Traveling Texts and the Work of Afro-Japanese Cultural Production: Two Haiku and a Microphone [1 ed.] 1498505473, 9781498505475

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TRAVELING TEXTS AND THE WORK OF AFRO-JAPANESE CULTURAL PRODUCTION

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New Studies of Modern Japan Series Editors: Doug Slaymaker and William M. Tsutsui New Studies of Modern Japan is a multidisciplinary series that consists primarily of original studies on a broad spectrum of topics dealing with Japan since the mid-nineteenth century. Additionally, the series aims to bring back into print classic works that shed new light on contemporary Japan. The series speaks to cultural studies (literature, translations, film), history, and social sciences audiences. We publish compelling works of scholarship, by both established and rising scholars in the field, on a broad arena of topics, in order to nuance our understandings of Japan and the Japanese. Advisory Board Michael Bourdaghs, University of Chicago Rebecca Copeland, Washington University in St. Louis Aaron Gerow, Yale University Yoshikuni Igarashi, Vanderbilt University Koichi Iwabuchi, Waseda University T. J. Pempel, University of California, Berkeley Julia Adeney Thomas, University of Notre Dame Dennis Washburn, Dartmouth College Merry White, Boston University Titles in the Series Haiku Poetics in Twentieth Century Avant-Garde Poetry, by Jeffrey Johnson Literary Mischief: Sakaguchi Ango, Culture, and the War, edited by James Dorsey and Doug Slaymaker Japan’s Siberian Intervention, 1918–1922: “A Great Disobedience Against the People,” edited by Paul E. Dunscomb Truth from a Lie: Documentary, Detection, and Reflexivity in Abe Kōbō’s Realist Project, by Margaret S. Key Japan’s Backroom Politics: Factions in a Multiparty Age, by Watanabe Tsuneo, translated and with commentary by Robert D. Eldridge Resilient Borders and Cultural Diversity: Internationalism, Brand Nationalism, and Multiculturalism in Japan, by Koichi Iwabuchi Traveling Texts and the Work of Afro-Japanese Cultural Production: Two Haiku and a Microphone, edited by William H. Bridges IV and Nina Cornyetz Japan’s Multilayered Democracy, edited by Sigal Ben-Rafael Galanti, Nissim Otmazgin, and Alon Levkowitz

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TRAVELING TEXTS AND THE WORK OF AFRO-JAPANESE CULTURAL PRODUCTION Two Haiku and a Microphone

Edited by William H. Bridges IV and Nina Cornyetz

LEXINGTON BOOKS Lanham • Boulder • New York • London

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Published by Lexington Books An imprint of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 www.rowman.com Unit A, Whitacre Mews, 26-34 Stannary Street, London SE11 4AB Copyright © 2015 by Lexington Books All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Traveling texts and the work of Afro-Japanese cultural production : two haiku and a microphone / edited by William H. Bridges IV and Nina Cornyetz. pages cm. — (New studies of modern Japan) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-4985-0547-5 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-1-4985-0548-2 (electronic) 1. African Americans—Relations with Japanese. 2. Japan— Civilization—American influences. 3. African Americans—Intellectual life. 4. Popular culture—United States—History—20th century. 5. Popular culture— Japan—History—20th century. 6. United States—Civilization—Japanese influences. 7. Cultural fusion. I. Bridges, William H., 1983– editor. II. Cornyetz, Nina, editor. E185.615.T75 2015 306—dc23 2015009096

™ The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992. Printed in the United States of America

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Contents

Acknowledgments

vii

Introduction: Work It: Traveling Texts and the Work of Reading Afro-Japanese Cultural Exchange William H. Bridges IV and Nina Cornyetz

1

Part I: Art and Performance 1

Urban Geishas: Reading Race and Gender in iROZEALb’s Paintings Crystal S. Anderson

2

The Theatrics of Japanese Blackface: Body as Mannequin Nina Cornyetz

3

Abbey Lincoln and Kazuko Shiraishi’s Art-Making as Spiritual Labor Yuichiro Onishi and Tia-Simone Gardner

31 45

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Part II: Poetry and Literature 4

5

Playing the Dozens on Zen: Amiri Baraka’s Journey from a “PreBlack” Bohemian Outsider to a “Post-American Low Coup” Poet Michio Arimitsu Richard Wright’s Haiku and Modernist Poetics Yoshinobu Hakutani

79 99

—v—

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Contents

In the Beginning: Blackness and the 1960s Creative Nonfiction of Ōe KenzaburŌ William H. Bridges IV Future-Oriented Blackness in Shōwa Robot Culture—1924 to 1963 Anne McKnight

119 141

Part III: Sound, Song, Music 8

What Is This “Black” in Japanese Popular Music? (Re)Imagining Race in a Transnational Polycultural Context Kevin Fellezs

9 Extending Diaspora: The NAACP and Up-“Lift” Cultures in the Interwar Black Pacific Shana Redmond

169

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10 Hip-Hop and Reggae in Recent Japanese Social Movements Noriko Manabe

209

11 Can the Japanese Rap? Dexter Thomas Jr.

223

12 Race, Ethnicity and Affective Community in Japanese Rastafari Marvin Sterling

239

Works Cited

253

Index

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About the Contributors

291

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Acknowledgments

W

e would like to acknowledge and thank for their generosity and support a number of institutional grants that made possible the panels and symposium that in turn made possible this volume of essays. Thanks to: the Northeast Asian Council of the Association for Asian Studies; The Humanities Initiative at New York University; the Gallatin Faculty Enrichment Fund; The East Asian Studies Department of New York University; and The Gallatin School, New York University. We would also like to extend special thanks to Dean Susanne Wofford of the Gallatin School, and for their magic, Rachel Plutzer and Theresa Anderson.

The editors and authors would like to gratefully acknowledge the use of the following: Chapter 6, “In the Beginning,” the ideas presented in which will be fully developed in an article in a future issue of positions: asia critique (Duke University Press). Chapter 8, “What Is This ‘Black’ in Japanese Popular Music?” which is an amended version of Fellezs, Kevin. “‘This Is Who I Am’: Jero, Yong, Gifted, Polycultural.” Journal of Popular Music Studies, vol. 24, no. 3: 333–356. 2012. Chapter 9, “Extending Diaspora,” sections of which were originally published in Redmond, Shana L. “Extending the Diaspora: The NAACP and Up‘Lift’ Cultures in the Interwar Black Pacific.” Anthem: Social Movements and the Sound of Solidarity in the African Diaspora. NYU Press: New York. 2013. Chapter 10, “Hip-Hop and Reggae in Recent Japanese Social Movements,” the ideas and examples in which are fully developed in the monographs The — vii —

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Revolution Will Not Be Televised: Music and the Antinuclear Movement in Japan Post-Fukushima Daiichi (Oxford University Press, 2015) and The Revolution Remixed: A Typology of Intertextuality in Protest Songs (Oxford University Press, forthcoming). Poems by Amiri Baraka: “Lines to Garcia Lorca.” Originally published as “Lines to García Lorca,” Yūgen, vol. 1, 1959: 17. “Parthenos.” Originally published as “Parthenos,” Yūgen, vol. 4, 1959: 23–26. “The Death of Nick Charles.” Originally published as “The Death of Nick Charles,” Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note, 33. Seven poems from Un Poco Low Coups. Originally published in Un Poco Low Coups, Berkeley: Ishmael Reed Publishing, 2004. “The Insidious Dr. Fu Manchu.” Originally published as “The Insidious Dr. Fu Manchu” from S.O.S. Poems 1961–2003, copyright © 2014 by The Estate of Amiri Baraka. Used by permission of Grove/Atlantic, Inc. Any third party use of this material, outside of this publication, is prohibited. By Richard Wright: Haiku originally from Wright, Richard, Yoshinobu Hakutani, Robert L. Tener, and Julia Wright. Haiku: The Last Poems of an American Icon. New York: Arcade Pub., 2012. Reprinted with permission of Skyhorse Publishing, Inc., New York. By James Weldon Johnson: Excerpt from “The Creation.” Originally published in Johnson, James Weldon. “The Creation.” In God’s Trombones: Seven Negro Sermons in Verse. New York: Viking Press, 1927. By Stuart Hall: Excerpt from “What is This ‘Black’ in Black Popular Culture? (Rethinking Race).” Originally printed in Hall, Stuart. “What is This ‘Black’ in Black Popular Culture? (Rethinking Race).” Social Justice, vol. 20, no. 1–2 (SpringSummer 1993): 104-15. Printed with permission of Social Justice. Excerpt from “Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing.” Originally published in Johnson, James Weldon. “Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing.” In God’s Trombones: Seven Negro Sermons in Verse. New York: Viking Press, 1927. By Darth Reider: Excerpts from “Safe is Dangerous.” Used with permission by Darth Reider and Da.Me.Records. By Dengarū: Excerpts from “Straight Outta 138.” Used with permission by Dengaryū.

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Introduction Work It: Traveling Texts and the Work of Reading Afro-Japanese Cultural Exchange William H. Bridges IV and Nina Cornyetz

I

n Ruth Ozeki’s recent novel, A Tale for the Time Being, the protagonist Ruth finds a diary written by a girl living in Japan washed up on the beach of Cortes Island near Vancouver in British Columbia—a literal traveling text. Examining her find, Ruth muses: Print is predictable and impersonal, conveying information in a mechanical transaction with the reader’s eye. Handwriting, by contrast, resists the eye, reveals its meaning slowly, and is as intimate as skin. Ruth stared at the page. The purple words were mostly in English, with some Japanese characters scattered here and there, but her eye wasn’t really taking in their meaning as much as a felt sense, murky and emotional, of the writer’s presence. Ruth glanced up from the page. “Of course it’s flotsam,” she said. “Or jetsam.” The book felt warm in her hands, and she wanted to continue reading but heard herself asking, instead, “What’s the difference, anyway?”1

Pondering how writing functions not just as communication but also as affect, the question that Ruth pauses to ask is an important one for us: she takes the time to consider not only the contents of her traveling text, but how it got there in the first place. This book considers the cultural work of texts informed by Afro-Japanese transculturation. Given our interest in traveling texts, it traverses a great deal of cultural terrain: this collection consists of conversations on blackface ukiyo-e, Jamaican culture in Japan, “black” robots in Japanese fiction, blackness in the fiction of Nobel laureate Ōe Kenzaburō, the Japanese translation of the Negro national anthem, ganguro girls, the haiku of Richard Wright —1—

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and the “low-coup” of Amiri Baraka, the birth of the Japanese hip-hop scene, post-Fukushima rap, and enka sensation Jero, poet Shirashi Kazuko and musician Abbey Lincoln. Even with, however, the eclectic energy that runs throughout this volume, we have—over the course of two conference panels and one symposium—come to a consensus concerning where our intellectual itinerary begins.2 First, we take up “texts” in the broadest sense of the term, as that which can be read in a socially significant way; for us, the mascara of the ganguro is no more or less of a text than the haiku of Wright. Second, the significance of our texts is rooted in the hard cultural work that they perform. It is to be expected that the traveling text is also a travailing text. These texts conduct, among other types of labor, what Lawrence Venuti calls the invisible labor of cultural and linguistic translation, the psychic labor of imagining race otherwise, physical labor—sweating in the dancehall, and intellectual labor—racing to meet the editor’s deadline, et cetera.3 The contributors to this volume attend to the cultural labor conducted by these works with an effort befitting the cultural artifacts we study: this work is composed of close readings and careful interpretations of transpacific translations, dispassionate analysis of the processes and implications of imagining race otherwise, passionate fieldwork, and, yes, races to meet the editor’s deadline. Our work is interested primarily in, to borrow Jane Tompkins’s summation, the “entirely new story [that] begins to unfold” when we attend “to the way a text offers a blueprint for survival under a specific set of political, economic, social, or religious conditions.”4 Third, we see our job as the telling of those new stories on their own terms; this is the work of a new wave of scholarship. Stephen MurphyShigematsu argues that the 1990s, on the heels of the influx of immigrant workers and globalization of Japanese labor markets in the 1980s, saw an increase in scholarship that “aimed to expose the true multiethnic nature of [Japanese] society and the monoethnic myth that conceals it.”5 Works such as John Russell’s Nihonjin no kokujinkan (The Japanese View of Blacks, 1990), Murphy-Shigematsu continues, are paradigmatic of the “first wave” of scholarship on transcultural Japan, which “greatly expanded our knowledge of minority groups in Japan,” but often ran the risk of “reinforc[ing] a dichotomy of two mutually exclusive categories of Japanese and Blacks.”6 In the wake of the first wave, a “new wave” of scholarship on transcultural Japan has emerged that attempts to further the attrition of the myth of monoethnic Japanese culture without reinforcing new myths of its own. “While not denying or belittling the importance of discrimination,” as Murphy-Shigematsu sets the table for the new wave, “this literature illuminates the complexity of the borderlands of race and nation, addressing hybridity and deconstructing the notion of essential minority subject [sic] by focusing

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on complexity and diversity among minorities . . . writing in ways that overcome the rigid binary oppositional framework of colonized and colonizer, minority and majority, oppressed and oppressor.”7 Conversely, no one has ever claimed ethnic and racial homogeneity for the United States. As we will discuss in some detail later in this introduction, many African Americans celebrated the early modern success of the Japanese nation state, as an example of a non-white culture competing, and winning, on the global political and economic stage. This admiration led some very prominent black leaders to scholarship on and familiarity with a wide variety of Japanese arts, philosophies, and more. Moonlighting black Japanologists such as W. E. B. Du Bois and George Schuyler are seminal figures—one genuine, the other, in characteristic form, more sardonic—of the burgeoning moments of “Afro-Orientalism.” From an investigation of African American haiku to an analysis of the racial performance of Japanese hip-hopster Zebra, the contributors to Traveling Texts and the Work of Afro-Japanese Cultural Production: Two Haiku and a Microphone have put in work. We all agree, however, that overcoming those rigid binaries (read: doing our work) requires that we first take a break, or, rather, that we make several breaks. This collection represents a radical break from business-as-usual disciplinary boundaries. We include contributions from both the Japanese and American academies. We are members of departments of Asian Studies, American Studies, African American Studies, English, Music, Anthropology and Interdisciplinary Studies. We are anthropologists, musicologists, and literary and cultural critics. We know, in short, what Asian Studies and African American Studies have told us for quite some time: that “discipline”—as it sets terms and puts objects and subjects of study in their place—can hinder (rather than facilitate) discussions of our inherently interdisciplinary enterprise. We know that the cross-pollinated energy of black haiku or Japanese rap is best served by interdisciplinary, transpacific dialogue. We have also vowed to take a break akin to the hiatus proposed by Ruth Ozeki. As Ruth, one of the narrators of Ozeki’s A Tale for the Time Being and alter ego of the author herself, reminds us, there are at least three components to any engagement with traveling texts. At the epicenter of the engagement is our interaction with the text: staring at it, feeling its warmth in our hands, getting “as intimate as skin” with the text. Alongside this engagement is our response to the text: the critique, the judgment, the waves of affect, the, in Ruth’s case, desire to “continue reading,” et cetera. It is here, however, at the very moment when the desire of Ozeki’s Ruth reaches its apex, that she takes a break, “asking, instead” for the difference between flotsam and jetsam. That is to say, before critiquing the content of the traveling text, Ozeki suggests that we let it “reveal its meaning slowly,” that we pause and ponder how the

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text got to us in the first place; that journey is, after all, both a vital part of the work itself and what makes our work possible. What this means for us is eschewing the rush to judgment and instead giving primacy to considerations of the paths into and out—the “roots and routes”—of Afro-Japanese cultural exchange. We focus on how traveling texts become meaningful and the social lives and afterlives that these meanings take on. We understand that this is a risky proposition; if our texts are conducting cultural work in the sense proposed by Tompkins, then we always run the risk of an “embrace of the conventional”—an intellectual complicity with the stereotyping, reification, appropriation and misrepresentation that haunts any cross-cultural exchange.8 We run this risk, however, because the journeys made by traveling texts, both their actual travels as well as the cultural, intellectual and sociopolitical travels that they inspire in those who engage with them, are all too often decimated by the salvos of judgment. Along with our decision to read slowly, we have also agreed to break away, as much as possible, from questions of representation. Or, to translate our agreement into the terms of this introduction: previous studies on AfroJapanese cultural exchange, particularly those in literary studies, often focus on the racialized body itself as a kind of traveling text. The objective becomes, then, to take the racialized body as a fraught, overwritten text and determine how it is translated (read: represented) into other, “foreign” discursive modes. (And when our endgame is the analysis of how the Other is represented, judgment is never too far behind.) To be clear, questioning the place of representation in cross-cultural exchange can be productive. One might even argue that we have a kind of ethical obligation to pose such inquiries; indeed, there are moments in this collection that consider representation. The overrepresentation, however, of representation in studies of AfroJapanese exchange speaks to what we see as the counterproductive logic that underpins our subfield. There is a tripartite rationale to the abundance of representation-driven Afro-Japanese studies. A brief overview of the history of Japanese-black cultural exchange, however, should make this rationale apparent; we promise to return to an articulation of that rationale after the historical interlude.

A Brief Overview of Afro-Japanese Cultural Exchange The seminal moment in Afro-Japanese cultural exchange coincides with the very opening of Japan. In 1853, Commodore Perry’s black ships brought a combination of epistolary and gunboat diplomacy to the shores of Japan. Almost as if to ensure that the message of the warships wasn’t overly adulter-

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ated by the cordiality of the letter, Perry—who was known to choreograph and rehearse his audiences with foreign officials—presented the Japanese with a cipher for interpreting the parallel modes of diplomacy: black bodies. As John Dower writes, “From the moment he first stepped on Japanese soil in 1853 to present the letter from President Fillmore, Perry also sought to impress the Japanese with authentic black men.”9 As Perry delivered the letter, he was flanked by two “negro[es], armed to the teeth . . . blacks, selected for the occasion . . . [and] two of the best-looking fellows of their color that the squadron could furnish.”10 The “authentic negroes furnished” by Perry served as a kind of hermeneutic aid to the Japanese as they navigated the two modes of diplomacy. On the one hand, the stalwart black soldiers coupled an ostentatious advertisement of American might with an invitation for Japan to open its doors to the allures of modernization. On the other hand, the black soldiers, insofar as they were subject to the rule of the Commodore, were less of an advertisement and more of a prognostication of what would come of Japan if it refused the invitation. If the eve of the Second Opium War didn’t make the prognostication clear, the “Plantation ‘Niggas’ of the South” in the minstrel show Perry produced for the Japanese upon his return in 1854 did. Some four days before the signing of the Treaty of Kanagawa, Commodore Perry invited Japanese commissioners aboard the USSF Powhatan for dinner and entertainment. Among the festivities: the “Japanese Olio Minstrels,” musically inclined members of Perry’s crew who put on “Ethiopian entertainment” in blackface.11 Again, the message here is clear. The variety of black performances put on by Perry for the Japanese—from being flanked by towering black soldiers to minstrel shows—are representative of something greater. By sharing in this performance of blackness, the Japanese are both invited to walk with (but always a step behind) the Commodore into the new world order. They are also reminded of black subjugation, living proof of what would happen if those black ships were to return in force.12 It didn’t take long for such politically charged social encounters to give birth to cultural artifacts. Japanese artists’ depictions of the black servants and servicemen who accompanied Perry include marginalia such as “darkie” (kuronbō) and “a hired darkie crewman” that guide the viewer in this first encounter. We also find references to “countries of sun-kissed darkies (kuronbō)” and “darkies from the African states hired on the cheap” as early as Kanagaki Robun’s (1829–1894) Aguranabe (The Beefeater, 1871) and Seiyō dōchū hizakurige (Shank’s Mare Round the West, 1870–1876).13 On the other side of the Pacific, the modern period’s inaugural contact between African Americans and the Japanese was facilitated by a series of Japanese missions. The first such mission was the 1860 Man’en gannen

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Ken-Bei shisetsu (literally the “embassy to the United States in the first year of the Man’en era,” typically translated as the “Japanese Embassy to the United States”). Charged with the ratification of the 1858 Harris Treaty, the itinerary of the 1860 mission included stops in Hawaii, San Francisco, Washington, D.C., and New York. Approximately a decade after the first embassy, the Meiji government commissioned the Iwakura Mission (Iwakura shisetsudan), a twenty-one-month circumnavigation of the modern world that included stops in Chicago, Washington, D.C., and Philadelphia. Given that both of these missions included stops in cities with a significant population of African Americans, the historians and diarists among the envoys provide us with documentation of these early Afro-Japanese encounters on American soil. In concert, these documents paint an ambivalent picture of the Japanese view of African Americans. “The members of the 1860 Embassy,” Masao Miyoshi tells us, “are nearly unanimous in rejecting all races except for themselves and the whites.”14 Take, for example, the assessment of Morita Kiyoyuki, the fourth in command of the 1860 envoys: “It seems that the whites are beautiful and shrewd and intelligent; and the blacks are ugly and stupid. So the whites always despise the blacks.”15 Morita’s assessment is clearly one that has been filtered through the opinions of his white escorts. As such, it represents the Japanese ambassador’s attempt to identify with white America, to show the world that the Kanrin Maru was no less than the USSF Powhatan. The mission documents also show, however, assessments that are less interested in identification with whiteness and more interested in the possibility of black modernization. After a tour of Washington, D.C., Kume Kunitake, the resident historian of the Iwakura Mission, recapitulated his thoughts on African Americans: Some black people achieved freedom early on, other outstanding black people were elected to the House of Representatives and still others have accumulated great wealth. Clearly, the colour of one’s skin has nothing to do with intelligence . . . It is not inconceivable that, within a decade or two, talented black people will rise and white people who do not study and work hard will fall by the wayside.16

Reminiscent of the process that John Russell deemed “race and reflexivity,” Kume superimposes the mission of D.C. blacks onto the Iwakura mission to “catch up and surpass” the West; when Kume writes of heaven helping those who help themselves irrespective of “the colour of one’s skin,” he is speaking to the Japanese condition through the proxy of the black condition. In lauding and identifying with industrious African Americans, Kume’s summary effectively turns Morita’s assessment on its head; African Americans have gone from “ugly and stupid” to “outstanding,” “intelligent,” and “talented.” To be sure, a part of what is at work here is the shift in cultural

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currents between 1860 and 1871. It should also be clear, however, that the ambivalent position vis-à-vis blackness we read across these missions is indicative of the ambivalence within the missions from the very start, making itself manifest in both the internal contradictions of single commentaries as well as the differing opinions of the various envoys. The desire to identify with white America as the standard of modernity is just as present as the desire to identify with black America as an embodiment of the possibility of a non-white alternative to that standard. This is why, alongside his derision, Morita also struggles to contain his burgeoning empathy for those whom “Nature [has] given a black exterior.”17 The next major moment in Afro-Japanese exchange came on the heels of the Iwakura Mission. The Mission’s primary objective was twofold: to renegotiate the unequal treaties promulgated in the preceding decades and to catalyze the modernization of Japan by learning from the models set by other nations. With the undeniable unattainability of the first objective, post-Iwakura Japan devoted even more of its attention and energy to the actualization of the second; more and more, mid-Meiji Japan opened itself to the modern world. In 1885, the Meiji government lifted its ban on emigration, sending workers first to the sugar plantations of Hawaii and subsequently to San Francisco and the American West. As the number of Japanese migrants swelled from the hundreds to the tens of thousands, the African American community began to take notice. Pre-1905 African American attention to Japanese immigration shared a certain affinity with the American response to the issei (first generation) Japanese. On the one hand, we have the germ of what Bill Mullen calls Afro-Orientalism: an exoticized interest in Japanese culture. “In black communities about the country,” Reginald Kearney tells us, “the popularity of the ‘Asian Negroes’ seemed to shape and encourage Japanese themes in a whole range of activities, gift giving, and entertainment”—fin de siècle cultural experiments of the kind to be explored in this volume.18 On the other hand, we also have the germ of what would become organizations such as the 1905 Asiatic Exclusion League, policies such as the “Gentleman’s Agreement” of 1907 and treatises such as the 1915 The Japanese Problem in the United States. Most first-generation Japanese émigrés were unskilled laborers. The competition they brought to the American labor market evoked bombastic, nativist responses from the black (as well as the white) press. The September 1, 1900, edition of The Broad Ax warned of “a phenomenal migration of Japanese . . . pouring into Washington and Oregon—some five thousand a month—the mere beginning of an endless tide. . . . This threatened invasion is a serious thing to all our people but especially so to the Negro. At least ninety percent of the colored labor of the country is unskilled . . . and it is precisely there [unskilled labor] that the Asiatic will commence.”19

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The nebulous allures and tensions of Afro-Japanese cultural contact, however, would come into sharp focus with Admiral Tōgō Heihachirō’s 1905 defeat of the Russian Baltic Squadron. With Japan’s victory in the Russo-Japanese War came the onset of what might be called the “Dark Princess” period of Afro-Japanese relations. W. E. B. Du Bois’s 1903 The Souls of Black Folk begins with a bold proclamation: “The problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color-line,—the relation of the darker to the lighter races of men in Asia and Africa, in America and the islands of the sea.”20 Du Bois’s writing from 1906, however, evinces his belief that Japan’s victory shifted the power dynamic of that problematic: For the first time in a thousand years a great white nation has measured arms with a colored nation and has been found wanting. The Russo-Japanese War has marked an epoch. The magic of the word “white” is already broken, and the Color Line in civilization has been crossed in modern times as it was in the great past. The awakening of the yellow races is certain. That the awakening of the brown and black races will follow in time, no unprejudiced student of history can doubt.21

The burst of cultural energy released in Japan by its successes in the RussoJapanese War is well documented; Du Bois’s 1906 commentary exemplifies the reverberations of that energy throughout black America. These reverberations shook the very foundation of the racial identity of the Japanese. If, as Michael Weiner suggests, “‘racialised’ identities are historically specific, and can only be understood in relation to other factors—economic and political—and the international environment within which they emerged and have since been transformed,” then the Russo-Japanese War solidified Japanese “yellowness” as in opposition to “whiteness,” and thus—so the thinking of Du Bois goes— in proximity to “blackness,” a kind of racial calculus that certainly was not axiomatic in 1906.22 Moreover, Japan’s stunning series of victories, which included precedent-setting tactics that influenced the course of modern warfare, implied that “yellow” opposition might challenge the framework of the modern world order. When paired with the Japanese prowess with the (modern) masters’ tools, the putative affinity between the black and yellow races was inspirational for many black intellectuals; as Marcus Garvey quipped: “The next war will be between the Negroes and the whites unless our demands for justice are recognized. . . . With Japan to fight with us, we can win such a war.”23 Alongside the burgeoning rhetoric of Afro-Japanese racial solidarity, however, ran the very real possibility that Japan was not a champion of the “darker races,” but another exploiter of them. Thinking through the possibility of Japan, Nahum Chandler writes: “It was this possibility that within and from the West ignited, on the one side, the spirit of hope and belief in a Japan

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of the future among many African Americans at the turn of the twentieth century, above all one W. E. B. Du Bois, and on the other, a sense of fear, threat, and peril—a possible challenge to existing forms of global-level hierarchy and dominance (if not always hegemony).”24 The fear of a Japan that would challenge global hierarchy via the processes of hegemony became particularly acute during Japan’s warring 1920s, 1930s and 1940s, as more and more members of Japan’s putative Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere fell under its war machine and imperial project. Japan’s aggressions against the “darker races” complicated its relationship with black intellectuals. Some, like Du Bois, continued to advocate on behalf of Japan even as they called for it to “stop aping the West and North and throw her lot definitely with the East and South.”25 Others, like Langston Hughes, were vocal and adamant in highlighting the potential contradictions of being both pro-Japanese imperialism and anti-racism. On his way home from a stint in Russia and Central Asia in 1933, Hughes’s return trip included stops in China and Japan. His activities there (such as visiting Tsukiji Little Theater before going to the kabuki theater, meeting with Madame Sun Yat Sen) aroused the suspicion of the Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department. During their interrogation of Hughes, Japanese police officials asked Hughes what the American Negro thought of the Japanese. Hughes’s reply: “Some do not think anything at all. Some think Japan might be the savior of the darker peoples of the world. And others who have had some contacts with the Japanese in the United States think quite otherwise.”26 Hughes’s assessment of Japan was clear-eyed: he admired the Japanese as “the only noncolonial nation in the Far East,” but also “hoped, however, that they [the Japanese] would not make the old mistakes of the West and, like England, France, Italy, and Germany, attempt to take over other people’s lands or make colonials of others.”27 The Japanese interrogation (and subsequent deportation) of Hughes highlights two aspects of interwar Afro-Japanese relations. First, Hughes reminds us of the nuances of black America’s response to the rise of Japan: from the sardonic, at times hyperbolic pro-Japanese sentiment of George Schuyler and his Black Internationale to the strident debunking of Japan as champion of the colored races posed by Cyril Briggs and the CPUSA, a vast spectrum of stances vis-à-vis Japan incubated during the interwar period. Second, Hughes makes it clear that Japan’s interwar maneuvering—e.g., the Anti-Comintern Pact of 1936, the 1937 onset of the Second Sino-Japanese War—placed a considerable strain, an intellectual burden of proof, on pro-Japanese African Americans, who had to account for Japan conducting a “race war” on the behalf of non-whites even as it waged war with nonwhites. The bombing of Pearl Harbor further exacerbated this intellectual dilemma. Now, in the words of Marc Gallicchio, “African American leaders needed to find some

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way to fend off charges of sedition without abandoning their quest for equality.”28 One solution to this dilemma was the Double V campaign, which urged black Americans to fight for both victory over the Axis powers abroad (the first “V”) as well as victory over Jim Crow at home (the second). The culmination of the Pacific War and the onset of the Allied Occupation of Japan made for heady times between the African Americans and the Japanese. The Double V campaign ended in partial victory: African Americans’ contributions to the war effort did not translate into immediate civil rights or economic opportunity. Postwar African Americans enlisted in droves in search of a better life on the other side of the Pacific. The Allied Occupation was less than a week old when the 24th Infantry Regiment, one of the army’s largest and oldest African American commands, was assigned garrison duty in Japan. Throughout the Allied Occupation, the number of black servicemen stationed in Japan “generally fluctuate[d] between ten and fifteen thousand,” a number that was bolstered by black military families in Japan.29 Add to this the vertiginous inversion of the power dynamic that came with the Allied Occupation; Japan, revered as the big brother of the colored races since its defeat of Russia, was now occupied by a white nation. This shift in the power dynamic significantly altered the tenor of black-Japanese racial solidarity. Until this point, Afro-Japanese affinities had been buoyed primarily by black quixotism and Japanese propagandism and opportunism. The Occupation saw both the genuine empathy and the messy disillusionment that comes with the lived experience of cross-cultural exchange. For the Japanese, African Americans were both powerful occupationaires and (fellow) second-class citizens “beneath” white soldiers in the racial world order; African Americans couldn’t help but notice the irony of enforcing a color line—the “SCAP Personnel Only” signs, the elections monitored by black soldiers—that they themselves hadn’t crossed fully. Add to this the fact that African Americans served as the stewards of the occupation, filling positions (such as service battalions, guarding cargo) that often put them in close contact with the Japanese. This rich contact extended beyond the drudgery of duty and into the soldiers’ rest and relaxation: “Black GIs experienced discrimination both on base and off. But in the off-base establishments where they felt at home, a vital Creolised counter-culture grew up. Many of Japan’s leading postwar jazz artists and popular entertainers got their start in this marginalized demi-monde of drugs, booze and black-marketeering where the creative juices could flow freely, undisturbed by convention and the prying eyes of whites.”30 And add to this the fact that the occupying forces were almost entirely men, which engendered a sexed dimension that complicated an already complex power dynamics.

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In sum, the postwar period gave birth to a vast body of cultural artifacts that Mary Louise Pratt calls arts of the contact zone. “Autoethnography, transculturation, critique, collaboration, bilingualism, mediation, parody, denunciation, imaginary dialogue, vernacular expression—these are some of the literate arts of the contact zone. Miscomprehension, incomprehension, dead letters, unread masterpieces, absolute heterogeneity of meaning—these are some of the perils of writing in the contact zone.”31 The photography of Tokiwa Toyoko and Tōmatsu Shōmei is a case in point. Tokiwa’s photographic expose of the Yokohama red light district captured this vexed contact zone in arresting gelatin-silver snapshots. As Pratt suggests, Tokiwa’s photography presents the mingling of languages and bodies in a way that is part critique, part imaginary dialogue. Tōmatsu, one of the leading figures of the Vivo group, focused on—among other projects—life in and on the periphery of American’s military installations. Tōmatsu’s work, which put photorealism into the service of symbolic storytelling, is predicated on a central irony: Japanese photographers working in postwar Japan, their “home” country, are also always out of it—just beyond the perimeter of the military base, just beyond the frame occupied by military personnel. His photographs, which often force viewers to literally look up to threatening embodiments of racial difference, are haunting reminders of the psychological dangers of life in the contact zone.32 In 1959, Nobel Prize laureate Ōe Kenzaburō wrote an essay that paired his musing on the Japanese mothers of African American-Japanese children with his thoughts on American race relations. On race relations, Ōe wrote: “When it comes to the American Negro problem, the Japanese stand on the side of the Negro. I imagine that there isn’t a single Japanese person who prefers the whites who do the beating over the Negroes who receive them.”33 On the mothers of biracial children, Ōe wrote: “For mixed-blood children and their mothers, the race problem is not an issue that can be solved without getting their hands dirty. . . . When it comes to this new race problem, the mothers who—whatever their reasons may have been—had the courage to give birth to the children of Negro soldiers in the immediate postwar period have shown us a remarkably humane solution.”34 Ōe’s dependent clause—“whatever their reasons may have been”—certainly speaks to the ever-lingering possibility of dependency; “the reasons” these mothers hold here are shot through with a gendered power dynamic that oscillates between empowerment and powerlessness. Ōe’s words and voice set the tone for Afro-Japanese exchange during the tumultuous times of the 1960s and 1970s. If Afro-Japanese exchange was characterized by vicarious wish fulfillment and proxy politics in the first

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half of the twentieth century, the second half saw a shift to a kind of affinity politics—with “affinity” here resonating both as the force that bonds us together and kinship based on something other than consanguinity. The contemporaneity of the Civil Rights, Anpo, and Zengakuren movements sparked an era of rich, authentic, transpacific synergy that we can call the golden age of Afro-Japanese exchange.35 The view from Japan would include the hosting of the Asian-African Writers Conference in 1961, the rise of the Japanese Association for Negro Studies and the intellectual coming of age of Furukawa Hiromi—a seminal figure in the Association for Negro Studies and co-author of the epochal Nihonjin to Afurika-kei Amerikajin: Nichi-Bei kankeishi ni okeru sono  shosō  (The Japanese and African Americans: Facets of Afro-Japanese Interaction in the History of Japanese-American Relations)—the travels through black America documented by artists and intellectuals ranging from Fulbright recipient Yoshida Ruiko to translator of Roots Yasuoka Shōtarō, and the swinging jazz riffs of Akiyoshi Toshiko. The view from the other side of the Pacific would include the some four thousand haiku penned by Richard Wright, the rise and fall of Amiri Baraka’s Yūgen, Yuri Kochiyama on the cover of Life magazine cradling the dying body of her colleague and friend, Malcolm X, and the heavyweight champion of the world—Muhammad Ali—declaring: “I am not a Negro. . . . I am an Asiatic black man.”36 The era was characterized by black language from Japanese mouths and Japanese forms in black ink. And, as if to embody the spirit of the times, the significant number of African American-Japanese children born during the Occupation came of age in the 1960s, a fact that received a great deal of press from both Japanese and black media outlets. Lest we romanticize this golden age, we should remember that transracial engagement is easily tarnished, that watershed moments rarely come without bloodshed. Afro-Japanese relations in Okinawa are a case in point. Given its amicable atmosphere for African Americans relative to other Asian stations, the US military, as previously mentioned, sent waves of black soldiers to Japan. Many of these soldiers were shipped in turn to Okinawa; the aforementioned 24th, for example, was stationed in Okinawa until its 1947 transfer to Camp Gifu. The history and legacy of America’s administration of Okinawa (1945–1972), then, holds within it a history of Afro-Japanese cultural exchange. To be sure, some of this contact takes the shape of the golden era exchange outlined above. Take, for example, Arakawa Akira’s “The Colored Race,” a series of poems published in Ryūdai bungaku, a student literary magazine housed by The University of the Ryukyus. The series includes “A Poem for the Black Troops,” which begins: “Your skin, like ours, is not white. / A rugged dark brown, it is / The color of iron. / Covering ineradicable welts / from the whip, / Your brown skin is / Strong, like stone.”37 There is also,

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however, a history of racial tension and strife in Okinawa, both of which have been exacerbated by extraterritoriality and crimes perpetrated by US servicemen. In the words of Inamine Susumu, mayor of Nago, Okinawa: “since we survived the end of the war, the San Francisco Treaty, [and] the ‘return’ to Japan, we . . . have to live with 74 percent of US military bases on Okinawa. . . . We will have to live not only with the bases, but with the accidents and the crimes that they cause, so that after we die we will leave our children and grandchildren a legacy of misery.”38 It is true that Okinawans have suffered at the hands of servicemen of all colors; the accusations of rape of Okinawan girls by US soldiers is yet another scar on the history of US-Okinawan relations. It is also true, however, that the myth of black criminality has planted firm roots in Okinawan soil. This reminder of both the potential and perils of transracial exchange is a prime juncture to transfer to a discussion of what might be called the hip-hop era of Afro-Japanese relations. The mid-1980s saw “booms” on both sides of the Pacific. In Japan, journalists coined the term “black boom” (kokujin būmu) to describe the Japanese fascination with all things African Americana. In black America, a fascination with Asian culture that had a decidedly Chinese inflection—this is the age of Bruce Leroy and Wu Tang— grew to include black-Japanese “collabos.” At the heart of these twin booms was the global rise of hip-hop, a cultural phenomenon that, as Ian Condry (channeling Cornel West) argues in his Hip-Hop Japan: Rap and the Paths of Cultural Globalization, has the potential to establish “a new cultural politics of affiliation.”39 Afro-Japanese cultural production of the age of hip-hop is both prodigious and problematic. Building on the foundation laid during the golden era, its prodigy resides in the incredible velocity at which AfroJapanese exchange takes place—a speed which only increases with the everincreasing sophistication of digital technologies, the mastery that black and Japanese artists wield over their localized versions of global culture. Lenard Moore is a case in point, and the power such non-essentialist, transnational borrowings have in helping us navigate political and cultural spaces.40 Or perhaps we should substitute “borrowings” with “purchases.” Decidedly estranged from the foundation established by the golden era, the difficulty of exchange during this period stems from its tendency toward commodification, fetishization, and (racial) reification. This tendency, moreover, is often coupled with a borrowing akin to that of Azuma Hiroki’s database animal.41 Whereas the artists and intellectuals of the 1960s and 1970s rooted racial affinity in what they saw as a common critique of a suffocating master narrative, most hip-hop era exchange is obsessed with borrowing solely styles and surfaces, many of which are divorced from any narrative whatsoever. This explains, in part, the odd coexistences of the Afro-Japanese cultural

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production of this period: for every innocuous, “superflat” collaboration between black rappers and Murakami Takashi, we can think of an equal number of disparaging remarks toward African Americans from the likes of Nakasone Yasuhiro, Watanabe Michio, and Kajiyama Seiroku.42

New Readings of Texts, A New Reading of Race We would like to—as promised—return to our discussion of the three reasons for the abundance of representation-focused Afro-Japanese studies. We hope to make good on that implicit promise as well: the previous history should make the logic behind representation-driven studies apparent. First, Gayatri Spivak tells us that “representation” is always (literally) duplicitous: it is both “representation as ‘speaking for,’ as in politics, and representations as ‘re-presentation,’ as in art or philosophy.”43 If this is the case, then the push toward studies of representation is due in part to the fact that Afro-Japanese relations have long been a representative affair in both senses of the term. From the black soldiers flanking Perry to rapper Lupe Fiasco’s journey from Paris to Tokyo, Afro-Japanese signification, in both art and life, typically represents an attempt to imagine race otherwise, to view one’s racial position from a new vantage point undetermined by the white gaze. The stakes are high: AfroJapanese artists are both speaking for these new visions and re-presenting them. It is to be expected, then, that scholarly attention would be attracted to work with such gravitas. Second, and here too our brief history should be informative, every Afro-Japanese exchange is haunted by the possibility of misrepresentation—with (mis)representation here too resonating on two valences. These misrepresentations should give the cross-cultural interlocutor, to borrow the words of Judith Butler, the “sense of standing under a sign to which one does and does not belong.”44 The burgeoning Japanese empire of the post-Russo-Japanese War, for example, both was and was not a champion of the colored races; black occupiers, for a second example, both were and were not in a position to empathize with the postwar Japanese. The identitarian massaging required for Afro-Japanese exchange always holds within it the risk of misrepresentation. Providing correctives to such misrepresentations, especially when the stakes are high, are part and parcel to the scholarly enterprise. The urge to address misrepresentation, moreover, is particularly acute when what is being represented supposedly speaks for the scholar herself. Both of these rationales are perfectly workable. It is with the third rationale, however, that this volume makes a break and presents new readings of texts and new readings of race. Third, representation-driven studies of Afro-Japanese cultural exchange often cross apply some of our sins from

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reading race to the reading of racialized texts: we approach the text with a predetermined hypothesis, speak for the text rather than letting it speak for itself, and judge the text according to what we have said on its behalf rather than on what it has actually said. The text merely represents what we already knew to be true about it in the first place (and if it doesn’t, confirmation bias will police away any messy actualities). In the micro-moments of racial judgment, we rarely have time to regard the text with what Giorgio Agamben calls the purity of the example, to regard it as a singular instantiation that we must work to connect to larger discourses, to ask it where it came from, how it got here, and where it is going.45 The danger of representative studies is the same danger inherent to our reading of race in general: we don’t go through the trouble of allowing the text to travel. The representations that float to the surface, and the study anchored by representation, are static. This volume is interested primarily in texts in motion—the contradictory motion within texts, the traveling of texts, and the action that such kinetic energy inspires in readers, viewers, listeners and travelers. The careful, slow reading of Ozeki’s Ruth—her work—does indeed pay off. Ruth’s question about “the difference” between flotsam and jetsam is answered: “Flotsam is accidental, stuff found floating at sea. Jetsam’s been jettisoned. It’s a matter of intent.”46 And the answer she receives is but a tributary to a larger body of transpacific knowledge. She learns in turn that the Kuroshio brings “warm tropical water up from Asia and over to the Pacific Northwest coast.”47 She learns that “gyres are bigger. Like a string of currents. Imagine a ring of snakes, each biting the tail of the one ahead of it.”48 She learns that “each gyre orbits at its own speed,” and that “the flotsam that rides the gyres is called drift.”49 She learns that drift “that stays in the orbit of the gyre is considered to be part of the gyre memory.”50 If this volume makes a difference, it is in no small part because of the schooling intimated by Ozeki. Allowing each cultural artifact cast (some accidentally, others intentionally) to move at its own speed, the contributions to this volume follow the currents that flow across the Pacific, even when those currents mimic the serpentine patterns of the Ouroboros. In so doing, we hope to unpack the gyre memories held within our traveling texts.

Previewing the Volume The very notion of cross-cultural only makes sense on the borders of coherent and identifiable cultures replete with reference points to particular origins and significations, and perhaps even meaning itself. This same is true of “representations” of one culture within another cultural context. As a text travels

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across cultures, inevitably, such anchoring “nodal points” begin to loosen, and perhaps, eventually, disintegrate. Or, if not disintegrate, to transform, transmigrate, or be transfigured in ways that may not be predictable or foreseeable. In a sense, such a loosening is essential for the text to do the work of reanchoring in a new and different context, as a polycultural or transcultural phenomenon. Sometimes, however, such nodal points “stick” to their texts, but again, in ways that may not be obvious, or faithful, to how they adhered in their originary configurations. For a text to retain an exoticism, which is also to retain its site as one of inciting desire, or as what is lacking in the desiring subject, it must continue to be perceived as somehow exterior to the familiar, to the self, to the cultural references and nodal points of what is perceived as the “home” texts. Finally, how does a material practice, an ideology, or even a musical genre, borrowed from another originating culture, change or transform the very bodies and subjectivities that perform that text under new or different contexts and anchor it differently to its nodal points, or to new nodal points entirely? The chapters gathered here vary in their analyses of how such nodal points are transformed, erased, retained, and reimagined, and how the bodies and subjectivities of those working to re-text the text moderate, accommodate, or transfigure both the texts and themselves. But for all the examples explored in this volume, there are a set of complex conversations unfolding between cultures, cultural work, and text that takes us far afield of more conventional studies of “representations.” The work of this volume is loosely grouped by topic into three sections, beginning with a series of chapters on art and performance. The second section comprises studies of literature and poetics. The final section, also the longest, addresses music, song and sound, from Japanese enka to hip-hop and rap. We begin with Crystal Anderson’s study of transculturation in the artworks of iROZEALb, “Urban Geishas: Reading Race and Gender in iROZEALb’s Paintings,” an artist whose a3 . . . Blackface 31, 2002, is also the cover art for this volume. Richard A. Rogers defines transculturation as follows: Transculturation questions whether the conception of culture as singular, bounded essence has ever had empirical validity or conceptual coherence. Transculturation, as conceived here, calls not only for an updating of the understanding of contemporary cultural dynamics but also for a radical reconceptualization of culture itself: as conjunctural, relational, or dialogic; as constituted by, not merely engaged in, appropriative relations; and as an ongoing process of absorption and transformation rather than static configurations of practices. . . . Transculturation identifies forces of cultural homogenization and highlights the influential role of economic, political, military, and other

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forms of power while also recognizing how cultural appropriation can be constitutive of cultural particularity and agency.51

iROZEALb is a contemporary American artist who has produced artworks blending elements from Japanese ukiyo-e woodblock prints of the Edo Period (1603–1868) with images of contemporary African American women. Focusing on iROZEALb’s a3. . . black on both sides (2004) exhibition catalog, Anderson finds an ambivalence of cultural appropriation critique and practices. She writes, “Instead of simply accepting the binary critical impulse of iROZEALb’s use of blackface, what does her appropriation of a Japanese art form heavily populated by images of Japanese women say about the potential for what Thompson calls ‘workable interracial tropes’?”52 iROZEALb’s figures in blackface are Japanese women, not white men, thereby raising questions about femininity and racial performance, as well as offering new, transcultural ways to “read” racial performances. By incorporating signifiers of African American youth consumerism, Edo-Period figural patterns, textures and aesthetics, and American minstrelsy blackface, Anderson argues that iROZEALb’s artworks speak across cultures to reference and comment on gender stereotypes, female agency, and historical to contemporary representations of blackness and Japaneseness in both the United States and Japan. The second chapter in our collection is “The Theatrics of Japanese Blackface: Body as Mannequin,” by Nina Cornyetz. The chapter takes up the 1990s Japanese phenomenon of the ganguro, or girls in blackface, to ask: how do the apparent origins of the style in American minstrelsy blackface affect what it signifies for the girls themselves? First, Cornyetz points out the inaugural association of gyaru style, of which ganguro is a subset, with consumerism and the goods for sale at the department store, Shibuya 109. Second, borrowing from Azuma Hiroki’s notion of cultural databases replacing narrative, Cornyetz describes the minutia of ganguro style as a cultural catalog of modular elements that can be combined in endlessly different “looks” by each gyaru.53 In the process, any deep narratives those modular elements might have had in originary contexts are lost, or transfigured. Ultimately, Cornyetz argues, using the distinction made by Richard Sennett in his The Fall of Public Man, the ganguro and her sub-styles of yamamba and mamba should be read as signs, not symbols—that is, at face value without need, or benefit from, interpretation. The style intends to inform the spectator that the girl is “independent, tough, and cool,” and has no relationship for the style practitioners themselves, to “real” black people, or to American minstrelsy, or even to any reality whatsoever. That Americans cannot but read ganguro in relation to the historical debasement of blacks in their own minstrelsy legacy is another issue altogether.

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“Abbey Lincoln and Kazuko Shiraishi’s Art-Making as Spiritual Labor” takes up the concept of art as spiritual labor shared by Lincoln, the musician, and Shiraishi, the poet. As part of Lincoln’s quest for self-realization, and the answer to “how does one come into being as a woman of color?” she turned to a concept of “Africanity.” This involved her journey away from American heteronormative cultural models towards an embrace of other forms of heterosexual relations, such as the specifically African polygamist paradigm, in which the husband visits the huts of his wives. In her music, which reached an apex of originality during her performances in Japan in the 1970s, she found inspiration in African performative rituals such as the “Ring Shout.” Yuichiro Onishi and Tia-Simone Gardner write of her 1973 performance: “Lincoln howled, shrieked, screamed, chirped, and groaned, like a bird, transforming her voice into a pacemaker, complementing the polyrhythmic sounds delivered at 3/4 time signature that amplified the dialectic between freedom and captivity.” (66) Attending this performance in Japan in 1973 was the avant-garde artist and poet Shiraishi, who had previously—in 1963—found instant alliance with Lincoln. Among other influences on Shiraishi’s work, such as the “dissonance” she found in a poem called “Saikai” [“Reunion”], written by Ryuichi Tamura, was jazz. In Lincoln’s music, in particular, Shiraishi discovered a lesson in “how to live.” (72) According to Onishi and Gardner, “Shiraishi, in essence, then, through Afro-Asian aesthetic correspondence, turned to the form of devotion to spiritual labor that was central to Lincoln’s art making.” The texts traveling between the two women thus cross continents: Lincoln, a black American woman, finds alliance with African cultural forms; in turn a Japanese woman, Shiraishi, finds alliance with this black woman’s cultural production—i.e. music—to generate her own anti-normative and transcultural work in the form of poetry. Onishi and Gardner’s chapter, which straddles music performance and poetry, is the bridge to our second section on literature. Michio Arimitsu’s chapter on the American poet Amiri Baraka takes up his lifelong fascination with Asia. As early as the 1950s, when Baraka still went by the name LeRoi Jones, he became interested in Buddhism, reports Arimitsu. In the 1950s, Baraka and then wife, Hettie Jones, co-edited a poetry journal, which they named Yūgen: A New Consciousness in Arts and Letters. Yūgen, Japanese for “mysterious depth,” is a Buddhist aesthetic, and the primary aesthetic of the nō-drama.54 In the 1970s Baraka paid homage to the Chinese author Lu Hsun with his Daggers and Javelins: Essays, 1974–1979. Meticulously tracing the influences of Asian arts, philosophy, politics and religion, from Buddhism to haiku to Maoism, throughout Baraka’s career as a poet and activist, Arimitsu finds that Baraka’s 1990s invention of a poetic form he called “low-coup” bor-

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rowed and adapted elements from haiku, such as puns and brevity, to form its own, distinct hybrid genre. While Arimitsu “uncovers” the role of Asian influence in Baraka’s corpus, “Richard Wright’s Haiku and Modernist Poetics” by Yoshinobu Hakutani gives as four thousand the number of haiku written by Wright, and offers close, interpretive readings of a selection of those haiku, obviously prominent as a genre within Wright’s other works of fiction. Hakutani summarizes for us the role of a set of key Japanese aesthetics at play in haiku, among other Japanese arts: yūgen (see above), sabi (lonely and old), and wabi (poverty), alongside the classical preference for an absence of authorial subjectivity central to the haiku tradition in Japan. Nature, the classicists insisted, must take primacy over humanity, and they shunned “emotion and intellect entirely.” (104) With modernism, the Japanese poet Shiki Masaoka challenged this convention by writing poems that brought human emotions, concepts and presence into the haiku form. In keeping with the importance of humanity to the modernists, argues Hakutani, many of Wright’s haiku likewise combined traditional aesthetics with a discernable subject who has moved forward and center. Hakutani has recourse to the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan to describe classical haiku as therefore a gesture towards the real that rejects symbolism, a description that holds when discussing the imagistic haiku by Wright. However, in those haiku in which a subject can be discerned, desire is thereby constitutively introduced into the poem, and it moves towards a symbolic, or metaphoric, use of language, and away from the models of early modern Japan. Ōe KenzaburŌ’s representations of black men in his fictional writings have met with some degree of controversy.55 William Bridges’s chapter, “In the Beginning: Blackness and the 1960s Creative Nonfiction of Ōe KenzaburŌ,” shifts the focus from an evaluative model of such so-called representation to a generative analysis that seeks to show how representations may emerge and what role they may play in empowering or disempowering the subjects of representation, as well as in forming the identity of the writing-subject him or herself. In the 1960s Ōe discovered, holds Bridges, an affinity with African American writers and their existential conditions that enabled him to generate (in his writings) problematics and indeed their potential solutions analagous between postwar Japanese and American blacks. This analogy originates in a shared terror of the violence embodied in the white gaze on non-white bodies. Deeply influenced by Jean Paul Sartre’s existentialism, Ōe—as did Frantz Fanon before him—rejected Sartre’s relegation of race to a particular moment under the larger rubric of class, and his vision of a “raceless” future.56 In its place, Ōe followed Ralph Ellison and saw celebration of human

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diversity instead as the ideal future vision. For Ōe, black literature was a minor literature with the potential to radically challenge the majority discourse of mainstream literature, and he modeled much of his writing on black literature. At the same time, notes Bridges, inevitably, such an identification based on analogy must fail to parse out the ways in which black and Japanese existential conditions and writings are not the same. Ending his chapter with a close read of Ōe’s Sakebigoe (The Cry, 1963), Bridges teases out the ambivalences in Ōe’s quest for authenticity as a man of color, and authentique as good faith, in the Sartrean sense. “Future-Oriented Blackness in Shōwa Robot Culture—1924 to 1963” takes up the trope of blackness in “future-oriented” proletarian literature alongside tales of robots. The chapter argues that these robots are symbolically rendered as black, a rendering which then functions metonymically as a circuit interlooping solidarity with ethnically Japanese readerships in stories of liberation or cautionary tales about the perils of ignoring white privilege. Anne McKnight points out that “robots play a catalytic role in social movements in a time of empire, traversing genres because of their modular nature and scalability. Their blackness in Japanese narratives is poised in ambivalence: inviting solidarity in some futures but dominated and controlled in others.” (142) The chapter opens with the 1920s Japanese translation of the drama, R.U.R. Rossum’s Universal Robots, by the Czech playwright Karel Čapek, in which the robots are allegorical signifiers for exploited workers, turns to a discussion of an actual robot, Gakutensoku, as a metonym for Imperial Japan’s colonial project, addresses a killer black robot in a work of science fiction by Unno Jūza, and concludes with a discussion of Tezuka Osamu’s 1963 inaugural episode of Astro Boy, “that celebrates the use of jazz for liberatory purposes, coding concern for solidarity and liberation into its robot main character’s coming of age as an aspiring human.” (143) Anne McKnight argues that these robot tales and proletarian fiction can be understood both within the purview of Afro-futurism and as speculative fiction, or literary forms that pose open-ended questions about future transformations, allowing for a complex inter-relation between machine and human contexts. The robots, variously troped as black, then generate future vitalist imaginaries of liberation and revolution, in which the robots shift from objects to subjects, overthrow their subordination to a creator, and become capable of autonomous action and self-determination. “It is precisely the biological turn away from mechanical features that makes the black robot different—and full of potential in terms of the directions its life might take.” (143) The metonymic blackness of the robot combines in these narratives with a Marxist-inflected vitalism that transcends mechanicity with generativity in a movement towards an organicity, which asked in part: “How can

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robots acquire and manifest life or explore its potentials in ways that are not subject to a creator or owner, but in which robots control their own means of production?” (146) As such these robots signify ambivalently, sometimes towards a terrifying future, and sometimes towards a hopeful one. Chapter 8 brings the volume to its final section on music as traveling text. As is Bridges, Kevin Fellezs is concerned with the generative function of what he calls, following Vijay Prashad, “polyculturalism.”57 Analyzing the case of Jero, a phenotypically African American young man with a Japanese grandmother, raised in the United States, who has become Japan’s first black enka singer, Fellezs asks, how does taking on Japanese enka conventions as a performer generate a sort of hybrid identity for Jero, and by extension, his fans? Arguing that his very existence as a black American enka singer contests the imaginary construct of enka as a uniquely Japanese musical genre, and one that expresses a premodern sensibility to boot (an imaginary already in denial of the genre’s use of Western instrumentation and in fact modern origins), Fellezs claims that Jero challenges Nihonjinron (theories on the Japanese people) essentialisms. Concurrently, the criticism of Jero from African American communities (or more commonly, simply lack of interest) suggests that Jero also defies essentialist black racialism, which would dictate that blackness must be lived according to a set of existing standards. Against these and other essentialisms of both Japanese and African Americans, Jero stands as a decidedly polycultural symbol of difference. Indeed, his very body might be thought of as one kind of “traveling text.” The first part of Shana Redmond’s “Extending Diaspora: The NAACP and Up-‘Lift’ Cultures in the Interwar Black Pacific,” focuses on the important role of the Negro National Anthem, “Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing,” written by brothers James Weldon and J. Rosamond Johnson, in the interwar period as a mechanism for uniting black intellectuals, activists, and communities in their struggle for civil rights, as well as in the ascendancy of the NAACP itself. Borrowing musical structure from, and referential to Negro spirituals and black gospel traditions, “the anthem excelled in areas that the formal NAACP did not; it embodied the organization, camaraderie, and political vision that one might expect of an NAACP chapter while also presenting the added advantages of easy transport and the dynamism of performance.” (197) In 1933, James Weldon Johnson received a letter from Yasuichi Hikida, a Japanese national living in the United States who already had strong ties to the NAACP, requesting permission to translate “Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing” into Japanese. He believed that the song could be as significant to the Japanese as it was to black communities in the United States. When the song was finally published in translation, Redmond notes, it was accompanied, rather puzzlingly, by an illustration composed of a caricature of a minstrel

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in blackface. The introduction, written by Hikida, was also surprisingly filled with stereotyping and generalizations about American blacks. In spite of these disappointing facts, the project of translating and importing the song into Japanese nonetheless stands as a testament to the interwar Afro-Nippon solidarity, based in part on black communities’ positive assessment of Japan as a non-white nation in ascendancy, and the Japanese sense of affinity with African Americans from the perspective of another colored race. Of course hip-hop and rap are a set of traveling texts, and have made their way to Japan as well as the rest of the world. Despite the very earliest origins of rap as social commentary, rap soon became dominated, as are most musical genres, by non-political entertainment functions. The same can be said for hip-hop. It is no surprise then that the majority of hip-hop and rap artists in Japan continue to perform purely for entertainment value. That being said, The Secrets Protection Law, the reinterpretation of the Japanese constitution in favor of “collective self defense,” and the order to restart nuclear reactors after the meltdown of 2011 comprise a series of events with powerful political repercussions. In response, a handful of what Noriko Manabe calls “brave” (211) artists in Japan have used these genres for performances of political protest in the 2010s. “Hip-Hop and Reggae in Recent Japanese Social Movements” looks at the aspects of some so-called black musics that make them particularly well suited for political protest, such as “the sampling ethos of hip-hop and dancehall reggae [which] encourages the referencing and appropriation of such tracks for the creation of new political songs.” (210) Moreover, “the call-and-response associated with black musics enables rappers to engage protesters in shouting slogans themselves.” (211) Manabe describes how, despite attempted censorship by record labels and the economic concerns of musicians dependent on media and other commercial support, these musicians performing rap, hip-hop, and reggae have made their opposition to government policies loud and clear. “Can the Japanese Rap?” asks what does it mean that Japanese rap and hip-hop artists overwhelmingly see themselves as performing a racially black musical genre? Earlier, Japanese artists who played rock and other “Western” musics had also grappled with the fact that their music had originated elsewhere, but that “elsewhere” was not exclusively marked as black. Today, such musicians understand well that there is no conflict between being Japanese and playing rock music, or that a Japanese national is no less “suited” to perform rock music than an American, for example. But for some reason, this has not happened (at least yet) with rap and hip-hop, which continue to be linked with blackness in Japan, in spite of the fact that today hip-hop has traveled throughout the globe and is performed everywhere by multiple races

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and ethnicities. Dexter Thomas takes up what he calls the “race problem” at the core of Japanese hip-hop, and focuses our attention on a manga written by Yutsuko Chūsonji, Wild Q, which was serialized in the mid-1990s in the popular men’s magazine Popeye. Chusonji apparently wrote Wild Q while she was living in New York City, as an educational tool for her fellow Japanese lovers of hip-hop, a guide to hip-hop culture, if you will. The manga tells the tale of two decidedly un-cool Japanese young men who travel to Brooklyn and learn the ropes of hip-hop while sojourning there. Assuming that Japanese hip-hoppers were clueless dolts when it came to the “real thing,” she set out to correct and inform them; the manga is replete with directives on style and behavior and includes vocabulary lists. Upon her return to Japan, much to Chusonji’s surprise, was the fact that those very hip-hop artists she had tried to educate actually despised her. They were furious at the negative portrayals of Japanese in her manga, who were pathetic and hapless idiots when it came to hip-hop. Chusonji had not realized that there was then a much more sophisticated hip-hop scene in Japan than when she had left. She proceeded to make amends to that scene by changing her portrayals of Japanese B-boys, and more importantly, by financing and using her celebrity to support Hip-Hop Night Flight, Japan’s first successful hip-hop radio show, and she was deeply influential in popularizing the genre. But something is missing here, Thomas points out. What was not addressed in the controversy aroused by Chusonji’s essentialist treatment of Japanese B-boys was the even more essentialist, indeed racist, portrayals of African Americans in Wild Q. Black men are routinely stereotyped as guntoting criminals and women as promiscuous sluts. The vocabulary lists are often wrong and the advice is often simply incorrect. How is it possible that Chusonji got it so wrong, she who, because she lived in Brooklyn, should have known better? And how could her readers, many of whom had also been to New York, not bother to critique this essentialism? Thomas’s chapter, as does Redmond’s, ends up with a question mark in place of a conclusion: How is it that some traveling texts fail to dislodge existing models of representation, or nodal points of signification, which continue to co-exist alongside decidedly polycultural and transcultural forms of these very same texts? Our volume closes with “Race, Ethnicity and Affective Community in Japanese Rastafari,” Marvin Sterling’s analysis of a loosely centralized Rastaidentified Japanese community, that is, ethnic Japanese for whom Rastafari ideology constitutes the primary way they represent their emotional, sociopolitical and other lived experiences to themselves. Sterling calls this an “affective community,” as defined by Leela Gandhi, that is, a subculture sharing values, ideology and material practices, including a love of reggae, the smoking of marijuana, and a sociopolitical stance oppositional to mainstream

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society and culture.58 Sterling writes, “The continued productiveness of affect as a concept resides precisely in its attentiveness to social behavior and relationships—individual and collective, past and present, small scale and large, successful and not (judged according to whatever measure)—whose unconscious significances remain unavailable to more ‘reasoned,’ or more familiar modes of analysis.” (240–41) But why, one might ponder, given that Rasta is an Afrocentric culture and Japan an extra-diasporic space, has Rastafari made its home as a transcultural text there? Sterling suggests that the answer lies precisely in the affective aspect of the identification: “Blackness in Japan is, if nothing else, a highly recognizable metaphor for intense feeling and emotionality that Japanese circumstantially imagine themselves as lacking. In this way, blackness, such as it is ideologically and symbolically encoded in a whole panoply of African Diaspora subcultural forms that have found themselves in the country, can be used as a resource in creating a deep sense of affect that links those who view themselves, in whatever degree of permanence, as belonging to these communities.” (244) Unlike younger Japanese enamored of dance hall Jamaican culture, the Japanese Rastas have their roots in the 1960s counter culture movement, and embrace a communalism that privileges extended families and friends living together in “naturalistic” settings, and they reject fundamentalisms of all kinds. Hence, as does Jero’s black body, or iROZEALb’s paintings, or any number of our other traveling texts, these Rasta communities also challenge the essentialisms lurking behind Nihonjinron discourses, as well as those that might attend notions of Rasta—and other “black texts” as (exclusively) the province of racially black bodies. As noted in the opening paragraphs to this section of the introduction, we will find that sometimes traveling texts indeed transcend and transfigure their relation to existing nodal points, or affix themselves to new ones, in the transition from cultural context to cultural context. Sometimes, however, our traveling, transcultural, and polycultural texts find themselves side by side with earlier “representations” of otherness and exoticism; moreover, some of which may be, frankly, starkly racialized and racist. Even in the last few years, not infrequently, non-Asian Americans have been chided for shockingly racist mimicry of Chinese or Japanese English-speaking accents or behavior, and some Japanese stores still sell Little Black Sambo dolls, two examples of “nodal points” affixed to much earlier representations that continue to coexist alongside transcultural ones. This may be why, for example, in this volume we find hip-hop still anchored to blatantly stereotyped black bodies, and yet a community of Japanese Rastafari, or that of Hikida’s translation of “Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing” was accompanied by an illustration of a minstrel in blackface, and the Japanese ganguro girl in blackface signals nothing of min-

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strelsy to the practitioners of the style while the American onlooker cannot see it as not linked to their history of whites performing caricatures of blacks. Like the diary Ruth finds washed up on the shores of Cortes Island in A Tale for the Time Being, our traveling texts bring with them complex and inspiring conversations, sometimes beautiful, sometimes vapid, and sometimes violent. Appropriation of whatever sort must be born from such conflicting and antagonistic discussions (and work) between cultures, and sometimes these then proceed, circuitously, to transculturation.

Notes 1. Ruth Ozeki, A Tale for the Time Being, 12–13. 2. This project began as a panel at the 2012 Association for Asian Studies (AAS) Annual Conference, “Reading Between the (Color) Lines: Translation, Traveling Texts and African American-Japanese Cultural Exchange.” This panel was organized by William Bridges and chaired by Nina Cornyetz, the co-editors of this volume. In 2013, William Bridges and Noriko Manabe co-organized “Straight Outta Nippon: Appropriation, Identification, Class Consciousness and Political Resistance in Japanese Hip-Hop and Reggae” for the AAS Annual Conference. A symposium convened at New York University, “Between African American and Japanese: Traveling Texts,” brought the two panels together and added a few new voices. The symposium participants put together a prototype for the current volume. 3. See Lawrence Venuti, The Translator’s Invisibility: A History of Translation. 4. Tompkins, Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction, 1790–1860, xvii. 5. Murphy-Shigematsu, “‘The Invisible Man’ and Other Narratives of Living in the Borderlands of Race and Nation,” in Willis and Murphy-Shigematsu, eds. Transcultural Japan: At the Borderlands of Race, Gender, and Identity, 285. 6. Ibid., 286. 7. Ibid. 8. Tompkins, Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction, 1790–1860, xvi. 9. Dower, Black Ships and Samurai: Commodore Perry and the Opening of Japan (1853–1854). 10. Perry, Narrative of the Expedition of an American Squadron to the China Seas and Japan Performed in the Years 1852, 1853 and 1854 under the Command of Commodore M. C. Perry, United States Navy, 295. 11. As quoted in a program printed for the 1894 performance by the Japan Expedition Press. This program can be found in the aforementioned Black Ships and Samurai. 12. Perry, Narrative of the Expedition of an American Squadron to the China Seas and Japan Performed in the Years 1852, 1853 and 1854 under the Command of Commodore M. C. Perry, United States Navy, 300.

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13. Kanagaki, The Beefeater, 273; Shank’s Mare Round the West, 254. 14. Miyoshi, As We Saw Them: The First Japanese Embassy to the United States, 59. 15. As quoted in As We Saw Them, 63. 16. Kunitake, Japan Rising: The Iwakura Embassy to the USA and Europe, 63. 17. Miyoshi, As We Saw Them: The First Japanese Embassy to the United States, 63. 18. Kearney, African American Views of the Japanese: Solidarity or Sedition?, 14. 19. Taylor, “The Political Nterests [sic] of the Negro.” 20. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, 9. 21. Du Bois and Burghardt, “Color Line Belts the World,” 20. 22. Weiner, “The Invention of Identity: Race and Nation in Pre-War Japan,” from The Construction of Racial Identity in China and Japan, 97. In Becoming Yellow: A Short History of Racial Thinking, Michael Keevak explains that sixteenth-century European documents often referred to the “whiteness” of Japanese. This “whiteness,” argues Keevak, signified the civilization, and amenability to Christian proselytization, of the Japanese. With the 1630s Tokugawa proscription of Christianity, the Japanese became less white. Kaempfer’s 1727 History of Japan, which Keevak calls “Europe’s standard account until well into the nineteenth century,” deemed the Japanese “braune,” which was translated into English as “tawny,” two of “the most common terms for describing native peoples who were not exactly black but not white either.” (For more on this, see the first chapter of Becoming Yellow). Du Bois’s positioning of “yellowness” as closer to “blackness” than “whiteness,” then, is indicative of an early twentieth-century addendum to Japan’s “becoming yellow.” 23. As cited in Deutsch, “‘The Asiatic Black Man’: An African American Orientalism?,” 195. 24. Chandler, “Introduction: On the Virtues of Seeing—At Least, But Never Only—Double,” CR: The New Centennial Review 26, no. 1 (Spring 2012): 3. The approach taken by this volume is informed by and indebted to the groundwork laid by Chandler in his 2012 special issue of CR: Toward a New Parallax: Or, Japan—in Another Traversal of the Transpacific. 25. Du Bois and Burghardt, Dark Princess, 257. 26. Hughes, I Wonder as I Wander, 264. 27. Ibid., 242. 28. Gallicchio, The African American Encounter with Japan and China, 116. 29. Green, Black Yanks in the Pacific: Race in the Making of American Military Empire after World War II, 45. 30. Eiji, Inside GHQ: The Allied Occupation of Japan and Its Legacy, 130–31. 31. Pratt, “Arts of the Contact Zone,” 37. 32. The Tokiwa images described here can be found in The History of Japanese Photography (Museum of Fine Arts Houston, 2003); the Tōmatsu images can be found in Tomatsu Shomei: Chewing Gum and Chocolate (Aperture, 2014). 33. Ōe, “Sengo sedai no imēji,” 17. 34. Ibid., 19. 35. Originally signed in 1952, the Treaty of Mutual Cooperation and Security between the United States and Japan (often abbreviated in Japanese as “ANPO”—security) effectively wed Japanese security to American interests in Asia. Prime Minister

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Kishi Nobusuke’s initiation of the revision and reratification of ANPO in 1958 was the sparkplug for a series of protests that would rock Japan in the 1960s. The ranks of protestors included the All-Japan Federation of Students’ Self-Governing Associations, often abbreviated as the Zengakuren, a conglomerate of (at times violent) student revolutionaries, radicals, communists and anarchists. 36. For more on Ali and “Asiatic blackness,” see Deutsch, “‘The Asiatic Black Man’: An African American Orientalism?” 37. The translation here is Molasky’s, from The American Occupation of Japan and Okinawa: Literature and Memory, 97. 38. As cited in Hamaker, “Nago Mayor Says US Bases ‘A Legacy of Misery’ in Okinawa.” 39. Condry, Hip-Hop Japan: Rap and the Paths of Cultural Globalization, 29. 40. A decorated haiku poet, Lenard Moore is, among the other accolades he has received on both sides of the Pacific, the first African American to be elected to the post of president of the Haiku Society of America. 41. In Otaku: Japan’s Database Animals, Azuma suggests that postmodern consumption as it is witnessed in otaku culture is characterized by a disregard for a product’s place vis-à-vis some grand narrative and a fascination with selecting whatever catches our eye/I. This mode of consumption, for Azuma, is akin to a primal dive into and out of databases. 42. Murakami Takashi’s self-styled “superflat” artwork—which Cornyetz’s “Murakami Takashi and the Hell of Others” describes as the culmination “of traditional planar Japanese art forms and contemporary, globally circulating, non-realist, nonhumanist anime-manga chimerical life forms” (p. 182)—found two of its many global homes in sartorial collaborations with rapper/fashionista Pharrell Williams and the cover art of the 2007 Kanye West album Graduation. Although such transracial collaboration is super-generative, perhaps the “flatness” of such exchanges is crystalized by the lingering memory of a battery of unfortunate comments made by Japanese politicians. In 1986, Prime Minister Nakasone Yasuhiro told some one thousand young members of his Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) that the average intelligence of the United States was lowered by the inclusion of blacks, Puerto Ricans and Mexicans; in 1988 Watanabe Michio, then chief of the LDP Policy Affairs Research Council, claimed that, whereas bankruptcy would besmirch the honor of any upright Japanese citizen, blacks would revel in the levity of having no financial responsibilities; in 1990, Kajiyama Seiroku, Justice Minister and member of the LDP, compared foreign prostitutes in Tokyo to African Americans crossing the red line into white neighborhoods. 43. Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?,” 275. 44. Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex,” 219. 45. For more on Agamben’s notion of the example as “pure singularity,” see “Example,” from Giorgio Agamben’s The Coming Community. 46. Ruth Ozeki, A Tale for the Time Being, 13. 47. Ibid. 48. Ibid. 49. Ibid. 50. Ibid.

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51. Rogers, “From Cultural Exchange to Transculturation,” 495. 52. Thompson, “Blackface, Rape and Beyond,” 124. 53. Azuma, Otaku. 54. See Yoshinobu Hakutani’s chapter in this volume, “Richard Wright’s Haiku and Modernist Poetics,” 99–118 for a discussion of the subtleties of the yūgen aesthetic. 55. See, for example, Tachibana, “Structures of Power.” 56. Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks. 57. Prashad, Everybody Was Kung-Fu Fighting. 58. Gandhi, Affective Communities.

