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Discourses of the Vanishing: Modernity, Phantasm, Japan
Japan today is haunted by the ghosts its spectacular modernity has generated. Deep anxieties about the potential loss of national identity and continuity disturb many in Japan, despite widespread insistence that it has remained culturally intact. In this provocative conjoining of ethnography, history, and cultural criticism, Marilyn Ivy discloses these anxieties—and the attempts to contain them—as she tracks what she calls the marginalized events, sites, and cultural practices suspended at moments of impending disappearance.
Ivy shows how a fascination with cultural margins accompanied the emergence of Japan as a modern nation-state. This fascination culminated in the early twentieth-century establishment of Japanese folklore studies and its attempts to record the spectral, sometimes violent, narratives of those margins. She then traces the obsession with the vanishing through a range of contemporary efforts by remote communities to promote themselves as nostalgic sites of authenticity, storytelling practices as signs of premodern presence, mass travel campaigns, recallings of the dead by blind mediums, and itinerant, kabuki-inspired populist theater.
Ivy shows how a fascination with cultural margins accompanied the emergence of Japan as a modern nation-state. This fascination culminated in the early twentieth-century establishment of Japanese folklore studies and its attempts to record the spectral, sometimes violent, narratives of those margins. She then traces the obsession with the vanishing through a range of contemporary efforts by remote communities to promote themselves as nostalgic sites of authenticity, storytelling practices as signs of premodern presence, mass travel campaigns, recallings of the dead by blind mediums, and itinerant, kabuki-inspired populist theater.
277 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1995
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Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
November 7, 2020
(I did this book review for a class.)
The welcome page of the Japan National Tourism Organization’s website is adorned by traditional icons such as noh masks and torii gates . As a hardly exhaustive slideshow of the numerous cultural products that convey an idea of Japanese-ness, the following question arises: what exactly is Japan?
This is the question that Marilyn Ivy does not answer, but rather encircles, in Discourses of the Vanishing: Modernity, Phantasm, Japan. To Ivy, the more important question is how Japan constructs an idea of itself, particularly through its obsession with certain cultural fragments that have not yet been completely erased by western-driven modernisation . These fragments – suspended in a limbo of eternal "vanishing", as Ivy calls them – function as points of “nostalgic recuperation”. Such recuperation is achieved through repetitive signification towards an abstract ideal: an “original Japan”. Not answering directly but exploring conscientiously, Discourses eclectically crosses the dialogues of Japanese cultural studies, post-colonialism, modernity and critical theory, among others.
Unfortunately, the opening chapter appears frustrating. Ivy’s main argument is dangerously obscured by her destabilising explorations not of but around the contexts of Japanese colonial history and modernity. Her daunting footnotes, alongside her attempt to spell out the critical theory alphabet from Adorno to Žižek , risk clouding her introduction further. Readers unfamiliar with the seemingly unnecessary difficulty of postmodernist philosophy might prefer to return to this introduction after reading the rest of the book, which is thankfully clearer.
Chapter 2 traces manifestations of nostalgic desire through a historical survey of Japan National Railway’s domestic tourism campaigns. The movement from Discover Japan to Exotic Japan is aptly paralleled against the Western shift from neo-romantic modernist yearnings of the absolute to postmodernist montage and play. Ivy then sketches this recursive mode of rediscovery into the “neo-Japonesque” mass culture of the 1980s before re-appropriating that pathway to the field of Japanese nativist ethnology, segueing well into chapter 3. The language of critical theory turns more patient and accessible in these subsequent chapters through meticulous linkages to relevant case studies.
What emerges from the historical survey of Japanese nativist ethnology in chapter 3 is an enlightening critique of Yanagita Kunio’s Tōno Monogatari, a seminal work of “folkloric ethnography” that stands ambiguously between scientific study and literature. Ivy discusses its complex authorship, questioning the problematics between Yanagita and the supposed ‘source’ of the tales, Sasaki Kizen. However, the profundity of chapter 3 lies not in Ivy’s critique of Yanagita but in the possibility for such critique to self-inflect onto Discourses as well. This notion becomes more concretised as Ivy works through her own fieldwork in the latter half of the book, suspiciously employing the same limiting techniques that she seems to be criticising.
