Some Notes on the Reception of Valentine de Saint-Point in Taishō Japan

My paper is focused on the image of Valentine de Saint-Point—a French intellectual who was significantly involved in Futurism in the years 1912-1914—as it emerges from a series of contemporary Japanese materials taken from the specialised and generalist press of the Taishō period. Saint-Point was mainly perceived along three different directions, corresponding to three current topics debated in the press of those days. She was thus characterised as a theorist of the role of women in modern society, as a member of the futurist avant-garde, and as an experimenter in dance and body expression. However, even though she enjoyed a relative visibility in the Japanese media, the chronicles of their artistic exploits and the excerpts of her literary works that had been episodically translated in Japanese, seemingly provoked no explicit reactions, be them positive or negative, by the local intellectuals. I consequently reflect on the meaning of this “operative silence”, which appears paradoxical if opposed to the wealth of information on the European avant-gardes available to Japanese intellectuals, and suggest interpreting it on the basis of the local strategies of appropriation of foreign symbolic capital.