Gaitō kamishibai in postwar Japan: picture-storytelling performance in the democratic public sphere

This thesis examines a popular Japanese form ofpicture-storytelling street theaterknown as gaitō kamishibai, a pervasive form of children's entertainment from circa 1925 to 1965. In gaitō kamishibai,a live performer uses sequential painted picture panels in tandem with his own voice and bodilygesture to relaynarrative. Thekamishibaiperformer (kamishibaiya) would traditionally navigate the city on a bicycle, with a simple wooden stage for displaying the painted panels to his audience mounted on the back. Focusing on two kamishibai picture-stories-Kurama Ko-Tengu and Abarenbō Sazen-that were produced in postwar Osaka by the association San'yūkai, foundedin 1947, this thesis analyzes visual-literary themes in the picture-stories themselves that bear particular salience in articulating trends of postwar creative production and democraticparticipation. Further, when placed in conversation with other modes of modern historical picture-aided performancein Japan, these casestudies implicatega

GAITŌ KAMISHIBAI IN POSTWAR JAPAN: PICTURE-STORYTELLING PERFORMANCE IN THE DEMOCRATIC PUBLIC SPHERE by Stephanie Marie Hohlios A thesis submitted to the faculty of The University of Utah in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in Asian Studies College of Humanities The University of Utah May 2015 Copyright © Stephanie Marie Hohlios 2015 All Rights Reserved Th e Uni v e r s i t y o f Ut a h Gr a dua t e S cho o l STATEMENT OF THESIS APPROVAL The thesis of Stephanie Marie Hohlios has been approved by the following supervisory committee members: Wesley Sasaki-Uemura , Chair 03/02/2015 Date Approved Winston Kyan , Member 03/02/2015 Date Approved Mamiko Suzuki , Member 03/02/2015 Date Approved and by Janet Theiss , Chair/Dean of the Department/College/School of Asian Studies Program and by David B. Kieda, Dean of The Graduate School. ABSTRACT This thesis examines a popular Japanese form of picture-storytelling street theater known as gaitō kamishibai, a pervasive form of children's entertainment from circa 1925 to 1965. In gaitō kamishibai, a live performer uses sequential painted picture panels in tandem with his own voice and bodily gesture to relay narrative. The kamishibai performer (kamishibaiya) would traditionally navigate the city on a bicycle, with a simple wooden stage for displaying the painted panels to his audience mounted on the back. Focusing on two kamishibai picture-stories-Kurama Ko-Tengu and Abarenbō Sazen-that were produced in postwar Osaka by the association San'yūkai, founded in 1947, this thesis analyzes visual-literary themes in the picture-stories themselves that bear particular salience in articulating trends of postwar creative production and democratic participation. Further, when placed in conversation with other modes of modern historical picture-aided performance in Japan, these case studies implicate gaitō kamishibai in a modern milieu of visual expression and consumption. In Abarenbō Sazen, the one-armed, one-eyed rōnin warrior Tange Sazen-a popular character in literature and film in twentieth-century Japan-articulates his identity in terms of personal memory and trauma. This kamishibai both appropriates and augments devices from a larger canon of postwar jidaigeki-style popular entertainment, as well as postwar stories of personal trauma more broadly. In jidaigeki the outcast itinerant hero often traverses an adverse landscape, toward a personal goal of justice and change. Similarly, the kamishibaiya-equally isolated during his erratic movement around the city-has historically been viewed as a social outcaste. Yet, the kamishibaiya also functions as a type of educator who unites groups through his specialized performance. The kamishibaiya, like the heroes in his stories, wanders alone, to (perhaps paradoxically) bring about social progress in the postwar context. When viewed within the context of descriptions of entrepreneurial agents who engage in the alternative economy of the black market, and drifting artists who develop highly individual styles of their own while participating in a variety of democratic groups in the postwar historical moment, gaitō kamishibai becomes a particularly striking example of how individual subjectivity flourishes through postwar democratic cooperation. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS ABSTRACT .................................................................................................................... iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ............................................................................................ vi INTRODUCTION ........................................................................................................... 1 Examining Gaitō Kamishibai in Postwar Osaka ............................................. 10 Defining "Postwar" .......................................................................................... 14 Chapters ONE KAMISHIBAI AS SUBVERSIVE SIDESHOW: THE TRICKSTER IN HIDARI HISAYOSHI'S KURAMA KO-TENGU ........................................... 20 TWO THE STORIES WE ARE TOLD, THE STORIES WE TELL OURSELVES: ABARENBŌ SAZEN, JIDAIGEKI, TRAUMA, AND MEMORY .................. 44 Narrative (Re)iteration, Appropriation, and Negotiation ................................. 48 Memory, Trauma, and the Development of Subjectivity in the Postwar Moment ............................................................................................................ 56 Temporal Displacement: Understanding the Now in Retrospect .................... 64 The Transformative Landscape ........................................................................ 72 THREE VISUALITY AND DISTRACTION IN THE DISCURSIVE SPHERE: OSAKA KAMISHIBAI AND THE SAN'YŪKAI CIRCLE ............................ 76 Visibility and Distraction ................................................................................. 81 Networks of Acquisition and Communication: Black Market Culture ........... 84 Circles and Associations: Individual Growth in (Contrast to) the Social Group ............................................................................................................... 89 Defining and Questioning Postwar Democracy in Japan ................................ 94 Conclusion: Visuality, Labor, and Democratic Culture ................................. 101 CONCLUSION ............................................................................................................. 102 BIBLIOGRAPHY ......................................................................................................... 108 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I am extremely grateful for the assistance that I have received from my Thesis Advisory Committee members since I first began this research. To Chair Wesley Sasaki-Uemura who helped me to establish research connections in the Kyoto area that would prove indispensable and for your warm support and guidance as I worked through this project, thank you. To committee members Winston Kyan and Mamiko Suzuki, your respective specialties and methodologies have allowed me to conceive of this project in a truly interdisciplinary way, and I thank you for the feedback and mentorship you have both provided. Lastly, to Lela Graybill, who has long since provided support, mentorship, and invaluable feedback, I am truly grateful. During the Asian Studies M.A. program I received generous funding through the University of Utah's Asia Center in the form of a two-year Foreign Language Area Studies (FLAS) Award that included summer intensive language study in Osaka, Japan during the summer of 2014. A Japan Foundation research travel grant was also kindly provided by the Asia Center early in my first year of the program, which allowed me to lay the groundwork for later archival research. Travel opportunities such as these rarely come to M.A. students, and I am truly grateful for the generosity and support that the Asia Center has provided me. Lastly, to my husband Michael, thank you for your support, kindness, and above all, patience. INTRODUCTION This thesis examines gaitō kamishibai's negotiation of the theme of memory in the postwar Japanese context, but also its role in Japanese memory today, as a nostalgic and largely lost form of entertainment. In the term gaitō kamishibai (街頭紙芝居), kamishibai translates as "paper drama," or "paper theater," and gaitō refers to a particular commercial variant performed on the street in the public sphere. In the summer of 2014 while living in Osaka, Japan, I was surprised to find a troupe of gaitō-style kamishibaiya (performers of kamishibai) who perform each weekend in the temple courtyard at Senkōji (全興寺), a Buddhist temple in Osaka's Hirano Ward. Most prevalent between circa 1925 and 1965, this form of kamishibai is largely unknown to youth today. The Osaka troupe of performers, led by Suzuki Tsunekatsu, a professional kamishibaiya and youth culture researcher, was comprised of approximately eight performers in all, four of whom performed on the day I attended. Before a few rows of rickety wooden benches placed on the dirt floor of the temple courtyard, a vintage bicycle stood with its equally vintage wooden stage mounted on the back (which I am told is an heirloom) to hold the colorful picture panels used as part of performance. A performer would take to his or her place next to the bicycle-mounted picture stage, slip a volume of about ten sequential picture-story panels into the wooden frame, and garner the children's attention with lively calling and the aid of wooden clappers called hyōshigi (拍子木). Using lively narration, performing distinct voices for each 2 character depicted in the picture-story panels, and often pointing to particularly pictorial elements to guide viewer understanding, the performer would narrate and elucidate meaning from the sequential panels, shuffling through them one at a time to progress the story. At Senkōji performers sometimes used their own handmade picture-stories, and sometimes, those borrowed from local libraries, which are now mass printed and distributed by children's book publishers. Children's picture book publishers in Japan now print versions for educational use and family entertainment. One can even check out from the public library small tabletop frames made of either wood or plastic to hold the picture panels. Suzuki Tsunekatsu performs the role of the itinerant kamishibaiya on a regular basis, in line with historical practice. He travels not just around Osaka, but even to China and countries in Southeast Asia performing kamishibai, because he feels, as he puts it, that by doing so he can keep the form of entertainment alive in the memory of younger generations. Suzuki's also adheres to the commercial tradition of selling mizuame and sōsu senbei (cheap snacks) to children for a price, albeit only for five yen a piece, as part of the participatory exchange that once characterized this form of entertainment. Not unlike the staged reenactments of gaitō kamishibai in the Kyoto International Manga Museum, perhaps, in which costumed performers relay kamishibai stories to children on a fabricated stage littered with nostalgic mise en scène-an old mailbox, a painted backdrop of bygone residential architecture, and of course, a vintage bicycle-the Senkōji troupe's performances are more a demonstration of tradition lost, rather than a means for making money. But Suzuki's troupe is not confined by the walls of a museum, 3 which tend to reaffirm the static, past identity of the subjects housed therein. And by requiring children to pay for their sweets, albeit at a price that would have been typical generations ago, Suzuki asks children to engage in an exchange of sensorial entertainment for money; their small monetary gesture creates a premise for the understanding of gaitō kamishibai's historical identity. Kamishibai at Senkōji uses setting (a real community intersection, the temple courtyard, rather than a museum space) and other devices to resurrect, if only for a moment, cultural memories of public participation around the kamishibai performer. Gaitō kamishibai was, through the 1960s, an industry comprised of its performers, the workshop-style groups who produced the handmade painted picture-story panels used in performance (labor was often divided between those who painted the panels and those who arranged the story), and the kashimoto who rented panels to performers. But the performer was, historically, the most visible arm of kamishibai enterprise. Sharalyn Orbaugh, one of the first English-language scholars to engage kamishibai in rigorous academic analysis, begins her most recent book Propaganda Performed: Kamishibai in Japan's Fifteen Year War with the following account of a 1958 performance by famous rakugo performer San'yutei Kinba in Tokyo. The story told by San'yutei is a comically wry look back at life in wartime from a postwar perspective and gives a glimpse of the rather funny way in which kamishibaiya were able to not just entertain children, but lead community participation. First written by Onuki Kiyoka in 1934, San'yutei (re)presents the story almost a decade and a half after the war's end. He tells his audience of a landlord who oversees a back alley row house (nagaya), who brings his tenants together to organize a neighborhood defense troop and conduct air raid drills in this "time of 4 crisis."1 But his tenants are confused by these terms (air raid, time of crisis), and humorous wordplay under the auspice of miscommunication á la Abbott and Costello ensues. The person who ultimately brings order and understanding to the rapidly disintegrating fabric of conversation is an itinerant gaitō kamishibai performer. The kamishibaiya is poor, a resident of a nagaya like the tenants here, but speaks in far more formal and correct Japanese than the other characters in this rakugo narrative. His eloquence, coupled with his tendency to traverse the imperial capital, causes the nagaya landlord to view him as a source of authoritative wisdom, despite his personal background being the same as everyone else. Frustrated, the landlord appeals for somebody who knows what's going on, and another man steps forward… [H]e says that he "constantly traverses the imperial capital engaged in a profession related to the education of young boys and girls." [The landlord] says, "‘Traversing the capital, educating young people'-you must be a schoolteacher." "No," says his tenant, "I perform kamishibai." The audience roars with laughter. [W]hen the landlord explains that "this area is also part of the imperial capital," one of his tenants says, "This place, the imperial capital? Wow, the capital is a dump." 2 Here the kamishibaiya occupies a position of limited but tangible power. The local group lends him the opportunity to speak and to facilitate discourse. The kamishibaiya's position as a recitation specialist renders him worth listening to in the minds of individuals, and his itinerant lifestyle as a travelling performer makes him an authority on contemporary events. From this position, the kamishibaiya in this story bears witness to 1 Sharalyn Orbaugh, Propaganda Performed: Kamishibai in Japan's Fifteen Year War (Boston: Brill Publishing, 2014). 