Japanese Grammar: Crisis and Oikonomics after World War I

Wendy Matsumura
History
UC San Diego

The manuscript Japanese Grammar: Crisis and Oikonomics after World War I traces how the Japanese capital/state produced surplus populations in order to resolve its crisis of accumulation by enabling new methods of social reproduction through their re-creation of the category of noka (farm household) as a racialized and gendered category after World War I. Tracing the process of abstraction of the category of noka that effaces its racialized and gendered nature is important because this form constituted the material basis of Japanese fascism. Japanese Grammar is a provocation to the field of Japan Studies, which has taken too much comfort in the fact that the empire need only be contemplated as legacy or afterlife. It asks, whose lives, experiences and struggles slip out of the frame when “Japanese fascism,” “total war mobilization,” or “primitive accumulation” – to be sure, all markers of a critical historical practice – are defined as discrete moments in Japan’s history to be analyzed and problematized and simultaneously seen as concepts that are only relevant for illuminating the past as such? For whom do these histories serve as redemptive projects? What kinds of solidarities are made visible and (im)possible in the act?