Modernology:
Reading, Writing, Looking and Collecting in Twentieth-Century Japan
11:00-12:20pm
Instructor:
TTh
WPH 106
Anne McKnight
mcknight@usc.edu
Dept of East Asian Languages and Cultures, COLT
Office hours: Tuesday 1-2 in office + Thursday 2-3 in garden @ 3015 Shrine Place
Office: 356P Taper Hall, in the EALC corridor
I try to respond to email within 24 hours, but please understand if I don’t get back to you on
weekends, or outside of business hours.
Course description and goals:
Since the 1860s, writers both inside and outside of Japan found its city streets,
countrysides and colonies to be fascinating laboratories of modern life.
We will look at some different methods of understanding modern Japanese life devised
around the concept and contexts, the highlights and lowlifes, of “modernology.” “Modernology”
was a new kind of urban ethnography practiced in the 1920s and 1930s by wildly different
groups of people: poets, historians, anarchists, artists and scholars. These writers and collectors
reformatted the “study of the archaic,” or archeology, into study of modern life. To do so, they
designed and employed specific practices of reading, writing, looking and collecting. They
claimed that new kinds of experience available through new kinds of media, work, housing, mass
culture, sexual mores and public spaces of the twentieth century demanded a new kind of
expression and participation in life.
Food was an important part of public life in modern Japan: in the military, in economic
life, in new practices of snobbery and food fads, in the gendering of households, and in
globalization. This semester we focus especially on how Japanese writers and thinkers worked
with food as sustenance, as symbol, as luxury, and as economy. The hands-on classes in the
garden are an important part of the course itself. They help you put into play ideas including
nature, decadence, pleasure, community, and taste.
Readings and other requirements:
As a GE course, this class focuses on reading, writing and the steps in between. Attendance is
expected, as is regular preparation for class—not just reading, but organizing your thoughts after
you read. Reading questions will be posted to give you a format for responses.
You need to buy one book, available at the USC Bookstore:
Akasaka Mari, Vibrator (Brooklyn, NY: Soft Skull Press, 2007).
* Discussion on course reader
August 26, 2010
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EVALUATION
paper 1
5pp
15% Sept 30
paper 2
7pp
15% Oct 26
garden tasks
10%
final project 7-10pp
20% on day of presentation
presentation
of final project
10%
a business plan; an image gallery; a close reading; or a garden
reading quizzes
6%
(up to 3)
short writing assignments (5) 10% Sept 7/14/21, Oct 12/19
participation
10%
=100% + extra credit
WEEK-BY-WEEK SCHEDULE OF ACTIVITIES
Week 1
Tu
Aug 24
Course introduction, self-introduction of students
Th
Aug 26
crisis and creativity
Read: Yukie Yoshikawa, "Can Japanese Agriculture Overcome Dependence and Decline?"
The Asia-Pacific Journal, 26-3-10, June 28, 2010 (file on blog).
Read: Tracey Potts, “Creative destruction and critical creativity: Recent Episodes in the Social
Life of Gnomes,” in Spaces of Vernacular Creativity: Rethinking the Cultural Economy,
eds. Tim Edensor et al. (London: Routledge, 2010), 154-169 (file on blog)
Read: Michel Foucault, "Of Other Spaces." Diacritics 16, no. 1 (1986): 22-27 (file on blog)
Optional:
Ava Bromberg, "Creativity Unbound: Cultivating the Generative Power of NonEconomic Neighbourhood Spaces," in Spaces of Vernacular Creativity, 214-225 (file on
blog)
Week 2
Tues Aug 31
orientation
Garden Demo Day--meet at garden 3015 Shrine Place
Bring a hat and sunscreen, and dress for low-stress gardening.
Guest: Florence Nishida, Master Gardener, Museum of Natural History
Thurs Sept 2
Planting day in garden
Week 3
Tues Sept 7
wild nature and the “organic”
Tasks: pick your avatar for the blog. Instructions at: http://en.support.wordpress.com/avatars/
August 26, 2010
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Write and post 250w about your favorite meal, using ideas of “vernacular creativity.”
Post on blog using category “vernacular food,” then add whatever tags you like
Read: Fukuoka Masanobu, excerpt from The One-Straw Revolution: An Introduction to Natural
Farming (Emmaus: Rodale Press, 1978), 1-29; 70-104; 115-133
Read: Shimazono Susumu, “Alternative Knowledges,” in From Salvation to Spirituality:
Popular Religious Movements in Modern Japan (Melbourne, Vic.: Trans Pacific, 2004),
194-211.
Google: guerilla gardening; CSAs; Fukuoka Masanobu; shizen nōhō
Thurs Sept 9
the taste of taste
Read: Kanagaki Robun, "Aguranabe/the Beefeater," in Modern Japanese Literature, an
Anthology, ed. Donald Keene (New York: Grove Press, 1956), 31-33
Read: Katarzyna Cwiertka, “Western Food, Politics and Fashion,” in Modern Japanese Cuisine:
Food, Power and National Identity (London: Reaktion, 2006), 13-34
Read: Pierre Bourdieu, preface, introduction and chapter 1, Distinction: A Social Critique of the
Judgement of Taste (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1984), xi-18.
