Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Hoyt Long is Assistant Professor of Japanese Literature, Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations, University of Chicago.

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On Uneven Ground

STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

Contents

Acknowledgments...................................................................viiA Note on Naming..................................................................ixPrologue: Making Place for the Author.............................................11. Finding Value in Locality......................................................173. Toward a Provincializing Literary Production...................................554. Making Space for a New Literary Region.........................................795. Conversations with Nature......................................................1036. Performing the Village Square..................................................1337. Farmers' Art in an Age of Cosmopolitan Agrarianism.............................159Epilogue: Trading Places..........................................................193Notes.............................................................................209Bibliography......................................................................271Index.............................................................................287

Chapter One

Capitalizing on Place

In the late 1990s, Tokyo's Ginza district welcomed a new member to its collection of high-end department stores, brand-name outlets, and trendy boutiques. Under the banner of "Iwate Ginga Puraza" (Iwate Milky Way Plaza), this new addition, situated across from the famous Kabuki-za Theater, was a retail outlet designed to offer a number of distinct services to the Tokyo consumer curious about Japan's northern prefecture of Iwate. Travel advice and business consultation were among some of the primary services on hand, but the biggest draw was to be the ready availability of traditional souvenirs and local foodstuffs shipped direct from "chilly Iwate." Here was a chance to consume the region, or at least a small piece of it, without actually having to be there. If the flavors of Iwate failed to suit you, however, you could always sample from one of the many other "antenna shops" (so-called because they help to feel out consumer response) to appear in Tokyo's trendiest neighborhoods at this time. It was a concept that proved so successful that by 2009, 35 of the country's 47 prefectures were represented by one or more of these shops, each seeking to enhance the brand recognition of their respective locales against a wash of other designer names and labels.

If the Iwate Ginga Plaza set itself apart from the competition in any way, it was with its name. Ginga (Milky Way) is a deliberate reference to Night of the Milky Way Railroad (Ginga tetsudo no yoru), the famous novella by native son Miyazawa Kenji. This fantastic tale depicting the spiritual journey of two young boys who hurdle through space on a galactic train is arguably one of his most recognized works. Because of this, the word ginga has come to assume a metonymic role by which it infuses objects from Iwate—whether beer (Ginga Alpine Beer), a rail line (Iwate Ginga Railway), or an assisted living home (Ginga Village)—with any positive connotations that the term, and by extension the figure of Miyazawa, can be made to conjure up. Thus its adoption by the Plaza. Ginga, however, only scratches the surface of the work that Miyazawa and his texts have been made to perform in the service of acts of place making.

This work began almost immediately after his death and initially followed a conventional trajectory. Friends, fellow poets, and fans would, in the interest of commemorating his passing, collect funds for large poetry stones to be placed near landmarks and topographical features alluded to in his verse. Seventy of these impressive stones are now scattered throughout Iwate, and if plotted on a map would serve as a cartographic record of his extensive wanderings. By the 1980s, this traditional form of intersection between text, author, and locality gradually came to be superseded by more capital intensive projects. In 1982, for instance, fans of his work raised funds for a Miyazawa Kenji museum to be erected near his hometown. Built on a forested hilltop (Koshio-zan) that appears in several of his poems as a sacred site, it soon attracted visitors from all across the country and by the late 1990s was one of the most popular literary museums of its kind. The realization that Miyazawa had such popular appeal opened the door to more commercial ventures, including a water park called "Kenji World" built in 1995; a small-scale amusement park built in 1996 to bring his fictional world to life via diorama and high-tech display; and an assortment of tours and guidebooks meant to introduce visitors to sites associated with him or his writings. Today, his connection with the Iwate landscape is so entrenched that the mere fact of his association with a particular built structure or natural site can determine how that site is developed or otherwise utilized by the community. In 2005, to cite but a recent example, a famous geodetic observatory built in 1920 was spared demolition when fans, who claimed it as a key inspiration for Night of the Milky Way Railroad, successfully lobbied for its preservation.

Part of the reason I began On Uneven Ground was to understand why Miyazawa and his artistic legacy have proved so successful in contemporary practices of place construction and local branding, and so infinitely more adaptable to these practices than some of the more staid faces of the literary canon. What have made his narratives and biography so good for thinking and constructing a version of locality that others find valuable? And why, for instance, has the Iwate Ginga Plaza been so willing to invest in him as a symbol of Iwate, going so far as to have once renamed the boulevard in front of the store "Kenji Street" as part of a two-day exhibition of regional foods, crafts, and folk performance? As I proceeded to wrestle with these questions, the problem became for me both a historical and a theoretical one. Historical because the success of Miyazawa in this regard has, as we will see, much to do with the conditions under which his fiction was produced and the ways he and his work were rescued from obscurity. Theoretical because the history of his relation to a particular locality and to acts of place making cannot be told without inquiring first into the nature of locality as an object of social and cultural value. How and under what conditions is this value produced? How and why is it sustained? Are there transhistorical processes underpinning its production? How should we situate this value in a system of competing values? And most critically, how do values assigned to a locale intersect with the physical locality itself? It soon became apparent that to try to understand why Miyazawa holds such significance for contemporary practices of place making was to ask after the longer history of how locality has been made and made relevant in modern Japan, but also how it is we can measure that relevance at all.

The simplest answer to the question of how the value of a place or locality is produced is to say that it is through the notion of "difference." A local product, for instance, comes to have value for both seller and consumer because it is perceived to be only here or there and nowhere...