On Uneven Ground: Miyazawa Kenji and the Making of Place in Modern Japan

Stanford University Press

Stanford, California

© 2012 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University.

All rights reserved.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Long, Hoyt J. author.

On uneven ground : Miyazawa Kenji and the making of place in modern Japan / Hoyt Long.

     pages cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-8047-7686-8 (cloth : alk. paper)

1. Miyazawa, Kenji, 1896–1933—Criticism and interpretation. 2. Japanese literature—20th century—History and criticism. 3. Literature and society—Japan—History—20th century. I. Title.

PL833.I95Z735 2012

895.6′144—dc22

2011012229

Typeset by Bruce Lundquist in 11/14 Adobe Garamond

E-book ISBN: 978-0-8047-7888-6

On Uneven Ground

MIYAZAWA KENJI AND THE MAKING OF PLACE IN MODERN JAPAN

Hoyt Long

On Uneven Ground

Contents

Cover

Copyright

Acknowledgments

A Note on Naming

Prologue: Making Place for the Author

PART ONE  |  THINKING THE LOCAL

1.    Finding Value in Locality

2.    Decentering the Uneven Geography of Cultural Production

PART TWO  |  THE MARGINAL CASE AND THE TEXTURE OF LOCALITY

3.    Toward a Provincializing Literary Production

4.    Making Space for a New Literary Region

5.    Conversations with Nature

PART THREE  |  THE NEW ROLES OF LOCAL ENGAGEMENT

6.    Performing the Village Square

7.    Farmers’ Art in an Age of Cosmopolitan Agrarianism

Epilogue: Trading Places

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgments

There are many who helped to see this book to completion, in ways both professional and personal. I am indebted to them for making the long journey both possible and rewarding.

Portions of the manuscript have benefited from criticism and comments by the following people: Allison Alexy, Gabriela Carrión, Robert Culp, Lianne Habinek, Elizabeth Holt, Ken Ito, John Knott, Lydia Liu, Leslie Pincus, Jordan Sand, Benjamin Stevens, and Jonathan Zwicker. I have done my best to incorporate their invaluable feedback. I am also grateful for the meticulous and thoughtful advice given by my two anonymous readers at the initial review stage.

While researching the project in Japan, I worked closely with Andō Kyōko and Sugiura Shizuka at Ōtsuma Women’s University. Their expertise and guidance helped me to discover aspects of Miyazawa’s life and work that I would never have found on my own. Thanks must also go to Yutaka Suga for sponsoring me at Tokyo University and to Kitahara Kanako for her support with archival work in Hirosaki. The staff at the Iihatov Center, the Iwate Prefectural Library, and the Iwate University Library graciously handled my often difficult requests.

In both the research and writing phases of the project, collaboration and conversations with the following individuals were instrumental in clarifying and complicating my thoughts: Alex Bates, Stephanie DeBoer, Mark Driscoll, David Henry, Jason Herlands, Reggie Jackson, Edward Mack, Markus Nornes, Emer O’Dwyer, Tim VanCompernolle, Kristina Vassil, Roderick Wilson, and Julian Worrall. To those in Japan who went out of their way to talk with me about Miyazawa, put me up in their homes, and introduce me to some of Iwate’s best-kept secrets, I owe an extra debt of gratitude. I am especially grateful to Miyazawa Takeshi, Mochizuki Tatsuya, Saiki Kenji, Sakurai Noriaki, and the Tomizawa family.

Research for this book was made possible by the support of the University of Michigan, the Center for Japanese Studies at Michigan, the IIE Fulbright Program, and the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science. Funds from the Humanities Division at the University of Chicago also helped to defray certain publishing costs. I must also thank Stacy Wagner at Stanford University Press for her steadfast support of the project as well as the various editors, including Carolyn Brown and Richard Gunde, who helped to bring the book to its final form.

Ken Ito and Jonathan Zwicker have been and continue to be invaluable mentors. I could not have gotten this far without their critical eye and passion for historical detail.

