#title Tsuji Jun
#subtitle Japanese Dadaist, Anarchist, Philosopher, Monk
#author Erana Jae Taylor
#date 2010
#source <[[https://archive.org/details/tsuji-jun-japanese-dadaist-anarchist-philosopher-monk_202308][archive.org/details/tsuji-jun-japanese-dadaist-anarchist-philosopher-monk_202308]]>
#lang en
#pubdate 2024-07-23T11:45:47
#topics dadaist, philosophy, buddhism, anarchism
#notes This is a collection of brief writings about Tsuji Jun, by Erana Jae Taylor. It includes a brief biography, background and context, and the relationship of his thinking to people like Nietzsche and Stirner.
This work was originally a master’s thesis submitted to the Department of East Asian Studies at the University of Arizona. You can view this earlier edition here: <[[https://archive.org/details/tsuji-jun][archive.org/details/tsuji-jun]]>.
#cover e-j-erana-jae-taylor-tsuji-jun-1.jpg
#publisher Enemy Combatant Publications
** I. Introduction: About This Book
*** Significance, Purpose, Avenues for Future Research
Though he is widely recognized in English, German, and Japanese scholarship as the prime establisher of Dadaism in Japan, there is a lack of substantial English literature about a most fascinating of historical figures, Tsuji Jun[1]. In spite of this, at the time of this writing there exist at least ten substantial works of scholarship in Japanese that are focused expressly on him.
Tsuji’s story is not, however, strictly a story about an eccentric Japanese. One cannot properly speak of Nihilism, Egoism, or literary Dadaism in Japan for any length of time without mentioning Tsuji’s place in that continuum. To lack English-language[2] scholarship on Tsuji leaves open a gap in not only understanding the Japanese avant-garde arts movement but also in the consequences of Germanic art, literature, and philosophy on a global scale.
While Dadaism was originally an importation into Japan from Europe, it began to blend with concurrent Japanese culture (including Buddhist ideas) almost immediately. Over time this created a whole new body of literature with a Buddhist aspect that has only been significantly explored in English-language texts in the context of a single individual, Takahashi Shinkichi.
While several academics have recognized the intersections between Nihilism and Buddhism in Japan (Nishitani, Parkes, Unno) there is a dearth of scholarship that deals with how this interfaced with the Anarchist and Dadaist movements in Japan that were so linked to Nihilism. Therefore, an important question becomes “what relationship did Buddhism have with the nihilistic elements of the Anarchist and Dadaist movements in Japan?” While this is covered to some extent by Won Ko’s parallel work on Takahashi Shinkichi, the present work will attempt to answer this question in regards to Tsuji’s take on Dadaism.
Indeed, Takahashi’s Dadaism was distinct from Tsuji’s, and Ko makes the correct observation that Tsuji’s ideas of Dadaism were rooted in Egoistic Nihilism[3], whilst Takahashi favoured a more expressly Buddhist take on Dada and became disenchanted with Stirner in light of his finding “a great gulf of contradiction fixed between the two [Egoism and Buddhism].”[4]
Regardless, there remains a definite Buddhist tint to Tsuji’s body of work and it is conceivable that Tsuji would have disagreed with Takahashi’s conception of Egoism and Buddhism being incompatible philosophies, especially during the middling years of his life. Rather, Tsuji’s Egoism contained a great deal of Epicurean idealism for thoroughly enjoying a simple life, which complemented Tsuji’s Buddhist objective of reducing (his own) suffering.
Late in life Tsuji gave up on Dadaism after an apparent mental breakdown, whereafter he became a wandering Buddhist monk. Takahashi also turned to Buddhism after Dadaism, though Tsuji does not seem to have renounced Egoism explicitly as Takahashi did. After his institutionalization, Tsuji remarked, “Since life isn’t very long, I [still] just want to manage an ordinarily peaceful and innocent life. It’s just that my experiences up until now have shown me that’s not so easy to do”[5]. This statement would prove an unfortunate foreshadowing of the difficulties he would continue to experience for years afterwards as he struggled to maintain sanity.
Both Takahashi and Tsuji tried to use Dadaism in their personal and philosophical pursuits of human freedom, though Takahashi utilized an approach more grounded in the Japanese tradition of Zen and Tsuji attempted a more philosophical approach reminiscent of the German philosophers. While Tsuji wrote voluminously to this end, Tsuji also attempted to express his philosophy foremost through his own lifestyle, as remarked upon by Hagiwara Kyōjirō.[6] As a result, much of Tsuji’s philosophical literature comes out through autobiographical explanations of his own experimentation in art and lifestyle.
Another central question laid out in this work concerns the role of Dada and affiliated philosophies during the process of Japan’s Meiji/Taisho Period modernization and Modernism, which is discussed in Chapter IV in the context of a breakdown of Rationalism.
The most overarching purpose of this work, however, is to briefly introduce Tsuji Jun to the English-speaking world with the hopes that it will encourage further research on him and related topics.
*** A Necessarily Interdisciplinary Approach
While applying the term “polymath” would be an exaggeration, Tsuji at once managed to be a translator of a large body of work, an avid reader and patron of the arts, a well-known essayist and philosopher, a musician, a poet, an actor and playwright, a painter, and a calligrapher. Dada as a medium must have suited Tsuji tremendously well because of the unlimited mediums Dada can be implemented in and the overlaps that occur between Dadaism and other philosophies.
The fertile interdisciplinary nature of Tsuji’s interests is part of what makes him such a fascinating topic, and this breadth lends itself to any number of angles for study. Surely this is a contributing factor as to why so many Japanese have chosen to write about him, each wanting to tell Tsuji’s story from their own angle. As a result we find titles ranging from Nihilist: the thought and life of Tsuji Jun; Love for Tsuji Jun (a lover’s memoir); Nomad Dadaist Tsuji Jun; Madman Tsuji Jun: a shakuhachi flute, the sound of the universe, and the sea of Dada; and Tsuji Jun: Art and Pathology[7], among others.
While the breadth of his interests and the variety of approaches taken in scholarship about him make a study of him challenging as well as rewarding, one cannot grasp this content without taking an international angle. After all, with Tsuji being a major reader and translator of various foreign literatures (German, English, Italian, and French[8]), it is essential to place him in the context of his Western peers.
To better grasp this internationalism of his would be to better understand the transnational exchange of thought and culture during early modern Japan. In the shadow of today’s perpetual discussion of globalization, it is often a neglected fact that intercultural blending had been significant long before the Internet- and globalization came about as we know them today.
Unfortunately the spatial limitations of this brief study prevent an analysis of this international exchange on any thorough level and focuses instead on other topics — but this leaves open for future comparisons between Tsuji and various European thinkers, as well as a more in-depth explanation of the depth of impact had on Tsuji by German thinkers (Nietzsche, Stirner, and the Dadaists) and the impact Tsuji may have had on other thinkers while he was abroad. While I am not suggesting that other international influences were unimportant to what Tsuji would become, this essay is definitely rooted in the Germanic slant to Tsuji’s literature. It is especially biased towards the (truly substantial) influence of Max Stirner.
*** Key Terms
The Germanic connection to Tsuji’s story is clear when it comes to the literary influence of Germanic writers such as Stirner, Nietzsche, and the German Dadaists, but one must also look to the historical context of these writers as an influence upon internationally sensitive individuals such as Tsuji. Unfortunately this background is also largely omitted here. Because there have been any number of books written on the historical context of European Dadaism and philosophy, this essay will focus predominantly on Japan’s place in this intellectual scene. This portion will fal mostly in Chapter IV through the Gleitende focus that is used there to describe the decay of Rationalism in Japan during Tsuji’s lifetime.
The Japanese terms mu (無), muga (無我), and kū (空) refer to concepts that have been used in describing Nihilism’s quality of “nothingness” in a variety of ways.[9] The term kū is a particularly Buddhist term that refers to “emptiness”, usually along with the phrase “all things are “empty”’. For Nagami lsamu[10] this implies that nothing has an unchanging form or “essence”, as though any given thing is like an empty vessel that can be filled with some temporary form. He explains that this emptiness is evident in the changing nature of all things in the world.
Some, including Nietzsche, have argued for the similarity of kū to the Nihilistic assertion that al things are empty of inherent meaning and are only “filled” with meaning when there is someone to create that meaning through the act of making a judgement about that thing. On the other hand, some argue that this approach is a mistake[11], presumably because the emphasis to the Buddhist kū is a thing’s lack of an unchanging form, whereas the emphasis to Nihilism’s emptiness is that meaning is a construct of the observer as a result of their drives.[12] However, it could also be argued that regardless of their rationales, both philosophies are still arguing that things lack inherent essences or meanings.
The term mu is best translated as “nothing”, “nonbeing”, or “non-” and does less to imply the existence of some vessel containing the emptiness. However, the character for kū is the same as the character for sora or “sky” (a trait often manipulated by poets), the imagery of which does not much imply a vessel. Thus, the point of the term kū is arguably to express emptiness rather than emptiness within a vessel, but the author prefers the term mu because it is less likely to be interpreted in this way.
Conversely, mu is a more flexible term because it simply implies a lack of something, especially because it often appears as a prefix to negate the meaning of a suffix in Japanese. For example, the term mugon no (無言の) signifies that something is silent, mute, or tacit, where the second character implies speech and the first, mu, implies the lack thereof. The incorporation of this power to negate makes the meaning of mu seem closer to Nietzsche’s original meaning of “Nihil”, which also incorporates the concept of negation.[13]
Mu stands as the opposite of u (有), or “being”. However, Abe Masao asserts that mu and u are completely reciprocal and that mu is not derived from u the way that nichtsein is derived from sein (186). His point is that there must be a distinction made between relative mu (the opposite of u) and absolute Mu (“true Emptiness” or Silnyata, the spiritual realization of which would be transcendent of even the negation of u into mu or vice versa).
Kūkyo (空虚) is another term that means emptiness, combining kū and the kyo (hollow) from kyomu (虚無) (both of which Tsuji uses in his work)[14] Kyomu combines mu and kyo and is used to indicate nihility, or the sense of emptiness implied specifically by Nihilism. The characters *kū* and kyo are basically interchangeable in the word utsuro (空ろ, 虚ろ), which Tsuji uses in “Absurd” in Chapter VI in the context of a great void, which itself could be interpreted as Nirvana or as death.
The semantical accuracy of the words mu, Mu, kū, etcetera in regards to Nietzsche’s and Stirner’s conceptions of nothingness is debatable, and while this writing makes use primarily of the term mu because of its usefulness in both Nihilist and Buddhist connotations, readers are encouraged to consider similarities between the two philosophies’ conceptions of nothingness in whatever terms best suit them. This work’s use of mu is intended less to pinpoint the exact relationship between the two philosophies, and is more intent on developing a historical account which indicates that Buddhist associations have been applied to Nihilism in Japan much the same way Dada received the same Buddhist associations — both from their very first introductions.[15]
Another term that finds use in discussions of nothingness between Japanese Buddhism and Nihilism is muga, or “no-self” I “no-ego” (anatta). This is also addressed in Ko’s work on Takahashi[16]. In this work, muga is an important point of contention between Buddhism and Nihilism. While both philosophies have overlapping conceptions of “nothingness”, muga presents a major distinction that reminds us of how they have different approaches for dealing with their common struggle for human freedom.
That is, Buddhism’s imperative is to dismantle a sense of ego to extinguish suffering (dukkha) by realizing nothingness, whereas (Stirnerist) Nihilism apotheosizes the role of the ego to enhance life and free one from limitations imposed by a lack of understanding of nothingness. [17] It is the nothingness itself, rather than the approaches or consequences, that this work asserts that Nihilism and Buddhism have in common. This commonality is expressed in Tsuji’s philosophy, as expressed throughout this work. The divergence of the philosophies’ approaches is what most severely divided the philosophies of Tsuji and Takahashi while they were Dadaists, who had both been influenced by Buddhism and Nihilism.
** II. The Life of Tsuji Jun
*** A Life History [18]
Tsuji Jun (also known during his later years as Mizushima Ryukitsu) was born the fourth of October, 1884 in Asakusa, Tokyo, and died at the age of 60 on November 24th, 1944.[19] He was born the eldest son of a low-ranking government official and attended Kaisei Junior High School until the age of 12, whereupon his family’s finances declined, forcing him to begin working as an office boy and taking classes at night. According to Tsuji, his youth was “nothing but destitution, hardship, and a series of traumatizing difficulties”.[20] To escape from this hardship Tsuji embraced literature, particularly classical Japanese literature (Hojoki, Tzuzuregusa) and the romantic thrillers of Izumi Kyoka. Literature would remain of extreme, lifelong importance for him.[21][22]
In 1899 he began to study English at a foreign language school, where he also was introduced to Christianity. He would study the Bible and the publications of the prominent Christian figure, Uchimura Kanzo, though this interest was not to be a lasting passion.[23] Later, he began to learn French and became interested in Tolstoyan Humanism and Christian Socialism.[24] Eventually he was able to land a job as an elementary school teacher in 1903. With his interest in socialism deepening, he subscribed to Kōtoku Shusui’s Heimin Shimbun (Commoner’s Newspaper) and began integrating into a circle of anarchist friends.[25]
In 1909 Tsuji began teaching English at an all-girls high school while doing on-the-side translation (Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Bell”, “The Shadow” [1906, 1907], Guy De Maupassant’s “The Necklace” [1908]). In 1912 a love affair developed between Tsuji (28 years old) and his pupil, Itō Noe (17 years old), resulting in his resignation — after which he would continue to be unemployed (not counting freelance work) until the end of his life. Rather, this former teacher of Ito, a fervent feminist, would strive to “cultivate her to the limits of woman’s possibilities. I’ll drag out of her every talent and gift dormant within her. I’ll definitely make her into a wonderful woman by pouring into her all my knowledge, even my life”.[26]
According to Tsuji’s essay “Humoresque”, Tsuji was charmed by Ito’s literary talent and country-girl beauty. He even goes as far as calling her way of speaking “like that of a bumpkin”.[27] Itō had been in a difficult arranged marriage from which she wished to escape, the attempt at which provoked controversy regarding a perceived romantic relationship developing between the two. From the time of Tsuji’s resignation Itō came to live in Tsuji’s house and the family would endure increasingly impoverished conditions because of the loss of Tsuji’s job. Tsuji and his mother would quietly pawn their possessions one-by-one to keep it a secret from Ito.[28] It was also in this year, 1912, that Tsuji began reading Stirner’s The Ego and its Own. Shortly thereafter Itō would begin contributing to Seito (Bluestockings[29]). The household made ends meet through earnings from Seito and Tsuji’s piecemeal translation work.
Ito would have Tsuji’s first son on January 20th 1914, named Tsuji Makoto, who later would also become known for his poetry and artwork, which often depicts rural scenes in a fashion generally critical of civilization. About the time of Makoto’s birth, Tsuji’s translation of Lombroso’s work The Man of Genius (a book about lunacy and prodigies) became a bestseller, and Itō Noe became chief editor of the now-renowned feminist publication Seito.’[30] During these early years together, because Tsuji had lost his job, Tsuji found himself suddenly enabled to experiment with the egoistic lifestyle he had thought so highly of while reading Stirner. As such it was a period of important personal transformation as he attempted to divine what he really wanted to do with himself and what socialized behaviours he did not really wish to adhere to.[31]
Tsuji encouraged Ito’s self-development most notably by frequently helping her with translations and editing her articles for Seito, as well as providing encouragement in the process of becoming “the new woman” (a feminist ideal of the liberated female, as discussed in various issues of Seitō).[32] He also introduced her to a number of texts that would be formative for her, including the work of Emma Goldman.[33] Not long afterwards, Tsuji and Itō began spending time with Ōsugi Sakae, who was quite a renowned anarcho-communist figure at the time. He would become even more famous for his belief in Egoism and his later experimentation in the open relationships between himself, Ito, his wife Hori Yasuko, and Kamichika Ichiko.
Tsuji’s and Ito’s second son, Ryiiji, was born August 10m, 1915.[34] At this time Itō was spending a great deal of time at Seito headquarters rather than at home, and Tsuji would end up having an affair with Ito’s cousin. Shortly thereafter they ended their relationship, and Itō and Tsuji would keep Ryi.iji and Makoto respectively after their separation.[35]
Ito shortly thereafter entered into Ōsugi’s four- person “free love” relationship. Tsuji returned to Asakusa and advertised his services as a teacher of English, shakuhachi flute, and violin. He evidently attracted a number of students, though he became increasingly self- indulgent and alcoholic.[36] Seitō was shut down in 1916. In 1917 it seems Tsuji began wandering about the country as a vagabond, often with his son, playing the shakuhachi for great lengths of time. He would stay overnight in various temples and shrines as well as the houses of friends. A few years later, in 1920, Tsuji learned of and joined the newly blossoming Japanese Dadaist movement through a visit by Takahashi Shinkichi (Chapter III).
A few years later, the Great Kanto Earthquake struck, and in its wake came a rightist political power shift. The authorities, allegedly fearing that anarchists would “take advantage” of the ensuing chaos, began to crack down on radicals. This is less surprising when one considers that the contemporary Japanese government was barely older than Tsuji himself and Japan had already gone through a tremendous amount of censorship and authoritarian law enforcement for the preceding two decades.[37] Thus erupted the Amakasu Incident in which Ito, Ōsugi, and Ōsugi’s six-year-old nephew were massacred by the military policeman Amakasu and his men.
Tsuji was a controversial writer during a period of time at which it was dangerous to write “questionable” literature. People in his social environment (such as Ito, Ōsugi, Kōtoku Shi.isui, and Kaneko Fumiko) were subjected to arbitrary arrest, confiscation of materials, and/or murder by the authorities. Because of his ideological and social proximity to these individuals Tsuji became particularly sensitive to the growing oppressiveness of the Japanese government leading up to World War II. For Tsuji to leave the country after the Amakasu Incident is prescient of what would become a norm for controversial writers in 1930s Japan when such people were commonly disappeared.[38]
As such, under the title of “Literary Correspondent” for the Yomiuri Shinbun, Tsuji traveled to Paris in 1924, where he and Makoto would live for a year. Upon returning to Japan he would continue to publish translations and original works, now including texts such as Max Stirner’s The Ego and its Own. It was in the post-earthquake period that Tsuji would become romantic with Kojima Kiyo, and in 1923 his third son, Akio, was born.[39]
About three years prior, Tsuji had begun involving himself in the spread of the newly born Japanese Dadaist movement and developing an even wider set of social contacts. He would participate in theatre as well as literature and the run g of the (probably fictional) Café Dada. It is from this period surrounding 1923 that Tsuji’s most well-known works were published, though major book publications incorporated some writings that he had written many years earlier. While this was the heyday of Dada in Japan, times were also fraught with censorship and cancellation of events and confiscation of publications resultant from government intervention was a frequent occurrence.
