Richard Sennett writes that in a society with a strong public life, “there should be affinities between the domains of stage and street…something comparable in the expressive experience crowds have had in these two realms” (Reference Sennett1977, 37). If later historians of public space have disagreed about the character and quality of these affinities, many have similarly privileged the urban street as the most suitable place to observe them. This holds true for scholars of Asia too, whose work on performance and publicness under modernity has centered on sites like the coffeehouses of Shanghai, the literary addas of Calcutta, the new boulevards of colonial Seoul, and the Western-style parks of Tokyo (Lee Reference Lee1999, Chakrabarty Reference Chakrabarty and Gaonkar2001, Henry Reference Henry, Tangherlini and Yea2008, Gordon Reference Gordon1991). Journey outside the city, however, and there are traces of an equally dynamic, if less visible, interplay between theater, public space, and civil society. Consider the case of Miyazawa Kenji (1896–1933), a provincial Japanese poet and children's author who, while alive, remained little known outside his native northeastern prefecture of Iwate. In January 1927, the local paper reported that he was leading nearly 30 village youth to form the Rasu Farmers Association, a cooperative run out of a repurposed family cottage on the outskirts of town. The new space would be used for exchanging ideas on agriculture, art, and the revitalization of rural life, but also for putting those ideas into practice through physical labor, concerts, and amateur theater (Miyazawa Reference Miyazawa and Seiroku1995, 16: 358).Footnote ¹ Preparations were already underway, in fact, for the staging of an original six-act play titled “Poran's Square” (Poran no hiroba). It is the fascinating story of this play—as a piece of amateur theater, as an evolving series of unpublished manuscripts, and ultimately as a meditation on the structure of rural social space—that serves here to illuminate the village “street” as an imagined site of social transformation and public engagement in interwar Japan.

The early part of the interwar period was a challenging time for Japanese farmers: crop prices dropped as the cost of material goods rose, tenant-landlord disputes became more contentious and politically charged, and rural youth flocked to cities in increasing numbers. Though the state would continue to downplay the severity of the agricultural crisis until the early 1930s, a growing number of metropolitan intellectuals and local rural elites took matters into their own hands and sought ways to reinvent the farm village as social space. They tried to imagine, that is, a public life organized along different cultural, economic, and political lines, where political should be understood broadly as the redistribution of power through the restructuring of established social or material relations.Footnote ² Miyazawa, whose regionally inflected poetic sketches and fabulist children's fiction (dōwa) have since made him one of Japan's most iconic and celebrated literary figures, developed his own independent response to the crisis with projects like the aforementioned cooperative, a series of public lectures on “farmers’ art” (nōmin geijutsu), and free fertilizer consultations for area farmers.Footnote ³ These, at least, are the activities cited by his earliest posthumous admirers as evidence of his selfless devotion to the lives of farmers (Yonemura Reference Yonemura2003, 201–12) and by later scholars who emphasize how radically grounded was his response. Unlike his urban counterparts, Miyazawa benefited from specialized study in agronomy and was able to apply this practical knowledge to social and environmental contexts with which, as a native resident, he was deeply familiar (Golley Reference Golley2008, 168–9; Yō Reference Yō1998, 103–19).

Equally central to Miyazawa's reformist project was his linking of communalist venture with amateur theater. His participation in the former put him in dialogue with a long line of “rural returnees,” including the gentleman farmers of late-Meiji who wrote while tilling the fields; the idealists of Taishō who sought a return to self-sufficiency in communitarian experiments like Mushanokōji Saneatsu's “New Village” and Tachibana Kōzaburō's “Fraternal Village”; and the anarchists and reformers of early Shōwa who re-imagined the village cooperative as instrument for cultural edification, socio-economic restructuring, and even radical political intervention.Footnote ⁴ Though less extreme in his politics, Miyazawa's “return” was most closely allied with this third group, as he was not so much focused on retreating from an urban modernity considered overly materialistic—and thus culturally bankrupt—as he was on rehabilitating rural society in the here-and-now.Footnote ⁵ Similarly, his interest in the stage borrowed from a conviction already shared by native and foreign dramatists that theater was a socially ameliorative art form with civilizing and democratizing functions. Where he diverged from either movement was in his determination to integrate both into a single vision of renewed rural community. Indeed, when two agricultural students visited him in 1927 to ask about revitalizing their own villages, he told them to, “First, be like the tenant farmer. Second, do farmers’ theater” (Andō Reference Andō1992, 11–12).Footnote ⁶

Miyazawa's use of theater as a form of praxis, however, has received less attention from scholars than some of his other endeavors. This is in part because he wrote only four plays, all during his four-year stint as instructor of chemistry, soil science, meteorology, and composition at the local Hanamaki School of Agriculture, a two-year vocational school. “Poran's Square” was among them, first staged as a one-act vignette in August 1924, for an audience of about 300 friends, family, and alumni from the surrounding community (IWATE NIPPŌ, August 13, 1924).Footnote ⁷ As described in the original script, the seventh and eighth-year students who performed the play were to be dressed as so many country gentlemen, village maidens, shepherds, and grape farmers, and were to be gathered at a hiroba (square, open space) in a field far from any human settlement. On stage, this hiroba was to be defined by linen-covered tables, a small conductor's podium, and two alder trees decorated in lanterns and tinsel. Behind it all, a backdrop depicting a vast field of blooming clover and a luminous night sky (Miyazawa Reference Miyazawa and Seiroku1973, 11: 341–42).

