大正ロマン
I have been in Japan for over a week now, and it’s been terribly inspiring. I have developed so many new ideas that I don’t quite know what’s going on. The amount of cheap and pretty manga available in used book stores (such as Mandarake) is offensive. The postal services will have to carry tons of it to Lund (and Berlin ○(･x･)○).
The weekend awaits with Tokyo-related exploits and I’m just trying to relax with green tea and green tea-flavoured torofuwa pudding and greenish daifuku. Outside, the neighbour’s shibaken is barking again. しばわんこの和のこころ…
Some useful words and phrases that I have picked up include
大正ロマン - Taisho-roman(tic?). It is a pretty popular term for design and aesthetics harking back to the Taisho era (大正時代, period of Great Righteousness) from 1912 to 1926. Lazy Eurocentrics might refer to it as “the Japanese Weimar Republic”, and there are indeed some similarities. (These pictures from a course at the University of Chicago say more than 1000 words.)
浪花節 - naniwabushi (songs from Naniwa = an old name for Osaka). They were a popular form of storytelling before WWII, but were often considered old-fashioned, low-class, and even immoral. The subjects included yakuza wars, lone rangers obeying their own code of chivalry, stealing from the rich and giving to the poor, gambling, drinking and extreme sentimentality. They are a strange mix of praise of the ideals of self-sacrifice and bravery, and relishing worldly enjoyments such as sex and sake. Thus, “naniwabushi” has come to mean militaristic, vulgar, rural, or otherwise tasteless, low-class, and out-of-date (Wetherall 2005). (Post-war politician Kakuei Tanaka caused a minor riot in an NHK radio show when he started to perform his favourite naniwabushi story. The broadcast was cut short, but Tanaka’s popularity among the working-class soared.)
“In recent times, the word naniwabushi-tic has become a synonym for a person with too much ninjo or anachronistic feelings.” (Hunziker & Kamimura)
人情 - ninjo. According to about.com: ‘Ninjo relates to the range of human emotions such as sympathy, compassion, love, friendships, etc. … Ninjo is a spontaneous expression of emotions towards another. There is a phrase in Japanese: “being warm in ninjo,” which relates to a person that is thoughtful and kind.’ However: ‘Being just thoughtful and kind is not enough, one must also keep up with one’s sense of moral obligation to be truly accepted in society.’ This is known as giri - 義理. As Snufkin said, responsibility means having to do something although you don’t want to. He is clearly a person with an excess of ninjo. (Snufkin is really the archetypal social anarchist, but that’s another story…)
Why is ninjo seen as an anachronistic feeling? Manga are brimming over with ninjo. Maybe mangaka filled the place of the naniwabushi singers in the gekiga 1960’s and the shojo boom in the 1970’s. I already love enka songs, so the naniwabushi tradition (which enka is distantly related to) makes me curious. Let’s enjoy our anachronistic feelings…