Beyond the Metropolis. Louise Young
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In the pages of a Kyoto newspaper, one of them “discovered” Shimada.
The publication of the first installment of The Earth in the prestigious Shinchōsha series transported Shimada into the spotlight of the literary world in the capital. The book was a fictionalized account of Shimada’s life, depicting the story of a young man from an impoverished background who emerged from adversity to embrace the mission of social justice and the ambition of becoming a political leader. The book was animated by humanist sympathies for the poor and their suffering and utopian visions of a new, just society. In 1919, this message resonated with the surging optimism of the Taishō democracy movement and the spirit of reform that galvanized the universities and the higher schools, accounting, in part, for its astonishing critical success. At the same time. Satō had been working assiduously to guarantee a positive response to his literary discovery. Shinchōsha promoted the book heavily in the company’s magazine advertisements and through Satō’s network of contacts in Tokyo. These efforts bore fruit when The Earth met with universal acclaim among the bundan. Critic Ikuta Chōkō wrote a glowing review in the Yomiuri; socialist Sakai Toshihiko commended it with equal force in the Jiji shinpō; writers Hasegawa Nyozekan and Tokutomi Sōhō showered it with praise. Rave reviews continued as subsequent installments of The Earth were published. A flood of solicitations poured in and Shimada embarked on a frenzy of literary productivity. He was deluged with fan mail. All doors were suddenly opened to him within the hallowed, exclusive world of the Tokyo bundan. Not only was he anointed to this privileged fraternity; he became a literary star.45
But for Shimada, this was a poisoned chalice. At the vulnerable age of twenty-one, he was suddenly elevated to fame and the full glare of public attention. A young man of reportedly fragile ego, he felt shamed by his family background and his reliance on an uncle’s charity for secondary-school fees. His father died young, leaving his mother to fend for herself by working in Kanazawa’s red light district. Shimada had difficulty socializing with fellow students of more secure social status and developed an arrogant manner as a defense against his sense of inadequacy. When thrust into the metropolitan spotlight, he began to entertain delusions of grandeur. One day he walked into Satō’s office and announced to the flabbergasted president of Shinchōsha that the reason The Earth was selling so well was because of a plot by the Seiyūkai political party. As Shimada explained it, he and the party leader, Hara Takashi, were the two best-known people in Japan at the time, and the Seiyūkai feared that Shimada’s fame would eclipse Hara. To forestall this they were buying up all the copies of The Earth themselves.46 Shimada published an essay in a Kanazawa literary magazine titled “To the Young Men in My Old Hometown,” announcing that he had become a literary messiah.
To the young men born in the snow and storms of the North Country
I grant my blessing to the future that opens up before you.
My courage, struggle, and accomplishment
Opens a path for all the young men that come after me.
Like Moses I stand at the head of all the masses.47
Though his stardom had opened up romantic possibilities, even bringing fan letters inviting marriage, Shimada’s strange behavior began to drive women away and led to a succession of broken engagements.
Repelled by rumors of Shimada’s increasingly bizarre behavior, the bundan closed ranks against him. Solicitations for his work dried up; his money ran out; he began to spiral downward. After an incident at a lodging house, he was arrested for disturbing the peace. The police gave Shimada a psychological evaluation and diagnosed him with schizophrenia. He was locked up in a mental institution where he remained for ten years, until his death in 1930. During this decade of incarceration, his condition reportedly improved enough that he began to write again, but none of his erstwhile friends from the bundan tried to help free him. At one point a Kanazawa newspaper, the Hokkoku shinbun, ran a campaign to push for Shimada’s release, but nothing came of it. Even as he languished in the mental ward, episodes from his final days of liberty found their way into print in a story of his broken engagement and emotional deterioration written by Tokuda Shūsei, fellow writer from Kanazawa and sometime friend.48 Shimada the man might be dead to the world, but Tokyo literati continued to pick over the remains of his literary legend.
Who killed Shimada Seijirō? Is his merely the story of an unsophisticated country boy blinded by the glare of the big city? Certainly the stresses of literary stardom did not create Shimada’s insecurities; his mental breakdown was brought on in part by his own psychological frailty. But Shimada also fell victim to the cruelty and capriciousness of the metropolitan cultural marketplace. The competitive pressures of the publishing industry left little room to consider the effects of instant stardom on his emotional stability. Once he had lost his cache as a literary commodity, the Tokyo bundan simply disposed of Shimada and moved on. Satō Giryū exploited the vulnerable Shimada in a publishing stunt to enact a mythic tale of the Tokyo literati’s “discovery” of a rustic genius and his “rescue” from provincial obscurity. As this story played out, The Earth became elevated from an unknown work of fiction to great literature and Shimada from a provincial writer to a literary star through the mediation and largess of the Tokyo bundan. Shimada’s (or rather Satō’s) spectacular success was due in no small measure to the intoxicating appeal of this jōkyō fantasy. Reaffirming the basic tenets of Tokyo-centrism—the idea that Tokyo could fashion literary greatness from the rough clay of Shimada’s rusticity, that only a metropolitan mind was capable of judging value in a provincial writer—the Shimada story offered comforting validation of the cultural privileges accruing to the Tokyo literati. At a time when so-called pure literature was expanding into a mass market, and when Tokyo’s dominance of that market concentrated enormous power in the hands of a few men in the capital, the Shimada story also vindicated Tokyo’s dominance of the cultural marketplace. Whatever this meant for the real Shimada was irrelevant to the success of the myth that was widely embraced by Japanese intellectuals, whether they enjoyed the privileges of Tokyo-centrism or simply lusted after them.
THE REGIONAL PRESS AND LOCAL DIFFERENCE
In provincial cities the formation of intellectual communities, the pursuit of scientific and historical research, the growth of new musical traditions and literary movements, and other forms of knowledge production all took place within a cultural geography that privileged the center in both material and ideological terms. The local literati were acutely conscious that they were positioned in a cultural hinterland; they willingly deferred to the presumed superiority of ideas brought in from the capital. Yet while they acknowledged secondary status through their eager absorption of the latest fashion from Tokyo, they also poured energy into a rich variety of local cultural movements. These aimed not simply to ape metropolitan culture but also to build on local traditions to create distinct and original modernist forms.
As in Tokyo, the print media and institutions of higher education were key agents of modernist cultural movements in the provinces. While the schools and the publishing industry served as instruments of Tokyo-centrism—promoting the power and centrality of the metropolis—they also helped to generate dynamic regional cultures, local innovation, and local autonomy. In this sense, the material and ideological impact of the movements channeled through their networks was felt differently in the localities than in the capital. Although cities such as Kanazawa were subject to the self-marginalizing impulses of the ideology of the metropolis, cultural geography and spatial separation also opened up the possibility for a critical perspective on Tokyo-centrism.
The regional press stood at the heart of this process, providing a central exchange for the networks of local literati and their cultural movements. Like higher schools, newspapers served as a conduit for the import of new ideas and practices from abroad and occupied a central place in the processes of cultural transformation in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.49 From its foundation as a political press in the 1860s and 1870s, the newspaper was an instrument of national integration and centralization. But also like the school system, it became an anchor of local culture and an institutional meeting ground for the provincial literati. In this sense the press effected cultural change at two levels, both local and national.