Out of Place:
Effaced History, Embodied Memory in Gotô Meisei’s “Nameless First-Lieutenant’s Son”
***
Gotô Meisei’s Interiorization of
Historical and Spatial Dislocation
Peter Tillack
p1002@darkwing.uoregon.edu
University of Oregon
The protagonist of Gotô Meisei's autobiographical "Nameless First-Lieutenant's Son" muses at one point that "[L]iving in a tranquil world like this seems somehow out of place."[1] Published in 1967 and written by a man born in 1932, such a sentence is highly evocative of the dislocations inhering in Japan's transformations from imperial power to defeated hegemon to postwar economic giant. William Kelly writes of Gotô's age cohorts, the so-called "Showa hitoketa" generation, as a demographic whose youth spanned the depression and the Second World War. Young enough to suffer, they were nonetheless not old enough to have inflicted suffering in the war. In the popular imagination of the postwar period, they were troped as the workaholic salaryman and the education mama "whose selfless efforts on behalf of company and children insured present and future prosperity".[2] As I relate below, Gotô's early life can be seen as having been a series of dislocations, both "historical" and spatial, and these have informed his ethos as a writer critical of postwar Japanese society's discursivity.
Born in northern Korea under Japanese occupation, Gotô came into the world one of the colonizers. In the city of Wonsan, in Hamkyong Province, Gotô's father, an Imperial Army officer, ran a sundries store and headed the local chapter of the home-town militia. Gotô's grandfather was a carpenter who, after the annexation of Korea by Japan in 1910, had emigrated for the purpose of building Shinto shrines.[3] "Repatriation" is an inapt term to describe the situation of a thirteen year-old Gotô who, at the end of the Second World War, was ordered to "Return to Japan!" when he had never actually set foot there.[4] As Isogai Jiro notes, Wonsan would manifest throughout Gotô's writings as his "hometown on a distant shore" (higan no furusato) (Isogai, 131). He recalls Gotô's having said that upon reaching Japan, Gotô had felt like a "'counterfeit Japanese'" (Isogai, 131). If Gotô's life has been that of a member of the temporally disjointed Showa hitoketa generation, then he has also experienced dislocations borne of his early spatial remove from the Japanese mainland.
Long after the uncertain days of the early postwar period was over, in the mid-1960s, Gotô would also experience the domestic spatial dislocation inherent to living in a danchi. Around the time he decided to pursue a career full-time as a writer, Gotô moved into a massive danchi complex of some twenty-thousand people, forty minutes by train from the heart of Tokyo.[5] The danchi appears as a setting for many of his essays and most of his early fiction, including the book-length serial shôsetsu Yonjussai no oblomov (Oblomov at Forty). In the essays I've read, the danchi, this most banal of living arrangements for so many urban Japanese, figures as a source of fascination for Gotô, who perceives it as an alienating home. Ensconced in the trappings of domesticity characteristic of salarymen of his generation, Gotô nonetheless regarded himself as an urban castaway of sorts. He writes of those who dwell in danchi as "placeless people" (hisho yu^sha), as "the masses, lacking an aboriginal consciousness" (dochaku no ishiki wo motanu shomin), for they have no sense of place: "[T]hey are people who have washed up at the danchi as a result of being selected from a move-in lottery. I too am just like someone who has sailed in on a boat from India."[6]
Later in the same essay (entitled "The Logic of "the Nameless'"), Gotô suggests that to live in a danchi is like living in the nation-state writ small. This is because identifying oneself with the nation-state (eg, as a "Japanese") eradicates "aboriginality" (dochakusei) in the same sense that living in the danchi eradicates a sense of place. Gotô asks why this is so, and, answering his own question says, it is because they are "tenants" (tanako. Gotô's emphasis. Gotô, "Mumei no ronri", 14). Being a tenant is just like being a citizen, a shimin: in the same way that one pays income taxes directly from one's bank account, bills for water, gas, elecricity, are all withdrawn automatically. And who is the landlord one pays? It is an abstraction: the public housing corporation (Gotô, 14). Noting, furthermore, that the great majority of fathers living in the danchi commute to a workplace far away, the children are unable to see where their father's work. Rather than being known as the "child of the man who runs the bath, or the child of the woman who runs the sundry shop", "all the children have this vague way of thinking that "My father works somewhere'", writes Gotô (Gotô, 15-16). On Sundays, the fathers take their children for rides in "'my car'" or, cameras and fishing rods in hand, accompany them to the danchi playground (Gotô, 15). In this sense, the attitudes of danchi children towards their fathers are "virtually uniform" (Gotô, 15). Mothers of these "danchi kids" are themselves known as "danchi housewives", which lends a perverse aura of equality to them, for "prior to their being the goddesses of department store clerks, they are "danchi housewives'. Prior to being the wife of a salesman, a woman is someone who lives in "block xx and unit yy'" (Gotô, 16). It is by the reciprocity of their consciousness of each other and by others as "danchi housewives", writes Gotô, that "just as in the case of our contemporary country, they can pass each day in calmness and peace" (Gotô, 16). Overall, Gotô's essay on danchi life effectively underlines the fragmented quality of social life that lends an air of epistemological "opacity" to everyday life during Japan's years of high-speed growth. Such an opacity--where one is unaware of the relationality intrinsic to social life to the extent that one feels she has lost her "aboriginality"-- is itself emblematic of what Henri Lefebvre asserts is the "internal colonization" constitutive of postwar everyday life in the developed world.[7]
As a writer, Gotô Meisei is regarded as representative of the so-called "Naikô no sedai", or "introverted generation," for which reason his fiction as well is seen as having occupied a certain critical disjuncture. Hailed into being by way of an epithet by marxist critic Odagiri Hideo in 1971, this putative "generation" was castigated for its members' apparent lack of concern with the creation of what Sartre termed a "literature of engagement" (engajuman no bungaku), as had writers of the sengo-ha, or "postwar generation", in their concern with wartime ethical responsibility and the issue of shutaisei (subjectivity). [8] Proclaiming their putative introversion "the big problem of contemporary literature", Odagiri wrote that these writers "seek a response of the truth of oneself only from within their own personal circumstances and, as an internal literary generation that would escape ideology [datsu ideorogi], they form one of the contemporary currents of the times" (Odagiri's emphasis). Gotô has himself bristles at the label Naikô no sedai, in the sense that it implies a lack of engagement with the political. Yet, he does not refute the label entirely. He asserts that Naikô no sedai is an apt label, but that it ought to be seen as applying to the process whereby Japan's defeat in the war was interiorized by Gotô and his age cohorts.[9] By way of illustration, Gotô relates an anecdote detailing how, when he was an elementary school child in occupied Korea, the nature of his school days was dictated by the weather. On rainy days, the children would stay inside the school and study. When the weather was good, they would go outside and dig for pine roots. The roots were collected for their oil, which was used as a lubricant for airplane engines. He says, "So there we were, digging, and one day, suddenly, we're defeated. It became the postwar as we were out there in the mountains loaded down with pine roots. It was just like some kind of a fool's errand depicted in a painting, and as such it was already funny" (Gotô, 1984: 208). Yet he notes the complicated emotions that washed over the children, and how, at the time, the situation had not seemed at all funny and, without quite knowing why, he and his schoolmates had begun to cry. Along with these conflicting emotions was "an exceedingly strong feeling of shame," the causes for which were unclear to him (Gotô, 208).