Into this space stumble Kyuste, an intellectual masquerading as a low-ranking civil servant from the Department of Museums, and Fazero, a young elementary school student. What they find there is a lively summer festival where everyone dances to the sounds of an orchestra as wine flows freely into their cups. There is one reveler, however, a belligerent hunter named Dr. Wildcat, who drinks despondently off to stage right. He believes that the space is his to lord over as he pleases, and he soon makes himself the center of attention by commanding the orchestra to play a song of his choosing and by insulting the two newcomers in verse, claiming that they have ruined the atmosphere of the place by requesting grape juice rather than wine. The young Fazero retorts with an insulting verse of his own, angering Wildcat enough to challenge the boy to a duel. Kyuste tries to intercede, but to no avail. “Fine. A child is the perfect match for a cowardly brute who can say nothing without a sip of liquor first” (347). A comical fight with steak knives ensues and the bully is sent fleeing from what he disparages as “a return to the Poran's Square of old.” The festival-goers are elated, including one grape farmer who proclaims, “For the rest of the night, let us not think of such trifling things as our daily lives and the question of who is better than who…let us sing happily as we are bathed in the light of the clover and the faint glimmer of the Milky Way” (348). Fazero has restored to the community a space to call its own.

At first glance, the play looks like children's theater as Walter Benjamin once envisioned it: “a great creative pause in the process of upbringing…[representing] in the realm of children what the carnival was in the old cults. Everything…turned upside down [as] children stand on the stage and instruct and teach the attentive educators” (Reference Benjamin and Jennings1999, 205). The lesson learned is that public space can be socially transformative when one performs roles different from those prescribed by society—a message with a suggestive homology in the structure of the event itself: an intellectual encouraging young farmers to stand before their community and enact the ousting of a tyrant. Indeed, the homology points to a greater conviction in the nexus of stage and public space as conduit for altering the character of lived social relations, and thus offers a glimpse, to be traced in more detail below, of perceived affinities between theater, public space, and civil society outside the nation's metropolitan core.Footnote ⁸ And this at a time when a rising national interest in school theater had a fellow Iwate educator claiming that even in the most remote mountain areas, no school assembly, alumni reunion, or commemorative event occurred without at least one children's play (IWATE NIPPŌ, May 26, 1924).Footnote ⁹

Yet when we consider that the play, based on a longer prose version, was seen only once, and by a limited audience, we have to wonder about the degree to which these affinities became intertwined with social reality. The traces left by “Poran's Square” on the public record were, beyond a few references in local media, almost negligible, mere flickers in the night at the darkest edge of a remote field. Miyazawa did return to the story in 1927 to expand on his vision of utopian rural community, but neither this nor the earliest prose version were ever published in his lifetime.Footnote ¹⁰ To this distance from the public record must be added the experiential distance generated by the narrative itself with its use of non-Japanese names, a distinctly foreign rural economy, and an image of public space that, with each subsequent version, strayed from the “horizons of meaning” associated with the hiroba, and public sites like it, in the interwar period.Footnote ¹¹ It neither borrowed from the classic European image of a town square, as one reporter suggested it might, nor was it obviously home-grown (IWATE NIPPŌ, August 5, 1924). Inscribed thus at the conceptual and archival fringes, “Poran's Square” forces a reevaluation of that which constitutes the object of any history of public space. Where does one include aspects less visible as material form or event, aspects inscribed as unpublished personal memory or creative vision and yet which clearly address public space as idea and lived reality? I argue that the value of these hidden aspects lies in their inability or refusal to obtain a public presence, making “Poran's Square” a record of public space in potentia, but also a record, in the form of a negative imprint, of the entrenched patterns of social association and order which kept it from being anything more.

