~~ In the Scopic Regime of Discovery: Ishikawa

Takuboku's Diary in Roman Script and the Gendered

Premise of Self-Identity ~ Charles Shiro Inouye

This reading begins with the desire to see. Upon reading Ishikawa Taku-
boku's (1886-1912) A Diary in Roman Script [R6maji nikki], I found myself
possessed by the urge to see the author's face. l So intensely did this feel-
ing impress itself upon me that in the end I had to pause and search my
library. I located a photograph of Takuboku collected in a volume of
poetry. Yet for reasons that I did not immediately grasp, his image left me
disappointed. Perhaps I had imagined he would resemble Dazai Osamu
(1909-1948), who died for love, or Shiga Naoya (1883-1971), who had writ-
ten so compellingly of losing and gaining what he termed "animal energy:'
Disappointing these expectations, the black-and-white photograph of
Takuboku showed insolent eyes, a boyish face, a large head with big ears.
Pondering over that image of the famous poet, I found myself wondering
why I had been filled with such desire to see him in the first place and why
I should have been disappointed when he finally came into view. These
were the questions that initiated my exploration of Takuboku's Diary in
Roman Script.
My desire and disappointment quickly brought to focus the problem
of sight-what sight is and how sight is generated in a modern text. The
general importance of the sense of sight to the modern period is a point
many have addressed. In his "Scopic Regimes of Modernity;' Martin Jay
concedes the prominence of the visual in the "West:' There is little dispute,
he argues, that "whether we focus on 'the mirror of nature' metaphor in
the philosophy of Richard Rorty or emphasize the prevalence of surveil-
lance with Michel Foucault or bemoan the society of spectacle with Guy
Debord, we confront again and again the ubiquity of vision as the master
sense of the modern era:'2
Recognizing the importance of the visual in modern culture, Jay still
rejects the notion of a single modern "scopic regime:' And it is Jay's sug-

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gestion of the plurality of modern scopic regimes that provides me an

opening. For it was the possibility of a scopic regime in modern Japan that
might allow me to understand Takuboku and my own desire to see him. I
was particularly encouraged in this direction by Jay's characterization of
sight as the master sense because the seer is indisputably exalted in A
Diary in Roman Script. The visuality of Takuboku's text is not precisely
Rorty's mirror, Debord's spectacle, nor the spying eye that Foucault dreads
and plots to debilitate. Takuboku has the eye of the discoverer; he searches
and finds, and makes what he has seen into his possession. Indeed, it
seemed to me upon reflection that far from being an anomaly, Takuboku's
eye is situated within just such a scopic configuration, what I will here call
the Japanese regime of discovery, a field of signifiers producing and pro-
duced by a desire to find. 3 Ishikawa Takuboku was, in other words, one
among many who, having been found, are compelled to find others. In
a land "opened" to such a scopic encounter by far-reaching nineteenth-
century mercantile expansion, the modern male Japanese author must
open yet other territories. By this means he becomes the site of subjectiv-
ity that we call the modern self.
Considered in this way, discovery appears to be a concatenation. Yet,
seeing it as such, I have no wish to characterize the regime of discovery
as-in some binary scheme-caused by the "West:' Karatani K6jin tries
to avoid this in his Origins of Modern Japanese Literature but ends up
doing it regardless. By conflating Westernization and modernization,
scholarship on the Meiji period overdetermines certain causes in what
might be better termed a chain reaction of discovery.4 To take another
instance, when he draws on Karatani's work in his "In the Mirror of Alter-
nate Modernities;' Fredric Jameson presents Japan's modern development
as a compression of Western modernity. Certainly, shortening occurred to
some degree. But Jameson's emphasis on the West as the source of Japan's
modernity obscures the equally germane fact that Japan's modern period
stretches back at least to Ihara Saikaku (1642-1692). Nor can we neglect
the numerous Meiji-period authors whose discoveries did not affirm
what has been held by most scholars of kindai bungaku (modern litera-
ture) to be the Eurocentric mainstream of Japan's modernity.s
The beginning of Japan's modernity is still a point of debate. We have
only to compare Richard Lane's "The Beginnings of the Modern Japanese
Novel: Kanazoshi, 1600-1682" with Marleigh Ryan's Japan's First Modern
Novel: Ukigumo of Futabatei Shimei to recognize the range of interpreta-
tions that exist. 6 From our present perspective, we can see that Ryan's

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 Scopic Regime of Discovery 225

model has prevailed. Despite the common element shared by kinsei (early-
modern) and kindai (modern), these two periods ofliterary history denote
a difference that has been stressed rather than modified. The prevailing
paradigm advances the perception of a rift between early-modern narra-
tive and the modern shosetsu and posits a sudden rather than gradual
modernization. As suggested by Karatani in his "One Spirit, Two Nine-
teenth Centuries;' the desire to propagate such a model follows from a
wish to ignore the existence of a Japanese nineteenth century and to argue
for a foreign source of modern Japanese culture.?
My analysis of Ishikawa Takuboku will support a gradual model of
modernization, while also recognizing the trauma caused when the West
"opened" Japan. The spread of modernity and the migration of genres and
texts, and even of ideas, are tenable notions, but only if we envision influ-
ence more like nuclear fission rather than defaulting to the metaphor of
the tow chain. We can note patterns of modernity. Just as easily, we can
assert that something happened. But can we be so sure when claiming to
identify relations of one cause and one effect? In the end, it makes more
sense to talk about those conditions of reception that have made the mod-
ern pattern relevant than it does to speculate about the "causes" of moder-
nity as they arose within Europe.
We can sense the trauma of Japan's modern condition (kindai) in the
words bunmei kaika or "civilization and enlightenment:' Advocates of
change made bunmei kaika a slogan for discounting a past (kinsei) that
hampered reform and therefore imperiled political survival in a world
made suddenly smaller and more threatening by European global expan-
sion.s I feel we should accept the Meiji sense of peril while at the same
time noting that the modern era preceded the Meiji by two centuries,
because naming the Meiji period as the beginning of modernity in this
limited way is to affirm the sense this era had of itself as an age of discov-
ery, when the new was good and the old was not. Only if we accept the
modern reformer's dismissive attitude toward the established order do we
understand why Japanese writers, who embraced the serious social crisis
in which they found themselves embroiled, might have sought the
authority of the author so aggressively. Takuboku's will to power germi-
nated in the new world of post-Restoration Japan, an era when murder-
ous power became a possibility even for poets.

