1After the First World War, the peace settlement made an attempt to redraw the political map on national lines, applying Wilsonian principles systematically to the nations of Europe: national frontiers were to coincide with the frontiers of culture as defined by language. The Wilsonian principles for nations made explicit certain assumptions already built into modern national structures, namely that political formations, cultural or ethnic identities and linguistic structures should coincide; the coincidence of these established natural, objective boundaries for nations. The Wilsonian world order, however, did not work. As E.J. Hobsbawm writes, “The main change was that states were now on average rather smaller and the ‘oppressed peoples’ within them were now called ‘oppressed minorities’ The logical implication of trying to create a continent neatly divided into coherent territorial states each inhabited by a separate ethnically and linguistically homogeneous population, was the mass expulsion or extermination of minorities. Such was and is the reductio ad absurdum of nationalism in its territorial version, although this was not fully demonstrated until the 1940’s.”1

2The Wilsonian or territorial version of nationalism continues to dominate our historical imagination of the emergence of the early Japanese courts – such as courts at Heijō or Nara (710-784) and at Heian (794-1185). Central to the conflation of the ancient state with the modern nation is a certain stance toward language, one that is particularly evident in, but not limited to, literary studies. If literary critics can “discover” Japanese speech in ancient Japan, then the Wilsonian model allows them to assume that there also existed a Japanese culture, and hence a Japanese nation. In short, in the Wilsonian model for the construction of national communities, language (as speech) allows one to use language to mark the boundaries of a culture as territority. This essay explores the ways in which postwar Japanese commentators conflate classical poetry with national speech, in order to link the ninth-century emergence of waka poetry to the formation of a modern Japanese nation.

3In the course of the ninth century, poetic composition at the Heian court gradually came to elevate the thirty-one syllable waka poem to the level of an imperial standard. One collection of waka in particular is thought to have marked the ascendency of waka – Kokinwakashū. In the year 905, the emperor Daigo ordered the compilation of an imperial anthology of waka, and by around the year 920, four compilers (Ki no Tsurayuki, Mibu no Tadamine, Oshikōchi Mitsune, Ki no Tomonori) had gleaned 1,111 poems from a range of sources and eras, presenting them in twenty scrolls by topic, with two prefaces, and with brief notes on each poem (the poet’s name and the occasion of composition).2 The anthology took the title Kokinwakashū or “Collection of Yamato Songs Old and New,” and its poetics became the major source for subsequent composition in court circles.

4Other forms of poetry continued to be composed, yet waka became central to court life. Diaries and tales turned around waka; lovers navigated through trysts and alliances with waka; waka punctuated the rites and ceremonies that negotiated the cosmological dimension of court bureaucracies, and waka flowed with major and minor exchanges of wealth – at large-scale poetry contests, the presentation and evaluation of waka meshed with an almost potlatch-like collection and redistribution of ranks and wealth.

5Now, for postwar critics, the advent of Kokinwakashū is seen in terms of unification and purification of language, construed as Japanese speech. From this linguistic unity, ethnic and national unity are assumed to arise, as if naturally and inevitably. Because the emergence of a stable form of poetic composition is taken for linguistic unification, the territorial version of nationalism finds an ancient home at the Heian court. The Wilsonian model is projected or imposed onto Heian Japan. A Marxist critic like Hobsbawm allows us to sense something of the terror and absurdity of this model. True to one strand of Marxist criticism for which the modern nation is always an anomaly, Hobsbawm looks at the nation conceptually and ideologically and concludes that it is a concept long past its heyday, long past the historical moment when it contributed anything to progressive politics. For Hobsbawm, the nation –especially as it lives on in its Wilsonian avatar – works against cosmopolitan or international movements. Certainly this is true of the Wilsonian framework as it permeates discussions of Nara and Heian Japan. In effect, to use Hobsbawm’s turn of phrase, studies of early Japan continue “to create a continent neatly divided into coherent territorial states each inhabited by a separate ethnically and linguistically homogeneous population.”

6The model of the ethno-linguistic territory continues to dominate the imagination of ancient imperial courts of Japan, and because this model is so rarely remarked or challenged in the context of Heian Japan, Hobsbawm’s attack on the Wilsonian nation provides a point of departure for critique. Yet there is a sense in which such a critique can become almost too obvious – after all, literary criticism and history in Japan are organized as “national literary studies’’(kokubungaku) and “national history” (kokushi) – and if the critique remains at this level, it risks becoming a simple exposure and denunciation of nationalism. In fact, it could be argued, as Pheng Cheah does, that the denunciation of nation as always complicitous with the nation-state forgets that the nation is not the nation-state, and ignores the ways in which nation can lend itself to cosmopolitanism.3 Still, one of the problems with the entrenchment of the Wilsonian model is that it tends to conflate nation with nation-state, and even to close the gap between nation and state, precisely because it draws authority from the state standardization and disciplinization of national language. And so, the goal of this essay is to review the ways in which postwar waka criticism uses poetic language to conflate the modern territorial nation with the ancient imperial court – not forgetting that this conflation may also afford ways to challenge and rethink nationalism and imperialism.

