The Japanese Journal of American Studies, No. 27 (2016)
Copyright © 2016 Keiko Nitta. All rights reserved. This work may be used, with this noticeincluded, for noncommercial purposes. No copies of this work may be distributed,
electronically or otherwise, in whole or in part, without permission from the author.

Black Bottom of Modernity:
The Racial Imagination of Japanese Modernism
in the 1930s

Keiko Nitta*

Appropriation of the Primitive
In 1930, the eminent Japanese literary critic of the day Soichi Oya
summarized “modernism” in terms of its fascination with the element of the“primitive”:
Modernism starts with abolishing the traditional norms of various
phases of life. Free and unrestricted from everything, and led by themost intense stimulus, it amplifies its own excitement; in this sense,
modernism has much in common with primitivism. . . . It is jazz thatflows with colorful artificial illumination to the pavements of themodern metropolis, bewitching pedestrians. Such bewitching
exemplifies the surrender of civilizations to barbarism.1
As Oya stated here, jazz was symbolized as something not merely primitive
but also something indicating a modern taste for “barbarism.” Similar to thecontemporaneous American author F. Scott Fitzgerald, who coined the term“the Jazz Age,”2 Japanese intellectuals attempted to establish their own“modernized” status as consumers of art and culture defined as primitive. It*Professor, Rikkyo University

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is to this paradoxical imagination of Japanese modernism that I turn myattention in this article. I will particularly look at creational tendencies of ashort-lived but once quite dominant literary circle in Japan in the early
1930s. The group known as Shinko geijyutsu-ha (the New Art school)
frequently dramatized new cultural phenomena, including American jazz
culture, and dealt with racial and ethnic themes to depict the quintessential
scenes of the modern age.3 Their new literary strategy was obviously
coincidental with the primitivist tendency of Western art, which was at once
based on a powerful attraction to African and Oceanian folk cultures and a
racial/geopolitical bias about its happily uncivilized and backward qualities.
The following argument by George Antheil (1900-1959) from the opening
section of his essay that was included in Nancy Cunard’s 1934 anthology,
Negro, perhaps well exemplifies the typical tone and logic of primitivism.
Antheil was an avant-garde trans-Atlantic American composer famous for
his Ballet Mécanique (1923-26), as well as A Jazz Symphony, which was
written in the year following the sensational premiere of George Gershwin’s
Rhapsody in Blue (1924). Art in post–World War I Europe, according tohim, was ending its autonomous life and being revivified by African vitality:
Europe began in the early twenties to assume the aesthetic of the desert
camp; subconsciously it came within the plan of things to live upon theveldt. The great war had come and gone, we had been robbed andransacked of everything: and we were on the march again. Therefore
we welcomed this sunburnt and primitive feeling, we laid our blankets
in the sun and it killed all of our civilised microbes. The Negro camenaturally into this blazing light, and has remained there. The black man(the exact opposite color of ourselves!) has appeared to us suddenly
like a true phenomenon. Like a photograph of ourselves he is the solenegative from which a positive may be drawn!4“The Negro” that Antheil imagines here is a fresh source of artistic creativity
providing the ruins of Europe with a brand-new sense of beginning. His useof a photographic metaphor, presumably inspired by his close connection
with the Stieglitz circle, demonstrates the mode of association between
Africa and the future, as well as the idea that a European self-portrait can be
developed solely from “the Negro” as its negative.5 Or rather, Africa is, inthis sense, a black box of appropriable signs for the future–if not an
unproblematic alter ego–for self-critically monotonized postwar artists suchas Antheil.

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Japanese literary culture of the 1930s was certainly situated in such an
economy of black figures. The literary motifs signifying Africanness, suchas jazz, supplied Japanese authors with a new aesthetic, even an ethicalinspiration in the sense that they began to represent social problems bysimulating a stranger’s subject position. The acquisition of such an
inspiration was quite urgent for them, as they attempted to express theircritical insights into modern civilization without being subsumed byproletarian propaganda, a dominant politico-artistic paradigm of the age.
Since the destruction caused by the Great Kantō Earthquake of 1923, Tokyo
had been rebuilt and transformed into a modern metropolis by way ofinternational financial assistance, including tremendous donations from theAmerican private sector.6 The restoration helped to introduce American
popular cultural infrastructures–including movie theaters, stadiums, dancehalls, and nightclubs. The New Art school gained timely resources fordescribing metropolitan lives and customs, which emerged as a result of theAmericanized urban renewal.
Members of this movement were loosely connected by their anxiety
about the artistic quality of the proletarian novel, which was then thriving in
the Japanese literary scene. Their critical stance vis-à-vis proletarian
literature was professed initially by the contributors to the little magazine
Kindai seikatsu (Modern life). Murao Nakamura, a powerful critic, popularnovelist, and editor of a mainstream cultural magazine, Shincho, supported
the inauguration of this monthly magazine in 1929 and, in so doing,
eventually encouraged the formation of the new circle. Nakamura and thecontributors to Kindai seikatsu organized something called Jyusan-nin
kurabu (the Club of Thirteen) as the body of their movement (fig. 1). Then,on April 13, 1930, the first conference of Shinko geijyutsu-ha kurabu (theNew Art Club), an extended circle based on Jyusan-nin kurabu, was held
after an appeal by a twenty-nine-year-old physician/novelist, Yu Ryutanji,
who subsequently became one of its core members) (fig. 2). It was
marvelously successful: most of the young prominent writers of the day,including thirty-one-year-old Yasunari Kawabata (who later became thefirst Japanese winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature), Tatsuo Hori (26),Masuji Ibuse (31), Tomoji Abe (27), Eisuke Yoshiyuki (24), Seiichi
Funabashi (26), and Hideo Kobayashi (28) (who eventually became a
representative critic after leading the national debates on literature andculture in the twentieth century) participated in the conference. The mostnotable characteristic of the group was the youth of the members. They
were at that point rising authors who started their careers in a variety of little

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magazines that had emerged as a trend in high schools and universities in
the late 1920s. They soon came to be acknowledged in the mainstream print
media. As these circumstances imply, the rise of the New Art school sharedessential elements determining literary modernism with similar movements
throughout the world in the same era. Because of their innovative motivations
and critical attitude toward the limits of creativity of the literary
establishment, such movements generally sprang up in small circles ofFig. 1. Jyusan-nin kurabu (The Club of Thirteen), the original contributors to the magazine
Kindai seikatsu (Modern life). Courtesy of the Museum of Modern Japanese Literature.
Kawabata is fourth from left; Yoshiyuki is sixth from left.