An alternate version of Chapter Six appears as Performing the Village Square in Interwar Japan: Toward a Hidden History of Public Space in the Journal of Asian Studies 70, no. 3 (August 2011).

Finally, I am thankful to my parents, family, and friends for their enduring patience and moral support. It is strangely ironic that a book about place has kept me from staying in any one place for very long. For putting up with all the moving and uncertainty, my deepest thanks goes to Mea and Kai, to whom this book is dedicated.

A Note on Naming

Japanese names mentioned in this book are given with the family name first. When writing the names of authors, I follow the Japanese convention of using pennames where both first and last names are not used. I refer to Natsume Sōseki, for instance, by his penname Sōseki and not by his surname. It should be noted that while it is standard practice in Japan for scholars to refer to Miyazawa Kenji only by his first name, Kenji, this was never a penname nor was it the name used by his earliest critics. I have thus chosen to use his family name instead.

On Uneven Ground

Prologue

Making Place for the Author

How strange that the greatest literary glories of our time should be born of entirely posthumous works: Kafka, Simone Weil, Hopkins; or of works partially posthumous, as is the case with Hölderlin, Rimbaud, Lautréament, Trakl, Musil, and in an even crueler sense, Nietzsche. One would like to recommend to writers: leave nothing behind, destroy everything you wish to see disappear; do not be weak, have confidence in no one, for you will necessarily be betrayed one day.

MAURICE BLANCHOT , The Infinite Conversation

In September 1933 Miyazawa Kenji (1896–1933), laying prostrate at his family home in the northern town of Hanamaki, finally succumbed to the lung ailment that had plagued him for much of his adult life. After nearly a decade and a half of literary output, he left for the opposite shore as a mostly obscure provincial poet and author of children’s fiction, having published just a single volume in each genre. A smattering of material had found its way into a few small coterie magazines (dōjin zasshi), enough to earn him recognition amongst a handful of local and metropolitan poets, but there was little at the time of his death to indicate that any of it would escape burial in the dustbin of literary history. Miyazawa himself was unsure about the present and future value of his work, recognizing the divergent routes it might take once handed over, as Borges put it, to that other man whose name appears in some biographical dictionary and whose pages are soon to belong to language itself, or to tradition.¹ Speaking to his father, who had never taken his son’s artistic ambitions seriously, Miyazawa explained that his manuscripts were merely the traces of his disillusionment and should be disposed of accordingly. To his mother, who had been more accepting of her son’s life choices, he declared them the resolute transcription of the blessed Buddha’s teachings and believed that they would one day be joyfully read by all. And to his younger brother Seiroku, arguably his longest and most devoted fan, he gave these simple instructions: If some bookstore comes wanting to publish them, I don’t care how tiny it might be, then let them. If not, don’t bother.² In giving such varied directives to each family member, Miyazawa seems to have been prefiguring at the moment before death the multiplicity of appropriations to which all writers and works are subject in the author’s absence.

When I first came across these last requests by Miyazawa, I was uncertain what significance they might have, if any, for the present book. They felt a bit too personal and tangential for a project meant as a broad historical investigation into the intersection of geographical unevenness, place-based identity, and cultural production in Japan’s interwar period. A project seeking to investigate, that is, how writers and intellectuals at this time identified with various expressions of locality (e.g., the native place, the region, the province) and how their choices did or did not reflect the increasing centralization, and increasing spatial inequality, of the literary marketplace. Miyazawa from the start had been the key organizing frame for this investigation, but I did not want to make him the subject of an author-study in that somewhat disdainful sense that critics in the academy typically regard literary biography.³ By which I mean, I did not want to be held captive by a life imagined as a transcendent totality, or feel pressure to make every element of the author’s oeuvre and biography sound in complete harmony, as if part of the same finely calibrated music box. After all, what difference [did] it make who [was] speaking when the author’s own indecisiveness at death suggested an already fragmented subject and a proliferation of both writerly intention and readerly interpretation?⁴ As I delved further into the local conditions under which his texts were produced, however, and recovered the experience of what it was to write from the geographical margins of a centralized literary field, I realized that the individual particularity of his life and afterlife, no matter how fragmented, was precisely what would allow me to map out the intricate network of connections—between literary expression, systems of textual production, and spatially situated subjects—that I sought to capture.