Mapping the Temporal Horizons of Interwar Public Space

When considering “Poran's Square” within the larger history of public space in Japan, what initially stands out is Miyazawa's refusal of more familiar spaces of interwar encounter: city streets and entertainment districts, theaters and cafes, temple and shrine grounds. Also striking is the refusal to give his hiroba a formal shape, though the word had since the 1880s been equivalent to the architectural form known variously as square, platz, piazza, and place.Footnote ¹² By late Meiji, in fact, writers were using the term to describe the various squares and plazas they encountered abroad, as when Nagai Kafū [Nagai Sōkichi] visited the St. Louis Plaza at the 1904 World's Fair and later wrote about it in his Amerika monogatari (American Stories, Reference Nagai1908).Footnote ¹³ Yet hiroba was just as likely at this time to signify “a wide or spacious place,” an older connotation that designated an informal space where people often congregated but rarely served as a proper noun, remaining into Meiji a general signifier for intersections of people and place or for empty, void-like spaces.Footnote ¹⁴ Poran's “square” is thus narrated somewhere between the hiroba as translated concept and as lingering linguistic trace. While it lacks concrete form and appears to exist in the middle of nowhere, it does have a name and, according to the script, a spatio-temporal location in the 1920s and in Miyazawa's invented literary region of Iihatov.Footnote ¹⁵

One reason for its lack of concreteness may be the relative dearth of built hiroba at the time. While there were spaces in Tokyo that had earned the label, it was slow to become a formal object of urban design.Footnote ¹⁶ None, for instance, were included in the first set of plans for Tokyo's restructuring, completed in 1889 (Fujimori Reference Fujimori2004, 188). Although they did eventually materialize as a feature of large metropolitan parks and as a spatial unit attached to train station buildings (Worrall Reference Worrall2005), it was not until the City Planning Law of 1919 that planners began to think seriously about integrating them into the urban landscape, and not until the era of reconstruction following the Great Kantō Earthquake in 1923 that those thoughts were realized. In Tokyo, as elsewhere, the traditional reliance on local shrines and temples as public open space slowed the adoption of policies that would provide for alternative kinds of open areas alongside urban growth. Indeed, it remained common practice in the first half of the century to develop large tracts of urban land with little or no public space (Sorensen Reference Sorensen2002, 43).Footnote ¹⁷ The stand-alone hiroba remained, at least until the mid-1920s, a figment of planners’ imaginations, existing primarily as a unit to be integrated into public parks (kōen) or as a kind of “small park” (shōkōen) in and of itself.Footnote ¹⁸

If its absence was pronounced in Tokyo, it was even more so in provincial towns like Miyazawa's native Hanamaki. While many rural sites qualified as hiroba in the sense of “open area” (e.g., shrine and temple grounds, the village crossroads, the spaces in front of prominent buildings or homes, and the fallow fields that lay between dispersed residences), none were of the planned variety.Footnote ¹⁹ In the town proper, whose population was near 15,000 in 1925, alternative public sites included the streets of the downtown commercial center, a park below the old castle grounds, and the open area fronting the local Asahi Theater. During the town's annual three-day autumn festival, townspeople and farmers alike flocked to the latter to witness sideshows and circuses, to partake from food stalls, and to crowd into a huge tent where they watched the latest moving-picture shows from the city.Footnote ²⁰ Significantly, Miyazawa took inspiration from none of these sites. Instead, he remained true to his creative propensity for engaging reality not through the “unmediated” recording of the directly observable, as was being encouraged by some of the gatekeepers of children's fiction at the time (Long forthcoming, chap. 3), but by meticulously translating reality's underlying structures and hierarchies—whether social, economic, or biological—into a symbolically dense allegorical language.

Where correspondences between “Poran's Square” and the historical record do begin to emerge is at the level of discourse, especially if we account for the typical association at the time of hiroba with the public park. City planners talked about both spaces extensively, imagining parks as open oases of rejuvenation for high density urban deserts, metaphorical lungs which improved air quality and hygiene through exposure to light and wind, recreational spaces for physical exercise, sites for leisurely walks and nature appreciation, and as places of emergency refuge (Takei Reference Takei1919, Tamura Reference Tamura1921, Orishimo Reference Orishimo1922, Uehara Reference Uehara1924, Hongō Reference Hongō and Kyōkai1924, and Inoshita Reference Inoshita and Kyōkai1924). The hiroba, as subset of the park, was seen to serve similar ends. Some planners, however, looked beyond such personally-oriented concerns, arguing for the public and populist character of parks and promoting them as gathering places for all members of society, lady and laborer alike. A few even differentiated the hiroba and small park as uniquely localized forms of public space to be administered and used by community members, and as spaces that could facilitate social integration and exchange (Takei Reference Takei1919 and Inoshita Reference Inoshita and Kyōkai1924).Footnote ²¹