Fig. 2. Yu Ryutanji with his flapper wife Masa. Courtesy of ART-REBIRTH SOCIETY,
http://www7b.biglobe.ne.jp/~artreb/.

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people with the same intention. Numerous such circles throughout the world
were motivated to manifest new artistic directions in self-produced andnoncommercial periodicals with limited circulations.7
Despite such an eventful formation of the circle, however, the New Art
Club faded away after only three years, even before their second conference,
due to its slide into commercialism and members not sharing any specificvision regarding the development of “New Art.” Their avowed intention toseek alternative principles of expression to overcome proletarian politics
appeared to be concrete. The promotional copy attached to the twenty-fourvolume Shinko geijyutsu-ha bungaku-shu (New Art classics) published in1930 celebrates its “variety of artistic individuality” that “dogmatic Marxist
literature” never could produce. In addition, the supplements to the series
by Ryutanji carry this passage that implied why they needed to stay awayfrom proletarians:
Our New Art movement has completed almost all our planned tasks inthe first half of 1929. In those months we published as much as two
thousand pages of literary works and theories. Partly because of our
predominance and partly because of oppression by the authorities, theproletarian literary movement was forced to give up its initial enterpriseof completely reforming Japanese literary institutions and theestablishment of modern literature.8
Ryutanji in this comment implies that contemporary writers need to explore
original literary devices that are immune to authoritarian “oppression.”
Nevertheless, a motivation to avoid oppression is so weak as a literary
manifesto that this self-confident statement unavoidably signifies its faddish
nature.
The proletarian literary movement in Japan that had taken shape in the
1910s started to attract popular attention after the earthquake due to anincrease in the general awareness of the necessity of social reform after thedisaster. The iconic novel of this movement was Takiji Kobayashi’s The
Crab Cannery Ship (Kani kosen), which sensationally depicted the brutal
exploitation of laborers in the crab fishing, meat processing, and packing
industry.9 The work, which could be quite properly designated as a Japaneseversion of The Jungle (1906) by Upton Sinclair, was published in the same
year as Rytanji’s statement, that is, 1929, and the novel’s protest theme
unquestionably represented the other aspect of modernism: political
radicalism. However, the general proximity between the leftist literary front

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and the Communist Party caused its practitioners to be persecuted by thegovernment. As is widely known, Kobayashi was arrested and tortured todeath in 1933 by the Tokyo Metropolitan Police (fig. 3).
In contrast with such proletarian writers, modernists, as represented by
the New Art school, are often regarded as apolitical, decadent, or lessserious.10 However, from an Americanist/comparativist perspective,
modernists, designated as the New Art school, seem to have indirectly
articulated a political interest in a viable modern literature. They entrusted
their social criticism to the literary motifs inspired by Africa, the Negro, andjazz in a way that was less controversial and ideological than the Marxist
manner. The connotations of their motifs that were dependent on primitivism
were certainly controversial insofar as the primitivist perspective entails
caricature and misrepresentation. Yet, the problem was not a contestation
merely within the Japanese literary tradition. It was, rather, a local
manifestation of a transnational situation, as Malcolm Cowley, representativeof the Lost Generation, which is to say he was an early modernist in the
United States, self-critically argued in 1934:
Indeed, it was in New York and other large cities that this escape into
primitivism was carried farthest and assumed a dozen different forms.
It was expressed, for example, in the enthusiasm of tired intellectuals
for Negro dances and music, the spirituals, the blues, Black Bottom
and Emperor Jones; time and again one was told that the Negroes had
retained a direct virility that the whites had lost through being
overeducated.11
Situating the case in the broader structure of being merely an “escape”
enables an evaluation of the practice of the New Art school. The evaluation,in addition, has to include an examination of the particular backdrop of theirescape.

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Fig. 3. Takiji Kobayashi at twenty-nine was killed while in custody of the police. Courtesy of
the Museum of Modern Japanese Literature.

The Grotesque as an Imperfect Signifier
The New Art school has generally been defined in terms of its interest in
the exotic, the bizarre or grotesque, and the foreign. The essential characterof the movement is, however, more explicable by identifying race as its
primary analytical concept. Probably due to the problematic insensitivity to
racial prejudice in Japanese culture, race as a source of authorial inspiration
has been inattentively translated to the more emotional term “grotesque.”
The entry of the New Art school in an encyclopedia of modern Japanese
literature critically summarizes its characteristics in accordance with theindiscreet selection of its materials:
The rise of print culture led to writers misreading its creative potential
by going into a jazz frenzy and investing their interest in an ephemeral
aestheticist modernism. This group’s most powerful representative, the
New Art school, produced works that focused on modern urban lifethat were saturated with the erotic, the grotesque, and nonsense. Their
preoccupation with these subjects led to commodification of literary
quality.12

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The triad of erotic, grotesque, and nonsense, or “ero, guro, nansensu,” hasbecome a popular phrase to indicate what the general public excitedly
consumed in their publications. Yet, at the same time, this signature triad
enabled authors of this school to express both their pleasure and pain in
their own expanding society in an age of cultural and demographic mobility.
An illustrated almanac of the time (1931) Gendai ryoki sentan zukan(Contemporary guidebook to bizarreness and the avant garde) testifies thatthe category of “guro,” or the grotesque, particularly refers to blackness andAfricanness, as its advertisement portrays the black dancer Josephine Baker
in a stage costume (fig. 4).13 “Bizarreness” (ryoki) is a word that is frequently
applied to the representation of African and Polynesian cultures, which
attracted the Japanese reading public in the 1930s. In response to this newly
constituted mass taste, the low-end literary market of the period tried tosensationalize the “bizarreness” of indigenous customs as well as stereotyped
features of African and Pacific people. At the same time, the uncommon
accompaniment of “avant garde” with “bizarreness” in the book’s title–like
Baker’s fame in the Negro revue at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées in
Paris–implied that featuring unfamiliar foreign scenes equaled knowledge
and thus culture in its original sense. The book expressed a quasianthropological objective by foregrounding academic comments on thesubjects it illustrates. “Gurotesuku” or grotesque, a loan word introduced toJapanese print culture in 1928 and popularized in the 1930s, seems to havebeen an imperfect or overly entangled signifier. The racial representations
animated by the term have thus ambiguous layers of signification to be

Fig. 4. Josephine Baker in an advertisement for Gendai ryoki sentan zukan [Contemporary
guidebook to bizarreness and the avant garde]. Courtesy of Rikkyo University Library.