This became most apparent when I began tracing the history of Miyazawa’s posthumous resurrection, or more accurately vivification, on the literary stage. Within just a few years after his death, as we will see, his final requests were drowned out by the inordinate interest we bring to works that come into our possession not by life, but by the death of their author.⁵ Today, he has been read by every school-age child since his inclusion in primary language textbooks in 1946, has been the subject of countless volumes of scholarship, has had his works adapted into hundreds of picture books and dozens of live-action and animated films, and has had his name affixed to everything from a museum and research center to a tropically themed water park. This remarkable gap between Miyazawa’s lack of access to cultural capital while alive (largely due to his decision to remain in the provinces) and his later canonization and commercialization as national literary icon and symbol of local pride is what initially drew me to the earliest events in his posthumous rise. I wanted to unravel the paradox of a writer whose strategies for capturing local difference were ignored in his day and yet whose image now facilitates some of the most popular forms of place making and local branding. But to do so I first needed to understand why Miyazawa and his texts had survived at all. As Bruno Latour reminds us, even an idea of genius, even an idea that is to save millions of people, never moves of its own accord. It requires a force to fetch it, seize upon it for its own motives, move it, and transform it.⁶ Taking his death as my starting point, I began to search for the actors and material agents responsible for generating and sustaining the idea of Miyazawa as an author worth reading, but also for insuring that his texts were available to be read.

What I initially found was that in the first several months after his funeral, the most visible actors were local poets and friends writing for the regional newspaper. Wielding an intimate language of personal encounter and familial loss, they wrote about Miyazawa as if they were addressing a circle of acquaintances who knew implicitly the significance of this man and his position in local literary culture. Some tried to exaggerate his stature by praising him as a magnificent artist with a unique, glittering presence in Japan’s poetry establishment, or as a creator of world-class art whose enigmatic genius—on par, they proclaimed, with Rimbaud and Mallarmé—should be a point of pride in the history of Japanese poetry. Others framed his death in more local terms, placing him alongside other accomplished poets from his native Iwate Prefecture (the renowned Ishikawa Takuboku, for instance, and the now forgotten Hahaki Hikaru), or else associating his passing with other recent deaths in the field of local letters (namely the folklorist Sasaki Kizen).⁷ For those closest to him, Miyazawa’s death was without question tragic and noteworthy, but the ripples it stirred up were initially confined to a small pond. Of the few voices that trickled in from elsewhere, many expressed regret at never having had a chance to meet the man or even to have read much of his work. In fact one metropolitan poet, Yoshida Issui (1898–1973), when asked by Hahaki Hikaru to write a few words for the local paper, proceeded to give a cursory critique of Miyazawa’s poetic style after admitting to having read just two of his poems. There was, or so he claimed, simply nothing else available.⁸

