The Road to Modernity: “Railway Texts” of the Meiji and Taishō Eras

1 Introduction

Natsume Sōseki’s (1867–1916) Sanshirō (1908) is a coming-of-age story about a country boy named Sanshirō who navigates the new environment of the nation’s capital. The novel begins with the protagonist’s three-day train ride from his home in rural Kumamoto to Tokyo. Serialized soon after the 1906–1907 nationalization of railways, his cross-country train trip is made possible by the 1906 nationalization of the Kyūshū and San’yō lines connecting Kumamoto to the Tōkaidō line on Honshū island, rail lines which were closely tied to Japan’s imperialist policies after the Russo-Japanese War (1904–1905) (Aoki 1994b, 59; Komori 1996, 313–15). While riding the various railroad lines, Sanshirō encounters characters who discuss the war and national development. These conversations reveal how people nationwide were connecting through shared war experiences and a common ideology.

Many prominent writers of the Meiji and Taishō eras, Sōseki included, were preoccupied with the development of the railways, and responded in their writing to the enormous impact of modern rails on the individual body and the Japanese nation as a whole. In using the train as a setting, theme, and metaphor, many of their works reflected upon the experience of traveling on inland rails, as well as the integral role that trains played in Japan’s colonial expansion. As such, these works reveal how trains played an essential part in everything from transforming quotidian life to nation building.

Given its critical role in contributing to the industrial capitalism of almost every modern nation, the railway was crucial to a Japanese modernity characterized by colonialism and nation-state formation.^[1] Meiji elites looked to railways as a powerful means of forming a modern nation-state. Japan’s first rail line, built between Tokyo and Yokohama in 1872, inaugurated the full-scale development of a railway network. Prior to its abolishment in 1879, the road check-point (sekisho) system had been used to control the movement of people across Japan, and for centuries the system monitored travel along major roads, often levying fees to pass through. Its abolishment, coupled with the unrestricted nature of rail travel, opened the door to the rapid development of Japan’s railway network (Fujii 1997, 13). As James Fujii has noted, the modern railway played a crucial role in unifying the nation by centralizing transportation (Fujii 1999, 108). The homogenization of train schedules also triggered important changes to people’s conceptions of time, and the ability to travel quickly between the Tokyo city center and the rural periphery compressed the sense of both time and space, making possible closer spatial and temporal connections between the “center” and the “periphery”. Thus, railways had the ability to “annihilate space and time” and “[open] up new spaces that were not as easily accessible before” (Schivelbusch 1986, 37). This consolidation, homogenization, and compression of physical and temporal spaces, with Tokyo at the real and imaginary centre, created a national community through the shared cultural practice of riding trains.

This article examines textual representations of trains and how they express Japan’s national consolidation. I will discuss how the railways crossing provincial boundaries transformed the landscape of Japan and altered people’s sense of belonging, which until the early Meiji era had been “restricted to local geographic and political units” (Fujii 1997, 14). Many writers from the Meiji and Taishō eras employ the metaphor of rails in their literary works. Touching on selected railway texts by Natsume Sōseki, Tayama Katai (1872–1930), Tanizaki Jun’ichirō (1886–1965), and Akutagawa Ryūnosuke (1892–1927), I will show how trains provide a means to reflect on Japan’s cultural, social, and political contexts, and how the space created inside and outside the train provided these writers with a space for imagining modernity. Rails redefined people’s temporal and spatial experiences in a way that consolidated the nation. However, the instability of boundaries between differently classed compartments also worked to destabilize existing hierarchical power relations and definitions of national subjectivity.

