The Society For Japanese Studies The Journal of Japanese Studies

The Society for Japanese Studies
Culture, Nationalism, and Sakaguchi Ango

Author(s): James Dorsey
Source: The Journal of Japanese Studies, Vol. 27, No. 2 (Summer, 2001), pp. 347-379
Published by: The Society for Japanese Studies
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JAMES DORSEY
Culture, Nationalism, and Sakaguchi Ango
Abstract: Studies of the writer Sakaguchi Ango (1906-55) convention

tray him as a staunch opponent of wartime ideology. An analysis of
bunka shikan" (A personal view of Japanese culture, 1942), however,
the iconoclasm prompting this reading is more appropriately attributed to
conception of a spiritual purity antecedent to intellectual contrivances. In
of this purity he constructs, perhaps inadvertently, an ethnic nationali
in accord with mainstream wartime ideology and propaganda. "Dara
(Discourse on decadence, 1946), Ango's postwar classic, is an extensio
vision, and its popularity suggests this strain of nationalism survived
intact.
"Nihon bunka shikan" (A personal view of Japanese culture, 1942)

guchi Ango (1906-55) is undoubtedly one of the most controversi
of cultural criticism published in Japan during World War II. Its ir
humor, bold iconoclasm, and unflinching engagement with the sen
sue of national identity make it an anomaly in that period when
under siege by repressive censors, were forced to compose with th
caution. Today, over 50 years after its publication, the work con
appeal to scholars, critics, and everyday readers.
When the essay appeared in the journal Gendai bungaku (Contem
literature) in March 1942, the war in the Pacific was three months
Japan was in full wartime mode. Under the slogan "Zeitaku wa t
(luxury is the enemy), the authorities were demanding ever greater
sacrifice from the people as well as vigorously repressing ideas tha
ened the unity or clarity of the national polity (kokutai). Since Aug
local censors had been enforcing regulations prohibiting any sugges
A number of people provided valuable suggestions at various stages of this

would like to thank Dennis Washburn, Doug Slaymaker, Paul Ziegler, and the a
readers for this journal.
347
Journal of Japanese Studies, 27:2
?) 2001 Society for Japanese Studies
348 Journal of Japanese Studies 27:2 (2001)
the Japanese were opposed to war, any insinuation that the Japanese were
warlike, any comment that indicated living conditions in Japan would be
harmed by the war, any remark that revealed a Japanese shortcoming, and
any statement that might prompt public confusion.1 It was, as critic Taka-
hashi Haruo has written, a time when "the topic of things Japanese was no
longer an object for discussion but rather an absolute and sacred concept." 2
Somebody forget to tell Ango. From the opening lines of the essay, he
inverts the official hierarchy of cultural practices and artifacts in a string of
bombastic remarks:
I know next to nothing about traditional Japanese culture. I've never seen
the Katsura Detached Palace which Bruno Taut praised so highly, nor am I
familiar with his precious Mochizuki Gyokusen, Ike Taiga, Tanomura Chi-
kuden, or Tomioka Tessai. As for his Hata Z6roku and Chikugen Saishi,
well, I've never even heard of them. For one thing, I'm not much of a tourist,
so the towns and villages of our homeland, with all their various local cus-
toms and landmarks, are a mystery to me. On top of that, I was born in what
Taut called the most vulgar city in Japan, Niigata, and I adore the strip run-
ning from Ueno to Ginza and the neon lights, both of which he despised. I
know none of the formalities of the tea ceremony, but I do know all about
getting rip-roaring drunk. In my lonely home, I've never once given any-
thing like the tokonoma [alcove] a second thought.3
These lines set the tone for the remainder of the essay, which is essentially
a sustained attack on a wide range of Japanese cultural icons. The following
two passages, perhaps the most frequently cited in the secondary literature,
are representative:
More than traditional beauty or intrinsically Japanese forms, we need more

convenience in our daily lives. The destruction of the temples in Kyoto or
the Buddhist statues in Nara wouldn't bother us in the least, but we'd be in
real trouble if the streetcars stopped running.
I couldn't care less if both Horyuiji and Byodoin burned to the ground. If
the need should arise, we'd do well to tear down Horyfiji and put in a park-
ing lot.4
1. The guidelines, distributed to publishers and newspapers by the Home Ministry (Nai-
musho), are reproduced in Soma Shoichi, Wakakihi no Sakaguchi Ango (Tokyo: Yoyosha,
1992), pp. 250-51. For an English discussion of the guidelines, see Richard H. Mitchell, Cen-
sorship in Imperial Japan (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), p. 284.
2. Takahashi Haruo, "'Nihon bunka shikan' to 'Darakuron' no aida," in Moriyasu Masa-
fumi and Takano Yoshitomo, eds., Sakaguchi Ango kenkyu (Tokyo: Nansosha, 1973), p. 306.
3. Sakaguchi Ango, "Nihon bunka shikan" (hereafter "Shikan"), in Vol. 7 of Okuno
Takeo et al., eds., Teihon Sakaguchi Ango zenshu (hereafter SAZ), 13 vols. (Tokyo: Tojusha,
1968), p. 122. All translations are mine unless otherwise noted. For an English translation of
approximately two-thirds of this essay, see James Dorsey, trans., "A Personal View of Japa-
nese Culture," in J. Thomas Rimer and Van Gessel, eds., The Columbia Anthology of Modern
Japanese Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, forthcoming).
4. Sakaguchi, "Shikan," pp. 124, 141.
Dorsey: Sakaguchi Ango 349
In addition to justifying the sacrifice of Japan's grand architectural and

sculptural heritage, Ango's pursuit of "convenience" prompts him to de-
fend the Westernized lifestyle of his contemporaries, a lifestyle subjected to
increasing suspicion during the war.
"What is the essence of the 'Japanese spirit' "? We, of all people, do not
need to theorize on that .... We yank trousers over our stubby bowlegs,
deck ourselves out in Western clothes, waddle about, dance the jitterbug,
toss out the tatami, and strike our affected poses amidst tacky chairs and
tables. That this appears completely absurd to the Western eye has abso-
lutely no bearing on the fact that we ourselves are satisfied with the conve-
nience of it all.5
In the oppressive atmosphere of Japan in 1942, inflammatory, subversive

remarks like these from Ango were downright dangerous, surely to one's
future publishing prospects if not one's liberty and perhaps even one's life.
Hirano Ken, Ango's friend and fellow contributor to Gendai bungaku, could
not have been the only one who, on reading "Nihon bunka shikan," felt
"immediately apprehensive, thinking 'Can Sakaguchi get away with writing
this sort of stuff?' "6
Ango did get away with it, though, and has subsequently been champi-
oned as a voice of true reason during a time when the only reason welcomed
was that which served the war effort. His reputation as a relentless critic of
reductive definitions of national culture and character was cemented in the
early postwar period with the essay "Darakuron" (Discourse on decadence,
1946), which made him a household name. The two essays, "Nihon bunka
shikan" and "Darakuron," share a great deal in terms of rhetoric and mes-
sage, and it is therefore paradoxical that each would be sanctioned by au-
thorities diametrically opposed in mood and purpose: "Nihon bunka shi-
kan" was acceptable to repressive wartime censors insisting on conformity
to an official vision of the nation and its mission, while "Darakuron" was
embraced by a public intoxicated with the individual and intellectual free-
doms that emerged after the surrender.
How did a consistent philosophy voiced by a single author appease such
diverse audiences? The feat was made possible by the invocation of a par-
ticular trope of Japanese cultural nationalism which, having spanned the
wartime and postwar periods, must be added to that growing list of wartime
legacies that survived the radical restructuring of Japan during the U.S. oc-
cupation and contributed to its miraculous postwar recovery. Inspired by a
widespread suspicion of reason and the intellect, Ango rejects all sustained
explications of national essence as mere rhetorical contrivance while advo-
cating instead a spiritual purity, or authenticity, available only in a realm
5. Ibid., p. 141.
6. Hirano Ken, "Sakuhin kaisetsu," in Ito Sei et al., eds., Ishikawa Jun, SakaguchiAngo,
Vol. 19 of Nihon gendai bungaku zenshu (Tokyo: K6dansha, 1967), p. 419.
antecedent to such abstractions and ideology. Although presented as a lib-

eration from the oppression of theories, this spiritual authenticity ultimately
reinscribes, under erasure, ideologies of self and nation all its own: the self-
realized individual is one who burrows beneath the misleading "static" of
abstract thought by acting on impulse and, similarly, the "true" Japan is one
unconcerned with locating or preserving its indigenous heritage as it faces
the immediate challenges presented to its survival and well-being. In other
words, although "emptied," the categories of the individual and the nation
remain, serving as receptacles for the incessant recreation of content.
Ango's vision of both the self and nation draws heavily on this trope. In
the context of World War II, this message (as delivered in "Nihon bunka
shikan") was fully consistent with an ideology promoting the desperate
measures taken in Japan's "holy war," and in the postwar "Darakuron" it
provided an intimately familiar framework within which to embrace defeat
and execute the revolutionary changes of the occupation period.
The Rise and Fall of Icons
In a certain sense it is neither surprising that Hirano would be concerned

over the repercussions that Ango might suffer for publishing "Nihon bunka
shikan" nor inconceivable that so many others would similarly read it as a
subversive text from a repressive age. Approximately 20 pages in length
(or 12,000 words in English translation), the essay is divided into four sub-
titled sections: "'Nihonteki' to iu koto" (Things "Japanese"), in which
Ango rebels against essentialist definitions of Japanese culture; "Zokuaku
ni tsuite (ningen wa ningen o)" (Vulgarity: humans love what is human),
dedicated to reversing the hierarchy of the refined/vulgar dichotomy with a
wild romp through the backstreets of Kyoto; "Ie no tsuite" (The home), a
short, puzzling section in which Ango portrays that emotionally charged
nexus of interpersonal relationships, often invoked as a metaphor of the
nation, as in fact a desolate place in which man confronts his isolation and
sadness; and "Bi ni tsuite" (On beauty), where a prison, dry ice factory, and
battleship are presented as aesthetically superior to the accepted paragons
of Japanese architecture.
While varied in focus, all four sections of the essay share what is evident
in the passages quoted above: a bold iconoclasm directed at the symbols of
the national polity and a defense of the plebeian pleasures of a modern,
Westernized lifestyle. In this respect the essay is drastically at odds with
what Louis Althusser would call the "Ideological State Apparatuses," the
plurality of almost-hidden yet inescapable forces of ideology.7 In the Japan
of the 1940s, these forces were joined in buttressing a definition of the na-
7. See Louis Althusser, "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses," in Lenin and Phi-
losophy and Other Essays, trans. Ben Brewster (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971),
pp. 121-73.
tion based on traditional icons while simultaneously promoting an austere

