Maja VODOPIVEC (Tokyo University of Foreign Studies)
“Rereading Kato Shuichi – Travel as Unfinished Modernity Site”

Kato Shuichi, the writer and critic, spent half of his long life out of Japan. Still almost all of his voluminous oeuvre was in contemplation about Japan. This presentation will try to examine travel or movement as crucial setting for an unfinished modernity. It will use a definition of travel by James Clifford and the “Travelling Theory” of Edward Said and define travel as the practice of crossing and interaction and a complex range of experiences in a heterogeneous modernity. Travel will be understood as movement against sedentary, as a way of escape from time and space and a way of searching for “self”. It will also be a symbolic break with the previous system or period in history. Edward Said’s essay Traveling Theory is a starting point for a problem analyses in terms of its locations and displacements. Said’s delineation is made of four "stages" of travel: an origin, a distance traversed, a set of conditions for acceptance or rejection and finally, a transformed (incorporated) idea occupying "a new position in a new time and place.”

The presentation will touch upon various categories such as center/periphery, home/abroad, past/present, in the writings and life of Kato Shuichi and - many questions – empirical and theoretical, historical and political will arise from the perspective of Kato as a traveler. The presentation will suggest possible overlapping experience of travel and borderland, immigration, diaspora, tourism and exile. I will try to analyze Kato’s world of ideas, its transformation and its meaning in specific historical conditions. I will also try to suggest the ongoing power of its legacy in the present conditions.



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