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I ART AND PERFORMANCE

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1 Urban Geishas Reading Race and Gender in iROZEALb’s Paintings Crystal S. Anderson

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isually arresting, the work of iROZEALb marries images from contemporary black America and Edo-era Japan. Her a3. . . black on both sides (2004) exhibition catalog features paintings that incorporate iconography from contemporary African American urban culture into traditional scenes from ukiyo-e, a genre of Japanese woodblock prints and paintings produced between the sixteenth and twentieth centuries that depicted “the floating world,” an escape from the everyday world. Many of these works visually echo the Japanese ganguro phenomenon iROZEALb encountered on a trip to Japan in early 2005. According to Andrea Barnwell, ganguro girls are “known for their outlandish fashions, platform shoes, darkened faces, dyed hair and eccentric white makeup.”1 This phenomenon has been interpreted in a variety of ways, including as an act of rebellion and statement of individual identity and an imitation of black hip-hop performers.2 Not only does the ganguro phenomenon involve a physical manifestation of borrowing from a different culture, it is also a performance of that culture. iROZEALb sees the trend as superficial posturing as opposed to authentic cultural exchange: “The ganguro overdo it. It’s a form of drag—over-accentuated movements to be more convincing—but there is also something sad about it, about the level that the ganguro have taken it anyway.”3 iROZEALb does not see any sincerity in the way Japanese youth appropriate African American culture and style because they do not appear to go beyond appearance to engage African American culture and history. However, appropriation as theft is problematic as the sole lens of interpreting such cultural exchanges. Richard A. Rogers asserts that “cultural exchange, domination, and exploitation presume the — 31 —

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existence of distinct cultures. . . . Unless culture is mapped directly onto nation, territory, or some analog thereof . . . the boundaries here are, at best, multiple, shifting, and overlapping.”4 Because culture flows in multiple directions with uneven results, Rogers suggests that transculturation functions as a better way of describing such complex culture flows because it “involves cultural elements created through appropriations from and by multiple cultures” and “involves ongoing, circular appropriations of elements between multiple cultures, including elements that are themselves transcultural.”5 This would certainly apply to iROZEALb’s prints, which involve ethnic cultural production traveling across national borders. In this light, iROZEALb’s prints appear to be the result of black transculturation of Japanese cultural elements. iROZEALb readily shares her own encounters with Japanese culture through Japanese puppet theater, kabuki and anime, in addition to a couple of courses in Japanese popular culture and a two-month stint in Tokyo during graduate school.6 She chooses the ukiyo-e style, a Japanese visual style with its own grounding in Edo-era Japan, as the vehicle for her exploration of Afro-Japanese dynamics. She centralizes women in her works, just as Edo-era ukiyo-e prints did. I argue that iROZEALb’s use of Japanese visual elements envisions a mode of transculturation involving African American and Japanese cultures with a variety of outcomes. iROZEALb’s blackface paintings use gender and Afro-Japanese dynamics to challenge blackface minstrelsy, and its cultural misappropriation, as the only way to read cross-cultural exchange. iROZEALb’s prints in the a3. . . black on both sides catalog uses elements of Japanese culture to extend agency for contemporary women and critique African American culture. Her non-blackface images in the collection use a subtle Japanese aesthetic to envision substantial Afro-Japanese exchange. In doing so, iROZEALb continues a tradition of cultural and intellectual exchange between American blacks and the Japanese that promotes a black transnational culture. By placing blackface minstrelsy at the forefront, iROZEALb’s a3 exhibition catalog alludes to negative images of African Americans performed by white men in blackface that reinforce stereotypes of blacks. Such images from the nineteenth century function as a visual touchstone for what some view as contemporary misappropriation. Barnwell links blackface minstrelsy, Japanese audiences and iROZEALb’s work, suggesting that iROZEALb’s paintings “raise relevant questions that provoke historic as well as contemporary concerns about blacks, imitation, entertainment and representation.”7 Those historic concerns include the use of blackface minstrelsy as entertainment for the Japanese by Commodore Perry in 1854: “The sailors’ performance irrevocably equated blacks with buffoonery and foreshadowed that minstrelsy would evolve into a comedic staple in Japan.”8 Moreover, traditional blackface

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minstrelsy was the provenance of white men, for Alexander Saxton reminds us that “until well after the Civil War[,] minstrel shows were performed exclusively by males, before largely male audiences.”9 Scholars interpret blackface minstrelsy as a specifically male racial performance, where white men, often of the working class, take on the personas of black men to bolster their own claims on masculinity. Eric Lott argues that “a certain dynamic of masculinity or, conversely, ‘unmanning’ seems to have been at work here, making the theft of black forms more urgent, if not more pregnant. Codes of black and white manhood gave the exchange its force, a fact enlarged upon in the minstrel show itself.”10 In the nineteenth century, blackface minstrelsy operated as a means of working out masculinity issues through a particular kind of black racial performance, one based on stereotypes. Thus, some read iROZEALb’s evocation of blackface minstrelsy visuals as a critique of contemporary cultural misappropriation. Because iROZEALb’s a3 series draws visually from the blackface minstrelsy tradition, some see it as a critique of Japanese appropriation of African American culture, specifically, hip-hop. On one level, iROZEALb’s work responds to the ganguro trend of the 1990s, which Tadashi Suzuki and Joel Best describe as a “heavily tanned kogaru [stylish high school girl], so as to resemble African Americans.”11 iROZEALb’s prints represent her response to the trend she witnessed on a trip to Japan: “It felt like to me that they were emulating this aspect of black people and that it provided them with a sense of liberation. But what they were emulating at hip hop clubs like Booty Booty in Osaka was a stereotype.”12 In addition to the literal brown faces on Japanese women, iROZEALb’s work also responds to the appropriation of black culture in the form of elements of hip-hop. iROZEALb places the prevalence and spread of hip-hop in Korea and Japan on the same continuum with the consumption of black culture by whites: “We’ve all seen white youth here in the states hang out with black youth, adapt the pimp stroll/gait, the slang/lingo/lexicon, the whole nine. Bo Derek took it to new heights with those cornrows and then these Japanese youth were trying to be as black as they could. It was different. I like bringing up Elvis as another example because he’s so formulated. Sing like this, wiggle that, shake that, pump that—the sum of all parts, right?”13 iROZEALb’s evocation of Elvis within the context of black culture reflects a disdain that puts Japanese appropriation on the level of theft and acts as a metaphor for negative cross-cultural appropriation. Paul C. Taylor has labeled this the “Elvis effect,” “when white participation in traditionally black avenues of cultural production produces feelings of unease.”14 Thus, iROZEALb’s blackface-themed work functions as a critique of Japanese appropriation, or the engagement with black culture in ways that disregard the African American experience. For example, a3 blackface #52 features a woman in blackface and an afro.

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Unlike the demure figures of many ukiyo-e images, this woman sports a blue bikini beneath her kimono, exposing a fair amount of skin on her upper and lower body. If we suppose that the woman beneath the blackface is Japanese, then this image suggests that she superficially engages black culture through clothing and hairstyles without any recognition of historical or cultural context. Barnwell suggests that such appropriative gestures in iROZEALb’s work should be read as demeaning: “brown’s brilliance is her ability to subtly convey that the spoof is intricately linked to the demeaning practice of evaluating, imitating and satirizing the lives of black people.”15 J. Susan Isaacs reflects a similar sentiment: “Through her studio practice, she explores the problematic issue of one culture taking on the practices and identity of another culture.”16 Japanese use of African American culture represents a misuse of African American culture in this interpretation. However, culture flows are not unidirectional. iROZEALb’s work is also about black transculturation of Japanese culture. She works in the Japanese genre of ukiyo-e, and to understand this dimension of her work requires a reconsideration of the nature of appropriation, especially when such cultural exchange occurs within a global context. Arnd Schneider focuses on the work represented by cultural exchange, such as the incorporation of “brokering practices between different (and co-existing) cultural contexts by visual artists and other.”17 By acknowledging the impact of various cultural contexts, such complex cultural exchange directs our attention to “the original context of an artefact and its producers,” “the artefact itself,” and “the appropriating person or agent.”18 By focusing on individual agents rather than collective groups, Schneider suggests combining “a model that takes into account the intentionalities of the actors involved and of the functions artefacts and artworks (or parts of these, such as symbols) perform within their respective social context” with “a concept of appropriation based on understanding the other—or the other’s products.”19 Thus, black transculturation becomes less about domination and exploitation and more about the ways in which cultural exchange transforms culture. As a cultural agent, iROZEALb uses synergy between African American and Asian cultures: “What actually drew me to Asia were the many similarities between those cultures and an African American sensibility. At the time, it was inexplicable. . . . If you close your eyes and listen to taiko drumming, it has an uncanny rhythmic style to go go music.”20 Her brokering practices place blackface on Japanese subjects, thus changing the function of blackface and shifting the performance in racial terms. Deborah Thompson speculates that blackface can be “transformed into a mode of performative understanding, one that respects but negotiates across the impasse between black and

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white historical experience” in female racial performance.21 In describing Anna Deavere Smith’s performance of a variety of characters in her play Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992, Debby Thompson raises the notion of “otheroriented” performance, where the goal becomes “not authenticity but exploration of the gap between self and other, actor and character, as well as of the gaps within our seemingly linear ideological narratives.”22 This means that the racial performance represented by iROZEALb’s paintings lays bare the slippage of representation, especially when one ethnic group represents another. In other words, instead of simply accepting the binary critical impulse of iROZEALb’s use of blackface, what does her appropriation of a Japanese art form heavily populated by images of Japanese women say about the potential for what Thompson calls “workable interracial tropes”?23 Such a question draws attention to the function of gender in iROZEALb’s blackface subjects. In using the aesthetic from Japanese woodblock prints, iROZEALb’s paintings partake from a genre where women dominate in representation. Richard Lane notes: “The other most striking ukiyo-e subject taken from popular pleasures was the courtesan-quarters.”24 One possible reason for the ubiquity of women in ukiyo-e prints stems from their function as promoting the floating world, a culture of aesthetics and beauty. J. Hillier notes: “They seem to have been introduced to display to best advantage fashionable dresses, as noted mannequins exhibit the creations of dress designers in the West.”25 iROZEALb’s paintings incorporate blackface as well as a feminine Japanese aesthetic and represent a different intersection of race and gender than that found in nineteenth-century blackface minstrelsy. iROZEALb’s subjects represent Japanese women who use stereotypical sexualized images of black femininity to enact a racial performance that enhances their own femininity and allows them participate in black culture. In doing so, they deviate from nineteenth-century blackface, which was used by white men to further their own identities as white men in a predominately white world. Both Lott and Saxton argue that the meaning of racial performance is directly tied to masculinity, but what happens when the racial actor is a non-white female? It raises issues about femininity and racial performance, but also possibilities for a different way to read that racial performance. Indeed, even traditional blackface minstrelsy complicates racial performance beyond cultural theft. Other scholars acknowledge that blackface minstrelsy contained authentic elements of black culture. Robert C. Toll cites black humor, animal trickster tales and parodies of slavemasters as evidence that early blackface minstrels made use of material borrowed from plantation culture.26 Sharon McCoy notes that early minstrelsy was “a tradition that went beyond the boundaries of simple racial parody and stereotypic representation” where the “focus was

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on using the racialized mask to deflate pretension and comment on issues of general or local significance.”27 Such a shift in gender may contribute to the critical use of blackface minstrelsy in iROZEALb’s work. iROZEALb’s use of Japanese aesthetics from a female-dominated genre represents her engagement in transculturation that uses ukiyo-e style for these paintings. Specifically, she transforms the lessons of the ukiyo-e prints into discourse aimed at contemporary women by basing some of her paintings on the work of Utamaro. iROZEALb’s choice of Utamaro is significant, for his ukiyo-e prints revolutionized the depiction of women in the genre. Tadashi Kobayashi notes that Utamaro’s “ukiyo-e prints are a sympathetic record of the lives of the lower classes of his time, and his prints of women possess the kind of universality that transcends historical and national boundaries. They demand a sincere aesthetic response.”28 In other words, by choosing to emulate Utamaro, iROZEALb is choosing a particular kind of Japanese aesthetic, one that is attendant on the representations of women that attempt to complicate their range of emotions. On one hand, iROZEALb uses Utamaro’s prints to comment on the ways contemporary Japanese women may be voyeurs of hip-hop culture rather than active participants in it. iROZEALb’s a3 blackface #19 (2002) mimics parts of Utamaro’s Takigawa of the Ogiya, part of the Collection of Reigning Beauties series of 1794. iROZEALb has mimicked parts of Utamaro’s print. Both figures are hunched over engaged in an activity: Utamaro’s figure is reading a scroll while iROZEALb’s figure fiddles with an ornamental necklace around her neck. Utamaro’s figure wears an outfit made up of several layers of patterned material in pastel pink colors at the top, while the bottom portion features a floral print against a black background. iROZEALb’s figure’s top is similarly layered, but with patterns that feature print, and the bottom portion of the outfit features a pair of dark pants finished with a pair of bulky Adidas athletic shoes. Utamaro’s figure wears an elaborate hairstyle typical of the ukiyo-e style, complete with hair ornaments, while iROZEALb’s figure sports a hairstyle that combines an Afro with cornrows and individual braids. Compared to Utamaro’s figure, who is engaged in the upbuilding activity of reading, iROZEALb’s figure does not seem to be engaged in a productive activity. iROZEALb transforms Utamaro’s original figure and renders her more passive. By overdetermining the figure with signifiers of hip-hop culture, iROZEALb suggests that the passivity mirrors the figure’s stance in relation to hip-hop, an observer rather than a participant. On the other hand, iROZEALb uses the possibilities that Utamaro grants to his Japanese subjects to extend similar possibilities to contemporary black women. iROZEALb’s a3 blackface #15 (2002) parallels Utamaro’s Hour of the Dog, part of his Twelve Lunar Hours series of 1796. Utamaro’s print fea-

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tures two women: one who writes a letter and another younger figure who attends the first. Rather than entertaining a guest, one of the major tasks of a courtesan, Utamaro’s courtesan seems to be teaching the younger girl. Implements for writing surround the courtesan, including an ink stone and a writing table. In iROZEALb’s version, the courtesan is transformed into a DJ. Two turntables replace writing implements. Rather than writing a letter, iROZEALb’s courtesan selects a record from her collection. iROZEALb emulates the educational impulse of Utamaro’s original print, but places it in a hip-hop context where the DJ has agency and receives accolades. Such an image cites iROZEALb’s own experience as a female DJ. The DJ is an important figure, not just because they keep the party going, but as Joanna Demers reminds us, “DJs favoured an elite collection of soul, funk and R&B for their samples,” and while they had a wide variety of genres from which to sample, they “faithfully returned (and continued to return) to soul and funk as a means of linking their work to the venerable musicians of the past.”29 Utamaro’s print functions as a springboard for iROZEALb’s exploration of additional agency for contemporary women. Given the contemporary allusion to ganguro girls, it is significant to note that iROZEALb’s subjects are Japanese women who borrow from African American culture in these paintings. Barnwell argues, “People laugh at the person who is being imitated. In other words, the idea that the subjects are in blackface is not the sole reason people laugh. They find brown’s work humorous, in large part, because it conjures spectacular, albeit demeaning, ideas about subjects with whom viewers may be familiar.”30 But if the paintings are about Japanese appropriation of black culture, then aren’t the subjects of the paintings Japanese? While the subjects may be performing blackness, does it matter that the subjects are Japanese women? If we read iROZEALb’s blackface figures as Japanese women in blackface, then iROZEALb critiques Japanese women in a3 blackface #19 but extends them agency in a3 blackface #15. In doing so, iROZEALb uses the same Japanese visual aesthetic, the ukiyo-e style, for divergent means. In addition to empowering women, iROZEALb also borrows Japanese elements to shed light on hip-hop’s own commercialism and decadence. iROZEALb bases her a3 blackface #42 (2003) on Utamaro’s The Hussy, part of The Eyeglasses of a Watchful Parent series of 1803. Utamaro’s print shows the figure in reckless abandon. We see a courtesan, but not the type celebrated in many Utamaro prints. This figure clearly lacks refinement and grace. With her robe open, she drinks what appears to be an alcoholic beverage while holding a crab in her right hand. Kobayashi suggests that the print “offers an admonishment for the woman who tends to be a hussy—uncultured, wanton and careless of others. . . . a wanton, who, in despair of life, has forsaken

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the reserved modesty demanded of a young Japanese woman who aspires to feminine charm.”31 Key to this image is the expression on her face, for Utamaro produced such prints “in which an attitude of decadence and selfabandonment is evidence even in the expression of his models.”32 Despite the centrality of pleasure in Edo Japan, individuals can go astray and can be subject to criticism for their lack of decorum. iROZEALb’s allusion to Utamaro’s print in a3 blackface #42 reveals the same warning for contemporary urban black women. iROZEALb’s figure sports a fur vest, which suggests a more urban style and attitude, whereas a fur coat could at least be functional. The vest overlays another garment, and those familiar with fashion will recognize the print as the designer Burberry. A close look at the accessories adorning her hair reveals not only hairpins reminiscent of geishas, but also a fabric headband that sports the logo of another designer, Gucci. Instead of a crab, iROZEALb’s figure holds a bottle of liquor that features a label, which is in full view. More so than Utamaro’s figure, iROZEALb’s figure looks directly at the viewer, suggesting that she is conscious of her conspicuous consumption and rejection of acceptable behavior. As did Utamaro, iROZEALb uses contemporaneous icons in the piece that signify markers of conspicuous consumption and materialism. iROZEALb takes the visual elements and theme of caution of Utamaro’s print and translates them to comment on African American experience. While iROZEALb’s painting certainly criticizes Japanese women who adopt the materially informed version of African American culture, iROZEALb also critiques African Americans who perpetuate such images in the first place: “The problem is just the way that marketing and the commercialization of things happens in this country. . . . Hip Hop is being used to sell things all the time.”33 Imani Perry notes the centrality of materialism in hiphop promoted by its black innovators: “The acquisition of these stylish status symbols by rappers who created casual chic was matched by the telling of socalled big lies. . . . As hip hop became more successful in the mainstream and the artists began to grow very wealthy, conspicuous consumption took on a new meaning for hip hop artists, so that more sophisticated styles became popular, along with more expensive designers.”34 In addition to her blackface paintings, iROZEALb’s catalog also features non-blackface images. Simply numbered and lacking “blackface” in the title, these non-blackface portraits of black and Asian women incorporate the two-dimensional style of ukiyo-e, but diverge from traditional ukiyo-e prints in their use of color and composition. Hillier notes that traditional ukiyo-e prints “are unquestioningly Japanese, with the invariable three-quarter face view, the simple outline of brow and cheek, narrow eyes, single line to give the nose, and half-parted petal-like lips; hierarchic, and drawn to a formula.”35

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iROZEALb’s a3 #6 (2002) deviates from traditional ukiyo-e by creating a subject who directly faces the viewer. The figure’s broader nose and fuller lips, along with her blonde hair texture, suggests that the figure may be African American rather than a traditional ukiyo-e figure. Moreover, the figure lacks the characteristic dress found in traditional ukiyo-e: “Brocades and silks, the range of colours and the inexhaustibly varied designs with which they were decorated, had always figured largely in the paintings and prints of the Ukiyoe school.”36 iROZEALb’s figure seems to be nude, and iROZEALb’s use of a monochromatic neutral color scheme diverges from the typical bold use of color and pattern. While the painting deviates from the traditional ukiyo-e style, it still gestures towards a Japanese aesthetic. While the figure looks directly at the viewer, she still maintains the sense of modesty some ukiyo-e prints promote. Her lips retain the geisha style of lipstick, where the entire lip is not filled in with the red color, but applied in a rounded form to resemble a flower bud. The figure also has a traditional courtesan ornament in her hair. Similarly, a3 #7 (2002) retains the color scheme of traditional ukiyo-e while deviating in the positioning of the figure. This figure, who may be Asian, does not look directly at the viewer, but she still gives a full view of her face. She features the same flower-bud lipstick, but her hairstyle does not resemble the ornate hairstyles in traditional ukiyo-e prints. The muted coloring hearkens to the color palette of ukiyo-e but lacks the elaborate layering of patterned material. The sole piece of fabric in this painting, the tank top the figure wears, features a large Chinese medallion symbol over a blue background with smaller medallions. These prints represent a mode of transculturation that differs from the blackface paintings. These images are less adorned than the blackface paintings. Gone are elaborate black-inspired hairstyles, clunky doorknocker earrings, long painted nails, fabrics with designer logos and unhappy expressions. These paintings gesture towards Japanese culture rather than blatantly represent it, and may be closer to the type of cross-cultural exchange iROZEALb would like to see: “In places like Osaka where you do have black people (service men and women) living and influencing the culture in a very different way, the vibe is very different, very real. I can’t quite articulate it, but there is both an authenticity and an artifice that coexists there.”37 In other words, in these paintings, iROZEALb tones down the way she appropriates from Japanese culture. She uses less spectacle, with a completely different effect. Both her blackface and non-blackface paintings express the different ways in which she borrows from Japanese culture. In creating such complicated images, iROZEALb continues a tradition of black transnational culture, specifically, a cultural and intellectual engagement between African Americans and the Japanese. There is a line of political

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engagement where African Americans not only express sympathy with the Japanese, but also incorporate Japan in their mediations on the future of African Americans. In the early twentieth century, African Americans often sympathized with Japan. Beginning with Japan’s victory over Russia in 1904, Marc Gallicchio observes: “Black American journalists celebrated Japanese exploits and evaluated Japan’s achievements for lessons that might be applicable to the conditions blacks found in the United States. . . . Not surprisingly, African Americans readily sympathized with the plight of the Japanese in America.”38 While W. E. B. Du Bois remained blind to the implications of Japan’s imperialism for China and Korea, Yuichiro Onishi reiterates that he succeeded in articulating an “Afro-Asian philosophy of world history” that emerged from his thinking about Japan and African Americans: “Du Bois affixed the symbolic and political significance of race-conscious Japan’s defiance against white Europe to a certain condition, characteristic, and possibility and linked it to the local significance of the struggle for Black freedom to intervene in prevailing discourses about race and revolution.”39 Like other black intellectuals, Du Bois saw the Japanese as a successful non-white people overcoming white racism. Because African Americans often viewed the Japanese as a potential model for resistance to racism in the United States and beyond, their promotion of the Japanese diverged from mainstream American attitudes. During the Harlem Renaissance, African American intellectuals thought about the political plight of American blacks within the context of Japan: “The iconography of Japan as a race rebel and a racial victim helped to open another space within the culture of the New Negro movement to critique white supremacy.”40 While many in American political spheres disparaged Japan as an inferior Eastern power, African Americans viewed Japan as a challenger to white supremacy. Japan functioned as a counter to white Europe as well: “[Du Bois] argued that the crisis in East Asia resulting from . . . Japan’s resistance to white Europe presented Japan with an opportunity to take a giant step in the movement of world history to complete its destiny: pan-Asian liberation from white Europe under Japanese leadership.”41 Notable African American intellectuals such as Harry Haywood, Cyril V. Briggs, Ida B. Wells-Barnett and C. J. Walker formulated modes of black internationalism that prominently featured Japan. Such a pro-Japan stance often clashed with the political discourse within the United States. For example, in the wake of the talks over Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points, efforts by African Americans to incorporate language related to racial equality failed: “In contrast to American liberals, most African American writers identified with Japan as the aggrieved party. Whereas the white press devoted scant attention to the debate over racial equality, African American journals saw the race question as inseparable

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from the basic issues of war and peace.”42 Thus, iROZEALb’s use of Japanese aesthetics to critique social behaviors echoes the political strategies of African American political leaders and writers. Not only have African Americans included Japan in transnational political strategies, they have also incorporated Japanese visual aesthetics into African American art. While the ukiyo-e style informs iROZEALb’s work, Japanese woodcuts inform the work of Elizabeth Catlett. An African American artist who gained Mexican citizenship, Catlett produced linocuts, which uses techniques of woodcuts on linoleum to produce a similar visual style. She learned this technique during her time at the Taller de Gráfica Popular (People’s Graphic Workshop), which specialized in linoleum prints and woodcuts. While Japanese woodcuts focused on Japanese subjects, Catlett used the technique to feature African American subjects. Catlett’s Sharecropper (1957) uses the techniques of woodcuts to create pattern and tension. The use of vertical white lines with heavy black horizontal lines approximates the texture of a seagrass hat on the figure. This contrasts with the texture of the figure’s hair, which appears to be white from age. The texture in the hat also creates visual tension with the diagonal lines of the figure’s neck as well as the textured background, which consists of vertical lines of white against a black background. The clashing lines give dynamism to the static figure. At the same time, the simple tones of black and white, created by the relief carving in the linoleum, adds visual intensity, with the jacket of the figure featuring more black and the background featuring more white. The figure’s face features lines that create tension as well, swirling around the contours of the eyes, cheeks, nose and mouth, implying that such texture was created “rough and leathery by years of toil in the fields.”43 This use of pattern, based on Japanese woodblock technique, shared by both Catlett and iROZEALb has similar visual implications. More contemporary visual artists like Aaron McGruder also incorporate Japanese visual aesthetics into their work. While McGruder’s syndicated comic strip The Boondoocks (1996–2006) is well known for its political and cultural critique, and is drawn in the style of manga, or Japanese comic books and graphic novels and anime, or Japanese animation. The strip follows the exploits of Huey and Riley Freeman as they adjust to a transition from their urban Chicago life to their grandfather’s suburban dwelling. Huey and Riley both have the large eyes, uniquely stylized hair and facial expressions that express a range of emotions that draw on the conventions of manga and anime characters. Adam Schwartz and Eliane Rubinstein-Avila note that unlike what American audiences describe as cartoons, anime reflects elements of Japanese communication: “They rely on highly contextual cues, combining visual and auditory modalities: facial expressions, tone of

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voice, and grunts. . . . It is not unusual for subjects of the comics to be drawn breaking out of their rectangular frames, an artistic technique intended to capture certain feelings and emotions.”44 And while manga differs from anime, there is a synergy between the two: “What originates as anime is often also appropriated into printed manga form.”45 According to Susan Napier, that style includes “grotesque drawings of characters with shrunken torsos and oversized heads” and gestures towards the alternative world that anime creates: “It seems reasonable to argue that this is an appeal that goes beyond the constraints of any specific culture. The very quality of ‘statelessness’ has increasing attraction in our global culture.”46 Like McGruder, iROZEALb uses these visual cues to accentuate black life. In looking at the blackface and non-blackface images in the a3 exhibit catalog, we see stark differences and a cross-cultural project complicated by different ethnic cultures. On one level, iROZEALb’s blackface work represents a complex response to contemporary Japanese phenomenon, ganguro girls and other Japanese youth that traffic in various modes of African American culture. She simultaneously uses Japanese visual aesthetics to point out how Japanese youth engage the more superficial aspects of African American culture as well as to grant agency to Japanese women. Her non-blackface work gestures to what may seem to be more acceptable modes of cross-cultural exchange that involve less spectacle. On another level, iROZEALb’s use of ukiyo-e represents the appropriation of Japanese aesthetics for an African American cultural project and a mode of cultural exchange in the other direction. In both instances, the results are varied and mixed. They both represent cross-cultural projects that attempt to work out ways that urban ethnic cultures, separated by centuries, engage in cultural exchange at a variety of levels.

Notes 1. Andrea Barnwell, “Guilty (Blackfaced) Pleasures,” in iona rozeal brown: a3 . . . black on both sides, ed. Andrea Barnwell (Atlanta: Spelman College Museum of Fine Art, 2004), 11. The artist has recently changed her name to iROZEALb. This change will be reflected in this chapter with the exception of the citation of sources in which she is referred to by her former name. 2. Barnwell, “Guilty (Blackfaced) Pleasures,” 11–12. 3. Lyneise Williams, “Black on Both Sides: A Conversation with Iona Rozeal Brown,” Callaloo 29.3 (2006): 832. 4. Richard A. Rogers, “From Cultural Exchange to Transculturation: A Review and Reconceptualization of Cultural Appropriation,” Communication Theory 16 (2006): 491. 5. Rogers, “From Cultural Exchange to Transculturation,” 491.

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6. Williams, “Black on Both Sides,” 829. 7. Barnwell, “Guilty (Blackfaced) Pleasures,” 12. 8. Ibid., 11. 9. Alexander Saxton, “Blackface Minstrelsy and Jacksonian Ideology,” in Locating American Studies: The Evolution of a Discipline, ed. Lucy Maddox (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), 123. 10. Eric Lott, Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class (New York: Oxford, 1995), 49. 11. Tadashi Suzuki and Joel Best, “The Emergence of Trendsetters for Fashions and Fads: Kogaru in 1990s Japan,” The Sociological Quarterly 44.1 (2003): 62. 12. Valerie Cassel, “From Noh to Nah: iona rozeal brown Remixed,” in iona rozeal brown: a3 . . . black on both sides, ed. Andrea Barnwell (Atlanta: Spelman College Museum of Fine Art, 2004), 29. 13. Williams, “Black on Both Sides,” 829. 14. Paul C. Taylor, “Funky White Boys and Honorary Soul Sisters,” Michigan Quarterly Review 36.2 (1997): 327. 15. Barnwell, “Guilty (Blackfaced) Pleasures,” 17. 16. J. Susan Isaacs, “afro-asiatic allegory,” iona rozeal brown: afro-asiatic allegory, ed. J. Susan Isaacs and A. M. Weaver (Towson, MD: Towson University, 2012), 4. 17. Arnd Schneider, “On ‘Appropriation’: A Critical Reappraisal of the Concept and Its Application in Global Art Practices,” Social Anthropology 11.2 (2003): 218. 18. Schneider, “On ‘Appropriation,’” 221. 19. Ibid., 222, 223. 20. Cassel, “From Noh to Nah,” 27–8. 21. Deborah Thompson, “Blackface, Rape and Beyond: Rehearsing Interracial Dialogue in ‘Sally’s Rape,’” Theatre Journal 48.2 (1996): 125. 22. Debby Thompson, “‘Is Race a Trope?’: Anna Deavere Smith and the Question of Racial Performativity,” African American Review 37.1 (2003): 130. 23. Thompson, “Blackface, Rape and Beyond,” 124. 24. Richard Lane, Images from the Floating World: The Japanese Print (Switzerland: Konecky & Konecky, 1978), 16. 25. J. Hillier, Utamaro: Colour Prints and Paintings (Oxford: Phaidon Press, 1979), 50. 26. Robert C. Toll, “From Folktype to Stereotype: Images of Slaves in Antebellum Minstrelsy,” Journal of the Folklore Institute 8.1 (1971): 43. 27. Sharon McCoy, “‘The Trouble Begins at Eight’: Mark Twain, the San Francisco Minstrels, and the Unsettling Legacy of Blackface Minstrelsy,” American Literary Realism 41.3 (2009): 234. 28. Tadashi Kobayashi, Ukiyo-e: An Introduction to Japanese Woodblock Prints, trans. Mark A. Harbison (Tokyo: Kodansha International, 1982), 69. 29. Joanna Demers, “Sampling the 1970s in Hip-Hop,” Popular Music 22.1 (2003): 41. 30. Barnwell, “Guilty (Blackfaced) Pleasures,” 18. 31. Tadashi Kobayashi, Utamaro: Portraits from the Floating World, trans. Mark A. Harbison (Tokyo: Kodansha International, 1993), 44.

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32. Kobayashi, Utamaro, 92. 33. Kaleena Johnson, “An Interview with iona rozeal brown,” in iona rozeal brown: afro-asiatic allegory, ed. J. Susan Isaacs and A. M. Weaver (Towson, MD: Towson University, 2012,) 10. 34. Imani Perry, Prophets of the Hood: Politics and Poetics in Hip Hop (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005), 194–95. 35. Hillier, Utamaro, 75. 36. Ibid., 92. 37. Cassell, “From Noh to Nah,” 30. 38. Marc Gallicchio, The African American Encounter with Japan and China: Black Internationalism in Asia, 1985–1945 (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2000), 15. 39. Yuichiro Onishi, Transpacific Antiracism: Afro-Asian Solidarity in Twentieth-Century Black America, Japan and Okinawa (New York: New York University, 2013), 56. 40. Onishi, Transpacific Antiracism, 50. 41. Ibid., 72. 42. Gallicchio, The African American Encounter, 25. 43. Andrea Barnwell, Kirsten P. Buick, Margaret Denny, Martin Fox, Jennifer Jankaukas, Dennis A. Narowcki, Mark Pascale, Kymberly N. Pinder and Andrew J. Walker, “A Portfolio of Works by African American Artists Continuing the Dialogue: A Work in Progress,” Art Institute of Chicago Museum Studies 24.2 (1999): 207. 44. Adam Schwartz and Eliane Rubinstein-Avila, “Understanding the Manga Hype: Uncovering the Multimodality of Comic-Book Literacies,” Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy 50.1 (2006): 41. 45. Schwartz and Rubinstein-Avila, “Understanding the Manga Hype,” 41. 46. Susan Napier, Anime from Akira to Howl’s Moving Castle: Experiencing Contemporary Japanese Animation (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 26.

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2 The Theatrics of Japanese Blackface Body as Mannequin Nina Cornyetz1

I

wrote an article many years ago, in 1994, “Fetishizing Blackness: Hip Hop and Racial Desire in Contemporary Japan.”2 In that article I interpreted the “deep” meaning of Japanese male youth who dressed in hip hop hairdos and outfits, many of whom were also rappers, as an appropriation of African American style indebted to a sort of phallic empowerment. One important way in which I understood this Japanese male blackface to diverge from the manner in which American white youth similarly appropriated rap music and hip hop style was the valorization of black skin itself as a key signifier. Male Japanese hip hop and rap enthusiasts consistently darkened their skin in tanning salons and/or with makeup. This I interpreted as an overturning of the cultural class-based valorization of whiteness, and for some youth, an intentional identification as “yellow” brothers to black American men, in opposition to mainstream “whiteness.” When I did the research for that article, in the early 1990s, it was unusual, however, to see Japanese women in blackface. Instead, as I described, girls who loved hip hop and rap turned to the acquisition of black boyfriends and rejection of Japanese youth in their rebellion against Japanese mainstream society. This new essay, “The Theatrics of Japanese Blackface,” represents my attempt to read a different sort of Japanese youthful style, which also originated in a kind of blackface, but is one practiced by girls. In Japan of the 1990s, shortly after I wrote the article just summarized, therefore roughly contemporaneous with the appearance of that essay in print, there appeared on the streets of Shibuya in Tokyo new styles sported by teenage girls of what today would be called gyaru. One of the most prominent of the original gyaru styles — 45 —

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was called ganguro (顔黒), which literally means “black face” and incorporates the homophone for “grotesque.” Under the general rubric of ganguro were the subset yamamba and her cousin style, mamba.3 The contraction yamamba and its further contracted form mamba originate from the term yamauba, traditionally the rubric for the mountain hags of Japanese folklore, who were said to inhabit the liminal abodes of mountaintops, waiting to catch and devour hapless male passersby. Such elements as the abundant, wild and unruly blonde or pink or other pastel tresses sported by girls in the 1990s are clearly inspired by the crone of folklore. The yamamba and mamba girls of the 1990s also tanned their skin and painted their faces with dark brown makeup, wore white lipstick, white eye shadow both above and below the eye, or for yamamba, only above the eye, and streaked their noses with white stripes. For Americans, these “original” gyaru outfits and makeup inevitably evoke the specter of Al Jolson and other minstrel portrayals of blackface. This is far truer of the ganguro style than it was in the male appropriation of black style, which, as noted above, incorporated darkened skin, but not in a caricature. Conversely, the ganguro look shares with black minstrelsy a hefty portion of precisely such caricature. American blackface, however, grew out of an ambivalent mix of racism, intimacy, and desire; a phenomenon that spoke to the depths of racial identity, selfness and othering, from its origins before the civil war in the 1830s through the early twentieth century.4 Originated by whites, later taken up by African Americans, it must be historically placed in the context of American interracial intimacy. Scholars such as Eric Lott have argued convincingly that American minstrelsy and blackface were at least in part indebted to an unconscious, complex and ambivalent function of desire on the part of white Americans.5 The question remains, however, of how do the historical significations of American blackface speak to the phenomenon of the 1990s ganguro subculture? Or, even, the question of does it speak at all to the Japanese context? Can we make any of the same sorts of assumptions? What, if anything, is the deeper “meaning” of Japanese ganguro blackface? Before turning to these questions, first, however briefly, I want to remind the readers that, as Tricia Rose showed in 1994 in Black Noise, rap and hip hop claims to origins in a counterculture defiant to mainstream culture aside, were always and still are fully embedded in commodity culture.6 Likewise, gyaru subculture cannot be severed from its association with consumerism. In fact, gyaru style has from its inauguration been associated with a particular hip department store in Shibuya, Tokyo: Shibuya 109.7 Yamamba and mamba are not the only “sub-styles” which can be gathered under the rubric gyaru.

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And today, each of the many sub-styles is associated with particular brands sold at Shibuya 109.8 Gyaru culture and style is also inseparable from a Tokyo-based magazine called Egg, originated in 1995, that has been fundamental to the shaping of gyaru culture. Girls who sought to be gyaru both starred in the photo shoots published in the magazine and consumed the products sold by the magazine in order to achieve the look itself. In the September 2011 edition, an interview with some of the Egg gyaru models has the girls, not surprisingly, praising the magazine and noting that back in the “old days” there was only Egg to follow for fashion and inspiration, while today there are also bloggers (and other magazines dedicated to gyaru style). And, they confirm that it is quite expensive to keep up with the style and its trends.9 Also in 2011, Egg released a special edition book titled Girl’s History of Egg Flowers, which was a collection of biographies and interviews tracing the trials and triumphs of ten first-generation Egg model gyaru. Reading their histories, I was surprised to realize that some of the original Egg girls were never independently associated with Shibuya, or Shibuya 109, or the gyaru style until they became models for Egg. Ishii Megu, for example, reported that she was from Yokohama, and therefore didn’t go to hang out at Shibuya at all.10 She, among others of the ten so-called original Egg gyaru were solicited by the magazine in model search campaigns, or applied to the magazine as models. Only then did they turn into gyaru, becoming models for the look, which in turn was inseparable from the goods being sold by the advertisers in the magazine to help girls turn themselves into gyaru. These goods, of course, are for sale at Shibuya 109, where they “provide new products every two or three weeks so that the teens find something new every time they shop. . . . shopping is a major form of entertainment among (gyaru) teens.”11 While the girls turned gyaru surely affect the fashion trends—if Egg and Shibuya 109 advertise and stock an item that nobody buys it cannot “drive” the newest trends—but in large measure it is the marketing and creation of commodities that “renews” the subculture and with which the gyaru consumers identify. This, of course, is endemic of today’s capitalist subcultures. Although subcultures (like rap music, for example) are first noted in the press with alarm, familiarity with its signs and, perhaps, symbols, as a result of the alarmist media coverage in the first place, eventually tames the subculture and prepares it for commodification and eventual absorption into mainstream culture.12 In fact, as Thomas Frank wrote back in 1997, “The countercultural idea has become capitalist orthodoxy, its hunger for transgression upon transgression now perfectly suited to an economic-cultural regime that runs on ever-faster cyclings of the new; its taste for self-fulfillment and its intolerance for the confines of tradition now permitting vast latitude in consuming practices and lifestyle experimentation.”13 What was outrageous in its origins

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becomes, in the end, mainstream. In the process, the style or subculture itself is frequently modified to be less shocking and, one might say, tamer. This has been the process with hip hop and rap in general, and, as I will argue later in this chapter, is also true of the gyaru style.14 Commentators on the ganguro/gyaru subculture often describe the girls as rebellious teens in search of a self-identity that rejects dominant cultural mores. In researching this paper, my assistant Monique Rose spoke directly with, and collected survey responses from, girls who had been engaged in the early incarnations of the ganguro in the 1990s. In response to her questions about what, if any, relationship did “blackness” as a racial category have to do with their style, their responses were generally vague and ambivalent. Yes they like hip hop, they think black American girls have a cool style that looks tough. One ex-yamamba gal who goes by “Yunkeru” (she did not want to reveal her real name; Yunkeru is the name of a well-known company that makes energy drinks) answered, “I believe it’s just about mastering Gal-ness, so it’s wrong to say that it’s about people wanting to be black. But, I will say that I wanted to be darker [of skin color] and  ikatsui [イカツい rough, tough] like black people.”15 The black origins of the style are seen as important to the girls’ desire to self-identify through style as strong (強め), tough, and self-reliant—all attributes popularly associated with African American culture. In Egg and Girl’s History of Egg Flowers, many of the girls spoke of how often B-kei (B系) style or culture affected their growth towards self-reliance or so-called independence. B-kei is a rubric for “black style,” consciously and overtly identifying blackness as the origin and the inspiration for the Japanese version. Because these girls identified blackness in general, or B-kei, with a kind of toughness and independence, using the term ikatsui, being “black like” helped them achieve a greater sense of independent selfhood.16 Of course, the Japanese mountain hag was also strong and defiant, and has to be factored in as just as much of an inspiration as black culture. Taking inspiration for fashion from black American style is not unique to those under the rubric gyaru. There are non-gyaru young Japanese women who also valorize dark skin and other “black style” in what might be called a “semiotic rebellion” against mainstream Japanese cultural preference for whiteness. Repeatedly, the power and strength associated with black pop culture and style lent power and defiance to the originators of the ganguro and other B-kei stylists. In a clip I accessed on YouTube, a Japanese young woman, Hina, consciously emulates American black style.17 And she uses the term akogare (longing or yearning for, awe of) to describe her attraction to black fashion and style, a term whose usage I stressed in my 1994 essay on Japanese hip hop. In Girl’s History of Egg more than half of the ten original gyaru likewise used the term akogare to describe their feelings about black

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music and/or style. It is a term that expresses a sort of distanced yearning, for something that can never really be possessed. Accordingly, the girls don’t expect to become black, only to emulate a blackness that will never “belong” to them. Thus, perhaps rather than origins, black “associations” are a better way to think about the cultural crossover. Japanese gyaru culture is not interested in a historical grasp of American blackface, nor is there any attempt to depict realistic imitations of actual black people, unlike Hina, the girl from the YouTube video, who emulated “real” black women with tanning, make up, outfits and hairstyle. Moreover, unlike such Japanese “black wannabes,” today’s gyaru would likely dismiss the notion that their style has anything to do with its “origins.” The attraction to blackness must not be confused with a deep identification that goes beyond appearance. It is a metaphoric valorization of blackness as such, dark skin as fashion, an appreciation for African American hip hop and other music, and not a desire for a closer relation with “real” black culture, or of course, black folks for that matter. And this, I believe, is why these associations were so easily forgotten as the gyaru movement shifted towards a new version of blackface, in which the face is no longer black—a point I will return to shortly. In fact, the only thing signaled by the yamamba/ mamba that still signifies in today’s gyaru style is the defiance of the style against mainstream social and aesthetic codes, and how cool it is. Unsurprisingly perhaps, there are also A-kei styles in gyaru culture. My first assumption was that A must be shiro, or white, an assumption facilitated by the current look of gyaru in which the faces are now decidedly white. But I was wrong in assuming A-kei meant white style. My research assistant informed me: The A in A-kei refers to “Akiba.” Akiba, of course, is shorthand for Akihabara, a district in Tokyo known for its electronics shops. The stereotypical A-kei apparently is like the main character in a hit movie Densha Otoko (Train Man) from a few years ago.18 It describes girls who “tuck their shirts into their chemically washed denim jeans and sport backpacks everywhere.” So what does this tell us? In part, it reminds us that the Japanese blackface phenomenon has no relationship to the American black-white binarism. It stands completely outside American racialism. The automatic American assumption that if B means black, A should be white is because of our historical binarism: either you are black, or you are not. But in the Japanese context, why shouldn’t B-kei, or black style, be paired off against A-kei, or Akiba style? B for black; A for Akiba. Actually, what these girls are most interested in are the minute distinctions that identify different subsets of style within the gyaru label, and that are only known to those in the know: while both yamamba and mamba wear a white stripe on the nose, their difference is largely signaled by the presence

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or absence of white makeup below the eye, and of fake eyelashes on both the top and bottom lids or only on the top lids. Sometimes yamamba also wear face patches. Ganguro are further recognized by their dyed hair in blondes, reds, or silvers, false eyelashes, platform shoes, often colored or special effects contact lenses, special fingernail treatments, and a whole host of miniscule distinctions between individual girls’ clothing and makeup and hairstyles and the style subset to which they belong (such as how stylized or natural the choice of false eyelashes). Nonetheless, these minutia have become more and more indecipherable to the non-gyaru observer. In Egg, or other gyaru magazines, models detail their eyelash, eyebrow, nose, contact lenses, lips, and other makeup choices, each of which signals a slight difference to the look, for example. This minutia is in fact integral to the details of the style. I would like to think of this fetishization of minutia along the lines suggested by Azuma Hiroki in his Otaku: Japan’s Database Animals: as a set of databases that elicit moe (attractions). These databases, argues Azuma, have replaced narrative proper in Japanese popular culture. For Azuma, characters in anime and manga are precisely formed by an additive process selecting elements from such databases of popular culture. According to this process, “As soon as the characters are created, they are broken up into elements, categorized, and registered to a database. If there is no appropriate classification, a new element or category simply will be added. In this sense, the originality of an ‘original’ character can only exist as a simulacrum. . . . There used to be a narrative behind a work. But as the importance of narrative has declined, the characters have become more important in otaku culture.”19 Hence, “characters emerging in otaku works were not unique to individual works but were immediately broken into moe-elements and recorded by consumers, and then the elements reemerged later as material for creating new characters.”20 Blonde versus red or purple hair, brown or blue or green contact lenses, special effect or conventional, these are all examples of moe elements that form the databases for gyaru style. One can mix and match to create a “unique” look for oneself, but what is no longer applicable is a deeper narrative, such as the history of American blackface, or even the traditional myth of the yamauba. As helpful as Azuma’s description is of the role of databases replacing narrative proper in Japanese anime and manga characterizations, I think there is also another way to read the ganguro style, as one in which we see the emergence of a public persona that resonates with the seventeenth-century French promenader. I say this because the gyaru dress up and promenade around Shinjuku precisely in order to be seen. I want to posit that for these Japanese gyaru, blackness is a sign that means exactly what it signs, and not a symbol to be interpreted, by which I mean, there is nothing, really, to read beneath,

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or encoded within this blackness. It is a blackface that should be taken, literally, at face value, if you will. It is simply how it looks: cool and defiant. All it says is: I am a gyaru. In Paris around the mid-eighteenth century, as Richard Sennett has argued in his The Fall of Public Man, public style operated to obliterate the natural features of both faces and bodies. Elaborate wigs, called “poufs,” perhaps sporting birds, vegetables, and flowers perched atop women’s ridiculously tall updos, while “nowhere was the attempt to blot out the individual character of a person more evident than in the treatment of the face.”21 Both men and women wore masks, or painted their faces red or white, adorned with little fabric patches that signified various political or emotional affinities of the day. “The face itself had become a background only, the paper on which these ideograms of abstract character were mounted.”22 Headdresses consisted of wigs and hats for men, and tied and waved hair, often with artificial figurines inserted, for the women. . . . Huizinga writes . . . “Every pretense of imitating nature is abandoned; the wig has become the complete ornament.” The wigs were powdered, and the powder held in place with pomade. . . . Women’s approach to dressing their hair is best illustrated by La Belle Poule. A ship of that name defeated an English frigate and inspired a hairdo in which hair represented the sea and nestled in the hair was an exact replica of La Belle Poule. Headdresses like the pouf au sentiment were so tall that women often had to kneel to go through doorways. Lester writes, “The pouf au sentiment was the favorite court style, and consisted of various ornaments fastened in the hair—branches of trees representing a garden, birds, butterflies, cardboard cupids flying about, and even vegetables.” The shape of the head was thus totally obscured, as was much of the forehead. The head was support for the real focus of interest, the wig or hairdo.23

“The surfaces of the body followed the same principles.”24 Women’s breasts might be bared in order to better display decorations draped over the chest; the natural body, or the breasts, were inconsequential. Although women’s skirts hid their legs, men’s “leggings divided the limb in half visually, and attention was focused on the shoe. . . . The bottom extremity of the body was, as were the face and upper torso, an object on which were placed decorations.”25 Hence, Sennett refers to the body of this period as a mannequin. “The woman in the pouf au sentiment did not feel ‘artificial,’ the pouf was an expression in and of itself. . . . the gesture was absolutely believable in its own terms. It had no referent to the scene in which it occurred.”26 In sum, the fashion of the mid to late 1700s in Paris was one antithetical to the modern notion of expressing one’s self as an individual, as reflected in the outfits one wore and the makeup one sported. The reality of the individual’s role in society and their “natural” features were obliterated to allow for what we can

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comfortably, I think, call a premodern form of what in Japan is called kosupure (costuming) with some leeway, because kosupure proper refers specifically to the dressing up as anime or game figures. I would argue, following Sennett here, that there is no referent to the gyaru style, and following Azuma, that the various elements they incorporate are a set of circulating “styles” from existing databases that can be recombined in novel manners, and to which additional elements can be added to make new attractive signs. This, of course, is also the exteriority that Roland Barthes discovered in Japan in the 1970s in his Empire of Signs. The signs he encounters in Japan are for him an outsider to this culture, without origins or referents. “The theatrical face is not painted (made up), it is written,” by which he means, it must be read as precisely what it says, or exactly at “face value.”27 Reduced to the elementary signifiers of writing (the blank of the page and the indentations of its script), the face dismisses any signified, i.e. any expressivity: this writing writes nothing (or writes: nothing); not only does it not “lend” itself . . . to any emotion, to any meaning (not even that of impassivity, of inexpressiveness). But it actually copies no character whatever: the transvestite actor . . . is not a boy made up as a woman, by dint of a thousand nuances, realistic touches, costly simulations, but a pure signifier whose underneath (the truth) is neither clandestine . . . nor surreptitiously signed . . . simply absented; the actor, in his face, does not play the woman, or copy her, but only signifies her . . . writing consists of “gestures of the idea.”28

Let’s briefly reconsider the YouTube footage with B-kei Hina. Watching a monitor, Hina praises a black woman whose style she is admiring because she “looks like a Barbie.” What does this mean? Well, for one, it means, she doesn’t look real. Hina’s attraction to the woman’s style is because she views it as unreal, impossible and lacking any referent in a real woman. “I want to look like a mannequin” might be a way of rephrasing her akogare or desire here. And, in fact, increasingly, the look of the gyaru loses even any semblance to a referent that exists in the material world. Perhaps this is one result of this intertwining of marketing with subcultures in the case of the gyaru subculture, without attempting to impute any intentions to the shift, which in the process of making the look less outrageous and more palatable has “whitewashed” the gyaru style that used to look much more like American blackface. This absence of content is mirrored, in fact, by the absence of content in the magazines celebrating the gyaru style that have proliferated since Egg made its debut, including Ageha, Nicky, and Ranzuki. As one standing outside the style looking in, I am astonished at how page after page, even from different magazines, seem to tell the same (vapid) stories, or the same stories with a little bit of a twist. Lists and surveys proliferate: From Nicky, a survey of one thou-

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sand gyaru: “When did you notice that you are a gyaru?” Answers range from “When I can’t quit wearing heavy makeup,” to “When I speak really loudly.” “Are you pierced?” answers the question with percentages, ears only, no piercings, desire to pierce, and face, ears and body pierced. Illustrated with a pie chart, we find: “Which do you prefer “White ‘orthodox’ Beauty (50.6 percent) or Black Skin Lively Gal” (49.4 percent)? This year, black skin is back! It is now as equally approved as white skin. Last year in the gyaru world, white skin definitely dominated but this year, for the first time since several years ago, the lively black skin look has returned! However, the gyaru world is always ever changing. We won’t know what will be in six months from now.”29 In Egg one finds a survey of middle school gyaru asking what they do with their dyed hair on school days? Do they use wigs or washout black hair dye?30 What does Egg model Hana Imai think about? The answer, displayed in a pie chart: 40 percent sleeping, 30 percent playing around, 15 percent eating, 10 percent school, and 5 percent family.31 In Ageha, thirty-five gyaru answered such questions as: “Do you have a boyfriend?” “Do you prefer men who are darker or whiter?” “Macho or lean?” “No eyelid crease or creased-eyelid guys?”32 But the bulk of each of these magazines, to reiterate, consists of page after page featuring different girls describing the minute details of how to achieve each of their individual looks, while remaining in the category to which they ostensibly belong. But what do these girls really look like? The “return of black skin” noted above now means simply a slightly bronzer cast to the face, and shares little else with the ganguro caricatures. This being said, nonetheless, anything akin to a “natural” face is obliterated, just in a different way than the ganguro precedents. In place of the “natural” face the girls “write” a figural face that reads very specifically both to the culture at large and in greater signification to the subculture to which these girls belong. It says: “I am a gyaru. I am loud, I am cool, I am fashionable. I reject your aesthetics and think I look cute.” It also proclaims: “Look at me!” The scopic drive circles its positions faithfully: the gyaru looks at her girlfriends and her magazines, is looked at, looks at herself, and gives herself to be looked at. But this is not an identification so much as a masquerade, by which individual faces are turned into sign systems, and bodies into mannequins. What has happened to their noses? Whose eyes really look like that? Don’t they look more like anime characters than live young women? In this sense we might borrow SaitŌ Tamaki’s comments on otaku to paraphrase: the gyaru are well aware of the distinctions between fantasy and reality, but they valorize fiction for its creative possibilities for self-fashioning.33 Hence the tanned “California Girl” look can combine with the mamba lips, or with the Lolita skirt, or even with bunny ears, I would imagine. In these incarnations, the narrative of black origins, or associations, indeed, has vanished.

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And, I am tempted to go further and temper my earlier submission to the claim that black culture’s association with strength and self-reliance were integral to the ganguro origins. Perhaps the origins were as much Japanese Little Black Sambo dolls, which can still be found for sale here and there in Tokyo shop windows and inside shops, and which are no more real or representative of any referent to most Japanese girls today than Doraemon,34 and just as cute, and not only American blackface or African American pop culture or the traditional yamamba of Japanese folklore.

Notes 1. This chapter would have been impossible without the research assistance of Monique Hanako Rose, who identified which magazines to read, conducted interviews in Tokyo in summer 2011, and helped me with slang expressions such as A-kei. 2. Cornyetz, “Fetishized Blackness.” 3. I was unable to locate any photos of ganguro, mamba or yamamba with clear attribution of copyright to reproduce here. However, if readers google those terms there are plenty of images to look at online. 4. See, for example, Lott, “Love and Theft,” or the book from which the article was excerpted, Love and Theft; John G. Blair, “Blackface Minstrels.” 5. Lott, Love and Theft. 6. Rose, Black Noise, 41. 7. Kawamura, Fashioning Japanese Subcultures, 51–64. 8. Ibid., 53. 9. “Paradise Talk,” Interview with select Egg models on the theme of “Gals Today, Shibuya Today,” in Egg 9, 62–63. 10. Takayama, ed. Girl’s History of Egg Flowers, 22. 11. Kawamura, Fashioning Japanese Subcultures, 53. 12. Hebdige, Subculture, especially 90–99. 13. Frank, “Why Johnny Can’t Dissent,” in Frank and Weiland, Commidify Your Dissent, 34. 14. On this process with rap and hip hop in the United States see Elizabeth Blair, “Commercialization of the RapMusic Youth Subculture.” See also Laura Miller, “Those Naughty Teenage Girls,” for an analysis of girl slang as subversive. 15. Interviews, and written questionnaire and response. Monique H. Rose, Tokyo, Japan, Summer 2011. 16. Egg Magazine, Girl’s History of Egg Flowers. 17. “Black Lifestyle in Japan,” www.metropoliswebtv. 18. Densha Otoko. 19. Azuma, Otaku: Japan’s Database Animals, 47. 20. Ibid., 52. 21. Sennett, The Fall of Public Man, 70. 22. Ibid., 70.

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23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34.

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Ibid., 69–70. Ibid., 70. Ibid., 70–71. Ibid., 79. Barthes, Empire of Signs, 88. Ibid., 89. Nicky 7, 122–23. Egg 179, 25. Ibid., 57. Ageha 59, 99–101. SaitŌ, Sentō bishōjo no seishin bunseki. Doraemon is a robot cat character in a Japanese cartoon for children.

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3 Abbey Lincoln and Kazuko Shiraishi’s Art-Making as Spiritual Labor Yuichiro Onishi and Tia-Simone Gardner1

T

his chapter is about an aesthetic correspondence between two women artists on the cutting edge. This exchange took place in Japan in the early 1970s. Two artists under consideration are Abbey Lincoln (1930–2010), the African American singer, lyrist, and composer who worked within and outside the jazz idiom to command presence and influence as an artist, and Kazuko Shiraishi (1931– ), the Japanese poet who continues to practice the first principle of the surrealist movement, nonconformity, through the enactment of the experience of exaltation marked by a variety of gender and sexual transgressions and erotic provocation. Moreover, the purpose of this juxtaposition is to assemble a response to M. Jacqui Alexander’s call to recall and renew the tradition of women-of-color feminism. In Pedagogies of Crossing, Alexander writes: Where does one come to consciousness as a woman of color and live it, at this moment? Have we developed a new metaphysics of political struggle?2

Like Alexander, the chapter makes an analytic move toward the primacy of the metaphysical to consider her insistence on seeing “experience” as “a category of great epistemic import to feminism.” Specifically, the chapter focuses on how these two women artists have come to experience their own experiences, that is how they have come to know what it means to be human. The key to their self-realizations was their approach to the labor of creating art as spiritual labor. Abbey Lincoln was an artist that reworked the idiom of jazz through her involvement in the civil rights movement in the 1960s. Much has been — 57 —

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written about the story of Lincoln’s transformation, how her marriage to drummer Max Roach opened the path toward her artistic maturity. She repudiated her glamorous past as a sex symbol and came into being as the female icon of Black militancy. Most notably her performance on We Insist! The Freedom Now Suite (1960), the collaborative project featuring the music of Roach and singer-songwriter Oscar Brown, Jr., and her own Straight Ahead (1961) marked her nascent social consciousness. Yet, not one scholarly treatment has achieved a sustained meditation on Lincoln’s art-making during the period in which she retreated from the limelight after ending her marriage with drummer Max Roach in 1970 and went to California to take care of her mother. Far from being crippled by loss and sorrow, she searchingly, with rigor, discipline, and talent, worked out what was original about her art between her divorce from Roach and the delayed US release of People in Me in 1978 (recorded and released first in Japan in 1973), followed by Golden Lady (1981) and Talking to the Sun (1983).3 These three albums laid the important foundation for Lincoln’s artistic success in the third and final phase of her career from 1990—the year in which the release of The World Is Falling Down coincided with the premiere of Spike Lee’s film Mo’ Better Blues in which she acted—until her death in August 2010. During these two decades, she led a very productive career, releasing eleven albums (all but one are Verve recordings).4 If part of the argument of this chapter is that the evidence of the beginning of Abbey Lincoln’s maturing artistry are to be found in her performances made audible in the live album Abbey Lincoln in Misty and the recording of tracks on People in Me—both of which took place in Japan in June 1973— then what did Lincoln work on in Japan that enabled her to make such acute advances as an artist? The context from which these 1973 albums came into being reveals Lincoln’s self-conscious effort to cultivate and preserve the mainspring of slave art in Black America without suppressing the unruliness of racial, gender, and sexual formations in the history of the Black struggle.5 As this chapter will show, ubiquitous in the compositions that she performed and lyrics she wrote for these 1973 albums is evidence of how she learned to follow the thrust toward spiritual autonomy—to be African in faith—and to make this pulse of Africanity productive for the constitution of transformative nonnormative Black identities that resided, as Cathy Cohen puts it, “outside of the heteronormative privilege—in particular those perceived as threatening systems of white supremacy, male domination, and capitalist advancement.” In other words, Lincoln found a way to elevate herself as an independent Black woman artist by taking a path of her own to affirm her conviction in living a life inside the nonnormative domain of social existence.6 Such a stance appeared explicitly in the way she communicated

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another way to love without succumbing to the traditional forms of marriage, family, and relationship buttressed by the racist logic of heteronormativity.7 To do so was to render in her music a certain type of “courage required to go on living in the present,” as Paul Gilroy has described the function of the music created by the descendants of enslaved Africans.8 The music that Lincoln created in Japan in 1973 possessed this authority of slave art, or what Alexander calls “the knowledge of Divine accompaniment and guidance.” Shiraishi, who plays the role of the interlocutor in this chapter, was one of the few Japanese listeners that responded to Lincoln’s art-making in Japan with deep understanding. It confirmed what Shiraishi had already known: faith in the metaphysical system called Africanity was not, to borrow from M. Jacqui Alexander, “uninformed epiphenomena, lapses outside the bounds of rationality to be properly corrected with rationality, but rather knowledge about Sacred accompaniment, knowledge that is applied and lived in as consistent and as committed a way as possible so as to feel and observe the meaning of mystery, not as secret, but as elusive—hence the constancy of work.”9 Presented as a meditation on an Afro-Asian aesthetic correspondence, the chapter will explore how these two women artists turned to sacred knowing to engage in the labor of creating art. Masahiko Yu, a critic who often wrote for Japan’s leading jazz periodical Suingu Jānaru [Swing Journal], was up close with Abbey Lincoln during her two-week stay in Japan in June 1973. Lincoln arrived in Tokyo on June 15, 1973, and performed at Roppongi Misty on June 18; at Takanawa Prince Hotel’s Night Spot on June 23; again at Roppongi Misty on June 25; at Akasaka Vipa Room on June 26; at Ginza Junk on June 27; at Kyoto Big Boy on June 28; and at Jan Jan on June 30. Her visit was managed by Ai Music, an artist management company still in its nascent formation (established in 1970). Prior to Lincoln’s arrival in June 1973, it had successfully organized the tours of such artists as tenor saxophonist Joe Henderson (July–August 1971), pianist Mal Waldron (July 1972), pianist McCoy Tyner (October–November 1972), singer Johnny Hartman (November 1972), singer Ann Burton (March 1973), and pianist Cecil Taylor (May 1973). The release of Lincoln’s People in Me and Abbey Lincoln in Misty in Japan in 1973, moreover, was made possible because of Ai Music’s existing relationship with the Japanese subsidiary of Phonogram, Nippon Phonogram, which was a part of the Philips record label. 10 Assigned the task of artist management and promotion by Toshinari Koinuma of Ai Music, Yu reviewed her first gig at Roppongi Misty on June 18 and watched her record the tracks for People in Me throughout the night until the wee hours at the Aoyama Victor Studio in Tokyo on June 23. Between Lincoln’s takes, he found some time to talk to her. That night, working with two Japanese musicians, pianist Hiromasa Suzuki and bassist Kunimitsu

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Inaba and three sidemen for Miles Davis, then touring in Japan, drummer Aloysius “Al” Foster, saxophonist David Liebman, and percussionist James Mtume, Lincoln recorded the tracks. Davis and Lincoln’s chance encounter in Tokyo led to this collaboration. Davis even briefly showed up in the studio that night, assuming the role of a “counsel,” as Lincoln characterized. People in Me included the following eight tracks: “You and Me Love,” composed by John Rotella; “Natas (Playmate),” composed by Abbey Lincoln; “Dorian (The Man with the Magic),” composed by African American pianist Ronnie Matthews; “Africa,” composed by John Coltrane; “People in Me,” composed by Abbey Lincoln; “Living Room,” composed by Max Roach; “Kohjoh-NoTsuki,” composed by Rentaro Taki; and “Naturally,” the standard arranged by Lincoln. This was the first album where Lincoln contributed her own original compositions. It was an important departure.11 However, Yu, Lincoln’s interviewer, was woefully unprepared, both epistemologically and politically, to fathom, let alone meditate, on this importance. An avid listener of jazz and a self-proclaimed student of Black culture and politics, he published widely in numerous jazz periodicals in Japan. The book titled Boku no jazu Amerika [My Jazz America], published in 1979, represented a summation of his immersion in Black music throughout the 1970s. For instance, in a series of articles written for Jazz Magazine that were based on his interviews with Max Roach in 1977, Yu engaged with Roach’s Black nationalist thought and showed admiration for it. Not surprisingly, throughout these interviews and essays not once did Yu mention Abbey Lincoln and her work. Such was the case for Roach as well. Neither of them highlighted the role Lincoln played in redefining the role and representation of Black women in the struggle, although their conversation dovetailed around the Freedom Now Suite project and its impact in the Black freedom movement. Clearly more interested in knowing about Max Roach and his Black nationalist politics than Lincoln and her work, Yu altogether glossed over Lincoln’s effort to achieve clarity on the source and purpose of the labor of creating art, her identification with the authority of slave art.12 Yet ubiquitous in Yu’s interview with Lincoln were markings of her own striving to present “new metaphysics of political struggle,” the unity of being, to become herself. All the while expressing how much she was still deeply indebted to Max Roach for showing her the essence of human dignity in the interview, she made a startling pronouncement. She told Yu that she had already decided to fundamentally repudiate the norm for Black heterosexual relations: “But I have no desire to be reunited with him. The next time I get married, I’ll choose an African form where the man would have his own house and the woman would have hers.”13

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While Lincoln’s desire for gendered segregation could be read as the perpetuation of a patriarchal household structure buttressed by the practice of polygamy, such an interpretation would end up concealing the context from which she engaged in the practice of her own distinct provocation against normativity. Her “attitude of revolt”—it is important to emphasize—was not just directed at monogamy, the structure of the nuclear family, and the gendered conception of capitalist property ownership, all of which hardened the demarcation between men and women and their roles in society. Rather it signified, as Lorraine O’Grady writes, “the reclamation of the body as a site of black female subjectivity.” It was a clear expression on Lincoln’s part to repudiate the white heteronormative logic that rendered “the Black female heterosexual” as a category devoid of gender and sexual normativity and, worse, to borrow from Cheryl Clarke, the master’s concubine to be violated, objectified, exploited, and vilified—and an outcome of “a theft of the body, a willful and violent (and unimaginable from this distance) severing of the captive body from its motive will, its active desire,” as Hortense J. Spillers explains. Denied was the right of those who desire to go beyond and exist outside this normative category, “the Black female heterosexual,” to speak and live on their own terms. Lincoln was pointing out the loss of ancient ways of knowing and being, or the following dictum presented by O’Grady: “To name ourselves rather than be named we must first see ourselves.”14 Lincoln was not alone in her effort to radically rethink how to locate the wellspring of Black female subjectivity. For instance, she was among the contributors to the landmark anthology The Black Woman (1970), edited by Toni Cade Bambara, the text that laid the groundwork for the formation of women-of-color feminism, both in the context of the political struggle and academy. Though not often cited as a significant figure of the Black women’s movement or of Black women’s intellectual history, Abbey Lincoln’s contribution to the anthology articulates a “protofeminist orientation.”15 Lincoln’s essay “Who Will Revere the Black Woman,” originally published in 1966, appeared alongside Audre Lorde and Nikki Giovanni’s poems, Alice Walker’s and Paule Marshall’s short stories, and Frances Beale’s essay, to name just a few. Of particular importance is how the perspective of Lincoln’s nonnormative provocation appeared centrally in Toni Cade Bambara’s seminal essay “On the Issues of Roles” as well. In this essay, Bambara discussed the problem of the destruction of the metaphysics of human relations and political struggle founded on the matrilineal system.16 Bambara’s argument was historically sweeping yet cogent. According to her, the emergence of gender norms and categories, or what she called “the madness of ‘masculinity’ and ‘femininity,’” was made possible by fifteenth-century indigenous and African worlds’

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encounter with the West, Europe’s intrusion into Africa, the Americas, and Asia.17 She explained this causality as epochal rupture, for the production of racial difference helped fuel gender and sexual oppressions against Black and indigenous women. Bambara wrote: I am convinced, at least in my readings of African societies, that prior to the European obsession of property as a basis for social organization, and prior to the introduction of Christianity, a religion fraught with male anxiety and vilification of women, communities were equalitarian and cooperative. The woman was neither subordinate nor dominant, but a sharer in policy making and privileges, had mobility and opportunity and dignity. And while it would seem she had certain tasks to perform and he particular duties to attend, there were no hard and fixed assignments based on gender. . . . There is nothing to indicate that the Sioux, Seminole, Iroquois or other “Indian” nations felt oppressed or threatened by their women, who had mobility, privileges, a voice in the governing of the commerce. There is evidence, however, that the European white was confused and alarmed by the equalitarian system of these societies and did much to wreck it, creating the wedges between the men and women.18

Much like the efforts by Black feminist and queer poets of color and activists of the 1970s to name the problems of sexism, misogyny, and homophobia within the Black community and beyond, Lincoln issued a critical call to transform the metaphysical system governed by the regulatory matrices of race, class, gender, and sexuality. Her proclamation, thus, had everything to do with devising a new logic of alliance, especially by way of tapping into the potential of the coming unity between sexuality and racial difference. Lincoln sought to make anew the social ontology of identity and social organization.19 Lincoln’s nonnormative provocation, as expected, stirred a deep anxiety within the Black community. It was categorically declared a case of “madness,” especially by those who adhered to the tradition of historical Black struggles concerned with the repudiation of subpersonhood (or the overthrow of their “actual being” as the object of private property) and the preservation of “historical being” (that is to say people with history). Within this tradition, heteronormativity was all too often taken for granted, and Max Roach, Lincoln’s former husband, was an adherent to this tradition. For this reason, Roach was dismissive of desire on the part of Lincoln to go beyond the category of “the Black female heterosexual.” As Lincoln once recalled, the imposition of this category of “madness” unleashed violence, causing her to doubt her own worth and capacities to live fully as human: “I visited a psychiatric hospital ‘cause Roach said there was madness in the house. He said it wasn’t him, so I figured it must be me / They had me hollering and screaming like a crazy person. . . .”20

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Equally important at this particular conjunction in the 1970s was how Lincoln’s call for nonnormative sexualities presented itself as a sharp critique of the infamous Moynihan Report, published as The Negro Family: The Case for National Action (1965) by Daniel Patrick Moynihan, then a sociologist working closely with the Kennedy and Johnson administrations. This Report unleashed a whole set of cultural explanations for structural racism, proclaiming, in particular, that the ubiquity of female-headed households and the presence of the so-called Black matriarchs as outlandish and pathological, a main culprit forestalling Black Americans’ successful upward social mobility in American society. Lincoln’s stance was that of repudiation. She rejected the remedy presented in the Moynihan Report, the constitution of heterosexual Black family structure by way of the restoration of Black patriarchy. What she recognized was that the experience of race in the United States was not mutually exclusive of gender and sexual formations: white supremacy established heteropatriarchy as the essential requirement for personhood and ultimately a key indicator of fitness for citizenship and integration into American liberal democracy.21 Her essay “Who Will Revere the Black Woman?” is an exemplary of the work of Lincoln as a theorist of critical race, gender, and sexuality studies. Throughout this essay, by way of interrogating a host of other racist and heterosexist images, including such terms as “loose,” “hotblooded,” “wanton,” sultry,” and “amoral,” Lincoln conveyed how these racist and sexist myths and constructs acquired categorical unity to do tremendous violence against Black women.22 Yet, for Lincoln, the most tragic aspect of this systematic assault on Black women’s humanity was Black men’s embrace of these hegemonic discourses about racial difference and sexuality, which further gave credence to white men and women’s attack on Black women’s “privacy and sanctity and sanity.”23 But strange as it is, I’ve heard it echoed by too many Black full-grown males that Black womanhood is the downfall of the Black man in that she (the Black woman) is “evil,” “hard to get along with,” “domineering,” “suspicious,” and “narrow-minded.” In short, a black, ugly, evil you-know-what.24

According to Lincoln, Black men remained myopic, unprepared to critique how these racist, misogynist, and sexist characterizations made Black women “the scapegoat for what white America has made of the ‘Negro Personality,’” directing her sharpest criticism at the Moynihan Report that not only blamed Black matriarchy for poverty, crime, and sexual promiscuity but also undermined Black men’s moral and political authority. To perceive Black women’s sexuality as unruly was no different from that of the perverse white conception of Black male sexuality as brute (hence a threat to white male control of women’s bodies); this was the bitter truth, the deep irony, Black men could

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not grasp or refused to admit. Throughout, thus, her focus rested squarely on how racialization fueled gender and sexual oppressions against both Black women and men. What she recognized was that the experience of race in the United States was not mutually exclusive of gender and sexual formations: white supremacy established heteropatriarchy as the essential requirement for personhood and ultimately a key indicator of fitness for citizenship and integration into American liberal democracy.25 Thus, Lincoln’s aim was to construct what I call the nonnormative ontology of we who are “black evil, ugly.” This was, for her, a new kind of synthesis, whereby the operations of the hegemonic discourse about sexuality and racial difference would be reoriented fundamentally to help facilitate the formations of transformative nonnormative Black identities. Knowing well that Lincoln’s approach to marriage appeared scandalous, Gil Noble, an African American producer and host of Like It Is, a television program dedicated to the enrichment of Black life, culture, and politics, told her with frankness during the 1979 interview that her comments would incite controversy. Bursting with laughter, Lincoln nonetheless responded to Noble with a kind of seriousness that suggested that she was already heading to the new destination, and she spoke about how she would like to try to change her relations with men, from living together to forging a different kind of alliance.26 Farah Jasmine Griffin writes in If You Can’t Be Free, Be a Mystery (2001) that “[Lincoln’s] work has something to nourish any who take the time to really hear the story she tells.” Indeed, her art possessed the characteristic of reciprocity, or universal appeal, precisely because Lincoln considered her work, as Griffin so aptly puts it, “a form of devotion.” Lincoln confirmed: “I’m possessed of my own spirit / This is the music of the African muse / I just want to be of use to my ancestors / It’s holy work and it’s dangerous not to know that ‘cause you could die like an animal down here.”27 She explained: The way I survived the turmoil and onslaught against my spirit was through practicing art at home. Sometimes I am a performing artist, but most of the time I am a Solitary Single Artist at home. Sometimes I paint. I’ve painted myself a few times and I write and search through dictionaries and old Encyclopedia Britannicas for a life that was privy to my ancestors that reinforces my life, a better understanding of where I am in the middle of nowhere. And I design and make my clothes. They are all disciplines and so I do this rather than be idle and find myself doing mischievous things that hurt me.28

Lincoln’s conceptualization of her own art-making as “holy work,” or something sacred and revitalizing that could help achieve a wholeness of being, is evidence of her grasp of the context from which her music would manifest utopian potential. That context was the slave culture of colonial and antebel-

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lum America. What the great scholar of African American life and history, Sterling Stuckey, calls the “circle of culture,” were rituals cultivated through dance ceremonies. One called the Ring Shout was often performed at a burial ground and involved singing, call and response, drumming, hand clapping, fiddle or violin performances, and storytelling, all carried out while moving counterclockwise in a circle to honor the dead and the ancestors.29 The Ring Shout was carried out with tremendous vigor, creativity, and imagination to muster the power, as Stuckey writes, “to fashion a life style and set of values—an ethos—which prevented them from being imprisoned altogether by the definition which the larger society sought to impose.”30 In the New World, this culture functioned as a shared spiritual language with which enslaved Africans of diverse ethnic backgrounds, such as the Akan, the Yoruba, the Igbo, and their descendants would find their shared identity and culture as African and achieve the form of solidarity based on race to mount resistance to slavery, even as they spoke different languages, worshipped their own gods, and perpetuated their own social and cultural norms.31 This may be also seen in her yet another medium, poetry, collected in the unpublished manuscript titled “In a Circle Everything Is Up.” One of the poems she often recited in interviews—“Where Are the African Gods?”—is a clear illustration of her engagement with Africanity as a vehicle to find a path toward the realm of freedom to live otherwise.32 In the poem, she answers her question by claiming that “we” (ourselves) are those very gods.33 Pianist James Weidman, a pianist who performed many gigs with Lincoln throughout the 1980s and participated in her studio session for the album Talking to the Sun (1983), exhibited a great appreciation for Lincoln’s craft grounded in her pursuit of Africanity. Weidman called it “a beautiful challenge.” Her art-making was at once beautiful and challenging because musicians working with her were expected to repudiate the normative practice of accompaniment, or a commonly accepted expectation to deliver wellorganized arrangement, which entailed following closely the already scripted and enumerated scores. Instead Lincoln demanded that they explore what it would take to invent a new form of life by interrogating “what your life is about in the moment,” as singer Cassandra Wilson, who also performed with Lincoln in the 1980s, recalled.34 Music-making had little to do with improvisation; it had everything to do with honing the art of listening and the practice of self-reflection. This creative project of identification with the interiority of self was a matter of survival for Lincoln. It was spiritual labor. For without it, to reiterate Lincoln’s sentiment, “you could die like an animal down here.” She approached her music-making with intense devotion and vigilance because it was concerned with the preservation of the consciousness and experience of the enslaved. This meant that musicians had to figure out myriad

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contingencies, wading through dissonances and detritus, all the while searchingly preparing for incitement to something sensuous to help constitute the collectivity based on the nonnormative ontology of we who are “black evil, ugly.” The critical call for “you and me” in “Where Are the African Gods?” is suggestive of this orientation in her art-making.35 The avant-garde Japanese poet Kazuko Shiraishi was a rare jazz enthusiast in Japan. In sharp contrast to Yu who reviewed Lincoln’s performance and music in 1973, Shiraishi was wholly cognizant of the self-conscious effort on the part of Lincoln to carve out a space to enact this embodiment of slave spirituality, the nonnormative ontology of we who are “black, evil, ugly.” Perhaps Shiraishi heard Lincoln’s utterance during the 1973 live performance at Roppongi Misty in Tokyo. The off-the-microphone shout out—“You and Me Now”—was made audible as a distant calling toward the end of her performance of “Caged Bird,” probably performed for the first time, for she wrote this composition in 1973 before coming to Japan. It would wait another seven years until it was recorded during her Paris studio session for Golden Lady on February 4, 1980, featuring tenor saxophonist Archie Shepp, trumpeter Roy Burroughs, pianist Hilton Ruiz, bassist Jack Gregg, and drummer Freddie Waits.36 The 1973 performance of “Caged Bird” was vigorous. Lincoln howled, shrieked, screamed, chirped, and groaned, like a bird, transforming her voice into a pacemaker, complementing the polyrhythmic sounds delivered at 3/4 time signature that amplified the dialectic between freedom and captivity, “the dialectic in the music of the blues,” as Sterling Stuckey puts it. She fashioned a critical agency around the notions of “flying” and “flights,” the sense of movement marked by “rest-less,” never-ending struggles of the enslaved to achieve the wholeness of being. “Caged Bird” captured this yearning for freedom, or passion that was at the core of the experience of women of color.37 Passion entered into her performance as a modality to present the experience of coming into being as human, or what Fred Moten calls “the extended movement of a specific upheaval” called blackness. It represented the story of how the enslaved—the object of private property—found a path to speak the chattel’s name, Africanity, a historical moment in which “the commodity who speaks,” as Moten puts it, developed the argument against the theory and practice of white supremacy by way of overcoming the unspeakable scale and depth of violence, exploitation and alienation in labor.38 Shiraishi succeeded in comprehending Lincoln’s aesthetic authority of slave art because she located in her shout “the tradition of devotion both to the happy and the tragic possibilities embedded in [such a] passionate utterance and response.”39

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Born in Vancouver, Canada, in 1931, but returning to Japan just before the outbreak of the Pacific War, Shiraishi discovered the avant-garde poetry scene in the context of the post-surrender Japanese surrealist movement. She was just seventeen years old, searchingly looking to bring an end to her stifling social existence governed by rigid gender conventions. She recalled devouring such works as Charles Baudelaire’s The Flowers of Evil (1857) and Sakutaro Hagiwara’s Barking at the Moon (1917) that rendered the depth of alienation. She was drawn to poets’ voices that moved with the ugliness, demonic, and beauty of life in all its fullness with intensity, passion, and mysticism. As she recalled, “I had no appetite for lukewarm lyric poetry.”40 But the life-changing encounter that ultimately pointed her in the direction toward creative advancement was the experience of reading the poem titled “Saikai” [“Reunion”], written by Ryuichi Tamura (1923–1998).41 Shiraishi was, then, seventeen. It opens with the following lines: Where did I meet you Where Where did I meet you my friend who is a good friend of death Midday in the city

my old friend

Repeatedly throughout her career, Shiraishi stressed the significance of Tamura’s “Reunion” in her development as an artist. The poem expresses the sentiment of a person in exile, both literally and figuratively, apprehending the pulse of unpredictable creativity, often made palpable at the threshold wedged between the known and the unknown. At its core, it is about a chance encounter. It communicates the power that the unlikely coming together of ideas and peoples unleashes. I can see dead volcanoes I can see the sexual city windows I can see the order without a sun Afternoon in the park that dried up in my palm and died Eternal summer that was crushed by my teeth The dark part of the earth is sleeping under my breast Where did I meet you Where I was a seventeen-year-old boy I used to walk around in the alleys of the city A shower I turn around when I am tapped on the shoulder42

In Tamura’s hands, indeed, the experience of reading “Reunion” becomes transformative. The words become the raw material with which the listener

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and the reader begin to mold the crossroads of homecoming and displacement, revelation and suffering, and remembering and forgetting. An outcome is that s/he learns how to inhabit this cityscape of desire with a certain kind of vigilance to do all that has to be done to make poetry the fountain of total human liberation.43 Tamura was one of the poets and writers who played an important role in organizing the avant-garde literary community during the immediate aftermath of the Second World War. The journal that he helped to publish in 1947–1948, called Arechi [Wasteland], influenced progressive young writers like Shiraishi, and literary and social activities of the group associated with Arechi often crossed paths with the surrealist poet Katsue Kitano’s group called Vou. In this overlapping space, Shiraishi honed her own poetic, learning how to live in the world forever transformed by poetry.44 In this context, Tamura’s “Reunion” was a map that guided her into this world. She explained: “For the first time, I met the earth face to face as swirling sand. The poem had a shocking impact on me. Up until then, I had been on the earth, but had never met the earth with such closeness as to have a game of chess with it.”45 Especially the passionate pronouncement of the last line of “Reunion” caused in her cognition the shock of transformation; it pulled her into a vortex and made her cognizant of the landscape of poetry: “You the earth is rough.”46 She explained, it “made my spirit explode!”47 In this overtone of dissonance in “Reunion,” shot through with jarring images and peculiar details, Shiraishi discovered life sustenance. It ultimately became the primary modality through which she shaped her own poetic process in her twenties and thirties. She delved deep into the domain of dissonance, or what she called “the poet’s mind.” She wrote, “Through an interior process, the poet’s mind sifts these miscellaneous impressions, synthesizes them, and gives birth to them as a singular, unified form. . . . Poems can only come into existence when a writer possesses this inner creative activity.”48 Sift she did with ferociousness, her interiority marked by the profane and the magical, to invent her own distinct pictorial language capable of capturing the danger and possibility that anticipation for elation in life would engender. For instance, her 1965 poem scandalously titled “Dankon (Penis)” [“The Man Root”], a love poem to her woman friend Sumiko Yagawa, is characteristic of her maturing poetic.49 It relies on the strategy of erotic provocation to organize the realm of sacred alterity. Referring to the “penis” as the form of elation, or a certain kind of devotion that is truly passionate and unencumbered, Shiraishi writes: The penis bursting out of bounds And beyond measure Arrives here

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Truly unique and entirely alone Seen from whatever perspective It’s faceless and speechless I would like to give you, Sumiko Something like this for your birthday When it envelopes your entire life And you’ve become invisible even to yourself Occasionally you’ll turn into the will Of exactly this penis And wander Ceaselessly I want to catch in my arms Forever Someone like you50

Far from being a poem about sex, let alone a penis, “Dankon” introduced the power of eroticization to capture the nature of the pursuit of poetic possibilities; it was a meditation on how to inhabit the experience of exaltation and relish it. Shiraishi’s approach to the labor of art-making complemented the Black lesbian feminist writer Audre Lorde’s meditation on the erotic as the supreme expression of love with tremendous shaping power. In “Uses of the Erotic as Power” (1978), Lorde explains: There are many kinds of power, used and unused, acknowledged or otherwise. The erotic is a resource within each of us that lies in a deeply female spiritual plane, firmly rooted in the power of our unexpressed or unrecognized feeling. In order to perpetuate itself, every oppression must corrupt or distort those various sources of power within the culture of the oppressed that can provide energy for change. For women, this has meant a suppression of the erotic as a considered source of power and information within our lives.51

This power of the erotic was Shiraishi’s gift to Sumiko. Shiraishi’s poet friend, Yagi Chuei, the editor of Japan’s leading poetry journal Gendaishi techo from 1965 and 1969 once said, “To pursue the poem ‘Dankon’ is to pursue a sexual being. To do so is to come to terms with the totality of cosmological systems . . . whereby sexualities become something sacred, or the embodiment of a life in all its sorrow and joy, emancipated from all that is rigid and repressive. It’s a philosophy.”52 Similar to Tamura’s poem, the outstanding feature of “Dankon” is how it would render with tremendous richness the innermost dimension of human desire, and in the process the experience of poetry would help constitute the landscape of freedom. Thus, in Yagi’s eyes, the poem was the project of sanctification.

