Beyond the Metropolis. Louise Young
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went to Tokyo to pursue a military career but took up literature after meeting writers associated with the Ken’yūsha school (Friends of the Inkstone). He became a prominent member of this group, making a name as a pioneer of detective fiction and popular literature. Hyakken was the son of an Okayama sake brewer. He attended the city’s most prestigious middle and higher schools, where his encounter with Shida Sokin converted him to the literary life. After moving on to Tokyo Imperial University for German literature studies, where he worked with Natsume Sōseki, Hyakken became a professor at Hosei University in 1916, gaining a name for his surrealist fiction and humorous essays. The path trod by Tsubota Jōji, a prominent figure in the children’s literature movement, followed a similar course. Born to a manager of a weaving factory, Tsubota was educated locally, continuing on to Tokyo’s Waseda University, from which he graduated in 1915. During his time at Waseda he joined with Ogawa Mimei and others to study folk and fairy stories; later he became a main contributor to the emblematic children’s magazine of the 1920s, Akai Tori (Red Bird). Others, like the poets Kinoshita Rigen and Arimoto Hōsui, followed similar paths from Okayama to Tokyo.18
What stands out in these biographies is that fame and recognition was achieved in every case only after writers had made the journey to the capital. That entree into the Tokyo literati defined literary success was not simply the conceit of metropolitan intellectuals but was reinforced by attitudes in the localities. Okayama, like other provincial cities, tended to celebrate its native sons and daughters once the metropolis embraced them: with Tokyo’s stamp of approval, local talent became a source of local pride. This tendency became even more pronounced after World War Two, with the creation of shrines to locally born artists who had made their careers in Tokyo. The Yumeiji Takiji Museum (Okayama) and the Tsubota Jōji (Okayama) and Izumi Kyōka (Kanazawa) literary prizes all venerated men who abandoned their hometowns to make their fortunes in the capital.19 But the self-marginalizing impulse to echo the commendations of Tokyo emerged well before the end of the Second World War, evident in the travel promotions and city guides that constituted a growing literature of local boosterism in the twenties and thirties.
In the magazine Touring Kanazawa (Kankō Kanazawa), for example, an article titled “Kanazawa and the Literati” did not showcase the local arts and culture of a city that had prided itself on being the center of Hokuriku regional culture for centuries. Instead the essay focused on the famous writer Akutagawa Ryūnosuke, who made a couple of visits to the city in the midtwenties.20 The Hokkaido Yearbook of 1930 singled out the tenor Okuda Ryōzō to honor in its description of local arts and music. An entry titled “Hokkaido Natives Impart a Distinctive Flavor to the Musical World in the Center” boasted that “local art, born amid Hokkaido’s magnificent natural beauty, is gradually moving into the metropolis. . . . Hokkaido’s participation in the national music scene is a milestone of our progress: this inspires all Hokkaido natives and raises expectations for the future.” In a capsule summary of Okuda’s biography, the Yearbook traced the itinerary typical of the successful artist: early training in Sapporo, migration to Tokyo for formal music study, and the critical career launch made possible on the metropolitan stage, where Okuda “made a sensation.” Okuda returned several times to perform in Hokkaido, dusting his old hometown with a touch of metropolitan glitter.21
Entries on literature and the arts in later editions of the Hokkaido Yearbook institutionalized the practice of monumentalizing the talent of intellectuals who had risen to capital fame. The 1940 edition even noted distinguished writers such as Takebayashi Musōan, a Sapporo native who moved to Tokyo at the age of four, as well as Shimaki Kensaku and Morita Tama, part of a generation of Taishō writers who left Sapporo in their teens and never looked back. Sasaki Chiyuki, who moved to Tokyo at five, and Kubo Sakae who left for Tokyo after middle school, also made the grade. These artists and writers maintained family connections with Sapporo; they wrote about it in their novels and returned for occasional visits. Nonetheless, Tokyo became their adoptive home, and they were identified with their artistic success in the capital.22 Yet it was these Tokyo transplants whom provincial guidebooks chose to celebrate in their features on local literary stars, rather than the native talent that elected to stay put. Even though Sapporo possessed a vibrant literary, artistic, and musical scene, little of this found expression in places like the Hokkaido Yearbook. And while the proliferating local guidebooks of the twenties and thirties championed the autonomy and distinctiveness of local culture, by reserving special acclaim for artists with Tokyo pedigrees, provincial boosters were complicit in a process of self-marginalization that helped install the ideology of the metropolis.
ASCENDING TO TOKYO
The brain drain to Tokyo, channeled through the educational tracking system laid down in the Meiji reforms, became much more than a mere exodus to the capital. When local artists such as Uchida Hyakken made the move to Tokyo, they underwent a kind of mutual appropriation. Part of this process involved their adoption of Tokyo: locally born writers and artists who made it in the capital shed their roots and took on the aura and identity of the metropolis. The mark of their success, induction into the elite fraternity known as the bundan, signified their embrace of a metropolitan identity. At the same time, Tokyo adopted them, appropriating their cultural production as its own. Their novels, paintings, and scientific discoveries all became illustrations, not of the cultural fecundity of the provinces, but of the prodigious cultural power of the metropolis—yet another example of Tokyo as the font of modern knowledge and the pinnacle of modern culture. These mutual appropriations erased the provincial origins of metropolitan culture.
The term used to describe the journey from provincial city to metropolis was jōkyō—“ascending to Tokyo.” The term captured the elevated status of the capital and the ways people saw this trip as being much more than a movement through physical space. Viewed from outside the metropolis, the journey to Tokyo brought cultural elites into a dazzling realm of celebrity intellectuals, famous places, and citadels of higher learning. Nothing symbolized this rarified world of cultural privilege better than the literary establishment known as the bundan. Tokyo was identified, similarly, with establishment circles in the arts (gadan), music (gakudan), and press (rondan), but because of the predilection of writers to use their own life experiences as material for their modernist novels, the angst-ridden, solipsistic world of the literary man became a prominent symbol of the highbrow culture of the capital. As Edward Fowler explains in an illuminating discussion of the bundan, this group included “writers, critics, and publishers associated with what is commonly called junbungaku, or ‘pure’ literature.”23 Though their output represented a tiny fraction of literary production in the early twentieth century, these metropolitan intellectuals were recognized both as trendsetters in literary modernism and as exemplars of a national literary tradition.24
They were defined by three key characteristics that knit them into a socially alienated, self-referential group and accounted for the surprising uniformity of their values and attitudes. First and foremost, shared education at schools such as Tokyo Imperial University, Waseda University, or the aristocratic peers school, Gakushūin, conditioned the social formation of the bundan. As aspirants to literary acclaim converged on these elite institutions, they concentrated themselves in literature departments and became disciples of the famous writers who taught there. During their school days they forged the relationships that would become crucial to their artistic production and to their publication opportunities. School connections developed into literary cliques that endured and generated the outpouring of university publications like Mita bungaku (Keiō University), Waseda bungaku (Waseda University), and Teikoku bungaku (Tokyo Imperial University) and, more important, the myriad coterie magazines that dotted the literary landscape. Institutionally anchored to elite schools, both types of magazines provided the primary forum for literary production in the late Meiji and Taishō periods.
The association with the coterie magazine (dōjin zasshi), like educational affiliation, powerfully determined the character of the bundan. The dōjin zasshi featured fiction, poetry, art, and criticism in varying proportions and were brought out to provide a forum for the literary experiments of a young clique of writers. Since their target audience was other members of their group and, with luck, the greater Tokyo literati, circulations were often limited. Finances depended on the resources of contributors and tended to be precarious, which meant