Nagai Kafu’s “Behind the Prison” and the

Westernization of Japan During the Meiji Era

Submitted by: Maheen Aamir Butt

4139-BS-ENG-22
Submitted to: Ma’am Saira Fatima
Course: WSS ENG-1205
Department of English Language and Literature
GC University, Lahore
Abstract:
Nagai Kafu’s short story titled “Behind the Prison” deals with his criticism
of Meiji Era Japan due to the industrialization tainting the original Japanese
culture. The unnamed narrator in his letter to His Excellency explains his
isolated existence and need for companionship in the face of the loss of
familiar surroundings.

Summary:
The unnamed narrator returns from his five-year journey abroad and is
faced with the condition of his homeland and the realities of Japan and its
ever-changing rural countryside as it goes through major changes due to the
ongoing industrialization. The narrator compares his life in the West to
Japan and in doing so critiques the loss of culture and originality in a letter
written to ‘His Excellency.’

Keywords:
Meiji Restoration era, Occidentalism, Nagai Kafu, The Returnee Stories,
Japan, Shogun, Daimyo, Samurai, Westernization, Industrialization, Edo.
Introduction:
The Japanese archipelago was ruled by emperors for thousands of centuries
but truthfully this government was run by the Shogunate, a general of
Samurai. The local government was under the control of the local samurai
and the daimyo (feudal lords) who hired them. The Shogunate had, in the
past, stopped civil wars and launched reforms that led to Japan’s era of
peace. Japan closed off its ports to neighboring countries and foreigners
however, this was short lived as America came knocking at the door backed
up by heavy artillery and gunships and forcefully made Japan open its ports
for trading under heavily imbalanced trading laws. A situation in which the
Japanese shogunate was powerless and had to accept. The Daimyos and the
Samurais bought guns from the Americans and turned them towards the
Shogun and forced him to retire and restored the empire to Emperor Meiji,
who at the time, was a teenager. This resulted in the beginning of the
Japanese era of westernization in which Meiji opened trade routes,
abolished the previous social hierarchy that prevailed during the Shogun’s
time and launched a new education system that resembled the West in
many ways and yet sustained the standardized Japanese qualities. Children
aged four were allowed an education regardless of their genders in an
attempt to breed new innovators for the turn of the century.

During the Meiji era, Japan saw the most advancement in technology. It can
be compared to the Victorian era when new technology was at a rise in
Britain, this advancement in technology led Japan to having a stable
currency system for the first time in centuries as the previous Daimyos had
taxed people unfairly during the Edo period of supposed peace. However,
this advancement in technology led to Japan’s age of imperialism.

The author Nagai Kafu, in his homogeneous works titled “The Returnee
Stories” criticizes the government of Emperor Meiji, these stories can be
read as Occidentalist works that use the West as a contrast with Japanese
society and tries to find what exactly makes Japan what it is. A country rich
with nature and culture rather than a caricature of the Western society and
its standard of civilization and success. Nagai Kafu, like the Japanese held a
high regard for his culture, so much so that it can be called a ‘superiority
complex.’

The Returnee Stories

The story “Behind the Prison” ( 監獄所 の 裏:Kangokusho No

Ura)follows the same rough outline as many of the stories Kafu wrote
during the early 1900s upon his arrival in Japan in 1908 after many years
abroad. The narrator is oft seen as a self-insert character, going through the
motion trying to find a sense of the Japanese identity while comparing it to
the West. This, while more apparent in stories like “Shinki-chosa Nikki”
(Diary of a Returnee) and “Reisho” (Sneers) is also seen in Behind the
Prison as the narrator returning from Europe tries to assimilate back into his
own culture and finds the things changed making him sorrowful and
nostalgic for the loss of his cultural identity.
This loss of cultural identity is not referenced directly rather hinted at and
symbolized through family members, the change in surroundings and
existential dread.

