If he stood beside a fellow villager whose cap was askew, he would walk away in disdain, as though about to be defiled.1
I
Japanese anime and manga featuring Shanghai could fill a library. Some devoted readers have already compiled detailed lists. (See “Shanghai, the Demon City, in Japanese Anime and Manga, Part One” and “Part Two.”) For now, let me simply pass their work along for your reading pleasure:
Manga:
Ōdō no Inu (Dog of the Kingly Way), by Yasuhiko Yoshikazu
Nijiiro no Trotsky (Rainbow-Colored Trotsky), by Yasuhiko Yoshikazu
RON (Dragon), by Murakami Motoka
YELLOW (Chinese title: Battle on the Yellow Earth), by Kawaguchi Kaiji
Seikan Bridge (Bridge Between the Stars), by Kyukkyupon
Fist of the Blue Sky
Nankin Road ni Hanafubuki (A Blizzard of Petals on Nanjing Road)
Shanghai Kaijinzoku (Shanghai Beggar Bandits)
1999-nen Shichi no Tsuki: Shanghai (Chinese title: 1999: Sleepless in Shanghai)
Shanghai Ijin Shōkan (Shanghai Foreigners’ Brothel)
Ri Kōran (Li Xianglan)
SHANG-HAI 1945
Anime:
Night Raid 1931
CANAAN
C – Control (C; Chinese titles: Money Control and Money in the Future Tense)
It is easy to see that most of these works depict Shanghai in China’s modern historical period, 1840–1949. Their images of the city vary widely, but if we had to find a common denominator, the term “Demon City,” coined by Muramatsu Shōfū, would probably fit best.2 This goes without saying for historically grounded works such as Nijiiro no Trotsky, but even works steeped in “fantasy” or “science fiction” give Shanghai the same underlying “demonic” coloring. The opening of episode one of Night Raid 1931, for instance, labels Shanghai “international,” “prosperous,” and “chaotic.”
Japan’s interest in Shanghai, in fact, long predates these anime and manga. Compared with the “Shanghai fascination” of Japanese politicians, writers, and artists during the Meiji, Taishō, and early Shōwa periods,3 today’s works confronting the reality of “Red Shanghai” pale into insignificance. As noted above, the name “Demon City” comes from the book Mato—Demon City—while Yokomitsu Riichi went so far as to call a novel simply Shanghai. Shanghai undoubtedly holds a greater attraction for Japanese people than other Chinese cities do.
But why Shanghai?
II
If we treat anime and manga as part of literature and the arts, we can offer one explanation for the fascination with Shanghai that emerges from modern literature: Shanghai serves merely as a stage, a backdrop that gives a story a grander setting—in other words, a certain exotic appeal. Yet Hollywood blockbusters that borrow Chinese scenery show what happens when China is used as a setting purely for commercial reasons: story and backdrop remain almost entirely disconnected. Shanghai is a negligible element. A story set on its streets today could just as well take place in Mumbai’s slums tomorrow. For American audiences, the mysterious East needs a concrete symbol, and Shanghai happens to be cast in the role.
Even when the aim is not commercial but a pursuit of the exotic—a deliberate distancing from one’s own country by setting the action abroad, as in Sirius the Jaeger, whose opening battle takes place in Shanghai—the story has little connection with its location from the outset. It is not Shanghai that draws Japanese stories to it; it is Japanese stories that need Shanghai. For Japanese audiences today, modern-era Shanghai as a setting offers, for the most part, little more than novelty and excitement. Soup dumplings, hair buns, Yu Garden, the Bund, broad streets. Fitted with these particular cultural labels, “Shanghai” thus finds a place in Japanese audiences’ “world.”