There were times when I wanted to murder all my acquaintances

without exception, from my most intimate friends to those I hardly

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 226 Charles Shiro Inouye

knew. The closer I was to a person, the more I hated the person.
"Everything fresh and new" was the "new" hope that dominated
every day of my life. My "new world" was, in other words, a "world
of the strong, a world dictated by power:' (6:64; Takuboku's quota-
tion marks)9
Takuboku's violent will to power was at war with itself. The statement
quoted above is at the same time self-aggrandizing and self-lacerating. It
makes me feel that the person discovered through the writing of the diary
could just as easily fall victim to violence as perpetuate it. But whether
. lamenting his own poverty or disparaging his failure to act heroically,
Takuboku seems to have intensified the possibility for despair under the
terms of the new scopic regime. Takuboku expressed self-knowledge
through a medium of savage representation. When he wrote down his
murderous thoughts, I believe, he undertook to move himself from the
position of the discovered to that of the discoverer, from the subjected to
the subject. What made this transformation feasible was a new language
that allowed him to express the heretofore unspeakable.
The consequence of Takuboku's kind of literary operation seems sim-
ple in retrospect. He and numerous others wrote into existence a new lit-
erary culture predicated on the erasure of the less-than-authoritative
gesakusha, the "scribbler" of playful writing, and on the parturition of the
author as serious artist. Typically modern in its presumption of improve-
ment, assertion of the serious writer's superiority necessarily denied the
possibility that Japan had been a civilized nation before its discovery (by
western Europe and white America) in the second half of the nineteenth
century.
Here I must reiterate the analytic point made earlier about the condi-
tions of reception that obtained prior to the Western incursion. There was
no scarcity of artists treating themes of violence prior to the Meiji period.
Gesaku (frivolous writing) was constantly castigated for its gratuitous
treatment of murder and mayhem throughout the bakumatsu period, or
latter years of the Tokugawa Shogunate. Yet the self-conscious relation-
ship of the writer to such violence changed noticeably starting in the last
decade of the nineteenth century. In seeking the conditions that account
for the difference, close attention must be paid to the language that makes
A Diary in Roman Script "new:'
Takuboku's Diary covers the period from 7 April to 16 June 1909. It is
one section excerpted from the twelve journals that transcribed events in

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 Scopic Regime of Discovery 227

the life of the poet from October 1902, after Takuboku had quit teaching
at Morioka Middle School and was about to go to Tokyo, to December
1911, two months before he succumbed to tuberculosis on 21 February
1912. What is known as A Diary in Roman Script is nothing more than
the portion of Takuboku's journals that he wrote in romanized Japanese,
or romaji, alphabetic script rather than the usual hiragana (with some
katakana) and Chinese characters that composed the contemporary writ-
ten language.
Takuboku's motivation for experimenting with romaji during this
three-month period cannot be considered apart from the poet's particular
place within larger linguistic trends. In the end, it was romaji that enabled
him to negotiate the movement of the writer from the position of an
object to the more powerful subjectivity of the writer as discoverer. Romaji
was particularly apt as a vehicle for this process because of the cloak of
secrecy that Takuboku used to enhance his own authorial power. Not only
was he writing a diary, an essentially private text, but he was using a script
which few people at the time could read. He chose, in other words, a secret
and powerful language that could tell of newly discovered territory. The
alphabet allowed Takuboku to write what others could not read and to see
what others could not admit to having witnessed. His was a modern lyri-
cism, an abundance of sight that expressed itself as a secreted insight.
Some might ask what is cryptic about a script that contemporary Japa-
nese read easily. Today, romaji is ubiquitous and its systematic study is a
regular part of the elementary curriculum. In Takuboku's day, however,
this was not the case.1O Attempts to transcribe the language began with
the earliest interactions between Japanese and Westerners. Indeed, some
of Japan's leaders came to believe that the success of their country's mod-
ernization effort depended on language reform, i.e., the wholesale use of
romaji. Nishi Amane (1829-1897)' for example, argued that Japan's eco-
nomic and political development was impossible in the absence of more
effective ways of disseminating information. This meant improving edu-
cation, a task that depended in turn on carrying out a thoroughgoing
reformation of the language in order to simplify the arduous task of
learning how to read and write. Nishi, for instance, thought romaji might
simplify Japanese orthography. "If we adopt their [writing] system;' he
reasoned, "all things of Europe will be entirely ours. Since to dismantle
our current writing system in order to incorporate the strengths of theirs
is not a trivial matter, it demonstrates quite well our boast that it is in the
character of our people to be guided by what is good:' II

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 228 Charles Shiro Inouye

As early as 1873, the desire of progressives to breach the perceived gap

between inferior Japanese and the superior alphabetic languages of
Europe reached a fevered pitch. Mori Arinori (184r1889) suggested
replacing Japanese entirely:

The commercial power of the English-speaking race which now rules

the world drives our people to acquire some knowledge of their com-
mercial ways and habits .... Under the circumstances, our meager
language, which can never be of any use outside our islands, is
doomed to yield to the domination of the English tongue .... Our
intelligent race, eager in the pursuit of knowledge, cannot depend
upon a weak and uncertain medium of communication in its
endeavor to grasp the principal truths from the precious treasury of
Western science and art and religion. The laws of state can never be
preserved in the language of Japan. All reasons suggest its disuse. 12

For Mori, the link between English and power is dear. English is the lan-
guage of rulers, who with their treasures of knowledge and their commer-
cial ways gain influence while the Japanese, hindered by an inadequate
language, fall behind. His astonishing assumption is that the intelligence
of the Japanese "race" (and therefore their right to assume a place among
the colonial powers) occurs in spite of the Japanese language.
Mori's proposal was never well received, but Nishi's was. The Romaji
Society (Romaji Kai), established in 1885, took up the notion of improv-
ing Japanese by transcribing it into alphabetic script. The movement
floundered because of disagreements about standards of orthography but
renewed its momentum in 1905, with the establishment of the Society for
the Propagation of Romaji (Romaji Hiromekai). Takuboku's interest in
alphabetic script coincided with this second wave of interest. His knowl-
edge of romaji set him apart as a progressive thinker, and he must there-
fore have been at least vaguely aware of the politics of the new script.
Romaji belonged to the larger cultural field of yokomoji or script writ-
ten horizontally (rather than vertically) across the page. English and other
horizontal scripts were associated with the European discoverers of the
world, whose spreading influence had rendered Japan's isolationist policy
untenable. As an approximation of foreign scripts, romaji certainly held
more attractions than simply the orthographic. Takuboku was no doubt
drawn to it as the script of the new and empowered. Romaji was a secret
by virtue of its newness within the Japanese sphere, an instrument of
power because of its currency outside of that same sphere. 13

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 Scopic Regime of Discovery 229

Of course, secrecy can be expression by another name. When we com-

pare different sections of the author's journals, it is startling to notice the
effect the secret script had on Takuboku's development as a modern writer.
When writing in romaji, his prose is noticeably freer, more descriptive,
more analytical, more "literary" (bungakuteki) to use Kuwabara Takeo's
word. 14 The alphabetic script made his writing magically take on the qual-
ities that Tsubouchi ShOyo (1859-1935) and other reformers ofJapanese let-
ters had in mind as they attempted to engage and absorb the cultural field
of yokomoji: his description is more realistic, his analysis of psychological
states more penetrating, and his narrative voice is stronger and more sta-
ble. Romaji enabled these qualities to develop because it allowed Takuboku
to be more freely expressive than he otherwise would have dared to be at
other points in the journals. Why he should have felt compelled to be more
freely expressive in the first place is, of course, the more fundamental issue.
Focusing on this question, I would like to suggest that there is a deeper
meaning to this secrecy that determines Takuboku's place within the more
general modern regime of discovery that I have termed scopic. Once again,
I am arguing that this scopic regime engulfed many writers in turn-of-the-
century Japan.
There is a cryptic impulse at the heart of the literature of this era and
its modes of representation. Secrecy, or the state of controlled visibility,
makes possible the privileged source of third-person narration by estab-
lishing the authorial and invisible seer who observes with heightened
powers of mimetic accuracy and is able to represent reality with persua-
siveness and insight. Itself a secret script, romaji became the vehicle for
this new way of seeing without being seen. And because romanized Japa-
nese is essentially phonetic, it was also historically important in the pro-
cess that eventually disowned or denied the wealth of pictorial expression
that had previously characterized the majority of narrative subgenres in
the early-modern era.
Edo-period literature tended to be ghostly and atemporal, filled with
illustration, figures of speech, stock characters codified as much by their
clothing as by their thoughts, and personalities presented more in formu-
laic narrative situations than in unprecedented situations of crisis. In con-
trast, Meiji-period works were both more analytical and antifigural.
Encouraged by the alphabetic simplicity of romaji, a newly, more trans-
parent literary language systematically discouraged the traditional enjoy-
ment of the visual body of language, while also weakening a long held
predilection among writers and readers for polysemy and image associa-

