The Pattern of Life— Discourses on Life in Literature, Art, and Design of Modern Japan

Abstract

This dissertation reconsiders Japanese modernism and modernity through the discouses on life. It examines the discourse on life and how it impacted modern cultural production in Japan from 1911-1941. The idea of life was shaped by evolutionary biology and the philosophies of life flourished around the turn of the 20th century. This dissertation traces the idea of life, and reveals that not only the physicists, but also philosophers, architects, novelists, and designers conceived biological life as material patterns. The intimate link between life and patterns became prominent in the interwar period, but it started to emerge in the late 19th century, not just in Japan, but in Europe and America as well. For instance, Charles Darwin struggled with the dizzying patterns of the peacock’s tails, which inspired his alternative evolutionary theory of biological life that differs from natural selection, namely, sexual selection. This dissertation also examines the aesthetic and political implications for the idea of life based on the alternative evolutionary theories, such as Natsume Sōseki’s aesthetic evolution, and Itō Chūta’s evolution of architecture. As such, I investigate how the ways in which they were embedded within the global colonial and imperial conditions. In addition, this dissertation focuses on case studies that link patterns and ideas of life together during the interwar period. For instance, the philosopher Kuki Shūzō considered the striped pattern the expression of the life energy of the Japanese race. Designer and sociologist Kon Wajirō recorded metropolitan data, such as the clothing patterns and decorative patterns of urban housing, as the materialization of mass life. Architect and historian Itō Chūta conducted tran-Eurasian fieldwork research on a pattern, karakusa, based on biological approach. Physicists like Terada Torahiko considered life as crack patterns—the distribution of life energy on uneven fields. The Department Store Takashimaya hired poets and designers to produce and advertise their kimono patterns of life. Ultimately, across these case studies, I claim that in the interwar period Japan, biological life (seimei) was conceived to be a material, and sometimes decorative, pattern (moyō), that appeared and arranged on the surface of a field. At the same time, patterns were considered to be a physical phenomenon of the formation and growth of life, just as the patterns were also a social-political construct that ordered the space-time of modernity.