Yet the Japanese fascination with Shanghai in the modern era was not merely a pursuit of the exotic. First of all, Shanghai was an international metropolis in the fullest sense. In The Cultural-Historical Significance of Primitive Christianity (Genshi Kirisutokyō no bunkashiteki igi, 1921–1922), the prominent modern philosopher and ethicist Watsuji Tetsurō argued that the worldwide spread of British and American culture in his day resembled the spread of classical culture throughout the Mediterranean in the Hellenistic–Roman era: “European styles of clothing, food, and housing have spread throughout the world. English is used everywhere, and popular British and American songs soon reach even the Far East. In cities such as London, New York, and Shanghai, people of every nation live together. The world becomes one.”4
Leo Ou-fan Lee writes in “Cosmopolitanism in Modern Shanghai”: “My position runs counter to Levenson’s interpretation: if cosmopolitanism means an enduring, ‘outward-looking’ curiosity—positioning oneself as a cultural mediator linking China with the rest of the world—then Shanghai was undoubtedly the quintessential cosmopolitan city of the 1930s. Western expatriates popularly called it the ‘Paris of the Orient.’ Leaving aside the name’s ‘Orientalist’ implications, ‘Paris of the Orient’ still underestimated Shanghai’s international significance; moreover, the name linked Shanghai to other European and American metropolises through the popular Western imagination. In Asia, however, Shanghai had actually replaced Tokyo, devastated by the 1923 earthquake, as the center of a network of metropolitan hubs connected by maritime traffic arising from trade, transport, and expatriate residence. The branches of the bookseller Kelly & Walsh illustrate this: their book-shipping routes closely linked Shanghai, Hong Kong, Tianjin, Yokohama, Singapore, New Delhi, and Mumbai.”5
In 2019, as globalization advances, “international metropolis” has become a cheap title. Bring in a little foreign investment, invite a few foreign experts, welcome a few groups of foreign tourists—even a small, third-tier city can boast that it has become “international.” But in East Asia at the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, “internationalization” meant something altogether different. And Shanghai’s internationalization meant different things at different moments in Japanese history.
From the closing years of the Tokugawa shogunate to the early Meiji period, Shanghai was a relay station for Western knowledge traveling east. Countless activists for the Restoration, such as Takasugi Shinsaku, first encountered Western civilization through Shanghai, whether in translated books or in the material civilization they witnessed firsthand. These encounters opened the way to their later explorations of “Asianism” (Ajia shugi)—a history not easily summed up.
With the advent of the Meiji era, building a modern nation-state became the new imperative. Shanghai continued to receive its due praise as a window onto Western civilization, but Japanese intellectuals repeatedly criticized its semicolonial condition and loss of sovereignty, holding it up as a cautionary example. Once they left the foreign concessions for the old Chinese city of Shanghai and the much larger interior, they judged that the Chinese still had a great deal to improve in their level of “civilization.” (See, for example, Akutagawa Ryūnosuke’s Travels in China.)
Yet as Japan’s modern state system became more fully developed, Japanese people living under the emperor system came to understand all too well the strengths and shortcomings of the nation-state version of “modernity.” Tightly organized institutions formed an oppressive cage. Intellectuals longed to escape a Japan moving gradually toward “totalitarianism”; it was then that they discovered Shanghai. Shanghai offered Western civilization in a more authentic form, together with a freedom Japan lacked—chaos and freedom are, after all, two sides of the same coin. Shanghai also possessed an inclusiveness like “the sea receiving a hundred rivers.” (“The sea receives a hundred rivers; pursue excellence; be open-minded and discerning, magnanimous and modest” is Shanghai’s present-day civic motto.) This inclusiveness extended not only to foreigners from distant lands, but equally to Chinese people arriving from elsewhere.
For Japanese intellectuals, Shanghai—the “Paris of the Orient,” the “adventurers’ paradise”—offered a version of modernity defined by globalization/internationalization. After the First World War, this was clearly a more “advanced” model. It matched precisely the aspirations expressed within Japan in “Taishō democracy” and “Taishō romanticism.”
With the beginning of the Shōwa era, however, criticism of the West—or the discourse of “overcoming modernity” (kindai no chōkoku)—gradually emerged.6 If we focus on Shanghai, the novel whose serialization began in 1928, we can see a shift in Japanese intellectuals’ position. In Shanghai, Yokomitsu Riichi “successfully rendered differences in sensory experience across subject positions marked by colonial, class, and racial distinctions. … National belonging is like a bank account. … In Shanghai, perhaps being British or French means having the largest balance, while pre-revolutionary Russian nationality, exemplified by Orga, means a fiscal deficit. The hierarchy of the imperialist world is laid bare.” (Naoki Sakai) “In Yokomitsu’s fictional account, Shanghai appears as a city full of complex tensions, a setting in which various colonial figures make their entrances. Their social rank, economic advantages, race, and nationality give rise to differing expressions of personal pride or shame, while racial and national identity also determine their attitudes toward people of other races and nations.” (Leo Ou-fan Lee) Shanghai, the international metropolis, gradually revealed the imperialist order beneath its surface. The surface “freedom” and “diversity” of its international character, once celebrated by Taishō writers, now became the very evidence with which Shōwa youth indicted Europe and America.