How then to explain the appearance in January 1934 of a slim volume of essays with the title Miyazawa Kenji tsuitō (In Memory of Miyazawa Kenji)? It not only bore a Tokyo address, but contained roughly thirty contributions from local friends, family, and, most astonishingly, established poets in the urban avant-garde like Yoshida, Kusano Shinpei (1903–1988), Takamura Kōtarō (1883–1956), Tsuji Jun (1884–1944), and Hagiwara Kyōjirō (1899–1938). In preceding decades, memorial volumes had typically been produced as special issues of literary journals for authors who, unlike Miyazawa, had a much wider following at their time of death. Dependent as the genre was on the most literal executions of man-and-his-work criticism, wherein life and art were made to speak in unison, it was important that there be plenty of literary associates and disciples who could vouch for both man and work. For instance, when the popular novelist Ozaki Kōyō (1867–1903) passed away, fellow founding members of the influential Ken’yūsha (Friends of the Inkstone) coterie contributed essays that were printed together with sketches of some of Kōyō’s possessions: his brush and ink stone, his bookshelves and calling card, even his front gate. The memorial volume for literary giant Natsume Sōseki (1867–1916) boasted a wealth of commentary from leading writers and intellectuals of the day, and significantly opened with an essay by the doctor who had performed his autopsy. That readers were expected to take seriously the link he drew between Sōseki’s literary genius and the weight of his brain (not to mention the terminally poor condition of his intestinal tract) is indicative of how accepted was the practice of using a writer’s life to evaluate his or her work.⁹ By the time of Miyazawa’s death two decades later, authorial criticism was still heavily invested in the idea that how a writer had lived—now encapsulated in the notion of lifestyle (seikatsu) or way of living (ikikata)—was inseparable from an understanding of his or her art.¹⁰

We know this in part because of the ways contributors wrote of Miyazawa in his memorial volume, despite there being no obvious life, nor life’s work, for them to fetishize and pass judgment on. Nearly half stated that they had never once met Miyazawa, or that they knew of his work only vicariously, through the editor Kusano Shinpei.¹¹ If they did know his work, it was typically only his poetry volume, Spring and Asura (1924), that they had read, and they invariably expressed a desire to go back and read it again or have it reprinted with all the other posthumously uncovered manuscripts they were anxious to see. This lack of familiarity did not inhibit them, however, from elevating the unknown provincial author to a figure larger than life—a figure who transcended locale, the present-day artistic milieu, and at times even history itself. One contributor declared him to be one of the greatest poets since the time of the ancient Manyōshū poetry anthology (eighth century), arguing that his writing was the product of sensory experiences transferred directly, and without conceptualization, onto paper. It thus lacked the odor of deliberateness and desk-work pervasive in contemporary poetry. Other contributors similarly fixated on the biographical Miyazawa as someone whose subjective mentality and aesthetic methods remained defiantly pure. They upheld his lifestyle and way of living as models for a beleaguered age and variously set them in contrast to the maelstrom of contemporary life and the chaos of urban intellectualism. In some cases, this sentiment carried over into praise for Miyazawa’s intimate knowledge of his native place and grounding in the realities of agrarian life.¹²

What is so curious about these claims of rootedness and purity is that they were made by some of the same people who denied having any real firsthand knowledge of the biographical Miyazawa. Even supposing they had read the reminiscences of the mere half-dozen contributors who knew him personally (e.g., memories of his devotion to the farming community, his jaunts through the forests and fields with notebook in hand, or his lifelong abstinence from sex), these hardly warranted such exaggerated statements as, the value of his poems is only a fraction, nay tenths of a fraction, of his value as a human being, or, the ‘cosmos’ that he possessed within allowed him to transcend his singularly provincial existence.¹³ Why this compulsion to inflate the very thing—the life of Miyazawa—that was for most of them the furthest out of reach? In the months to follow, as Kusano and others worked to drum up support for the publication of a first zenshū (collected works), this tendency only persisted and the memorial volume became a promissory note on the potential future returns of Miyazawa’s published writing.¹⁴ All those involved seemed to assume that a life so authentically lived could not but produce desirable art.

