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TWO

The Ideology of the Metropolis

One of the most striking effects of Japan’s modernization project of the late nineteenth century was the rising prominence and increasing centrality of Tokyo within the new national space. By the 1920s, Meiji government policies of national developmentalism pursued since the 1870s had built Tokyo up and transformed it into the control room for nationwide political parties, the seat of national government and apex of administrative hierarchies, the clearinghouse for the financial industry, the heart of the national transportation grid, a locus of industry and a major concentration of population, and the main portal to the outside world. These policies increased Tokyo’s centrality in cultural ways as well, as it became a center of higher education, the high arts, the publishing industry, and the mass media.

In a material sense, these economic, political, and cultural institutions and networks concentrated power and resources in the capital, producing and reproducing its centrality. But just as significant, people came to think of Tokyo as the first among cities: they believed it to be the largest, the best, the foremost, the fastest, the most advanced. And because nothing succeeds like success, this faith in Tokyo as number one augmented the capital’s capacity to attract still more economic, cultural, and political resources. In other words, belief in Tokyo as the center had a power-effect, which reinforced and reproduced its centrality. It is this combination of material and ideological forces that I highlight by the term Tokyo-centrism.

Intellectuals, the literati in particular, stood at the heart of this process. Literary production in the early twentieth century was concerned, overwhelmingly, with everyday life. Because their depictions of life in the metropolis, in the provincial town, and in the rural village critically shaped urban and rural imaginaries, writers occupied a central role in the production of Tokyo-centrism. Moreover, faith in Tokyo’s centrality was most fervently felt in high cultural circles. For writers, artists, and musicians, the metropolitan stage represented a singular pinnacle of achievement. Their fixation with Tokyo emerged from the intimate relationship between the literati and institutions of the press and the schools. Built up in the late nineteenth century as instruments of national integration, newspapers and the educational system created networks that connected urban communities, and they provided a conduit that channeled talent and ambition to the capital. In the process, they became important vehicles for the production and dissemination of Tokyo-centrism. More than any other, these two modernizing institutions gave definition to the literati as a social formation and cultural force. They offered a meeting ground and a stage, shaping the ethos of the literati and propelling them to social prominence and influence. Like the institutions that fostered them, the literati became instruments of Tokyo-centrism.

Though Tokyo’s centrality owed something to the Tokugawa legacy of Edo-centrism, Tokyo’s rise was determined as much by what happened after the overthrow of the feudal regime in 1868 as before. Soon after the establishment of the new state, fierce competition broke out between two centers of the old regime for designation as the new national capital. Osaka, the economic hub of rice and money exchange, emerged as one contender, and Edo, the seat of shogunal political power, as the other. Edo, renamed Tokyo, or “Eastern capital,” won out, but even its new designation called attention to the contingent nature of capitals in Japan, where the physical seat of power had shifted frequently over the centuries.¹ Old Edo bequeathed to new Tokyo its academies of samurai erudition, its shogunal palace and aristocratic estates, its vibrant popular culture, and its demographic dominance over other urban centers. Nevertheless, as Henry Smith points out, in the early years of the transition from Edo to Tokyo the new city became a shell of its former self, losing population as the feudal lords and their samurai retainers abandoned the city for their homelands, taking with them much of the wealth that had sustained the city as a center of consumption and cultural production since the 1600s.² Two decades into the new era, Tokyo recovered the million population mark and regained its centralizing momentum through the establishment of a national railway grid, a constitutional government, and other policies of the Meiji developmental state. Though we have tended to assume the inevitability of Tokyo’s rise, this history highlights the human contrivance that lay behind Tokyo-centrism.

The same forces that made Tokyo central—that concentrated power and prestige in the capital—provincialized other urban centers, turning them into “local cities” (chihō toshi) in relation to Tokyo by marginalizing their cultural and economic production and limiting their political clout. New educational institutions and the publishing market channeled ambitious and talented intellectuals to the capital; the ongoing brain drain held profound implications for local communities. The belief that Japan’s modernist cultural movements originated in Tokyo blinded people to the dynamism and creativity of local cultural movements and their influence on the center. And yet, provincial cities did support thriving communities of artists and writers. Cities such as Kanazawa cultivated towering figures in modern Japanese thought such as writer Izumi Kyōka, Buddhologist Suzuki Daisetsu, and philosopher Nishida Kitarō. As the distinctive regional voices of Sapporo’s proletarian literature, Niigata’s orchestras, and Okayama’s new poetry reveal, innovation and originality was possible in the world beyond the metropolis.

This chapter examines the creation of a new cultural geography that privileged Tokyo and marginalized its outside world—a geography that defined Japan in terms of Tokyo and its Others. In the circulation of people and ideas set in motion by the modernizing project of the Meiji state, Japan’s cities redefined themselves in relation to other urban centers. Just as Tokyo’s metropolitan identity was constructed against a rural imaginary—the chihō, or provinces—Tokyo provided the Other against which local cities forged their own self-conceptions.

EDUCATION AND CULTURAL GEOGRAPHY

The architecture of the national education system was created through a series of late-nineteenth-century laws that shunted children into different streams based on gender and status. The Meiji oligarchy initially intended educational reform to become a vehicle for the introduction of western knowledge into Japan, as well as a vehicle for the creation of a national citizenry capable of service to the state and of work in new economic enterprises. The new leadership also saw education as an instrument of social reform, part of the broader effort to phase out feudal status distinctions between samurai and commoners. To this end they created a compulsory elementary school system available to children of all backgrounds, which by 1907 meant eight years of schooling, tuition free. Entry into secondary school was based on competitive entry examinations, grounding higher education on the principle of meritocracy. These reforms ended the samurai monopoly on learning and made upward mobility theoretically possible through the school system, an ideal captured in the Meiji slogan of “rising in the world” (risshin shusse).³

In practice, however, the elaborate educational tracking system quickly became a vehicle for the reproduction of existing social hierarchies. The first moment of separation, between primary and secondary education, fixed the boundary between an emerging working class on one hand, and middle and upper classes on the other. Because high tuition effectively barred the poor from most secondary schools, the lower tier of primary schools was terminal for children of tenant farmers or of the urban lower class. For children of means, secondary education proceeded along multiple pathways, dividing into a university-bound middle-and-higher-school track, and alternative tracks for normal schools, girls’ higher schools, and commercial, foreign language, and trade schools. Students on the exclusive university track moved from a five-year middle school to a three-year higher school, between which stood a brutal weeding process. School statistics reveal that in 1890 there were spaces for 11,620 students at 55 middle schools spread throughout the country, but only 4,356 spots at the nation’s 7 select higher schools. By 1920 the numbers of state middle schools expanded to 368 (177,201 students) and higher schools to 15 (8,839 students), an asymmetry that significantly sharpened the odds against passing higher-school examinations. These statistics translated into a higher-school admission rate of roughly 1 percent of the male population between sixteen and nineteen. The good news for that successful 1 percent was that higher-school graduation virtually guaranteed entry into a university.⁴

While numerous private schools emerged to meet the growing demand for education, state schools commanded considerably more prestige and maintained the ranking system that placed Japan’s cities in a hierarchy of educational stature. The first public higher schools were named according to their place in this hierarchy; the nation’s top school in Tokyo, for example, was designated Ichikō, literally “First High.” Tokyo was also the site of the nation’s top (and until 1897 only) public university, Tokyo Imperial University. The cities of Kyoto, distinguished by its long association with the imperial court, and Sendai, seat of one of the most powerful feudal domains and a center of learning during the Tokugawa period, tied for second place in this ranking when the new government located the next higher schools Nikō (Second High) in Sendai and Sankō (Third High) in Kyoto in the 1880s. Establishment of a second imperial university in Kyoto in 1897, and a third in Sendai (Tōhoku University) in 1907 reinforced their positions at the head of the academic hierarchy.⁵

This educational ranking system privileged Kanazawa and Okayama, where the Fourth and Sixth Higher Schools were located, respectively.⁶ Sapporo also achieved cultural prominence as an educational center when the Meiji government in 1876 created Sapporo Agricultural College, making it a center for research in agricultural modernization. Its status was greatly elevated when it became the agricultural campus of Tōhoku Imperial University (main campus in Sendai) in 1907, and was made into Hokkaido Imperial University in 1918 (with the addition of faculties of science, engineering, and medicine). In anointing certain cities as centers of modern knowledge, state educational policy created a cultural geography that concentrated human and material resources for knowledge production, in the process helping to constitute a system of centers and peripheries.

Moreover, the tiers in the state’s educational tracking system were distributed according to a particular spatial logic that distinguished villages (with elementary schools only) from cities (with a range of secondary school choices), and both of these from the metropolis (where universities were concentrated). This geographic dispersal of educational institutions linked social mobility to geographic mobility, and it laid the channels through which such demographic movements would flow. Thus, in the late Meiji a pattern established itself where the second and third (noninheriting) sons of rural landlords moved from their villages to the cities to be schooled with children of the urban elite, members of old merchant and artisan families as well as former samurai. For these families, education represented one way to transform feudal wealth into human capital and secure the family’s fortunes at a time of rapid economic transition. Elite urban in-migration implied upward mobility, social advance secured through access to new knowledge. The rural poor, in contrast, lacked the property requisite to finance secondary education for their children. For them, the labor market, rather than the school system, created the channels of geo-social mobility. In their case, movement to the cities was less upward mobility than outward mobility, since geographic movement, for the most part, changed the social form of their labor but not their position in the social hierarchy. Like the labor market, modern educational institutions became a vessel for the transmutation of feudal social categories into modern social categories, for dissolving status positions and reshaping them into class formations. Moreover, complementing the effects of urban rankings of public schools, the geographically dispersed tiers of school tracks constituted a new cultural geography that was hierarchical and created a system of centers and peripheries.