Week 4
Tues Sept 14
food and ritual
Task: write and post 250w about a puzzling meal, using ideas of “wild nature” or taste
Read: Natsume Sôseki, first chapters of I Am a Cat, trans. Aiko Ito and Graeme Wilson
(Rutland, VT: Tuttle, 2001), 1-79
Optional: “The Omnivore’s Dilemma,” in The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four
Meals (Penguin: New York, 2006), 184-203
Thurs Sept 16
decadent food
Read: Tanizaki, Jun’ichirō, “The Gourmet Club,” in The Gourmet Club: A Sextet, trans.
Anthony H. Chambers and Paul McCarthy (Tokyo; London: Kodansha, 2001), 99-140
Week 5
Tues Sept 21
magical food
Task: write and post 250w about a decadent or magical meal or place
Read: Miyazawa Kenji, “The Restaurant of Many Orders,” trans. John Bester, in Once and
Forever: The Tales of Kenji Miyazawa (Tokyo: Kodansha International, 1997), 117-125
Read: Kajii Motojirō, “Lemon,” in William Jefferson Tyler, Modanizumu: Modernist Fiction
from Japan, 1913-1938 (Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2008), 334-339
See: Clip from Miyazaki Hayao, Spirited Away (2005)
Thurs Sept 23
Garden day
Week 6
Tues Sept 28
August 26, 2010
paper 1 due Sept 30
proletariat food
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Read: Kobayashi Takiji. "The Factory Ship," in "The Factory Ship" and "The Absentee
Landlord” (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1973), 3-83.
Thurs Sept 30
Cooking class, with things from the garden: pumpkins + …
Week 7
colonial food
Tues Oct 5
Read: Yuasa Katsue, “Kan’nani,” in Kannani and Document of Flames: Two Japanese Colonial
Novels, trans. Mark Driscoll (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2005), 26-98
Thurs Oct 7
Animé screening:
myth and food propaganda
Momotaro's Gods-Blessed Sea Warriors
Week 8
Tues Oct 12
Task: write and post 250w about a mythic or propagandistic food
Read: collection of Momotaro myths
• Momotarō tale found in 1st edition of Japanese school reader, 1887, trans. David
Henry;
• Iwaya Sazanami, Momotaro = the Story of Peach-Boy (Tokyo: Hokuseido Press,
1938).
• National Diet Library picture book, Arai Gorō, Momotarō (Osaka: Koyosha shuppan,
1951), on line at http://www.ndl.go.jp/en/publication/ndl_newsletter/109/0942.html
View: Momotarō modern jazz opera on blog
Thurs Oct 14
wartime food
Read: Nosaka Akiyuki, "American Hijiki," in Contemporary Japanese Literature: An Anthology
of Fiction, Film, and Other Writing since 1945, ed. Howard Hibbett, (New York: Knopf,
1964), 435-68
Week 9
Tues Oct 19
postwar food
Task: write and post 250w about a meal or food that provokes memory
Read: Dazai Osamu, The Setting Sun, trans. Donald Keene (New York: New Directions, 1968)
Read: Sakaguchi Ango. "Discourse on Decadence,” trans. Seiji Lippit, Review of Japanese
Society and Culture 1, no. 1 (1986): 2-5
Thurs Oct 21
Read: The Setting Sun
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Week 10
Paper 2 due Oct 26
Tues Oct 26
Harvesting & planting day in garden
Thurs Oct 28
Film screening:
avant-garde food
Giants and Toys (Mazamura Yasuzō, 1958)
Week 11
Tues Nov 2
Read: Michael Raine, "Modernization without Modernity: Masamura Yasuzō's Giants and Toys
(1958),” in Japanese Cinema: Texts and Contexts, ed. Alistair Philips, (London:
Routledge, 2007), 152-67
Thurs Nov 4
Los Angeles and the rise of global sushi
Read: Sasha Issenberg, Introduction and ch. 5 “Los Angeles, California: Are You Ready for
Rice Sandwiches?,” in The Sushi Economy : Globalization and the Making of a Modern
Delicacy (New York, N.Y.: Gotham Books, 2007), ix-xxiv and 79-106
Week 12
Tues Nov 9
cute food
Read: Anne Allison, "Japanese Mothers and Obentos: The Lunch Box as Ideological State
Apparatus," in Permitted and Prohibited Desires: Mothers, Comics, and Censorship in
Japan (Boulder: Westview Press, 1996), 81-103
Google:
images of bentos, post one on the blog, with caption
Thurs Nov 11
vengeful food
Read: Kirino Natsuo, Out, trans. Stephen Snyder (Tokyo ; New York: Kodansha International,
2003), 1-59.
Week 13
Tues Nov 16
neurotic food
Read: Akasaka Mari, Vibrator (Brooklyn, NY: Soft Skull Press, 2007).
Thurs Nov 18
Finish Vibrator
Week 14
Tues Nov 23
Garden day--final harvest
Thurs Nov 25
Thanksgiving--no class
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Week 15
Tues Nov 30
Presentations
Thurs Dec 2
Presentations
Statement on academic integrity
Please familiarize yourself with the general principles of academic integrity at USC at
http://www.usc.edu/student-affairs/SJACS/forms/AcademicIntegrityOverview.pdf. Basically,
this means don’t plagiarize, cheat, submit the same assignment twice, or collaborate in unauthorized ways. I am required to report all violations and cases of plagiarism to he Student
Affairs Office, who takes over conduct of an investigation.
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