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unpacked. Investigation of the professional discourse on jazz music opens apromising way to do this.
Jazz was undeniably the primary cultural figure considered to penetrate
the melancholic inside of the people who were labeled as grotesque. We are
now familiar with the theory asserting that the Jazz Age of Fitzgerald’s
coinage had in fact little to do with African American cultural autonomy.14
Jazz in this context was a product of the Roaring Twenties, which was
intrinsically a white mainstream psychosocial event. Japanese popular
cultural criticism in the 1930s, however, suggests that Japanese listeners in
the period were trying to distinguish black jazz music from white big bandswing jazz. Western cultural connoisseur Suisei Matsui wrote at the time:
Jazz music certainly belongs to the Negro, though I have never blindly
follow the current argument that the sole originator of the genre is the
Negro. Still, I have never listened to jazz performed by others as
impressive as that of Negro bands. Even though Negro jazz does nothave the same splendor as the music of the Paul Whiteman Orchestra,
the “king of jazz,” it has something melancholic that incites our affectto world weariness. . . . Jazz music is a manifestation of the Negro’s
original creativity, to which contemporary American culture owes
much. Negro jazz is not a creation under white influence.15
According to Matsui, African American jazz wields an affective power thatawakens the audience’s insight into the melancholic substructure ofmodernity. For Matsui, this quality is the supreme criterion of Negro jazzthat its white counterpart can never equal.
Literary journalists of the period invented an unstable genre known as“jazz literature,” which included a series entitled Sekai daitokai sentan jazu
bungaku (The world metropolitan avant-garde jazz literature) (1930),16 as
well as Yasunari Kawabata’s, 1930, serialized The Scarlet Gang of Asakusa(Asakusa kurenai-dan).17 Most of the jazz literature series pieces had no
direct connection with jazz music, as the Jazz Age could refer to a wide
range of popular cultural phenomena in addition to music. In any case,
African American themes were the most controlling ones in Japanese
literary culture at the time. It was exactly when American novels by black
authors as well as those about African Americans were rapidly beingtranslated into Japanese. One of the major theorists of modernism, Itaru Nii,
contracted with the publisher Shun’yodo to translate Carl Van Vechten’s
Nigger Heaven.18 Another popular collection, Amerika sentan bungaku

106Keiko Nitta

sosho (American avant-garde literature series), included abridgedtranslations by the same translator of W. E. B. DuBois’s Dark Princess,Jean Toomer’s Cane, and Walter White’s The Fire in the Flint (fig. 5).19
These three were, needless to say, prominent Harlem Renaissance authors,
and the translations of their works were done only two years after theoriginal publications.
At the same time, Tsukiji sho-gekijyo (Tsukiji Small Theater), Japan’s
first permanent theater for modern dramas and the most influential avantgarde center, was established after the earthquake. In the late 1920s thegroup of playwrights who administered the theater produced onlyinternational works in translation as part of their revolt against the nation’s
literary establishment. In this context, both Eugene O’Neil’s Emperor Jonesand DuBose and Dorothy Heyward’s Porgy were staged before 1930.
Because of the theater’s international reputation for integrity in dealing withthe “Negro problem,” Harlem Renaissance poet Langston Hughes visited
there when he stopped by Tokyo in 1933 on his way back from a trip toSoviet Russia. His visit was a very significant one: it resulted in a symbolic
incident that highlighted the political connotations of the emergence of the
Negro theme in Japan. Owing to their radical production policy, Tsukiji

Fig. 5. Itaru Nii, the modernist philosopher and translator (second from left). Reproduced
from Wikimedia Commons on February 8, 2016.

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Small Theater was already a primary target of the Tokyo Metropolitan
Police, and Hughes was detained by officers and forced to come to Tsukiji
station to justify his reason for visiting Japan; this was the same station
where Takiji Kobayashi was murdered earlier in that same year.
Translated works on racial themes ironically expressed a significant
contradiction in Japanese modernists’ attitude toward politics and literature.
The modernist literary movement in Japan originally intended to avoid
explicit politics in literature, as represented by the proletarian propagandists.
They assumed, at least in the beginning, that they could deal with
contemporary subject matter in a way that was purely artistic without thecontamination of propagandistic politics. However, what they adopted as
their new theme, in accordance with their artistic convictions, was the
Negro. W. E. B. DuBois and Walter White, whom they translated, were civilrights activists. DuBois in his 1926 treatise “Criteria of Negro Art” literally
declared: “All Art is propaganda and ever must be.”20 At the same time,
Hughes, in his own record of his experience at the police headquarters in his
second autobiography/travelogue I Wonder as I Wander (1956), testified tothe strange political preoccupation of Japanese police officers with Negro
intellectuals as leftist activists:
The whole procedure [police interrogation] was most politely donewith no one raising his voice, and no show of anger or impatience
when my answers led nowhere. . . . [W]hy were the Japanese police
interested to find out what American writers I might know at home?
They even asked me about Floyd Dell. At that time I had not met anyof the really famous American leftist writers. Carl Van Vechten, Julia
Peterkin, James Weldon Johnson, Paul Green and Marc Connelly
hardly fell into that category. John Dos Passos was just a name to me.
“Why are you so interested in American writers?” I asked.
“We wish to know more about them,” said the bright young officer–
who probably had read more of their work than I had. Then, changing
the subject, he said, “Negroes in America must know that Japan is thestrongest of the nations in the East, do they not?”21
Japanese authorities considered that Hughes, a black writer who had goneon an official trip to Soviet Russia and extended his journey to China andTokyo, must be political. His itinerary made them suspect him of being a
Communist spy, while they displayed their expectation of the poet’s
inclination to validate the power of the non-Western empire. Either through108