7Central to this account is Suzuki Hideo, a prominent scholar of ancient Japanese poetry and literature as well as an important cultural commentator. Kodaiwakashiron (On the History of Ancient Waka), published in 1990, is an ambitious volume that includes a range of previous essays written over the preceding decades, reworked with new materials to produce an impressive history of early Japanese poetry, one that entails a kind of presentation and consolidation of the existing theories on waka from the 1960s through the 1980’s. I will focus especially on his account of the emergence of waka and situate it with respect to some other approaches to his central concerns, such as the relation of Japan to China, the problem of cultural imperialism, and the role of waka poetry in the emergence of Japanese identity and community. Finally, I will show how his version of the territorial nation entails a discourse on the mother tongue, which uses women as ethno-linguistic boundary markers between Japan and its others, resulting in a “double colonization” of Heian women.

Resisting China

8In literary and historical studies of early Japan, one general aim is to show how Japan responded actively and selectively to China, in an attempt to reverse the order of priority implicit in studies of Chinese influence. To achieve this reversal, studies of early Japan invariably take the logic of selective reception to its limit: not only did early Japan respond actively to China, but it also resisted and overturned Chinese influences. Invariably, the paradigm of influence and reaction posits China and Japan a priori as self-evident territories, and reaction takes the form of Japanese resistance to China. Needless to say, resistance can be situated in a variety of ways, ranging from active, conscious opposition to a sort of passive or unconscious resistance built into daily practices with reference to different socio-historical circumstances. And the way in which resistance is situated says a great deal about what is at stake for different commentators. I will return to this issue. But first, I would like to suggest some general contours for waka criticism.

9In studies of waka, there are two basic paradigms for situating its Japaneseness in relation to China. These correspond roughly to prewar and postwar criticism, but naturally there is considerable overlap and admixture between the two periods.

1. In the first half of the twentieth century, scholarship on early Japanese poetry tended to celebrate the lyricism of Man’yōshū (a heterogeneous collection of diverse poetic forms from different periods compiled around 759). Scholars situated its poetics at the moment just prior to, or coeval with, the ascendency of foreign influences. This assured the possibility for native purity or native resistance to the foreign around Man’yō poetry. Broadly speaking, this emphasis on a Japan before China echoed the prewar concern with locating a Japan before and without the West. As a result, the Heian court and Kokinwakashū tended to be held under suspicion: everything looked and sounded too Chinese, and in general it didn’t seem possible to claim outright that Heian poetics resisted or overturned Chinese poetics. There had been too much influence. Such prewar scholarship generally looked at poetics in terms of imagery, themes, and concepts, and in those terms, much of Kokinwakashū failed to reveal its native status.
2. In the postwar period, the stance would change considerably, and scholars frequently posited Kokinwakashū as a moment of native absorption of the foreign. Whereas prewar studies tended to elevate Man’yōshū and hold Kokinwakashū in suspicion, on the contrary postwar studies showed greater interest in establishing the Japaneseness of Kokinwakashū. In conjunction with a linguistic emphasis, there arose a tendency to classify and quantify rhetorical devices and tropes, which served to establish links between pre-Chinese and post-Chinese styles of expression. In particular, this stance emphasized the emergence of kana, that is, the indigenous system of writing that deploys a limited number of characters, largely for their phonetic value.

10There is then a common problematic in prewar and postwar studies, that of influence and reaction. The major collections of poetry are situated with respect to a history of external influences, which were met with internal reaction, resistance, opposition, negation, and so forth. In both scenarios, the songs of Man’yōshū, especially the early ones, are assumed to constitute a native poetics (associated with orality). Subsequently, Chinese script and poetics came to dominate the Yamato world, resulting in the three imperial anthologies of Han-style poetry in the early ninth century – the so-called “dark ages of native styles and customs” (kokufu ankoku jidai). Yet prewar and postwar studies have somewhat different sensibilities with respect to the “dark ages.” Prewar studies are often pessimistic about Kokinwakashū, as if the dark ages continued. Postwar studies are mostly confident that, in the early tenth century, native forms surged out of the dark shadows cast by Chinese forms: Kokinwakashū revived or restored native poetics in the form of an imperial anthology of waka (Yamato uta). More recently this confidence in native forms has gone a step farther: there really was no dark ages: native forms continued alongside the foreign, unabated and unshadowed.

11In sum, Man’yōshū remains an important site of Japaneseness (because it is deemed to record oral poetry from eras before the intrusion of Chinese values), and postwar studies strive to establish links between Man’yōshū and Kokinwakashū. The maintenance of such links involves a common desire to see ancient Japanese poetry in opposition to Chinese forms, but now opposition is assumed to be successful – in the form of absorption, domestication, or sublation of the foreign.