In 1931 Tsuji began to live with his lover Matsuo Toshiko[40], and they would continue to be in contact for the rest of Tsuji’s life. Then, in 1932, Tsuji had what is often thought to be a mental breakdown. One night during a party, Tsuji climbed to the second floor and began flapping his arms and crying “I am the bird-man!”[41], eventually jumping from the building, running around, and jumping onto the table calling “kyaaaaaa, kyaaaa! !”[42] Tsuji was already quite famous by this time for his writings, lifestyle, and social life, and this event would become a scandal in the newspapers, which bore articles with titles such as “Tsuji Jun Becomes a Tengu”.[43]
Whether or not this event constituted a mental breakdown or if it was not merely a wild antic by an eccentric Dadaist is debatable. After al , Takahashi Shinkichi was smeared by the media as having “gone nuts” after having swatted a taxi driver with a cane during an argument, an act which Tsuji defended as an act resulting from merely his Dadaist eccentricity and the heat of the moment.[44]
However, shortly after Tsuji was institutionalized in a mental hospital, and the doctor there would diagnose him with “temporary psychosis’ resultant from habitual drinking. Soon afterwards Tsuji begin roaming again, dressed in the raiment of a wandering Zen monk (complete with sedge hood and shakuhachi)[45] [46], and over the next few years he would repeatedly end up in the hands of the police. As the years went by his associates describe him as increasingly out of touch with reality, and he would enter mental institutions several more times. While the tengu incident may not have been an act of lunacy, it seems his mental health in the years to follow broke down in a major way[47].
Having left behind his writing career, Tsuji made ends meet by going door to door playing the shakuhachi and by relying on the generosity of his friends and royalties from his old publications. He was also supported by the “Tsuji Jun Fan Club” that was created in 1925.[48] As the years progressed, Tsuji became more and more absorbed with Buddhism, particularly with the Tannisho and Shmran[49].
Ultimately, in 1944, while he was staying in a friend’s one bedroom apartment in Tokyo, Tsuji was found dead from starvation. He is buried at Saifuku Temple in Tokyo.[50]
To Write in an Increasingly Oppressive Climate Tsuji was a writer in the highly censored and dangerous decades leading up to World War II, and one of radical ideas at that. Having witnessed friends and lovers being imprisoned or murdered for continuing to speak their mind, Tsuji was acutely aware of the implications of being a writer. Having been close to so many anarchists and other dissidents would have made him even more of a target. Whether or not to continue to write would be a question he would perpetually struggle with. In 1924 Tsuji responded to the political climate by leaving the country, yet returned — and while in Japan was inclined to vagabondage. Not only did Tsuji’s wandering suit his philosophy and desired freewheeling lifestyle, it suited his need to evade government surveillance and enforced silencing. That he remained so vocal and successful in making a living as a writer in such times was indeed an accomplishment.
Tsuji’s feelings about writing in such a political climate are best summed up in a passage from “Vagabond Writings”[51]:
Even if I get up the casual desire to express myself again, such expressions are basically forbidden by the current social system. Basically, in today’s world, at least in the society I’m living in, there really isn’t freedom of speech. When I think of this, I get pretty ill at ease. The passion to go against this and speak anyway just does not come about, so in this way it all begins to bottle up, and I shut up. Even if we’re all humans and we’re feeling this way together, this world’s constraints are tight. These days it seems you really can’t talk this way, and it’s fashionable now to peg things as “dangerous thoughts”. ‘Til now I’ve been swallowing these words dutifully. Naturally, I pity my low intelligence.
After this section Tsuji renounces affiliating with any sort of nationality and submitting to any authority other than himself. He says he wants to rid himself of such duties and cares, to instead live with intentions probably not unlike “the fine thoughts of an insect” (a thoroughly Egoistic and appropriately Dadaist turn of phrase). He then continues that, were he living instead as a peasant in Russia at the time, he would surely be shot to death.[52]
Regardless of his apprehensions, Tsuji continued to write and churned out a great number of translations as well in the years to come. He reacted to the climate of censorship instead with a lifestyle of physical mobility through adopting the transience of a vagabond:
That I, without an objective and completely light-heartedly, walk — having unawares become absorbed in the winds and water and grass among other things in nature, it is not unusual for my existence to become suspicious. And because my existence is in such a suspicious position, I am flying off from this society and vanishing. In such circumstances there is a possibility of feeling the.- “vagabond’s religious ecstasy”. At such times one may become utterly lost in their experience. Thus, when I set myself to putting something down on paper, at last feelings from those moments drift into my mind, and I am compelled to make these feelings known.
When I am compelled to write, it is already too late and I become an utterly shackled captive... Thus, after writing and garrulously chatting I often feel I have surely done something tremendously pointless. This results in me lacking the spirit to write. Nevertheless, thus far and from here on out, I have written, will continue to write.
My impulse to wander comes about from the uneasiness of staying still... and this uneasiness is for me quite dreadful.[53]
While Tsuji’s restlessness is likely the product of a variety of forces, part of this is surely the result of the stifling suppression his associates had been encountering for decades. This text was written in 1921: two years after Tsuji gave himself up to komusō style wandering, two years before the Amakasu Incident and the martial law resulting from the Great Kantō Earthquake. Thereafter conditions worsened with the ramping up of the war and Tsuji would continue wandering until the final year of his life, 1944.
*** Personality & Lifestyle[54]
Curiously, Tsuji is described by some as a rather shy, cowardly person lacking in conviction, especially when compared to Ōsugi[55] Partly, this is probably a depiction resulting from having been around so many activists with high political ideals. Tsuji’s writing is full of self-deprecating comments typical of a polite Japanese, so he does not come across much as an egotistical person. However, a strongly individualistic attitude and self-respect permeates his writing and he is insistent on not changing his own behaviour to suit the norms of those around him. He can be very blunt when describing how “lazy” and egoistic he is, but he does not usually portray this as a habit he wants to break. Tsuji’s work generally suggests that he merely has little care for portraying himself in a contrived light and cares little for how he is labelled by others, as we have seen in his comment about “isms”: “Whatever sort of ‘ist’ you call me, for whatever reason, doesn’t really matter to me... even ‘Dadaist’... I am going to be my own variety of Dada regardless”.[56]
In general terms we can understand Tsuji as a Bohemian[57] and an Epicurean. While these themes are further expanded upon later in this study, two attributes of these philosophies that he exemplified are those of being primarily interested in the artistic and living in accord with simple, essential values (of a rather anti-consumerist bent). Indeed, Tsuji did not choose to become a wealthy individual but would frequently wander the country with little more than a shakuhachi.
Tsuji further suggests these attributes when he describes himself as an individual interested in living simply and freely, indulging in “real art” that uses depictions that get to “the heart of the matter” (i.e. consist of mental and emotional content)[58] rather than of fancy minutiae. He says that, regarding haiku, he has no interest in the names and fine details of various trees and flowers, but wants instead to get to the point. [59] It is probably this that has led him to write proliferously through essays as opposed to volumes of flowery poetry. Through a Bohemian and Epicurean approach as it may have been, Tsuji was very enamoured with artistic expressions of the human condition, which provided him a lifelong connection to reading, writing, and the arts.
Especially after losing his job at Ito’s school, Tsuji made many friends and associates. From the way Kojima Kiyo and Matsuo Toshiko describe him in their memoirs[60], Tsuji was a loving man, though intent on not domineering over his lovers, children, and others. However, he was often an utter drunkard and he was less than enthusiastic about parenting (being at times downright neglectful)-he would not let raising a child deter him from what he sought to do.
That Makoto, when he grew older, would be more than a little unwilling to take interviews about his father was probably the result of both this, and the desire to live a somewhat normal life despite being cast in the shadow of his famous, eccentric father. The same is likely true for Mako, daughter of Itō and Ōsugi, who was also not predisposed to speaking garrulously with the media about her (in)famous parents.[61]
*** From ‘“Tsuji Jun and the Teachings of the Unmensch[62]”
For a deeper understanding of Tsuji’s personality, let us take a selection written about Tsuji by Hagiwara Kyōjirō:
This person, “Tsuji Jun”, is the most interesting figure in Japan today. He has taken on elements from a variety of cultures he was exposed to: Tokyo literature, Christianity, Buddhism, English literature, and Nihilism. He is like a comical writer, like a commandment-breaking monk, like Christ, like a man of developed character, like a Dadaist. When he drinks, Tsuji spits out broken jokes and scathing sarcasm without respect... but when he sobers, he becomes sad, he wanders about the town blowing his shakuhachi. In his music lies the heart-breaking despair and nostalgia represented in the lyricism of his poetry. He plays the shakuhachi, crying alone.
Vagrants and labourers of the town gather about him. The defeated unemployed and the penniless find in him their own home and religion... his disciples are the hungry and the poor of the world. Surrounded by these disciples he passionately preaches the Good News of Nihilism. But he is not Christlike, and he preaches but drunken nonsense. Then the disciples call him merely “Tsuji” and sometimes hit him on the head. This is a strange religion...
What the hell is Tsuji Jun? A poet, a literary man, and yet-- an ordinary guy, a spiritual man... thinking over human history, he sought his principles and how to live rightly. This in the pattern of Goethe, Tolstoy, Chekhov, Baudelaire, Buddha, and Socrates...
But unfortunately this was the beginning of his tragedy. A man of his sincerity cannot live well in today’s Japanese culture and literary circle. Why did Arishima Takeo kill himself? Why did Ikuta Shungetsu kill himself? Why do so many sincere poets suffer from persecution? It is tragic that a literary man like Tsuji Jun had to be born in Japan... Thus, Tsuji chose not to express himself with a pen so much as he chose to express himself through living, as conveyed by his personality. That is, Tsuji himself was his expression’s piece of work.
But here Tsuji has regrettably been portrayed as a religious character. It sounds contradictory, but Tsuji is a religious man without a religion. Although he speaks of Egoism alongside Max Stirner, he is by the side of [the Buddhist monk] Shinran... teaching of being a beggar with Buddha, teaching the life of a drunkard like Verlaine [the French poet]... his spirit cannot stay in one place...
As art is not a religion, neither is Tsuji’s life religious. But in a sense it is. Tsuji calls himself an Unrnensch... If Nietzsche’s Zarathustra is religious... then Tsuji’s teaching would be a better religion than Nietzsche’s, for Tsuji lives in accord with his principles as himself...
Tsuji is a sacrifice of modern culture... In the Japanese literary world Tsuji can be considered a rebel. But this is not because he is a drunkard, nor because he lacks manners, nor because he is an anarchist. It is because he puts forth his dirty ironies as boldly as a bandit... Tsuji himself is very shy and timid in person... but his clarity and self-respect exposes the falsities of the famous in the literary world... [though] to many he really comes across as an anarchistic rogue...
The literary world only sees him as having been born in this world to provide a source for gossip, but he is like Chaplin, producing seeds of humour in their rumours... The common Japanese literati do not understand that the laugh of Chaplin is a contradictory tragedy... In a society of base, closed-minded people, idealists are always taken as madmen or clowns.
Tsuji Jun is always drunk. If he doesn’t drink he can’t stand the suffering and sorrow of life. On the rare occasion he is sober, he does look the part of an incompetent and Unrnensch-ian fool. Then his faithful disciples bring him sake in place of a ceremonial offering, pour electricity back into his robot heart, and wait for him to start moving... In this way the teaching of the Unrnensch begins. It is a religion for the weak, the proletariat, the egoists, and those of broken personalities, and at the same time — it is a most pure, a most sorrowful religion for modern intellectuals.[63]
** III. Background & Conntext
*** An Overview of Pre-War Japanese Anarchism
Tsuji was deeply interested in socialism and believed in an “Anarchist Utopia” for a period of time, but reached such a point of scepticism that he would only consider himself a Stirnerist and Nihilist, and years later he would shuck even the title “Dadaist” because he found it overly burdensome[64]. While it is true that Stirner did not describe himself as an Anarchist, the philosophy both Tsuji and Stirner advocated is patently anarchistic enough that the term can still apply to them, even after Tsuji’s disenchantment with socialist Anarchism. A history of Japanese Anarchism is furthermore vital to this study because Tsuji’s life and social environment, as well as his thought, were deeply embedded in that history extending from the beginnings of that movement to what would mark the end of its pre-war period.
Anarchism was first popularized in Japan by Kōtoku Shūsui[65] at the beginning of the 1900s. Kōtoku was a fervent socialist since before the turn of the century and was a highly active freelance journalist and publisher. He is famous for heading the Heimin Shimbun (Commoner’s Newspaper) and for speaking out against the Russo- Japanese War of 1905, at which point Kōtoku was imprisoned for violating press censorship laws. Kōtoku was the principle voice of the socialist anti-war movement and while the loss of his presence during imprisonment made a strong impact at the time, Kōtoku would emerge five months later an anarchist, having read Kropotkin’s Factories, Fields, and Workshops while imprisoned.[66]
After this point Kōtoku began speaking out against the Japanese emperor system and other authorities, but shortly departed for the United States, presumably to evade being censored again. There he made friends among the IWW (Industrial Workers of the World) and other radical groups. Overseas he became even further radicalized. After witnessing what he saw as mutual aid in direct action in the wake of the San Francisco earthquake of 1906, Kōtoku became even more confident in espousing direct action as the most effective means of creating social change.[67]
It was repeatedly only random chance that saved the perpetuation of the anarchist movement in Japan. Kōtoku was out of Tokyo when the Red Flag Incident occurred in 1908, wherein a group of radicals including Ōsugi Sakae were arrested for having displayed banners and having called out anarchist slogans at a friend’s release from prison.[68] While this saved Kōtoku from imprisonment at the time, he was to be arrested again in 1910 and shortly thereafter executed in the High Treason Incident. The fact that Ōsugi was still in jail at the time of the High Treason Incident again allowed the anarchist movement to retain one of its key figures, at least until Ōsugi’s murder twelve years later.
The High Treason Incident of 1910 was the trial of a group of socialists and anarchists who were allegedly plotting to assassinate the Japanese emperor, during which dozens of individuals were subject to mass arrest. Whilst the evidence for Kōtoku’s alleged intentions is scant, his position as a major leader in the socialist and anarchist movements made him a sure target for the round-up. Several scholars have remarked upon the case’s lack of due process and the shakiness of evidence, some going as far as calling it a show trial.[69]
Kōtoku and his former wife, anarcho-feminist Kanno Suga, as well as twenty-two others (including several monks including Gudo Uchiyama) were sentenced to death by hanging. Eleven of these twenty-four later had their sentences commuted to life imprisonment. Nonetheless, the rushed and secretive trial process as well as its iconically forceful suppression of free thought drew criticism from various individuals including the well- respected author Mori Ogai[70] The High Treason Incident resulted in the renunciation of some socialists as well as the radicalization of others. This resulted in what was known as the first winter of socialism/anarchism in Japan.[71]
From this point on Ōsugi would continue publishing Heimin Shimbun in Kōtoku’s absence. Ōsugi’s energetic efforts led him to be known as anarchism’s most respected figure, and it could be said that he built up the foundations for the following “spring” of anarchism. As time went by the variety of strains of anarchism widened to incorporate more ideas about free love, syndicalism, and Stirnerism/Nihilism. This widening would put additional strain on tensions between syndicalist and communist anarchists, resulting in the anarchist-bolshevist split of 1921.[72] This period also saw this incorporation of Dadaism into some strands of anarchist thought, as was the case for Tsuji, Mavo, and writers of Aka to Kuro (Red and Black).
Following the Great Kantō Earthquake in 1923, the devastation wreaked on the centre of Japanese modernity and industry, Tokyo, created immense disorder and strife. The chaos that followed put many in the government in a state of panic, which would manifest in the assassinations and imprisonments of several political radicals, most notably including those who became martyrs in the Amakasu incident and Kaneko Fumiko. The Amakasu Incident involved the abduction of Ōsugi Sakae, his anarcho-feminist lover Itō Noe, and their six-year-old nephew, all of whom would later be beaten to death by a squad of military police led by Lieutenant Amakasu Masahiko. Afterwards their bodies were thrown down a well. The crackdown on political radicals and their publications that would happen around this event would amount to a second “winter” in anarchism and socialism in Japan[73].
This crackdown and the shock resulting from the devastation of modernity’s centre would result in fervent Neo-Dada/Anarchist art. This phenomenon has been compared to the shock of World War I that stoked Dadaism in Europe. The quake also resulted in immense personal impact on Tsuji, as with many people across Japan.[74] From this point on until the end of World War II, censorship and political intolerance would rise to the point of extinguishing the potential for a sizeable anarchist movement, though for about five years after the quake there was a lot of radical (including anarchist) political activity.
Tsuji had been a subscriber to Kōtoku’s Heimin Shimbun since the age of twenty[75] and he associated with many key figures of Japanese anarchism over the course of his life, reading various foreign language anarchist texts. It was particularly from after the High Treason Incident into the 1920s during which Tsuji became increasingly sceptical of the plausibility of revolution[76].
Stirner, whom Tsuji so greatly admired, looked contemptuously on communism and considered it another form of authority suppressing the will of the individual: “loudly as it always attacks the ‘State’, what it intends is itself again a State”[77]. However, this is not to say that Tsuji was not very familiar and sympathetic to the popular branches of communist anarchism and anarcho-syndicalism — indeed, Stirner also cuts his criticisms of communism with a bit of sympathy[78]. However unlike his contemporary Egoist, Ōsugi, Tsuji would not devote a lot of energy to expounding ideas of social justice in tandem with ideas about radical individualism (Stirnerism).
*** On Nihilism in Japan
The Nihilisms of Stirner and Nietzsche were very influential to Tsuji and such contemporaries as Murayama Tomoyoshi[79], Ōsugi Sakae[80], and Kaneko Fumiko[81] as well as to other notable figures of the time such as the naturalist writer Masamune Hakucho.
**** Egoism as a Form of Nihilism
While it is debated as to whether or not there was a direct stream of influence between Nietzsche and Stirner’s work.[82], commonalities between Stirner’s Egoism and Nietzschean Nihilism have been recognized by numerous scholars. Whilst there are profound differences between Nietzsche’s and Stirner’s philosophies and the different contexts from which their ideas arose remain important, some would have Stirner’s Egoism fall under the category of Nihilism rather than strictly binding the term “Nihilism” to the philosophies of Nietzsche and Dostoevsky only.