2 This story is Orbaugh's account of a live recording of the rakugo story Boku enshu (Air Raid Practice, originally written in 1934 by Onuki Kiyoka) performed by San'yutei Kinba in 1958 to an audience in an unnamed theater in Tokyo, recording courtesy of the Cambridge University Library. See Orbaugh Propaganda Performed, 1. 5 community activism and even gets put in a leadership role despite his not being close with the landlord and tenants prior to this scene. He is an anonymous visitor, and perhaps therefore a strange choice for a leader in the moment. But the landlord defers to him because of his eloquence and position as a street corner educator (even as this title serves as a comic punchline for the rakugo audience). He therefore becomes someone to whom the members of the row house look for understanding and mutual support. Kamishibai here is simultaneously articulated as educational and frivolous, and its performer is both suspicious as a wandering, unknown outsider, yet immediately afforded trust by a close-knit local group. He therefore occupies an ambiguous, liminal role somewhere between outsider and community lynchpin. Kamishibai is a popular form of entertainment associated with the isolation of back alleys and nagaya-with the local. But its performer's movement about the city brings cosmopolitan knowledge-national connections-to the relatively uninformed, insular community. As part of a greater urban, and indeed, national community, the local finds itself implicated in a vast network of grassroots engagement and expression. I am analyzing here a scholar's interpretation of an audio recording of a rakugo play about kamishibai, and this anecdote gets at the implications and difficulties inherent in my own project. Rakugo, which is itself a highly stylized performance, narrates the kamishibai performer's fictional run in with the row house tenants and their landlord, and further, this story is reinterpreted in the postwar context (as the story was originally written in 1934). Unlike rakugo, which was (and is) performed in a traditional theater space, kamishibai was performed in isolated, anonymous back alleys like the one in this story, and on countless generic street corners. It was seldom documented, likely because 6 performances were somewhat impromptu, but were also a pervasive and unsurprising part of daily life on the streets of Japan. Quite simply, it likely was not viewed as being worth documenting, unlike rakugo. Performance context, then, must be understood through mediated accounts of cultural and individual memory, such as this anecdote brought to our attention by Orbaugh, and the occasional photograph, which I analyze below, although such photographs do not provide detailed performance documentation either. On the occasion that photographs do capture kamishibai performances, they serve as little more than an index for assuring the viewer that kamishibai was indeed performed in a certain time and place, but do little to explain issues of viewer reception or devices and gestures of stylized performance. In collective and cultural memory today kamishibai harbors feelings of nostalgia, but is kept at a psychological distance by the aging generation who remembers it. Kamishibai is, as Orbaugh puts it, an object of "mild derision-something one loved as a child, but now recognizes to have been tawdry; something that evokes the atmosphere of a gentler, simpler time in Japan's modern history, but a time that now seems a little shabby."3 Considering the extreme economic depression experienced by Japanese toward the end of World War II and in the immediate years following, coupled with the literal destruction and deterioration of urban environments in particular during wartime, where kamishibai was one of the few attainable forms of entertainment for the hard-working and impoverished, it is perhaps no wonder that it holds this connotation. In famed photojournalist Domon Ken's album Chikuhō no Kodomotachi (Children of Chikuhō, 1960) in which he documents the daily life of children in the rural coal-mining town of Chikuhō in Fukuoka prefecture, the photographer includes two photographs of a 3 Orbaugh, Propaganda Performed, 4. 7 kamishibaiya performing on a residential street that indeed situate kamishibai within an image of postwar rural life that is dust-covered, difficult, and, to use Orbaugh's word, shabby. They are captioned: ボタ山の見える炭住街のたそがれ。親たちと同じに貧しい労働者として生 い育って行く子供たちには一生忘れがたい風景となるであろう。紙芝居が 終われば、子どもたちの一日も暮。 Twilight on in a charcoal residential area [mainly nagaya, or communal living row houses] with a view of Botayama [a manmade mountain of slag]. This view is an unforgettable one for the children who grow up in in this impoverished, hard labor lifestyle, who will become laborers [in the coal mine] like their parents. When the kamishibai is over, it marks the end of the day. 町は遠いし、お金はない。こどもたちのただ一つの楽しみは、毎日黒いゴ ロゴロの坂道を自転車を押し上げてやってくる紙芝居だ。拍子木をたたい ておじさんがふれ廻ると、子どもたちは炭住街のかしいだ家や黒い丘から 自分で稼いだお金をもってあふれ出してくる。アメとくじびきでおまけが もらえる５円の紙芝居は、炭住街の唯一の観劇だ。アメを買わない子ども たちは、遠慮してまわりに立っている。 The city is far, and money is scarce. The children's one true joy is when the bicycle of the kamishibai man comes creaking up the black, rocky slope. The performer hits two wooden clappers together and the children come flooding excitedly from their homes and the surrounding black hills with money they earned themselves. The 5-yen kamishibai-with its small added attractions of sweets and lottery tickets-is the only entertainment available in the charcoal residential area. Children who do not buy candy restrain themselves, and stand on the periphery of the viewing audience.4 Domon Ken posits these photographs as slices from the daily life of the children, in which kamishibai is a short (but exciting and much welcomed) reprieve from hard work and a destitute existence. The kamishibaiya's appearance signals they have survived another day, acting as a tangible marker of passing time. Of course, this is not a documentation of kamishibai performance, but of the children of Chikuhō. We see their 4 Domon Ken, Chikuhō no Kodomotachi (Tokyo: Patoria Shoten, 1960), 30-31. 8 collective gazes fervently fixed on the performer, some mouths gaping as they gnaw on candy-a sea of viewers oriented with excitement at the spectacle. Domon Ken captions his photographs, telling us in the space below that the kamishibai man's visit to this rural town is the children's "one true pleasure," and when his bicycle come rumbling near, they burst out of their homes with their meager change to buy candy (with money they have earned themselves) and listen to the stories. The "goro-goro" onomatopoeic sound of his bicycle on rough earth, as the caption reads is, perhaps significantly, the same sound made by the cart in Koike Kazuo and Goseki Kojima's Lone Wolf and Cub (子連 れ狼, 1970) as the father approaches with his infant son in a wooden cart. Similarly, the kamishibaiya carries with him the simple joy usually associated with childhood that the samurai's son in the graphic novel seems to embody. We also understand that kamishibai might hold similar joy for adults as well since he also sells lottery tickets-a game, a chance at a better existence. Kamishibai plays host to ideas of entertainment and fantasy for people of all ages in this "charcoal residential area," as Domon Ken terms it. These photographs document kamishibai's pervasiveness in postwar Japan, even in this rural mining town. The performer in each photograph is the same man with the same wooden stage, which is as weathered and rough-looking as the precarious wooden housing that also appears in these compositions. The photographs were likely taken on two different days, considering the slightly unique arrangement of the kamishibaiya and his bicycle-mounted wooden stage in respect to buildings in each. In the first photograph, which is printed as a two-page spread, we see the kamishibaiya in action, left hand about to pull the front panel out to reveal the next one, mouth open telling his story. The photographer shoots from behind and to the left side of the kamishibaiya, which allows 9 us to see the pile of picture-story panels that the performer has already shown the children, the written narrative script on the verso of the last panel lying face up. We cannot see what the children see, and so cannot identify the picture-story. And we do not see the performer's face and bodily gesture as the children do; we see him in profile. In the other photograph, Domon Ken captures a similar crowd of young viewers either before or after the story has been performed. The kamishibaiya rummages in the case that supports the small wooden stage, imaginably looking for candy, or a lottery ticket (sold to older customers as Domon Ken's caption tells us). We see this crowd of children here in the larger context of their daily environment. In the middle ground behind them are timber-constructed houses with pitched roofs, with nonuniformly shaped slats that appear splintery and damaged. Then in the background a hazy silhouette of botayama, the manmade mountain of coal slag (waste from the mining process) that accrued over years of hard labor in the poor rural town seems to preside over the children's momentary reverie, as a reminder of the harshness that preceded their viewing and waits for them each morning. Here Domon Ken allows the viewer's gaze to move through space- foreground, middle ground, background-to identify a common shabbiness in the kamishibaiya's humble wooden stage, the disrepair of the town's housing, and the heap of waste collected over time, to characterize Chikuho and its children as impoverished, destitute, and tawdry. Kamishibai, in these photographs as much as in collective memory, is inseparably linked to hardship, struggle, and trauma in postwar Japan. The kamishibaiya in Domon Ken's photographs inserts himself into the local and particular and provides ephemeral entertainment. 10 Examining Gaitō Kamishibai in Postwar Osaka This thesis takes as its case studies two extant picture-stories-the actual painted panels that are now relics of quotidian performance-from a collection of such examples produced by artists in the postwar Osaka association San'yūkai (三邑会, founded in 1947 by artist Shiozaki Genichirō), who also rented the association's collective work to performers, as a kashimoto (貸元). These panels are hand painted compositions on paper affixed to cardboard and usually lacquered for waterproofing so that they could withstand the kamishibaiya's travels and outdoor performance. They are produced by individual artists (usually credited in the first panel), with the story inscribed on the verso of each panel so that it was only visible to the performer. This story could serve as a script, and in the classroom form of kamishibai in particular, which Orbaugh asserts is the forerunner to the propagandist kamishibai distributed by the Japanese Empire during wartime, it ensures that the performer relays the story exactly as the producer (and national censors) intended. In gaitō kamishibai as in rakugo performance, however, live improvisation tends to reflect audience interests; a contemporary sense of humor and unexpected outburst are key to grabbing and maintaining patrons. Therefore, these panels may indeed serve as relics of performance, but not necessarily as documentation. In the chapters that follow I analyze two kamishibai picture-story series produced rather closely in time and space within a single association of artists. I then situate such commercial-creative production within related movements and cultural circles of the postwar historical moment. In the first two chapters in particular, memory is a central theme in my negotiation of kamishibai. First, I draw on tangible memory of performance, as embodied by the picture-story panels for Hidari Hisayoshi's (左久良) twenty-nine- 11 volume series of narrative kamishibai panels Kurama Ko-Tengu (鞍馬小天狗, after 1947, Osaka International Children's Literature Collection) in Chapter One. Here, I show how both the picture-story itself and its typical performance context raise cultural memories of early modern carnival festivities. Situating both the protagonist in Kurama Ko-Tengu and his live orator within the tradition of the carnival trickster, I illuminate historical devices for soliciting public participation and situate kamishibai within a longer history of picture-storytelling. In Chapter Two, I relate the narrative device of memory flashback in Yamamoto Gohare (山本梧晴) and Sado Masashi's (佐渡 正士) Abarenbō Sazen (暴れん坊左膳, Rowdy Sazen, after 1947, Osaka International Children's Literature Collection) to the pervasive trope of the individual hero's personal negotiation of trauma (and its pendant residual effects as memory) in jidaigeki film and literature, a Japanese narrative genre of historical drama that has its roots in kabuki theatre that finds prolific expression in postwar Japan. The fictional hero navigates the adverse Japanese landscape in a physical sense, while also mentally navigating personal memory, on a journey toward transformed identity. This kamishibai not only engages the canon of jidaigeki, but also a long history of iterations of the hero Tange Sazen, both recalling and rejecting public memories that define the character. I therefore offer Abarenbō Sazen as a case where the contemporary and particular vie with the historical and canonic to differentiate itself in the moment, as an original body of work produced by (two) individual creators. This frames the reader's understanding of the final chapter, then, where I discuss the relative role of the individual creator in the postwar context, in reference to associations, or circles (specifically that of San'yūkai), and the nation. Whereas the lone 12 individual in this context is responsible for the formation of their own subjectivity, the postwar circle, then, is defined as a collective of individual creators-a democratic group. In challenge to historical memories of wartime associations that instead employed a top down dissemination of goods, information, and power that subordinated the individual, diffuse networks of associations in postwar Japan-where lone entrepreneurs, proverbial vigilantes, and artists differentiate themselves through group participation in comparative contrast to their cohort-offer evidence of grassroots democratic participation. A related theme in the chapters that follow is that of itinerant wandering, which is inherent in the popular practice of gaitō kamishibai since performers had to daily seek out groups of potential viewers in order to make a profit, but also serves as a visual-narrative theme the kamishibai picture-stories that are the focus of Chapter One and Chapter Two. In Chapter One, I explore how the kamishibai character Kurama Ko-Tengu, as a wandering samurai-detective, serves as an example for honing skills of critical investigation. The wandering gaze of the hero (and the viewer who often embodies the hero's perspective) illuminates social injustice and works to interrogate the political institution of the feudal bakufu. His propensity to wander also allows him to interject himself into events, unexpected by other characters, so as to play the part of the disruptive trickster, further undermining civic authority. The itinerancy of Kurama Ko- Tengu aptly mirrors that of the kamishibai performer and draws attention to the similar role, illuminating the performer's capacity for disruption and even dissidence. I use this picture-story to thematically unpack the distinct features of the kamishibai performance medium and to situate it within domestic