12There is, in this latest permutation of the history of influence and reaction, an opportunity to challenge the logic of the native versus the foreign. One could submit that there were no natives versus foreigners, nor were there dark ages. Out of a heterogeneous field, there emerged a binary machine that could synthesize and organize multiple forms of expression and production – the Yamato-Han or “wa-kan” assemblage – which I have examined elsewhere. But in this context, I would like to work through the framework for literary histories of influence and reaction. I begin with Saigo Nobutsuna, who provides a bridge between prewar and postwar studies.

Folk Resistance to Empire

13Saigo Nobutsuna, not long after the war (1951), published Nihon kodai bungakushi (The History of Ancient Japanese Literature), and in a chapter on waka and kanshi (Chinese poems, literally Han shi), he situates early Japanese poetry with respect to historical and technological development.

At that time, there existed great disparity between T’ang society and Japanese society in their degree of historical development. [...] Accordingly, since the culture of the former functioned freely and powerfully with respect to the latter, this naturally could only lead to a process of cultural subjugation and assimilation of the latter by the former. In this way, beginning with Japan (even though a phenomenon of the ruling classes), a state of affairs arose in which the less developed folk who inhabited the great T’ang empire nevertheless became colonies of the T’ang empire culturally, and offered tribute as well.4

14Saigo considers his criticism part of a Marxist critique, and he wishes to situate ancient Japanese poetry in terms of historical subjugation and liberation, of peoples and empires, of cultures and ideologies. For Saigo, the T’ang empire posed the threat of cultural subjugation and assimilation, and he briefly reminds us that this cultural imperialism addressed not so much the people of the Japanese archipelago but the ruling class. His critique, however, quickly shifts from the class divisions of early Japan to the problem of cultural imperialism. Suddenly, Saigo forgets social divisions like class or caste. Despite profound stratification of the early courts by rank and caste in the eighth century, he assumes a unified people, a Japanese folk. As a result, the ruling elite comes to stand in for Japanese folk generally. Clearly, he adopts from Marxism a critique of imperialism, yet once he establishes the idea of cultural imperialism, he turns to the significance of that imperialism not in terms of social struggle but in terms of a battle between cultural mentalities.

What soon becomes problematic are the contents of the so-called advanced culture. It was truly not a healthy popular culture but a decadent, degenerate, aristocratic culture, intellectually overripe, centered on Buddhism and Confucianism, and as a result it held the potential to dissolve the youthful folk mentality with its poison. Since we/they did not universally adopt foreign culture, we must grasp the concrete substance of that culture of foreign mentality which they did accept.5

15Saigo wishes to champion the spirit of the people or folk who confronted an advanced culture. Yet this shift from social conflict to differences in cultural mentality make his an unusual type of Marxism. In effect, he displaces modern class struggle onto ancient empire. This results in a strangely anachronistic unity of the Japanese people. The early Japanese come to stand in for a subjugated class, and it becomes obvious that his account of the archaic state is not so much Marxist as nativist. His concern is not for the material subjugation of the peoples within the ancient empires, but for the cultural subjugation of Japan. Only then does he bring in the question of “concrete substance” – under the aegis of cultural imperialism.

16He asks, how were we/they concretely affected by decadent foreign culture? In 1951, in the wake of the “reverse course” of the American occupation (characterized by a blatant shift from ideals of freedom and democracy to a concerted effort at capitalist development at any price), Saigo’s was surely a loaded question. His critique of decadent imperialism plays not only against the Tang empire but against American imperialism as well. Yet for all its possible resonance with critiques of American imperialism, Saigo’s account neatly draws the line between the Japanese folk and empire. Empire is external to the native spirit of the people. Six years after the end of the Japanese empire, this inability or unwillingness to link Japan and empire is problematic. In this respect then, Saigo makes clear that he does not truly intend to discuss “the concrete substance of that foreign mentality.” He wants to explore the native purity and innocence of the Japanese folk. Not surprisingly, he turns to the mental purity and vitality of the ancients.

Yet fortunately in the hearts of those courtiers of ancient Japan, the vitality of an artless, healthy folk mentality resolutely lived on, one which could not be defeated even while being assimilated to a decadent foreign culture. Seen in terms of culture, the tragic quality of Hitomaro constitutes a vehement expression of dissent against the foreign culture continuing to dissolve the folk mentality. What sustained the particularly superior quality of the early Man’yōshū was the great soul of a youthful folk mentality yet undefiled by Confucian prosaism and Buddhist pessimism.... in the depths of their hearts pounded, in some form, the tradition of folk mentality which, unperturbed, lashed back and turned against foreign intellect and education.6

17It is initially difficult to say what Saigo himself intends to make of folk resistance. His notion of ancient folk resistance may be intended to promote local resistance to the alignment of postwar Japan with the American military-industrial order which marked the start of the Cold War. Yet his story partakes so fully of nativist cum nationalist scenarios. He insists that the spiritual vitality of the folk is not some magical force, it “originates in the folk independence which our ancestors won through their battles in the heroic age.” He disparages the artificiality of the court bureaucracies, singing the praises of Otomo Yakamochi who resisted to the death the plans of the Fujiwara clan to move the capital from Heijō-kyō to Heian-kyō.7 The shape of his national fantasy emerges more clearly when he strives to establish a contradiction between excellence in literature and the establishment of class society.