Literary and journalistic accounts also reveal a split between the experience of parks and hiroba as personal spaces in which one had the right to do as one wished and as shared spaces belonging to the larger community. In the former case, there is the example of the earliest visitors to Tokyo's Hibiya Park, Japan's first Western-style park. Within two months of its opening in 1903, administrators had to put an end to late-night hours because too many people were stealing the flowers and trees (Aoki Reference Aoki2004, 226–27). This personalizing urge was evident amongst intellectuals too, even as there emerged a greater awareness of parks as disciplined, shared spaces. For them, public space entailed an equal right to “an invisible shield, a right to be left alone” (Sennett Reference Sennett1977, 27). Ishikawa Takuboku, writing in 1906 about his hometown, dreamt of closing the gates of Morioka Park and building there a grand private residence of his own (Reference Ishikawa1970). In 1917, poet Hagiwara Sakutarō rendered the park as a space for holding a quiet, intimate conversation cut off from all familial and social ties, interrupted only by the distant sound of a fountain (Reference Hagiwara1975, 43). Later, writer Terada Torahiko expressed frustration that he could not use Hibiya Park as a space of his own. In search of a place to sketch, he wandered into a “hiroba of grass and flowers” only to find it occupied by “someone cleaning his mouth with a toothpick, someone walking a dog, someone with a camera running to-and-fro in affected anguish, and someone finding pleasure in observing them all” (Terada Reference Terada1922).

Inseparable from the notion of the park as a space of one's own was the perception that it was a space open to all. Indeed, it was from its inception highly susceptible to appropriation as a shared locus of public protest. This tendency emerged at Hibiya Park almost as soon as the gates opened, as “Tokyoites of all sorts felt entitled to claim it as theirs” (Gordon Reference Gordon1991, 44). Proximity to the national government offices made it an ideal location for both state-sponsored events (e.g., wartime victory celebrations) and public demonstrations of state opposition (e.g., the rally against the outcome of Russo-Japanese War treaty negotiations which eventually erupted into wider riots). By the late teens and early twenties, while major urban parks in Tokyo and elsewhere continued to function as sites of state-sponsored ceremony, they also increasingly served as loci for a wide range of political gatherings, including the rallies which sparked the urban rice riots of 1918, the May Day celebrations of worker solidarity inaugurated in 1920, and demonstrations in support of universal manhood suffrage (Maruyama Reference Maruyama1994, 93–101). And while hiroba were hardly susceptible to large-scale political demonstrations, they were open to similar modes of appropriation. Articles from the Yomiuri newspaper reveal that through the end of the Taishō period, hiroba in Tokyo served as sites for athletic field days, military reviews, victory celebrations, demonstrations against rising streetcar fares, sendoff and welcome ceremonies, and even a student brawl.

Miyazawa's own vision of the hiroba, despite its rural setting and lack of form, arguably drew upon the same conflict between self-interest and communal will that permeated interwar discourse on public space. On one side is Dr. Wildcat, determined to make the hiroba his own, and on the other Fazero, who operates on the notion that the space rightfully belongs to any and all who find their way there. If we consider how the space functions symbolically to facilitate Fazero's victory and the sense of group solidarity achieved, we also begin to discern further historical correspondences at the level of the social imaginary (i.e., public space as ideological construct). In the first prose version of the story, for instance, which includes several layers of narrative description absent on stage, two strong correspondences emerge.

This version begins with Fazero visiting Kyuste's home to share stories about his nightly wanderings in search of Poran's Square, a place he knew as a young child for having sweets, an orchestra, fireworks, and “just about anything in any amount” (Miyazawa Reference Miyazawa and Seiroku1973, 9: 169). Kyuste, who doubles as narrator, is intrigued, though he soon learns that this idyllic spot is lorded over by Dr. Wildcat. Much less aloof than his stage persona, here he twiddles his moustache as he moves about in his long frock coat, shaking hands with the other gentlemen and feigning interest in such things as Japanese foreign investments in China.Footnote ²² Adding to the caricature is the fact that he has never allowed his carriage driver in for a drink. By the time Kyuste and Fazero arrive, then, one is inclined to see Dr. Wildcat as an arrogant capitalist who treats public space as his own while denying the rights of others to enter. Fazero's victory is consequently imbued with a stronger sense of social justice, as he appears to be expunging the corrosive effects of moneyed private interest on the greater public good.

His decision to act out, when considered as a function of the space itself, can be read either as an intrinsic by-product of the festive atmosphere and the temporary sense of liberation to which it gives rise; or as a product of extrinsic social anxieties (e.g., class friction) finally allowed a voice because of the site's ostensible openness to all. The first reading suggests that the hiroba is a temporary retreat from the work of existence and the flow of everyday life—a space ordered by cyclical progression and recurrent ritual where community members assemble, celebrate their shared escape from routine, and then disperse in anticipation of next summer's event. To visit such a hiroba is, borrowing from Chakrabarty's work on the adda of Calcutta, “to enjoy a sense of time and space that is not subject to the gravitational pull of any explicit purpose” (2001, 152). The second reframes Fazero's victory as a singularly important event which advances the space, and the public gathered there, towards something other than what it was before. The hiroba, in other words, comes to appear as a monumental site where “one's private world becomes a world-view, personal passion is transmuted into public conflict, and one has not only to make small talk, but to make history” (Hirschkop Reference Hirschkop1999, 259). Both visions would have found resonance with other ideological constructs of public space circulating at the time.