and global postwar phenomena that interrogate modes of subjective understanding, response, and public participation through devices of 13 disruption and "nonsense." In other words, the kamishibaiya's seemingly erratic navigation of the city situates the performer at the center of modern postwar thought, in a position where the performer can visibly articulate the relationship of the individual to the nation and to the perceivable environment. Then in Chapter Two, I explore how this theme of wandering serves as a pervasive theme in jidaigeki entertainment, where the navigation of the adverse landscape ultimately leads to the jidaigeki hero's intervention in sociopolitical life. Here itinerant movement is a solitary act, albeit one with subversive and transformative potential. My thematic focus on the wandering nature of gaitō kamishibai performance and the itinerant hero associated with jidaigeki-style storytelling, who often appears as a social outcaste-an oddball, not wholly understood by nucleic society who achieves a personal form of justice in round-about ways-allows me to illuminate a fundamental difference in the cultural place that kamishibai occupies in postwar Japan as compared to wartime, which is the primary focus of scholars like Sharalyn Orbaugh, Barak Kushner, and others. The path of the national hero in wartime propaganda kamishibai in particular is portrayed as linear and inevitable; in Orbaugh's examples in particular, heroes barrel toward their goal of self-sacrifice for the national body with focus and gusto. The path toward personal transformation and the attainment of some particular form of justice in the postwar jidaigeki examples discussed here, however, is far more meandering and indirect. Wandering, at times, delays participation in events on the part of the protagonist and denotes the slow internal process of personal transformation carried out within the hero. As part of a nation of individuals in flux, navigating new discourses on subjectivity, democratic participation, and the newly emerging image of Japan as an international 14 participant in the Cold War, kamishibai artists in the moment present personal transformation as an important, albeit slow and indirect, process. The picture-stories analyzed here work as particularly salient expressions of the grassroots culture identified by scholar Justin Jesty where the visibility of the personal, the particular, contributes to a collective network of democratic participation. Defining "Postwar" There are several related definitions of "postwar" with which I work in this thesis. But in all uses, the term demarcates the time period following Japan's surrender in 1945 at the end of World War II. The immediate years following war-1945 to 1947-were characterized by extreme economic depression, shortage, and general want. Urban infrastructure and networks of trade and acquisition alike existed in a state of ruin. While the government set up ration programs, its supply was neither consistent nor sufficient, which left many people to resort to navigating the alternative economy of the black market to acquire basic food and necessities, in addition to materials like paper, paint, and the like used in kamishibai panel production. The Japanese economy underwent a revitalization as Japan became a staging and production arm for U.S. efforts during the Korean War that began in 1950, and so economically speaking, the Japanese economy entered a different dispensation characterized by growth nearing this point. The postwar period is also quite inseparable from the dominating presence of the Allied Occupation that pushed along social, political, and economic reformation until its effective end in 1952. Therefore, the early 1950s often serve as a cutoff in tandem with the end of war in 1945 that defines the "postwar" period. My analysis of postwar democratic participation and creative production, however, is less concerned with bookending the postwar 15 moment. Rather, I identify a tone of unsettled transformation specifically connected to the trope of the individual's search for personal identity and progress that is expressed through materiality and performance in the years after World War II. That is, I identify a general restructuring of thought and community participation in the wake of war. But as for an end date for this type of "postwar" creative expression, I offer none, partly because such themes as wandering, memory, and trauma continue to pervade heroic tales in Japanese popular entertainment even today. Similarly, the type of professional participation in creative circles that I discuss still continues in the contemporary manga industry as well, in a very similar form. In other words, I wish to point to the origin of certain cultural concepts that have not yet ended. I have chosen to focus on kamishibai in the postwar context because, while this is certainly a rather late portion in the history of this form of entertainment, kamishibai undergoes significant pressures and changes in this moment. And here, kamishibai becomes a tangible expression of modes of creative production and participation across Japan in the moment. My analysis of these panels privileges their materiality and production history, not just to illuminate the distinct features of the medium but to situate such objects within an extremely disadvantageous socioeconomic context-a moment of extreme transition for Japanese society in several ways-in which they were produced. In immediate postwar Japan, kamishibai suffers loss and shortage along with the rest of Japanese society and hobbles along in the immediate postwar years, a mirror for the nation at large. In Chapter Five of his book Kamishibai Cultural History: Deciphering the History of Kamishibai Through Archival Documents (紙芝居文化史: 資料で読み解 く紙芝居の歴史 , 2011) Ishiyama Yukihiro discusses how the kamishibai industry, 16 which he paints as a microcosm of the nation at large in many ways, suffers extreme destruction by the end of the war and so pushes for rebuilding and overhaul in the years following the war's end. In wartime, many of kamishibai's professionals, like those in any other industry, were shipped to the battlefront, and many did not return alive.5 In addition, major cities saw the almost total destruction of their urban infrastructure, which decimated usual trade routes and supply chains through which artists rented painted panels and bought candy to sell to their audiences and panel artists acquired materials for production.6 Kamishibai in the postwar moment existed in a state of severe supply depletion, infrastructural trauma, and human loss.7 But despite this, Japanese scholars like Ishiyama Yukihiro have depicted trends in postwar kamishibai associations, commerce, and legislation as highly creative, revolutionary, and above all, democratic in nature since they judiciously utilized extant threads of personal and commercial connection to keep production going while deferring to a diverse group of professionals to collectively drive industry change. 5 "この時期、街頭紙芝居に目を転じると、製作所は東京で唯一「正ちゃん会」という極小製作所 がかろうじて息をしているのみで、出来上がったものも東京では配給ルートが寸断され、かつ供 給量も少しなかったので到底活用しきれず、地方へ送り出されていた。" "In this historical moment the focus of street-corner kamishibai shifts, and a factory in Tokyo, the unique Macchan Association as it was called, putt-putted along, and actually accomplished things even as the distribution roots in Tokyo had fallen apart and the supply feed was extremely weak, without focusing on the impossibility of the task, set off toward rural areas." Translation is my own. Ishiyama Yukihiro, Kamishibai Cultural History: Deciphering the History of Kamishibai through Archival Documents (紙芝居文化史: 資料で読み解く紙 芝居の歴史) (Tokyo: Hōbunshorin Publishers, 2011), 114. 6 " 紙芝居業者に至っては東京市中でかつては２、０００人とも２、５００人ともいわれたもの が１０人ほどとなり、飴類の配給を毎月１０日分だけ受けて営業している程度で、ほとんど壞滅 状態だった。空襲があり、学童疎開があり、飴類の枯渇、何より制作画家や業者自体が出征して いった。" "In the case of kamishibai, only 10 entrepreneurs (traders) remained-there used to be 2,000 or 2,500 traders at one time in the center of Tokyo-who vended their sweets each month on the Tenth, so for those who survived the war, business was quite dead. There were aerial attacks, evacuations of school children, and worse yet, production artists and the traders themselves were gone to the front of battle fields." Translation is my own. Ibid. 7 "商売として成り立つ条件は奪われていたのである。" "All the conditions necessary for the kamishibai industry to function were not met; the war bereaved them of everything." Translation is my own. Ibid., 115. 17 In Osaka as elsewhere in Japan, the effects of kamishibai reformation on a national level, led by participants in Tokyo, would have had a profound effect on the creative and commercial practices of kamishibai. In October the Japanese Kamishibai Association established Sōma Taizō as its representative, and Saki Akio assumed the post of Executive director.8 Ishiyama Yukihiro identifies this as evidence that kamishibai (both educational and commercial) collectively desired to represent their interests and play a part in furthering postwar democracy.9 Situating itself as the successor to the prewar Japanese Educational Kamishibai Association, the postwar Japanese Kamishibai Association began to publish the Kamishibai journal. And democratic advancement culminated in March of 1948 (Shōwa year 23) with formation of the "Democratic People's Kamishibai Assembly," led by Chairperson Saki Akio, with Inaniwa Keiko, Horio Seishi, Takahashi Gosan, and Sōma Taizō from the educational side, as well as Kata Kōji, Nagamatsu Takeo, and Matsui Mitsuyoshi, Kako Satoko, and Dohen Yashushiko from the commercial side, collectively enrolling as the main forces behind the movement. This movement diverged in two different directions, however, in November of 1950 (Shōwa year 25), when the educational arm formed the "Educational Kamishibai Collegium," moving toward the formation of a joint stock company, and the commercial side, the "Japanese Kamishibai Gentō," or "Japanese Kamishibai Phantasmagoria," the later term recalling the visual sensationalism of popular lantern theaters that were popular in Japan and globally from around the Nineteenth Century. 8Ishiyama, Kamishibai Cultural History, 114-136. 9 "それまで、対立的にあった教育紙芝居系と街頭紙芝居系が共に戦後民主主義推進に一役買おう というもので、紙芝居制作で相互協力をしていこうというものだった。" "The educational and street-corner kamishibai systems who once competed now, together, were playing a role in promoting postwar democracy, building mutual cooperation in kamishibai production." Translation is my own. Ibid., 115. 18 Kamishibai's newly reiterated postwar identity in this moment is characterized by a diversity of interests and efforts. Further, not limiting heeded voices to the old guard of professionals that were already entrenched in kamishibai production, Ishiyama says, the creative field resonated with the new, fresh ideas and creations of amateurs and professionals alike, in a highly revolutionary manner.10 Kamishibai in this moment allowed itself to change and grow organically, according to the voices of any and all willing participants. Yet, despite suffering the loss of its practicing professionals, materials, and supply chains, kamishibai began an extreme overhaul by which its participants placed the creative form in staunch contrast to wartime national policy (propagandist) kamishibai. Practitioners and creators carved out a new identity for the medium through the (re)formation of its association structures and a (re)presenting of its identity in the political arena. Working to both differentiate itself from national policy campaigns that employed kamishibai as a conduit for propagandist messages in wartime, and to (re)present creative practice in a new and diverse light, figures like Kata Kōji, Sōma Taizō, Otani Shino, and Mizuki Shigeru in Tokyo collectively inaugurated new gaitō kamishibai associations and factories and made possible the massive distribution of new picture-stories through which kamishibai was effectively reborn as a new and separate postwar form of creative production.11 Beginning in December of 1945, Kata and Sōma worked toward the opening of the "Friends Association" factory for gaitō kamishibai 10専門作家によらない作品が、流通ルートに継続的にのることは、当時として画期的だった。" "Not relying on professional writers, the group resonated with the revolutionary tone of the historical moment to ensure the proper and continued circulation of its publications." Translation is my own. Ibid., 116. 11 See Chapter Five in Ibid. Ishiyama, Kamishibai Cultural History, 114-136. 19 picture-stories, and Otani and Mizuki launched the "New Japan Gageki [Pictorial Drama] Corporation" one month later, beginning their own distribution the following year.12 Thus, as Ishiyama puts it, "gaitō kamishibai righted itself of its own accord, and took its first [postwar] steps forward with extraordinary momentum, and even provided significant financial relief for unemployed returning war veterans."13 At first, the picture-story panels as much as the snacks sold during kamishibai performance were indeed meager products due to national shortage, but out of necessity, creativity flourished and kept the medium afloat. Kamishibai is a tangible relic of struggle, reformation, and a general shaking up of notions like individual expression and democratic participation in the postwar public sphere. 12 "加太の「黄金バット」（ただし仏像マスクタイプ）が復活し、雄谷信乃夫・滋父子による 「新日本画劇社」（葛飾）もひと月遅れで発足、翌年１月から配給を開姶している。" "Kata's Golden Bat (a Buddha-image masked type of hero) is revived, Otani Shino and Shigeru (father and son) launched the "New Japan ga-geki (picture drama) Association" (Katsushika) one month later, and they started distribution in January of the following year." Translation is my own. Ibid., 115. 13 "こうして街頭紙芝居は、自力でいち早く立ち直りの第一歩を踏み出し、復員してきた人々に、 必要に見合った数量の失業対策事業を施したことになる。