existence purified of pernicious foreign influences. Ango's opposition to
this ideological pressure is at the root of both Hirano's concern and Ango's
reputation as a subversive voice.
An iconoclast requires icons, symbols invested with a sentimental
charge built up through energy invested over long years. Ango found a
ready catalogue of such icons in the work of the German architect Bruno
Taut (1880-1938), whom Ango mentions at various points in the essay.
Taut arrived in Japan in May 1933 and spent the following three and a half
years lecturing to the Japanese on their architectural heritage and cultural
identity. A prolific writer, he is best known in Japan for three books: Nip-
pon: Yoroppajin no me de mita (Japan as seen through European eyes,
1934), recommended by Japan's Ministry of Education and translated re-
peatedly; Nihon bunka shikan (A personal view of Japanese culture, 1936),
a great commercial success; and a posthumous collection of previously pub-
lished essays, Nihon bi no sai hakken (A rediscovery of Japanese aesthetics,
1939), which not only joined Nippon: Yoroppajin no me de mita on the
Ministry of Education's recommended reading list but also earned a place
in the commercially profitable Iwanami Shinsho "red series." 8
Taut's reputation as a distinguished foreign architect attracted a large
readership, and his enthusiastic endorsement of Japanese culture thrilled a
generation hungry for affirmations of Japan's status as a culturally advanced
nation. Among these readers was Sakaguchi Ango, who takes the title of his
essay from one of Taut's books. He also takes so many of his cues from the
German architect that it is tempting to read "Nihon bunka shikan" as a
parody of Taut's work. The fact, however, is that Taut is but a foil for Ango's
attack on a much older and larger discourse. Fortunately the discourse sur-
rounding two of the icons central to both Taut and Ango, the Horyuji and
the Katsura Detached Palace, has been carefully documented.9 Within these
contexts, Ango's bombastic statements reveal their full force.
When Ango wrote of his willingness to replace the H6ryfiji with a park-
ing lot, he was, at one level, reacting to Taut's high evaluation of the site. In
an essay on Nara, Taut had written:
The Japanese spirit has unraveled the strict symmetry of the Chinese style,
and the spacious compound is laid out in a completely Japanized manner-
free and asymmetrical. The architectural style has similarly escaped the
heavy, outlandish shapes of the Chinese mode to emanate instead a mood of
8. See Inoue Shoichi, Tsukurareta Katsura Rikytu shinwa (Tokyo: K6bund6, 1986),
pp. 65-67, and Jacqueline Eve Kestenbaum, "Modernism and Tradition in Japanese Architec-
tural Ideology, 1931-1955" (Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 1996), pp. 119-21.
9. I am referring here to two books by Inoue Sh6ichi: the previously cited Tsukurareta
Katsura Rikyu- shinwa and Horyuji e no seishinshi (Tokyo: K6bundo, 1994). I am much in-
debted to these works in the following discussion.
lightness and refinement.... The day I spent looking at the Horyuiji will
remain enshrined deep in my heart, never forgotten.10
This evaluation by Taut was actually the settling point of a long process
of ideological interpretations that had begun in the work of Ernest Fenel-
losa (1853-1908) and Okakura Kakuzo (a.k.a. Tenshin, 1862-1913). Their
work, and the national trend to emphasize Japan's links with the West while
downplaying its Asian roots, prompted the pioneering architectural histo-
rian It6 Chuta to conclude in the 1890s that the entasis (graceful bulge) of
the Horyuiji's pillars was evidence of a Hellenistic influence on classical
Japanese architecture.ll In basing his appreciation of an indigenous struc-
ture on this point, Ito was in essence claiming that Japanese architecture was
important because it was not really Japanese.
The Horyuiji's evolution into a national icon did not, however, stop there.
In the first decade of the twentieth century, Japan began to remake its image
along Asian lines, and the interpretation of the Horyuiji evolved accordingly.
As Okakura's The Ideals of the East (1903) and The Book of Tea (1906)
began to explain Japan to the world in terms of its Asian heritage, the very
same Ito Chuta turned his attention to the asymmetrical layout of the build-
ings in the Horyuiji compound. After initially linking it to a temple in China,
Ito eventually concluded that none other than Shotoku Taishi himself had
overseen the unique construction and that "the design of the Horyuiji is
rooted, of course, in the spirit, tastes, and preferences of our Japanese race,
cultivated over thousands of years." 12 In recasting the Horyuji first as a part
of Asian culture and later as evidence of Japan's unique place therein, Ito's
interpretations reflected the changes in the national mood, changes that were
to spawn the Japanese ethnic nationalism of the 1930s and 1940s. A premier
slogan for the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, "Asia is one," was
to be taken from the opening lines of Okakura's Ideals of the East and, as
Donald Keene notes, this phrase was repeated ad nauseam by participants
in the Greater East Asia Writers Congresses in 1942, 1943, and 1944.13 A
10. Bruno Taut, "Nara," trans. (to Japanese from German) Shinoda Hideo, in Nihon
zakki, Vol. 2 of Shinmura Izuru et al., eds., Tauto zenshu (Tokyo: Ikuseisha Kod6kaku, 1943),
pp. 179-80.
11. Inoue, Horyaji e no seishinshi, pp. 5-62. On Japan's efforts to merge with Europe
and leave Asia behind (nyu-O, datsu-A), see Hirakawa Sukehiro, "Japan's Turn to the West,"
trans. Bob Tadashi Wakabayashi, in Bob Tadashi Wakabayashi, ed., Modem Japanese Thought
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 30-97. For the subsequent reverse
course, "escape Europe/enter Asia" (datsu-O, nyu-A), see Tetsuo Najita and H. D. Harootu-
nian, "Japan's Revolt Against the West," in ibid., pp. 207-72.
12. Ito Chtta, "Asuka jidai no kenchiku," in Sekai bijutsu zenshu, Vol. 6 (Tokyo: Hei-
bonsha, 1928), pp. 27-28; quoted in Inoue, Horyuji e no seishinshi, p. 196.
13. See Kakuzo Okakura, The Ideals of the East with Special Reference to the Art of
Japan (Rutland, Vt: Charles E. Tuttle Co, 1970), p. 1. Donald Keene's remark is made in
"Japanese Writers and the Greater East Asia War," Landscapes and Portraits (Tokyo: Kodan-
sha International, 1971), p. 310.
second popular wartime slogan, "eight corners of the world pulled under
one roof" (hakko ichiu), reflects the second stage of Ito's evolving appre-
ciation-this "roof" was most certainly to be Japan's.
The symbolic elasticity of the Horyuji ended here. Though the archae-
ologist Ishida Mosaku, skeptical of the Sh6toku-Horyuiji myth, uncovered
physical evidence in the 1940s that dated the asymmetrical layout of the
compound to a rebuilding 50 years after Sh6toku Taishi's death, he did not
dare tamper with this icon of national character. In the postexcavation re-
port, which should have sounded the death knell for the Sh6toku-Horyuji
myth, Ishida could only write:
Some of my senior colleagues have claimed that this [H6ryiji] was an origi-
nal idea conceived by Shotoku Taishi. While it is unclear whether the idea
is indeed original, one might say that the Horyuiji is a manifestation of one
part of Shotoku Taishi's spirit. Though Shotoku's ideals were realized to
some extent during his own lifetime, it was actually in the next age that they
finally reached a fuller fruition.14
Ishida's reticence is evidence that in the 1940s the topic of things Japanese
was indeed "an absolute and sacred concept." Ishida realized this and had
no choice but to resort to the tortured logic whereby 48 years after his death
Shotoku's spirit reaches from beyond the grave to shape a uniquely Japanese
Horyfiji that breaks with the Chinese convention of symmetry.
Sakaguchi Ango, however, had no stomach for such equivocation. As
noted above, in addition to prioritizing working streetcars over Kyoto's
temples and Nara's Buddhist statues, Ango was ready to replace the Horyuji
with a parking lot. In Ango's mind none of these icons had any intrinsic
value. "Let the ancient temples of Kyoto and Nara burn to the ground. The
traditions of Japan would not be affected in the least. Nor would Japanese
architecture as a whole suffer. If a need exists, we can just as well build the
temples anew; the style of prefab barracks would be just fine." 15
These statements are delightfully outrageous. While so many had worked
so hard to negotiate Japan's place in the world and to delineate the bounda-
ries of its cultural hegemony through readings of the Horyuiji, Ango refuses
to be drawn into the alluring quest for the symbols of national identity. Nor
is he seduced by a desire to expose the specious logic and shaky evidence
behind the invocation of these structures as symbols of the nation-reason
has no place in the mythical realm of nation-building, as the archaeologist
Ishida was well aware. Rather, Ango cuts the Gordian knot by dismissing
14. Ishida Mosaku, "Horyuji saiken hisaiken mondai no kiketsu," in Garan ronko--
bukkyo kokogaku no kenkyu (Tenri: Yotokusha, 1948), p. 61; quoted in Inoue, Horyuji e no
seishinshi, p. 229.
15. Sakaguchi, "Shikan," p. 136.
the realm of signifiers of nation in its entirety. This was a bold, unconven-
tional move, and a dangerous one. Hirano did have cause for concern.
The construction of a geopolitical space for Japan through the discourse
surrounding the Horyuji was grounded in an aesthetic argument: the asym-
metry of the compound's layout was construed as distinguishing a Japanese
sensibility from its counterparts on the continent. A similar argument re-
volved around the wabi tradition, particularly as it is manifested in the Ka-
tsura Detached Palace. Bruno Taut enthusiastically championed this aes-
thetic vein, juxtaposing it with the vulgarity and kitsch of Nikko's Toshogu.
Many of the other icons Ango undermines in "Nihon bunka shikan" can be
traced to this realm.
Taut's conception of the relationship between beauty and national iden-
tity is evident in the epigram in his Nihon bunka shikan: "Imitation is the
death of Beauty," a maxim in which the actors are not individuals but
nations.'6 Taut disapproved of anything that was not purely "Japanese,"
which he took to mean part of the minimalist, understated wabi aesthetic.
Singing the praises of haiku and ink paintings (suibokuga, or zenga), he
writes: "The conciseness of the words and the pictures ... their impartiality,
and their objectivity are truly perfection itself." 17 Taut lauded the tea room
and the tokonoma for the same reasons but saves pride of place for the Ka-
tsura Detached Palace, which he believed represents the very heart of Japan.
Where, oh where, is the true Japan? In other words, what is it in Japan that,
when compared to all the other creations of the world, manifests at a glance
Japan's utter uniqueness? It goes without saying that it exists among the
examples [haiku, ink paintings] I have already given. Still, even among
these, it can be said that the Katsura Detached Palace is Japan's ultimate,
most sublime source of architectural light.18
Clearly Taut conflates beauty with cultural purity; the Katsura Detached Pal-
ace is the model of beauty because it expresses "Japan's utter uniqueness."
Taut associates this wabi aesthetic with the refined tastes of the imperial
house, and he privileges it over the opposing half of the dichotomy: the
crude shogunal sensibility. While the imperial aesthetic is associated with
the beautiful tokonoma, the shogunal arts are akin to what most often lies
behind that tokonoma: the toilet.19 According to Taut, vulgar shogunal cul-
ture reaches its most detestable depths in the legacy of Toyotomi Hide-
yoshi (1536-98). Hideyoshi's "famous gargantuan audience chamber is,
architecturally speaking, terribly clumsy; furthermore, its proportions are
16. Bruno Taut, Nihon bunka shikan, trans. (to Japanese from German) Mori Toshio (To-
kyo: Meiji Shob6, 1936). This statement is found on the unnumbered page preceding page one.
17. Ibid., p. 37.
18. Ibid., p. 40.
19. Ibid., pp. 3-22, esp. p. 18.
completely plebeian, its gaiety is inappropriate, and its tediousness is ex-

treme." 20 Furthermore, the ignorance that prompted Hideyoshi to demand
tea master Sen no Rikyu's suicide and the "wretchedly poor taste" of his
gold-leaf tea room prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that Hideyoshi was
"entirely lacking in both the poetic sensibilities of the understated and any
sensitivity to architecture." 21
The building Taut chooses to represent this vulgar shogunal taste is
Nikk6's T6shogu. This complex sits at the center of Taut's "Ikamono to
inchiki" (Kitsch and inauthenticity, 1936), where he writes:
The mausoleum at Nikk6 is considered the epitome of kitsch [ikamono],

and this evaluation is right on the mark. Though Nikko's shrine may include
many skillfully crafted items, for its lack of a Japanese aura (aji) and the
absence of a calm, understated rigor (shibui), we can only call it kitsch.22
Taut's disappointment in Nikko's most famous site sent him scurrying back
to the home of the Katsura Detached Palace and the imperial aesthetic: "The
Toshogii is a corruption of architecture, and an extreme one at that. We
returned to Kyoto."23
In Taut's popular writings on wabi, the Katsura Detached Palace, and
Toshogu we find the construction of an aesthetic identity for Japan. In its
insistence on a cultural purity (Taut's condemnation of anything imitative of
the Chinese or Western traditions), it is orientalism of the first order, but one
that was quickly adopted by the Japanese themselves and served as a well-
spring of patriotism. Looking back on the 1930s from a time shortly after
the war, architectural critic Kawazoe Noboru would write:
Works by Taut and books about him were being published one right after
the other. Obsessed, I bought them and read them. They were what pulled
me into the world of the Japan Romantics. Before I knew it, I had stopped
skipping school and was enthusiastically taking part in the military drills
and labor conscription. Without noticing the contradictions, it struck me
that Japan was a very good country, and that it must win the war.24
Obviously popular treatises on Japan's cultural traditions were influencing

more than home decorating choices; expositions of Japanese culture were
fanning the flame of a national pride that dovetailed neatly with the contem-
porary war effort.
20. Ibid., p. 50.