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 230 Charles Shiro Inouye

tion. Phonocentric language-such as that written in romaji-thus

served the modern desire for analysis and also helped to generate the
notion of psychologically complex, "interiorized" characters. This latter
concept, I hasten to add, was not entirely new but furthered an idea enter-
tained much earlier by the seventeenth-century author Ihara Saikaku: that
human quality, like capital itself, is wholly open to description and is fun-
damentally definable. Though not exactly new, the need to know the
essence of human character contributed importantly to the formation of
modern authorial vision during the Meiji period.
The emergence of the watakushi shosetsu (or I-novel) documents the
pain that was felt when Japan was "opened" at this time. This genre of first
person, confessional fiction is often held to be solipsistic and therefore
resistant to the clearly configured interior/exterior dyad that was required
for the birth of realistic fiction. In truth, the watakushi shosetsu is neither
properly a diary nor a novel but an unexpected melding of both. Though
most studies of this genre focus on its differences from either the diary or
the novel, we must not overlook how this hybridized quality speaks so
eloquently of the spirit of discovery that pervaded the modern age. In
short, the I-novel is firmly situated on that ground which is common to
the diary and the novel. It speaks to the same requirements of secrecy. It
documents that weakly fictitious move from the position of discovered to
that of the discoverer. Whether we are talking about third or first person
narrative, the carefully controlled presentation of information in each is
primarily designed to establish the source of that secret knowledge: the
modern author.
In sum, secrecy discovers the modern writer in the Meiji period. It
enhances an analytical, descriptive mode of seeing that is corrosive to the
traditional, pictocentric regime with which it competes. Following Noel
Burch, Edward Fowler defines the traditional narrative system as being
"presentational" in nature, that is, essentially disinterested in "the conceal-
ment of the mechanics of representation;' and concerned with "the joy-
ously self-conscious revelation of those mechanics."ls As I have argued
elsewhere, one defining characteristic of the presentational text was its
lavish use of illustration. More forcefully than the phonocentric text, the
iconic and indexical signifiers that were painted and reproduced upon the
gesaku page by artists such as Hokusai and Kunisada contributed to both
the artificiality and availability of the story. The drastic increase in the
ratio of text to illustration that occurred toward the end of the nineteenth
century is a rejection of this artificiality and indicates the intensity of the

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 Scopic Regime of Discovery 231

need for secrecy that was inherent to the spread of the scopic regime of
discovery.16 Words, especially those written in a secret script such as the
one employed by Takuboku, replaced pictures because their abstract and
symbolic qualities readily lent themselves to the project of representation.
Being alphabetic (and therefore phonocentric to an extreme), rarnaji rein-
forced the observational and interpretive authority of the author in a way
that illustration did not.
Placed within this larger phonocentric shift, Takuboku's diary is like
the watakushi shasetsu in that it is a carefully orchestrated performance of
self-expression. It is not a total secret, however. The diary must show its
author to a privileged few since the writer's power cannot be guaranteed if
the secret is absolute. That Takuboku wanted this record to survive and be
read is clear. We know that he entrusted all his journals to his close friend
Kindaiichi Kyosuke (1882-1971) who shared, albeit hesitantly, in the
process of sexual awakening that Takuboku sets down. Shortly before his
death, Takuboku instructed Kindaiichi to read his diaries and, if he so
decided, to destroy them. Though embarrassing to him - Kindaiichi is
described by Takuboku as a "jealous, weak, and effeminate man with petty
vanities" (6:59)- he could not bring himself to burn them.
After Takuboku's death, Kindaiichi sent the diary to the author's wife
Setsuko, who was not meant to be included among its readers. In the
diary, Takuboku gave his reasons for wanting to exclude her:
So why have I decided to write this diary in Roman script? . .
because I love my wife and don't want her to read this. (6:54)
It is impossible to say if Setsuko actually read this section of the journals
after Takuboku's death. We do know that she was unable to bring herself
to discard this record of her husband's life. Shortly after Takuboku died,
she passed the journals on to Miyazaki Daishiro before she herself suc-
cumbed to tuberculosis.J7 Many years later, in 1954, the romanized section
was made public over Kindaiichi's protests; and today it is a familiar work
of modern Japanese literature. IS It would appear that many other readers
have been as interested as I to see turn-of-the-century Japan through
Takuboku's eyes, to enjoy the feel of the text's perspective, and to be privy
to the secrets that his various discoveries unearthed. (Perhaps nothing
more than my own will to power has impelled me to seek out an image of
the author's face, and later to imagine the faces of the prostitutes who
occupied so much of Takuboku's time.)
In Takuboku's diary the literary process of discovery is still nascent.

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 232 Charles Shiro Inouye

The techniques for controlling what the readers are allowed to witness
and appropriate as our own wait to be developed later in the works of
such novelists as Tanizaki Jun'ichiro (1886-1965), who learned, by study-
ing the rigorously emplotted mystery novels of Arthur Conan Doyle, the
technique of flattering the readers by giving us not only the scene of dis-
covery but the process of adventure, as well. Using means other than the
manipulations of plot, however, the lyrical and fragmented space of A
Diary in Roman Script still manages to establish visual barriers, areas hid-
den from the normal eye, and, as Georges Bataille's Eroticism puts it, to
generate the new, modern knowledge that comes from transgressing
taboo. When Takuboku puts himself in the new position of seer, his range
of sight challenges socially objectionable barriers so that both writer and
reader can enjoy a special knowledge: they are privileged to see anything
they wish. And what Takuboku wished to see with us was a woman's "per-
fectly white body" (6:66), her "privates without flaw" (6:99). Maneuvering
within the regime of discovery, the writing subject moves from the posi-
tion of discovered to that of discoverer by finding and objectifying the
subject of his gaze.
As Karatani puts it in his Origins of Modern Japanese Literature, only by
holding fiction's represented objects within the field of vision can the
writer (and reader) truly develop a sense of the author's self as it emerges
by way of the territory he explores. Neither the territory of discovery nor
the objects discovered there can be simply said to be present. Territory
and object must be discovered in the process of representation, which is
the special genius of the mediating seer. Discovery, we might say, pre-
supposes the hidden. And since modern fiction must represent the dis-
covered, hidden, interior truth of the individual self, the process of self-
creation is consequently laden with tension and pain. This is because the
discovery of self requires the obscurity of an Other: the foreign, the bar-
barous, the unrealized, the past, the feminine. In fact, such self-invention
also works against a benighted state of premodernity. Japan existed before
Perry's visit, just as the isles of the Caribbean did prior to the discoveries
of Columbus. Yet the modern attitude, as embraced by Takuboku,
assumes itself to be an improvement over what preceded and insists on
the obfuscation and even erasure, when necessary, of that which came
before it.
For Takuboku, the territory of self-invention is the new Japan, and the
primary object of his sight is a woman.