When a third-rate publishing outfit in Tokyo finally agreed to produce a three-volume zenshū in October 1934, Miyazawa’s life was once again held up as substitute for the as yet unconfirmed value of his work (and again by people who knew him only in death, and at a remove).¹⁵ Popular modernist writer Yokomitsu Riichi (1898–1947), for instance, in a review written for the Yomiuri shinbun, admitted to knowing nothing about him as a person even while praising his noble lifestyle and the fact of its rootedness in the study of the natural sciences. He felt that his poetry, as a product of this lifestyle, was "filled with a sense of life (seimeikan) that goes one step deeper than anything in previous ages."¹⁶ A few months on, philosopher Tanikawa Tetsuzō (1895–1989), writing for the Tōkyō Asahi shinbun, commented on how practical and realistic was his lifestyle, and on the degree to which this down-to-earth quality permeated his writing. Taking note of Miyazawa’s engagement with the local farming community, he remarked how refreshing it was to imagine him quietly cultivating the fields and composing poetry in the far recesses of Tōhoku, unbeknownst to the wider world and free from the stench of the literary establishment.¹⁷ The eagerness with which these posthumous promoters conjured up a life from so little, overcompensating with hyperbole for a lack of firsthand evidence, once again suggests how entrenched was the belief in life and art as mutually constitutive. So much so that some sublimated the former over all else, transferring to the absent figure of Miyazawa their own desires about what it was to live a socially engaged and truly selfless existence.

While Miyazawa’s curious afterlife has much to say about the state of authorial criticism in 1930s Japan, it has even greater implications for how we deal with the contested place of the author, as both real individual and discursive construct, in the writing of literary history. Given a pile of incomplete manuscripts by a writer with very little public recognition and even fractured intentions at death, we would seem to have the ideal situation for distancing literary analysis from the impositions of the biographical signified. Instead, we find the author’s life is present everywhere, and overwhelmingly so. And not, as Foucault would have it, as a purely negative principle to limit, exclude, and choose; in short, by which to impede the free circulation, the free manipulation, the free composition, decomposition, and recomposition of fiction.¹⁸ But rather as a positive and necessary force that allowed a body of texts to circulate precisely by liberating them from the deadening weight of anonymity. It did so by giving the agents of literary production—editors, publishers, critics, and fans—a means to position Miyazawa in the existing cultural field as a particular kind of author writing from a particular kind of place. That is, to situate him vis-à-vis the many concrete forms and positionalities that the labor of writing had come to assume by this time (e.g., establishment figure, popular genre writer, avant-garde intellectual, children’s author), as well as those imagined to be possible (e.g., the isolated provincial poet). Surely we can reject the conclusions drawn by these agents in their efforts to give life to Miyazawa’s work, relying as they did on a romantic image of a sovereign author whose biography commands [the work’s] writing with transparent immediacy.¹⁹ But we cannot ignore the material effects engendered by their ideas of authorship and the structuring force of these ideas in working to produce texts as objects worthy of circulation. Here is confirmation of Roger Chartier’s assertion that the author-function, inscribed in the books themselves, ordering all attempts to establish textual classifications commanding the rules for the publication of texts, is henceforth at the center of all questions linking the study of the production, forms, and readers of texts.²⁰ Or in this case, at the center of all questions linking the study of production, geography, and narrative strategies of place-based identification.

If we understand the author-function to be a set of ideas that both delineate and define the parameters of authorship within a specific cultural moment, then its centrality is justified to the extent it serves, as Seán Burke has described it, as a "principle of specificity in the world of texts. That is, as a means to retrace connections between authors and works, between authorial positions and contexts of production, in ways that work back to a sense of historical, cultural, political," and I would add spatial, embeddedness on the part of speaking subjects.²¹ Where the difficulty lies is in finding ways to work back that avoid romantic notions of a unitary transcendental subject or sovereign authorial will—as these tend only to obscure the social and material points of intersection between text and context—while also counter-balancing the anti-authorial bias present in many current modes of critical discourse. It is a bias present, as Burke notes, in postmodern emphases on locality, on little narratives, on singularity . . . [and in] postcolonial specifications of the subaltern, of national and historical contexts, all which pass from the text to its histories without properly acknowledging that an authorial life and its work allow such a passage to be made.²² Yet this bias also resides implicitly in the specific forms that scholarly monographs have taken in recent decades, at least in Anglo-American studies of Japanese literature. Here the trend has been toward ever wider scales of analysis (e.g., historical genres, bodies of discourse, new theoretical paradigms) in which individual authors and works are reduced or compartmentalized in ways resonant with an overarching analytical or narrative frame. While these kinds of studies can be effective in what they set out to accomplish, they also represent a mode of literary history that inevitably pushes the question of the author-function to the margins. Driven by different principles of specificity, such studies actually risk squeezing authors and works into discrete niches that, like conventional biography, close off competing avenues of interpretation and thereby elide the indeterminacy and multiplicity of the author as situated subject.²³

