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This guest author post is written by Tara Rodman, author of the new book Fantasies of Ito Michio, from the University of Michigan Press. The book is now available in hardcover, paperback, and open access.

In 1946, at the beginning of the post-war American occupation of Japan, the modern dancer and choreographer Ito Michio published a book entitled Amerika to Nihon [America and Japan]. Having spent over thirty years—the bulk of his adult career—in Europe and the United States, the book is part memoir, part manual for American culture. In a brief interlude section, Ito writes:

These days, I am often asked my age, and each time, I respond, “I am 21.”

“Huh?” [responds his imagined interlocutor]

“When I went to Germany I was 19, and from then on, I spent each New Year abroad; since returning to Japan, I have only greeted the New Year twice, and so, this year makes me 21.”

Ito was born in 1893, so this is more than being a little coy about his age. By his reckoning, he is 21, because he has spent 21 years in Japan. Gone are the three decades spent abroad—a particularly striking lacuna given that the rest of the book, intended as a primer on American culture for Japanese readers curious about their nation’s occupiers, is full of anecdotes about his earlier life in the US and in Europe.

The passage is characteristic of Ito, in its dialogue format, its slight circularity, and its subtle humor. It is also characteristic in its attempt to think about what time counts, and what experiences count, in an account of someone’s life. The question of how to tell the story of a life is central to thinking about Ito, because he spent much of his life engaged in performances and narratives of self that stretched the contours of the true—but in doing so, perhaps reflected other truths about his life. In my book, I highlight these stories and performances as fantasies, and assert that they are central to understanding Ito.

Ito was born in Tokyo in 1893, during Japan’s heightened wave of explicit modernization and Westernization, and in the early phase of its imperial agenda. At age 19, Ito left Tokyo’s burgeoning modern theatre scene for Europe, and soon began a year of study at the Jaques Dalcroze Institute for Eurythmics in Hellerau, Germany. His studies were interrupted by World War I, prompting him to move to London, where he became a sort of muse for—but also active artistic collaborator of—the modernist poets W.B. Yeats and Ezra Pound, especially on the 1916 dance drama At the Hawk’s Well. When war spread further across Europe, Ito sailed to the US, where he spent more than two decades, in New York and Los Angeles, as an active figure in the emerging practice of what would come to be known as “modern dance.” However, the day following the bombing of Pearl Harbor, Ito was interned in Department of Justice camps as an “enemy alien,” until he repatriated to Japan in 1943. He spent the rest of the war working on behalf of Japan’s imperial propaganda effort. After Japan’s defeat, he became a producer, director, and choreographer at the Ernie Pyle Theatre in Tokyo, the foremost entertainment venue for Allied service members and personnel during the Occupation of Japan.

As even this brief sketch makes clear, Ito’s life was full of ruptures, dislocations, and experiences of alienation. One of the ways he dealt with these tensions and the multiple audiences he faced was to offer versions of himself that were…somewhat different from a straightforward narration of the facts of his life. Across his career, and then after his death, some of these stories became accepted parts of his biography, especially in the US, as geographic and linguistic borders prevented some of his students and their descendants from accessing the many details of his life.

When I first began to research Ito, I understood my task as one of setting the record straight. After all, it is not as if his life was one of humdrum ordinariness to begin with! But as I continued to think and write about Ito, I kept coming back to these stories. I began to realize that these fabrications held a great deal of truth in them—if not the truth of what happened, then truths about who Ito was, or just as important, who he might have wanted to be. These stories—fantasies, as I began to call them—became central to my research. As a result, Fantasies of Ito Michio offers a deeply archival account of Ito’s life, alongside a consideration of the role of fantasy in an individual’s life and performance of self.

Fantasy, as I conceive of it, is how we construct a sense of self within the actual material world of social and political relations. Fantasy is how we know ourselves, how we perform ourselves and come to think of those performances as constitutive of ourselves. Ito’s fantasies—his invented anecdotes, unrealized projects, and quixotic affiliations—though perhaps not the “real” or the “what happened” of his life, were the things that made it solid. Moreover, although fantasy resembles escapism, it is different because fantasy operates on the border of possibility. As the feminist critic Jaqueline Rose writes, “fantasy is always heading for the world it only appears to have left behind.”1 Fantasy then, is a way of seeing the truth of a situation by looking at its shadows—as suggested by the book’s stunning cover photograph, taken by Ito’s friend Toyo Miyatake.

As I immersed myself as much in Ito’s fantasies as in his life, I also understood fantasy as a way to think about the desires an individual holds for themselves—and how those desires then are enacted as particular, often political choices. For instance, Ito’s political affiliations have always been a tricky part of his biography. For much of his career, Ito, like many of his peers, embraced a vision of internationalism, fueled by his own transnational itinerary and belief that artistic cultural exchange could provide a foundation for world peace. As he matured, this fantasy intertwined more and more with the fantasy of Pan-Asianism—a concept of pan-Asian solidarity, which at the turn of the century had represented a challenge to Western colonialism, but, by the 1930s, had been fully co-opted as a justification for Japan’s own imperialism across Asia. Once Ito repatriated to Japan, he spent the final two years of the war planning (and when possible, actually producing) performances that celebrated Pan-Asianism under Japan’s “benevolent” leadership.

One way to understand Ito’s propaganda work is that it was simply what was necessary to survive once he returned to Japan—and Ito had a strong instinct for survival. Another interpretation is that after being labeled an “enemy alien” by the US, and spending two years in Department of Justice internment camps, redoubling his allegiance to Japan was a way to navigate his sense of being betrayed by the US. But a third explanation is that part of Ito really believed in the Pan-Asian dream, because it was a fantasy about different people and cultures coming together, and therefore, seemed like a scaled-up version of his own life and sense of self. Japan’s Pan-Asianism seemed to offer a home for his own desires for himself, and so he looked past the Japanese government’s extraordinary violences, at least some of which Ito was aware of. Fantasy, then, becomes a way for us to think about how and why individuals tie themselves to larger social movements, and how mass political events and collectivities are fueled and carried out by individuals with their own private desires, and personal ways of imagining themselves into significance.

Finally, if fantasy is a way of understanding how Ito navigated the experiences of his life, I also offer it was a way of thinking about the scholar’s work. It is this that I gesture to in the book’s title; the book’s fantasies are not only Ito’s, not only those of his colleagues, spectators, students, and patrons, but they are also mine. The story I tell in this book is only one way of narrating Ito’s life, necessarily reflective, as books always are, of my own preoccupations, and of my own journey through the archival traces of Ito’s life. Ito’s tallying of his age, and the omission of nearly thirty years in the passage with which I opened is a sign, perhaps, of this contingency. In the stories we tell, we always leave out others, more fantasies for another day.

1. Jacqueline Rose, States of Fantasy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 3.