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 Scopic Regime of Discovery 233

I put my fingers to the woman's crotch and roughly fingered her gen-
itals. Finally, I put five fingers in and pushed as vigorously as possi-
ble. Even then the woman did not wake up. Perhaps she was so
inured to men that her vagina had become totally insensitive. A
woman who had slept with thousands of men! I became more and
more irritated. And then I pushed my fingers in all the more force-
fully. Ultimately my hand entered as far as my wrist. At that moment
the woman awoke saying, "Mm, mm."
Suddenly she was clinging to me. "Ah ... ah ... ah, that's good.
More ... more. Ah ... ah ... ah!" A girl of eighteen no longer able to
feel pleasure from the usual stimuli. I wiped my hand on her face. I
felt like inserting both hands or even my foot into her vagina and
ripping it apart. And I wanted to see, even in a vision, her body cov-
ered with blood, lying dead in the darkness. Men have the right to
murder women by the cruelest methods. What a terrible, disgusting
thought! (6:67)
With the discovery of this and other women, Takuboku's subjectivity
comes into a written state of being. By expressing his loathing, the con-
struction of consciousness is completed.
If Takuboku's process of becoming human -of becoming a thinking
being in the Cartesian sense-is fueled by a deep-seated disgust for
women, we must add that in this misogyny he is not alone. For the sub-
ject/object split that I have been describing in previous pages exists as an
already gendered premise: male subject, female object; the sensitive poet,
the insensitive whore; the opening male and the opened female. Inasmuch
as Takuboku's narrative of discovery establishes its secrets by first creating
a world scattered with objects of lower worth-"the bitches" that are
available to the seer's eye and to Takuboku's program of self-aggrandize-
ment and self-flagellation-it departs from the parodic familiarity and
humor of, for instance, Santo Kyoden's (1761-1816) Playboy Grilled Edo-
Style [Edo mumare uwaki no kabayaki (1785)], a short illustrated fiction
that mocks the comical figure of the playboy. Kyoden's Master Glitter
(Kinkin-sensei), as he is called, is a country bumpkin who comes to the
city, fancies himself as a great lover, but awakens to find that his moment
of wealth and sexual indulgence was all a dream. By contrast, Takuboku
portrays the lover in a decidedly sober way since he, the modern man, is
positioned by the regime of discovery to see himself in a serious and even
tragic light. The search for modern self-identity shapes him; and in his

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 234 Charles Shiro Inouye

journey of discovery, Takuboku becomes as directed as a colonizer, as

businesslike as the nameless customer who pays to enter another's body,
as dreary as the selves of the self-centered I-novel.
Takuboku's is not the traditional erotic peep-neither kaimami nor
nozoki-but rather the "Dutch stare" that empowers him to rape with
a grimness of purpose unimaginable to Murasaki Shikibu's Genji or
Saikaku's Yonosuke. He does not aspire to the status of a tsu, an expert in
the way oflove, but is, rather, a journalist of sex. Play (asobi) and chic (iki)
are no longer relevant and their absence does not clear the way for attrac-
tive possibilities. Though we might expect the modern seer to be powerful
and strong (as I certainly did), in truth he is actually only a boy, prurient
and insecure-"a weakling with a sword as good as any man's" (6:65), to
use Takuboku's metaphor. His self-consciousness is as youthful in its sex-
ual preoccupation as that of, for instance, John Updike, who on the oppo-
site end of the twentieth century supplies gasps of an exhausted modernity.
We must recall that Takuboku, who married at seventeen, was only
twenty-three when he wrote the following:
"Oh, I'm so happy!" Hanako said, burying her face against my chest.
It was a strange night. Until now I had slept with numerous
women. But I had always been irritated, as though being urged on by
some unknown force. At such moments I always jeered at myself.
Never before this night had I experienced such feelings of ecstasy
and expansiveness, so much so that my eyes narrowed in delight.
I no longer thought about anything. I only felt the rapture of feel-
ing my body warming to its very core by the heat from the girl. Fur-
thermore, the act of copulating, which had done nothing recently
but leave me with unpleasant feelings, was performed twice this
night with nothing but sheer pleasure. And even afterwards not a
trace of disgust remained in me .... An hour passed. An hour's
dream. We sat up in bed and smoked. (6.108)

Being young, Takuboku is naturally youthful. But, in addition to this,

he is also young in a cultural, historical way. He is just another of many
young, self-conscious, and hesitant heroes of the modern Japanese tradi-
tion. I am thinking of Futabatei's Bunzo (Ukigumo [1886-1889]), Soseki's
Daisuke (Sore kara [1909]), Ogai's Jun'ichi (Seinen [1910]) or his Okada
(Gan [1911-13)). All try to be manly. But they proceed as if being a man
were a new aspiration. They act as if masculinity, like the beginning of
civilization, originated with the Meiji era. And each goes about his busi-

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 Scopic Regime of Discovery 235

ness as though adopting a new sexuality were his inevitable destiny as a

would-be explorer.
So convinced has the critical establishment become about the privi-
lege of embarking on this fated modern adventure that Japanese scholars
such as Kuwabara Takeo can unapologetically declare: "Why is it that
people cannot stop loving Takuboku's writing? It is because they find in it
pure youth (seishun)."19 In Hijiya Yukihiko's opinion, to give another
sampling, Takuboku deserves our attention because he "continues to live
as the symbol of eternal youth:'20 It would seem that such positive
appraisals of youth are part of the discourse of the modern. They eco-
nomically transmit its self-important sense of newness and beginning.
Yet just as the scopic regime of discovery places itself in tension-the dis-
covered object striving to be the discovering subject through the act of
discovering other subjects-made-objects-this faith in modernity's
youthfulness similarly inverts itself and creates a reflexive ambivalence.
That is to say, the positive valuing of youth is possible only when youth
also takes on negative meaning.
This dynamic is particularly obvious in turn-of-the-century books
about Japan. John R. Black's Young Japan: Yokohama and Yedo, for in-
stance, declares the country to be "young" by virtue of its having been dis-
covered by the West:
Then, boasting herself as one of the most ancient empires in the
world, with an Imperial Dynasty extending over two thousand five
hundred years, she was for the first time born into the family of
nations. In the most literal sense may she have been said previously
to speak and think and act as a child; but now she is of age she has
put away childish things. 21
James Scherer's 1905 text, Young Japan: The Story of the Japanese People,
and Especially of Their Educational Development, similarly declares Japan
to be young, because though "possessed of an antiquity that loses itself in
the mists of primitive tradition;' still "the nation is yet young, because
somehow the heart of the people is young:' Indeed, in this view "Japan is
the most youthful spot on earth:'22 Carrying through Black's trope of
Japan's birth "into the family of nations;' Scherer's book has Japan move
steadily and progressively from benighted native to enlightened initiate,
for he entitles Book I "Early Culture;' Book II, "Adolescence;' and Book
III, "Modern School-days:'

