Weng Nao's 'Tokyo Vagabonding'

Abstract

In the years that followed the 1923 Great Kantō Earthquake, tremendous growth in Tokyo’s suburbs (kōgai 郊外) allowed “newly opened land” (shinkaichi 新開地) on the urban periphery to be absorbed into the imperial capital. In this sense, suburbanization bears a strong affinity with colonization, insofar as both spatial processes expand their domains through deterritorialization and reterritorialization. With the expansion of Tokyo’s rail network, patterns of bourgeois middle-class life and commuter culture reshaped the city. Yet alternative spaces also emerged, embodying a bohemian lifestyle and encompassing cosmopolitan scenes of intellectual encounter. Through a reading of Weng Nao’s 翁鬧 (1910–1940) essay, “The Vagabond Town of the Tokyo Suburbs: The Neighborhood of Kōenji” (Tōkyō kōgai rōningai: Kōenji kaiwai 東京郊外浪人街：高円寺界隈, 1935), I consider Kōenji as the milieu of the “vagabond” (rōnin 浪人). The term carries implications of socioeconomic marginality and the absence of a fixed and stable existence. As a spatial practice, vagabonding seeks individual liberation in the cosmopolitan culture of the modern metropolis. The cosmopolitanism of Kōenji derives from the neighborhood’s relationship to both the Japanese capital and the Japanese empire. In his vagabonding, Weng Nao negotiates the spaces produced by suburbanization and colonization, the two modes of spatiotemporal reordering perpetuated by Japanese imperialism.