Beyond the class distinctions it helped to generate, the educational system created cultural disparities between communities. As they were situated on the educational grid, localities assumed places in a new cultural hierarchy that privileged the learning and knowledge production of the metropolitan center. The nexus of knowledge and power concentrated in secondary education was one reason why localities were willing to commit scarce budgetary resources to establish a network of postelementary schools. As communities recognized, schools provided a cultural resource that could become an engine of local development. Secondary schools were magnets for intellectuals who injected into their adopted homes new forms of knowledge that helped cities modernize; they contributed their expertise to city planning, architectural innovation, public health initiatives, and the creation of local libraries, museums, and exhibitions. This could spell the difference between standing at the forefront of urban innovation and growth or being left behind in the competition for private investment and further government financing.

In the case of Niigata, the prefectural government worked hard to build up educational institutions within its jurisdiction. A middle school was built in Niigata city in 1892, followed by schools in Nagaoka, Shibata, Sado, and Takada. By 1910 the prefecture boasted twelve middle schools, with an enrollment of 5,500 students. Of the 500 graduates that year, 85 had submitted applications to higher school. And though 152 Niigata students were currently attending higher schools, all of these were outside the prefecture.⁷ Establishing a higher school was considerably more difficult than building a middle school, however. Both required approval of the Ministry of Education, but higher schools had the distinction of being fully funded by the national treasury. Localities could sweeten the pot for the national government by financing the school building or donating an existing facility. Indeed, Kanazawa and Okayama, early victors in the interurban competition for a higher school, were selected in part because they could draw on their legacy as castle towns to provide this type of assistance. In Kanazawa’s case, a generous donation from the former daimyo family, plus the large pool of literate young men ready to matriculate at a higher school, tipped the scales in the city’s favor.⁸

Though political leaders in Niigata had been active since the late 1880s with a campaign to raise money for local facilities and efforts to lobby the central government, they lost out to places such as Okayama in the early round of competitions. Further campaigns in 1905 and 1911 likewise met with failure, but another drive was undertaken in 1916. Facing fierce competition from other prefectures, Niigata began a new fund-raising campaign and sent an entourage of local dignitaries to Tokyo to appeal for support. This time the efforts bore fruit: flush with cash generated by tax receipts from the war boom, the state approved the establishment of higher schools in Niigata and three other cities.⁹ Departing from previous practice, higher schools of the new generation were designated with the names of the cities in which they were based: Niigata Higher, Yamagata Higher, and so on. Though the round of higher-school expansion during World War One brought great prestige to the communities that gained the new institutions, status distinctions persisted between the first generation of “number” schools and the expanded cadre of “name schools,” a distinction exacerbated by the overproduction of middle- and higher-school graduates and so-called employment difficulties (shūshokunan) of the 1920s.

Undoubtedly a boon to local development, the enormous investment in secondary schools also fixed the position of localities in the educational grid. A city’s status as a center of learning ensured cultural dominance in its respective region and, at the same time, cemented its position of cultural subordination to Tokyo. In other words, the educational system created multiple centers and arranged them hierarchically. The metropolis, with its concentration of universities, was one center, but local cities such as Okayama, with its concentration of secondary schools, constituted another, secondary center. Okayama’s ability to develop educational resources drew on its rich inheritance as a center of learning during the Tokugawa period; in the late nineteenth century the city moved quickly to build on this legacy. Okayama’s first public middle school opened in 1874; a second was built in 1921. The city’s two middle schools, together with the private middle school that had opened in 1894, enrolled about 2,600 students. By 1886 Okayama boasted two women’s colleges, and additional schools were established in 1900, 1908, and 1925. In terms of commercial and technical schools, the city offered a range of options by 1926: a four-year public technical school, a four-year public commercial school, a private professional women’s college, a women’s arts school, and city-run industrial arts and commercial schools. In addition, Okayama was home to a prestigious medical school and a normal school.¹⁰

This impressive array of schools established Okayama’s reputation as a center of higher learning for the region, attracting a flow of students from the surrounding counties as well as neighboring prefectures of the Chūgoku and Shikoku districts. Moreover, because employment at Okayama’s secondary schools typically required a university degree, the school network generated an in-migration from university centers in Tokyo and, to a lesser extent, Kyoto. In their capacity as teachers, metropolitan intellectuals made enormous impacts on local cultural movements, often acting as conduits for the introduction of Tokyo trends into the provinces, where they encountered thriving local cultures and became part of a cultural melting pot. Whether it was in-migration of Tokyo intellectuals or the influx of students from surrounding towns and villages, the new educational system provided a channel for the circulation of people and local knowledge. It created extended social networks and provided the context for productive engagements and mutual influences, a synergy between artists and writers from different local communities who came together in places like Okayama.

At the same time, their subordinate position on the grid turned cities such as Okayama into way stations on the path to the metropolis, both for students continuing on to university and for the scholars who used employment in Okayama as a stepping-stone to a more prestigious post at a metropolitan university. Modern educational institutions operated to reinforce Tokyo-centrism in other ways as well. Indeed, the status hierarchy between faculty and students became a powerful mechanism for the production of the ideology of the metropolis. Facing their provincial students, Tokyo intellectuals represented the source of knowledge; in the act of teaching and learning, and the relationship of mentor to student, the lived experience of higher education in the provinces naturalized the idea that modern knowledge issued forth from a single source in Tokyo. Performing, metaphorically, the interplay between Tokyo and the provinces, the teacher-student relationship helped to breed condescension for provincial culture, on the one hand, and deference toward the center on the other.

INTELLECTUAL CIRCUITS

Biographies of Japanese intellectuals who lived during these years reveal the power this tracking system had in structuring individual lives. It influenced career choices and shaped decisions about where to live and when to move. The stories of Shida Sokin (1876–1946), a minor figure in the modernist poetry movement, and Mitani Takamasa (1889–1944), an eminent legal philosopher and Christian leader, offer telling examples of the operations of the new cultural geography. As they traveled along career paths prescribed for upward mobility, Shida and Mitani made the trip between provincial city and metropolitan capital multiple times, crisscrossing the country in pursuit of cultural acclaim. Through their peregrinations along the tracks of higher education, intellectuals such as Shida and Mitani laid down circuits of knowledge production and exchange. They also established personal and institutional networks that knit the new cultural geography into a social web. Not only did these intellectual circuits serve as vectors for the diffusion of metropolitan trends to the provinces, but they also did the reverse. They created an intellectual feeder system that channeled the innovations of provincial cultural production into the metropolis.

After studying literature at Tokyo University, Shida Sokin came to teach at Okayama’s Sixth High, where he remained for almost twenty years. As a beloved professor of Japanese literature, he mentored many accomplished poets, including one of Okayama’s most famous sons, Uchida Hyakken.¹¹ During his time at Tokyo University, Shida had come under the influence of Masaoka Shiki, the great naturalist poet and founder of the modern haiku movement. Through disciples like Shida Sokin, the new haiku movement established strong provincial links and spread throughout Japan. Indeed, Shida’s energetic promotion of haiku poetry clubs made them a cornerstone of Okayama’s literary scene.¹² In spite of his established position as a leading figure in Okayama intellectual circles, Shida quit in 1925, after a long and successful career at Okayama’s public higher school, to take a post at a private higher school in Tokyo—Seikei Higher School, forerunner of the prominent private college in Kichijōji. Since public schools were more prestigious than private schools in the prewar context, the only reason this made any sense as a career move was because it took Shida back to Tokyo. Critical as it was to the socialization and acculturation of Japan’s intellectual establishment, the intellectual life of the provincial higher school simply could not compete with the cultural attractions of Tokyo.

Much like Shida, the scholar Mitani Takamasa exerted great influence on local intellectual and religious movements in Okayama and served as a cultural bridge to the metropolis. While a student at Tokyo Imperial University, Mitani joined Uchimura Kanzō’s “nonchurch” movement (mukyōkai). When he came to teach at Sixth High, he brought this school of religious practice to Okayama. Though he became famous only after he returned to Tokyo to teach at First High, during his time in Okayama he introduced Sixth High students to the latest legal debates in Tokyo and Europe and to what later became his hallmark blend of ethics, law, and philosophy.¹³ The prominent place Tokyo intellectuals such as Shida and Mitani occupy in local histories testifies to their importance both as leaders of local cultural movements and as conduits for the import of metropolitan intellectual trends into the provinces.

As the stories of Shida and Mitani illustrate, the educational tracking system created a strong material basis to Tokyo-centrism through the circulation of knowledge and human capital. Yet these powerful channels of social circulation and their impact on the way people thought of the relationship between Tokyo and the provinces masked a more complex reality about the movement of ideas and the intellectual formation of scholars. While Tokyo was undoubtedly the single greatest source of academic pedigree, the “Tokyo intellectuals” who staffed Japan’s provincial schools had in fact been provincial transplants to the capital. In this sense Tokyo represented only a single phase of an intellectual biography that circulated scholars through various locales; these diverse cultural experiences cumulatively constituted their intellectual formation.

The biographies of professors at Okayama’s Sixth High show the common Tokyo polishing but also the typical path of education and employment that rotated cultural elites back and forth between the provinces and the capital. Both Shida and Mitani grew up outside the capital, Shida in Toyama and Mitani in Kanagawa. The professor of Chinese literature at Sixth High, Mitsuda Shinzō, was raised in Fukushima; the English teachers Sasaki Kuni and Sangū Makoto came from Shizuoka and Yamagata. Sekiyama Toshio and Fujimori Narikichi, both of whom taught German literature, grew up in Toyama and Kanagawa, respectively. Japanese history professor Matsumoto Hikojirō and philosophy professor Takahashi Satomi were from Aomori and Yamagata in the Northeast.¹⁴ In other words, virtually none of the academics hired from Tokyo were actually raised in the capital. This suggested a more complex, heterogeneous intellectual formation than their Tokyo branding implied. Though their scholarship and artistic production were associated with the Tokyo pedigree, this was the capstone of a long period of education and socialization, all of which took place outside the metropolis.