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In the mid-1960s, however, Shiraishi was self-consciously embarking on a new adventure amidst her notoriety (or popularity in the context of youth subculture) as a “sex poet” and “penis poet” in the contemporary Japanese poetry scene. This all-too-predictable characterization was ubiquitous, and it lent itself to suffocating canonization that she had to endure.53 Meanwhile, Shiraishi was looking to expand the sphere of her creative activity to prepare for a new journey into the interiority of the self that was the hallmark of her craft. Specifically, she was on a quest to find self-expression in her poetry, something truly distinct and original that could help her not only move in a different scale with unexpected outcomes but also reach epic and grand proportions. For her, in terms of form, it entailed writing longer poems that would have the depth and breadth of novels. In terms of metaphysics, Shiraishi regarded shorter poems as snapshots or “dimensions of the cosmos,” as she puts it.54 The new challenge she set for herself was to write poems that would render the continuum of snapshots of human experience, the ontological totality. What came out of her experiments were two poems published in 1967 in Gendai shi techo under the editorship of Yagi: “MY TOKYO” and “Seinaru inja no kisetsu” [“The Season of the Sacred Lecher”]. These poems are essentially outcomes of her self-conscious efforts to make, as Shiraishi explains, “the poet’s internal sensitivity to a multitude of experiences and impressions” productive for the transformation of meanings into a singular and unified life form. She continues, “Poems can only come into existence when a writer possesses this inner creative activity. Rhetorical devices—such as simile and metaphor, or using fancy expressions in place of direct wording—cannot create poetry.”55 Also important to Shiraishi’s pursuit of a new form of art, then, in the mid-1960s was the music of Black Americans. She listened to the voices of Billie Holiday and Nina Simone and the performances of Wayne Shorter and John Coltrane with spiritual fervor. She also danced to the groove of the Clifford Brown and Max Roach Quintet and the rhythm and blues of Etta James and James Brown into the wee hours. She frequented jazz cafés, particularly a place called Ki-yo in Shinjuku, where jazz enthusiasts, artists and writers (including Yukio Mishima), and American musicians and servicemen all converged.56 There, in 1963, Shiraishi met Abbey Lincoln, then touring with Max Roach’s We Insist! project, thereafter forging with her a strong “sisterhood,” she recalled.57 It was in this space where she achieved epistemic clarity to never veer away from the ugliness of racism in Japan and beyond and commit herself to staying human. Of particular importance to the cultivation of such an attitude of devotion to the cause of universal humanity was Coltrane’s music. It decisively influenced the development of her new collection Seinaru inja no kisetsu [The

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Season of the Sacred Lecher]. Published in 1970, it went on to win Japan’s top poetry prize. Shiraishi wrote in her memoir that Coltrane’s “Olé” (1962) was her “divine accompaniment and guidance” when she wrote poems.58 However, Shiraishi made it clear that she was no jazz critic nor aficionado that elevated jazz to the aesthetic of highest order. In her 1968 essay with an English title “Nobody’s Business If I Hear,” a derivative of Billie Holiday’s “Ain’t Nobody’s Business If I Do,” published in Jazu Hihyo [Jazz Criticism], she explained that she did not identify with jazz, like other Japanese jazz enthusiasts, but rather worked within the idiom of jazz.59 She was cognizant of this distinction, as it were many African American musicians who used this idiom to strive toward a truly humane society still unmet. At its core, her identification with “this thing called jazz” was guided by something very personal and spiritual, like Coltrane’s “Olé” or “A Love Supreme,” an ethos with markings of ecumenicalism.60 Indeed, she insisted that her engagement with the idiom of jazz had to do with her desire to make an inroad into the interiority of the cosmos, like Coltrane, so as to learn how to relate to and in the process transform art as evidence of human life in all its imperfection, indeterminacy, and rawness.61 An artist in the state of emergence in the late 1960s, Shiraishi was trying to bring to the outside world the intuitive and emotive dimensions of her own social existence, something sensuous that was her latent poetics of Eros, which she regarded as the original form of human life. The poem she published in Suingu Jānaru [Swing Journal] shortly after Lincoln’s 1973 recording session and performance in Japan was a case in point. Titled “Sekai no uchigawa matawa sotogawa” [Either within the Bounds of the Universe or Outside], she wrote a poem that expressed her reverence for Abbey Lincoln, or all that she had done to preserve the wellspring of her life, and the spiritual autonomy to be African in faith. Strikingly, Shiraishi’s poem utilizes what Black studies scholar George Lipsitz refers to as “the semiotics of the circle,” the symbolic function of the circle in perpetuating the consciousness of the enslaved, especially the movement in and out of boundaries separating the past and present, Africa and African America, and the old and the new. This recursive movement was in essence the history of blackness.62 The poem opens in this way: I thought I was walking Outside the bounds of the universe But all along I was walking Within My interior universe63

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In this poem, Shiraishi approaches Abbey Lincoln’s metamorphosis into “Aminata Moseka,” which occurred during her 1972 trip to Guinea and Zaire, by the invitation of South African singer Miriam Makeba. “Aminata Moseka” was Lincoln’s new identity comprised of two honorary appellations, “Aminata” and “Moseka.” Seeing this new formation, or self-creation called Africanity, as the model of self-emancipation, Shiraishi’s poem follows in Lincoln/Moseka’s footsteps, just as Lincoln/Moseka has journeyed into the “circle of culture” to constitute Africanity in her art and life.64 It uses the metaphors of walking across time and space and boundary-crossings to highlight the process of transformation. I see Aminata Moseka time to time No, I see her eternally day and night Nowadays Aminata She is more like me I seldom see Abbey I thought I was walking Inside the bounds of the universe But now Without boundaries Separating outside from inside I walk endlessly across the horizon Embarking on a journey65

Shared between these two women artists is a strategy to deliver their own presence to the world outside, the bittersweet, the heart-wrenching, the soulmurdering, the profane, the revelatory, and the holy, not as mutually exclusive conditions of human existence, but as constitutive of all that was required to set the tonality of the blues. In Lincoln’s music, Shiraishi has found what it would take to invest in art, or, as she called it, a lesson in “how to live.” Shiraishi learned from Lincoln’s art-making the necessary work of transgressions—between the secular and the sacred or the living and the dead— through which art would index the evidence of human life that is at once imperfect, jagged, tragic, and potentially promising.66 The poem honors this very work of transfiguration, or how to achieve wholeness and greatness. Shiraishi, in essence, then, through Afro-Asian aesthetic correspondence, turned to the form of devotion to spiritual labor that was central to Lincoln’s art making. The sense of movement that is at once onward and inward, evident throughout much of Shiraishi’s work, is suggestive of the ongoing presence of the aesthetic authority of slave art emanating from spiritual labor. This

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moment of correspondence was historically contingent, to be sure, yet it does serve, in this current moment, as a highly generative platform to respond to M. Jacqui Alexander’s riddle that sets up this chapter: “Where does one come to consciousness as a woman of color and live it, at this moment? Have we developed a new metaphysics of political struggle? Notes 1. The conversations with Juliana Hu Pegues, Zenzele Isoke, and Roderick Ferguson, as well as their close reading helped me locate the thrust of my analysis. Also important were manuscript reviewers for the Journal of American Studies. Finally, my co-author Tia-Simone Gardner participated in the whole process of thinking, rethinking, writing, and rewriting and, along the way, made the dynamics of this iteration generative. This research was funded by the Imagine Fund grant in the arts, humanities, and design at the University of Minnesota. 2. Alexander, Pedagogies of Crossing, 275. 3. Porter, What Is This Thing Called Jazz?; Saul, Freedom Is, Freedom Ain’t; Monson, Freedom Sounds. One exception is that of Farah Jasmine Griffin’s work, although her discussion on the place of Japan in Lincoln’s art-making is not fully elaborated. See Griffin, If You Can’t Be Free; Chinen, “Abbey Lincoln.” Also especially essential in shaping my analysis is Fred Moten’s incisive reading of Lincoln’s aesthetic. Moten, In the Break. 4. Davis, Jazz and Its Discontents, 26–32; Chinen, “Abbey Lincoln”; Blumenthal, Liner Notes, Abbey Lincoln, People in Me, 626–22. 5. Stuckey, “‘I Want to Be African’”; Stuckey, Slave Culture; Stuckey, African Culture; Stuckey, “Afterword,” 451–58; Stuckey, “The Music That Is in One’s Soul,” 73–88. 6. Cohen, “Punks, Bulldaggers, and Welfare Queens,” in Black Queer Studies, 39. 7. Woods, Development Arrested, 25–39. 8. Griffin, If You Can’t Be Free; Collins, Black Feminist Thought; Davis, Blues Legacies and Black Feminism; Carby, “The Sexual Politics of Women’s Blues”; Brooks, “Nina Simone’s Triple Play,” 176–97; Gilroy, The Black Atlantic, 36–37. 9. Alexander, Pedagogies of Crossing, 327. 10. Yu, “Abbey Lincoln,” 236–37; Yu, “Interview with Abbey Lincoln,” 76–81. For a short history of Ai Music, see www.koinumamusic.com. 11. Yu, “Abbey Lincoln”; Yu, “Interview with Abbey Lincoln.” 12. Yu, “Interview with Abbey Lincoln,” 78; Yu, Boku no jazu Amerika, 229–82. 13. Yu, “Interview with Abbey Lincoln,” 78. 14. Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe,” 67; O’Grady, “Olympia’s Maid,” 176; Clarke, “The Failure to Transform,” 200; Clarke, “Lesbianism,” 128; Combahee River Collective, “A Black Feminist Statement,” 210–18. 15. Higashida, Black Internationalist Feminism, 94. 16. Lincoln, “Who Will Revere the Black Woman?”; Bambara, “On the Issues of Role.”

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17. Bambara, “On the Issues of Role,” 102. 18. Ibid., 103–4. 19. In “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe,” Spillers asserts that “claiming the monstrosity (of a female with the potential to ‘name’), which her culture imposes in blindness, ‘Sapphire’ might rewrite after all a radically different text for a female empowerment” (80); Clarke, “The Failure to Transform,” 200. 20. Griffin, If You Can’t Be Free, 182. 21. Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe”; Ferguson, Aberrations in Black, 119–25, 125–30; Hancock, The Politics of Disgust, 56–64; Summers, Manliness and Its Discontents. In Aberrations in Black, Ferguson establishes this point concerning the mutually constitutive formations of race, gender, and sexuality: “Put plainly, racialization has helped to articulate heteropatriarchy” (6). 22. Lincoln, “Who Will Revere the Black Woman?” 82;. Kelley, Freedom Dreams, 143–44. 23. Lincoln, “Who Will Revere the Black Woman?” 84. 24. Ibid., 81–82. 25. Clarke, “Lesbianism,” 131–32. 26. “Abbey Lincoln on Love, Marriage & Polygamy/Polyamory,” YouTube video, 4:16, from Gil Noble’s Like It Is Interview in 1979, posted by Auntkekebaby, August 30, 2010, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZokBQsC4AdA. 27. Griffin, If You Can’t Be Free, 190–91. 28. Ibid., 190–91. 29. Stuckey, Slave Culture, 3–97. 30. Stuckey, “Through the Prism of Folklore,” 4. 31. Gomez, Exchanging Our Country Marks; Young, “Through the Prism of Slave Art,” 389–400. 32. Davis, Jazz and Its Discontents, 31. Abbey Lincoln, “Where Are the African Gods?” (The Abbey Lincoln Collection (MC 101), Institute of Jazz Studies, Rutgers University Libraries). The idea of living otherwise to constitute the realm of freedom is derived from Ian McKay’s work. McKay, Rebels, Reds, Radicals. 33. The variations of this poem read by Lincoln: YouTube video, 3:15, posted by LINKLaV, February 16, 2008, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d4JufYw7f7E&fe ature=related; YouTube, posted by dnworks, August 27, 2010, http://www.youtube .com/watch?v=xfOkYbyzCJM&feature=related. 34. Pulliam, “Abbey Lincoln on JazzSet”; Chinen, “Abbey Lincoln.” 35. Moten, In the Break, 23; Griffin, If You Can’t Be Free, 190–91. 36. Lincoln, Abbey Lincoln in Misty. 37. Griffin, If You Can’t Be Free, 159; Stuckey, African Culture and Melville’s Art, 10, 81–85. 38. Moten, In the Break, 1–24. 39. Ibid., 13–14; Moten, “Not In Between,” 21, 133–35. 40. Shiraishi, Kuroi Hitsuji no Monogatari, 17; Shiraishi, “Landscape of Poetry,” 59. 41. Shiraishi, Kuroi Hitsuji no Monogatari, 17. 42. Shiraishi, “Landscape of Poetry,” 160, 162. 43. Ibid., 160.

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44. Shiraishi, Kuroi Hitsuji no Monogatari, 16–37. 45. Shiraishi, “Landscape of Poetry,” 159. 46. Ibid., “Landscape of Poetry,” 160, 162. 47. Ibid., 162; Shiraishi, Kuroi Hitsuji no Monogatari, 17. 48. Shiraishi, “Landscape of Poetry,” 163. 49. Shiraishi, Seasons of Sacred Lust, 17–18; Shiraishi, Shiraishi Kazuko Shishû, 127–28. 50. Shiraishi, Seasons of Sacred Lust, 17–18. 51. Lorde, “Uses of the Erotic,” 53. 52. Shiraishi, Kuroi Hitsuji no Monogatari, 74–75. 53. Ibid. 54. Ibid., 66–69. 55. Shiraishi, Shiraishi Kazuko Shishû; Shiraishi, “Landscape of Poetry,” 163. 56. Shiraishi, Kuroi Hitsuji no Monogatari, 68. 57. Ibid., 15–37, 61, 74–75, 78–79; Stuckey, “The Consciousness of the Enslaved,” 451. 58. Shiraishi, Kuroi Hitsuji no Monogatari, 68–69; Alexander, Pedagogies of Crossing, 327. 59. Shiraishi, “Nobody’s Business If I Hear,” 23–24. 60. Porter, What Is This Thing Called Jazz? 70–71. 61. Shiraishi, “Shinda jon coltorane ni tsugeru,” 2–10; “Nobody’s Business If I Hear,” 23–24. 62. Shiraishi, “Aminata Moseka sekai no uchigawa matawa sotogawa,” 237; Lipsitz, “White Desire,” 136. 63. Shiraishi, “Aminata Moseka sekai no uchigawa matawa sotogawa,” 237. 64. Griffin, If You Can’t Be Free, 185, 193–98. 65. Shiraishi, “Aminata Moseka sekai no uchigawa matawa sotogawa,” 237. 66. Shiraishi, Kuroi Hitsuji no Monogatari, 80.

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II POETRY AND LITERATURE

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4 Playing the Dozens on Zen Amiri Baraka’s Journey from a “Pre-Black” Bohemian Outsider to a “Post-American Low Coup” Poet Michio Arimitsu1

The First Taste of a Globe-Fish

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n the third volume of LeRoi Jones and Hettie Cohen’s Yūgen: A New Consciousness in Arts and Letters (1958), a nineteenth-century haiku was featured that resonated in subtle, yet significant ways with both the mission of the little magazine and the coming transformation of Jones himself. To a man who has not eaten A globe-fish, We cannot speak of its flavour.2

The provocative poem was written by Taibai (1772–1841), a well-respected figure who had first distinguished himself in Edo-era Japan for his Chinesestyle poetry. In a move that stunned his admirers, Taibai suddenly abandoned Chinese poetry and turned instead to haiku. This self-reflexive poem was Taibai’s creative response to those who did not share his new passion for haiku. Teasing those who looked down upon the haiku form, Taibai compared the genre’s aesthetic appeal to the fatal attraction of a globe-fish, known for its heavenly taste as well as its deadly poison.3 Though Jones and Cohen were probably unaware of the compositional history of the poem, Taibai’s adventurous haiku clearly provided a befitting motto for Yūgen, whose goal was to expand what its editors viewed as the moribund provincialism of American poetry at the time.

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Just as Taibai had surprised those around him by refashioning himself as a haiku poet, LeRoi Jones also went through radical metamorphoses, from a racially ambiguous bohemian in the late 1950s to Amiri Baraka, a fiery black nationalist in the mid-1960s, and ultimately to a Third-World Marxist in the mid-1970s.4 Moreover, as if to follow Taibai’s footsteps, Baraka himself engaged with haiku in the 1990s, and eventually invented his own hybrid poetic form transculturally inspired by the Japanese tradition. This chapter reexamines the protean life and works of Amiri Baraka, a major if polarizing African American poet, and sheds a new light on his complex and enduring fascination with Asia. While accounting for how and why Baraka developed such an abiding interest in Asia, this chapter also seeks to recognize the diversity of African American literature as it has flourished “beyond black and white”—or rather, “beside” such a constraining racial dichotomy—in the United States during the post-WWII period.

Ambivalent Figures of Asia in Baraka’s Early Avant-Garde Poetics Baraka’s first encounter with Buddhism is vividly recalled both in his Autobiography (1984) and in a more recent short essay, “‘Howl’ and Hail” (2006).5 Right after dropping out of college, the young Baraka joined the air force in 1954 and was stationed in Puerto Rico. In his free time, Baraka intensely studied literature, later describing the years of military service, in a clear allusion to Melville’s Moby Dick, as “my graduate school.” He would spend the “nights and 12 hrs every day under the Latino sun,” voraciously reading classics as well as popular titles. As Baraka acerbically emphasizes, the English classics struck him as “some under the earth dull shit,” while the modernists and the French symbolists had a strong appeal. But even more crucial to the trajectory of Baraka’s literary and political career going forward was the unlikely encounter with “a book on Buddhism and The Communist Manifesto . . . in the same afternoon.”6 This serendipitous exposure to Buddhism in the Caribbean whetted Baraka’s appetite for more things Asian. During the Christmas leave of 1956, Baraka visited Allen Polite (1932– 1993), his high school friend, in the Village.7 Thanks to Polite, who had recently become a Buddhist himself, Baraka’s intellectual and cultural horizons broadened dramatically: It was still the middle ’50s (’56) and the tremendous popularity of the East in bohemian circles had not yet reached its full peak. [Polite] was an early acolyte. He even worked in an Eastern bookshop called Orientalia, around 12th Street. I came to the bookstore before I went back to Puerto Rico and I was transported by the hundreds of scholarly books on various schools of Buddhism and Eastern

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thought in general. I bought two of R. H. Blythe’s [sic] books on Zen, analyzing Western art for parallels with Zen consciousness. I was swept up. (169)

The books Baraka mentions here must have been Zen in English Literature and Oriental Classics (1946) and one of the four volumes of Haiku (1949– 1952). In all likelihood, it was in the former that Baraka discovered Taibai’s globe-fish haiku.8 That Baraka identifies Blyth as one of his main sources of information about Zen and haiku is vital, for this means that Blyth’s account of haiku had mesmerized Baraka three years before it did Richard Wright in Paris— Wright read all four volumes of haiku—and to write nearly four thousand haiku as his swan song.9 The fact that the two of the most important African American authors in the twentieth century engaged with Asia (without necessarily knowing that they shared such an interest)10 encourages us to think more carefully about the necessity of recognizing the scope and diversity of the African American imaginings about Asia in the post-WWII era.11 Wright’s interest in Asia—attested also by The Color Curtain (1956), a report on the Bandung conference, in which he conducted a quasi-anthropological investigation of what he called the “Asian personality”—has recently received long-overdue critical attention.12 In contrast, Baraka’s early evocations of Asia, inspired also by Blyth’s work on haiku and Zen, have seldom been analyzed seriously, and even when noted, they have been interpreted as little more than shallow rhetorical gimmicks evoking exoticism and primitivism.13 Despite the general consensus that Asia—in the form of Buddhism, haiku, or classic Chinese poetry—had relatively little impact on Baraka, I argue that his early poems deserve much more critical attention because they often significantly inflected and complicated stereotypical images about Asia and the people of Asian descent with his poignant knowledge of racial difference in his native land. Put differently, Baraka’s early poetic allusions to Asia are crucial, as they symptomatically revealed the deep psychological conflicts about his own marginalized racial identity while complicating the black-and-white dichotomy of race relations in the United States. To be sure, Baraka often hesitated to give such a loaded symbolic value to Asia in his own reminiscences about the past. For instance, when Baraka famously renounced his bohemian self in 1969, he associated everything negative with “Europe” and “whiteness”: You notice the preoccupation with death, suicide, in the early works. . . . The work [was] a cloud of abstraction and disjointedness, that was just whiteness. European influence, etc., just as the concept of hopelessness and despair, from the dead minds[,] the dying morality of Europe.14

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In other words, Baraka, the newly minted black nationalist, sought to erase everything “non-black” in this period, which consequently led to the suppression of his earlier fascination with Asia as well. In Autobiography over a quarter of a century later, however, Baraka, by then a revolutionary Marxist, revised the earlier years of his poetic career as an admittedly confused but necessary stage in his intellectual apprenticeship. Having become a self-identified cosmopolitan, he now recalled his “preblack” (xxi) bohemian period with a subtle but significant difference: I am an internationalist and it is clear to me now that all people have contributed to the wealth of common world culture—and I thought that then, if only on the surface! But I had given myself, in my quest for intellectualism, a steady diet of European thought, though altered somewhat by the Eastern Buddhist reading. (174; emphasis mine)

A closer look at the instrumental role Baraka played as a co-editor and a contributing poet of Yūgen, in addition to the repeated references to the Eastern thought and art elsewhere in Autobiography, reveals this passage as a curious understatement. As he himself admitted time and again, Baraka in the late 1950s was an alienated Beat poet, who aesthetically expressed his confusion, loneliness, and death wish, under the heavy influence of T. S. Eliot and the French symbolists. At the time, Baraka also relentlessly attacked the black bourgeoisie, who, in his view, self-deprecatingly aspired to “white” respectability. As Jerry Watts has compellingly shown, however, the great irony of Baraka’s anti-bourgeois stance, the vehement criticism of what he deemed as their dull and suffocating conformity, was that Baraka actually belonged to the very social class that he rhetorically condemned.15 “Vice,” a poem from his first collection, Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note (1961), memorably articulated this telling contradiction as a “mosaic of disorder I own but cannot recognize. Mist in me” (28). To locate where and how exactly Asia figured in this mosaic of disorder, let us take a look at Baraka’s “Lines to García Lorca” in the first issue of Yūgen. Lorca had been enormously popular among African Americans since his visit to the United States in 1929. While attending a program at Columbia, the Spanish poet frequented Harlem. There, he heard African American spirituals and expressed his profound admiration for them. Lorca’s political use of surrealism and primitivism, in addition to his demonstrated solidarity with African Americans, influenced a number of African American authors including Richard Wright, Audre Lorde, and Robert Kaufman.16 As if to reinforce this interracial connection or “lines” to the murdered Spanish freedom

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fighter, Baraka inserts a “Negro spiritual” as the poem’s epigraph—“If I’m gonna see you agin, / It’ll be on the judgment day” (17). In his imaginary postmortem communion with the Spanish poet, the poem’s speaker emulates the Lorcaesque imagery, and it is here in a surreal and primitivist description of the speaker’s dwelling place that one encounters Baraka’s first reference to Asia between the covers of Yūgen: “Mandolins grow on the highslopes / orange robed monks collect song” (17). In Baraka’s imaginary Orient, as Werner Sollors has noted, Buddhist monks in orange robes are idealized as hard-working preservers of the vernacular songs, sung for/by the heroes of the people, like Lorca (and, by his obvious identification with the poet, Baraka himself).17 Similarly, in section 6 of “Hymn for Lanie Poo,” also collected in Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note, Baraka simultaneously evoked an Indian independence leader and Zen, along with the Great Emancipator, in a protest against racial discrimination: “I think they [white Americans] are not treating us [black Americans] like / Mr. Lincun said they should / or Mr. Gandhi. / For that matter. By God. / Zen / is a bitch!” (11). In yet another early poem, “In Memory of Radio,” the speaker uneasily expresses his disappointment at his relative lack of political power. As if to compensate for his political impotence, the speaker/Baraka boasts of having a secret/sacred knowledge, “satori” [epiphany, enlightenment], of language and imagination (13). “To a Publisher . . . Cut-Out,” also alludes to one of the most important Zen/Chan masters who lived in seventh-century China, attesting to Baraka’s continuing interest: “I ride the 14th St. bus / every day . . . reading Hui neng” (20). Moreover, the speaker of “SCENARIO VI” shows off “a series of dramatic half-turns I learned / many years ago in the orient . . .” (23). While these fragmentary, decorative references merely exoticize Asia/ Asians, Baraka also used Asian figures more seriously to address his central concern at the time: existential anxiety inflected by his racial difference. In “The Insidious Dr. Fu Manchu,” for instance, Baraka responds to a notorious case of racial stereotyping in the American popular cultural imaginary.18 Unlike Baraka’s works of the militant late-1960s and early-1970s, the poem does not explicitly reject the yellow-facing ventriloquism in the figure of Dr. Fu Manchu, who represents the Asian male as effeminate, cunning, and evil. Nor does it attack his no less egregiously stereotyped “Nubian slaves.” Remarkably, Baraka’s reaction to such racial caricature during this period is not that of outrage but of pensive self-reflection: “If I think myself / strong, then I am / not true to the misery / in my life. The uncertainty. / (of what I am saying, who / I have chose [sic] to become.” The psychological trauma inflicted by racial stereotyping is salved (if only momentarily) by the knowledge of his own

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worth: “If / I think myself ugly / & go to the mirror, smiling / at the inaccuracy . . . / . . . I think / how very wise I am. How very / very wise” (42). Another example, “The Death of Nick Charles,” refers to “lovely chinese ladies/sweeping the sidewalk” (33). The poem’s speaker expresses his envy of the Asian women, as they bitterly remind and reinforce his own sense of hopelessness. As “Lines to García Lorca,” “The Insidious Dr. Fu Manchu,” and “The Death of Nick Charles” confirm, Baraka’s sense of alienation, powerlessness, and weariness was either assuaged or deteriorated by comparative references to Asia, Asians, or Asians Americans. In this context, “Parthenos,” which appeared in the fourth issue of Yūgen, has particular significance. Though its ultimate message is far from clear, the poem creates a multiracial/multiethnic genealogy for its speaker, who claims to be descended from four mothers, each of whom represents a different racial/ethnic heritage. The Arcadian first section (presumably set in Africa) celebrates blackness as the poem’s speaker sings of the “ebon princess” who rides “her black horse” (23) in the morning; the second section continues in this vein. As night comes on (“very early / when night was a pickaninny on a pony”), the princess “danced / and wore rings of flowers” (24). A bracketed command, “(chantnow),” suddenly disrupts this idyllic scene: My chinese mother is full of compassion my japanese mother dances all day I have a white mother pale as a bone, with red moons smeared in her cheeks, who thinks nothing of vanishing trailing leis of orange flames. ... My black mother Was a witch doctor a crazywoman with a red cape. hucklebucking beneath the pyramids. (Yūgen 4:24)

The contrast the poem draws between the speaker’s differentially racialized mothers is stark: the Chinese mother is “compassionate,” the Japanese one energetic (she “dances all day”), and the white one (rather ambivalently) as both carefree and unreliable (she “thinks nothing of vanishing”), while the

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poem unflatteringly and unequivocally depicts his black mother as “crazy.” The poem ultimately reads as a frustrated lament of an embittered son/ daughter who was somehow abandoned by the black mother. When Baraka poetically alludes to “visible hierarchies/Of angelic intelligences,” he is evoking (in fact, significantly prefiguring) the model minority discourse. As Gary Okihiro among others have discussed, the model minority discourse has deployed the figure of “honorary white” Asians to denigrate African Americans especially since 1965.19 “Parthenos” is then a quintessential literary figuration of what Claire Jean Kim, refining Okihiro’s argument, has called a “racial triangulation,” for the poem pits Asians against blacks without fundamentally critiquing the normativity of whiteness.20 While “Parthenos” is therefore entangled in the logic of the model minority thesis, the poem can also be read, conversely, as denouncing the national allegory of the United States as it continues to disown the African heritage despite its vaunted ideal of multiraciality. As a matter of fact, the speaker, “who clutches the past/in his bony fist” (25), does try to dismantle the stark racial hierarchy in section III. His desperate effort nevertheless ends in vain, making it moot whether the poem ultimately critiques or reinforces the model minority thesis. In fact, the very indeterminacy of its attitude towards Asians, I argue, is the point of “Parthenos,” for its amibivalent but powerful emotional expression testifies to the prominent if uneasy presence of Asia in Baraka’s early poetics as he sought to articulate “the chaos of disorder” in him at the time. Yūgen: Baraka as a Transcultural Mediator of the East and the West Baraka’s editorial work in this period further underscores the complexity and persistence of his early engagement with Asia and its cultural traditions. To begin with, the title of his and Cohen’s little magazine, Yūgen, refers to a Zen ideal, which they defined as “elegance, beauty, grace, transcendence of these things, and also nothing at all” (1:1).21 The elusiveness and expansiveness of the term borrowed from a cultural tradition across the Pacific perfectly matched the aspirations of their brand-new little magazine, which was to serve as a site for avant-gardist poetic experimentation, where the past and the present, the East Coast and the West Coast, as well as the East and the West, were to meet. The existing scholarship on Yūgen, however, underplays the magazine’s transcultural work, not paying due attention to its mediation of heterogeneous traditions across geographical and temporal boundaries. For instance, in their influential study of African American magazines in the twentieth

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century, Abby Arthur Johnson and Ronald Maberry Johnson misrepresent the multiracial dimension of the cultural politics of Yūgen when they emphasize “the generally nonracial tone of the poems, stories, and essays.”22 Their interpretation of the magazine as integrationist, which in their view encouraged cooperation between black and white writers in racially neutral terms, overlooks the pervading racial anxiety (explicitly inscribed in Baraka’s early poems such as “Parthenos”) on the one hand, and the presence of Asia (prominent in almost every issue of Yūgen) on the other. A more recent and balanced article by Ian Patterson calls Yūgen “a landmark . . . which helped establish the common ground for writers from disparate backgrounds and tradition” (999).23 Otherwise well-balanced and informative, Patterson’s description nevertheless reduces the “discernible Beat/ Zen influence” (997) to Rachel Spitzer’s calligraphy (998) and the magazine’s title, which he ultimately dismisses as not really matching the magazine’s content (997). Patterson’s summary of how the little magazine was run—“Jazz poets, Beats, students, men and women, black and white, all the contributors brought something to the mix” (999)—similarly gives a misleading impression that little of Asia (or Asian America) was in the “mix.” Like Johnson and Johnson, Patterson therefore misrepresents the precise nature of the cultural politics of Yūgen, which, however ambivalently, sought to engage with multiply drawn racial and cultural boundaries, instead of simply ignoring them in racially neutral—i.e. color-blind—terms. The transracial and transnational aspirations of Yūgen were indeed explicit from the very beginning. For instance, the first issue of the magazine, for which five hundred copies were printed,24 contained two of Baraka’s poems, including the aforementioned “Lines to Lorca.” Moreover, along with works by such white poets as Allen Ginsberg, Philip Whalen, and Diane Di Prima, this issue also featured two other African American poets whose relationship to Asia requires special attention. The literary contribution of Baraka’s aforementioned spiritual mentor, Allen Polite, is the case in point. It is true that his “Beg Him to Help” and “Touching Air,” featured in the first issue of the little magazine, do not bear any discernable sign of Polite’s known interest in Asia. Nevertheless, the active role Polite played in the intimate circle of avant-garde Zen aficionados at the time should not be underestimated.25 As Baraka’s Autobiography reiterates, Polite had a formative influence on Baraka as a man and a poet since their high school days. Baraka even goes so far as to admit that “[Polite] was my center, and his circle the pinnacle of my social and intellectual aspirations” (185). One might even suggest that had it not been for Baraka’s social and intellectual admiration for Polite, he may not have gotten so deeply interested in Asia in the first place, let alone publish a magazine carrying a Japanese title.

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The inclusion of Polite’s poems in Yūgen was Baraka’s way of acknowledging his mentor as a crucial member of the disparate groups of avant-garde artists and intellectuals in the Village in the late 1950s. On one hand, such recognition compels us to revise the history of American avant-gardism in the postWWII era, which tends to ignore or marginalize the contributions made by African Americans. On the other hand, the interest in Asia expressed by African American cultural workers such as Polite and Baraka expands the familiar historical narrative of African American culture in the post-WWII era, which is still generally framed in the reductive dichotomy of “black” and “white.” Ed James, the other African American poet featured in the first issue of Yūgen, also calls for more critical attention for the same reason. James was introduced in this volume as an M.A. student in philosophy at the New School (24). According Baraka’s later recollection, James was deeply absorbed in haiku and tanka at the time (Autobiography 195). Though his work, like that of Polite, appeared only in this issue, one of the poems he submitted to Yūgen captures nature in a haiku-inspired imagistic style: “Hawks will cry / slow concentric circles / where the willows of march brood / naked loneliness, / meadowlark, / walk quietly” (7).26 The second issue of Yūgen, which followed a few months later, featured poems more clearly influenced by Asia: “4 Haiku” by Tuli Kupferberg (7) and Gary Snyder’s “Chion-in” (20). The latter was an imagistic poem about a famous temple in Kyoto. As we shall see, Snyder would continue to send many more poems to Baraka and Cohen while shuttling back and forth between Kyoto and California. The third issue, also published in 1958, contained the Taibai poem cited earlier. To this volume, Snyder contributed two more poems: “Praise for Sick Women” was a primitivist work on the theme of menstruation with an allusion to the Hindi goddess Shakti;27 “another for the same” contained a Chinese character and a reference to a famous Japanese beauty—“A cut reed floating, / A sort of lady Komachi; / Wiser than me / The best of your beauty / Always hidden, yū 幽” (4).28 Also appearing in the third issue was “Now When I Hear” by C. Jack Stamm, whom Baraka and Cohen introduced as “someone who does a lot of translating from the Japanese” (24). In the haiku-inspired form, Stamm used Japanese imagery to parody Edgar Allan Poe’s famous poem, “The Raven” (1845). Stamm would later translate Tawara Machi’s best-selling book of contemporary tanka, Salad Anniversary, in 1988 (originally published in Japan in 1987). Robin Blaser, who, along with Robert Duncan and Jack Spicer, would play a central role in the Berkeley Poetry Renaissance, also published “Quitting a Job” in this issue. In the poem, the speaker quits his job, longing to get away

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from the “hot Boston summer,” and ends up imaginatively teleporting himself to Tang Dynasty China, under the spiritual guidance of a great Chinese poet: “I think of Tu Fu’s rabbit pounding bitter herbs. The seeding grass. And yes, this blue (O, inward) mountain” (22–23). The fourth issue was epoch-making in the history of contemporary American poetry in that it brought together for the first time diverse groups of innovative poets from around the country: the Black Mountain poets (Charles Olson and Robert Creeley); the Beats (Jack Kerouac, Gregory Corso, Peter Orlovsky, and Allen Ginsberg); and the New York School poet, Frank O’Hara.29 The continuing significance of the Asian influence on the magazine is again confirmed by Kerouac’s four haiku (18–19), which were featured along with Baraka’s multiracial poem “Parthenos.”30 Perhaps more important than the few other references to Asia in the fifth issue is the inclusion of William Carlos Williams’s short poem, “A Formal Design” (2). Reminiscent of the three-line series in Paterson (1946), Williams’s poem does not seem to owe anything specifically to Asia. As Zhaoming Qian has compellingly shown, however, Williams’s early interests in Asian art and literature were rekindled in the late 1950s, right around the time he sent the poem to Yūgen.31 Williams was indeed beginning to engage in a creative collaboration with a young Chinese American poet, David Raphael Wang, to translate, or rather creatively adapt, the Chinese classics of Li Po, Wang Wei, and Du Fu.32 Although “A Formal Design” does not contain any clear allusion to Asia, Williams, again immersing himself in the world of classic Chinese poetry with the help of Wang, must have felt some kind of affinity with the younger generation as Baraka’s ever widening poetic circle eagerly sought to rejuvenate and expand American poetry by putting it into a creative dialogue with the cultural traditions of Asia. Incidentally, Wang, his collaborator in this ambitious project, submitted “II. Invocations,” a short poem based loosely on his translation of classic Chinese poetry, to the sixth issue of Yūgen. The seventh issue of Yūgen contains no explicit reference to Asia, but the eighth issue cites a Zen monk, Tokusan: “Whether you speak or do not speak, thirty blows of my stick just the same” (3). This passage confirms the editors’ interest in Eastern thought, which continued until the very end of the magazine in 1962. More importantly, Tokusan’s seemingly “profound,” but in fact ridiculous declaration attests to Baraka and Cohen’s fascination with Zen as a source of amusing jokes. Humor may indeed have been one of the primary—rather unexpected—reasons why the young, morose bohemian Baraka was drawn to Zen. As a matter of fact, Autobiography records the close association Baraka and his bohemian circle perceived between Zen and humor in the mid-50s:

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The most obvious facet of the Zen trend in the Village in those days was the presence of the Zen “jokes.” People in that circle would make ironic statements, funny or with pretensions of being funny, that were supposed to reveal some basic Zen truth or insight. I guess this came because in the various books about Zen, especially those of Blythe [sic], Alan Watts and Suzuki, humor was supposed to be an intrinsic part of the doctrine. And many times individuals were supposed to have gained “enlightenment” through laughter. In fact, the Zen masters and monks and other initiates were always supposed to be “roaring with laughter” in revelation of one Zen truth or another. (185)

Recall here that African American vernacular traditions such as the dozens and the blues deeply affected the development of Barakian poetics since the 1960s. Like Zen, the African American vernacular cultural forms also contain at their core the resilience of humor (i.e., “laughing to keep from crying”). As we shall see in the next section, the recognition of the centrality of humor both in Zen and the African American vernacular culture was to take on a crucial meaning when Baraka began transculturally to adapt haiku in the late 1990s. Before concluding this section, let us take a brief look at the eighth and last issue of Yūgen, for this issue featured Steve Jonas’s “No. IV Orgasms,” which paid an important tribute to Asia. Jonas, who was of mixed racial origin,33 offered a pyrotechnic explosion of a poem that recognized the “defects inherent in all art-forms” (16), but also boldly expressed a determination to create his own poetics by, as it were, any means necessary. While declaring his future artistic independence, Jonas paid homage to two of his spiritual ancestors: Cimabue, the thirteenth-century Florentine painter who decisively broke away from the earlier Byzantine style, and Okakura Kakuzo [Tenshin] (1862–1913), the famous Japanese author of The Book of Tea (1906), who became the first Asian chief curator of the Chinese and Japanese Division at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.34 Jonas’s obsession with Pound, if not with the Eastern aesthetics per se, is also clearly discernible in his “Subway Haiku” (1967), which appeared in The Floating Bear, another little magazine edited by Baraka, together with Diane Di Prima.35 Needless to say, this poem was an allusion to Pound’s “In a Station of the Metro” (1913), the most famous Imagist poem of all time.

From Zen to the Dozens: Baraka’s Invention of “Low Coup” It should be clear by now that the desired but risky taste of a globe-fish served Yūgen as a crucial figure of its avant-garde aspirations on the one hand, and how that symbol can also be read as encapsulating the tremendous, if

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ambivalent, interest in Asia among many of its contributors on the other. The rest of this paper will look briefly at the trajectory of Baraka’s career as a poet in the 1960s and the 1970s and discuss the transcultural significance of his creative adaption of haiku in the late 1990s. Baraka’s “pre-black days” (Autobiography, xxi) began to fade with his trip to Cuba in 1960 and definitely ended with the assassination of Malcolm X in 1965. In the introduction to Home (1966), Baraka famously declared, “By the time this book appears, I will be even blacker” (22). Now enamored with a “hyper-Black” (ibid., xxi) militancy, Baraka’s interest in the 1960s came to be more and more politicized and racialized. Just as he left his bohemian life and became “blacker” day by day, Baraka divorced Cohen, and married a member of his own race, Sylvia Robinson. Whereas Baraka had married Cohen in a Buddhist temple in New York’s Upper West side, Baraka and Robinson held a Yoruba ceremony in Harlem, which spectacularly dramatized the change of his political and cultural affiliation (Autobiography, 378). Baraka’s deepening racial and political consciousness decisively affected the subsequent development of his poetics as well. Before his trip to Cuba, Baraka had devised an individualist poetics, which he went on to revise and elaborate during the 1960s. “How You Sound??” was written in 1959 and published in Donald M. Allen’s epoch-making The New American Poetry in 1960, under the powerful influence of Charles Olson’s Projective Verse. In this text, Baraka, like Jonas, declared his absolute independence and freedom as a poet: “I CAN BE ANYTHING I CAN. I make a poetry with what I feel is useful & can be saved out of all the garbage of our lives” (424). Reiterating Olson’s rhetorical question, “Who knows what a poem ought to sound like? Until it’s thar,” Baraka continued: I’m not interested in writing sonnets, sestinas or anything . . . only poems. . . . The only “recognizable tradition” a poet need follow is himself . . . & . . . all those things out of tradition he can use, adapt, work over, into something for himself. To broaden his own voice with. (You have to start and finish there . . . your own voice . . . how you sound.) (425; italics original; ellipses mine)

In “Hunting Is Not Those Heads on the Wall” (1964), a few years later, Baraka introduced the idea of “art-ing,” which emphasized the spontaneous and the improvisational,36 privileging the verb, the process, and the natural, while criticizing the noun, the product, and the artificial (199–201). Another characteristic of Baraka’s poems, essays and speeches from this period is the frequent use of puns: eye/I, son/sun, concrete (adjective/noun), Lincoln (the president/a car coveted by black bourgeoisie), a sexual pun on Jesus’s Second “Coming,” fair (light skin/justice), Negro/

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Knee-Grow, air force/error farce, Newark/New Ark, and Why’s/Wise.37 Noting this characteristic, some critics have suggested Olson’s direct influence,38 for Olson had recently stated that “pun is rime” in the “Letter to Elaine Feinstein,” which Baraka published in 1959, along with Projective Verse. During an interview in the early 1980s, however, Baraka explicitly dismissed this claim. Instead, Baraka identified his fondness of the pun as “a street thing” (Melhem, “Amiri Baraka,” 252). From his newly embraced cosmopolitan position, Baraka described the extensive use of the pun as belonging firmly but not exclusively to the African American oral tradition: “the rhyme and the pun are really part of the Black oral tradition. I think they’re part of everybody’s oral tradition” (ibid., 252). From 1974 onward, Baraka outgrew black nationalism and further transformed himself into a third-world socialist by upholding Marxism-LeninismMao-Tse-Tung thought. His cultural interest in Asia, particularly in China, was also revitalized.39 As a matter of fact, he repeatedly emphasized Lu Hsun’s influence on his own literary and political endeavors.40 The title of his essay collection during this period, Daggers and Javelins: Essays, 1974–1979 (1984), for example, alludes to the Chinese writer’s characterization of his short essay form, which Baraka adopted as his own favored daily “struggle form.”41 Although Baraka’s interests in Mao and Hsun certainly deserve more analysis, the rest of this chapter will focus instead on Baraka’s more recent poetic experiment, which has received relatively scant critical attention.42 In 1998, Baraka claimed to have invented a new literary form: “low coup.” According to his own definition, low coup is “an Afro-American verse form . . . as distinct from the Japanese Haiku.”43 In a more recent article, Baraka described it as “an Afro-American tribute form,” which he invented as a result of “the long reading of Japanese Haiku form.”44 The simple definition of low coup is that it has “[n]o fixed amount of syllables like the classic, just short and sharp.”45 This Afro-Asian hybrid form can be seen as the fruit of Baraka’s long search for what he called a “post-American form,”46 which he had articulated in 1967 as an endeavor to re-center the black experience in literature and art by displacing what he understood as the white mainstream values in the United States. One of the first low coups Baraka produced serves as a perfect example of his haiku-inspired post-American form: “If Elvis Presley is / King / Who is James Brown? / God?”47 In 2004, Baraka published Un Poco Low Coups (Berkeley: Ishmael Reed Publishing). This twenty-three-page chapbook featured a low coup—sometimes two or three—on every page, each with an illustration presumably drawn by Baraka himself. Almost all of the poems in this volume satirically critique white supremacy and capitalism from the perspective of an African American

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revolutionary Marxist: “Since the rich eat / more than / anybody else / it’s reasonable to / assume / that they are / more full of / SHIT” (7); “Low Coup for Bush 2: The Main Thing / Wrong / w/You / Is / You Ain’t / In / Jail” (10). Despite the accusations of anti-Semitism elsewhere in Baraka’s poetry, the following low coup creatively intertwines the traumatic histories of slavery and holocaust: “Culture: / european jews / say the devil / speak perfect / german / black / americans on / the other / hand say, he / speak pretty / good english / too! (14).” Somewhat reminiscent of Whitman’s “Song of Myself,” yet another low coup poetically celebrates blackness, “We are / The blues / Our Selvz / The Actual Song” (12). The use of visual images juxtaposed to the text in Un Poco Low Coups may remind those familiar with the haiku tradition of the work of Yosa Buson, the eighteenth-century Japanese haiku poet, who also painted. Whatever Baraka’s illustrations’ aesthetic merits may be, they confirm his understanding of the significance of the painterly eye—that is, the visual imagination, which is vital for writing successful haiku.48 Unlike haiku, however, the visual dimension of Baraka’s low coups is secondary to the significance of the aural. In his transcultural riffing, Baraka literally turned haiku upside down through the pun, his favorite rhetorical device, which he once described as based on “delicious accident [followed by] a much more rational juxtaposition of sounds and things” (Melhem, “Amiri Baraka,” 252). Despite the fact that Western as well as Japanese classic haiku poets tended to look down upon the pun, Baraka took pleasure in such “delicious accidents” when adapting haiku to create his own poetic form.49 Baraka’s transcultural adaptation of haiku also foregrounded the centrality of politics in his poetry. While ku in Japanese means a “verse,” Baraka’s “coup” consciously inscribed his political rebelliousness. The title, Un Poco Low Coups, in itself was a pun on “locofoco,” a faction of the Democratic Party in the mid-nineteenth century, which attacked economic monopoly and vehemently criticized its rival organization, Tammany Hall, in New York City.50 In contrast to many of the classic haiku poets, who sought to transcend the world of the mortals, the human drama, Baraka commandeered the form for his political struggle, although it must be said that his late poetry clearly lacked the revolutionary power that he desired it to have. Baraka’s low coups also signaled an ongoing modification of his earlier individualistic poetics encapsulated in his idea of “art-ting.” As a matter of fact, Baraka had begun to appreciate the value of collective poetry-making and revised his previous position as an individualist poet as early as in 1974: If you’re a modern artist who’s not some kind of cultural nationalist, you understand that you can learn from anything and anybody, see that the whole of world culture is at your disposal, because no one people has created the monuments of art and culture in the world, it’s been collective.51

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Since the mid-1970s, Baraka indeed endeavored to borrow and build on the world’s common cultural heritages, rather than “mak[ing] a poetry” in an unabashedly egoistic manner out of what he cynically called “all the garbage of our lives” (“How You Sound??” 424). Finally, even though Baraka became “tamer” (despite the 2002 scandal over the alleged anti-Semitism in the poem “Somebody Blew Up America,” which led to his removal from the New Jersey Poet Laureateship), he never lost his acerbic sense of humor even to the very end of his life.52 In fact, his adaptation of haiku relishes humor, sometimes blatantly, at other times more subtly and enigmatically: “Buddha asked Monk, ‘If you were always right . . . / Would it be easier / or more difficult / living in the world?’ / ‘I knew you would ask that!’ said Monk, blue, and invisible” (Un Poco Low Coups, 11). Here the African American jazz pianist, Thelonius Monk, literally becomes a Buddhist monk, and even gives the Buddha a lesson in life. Baraka’s low coups may not look or sound like classic Japanese haiku in the eyes and ears of cultural purists. It is certainly true that the serene spirituality of Zen is all but absent in his rambunctious low coups. Instead of faithfully emulating the classic conventions of haiku, however, Baraka found another way of inheriting a foreign poetic tradition across time and place. To hazard a pun, while recognizing the subtle art of Zen-inspired haiku, Baraka consciously played the dozens on Zen and subversively transformed the poetics of allusion and suggestiveness into a series of explicit political statements that contest white supremacy and the rapaciousness of capitalism. In doing so, Baraka indeed “broadened his own voice,” giving us a delicious taste of the rich diversity of literature as it travels (as it always has done) beyond the boundaries of time and place, not to mention those of race and the nation state.

Notes 1. I thank Nina Cornyetz and William Bridges for organizing the amazing symposium. I’m also grateful to Keio Gijuku Academic Development Funds for making it possible for me to travel to NYC to present an earlier version of this paper. 2. Amiri Baraka [LeRoi Jones] and Hettie Jones, eds., Yūgen: A New Consciousness in Arts and Letters, 8 vols. (New York: Troubador Press [Totem Press], 1958–62). In the original, the haiku reads, “ふぐくはぬ人にはいはじ鰒の味.” See R. H. Blyth, Zen in English Literature and Oriental Classics (Tokyo: Hokuseidō, 1946), 69. 3. The globe-fish/swell-fish were eaten by the common folks in the eighteenth century in Japan and were not considered the luxury they have become today. For a more detailed cultural explanation, see Takashi Ibi, “Taibai ron: shi kara haikai e [On Taibai: From Poetry to Haikai],” Seikei jinbun kenkyu 5 (1990): 12.

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4. For a helpful periodization of Baraka’s early career, see Werner Sollors, Amiri Baraka/LeRoi Jones: The Quest for a “Populist Modernism” (New York: Columbia University Press, 1978), 7–8. 5. The Autobiography of LeRoi Jones (Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books, 1984); “‘Howl’ and Hail,” American Poetry Review 35, no. 2 (2006): 8–9. 6. “Howl’ and Hail,” 8; Autobiography, 156, 163–65. 7. As Baraka fictionalizes some of the names that appear in his 1984 autobiography, Polite is mentioned as “Steve Korret.” Similarly, Baraka refers to Yūgen as Zazen. 8. In Zen in English Literature and Oriental Classics, Blyth attaches a helpful note to his translation of Taibai’s haiku for the non-Japanese readers (69). In Haiku (Tokyo: Hokuseidō, 1949–1952), Blyth also cites Yosa Buson’s “Waking up,— / I am still alive, / After eating swell-fish soup!” to explain the globe-fish’s fatal attraction: “The swell-fish, or globe-fish is very poisonous, but as people think it delicious, they often eat it at the risk of their lives” (958). 9. For more on the complexity of Wright’s four thousand haiku, see Eugene E. Miller, Voices of a Native Son: The Poetics of Richard Wright (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1990); Michel Fabre, “The Poetry of Richard Wright,” in Critical Essays on Richard Wright, ed. Yoshinobu Hakutani, 252–71; Fabre, “From Revolutionary Poetry to Haiku,” in The World of Ricahrd Wright, 34–55 (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1985); Fabre, The Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright, 2nd ed., trans. Isabel Barzun (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993); Yoshinobu Hakutani, ed., Cross-Cultural Visions in African American Literature: West Meets East (New York: Palgrave, 2011); Jianqing Zheng, ed., The Other World of Richard Wright: Perspectives on His Haiku (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2011); Hakutani, Richard Wright and Haiku (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2014). 10. Baraka would later encounter eight of Wright’s haiku in Arna Bontemps’s American Negro Poetry and describe them as “lovely, though overly literary.” See “A Dark Bag,” in Home: Social Essays (New York: William Morrow, 1966; New York: Akashic Books, 2009), 147. 11. For the growing scholarship on African American haiku, see William J. Higginson, “Afro-American Haiku,” in Frogpond 5, no. 2 (1982): 5–11; Michel Fabre, “James Emanuel: A Poet in Exile,” in From Harlem Renaissance to Paris: Black American Writers in France, 1840–1980, 324–36 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993). Sonia Sanchez, “From Blues to Haiku.” Interview by John Kryder. Artvoice (April 19, 2007, http://artvoice.com/issues/v6n16/from_haiku_to_the_blues); Toru Kiuchi, “Creating African American Haiku Form: Lenard D. Moore’s Poetic Artistry,” Journal of Ethnic American Literature 1 (2011): 153–67; Karen Jackson Ford, “The Fight and the Fiddle in Twentieth-Century African American Poetry,” in Modern and Contemporary American Poetry, ed. by Cary Nelson (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 369–404. For more on the various interactions between African Americans and Asians in general, see Bill V. Mullen, Afro-Orientalism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004); Heike Raphael-Hernandez and Shannon Steen, eds., AfroAsian Encounters: Culture, History, Politics (New York University Press, 2006); Hazel M. McFerson, ed., Blacks and Asians: Crossings, Conflict and Commonality (Durham, NC: Carolina

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Academic Press, 2006); Fred Ho and Bill V. Mullen, eds., Afro Asia: Revolutionary Political and Cultural Connections between African Americans and Asian Americans (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008); Yuichiro Onishi, Transpacific AntiRacism: Afro-Asian Solidarity in 20th-Century Black America, Japan, and Okinawa (New York: New York University Press, 2013); Crystal S. Anderson, Beyond the Chinese Connection: Contemporary Afro-Asian Cultural Production (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2013). 12. See, for instance, Virginia Whatley Smith, ed., Richard Wright’s Travel Writings: New Reflections (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2001). 13. A notable exception is Sollors’s Amiri Baraka/LeRoi Jones, to which my reading of Baraka is heavily indebted. 14. Baraka, Black Magic: Collected Poetry 1961–67 (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill Co, 1969), 2. 15. Watts, Amiri Baraka: The Politics and Art of a Black Intellectual (New York: New York University Press, 2001). 16. For more on Lorca’s identification with African Americans, see Carol A. Hess, “From Buster Keaton to the King of Harlem Musical Ideologies in Lorca’s Poeta en Nueva York,” Anales de la Literatura Española Contemporánea 33, no. 2 (2008): 111– 28. For Baraka’s own account of his debt to Lorca, see Nathaniel Mackey, Discrepant Engagement: Dissonance, Cross-Culturality, and Experimental Writing (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 289–90, n. 21. 17. See Sollors, Amiri Baraka, 56–57. In Sollors’s reading, the poem is more ambivalent and sinister, as it is understood to embody Baraka’s suicidal impulse. Also see Aldon Lynn Nielsen, Black Chant: Languages of African American Postmodernism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 51–53. 18. For a critical look at the intertwined history of the hypermasculinization of African American men and the emasculation of their Asian American counterparts, see Daniel Y. Kim, Writing Manhood in Black and Yellow: Ralph Ellison, Frank Chin, and the Literary Politics of Identity (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005). 19. See Okihiro, “Is Yellow Black or White?” in Margins and Mainstreams: Asians in American History and Culture (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1994), 31–63. 20. Kim, “The Racial Triangulation of Asian Americans,” Politics and Society 27 (1999): 105–38. 21. Cohen’s How I Became Hettie Jones (1990; repr., New York: Grove Press, 1997) provides significant details regarding the running of the magazine. 22. Johnson and Johnson, Propaganda & Aesthetics: The Literary Politics of African-American Magazines in the Twentieth Century (1979; repr., Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1991), 158. 23. Patterson, “The New York Poets: Folder (1953–1956); Neon (1956–1960); and Yugen (1958–62),” in The Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines: Volume II, North America 1894–1960, ed. Peter Brooker and Andrew Thacker (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 983–1000. 24. Ibid., 998. 25. MLA International Bibliography lists no articles on Polite, but a group of scholars is now working to resurrect his legacy from oblivion. See Mary Jane Dunlap,

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“History of Black Writing Project Helps Recover Poetry of Expatriate Allen Polite,” KU NEWS RELEASE, April 20, 2012, http://archive.news.ku.edu/2012/april/20/polite .shtml, and the Allen Polite Papers, which are now kept in the Archives & Special Collections at the Thomas J. Dodd Research Center, University of Connecticut Libraries, http://doddcenter.uconn.edu/asc/findaids/Polite/MSS20100117.html. 26. Neither the MLA International Bibliography nor the Oxford African American Research Center contains any article on James. 27. In “American Zen: Gary Snyder’s No Nature,” collected in Soul Says: On Recent Poetry (Cambridge: Belknap, 1996), Helen Vendler accurately reads this primitivist poem as one of the “failed attempts to speak with a tribal voice” (122) among Snyder’s more successful treatments of the relationship between human and nature. This poem was nevertheless later reprinted in Donald Allen’s epoch-making The New American Poetry (New York: Grove Press, 1960). 28. For an extended reading of this poem, see Joan Qionglin Tan, Han Shan, Chan Buddhism and Gary Snyder’s Ecopoetic Way (Eastbourne and Portland: Sussex Academic Press, 2009), 207. 29. As James Smethurst has recently argued in The Black Arts Movement: Literary Nationalism in the 1960s and 1970s (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005), Baraka should take more credit for bringing these different schools of avantgarde poetry together (39). 30. Although her work is not directly relevant to the argument I am making, the rebellious and ribald poems of another neglected African American poet, Mason Jordan Mason, in the third and fourth issues of Yūgen, is worth special attention. Prefiguring the militancy of Black Power, her poems clearly defy the later critics’ interpretation of the magazines as “non-racial.” 31. For more on Williams’s early interest in Asia, see Qian, Orientalism and Modernism: The Legacy of China in Pound and Williams (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995), 113–65. 32. Their joint venture was soon to culminate in “The Cassia Tree” (1966), which was published three years after Williams passed away in New Jersey. For more details on the Williams-Wang collaboration, see Qian, “William Carlos Williams, David Raphael Wang, and the Dynamic of East/West Collaboration,” Modern Philology 108.2 (2010): 304–21. “The Cassia Tree” is reprinted in Williams, The Collected Poems, vol. II. 1939–1962, ed. Christopher MacGowan (New York: New Directions, 1991), 359–76. Qian somehow overlooks the fact that Williams in his last years was also reading (or re-reading?) Japanese poetry. For his more or less ambivalent references about his poetic debts to Japan, see “The Sparrow” (1959) and “The World Contracted to a Recognizable Image” (The Collected Poems, vol. II, 291–95; 415–16). 33. For more on Jonas, see Baraka, Autobiography, 237–38; Nielsen, Integral Music: Languages of African American Innovation (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2004), 64; Smethurst, The Black Arts Movement, 39. 34. Okakura was, of course, a disciple of Ernest Fenollosa, who was instrumental in promoting Japanese art and Chinese poetry to the West in the late nineteenth century. Pound posthumously edited and published Fenollosa’s notes, which had a crucial impact on his Cantos. For more on Pound’s relationship to the legacies of Fenollosa, see

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Qian, Orientalism and Modernism; Yunte Huang, Transpacific Displacement: Ethnography, Translation, and Intertextual Travel in Twentieth-Century American Literature (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002); and Rupert R. Arrowsmith, “The Transcultural Roots of Modernism: Imagist Poetry, Japanese Visual Culture, and the Western Museum System,” Modernism/modernity 18, no. 1 (2011): 27–42. 35. Since 1963, Di Prima had taken the full responsibility of editing the magazine. “Diane Di Prima Papers,” University of Connecticut, accessed December 12, 2013, http://doddcenter.uconn.edu/asc/findaids/Diprima/MSS19910042.html. For more on “Subway Haiku,” see Nielsen, Integral Music, 72; Black Chant, 22. 36. For the eclectic sources of Baraka’s term, see Sollors, “Toward a Definition of Art-ing” in Amiri Baraka, 72–82. 37. For the contexts in which these puns occur, see Sollors, ibid., 12–13, 179, 271. n.3 and 281. n.12; William J. Harris, The Poetry and the Poetics of Amiri Baraka: The Jazz Aesthetic (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1985), 98, 110–11; D. H. Melhem, “Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones): Revolutionary Traditions, Interview,” in Heroism in the New Black Poetry: Introductions & Interviews (Lexington: Kentucky University Press, 1990), 252–53. 38. Melhem, “Amiri Baraka,” 252–53; Harris suggests the use of pun (“in we/ us—eye”) in “Class Struggle in Music” collected in Reggae or Not (1981) is specifically influenced by Olson’s eye metaphor (“polis [the ideal city] is eyes”) in “Letter 6” of The Maximus Poems (The Poetry, 110–11). 39. Melhem lists Lu Hsun’s Selected Stories, 2nd (1972) and Mao’s Talks at the Yenan Forum of Literature and Art (1967) and Five Documents on Literature and Art (1967) as “important influences on Baraka’s recent thinking” (263, n.13). In addition, there are a few references to Asia even in his hyper-black nationalist years. For instance, “New-Sense” collected in Tales (1967; rept. in Baraka, The Fiction of LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka [Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books, 2000]), borrows (rather stereotypically) Confucius’s authority to counter Eurocentrism: “The thinkers try. The extremists, Confucius says, shooting past the mark. But the straight ahead people, who think when that’s what’s called for, who don’t when they don’t have to. Not the Hamlet burden, which is white bullshit, to always be weighing and measuring and analyzing, and reflecting. The reflective vs. the expressive. Mahler vs. Martha and the Vandellas” (197). 40. See Sollors, Amiri Baraka, 247, 249, 252; Kimberly W. Benston, “Amiri Baraka: An Interview,” in Conversations with Amiri Baraka, ed. by Charlie Reilly (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1994), 111; Melhem, “Revolution: The Constancy of Change,” in Conversations, 192–93. 41. See Benston, “Amiri Baraka,” 105–17. 42. For more on Lu Hsun’s influence on Baraka as a revolutionary essayist, see Watts, Amiri Baraka, 432–33. 43. Baraka, “‘The International Business of Jazz’ and the Need for the Cooperative and Collective Self-Development of an International People’s Culture,” in Home, 96–97. 44. Baraka, Digging: The Afro-American Soul of American Classical Music (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), 403. 45. Ibid., 403.

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46. Baraka, “What the Arts Need Now,” Black World/Negro Digest 16, no. 6 (April 1967): 7. 47. Baraka, “What You Mean, Du Wop?” in Home, 116. 48. For more on this subject, see Rupert Arrowsmith, Modernism and the Museum: Asian, African, and Pacific Art and the London Avant-Garde (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011) and “The Transcultural Roots of Modernism: Imagist Poetry, Japanese Visual Culture, and the Western Museum System,” Modernism/modernity 18, no. 1 (2011): 27–42. 49. The aural significance of low coup is also confirmed by Baraka’s performance on stage, where his reading, or rather singing, of low coups was often accompanied by jazz musicians. See, for instance, his performance at Apertivo in Concerto in 2013: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eu9KCY9C8-4. 50. According to Merriam-Webster On-Line Dictionary, the term derived from locomotive and fuoco, meaning “fire” in Italian, and originally referred to a kind of friction match. For more on the Locofocos, see Carl Degler, “The Locofocos: Urban ‘Agrarians,’” Journal of Economic History 16 (1956): 322–33. 51. Amiri Baraka, interview by David Barsamian, KGNU, Boulder, Colorado, July 27, 1984, in William J. Harris, The LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka Reader (New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 1991), 249–50. 52. For more on this incident, see Jeremy Pearce, “When Poetry Seems to Matter,” New York Times, February 9, 2003.