21. Ibid., p. 51.
22. Bruno Taut, "Ikamono to inchiki," trans. (to Japanese from German) Shinoda Hideo,
in Bijutsu to kogei, Vol. 3 of Shinmura et al., eds., Tauto zenshu, p. 339.
23. Bruno Taut, "Nikko," trans. (to Japanese from German) Shinoda Hideo, in Katsura,
Vol. 1 of Shinmura et al., eds., Tauto zenshu, p. 301.
24. Kawazoe Noboru, "Watakushi no Tauto kan," in Tosho, April 1962, p. 15; quoted in
Inoue, Tsukurareta Katsura Rikyu shinwa, pp. 112-13.
In "Nihon bunka shikan" Ango gleefully upsets these ideologically

charged icons as well. The attack begins in the very first paragraph of his
essay, quoted in its entirety above. Not only is Taut's symbol of "Japan's
utter uniqueness," the Katsura Detached Palace, flung into the realm of the
unknown, but the symbolic tokonoma and no fewer than six of Taut's artistic
heroes are discarded with equal alacrity. Even the precious tea ceremony, so
important to Taut (and Okakura before him), is replaced by the consumption
of other, more potent, potables.
Later in the essay Ango even goes so far as to label Taut's beloved wabi
aesthetic the epitome of the vulgar-the excessive contrivances deployed in
the attempt to reproduce simplicity and spontaneity render the rock gardens
and tokonoma fraudulent and self-contradictory. From here it is a short step
to Ango's declaration that "the distinction between the simple, refined Ka-
tsura Detached Palace and the vulgar Toshogu is invalid." 25 To complete his
undermining of Taut's Japan, Ango writes of Toyotomi Hideyoshi, Taut's
emblem of the vulgar, as having an artistic sensibility fully worthy of emu-
lation.26 By the end of the essay Ango has completely erased the "Japan"
painted by Taut along the lines sketched by so many others.
While Ango's attack squarely hits all of Taut's icons, his critique is by
no means simplistically reactionary. Ango is actually striking at the core of
Taut's portrait: the conviction that the beauty and value of Japanese culture
is contingent on its being "purely" Japanese. Ango severs this specious link
tying art and culture to issues of nationhood, a link that implies that
regardless of personality an individual is drawn by some innate urge to abide

by certain customs and traditions. However, it does not stand to reason that
just because a practice existed in Japan long ago, it is somehow innately
Japanese. It is quite conceivable that customs followed in foreign countries
and not in Japan are, in fact, more intimately suited to the Japanese.27
The key issue is finding what is "suitable" or convenient, regardless of na-

tional origin. This severance of culture from its national origin is behind
Ango's defense of a Westernized lifestyle. If greater convenience should be
the result, to Ango, "apish imitation is as precious as creativity." 28 At a time
when the eradication of pernicious foreign influences was becoming such a
national priority that baseball umpires would soon be forced to shout "yoshi
ippon" rather than "strike," this flippant dismissal of the national roots of
cultural practices was revolutionary.
Ango's rebellion doesn't stop there, his reversal of cultural hierarchies
being very thorough. Taut's disappointment in the T6shogu sent him back
to Kyoto, flower of Japan's ancient culture and home to the imperial family

26. Ibid., pp. 134-35.
27. Ibid., p. 124.
28. Ibid., p. 141.
and its gentle arts for centuries. Ango, too, "fled" to Kyoto to write "Nihon
bunka shikan," and the essay is filled with autobiographical tangents that
completely reshape the feel of the city. Finding the famous natural vistas
and temples of the Arashiyama area "unpleasantly cold and lifeless," Ango
discovers a Kyoto more in keeping with his heavy-drinking, hedonistic na-
ture. One of his favorite spots in the ancient capital is the all-but-forgotten
Kurumazaki Shrine. While most shrines encourage visitors to pray for
health, safe childbirth, or academic success, this one is different: though
"supposedly dedicated to the memory of somebody-or-other Kiyohara, a
scholar it seems, the real object of veneration is quite obviously the almighty
yen." 29 A second "shrine" for Ango is the Arashiyama Theater, a run-down
vaudeville hall with amateurish acts where relieving himself often meant
"wading through an ocean of urine just to make my way to the piss-pot." 30
This was Ango's Kyoto, Taut's precious ancient capital turned inside out
and upside down.
Other symbols of "Japaneseness" fall as well. Ango's claim of igno-
rance concerning the "various local customs and landmarks" of rural areas
is a poke at the ethnological discourse of Yanagita Kunio (1875-1962).
His joy over the replacement of an ancient wooden bridge with one of steel
is a rebuttal to Yasuda Yojiur's 1936 essay, "Nihon no hashi" (Japanese
bridges), in which Yasuda linked Japan's identity and fate to the heartrend-
ing old bridges of rural areas.31 Ango also deals with the samurai tradition,
linked to the essence of the modern Japanese by Nitobe Inazo's Bushido,
and also figuring prominently in wartime propaganda.32 Referring to Japan's
most famous tale of samurai loyalty and revenge, Chushingura (Treasury of
loyal retainers, 1748), Ango wrote:
It has only been 70 or 80 years since the end of these "samurai," but the
stories seem like fairy tales to us now .... Make no mistake about it: most
Japanese today are keenly aware that revenge just doesn't suit them. Har-
29. Ibid., p. 128. Signs on the shrine grounds identify the deity as the scholar Kiyohara
Yorinari (1122-89), and the practice described by Ango in the essay (and paraphrased here)
was still alive at the time of my visit in March 2000.
30. Ibid., p. 130. Ango's scatological reverie is another poke at Taut, who detested the
filth hidden behind his glorious tokonoma.
31. Ibid., p. 124. Yasuda's essay can be found in Yasuda Yojuro Senshu, Vol. 2 (Tokyo:
Kodansha, 1971), pp. 19-47. For an analysis of the essay, see Alan Tansman, "Bridges to
Nowhere: Yasuda Yojuro's Language of Violence and Desire," Harvard Journal of Asiatic
Studies, Vol. 56, No. 1 (June 1996), pp. 35-75. For a treatment of the Japan Romantics as a
whole, see Kevin Doak, Dreams of Difference: The Japan Romantic School and the Crisis of
Modernity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994).
32. Inazo Nitobe, Bushido: The Soul of Japan (Rutland, Vt: Charles E. Tuttle Co, 1969).
For an example of how this legacy was linked to the war effort, see the "bible" of national
essence: Robert King Hall, ed., Kokutai No Hongi: Cardinal Principles of the National Entity
of Japan, trans. John Owen Gauntlett (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1949),
especially pp. 144-46.
boring a deep-seated hatred over long periods is beyond them; the best they
can manage is a dirty look.33
Ango further distances his Japan from this heritage by writing the word
"samurai" (and later the word "kimono" as well) in katakana, the syllabary
associated with words of foreign origin.
Ango leaves no icon unsullied and so is true to his vision of the "highest
form of art": the farce.34 In a 1932 essay on the genre, Ango had described
farce as "from start to finish a wild rampage [ranchiki sawagi]" 35 and re-
joiced in both its purity and its ability to break through the limitations im-
posed by mimetic impulses and reason. By staging just such a "wild ram-
page" in the field of cultural nationalism with his "Nihon bunka shikan,"
Ango succeeds in producing the heady sense of liberation the genre can
induce. This sense of freedom was what made the essay such an anomaly
at that most repressive time, and it was the reason Hirano Ken feared for
Ango's safety.
Critical Reception and Slippage in the Record

Hirano Ken's immediate determination that "Nihon bunka shikan" was
a dangerous piece of literary resistance was followed by generations of simi-
lar interpretations. The second wave was prompted by Ango's postwar clas-
sic, the aforementioned "Darakuron." Critic Okuno Takeo is representative
of that generation's reading of Ango's work when he writes:
Nothing that I read in the course of my life will match the amazing shock I
got when I read Sakaguchi Ango's "Darakuron" in the magazine Shincho
in April 1946. In one stroke it freed me, then only 19 years old, from the
wartime ethics, ideology, and taboos that had until that point kept me in
chains; it was a thunderbolt that showed me a new way of life. It was, I
suppose, the imperial proclamation of 15 August that declared the end of
the war in a political sense, but for me it was undoubtedly Ango's "Dara-
kuron" that declared the spiritual end of the war. It was through that es-
say that my postwar life as an autonomous subject [shutai teki na jinsei]
began.36
Much of the postwar reading public felt the same way and, after almost ten
years of relative obscurity following his initial successes, Ango found him-
self catapulted into the popular consciousness.37
33. Sakaguchi, "Shikan," pp. 123-24.

