Narrating war in modern Japan : dispatched journalism, written style, and narrative authority
Keywords: East Asian Languages and Cultures.

This dissertation investigates the specific ways that ideologies of modern literature, nation, and self are articulated, contested, and negotiated in the war correspondence of Japan's Meiji period (1868-1912). Though we usually think of journalism and literature as separate spheres, the ideologies of modern literature, nation, and "the news" are intermixed. This is true the world over, but all the more true in the case of Japan. Newspapers and reportage first emerged and flourished in the Meiji period, just when fierce debates were raging over the relationship between literature and lived reality as well as over the "proper" form that a national Japanese literature should take. It was in this context that modern Japanese ideologies of national community, journalism, and literature became inextricably imbricated. The work of dispatched and embedded war correspondents provides a novel lens through which to examine this imbrication. The Meiji period was punctuated by military expeditions of successively increasing scale and intensity (the Meiji Restoration of 1868, the Taiwan Expedition of 1874, the Satsuma Rebellion of 1877-78, the Sino-Japanese War of 1894-95, and the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-05), each of which was accompanied by a growing volume and variety of news coverage. One of the few constants in this maelstrom was the war correspondent's report: each of the military actions above produced serialized accounts from newspaper reporters traveling with Japan's forces. These reporters included not only canonized authors of modern fiction and poetry and pioneers of Japan's first Western-style newspapers, but also countless others whose names have been largely absent from histories of modern Japan. By treating the work of figures from all of these categories as a unified discursive field, this project challenges the boundaries of canon in literary and journalistic writing and reveals the underlying connections between the two fields of endeavor. Furthermore, I suggest that this shared discourse established a dialectic relationship between conceptions and practices of literary and journalistic narration in modern Japan, through which authority and national identity were not only gradually articulated, but also relocated and rendered transparently "natural" in the form of the narrating modern subject. The dissertation consists of two broad parts comprised of two chapters each for four chapters in total. Part One covers the first decade of the Meiji period, examining the still tightly related forms of newspaper writing, kanbun kundoku, and the gesaku written tradition. This period is marked by both tension and melding between elite and vulgar written forms, with the historical rupture of the Meiji Restoration and the ongoing massive reorganization of laws and society providing the possibility of a similar upheaval in the order of language. Chapter One centers on Kanagaki Robun and his 1874 work Saga denshinroku. Robun melds elite and vulgar discourses and written modes in the compilation of his history, patterning himself after the elite Fukuzawa Yukichi and proclaiming his dedication to contributing to "public history" even while he formats Saga denshinroku as a traditional e-iri yomihon and includes generous helpings of familiar moral didacticism. Despite this seeming tendency toward pastiche, however, I argue that Saga denshinroku should be understood primarily as a genuine attempt to put the style of the Edo yomihon to work at contributing to elite discourses, as an attempt to elevate the gesaku written mode to something much more credible and authoritative than it had been considered before. The attitudes and themes that Robun develops over the course of the text's composition inform and anticipate his oft-mentioned "return to gesaku" several years later. Chapter Two centers on Senpō sairoku, the dispatched reporting of Fukuchi Gen'ichirō in the Seinan War. I argue that a new narrating subject emerges as a result of the stylistic techniques Fukuchi gradually develops. Anchoring national-level events and ideas within a first-person personal narrative, this narrator combines authority and status (established by way of the real-life Fukuchi's experiences and his close access to war command and the Meiji government) with an ability to be personally sympathized or even identified with by readers. This was to become the model approach to dispatched reporting in modern Japan. Part Two of the dissertation covers the Sino-Japanese War (1894-95) and the Russo-Japanese War (1904-05). This section of the dissertation focuses in on the ways that the two discourses of "journalism" and "literature" remain in close contact, even as they begin increasingly to be conceived of as separate fields of endeavor. Chapter Three takes up the dispatched reporting of Kunikida Doppo for the Kokumin shinbun in the Sino-Japanese War. Posthumously collected and published under the title Aitei tsūshin, Doppo's reporting rejects the conception — already prevalent in the 1890s — of the war correspondent as objective observer and reporter of fact. Instead, Doppo seeks initially to poetically evoke the experience of being at sea far from home. On the one hand, this focus on lyricism and natural description serves as a grounds to develop and practice the written style which Doppo would put to use in much of his later fiction. Simultaneously, however, the narrative shifts in tone and written style. Read in sequence, these shifts describe a kind of narrative arc, whereby the romantic but callow poet is awakened to the grand ideas of nation and war. I examine the ways that Doppo's written personae are performed and inscribed to reveal how conceptions of individual subjectivity articulated through written style intersect with consciousness of nation and national identity in the reporting of modern Japan's first foreign war. Chapter Four examines Tayama Katai's reporting in the Russo-Japanese War. I consider Katai's war narratives in relation to his literary theories, on the one hand — particularly February 1904's Rokotsu naru byōsha — and to his journalistic writings on the other, especially the travel writing that he was known for. Katai's dispatched reporting is much more indebted to the latter than the former. I suggest that for Katai, journalism and literature had become completely severed, functioning as two entirely distinct modes of written practice. Nonetheless, the reworking and rewriting of Katai's war narratives reveals how Katai paradoxically considered his reporting experience as the means for collecting material to be turned into great art. Katai's journalistic writing also provides a critical context for understanding the ways that Katai's canonical "literary" writings were particularly open to a certain kind of biographic reading, which I suggest contributed to the furor on the release of Futon in 1907 and may have helped pave the way for "I-novel" readings in later decades