以後、続々街頭紙芝居製作所が立ち上 がっていった。" "Thus gaitō kamishibai righted itself of its own, and took its first step forward with extraordinary momentum as it subjected itself to quotas for meeting the needs of demobilized persons." Translation is my own. Ibid., 115. CHAPTER ONE KAMISHIBAI AS SUBVERSIVE SIDESHOW: THE TRICKSTER IN HIDARI HISAYOSHI'S KURAMA KO-TENGU Hidari Hisayoshi (左久良) produced his twenty-nine-volume series of narrative kamishibai panels Kurama Ko-Tengu (鞍馬小天狗, after 1947, Osaka International Children's Literature Collection) as part of the circle of kamishibai artists known as San'yūkai, founded in 1947 in Osaka, Japan. Such panel series functioned as a visual aid for the popular Japanese picture-storytelling street theater gaitō kamishibai (街頭紙芝居), most popular between circa 1925 and 1965, in which live recitation, painted images, and literary narrative work to mutually support and undermine one another simultaneously, in a curious relationship that I explore in detail below. The main character for whom the kamishibai is named is no doubt based on the fictional samurai detective Kurama Tengu, the protagonist from popular fiction novels by Osaragi Jirō (1924-59) and a 1928 silent film, even as he appears in this kamishibai in childlike stature and demeanor: a comically miniature, trickster version of the popular hero. Kurama Ko-Tengu is depicted in the title panel with confident stance and defiant smirk.14 His apple cheeks blush red, and his sharp eyes dart to the upper right-hand corner of the composition, glistening with active anticipation and deviancy (qualities he also expresses in subsequent panels). A katana 14 For images see the Osaka International Children's Literature Collection's online database of its kamishibai holdings: http://www.library.pref.osaka.jp/central/kamishibai/hb0073n/0001/hb0073n_0001.html. 21 sword juts out from his belt on his body's left side, hilt protruding perpendicular to his body, waiting to be drawn by his right hand, and the intensity of his right fist suggests that he is indeed ready to draw his sword and fight at any moment. The kamishibai hero's dark garment with white starbursts, along with his bodily arrangement with one arm pulled up and out of the sleeve and freed from its constraints, reminds of another now famous rōnin-style character, played by actor Mifune Toshiro in Kurosawa Akira's jidaigeki film Yōjinbō (用心棒 ,1961), which is set in 1860 at the end of the Tokugawa Shogunate (1603-1868). And from the depiction of garments and presence of the Shinsengumi (新選組, a special police force for the feudal bakufu, or military government) in this kamishibai picture-story, we know the setting to be roughly contemporary with that of Kurosawa's film. Kurama Ko-Tengu belongs to a class of historical fiction rogue heroes in postwar Japanese literature, film, and popular culture-often wandering rōnin (浪人, literally "wandering person," a masterless samurai)-who are characterized by erratic gesture, function as social aberrations, and often, exist within a historical drama setting where they challenge viewer expectations regarding behavior and morality. In the film Yōjinbō, for example, the rōnin hero Tsubaki Sanjūrō (a made-up alias) who is an outcast for hire singles himself out as perpetually energized, violent, and unpredictable, much like the character Kurama Ko-Tengu in this kamishibai, which serves to alienate both protagonists from their respective fictional societies. Tsubaki often draws his arms up and out of his sleeves, to stroke his chin in contemplation or merely rest his arms in a folded position inside the wrapped breast of his hakama, in something of a nervous tick that displays a childlike lack of decorum. His hands move ambiguously beneath the folds of 22 fabric in agitation in idle moments between fight scenes. The seemingly unconscious gesture becomes a sign of the hero's oddity. His propensity to fidget is a bodily manifestation of his function in reference to the community; erratic and defiant, he is uninhibited by the restrictions of the social fabric. Similarly the kamishibai hero Kurama Ko-Tengu follows suit, freeing his arm of clothing's restrictions in the title panel in a familiar signifier of the jidaigeki brand of hero to cinephiles then and now, allowing his body the freedom to act on whim. But in his small stature, caricature-like facial features, tricks, and stunts, Kurama Ko-Tengu is a shocking and comical aberration even among this class of fictional heroes. The viewer of this kamishibai cannot assume a passive role while watching this kamishibai, as both image and the nature of kamishibai performance implicates him or her in the protagonist's games. As Kurama Ko-Tengu toys with a band of corrupt Shinsengumi the viewer often embodies the perspective of the hero himself. Devices of framing and cinematic-style sequence generate a slippage between the viewer's perspective and the hero's to signify a loosening of the boundaries between the viewer's space and that depicted in the painted panels. In the first few panels of Kurama Ko-Tengu the perspective that is granted to the viewer is often approximate to that of the hero himself. We the viewer can imagine ourselves to be the hero of this story, but we also function as his witness or accomplice, legitimating his actions through our presence. As the sequence of panel compositions guides us from a perspective far above the fray into this position of the hero-witness below, then throughout fictional space in Volume 1, viewer perspective functions as a device for illuminating evidence of social injustice and presenting it to the viewer while also placing the viewer in the middle of the action as if 23 prompting him or her to act as the hero (does). When considered within the typical viewing context of gaitō kamishibai-on busy street corners, and at urban intersections of pedestrian transit, which allows the kamishibai performer to attract large groups of children with his promise of sweets and a story-this slippage between the viewer's perspective and the hero's in the panels' composition takes on meaning. Since viewers can optically explore the spaces of the story as a visual extension of their own quotidian world since they can imagine the testing and application of their own judgments in this space, the protagonist's heroics, then, unbound by pictorial or narrative space, bleed into the reality of the public sphere. Two worlds (one fictional, the other experiential) become one in this modern public mode of viewing. In what follows I analyze the kamishibai picture-story Kurama Ko-Tengu to identify inherent themes that resonate with its typical performance context. The kamishibai's samurai detective both gathers and presents evidence of injustice, but also undermines his own role as objective observer by actively and violently intervening in the actions of the Shinsengumi to oscillate between active and passive, objective and subjective, thereby permeating the usual boundaries between these disparate roles. And the live performer similarly transgresses boundaries as he intervenes in painted image via speech and gesture, breaking down the usual wall between spectacle and spectator. I therefore argue that both story and performance medium use disruption and intervention as a devices for cultivating critical and investigational skills in public viewership. I consider Kurama Ko-Tengu in connection with the distinct features of the kamishibai medium to show how it generates viewing and learning dynamics that are found in modern fiction, film, and carnival-style festivity that tend to create internal moments of 24 consideration and viewing in the space of the public sphere. Kamishibai, in a distinctly Modernist impulse identified in modern conceptual performance art by Arthur C. Danto, displays a propensity to collapse spaces of fiction and experiential life into a single jumble of ideas to upset traditional social structures and categories of understanding. The kamishibai medium continually appeals to both private/individual and public/participatory modes of consideration, blurring the line between self and society. In this, kamishibai illuminates, particularly through this example of a samurai detective story where removed surveillance and intimate intervention are carried out by a single protagonist, the roles of intervention, appropriation, (re)iteration, and creative gesture in modern Japanese and global forms of democratic performance and participation in the public sphere. In Panel 1-2 of Kurama Ko-Tengu (the first panel of the story following the title panel) the viewer gets a bird's eye view of the bridge from far above, rendering the figures below in small flicks of the paintbrush that are barely distinguishable-an objectively distant view of the action. While the Shinsengumi converge on the peasant below, the compositional perspective of the sequential panels "zoom" (to use a cinematic term) from an aerial view far above to the action below (in the following panel, 1-3), and subsequent panel compositions then oscillate between multiple perspectives to lend an intimate visual understanding of the depicted event. First as removed surveillance, then as something akin to an omnipresent, ghostly observer on the ground, the viewer's framed perspective allows him or her to gather evidence, map out the spatial dynamics of the depicted event, and insert an embodied eye into the assault of a band of Shinsengumi on a lone, cowering peasant. The viewer's gaze, which initially appears to be disembodied and 25 distant, comes to embody that of the hero. Parallel in height to the other human figures, we are presented with a glimpse of the cornered peasant from behind his Shinsengumi assaulters, seemingly from the bridge's railing on the opposite side (the precise position that the hero Kurama Ko-Tengu will occupy a few panels later). In the very next panel (1-4) we see the same arrangement of figures from behind the peasant, his back and head appearing in the extreme foreground and blocking our view of a good portion of the bridge and assaulters. Indeed, such a quick move that evades the notice of the other figures, as none look our way, would require superhuman speed and stealth. Then suddenly, we are back on the original side of the bridge, opposite the action, in the subsequent panel. In Kurama Ko-Tengu the oscillation of vantage points from behind the Shinsengumi assaulters, then the victim, then back is highly erratic and as such builds anticipation for impending action in the viewer while providing an ideal view-in-the-round (which the wide-eyed viewer would strain to assemble as images are presented). It lends a detailed understanding of the situation; the viewer is now well-informed and able to make judgments on the apparent injustice of the assault. We see the Shinsengumi leader close in with his sword on the cowering victim (1-5 and 1-6, as he gets closer and closer). Then, in 1-7, the hero appears. He suddenly sits perched on the top railing in the viewer's immediate foreground without explanation, precisely where the viewer's visual exploration of the fray in detail first began, causing the viewer in retrospect to realize that this embodied, erratic perspective approximated that of the hero. Kurama Ko-Tengu seems to appear out of nowhere since earlier depictions of the bridge from above did not include his figure. The movement of his agile body through space in ghostly, clandestine 26 style relates to his character's vocation as detective. His critical gaze is swift. It works to amass evidence for judgment of the injustice at hand. But it also provides evidence of a moral rational for his intervention in the event, as then he comes to the rescue of the lone unarmed peasant. No sooner does he appear, then he leaps into action to intervene. The gaze of the hero-viewer does not remain distanced from the event, but materializes with the body of the hero to actively intervene in the progression of events. Our initial sleuthing (the viewer-as-hero's) leads to active intervention; we gather evidence, serve as witness, then dole out punishment in an instantaneous, muddled version of democratic process fueled by visual investigation. This too attests to the kamishibai medium's ability to break down the usual distance between viewer and spectacle, by creating an active investment and soliciting interaction. This interaction can take place in mental fantasy alone, but as I witnessed in Osaka, in live kamishibai performance children tend to blurt out orders for the hero to act against the villains when narrative tension comes to a head, in highly interactive fashion; the removed realm of visual narrative is directly confronted by the voices of the viewers, as they attempt to will the progression of narrative themselves. Kurama Ko-Tengu proves himself to be a keen, sly investigator time and again in this picture-story. In Volume 4 the Shinsengumi plots to poison the hero and his sidekick by contaminating the food served to them at an inn, coercing the owner to participate in their plan. A stray cat wanders in by chance and draws the hero's attention to the food, cuing him to realize that something is wrong (Volume 5). The cat draws attention to a potential danger for the hero to sort out, aptly paralleling the role of the performer of kamishibai who gestures at narrative and visual elements but does not solve issues of 27 meaning or prescribe a particular reaction for the independent and critical viewer-investigator. While both cat and sidekick fall prey to the poisoned food, Kurama Ko- Tengu does not. In Panel 5-10 we see the hero, one knee on the ground, left foot poised to propel him with force toward the door, fist on sword hilt in readiness, and piercing gaze aimed at the door in expectation that his foes will soon enter, we see that visual and physical readiness are complementary traits in the detective. A keen observer, he listens at the door (Panel 6-2), then settles on a game of trickery in lieu of direct combat and allows the Shinsengumi to find him seemingly unconscious, as though he too has eaten the poisoned food, with the other two. The Shinsengumi carry him and his sidekick to a nearby well and toss them in to dispose of them, but the hero then leaps from the well to attack when the Shinsengumi least expect it. His practical application of the senses toward critical investigation has provided an ideal opportunity. Kurama Ko-Tengu is a samurai detective (like his counterpart in Osaragi's novels and the silent film). He is calculating, patient, and critical in his evaluation of situations, but also a force in battle. His two roles (passive and active, contemplative and rash) vie for control of the character at various moments in the story. Duality in the character Kurama Ko-Tengu, who is at once a detective (passive, methodical) and warrior (active, volatile) reminds of the duality of the kamishibai performer himself, who is both a passive conduit for narrative and active interventionist. The complicated interplay of these two roles activates viewer interest and tests critical subjectivity. Both hero and the medium that bring him to life are characterized by competing opposites, passive and active. The hero's transition from ghostly observer to fearsome intervening protector is a sudden frustration to the Shinsengumi. He disrupts the 28 flow of events and subordinates them to his own set of mores. Similarly, the kamishibai performer intervenes in the interval to hijack visual narrative, adding and augmenting meaning, and in the process soliciting the viewer to do the same. This kamishibai privileges critical (visual) investigation, modeled in narrative ideal by Kurama Ko-Tengu as a detective, whose gaze is shared and merged with that of the viewer. As narrative tension builds the hero leaps in to intervene, and the viewer-participant works in tandem with the performer to personally guide narrative meaning. To refer to kamishibai as picture-storytelling is perhaps misleading since it does not merely relay the story from image to viewer (although this part of how it is conceived by the panel artist). Rather, the narrative is carefully unpacked, questioned, predicted, and revised in the moment by both viewer and performer in an atmosphere of democratic participation that privileges individual subjectivity. The cinematic-style sequencing that progresses the visual narrative, one painted panel to the next, is at odds with the picture-story's themes of interruption and intervention. Similar to cinematic montage the panel format structures an ordered viewing through its sequential painted images.15 This is something that is visible in Kurama Ko-Tengu, in the first few panels in particular, as each sequential panel's perspective carries the viewer through space and into the action below with authoritative power. Knowledge of the event is gained incrementally via the sequential presentation of painted panels that propel the viewer through the narrative. Like frames on a film reel presented at a much slower pace than twenty-four frames per second, the visual sequence 15 Kamishibai artist and theorist Kata Kōji cites the filmic work of Sergei Eisenstein, 1898-1948, and Vsevolod Pudovkin, 1893-1953, on montage in cinema as particularly formative to his own work and that of others in kamishibai. See Orbaugh, "Kamishibai and the Art of the Interval," Mechademia 7, No. 1 (2012): 78-100, 86. 