The various spatial and historical dislocations of Gotô's life have, he implies, imbued him with an appreciation for the discursivity of social institutions. Of his experience of Japan's wartime defeat, for example, Gotô says he learned that nations "are all just fictions" (210). Existing in one's consciousness as both natural and eternal, they nonetheless crumble, just like many "small and medium-sized businesses at year's end" (210). Such a fate is, realized Gotô, "inevitable" (210). Despite such an awareness, however, the protagonist's of Gotô's works I've read lead lives seemingly cut off from an engagement with the wider world that such a realization would enable.[10] Ensconced in their danchi, they conceive of the relations they have with others in society primarily in terms of the physical conduits and barriers-- the phone lines and sewage pipes, ceilings and floors--constitutive of a larger social enclave. Such materials are themselves both produced by and reproductive of the social world in which Gotô's protanonists live. Gotô's representations of his protagonists' alienated interactions with these materials effectively constitutes a social critique of the homogenized realm that Japan is quickly heading towards, such that Japanese have become effectively cut off both from each other and the historicity of their own lives.
The Markings of "Success": Homogenized Bodies and Spaces
Given the discursive nature of Japan's pre-war and wartime kokutai, it stands to reason that, upon Japan's defeat, even non-combatants such as Gotô and his classmates might well have felt a keen sense of shame. For, as Yoshikuni Igarashi notes, the kokutai (national polity/national body) had been effectevely embodied within individual Japanese, through the practice of yoking nationalism to bodily functions.[11] One such example was the calisthenics program developed by University of Tokyo professor Kakei Katsuhiko in 1929. Exercises designed by this nationalist suffused every physical movement with mythological interpretations (Igarashi, 49). This was but the beginning of militaristic efforts to center ideological struggle in the body, efforts which culminated in a popular radio calisthenics show airing in the latter days of the Pacific War, in which the listeners were exhorted to exercise to the slogan "Bei-Ei-geki-metsu", or "Destroy, perish, America and England" (Igarashi, 49).
Yet Igarashi argues that, even long after defeat, during the years of Japan's high-speed economic growth, Japanese bodies once again became sites of ideological inscription, this time for what he calls postwar Japan's "foundational narrative." This metanarrative, crafted with American complicity, cast Japanese at large as pure "victims" of Japanese militarists, who had led Japan down the "wrong road". Japan's defeat by the Allied Powers was characterized as a conversion, under which Japan "was converted into a peaceful, democratic country under American tutelage" (Igarashi, 13).[12] The "new alliance between America and Japan" was expressed "through images of hygienic, democratic bodies" (Igarashi, 14).[13] The impulse of the official narrative, writes Igarashi, was to "construct an ahistorical body" (Igarashi, 14). Indeed, as he asserts, under the conditions of material prosperity that increasingly came to characterize Japanese society during the 1960s, the act of remembering the war became increasingly difficult (Igarashi, 14).
Perhaps the most visible of the many events in Japan's postwar history troped as a proof of Japan's postwar conversion is, as Igarashi asserts, the 1964 Tokyo Olympics, which would showcase a newly resurgent, economically vital, yet peace-loving Japan to the world. In his discussion of the preparations leading up to this event, Igarashi implies that "ahistorical" Japanese bodies came to inhabit a concomittantly constructed "ahistorical" Japanese city. Tokyo itself was radically changed in preparation for the Olympics, with the destruction of whole swathes of the city for the implementation of a massive freeway system designed to facilitate, among other things, the efficient transportation of spectators from airports and lodgings to the games.[14] After transportation infrastructure, the biggest concern of city planners in relation to the Tokyo Olympics was the state of the sewage system. At the time, only about a third of the city's population had access to sewers. The rest depended on kumitoriya, or nightsoil carters, to take their sewage off their hands. These were replaced--in areas most visible to visiting foreigners--by vaccuum trucks, in order to hide the smell of raw sewage. The Sumida River, having become in the postwar era literally a poisoned sewer, was also flushed with fresh reservoir water in anticipation of the games (Seidensticker, 234). Such essentially stopgap measures extended to the human body as well, with urination in the street declared in 1964 a "crime" by the metropolitan police (Igarashi, 153). But this was not all: homeless persons too were part of the "clean-up" operation of Tokyo, and were "harassed" by the authorities until they moved out of areas where they might be seen by visitors (Seidensticker, 235).