For example, in the chapter “Nihilism as Egoism: Max Stirner” in Nihirizumu[83], Nishitani presents Stirner’s Egoism as a form of Nihilism for, among other things, the fact that it is 1) opposed to the idealism and progressive conception of history common among Stirner’s contemporaries, 2) based on the negation of the absolutes imposed by religiosity, and 3) embraces “nothing” as the basis for existence[84] The present study will regard Tsuji’s and Stirner’s Egoism as a form of Nihilism because of these foundational commonalities.[85] This is noteworthy because of Tsuji’s use of both the terms “nihilism” and “egoism” widely to support ideas that could be identified as either by this rubric.
**** Relation to Darwinism
This work surveys activities that took place mostly in the 1910s, ‘20s, and ‘30s, and Darwinism and Social Darwinism were both deeply influential to many thinkers at the time. Darwin’s The Origin of Species helped excite the atmosphere of questioning human society and how it ought to be run, feeding into the Anarchist, Socialist, Nihilist, literary, and artistic (especially Dadaist) movements. For poet and novelist Shimazaki Toson this meant “We should leave behind the sweetness of life shown by the romantics and the hedonists. We should make a renewed attempt to dissect human nature scientifically with the knowledge of Darwin’s Origin of Species or Lombroso’s study of criminal psychology”[86][87]. This demonstrates how Darwin’s ideas fed into Naturalist writing — but it also provided the fertile ground across the board for those various movements that were inspired to question human society.
Social Darwinism, especially as interpreted by Herbert Spencer with his notion of “survival of the fittest”, was influential to the Nihilist Kaneko Fumiko in that it supported her Nihilism’s perception of life being comprised, ultimately, of humans struggling against one another. However, Kaneko did not absorb Spencer’s notion of social evolutionary progress[88] nor, it would seem, the conception of racial superiority.[89]
Similarly, anarcho-communists were generally against such concepts, as well as against embracing “survival of the fittest” as a social model. That is, their central principle was that of mutual aid and solidarity rather than competition. However, a strand of Social Darwinist rhetoric was present within the more Marxist individuals among them. This was a result of the presence of Social Darwinism in Marxist literature itself.[90]
This Social Darwinism in Marx essentially criticized the competitive struggle it portrayed as inherent in Capitalism. To quote Engels, “between single capitalists as between whole industries, and whole countries... is the Darwinian struggle for individual existence, transferred from Nature to society with intensified fury”.[91] Thus, Social Darwinist rhetoric was used in some Japanese anarchist and socialist writing, but it was used in a negative sense with regards to capitalism in order to bolster their argument for a more cooperative rationalist society. Leftist Dadaists, such as Hagiwara and others in Mavo, were as a result caught between their political idealism and their Dadaist desire to smash blind allegiance to social norms, particularly rationalism. Tsuji and Kaneko, on the other hand, did not bear this conflict as much and left behind political idealism for the quest to free themselves as individuals through Egoism.
Additionally, the bleaker outlook of the individualist anarchism of Tsuji and Kaneko was more in line with the pessimism of Spencer’s Darwinism because they found the struggle of the individual more realistic than revolutionarily overcoming institutions imposing social struggle (especially across classes). However, this outlook resulting from Darwinism did not permeate their Egoist philosophies to the extent that it necessitated those feelings of racial superiority or eugenic ideals popularly associated with Social Darwinism today, much like the anarchists above. Rather, these concepts would have reeked of the Social Darwinist justifications used in Japanese imperial expansion, which Tsuji and Kaneko surely encountered from the late 1800s leading up to World War II. This effect is especially a result of having been exposed to the writing of anti-imperialist writers they sympathized with, such as Kōtoku. Kaneko would have been especially sensitive to colonialist strains of Social Darwinism, having experienced the Korean annexation first-hand.
Thus far in my reading of Tsuji’s immense body of work I have yet to find reference to Darwin explicitly, outside of his appearance in Tsuji’s translation of The Man of Genius (one section of which describes Darwin’s idiosyncrasies as possible symptoms of Lombroso’s archetypal genius)[92] Even were it not for this translation, however, it is a historical inevitability that Tsuji would have been familiar with Darwin’s ideas and would have been influenced by the climate of heated socio-political debate that had been stoked by the introduction of Darwinism.
Even if Tsuji had never read Darwin first-hand, there would have been a significant current of influence on Tsuji also through the work of Nietzsche (who was “aroused from his dogmatic slumber by Darwin”[93]). The fact is, Nietzsche was a very popular read amongst people in Tsuji’s social circle as well as an important author for Tsuji himself. Still, it must be remembered that Tsuji’s Nihilism, however impacted by Nietzsche, was more founded on the work of Max Stirner, whose death predated the publication of Origin.
Darwin’s Origin is of more relevance to the present work than for simple influence, however. It brought up a deeply distressing problem in regards to morality. First let us assume the validity of the Theory of Evolution, as Nietzsche asserted:
Formerly one sought the feeling of grandeur of man by pointing to his divine origin: this has now become a forbidden way, for at its portal stands the ape, together with other gruesome beasts, grinning knowingly as if to say: no further in this direction![94]
Now, to understand Evolution (rather than God) to have created humanity as above, leads to the dilemma of a sudden absence of divine decree necessitating moral behaviour. With Nihilism’s assertion that nothing is inherently good or bad, humans would be left in the position to figure out a morality for themselves, if they were to choose to take up morality at all.
Nietzsche does not stop there, however. He then implies that this situation is to be overcome, and that “as long as anyone desires life as he desires happiness he has not yet raised his eyes above the horizon of the animal... but that is what we all do for the greater part of our lives: we usually fail to emerge out of animality.[95] From there we are presented with the figure of the Obermensch in furthering his assertion that humanity must raise itself up. Thus we can interpret Nietzsche’s allegory of the camel that became a lion that became a child: one who realizes the emptiness of existence can break themselves free from their burdens by becoming a lion, which is yet an animal, which must then transform into a child in order to acquire the capabilities of imagining a new world, therein overcoming humanity’s condition of animality, which would persist regardless of one’s grasp of Nihilism according to Nietzsche.[96]
Max Stirner, not living long enough to read Origin, did not create Egoism as a response to Darwinism. However, it has been interpreted as an alternative Nihilist answer to this question of morality. While its reply may be a more frightening one, it presented an attractive option for those who were not willing to buy into the necessity for overcoming “the animal condition”.
*** Stirnerism in a Nutshell[97]
Born in 1806 as Johann Caspar Schmidt in Bayreuth, Germany, Max Stirner took for a pen name his childhood moniker “Stirner” (which it is said he acquired for having a high brow, or stirn in German). Stirnerism was the origin of what is now called Egoist Anarchism, which is one branch of Individualist Anarchism. His philosophy became known through his book The Ego and its Own, published in 184 . The book’s influence has reached far beyond the limits of anarchism and into various branches of philosophy including nihilism and existentialism, drawing comment from figures such as Marx, Feuerbach, and others including such Dadaists as Max Ernst and Marcel Duchamp. Just so, Stirner was of great significance to the Dadaist movement in Europe.[98]
The philosophy expounded in Ego presents humankind along the trajectory of (a somewhat inaccurately portrayed, out-dated, and at times racist) history as having been plagued by a number of institutions that have stripped people of freedom. These institutions are comprised of religious, political, as well as social (societal) examples.[99]
Like Nietzsche, Stirner asserts there are no inherent meanings, or essences to anything in the universe, and as a result humankind is but a product of its deterministic history. However, one can understand Stirner as a compatiblist who conceives of the ability of free will (the ego) to exist despite the deterministic outcome of any event. This is not to confuse free will with the necessary existence of a soul, which Stirner denies, along with other religious concepts. Rather, Stirner vehemently opposes any inherent essence, proposing instead that people and their Egos consist of the “creative nothing” .[100] That is to say, much like the concept of *mu*/*kū*. described in the introduction, “creative nothing” implies that things exist in a state of limitless fluctuation and, because of their ability to change into new things, are creative. However, Stirner phrases this as an ability of creators (who presumably require an Ego in order to willfully create). As Stirner wrote, “I am not nothing in the sense of emptiness, but I am the creative nothing, the nothing out of which I myself as creator create”.[101]
Stirner suggests that in the absence of any inherently necessary purpose in existing and the inevitability for circumstances to change people’s lives (deterministically speaking), people must come to an understanding of themselves more realistically as common mortals not bound by divine injunction. That is, they must understand themselves as an “under-human” (Unmensch or tei-jin 低人). Stirner describes the Unmensch as someone who does not correspond to the popular concept of what it means to be human. That is, they are Egoists that understand themselves to be individuals like “me” and “you” rather than as an example of a prescriptively determined archetypal person.[102] Stirner’s Unmensch[103] comes in sharp contrast with Nietzsche’s Obermensch (“over-human”) who is a figure put on a pedestal as something that humankind must achieve.
With Stirner’s Unmensch Egoist we see his advocacy of the self-made individual, the independent thinker — those who live limited to only what they are deterministically limited to and what they choose to limit themselves with. Thus Stirnerism does not preclude typical moral behaviour, but would argue that the Egoist figures out what (if any) morals they think they ought to follow, even if they do not coincide with conventional moral standards. Therefore, an Egoist may technically try to achieve some Obermensch ideal so long as they are doing it for themselves. However, Egoism is more commonly thought to imply that one would best understand their inevitable condition as an Unmensch (non-divine figure) and work to free themselves from dictates imposed on them by others.
Indeed, Stirner’s philosophy is a dangerous one because it asks the reader to question such foundational qualities of themselves as morality while at the same time speaking highly of individual freedom. Stirner’s ideas would prove influential to proponents of Illegalism across Europe, especially in France where it spawned groups such as the Bonnot Gang. These groups consisted of individualist anarchists who openly embraced criminal ways of life. However, Stirner makes no apology for publishing such a dangerous philosophy and makes no claim that he did it for the benefit of others.[104] Perhaps this is part of why Takahashi conceived of a “great gulf” between Buddhism and Egoism[105] — being an Egoist does not necessitate being compassionate.
This said, it would seem that Tsuji did not manage to become a criminal or alienate other people entirely by taking up Stirner’s radical philosophy. Even Takahashi admired some aspects of Tsuji, calling him a “pure soul” whose life was “a rebellion against the common run of people and evil”[106] Rather, the Epicurean side of Tsuji’s philosophy seems to have balanced out whatever frightful behaviour might otherwise have been spawned from Stirner’s writing.
While he was often thought of as something of a deadbeat by others[107], Tsuji was not an unproductive individual (as demonstrated by Appendix I) and in fact kept a great many friends and lovers. However, he was prone to foist his parental duties on his mother and would not seek out undesirable forms of employment once embracing Egoism, preferring to rely on writing as a source of income despite those years of poverty this subjected him and his family to. However, to an Egoist, dependants are only dependant because they allow themselves to be so.
*** On Dada in Japan
Some background reading on the history of Dadaism in Europe is recommended to complement this study[108] because there is insufficient space to discuss this context or the complexities of Dada as an art-form and as a philosophy in general.
Dada in Japan is commonly considered to have come about in two waves, the first beginning in the early 1920s as something of an importation from Europe. The second wave is referred to as “Neo-Dada”, and while some such as Omuka use the term to refer to the resurgence taking place after the 1923 Great Kantō Earthquake[109], Kuenzli uses the term to describe the post-war resurgence of Dada in Japan, as led by the Gutai and Hi Red Comer groups in the 1950s”[110] The present study only focuses on the pre-war period and therefore would make the most out of using the Great KantO Earthquake as the dividing line. Tsuji participated from the very inception of Dada in Japan (1920) to its fading away in the years leading up to World War II (early to mid-1930s).
By the 1920s modernism had already been considerably reshaping the Japanese art scene, and Dada gradually became ingrained into the greater context of the Taisho period modem art movement (Taisho-ki Shinko Bijutsu Undo). As a result of the common context and mutual influence between Dada and other movements in modem Japanese art and literature such as surrealism and futurism, Dada is not easily divided from other currents in avant-garde Japanese art of the same period. Despite this fuzzy line, however, Dada is most pronounced in a few notable individuals who will be covered further in the Contemporaries section.
Originally Dada was limited to the literary world following its introduction in a pair of articles in the Yorozu Chōhō newspaper. The first of these, dating from June 27th 1920, featured works by Kurt Schwitter and Max Pechstein. It was titled “A Strange Phenomenon in the Art Circle of Germany” and included the first written usage of the term “Dadaist” in Japan.[111]
The more relevant second article, from August 5th of the same year, featured Marius de Zayas and consisted of two parts, one being titled “The Latest Art of Epicureanism” by Wakatsuki Shiran, and the second titled “A View of Dada” by Yōtō-sei-sei. In Wakatsuki’s article the term “Dada” is defined as being the same as the Japanese mu and claimed Dadaists were “radical, epicurean, egoist, extreme individualists, anarchist, and realist, [and] their art... lack[ed] principles” as a result of the social situation resulting from World War I.[112]
An onslaught of other articles would continue to pop up as Dada became a more and more popular topic from 1921 on[113], at which point Tsuji and Takahashi also were becoming seriously involved in the creation of Dadaist literature. Shortly thereafter Mavo, Yoshiyuki, and Red and Black began producing their major contributions as well.
Dada survived in Japan into the 1930s, at which point a wide variety of factors led to its fading away, most prominently including the increasing censorship and economic hardship resultant of the Great Kanto Earthquake and Japan’s increasing imperialism and nationalist militarization.
While Tsuji Jun has called himself the first Dadaist of Japan and is often called the prime (if not the first) establisher of literary Dadaism in Japan, Takahashi Shinkichi could also be considered for that title and has also called himself the first Japanese Dadaisf[114] Tsuji was originally introduced to Dada through Takahashi by means of the August 15th article, and it could be said that their interests took root at basically the same time.
*** Relation to Ero Guro Nansensu
The term ero guro nansensu (or ero guro for short) is a general term used to express tendencies of deviant art and literature that explored the extremes of erotic, grotesque, and/or nonsensical themes, especially in 1920s and 1930s Japan, but the term also applies to some postwar works. Perhaps the most well-known ero guro writers were Edogawa Ranpo and Yumeno Kyiisaku.
Because it is a term meant to suit a general thematic trend, it does not map neatly onto the Japanese Dadaist movements, as authors and artists varied in their usage of each of these themes. In fact, ero guro is more closely associated with mobo (“modern boy”) popular magazines than the more esoteric stream of Dadaism. However, it is no coincidence that the heyday of this phenomenon coincided with the pinnacle of pre-war Japanese Dadaism. That is, the conditions that were foundational to the rise of Dadaism were also foundational to the more strictly surrealist varieties of art and literature, as well as to ero guro. Also, these movements did not exist in a vacuum and often melded with each other, making classifying avant-garde writers and artists of this period difficult.
Dada, however, does have a particularly good amount in common with the nonsensical portion of ero guro nansensu. That is, to break away from adherence to the modern Japanese convention of rationalism, some nonsensical elements were used in Dada. Also, since the emphasis of Dada was more on liberation than it was for pleasing the viewer of Dada, Dadaists were less prone to make compromises in their creation process for the sake of popular intelligibility. Erotic and grotesque content, of course, also lent avenues to Japanese Dadaists to break from convention[115].
*** Contemporaries of Tsuji Jun
**** Mavo
Mavo was a group of Dadaists active primarily in the 1920s, spearheaded by Murayama Tomoyoshi. Hagiwara Kyōjirō (from later in this section) would join the group later in its history and represented one part of a core of fervent anarchists who participated in the group’s activities. Even the famed feminist writer Hayashi Fumiko[116] was a contributor to Mavo’s eponymous publication. Both Murayama and Hagiwara were fairly close associates of Tsuji, who also contributed to the Mavo publication.[117]
Murayama travelled to Berlin where he became enamoured of Dadaism, returning to Tokyo in 1923 whereupon he would take that inspiration and become the leading figure of Mavo, further radicalizing the group.[118] Mavo engaged in multiple artforms including theatre, construction, painting, typesetting, poetry, photography, architecture, and dance. This group was essential in making Dada a recognizable movement in Japan and would contribute heavily to the Japanese modem art scene. Mavo is of particular importance in this work because of its bridging of anarchist theory and Dadaisim.[119]
As was the case for Tsuji, Mavo was involved in creating through art a new and freer lifestyle and worldview for themselves.[120] However, Mavo was much more involved in sending socialist anarchist messages through this than Tsuji, who focused primarily on ideas of individualist anarchism.[121]
**** Yoshiyuki Eisuke
Yoshiyuki Eisuke (1906–1940) was a Dadaist, poet, and novelist writing in the 1920s and 1930s, contributing to various publications including the Dadaizumu magazine and Kyomushisō (Nihilism, to which Murayama and Hagiwara also contributed). Today he is mostly known for being the father of the famed writer Yoshiyuki Junnosuke. He wrote much about the darker side of Japanese city life (e.g. prostitution, political corruption, industrial working conditions) and grew increasingly critical of capitalism as a result[122].
The works of Tsuji and Takahashi were highly influential to Yoshiyuki[123], though Yoshiyuki can be considered much more closely aligned with the Proletarian Writers than Tsuji or Takahashi. The three worked together on publications and conferences, and Yoshiyuki’s magazine ran ads for the Café Dada discussed later in this chapter.[124]
**** Hagiwara Kyōjirō
Hagiwara was a fervent anarchist and Dadaist poet. His writing is perhaps the most explosive of any author mentioned here, and he stands as an icon of the passion and extremity that characterized the Neo-Dada that emerged from the desolation of the Great Kanto Earthquake. Before joining Mavo, Hagiwara was a principal writer in the anarchist avant-garde poetry magazine Red and Black. While Red and Black did not openly call itself Dadaist, the similarities are strong enough that various scholars consider them to be a part of the Dadaist movement anyway. Hagiwara also performed in the anarchist theatre troupe Kaihōza and performed modern dance under the name Fujimura Yukio.[125]
Hagiwara was a close friend of Tsuji’s and together frequented the Café Lebanon, along with many other anarchists and radicals, such as Hayashi Fumiko, Ōsugi Sakae, Ishikawa Sanshiro, Takahashi Shinkichi, and Hirabayashi Taiko. This café would serve as a den where radicals could meet each other, share their work, and stoke their ideas with conversation. Going to the theatre and participating in thespian performance also served this purpose, and both Tsuji and Hagiwara engaged in this.