2 The Railway and New Literary Sensations

Japan’s railway development arguably began in 1854, when American Commodore Matthew Perry brought a miniature railroad to Yokohama, attracting the interest of Tokugawa government officials. The demonstration of the system sparked a public fascination with railways. Throughout the 1860s, representatives from the West pressured the Tokugawa government to build railroads, but it was not until after the Meiji Restoration that the Japanese government began to study railway technology. Their belief that railroads would be beneficial for “national wealth and military strength” (fukoku kyōhei) was the main impetus behind the development of railways well into the latter half of the Meiji era (Ike 1955, 217–219). Japan’s first rail line was built between Tokyo and Yokohama in 1872, forty-two years after Liverpool & Manchester, the first railway in Great Britain, began operations. The Meiji government initially planned to develop a state railway system but lacked the necessary capital, forcing them to cooperate with private businesses for its construction and operation (Hirooka 2000, 4). The unreliable nature of this collaboration foreshadowed future nationalization of railways in 1906. By 1880, railways were already running on the northernmost island of Hokkaido. As awareness spread that generous terms were granted to private companies by the state, constructing railways became, as Nobutaka Ike puts it, “something of a national mania,” and by 1897 the mileage laid by private investors “surpassed that built by the government” (Ike 1955, 223). During this period, only the Tōkaidō line from Tokyo to Osaka-Kobe via Nagoya was built and operated by the government, while other national routes were privately run. This situation changed in 1906 with the passing of the Railway Nationalization Act (Tetsudō kokuyūhō), in which most of the country’s private railway lines came under public control (Ministry of Railways 1921, 838). By the end of the Meiji period, the railway network ran through Honshu Island from its southernmost to its northernmost regions, heralding the arrival of Japan’s railway era.

From the 1910s–1920s, Japan experienced a second railway construction boom. During this time, the national railway’s trunk network was basically completed, as were many of its branch lines (Hirooka 2000, 25). Private companies were especially active in building many new intra-city lines to serve major urban centers like Tokyo and their adjacent areas. The development of railways thus resulted in crucial changes to Tokyo’s urban structure. The 1910s saw a rapid growth in private railway companies (particularly short-distance electric railway companies) after private development was again allowed following nationalization in 1906 and 1907 (Sorensen 2002, 60). It was during this time that station-front areas developed into business districts with big department stores, replacing the old waterfront sakariba (entertainment quarters). In addition, private railway companies primarily focused development on local suburban commuter routes to serve the large emerging middle class. Thus, the development of train networks prompted large scale suburbanization and the cultivation of new middle-class values in the 1910s (Sand 2003, 137).

As a symbol of and a means to Japan’s modernity, the train was both shockingly novel yet extremely mundane, providing an innovative space for new experiences. Most writers of modern Japan had personal experience taking trains: the famous I-novelist Tayama Katai, for instance, once lived in Yoyogi, a western suburb of Tokyo, and commuted every day to Honchō, where he worked as an editor for Hakubunkan publishing house (Tayama 1987, 179, 188–89, 217). This experience prepared him to write “The Girl Watcher” (“Shōjōbyō,” 1907), set in an interurban commuter train. Representations of space within train compartments often presented a microcosm of modern society: different coach classes in particular caught the attention of literati.

While railways sometimes served as the background setting for stories, in other works the train provided a powerful and innovative symbol. Akutagawa Ryūnosuke’s “While Watching a Locomotive” (“Kikansha wo minagara,” 1927), for example, features the train as a metaphor for life, representing a youthful vitality that the author envied. At the same time, Akutagawa also ruminates on the fact that trains can never deviate from their tracks, reflecting his reluctance to accept a preordained and monotonous life. The train embodies his extreme unease toward modern life and modernity, an unease rendered even more significant considering the fact that the posthumously published text was written a week before his suicide.

Not only did the novelty of the train prompt philosophizing, but its movement also inspired new rhythms in writing style. According to Seiji Lippit, the New Sensation School (Shinkankakuha) emphasized “corporeal sensation” and “the representation of urban space” to signal “the collapse of a certain totalizing understanding of modernity” (Lippit 2002, 82). A foundational work of this movement is Yokomitsu Riichi’s short story “Head and Belly” (“Atama narabi ni hara”), published in the first issue of Bungei jidai (Literary Times) in October 1924. The story begins with the famous line: “It is high noon. The special express train is packed and running with full speed. The small stations along the line are being silenced like little stones” (Yokomitsu 1956, 331).^[2] Mimicking the speed of the express train, Yokomitsu’s fragmentary and rhythmic writing style reproduced the pace of modern urban life (Hashimoto 1974, 33), while his use of “unconventional grammatical structures and tropes” aptly expressed the phenomena of urban culture (Lippit 2002, 78).