18Saigo claims that the foreign-derived class society of the Man’yōshū period merely furthered bureaucracy and solidified prosaisms: “it did not enable a fertile womb for literature in the truest sense; it only furthered a cold intellectual numbing of the poetic mentality of the people.” The imperialism of class society, then, is foreign to Japan, and the proletarian revolution must pass through the ancient literature that truly expresses the original classless spirit of the ancient folk. In particular, because literature in the truest sense is lyric poetry, the revolution against class society must pass through the songs of early Japan, restoring the purity and vitality lodged in the womb of ancient Japan. (Note that the “mothers” of this native womb are doubly erased, for they do not possess the lyric spirit, they bear it and guarantee its continuity, they are channels in which the blood and spirit of heroes flows in lofty independence.) In sum, Saigo combines the logic of a classless society with the logic of ancient poetic purity, and the resulting Gemeinschaft is far closer to racialized nativism than to Marxism.

19Even though Saigo’s attempt to understand ancient poetry in political terms tends to align him with fantasies of native purity and unity, his account remains of interest for a couple of reasons. First, his desire to bring political conflict into the realm of waka studies does serve to politicize literary criticism. Second, his approach, for all its nativist idealism, opens the question of culture and empire in a way that potentially allows readers to pose further questions, maybe even about Japanese complicity with modern imperialism. After all, in his account, there are both collaborators and resisters. More established figures like Suzuki tend to evoke the same problematic – that of the subjugation of ancient Japan to Chinese cultural imperialism – only to resolve all conflicts with the emergence of the Japanese nation. There are no questions about empire, or even about complicity versus resistance.

National Emergence and Phonetic Evolution

20In Kodaiwakashiron, Suzuki Hideo frequently takes up the question of Chinese sources of Heian waka, acknowledging the importance of dynastic China: “No matter how much we insist, it is impossible to stress the point enough, that Japanese culture was cultivated on the soil of T’ang styles and customs.” As with Saigo, there is a question about cultural imperialism, but in Suzuki it is muted, not so much a problem as a point of reference. In fact, after insisting on Tang styles and customs, he goes on to declare the autonomy of Japanese culture. How exactly does the flower of waka prove independent of its soil?

21Suzuki does not attempt to establish Japanese autonomy on the basis of waka themes, images, or concepts. On the contrary, he frequently notes the Chineseness of waka sentiments and expression. In this sense, his account is consonant with prewar interpretations of Kokinwakashū: with respect to themes and images, its waka fail to reveal their native status. Suzuki will mobilize a different narrative for autonomy, one that only emerged fully in postwar scholarship: kana enable a native speech community, and hence an autonomous culture. Thus kana – or rather, kana culture – becomes his emblem of autonomy: “Within the wide-ranging sphere of kanji culture in East Asia, it so happens that kana culture came to life while taking in kanji culture – all the more so because kana culture was continuously encompassed by it.”8 Suzuki’s evocation of “kana culture” links a form of writing with an “independent Japanese culture,” both of which demand some discussion. I’ll deal with the independent culture first.

22The way in which Suzuki writes of kana culture versus kanji culture evokes a muted version of anti-colonial nationalism. Which is to say, when local peoples are surrounded by an imperial culture, a national culture emerges. He does not put it precisely in those terms, however. The Heian court is refered to as “our country” (waga kuni), “Japanese culture,” or the “Japanese nation,” or simply “Japan.” Yet the Tang dynasty is not always explicitly framed in terms of empire. We are to understand it as a stronger or advanced culture, one that surrounded and laid the ground for Japan, but unlike Saigo, Suzuki is not explicit about empire because he is not interested in a critique of empire per se. He is interested in the “national” response to Tang culture, which he construes as the emergence of a Japanese culture. If he does not take up the question of empire, it is also because he is interested in the legitimation of a certain kind of emperor system: the symbolic emperor. So it is that kana – which he styles “the phonetic characters unique to our country” – “formed as one part of an independent Japanese culture in the latter half of the ninth century, in no other period than that of the inauguration of the regency system.”9

23By aligning the formation of “an independent Japanese culture” with the Heian regency system (in which the maternal grandfather to a very young emperor effectively assumed leadership at the court), Suzuki imparts ancient authority to Japan’s postwar emperorship. He follows a common scenario for the postwar redescription of Heian Japan. In the immediate postwar years, the construction of a symbolic emperor afforded a vision of a culturalist, non-militarist Japan, in which the emperor served as a symbol of the people rather than as a militarist leader, and hence as a symbol of Japanese unity within an isolated, demilitarized Japan. With its courtly aesthetic, Heian Japan provided the perfect image for a peaceful, cultured Japan. Where Heian Japan had once appeared too invested in Chinese culture, now scholars could evoke its apparent desire for isolation from the Chinese courts, emphasizing those arts that seemed most obviously non-Chinese. The status of the Heian court’s “non-Chineseness,” however, is very different from that of Man’yōshū. This is not a Japan that comes before Chinese influence and resists its cultural imperialism, as in Saigo. This is a Japan that comes after China, that absorbs and transforms that culture in order to come into its own. For Suzuki, who follows this impulse, there is no critique of imperialism, only an adulation of national autonomy (that remains ambiguously positioned vis-à-vis imperialism with the figure of the symbolic emperor). Suzuki’s account of “kana culture” turns into a comforting political fable about Japan: what is uniquely Japanese is the emergence of a symbolic emperor and cultural independence from surrounding forces. Thus the courtly refinement of Heian Japan serves to aestheticize postwar emperorship.