The Unnamed Narrator’s Plight

The narrator upon his return from Europe finds the world he left behind has
changed significantly; his younger brother is now an officer (a hint at the
beginning of the emperor’s army that led the Japanese imperialism after the
modernization) and he discovers a great change in his parents which shocks
him the most. His father, now sixty is more robust than before and looks to
be in good health however his mother has seen a decline in her health in the
years of his absence. These accounts appear uncomplicated on the surface
however when observed in detail, Nagai Kafu has used the narrator’s own
parents as symbols to identify the “Old Japan” and the new “Western
Japan.”

The narrator while describing his father states, “There were flecks of grey
in my father’s moustache, but his tanned face was more radiant than ever,
and the added years only seemed to increase the youthfulness of his robust
frame.” While in contrast when he describes his mother he says, “(she)
looked as though she had aged ten or twenty years during my absence.
Now she was just a shriveled up little old lady I could hardly recognize.”
He follows this up by an account of his mother’s cultural tastes that
concede with Edo era Japan, the love of classical theatre, music and
kimonos that weren’t gaudy. Unintentionally, the narrator is comparing the
two co-existing cultures in Japan, one represented by his old yet flourishing
father who acts as a stand in for the empire and the other in the form of his
mother who has been weakened by time, an insight of the Japan of old. He
goes as far as to comment (on the state of his parents): “Oh, the cruelty of
time that destroys all things!”

On another instance Kafu uses plants and the rain as a symbol for the West
and Japan while criticizing the Meiji reign for giving into Western
influence in the following words: “Each of the plants responds differently
to the downpour, the delicate ones bowing to earth, the stronger ones
springing upwards.” This comparison is in part due to the nature of Kafu’s
writings being decidedly anti-Meiji restoration, but it can also be used as a
metaphor for Japan’s imperialist regime in the future that attacked Korea
and China solely due to their industrialization, courtesy of the West.

The narrator’s distaste for the change in his surroundings shines through on
multiple occasions, particularly when he talks about his father’s estate
behind Ichigaya prison. “‘You know,’ I would tell the city girls, ‘it’s that
place where the azaleas bloom.’ Only then would it dawn on them which
area I was talking about. Now, however, it is just another new district
slapped together on the edge of Tokyo.” Like the majority of Japanese
writer’s, Nagai Kafu seems to favor the naturalist way of life as is evident
by his writing.
The Meiji Restoration and the Westernization of
Japanese Society
During the Meiji Restoration era, the government’s main goal was
industrialization and adapting to the progress rate of the West. This brought
about many changes in terms of economy and living space, the elite settled
in the rural areas and the housing system turned from the original feudal
system that resembled that of medieval Europe to the newer more American
system. The narrator comments on this, “the narrow street becomes a

downward-winding slope, on one side of which, during my absence, some

rich gentleman seems to have built a new residence upon high stone walls”
these changes in the structure of Japanese society can be seen till date. The
Shinto religion was slowly eclipsed by Christianity with the arrival of the
missionaries and soon the temple like architecture of the old Japanese
buildings was also a thing of the past.

The Meiji era saw the dawn of a whole new Japan. The fastest
industrialization the world had seen during that era. This also meant the
assimilation of western and traditional Japanese culture that led to the state
of Japan today. “I have seen men in Western suits stop at the fish guts
stand by the roadside on their way home from the office before climbing the
hill towards the back of the prison, carrying their purchases wrapped in
bamboo sheathing. The sight brings to mind scenes of dinner in poor
Japanese households.”
The narrator’s alienation from society is a result of his disdain for it, Nagai
Kafu in his collection “The Returnee Stories” tends to criticize the
superficial Westernization Japan has adapted yet he himself has been
critiqued for this by Edward Seidensticker in his book “Kafu the Scribbler”
written n 1965. Kafu’s love for the West and the Japan of the past seemed
to be the two driving forces behind his disdain for the Meiji era and the
faux westernization Japan was undergoing.

Conclusion
It is important that we discuss Japan’s role as a colonizer as well when
referencing the forced westernization and tainting of Japanese culture.
However, it is a truth universally acknowledged that western powers have
invaded the Asian lands and in turn for bestowing them with technology
(like the British with their railways in the sub-continent) tarnished precious
cultural practices and ways of living. The Westernization of Japan
happened at the hands of its own Emperor in the name of progress.