A mode of literary history that appears even less suited to foregrounding the author-function is that proposed by Franco Moretti. He asks the historian to stand at a distance from the literary archive in order to ask questions that go beyond the level of the individual author or work and instead direct themselves toward the large mass of facts (i.e., data) that literature, as a collective system, has left behind in the form of bibliographic records. In pursuit of a more rational literary history, Moretti builds on Fernand Braudel’s assertion that history is indeed ‘a poor little conjectural science’ when it selects individuals as objects . . . but much more rational in its procedures and results, when it examines groups and repetitions.²⁴ It certainly is much more rational, but this has everything to do with the move to define the individual as a single, static data point within a much larger array. Viewed from this distance, as if looking out over a crowd, the individual cannot help but look analytically useless until plotted against the other individuals with whom it stands in relation. This strikes me as fundamentally a problem of scale, however, not a statement on the inherent worth of that individual node as a frame for investigation. For one can imagine zooming in on this individual to treat it as the system under analysis, constituted by its own set of discrete data points.

Moretti’s call for a rational literary history thus offers a clue as to how we might reorient our perspective of the individualized author to make him or her the center of our analysis, but not its ultimate end-point. Imagine defining our scale in such a way that the name of the author becomes the larger organizing system for constellations of data points that are in some way connected to the individual in question, whether as biographical figure or as posthumous literary icon. These points might consist of any discursive or material object bearing an association, strong or weak, with that author—a literary text, a piece of critical commentary, a letter from a friend, a newspaper account of some public deed, a building once occupied, a landscape once traversed. A rational approach to these data would then entail identifying patterns of association or coherence amongst the data points as functions of more general sociohistorical properties and relations. Thus, for instance, we might look at the evolution of an author’s literary style as a function of his or her degree of social connectedness. We might plot the history of that author’s critical appraisal against the quantity and quality of texts available over time. Or instead, as is my interest here, we might look for patterns within the data that correspond in some way to real geographical relations. The image of the author to emerge from these approaches would thus rely not on a treatment of the individual as a self-contained and internally motivated entity, nor as a transcendent will, but as constituted by multiple overlaying patterns of social, historical, political, and spatial relations observable in the mass of facts that coalesce—across both space and time—around that individual as situated subject.

One pattern that emerged while researching On Uneven Ground is defined by a string of moments in Miyazawa’s life and afterlife where a correlation can be observed between the geographical locus of a statement or action—whether made by Miyazawa himself or merely in his name—and the ideational content of that statement or action. In other words, where the what of the data seems motivated by the where of its appearance. The first of these moments comes in 1921, at the age of 25. As the eldest son of a merchant family with deep and flourishing roots in Hanamaki, Miyazawa was destined from a young age to inherit the family business, and was given all the moral and educational training he would need to do so.²⁵ Yet like many of his generation who similarly benefited from the desire of wealthy rural households to be upwardly mobile, the opportunity for higher education also introduced him to the pleasures of intellectual freedom and the possibility of shedding familial obligations (and financial privilege) in pursuit of loftier social goals. Upon graduating from Iwate’s most prestigious middle school in 1914, he pleaded with his father to be allowed to continue his studies in Tokyo, but was denied this wish. His father did allow him, however, to attend the Morioka Higher School of Agriculture and Forestry, just twenty miles north of Hanamaki at the far end of the Kitakami River valley. At the school, one of only two of its kind in the country, Miyazawa studied chemistry, pedology, geology, and mineralogy, establishing his scientific credentials as well as a lifelong interest in agricultural science. He also spent his free time trekking, often for days on end, through the hilly and mountainous terrain that rises quickly from the valley floor up to highland plateaus and dense pockets of mixed deciduous and evergreen forests. The intimate knowledge of the local landscape he gained from these hikes, which was already providing him with poetic inspiration, was put to good use as a post-graduate research student assigned to conduct geological surveys in his native Hienuki county and in other parts of the prefecture. He soon realized, however, that the tedious work of quantitative analysis was not for him; nor could he accept the alternative of staying home indefinitely to manage the family pawnshop. Having reached an impasse, he made a break for Tokyo in early 1921 and there began toying seriously with the idea of literature as a profession.