29 pulls the viewer along in a preset rhythm, dictated by the panels' painter. Acknowledging this, Sharalyn Orbaugh has argued that kamishibai's sequential format has the potential to create a streamlined narrative, prepackaged for viewer consumption, making it an ideal conduit for primary education and propaganda messages in that it relays a message in its complete, ordered form to the viewer.16 Neat, constant, and indeed much like a film, the narrative flows into viewer consciousness and retains connections between narrative points, one panel to the next, to adhere itself in totality to the individual mind. But Orbaugh also identifies an internal struggle within the kamishibai medium itself, between its sequential prefabricated panels and its live performer, where the latter functions as a disruptor of the preordained visual narrative flow through gesture; choices in how, when, and at what speed the panels are cycled through; and improvised additions or changes to the story written on the verso of the painted panels that is intended to serve as a script. Sharalyn Orbaugh characterizes kamishibai as a medium based on visual and narrative interval, which is the conceptual space where disruption occurs.17 The space between one panel and the next-that pause or switch where the live performer shuffles to a new painted panel-is what for Orbaugh is the most distinctive feature of the medium, and it is these intervals that undermine the structure of ordered viewing. In these moments, these "intervals," the performer (as I witnessed in the summer of 2014 at a kamishibai 16 Sharalyn Orbaugh differentiates between kyōiku kamishibai (教育紙芝居, or "educational" kamishibai) that could be (and occasionally, still is) found in children's classrooms, and gaitō kamishibai, the commercial version performed in public spaces for a profit, for which this story of Kurama Ko-Tengu would have been used. See for example her latest book But during Japan's Fifteen Years' War (1931-45) and the Allied Occupation (1945-52) kyōiku kamishibai also appeared at the nexus of public life, as highly-formulated, predigested stories with propagandist underpinnings produced under the eye of the government-backed Japan Educational Kamishibai Association (日本教育紙芝居協会) during the war, and SCAP afterward. See her Propaganda Performed: Kamishibai in Japan's Fifteen Year War and "How the Pendulum Swings: Kamishibai and Censorship under the Allied Occupation," in Tomi Suzuki, Hirokazu Toeda, Hikari Hori and Kazushige Munakata, eds., Censorship, Media and Literary Culture in Japan: From Edo to Postwar (Tokyo: Shin'yôsha, 2012), 161-174. 17 Sharalyn Orbaugh, "Kamishibai and the Art of the Interval," 78-100. 30 performance in the courtyard of Senkōji, a Buddhist temple in Osaka, Japan) can hijack the narrative, retarding the progression between panels, using the overlap of the previous panel and the next to hide or emphasize painted elements or to completely stop the narrative flow to banter with the audience or tell a joke. The interval is not a mere oversight or liability in kamishibai picture-storytelling, but is the temporal site in which narrative is made in the moment via the interaction between image, performer, and audience member. At Senkōji in Osaka in the summer of 2014, I watched as the performer explained with animated gesture and emphatic voice the picture-story of Niji ni Natta Kitsune (The Fox Who Became a Rainbow), in which the fox Gorozaemon turns himself into a rainbow to help an old man. Sometimes, as the performer switched between panels, she would leave the top panel covering part of the next one, to help the children focus on the character or event on one side of the next picture before revealing the other side. And in anticipation, agitated by this pause, the children would shout out what they thought would be underneath the edge of the last panel, predicting the flow of the narrative. Sometimes the children guessed correctly, and sometimes they were surprised, but what interested me was the way in which the children's active participation allowed them to weave their own stories, and act as their own storytellers. They listened to the speaker, looked at the pictures, and drafted their own version of the story, step-by-step, based on the information already presented. In the interval, the viewer mentally compensates through memory and prediction (perhaps aided by the performer's voice and bodily gesture) to fill the visual gap. And this is often encouraged by solicitations from the performer: "what will the hero do next?" Orbaugh asserts the performative disruption of image in kamishibai performance 31 to be a challenge to Cartesian Perspectivalism in which rational scientific categories of understanding and the overall stability of the individual as autonomous and separate from their environment is disrupted. Image can be penetrated by voice and bodily gesture, and this penetration can interfere with the individual's mental processing of the picture-story, thus rendering the self and environment as fluid and connected. And the effect of this perspectival disruption is the activation of critical subjectivity in the viewer. But in Kurama Ko-Tengu, intervention is not just an attribute of performance; it is a visual and narrative theme in the picture-story itself. The protagonist inserts himself into the conflict between Shinsengumi and peasant and otherwise works to undermine the Shinsengumi's authority and interrupt their plans over the progression of volumes. Similarly, in real time, performer and participant use intervention to revise narrative and question traditional understanding. There is a potential for runaway narratives that take on new meaning through performance and individual reception. By facilitating the critical dismantling of events presented to the viewer, this particular picture-story privileges anarchy and outburst. In terms of image, message, and the way it granted a public forum to volatile and creative orators, commercial kamsihibai was a frustration to be mitigated through regulation by national policymakers in postwar Japan. On August 11, 1950, Osaka Ordinance No. 67 entered into effect (and remained so until its repeal in 1973), which mandated licensing and standards for the professional practice of kamishibai. Kamishibai as a performance is described as either the explanation (setsumei, 説明) or oral presentation (kōen, 口演, which denotes creative performance rather than the mere relaying of information) of paintings, photos, or puppet dramas. The ordinance identifies the potential for each, seemingly, to get at the variation 32 between "educational" (often, propagandist) versus creative, for-profit types of the medium. The expressed purpose of this ordinance (in Article 1) is to tighten regulations for the performance of kamishibai in order to protect child welfare (jidō fukushi, 児童福 祉), but this can be interpreted to mean physical welfare (health and safety) as much as psychological welfare, considering the didactic nature of kamishibai performance. Further, while rules on health and safety may seem objective and obvious to most individuals (ensuring that the snacks sold are safe, and that attending the performance will not somehow result in bodily harm), what constitutes "foundations in common sense" (Kaname-na kiso jōshiki 要な基礎常識) is less clear-cut. Poised to degrade body and mind, both story and its entertainment medium perhaps present a potential threat to child welfare and "foundations in common sense." Kurama Ko-Tengu is indeed pervaded by scenes of danger, cruel humor, and anarchy, and its viewing would have included the consumption of some (likely homemade) sweets purchased from the performer. The protagonist serves as a nuisance who intervenes in official efforts for control and order. A fidgety, volatile, yet keen force for nothing but his own cause, he is a liability in the public sphere. And I offer that the itinerant performers of gaitō kamishibai filled a similar niche in the minds of lawmakers, threatening to unravel efforts of national order by encouraging critical subjectivity and outburst in a public context. Based in the intervention and manipulation of narratives, the kamishibai performer is indeed like a rogue virus that infects traditional stories and wreaks havoc with subjectivity in the mind of the viewer. Just as Kurama Ko-Tengu inserts himself into the fray at opportune moments, the kamishibai performer similarly sets up camp and interrupts the daily rhythm of spaces where maximum attendance is assured. Performing 33 the role of detective, pointing to particularly salient elements of image and stretching out key moments of the narrative for the viewer, the kamishibai performer infects, via disruption, the otherwise automatic progressions of social exchange, labor, and play in the public sphere. And he morphs the viewer into an active participant, accomplice, or aggressor even, mutating the experience into something recognized as potentially abnormal, especially in comparison with the highly controlled, formulaic versions of kamishibai used for education and propaganda discussed by Orbaugh. The regulation and requirement of licensing is something that also happens in the benshi (弁士, "lecturer," or "rhetorician") tradition in Japan, where a live performer relays filmic narrative and performs character voices adjacent to the film screen in the time before talking pictures, a commonality that allows kamishibai to be situated within a larger realm of popular performance (and national discourse regarding such performance) in modern Japan. Popular for roughly the first two decades of the Twentieth Century, benshi initially had a fair amount of autonomy in their oral recitation and were viewed as creative artists, which made them celebrities in the public sphere. Not merely an accessory to the moving pictures of silent film, they were revered for their ability to manipulate the audience's reception of the film, and even function as a spectacle in their own right. In later years, however, the institutionalization of benshi practice realized through a standard licensing program rendered the benshi more similar to primary school teachers than creative performers in that they were now tested on mandatory knowledge of historical and cultural trivia-preapproved elements to be regurgitated during performance, rather than original improvisation and stage presence. Morphing from actor to educator, their skill set migrated from the realm of ephemeral improvisation to 34 previously acquired knowledge, rendering performance automatic and uncreative.18 It seems that here too the combination of creativity with didactic license is cause for concern on the part of the Japanese government. And I argue that this concern has to do with the performed role of the rhetorician (in both benshi and kamishibai performance) as a "detective," who along with the subjective viewer unpacks visual and narrative form through critical investigation. In "Narrating the Detective: Nansensu, Silent Film Benshi Performances and Tokugawa Musei's Absurdist Detective Fiction" Kyōko Ōmori shows how one of the most famous benshi performers of all time, Tokugawa Musei, integrates the nonsensical style of benshi cinematic commentary into his literary work in detective fiction, upsetting the usual boundaries between modes of creative production and challenging notions of modern entertainment consumption.19 "The drastic modernization of the 1920s-30s in Japan prompted literary works that attempted to go beyond realism in portraying the conditions of modernity," Ōmori claims, and "nansensu [nonsense], which could encompass both thematic innovation and formal experimentation [in benshi improvisation as much as the perimeters of realist fiction], was one way of addressing the unevenness of the changes through which [moderns] were living."20 The benshi performer-turned-realist detective fiction writer openly questioned in a variety of venues the static concepts of the self as separate from society and 18 In Hideaki Fujiki's "Benshi as Stars: The Irony of the Popularity and Respectability of Voice Performers in Japanese Cinema," Cinema Journal 45, No. 2 (Winter 2006): pp. 68-84, Fujiki situates her article within a conversation already taking place between two schools of thought on the historical place of benshi: the first led by Noel Burch and Joseph L. Anderson, who "essentialize the benshi's performances by describing them as a distinctive trait of Japanese cinema," and the second led by Aaron Gerow and Jeffrey A. Dym, who "shed light on how the benshi's performance and social position changed in their historical context," 69. As mere expositor or original creator of ideas, the benshi was paradoxically viewed as both celebrity artist and mere presenter of cinematic art proper. 19 Japan Forum 21, No. 1 (2009): 75-93. 20 Hideaki Fujiki, "Benshi as Stars," 75-76. 35 environment and of literary genres as distinct and separate.21 He thus adapted his approach to oral performance as a benshi as a device to use in his detective fiction writing. Specifically appropriating aspects of benshi narration like maesetsumei, (introductory remarks), nakasetsumei (parallel narration and running commentary), and mandan (comic chat), he used such devices to interrupt the flow of narrative and unravel the genre itself. Musei reveals genres and types of creative production to be permeable and unstable and confuses fictional detective (the character who usually interjects with such remarks) with benshi performer. Ōmori pokes holes in the façade that maintains creative production as separate from "real life," similar to how the performer in kamishibai chips away at painterly compositions, contained by their panel format, to unhinge the gate between the viewer's space and that of the narrative. In Ōmori's fiction these effects are the result of integration and reappropriation from one form of creative production to another, from performance to fiction. Here, narrative structure in the novel takes cues from live performance, and fiction approximates in surrealist fashion the ephemeral experience of watching the benshi. In Kurama Ko-Tengu the same thing happens as viewer perspective embodies that of the protagonist, and the comic hero enacts his comical disruptions, like the kamishibai performer himself. In both Ōmori's benshi-reminiscent detective fiction and the live performance of the Kurama Ko-Tengu picture-story the detective persona plays host to concepts of investigation, criticality, and upset. Uninhibited by the boundaries of creative production, art and life exist in contingency. Nansensu for the benshi-author and his contemporaries was not merely an attack on contemporary forms of entertainment; it was an intellectual exercise, and a challenge 21 Ibid., 76. 