24In historical and political terms, it is hard to agree that the Heian court responded to the imperial dynasties of China by forming an independent national culture, for this move ultimately erases historical differences between modem imperialism and the ancient Chinese empire. Japan then occupies the site of the “almost-colonized” twice, first vis-à-vis China and then vis-à-vis the West. And the modern Japan nation appears no different from the ancient state: both are instances of anti-colonial resistance. Nonetheless, it could be interesting to pursue some of the implications of Suzuki’s notion of national response to an encroaching Tang culture. His account potentially prepares a very different view of the relations of the Heian court to its past; it would no longer be a matter of realizing or restoring prior forms but of overcoding and mutating them. Yet Suzuki does not take this route. While he presumes a framework of cultural imperialism, there is no violence or conflict to his notion of cultural encompassment. And ultimately, he sees waka as a restoration of the pre-Chinese language. As anachronistic and idealistic as Saigo’s account was, his Marxist critique of imperialism did open questions about social conflict and cultural stratification. For Suzuki, however, independent Japanese culture – enabled by, and embodied in, kana – arose organically and placidly from the kanji culture of the Tang dynasty. He is able to gloss over the implied narrative of anti-colonial nationalism by constructing a narrative of phonetic evolution. He calls on the framework of phonetic evolution to erase any conflicts and difficulties that could be associated with the emergence of an autonomous culture – whence his insistence on the organic emergence of kana.

The very beginning of kana in the Heian period consisted of something called the masculine hand, in the regular or semi-cursive style. Although there are differences owing to the disappearance of characters from the ancient period and to linguistic currency of varying purity, there is a direct succession from the man’yōgana of the previous period. Around the end of the ninth century, this advances one step further into the feminine hand (hiragana) – grass kana in the grass style, and in this series of stages in formation of kana, vowels become restricted to some extent, and there is a gradual purification into phonetic characters of one character for one sound. In this way, prayers, proclamations, songs, waka – pure Japanese so to speak – came gradually to be recorded.10

25Suzuki is aware, of course, that the emergence of kana was not so linear or continuous. Yet, in this passage, he enjoins us to see it as a linear development. If you ignore changes in character usage and linguistic impurities, he tells us, you will detect a gradual purification of writing and speaking, in the direction of pure Japanese (so to speak). Suzuki asks us to discount actual changes in the structure of the spoken language – the vowel shifts that occur between the Man’yōshū and Kokinwakashū – in order to assure continuity.

26Paring away the heterogeneity of songs and scripts, Suzuki arrives at a single line of transmission between the Man’yōshū and Kokinwakashū. “In the reception of old poems,” he writes, “I think that, although there are differences between oral transmission and the medium of written records, we should think of them in terms of one world, one space of transmission.”11 This too is an important moment for Suzuki: although there are differences, we should think of them in terms of one world. If we do as Suzuki thinks we should, we see the emergence of kana and waka around Kokinwakashū in terms of direct transmission, a single line and a process of purification. If we do not, we have to face a heteroclite field riddled with scriptural oddities, with figurai operations, vocal impurities, and poetic and political experiments. Yet Suzuki continually assures us that it is reasonable, and maybe not undesirable, to ignore discrepancies and differences.

We get a better handle on the process in which the waka of Man’yōshū went from indigenous songs to court songs subsequently to settle in as imperial poetry, in terms of a single thread of logic through the history of literature in the early Heian period. The stages of formation in which kana originally generated among the people went on to be perfected as court culture can also be seen to correspond with that logic, for the most part.12

27Suzuki mentions two movements, one of speech – from indigenous song to imperial poetry; one of writing – from the people to the court. Suzuki passes over this ground so quickly that, in a blink of an eye, he arrives at an indigenous, populist imperial court. I would like briefly to spell out some important omissions.

28With respect to the oral line of transmission, Suzuki passes over the plurality of languages and dialects at the Nara and Heian courts; he omits the use of Chinese speech at court, and he ignores the differences in pronunciation that separate the vocality of Man’yōshū and Kokinwakashū. With respect to the written line of transmission, Suzuki omits the importance of Buddhist monasteries and bureaucracies in order to claim that the people generated kana; he ignores that kana pursue trajectories already established in Chinese calligraphy, which would imply a certain level of continental expertise, an expertise that court anthologies often highlighted calligraphically. Suzuki glosses over these and other discrepancies because he wants us to see the period between Man’yōshū and Kokinwakashū in terms of an organic development that unifies and purifies the voice of the people.