“From the 1930s onward, Yokomitsu himself began a transformation. He retreated from the cosmopolitan stance he had taken when writing Shanghai, when he was concerned with the effects of imperial nationalism and anticolonial nationalism. His later novels clearly show that he had lost his earlier avant-garde character and moved to a rigid position that lent cultural authority to Japanese nationalism. In the eyes of Japan’s new nationalists, the May Thirtieth Incident, the ‘first battle between Europe and the Far East’ in modern history, had an entirely different meaning: it demonstrated the need for Japan to lead a greater Far Eastern alliance against Western imperialism.” (Leo Ou-fan Lee) Interestingly, though, in December 1937, after Shanghai had fallen, the Japanese established the “Shanghai Great Way Government” in Pudong. “Great Way” comes from the saying, “When the Great Way prevails, all under Heaven is held in common.”7 After taking Shanghai from Chinese hands, the Japanese still (pretended they) wanted to realize a kind of “cosmopolitanism”—only an Eastern cosmopolitanism led by Japan.
III
From a window onto “modernity,” to a new model of “modernity,” and then to a testing ground for going beyond “modernity”: Japanese images of Shanghai changed along with Japan’s history. Exotic appeal was only one factor. Modern-era Shanghai was not merely a distant foreign city, and the dazzling adornments of Western civilization were not all that drew Japanese people to it. Shanghai offered answers to Japan’s problems at different historical moments, answers spanning Eastern and Western civilizations. It was a mirror of the world; it was even the world itself. Perhaps this is the historical reality of Japan’s “longed-for Shanghai”—a phrase from the celebrated Shōwa-era song Shanhai kōro (Passage to Shanghai), with lyrics by Saijō Yaso and sung by Matsudaira Akira.
Today, the Bund’s buildings from around the world still stand. Yet having returned to the world stage after half a century of standing “aloof and apart,” Shanghai no longer wears the crown of “Paris of the Orient.” For those who look up to Shanghai and long for it, what exactly is the attraction: the world it offers, or its modernity? Is it a window onto world civilization, or a symbol of national rejuvenation?
Once, Japanese intellectuals sailed from Tokyo to Shanghai in a steady succession; today, countless tourists set out from Shanghai and linger in Tokyo. The Shanghai the former longed for was thought to have “world” significance because of its diversity and freedom. The Tokyo the latter long for is regarded as a model of modern life more refined and attentive to detail than that of mainland China. The two may look alike, but in fact a gulf separates them. Still, to those so-called “scholars living in Japan” who cannot praise Tokyo Station and Yokohama’s red-brick warehouses enough, perhaps we might offer a reminder: come home and have a look around once in a while.
Comments
Nori Steeped in Black Tea: On the question of representations of the Demon City in anime and manga, the author introduces a perspective drawn from modern literature. But the author gives no convincing explanation of how these literary accounts connect with anime and manga. I hope this can be expanded.
Jingxi: In Japanese literature and the arts, the Demon City is an image well worth pondering. Taking anime and manga as a starting point, the author introduces the Demon City as an Other in modern Japanese literature. That said, it would have been better to dig further into the anime and manga themselves. It is far too short, too, and deserves criticism for that.
Zimo: Judging by its topic, this article could have been an excellent study in comparative culture. Shanghai assumes complex guises in many works: the prosperous metropolis harboring self-organizing criminal groups in CANAAN, for instance, or the “wuxia-punk” foreign land of Kikokugai, where high technology coexists with martial arts. In these works, “Shanghai” is a site where ambiguously opposed signs—tradition and modernity, feudalism and progress—hybridize. Under the name “Demon City,” it is branded onto consumer culture as a “spectacle” of the Other, contributing to the reproduction of stereotypes with commodity value. The distinction the author draws at the end between Japanese longing for Shanghai in the past and Chinese longing for Tokyo today is worth pursuing. Unfortunately, this article gives us only a starting point for reflection, and it has not analyzed the questions it raises through specific depictions in anime, comics, and games.