34. Sakaguchi Ango, "Farce ni tsuite," in ibid., p. 13.
35. Ibid., p. 14.
36. Okuno Takeo, Sakaguchi Ango (Tokyo: Bungei Shunju, 1972), p. 11.
37. For a critical overview of Ango's career, see James Dorsey, "Sakaguchi Ango," in
Jay Rubin, ed., Moder Japanese Writers (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 2000), pp. 31-
48. Donald Keene also provides a biographical sketch in Dawn to the West: Japanese Litera-
ture of the Modem Era, Vol. 1, Fiction (New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1984),
pp. 1064-80.
Readers moved by "Darakuron" naturally turned to the wartime "Nihon

bunka shikan" for more. As the two essays share much in terms of theme
and rhetorical tropes, these readers were not disappointed. Again, Okuno's
comments are representative, and they indicate he found in this wartime
essay an equally revolutionary stance. In writing "Nihon bunka shikan,"
Okuno claims, Ango was
boldly speaking out in a way that surely infuriated the traditionalists, the
ultranationalists, and the men of culture. I can feel nothing but awe at his
courage, backed as it was by his practical, rational spirit. Equally awe-
inspiring are the flexibility and freedom with which he exercised that spirit
in his critique of traditional Japanese aesthetics-and all under the wartime
conditions in which the Japanese spirit, traditional Japanese aesthetics, and
ultranationalism reigned supreme.38
Like Hirano Ken, Okuno reads the essay as running against the grain of
Japan's wartime ideology.
In the following years Ango was to be slowly forgotten. His iconoclasm,
which had so closely reflected the mood of the early postwar years, lost
relevance as Japan moved quickly from a period of deep self-reflection and
flirtation with radical reforms to an increasing conservatism and the reha-
bilitation of many prewar and wartime ideologies and social structures. By
1955, the year Ango suddenly died of cerebral hemorrhaging at the age of
48, this conservative swing had left Ango so far behind that only two literary
journals (Bungei and Bungakukai) saw fit to issue special editions on this
writer. Furthermore, a collected works (zenshu) project was not launched
until 1967.39
The publication of this zenshu coincides with the emergence of the next
generation to find Ango's message appealing-those involved in the stu-
dent movements (Zenkyoto) of the late 1960s and the Anpo riots of 1970.
These youths found the iconoclastic, antiauthoritarian rhetoric of Ango so
relevant that his popularity flared into what magazines and newspapers be-
gan referring to as an "Ango Revival" (Ango fukkatsu).40 A paperback
(bunko) edition of "Darakuron," "Nihon bunka shikan," and other essays
was saved by this revival. Previously on the verge of going out-of-print, it
suddenly became a bestseller.41
Yet another Ango boom has been building since the early 1990s. In 1992
38. Okuno Takeo, Sakaguchi Ango (Tokyo: Bungei Shunju Bunshun Bunk6, 1996),
p. 163. I have generally quoted from the original 1972 edition of Okuno's study. Here, however,
I quote from a revised edition published in 1996. I have not done a systematic comparison of
the two editions, but it seems that the revisions serve to emphasize Okuno's deification of Ango
as a voice of resistance during the war.
39. Okuno, Sakaguchi Ango (1972), pp. 327-29.
40. See Hy6do Masanosuke, Sakaguchi Ango (Tokyo: Kodansha, 1976), particularly
pp. 13-15.
41. Okuno, SakaguchiAngo (1972), p. 333.
Akutagawa Award-winning novelist and professor of French literature Ogino

Anna published a popular book on the author, Ai rabu Ango (I love Ango).
The annual gathering of Ango fans and scholars in his native Niigata re-
corded up to 500 in attendance in 1994.42 Most significant, however, is the
attention given Ango by contemporary critic and philosopher Karatani
Kojin, who first collected eight of his essays on Ango in a 1996 book and
has contributed commentaries to the new zenshuf published by Chikuma
Shobo.43 Like those before him, Karatani reads Ango as a subversive voice,
characterizing "Nihon bunka shikan" as "an unqualified critique of aes-
thetics and Japanese uniqueness."44 Karatani also claims that Ango is one
of only two to "tear into" (yatsukeru) the Buddhist-based circular reason-
ing employed by ultranationalist thinkers such as those participating in the
infamous "Overcoming the Modern" (Kindai no Chokoku) symposium of
1942.45 All told, Karatani finds this essay by Ango so critical of the wartime
ideology of the early 1940s, such an anomaly in that repressive age, that he
has written, time and again, that "until I was corrected by a friend about
ten years ago, I was under the illusion that 'Nihon bunka shikan' was a
postwar work." 46
Though this reading of Ango's essay is an appealing one, there is much
to suggest that it is incomplete. First, Ango's career as a whole does not
suggest the type or degree of political consciousness that such an interpre-
tation of "Nihon bunka shikan" implies. While his rebelliousness in his
early days is well documented and surely included a rejection of the politics
that played such an important part in his father's life, as a young man Ango
42. The attendance figure is mentioned in Robert Adam Steen, "To Live and to Fall:
Sakaguchi Ango and the Question of Literature" (Ph.D. diss., Cornell University, 1995),
p. 226.
43. The book is Sakaguchi Ango to Nakagami Kenji (Tokyo: Ota Shuppan, 1996). The
new zenshu is Sakaguchi Ango zenshu, 18 vols. (Tokyo: Chikuma Shob6, 1998-2000).
44. Karatani Kojin, "Kindai Nihon no hihyo: Showa zenki II," in Kindai Nihon no hihyo;
Showa henjo (Tokyo: Fukutake Shoten, 1990), p. 155.
45. The other is Takeda Taijun. See Karatani's dialogue (taidan) with Sekii Mitsuo,
"Sakaguchi Ango no fuhensei o megutte," in Sekii Mitsuo, ed., Sakaguchi Ango to Nihon
bunka, a special edition of Kokubungaku kaishaku to kansho (September 1999), p. 15.
46. Karatani K6jin, "'Nihon bunka shikan' ron," in Sakaguchi Ango to Nakagami Kenji,
p. 10. Karatani records the same misunderstanding in "Daraku ni tsuite," ibid., p. 66, and again
in his dialogue with Sekii Mitsuo, "Fuhensei," p. 13.
It should be noted that there is some small degree of dissention from the conventional
reading of Ango as a voice of resistance. Robert Steen, in his dissertation, notes three ex-
amples: Isoda Koichi in a taidan with Akiyama Shun, "Sakaguchi Ango no seishin," Yuriika,
Vol. 7, No. 11 (December 1975), pp. 82-107; Ueno Takashi, "Kotei no und6," Kaie, Vol. 2,
No. 7 (July 1979), pp. 184-91; and Suzuki Sadami, "'Nihon bunka shikan' ni tsuite," Koku-
bungaku kaishaku to kansho, Vol. 58, No. 2 (February 1993), pp. 98-102. See Steen, "To Live
and to Fall," p. 147. Steen himself argues that Ango's ideas are not inconsistent with the war
effort (pp. 105-52, esp. pp. 105-6).
turned not to proletarian literature but rather to, of all things, the study of
religion. At the age of 20 he entered the Department of Indian Philosophy
at Toyo University, studying Sanskrit, Pali, and Tibetan. When his fancy did
turn to literature around the year 1928, Ango was taken not with the Marxist
writers then at their peak but rather with authors such as Masamune Haku-
ch6, Sato Haruo, and Akutagawa Ryunosuke, none of whom had a particu-
larly keen social or political conscience.47 Unlike his colleagues at the maga-
zine Gendai bungaku during the war, Ango had not been involved with
either Marxism or the proletarian literary movement, nor did he join these
men in producing the postwar magazine Kindai bungaku, the primary venue
for exploring the complicity of intellectuals during the war and the relation-
ship of literature to politics. While it is conceivable that Ango simply turned
his attention elsewhere once he had struck his bold blow against wartime
ideology, it is unlikely in light of this generally apolitical stance.
Reading "Nihon bunka shikan" as an unequivocal act of resistance is
also problematic when one considers other works written by Ango dur-
ing the war years. Most troubling is his contribution to Tsuji shosetsushu
(Streetcorner stories, 1943). With one-page contributions by 207 writers,
this volume was published by the Japanese Literature Patriotic Society (Ni-
hon Bungaku Hokoku Kai) with proceeds earmarked for the battleship con-
struction fund. In the introduction to this volume, Kume Masao wrote:
Each time the people get news of the daily glorious battles and military
achievements of the Imperial Navy in the south seas, each time we learn the
nature of these horrible battles to the death, we brush away the tears that
have welled up in our eyes and, with appreciation for the valiant struggle
and courageous fighting of our officers and men on the front line, we all rise
up to repay their precious sacrifices, as it is only right we should.48
The collection of stories is an attempt at that repayment by those "aflame

with the single thought of serving the nation through literature."49
The quality and tone of the stories included in this volume vary greatly,
with some of them exceedingly innocuous.50 Ango's contribution, "Dent6
no musansha" (People bereft of tradition), however, is in keeping with the
volume's spirit of sacrifice for the sake of victory while also reading very
much like the ostensibly subversive "Nihon bunka shikan." Insisting that
47. Saegusa Yasutaka, "Nenpu," in Sakaguchi Ango, Darakuron (Tokyo: Kadokawa

Shoten, 1957), p. 271.
48. Kume Masao, "Jo," in Kume Masao, ed., Tsuji shosetsusha (Tokyo: Hakkosha Sugi-
yama Shoten, 1943), p. 1.
49. Ibid.
50. Jay Rubin highlights just one such innocuous contribution, that of Tanizaki Jun'i-
chiro. See Injurious to Public Morals: Writers and the Meiji State (Seattle: University of Wash-
ington Press, 1984), p. 278.
tradition is eternally born from within man himself, Ango dismisses the
physical destruction of Japan as essentially inconsequential: "Should To-
kyo be turned to ruins, we lack nothing for building even a grander imperial
capital. Neither would we grieve much in turning the roof tiles of the Ho-
ryuiji into artillery." 51 In the context of this explicitly nationalistic collec-
tion, Ango's "iconoclasm" appears anything but subversive.
The same is true of "Shinju" (Pearls), a short work that walks the border
between essay and autobiography, published in the magazine Bungei in June
1942. Though this work is problematic to the same degree and in many of
the same ways as "Nihon bunka shikan," there is no question that at one
level it is very much a paean to the pilots of the midget submarines who
willingly and knowingly sacrificed their lives in the attack at Pearl Harbor.
Ango expresses awe at the feat of these "superhumans" (chojin) who ex-
hibit the superior fighting spirit of the Japanese. It originates at the moment
men are called to duty.
The Parisians and Yankees are cheerful about it. They march off humming
to themselves as the ladies throw them kisses. The humming emerges from
a subconscious belief that their lives will be spared; their mental state is not
that of a man staring death in the face as he turns to serve his motherland in
her time of crisis. The Japanese, on the other hand, are keenly aware of the
possibility of death from the moment they answer their call to duty. They
are not cheerful but solemn. One need only look at our glorious victories in
the Greater East Asian War to know which of these attitudes leads to greater
heroism on the battlefield.52
The overall message of "Shinju" is certainly more complex than this pas-
sage suggests. Still, the fact remains that statements such as the above, and
Ango's wartime publications as a whole, suggest a relationship to the con-
temporary regime that is far more complex than the conventional reading
implies.
Interpretations positing Ango's "Nihon bunka shikan" as a subversive
text are predicated on the essay's resistance to the "Ideological State Appa-
ratuses" that were holding the nation together in this time of crisis. How-
ever, this is only half the story. Althusser's "Repressive State Apparatuses"
were also at work, and in the conventional reading there is an inexplicable
slippage between Ango's relationship to the two: the ostensibly oppositional
stance toward the former did not, as one would expect, invoke the wrath of
the latter. This is a third reason to question the accepted interpretation of
"Nihon bunka shikan."
51. Sakaguchi Ango, "Dento no musansha," in Kume, ed., Tsuji shosetsushu, p. 105.
This very short essay originally appeared in the magazine Chisei in May 1943. See Sekii Mi-
tsuo, "Nenpu," SAZ, Vol. 13, p. 416.
52. Sakaguchi Ango, "Shinju," in SAZ, Vol. 2, pp. 385-86.
The essay appeared during the most repressive years of an extended gov-
ernment campaign to control discourse at all levels. As Jay Rubin's Injurious
to Public Morals demonstrates, modern Japan's government had little pa-
tience for disruptive voices, dealing with most under the Peace Preservation
Act (Chian Iji Ho).53 Promulgated in 1925, the law expanded in scope over
the years to include jurisdiction over organizations, movements, and even
ideas. It was evoked in the convictions of tens of thousands during the cul-
ture wars pitting "everything that was wholesomely Japanese [against] the
alien forces of sedition and decadence, their deadly germs always threaten-
ing to infect the sacred kokutai [national polity]." 54
The system of censorship and thought control really came to maturity
with the persecution of marxist critics and proletarian writers during the
1930s: author Kobayashi Takiji was killed by police during questioning in
February 1933, Communist Party leaders Sano Manabu and Nabeyama Sa-
dachika were imprisoned in June of the same year, and the statement of
recantation they issued from prison triggered an avalanche of ideological
conversions (tenko) among left-wing writers of all stripes.55 Publishers were
also subjected to pressure, and by 1935 all legal left-wing publications had
been halted.56
At this point the range of acceptable speech was made narrower still.
While most of the censorship had been masterminded by the Home Minis-
try, beginning in 1936 the propaganda bureaus of the military services be-
gan to get involved as well. According to Rubin,
their fanaticism made them far more difficult to deal with than the ministry.
They saw Communists behind every hint of unorthodox thought and in-
sisted on complete cooperation with the war effort.... Especially after Pearl
Harbor, fiction did not have to be either leftist-oriented or erotic to be un-
acceptable: the military did not want to see anything in print that did not
actively support the war.57
Ango's "Nihon bunka shikan," which in the standard reading is certainly

brimming with "unorthodox thought," hedonism if not eroticism, and resis-
tance to the demands of the war, would surely warrant censorship in this
environment.
53. Jay Rubin, Injurious to Public Morals, especially pp. 225-78.

