Joel Littler discusses his new publication, ‘A Song of Fallen Flowers: Miyazaki Tōten and the making of naniwabushi as a mode of popular dissent in transwar Japan, 1902–1909’, in Modern Asian Studies. The popular genre of sung and spoken performance—naniwabushi—was the biggest ‘craze’ during the first decade of the twentieth century in Japan.

In this talk, Joel uncovers how Miyazaki Tōten (1870–1922), a revolutionary and thinker who became a naniwabushi balladeer, was instrumental in the rise of naniwabushi as a popular art form during the Russo-Japanese transwar period (1902–1909) and used it to engage in a practice of nihilist democracy. He uses a transwar frame to examine how Miyazaki Tōten created ‘new’ naniwabushi to deliberately link the techniques and rhetoric of the Freedom and People’s Rights Movement from the 1880s to the Russo-Japanese War (1904–1905). Tōten used naniwabushi to articulate his concepts of autonomous freedom, nihilism, and anarchist communitarianism in a time usually characterized by the heavy suppression of dissent. The study of Tōten’s naniwabushi performances counters the impression of the wholesale embrace of nationalism and support for Japanese imperialism and shows how Japan’s urban poor engaged in political discourse through popular entertainment that was critical of Japanese imperialism.

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About the contributors

Joel Littler is a DPhil student in History at Pembroke College, University of Oxford. He was a visiting researcher at Kyushu University in 2022-23 and is a Daiwa Scholar in Japanese Studies. Before beginning his doctoral work he was a lecturer of philosophy in Thailand. His research centres on the noncolonial intellectual, cultural, and political phenomena that emerged in nineteenth and early twentieth century Japan as a reaction to the perceived failures of the Meiji Restoration to improve ordinary people’s lives. He is currently completing his dissertation on how some Meiji civil war ‘losers’ articulated their nonhierarchical vision for Japan within Asia by focusing on the ideas and activities of Miyazaki Tōten.