In 1920 Jiro Abe delivered serial lectures at the South Manchuria Railway Company. His lectures, later published in book form with the title Jinkaku-shugi-no-shucho, are interesting because they marked the juncture when the concept of "personality" underwent an epistemological change after World War I. In the lectures, probably influenced by John Spargo's The Psychology of Bolshevism (1919), a book he was reading during the tour in Manchuria, he turned "personality" into something more adaptable for globalization after the war. The audience, mostly of the elite class graduated from imperial universities, was naturally expected to have a personality that could survive in the struggle of the international market. In this essay, by analyzing Abe's lectures, his diary, and the magazines issued by the reading group of the company, I will locate the birth of the new personality in modern Japan.

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"Misaki," Yumeji Takehisa's story with his illustrations, first appeared as a newspaper serial in 1923, but it had a brief interruption because of the great earthquake of that year. Although the publication of the serial as well as that of the newspaper was soon resumed, the tone of the story was not the same as before the disaster, surrounded by lots of media discourses about the earthquake, among which there were highly political ones like those of the formation of vigilance bands and their racist activities. Thus the visual and verbal images of the story began to interact in a subtle way with the representations of the disaster by the mass media. With his sketches of wasted areas, I will examine the shift of the writer-illustrator's way of seeing which occurred when he started the once interrupted story again.

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In his short story "Kinuta," Haruo Sato inserted an episode of a revolutionary obviously modeled after Osio-Heihachiro who revolted against the government in the late Edo Period. The reason he did so was not only that his family was actually involved in the Osio Revolt but also that at that time there happened an incident reminiscent of the revolt - the High Treason by Shusui Kotoku and other anarchists. Although the treason is never mentioned in the story, the two historical events overlap in the course of narrating the episode. It is as if the author's dangerous desire to write about the treason emerged in a transferred and transformed fashion, almost unconsciously fused with the memory of the revolt inherited from his ancestors, especially his father Toyotaro.

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The "tsuzurikata" movement arose out of the liberal atmosphere of the Taisho Period. Originally a teaching method for composition at school, "tsuzurikata" was adopted as a literary style by the group of Akai-tori, the magazine well-known for its concept of writings for children. As a result, many teachers were made aware of the possibility of their teaching method as a more creative way of writing, and they came to join the literary group. Tracing the change of discourses about "tsuzurikata" from pedagogical to literary, I will show the process in which a teaching method developed into a literary and cultural movement.

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On the eighth of December in 1941, the Pacific War broke out. Much was said and written about that special day, but how was it grasped and represented by the writers of the age? Osamu Dazai wrote about it in "The Eighth of December," a short story with the very day used for its title. In the story, however, the day is not described as a historical moment when the war started but represented as a symbolic moment when daily life became a battleground. The story thus gives us the opportunity to see what happened on the day from a different perspective.

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