In most discourses on modernization Japan has been judged by the standards of Western civilization and criticized for its backward and pre-modern nature. In the same vein the Japanese have been defined as a people with little modern individualism. But any highly civilized country has a certain backwardness, and absolute individualism is impossible in the complex structure of modern society. With this in our mind we should reconsider Japanese modernization.

“Yoshin-chōsho” (1926), Hatsunosuke Hirabayashi's first short story, has been interpreted in terms of the author's own concept of modern detective fiction. But the text represents more than the abstract idea of modernity; it also exposes its ideological nature through the description of the arbitrary procedures of a preliminary examination and a sanity hearing in the closet. It is violence legitimatized in the name of modernity.

Since the Manchurian Incident in 1931 modernism in Japan had gradually become eclipsed under the shadow of the fascist regime. The Panel of Art and Literature is one of the manifestations of such a tendency. In 1934 it started with the talk between Sanjūgo Naoki, the writer, and Manabu Matsumoto, the chief of the Police Affairs Bureau of the Home Ministry. Soon Kan Kikuchi, Shūsei Tokuda, and others voluntarily joined in the panel and eventually lost their identity as modernist writers. This article will consider how the dissolution of literary modernism occurred in the overdetermined context of the contemporary literary scene.

“Aru-hito-no-monogatari” is Kan Shimozawa's “historical” novella published in January, 1962. The story is set between the Boshin War in 1868 and the late years of the Meiji Period, and the main character Tarōji Miyake is modeled after a swordsman named Shigekatsu Makita. Referring to Makita's hand-written documents preserved by his grandchildren and relatives, this article will historically, thematically, and structurally analyze the story.

Discourses on modernization from the late 1960s to the early 1970s were still centered on how to establish individualism in postwar Japan. They covered political freedom, human rights, and even self-responsibility in the market economy. Kazue Morisaki, a woman poet in Kyushu, also treated the theme of individualism in her cultural criticism. From her own experience of living in Korea under Japanese rule, she hated the collectivism of Japanese society which stifled the development of individuals. But she finally found out the limitations of individualism in the fact that we as mortal beings cannot live alone without being involved in social relations.

Shutsu-nippon-ki is Eisin Ueno's reportage of the miners who emigrated from Japan to Brazil. In Brazil some of them have changed their position from laborers to employers who hire native farmhands but treat them as comrades. Their egalitarian relationship points to a possibility of solidarity across nations. The aim of this article is first to follow the thematic development of the work with such a provocative title and then to explore the non-fiction writer's method of representing people of diverse backgrounds.

In his short story “Seisan” (1983), Kenji Nakagami inscribed the very moment when the community of social outcasts in his hometown was dismembered. The “dismemberment” of the district called “roji” was actually executed for the improvement of the regional conditions as one of the assimilation projects. The author, however, depicts such modernization as a “scar” that brought about local degeneration symbolized by a woman's nymphomania. Then how is the scar shown there? This article will analyze the representation of modernization in the story.