29Suzuki’s approach merits comparison with another Japanese scholar, Karaki Junzō, who merely bypasses the questions that Suzuki feels compelled to finesse. In Nihon no kokoro no rekishi (The History of Japanese Heart/Mind), Karaki demonstrates complete confidence that Chinese writing simply did not matter. A prime example is his discussion of inscriptions that simultaneously register Han and Yamato modes of notation.

Using diacritic marks to read Chinese by omitting the Chinese reading of characters and reading them in Japanese is probably a unique phenomenon, without parallel in the world. And whenever the Japanese wrote Chinese poetry, they wrote using diacritic marks, adding Japanese inflections in their hearts. Although its form may have been Chinese poetry, it was actually Japanese poetry.13

30Karaki basically assumes that there are two forms of writing, kanji and kana, which he conflates with Chinese culture versus Japanese culture. While kanji threaten to alienate the Japanese heart, kana allow the utmost transparency. He extends the idea that kana began as diacritic marks (kaeriten) for altering the order in which Chinese characters were read, and adding some Japanese grammatical inflections (okurigana), in order to produce a kind of crib (kundoku) for parsing difficult Chinese texts.

31These diacritic marks derived largely from the sutra exegeses of Buddhist monks, and were used to gloss pronunciations of Chinese and Sanskrit characters, and to edit, punctuate and indicate relations between words. One form of kana stemmed from such diacritic marks that transformed and explicated the flow of Chinese characters (much later systematized as katakana). In the ninth century, however, diacritic marks and kana did not constitute homogeneous or autonomous systems, and it is difficult to see how they could have transmitted a homogeneous language. What is more, there exist few documents that actually show the poetic usage of diacritic marks, and these do not date from the ninth century. Karaki insists that, because all Chinese texts used diacritic kana, no one actually read or wrote Chinese (he never entertains the idea that some spoke Chinese); and if they did, he tells us, they really felt and thought in Japanese. He invents an ideal or mental continuity by insisting on the immateriality and transparency of writing. Actual usage, however, does not support his claims.

32There is no doubt that Heian courtiers aimed to assure the intelligibility of inscription. In fact, intelligibility might be called the first principle of calligraphy. Nevertheless, intelligibility is not the same thing as transparency or immateriality or phonography. On the contrary, the intelligibility of Heian writing, whether kana or mana, related directly to figurality, and as a result, it called attention to operations that, by the standards of modern linguistics, could only be considered opacity or materiality.14 Moreover, it is impossible to think of such texts in terms of purity, for the operations of calligraphy as well as the use of diacritic marks result in profoundly hybridized texts. In fact, texts were so hybridized that it seems impossible to think in terms of purified origins. For Heian courtiers, however, when questions of textual authority were raised, it was clearly the Chinese character that guaranteed the authority of signs.

33Karaki’s account recalls Suzuki’s in its insistence on the inappropriateness of Chinese characters for expressing Japaneseness. Both see kana as a means to overcome the supposedly alienating effects of Chinese characters. Yet, whereas Karaki simply announces the successful outcome (and frankly negates Chinese forms: even Chinese poetry was secretly Japanese poetry), Suzuki reasons with his readers, arguing that there’s no need to concern oneself with discrepancies and heterogeneity. His is a plea to see general trends – the big picture. His plea for the big picture opens his account in ways that Karaki’s celebration of Japaneseness does not. Suzuki, by encouraging us to look at the big picture, calls attention to the bigger picture: this is just not Heian Japan that is at stake but Japan itself. We really should see this history in terms of a unification, purification, and restoration, he suggests again and again. What is disturbing is that his plea for Japan entails a steady eradication of difference from history – ancient and modern.

34Integral to this eradication of difference is the absolute coincidence of script and speech. At the end of Suzuki’s history lies the phonetic ideal that kana usage consists of “one character for one sound.” Previously, I characterized this phonetic emphasis as a postwar development in waka criticism, but it should be noted that it involves an extension to Heian Japan of the logic of genbun itchi (the movement for the “unification of speech and script” that accompanied the establishment of a standardized Japanese language for national instruction in the modern era).15

35In postwar waka criticism, it was the work of Akiyama Ken which established the idea that Heian kana constituted a phonetic script, which made possible the establishment of a standard poetic language, with the waka of Kokinwakashū.16 Suzuki follows the lead of Akiyama.

It is due to the waka of Kokirmakashū period that kana inscription comes to have a profound relation to waka expression in terms of pure phonetic characters with one character for one sound. In terms of kana inscription lending a fixed form to waka with Kokin-style expression, Akiyama Ken places emphasis on the depth of the relationship between the two entities, and his lead is extremely important. As I wrote above, kana words, abandoning ideographism, finally restore vocality to words.17

36Suzuki refers to kanji or Chinese characters as “ideographs” (hyōimoji) and kana as “phonographs” (hyōonmoji). As he uses it, “ideographism” refers to the visual and gestural operations of writing – its figurality, so to speak. Suzuki shuns the visual and gestural operations of kana and waka in order to insist on a restoration of vocality as pure speech.