Three different spectres of “vanishing” are explored in each remaining chapter. The focus of chapter 4 is the city of Tōno, situated as a memorialised utopia which cyclically re-appropriates utopian ideals for economic goals. Next, chapter 5 investigates the “meta-graveyard” of Mt Osore and its unofficial ‘popular’ attraction, the itako ‘mediums’, as aiding recuperative mourning through contact with the dead. Finally, Ivy illustrates the dreamlike wish-fulfilling pastiche of taishū engeki in chapter 6, a kind of “low-budget kabuki” equivalent to vaudeville in the west. Ivy’s traversals through the psychoanalytic concepts of mourning, repetition and the uncanny, while disorienting and labyrinthian, always neatly return to and insightfully illuminate her thesis. Additionally, she constantly re-navigates to the greater concerns of modernity and capitalism that the loci of “vanishing” simultaneously support and destabilise.
Furthermore, such destabilisation is subsequently transferred beyond the text of Discourses, disturbing the foundations of ethnography as a field as well as the ‘tradition’ of critical theory that Ivy herself relies on. Nativist ethnology’s returns to Yanagita uncannily extend to Ivy’s own returns to Freud and Lacan. Hence, in addition to the issues of translation and authorial mediation which Ivy criticises Yanagita for but hardly solves herself, Discourses exposes itself as working to translate Japanese constructions of Japan as an “object of knowledge” into the language of postmodernist philosophy.
However, a rediscovery of the first chapter can unveil a way of escaping Ivy’s repetitions of Yanagita’s ‘mistakes’ of translation leading to loss. Referencing Bakhtin, Ivy contends that “it is… the dialogic encounter of different discourses that frees up the possibility of politics” (19). Ivy’s repetition can thus be presumed to be openly inviting critique, thereby advocating a more critically-tuned readership. This idea resonates with Roland Barthes’s proclamation that “the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author” . Advancing from the “monologue” of ethnographic study under a single author(ity) opens the text to “dialogic” conversation, followed by possibilities for continuing research.
Discourses hence stands as a monumental step towards a new ‘reflexive’ ethnography unbound by doctrinal knowledge, beginning with a conversation between Japanese and western thought. Critical theorists will find this to be an exciting introduction to Japan as an object of cultural study, just as Japanese studies scholars will find it to be an eye-opening introduction to the revolutionising world of critical theory .
The welcome page of the Japan National Tourism Organization’s website is adorned by traditional icons such as noh masks and torii gates . As a hardly exhaustive slideshow of the numerous cultural products that convey an idea of Japanese-ness, the following question arises: what exactly is Japan?
This is the question that Marilyn Ivy does not answer, but rather encircles, in Discourses of the Vanishing: Modernity, Phantasm, Japan. To Ivy, the more important question is how Japan constructs an idea of itself, particularly through its obsession with certain cultural fragments that have not yet been completely erased by western-driven modernisation . These fragments – suspended in a limbo of eternal "vanishing", as Ivy calls them – function as points of “nostalgic recuperation”. Such recuperation is achieved through repetitive signification towards an abstract ideal: an “original Japan”. Not answering directly but exploring conscientiously, Discourses eclectically crosses the dialogues of Japanese cultural studies, post-colonialism, modernity and critical theory, among others.
Unfortunately, the opening chapter appears frustrating. Ivy’s main argument is dangerously obscured by her destabilising explorations not of but around the contexts of Japanese colonial history and modernity. Her daunting footnotes, alongside her attempt to spell out the critical theory alphabet from Adorno to Žižek , risk clouding her introduction further. Readers unfamiliar with the seemingly unnecessary difficulty of postmodernist philosophy might prefer to return to this introduction after reading the rest of the book, which is thankfully clearer.
Chapter 2 traces manifestations of nostalgic desire through a historical survey of Japan National Railway’s domestic tourism campaigns. The movement from Discover Japan to Exotic Japan is aptly paralleled against the Western shift from neo-romantic modernist yearnings of the absolute to postmodernist montage and play. Ivy then sketches this recursive mode of rediscovery into the “neo-Japonesque” mass culture of the 1980s before re-appropriating that pathway to the field of Japanese nativist ethnology, segueing well into chapter 3. The language of critical theory turns more patient and accessible in these subsequent chapters through meticulous linkages to relevant case studies.
