Editor's Note
Homa today pushed the article "The History and Current Situation of Japanese Science Fiction Research" by Professor Takayuki Sunda. Since the 1980s, the exchanges between the Chinese and Japanese science fiction circles have been increasing, and Japanese science fiction has also influenced the development of Chinese science fiction to a certain extent. In the article, Mr. Takayuki Sunda reviews the history of Japanese science fiction research, examines the earliest science fiction controversies in Japan, and points out several development opportunities for Japanese science fiction research since the 1970s. Similar to the "Kobun Controversy" of Chinese science fiction, at the end of the 19th century, in the context of the "literary extreme decline controversy", the criticism of "The Tale of The Floating Castle" by Uchida Luan and Ishibashi Nintsuki influenced Japan's subsequent discussion of the nature of literature and the nature of science fiction. In the view of Sunda Xiaozhi' teacher, this controversy has become a major premise for thinking about the relationship between literary genres and science fiction genres and the relationship between literary studies and science fiction research. In the review and prospect of Japanese science fiction research, Mr. Xun Xiaozhi looks forward to a science fiction research model that integrates the circle of professional science fiction writers, the circle of fans and the academic circle.
This article was originally published in Popular Science Creation Review, No. 3, 2021, and was originally published in May 2008 in Modern Japanese Literature ("Modern Japanese Literature"),No. 78).
The History and Present Situation of Japanese Science Fiction Research
Text | Sunda Filial Piety
Translation | Ma Junfeng
First, Japan's earliest science fiction controversy
Yokota Shunya, an authority on classical science fiction studies, believes that Japan's earliest science fiction controversies revolved around the famous journalist Yano Ryukei's 1890 publication of The Tale of Fukagi ("Ukijo Monogatari").
Left: Yano Ryukei (1850-1931)
Picture right: Cover of Yano Ryukei's "Floating City Story"
Born in 1850 in Oita Prefecture and died in 1931, Yano Ryukei is praised today as "an incredible man of the Meiji era" because of his role in leading the times in many fields. Representative literati of his contemporaries were also Koizumi Yakumo (Lafcadio Hearn). Not content with Confucianism and Sinology, Yano aspired to foreign studies, so in 1871 he entered Keio Yoshijuku, which had been founded by Fukuzawa Yukichi for only ten years, and later served as a teacher and journalist at Keio Yoshikura, where he made great achievements in politics, religion, literature, and journalism, and was an encyclopedic enlightenment representing the Meiji era. From Maruo Maruyama to Hiroshi Aramata, intellectuals or scholars who later revered Yano Ryukei emerged. The Tale of floating castle left by Yano Ryukei is a thrilling marine adventure novel. The main content of the novel is as follows: Kiyotaro Uei, an ordinary young man from Oita Prefecture, meets two aspiring men and joins a gang led by them who have broken off their Japanese nationality; in order to explore new territories in Africa, they not only seize warships from pirates, but also engage the local natives and dutch and British fleets, and finally try to help Java gain independence from the Netherlands. Jules Verne's le tour du monde en quatre-vingts jours (around the world in eighty days) and De la Terre à la Lune (Journey to the Moon) were previously popular, but by this time the climax of translation had passed, and in its place were a type of work that could be called domestic utopian novels, and "Floating City Story" was one of them. This type of novel, starting from a global perspective and skillfully integrating elements of science fiction and adventure, has won great popularity. Although The Tale of the Floating Castle was praised by people such as Fumiharu Morikawa and Shirohito Morita, who was known for translating Deux Ans de vacances, Uchida Luan and Ishibashi Shizuki criticized the work for not having insight into the human heart, that is, failing to portray people well. In this way, "The Tale of the Floating City" involved the literary circles at the front line at that time, setting off the earliest literary controversy in Japan. According to Akio Noda's biography "Yano Ryukei" ("Yano Dragon Creek"), the background of this literary controversy is the "literary extreme decline controversy" between Saburo Shimada, Yoshiharu Yanmoto, Yukio Ozaki, and Tokufu Sufeng, who advocate that "articles are the great cause of the country", and Uchida Luan and Ninsuke Ishibashi, who believe that "the novel should describe the fate of man and the truth of his heart.". At that time, the publication of "The Tale of Floating Castle" happened to be used as a target for criticism by Uchida, Ishibashi and others. As a result of the controversy, 10 years later, in meiji 33 (i.e., 1900), the originator of Japanese science fiction, Oshikawa Haruna, published his famous science fiction work "Submarine Warship" ("Submarine Warship"), and Japan's first golden age of science fiction arrived.
