Humor out of place: laughing counterpublics and transnational satire in nineteenth century Japan

Thesis

In the historiography of Japan, the bakumatsu years have been positioned as a period of particular turmoil and unrest that witnessed an explosion in humorous and satirical cultural production. What has been described as an Edo popular culture of play arising from the expansion of urban centers, developed social imaginations and forms of knowledge, which subverted the official Tokugawa order. Japan’s mid-nineteenth century opening to the West and the establishment of the new Meiji government, which embarked on a serious mission of modern nation-state building, are said to have extinguished these popular critical energies and closed this cultural space of play. The Meiji state and influential intellectuals rendered humorous cultural production as an evil custom of the past as it elicited a laughter that was out of place with official ideologies of civilization and enlightenment.

Shifting the locus of attention to foreground popular sources such as the work of writers of playful literature, artists and cartoonists, satirical newspapers, and an active audience for these cultural productions, this dissertation discloses the surprising abundance of laughter and networks of people who adaptively laughed out of place in the second half of nineteenth century Japan. In particular, I illuminate the emergence of a distinct intellectual and cultural space of a ‘laughing counterpublic,’ which became a world-articulating project that was in tension with and undermined the Meiji state’s national public building and imperial subject formation. Delineating how transnational encounters of satirical cultures on the non-state level reconfigured the laughing counterpublic and forged a practice of laughing at imperializing and hierarchizing discourses of Western civilizational progress across an imagined East-West divide, this thesis contributes to understandings of the meanings of Japan’s opening beyond narratives of Western modernity or binary oppositional notions of anti-modernity and nativist reactionism.

Authors: Stanislaus, WA

• DOI: 10.5287/ora-ozgggprvx
• Type of award: DPhil
• Level of award: Doctoral
• Awarding institution: University of Oxford
• Language: English
• Keywords: Meiji newspapers; Gesaku; counterpublic; Bakumatsu; Japan; Punch; satire
• Subjects: Transnational history; Humor; Intellectual history; Laughter; Modern Japanese history