Discourses of the Vanishing: Modernity, Phantasm, Japan.

TLDR

Deep anxieties about Japan’s potential loss of national identity and continuity, coupled with a fascination that led to early 20th‑century folklore studies, frame the cultural context. The study aims to expose Japan’s anxieties about cultural loss by tracing the phenomenon of the vanishing—marginalized events, sites, and practices on the brink of disappearance. The author traces the obsession with the vanishing across contemporary practices, from remote communities marketing nostalgic authenticity to storytelling, tourism campaigns, medium‑led recallings, and itinerant kabuki‑inspired theatre. The findings reveal that fascination with cultural margins paralleled Japan’s emergence as a modern nation‑state.

Abstract

Deep anxieties about the potential loss of national identity and continuity disturb many in Japan, despite widespread insistence that it has remained culturally intact. In this conjoining of ethnography, history and cultural criticism, Marilyn Ivy discloses these anxieties, as she tracks what she calls the vanishing: marginalized events, sites and cultural practices suspended at moments of impending disappearance. Ivy shows how a fascination with cultural margins accompanied the emergence of Japan as a modern nation-state. This fascination culminated in the early 20th-century establishment of Japanese folklore studies and its attempts to record the spectral, sometimes violent, narratives of those margins. She then traces the obsession with the vanishing through a range of contemporary reconfigurations: efforts by remote communities to promote themselves as nostalgic sites of authenticity, storytelling practices as signs of pre-modern presence, mass travel campaigns, recallings of the dead by blind mediums, and itinerant, kabuki-inspired populist theatre.