3 The Spatial Unification of the Nation

The train contributed to the sociopolitical unification of the nation-state through the construction of a railway network centered in Tokyo, which “provided the infrastructure for national unification,” reinforcing the government’s attempts to further “centralize and standardize the nation” (Grunow 2012, 236). Trains made the “shrinking of space” (Schivelbusch 1986, 33) possible through their rapid movement, in effect negating the physical space between remote regions and the national center. Rails provided people all over Japan with the ability to travel to Tokyo within a couple of days, creating the impression that the capital city was just a short trip away from their hometowns. Within this network, Tokyo, with its centralized political, economic, and cultural power, became an imaginary core connecting all the people within the Japanese mainland. In this sense, the railway network physically and symbolically united the Japanese landscape and its people.

As mentioned earlier, Sōseki’s novel Sanshirō traces a centripetal movement along a rail network that connected “all corners of the nation” to Tokyo, which was located at “the physical and conceptual center” of this integrated railway network (Grunow 2012, 242). The increasing demand for transporting and mobilizing troops during the Russo-Japanese War made the Japanese government realize the significance of an efficient railway network for military strategy. It is no coincidence that the nationalization of the railways took place immediately after the end of the war. As the novel opens, Sanshirō rides three different railway lines, first taking the Kyūshū line from his hometown Kumamoto to the port Moji, where he rides a ferry to Shimonoseki port on Honshu island.^[3] He then takes the San’yō line from Shimonoseki to Kobe, where he transfers to the Tōkaidō Line, riding it to his final destination at Tokyo’s Shinbashi Station. Except for the privately-owned Kyūshū and San’yō lines which were not nationalized until 1906,^[4] all three lines were used for military transport, and became part of the national rail network by 1907. The massive expansion of cross-country railroads toward the end of the Meiji era was initiated mainly by the state’s interest in promoting “national wealth and military strength” rather than consumer demands, and it was not until after the 1910s that train travel became “cheaper and more accessible to the general public” (Freedman 2011, 96). This military expansion was the backdrop against which Sanshirō is set: Sanshirō’s cross-country train ride would not be possible without the context of imperialism and railway nationalization, which shrank the distances between the capital city and its outer regions.

The railways also helped to foster a sense of Japanese national identity. While most people possessed a strong sense of local regional identity well into the Meiji era (Fujii 1997, 14), the railway network, along with the abolishment of the sekisho system and the regional barriers that had once been used to control travelers moving across territories, allowed the Meiji government to establish a centralized nation-state. The linking of “temporally-distant parts of Japan into conveniently traversable land” (Fujii 1997, 12) helped to create a sense of cultural belonging needed to form a national identity.

This integration of “temporally-distant parts” (Fujii 1997, 12) into a unified nation was especially apparent through the general descriptions of trains as either going “up” toward or “down” and away from Tokyo. This “up”/“down” dichotomy not only connected all parts of the mainland by positioning them within the same system of spatial relations, but also established a hierarchy between the national capital and other areas. In this regard, railways reconstructed space by putting previously autonomous regions on the imperial map, of which Tokyo was the new center (Komori 1996, 315–16). Thus, going “up” to Tokyo (jōkyō) became “a rite of passage for those destined to play a significant role in government, politics, commerce, or the arts” (Fujii 1997, 14) and for anyone who wanted to climb the social ladder to be a part of the metropolitan dream. Even those who did not go to Tokyo usually had ties in the cultural and economic center, such as family, friends, or neighbors studying or working in the capital. Those who migrated from the provinces to Tokyo also kept ties to their hometowns, creating another level of connections between the “center” and the “periphery.” By linking outer areas into a national network as well as transporting increasing numbers of non-metropolitan people to Tokyo, railways were also able to unify the nation by creating spatial as well as emotional, personal connections.