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5 Richard Wright’s Haiku and Modernist Poetics Yoshinobu Hakutani

O

ne of the most visible East-West artistic, cultural, and literary exchanges that have taken place since the end of World War II was reading and writing haiku in the West. Among others in the West, Richard Wright (1908–1960), the most influential African American writer known for Native Son (1940) and Black Boy (1945), distinguished himself as a haiku poet by writing over four thousand haiku in the last eighteen months of his life in exile in France. After his death, the Richard Wright estate deposited, in Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, his two haiku manuscripts: “This Other World: Projections in the Haiku Manner” and “Four Thousand Haiku.”1 The former was first published in 1998 as Haiku: This Other World, edited by myself and Robert L. Tener.2 This edition of the 817 out of four thousand haiku Wright himself had selected has been the largest collection of haiku written in English. Before trying his hand at writing haiku, Wright had read and studied R. H. Blyth’s seminal book of haiku, especially the first volume, Haiku: Eastern Culture.3 Blyth, a foremost Japonologist and Sinologist, was the eminent and most influential haiku scholar and critic who introduced haiku to the West after World War II. Wright, as was Jack Kerouac, a Beat Generation writer known for On the Road (1957) and The Dharma Bums (1958), was deeply influenced by the theory and technique of haiku composition that Blyth demonstrated with many of the well-known haiku by the four great masters—Matsuo Basho (1644–1694), Yosa Buson (1721–1783), Kobayshi Issa (1763–1827), and Masaoka Shiki (1867–1902). Reading the haiku by these masters, Wright became familiar with the classic Japanese poetics, as well as — 99 —

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with modernist poetics. It looks as though the haiku texts by Japanese poets had traveled to the West and inspired Wright to write haiku in France. His haiku, posthumously published in America, have now been translated into Japanese and published in Japan.4 Wright’s haiku through translation have in turn traveled back to Japan. These haiku, then, is a representation of the traveling texts between African Americans and Japanese. The modernist movement of haiku, which took place toward the end the nineteenth century, was spearheaded by a young poet, Masaoka Shiki. He assailed the tradition of haiku established in the seventeenth century by publishing his controversial essay “Criticism of Basho.” He urged his fellow poets to express their subjective thoughts and feelings in haiku. He advised his followers that haiku should be a depiction not only of nature but also of humanity and that humanity should be represented by the author of a haiku himself or herself. In short, he urged his followers to write haiku to please themselves. Yone Noguchi, who played the central role in introducing haiku to the West and to W. B. Yeats and Ezra Pound, in particular, was not entirely persuaded by Shiki’s manifesto but was nonetheless drawn to his modernist techniques of haiku. Shiki was in opposition to the classic tradition of suppressing subjectivity but was in agreement with such aesthetic principles as yugen, sabi, and wabi. As haiku has developed over the centuries, it has established certain aesthetic principles. To define and illustrate them is difficult since they refer to subtle perceptions and complex states of mind in the creation of poetry. Above all, these principles are governed by the national character developed over the centuries. Having changed in meaning, they do not necessarily mean the same today as they did in the seventeenth century. Discussion of these terms, furthermore, proves difficult simply because poetic theory does not always correspond to what poets actually write. It has also been true that the aesthetic principles for haiku are often applied to other genres of Japanese art such as noh play, flower arrangement, and the tea ceremony. One of the most delicate principles of Eastern art is yugen. Originally yugen in Japanese art was an element of style pervasive in the language of noh. In reference to the Works by Zeami, the author of many of the extant noh plays, Arthur Waley expounds this difficult term yugen: It is applied to the natural grace of a boy’s movements, to the gentle restraint of a nobleman’s speech and bearing. “When notes fall sweetly and flutter delicately to the ear,” that is the yūgen of music. The symbol of yūgen is “a white bird with a flower in its beak.” “To watch the sun sink behind a flower-clad hill, to wander on and on in a huge forest with no thought of return, to stand upon the shore and gaze after a boat that goes hid by far-off islands, to ponder on the journey of wild-geese seen and lost among the clouds”—such are the gates to yūgen.5

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Such scenes convey a feeling of satisfaction and release as does the catharsis of a Greek play, but yugen differs from catharsis because it has little to do with the emotional stress caused by tragedy. Yugen functions in art as a means by which human beings can comprehend the course of nature. Although yugen seems allied with a sense of resignation, it has a far different effect on the human psyche. A certain type of noh play like Takasago celebrates the order of the universe ruled by heaven. The mode of perception in the play may be compared to that of a pine tree with its evergreen needles, the predominant representation on the stage. The style of yugen can express either happiness or sorrow. Cherry blossoms, however beautiful they may be, must fade away; love between man and woman is inevitably followed by sorrow. This mystery and inexplicability, which surrounds the order of the universe, had a strong appeal to a classic haiku poet like Basho. His “The Old Pond” shows that while the poet describes a natural phenomenon realistically, he conveys his instant perception that nature is infinitely deep and absolutely silent: The old pond A frog jumped in— The sound of the water.6 Furu ike ya Kawazu tobi komu Mizu no oto

Such attributes of nature are not ostensibly stated; they are hidden. The tranquility of the old pond with which the poet was struck remained in the background. He did not write, “The rest is quiet”; instead he wrote the third line of the verse: “The sound of the water.” The concluding image was given as a contrast to the background enveloped in quiet. Basho’s mode of expression is suggestive rather than descriptive, hidden and reserved rather than overt and demonstrative. Yugen has all the connotations of modesty, concealment, depth, and darkness. In Zen painting, woods and bays, as well as houses and boats, are hidden; hence, these objects suggest infinity and profundity. Detail and refinement, which would mean limitation and temporariness of life, destroy the sense of permanence and eternity. Sabi, another frequently used term in Japanese poetics, implies that what is described is aged. Buddha’s portrait hung in Zen temples, as the Chinese painter Lian K’ai’s Buddha Leaving the Mountains suggests, exhibits the Buddha as an old man in contrast to the young figure typically shown in other temples.7 Zen’s Buddha looks emaciated, his environment barren: his body, his tattered clothes, the aged tree standing nearby, the pieces of dry wood strewn around, all indicate that they have passed the prime of their

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life and function. In this kind of portrait the old man with thin body is nearer to his soul as the old tree with its skin and leaves fallen is to the very origin and essence of nature. Sabi is traditionally associated with loneliness. Aesthetically, however, this mode of sensibility is characteristic of grace rather than splendor; it suggests quiet beauty as opposed to robust beauty. Basho’s oft-quoted “A Crow,” best illustrates this principle: A crow Perched on a withered tree In the autumn evening.8

Loneliness suggested by a single crow on a branch of an old tree is reinforced by the elements of time indicated by nightfall and autumn. The picture is drawn with little detail and the overall mood is created by a simple, graceful description of fact. Furthermore, parts of the picture are delineated, by implication, in dark colors: the crow is black, the branch dark brown, the background dusky. The kind of beauty associated with the loneliness in Basho’s poem is in marked contrast to the robust beauty depicted in a haiku by Mukai Kyorai (1651–1704), one of Basho’s disciples: The guardians Of the cherry blossoms Lay their white heads together. Hanamori ya Shiroki kashira wo Tsuki awase (Blyth, History 2: vii)

Some well-known haiku poets in the twentieth century also preserve the sensibility of sabi. The predicament of a patient described in this haiku by Ishida Hakyo (1913–1969) arouses sabi: In the hospital room I have built a nest box but Swallows appear not. Byo shitsu ni Subako tsukuredo Tsubame kozu9

Not only do the first and third lines express facts of loneliness, but also the patient’s will to live suggested by the second line evokes a poignant sensibility.

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To a modernist poet like Hakyo, the twin problems of humanity are loneliness and boredom. He sees the same problems exist in nature as this haiku by him shows: The caged eagle; When lonely He flaps his wings. Ori no washi Sabishiku nareba Hautsu ka mo (Blyth, History 2: 347)

The feeling of sabi is also evoked by the private world of the poet, the situation others cannot envision as this haiku by Nakamura Kusatao (1901–1983), another modernist, shows: At the faint voices Of the flying mosquitoes I felt my remorse.10 Ka no koe no Hisoka naru toki Kui ni keri (Blyth, History, 2: 322)

Closely related to sabi is a poetic sensibility called wabi. Traditionally wabi has been defined in sharp antithesis to a folk or plebeian saying, “Hana yori dango” (Rice dumplings are preferred to flowers). Some poets are inspired by the sentiment that human beings desire beauty more than food, what is lacking in animals and other nonhuman beings. Wabi refers to the uniquely human perception of beauty stemmed from poverty. Wabi is often considered religious, as the saying “Blessed are the poor” implies, but the spiritual aspect of wabi is based on the aesthetic rather than the moral sensibility. Rikyu, the famed artist of the tea ceremony, wrote that food that is enough to sustain the body and a roof that does not leak are sufficient for human life. For Basho, however, an empty stomach was necessary to create poetry. Among Basho’s disciples, Rotsu (1649–1738), the beggar-poet, is well known for having come into Basho’s legacy of wabi. This haiku by Rotsu best demonstrates his state of mind: The water-birds too Are asleep On the lake of Yogo?

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Toridomo mo Neitte iru ka Yogo no umi (Blyth, History 2: viii–ix)

Rotsu portrays a scene with no sight or sound of birds on the desolate lake. The withered reeds rustle from time to time in the chilly wind. It is only Rotsu the beggar and artist who is awake and is able to capture the beauty of the lake. The sensibilities of yugen, sabi, and wabi all derive from the ways in which Japanese poets have seen nature over the centuries. Although the philosophy of Zen, on which the aesthetics of a poet like Basho is based, shuns emotion and intellect altogether, haiku in its modernist development by such a poet as Shiki is often concerned with one’s feeling and thought. A modernist poet, Shiki argued, should put more emphasis on humanity than on nature. A classic haiku poet like Basho, on the contrary, advocated the primacy of nature over humanity. To Shiki, the haiku poet’s mission was to create beauty out of humanity, as well as of nature. His argument bears a resemblance to the privilege in which a Western modernist such as T. S. Eliot took pride. Western modernists in the 1920s believed that their art offers a privileged insight into reality and at the same time, because art creates its own reality, it is not at all concerned with commonplace reality: art is an autonomous activity. In reference to John Donne’s poetry, Eliot wrote, “When a poet’s mind is perfectly equipped for its work, it is constantly amalgamating disparate experience; the ordinary man’s experience is chaotic, irregular, fragmentary. The latter falls in love, or reads Spinoza, and these two experiences have nothing to do with each other, or with the noise of the typewriter or the smell of cooking; in the mind of the poet these experiences are always forming new wholes.”11 Much like Eliot, Shiki took pride in the privilege he had in creating art out of human reality. Shiki is well known in Japan for writing such haiku as “The Wind in Autumn” and “Yellow and White Mums”: The wind in autumn As for me there are no gods, There are no Buddhas. Aki-kaze ya Ware-ni kami nashi Hotoke nashi12 Yellow and white mums But at least another one— I want a red one.

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Kigiku shira-giku Hito moto wa aka mo Aramahoshi13

Because these haiku directly express subjectivity, they have not been considered good haiku by all Japanese readers. On the other hand, Shiki wrote many haiku that thrive on the expression of the beauty the poet creates out of humanity. Subjectivity is expressed indirectly and subtly in such haiku as the following: A small shop Carving dolls,— Chrysanthemums.14 Ningyō wo Kizamu komise ya Kiku no hana At the bend of the road, The temple in sight,— Wild chrysanthemums.15 Tera miete Komichi no magaru Nogiku kana Near the boat-landing, A small licensed enclosure; Cotton-plant flowers.16 Funatsuki no Chisaki kuruwa ya Wata no hana

The first two haiku, “A Small Shop” and “At the Bend of the Road,” both depict images of beauty created out of humanity, as well as of nature. In “A Small Shop,” the carving of dolls, a human activity, complements the chrysanthemums, a produce of nature. In “At the Bend of the Road,” the temple, which represents religion, not only coexists with the wild chrysanthemums, but also complements them. In both haiku, beauty is created by the interaction of humanity and nature. The third haiku, “Near the Boat-landing,” depicts a house of prostitution with cotton-plant flowers. Not only did Shiki portray reality in society, but he also captured beauty in nature. The beautiful scene of nature compensates for the ugly feature of humanity. None of the words in this haiku directly

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expresses subjectivity, but the reader shares Shiki’s feelings about the unfortunate women’s livelihood. The reader also shares Shiki’s appreciation of the beautiful cotton flowers. Such a haiku can indirectly convey the poet’s thoughts and feelings. This haiku is reminiscent of Hawthorne’s description in The Scarlet Letter of the wild rosebush growing by the door of the prison where Hester Prynne is doomed to wear the scarlet letter “A” for adultery. “Before this ugly edifice,” Hawthorne wrote, “and between it and the wheeltrack of the street, was a grass-plot, much overgrown with burdock, pig-weed, apple-peru, and such unsightly vegetation, which evidently found something congenial in the soil that had so early borne the black flower of civilized society, a prison. But, on one side of the portal, and rooted almost at the threshold, was a wild rose-bush, covered, in this month of June, with its delicate gems, which might be imagined to offer their fragrance and fragile beauty to the prisoner as he went in, and to the condemned criminal as he came forth to his doom, in token that the deep heart of Nature could pity and be kind to him.”17 Hawthorne’s delineation of the scene not only indirectly expresses the compassion he felt for Hester, but also thrives on the interaction of nature and humanity. It shows, as does Shiki’s haiku, “Near the Boat-landing,” that the beauty of nature compensates for the ugliness of humanity. Many of Wright’s haiku reflect the features of modernist haiku, such as the expression of subjectivity and the interaction of humanity and nature. Although Wright emulated classic haiku, he consciously or unconsciously departed in many of his compositions from the classic poetics in which the poet effaces human subjectivity. Wright’s “A Thin Waterfall,” for example, is akin to Basho’s “A Crow”: A thin waterfall Dribbles the whole autumn night,— How lonely it is. (Haiku 569) A crow Perched on a withered tree In the autumn evening.18 (Basho)

Basho focuses on a single crow perching on a branch of an old tree, as does Wright on a thin waterfall. Both haiku create the kind of beauty associated with the aesthetic sensibility of sabi that suggests loneliness and quietude, the salient characteristics of nature, as opposed to overexcitement and loudness, those of society. As Basho expresses sabi with the image of an autumn eve-

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ning, so does Wright with the line “How lonely it is.” Subjectivity, however, is absent in Basho’s haiku while it is directly expressed by Wright’s third line, “How lonely it is.” The two haiku are different: while Basho describes nature for its own sake, Wright interjects his own feelings. Whether Wright and Basho actually felt lonely when writing the haiku is moot. Wright’s “I Would Like a Bell” is comparable to Buson’s well-known “On the Hanging Bell” in depicting a spring scene: I would like a bell Tolling in this soft twilight Over willow trees. (Haiku 13) On the hanging bell Has perched and is fast asleep, It’s a butterfly.19 (Buson)

Wright and Buson take different approaches in terms of subjectivity: Wright’s focus is on imagining a bell ringing softly over willow trees while Buson’s is on a butterfly actually fast asleep on a hanging bell. The two haiku are quite different: subjectivity is present in Wright’s haiku while it is absent in Buson’s. Buson was well known in his time as an accomplished painter, and many of his haiku reflect his singular attention to color and its intensification. Wright’s “A Butterfly Makes,” for example, is reminiscent of Buson’s “Also Stepping On”: A butterfly makes The sunshine even brighter With fluttering wings. (Haiku 82) Also stepping on The mountain pheasant’s tail is The spring setting sun.20 (Buson)

For a seasonal reference to spring, Buson links an image of the bird wih a spring sunset, because both are highly colorful. As a painter he is also interested in the ambiguous impression the scene gives him; it is not clear whether the setting sun is treading on the pheasant’s tail or the tail on the setting

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sun. In any event, Buson has made both pictures beautiful to look at, just as Wright draws pictures of a butterfly and the sunshine, themselves highly colorful and bright, which in turn intensify each other. But there are some differences between Buson’s and Wright’s haiku. While Buson abides by the traditional rule of including a seasonal reference, Wright does not. While Buson’s perception is based solely on nature, Wright’s haiku reflects a subjective perception. Wright is interjecting his view that a butterfly’s action makes the sunshine brighter. While classic haiku poets often tried to suppress subjectivity in depicting nature, some of Wright’s haiku bring the poet to the fore: A wilting jonquil Journeys to its destiny In a shut bedroom. (Haiku 720) Lines of winter rain Gleam only as they flash past My lighted window. (Haiku 722)

While “A Wilting Jonquil” focuses on an object, “Lines of Winter Rain” insists on the importance of “my lighted window.” None of the classic haiku Wright emulates expresses the poet’s thoughts or feelings. The first haiku in Wright’s Haiku: This Other World suppresses subjectivity by depicting the red sun that erases his name: I am nobody: A red sinking autumn sun Took my name away. (Haiku 1)

And yet the poet is strongly present, even by negation. In depicting the moon, for example, Wright and Kikaku write remarkably different haiku: A pale winter moon, Pitying a lonely doll, Lent it a shadow. (Haiku 671)

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The bright harvest moon Upon the tatami mats Shadows of the pines.21 (Kikaku)

In “A Pale Winter Moon,” the second line “Pitying a lonely doll” projects loneliness onto a doll; thereby Wright is indirectly expressing his sympathy for the doll. Subjectivity is entirely absent in “The Bright Harvest Moon”; Kikaku is simply depicting the intricate pattern of the shadow of the trees created on the dustless tatami mats under the bright harvest moon. Absent subjectivity in composing haiku is akin to Lacan’s concept of the subject. Lacan, as a postmodern psychoanalyst, challenges the traditional concept of subjectivity. On the basis of his analytic experience, he sees subjectivity as a concept that concerns neither the autonomy of the self nor the subject’s ability to influence the other. Subjectivity is deficient because of the deficiencies inherent in language: “The effects of language are always mixed with the fact, which is the basis of the analytic experience, that the subject is subject only from being subjected to the field of the Other, the subject proceeds from his synchronic subjection in the field of the Other. That is why he must get out, get himself out, and in the getting-himself-out, in the end, he will know that the real Other has, just as much as himself, to get himself out, to pull himself free.”22 Because the subject, an infinitesimal fraction in time and space, is isolated from the world, the subject is only capable of imagining the other: society, nature, and life. Only when the subject is conscious of the deficiencies of language, as Lacan theorizes, does the subject of the unconscious emerge. Only then is the subject able to approach and encounter the truth of life—what Lacan calls “the real” and “the unsymbolizable.” To Lacan, the motive for subjectivity aims at the symbolic—what constitutes tradition, religion, law, and so on—whereas the motive for absence of subjectivity aims at the unconscious, a state largely derived from the other and partly derived from the imaginary on the part of the subject. The unconscious and the imaginary, then, are closer to the real than they are to the symbolic. Lacan posits, however, that “there exists a world of truth entirely deprived of subjectivity,” universal truth, “and that . . . there has been a historical development of subjectivity manifestly directed towards the rediscovery of truth,” historically subjective truth, “which lies in the order of symbols.”23 Lacan sees the door as language; the door is open either to the real or to the imaginary. He says that “we don’t know quite which, but it is either one or the other. There is an asymmetry between the opening and the closing—if the opening of the door controls access, when closed, it closes the circuit.”24 He

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considers language either objective or subjective; the real is objective whereas the imaginary is subjective. Applied to traditional haiku composition, the language aims at the real through the imaginary rather than at the symbolic through the historically subjective. The Lacanian distinction of the imaginary and the symbolic has an affinity with one of the disagreements between Pound and Yeats in reading Japanese poetry and drama. Pound regarded symbolism as “a sort of allusion, almost of allegory.” The symbolists, Pound thought, “degraded the symbol to the status of a word. . . . Moreover, one does not want to be called a symbolist, because symbolism has usually been associated with mushy technique.”25 For Pound, symbolism is inferior to imagism, the imaginary in Lacan’s theory, because in symbolism one image is used to suggest another or to represent another whereby both images would be weakened. Pound’s theory of imagism was derived from classic haiku, which shuns metaphor and symbolism, rather than from the noh play, which Yeats considered indirect and symbolic. If Yeats’s ideal language has the suggestiveness and allusiveness of symbolism as opposed to the directness and clearness of imagism, then his sources certainly did not include Pound. Even though Yeats dedicated At the Hawk’s Well (1917) to Pound, Yeats was not enthusiastic about Pound’s theory. Yeats, a symbolist and spiritualist poet, was fascinated by the noh play while Pound, an imagist, was influenced by Japanese poetry and by classic haiku in particular. In any event, Lacan moreover envisions a domain of the real beyond “the navel of the dream, this abyssal relation to that which is most unknown, which is the hallmark of an exceptional, privileged experience, in which the real is apprehended beyond all mediation, be it imaginary or symbolic.” Lacan equates this domain with “an absolute other . . . an other beyond all intersubjectivity.” In Lacanian terms, the haiku poet is motivated to depict the real directly without using symbols. In this process the poet relies on the imaginary, a domain that is closer to nature, where subjectivity is suppressed as much as possible, or minimized. The poets avoid symbols in writing haiku in an attempt to be objective and yet creative. “If the symbolic function functions,” Lacan laments, “we are inside it. And I would even say—we are so far into it that we can’t get out of it.”26 That symbolism is an obstacle in writing haiku can be explained in terms of Lacan’s definition of the symbolic order. Lacan observes that language symbolizes things that do not exist, non-being: “The fundamental relation of man to this symbolic order is very precisely what founds the symbolic order itself—the relation of non-being to being. . . . What insists on being satisfied can only be satisfied in recognition. The end of the symbolic process is that non-being come to be, because it has spoken.”27 To Lacan, then, language makes non-being become being. Because haiku aim to represent being rather

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than non-being, what Lacan calls “language” or what is “spoken” does not apply to the language of haiku. In Wright’s haiku, as in Pound’s imagistic poem, an image does not function as a symbol. In explaining the composition of the Metro poem (“The apparition of these faces in the crowd: / Petals, on a wet, black bough”), Pound stated that “the apparition of these faces” functions as an image that has generated another image, “petals, on a wet, black bough.” Before this explanation Pound quoted Moritake’s haiku (“The fallen blossom flies back to its branch: / A butterfly”)28 to demonstrate that “the fallen blossom” functions as an image that generates another image, “a butterfly.” In a similar fashion, Wright composed the following haiku in which an image generates or transforms into another image as it does in Pound’s and Moritake’s haiku: Off the cherry tree, One twig and its red blossom Flies into the sun. (Haiku 626) A leaf chases wind Across an autumn river And shakes a pine tree. (Haiku 669) Each moment or two A long tongue of autumn wind Licks the river white. (Haiku 687)

The first haiku, “Off the Cherry Tree,” like Moritake’s “The Fallen Blossom,” is a haiku of illusion. The image of a twig with its blossom generate an imaginary, illusionary image—that of a bird. Similarly, the image of a leaf chasing wind and shaking a pine tree in the second haiku transforms into an imaginary, illusionary image—again, that of a bird. The difference between Wright’s haiku of illusion and Moritake’s is that, while Moritake identifies the imaginary image as that of a butterfly, Wright depicts the actions of a bird: chasing wind and shaking a pine tree. In the third haiku, “Each Moment or Two,” the image of wind transforms into that of a long tongue. In this haiku, while the imaginary, illusionary image of a long tongue is identified as that of an actual tongue, the image of wind is identified not as that of actual wind that blows, but as an imaginary, illusionary image of wind that “licks the river white.”

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The unsymbolic characteristic of haiku, reflected in the imagistic haiku by Moritake, Pound, and Wright quoted above, also accounts for the absence of subjectivity in classic haiku. Those haiku by Wright that express subjectivity directly or indirectly might be considered modern rather than traditional. The first line in Wright’s haiku 13 (“I would like a bell / Tolling in this soft twilight / Over willow trees.”), quoted earlier, constitutes an expression of subjectivity, but the second line, “Tolling in this soft twilight,” is an image created by the imaginary. In Pound’s imagistic haiku-like poem “In a Station of the Metro,” quoted earlier, the image of the apparition, as well as that of petals, as Pound explains in his “Vorticism” essay, are derived from the subject’s experience at the metro station, this poem indirectly expresses subjectivity. Pound also expresses subjectivity directly in another haiku-like poem, entitled “Alba”: As cool as the pale wet leaves of lily-of-the-valley She lay beside me in the dawn.29

As the image of “the pale wet leaves,” a creation by the imaginary in Lacanian terms, indirectly expresses the subject’s desire, the last line explicitly brings in the desiring subject. One of the disciplines in classic haiku composition calls for restraining the expression of desire. “Desire,” as Lacan observes, “always becomes manifest at the joint of speech, where it makes its appearance, its sudden emergence, its surge forwards. Desire emerges just as it becomes embodied in speech, it emerges with symbolism.”30 The following haiku by Wright bear a close resemblance to Pound’s modernist haiku such as “Alba”: As my delegate, The spring wind has its fingers In a young girl’s hair. (Haiku 209) While she undresses, A spring moon touches her breasts For seven seconds. (Haiku 368)

In the first haiku, as the image of the spring wind with fingers in the middle line, a creation by the imaginary in Lacanian terms, indirectly expresses the subject’s desire, the first and the third lines explicitly brings in the desiring subject. Similarly, in the second haiku, as the image of a spring moon while she undresses—another creation by the imaginary—indirectly expresses the subject’s desire, and the second and third lines depict the action of the desiring subject.

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Another salient characteristic of modernist haiku is for the poet to depict the interactions between humanity and nature. As a classic haiku poet focuses on nature, a modernist like Shiki focuses on the relation of humanity to nature. The modernist’s aim is to create images of humanity and relate them to those of nature. The modernist’s vision of the world, however, was derived from Confucius’s worldview. Confucius envisioned the universe consisting of heaven, earth, and humankind, united as one entity. Confucius theorized that God is a human concept and that, because humanity and nature are united, virtues are derived from human sentiments as well as from natural phenomena. The following haiku by Wright, for example, illustrate the interactions between humanity and nature: Rotting yellow leaves Have about them an odor Both of death and hope. (Haiku 310) Merciful autumn Tones down the shabby curtains Of my rented room. (Haiku 174)

The first haiku “Rotting Yellow Leaves” shows that “hope,” a human sentiment, is reflected on “rotting yellow leaves,” an object in nature. Wright uses the technique of transference of the senses. Through transference of color and smell, the image of death and hope in the third line intensifies that of the rotting yellow leaves in the first. The second haiku “Merciful autumn” illustrates that the images of humanity and nature, “the shabby curtain” and “merciful autumn,” reflect each other. Wright composed this haiku, as did Shiki, with the aesthetic sensibility of wabi, a beauty of poverty. Wright, while describing his poverty and isolation, intimated the transcendence of materialism and the creation of beauty. He captured a beautiful autumn scene in nature. As classicist and modernist haiku poets were both influenced by Confucianism, so was Wright. Many of Wright’s haiku reflect the Confucian thought that humanity and nature coexist and that humanity emulates nature. The following haiku show that humanity and nature are equal partners on earth: When the school bell sounds A momentary silence Falls upon the birds. (Haiku 411)

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A September fog Mute upon the empty porch Of an empty house. (Haiku 348)

The first haiku portrays a harmony between humanity and nature. Birds listen to the school bell just as do children; they both live on earth in peace. The second haiku also exhibits the unity of humanity and nature. Silence in nature and silence in humanity complement each other: “a September fog,” a silent image of nature, reflects “the empty porch of an empty house,” a silent image of humanity, just as “the empty porch of an empty house” reflects “a September fog.” In the following haiku, Wright illustrates a Confucian cosmology in which humankind occupies the bottom of the universe: After the parade After all the flags are gone, The snow is whiter. (Haiku 262) Waving pennants gone, The white houses now belong To a summer sky. (Haiku 771)

“After the Parade” portrays a scene where “the parade” and “all the flags,” representations of humanity, disappear and snow covers the earth. Wright is suggesting—as Emerson does in “The Snow-Storm,” in which people and their properties are all buried helplessly by a powerful snow storm—that even though humankind and nature coexist, nature is always above humankind. “Waving Pennants Gone” depicts a scene where humankind and nature coexist on earth but they are controlled by heaven. Some of Wright’s haiku portray nature as a model of humanity. In these, humanity emulates nature and, in the manner of Zen admonition, nature teaches humanity: As my anger ebbs, The spring stars grow again And the wind returns. (Haiku 721)

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Why did this spring wood Grow so silent when I came? What was happening? (Haiku 809) Did somebody call? Looking over my shoulder: Massive spring mountains. (Haiku 203)

In the first haiku, as “anger,” a negative human attribute, subsides, “spring stars,” a beautiful image of nature, grow brighter. Nature teaches Wright how to control his temper. The second haiku, “Why Did This Spring Wood,” resembles a Zen mondo (question and answer). Wright asks the spring wood why it becomes so silent. The answer the spring wood gives him is that silence is a human virtue. This admonition reminds one of Benjamin Franklin’s discussion of the thirteen virtues that represent the American national character. In his Autobiography, Franklin lists “Silence” as the second virtue among the thirteen virtues.31 For the third haiku, Wright draws an analogy between the “massive spring mountains,” a representation of nature, and his “shoulders,” a representation of humanity. The haiku sounds as though Wright is receiving an epiphany from nature. In many of his haiku, Wright contrasts the plight of humanity with the beauty of nature. The following haiku display a contrast between the poverty of humanity and the richness of nature: I am paying rent For the lice in my cold room And the moonlight too. (Haiku 459) My decrepit barn Sags full of self-consciousness In this autumn sun. (Haiku 695) That abandoned house, With its yard of fallen leaves, In the setting sun. (Haiku 38)

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These haiku are characteristic of the aesthetic sensibility of wabi. In the first two, the poet’s physical poverty is rewarded with the spiritual richness of nature. The beauty of the moonlight compensates for his cold, lice-infested rented room in the first haiku, as does the beauty of the autumn sun for his decrepit barn. Similarly, in the third haiku a beautiful scene where the setting sun shines on fallen leaves compensates for the abandoned house. In the following two haiku, Wright depicts his own feelings of loneliness and isolation: Walking home alone From the sporting arena A curve of spring moon. (Haiku 475) This tenement room In which I sweat this August Has one buzzing fly. (Haiku 421)

In the first selection, the poet is lonely as he walks home, but he is accompanied by a beautifully curved spring moon. In the second haiku, he is confined in a hot, humid tenement room but is accompanied by a buzzing fly. To a modernist poet, the twin problems of humanity are loneliness and boredom. Wright sees the same problems exist in nature as “one buzzing fly” in the second haiku implies. As the first haiku shows, the aesthetic sensibility of sabi is evoked by the private world of the poet, the situation others cannot envision. The poet’s capturing an image of beauty in nature compensates for his loneliness and boredom. The two haiku below depict some of humanity’s negative features: On a bayonet, And beyond the barbs of wire,— A spring moon at dawn. (Haiku 477) In this rented room One more winter stand outside My dirty window pane. (Haiku 412)

In the first example, “a bayonet”—an image of one of the most negative features of humanity—is contrasted with “a spring moon at dawn,” a beautiful

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image of nature. In the second haiku, “my dirty window pane,” an unpleasant, ugly image of humanity is pitted against “one more winter . . . outside,” an image of nature that compensates for the dirty window pane. Both haiku illustrate the transcendence of materialism and the creation of beauty, as do Wright’s other modernist haiku of wabi and sabi. As Wright’s and Pound’s modernist haiku demonstrate, subjectivity in such haiku is expressed through the use of a personal pronoun, and the subject’s desire is evoked in an image that reflects subjectivity. Subjectivity and desire, its dominant construct, are both expressed through pronominal language rather than through an image in nature that embodies the real or the unconscious. Wright’s haiku were strongly influenced by classic Japanese haiku from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and perhaps two-thirds of his haiku can be categorized as traditionalist haiku; in these an image of nature is the focus of the poem, and subjectivity is absent. The rest, a third of his haiku, might be called modernist. Some of Wright’s haiku, however, can be read both as traditional and modernist. Notes 1. Both manuscripts are among the Richard Wright manuscripts and papers, housed in the Beinecke and Rare Book Library, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut. 2. Richard Wright, Haiku: This Other World, eds. with Notes and Afterword, Yoshinobu Hakutani and Robert L. Tener (New York: Arcade, 1998; rept. New York: Random House, 2000; rept. Haiku: The Last Poems of an American Icon, New York: Arcade, 2012). 3. Blyth, Haiku, 4 vols. (Tokyo: Hokuseido, 1949). Volume 1 was reprinted as Haiku: Eastern Culture (Tokyo: Hokuseido, 1981). 4. Wright, Haiku: Kono Bessekai by Richard Wright, ed. with Notes and Afterword, by Yoshinobu Hakutani and Robert L. Tener, trans. Toru Kiuchi and Michiko Watanabe (Tokyo: Sairyusha, 2007). 5. Waley further shows with Zeami’s works that the aesthetic principle of yugen originated from Zen Buddhism. “It is obvious,” Whaley writes, “that Seami [Zeami] was deeply imbued with the teachings of Zen, in which cult Yoshimitsu may have been his master.” See Arthur Waley, The Nō Plays of Japan (New York: Grove, 1920), 21–22. 6. The translation is by Hakutani. 7. See Max Loehr, The Great Paintings of China (New York: Harper and Row, 1980), 216. 8. R. H. Blyth, A History of Haiku (Tokyo: Hokuseido, 1949), 2: xxix. The translation is by Blyth. 9. The original is quoted from Akimoto Fujio, Haiku Nyumon [Introduction to Haiku] (Tokyo: Kodansha, 1971), 222. The translation of the haiku is by Hakutani. 10. The translation of the haiku is by Hakutani. 11. T. S. Eliot, Selected Essays, 1917–1932 (New York: Harcourt, 1932), 247.

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12. The original is quoted from Harold G. Henderson, An Introduction to Haiku: An Anthology of Poems and Poets from Basho to Shiki (New York: Doubleday/Anchor, 1958), 164. The translation is by Hakutani. 13. The original is quoted from Henderson, An Introduction to Haiku, 160. The translation is by Hakutani. 14. R. H. Blyth, Haiku: Eastern Culture, 262. The translation is by Blyth. 15. Ibid., 262. The translation is by Blyth. 16. Ibid., 308–9. The translation is by Blyth. 17. Nathaniel Hawthorn, Scarlet Letter, ed. Ross C. Murfin (Boston: St. Martins, 1991), 53–54. 18. The original of the haiku is in Henderson, An Introduction to Haiku, 18. The translation is from R. H. Blyth, A History of Haiku (Tokyo: Hokuseido, 1949), 2: xxix. 19. The original of Buson’s haiku is in Henderson, 104. The translation is by Hakutani. 20. The original of Buson’s haiku is in Henderson, 102. The translation is by Hakutani. 21. The original of Kikaku’s haiku is in Henderson, 58. The translation is by Hakutani. 22. Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, ed. JacquesAlain Miller, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1881), 188. 23. Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, book 2: The Ego in Freud’s Theory and in the Techniques of Psychoanalysis, 1954–1955, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Sylvana Tomaselli (New York: Norton, 1988), 285. 24. Ibid., 302. 25. Ezra Pound, “Vorticism,” Fortnightly Review, n. s., no. 573 (September 1, 1914), 463. 26. Lacan, Seminar 2: 176–77, 31. 27. Ibid., 2: 308. 28. The translator of Moritake’s haiku is unknown. Pound might have quoted the translation of this haiku from a book, or he himself might have translated the original in Japanese. The original has three phrases: Rak-ka eda ni / kaeru to mireba / kocho-o kana (Blyth, History 2: 56)

A literal translation in three lines reads: A fallen petal Seems to return to the branch— It’s a butterfly!

29. Ezra Pound, Ezra Pound: Selected Poems (New York: New Directions, 1957), 36. 30. Lacan, Seminar 2: 234. 31. Franklin’s precept for the virtue of Silence reads: “Speak not but what may benefit others or yourself. Avoid trifling Conversation.” See Benjamin Franklin, The Autobiography in Anthology of American Literature, vol. 1: Colonial through Romantic, 6th ed., ed. George McMichael (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1997), 384.

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6 In the Beginning Blackness and the 1960s ¯ e Kenzaburoˉ Creative Nonfiction of O William H. Bridges IV

And God stepped out on space And he looked around and said: “I’m lonely—/I’ll make me a world . . .” Then God smiled, And the light broke And the darkness rolled up on one side And the light stood shining on the other, And God said: That’s good! Then God sat down On the side of a hill where He could think; By a deep, wide river He sat down; With His head in His hands, God thought and thought, Till He thought, “I’ll make me a man!” —James Weldon Johnson, “The Creation” (1927) Someday, I intend to write about my observations concerning this issue in greater detail, but I think that contemporary Japanese literature and black literature have qualitative similarities . . . Black American authors— Baldwin in particular—who have made themselves through the means provided by the Western worldview are a great stimulus vis-à-vis the sense of difficulty I have [regarding the creation of literary works]. —Ōe Kenzaburō, “On the Sense of Difficulty: My Experience of Literary Creation” (1963)

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Introduction: Toward a Re-Reading of Blackness in Ōe Kenzaburō

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n December 7, 1963, the Tokyo branch of the Kokujin kenkyū no kai (Association for Negro Studies, now Association for Black Studies) commemorated the issuing of the Emancipation Proclamation with a symposium of speeches, poetry readings and movie viewings. Ōe Kenzaburō (1935– ), by this point already an Akutagawa Prize recipient and rising star of the literary world, took part in the festivities by delivering a talk entitled “Negro American Literature and Modern Japanese Literature.” December 7, 1963, then, is most likely the “someday” on which Ōe mused “in greater detail” about the “qualitative similarities” between black and Japanese literature alluded to in the second epigraph. As such, “Negro American Literature” would seem to be an ideal place to begin a study of Ōe Kenzaburō’s 1960s nonfictional writing of blackness. There is, however, no recording of Ōe’s 1963 speech and, according to my personal correspondence with the writer, Ōe himself has no documentation or recollection of what was said on that day.1 In lieu of “Negro American Literature and Modern Japanese Literature,” I propose that we begin by recalibrating our methodological approach to reading Ōe’s creation of blackness. This recalibration should address the fact that Ōe writes not black literature, but black literatures, by which I mean that blackness in Ōe’s texts has a wide variety of complex, conflicting manifestations. Insofar as blackness is, as Marvin Sterling reminds us, characterized by the relationship between the “biological,” “imagined fixity” of the identity of people of sub-Saharan African descent and the fluid “range of ideological agendas facilitated” by this imagined fixity, Ōe’s vexed, multifaceted writing and rewriting of blackness is far from anomalous.2 Doing justice to these facets—and, in so doing, doing justice to Ōe’s rewriting of post–World War II Japanese-American race relations—requires close reading of three intertwined moments in Ōe’s oeuvre: 1) the representation of the black, male body in Ōe’s short fiction circa 1957; 2) Ōe’s creation of a black-Japanese analogy across his 1960s essays and reportage; and 3) literary analysis of works such as Kojinteki na taiken (A Personal Matter, 1964) and Sakebigoe (The Cry, 1963), in which Ōe attempts to translate the program set in his 1960s nonfiction into fictional form.3 A considerable amount of scholarly ink has been spilled—my own included—on the representation of blackness in Ōe’s early fiction.4 This chapter focuses primarily on that second facet of Ōe’s writing of blackness and concludes with a prolegomenon of the third. This decision speaks to both my debt to previous scholarship as well as my concern that, when it comes to the question of blackness in Japanese literature, we have yet to thoroughly diagnose “how nonrepresentational forces are always at work—forces that may produce representations but that cannot be explained by that logic”;5

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my concern is that we have focused on the representation of race and “judgment of them [racial representations] in terms of their more or less accurate resemblance to reality and truth” without accounting “for the emergence of representations” or questioning how such racially charged texts “increase”— or, we might add, decrease—“the power of the subjects encountering [them] to act, to think, to move?”6 Indeed, Ōe’s 1960s nonfictional writing of blackness aims to add an avenue through which his readership can act, think, and move as racialized subjects in the postwar, post-Occupation era. The construction of this avenue is predicated on Ōe’s sense of the affinity—the, to borrow Oe’s term, “qualitative similarities” (shitsuteki na ruiji)—between both black and Japanese literature and the black and Japanese existential condition. Take, for example, Ōe’s justification for his first trip to America: “I wanted to show the interest that I have in the way in which black authors (kokujin sakka) have continued to write a literature of their own even under the deep influence of European literature.”7 Throughout the 1960s, Ōe penned numerous essays, articles and speeches in which he attempts to recreate himself as a kind of “black Japanese” author by resituating his literary techniques and thematic concerns in proximity to those of African American authors such as Richard Wright, James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison and Chester Himes. This resituating exemplifies a fundamental shift in Ōe’s engagement with black people, culture and literature: Ōe transitions from gazing at and representing black bodies—which characterized his writing of blackness in the late 1950s and, after Ōe resituates his writing, becomes associated with the “white”/“Western” gaze—to examining the world alongside black authors as a fellow “colored” (yūshoku jinshu) writer. Ōe’s nonfictional investigations of blackness are (figuratively and literally) creative: they create an analogy between the postwar Japanese and Civil Rights–era African Americans, which, in turn, opens a space for shared stories—both factual and fictional—between African Americans and the Japanese. Here, we will consider Ōe’s self-styled recreation as a “colored” author as it is articulated in his nonfiction written in the early to mid1960s, the years in which Ōe devotes himself to the project of constructing an analogical link between his own works and black literature. This analogical recreation entails two gestures. Ōe begins with what I call the dialectics of the racial gaze—a phrase that I borrow intentionally from Sartre studies to describe Ōe’s positing of an analogous existential dilemma experienced by postwar black and Japanese people living under the disciplinary power of the white gaze. I will also address the pitfall of Ōe’s proposed solution, which has less to do with any logical fallacy on the part of Ōe and more to do with the fallacies inherent to analogical thinking. The second gesture, in which Ōe stresses the pedagogical power of African American literature and

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its ability to assist all “minor writers” in overcoming the aforementioned existential dilemma, represents Ōe’s discovery of “the greatest hint in regard to [the resolution of] not only the black problem (kokujin mondai), but to all of the problems surrounding Japanese people (Nihonjin wo meguru subete no mondai) as well” in African American letters.8 We will conclude with analysis of Ōe’s translation of the program set in his nonfictional works into fictional form, namely by way of his 1963 Sakebigoe.

Ōe’s Black-Japanese Analogy and the Dialectics of the Racial Gaze In March of 1961, the Asian-African Writers Conference, which saw itself as the literary wing of the Bandung Conference, held an emergency meeting in Tokyo. Ōe attended as a member of the Japanese delegation. It was “around the time when the Asian-African Writers Conference was held that I [Ōe] began to carry black literature (kokujin bungaku) and works concerning Africa with me and nothing else and read them like a man who had been washed onto a deserted island.”9 Ōe’s voracious reading of black literature was coupled with his contributions to both the Kokujin bungaku zenshū (The Complete Works of Black Literature)—a twelve-volume collection of Japanese translations of the likes of Richard Wright, James Baldwin, Jean Toomer and Langston Hughes published between the years of 1961–1969—and the aforementioned Kokujin kenkyū no kai. As Yuichiro Onishi argues, the linguistic and cultural translation of the rhetoric of black liberation by the Kokujin kenkyū no kai fostered “colored-internationalism” and “Afro-Asian solidarity” rooted in a notion of race that “had less to do with personal identity than the politics of identification.”10 It is within this milieu that Ōe would begin to identify with black authors such as Wright, Ellison and Baldwin. The crux of Ōe’s transpacific identification is what he sees as the shared fear (kyōfu) evoked by the white gaze in both Civil Rights-era black Americans and postwar Japanese people. Take for example the representation of racial fear in the beginning of Ōe’s “Huck Finn Goes to Hell,” the inaugural piece in a quintet of essays entitled “Dreams of a Traveler in America” that Ōe published in the left-leaning Sekai from September of 1966 to October of 1967. Somewhere between diary entries and political reportage, the five essays document Ōe’s first trip to the United States in the summer of 1965. “Huck Finn Goes to Hell,” and thus “Dreams of a Traveler in America,” begin with extreme fear: America. I will never be completely free (jiyu ni naru koto wa nai) from the mystical power that grips my chest whenever I hear the word “America.” . . . The first and greatest feeling of terror (kyōfukan) in my life was brought about

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by the word “America.” Our country fought with America. America might take my mother and . . . me—just a little boy—and make us lie face down on the paved roads of our village and crush us with their tanks. And if the skin on my face wasn’t hurt too badly by the shock, America might make a little lamp shade with it as memorabilia of its trip to Japan. And if it managed to do a particularly good job and make it look really Japanese, America might give the lamp shade to the President of the United States . . . America might eat the flesh of a Japanese person.11

In this excerpt, America is represented as a bodiless actor—personified, yet bodiless nevertheless. The bodilessness of America is crystallized here both by the stylistics of the opening line, a sentence without appendages that both begins and ends with a free-floating “America,” and the repetition of the phrase “the word America” (Amerika toiu kotoba). This is in stark contrast to the Japanese body. Ōe’s Japanese body in pain is marked by its ethnicity: America “eats the flesh of Japanese people” (Nihonjin no niku wo kuu), makes lamp shades that are “particularly Japanese” (Nihonjin . . . rashiku), et cetera. By highlighting the “Japaneseness” of the bodies within which America instills fear, Ōe opens a space for the interrogation of the heretofore disembodied “America” which elicits said fear. These American bodies turn out to be racialized à la their “Japanese” counterpart, with some races in proximity to their Japanese counterpart and others at more of a distance. The black body in white-black relations maintains a relationship with fear and pain analogous to the Japanese body in white-Japanese relations. The white body remains in a similar pose—instigator or agent that instills and commemorates fear and pain—even as Ōe’s commentary shifts from white-black relations to whiteJapanese relations and back again. In “Invisible Men and Diversity” (Fukashi ningen to tayōsei), the fifth and final installment of “Dreams,” Ōe creates a fear that hangs ubiquitously over black Americans, that is, a fear reminiscent of the Japanese fear vis-à-vis whiteness with which “Huck Finn Goes to Hell” begins. Ōe writes: What many journalists saw even in the face of the heavyweight champion of the world before a bout . . . was the face of one young black boy that harbored a fear (kyōfushin) with the potential to erupt in insanity . . . We don’t have to stop at Cassius Clay; the reason why we are humanely and deeply moved by the impression of a pre-bout black boxer captured by fear (kyōfushin) is because the fear (kyōfushin) he harbors regarding the violence (bōryokuteki naru mono) he is about to endure in a matter of minutes is connected to the gigantic fear (kyōfushin) that drenches the roots of his daily existence as a black man. 12

Here in the closing essay of the quintet, Ōe returns to the first essay and constructs an analogue between Japanese and black fear vis-à-vis whiteness.

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The analogous diction of the two passages is unmistakable: the Japanese fear of American soldiers is referred to as “the greatest fear” (saidai no kyōfu); the black fear recorded by American journalists is “gigantic fear” (bōdai na kyōfushin). The representation of fear in the two passages is also of a like kind. Both feelings of fear are evoked by phantasmagoric violence—the tank that has yet to crush the Japanese family, the punch that has yet to land on the pugilist’s face. Fear arises in both cases from pain to be inflicted on young, nonwhite, males (Ōe as a child, Ali as a “young man”). Both memories of fear are permutated into commemorative objects—Ōe’s lampshade/the journalists’ reports of Ali—by white American actors. Finally, both of these singular examples of black/Japanese fear vis-à-vis whiteness are deemed representative of the mundanity of a fear of whiteness that pervades the very daily existence of black and Japanese folks. As such, Ōe’s postwar Japanese fear finds its analogue in 1960s black America. On the following page of the essay, Ōe makes the link explicit for readers not familiar with the argument built over the series of essays: “Swollen fear of white people . . . lies at the heart of . . . fight[s] between . . . black brothers. Surely we can understand this violence if we compare it to the radicalization of the individual’s violent crimes in states that are conducting large-scale wars.”13 Given that Japan was only two decades removed from the conclusion of its Fifteen Year War and the throes of the Vietnam War, the “we” here signifies the assumedly all-Japanese readership of Sekai. As the previous depiction of Ali suggests, Ōe presents the ubiquity of the white gaze as a catalyst for black and Japanese fear and violence as the inevitable manifestation of that fear. In a move undoubtedly informed by his reading of Sartre, Ōe suggests that it is through this frightening gaze that both the Japanese and African Americans acquire knowledge of themselves qua Japanese/African Americans. Ōe’s dialectic assumes that the postwar African American existential condition is the closest analogue to the postwar Japanese existential condition. As such, Ōe cites examples of postwar black and Japanese existentialism almost interchangeably. During his time in the United States in the summer of 1965, for example, Ōe went to Atlanta to see Morehouse College and “to visit the headquarters of the SNCC and Martin Luther King, Jr.’s SCLC.”14 The “first memorable scene” (saisho ni mita inshō teki na nagame) Ōe witnesses in Atlanta as he heads for the headquarters of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee was “the spectacle (kōkei) of two black people fighting on a street corner in a black neighborhood as if their lives depended on it.”15 As Ōe looks forward to the day when he can discuss this incident with black intellectuals, he begins to “see (midasu) not violence (bōryoku), but stark-naked fear (kyōfushin)” in the fighting men.16 After his “discovery” of fear in the black Atlantans, Ōe “tastes a strange ex-

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perience that goes beyond [seeing the spectacle of the fight]: what I actually experienced was the presence of the gargantuan eyes of white people (hakujin no me) on the backs of the two fighting men, and the eyes were gazing fixedly (mitsumeteiru) at the men.”17 Ōe posits a fear of the white gaze embodied by the “fighting brothers” that finds its analogue in postwar Japan. Directly following his recollection of his childhood fear of America, Ōe rehearses the story of a young “idiot boy” from a village near his hometown who is convicted of sexually assaulting and murdering a young girl. Ōe’s description of the murder is gratuitous in its violence; at one point the boy takes a bamboo spear and runs it through the girl’s vagina to the base of her neck.18 Ōe writes that the responsibility for such gruesome violence lies not on the hands of the youth, but on fear mongered by “the illusion of America that exerted power over my village, the raping, slaughtering America,” on the “homogenized (jyunichi) America that was the target of [his village’s] fear (kyōfushin) and animosity.”19 Just as it is the fear crystallized by living perpetually under the white gaze that is responsible for black-on-black violence in Atlanta, Ōe’s murderous youth living under the disciplinary gaze of SCAP “has no choice but to revive the frightening illusion (osoroshi gensō) that once held all of Japan.”20 Moreover, Ōe’s nonfictional essays recount his own firsthand experience, that is, the lived “reality” of the analogous position shared by blacks and the Japanese vis-à-vis the white gaze. During his first trip to the United States, Ōe spent most of his time at Harvard as a participant in the Kissinger International Seminar. After being mocked by four white students at Harvard Square on August 15, 1965—Ōe’s anniversary of frightening American violence on Japanese bodies par excellence—Ōe claims that he is reminded of Chester Himes’s If He Hollers Let Him Go, particularly the following passage: “Little Riki Oyana singing ‘God Bless America’ and going to Santa Anita with his parents the next day . . . I was the same color as the Japanese and I couldn’t tell the difference. ‘A yeller-bellied Jap’ coulda meant me too. I could always feel race trouble, serious trouble, never more than two feet off.”21 After falling under the white gaze himself, Ōe begins to comprehend the analogous position between the two, to “see himself as one and the same” with “the Nisei Japanese who were sent to internment camps and the black youth who begins to fear his premonition that he shares a like fate with the interned.”22 Ōe “began to see myself through the eyes (me) of those American cartoonists. I, the very same person who had until that time slipped into the hustle and bustle of Harvard Square without feeling the least bit out of place, now discovered myself alone standing there as a disgusting, bucktoothed, bespectacled Japanese like those in the comics . . . and felt something within the realm of fear.”23

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It is important to reiterate that it is not America per se, but the illusion (gensō) of a homogenized (jyunichi) American gaze that prompts such fear. In “After the Collapse of the Image of ‘Mighty America’ . . . ,” Ōe writes that “Japanese people will be able to comprehend the real America for the first time only when we have been freed (kaihō) from the simplified, flattened (ichimenka) image of mighty America, if we . . . look (mitsumeru) at America as it actually is with new eyes (atarashii me).”24 Ōe returns perpetually to this notion of an imagined, homogenized America: “When we think of America and Americans . . . we think of a flat (ichimenka) America—America is the enemy; if an American spots (mitsukeru) a Japanese person, he’ll crush us to death with a tank . . . we held a one-dimensional (ichimenteki) image of America.”25

The Pedagogical Power of Black Literature 1: The Power of Minor Literature Ōe contends, as the previous references to Himes and “invisible men” intimate, that black literature posits possible worlds that provide alternatives to this illusion; it is for this reason that the literature of Baldwin and Ellison hold, for Ōe, the “greatest hint in regard to [the solution of] not only the black problem, but to all of the problems surrounding Japanese people as well.”26 In extrapolating Ōe’s interpretation of black literature, it might help us to think, as Ōe does, of black literature as a “minor” literature in the sense suggested by Deleuze and Guattari. Minor literatures, whose language can be “compared in another context to what blacks in America today are able to do with the English language,” are characterized by their “high coefficient of deterritorialization” vis-à-vis “major” literatures.27 Minor literatures’ capacity to deracinate the (semantic, ontological, ideological, political, et cetera) stronghold of major discourses makes minority “the revolutionary condition . . . for every literature within the heart of what is called the great (or established) literature.”28 Given Ōe’s assumption that Japanese and African American people are analogously belittled by the illusions of power and homogeneity upheld by American racial discourse, he turns to black literature as an “American ‘minor’ literature” that injects “minority” with revolutionary potential, that “overthrows ontology, gets rid of beginning, ends and origins, [and] a sense of fixity and fixation.”29 Indeed, Ōe himself claims that black literature has “destructive power” (hakairyoku) that “crushes the protective covering of naïve deception [that exists] between white Americans and black Americans” and presents the “truth of their intertwinement.”30 Ōe deems black literature qua minor literature as the art form best equipped to free both black and Japanese people from “the mystical power

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that grips [their] chest whenever [they] hear the word ‘America.’”31 “Among the black arts,” Ōe writes, “isn’t the only field in which Japanese people can directly touch the spirit and pathos of black people, can comprehend it and be moved by it without losing the fact that they are Japanese, the black literature of Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison?”32 By arguing that it is only through black literature that “I [Ōe] feel myself, and what’s more feel myself as a Japanese person, standing side-by-side with black people and facing off against white people,” Ōe places the potential solution to his analogous black and Japanese existential problems within the lines of African American prose.33 In the following sections, I consider the potential solution that Ōe reads in and into the likes of Ellison, Wright and Baldwin, three epochal figures in African American letters. It is important to note, however, that the germ of Ōe’s notion of the power of minor black literature was planted by his engagement with African, rather than African American, writers. In his reports on the Asian-African Writers Conference, Ōe writes at length on his exchanges with the Cameroonian delegation. Ōe was drawn to the delegation’s articulation of the writer’s task, which was based in its advocacy of Negritude. Ōe writes that the Cameroonian delegation’s approach both served as his introduction to Negritude and embodied the conference’s “best discussion of politics, and, in the end, the most profound [discussion of] literature.”34 Even with these self-styled “out of Africa” underpinnings to his conceptualization of protest literature, however, Ōe frequently reroutes blackness through the United States and African American literature. This vacillation between engagements with African and African American embodiments of blackness is a familiar one to readers of Ōe’s 1960s novels such as Kojinteki na taiken, Sakebigoe, and Man’en gannen no futtobōru (The Silent Cry, 1967), which swing between the intertextual activation of both African-Americana and Africana. This vacillation, I argue, is strategic; the conclusion of this chapter considers the differing significance and signification of African American blackness and African blackness in Sakebigoe.

The Pedagogical Power of Black Literature 2: From the Homogeneity of Sartre to the Diversity of Ellison “Looking back on my student days,” Ōe reminisces, “I realize now that my literary background existed on a delta surrounded by Sartre [and] Norman Mailer . . . I was singing . . . in Sartre’s voice, like a grotesque, red-cheeked puppet that belonged to a ventriloquist.”35 To be sure, Ōe’s reading of Sartre and Mailer informs, inter alia, his writing of Otherness and racial difference. What I would like to do here, however, is make Ōe’s delta quadratic. Ōe’s

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rechanneling of his writing of racial fear and existential ontology through his readings of African American literature alters his relationship with thinkers such as Sartre. The primary implication of this rechanneling: a change of allegiance in a game of racial politics—Ōe resituates himself alongside fellow “minority” (read: African American) authors in a show of transpacific racial solidarity. Our literary history of Ōe is incomplete insofar as it has yet to consider how reading the literature of Ellison and Baldwin teaches him, opens new possibilities in his conceptualization and writing of blackness, of Japaneseness, and of racial difference. John Treat has argued persuasively that “the dark sketch of the human condition which Sartre draws prefigures the state of Hiroshima described in [Hiroshima] Notes,”36 a collection of essays researched, written and published concomitantly with Ōe’s readings in African American literature.37 Analogous to his mobilization of Sartre in Hiroshima Notes, Ōe reconfigures the template provided by Sartre to conceptualize the relationship between black/Japanese people and white Americans. Given that much of Ōe’s discussion of race relations is in dialogue with Sartre’s existential ontology, and that Ōe’s disagreement with Sartre at a key juncture leads Ōe to search elsewhere—namely, the work of Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, and Richard Wright—for a solution to his existential dilemma, let us begin by rehearsing the basic tenets of Sartre’s existentialism as it is proposed in Being and Nothingness and the foundation these tenets form for Sartre’s and Ōe’s philosophy of existential antiracism. In Being and Nothingness, Sartre posits three kinds of being: the ontic being-in-itself (etre-en-soi) of the object world, the free being of human consciousness that must define its being for itself—hence being-for-itself (etre-pour-soi), and our being as it is gazed upon by others in the world, our being-for-others (etre-pour-autrui). When “the look” of the Other falls upon us, Sartre suggests, we become objects defined by the Other.38 It is “only for and by means” of “the Other’s infinite freedom” that “my possibles can be limited and fixed.”39 Sartre, like Ōe, sees human exchange as inevitable—at times violent—conflict, the clashing of two freedoms trying to define themselves and the Others around them. Many respond to the freedom of human being-for-itself with what Sartre calls bad faith (mauvaise foi). To be in bad faith is to live a life without, to borrow Sartre’s term, authenticity; we are in bad faith when we conflate our refusal to choose with an inability to choose or, alternatively, when we essentialize either our own or the Other’s beingfor-itself in order to avoid the anguish of choice. Sartre, who studied in Germany during the rise of Hitler, researched and wrote Being and Nothingness during the Nazi occupation of France, visited the Jim Crow South, and was the target of assassination attempts for his role

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in the fall of the Fourth Republic, saw race and racism as classic examples of bad faith. Take for example Sartre’s discussion of “the oppression of Blacks in slavery in the U.S.A.” The slave owner presents himself, in bad faith, as a kind of in-itself-for-itself (en-soi-pour-soi), a being that is both conscious and the foundation of its own being. As a god-like figure, the slave owner “freezes the other into an object” and now has a basis for the self-generation of his own subjective being.40 Indeed, the slave owner’s self-creation and justification comes as the word of God: Noah, according to Genesis, condemned all the Blacks, the sons of Ham, to perpetual slavery. Here there is certainly an underlying bad faith . . . When one is not yet certain about being in accord with the Bible, one says that the Black can be a slave since he is not Christian . . . But since, at the same time, they [black slaves] were prevented from becoming Christians, they [slave owners] knew quite well that Christian faith lay within their possibilities. In other words, that the Blacks are something other and more than what they are.41

Quoting Being and Nothingness, Jonathan Judaken extrapolates that “the objectification of your being, the designation of your essence by an Other, does not define who you are for-yourself.”42 The “objective conditions which structure our choices—class, race, place, the body, and the gaze of the Other” require “an interiorization and a subjectivizing” and “only have the meaning that an individual confers upon them”; hence “Blacks” being “something other and more than what they are.”43 Alongside Sartre’s support of antiracism, however, came his Hegelian critique of the Negritude Movement and the prophecy of its demise: “This minor moment [of Negritude] is not sufficient in itself. These black men who use it know this perfectly well; they know that it aims at preparing the synthesis or realization of the human being in a raceless society.”44 Sartre’s path to racial good faith is homogenous insofar as there is only one racial way of being—the synthetic, “raceless” society—that is in good faith, race itself being, as we witnessed in Sartre’s slavery example, both a creation and creator of bad faith. In light of the power Ōe reads into minor literature and Negritude, however, it is clear that Ōe and Sartre have differing visions of the power of “minor moments.” For Ōe, the bad faith of race is engendered not by the notion of race itself, but by the frightening imbalance of power in the economy of the racial gaze, an imbalance that evokes the fear, violence and homogenized version of the racial Other discussed in the previous section. Ralph Ellison’s literature, with its simultaneous positive affirmation of black identities and upheaval of American paradigms of static black identity, presents Ōe with an alternative to Sartre’s “raceless society”: diversity. Ōe first met Ellison in the summer of 1965; Ellison was the final lecturer

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for the Kissinger International Seminar. After the lecture, Ōe and Ellison discussed their mutual support of the Ellisonian project of diversity. The exchange left a lasting mark on Ōe. In “Invisible Men and Diversity,” Ōe follows an account of this meeting with Ellison by quoting the following excerpt from Invisible Man: Whence all this passion toward conformity anyway?—Diversity is the word. Let man keep his many parts and you’ll have no tyrant states. Why, if they follow this conformity business they’ll end up by forcing me, an invisible man, to become white, which is not a color but the lack of one. Must I strive toward colorlessness? But seriously, and without snobbery, think of what the world would lose if that should happen. America is woven of many strands; I would recognize them and let it so remain.45

Following Ellison, Ōe too contends that diversity, or tayōsei, can serve as a panacea for fear based on racial myopia. To reiterate, Ōe presents the illusion of America as a monolithic source of power as the cause of Japanese Ameriphobia. Ōe mobilizes a matrix of terms to articulate and highlight the notion of the “monolithic”: ichimenka (which I have translated as “flattened” or “one-sided”), tanitsuka (“simplified” or “unified”), ichiyōka (“homogenized”), et cetera. The common denominators of these terms are readily apparent to speakers of Japanese. First, each includes the character which denotes singularity, “一” (read in the previous terms as either ichi or itsu.) In addition to this, all three end with ka (化), a suffix similar to the English “-ization” that denotes the process of transformation. As such, Ōe’s “America” as instigator of racial fear takes multifaceted racial identities and reductively transforms (in addition to its suffixal duty, the character for ka also appears in the verb bakeru, “to transfigure,” “appear in disguise,” or “corrupt”) them into something monolithic, and thereby “flattened,” “simplified,” “homogenized,” et cetera. Although Ōe will at times use the English “diversity,” his Japanese translation of the term, tayōsei, is telling; the prefix ta, semantically in the vicinity of the English “poly-”, stands in direct protest of the monolithic treatment of Others implied by the ichi of ichimenka, ichiyōka, et cetera. Ōe’s advocacy of “diversity” suggests that renewing a Japanese-American dialogue not doomed to repeat the violence and fear of the countries’ shared past must be predicated on seeing each Other for what they truly are: diverse. Ōe writes: Ralph Ellison tells us in that postwar novel [Invisible Man] that in order for America to survive from now on, Americans will have to live with the diversity of Americans, the diversity that each human has, the diversity of white people, the diversity of black people. And isn’t this the aspiration of America? I too think that diversity is the issue. . . . From here on us Japanese people too will have to

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acknowledge the diversity of the entire world, including America . . . and at the same time the diversity of Japanese people. It is from here that we must think about our future and our relationship with America. It seems that it is only when we do this that independence will become a possibility for Japanese people.46

Ōe will return again and again to “diversity” as a method of easing the psychological burden, the melancholy, of moving under such weight; it is Ōe’s “hope that we . . . use our imaginative power, and see [individuals] not as invisible men, but that we train our eyes (me) and see them as they should be seen (miru beku): as real people with diversity.47 It is in this way that we must protect ourselves from becoming ‘invisible men.’” To borrow Ichijō Takao’s articulation, we can “note the fact that Ōe was influenced by Ellison, that Ōe paid attention to their contemporaneous issue of diversity, and that Ōe took up [Ellison’s project of diversity] as his central literary thesis.”48 After reading Invisible Man, meeting with Ellison and traveling to major metropolitan cultural hubs of black America, Ōe resets the origins of his creative nonfiction of race relations. The terms that were originally informed by Sartre’s existentialism—or Ōe’s existential antiracism—are now filtered through Invisible Man. This new beginning is indicative both of Ōe’s valuation of Ellison as well as his desire to supplement the narrative of existential antiracism with Ellisonian diversity; Ōe suggests that the beginning and the end of our racial bad faith can be read in Invisible Man. Allow me to translate at length an excerpt from Ōe’s 1968 “On America,” a speech given after Ōe’s encounter with Ellison. This excerpt presents Ōe’s narrative of race relations as it is channeled through Invisible Man: How is this type of Japanese person, the kind that has lived under the image of an unilaterally (ichimenteki) mighty America, going to fill in their psychological cavities (anaboko)? . . . I consider the words of Ralph Ellison, the black author (kokujin no sakka) . . . to be a remarkably clear hint. In the end of Invisible Man, Ellison provides us with a suggestion. The black youth who is the protagonist of the novel . . . secludes himself in a manhole all his own and tries to think about what America is. The impetus [for his meditation] is the Harlem riots. . . . During the riots, one crazed movement leader rides in on a steed while brandishing a spear. . . . The other black people [here, Ōe is signaling the diegetic level of the Invisible Man] who see this find it funny. . . . This kind of black violence, however, is not actually funny. When viewed from the all-too sober eyes of black people (kokujin no me) they [this time the readers of the Invisible Man] too don’t deem it simple comedy. It is something miserable, something dangerous. The youth determines that we must try to think of a way to rescue ourselves from this kind of comedy, from all of this danger and misery. The youth concludes that Americans have to be rescued from homogenization (ichiyōka) and simplification (tanitsuka). . . . Homogenization (ichiyōka) . . . poisons Americans, and it

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is precisely diversity (tayōsei)—Ellison uses the word “diversity”—that we must protect, we must preserve the varying attributes of humans. . . . If we protect diversity, tyrant states won’t be born. . . . This is what Ellison says in his novel that was published right after the war ended. I too think that diversity (tayōsei) is the central issue. . . . Japanese people must learn to recognize the diversity of America and the entire world.49

In this 1968 speech, the terms and themes we have traced from Sartre’s Being and Nothingness are all filtered through Invisible Man. First, Ōe establishes his black-Japanese analogue by punning on the term anaboko. Ellison’s Invisible Man begins (and ends) with the narrator “holed up,” living underground. Ōe uses the same term—anaboko—to describe both the narrator’s underground hideout and the pitfall in the postwar Japanese psyche. I have translated anaboko as “cavity” to reproduce the pivot of this pun: for Ōe, anaboko speaks to both the denotative, physical depression and the connotative, psychic depression of living underground. Next, we hear the undertones of Sartre as Ōe attempts to overcome this cavity; the reverberations of Sartre are clear in Ōe’s search for an exit from what he calls our dangerous comedy. Now, however, Ōe’s exit traverses Ellison’s Invisible Man. By citing the narrator’s musing from the manhole, “let man keep his many parts and you’ll have no tyrant states,” Ōe finds the “protection of diversity” to be a “remarkably clear hint” to the answer to Sartre’s call for good faith. Ōe’s black-Japanese analogy is undeniably productive. Before turning to the conclusion—which provides a preliminary consideration of Ōe’s translation of his creative nonfiction into fictional form—however, we should consider one of the pernicious byproducts of Ōe’s analogical thinking; indeed, this byproduct resides in both Ōe’s nonfictional and fictional writing of blackness. For all of their explanatory and sociopolitical potential energy, analogies, by definition, tell us only how “X” is like “Y.” The very grammar of the political analogy, as Janet Jakobsen reminds us, “reduces the relationship between various ‘oppressions’ to their similarities,” which often submerges the historical “specificity of each experience” in “a generalized sense of oppression in which all oppressions are (generally) like each other.”50 To be sure, there is a genuine affinity between Ōe, the young man from Shikoku, and the black characters he encounters throughout the 1960s. We can also be sure, however, that his analogical thinking leaves little room for discussion of how the singular historical baggage and contemporary trauma of the postwar Japanese is not and can never be “like” that of its singular African and African American counterparts. In his analogical rewriting of postwar Japanese identity, Ōe submerges the vexed, complex, historical specificity of the postwar Japanese in the similarity of a shared, transracial “oppression.” Although Ōe’s is no more or less of a false analogy than any

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analogy, it runs the risk of both historical amnesia and, particularly in his “black fiction,” substituting hermeneutic logic with questionable analogic, a point we will return to momentarily. In Lieu of a Conclusion: Sakebigoe between the Authentique and the Authentic In lieu of a conclusion proper, I would like to consider Sakebigoe, the story of a zainichi Korean youth named Kure Takao and his obsession with the possibility of a life of Sartrean good faith for social minorities, as a text that translates the nonfictional narrative created by Ōe into fictional form. This analysis of Sakebigoe functions in lieu of a conclusion insofar as this fictional text itself recapitulates Ōe’s nonfictional commentary on the dialectics of the racial gaze and exhibits the pedagogical power of black literature. Sakebigoe begins just as Ōe’s nonfiction writing of blackness does: with fear. The opening line of Sakebigoe reads: “According to the pensées of a French philosopher who lived in an age of fear, in times of terror, when all humans are longing for a long-overdue salvation, everyone who hears the distant cry of someone hoping for salvation loses faith in their hearing, wondering if the crying isn’t their own.”51 Here, Ōe’s analogy goes sonic. The fearful cry of Sakebigoe is shared between three young men: a Japanese narrator, zainichi-Korean Kure, and half-black, half-Japanese Tora. All three live with their American benefactor, Darius. Reminiscent of the argument made in his 1960s nonfiction, Sakebigoe presents the three young men, particularly Kure and Tora, as analogous figures who live in fear of the racial gaze. Both Kure and Tora are under the watch of “gigantic green eyes . . . that peer into them. . . . These are the eyes of the outside world.”52 Here, the gaze is racialized by way of eye color: the gazer is, we are to assume, white and both Kure and Tora are phenotypically analogous and have brown eyes. Still tracing the path laid out in his nonfiction, here too the “age of fear” is catalyzed by life under such racialized disciplinarily gazes. Ōe’s nonfiction tells us that, given their analogous existential condition, Japanese authors and readers have much to learn from their black counterparts. What I have called the pedagogical power of black literature makes itself manifest on both the textual and intertexual levels of Sakebigoe. Textually, the amalgamation of black and Japanese literature in Sakebigoe is embodied by its characterization, namely one of its semi-protagonists, Tora. “He [Tora] was the mixed-blood (konketsu) child of an American Negro father and an immigrant mother of Japanese descent. He saw himself as a morass of black blood (kokujin no chi) and yellow blood (ōshokujin no chi) and called himself

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a racial ‘tiger’ (tora) . . . [He formerly] went by Tiger (taigā) . . . we called him Tiger (tora).”53 In this passage, the narrative completes the interpretive work for the reader, thereby ensuring that the notion of black-Japanese hybridization embodied by the moniker “Tiger” is clear. Moreover, Tora’s name, “Tiger,” is presented as a signifier in motion: it begins in a neutral position bracketed by quotation marks, moves once to the Japanese phonic approximation of the English “tiger”—the katakana taigā, and settles on the kanji 「虎」, thereby bestowing a Japanese name upon Tora. Tora’s entry into the Japanese linguistic system of signs reinforces the aforementioned racial hybridization with orthographic hybridization. Such mixings—of race and writing codes—both adumbrate the modus operandi of Sakebigoe and remind us of Ōe’s nonfictional writing of blackness; here, Ōe’s project of writing literary blackness in Japanese is less concerned with representation and more interested in cross-cultural analogy and confluence. Kure, “just like Tora wants to go to Africa . . . wants to go somewhere else” in order to free himself from the cavity—here too Ōe uses the word anaboko—engendered by the frightful power of the racial gaze.54 Before he can make his escape, however, fear in Sakebigoe culminates precisely as Ōe’s nonfiction portends: in violence. Tora is shot and killed by two military police who cannot determine whether or not he is a “Negro.” In death, Tora provides Kure with a path for escape. Kure imagines that “the blood that spills from Tora’s body is carried away by the angels of the African jungle back to a heaven for black people . . . Tora finally returned home to Africa.”55 After Tora’s death, Kure “realizes that, if he . . . doesn’t have an adventure so grand that it puts his own life in danger, then he will never be free, never feel the relief of living in a land that is all his own.”56 It is at this juncture that the intertextual blackness of Sakebigoe shines through. It does so, moreover, in a way that invites us to revisit two of our previous conversations: the schism between African and African American blackness in Ōe’s nonfiction and the danger inherent to analogical thinking. To begin with the former, if, to return to Marvin Sterling’s observation, the fluidity of blackness facilitates a range of ideological agendas, then Ōe has at least two agendas as he mobilizes blackness. For Ōe, blackness signifies both the possibility of full membership in a transnational community as well as the possibility of protest against what he calls the illusion of monolithic American might. Ōe has delegated these two possibilities to differing embodiments of blackness: Africa becomes synonymous with an escape to a transnational, transracial homeland; African American literature becomes Ōe’s source for blackness as protest, for what Amiri Baraka once called “poems that kill.” With this, we can begin to make sense of the climax of Sakebigoe. As he searches for the “grand adventure” that will facilitate a return to his “Africa,”

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Kure turns (in)to Bigger; Ōe himself has written that his decision to thematize the existential crisis of a social minority, as well as the ethico-politically fraught murder that serve as the apex of Kure’s crisis, is “ultimately rooted in Richard Wright, its color [irodori] has traces of ” Wright’s Native Son.57 Here, we must revisit what I previously called the danger of analogy: Kure Takao’s murder of an innocent Japanese girl is analogous to, is “like,” Bigger’s murder of Mary and Bessie. What Sakebigoe does not—and indeed cannot—address by way of its analogic is how Kure’s intentional murder is unlike the chain reaction of Bigger’s accidental murder of Mary and subsequent intentional murder of Bessie. Nor will analogical thinking allow us to question the ethical and historical dilemma of Ōe, a Japanese author, writing of the victimization of an innocent Japanese person at the hands of a murderous zainichi-Korean. This line of questioning is effaced in analogical analysis of how Ōe is like Wright, and of how Takao—who “wasn’t raised as Korean, wasn’t raised as Japanese, wasn’t raised as anything, so at least he wanted to become a killer”—is like Bigger.58 We will recall that, after positing a Sartrean existential analogue between black Americans and the Japanese, Ōe’s nonfictional account of black/Japanesewhite race relations diverges from Sartre’s vision of a “raceless society” and turns to black literature in search of a solution to the shared existential dilemma of postwar African Americans and the Japanese. In Sakebigoe, this divergence occurs at the juncture of Sartre’s notion of the authentique and Baldwin’s notion of the authentic. Sartre tells us that it is only by way of a raceless society that racial minorities can live authentique, good-faith lives. Ōe, however, “places an extremely deep . . . personal trust, in [James] Baldwin”59 and his Another Country; Ōe wrote Sakebigoe as he read Another Country. The ethnically diverse cast of semi-protagonists that populate the literary world of Sakebigoe stem from “a new plan that I [Ōe] was taught by Baldwin” via Another Country.60 In Another Country, Baldwin “attempts to forge [an] . . . authentic existence in the United States” for black people by interrogating “the cultural landscape that defames, debases, and . . . destroys black . . . life, productivity, and genius.”61 After the death of Tora, Kure’s attempt to “avenge” his friend is also an attempt to forge an identity that is both authentique—that is, of Sartrean good faith—and authentic, that is, full of the complexity that Baldwin’s Another Country attributes to human identity and not homogenized by racial or racist ideology.62 Kure articulates the intersection of the authentique and the authentic as follows: “Authentique: authentic, right, certain, unmistakable, real, unmistakably of a certain land.” Kure Takao wrote this in the notebook that contained his philosophical treatise and would sometimes invoke the French authentique [written in French in the Japanese original] as he pursued his feverish sickness. L’ homme

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authentique, according to Kure, is one who lives in the real world with a firm grasp on his civil rights (shiminken). The authentic, the people of a country, the real people of a country, the people that are unmistakably of that land. I don’t know why, but I know that he was not an authentique human and that this was the fundamental source of his anxious, thirsty, febrile disease.63

I agree with Michiko Wilson that Kure is an “existentialist hero,” that the murder he commits is both an exercise in existential freedom and a desperate bid to “secure the authentic life,” and that his existential dilemma is rooted in the fact that “he had not been able to . . . live with authenticity in this world [from] the time his mother forced him to live as the fake Japanese Kure Takao, instead of the Korean Ochan,” his Korean name.64 I would add to Wilson’s insights only the fact that the “authenticity” of Sakebigoe has a second valence that is related to yet not synonymous with the authentique: “authenticity” as a call to recognize the diversity and complexity of racial being and ensure that such being is not scathed by the reductive ideologies of racial oppression. This second valence is signaled in the previous passage by Ōe’s references to Kure’s desire for “civil rights” (shiminken) and the existential violence caused by a maternallyimposed sōshi kaimei.65 Ōe’s “existentialist hero” looks less like those of Sartre circa Being and Nothingness and more like those of Sartre circa his Notebooks for an Ethics. For Ōe, existential freedom resides right beyond its ontological, sociopolitical, and racial limits; it is no coincidence that the story of Kure, like that of Wright’s Bigger Thomas, ends with our existentialist hero incarcerated and awaiting capital punishment. Insofar as this second valence of authenticity is informed by Ōe’s reading of Baldwin, Ellison, and Wright, we witness in Ōe’s Sakebigoe precisely the program delineated in his nonfiction: a turning from the Sartrean dilemma of race to the pedagogical power of black literature. In Sakebigoe, we observe the same two movements—the dialects of the gaze and the revolutionary power of black literature as a minor literature—the same attending terminology (i.e., fear, the gaze, violence, authenticity) and the same positing of the pedagogical relevance and analogical applicability of black literature seen in Ōe’s 1960s essays on the dialectics of the racial gaze. Ōe’s repetition of these two movements across literary genres exemplifies both his rich engagement with black literature and culture during the 1960s and the “great stimulus” black literature provided in relation to Ōe’s creation of black characters and fiction.66

Notes 1. Ōe, ever the writer, communicates primarily by way of handwritten letter. I wrote to him in August of 2010 to inquire about “Negro American Literature and

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Modern Japanese Literature,” which is referenced in a program for the 1963 symposium held by the Association for Negro Studies. Ōe replied on September 21, 2010. Although he has no recollection of the speech, in his letter he wrote that he “feverishly” (nechū) read the works of James Baldwin, Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison and Chester Himes in the early 1960s. My thanks to Professor Michael Bourdaghs for facilitating my correspondence with Ōe. I would also like to thank positions: east asia critique, which granted permission for the republication of this essay. All translations from Japanese are my own unless noted otherwise. 2. Marvin Sterling, “Searching for Self in the Global South: Japanese Literary Representations of Afro-Jamaican Blackness,” Japanese Studies, Vol. 31, No. 1 (2011), p. 56. 3. The narratives of Ōe’s 1957 “Shiiku (Prize Stock)” and 1958 “Kurai kawa, omoi kai (Dark River, Heavy Oar)” and “Tatakai no konnichi (Today the Struggle)” are propelled primarily by the Japanese narrator’s gaze and author’s representation of the black male body. Several of Ōe’s post-1961 works—primarily Sakebigoe (1963), but also moments in Kojinteki na taiken (A Personal Matter, 1964) and Man’en gannen no futtobōru (1967) are highly informed by Ōe’s reading of Wright, Baldwin and Ellison. 4. Scholarship that takes up the representation of blackness in Ōe’s “Prize Stock” includes: Russell’s “Taishū bungaku ni miru Nihonjin Kokujinkan (The Japanese View of Blacks as Seen in Popular Literature),” in Nihonjin no kokujin kan (The Japanese View of Black People) and “Race and Reflexivity,” Norma Field’s “Neitibu to eirian, nanji to ware: Ōe Kenzaburō no shinwa, kindai, kyokō (Native and Alien, I and Thou: Ōe Kenzaburō’s Myth, Modernity and Fiction),” Tetsushi and Hiromi Furukawa’s “Nihon no sengo shōsetsu ni okeru ‘kokujin’ (‘Blacks’ in Postwar Japanese novels),” in Nihonjin to Afurika-kei Amerikajin (The Japanese and African Americans), Ted Goossen’s “Caged Beasts: Black Men in Modern Japanese Literature,” and Michael Molasky’s “A Darker Shade of Difference,” in The American Occupation of Japan and Okinawa: Literature and Memory. 5. Marco Abel, Violent Affect: Literature, Cinema and Critique after Representation (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 2007), 74. 6. Ibid., 58, 85. Emphasis in original. 7. Ōe Kenzaburō, “Amerika no yume” (American Dream), Shinchō (1965), p. 184. “American Dream,” which Ōe penned before his inaugural journey to the United States, is not to be confused with Dreams of a Traveler in America (Amerika ryokōsha no yume), a series of essays written in commemoration of his travels in America. All translations are my own. 8. Ōe, “Fukashi ningen to tayōsei (Invisible Men and Diversity),” Sekai (1967), 39. I use “minor” here in the manner suggested by Deleuze and Guattari in Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, trans. Dana Polan (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986). 9. Ōe, “Ryūkeisha no dokusho (The Readings of an Exile),” Tosho (1961), 2–3. 10. Yuichiro Onishi, Transpacific Antiracism: Afro-Asian Solidarity in 20th-Century Black America, Japan, and Okinawa (New York: New York University Press), 100.