36 to which the viewer (in benshi) or reader (in detective fiction) would hopefully rise. Shinseinen, which published Musei's detective stories, asserted that "nansensu provides readers with the opportunity to decode or discern the satirical messages that are implied but not expressed in a straightforward manner."22 Nansensu, a conceptual, absurdist, even avant garde tool, chips away at the façade of realism and energizes original thought by transcending logical connections or categories. And I offer that kamishibai, via its constant interventions of performance into image, of spectacle into the realm of daily life, and of viewer into performance, works in much the same way. As a populist form of entertainment, it privileges the practical exercise of modern democratic subjectivity in connection with a specialized style of performance. Challenging preestablished notions of "common sense" as the Osaka ordinance identifies, the kamishibai performer solicits playful outburst, in effect, "nonsense," similar to the benshi Musei and his detective fiction. Performance in kamishibai is characterized by creative intervention and disruption, and in Kurama Ko-Tengu the fictional hero aptly echoes the performer's tendency for disruption and shock in his own fictional public sphere, specifically, through devices of trickery. After fighting in traditional samurai fashion with his sword (Volumes 1 and 2), Kurama Ko-Tengu pulls a pistol on the Shinsengumi, frightening them away and ending the skirmish. This is an interestingly abrupt gesture on the part of both panel artist and his painted hero that perhaps violates the honor code of the fictional jidaigeki hero, who almost always fights with a sword even if his enemy has a gun. It ruptures the timelessness of this historical drama-style narrative by bringing it into a decidedly 22 Ōmori, page 82, translating Ōya Sōichi's ‘Bungaku no jidai-teki hitsuzen-sei' (The necessary conditions of literature vary as time passes), Bungaku jidai 2, No. 1 (1930): 14-18. 37 modern technological period, and even undermines the appeal of the hero himself, as it functions as a cheat or trump card to end the fight. Even in Kurosawa's Yōjinbō, a gun is associated with corruption and underhandedness, traditionally kept separate from the moral hero. In the film's iconic battle scene where the hero faces his opponent Unosuke (Tatsuya Nakadai), both figures stride toward each other with directness and resolve, but instead of reaching for his sword Unosuke pulls a pistol from the breast of his hakama, and directs it at the protagonist with spiteful enjoyment. In this scene the hero, undeterred by the gun, calmly and powerfully (despite his childlike antics in other scenes) extends his fists out the holes of his sleeves where he usually holds them in calm, confident repose and meets his opponent in battle head-on with his sword. But Kurama Ko-Tengu is not a hero constrained by such a code of ethics, nor by the confines of the jidaigeki narrative genre of traditional Japanese samurai heroes; he never meets his opponents head-on. Further, Kurama Ko-Tengu in this kamishibai uses the gun as a device of trickery, not to win the battle by actually shooting his opponents, to undermine expectations from both the viewer and his enemies in the narrative. We see at the end of Volume 2 when the hero turns the gun on his goofy sidekick that it is actually just a water gun, a toy, and that his cunning move that scared away the attackers was a mere bluff. He squirts the water in his sidekick's face, and the sidekick's mixed facial expression of entertainment, awe, and exasperation would likely be accompanied by outbursts of bewildered laughter from viewers when the story was performed. Kurama Ko-Tengu's rose-colored cheeks, salty insults, and pranks align him with an almost Vaudevillian style of performative comedy, with its reliance on physical humor and props. In Volume 7 the hero rudely wakes his 38 sidekick from his drug-induced sleep with a bucket of cold water that shocks and animates the lanky sidekick in a pantomimic, humorous way. His tactics are awkward, funny, and questionable at times, but always lead to victory over the bumbling arm of the feudal bakufu. His unexpected tricks occasionally leave the viewer bewildered and forced to confront the limits of their own morality, when the hero behaves unheroically, in direct affront to the jidaigeki canon. Kurama Ko-Tengu is a subversive trickster who uses shock and humor, often to undermine (corrupt) civic authority and jostle preconceived categories of moral understanding. In both his continual disruption of narrative flow and viewer expectations, and his visual appearance as small, oddly childlike, yet conniving and fearsome-he is not statuesque and severe like the actor who plays Kurama Tengu in the silent film, nor does he imploy the intimidating swagger popularized by Toshiro Mifune. But the kamishibai character does fit well into a global theatrical role played by comical, trickster characters in carnival and theater, who generate what Susan Stewart terms the "symbolic inversion" of, or an intervention in, customary viewing.23 The trickster (like Kurama Ko- Tengu) is "a spirit of creativity, a refuser of rigid systems," Stewart says, who appears in a wealth of cross-cultural examples.24 The trickster brings wreckage and disruption, but also positive change and eventual improvement to society (Kurama Ko-Tengu, for example, frightens and shocks, but also restores autonomy and safety to the downtrodden). In this "space occupied by the other, the space of dialogue," Stewart says, speaking to the place of the grotesque figure in the public sphere, roles are unspecialized, hierarchy is overturned, and "the performer must engage with face-to-face 23 Susan Stewart, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection (Durham: Duke University Press, 1984). 24 Ibid., 106. 39 communication with the audience."25 Like Kurama Ko-Tengu who hurls himself into the fray, the kamishibaiya inserts himself into public life and invites viewers to break down the distance between him and them. Confronted by the grotesque, the liminal, and the confusing, the individual engages the subject in democratic reciprocity. The unexpected or abnormal appearance of the character disrupts narrative flow by undermining viewer expectations, like Kurama Ko-Tengu, whose stature does not coincide with the usual depictions of tall, strong samurai heroes in Japanese literature and visual culture. The hero's smallness and willingness to use unsavory gimmicks that rupture the concept of the historical hero allow him to intervene in the usual viewing or consumption process: a "trick" on the viewer to-be-countered with mental agility. In particular, Kurama Ko-Tengu dismantles the traditional representation of the body through verticality (he is half the height of his foes), a trope often found in the bodily representations of the miniature and grotesque, Stewart says. Stewart points out that the phenomena of the grotesque trickster in entertainment historically function (in the European tradition, anyway) as a "mechanism for change and revolution, and as [a] ‘safety valve' for an otherwise turbulent populace."26 Linked to a Renaissance culture of the carnival grotesque, the trickster for Stewart belongs to a "‘second life' of the masses, a life of antiorder and vernacular authority as opposed to the official doctrines of religious and state institution."27 Kurama Ko-Tengu's trickster persona in this kamishibai holds significant interest in this context, for he is both depicted as trickster who sews disorder and causes confusion in his narrative realm. But as a visual element in kamishibai performance, his depicted gestures of insurrection aptly mirror that which the 25 Ibid., 107. 26 Ibid., 106. 27 Ibid., 106. 40 kamishibai performer solicits from his audience who challenges narrative and banters with the performer. As an ephemeral sideshow to the course of daily life, kamishibai provides a momentary distraction akin to carnival spectacle.28 And in this particular kamishibai the trickster hero provides even further resonance with the carnival and its grotesque figures. But Stewart also points out that such festivities surrounding the grotesque trickster have a history of being taken up as symbols of revolution in times of class conflict.29 This happens when "[t]he [grotesque] body is paraded, put on display, in time as well as in space…" in a context that allows "little or no division between participants and audience."30 In this way the grotesque is "apprehended," Stewart's word, in what Phillip Fisher calls the "democratic space" of lateral viewing, parallel and in immediate proximity to the viewer in their own space. The trickster, the grotesque figure, confronts the viewer on equal footing in this latter scenario, soliciting interaction and critical appraisal, even as (s)he serves as a subject of viewing entertainment. The realm of the trickster character in entertainment, in other words, fosters a space for the working-through of newly disturbed ideas concerning identity and politics, on the part of performer and viewer alike. In this arena where boundaries fall apart (and can be moved and replaced in the mind of the viewer) radical changes in subjectivity can occur. And kamishibai like those grotesque spectacles of the carnival similarly functioned as a spectacle of oddity against which individuals could evaluate their own notions (and 28 Scholars of kamishibai such as Sharalyn Orbaugh, but also others of similar historical modes of picture-storytelling throughout Asia have pointed out the similarity between kamshibai and other modern forms of street theater in Japan that took place within the context of the carnival, or misemono, such as nozoki megane (覗き眼鏡, "peeping spectacles," or the peep-box). In nozoki megane a passing attendee of the carnival would be solicited to look through an optical device, into a panoramic box with a painted or printed composition. A live orator standing next to the peep-box would then explain the composition to the viewer. See Maki Fukuoka, "Contextualising the Peep-Box in Tokugawa Japan," Early Popular Visual Culture 3, No. 1 (May 2005). 29 Stewart, On Longing, 106-07. 30 Ibid., 107. 41 frustrations) of changing modernity in postwar Japan. It is not just the comical, grotesque protagonist in this kamishibai, but the medium's overall structure that disturbs. Kamishibai exhibits a Modernist impulse similar to much of twentieth-century performance art to disturb boundaries between creative mediums (specifically painting and performance) and spatial or temporal categories of understanding (by bringing the far-off near to the viewer, and the long-ago into the present moment). Arthur C. Danto explains how twentieth-century performance art (and other forms of Modernist art) seeks to call into question the boundaries between art, its philosophy, and life by existing on the edge of the previously-conceived limits of art as something "marked by a curious ephemerality and indefinition."31 Via the confusion of boundaries of understanding, the rejection of distance between image and its tangible referent, Modernist performance art can achieve a transformation of the rules of viewing. As the kamishibai performer solicits narrative predictions from the audience, allowing them to become narrative specialists and even embody the moral framework of story and protagonist, I argue, a slippage similar to that identified by Danto in Modernist performance art-between viewer, performer, and elements of the picture-story-occurs. The "trick," as it were, is the implication of the viewer as protagonist and as performer, that they are thoroughly enmeshed in the tangled web of visual-literary life. In this kamishibai the protagonist Kurama Ko-Tengu fills two roles: detective and vigilante enforcer, although the latter sometimes seems a coincidental byproduct of his comical, anarchist stunts that, more than anything, make the Shinsengumi look a fool, thus undermining authority. The viewer is then left to realize for him or herself the 31 Arthur Danto, "Art and Disturbation," Formations (Winter 1985). See the essay's reprinting as a chapter of Danto's book The Philosophical Disenfranchisement of Art (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), 119. 42 relative merits and faults of the hero's actions as both protagonist and villains alike are examined in the judicial arena presided over by the viewer-participant. But via the interactivity of the medium, the viewer is also implicated in the transgressions carried out by the hero, as his embodied gaze, in a wonderful rupture of Cartesian perspectivalism, as Sharalyn Orbauh says. Kurama Ko-Tengu illuminates social injustices and patterns in human behavior, revealing them to the audience, through painterly composition and live recitation. This is the aggressive, didactic aspect of kamishibai that relays narrative and meaning "as they are" to the viewer, prefabricated and continuous. But through consistent disruption (of image viewing by the performer's gestures or voice, of viewer expectations through shock and unforeseen actions on the part of the main character, and in general, of the quotidian rhythm of public life by the popular performance) kamishibai undermines its own materiality and conceptual authority, thus poking holes in the façade of the boundedness of art from life, of fiction and "reality." The character Kurama Ko-Tengu delights in upsetting proceedings as usual, those traditional expectations that render public life static and oppressive. And in this, despite his historical setting, he is a figure of modernity who privileges change and the reshuffling of categories of understanding. In his role as detective, he inspires a process of critical investigation in the viewer, but does not allows the viewer to remain static, surveying from a distance. Instead, via the hero's example, and the integrated, interactive nature of kamishibai, the individual remains just that: autonomous in his or her subjectivity, but thoroughly enmeshed in the issues of changing narratives and understandings that characterize modernity. Stewart places the carnival experience (where the grotesque figure mingles with the populace) in contrast to that of the spectacle, where the viewer is "absolutely aware of the distance between the 43 self and spectacle."32 The spectacle is outside (the viewer and his or her immediate space) at all times and viewed with a directional gaze, whereas the carnival transgresses boundaries of the self through intermingling and inclusion, and harnesses a reciprocal ("democratic") gaze. And this latter space, characterized by confusion and criticality, is where both Kurama Ko-Tengu and his kamishibai medium reside. 