Modern Japan History Workshop

“Taishō Enchantment: Between Science and Religion in the /Shirakaba/ Journal”

Speaker: Joshua Rogers (PhD Candidate in Japanese Literature, Columbia University)

Date & Time: Friday, July 12th, 2019 at 6:00pm

Location: Komaba Campus, University of Tokyo, Komaba International Building for Education and Research (KIBER), Room 110

The Japanese literature of the early 1910s was marked by a tension between science and religion. On the one hand, the materialistic philosophy of thinkers like Ernst Haeckel combined with a surge in popularity of critical writings on Christianity by Friedrich Nietzsche and Ernest Renan pushed many Japanese literati to abandon their Christian faith. On the other hand, these writers’ desire for spiritual experience and their skepticism of purely mechanistic worldviews led to a great surge of interest in spiritualism, mysticism, and the vitalism of Henri Bergson.

In this presentation I introduce a selection of the literature and philosophy that was both anti-materialistic and anti-religious, written by authors who contributed to, or were greatly influenced by, the /Shirakaba/ (White Birch) journal. Yanagi Muneyoshi was a leading voice in this movement as it jumped from psychical research, pantheism, vitalism, and mysticism. It was also Yanagi who helped forge the connection between spiritualism and a theory of the genius, under which the great artists of the world were equated to religious figures like Jesus and the Buddha. These connections in turn had a deep impact on the fiction of writers like Mushanokōji Saneatsu, Arishima Takeo, and Shiga Naoya.