Consider, for instance, how the utilitarian rhetoric of urban planners and park advocates generated an idealized image of parks as sites for escaping the everyday and for engendering social unity. Indeed, it would have been difficult for these men to do otherwise given their professional training and a bureaucratic audience with little interest in creating sites that might facilitate unregulated assembly or popular protest. Amongst writers and poets too, as we have seen, there was a tendency to view the park as site of recurring retreat, in much the same way as the city's older parks and entertainment districts (sakariba). Tokyo's Asakusa Park, for example, and its adjoining Sixth District (Rokku), were by the 1920s well established in the minds of writers and urban ethnographers as other-worldly locales where “people from all classes and ethnicities were mashed together in one giant flow” and where “the line between stage and audience disappeared, everyone melting into a single entity” (Yoshimi Reference Yoshimi1987, 204–12).Footnote ²³ These were places designed not for marking time, but for forgetting its passage amidst the phantasmagoric chaos of commodity exchange and mass spectacle. Surely this was what Miyazawa had in mind when, upon visiting a local shrine festival in 1926 and seeing the strings of gas lights, the fruit and sweets vendors, and the tea-shops, he referred to the scene as a “Pastoral Asakusa” (den'en Asakusa).

This image of an other-worldly site recurring at the boundaries of the everyday also emerged amongst contemporary ethnographers of rural life, who associated traditional village festival with “semi-public” spaces marked as secluded or liminal. Of particular interest was the summer Obon celebration, whose defining feature was the Obon dance (bon odori), wherein residents of area hamlets came together for a night-time parade through the community. In the late 1920s, ethnographers sought to capture the essence of this dance in all its regional variation, partly out of fear that recent efforts to reform the dance's lewder elements and to bring it under the jurisdiction of official village organizations like the seinenkai (youth groups) were erasing its “authentic” form. The picture they collectively painted of the dance was one in which villagers both young and old, male and female, gathered at dusk on sacred shrine grounds, or on the fringes of the community, and spent a night engaged in revelry and social release under the ethereal light of the moon.Footnote ²⁴ A similar portrait of liminal community space was also to be found in contemporary discussions of rural theater (mura shibai, jikyōgen). One historian, noting the strict prohibitions to which such performances were once subject, wrote of instances in the early 1880s when communities, in order to evade the police, set up temporary stages in the forests outside their villages and snuck out under cover of night to watch, or sometimes perform in, amateur productions (Hayakawa Reference Hayakawa1928).Footnote ²⁵ In linking festival and theater with “public space at-a-remove” (a space located both physically and socially distant from the everyday), these images exhibit considerable structural affinities with “Poran's Square.” The story even seems to predict this discourse of rural festival as a socially liberating, yet also clandestine activity.

There are consequences, however, should we read Miyazawa's image of the hiroba as conforming solely to the cyclically determined spaces of the entertainment district or rural festival. To seek affinities along this horizon would be to place it onto a non-dialectical plane of history extending flatly both forward and back, on which it cycles in and out of presence much like a seasonal occurrence. In relation to history conceived as a forward progression of events, it could thus only play a passive role. This is similar to how traditional forms of rural entertainment (goraku) were at the time being re-imagined by folk ethnographers and social conservatives as instrumental to the preservation of village harmony. Yanagita Kunio and Orikuchi Shinobu, for instance, increasingly viewed these older practices—which in the 1920s included the Obon dance, village performances (mura shibai), and amateur wrestling (sumō)Footnote ²⁶—as “monuments to the past” which could be “imitated” endlessly, consciously enacted and performed in the interest of preserving, or renewing, for Japanese the memory of themselves as a community and, more importantly, as a single communal body (Harootunian Reference Harootunian2000, 293–206).Footnote ²⁷ A second consequence of the cyclical reading would be the implication that the “public” formed there lasted only as long as the space itself. An end to the festivities, no matter how subversive of normative practices, would mean a return to prior social relations. Or even a potentially more dangerous kind of mass hallucination in which, “all people suddenly behave as though they were members of one family” and, “deprived of seeing and hearing others,” precipitate “the end of the common world” (Arendt Reference Arendt1958, 58).Footnote ²⁸

