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Secondary Art and the Two-Story House: Kuwabara Takeo and the Comparative Imagination in Mid-Century Japan, 1935–1947
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 19 February 2020
Abstract
This article focuses on the life and ideas of Kuwabara Takeo, a cultural critic and scholar of French literature who became renowned for his 1946 critique of haiku as a “secondary art” in comparison with the novel. By reconstructing Kuwabara's intellectual trajectory from the mid-1930s to the mid-1940s, I show how this famous essay was in part an effort to respond to Karl Löwith's famous critique of Japanese intellectuals. Löwith argued that Japanese intellectuals were insufficiently critical towards their own culture, due to the way that they compartmentalized practices and ideas associated with either Japanese culture or Western civilization. Kuwabara resisted such tendencies through the practice of cross-cultural comparison. His work gained encouragement from and responded to Löwith's critique in a way that illuminates the role that comparisons played in the intellectual culture of mid-twentieth-century Japan.
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References
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34 Ibid., 163. This is my translation of Kuwabara's translation of Alain from French into Japanese. Kuwabara notably added the verb “strive” (tsutomeru), whereas the original does not mention any effort expended to preserve what people say in this state: “Dès que l'on veut s'instruire sur la nature humaine, ce qu'on dit, absurde ou non, doit être premièrement laissé dans son état naïf, qui vaut cent fois mieux qu'un arrangement vraisemblable, dont vous ne tirerez que des lieux communs.” Alain, Les dieux (Paris, 1934).
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48 The only successful purges occurred within Kuwabara's division, law and letters. Three professors were purged. Tōhoku daigaku hyakunen-shi henshū iinkai, Tōhoku daigaku hyakunen-shi, vol. 8 (Sendai, 2004), 539–50Google Scholar.
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72 Itō believed that this guild-like arrangement had positive aspects as well. For example, the bundan establishment was conducive to the emergence of a tight-knit community that could convey advice and criticism to writers that would be difficult to communicate in a more impersonal public forum. Itō, Sei, Itō Sei zenshū, vol. 13 (Tokyo, 1973), 388–90Google Scholar.
73 Kuwabara Takeo, “Nihon gendai shōsetsu no jakuten,” in Kuwabara Takeo zenshū, 1: 239–40 (originally published in Ningen in Feb. 1946).
74 To make this point, Kuwabara pointed to an advertisement for a haiku composition course that promoted the fact that the instructor was the son of a major poet. Kuwabara, “Dai-ni geijutsu,” 20.
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