This included the critical period of higher school, which for those born outside the metropolis almost invariably took place in a provincial city. As Donald Roden notes in his engaging study of Japanese higher schools in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, these schools were the equivalent of present-day undergraduate institutions. Indeed, after World War Two many converted into four-year colleges. Prestigious and exclusive, they prepared a select group of students for the imperial university. Passing through the gates of the higher school signaled entry into the intellectual elite. The Japanese government designed the higher school to provide—like the French lycée, the German gymnasium, and the British public school on which it was modeled—“the highest level of general education for young men” and “dedicated [them] to the perfection of national morality.”¹⁵ As the instrument of molding the higher-school gentleman, these schools developed a set of distinctive customs that included collective life in self-governing dormitories, hazing rituals, school sports, and school magazines. Such practices became the hallmark of the higher school experience and defined the culture of the student elite. They made the higher school a context for intense sociality and socialization, the formation of a school ethos, and the establishment of old school ties between classmates. The cloistered life, the merging of private and scholastic experience, and expectations of mutual assistance based on hierarchical junior-senior relationships meant that higher-school bonds were particularly strong and enduring. Not only did they demarcate social pathways that took the student elite far beyond their school years, but the hothouse atmosphere of the higher schools also incubated the most powerful intellectual tendencies of the time.¹⁶

Many scholars whose educational trajectory took them from higher school in a provincial city to university in the capital found themselves retracing these same steps in pursuit of career advances. In both senses, then, cities such as Okayama became way stations for aspirants to national acclaim. The life course of writer Sasaki Kuni (1883–1964), who made a brief sojourn in Okayama, was typical in this regard. Born and raised in Shizuoka, Sasaki moved to Tokyo to study literature at Meiji Gakuin. He left Tokyo for his first job, a teaching post at Okayama’s Sixth High, where he taught English literature. But he found a way to return to Tokyo, landing a position at the prestigious private Keiō University. It was during his time at Keiō that he achieved renown for his translations of Mark Twain’s humorous fiction. The move to the capital was thus a prerequisite for Sasaki’s recognition as a member of the elite fraternity of writers known as the bundan.

The life of doctor and poet Inoue Michiyasu traced out a similar peregrination. Inoue was raised in Hyōgo prefecture and went to Tokyo to study medicine at Tokyo Imperial University. He took a job at Okayama Medical College but returned to Tokyo, where he opened a private practice and achieved some fame as a poet. In the meantime, his time spent in Tokyo nurturing university connections eventually paid off with an appointment as advisor to the imperial family. Others also used their time in Okayama as a stepping-stone to greater things. Both Gumma-born Aragi Torasaburō, who taught at the Medical School, and Fukuoka-born Matsui Moto’oki, professor of chemistry at Sixth High, went on to become presidents of Kyoto University.¹⁷

For all these men, career advancement dictated a departure from Okayama. Ambitious students likewise saw provincial cities as way stations on the road to the university. Though Kyoto, too, was a university town—and by 1918, imperial universities in Sendai, Fukuoka, and Sapporo were other options—most set their sights on Tokyo, where the most prestigious and greatest number of universities were concentrated. The allure of the metropolis deprived provincial cities of local talent, creaming off the men and women who would go on to achieve fame and fortune in the capital. Okayama’s most renowned intellectuals and artists trod this path, leaving the prefectural capital after higher school and never moving back.

The roster of Okayama-born members of the Tokyo literati included a founding figure in western philosophical studies, Ōnishi Hajime (1864–1900), as well as the writers Emi Suiin (1865–1934), Uchida Hyakken (1889–1971), and Tsubota Jōji (1890–1982). Emi initially went to Tokyo to pursue a military career but took up literature after meeting writers associated with the Ken’yūsha school (Friends of the Inkstone). He became a prominent member of this group, making a name as a pioneer of detective fiction and popular literature. Hyakken was the son of an Okayama sake brewer. He attended the city’s most prestigious middle and higher schools, where his encounter with Shida Sokin converted him to the literary life. After moving on to Tokyo Imperial University for German literature studies, where he worked with Natsume Sōseki, Hyakken became a professor at Hosei University in 1916, gaining a name for his surrealist fiction and humorous essays. The path trod by Tsubota Jōji, a prominent figure in the children’s literature movement, followed a similar course. Born to a manager of a weaving factory, Tsubota was educated locally, continuing on to Tokyo’s Waseda University, from which he graduated in 1915. During his time at Waseda he joined with Ogawa Mimei and others to study folk and fairy stories; later he became a main contributor to the emblematic children’s magazine of the 1920s, Akai Tori (Red Bird). Others, like the poets Kinoshita Rigen and Arimoto Hōsui, followed similar paths from Okayama to Tokyo.¹⁸

What stands out in these biographies is that fame and recognition was achieved in every case only after writers had made the journey to the capital. That entree into the Tokyo literati defined literary success was not simply the conceit of metropolitan intellectuals but was reinforced by attitudes in the localities. Okayama, like other provincial cities, tended to celebrate its native sons and daughters once the metropolis embraced them: with Tokyo’s stamp of approval, local talent became a source of local pride. This tendency became even more pronounced after World War Two, with the creation of shrines to locally born artists who had made their careers in Tokyo. The Yumeiji Takiji Museum (Okayama) and the Tsubota Jōji (Okayama) and Izumi Kyōka (Kanazawa) literary prizes all venerated men who abandoned their hometowns to make their fortunes in the capital.¹⁹ But the self-marginalizing impulse to echo the commendations of Tokyo emerged well before the end of the Second World War, evident in the travel promotions and city guides that constituted a growing literature of local boosterism in the twenties and thirties.

In the magazine Touring Kanazawa (Kankō Kanazawa), for example, an article titled “Kanazawa and the Literati” did not showcase the local arts and culture of a city that had prided itself on being the center of Hokuriku regional culture for centuries. Instead the essay focused on the famous writer Akutagawa Ryūnosuke, who made a couple of visits to the city in the midtwenties.²⁰ The Hokkaido Yearbook of 1930 singled out the tenor Okuda Ryōzō to honor in its description of local arts and music. An entry titled “Hokkaido Natives Impart a Distinctive Flavor to the Musical World in the Center” boasted that “local art, born amid Hokkaido’s magnificent natural beauty, is gradually moving into the metropolis. . . . Hokkaido’s participation in the national music scene is a milestone of our progress: this inspires all Hokkaido natives and raises expectations for the future.” In a capsule summary of Okuda’s biography, the Yearbook traced the itinerary typical of the successful artist: early training in Sapporo, migration to Tokyo for formal music study, and the critical career launch made possible on the metropolitan stage, where Okuda “made a sensation.” Okuda returned several times to perform in Hokkaido, dusting his old hometown with a touch of metropolitan glitter.²¹

Entries on literature and the arts in later editions of the Hokkaido Yearbook institutionalized the practice of monumentalizing the talent of intellectuals who had risen to capital fame. The 1940 edition even noted distinguished writers such as Takebayashi Musōan, a Sapporo native who moved to Tokyo at the age of four, as well as Shimaki Kensaku and Morita Tama, part of a generation of Taishō writers who left Sapporo in their teens and never looked back. Sasaki Chiyuki, who moved to Tokyo at five, and Kubo Sakae who left for Tokyo after middle school, also made the grade. These artists and writers maintained family connections with Sapporo; they wrote about it in their novels and returned for occasional visits. Nonetheless, Tokyo became their adoptive home, and they were identified with their artistic success in the capital.²² Yet it was these Tokyo transplants whom provincial guidebooks chose to celebrate in their features on local literary stars, rather than the native talent that elected to stay put. Even though Sapporo possessed a vibrant literary, artistic, and musical scene, little of this found expression in places like the Hokkaido Yearbook. And while the proliferating local guidebooks of the twenties and thirties championed the autonomy and distinctiveness of local culture, by reserving special acclaim for artists with Tokyo pedigrees, provincial boosters were complicit in a process of self-marginalization that helped install the ideology of the metropolis.

ASCENDING TO TOKYO

The brain drain to Tokyo, channeled through the educational tracking system laid down in the Meiji reforms, became much more than a mere exodus to the capital. When local artists such as Uchida Hyakken made the move to Tokyo, they underwent a kind of mutual appropriation. Part of this process involved their adoption of Tokyo: locally born writers and artists who made it in the capital shed their roots and took on the aura and identity of the metropolis. The mark of their success, induction into the elite fraternity known as the bundan, signified their embrace of a metropolitan identity. At the same time, Tokyo adopted them, appropriating their cultural production as its own. Their novels, paintings, and scientific discoveries all became illustrations, not of the cultural fecundity of the provinces, but of the prodigious cultural power of the metropolis—yet another example of Tokyo as the font of modern knowledge and the pinnacle of modern culture. These mutual appropriations erased the provincial origins of metropolitan culture.

The term used to describe the journey from provincial city to metropolis was jōkyō—“ascending to Tokyo.” The term captured the elevated status of the capital and the ways people saw this trip as being much more than a movement through physical space. Viewed from outside the metropolis, the journey to Tokyo brought cultural elites into a dazzling realm of celebrity intellectuals, famous places, and citadels of higher learning. Nothing symbolized this rarified world of cultural privilege better than the literary establishment known as the bundan. Tokyo was identified, similarly, with establishment circles in the arts (gadan), music (gakudan), and press (rondan), but because of the predilection of writers to use their own life experiences as material for their modernist novels, the angst-ridden, solipsistic world of the literary man became a prominent symbol of the highbrow culture of the capital. As Edward Fowler explains in an illuminating discussion of the bundan, this group included “writers, critics, and publishers associated with what is commonly called junbungaku, or ‘pure’ literature.”²³ Though their output represented a tiny fraction of literary production in the early twentieth century, these metropolitan intellectuals were recognized both as trendsetters in literary modernism and as exemplars of a national literary tradition.²⁴

They were defined by three key characteristics that knit them into a socially alienated, self-referential group and accounted for the surprising uniformity of their values and attitudes. First and foremost, shared education at schools such as Tokyo Imperial University, Waseda University, or the aristocratic peers school, Gakushūin, conditioned the social formation of the bundan. As aspirants to literary acclaim converged on these elite institutions, they concentrated themselves in literature departments and became disciples of the famous writers who taught there. During their school days they forged the relationships that would become crucial to their artistic production and to their publication opportunities. School connections developed into literary cliques that endured and generated the outpouring of university publications like Mita bungaku (Keiō University), Waseda bungaku (Waseda University), and Teikoku bungaku (Tokyo Imperial University) and, more important, the myriad coterie magazines that dotted the literary landscape. Institutionally anchored to elite schools, both types of magazines provided the primary forum for literary production in the late Meiji and Taishō periods.

The association with the coterie magazine (dōjin zasshi), like educational affiliation, powerfully determined the character of the bundan. The dōjin zasshi featured fiction, poetry, art, and criticism in varying proportions and were brought out to provide a forum for the literary experiments of a young clique of writers. Since their target audience was other members of their group and, with luck, the greater Tokyo literati, circulations were often limited. Finances depended on the resources of contributors and tended to be precarious, which meant that most were short-lived, lasting no more than a few issues. Probably the most famous of the coterie magazines, Shirakaba (White Birch), departed from this pattern because its aristocratic contributors were able to fund an exceptionally long run of the magazine. Yet as ephemeral as more typical coterie magazines were, they offered publishing opportunities to untested writers and exposure to a literary community that was intensely engaged in mutual reading and mutual criticism. And since positive reception signaled induction into the bundan, coterie magazines provided a critical stepping-stone to career success. Because contributors, publishers, and readership were essentially identical, coterie magazines became a vehicle for producing the practices of mutual criticism and validation, as well as the inward gaze and collective narcissism that shaped the culture of the bundan.²⁵

Common physical location in the capital was the third defining characteristic of the literary establishment. As Fowler points out, Tokyo was the home or adopted home of virtually all “pure literature” writers. The identification of the bundan with Tokyo was sustained by a number of factors. As we have seen, the educational ladder concentrated resources of higher learning and highbrow culture in Tokyo and funneled aspiring writers to the capital. Likewise, Tokyo was home to the major publishing firms as well as newspaper companies like the Tokyo Asahi Shinbun, which employed establishment writers and published their novels in serial form. But synonymy with Tokyo also emerged from the centrality of personal connections within the literary establishment. The constitutive cultural practices of the bundan were based on mutual acquaintance and the intense intersociality of the local community of writers. This was true of not just the coterie journal but also the “I novels” and modes of literary critique that dominated literary form in the teens and twenties.

As many literary historians have pointed out, the Japanese inflection of naturalism was based on an unflinchingly honest and unsentimental depiction of everyday life through the thoughts and emotions of the artist.²⁶ When applied by Tokyo writers, the celebrated literary technique of “sketching from life” yielded intimate, if thinly disguised, portraits of the artist, his friends, and their lives in the metropolis.²⁷ As naturalism gave rise to the “I novel” form, fiction became part gossip and part confession, focusing in particular detail on romantic entanglements and sexual peccadilloes. These conditions of production also affected the practice of literary criticism, in which commentary on the merits of technique and form jostled for place with speculation about the identity of specific characters and reactions to the personal revelations contained in the text. Moreover, because of the exclusive nature of the bundan, much of what passed for literary criticism devolved into a kind of shoptalk whose meaning was readily apparent only to an insider. In other words, the self-referential nature of the bundan and its literary production reinforced its identification with the Tokyo locale. Tokyo’s position as a national capital elevated this intensely localized and inward-looking social formation—the Tokyo literati—to the apex of high cultural production. The privilege of cultural geography turned a local literature into a national canon and helped foster the misrecognition of the metropolis as the font of the modernist imagination.²⁸

What did it mean for the Tokyo literati that most were born and raised outside the capital city? As literary historians have pointed out, such prominent naturalists as Kunikida Doppo, Tayama Katei, and Tokuda Shūsei were all provincial transplants, and the humanist “White Birch” school (Shirakabaha) was drawn from the ranks of the provincial aristocracy.²⁹ With their enthusiasms for Tolstoy’s vision of a pastoral life and their romantic exultations of nature, these writers contributed to what Carol Gluck called the “rediscovery of the countryside” in the early twentieth century.³⁰ The predilection for writing from life experience meant that a city like Kanazawa, which sent a parade of intellectual luminaries to the capital, served as the stage for many classic works of modern Japanese literature. The list of Kanazawa writers included Izumi Kyōka, disciple of Ozaki Kōyō and founding member of the bundan, who wrote lyrical melodramas with a touch of the gothic; Tokuda Shūsei, a naturalist whose fiction evocatively captured the lives of the urban lower-middle class; Murō Saisei, the influential naturalist poet; and Nakano Shigeharu, the celebrated poet of the proletarian literary movement.³¹

Though these artists became identified (by themselves and by others) as belonging to Tokyo, their provincial origins left conspicuous traces in their literary production. Thus it is possible to track a shift in subjectivity—their embrace of a metropolitan identity—through their writings. In a literature that was often autobiographical or loosely based on life experience, the Tokyo literati located themselves as men of the metropolis, but also in relation to an earlier, provincial identity. This came through with particular clarity in the way the bundan wrote about their old hometowns. As a focal point of their literary production, the “hometown” (kokyō) became the lens through which the bundan and their readers visualized the local city. Viewing it from the perspective of Tokyo and situating it in a particular relationship with the capital, they provided in fictional and poetic space a powerful symbolic rendering of places like Kanazawa that became integral to the ideology of the metropolis.

One example of this was the frequent emplotment of Kanazawa within the “ascension to Tokyo” (jōkyō) narrative. Izumi Kyōka set much of his fiction in Kanazawa, where he grew up the son of an engraver in the 1870s and 1880s, before moving to Tokyo at the age of seventeen to make his fortune as a writer. Kyōka’s writings drew extensively on his experiential knowledge of plebian Kanazawa, the realm of the artisan, the merchant, and the geisha that, in his youth, was still heavily flavored with the old-world traditions of the castle town.³² Like those of many writers, his plots reproduced his own migration to Tokyo and mapped Kanazawa onto a hierarchical cultural geography that situated the metropolis at the center. His first critical success, Noble Blood, Heroic Blood, portrayed a doomed love between a Kanazawa geisha and a student, who “ascends to Tokyo” to study law. This journey was made possible by the sacrifice of the geisha, trapped back in Kanazawa, who sends money to support his studies in Tokyo. Sustaining the flow of money proves an almost impossible task, and the geisha is finally driven to theft and murder in order to help the student realize his ambition. Fatefully, she is caught and tried, as it turns out, by her law student, now a distinguished prosecutor. Hewing to the principles of law he learned at the university, the prosecutor feels he must sentence her to death. But to acknowledge her sacrifice and the bond they shared, he commits suicide after her sentence is carried out.

Both the student and the geisha were stock characters in the fiction of late Meiji and Taishō Japan and were used, as in Kyōka’s story, to symbolize Japan’s future and its past. The student looked forward to his future and to Japan’s future; he had access to modern knowledge and was destined for wealth, status, and power. The geisha was shut out of this new world, trapped in a system of entertainment and sex work that harkened back to an earlier era. As in this story, the social encounter between the geisha and the student narrativized the clash between the old and new worlds, a clash that proved fateful for the geisha who was invariably left desolate or dying.³³ The association of the geisha with Kanazawa and the student with Tokyo linked topos to temporality, turning province and metropolis into chronotopes and leaving Kanazawa behind the juggernaut of progress and out of a modernity concentrated in Tokyo.³⁴ Moreover, just as the student needs the geisha’s support, at any cost, to succeed in his studies, the story implies that Kanazawa must be sacrificed to sustain knowledge production in Tokyo. In painting Kanazawa as provender for Tokyo, a way station to the metropolis, a place that existed only to function within the logic of jōkyō, such fictional spaces emplotted provincial cities as part of a cultural system trained toward the capital. They shored up the ideology of the metropolis.

Nakano Shigeharu, too, staged his writing in Kanazawa and deployed the jōkyō narrative. In one of his forays into fiction, Nakano structured the plot of Changing Song (Uta no wakare) around his own biography. At least in terms of geo-social mobility, this conformed to type: born to a landholding family in Fukui prefecture, Nakano attended a village elementary school, continued on to middle school in a nearby town, went to Kanazawa to attend Fourth High, and from there moved to Tokyo University. The first two parts of Changing Song were set in Kanazawa during his higher-school years. They depict student life in a provincial town as a rite of passage on the path to literary renown in the capital: early romantic attachments, the rivalries and comradeship of classmates—a story of youthful dreams and character formation.³⁵

As such stories make vividly clear, an integral part of the memory of youth in a provincial town was the sense of proximity to nature. The force of nature that infused Kanazawa mesmerized Nakano’s protagonist in Changing Song, Kataguchi Yasukichi. “The town of Kanazawa was for Kataguchi Yasukichi a place of mystery. It had two rivers, the Saigawa and Asanokawa, which ran almost parallel. There were hills beyond the outer banks of the rivers and between the two rivers rose another hill. To Yasukichi it seemed as if the entire city was languidly dozing, draped across these two rivers and these three hills.”³⁶ Nakano was not alone in his penchant for lyrical natural description; the Tokyo literati laced their works set in Kanazawa with sketches of its hilly surrounds and its rivers, as well as with evocations of the snowbound winter landscape, as in Tokuda Shūsei’s fictionalized autobiography, The Snow in My Old Hometown (Furusato no yuki).³⁷ By minimizing the built environment of the city and focusing on natural landscape, such scenic descriptions framed the provincial town as an extension of the countryside. While the big city never slept, Tokyo writers portrayed the localities held frozen in place by the overwhelming force of nature; Nakano stressed the somnambulant effect this imparted to a provincial city like Kanazawa.

Likewise Murō Saisei (1889–1962) infused his work with natural imagery and scenic descriptions of the country town. Though Saisei is better known for his poetry, he also produced a good selection of fiction, largely set in Kanazawa. His novel Sexual Awakening (Sei ni mezameru koro) based on the loves of a boyhood friend, offers one example. Against the backdrop of higher-school life, this was a coming-of-age story that recounted the youthful moment when the protagonist discovered both sexual love and his desire for literature. Much as he did in his poetry, Saisei used natural imagery to convey the protagonist’s state of mind, here to capture the pure, fresh quality of youth and the physicality of a boy on the cusp of manhood.³⁸ In the following passage, Saisei relays the thoughts of the protagonist as he sets out from his lodging house to walk around the town with no particular object in mind.

I set out aimlessly.

The border of mountains glittered intensely in the sun, reflecting on the deep drifts of icy snow that piled up like heaps of shavings after hail had fallen two or three times. The ripe heads of grass on the riverbank now trembled against the bleak landscape, unable to stand against the harsh wind of late fall that scoured them to sharp points. Anyone who grew up in the North Country knows the feeling of being suffocated by the stifling monotony of the landscape just before winter comes, when it seems to creep into your very soul and makes you dull and numb with cold.³⁹

The striking predilection for landscape rather than cityscape in Saisei’s descriptions of Kanazawa conveyed the impression that life in this countrified city was lived closer to nature. Denuded of its built environment, Kanazawa became a place where the moods, the passions, the sensations of the seasons could be felt in all their intensity; its people, defined by the force of nature, were not truly urban. The effect of such literary devices was to subsume cities such as Kanazawa into a vast rural countryside that constituted Tokyo’s Other, dissolving the differences between urban and rural into a monolithic chihō of the metropolitan imagination.

Moreover, scenic descriptions such as this invariably depicted a Kanazawa of an earlier moment, a time when the writer, now established in Tokyo, was a youth. In the literary spaces of the Tokyo literati, the provincial city became a memoryscape—the mountains Tokuda Shūsei used to climb, the cafes Nakano Shigeharu used to visit, the riverbanks along which Murō Saisei used to tramp. These descriptions provided a snapshot of youth that cast the hometown in the warm afterglow of nostalgia.⁴⁰ Critics of Saisei often note the elegiac quality of his writing, the sense of longing for a lost childhood. Certainly this was the effect of his first novel, the autobiographical Childhood (Yōnen jidai) published in 1919.⁴¹ Melancholy longing for a childhood far away in space and time also suffused his poetry, as in The Time of Cicadas.

Somewhere or other

Sheee—the cicadas are singing.

Is it already the season for cicadas?

A boy runs over the hot summer sand

Hoping to catch some cicadas—

Where has he gone today?

In the sadness of summer

How short its life is!

Far beyond the streets of the capital

Beyond the sky and the roofs

Sheee—the cicadas are singing.⁴²

The poem captures the sentiments of a man, now living in the metropolis, as he recalls a childhood moment in a country town. Hearing the sound of the cicada he is brought back to his boyhood, when the summer saw him running across the sand.

This kind of literature-as-recollection represented the provincial city through the ideologically saturated metaphor of “hometown.” As such, it offers a classic example of the way the hometown metaphor operated to produce the center-periphery effect. From their perches in Tokyo, the bundan situated the provincial town at a physical and temporal remove from the metropolis. Paired as Tokyo’s Other, the provincial city was lodged within a nest of binaries: the adult contrasted with the boy, the present with the past, civilization with nature. In this way “the literature of a lost home,” as critic Kobayashi Hideo characterized it in his 1933 essay, stereotyped the provincial city as childish and unsophisticated, a world of an earlier age and a simpler time. Indeed, such literature narrated the transformation of a Murō Saisei or Nakano Shigeharu from provincial intellectuals to Tokyo literati, tracing this shift in subjectivity. Their embrace of Tokyo required the distancing and marginalizing of the local city. As they assumed their new identity, they minimized the power and vitality of provincial culture and what it had meant to their own intellectual formation.

If they were complicit in its production, the Tokyo literati were also powerfully affected by the ideology of the metropolis, which acted to reproduce the conditions of its own production as a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy. At an institutional level, it aggravated the concentration of resources in the capital; on a personal level it shaped career and life decisions. Sometimes Tokyo-centrism could exercise a fateful and tragic power, as in the case of Shimada Seijirō. Another famous literary figure from Kanazawa and the author of the best-selling novel The Earth (Chijō, 1919), Shimada was arguably Japan’s first literary celebrity. He emerged at a critical moment in the publishing industry, on the eve of the conversion to mass production. A printing of ten thousand copies of the second installment of Shimada’s four-volume book sold out in two days, an unprecedented feat in publishing history that opened the doors to the mass marketing of high literature.⁴³ This triumph owed its success to clever manipulation of the ideologically charged symbols of “the hometown” and “the capital.” Shimada’s success was wrapped up in a compelling personal narrative—heavily promoted by his literary backers—about a literary novice, plucked from the obscurity of a country town, who become an overnight publishing phenomenon.

The publishing giant Satō Giryū (1878–1951) engineered Shimada’s extraordinary burst onto the literary stage. Founder of the influential magazines Shinchō and Bunshō kurabu, and president of the publishing house Shinchōsha, Satō played the role of kingmaker in the world of pure literature and wielded enormous power in directing literary fashion in Tokyo. In the teens Satō pioneered the library format in Japanese publishing, inaugurating a string of special series on foreign literature, philosophy in translation, and modern Japanese literature. With this hugely successful initiative, he made the publishing firm of Shinchōsha synonymous with highbrow literary production and the gold standard of western translations. Moreover, by making the works of the bundan widely available to a national audience, Shinchōsha presaged the era of the zenshū (collected works), the enbon (one-yen book), and other strategies to market high culture to the masses in the 1920s. In 1917 Satō established a series called “New Writers” that quickly became a passport to bundan status.⁴⁴ As he began to exhaust the ranks of young Tokyo writers in his search for fresh talent, Satō hit upon the scheme of publishing a complete unknown. To fulfill this role, Satō plucked promising young writers out of nowhere—or at least a place that could stand in for nowhere in the eyes of the Tokyo literati. He enlisted the help of friends to scour the pages of provincial magazines and newspapers for likely candidates. In the pages of a Kyoto newspaper, one of them “discovered” Shimada.

The publication of the first installment of The Earth in the prestigious Shinchōsha series transported Shimada into the spotlight of the literary world in the capital. The book was a fictionalized account of Shimada’s life, depicting the story of a young man from an impoverished background who emerged from adversity to embrace the mission of social justice and the ambition of becoming a political leader. The book was animated by humanist sympathies for the poor and their suffering and utopian visions of a new, just society. In 1919, this message resonated with the surging optimism of the Taishō democracy movement and the spirit of reform that galvanized the universities and the higher schools, accounting, in part, for its astonishing critical success. At the same time. Satō had been working assiduously to guarantee a positive response to his literary discovery. Shinchōsha promoted the book heavily in the company’s magazine advertisements and through Satō’s network of contacts in Tokyo. These efforts bore fruit when The Earth met with universal acclaim among the bundan. Critic Ikuta Chōkō wrote a glowing review in the Yomiuri; socialist Sakai Toshihiko commended it with equal force in the Jiji shinpō; writers Hasegawa Nyozekan and Tokutomi Sōhō showered it with praise. Rave reviews continued as subsequent installments of The Earth were published. A flood of solicitations poured in and Shimada embarked on a frenzy of literary productivity. He was deluged with fan mail. All doors were suddenly opened to him within the hallowed, exclusive world of the Tokyo bundan. Not only was he anointed to this privileged fraternity; he became a literary star.⁴⁵

But for Shimada, this was a poisoned chalice. At the vulnerable age of twenty-one, he was suddenly elevated to fame and the full glare of public attention. A young man of reportedly fragile ego, he felt shamed by his family background and his reliance on an uncle’s charity for secondary-school fees. His father died young, leaving his mother to fend for herself by working in Kanazawa’s red light district. Shimada had difficulty socializing with fellow students of more secure social status and developed an arrogant manner as a defense against his sense of inadequacy. When thrust into the metropolitan spotlight, he began to entertain delusions of grandeur. One day he walked into Satō’s office and announced to the flabbergasted president of Shinchōsha that the reason The Earth was selling so well was because of a plot by the Seiyūkai political party. As Shimada explained it, he and the party leader, Hara Takashi, were the two best-known people in Japan at the time, and the Seiyūkai feared that Shimada’s fame would eclipse Hara. To forestall this they were buying up all the copies of The Earth themselves.⁴⁶ Shimada published an essay in a Kanazawa literary magazine titled “To the Young Men in My Old Hometown,” announcing that he had become a literary messiah.

To the young men born in the snow and storms of the North Country

I grant my blessing to the future that opens up before you.

My courage, struggle, and accomplishment

Opens a path for all the young men that come after me.

Like Moses I stand at the head of all the masses.⁴⁷

Though his stardom had opened up romantic possibilities, even bringing fan letters inviting marriage, Shimada’s strange behavior began to drive women away and led to a succession of broken engagements.

Repelled by rumors of Shimada’s increasingly bizarre behavior, the bundan closed ranks against him. Solicitations for his work dried up; his money ran out; he began to spiral downward. After an incident at a lodging house, he was arrested for disturbing the peace. The police gave Shimada a psychological evaluation and diagnosed him with schizophrenia. He was locked up in a mental institution where he remained for ten years, until his death in 1930. During this decade of incarceration, his condition reportedly improved enough that he began to write again, but none of his erstwhile friends from the bundan tried to help free him. At one point a Kanazawa newspaper, the Hokkoku shinbun, ran a campaign to push for Shimada’s release, but nothing came of it. Even as he languished in the mental ward, episodes from his final days of liberty found their way into print in a story of his broken engagement and emotional deterioration written by Tokuda Shūsei, fellow writer from Kanazawa and sometime friend.⁴⁸ Shimada the man might be dead to the world, but Tokyo literati continued to pick over the remains of his literary legend.

Who killed Shimada Seijirō? Is his merely the story of an unsophisticated country boy blinded by the glare of the big city? Certainly the stresses of literary stardom did not create Shimada’s insecurities; his mental breakdown was brought on in part by his own psychological frailty. But Shimada also fell victim to the cruelty and capriciousness of the metropolitan cultural marketplace. The competitive pressures of the publishing industry left little room to consider the effects of instant stardom on his emotional stability. Once he had lost his cache as a literary commodity, the Tokyo bundan simply disposed of Shimada and moved on. Satō Giryū exploited the vulnerable Shimada in a publishing stunt to enact a mythic tale of the Tokyo literati’s “discovery” of a rustic genius and his “rescue” from provincial obscurity. As this story played out, The Earth became elevated from an unknown work of fiction to great literature and Shimada from a provincial writer to a literary star through the mediation and largess of the Tokyo bundan. Shimada’s (or rather Satō’s) spectacular success was due in no small measure to the intoxicating appeal of this jōkyō fantasy. Reaffirming the basic tenets of Tokyo-centrism—the idea that Tokyo could fashion literary greatness from the rough clay of Shimada’s rusticity, that only a metropolitan mind was capable of judging value in a provincial writer—the Shimada story offered comforting validation of the cultural privileges accruing to the Tokyo literati. At a time when so-called pure literature was expanding into a mass market, and when Tokyo’s dominance of that market concentrated enormous power in the hands of a few men in the capital, the Shimada story also vindicated Tokyo’s dominance of the cultural marketplace. Whatever this meant for the real Shimada was irrelevant to the success of the myth that was widely embraced by Japanese intellectuals, whether they enjoyed the privileges of Tokyo-centrism or simply lusted after them.

THE REGIONAL PRESS AND LOCAL DIFFERENCE

In provincial cities the formation of intellectual communities, the pursuit of scientific and historical research, the growth of new musical traditions and literary movements, and other forms of knowledge production all took place within a cultural geography that privileged the center in both material and ideological terms. The local literati were acutely conscious that they were positioned in a cultural hinterland; they willingly deferred to the presumed superiority of ideas brought in from the capital. Yet while they acknowledged secondary status through their eager absorption of the latest fashion from Tokyo, they also poured energy into a rich variety of local cultural movements. These aimed not simply to ape metropolitan culture but also to build on local traditions to create distinct and original modernist forms.

As in Tokyo, the print media and institutions of higher education were key agents of modernist cultural movements in the provinces. While the schools and the publishing industry served as instruments of Tokyo-centrism—promoting the power and centrality of the metropolis—they also helped to generate dynamic regional cultures, local innovation, and local autonomy. In this sense, the material and ideological impact of the movements channeled through their networks was felt differently in the localities than in the capital. Although cities such as Kanazawa were subject to the self-marginalizing impulses of the ideology of the metropolis, cultural geography and spatial separation also opened up the possibility for a critical perspective on Tokyo-centrism.

The regional press stood at the heart of this process, providing a central exchange for the networks of local literati and their cultural movements. Like higher schools, newspapers served as a conduit for the import of new ideas and practices from abroad and occupied a central place in the processes of cultural transformation in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.⁴⁹ From its foundation as a political press in the 1860s and 1870s, the newspaper was an instrument of national integration and centralization. But also like the school system, it became an anchor of local culture and an institutional meeting ground for the provincial literati. In this sense the press effected cultural change at two levels, both local and national.

Although the early twentieth century saw standardization of cultural forms like the newspaper through the integration of local into global and national markets, this did not spell the end of cultural diversity. Nor did it produce a simple bifurcation of metropolitan and second-city variants on the newspaper form. Rather, local conditions in Japan’s cities, large and small, led to different configurations of the local news market and generated a variety of newspapers with distinctive local flavors. It is important to keep this heterogeneity in mind when exploring the nature of regional cultures. Since the newspaper, together with schools, libraries, and museums, provided the main institutional base for regional cultural movements in this period, local difference determined the particular characters of the provincial bundan as social and cultural formations.

For good reasons, most accounts of the newspaper in Japan focus on the two major markets of Tokyo and Osaka. With the model of the English-language press in Yokohama and a long history as a center of book publishing in the Tokugawa period, Tokyo quickly emerged as the center of the modern newspaper industry in the 1870s. Blessed with the same advantages—proximity to Kobe’s treaty port press and the Tokugawa legacy as a book market—Osaka became a competing center in the 1880s. Discussing a measure of metropolitan dominance of the newspaper trade, Eleanor Westney notes that, in 1884, 54.5 percent of Japan’s daily newspapers were published in Tokyo, while Osaka accounted for 21 percent of newspaper production the same year. The lion’s share of this production was locally consumed. Together, the two cities represented 6 percent of the national population.⁵⁰

Less well known is the story of the regional press. Even though they lacked the overwhelming advantages of the two metropolitan news markets, provincial cities provided the base for an energetic local press, which emerged virtually simultaneously with that of the center. Like Tokyo and Osaka newspapers, the provincial press in its early years was enormously diverse, borrowing from western press models as well as indigenous sources of publishing culture such as the kawaraban, or woodblock broadsheet. Not until the pressures of competition intensified in the 1890s with a major expansion drive by the metropolitan papers did the rich varieties of newspaper form begin to converge toward a national standard.⁵¹ The history of the newspaper in Kanazawa Exemplified both the influence of metropolitan publishers on the Kanazawa news market and the power of local conditions to generate the singular features of the provincial press. One newspaper history lists at least thirteen different local papers established during the Meiji period. Many of these were short lived; even papers with a longer shelf life went through multiple reorganizations, often reinventing themselves four or five times over the course of a few years. The crooked path taken by Ishikawa prefecture’s first newspaper, the Kaika shinbun (Enlightenment News), was typical of the shifts and starts of the early Meiji press.⁵²

The Enlightenment News was established in 1871, one year before Tokyo’s first three dailies entered circulation. Founded by a Tokugawa book publisher, Kaika shinbun embraced the mission of the new government’s Charter Oath, engaging to “enrich our grasp of new knowledge and leave behind the taint of the past . . . to strengthen our capacity to use new information and expunge persisting resistance” to change.⁵³ From its first incarnation as a champion of cultural reform, Kaika shinbun went through a series of transformations over the 1870s and 80s. When its editors became too partisan in the government debate over the invasion of Korea in 1873, the paper was forced to close. It quickly reemerged as the Ishikawa shinbun, transmogrified into a kind of official gazette that devoted itself to publicizing prefectural government policy and directives. Later the paper was bought up by a local politician who turned it into an organ of the Ishikawa Kaishintō, the local wing of the Progressive Party. In his hands the Ishikawa shinbun became a highly effective political tool, facilitating his ascent to leadership of the prefectural assembly. Though it maintained its party affiliation, the paper subsequently passed through the hands of a series of owners and editors, was acquired by another prefectural assembly leader, and changed its name twice before it was reorganized in 1893 as the Hokkoku shinbun—which it remained through the end of World War Two.⁵⁴

The mercurial shifts in the early life course of the newspaper company that finally settled down as the Hokkoku shinbun were typical of the instability, diversity, and flexibility of the early newspaper form in Japan. As was the case for this Kanazawa paper, innovation and experimentation sought a formula for institutional longevity within a particular setting. Certainly, Tokyo represented an important resource in these early years of the provincial press. As company histories recount, early founders of local newspapers drew inspiration from reading copies of Tokyo papers such as the Yomiuri shinbun while on trips to the capital; they recruited staff from Tokyo to help set up the machinery of publication.⁵⁵ By the early twentieth century, most provincial papers were allied with one of the two leading Meiji period news services, Teitsū (Teikoku Tsūshinsha) or Dentsū (Nihon Denpō Tsūshinsha), which provided access to metropolitan news and a network of connections to the press world in the capital.⁵⁶ Nevertheless, in this critical early phase, local newspapers reinvented themselves to address the vicissitudes of their immediate environment and not simply to replicate metropolitan models of cultural modernization. As in the case of Hokkoku shinbun’s affiliation with the Progressive Party and the emergence of a different paper to espouse the cause of the rival Liberal Party, much of this was driven by local politics.⁵⁷ Indeed, a large fraction of the early provincial newspapers rose from the froth of political activism that attended the establishment of prefectural assemblies in 1878 and the national assembly in 1890.

Thus the early history of the provincial press was very much a local story intimately connected with the dynamics of local politics. The point when the encounter with metropolitan models became decisive was around the turn of the century, with the first big push by Osaka and Tokyo papers to expand into provincial markets. Driven by the saturation of the metropolitan markets and the increasingly fierce competition among big city newspapers, and made technologically possible by the extension of communications infrastructure like the railroad and postal system, the metropolitan press moved aggressively to promote their news products across the country. The war fevers touched off by the Sino-Japanese and Russo-Japanese wars of 1894–95 and 1904–5 provided a fortuitous opening for their marketing campaigns. In the wake of the Sino-Japanese War, the results of these efforts were still quite modest. In 1899, for example, the largest circulation of the Ōsaka mainichi shinbun outside its home base was 330 in the city of Ōgaki, Gifu Prefecture, and elsewhere much less. After the Russo-Japanese War, however, the provincial press felt the impact of this expansion more keenly. As the metropolitan dailies intensified their competition and brought out regional editions, local papers began to fail in Saitama, Ibaragi, Chiba, and Kanagawa, the prefectures that surrounded Tokyo. By 1907, only 31.5 percent of the circulation of the Osaka asahi shinbun fell within city limits. Another 36.3 percent went to nearby prefectures, and the remainder to more distant locales.⁵⁸