Turning to the monumental horizon, we find that public sites susceptible to this particular ideological formulation tended to be those with high public exposure and thus more readily subject to legal measures for maintaining public order. Inscribed most explicitly in the Peace Police Law (Chian Keisatsu Hō) of 1900, these measures gave authorities the power to suppress any kind of discourse or assembly that might disrupt the peace or harm the decency of places where the public gathered freely. Though its obvious targets were oppositional political organizations, labor strikes, and rural tenancy disputes, the law also made it illegal for women and minors to participate in political events (e.g., rallies or speeches) and required that police be notified of any large, outdoor public gathering at least twelve hours in advance.Footnote ²⁹ The Peace Preservation Law (Chian Iji Hō) of 1925 was much less specific in its restrictions on gathering, but it effectively suppressed any activity which sought to reform the national body or repudiate the established system of private ownership (Okudaira Reference Okudaira1977, 59–62). Such regulative tendencies paradoxically facilitated the openness of parks and hiroba to the monumental horizon. For one, visibility made them the perfect stage to engage with historical memory and collective identity. Secondly, the laws meant to impose order on these spaces insured that any activity deemed unacceptable would, if carried out there, take on the air of an extra-ordinary occurrence.

In this respect, the placement of Poran's Square in the far-off fields clearly diminishes its monumental potential, at least at the level of material form. Yet if we maintain that those gathered there are not merely disparate revelers but representatives of larger social groups (e.g., poor peasant and greedy capitalist), then there is still room to read the space as monumental in its ideological intent. This would imply an image of public space naturally more abstract in its symbolic structure, wherein the complexities of relations between social groups in space are reduced to a single site where all come together in the form of caricatured spokespeople. But if Miyazawa wanted his audiences to believe that real physical locales could be infused with new political promise, as his later founding of the Rasu Association would suggest, then it was exactly this kind of utopian representational mode—where actions taken in public are imbued with a socially instrumental purpose—that was needed. This mode could also help convey to students the radical potential of performing and imagining public roles overtly transgressive of conventional behavior rather than merely imitative of it.

Community Takes the Stage: Theater as Public Space

Contributing to this sense of potential were contemporary attitudes toward the stage itself, which in the era of “Taishō Democracy” was quickly being redefined by Japanese educators and intellectuals as an ideal medium for social integration and class-leveling, and thus as a new kind of public forum. It was a very specific kind of forum, of course, envisioned from on high as morally edifying or as a means to democratize the production and reception of art. Influenced by popular theater movements in France, England, Russia, and America, proponents argued that the unique character of theater, as an art which synthesized all arts, made it accessible to each and every citizen.Footnote ³⁰ Critic Honma Hisao, borrowing from Swedish reformer Ellen Key and French dramatist Romain Rolland, declared in 1916 that theater was the true “people's art” (minshū geijutsu) and that, when conducted properly, it was the purest form of “recreation” for the laboring masses (Reference Honma1916).Footnote ³¹ In the years following, dramatists engaged with increasing seriousness the notion of theater as socially transformative art. Tsubouchi Shōyō, taking cues from civic theater movements in England and America, advocated an outdoor “pageant theater” to be performed for and by the people—a “public theater” (kōkyō gekijō) much in the manner of a local religious festival, but with the clear intent to foster a “democratic spirit” (Reference Tsubouchi1921, 44–59). Hirasawa Keishichi placed the urban working class at the heart of his definition of “the people” and helped to stage productions with worker actors for predominantly worker audiences (Powell Reference Powell2002, 66–76). Even the famed Little Tsukiji Theater, which opened in June of 1924, was built with raised and open seating, inscribing the ideal of equal access into the theater hall itself.Footnote ³²

Alongside these efforts came similar populist appeals for a “School Theater” (gakkō geki) and a “Farmers’ Theater” (nōmin geki). The former, which had a substantial following amongst progressive educators by the early 1920s, was touted by its most vocal proponents, Obara Kuniyoshi and Tsubouchi Shōyō, as a means for spiritual nourishment, moral instruction, and for nurturing the child's innate ability to imitate life. While both stressed the development of the individual over any benefits that child acting might have for civil society, the implication was that theater was well suited for cultivating “true humans” who could then perform the required roles of an enlightened citizenry.Footnote ³³ For the fledgling farmers’ theater movement, which emerged in the early 1920s, the stage was less moral training ground than gathering place for under-educated rural residents who were to be awakened to the enriching power of art and to their own class position. Its most prominent advocates were novelist Nakamura Seiko (1884–1974) and dramatist Iizuka Tomoichirō (1894–1983). Nakamura argued that farmers’ theater should adopt the same amateur-run, non-commercial quality of school theater, and should employ the classroom or local shrine as stage or else take place out-of-doors in the manner of a community pageant. He predicted that village youth and intellectuals interested in the plight of farmers would initially assume leadership for such productions, but that all community members would eventually take part (Nakamura Reference Nakamura1927, 40). Iizuka believed such theater would arouse in farmers a love for the soil, their neighbors, and for society as a whole (Iizuka Reference Iizuka1927, 33).Footnote ³⁴