37Karatani Kōjin, in his critique of genbun itchi, describes this modern impulse to discard the figurality of Chinese characters in terms of “transparency” and “interiority.”18 Characters become transparent, and voices speak through them without visual obstacles; voices appear to inhabit words, to emerge from them; words appear to speak directly to the mind, purely and freely. When Suzuki joins writing and speaking, he imagines that he attains vocal purity, liberty, and autonomy. Karatani sees this phonocentrism as part of the subjectifying processes through which the modern nation forms a modern subject. In Karatani’s terms then, Suzuki’s insistence on the phoneticism of kana is an attempt to shift the emergence of the modern national subject in Heian Japan – in effect, to disavow Japanese modernity. This disavowal also insists on projecting the Wilsonian version of territorial nationalism.

38In the Wilsonian model, it is language as speech that establishes the boundaries for cultures and peoples, and hence nations. This is why Suzuki takes pains to show that kana characters are, in fact, Japanese speech. If Heian kana did not align neatly with Japanese speech, if they inscribed other languages (like Chinese), if they presented a hybrid speech, a rarefied dialect, or vocal figures, then the Heian court could not be a modern nation, and its subjects would not be Japanese. Thus, at every step along the way, Suzuki suggests that we overlook discrepancies and variations in favor of unilinear movements. The risk is, of course, that he insists so much on oneness and unity that, in the end, waka poetry appears as nothing but a univocal, totalizing expression of purity and autonomy. And so, once he has hammered out a unified field, he adds that, with the restoration of vocality to words, “rather than a unitary restriction of meaning, there comes about an emphasis on the diversity of words.”19 The diversity stripped from waka history returns in the space of national speech. But the order of priority is clear: only once Suzuki has eradicated diversity around the formation of Heian poetics does he rediscover and restore diversity within poetics. Once the nation has expelled foreign elements, its subjects speak freely and diversely in the native tongue.

39In sum, Suzuki devotes his waka criticism to a plea for a particular kind of Japanese community (consonant with postwar emperorship and cultural nationalism), which involves a self-aware elimination of heterogeneous elements that wishes to pose itself as a form of diversity. Thus, what Hobsbawm styles “the absurdity and terror of the territorial version of nationalism” comes to pervade the practice of waka interpretation. What makes it absurd and terrible is its awareness of difference with a paradoxical insistence that only within the Wilsonian framework of ethno-linguistic unification and purification can difference be expressed. Nevertheless, when read in conjunction with other postwar waka interpretors, the eerie twist of Suzuki’s account succinctly phrases the fundamental impasse of postwar Japan: can difference only be imagined through territorial nationalism? For, without territorial nationalism, questions about empire invariably arise, and not just about Chinese dynasties or Western colonialism but about Japans imperial legacy as well. If Suzuki, unlike Saigo, does not have an overtly critical stance on imperialism, it is not only due to their basic ideological differences; it is also due to the complications of Japan’s complicity with American imperialism in the wake of the American Occupation. Although Suzuki is loathe to insinuate those complications and opts for the vision of a Japanese past sanctified by the postwar Japanese-American reconstruction of a Wilsonian Japan, his finesse inevitably reinscribes that “imperial” complicity.

Coda: The Mother Tongue

40Edward Said has recently taken up the problem of how a framework for the study of cultures based on influence invariably evokes a polarized relationship between influence and resistance – which takes the form of imperial influence and anticolonial resistance.20 This is precisely the case with waka criticism based on the study of “influence and reaction.” That is, waka criticism centers on Chinese (imperial) influence and Japanese (national) resistance–which is a displacement or miniaturization of the question of Western imperialism and Japanese response to it (usually hailed as a successful instance of national formation in Asia). There is, of course, the matter of whether Japan should be properly seen as colonized by the West, regardless of the historical threat of colonization, in view of its national success and imperial legacy. Often in the postwar era, Japan is situated as complicitous with economic imperialism yet subject to American cultural imperialism. For instance, in the wake of the American Occupation and the Cold War military-industrial “annexation” of the Japan ally, Oe Kenzaburo described Japan as being a First World nation economically but a Third World nation culturally. While the discussion always remains open as to the situations in which it makes sense to see Japan as a victim of cultural imperialism, it is evident that, in postwar Japan, the question of cultural imperialism re-emerges insistently in discussions of Japanese history, literature, and culture-which question is continually couched in terms of influence and resistance, in waka criticism as elsewhere. What is the upshot of this resistance?

