Bungei Sensen | Overland literary journal

‘I think those who should feel ashamed are not us’

Author: Dougal McNeill
Posted on: 16 May 2013

I spent a morning at the former ‘comfort women’s’ weekly demonstration outside the Japanese embassy in Seoul one Wednesday during the northern summer of 2008, and have never been sure how to write about the experience. The women gathered under the banner ‘The Wednesday Demonstration for Resolving the Issue of Comfort Women Enslaved for the Japanese Military,’ and, flanked by supporters from trade unions, women’s groups, and international solidarity campaigns, re-iterate a series of very simple demands. An apology, a proper one. Decent compensation. Acknowledgement. Reparation.

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For the Liberation of Onna

Author: Dougal McNeill
Posted on: 25 March 2013

Uman ribu was an explosively radical, restless, artfully angry constellation of women’s liberation groups and collective thinkers who emerged out of Japan’s New Left in the 1970s. Ribu aimed, in its fusing of life experiences, activist intervention and theoretical reflection, to offer ways out of some familiar Left impasses.

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‘Think of the children!’

Author: Dougal McNeill
Posted on: 20 February 2013

At the centre of resistance is a tent outside the Ministry of Economy, Trade, and Industry, a reclaiming of public space that has been defying official warnings, police threat, attacks from rightists and the weather for well over a year. It’s quite a sight in Tokyo, where busking, political leafleting or postering are almost impossible.

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Fight the real enemy

Author: Dougal McNeill
Posted on: 11 February 2013

Pop Idol Minami Minegishi of AKB48, begging forgiveness of her fans and managers, her long hair shaved, her face contorted by grief and shame. The YouTube video of her confession and recantation – viewed more than 3 million times on AKB48’s official channel, but currently private at the time of writing this – makes for horrible viewing. She begs, cries, bows before the camera, distraught and obviously emotionally damaged.

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‘In loneliness and hardship – and with just a touch of pride’

Author: Dougal McNeill
Posted on: 14 January 2013

Literary criticism discusses its objects always in the present tense, I tell my students when correcting their attempts to follow the discipline’s odder habits, because literature is always happening.

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Best of 2012: Gold into straw

Author: Dougal McNeill
Posted on: 14 December 2012

In 2009, the last year I lived in Japan, it was 新 – the new – that became word of the year: a new government, with the Liberal Democrats defeated and in disarray, and new hopes.

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Writers and Terrorists

Author: Dougal McNeill
Posted on: 26 November 2012

The term ‘terrorist,’ Alain Badiou argues in ‘On September 11: Philosophy and the ‘War Against Terrorism’ has become ‘an essentially empty term,’ a ‘non-existent substance, an empty name,’ a void which is ‘precious because it can be filled’. The predicate ‘Islamic’ (or, in the past week ‘Palestinian’) has, for Badiou, no ‘other function than to give ostensible content to that form’.

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You can take it to your analyst and have it turned into meaning

Author: Dougal McNeill
Posted on: 6 November 2012

Is the internet making us all stupider? Are we cursed to a lifetime of intellectual paddling in the shallows? Are young people now culturally bereft and cursed with short attention spans? Is this the age of cultural amnesia? Is the book dead? Is everyone forgetting everything? Are we going to be cursed with total recall? Does no-one out there on the internet realise I’m a dog?

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And poppy or charms can make us sleep as well

Author: Dougal McNeill
Posted on: 8 October 2012

i.m. Alison Stoddart (1980–2012)

It’s a sign of the full force and audacity of the Modernists (I’m using this term, slackly perhaps, both for the writers themselves and for their institutionalisation via Kenner and the rest) that, even now, and after all of what’s been, theirs are the lines I reach for in self-justification.

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