54. Ibid., p. 227. On the frequency of the invocation of the Chian Iji Ho, see the entry in
Takayanagi Mitsutoshi et al., eds., Nihonshijiten (Tokyo: Kadokawa Shoten, 1974).
55. Honda Shuigo claims that over 95 per cent of the proletarian writers committed tenko.
See "Tenko bungaku to watakushi shosetsu," in Tenko bungaku ron (Tokyo: Miraisha, 1974),
p. 180. Though he raises the question of the sincerity of the conversions, Ben-Ami Shillony
offers the same figure in Politics and Culture in Wartime Japan (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1981), p. 120.
56. Mitchell, Censorship in Imperial Japan, p. 270.
57. Rubin, Injurious to Public Morals, p. 10.
Though there seems no room for dissent even within this system, restric-
tions on free speech were made ever tighter. Just two months after Ango's
essay was published, in May 1942, the Cabinet Information Bureau (Nai-
kaku Joho Kyoku) cemented the stranglehold on literature with the inaugu-
ration of the Japanese Literature Patriotic Association (Nihon Bungaku Ho-
koku Kai). By withholding precious paper supplies from publishers who
continued to print works by blacklisted nonmembers, the lines were clearly
drawn. Writers and intellectuals were forced to choose between (at least
nominal) cooperation, imprisonment, and silence.
In light of the refined apparatuses of repression and the virtual consen-
sus on Ango as a voice subverting nationalistic wartime ideologies, the
question becomes one of how "Nihon bunka shikan" ever got past the cen-
sors and into publication. Though a coterie magazine (dojin zasshi), Gendai
bungaku was a polished, leading literary journal at the time. Not only was
it known for resisting the ideological pressures brought to bear on the war-
time publishing industry, but it also boasted a roster of contributors with
left-wing inclinations, including Ara Masahito, Hirano Ken, Honda Shugo,
Sasaki Kiichi, and Odagiri Hideo.58 Considering the magazine's high profile
and the politics of its contributors, it is unimaginable that the magazine went
unnoticed by the censors.
Even should the essay have miraculously slipped past the authorities on
its first publication, such could not have been the case when it appeared in
a collection of Ango works issued in December 1943. The increasing pres-
sure on all aspects of publishing at this point is evident in the very name of
the company issuing the book: Buntai-sha was the new name for the Sutairu
(i.e., Style)-sha, the change having been made after the edict restricting the
use of foreign words.59 Ango was feeling the increased pressure as well. His
third collection of short stories, Shinju had almost failed to reach the book-
stores, and it was only after the publisher, Taikand6, pleaded with authori-
ties on behalf of "the destitute author" that a minimal run of 3,000 copies
was permitted provided that no reprint be issued later. As is often the case,
the precise reason for the censorship is unclear, but there can be no doubt
that the watchful eye of the censors was focused on Sakaguchi Ango. Still,
two short months after the trouble with Shinju, he was successful in releas-
ing a reprint of "Nihon bunka shikan." Clearly not everyone found in this
work what Karatani K6jin calls an "unqualified critique of... Japanese
uniqueness." The public expression of such was unthinkable at the time.
58. See Hasegawa Izumi, ed., Kindai bungaku zasshijiten, a special edition of Kokubun-
gaku: Kaishaku to Kansho (October 1965), s.v. "Gendai bungaku," by K6no Toshio. Kamiya
Tadataka also credits Gendai bungaku with a stance of resistance, though a mild one. See
"Sakaguchi Ango no hito to sakuhin," in Sakaguchi Ango, Vol. 22 of Kansho Nihon gendai
bungaku (Tokyo: Kadokawa Shoten, 1981), p. 23.
59. See Sekii Mitsuo, "Nenpu," SAZ, Vol. 13, pp. 416-18.
Though generations have championed Ango as a voice of resistance,

conflicting evidence abounds: Ango's career suggests a thoroughgoing aver-
sion to political discourse, his wartime production includes both troubling
prowar statements and testimonies to the uniqueness of Japan's culture and
its fighting spirit, and "Nihon bunka shikan" received at least nominal ap-
proval from a censorship mechanism dedicated to repressing expressions of
resistance. Given all this, the conventional portrayal of Ango as an uncom-
promising voice of reason is clearly an overly simplified, untenable posi-
tion; this reputation is a product of well-intentioned postwar critics deter-
mined to discover and champion wartime resistance and subversion.60
Anti-Intellectualism and a By-Product: Nationalism
Though it is true that various theories of Japaneseness are debunked in

"Nihon bunka shikan," the essay is not primarily engaged with the issue of
national or cultural identity. This ideological arena is simply-almost co-
incidentally-the site, or playground, for this particular round in a different,
larger war: the campaign to forge alternatives to the usually self-conscious,
often hyper-intellectual, and sometimes painfully contrived arguments of
reason, the modern world's preferred mode of rhetoric. Because of his
unique background in both classical Buddhist studies at Toy6 University
and French fiction and criticism at the private academy Athene Francais,
Ango was heir to the quest to break through what some saw as the impasse
faced by the rational mind. Many of his works illustrate the pursuit of a
liberation from all theories, ideologies, and intellectual constructs in the
pursuit of a "purer," more authentic mode of existence. Living through an
age in which the specious application of reason for suspect (and dangerous)
purposes was especially apparent, it is not surprising that Ango would seek
to somehow get under, behind, or anterior to that distorting filter.
This quest is what had led him to the genre of farce in that 1932 essay.
In the genre's "wild rampage" transgressing the boundaries of realism and
mimesis, Ango sensed the potential for a grand liberation from the limits
imposed by the analytical mind. The technique making this possible was the
rejection of all discriminating hierarchies.
Farce works to affirm all sides of man-completely, and without leaving a

single thing behind. Whether it be fantasies, dreams, death, rage, contra-
diction, absurdity, or ambiguity, farce attempts to affirm every last thing that
is connected to human reality. Farce affirms negations, it affirms affirma-
tions, and then it affirms this. In the end it tries to take everything related to
60. Donald Keene notes this quest for evidence of intellectual resistance to the war and
also provides several case studies of writers and their activities during times of war in "The
Barren Years: Japanese War Literature," Monumenta Nipponica, Vol. 33, No. 1-4 (1978),
pp. 67-112.
man and forever, for eternity, and in perpetuity affirm, affirm, affirm, and
never stop.61
This indiscriminating affirmation, and the sense of liberation it induces, is

what prompts the iconoclasm of "Nihon bunka shikan."
Ango's suspicion of reason and general anti-intellectualism is also ap-
parent in "Bungaku no furusato" (The birthplace of literature, 1941). Here
Ango offers, as prototypes of all literature, a number of shocking works that
catch us completely off guard, often through sudden acts of violence. One
such example is an anecdote about the quintessential modern intellectual
Akutagawa Ryuinosuke. With obvious relish, Ango relates how, faced with
a poor farmer's tale of his own act of infanticide, "this talented man, who
always had something to say about everything, was left completely speech-
less." 62 These unanticipated turns frustrate our expectations to such a de-
gree that "the eyes we have trained on abstractions are closed" (kannen no
me o tojiru).63 It is in this realm antecedent to reason-and even language-
that Ango finds his liberation from the prison of the modern intellect.
Ango's literary vision does lead to impressive results: the ideas behind
his essay on farce made possible some of his promising early experimental
works (see, for example, "Kaze hakase" [Professor Blowhard, 1931]), and
the perspective expressed in "Bungaku no furusato" inspired much of his
most powerful postwar fiction (see "Hakuchi" [The idiot, 1946] and "Sa-
kura no mori no mankai no shita" [In the forest, under cherries in full bloom,
1947]). At a certain level, the same might be said for "Nihon bunka shikan,"
Ango's application of this same implosion of reason in the discourse on
national identity. Ango does succeed in escaping the essentialist, reductive
definitions of Japanese cultural identity that were common at the time.
Ideology and thought, however, are ultimately inescapable: "affirma-
tions" are inevitably reactionary and closing one's eyes to abstractions does
not erase them so much as leave one even more helplessly in their grasp.
What Ango in effect accomplishes in his dismissal of the more transparently
61. Sakaguchi, "Farce ni tsuite," p. 19. The playful, exaggerated tone of this passage is
typical of the essay as a whole. "Farce ni tsuite" is performative, demonstrating in its form
what it advocates in its message. It mischievously undermines the conventions of its genre,
literary criticism, for the purpose of opening the discourse to new possibilities.
62. Sakaguchi Ango, "Bungaku no furusato," in SAZ, Vol.7, p. 113. The translations here
are mine. For a translation of the full essay, see Steen, "To Live and to Fall," pp. 239-49.
63. Sakaguchi Ango, "Bungaku no furusato," in SAZ, Vol. 7, p. 113. Akutagawa was a
touchstone for many of the Japanese writers who sought, like Ango, to escape the impasse of
the intellect. See, for example, Kobayashi Hideo's 1927 critical debut, "Akutagawa Ryfinosuke
no bishin to shukumei," in Vol. 2 of Ooka Shohei et al., eds., Shintei Kobayashi Hideo zenshu
(Tokyo: Shinchosha, 1979), pp. 235-40. Kobayashi also shared Ango's nostalgic longing for
a literary realm antecedent to that contrived by the intellect. See his 1933 essay "Koky6 o
ushinatta bungaku," in KHZ, Vol. 3, pp. 29-37. An English translation of this essay is avail-
able in Paul Anderer's Literature of the Lost Home: Kobayashi Hideo, Literary Criticism,
1924-1939 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), pp. 46-54.
contrived discursive constructions of nation is the production of an alterna-