If these various practitioners disagreed in their methods and aims, all were convinced of the stage's capacity for social unification. While this often meant unification in the interest of a morally enlightened and politically benign community, it is still significant that they saw the stage as a place where disparate individuals could assemble without regard to socially prescribed roles or hierarchies, nurture their creative instincts, and practice egalitarian forms of community. “Poran's Square” takes the conceit further by literalizing this desire for unity through the figure of a magical clothing attendant. Though his presence is minimized on stage, we learn in the first prose version that he greets visitors by not only taking their jackets, but also by offering to dress them up in whatever clothes they might imagine. Thus while patrons appear to be aristocrats of the highest rank, a fact initially of great concern to “sixteenth-ranked” civil servant Kyuste, the reality is that all outward marks of class status have been rendered indeterminate. To the extent that a visitor can dream up a suitably elegant outfit, he or she enters on the same material footing as everyone else. Ragged and shoeless Fazero chooses gold-striped red pants, shiny new boots, and three-starred epaulets, while Kyuste opts for a black velvet suit, leather boots, and pure-white gloves.Footnote ³⁵

Arguably, the leveling effect of this clothing change—itself a literal representation of the “dressing up” to which Miyazawa's students, the sons of farm families, were temporarily privilege—is precisely what generates the opportunity for Fazero to wage his contest of authority with Dr. Wildcat and win back the hiroba from the hands of a controlling minority.Footnote ³⁶ In an era when one of the first attainable steps toward a representative politics was seen to be the extension of suffrage to all adult males, irrespective of how much land they owned or how much they paid in taxes, Miyazawa may have been keen to demonstrate, through its very performance on stage, the idea that young farmers were able to represent the moral and political interests of the community at large.Footnote ³⁷ They had a right to be judged in public not for their apparent station in life, but for their potential to act out roles denied them by conventional social hierarchies.

What Miyazawa does not reveal, however, is the purpose of such acting out. What, in other words, was the lasting significance of Fazero's victory? Did he intend to reinstate some prior, ideal vision of community, or to redefine the rationale for which a community could legitimately come together in public? Neither the play nor the first prose version resolve this ambiguity, for we do not know if the victory is restorative, and thus an attempt to escape from history (cyclical), or if it is progressive, and thus a push toward the image of a public body perpetually unfinished (monumental). The first prose version speaks only of a second, failed search for the site carried out too late in the summer.

Poran's Square Revisited

Upon founding the Rasu Farmers Association in 1927, Miyazawa was better situated to articulate in concrete terms how rural social space might be reconstituted in the interests of the farming class. For he was no longer orchestrating a simple school play, but rather a real-time social experiment intent on repurposing private land (the family cottage) for cooperative use and on disseminating practical knowledge outside of typical institutional constraints. Soon after beginning this experiment, in fact, he returned to “Poran's Square” to offer a more conclusive ending. In this later version, the lines of class conflict are drawn much more starkly: Fazero is a seventeen-year-old youth who works as a kind of indentured laborer for an overbearing landowner, while Dr. Wildcat is a powerful prefectural assemblyman named Destupaago to whom Fazero's sister has been pledged in marriage. The hiroba too, here named Poraan, traces a clearer narrative arc and historical progression. Beginning in the minds of Fazero and Kyuste as local legend and mythical symbol of communal harmony and abundance, its rumored reincarnation on the outskirts of town is soon revealed as a sham. Destupaago, in an effort to win votes in an upcoming election, has merely appropriated the legend as a way to promote an open-air establishment where he serves free alcohol (Miyazawa Reference Miyazawa and Seiroku1973, 10: 93). Upon entering, Kyuste and Fazero realize that the site is anything but public. “Everyone stopped what they were doing at once and looked at us with a suspicious eye. Then they looked to Destupaago” (1973, 10: 87). When he reluctantly offers the uninvited guests some bootleg liquor, they ask for water instead, setting up the climactic duel and Fazero's victory. This time, however, there is no return to dancing, nor any call for mutual understanding. The “old” Poraan's Hiroba is abandoned by Fazero and his friends for a small factory (kōjō) that lay further out—the very site where Destupaago had been cooking up his illicit brew and falsely labeling it as medicinal acetone. There they establish a cooperative whose members, men both young and old, utilize their technical skills and practical knowledge to produce a range of goods—leather products, ham, oatmeal, chestnuts—for sale in regional markets.Footnote ³⁸ Significantly, these men imagine themselves to be creating the “true Poraan's Square of old” with their very own hands. “Not a dirty, despicable Poraan's Square meant to deceive, but one where we can go at night and sing—a wonderful place where you feel energized just from taking the wind into your lungs, where you feel ready to work the next day through full of vigor” (1973, 10: 118).