Provincial newspapers mounted a vigorous response to what they called “papers from the center” (chūōshi) and, except in the immediate environs of Osaka and Tokyo, were generally able to survive the test. In Kanazawa, for example, the local press sought to match the technological advantages of the metropolitan dailies by upgrading their own production. The Hokkoku introduced its first high-speed Marinoni rotary printing press in 1912 and bought a second in 1916. In 1915, when the metropolitan press began to publish morning and evening versions of their regional editions, possession of a high-speed press allowed the Hokkoku to quickly follow suit, adopting this hallmark feature of the big city press. In 1921, the Hokkoku established new departments and expanded its staff, hiring an editor away from the Osaka mainichi. Competition with the metropolitan dailies spurred the consolidation of the provincial newspapers, which put their own rivalries to bed in order to fend off the more serious threat from the center. By the 1920s, the field had shaken down to two main regional papers, the Hokkoku shinbun and the Hokuriku mainichi. Like the Hokkoku, the Hokuriku brought in famous figures such as Nagai Ryutarō, a local son who had made a name in national politics, to enhance its public profile. It also raided the metropolitan papers for talented staff and added new features and divisions to match the formats of the big dailies.⁵⁹

This process encouraged the standardization of the newspaper form, which stabilized around certain technologies, format, and marketing strategies. At the same time, the ability of the provincial press to withstand the challenge of the big dailies from Osaka and Tokyo spoke to the strength of local connections to newspaper readers. In the early decades of the Meiji the provincial press had laid strong, deep roots in the community, becoming a fixture in the local cultural matrix and social system. Residents responded to the availability of papers from the center by continuing to support their local press. Those who did buy the metropolitan news tended to do so as a supplement rather than a replacement for their local paper, as we can see from circulation figures for provincial cities in the Japan Newspaper Yearbook.⁶⁰

As papers adopted the most effective marketing and technological features of their rivals in order to survive, competition with the center meant that a certain amount of the heterogeneity characteristic of the early newspaper industry was eliminated. Yet this did not lead to a uniform provincial market, by any means. Indeed, a brief overview of the local newspaper market in the prefectures of Niigata, Hokkaido (Sapporo), Ishikawa (Kanazawa), and Okayama conveys the variety of reactions to the challenges imposed by successive waves of metropolitan expansion.

Niigata managed to emerge from the fracas with a large number of vibrant local papers supported by different local communities. As an observer noted in 1911, after the first wave of metropolitan expansion, “Things that Echigo [a premodern designation for the region] possesses in abundance include rice, oil, schools, unfinished railroads, snow, and newspapers.”⁶¹ Though Niigata prefecture experienced the same shakedown of the newspaper industry that affected other regions, more than two decades later the Japan Newspaper Yearbook still noted the unusually high number of regional papers. Partly this rested on a relatively large prefectural population (almost 2 million), but it also related to strong press traditions in the prefecture’s three leading cities, Niigata (population 139,000), Nagaoka (population 63,000), and Takada (population 31,000). The dispersed nature and large number of papers meant that even the prefecture’s largest presses, the Niigata shinbun and the Niigata mainichi, did not circulate much beyond the prefectural capital in which they were based. Comparative circulation figures for the more remote Sado Island, positioned just off the coast from Niigata city, illustrated the limited reach of the provincial press. In addition to supporting a Sado paper, residents subscribed to six outside papers, the Tokyo asahi (Sado circulation 2,200), the Tokyo nichi nichi (2,000), the Yomiuri (1,300), the Hōchi shinbun (700), the Niigata mainichi (500), and the Niigata shinbun (circulation 300). Thus the four Tokyo papers overwhelmed the nearby Niigata press.⁶²

In Ishikawa, a much less populous prefecture (768,416 residents), cultural institutions, including the press, were concentrated in a single center, in the city of Kanazawa (population 190,000). This strong base meant that the two main local papers, the Hokkoku shinbun and the Hokuriku mainichi maintained a healthy circulation outside Kanazawa itself, even though their rivals from Osaka and Nagoya held the advantage in the region.⁶³

The situation was different again in the northern region of Hokkaido. With more than 3 million in population spread across a broad territorial expanse, Hokkaido supported thirty-eight daily papers. Their ability to survive was enhanced by limitations in the transportation network, which forced the metropolitan press to rely on local papers for distribution. Because of such obstacles, not until 1936 did the region’s leading paper, the Sapporo-based Hokkai taimusu, begin to feel competitive pressure from Tokyo papers such as the Asahi, the Nichi nichi, or the Yomiuri. Size and poor transportation meant that newspaper production was dispersed across seven cities, including Sapporo (population 205,900), Otaru (155,400), Hakodate (211,700), Asahikawa (92,600), and Muroran (68,900). Two papers occupied the dominant position, however, the Hokkai taimusu and Otaru shinbun. Both stood out among the provincial press for their ability to command markets beyond their respective urban bases, boasting high circulations not only throughout Hokkaido, but also to the south, on the main island of Honshū, and to the north, in the colony of Karafuto. The Hokkai taimusu achieved this position by employing the same “regional edition” strategy used to great effect by the Tokyo papers: the press operated eleven local editions and managed sister papers in Hakodate and Asahikawa. Statistics for the port town of Hakodate illustrate the success of this strategy in competing both with other local papers and with Tokyo rivals. The principal local paper, the Hakodate shinbun, with a circulation of 18,000, dominated the market, but the Hakodate taimusu (owned by Hokkai taimusu) came in a close second with 10,000. Next came another Hakodate paper, the Hakodate nichi nichi, with a circulation between eight and nine thousand, followed by four metropolitan papers, the Tokyo asahi (3,000), the Tokyo nichi nichi (2,500), the Yomiuri (2,000), and the Hōchi (1,000).⁶⁴

The newspaper market in Okayama offered yet another variation in the story of the local press. Proximity to Osaka insured a strong infiltration of Osaka newspapers, but the size of the prefecture (population 1,332,647) gave the provincial press some resources to fight back. Likewise the concentration of the news industry in the capital city of Okayama (population 170,000) facilitated an effective strategy of resistance. Competitive pressure from Osaka in the first decades of the twentieth century intensified local rivalries and forced a series of amalgamations. After the dust settled, the two papers left standing were the San’yō shinpō and the Chūgoku minpō, both political organs that expanded aggressively as a result of the Sino-Japanese and Russo-Japanese war fevers.⁶⁵

Initially, it was competition between the two local papers, rather than the threat from the center, that stimulated a wave of innovation and improvement. In the race for readership that heated up after the Russo-Japanese War, both papers upgraded production with the purchase of high-speed rotary presses and the introduction of advertising and promotional campaigns. In the teens the Chūgoku minpō appealed to readers by sponsoring a series of exhibitions, one on western art and another on education. The San’yō shinpō in turn funded a tennis competition and a sumo match, with the results prominently featured in the paper. The Chūgoku minpō answered this with a track and field competition. These efforts helped both papers to maintain healthy circulations of 15,000 in the late 1920s.⁶⁶

In expanding their operations into the field of public entertainment and in sponsoring various events, the Okayama papers joined with broader trends in the news industry that sought to enlarge readership through new marketing strategies. By the end of the Meiji period, newspaper readers throughout the country were accustomed to seeing newspapers sponsor fund-raising drives for victims of disaster or distress, contests and lotteries and concerts, exhibits, lectures, and sporting events.⁶⁷ The ingenuity of the Okayama press in inventing new forums for reader involvement captured the attention of the Osaka news media, where they became known as a source of new marketing ideas picked up by the big Osaka dailies. The Okayama story thus offers an example of provincial innovation and metropolitan imitation, showing how the process of cultural diffusion could move in both directions.

By the early 1930s, however, pressure from Osaka rivals had grown too great; the two local papers merged in 1936 under the new banner Gōdō shinbun. This left Okayama with one major regional newspaper, albeit of greatly strengthened capacity. The Gōdō shinbun overwhelmingly dominated the prefectural market and soon made inroads in surrounding regions as well, circulating in Hiroshima prefecture, the island of Shikoku, Hyōgo prefecture, and parts of the San’in region. In terms of circulation within the prefecture, in 1938 Gōdō held its own against the Osaka papers. Its circulation of 80,000 dwarfed the Osaka asahi at 35,000, the Osaka mainichi at 25,000, and a few odd sales by Tokyo papers.⁶⁸

Although histories of the newspaper industry have focused almost exclusively on the large metropolitan papers, the story of the provincial press offers insights that complicate the standard account of the relationship of the press to cultural change. The Tokyo and Osaka case studies have told the story of modernization in terms of centralization, standardization, and cultural diffusion of the metropolitan model; they have stressed the insuperable advantages of scale and capital investment. Yet the metropolitan press is only one piece of the story. As in the proverb of the blind men examining the elephant, there are hazards to making generalizations based on partial data. Even these four accounts reveal enormous variation in the development of a modern newspaper industry. Expanding connections between local, national, and international media markets over the course of the early twentieth century meant increasing competition for local papers, which led to standardization of the newspaper form through common innovations in technology, marketing, management, and organization. At the same time, local newspapers were embedded within distinctive political-economies and social-cultural contexts, which created their own particular set of constraints and possibilities.

The story of variations in the provincial press is important because the newspaper provided a critical institutional foundation for local cultural movements in the early twentieth century. Since Japanese newspapers published both news and literature, people bought papers to read the so-called hard coverage of political affairs as well as the “soft” columns of poetry and serialized novels. Although the intimate connection between the newspaper and the arts was deeply rooted in the broader history of Japanese publishing, the competitive challenges encountered by the local press fortified this connection. Economic self-interest and the quest for survival in the face of competition with metropolitan papers required local papers to carve out and protect a relatively autonomous sphere of local culture, for this was the one place where the papers from the center could not compete. Provincial newspapers provided access to an audience for locally produced knowledge and culture, a market for cultural production that sustained a large cadre of intellectual workers and artists in provincial cities. Thus the regional press became a critical space for the incubation of the local literati. Its organizational structures and social networks lent the provincial bundan social cohesion and provided a forum for the creation of a distinctive esprit de corps.