Yet such preparations were merely the most overt manifestatations of attempts to eradicate the heterogeneous, those aspects of city life that contrast the homogenizing imperatives of rationalization. An example of such an attempt would be that documented at the beginning of Kon Ichikawa's 1965 "Tokyo Olympiad." Ichikawa's film starts out not with a paean to the Olympics as a revered tradition bringing nations together, but with several short scenes of wrecking balls demolishing what, by their architectural styles, appear to be the Meiji-Era structures of the famed "London One Block" of the city's financial district, the Marunouchi. The demolition of prewar buildings in a time of postwar peace in this film has the effect of asserting that the Japanese were taking it upon themselves to finish the job the Allies had started, of demolishing Japan's militarist identity so that Japan might be born anew. Significantly, much of this new reality would be built in the "International Style," as evidently adapted by Toshiro Yamashita, in his Kasumigaseki building of 1968.[15] The international style was propounded after World War One in the West, but by the late 1960s, it would verge on ubiquity in large cities throughout the "developed" world. In its priveleging of function over form, the international style effectively enacted the production of the homogeneous space symptomatic of advanced capitalism.[16]
In contrast to such homogenizing impulses, heterogeneity is that which bears the marks of history, whether at the level of the body with its imperfections, its marks of age and disease, or at the level of the neighborhood, with its vernacular architecture, with its unsanctioned spillover onto the streets and byways, as of stores the merchandise of which was often displayed out on the street, or of children playing in the street, of old people sitting and chatting, even of flowerpots placed in groups outside urban dwellings, themselves constituting the plebian urban Japanese "garden". Heterogeneity is that which, out of simple organic necessity, creates a sense of identity in space; it creates place. Heterogeneity could be said to be the name for what troubled Jeremy Bentham, the architect of the panopticon as a device for inscripting institutionally-acceptable behavior on the body. As such, it is no surprise to read that, around the same time and throughout the sixties, Japanese authorities resorted to "panoptic" procedures to "regulate the city by making its space more visible to police surveillance" (Igarashi, 151). Under the auspices of "environment-cleaning activities" (kankyôjyôka katsudô), police escorted minors out of the entertainment districts "to protect them from the temptations of darkness" (Igarashi, 151). All-night coffeehouses were required to maintain minimum, specified levels of brightness, a measure that was enforced by the purchase of one-hundred "illuminometers" by the metropolitan police department in 1963 (Igarashi, 152-3). The stated purpose of such tactics was to create a "bright and crime-free town" (hanzai no nai akarui machi) (Igarashi, 152).
Indeed, as Igarashi implies, akaruisa, or brightness, seems to have been the official goal of the decade. Perhaps the change in brightness which affected the greatest number of people between those two poles of life however, had to do with life in the danchi. So ubiquitous have danchi become since their initial appearance on the Japanese cityscape in 1955 that, as Seidensticker says, "scarcely a Japanese above infancy" can be unfamiliar with the term (Seidensticker, 275). Statistics cited by Maeda Ai provide a sense of the rate at which this new form of mass dwelling began to transform the city and the lives of its people. Whereas in 1964 there had been 35,000 individual apartment units in Tokyo, by 1965 the number had risen to 53,000.[17] Igarashi notes that Ueno Kôshi "describes the transformation of the space that surrounded the body in terms of the disappearance of darkness in 1960s Tokyo: the interstices that used to exist in quotidian space were eradicated in the functional space of the danchi, while artificial lights filled the darkness of the city" (Igarashi, 131).
Edward Seidensticker asserts that, during the Olympics, Tokyo came close to achieving what may have been its goal: to look like any other city (Seidensticker, 234). A corollary to the emergence of clean, bright, homogenized spaces was the effacement (this time not by earthquakes or by bombings, but by the actions of city planners) of many material touchstones to Japan's past. As such, it is little surprise to discover that literary and cultural critics of the time were noting the development of an "attenuated everydayness" (kihakuna nichijôsei).[18] Harry Harootunian notes that in Japan, as in the West, everydayness as an ontological condition is as old as modernity itself.[19] Yet, the nichijôsei of Japan's postwar, high-speed growth years is, in its attenuated condition, qualitatively different from the prewar everydayness described by Harootunian as "a concern for the actual", in which "possibility was seen to inhere in routine, habit and custom."[20] Harootunian notes that everydayness, whereas "seen as part of [the] experience of modernization" as in Europe and America, in Japan it was further informed by the fact of "the specular contrast between imported custioms and practices identified with foreign cultures, and received and homegrown conventions [which were] put into question by the introduction of the new" (Harootunian, History's Disquiet, 65). Yet, in the prewar period, if everyday life was itself characterized by an increasingly dizzying array of foreign influxes, commodities and styles, everyday life in the postwar, high-speed growth years was characterized by the increasingly noticeable trend towards homogeneity. Appending the adjective "kihakuna" (thin, attenuated) to the nichijôsei of the 1960s, critic Akiyama Shun writes of the condition:
The system of "things" (mono) that permeates the everyday in its entirety is such that, if we try to apprehend [it] with a vision that exceeds theories of our circumstances (jyôkyô ron) we immediately run up against the boundaries of consciousness. Our eyesight sees all things, yet no matter how we try, we cannot visually apprehend the entirety of the world, which hides itself from our sight. At such times, the focus of cognition resembles very closely a distorting lens. Regardless of seeing all clearly, this is [nonetheless] a case of not seeing a single thing, a strange case of one's thought losing its eyesight. ? The objects that thought can pursue are those that do not lie beyond one's own very existence.[21]
This passage suggests that everyday life is characterized by a certain epistemological blindness; that the relation of causes to effects has been rendered so obscure that one cannot "see" farther than what is in front of one's nose.