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anxiety or hope, black figures were politicized.
Japanese modernists, too, presumably understood the Negro to be aliterary theme that had been politicized in the United States. In the preface
to Sentan tanpen-shu [Avant-garde collection of short stories], volume 14of the series Amerika sentan bungaku sosho (American avant-garde
literature series), the editor, Jiro Hayasaka, wrote:
In a survey of contemporary American literature, it would be absolutely
impermissible to neglect black American authors. The black population
has now reached twelve million, and they have completely been
Americanized. Nonetheless, they have been in the past exposed toincessant danger of lynching and social maltreatment, and in thepresent world dominated by capitalism, they still experience work
oppression as severe as under slavery. It is black American authors
who document their people’s long tear-provoking submission andresistance.22
Hayasaka in this passage analogized racial liberation from white oppression
with proletarian liberation from capital. This was actually quite a common
way of politicizing the racial issue.23 This is also why Hughes was arrested
in Japan. In addition, the African American texts that were translated into
Japanese were ones that were compiled in the Anthology of American Negro
Literature, which the American Marxist literary critic V. F. Calverton edited
in 1929.
It is impossible to determine if these Japanese literary figures intentionallyadopted the African American motif as a substitution for explicit leftist
politics. Insofar as their frustration with the proletarian literary formula wassincere, their racial interest was not something camouflaging a politicalleftist interest. Rather, what they were facing when they scrutinized themodern metropolis was an element of art not accidentally found in ongoing
human struggles for survival. It is no wonder that not a few Japanesemodernists were fascinated with African American writers. They must haveseemed to their Japanese counterparts to be much more articulate andskillful in expressing those struggles.
A cross-examination of American and Japanese sources contextualizing
racial subjects of authors connected with the New Art movement clarifies
the paradox of their aesthetics. What we can examine here is, so to speak,
the return of the political to their new literary enterprise. They might have
hoped that their urban subjectivity would allow them to proceed to a realmBlack Bottom of Modernity

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of expression free from the intervention of politics. This aspiration seems tohave stemmed specifically from the immaturity of their ideas about what itmeans for an artist to be political. Politics for literary authors and artists isdifferent from sheer ideological struggles. It is about how to grasp andexpress human conditions, or how to sustain one’s creative autonomy in thecourse of social participation by writing. Although the New Art schoolfound their original literary motif in the Negro, they were unable to fully
develop their ideas about what they were describing. They discovered race,
but their enterprise did not allow them to progress beyond an “escape into
primitivism”–the phrase that Cowley used when looking back at the problemof the Lost Generation. Many Japanese authors were similarly dazzled by
the novelty and eccentricity of their urban milieu. To exercise an urban
subjectivity is, however, to get involved with a promiscuous andindiscriminate flux of peoples and commodities. This certainly results insubversion of a familiar sense of the self. The return of the political in thissituation was simply unavoidable, and this gives us a clue to as to what
Japanese modernists desired and suppressed while they enjoyedunprecedented freedom of expression by using foreign literary motifs. To
exemplify a literary imagination that the black subject matter unleashed,
I will analyze Tomoji Abe’s short story “Shinema no kokujin” (A black man
in cinema) (1930).

Reflections on Black Subjectivity
Tomoji Abe (1903-73), novelist, poet, translator, and professor of English
literature, began to commit himself to the New Art school when he wastwenty-seven because of his sense of crisis about the future of Japanese
literature, not only because of the stagnated proletarian motifs but also
because of the poverty of the traditional novelistic convention thatconcentrated on the author’s private life (the I-novel) (fig. 6). His shortstories, successively published in 1930, represent distinctive features of his
early theme.24 In those stories, he repeatedly portrayed the consciousness ofminorities, not only of African Americans but also of Koreans in Japan andvarious racially hybrid subjects. For instance, “Omnibus” dramatizes a
Korean-Japanese bus driver who becomes conscious of his ethnicity when
he falls in love with a beautiful passenger; “Nihon no jipushii”(Japanesegypsy) describes the fears for and fascinations with those who are outsideof modern civilization; “Heren Numa” (Helen Numa) is a monologue of ayoung multiracial woman; and “Koi to afurika” (Love and Africa) deals

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with the imperialistic egoism of its male narrator.25
In “Shinema no kokujin,” published in 1930, Abe deals with the subjectof interracial marriage.26 The protagonist of the story, Stepin Fetchit, ismodeled on the actual Hollywood comedian Stepin Fetchit (real name:Lincoln Theodore Monroe Andrew Perry). The real Fetchit started his career
as a vaudevillian in Alabama. He is recognized as the first black actor toreceive a screen credit. Fetchit’s movies The Ghost Talks and Hearts inDixie, which Abe mentions in the story, were released in 1929 and distributedin Japan in the following year. No doubt Abe saw Fetchit on screen andattempted to dramatize the actor’s inner world through his modernist fiction.

Fig. 6. Tomoji Abe (left) with Soviet writer Ilya Ehrenburg and the delegation of Japanesewriters in Moscow in 1958. Courtesy of the Museum of Modern Japanese Literature.

The story opens with a young white poet, who is also an associate
professor at the University of Missouri, Henry Brook, making a trip toHollywood. Strolling along a boulevard, he coincidentally meets his formerclassmate John Barrington. Barrington, now a staff writer for a newspaper
in Los Angeles, tells Brook a nuanced story about the black man in astunning Cadillac who has just dashed up from behind and passed them as
they walk on the sidewalk. It is the movie star Stepin Fetchit. While relating
Fetchit’s success story, Barrington remarks mysteriously on a white woman
named Anne Crawford. He says that she may know Brook much better thanBarrington does. Later in the story, the narrator informs the reader that