If we are to understand the advertisements for it as non-fictional, various Dadaists were involved in running “Cafe Dada” and its (never performed) theatrical performances. According to advertisements in Yoshiyuki’s magazine Baichi Shilsui (Selling Shame and Ugly Text), Tsuji was scripted to play shakuhachi there in accompaniment to his mother’s shamisen, Murayama’s dancing, and chanting by Takahashi.[126] This café was advertised as located in Kamata, Tokyo and resembled Hugo Ball’s (1886–1927) Cabaret Voltaire café in Zurich.[127]
Also, Café Lebanon hosted art and poetry exhibitions (including the work of Red and Black), further giving voice to its visitors. Just so, the artistic and political hotbed cafés in part represented the heights of modem cosmopolitan culture in Tokyo, and were crucial to various avant-garde movements in Japan. This did not go unnoticed by the authorities, of course, who confiscated some of the poetry posted there on charges of “corruption of public morals” and “disruption of public stability and order”.[128] The authorities would also frequently cancel theatre performances and other events (an occurence Omuka terms “misfires”). That there was so much interaction going on between the various proponents of avant-garde art, literature, and politics, both in and out of cafés and theatres, demonstrates the necessity of understanding Tsuji’s social environment in the process of understanding his own story.
**** Takahashi Shinkichi
Takahashi Shinkichi (1901–1987) and Tsuji together were the first and most influential pre-war Dadaist writers in Japan. Takahashi came to know of Dada in 1921 through the two articles mentioned in the Dada overview earlier in this chapter, which he introduced to Tsuji when they first met. During this visit, Takahashi allegedly came wanting a copy of Tsuji’s full translation of The Ego and its Own, and Stirner would continue to prove influential on Takahashi, despite the criticisms he would address to Egoism and Tsuji later on.[129] Since both authors began writing Dada at roughly the same time, it becomes difficult to discern whether the Buddhist influence on Tsuji’s work came largely from his friendship with Takahashi or from elsewhere.
Like Tsuji, Takahashi was not overly enamoured of revolutionary socialist and anarchist politics, feeling more sympathy with Stirner’s brand of nihilistic anarchism. Takahashi had joined a monastery in 1921 but began to have his doubts about the esoteric Buddhist rules and practices there, “leading him deliberately to act out the transgression of commandments”.[130] Takahashi was then expelled from the temple. That Takahashi behaved in this way and then further immersed himself in (a quasi-Buddhist) Dada demonstrates his sentiment that Buddhist nothingness does not necessitate the following of such strict (and perhaps seemingly arbitrary) rules and practices as those he experienced at the monastery. Takahashi’s career as a Dadaist poet would prove to be a relatively short one, however, after which he devoted himself to a more strictly Zen poetry. The convergence of Buddhism and Dada in Takahashi’s mind is of relevance to the present work because of its similarity to that convergence which took place in Tsuji’s.
**** Kaneko Fumiko
While the preceding four selections above describe Dadaists contemporary with Tsuji, Kaneko was not a Dadaist but an Anarchist, Nihilist, Egoist, and poet. It is likely that she was introduced to Stirner’s ideas through Tsuji’s translation of The Ego and its Own, which had been published a few years before her remarks about Stirnerism began to appear.[131] After her mother failed to sell her to a brothel, Kaneko was sent overseas at the age of nine, where she experienced the poverty and oppression in Korea, which had been annexed by Japan. Both this and her abandonment by her parents were surely influential to the development of her Nihilist, Anarchist philosophy. Also influential to this was her acquaintance with Pak Yeol, a Korean anarchist, with whom she would form the two- person anarchist group “Society of Malcontents” and later marry on the verge of their imprisonment.[132]
While Kaneko was farther removed from Tsuji’s social circle than those close-knit individuals mentioned elsewhere in this section, her thoroughly Egoist philosophy makes her thought the most closely akin to Tsuji’s. While Kaneko was somewhat involved in the politics of Korean independence, she was not as driven to activism as were others like Pak. What written contributions she made to Japanese Anarchist and Nihilist thought were more bound to her own Egoism:
I am not living for the sake of other people. Must I not earn my own true satisfaction and freedom? ...Even though neither of us [Kaneko or nihilist Niiyama Hatsuyo] had ideals regarding society, we both thought about having something we could call our own true task. It wasn’t that we felt it had to be fulfilled. We merely thought it would be enough if we could look upon it as our true task.[133]
Like Ōsugi and Ito, Kaneko was abducted by the authorities in the wake of the Great Kanto Earthquake and, on claims of conspiracy to assassinate the emperor, sentenced to death as was Kanno Suga in the High Treason Incident of 1911. This came at a time when rumours of looting Koreans led to the vigilante massacre of thousands of Koreans in the wake of the earthquake’s devastation. Kaneko’s sentence was later commuted to life in prison, where she would eventually die by hanging; whether or not her death was really a suicide is contested.[134]
**** Ōsugi Sakae and Itō Noe
The relevance of the life of Ōsugi Sakae to that of Tsuji’s lies in both the importance of their interpersonal affairs in life as well as their common countercultural endeavour: Egoist anarchism.[135] The two were comparably prominent in the development of this philosophy and would become rivals for the love of anarcho-feminist Itō Noe.
Tsuji came to know of Ōsugi through being an avid reader of Ōsugi’s writings in the radical publications Modern Thought and Heimin Shimbun. Ōsugi was first radicalized after he was expelled from military cadet school, which he would later cite as influential in his rejection of militarism and the Japanese government.[136] Following the shock of Kōtoku’s execution, Ōsugi’s propaganda became more focused on radical individualism and criticisms of capitalism, as opposed to calling openly for revolution. Ōsugi then became a proponent of free love and eventually experimented with an open relationship with Kamichika lchiko while remaining married to Hori Yasuko, eventually including Itō Noe in the experiment, thereby ending Ito’s marriage to Tsuji[137].
Originally Ōsugi had theorized three principles that would be important to maintaining such an open relationship, most prominently being the financial independence of each member. However he soon compromised each of these and the experiment broke down, fraught with issues of finance and jealousy.[138] This climaxed in 1916 when the emotionally ravaged Kamichika flew into a rage and stabbed Ōsugi.[139] This incident caused a scandal in the news media, and Ōsugi ceded to a more closed relationship with Itō. In 1923 both Itō and Ōsugi would be murdered with their young nephew in the Amakasu Incident.[140]
Notably, Ōsugi remained ardently supportive of the anarcho-communist cause even as Tsuji’s enthusiasm for such political tendencies was waning. That Tsuji behaved as a cynic rather than as a more starry-eyed activist like Ōsugi, most prominently in regards to the Ashia Copper Mine Incident, was one of the most significant reasons why Itō would eventually leave Tsuji and join Ōsugi’s romantic company. This is famously depicted in the film Eros + Gyakusatsu (Eros + Massacre)[141].
** IV. Dada as a Reflection of Das Gleitende; Rationalism in Austria, Meiji Japan
It would be dangerous to assume an understanding of the international influence on Tsuji without any understanding of the context which brought that to be. For more background on this than can be provided in this work, see Motherwell for a history of Dada, and if needed, a work that gives a general history of 19th, 20th century Germany for the context of writers like Stirner and Nietzsche.
While the impact of the upheaval in the Austrian- Hungarian empire in the late 1800s and early 1900s was limited to Germanic writers of the same period, a comparison between tum-of-the-century Austria with Meiji-Taisho Period Japan would make Tsuji’s historical context more clear. By making this comparison it is not meant to imply a direct influence from one on the other. Rather, the Austrian example was chosen simply for its relevance to the topic of the decay of Rationalism.
Austria at the turn of the 19th century was an important centre of cultural and intellectual change, but at this time there was a growing erosion of faith in Rationalism. Rationalism here implies the optimism that logic and science, in subjects such as physics, politics, philosophy, and mathematics, can bring humanity a solid and consistent understanding of the universe and humanity’s place within it, thereby finding solutions to the various difficulties of humankind. To an extent this includes a sort of technological optimism as well. “Rationalism” also implies a philosophy of trusting reason to provide knowledge and certainty, as opposed to primarily trusting sensory experience and/or a religious basis, thus resulting in a dependence on the scientific method. This therefore implies a logic-based approach to philosophy and religion as opposed to mysticism.
The most crushing weight on this optimism was the collapse of Austria’s political (and therefore to an extent economic) systems. With its repeated breakdowns from the late 1800s into the early 1900s came the loss of a confidence in infallible human progress which had been built up over centuries of intellectual and pragmatic innovation. With this came the sense of ennui and disorientation described at length in Schorske[142], who writes: “Traditional liberal culture had centered upon rational man, whose scientific domination of nature and whose moral control of himself were expected to create the good society. In our century, rational man has had to give place to that richer but more dangerous and mercurial creature, psychological man. This new man is not merely a rational creature, but a creature of feeling and instinct... Ironically, in Vienna, it was political frustration that spurred the discovery of this now all-pervasive psychological man”.[143] This disillusionment for Rationalism was compounded by the fact that what scientific and social progress had been made in the past was not stable, and was increasingly being broken down by new and contradicting arguments. For example the entropy theory of Ludwig Eduard Boltzmann (1844–1906) confounded the “nearly perfect” mathematical comprehension of Austrian intellectuals and created an uproar. It was an example of people once again learning that their understanding of the universe was far from complete. Boltzmann would later commit suicide.[144]
This general phenomenon also resulted in a new kind of artist called the feuilletonist, who fled to non- rational means of expression as a result of their frustration with Rationalism’s shortcomings: ‘The feuilleton writer, an artist in vignettes, worked with those discrete details and episodes so appealing to the nineteenth century’s taste for the concrete. But he sought to endow his material with color drawn from his imagination... To render a state of feeling became the mode of formulating a judgment. Accordingly, in the feuilleton writer’s style, the adjective engulfed the nouns, the personal tint virtually obliterated the contours of the object of discourse”[145] While the feuilleton was fairly dissimilar to the later Dadaists, what they shared was the same attempt to escape the limitations of logic and Rationalism.
The suspicion that Rationalism would be ultimately unable to answer humankind’s questions and problems met an apex decades later with Kurt Godel’s incompleteness theorems, which mathematically proved that there will forever be questions in the universe that humankind cannot hope answer. As Goldstein says, “Godel’s findings seem to have even more far-reaching consequences... when one considers that in the Western tradition... mathematics as the very model of intelligibility has been the central citadel of rationalism. Now it turns out that even in his most precise science — in the province where his reason had seemed omnipotent — man cannot escape his essential finitude” .[146]
One prominent writer who commented on the state of Austria during the onset of this decay of Rationalism was playwright Hugo von Hofmannsthal (1874- 1929), who was famous for coining the term das Gleitende to describe Austria’s state of affairs.
The term das Gleitende translates to something like “the slippage”, which is meant to invoke the feel of foundations slipping out from beneath one’s feet as one strives for progress, akin to the plight of the protagonist in Abe Kobo’s 1962 Suna no Onna (Woman in the Dunes)[147] attempting to climb a steep sand dune and being confounded because the ambitions that seemed plausible perpetually slipped out from underneath his feet. That is, while math, science, politics, and philosophy had been giving people an impression of progress being made towards finite goals (such as corning to an understanding of the workings of the world), the ability to really grasp the totality of how reality works would remain forever just out of reach. Hofmannsthal describes this eloquently in one poem, “Stanzas in Terza Rima” in a fashion that combines it with a frustration with the transitoriness of all things:
This is a thought no mind can truly grasp,
A thing too terrifying for mere tears:
That all we want and are eludes our clasp... [148]
These dreams that suddenly each night open our eyes
Like those of a child under the blossoming trees
Above whose crests the moon mounts the skies
On her pale, gold course through the gathered night--
The way our own dreams loom so real and rise.
Like a brightly laughing child, and to the sight
Appear as immense and still and far away
As the moon when the treetops edge her light.[149]
In this poem Hofrnannsthal describes “all we want and are” as perpetually out of reach, like the moon hanging in the sky. For him to mention “al we are” could imply that humanity can never reach a complete realization of who they are, which would be in keeping with the loss of faith in Rationalism and words that is found in his other work.
In his famous (fictional) “Lord Chandos Letter”[150], Hofrnannsthal describes a personal breakdown of Rationalism wherein he ceases to feel like words can succeed in conveying what he wished to communicate. More than merely bemoaning the weakness of words, it conveyed his disillusionment in the power of logic.
Furthermore, Hofmannsthal describes Austrian directly as such in 1905: “[T]he nature of our epoch is multiplicity and indeterminancy. It can rest only on das Gleitende, and is aware that what other generations believed to be firm is in fact das Gleitende. “ In another selection he writes: “Everything fell into parts, the parts again into more parts, and nothing allowed itself to be embraced by concepts anymore” .[151] What all this reaffirms is his dying faith in the infallibility of logic and thus Rationalism.
*** Das Gleitende Outside of Vienna
While a direct influence from Austria is not implied, Germany and Japan would also experience a decay in Rationalism. In the context of this work, this was expressed in Nihilism. That is, Nietzsche’s assertion that meaning is not inherent but assigned struck a tremendous blow against having faith in any singular, axiomatic view of reality that could be systematically discovered and was thoroughly consistent.
This is further captured in Nietzsche’s 1886 Beyond Good and Evil: “It is perhaps just dawning on five or six minds that physics too is only an interpretation and exegesis of the world — and not a world explanation”.[152] Furthermore, Nietzsche adds in The Will to Power that “human idealism up until now is about to turn into nihilism”.[153] When Nietzsche’s scepticism was picked up by who would become Dadaists, compounded by the disorientation and loss of faith in “the System” caused by World War I, this exploded into an anarchistic avant-garde art movement.
Similarly, when Nihilism and Dadaism were introduced to Japan it contributed to the growing scepticism in Modernity and Rationalism there. During Meiji Japan a new government had been constructed and the opening of trade in the formerly isolationist nation allowed technologies and ideas to pour in en masse. There was a major push to modernize, especially for the purpose of making Japan a strong enough international competitor that it could shirk the burdensome trade deals that were imposed on it by Commodore Perry and the United States. However, over the course of Japan’s intensely fast and high-pressure modernization, many people became disturbed by what was being called “progress” and began to write literature that was critical of the path Japan was taking.
Nihilism was an influential factor for literary Naturalists, who were not content to write idealistic, romanticized works. In a sense this describes a loss of faith in “progress”. However, Naturalism was not to be the most developed expression of das Gleitende, as it continued to have some amount of confidence in realism being able to clearly depict the human condition, which was a product of deterministic social conditions and their environment. Not surprisingly, Darwinism had a lot to do with this.[154]
When those who would become Dadaists picked up Nihilism, however, they rejected the idea that a realistic approach was reliable. Rather, the subjectivism of Nihilism led them to revolt against being bound up by any imposed norms about what it means to do art. As such, the Dadaists would embrace elements of surrealism when they desired, as well as their iconic, outwardly nonsensical approach to expression. What they were attempting to do, in general, was to reclaim Art as a form of expression without limits, similarly to the way the Zen Buddhist koan would make use of disorienting, paradoxical, and/or seemingly nonsensical expression in an attempt to escape the limitations of logic. Stirner’s ideas would provide an impetus to reclaim the freedom of making art for one’s own individual purposes, releasing the artist from having to conform to the expectations of others.
For Tsuji this became the central preoccupation that drove him to a passionate study of Dadaism, Stirnerist Nihilism, and Anarchism. For Tsuji, art was a means of freeing himself, like Buddhism, like Egoism. Alongside Tsuji, Japan was developing a host of other discontents during the Meiji and Taisho periods, many of whom were not as directly influenced by anti-Rationalist European sentiments. However, the indirect influence of das Gleitende from Germanic thinkers such as Nietzsche and Stirner would become increasingly wider as their popularity there grew.
Tsuji’s Stirnerist anarchism is presented here as oppositional to the presumed sanctity of Rationalism, but the author does not mean to imply that all strains of anarchism were as such. For example, Kropotkin’s highly influential work, The Conquest of Bread, from the very first page speaks with great optimism about the capacity for logic, machines, and science to provide adequate material goods and strategies for a great restructuring of human societies, to bring about a new abundance of leisure.[155] It was this kind of optimism that would drive Tsuji away from activism and radical politics, as his philosophy was drenched in the anti-Rationalist reaction to das Gleitende. The neo-Dada created from the devastation of modernization’s progress in Tokyo would stoke this fiery rejection of Rationalism even further.
** V. The Dada Connection Dada: Tsuji’s Philosophical Nexus
Tsuji’s ideas on Nihilism, Egoism, Epicureanism, Anarchism, and Buddhism all find a common place of intersection in Dada, the hub where all of these currents finds expression. Tsuji’s philosophy is comprised of all of these, and what these facets had in common was that they presented Tsuji with ideas about how to better understand himself and the world, as well as how to live freely — escaping the boundaries imposed by standard (“rational”) society.
While Dada was a means of expressing sentiments from these philosophical components, Dada was for Tsuji a lifestyle[156] [157], and thus these philosophies were for Tsuji also his way of life, as we shall also see in this section.
Tsuji was not alone in exhibiting such parallels across philosophies. There is a significant body of English and Japanese literature that compares Buddhism with Nihilism in detail[158], and to a lesser extent Nihilism and Anarchism[159], but there is hardly any scholarship that draws parallels between Buddhism and some form of Anarchism (presumably because Buddhism is thought of as an “Eastern” tradition disparate from the predominantly “Western” tradition of Anarchism). Most uncommon of all, however, is someone like Tsuji who finds relevance across each of these philosophies.
These philosophies melded for Tsuji in the process of his assimilating portions of each into his ideal lifestyle, amounting to a sort of irreducible chimera. From what we can read from his literature Tsuji did not have a sharp analytical process to this blending (comparing and contrasting these philosophies to find commonalities), but it rather occurred organically in the process of Tsuji being introduced to these ideas through literature and Tsuji’s social environment.
To understand how Tsuji was able to draw upon so many philosophies and create a synthesis of them, one must understand that the intellectual environment of Meiji/Taisho Period Japan was awash in a jumbled flood of ideas that came in after the end of Japan’s isolationism in the late 1800s. That is, before the arrival of Commodore Perry, Japan’s trade networks were extremely limited and therefore contact with Western literature was narrow. With the sudden institution of a new government that encouraged looking to Europe and America for ideas on how to modernize[160], in the torrent of incoming scholarship Nihilism, Socialism, Anarchism, etcetera were able to enter Japan more or less at the same time, detached from the several-hundred-year-old historical contexts in which each was produced. For the early 1900s translator Tsuji, more or less unintroduced scholarship was bountiful, and Tsuji could go about investigating philosophies from far-ranging backgrounds at will. As we have seen, however, the freedom of speech that enabled this condition would fade as government restrictions became tighter and tighter.
