The Aesthetics of Japanese Fascism

Abstract

Alan Tansman University of California Press, 2009. 355 PP. $49.95 (HBK). When picking up a book called The Aesthetics of Japanese Fascism, the first thing one wants to know is exactly what its author, Alan Tansman, is claiming. Is he, for example, arguing that certain aesthetic strategies are, by definition, fascist? Is he suggesting that artists who employ those strategies are fascist? Does he believe that art displaying this fascist aesthetic significantly fortifies fascist states, and that such art fortified Japan before and during World War II? If one could answer yes to any of these questions Tansman’s book would be more startling and more stimulating than it is. In fact, Tansman is too careful a scholar to go out on any of these limbs. Judiciously hedging, he argues in the end for very little, and the logic underlying some of the claims he does make is questionable. However, one hastens to add that, though the edifice Tansman constructs is rickety in places, it is fascinating to see the pieces he uses to build it—careful readings of cultural products, ranging from the essays of Yasuda Yojuro to the enka of Misora Hibari, and from the postmodern novels of Nakagami Kenji to Inagaki Hiroshi’s tear-jerking popular film Mother under the Eyelids—not least because these works are seldom noticed at all by those outside of departments of Japanese studies, or Japanese themselves.

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