In a 1978 essay, Akiyama traces the lineage of postwar nichijôsei back to two events. The first was the well-known declaration in a 1966 white paper that the postwar period was now "over", owing to GNP growth rates that, for the first time since the end of the war, had surpassed the 1937 record high. The other event was the failure of the 1960 Anpo movement to effect extraparliamentary democratic change.[22] The upshot of these two events was that postwar democracy had effectively been bought off by high-speed economic growth, especially since 1961, with the inception in 1960 of Prime Minister Ikeda Hayato's so-called "income-doubling policy". The resulting mood of stability, was characterized by what Maeda calls private lifestyle-ism (shiseikatsushugi), and what Tada Michitaro has called "Mai-homeism".[23] Both terms refer to the increasing tendency during this time for people to turn "inward". Eschewing the political and even the social, people tended increasingly to revel in the private realm of consumption. Enmeshed in consumerist activities, isolated from each other by the thin ferroconcrete walls and steel doors of their danchi, and, increasingly, foregoing even trips to the neighborhood sentô for the privacy of their locked bathrooms, people began to exist, in the words of Akiyama Shun, as "isolated grains of sand" in a huge dune (Akiyama, 1979: 325). Defining nichijôsei as "that in which every day is devoid of incidents" (jiken no nai mainichi to iu koto), Akiyama notes that it was in this period that Japanese society, heretofore universally characterized as "postwar", now came to be largely characterized as "contemporary" (Akiyama, 1979: 327, 321-22). It was as if--having lost sight of the ideological and material bases of postwar Japan's contradictions-- people had come to live outside history, existing in an endless "now". Like the wartime of Gotô Meisei's youth, postwar nichijôsei was evidently a condition in which the causality of sociohistorical relationships had become unclear. Under such circumstances, it is little surprise that Akiyama should assert that nichijôsei should manifest itself as a kind of critical myopia.
Bodily Traces: "Effective History" in The "Nameless First-Lieutenant's Son"
In "Nameless First-Lieutenant's Son", Gotô juxtaposes representations of a colonial past that, in Japan's postwar period, exists primarily under erasure with depictions of an everyday life the ideological underpinnings of which--in their very "opacity"-- can also be said to exist "under erasure". The two moments are mediated through the narrator's body, which has lived through both of them. The story centers on a nameless danchi-dwelling man--the narrator/protagonist of the story--who is in his mid-thirties. He is married, with a four-year old son prone to bedwetting. His wife is expecting their second child. As is the case with Akiyama Shun's definition of the "everyday", the man's is a world devoid of "incidents". The bulk of what he relates in the here-and-now is confined to the space of the danchi in which this nuclear family lives. It is a space striking both in the depth of its description and the breadth of its banality. Yet, through a protracted interior monologue, the protagonist/narrator details a life comprised primarily of juxtapositions of "danchi-nichijôsei" with self-avowedly faulty memories of a rural agricultural life in Korea inadvertently experienced by his family as refugees from Soviet soldiers upon Japan's defeat in the Second World War. Memories of the past are interwoven with descriptions of the narrator's current life, such that the past becomes oddly present, the present strangely absent, and time itself takes on a dreamlike quality, as if resistant to the temporal demarcations of clocks and calendars.
Both the narrator and his mother have grievances surrounding the death of the narrator's father, who died after three days of vomiting blood due to what a doctor had diagnosed as gastric ulcer from combat fatigue complicated by alcoholism. The mother grieves because she is unable, despite years of dogged effort, to obtain a Bereaved Families Pension, owing to the fact that the father died under circumstances that could not be documented and no death certificate had been issued. She relates in her letters the hardships faced by herself and her seven children upon being "repatriated" to defeated Japan with little more than the clothes on their backs, all of their possessions having been requisitioned. For this reason, she feels her husband died a most "selfish" death. Upon seeing her now adult son-- in the recent past of the narrative-- drunk and vomiting blood in the kitchen sink, she admonishes, "If you don't stop your irresponsible behavior, you'll wind up just like your father."[24]
The narrator's attitude towards his father is more ambivalent. This is because the father had been far to the south of Korea at war's end. Risking his life to collect his family he headed north, across what shortly after defeat became a closed-off border (later to become the "thirty-eighth parallel"). Arriving back at Wonsan, the father ushered them on a journey southward, in an attempt to evade marauding Soviet troops. One of the mother's letters, recalled by the protagonist as having been read by him in the narratival recent past, recounts a harrowing run-in with Soviet soldiers in which they had attempted to abduct several of the women in the party. Finally, the family finds refuge in a Korean acquaintance's farmhouse, where they spend a good deal of time, until the father dies and the family is shipped off to Japan.
Yet, the undocumented nature of the father's death bothers the narrator as well, to the extent that he searches for documentation of his father's military career, consulting various military histories. In one, he finds a vivid description of the lawless situation that prevailed in northern Korea and its attendant hardships immediately following the war, but documentation of his father's existence as a soldier is nowhere to be found, and, as such, the man cuts a palimpsestic figure in even the letters written years later by the narrator's mother, in which she can recall only the names of places to which the father was posted and the set phrases with which he wrote to her. She remembers a sole exception to these stark messages. It was the time he had added to an otherwise hastily-written postcard, "This evening a clear, mid-autumn moon" (Gotô, 1967:156).
Unable to gain material compensation for the father's having served in the military and died in uniform due to an absence of official documentation, unable to access even his grave-- in what had by now become North Korea-- the narrator/protagonist is preoccupied with thoughts of his father for having died a death that renders the father's life unrecuperatable in not only a material (monetary) sense, but also in an (officially) historical sense. And so, deprived of an official eulogy comfortingly "aristotelian" in its depictions of his father's life and death, and hence unable either to properly mourn or to forget him, the narrator is constantly brought back to ever-fading recollections of the man. These constitute a palpable absence that bleeds into the narrator's present life, so distant in time and space from his own childhood.
