Publication Date

Fall 9-1-2020

Description

The decades immediately following the Meiji Restoration of 1868 saw Japan rapidly develop as a “modern” nation — replete with industrial technology, a powerful and sophisticated military, a burgeoning capitalist economy, a broad based educational system, and, by the early twentieth century, a massive influx of contemporary Western political, philosophical, literary and artistic ideals, including socialism, anarchism, and nearly all variations of avant-garde art and aesthetics. By the end of the Meiji period, however, with the crackdown on leftist activities in the wake of the High Treason Incident (1910–1911) and the slow but steady accretion of Japanese imperialist ideology through the 1920s and 1930s, the possibilities for art and politics become significantly proscribed. A number of figures stand out during this period as significant innovators of avant-garde thought and practice. This paper deals with two of them: Tsuji Jun 辻潤 (1884–1944) and Takahashi Shinkichi 高橋新吉 (1901–1987). While Tsuji, a devotee of Epicurus, Tolstoy, Oscar Wilde, and Max Stirner, exemplifies the Dadaist (or Nietzschean) attempt to make one’s life itself into a work of art, the more restrained poet Takahashi embodies the connection, later to be developed in the postwar American avant-garde, between Dada and Zen. And yet, as I will argue, the differences in style and approach to living a life of direct and immediate experience mask a strong similarity in the work of Takahashi and Tsuji, both of whom limn the promise and pose the challenge of integrating the freedoms and energies of Dada with progressive politics and East Asian forms of religiosity, including Daoism, Zen and Pure Land Buddhism.

Journal

Modernism/Modernity

Volume

27

Issue

3

First Page

447

Last Page

466

Department

Comparative Humanities

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