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 236 Charles Shiro Inouye

The period of early national culture extends from the first dim tra-
ditions of history to the introduction of Chinese civilization in the
sixth Christian century, when Japan put off her swaddling-clothes.
The period of adolescence traces the growth of the people under the
influence of Chinese culture until that was discarded for Western
civilization in the middle of the nineteenth century. "School-days"
denotes the progress made under this Occidental tutorship. The
whole book is built on the theory that Japan stands to-day at the
threshold of new national manhood; YOUNG JAPAN. The three sub-titles
as applied to individual development hardly need an explanation. 23
(italics are mine)

Both Black and Scherer want to show how life in newly discovered
Japan differs from before. But if their ascription of youth is meant to rec-
ognize progress, their generally favorable appraisals of Japan are surely
backhanded since both writers establish a position external to the object
of vision that is relatively more mature and able to see youth for what it
is. In short, books such as these pioneering works of "Japanology" indi-
cate Japan's modernity in relation to an already established (and therefore
even more advanced) modernity.
Positing a time line against which the various cultures of the world can
be measured is characteristically modern, too. Modernization theory like
that of Black, Scherer, and their later epigones assumes synchronicity
because it requires a universal ethical and temporal starting point. It
declares a linear chain of causality that provokes a "natural" ranking of
nations to form along an axis of "advanced" or "underdeveloped:' Again, I
do not mean to say that there is no such thing as influence, or that it is
wrong to talk of the Japanese as having patterned their modern institu-
tions (including modern literature itself) after Western models. Rather,
when we affirm these influences and note their pattern we can finally come
to a general understanding of modernity that does not trace back in time
to a single point of origin in the West but to many points of origin. To this
end, however, we must change our focus from authorship to reception,
from the logically impossible task of positing clearly distinguishable begin-
nings to the more fruitful endeavor of trying to understand those condi-
tions which allow certain ideas to gain or lose persuasiveness.
If we therefore pause to widen our focus, we can see that the prurient
interest noted in Takuboku's diary is hardly peculiar to Japan. Jean-
Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778), for one, expressed a similarly "young" per-

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 Scopic Regime of Discovery 237

spective in his Confessions. (While Rousseau is not usually compared to

Takuboku, their juxtapositioning conveys my sense of a horizon of ideas
necessary to modernity and the conditions which are favorable to it.) To
suggest an answer to Ogai's Jun'ichi, who poses the question "To what
does the self open?" we might say that the modern self emerges to and
within a restructured awareness of sexuality. It does this by way of a harlot
writing (porne + graphein) that teaches sexual (and therefore self) differ-
ence, domination, and finally alienation and loathing. Recognizing porno-
graphic representation as a general pattern of the modern might also
allow us (without resorting to the tow chain of causality) to make the
point that in this process of self-awakening, Japan was a late bloomer. Just
as the modernizationists argued, Japan was during Takuboku's time
"young" in a way that Europe was not.
This, at least, was the perspective of Japan's enlightened leaders, politi-
cal men such as Nishi Amane, who held, as I mentioned earlier, that the
Japanese people were intelligent to the extent that they were willing to
admit their inferiority. Takuboku, I believe, shared this attitude. Ostensi-
bly an expression of humility, in reality the admission is not, for hidden
in the inferiority is the self-serving notice of the discovered who wishes to
become a discoverer. In its essence, writing about the desire for reform is a
statement not of inferiority but of aggression. It brings us back to
Takuboku's youthful self-loathing and how his attitude promotes self-
awareness. When we contextualize the writer's secretive act of writing
himself into history, we must see that for modern processes-be they the
construction of railroads or of national myths-humility vis-a-vis the
West was a particularly useful pose to strike. Why? Because to posit a
superior example confirms as uncontestable the worth of imitation. It
places the learner beyond criticism and at the same time conveniently
does away with the need to grant subjectivity to the objects of one's dis-
covery (in our immediate case the women with whom Takuboku sleeps).
If the initial agents of a discourse of discovery represent a first order, then
"the discovered" become a second order, eager to transform themselves
into the discoverers of yet a third order of subjects. And it is a truth of
modernity that third-order subjects are frequently assigned marginal
value and are indeed actively discouraged from transforming themselves
into discoverers. Their world is not whole but halved, a true demimonde.
To those who discover her, force her into the line of vision, and make her
participate in a process we might want to call a collaborative inversion of
discovery, the harlot can never announce her own presence. She can only

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 238 Charles Shiro Inouye

be represented in the diary of Takuboku, just as his own humble-yet-

arrogant self is a representation of an old formation.2 4
This complicated position of denying oneself in order to produce one-
self, or turning on one's own in order to find one's own, defines those of
the second order of discovery. Takuboku belongs among these collabora-
tors. He occupies himself with harlots because he sees himself as a learner
of a new type of sexual pose. 25 This is far from being a new strategy, of
course, and Kyoden's playboy-grilled-Edo-style provides an earlier exam-
ple. But notice how in Kyoden's work, the joke is on Master Glitter whose
status as a poser is emphasized to comic effect. Takuboku, on the other
hand, interiorizes the pose. He conceals (and reveals) sexual desire in a way
that brings attention to the seer as author rather than as laughingstock.
Consequently, the meaning of the pose has changed significantly.
In both Playboy Grilled Edo-Style and A Diary in Roman Script, sexual
conquest signifies a dawning to a new and better world. In this sense, both
are modern texts. But the Edo-period kibyoshi gives us a humorous dream
while the Meiji-period diary presents us with a reality of intense serious-
ness. The disparity between these two male poses-the laughable play-
boy and the romantic self seeker-signifies the difference between early-
modern pictocentrism and the modern scopic regime of discovery. The
ascendance of word over picture in the Meiji-period text is in essence a
replacement of the presence of figures with the represence of description.
The anti-figurality of the genbun itchi (the attempt to make written lan-
guage more colloquial) movement was corrosive not only to the drawn fig-
ures that filled the pages of so many forms of gesaku but also to figures of
speech, loaded as they were with pre-enlightenment connotations. The
new language of fiction was to be a transparent tool that would enable a
more serious, penetrating, and accurate look at the real world of turn-of-
the-century Japan, a place that was worthy of vision to the extent that it
departed from the benighted obscurities of the past. Between the strik-
ing of these two very different masculine poses-Kyoden's fool and
Takuboku's hateful weakling-lie the events of Japan's "opening" and the
epistemic shift that turned folly into an opportunity for insight.
Here we can talk of influence and migrating texts. We have clues about
the Western forms of pornographic writing that, once received in Japan,
helped create the new, interiorized sexuality we find in Takuboku's work.
A year before he began writing A Diary in Roman Script Takuboku made
the following journal entry:

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 Scopic Regime of Discovery 239