This bleeding of the past into the present is nowhere more apparent than in the juxtapositioning of two versions of a single chronotope, which I call the chronotope of the toilet. Both versions of the toilet chronotope merit citing at length. The first version is set in the toilet of the danchi where the narrator now lives, and appears near the beginning of the story. This scene is as follows:
I slid open the fusuma, and entered the toilet with its blue-vinyl cover. Usually, I would spread open the morning edition. But, because today I had entered without it, being unable to do anything besides sit down, if I extended my right hand, from the lowest shelf of a set of three built into the wall, I could reach out and take the tabloid danchi newspaper that every morning was delivered free of charge. Often I would glance over the the folded section, and in the "contacts column" section, my eye would fall upon an article such as the following:
"Lost dog. Wire terrier. Brown, black, white. Collar green. Ears hang down, body length approx. 40 cm, height, 30 cm. Persons with information, please call the number noted at left. 000-0000 (name)"
"TV, stereo, electrical appliances. Preparing for business trip. Everything cheap. XX danchi, X number (name)"
"Organ, piano, individual guidance. Beginners 2000 yen. Ondai piano graduate. YY Danchi, Y number (name)"
In addition, there were those looking for part-time work, for individual guidance in tea ceremony and flower arranging; there were ads for baby carriages, sewing machines, and for knitting machines to be had cheaply. All took the form of three-line advertisements. I would untiringly run my eyes over them. The three levels of shelves had been made up by my wife, and they were quite convenient. On the lowest shelf were the danchi newspaper, as well as weekly and monthly magazines. On the middle shelf were toilet paper and cleansers for the bathroom fixtures. And on the top shelf were vinyl covers for the horseshoe-shaped, Western-style toilet and other things which had been placed there. My wife, moreover had made up one more small triangular shelf, under a flower vase in the left corner of the wall, in front of me, upon which an ashtray had been placed. Because my wife did not smoke, that had been made for me alone, but, because I had come in here today without a cigarette, there was nothing for me to do but gaze absently at the yellow flowers in the vase right in front of me, or else at the two pictures which had been pinned, for Yasuo's sake, to the wall directly in front of me.
Although I say pictures, they were two large picture postcards, appearing as though they might be supplements to something. But one showed a boy of three or four years washing his hands before having a snack. The other was of a boy who, just like Yasuo, was being scolded by his mother for having wet the bed. Although I say he was being scolded, in the case of this picture, he was not being beaten on the bottom, but, was sitting seiza on a futon on which there was a stain resembling world maps of childhood, while a still-young looking mother did the scolding. In spite of the fact that it was just a simple line drawing in black on white paper conveying no detailed expression, the boy, with his downcast eyes and big head, was ineffably sad. Of course, because Yasuo too was already using this toilet, I felt I'd like to inquire just what it was, exactly, that she had in mind, and, while I was at it, I could explain to her the fact of the identical nature of the interiors of all the toilets of the six-thousand units comprising this danchi. To the north of where one would sit like this on the toilet and against the wall passed an iron pipe painted with green enamel and roughly ten centimeters in diameter. Because it was used for the disposal of sewage from each toilet of this four-story structure, if for some reason it were to burst it would probably be harder to deal with than destruction wrought by a fire (Gotô, 153-154).
The second version of the chronotope is set behind a farmhouse in northern Korea at war's end:
The laboring season ended, and, tired out and curled up sleeping as we were in the two-room ondoru-- itself roughly the size of six mats-- naturally our bodies were attacked by countless lice, and so it seemed as if we spent most of our waking hours crushing them. Inseparable from the lice in the life in that Korean ondoru was the chamber pot.
The trunk was the longest part, while the mouth and the bottom were a little narrow, and this chamber pot, of a condition just right for one to sit his buttocks on, seems usually to have had an inner [lining] made of brass? By November, and at night and on days the weather was bad, regardless of [how many people there were] it was used even by those who were not sick, and it so was customary to put the chamber pot inside, placing it in a corner of the room. In the mornings, the women were employed in washing the daily-used pot in the flow of a nearby river, scouring it out with straw. However, North Korean rivers, whether large or small, would freeze by December and so I can't remember what they did then. In the case of a big river with a name like XX kô （XX江）、they could not have done anything unless they struck apart the ice with something. In any case, I never saw what they did. What with my father's hating to use the chamber pot, and my mother's refusing to, and, furthermore, on account of the lice infestation, we did not use the chamber pot. There was nothing for it but to cross the log bridge and go into the corner of the cow shed, in the corner of the pigsty, even at night, in a shivering crouch. While spitting black blood from his nose and mouth, and two or three days before his death, my father stood up at the edge of this log bridge and, grasping my shoulder, peering between the logs as if his breath would stop, shone that old, four-cornered electric torch between them. At that time my father had muttered to himself as if he were alone, "Well, now, I wonder how hard it is?" (160-161).
The refrain, "Well, now, I wonder how hard it is" (referring to the condition of the man's stool), echoes across time and space such that the first version of the toilet chronotope is viscerally linked through the body-- because the narrator/protagonist too had used the stream as a toilet--to the latter. In the toilet scene in the narrrator's danchi, having done his business, the narrator peers in the toilet at the results. Recalling his father's "Well, now, I wonder how hard it is" sets in motion what can only be called--if parodically-- a Proustian chain of associations. So deliberate is the juxtapositioning of these two very different versions of the same chronotope that, at one point, Gotô delineates them with cartesian simplicity, as if they charted out the trajectory of his own life: "The distance between that corner of the cow shed, reached on crossing those two logs, and the white, horseshoe-shaped, Western-style toilet bowl, corresponded to the letter the spatial distance of crossing the sea, and, if we take this to be the X axis, the Y axis would be the temporal [dimension] of my having gone from thirteen years of age to thirty-five" (161).