tive, tremendously seductive, and almost invisible nationalism. The vacuum
left by his rejection of the Katsura Detached Palace, the Horyiiji, and tatami
as icons of national culture is immediately filled by the spiritual purity or
authenticity that originally prompted him to discard these ideological con-
structs. The degree to which Ango was aware of this by-product of his
method is unclear and unknowable. Nonetheless, the spiritually pure, au-
thentic Japan that emerges in "Nihon bunka shikan" shares a great deal with
the more blatantly nationalistic wartime texts, many of which were inspired
by the same anti-intellectualism that Ango embraced. This ethos helped
forge the perception of the conflict in the Pacific as a matter of the spirit; it
remained intact in the postwar era as well, aiding in the radical changes and
rebuilding of postwar Japan.
At the root of Ango's expression of this cultural nationalism is the con-
cept of a spiritual authenticity located anterior to the intellect. Ango estab-
lishes this foundation in reaction to Bruno Taut's focus on material culture
and formalized practice. Early in the essay Ango depicts Taut engaged in a
stereotypical enjoyment of Japanese culture: treated to a viewing of exqui-
site hanging scrolls, each displayed in the tokonoma, Taut then enjoys a tea
ceremony and a formal banquet. Ango mocks this depiction of Japanese
culture and, referring to Taut's appreciation of his host's cultural sophisti-
cation, writes: "To claim that this lifestyle is spiritually rich [naimenteki ni
hofu] because it 'does not lose sight of the traditions of ancient culture' is
absurd-the standards for the spiritual are so very low." 64 With this Ango
substitutes spirit for established tradition as the measure of culture.
The spirit at the core of Ango's cultural practice precludes static theoreti-
cal definitions, formalization, and even any degree of self-consciousness.
While Taut had to discover Japan, we have had no such need for we are
Japanese.... Japan does not arise from some explication of its spirit; nor
can something like the Japanese spirit be explained. If the everyday life of
the Japanese is healthy, Japan itself is in good health.65
Not only does Ango locate his essence of Japaneseness in existence itself
("we are Japanese"), he also implies that having transcended concerns with
indigenous cultural practices and national identity indicates the attainment
of a higher spiritual state.
[Westerners] laugh because we look funny waddling along with our short
bowlegs draped in trousers. That's just fine. As long as we don't obsess over
that kind of thing but rather set our sights on goals more lofty, the last laugh
might not be theirs after all.66

65. Ibid., p. 125.
66. Ibid., p. 126.
Here we see a rhetorical trope used by Ango throughout the essay, the use
of antinomy to simultaneously deny and affirm the very same thing. He
rejects the idea of a "Japanese spirit" only to subsequently reinstate it in a
realm that is both "lofty" and, simultaneously, grounded in an everyday life
lived amidst tacky chairs and tables. The spirit infusing Ango's Japanese
culture is so pure, so disinterested, so authentic that it transcends obsessions
with both the nature of Japan and matters of the spirit.
This purity of spirit drives the iconoclasm described above, the transcen-
dence of petty intellectual constructions such as cultural identity and artistic
refinement allowing (or actually requiring) Ango to choose moonshine over
the tea ceremony, streetcars over temples, a parking lot over the Horyuji.
Ango's polemic through all of this is rooted in what he describes as "the
things that must be" (nakereba naranu mono), "the necessities of daily
life" (seikatsu no hitsuyo), "uncontrollable needs" (yamu bekarazaru hi-
tsuyo), or, most often, simply "necessities" or "needs" (hitsuyo). Impor-
tantly, these "needs," and the "proper desires" (seito na yokyi) from which
they arise, are not set in opposition to national identity or an ideology of
ethnic culture. On the contrary, fidelity to these desires and needs is the heart
of authenticity at both the personal and national levels: the "health" of the
everyday life of each Japanese translates directly to the wellbeing of the
nation, as Ango writes in the passage quoted above. Elsewhere he states:
"Though ancient culture may be destroyed, our day-to-day lives [seikatsu]
would not come to an end, and as long as these are intact, our uniqueness
is assured." 67 The uniqueness of Japan, its national identity, is contingent
upon the very same conditions as the spiritual authenticity of the individual:
a fidelity to plebeian needs and desires that brooks no interference from the
intellect.
In the second section of the essay, "Zokuaku ni tsuite (ningen wa ningen
o)," Ango sets up a hierarchy of the spiritual purity, or personal authenticity,
that defines "Japaneseness." At the peak of this hierarchy are phenomena
and individuals fully realized, things exhibiting no discrepancy between
their ideals and their existence. The quintessential example is nature it-
self, but Ango also identifies three individuals who embody this complete
self-realization: poet Matsuo Basho (1644-94), Southern School (nanga)
painter Taigado (a.k.a. Ike no Taiga, 1723-76), and poet-monk Ryokan
(1758?-1831). Of the three, Ango has the most to say about Basho, whom
he depicts as having transcended all poetic conventions and consequently
able to depict "unmediated landscape [chokusetsu nafiWkei] and at the same
time unmediated concepts [chokusetsu na gainen]." 68 This image of an in-
dividual who has gone beyond (or beneath) all intellectual interference is
obviously beholden to Buddhist (most likely Zen) images of the enlightened
67. Ibid., p. 124.

68. Ibid., p. 133.
individual. Of Taigado and Ryokan, Ango writes, "Studios and temples

were not meaningless to them; rather, they realized that the absolute was
unobtainable and, rejecting the idea of compromise, chose instead a purity
wherein nothingness is the absolute value [naki ni shikazaru no seiketsu]."69
The ultimate spiritual state, then, is one in which no concessions are made.
While an uncompromising purity sits at the pinnacle of Ango's hierar-
chy, at the bottom rests all art and actions that are tainted by intellectual
contrivances mustered in the interest of supplementing or tempering the ex-
pression of one's desires. In that such cerebral manipulations compromise
the initial, primal desire, Ango believes they render the entire endeavor in-
authentic. This perspective inspires Ango's disdain for all manifestations of
the wabi aesthetic, including Southern School painting and landscape or
rock gardens (such as that at Ryoanji). Of Bruno Taut's beloved tea room,
Ango writes:
The tea room is designed around the idea of simplicity. Still, it is not a
product of the spirit wherein [an uncompromised] nothingness is the ulti-
mate value. For this spirit every last ounce of energy deliberately expended
is impure and garrulous. However much a tokonoma may exude an aura of
rustic simplicity, the efforts invested in producing that effect render it, by
definition, inferior to nothingness.70
In other words, the perversity of straining to artificially construct an illu-

sion of the natural renders the entire enterprise inauthentic. This perspective
leads Ango to reject the distinction between the refined Katsura Detached
Palace and the gaudy T6shogu; both are similarly products of a necessarily
compromised materiality.
Resting between the perfectly realized and the fatally compromised is
the third category of Ango's spiritual hierarchy. Those of us unable to em-
brace nothingness as an ultimate value should strive to express ourselves in
the following mode:
Although that harsh critical spirit centered on nothingness as an ultimate

value may exist, an art based on this ideal is inconceivable. There is no such
thing as art without form. Therefore, if one were to attempt to incorporate
the ideal of nothingness in the creation of a material beauty, it would make
more sense to reject the contrived simplicity of something like the tea room
and instead attempt to bring the ideal to fruition in the greatest extravagance
humanly possible, pushing a worldly vulgarity to its very limits. If both
simplicity and ostentation are ultimately vulgar, then surely one is better off
adopting a magnanimity capable of embracing a vulgarity that revels in its
vulgarity rather than clinging to a pettiness that remains vulgar in spite of
attempts to transcend that state.71
69. Ibid., p. 134.

70. Ibid.
71. Ibid.
It is this rejection of intellectual contrivance (the method of a tea room) in

favor of an unmediated, unrestrained expression (vulgarity pushed to its
limits) that Ango finds authentic and pure. His vision shows no concern for
the nature of the needs or desires that sit at the root of the expression. He
wants only that we live true to ourselves: "I yearn for those who once lived
true to their desires-the common man living a common life without apol-
ogy, the petty man living a petty life with no regrets." 72 It is the purity and
authenticity of this spiritual state that defines Ango's Japanese culture.
Through this hierarchy of spiritual purity Ango establishes icons of his
own and, as with Taut, many of them are architectural. Two such icons of
authenticity have been mentioned briefly above: Kyoto's Arashiyama The-
ater, with its stench of urine and clumsy, raunchy performances, and the
Kurumazaki Shrine, where patrons petition the gods for cold hard cash, and
in very specific amounts. Ango celebrates these sites for their embrace of
the human condition with all its foibles: the Arashiyama Theater reveling in
the direct expression of raw human needs (entertainment, bodily functions,
sexual titillation) and the Kurumazaki Shrine sanctioning the basic human
desire for wealth by allowing an unmediated expression of greed.
To these Ango adds paragons of "beauty." In "Bi ni tsuite," the fourth
and final section of the essay, he delineates an aesthetic that parallels his
Japanese spirit; just as the spirit is defined by a lack of concern for matters
of the spirit, his concept of beauty is predicated on a rejection of the beau-
tiful. Grounded in necessity, Ango's aesthetic is the polar opposite of Taut's
quaint, orientalist wabi. To illustrate his point, Ango explains the "beauty"
of Kosuge Prison, a dry ice factory, and a battleship.
How could these three things be so beautiful? The reason lies in the fact that
they have no processed beauty added solely for ornamentation. Not a single
beam or sheet of steel has been added in the interest of beauty, nor has a
single beam or sheet of steel been removed because it was not aesthetically
pleasing. That which is needed, and only that, is placed where it is needed.
With anything superfluous removed, the unique shapes demanded by neces-
sity emerge. These are shapes true to themselves, and they bear no resem-
blance to any other thing. Where needed the beams are ruthlessly warped,
the sheets of steel are stretched unevenly, and rails jut out of nowhere. It
is all just necessity, pure and simple. Other pre-existing concepts could
not muster the strength to obstruct necessity's unstoppable creation of these
things.73
This aesthetic, then, is a direct manifestation of the purity and authenticity

of spirit that Ango posits as a defining characteristic of the Japanese. Re-
maining true to our most primal needs and desires is the lifeblood of Japa-
nese culture.
72. Ibid., p. 135.

73. Ibid., pp. 139-40.
Beauty for beauty's sake is not sincere; it is not, in the end, authentic...
Just look-planes fly overhead, iron warships ply the seas, trains clatter by
on elevated rails. Our day-to-day lives are healthy and as long as this is so
our culture is healthy, even if we do pride ourselves on replicating cheap
Western-style prefabs. Our traditions, too, are healthy.74
A fidelity to personal needs translates directly into the nation's well-being.

Though Ango's appeal to everyday necessities as the root of culture ap-
pears to liberate him from a repressive ideology of nation, an equally limit-
ing mode of thought takes its place. For Ango the proper mode of being,
and of being Japanese, is to act directly on one's most primal desires. As
such it is no coincidence that the sites he champions include not only those
promoting sexual titillation (Arashiyama Theater) and greed (Kurumazaki
Shrine) but also those accommodating even more oppressive desires: coer-
cion (Kosuge Prison), exploitation (the factory), and violence (the battle-
ship). Though he does escape essentialist, orientalist definitions of culture,
in their place Ango ends up positing unbridled assertions of primal desires
as near-perfect manifestations of the pure Japanese spirit.
This dimension is most evident in the hero Ango offers, Toyotomi Hide-
yoshi (1536-98). While a desire to undermine each and every one of Taut's
examples, including Hideyoshi, is part of the motivation, Ango's deifies this
man mainly due to the perfect fit between Ango's authentic spirit and the
legacy of this headstrong warrior. Describing the various building projects
Hideyoshi undertook, Ango writes:
All of them are the epitome of artifice; they are extravagant to the extreme.
As long as the work was carried out along those lines, Hideyoshi was open
to any and all interpretations. When he was building a castle, he would
gather the biggest damned boulders in the realm ... Producing art and tak-
ing a shit were alike: both were endeavors born of the most vulgar inten-
tions. Still, the works have an undeniable decisiveness about them. They
have a feeling of stability .... There is nothing of elegance or pleasure in
Hideyoshi's work. Each and every thing that he did was an expression of a
fanatical desire for things unparalleled in the realm. There is no evidence of
hesitation, no trace of even the slightest restraint. He wanted all the beautiful
women in the realm, and, when denied, somebody would end up like Sen
no Rikyfi: dead. Hideyoshi was able to demand anything, even the impos-
sible. And he did.75
Though Ango does not explicitly note it here, it was precisely Hideyoshi's
"fanatical desire for things unparalleled in the realm" that prompted him to
attempt-not once but twice-to invade and colonize the Korean Penin-
sula. Neither Ango nor his readers could have failed to notice the parallel
74. Ibid., p. 141.

