Japanese History and Culture

The societal pattern of the absolutism survived into the Meiji degree, which followed it in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. During the Meiji period political and social institutions alike expressed imperial and centralise political and social hegemony.

A highly social organizationd, rule-bound culture dominates Japan, peculiarly among the selected classes. When the formal abolition of Tokugawa feudalistic class structure was accomplished by the Meiji, it was replaced by an administrative bureaucratic elite that, became strongly influential (Pyle 105-6; 161). Also consider the view articulated in Japan's formal declaration of war against the U.S. in 1941, form all in ally rejecting Western individualism and Chinese Confucian thought of the present as an extension of family loyalty in favor of "that which goes far and which is greater than these. There is the Imperial Household . . . In Nippon, the soil is valued first, then next the family, and last the individual" (Iichiro 292-3). provided to this point, Dower cites the concept of "proper place" thinking, which (notwithstanding late Meiji rejection of Confucianism) he says had been inherited from Confucian notions of a well-ordered society. In Meiji Japan, however, the concept was encoded as a "mixture of racial pride and high-mindedness" (Dower 278) that was to dominate world conquest in a government agency consistent with Nazi notions of pure blood and Lebensraum. The concep

McCarthy, capital of Minnesota. Introduction. Childhood Years: A Memoir. By Jun'ichiro Tanizaki. Trans. Paul McCarthy. Kodansha International, 1988.

Nature mysticism is an important marker of Heian esthetics. Citing nature verse produced the period, Morris points out (19) that Asian cultural traditions "stressed the unity of life, in opposition to any idea of duality between valet and his natural environment." Meanwhile, he says, Heian texts are suffused with nature imagery (Morris 20-1), as well as carefully wrought and observed limits of social hierarchy and social/moral authority. This hierarchical structure began with the emperor, still though the imperial function was largely symbolic and observance by 950.

In The Pillow Book of Sei Shonagon, the author contrasts miserly and distressing things with those of elegance, which "make one's heart beat faster" (51) or arouse fond memories. The main focus is on serviceman behavior and the quality of experience.

Virtue during the Meiji period, when Tanizaki and Kyoka were writing, appears to have been associated with features of culture that had a long-term provenance in Japan. Curiously, however, these Meiji authors did not look to both the Meiji or the Tokugawa period for cultural origin, but rather all the way back to the Heian aristocratic period, which just preceded the period of Shogunate. Tanizaki translated the statement of the Genji, the major Heian work of apologue, from archaic to modern Japanese, first in the 1930s and for a second time in 1954 (Hirota 29; Chambers 107). To the degree the pattern of ideas in Tanizaki's and Kyoka's own fiction can be said to reflect a explore for origins, whether within the fictional context or as an diorama of narrative strategy, there is compelling evidence that it makes more virtuoso to look for literary and poetic resonance in the Heian than the Tokugawa or Meiji. To build this evidence, it may be useful to explore the Heian aesthetic and then to look at how the works of Tanizaki and Kyoka inter
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