The following passage from Katai’s 1909 novel Country Teacher (Inaka kyōshi) demonstrates how centralized authority was disseminated through railways. The novel centers around a young man named Hayashi Seizō who becomes a rural primary school teacher. He struggles to fit in, but fails miserably, eventually dying of tuberculosis just as he receives news of Japan’s victory in the Russo-Japanese War. The following scene occurs at the war’s outbreak:

The news of the outbreak of hostilities with Russia, with the Port Arthur Incident on the eighth and the Inchon Incident on the ninth, came with a surprising swiftness. […]

The fuss that was going on in Tokyo could be surmised from the daily papers. The rapid developments in the political situation over the last month could be anxiously appreciated even in the countryside. The call-up had been issued. […] There were more than three hundred conscripts from the one subdistrict of Minami Saitama, and since the Tōbu Line had not yet been built, they largely assembled at the Shinetsu Line Station of Fukiage, Kōnosu, and Okegawa, and the Ōu Line Stations of Kurihashi, Hasuda, and Kuki.

Tayama (1984, 165)

At the end of the passage, the author lists a number of mostly rural-area stations in Minami Saitama where the conscripts assemble, demonstrating how railway lines like the Ōu and Shin’etsu Lines, both national railways used to transport troops, greatly facilitated mobilization from even small villages. In the next few paragraphs, Katai vividly describes the patriotic environment “in the towns that were now transportation centers,” as he writes, “flags were rapidly hoisted and the soldiers given a good send-off. Mayors and military secretaries and school students and friends and relatives gathered in the stations and gave rousing cheers when the trains set off” (Tayama 1984, 165). Just as they had transformed big cities, railway networks also became deeply embedded in local rural life and culture. Areas located at important hubs of the railway network became increasingly busy. As in the quote above, Country Teacher often describes gatherings at train stations to mobilize troops and celebrate war victories: civilians raised national flags, a symbol of the state’s authority, demonstrating their spiritual connection to the nation and answering its call to war. In this way, trains created spaces for the public to gather, share information, and thus create a national community.

Through the extensive railway network, the state’s influence was able to reach all parts of Japan “with a surprising swiftness” (Tayama 1984, 165), indicating that railways not only facilitated military mobilization, but helped spread information and ideas as well. Information about the political situation in Tokyo could even be disseminated to the remote countryside without delay: daily papers were delivered quickly into the hands of rural inhabitants who “anxiously appreciated” (Tayama 1984, 165) the news. Newspaper readership, as Benedict Anderson explains in Imagined Communities, is “a synchronized mass ceremony which formed in actuality a ‘community imagining’” (Anderson 1991, 22). Each communicant is aware that in the act of reading a newspaper, a “ceremony” is being replicated simultaneously by thousands of other people they do not know personally but with whom they share a “communal experience” (Anderson 1991, 22). In Katai’s narrative, information carried by newspapers “full of bold type” delivered from the national center was able to reach every corner of Japan so quickly that it “surprise[d]” its readers (Tayama 1984, 165). This experience thus enabled the villagers to be keenly aware that people they did not know in Tokyo were simultaneously sharing a “communal experience” with them. This communal experience was further compounded as the quiet countryside buzzed with the news in the various places neighbors would gather to exchange rumors and speculation:^[5]

In the bathhouse, at the barber’s – talk about the war was everywhere. Some of the old men hated the Russians and wanted to teach them a lesson, while some of the other old-timers were worried about Japan’s chances of victory against such a big country.

Tayama (1984, 166)

The entire country thus shared a certain emotional connection through this communal experience. The reduced temporal distance between the capital and the outer regions made sharing information almost instantaneous, thus unifying the Japanese islands not only physically but spiritually. Therefore, by annihilating space through speed, the railway network enabled the political unification of the nation.

When Katai penned Country Teacher, most Japanese people had personal connections to the war, either directly or through family or friends. Even in the “secluded village” of Katai’s novel, everyone from the elderly to children shared this common experience with each other and the rest of the nation. Katai’s interest in the Russo-Japanese War can be explained by his personal experience in the war as a correspondent. However, the war is also significant in that it enabled Japan to proclaim its separation from Asia and establish itself as an international power. As Irokawa Daikichi argues, the Russo-Japanese War gave the people “direct experience of the state as a shared national fate,” and completed the process of bonding them to the state (Irokawa 1988, 293). In representing rural communities mobilized by war, Katai’s narrative actively participated in discussions about Japan’s status as a modern nation and the (re)construction of ideas about national subjects. Because rails link disparate spaces by shrinking the space between them (Schivelbusch 1986, 38), they create an intimacy that aids in the physical and conceptual reconstruction of the Japanese nation-state. Various spaces were thus ideologically homogenized, and those in-between spaces (like the small stations described by Yokomitsu at the beginning of “Head and Belly”) were easily and inevitably neglected. This homogenization of space resulted in the loss of local identity, formerly determined by the spatial distances between them (Schivelbusch 1986, 38). In its place, a national identity was conveniently created to fill the void.