Late that same year is when the moments of correlation between what and where begin, most specifically in the children’s fiction (dōwa) he began writing upon returning home—after just eight months—to take a teaching position at the local Hienuki (later Hanamaki) School of Agriculture.²⁶ In this case, the correlation was motivated by Miyazawa’s own awareness that he was writing as a geographical outsider for a literary market that had largely become centered on and in Tokyo. The city’s cultural dominance was so fixed by capital accumulation, in fact, and so naturalized in the cognitive maps of Tokyo writers and critics, that most could not imagine any literature thriving independently outside its borders. A few did, however, particularly after the Great Kantō Earthquake of 1923 temporarily crippled the city’s publishing industry. As I discuss in Chapter Two, their proposals for how to decentralize the machinery of literary production, and for how to correct the urban bias latent in its products, are key to understanding just how much of a role geography played at this time in discussions of literary form and aesthetic strategy. They also help to frame Miyazawa’s own position as a writer who, having been turned away several times by popular dōwa magazines in Tokyo, knew well the limitations of a highly centralized field. His response was to develop representational strategies that linked the narrative locus and actual site of writing in Iwate (the where) with attempts to critically reimagine this locus in ways that countered or contradicted the expectations of those at the center (the what).

It is these strategies that I examine in the book’s middle chapters. The first, found in some of Miyazawa’s earliest children’s stories, relativized certain spatial and temporal biases prevalent in prominent dōwa publications of the day, including magazines like Akai tori (Red Bird) and Kin no hoshi (Golden Star). In Chapter Three, I demonstrate that editors and contributors to these magazines appropriated folk or regional material in ways that positioned the provinces allochronically, or as spaces outside of historical time. Miyazawa, in contrast, restored to them a sense of contemporaneity by resituating the same folk material within nonmetropolitan spaces more fully in dialogue with the modern moment. In the years ahead, he would localize these spaces through an imagined literary region he called Iihatov, which acted as a critical filter for perceiving anew the real landscapes of his native Iwate and for reimagining their historical potential. Chapter Four explores the historical context and theoretical implications of this filter, which Miyazawa deployed in assembling and marketing his first and only published dōwa collection, The Restaurant of Many Orders (1924). By situating this particular strategy against other attempts in local media and the regional press to reimagine the future of Iwate and the larger Tōhoku, or northeast, region, I call attention to the broader struggle by provincial elites at this time to speak for the value of specific localities within discursive networks that were unevenly distributed in space and increasingly a part of national or global systems of knowledge and material exchange.²⁷ Significantly, Miyazawa attempted to narrativize this struggle in several of his Iihatov stories, two of which are taken up in Chapter Five. I argue that these stories, one about a globe-trotting wind imp and the other about an alpine flower, reveal the capacity of his narrative strategies to expose critical sites of epistemological conflict between locality and the nation-state in education, language, and scientific discourse. As such, they constitute a record of the perceived impact of culturally homogenizing processes (i.e., national education, linguistic standardization) on local systems of knowledge.

