1920s Japan
This is an excerpt from the paper...
The 1920s was a period of some confusion in Japanese society. The 1930s would be a period of militarization, a process started in the late 1920s with the growth of nationalism at the end of the Taisho period. The previous period, the Meiji, had seen great changes in the economic structure of Japan, and it was also an era when Japan opened to the rest of the world somewhat before closing up once more. Western influences in popular culture in the Taisho period in the 1920s created new tensions as national fervor produced a backlash and a consequent desire to promote and protect all things Japanese. Many of these social tensions are depicted in the novel Naomi, written in 1925 but not translated into English until 1985. Like the society he depicted in this novel, Tanizaki's work is marked by a mixture of Japanese and Western literary elements, though at different times in his professional life he would accept or reject Western influences while developing his own unique Japanese literary structures. Western influences in Japan started in the Tokugawa period in the middle of the nineteenth century and continued in varying strengths through much of the Taisho period. The last half of the Tokugawa period began in the middle of the eighteenth century, and this was also the era of the rise of industrialism in Europe. Japan during this era maintained her policy of seclusion. A change came about in 1858 when Japan signed commercial treaties with fiv
. . .
eological exchanges among serious minds, but the lost generation was more an object of fun to the journalists, who gave it the epithet "ero-guro-nansensu" ("erotic-grotesque-absurd"). For a time Tanizaki was that generation's laureate (Miyoshi, 1985, 12).
Naomi is singled out by Edmund White as the first important book by the greatest novelist of Japan. he likens the work to Henry James's Daisy Miller in that like James, "Tanizaki created for his readers in a single blow the type of the modern young woman" (White, 1985, 36). White also notes how Tanizaki would later turn his back on Westernization and become a leading champion of Japanese culture:
What makes Naomi of special interest is that it shows Tanizaki's mind before he embraced the past, but after he had already struck a critical stance toward his country's hasty, often shallow, usually painful, adoption of western manners, mores, and fads (White, 1985, 36).
Tanizaki wrote this novel soon after making a permanent move to Osaka from Yokohama and Tokyo, where he had been living the fast life for some time among the Westerners who gave Yokohama its reputation as a cosmopolitan city. He had actually been forced to make this move by the disastrous earthquake of 1923. On
. . .
Some common words found in the essay are:
West Japan, Meiji Era, Tanizaki Japan's, Mary Pickford, Takao Tsuchiya, Naomi Naomi, , I'd Naomi, Japan Meiji, Westerners Yokohama, tanizaki 1990, western influences, popular culture, meiji period, taisho period, white 1985, adoption western, white 1985 36, contemporary literary, japanese culture, 1985 36, contemporary literary criticism, tokugawa period middle, criticism 1990 413, adoption western values,
Approximate Word count = 3161
Approximate Pages = 13 (250 words per page)
More Essays on 1920s Japan
|
Customer Service
to Over
32,000 Professionally Written Papers!!!