Although Gotô's juxtapositioning of the two scenes is reductive of his personal history to the point of comedy, because each chronotope has been mediated by his own body, the chronotope of the toilet in this story is rendered dialectical . Inasmuch as using the toilet is both a taken-for-granted everyday activity and-- owing to the changing nature of the act and its attendant practices and associated paraphrenalia over time-- an eminently historical act, then representations of this most mundane of activities can be seen as ideologically-charged. This is because, described as "an optic for reading texts as x-rays of the forces at work in the culture system from which they spring", the chronotope-- a slice of represented space-time-- is metonymical of a given socio-historical milieu.[25] For this reason, the chronotope rendered dialectical can perform a critical intervention.
The nature of such an intervention in the case of "Mumei chu^i no musuko" is the writing of what Foucault calls an "effective history." "History becomes "effective'," says Foucault, "to the degree that it introduces discontinuity into our very being--as it divides our emotions, dramatizes our instincts, multiplies our body and sets it against itself." [26] Because the body "is the inscribed surface of events? everything that touches it: diet, climate soil--[being] the domain of [geneology]," he maintains that the body itself is central to the production of an effective history, for it is in the body that these elements may encounter each other insurmountably (Foucault, 147-148). The writing of "effective history," then, is the undertaking of a geneology, the tracking of a descent from the past to the present. The purpose of such an endeavor, says Foucault, is not to map the destiny of a people, but "to identify the accidents, the minute deviations--or conversely, the complete reversals--the errors, the false appraisals, and the faulty calculations that gave birth to those things that continue to exist and have value for us; it is to discover that truth or being do not lie at the root of what we know and what we are, but the exteriority of accidents" (Foucault, 146. My emphasis).
Certainly, the toilet chronotope in its rural Korean guise elicits the reproduction of "othering" intrinsic to colonialism, as evinced in the Japanese family's refusal to use the chamber pot. Also of significance however is the amount of ink devoted to descriptions of cleaning that toilet. While representative of gender-biased divisions of labor, it nonetheless also effects a verbal snapshot of an instance of communality intrinsic to the narrator's memories of days at the farmhouse. As such, the descriptions of the toilet resonate with the immediately-preceding passage. In that passage, the narrator recalls his thirteen year-old self, his older brother and his father all having gone out every day to the fields to help with the harvesting. His whole family with him involved in various aspects of the final two weeks of the harvest, the narrator feels as there had "truly been a bright, healthy feeling every day" (jitsu ni akaruku kenkôna mainichi de atta yô na ki ga suru) (159a). What is described, in other words, is an everyday life that, however fleeting, was not "opaque" because it was experienced in its totality: one harvested what had been sown, it was a communal act, and, afterwards, one partook of the fruits of one's labors with one's fellows. The nature of the social relations involved were, in other words, immediately comprehensible to all the participants. The narrator says of such times, "[W]hen the tray was carried into us on a day we had worked in the fields, I remember having felt quite strongly that I was a man. It was strange that I should have felt that now, even more than when I had received military training in junior high school, or when, performing labor [for the war effort] I had dug for pine roots" (160). This feeling of "being a man", while of course always already ideological, nonetheless strikes the narrator with greater force because of the experiential totality in which he labors: he sees the fruit of his labor, he partakes of it, and he shares them with the community. In laboring side-by-side with the former colonials, the narrator feels as if he is coming into his own.
Implicitly counterposed to this scene of communality is one of utter alienation. This is when (in the narratival space-time of danchi life) the narrator's wife, having gone into the hospital for six days due to premature bleeding in her pregnancy (brought about by walking up and down the concrete stairs of the danchi), leaves the son, Yasuo, in the care of the narrator. Yasuo tends to get up around 5:00 am, but the narrator, having become insomniacal over the psychosomatic symptoms stemming from concerns over venereal disease, which he thinks he may have caught from a prostitute, winds up drinking all night. He says,
When I think about it, I realize that around then my nerves might have been rather shot. Along with the lighting of the gas, the working of the electric washing machine, the drainage of water, although I'd been taught those things when my wife entered the hospital, I felt I couldn't so much as use the sink. Morning, noon, night; morning, noon, night, feeding Yasuo, and I too had to eat something. And then, after eating, no matter what, I had to clean up the mess. After cleaning up, I then had to think of what it was I had to do next. Inasmuch as I was thinking like that, I got so I came to embrace the foolish issue of Do I clean up after I eat, or do I eat after I clean up, and, at last, when that problem began to pressure me--something I did during the afternoon as a matter of course--after Yasuo had fallen asleep, I'd fall asleep on the sofa in the TV room, at which point, as if I'd forgotten something, begin to get irritated. And then, just as if I were Gregor Samsa turned into a cockroach, I would walk around the dining kitchen, and it seemed as if I couldn't attain peace of mind unless I drank my whiskey squatting in front of the stainless kitchen sink. (175b)
Certainly, the narrator's very ineptitude as a surrogate mother for Yasuo can be said to confirm his status as a salaryman of Japan's high-growth period. But the interest of the passage to me lies in its implicit contrast to the "bright, healthy feeling" that the narrator attributes to everyday of the Korean farmhouse life in his memory. The passage calls to mind the scene in "Modern Times" where Charlie Chaplain has to but cannot keep up with the simplest of tasks, as a conveyor belt from some other, unknown part of the factory rumbles past him to another, unknown part of the factory. For the narrator in this scene is leading the same kind of alienated existence, utterly blind to the "totality" of his everyday not only to the extent that he ceases to know whether he cleans up to eat, or eats to clean up, but that he never stops to wonder whether this is really the question he ought to be asking about his situation.
