Ri Ko Ran and Yomota book

[Aaron Gerow]

I saw that a number of KineJapanners were at the Ri Ko Ran symposium last 
Saturday.  The overall opinion among the audience and the presenters was 
the symposium went quite well, providing interesting takes not only on Ri 
Ko Ran, but on Manshu and its role in Japanese modernity.  The most 
common theme seemed to be the attempt to conceptualize Ri Ko Ran as less 
the "perfect Chinese" for Japanese imperial interests, but rather as a 
polysemous figure with multiple names and identities who, even for 
wartime Japanese, was attractive to the degree she escaped strict 
definitions of identity.  While this status, on the one hand, accorded 
with imperial interests that were trying to expand the definition of 
Japanese identity to include other Asians, it also signalled how these 
other Asian elements were entering and complicating the Japanese cultural 
sphere.  In particular, several presenters stressed Manshu's ambiguous 
position as both a form of Japanese colonization and as "the part of 
Europe closest to Japan" that enabled many Japanese to conceive of 
themself as more Western.

What with a phone call from Yamaguchi Yoshiko herself during the 
roundtable discussion session, the general tone was to favorably re-read 
her status, something which not a few I talked to afterwards felt 
uncomfortable with.  Even if, as Yomota stressed, she has regretted her 
wartime past and has gone on to work on behalf of Palestinians and 
comfort women, her role, first during the war as the woman conquered by 
the Japanese male, and then second, after the war as the woman conquered 
by the American male, demands a more critical examination of her own 
culpability.  This has to go with a more critical attitude towards the 
narration of history.  What with the modernity and multivalency of Manshu 
being praised so loudly, Yomota even went so far as to declare that 
Amakasu, the man who ran Man'ei infamous for killing Osugi Sakae, did not 
kill Osugi (Yomota's alternative picture was of the Man'ei leader who 
respected and in turn earned the respect of his Chinese employees).  I 
wondered about this tendency to offer narrations of Manshu history with 
heroes and heroines, and wished there was more self-awareness of the role 
of such reinterpretations in a present alive with revisionist reactionary 
thought.

Anyway, I'd like to hear others' impressions of the symposium.

For those who could not come, Yomota's book on Ri Ko Ran and Hara Setsuko 
has come out.

Yomota Inuhiko.  Nihon no joyu.  Iwanami Shoten, 2000.  ISBN 4000263196.  
2800 yen.
???????????????????

It is part of a series called "Nihon no 50-nen, Nihon no 200-nen" 
featuring books by Kato Tenyo, Kang Sangjung, Ueno Chizuko, and others.

Aaron Gerow
Associate Professor
International Student Center
Yokohama National University
79-1 Tokiwadai
Hodogaya-ku, Yokohama 240-8501
JAPAN
E-mail: gerow at ynu.ac.jp
Phone: 81-45-339-3170
Fax: 81-45-339-3171