75. Ibid., pp. 134-35.
between Hideyoshi's legacy of invasion and the imperialism of their own

historical moment.
These aspects of Ango's vision strongly suggest that the conventional
claims made for "Nihon bunka shikan" are, at best, one-sided. Readings of
the essay as a defense of the individual in the face of the state or as a dis-
mantling of cultural identity are both simplistic. While in his emphasis on
"desires" and "needs" over theories Ango seems to be defending the inter-
ests of the individual in opposition to those of the state, he is, in fact, con-
flating the two. While wartime slogans such as "Zeitaku wa teki da" pit the
individual's quest to satisfy personal desires against the state's efforts to
quell consumption, Ango's Japanese culture erases that friction: the indi-
vidual's pursuit of authenticity through a struggle for sake, sex, and money
is rendered an exercise of national character and a replication of the very
same act the nation is performing at another level, that is, military conquest
and the pursuit of colonies.
Ango's promotion of unmediated assertion is reflected in the essay's
style itself. In keeping with his suspicion of reason and logic, Ango's style
avoids it, opting instead for a casual, autobiographical, and anecdotal prose
which slips unexpectedly into philosophical aphorisms. A figure in one of
his own novels offers the perfect characterization when he labels Ango's
style "a cross between some cheesy vaudeville act and the Analects of Con-
fucius." 76 Such writing blurs the line between Ango the man, Ango the
synecdoche for all Japanese, and Ango the theorist of national character.
Relying less on reason and more on mood to make its point, this disarming
blend offers no stable subjectivity and is hence almost immune to critique.77
The title of the essay reflects this merging of individual and nation as
well. While the essay is usually referred to in English as "A Personal View
of Japanese Culture," the very same characters might be interpreted as "A
View of the Self in Japanese Culture." The source of the gaze is left am-
biguous. The self depicted is hardly a self at all, introspection and sustained
self-determination being erased in favor of a fidelity to impulses and an
almost animal-like state.78 Followed to its logical conclusions, the ideal
Japanese self constructed by Ango, "liberated" from intellectual contriv-
76. Sakaguchi, Furenzoku satsujinjiken, in SAZ, Vol. 10, p. 88.

77. For an exploration of why literary style and rhetoric may have been more important
than content and message, see Alan Tansman's review of Kevin Doak's Dreams of Difference
in Journal of Japanese Studies, Vol. 21, No. 2 (Summer 1995), pp. 434-40.
78. Ango himself sometimes took this step, intentionally blurring the lines between man
and animal in his fiction. This move is most notable in "Hakuchi," the first line of which reads:
"Various species lived in the house: human beings, a pig, a dog, a hen, a duck. But actually
there was hardly any difference in their style of lodging or in the food they ate." See SAZ,
Vol. 2, pp. 447- 67. The translation is by George Saito, "The Idiot," in Ivan Morris, ed., Mod-
em Japanese Stories (Rutland, Vt.: Charles E. Tuttle Company, 1962), pp. 383-415.
ances like tradition (or ethics), is perfectly capable-in fact ideally suited
to-acts of aggression and violence.79 Waged partly in the name of cleans-
ing the spirit of distorting ideologies and intellectual mediation, Japan's
"holy war" was fueled by just such Japanese selves.
Denial of Self, Affirmation of Self: The Primal Japanese and the War
Ango's point is at many levels so appealing that the reader easily fails to
notice that he reifies, at a deeper level, a cultural nationalism as dangerous
as the one he appears to be sweeping away. This phenomenon can be seen
in the very critics who champion Ango as an oppositional voice. Takahashi
Haruo claims that in "Nihon bunka shikan" Ango "tramples" on the sacred
ground of cultural identity, making a "dangerous gamble" with both his
"subversive thought" (han ken'i teki shiso) and "critique of the wartime
romanticism of Japanese cultural identity." Still, two pages later Takahashi
writes: "Ango rejects the false images of things 'Japanese' and offers in
their place a vibrant, true image of Japan." 80 The intoxicating sense of lib-
eration emanating from Ango's prose blinds Takahashi to the contradiction
inherent in speaking of a sweeping critique of cultural identity that produces
a "vibrant, true image of Japan."
The same contradiction can be seen in Okuno Takeo's reading of Ango.
As quoted above, Okuno speaks of Ango as a rational spirit striking a bold
blow against the wartime discourse on the Japanese spirit. Still, while read-
ing Ango as opposed to the ideology of cultural nationalism, Okuno simul-
taneously absorbs his theory of the Japanese as a pure, dynamic race unre-
strained by abstract thought.
Sakaguchi Ango possesses a grandness of scale that propels him beyond the
borders of the cozy category of "Japanese." The trajectory of his spirit is
just too big and fierce to be contained therein. When I read "Nihon bunka
shikan" I am convinced that of all people it is Ango who is truly the proto-
type for all Japanese, and this at the deepest level. Beneath our post-Yayoi,
tamed, superficial personalities, doesn't each and every Japanese have an
Ango-like nature? We might label it the nature of Jomon [ca. 8000-300 BC]
man, who lived by hunting, fishing, and gathering. This nature is wild, ever
changing, and nomadic; it does not cling to old things but smashes them
one after the other and leaves them behind; it rejoices in the new, it imitates,
creates, and adapts.81
79. Ango's writings often include celebrations of such violence. See, for example, "Sa-
kura no mori no mankai no shita," in SAZ, Vol. 3, pp. 352-68. On Ango's misogyny, see Steen,
"To Live and to Fall," pp. 171-210.
80. Takahashi, " 'Nihon bunka shika' to 'Darakuron' no aida," pp. 305-6 and 308.
81. Okuno, SakaguchiAngo (1972), pp. 346-47. On Okuno's role in establishing Ango's
legacy, see Steen, "To Live and to Fall," pp. 213-25.
Like Takahashi, Okuno does not recognize the contradiction in reading

Ango as both an opponent of cultural nationalism and as a prototype for
some homo Japonicus. This reaction, however, is precisely what Ango's
works induce. Prehistoric man, living at an almost instinctual level and
seemingly free from the convoluted intellectual conventions that subse-
quently accrued to mankind, is close to what Ango advocates. Furthermore,
it is no coincidence that Okuno speaks not of a generic prehistoric man but
rather the specifically Japanese Jomon man-in Ango's "Nihon bunka shi-
kan" the fate of the individual struggling to break through the impasse of
the intellect and reason is inextricably tied to the well-being of the Japanese
nation. Though Okuno believes Ango has freed him from "the wartime
ethics, ideology, and taboos" of the early 1940s military regime, he has in
fact been indoctrinated into an alternative cultural nationalism, one almost
invisible. This subtle reification of that which has ostensibly been rejected
is what most readers of "Nihon bunka shikan" fail to acknowledge.
The spiritual dimension of Ango's nationalism is fully in keeping with
the characterization of Japanese wartime propaganda offered by John W.
Dower in War Without Mercy. While the United States concentrated on vili-
fying and de-humanizing the enemy, efforts in Japan were directed more at
emphasizing Japan's own inherent virtue, the greatest of which was a spiri-
tual purity: "In countless ways, the Japanese presented themselves as being
'purer' than others-a concept that carried both ancient religious connota-
tions and complex contemporary ramifications." 82 While detailed explica-
tions of this purity could be found in a variety of texts, at "the everyday
level, purification was understood to mean (1) expunging foreign influences,
(2) living austerely, and (3) fighting and, if need be, dying for the em-
peror." 83 One might add that while perhaps not evident at the "everyday
level," a liberation from intellectual contrivances was part of this purity, too.
Ango's goal was the attainment of the same pure, bright heart (seimeishin),
"free of encumbrances, not being enslaved by any one deed or thing," ad-
vocated in the Kokutai no hongi (Cardinal principles of our national pol-
ity, 1937).84
Dower demonstrates how the "complex contemporary ramifications" of
the Japanese obsession with purity pushed the war effort to the level of a
merciless race war. To Dower's argument we might add that purity, con-
ceived as a liberation from abstractions and as a movement toward an un-
82. John Dower, War Without Mercy (New York: Pantheon Books, 1986), p. 205.
83. Ibid., p. 228.
84. Hall, ed., Kokutai No Hongi, pp. 100-101. Couched in terms of a defense of Japan's
particularity in opposition to the universalist discourse of the West, Kokutai no hongi includes
an extended polemic against the intellectual abstractions whereby man "loses sight of the
totality and concreteness of human beings" (p. 176). In this respect it shares much with Ango's
essay.
mediated expression of desires, was a part of this as well. One explicitly

imperialistic tract that reveals the link between Ango's purity and Japan's
national mission is philosopher Nishitani Keiji's contribution to the infa-
mous "Overcoming the Modern" symposium of 1942. Building on the work
of his teacher, Nishida Kitar6, Nishitani argued that the only way to over-
come the fragmented modern self was to attain a "position of subjective
nothingness" (shutai teki mu no tachiba).85 This move parallels Ango's idea
of authenticity and his "emptying" of Japan's national identity through his
iconoclasm.
Nishitani, however, does not stop there. The attainment of a "subjective
nothingness" creates a "true subjectivity" (shin no shutai-sei) capable of
creating culture free of the contradictions of modernity.86 Nishitani's reha-
bilitation of a subjectivity from the "nothingness" to which he had relegated
it just a page before parallels Ango's resurrection of a national self based
upon a lofty spirit that had transcended just such plebeian concerns. This
antinomical trope allows Nishitani to make his next move. Concerning Ja-
pan's military aggression in China and the construction of a Greater East
Asia, Nishitani writes:
the situation should be one in which the nation [Japan] is manifesting that
aspect of itself that is a fundamental denial of self. This being the case,
Japan ... could rightly assert its authority as the leading nation of the pres-
ent time. In short, Japan's denial of self makes possible a proper self affir-
mation .... This denial of self is also behind our awakening anew to the
concept of "the eight corners of the world pulled under one roof [hakko
ichiu]" as the guiding principle of our nation today.87
This "self affirmation" takes the form of Japanese aggression on the conti-
nent and the war with the Allied Forces; the "one roof" under which all will
stand is, of course, Japan's. Nishitani's explicit (albeit convoluted and some-
what tortured) advocacy of Japan's military aggression is rooted in the very
same logic as Sakaguchi Ango's "Nihon bunka shikan." The conception of
nation, too, is the same.
Conclusion: "Darakuron" and the

Abiding Nationalism of Postwar Japan
The defining moment in Ango's career is undoubtedly the publication of

"Darakuron" in April 1946. Okuno compared its impact to the emperor's
declaration of the end of the war, and another critic has gone so far as to
claim:
85. Nishitani Keiji, "'Kindai no ch6koku' shiron," in Kawakami Tetsutaro et al., Kindai
no chokoku, ed. Takeuchi Yoshimi (Tokyo: Toyamab6, 1990), p. 24.
86. Ibid., p. 25.
87. Ibid., p. 34.
There is no other document in Japan's entire long history that so captured

the essence of its age and had such an enormous impact on people's spirits.
"On Decadence" [ "Darakuron" ] freed people from the possession of war,
returned to them their rightful selves, and gave them the confidence to live.88
Though the claims may be somewhat exaggerated, there is no doubt that