The narrator's situation--that of an "ahistorical body" inhabiting the endless everydayness of a Japan now conceived of as "contemporary"--is metonymically represented by the toilet chronotope in its present-day danchi guise: The "western-style-horseshoe-shaped" toilet bowl with its blue vinyl cover, replacements for which are on one of the shelves enacts the imperatives of hygiene intrinsic to the maintenance of healthy, efficiently-performing bodies necessary to Japan's high-speed economic development and constitutive of its ahistorical, postwar kokutai. That the housewife is a principle reproducer of such an ideology is represented in the narrator's discussion of how the bathroom's organization--down to the anti-bedwetting and pro-handwashing propoganda for the next generation on the wall--is her doing. As far as representations of "community" are concerned, there is only the imagined community of the danchi newspaper read by the narrator, and the rather more real, if less "social", connection to the neighbors through the tube of sewage that passes behind his back.
Maeda Ai writes that, whereas, prior to the development of the so-called "3-DK", the first room one would enter in a Japanese house would be the chanoma or the "tea room". Rooms such as the kitchen and the toilet would be at the back of the house, out of sight to guests. With the advent of danchi, however, the design changed such that, concommitant with the ethos of efficiency, on entering the danchi, one found oneself immediately in the "sanitary space", comprised of the dining-kitchen area, bath and toilet. The upshot of this was that domiciles had come to resemble nothing so much as giant alimentary canals, with lumens on either end, for intake and elimination (Maeda, 470-471). In this respect, perhaps the most intriguing item in the toilet of Gotô's represented danchi is the flower vase affixed to the wall. It betrays a recognition on some level that even this space had to be aestheticized in some sense so as not to appear too unabashedly functional, lest it betray the entire nature of the danchi in this most efficient of ages, and, by extension, the nature of the everyday lives lived by its inhabitants, pared down to bare essentials for the sake of that protracted state of national emergency, Japan's "economic miracle".[27]
The critic Kawamura Jiro says of Gotô that his fiction "captures one tiny situation, examines it minutely, and takes in the form covering the totality of the plane that, in the manner of a mysterious dream, spreads outward from that examination" (Kawamura Jiro, cited in Maeda, 466). Certainly that is the case with "Mumei chu^i no musuko." One has only to consider the detail with which the most mundane aspects of everyday life are shown to inhere in human actions as constitutive of the real of human history. Exemplifying this are representations of the physiological aspects of the chararacters' lives. They are represented largely in terms of the fluids that flow from their bodies and into the world: the semen of the narrator/protagonist, as well as his feces and that of his father, the premature bleeding of the narrator/protagonist's wife, the urine of the son Yasuo. All of these bodily effluvia, the results, variously, of sexual desire or of eating and drinking, are the traces of the bodies that live in this autobiographial narrative. Such traces however are central to the writing of an effective history. As Foucault says,
Finally, descent attaches itself to the body. It inscribes itself in the nervous system, in temperament, in the digestive apparatus; it appears in faulty respiration, in improper diets, in the debilitated and prostate body of those whose ancestors committed errors. Fathers have only to mistake effects for causes, believe in the reality of an "afterlife', or maintain the value of eternal truths, and the bodies of their children will suffer. Cowardice and hypocrisy, for their part, are the simple offshoots of error? because the body maintains, in life as in death, through its strength or weakness, the sanction of every truth and error, as it sustains, in an inverse manner, the origin--descent (Foucault, 147).
Gotô's bridging of time and space through his use of the chronotope of the toilet, moreover, traces the arc of a life that has spanned a history--from an uncomprehending colonial childhood to a prosperous yet alienated adulthood-- which has been narrated as discontinuous. Through practices of the human body, at once timeless yet (because of hygienic practices that change over time) historical too, Gotô's toilet chronotope elicits a wider sense of Japan's own historical trajectory, perhaps to the extent that the narratival present, troped as "miraculous," cannot but feel out of place. Inasmuch as it elicits such a sense, Gotô's story can be said to vindicate his status as one of the "introverted generation," in defense of which Karatani Kojin once wrote, "Perhaps the road to the interior is the road to the exterior."[28]
[1] Gotô Meisei, "Mumei chu^i no musuko", Bungakukai, September, 1967. 161. All translations are my own.
[2] William W. Kelly, "Finding a Place in Metropolitan Japan: Ideologies, Institutions, and Everyday Life", in Andrew Gordon, ed. Postwar Japan as History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993). 197.
[3] Isogai Jiro, Sengo nihonbungaku no naka no chôsen kankoku (Tokyo: Daiwa shobô, 1992) 130-31.
[4] Gotô Meisei, "'Mumeishi no hanashi'--Kakarenai hôkoku kôki", in En to daen no sekai (Tokyo: Kawaide shobôsha, 1972) 150.
[5] Gotô Meisei, "Kaku toshite no danchi", in Gotô Meisei, En to daen no sekai. 215.
[6] Gotô Meisei, "'Mumeishi' no ronri", in En to daen no sekai, 12-14.
[7] Henri Lefebvre, cited in Rob Shields, Lefebvre, Love & Struggle: Spatial Dialectics (New York: Routledge, 1999) 77.
[8] Odagiri Hideo, Manshu^ jihen kara yonju^ nen no bungaku no mondai, Tokyo shinbun, March 23, 1971. Odagiri couched his polemic in terms of a recent tendency he noted for people to note that it was "already forty years since the Manchurian Incident." In arguing that they ought to be lamenting that it was still "only forty years since the Manchurian Incident", he was taking newly-emergent writers to task for failing to face up to the fact of Japan's as-yet officially unacknowledged role of aggressor in the Second World War. (Odagiri's emphasis)
[9] Gotô Meisei, Bekku Minoru (taidan), "Nani ga okashii no?", in Gendai Shisô, Vol. 12, no. 2, 1984. 210.