Left: Cover of the French edition of Verne's Around the World in Eighty Days
Pictured right: Cover of the French edition of Verne's Journey to the Moon
It is worth noting here that the "literary extreme decline controversy" triggered the earliest science fiction controversy in Japan, and this mode of debate influenced the subsequent discussion of the nature of literature and the nature of science fiction. It can even be said that this has become a major premise for thinking about the relationship between literary genres and science fiction genres, as well as thinking about the relationship between literary studies and science fiction research.
Today, more than a century later, science fiction has the refinement of pure literature, and pure literature has taken the storytelling of science fiction as the logical premise of natural narrative. Yasutaka Tsutsui's "Fictional Man" ("Imaginary Man") and Osaku Mememura's "Disappearing Halo" ("Dissipation"). The Healing Tower ("Healing Tower") and Shikasta, among others, are examples of the relationship between science fiction and literature today. The structure from the most essential literary controversy to the creation of new literature is not an exaggeration to say that it is a tradition inherited from the early science fiction controversy pioneered by Yano Ryukei.
Second, the history of Japanese science fiction research
If we trace the origins of Japanese science fiction research in this controversial theme, since the establishment of Japan's first science fiction fandom magazine in 1957[1] Cosmic Dust ("Cosmic Dust"), the earliest science fiction monthly science fiction magazine "Science Fiction Magazine" ("SF マガジン"), which was founded in late 1959, and the establishment of the Japanese Science Fiction Writers Club centered on the first batch of Japanese science fiction writers in 1963, it is only natural that the aforementioned "literary extreme decline controversy" has always been deformed and repeated within the framework of the opposition between pure literature and popular literature.
Left: Cosmic Dust, inaugural issue
Pictured right: The inaugural issue of Science Fiction Magazine
It has been 60 years since the end of World War II, and it has been more than 50 years since the beginning of modern Japanese science fiction. During this period, mankind was deeply involved in the huge vortex of the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union, on the one hand, the Apollo Program symbolized the dream of human space development, and on the other hand, nuclear war brought about the nightmare of the earth facing the crisis of extinction; during this period, the Vietnam War and the oil crisis occurred, and for Japan, the loans that were named "future" during the turbulent economic growth period in the 1960s were of great significance, but gradually lost their effectiveness[2]; it was also during this period that the world entered the end of the Cold War. At the fork in the road where the bipolar pattern disintegrates, as soon as the new century arrives, many cultural opposing forces that have been suppressed by the huge bipolar opposition situation have also emerged like science fiction.
Thus, in the face of these successive crises unprecedented in human history, science fiction—the literary genre that originated with Edgar Allan Poe, Verne, Herbert George Wells, and others—expanded its imagination and weaved masterpieces such as Arthur Clarke, Isaac Asimov, and Robert The outer universe represented by the Robert Anson Heinlein Triumvirate, the inner universe represented by New Wave writers such as James Graham Ballard, the gender difference universe represented by feminist writers such as Ursula Le Guin, and the universe represented by William Gibson Gibson) and other cyberpunk writers represented by the computer universe and so on. As a result, science fiction, which was originally regarded as an absurd and nonsensical thing as an emerging force, has now been "soaked" and "spread" to all parts of the world, and the science fiction genre itself has also experienced half a century of "transformation and disintegration". Looking around at the forefront of contemporary literature, it is now difficult to find works that are completely devoid of science fiction imagination, which means that in the past half century, the literary genre of science fiction has gradually become fixed and inseparable from reality. At the same time, with the advent of the nuclear age, the development of the universe and the development of the Internet, if the real world has become more science fiction, how to maintain its uniqueness as a literary science fiction is a problem that the science fiction community needs to face more and more. On this issue, there have been discussions among many science fiction writers, critics, and editors from the first to third generations of Japanese science fiction, namely From Sakyo Komatsu, Yasutaka Tsutsui, Masami Fukushima, Yoshiji Ishikawa, Takumi Shibano to Koichi Yamano, Yoshio Aramaki, Kasai, Nagase, and even Omariko Ohara (Ohara まり子), which is detailed in the humble compilation of the History of Japanese Science Fiction Controversy ("History of Japanese SF Controversy"),and will not be repeated here.
Cover of the Japanese edition of Takayuki Sunda's History of Japanese Science Fiction Controversy
At present, the key question is, what kind of historical inevitability and development possibilities are there in the process of establishing a unique research system in Japan, which is formed by commercial newspapers such as "Science Fiction Magazine"?
