Tokyo in Transit: Japanese Culture on the Rails and Road - Hardcover

Freedman, Alisa

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0804771448 ISBN 13: 9780804771443

Verlag: Stanford University Press, 2010

Inhaltsangabe

Increased use of mass transportation in the early twentieth century enabled men and women of different social classes to interact in ways they had not before. Using a cultural studies approach that combines historical research and literary analysis, author Alisa Freedman investigates fictional, journalistic, and popular culture depictions of how mass transportation changed prewar Tokyo's social fabric and artistic movements, giving rise to gender roles that have come to characterize modern Japan.

Freedman persuasively argues that, through descriptions of trains and buses, stations, transport workers, and passengers, Japanese authors responded to contradictions in Tokyo's urban modernity and exposed the effects of rapid change on the individual. She shines a light on how prewar transport culture anticipates what is fascinating and frustrating about Tokyo today, providing insight into how people make themselves at home in the city. An approachable and enjoyable book, Tokyo in Transit offers an exciting ride through modern Japanese literature and culture, and includes the first English translation of Kawabata Yasunari's The Corpse Introducer, a 1929 crime novella that presents an important new side of its Nobel Prizewinning author.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorinnen und Autoren

Alisa Freedman is Assistant Professor of Japanese Literature and Film at the University of Oregon. She is engaged in several interdisciplinary research projects and literary translations that investigate how the modern urban experience has shaped human subjectivity, cultural production, and gender roles.

Alisa Freedman is Assistant Professor of Japanese Literature and Film at the University of Oregon. She is engaged in several interdisciplinary research projects and literary translations that investigate how the modern urban experience has shaped human subjectivity, cultural production, and gender roles.

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TOKYO IN TRANSIT

JAPANESE CULTURE ON THE RAILS AND ROADBy Alisa Freedman

Stanford University Press

Copyright © 2011 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8047-7144-3

Contents

List of Illustrations.............................................................................................ixAcknowledgments...................................................................................................xiIntroduction Tokyo on the rails and road: Mass Transportation as Cultural and social Vehicles.....................11 Eyewitness Accounts: Observations of Salarymen and Schoolgirls on Tokyo's First Trains..........................272 Boys Who Feared Trains: University Students, Railway Trauma, and the Health of the Nation.......................683 Shinjuku Station Sketches: Constructing an icon of Modern Daily Life............................................1164 From Modern Girls in Motion to Figures of Nostalgia: "Bus Girls" in the Popular Imagination.....................173The Corpse Introducer by Kawabata Yasunari........................................................................225Notes.............................................................................................................267Bibliography......................................................................................................299Index.............................................................................................................309

Chapter One

Eyewitness Accounts

Observations of Salarymen and Schoolgirls on Tokyo's First Trains

If you look closely, you will notice that most dramatic change enveloping Tokyo is in the kinds of people found here. This is a natural and inevitable result of the extension of modern transportation. —TAYAMAKATAI, Thirty Years in Tokyo

A hand gets grabbed. A foot gets stepped on. Something that should not be touched gets touched. A wallet gets picked from inside a kimono sleeve in a momentary impulse. Abnormal psychology and the seduction of theft are there if we only turn our heads and look.... Caring parents must not let their darling daughters ride the train during rush hour. —MAEDA HAJIME, Story of the Salaryman

In the early twentieth century, there were several transformations in Tokyo space, the lives of its inhabitants, and writings about the city. Many of these spatial, social, and literary movements converged on the commuter train. During the years after Japan's 1905 military victory over Russia, government attention was paid to developing the urban infrastructure, an effort that involved extending train and streetcar routes. A growing number of people moved to Tokyo from other parts of Japan, an increasing trend from the late nineteenth century, and the city's population reached 2.2 million people in 1908. At the time, the national population totaled around fifty million. Concurrently, use of Tokyo mass transit vehicles helped initiate a first wave of suburban migration, as different socioeconomic classes moved to residential areas to the west and south of the city center.

Upper-class families were among the first to move to the suburbs, and daughters of government officials, military officers, and other elite of the time commuted to school in the center of Tokyo. Especially from the last decade of the nineteenth century, the number of female students (jogakusei) increased because of the culmination of economic, ideological, and educational changes. The image of the teenage schoolgirl as dressed in hakama, wearing hair ribbons, and traversing Tokyo or its suburbs on bicycle or by train frequently appeared in popular literature and mass media. These affluent women shared the space of the passenger car with various strata of predominantly male workers, including white-collar corporate and government employees, who, after 1918, would generally be referred to by the Anglicized signifier "salaryman," the common term for Japanese businessmen today. The proliferation of schoolgirls and salarymen and the suburbs where they resided was facilitated by the new electric trains and streetcars, which were cleaner and quieter than the steam locomotives that preceded them. As Foucaultian "heterotopia," temporary worlds in transit, commuter trains reflected the conditions of the early twentieth century city. Different from earlier horse-drawn buses, trains and trams were "mass" transportation, and genders and classes mixed in passenger cars.

Especially as trains were becoming integral to daily life, observations of the behavior and appearance of mid-level businessmen and schoolgirls became the topic of fictional stories, news reports, the comics of social mores that flourished at the time, and popular songs. These accounts were used to show class differences, to criticize schoolgirls for representing degenerate behavior believed to be a negative consequence of urban life, and to present the common man as a new kind of literary protagonist. The increasingly common sight of elite young women on trains changed the ways they were seen in the popular imagination, giving rise to a stereo typed identity that is still perpetuated in the global mass media. This stereotype casts Japanese schoolgirls, conspicuous in their uniforms then as today, as paragons of innocence and budding sexuality. Stories of schoolgirls on trains proliferated when magazines—those aimed at female readers and those not—played a growing role in defining notions of girlhood and showed that these young women not only consumed but also produced cultural trends.

In particular, the short story "The Girl Fetish" (Shojobyo) by Tayama katai, published in the May 1907 issue of the influential journal Taiyo (The Sun), which appealed to an educated readership, dramatizes historical problems caused by the extension of the gaze, mobility, and sexuality engendered by train travel. This story, the prose of which reflects the rhythm of a moving train, is the tale of a thirty-six-year-old male office worker whose obsessive staring at schoolgirls during his daily commutes causes him to fall from the crowded passenger car to his gory death on the tracks below. The protagonist, continually referred to as "the man" (kono otoko) by the third-person narrator, is the author of sentimental novels popular among schoolgirls, but he becomes a laughingstock in the literary world because of his fetish for young women. The man is dissatisfied with his domestic life in the Yoyogi district, a new suburban, residential area in the western part of Tokyo, and is tired of his banal editorial work at the Seinensha magazine publishing company in the central Kanda section of the city, located on the same street as the school for Proper English. The times of the man's morning and late afternoon commutes coincide with those of schoolgirls, whom he watches to seek comfort from the frustration of leading a life he feels that he cannot improve. He fantasizes about starting a relationship with one of these attractive women but is restrained by social and class constraints. The physical space of trains and streetcars is more than a setting for the man's actions; it is the environment that encourages his self-realization and causes his death.

The man does not merely look at women's bodies but also carefully notes their clothing and hairstyles. As a...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Stanford University Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2010
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0804771448
• ISBN 13: 9780804771443
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 349
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Buchbär; info@buchbaer.de; ; Weberstr. 67; Osnabrück; 49084; Deutschland