May 3,1908: In Hirano Hisayoshi's room. 26 Got up at eight. At ten,

the four of us ate breakfast together,27 Hirano brought out a book of
Western pornography, True Love, Its First Practice, and plied us with
the passages he thought most interesting. (7:200)28
In a letter to Yoshino Shozo, 7 May 1908, Takuboku mentions the incident
again:
Hirano brought out a book of American pornography (that was
banned from publication) and kept talking about it. I took a look at
it, but the things written there were graphic and distasteful. Can you
appreciate a book like that and still say you abhor the novels of the
naturalists? (7:200)
Again, a few days later, on 12 May 1908, Takuboku wrote in a letter to
Fujita Takeji and Takada Jisaku, friends from a brief stay in Otaru, "In
Tokyo it's the fashion these days for everyone to be reading Western
pornography (imported secretly, with very detailed descriptions of men
and women in sexual union)" (7:203). The book, True Love, seems to have
been very much on Takuboku's mind despite his alleged aversion to its
graphic nature. A year later, his diary was still reflecting this interest.
I almost need not mention that the Japanese possessed their own tra-
dition of pornography, made available to the West primarily through the
woodblock prints of Moronobu, Utamaro, Kunisada, and other artists.
Additionally, there existed enbon (amorous books), sharebon (guide and
fashion books), hyobanki (ratings of actors and prostitutes), and ninjobon
(romances), all sub genres of gesaku focusing on the world of the theater
and the brothels. Taken together, these represent a large portion of all the
books and prints produced during the entire Edo period; yet their formal
existence in the modern era waned rapidly when text pulled away from
illustration and the prostitute herself was remade into an object of the
vision of self-discovery. The correlation between the two phenomena-
the diminished role of illustration and the focus placed upon prosti-
tutes-is worth noting since the separation of text and illustration is a
result of the role given to language to objectify the modern harlot. If it is
true, as Jay and others have argued, that sight predominates in modernity,
the formal aspects of modern visuality need to be carefully specified.
Scrupulous research will no doubt determine what modes of vision were
more modern than others, or perhaps, to put it more clearly, how the

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 240 Charles Shiro Inouye

modernity of the visual is inflected by the various civilizations within

which it emerges.
I would argue that the anti-figural and therefore secretive bias ofJapa-
nese modernity is clearly evident in Takuboku, who engaged in the curi-
ous process of transcribing conventional Japanese pornography into
romaji. "The appetite for writing and the sexual appetite;' he wrote, "seem
closely related. When the keeper of a lending library came and showed me
his strange books, somehow I found myself wanting to read them. I went
ahead and borrowed a few. One was The Flowery Night of the Hazy Moon
(Hana no oboroyo );29 another was The Secret Way of Love (Nasake no tara
no maki).30 I spent three hours copying The Flowery Night of the Hazy
Moon into romaji" (6:78).
This process of transcribing a native text into a "native-yet-foreign"
one reveals the conditions necessary for Takuboku's emergence as a mod-
ern writer. First, his construction of himself as a seeing, discovering au-
thor required a phonocentric, abstract language-a sign vehicle that had
a non-iconic relationship to the signified-with which the concept of
self-identity could be articulated. Here, romaji allowed him to recast the
figural presence of the illustrated, Japanese text in a way that made it
less available to the average reader and, at the same time, more textually
alluring and empowering for those who understood the rules of rep-
resentation. And second, the emergence of selfhood also required the
pornographic act. It made necessary, that is, writing about harlots. For
Takuboku, "the appetite for writing and the sexual appetite" are closely
related because in discovering the need to be a discovering modern male
he must sense both his youthfulness as an explorer and, at the same time,
the presence of an already existing and painfully meaningful trope of self-
awareness: the harlot.
What Takuboku seems most anxious to claim through the act of tran-
scription and by his writing of a journal in romaji is the very identity of the
prostitute. Her self-awareness coincided with that of the modern male
because her discovery and sense of entrapment came by virtue of a set of
conditions under which she had been made to live that resembled the dis-
covery of Japan. What was the plight of the harlot? Many were sold into
bondage. Many were trapped in a role forced upon them by others. Many
were made to live with a new name and, therefore, with a heightened
awareness of self-identity. It is her crisis, her privileged-yet-oppressed posi-
tion within the "floating world;' that provided an important prototype for
the modern ego as it emerged within the scopic regime of discovery.
The connection between this paradigm of prostitution and the lan-

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 Scopic Regime of Discovery 241

guage of self-awareness is equally deep, for the harlot's linguistic situation

also provides a modern model. Because the women who populated the
urban brothels during the Tokugawa period came from various regions
and spoke in a multitude of dialects, they were taught a standard language
called arinsu no kotoba, which allowed buyer and seller to communicate
with each other within the demimonde. 31 The erasing of regionalism that
was a common feature of erotic life in the Yoshiwara brothels can be seen,
then, as paradigmatic for the forging of a standard language that, as
Nanette Twine and others argue, was a necessary condition of moderniza-
tion. 32 To return to an earlier point, it was the desire for standardization
that motivated such language reforms as those already mentioned.
When we consider the prostitute in this way, we understand why
captive women became a paradigm for the "liberated" men such as
Takuboku. She, as much as any early-modern figure, becomes the harbin-
ger of the twentieth-century modern, though she was, of course, modern
from at least the time of Saikaku's awareness of her. Even before the
arrival of Commodore Perry's black ships, the prostitute was already the
discovered territory of Japan. In the passage below, Takuboku recognizes
in the harlot an incipient form of his own identity as a modern male.
Reflecting the tension inherent in trying to establish a "new;' liberated
identity by appropriating an "old;' captive one, he cannot help but feel
sympathy for the prostitute even as he buys access to her body:
''I'm quitting the fifth of next month;' Tamako said, her face sad.
"You should. If you're thinking of leaving, then get out of here:'
"But I have my debts:'
"How much?"
"It was forty yen when I got here. Now it's more like one hun-
dred. They didn't even give me one kimono... :'
I felt as if I couldn't bear it any longer. It seemed as if there was
nothing else for me to do except to cry or make a joke. But I was in
no position to tell a joke, and I couldn't cry....
I paid two yen, and went into an adjoining room, where I had sex
with a girl named Oen for about five minutes .... I went back into
the other room, where I found Kindaiichi lying down, resting. I
didn't feel like saying anything, overwhelmed with the feeling that at
last I had finally fallen into the abyss .... (6:101-102)
Takuboku's abyss is the loneliness of the seer. And his disgust, fascina-
tion, and pleasure are commemorated with the newly coined word ji-
ishiki, self-consciousness, as in the passage that leads into the one quoted

