On July 31, 1937, the Japanese national newspaper Asahi carried a photograph of a group of stylishly dressed women facing the camera, smiling, caught in movement. What appear to be patriotic slogans are pinned like sashes across their bodies; some of the women carry donation boxes (Fig. 1). The image is accompanied by a short news item about fashion models performing “patriotic service” ( hōshi). “Beguiling” in their elegant Western outfits or Japanese kimono, around forty of these “mannequin...

The English philosopher Roger Scruton observes that conservative thinkers who attempt to define and defend “conservatism” often find themselves trapped in a paradox. To the extent that they succeed in making their points through reason and argument, they ironically end up contradicting the conservative way of living in the world, which is supposed to be intuitive, unconscious, and natural, rather than reasoned, self-conscious, and philosophical. After all, Scruton writes, the classic tradition of “English conservatism is rooted in the patrimony of the English upper class, in the quiet common sense of the old English constitution and in the plain-man unassuming practices that are, in the life of an English Tory, a handy substitute for thinking.” Scruton’s point is that conservatives distrust intellectual abstraction and grand theory as ways of making sense of the world, instead defining themselves and their times with reference to the realm of lived experience as it manifests in the “patrimony” of the “upper class,” the “common sense” of custom and tradition, and the collective wisdom that guides “unassuming practices” in everyday life, sparing the individual the burdens of independent reasoning. In this view, conservatism is a way of living in the world as it is, rather than thinking about the world as it could or should be. None of this will come as a surprise to readers of conservative thought, who have encountered versions of Scruton’s argument in numerous contexts. But what stands out in Scruton’s rumination on conservatism more starkly is his claim that the desire to live in the world as it is rather than to change it into what we imagine it could be is what makes conservatism the modernist frame of mind par excellence. In an essay on the prominent modernist poet and literary critic T. S. Eliot, who has long been read as a conservative, Scruton reflected on the paradox “that our greatest modernist should also be our greatest modern conservative” (Scruton, Political Philosophy, 194). He explained that although modernism in literature and thought is usually associated with the avant-garde who self-consciously break from the past as they attempt to create something radically new, Eliot’s conservatism was in fact a more meaningful form of modernism because Eliot engaged the modern world of “fragmentation, heresy and unbelief” as given, attempting to live within its contradictions rather than trying to transcend them (194). Scruton concluded that in so doing, Eliot revealed that “conservatism is itself a modernism, and in this lies the secret of its success. What distinguishes [the classic conservative thinker Edmund] Burke from the French revolutionaries [whom he famously criticized in Reflections on the Revolution in France] is not his attachment to things past, but his desire to live fully in the present, to understand it in all its imperfections, and to accept it as the only reality that is offered to us” (194). With this, Scruton radically reorients our understanding of conservatism in modern times: rather than thinking of “conservatism” as a backward-looking form of nostalgia attached to an idealized past that can never be recovered, he suggests that conservatism is in fact a bold form of modernism that sets aside the utopian alternatives conjured by intellectual abstraction in order to live within the constraints and imperfections of “the only reality that is offered to us.”

When attention is paid to Japanese poetry in Anglo-American culture, it is overwhelmingly to what Hosea Hirata observes are considered “authentically ‘Japanese’ texts, such as haiku and waka.” [1] Modern Japanese poetry—and certainly modernist Japanese poetry—have long been relatively overlooked because of their perceived “inauthenticity” and the sense that Japanese responses to movements such as Imagism and surrealism were merely “a translation of Western texts” (Hirata, Poetics, 184)...

Serialized in the first years of Japan’s modern Shôwa period (1926-1989), Hayashi Fumiko’s wildly popular Diary of a Vagabond ( Hôrôki) recounts, in playful turns both confessional and elusive, its author’s formation in the provincial mining communities of southern Japan and the booming Tokyo metropolis of the 1920s. A testimony of personal life events written in an accessible vernacular style identifiable as feminine in voice, Hayashi’s Diary adapts a narrative genre that had been deployed to...

The current war is the most beautiful futurist poem. —F.T. Marinetti

Translation takes time; it also gives time, a new and complex temporality, to a source text that exists in a relation of misunderstanding and inspiration to the translation. Early twentieth-century Japanese-English translation practices and theories offer a case study for a version of global modernism informed by ancient aesthetics and subjectivities—but not the typical version in which the ancient is non-western and modernity is firmly Euro-American. Two competing committees translated James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922) into Japanese before it was legal to sell in any English-speaking country. [1] Ezra Pound, that great promoter of Joyce as well as translation “by a committee,” did not encourage the Japanese interest in translating Anglophone modernist texts. [2] He worried that Japanese artists would be swept up in “the apeing of Europe,” as he put it in The Classical Noh Theatre of Japan (1916), a controversial translation of ancient noh plays he published in spite of his minimal knowledge of Japanese. [3] Noh plays and other classical texts, like Lady Murasaki’s famous The Tale of Genji (c. 1000, translated by Arthur Waley from 1926–33) were present in Anglophone modernism before many of its great works were produced, translated, and at risk of being “aped.” While western modernists celebrated a version of Japaneseness based on translations of classical texts, translators in Japan were eagerly tackling contemporary works like Ulysses. [4] This discrepancy in translation practices troubles the common presumption that Japanese modernism lagged behind Euro-American modernisms. Some theories of global modernism suggest that we need to expand the modernist period to accommodate the time of translation and open its geographical boundaries to include non-Western countries. [5] While these approaches work to be inclusive, they can imply that nonwestern modernisms were derivative; they also maintain a version of temporality that does not accommodate the messy, fertile, and multi-directional creativity of cross-cultural translation and exchange—much less the temporalities featured in noh plays.

When the photography exhibit Provoke: Photography in Japan between Protest and Performance, 1960-1975 began its tour of Europe and the United States in January of 2016, its relevance to the contemporary moment was unclear.

In 2011, the Japanese government designated Yasuda Yukihiko’s Camp at Kisegawa ( Kisegawa no jin, 1940-41) as an Important Cultural Property ( Jūyō bunkazai) (fig. 1). The left half of the painting, which portrays Minamoto Yoshitsune (1159-1189), a famous warrior from the Kamakura period (1185-1333), was initially produced and exhibited in 1940 as The Arrival of Yoshitsune (Yoshitsune sanchaku). The right half, which depicts Yoshitsune’s older brother Yoritomo (1147-1199), was added later, and the artist then titled the completed work Camp at Kisegawa (Kisegawa no jin). The finished painting, executed in ink on two paper folding screens, shows the much-desired reunion between the two men before their battle against the rival Heike clan. Given that the list of Important Cultural Properties includes Dogū clay sculptures from the Neolithic Jōmon period and the Niō sculptures at Hōryūji temple in Nara, the designation made Yasuda’s painting a canonical work of Japanese art. What this downplays, however, is the fact that the work was produced during the Second World War and served a political function. Since the Meiji period (1868-1912), which witnessed the intensive modernization and Westernization projects of Enlightenment and Civilization ( Bunmei kaika), there have been two broad categories of Japanese painting: Japanese-style paintings ( nihonga), executed in ink/color on paper/silk, and Western-style paintings ( yōga), created with oil on canvas. Japanese-style paintings have most often been considered as supportive of tradition, while the Western-style paintings have been linked to modernity. Nevertheless, during the Second World War, many Western-style painters were dispatched to the front to depict battles and political events, because of the medium’s supposed ability for realism. Western-style painter Miyamoto Saburō, for example, depicted an encounter between Japanese and British generals on the occasion of the Japanese occupation of Singapore in his The Meeting of General Yamashita and General Percival ( Yamashita pāshibaru ryōshireikan kaikenzu, 1942). The painting communicates Japan’s victory over Britain through the generals’ contrasting gestures: Japanese General Yamashita sits near the center of the painting in an imposing posture while three British officials in the foreground look at each other, unable to confront Yamashita. Since, on the other hand, it was generally agreed that Japanese-style painting was not conducive to realism, few Japanese-style painters depicted contemporary soldiers or battles; instead, during the war years, they continued to take as their subject matter traditional iconography, such as religious and historical figures, scenes of nature, and beautiful women.

In her article on Japan’s interwar visual culture, Gennifer Weisenfeld has documented and critically discussed a wealth of interwar images, many of them photographic, that involve gas masks. [1] Among them stands out Masao Horino’s 1936 Gas Mask Parade, a photograph showing a formation of girls marching in school uniforms, with gas masks on their faces. While her material offers a fascinating angle on a local visual culture, Weisenfeld reminds us in a footnote that gas-mask imagery was actually...