If you take a quick look, you can find that the beginning of Japanese science fiction research still needs to be looked at in the concept debate centered on writers. This is true whether it is Akasa Kobo's Science Fiction, This Monster-Like Thing ("SF, この Monster's なるもの" ) or Komatsu Sakyo's "Letter to Mr. Ivan Ampremov [3]" (拝啓イワン·エフレーモフ様'). Since then, Yoshiji Ishikawa has sought "everyday shock" in the science fiction genre, Takumi Shibano, editor-in-chief of Cosmic Dust, has argued that science fiction is "a literature that focuses on the product of human reason and develops independently without human reason", Masamito Fukushima, the first editor-in-chief of Science Fiction Magazine, has proposed a science fiction view that contrasts with the "modern aspects of fantasy literature", and Memomura has proposed an "internal literary theory" that is opposed to Colin Wilson's theory of external art (アウトサイーダー術論). Koichi Yamano's position in the experimental philosophical novels of James Graham Ballard and others has always attached importance to the "subjective theoretical system with science fiction as the starting point".
In the 1970s, when Yoshio Aramaki re-evaluated Heinlein, he argued that science fiction was a "'technical' novel" rooted in Kant's thought, Nobumitsu Omiya proposed the "theory of 'science fiction consciousness' from the perspective of human history," Kawayachi Shiro sought to resonate with the New Wave and mass culture, and Yasutaka Tsutsui completed the "hyper-fiction theory" that resonated with the development of avant-garde literature such as metafiction from the perspective of post-philosophical fiction. After entering the 1980s, Kasai fundamentally re-discussed science fiction, arguing that science fiction is "literature that uses science as a dominant rhetoric". In the 1990s, Cyber feminist Shinji Kotani deepened the theory of "female gender unconsciousness" from the perspective of the post-cyberpunk politics of gender differences.
Komatsu Sakyo, Japan Obituation, Japanese Version Of The Seal
From the best-selling of Sakyo Komatsu's "Japan Sinks", to the hit of George Lucas's "Star Wars," these works sparked a science fiction boom from the mid-1970s to the mid-1980s. In this upsurge, not only the column planning of "rubbing hot spots" has emerged, but also such a serious and constructive attempt to explore the nature of science fiction imagination in literature. In britain and the United States, the Science Fiction Research Association (SFRA), an organization of societies for scholars who study or teach science fiction at universities,[4] has a long history, and around 1980, the association suddenly became active. Science fiction research majors Darko Suvin, Robert Scholes, Eric Scholes, and Eric Scholes. Eric S. Rabkin, Patrick Parrinder and others absorbed ideas such as Marxism and structuralism, and a series of thick science fiction research works came out. Because of their enormous influence, the SFRA Annual Convention established the Pilgrilm Award, which rewards years of dedication to science fiction criticism or science fiction research, the Pioneer Award for the best paper of the year, and the Mary Kay Bray Award for the best book review of the year.
This trend also had an impact in Japan, and many Japanese magazines began to publish domestic and foreign science fiction reviews and research articles, including the established journal Science Fiction Magazine, the New Wave Magazine New Wave - Science Fiction Quarterly ("Quarterly NW-SF", founded in 1970), the second science fiction business monthly magazine edited by Abe Public Housing and Yukio Mishima ( "Fantasy Heavenly Outside" ("Fantasy Heaven", which was first published in 1974), and the second science fiction business monthly edited by Tadaho Tadaho Tsunade Tsunade. Science Fiction Adventures, the third science fiction business monthly magazine edited by Yoshio Sugahara ("SF アドベンチャー", founded in 1979). In addition, in 1977, the "Science Fiction Symposium" ("SF セミナー", founded in the 1960s by translators Norio Ito and Masahiro Noda) expanded its scale by taking advantage of the events hosted by the Overseas Science Fiction Research Association in Kobe; in the 1980s, the science fiction critic Maki shinji further developed it into the series of "Science Fiction Research Associations" ("SF Research Associations"), an annual conference held in Tokyo every year, and to this day the event has become a feature of Golden Week. During this period, the science fiction review quarterly Book of Science Fiction ("SF の本", founded in 1982), edited by science fiction critic Takashi Shiga, was also published, with a total of 9 issues. The aforementioned SFRA and science fiction research systems such as the Aforementioned SFRA and Science Fiction Research have been successfully transplanted into the unique soil of Japanese science fiction.
Group photo of the first "Science Fiction Research Society"
But what about formal academic science fiction research, which is deeply rooted in the tradition of science fiction research born out of the so-called science fiction fandom?
