On uneven ground: Provincializing cultural production in interwar Japan.

Abstract

This dissertation seeks to show that a full appreciation of literary and cultural production in Japan's interwar period (1918-1933) requires careful examination of how that production took shape within spatially uneven trajectories of economic and cultural development. It does so by focusing specifically on the domestic periphery and revealing it to be both an alternative and contested site of cultural production. Framing the study is writer, poet, and educator Miyazawa Kenji (1896-1933), who as a no-name author working in the provinces sought to blur the real and imagined borders dividing city and country, modernity and tradition, Art and rural community. A careful analysis of the strategies he employed in that effort leads toward a better understanding of the spatial structures that influenced cultural production outside the center; of the decidedly modern, and in some cases cosmopolitan, character of rural social transformation; and of the ways that provincial localities were being rethought in the wake of continued integration of cultural and economic markets. While scholarship on this period tends to take for granted Tokyo's centrality in the aesthetic realm, treating it as an undeniable given, the aim here is to bring this centrality into greater relief by viewing it through the eyes of those for whom it was both obstacle and object of critique. In doing so, we are able to more effectively interpret contemporary responses to the uneven field of cultural production as attempts to open a synchronous and provincializing dialogue---one that looked forward as much as it looked back, that looked outside the nation as much as within, that looked to reorganize space as much as to keep it the same. Miyazawa proves fascinating in this regard, because for him it was a dialogue carried out in arenas as diverse as children's fiction (<italic>dowa</italic>), science education, amateur theatre, and farmers' art. All are considered in the course of argument as I situate Miyazawa's own strategies within the local sites of their enunciation, the intellectual and institutional networks from whence they were born, and the practices of place-making to which they did, and still do, contribute.