Thus, though it may seem like a jumble of ideas, Tsuji’s philosophical chimera was the product of Tsuji’s making connections across the wide range of literature he was reading. Like many others in the Meiji and Taisho periods, Tsuji’s personal culture became one mixed with elements from both European/American culture and native Japanese culture. !conically, one can find accounts of Tsuji wearing simultaneously a Western-style business suit along with the traditional Japanese geta clogs and a sedge hat[161], blowing a shakuhachi flute and tossing out esoteric words from foreign languages.[162] Tsuji was one face of the modem Japanese cosmopolitan.
*** Art as a Social and Political Medium
As an Individualist grown sceptical of Revolution’s plausibility, Tsuji’s politics did not resemble those of the anarchists and socialists about him waving streaming banners and printing fiery propaganda. Compared to the vivid poetry of Hagiwara and other contributors to Red and Black[163], as well as Ōsugi’s theories on Revolution, Tsuji’s politics were not flagrantly politically explosive and romantic.[164] Tsuji’s writing focused on the liberation of the individual rather than on sweeping social change, which makes it less obvious as a political statement. Lastly, Tsuji spoke more through example, through lifestyle, than through complex theoretical arguments like his many of his anarcho-communist peers.
Tsuji’s politics argued for an anarchistic individualism (Stirnerism) for anyone who wanted it, meaning he offered his ideal up for examination: a life lead without any authority other than oneself.[165] For Tsuji this meant putting one’s own judgements before the judgements of institutions and social norms. This manifested in his freelance approach to making ends meet, his advocacy of feminism, and living the kind of life he wanted despite the hardship it would impose on himself and his family: reading, playing the shakuhachi, writing, travelling, having plentiful sex, and drinking as often as he wanted and at whatever hour, as well as freely speaking his mind.
By behaving in this way and advocating Stirner’s self-determining lifestyle verbally and in writing, Tsuji was advocating a revolution for individuals while not expecting it to catch on with people at large. Therefore his propagandizing was limited to how much he felt inclined to do at any given time and was not aimed at creating social justice on any large scale. Ultimately, Tsuji’s Egoism and Dadaism were attempts at freeing himself from norms and dictates. In theory Stirnerism allowed him this freedom through reducing the alienation between his own will and his actions, via no longer having to subject himself to decisions made by others.
This form of anarchism would become known as “Lifestyle Anarchism” in the 1990s when quasienvironmentalist anarchist Murray Bookchin published Social Anarchism or Lifestyle Anarchism: An Unbridgeable Chasm wherein he criticized Lifestyle Anarchism as not truly free and as coming at the expense of an all-important class struggle.[166] Generally, the term implies living an anarchic lifestyle and having that lifestyle itself be one’s foremost political contribution.
Tsuji was not devoted to massively propagating ideas of class war, and the ideologue Bookchin would surely have criticized him. Tsuji was instead an Epicurean, seeking a simple lifestyle and revelling in a peaceful enjoyment of modest pleasures, both physical, social, and intellectual. While given to moments of excess, particularly in regards to alcohol, Tsuji was not interested in striving for monetary wealth and fame as the foundations for his happiness. Rather, the ability to live freely, play his flute, and socialize were his espoused means to wellbeing and he did not feel bound by some sort of civic duty.[167] Rather, having come to the realization that he has been saddled with the desires and needs of his human condition, Tsuji finds that his desire to live his life with idle dreams and intoxication (suiseimushi 酔生夢死) could not possibly be the civic duty of someone from any nationality, which led to his decision to cast off national identity altogether.[168] Bear in mind that this was written in 1921 while Tsuji was getting deeply into Dadaism and, evidently, encountering some nationalistic pressure to be patriotic and productive.[169]
Tsuji’s frugal and free-wheeling lifestyle of Epicureanism is perhaps best exemplified in his vagabondage, wherein Tsuji gave up worldly wealth for the freedom of the road. However, as a Nihilist who by definition did not see particular values as inherently correct, Tsuji was not the type to attempt to force his Epicureanism on others and throughout his work maintains a humble, self-deprecating tone. As such, the most he could do was write about it and live by example: “I only tried to describe the details of my life which might explain the process of becoming a Dadaist”.[170] Combining this lifestyle with his deep interest in the arts and vagabondage, Tsuji might best be summed up as a Bohemian.
For the moment putting aside his lifestyle, Tsuji’s artwork and essays also exhibit a strong streak of antiauthoritarianism. One example of this is in his poetic drama titled Kyomu (Nihil), which was performed by Tokiwa Opera Company of Asakusa (including acting by Tsuji himself) on May 6, 1919.[171] In it there is a character named Tosukina[172] who is an “official pickpocket” — official because he has a certificate granting him the authority to pickpocket, thereby rendering his victims unable to report his thieving to the police.[173] This could easily be read as a criticism of the legitimacy of taxation or the occurrence of government corruption, where in both cases in contemporary Japan it was basically impossible to report the government’s “thieving” to the government itself with the hopes of attaining justice. With content so easily taken as anti-authoritarian, it is no wonder the authorities were often involved in shutting down these productions, a phenomenon referred to earlier as “misfires”.
However, despite the tragicomic depiction of Tsuji as a preaching figure by Hagiwara, as with his form of anarchism, Tsuji was not driven to spread Dada around the world either. His lack of motivation to proselytize devotedly rather than sporadically (out of enjoyment) lost Tsuji the respect of some figures, who labelled him “passive”. One example of this appears in a newspaper article in the Yomiuri Shimbun in 1922 which describes Takahashi as a “young warrior” (wakamusha 若武者) having been so disgusted with Tsuji’s passivity that he declared to numerous fellow writers that he would take it upon himself to propagate Dada across the world. Before Takahashi could go on this world tour, however, he was imprisoned for the famed incident in which he struck a taxi cab driver with a cane.[174][175]
Dada itself was an art-form that, while for some able to lend itself to socialist and anarchist propagandizing, was philosophically predisposed to being used individualistically. That is, Dada came as a reaction to the long-standing norm of art being primarily the privilege of the upper class. Dadaists were breaking free from this role of serving the wealthy for sustenance by creating art in accord with their own avant-garde style without much regard for whether or not it would appeal or make sense to aristocrats or others in general. The original intent was to break free from societal constraints[176]: partly to free the artist, partly to create a truly original and fresh art form.
Dada was also about breaking free from the constraints of traditional means of creating art and attempted to blend mediums and approaches without regard to preserving typical conceptions of what it meant to be art, as mentioned above. This led to the creation of new techniques such as construction and collage.[177] By trying to destroy the limitations on what could be considered art they were simultaneously trying to destroy what could have a monopoly on being considered beautiful or desirable. This was very much in line with Tsuji’s and Stirner’s Egoism, the extension of which would propose that individuals should adhere to their own individual ideas of the beautiful and desirable. In al likelihood, theatre was so useful and important to Tsuji for the fact that, in it, he could combine a number of interests and art-forms seamlessly: music, acting, writing, philosophy, and camaraderie with friends-- itself a chimera of sorts.
*** The Private as Public and Living Life as an Artform
Regardless of whether Tsuji’s Lifestyle Anarchism and his works were intentionally socially and politically provocative, the fact remains that they were. The line between political statement and personal lifestyle preferences had become so blurred for Tsuji that the two were hardly distinguishable as result of his Stirnerism.
As Tsuji states, Dada is not simple absurdism but is instead merely “being honest and true to itself” whether or not this approach makes the art intelligible or desirable to others.[178] Tsuji’s artistic endeavours were less for the sake of creating art and more for his own satisfaction. As such, for Tsuji Dada is the spirit of Stirnerism, and therefore is “not art, not literature, not social movement, not religion, not science... not futurism or expressionist, and at the same time Dada is all of them”.[179] As Omuka has it, “the Dadaist is a respectable realist in the Stirnerist sense, as he is not confined to just one narrow field of art and is free from the rigid programmatic burdens of futurism or expressionism”.[180]
For Tsuji, anything in life could be Dada, could be art, if it is done for one’s Egoistic intentions rather than as a result of social or political dictates. Where Egoism was Tsuji’s lifestyle, so was Dadaism because these two things were synonymous to Tsuji.[181] This made interdisciplinarianism a matter of course for Tsuji’s approach to art, and living in accord with the above principle of Dada thereby blurred the boundaries between the mediums of Tsuji’s art to the point that living itself had become for Tsuji an amalgam of art forms.
This sense of boundarilessness also carried over in a Buddhist sense wherein, through Nihilism, to Tsuji all things were “empty” and were thus Dada. This concept is demonstrated by the tagline “Tada=Dada”, as used in one of his Dada poems “The Tada=Dada of Alangri- Gloriban”[182], where tada is Japanese for “everything” or “all things”, meaning that “everything is Dada”. At once this is tinged with a sort of existentialist absurdism (i.e. all things are meaningless and existence is absurd), and at the same time it is Buddhist in the sense of the tagline “all things are empty”. This would be a foundational similarity between Tsuji and Takahashi, who also saw Dada as conveying the mu of Buddhism’s worldview. [183]
As a writer of voluminous accounts of his lifestyle and his philosophical/artistic transformations, Tsuji’s life, thought, and art were inextricable in his publications and performances because when he wrote, he tended to write about all of them together. Also, all of this, including personal details, were up for public consumption particularly as a result of the gossiping press coverage he was getting from the newspapers. Because Dada and philosophy were so much the core of his life itself, they did not cease to be central when it came to his “private time” with friends. While this exhibits the adages of “doing for work that which one loves to do anyway” and “living out one’s principles”, the result was the union of private and public in Tsuji’s life.
The destruction of this boundary between the public and private spheres must have seemed to Tsuji at the time a positive sign of successfully living his life in accord with his Ego at all times. Later, when Tsuji quit publishing and became devoted primarily to kōmuso monk style wandering, it is conceivable that he no longer desired to follow the whims of his Ego, as seems to be indicated in the essay he wrote after release from the mental institution, “Hen na atama”[184], which had strong indications of Tsuji developing a devotion to Shin Buddhism. From that point on Tsuji’s publications became scarce, and for basically the last decade of his life Tsuji seems to have largely dropped out of the Japanese media’s public sphere, making it more difficult to determine how much his Egoism persisted after 1932.
Dada, Stirner’s Anarchism, and Buddhist Nothingness For Tsuji, Egoist Nihilism and Buddhism converged at a common point, which he put into action through living as an Epicurean and expressed through Dada. This point of convergence is that of the concept of “nothingness”.
As mentioned earlier, Stirner’s Nihilism rested on the concept of a “creative nothing”: since nothing is inherently meaningful things exist with the potential for change and thus creativity. With Buddhism’s mu also pointing at the fluidity of all things (and thus the illusory nature of their boundaries), Tsuji also finds that Buddhism suggests the potential in al things[185] for change (though perhaps emphasizes more the inevitability of change).
One of Tsuji’s plays, performed in September 1922 by the Gypsy Operetta Company (aka the Theatre of Epicureanism) at the Yuraku-za in Tokyo, was titled “Kyoraku-shugi-sha no Shi” (“Death of an Epicurean”) and consisted largely of Dada and absurdism. The director of this theatre company also ran an organization of dancers by the name of Pantarai-sha. This name was conceived of by Tsuji and refers to the Greek saying “Panta rhei” (All things are in flux).[186] Tsuji’s preoccupation with the ‘creative nothing’ he saw as emerging from a transient and essenceless universe is reflected in the name Pantarai-sha.
In “Death of an Epicurean”, Tsuji comments on the destruction of the Ryounkaku (Cloud-surpassing Tower) in the area of Tokyo he often called home, Asakusa. This building was a skyscraper that had become very much a symbol of modernity in Japan[187], and its destruction in the Great Kantō Earthquake came as a harrowing omen to many for whom it had the same implications as the Tower of Babel. This symbol would become a popular one in literature, used by such authors as Ishikawa Takubokui[188] The popularity of using the tower’s fall symbolically to convey the fragility of modernity’s “progress” reflects the impact of Tokyo’s devastation on levels of confidence in modernity and Rationalism.
Scripted in the wake of this event, Tsuji’s “Death of an Epicurean” reads: “the tower in Asakusa was burnt in columns of fire and from their ashes came the young ‘Variete d’ Epicure.’ Saddled with the grief of the notion that ‘Al things are in flux,’ children who have used rouge and powder are playing tambourines and castanets. Just chant the incantation ‘Panta rhei’ and bless the lips and thighs of the young men”.[189]
In this passage Tsuji describes the birth of an Epicurean out of someone who experienced the transience of such an eternal-seeming icon as a great building and greater Tokyo, who experienced the fracturing of confidence in what seemed so stable as this symbol of modernity. The Epicurean is portrayed here as someone who, in their despair, embraces the Arts and uses the memory of transience as a spiritual aid in life. For Tsuji who experienced so much tragedy as a result of the earthquake, this description comes off as autobiographical, describing his turn to revelling in Epicureanism and the Arts in recognition of worldly transience.
This embracing of the Arts in reaction to tragedy and a sense of emptiness came out through Dada as an expression of not only the absurdity of life, but also of a Stirnerist and Buddhist sense of emptiness. That is, because things are transient and not inherently meaningful, one can only embrace the absurd position they are left in and attempt to live as true to one’s desires as possible (Egoism) or attempt to release one’s attachments to evade suffering (Buddhist dukkha). Takahashi felt that the Buddhist imperative to attain muga (no-ego) was inconsistent with this embracing of Epicurean hedonism.[190] However, Tsuji seems to believe that the two are reconcilable through experiences of hedonistic traveller’s bliss[191] Whiether or not to embrace the Ego during the pursuit of his Epicurean hedonism, as opposed to making a Buddhist attempt to dismantle the Ego, would recur to Tsuji throughout his life, at one point culminating in his decision after leaving the mental institution for the first time to leave behind his translation and writing career, possessions, and household to wander as a Buddhist “nothingness” (kōmuso) monk. The kōmuso wore large reed hoods (tengai) which were generally used in Buddhism to dismantle a sense of ego, though there is a history of it being used simply to conceal identity.[192] Thus it is conceivable that Tsuji wanted to suppress his Ego and deny Egoism for the latter years of his life. There is just as strong a possibility, however, that he wanted to conceal his identity in the 1930s harsh political climate.
The Epicurean virtue of maintaining a simple lifestyle was common between this Buddhist approach and Tsuji’s form of Egoistic hedonism, and thus would remain with Tsuji during his possible transition from the latter (refining, apotheosizing the Ego) to the former (dismantling the Ego). In this way Tsuji’s later Ego-renouncing approach to living became closer to Takahashi’s Buddhist approach to life as Tsuji entered the final decade of his life (1933–1943). However, it would seem this process was a difficult one and wrought psychological problems on Tsuji, who would then be institutionalized several more times.
To sum up, Tsuji’s most prominent concern in life was the problem of the Ego: how can one be most free, what is the best way one can live, how should one react to the absurd conditions of living in an inherently meaningless and despairingly transient world? To this, during the Dadaist phase of his life, Tsuji responded with art and Epicurean, Egoist hedonism-- to break free from social and institutional constraints and better come to understand the nothingness of the world, to appreciate its tragicomedy through indulging in art and its creation, as well as enjoying the camaraderie of one’s cohorts.
Whether or not the tengu incident was really a mental breakdown, the alcoholic and emotionally unwell condition that spawned the incident and the subsequent kōmuso renunciation demonstrates that this response was not satisfying to Tsuji. However, considering the continued ill mental health that followed his apparent renunciation of the Ego this was not a satisfying one either. Because of the lack of writing coming from these final years of his life it is difficult to discern if he ever found a means of dealing with the above Ego-related questions in a way that was deeply satisfying to him.
Yet, there is one more idea that Tsuji found of great importance. It is first reflected in a passage from Oscar Wilde’s “De Profundis”, which Tsuji translated:
I wanted to eat of the fruit of all the trees in the garden of the world... And so, indeed, I went out, and so I lived. My only mistake was that I confined myself so exclusively to the trees of what seemed to me the sunlit side of the garden, and shunned the other side for its shadow and its gloom... And as I determined to know nothing of them [dark things], I was forced to... feed on them, to have for a season, indeed, no other food at all. I don’t regret for a single moment having lived for pleasure. I did it to the full, as one should do everything that one does to the full. There was no pleasure I did not experience... But to have continued the same life would have been wrong because it would have been limiting... the other half of the garden had its secrets for me also.[193] Tsuji’s choice of lifestyle was unconventional and often impoverished, difficult because it involved moving away from stable employment, wealth, and maintaining a household, all of which contributed problems to Tsuji’s life. His adherence to Egoist Nihilism was far from a rosecolored worldview, and his choice of friends (fraught with their own drama and political tragedies) lent life even more difficulties. However, as we will see, it would seem Tsuji developed a sense of appreciating the good along with the bad.
Tsuji’s Dada, as based on Stirnerism, was an art that negated a sense of inherent goodness or badness, freeing the viewer by not censoring itself to spare the viewer’s feelings. Rather, through Art Tsuji was able to address the tragedies and difficulties he encountered, rather than neglecting “the dark side of the garden”. It is in this sense that we can understand Hagiwara’s reference to Tsuji and understanding Chaplin’s tragicomic laugh: as an artist and philosopher Tsuji did not spare himself the difficulties associated with living without the limitations Wilde refers to above. We see this laid out in the work “Fiikyo Shigo” (“Lunatic Whispers”)[194]:
This year has been especially cold. I wonder if it just seems that way because things have become especially destitute. And yet — now that it’s beginning to warm up I feel a sense of gratitude. If it were not for winter I would not know the value of springtime. Each of the ten thousand things is relative. If you thought everything was interesting, then it would be so, or if you thought it all dull, then it would be. Since it’s beneficial to think of things as interesting, it would be best if we could enjoy ourselves as much as we can manage.[195]
At least until he stopped publishing writings, Tsuji seems to have been left with a sense of acceptance of the comfortable and the uncomfortable things in life, the joys and the difficulties, without having to reject either set. Yet, Tsuji remained human at heart, just wanting to have as enjoyable a life as possible.
** VI. The Work of Tsuji Jun
Tuuji’s Translations and Literary Influences While Tsuji was a prolific translator and numerous works could be considered important to his development, no work was more significant to this than Stirner’s The Ego and Its Own. As the impact of this work is explored throughout this piece, examined here is the still significant Man of Genius. Also of note is his translation of Voltaire’s Zadig and Oscar Wilde’s De Profundis . Throughout his translations is a tendency towards the philosophical, which reflects Tsuji’s sustained efforts to divine the best way he could live.[196]
Tsuji published his translation of Cesare Lombroso’s The Man of Genius in 1914. Tsuji’s work on this volume came at a period of time that was utterly formative to the poet philosopher he would slowly become: that of his marriage to Noe. This also was period of time when Tsuji’s interest in deviating from norms was burgeoning. With Nihilism and Egoism providing the backdrop of humans growing up in a world where meaning is assumed to not be inherent but assigned, Tsuji must have found it imperative to explore nonconformist lifestyles and modes of thinking, having come to a realization of his own socialization.
