Discourses of the Vanishing: Modernity, Phantasm, JapanJapan today is haunted by the ghosts its spectacular modernity has generated. Deep anxieties about the potential loss of national identity and continuity disturb many in Japan, despite widespread insistence that it has remained culturally intact. In this provocative conjoining of ethnography, history, and cultural criticism, Marilyn Ivy discloses these anxieties—and the attempts to contain them—as she tracks what she calls the vanishing: marginalized events, sites, and cultural practices suspended at moments of impending disappearance. Ivy shows how a fascination with cultural margins accompanied the emergence of Japan as a modern nation-state. This fascination culminated in the early twentieth-century establishment of Japanese folklore studies and its attempts to record the spectral, sometimes violent, narratives of those margins. She then traces the obsession with the vanishing through a range of contemporary reconfigurations: efforts by remote communities to promote themselves as nostalgic sites of authenticity, storytelling practices as signs of premodern presence, mass travel campaigns, recallings of the dead by blind mediums, and itinerant, kabuki-inspired populist theater. |
Contents
NationalCultural Phantasms and Modernitys Losses | 1 |
Itineraries of Knowledge TransFiguring Japan | 29 |
Travels of the NationCulture | 34 |
Discovering Myself | 40 |
Exotic Japan | 48 |
The NeoJaponesque | 54 |
New Japanology | 59 |
Ghastly Insufficiencies Tono Monogatari and the Origins of Nativist Ethnology | 66 |
Ghostly Epiphanies Recalling the Dead on Mount Osore | 141 |
Memorialization and Its Others | 145 |
Markings Offerings Garbage | 151 |
Ghosts in the Machine | 163 |
Dividing the Voice | 169 |
Mourning and Predictions | 175 |
Dialect and Transgression | 185 |
Theatrical Crossings Capitalist Dreams | 192 |
Civilization and Its Remainders | 68 |
The Distance between Speech and Writing | 73 |
The Modern Uncanny | 80 |
Undecidable Authorities | 87 |
An Originary Discipline | 92 |
Narrative Returns Uncanny Topographies | 98 |
The Home Away from Home | 103 |
Museumd Utopias | 109 |
Memorable Ruins | 117 |
Textual Recursions | 122 |
Reminders of the Archaic | 130 |
LowBudget Kabuki and Its Promises | 196 |
The Grand Show | 206 |
Doubled Crimes Gendered Travesties | 212 |
Counternarrative and Figurality | 218 |
Powers of Attraction | 222 |
Ephemeral Gifts | 233 |
Afterwords on Repetition and Redemption | 241 |
| 249 | |
| 261 | |
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Common terms and phrases
actors advertising aesthetic appear audience authentic become Buddhist called contemporary dance dead person death deity desire dialect difference discourse Discover Japan display emerged enka essay event everyday Exotic Japan festival forms Fujioka furusato ghosts itako Japa Japanese culture Japanese folklore Japanology Jizō kabuki kappa Kōjien Koryū kuchiyose Kyūshū language literary loss marginal matsuri Meiji Meiji period memorialization Mishima mode modernity Mount Kōya Mount Osore mountain mourning museum narrative national-cultural nativist nativist ethnology nese Nihon nostalgia object offerings onnagata origins Osorezan particular past performance period plays popular postwar practices representation rhetoric ritual rural Sainokawara Sasaki scene Shimokita shrine song show speech spirit status stories storyteller stupas sumō tabi taishū engeki temple theater theatrical tion tōba Tokugawa Tokugawa period Tokyo Tono Tōno monogatari Tōno's tourists tradition trance translated troupe Umezawa uncanny urban vanishing voice western woman women writing yakuza Yanagita Kunio