| The primary subject of this study is literary and cinematic representations of the suburb in imperial Japan. The project's scope of inquiry, however, extends beyond suburban borders to include Japan's colonies. The present study attempts to draw the suburb and colony closer as correlative spaces underpinned by differential power relations, and in making the unlikely connection, aims to contribute to furthering the critical inquiries initiated by the recent studies that reassess modern Japanese culture in the context of Japan's experience of colonialism.; There have been no major studies of the representations of the Japanese suburb in the prewar period, but the suburb in Japan began to develop in the late nineteenth century and has been depicted, as a main subject, a setting, or a narrative detail, in various literary and cinematic works since then. This study examines the suburbs depicted in four such works---Kunikida Doppo's "Musashino" (1898) and "Take no kido" (1907), Tanizaki Jun'ichiro's Chijin no ai (1924--25), and Ozu Yasujiro's film Umarete wa mita keredo (1932). Focusing particularly on signs of differential power relations in these works---narrative strategies that instill a sense of national unity by rendering the inhabitants of the suburb as invisible Other, or details of suburban life that reveal the system of unequal wealth distribution, or a mode of gender relations that is bound up with the ideology of the suburban home, or the markers of a new mode of production in the suburb that alters the existing, agrarian rules of social relations, among others---the present study argues that the suburb is a site that articulates a power relationship that can be accurately called colonial. The epilogue takes up a recent film by Iwai Shunji, Suwaroteiru (1996), and examines how the contemporary suburb continues to reveal colonial relations that still organize and govern Japanese society, albeit in a new formulation. By critically engaging literary and cinematic texts from different periods of modern Japanese history, this project seeks to unsettle the monotonous and innocuous image of the suburb and bring into light unsettling underpinnings of the suburb. |