THE PROVINCIAL LITERATI

Newspapers occupied a central position in the culture-space of the provincial city. They brought writers together and offered a place to make connections and contacts. They encouraged the arts through literary pages, poetry columns, and various competitions and awards. They gave financial support, publication opportunities, and prestige to aspiring writers. In all these ways, newspaper companies were critical to the formation of intellectual community in provincial cities. Moreover, local newspapers were a focal point of cultural innovation in their communities. The press stimulated the transformation of literature and influenced modern literary form through the standards they set in poetry competitions, the privileging of certain literary schools, and the common feature of the serialized novel. And like institutions of higher education, newspapers served as conduits for the import of new ideas and practices from abroad: both occupied a central place in the processes of cultural transformation in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Through their literary pages, local newspapers and magazines served as forums to bring together local with metropolitan literary trends. As part of their marketing strategy, local newspapers published serial novels by writers with both local and national reputations. In the 1880s and 1890s the Kanazawa press commissioned Tokyo writers such as Ishibashi Ningetsu to publish in their papers and brought back Izumi Kyōka and other local heroes. A list of serial novels published between 1900 and 1923 in the Hokkai taimusu featured writers Izumi Kyōka, Tokuda Shūsei, Ōguri Fūyō, and others from the Tokyo-based Ken’yūsha clique, as well as works by staff writers and submissions by other local authors.⁶⁹ Though local residents invariably submitted the poetry published in the provincial press, Tokyo intellectuals were frequently employed to edit the poetry column, write critical reviews of the poems that were published, or act as judges for poetry competitions. The Sapporo poetry magazine Northern Star appointed Naitō Saiseki and three other establishment poets from Tokyo to judge their competitions. The main regional newspaper, the Hokkai taimusu, likewise brought judges from Tokyo to select poems.⁷⁰ In this way local papers actively promoted the circulation of ideas between Tokyo and the provinces. The literary networks they helped to forge transcended the parochialism of the Tokyo bundan.

The literary initiatives of local newspapers also fostered the dynamic fusion of old and new cultural forms. In Niigata, one of the prefecture’s earliest and most successful newspapers helped reinvent the social practice of poetry writing. Established in 1877, the Niigata shinbun achieved a certain national prominence as a forum for political opinion by publishing a string of articles by influential party leaders such as Ozaki Yukio, who was invited to visit and write a piece for the paper.⁷¹ The Niigata shinbun also introduced a column to feature local poetry with critical commentary, using the poetry column to draw readership from the wealthy rentier class in a region known as the Kingdom of the Landlord. Throughout the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth, a handful of wealthy landowning families dominated the local political economy. This group composed a highly literate and cultured elite, which provided the core membership for the amateur poetry circles that flourished in the late Tokugawa period as a form of male sociality and connoisseurship. Much like groups of wealthy merchants and samurai in the castle towns of Okayama and Kanazawa, Niigata poetry circles would meet to write together and judge each other’s work; for these men, poetry signified a mark of status and an expression of erudition. Such poetry circles brought out the first coterie magazines in the Niigata region. Through its poetry columns, Niigata shinbun mobilized this cultural practice to draw an important social constituency into newspaper reading.⁷² In the process, the social and performative mode of writing associated with the traditional poetry circle was grafted onto the individualized, text-based mode of writing for the modern print media, creating a hybrid form that incorporated elements of the old and the new.

Like the press, institutions of higher education provided a forum for the local arts, nurturing talent and encouraging the spread of different art forms. Here, too, poetry circles and other literati practices of the late Tokugawa migrated into the higher schools, where they were adapted to become an integral component of the ethos of the new student elite. New poetry movements offered particular appeal in provincial higher schools, where they became a center of student social life and an instrument of male bonding. Accounts of literary youth at places such as Fourth Higher in Kanazawa capture the intoxicating discovery of poetry that many young men experienced during their time at school. For Kubokawa Tsurujirō, one of the talented coterie of young men that included Nakano Shigeharu, Moriyama Kei, and others, the encounter with poetry altered the course of his life. His story was typical of the ways in which participation in local arts shaped a sense of self for a generation of student elite.

Kubokawa was born in 1903 in a small village in Shizuoka, the son of a country doctor. Raised in a strict, old-fashioned household, the young Kubokawa was schooled in the Confucian classics and kept away from what his family regarded as the corrupting influence of boy’s popular magazines and newspapers. When Kubokawa was in his teens, tragedy struck the household, leaving both parents and an aunt and uncle dead. He was sent off to study at Fourth Higher by his adoptive family, with the understanding he would train to become a doctor. But during his years in Kanazawa, he sought solace for his grief in poetry and fell under the spell of literature. He joined the school’s tanka association (tanka is a classical Japanese verse form of thirty-one syllables), became friends with other literary youth, and spent all his time talking, thinking, writing, reading, and performing poetry. Eventually he made his mind up to abandon a medical career. Apologizing to his adoptive family, he quit school and headed off to Tokyo to pursue a literary calling.⁷³ Like many students who became caught up in the literary movements at their schools, Kubokawa’s life was changed as a result of his encounter with the all-encompassing experience of poetry. Before it changed his future, poetry took over his life. Poetry engaged higher-school students so intensely because of the way it was practiced: it was not simply a text on paper but a rich and multifaceted cultural form and a lived experience. Through their introduction to new cultural forms such as this in higher school, elite youth like Kubokawa experienced a change in subjectivity: they now thought of themselves as part of that elite fraternity the bundan.

The poetry-writing practices fostered by higher schools found expression in an expansion of coterie magazines in provincial cities. Much as in the case of the metropolis, local magazines were striking both for their quantity and their ephemerality. And like dōjin zasshi in the capital, such journals were central to the coherence and identity of the local literati. They created a community of readers, writers, and critics and encouraged the self-referential character of the local bundan. The coterie magazines focused intellectual attention on the local literary scene and themselves defined local trends in high culture. Also like the coterie magazines in Tokyo, provincial literary journals fostered practices of mutual criticism that blurred the roles of writer and critic, an ambiguity characteristic of Japanese literary practice in this period. Because the higher-school experience and provincial magazines engaged literary youth at a critical juncture in their lives, it was here, in the local city, that these youth were groomed to think of their reading and writing as broadly integrated intellectual practices, and that they came to see literature as a way of life.

In contrast to the bundan in Tokyo, who formed a closed and exclusive society that reveled in its alienation from the broader urban social world, the local bundan were better integrated into their communities. In part this reflected their diminished status relative to Tokyo—local intellectuals lacked many of the cultural and social resources used by metropolitan intellectuals to place themselves in a world above the clouds. In the context of their own communities, however, they enjoyed great status, and here the smaller scale of the city gave them a certain advantage. As big fish in small ponds, local intellectuals found it easier to command the attention of their communities against the competing attractions of the modern cityscape, since provincial cities possessed a tiny fraction of Tokyo’s myriad department stores, restaurants, movie palaces, entertainment districts, newspapers, and publishing houses.

Intellectuals’ leadership in local cultural movements made a powerful impact on the cultural and social life in their communities. New poetry movements promoted through the elite schools and the local press offered one point of contact. Though the old-boy web of connections smoothed the way to publishing opportunities for cultural elites, the frequent poetry contests held by newspapers and magazines encouraged aspiring writers of all backgrounds to send their selections in. Young men such as Shimada Seijirō sent scores of their poems around to juried competitions published in their own local papers as well as other regional and national papers.⁷⁴ In Kanazawa, poetry banquets sponsored by student organizations were advertised on the street, and these organizations actively sought to involve poets from the broader community. Such activities identified the cultural production of the bundan with an intellectual community that transcended the exclusive world of the higher school. Unlike Tokyo—where isolation defined the bundan—Kanazawa literati were identified with their urban community.

Indeed, the event Kubokawa Tsurujirō remembers capturing his interest as a freshman at Fourth Higher was not even hosted by a student group. Shortly after he arrived in Kanazawa, he noticed an advertisement posted on a wall announcing a haiku party at the Kenrokuen Public Gardens. During this unforgettable event, participants wrote poem after poem, inspired by the convivial atmosphere of food, drink, and cherry blossoms. In a particularly elegant touch, the poets were requested to affix their favorite creation to the branch of a blooming tree, and the reveling crowds were invited to take away those they judged superior. In its focus on process rather than product, and in defining aesthetic value in terms of both creative writing and critical judgment, the practice of poetry writing as social event harked back to the poetry circles of the late Tokugawa. As in the previous era, the practice of writing served to create an intellectual community. Where the Taishō-era banquet departed from precedent was its expansion of the social range of participants; the exclusive social world of the literati poetry circle now embraced the Kanazawa public.⁷⁵ In the different forums it provided for poetry writing, the literary scene in Kanazawa offered the simultaneous experience of old and new cultural forms. Literary youth and other amateur poets could shift from the social and performative mode of the banquet to print culture, where publication monumentalized the literary product and where newspapers and magazines provided a medium of anonymous communication between a solitary writer and a solitary reader. The oversized importance of the higher school or the local newspaper in the provincial city magnified the importance of literati within the urban cultural scene. These new forms of cultural practice were at once more public and more part of “our city” in a place like Kanazawa.

The democratization of literary practices symbolized by the haiku banquet revealed one of the most dramatic shifts in the cultural landscape in the early twentieth century. Public schools and the press encouraged this social opening, as did institutions such as public libraries. Despite limited public support, a network of libraries sprang up in the teens and twenties in most areas of the country. In Niigata prefecture, for example, there were 199 libraries by 1924, 123 of which were privately funded. The three main cities, Takada, Nagaoka, and Niigata, all had public libraries; the largest of these was based in the capital city of Niigata. Established in 1915, by 1925 the Niigata Prefectural Library housed a collection of more than 50,000 volumes, 2,503 of which were in western languages. The library was open 326 days a year, and in 1924 the library recorded 370,153 visitors, an average of more than a thousand patrons a day.⁷⁶ People went to the library to read books and magazines they could not afford and especially to read newspapers. For literary youth of modest backgrounds, libraries offered crucial access to the world of literature and ideas. Shimaki Kensaku, a leading figure in the agrarian literature movement, who grew up in a poor Sapporo household, wrote that his love of literature and ambition to become a writer were acquired by visiting the local library.⁷⁷