4 The Temporal Homogenization of the Nation

In addition to integration of the countryside through the annihilation of space, railways also reconfigured the industrializing world’s sense of time. As Wolfgang Schivelbusch argues, “the temporal foreshortening of the distances that was effected by the trains forced the differing local times to confront each other,” resulting in railway companies standardizing time (Schivelbusch 1986, 43). By the late nineteenth century, Greenwich Time had been fully accepted and, deprived of their local time, “[r]egions lost their temporal identity” (Schivelbusch 1986, 43–44). The homogenization of time occurred in Japan during the same period. After the nationalization of railways and the establishment of the South Manchuria Railway (Minami-Manshū Tetsudō) in 1906, the Meiji government adjusted domestic train schedules to coordinate with lines going to the continent.^[6] The synchronization of different spaces into a singular temporal order prescribed a path of progress for “backwards,” non-synchronized places (Tanaka 2004, 19), implying that only those nations synchronized to the global standard were deemed modern and advanced. Moreover, since the establishment of the SMR, Japan frequently needed to transport troops to Manchuria and natural resources back to the homeland; coordinating its domestic schedules with the continent was a strategic move.

By creating the need for standardized timetables, railways homogenized people’s conception of time. As Narita Ryūichi suggests, the adaptation to technological change was very much a learned behavior: trains taught strict punctuality and the etiquette of sharing space (Narita 1993, 19, 51). In Tanizaki Jun’ichirō’s Naomi (Chijin no ai, 1924), it is clearly shown that trains imposed a strict temporal organization, routinizing behavior through schedules. While the novel was written just after Tanizaki’s forced move west to Kansai following the 1923 Great Kantō earthquake, it is mainly set in pre-earthquake Tokyo. Naomi is the story of Kawai Jōji, the son of a farmer from Utsunomiya. Making a decent living as an engineer in an electrical firm, he takes in Naomi, a fifteen-year-old café waitress from a poor Shitamachi family, grooming her to become his ideal of Westernized beauty. In the story, Naomi gains geographic and social mobility by riding trains and by memorizing train schedules. Her affairs with other men are only possible because she knows Jōji rides the same commuter train to and from work every day and can plan her rendezvous around the train timetable. When her lover Hamada is caught red-handed by Jōji in their Ōmori residence, Hamada confesses to the affair, explaining that he and Naomi had met three times already, and that every time “Naomi would come to Ōmori one or two trains later” after Jōji left for work (Tanizaki 1985, 149). Hamada’s specific use of “one or two trains later” to describe their schedule demonstrates how deeply train time was embedded in the modern lives of the characters.

The thirteen-year-old country girl in Akutagawa’s short story “Mandarins” (“Mikan,” 1919), however, shows no such preoccupation with train schedules. The story takes place on “a Tokyo-bound train departing from Yokosuka,” and just when the narrator thinks he is the only passenger in the carriage, she bursts in (Akutagawa 2007, 9). The train had already begun to move, and he hears the conductor cursing the girl for her lateness and ignorance of the schedule. The narrator calls the teenager “a country girl” (Akutagawa 2007, 10), likely in part because of her lack of punctuality. In this regard, the standardized timetable of domestic rails introduced a new temporal aspect of modern identity. Temporal homogenization, like spatial unification, facilitated people’s ability to imagine themselves as members of the Japanese nation-state and consolidated the imaginary boundaries of the Japanese empire.