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 242 Charles Shiro Inouye

above: "Self consciousness leads my heart to an abyss" (6:101).33 Disap-

pointment and self-loathing plague his search for subjectivity. He has set
off on an empowering journey, only to find that the land of his discovery
was already a woman, and that the best of these women resembled his sis-
ter. In the eyes of the first-order discoverers of Japan, this second-order
masculinity might seem compromised and inferior. And yet the modern
Japanese text discovers the harlot again and again because she, by virtue
of her long history of captivity, is the model for the author's suffering. She
is the very form of self-awareness, the stereotype of male self-identity. Not
unlike Flaubert's Madame Bovary or Tolstoy's Anna Karenina, Takuboku's
diary similarly discovers a new age by writing the harlot into it. That is
why the register of purchased women in modern Japanese literature is as
long as its list of prurient males: Higuchi Ichiyo's Midori (Takekurabe
[1896]), Nagai Kafii's Oito (Sumidagawa [1909]), Iwano Homei's Kichiya
(Tandeki [1909]), Mori 0gai's Otama (Gan [1915]), Izumi Kyoka's Osen
(Baishoku kamonanban [1920]), and on and on.
I might mention, in passing, that Higuchi Ichiyo's position in this list
of authors is unique because she was a woman who took other women for
her subjects. I am not the first to suggest that she is always included in the
usual list of prominent Meiji authors because she wrote about women as
men did. Hiratsuka Raicho, a contemporary Japanese woman writer,
recently criticized Ichiyo for never breaking with what I have been calling
the modern (and therefore pornographic) literary tradition that Saikaku
established and men such as Takuboku reestablished. Seemingly under-
standing the connection between pornography and self, Raicho writes:
I understand that Ichiyo's writings are all the more attractive to men
now. That is not surprising, for in addition to the appeal of a "femi-
nine" writer, sincerely and intimately depicting the private emotions
of women, each additional rendering of some weak woman's sad
fate fits into the concept men have of women-or rather the con-
cept itself assuages an egotistical need, inciting masculine pity by
awakening in men the pleasant sensation of awareness of their own
strength.34

Sata Ineko, another female writer, was more sympathetic, seeing in Ichiyo
an author herself trapped in inexpressible sorrow. Sata exonerated Ichiyo
with the remark that she could be expected to convey "the constrictions of
the society of her time along with the aspirations of human beings:'35 The
tension inherent in this statement reinforces my ultimate point.

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 Scopic Regime of Discovery 243

Ichiyo's literary life under the regime of discovery was compromised

by the fact that she wrote inescapably as a woman. The gendered premise
of self-discovery rendered her position more naturally self-reflexive than
Takuboku's. Whether or not her path of discovery was more thoughtful
and profound than his, one point is clear: the writer in Meiji Japan, in
search of a territory that permitted the birth of a second-order discover-
ing subject, found the agony of the prostitute (or of the mistress or the
unloved wife) a subject too relevant and useful to ignore.36 So great was
the potential she offered that writers of both genders felt compelled to
make use of her.
Once again, when I point to the new discoverers and speak of the epis-
temic shift that was caused by the anti-figural forces of genbun itchi and,
as a part of this wider cultural movement, the use of romaji, I am not
claiming that their desire to discover was wholly caused by the West. Cer-
tainly, it was intensified and expressed differently because of Japan's
"opening:' Yet Takuboku, working in the wake of "civilization and en-
lightenment;' was repeating what Saikaku did at another, much earlier
modern juncture in Japanese history. Saikaku's A Woman Who Loved Love
[Koshoku ichidai onna (1686)1 is nothing more nor less than harlot-
writing. A voyeuristic treatment of the heroine's damning sexual adven-
tures, it belongs to a particularly ebullient period of mercantile growth
and social change, a time when the newly enforced stability of the Toku-
gawa regime allowed a recently unified nation to begin forming a truly
urban, monetary culture. Marked by its intense interest in the details of
social role-playing and in the nature of human character, Saikaku's con-
fessional is a significant modern precedent for Takuboku's diary. Whether
talking about Matsuo Basho's (1644-1694) self-conscious turn to haibun
(poetry prose) or to the flourishing of katagi-mono (character studies)
that were written by Saikaku and Ejima Kiseki (1666-1735), we can see that
the search for the self had begun long before what Karatani calls the dis-
covery of landscape.
Having been given the opportunity to reflect upon the nature of dis-
covery and its scopic regime, I now know that my urgent desire to see
Takuboku's face was a response to the pornographic nature of his diary. I
was tempted to see Takuboku because of the secretive way that he saw
himself, by way of a new empowering language, and in response to the
regime of discovery that permitted the already discovered author to
reestablish self-identity by rediscovering an objectified female body. The
phonocentric script contributed to this search for identity by allowing

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 244 Charles Shiro Inouye

Ishikawa Takuboku

him to explore the sexual territory of Meiji Japan more freely and willfully
than would have otherwise been possible. Takuboku's experiments with
romaji led him to see himself not just as an individual but rather as an
adolescent, a self in sexual emergence. And it is here that the source of my
disappointment lies. The story of Japan's modernity is a narrative of
prurient males seeking out and appropriating the identity of captured
females. That I expected to see a more mature face indicates the extent to
which I have become both accustomed to and rendered young by the
scopic regime of discovery.

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 Scopic Regime of Discovery 245

NOTES

1 An English translation of this diary as well as a brief biographical sketch of Takuboku

can be found in Romaji Diary and Sad Toys, trans. Sanford Goldstein and Seishi Shinoda
(Rutland, Vt.: Charles E. Tuttle, 1985). A partial translation is also contained in Modern
Japanese Literature, ed. Donald Keene (New York: Grove Press, 1956),211-231. Transla-
tions of quoted passages are my own. For a book-length study of the author, see Hijiya
Yukihiko, Ishikawa Takuboku (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1979).
2 Martin Jay, "Scopic Regimes of Modernity;' Fision and Visuality, ed. Hal Foster (Seattle:

Bay Press, 1988), 3.

3 James A. Fujii, Complicit Fictions: The Subject in the Modern Japanese Prose Narrative
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), helps us understand this seer as an
unstable nexus of textual contingencies rather than a "static, given, unproblematic cen-
ter from which meaning issues" (24). Takuboku is an acting subject whose vision is cre-
ated by the act of narration, which is in turn determined by social forces more multifar-
ious and powerful than his own individual will to see.
4 Karatani Kojin, Origins of Modem Japanese riterature (Durham, N.C.: Duke University
Press, 1993).
5 Fredric Jameson, "In the Mirror of Alternate Modernities;' in Kojin, Origins of Modern
Japanese Literature, vii-xx.
6 Richard Lane, "The Beginnings of the Modern Japanese Novel: Kanazoshi, 1600-1682;'
Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 20 (1957): 644-701; Marleigh Ryan, Japan's First Mod-
ern Novel: Ukigumo of Futabatei Shimei (Ann Arbor: Center for Japanese Studies, Uni-
versity of Michigan, 1990).
7 Karatani Kojin, "One Spirit, Two Nineteenth Centuries," in Postmodernism and Japan,
ed. Masao Miyoshi and H. D. Harootunian (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1989).
8 Both kindai and kinsei indicate modernity. In its broadest sense, kinsei is the last of a
threesome: ancient (kodai), medieval (rhasei), and modern (kinsei). In its narrower
sense, kinsei indicates that period prior to kindai, i.e., the Edo-period (1600-1868) and,
in some cases, the preceding Azuchi-Momoyama period (1568-1600). Here I am using
the term kinsei in this narrower sense. I have translated it as "early-modern" and killdai
as "modern:'
9 The numbers in parentheses indicate volume and page of Takuboku's collected works,
Ishikawa Takuboku zensha (Tokyo: Chikuma Shobo, 1978-1980). This diary is also read-
ilyavailable as Romazi nikki, ed. Kuwabara Takeo, Iwanami Bunko 54:4 (Tokyo: Iwanami
Shoten, 1978). The diary was first published in 1954.
10 Kuwabara Takeo suggests that writing in romaji was as difficult for the Japanese of

Takuboku's day as writing diaries in French might be to Japanese today. Donald Keene
compares writing in romaji with our writing in Esperanto. See Keene's anthology, noted
above. For an introduction (in Japanese) to Takuboku's diaries, see Kuwabara Takeo's
introduction in Romazi nikki, 24-35.
11 Meirokllsha zasshi no. 1, in Meiji bllllka zellsh ii: Zasshi hen, 18, ed. Yoshino Sakuzo et al.
(Tokyo: Kyodo Insatsu, 1928), 53. See also William Reynolds Braisted, Mciroku zasshi
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1979), 9.
12 Education in Japan: A Series of Letters Addressed by Promillent Americans to Arinori Mori
(New York, 1873), vi. Quoted in Ivan Hall, Mori Arinori (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University Press, 1971), 189.

