Unno Jūza and the Uses of Science in Prewar Japanese Popular Fiction

Abstract

The development of science fiction in early twentieth-century Japan traced a noticeably distinct trajectory from its western predecessors and counterparts. In Europe and North America, science fiction was fairly well established by the 1920s, having appropriated tenets from modernism as well as other genres of popular fiction—fantasy, adventure, mystery, romance and so on—and from authors as varied as Edgar Allan Poe, Jules Verne, H.G. Wells, Auguste Villiers d’Isle Adam and Karel Čapek. Its standing was further buttressed by the rise of mass-market publications such as Amazing Stories, first published in New York in April 1926. Although science fiction continued to overlap with other genres, it could thus also be conceptualised as an independent category. In Japan, too, one may point to belles lettristic works by Ryūnosuke Akutagawa, Jun’ichirō Tanizaki and others prior to 1920 that inhabited the discursive space between mass culture and the avant garde or, more broadly, between the cultural productions and reactions occasioned by the increasing expansion and complexity of industrial modernity. Nor was it coincidental that the very same writers experimented with silent cinema and incorporated the burgeoning media technologies of the era into their fiction. Yet it was in the pages of Shin seinen (‘New Youth’), a magazine published from January 1920 until July 1950, that science fiction in Japan decisively arose from within the fold of detective fiction.