5 Transgressions of Space and Class

The train itself is often taken as material evidence of modernity: with its perpetual forward motion, it represents “the engine of ‘progress’” (Trachtenberg 1986, xiii). The train car itself presented a new space for people to bond as a unified, national community. Anyone with money enough for the price of a ticket could board a train, enabling people from different social backgrounds to mix and mingle. The railway car was thus a moving miniature of the modern urban social environment: individuals from different social, economic, and political backgrounds were converted into members of a unified community through the shared cultural practice of riding trains.

In the depiction of Sanshirō’s first train ride, for example, Sōseki demonstrates how the close proximity of others within the space of the train car gives passengers the opportunity to speak, and thus share common war experiences. The topic of the Russo-Japanese War connects two strangers on the train – a “Kyūshū-color” (Natsume 1977, 3) woman and an old farmer, whose lower-class status is emphasized through the woman’s dark skin and the farmer’s crude behavior of stripping to the waist. As their train travels across the space of imperial Japan, they create personal and national bonds, demonstrating the aforementioned shift from an identification with local ties to one of national unification (Komori 1996, 314). As a Kyūshū native, Sanshirō perceives a sense of kinship with the “Kyūshū-color” woman based on her physical resemblance to women from his Kumamoto hometown. However, unlike the regional bond Sanshirō feels with her, the old farmer connects with the woman through their families’ similar experience during the war, one shared nation-wide and reflective of the social context of imperial Japan. Experiences of wartime suffering created strong ties between Japanese nationals that were, as this scene implies, stronger than even the old feudal-domain-based ties they replaced during the process of national unification. These bonds between strangers demonstrate the train’s ability to bring together people from different backgrounds and enable them to imagine living in the singular, unified space of the Japanese nation.

By the 1900s, riding trains was no longer a novel experience limited to the elite, yet seating arrangements on trains repeated spatial hierarchies, heightening passengers’ consciousness of emerging capitalist social orders. While “passengers were temporarily equal in the space of the train car,” a social structure was still “maintained through classes of tickets” (Freedman 2011, 40). In other words, the public space within the train reproduced a hierarchical space by inscribing fare divisions. The division of the train into first-, second-, and third-class compartments made class transgression more apparent. In Naomi, for instance, Jōji describes how he spent his entire income on Naomi, explicitly mentioning that she “bought a second-class commuter pass” for the line they rode every day, while he “settled for third class” (Tanizaki 1985, 75). While the cost of a second-class commuter pass may not have been prohibitive for Jōji, crossing class boundaries was not so simple:

Thrilled to be taking my first overnight trip with Naomi, I wanted to leave her with the most beautiful impressions possible: we’d stay in a high-class place and not worry about the cost. But when the day came and we boarded a second-class coach bound for Yokosuka, we were seized by a kind of timidity. The train was full of women and girls headed for Zushi and Kamakura, sitting in resplendent rows. In their midst, Naomi’s outfit, to me at least, looked wretched.

As it was summer, of course the women couldn’t have been particularly dressed up. But when I compared them to Naomi, I sensed an unmistakable difference in refinement between those who are born to the higher classes of society and those who are not.

Tanizaki (1985, 26)

Although Jōji could afford the relatively higher-class tickets, traces of class division still persist in material ways, such as Naomi’s outfit. More importantly, the division is made clear through a conceptual segregation – that is, their feeling out of place and self-consciousness of their own socioeconomic status, manifesting in “a kind of timidity” (Tanizaki 1985, 26).

The self-consciousness resulting from transgression, however, does not necessarily mean that the boundaries between different socioeconomic spheres were solidified. While the separation and convergence of different classes in the space of the train makes such divisions more obvious, it also challenges the boundaries between them. The train thus becomes a fluid space that subverts hierarchical structures and displaces old power relationships. To return to Akutagawa’s “Mandarins,” such a transgression of class boundaries is depicted through the “country girl” who mistakenly seats herself in the second-class compartment:

Finally feeling at ease, I put a match to a cigarette and raised my languid eyes to look for the first time at the girl seated on the opposite side. She wore her lusterless hair in ginkgo-leaf style. Apparently from constant rubbing of her nose and mouth with the back of her hand, her cheeks were chapped and unpleasantly red. She was the epitome of a country girl.