What emerges in this version, then, is the image of a public space to be built in the here-and-now through a distinctly dialectical process. That is, it arises in direct response to previous manifestations of Poran's Square within the narrative, ultimately tending toward the monumental horizon by refusing the cyclical closure that might otherwise reduce it to mere temporary festival or seasonal occurrence. Instead, it seeks a role in civil society as an autonomous site administered by the interests of all its members—a kind of Kropotkinian updating of the traditional village “common land” where the land is now the shared agricultural and manufacturing resource base for the community and where the claims of older established families for exclusive rights of access are no longer recognized. It has also shifted from a site of passive consumption to one of active production and labor where participants no longer succumb to the deceitful and hidden agendas of men like Destupaago, but rather act with a shared sense of purpose. Yet ironically, the more it gains in monumentality, the less outwardly public this space becomes both within the text and as text. On the one hand, the space itself has been transformed from a non-descript open space where anyone can gather into a formal organization constituted by a select group of men with technical training and a shared desire for economic independence. Though ostensibly still open to all, entry is in fact limited to those who align themselves with the ideological mission of the group. Mirrored here, then, is the unavoidable fracturing of the public sphere under democratic rule. To grant everyone the right to speak is to open the door to manifold competing interests, much like the awarding of male suffrage in 1925 prompted a flowering of diverse political parties in Japan, each claiming the right to realize its own future vision for society. Fazero too, once given the opportunity to speak for the community, must choose a specific political path along which he and his followers can proceed, even if this risks foreclosing on other possibilities.

The accessibility of Poraan's Square is also diminished by added spatial and temporal layers placed between Kyuste and the events of the narrative. In this version, seven years have passed since he first stumbled upon the magical square, and he writes from the hectic environs of urban “Tokiio” where he has no friends and is confined to a small room in a massive stone building, assailed by the violent sounds of a printing press next door. From within this cavernous vault he thinks back fondly to the events of that summer, now no more definite than an “old-fashioned, blue-green lantern slide (gentō).” In a place where opportunities for public encounter should be plentiful, Kyuste, appearing much closer in image to the cloistered Taishō intellectual, envisions his ideal public forum by looking away from the city to a distant rural locale.Footnote ³⁹ This distance is further amplified by Miyazawa's strategic labeling of himself as the translator of Kyuste's story, and not as the original author. One obvious reason for this added layering is the increasing suppression to which “socialist” organizations were subject in the late 1920s. Authorities, in accordance with new restrictions set down in the Peace Preservation Law, were more forcefully clamping down on organizations that smacked of socialist or anti-government sentiment. Of particular concern were those intellectual “outsiders,” as Andrew Barshay calls them, who were only loosely affiliated with official institutions or who failed to express allegiance to orthodox visions of community (Reference Barshay1988, 15). Miyazawa experienced the impact of this increased authoritarianism on a deeply personal level. For instance, in choosing to support the local arm of the Labor-Farmer Party (Rōdō Nōmin Tō), he had to be careful to participate only by way of covert donations so as to avoid unwanted public scrutiny (Miyazawa Reference Miyazawa and Seiroku1995, 16: 322; Nasukawa Reference Nasukawa1997). In fact, soon after the newspaper reported his role in founding the Rasu Association, he actually did come under police suspicion and felt pressured to temporarily suspend the group's meetings. It is perhaps not surprising then that his most definitive image of public space as it potentially related to the transformation of civil society—the image he was trying to act out in real time—saw him having to stand furthest back from the limelight.

So far back that he thought it necessary after 1927 to excise a four-page section in which Kyuste, upon hearing the men talk about the future of the cooperative and a lack of educational opportunities, jumps to his feet and, criticizing the education system for its narrow focus and emphasis on physical training, offers to help by giving practical instruction in farming. Together, he predicts, they can create a Poraan's Hiroba “even greater than the [one in the] old fairy tale,” a place where “a thousand geniuses will soon gather” to work in mutual respect of one another. Upon expressing his desire to join the group, however, he quickly reconsiders.

Despite this backpedaling, the fact that Kyuste does not shy away from voicing his commitment to the group distinguishes him from previous figurations of the interwar intellectual as one who “subordinated public to private considerations” while insisting “upon the isolation and self-centeredness of the aesthetic man” (Harootunian Reference Harootunian, Silberman, Harootunian and Bernstein1974, 15–17). Though he may reflect on the possibility of public engagement and social transformation behind closed doors, this has more to do with feelings of inadequacy—and an implicit fear of exposure—than with a wish to privilege a private culture of being over a public culture of doing. Indeed, we see here a rejection of the latter inclination, which has proved such a powerful narrative device for explaining the failings of conscience of the prewar intellectual, in favor of the idea that private intellectual work can be publicly and politically meaningful. And yet even as this idea echoes Miyazawa's own efforts to restructure rural social space, it is telling that he not only excised the above passage but also bundled it separately from the manuscript, as if to insure its future invisibility within the archive.