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Crawford is the woman with whom Henry Brook has fallen in love. The
story concludes with a newspaper article reporting on Fetchit’s marriage toCrawford. Brook finds the article. When he finishes reading it, he has avision of the interracial couple in bridal costumes in the Cadillac he andBarrington saw receding into the distance.
This short story describes Fetchit’s consciousness about his stardom,
together with some background episodes seemingly influenced by racialstereotypes. Even though Fetchit is now a millionaire, he has a kleptomaniac
tendency and steals small change even from a poor extra. He fears andregrets his uncontrollable propensity because it may someday disclose his
sinful past and cause his downfall. (When he was still an obscurevaudevillian, he and his partner made a living by theft.) While worrying
about his illicit tendency, he feels the contemptuous gaze of his secretary,
who is a white woman:
Step is now aware of an insult from his employee. White and black: heremembers an event that made him perceive the difference for the firsttime. It happened in his hometown in Florida. He was three or four. As
he was hanging out with a white friend, he attempted to go into thefriend’s house. At that moment, however, his friend’s father came out
and suddenly kicked him. He has never forgotten his feeling then. It
was as if he had been doused head to foot with cold water on that hotsummer day in Florida.27
Fetchit in his childhood was already forced to suffer the mortification of
being black. By introducing the episode in which he articulates thecharacter’s kleptomaniac tendency and racially traumatic experience, Abein this passage dismantles the stereotypical articulation between blacks andcrime. Being aware of his complicity with the stereotype, furthermore, Abe
added an endnote to the story: “This story was inspired by Stepin Fetchit,
20th Century Fox star; however, needless to say, most of the biographicalinformation presented in the story is a fiction. I hope my story will not
injure our Stepin’s reputation.”28
At this point, let us recall the return of the political to the New Art authors’treatment of racial matters. Abe’s explicit disclosure of his story’s
fictitiousness is understood to be a tactic for conveying the politicalsignificance of his subject. In addition, the author here clearly illuminates
his design by introducing episodes based on American subject matter:miscegenation. The gravity of the subject is apparent given that white fear

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Keiko Nittaof miscegenation had been used to justify the lynching of black men.
Although Abe uses the motif in a happy ending, in an earlier section of thestory, he inserts a quite graphic corresponding scene in which Fetchit recallsa past experience of witnessing a lynching.
Comparable to Jean Toomer in Cane (1923), who elaborated on his
lynching episodes by adopting some real cases that the NAACP made publicduring their antilynching campaign,29 Abe represents an American terror
internationally known in the 1920s and 1930s. He contrives a black man’s
racial frustrations and their appeasement in the form of an interracial
marriage that takes place not in the South but in a quite exceptional, yet stillplausible, urban setting in Hollywood. This plot is a typical instance of New
Art authors’ flat treatment of the ethical content. In contrast with his
contemporary black American authors, Abe might have not been able toaccommodate himself to the black character so comfortably. His selfconsciousness, instead, made him treat the racial anguish rather remotely asalterity, which he could not uncritically appropriate.
As a literary critic, Abe published several theoretical works such as
Shuchi-teki bungaku-ron (An intellectual theory of literature) (1930).30 In
reference to this book, his authorial stance can be summarized as a resistanceto the cult of the personal as well as to the generalization of individual
experience to a “conventional sentimentality.”31 Accordingly, he criticizedthe dominant and traditional novelistic device of Japan, the I-novel(shishosetsu). Indeed, in opposition to its practitioners’ belief, he claimed
that the status of “I” is not necessarily unique or singular. As a literary
subject, it is generalizable or replaceable for any other arbitrary “I.” In
contrast, Stepin Fetchit is a character based on a real-life model and seems
to be familiar; however, Stepin Fetchit is in fact an actor, that is, a black
actor portraying a black character on screen, in other words, a simulacrumof a black man in cinema, with whose actual life neither the author nor
reader can easily identify.
To avoid the “conventional sentimentality, or literary cliché of thestreets,”32 Abe thought a black character should be simultaneously flat and
impenetrable, resisting an infusion of self-serving melodramatic sentiments.
In this connection, we can find another interesting passage in the story. One
day, Brook and Barrington are invited by Fetchit to the premiere of his newfilm, but strangely they cannot find him in the theater. The two men wonder
why the star has skipped out on his own event. After the show, however, heappears. He tells them that he has actually been there from the beginningbut just wanted to enjoy the movie from a Jim Crow back-row seat.

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Astounded by the explanation of Fetchit’s subservient behavior, the friends
discuss his interior state:“He is so pragmatic, and smart, too,” Barrington whispered to Brook.
Yet Brook was feeling something close to resentment. “It’s true, he’s
had success. But that success is not human. He’s not that different fromdogs and horses that are trained to act. The same as Rin Tin Tin or
Wonder Horse Tony–he’s a tool.”“You mean you sympathize with him, sympathize with Negros
oppressed all over the country. I know you have been a humanitariansince you were young. But, you know, he was possibly pretending toconform. He shrewdly acted like a servile creature in order to win
public favor.”“Come on, that’s quite a malicious interpretation.”“Since you’re a poet, you must know that black poet who was afriend of Chaplin.”“Right. I forget his name. But anyway, he only wrote rebellious
pieces.”“Unlike this poet, our Step never has had an interest in getting
involved in such a problem. Who knows how much he is pragmatic.”33
The point of this discussion is to explore the intentionality of thesubmissive behavior of the African American character Stepin Fetchit
portrayed. Brook, a poet and secret rival of Fetchit, sees him as a subhuman
to be pitied, one who is innocently and willingly utilized by the cultureindustry while remaining ignorant of his own right to dignity. Barrington,
however, interprets a tacit political stance underlying Fetchit’s spontaneous
docility. By contrasting Fetchit’s pragmatic obedience with astraightforwardly rebellious black poet, he calls our attention to the varietyof political strategies available and ultimately to Fetchit’s intelligence.
Nonetheless, insofar as the narrator suspends judgment, the reader cannot
know whether or not the black man’s humanity is warranted under the
morality of this fiction. Fetchit remains impenetrable, and the only thing thestory addresses is the power of a black character that is not confined to thereader’s customary imagination about racial justice.
Tomoji Abe, in his days as part of the New Art school, frequently dealt
with race, ethnicity, and eccentricity to upset the current dependence on thenovelistic monologue of a loosely subjective “I.” In so doing, he attempted
to secure both individuality and to mark the distinction between fiction and114