[10] In addition to "Mumei chu^i no musuko", these include "Dare?" (Who?), and "Kakarenai hôkoku" (The unwriteable report).
[11] Yasukuni Igarashi, Bodies of Memory: Narratives of War in Postwar Japanese Culture, 1945-1970. (Princeton: Princeton UP, 2000) 13.
[12] As Igarashi says, "The demonstration of the unprecedented power of the nuclear weapons detonated in Hiroshima and Nagasaki provided the impetus for the United States and Japan to reconfigure their collective memories. At the end of the war, the United States and Japan cast themselves in a melodrama, so to speak, that culminated in the demonstration of the atomic bomb's unprecedented power. Through the bomb, the United States, gendered as male, rescued and converted Japan, figured as a desparate woman. Hirohito's so-called divine decision to end the war participated in this drama by accepting the superior power of the United States. Despite its hyperbole, this popular narrative was effective in defining the two countries' perception [sic] of the war and how it ended" (Igarashi, 20).
[13] If unclean, unfit or sick bodies had come to be equated under the Japanese militarists with a lack of "purity" or patriotic zeal, under the postwar American Occupation, such bodies were seen as a threat to the democratization process (Igarashi, 65). Accordingly, GHQ instituted nationwide innoculation programs against various diseases such typhus and smallpox, as well as providing massive influxes of basic foods such as flour, soy beans and dry milk. Much of the population was also systematically dusted with DDT to stop the spread of insect-borne infectious disease. This was a practice that began before the Occupation itself. Igarashi relates how, twenty-four hours prior to landing at Yokosuka, the occupation forces sprayed DDT in the area from the air (Igarashi, 67). In addition to greatly allaying the spread of disease, such measures demonstrated the then vast material superiority of the US over Japan, inculcating in many Japanese a desire to emulate the US (Igarashi, 69). Igarashi argues that in the minds of many, this material superiority was deemed a product of the firm scientific grounding of American hygienic practices. From this observation, it was an easy jump to the conclusion that America had won the war "inevitably"; that is, not due to any inherent superiority on its part, but merely because of the superior state of its science. Defeat having been regarded as an inevitability enabled many Japanese to "sanitize their memories as well" (Igarashi, 71).
[14] Edward Seidensticker, Tokyo Rising: The City Since the Great Earthquake (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1990) 230-232.
[15] See, for example, Botond Bognar, ed., World Cities: Tokyo (London: Academy Editions, 1997) 50-51.
[16] Louise Gardner, Art Through the Ages, seventh edition (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovitch, Inc., 1980) 850-855.
[17] Maeda notes that the growth of danchi (or "new towns") both stimulated the growth of the nuclear family, and was in turn stimulated by that growth. For this reason, dramatic rates in the increase of danchi were accompanied by equally striking figures for the "nuclearization" of the family, up from 51.7% of families nationwide in 1960, to 58.9% by 1970. The upshot of such mutually-reinforcing trends was, says Maeda, the phenomenon of "individual lifestyle-ism" (shiseikatsu shugi). Maeda Ai, Toshi ku^kan no naka no bungaku (Tokyo: Chikuma shôbô, 1983) 467.
[18] Akiyama Shun, "Nichijôteki genjitsu to bungaku no tenkai: 1961-1977", in Matsumoto Shinichi, Isoda Koichi, Akiyama Shun, eds., Sengo nihon bungaku shi/nenpyô (Tokyo: Kodansha, 1979) 355.[19] See Harry Harootunian, History's Disquiet: Modernity, Cultural Practice and the Question of Everyday Life (New York: Columbia UP, 2000) and his Overcome By Modernity: History, Culture and Community in Interwar Japan (Princeton: Princeton UP, 2000).
[20] Harootunian, History's Disquiet, 70.
[21] Akiyama Shun, "Nichijôsei to hannichijôsei", in Kokubungaku: kaishaku to kanshô, 1973, no. 11, p. 34.
[22] Akiyama Shun, "Nichijôteki genjitsu to bungaku no tenkai, 1956-77". 319.
[23] Tada Michitarô, "The Glory and Misery of "My Home,'" in J. Victor Koschmann, ed., Authority and the Individual in Japan: Citizen Protest in Historical Perspective (Tokyo: University of Tokyo Press, 1978) 210.
[24] Gotô Meisei, "Mumei chu^i no musuko", 178.
[25] M.M. Bakhtin, "Forms of Time and Chronotope in the Novel: Notes Towards a Historical Poetics," in The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2002) 425-6. Propounded by Bakhtin as "a formally constitutive category of literature" that has been used to "define genre and generic distinctions," the artistic chronotope is regarded by hiim as the central underpinning of coherence in the novel (Bakhtin, 84-5). Bakhtin writes of the chronotope: "In a literary artistic chronotope, spatial and temporal indicators are fused into one carefully thought-out, concrete whole. Time, as it were, thickens, takes on flesh, becomes artistically visible; likewise, space becomes charged and responsive to the movements of time, plot and history" (Bakhtin, 84).
[26] Michel Foucault, "Nietzsche, Geneology, History", in Bouchard, Donald F., ed., Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews by Michel Foucault, trans. Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1992) 154.
[27] Igarashi notes that Eto Jun, commenting upon all the construction going on in Tokyo in preparation for the 1964 Tokyo Olympics, said, "Seing the construction for the Olympics going on day and night, I felt the Japanese were fighting a war" (Eto Jun, in Igarashi, 144). Igarashi continues, "Almost everybody must have instictively known that this "war' was worth the sacrifice" (144). Of course, the implications are that, despite the LDP-dominated government's self-avowed commitment to maintain Japan's status as a "peace state" in the postwar period, mobilization of the population for high-speed economic growth was little different from mobilization for total war.
[28] Karatani Kôjin, "Naimen e no michi to gaimen e no michi", Tokyo Shinbun, April 9, 1971.