Lombroso describes a genius in part as someone whose psychical energies are so concentrated in one particular direction that it manifests in greatness, though usually at the expense of other faculties, resulting in what he refers to as “degenerations”. These degenerations range from eccentricities to full-blown debilitating deficiencies that can result in madness. Lombroso asserts that it is because a genius gets so carried away in one direction that they are capable of breaking free from conventional ideas on the subject.[197]
With Tsuji sensitized to the excitement of rediscovering the world for oneself through vision unbound to unquestionable traditions, The Man of Genius might have been one way he felt he could explore nonconformist approaches to understanding the world and living within it. With Stirnerism providing Tsuji with confidence in the value of defining oneself rather than accepting social imperatives passively, Tsuji was undergoing a process of redefining himself, utilizing the world of literature as his primary resource. While Tsuji’s humble descriptions of himself do not indicate he thought of himself as a genius, it could be that he wondered if he could not through Lombroso’s work discover something which he might emulate to better his own avant-garde attempts at writing, living, and thinking.
Lombroso’s work by today’s standards may seem outdated (especially in light of such assertions of lefthandedness being a form of degeneration and its occasional racist undertones[198]). However, at the time it would have been fascinating and cutting-edge for Tsuji with his hopes of self-expansion. Interestingly, some of Lombroso’s characteristics of genius personalities resemble characteristics of Tsuji, though it remains unclear as to how many of these similarities resulted from Tsuji’s emulation of them, from sheer coincidence, or from them resonating with Tsuji’s ideal Ego. Some of these characteristics include the tendency towards vagabondage, a socially unacceptable sense of morality (or “moral insanity”), alcoholism, melancholy (a word Tsuji himself used quite a bit), being very preoccupied with their own Ego[199], misery, an interest in describing insanity, an ability in and passion for music, and generally not being entirely constrained by social expectations.
Regardless, Tsuji’s interest in Lombroso’s ideas must have been fervent in order for him to have spent so much time and energy on it in the depths of poverty.[200] It seems unlikely that Tsuji could have gotten a respectable job in light of his scandalous resignation from his position at Noe’s high school, which probably spurred him on to earn his keep through the more independent profession of writing. However, to take on Lombroso’s translation must have been more out of sheer passion for the topic matter than out of effort to bring in money: the likelihood of him successfully publishing his translation was questionable, and it was a tremendously large project that put him and his family through a more immense poverty than he might have had to endure had he focused on smaller pieces of writing bringing in a steady income. This comes as another piece of evidence suggesting that Tsuji’s interest in genius and insanity (especially of an artistic nature) was a curiosity he was passionate about for its use in his self development.
*** Tsuji’s Self-Perception
In light of his philosophy of the personal-as- political and the private-as-public, in order to convey a lot about his ideas Tsuji has ended up talking a lot about himself. Tsuji has called himself any number of things, including “one variety of lunatic”[201], and as above, it could be that Tsuji strived to embody one of Lombroso’s lunatic artistic geniuses. As one can tell from the References section, any number of biographical works on Tsuji also portray him as insane, and may well be referring to the tengu incident. Indeed, all the listed works corroborate his eventual insanity, which must have been a bitter irony for this translator of Lombroso’s book.
If we are to believe that his personality was a neivous and withdrawn one, in contrast with his devil-may- care Egoist philosophy, one is left wondering if his selfdescription as “lunatic” (before the tengu incident) does not demonstrate that Tsuji felt ill at ease with how different he was compared to most other individuals in contemporary Japanese society. It could be that Tsuji did not see himself in particularly conventional mental health in light of how different (or hen)[202] he was. There is evidence that his self-destructive behaviour and psychologically distressed state deepened whenever Tsuji would become increasingly hermetic and withdrawn from his peers, as we see in the period following Itō’s effective divorce[203] from him.[204]
Regardless of his self-professed psychological distresses, in what works I have read Tsuji never came out and called himself a genius, and in fact comes off as quite humble and self-disparaging. When he does mention genius, it is in the context of something he is not, such as those individuals who are both great painters and musicians.[205] Therefore, it seems Tsuji did outwardly exhibit signs of presuming himself a genius, though he did find himself to be mentally “out there.” Rather, he claims that Dada and his struggles are scarcely original and have been repeated many times over the course of history.[206]
In “Mad Murmurs” Tsuji says he is “a person like the haiku poet Hirose Izen” (aka Hirose Gennojo 16461711)[207], but then claims that he has not really been able to write haiku poems. Tsuji has found this to be very strange because he says that, above all, he is a musician and a poet.[208][209] He then writes that someone who writes poems is not necessarily a poet and someone who writes novels is not necessarily a novelist, reserving such titles for those he feels have some quality that makes one able to “really” write, e.g. Shakespeare and Emerson[210]. For Tsuji this quality is the ability to express characteristics of the human spirit. It seems Tsuji’s argument is that while it may not suit his self-image of a vagabond monk poet to not write haiku, it does not ultimately matter because he sees himself as expressing that essential element of poetry — aspects of the human spirit. That he goes out of his way to argue this demonstrates how important Tsuji found his self-image as a poet.
Tsuji later criticizes himself for being too dependent on subjective means of expression (which he associates with the aural arts) as opposed to objective means of expression (a la visual arts), and finds that great art utilizes both qualities, which Tsuji cites as a line by Goethe[211]. He claims he cannot make the form of something come across distinctly and can only communicate psychological matters[212] rather than realistic depictions. It could be this is why Tsuji feels so drawn to Dada — he feels more interested in depicting psychological conditions rather than describing reality.
Tsuji finds poetry to be the most artistic of all disciplines and esteems it because it is the discipline least bound to its medium, as a result of the seemingly boundless limits of words.[213] This line of thought is surely a central component to his fondness for Dada, which also rejects boundaries in its stylistics, content, and choice of mediums. As described throughout this work, in general Tsuji aspired to be a limitless person, in reflection of the limitlessness of Nihilism’s “creative nothing”.
*** Poetry Sample: “Absurd”
(following pages)
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This section provides a sample poem by Tsuji and an analysis of it. Because of the highly visual nature of Tsuji’s poetic experimentation, the original Japanese text is provided in this section for quick reference. Titled “Abusarudo” (“Absurd”), this poem is filled with repeated onomatopreia, a trait which resembles the work of lzen, mentioned above, who was known as a poetic deviant much like Tsuji was. lzen wrote: “Mizu satto I tori yo fuwa-fuwa I fiiwa fuwa” .[214][215]
Absurd.[216]
Capsize, drive to frenzy, twist your life;
A laugh loud and out of turn, a harlot’s white blood cells,
A camel’s thickheadedness a leopard’s electric current--inject them all
Gather the Bat cigarette butts[217], tatter-tattered
Take your red polished ego and burn it, drop it into the
xxxxxx
The breathing mechanism’s gasping.... the opened-up
xxxxx.
Take that two-faced shyster and xxxxx his neck!!
The madman’s wan inflamed tongue
Your deadened senses-- burn them away in sulphuric acid
The bitter smile of a dog made xxxxxxx
The point of contact is the point of contact.....
Draw an infinitely expansive ellipse
Revolve infinitely
We are drooling away life’s resources wastefully
Clop clop clop clop
v^ ^v ^h, holes
Don’t touch the yawning pistons
A sheet of tin is more tender than your bosom
Your pallid blood is streaming, trickling
Drip drip ..... drp drp ........
The moon is grinning red
A stacatto gnawing the mad dog’s corpse
The owl’s eyes more magnificent than obsidian
The torso suspended upside-down
I can hear the cruel flute of the winds now
Darkness a great empty hole[218]
Tsuji’s unnerving poem displays trademark features of his writing: a passion for living intensely, experimentation in style, references to the ego/transience/nothingness, Dadaistic (unpredictable, unbounded) metaphors such as “a harlot’s white blood cells”, a preoccupation with madness, dark undertones, foreign terms, and references to sardonic happiness.
As an avid reader of foreign and esoteric literature Tsuji often references foreign literature, words, and phrases (such as “stacatto” and Panta rhei)[219], and presumably Tsuji uses these esoteric terms without care for the reader’s effortless understanding because he (allegedly) wrote for his own Egoistic satisfaction only. This particular example has surprisingly few such esoteric references.
The darkness, sardonic happiness and love for beauty (as in the “magnificence of an owl’s eyes”), and passion for living intensely which permeate so much of his work are reflections of his own feelings about how to live and the absurdity of life, which is mirrored in his self-descriptive essays as well, such as Hagiwara, said of him. Written a little more than a year after the Great Kantō Earthquake, at the time of this writing Tsuji was at his most artistically experimental and at the peak of his Dadaism.
The shock of life’s transience was likely still weighing down on Tsuji at the time of this writing, such that his preoccupation with death at once filled him with the urge to live fully and yet shrouded bis thoughts in morbidity. The poem suggests the dripping away of life: “We are drooling away life’s resources wastefully... Your pallid blood is streaming, trickling... Drip drip ... drp drp “ The fading away of the dripping sound of life and blood (which goes from a stream to a trickle) comes across in Japanese as “potari potari ... tari tari “[220] Perhaps Tsuji was concerned with the passing of his own life’s hours, a theme that appears in the poem preceding “Absurd” by one month, “Do o-nari Desho”[221]
Tsuji’s philosophical tendencies show through this poem in the lines, “Take your red polished ego and burn it... Draw an infinitely expansive ellipse I Revolve infinitely.” Tsuji would have been familiar with the Buddhist concept of burning, which describes the suffering that people encounter as they live in Samsara (the cycle of birth and rebirth). Tsuji’s approach to living, Epicurean hedonism and Egoism, suggests that people should embrace the whims of the Ego, much as the reader is told to embrace burning here. This contrasts with the Buddhist imperative to extinguish the Ego and its attachments to put out the burning of human suffering.
The concept of an infinitely expansive ellipse and infinite revolution suggest a sort of Zen statement describing the unbounded, empty state of existence indicated by Nihilism and Buddhism. That is, the shape of an ellipse contains emptiness, but an infinite ellipse suggests a broadness that cannot be encircled by a shape of any size. Again, the reader is told to embrace this kind of existence, as well as those things that are generally looked upon disfavorably: the blood of a prostitute, a socially inappropriate laugh. The lack of denying these icons is a very Dadaist course of action, in line with Dadaism’s attempt to open up stigmatized things to reanalysis. This also resonates with the idea of things not carrying an inherent essence to them that should make them an object of rejection, relevant to both Nihilism and Buddhism’s “nothingness”.
The most playful feature of this writing is its pictographic use of certain characters. Empty boxes, depicted above as “xx “, leave the word that fits there up to the reader’s imagination. It harkens back to the Dadaist practice of creative typesetting, most prominent in Japan in publications of Mavo, which is a holdover from the same sort of practice by European artists such as Tristan Tzara.
Also of interest in Tsuji’s pictography is his use of kanji (Chinese-origin characters) in certain sections. One section reads “dekoboko bokodeko dekoboko boko” (凸凹 凹凸 凸ボコ ボコ) [222](poorly attempted here as "v^ ^v ^h, holes"). Tsuji’s characters metamorphosize from kanji into the katakana syllabary without disrupting the repetition of sounds, but the meaning changes to indicate a sense of hollowness or being full of holes (bokoboko). The kanji towards the beginning of the sentence indicate alternations of holes and bumps, the pairing of which create the words for “unevenness, ruggedness”. The “clop” sounds preceding this line are simply onamatopoeia that resemble a popping, rattling sound, perhaps not unlike that of a piston (which appears in the next line). Possibly the piston is a metaphor for the mechanical rhythms of life and the kanji that precede it indicate the ups and downs of one’s life experiences.
Altogether, “Absurd” encapsulates Tsuji’s experimentalism and Dadaist style of poetry writing. Tsuji’s Dadaism, Takahashi’s Dadaism
The key difference between the Dadaisms of Takahashi and Tsuji was that Takahashi utilized an approach more grounded in the Japanese tradition of Zen and Tsuji attempted a more analytical approach structured in the tradition of the German philosophers. The most important commonality they shared was that they both tried to use Dadaism in their personal and philosophical pursuits of human freedom.
Stylistically speaking, Tsuji makes less use of the erotic than Takahashi, but does share the use of morbid and despairing themes. Both have played with the visual construction of poetry — Tsuji’s example can be found in “Absurd” with the use of the dekoboko characters. Takahashi’s experimentation can be seen in his famous poem that stacks the character for “plate” (the kind one eats from). Takahashi had been a dishwasher himself, and the narrator in the poem “stacks” a series of plates by putting the character for plate (sara) on one line on top of another. The narrator then smashes the plates in the following lines, and this poem itself could describe his personal frustration with his daily life.[223]
As mentioned in the previous section there is also a shared conception of Dada conveying the Buddhist sense of mu, though Tsuji and Takahashi differ for their opinion of Egoism. That is, Takahashi found that Buddhism necessitated morality whereas Egoism was self-interested and reacted against the Buddhist morality Ko explains was pervasive during the Meiji Period.[224]
*** Reception
Tsuji became a widely renowned and respected Dadaist. While he had his critics like most other famed writers, several articles in the newspapers of his day have praised him and commented on his work. One article published after his institutionalization calls him a deviant genius with top class writing (ichiryu bunsho), the founder of (Japanese) Dadaism, and says that his writing will be missed (since Tsuji claimed that he would step down from writing)[225].
As Hagiwara suggests in “Teachings of the Unmensch”, Tsuji would become fodder for gossip in the press. This appears in articles even unrelated to his mental collapse, most often about his drinking habits and his relationships. Take one newspaper article title, “Is it the YUkata-clad God of Drinking the Night Away? Tsuji Jun and Sake, Sake, Sake”[226] Another article calls him an “eccentric writer” (bundan no kijin) who lives with his mother and is greatly impoverished. It then describes another of Tsuji’s drunken incidents[[227]
Tsuji had something of a following outside of the media as well. Some individuals from this following (including the anarchist novelist Miyajirna Sukeo) would form a sort of “Tsuji Fan Club” (kōenkai 後援会). After Tsuji suffered an asthma attack at the age of 41 Tsuji accumulated substantial medical bills. This group would help pay back the resultant and future debts Tsuji would incur.[228]
Tsuji was inspirational for several Dadaists, including Yoshiyuki Eisuke. That he worked closely together with the other central figures of Japanese Dadaism makes his particular influence different to pick apart from the influence of these Dadaists in general, however the fact that he is so widely acclaimed as the founder of Japanese Dadaism is an indication of how influential he was.
** VII. Conclusion
*** Tsuji Jun in the late 20th and early 21st Century
Tsuji Jun has not been forgotten in recent times, and along with that there has been a good deal of continuing Japanese scholastic interest in him (the most recent publication of which is Takano’s 2006 work[229], followed by Tamagawa’s latest, 2005 reworking of his 1971 Hyoden[230] (Appendix II). That Tamagawa has been able to keep renewing his biography on Tsuji for more than thirty years demonstrates the resilience of the topic as well. Many (Japanese) blogs and websites have been erected for him, including what can be taken as a parody site (presently defunct) that creates a religion out of the man, sarcastically extolling his example as the Unmensch and humorously criticizing his human failings:
Our lord left many essays. But as our lord was stupid, we cannot admit them as the scriptures in themselves. The committee of scripture compilation is now trying to extract the useful phrases and compile them as the scripture. So please wait for this work...
One can neglect Tsuji Jun in the history of Japanese literature. But when one tries to study the literatures and thoughts in 1910’s and 1920’s, he may hit upon Tsuji everywhere unexpectedly at the corner of the street or in the narrow path. In a sense he is a nuisance in Japanese literature.[231]
This parody site thus resembles in tone Hagiwara’s semi-sarcastic description of Tsuji as a religious figure at the end of Chapter II.
In 1969 director Yoshida Yoshishige released the film Eros + Massacre[232], which portrays a history of Ōsugi and Itō in which Tsuji and members of Seito are also significant characters. Key scenes depict the tea house stabbing incident, the Amakasu Incident, and a scene in which Ōsugi recites poetry about the hanged anarchists of the High Treason Incident to Itō under a grove of blossoming cherry trees. This (slightly embellished) historical account is combined with a parallel plot about a pair of youths striving to understand the philosophy of Ōsugi and his counterparts.
Tsuji (as played by Takahashi Etsushi) is depicted as a sombre man constantly carrying around a shakuhachi flute and is featured in scenes of home life with Itō and Makoto, often speaking of Stirner. Other scenes include one where he cheats on Itō with her cousin as a result of Itō’s “pulling away” (i.e. spending great amounts of time with Seito and hardly any with the family), as well as the following breakup. After the breakup his character becomes a vagabond, donning a straw travelling hat and playing the shakuhachi while wandering the country with little Makoto tagging along behind. Hereafter he and the sound of his flute appear once in a while in the background, as if to convey some quiet message about the ongoing scene. Generally speaking, Tsuji is here depicted sympathetically and with an air of mystery. Eros + Massacre was rereleased in 2008 on DVD in Japanese with French subtitles.
More surprisingly, there is an upcoming Japanese animation series directed by Nakamura Ryutaro appearing under the title Despera, after the famed work of the same title by Tsuji Jun. The graphic novel serialization began in 2009 and its story is set to take place in a steampunk environment in 1922 Tokyo, shortly before the Great Kanto Earthquake.
A surprising number of photographs of Tsuji and associates can also be found through a simple web search, several images of which do not appear in standard scholarship about him. Considering all the current attention he is receiving as well as the attention he has received over the course of the past hundred years, the figure of Tsuji Jun seems to have left a strong impression.
*** Hope versus Despair
Many find the prospect of Nihilism to be a depressing one. However, despite the theme of despair in such works as Desupera and Writings of Despair (Zetsubō no sho), to Tsuji and other Nihilists there is a hopefulness and joy to their philosophy as well. While the absence of a loving and/or vengeful God and an inherent purpose or meaning to life may be disorienting, Nihilism does not necessarily negate meaning and purpose. Rather, for Stirner, Tsuji, and Kaneko this meant liberation and being able to embrace the mundane through no longer being bound to divine expectations (thus the Unmensch).