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life. The protagonist Henry Brook, whose decoding mediates the character
formation of Stepin Fetchit, seems to self-reflexively signify Abe’s poetics,
which aims at defamiliarizing a prescribed understanding of life through his
literary plots. The background of Brook, a scholar-poet from St. Louis,
furthermore, cannot help but bring to mind T. S. Eliot, a representative
modernist. If this association is possible, the story is more reasonably readas an indicator of the artistic interest of Abe, who is a self-consciously
modern author trained in the field of literature in English. I am inclined toread this story as an allegory of the unfolding of authorial subjectivity. Abe
could illustrate this concern through the story of a young gifted poet’s
peculiar encounter with an impenetrably unique stranger, who is in fact his
rival, competing for the same object of desire. How can one represent sucha stranger? This is a categorically political question in light of Japanesemodernists’ general emulation of Western primitivism. Abe is a typicalauthor who might have stuck to this dimension of politics.
As one of the trailblazers in Japanese Herman Melville scholarship andthe first translator of Moby-Dick, Abe knew well the vulnerability of theromantic assumption of both readability and representability of strangers.
His critical biography of Melville, published in 1933, suggests one crucial
reason for his devotion to the author:
We should deliberately learn that Melville did not write his novels
about the South Seas in order to entertain his readers’ curiosity.
Curiosity about the primitive brought about critical consequences
besides a harmless incitation of romantic longing. What he hasregistered in his works is the gloomy consequences. Melville in reallife physically investigated the destruction of indigenous life andnatural order resulting from the invasion of civilization. Missionary
activities meant the annihilation of local beliefs, and economic
incorporation meant nothing but exploitation. Melville examined thosedisasters.34
In introducing colonized characters into his own stories and being engaged
with them as a part of an aesthetically challenging project, Abe relied on his
understanding of the postcolonial significance of Melville’s works and theethical burdens related to primitivism. Yet, unlike Melville, who actually
ventured out into the estranging seas, Abe, at this point in his career, could
only approach the problem theoretically.
In November 1941, however, Abe was drafted by the Japanese militaryBlack Bottom of Modernity

115

regime as a civilian staff member of the army intelligence corps. Dispatched,in the following year, to the Indonesian islands of Java and Bali, which were
under Japanese colonial rule, he fortunately–or ironically–witnessed similardisasters in his own “South Seas.”35 Because of his status as a propaganda
agent–that is, he was supposed to be producing pro-Japanese materials in
English through analysis of local culture and civilization and studying thework of Dutch scholars–his representation of the war was primarily as a“war on culture.”36 He saw Indonesian culture as an accumulation of its
native people and natural cycles that was about to be destroyed by imperial
powers including Japan. According to Kazuaki Kimura, Abe, in a variety of
media–both the mainland’s and the territory’s–frankly warned “Japanese
troops” not to tread on the local “intellectual institutions.”37 As befitted aliterary critic who advocated “intellectualism,” his attempt to protect
intellectual freedom extended to Dutch scholars who were his national“enemies” and placed under Japanese surveillance. As a civilian recruit,
Abe may have been exercising his personal integrity in this activity toprotect, so to speak, alien humanity.38 Nevertheless, such a cosmopolitan
attempt of his–by that time not merely a literary gesture–did not impress
Japanese military headquarters. In a newspaper interview in 1942 heasserted: “As just a literary author, I lack political power.”39
As soon as the war was over, Abe started to dramatize his experiences inIndonesia and Shanghai, where he was likewise dispatched (twice) justbefore the defeat (1943-45), in more than ten stories, including “Shi nohana” (The flower of death) (1946).40 In giving birth to uniquely rational
characters who aspire to be independent of their nation in its territories,41 heestablished himself as a postwar intellectual noted for his comments on thecultural superiority of Japan’s former colonies. In the foreword to a sevenvolume collection of studies in Japanese arts and crafts, he mentions Korea
as a significant source of influence on the crystallization of Japanese artistic
creativity.42 Several scholars refer to the deployment of his postwar career
as his “leftist conversion” and argue that his inconsistent course makes theevaluation of his authorial quality difficult to assess.43 Such a view might bearoused when one is preoccupied with his discontent with proletarian protest
novels in his earlier career. However, the author’s choice of black andAfrican subjects in his early days testifies that the seeds of politics were
present from the beginning in his literature. They just took further shapewhen his encounter with the stranger was actualized as a historicalexperience embedded in the process of both cognitive and militarycolonization of Africa, Asia, and Oceania. It is true that as an author he

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sought the grotesque to expand his expressional possibilities. All along,
however, he kept tasting the bitterness of his own subjectivity and quietly
reproached himself for limiting his literary insight to the framework of thegrotesque and primitive.44

Notes
Earlier versions of this article were presented at the following conferences
and institutions: The 82nd Annual Conference of the English LiterarySociety of Japan at Kobe University (May 30, 2010); Association for
Cultural Studies, Crossroads 2010 at Lingnan University, Hong Kong (June18, 2010); College of William and Mary, Asian and Middle Eastern Studies
Program (November 5, 2013); and the University of Louisiana at Lafayette,
Department of English (March 24, 2014).
Oya Soichi, Modan-so to modan-so [Modern strata, modern phases] (Tokyo:
Taihokaku, 1930), 27. All translations of Japanese texts in this article are mine unlessotherwise noted.
2 Fitzgerald coined the term “the Jazz Age” in the title of his second collection of shortstories, Tales of the Jazz Age (1922), and ten years later he emphasized the era’s ephemeral
nature rather cynically: “Yet the present writer already looks back to it with nostalgia. It
bore him up, flattered him and gave him more money than he had dreamed of, simply for
telling people that he felt as they did, that something had to be done with all the nervous
energy stored up and unexpended in the War.” F. Scott Fitzgerald, “Echoes of the Jazz
Age,” Scribner’s Magazine 90, no. 5 (November 1931), 459. While the American jazz
frenzy could not help but end in 1929 with the stock market crash, the Japanese version
faded slowly until the full-scale rise of totalitarianism and the outbreak of the Second
Sino-Japanese War in 1937.
3 Not a few American scholars of Japanese literature have explored the literary andcultural circumstances of the 1930s, and some have remarked on this notable movement
as the “New Art” school. The following books extensively cover this modernist
movement in Japan. Joel R. Cohn, Studies in the Comic Spirit in Modern JapaneseFiction (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998) provides a fine outline of the
New Art school, in particular Ryutanji’s concept of modern literature in the chapter on
Masuji Ibuse. William O. Gardner, Advertising Tower: Japanese Modernism andModernity in the 1920s (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006) discusses thework of Kyojiro Hagiwara and Fumiko Hayashi as representative authors of the earlyphase of Japanese modernism. Miriam Silverberg’s Erotic Grotesque Nonsense: The
Mass Culture of Japanese Modern Times (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1Black Bottom of Modernity