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11. Ōe, “Jigoku ni yuku Hakkuruberī Fin (Huckleberry Finn Goes to Hell),” Sekai (1966), 229. 12. Ōe, “Fukashi ningen to tayōsei (Invisible Men and Diversity),” 140. 13. Ibid., 141. 14. Ibid., 142. 15. Ibid., 140. 16. Ibid. 17. Ibid. 18. Initially used as training weapons at military academies, Japanese civilians, Okinawans in particular, were issued and trained in the use of takeyari, bamboo spears, for civil defense purposes in the case of an Allied invasion. The use of this wartime relic in a postwar homicide between Japanese civilians, in conjunction with the homicide taking place in an air raid shelter, is indicative of the lingering and liquid fear and violence Ōe attributes to prolonged war. 19. Ōe, “Jigoku ni yuku Hakkuruberī Fin (Huckleberry Finn Goes to Hell),” 230. 20. Ibid. 21. Chester Himes, If He Hollers Let Him Go (New York: Doubleday, 1945), 4–5. 22. Ōe, “Jigoku ni yuku Hakkuruberī Fin” (Huckleberry Finn Goes to Hell),” 237. 23. Ibid., 236. 24. Ōe, “Kyōdai na amerika-zō no kuzureta ato ni (After the Collapse of the Image of ‘Mighty America’ . . .),” Shūkan Asahi (1968), 31. 25. Ōe, “Amerikaron (On America),” in Kakujidai no sōzōryoku (Tokyo: Shinchō, 2007), 99. 26. Ōe, “Fukashi ningen to tayōsei (Invisible Men and Diversity),” 39. 27. Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, 17, 16. 28. Ibid., 18. 29. Mary F. Zamberlin, Rhizosphere, Gilles Deleuze and the “Minor” American Writings of William James, W. E. B. DuBois, Gertrude Stein, Jean Toomer, and William Faulkner (New York: Routledge, 2006), 10. 30. Ōe, “Gendai bungaku to sei (Sex and Contemporary Literature),” in Genshuku na tsunawatari (Tokyo: Bungei shunju, 1974), 266. 31. Ōe, “Jigoku ni yuku Hakkuruberī Fin (Huckleberry Finn Goes to Hell),” 229. 32. Ōe, “Kokujin no suijaku to katsuryoku: Āto Bureikī to sono gakudan (The Enervation and Energy of Black People: Art Blakey and His Band),” Asahi jānaru (1961), 22. 33. Ibid. 34. Ōe, “Ajia Afurika ningen no kaigi (The Meeting of Asian/African Humans),” Sekai (1961), 339. 35. Ōe Kenzaburō, “Dai sanbu no tame no nōto,” in Genshuku na tsunawatari, 155, as cited in Yasuko Claremont’s The Novels of Kenzaburo Ōe (New York: Routledge, 2009), 4–5. 36. John Treat, Writing Ground Zero: Japanese Literature and the Atomic Bomb (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 234. 37. Ōe conducted fieldwork in Hiroshima from the summer of 1963 to 1964 and published his findings in installments in the journal Sekai. The 1965 Hiroshima Notes

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compiled the Sekai essays. Ōe published The Cry in 1963 and the aforementioned “American Dream,” in which he discusses his interest in black literature, in 1965—the same year as the publication of Hiroshima Notes. 38. Sartre’s “look (le regard)” is occasionally translated as “the gaze.” I employ the “gaze” translation for the remainder of this excerpt. 39. Sartre, Being and Nothingness: A Phenomenological Essay on Ontology, trans. Hazel Barnes (New York: Washington Square Press, 1992), 362. 40. Sartre, Notebooks for an Ethics, trans. David Pellauer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 563. 41. Ibid. 42. Jonathan Judaken, “Sartre on Racism: From Existential Phenomenology to Globalization and ‘the New Racism,’” in Race after Sartre (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2008), 27. 43. Ibid. 44. Sartre, “Black Orpheus,” in “What Is Literature?” and Other Essays (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988), 327. 45. Ōe, “Fukashi ningen to tayōsei (Invisible Men and Diversity),” 139–140. 46. Ōe, “Amerikaron (On America),” 102. 47. Ibid.; “Fukashi ningen,” 145. 48. Ichijō Takao, “Ōe Kenzaburō to roku jyū nendai no ‘Amerika’: Rarufu erison no iwayuru ‘tayōsei’ wo megutte (Ōe Kenzaburō and 1960s ‘America’: The ‘Diversity’ of Ralph Ellison),” Tezukayama gakuin daigaku kenkyū ronshū: Bungakubu, Vol. 43 (2008), 11. 49. Ōe, “Amerikaron,” 100–101. 50. Janet Jakobsen, “Queers Are Like Jews, Aren’t They? Analogy and Alliance Politics,” in Daniel Boyarin, Daniel Itzkovitz and Ann Pellegrini, eds., Queer Theory and the Jewish Question (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), 67. 51. Ōe, Sakebigoe (Tokyo: Kōdansha, 1990), 7. 52. Ibid., 77. 53. Ibid., 24. 54. Ibid., 29. 55. Ibid., 144. 56. Ibid. 57. Ōe, “Ryūkeisha no dokusho (The Readings of an Exile),” 3. Ōe also suggests that the title Sakebigoe is a translation of the trope of lamentation that Ōe reads in Wright’s Native Son and Uncle Tom’s Children. 58. Ōe, Sakebigoe, 169. 59. Ibid., 94. 60. Ōe, “Konnan no kankaku ni tsuite,” 93. 61. Charles P. Toombs, “Black-Gay-Man Chaos in Another Country,” in D. Quentin Miller, ed., Re-viewing James Baldwin: Things Not Seen (Philadelphia: Temple University Press), 105. My emphasis. 62. By “full of the complexity that Baldwin . . . attributes to human identity and not homogenized by racial or racist ideology,” I refer to what might be called the identitarian desegregation advocated in Baldwin’s nonfictional works. For one ex-

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ample among many, consider Baldwin’s “Here Be Dragons,” one of his later essays from the 1985 The Price of the Ticket. Baldwin reminds us, “Each of us, helplessly and forever, contains the other—male in female, white in black, black in white. We are a part of each other. Many of my countrymen appear to find this fact exceedingly inconvenient, and so very often do I. But none of us can do anything about it.” James Baldwin, “Here Be Dragons,” in The Price of the Ticket (New York: St. Martin’s/Marek, 1985), 690. 63. Ōe, Sakebigoe, 144. 64. Michiko Wilson, The Marginal World of Ōe Kenzaburō: A Study in Themes and Techniques (Armonk: M.E. Sharpe, 1986), 41. The translation of Ōe here is Wilson’s. 65. I read in Kure’s mother’s decision to bestow a Japanese name upon her zainichiKorean son reverberations of the sōshi kaimei policies, which between the years of 1939–1945 obligated ethnically Korean subjects of the Japanese empire to adopt Japanese-style family names. Even after the USAMGIK’s 1946 issuing of the Name Restoration Order, some zainichi-Koreans opted to keep their Japanese-style names in order to—to borrow the term from black literature—“pass” and avoid discrimination. 66. Cf. Ōe, “Konnan no kankaku ni tsuite—Wa ga sōsaku taiken (On the Sense of Difficulty: My Experience of Literary Creation),” especially 93.

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7 Future-Oriented Blackness in Shoˉwa Robot Culture—1924 to 1963 Anne McKnight1

T

his chapter looks at future-oriented narratives of blackness in colonial Japan in the two categories where they appeared in the 1920s: in the new genre of robot stories, and the similarly new genre of proletarian literature. I begin with the Japanese reception of R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots), the 1920 theatre work by Karel Čapek that coined the term “robot” and set in motion the terms for translating robots in Japan. I then turn to a discussion of the imperial symbolics of a 1928 Japanese robot, the first built in Asia, called Gakutensoku. In this robot, I explore the potential for ruling over blackness that might be imagined in a discourse where robots shift from the revolutionary labor narrative of R.U.R. to situate blackness in a panorama of racial types celebrated in the Japanese empire. I next look at one further prewar example, a 1931 crime story by science fiction pioneer Unno Jūza that features a killer black robot, “The Case of the Robot Murder.” I conclude with a look at the different role blackness plays in the postwar anime Astro Boy, a wildly popular series that celebrates the use of jazz for liberatory purposes, coding concern for solidarity and liberation into its robot main character’s coming of age as an aspiring human. The robot is a new character through which possible struggles with liberation (or its failure) in a time of empire are played out. Their beings are cooked up in a lab, of negated histories but invested with possible futures and charged with new modes of life altogether. Robot narratives bear a strong resemblance to proletarian narratives in their stress on futurity, potential, and scaling of individual to social struggle. Metonymy is the favored literary device of the robot story, because rather than being metaphorically “like” some existing — 141 —

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thing, robots are new, and open up the space for a collective representation of newness. Struggle in solidarity is sparked by characters’ potential to rise away from a master or creator in the service of self-determination. And robots play a catalytic role in social movements in a time of empire, traversing genres because of their modular nature and scalability. Their blackness in Japanese narratives is poised in ambivalence: inviting solidarity in some futures but dominated or controlling in others. I place narratives of black robots in the context of two other movements. The first is proletarian literature as it sweeps from Japan across the Pacific Ocean to make alliances with proletarian and occasionally colonized people. The second case is how the catalytic power of blackness participates in the broader program of vitalism (seimeishugi, 生命主義, from the German Lebensphilosophie)—a set of philosophies that thrived in the prewar era and explored the biological, cultural, and political meanings of “life” (seimei). Many kinds of mechanically based humanoids appeared in Japan from the Tokugawa period forward; twentieth-century robots were new because their systems were modeled on biological features that hinged on “life” (seimei) itself.2 By exploring these connections, I try to understand what Japanese writers might want from making robots black and catalytic—and why these characters always seem to appear in leadership roles, in numbers of one or “overwhelming,” in a sublime mass, mob or crowd. The word “robot” came into Japanese in the 1920s following the translation from English of the Czech playwright Karel Čapek’s R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots). In January 1921, R.U.R. débuted in Prague. The first recorded viewing of the play by a Japanese spectator happened about two years later. In September 1922, Suzuki Zentarō would see a Theatre Guild production of R.U.R. at the Garrick Theatre in New York.3 Soon after, he would translate it into Japanese from Paul Selver’s English translation.4 Suzuki’s translation of R.U.R. would be performed as the first full-length production at the Tsukiji Little Theatre, an important avant-garde space that was established just after the massive 1923 Kantō earthquake and was noted for its Expressionist/Constructivist sets.5 Suzuki’s sympathies were strongly with the working class: “the greatest offense of modern mechanical society was its creation of a working class. Workers are cruelly used as machines both day and night, bent on breaking their life (seimei) and soul into bits.”6 Suzuki’s translation of the play and its presentation to Japanese audiences would locate the play in the South Seas, a part of the Japanese colonial imaginary with its own lexicon of blackness, and would translate the term “robot” as both “robot” (ロボット) and as “artificial human” (jinzō ningen, 人造人間). R.U.R.’s contexts place this new being not only in the international avant-garde, but in the thick of debates about what determined and cultivated “life.” The

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robot is native to nowhere, but also generates from the primitive South Seas with its abundance of basic life forms; it is both a machine and an organism. Until 1930, the biology-oriented term “artificial human” vied with the labororiented “robot” for this new being’s name. Because of the two names, the issue of how life could be produced in an artificial human could be detached from the labor issues that galvanize R.U.R. Along with these contexts, R.U.R.’s début in Tokyo would spur the themes of robot self-preservation, liberation, and sublime surges of mass blackness to become nodes in robot narratives. The plot of R.U.R. is simple, but the takeaway that Suzuki had from seeing black robots in R.U.R. requires a bit of context. I hope that readers will not lose patience with a detour into some conventions of liberation narratives as they are filtered through the biologist lens of R.U.R. before we get to the specific stories and the roles that blackness plays. It is precisely the biological turn away from mechanical features that makes the black robot different— and full of potential in terms of the directions its life might take. Thinking of robots as life forms with connections to dynamic organic life, rather than as fixed-component machines, allows us to see why black robots would have been such a particular promise, and a particular worry, to the avant-garde translator Suzuki, among other Japanese writers of the time. Simply put, the black robot with all its gradations of color and origin is the denizen of a world newly opening. As Japanese policies and everyday people make forays out into the colonial world and encounter new people, relationships of kinship, economics, and other kinds of social life are still to be forged with beings whose histories they may or may not know. R.U.R. is a “fantastic melodrama” that dramatizes a robot revolt after robots are dispatched from their factory to work as soldiers all over Europe. As the drama of R.U.R. opens, Helena, the liberal-minded daughter of a certain nation’s ruler, pays a sudden visit to an island on behalf of a human rights organization, the League of Humanity. She has arrived to investigate the working conditions of the “robots” made on the island. She tells the robots, “[t]he whole of Europe is talking about the way you’re being treated.”7 While Helena aspires to investigate how the robots are exploited as workers, the factory’s manager tells her that the early history of the factory was different—it was about pure research into the materials that make life. The factory was established on the island because its founder had been researching marine animals and had managed to scientifically replicate “the living matter known as protoplasm” (genkeishitsu, 原形質) to extract a “tree of life” from a “test tube.” In effect, he managed to create a being in whom there was no difference between nature and culture, and who was connected to all things by virtue of sharing the same material substance as its basis for life. However, his commitment to perfectionism and to debunking the idea of God kept him

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from building a full-fledged robot industry. His impatient nephew took over the company, “from an engineer’s point of view.” The engineer’s new business plan turned basic research into a program for making machines. These approaches have very different ideas about forecasting: one aims to aggregate knowledge about the world based on the forms that this protoplasm generates; the other aims to mass produce and standardize certain functionalities of the life forms. The engineer seems to prevail, and during the play, the way his company innovates the robots takes them from being office workers to soldiers. The factory starts selling masses of robots to the “War in the Balkans,” while rumors of robot mutiny reach the island. The robots seem unsatisfied and manage a coordinated effort of rebellion. Robots apparently attack the Spanish government and successfully establish a base in Le Havre, France. They recruit new members and take over territory, fully autonomous from their human masters and makers. As the human birth rate plummets, robots become proportionally greater, but the only thing the robots cannot do is reproduce. (We could pause a minute here to recall the ways that reproduction is controlled and valued to life parsed out in racially discriminatory systems.) The robots issue a manifesto, modeled on the Communist Manifesto, except that the robots are exhorted to kill the humans as part of seizing the means of production. The factory managers try to bargain with their aggressors by threatening to tear up the formula for robot-making unless their own lives are spared. However, unknown to them, Helena had already burned it. The robots triumph all over Europe, and vanquish all but one human, kept alive because he, too, is a maker not a manager. He is unable to reproduce the formula. But meanwhile, two robots fall in love while trying to coerce the builder into giving up the formula. Each robot agrees to sacrifice itself so that the builder can dissect it and replicate the robot formula in order to transform this single “tree of life” into a whole sustainable population in which all are interconnected. But the secret to enabling robot life turns out not to be mechanical. Rather, it is self-sacrifice and affection which lead to self-preservation. Love and sacrifice transform the robots into the “Adam and Eve” of an evolving species while the open ending of the play leaves human survival in a precarious position. R.U.R.’s use of the robot as an allegory of exploited workers who become their own masters flows well with the stream of the other avant-gardist genre of literature in Japan that similarly took off in the early 1920s—the proletarian literary movement. This movement afforded space and voice to the working classes and saw language as a material useful in the struggle for a transformed relation to work and commodities.8 The Communist Manifesto, published in 1848, provided the frame for narratives in which people who

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were treated like objects discover the means to re-make themselves as subjects. 9 This move from object to subject will motivate all of the black robot stories; they differ only in the goal toward which the life force drives them. (In its time, the manifesto did not take up issues of race explicitly. This only becomes explicit in R.U.R. when, as I explore later, translator Suzuki remarks on the robots as black, and identifies them with the South Seas.) The architecture of Japanese liberation narratives, including robot narratives, shares the basic narrative coordinates of the manifesto genre.10 It shows a flawed, exploitative means of production and advocates its change. It details grievances, arranges events in an understandable sequence of history, and advocates a new future, dependent on worker energy and desires. “You have nothing to lose but your chains!” exhorts the manifesto’s last line in 1848. The robot chains that are broken in this play are metaphorical; they are the obligations that bind them to their servile position as workers. Most etymologies of “robot” trace the word’s roots to something like “the practice of forced labor.” The word “robot” comes from “an Old Church Slavonic word, rabota, which means servitude o[r] forced labor,” according to medical historian Howard Markel.11 The word, however, did not refer to a specific kind of being until Čapek’s play. The question the play entertains is “how did one kind of being, seen as objects, become subjects in their own right?” Breaking away from labor-related chains in the play has another payoff in the power the robots discover to transform and acquire qualities normally associated with human “life.” Chief among these qualities are love and language. In the Communist Manifesto, consciousness motivates the transition from objects to subjects. In R.U.R., robots had never desired to reproduce themselves—or to create anything at all within themselves. But with the discovery of love comes the capability to reproduce life, all that guarantees it, and the social forms that follow and that include language. “Good heavens,” wonders the factory manager, “who taught them these phrases?” In all cases, the robots’ new powers are generative but potentially frightening to others. The robots’ ability to create things that no one taught them situates them in the arena of vitalism that thrived in Taishō-era Japan, the 1910s and 1920s. Vitalism was a set of philosophies that had both popular and scholarly inflections and sorted through biological, cultural, political meanings of “life.” Thinkers as far-flung in discipline as folk art historian Yanagi Sōetsu and anarchist Ōsugi Sakae drew on the vitalist thought of Henri Bergson, especially the philosophical work Creative Evolution (1907). Yanagi was noted for praising the vital qualities of Koreans, who he claimed had an unconscious relation to material culture, and made “art” without realizing it. Ōsugi was a translator, political organizer and partisan of free love who was killed by military police in 1923. These thinkers, along with many writers such as Tamura Toshiko, Wat-

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suji Tetsurō and even partisans of the occult boom ongoing at the time drew on Bergson and allied texts to talk about how organic social energies could be harnessed through individuals and the social forms they produced.12 Vitalism is interested in how properties of life (spontaneity, generativity) work to oppose or transcend mechanicity (repetition, segmentation/ reduction into parts) or find a relation to organicity. In the robot world, this means the vitalist is interested in speculative questions like “how can robots acquire and manifest life or explore its potentials?” rather than “how can robots functionalize tasks humans are loath to do?” In the mode of Marxism, this question comes to sound like: “how can robots acquire and manifest life or explore its potentials in ways that are not subject to a creator or owner, but in which robots control their own means of production?” (This issue is obviously key to any labor situation where master and servant reside in the socially constructed spheres of different races.) Donna Jones reminds us that Bergson’s thought was appealing to a broad spectrum of thinkers, artists and politicians. It allowed them to “[valorize] intuition as the means to access the principal ontological category of the universe or the whole, the life principle or élan vital.”13 Intuition is a shorthand and highly conceptual way of saying that “life” is made of a fusion of experience and cognition; life is already full of the precipitates of social forms. It is not pure experience, but rather the way that experience meets situation already dynamically prepared with social forms. For a robot, this means that the future is forward-looking, but not purely new, and energetic movement forward is shaped by past elements which are interconnected and alive—not divisible and mechanical. Jones speaks of Europe, but the vitalism is equally key in the Japanese context. (People in Japan were not sapped and disenchanted by the outcome of World War One the same way that Europeans were, and the vitalist inquiry did not end on the same timeline. The same League of Nations that R.U.R. suggests as a failed but ultimately caring universalizer is the organization that rejected Japan’s submissions of a Racial Equality Clause at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919.) Blackness in each example of robot narrative plays a role in the story of catalyzing social energies in the service of self-determination through a process of organic growth.14 Black robot characters figure in messianic roles, gathering strength or numbers in quick and open-ended narrative climaxes. Earlier I recounted how R.U.R. débuted on the avant-garde stage in Japan in 1924. The blackness depicted in R.U.R. is located in Japan’s own colonial realm, the South Seas. Suzuki’s reading of R.U.R. asks us to ask the question: “Of what impulses and directions will a black life force consist?” And if he is unable to see nothing like a culture, and nothing like a past, and nothing like love, what sort of speculative fiction does he see? In the Tsukiji theatre’s

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monthly playguide, Suzuki described his experience of viewing the play’s culmination, the robot unrest. In one scene, robots pour in the window of a room where the last remaining humans are hiding. Suzuki writes, “like Adam suddenly aware of good and evil . . . these black automatic dolls give us a vast feeling of unease.”15 It is striking that Suzuki’s unease at the robot surge obscures his memory of the discovery of love, the play’s melodramatic message. It is as if he fears the future that might be put into play by these now-conscious robots. The blackness of the robot cast that Suzuki notes in his review of the travelling version may refer literally in part to the chiaroscuro set design and dark costumes of the Expressionist/Constructivist set. These sets typically embedded elements of irrational psychic forms into their space to suggest distorted psyches and worlds. But what makes me read these “black dolls” in terms of race is the fact that although the location is un-specified in English, Suzuki’s summary locates the play on “a lonely South Seas island.” The trope of the empty island in the Japanese colonial imaginary is a common setting for young, frustrated élites to dream of expansion and to try out political experiments in a small-scale laboratory.16 The experiment on this unnamed island that houses the factory is associated with an original substance of “life,” replicated in the robots. And in this imaginary, residents—of which there are none in the play—are typically imagined as black with iconography borrowed from projections of African life forms. Cultural historian Sudo Naoto writes that before 1945, South Seas islands and imagined African tropical islands had interchangeable visual markers in both Hollywood animation and Japanese cultural forms: “Africa and the Pacific Islands are mixed up with each other as having the same primitive savage and tropical images,” including the same animals—elephants and giraffes.17 Betty Boop cartoons, for example, used primitivist icons of African pygmy warriors and served as models for the popular Adventures of Dankichi adventure comic.18 These characters and icons were used to comic effect to show the Japanese character’s fitness to rule, and the native’s fitness to consent. The South Seas exoticism featured in adventure stories had a logic that Thomas LaMarre calls “speciesism,” “a displacement of race and racism (relations between humans as imagined in racial terms) onto relations between humans and animals.”19 This dynamic was especially prominent in interwar and wartime visual culture and represents Japanese characters taking leadership roles over deferential and cuddly animals. Seo Mitsuyo’s animated film Momotarō’s Sea Eagle, for instance, features the celebrated fairy tale hero leading a multi-animal brigade to conquer a navy of foreign devils in a thinly veiled version of Pearl Harbor. In my reading, the robot is the flip side of these “cute and friendly animals that fairly cry out for nurture.”20 It has the ambivalent ability to overturn the system, turning

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from an energy-dependent being into one that revolts, like an unruly native who fails to assimilate to managerial demands. Along with the new word “robot,” R.U.R. tied a set of tropes to the robot character that ripple out to support the representation of the “artificial humans” in robot works over the next decade. Details of R.U.R.’s revolution—the lost formula, the silent mass march of dark triumphant beings overcoming the bourgeois profiteers—will surface directly in Japanese stories about proletariats and robots later in the 1920s. But more generally, the process of turning from objects to subjects provides the narrative backbone for the stories about robots that flourished after the play was staged in 1924 in Tokyo. 21 However open and abstract blackness is at this point, the trope of the black being tapping into an energy inaccessible to humans, overcoming its overlords, and turning from object to subject to form part of an organic mass establishes a pattern that wends through subsequent robot stories as abstract black masses morph into concrete ones.

The Début of Gakutensoku: “An Anti-Racist Symbol” Blackness, technology and future-oriented narratives came together in the Japan of the 1920s—with legacies that are apparent to this day. Most robots in prewar Japan were metal, whether they were fictional or embodied. They glistened, whirred, breathed and cranked to emphasize their technical functionality and their fitness to augment human functions. However, a small but significant subset of robots were black. Their blackness grounded existential dimensions of liberation and self-determination, rather than mechanical functions of scientific-technical objects. They thus correspond to the genre literary critic Istvan Csicsery-Ronay refers to as speculative fiction: “the belief that certain ideas and images of scientific-technological transformations of the world can be entertained, and, on the other, the rational recognition that they may be realized (along with their ramifications for worldly life).”22 Speculative fiction is broader than science fiction because its “what-if” questions do not pour all of their problem-solving energy into “scientific technical objects.”23 Instead, speculative fiction traces how these objects and concepts play out in the human realm of actions, experiences, and values. Robots provoke profound questions not only about the mechanization of life, but for Japanese writers, black robots are also unknowns that inspire thinking about the possibility of being joined, taken over or displaced by unreadable yet overpowering racially different forces. The first Japanese robot, Gakutensoku, was launched in 1928 and was, in Tim Hornyak’s words, “Japan’s first attempt to realize a newfangled

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European concept called ‘robot.’”24 Gakutensoku literally means “learning from the laws of nature,” where laws are immutable ideals or principles. Nishimura Makoto (1883–1956), the creator and exhibitor of the robot, was an Osaka-based biologist with PhDs from Columbia and Tokyo Imperial University who worked in Manchuria, Hokkaido, and at the Osaka Mainichi Shinbun (Osaka Daily Newspaper), which sponsored the robot. Nishimura is a fascinating figure with many personal as well as professional attachments to nature. These include rescuing a wounded dove in colonial Shanghai in 1932 and bringing it back to raise in Osaka, an experience he later recounted in a poem to his friend and interlocutor, founder of modern Chinese literature, novelist Lu Xun.25 Nishimura’s writings on Gakutensoku in popular science magazines and Mainichi periodicals dwell on the word seimei, or life, as the key inspiration for his engineering. The translation of robots using the term “artificial human” (jinzō ningen, 人造人間) was common until about 1930, and situates robots in the broader frame of discussions on vitalism (seimeishugi, 生命主義), itself an anti-mechanistic philosophy.26 The robot, like the poem, bore witness to the aim of personal aesthetics to transcend national conflict during Japan’s colonial era. Hornyak writes that Nishimura timed his robot’s launch to accord with the celebration of the ascension of Emperor Hirohito to the throne: “When Nishimura learned that the Mainichi Shimbun would mount an exhibit at the 1928 Kyoto Fair, he suggested building a jinzō ningen (artificial human).”27 The robot with its modular racial elements was soon exhibited at expositions in Hiroshima (1929), Korea (1929), and Tokyo (1931), with slightly different features with each rollout; the robot is rumored to have disappeared in Germany. Many interpretations of the robot—including those that analyze R.U.R.— focus on the robot as an allegory of exploited labor, a machine that refuses to be exploited and finally discovers its own creative powers, which define and enable it as “human.” This robot is different. Gakutensoku displayed functions of breathing, writing kanji (Chinese characters), and complexly moving his head, face, arms, hands and body. But while the movements that replicate human actions are foregrounded, they do not create even a remotely humanlike impression of the six-meter robot. Parts of the robot were modeled on human systems, such as a rubber vascular system and a pulmonary system. But critics today frame the robot’s performance as a piece of art that abstracts and performs specific human movements; it bears no relation to the idea of work as a platform for solidarity and self-determination that we see in R.U.R. In 2008, the Osaka Science Museum unveiled a half-size reconstruction of Gakutensoku. Hasegawa Nōzō, of the Museum, writes that in contrast to the practical (jitsuyōteki, 実用的) robots of the West, Nishimura aimed for an

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artistic (geijutsuteki, 芸術的) robot.28 The robot was artfully constructed. His pen was in the shape of a kabura-ya, a whistling arrow used to launch a medieval battle; a medallion named a “cosmos” was placed on his chest, signifying the both the cosmos flower and the world; and he wore a crown of leaves, part of a circuit of life that used the sun and soil nutrients to grow, and in turn fed other plants, when dead. Each element correlates to a larger narrative, and assigns the modular elements a specific place in this order. These modular elements also comprise a set of racial components in the robot’s face. Robot historian Inoue Haruki writes that the robot’s “multi-racial elements include African lips and nose, Asian cheeks and ears, Caucasian eyes and forehead, and a Native American hairstyle.”29 Blackness, fabricated as “African lips and nose” is part of a blazon of human parts held together in the figure as a whole. I suspect that the interpretation of “universal” works because Japan had no colonial presence in Africa, and thus Africa sounds abstract in this list if it is interpreted as comprehensive of all world races. But in my view, when we think of these modules as representing peopled spaces in a composite, the relation between those spaces becomes important. The very idea of modular races that map onto the world is just as important as the content of each unit itself. Where Tim Hornyak sees the “artistic statement” of Gakutensoku’s tour as “a tribute to universal solidarity,” robot historian Inoue argues that “Nishimura . . . strove to make the robot an anti-racist symbol of the universality of humankind,” perhaps because of the inclusive nature of the racial modular elements.30 I submit that we should interpret the robot’s multi-racial composition slightly differently. It is true that the story of a creator is not embedded into the robot—there are no chains sundered, and the inventor Nishimura seems to be on good terms with his creation. But the launch of the robot on the day when the emperor officially took the throne, the tour around the realm, and the composite of races all suggest that each element in the robot world is coordinated and literally empowered by a higher source, if not a literal creator. In my view, the framing mechanism, the speculative fiction at work, is the imperial narrative and the drive to expand while recognizing and being recognized by a chromatically wide range of subjects. The road trips that Gakutensoku took formally resembled a journey called the junreikō—a style of ritual institutionalized in the Meiji period “in which the emperor travelled around the countryside watching and being watched by the people who were becoming the Japanese.”31 In lieu of the emperor himself traveling to welcome all the new subjects as he did in the Meiji period, when Gakutensoku was first launched in 1928, the robot stood as a large-scale artistic-technical emissary of the emperor that was dispatched to see and be seen. The very name Gakutensoku suggested a logic of what classical scholars call correlative cosmologies—cosmological systems that serve as the sources

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of art, ornament and design, and order the relations between things within an order of meaning, as well as between orders of meaning.32 The cosmology at issue in the late 1920s was Japan’s pan-ethnic empire whose parameters were dynamic at that point in time. Now I would like to briefly turn to the question of what African blackness might signify in 1928. In my view, African blackness did not just participate in a level playing field of access to technological wonder, becoming exalted because it was included in the realm of imperial symbolics. It stood for any people that exist in the world that Japan does not have a direct relation to—but might, at some point in the future, as might many other modular substitutable races or ethnicities. And the particular choice of features, especially the lips, gets particular attention in visual and literary representations of African American characters, and overlaps with western representations.33 The majority of twentieth-century prewar Japanese versions of blackness in fact locate black characters and black masses not in Africa or its peoples’ diasporic destinations, but among the colonial residents of South Asia, the South Seas and Pacific Islands, Japan’s own potential empire. As anthropologist John Russell notes, the parameters of what was considered “black” have shifted over time, have responded to currents in western thoughts about race, and have included Africans and African Americans, but also dark-skinned Pacific Islanders and Malays.34 When Japan won the Russo-Japanese War in 1905, hopes for becoming another Great Power—previously limited to Euro-American countries— were stoked. Japan expanded into territory in Taiwan, Korea, China, and the South Seas to encompass a territory over which it ruled through cultural and economic policies. Especially after the March 1 movement in Korea in 1919, which protested Japanese control, Japanese narratives that aimed to show cooperative assimilation of other ethnic and national groups were key to showing how Japanese governance was a desirable alternative to white imperial rule. The structural nature of racial categories can be seen, for example, in a reference to the hero of the Japanese character in the popular comic Adventures of Dankichi—he is called shironbo, “little white boy,” in contrast to the term that refers to local natives, kuronbo, “little black boy.”35 Racial identification can indicate a semantic content, or it can refer to a structural position.36 The robot, as a character without a history, becomes a device through which the outcomes of encounters, whether between persons or policies, can be imagined as speculative fictions. Gakutensoku mapped the spatial integration of multiple racial groups into its own fabricated body. The spatial integration of the body offered a formally unifying pattern, if not an exact map, for the spatial integration of the empire. The law of nature expressed in this cosmology is that races are multiple, each has a role,

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and that role is subordinate to the body as a whole. Governance was tied to a regime of sight. In Gyewon Kim’s words, “The main purpose of these tours was to increase the visibility of the emperor among the locals, thereby impressing them with a clear and commanding image of the emperor as the new nation’s foremost symbol.”37 Not only the live emperor, but his portrait likeness was distributed to schools and public buildings. The robot’s journey followed on the heels of this new icon, but displayed a pan-racial vision for thousands of visitors on mainland Japan and in its Korean colony. If the live emperor’s tour allowed him to be made visible, and if the portrait allowed people to see themselves as imperial subjects, then seeing the robot in action allowed people to see themselves as part of a living, multi-ethnic or multi-racial imperial body. The robot Gakutensoku demonstrated not only mobility and coordination, but an aesthetic incorporation of a range of racial physiologies brought into motion by his coordination. One difference between the live tour and the portrait is, of course, that some of these features did not belong under the Japanese imperial umbrella proper. A second is that people crowded to see the robot out of curiosity and wonder, not because institutions like schools required them to. The most important distinction between the R.U.R. robots and Gakutensoku is their position with respect to self-determination. Gakutensoku was engineered to demonstrate how the latest technology could participate in ancient rituals while tackling new public policy issues like integrating a multi-ethnic empire. It was in service to the empire and hardly the site of liberatory politics. If the robot Gakutensoku demonstrates a coordination of racial groups under the guidance of a Japanese source of motion, the R.U.R. robots commit humanicide with the intention of eradicating their creators. The imperial symbolics of this robot represented a massive sea change from the context of labor, love and liberation in which robots were first viewed.

Colonial Blackness “The Black Brothers” (Kokujin no kyōdai, 黒人の兄弟), by Ema Shū (1889– 1975), is a work of proletarian fiction published in July 1928.38 On reading the story, the first thing a reader might think is: “What is this story about two wealthy jewel merchants doing in a collection of proletarian literature?” Ema was trained under belle-lettristic fiction-writers Tayama Katai and Natsume Sōseki, but committed to socialism in 1923, a year after the Japan Communist Party was founded. “The Black Brothers” was published in the inaugural issue of Senki (Fighting Flag, 戦旗), a key proletarian literary journal of which Ema was also an editor.39 Ema’s take on blackness is squarely in line with the

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Marxist desire to turn workers from objects into subjects. But it also suggests that the merchant characters, while sympathetic, are casualties of the class struggle, and will ultimately cede the momentum of representation to the proletarian characters they are identified with throughout the story via the consistent mention of their blackness. In keeping with the ideal of international solidarity, the moniker of “brothers” in “The Black Brothers” gestures to both the biological kinship of the two main characters who are brothers, and to the kinship to come with peripheral characters and with readers. Ema’s story is exceptional in Japanese proletarian literature because it suggests that the class struggle—the solidarity of brotherhood—cannot be fully understood or overcome unless racial discrimination is factored into the experience of class. His treatment of blackness locates blackness in Asia and suggests that because both the brothers and the crew—and readers—are Japanese, they have a special insight into discrimination, a special responsibility to disable it, and a special benefit, in the form of solidarity with a stewardship whose terms remain to be negotiated. The story depicts two wealthy Ceylonese brothers, merchants from the city of Kandy who take a Japanese-owned passenger ship home to Colombo from Cairo and Alexandria. The brothers hide their merchant class identity and pretend that they are returning from a family visit to Egypt so that their newly acquired wares are not plundered from their cabin. The brothers’ relief at landing on an Asian-run ship is apparent from the beginning, although they note that they are lodged in third class. They are identified as Indian (Indo-jin), as residents of Colombo, then a British colony, and as speakers of “Ceylonese”; they are colonial residents of the British colony of Ceylon (now Sri Lanka). Everyone in the story, from narrator to brothers to the white antagonist who makes their trip miserable uses the same term: “black.” “The elder brother would be twenty-four. He wasn’t remarkably tall, but he had a solid build. Unlike most Indians, he had deep-set eyes and dark pupils that twinkled out from the whites, high cheekbones and full red lips, and rather looked like a black African” (30). At first they fall into rapture at the luxury their Japanese hosts allow them. One brother exclaims, “Boy, this is great!” (28), a “return to Eden” (29). The other follows with, “For sure, it’s really a good thing we landed on a Japanese ship!” (29).40 Initially, the Japanese ship is presented as a haven from ill treatment and racial discrimination. Says the elder brother Chiruta, “when we travelled that one time on that English ship, they just wouldn’t stop staring. There is no way I want to get on any white people’s ship” (29).41 Flashing back, “unspeakable horrors” make him shudder and vow never to set foot on a white-run ship all his days. The story has Chiruta explain the brothers’ hopes and grievances with reference to their identity as both black and Asian.

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“[the Japanese owners and operators] are the same race as us . . . no doubt we’re going to be able to relax while we’re aboard this ship. They’re an Asian race . . . Anyway, let’s pick a room and put away our luggage” (29). The brothers’ initial feeling of safety is soon compromised when they meet the disagreeable white British engineer, Anderson, and the feeling of calm is ruptured. They are disillusioned to find that the ship’s crew and passengers defer to white passengers and treat them as second-class citizens on the other side of a color line. Anderson harasses the brothers and insists on enforcing every possible rule on the ship to further affirm their second-class status. Anderson is the narrative device through which rules and policies of discrimination on board are articulated. The narrator tells us that white passengers are hyper-aware of their own privilege when among the colored races (yūshoku jinshu, 有色人種), especially the colonized of the British empire: “Even if they were shrouded in dubious morality, their white skin was enough to merit special treatment” (39). On the ship’s deck, Anderson complains that he is stuck with these “smelly negroes” (kokudo, 黒奴, ニイグロ) all the way to Colombo. He complains about the service: “the Japanese don’t know how to treat us Europeans properly” (38) and about losing his appetite because of black hands on white bread and asks for special segregated eating quarters (40). He further segregates himself by drinking alone in his room until the ship’s staff refuse to serve him anymore. Anderson lodges a series of complaints against the brothers’ insolence, while also trying to intimidate them into loaning him money for drink and a writing brush. This happens though they have paid the same fare as he, and should—ideally, on the Japanese boat—have the same benefits. Endless days on the ocean pass as the weather gets hotter and Anderson acts like a “bad-tempered master” (43). Anderson drives the younger brother further and further into a corner by staging public confrontations. The ship’s officers resolve the problem by upgrading Anderson to first class, and he has free rein of the ship, unlike the brothers, who are constantly banished from any space that might remotely be off limits. Once the ship arrives in Colombo, Anderson has a letter delivered by a Japanese “boy,” a purser, in which he threatens to haul the brothers into court. The story comes to a rapid and tragic end when the sheer number and variety of Anderson’s discriminatory actions becomes unbearable. One brother commits suicide, followed by the other. The brothers are, in effect, also betrayed by the Japanese crew who failed to respect them, much less recognize any kind of solidarity. As the brothers’ persecutor Anderson disembarks from the ship and encounters some local Ceylonese “black men” in canoes, he taunts them until they react in a fantasmatic surge and vow revenge. The story ends with a direct address to the aggressor, and the reader, poised to

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revolt: “look at us, we will kill you, and crush you underfoot” (62). Like many proletarian stories of that era, it ends with a gesture to an undetermined, but potential-filled, future. The story also suggests that by not becoming part of a multi-racial proletariat, by default Japanese people enforce systems of injustice. Until the end, when it is safe, no one challenges Anderson’s repeated insistence that a two-tier system of race be enforced to the brothers’ detriment. The proletarian characters that drive the end of the story echo a series of “ant-like” workers viewed from afar while the boat is in the Indian Ocean. Though witnessed, they appear only as masses of abstracted workers: “One of the ships was a coal freighter bring loaded up; there was a large number of local natives (dojin, 土人) hard at work carrying coal across the loading ramp. The dark shadows of those forms going back and forth carrying coal looked, from far away, just like ants carrying their fodder” (31). A single robot never appears in this story. But the image of ants here too recalls a coordinated body with a secretly organized life that is mistaken for mechanical but yet has life. As the story telescopes out from racial identification between two individuals—the two brothers—to a mass racialized class struggle, it recalls the vitalist stories of surging black robots where one body quickly scales into thousands. The blackness of “The Black Brothers,” in contrast to the modular black parts of Gakutensoku the robot who remain subordinated to their Japanese technical framework, stands in for a future that will swell up and override the singular and oppressive ruling antagonist. The ending also suggests something of a tug-of-war for the allegiance of “black brothers” in general. If the Japanese do not practice proper stewardship of their ship on the open waters, there is a chance of revolt. Blackness is the opening to anti-colonial insurrection—one that might leave Japan behind. A second genre story published three years after “The Black Brothers” also sees blackness as an opening to a potentially threatening anti-colonial insurrection. SF pioneer Unno Jūza’s September 1931 potboiler “The Case of the Robot Killer” (Jinzō ningen satsugai jiken, 人造人間殺害事件) is a first-person crime story set in the ambience of high unrest in colonial Shanghai.42 Unno was employed as an engineer at the Ministry of Telecommunications in Japan. He would go on to write many stories and novels about how properties of humans can be instrumentalized in a time of war. In this story, one black robot terrorizes the city streets, while another interrupts a meeting of a secret society dedicated to making an alliance with a European country to keep Japan out. It is later revealed that the robots, “human bullets,” are the result of the narrator Itō’s experiments, in which he is able to transform people into robots in a mere twelve seconds by applying a solution to their skin—the blackness that results is clearly tied to an epidermal consciousness, rather than the “dark” recesses of inner life or

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psychology. The inner workings of the robots and the exact cause of their obedience are not clear. What is clear is that robot loyalty is part of the “Science” that will allow Itō to outwit the European Great Powers then jostling for space in Shanghai, even though their reserves of money and brute power may dwarf his.43 The story, like the proletarian story, ends swiftly, and remains open-ended—the narrator skims away in a futuristic ship taking his “Science” with him, leaving a Japanese-born robot behind, an object lesson in disloyalty left for dead on the floor. “The Case of the Robot Killer” was published in the magazine Shin seinen (New Youth, 新青年), which introduced many popular science ideas in narrative and fantastic form to readers, along with genres such as the erotic-grotesque thriller. The narrator disguises himself as a worker at Asia Steel Works, a site of potential populist organizing, while pursuing work as a detective by night. He receives “special orders” to carry out a do-or-die mission, presumably on behalf of some wing of the Japanese government. He is ordered to work with his close colleague Hayashida to assassinate the head of a secret society, the Water Dragon Club. An old flame—a Japanese woman named Kinuko, now Madame Liu—has married a Chinese man and is resident in Shanghai. She approaches Itō in the street and attempts to rekindle their romance. Meanwhile, another plot develops in the background where some agitators threaten to bring a strike down on the steel factory, which is the hiding place of a secret document of alliance between China and a mysterious great power, X (whose ambassador is named Rudy Schuller). If China and this Great Power seal an alliance, it could jeopardize Japan’s stake in Shanghai. At stake is the international world order, but also the methodological integrity of Īto himself. In this reverie, he exalts his secret weapon of “science” as his trump card against the Great Powers (the West). Not to mention that we have a weapon more powerful than any weapon to use against this enemy. And that enemy is science. The Water Dragon Club and the government flunkies hiding behind the great powers are politically competent, and no doubt they have money and power—but to put it bluntly, in terms of science they are complete idlers. We are no doubt idlers in our daily life and environment, but once we pick up the hammer and stand in front of the switchboard, and get a hold of the test tubes and drugs, we’re going to really steal their thunder. Science is the thing we need to dominate them. Science! Science! I will use science, the target of their terror, to pierce them straight through the heart!44

When Itō is out flirting with Madame Liu, they get caught in a sudden car chase and gun battle. In this passage, the robot is described as a monster: soulless, but linguistically perfect and indestructible.

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It was Mrs. Liu who cried out. She slipped out of my grasp and hid herself behind me. —— From the window of the car outside, a strange face jutted out. Its whole entire face was black—eyes, lips, forehead and cheeks. A black man? Or, this bearer of a face straight out of a Constructivist sculpture had an aura that was not quite human and not quite a monster, one without a soul. As I saw Mrs. Liu’s right hand reaching out, a pistol was fired at the monster through the glass window. The monster was shot directly in the face, but just when we expected to see it shattered to bits, stuck out its unfazed face ordered the driver to “turn left at 30th Street” in flawless Chinese, and looking at us out of the corner of his eye as we started in fright, returned to the back of the car.45

The “strange face” that Itō is unable to immediately interpret nonetheless has meaning for him. The reference to a black man on one hand suggests at first a real person, even as it is absurdly described in features that cannot possibly be human. The reference to a “sculpture” suggests a connection to the Constructivist setting of the Tsukiji presentation of R.U.R., the image of black robot masses that so compelled Suzuki Zentarō when he saw that play in New York. The main point in the narrative is that science can transform people into black beings who may potentially be manipulated by the Japanese technological wizard Itō. But their anarchic and creative energy needs that scientist both to enable it and to harness it. The story ends when a second robot, an assassin, interrupts a meeting of the Water Dragon Club at the same time as a robot-led strike breaks out in a building that houses a secret contract between China and an unnamed Great Power. The implication is that Itō’s robot-making potion has been made possible on a large scale. The Water Dragon Club leader explains: A riot has broken out at the Asia Steel Works. The whole factory has gone up in flames. The cupola has exploded and molten steel has sprayed all around as far as 500 meters. A bunch of eerie-looking robots were sighted in the midst of the rioters, leading the way in causing destruction.46

In a reframing of the plot of R.U.R., a secret document held in the factory holds the key to alliance, instead of being the secret robot formula. We know nothing about the robots other than that they are sculptural and black, and that the blackness is registered visually as skin color, and ideologically as a threat. Where in R.U.R. the bourgeois woman burns the formula, here it is the robots themselves who are agents of destruction, working under the effect of Itō’s “Science” and still beholden to their creator. The intent is clearly to disrupt the alliance, but at the same time, another robot has sneaked into that secret meeting to vote in support of the alliance. It is shot and bleeds to death on the ground.

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The sound of a silenced pistol hissed through the room and did not miss its mark, hitting the figure right in the eye socket. The entirely black robot fell heavily over on its side. “The robot is dead!” someone cried out. The situation looked dire. Everybody realized that if their awareness had been just a bit slower, the robot would have bombed the room into a living fireworks show and would have been the only one to escape alive. “Ooh, there’s blood gushing out. It’s robot blood,” screeched out someone hysterically. “There’s something weird about this robot blood.” “Let’s look at its insides.” We were all baffled about how to conduct an autopsy on a robot, but it actually came apart quite easily, and sure enough, the outer skin split in two. On the inside, where you would expect to find a tangle of wedged-in gears and batteries was the corpse of a young woman in a gossamer dress. When we took it out, it was none other than Madame Liu.47

In short, what has happened is that Itō has tried to create a manageable empire via his scientific experiments. This cadre started with his intimates (his colleague and an old lover and fellow conspirator). Madame Liu has turned out to be faithful after all: to her old flame, and to the empire. Despite its seeming erotic pull, the replication process requires no actual sex. The robotic result embodies blackness as both a threat—“a black man!”—and as a black meta-category that can absorb originary identities and act as an agent of social revolution. Like the ant-workers in “The Black Brothers,” the modular unit of blackness can stand in metonymically for a potentially innumerable number of like bodies to inhabit in insurrection. The mobilization of black bodies coded in the manner of primitive objects as instruments of warfare and Japanese conquest differs from the idealist tragedy of “The Black Brothers.” What is consistent is the understanding that black characters have an indeterminacy that allows them to catalyze unrest. In contrast to 1920s and 1930s Japan, in the postwar-era blackness that linked the South Seas to Africa was jettisoned in favor of drawing primarily and overtly on African American cultural forms. Postwar robot blackness draws on a recognizably African American history of collective social movements and is visible in the first robot blockbuster. The postwar mass boom in robots began in 1963 when the animated TV series based on Tezuka Osamu’s beloved Astro Boy (Tetsuwan Atomu, 鉄腕アトム) hit the airwaves on New Year’s Day.48 The opening credit sequence of each episode contains a medley of villains. The metonymic group contains a shot of a tuxedo-clad group of hooded menaces whose visages strongly recall the Ku Klux Klan—not noted for their presence in Japan. Astro Boy is the story of a robot created to replace the son of an élite scientist after his own son dies in an accident while riding in a driverless car. Astro Boy was key in posing the question of how humans ought to use technology

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Legions of KKK-like villians appear in the opening credit sequence of Astro Boy. Rintaro, Koji Bessho, and Mori Masaki. Astro Boy. Fuji TV,. 1963. Television.

and power together in socially responsible ways; the cybernetic “driverless” car showed that machines were absolutely unable to sufficiently monitor themselves to keep alive even the most precious of cargos.49 One way Astro Boy showed a positive relationship between humans and technology was by showing and celebrating how a robot becomes human, and acquires admirable qualities rather than exploitative ones. Vanquishing villains like the KKK is seen as a part of this robot’s mission. Astro, the name in the English version, is “born” from a Frankenstein-like tangle of wires and currents to a father who literally conducts him into being accompanied by a Romantic symphony that is the soundtrack to his manipulation of wires, dials, and circuits. Astro is quickly launched into life and its human demands of scale and appropriate behavior. The anime extends the vitalist concern with robot life through its concern with how the powers of life and death are literally harnessed and distributed—how Astro came into being, and how he distributes his access to power.50 It highlights all the steps and cultural codes that go into being a “human” (boy). He has to master walking, turning off his alarm without smashing it, hand-eye coordination, and other mechanical and perceptual tasks of being human. The one force that seems to come to him hard-wired, though, is a sense of justice. In the saga of Astro Boy, a key moment in Astro’s education comes through solidarity with oppressed and castoff machines. Astro’s father becomes

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enraged that Astro remains small and “won’t” grow beyond his small stature. He sells Astro to the circus where Astro is pitted against other creatures in a fight-to-the-death match. In Astro’s first match, he battles another robot called the Golem. He can’t bring himself to kill the monster, and is banished behind the scenes: “from now on, no more electricity for you!” the circusmaster threatens. He goes on a walk, and meets other robots who are being similarly “starved” and sold for scrap. Here, the script of vitalist energy is updated to include the threat of starvation—one that would have been keen to audiences who lived through wartime and Occupation. Astro has an idea: “Wait, we can share my power!” He juices up all the castoff robots and they regain their full, playful functionalities. The robots’ joy and revitalization results in a parade through the fight arena to the tune of music labeled “Dixieland jazz.” The music actually sounds much more like marching music, as it has an oompah beat and is centered on low brass notes, without the swagger of solos that Dixieland typically boasts. Sequences that follow in the episode use a snare drum, providing a martial backdrop built for walking rather than a festive club-like context. In keeping with the procession of machines who have equal access to resources, all operate at full potential. Astro the energy donor disappears, and jazz as the trope of black freedom is invoked to emphasize a specific vision of democracy based on solidarity.

Robots march in a parade that celebrates their revival after being left for dead by their circusmaster owner. Rintaro, Koji Bessho, and Mori Masaki. Astro Boy. Fuji TV, 1963. Television.

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Regardless of the color of the robot musicians—mostly metal but in gradations from grey to black—the march is coded as African American black New Orleans music which participates in and celebrates this form of ideal collectivity. The robots’ humanity further emerges in another disaster. During an especially risky act, another robot, an “electric cannonball,” falters and gets caught in high-voltage wires, causing an enormous fire.51 Astro is witness to the conflagration, and with the heroic help of the other robots, he rescues not only frightened civilians, but also his oppressive overlord, the circusmaster. While the circusmaster is in the hospital, the new collective of robots organizes and petitions for their own rights— emancipated from their owner. The uprising technically takes place in the name of “human rights,” but bears a strong resemblance to a robot revolution or emancipation. The TV narrates: “. . . and 100,000 robots assembled in the plaza below have just heard the joyous news. They are free. The robot bill of rights, signed this morning, now prohibits the pur---[purchase].” As in the classical twentieth-century robot narratives, robot self-determination works to free the robots from unjust forms of exploitation. While Astro’s initial burst of juice here first gets the robots moving, their uprising emerges from the mass robot brethren as Astro is occupied with heroic business elsewhere. The petitioning robots become not only rights-holders, but hold the moral high ground because they act in a more ideally human manner

The circusmaster watches a TV broadcast that shows one hundred thousand robots assembling for their rights. Rintaro, Koji Bessho, and Mori Masaki. Astro Boy. Fuji TV, 1963. Television.

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than the humans who oppressed them.52 The black robots here are less colleagues in alliance, and more observant strategists who benefit from the leadership of the unmarked robot boy, but then petition their own destiny, one that allows them to be both independent and still in production. Black robot autonomy is successful here in a liberal model of rights-based equality. In contrast to the robots of R.U.R., who were never interested in life after conflict, these robots are interested in collective self-determination after a regime change and major shift in property rights. Over the twentieth century, themes that tie blackness and robots recur: self-determination, the creative powers of neologism, abjection at the hands of racist people and structures, and a tendency to collective belonging and action. Further research is needed to explore the equal and opposite tendencies of the loner robot, the Afrofuturist robot who uses technology to engineer possible futures, and the way that a life force actively gendered masculine is consistently seen in the black robot contrasts with the more tentative, psychologically internal look of the post-1990s Japanese cyborg. The gradations and territories of blackness before and after the war remain distinct—before the war, Japan’s own empire doubled with the imaginary signs of primitivist Africa but also with potential proletarian movements that may override the perceived passivities of Japanese nationalism. After the war, blackness is linked to generative collectivity that requires a jumpstart from a hero who—whoever Astro is—is unmarked by the kinds of histories that shape race into an effective social construct. The robot is at his most suggestive when his actions open up into a larger social form, suggesting a transformation or better future, where losing your chains is mandatory as neither a metaphorical nor a mental act. Notes 1. I would like to thank Iwamasa Shinji, Christine Marran, Cody Poulton, Zelideth Maria Rivas, and Christophe Thouny for their kind and helpful suggestions. 2. See Jacobowitz, “Between Men, Androids, and Robots,” on Meiji-era humanlike constructions, and on Tokugawa-era writer, medical scholar and inventor of the erekiteru (electrostatic generator), Hiraga Gennai, see Jones, “Lying about Flying.” 3. Suzuki, “Garikku shiatā jōei no ‘Jinzō ningen’ no hihyō,” 43. 4. The English translation contained factual mistakes in the original English (e.g., the number of years since Columbus landed in America) that are maintained in the Japanese version, which suggests that the English script was the one Suzuki used. 5. See Powell, “Japan’s First Modern Theater.” 6. Suzuki, “Shogen,” 3. 7. Čapek and Selver, R.U.R., 19. The organization is no doubt modeled on the League of Nations, founded in 1920.

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8. Proletariat literature was inaugurated in 1921 with the journal The Sower (Tane maku hito, 種蒔く人). 9. In the early 1920s, multiple ethnic movements for self-determination drew on the tenets of the Paris Peace Treaty to launch their own programs of ethnic nationalism. In terms of structural discrimination, there is a significant limit to seeing proletarian literature as completely universal in its liberation aims: it did not address the problems of indigenous outcast (buraku) residents. In Japan, the outcast (buraku) liberation organization modeled its own 1922 manifesto and liberation movement on this document, apart from the Communist Party. As people striving to rid themselves of discriminatory associations with beastliness, the last thing buraku activists probably wanted to do was transcend the “human” before they even owned it. The genre of proletarian literature, moreover, never championed the humanist cause of buraku residents, and the two groups would clash well through the 1960s. For a Communist Party history, see Nihon Kyōsantō, Nihon Kyōsantō to dōwa mondai. 10. My preferred print version has this introduction: Engels, Marx, and Hobsbawm, The Communist Manifesto. The manifesto is also available online at Marx and Engels, “Manifesto of the Communist Party.” 11. Talk of the Nation, “Science Diction.” 12. See Suzuki Sadami, “Seimei” de yomu Nihon kindai. 13. Jones, The Racial Discourses of Life Philosophy, 82. 14. Jones also notes that “[t]he fear of ‘becoming automaton’ haunts Bergson’s thought from beginning to end” (85). An “automaton” is a person with robotic characteristics, rather than a robot with human ones. 15. Suzuki Zentarō, “Garikku shiatā jōei no ‘Jinzō ningen’ no hihyō,” 41. On the concept of the “uncanny valley” as it creates a frisson-filled distance between robot and spectator, see Mori, “The Uncanny Valley.” On robots and modern/contemporary theater, see Poulton, “From Puppet to Robot.” 16. Čapek, Robotto, 1. See the analysis of Meiji-era political novels in Mertz, Novel Japanese. 17. Sudo, Nan’yō Orientalism, 37. 18. Relevant episodes are “Betty Boop’s Bamboo Isle” and “You’ll Be Glad When You’re Dead You Rascal You,” both from 1932. 19. LaMarre, “Speciesism, Part I,” 76. 20. LaMarre, “Speciesism, Part I,” 78. 21. A number of sub-genres featuring robots appeared. There were translations of Anglo-American stories, news about robots, and even a robot burlesque. 22. Csicsery-Ronay, Jr., “The SF of Theory: Baudrillard and Haraway.” 23. Csicsery-Ronay, Jr., “Second Beauty: Fictive Novums.” 24. Hornyak, “The Face That Launched a Thousand Robots.” There is no space to discuss it here, but the first robot boom of 1928 saw robot stories and illustrations in a number of popular science publications for both adults and children; these included Kagaku chishiki (Science Knowledge, 科學知識), Kagaku zasshi (Science Magazine, 科學雑誌), and Kodomo no kagaku (Children’s Science, 子供の科學). 25. Harada, “Toyonaka-shi de Ni-Chū yūkō shinpojiamu o kaisai.”

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26. The first story to feature an “artificial human” was Hirabayashi Hatsunosuke’s “The Man-Made Baby” (Jinzō ningen, 人造人間) published in 1928 in the popular monthly magazine Shin seinen. Hirabayashi had co-founded the leading proletariat fiction magazine, Literary Front (Bungei sensen, 文芸戦線). He was a women’s rights supporter whose melodrama places a young ingénue scholar at the center of the story, and turns it into a tragedy of alienation from the process of procreation. A young woman falls in love with her university biology professor, who is married. He convinces a rabidly eager press and pedigreed, anxious academy that he has succeeded in creating life from a chemical solution. In reality, he has gotten his young assistant pregnant, and commits suicide shortly after the child’s birth. The story does not reference race, but it does satirize the frenzy of a national media and scholarly audience for creating forms of artificial life in replicable lab conditions. Hirabayashi Hatsunosuke, “Jinzō ningen.” For a translation, see Hirabayashi, The Man-Made Baby. 27. Hornyak, “The Face That Launched a Thousand Robots.” 28. Hasegawa, “Gakutensoku no ishō to dōsaku—Gakutensoku fukugen ni atatte,” 1. 29. Katsuno, Materializing Dreams, 56. In future work, I hope to further refine the historical meaning of these choices and the understandings of race, territory and evolution the features correspond to. 30. Inoue Haruki, Nihon robotto sōseiki 1920–1938, 128. 31. Fujitani, Splendid Monarchy, 13. 32. This concept has been most articulated in Chinese Daoist studies, due to the influence of Marcel Granet’s La pensée chinoise in 1934; since much of classical Japanese literature contains similar dynamics, the concept is also found in this field. For a broad overview of newer scholarship, see the collection of articles in Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities Bulletin. 33. See examples in Russell, “Race and Reflexivity.” 34. Russell, “Excluded Presence,” 35, 41. 35. Sudo, Nan’yō Orientalism, 39. 36. Their black modularity further corresponds to the logic of realist markers that literary historian Watanabe Naomi refers to as “outwardly legible signs” (shirushi) that marked outcast residents. These signs are a pool of attributes that have different semantic contents, but function in a structurally interchangeable way. See Watanabe, Nihon kindai bungaku to “sabetsu.” 37. Kim, “Tracing the Emperor.” 38. Ema, “Kokujin no kyōdai.” 39. Ema’s most critically regarded work is the mammoth novel he published from 1938–1940 and then revised and republished over forty years, The Mountain Folk ( 山の民). See Schnell, “Ema Shū’s ‘The Mountain Folk.’” The Mountain Folk links Ema’s sustained interest in a peasant rebellion that took place when a new governor arrived in a remote mountain town in Hida at the beginning of the Meiji era. In Scott Schnell’s words, Ema wrote the book in an atmosphere of militarist pressure to show “disturbing parallels between Japan’s incursion into the Asian mainland and the early Meiji government’s autocratic treatment of ‘peripheral’ regions like Hida.” 40. The original reads「なかなか良い」and 「やっぱし、日本の船にしてよ かったな」.

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41. The original reads:「実際、この前イギリスの船ではどえらい目に会っ たからね。ほんとうに白人の船なんかには金輪際乗るもんじゃないよ。」. 42. Unno, “Jinzō ningen satsugai jiken.” 43. See Driscoll, Absolute Erotic, Absolute Grotesque and Silverberg, Erotic Grotesque Nonsense. 44. Unno, “Jinzō ningen satsugai jiken,” 161. 45. Unno, “Jinzō ningen satsugai jiken,” 163. 46. Unno, “Jinzō ningen satsugai jiken,” 167. 47. Unno, “Jinzō ningen satsugai jiken,” 168. 48. The set is available with English dubbing. Astro Boy—Ultra Collector’s Edition DVD Set. 49. The term cybernetics was coined by the mathematician Norbert Wiener in 1948 to refer to self-reflexive elements of machines that would self-monitor their mechanical and electronic processes. 50. Astro Boy, with his sister Uran, is also a long-running scientist columnist in the Yomiuri shinbun newspaper. The Yomiuri was helmed for many years by Shōriki Matsutarō, a major proponent of nuclear energy in Japan. 51. There is a considerable literature on the spectacles of race and ethnicity in mass exhibitions, including those in Japan, and in colonial Japan. See Hotta-Lister, The Japan-British Exhibition of 1910. 52. Much remains to be explored in Tezuka’s conceptions of blackness. His muchloved comic series Black Jack, for instance, features a mercenary hero-surgeon whose face is visibly half black, due to a graft donated from a black friend who died young. And his early manga represent black African characters as primitives, suggesting that western modernity is the great racial equalizer.

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III SOUND, SONG, MUSIC

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8 What Is This “Black” in Japanese Popular Music? (Re)Imagining Race in a Transnational Polycultural Context Kevin Fellezs

“Popular culture, commodified and stereotyped as it often is, is not at all, as we sometimes think of it, the arena where we find who we really are, the truth of our experience. It is an arena that is profoundly mythic. It is a theatre of popular desires, a theatre of popular fantasies. It is where we discover and play with the identifications of ourselves, where we are imagined, where we are represented, not only to the audiences out there who do not get the message, but to ourselves for the first time.” —Stuart Hall, “What Is This ‘Black’ in Black Popular Culture? (Rethinking Race),” 104

J

ero is Japan’s first black enka recording and performing star. Enka is a popular music genre that dominated Japanese popular music through the 1960s and 1970s but remains an important part of Japanese popular culture for reasons I detail below. Jero, né Jerome Charles White, Jr., was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in 1981, the grandson of a Japanese woman, Takiko Kondo, and Leonard Tabb, an African American naval officer, who met and married while Tabb was stationed in Hiroshima, Japan, during WWII. While growing up in Pittsburgh, Jero, who is phenotypically black, participated in hip hop culture primarily as a dancer throughout high school and college. However, he had also been singing enka at home with his Japanese grandmother since he was six years old, initially learning the songs phonetically. Jero actively contests a long history of positioning enka as a distinctly Japanese musical idiom by challenging its construction as the sound of a pre-modern, pre-Western-contact Japan despite its blatant use of West— 169 —

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ern instrumentation and reliance on modern production techniques and technologies. Indeed, Jero presents an unusual case of a person who is unmistakably black, in a phenotypic sense, and yet who seems to have chosen to “pass” as Japanese. With his stardom in a genre popularly thought of as quintessentially Japanese, Jero defies both essentialist black racial ideologies as well as the discourse of Nihonjinron (treatises on being Japanese) in his polycultural enka performances. Yet Jero’s performative displays of Japanese-ness—his bowing low before elderly Japanese, for example—reinforce rather than challenge Japanese cultural norms. It is, rather, his black body in conjunction with his apparent vocal affinities to enka that undercuts Japanese discourse regarding the distinctive inaccessibility of their culture to non-Japanese. In this chapter, I argue that it is within this contradiction that, despite being black and American, Jero’s unlikely turn as an enka star offers a polycultural challenge to think beyond easy correspondences among categories of race, nationality, and musical genre.  I take the idea of the polycultural from Vijay Prashad, who describes it as “a provisional concept grounded in anti-racism rather than diversity [and that] unlike multiculturalism, assumes that people live coherent lives that are made up of a host of lineages—the task of the [scholar] is not to carve out the lineages but to make sense of how people live culturally dynamic lives. Polyculturalism is a ferocious engagement with the political world of culture, a painful embrace of the skin and all its contradictions.”1 Arguing against multiculturalism due to its replacement of cultural for biological essence as a mere masking rather than a substantive re-thinking of race, Prashad asserts that both the “conservative theory of the color blind and the racialist theory of the indigenous, in their own way, smuggle in biological ideas of race to denigrate the creativity of diverse humans.”2 The various tensions Jero’s enka career represents—black skin, Japanese sensibilities, gaijin (non-Japanese foreigner) interloper, American expatriate—may be more ably addressed through a polycultural understanding than attempting to finesse his positioning within the white/black paradigm of normative US race relations. Simon Frith notes in his essay “Music and Identity,” which was published shortly after Hall’s piece, that “while music may be shaped by the people who first make and use it, as experience it has a life of its own.” Frith continues, asserting that “it is easy enough . . . to interpret culture, to read it ideologically, to assign it social conditions.” However, the “difficult trick is to do the analysis the other way round, to show how the base produced this superstructure, to explain why an idea or experience takes on this artistic or aesthetic form, and not another, equally ‘reflective’ or ‘representative’ of its conditions of production.”3 Frith also notes that “the issue is not how a particular piece of music or a performance reflects the people, but how it produces them, how it creates and

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constructs an experience—a musical experience, an aesthetic experience— that we can only make sense of by taking on both a subjective and a collective identity. The aesthetic, to put this another way, describes the quality of an experience (not the quality of an object); it means experiencing ourselves (not just the world) in a different way.”4 One final word from Frith: “If music is a metaphor for identity, then, to echo Marx, the self is always an imagined self but can only be imagined as a particular organization of social, physical and material forces.”5 Rather than aesthetic questions or concern over meanings and interpretations, Frith was writing about “identity produced in performance.”6 While Frith was concerned with large-scale considerations of popular music and identity formation, I am focused on the particulars of Jero, a case study, essentially, to think through Frith’s once-provocative notion that music allows for the construction of an imagined self. Jero tests the limits of the flexibility in the “particular organization of social, physical and material forces” that form the Japanese popular music industry and Japanese musical genres and that may or may not help them imagine a “new self” through musicking—a self that is, in almost every other way, unimaginable. Restating Frith through the particulars of Jero, for instance, we might say, since “the issue is not how a particular piece of [enka] or [enka] performance reflects the people, but how it produces them, how [enka] creates and constructs an experience—a musical experience, an aesthetic experience—that [Jero] can only make sense of by taking on both a subjective and a collective identity. The aesthetic, to put this another way, describes the quality of an experience (not the quality of an object); it means [Jero] experiencing [himself] (not just the world) in a different way.” Enka produces Jero as he “takes on” both a subjective and collective identity through his participation and identification with the genre, or, more concisely, through his enka musicking—a co-constitutive process. What subjective and collective identities might Jero be “taking on” through his enka performances?

