A manifesto for renaissance. Mirroring kasutori Japan’s decadence through Sakaguchi Ango

This article focuses on the intellectual debate concerning the decadent way of life exemplified by intellectuals and writers such as Sakaguchi Ango. Although Western commentators have been unanimous in pointing to the radical shift in the discussion of sexual mores that took place soon after Japan’s defeat, arguing that the confusion which followed the defeat was catastrophic to the old morality, I look at how in those years it was finally possible to be an intellectual in one’s office and an “activist” in the streets; politics – and history – had permeated and altered the very fabric of daily life, the structure of the individual existence (or survival), the framing of one’s intellectual activity. The new Japanese, as Ango himself, strove to integrate their intellectual and political lives, and their struggle resulted to be cultural within literature but also in the political dimension of their reinvented country.