Miyazawa’s strategies were not limited to narrative, however, and in my final two chapters I turn to moments of correlation in which the what is manifest more through praxis and public action than through literary experimentation. That is, moments when ideas about what does, and what should, constitute local cultural production were translated into practical steps toward the realization of those ideas. In Chapter Six, I consider his interest in amateur theater and look at a play, Poran’s Square, that he conceived while teaching and which later became for him a vehicle for rethinking the borders of village public space. Through this play, we see how theater was for Miyazawa a means not only to challenge assumptions about who had the right to speak out in agrarian communities, but also to imagine what forms an ideal village public might take given the social and political structures by which public space had historically been bound. Of special interest to this study are his attempts to realize this ideal through the performance of the play by area students and young farmers, and also the choices he made to hide certain aspects of his vision from the public eye. Miyazawa’s conviction in theater as a means for social change belonged to a broader intellectual movement to decentralize and/or democratize cultural production by putting it squarely in the hands of a rising generation of rural laborers. It was in pursuit of an art created both for and by the farmer that he resigned from teaching in 1926 to develop his own philosophy of farmers’ art (nōmin geijutsu). This found him lecturing to local youth about his ideas for invigorating agricultural work, giving advice on planting and fertilizing techniques to area tenant farmers, and even establishing a new village cooperative for cultural, economic, and technical exchange. Chapter Seven considers what these activities, when set against parallel efforts by Tokyo-based intellectuals and the backdrop of a rapidly transitioning rural society, have to tell us about the institutional pathways (cooperatives, schools, political groups, artist coteries) and many discursive channels (public lectures, regional newspapers, foreign translations, mimeographed pamphlets) available in the interwar period for reinventing rural locality in real time. I am interested in how Miyazawa used these to translate thought into action and to make the local feel socially and culturally relevant, but also in how these same pathways and channels circumscribed what it was possible for him to achieve.

Each moment of correlation taken up in On Uneven Ground reveals something of the intricate network of connections that inhered in interwar Japan between cultural expression, material acts and texts, and spatially situated subjects. Together, they form a pattern by which it is possible to restore a sense—obscured by the natural leveling effect of the archive—of what it meant for Miyazawa to write and work on the margins of an uneven cultural field while trying to speak for and alter that marginal site. What it meant, in other words, to be submerged under the sign of the local (which typically carried more pejorative connotations like provincial, backward, unknown) while trying to redefine the terms of its representation. In the seventy years since his death, of course, these terms have undergone a dramatic reversal as the local has come to be valued both politically and economically in Japan, as elsewhere, for the kinds of difference that it can signify. Curiously, this reversal has only increased the potential of Miyazawa and his work to inform acts of place making in Iwate. The situation has evolved from one in which his various critical strategies had little or no bearing on the identity and physical character of Iwate to one in which it is difficult to imagine the landscape without him. His posthumous rise to the status of a national literary icon has coincided, as I explore in Chapter One and again in the Epilogue, with further moments of correlation in which he and his narratives are entwined with the local as a positive sign of things like regional identity, environmental protection, heritage preservation, and cultural tourism. Paradoxically, the less that spatial unevenness has been a determining factor in the circulation of Miyazawa’s image and texts, the more valuable they have become as signifiers for, and generators of, a sense of place.

A central conceit of this book is that this paradox illuminates something essential about the history of how locality has been written, produced, and consumed in Japan since the turn of the last century. For not only does it underscore the radical multiplicity of the local as a site of identification, suggesting that this multiplicity is partly generated by the uneven ways that discourse about a place, and the actions taken there, enter wider networks of cultural production, it also raises important questions about how this unevenness impacts the potential of things said and done locally to work back upon the physical and cultural character of a place. This paradox would have remained invisible, suffice to say, had Miyazawa not been used as a consistent and stable frame for organizing the mass of facts that makes up this study. His pluralized private-public figure, though changeable and open to endless interpretation, has for me been a way to connect individual discourse with the social text and to constitute a specific sociohistorical locus for the archival intertext.²⁸ Though my focus on certain facts has led, recalling Blanchot, to a necessary betrayal of other aspects of Miyazawa’s life and writing, this is