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relationship with each other through the promotion of mutual under-
standing.
Apart from the political necessities, however, Faulkner s visit to Japan
inspired Japanese writers and scholars, and helped develop wider appre-
ciation of Faulkner s works in Japan. Faulkner was at first reluctant to go
to Japan, since he was not sure if he could fulfill the duty he had been as-
signed by the State Department. But he enjoyed the stay more than he
had expected, and even left a public message entitled To the Youth of
Japan, in which he encouraged young Japanese writers, saying that their
disaster and despair 4 after the war would eventually lead them to accom-
plish highly artistic achievements. He was clearly reminded of his home-
land, starting the message with a reference to the South s loss of the Civil
War. But what kind of influence did Faulkner have on Japanese writers
after World War II in the concurrence of local, national, and global inter-
actions, and moreover, what common problems, if any, attract Japanese
writers and scholars so much to Faulkner, well into the twenty-first cen-
tury? I would like to examine how Faulkner and Japanese writers, espe-
cially Kenji Nakagami, respond to patriarchy in their respective societies,
and trace how Faulkner s exploration of patriarchy, on global, national, and
local levels, inspires Nakagami to pursue a critical dialogue with Faulkner
through his own fiction.
116
Japanese Writers Encounter Faulkner 117
At the Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha Conference in 1982, Kenzaburo
Ohashi, a great scholar and the founding father of Faulkner studies in
Japan, discussed in detail Faulkner s influence on individual Japanese writ-
ers.5 In his lecture, he also mentioned some resemblances between Japan
and the American South to explain Japan s particular interest in Faulkner.
First, I would like to elaborate on this point a little further and review the
situational similarities between Japan and Faulkner s South by mapping
the U.S.A. in a transpacific perspective.
In the American hemisphere, the term Plantation America is often
used to explain the plantation slave system common both in the American
South and the Caribbean islands.6 The slavery system necessarily brought
problems of miscegenation and cultural hybridity. Japan, on the other hand,
had neither a large-scale plantation economy nor African slavery. The
country had never been occupied by a foreign power until the American
occupation after Japan s defeat in World War II. The Japanese believe in
general that they are a very homogeneous people.
In spite of the apparent contrast, however, there are in fact some un-
canny resemblances between Japan and the American South, when ex-
amined more closely. Japan s loss in World War II has haunted the Japa-
nese, just as the defeat of the Civil War haunted white Southerners. There
is some difference between Japan and the South concerning their willing-
ness to accept foreign influences, but the traumas of modernization and
of the loss of traditional society and culture, caused by a foreign power
or by capital, exist both in Japan and the American South. In these socie-
ties, patriarchy often depends on the legitimate succession of authentic
blood to ascertain and assure the continuation of traditional culture seem-
ingly threatened by modernization and alien powers. Moreover, the du-
ality of being a victim and a victimizer is also discernible in Japan and
the American South. In its plantation economy, the American South was
a colonizer to the African American slaves, but the Southerners felt that
they were virtually colonized by the predatory North after the Civil War.
To their dismay, not only the Civil War but also modernization brought by
Northern capitalists destroyed their traditional society, and put the South
in a subjugated position in the national economy. Accordingly, Southern-
ers easily identified themselves as victims, even though the South was itself
in a colonizer s position in the American hemisphere as part of the U.S.
Much like Southern society felt Northern pressure, Japan has felt the
constant pressures of Western imperial power since it opened its door to
the West. As a matter of fact, the first demand from the West to open
Japanese ports came from Commodore Matthew Perry of the U.S.A. in
118 takako tanaka
1853. Perry anchored with his squadron off the shores of Uraga, not too
far from present-day Tokyo. It was, incidentally, about the same period
in which the Monroe doctrine claimed U.S. power across the American
hemisphere.7 Perry s visit caused a tremendous turmoil throughout the
country, and triggered the civil war that resulted in the fall of the Toku-
gawa Shogunate, a feudal system that had governed Japan for more than
250 years. At roughly the same time as the Southern plantation system col-
lapsed and the South lay in shambles after the Civil War, the Tokugawa
Shogunate collapsed in 1868. The Meiji government (starting in 1868)
quickly succeeded it with the restoration of the Imperial Court. The new
government took the form of the ancien régime, but it was quite aware
of the critical situation surrounding Japan. Western countries including
Britain and France were eyeing Japan as a possible colony, and moderni-
zation was absolutely necessary to defend the country and to survive as an
independent nation. The trauma of discarding traditional culture was tem-
porarily repressed in the face of this urgent demand. In turn, the centrali-
zation of power to the Emperor and his new government reassured the
Japanese of their legitimacy and helped appease people s anxiety about the
continuation of the traditional culture.
The Japanese government soon came to believe that the only way to sur-
vive was to imitate and join the ranks of the Western great powers. From
the Sino-Japanese War in 1894 95 through the Russo-Japanese War in
1904 5 and the Manchurian Incident in 1931 to World War II, Japan pur-
sued a continental expansion policy with the ostensible purpose of liber-
ating Asia from the Western imperial nations. Japan colonized Taiwan in
1895 and, as a result of the Russo-Japanese War, annexed Korea in 1910.
Japan started war with China again in 1937 and moved into French Indo-
china in 1940. Japan was finally defeated in 1945 after the two atomic
bombs at Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
This brief history shows that Japan, like the American South, has her
own double consciousness of victim and victimized. But the Japanese are
rather forgetful of what they did on the Asian continent during the wars.
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