual Word Order: Language without Culture in Post-Russo-Japanese War Japan’, The Journal of Asian Studies, 72:1 (2013), p.96. [↩]
  4.  Ibid., p.99 [↩]
  5. Rapley, ‘A Language for Asia?’, p.170. [↩]
  6. Gerald Chan, ‘China and the Esperanto Movement’, The Australian Journal of Chinese Affairs, 15 (1986), p.11. [↩]
  7. Kanishi, ‘Translingual Word Order’, pp.91-114. [↩]

Paradise on earth: Uchiyama Gudō’s imaginations of a (Buddhist) anarcho-communist utopia

The utopian vision of Uchiyama Gudō (1874-1911), a Zen Buddhist priest who was executed for his purported role in the plot to assassinate the Japanese Emperor Meiji in 1910, offers a unique example of the fusion of Buddhist and socialist ideas in early twentieth-century East Asia. Throughout his writings, Gudō repeatedly imagines a vision of tengoku, explicitly evoking the Christian idea of “soteriological and eschatological” paradise rather than the Buddhist jōdo (Pure Land) or gokuraku (land of bliss).1 Although connections between Christianity and the development of socialist revolutionary thought in Meiji Japan by Rambelli help to contextualise the contemporary meanings and connotations of tengoku, it is arguably most significant in the negative sense; that is, the imagination of an earthly, anarcho-communist utopian ‘paradise’ over a Buddhist heavenly bliss.

Gudō’s (Buddhist) anarcho-communism formed part of a broader wave of emerging Radical Buddhism in late Meiji Japan. He was not alone in his focus on earthly paradise; contemporary anarchists like Tanaka Jiroku were similarly advocating ideas of genseshugi (‘this-world-ism’).2 In China, both Taixu (1890-1947) and Lin Qiwu (1903-1934)  developed similar imaginations of a “pure land in this world” where anarchist utopia and Marxism respectively were “one and the same” as the Buddhist Pure Land.3 Yet, not only do Gudō’s ideas predate many of these other anarchists, his utopian imagination also differs in a critical way in its absence of Buddhist spiritualism. Avoiding references to the pure land, Gudō situates his paradise purely in the earthly realm; in a way, he subverts Radical Buddhism, which views socialism and anarchism as paths to an explicitly Buddhist ‘pure land’, and instead proposes an anarcho-communist revolution in which consciousness and freedom is achieved through Buddhism (as Buddhism and socialism are two sides of the same coin) yet paradise itself is defined by its material, social and political conditions rather than ‘heavenly bliss’. For example, during his interrogation for his alleged role in the High Treason Incident of 1910, Gudo describes his intellectual conversion to anarcho-communism as a result of reading about the communal lives of the Buddhist sangha in Chinese monasteries4. However, this is framed from a specifically worldly perspective; it was the communal and egalitarian aspects of the sangha that appealed to Gudō, as opposed to their spirituality and religious practice. Thus, Gudō removes the distinction between Buddhism and anarcho-communism; he is not striving for a spiritual awakening to nirvana or pure land, but for a (Marxian) social revolution through labour unions to achieve “the ideal land of anarchist communism, where all are free and live a comfortable life”.5

As Rambelli emphasises, Gudō was seeking to transform the (earthly) world as a Buddhist anarcho-communist, rather than “striving for a socialist form of Buddhism”6. Paradise would be distinctively and exclusively anarcho-communist. Whilst inherently informed by the semantic, epistemological, and ontological frameworks of Gudo’s Buddhism, paradise on earth in its realised form seems more rooted in classical Marxism. Paradise would thus begin when the capitalist bourgeoisie “reject[s] the old crime of living out of his capital” and “realize[s] that all human beings must secure their clothing and food through their own labor”.7

Consequently, Gudō’s vision for paradise was both inseparable from his conception of Buddhism and yet fundamentally material. This fusion of Buddhism and socialism was the path necessary to achieve individual and collective consciousness to eliminate oppression and achieve freedom. Attaining social consciousness and establishing paradise would be achieved through Buddhism not because he imagined a future land of heavenly bliss, but instead because the worldly anarcho-communist ‘paradise’ envisaged by Gudō would be the true realisation of Buddhism on earth.

  1. Fabio Rambelli, Zen Anarchism: The Egalitarian Dharam of Uchiyama Gudō (Berkeley, 2013), p.31. [↩]
  2. Lajos Brons, A Buddha Land in This World: Philosophy, Utopia, and Radical Buddhism (Santa Barbara, 2023), p.76. [↩]
  3. Brons, A Buddha Land in This World, pp.92-95. [↩]
  4. Rambelli, Zen Anarchism, p.20. [↩]
  5. Uchiyama Gudō, Museifu Kyosan kakumei, quoted in and translated by Rambelli, Zen Anarchism, p.50. [↩]
  6. Rambelli, Zen Anarchism, p.30. [↩]
  7. Uchiyama Gudō, Heibon no jikaku, quoted in and translated by Rambelli, Zen Anarchism, p.63. [↩]