Enka Enka holds a unique place in Japanese popular culture. Though enka emerged as protest music by the Freedom and People’s Rights Movement as a way to get around Meiji-era (1868–1912) proscriptions against public political speech, it had been transformed into a popular music genre by the 1960s. Unlike other popular music genres in Japan, both domestic genres such as J-Pop and those imported from America that are often from music that has been racialized as black, enka has not crossed over to any other

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national audience, including the Japanese American audience who have embraced Jero. Japanese Americans do not, for example, represent a significant audience for any other enka performer. It is Jero’s Japanese Americanness that enables his visibility as an enka singer in the United States.7 Why, then, one might ask, didn’t minyo, or folk music (e.g., work songs, fishing songs, planting songs, harvest songs, festival songs), rather than enka, with its overt debt to Western popular music, claim the title Nihon no uta, or “song of Japan”?8 Despite minyo’s folksy authenticity as measured by “its rootedness in amateurism and regionalism,” and the fact that its “status was higher than that of enka and its place more esoteric,” enka would come to play a central role in defining post-WWII Japanese national identity despite its devaluation by “legitimate” cultural agents.9 The period of enka’s greatest popularity, the late 1960s through the 1970s, was also a period when Nihonjinron, or treatises on being Japanese, enveloped the nation as it struggled to define itself in the aftermath of the loss of WWII and the humiliations of the Allied occupation.10 Nihonjinron remains a powerful ideological discourse in Japan with its emphasis on “the special uniqueness of the Japanese almost to the point of characterizing them as a different species of human.”11 Indeed, the continuing fascination with Jero’s pronunciation skills nine years after he first gained notice in Japan speaks to the ways in which his black and American difference remain signs of foreign exceptionalism. With its sentimental view of rural Japanese life and a focused concern with the emotional lives of working class urbanites displaced from their rural childhood surroundings, enka blends Western instrumentation with Japanese vocal traditions and melodic conventions in a sonic melding of modernity and the traditional, bringing the imagined rural spaces of the past into the urban environments in which the majority of enka’s audiences find themselves. Japanese instruments are used as decorative elements in enka even as Western instrumentation is bent to Japanese musical conventions. Moreover, its representation as Nihon no uta developed despite the fact that enka is widely acknowledged as a “commercial music, professionally produced and distributed from urban centers.”12 Still, traditional—that is to say, prenineteenth century—Japanese aesthetics lived through the vocal expression of the enka singers. Following Christine Yano’s analysis, enka lyrics deal primarily with three interrelated themes: furusato (hometown), representing a longed-for rootedness for the displaced urban working class that served as enka’s primary audience; paeans to long-suffering or devoted mothers; and the darker side of romance and sexuality. These themes, particularly furusato, influence the Japanese tendency to hear enka as a uniquely Japanese cultural expression that produces a strong sense of Japanese culture as homogeneous and unitary—a

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view that conveniently ignores Ainu, Okinawan and Korean histories, among others, within Japan. As Joe Wood notes, “Japan incorporated Chinese characters into its alphabet; sushi supposedly comes from Korea; the word arigato comes from obrigado, the Portuguese word for thank you—but the average Japanese still doesn’t think of his or her culture as creolized.”13 Enka bolstered the monoethnic myth through furusato by reassuring Japanese audiences that they remained untouched by the intrusion of foreign influences even as the music, announced through Western instrumentation and popular music conventions, gave the lie to their sense of cultural singularity. Enka’s ability to incorporate seeming incommensurabilities between Japanese and Western music aesthetics can also be seen in the casual “gender” crossing often performed by both female and male singers. While the genre is dominated by female singers, the majority of songwriters, composers, arrangers, producers and management (who hold an inordinate amount of control over their artists’ careers) are male. Importantly, however, singers of both sexes will sing songs written and sung from the perspective of the opposite sex without changing the pronoun of the protagonist of a given song. Other, more explicit sorts of “gender” play have a long history in the Japanese performing arts. A tradition of female impersonators in kabuki known as onnagata serve as precedents for male enka singers, such as Mikawa Kenichi, whose feminine appearance undermines the overwhelmingly patriarchal social order.14 Mikawa and other crossdressing singers’ vocals do not attempt to hide the fact that they are male singers, and it is the juxtaposition of feminine appearance and male-d vocals that give their performances a distinctive frisson for Japanese audiences. Otokoyaku, or females who perform male roles such as those involved in the famous Takarazuka Revue, give another indication of a flexible Japanese conception of gender and sexuality, though both onnagata and otokoyaku occupy marginalized, if often celebrated, positions in the larger social world. Still, the often-effusive homosocial bonding between female fans and otokoyaku or female enka singers indicates a broader female homosociality that runs just beneath the surface of the patriarchal social norms of daily Japanese life.15 Enka continually provides new twists on its nostalgic themes as new enka songs are composed every year with a crop of new singers to sing them. But a reliance on formulaic genre conventions also ensures that a song composed today would not sound out of date on an earlier enka recording.16 At the same time, a thriving natsu-mero, literally, “nostalgia-melody,” market exists in which singers perform cover versions of popular core repertoire similar to the way jazz artists continually mine the “jazz standards” songbook. In fact, most of Jero’s recordings are titled Covers, including his debut, with volume four released in June 2011. Arguably, by presenting his recordings in this

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way, it allowed Japanese enka fans who might hesitate to purchase a CD with a young black man on the cover to see lists of familiar songs and comfortably place him in the natsu-mero subgenre. His ability to sing in familiar, even “traditional,” ways has certainly helped him gain popularity with enka’s core audience. Of course, as a superstar, Jero easily overcomes such reticence today, yet he continues to release “covers.” Nostalgia is not the only way enka reinforces its position as Nihon no uta. Enka stars, in conjunction with their record labels’ fan clubs, integrate themselves into the emotional and personal lives of their fans.17 Magazines devoted to enka and karaoke provide the words and music to would-be enka singers, creating not only a vast market that reaches beyond its fan base to non-fans who sing enka in karaoke bars self-consciously or ironically but also ensuring the maintenance of a knowledgeable audience. Thus, despite a dwindling core audience of middle-aged and elderly women, most Japanese, regardless of their age or taste in music, hear enka as a uniquely Japanese expression and are familiar with its stars, its core repertoire and would find it non-controversial to assert its cultural significance. Still, as Michael Bourdaghs argues convincingly, “Enka emerged as a distinct, somewhat marginalized genre as a result of [rock music’s growing dominance of the commercial music market], one that retained many of the old practices and one that was largely the domain of a well-defined set of record labels devoted to its propagation. In other words, enka is as much a business model as it is a musical genre.”18

From Jerome to Jero Jero actively contests a long history of positioning enka as a distinctly Japanese musical idiom by challenging its construction as the sound of a pre-modern, pre-Western contact Japan despite its blatant use of Western instrumentation and reliance on modern production techniques and technologies. Indeed, Jero’s enka performances demonstrate his desire to transcend phenotype and claim Japanese-ness, contesting the biological determinism that grounds the ways in which racialized thinking about enka inhibits, even prohibits, bodies that are read as non-Japanese from participation in enka and Japanese culture writ large. While most of the commentary in English on Jero has focused on either the Japanese reception to his bid for credibility in a genre thought of as quintessentially Japanese, his stardom as a bridge between generations in Japan, or his more recent embrace by Nisei (second generation Japanese Americans) and hapa (half-Japanese) audiences in the United States, I am more interested in thinking about his attraction for a dated popular music genre that compelled his move to Japan and, more significantly, his move

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into Japanese-ness—Jero’s assumption of an imagined identity that confirms Frith’s argument that music produces its listeners. As mentioned, Jero’s enka singing was strictly a family affair while growing up in Pittsburgh and his friends, while cognizant of his ability to speak Japanese, were kept unaware of his fascination with enka. But after graduating from the University of Pittsburgh with an Information Sciences degree in 2003, Jero immediately moved to Japan with the dream of becoming an enka star. Jero had decided seven years earlier to return to Japan when he visited the country as part of an international speech competition: “[When I visited as a fifteen-year-old] I fell in love with the country and decided [that] everything I wanted to do with my life is in Japan. The day I landed, I went to karaoke [and sang enka].”19 His move came with his adoption of Jero, a nickname his Japanese friends gave him and which, perhaps, by sounding more Japanese, gave him a deeper sense of Japanese-ness. In any case, like many enka hopefuls, he participated widely in the many televised karaoke contests. An appearance on the popular TV show Nodo Jiman (Proud of My Voice) garnered him a JVC recording contract, making him the first professional black enka singer in Japan. Holding a steady day job in the computer industry while he trained with an enka mentor for five years, he released his first single, “Umiyuki (Ocean Snow)” in 2008. He eventually fulfilled a promise to his grandmother by getting invited to participate in the prestigious Kōhaku Uta Gassen, the New Year’s Eve television show that is watched by a majority of the nation’s public and features enka singers as representatives of traditional Japanese culture. Jero’s public confession that his career is dedicated to his Japanese grandmother, who instilled a love of enka music early in his life and witnessed by his teary dedication to her at his Kōhaku Uta Gassen performance, resonates with the middle-aged and elderly female Japanese listeners who comprise the majority of the enka audience. His respectful demeanor, linguistic skills, desire to live in Japan, and obvious love of Japanese culture all serve to justify his black body within the tightly structured and hierarchical world of enka production. For example, young enka artists apprentice to a senior mentor, often sweeping and performing menial chores in the mentor’s household for years before even being allowed to sing. Thus, despite Jero’s early notice in 2003, “Umiyuki” was not released until after Jero completed five years of private enka training. While many enka singers labor for years before becoming stars due to an older guild-like system of hierarchical business practices, Jero managed to bypass the journeyman stage when “Umiyuki” became the highest debut ever recorded on the Oricon charts for an enka title, shooting up to number four in the first week of sales. His career has continued to expand into Japanese television and film.20

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A hip hop intro in “Umiyuki” and its subsequent abrupt shift into more conventional enka territory suggests phenotype is just skin deep but that enka is at the core of Jero’s sound. A slight four-measure introduction of hip hop drum hits and short synthesizer break quickly dissolves into a Japanese shakuhachi (bamboo flute) note that is taken up by an electric guitar. The electric guitar, signifying rock rather than hip hop, has long been incorporated into enka production and does not necessarily mark itself as “non-enka” or “Western.” A clavinet, an instrument associated with 1970s soul and funk music, is buried in the arrangement, appearing and disappearing throughout the track, a presence that lies below the percussion and string sections. In truth, little else in the audio track itself signifies blackness or points to Jero’s blackness apart from the brief introductory material. His singing is in the traditional male enka mode, emotionally charged yet (barely) contained as dictated by the style for male singers. In addition, his bodily stance and posture throughout the majority of the video assumes the still, resolute body positioning of traditional enka male performance style meant to convey an emotional control that might only be betrayed by a single tear or wide vibrato in the voice. Jero’s video, however, cannot help but make visible his black presence and its foreign-ness. His body, clothed in hip hop gear, presents an unambiguous black presence in the video for the song. He is accompanied by two Japanese male dancers, who are also draped in hip hop gear—one with a sideways cocked New York Yankees baseball cap, both in oversized jackets and pants, and wearing athletic shoes; they only appear three times. First, in the brief introduction and, second, in a short dance sequence towards the middle of the song that replaces the serifu (recitative) section of traditional enka song form, in which a singer delivers an emotional recitative related to the song’s narrative. We get, instead, a hip hop dance sequence performed by Jero and his two male companions in a space clearly marked as urban. The cement walls behind them are graffitied with spray-painted hip hop graphics, and the sequence is shot through a chain link fence, implying not only Jero’s trespass into Japanese space but a Japanese viewers’ distance from Jero and his “black enka.” The rest of the video shows Jero performing at an outdoor concert, in a recording studio, and in isolation on a soundstage. The third time we see the other two dancers is a brief moment late in the song when Jero is seen outdoors with them, singing against the graffitied wall of the introduction. For the most part, however, Jero is alone on some kind of stage, reinforcing the performativity of his act and his isolation from Japanese more generally.21 Initially, Jero was reticent to incorporate hip hop dance into enka because he was “afraid people would think of it as a parody, me making fun of enka. I was negative toward it but after doing it and seeing the results, I’m glad

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that I did.” But he sees his hip hop affiliations as being true to himself, asserting a polycultural brand of Japanese-ness, “I’ve been wearing hip hop fashion since I was in high school. Now, if I were to wear a kimono on stage when I sang, no one would take me seriously and it would look more like a parody. That’s something I didn’t want to do. I don’t think I’d look good in a kimono anyway. I’ve never worn one and have no inkling to wear one.”22 As he mentioned in the Washington Post a year later, “I’ve lived in Pittsburgh till [sic] I was 21,” he said. “The kimono was not a part of who I was, and I never actually wanted to wear one. I didn’t want to be someone else when I went on stage. I wanted to be who I was. . . . I wanted to be me. I wanted to be true to myself.”23 In fact, his anxieties about his hip hop clothing was a concern with his reception by older enka singers with their strong sense of tradition: “The main thing I was worried about was not how the audience would perceive me, but how other enka singers would perceive me. I’ve looked up to them and I don’t want them to think I’m making fun of enka or trying to change enka.”24 As he admitted, “Actually, I don’t think I am reinventing the genre. Rather, I hope I am making it something new for younger people to listen to. I’m really just doing something that I loved to do since I was a kid. Not being Japanese is why I am getting a lot of media attention. If I was just another young Japanese enka singer, it wouldn’t be this big. Still, I wish there could be more focus on the music and the songs rather than having people say ‘Americajin enka kashu’ [American enka singer].”25 As noted, he has steadily distanced himself from hip hop, abandoning its sonic language of programmed drum beats as well as its sartorial gear. While he has not donned a kimono in his enka performances, he now sports fashionable formal wear, exchanging his baseball caps for fedoras and outsized hip hop clothes for tailored suits. Additionally, hip hop dancing has all but disappeared from his act, marking his growing distance from youth culture and a more serious attempt to move into the adult world of enka. While his suits are brightly colored ensembles that suggest black American clothing style rather than the somber black and white suits of his Japanese peers, it does reveal a growing conformance to enka priorities.26 These shifts, moreover, indicate a conscious deployment of the tensions between enka’s Japaneseness and his phenotypic blackness as a way to legitimize his position within enka. Importantly, Jero emphasizes his American identity. There is at least one implication for Jero’s emphasis on his nationality as a way to “talk around” his skin color. As a star in a genre that is closely associated with a country that is often criticized for its xenophobia, Jero yet hopes that he can send a positive message to the Japanese people. “I think that me being an American and singing enka might change the perception for a few

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people about their views toward Americans or their views toward blacks,” Jero said. “I would be extremely happy if I can (contribute to) the change in (people’s) way of thinking, or [in] changing some stereotypes as well.”27

Polycultural Enka Jero has envisioned himself as atarashī ningen or “New Human,” wed to internal definitions that do not adhere to conventional or normative narratives, social categories, or concepts of belonging and identification.28 He speaks eloquently of his commitment to life in Japan. Jero is also represented as a happy émigré, a prodigal son, as Christine Yano argues convincingly, to show Japanese how to be “real Japanese.” Jero has vowed to live the rest of his life in Japan as his home base and has confessed that he is happiest when in Japan. However, before celebrating Japanese pluralism, we need to remember that Korean and Filipino entertainers have “passed” as Japanese to enter the lucrative domestic Japanese market since the late nineteenth century and have been significant stars in enka—yet have not managed to make a dent in Japan’s rigid social hierarchy and its investment in the ideology of Nihonjinron. While acknowledging that Jero carries an epidermal difference that always “gives him away” as different, as gaijin, no matter how high his linguistic skills, in the end, as Hall and Frith suggest, the singer has the freedom to (re)imagine himself in the world as open-ended as he is able, but those imaginings can only be realized under conditions he has had little voice in creating. The structure and institutionalization of the Japanese music industry may dictate a short music career for him, in any case, and Jero is making moves similar to other Japanese idols by diversifying into film, television, and other media as a path to a longer public career. To return to the question, “What is this ‘black’ in Japanese popular music?” we might want to reply by reversing the question to “What is this ‘Japanese’ in a black singing body?” As Frith suggests, the question is not so much about teasing out the meaning of “Umiyuki” but in thinking through how “Umiyuki” produces Jero. Clearly, his early sessions with his grandmother—when he was learning enka repertoire phonetically and the only meaning these songs had for him was his grandmother and whatever emotional bond they shared in their time singing together—made him into the singer he is today, a fact that would, perhaps, seem less remarkable if “Jerome” were an R&B singer and had honed his chops in his paternal grandmother’s Baptist church choir. Enka produced Jero even as he made choices that led to a highly successful professional enka singing career in Japan.

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Jero can also be seen as a manifestation of the mukokuseki (“statelessness”) ideal. Mukokuseki is a cosmopolitanism usually registered at the level of consumption that has become a cliché of postmodernity. For example, writer W. David Marx: “In Tokyo, the following are all pedestrian: sips from a Mauritanian vanilla milk tea at a Continental café under the soothing pulse of bossa nova; glimpses at a kanji-coated article about a Hollywood-funded Hong Kong director; calls on a Korean phone and music on a Chinese-built, American-designed iPod as the Japanese train passes Belgian designer boutiques, German bakeries, and British pubs.”29 We can add Jero to that list, producing and produced by subjective identities imagined through engagements with enka, the obedient grandson, returning home to fulfill familial obligations. Against this cultural and historical backdrop I have outlined, it is notable that Jero has made his way back to the United States for tours and personal appearances as Nisei have begun to embrace him. According to the Berkeley Japan New Vision Award from the University of California, Berkeley’s Center for Japanese Studies, “the award was established in 2009 to award an individual who has, in recent times, dramatically transformed our vision of Japan. Singing traditional Japanese ballads in an American idiom, not only has Jero rekindled an interest in enka among the younger generation of Japanese but he has also opened up the possibilities for fluent Japanesespeakers from around the world [to break] into the entertainment and other industries in Japan. Given his mixed-race background, he has also become a symbol for the acceptance of a more multiethnic society for 21st-century Japan.”30 Yano makes the same point in a recent talk in which she characterizes this move as the return of a prodigal son to his motherland who teaches the Japanese about becoming a multicultural community.31 Thus, for Japanese and Nisei alike, Jero represents both a youthful turn for enka as well as a reinforcement of its central position within Japanese popular music culture. But it is Jero’s construction as the symbol of an emergent recognition of Japan’s pluralism that most clearly rubs against the representation of enka as Nihon no kokoro, or the “heart and soul of Japan.” In fact, while Nisei and immigrant Japanese audiences have embraced him, it is still unclear whether he announces a broadened conception of Asian American. In research found in the anthology, Asian American Identities: Beyond the Hyphen, for example, while the contributors do an admirable job of dislocating Asian American-ness from imposed identities, especially as constructed as liminal, always-alien, and between black and white racial formations, a space for someone like Jero who, in many ways, is not seeking to be “Asian American” but “Japanese,” remains to be seen.32 The crosscultural dialogue his presence promises is often denied by his emphasis on his Japa-

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nese-ness with little said about any attachment to black America, culturally or politically. In fact, there is little made of America at all in his public appearances beyond being mentioned as the place of his birth. His immersion in and commitment to his life in Japan—he has stated publicly that he will remain living there and has no plans for a return to the United States—undermine the kind of solidarity Japanese Americans might desire with Japanese. Indeed, his stardom has yet to ease Japanese attitudes towards blacks in general. As mentioned, most of the commentary has been focused on his relationship with enka, Japanese fans and Japanese Americans. However, I would like to briefly think through his relation to blackness and US American blackness in particular. To start, black American reception has not been as welcoming. Kokujin Tensai (Black Genius), an aspiring African American rap artist in Japan, challenged Jero’s re-working of enka in a video: I got somethin’ I want to say. Right now, in Japan, there is a famous black guy that can speak Japanese. That person’s name? Jero. Pronounced in English? Jerome. Jerome, what’s good for ya nigga? I got some words for ya bro. You ready? You feel me? I’m gonna ask a question so Japanese people can understand you. [in Japanese] Number one. Why you dressin’ hip hop when you sing enka? You stupid or something? I don’t get it at all. How about at least wearin’ a kimono? Hip hop equals rap.33

A pair of African American YouTube reviewers question the entire Jero project.34 As one states succinctly, “[Jero is] breaking down the walls nobody wants to break down.” Jero has not commented publicly to Kokujin Tensai (or any of his black detractors) but the difference in reception—as well as the Japanese and Nisei press’s emphasis on his Japanese-ness and a reluctance to fully engage his biracial status—indicates the way in which the downplaying of his blackness in order to market himself as Japanese creates tensions for which normative racialist thinking cannot account. In fact, Jero’s desire to live and “turn Japanese” may cloak his determination to “escape” blackness in some way. Importantly, he has never indicated publicly any inclination to forge links to black audiences in Japan or America. We can see this tension in a series of commercials for Marukan instant ramen in which he is positioned as “Japanese yet not-Japanese.” He is dressed atypically in a kimono, though with a baseball cap and do-rag, loudly slurping his noodles the “Japanese way” and is properly acquiescent to an elder enka star, Kobayashi Sachiko, in one of the ads. However, in an ad in which there is a flirtatious undercurrent to his interactions with a young Japanese female—also, notably, dressed in a kimono—his alterity is highlighted through

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his embarrassed reaction to the woman’s smile at the end of the ad. It is also noteworthy that they are both ostensibly enjoying a New Year’s fireworks display, signaling both the long-standing visual trope of attraction setting off fireworks between lovers as well as recognizing the importance of New Year’s for Japanese, emphasizing once again the very Japanese-ness Jero represents despite his black skin, sideways cocked baseball hat and white do-rag. But rather than trying to account for a bifurcated identity, might Jero’s enka performances be thought of more productively as instantiations of Vijay Prashad’s description of the polycultural? Using Prashad’s template allows us to see the ways in which the Japanese reception of Jero’s multilineal descent and cultural hybridity is part of the longer history of hāfu marginality and fascination in Japan as well as the troubled relationship between African Americans and Asian Americans, immigrants as well as native-US born.35 Jero’s enka performances act as an abridgement of the ways in which a polycultural analytic productively disturbs ideas of a cohesive racial identity based on phenotype or ethnic identity based on cultural affinities that have been constructed by both anti-racist, progressive struggles for equality as well as the exclusionary Japanese sensibilities as expressed in Nihonjinron. Jero, for obvious commercial as well as deeply felt personal reasons, has chosen to highlight his connections to Japanese culture through his deep love and affection for his Obāsan (grandmother) and Okāsan (mother). Pointedly, he was raised biculturally in a home in which Japanese lifeways dominated and its familiarity belied the way he looked in the mirror. His love of hip hop, in other words, never negated or blunted his love of enka. These seeming incompatibilities were comfortably merged in his early enka career as displayed in “Umiyuki,” in which the hip hop intro and the hip hop dancing break provided him with a springboard for his current trajectory of embracing a more cosmopolitan sensibility that enlarges his articulation of Japanese-ness. In fact, his blend of an urbane sophistication, racial/ethnic mixture, and choice of genre in which to pursue a professional singing career speaks to one possibility for polycultural positionings. And yet, Jero’s rejection by some blacks—and, let’s be clear, even beyond the anecdotal evidence I present here, the African American media seems little interested in any enka singer, no matter what she or he looks like—rely on notions of a racialist authenticity, causing them to reject his multivalent display of polyculturality. This lack of recognition, for the most part, from black America augurs less the utopic desire of Yukiko Koshiro’s “hope and desire [that] translating African American impacts on Japanese history . . . as a central theme [suggest] that trans-Pacific relations have been and will be full of hope and visions for the Afro-Asian century” than an inertial reluctance for some African Americans to accept a broader, more inclusive conception

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of blackness.36 As a performance of polyculturality, Jero is a case example of how the polycultural pushes against the notion that there are “correct” and “incorrect” ways of being black by demonstrating, instead, that there are ways to live in black skin that are neither “tomming” gestures of black denial nor ghettocentric tropes of “bein’ real, yo.” Still, most of the literature on biraciality or mixed race identity are concerned with mixtures of black and white. The literature on marriages between blacks and Japanese focus primarily African American men and Japanese women, but Jero would seem to be an outlier here, as well. Christine C. Iijima Hall, speaking directly to Jero’s particular mixture, writes, after noting that black Asian Americans experience difficulty being accepted by African Americans as “real blacks,” adds that “Asian communities have also been unaccepting of racially mixed individuals. Asians have traditionally not seen mixed race Asians as ‘real Asians.’ This is especially true for African American-Asians. For example, the Japanese American community had denied the racial heritage of mixed Japanese children until the 1970’s when the number of interracial marriages and offspring nearly outnumbered the number of Japanese-Japanese marriages and children.”37 For obvious reasons, there is little mention in the literature of those who decide to “pass” as non-black despite black skin coloration. Passing has typically been characterized as the movement from black to white where racial privilege and social mobility are understandably powerful motivations for obscuring one’s blackness. But this is successfully accomplished only by persons with light-colored skin. There is also a long history of whites’ desires for ethnic acculturation or, less kindly, for easy claims to “go native” or, more to the point here, “become Negro” as evidenced by jazz musicians such as Mezz Mezzrow or exemplified by Norman Mailer’s “white Negro” beatniks. However, to reiterate, Jero presents an unusual case of a person who is unmistakably black choosing to “pass” as Japanese, defying both essentialist black and Japanese racializing ideologies through his polycultural enka performances. In closing, I want to suggest that Jero is more courageous, more inventive and more attuned to the liberatory potential of an increasingly globalized culture in which Japanese youth mimic black Americans through their participation in hip hop culture and their consumption of Hollywood films while black Americans listen to J-Pop, read manga, watch anime and participate in cosplay. The embodiment of fluid identity sounded out in a song form foreign to his birthplace yet a significant part of his home culture, Jero embodies the polycultural with both its promise of moving beyond racialist ideologies as well as its peril of social alienation. His acknowledgement that he may always hold an alien gaijin position in Japan does not deter him from producing enka that is not only true to its traditions but also true to his inner sense of himself.

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Jero’s performances of enka show us that negotiating the “painful embrace of the skin and all its contradictions” can expand current notions of identity and identity formation that better reflect the multiple lineages we all share. For despite enka’s hybrid aesthetic that has been constructed as uniquely representative of Japanese-ness and a recent biography of the singer entitled Enka Transcends Borders: African-American Singer Jero and a Family History Spanning Three Generations that positions him firmly as gaijin, Jero has boldly equipped himself as a polycultural explorer.38 His journey does not merely bridge the generational gap in enka audiences (though it surely does that, as well), nor is it enacted in order to grant Japanese Americans, who are considered gaijin in Japan regardless of “blood relation,” a place at the Japanese banquet. Rather, Jero has set out to explore the unmarked territories of the racial imaginary by transforming the songs his grandmother taught him into a polycultural enka, a music formed out of the contradictions and confluences between sound and skin.

Notes 1. Prashad, Kung-Fu Fighting, pp. xi–xii. 2. Ibid., p. xi. 3. Frith, “Music and Identity,” p. 109. 4. Ibid., p. 109. First emphasis added, second emphasis in original. 5. Ibid., pp. 109–10. 6. Ibid., p. 115. 7. By contrast, Japanese Americans are considered by the Japanese as distant cousins at best, and are more typically regarded as gaijin, or foreigners—a group as distinct from the Japanese as any other nationality or ethnicity. Though it may also hold, as Carolyn Stevens notes, that “a third-generation Japanese living in the United States whose Japanese is rudimentary holds less claim to Japanese cultural identity than a Japanese national who has lived his/her entire life in Japan, but holds more claim to Japanese identity than a foreigner who was born and raised in Japan.” 8. I am indebted to enka scholar Christine Yano for her cogent study of the genre and borrow liberally from her work in tracing the genre’s broad outlines in this section of the chapter. 9. Yano, Tears of Longing, p. 18. 10. Besides Yano, see Stephen Murphy-Shigematsu, “Multiethnic Japan and the Monoethnic Myth,” and Kenji Kaneko, “Constructing Japanese Nationalism on Television: The Japanese Image of Multicultural Society.” John Russell also comments on Nihonjinron in “Narratives of Denial: Racial Chauvinism and the Black Other in Japan.” Japan Quarterly 38, no. 4 (1991), pp. 416–28; and in “The Other Other: The Black Presence in the Japanese Experience” in Japan’s Minorities: The Illusion of Homogeneity, edited by Michael Weiner (London: Routledge, 2009 [1997]): 84–115.

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11. Murphy-Shigematsu, “Multiethnic Japan,” p. 66. 12. Yano, Tears of Longing, p. 18. 13. Wood, “Yellow Negro,” p. 63. 14. Indeed, there are a number of crossdressing male stars in Japan such as Miwa Akihiro, who are given license to be publicly critical of politicians and other public figures. 15. One can also observe this tight-knit homosociality, for example, in the overwhelmingly Japanese female world of hula in Japan. 16. Christine Yano borrows and develops the term “kata” [form] to think about “codified gestures” within enka. The term is borrowed from Japanese martial arts that refers to a series of choreographed moves that have developed over the centuries by martial artists in order to build in muscle memory for fundamental offensive and defensive moves. It is similar to the ways and reasons given to drummers who receive formal training when they are introduced to military rudiments. 17. Record labels, and not the fans themselves, initiate and organize fan clubs and their activities. 18. Bourdaghs, Sayonara Amerika, p. 71. 19. Hamamoto, “Enka Singer,” online, emphasis added. 20. Oricon is the Japanese equivalent of the Billboard charts. 21. A paper presented at the 2010 Society of Ethnomusicology conference by Shelley Brunt, “Black Tears, Black Songs?: Image-Making, Race, and Cultural Identity in a Case Study of the Hip-Hop ‘Enka’ Singer Jero,” demonstrated convincingly that the iconographic use of the various Japanese scripts throughout the video also signaled Jero’s foreign-ness. 22. Bestros, “Mix,” online. 23. Ruane, “Unlikely,” online, emphasis added. 24. Ito, “American,” online. 25. Bestros, “Jero,” online. 26. An important exception to this is the flamboyant enka star, Kiyoshi Hikawa, dubbed the “Prince of enka,” a reference to the equally colorful mixed-race pop star, Prince Rogers Nelson. 27. Ito, “American,” online, parentheses in original. 28. I use the term atarashī ningen instead of shinjinrui, “new humankind,” to distinguish Jero’s polycultural positioning from the latter term’s use to describe Japanese youth of the 1980s “boom” years. 29. W. David Marx, “Manifesto,” Néojaponisme, http://neojaponisme.com/cate gory-about/manifesto/ (accessed February 25, 2014). 30. Kathleen Maclay, UC Berkeley News Center, http://newscenter.berkeley .edu/2011/04/04/jero-berkeley-japan-award/ (accessed September 13, 2011). 31. Manuscript sent to author, courtesy of Yano. See also Kenji Kaneko, “Constructing Japanese Nationalism on Television,” and Yuya Kiuchi, “An Alternative African American Image in Japan.” 32. See, in particular in light of the present essay, LeiLani Nishime’s “‘I’m Blackanese’: Buddy-Cop Films, Rush Hour, and Asian American and African American Cross-Racial Identification.” Nishime’s insightful analysis of the film Rush Hour ex-

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plores the ways in which the film “both offers up and forecloses on the pleasures and possibilities of cross-racial bonding and identification.” In Jero’s case, this possibility is embodied within a single actor who arrives as a result of one kind of cross-racial bonding, if not identification. 33. Kokujin Tensai continues: “Number two. ‘Umiyuki.’ It’s a sad song. Sad. Makes you cry. Why you dancing hip hop to a sad song? Ughh, Jero. I’m a little disappointed. Number three. I’m challenging you. Listen to my voice, Jero. A challenge. I’ll make an enka song, you make a rap. The viewers will decide who is the best. Whether you accept it or not depends on if you got the balls, right? There’s no way you can beat me!” 34. View at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b0HK28muI-o&feature=results_ video&playnext=1&list=PL890B9D6E35643CA7. 35. I am thinking here of the so-called riots following the rendering of the Rodney King verdict in Los Angeles in 1992 in which Korean storeowners were singled out by African Americans. See Dae Young Kim and L. Janelle Dance, “Korean-Black Relations: Contemporary Challenges, Scholarly Explanations, and Future Prospects.” 36. Koshiro, “African American Impact,” p. 441, reordered wording for clarity. 37. Hall, 228. Hall refers readers to Velina Houston and Teresa Williams-Leon, “No Passing Zone: The Artistic and Discursive Voices of Asian-Descent Multiracials,” Amerasia Journal, v23n1 (1997), pp. vii–xii. 38. Title published by Iwanami Publishers in March 2011.

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9 Extending Diaspora The NAACP and Up-“Lift” Cultures in the Interwar Black Pacific Shana L. Redmond

The Negro’s gift of music has been almost entirely overlooked . . . yet, it is the magic thing by which he can bridge all chasms. —James Weldon Johnson

B

y the late 1920s, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) was the primary Black political organization in the United States, having survived the surveillance and censure that ended the mass mobilization of its contemporary, the powerhouse Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA). In the wake of that organization’s demise, the NAACP stepped in to recuperate the political energy of the Black community and use it toward their project of racial uplift. With “Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing” as their anthem, the organization distanced itself from a Black nationalist frame, choosing instead an agenda of social welfare and interracial political campaigning to be recognized the world over. An opportunity for translation and global community building through “Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing” soon appeared, and in the process the concepts and practices of diaspora were expanded and contested. As the NAACP leader and anthem co-author James Weldon Johnson believed, the “Negro problem . . . is and always has been a series of shifting interracial situations” negotiated by the African descended in every location in which they are present or, I would add, imagined.1 Eastern Asia was an important site of interracial experimentation that manifested itself robustly through various political exchanges, many of them also cultural. As Etsuko Taketani notes, “the racialized Pacific that emerged as a battlefield during World War II is envisioned as an international milieu — 187 —

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belonging simultaneously to multiple peoples and histories influenced (if to a less conspicuous degree than was the Atlantic) by black experience and crossings.”2 One decade prior to the second Great War Black political culture was sent across the western ocean, sonically manifesting the struggles of the NAACP through a Japanese translation of “Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing.” This exchange with Japan is exemplary for its ability to display the tensions that underlay early twentieth-century African American identifications with imperial Japan—tensions that not only implicated Black US communities but also exposed the adoption and exhibition of Black caricature by the Japanese. Even in contradiction this alliance also models the political desires motivating racial formation and how new solidarities developed across the Pacific and greater Afro-Asian world. The anthem’s travel to Japan was a negotiation that evidences the spread of Black protest traditions in excess of the nation and documents Black music as a global archive that labored to develop robust radicalisms and diasporas of political thought and performance during that generation’s Great Depression.

Histories of Origin: The Brothers Johnson and “Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing” The history of the NAACP reads as a catalogue of Black leadership in the twentieth century. From its roots in the exclusively Black male Niagara Movement of 1905, to its integration in 1909, through the decades of a progressive US civil rights movement, the names W. E. B. Du Bois, Walter White, Rosa Parks, and Roy Wilkins serve as a genealogy for the NAACP and document but a few of the many icons of modern Black intellectual and activist practice.3 Its uplift mission of thrift and chastity, education and entrepreneurship, was intended to encourage the financial and representational development and diversification of Black communities, but it also highlighted the organization’s deeply embedded class politics that effectively divided blackness along economic lines.4 Though its rhetoric had the potential to exclude, the NAACP developed a culture early on in its history that made it a force to be reckoned with, artistically, socially, and politically. In addition to its popular, international arts magazine the Crisis, it was the music of the movement—the sound that resisted printing—that served to unite the cultural and the political in the lives of its participants. The song that inspired the masses of the NAACP was James Weldon and J. Rosamond Johnson’s “Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing.” The adoption of “Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing” by the NAACP is a history with little clarity. Some sources locate its adoption in 1919, others in 1920.

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According to the documentation left behind, it was not until February 1921 that philanthropist and chairman of the board Joel E. Spingarn appointed a committee to brand the national NAACP with a song. Approximately seven months after the UNIA adopted its anthem “Ethiopia (Thou Land of Our Fathers),” Black Swan founder Harry Pace, Spingarn, and James Weldon Johnson gathered to find its equivalent for the NAACP.5 In order to do so, the committee went back in time. Like that of so much of Black music, the genesis of “Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing” was locally situated in response to the needs of a particular community. As the 1899 anniversary of Abraham Lincoln’s birthday approached, a group of young men in Jacksonville, Florida, gathered to plan its celebration. James Weldon was approached to offer an address, and after accepting he decided to write a poem in commemoration. Failing in his attempt at the project, he instead turned to his classically trained musician brother (John) Rosamond for assistance, and together they “planned to write a song to be sung as a part of the exercises. We planned, better still to have it sung by schoolchildren—a chorus of five hundred voices.” James Weldon described the unfolding process: I got my first line: Lift ev’ry voice and sing. Not a starting line; but I worked along grinding out the next five. When, near the end of the first stanza, there came to me the lines: Sing a song full of the faith that the dark past has taught us. Sing a song full of the hope that the present has brought us. The spirit of the poem had taken hold of me. I finished the stanza and turned it over to Rosamond. In composing the two other stanzas I did not use pen and paper. While my brother worked at his musical setting I paced back and forth on the front porch, repeating the lines over and over to myself, going through all of the agony and ecstasy of creating. As I worked through the opening and middle lines of the last stanza: God of our weary years, God of our silent tears, Thou who has brought us thus far on our way, Thou who hast by Thy might Let us into the light, Keep us forever in the path, we pray; Lest our feet stray from the places, our God, where we met Thee, Lest, our hearts drunk with the wine of the world, we forget Thee. . . . I could not keep back the tears, and made no effort to do so. I was experiencing the transport of the poet’s ecstasy. Feverish ecstasy was followed by the contentment—that sense of serene joy—which makes artistic creation the most complete of all human experiences.6

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From this catharsis stemmed one of the most celebrated songs of the next fifty years. By changing the composition from a poem to a song, Johnson acknowledged the necessity and power of collective performance. The use of plural nouns—“our,” “us,” “we”—prioritizes and privileges assembly and places the history of Black struggle and victory in the hands of a collective. Rosamond’s composition in four-part harmony concretizes the necessity of cooperation in the success of the song’s vision and performance. Their piece, which began as “an effort made under stress and with no intention other than to meet the needs of a particular moment,” became that which surpassed all else in his repertoire. James Weldon ultimately believed that “nothing that I have done has paid me back so fully in satisfaction as being the part creator of this song.”7 The text of “Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing” exhibits literature scholar Richard Long’s contention that James Weldon’s “early verse was a species of propaganda, designed sometimes overtly, sometimes obliquely, to advance to a reading public the merits and the grievances of blacks.”8 Through “Lift,” James Weldon highlighted the shared conditions experienced by Black people and championed the strength and resolve of the collective to persevere through them. Stony the road we trod Bitter the chastening rod Felt in the days when hope unborn had died; Yet with a steady beat Have not our weary feet Come to the place for which our fathers sighed? We have come over a way that with tears has been watered We have come, treading our path thro’ the blood of the slaughtered Out of the gloomy past Till now we stand at last Where the white gleam of our bright star is cast.

In his recounting of a bloody past, James Weldon suggests that it is through song—lifting our voices to sing—that the Negroes in America most potently articulated their plight and their triumph. His recent success as a poet (with the 1899 publication of the dialect poem “Sence You Went Away”) was translated in “Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing” into a sonic literacy, which mitigated against the structural mis/undereducation of Black people in the post-Reconstruction United States. Through adjusting the method of delivery from text to sound, James Weldon ensured that the historical progress that he championed would have a structure, a pace, and a deeper and longer-lasting resonance than his individual address or poem may have allowed.

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Musically, “Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing” exhibits components of the spirituals so diligently anthologized by the Johnson brothers. Relatively simple melodic lines and strong chord accompaniment mimic the reliance on the oral tradition in Black music (versus a literate tradition). Rosamond uses his accompaniment and vocal harmonies to highlight the meaning of the text. The first measure of the vocal line is a half measure and offers a running start to the A-flat major key signature, with the text “lift ev’-ry” notated by three eighth notes in the 6/8 time signature. While the song was written in 6/8, its performance follows a 12/8 phrasing, placing it alongside the Black gospel tradition that was growing in dynamic ways at this very moment. This quick introduction leads the vocalist to a strong tonic chord on the downbeat of measure 2. The melodic emphasis lands on the word “voice” with “and sing” (measures 10 and 11) following as long notes (dotted quarter notes). This is the dominant rhythm that follows throughout the text in four-part harmony until the listener reaches a moment of unison in measure 24 with the text “sing a song full of the faith that the dark past has taught us.” This portion of the song is carried in a full-bodied unison in the middle to low vocal range. In the following line, “sing a song, full of the hope that the present has brought us,” “song” is emphasized with a flat sixth as the tempo quickens into a crescendo and returns to a four-part harmony at “brought” with a fermata (untimed hold) at “us.” The flat sixth introduces the listener to the changes from the “dark past” to the hope of the present, and the return to a collective four-part is one of deliverance as singers and audience revel together in what “the present has brought us.” To hold the “us” on a fermata signals its eternal construction, the ways in which Black people will be held together forever, outside of time. Following the hymn tradition, Rosamond ends the piece with a dramatic, prolonged seven chord that resolves into the major I, placing victory and harmony at the end of his piece.9 The composition of “Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing” emerged from a profound insight in which James Weldon realized “the importance of the American Negro’s cultural background and his creative folk-art” and, perhaps appropriating the theory of Karl Marx, began to “speculate on the superstructure of conscious art that might be reared upon them.”10 He and Rosamond soon decided that this grand “superstructure” could not be built nor properly nourished in their native Jacksonville, and the brothers descended on New York City with every intention of building a career in musical theater. Considering James Weldon’s investment in the political ends of artistic innovation he could not have arrived at a better time. He noted that “[b]y 1900 the Negro’s civil status had fallen until it was lower than it had been at any time following the Civil War,” leading the race to be “surrendered to Disfranchisement and

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Jim-Crowism, to outrage and violence, to the fury of the mob.”11 In response, Black artists, particularly those of the musical stage, conceived of and enacted an agenda of supreme artistry in order to advance the race, and these were the men whom the Johnson brothers came to know and collaborate with while in New York: comedic musician Bob Cole, duo Bert Williams and George Walker, comedian Ernest Hogan, art composers Will Marion Cook and Harry T. Burleigh, and poet Paul Laurence Dunbar. This group of “postslavery Black composers—i.e., those born before 1900”—were, according to musicologist Lucius Wyatt, “nationalists in the sense that they consciously turned to the folk music of their people as a source of inspiration for their compositions.”12 In so doing, they developed multidimensional representations of Black people to compete with the primitivist, native, and minstrel stereotypes that characterized American popular theater and culture. According to literature and performance scholar Daphne Brooks, this cohort used their hyphenated identities to construct a “kind of Afro-diasporic alienation effect,” thereby engaging in questions of “how and in what ways to articulate the dissonant multivocality of black identity in performance space.”13 The Johnson brothers modeled this preoccupation with voices, identity, and performance through “Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing,” a sonic text that complicated representations of Black people’s relationship to and enactments of history and citizenship. By adjusting the images and sound of Black people within the context of a booming national leisure culture, historian Karen Sotiropoulos argues that James Weldon and his contemporaries became the “artistic arm of race leadership at the turn of the century.”14 Their “love for the race,” as Walker described it, led them to “feel that in a degree we represent the race and every hair’s breadth of achievement we make is to its credit.”15 His sentiments reflect the paradigm of uplift institutionalized by the NAACP and other race organizations of the period, materializing it as both organizing frame and performative act. The methods of resistance employed by Black performers, composers, and writers, including “parody—inversion, reversal, and ‘signifying,’”16 were intended to mean something to those who viewed their performances. Whether it was through a critique of the Black elite or derision of white racism, these compositions and performances created a bridge between the quotidian and the utopian for Black citizens. This turn-of-the-century period is therefore essential for the study of Black politico-cultural formations and highlights James Weldon’s unique role in them. During the course of his seven-year career with J. Rosamond and Bob Cole in Cole & Johnson, James Weldon produced over two hundred songs and expanded his intellectual and artistic horizons by entering prominently into the political sphere. A devout Republican, James Weldon used his political ties to move about the western hemisphere after

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ending his professional affiliation with Cole & Johnson, in the process developing a complex perspective of power and difference on a global scale. In 1906 he accepted a federal position as consul at Venezuela (1906–1909) and later Nicaragua (1909–1913), where he likely overlapped with the enterprising and migratory (although then unknown) Marcus Garvey. While in Nicaragua he also married his longtime sweetheart Grace Nail and continued writing, publishing his classic Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man anonymously in 1912. A twist of electoral fate that same year beckoned James Weldon back to New York as contributing editor to the oldest of New York’s Black newspapers, the New York Age. From this position, Johnson would “become visible as a national race leader” through columns that offered his social and political philosophy.17 His reputation with the New York Age was precisely the platform needed to gain the attention of the burgeoning NAACP. James Weldon’s role in the organization took off in 1916 when he was an invited participant in the first Amenia meeting, an interracial conference at the New York estate of liberal philanthropist Joel E. Spingarn. Dedicated to “questions relating to the Negro,” this event included early NAACP leaders, including Du Bois, and occurred during an escalation of war in Europe and domestic anxieties over the mass movement of Black bodies from South to North as well as from South and North to the West. Obviously impressed by James Weldon, Spingarn quickly followed the conference with an invitation to join the staff of the NAACP. Johnson recalled that Spingarn’s offer “was in line with destiny,” and with a strong sense of fortuitousness on his side he accepted the position of field secretary, a new position within the organization created by the Board of Directors in 1916.18 Johnson’s primary goal was to grow the membership. Low in funds and low in numbers, the NAACP struggled in its early years to build a reputation. What effort was made in that arena was due to the only tool at their disposal: agitation. Similar to the early work of the UNIA, the NAACP used public meetings, the Crisis, pamphlets, and any other open forum available to spread their message. The odds were against Johnson as the only paid staff person with the explicit job of traveling to gain membership. During his NAACP membership drive in the South, Johnson encountered individuals who, while not necessarily knowledgeable of the NAACP, knew of him—through his popular songs, Broadway fame, and writing. Quite often, however, it was “Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing” that built the acquaintance between Johnson and his southern constituency. The oral traditions of the South made his anthem a prominent cultural text prior to its adoption by the NAACP, demonstrating the organization that already existed in the South. Johnson corresponded with southerners like Mrs. Effie T. Battle, a studentteacher living in Boston, who claimed to have “taught [the] National Negro

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Anthem to thousands of Negro children in Dixie.”19 Her statement evidences the underappreciated work of women—especially southern women teachers—who offered Johnson and the NAACP their greatest resource: word of mouth. By teaching and performing the anthem in the 1910s and 1920s, they also carried the seeds of Black political organization, which would grow and connect them to the national organization upon adoption of the anthem by the NAACP in 1921. “Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing” had the southern presence that the NAACP lacked, and its performance at association functions built upon two decades of memories prior to the NAACP’s arrival. As sociologists Ron Eyerman and Andrew Jamison document, the memories associated with music are often as significant as the music in the contemporary moment because they remain as a “potential way to inspire new waves of mobilization.”20 In this regard, Black southerners already had a relationship with Johnson, and the NAACP’s adoption of this piece that had so long been a part of southern culture was an inviting and mobilizing feature for future members. As the ample correspondence received by Johnson about the anthem attests, musical performance was a litmus test for experiments in interracial cooperation. “Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing” exposed the power dynamics that determined the nation’s character, and despite numerous local battles over its use, reception, and performance, it traveled beyond the US South and into the global arena, feeding other challenges and victories.

Japan’s Muse: Afro-Nippon Relations and the Reach of Black Music In 1933, James Weldon Johnson received a letter from Yasuichi Hikida, a Japanese immigrant to New York City. Hikida arrived in the United States in 1920 and quickly familiarized himself with the functions of Black American organizations, first among them being the NAACP. By the time of his letter, he was a longtime member of the association and had attended numerous events in Harlem, twice meeting Johnson at organization functions. He worked at the Japanese consulate in New York City for a brief period as well, foreshadowing the crucial synergies at play between his work with Black Americans and his work for Japan. Hikida took advantage of the extended Black activist channels in the city through friendships with NAACP leader Walter White and Puerto Rican intellectual and bibliophile Arturo Schomburg as well as by attending cultural events within the community, including a Paul Robeson concert at Town Hall. But it was his association with the NAACP that offered him his first acquaintance with “Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing,” by then known as the Negro National Anthem.21 Hikida recounted this event:

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It was during the Springfield Conference of NAACP that I was impressed and thought so much of “Lift Every Voice.” I heard the song many times before 1930, but it was at that time when I felt its great beauty and force; and thought its significance to the life of the American Negro. How, evening after evening . . . I enjoyed, and moved, and impressed [sic]! I thought [to] myself that it would be a wonderful thing to introduce the song to Japan.22

Hikida’s letter outlined a plan, with Johnson’s permission, to translate “Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing” into Japanese. As expressed here, he recognized the song’s “significance to the life of the American Negro” and was confident that a similar effect could be had in Japan. Hikida’s belief that this song would be a factor abroad is a reflection of the cross-cultural and diasporic exchanges that the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s helped to initiate and the Great Depression of the 1930s reinforced worldwide. The work of developing Afro-Japanese relationships was in motion for many years prior to 1933. Historian Reginald Kearney argues that between 1900 and 1945 “black intellectuals, who differed sharply from one another regarding domestic goals and strategies for black advancement, were in basic agreement that Japan’s achievements on the world scene were good for peoples of color everywhere.”23 African American leaders W. E. B. Du Bois, Mary Church Terrell, Booker T. Washington, and Walter White were among those sympathetic to or active in the causes of the Japanese in this period. Marcus Garvey was awed by the military prowess of the Japanese and imagined their crucial role in the fight for Black liberation.24 After the Japanese victory in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–1905, Japan was seen as a contender in global power struggles, and the fact that the Japanese were of the “darker races” of the world offered them approval and respect within the Black community. While the amount of support they garnered in the Black community is difficult, if not impossible, to quantify, Kearney argues that “prior to Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor, a great many, perhaps most, African Americans had only positive impressions of the Japanese and their achievements.”25 These “positive impressions” were translated into on-the-ground advances in the Black freedom struggle. Collaborative ventures between Japanese and Black organizers and activists sprung up across the United States during the 1930s, but as historian Ernest Allen, Jr., documents, the Midwest was a particular bastion of interracial radicalism. He argues that the “pro-Japan penchant of Missouri blacks was characteristic of African American thought of the era: an unfolding of messianic nationalist sentiment occasioned by the hard times of the Great Depression and a populistbased admiration for Japan,” which attracted “tens of thousands of black Missourians to the pro-Japan movement.”26

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Black organizations were in large part responsible for the extension of diaspora to include Japan and other “Asiatics” through creation myths and messianic visions. The Nation of Islam (NOI), founded in 1930, was a principal coordinator of this project. Leader Elijah Muhammad taught that Black people were “members of the Asiatic [Black] Nation,” a condition of existence that “referred to all the people to the south and east of Western Europe and all people who were believed to have ancestry among these peoples.” Furthermore, Elijah Muhammad preached that all of Africa was a part of the “Orient” or Asiatic Nation.27 While cultural and religious emulation guided much of the orthodoxy of the Asiatic Black man espoused by the NOI, Muhammad’s prophecy that “white civilization would be destroyed by the Mother Plane—a giant circular plane—built by Allah in Japan,” demonstrated admiration for the military and technological might of Japan as well.28 It is through the evidence and imaginary of both its power and culture that Japan was welcomed into the fold of the African descended. With “tens of thousands of African Americans” embracing what religious historian Nathaniel Deutsch calls a “pan-Asiatic racial identity” in the early decades of the twentieth century through the NOI and other organizations, Hikida’s translation represented a natural extension of the relationship that had evolved in the political and cultural spheres between Black Americans and the Japanese.29 Hikida recognized that it would be no small task to translate the song into a vernacular Japanese while still maintaining the intentions of its American usage. He confessed, “I discovered that I had sadly mistaken for this assumption when I came to the point of the translation of ‘Lift Every Voice.’” He outlined to Johnson that he “faced a black Wall [sic] in this translation” and included other concerns as he moved forward with the project: “1. It must be translated as music as well as song; 2. It never before was introduced to Japan[,] so it will make a precedent and must become standered [sic] version; [and] 3. Therefore it must be not only good translation, but must be the best translation.”30 Hikida seemed preoccupied with the details of the project, but for good reason. His letter demonstrates his awareness that there was something at stake in whether or not he was successful—failure in this project might damage communities and relationships beyond his association with Johnson or the NAACP. Hikida’s attention to the issue of translation exposed a necessary obsession with language. Indeed, “the practice of translation” described by literary scholar Brent Edwards “is indispensible to the pursuit of any project of internationalism, any ‘correspondence.’” As an always-already fraught enterprise, translation within diaspora must do battle with “unavoidable misapprehensions and misreadings, persistent blindnesses and solipsisms” and the tyranny of difference.31

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As an outsider to this “practice,” Hikida demonstrated an appropriate amount of concern as the translation moved forward. To facilitate the language difficulties, Hikida enlisted the talents of Reverend Koh Yuki.32 Described as “one of the most important and active committee [members] of [the] newly published Japanese Hymnal[,] which has been used and will be used by almost all Christian Churches in Japan in years to come,” Yuki was well suited for the task of the translation, particularly in its combination with music.33 Upon its completion, Yuki wrote, “I feel confident to announce . . . my Japanese version [of “Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing”] as one of my masterpieces.”34 While his translation altered the text to accommodate Japanese phonics and syntax, the music remained the same, thereby leaving the song’s core structure unaltered. Although its publication was directed at a Japanese audience and for Japanese performers, maintaining the identical harmonies and chord progressions of the US version would be the glue that bonded this piece to the traditions of the African American community. Hikida understood that the decision to translate “Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing” must be measured by its weight within Black US histories as well as its future impact in Japan. He announced to Johnson, “To attempt such a difficult work with my limited knowledge, [would] be an insult not only to its author but to fo[u]rteen million American Negroes.”35 Music was the text tying Johnson to “fourteen million Negroes” and the best medium for this negotiation between the Black United States and Hikida’s Japan. It is important to notice that Hikida’s request was not for the establishment of an NAACP branch in Japan. The anthem excelled in areas that the formal NAACP did not; it embodied the organization, camaraderie, and political vision that one might expect of an NAACP chapter while also presenting the added advantages of easy transport and the dynamism of performance. Of all Johnson’s achievements it was his accomplishments in music that served to resonate within and potentially mobilize alternative national and cultural imaginations. Hikida’s choice of Black music as his method of political translation underscores a unique negotiation of Japan’s history of engagement with the West. Recognizing the exercise of ideological authority by the Western nations, Japan long kept a safe distance; prior to the opening of consular relations with the United States in 1854, Japan practiced a strict seclusion policy. The next one hundred years of Japan’s history were marked by internal disputes and battles for power as well as aggressive expansion into surrounding nations. In the twenty years between 1895 and 1915, Japan’s military boosted the country’s reputation and colonial holdings; victories over China and Russia “not only extended its empire . . . but also vaulted [Japan] into the ranks of the world powers.”36

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The recession that followed the World War I economic boom witnessed widespread disorder; in 1919 alone, there were 497 labor disputes, coupled with hundreds of tenancy quarrels as well as anti-Japanese demonstrations held by students in Korea and China, while the US Japanese Exclusion Act, which radically curtailed the numbers of Japanese immigrants to the West Coast, was instituted in 1924.37 The worldwide economic Depression of 1929–1930 “heightened demands that Japan abandon its unproductive policy of cooperation with the Western powers and act independently and forcefully in foreign affairs.” The military again played a decisive role in this move away from diplomacy; state violence, political assassination, and a withdrawal from the United Nations were the symptoms of what the “Japanese regard as the phase of fascism in their country.”38 This oppressive military state exacerbated the conditions that would lead to Japanese participation in World War II and an exodus from the country of nearly thirty-seven thousand to the United States between 1920 and 1940.39 It was at the very beginning of this turbulent period that Hikida traveled to the United States. As Japanese men and women traveled west, Black Americans were traveling east. One of the contributing factors to the positive reception of the Japanese by Black people were the “first-person reports” offered by the Black intellectuals and reporters who maintained a healthy engagement with Japan in the first decades of the twentieth century.40 James Weldon Johnson engaged with Japan in his early days with the NAACP. At the end of World War I he joined the Japan Society, believing, like his solicitors, that “there is no question about the importance to the United States of good relations with Japan.”41 Ten years later he had more intimate contact with Japan and its culture. During the fall of 1929, he was part of a delegation headed for Kyoto under the banner of the American Council of the Institute of Pacific Relations (IPR), a nongovernmental organization founded in 1925 and interested in discussing relations between the nations of the Pacific Rim.42 Largely composed of philanthropists and academics, this delegation represented the organization at the third biennial conference of the IPR. Aboard the steamship from Seattle, Johnson encountered strangers who expanded his understanding of Eastern Asia, but the personal acquaintances were simply companion to the visual encounters. Upon reaching the shore, Johnson was awestruck at the elaborate scene he viewed: “I judge there is no experience more fascinating for the American or European traveler than the first landing in Japan. Strange lands there are many, but I surmise that in none, other than Japan, is found such perfection of strangeness—strangeness which at once excites the sense of wonder and satisfies the sense of beauty.” While Japan seemed unfamiliar from the sea, once on land Johnson received the type of reception he was accustomed to as a popular US figure. After being surrounded by half a dozen Japanese report-

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ers—“as enterprising and insistent as their New York or Chicago brothers could be”—he was interviewed and photographed. Almost immediately, he was asked about the Negro condition in the United States and the efforts of the NAACP, which led Johnson to remark, “[T]hey were surprisingly familiar with the aims and work of the organization.”43 This familiarity and interest in the Negro condition was not an isolated event. While in Kyoto, Johnson continued to be recognized as a Negro American race leader. He was asked for autographs, original poems, and other memorabilia. The most significant requests took shape as entreaties for help. The conditions described in these pleas offer compelling accounts of the experiences and desires shared between the Black and Japanese communities. While he maintained a focus on the Black American community, Johnson understood the necessity of using his political work and art to address the common state of all those abused by white oppression.44 Of his trip to Japan, he remarked, “[T]he truth that came home most directly to me was the universality of the race and color problem. Negroes in the United States are prone, and naturally, to believe that their problem is the problem. The fact is, there is a race and color problem wherever the white man deals with darker races.”45 This “race and color problem,” more famously described by the likeminded Du Bois as “the problem of the color line,” proved more and more complicated as the Depression deepened and fascism gripped the world.46

Profits and Propaganda: The Limits of Cultural Exchange in the Expanse of War The global backdrop of a threatened second world war infused the exchange between Johnson and Hikida with no uncertain amount of significance and urgency. Yet in advance of its eruption, it was the domestic context in the United States that provided the greatest potential for violence through the ongoing national efforts to squelch labor and Black radicalism. As cultural historian Robin Kelley impeccably documents in Birmingham, Alabama, the Depression brought to the fore extreme formations of formal and informal white vigilantism and violence. In its wake, Black resistance mounted, and through a unique alchemy of ideology, auxiliaries, and tradition there developed an indigenous “culture of opposition” among Black working people.47 Johnson’s art helped to increase the reserve of cultural tools available to Black people nationally and, if Hikida was successful, internationally. This project of translation demonstrated the reach of Black cultural labor but also the bulwarks inhibiting its creative and political potential. As the anthem gained prominence, the music industry actually resisted Johnson’s intentions for

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“Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing,” compelling unintended consequences for this act of Afro-Nippon solidarity. In his letter to Johnson, Hikida was confident that “Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing” would make a difference in Japan: “I do not know whether at the time you wrote the song [if] you actually for[e]saw the importance of it to the life of [the] American Negro today. I do feel . . . this translation of ‘Lift Every Voice’ into Japanese will bring a significant result in years to come.”48 In part, the success of the song would be its communicative effects beyond language and location. He reminded Johnson of the foundation for this association between the Black American and Japanese communities—the tie that transcends the boundaries of language and geography—the bonds of race, when he wrote, “I do not know how many languages the song is already translated [into], but I am sure this will be the first time to be translated into a l[a]nguage of a colored race.”49 Hikida’s was not the first translation, but his request was certainly distinct. Despite the miscommunication and misinformation that he acknowledged to exist between the two races, Hikida believed that “this translation will eventually contribute an important factor to create a sentiment and promote [an] understanding of [the] American Negro among [the] Japanese.” He offered an illustration for this process should the translation move forward: During my trip to the South, many Negroes told me that they wished to make a trip to Japan—someday. I advised them to do so by all means—but not someday, at certain day [sic], say for instance, in 1940 when we will be the host to the Olympic game. Suppose you send some American Negro athletes to that game[,] which possibility is already proved, and many of you go to Japan, then, what better way can you think of to welcome you there than by singing “Lift every Voice” in our native tongue?50

Johnson’s reaction to the “perfection of strangeness” that awaited him in Japan during his visit of 1929 surely would be no match for arriving to such a welcome as Hikida described. After reminiscing on Johnson’s humble beginnings in Jacksonville, Hikida wondered, “Who dared to have thought that that shanty building could [have] nurtured a soul which would tie fo[u]rteen million souls together? And at the one-thirds mark of the present century, by acc[i]dent, or by providence if you call, going to tie these souls to seventy-million Asiatics?”51 This was the challenge that Hikida placed in front of Johnson at the end of his letter. Would Johnson, through “Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing,” take up the mantle of a pan-Afro, Japanese public? Unfortunately, Johnson alone could not decide the answer to that question. Hikida’s vision of AfroJapanese solidarity would face another moment of jeopardy as the logistics of the enterprise became increasingly arduous in America. In addition to his own concerns with the translation, Hikida faced an uphill battle with the Edward B. Marks Music Company, the publisher of “Lift

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Ev’ry Voice and Sing.” Starting with their copyright at the turn of the century, the Marks Company kept close reigns on the piece, often denying the most elementary of requests. By 1933, dozens, if not hundreds, of individuals and groups were turned away by the Marks Company. From requests to print the hymn in Sunday school bulletins to small school performances, the company worked to protect its interests, arguing that “[W]hat people receive for nothing, they will not purchase.”52 The copyright practices of the Marks Company exposed the gulf that existed between Johnson’s intentions for the song and the profit imperatives of the music business. “Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing” was set apart within Johnson’s repertoire, and its unique identity as an anthem made it a “valuable piece of property,” not because of its potential to generate income (as the Marks Company imagined) but instead because it promoted the noblest aspirations of Johnson and the NAACP: interracial cooperation, democracy, and justice.53 To materialize “Lift” as “property” exposed it to the whims of the marketplace, an already tortured and precarious location for goods and services during the Depression, especially those produced by and for Black people. This designation also assumes ownership, whether to the Marks Company or to James Weldon and J. Rosamond Johnson. As the performance of “Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing” by Black communities and its adoption by the NAACP shows, neither of these claims to ownership was entirely legitimate, nor was either complete. This tension between doing the work of racial justice and adhering to the mandates of the music industry continued to plague “Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing.” Possibly expecting more of the same from the Marks Company, Johnson early on encouraged Hikida to contact the Marks Company about the translation, and he did as well. On November 1, 1933, Johnson wrote to Marks, “I have written to Mr. Yasuichi Hikida, who lives at Bedford Hills, New York, and advised him that he had better write to you and make an appointment and then come down to the city and talk this matter over. I still think that we can afford to be easy in the matter and facilitate them as much as we can while protecting our own rights in placing the hymn before the Japanese nation.”54 Again, Johnson was forthright about his position on the issue— Hikida’s situation should be afforded ease. His genuine excitement for the project was earlier articulated to Hikida when he wrote, “I am impressed by the plan and enthusiastic about it” despite the “stupendous task involved.”55 In his correspondence with Marks, however, Johnson was careful to balance his animation with a nod to the desires of the company. Hikida too worked diligently to remove any extra obstacles to the task of translating “Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing.” He was proactive, contacting the Library of Congress about musical reproduction rights and also sharing with the Marks Music Company a copy of the international copyright agreement between the United States and Japan. It appears as though his work paid off: by the end of 1933, the

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process had moved forward. Whether Marks’s decision to give the go-ahead was tied to a profit motive or other reasons is unclear. Whatever the reason, Johnson was confident that Marks “is as desirous as I am of seeing the hymn published and used in Japan.”56 The interaction between Johnson and Hikida was scant in the years following this exchange over the anthem. There was no communication between the two men in 1934. In 1935 Hikida wrote to Johnson with the primary interest of gaining his opinion on his new manuscript titled “The Canary Looks at the Crow,” a report on the Black American condition through the eyes of the Japanese. While the manuscript gained little traction with publishers, something within it encouraged Johnson to comment, “I do not consider that Japan needs to make a defense, and certainly she needs no apology to be made for her.”57 This statement echoes the sentiments of other Black Americans who felt camaraderie with the colored nation, although it also hints at Japan’s increasingly embattled position in the lead up to World War II. Japan’s continued annexation of Korea heightened what was an already precarious balance in Japanese rhetoric between global racial solidarity and virulent nationalism. While he may have discussed these political maneuvers with Johnson, the literature between the two men shows that Hikida was primarily invested in bringing to evidence the translation. His inquiry with Johnson in December 1935 included a note that read: “I just heard today from home that the translation of lift every voice and sing will be published in the January issue of the best magazine in [the] Japanese musical world.”58 Quite enthusiastic about the prospect, Hikida promised to avail Johnson of the magazine’s arrival. After lamenting the absence of the magazine in other correspondence, Hikida eventually stopped mentioning it altogether, and it faded from the historical record without having made its way to the United States. Although Johnson never saw the finished product published in Japan, the translation was eventually realized. In September 1936 Ongaku Sekai (Music World) published “The World of Black People and the World of White People from the Perspective of Yellow People: Introduction of National Negro Anthem,” by Yonezo Hirayama, the pen name of Yasuichi Hikida. The article included an image, a copy of the sheet music with roman lettering produced by Koh Yuki, and introductory remarks by Hikida.59 The first feature of the article that strikes the reader is the illustration. On the right-hand side of the title page is a hand-drawn minstrel character that runs nearly half the length of the page. Sporting a top hat, signature blackface distinguished by exaggerated light lips, and long shirt and pants, the figure is posed next to the text in an angular marionette position. It is not clear if Hikida or the publisher decided to include this image. In either case it is shorthand that orients the reader toward some engagement with blackness. The ready-made trope of the black minstrel, sans comment or critique, offered easy associations be-

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tween the Black body and performance, a perilous cohabitation when filtered through the imagery and stereotypes grown from minstrelsy. As Eric Lott describes, “[B]lackface allowed the minstrel to play in the fantasy and fears of blackness while at the same time having complete control over them.”60 The international success of Al Jolson’s 1927 film The Jazz Singer, in which he praised his “Mammy” in blackface, enlivened the lingering ghosts of minstrelsy for a Depression-era audience. The damaging effects of this performance were replicated in the Ongaku Sekai translation, which was originally meant to advance and “promote [an] understanding of [the] American Negro among [the] Japanese.” It is not clear if the minstrel who adorned the article’s title page is a white man in blackface or a Black man in blackface, a critical distinction that is made no more clear by Hikida’s commentary. The histories and cultures of the African descended in the United States are woefully absented from Hikida’s introduction; instead he chose to substitute vague descriptions of emotion for substance. He wrote, “When you read Negro literature or sing Jazz [sic], you have to remember one thing. If you do not know the lives of Negroes and understand how and why they expose their emotions, you will not be able to write about nor sing about the naked truth of Negroes’ lives.”61 His emphasis on a three-dimensional engagement with Black communities is well warranted, yet his introduction does nothing to help his largely urban Japanese audience understand the “lives of Negroes,” nor does it entirely situate “Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing” as the opportunity for the magazine’s readers to do so. It is only in his description of the anthem in performance that the reader receives a sense of the power of this music: “When Negroes sing this National Anthem, [they] are in a trance, and are dreaming of a free country in a profundity, they truly find solace in the song.”62 It is significant that Hikida maintains the identity of “Lift” as a national anthem. It highlights for his Japanese audience the importance of the text to Black Americans and their music traditions but also implicitly registers the song as a negotiation of the nation’s established symbols and, by extension, its performances of unity. While his work in disturbing US nationalism is of critical significance, Hikida’s presentation of the anthem in Ongaku Sekai relied on sordid representations of African Americans in order to provoke Japanese engagement with the anthem and those it sought to represent. He may have achieved his goal of “creat[ing] a sentiment” of blackness for Japanese audiences, yet Hikida failed in his attempts to “promote understanding” of the same. His inability to materialize and bring dimensionality to Black life in the United States—excluding important community struggles during the Depression, the 1931 international case of the Scottsboro Boys, or even close attention to the campaigns of the NAACP—compromised his aims of making a significant impact on his readers and encouraging them to see the song and its performance as a part of a

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shared, global political advance. Yet it is precisely through performance that Hikida makes his final statement and attempts to tie his Japanese audience to the possibilities held within “Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing”; he wrote, “If the Japanese people, who is the leading nation of Asia, understand and sing the National Negro Hymn, thirteen million American Negroes will see it as an epoch-making event and have great joy.”63 Why a performance of “Lift” by the Japanese would be “epoch-making” for American Negroes is never articulated, nor how or why the Japanese should sing the anthem, leaving his essay as ambiguous as it began. The most astute reader, however, might find here the possibility engendered by Hikida and Johnson’s shared vision, which sought to draw together two differently embattled communities through a song that had the potential to facilitate a cross-cultural exchange with powerful repercussions for political solidarities in a decolonizing world. Within a few years of his last letter to Johnson, Hikida had the opportunity to see and manipulate the effects of “Utae Takaru Jiyu no Uta” in Japan.64 In the wake of the 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor, Japanese nationals within the US mainland were interned. At the time of his detention, Hikida was said to have “hundreds of pounds” of information on Black Americans in his possession.65 This evidence no doubt facilitated his swift departure from the United States. Intelligence gathering on this scale caused alarm for the US government because it was a technique of cross-racial leftist organizing; less than a decade earlier, interracial organizers with the Pacific Movement of the Eastern World also were described following their arrest as having “suitcases filled with records of lynching incidents, newspaper clippings concerning the Scottsboro case, and other literature.”66 Similar items likely composed the many pounds found on Hikida. While he was forcibly removed from the site of his research, his work in the United States would not be in vain; he went back to Japan and became the authority in Afro-Japanese relations. The title was well deserved; “perhaps no Japanese worked more diligently [than Hikida] to foster a bridge of understanding between the people of Japan and American blacks.”67 During the war effort in Japan, Hikida was responsible for significant intelligence gathering including the publication of Senji Kokujin Kosaku (Wartime Negro Propaganda Operations) in January 1943.68 Considering his labor in translating and publishing the anthem, it is not a stretch to imagine that it too may have been a part of Japanese war propaganda. The vision that he expressed to James Weldon Johnson in 1933, which included a welcome for Black women and men through the singing of “Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing” in Japanese, was but a prelude to the possible reality of a radio broadcast of the Negro National Anthem over “enemy” airwaves. It may never be known whether “Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing” was used in Japan’s wartime broadcasts, but the legacies of Afro-Asian solidarities advanced by Johnson, Hikida, and

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others are pronounced.69 When World War II ended and the Axis coalition dissolved, these Afro-Asian political alliances were revived and continued to link African Americans and the “darker nations” in collective response to the hegemony of the white West.70 A conspicuous and resonant narrative of political ingenuity through music facilitated these coalitions, growing the base and ushering in new techniques of performance and solidarity.

Notes 1. James Weldon Johnson, “Race Prejudice and the Negro Artist,” in eds. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Gene Andrew Jarrett, The New Negro: Readings on Race, Representation, and African American Culture, 1892–1938 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007), 343. 2. Etsuko Taketani, “The Cartography of the Black Pacific: James Weldon Johnson’s Along This Way,” American Quarterly 59, no. 1 (March 2007): 80. 3. For histories of the NAACP, see in particular Gilbert Jonas, Freedom’s Sword: The NAACP and the Struggle Against Racism in America, 1909–1969 (New York: Routledge, 2004); Charles Flint Kellogg, NAACP: A History of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1967); B. Joyce Ross, J. E. Spingarn and the Rise of the NAACP: 1911–1939 (New York: Scribner, 1972); Patricia Sullivan, Lift Every Voice: The NAACP and the Making of the Civil Rights Movement (New York: New Press, 2009). 4. Kevin K. Gaines, Uplifting the Race: Black Leadership, Politics, and Culture in the Twentieth Century (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996). 5. Minutes of the Board Meeting of the NAACP, New York, NY, February 14, 1921, 4, National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) Papers, Yale University, Microfilm: reel 1 (hereafter cited as NAACP Papers). Black Swan was the first Black-owned record label in the United States. Harry Pace founded the label in 1921 in New York City. 6. James Weldon Johnson, Along This Way: The Autobiography of James Weldon Johnson (1933; New York: Da Capo Press, 2000), 154–55. 7. Ibid., 156. 8. Richard A. Long, “A Weapon of My Song: The Poetry of James Weldon Johnson,” Phylon 32, no. 4 (4th Qtr., 1971): 374. 9. The three words on which the final I chord strikes are “(victory is) won,” “(our bright star is) cast,” and “(true to our native) land.” 10. James Weldon Johnson, Along This Way, 152. 11. Ibid., 158. 12. Lucius R. Wyatt, “The Inclusion of Concert Music of African-American Composers in Music History Courses,” Black Music Research Journal 16, no. 2 (Autumn 1996): 243. 13. Daphne Brooks, Bodies in Dissent: Spectacular Performances of Race and Freedom, 1850–1910 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), 224.

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14. Karen Sotiropoulos, Staging Race: Black Performers in Turn of the Century America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), 121. 15. Quoted in ibid., 42. 16. David Krasner, Resistance, Parody, and Double Consciousness in African American Theatre, 1895–1910 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 1997), 35. 17. Sondra Kathryn Wilson, “Introduction,” in Johnson, Along This Way, xiv. 18. Johnson, Along This Way, 309; Minutes of the Board Meeting of the NAACP, New York, NY, December 6, 1921, 3, NAACP Papers: reel 1. 19. Effie T. Battle to James Weldon Johnson, April 5, 1934, James Weldon Johnson Papers, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, series 1: box 3, folder 39 (hereafter cited as JWJ). 20. Ron Eyerman and Andrew Jamison, Music and Social Movements: Mobilizing Traditions in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 2. 21. The official designation of “Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing” as the Negro National Anthem lasted for decades and was noted on the official sheet music published by the Marks Company. Eventually the NAACP capitulated to concerns of patriotism and unity and requested a change to the song’s unofficial title. In 1964 Marks Company President Herbert E. Marks wrote, “For many years it was known as the Negro National Anthem, but some time ago there was a protest from the N.A.A.C.P. pointing out that ‘The Star Spangled Banner’ is the National Anthem of American Negroes and asking us to change the description on our copies. From then on we have called it ‘The Official Song of the N.A.A.C.P.,’ having that distinguished organization’s approval to do this.” Herbert E. Marks to Rufus B. Easter, Jr., September 17, 1964, JWJ, series 1: box 12, folder 311. The contest between the two songs continued in various manifestations throughout the twentieth century and into the twenty-first as well. 22. Yasuichi Hikida to James Weldon Johnson, September 26, 1933, JWJ, series 1: box 9, folder 206. 23. Reginald Kearney, African American Views of the Japanese: Solidarity or Sedition? (Albany: State University of New York, 1998), xvii. 24. Historian Colin Grant notes that Garvey speculated within the pages of Negro World that “the next war [following World War I] would be between the white and darker races, aided by the Japanese.” Colin Grant, Negro with a Hat: The Rise and Fall of Marcus Garvey (London: Oxford University Press, 2010), 125. 25. Kearney, African American Views of the Japanese, xxvi. 26. Ernest Allen, Jr., “Waiting for Tojo: The Pro-Japan Vigil of Black Missourians, 1932–1943,” Gateway Heritage (Fall 1994): 39, 51. 27. Algernon Austin, “Rethinking Race and the Nation of Islam, 1930–1975,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 26, no. 1 (2003): 56. 28. Ibid., 59, 58. 29. Nathaniel Deutsch, “‘The Asiatic Black Man’: An African American Orientalism?,” Journal of Asian American Studies 4, no. 3 (October 2001): 198. 30. Yasuichi Hikida to James Weldon Johnson, September 26, 1933, JWJ, series 1: box 9, folder 206. 31. Brent Hayes Edwards, The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black Internationalism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 20, 5.

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32. Yasuichi Hikida to James Weldon Johnson, September 26, 1933, JWJ, series 1: box 9, folder 206. 33. Ibid. 34. Reverend Koh Yuki to Masatane Mitani, June 4, 1933, JWJ, series 1: box 9, folder 206. 35. Yasuichi Hikida to James Weldon Johnson, September 26, 1933, JWJ, series 1: box 9, folder 206. 36. Paul Varley, Japanese Culture, 4th ed. (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2000), 271. 37. Kenneth B. Pyle, The Making of Modern Japan, 2nd ed. (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1996), 167, 184. 38. Varley, Japanese Culture, 296. 39. Kuei Chiu, “Asian Language Newspapers in the United States: History Revisited,” Chinese American Librarians Association E-Journal 9 (November 15, 1996), http://cala-web.org/node/648 (accessed May 11, 2013). 40. Reginald Kearney, “The Pro-Japanese Utterances of W. E. B. Du Bois,” Contributions in Black Studies 13, no. 1 (1995): 204. 41. Secretary of Japan Society (initials E. C. W.) to James Weldon Johnson, October 24, 1918, JWJ, series 1: box 11, folder 233. 42. “Institute of Pacific Relations,” Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insti tute_ of_Pacific_Relations (accessed October 26, 2010). 43. Johnson, Along This Way, 394. 44. Johnson’s time as consul to Venezuela and Nicaragua as well as his extensive writings on Haiti after the 1915 US occupation offer evidence of his global perspective on injustice, investment in bringing these conditions to light, and hopes for their eradication. 45. Johnson, Along This Way, 398 (emphasis in original). 46. W. E. B. Du Bois, “To the Nations of the World” in ed. David Levering Lewis, W. E. B. Du Bois: A Reader (New York: Henry Holt, 1995), 639. 47. Robin D. G. Kelley, Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists during the Great Depression (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990), 116. 48. Yasuichi Hikida to James Weldon Johnson, September 26, 1933, JWJ, series 1: box 9, folder 206. 49. Ibid. 50. Ibid. 51. Ibid. 52. Edward B. Marks to James Weldon Johnson, February 26, 1932, JWJ, series 1: box 12, folder 311. 53. Johnson, Along This Way, 155. 54. James Weldon Johnson to Edward B. Marks Company, November 1, 1933, JWJ, series 1: box 13, folder 311. 55. James Weldon Johnson to Yasuichi Hikida, October 4, 1933, JWJ, series 1: box 9, folder 206. 56. James Weldon Johnson to Yasuichi Hikida, November 1, 1933, JWJ, series 1: box 9, folder 206.