32 Stewart, On Longing, 108. CHAPTER TWO THE STORIES WE ARE TOLD, THE STORIES WE TELL OURSELVES: ABARENBŌ SAZEN, JIDAIGEKI, TRAUMA, AND MEMORY Like the protagonist of the kamishibai picture-story Kurama Ko-Tengu that was analyzed in Chapter One, the protagonist in Yamamoto Gohare (山本梧晴) and Sado Masashi's (佐渡 正士) Abarenbō Sazen (暴れん坊左膳, Rowdy Sazen, created after 1947, Osaka International Children's Literature Collection), which was also created for the postwar Osaka circle known as San'yūkai, is a rogue samurai warrior, a rōnin.33 Tange Sazen is a jidaigeki-style protagonist who first appeared in a serialized newspaper novel in 1927 and numerous film adaptations in 1928, 1935, 1960, 1966, and most recently in 2004. Jidaigeki (時代劇, costume drama or period drama) is not a genre born in postwar Japan, but it certainly found popularity and an overwhelming rate of consumption, as evidenced by the many filmic iterations of Tange Sazen's story that debuted in the years following the Allied Occupation, and by the success of Kurosawa Akira's jidaigeki films from around the same time. During this time the economy, starting at a point of extreme depression at the end of the war, saw drastic improvement, and discretionary income increased as a result, allowing for such consumption. And starting in 1952 with the end of the Allied Occupation, the volume of entertainment 33 For images see the Osaka International Children's Library Website: http://www.library.pref.osaka.jp/central/kamishibai/hb0002n/0001/hb0002n_0001.html. 45 available for consumption increased exponentially as SCAP (Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers) lifted bans and censorship, such as those that had kept films like Kurosawa Akira's 1945 jidaigeki-style Tora no o o Fumu Otokotachi (虎の尾を踏む男 達, The Men who Step on the Tiger's Tale) hidden from the public's eyes. With a newfound freedom of consumption and discretionary income to satiate personal taste, a diaphanous public of individuals patronized the postwar jidaigeki current and ensured its propagation. This chapter unpacks the relationship between the kamishibai Abarenbō Sazen and the jidaigeki genre that transcends any single medium of popular entertainment in the postwar period to show how it invokes and negotiates this popular style of storytelling. Specifically, it exemplifies how jidaigeki can spark the examination of traumatic histories from a modern standpoint and speak to modern concerns through the device of temporal displacement of the setting. Demonstrative of the rather considerable collection of jidaigeki-inspired narratives in the oeuvre of San'yūkai, where such stories comprise approximately one-third of the total holdings in the Osaka International Children's Literature Collection produced for the circle, Abarenbō Sazen participates in this genre of historical drama that found iteration in not just kamishibai, but film, serial literature, and manga in postwar Japan. The story of Tange Sazen (broadly speaking) is one that thematically privileges the trauma of loss, compounded in memory and embodied by the visibly scarred figure of the hero. The hero copes with the respective emotional and physical pain of being wounded while protecting his feudal lord, then abandoned for dead by the same, by seeking revenge on this and other feudal lords-interrupting their journeys, stealing their goods, and otherwise making fools of them-through acts of 46 vigilante justice. Variously depicted as an isolated and vagrant figure no longer bound to a feudal house, as a sword for hire, or as a vigilante for personal justice, the rōnin hero navigates his posttrauma world largely alone. In his rejection by/of nucleic society, in his identification with the adverse landscape that serves as a setting for transformation through hardship, his private negotiation of memory and trauma, and his eventual return to civilization as a shaker of oppressive powers, Tange Sazen shares much with the heroes of jidaigeki film. The San'yūkai version of the popular fictional hero's story does veer somewhat off canon with its comparatively lighter tone and its depiction of Tange Sazen as troublesome, reckless, and juvenile, although there is one precedent for the more petty depiction of the hero in the 1935 film about the character that functions as something of a comedic spoof on the more sober and dramatic 1928 silent film version. This divergence becomes particularly evident when the San'yūkai version is placed in comparison with another kamishibai concerning the same fictional protagonist now in Tokyo that signifies the more historical depiction of the hero as reticent and driven primarily by revenge.34 Instead, Abarenbō Sazen lends unexpected quirks to a well-known jidaigeki-style hero, morphing him into something at once familiar and unfamiliar, nostalgic and off putting. He invokes viewer memories of previously-viewed jidaigeki heroes, but questions and revises them through variation and narrative pastiche to bring the very idea of singular memory and canonic representation into question. In other words, cultural memory plays a prominent role as Abarenbō Sazen invokes the larger realm of jidaigeki entertainment and stories about Tange Sazen historically told threin. But cultural memory is also shown 34高橋 一京Takahashi Ichikyo, 丹下左膳(宝壷の巻) Tange Sazen: The Winding of Takaratsubo. 大空社 Oozorasha (Publisher), 紙芝居大系 Kamishibai Taikei Collection (encompasses examples from during and after World War II). Tokyo Metropolitan Library Tama Collection. 47 to be vulnerable to the particulars of the moment and the whims of memory's creator(s)-that is, the individual. In what follows, I show that while Tange Sazen is historically depicted as a scarred, broken, yet stubborn hero bent on revenge and informed by a long and weary personal existence, the San'yūkai version foregrounds instead his rather youthful, and immature character traits (magnified further by his association with two rambunctious young boys). Rather than stoic and hardened by pain, time spent in isolated struggle and thoughts of revenge, Tange Sazen is depicted here as quite immature, playful, and even indecorously bumbling (particularly in the first couple of volumes). And like his young cohort, he seems to be a less settled version of the hero, like an adolescent still undergoing the transformation to adulthood. His raison d'être is the same-he seeks to undermine and disrupt feudal power, corruption, and greed-but his methods are far more playful, agile, and tricky. In the context of academic discourses on the emergence of individualism and subjectivity that have, since that historical moment, surrounded discussions on postwar Japanese society, this aberrational depiction of Tange Sazen becomes a particularly salient example of how individual subjectivity is articulated, tested, and valued at this time-as something changeable and subject to a continual working-through on the part of the individual. Particularly through the story's invocation and commentary through comedy on a genre that has increasingly moved, as period drama film scholar S.A. Thornton puts it, from subjects of national memory to those of anonymous, unremarkable, or strange characters who negotiate historical settings via their own unique path, Abarenbō Sazen gets at the importance of storytelling in the 48 postwar period.35 Namely, I assert, it allows for the conception of the self as unique, independent, and solely responsible for personal transformation. The historical drama of jidaigeki, conflated with the history of the Japanese nation as understood in the postwar moment becomes a mirror against which this kamishibai hero is compared. Correspondingly, individual viewers can evaluate and reorganize their own personal histories, and against the formula of historically transcendent, transformed Japanese heroes, en route to envisioning a future characterized by memory yet vindicated from its trauma. Narrative (Re)iteration, Appropriation, and Negotiation In San'yūkai's Abarenbō Sazen we are not told or shown the hero's origin story (his bodily trauma and subsequent abandonment), though arguably it should be incorporated into our viewing, as the hero possesses the prominent eye scar, missing arm, stubborn scowl, and iconic white kimono made popular by actor Denjirō Ōkōchi in the 1935 film. The white robe worn by the hero is the uniform of his former master's household, although he no longer serves that house, and his body, bearing physical scars of trauma silently connotes the back story that the viewer maps on to the current manifestation of the maimed and flawed hero based on other encounters with the hero in popular entertainment. In Takahashi Ichikyo's (高橋 一京) Tokyo-made kamishibai titled Tange Sazen: Takaratsubo no Makida (丹下左膳:宝壷の巻, Ōzorasha Publishing, Tokyo Metropolitan Library Tama Collection), the artist brings into question the honor and 35S.A. Thornton, The Japanese Period Film: A Critical Analysis, (Jefferson, NC: Mc Farland & Company, Inc., 2008). 49 ethics of the young lord of the Sōma clan whom Tange once served through a sequence in which the lord threatens Tange by angrily and rashly bringing the hilt of his sword to the throat of his sworn servant during a discussion. When Tange is attacked during a mission for his lord and left for dead, he undergoes a painful transformation from lorded samurai to masterless rōnin, learning to cope with the loss of eye and limb as much as the lost part of his identity as a servant to a feudal household. He then becomes a vigilante against feudal power, targeting in particular his former lord. In various cinematic versions, this attack comes from the Sōma clan directly, as punishment for Tange's supposed betrayal. But more integral to the canon's different narrative reasons for why Tange is scarred and severed from his place of servitude are the memories of trauma themselves. Tange's anger at abandonment and eventual resolve to transform his personal character become a starting point for the hero's lone psychological journey forward. There are two major themes that are communicated visually in both the San'yūkai and Tokyo versions of this kamishibai that work to characterize the hero, speaking specifically to traumatic memory, and the pain of past transformation that the hero endures. One is the literal scarring and fragmentation of the hero's body that tells of the physical trauma endured at the moment he was severed from the Sōma clan, which I discuss here. And the second is the space in which the hero negotiates this trauma and takes action to claim his memory as his own (rather than something inflicted on him by someone else): the inhospitable, adverse landscape. I discuss this second theme in depth later on. The body becomes a vessel for lived traumatic memory and a visible record of that trauma's effects on the current Tange Sazen. The Tokyo kamishibai tells Tange's painful history through a sequence of flashbacks. In Volume 5 the hero is depicted 50 kneeling next to a stream, in the uniform of his master's clan, with a fresh, red gash that runs diagonally down his right eye, cradling his newly-severed right arm with the hand of the other. He sheds his garment to wash himself and we see, through his mind's eye as he stares laterally across the panel composition, the figure of his formal feudal lord appears in a halo of yellow as he painfully recalls his master. Bodily injury, here, is the catalyst for the review of memory. And memory opens like a gaping wound in pictorial space. It is through this flashback that we learn of the young lord's propensity to lose control of his anger and threaten his subordinates, and this initial betrayal, compounded with that of Tange's current injured state, serves to convict the feudal lord of selfishness and power abuse before the viewer. As I later discuss, drawing on the writing of S.A. Thornton, jidaigeki narratives typically offer a critique of the present, couched within a setting of temporal displacement. That is, while the historical setting and period costumes depicted distance the conflict therein and allow for apparently retrospective analysis, jidaigeki often, in actuality, resonates with current sentiments and concerns. And I offer that postwar iterations of Tange Sazen's story are no different. The stalwart persistence of the jidaigeki hero's body-fragmentary and scarred-that functions as a vessel for traumatic memory, in this kamishibai is, for example, a rather sober reminder of the wealth of writings by those who survived the atomic bombs that destroyed Nagasaki and Hiroshima in 1945, in which the fragmentary body persists as a symbol of trauma. In her book Japan's Cold War: Media, Literature, and the Law (2009) Ann Sherif explains the important impact of Hara Tamiki's writing on the postwar canon of hibakusha (被爆者, atomic bomb survivors) writing on a circle of both amateur and professional authors who 51 fostered a group antinuclear consciousness.36 For both Sherif and this school of hibakusha writers, the significance of Hara's writing lies in his ability to communicate the horrors of nuclear weapons to younger generations, in his ability to empathetically convey historical narrative. And the Tokyo version of Tange Sazen in particular shows how jidaigeki, as a genre concerned with historical memory, provides a similar opportunity for the (re)telling of trauma narratives. Specifically, this picture-story emphasizes the importance of memory through the protagonist's flashback in the Tokyo version, and the persistence of his scarred body in any and all iterations of the hero's story. Some of Hara's postwar writings, such as "Ice Flowers," have historically been understood as victimizing Japanese society. However, Sherif points out that critic Nogami Gen attempts to reframe the novella as a "report from the battlefront."37 Situating Hara's writing within an already well-known genre of firsthand accounts of soldiers at war, Nogami asserts that Hara works to embattle Japanese at the precipice of the Cold War, rather than merely lament wartime destruction in a time of recovery. In other words, Hara's account can be interpreted as not merely a mourning of loss, but a recalibration of the self in preparation for present and future encounters with challenges. While this story of Tange Sazen indeed shows the hero lamenting his abandonment and bodily trauma, memory also serves as a catalyst for personal action and progress, just as Nogami asserts Hara's writing has the potential to do. Nogami predicates his argument on Hara's personal circumstances; while he still had family and property in Hiroshima that indeed 36 Ann Sherif, Japan's Cold War: Media, Literature, and the Law, New York: Columbia University Press (2009), 90-91. 37 Nogami Gen, "Hara Tamiki igo: Aruiwa, ‘media' to shite genshi bakudan o kangaeru koto no (fu)kanōsei." Gendai shisō (August 2003): 104. Discussed in Sherif, 107. 