What they were working for through the study of Nihilism was not only an understanding of the human condition and freedom, but also how to continue living well in a nihilistic world. Kaneko resolved that she was a creature that desired fulfilment, and thus decided to apply herself to a quest. While she, like Tsuji, was initially struck with a despairing sense of life-negation, Kaneko found a means of affirming life through Nihilism:
Formerly I said ‘I negate life’. Speaking scientifically, that is so... [but] a negation of life does not originate in philosophy, for life alone is the origin of all things... Therefore I affirm life. I affirm it strongly. And since I affirm life, I resolutely rebel against all power that coerces life... Living is not synonymous with merely having movement. It is moving in accordance with one’s own will... One could say that with deeds one begins to really live.
Accordingly, when one moves by means of one’s own will and this leads to the destruction of one’s body, this is not a negation of life. It is an affirmation. [233]
What Kaneko is saying here is that, for her, Egoism (acting by means of one’s own will rather than passively assimilating the values of those around one) has enabled her to “really live”. Thus Nihilism becomes a positive force for her. Takahashi and Tsuji also mirror the idea that Nihilism as expressed through Dada can both negate and affirm, as in Takahashi’s “Dagabaji Assertion”: “DADA affirms and negates all”. [234]
For Tsuji, Nihilistic Egoism was connected to Buddhism through their assertion that meaning is not inherent, and Tsuji expressed this through Dada, essays, and his way of life. While for Tsuji “everything is Dada”[235], much like for Stirner “All things are nothing to me”,[236] Tsuji embraced Nihilism as a means to freedom and affirming the passions of life:
Now, the delusion of my Ego is terribly burning. On my delusional ego I am feasting and living. On this deception I am constantly pouring fuel, increasingly, increasingly, more and more, making it white-hot, steadily gushing lava into the emptiness I turn to face: I want to become a Vulcan figure.[237]
At this point Tsuji slows down and says that he fears that while he was writing, unwittingly the “vagabond’s spiritual ecstasy” has turned into the “erotic lunatic’s spiritual ecstasy” and quickly ends “Vagabond Writings”. What we find here is the same conclusion reached by Kaneko, above — an affirmation of life, and a subsequent passion to live fully while aware of the nihilistic underpinnings of their world view. Rather than following in the philosophy of Nietzsche’s Obermensch, Tsuji embraces the world pragmatically as an Epicurean Unmensch.
This said, Tsuji was plagued with depression and alcoholism for years on end, was often ostracised by the mainstream literary world, and encountered a terrible amount of tragedy — and it is not that his Nihilism had nothing to do with this. Rather, it would seem Dada and Nihilism had taught Tsuji a means of appreciating life’s variety of experiences, including the tragic, as in Wilde’s allegory of the grove of fruit trees[238] As such we might imagine that Tsuji lived a ful life and would have been able to understand the tragicomic laugh of Chaplin.[239]
The work of Tsuji Jun does not amount to a selfpitying lament about the pointlessness of existence, but rather to an empowering affirmation of the freedom of the individual and the ability for non-theists to make the most out of Life.
** Appendix I: Major Translations
Andersen, Hans Christian: “The Bell”, “The Shadow” [1906, 1907]
Maupassant, Guy De: “The Necklace” (“La Parure”) [1908]
Maeterlinck, Maurice: “The Blind” [1909]
Makower, Stanley: The Mirror of Music [1909]
Lombroso, Cesare: The Man of Genius (L’homo di Genio) [1914]
Stirner, Max: The Ego and its Own (Der Einzige und sein Eigentum) [1915]
Quincey, Thomas De: Confessions of an English Opium-Eater [1918]
Wilde, Oscar: De Profundis [1919]
Voltaire: Zadig the Babylonian [1920]
Poe, Edgar Allen: “Shadow-- a Parable” [1921]
Leopardi, Giacomo: The Canti [1921]
Moore, George: Confessions of a Young Man, [1921] [1924]
Barbusse, Henri: Hell (L’enfer) [1921]
Villon, Francois: The Poems of Francois Villon [1922]
Baudelaire, Charles Pierre: “Anywhere Out of the World” [1923]
Morand, Paul: “Sample (Dada)” [1923]
Simons, Arthur: “Vagabond Songs” [1923]
Shestov, Lev: Apotheosis of Groundlessness [1923]
Hecht, Ben: Erik Dorn [1926]
Senancour, Etienne Pivert de: Oberman [1931]
Cabell, James Branch: Epper Si Muove [1932]
Dell, Floyd: Intellectual Vagabondage [1932]
** Appendix II. A Review of Supporting Literature[240]
*** Secondary Literature
No English-language literature exists that focuses on Tsuji himself, but he does appear in the periphery of some works. That which deals with him most extensively is the translation of Harumi’s Bi wa Rancho ni Ari, by the name of Beauty in Disarray. This book centres on Itō Noe, Tsuji’s first wife, and does a splendid job of bringing to life the social environment of associates shared by both Itō and Tsuji. In short, while Tsuji was the one who was institutionalized later in life, this book can make one wonder if it was not rather others in his social circle who were the more certifiable. Tsuji also appears briefly in various works relating to his contemporaries, most often in regards to Ōsugi Sakae and Itō Noe (Stanley, Large).
Another useful text in understanding the pre-war Japanese radical feminist and nihilist scenes in which Tsuji played significant part is Hane Mikiso’s Reflections on the Way to the Gallows: rebel women in prewar Japan and Helene Raddeker’s Treacherous Women of Imperial Japan: patriarchal fictions, patricidal fantasies. Most pivotally, both have a lot to say about Tsuji’s nihilist and feminist contemporary, Kaneko Fumiko — as well as Kanno Suga of the High Treason Incident (Chapter Il ).
There are also a handful of extremely useful books in English that cover various aspects of the Dadaist movement in Japan, which go a long way in providing context for understanding the time in which Tsuji lived, the thought and lives of his associates, and the Japanese avant- garde movement and its politics, occasionally mentioning Tsuji.
In 1977 Won Ko published Buddhist Elements in Dada: a comparison of Tristan Tzara, Takahashi Shinkichi, and their fellow poets (which seems to have been based on his 1974 dissertation “Dada and Buddhist Thought: Takahashi Shinkichi as a Dada poet compared to Tristan Tzara”). Considering the strong ties between Takahashi and Tsuji (chapters II, III, VI), it is easy to see why this is a keystone piece to understanding the Dada they had in common, especially in regards to the intersections of Zen and Dada.
Important also is Omuka Toshiharu’s “Tada=Dada (Devotedly Dada) for the Stage: the Japanese Dada Movement 1920–1925”. This article addresses Tsuji several times, giving a very interesting account of his participation in radical theatre in Tokyo. Most importantly it provides an excellent general history of the movement, breaking it down into sections on its first phase and then Neo-Dada. This selection was the most necessary piece of English- language scholarship in the creation of the present work.
Gennifer Weisenfeld’s Mavo: Japanese artists and the avant-garde, 1905–1931 (2002) is an essential work on the Japanese early 1900s avant-garde movement in general as well as for understanding Murayama and others associated with Mavo who were essential to the Dadaist scene in Japan. Filled with lavish photographs of notable figures and works of art, it is perhaps the most visual and also the most sizeable piece of English language scholarship about Japanese Dada to date. Furthermore it much discusses the correlations between this movement and the anarchist and socialist politics of the day.
There is a respectable twenty-page chapter on Tsuji in Thomas Hackner’s German-language 2001 book, Dada und Futurismus in Japan: Die Rezeption der Historischen Avantgarden. It gives biographical information and focuses on his connection with Max Stirner. The book also contains sections on Murayama, Hagiwara, and Takahashi, the author’s ideas on Dada and socialism, and some translations of Japanese Dadaist works including Tsuji’s “Dada no Hanashi” (“A Talk on Dada”).
As mentioned earlier, there are in Japanese at least ten lengthy works expressly about Tsuji which bear his name in their titles, several of which are used in this work and can be found in the bibliography. Noteworthy Japanese books that regard Tsuji less directly than these include Tadataka Kamiya’s volume Nihon no Dada (1987), Takahashi Shinkichi’s Dada to Zen (1971), and Shuzo Orihara’s Tsuji Makoto, Chichioya Tsuji Jun (2001) which is focused on Tsuji’s first son, Makoto.
*** Works By Tsuji Jun
While many smaller collections of Tsuji’s exist, the 1982 collected works Tsuji Jun Zenshil is, to the best of my knowledge, complete in that it incorporates al of Tsuji’s published literature, including both his original work and his translations. It should be noted also that there is in volume five an extremely helpful list of Roman alphabet transcriptions of non-Japanese names and titles together with their katakana equivalents, as mentioned in Tsuji’s work (with volume five being his translation of The Man of Genius). This is helpful because some of Tsuji’s spellings of foreign names and titles are not the standard ones used today, nearly one hundred years later. The final volume in the nine volume series includes texts about Tsuji by numerous people (in Japanese Tsuji-ron), including his own associates and children.
*** A Three Piece Sample of Japanese Works on Tsuji
Tamagawa Nobuaki’s Horo no Dadaisuto Tsuji Jun: ore wa shinsei yuiitsusha de aru (Wandering Dadaist 1Suji Jun: I am intrinsically an Egoist, 2005) is one of the most recently published books on Tsuji to date. This work is something of a rehashing of the original 1971 TSuji Jun Hyoden (Tsuji Jun Biography), which underwent a similar process as Dadaisuto Tsuji Jun (Dadaist Tsuji Jun 1984) . Both of these fundamentally differ little from Wandering Dadaist, which seems to have been redone in order to appear as the first volume in Nihon Autoro Retsuden (The Japanese Outlaw Biographical Series). Together, the three volumes afford one primarily photographs and illustrations they would not have seen otherwise (with Biography’s collection being the most delightful). Thus we can understand Wandering Dadaist as the most recent edition of Tamagawa’s take on Tsuji Jun’s life and work.
Wandering Dadaist is laid out chronologically in biographical sections and thus is able to discuss Tsuji’s changing philosophy in tandem with his personal changes. It therefore is a great work for bringing out historical context. It is more all-encompassing than either of the other two books surveyed here which take narrower angles, and therefore Wandering Dadaist makes a good reference work because the chronological layout makes it particularly navigable.
Kuninosuke Matsuo’s Nihirisuto: Tsuji Jun no shisō to shōgai (Nihilist: the thought and life of Tsuji Jun, 1967) complements Tamagawa’s work nicely in that its focus is very much on the thought and work of Tsuji, whereas Wandering Dadaist is more strictly biographical. Kuninosuke (born in 1899) knew Tsuji personally. This work includes a bonus section with short writings of various individuals who were acquainted with Tsuji, much like the ninth volume of Tsuji’s Zenshii. Of central importance, however, is the chapter that breaks down each of his major works separately. It is the most clearly written work in regards to getting to the heart of Tsuji’s philosophy, but it is not strictly about Nihilism either. However, Nihilist is best understood as a collection of writings rather than a volume belonging to a single author’s domain. Kuninosuke, however, organizes these in a playful and yet logical way, such as by grouping several pieces under the chapter title “Is it Tsuji that is Crazy, or is it Japanese Society?”
Mishima Akira’s Tsuji Jun: geijutsu to byori (Tsuji Jun: art and pathology 1970) lays out a psychology- oriented perspective that highlights Tsuji’s interest in Lombroso’s The Man of Genius and the way Tsuji’s philosophy and lifestyle mirror some of Lombroso’s ideas on insanity and the creative mind. It also includes the most lengthy section on Tsuji and Max Stirner. While its biographical elements are strong, Mishima’s volume can be understood as a more critically focused approach than that of Tamagawa because of its focus on art and madness, as the title implies.
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** [Back Cover]
JAPANESE DADAIST, ANARCHIST, PHILOSOPHER, MONK
One cannot properly speak of Nihilism, Egoism, or literary Dadaism in Japan for any length of time without mentioning Tsuji’s place in that continuum.
[1] Japanese names in this work appear with the surname written first, followed by the given name. Non-English tenns are set in italics with the exception of placenames. 1be macron is used to indicate Japanese long vowels and is omitted only in commonly known placenames such as “Tokyo”.
[2] While the author does not intend any disparaging of other languages through asserting the necessity for English-language scholarship, practically speaking English is a language with such widespread usage that it becomes a particularly effective language for disseminating scholarship across the world and is therefore the language suggested here.
[3] “Egoism” is a term often conflated with “Egoist Anarchism”, and whilst it must be remembered that there are several possible usages for the term “Egoism”, in the context of this work it is simply used to imply Stirner’s Egoist Anarchism, especially as interpreted by Tsuji.
[4] Ko, Wǒn. 1977. Buddhist elements in Dada: a comparison of Tristan Tzara, Takahashi Shinkichi, and their fellow poers. New York: New York University Press. 23,80.
[5] Tsuji, Jun ed. Nobuaki Tamagawa. 1982 1Suji Jun zenshii. Tokyo: Gogatsushobo. V. 4, 154.
[6] “Tsuji chose not to express himself with a pen so much as he chose to express himself through living, as conveyed by his personality. 1bat is, Tsuji himself was his expression’s piece of work” (Tsuji v. 9, 220–221).
[7] In order of appearance, these titles are Nihirisuto: Tsuji Jun no shisō to shagai, ISuji Jun e no Ai, Haro no Dadaisuto ISuji Jun, Fūkyō no Hito ISuji Jun: shakuhachi co uchii no oto to Dada no umi, and ISuji Jun: geijutsu ro byari.
[8] While Tsuji has used words in his writing from various languages including English, German, and French (Tsuji v. 1, 16–19), Tamagawa indicates that at the time of Tsuji’s translation of Lombroso’s The Man of Genius, Tsuji knew “only English” and had worked from an English copy of the work (Hyōden 92). That was in 1914, and a year later Tsuji would publish Stirner’s The Ego and Its Own. While the works were first published in Italian and German respectively, it would seem Tsuji’s translations in general came through English copies of foreign literature. Tsuji used English extensively during his life, panicularly during his employments as a school teacher and a freelance tutor. While Tsuji’s knowledge of other languages was limited, Tsuji had studied French during his Christian Socialist phase (Hackner 81) at the turn of the century, and it is likely Tsuji developed better French during his sojourn in Paris.
[9] For a more thorough and comprehensible definition of these terms, particularly when taken in a Buddhist sense, se Abe Masao, Allen (132), Nagami, Kasulis, Unno, and Ko (35, 63).
[10] Nagami, lsamu. 1981. “The Ontological Foundation in Tetsuro Watsuji’s Philosophy: Kii and Human Existence”. Philosophy East and West. 31 (3): 279–296.
[11] Piovesana, Gino K. 1969. Contemporary Japanese philosophical thought. Asian philosophical studies, no. 4. New York: St. John’s University Press. 202
[12] Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm, Walter Arnold Kaufmann, and R. J. Hollingdale. 1967. The will to power. New York: Random House. 267
[13] Jaanus, Maire. 1979. Literature and negation. New York: Columbia University Press, 134.
[14] One use of kūkyo is in Tsuji’s *Zenshū* v. 4, 426, and kyomu appears in the phrase “creative nothing” (sōzōteki kyomu) in various works, including in the latter half of “Jibun dake no sekai” in Zenshū v. 3. Kū appears in various forms, such as in the work “Kūkūbakubaku” (empty and boundless) (Tsuji v. 4, 108). Essentially, Tsuji makes use of several of these terms for nothingness.
[15] Parkes, Graham. 1991. Nietzsche and Asian thought Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 181, Ornuka, Tushiharu, and Stephen Foster, ed. 1998. “Tada=Dada (Devotedly Dada) for the Stage”. The Eastern Dada orbit: Russia, Georgia, Ukraine, Central Europe and Japan. Crisis and the ans: The History of Dada I Stephen C. Foster, general ed, vol. 4. New York: Hal [u.a.]. 226, Ko 16.
[16] Ko 63–64.
[17] Parkes 181.
[18] More about Tsuji’s contemporaries (such as Itō) can be found in the next chapter under the “Contemporaries” heading.
[19] Nihon Anakizumu Undo Jinmei Jiten Henshil, 423.
[20] Tsuji v. 1, 313.
[21] Hackner, Thomas. 2001. Dada und Fururismus in Japan: die Rezeption der historischen Avantgarden. Mūnchen: Iudicium. 80.
[22] Setouchi, Harumi. 1993. Beauty in disarray. Rutland, VT: Charles E. Tuttle. 66.
[23] Tamagawa, Nobuaki. 2005, Horo no dadaisuto Tsuji Jun: Ore wa shinsei yuūtsusha de aru. Tokyo: Shakai Hyoronsha. 50–51.
[24] Ibid. 52, Hackner 82, Tsuji v. l, 389.
[25] Setouchi 250.
[26] Ibid. 110.
[27] Tsuji v. 1, 405.
[28] Ibid 125, 152.
[29] Named after the fashion of the feminist group, the Blue Stockings Society of late 18th Century England.
[30] Tamagawa, Nobuaki. 1971. Thuji Jun hy&len. Tokyo: San’ichi Shooo. 332.
[31] Setouchi 107.
[32] Ibid. 110.
[33] Bardsley, Jan. 2007. The bluestockings of Japan: new woman essays and fiction from Seita, 1911–16. Ann Arbor: Cemer for Japanese Studies, The University of Michigan. 144.
[34] Stanley 93.
[35] Setouchi 320.
[36] Takaki, Mamoru. 1979. Tuuji Jun: [ko] ni ikiru. TOkyo: Taimatsusha. 88, 92–93.
[37] See the next section, Chapter III’s history of Japanese anarchism, and Rubin: Rubin, Jay. 1984. Injurious co public morals: writers and the Meiji state. Seattle: University of Washington Press.
[38] Rubin 227–234.
[39] Tamagawa Hyōden 333.
[40] Matsuo Toshiko wrote a memoir for Tsuji Jun: Matsuo, Toshiko. 1987. Tsuji Jun no omoide. Kyoto-shi: Kyomu Shisti Kenkyū Henshū ūnkai.
[41] Literally, “Ore wa tengu dazo!”, referencing the popular mythological tengu (a goblin that is a cross between a bird and a human, held in Buddhism to be a disruptive demon that lives in the mountains and leads people off the proper Buddhist path, also thought to take the form of a wandering monk with a sage hat and a curiously long nose).
[42] Tamagawa Hyōden 270.
[43] Yomiuri Shimbun April 10th, 1932.
[44] Omuka 246.
