Playing in the Shadows: Fictions of Race and Blackness in Postwar Japanese Literature

Bridges, William H.

doi:doi:10.3998/mpub.11301772

Will Bridges

2020

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Playing in the Shadows considers the literature engendered by postwar Japanese authors' robust cultural exchanges with African Americans and African American literature. The Allied Occupation brought an influx of African American soldiers and culture to Japan, which catalyzed the writing of black characters into postwar Japanese literature. This same influx fostered the creation of organizations such as the Kokujin kenkyū no kai (The Japanese Association for Negro Studies) and literary endeavors such as the Kokujin bungaku zenshū (The Complete Anthology of Black Literature). This rich milieu sparked Japanese authors'—Nakagami Kenji and Ōe Kenzaburō are two notable examples—interest in reading, interpreting, critiquing, and, ultimately, incorporating the tropes and techniques of African American literature and jazz performance into their own literary works. Such incorporation leads to literary works that are "black" not by virtue of their representations of black characters, but due to their investment in the possibility of technically and intertextually black Japanese literature. Will Bridges argues that these "fictions of race" provide visions of the way that postwar Japanese authors reimagine the ascription of race to bodies—be they bodies of literature, the body politic, or the human body itself.

Series

Michigan Monograph Series in Japanese Studies

ISBN(s)

978-0-472-12652-1 (ebook)
978-0-472-05442-8 (paper)
978-0-472-07442-6 (hardcover)

Subject

Citable Link

A photograph of Ōe Kenzaburō circa 1964, when he was writing A Personal Matter, holding a copy of Stanford’s General Map of Africa. Note Ōe’s skewed gaze: Ōe asks readers to make eye contact with the cartography of Africa rather than the Japanese author who holds the map. Republished with permission from Shinchōsha.

Oe Kenzaburo with Map of Africa

From Chapter 2

Figure 1. Ōe Kenzaburō circa 1964, when he was writing A Personal Matter, holding a copy of Stanford’s General Map of Africa. Note Ōe’s skewed gaze, which asks readers to make eye contact with the cartography of Africa rather than the Japanese author who holds the map. (Reprinted with permission from Shinchōsha.)

An advertisement from the October 1, 1977 evening edition of the Asahi Shimbun for the Japanese television premier of Roots. Above the English title of “Roots,” the advertisement frames the story as “a message of the spirit for all mankind,” or, as the superimposition of Japanese over the English title suggests, a message of the spirit for all the kinds of men.

Asahi Newspaper Advertisement of Roots

From Chapter 3

Figure 2. Advertisement in the 1 October 1977 evening edition of the Asahi Shimbun for the Japanese television premier of Roots. Above the English title, the story is framed as “a message of the spirit for all mankind” or, as the superimposed Japanese over the English title suggests, a message of the spirit for men of all kinds.

A photograph of Nakagami Kenji with Bob Marley

Nakagami Kenji and Bob Marley

From Chapter 3

Figure 3. Nakagami Kenji with Bob Marley

The cover of the September 1967 issue of Ebony magazine, which features eight photographs of black Japanese “war babies” entering young adulthood in the long 1970s. They are, in the words of Ebony, “Japan’s Rejected: Teen-age war babies [who] face bleak future

Cover of September 1967 Ebony

From Chapter 4

Figure 4. The cover of the September 1967 issue of Ebony magazine, which features eight photographs of black Japanese “war babies” entering young adulthood in the long 1970s. They are, in the words of Ebony, “Japan’s Rejected: Teen-age war babies [who] face [a] bleak future.”