Here, it is necessary to re-evaluate the role of Ishikawa Joji. In the first generation of the first generation, Ishikawa supported the discourse space of the science fiction genre, and in 1977 compiled the science fiction reviews, commentaries, and commentaries of the past years into the "Age of Science Fiction" ("SF の時時"), which is the earliest collection of science fiction reviews in Japan and won the Japan Mystery Writers Association Award. Not only that, but in the six months from April to September 1979, he opened a course called "Literature and Time" at the Faculty of Liberal Arts of the University of Tokyo, which was part of the general comprehensive course "The Phases of Time" ("Time を巡る諸相"), which shocked the world and became a hot news after the course. The course was dominated by discussions between Ishikawa himself and Brian Wilson Aldiss at the 1970 International Science Fiction Symposium (ishikawa participated as a member of the Japanese Science Fiction Writers Club, the organizer), starting with Michael Ende, involving Herbert George Wells, Marcel Proust, and Marcel Proust. James Joyce, Italo Calvino, Alejo Carpentier, Sasuke Komatsu, Ryo Hanmura, Masaki Yamada, and others discussed a broad perspective and an insightful critique of the boundaries between science fiction and pure literature. Therefore, this undoubtedly lays a certain foundation for today's science fiction research.
However, when it comes to the science fiction courses in college throughout the year, one thing cannot be ignored. In 1975, Junmi Yura, a researcher of English literature who specialized in The English Romantics at the Faculty of Liberal Arts at the University of Tokyo, used Scholes' latest science fiction treatise, Structural Fabulation, as a textbook, and in the discussion class, students applied the relevant theories in the book to focus on G.K. Chesterton. K. Chesterton), Ray Douglas Bradbury, Ballard, and Masazo Numa made statements. This is four years earlier than the aforementioned science fiction course by Yoshiji Ishikawa, and is likely to be the earliest science fiction academic course in Japan. Perhaps influenced by it, orthodox literary criticism magazines with deep roots in Yura began to plan and publish science fiction specials, such as the "Science Fiction" special edition ("SF") special edition of "From Science Fiction to Modern Literature" ("SF から Modern Literature" special collection" in the December 1978 issue, "Discovery" (ユリイカ) in the April 1980 issue of "Science Fiction" Special Edition ("SF") and "National Literature: Research on Interpretation and Textbooks" ("National Literature Interpretation 釈と Textbook Research"),August 1982 issue" The Impact of Modern Literature and Science Fiction" Special Edition ("Modern Literature · SF の衝撃") and so on. The special edition of "National Literature" also features a conversation between Inoue and Yura, who has just won the second Japan Science Fiction Award for "Kirigiri". It can be seen from this that the science fiction boom at that time also brought about the science fiction research fever.
Third, science fiction cruises the world
In the more than 20 years after the 1970s, several important changes occurred in the discursive space of Japanese science fiction research.
One of the opportunities was that from 1984 to 1987, I studied at Cornell University Graduate School, and I happened to meet science fiction scholars such as Dakota Suenwen, the founder of Science Fiction Studies, and Elizabeth Anne Hull, who later became president of the Science Fiction Research Association. Influenced by the cyberpunk craze sparked by William Gibson's Neuromancer, I participated in the North American science fiction academic circle and founded SF Eye, a critical magazine of cyberpunk, along with Gibson's friend Steve Brown and others as an editorial board member. Since then, science fiction research has been inspired by the cyberpunk movement known as the Second New Wave, and it seems that the encounters I experienced at that time were not only accidental on a personal level, but perhaps also a historical necessity. It is worth mentioning that in 1993, Larry McCaffery, a professor at San Diego State University who would later become my main research partner, published a co-authored book, Towards the Theoretical Frontiers of 'Fiction': From Metafiction and Cyberpunk through Avant-Pop), the book won the 1994 Science Fiction Research Association's Fifth Pioneer Award. In 1995, I compiled his main essays and interviews into a book based on Japan's unique perspective in avant-garde art (アヴァンポップ)). Later, the book laid the foundation for McCaughley to become a key figure in the study of Japanese and American postmodern literature, including science fiction.