52 tie him to memories of war and trauma, he departed Hiroshima for Tokyo (like many hibakusha who sought to escape the ruins of the A-bombed Hiroshima or Nagasaki). Alienated and struggling in Tokyo, the site of the Japanese vanguard for social change, the writer had to use introductions from friends and colleagues in order to just find rooms to rent and survive. In other words, Hara opted for self-exile and hardship away from his home, which Nogami takes as evidence that he indeed had a stake in future change. As a writer whose suicide sometimes overshadows the legacy of his writing proper, this allows us to reconsider Hara's efforts and connections to the hibakusha community; rather than a mere victim, he is a protestor, and rather than a refugee, he is a fighter. Like the wandering jidaigeki hero Tange Sazen, painful memories allow the individual to reach backward in time so as to reclaim trauma through storytelling. In San'yūkai's version, Abarenbō Sazen, when we first see the hero depicted in the sequence of Panel 1-6 (although the missing panel 1-2 could have potentially depicted the hero), it is not with a visage hardened by physical pain and the trauma of memory as we do in the Tokyo kamshibai. Instead of depicting him in a state of static repose and stalwart conviction-it seems, in the Tokyo kamishibai that Tange has already decided on the meaning of these memories-the artist of Abarenbō Sazen depicts him midmovement, in an awkward and in-between moment, midleap (or stumble). And his bodily state in flux, here, resists the viewer's reading of the hero as firmly set in character or values, in contrast to the stoic depiction of the hero in the Tokyo version. The fabric of his garment flutters up toward the top of his thighs with the motion of his body, one knee jutting out to the left, his upper body dodging in the same direction as if to avoid the paper screens, household objects, and the figure of a young boy that fly toward him from 53 the background; this is neither a static nor dignified depiction of the hero. It is as if he is completely unconcerned with performing stoicism for the gaze of a viewer, whereas the Tokyo version shows him kneeled in pained repose with frontal arrangement that assumes a viewer. The figure of Tange Sazen keeps his eyes locked on incoming projectiles in this frozen moment of complete chaos. Fully immersed in the mayhem of the moment, he considers only his own body, his own quickly shifting circumstances. The comical and awkward pandemonium depicted in this panel is the effect of a friendly scuffle between two young boys, close cohorts of the protagonist with whom he is often depicted in subsequent volumes, characters who emphasize the childlike qualities of Tange Sazen himself. The protagonist becomes entangled in their mischief in this first volume, and they in his, in later volumes. In panel 1-4 the two figures burst through the paper screens of one man's home, their bodies spiraling like cannonballs through the thin material. And one boy's bodily momentum continues into another domestic space where Tange Sazen resides. The boys generate paths of destruction that unite the street in comic turmoil. In Volume 2, an aerial perspective of the town, its wooden buildings and dirt streets forming an idealized geometric field punctuated by hardworking figures going about their daily tasks, precedes a recapitulation of the play-turned-scuffle that caused so much upset in the first volume (panels 2-2 to 2-10). The boys' mischief comes as a disruption to the order of daily life. Tange Sazen, far from showing annoyance at their games, shares in their responsibility for the destruction (panel 2-7) and walks them home (2-8). Tange displays a flexibility here, a willingness to go along with whatever challenges present themselves, similar to the protagonist at the beginning of Kurosawa's film Yōjinbō (用心棒, 1961) 54 who, coming to the intersection of several country roads in the otherwise wild landscape and eying a stick on the ground there, throws it into the air with childlike flare, watches it fall back to the ground, and follows the road in the direction that it points to continue his journey. The hero's seeming aimlessness, or rather, his lack of a hurry to find "civilization," and his leaving the path of his journey to chance and the implements of nature, designates him as something of a wild vagrant, but one who is unthreatened by the adversity of the natural world. In panel 2-8 the three figures-the protagonist in the middle, and the two boys who use crutches and wear bandages, signs of injury incurred through mischief-making-appear as three of a kind, each of their garments loose and askew, each of them displaying wounds (although Tange's are far older and more severe). Tange Sazen's lost arm and eye are downplayed as the result of childlike play and the personal lessons learned from it. He, like the children, is still in a state of personal growth and transformation, and his bodily trauma commemorates personal experience. This is not to say that the hero's history of bodily trauma is sublimated in this version of the story; to the contrary, it is a key visual cue that evokes a history and helps the viewer to understand his actions. Tange Sazen's occupation as a samurai detective and occasional sword for hire comes with the threat of harm, and even death. He has made an enemy of the local feudal lord, who seeks to kill him. The final panel of Volume 2 depicts a black-garbed ninja assassin crawling in the rafters above Tange Sazen and his associate, in advance of carrying out his plot to kill. And in panel 3-9 an unseen assassin only known to the viewer by the hand that clutches a pistol in the shadows stands poised to kill Tange Sazen who is flanked by his two young friends as they walk through the street. In the next panel we see Tange Sazen's body falling to the ground with the shot, as 55 he twists to grab at the two children and force them down as well. In the next volume we see the boys trying to rouse the unresponsive hero in the aftermath, as cloaked ninja close in on the boys. The two draw wooden weapons-their crutches on which they leaned in the previous volume-with heroic resolve to defend their friend. But then the cunning hero who only pretended to have been shot (ostensibly having secretly noticed the marksman) catches the assaulters off guard and successfully fights them off, saving himself and the boys. The hero eyes the assaulters wearily over his shoulder as they run off (panel 5-3), but the boys stand in confidence at the victory in the next panel, back-to-back with each other, one kneeling and the other standing, a wooden crutch-turned-bō staff balanced casually on the standing boy's shoulder, a comic scene suggesting that they believe that they were the true saviors in this fight. And in the following panel 5-5 the boys mirror in figural arrangement the confident stride of the protagonist. As villagers part for the samurai detective, gawking in awe, the boys stride immediately behind him in the left background, performing the role of successful hero by modelling his posture. Just as play gave way to fighting for the children in the first volume, here, true danger and violence are met with enjoyment, as battle conversely becomes a playful fantasy of heroic feat. This real danger is met with the gaze of youthful excitement, and as the two young boys experiment to find their own subjectivities by often trying on Tange's for size, we see that this jidaigeki hero, like others viewed in postwar entertainment, serves as one model, or mirror, for the working-out of identity. The two boys, like the viewers of this kamishibai, formulate personal identity in reference to the actions and appearance of the jidaigeki hero. 56 Memory, Trauma, and the Development of Subjectivity in the Postwar Moment Sazen's figural depiction in this kamishibai tells of traumatic memory, violent battles, and the grating wear of time on the hero. But his occasional light-hearted reactions (as when the children tumble through the wall of his house) and helter-skelter appearance (his kimono is not tautly wrapped, but baggy, and coming undone) suggest that a juvenile spirit lies beneath the angry visage, and this is further confirmed by his preferred choice to associate with children. They not only learn through contact with him, but he through contact with them, in contrast to his more sober, and staunchly-set personal in the Tokyo kamishibai version. He identifies with their penchant for experiment and adventure, their active readiness to jump in to a skirmish, and their desire to learn and grow through experience. In the volume of the Tokyo kamishibai discussed earlier, Tange Sazen's flashback, the visual narrative that he relays for himself and the audience within the parameters of the kamishibai picture-story occupies more panels than his actual revenge, and many of these panels depict static scenes where we can contemplate the character of both the selfish young lord and the stubbornly-resilient hero. Indeed, the mere act of telling his story (and having lived long enough to do so because he braved the wild landscape), rather than the exacting of revenge, seems to be his most important function as a hero in this narrative. The negotiation of memory here relates directly to the protagonist's status as hero; it provides a reason to fight, a reason to keep going. And while this is a story of historical fiction, the formative role that memory plays in fashioning identity resonates in theme with fiction beyond jidaigeki proper in the postwar moment. But I offer that while this kamsihibai echoes a national propensity to characterize the self through memory and 57 reflection, it also privileges the uniqueness of the individual and their particular experience, and it does not take for granted the direct correlation between the individual and the nation; memory here is personal. Namiko Kunimoto in her 2013 article, "Tanaka Atsuko's Electric Dress and the Circuits of Subjectivity," discusses the high circulation of terms like shutaisei (subjectivity) and shukan (the subject) in postwar Japan, as part of Marxist discourse led by the Communist Party.38 Such terms indeed helped to fashion a future model for the postwar the social subject, plotted as part of a longer history of development. But the term "subjectivity" also denoted a separate notion of Japanese existentialism tied to a Kierkegaardian leap of faith, "or, alternatively… an individualistic ethos that was based on Protestant ethics."39 Søren Aabye Kierkegaard (1813-1855) often spoke of the primacy of the single individual and asserted the importance of personal choice made on the basis of lived experience rather than abstract thinking.40 Concepts of morality and their effects on character and action are left to be sorted out by the individual. Both the Marxist and Kierkegaardian philosophies that circulated in the postwar Japanese public sphere speak to the theme of individual development and transformation that appears in Abarenbō Sazen. Kierkegaard places the individual in relation to the institution (the church) in a similar way to how Marxist ideology places individual subjectivity in relation to national politics. Both of these realms of thought speak to a general concern with the individual, who is part of the nation. In this context, the Tange Sazen in the San'yūkai version of the kamishibai seems to resonate with contemporary concerns for 38 Cited in Namiko Kunimoto, "Tanaka Atsuko's Electric Dress and the Circuits of Subjectivity," Art Bulletin XCV, No. 3 (September 2013), 469. 39 Ibid. 40 See for example his Edifying Discourses in Diverse Spirits, (Opbyggelige Taler i forskjellig Aand), 1847. 58 sorting out individual identity. And further, as a picture-story for children, it shows how the act of storytelling informed by the jidaigeki canon works to include even the youngest generation in public discourse. Individual identity negotiated in terms of memory was indeed a primary concern in postwar Japanese discourse, but it certainly did not proceed unhindered by other factors. Sharalyn Orbaugh, along with historian John Dower and many other writers, argues that during the Occupation Japanese collective memory underwent invasive editing, largely due to efforts from the Occupation forces. Her Japanese Fiction of the Allied Occupation: Vision, Embodiment, Identity (2007), Orbaugh analyzes how Japanese writers of fiction working during the Allied Occupation (1945-52) contributed to discourses on Japanese identity, "as influenced by the historical circumstances of war, defeat, privation, and occupation by a foreign power."41 She says that a tangible cognitive dissonance and resulting trauma to Japanese memory in this period was profoundly felt by the population who saw the near-total destruction of all major cities followed by gifts and care given by the very same troops who destroyed those cities; the rupture of imperial imagery as the divine emperor was forced to renounce his title as such and unquestioning loyalty to the empire was forcibly displaced by American-made notions of personal autonomy and democracy. The values and messages of the current occupied Japan displaced those of wartime, and the narratives-told by country, by groups, and by the individual to him (or her)self-of the previous dispensation similarly gave way to new ones. Stories told to oneself about one's past (memory or personal narrative) 41 Sharalyn Orbaugh, Japanese Fiction of the Allied Occupation: Vision, Embodiment, Identity (Boston: Brill Publishers, 2007), 3. 59 Orbaugh says, are integral to the reconstruction of identity.42 And the reconstruction of identity through narrative, through memory, "will allow a person to live through the traumatic rupture and into the visible present."43 The protagonist in Abarenbō Sazen, with his scarred, fragmented body and his continual efforts to negotiate memory through current actions (and to ostensibly bring about social change) certainly mirrors the struggle of individuals in Japan in the postwar moment; the negotiation of lived trauma, existence in an in-between moment en route to personal and social change aptly reflects the collective desire to make sense of the present and ensure a viable future by reconciling with the past. But in Tange's divorce from society, his literal abandonment and operation independent of any cohesive structure, allegorical potential here is rather limited. Tange Sazen struggles to reconcile himself with his past and to find his future, not as a member of the Japanese nation but as an individual in Japan. Tange represents the development of the particular and individual self in the postwar moment, not the development of the postwar nation. The lonely place of the hero, as separate from society, is a running theme in much of Kurosawa's jidaigeki films as well. "Kuwabatake Sanjurō" (桑畑三十郎, where Kuwabatake translates as "mulberry field," and Sanjurō as "thirty," or "thirtieth," as in familial succession), the protagonist in Yōjinbō, gives this made-up alias while staring off into a mulberry field, and we understand that this name is fabricated on the spot. His giving of a made-up name signifies the conceptual distance (in character and experience) between him and the community. And the camera's perspective often draws attention to "Kuwabatake's" exile from humanity when it is placed in close proximity to the main character's body (and 42 Orbaugh, Japanese Fiction of the Allied Occupation, 9. 43 Ibid. 60 keeps it in focus) while capturing a blurred crowd of figures in the distance. Displacement of the individual from his family or cultural roots is also, significantly, a prominent theme in much of Hara's postwar writing. Ann Sherif notes that "along with the literal displacement and wandering caused by the widespread destruction of cities during the war, the sense of lost home and alienation become familiar tropes" in Hara's writing as much as that of other hibakusha.44 Sherif explains (partly from reading Hara's work, and partly in historical synopsis) how people in Tokyo looked coldly on hibakusha, as though they were walking corpses who would all starve. Hara's own landlady in Tokyo kept her distance from him and was keen to point out his seemingly odd behavior. For Sherif, Hara's wandering (from Hiroshima to Tokyo, and from place to place once in Tokyo) allows his readers to view him as a figure of universal suffering and displacement.45 But Sherif herself does not take a stance on whether his wandering connotes exclusively a status as victim or hero. The jidaigeki hero, again, resonates with the isolated struggle of victims of wartime trauma in the postwar historical moment. Such a visible severing of the individual self from the body of the nation, such subjective independence, would have been inconceivable in wartime, as Orbaugh has pointed out. And perhaps the fragmented appearance of Tange's body aptly speaks to the psychological pain of this separation, as the self learns to operate independently of historical constructions of identity once dominated by imperial rhetoric. In Chapter 6 ("National Mobilization: from Nation to Gunkoku (a Country at War)") of her b