Joshua Young 
                                                                         Cornell University
 

            The works of the nineteenth-century writer Shikitei Sanba have, since the beginning of
      the scholarly study of literature in Japan, been known for their representations of actual
      speech, especially of speech of the urban commoners of the time. Futabatei Shimei, in his
      essay Yo ga genbunitchi no yurai, speaks of Sanba’s writing as one model in his search for a
      suitable style of conversational prose. In the late Twentieth century, literary scholars
      continued to approach Sanba as the great recording artist of the late Tokugawa period, the
      mixer who sampled techniques of his gesakusha predecessors but moved the scene being
      recorded from the exclusive environs of the pleasure quarters to the streets of Edo. 

      What these understandings of Sanba’s work have skipped over in their utilitarian conception
      of writing is the great preoccupation with performance in both Sanba’s writings and the
      cultural texts of the early Nineteenth century. Not only do Sanba’s texts often take theatrical
      settings as their subject matter, but they often also frame the written text as transcriptions of
      performances, transcriptions in this case ambiguously oriented toward both demonstrations of
      past events and the elicitation of future practices. Reading for the demonstration and
      elicitation of performance in Sanba’s humor books (kokkeibon), this presentation will attempt
      to show how these texts are part of a cultural concern with the idea of performativity: the
      awareness of a constructed nature of practices that disrupts the assumption of a natural
      ground of identities.
 

                                                                           Massimiliano Tomasi 
                                                                  Western Washington University

            The Meiji period saw the rise of a controversy over the character of the new written
       language.  The literary world was divided into two factions, one supporting the
       vernacularization of the written language and one who insisted on the supremacy of classical
       language.  Scholars and writers debated the necessity of reconciling the notions of elegance
       and simplicity in writing to create a refined literary language that could be intelligible even to
       the less educated. 

             Western rhetoric, first introduced to Japan after the Restoration, was an important
       component of this debate.  Like the novels published during that period, treatises of rhetoric
       took a position on the issue.  But while novels endorsed either classical or colloquial styles
       primarily on a connotative, implicit level, works of rhetoric did so on a denotative level, by
       means of a metalanguage that explicitly discussed the prerequisites of language in written
       communication. 

             Already in these terms rhetoric played an important function, speaking in favor of certain
       styles over others and providing notions of refinement, clarity and appropriateness of
       expression.  However, its contribution went even further: as texts, treatises of rhetoric had
       their own written style, and this gave birth to (meta)metalanguage that also connoted a
       preference for a specific literary language. 

             This paper proposed to analyze Meiji and Taishô works of rhetoric and their
       metalanguage to investigate the relationship between their mode of discourse and their object
       and ultimately to discuss rhetoric’s multiple contributions to the controversy over the new
       written language.
 

                                                                        Elizabeth Herman 
                                                                       Stanford University

       That there exists a modern Japanese language capable of expressing the complexity of
      the modern Japanese self is something that few would question.  What appears equally
      self-evident is the developmental narrative which traces the origin of modern Japanese
      back to Tsubouchi Shoyo's Shôsetsu Shinzui  and the "first modern novel" it inspired,
      Futabatei Shimei's Ukigumo.  Yet in order to destabilize this teleology which serves to
      naturalize the notion of a "modern Japanese language," one need only turn one's gaze
      back to that which precedes this so-called origin of modern Japanese, the early Meiji
      debate on language.  One finds here a myriad of ideas about the way language should
      be construed: ideas which are both contradictory and discontinuous, both inspired by
      the West and resistant to it, and which play with the possibilities of being modern and,
      at the same time, Japanese.  The existence of a modern Japanese language is by no
      means self-evident at this particular historical moment. 

       This paper will explore the editorials on writing written by Fukuchi Ôchi, editor of the
      Nichi nichi shinbun from 1874 to 1888 and one of the participants in the early Meiji
      debate on language. How does Fukuchi define writing and what does he envision as its
      purpose? Where does Fukuchi position Japanese writing vis-à-vis Chinese and Western
      writing? What does he present as true and false, practical and impractical, modern and
      not modern?  Who and what is he writing against and what assumptions does he
      make?  The questions of what "the modern" is and of what "language" and "writing"
      are, can only be asked, I argue, within the historical moments in which they are uttered
      and in relation to the other utterances around them. Thus, it is my hope that this paper
      will shed some light on how Fukuchi's editorials existed simultaneously and in dialogue
      with the Meiji discourses on race, freedom, nation, and modernity.