Cover of the Japanese edition of Avant-Garde Art
Another opportunity is that, especially in the past decade, there has been a surge of interest in Japanese manga and anime in areas centered on the English-speaking community. The Japanese language skills of Japanese researchers in North America have improved significantly, and in addition to the translation of their works, special editions of periodicals and collections of works with Japanese science fiction reviews as the main content have also been planned and published. The November 2002 issue of Science Fiction Studies (No. 88) was published as a "Japanese Science Fiction Special", which included the novels of Hisaku Yumono and the anime of Mori Oshii. The special edition sold out quickly, so christopher Bolton, a young scholar who studied Japan, and Istvan Csicsery-Ronay, editor-in-chief of Science Fiction Studies, subsequently edited the issue into a single edition and titled Robot Ghosts, Wired Dreams. Published in October 2007 by the University of Minnesota Press. It also happened to be the same year that a seminar on the theme of "What is Literature for Human beings" ("Humanity") ("Humanity にとて傳て文ととは何か"), co-organized by Iwanai Kuniya Bookstore, was held on April 29, with the participation of Sakyo Komatsu, Hideaki Seina, Susan Napier, and the author. Building on the content of this seminar, Literature launched a science fiction special in the July and August 2007 issues. From the end of August to the beginning of September of the same year, the 46th Japan Science Fiction Congress and the 65th World Science Fiction Congress "NIPPON2007" were held at the Yokohama International Peace Convention Center. The writers of the book "Robot Ghosts and Connected Dreams" participated in sub-forums such as "Science Fiction Research and Science Fiction Education", and the atmosphere of the meeting was very warm. As an important force in science fiction research, these new scholars of Japanese studies in Europe and the United States who study science fiction often publish articles in the annual research journal Mechademia [5].
Cover of the English edition of Robot Ghosts and Connected Dreams
In the work for Robert Scholes and Eric M. In a book review written in the Japanese translation of Science Fiction: History-Science-Vision, co-authored by S. Rabkin, Nakajima makes it clear that he was deeply anxious that the book did not speak of Japanese science fiction in the slightest. After more than twenty-five years, the World Science Fiction Convention centered on North America now has a section set up every year around Japanese science fiction, manga, animation, etc., and there are constantly content involving Japanese writers and critics in North American science fiction review magazines. From The Anbe Public House to Yasutaka Tsutsui to Saito Kane, most of the critics about these writers did not wait for the English translation to be published, and directly read and quoted the original works. The era of creating science fiction in Japanese is over.
In this way, the sub-genre of Japanese science fiction, along with the boom in cultural studies, entered an era of evaluation from a global perspective. Now, the time has come to explore new standards of criticism. In 1988, I offered a science fiction course as a general studies course at the Hiyoshi Campus of Keio University, and in 2005 and 2008, I also taught the course "Science Fiction - Genre and Criticism" ("SF-そののジャンルと Criticism") in the Department of Modern Western Languages and Modern Literature of the Faculty of Letters of the University of Tokyo. At present, only Otani Makoto has been offering a series of courses in the Department of Children's Culture at the Faculty of Literature at Shirayuri Women's University since 2000, "Introduction to Science Fiction Fantasy" ("Introduction to Science Fiction Fantasy" ("Introduction to Science Fiction Fantasy") that Kotani has been offering in 2000. In addition, there are science fiction workshops and seminars centered on The National Congress of the American Literary Association of Japan in October 2006 and the Central Branch of the Japan Comparative Literature Society in November 2007, centered on the science fiction workshops and seminars centered on Yukisan Rinwo Gakuen University Associate Professor Morishi Nagasawa. Academic science fiction research has been widely developed in North America and is gradually gaining university recognition in Japan.
In addition, it cannot be ignored that in 2005, the Japan Science Fiction Writers Club set up a new literary award provided by Science Fiction Magazine, the Japan Science Fiction Criticism Award, and in less than three years, a number of cutting-edge science fiction researchers and critics such as Yokomichi Hitoshi, Toyo Ebara, Tsuyoshi Isobe, and Yuri Miyano were successively introduced. Influenced by the 2007 World Science Fiction Convention, New Wave writers Koichi Yamano and Yoshio Arama, who had made important contributions to the history of science fiction criticism and research in the past, happened to form a new research organization, "Reasoning and Japan" ("スペキュラティヴ·ジャパン"), which began to point out new directions. Perhaps in the not-so-distant future, a science fiction research model that integrates the circle of professional science fiction writers, the circle of fans and the academic circle will be born.
Notes
[1] Doujin magazine (doujin 誌誌) is a Japanese word for doujinshi (doujinshi) and refers to a magazine funded by people with similar interests and aspirations.
[2] After the 1950s, the Japanese government established a fiscal investment system, that is, after concentrating scattered private funds through financial channels such as postal savings, it was directly loaned to enterprises in the form of financial credit. Thanks to this system, Japan has achieved rapid economic growth, and loans that play an important role in corporate development have been given the name of "future".
[3] Ivan Efremov was a Soviet science fiction writer and paleontologist whose masterpiece is the andromeda nebula.
[4] Its representative academic journals are Extrapolation, Foundation, and SF Studies.
[5] Organized by the University of Minnesota Press, the journal began distribution in 2006 and focuses on popular Japanese culture such as science fiction, manga, and anime.