1172008) has a brilliant analysis of gender issues with regard to “ero, guro, nansensu,”
despite containing no reference to the New Art school itself. She provides a fascinating
explanation of cultural works of African Americans by analogizing Japanese barmaids
with American female blues singers. Her investigation of antiethnic hate crimes in thecontext of modern Japan is also extremely incisive.
4 George Antheil, “The Negro on the Spiral, or, a Method of Negro Music,” in Negro,ed. Nancy Cunard (London: Wishart, 1934), 29.
5 The Stieglitz circle was a permutable group of modernist artists and thinkers
supported by the first recognized American pictorial photographer, Alfred Stieglitz(1864-1946), and his New York-based gallery, 291. The group affiliated a number ofavant-gardists including Waldo Frank, Paul Rosenfeld, Georgia O’Keeffe, and William
Carlos Williams, while having inspired a movement called New York Dada after the
Armory Show of 1913. Stieglitz’s knowledge of and connection with the European
artistic vanguard influenced the stylistic experiments of the American literary modernists
in terms of their representation of the visual.
6 “Beikoku kyugo sagyo” [US rescue operation], Taisho 12 nen kobun biko[Supplements to official papers of 1923], vol. 161, Tensai, Saigai [Natural disasters anddisturbances]. National Archives of Japan, digital archive, reference code C08050982700,
http://www.jacar.go.jp/DAS/meta/MetaOutServlet (accessed June 8, 2010). Regarding
the political and cultural environment of the urban restoration in the aftermath of theGreat Kantō Earthquake, see Kiyotada Tsutsui, Teito fukko no jidai [The age of therestoration of the imperial capital] (Tokyo: Chuokoron-shinsha, 2011).
7 American instances of such modernist little magazines include The Masses (191117), a socialist magazine famous for its introduction of Sherwood Anderson; The Double
Dealer (1921-26), one of the most prestigious modernist publications and particularly
remembered for contributions of Southern writers including William Faulkner andRobert Penn Warren; The Little Review (1914-29), which serialized James Joyce’s
Ulysses; and The Crisis (1910- ) and Opportunity (1923-42), African American magazines
sponsored by the NAACP and the National Urban League, respectively.
8 Yu Ryutanji, “Nenpu” [Chronology], in Shinko geijyutsu-ha bungaku-shu [New Art
classics] (Tokyo: Kaizosha, 1931), 606.
9 The University of Hawai’i Press published a new English edition of this book in
2013. According to the translator, Tzeljko Cipris, a “partial English translation of Kani
kosen, based on a heavily censored edition and done by an anonymous translator–who
turned out to be a young New Zealander named Bickerton–had appeared as early as
1933, and the first to produce a complete translation (along with another work by Takiji)
was Professor Frank Motofuji of [the] University of California at Berkeley, in 1973,” xii.
See Takiji Kobayashi, The Crab Cannery Ship, trans. Tzeljko Cipris (Honolulu:
University of Hawai’i Press, 2013).

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In the field of modern Japanese literature, the New Art school has been a relatively
marginal research topic. Yet, scholars in the Geijyutu-shijyoshugi bunngaku-kai[Association for Aestheticist Literature] have produced works that specialize in theschool; for instance, see volume 7 of their journal Shinko geijyutsu-ha no saikentou[Reconsidering the New Art school] (1981). I am greatly indebted to the authors of thisvolume, particularly Masafumi Moriyasu, Kenzaburo Mawatari, and Kiyomi Takeuchi,
for helping my understanding of the movement’s chronology and basic principles.
11 Malcolm Cowley, Exile’s Return: A Literary Odyssey of the 1920s (New York:Viking, 1976), 237.
12 Sen’ichi Hisamatsu, Osamu Kimata, Masakatsu Naruse, eds., “Shinko geijyutsuha,” in Gendai nihon bungaku dai-jiten [Encyclopedia of modern Japanese literature](Tokyo: Meijishoin, 1972), 566.
13 Giryo Sato , ed., Gendai ryoki sentan zukan [Contemporary guidebook to bizarrenessand the avant garde] (Tokyo: Shinchosha, 1931).
14 As an instance of such works, see Burton W. Peretti, The Creation of Jazz: Music,
Race, and Culture in Urban America (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1994).
15 Suisei Matsui, “Jazu to revu-kai” [Jazz and the world of the revue], in Gendai ryoki
sentan zukan [Contemporary guidebook to bizarreness and the avant garde], ed. Giryo
Sato (Tokyo: Shinchosha, 1931), 37. Matsui was a popular cultural figure who established
his career as a verbal performer attached to silent film showings. Such a performer,
called a “benshi,” was peculiar to the Japanese cinema industry in the silent era andplayed a combined role of MC, narrator, and commentator on a movie by talking
simultaneously as it was running. Having majored in English at Waseda University inTokyo, he was a favorite of highbrow audiences because of his extensive knowledge andastute opinions about Western popular culture. In 1930, he appeared in the Japaneselanguage version of Paramount on Parade as a guide for the Japanese audience.
16 Shun’yodo in Tokyo serially published the fifteen volumes of Sekai daitokai sentan
jazu bungaku (International metropolitan avant-garde jazz literature) in 1930. Eachvolume recognized its own translator, but the general editor of the series is unknown. It
described itself as a collection of contemporary international stories in translation,although it is difficult to locate all of the originals today. Ben Hecht’s collection of his
Chicago Daily News columns in the early 1920s is included in the collection. See thefollowing reprinted edition: Ben Hecht, 1001 Afternoons in Chicago, intro. Bill Savage(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009).
17 Yasunari Kawabata, The Scarlet Gang of Asakusa, trans. Alisa Freedman (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2005).
18 A reprint of the original text (1926) is available: Carl Van Vechten, Nigger Heaven(Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1999). Itaru Nii’s translation of Nigger Heaven,entitled Kokujin tengoku, was extensively publicized but never published.
10Black Bottom of Modernity