41In Culture and Imperialism, for instance, Said “stubbornly refuses to elevate anti-colonial resistance to the status of anti-colonial critique. The culture of resistance, he argues, finds its theoretical and political limit in the chauvinist and authoritarian boundaries of the postcolonial nation-State–itself a conformity-producing prison-house which reverses, and so merely replicates, the old colonial divisions of racial consciousness” (to cite Leela Ghandi’s assessment).21 This echoes some of the arguments made in this essay, namely that the notion of ancient Japanese resistance to China finds its limit in an insistence on the boundaries of modern nation. In Saigo, resistance opens a critique of empire, but one critically limited by his endorsement of a folk community at the heart of the Japanese nation. Suzuki evokes the ubiquitous framework of influence and reaction but glosses over the problem of anti-imperial resistance in order to center his attention on the necessity for national unification. In this respect, I tend to follow Said, who concludes that resistance only becomes critique when nationalism becomes critical of itself. Thus this essay sought to push the notion of resistance in the direction of a critique of Japanese nationalism as it informs postwar waka criticism. Ultimately, it seems almost a trivial request that waka studies become critical of the authoritarian boundaries erected by their continued replication of national consciousness, yet there are entrenched methodologies within area studies that continue to resist critique. This is unfortunate, because the Nara and Heian courts are, in so many respects, unlike modern national communities, and as such, they promise an important site for a critique of the contemporary framework for discussions of Japanese culture.

42Still, it should be noted that postcolonialist discourse is often critical of Said for his failure to recognize the importance of sustaining certain loyalties to anti-colonial nationalism. And although I would not want fully to endorse the notion of Japan as an anti-colonial nation, I do not wish to gloss over the problematic relation between Western criticism and expressions of Japanese nationalism. The denunciation of Japanese nationalism that pervades many contemporary discussions of nihonjinron (the mass-marketed discourses on Japaneseness) verges on a replication of Western chauvinism. And so, rather than defend some manner of area-studies loyalties to Japanese nationalism, I would echo Rey Chow’s suggestion: “unless we grant non-Western authors and texts – be these fiction, theory, film, popular music, or criticism – the same kind of verbal, psychical, theoretical density and complexity that have copiously endowed upon Western authors and texts, we will never be able to extricate our readings from the kind of idealism in which the East-West divide [...] is currently mired.”22 It is in that spirit that I have attended to the issue of culture and nationalism in postwar waka criticism. And in that spirit, by way of conclusion, I would like to introduce some further complications, which follow from the above discussion.

43In addition to its concerted efforts to eliminate external others, waka criticism shows an equal insistence on the domestication of any internal otherness. Again Suzuki’s account of kana is emblematic, for, despite his claims for diversity within waka, diversity is always predicated upon internal purification, which is strongly encoded for gender. This is evident in his association of kana with the feminine hand.

The stages toward the formation of the “feminine hand” (hiragana or grass writing) – a simplification of the “masculine hand” (so-called man’yōgana in the stiff style) – were stages that steadily purified the man’yōgana phonetics that employed Chinese and Japanese pronunciations for Chinese characters, and in so far as it became difficult to restore the original Chinese character, these stages also established the autonomy of the phonetic characters unique to our country (395).

44This is the reigning wisdom in Heian studies, and Suzuki like others conflates stylistic differences between calligraphic styles (that is, between mana and kana, or the stiff style and the grass style) with differences between Chinese and Japanese languages. A series of generalizations then mobilize a discourse on the mother tongue. First, the feminine hand is collapsed onto the female sex – regardless of the fact that male poets used it. Second, inscription is treated as purely phonographic. Third, Yamato styles are equated with Japanese ethnicity. As a consequence of these three reductions, the feminine hand ultimately becomes conflated with an unadulterated mother tongue. Suzuki, for instance, always links autonomy, purity, and femininity, and thus the alleged purity (or chastity) of Heian women becomes the site of Japanese autonomy. In the end, such reductions spin a dubious tale: that Japanese women remained pure and chaste, unadulterated by foreign forms (while men trafficked in both Chinese and Japanese). Men domesticated the exterior, but their encounter with the foreign places put their authenticity in jeopardy, and so ultimately, it is women – via the mother tongue – who guarantee the purity of Japanese.

45Deniz Kandiyoti provides a succinct critique of this use of the feminine hand to mark boundaries between Japan and China: “Whenever women continue to serve as boundary markers between different national, ethnic and religious collectivities, their emergence as full-fledged citizens will be jeopardized.”23 Nonetheless, it is not sufficient to expose and denounce the ways in which the national imagination mobilizes the feminine hand as the mother tongue, and constructs its subalterns. It is too easy to imagine that Heian women – or Japanese women – are subalterns whom we must save, for whom we must speak. Similarly, the attempt to undermine Japaneseness by emphasizing the omnipresence of Chinese or Korean influences is an important step but one that risks replacing one national construction with another, or introducing a spurious internationalism, which merely reifies the same categories. It is imperative then to seek ways to expand and transform expressions of otherness in the realm of Heian literature, ways to explore mulitiple discourses without stabilizing and reifying the binarisms that currently dominate waka criticism in neat alignment: China/Japan, foreign/native, influence/reaction, and masculine/feminine. Only then will we begin to dislodge the longing for the nation that lingers at the heart of postwar waka criticism.