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57. James Weldon Johnson to Yasuichi Hikida, September 27, 1935, JWJ, series 1: box 9, folder 206. 58. Yasuichi Hikida to James Weldon Johnson, December 28, 1935, JWJ, series 1: box 9, folder 206. 59. Johnson did have a copy of the sheet music produced by Yuki with roman lettering in his possession but did not have a copy of the final publication. 60. Eric Lott, Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 25. 61. Yonezo Hirayama (aka Yasuichi Hikida), “The World of Black People and the World of White People from the Perspective of Yellow People: Introduction of National Negro Anthem,” Ongaku Sekai 8, no. 9 (September 1936): 92. 62. Ibid. 63. Ibid. 64. Japanese translation of “Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing.” 65. Kearney, African American Views of the Japanese, 84. 66. The Scottsboro case of 1931 involved nine young Black boys falsely accused of raping two white women aboard a train in Scottsboro, Alabama. The arrests and trials induced an international campaign for their freedom and racial justice, in large part due to the efforts of the Communist Party USA; Allen, “Waiting for Tojo,” 47. 67. Kearney, African American Views of the Japanese, 83. 68. Sato Masaharu and Barak Kushner, “‘Negro Propaganda Operations’: Japan’s Short-Wave Radio Broadcasts for World War II Black Americans,” Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television 19, no. 1 (1999): 15. 69. “Unfortunately, since most broadcast records were lost or purposefully disposed of by the Japanese forces at the time of surrender [in 1945], there is no clear picture concerning the content of the actual short-wave broadcasts which had American Blacks as the target audience.” Masaharu and Kushner, “‘Negro Propaganda Operations,’” 17. 70. One of the most prominent examples of Afro-Asian political solidarity during the twentieth century was the Bandung Conference of Asian and African States that convened in Indonesia in 1955. This conference set a strong agenda for anti-colonial revolutionaries and helped to inspire and mobilize a global political left. See Shana L. Redmond, Anthem: Social Movements and the Sound of Solidarity in the African Diaspora (New York: New York University Press, 2014) and Cynthia A. Young, Soul Power: Culture, Radicalism, and the Making of a Third-World Left (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006). For other examples of Afro-Asian connections, see Robeson Taj P. Frazier, The East Is Black: Cold War China and the Black Radical Imagination (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, forthcoming); Heike RaphaelHernandez and Shannon Steen, eds., Afro-Asian Encounters: Culture, History, Politics (New York: New York University Press, 2006); Fred Ho and Bill Mullen, eds., Afro Asia: Revolutionary Political and Cultural Connections Between African Americans and Asian Americans (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008); Vijay Prashad, Everybody Was Kung-Fu Fighting: Afro-Asian Connections and the Myth of Cultural Purity (Boston: Beacon, 2001) and The Darker Nations: A People’s History of the Third World (New York: The New Press, 2007).

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10 Hip-Hop and Reggae in Recent Japanese Social Movements Noriko Manabe1

T

he hip-hop extravaganza Summer Bomb on August 16, 2014, organized by veteran rapper Zeebra, featured over a dozen rappers and R&B singers whose performances noticeably lacked political engagement. It was all about swagger and hedonism, with the exception of Shingo Nishinari and Anarchy’s acknowledgment of their roots from very poor neighborhoods.2 This is perhaps not surprising—after all, most hip-hop that gets airplay, including American hip-hop, is not political. Furthermore, the show was designed as a summer daytime festival to appeal to younger audiences, who had come to have fun and forget about life for a while. Nonetheless, Japan was at a historical inflection point. The Secrets Protection Law, which makes inquiring about a state secret a criminal act, was about to be enacted, despite objections from the UN Human Rights Council, the Japan Federation of Bar Associations, and others that it would dampen investigative journalism and endanger the people’s democratic sovereignty.3 In addition, Prime Minister Abe Shinzō’s cabinet had recently reinterpreted the Constitution to allow Japan to wage war in “collective self-defense” with allied countries. Abe’s government was raising consumption (value-added) taxes, which hurt the underclass, at the same time that it was planning to lower corporate taxes. It was restarting nuclear reactors at a time when polls had consistently shown that 70–80 percent of the population favored a phaseout or abolition of nuclear power. Shouldn’t rappers be saying . . . something? Part of this political reticence is due to self-censorship, by both the industry and the rapper. According to Martin Cloonan, the British music industry conducts its censorship largely by restricting a product already released.4 In — 209 —

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contrast, music censorship in Japan usually takes place well before the public ever sees the work. Commercial recordings are inspected multiple times prior to release by the record companies and the Recorin, an organization run by the Record Industry Association of Japan.5 A prohibition against shaming individuals or organizations makes musicians avoid saying actual names. K Dub Shine recounted several instances where the record company pushed him or his group, King Giddra, to change lyrics prior to release. As one example, Defstar, a Sony Music Entertainment Japan label, forced him to remove the word “Palestine” from the lyric, “Faceless attackers should get out of Palestine” in the antiwar song “911.” Originally recorded shortly after 9/11, the single’s release was held up for a year while the revision was negotiated (K Dub Shine, p.c., Tokyo, August 17, 2014).6 But the rappers, too, censor themselves in stating their political views. When I asked K Dub why he doesn’t rap more about politics (and he does so more than many other rappers), he said that his market of street youth would be disinterested. Like the editors who pre-emptively redacted materials in the 1930s,7 musicians themselves and their entourages cut off thoughts before they are realized. The result is that most Japanese musicians of all genres avoid political engagement and stick to being entertainers, which is what most Japanese expect of them.8 K Dub also noted that some prominent rappers with regular media appearances did not say anything against nuclear power after 3/11 until well over a year later, when public opinion had become much clearer, and that they still weren’t saying anything critical of the media’s role in the crisis.9 Such caution is not at all unusual; it is the norm among entertainers. First, broadcasters have even stricter rules than record companies. But more importantly, before 3/11, electric power companies and associated agencies had been spending over $2 billion US per year on advertising (Kawabata 2011: 11). Media companies—and many entertainers benefitting from media exposure—are hesitant to say anything negative about nuclear power. Then why consider politics and Japanese hip-hop at all? First, as Bennett, Mitchell, and many others have recounted, hip-hop has been appropriated for political expression around the world, from Turkish youth in Germany to Maori in New Zealand, to give just two examples.10 Several aspects of hip-hop make it well suited for political expression, in Japan as well as elsewhere. One aspect is the reputation of political positioning in hip-hop, gained particularly from classic tracks by Public Enemy, De La Soul, and others. As the chapter will discuss, some of these tracks address political themes that have resonance in Japan today. The sampling ethos of hip-hop and dancehall reggae encourages the referencing and appropriation of such tracks for the creation of new political songs. A second aspect of hip-hop is its often forthright posture and philosophy of “keeping it real,” which

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provides rappers with the opportunity (or excuse) to express themselves directly in a society that discourages such behavior, like Japan.11 The musical format of rapping also allows musicians to cram more words into a verse (as the norm is four syllables to a beat, rather than the one to two in a sung genre), facilitating the formation of arguments. Furthermore, the call-andresponse associated with black musics enables rappers to engage protesters in shouting slogans themselves. These characteristics make hip-hop and reggae excellent vehicles for expressing the anger that is a necessary stage in building social movements. A brave handful of hip-hop and reggae musicians—not the majority—have chosen to politicize their material. This chapter discusses the deployment of hip-hop and reggae for the antinuclear movement in Japan since the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster. Hip-hop and reggae were among the first genres to respond after 3/11, with both new songs and those that paid homage to hip-hop and reggae classics. It also developed into a form of participatory protest, with rappers and others trading Sprechchor (protest slogans). The style continues to be used in the movement against the policies of the Abe administration, including the Secrecy Law and the reinterpretation of the Peace Constitution. The chapter first outlines the employment of the hip-hop form as a mode of street protest. It then gives examples of the references Japanese hip-hoppers have made to the classics, to pay homage and point out their resonances with the current situation. Finally, it gives examples of syncretic blends of reggae and other musics for political purposes.

Hip-Hop and Reggae in Demonstrations Since the late 1990s, Japanese demonstrations have occasionally featured sound systems on top of trucks, on which DJs, bands, singers, and rappers perform. The antiwar “sound demonstrations” of 2003 had featured wordless techno DJs whose amplified sound reclaimed the streets.12 In contrast, sound demos since 2011 have tended to front-forward rappers and reggae DJs, who channel the forthrightness expected of their genres to verbalize political messages. In the first antinuclear demonstration organized by the used-goods shop Shirōto no Ran (Revolt of the Laymen) on April 10, 2011, the rapper Darth Reider gave an impromptu speech, saying “we had been tricked into accepting something so dangerous” and that he wished Japan to remain a place where his daughter could “breathe the air and play outside.”13 In doing so, he was extending his persona as a well-known master of ceremonies at hip-hop events to the sound demonstration, using the opportunity for a frank expression of his views.14

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Taking over the microphone, the female rapper Rumi continuously repeated the word riken (business interests) in a rhythmic flow that blended into her freestyle on the relationships tying the nuclear industry to bureaucrats, local politicians, and the media; she then performed her reggae-style antinuclear song, “Jaaku na hōshanō” (Evil Radiation). The reggae singer Rankin Taxi performed the antinuclear song he first recorded in 1989, “Dare mo mienai, nioi mo nai” (You Can’t See It, You Can’t Smell It Either), which points out that nuclear power has many risks, that the industry manipulates information, and that no one can escape from radiation. The bridge of the song quotes the melody of the children’s song “Old McDonald Had a Farm” (familiar in Japan as “Yukai na makiba”), upon which Rankin sang about the consequences of nuclear accidents. Each line was punctuated by “iya iya yo” (I don’t want it)—a homonymic conversion of the original refrain, “E-I-E-I-O,” and intended as a call-and-response. The protesters sang it back at the top of their lungs. Hence, hip-hop and reggae’s emphasis on rhythm and wordplay aided Rumi and Rankin Taxi’s political expression, while the moderate tempo (80–100 bpm) accompanied the marching of demonstrators.

Development of Improvisation in Protests Rankin Taxi’s example notwithstanding, performance in sound demonstrations in 2011 primarily involved musicians performing prepared pieces and improvisations to an audience of protesters, in what Thomas Turino calls a presentational style of performance. In contrast, he describes participatory style as one in which performers and audience become indistinguishable as everyone participates in the music making. Such participation tends to stimulate social bonding, as participants concentrate on the sounds being created. Musical performances lie on a continuous spectrum from presentational to participatory, but Turino believes that for most performances, one style dominates the other.15 As the antinuclear movement progressed from raising awareness of problems to mobilizing the population and building solidarity from late 2011 onwards, the performances shifted to a more participatory style. Rappers exchanged antinuclear Sprechchor like “Saikadō hantai” (We oppose restarting nuclear reactors) and “Genpatsu iranai” (We don’t need nuclear power) in call-and-response patterns with the protesters, in time to the DJ’s tracks. This style was pioneered by the rapper Akuryō and further developed with ECD, ATS, and Noma Yasumichi of i Zoom i Rockers, all of whom had been frequent participants in the drums-only antinuclear protests of TwitNoNukes. With this style, these rappers successfully engaged protesters in large demonstrations, such as the two-hundred-thousand-

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strong one in the government district of Kasumigaseki on July 29, 2012. The style continues in antinuclear protests as of 2014 and has subsequently been adopted in antiracist demonstrations (e.g., Tokyo March for Freedom, September 2013) and demonstrations opposing Prime Minister Abe Shinzō’s policies by Students Against the Secrecy Protection Law (SASPL) in 2014.16 The concept of fitting words to the rhythm of beats, as rappers do, works well with political slogans in demonstrations, as the verbal rhythms, bouncy tracks, and rappers’ interactive performances induce protesters to repeat these slogans in call-and-response patterns. Hence, hip-hop and reggae have played an important role in Japanese demonstrations. Because of their reputation for social consciousness and forthrightness, these genres provide artists with the performative excuse to voice their thoughts and opinions. Furthermore, the rhythmic word play of hip-hop and practices of call-and-response engage not only the rappers but also the protesters in articulating political claims.

Homage to the Classics In addition to its rhythmic qualities and reputation for forthrightness, the sampling method of hip-hop encourages artists to refer to hip-hop classics with similar themes. An example is the bilingual US-based rapper Shing02 and Tohoku-based rapper Hunger’s remake of Gil Scott-Heron’s “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised.” The track’s title, “Kakumei wa terebi ni utsuranai,” is a direct translation of the original. Scott-Heron comments on the distortive lens of television through a whirlwind recital of the white politicians (Nixon), white actors (e.g., Steve McQueen), white musicians (Glen Campbell), and white-casted television shows (Beverly Hillbillies) seen on television in 1970. These images are juxtaposed against the negative depictions of African Americans in the line, “pigs shooting down brothers in the instant replay,” which he immediately repeats (simulating a replay). He quotes then ubiquitous advertising jingles, demonstrating the banality of “a white tornado, white lightning, or white people.” This inventory of indexes on television illustrates the marginalization of African Americans and the domination of white characters and concerns. Shing02 and Hunger’s remake, “Kakumei wa terebi ni utsuranai,” adopts Scott-Heron’s premise to be about the pronuclear frame of television.17 Delivered in a mimicry of Scott-Heron’s spoken-poetry style to the original track, Shing02 declares, “The revolution will not be brought to you by advertising campaigns by Dentsū and Hakuhōdō and TEPCO’s sponsorship,” mirroring the reference to Xerox in the original and commenting on TEPCO’s heavy television advertising. Dentsū and Hakuhōdō are Japan’s top two advertising

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agencies. As did Scott-Heron, the rappers inventory the people seen on Japanese television following the crisis—TEPCO directors bowing their heads, dubious politicians and academics, nodding talk-show hostesses—all indexes of the lack of useful information on television. It also mentions television personalities who were marginalized for their antinuclear views, like the actor Yamamoto Tarō and the journalist Tahara Sōichirō. Hence, Shing02 and Hunger’s remake employs the words, style of delivery, music, and premise of Scott-Heron’s original to denounce the media, the political system, and the handling of the nuclear crisis. Another American hip-hop artist to whom Japanese rappers have paid homage is Public Enemy. In “Can’t Truss It 2011,” K Dub Shine takes Public Enemy’s notion of modern-day enslavement by white-owned corporations to comment on TEPCO’s excessive control of information, effectively holding Japanese citizens captive.18 A Public Enemy track more explicitly about media manipulation—“Don’t Believe the Hype”—has been recombined by several Japanese hip-hoppers. The original, in which Chuck D rants against the inaccurate depictions of the group in the media (Chang 2005), has been interpreted to mean that one should think independently rather than take the media at face value. Two versions—one produced by DJ Honda and featuring eight rappers,19 and the second, a solo effort by the rapper Deli20—quote the rapped chorus, “Don’t, don’t, don’t (don’t)/Don’t believe the hype,” and retain the theme of thinking critically about information in the media. However, both of these versions use different musical tracks from Public Enemy’s original version, unlike “Revolution” and “Can’t Truss It” described above. Hence I classify them as reinterpretations rather than remakes. Deli’s solo version shares Public Enemy’s themes of media manipulation, but it also differs in its interpretation. Public Enemy’s lyric is aimed more at the media. Deli’s version is aimed more to ordinary citizens, telling them not to allow themselves to be manipulated: In Japan today, if you tell people “It’s like this,” they’ll swallow it whole . . . Cheaters will come out again from elsewhere as long as there are suckers around. But if people stop being suckers, then there can be no deception, and there would be less fraud. So by “don’t believe the hype,” . . . I’m telling people to be more skeptical so that liars can’t trick them. I’m shifting the blame from those that deceive, to those that let themselves be deceived . . . Everyone has to examine things for themselves and apply their own filters.21

Like Shing02, he lambasts the mainstream media and authorities through quotations of officials that became indexes of their lack of responsibility. For example, he quotes TEPCO’s excuse for the nuclear accident, “[the tsunami

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was] beyond expectations,” as it later became clear that TEPCO had known that a tsunami could breach the sea walls of the plant. He quotes then chief cabinet secretary Edano Yukio’s infamous saying, “There’s no immediate damage to health,” and follows it with the argument, “but if you develop cancer, TEPCO would of course not compensate you.” The most quoted line in Deli’s lyric is this palindrome (morae separated by “-,” words by “/”): Ho-a-n’-i-n / ze-n’-i-n / a-ho NISA [Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency], all dumb as sin.

Summing up his twist on Chuck D’s theme, Deli translates the title thus and raps it toward the end: “To believe firmly in lies is unacceptable.” A third take on “Don’t Believe the Hype” is in Scha Dara Parr’s “Kaese! Chikyū o” (Give Us Back the Earth), a mash-up of the funky groove from Tone-Loc’s “Wild Thing” with “Kaese! Taiyō o” (Give Us Back the Sun), a 1960s-kitch theme song from Godzilla vs. the Smog Monster (1971). This film was released during a time of heated protests and litigation over the Four Big Pollution Diseases (mercury poisoning in Minamata and Niigata, asthma from sulfur dioxide smog in Yokkaichi, and cadmium poisoning in Toyama Prefecture); its villain, Hedora, is a mud-like blob named after the toxic slime (hedoro) from which it emerges. The verses of the original song list the chemical pollutants of the Four Diseases; the MCs of Scha Dara Parr insert the names of radioactive isotopes (in parentheses) among them, also referring to plutonium by its half-life. They thus update this prior environmental conflict to the current situation. As MC Bose exclaimed during a performance at the World Happiness Festival in August 7, 2011, “The same incident from 40 years ago is happening again!” Mercury, cobalt, cadmium, Lead, sulfuric acid, oxidane. (Cesium! Iodine!) (24,000 years?) Cyanogen, manganese, vanadium, Chromium, potassium, strontium. (Plutonium!) The sea has been tainted; the air has been tainted.

The chorus of the original song is a call-and-response of “kaese” (give it back), which translates well in live performance: audience members joined in at the top of their lungs. At the end of the chorus, one hears a sample of Flavor Flav shouting, “Don’t Believe the Hype!” from Public Enemy’s classic hit, as an argument about official pronouncements. For the rest of the track, a sampled “Don’t” is inserted in syncopated positions, creating a groove (and ideological backdrop) for Bose to rap a verse. He quotes Edano’s explanation, “no immediate

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impact on health,” three times, in an imitation of the politician’s repetitions of this claim (and recalling Scott-Heron’s repetition of the instant-replay line). Counting up in powers of ten, he refers metonymically to the increase in radioactive contamination, and hence to TEPCO’s inability to stop radioactive leaks from the Fukushima plant. The key words are highlighted through rhymes (bolded) and regular placement (on the rhythmically strong beat 3, underlined), making it easy to understand his point. Tadachi ni eikyō shinai teido no senryō (3x) . . . 1, 10, 100, 1,000, man, 10 man, 100 man, 1000 man, 1 oku, 10 oku, 100 oku, 1000 oku, 1 chō, 10 chō, 100 chō, 1000 chō. Don don moreru, sū-hyakuman kei bekureru, Soshite mata boku wa doko ni kureru? “Radiation doses are at a level that won’t immediately impact [health].” 1, 10, 100, 1,000, 10,000, 100,000, 1 million, 10 million, 100 million, 1 billion, 10 billion, 100 billion, 1 trillion, 10 trillion, 100 trillion, 1 quadrillion. It’s leaking more and more, a few dozen sextillion becquerels. I’m at a loss as to what to do.

After a reprise of the chorus, the song slows down, like a vinyl record grinding to a halt when the electricity for the turntable is cut off—a reminder of the loss of electricity at Fukushima Daiichi on 3/11 that precipitated the crisis. The gradual lowering of pitch is a sonic icon of the meltdown. When the sound stops, a congratulatory fanfare follows. This fanfare is the one that sounds on the video game Dragon Quest when a player ascends to the next level. It is a sarcastic reference to the upgrade in the rating for the Fukushima Daiichi accident from its initial assessment of 4 to 7, the maximum. The song ends with an excerpt from “Kanashikute yarikirenai” (I’m So Sad I Can’t Stand It, 1968) by the Folk Crusaders, whose sad melody and words (as well as the suicide of its singer, Katō Kazuhiko, in 2009) remind the listener that while the performance is funny, the situation itself is not. As with “Don’t Believe the Hype,” Japanese rappers quote words or short phrases in their favorite hip-hop and reggae classics that speak to current circumstances. In his raps in street demonstrations and anti-Secrets Law events, Ushida Yoshimasa of SASPL quotes De La Soul’s “Stakes Is High”; he has developed Peter Tosh’s “Get up, stand up, / Stand up for your rights” into a signature call-and-response pattern.22 Similarly, Darth Reider builds the song, “Safe Is Dangerous,”23 around a sample of Peter Tosh’s “Stepping Razor” and these lyrics: Seifu no iu SAFE koso DANGEROUS The government’s claims of safety are more dangerous than anything else.

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The lyrics play with the near-homonyms “seifu” (government) and “se-efu” (the Japanese pronunciation of “safe”). Rei’s juxtaposing them against the word “dangerous” indicates that the dubiousness of the government’s claims of safety. When Darth Reider thought of this lyric, Peter Tosh’s song, “Steppin’ Razor,” came immediately to mind.24 “Steppin’ Razor” was a signature song for Tosh and an expression of his confrontational persona; the refrain ends with “I’m dangerous, said I’m dangerous.” Rei samples Tosh’s “dangerous” and repeats it, in juxtaposition with the organizations and circumstances that he considers dangerous, to form the chorus for “Safe Is Dangerous.” They are all indexes of the nuclear debate; by July 2012, the possibility of nuclear plants being located near active faults had become news items, and the Ōi Nuclear Power Plant had just been restarted. Minshutō, DANGEROUS Jimintō, DANGEROUS Keisanshō, DANGEROUS Katsudansō, DANGEROUS Zaimushō, DANGEROUS TEPCO, DANGEROUS Saikadō, DANGEROUS Hōshanō, DANGEROUS Democratic Party of Japan? Dangerous! Liberal Democratic Party? Dangerous! METI? Dangerous! Active faults? Dangerous! Ministry of Finance? Dangerous! TEPCO? Dangerous! Restarting (nuclear power plants)? Dangerous! Radiation? Dangerous! (Used with permission of Darth Reider.)

The second meaning of juxtaposing “seifu” and “dangerous” is that some members of the government feel threatened by the antinuclear movement—a meaning that reflects the threatening posture of Tosh’s original. These two meanings are explored in the pre-chorus, shown below. He plays with the similarity in Japanese pronunciation of “level” and “rebel,” so that the line can be heard as 基準値越えLEVEL, and as 基準値越えREBEL.

The first hearing points to the increase in radiation levels beyond safety limits, while the second says that antinuclear protesters (“rebels”) are growing beyond the usual levels, threatening the government. The second reading reflects Darth Reider’s own experience as a regular protester at the Friday-night

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demonstrations in front of the prime minister’s residence in summer 2012.25 Hence the sample of “Steppin’ Razor” works on several levels: it is an index of Tosh (the dangerous rebel), while the word sampled, “dangerous,” is used to construct an argument. With local hip-hop and reggae having existed for more than thirty years, Japan has a long enough history in these genres that it has classics of its own. In “Straight Outta 138” (2012), Dengaryū’s rap about frustrations with nuclear power, media coverage, the Entertainment Law, and other Japanese social issues, he used the line: 26 Yūkoto kiku yōna omeko ja neezo I’m not the kind of pussy who’ll listen to what you say

This line was a variation of the rapper ECD’s anthem from the 2003 antiwar demonstrations: Yūkoto kiku yōna yatsura ja naizo We’re not the kind of guys who’ll listen to what you say

Recognizing the homage, Dengaryū asked ECD to compose the last verse. ECD flipped the meaning of the refrain, capturing the shift from “reclaim-the-streets demonstrations to antinuclear ones, an uprising to a social movement”:27 Yūkoto kikaseru ban da, oretachi ga It’s our turn to make them listen to us

Saying that “If we stay silent, we’ll be killed,” he equates nuclear power with older politicians’ fantasies of military strength (expressed as a metaphor of virility). Again tying nuclear power to World War II, he quotes the hikokumin (traitor) insult that people hurled at those who were suspected of doubting the war effort, and which counter-protesters hurl at antinuclear demonstrators today. For many Japanese, the Pacific War is associated with their parents or close relatives’ personal experiences in it—deadly firebombing of cities, widespread starvation, and war trauma—and is hence an index of dictatorship and destruction; recalling it provokes fear of the recurrence of an oppressive environment. The reference lends urgency to ECD’s call on citizens to make their voices heard—“sign petitions, vote, demonstrate.”28 Hence, hip-hop musicians have exploited the genre’s practice of sampling, referencing, and versioning to recast classic tracks as relevant to current political issues in Japan. In particular, they have made use of Gil Scott-Heron’s “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised” and Public Enemy’s “Don’t Believe

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the Hype” to comment on the media’s lack of reporting of antinuclear views. They have also quoted specific words in songs, reframing the meaning of “dangerous” from “Steppin’ Razor.” Finally, rappers like ECD have referred to their own songs, recasting them into the present situation. Combining Reggae with Other Musics Like Japanese hip-hoppers, most Japanese reggae and dancehall musicians have typically been more entertainment-oriented than politically minded. Along with Rankin Taxi and Hibikilla, the reggae singer Likkle Mai has been an exception. Originally aware of reggae’s political and religious roots through her love of Bob Marley and her prior work with the reggae band Dry and Heavy, she became actively involved in post-3/11 relief efforts in her home prefecture of Iwate, which was heavily damaged in the tsunami and whose fishing and seaweed industries were damaged by radiation fears. She has been a fixture at antinuclear demonstrations, where her rendition of Chilean songwriter Victor Jara’s anti-Vietnam War song, “El derecho de vivir en paz” (The Right to Live in Peace), has served to comfort and motivate assembled protesters. Since the April 10, 2011, demonstration, the chindon-brass band Jintaramūta had been playing “El derecho” constantly in instrumental version, making it one of the theme songs of the antinuclear movement.29 In fall 2012, Likkle Mai began singing it with the band. The basis for the song was Nakagawa Takashi’s translation of Jara’s song into Japanese from the 1990s; this version emphasizes the word “ikiru” (to live) by setting it on a downbeat and a high note, giving it a plaintiveness that the word “vivir” does not have in Jara’s original.30 Likkle Mai retained Nakagawa’s setting of the title and refashioned his version to be about the right of the people of Fukushima to live in peace without problems and the will to protect children’s lives. In keeping with her usual genre, Jintaramūta recast the song in a ska-type rhythm, lengthening the triple meter of Jara’s original to a quadruple with ska’s characteristic backbeat.31 When she and Jintaramūta perform it live at demonstrations, protesters’ chants of “saikadō hantai” (We oppose restarts) blend in with the performance. In summer 2014, Likkle Mai joined in a tour of Nakagawa’s band Soul Flower Mononoke Summit, which is well known for their political songs and syncretic mix of traditional Japanese and Okinawan styles with a rock beat.32 At the concert in Shimokitazawa, Tokyo, on August 14, 2014, she performed traditional songs from the Tohoku region like “Akita ondo” (Dance of Akita) and “Kitaguni no haru” (Spring in the Northern Country). Her minyō-style vocalization, with its melismas and nasal tone, fit nicely with reggae rhythms,

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combining the sounds of summertime Japan with a beat that induced the audience to dance. She also joined Soul Flower in a memorable rendition of prewar enka singer Soeda Azembō’s “Nonki bushi” (Carefree Song, 1918), with new verses that pointed out the proposed doubling of the consumption tax, among other contemporary issues. This tax, which had been raised from 5 percent to 8 percent in April 2014, had caused a rise in prices while many workers’ wages had not risen, squeezing the budgets of many Japanese; the Abe government was planning an additional hike to 10 percent in the near future. Performed with a dancehall-like bass rhythm, the song had the audience dancing and singing back the repeating refrain, “a nonki da ne” (Ah, how carefree).33 Likkle Mai was harnessing the danceable rhythms of Jamaican genres to deliver serious political messages. Conclusion Most hip-hop and reggae in Japan has not been politically motivated, as is the case in the United States and elsewhere. In Japan, musicians have been discouraged from expressing political views because of censorship by the record industry, the media’s dependence on corporate sponsors like the nuclear industry, and people’s expectations that musicians should only be entertainers. Nonetheless, a few hip-hop and reggae musicians have harnessed the genre to express their views in recent social movements, particularly in the antinuclear movement and complaints against Abe’s policies like the Secrecy Law, the Right to Collective Self-Defense, and higher consumption taxes. To do so, they have harnessed several characteristics of these genres. They have used the forthrightness and verbal density of the genres to express themselves, as well as call-and-response patterns to engage protesters in slogans. They have used the tradition of sampling and quotation to draw attention to media manipulation while paying homage to classic hip-hop and reggae tracks. Finally, they have syncretized reggae and hip-hop rhythms with older Japanese songs that harken to older traditions of community and protest. Hip-hop and reggae have provided an outlet for anxiety and anger in an environment where behavioral norms and the structure of the media industries make it difficult to express one’s political opinions. Notes 1. The ideas and examples in this chapter are fully developed in the monographs The Revolution Will Not Be Televised: Music and the Antinuclear Movement in Japan Post-Fukushima Daiichi (Oxford University Press, 2015) and The Revolution Remixed: A Typology of Intertextuality in Protest Songs (Oxford University Press, forthcoming).

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2. See Armstrong, “The Japanese ‘Ghetto-Gangsta,’” for an ethnography of these and other Japanese ghetto rappers. 3. Repeta, “Japan’s 2013 State Secrecy Act,” Asia-Pacific Journal. 4. Cloonan, Banned!; Cloonan, “Call That Censorship?” 5. Dorsey, “Breaking Records”; RIAJ, “Rekōdo rinri shinsa-kai.” 6. K Dub Shine, conversation with the author, Tokyo, August 17, 2014. Condry describes the resulting single, “911 Remix,” but does not mention the censorship incident. He recounts the withdrawal from the market of King Giddra’s “F. B. B.”/ “Driveby”; “F. B. B.” was eventually re-released after re-recording. See Condry, HipHop Japan, 205–6, 159–60. 7. Abel, Redacted. 8. The depoliticization of Japanese musicians and the punishments political musicians endure are discussed at length in Manabe, The Revolution Will Not Be Televised. 9. K Dub Shine, conversation with the author, Tokyo, August 13, 2014. 10. Andy Bennett, Popular Music and Youth Culture; Tony Mitchell, ed., Global Noise. 11. Similarly, punk carries an aura of forthrightness and rebelliousness. Punk musicians like Ko of Slang, Toshi-Low of Brahman, Namba Akihiro, and Anamizu Masahiko have been active in protesting nuclear power and spearheading relief efforts. 12. Hayashi and McKnight, “Good-Bye Kitty, Hello War.” 13. Darth Reider (Wada Rei) runs his own record label, Dame Records. He has also been active in the movement to revise the Entertainment Law, described later. He attended Tokyo University and is the son of Wada Kei, a long-time government reporter and editing committee member for the news department at Fuji Television. 14. “DARTHREIDER & RUMI at Kōenji Genpatsu Yamero Demo!!!!!!!!!,” YouTube video, 3:53, from antinuclear demonstration on April 10, 2011, uploaded by “taikieatssushi,” May 9, 2012, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qii6BT_s540. 15. Turino, Music as Social Life, 23–65. 16. Manabe, “Music in Japanese Antinuclear Demonstrations”; Manabe, “Uprising.” 17. Shing02 and Hunger, “Kakumei Wa Terebi Ni Utsuranai: The Revolution Will Not Be Televised 2012,” November 2011, http://e22.com/notv/. Shing02, who is a graduate of University of California at Berkeley, constructed the website Boku to kaku, providing information on radiation and its effects on health (http://www.e22 .com/atom2/index2.htm). Hunger, a resident of tsunami-hit Sendai, participated in post-3/11 relief efforts. His group, Gagle, donated the proceeds to the song “Ubugoe” (See the Light of Day) to charity. 18. “Can’t Truss It 2011 K Dub Shine Freestyle,” YouTube video, 1:41, posted by “wanpa1303” on April 21, 2011, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qAeUvf79dKw. 19. See information at “Don’t Believe the Hype—Shinjitsu no shi (TRAILER),” YouTube video, 1:55, posted by “djhonda3” on July 29, 2011, http://www.youtube .com/watch?v=zVI9h-XZHgU. 20. “Don’t Believe the Hype! by DELI,” YouTube video, 3:26, posted by opkodomotachi1 on December 11, 2011, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oUzamWN8z2c. After 3/11, Deli ran “Operation Kodomotachi,” a non-profit to evacuate children and their families from high-radiation areas to Hokkaido. 21. Deli, interview with the author, Tokyo, June 5, 2012.

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22. Manabe, “Uprising.” 23. Darth Reider featuring Hibikilla, “SAFE IS DANGEROUS,” Soundcloud audio, 3:55, uploaded by Wada Rei, 2012, https://soundcloud.com/rei-wada/safe-is -dangerous-feat. 24. Darth Reider, email to the author, March 18, 2013. 25. Ibid.; Darth Reider, Amebreak Rapstream, Tokyo, July 22, 2012. 26. The recording is available on Dengaryū’s 2012 album, Bkyu Eiga No Youni 2. The Entertainment Law (fūeihō) is an Occupation-era law that stipulates that establishments that serve alcohol and allow people to dance cannot stay open past midnight or 1 a.m. After decades of looking away, the police began a concerted campaign from 2010 onwards to close clubs that had been instrumental in developing and sustaining the hip-hop, reggae, and dance music scenes. While the law looks set to be debated and revised in the Diet in September 2014 (after much lobbying from key musicians like Zeebra, Darth Reider, Taku Takahashi of m-flo, and others), the campaign has resulted in the closure of many clubs, especially in the Kansai area. 27. Isobe Ryō (@isoberyo), Twitter, April 10, 2012. 28. Manabe, “Straight Outta Ichimiya.” 29. “Kōenji genpatsu yamero demo! ! ! ! ! 03: Gaado-ka to ekimae de kanade rareta merodi,” YouTube video, 8:22, uploaded by Akira Shimada, April 10, 2011, http:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=xn0QsxUg8nk. 30. “Soul Flower Union ‘Heiwa ni ikiru kenri,’” YouTube video, 6:39, from a performance at On Air East, December 16, 1998, uploaded by “mute60s,” February 6, 2009, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jTPD6cPym_M. 31. “Jintaramūta with Likkle Mai—Heiwa ni ikiru kenri,” YouTube video, 4:56, uploaded by “elpaisa2005,” January 3, 2014, http://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=mW7vC7umnVA. 32. Soul Flower Mononoke Summit involves somewhat different personnel from Nakagawa’s main band, Soul Flower Union. Mononoke includes Ōkuma Wataru of Jintaramūta on clarinet. 33. Other politically themed songs played by Soul Flower Mononoke Summit and Likkle Mai at the concert included two other songs by Soeda (“Aa wakaranai” [I Don’t Understand] and “Kane no yo ya” [It’s a Money World]), “Henoko bushi” (Dance of Henoko, the Okinawa base under construction), folk singer Takada Wataru’s “Seikatsu no gara” (Right to Life), and “Kike, bankoku no rōdōsha” (Listen, Workers of the World).

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ike techno, punk, and other genres of music that entered Japan in the 1970s and 1980s, the Japanese iteration of hip-hop was born with an identity problem. Unlike its cousins, however, Japanese hip-hop was never able to shake this complex, as it has also always had a race problem. From the beginning, Japanese rappers, dancers, and everyone involved in the culture have had to deal with the fact that they were ethnically Japanese, doing something that was understood as being racially black. In our discussion, we will leave the question of whether or not Japanese hip-hop is “authentic” for another researcher, and the question of why we should feel the need to evaluate the “authenticity” of a culture for another occasion.1 Instead, we will focus on Japanese hip-hop’s perception of itself. We will examine why Japanese hiphop artists and fans are generally rejected and ridiculed by Japanese society, and why the scene is so preoccupied with its own race. As a way to focus our examination of this phenomenon, we will begin with a look at a manga called Wild Q that set off an infamous debate within the mid-1990s Tokyo hip-hop scene about the proper representation of hip-hop culture.2 This event forced Japanese hip-hop artists and fans to deal with not only their own Japaneseness, but also their perceived “non-blackness.” As students of this cultural phenomenon of music-induced identity crisis, this event provides us with a window into understanding not only the process of the Japanese hip-hop scene’s early development of its own views on race and identity, but a view of the implications of “imported” racial stereotypes in the broader Japanese context.

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Wild Q began serialization in 1995 in Popeye, a popular monthly men’s magazine. Written by manga artist and electronic/new wave musician Yutsuko Chusonji, it was a goofy comic strip about a group of Japanese kids that go to New York, and learn about hip-hop culture along the way.3 The plot, however, was secondary to Chusonji’s main interest: introducing hip-hop culture to young Japanese readers.4 Some sections featured descriptions of hip-hop elements such as DJing, rapping, breakdancing, and graffiti. Other sections featured maps of Brooklyn, complete with locations of famous hiphop clothing stores such as Dr. Jay’s, and lists of brands (such as Mecca, Karl Kani, Pele Pele) that were popular there. This meant that a young fashionconscious Japanese reader with no previous firsthand knowledge of New York’s hip-hop scene could step off the plane from Tokyo with the manga in hand and know exactly what to buy and where to buy it. Also, because most characters spoke in black vernacular (or, so-called Ebonics), Wild Q also functioned as a sort of hip-hop English textbook. Each installment of the comic included a vocabulary list at the end, in which meanings and pronunciations would be given for particularly important words that had been used in previous panels, such as “bitch,” “flava,” or “nigga” (I will come to this later). This function was expanded upon in the collected volume published after the release, with an additional hip-hop slang dictionary that was compiled by K Dub Shine, one of the most respected rappers in the scene at the time.5 Chusonji also used her manga to poke fun at Japanese hip-hop fans, and it was this move that made people angry. As she says in the afterword of the collected volume of Wild Q, Chusonji had come up with the idea for Wild Q after living in New York and being inspired by the hip-hop scene there. Due to her absence, she was completely unaware that a serious underground rap scene had been developing for years in Tokyo and other major cities. Instead, she assumed that all Japanese rappers were just copycats or comedians, and thought that Japanese fans were completely ignorant of the true essence of black music and culture.6 This attitude is reflected in the portrayal of Japanese characters in the manga. Most of the main characters are irredeemably pathetic, and their attempts at fitting in the Brooklyn ghetto are constantly ridiculed. One character enters a hip-hop battle only to get beat up by a crowd of anonymous black men, and most of the other characters are portrayed as simple copycats that buy the clothes, records, and other trappings of urban black culture but have no real understanding of black people or hip-hop. Because of this, a few months into the manga’s serialization, the Japanese hiphop scene began to lash out at Chusonji. She was shouted at by hip-hop fans and artists when they recognized her in public, and she even began receiving angry phone calls from rappers.7

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To be sure, Chusonji’s characterization of Japanese hip-hop fans was unfair. In Hip-Hop Japan: Rap and the Paths of Globalization, Ian Condry notes that “many Japanese artists and fans of hip-hop do in fact make an effort to learn about hip-hop history and its relationship to black Americans through books, films, and Japanese magazine articles.”8 This is true. The dedication to learning the black “roots” of hip-hop seen in the Japanese hip-hop scene has no parallel in the scenes whose music is considered “white,” or more accurately, is considered raceless or neutral. Most veteran rappers are well versed in black American history and popular media culture, whereas punk artists are not expected to understand white British culture or be students of the history of the Caucasian diaspora. Nor is there a rock analog to Japanese “hustler rap” progenitor Seeda’s line in “Music,” where he raps, “I want to rap what’s on my mind / in front of black people, with respect and responsibility.”9 But we must not make the mistake that Condry does when he asserts that this focus on race means that “Japanese rappers are precisely the ones thinking about race and culture in ways more subtle than those of the average Japanese music fan.”10 Most of the discourse on race in the Japanese hip-hop scene is no more subtle than that of Japanese society at large. As we will see below, while the Japanese hip-hop scene is certainly conscious of race, it has generally failed to view black music through anything other than a white or Western lens. The Japanese hip-hop subculture continues to commit the same errors that its surrounding society makes. While Wild Q may have been created with good intentions, it ended up touching a nerve.11 Even worse than the belittling of Japanese hip-hop fans, however, was the fact that the manga ran in Popeye. Far from a niche hip-hop maniac magazine, Popeye was a very popular and well-regarded men’s fashion and general interest publication.12 This meant that a lot of people without any knowledge of or interest in hip-hop would also read Wild Q. Thus, there was a danger that the image of Japanese hip-hop fans as a bunch of silly, clueless wannabes would spread even further across Japanese society. This issue was addressed most clearly by an article written by Utamaru, a rapper that had shouted at Chusonji in a nightclub for “making fun of Japanese B-boys” only months before. The article is included as part of the afterword of the collected volume version of Wild Q itself, and seems to have been intended as food for thought for the Japanese hip-hop fan in 1996. For us today, it also provides a snapshot not only of a scene in its formative years, but of a scene that is extremely self-aware; a scene concerned with both its “outside” public image and its own internal worries. Near the beginning of his article, Utamaru explains that the reason he and so many other people were furious at Chusonji was that they were worried

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that the publication of Wild Q would confirm suspicions among the wider populace that the scene was nothing more than cheap mimicry: It is a fact that Japanese B-boys in general are considered “copycats.” Like, “they’re just copying black people.” People say that. . . . So yeah, partially because of that situation . . . a lot of Japanese B-boys were angry. Our feeling was that we didn’t want to be thought of as the same as what was appearing in [Wild Q].13

What should draw our attention, however, is the moment of self-reflection in which Utamaru acknowledges that these accusations of copycatting are not just external, but also internal: Maybe the reason we Japanese B-boys got upset was because we felt like that “wannabe” (naritagari) element that hides within us was being expanded and laughed at. Then we had to ask ourselves “so, what about me?” Wild Q is a “hiphop manga,” so of course it would arrive at this conclusion. So, what about you?14

This is a statement that deserves attention. Here, Utamaru is experiencing, and articulating, a stubborn element of the Japanese hip-hop scene: that internal worry that maybe one really is just a wannabe. He not only identifies this within himself and his fellow performers, but within the fans, as he asks his reader: “what about you?” In this brief passage, Utamaru condenses a conversation that has been part of the Japanese hip-hop scene since its birth. To better understand the significance of this moment, we might contrast it to the process of importation of rock music in the late 1960s. In Sayonara Amerika, Sayonara Nippon, Michael Bourdaghs describes the difficulty that young Japanese rock musicians faced in the aftermath of Beatlemania, as a new kind of rock began to emerge in America and the UK. The young Japanese interest in rock music brought with it a linguistic quandary: should this “new music” be sung in English, or in Japanese? Proponents of the former argued that rock sounded best in English, and proponents of the latter maintained that rock was meaningless if people did not understand it. After a few short years of experimentation, however, the general consensus was made that Japanese lyrics were appropriate. The scene moved on quickly, and Japanese rock and pop music today is generally sung in Japanese. Hindsight has shown the initial linguistic and cultural fumbling of the early Japanese rock scene to have posed little danger to the sustainability of the genre, but at the time, young musicians were seriously worried about the future of their new culture. Consider this excerpt from an article published by Happy End drummer Takashi Matsumoto in 1970: Our everyday is buried in the crevice between the “Western-looking” and the “Japan-like.” Then, we lose sight of the “West” we have been dreaming of, and

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when we turn around, we realize we’ve even lost Japan. We’re anxious, like a blind person that has wandered into a dead-end alley.15

The article was called “Let’s Find ‘Our Japan.’” Twenty five years later, Utamaru would take an almost identical position, insisting that “we are fighting to create a ‘Japanese’ hip-hop.”16 He criticizes one of the main characters of Wild Q as a “typical wannabe” that goes to the honba (“the real or genuine place, the original place”) of hip-hop without even knowing what he wants. He argues that going to hip-hop’s honba is not necessarily a bad thing, but it must be done much more (racially) consciously: There is the method of going directly to the honba [i.e., Brooklyn], where you can “breathe hip-hop like air” . . . and actually, recently there have been some Japanese people that have done that and found success that way. But, they are going to the honba only after having learned a skill, like DJing, that they can say, “this is what I am,” and be proud of. Of course, one’s “stance as a Japanese” should also be included in that process.17

In both of the above statements, we find young artists trying to push their scene away from a blind idolatry of an Other, and toward an embracing of a new culture that is also compatible with a new, yet authentic Japan. Neither Matsumoto or Utamaru are entirely sure what this authentic “Japan” should or could look like, but they both feel that the scene in its present form is simply not sustainable. But whereas the barrier Matsumoto struggles with is one of nationality or culture, Utamaru is referring to one of race, or of species. When Utamaru refers specifically to a public perception that Japanese hip-hop artists and fans are “copying black people,” we can see that the sort of unease he is referring to here is less an issue of national boundary (United States versus Japan) than it is of racial boundary (black versus yellow). That is, whereas Matsumoto was concerned with the nebulous “West” or “Westerners,” Utamaru is focused on Brooklyn (the honba), and black people. For Matsumoto, race is not really part of the question. Or, if it is, it is inseparable from “the West”—the predominantly white rock groups that Japanese groups are emulating at the time are never referred to as “white,” but only “Western” or “American.” Their race is invisible. Instead, he speaks about linguistic and cultural differences—barriers that can conceivably be overcome with time. Utamaru, however, cannot hide his preoccupation with the physical, presumably biological and insurmountable, racial differences between Japanese and black hip-hop practitioners. When he muses on the people that Japanese b-boys “wanna be,” Utamaru never actually uses the word “American,” nor does he ever talk about “America” (or even “New York”). Instead, he refers

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specifically to “black people” (kokujin), and his ambiguous term honba refers specifically to “Brooklyn” (which is understood as an exclusively “black” domain, and is presented as such in Wild Q). Both Matsumoto and Utamaru are looking for a way to say, “this is what I am,” but only for Utamaru does the verb to be explicitly involve the experience of being racially different. In an MTV Japan interview that aired three years after Wild Q (along with his column) published, Utamaru was much more explicit about the Japanese scene’s preoccupation with race: [There were] people that got really into hip-hop, that you know, were wannabes. Like saying, “Man, New York is so cool . . .” and wanting to be like rappers. Anyone who has had that experience, it’s really silly. . . . In Japan, we’ll tan our skin, do our hair in dreadlocks, stuff like that. And after you grow up a bit, it seems silly, but that passion, it’s really wonderful, I think. . . .18

That is, while he does say that this is a “phase” that one should “grow up” out of, Utamaru is explicit about the racial nature of the “wannabe” in this interview. Whereas in his column in Wild Q one needs to read in between the lines for this insight, here Utamaru is very clear about the fact that the boundary being felt was primarily one of biological race—hence the desire to darken one’s skin or make one’s hair look like a black person’s.

Rejection and Alignment Now that we have compared two scenes in their infancy, we can compare their position in Japanese society in 2014. Here again, we will focus on rapper (and now, radio host) Utamaru, and his response to another incident in which the legitimacy of Japanese hip-hop was challenged. Utamaru is a useful figure for our analysis of hip-hop, as he has achieved both respect in the hiphop subculture as well as a degree of mainstream recognition. He began his career as an underground rapper in the early 1990s, and continues to release albums with his group, Rhymester. On the other hand, he is also the host of a Saturday evening show on major market station TBS Radio, and is known primarily in the Japanese media for his position as a radio host and cultural commentator. Thus, he is expected by hip-hop fans to not only speak internally to the scene as a veteran rapper, but also represent Japanese hip-hop culture to mainstream society as an ambassador. In September of 2014, a sports commentator named Dai Tamesue made a series of tweets about “trying to be something you can never be,” which peaked in a tweet in which he declared that “It’s sad. Whenever a person born and raised in Japan does hip-hop, no matter how hard they try, it seems

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unnatural.” Some people agreed with his statement, while others responded angrily, accusing him of not knowing anything about the Japanese scene.19 That same week, Utamaru responded to the uproar on his radio show, referring back to the topic of rock music that we have previously covered: Something that I always find strange is, why don’t we have a problem with Japanese people doing rock music? I’m serious. Or even our entire lifestyle in Japan [like wearing Western clothing], should that be rejected overall, too? If you think about that, then you realize how shallow and extreme [rejecting Japanese hip-hop] is. So, I think behind these kinds of statements, there’s a thought there, that “hip-hop belongs to black people.” So, because black people are doing it, it’s something particular, special—based in their physicality, like a reverse . . . well, a racial prejudice. Like you’re just looking at that particular part of black people as special. And if you’re going to say that, then well, who made rock? Black people. And, well, once you go there, then it’s going to take forever to discuss that.20

Utamaru begins his discussion with what looks like an anti-essentialist argument against the racialization of genres. However, he stops short of truly questioning the implications of acceptance of white music and rejection of black music. Instead, he retreats to an appeal of the fact that at one point, rock was also known as “black” music—in essence, treating the problem as a “slippery slope” issue. It is here that we can return to Utamaru’s point about rock music, and add an extra layer of analysis by recognizing that the problem that hip-hop faces in Japan is not only one of negative rejection, but also of positive alignment. In “Modernity and Its Critique: The Problem of Universalism and Particularism,” Naoki Sakai describes the continual process through which “The West (Europe)” was formed. At the same time that Western colonial powers were “Westernizing” Japan, they were also “Westernizing” themselves. As Sakai explains, as “the West” (today, white Europe and white America) struggled to present itself as a benevolent leader of the world, it has had to continually define and redefine itself.21 But this is difficult to do without an external foil, and eventually the West needed to move beyond talking about the progress it had made from its own feudal past. Instead, the West began to continually point out how it was different from the “Orient”—or, more accurately, to point out how different the “Orient” was from the West. To borrow Sakai’s language, we relied on them as a source of “an endless series of strange and different things”—odd ceremonies, weird alphabets, and so on—that could be pointed to and marveled at, which would then implicitly affirm “the familiarity of our things.”22 Looking for differences, and presenting those things as strange, in order to implicitly define our things as normal and universal—this is the mechanism. We can now describe the application of this mechanism as it appears in alignment.

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Later in his essay, Sakai describes philosophers in imperialist Japan who wanted to defeat Eurocentricism not because it was oppressive, but because they wanted to co-opt its structure: they wanted to “change the world so that the Japanese would occupy the position of the center,” and thus give Japan the right to “determine other particularities in its own universal terms.”23 Since the loss of the war, however, the sheer force of Euro-American supremacy has proven that fantasy to be unrealistic. Instead, it became more prudent to simply align Japan with the existing Western supremacy—a move that does not provide a feeling of superiority, but at least offers safety from the feeling of inferiority. This is where the mechanism of alignment comes into play. In the same way that “the enemy of my enemy is my friend,” we can say that if we want to align ourself with the West, the most convenient method is to reject the same “other” that they do. In other words, in order to present itself as a “universal,” unified, and objective entity, the West placed Africa and its immediate descendants under a microscope, and turned them into strange objects to be studied. Japan, knowing all too well that horrors can happen in the colonial laboratory, has donned its own white coat and joined these scientists, peering over their shoulders into the microscope in hopes that they will avoid judgment as a “particular,” or strange nation, and unworthy of their status as an honorary “Western” nation. To return from the theoretical to the practical, what I mean is this: black music is simply a small part of a larger, imaginary “blackness” that was rejected in the immediate postwar by Japan.24 This is why there are so many books and articles available to teach Japanese people “black” rhythm: precisely because “black” rhythm is not white, it is (or must be) understood as strange and foreign. We should notice, for example, that Rhythm Training Theory for Japanese People, which is advertised on the cover as a “shocking book that will relieve your rhythm [inferiority] complex, and teach you black rhythm sense,” says almost nothing about indigenous Japanese music forms. It instead begins by quoting Beethoven and Stravinsky in the first chapter, and then moving on to an analysis of Carl Lewis and Usain Bolt’s Olympic feats, reminding the reader that Bolt is from the country that also produced reggae.25 The author then quotes a Japanese researcher who maintains that black Brazilian soccer players’ rhythmical movements are “somehow different from we Orientals and Europeans.”26 Sound and culture are directly linked to bodies. When the author does reference non-Japanese sources, they are always white researchers—an interview with a white American expert on African drumming, a book by a German scholar of rhythm. We are told that the entire black diaspora retains the instincts of their ancestors that hunted in the “African savannas” and had to be prepared to chase prey at a moment’s notice, and that their rhythm sense is connected to this supposed inborn

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athletic prowess (which is not attributed to hard work or societal factors, but their well-developed dorsal hip and gluteus maximus muscles).27 In summary, white people are partners and sources of knowledge, while black people appear only as physical objects of study. Japanese readers are encouraged to view black rhythm as if they were a white person (or at least as if they are part of an in-group that includes everyone except blacks).28 That is, black music is presented as a particular peculiarity, something that is difficult to understand objectively—with “objectively” generally meaning “from a white perspective.” This is a common story: African music scholar Kofi Agawu has pointed out that in the Western academy, African rhythm is presented as not only complex, but “ultimately incomprehensible.”29 Again, this diagnosis is always spoken with an air of authority, from an “objective” (that is, white, Western) standpoint. This rejection of blackness shown above may seem strange considering the phenomenon of Nihonjinron, a popular genre of books and media that seek to explain how Japan is different from the West, by pointing out Japan’s peculiarities—a practice that Sakai attributes to “a nagging urge to see the self from the viewpoint of the Other.” But if Japan is generally interested in itself as a unique outsider, how is it that Japan has stubbornly added itself to the Western side in this context? Here, we should remember that Nihonjinron “is nothing but the positing of Japan’s identity in Western terms which in return establishes the centrality of the West as the universal point of reference.”30 The logic that lies at the center of Nihonjinron and Eurocentricism—that is, the logic of racism and essentialism—makes the vacillation between affiliation and rejection possible, or even necessary. It allows for an acceptance of nonwhite inferiority, but maintains a certain level of pride. Japan is able to say, to itself and to the West—“Yes, we acknowledge that we are different, but we are not as different as they are.” With this in mind, it is difficult to fault sports newscaster Tamesue for simply speaking for the vast majority of Japanese society, for whom restricted participation in black music is but a small price to pay for the peace of mind of knowing that one is a modern and normative human (unlike blacks, who are considered primitive or strange). This is not to say that black music is specifically targeted as something to reject. The West’s image of blackness is as linked to backwardness, which must be rejected, as it is to “positive” stereotypes such as athletic talent or music skill. Music is the baby that must be thrown out with the bathwater, and only for a small minority—those who want to participate in hip-hop—does this actually pose a dilemma. This phenomenon has precedent in another “black” genre—jazz. In Blue Nippon: Authenticating Jazz in Japan, jazz performer and scholar E. Taylor Atkins notes that before WWII, most Japanese musicians’ exposure to jazz music was through the work of white band leaders such as Paul Whiteman,

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and Japan at the time was not particularly interested in the idea of jazz as a uniquely black art form. In fact, Paul Whiteman’s “explicitly unfunky,” commercialized versions of jazz were preferred over “wild” black jazz. Jazz was not “black” music, but instead “American” or “Western” music; a symbol of modernism, with all of the benefits or suspicions that this entailed. As Atkins describes, one of the defining differences between 1920s Japanese and European jazz scenes was “the lack of a Japanese analogue to the négrophilie that was a defining element of modernism and jazz culture in Europe, particularly in France.” European fans found in jazz the promise of a “primitive” black culture that could be an antidote to the civilizational evils that had caused the First World War. Japan, however, was not interested in any sort of “antidote” to modernization, as it was focused on proving its own modernity to the West and to itself.31 After the war ended, and the occupying military entered Japan, perceptions of jazz changed. Black and white American GIs brought along their instruments, and their racial contexts. Soon, the Japanese jazz scene began to “naturally equate authenticity with the Negro,” and display a deep disinterest in its own domestic jazz music.32 In the late 1950s and early 1960s, there was marked uptick of concert tours by funky, black bands in Japan. At the same time, the market for Japanese jazz artists decreased. Record labels went out of business, jazz coffeeshops that once hosted live jazz concerts now only played jazz records, and talented musicians were forced to move abroad to earn a living.33 The fact that the very same music was at one point considered merely “Western” and an appropriate base upon which to build Japanese popular music, and then a few decades later was considered “black” and thus untouchable, is instructive. It should then be no surprise then, that the conversation crystallized by Wild Q has progressed little, and that the scene is still trying to come to terms with what it means to be a Japanese person that performs black music. Because mainstream Japanese society (like mainstream US society) views hip-hop as something that is essentially black, and rejects any attempt at reproducing it “unnatural,” members of the Japanese hip-hop scene are left stuck in the middle. They resent the label of “copycat,” but are not immune to the pressure of expectations and assumptions of mainstream society. They are forced to grapple with the sneaking suspicion that maybe, after all, hip-hop just was not meant for anyone but black people. This is why Japanese practitioners of black genres occasionally blame their lack of success on their racial Japaneseness, complaining that they lack the physical attributes that make black people so innately talented at dancing or making music.34 Rock, techno, and punk musicians, on the other hand, do not generally complain that they cannot play as well as a white musician because they do not have European

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blood coursing through their veins. There also seems to be little demand for books or articles to teach Japanese readers how to learn “white rhythm.” After all, Utamaru’s mention of the double standard for rock music is a fair point. For example, we should recall that punk and hip-hop both were born in the mid-1970s. We can then note that by 1979, a Japanese punk band called Inu was playing a brash sound that simultaneously referenced and ignored the Sex Pistols, and that by 1987, Tokyo-based The Blue Hearts had developed a pop-punk formula that took them to the top of the charts. In comparison, we can look back to the uproar over Chusonji’s manga, which shows that Japanese hip-hop was still struggling internally with its own racial legitimacy over fifteen years after DJs first played “Rapper’s Delight” in a Shibuya club. The situation remains fundamentally the same today. One might be tempted to attribute the difference in the acceptance of these musical cousins to the lyrical difficulties of rap music—perhaps hip-hop has failed to gain acceptance because Japanese is somehow less suited for rhymebased lyricism than English. But even if this is the case, we must remember that the problem of rejection also occurred in jazz, which is no more lyrically complex than rock. Further, the preoccupation with physical race transcends linguistic barriers. For example, rapper and producer OMSB, whose mother is Japanese and father is a black American, has repeatedly expressed annoyance that Japanese hip-hop fans attribute his quirky beats to an inborn, “black” talent for rhythm. In an interview, he says that people expect him to sound different somehow because of his mixed race, and maintains that those people “aren’t even listening to [his] music,” and their biases “get in the way of the music.”35 Dancers also seem to be susceptible to this same paranoia. We need look no further for evidence than the popularity of The Secret of Black People’s Rhythm, a book first published in 1999 by dancer Seiichiro Shichirui and currently in its seventh edition. Whereas the aforementioned Rhythm Training Theory for Japanese People is a comprehensive overview of rhythm in general (complete with a CD and training exercises for musicians), Shichirui’s book is specifically about the body and motion. As a professional dancer, Shichirui teaches Japanese people to understand what it is about black people’s bone structures and bodies that makes them unique, so that they can make appropriate efforts to compensate in their own training regimen. Most of his practical instruction involves teaching readers to imitate animal movements to (e.g., shrimp, pigeon, alligator, and panther) so as to get closer to those of black people. Thus, it seems that the physical “race” of a genre is a primary variable in its acceptability as a domestic subculture. But why does race in “white” music remain transparent, while in “black” music it is forever hyper-visible? Or, put another way—why must “white” music remain transparent? Is this, as

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the analysis above suggests, another permutation of a Japanese need to hold blacks at arm’s length to prove worthiness of Western civilized approval—a sort of global “model minority” complex? And if so, what might this say about mainstream Japanese, white American, or black American, or global societies—or the perceptions they have of each other? To answer these questions may, in Utamaru’s words, “take forever.” But until the scene considers these questions seriously, there will be no conclusion. Similarly, until scholarship in this field begins to take these questions seriously, academic discussions (both domestic and foreign-language) of Japanese popular culture, particularly of music, will never exit the realm of simple show-and-tell. 36

What Remains Unsaid In anticipation of such dialogue, we can now move on from discussing mainstream society’s pressure on the Japanese hip-hop scene, and address the fact that the Japanese hip-hop scene has done little to combat the racist myths that cause it to be rejected. That is, now that we have looked at what was said in this uproar over Japanese identity in the rap scene, we can look at what was not said. If we return to Utamaru’s article, we can see that he was angry about Chusonji spreading incorrect information about Japanese b-boys, but he does not seem concerned about her spreading incorrect information about black b-boys. To Utamaru, and many people in the scene at the time, the way in which Japanese hip-hop fans were portrayed was negative and stereotypical, and thus unacceptable. However, in Wild Q, black characters are portrayed in ways that are extremely stereotypical—much more so even than Japanese characters. Black males in Wild Q are large and imposing, with angry, distorted faces. They carry guns, spraycans, and malt liquor bottles. They seem to all be interchangeable—none of them even have names—and exist only to bully the Japanese characters. Black women are all shown as hypersexualized and promiscuous. One of the only identifiable black female characters is named Sister Blunt, probably for the huge marijuana blunt she always has in her mouth. She has several children (“of course, all of the fathers are different,” a note in her description tells us) and generally appears wearing nothing more than a bikini, with a snubnose revolver tucked into her cleavage. Black living spaces are depicted as blighted war zones, full of dog feces and garbage. In several outdoor scenes, Japanese characters are shown ducking bullets. There often are no specific shooters or targets—the flying bullets are simply part of the ghetto ambiance, like mosquitos in a jungle. Even the vocabulary component, which is perhaps the most revolutionary part of Wild Q, is full of misinformation. In a glossary at the end of

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the second installment, readers are told that “nigga” doesn’t actually mean “black person,” but that “in street slang, it’s an insult that means ‘terrible’ or ‘awful.’” The entry for “bitch” warns the reader, “Don’t use this on Japanese girls!” (implying that the word is only appropriate when used as it is in the manga—that is, toward black women). Low-income housing projects are defined as a place where “blacks and Hispanics live, and the government takes care of them.”37 In the afterword to Wild Q, Chusonji notes that she wrote the dialogue of the black characters, vocabulary items, and descriptions via phone calls and faxes back to her black contacts in Brooklyn, so as to make sure that she was properly representing true black hip-hop life.38 She aims to speak for those who (due to distance and language barriers) cannot speak to their Japanese counterparts, but the message is often inaccurate. It is possible to dismiss the racist portrayal of blacks in Wild Q as simple ignorance on the part of one author. We might allow, for example, that Chusonji misunderstood a few things during her two-year stay in New York, and that some of those errors made it into the manga. But we must keep in mind that this manga passed in front of several people before it was published, particularly before it was put out once again as a collected book. Many contributors, including rapper K Dub Shine (who helped put together the vocabulary section), had lived in the United States for years, and would have understood that the depictions of blacks in the book were inaccurate. K Dub Shine, in fact, studied black history and sociology at Temple University in Philadelphia.39 Thus, the most qualified and trusted experts on the truth and diversity of black urban life, those who were adamant about properly representing true hip-hop culture, chose to re-present (that is, regurgitate) the same tired tropes (black violence, promiscuity, paternal and financial irresponsibility) handed down by white supremacist society. It seems that for them, and for the scene, the incorrect portrayal of black people was not cause for concern. Thus, with no criticism from inside or outside of the scene, stereotypical views of blacks remain prominent in Japanese hip-hop culture. Exaggerated images of blacks are used to advertise events and products. Travelogues aimed at hip-hop fans often portray black Americans as hypersexualized, dangerous, and entertaining. The reproductions of these tired stereotypes may seem surprising, especially when they come from people who have lived among blacks and should thus “know better.” But these racist fantasies may be best understood in the same terms as mainstream Japanese distancing of itself from blackness. That is, the Japanese hip-hop subculture’s preference to avoid realism in favor of a repetitive fantasy comes from the same place as mainstream Japanese society’s need to view blackness from a white point of view. While the subculture and the mainstream may use different methods, both seem to keep black people at arm’s length in order to maintain a sense of

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self. We can now see that the Japanese hip-hop scene’s conditional “embrace” of hip-hop culture has never been one of true acceptance, but one made calculatingly and at arm’s length. The Japanese hip-hop scene constantly vacillates between multiple complexes, continually being pulled in turn towards invisible whiteness, mainstream Japaneseness, and hyper-visible blackness— and being forced to reject each of them, as they are in turn rejected by each pole, in an endless (if imaginary) triangular spiral. So—can the Japanese rap? Is it possible for the subculture which by societal standards should not exist, and which is unsure itself if it should exist, to speak with the same unreflective abandon and freedom that rock does? It is not impossible. It might be achieved passively: perhaps with time, some of the perceived “blackness” will fall away from the genre of hip-hop, as it largely has with jazz. If hip-hop becomes colorless, then perhaps the mainstream will cease to reject it. But, the Japanese preoccupation with blackness will remain. If another “black” genre comes along, the cycle will likely begin anew. On the other hand, perhaps this cycle can be broken proactively, and the scene can follow the lead of those individual artists and fans who have successfully abandoned their fantasies, and accept the genre as something that can belong to them—or more accurately, that belongs to no one. But that would require an entire subculture completely rejecting and overcoming the complexes of its parent society—a feat that US hip-hop has never managed.40 Thus, it does not seem realistic to expect, nor intellectually responsible to suggest, that Japanese hip-hop’s interpretation of race should be any more radical than that of the Japanese nation at large. The backlash that came as a response to Wild Q—including the conversation that continued after its serialization ended—demands our attention not only because of what was said, but what was not said. 41 By looking at society’s view of the Japanese hip-hop subculture, and the ways that the subculture attempts to defend itself while failing to truly address racism, we can discover that the challenge that Japanese hip-hop faces is partially a symptom of a larger Japanese phenomenon of distancing oneself from blackness. This is why racist essentialism of blacks is always part of the scene’s conversation— and at one point, was actually part of the education.

Notes 1. Most discussions of non-black American hip-hop are focused on the question of authenticity, from a very particular standpoint: that of the outside observer who is an arbiter of quality and authenticity. Some dismiss non-black attempts at hip-hop as appropriation (this is most common in music journalism), while others (generally academics) tend to search for and celebrate things that make their object of study

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“authentic”—usually centering on political or culturally subversive lyrics to make their case. While these conversations can occasionally be interesting, they rarely give any insight as to the perception of the scene by either those who live in it, or those who live outside of it. 2. Chusonji, Wild Q. 3. Ibid., 153. 4. Ibid. 5. K Dub Shine (along with his group, King Giddra) had just released Sora Kara No Chikara (Power from the Sky), one of the most critically lauded records of Japanese rap history. For those more familiar with the US hip-hop scene, consider that featuring a section personally edited by K Dub Shine would be something like having a book’s afterword penned by a young Nas in his prime. 6. This is understandable—in the early 1990s, when Chusonji first left Japan, hip-hop was most often used as a quick gag in comedy routines on evening variety shows. Serious, legitimate Japanese hip-hop acts were not given television airtime until much later. 7. Ibid. 8. Condry. Hip-Hop Japan, 33. 9. Seeda, CD. Emphasis added. 10. Condry, Hip-Hop Japan, 33. 11. Eventually, Chusonji was able to reestablish herself as a patroness of the hiphop scene by funding Hip-Hop Night Flight, Japan’s first successful hip-hop radio show. I will leave this topic for a future discussion. 12. Japan wouldn’t get its first dedicated hip-hop magazine until the debut of Front (later known as Blast). It began in 1994 as a seasonal, “special edition” offshoot of rock magazine Crossbeat, but only became an independent magazine in 1998. Incidentally, Utamaru was a regular contributor to Front, writing articles that provided much of the educational value that Chusonji was aiming for, albeit in a slightly less comical fashion. 13. Chusonji, Wild Q, 146–48. 14. Ibid., 149. 15. As quoted in Endô, YMO kompurekkusu, 91. 16. Chusonji, Wild Q, 148. 17. Ibid., 147. 18. “MC Shiro Pt 3.” Note that this video was labeled “1996,” but the actual content of the interview (e.g., a reference to their 1998 hit “B-Boy-ism”) suggests that it took place in 1999. 19. Utamaru,“Nihonjin ni Hip-hop.” 20. Ibid. 21. Sakai, “Modernity and Its Critique,” 93–123. 22. Ibid., 116. 23. Ibid., 113. 24. It should be pointed out, however, that there are certain situations in which it is advantageous to align Japan politically with blacks, particularly in matters of oppression from outside or Western powers. This is a topic that I will discuss at a later time. 25. Tomoyose, Nihonjin no tame, 39.

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26. Ibid., 107. 27. Ibid., 55. 28. It should be noted that this book is published by Rittor Music, a well-regarded music company that also publishes such magazines as Guitar and Sound & Recording. Rittor publications are easily found in any music or sound equipment store. 29. Agawu, Representing African Music Postcolonial Notes, 55. 30. Sakai, 105. 31. Atkins, Blue Nippon, 97. 32. Ibid., 216. 33. It is perhaps not a coincidence that during the same time period there was a “defection of a mass youth audience to rockabilly,” a genre marked—or, rather, unmarked—by its whiteness, despite its black musical roots. (Atkins, 210) 34. See, for example, rapper Seeda complaining about his voice, saying “I don’t like my voice. If you compare it to black people’s, I don’t have enough harmonics” (Itoh, “Seeda Interview”). 35. OMSB finally concludes that “people say that there’s some ‘groove that is unique to blacks’—who cares about that? It doesn’t matter what you are—if you’re dope, you’re dope.” The interviewer then admits that he was one of those that thought his rhythm came from his blackness, and asks him to explain where his unique sound comes from. Futatsugi, “Shinbu kara no Rizumu,” 33–34. 36. Michael Bourdagh’s otherwise excellent Sayonara Amerika, Sayonara Nippon falls short in this area. The book analyzes Japanese importation and interpretations of “white” music, but almost completely avoids or ignores the topic of black music. Entire chapters are devoted to rock, but soul and funk music are not addressed, nor are the influences of black artists on Japanese musicians. This is a strange omission, especially when one considers that much of modern J-pop is deeply rooted in genres such as R&B. 37. Among youth in Japan, the word “bitch” (bicchi) is understood fairly widely, even outside of the hip-hop subculture. However, it has a slightly different meaning in Japanese. In English, “bitch” is an insult referring to a woman that is too assertive or bossy. In Japanese slang, “bitch” basically means “slut.” 38. Chusonji, 153. 39. Condry, Hip-Hop Japan, 158. 40. That is, for all the praise that US hip-hop receives for occasionally producing rappers with positive political messages, the scene as a whole has never managed to escape most of the oppressive habits (e.g., sexism and homophobia) of its larger, parent society. 41. We should also make the same observation of music scholarship. In Hip-Hop Japan, Condry also makes a note of Wild Q and the conversations that it brought up. However, in his analysis, Condry presents it merely as a manga that upset a few rappers; that is, he seems to have either completely missed or deliberately sidestepped the issue of representation of black men and women in the manga (Condry, Hip-Hop Japan, 153).

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12 Race, Ethnicity and Affective Community in Japanese Rastafari Marvin Sterling

I

n the past twenty years, Japan has witnessed two booms in Jamaican popular culture. The first began in the late 1980s, the culmination of a preliminary interest in roots reggae—an Afro-Jamaican folk music deeply informed by the Afrocentric religious movement, Rastafari—in the mid1970s.1 In the late 1990s, a second reggae boom, this time in dancehall music, emerged. Dancehall, a new, digital form of reggae featuring toasting (a kind of speech song) and which in these and other ways reflects a close musicological kinship with hip-hop, had become Jamaica’s most popular music by the early 1980s.2 The popularity of dancehall in Japan has been driven by the victories of Mighty Crown, a Japanese sound system (high-powered audio systems run by rivaling groups of usually young men) and dancehall reggae dancer Junko Kudo in otherwise all-Jamaican competitions in New York in 1999 and in Montego Bay, Jamaica, in 2002, respectively. While many, especially younger Japanese, have been most drawn to dancehall, others have sought to deepen their appreciation not only of roots reggae but also Rastafari. The adoptions by Japanese—citizens of an Asian nation— of a profoundly Afrocentric movement like Rastafari raises the question of the status of blackness as a globally circulated idea that has taken root not only within but also beyond the West-cum-African diaspora, spaces where very few black people have historically lived. It is important to explore not only imaginaries of blackness that are structured in black interpersonal presence, that speak more immediately, and very importantly, to the possibilities of black political agency, but also those that reflect their relative absence. “Extra-diasporic spaces,” loosely defined as the term may be, represent an — 239 —

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important arena for scholarly analysis of racial blackness as a fully global concept. This includes such regions as East Asia, largely untouched by the Atlantic slave trade, where much of the meanings and practices associated with blackness today are indeed informed by the relative absence of black people. In this chapter, based primarily on ethnographic research conducted in Japan between 1998 and 2000, and on subsequent visits to Japan and Jamaica between 2002 and 2009, I use the notions of affective community as mobilized by Leela Gandhi as a principal theoretical means by which to explore what happens to Afrocentric cultural expressions like Rastafari as they become rooted in sites generally considered outside of the diaspora.3 First, I discuss the notion of affective community. Second, I discuss Rasta in Jamaica and throughout the African Diaspora. I draw generally on my ethnographic data to consider how my research participants rearticulate the movement to create a sense of community in Japan, and then provide a more specific ethnographic case study, a wedding ceremony between a Japanese Rastafarian man and a Japanese woman, to consider Japanese Rastafari as an instance of affective community. Finally, I draw some conclusions based on this analysis.