[45] Literally, this implies a Komusō (虚無僧) or “Priest of Nothingness”, generally from the Fuke sect of Zen Buddhism. The komus6 were famous for their reed hoods/hats, which obscured most of the wearer’s face . The anonymity of this was intended to dismantle one’s sense of ego. The shakuhachi was for komus6 a spiritual tool.
[46] Shinchō, v. 80. 1949. Tokyo: Shinchosha. 310.
[47] This is corroborated across al major works about Tsuji Jun.
[48] Tamagawa Hyōden 33 .
[49] Tsuji v. 3, 153.
[50] Tamagawa Hyōden 335.
[51] The original title is “Furōmango”, which uses the characters 浮浪漫語. Reading the first two characters as a word we find furō, or vagabond. However, it could have been intentional that another word emerges from reading the second and third characters together, *roman* (romance). Therefore, a more cheesy translation of this title could be “Roamance Writings”. The final character implies words or a language, which Omuka translates as “notes” (Omuka 226).
[52] Tsuji v. 1, 23.
[53] Tsuji v. 1,24–25.
[54] Tsuji’s self-perception is covered further in Chapter VI.
[55] Setouchi 73, 2S7.
[56] Tsuji v. 1, 273.
[57] Tsuji v. 1, 16.
[58] Tsuji v. 4, 210.
[59] Ibid. v. 4, 210.
[60] Kurahashi, Ken khi. 1990. Tuuji June no ai: Kojima Kiyo no shi’igai. Tokyo: Sojusha.
Matsuo, Toshiko. 1987. Thuji Jun no omoide. Kyoto-shi: Kyomu Shis5 Kenkyū Henshū linkai.
[61] Setouchi 27.
[62] A definition of Unmensch is provided in Chapter III: “Stirnerism in a Nutshell”. In shon, it is Stirner’s idea of a typical Egoist.
[63] Tsuji v. 9, 219- 223.
[64] Tsuji v. 4, 407, 211.
[65] For more on Kōtoku and the inception of Japanese anarchism see:
Notehelfer, F. G. 1971. Kōtoku Shis ui, portrait of a Japanese radical. Cambridge
[Eng.]: University Press.
[66] Notehelfer, 108, 110
[67] Ibid. 116, 121, 125, 130–133.
[68] Hane, Mikiso. 1993. Reflections on the way to the gallows: rebel women in prewar Japan. Berkeley: University of California Press. 54
Rubin 108.
[69] Notehelfer 185–200.
Ōsugi, Sakae. 1992. The autobiography ofŌsugi Sakae. Voices from Asia, 6.
Berkeley: University of California Press. xi
[70] See Ogai’s “Chinmoku no To” or its English translation “Tower of Silence”, as well as his short story “The Dining Room” (“Shokudo”), as noted in References.
[71] Crump, John. 1993. Hatta Shūzo and pure anarchism in interwar Japan. New York, N.Y.: St. Martin’s Press. 31–36
[72] Ibid. 33–6.
[73] Weisenfeld, Gennifer. 2001. Mavo: Japanese artists and the avant-garde, 1905–1931.
Belkeley, Calif: University of California Press. 78
[74] Ibid. 78.
[75] Orihara, Shfizo. 2001. 1Suji Makoro, chichioya 1Suji Jun. Tokyo: Heibonsha. 12
[76] Tsuji v. 4, 407.
[77] Stirner, Max, and David Leopold. 1995. The ego and its own. Cambridge texts in the history of political thought. Cambridge [England]: Cambridge University Press. 228
[78] Ibid. 228
[79] Weisenfeld 43
[80] Stanley, Thomas A. 1982 . Dsugi Sakae, anarchist in Taisho Japan : The creativit,y of the ego. Cambridge : Council on East Asian Studies, Harvard University Press.
[81] Raddeker, Helene Bowen. 1997. Treacherous women of imperial Japan: patriarchal fictions, patricidal fantasies. Nissan Institute/Routledge Japanese studies series. London: Routledge. 96, 100, 101
[82] Stanley 62, Raddeker 101, Nishitani 101.
[83] This 1986 walk was translated into English in 1990underthe new title The Self- Overcaming of Nihilism. Both the English and Japanese versions can be found in References. Nishitani Keiji remains the most prominent Japanese scholar of Nietzsche, and his remarks about Buddhism and Nihilism continue to circulate today.
[84] Ibid. 101–126.
[85] Refer also to Paterson’s work The Nihilistic Egoist: Max Stirner.
[86] This is to be distinguished from The Man of Genius, the focus of which is primarily insanity and the artistic or scientific mind, usualy in a non-criminal sense.
[87] Arima, Tatsuo. 1969. The failure of fred om; a portrait of modem Japanese intellectuals. Harvard East Asian series, 39. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
[88] Raddeker 97-B
[89] Ibid. Bl
[90] Hoston, Germaine. 1994, The State, identity, and the national question in China and Japan. Princeton, N.J. : Princeton University Press, 85–86.
[91] Engels, Friedrich, Emile Burns, and C. P. Dutt. 20 1. Herr Eugen Dūhring’s revolution in science (anti-Dühring). London: Electric Book Co. 299
[92] Lombroso, Cesare. 1984. The man of genius. The history of hereditarian thought, 19. New York [u.a.]: Garland. 356–357.
[93] Kaufmann, Walter Arnold. 1974. Nietzsche, philosopher, psychologist, antichrist.
Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press. 167
[94] Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm, Maudemarie Clark, and Brian Leiter. 1997. Daybreak: thoughts on che prejudices of morali(Y. Cambridge texts in the history of philosophy. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press. 32
[95] Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm, and R. J. Hollingdale. 1997. Untimely meditations. Cambridge texts in the history of philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 157–8
[96] Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm, Adrian Del Caro, Roben B. Pippin. 2006. Thus spoke Zarathusrra : a book for all and none. Cambridge ; New York : Cambrige University Press. 23, 24.
[97] The terms “Egoism” and “Egotism” should not be confused, and Stirnerist Egoism as taken up by Tsuji does not imply direct associations with Freudian conceptions of the Ego.
[98] Paterson, R W. K. 1971. The nihilistic egoist: Max Stirner. London: Published for the University of Hull by Oxford University Press. 3, 11, 97–8
[99] Stirner 19–128.
[100] Paterson 176.
[101] Stirner 7.
[102] Stirner 159–160.
[103] In Gennan, the term Unmensch comes off panicularly villainously. This term is most likely used to heighten Stirner’s unapologetic and provocative tone, rather than to imply that the philosophy means people should do villainous things.
[104] Stirner 262.
[105] Ko 80,
[106] Ibid. 80.
[107] Setouchi 252, 301.
[108] One particularly useful work is Motherwell’s TheDada Painters and Poets (1951).
[109] Omuka 259–260.
[110] Kuenzli, Rudolf Ernst. 2006. Dada. Londres: Phaiclon. 178,
[111] “Doitsu Bijutsu-kai no ki-gensho” (“A Strange Phenomenon in the German Art World”). 27 June 1920. Yorozu Chōhō, morning edition. 5
[112] Omuka 227.
[113] See Omuka.
[114] In much literature the term “Dada” is preferred to imply someone who creates Dada, and while this is further in line with the general Dadaist intention to destroy the blind adherence to “isms”, for the sake of clarity this work uses the term “Dadaist” rather than “Dada”. This choice was made in accord with Tsuji’s own statement, “Whatever sort of ‘ist’ you call me, for whatever reason, doesn’t really matter to me... even ‘Dadaist’... I am going to he my own variety of Dada regardless” (Tsuji v.l, 273).
[115] See Chapter 3 of Won’s work on Takahashi: “Sex and Excreta”, Weisenfeld 242–245.
[116] Tsuji was also a staunch feminist and even contributed a foreward to Hayashi
Fumiko’sAo-uma wo Mitari:
Hayashi, Fumiko, Janice Brown, and Fumiko Hayashi. 1997. I saw a pale horse = Aouma wo mitari ; and, Selected poems from Diary of a vagabond (Horoki). Cornell EastAsia series, 86. Ithaca, N.Y.: East Asia Program, Cornell University.
[117] Omuka 280.
[118] Weisenfeld 37.
[119] Ibid. 70.
[120] Ibid. 70.
[121] Ibid. 158–9.
[122] Wilil ams, Junko Ikezu. 1998. Visions and narratives: modernism in the prose works o(Yoshiyuki Eisuke, Murayama Tomoyoshi, Yumeno Kyūsaku, Okamoto Kanoko. Thesis (Ph. 0.)--0hio State University. 31
[123] Ibid. 45.
[124] Kuenzli 40.
[125] Gardner, William 0. 1999. Avant-garde literature and the new city: Tokyo 19231931. Thesis (Ph. D.)--Stanford University. 130.
[126] Omuka 269.
[127] Kuenzli 40, Ornuka 270.
[128] Gardner 18.
[129] Ko 26.
[130] Ibid 23, 26.
[131] Raddeker 101.
[132] Hane 75–76.
[133] Raddeker 81.
[134] Ibid. 63–87.
[135] Setouchi 250.
[136] Ibid. 248.
[137] Stanley 100.
[138] Ibid. 96, 103, 98.
[139] Ibid 104.
[140] Ibid. 159, 160.
[141] Yoshida, Yoshishige, Shinji Soshizaki, Masahiro Yamada, Mariko Okada, Toshiyuki Hosokawa, Yuko Kosunoki, and Etsushi Takahashi. 20 . Eros + massacre. [Film] [S.l.]: Carlotta.
[142] Schorske, Carl E. 1979. Fin-de-siecle Vienna: politics and culture. New York: Knopf : distributed by Random House.
[143] lbid. 5.
[144] Mūller, Ingo. 2007. A history of thermodynamics the doctrine of energy and entropy. Berlin Heidelberg New York, NY. 94
[145] Schorske 9.
[146] Goldstein, Rebecca. 2005. Incompleteness: the prof and paradox ofKurt G&lel. Great discoveries. New York: W.W. Norton.
[147] Abe, KobO. 1981. Suna no onna. Tokyo: Shinchosha.
[148] “Das alles gleitet und voribei rinnt”-- this section uses a conjugation of his famed Gleitende.
[149] Hofmannsthal, Hugo von, and J. D. McClatchy. 2008. The whole difference: selected writings of Hugo von Hofmannsthal. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press. 2627,
[150] Hofmannsthal, Hugo von, and Joel Rotenberg. 2005. The Lord Chandos letter and other writings. NewYork Review Books classics. NewYork: New York Review Books.
[151] Schorske 19.
[152] Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm, Rolf-Peter Horsnnann, and Judith Nonnan. 2002. Beyond good and evil: prelude to a philosophy of the future. Cambridge texts in the history of philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 15
[153] Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm, Walter Arnold Kaufmann, and R.J. Hollingdale. 1967. The will to power. New York: Random House. 331
[154] Pehowski, Marian Frances. 1980. Darwinism and the naturalistic novel: J.P. Jacobsen, Frank Norris and Shimazaki Toson. Ann Arbor: University Microfilms. 214
[155] Kropotkin, Petr Alekseevich. 1926. The conquest of bread. New York: Vanguard Press. 1–5.
[156] Tsuji v. 1, 406.
[157] Ornuka 246.
[158] For example, Nishitani, Parkes, and Mistry, Freny. 1981. Nietzsche and Buddhism: prolegomenon to a comparative study. Berlin ; NewYork : W. de Gruyter.
[159] Moore, John. 2004. I Am Not a Man, I am dynamite!: Friedrich Nietzsche and the anarchist tradition. New York: Autonomedia; London: Pluto.
[160] Karatani, Kōjin. 1993. Origins ofmodem Japanese literature. Post-contemporary interventions. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press. 55
[161] “GaitO ni Chijini no Dokugo” (original date 5 June, 1937). Tamagawa, Nobuaki. 1984. Dadaisuto ‘Tsuji Jun. Tokyo: Ronsosha.
[162] Tsuji’s inclination to use snippets of foreign language will be addressed more later in this chapter.
[163] The Red and Black manifesto reads: “What is poetry? What is tbe poet? We audaciously declare, throwing out al notions of tbe past: ‘poetry is a bomb! The poet is a black criminal who throws a bomb at tbe strong walls and doOls of tbe prison!”’ (Omuka 248)
[164] Tsuji as an anarchist is scarcely mentioned in Stephen Large’s 1977 “The Romance of Revolution in Japanese Anarchism and Communism during the Thisho Period” (Modem Asian Studies. 11 (3): 441–467).
[165] Tsuji v. 1, 23, 24.
[166] Bookchin, Murray. 1995. Social anarchism or lifestyle anarchism: the unbridgeable chasm. Edinburgh, Scotland: AK Press. 52.
[167] Tsuji v. 1, 23, 27–28.
[168] Ibid. v. 1, 26, 28, 23, 24.
[169] Ibid. v. 1, 23, 24.
[170] Omuka 246.
[171] Ibid. 235, 237
[172] Omuka points out that, when read backwards, Tosukina’s name resembles a Japanese word for anarchist, anakisuto.
[173] Ibid. 235–7.
[174] Ko 245.
[175] Yoneda, Ko. 23 December 1922. “Tsui ni Hak o wo shita Dada no Shijin Takahashi Shinkichi Kun”, Yomiuri Shimbun. 7.
[176] Weisenfeld 56.
[177] Ibid. 10, 38, 40.
[178] Ornuka 246.
[179] Ibid 246.
[180] Ibid. 244.
[181] Hackner 99.
[182] Tsuji v. 1, 16
[183] Ko 35, 63.
[184] Tsuji v. 3, 150–155.
[185] Hackner 98.
[186] Omuka 237.
[187] Ambaras, David Richard. 2005. Bad youth: juvenile delinquency and the politics of everyday life in modem Japan. Studies of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute, Columbia University. Berlshigo (私語) implies that one is munnuring to oneself. Therefore we can understand the essay to be mostly notes written for his own purposes in proper Egoist fashion, rather than something written for the reader’s consumption.
[195] Tsuji v. 4, 211.
[196] See Hagiwara’s passage at the end of Chapter II and Tsuji v. 4 211.
[197] Lombroso viii.
[198] Ibid. 133.
[199] Ibid. 319.
[200] Setouchi 125, 152.
[201] Tsuji v. 4, p. 209.
[202] This is the same term used in his post-institutionalization essay, “Hen na Atama” (“Crazy”) (Tsuji v. 3 150–155).
[203] Tsuji and Itō did not go “on the books” when they got married (Setouchi ##).
[204] Tsuji v. 1, 377–378.
[205] Ibid. v. 4, p. 209.
[206] Omuka 244, Tsuji v. 3, 153.
[207] Izen was a disciple of the famed Matsuo Basha and was a monk and poet, known for incorporating nenbutsu into his poetry and for utilizing onomatopoeia to an extreme degree. That Tsuji compares himself yet again with an archetypal monk poet suggests that there was a significant amount of spiritual significance to Tsuji’s poems- perhaps more than Takahashi would have cared to admit. (Ueda 137, (Yamada-Bochynek 247)
[208] Ibid. v. 4, p. 209.
[209] There is less of a distinction between “musician” and “poet” in Japanese than comes across in English translation because the word for poem, *shi* # can also mean “song”, uta,
[210] Ibid. v. 4, p. 210.
[211] Ibid. v. 4, p. 210.
[212] The Japanese is shinri byōsha (心理描写) meaning expressions of matters of the heart/mind (or “psychology”). The problem of this translation involves the character 心, or kokoro, which is a term that makes no real distinction between one’s heart and mind. Shinri itself is usually translated as “mentality” or “psychology”.
[213] Ibid. v. 4, 209.
[214] Yamada-Bochynek, Yoriko. 1985. Haiku east and west: a semiogenetic approach. BPX, 1. Bochum: N. Brockmeyer. 247
[215] “Water’s flash / a bird! buoyantly / buoyantly”, where *fuwa* implies softness like a bird’s down and may be referring to the bird itself, but is more likely referring to a gentle flap of wings which the sound *fuwa*, when repeated, resembles.
[216] Published in November, 1924 in the first issue of *Shi wo Umu Hito* (*The Birther of Poems*)
[217] Probably referring to the ash of the Japanese “Golden Bat” brand cigarete since Tsuji refers to “an empty carton of “Bat” in another (untitled) poem (Tsuji v. 4 432).
[218] TSuji v. 4, 427–428.
[219] See “Tada=Dada of Alangri Gloriban” for a glut of mixed English, German, and Japanese words, esoteric references, and Dada (Tsuji v. 1, 16).
[220] This is an example of the repetitive onamatopoeia in “Absurd”, resembling the same feature of Izen’s poetry.
[221] “I Wonder What Will Become of You?” ibid. v. 4, 425–426.
[222] These characters (凹凸 凹凸) visually present the reader with the images of bumps and holes, as well as the meaning of “roughness” they imply as words.
[223] Ko 39–40.
[224] Ko 80.
[225] 1932. “Tsuji Jun Shi Tengu ni Nam”, Yomiuri Shimbun, April 11”’ Morning Edition.
[226] 1931. “Yoru wo Toshite Nomu Yukata gake no Kamisama? Sake Sake Sake no Tsuji Jun Shi” Yomiuri Shimbun, August 9* Morning Edition.
[227] 1932. “Bundan no Kijin Tsuji Jun Shi Totsujo Hakkyosu”, Yamato Shimbun, February 10”’ Morning Edition.
[228] Tamagawa Hyōden 171.
[229] Takano, Kiyoshi. 2006. *Fūkyō no hito tsuji jun: shakuhachi to ucha no oto to dada no umi*. Tokyo: Jinbunshokan.
[230] Tamagawa, Nobuaki. 2005. *Hora no dadaisuto Tsuji Jun: Ore wa shinsei yuiitsusha de aru*. Tokyo: Shakai Hyoronsha.
[231] Et. vi. of Nothing. 1998. “Tsuji Jun Home Page and The Headquarters of The Sacred Teaching of Underman.”
[[http://web.archive.org/web/20010219055722/www2.justnet.ne.jp/-etvi/TsujiJun/English/Underman.html][http://web.archive.org/web/20010219055722/www2.justnet.ne.jp/-etvi/TsujiJun/English/Underman.html]]
[232] Yoshida, Yoshishige, Shinji Soshizaki, Masahiro Yamada, Mariko Okada, Toshiyuki Hosokawa, Yūko Kosunoki, and Etsushi Takahashi. 2008. Eros + massacre. [Film] [S.I.]: Carlotta.
[233] Raddeker 74.
[234] Omuk.a 243.
[235] Tsuji v. 1, 16.
[236] Stirner 5.
[237] Tsuji v. 1,32.
[238] Chapter V.
[239] Chapter II: “Teachings of the Unmensch “.
[240] See References for further publication information regarding these texts.