What emerges from the historical survey of Japanese nativist ethnology in chapter 3 is an enlightening critique of Yanagita Kunio’s Tōno Monogatari, a seminal work of “folkloric ethnography” that stands ambiguously between scientific study and literature. Ivy discusses its complex authorship, questioning the problematics between Yanagita and the supposed ‘source’ of the tales, Sasaki Kizen. However, the profundity of chapter 3 lies not in Ivy’s critique of Yanagita but in the possibility for such critique to self-inflect onto Discourses as well. This notion becomes more concretised as Ivy works through her own fieldwork in the latter half of the book, suspiciously employing the same limiting techniques that she seems to be criticising.
Three different spectres of “vanishing” are explored in each remaining chapter. The focus of chapter 4 is the city of Tōno, situated as a memorialised utopia which cyclically re-appropriates utopian ideals for economic goals. Next, chapter 5 investigates the “meta-graveyard” of Mt Osore and its unofficial ‘popular’ attraction, the itako ‘mediums’, as aiding recuperative mourning through contact with the dead. Finally, Ivy illustrates the dreamlike wish-fulfilling pastiche of taishū engeki in chapter 6, a kind of “low-budget kabuki” equivalent to vaudeville in the west. Ivy’s traversals through the psychoanalytic concepts of mourning, repetition and the uncanny, while disorienting and labyrinthian, always neatly return to and insightfully illuminate her thesis. Additionally, she constantly re-navigates to the greater concerns of modernity and capitalism that the loci of “vanishing” simultaneously support and destabilise.
Furthermore, such destabilisation is subsequently transferred beyond the text of Discourses, disturbing the foundations of ethnography as a field as well as the ‘tradition’ of critical theory that Ivy herself relies on. Nativist ethnology’s returns to Yanagita uncannily extend to Ivy’s own returns to Freud and Lacan. Hence, in addition to the issues of translation and authorial mediation which Ivy criticises Yanagita for but hardly solves herself, Discourses exposes itself as working to translate Japanese constructions of Japan as an “object of knowledge” into the language of postmodernist philosophy.
However, a rediscovery of the first chapter can unveil a way of escaping Ivy’s repetitions of Yanagita’s ‘mistakes’ of translation leading to loss. Referencing Bakhtin, Ivy contends that “it is… the dialogic encounter of different discourses that frees up the possibility of politics” (19). Ivy’s repetition can thus be presumed to be openly inviting critique, thereby advocating a more critically-tuned readership. This idea resonates with Roland Barthes’s proclamation that “the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author” . Advancing from the “monologue” of ethnographic study under a single author(ity) opens the text to “dialogic” conversation, followed by possibilities for continuing research.
Discourses hence stands as a monumental step towards a new ‘reflexive’ ethnography unbound by doctrinal knowledge, beginning with a conversation between Japanese and western thought. Critical theorists will find this to be an exciting introduction to Japan as an object of cultural study, just as Japanese studies scholars will find it to be an eye-opening introduction to the revolutionising world of critical theory .
July 23, 2021
Interesting. Also makes me glad all over again that I bailed on graduate school and don't have to care about Lacan all the time.
May 27, 2007
I read this for my senior thesis - my advisor was a personal friend of the author, who apparantly is quite a bluegrass afficianado in addition to being a Japanese scholar of some repute. The book itself is a pretty perfect case of an academic text: it is by turns enlightening and infuriating. For example, this is the first place I ever encountered the word "phantasmatic", and, if I have any say in the matter, the last.
Why can't someone write a decent academic book about cultural change that doesn't read like an unitelligible glossary of made up words?
Why can't someone write a decent academic book about cultural change that doesn't read like an unitelligible glossary of made up words?
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June 3, 2012Frustrating, yet rewarding for anyone with the time/energy to really try to dissect Ivy's writing. But to have to do that almost feels like a failing of the author. At times it felt that Ivy was infatuated with her own vocabulary and had fallen too far down the rabbit hole of Japanese modernity, so to speak. Would give this book 1 or 2 stars, but honestly feel that I should have given it another chance. Would not recommended to anyone who isn't an anthropologist.
May 3, 2010
Ivy does a fantastic job tracing how the peripheral and particular in Japan have become enshrined as the sites of tradition in contemporary Japan. One can never have too much demystification, and Ivy manages it with nuance and grace, noting the phantasms but also noting that phantasm is not pure fiction.
February 12, 2011
Some parts rate 4.5 stars, others only 2.5, IMHO.
January 29, 2014
An interesting window into some Japanese things I knew nothing about and how they're shaped and changed by modernity.
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews