Springboard Japan Translates (Vol. 2): “CorpoRealities in Japan”
Sachi Schmidt-Hori
1. Introduction
Since the first issue of Springboard Japan Translates, “Kinship and Labor,” came out in the summer of 2021, many things have evolved and changed about this platform. Yet here it is—the second issue of Springboard Japan Translates! This time, I have chosen the theme of “CorpoRealities in Japan” and will present a variety of voices, perspectives, and images pertaining to the notion of corporeality, as it is broadly conceived and represented in literary and visual media or experienced by people in society. I hope that these collective voices, perspectives, and images will help us think of the not-so-straightforward relationship between our selfhood and our physical existence in the world—what is perceived as our corporeality.
We are meaning-making creatures, and it is only human nature for us to make assumptions and judgements when we first encounter our fellow humans. And we do so based primarily on visual cues. Granted, as educated adults living in wealthy countries, we have been taught that it’s wrong to judge a book by its cover and beauty is only skin-deep. We also know that lookism, racial profiling, body-shaming, the politics of “passing,” etc., are all serious issues in our societies. But it is also true that our effort to raise awareness on these issues makes us hyperfocus on the corporeality of others and our own.
Speaking of our own corporeality, it’s important to note that because we cannot see how we exist in the natural environment, our self-image is inevitably mediated by the implicit and explicit feedback we receive from others. A mirror, a camera, or even a camcorder cannot capture a “real” and comprehensive picture of how we appear to others. In essence, our face and our name exist for others for the purpose of identifying us. Our face is the fleshy counterpart of our name, and our name is the linguistic counterpart of our face. In tandem, these signifiers function as our ID, though we are not the sum of our face and our name.
Those of us living in highly industrialized, democratic societies are constantly juggling two conflicting ideas about the body. On the one hand, we think that our physical body is extremely sacred and must be dignified and protected at all times. Perhaps it’s not a coincidence that the English language treats “-body” as a shorthand for “human,” as in somebody, anybody, nobody (cf. “-thing”). On the other hand, we think that the body is vulgar and grotesque, as well. We refuse to be equated with our body, which is purportedly a mere vessel that contains something loftier like our personhood, mind, intellect, and virtue. We think our rational, cultured mind possesses and controls our body, not vice versa.
I have always been fascinated by the conventions of how premodern Japanese literature communicates the relative age, gender, socioeconomic class, and even personalities and dispositions of fictional characters to the audience through describing their physical traits. Not only did the people in premodern Japan tend to judge a book by its cover, but they also believed in the circular logic of “a lowly man looks lowly, so if a man looks lowly, he must be lowly.”
Along these lines, people in premodern Japan also believed that changing a person’s exterior caused an internal—and fundamental—change. For instance, in medieval times, aristocratic ladies who entered into the nunhood usually cropped their trailing hair at the shoulder length instead of shaving their heads like male priests. Yet some highborn nuns took the full tonsure right before their deaths. Back then, women were thought to have transformed into men by assuming a male hairstyle, as the Sun Goddess Amaterasu and Empress Jingū did so, according to the mytho-histories of Japan. By shaving their heads, nuns, too, acquired the status of a male priest, which supposedly increased their chances of attaining rebirth into the Pure Land. Another example is the concept of becoming an adult. Today, one’s legal status instantly switches from minor to adult when one reaches a certain, somewhat arbitrarily chosen age. Outside of the legal framework, we posit that a child gradually grows into an adult according to the biological clock. In premodern Japan, however, a child became an adult by undergoing a coming-of-age ritual, which usually accompanied modifications of his or her appearance (hairstyle, makeup, clothing) and personal name. If becoming an adult hinged on such corporeal transformations, not altering one’s corporeality meant never entering into adulthood. Thus, in medieval Japan, those who were born into the outcast class permanently remained nonadults, even when their bodies became wrinkly or they hair turned white.
In December 2021, I organized a workshop “Embodiment: Representations of Corporeality in Texts and Images of Japan” at Dartmouth College. Due to the pandemic, some participants joined via Zoom, including the guests of honor, Professor Kanechiku Nobuyuki (Waseda University), who gave a wonderful online poetry workshop, and Professor Sakamoto Kiyoe (Japan Women’s University), whose keynote lecture titled “The Calves and the Shins of the Bunraku Puppets” is shared on this platform.
Two additional contents in this issue were born out of the “Embodiment” workshop, as well. One is Prof. Jon Holt’s (Portland State University) paper on Umezu Kazuo’s horror manga Watashi wa Shingo: “I Am a Japanese Body, My Name Is Shingo: Umezu Kazuo’s Fleshy and Mechanical Bodies.” In this essay, Holt discusses how a bulky and innocently violent robot acquires something akin to human consciousness and how Umezu conveys this chilling process by zooming into the robot’s corporeality.
The other is a post-workshop conversation “The Three-Way Girl Talk: Sachi’s Conversation with Japan Studies Scholars Kimberly Hassel and Junnan Chen.” At the workshop, Dartmouth graduate Kimberly Hassel, now assistant professor at the University of Arizona, presented her paper titled “Digitizing Women’s Worlds: Gender, Participatory Culture, and ‘New’ Mediatic Assemblages in 5G Japan.” Kimberly’s kōhai and PhD candidate at Princeton University, Junnan Chen, gave a paper on the relationship between the hypermediated urban environment and the coding of femininity in late 1960s and 70s Japan through an analysis of Oshima Nagisa’s film, The Man Who Left His Will on Film (1970). Though we looked back on the workshop to a degree, we mostly shared with each other what we had been up to since the workshop. Our conversation shines a light on some of the things that many graduate students and early-career faculty, especially women and minority, experience but don’t necessarily openly discuss. Ultimately, this conversation provided us with an opportunity to reiterate our mutual admiration and support for each other’s career.
Two items are corporeality-related essays that were written independent of the Dartmouth workshop. Prof. Yoshikai Naoto (Doshisha Women’s University) contributed a short piece on kaimami, a literary device that normally takes the form of a man’s peeking at a noble lady and his subsequent courtship for her. This highly romantic, elegant trope of the Heian courtly tales can be easily misconstrued as illicit perversion by modern readers and, indeed, Prof. Yoshikai talks about the challenge of explaining the aesthetics of kaimami to his well-meaning international students. In any case, what’s most significant about this short essay—I should also note that Prof. Yoshikai has a monograph on this topic (Kaimamiru Genji monogatari: Murasaki Shikibu no shuhō o kaiseki suru [2008])—is that kaimami is not so much about the mundane action of looking per se. Rather, this literary trope evolved from the ancient belief in Japan that seeing was a quasi-magical, causative force, similar to uttering words (kotodama).
The second non-workshop-related piece is a Japanese translation of an essay by Prof. Vyjayanthi Selinger: “War without Blood? The Literary Uses of a Taboo Fluid in Heike Monogatari,” originally published in Monumenta Nipponica (2019). Prof. Selinger makes a compelling case as to why the Tale of the Heike goes to such great lengths to avoid mentioning blood, unlike many other military epics of Japan. I am very excited to be able to share this eye-opening essay with Japan scholars who do not have easy access to the original piece in English. I would also like to thank Prof. Bettina Gramlich-Oka, the editor-in-chief of Monumenta Nipponica, for giving us permission to translate “War without Blood?” and share it on Springboard Japan Translates.
The second issue of Springboard Japan Translates is missing one work, an essay that was going to be written by the late Mark Bookman. The photographer Peter Weld kindly provided captions for Mark’s photos he took as well as a short remark on the photoshoots. I have been working on a bilingual essay collection, Why Study Japan? (Bungaku tsūshin, 2023), to which Mark contributed an essay before his untimely passing. I will quote myself from the epilogue of the edited volume:
Regrettably, I must share extremely sad news with my readers. Mark Bookman, who authored “My Life as a Disabled American in Japan: Intersectional Barriers and Inclusive Imaginaries,” passed away on December 16, 2022. The last time I saw Mark was August 2022. That day, I arrived at Odaiba Marine Park station of the Yurikamome Line. One year had passed since the conclusion of the Tokyo 2020 Summer Olympics (which was delayed for one year due to the pandemic), the area looked eerily quiet. My photographer friend Peter Weld and I went to visit Mark’s apartment in the futuristic Odaiba neighborhood to discuss a collaborative project for the “Springboard Japan” website. I remember clearly that it was a particularly hot and humid day and that Mark, Peter, Mark’s caregiver (a Nepali gentleman whose name I cannot recall), and I constantly switched back-and-forth between English and Japanese. Even though the windows of Mark’s apartment were shut, and the air conditioner was on, the cicadas’ cry reverberated across the entire place and the four of us kept wiping the sweat off our faces. I never dreamed that this was going to be the last time I would see Mark in person. Four months later, he departed this world at age 31. Japan Studies lost a talented young scholar-educator-activist who was truly beloved and respected by so many people.
I would like to thank everyone who helped with the “CorpoRealities in Japan” issue of Springboard Japan Translates. In addition to the authors/speakers/photographer of the original pieces, I received assistance with translation, editing, among other things, from Prof. Vyjayanthi Selinger, Prof. Paula Curtis, Ms. Saki Hirozane, Mr. Jason Saber, Mr. Yuanhao Chen, and, last but not least, my wonderful husband Roy Schmidt.