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 246 Charles Shiro Inouye

13 The allure of riimaji is today evident in its use for commercial purposes, for instance.
Advertisements, product packaging, company logos, and so forth often employ alpha-
betic script because of its modern associations with consumer culture and its claims to
improve life. Riimaji is a marker of worth, serving a similar semiotic function to the
multitude of Caucasian faces featured in contemporary Japanese television commercials.
14 Kuwabara, Romazi nikki, 25I.
15 Edward Fowler, The Rhetoric of Confession: Shishiisetsu in Early Twentieth-Century
Japanese Fiction (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), xxiv.
16 Charles S. Inouye, "Pictocentrism;' Yearbook of Comparative and General Literature 40
(1992): 23-39·
17 Miyazaki took care of Takuboku's family-his mother, wife, and daughter-in Hako-
date, from 24 April until June 1909. Miyazaki and Takuboku met at a society for tanka
poets in Hakodate during the summer of 1907.
18 This is, at least, Kuwabara Takeo's appraisal: "Soviet textbooks contain passages from the
diary, and in Donald Keene's Modern Japanese Literature (Grove Press, 1956), the most
popular piece among American readers is A Diary in Roman Script" (Romazi nikki, 241).
As for Japan's reception of this text, "It is not enough to say that A Diary in Roman Script
is one of the monuments of Japan's diary-writing tradition. Though it has been unjusti-
fiably neglected, it stands as a high point of the modern Japanese tradition, one of a few
great masterpieces:' Kuwabara, "Takuboku no nikki;' in Bungei tokuhon: Ishikawa
Takuboku (Tokyo: Kawade Shinsha, 1979), 30. Donald Keene also values this text highly:
"It reveals a man of depth, complexity and modernity of thought and emotion that
would not have been predicted from earlier literature" (Modern Japanese Literature, 211).
The bias in favor of the (Westernized) modern as opposed to the "earlier literature" is
shared by Western and Japanese critics alike.
19 Kuwabara. Romazi nikki, 241.
20 Hijiya, Ishikawa Takuboku, 172.
21 John R. Black, Young Japan: Yokohama and Yedo (London: Trubner and Company,
1880),2.
22 James A. B. Scherer, Young Japan: The Story of the Japanese People, and Especially of Their
Educational Development (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner, 1905), 15.
23 Ibid., 6.
24 In his "Writing Out Asia: Modernity, Canon, and Natsume Saseki's Kokoro;' positions 1,
no. 1 (summer 1993): 194-223, James Fujii makes a similar point: "The term 'modern'
almost always erases Japan's own reproduction of imperialist behavior" (204). The struc-
ture of inequality is the same as in the collaborative inversion.
25 The problem of youth is taken up from a different perspective by the historian Kenneth B.
Pyle, The New Generation in Meiji Japan (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1969). To
Tokutomi Soha, the focus of Pyle's study, Japan's youth are "the masters of the future;'
valued in contrast to the old, who are "relics of yesterday's world" (33). The discourse of
youth consumes Tokutomi and Takuboku alike since the cataclysmic changes brought
about by the Meiji Restoration and the "opening of Japan" to the West have the effect of
erasing history. Consequently, though focused on different aspects of Japan's youth in the
Meiji period, Pyle's concerns-problems of identity, the agony of consciousness, the
search for moral surety, war and its influence on self-discovery, and so forth-are all rel-
evant to this discussion of Takuboku and his adolescent objectification of the female.

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 Scopic Regime of Discovery 247

26 Also known as Hirano Banri (1885-1947). He was a graduate of the First Higher School
(Ichiko), earned a degree in applied science from Tokyo University, was an engineer for
the Mantetsu Central Testing Laboratory, studied in Europe, and later served as an engi-
neer for the Ministry of Agriculture and Commerce (NiJshiJmusho). He was a haiku poet
of the Myojo school.
27 The other two alluded to here are the playwright, novelist, and poet Yoshii Isamu
(1886-1960) and the poet Kitahara Hakushii (1885-1942).
28 I learned of this book from Kawanami Hideo, Takuboku hiwa (Tokyo: Tojiisha, 1979),
277. I have not been able to locate True Love or the Japanese translation Obei-koi no
shinsa, which appeared in 1908. Kawanami himself has seen only a later edition, Toru
rabu, translated in February 1951 by Hara Shoji. Supposedly, the book is about a college
graduation party in the United States. Friends gather. Everyone gets drunk. John Brown
proposes an end to his friend Eton's virginity. Eton is stripped, bound, and placed on a
table. Ida, slender and eighteen, and Vick, well-muscled and twenty-two, disrobe and
take a place on either side of the naked Eton. By relating stories about their first sexual
conquests-conqueror and conquered-the group tries to titillate him and ultimately
to make him a man.
29 By Baitei Kinga (1821-1893). The full title is ShunjiJ hana no oboroyo.
30 This book was not listed in the Kokusho samokuroku [A compendium of Japanese titles J.
31 I thank Sumie Jones for bringing my attention to this language.
32 Nanette Twine, Language and the Modern State: The Reform of Written Japanese (New
York: Nissan Institute/Routledge Japanese Studies Series, 1991).
33 Kuwabara speculates that Takuboku was the first to use this word ("Takuboku no nikki;'
in Bungei tokuhon, 31). In fact,ji-ishiki occurs earlier, in Oguri Fiiyo's Youth (Seishun,
1905-1906), for example. The point that Takuboku was self-conscious remains.
34 Quoted in Victoria V. Vernon, Daughters of the Moon: Wish, Will, and Social Constraint in
Fiction by Modern Japanese Women (Berkeley: Institute of East Asian Studies, University
of California, 1988), 39. Vernon's translation.
35 Ibid., 66.
36 Of course, there were other ways to understand this identification. No less trapped than
Takuboku in the youthful season of Meiji, Kurata Hyakuzo (1891-1943) attempted to
reify the modern merging of man and woman, raising the encounter to the level of love
and understanding: "I want to adore my beloved to such a degree that the sweat will
pour from me, so much that I could die. I want to know the shame of loving someone so
much that I might fear death itself." For a humanistic interpretation of gender appropri-
ation, see J. Thomas Rimer, Culture and Identity (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1990 ),22-3 6.

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