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Jiro Hayasaka, ed., “Kokujin bungaku-shu” [Collected stories by black writers], in
Sentan tanpen-shu [Avant-garde collection of short stories], vol. 14 of Amerika sentan
bungaku sosho [American avant-garde literature series] (Tokyo: Shinchosha, 1931).
20 W. E. B. DuBois, “Criteria of Negro Art,” in The Crisis Reader, ed. Sondra Kathryn
Wilson (New York: Modern Library, 1999), 323.
21 Langston Hughes, I Wonder as I Wander, vol. 14 of The Collected Works of Langston
Hughes, ed. Joseph McLaren (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2003), 268.
22 Jiro Hayasaka, ed., “Henjya no kotoba,” preface to Sentan tanpen-shu [Avant-gardecollection of short fiction], vol. 14 of Amerika sentan bungaku sosho [American avantgarde literature series], 8.
23 The way of introducing Claude MacKay to Japanese readers demonstrates thispattern of understanding. His “If I Must Die” (1919) was included in Amerika puroretaria
shishu [A collection of American proletarian poems] in a translation by Jyuzaburo Ono(Tokyo: Dandosha, 1931). The Jamaican-born Harlem Renaissance poet was never amember of the Communist Party.
24 Most of them are included in his two anthologies, Koi to afurika [Love and Africa]and Umi no aibu [Caresses of the sea]. Both books were published as the part of Shinko
geijyutu-ha sosho [The collected volumes of the New Art school] (Tokyo: Shinchosha,1930).
25 “Omnibus” and “Heren Numa” are in Umi no aibu, and “Nihon no jipushii” and“Koi to afurika” are in Koi to afurika.
26 Tomoji Abe, “Shinema no kokujin” [A black man in cinema], in Koi to afurika(Tokyo: Shinchosha, 1930). There is an English translation of this short story under thetitle “A Negro in Cinema” in Modanizumu: Modernist Fiction from Japan, 1913-1938,
ed. William J. Tyler, trans. Ayanna B. Hobbs (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press,
2008): 255-69. All the translated passages from this story are, however, mine, because
the translation of this story is quite imprecise. The book as a whole, however, is superb;
it collects twenty-five short stories from Japanese modernism with wonderfulintroductions by Tyler.
27 Abe, “Shinema no kokujin,” 40.
28 Ibid., 42.
29 Jean Toomer, Cane (New York: Liveright, 1994). Regarding the source of Toomer’s
depictions of lynching, see Barbara Foley, “‘In the Land of Cotton’: Economics andViolence in Jean Toomer’s Cane,” African American Review 30, no. 2 (Summer 1998):
181-98.
30 Tomoji Abe, Shuchi-teki bungaku-ron [An intellectual theory of literature](Tokyo:
Koseikaku, 1930).
31 As a general explanation of Abe’s intellectualism in terms of his understanding ofJapanese literary tradition, see Yoshiaki Takematsu, Abe Tomoji-ron: “Shuchi” no kobo
19

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Keiko Nitta[Studies in Tomoji Abe: Illumination from “Intellect” (Tokyo: Sobunsha, 2006), 139,
167-73.
32 Ibid., 139.
33 Abe, “Shinema no kokujin,” 34-35.
34 Tomoji Abe, Eibei bungaku hyoden sosho: Meruviru [Critical biographies of English
and American authors: Melville] (Tokyo: Kenkyusha, 1980), 36.
35 In 1944, Abe published his memoir, Hi no shima [Islands of fire], in which hereflected on his psychohistorical experiences during his ten-month military service. The
book is reprinted as Abe Tomoji 1, vol. 4 of Nanpo choyo sakka sosho [Collected works
of writers drafted for the southern front during the Pacific War], ed. and intro. Kazuaki
Kimura (Tokyo: Ryukeishosha, 1996).
36 The original phrase in Japanese is “bunka no tatakai.” Abe used this expression for
the first time in 1942 in his war reportage that appeared in the Asahi in a five-part serial.
See Kazuaki Kimura, “Abe Tomoji to indonesia taiken (1): Sono jijitsu wo megutte”[Tomoji Abe and his experiences in Indonesia (1): A study based on the facts], Ritsumeikan
gengo-bunka kenkyu 3, no. 3 (1992), 57-58.
37 Ibid., 59.
38 A similar interpretation is found in ibid., 60.
39 Cited in ibid. According to Kimura, the article is available only as a newspaper
clipping, and thus details of the source are unknown.
40 “Shi no hana” is the first of his series of works dealing with Indonesia, later classified
as “the Java sequence” in his large oeuvre. Reprinted in Abe Tomoji Zenshu [Thecomplete works of Tomoji Abe], vol. 5 (Tokyo: Kawadeshobo-shinsha, 1975).
41 The protagonist Hie in “Tsumi no hi” [The day of crime] (1947) designates himself
as an “eibei jiyu-ha” (Anglo-liberal). The story, the second piece in his Java sequence,
involves Hie’s internal conflict between that self-image and his status as a colonial
officer. Takematsu reads “the relentless sense of atonement for the author’s own wartime
incompetence” as at the core of the stories in the sequence. Takematsu, Abe Tomoji-ron,
127.
42 Tomoji Abe, ed., Kouza gendai geijyutsu 1: Geijyutsu to ha nani-ka [A course on
modern art 1: What is art?] (Tokyo: Keisoshobo, 1958). Abe was the general editor of thecollection.
43 See, e.g., Isao Mizukami, “Abe Tomoji ni okeru sengo: ‘Jyojyo to hyogen’ kara‘gendai no bungaku’ he” [Tomoji Abe’s postwar period: From “lyricism and expression”
to “literature of the present”] Doshisha kokubungaku 42 (1995): 260-72.
44 Jun Takami, novelist and critic and Abe’s contemporary, described this common
dilemma of modernists as “fudan no shitsuu” (“a constant toothache”). Jun Takami,
Showa bungaku seisui-shi [A history of the rise and fall of Showa literature] (Tokyo:
Bungei shunjyusha, 1987). Takami, one of the delegation of Japanese writers who visitedBlack Bottom of Modernity

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Moscow in 1958, happens to appear in figure 6 with Abe: he is the second person fromthe right.