[ …] In those same hands affected with chilblains she clutched for dear life a red third-class ticket. I found her vulgar features quite displeasing and was further repelled by her dirty clothes. Adding to my irritation was the thought that the girl was too dimwitted to know the difference between second- and third-class tickets.

Akutagawa (2007, 10)

The narrator at first sees himself as a victim of this girl’s transgression, emphasizing their difference in class: “I” immediately notices that “she was the epitome of a country girl” who “clutched for dear life a red third-class ticket” (Akutagawa 2007, 10). Rapid industrialization in the early 1900s saw a growing number of people from rural regions flooding into major cities like Tokyo. The narrator’s thirteen-year-old fellow passenger is one of these migrants, “perhaps leaving home now to go into service as a maid or an apprentice” (Akutagawa 2007, 13) in Tokyo. In the presence of such a transgressor, the narrator is displeased and repelled by her “vulgar features” and “dirty clothes” (Akutagawa 2007, 10), but is particularly irritated because she entered a second-class car with a third-class ticket. The narrator’s contempt for the “country girl,” who is undoubtedly the embodiment of the disadvantaged agrarian Other, was universal in Japan’s rapidly industrializing society. In regard to the “country girl,” “I” naturally assumes an attitude of superiority in order to maintain the established power structure between the industrial and the agrarian, the urban and the rural.

The hierarchical division of space between the industrial and the agrarian economies demonstrated by these characters is repeated in spatial contrasts. It is accentuated by a metaphorical contrast as the fast-moving locomotive (“progressive” industrial space) cuts through an impoverished banlieue with clumps of shabby “thatch- and tile-roofed houses” (disadvantaged agrarian space) (Akutagawa 2007, 12). It is also replicated within the intimate yet alienating space of the train car itself:

If only to blot her existence from my mind, I took out my newspaper, unfolded it over my lap, and began to read, still smoking my cigarette.

[…]

At the same time, I was, despite myself, rather conscious of the girl sitting in front of me, as though she were the personification of coarse reality.

Akutagawa (2007, 10–11)

The narrator uses his newspaper to erect a division between himself and the girl, but the close quarters of the train force him to be aware of his fellow passenger’s presence. Later, when the girl moves to his side of the train and attempts to open the heavy window, he does not help but instead hopes “she would be forever doomed to fail” (Akutagawa 2007, 11), expressing his incomprehension at the girl’s actions, as they will soon be inside a tunnel and unable to enjoy any scenery.

The narrator’s logic is later proven to be beside the point: the country girl, leaving her home and family for the first time, is trying to open the window in order to toss a couple of mandarins to her brothers as a farewell gesture. The country girl thus offers the narrator a totally new perspective: at the end of the story, “I” again mentions the country girl’s “third-class ticket,” but this time, it is no longer a sign of division or a symbol of hierarchical class relations. Rather, it is a reminder of how fluid that boundary is. By depicting this melancholy middle-class man who is eventually delighted by a grimy country girl he first despises, Akutagawa subverts the hierarchical structure formed by the third- and second-class division, and redefines relations between these two strangers and what they symbolize. With the narrator’s reconciliation to the country girl, the author also questions the legitimacy of industrial modernity as being necessarily better than agrarian civilization.

6 Speed and Perception

The train established speed as “a new principle of public life” (Trachtenberg 1986, xiii), bringing with it new patterns of behavior, thought, feeling, and expectations. While rail travel is now viewed as routine, those present at the moment of its inception had to accommodate themselves to its technological newness and accompanying physical sensations. Frequently portrayed in Meiji literature, the new bodily experience of riding trains undoubtedly shaped people’s identities as modern subjects. Alisa Freedman points out that steam trains appear at “either the beginning or the end of almost every Sōseki’s novel” (Freedman 2011, 90). Sōseki’s time in Europe convinced him that “trains were spaces in which to observe modern behaviors and pathologies,” and his frequent metaphorical usage of trains reflects their influence on “the construction of both his characters and his theories of Meiji modernity” (Freedman 2011, 82). The experience of rail travel forced people to separate their individual bodily existence from the background “landscape” (Karatani 1988, 19), thus aiding in the formation of modern individuality and identity.