“Affective Community” and African Diasporic Rastafari The notion of affect has come to assume an increasingly prominent place in much of the social scientific scholarship, including anthropology, sociology, history, queer studies, and cultural studies, among others. The study of affect of course is not new, not even if one discounts its long history in the field of psychology. It echoes, for instance, the Romantic turn from the scientific presumptions of Enlightenment thought at the end of the eighteenth century. More recently, affect has been both privileged and marginalized in the postmodern moment in the 1970s–1990s. Along with such buzzwords as “hybridity,” “pastiche, “and “play,” it was mobilized to revoke the closed, bland and even oppressive formalisms associated with modern thinking for something more creative and more intuitive. This was so even where that creativity involved returns to a reworking of the familiar. Affect in postmodern thought has also been a sort of victim of these new circumstances, of a hyperstimulated present. “The waning of affect” was seen as a consequence of experiences made instantaneously available through mass and other forms of media as well as through international travel, through a desire—however politically circumscribed—to hear the voices and engage in the cultural practices of peoples from all over the world.4 The continued productiveness of affect as a concept resides precisely in its attentiveness to social behavior and relationships—individual and collective,

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past and present, small scale and large, successful and not (judged according to whatever measure)—whose unconscious significances remain unavailable to more “reasoned,” or more familiar modes of analysis. Leela Gandhi’s 2006 book, Affective Communities: Anticolonial Thought, Fin-de-Siècle Radicalism, and the Politics of Friendship, does this kind of work. It uses affect, and more specifically “affective community,” to reclaim a moment of British social utopianism at the turn of twentieth century that has largely fallen by the wayside of historical consideration. Gandhi’s book centers on the late nineteenth century to early twentieth century British activists whose anticolonial efforts involved a cosmopolitan engagement with colonized peoples and their cultures. She employs Jacques Derrida’s notion of friendship as “the lost trope of anticolonial thought.”5 The value of friendship is seen in how it circumvents the boundedness of nation particularly here in the divisions between colonizer and colonized. She explores through this trope of friendship how such activists as Edward Carpenter, Henry Salt and C. F. Andrews involved themselves in a culture of vegetarianism, in welfare societies and socialist activism. These activities were labeled as “immature” by such exemplars of the modern as Lenin and Friedrich Engels;6 Gandhi cites George Orwell’s (1937) ridicule of this affective community of radical utopianists as home to “every fruit-juice drinker, nudist, sandal-wearer, sex-maniac, Quaker, ‘Nature-cure’ quack, pacifist, and feminist in England.”7 Gandhi further explores this notion of friendship and of affective community not only from the metropolitan perspective but also vis-à-vis the postcolonial world, including through consideration of Mahatma K. Gandhi’s and other Indian intellectuals’ and activists’ cosmopolitan friendships with these British anti-colonialists and social utopianists. Leela Gandhi’s affective community is populated by a range of what contemporaneous thinkers labeled as morally and ideologically “immature” outsiders: homosexuals, utopianists, feminists, communists, mystics, environmentalists, anti-colonialists and the colonized. Such thinkers viewed these outsiders’ engagements with each other as founded in a “noncommunitarian understanding of community” in which the teleologies, strictures, and hierarchies of nation, of gender, sex and race, are subverted through liaison with the shifting and thus, potentially, “radically” destabilized ground of otherness.8 How does this idea fit with the contemporary case of Rastafari? Rastafari is an anti-colonialist, anti-capitalist religious movement born among the black underclass in British colonial Jamaica in the 1930s. Smith, Augier and Nettleford identify four beliefs essential to the movement. The first is that Haile Selassie I is black people’s returned Messiah. The second is that Ethiopia is the black person’s true home. Third, repatriation is the black person’s only means of salvation, and fourth, the (neo)colonial and capitalist ways of the West-

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ern world—“Babylon”—are evil.9 Rastafarians express their dissent against Babylon in a range of ways. “Dreadlocks” represent a rejection of European bodily aesthetics and other expressions of Anglophilia. Through “dread talk,” Rastas interrogate in lexical play the colonialisms perceived in the English language.10 In their ritual use of marijuana and consumption of I-tal (natural) foods and medicines, Rastas strive naturally (rather than through artificially created drugs) for spiritual elevation, and at secret nyabinghi gatherings, they “chant down Babylon” in rhetoric, in music and in dance.11 Given the relevance of Rasta ideology to Afro-Caribbean peoples, the religion has spread throughout the region and elsewhere throughout the diaspora.12 Jamaicans immigrating to Great Britain, the United States, and Canada have continued using or have come to use Rasta to challenge the racist and anti-immigration sentiment they encounter in these countries.13 Rastafari has also “returned” to Africa, a spiritual repatriation inflected according to local issues of race, ethnicity, other religious traditions, class, gender and political history. Jamaican Rastas who have managed to travel to Ethiopia, the Promised Land, have had to carefully navigate realities of Ethiopian political life far different from those imagined within the Jamaican movement.14 Terisa Turner sees the viability of Rastafari in East Africa as greatly depending on how well this historically male-dominated movement links feminist concerns with those of race and class.15 Neil Savishinsky argues that the ease with which many West Africans have accepted Rastafari stems from Rasta’s bearing within it elements of a Christianity with which these West Africans too are familiar, and which they, like Rastas, view as a tool of Western hegemony.16 Rastafari might be argued as constituting an affective community—as a radical social relationality significantly realized through a transnational politics of friendship—in several ways. First, and perhaps most fundamentally, is the way in which affective community as Gandhi understands it and Rastafari are both responses to (British) colonial authority. She uses the concept of affective community to speak principally to British imperialism as experienced and challenged by metropolitans and by colonized people.17 Rasta is an example of the latter. The movement in its early days left little room for friendship with “the white oppressor.” Still, it bore within it a politics of friendship between other anti-imperialists especially in the African diaspora, Africa more specifically, and Ethiopia even more specifically. Here “friendship” is understood in perhaps the most profound way possible: through the articulation of a radical fictive kinship between Ethiopians (in East Africa, rather than West Africa where most Jamaicans are descended from) and other diasporic spaces most Jamaican Rastas, given limited resources, have little access to. In the present day, some denominations of Rastafari, such as Twelve Tribes, welcome members of all races, and the hard stance against white peoples has softened in part because of the international attention

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brought to the movement by Rastafarian musician Bob Marley. A second measure of the conceptual fit between Rastafari and affective community may be seen in the correspondence between affective community as a critical communitarianism without the telos of communitarism, and Rastafari’s resistance against attempts to label it as an “-ism” (hence their rejection of the term, “Rastafarianism”). These “-isms” rapidly ossify into the kinds of fundamentalisms that Rastas explicitly reject, including the imperatives of imperialism and Jamaican nationalism in favor of a return to the African homeland. Thirdly, this affective community and the friendships/fictive kinships it creates is seen more intimately in its reimagination of the Jamaican family, in which nuclear families merge with other nuclear families along with friends, relations of friends and so on often all communing together as Rastafarians. It is felt, finally, in embodied affect: in immersion in the natural world, in the sensorial depths of marijuana consumption, in Rastafarian music and dance, in “word-sound-power” as a radical phenomenological resource in the effort to “chant down Babylon.” However, how have ideas of blackness like those expressed in Afrocentric Rastafari come to take root in Japan? What is the status of blackness in this country that bears relatively little history of interpersonal contact with black peoples? The introduction to this volume details the deeply ambivalent and complex history of modern Afro-Japanese relations, from the minstrel show performed for Japanese hosts on Commodore Perry’s ship to the mutual pre-World War II affinities that Afro-Japanese groups shared as non-white peoples, to the global spread of rap and hip-hop. Much of the analysis of blackness in contemporary Japan has indeed centered on the popularity of hip-hop.18 Japanese steeped in hip-hop culture have made themselves over in the image of the African Americans they see in black fashion magazines and hip-hop videos, including by braiding their hair and by deep tanning. Despite the differences between Rasta as a Third World movement and the largely Western sources of Japan’s visualizations of blackness, mainstream representations of Rasta significantly belong to this same symbolic economy. These images are sometimes in the mode of the black-skinned, bulging whiteeyed, white- or red-lipped characters commonly found in Japan until a storm of international protest in the late 1980s to early 1990s.19 Tellingly, casual mainstream images of monkeys in dread tams and sprinting, dreadlocked silhouettes similarly cast Afro-Jamaicans as less than fully human.

Japanese Rastafari as (Affective) Community The “political economy of passion” that Marta Savigliano discusses in her work on tango reveals the highly relational, and perhaps even contradictory

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terms in which passion as a measure of one’s ethnoracial identity and the passion of others is understood. Even as Nihonjinron (theories on the uniqueness of the Japanese people) often posited Japanese as warm, earthy and emotional in relation to cold, rational Westerners, Japanese have also often regarded themselves as cold and rational in relation to “ethnic” groups. These ethnic groups are peoples found around the world except for the familiar (including politically fraught), and therefore in some ways less readily consumable, nonexotic spaces of East Asia and the West. The cultural productions of these peoples—from clothing to musical instruments—have driven a sustained vogue in the consumption of “the ethnic” (esunikku) in Japan. Blackness, as one phenotypic sign of ethnic difference, stands in particularly dramatic contrast to the Japanese sense of themselves as emotionally reserved, or affectively challenged. Blackness in Japan is, if nothing else, a highly recognizable metaphor for intense feeling and emotionality that Japanese circumstantially imagine themselves as lacking. In this way, blackness, such as it is ideologically and symbolically encoded in a whole panoply of African diasporic subcultures presently in Japan, can be used as a resource in creating an affectively deep sense of belonging, in whatever degree of permanence, to these communities. Who are the Japanese who identify most deeply with Rastafari, and how many are there? What are the dimensions of “the Rastafarian community” in Japan? Given the difficulty in gauging the nature of any individual’s personal engagement with Rasta, it is hard to say how many such individuals there are. Some identify themselves as Rasta; others see their lifestyle as significantly Rastafarian or are well versed in Rastafari but do not actually claim to be Rasta. And yet, a few do labor to intimately understand and live out what it means to be Rasta. Explored beyond the “depth” or “superficiality” of its fidelity to the Jamaican instance, the case of Rastafari in Japan offers insight into the terms of Japan’s adaptations of global cultures. I will describe as “Rasta-identified Japanese” Japanese individuals who use Rastafari as a primary ideological means through which to understand their lives and their worlds in sociopolitical, economic, and other terms. While it is hard to say how many there are, given the personal nature of the criteria used (discussed further below), in the course of my research I have personally met about twenty-five individuals whom I believe, having known some for as many as sixteen years, readily meet these criteria. (There are, without doubt, many more than twenty-five.) These individuals tended to be men, perhaps an extension of the male dominance of Jamaican Rastafari and the roots reggae music with which it is closely associated. They tended to be older, in their mid-twenties onward, than the teenagers and young adults attracted to the newer import of dancehall reggae. When I began my research in the late 1990s, the oldest of these individuals were middle-aged and often married

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with children. When they were employed or did not only earn their living primarily from their semi-professional careers as musicians, they were (self-) employed in small businesses rather than in large companies. While engagement with Rastafari can manifest itself in such embodied forms as the wearing of dreadlocks, many Japanese wear dreadlocks but have very little interest in Rasta itself. Dreadlocks in such cases tend to be the expression of a more strictly subcultural affinity with reggae or hip-hop. I exclude these individuals from my use of “Rasta-identified.” What is important in my use of the term is that Rastafari, as far as I was able to determine through sustained contact with these individuals, represents a primary means through which they construct their conscious ideological universe (which may or may not include wearing locks or being reggae musicians and fans). I am concerned with those who not only knew a great deal about Rasta, but who sought to deeply link this knowledge to their sense of themselves in a range of social political terms, including class, gender, and religion. Another way I “determined” whether someone was Rasta-identified was by noting the degree to which they could be said to belong to a community of like-minded people. “Community” in Jamaican Rastafari is ritually articulated in the spontaneous, private encounter between individuals or small groups of Rastafarians who consume marijuana as a sacrament while “reasoning” about politics and society in Jamaica and in the world beyond its shores. While the opinion of Rasta elders is respected, understanding of black people’s situation in the world cannot be codified and sanctioned by institutional authorities, but is rather dialogically, phenomenologically disclosed in “word-soundpower” as the power that inheres in the very sounding of words. Adherents’ being able to follow Rastafari as they intimately understand it is one dimension of the attractiveness of the movement in Japan. The intimacy of this pursuit; the multivalent nature of Rasta itself (religion, sociopolitical movement, symbolic corpus, natural lifestyle and so forth); Rasta’s status as a product of Afro-Jamaican peoples who do not have a strong presence in Japan and who are thus generally unable to dictate the terms of Rasta’s “proper” adoption there, facilitate engagement with the movement most fully according the needs of Japanese self-making. Also for these reasons, it is difficult to describe Rasta in Japan as a discrete, clearly bounded community unified by a single body of ideology and associated cultural practices. The physical spaces of this community are more closely linked to the popularity of roots reggae music than is the case in Jamaica (where the birth of the religion preceded that of the music by nearly four decades). Whether as performers, owners of Jamaica-related businesses, customers, or friends, these individuals tended to frequent such commercial spaces as roots reggae clubs, reggae record stores, Jamaican-themed craft

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shops and I-tal food restaurants. One craft shop whose owner I became friends with was home to periodic cooking classes with an African American Rasta herbalist that drew an audience including Rasta-minded people as well as vegetarians less engaged in Rasta per se. Throughout my research, despite encountering Rasta-identified individuals in geographically disparate parts of the country and under very different circumstances, I was surprised to discover that they often knew each other very well. To the extent that the movement is linked to the popularity of roots reggae, then, it might be seen as conservative, a choice made in keeping with mainstream Japanese imperatives of self-making through (subcultural) consumption. However, Rasta’s status as counterhegemonic community might be seen as partly constituted within this musical subculture, even in the most commercial spaces associated with it. My friend who owned the craft shop also allowed Koni, a deeply Rasta-identified Japanese “dread” (a person who wears dreadlocked hair) and member of the 12 Tribes denomination of Rastafari, to post his newsletter on the movement in her shop. My friend and Koni (a widely traveled former monk-in-training who, much to his family’s distress, gave up his calling to follow Rastafari) mutually hoped that this newsletter would offer shoppers an opportunity to learn more about the movement. An annual rural concert celebrating the birth of Haile Selassie became a relatively specialized space in which hundreds of Rasta-identified Japanese from around the country could meet up and commune with each other. The spaces of other subcultural movements also inform Rasta as a community. Many of the individuals who became part of the Rasta scene in its earliest days had been part of the counterculture scene in the late 1960s, attracted to its similar modes of dissent against the political status quo (long hair, folk music, and natural lifestyle, often including vegetarianism and consumption of marijuana). At one rural event drawing a primarily countercultural crowd, booths were set up providing attendees information about the ongoing American military presence in Japan, the legacy of Japanese imperialism throughout Asia, the Chinese presence in Tibet, and the displacement of Native American communities due to strip mining in Big Mountain. One group of dreads, the members of a reggae band who in the several weeks I spent with them demonstrated close familiarity with these issues, fit in this progressive political space given their songs—sung in Japanese—about the beauty of the natural world, the value of recycling, and the simple pleasures of the Rastaman’s lifestyle. In addition to these spaces of a more generalized interest in reggae music and related scenes, Rasta-identified Japanese have created communal spaces more particular to the movement. Especially during the summer when they perform frequently, many of the ten or so men who are part of the reggae band noted above reside in a “Rasta yard” in Nara Prefecture. As previously

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mentioned, Rasta yards in Jamaica are spaces in which several, variously related individuals—the members of one or more nuclear families, near and distant relatives, friends—live together under one roof as Rastafarians. In this way, the Rasta yard is both secularly residential as well as sacred, one space in which, for instance, reasoning sessions unfold. Most of the Nara dreads have visited and in some cases lived in Jamaica for several months at a time, communing with renowned elders about how to live as true Rastafarians. Several of these men decided that upon return to Japan, they would create their own Rasta yard at the rented house of one of the band members. At one point in my research, two families lived there long term, with visitors staying for days at a time (including the many band members sleeping overnight on the crowded living room floor). One of the dreads described Japanese nuclear families as two lines running parallel to each other, the space in-between representing the social separations demanded by modern life; in contrast, he characterized this African-cum-rural Japanese Rasta yard as a circle in which all might belong. Therefore, where community is understood as a space in which individuals with shared interests (residential, economic, recreational, ideological) can regularly interact with each other, Rastafari in Japan represents a multiplicity of circles of communal intimacy nested within each other. These include, on the outermost edges, Jamaica and the African diaspora, remote despite their status as the birthplace of Rastafari; Japan as their home country; the venues of commercial events in Japan related to Jamaican culture but not Rasta; and spaces that are more Rasta-related even as their primary purpose remains commercial (the craft shop and the concert event celebrating Haile Selassie’s birthday). Moving further inward, there are the towns and villages, and spaces within them, in which Rasta-identified Japanese lead lives as “regular” people. The dreads variously express their love for their rural hometown, imagining it as a place to which Rasta (always already) belongs. The rural communal has long been framed in ideological conversation with the modern, a conversation whose tone largely depends on the historical moment of its occurrence. The early twentieth-century work of folklorist Kunio Yanagita arguably reflects the need to imagine the common folk and their rural communities as the deep and stable source of the spirit of a Japan progressing rapidly into industrial modernity. Intellectuals such as Miki Kiyoshi valorized rural cooperativism, or kyōdōshugi, in the context of coming war: his scholarship transitioned from critique of what he saw as Japan’s descent into “fascist” irrationality to a use of kyōdōshugi as a symbol of Asian nations—led, of course, by Japan—in harmonious co-existence.20 Much as the fursato (hometown) boom of a couple decades ago reflected yearning for the agrarian premodern past (ironically expressed through modern railway travel

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to the countryside and through consumerist fetishization of rural produce), organic cooperative farming including as practiced by members of Japan’s Communist Party represents an effort to protect family farmers threatened by neoliberal capitalist opening-up of the Japanese market to foreign produce.21 Similarly, Rasta in contemporary, information-age Japan represents an ideological rejection of a modern world most immediately experienced in seemingly arbitrary cycles of boom and, at the moment, bust, a global cultural metaphor through which to valorize the rural collective experience. Beyond the (rural) community, the final, most nested circle represents the intimate spaces shared by family and friends, spaces structured around a focused, purposeful engagement with Rastafari (such as the Rasta yard and, generally speaking, the homes of Rasta-identified Japanese). Japanese adoption of Rasta may appear conservative for its apparent fit with wartime rightwing valorization of the rural as a folk-based corrective to the encroachment of Western modernity. And yet, Rasta in Japan bears no immediate empirical connection to these reactionary movements, its calls for return to the rural premodern tending to be phrased in global cultural rather than in nationalist terms. In this way, it is of a kind with community as Gandhi describes it. While Rasta in Japan to some degree represents one choice consumed among many others available on the cultural supermarket,22 its more serious followers expressly reject the commercialization of life in Japan through cultural practices that are immediately informed by or that are readily articulated with the movement.Among these cultural practices is small-scale farming on plots of land immediately adjacent to or near their homes. While few depend on farming as a primary source of income, some sell their produce at Rasta, countercultural or related events. Also in view of diasporic Rastafari, the more serious Japanese practitioners like the Nara dreads tend toward vegetarianism. Based on medicinal knowledge obtained directly from Jamaican Rastas encountered in Jamaica, the Nara dreads shun conventional medicine as dangerous, preferring natural therapy instead. In this way, then, the circles of communal intimacy as intensely centered in cultural practice ultimately comes to be realized through the collective and the individual body.

Rasta Wedding In this section, I will try to ethnographically ground the foregoing discussion with a brief vignette of a wedding I attended early in my research, around the summer of 1999. The wedding was between Koni, the former monk-in-training, dub musician and Rastafarian mentioned previously, and his fiancée, Aiko, who was pregnant with his child. In the strictest

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sense, this was not really a wedding, as Aiko and Koni had actually already been married. They held this event simply to celebrate with their friends. I want to use it to illustrate the ways in which Japanese appropriate AfroJamaican and other forms of ethnic and racial difference in ways that resonate with the idea of affective community. I arrived to Koni’s and Aiko’s rented house in rural Shizuoka Prefecture, where the ceremony would take place, about mid-afternoon. Near the main entrance was a hand-drawn picture of a man wearing a large tam and a woman wearing a hemp dress, with the names Koni and Aiko written above. Inside, the couple and their helpers prepared for the event. Only a handful of people were present at this point, mostly gathered outside the house. Their dress—some tie-dyed, others made of hemp, with straw hats, beads, sandals and other esunikku accessories—reflected a strong countercultural vibe. A few whiled the time away playing music. A man in a blue tie-dyed shirt, round black glasses and long dreadlocks stood quietly but steadily drumming throughout the afternoon as others listened and nodded. Gradually more guests trickled in, and as the yard grew full, the gathering become diverse: mostly Japanese, with some mixed-race people as well as a few “foreigners”; a woman and her husband or boyfriend who wore a straw hat, a red shirt and a tie-dye scarf, their baby strapped to his back as he played a flute; and a physically slight man with a large tam containing his long dreadlocks. He sat by himself, arms wrapped around his knees, for much of the afternoon. Children of all ages chased each other and a couple of dogs romped in a stream very close to the house. Soon the food was laid out in the yard. Dozens of bamboo shoots cut at their joints served as cups. Koni appeared, giving a brief speech in which he thanked his well-wishers. After a brief while he disappeared. A few more minutes passed. Three more drummers joined the first; they played more and more intentionally. A middle-aged woman dressed in a sari and ankle bells danced while shaking another bell held aloft in her hands. This, and the sound of a conch blown by the dread in the blue shirt and round glasses, brought the audience to attention. Headed and trailed by a group of children wearing garlands of flowers, Koni and Aiko, visibly pregnant, proceeded down a path flanked by cheering guests. Both wore new outfits made of hemp. Koni, wearing the Coptic cross of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church, held his hands briefly by his waist, thumb paired to thumb, with index fingers similarly linked and pointing downward, the remaining fingers interlocked. (This diamond-shaped sign is a greeting Rastas have adopted from Haile Selassie, who has often been photographed with his hands arranged in this manner.) Aiko wept; at the end of the runway they turned around and returned, whereupon she bowed a little unsteadily to her guests. Koni, describing his

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excitement about becoming a father, extended his thanks to his guests for coming; Aiko did the same. The audience applauded. The well-wishers themselves took turns describing how they met the newly married couple, and wishing them well. The crowd dispersed into clusters of spontaneous activity: eating, talking, playing, approaching the bride and groom individually with their congratulations. The sounds of “The Wedding March” played on a flute rose lightly. The couple sat together by a low wooden table, on which sat an orange-colored pie (maybe pumpkin, maybe sweet potatoes) whose edges were decorated in tiny green leaves. Aiko continued to weep, heavily, for a moment playing distractedly with a hand-held calimba. Koni went inside. Koni returned and sat; a young girl served him sake in a bamboo cup he held in his hands. A close friend of the couple, a former dancehall reggae deejay, and his wife, who owned the Jamaican-themed craft shop in Tokyo, offered their well wishes. The couple cut the pie. Another dread, in a patternless cotton or hemp blue kimono, seemed to have assumed the role of master of ceremony. At least three more drummers joined the group, and someone played the balafon (a West African wooden xylophone with several calabashes beneath acting as resonators). A woman selling esunikku goods lay out her wares on the grass. Another middle-aged woman in a full-length brown dress with a white floral pattern gave a speech, describing how she met the couple as individuals, only later learning about their relationship with each other. In celebration of their union she did a languid hula dance to a recorded Hawaiian wedding song. The woman dressed in the sari joined her, as did a toddler, who mimed the intricate hand movements as best she could. The guests laughed and cheered her on. The toddler grew distracted, and went away, and the woman in the brown dress ended her dance. The woman in the sari kept dancing. The hula dancer continued watching her attentively, but the rest of the audience’s attention eventually shifted away, to more eating, talking, playing and congratulating the newlyweds. The sari dancer ended her long performance with a flourish, and the audience, whose attention immediately returned to her, applauded. By this point it was getting dark, and soon the guests began heading home. In this event, several things are worth noting here in relation to affective community. Cultural expression from all over the world—West African drums, dreadlocks, Hawaiian and Hindi dance, and the countercultural and ethnic subcultures under which they all, here, may be said to be subsumed— convey a sense of creativity and openness that resonate as a kind of metaphor for the affective openness and free-spiritedness of the newlyweds. Much as the social utopianists whom Gandhi describes declined narrow-minded revel-

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ing in nation and empire, the depths of affection between the newly married couple is revealed in their decision not to formalize that affection through the “culturally nationalist” structures of the Shinto wedding. Their love for each other, their affective community of individuals with similarly rich experiences of the ethnic globe, requires something else, something more improvised (even as their union has already been sanctioned by the state). Indeed, despite the seriousness of Koni’s commitments to Rasta, it too is made secondary to the agglomeration of global cultures that is the esunikku.

Conclusions What is the value of linking Rastafarian in Japan to affective community? I have sought to make this connection because of the way both the case of British, and Indian, utopianisms over a hundred years ago, and Rastafarian today resonate with and have the potential to productively inform each other. The respective movements were initially viewed as immature, as lacking ideological weight and purposeful action that is necessary for them to be judged as historically significant. For her part, Gandhi challenges this by arguing that despite social utopianism’s unwillingness to present itself as important in ways that are recognizable to the intellectual establishment, even (or perhaps especially) in its progressive elements, the movement may yet have significantly influenced the politics and morality of Mahatma Gandhi and other important figures. Rastafarians, too, were long dismissed as raving lunatics, were actually institutionalized in insane asylums for their beliefs, and remain largely ostracized in Jamaican society. Both movements reveled in the affective in ways that were profoundly political. They expressed an alternative politics significantly realized in affect. In the case of Rasta, this was simply to radically desire nothing of the colonial Jamaican social order except to be left alone, to pleasure in a hard-won communion with each other made possible through a religious and political system that valorized their otherwise beseiged sense of racial self-worth. But a politics of affect of course comes with risks of being profoundly apolitical. Its status as not necessarily progressive potentially becomes not progressive at all, even regressive. Leela Gandhi’s affective community represents a valuable theoretical intervention. However, applying this concept to the case of Japanese Rastafari raises questions about how this playful-asprogressive engagement with the other does not only work to destabilize the notion of otherness as absolutely alien to the consuming self, but also may reinscribe that otherness. This risk can be seen in Jamaica and internationally as non-Rastafarians adopt dreads for purposes of play. It perhaps becomes

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especially evident in places like Japan where politics of blackness, such as interpersonally inscribed in African disasporic Rastafari, are undermined by the relative absence of black people. They are readily subsumed by an “ethnic culture.” While Rasta deconstructed permits Japanese to seek progressive alternative socialities, from the Jamaican perspective, these shifted politics can feel like a loss. They can feel like compromise, an attenuated politics of friendship, in which even deeply felt and sincere commitment to Rastafari emerges from boundless choice. They emerge from earnest engagements with global cultural difference like those evidenced at the wedding. This contrasts diasporic Rastas’ sense that the movement is all there is.

Notes 1. Collinwood and Kusatsu, “Japanese Rastafarians.” 2. See, for example, Chang, Can’t Stop, Won’t Stop; Cooper, Noises in the Blood; Stolzoff, Wake the Town and Tell the People; Stanley Niaah, DanceHall; Hope, Inna di Dancehall. 3. Gandhi, Affective Communities. 4. Jameson, Postmodernism, 10. 5. Ghandi, Affective Communities, 14. 6. Ibid., 12. 7. Ibid., 178. 8. Ibid., 20. 9. Smith, Augier and Nettleford, The Ras Tafari Movement in Kingston, 22–27. 10. Pollard, “Dread Talk,” 21. 11. Chevannes, Rastafari, 164–65. 12. Campbell, Rasta and Resistance, 153–229. 13. Hepner, “Chanting Down Babylon,” 200. 14. MacLeod, Visions of Zion, 2–3. 15. Turner, “Introduction,” 10. 16. Savishinsky, “Rastafari in the Promised Land,” 31. 17. Ghandi, 2. 18. See, for example, Condry, “The Worlds of Japanese Hip-Hop”; Cornyetz, “Fetishized Blackness”; Kelsky, “Intimate Ideologies.” 19. Russell, “Race and Reflexivity,” 3–4. 20. Fletcher, “Intellectuals and Fascism,” 50–52. 21. See Ivy, Discourses of the Vanishing, 22, 100–4; Moen, “Radicalism in the Midst of Conservatism,” 59. 22. Mathews, “The Stuff of Dreams,” 718.

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Index

a3 #6, 39 a3 #7, 39 a3 blackface #15, 36–37 a3 blackface #19, 36–37 a3 blackface #42, 37–38 a3 blackface #52, 33–34 a3. . . black on both sides, 17; blackface minstrelsy in, 32–33; cultural exchange and, 31–32; cultural misappropriation in, 33–34; gender in, 32, 35–36 Abe, Shinzō, 209 affect, 1, 240–41 affective communities, 23–24, 252; friendship and, 241; Rasta wedding and, 250–51. See also Rastafari Affective Communities: Anticolonial Thought, Fin-de-Siecle Radicalism,, and the Politics of Friendship (Gandhi, L.), 241 Africa, 62, 65; African Americans and, 127, 134–35 African American literature, 121–22. See also black literature power African American music, 70, 187, 192. See also hip-hop

African Americans: Africa and, 127, 134–35; Asian Americans and, 181, 185n34; broadcasts to, 204–5, 208n69; culture misappropriation from, 33–34; hip-hop against, 13–14, 33, 213, 234–35; support from, 195–96, 202 Africanity, 18, 59, 65–66, 74n32 Afro-futurism, 20–21 Afro-Japanese cultural exchange, 4–5, 200; hip-hop era of, 13–14; Japanese missions in, 5–7; in Okinawa, 12–13; synergy in, 34–35; World War II and, 9–11. See also Hikida, Yasuichi Afro-Orientalism, 3, 7–9 Agamben, Giorgio, 15 Agawu, Kofi, 231 aged description (sabi ), 101–3, 106–7, 116–17 agency, 32, 36–37 aggression, 9–10 Aguranabe (The Beefeater) (Robun), 5 Akihabara style (A-kei), 49 Akuryō, 212 Alexander, M. Jacqui, 57, 59, 73 alienation, 84–85

— 275 —

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Index

Allen, Ernest, Jr., 195 alliance, 156–58 All-Japan Federation of Students’ Self-Governing Associations (Zengakuren), 26n35 America, 4–5, 7, 11–12, 17, 198; diversity of, 130–31; illusion of, 126; Jero related to, 171–72, 177–80; rappers in, 213–16, 238n40; violence and, 199; white, 40–41. See also African Americans; black America “American Dream” (Ōe), 137n7, 139n37 Aminata Moseka. See Lincoln, Abbey anime (Japanese animation), 41–42 ANPO. See Treaty of Mutual Cooperation and Security anti-colonialism, 155, 208n70, 241 antinuclear demonstrations, 211–13 antinuclear hip-hop, 213–16 antinuclear reggae, 219–20 antiracism, 129, 131–32 anti-Semitism, 92–93 Arakawa Akira, 12 Arechi (Wasteland) (journal), 68 arguments, 211 art, 149–50 artificial humans, 142–43, 148, 164n26 arts of contact zone, 10–11 Asia, 83–84 Asian American Identities: Beyond the Hyphen, 179 Asian Americans, 181, 185n34 Asiatic Exclusion League, 7 Association for Black Studies (Tokyo), 120 Astro Boy (Tezuka), 20, 141, 165n50; blackness and, 161–62, 165n52; emancipation in, 161, 161–62; solidarity in, 159–60; spectacle in, 161, 165n51; villains in, 158–59, 159; vitalism in, 160, 160 Atkins, E. Taylor, 231–32 attractions (moe), 50 authenticity, 35–36, 223, 231–32, 236n1 authentique (good faith), 20, 135–36

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Autobiography (Baraka), 80, 82, 86 Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (Johnson, J. W.), 193 automaton, 146, 163n14 Azuma, Hiroki, 27n41, 50 bad faith, 128 Baldwin, James, 135, 140n62 Bambara, Toni Cade, 61–62 bamboo spears (takeyari), 125, 138n18 Bandung Conference of Asian and African States (1955), 81, 122, 208n70 Baraka, Amiri (LeRoi Jones), 18–19, 79, 86, 94n10, 134; alienation of, 84–85; anti-Semitism and, 92–93; Asia and, 83–84; blackness of, 90; Buddhism for, 80–81, 83, 88–89; for collective poetry, 92–93; humor of, 90–93; identity of, 81–82, 84–85; low coup of, 91–92, 98n49; politics of, 90–92; puns from, 90–92; stereotypes and, 83–84. See also Yūgen Barnwell, Andrea, 31–34, 37 Barthes, Roland, 52 Basho, 101–4, 106–7 Battle, Effie T., 193–94 beauty from poverty. See wabi The Beefeater (Aguranabe) (Robun), 5 Being and Nothingness (Sartre), 128–29, 132 belittling, 224, 237n6 Bergson, Henri, 145–46, 163n14 Best, Joel, 33 biracial children, 11, 169–70 B-kei (black style), 48–49, 52 black America, 6–7, 70; hope for, 8–9, 39–40; white America compared to, 40–41 black boom (kokujin būmu), 13 “The Black Brothers” (Ema), 158; blackness in, 152–53; class in, 153– 55; racism in, 153–55; whiteness in, 153–54 black face. See ganguro

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Index

blackface minstrelsy, 17, 33; stereotypes in, 24–25, 32, 35–36, 202–3 blackface performers, 5, 17, 34–35, 45. See also ganguro black fear, 123–25 black fighters, 124–25 Black Genius (Kokujin Tensai), 180, 185n32 Black Jack, 165n52 black-Japanese literature, 120; African American literature in, 121–22; dialectics of racial gaze in, 121–26, 138n18 black literature power: delta of, 127–28; diversity in, 129–31; as minor literature, 126–27, 137n8; Sartre and, 127–32, 139n38. See also The Cry Black men, 63–64 blackness, 24, 45, 90, 157–58, 163n14; Astro Boy and, 161–62, 165n52; in “The Black Brothers,” 152–53; distance from, 235–36, 244; extradiasporic spaces and, 239–40; of gyaru, 48–49, 53; jazz and, 231–32; of Jero, 176–77, 180, 182; from Ōe, 120–22; passion and, 66; Rastafari and, 239–40, 244; rhythm related to, 230–333; in R.U.R., 145–48; symbolism of, 151; vitalism and, 142. See also hip-hop Black Noise (Rose, T.), 46 black soldiers, 4–5, 10–11 black stereotypes, 23, 83–84; in blackface minstrelsy, 24–25, 32, 35–36, 202–3; in Wild Q, 234–35, 238n41; of women, 35, 63, 234 black style (B-kei), 48–49, 52 Black Swan, 189, 205n5 black transculturation, 34 black vernacular, 224, 234–35, 238n37 The Black Woman, 61 Blaser, Robin, 87–88 Blue Nippon: Authenticating Jazz in Japan (Atkins), 231–32

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277

Blyth, R. H., 80–81, 94n8, 99 Boku no jazu Amerika (My Jazz America) (Yu), 60 Bolt, Usain, 230 The Boondocks (McGruder), 41 Bose, 215–16 Bourdaghs, Michael, 174, 226, 238n36 Briggs, Cyril, 9 broadcasts, 204–5, 208n69 Brooks, Daphne, 192 Brown, Iona Rozeal. See iROZEALb Brunt, Shelley, 184n21 Buddhism, 80–81, 83, 88–89 buraku (outcast), 163n9 Buson, Yosa, 94n8, 107–8 Butler, Judith, 14 “Caged Bird,” 66 call-and-response, 213, 215–16, 220 Čapek, Karel, 20. See also R.U.R. Rossum’s Universal Robots capitalist subcultures, 47–48 caricatures, 24–25, 46, 188, 202–3. See also stereotypes “The Case of the Robot Killer” (Unno): alliance in, 156–58; blackness in, 157–58; monster in, 156–57; science in, 155–57 Catlett, Elizabeth, 41 Chandler, Nahum, 8–9 Chinese poetry, 79 Christianity, 62, 129 Chuck D, 214–15 Chusonji Yutsuko, 23, 224, 237n11. See also Wild Q Clarke, Cheryl, 61 class, 153–55 Cloonan, Martin, 209 Cohen, Cathy (Hettie Jones), 18, 58, 90. See also Yūgen Collection of Reigning Beauties series (Utamaro), 36 collective poetry, 92–93 collective self defense, 22

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278

Index

colonialism, 149–51; anti-colonialism, 155, 208n70, 241; Rastafari and, 242, 251 “The Colored Race” (Arakawa Akira), 12 Coltrane, John, 70–71 communication, 41–42, 204–5, 208n69 Communist Manifesto, 144–45 Condry, Ian, 13, 221n6, 225, 238n41 Confucius, 97n39, 113–14 conspicuous consumption, 38 consumerism, 17, 46–47 conventional analysis, 4 copycats, 224–26, 225–26, 234 Cornyetz, Nina, 45 correlative cosmologies, 150–51, 164n32 costuming (kosupure), 51–52 counterculture, 47–48, 246 Covers, 173–74 cross-cultural representations, 15–16 crossdressing, 173, 184n14 The Cry (Sakebigoe) (Ōe), 20, 137n3, 139n37; characterization in, 133–34; fear in, 133–34; names in, 134; Sartre related to, 135–36; violence in, 134–35 Csicsery-Ronay, Istvan, Jr., 148 cultural exchange, 31–32, 34. See also Afro-Japanese cultural exchange culture, 33–34, 169; counterculture, 47–48, 246; of Japan-West, 227–28; polyculturalism, 21, 170, 181–83; transculturation, 16–17, 32, 34 cybernetics, 158–59, 165n49 Daggers and Javelins: Essays, 1974–1979 (Baraka), 18 dancehall reggae, 239 dancing, 65, 222n26, 233, 250; Jero and, 176–77, 185n32; in poetry, 84–85 “Dankon” (“The Man Root”) (Shiraishi), 68–69 “darkie” (kuronbō), 5 Darth Reider (Wada Rei), 211, 216–18, 221n13

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databases, 27n41, 50 Davis, Miles, 59–60 decadence, 37–38 Deli, 214–15, 221n20 Demers, Joanna, 37 Dengaryū, 218, 222n26 Depression, 198–99 Derrida, Jacques, 241 Deutsch, Nathaniel, 196 dialectics of racial gaze, 121, 126; black fear in, 123–25; black fighters in, 124–25; homicide in, 125, 138n18; Japanese fear in, 122–23; whiteness in, 123–24 diaspora, 239–40, 242 diversity, 129–31 DJs, 37, 211 “Don’t Believe the Hype,” 214–16, 218–19 double standard, 229, 233–34 Double V campaign, 10 Dower, John, 5 Dreadlocks, 242, 245, 247–48, 251–52 Dreams of a Traveler in America (Ōe), 122–23, 137n7 drift, 15 Du Bois, W.E.B., 3, 8, 26n22, 40, 89, 199 ECD, 218–19 Edano Yukio, 215–16 Edward B. Marks Music Company, 200–202 Edwards, Brent, 196 Egg (magazine), 47–48, 50, 53 “Either within the Bounds of the Universe or Outside” (“Sekai no uchigawa matawa sotogawa”) (Shiraishi), 71–72 Eliot, T. S., 104 Ellison, Ralph, 19–20; Sartre compared to, 129–32 emancipation, 161, 161–62 Ema Shū, 152–55, 158, 164n39 emigration, 7 empathy, 6–7, 40

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Index

Empire of Signs (Barthes), 52 enka, 21, 171, 184n16, 220; fan clubs for, 174, 184n17; Nihonjinron and, 172, 178; themes in, 172–73. See also Jero Enka Transcends Borders: AfricanAmerican Singer Jero and a Family History Spanning Three Generations, 183 Entertainment Law, 218, 221n13, 222n26 esunikku (the ethnic), 244, 251 Ethiopia, 242 Etsuko Taketani, 187–88 Eurocentrism, 97n39 existentialism, 124; antiracism and, 129, 131–32; authentique and, 135–36; bad faith in, 128–29 Eyerman, Ron, 194 face value, 52 The Fall of Public Man (Sennett), 17, 51 family: of Jero, 175, 178, 181; in Rastafari, 243 fan clubs, 174, 184n17 fascism, 198 fashion, 51–52, 177. See also hair fear, 122–25, 133–34 female DJ, 37 female impersonators (onnagata), 173 feminism, 61–62 Fenollosa, Ernest, 96n34 Ferguson, Roderick A., 74n21 “Fetishized Blackness: Hip Hop and Racial Desire in Contemporary Japan” (Cornyetz), 45 fish. See globe-fish/swell-fish Flavor Flav, 215 flotsam, 1, 15 folk music (minyo), 172 foreigners (gaijin), 178, 182, 183n7 Four Big Pollution Diseases, 215 Frank, Thomas, 47 Franklin, Benjamin, 115, 118n31 freedom, 66; emancipation, 161, 161–62 friendship, 241–243

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279

Frith, Simon, 170–71, 178 Front, 237n12 Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster (3.11), 221n17; TEPCO and, 213–15. See also antinuclear demonstrations gaijin (foreigners), 178, 182, 183n7 Gakutensoku, 141, 155; as art, 149–50; correlative cosmologies in, 150–51, 164n32; creator of, 148–51; multi-racial elements of, 150–52; symbolism of, 150–52 Gallicchio, Marc, 9–10, 40 Gandhi, Leela, 23–24, 241–42, 250–51. See also affective communities Gandhi, Mahatma, 241, 251 ganguro (black face), 17, 32, 54n3; caricature of, 46; description of, 31, 50, 53; origins of, 48, 54; superficiality of, 31, 42 Garvey, Marcus, 8, 195, 206n24 gender, 63–64, 173, 184n14; in a3. . . black on both sides, 32, 35–36 gender norms, 60–62 Gilroy, Paul, 59 girls. See ganguro; gyaru Girl’s History of Egg Flowers, 47–49 globe-fish/swell-fish, 79, 89–90, 93n3, 94n8 good faith. See authentique Granet, Marcel, 164n32 Grant, Colin, 206n24 graphic novels (manga), 23, 41–42, 50 Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, 9 Griffin, Farah Jasmine, 64 gyaru, 45, 51; blackness of, 48–49, 53; Egg for, 47–48, 50, 53; mamba and, 17, 46, 49–50, 54n3; unreality of, 52–53; yamamba and, 17, 46, 49–50, 54n3. See also ganguro haiku, 19, 79–81, 91–92; reality and, 109–12; sabi in, 101–3, 106–7, 116– 17; wabi in, 103–4, 116–17; yugen

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280

Index

of, 100–101. See also Pound, Ezra; Wright, Richard hair, 36, 51, 243; Dreadlocks, 242, 245, 247–48, 251–52 Hall, Christine C. Iijima, 182, 185n36 Hall, Stuart, 169, 178 Hana Imai, 53 Harris Treaty (1858), 6 Hasegawa Nōzō, 149–50 Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 106 “Here Be Dragons” (Baldwin), 140n62 Hikida, Yasuichi (Hirayama, Yonezo): Afro-Japanese cultural exchange from, 200; intelligence gathering by, 204; introduction by, 21–22, 203–4; music industry and, 200–202; NAACP membership of, 194; propaganda from, 204; proposal from, 21, 195, 200; translation difficulties of, 196–97 hikokumin (traitor), 218 Hillier, J., 35 Himes, Chester, 125 Hina, 48–49, 52 hip-hop, 22, 37, 237n12; against African Americans, 13–14, 33, 213, 234–35; alignment of, 229, 236; antinuclear, 213–16; authenticity of, 223, 236n1; call-and-response in, 213, 215–16, 220; classics in, 213–20; copycats in, 224–26, 234, 243; politics in, 209–11, 213–16, 238n40; race and, 225, 227–28, 237n18, 238nn34–35; rock music compared to, 226, 229; self-awareness about, 225–26; sound demonstrations and, 211–12; television and, 213–14. See also Jero; rappers; Wild Q Hip-Hop Japan: Rap and the Paths of Cultural Globalization (Condry), 13, 225, 238n41 Hirabayashi Hatsunosuke, 164n26 Hirayama, Yonezo. See Hikida, Yasuichi Hirohito (emperor), 149, 152 Hiroshima, 139n37

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Home (Baraka), 90 homicide, 125, 134–35, 138n18 homosociality, 173, 184n15 honba (“the real, original place”), 227 hope, 8–9, 39–40 Hornyak, Tim, 148–50 “Hour of the Dog” (Utamaro), 36–37 “Huck Finn Goes to Hell” (Ōe), 122–24 Hughes, Langston, 9 humanity, 149 humor, 34, 88–89, 90–93 Hunger, 213–14, 221n17 The Hussy (Utamaro), 37–38 Ichijō Takao, 131 identity, 183n7, 196, 223, 231; in African societies, 65; of Baraka, 81–82, 84–85; of Jero, 174–75, 177–83, 184n31; music and, 170–71; of postwar Japanese, 122–23, 132–33; racial, 151, 164n36. See also Rasta-identified Japanese If You Can’t Be Free, Be a Mystery (Griffin), 64 imperialism, 9, 40, 242–43, 246 Inamine Susumu, 13 Indians. See Native Americans Inoue Haruki, 150 Institute of Pacific Relations (IPR), 198 instrumentation, 172 intelligence gathering, 204 Invisible Man (Ellison), 130–32 “Invisible Men and Diversity” (Ōe), 123–24, 130 IPR. See Institute of Pacific Relations iROZEALb (Iona Rozeal Brown), 16, 40, 42n1; a3 #7, 39; a3 #6, 39; a3 blackface #15, 36–37; a3 blackface #19, 36–37; a3 blackface #42, 37–38; a3 blackface #52, 33–34; a3. . . black on both sides, 17, 31–36; complexity from, 34, 42; decadence and, 37–38; McGruder compared to, 41–42; non-blackface images from, 38–39; ukiyo-e style for, 32, 36, 38–39,

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Index

42; Utamaro compared to, 36–38; women’s agency from, 36–37. See also ganguro Isaacs, J. Susan, 34 Ishida Hakyo, 102–3 Ishii Megu, 47 Iwakura Mission (Iwakura shisetsudan), 6–7 Jakobsen, Janet, 132 Jamaica, 242. See also Rastafari James, Ed, 87 Jamison, Andrew, 194 Japan, 2, 7, 24; Afro-Japanese golden age in, 12; aggression of, 9–10; black soldiers in, 4–5, 10–11; broadcasts from, 204–5, 208n69; fascism in, 198; imperialism of, 8, 40 Japanese, 39, 122–23; African American support for, 195–96, 202; whiteness of, 8, 26n22, 48 Japanese Americans, 125, 179–80 Japanese animation (anime), 41–42 Japanese B-Boys, 23, 225–27, 234 Japanese comic books (manga), 23, 41–42 Japanese Embassy to the United States (Man’en gannen Ken-Bei shisetsu), 5–6 Japanese Exclusion Act, U.S., 198 Japanese missions, 5–7 Japaneseness, 17, 123, 177, 232 Japanese performers, 173, 184nn14–15. See also rappers The Japanese View of Blacks (Nihonjin no kokujinkan) (Russell), 2 Japan-West, 197–98; culture of, 227–28; Nihonjinron and, 231; particularism of, 229–30; superiority in, 229–30; universalism of, 230 jazz, 60; blackness and, 231–32; Shiraishi and, 71 The Jazz Singer, 203 Jero (Jerome Charles White, Jr.), 169– 70; in ads, 180–81; America related

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281

to, 171–72, 177–80; blackness of, 176–77, 180, 182; Covers from, 173– 74; dancing and, 176–77, 185n32; family of, 175, 178, 181; foreign-ness of, 176, 184n21; as gaijin, 178, 182; hip-hop and, 176–77; identity of, 174–75, 177–83, 184n31; Nisei for, 179–80; polyculturalism of, 181–83; “Umiyuki” from, 175–76, 178, 185n32; vocalization of, 172, 176 jetsam, 1, 15 Johnson, Abby Arthur, 85–86 Johnson, James Weldon, 21, 119, 187; global perspective of, 193, 207n44; Japan visit of, 198–99; music career of, 192–93; NAACP membership and, 193–94; support of, 201–2. See also “Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing” Johnson, J. Rosamond, 21, 188. See also “Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing” Johnson, Ronald Maberry, 85–86 Jolson, Al, 46, 203 Jonas, Steve, 89 Jones, Donna, 146, 163n14 Jones, Hettie. See Cohen, Cathy Jones, LeRoi, 79–80. See also Baraka, Amiri Judaken, Jonathan, 129 Kajiyama Seiroku, 13–14, 27n42 karaoke, 174 kata (form), 184n16 K Dub Shine, 210, 214, 224, 235, 237n5 Kearney, Reginald, 7, 195 Keevak, Michael, 26n22 Kelley, Robin, 199 Kerouac, Jack, 99 Kikaku, 108–9 Kim, Claire Jean, 85 Kim, Gyewon, 152 Kishi Nobusuke, 26n35 Kiyoshi Hikawa, 177, 184n26 kokujin būmu (black boom), 13 Kokujin Tensai (Black Genius), 180, 185n32

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282

Index

Koreans, 185n34, 202; zainichi, 133–35, 140n65 Koshiro, Yukiko, 181–82 kosupure (costuming), 51–52 Kunio Yanagita, 247 Kunitake, Kume, 6 “Kure Takao,” 131, 133–36, 140n65 kuronbō (“darkie”), 5 kyōdōshugi (rural cooperativism), 247–48 Lacan, Jacques, 19; subjectivity of, 109– 10; symbolism and, 109–12 LaMarre, Thomas, 147 Lane, Richard, 35 language, 172, 176, 226, 242. See also black vernacular; translation LDP. See Liberal Democratic Party Lewis, Carl, 230 Lian K’ai, 101 Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), 27n42 life, 143–45 life (seimei), 142 “Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing,” 187, 193; Black caricatures with, 24–25, 188, 202–3; lyrics of, 189–91, 205n9; music of, 190–91; NAACP adoption of, 188–89; as Negro National Anthem, 21, 194, 202, 204, 206n21; publisher of, 200–202; translation of, 21–22, 24–25, 188, 196–97, 202–4. See also Hikida, Yasuichi Likkle Mai, 219–20 Lincoln, Abbey (Aminata Moseka), 18, 57; Africanity of, 65–66, 74n32; on Black men, 63–64; body of, 60–61; “Caged Bird” of, 66; Davis and, 59–60; Japan gigs of, 59–60; love of, 58–59, 64–65; madness of, 62; Noble with, 64; People in Me from, 58–60; present of, 59; on racialized gender and sexuality, 63–64; self-reflection from, 65–66; sexuality and, 60–62; Shiraishi for, 71–72 “Lines to García Lorca” (Baraka), 82–83

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linocuts, 41 Lipsitz, George, 71 loneliness, 102–3, 106–7, 116 Long, Richard, 190 Lorde, Audre, 69 Lott, Eric, 33, 35, 46, 203 love: of Lincoln, 58–59, 64–65; in R.U.R., 144–45, 147 low coup, 91–93, 98n49 Lu Hsun, 18, 91 lyrics, 189–91, 205n9 madness, 62 Mailer, Norman, 127, 182 male impersonators (otokoyaku), 173 mamba, 17, 46, 49–50, 54n3 Man’en gannen Ken-Bei shisetsu (Japanese Embassy to the United States), 5–6 manga (Japanese comic books, graphic novels), 23, 41–42. See also Wild Q mannequin, 51–53 “The Man Root” (“Dankon”) (Shiraishi), 68–69 marijuana, 242–43 Markel, Howard, 145 Marks, Herbert E., 206n21 Marks Company. See Edward B. Marks Music Company Marley, Bob, 242–43 Marx, Karl, 191 Marx, W. David, 179 Marxism, 146 Masaoka Shiki, 19, 100, 104–6, 113 Mason, Mason Jordan, 96n30 materialism, 38 Matsumoto, Takashi, 226–28 McCoy, Sharon, 35–36 McGruder, Aaron, 41–42 McKay, Ian, 74n32 Miki Kiyoshi, 247 military, 4–5, 10–11 minor literature, 126–27, 129, 137n8 minyo (folk music), 172 Miyoshi, Masao, 6

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Index

Mo’ Better Blues (film), 58 “Modernity and its Critique: The Problem of Universalism and Particularism” (Sakai), 229–30 modernization, 6–7 moe (attractions), 50 Moore, Lenard, 13, 27n40 Moritake, 111–12, 118n28 Morita Kiyoyuki, 6–7 Moten, Fred, 66, 73n3 The Mountain Folk (Ema), 164n39 Moynihan, Daniel Patrick, 63 Muhammad, Elijah, 196 Mukai Kyorai, 102 mukokuseki (statelessness), 179 Mullen, Bill, 7 multiculturalism, 170 Murakami Takashi, 13–14, 27n42 Murphy-Shigematsu, Stephen, 2–3 music, 70, 187, 192–93, 250; DJs, 37, 211; identity and, 170–71; language for, 226; mobilization from, 194; natsu-mero, 173–74; self through, 171; superstructure of, 170. See also rappers; specific musicians; specific songs; specific types music industry, 192–93; Black Swan, 189, 205n5; censorship in, 209–10, 211n6; Hikida and, 200–202; Rittor Music, 230, 233, 238n28 My Jazz America (Boku no jazu Amerika) (Yu), 60 NAACP. See National Association for the Advancement of Colored People Nakamura Kusatao, 103 Nakasone Yasuhiro, 27n42 Name Restoration Order (1946), 140n65 names, 134 Napier, Susan, 42 National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), 21, 188–89, 193–94, 197. See also “Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing” Nation of Islam (NOI), 196

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283

Native Americans, 62 Native Son (Wright), 134–35 natsu-mero (nostalgia-melody), 173–74 nature: for Rastafari, 242–43; Wright and, 113–16 Negritude Movement, 129 The Negro Family: The Case for National Action (Moynihan), 63 Negro National Anthem, 21, 194, 202, 204, 206n21 New York Age, 193 Nicky (magazine), 52–53 Nihonjin no kokujinkan (The Japanese View of Blacks) (Russell), 2 Nihonjinron (theories on Japanese people), 21, 170; enka and, 172, 178; esunikku and, 244, 251; Japan-West and, 231 Nisei (second-generation Japanese Americans), 125, 179–80 Nishime, LeiLani, 184n31 Nishimura Makoto, 149–51 Noble, Gil, 64 “Nobody’s Business If I Hear” (Shiraishi), 71 nodal points, 15–16, 24 NOI. See Nation of Islam Noma Yasumichi, 212 nonconformity, 57 nostalgia-melody (natsu-mero), 173–74 notoriety, 70 nuclear power, 210, 219–20; hip-hop against, 213–16; protests against, 211–12 Ocean Snow (“Umiyuki”), 175–76, 178, 185n32 Ōe Kenzaburō, 11, 136n1, 137n7; blackness from, 120–22; controversy of, 19–20; on qualitative similarities, 119–20; Wright compared to, 134– 35. See also black-Japanese literature; The Cry; dialectics of racial gaze O’Grady, Lorraine, 61 Okakura Kakuzo, 89, 96n34

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284

Index

Okihiro, Gary, 85 Okinawa, 12–13, 138n18 OMSB, 233, 238n35 Onishi, Yuichiro, 18, 40, 122 onnagata (female impersonators), 173 “On the Issues of Roles” (Bambara), 61–62 Orwell, George, 241 Otaku: Japan’s Database Animals (Azuma), 27n41, 50 Other, 231 otokoyaku (male impersonators), 173 outcast (buraku), 163n9 overrepresentation, 4 Ozeki, Ruth, 1, 3–4, 15, 25 Pace, Harry, 189, 205 painting, 101–2. See also iROZEALb Paris, 51 “Parthenos” (Baraka), 84–85 particularism, 229–30 Patterson, Ian, 86 Pedagogies of Crossing (Alexander), 57 People in Me, 58–60 performance, 5, 17, 34–35; identity in, 171; Japanese performers, 173, 184nn14–15; participatory style in, 212–13 Perry, Imani, 38 Perry, Matthew C., 4–5 photography, 11 Un Poco Low Coups (Baraka), 91–92 poetry, 65, 82, 101–2; Chinese, 79; collective, 92–93; dancing in, 84–85; of Shiraishi, 67–72. See also haiku Polite, Allen, 80–81, 86–87, 94n7, 95n25 politics, 251–52; of Baraka, 90–92; in hip-hop, 209–11, 213–16, 238n40; iROZEALb and, 40–41 polyculturalism, 21, 170, 181–83 polygamy, 18, 61 Popeye, 224 postwar existential condition, 124 postwar Japanese identity, 122–23, 132–33

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Pound, Ezra, 89, 96n34, 100, 110, 117; Moritake and, 111–12, 118n28 power, 11; nuclear, 210–16, 219–20; Shiraishi and, 69. See also black literature power Prashad, Vijay, 21, 170, 181 Pratt, Mary Louise, 11 predetermination, 14–15 Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note (Baraka), 82–83 Presley, Elvis, 33 proletarian literature, 20, 142, 152, 163n8; buraku and, 163n9. See also “The Black Brothers”; R.U.R. Rossum’s Universal Robots propaganda, 204 protest slogans (Sprechchor), 211 Public Enemy, 214 public style, 51–52 publisher, 200–202 punk music, 221n11, 225, 232–33 puns, 90–92 Qian, Zhaoming, 88, 96n32 race: acceptability of, 233–34; hip-hop and, 225, 227–28, 237n18, 238nn34– 35; multi-racial elements, 150–52 racial identity, 151, 164n36 racism, 129, 131–32, 153–55 Rankin Taxi, 212 rappers, 22–23; Akuryō, 212; in America, 213–16, 238n40; arguments by, 211; Black Genius, 180, 185n32; Bose, 215–16; Chuck D, 214–15; Darth Reider, 211, 216–18, 221n13; Deli, 214–15, 221n20; Dengaryū, 218, 222n26; ECD, 218–19; Flavor Flav, 215; Hunger, 213–14, 221n17; K Dub Shine, 210, 214, 224, 235, 237n5; OMSB, 233, 238n35; protest slogans for, 211; Public Enemy, 214; Rumi, 212; Scha Dara Parr, 215; ScottHeron, 213–16; Seeda, 225, 238n34; Shing02, 213–14, 221n7; Ushida

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Index

Yoshimasa, 216; Zeebra, 209. See also Jero; Utamaru Rastafari, 23–24; apolitics and, 251– 52; blackness and, 239–40, 244; colonialism and, 242, 251; degrees of, 244; description of, 241–42; diaspora of, 242; Dreadlocks and, 242, 245, 247–48, 251–52; family in, 243; nature for, 242–43; passion and, 243– 44; reggae from, 239; utopianism and, 241, 251 Rasta-identified Japanese: against commercialization, 248; community of, 245–48; counterculture in, 246; demographics of, 244–45; kyōdōshugi of, 247–48; manifestations of, 245; Nara dreads in, 247–48; roots reggae and, 246; spaces for, 246–48 Rasta wedding: affective community and, 250–51; dancing at, 250; guests at, 249; music at, 250; participants for, 248–50; space for, 249 “the real, original place” (honba ), 227 reality, 52–53, 126; haiku and, 109–12 reggae: antinuclear, 219–20; anti-Vietnam War song, 219; combinations with, 219–20; dancehall, 239; Likkle Mai, 219–20; Rankin Taxi, 212; from Rastafari, 239; roots, 239, 246; from Soul Flower Mononoke Summit, 219–20, 222nn32–33 representations, 35; for African American music, 192; in blackJapanese literature, 120–21; crosscultural, 15–16; exoticism of, 16; as misrepresentation, 14; nodal points in, 15–16, 24; predetermination and, 14–15; purity of, 15; in traveling texts, 4, 14–15 reproduction, 144 “Reunion” (“Saikai”) (Tamura), 67–68 Revolt of the Laymen (Shirōto no Ran), 211–12

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“The Revolution Will Not Be Televised,” 213, 218–19 Rhymester, 228. See also Utamaru rhythm, 230–333, 238n28 Rhythm Training Theory for Japanese People, 230, 233, 238n28 Ring Shout, 18, 65 Rittor Music, 230, 233, 238n28 Roach, Max, 57–58, 60, 62 Robinson, Sylvia, 90 robots, 20–21, 141–42, 163n21, 163n24. See also Astro-Boy; “The Case of the Robot Killer”; R.U.R. Rossum’s Universal Robots Robun Kanagaki, 5 rockabilly, 232, 238n33 rock music, 226–27, 229, 232–33 Rogers, Richard A., 16–17, 31–32 roots reggae, 239; Rasta-identified Japanese and, 246 Rose, Monique, 48 Rose, Tricia, 46 Rotsu, 103–4 Rubinstein-Avila, Eliane, 41–42 Rumi, 212 rural cooperativism (kyōdōshugi), 247–48 R.U.R. Rossum’s Universal Robots (R.U.R.) (Čapek), 20, 152, 157; artificial humans in, 142–43, 148; blackness in, 145–48; Communist Manifesto and, 144–45; life related to, 143–45; location of, 142–43, 147–48; love in, 144–45, 147; Marxism and, 146; plot of, 143–44; reproduction in, 144; Suzuki for, 142–43, 146–47, 162n4; translations of, 142; vitalism related to, 145–46. See also Astro Boy; Gakutensoku; Unno Jūza Rush Hour (film), 184n31 Russell, John, 2, 6, 151 Russo-Japanese War, 8, 151, 195 Ryuichi Tamura, 67–68

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“Safe Is Dangerous,” 216–18 “Saikai” (“Reunion”) (Tamura), 67–68 Saitô Tamaki, 53 Sakai, Naoki, 229–30 Sakebigoe. See The Cry sanctification, 69 Sartre, Jean Paul, 19, 127; authentique of, 20, 135–36; The Cry related to, 135–36; disagreement with, 128; Ellison compared to, 129–32; gaze of, 128–29, 139n38 SASPL. See Students Against the Secrecy Protection Law Savigliano, Marta, 243–44 Savishinsky, Neil, 242 Saxton, Alexander, 32–33, 35 Sayonara Amerika, Sayonara Nippon (Bourdaghs), 226, 238n36 Scha Dara Parr, 215 Schneider, Arnd, 34 Schnell, Scott, 164n39 Schuyler, George, 3, 9 Schwartz, Adam, 41–42 science, 155–57 Scott-Heron, Gil, 213–16 Scottsboro case, 203–4, 208n66 The Season of the Sacred Lecher (Seinaru inja no kisetsu) (Shiraishi), 70–71 second-generation Japanese Americans (Nisei), 125, 179–80 Second Sino-Japanese War, 9–10 The Secret of Black People’s Rhythm (Seiichiro Shichirui), 233 Secrets Protection Law, 209, 220; SASPL against, 213 Seeda, 225, 238n34 “See the Light of Day” (“Ubugoe”), 221n17 Seiichiro Shichirui, 233 seimei (life), 142 Seinaru inja no kisetsu (The Season of the Sacred Lecher) (Shiraishi), 70–71 Seiyō dōchū hizakurige (Shank’s Mare Round the West) (Robun), 5

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“Sekai no uchigawa matawa sotogawa” (“Either within the Bounds of the Universe or Outside”) (Shiraishi), 71–72 Selassie, Haile, I, 241, 249 self, 171 self-awareness, 225–26 self defense, collective, 22 self-determination, 161–62, 163n9 self-expression, 70 self-reflection, 65–66 Sennett, Richard, 17, 51–52 Seo Mitsuyo, 147 sexuality, 60–62; polygamy, 18 Shank’s Mare Round the West (Seiyō dōchū hizakurige) (Robun), 5 Sharecropper (Catlett), 41 Shibuya 109, 46–47 Shing02, 213–14, 221n7 Shiraishi Kazuko, 18; African American music for, 70; Africanity and, 59; background of, 67; Coltrane for, 70–71; “Dankon” from, 68–69; dissonance of, 68–69; jazz and, 71; for Lincoln, 71–72; nonconformity of, 57; notoriety of, 70; poetry of, 67–72; power and, 69; “Saikai” for, 67–68; sanctification and, 69; for selfexpression, 70; slave spirituality and, 66; snapshots of, 70; transgressions of, 72–73; understanding of, 59 Shirōto no Ran (Revolt of the Laymen), 211–12 Shōriki Matsutarō, 165n50 shout out, 66 Shōwa Robot Culture. See Astro Boy; “The Case of the Robot Killer”; R.U.R. Rossum’s Universal Robots silence, 115, 118n31 slavery, 66, 92, 129 Smith, Anna Deavere, 35 snapshots, 70 Snyder, Gary, 87, 96n27 solidarity, 153; in Astro Boy, 159–60

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Index

Sollors, Werner, 83 “Somebody Blew Up America” (Baraka), 93 Sotiropoulos, Karen, 192 Soul Flower Mononoke Summit, 219– 20, 222nn32–33 The Souls of Black Folk (Du Bois), 8 sound demonstrations, 211–12 spaces, 239–40, 246–49 spectacle: in Astro Boy, 161, 165n51; of gyaru, 50–51 Spillers, Hortense J., 61, 74n19 Spingarn, Joel E., 189, 193 Spivak, Gayatri, 14 spoof, 34 Sprechchor (protest slogans), 211 Stamm, C. Jack, 87 statelessness (mukokuseki), 179 “Stepping Razor,” 216–18 stereotypes, 33, 46, 81. See also black stereotypes Sterling, Marvin, 120, 134 Stevens, Carolyn, 183n7 “Straight Outta 138,” 218, 222n26 Stuckey, Sterling, 65–66 Students Against the Secrecy Protection Law (SASPL), 213 subjectivity, 109–10 Sudo, Naoto, 147 superficiality, 31, 42 Suzuki Zentarō, 142–43, 146–47, 162n4 symbolism: of Gakutensoku, 150–52; Lacan and, 109–12 Tadashi Kobayashi, 36 Tadashi Suzuki, 33 Taibai, 79–81, 94n8 takeyari (bamboo spears), 125, 138n18 Takigawa of the Ogiya (Utamaro), 36 A Tale for the Time Being (Ozeki), 1, 3–4, 15, 25 Talking to the Sun, 58, 65 Tamesue, Dai, 228–29, 231 Taylor, Paul C., 33

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television, 213–14 Tener, Robert L., 99 TEPCO, 213–15 texts, 2. See also traveling texts Tezuka Osamu, 20. See also Astro Boy theories on Japanese people. See Nihonjinron Thompson, Deborah, 17, 34–35 3.11. See Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster Tōgō Heihachirō, 8 Tokiwa Toyoko, 11 Toll, Robert C., 35 Tōmatsu Shōmei, 11 Tompkins, Jane, 2, 4 Tosh, Peter, 216–18 traitor (hikokumin), 218 transculturation, 16–17, 32, 34 transgressions, 72–73 translation, 2, 142; of “Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing,” 21–22, 24–25, 188, 196– 97, 202–4 traveling texts: content of, 1, 3–4; conventional analysis of, 4; engagement with, 3–4; representation in, 4, 14–15; travail of, 2 Treaty of Kanagawa, 5 Treaty of Mutual Cooperation and Security (ANPO), 26n35 truth, 51–52 Turino, Thomas, 212 Turner, Terisa, 242 Twelve Lunar Hours series (Utamaro), 36–37 Twilight: Lost Angeles, 1992 (Smith), 35 ukiyo-e style, 32, 36, 38–39, 42 “Umiyuki” (Ocean Snow), 175–76, 178, 185n32 UNIA. See Universal Negro Improvement Association United States (U.S.), 198. See also America universalism, 230

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Index

Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), 187, 189 universal race issues, 199 Unno Jūza, 20, 141, 155–58 unreality, 52–53, 126 urban geishas, 16–17. See also iROZEALb U.S. See United States Ushida Yoshimasa, 216 Utamaro, 36–38 Utamaru, 237n12, 237n18; on copycats, 225–26, 234; on double standard, 229, 233–34; Matsumoto compared to, 227–28 utopianism, 241, 251 Vendler, Helen, 96n27 Venuti, Lawrence, 2 Vietnam War, 219 villains, 158–59, 159 violence, 199; homicide, 125, 134–35, 138n18 vitalism: in Astro Boy, 160, 160; blackness and, 142; R.U.R. related to, 145–46 vocalization, 172, 176 wabi (beauty from poverty), 103–4; from Wright, 113, 115–17 Wada Kei, 221n13 Wada Rei. See Darth Reider Waley, Arthur, 100–101, 117n5 Walker, George, 192 Wang, David Raphael, 88, 96n32 wars: Russo-Japanese, 8, 151, 195; Second Sino-Japanese, 9–10; Vietnam, 219; World War II, 9–11, 198, 218 Wasteland (Arechi) (journal), 68 Watanabe, Naomi, 164n36 Watanabe Michio, 13–14, 27n42 Watts, Jerry, 82 Weidman, James, 65 Weiner, Michael, 8 White, Jerome Charles, Jr. See Jero

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white America, 40–41 Whiteman, Paul, 231–32 whiteness, 81; in “The Black Brothers,” 153–54; in dialectics of racial gaze, 123–24; of Japanese, 8, 26n22, 48; Japanese male blackface against, 45 white soldiers, 10 “Who Will Revere the Black Woman” (Lincoln), 61, 63 Wiener, Norbert, 165n49 Wild Q (Chusonji Yutsuko), 23, 223; belittling in, 224, 237n6; black stereotypes in, 234–35, 238n41; black vernacular of, 224, 234–35, 238n37; against hip-hop, 224–25; origin of, 224 Williams, William Carlos, 88, 96n32 Wilson, Cassandra, 65 Wilson, Michiko, 136 Wilson, Woodrow, 40–41 women: agency for, 36–37; black stereotypes of, 35, 63, 234; DJ, 37; feminism, 61–62 Wood, Joe, 173 woodcuts, 41 “The World of Black People and The World of White People from the Perspective of Yellow People: Introduction of National Negro Anthem” (Hirayama), 202 World War II, 9–11, 198, 218 Wright, Richard, 19, 99–100; Baraka and, 81, 94n10; Basho compared to, 106–7; Buson compared to, 107–8; Confucius compared to, 113–14; humanity’s negativity from, 116–17; Kikaku compared to, 108–9; Moritake compared to, 111–12, 118n28; nature compared to humanity from, 115–16; nature with humanity and, 113–16; Ōe compared to, 134–35; Pound compared to, 112; wabi from, 113, 115–17 writing, 1 Wyatt, Lucius, 192

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Index

Yagi Chuei, 69–70 yamamba (mountain hags), 17, 46, 49–50, 54n3 Yano, Christine, 178–79, 184n16 Yeats, William Butler, 110 Yone Noguchi, 100 Yosa Buson, 94n8, 107–8 YouTube, 48–49 yugen, 100–101, 117n5 Yūgen (journal) (Jones, L. and Cohen), 82, 94n7; first issue of, 86–87; second issue of, 87; third issue of, 79, 87–88, 93n3, 96n30; fourth issue of, 88,

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96n30; fifth issue of, 88; eighth issue of, 88–89 Yuki, Koh, 197 Yu Masahiko, 59–60 zainichi Korean, 133–35, 140n65 Zeebra, 209 Zen, 88–89, 117n5 Zengakuren (All-Japan Federation of Students’ Self-Governing Associations), 26n35 Zen in English Literature and Oriental Classics (Blyth), 80–81, 94n8

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About the Contributors

Crystal S. Anderson is an associate professor of English at Longwood University, where she conducts research in comparative ethnic studies (African American, Asian, Asian American) focusing on popular culture, visual culture and literature.  In addition to her book, Beyond the Chinese Connection: Contemporary Afro-Asian Cultural Production  (2013), she has published articles on Afro-Asian cultural studies in African American Review, MELUS, Ethnic Studies Review and Extrapolation.  Her current book project focuses on the impact of rhythm and blues on contemporary Korean popular music (K-pop).  She is also conducting a five-year qualitative study on global K-pop fandom and manages several digital humanities projects that document and curate Korean popular music.        Michio Arimitsu is an assistant professor at Keio University in Tokyo, Japan, where he teaches American studies and African American studies, in addition to the English language. His recently completed PhD dissertation, “Black Notes on Asia: Composite Figurations of Asia in the African American Transcultural Imagination, 1923–2013” (2014), includes an extended version of his contribution to this volume. His current research explores the hitherto neglected engagements of African American writers and thinkers with various literary, cultural, and artistic traditions of Asia, with a special focus on African American poets’ adaptation of haiku. William H. Bridges IV is assistant professor of Japanese and Asian Studies at St. Olaf College.  He is currently working on a manuscript entitled Playing in — 291 —

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the Shadows: Fictions of Race and Blackness in Postwar Japanese Literature.  His research considers the confluences of African American and Japanese literature. Nina Cornyetz is associate professor of interdisciplinary studies at The Gallatin School for Individualized Study, New York University. Among her more recent publications are: The Ethics of Aesthetics in Japanese Cinema and Literature: Polygraphic Desire (Routledge, 2007), Perversion and Modern Japan: Psychoanalysis, Literature, Culture, co-edited with J. Keith Vincent (Routledge, 2009), and “Murakami Takashi and the Hell of Others: Sexual (in)Difference, The Eye and the Gaze in ©Murakami,” in Criticism, 2012. Tia-Simone Gardner is a graduate student in the Department of Gender Women’s and Sexuality Studies at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. Her work has focused on geography and black women artists, examining the use of culture for political mobilization in the work of Claudia Jones, Lorraine Hansberry and Assata Shakur. Her current research takes this work further through the concept of post-colonial Black feminisms, looking at spatial events of containment, removal, and displacement, connecting the Southeastern United States to the Caribbean. Yoshinobu Hakutani is professor of English and University Distinguished Scholar at Kent State University in Ohio. He is the author or editor of many books, including Richard Wright and Haiku; Richard Wright and Racial Discourse; Haiku: This Other World by Richard Wright, with Robert L. Tener; Haiku and Modernist Poetics; and Cross-Cultural Visions in African American Modernism: From Spatial Narrative to Jazz Haiku; Art, Music and Literature, 1897–1902, by Theodore Dreiser. Kevin Fellezs is an assistant professor of music at Columbia University, where he shares a joint appointment in the Institute for Research in AfricanAmerican Studies. His book titled Birds of Fire: Jazz, Rock, Funk and the Creation of Fusion (Duke University Press) is a study of fusion (jazz-rock-funk) music of the 1970s framed by insights drawn from ethnic studies, jazz studies, and popular music studies.  Birds of Fire  was awarded the 2012 Woody Guthrie Book Award from the International Association for the Study of Popular Music, US Branch. Fellezs has published articles in Jazz Perspectives, the Journal of Popular Music Studies, and Popular Music History. He is currently writing a manuscript on Hawaiian slack key guitar. Noriko Manabe is assistant professor of music and associated faculty in East Asian Studies at Princeton University. Her two monographs, The Revolution

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Will Not Be Televised: Music and the Antinuclear Movement in Japan PostFukushima Daiichi and The Revolution Remixed: A Typology of Intertextuality in Protest Songs, are forthcoming from Oxford University Press. She has published articles on Japanese rap, hip-hop DJs, online radio, the music business, wartime children’s songs, and protests in Ethnomusicology, Popular Music, and two Oxford handbooks, Cambridge Companion to Hip-Hop and AsiaPacific Journal. Her research has been supported by fellowships from NEH, Kluge, Japan Foundation, and SSRC/JSPS. Anne McKnight is associate professor of English language and literature at Shirayuri College in Tokyo where she teaches Japanese literature, film, and popular culture, as well as experiential courses on agriculture, gardening and food cultures. She is the author of Nakagami, Japan: Buraku and the Writing of Ethnicity (University of Minnesota Press, 2011) as well as articles on various topics in Japanese and American literatures, feminism, and film. Yuichiro Onishi is an associate professor of African American & African studies and Asian American studies at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. He is the author of Transpacific Antiracism: Twentieth-Century Afro-Asian Solidarity in Black America, Japan, and Okinawa  (NYU Press, 2013). His work has also appeared in XCP: Cross-Cultural Poetics, The Journal of African American History, American Quarterly, and an anthology called Extending the Diaspora: New Histories of Black People (University of Illinois Press, 2009). Shana L. Redmond is associate professor of American studies and ethnicity at the University of Southern California and the author of Anthem: Social Movements and the Sound of Solidarity in the African Diaspora (NYU Press, 2014). She is the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships, and her work has been published in a wide array of journals and anthologies, including Critical Ethnic Studies: An Anthology, of which she is also a co-editor. Her next project details the performative regimes of aid music. Marvin D. Sterling is associate professor of anthropology at Indiana University. His research interests include contemporary Japan, Afro-Asia, race, globalization, performance and human rights.  He is the author of Babylon East:   Performing Dancehall, Roots Reggae and Rastafari in Japan (2010, Duke University Press). In a more recent line of research, Sterling has shifted geographical focus from Japan to explore the small Japanese community in Jamaica, whose members arrive to the island primarily to learn Jamaican popular culture at its source. In another new line of research, he historicizes the development of ideas of social justice in the country primarily as a con-

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About the Contributors

versation between local and international civil society groups, with focus on the contemporary discourse and practice of “human rights.” Dexter Thomas Jr. is a PhD candidate in East Asian studies at Cornell University. He studies race and identity, youth and music subcultures, and technology.

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