Beyond the Metropolis. Louise Young
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within distinctive political-economies and social-cultural contexts, which created their own particular set of constraints and possibilities.
The story of variations in the provincial press is important because the newspaper provided a critical institutional foundation for local cultural movements in the early twentieth century. Since Japanese newspapers published both news and literature, people bought papers to read the so-called hard coverage of political affairs as well as the “soft” columns of poetry and serialized novels. Although the intimate connection between the newspaper and the arts was deeply rooted in the broader history of Japanese publishing, the competitive challenges encountered by the local press fortified this connection. Economic self-interest and the quest for survival in the face of competition with metropolitan papers required local papers to carve out and protect a relatively autonomous sphere of local culture, for this was the one place where the papers from the center could not compete. Provincial newspapers provided access to an audience for locally produced knowledge and culture, a market for cultural production that sustained a large cadre of intellectual workers and artists in provincial cities. Thus the regional press became a critical space for the incubation of the local literati. Its organizational structures and social networks lent the provincial bundan social cohesion and provided a forum for the creation of a distinctive esprit de corps.
THE PROVINCIAL LITERATI
Newspapers occupied a central position in the culture-space of the provincial city. They brought writers together and offered a place to make connections and contacts. They encouraged the arts through literary pages, poetry columns, and various competitions and awards. They gave financial support, publication opportunities, and prestige to aspiring writers. In all these ways, newspaper companies were critical to the formation of intellectual community in provincial cities. Moreover, local newspapers were a focal point of cultural innovation in their communities. The press stimulated the transformation of literature and influenced modern literary form through the standards they set in poetry competitions, the privileging of certain literary schools, and the common feature of the serialized novel. And like institutions of higher education, newspapers served as conduits for the import of new ideas and practices from abroad: both occupied a central place in the processes of cultural transformation in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Through their literary pages, local newspapers and magazines served as forums to bring together local with metropolitan literary trends. As part of their marketing strategy, local newspapers published serial novels by writers with both local and national reputations. In the 1880s and 1890s the Kanazawa press commissioned Tokyo writers such as Ishibashi Ningetsu to publish in their papers and brought back Izumi Kyōka and other local heroes. A list of serial novels published between 1900 and 1923 in the Hokkai taimusu featured writers Izumi Kyōka, Tokuda Shūsei, Ōguri Fūyō, and others from the Tokyo-based Ken’yūsha clique, as well as works by staff writers and submissions by other local authors.69 Though local residents invariably submitted the poetry published in the provincial press, Tokyo intellectuals were frequently employed to edit the poetry column, write critical reviews of the poems that were published, or act as judges for poetry competitions. The Sapporo poetry magazine Northern Star appointed Naitō Saiseki and three other establishment poets from Tokyo to judge their competitions. The main regional newspaper, the Hokkai taimusu, likewise brought judges from Tokyo to select poems.70 In this way local papers actively promoted the circulation of ideas between Tokyo and the provinces. The literary networks they helped to forge transcended the parochialism of the Tokyo bundan.
The literary initiatives of local newspapers also fostered the dynamic fusion of old and new cultural forms. In Niigata, one of the prefecture’s earliest and most successful newspapers helped reinvent the social practice of poetry writing. Established in 1877, the Niigata shinbun achieved a certain national prominence as a forum for political opinion by publishing a string of articles by influential party leaders such as Ozaki Yukio, who was invited to visit and write a piece for the paper.71 The Niigata shinbun also introduced a column to feature local poetry with critical commentary, using the poetry column to draw readership from the wealthy rentier class in a region known as the Kingdom of the Landlord. Throughout the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth, a handful of wealthy landowning families dominated the local political economy. This group composed a highly literate and cultured elite, which provided the core membership for the amateur poetry circles that flourished in the late Tokugawa period as a form of male sociality and connoisseurship. Much like groups of wealthy merchants and samurai in the castle towns of Okayama and Kanazawa, Niigata poetry circles would meet to write together and judge each other’s work; for these men, poetry signified a mark of status and an expression of erudition. Such poetry circles brought out the first coterie magazines in the Niigata region. Through its poetry columns, Niigata shinbun mobilized this cultural practice to draw an important social constituency into newspaper reading.72 In the process, the social and performative mode of writing associated with the traditional poetry circle was grafted onto the individualized, text-based mode of writing for the modern print media, creating a hybrid form that incorporated elements of the old and the new.
Like the press, institutions of higher education provided a forum for the local arts, nurturing talent and encouraging the spread of different art forms. Here, too, poetry circles and other literati practices of the late Tokugawa migrated into the higher schools, where they were adapted to become an integral component of the ethos of the new student elite. New poetry movements offered particular appeal in provincial higher schools, where they became a center of student social life and an instrument of male bonding. Accounts of literary youth at places such as Fourth Higher in Kanazawa capture the intoxicating discovery of poetry that many young men experienced during their time at school. For Kubokawa Tsurujirō, one of the talented coterie of young men that included Nakano Shigeharu, Moriyama Kei, and others, the encounter with poetry altered the course of his life. His story was typical of the ways in which participation in local arts shaped a sense of self for a generation of student elite.
Kubokawa was born in 1903 in a small village in Shizuoka, the son of a country doctor. Raised in a strict, old-fashioned household, the young Kubokawa was schooled in the Confucian classics and kept away from what his family regarded as the corrupting influence of boy’s popular magazines and newspapers. When Kubokawa was in his teens, tragedy struck the household, leaving both parents and an aunt and uncle dead. He was sent off to study at Fourth Higher by his adoptive family, with the understanding he would train to become a doctor. But during his years in Kanazawa, he sought solace for his grief in poetry and fell under the spell of literature. He joined the school’s tanka association (tanka is a classical Japanese verse form of thirty-one syllables), became friends with other literary youth, and spent all his time talking, thinking, writing, reading, and performing poetry. Eventually he made his mind up to abandon a medical career. Apologizing to his adoptive family, he quit school and headed off to Tokyo to pursue a literary calling.73 Like many students who became caught up in the literary movements at their schools, Kubokawa’s life was changed as a result of his encounter with the all-encompassing experience of poetry. Before it changed his future, poetry took over his life. Poetry engaged higher-school students so intensely because of the way it was practiced: it was not simply a text on paper but a rich and multifaceted cultural form and a lived experience. Through their introduction to new cultural forms such as this in higher school, elite youth like Kubokawa experienced a change in subjectivity: they now thought of themselves as part of that elite fraternity the bundan.
The poetry-writing practices fostered by higher schools found expression in an expansion of coterie magazines in provincial cities. Much as in the case of the metropolis, local magazines were striking both for their quantity and their ephemerality. And like dōjin zasshi in the capital, such journals were central to the coherence and identity of the local literati. They created a community of readers, writers, and critics and encouraged the self-referential character of the local bundan. The coterie magazines focused intellectual attention on the local literary scene and themselves defined local trends in high culture. Also like the coterie magazines in Tokyo, provincial literary journals fostered practices of mutual criticism that blurred the roles of writer and critic, an ambiguity characteristic of Japanese literary practice in this period. Because the higher-school experience and provincial magazines engaged literary youth at a critical juncture in their