"Darakuron" struck a chord in the ruins of postwar Japan, inspiring many
in the task of restructuring their ideas as they rebuilt their homes and lives.
This postwar essay shares many things with the wartime "Nihon bunka
shikan." In terms of contents, Ango's rereading of the classic story of the
47 samurai in "Nihon bunka shikan" appears almost word for word in
"Darakuron" as well. More importantly, though, the two essays are very
similar in terms of rhetorical technique and message. Both are ruthlessly
iconoclastic and both advocate as proper spiritual goal a more authentic,
close-to-the-bone mode of life, one free from ideological filters. Whereas in
"Nihon bunka shikan" Ango had toppled icons such as the Horyuji, the tea
ceremony with its wabi aesthetic, and Kyoto as the city of a glorious ancient
culture, in "Darakuron" he turns his sharp wit on military icons and the
ideology of the emperor system.
The literary (and literal) deification of the tokkotai, the Special Attack
Forces, which epitomized selfless sacrifice for the nation is negated in one
sharp line: "The young kamikaze pilots scattered like cherry blossoms, but
now half the bunch are black marketeers." 89 Ango also takes on the most
sacred, untouchable symbol of the nation: the emperor. This had been the
most taboo of topics since the mid-1930s, when Minobe Tatsukichi was
persecuted for proposing that the emperor was not sovereign but rather the
highest organ of the state (tenno kikan setsu).90 The emperor system was fair
game now, though, and Ango avails himself of the opportunity to work his
magic on this icon, too.
The emperor system did not come into being because of the emperors.
Though there are occasions when an emperor pulled off a coup all by him-
self, generally speaking they did nothing, and there is not a single coup that
88. Nihon bungaku no rekishi, Vol. 12, p. 368; quoted in Jay Rubin, "From Wholesome-
ness to Decadence: The Censorship of Literature under the Allied Occupation," Journal of
Japanese Studies, Vol. 11, No. 1 (Winter 1985), p. 77.
89. Sakaguchi Ango, "Darakuron," in SAZ, Vol. 7, p. 197. This translation is from Rubin,
"From Wholesomeness to Decadence," p. 77. Interestingly, as soon as postwar Japan began
vilifying the kamikaze, Ango switched his stance and began praising them. The U.S. Occupa-
tion forces labeled his essay, "Tokk6tai ni sasagu" (An offering to the kamikaze, 1947), "mili-
taristic," and repressed it. It appeared in print for the first time in 2000. See Sakaguchi Ango,
"Tokkotai ni sasagu," in Vol. 16 of Sekii Mitsuo et al., eds., Sakaguchi Ango zenshu (Tokyo:
Chikuma Shobo, 1998-2000), Vol. 16, pp. 740-43. I would like to thank Ogino Anna for
calling this essay to my attention.
90. See Mitchell, Censorship in Imperial Japan, pp. 274-77.
ended successfully. In the end the emperor would always end up exiled to
some island or escaping deep into the hills. Furthermore, in the final analy-
sis, the recognition of the imperial house was always for a political reason.
Just when it had been forgotten by society, it would be hauled out by poli-
ticians; its political raison d'etre was something sniffed out by politicians
who had observed the idiosyncrasies of the Japanese people. In response
they came up with the emperor system. What they proposed did not have to
be the imperial house. It could very well have been the family of Confucius,
Gautama the Buddha, or even Lenin. It was pure coincidence that things
didn't turn out that way.91
Portraying the emperor as a pawn in the hands of more astute political play-
ers, and the entire imperial house as a random product fully interchangeable
with a host of alien authorities, was a shocking deviation from the homage
paid the emperor during the war. Though the targets have changed, Ango's
"Darakuron" is the same sort of wild rampage in the field of the sacred that
he had worked in his wartime essay.
A key word in Ango's "Nihon bunka shikan" had been "vulgarity"
(zokuaku), a concept Ango had recast to signify the spiritual authenticity
inherent in actions uncompromised by intellectual considerations. In the
postwar essay the very same concept is represented by the word "deca-
dence" (daraku) and the related "to fall" (ochiru). As Jay Rubin notes, this
was Ango's answer to the repressive ideologies of sacrifice and wholesome-
ness that were emphasized during the war.92 Ango writes:
Man does not change. He just returns to his human state. Man falls. Faithful
retainers and saintly women fall. There is no way to avoid this, nor would
an avoidance save man. Man lives, man falls. There is no convenient short-
cut to salvation that exists outside of this. We do not fall because we have
lost the war. We fall because we are human; we fall because we are
alive.... Like man, Japan, too, must fall. It must redeem itself by falling to
the very depths and there finding itself. Redemption through politics is but
a surface phenomenon and of no value at all.93
Just as he had in "Nihon bunka shikan," Ango conflates a pure state of

humanity with a true image of the nation of Japan. The essence of both is
located in a mode of existence that has escaped, or fallen through, attractive
but inevitably misleading intellectual constructs.
It is easy to see how this vision would reverberate in the consciousness
of postwar Japanese. On one level, it put a positive spin on what was a very
destitute moment. By emphasizing the potential for salvation in a landscape
wiped clean of both material and ideological legacies, Ango inspired hope
91. Sakaguchi, "Darakuron," p. 199.

92. Rubin, "From Wholesomeness to Decadence," pp. 79-80.
93. Sakaguchi, "Darakuron," pp. 203-4.
in many and paved the way for the many radical changes that were soon to
come. As Dower claims, the American occupation forces "set about doing
what no other occupation force had done before: remaking the political,
social, cultural, and economic fabric of a defeated nation, and in the process
changing the very way of thinking of its populace." 94 This ambitious, wide-
ranging occupation agenda meant that without an acceptance, or rather an
embrace, of their "fallen" state, the people and the nation were doomed
to continue the fight, though now on ideological rather than geographical
battlefields. Ango's vision allowed a tired population to avoid this battle.
Ango's message was comforting on a second level as well. His appeal
to a spiritual purity distinguished by its transcendence of obsessions with
traditional culture and national character was a familiar refrain. It echoed
his own wartime writing as well as the antinomical rhetoric of other, more
nationalistic thinkers (including Nishitani Keiji with his "position of sub-
jective nothingness"). In this sense, Ango's wartime and postwar essays
provide a concrete example of an ideological trope that not only survived
both the war and its aftermath, but actually served as an integral component
of the revolutionary dimensions of both.
Ango was slightly off the mark in the reason he provides for man's in-
ability to fall completely, his inability to slip the chains of ideological
constructs.
Still, it is not possible for man to fall eternally, it is not possible for him to
hit rock bottom. The reason? In the face of hardship man cannot maintain a
heart of steel. Man is pathetic, man is frail, and for this he is laughable. But
he is just too weak to fall to the very bottom.95
In fact, the obstacle preventing a complete fall from ideological castles

the air is not human weakness, as Ango would have us believe, but rath
the ubiquity of ideology. We cannot conceive of a "fall" without the spa
to fall through. Without recognizing and engaging that space, we a
doomed to plummet out of control, like Ango feeling the thrill of the fa
but able neither to determine where we land nor to affect the space throu
which we fall. Though he escapes the more explicitly repressive dimensio
of the ideology of self and nation, these concepts themselves remain full
intact in his work.
Where Ango did get it right, though, was his qualification of the radic
changes he was noting in "Darakuron": "People haven't changed, they've
always been like this. The times have changed. The world. Its outer skin."
94. Dower, Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II (New York: W. W
Norton and Co., 1999), p. 78.
95. Sakaguchi, "Darakuron," p. 204.
96. Ibid., p. 197. Translation by Rubin, "From Wholesomeness to Decadence," p. 78.
People did stay the same-the wartime censors and the pos
embracing Ango's vision of a national culture so deep that
exhaustively express it nor any logic effectively dislodge i
DARTMOUTH COLLEGE

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The Society for Japanese Studies

Culture, Nationalism, and Sakaguchi Ango

Culture, Nationalism, and Sakaguchi Ango

Abstract: Studies of the writer Sakaguchi Ango (1906-55) convention

"Nihon bunka shikan" (A personal view of Japanese culture, 1942)

A number of people provided valuable suggestions at various stages of this

More than traditional beauty or intrinsically Japanese forms, we need more

In addition to justifying the sacrifice of Japan's grand architectural and

In the oppressive atmosphere of Japan in 1942, inflammatory, subversive

antecedent to such abstractions and ideology. Although presented as a lib-

The Rise and Fall of Icons

In a certain sense it is neither surprising that Hirano would be concerned

tion based on traditional icons while simultaneously promoting an austere

completely plebeian, its gaiety is inappropriate, and its tediousness is ex-

The mausoleum at Nikk6 is considered the epitome of kitsch [ikamono],

Obviously popular treatises on Japan's cultural traditions were influencing

20. Ibid., p. 50.

In "Nihon bunka shikan" Ango gleefully upsets these ideologically

regardless of personality an individual is drawn by some innate urge to abide

The key issue is finding what is "suitable" or convenient, regardless of na-

25. Sakaguchi, "Shikan," p. 134.

Critical Reception and Slippage in the Record

33. Sakaguchi, "Shikan," pp. 123-24.

Readers moved by "Darakuron" naturally turned to the wartime "Nihon

Akutagawa Award-winning novelist and professor of French literature Ogino

The collection of stories is an attempt at that repayment by those "aflame

47. Saegusa Yasutaka, "Nenpu," in Sakaguchi Ango, Darakuron (Tokyo: Kadokawa

Ango's "Nihon bunka shikan," which in the standard reading is certainly

53. Jay Rubin, Injurious to Public Morals, especially pp. 225-78.

Though generations have championed Ango as a voice of resistance,

Anti-Intellectualism and a By-Product: Nationalism

Though it is true that various theories of Japaneseness are debunked in

Farce works to affirm all sides of man-completely, and without leaving a

This indiscriminating affirmation, and the sense of liberation it induces, is

contrived discursive constructions of nation is the production of an alterna-

64. Sakaguchi, "Shikan," p. 122.

67. Ibid., p. 124.

individual. Of Taigado and Ryokan, Ango writes, "Studios and temples

In other words, the perversity of straining to artificially construct an illu-

Although that harsh critical spirit centered on nothingness as an ultimate

69. Ibid., p. 134.

It is this rejection of intellectual contrivance (the method of a tea room) in

This aesthetic, then, is a direct manifestation of the purity and authenticity

72. Ibid., p. 135.

A fidelity to personal needs translates directly into the nation's well-being.

74. Ibid., p. 141.

between Hideyoshi's legacy of invasion and the imperialism of their own

76. Sakaguchi, Furenzoku satsujinjiken, in SAZ, Vol. 10, p. 88.

Like Takahashi, Okuno does not recognize the contradiction in reading

mediated expression of desires, was a part of this as well. One explicitly

Conclusion: "Darakuron" and the

The defining moment in Ango's career is undoubtedly the publication of

There is no other document in Japan's entire long history that so captured

Though the claims may be somewhat exaggerated, there is no doubt that

Just as he had in "Nihon bunka shikan," Ango conflates a pure state of

91. Sakaguchi, "Darakuron," p. 199.

In fact, the obstacle preventing a complete fall from ideological castles

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