The newly “discovered landscape” (Karatani 1988, 62), however, was again lost as railways created new conditions that “mechanized” travelers’ perceptions. According to Schivelbusch, the train diminished the visual sense; other perceptions, such as smell and sound, which were an important part of travel experiences before rail era, simply disappeared due to its velocity (Schivelbusch 1986, 55). Hence the evanescence of the landscape as seen from a moving train: blurred by speed, it entirely disappears as the train cuts through hills and enters dark tunnels. The narrator in “Mandarins” posits the tunnel as the very reason that he ignores the scenery outside the train car:

All at once the light from outside was eclipsed by the electric illumination within; now the badly printed letters in some column or other stood out with a strange clarity. We had entered one of the Yokosuka Line’s many tunnels.

[…]

Yet surely she could have seen that the hillsides, their dry grass alone illuminated in the twilight, were moving inexorably closer toward the glass panes – and known that at any moment we would again be in darkness.

Akutagawa (2007, 10–11)

The narrator fails to notice that the train is entering a tunnel until the light has changed, indicating that he has not been paying attention to the landscape outside. Even with the girl sitting next to him attempting to open the train window, which naturally draws his attention to the landscape outside, he simply renders it as monotonous and forgettable, mere hills of dry grass that will soon be left behind. In a sense, isolated by the train interjected between them, the passenger’s olfactory and aural perceptions of the landscape disappear.

The disappearance of landscape and the enclosed environment of the compartment inevitably led passengers to focus more on the space inside the train car. The new practice of reading while traveling emerged (Schivelbusch 1986, 64), as evidenced by the narrator reading a newspaper in “Mandarins.” The newspaper is a mediated space that neutralizes the diversity of distant places and the distance of events, giving readers the illusion of a flattened world. The narrator’s preference for a supposedly neutral, objective, and homogeneous space as exemplified by the newspaper is closely linked to modernity; by contrast, he is reluctant to share the physical space of the train car with the “country girl,” whom he perceives as different. Thus, the practice of reading newspapers on trains not only mirrors the compression of space through railways, but echoes Benedict Anderson’s linking of print capitalism to the formation of imagined communities like the Japanese nation-state.

However, the narrator’s dismissal of the landscape outside the train does not necessarily indicate, as Schivelbusch maintains, the diminishment of bodily senses. The new experiences associated with railway travel – such as the rumble and sway of the train on the tracks, or the screeching of the brakes – offer passengers the opportunity to develop new and novel sensations. By isolating the passenger from the outside landscape, the train arguably heightens bodily senses, and it is this increased sensitivity that ultimately leads to the final reversal of power between the two passengers in “Mandarins.” When the “country girl” finally opens the train window, the narrator is engulfed by the soot-laden air pouring in. He notes that he would have “barked at” her to shut the window “had it not been for the outside view, which was growing ever brighter, and for the smell, borne in on the cold air, of earth, dry grass, and water” (Akutagawa 2007, 12). In this moment, all kinds of bodily senses come rushing back to him: in addition to the smell of “earth, dry grass, and water,” he hears “the chirping voices of the children” and sees “the railway crossing bathed in evening light,” “the dazzling color of the oranges raining down” (Akutagawa 2007, 12–13). All these sensations, experienced through the opening of the window, “passed in a twinkling of an eye,” but are vividly burned into his mind, giving him “a strangely bright and buoyant feeling” (Akutagawa 2007, 13). The outside landscape is still evanescent, but the window, which formerly closed off the train’s interior space from the exterior, introduces the exterior sensuous world back into the machine. The before-and-after contrast highlights the narrator’s bodily senses, putting the world-weary man back in the mood to enjoy life. In this respect, the teenage “country girl” who opens the heavy window becomes his savior, toppling the previous power relations between the two, and between the respective spaces they embody.

The textual representations of trains discussed in this paper reflect on the ways in which rail transport influenced the individual body and the Japanese nation as a whole in the modern period. The train is both intimate and enclosed while being open and exterior; it is confining, yet able to traverse boundaries. The railway network, which helped reconstruct time and space in the metropole and unify the nation, played an important part in the transformation of Japan into a modern, imperial nation.